Author Archives: Paul

80 today. Thanks to the huge success of Jersey Boys, the hit musical based around his life and work, we’re all familiar with his story. And we discovered that songs made famous by others like Can’t Take My Eyes Off You, Bye Bye Baby and Working My Way Back To You were originally recorded by […]

Never have. I don’t disapprove, I don’t want it banned, I just don’t like it. I don’t like scrambled eggs either but I do like Blurred Lines. I loved it from the moment I heard it. However, I wasn’t fussed about the now infamous video that accompanied it. Though hardly hard-core, it came under fire […]

So we have to play his one Top 20 hit. Along with Sir Laurence Olivier, he provides trademark vocals on Paul Hardcastle’s long-forgotten follow-up to 19. I worked with him a couple of times and he was exactly the same off-screen as on it. So he was either genuinely like that or else he was […]

Is the welcome return of the butcher. Another new one has just opened in Kentish Town, suggesting that people are finally turning their backs on supermarkets when looking for good, responsibly-sourced meat. Though the term “Family Butcher” still makes me think of the sort of murderer seen in films like Friday 13th. So why pick […]

Most of them ridden by people who don’t normally cycle. And that’s possibly the worst thing about a tube strike. Commuters who usually take the tube decide to get out the bike, the helmet and the unnecessary amount of hi-viz apparel to wobble slowly, nervously and perilously through heavy traffic. Cycling in London requires a […]

Don’t panic. You won’t have to wear a bikini and dance on a raised platform at a 1960s discotheque. I’m talking about this sort of Go-Go, a much underrated sub-genre of da funk. Overshadowed by soul, hip-hop, house and practically every other sort of urban dance music, this groove that came out of Washington in […]

For a long time I just thought it was anything that rhymed but have since discovered otherwise. Can there be real poetry in pop songs? Of course there can. You don’t have to look too hard to find words to rival those of Keats, Shelley or Donne. Think about the most poetic pop songs ever […]

…fill it with bleach and squirt the bleach on your back tyres. Then rev the engine, drop the clutch and pull fantastically smokin’ wheelspins. It’s the last Saturday of the month which always meant a trip to the Chelsea Bridge Cruise where proud owners would parade their beautiful 1950s American and customised cars. Wannabes like […]

He’s been travelling in South East Asia for five weeks. I’ve really missed him so I’m feeling very sentimental this morning. Though I do wonder just how sentimental I’ll be feeling once he’s been back for a few days.

…has just been served at Trattoria Luca in Camden Town and I made sure I went along one final time before Paolo Boggi closed the doors forever. It was a once-typical, old fashioned family-run Italian trattoria where the family actually lived upstairs. Practically unchanged since the 70s, it was first place I was ever taken […]