Author Archives: Paul

Those joyless souls who regard it as tacky, naff and horribly commercial. They have a point but aren’t they missing a much bigger one? Its good outweighs its bad – impulsive acts of love and kindness are carried out, relationships started, children conceived. People all over the world owe their very existence to Valentine’s Day, […]

….. as you prepare to emulate a true rock legend. Cozy Powell was the 1970s drummer from central casting. He looked the part because he was the part. He lived it and he died it. How’s this for a proper rock ‘n’ roll death? Aged 50, he was racing down the M4 at 110 mph, […]

Horrible place on the Essex coast and only about an hour up the A12, but people would take their caravans and stay for a fortnight. One of my many uncles had a caravan up there and when I was very young, we went to stay in it. One morning, a small caravan two along from […]

That’s what we were told by careers teachers at school but they turned to be so, so wrong. Traditional branches were ruthlessly replaced by distant call centres, including the first two to hold my constantly overdrawn account. Barclays Bank in Piccadilly is now a famous restaurant called The Wolseley. Barclays in Camden Town is now […]

6th February – Bob Marley Day to commemorate the great man’s birthday. There’ll be a lot of parties, a lot of reggae, and a lot of people just chilling with a cheeky spliff. Not a lot of work’s going to get done. Meanwhile, this morning most of Britain is affected by either severe flooding or […]

So she had first hand knowledge of Bob Crow’s predecessors. She wasn’t a great fan of the transport unions because she never forgot them saying “We’re not giving our jobs to women or blacks”. That sort of misogyny and racism may have been reined in but their “Stuff you. What’s in it for me?” attitude […]

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know almost every word to almost every Kinks record. Our house was full of their pink Pye 45s. So Ray Davies is rightly renowned as one of the greatest songwriters of all time. But what’s often forgotten is that in 1964, on this groundbreaking record, Dave Davies […]

…..was the radio treat of the week. Bob Harris is one of my broadcasting heroes. Kind, interesting and knowledgable. I’ve worked with him a few times and he’s exactly like that in real life. At heart, he is the bearded hippie who presented The Old Grey Whistle Test but his musical tastes cover every genre. […]

…..he could make you feel whatever he was feeling when he wrote the song you’re listening to. Play “We’re a Winner” and you’ll believe that you’re a black American civil rights campaigner in the 1960s. Listen to “Superfly” and you instantly become a Harlem drug dealer in a 70s blaxploitation movie. And as for the […]

Because today, no other track will do. After the wettest January since records began, the first day of February has brought brilliant sunshine. But doesn’t it look and feel quite weird? The really obvious thing to do would be to play Johnny Nash’s 1972 original but I prefer Jimmy Cliff’s cover from about twenty years […]