Wire’s Pink Flag is, as you know, essential listening. Twenty one tracks in little over half an hour trip over themselves in a rush to the finish line, skinny-waisted, free of flab, fighting …

Our first house was a two up, two down, easy to keep semi in a quietish part of Ayrshire. We decorated as we went, wallpapering here, painting there. We did up the kitchen, sorted out the bathroom,…

See if you’re going to crawl around on top of a slag heap in yr birthday suit, with only a giant turtle shell on top of your back to protect you from the elements, you don’t really need…

The uncracked, ochre-washed spine of a book leapt out at me from the shelf of an Irvine charity shop recently, followed immediately by a shuddering Proustian rush of deja vu. The offending novel, D…

“Bill! BILL!!! Stop! STOP!!! The bassline, man… What you playin’ at? Disco’s been over for six whole months. Get your mind off the 13-year olds in Tramp and focus on the task in hand, man!” “Mick…M…

This piece was originally written a month, maybe even six weeks ago, but I was waiting on permission from various sides to post it. In the interim, the Trashcans suddenly, unexpectedly and shocking…

I’m a sucker for a well-sung harmony. You know the sort of thing, a radiant Gibb brothers burst of aural sunshine, a California-coated Mamas and Papas heart melter, a slow-ooze of Bellshill B…

I’ve been asked a few times the past week where folk can pick up copies of my Trashcan Sinatras books. The Perfect Reminder was initially available through Last Night From Glasgow, but it see…

John Douglas 1963 – 2026 “How’s it gaun? Y’awright?” These were usually John Douglas’s first words, whether one or two songs into a set with the Trashcan Sinatras, or more recently out front …

The boy always had bikes. From the moment he spied his big sister’s, he wanted one of his own. He had a wee yellow Halfords-made thing, a Stinger, all go-faster stripes and cartoon wasps with…

Odd band, The Strokes. They’ve got – or maybe nowadays since they’ve made some real money – they had something of a classic rock ‘n roll look; battered Levi’s an…

Jimmy Smith is the bridge between jazz and soul, a colossus of his chosen instrument who had one well-tailored foot firmly planted in the camp marked ‘strictly no sell out’ and the othe…

It’s a well-written fact over the years that Tomorrow Never Knows was the first track The Beatles recorded for Revolver. Barely out of short trousers, The Beatles turned to studio-as-instrume…

Brian Epstein, in possibly one of the first genius music marketing moves, had The Beatles record a couple of vocal tracks in German, the idea being that the fans in the country where the group had …

American groups – like any number of those Nuggets bands you can reel off in your sleep – or The Turtles or The Byrds (‘animal’ name, weird spelling – coincidence?!?) …

To paraphrase a well-worn old cliché, there are two types of people; those who love the Trashcan Sinatras and those who haven’t yet heard them. The Trashcans are the epitome of the cult band.…

I see Del Amitri are in the States. Deacon Blue too. Funny how they’ve both managed to arrange a tour of America’s Eastern seaboard while the national football team is playing three (at…

There’s a La’s story I was party to a few years ago. It concerned the recording of their album – I mean, it would, wouldn’t it? The gist of the story involved a conversation…

A couple of years ago, to generally positive reviews, the reformed?/reawakened?/reimagined? Blur released the horrendously-titled The Ballad Of Darren album. In this part of the world it was welcom…

We’d spent our formative drunken teenage years falling out of lofts, falling through hedges and falling out and in with each other through a holy triumvate of sounds; New Order’s Blue M…

There’s been a good wee buzz in the more discreet corners of the world wide web surrounding the imminent release of the Trashcan Sinatras’ (magnificent) seventh album, Ever The Optimist…

When you first attacked that plank of wood you had the cheek to call an electric guitar, if you were like me you were in immediate need of something with which to amplify your clunky chord changes …

David Bowie’s Low is an album with its own split personality. On side one you get the interesting guitar stuff, heavily treated and effected tracks that cut against the punkish musical landsc…

I was sad to hear of Andy Kershaw’s death last week. We were away, and for the hours after the news had come through, I was a wee bit quiet and introspective, the way most of us go when a person in…

This post comes live, direct and on the hoof from the departure lounge of Terminal 2 in Copenhagen Airport. We’ve been clean(ish) living the past week in Copenhagen, a modern, sleek and styli…

“We asked 100 people to name a musical duo from Scotland.” With a TV audience of millions watching and a five or six-figure jackpot prize hanging on your answer, the chances of a clued-…

I came to Gang Of Four via the Wedding Present. I was in thrall to Madness and Adam and the Ants and clearly far too young for this thing called post-punk, but I was however just the right age for …

May 1971. Marvin Gaye releases What’s Going On?, a musical tour de force of luscious, orchestral funk, dusted with hard-hitting socio-political lyrics that address the state of America. It&#8…

Bill Forsyth’s Gregory’s Girl is the greatest film to come out of Scotland no, the UK  no, the world bar none. Any one random, washed-out coloured still from the film will instantly sti…

Davie Cooper didn’t play for my team, but still, he was just about my favourite player of the eighties. As a teenager, I never missed a Scotland game at Hampden and Cooper – Super Coope…

*Warning. Jazz. Turn off your mind, relax, float downstream. From Trump to the Trongate, the world right now seems hellbent on willful annihilation and pointless self-destruction. Instead of firing…

“I’m beginning to think,” says a hot ‘n sweaty Stuart Murdoch, mid-way through ‘Side 1′ of If You’re Feeling Sinister, “that velour maybe wasn’…

YouTube video by Trashcan Sinatras Official

‘Busboy’…’bellboy’… ‘waterboy’ …’shoeshine boy’…the reason African Americans began using ‘man’ as a full stop in conversation is there for all to see. Fed up of …

I found myself watching the Olympics the other night there. Men and women dressed head to (camel) toe in the sort of tight-fitting get up that yr average Marvel superhero might reject on grounds of…

I was, for years, a 6 Music devotee in the morning. From the fill of the kettle in the kitchen to the resigned opening of the car door at work, there wasn’t a day between a Monday and a Frida…

If Screamadelica was the result of Andrew Weatherall pointing a rudderless Primal Scream (shambling, jangling Byrds copyists? Long-haired, leather-breeked faux rockers?) towards the boundary-free p…

It’s a long way from Scotland to Jamaica – about four and a half thousand miles at the last Google search – but the two small nations are inextricably linked. Thanks to mercenary …

There’s a well-worn meme that does the rounds, a life truth centred on the idea that the music you listened to between teens and twenties is the stuff that comes to define you in your later y…

In this house at least, it’s very probably I Am Kurious Orange, but This Nation’s Saving Grace is often universally acknowledged as The Fall’s greatest album. It is simultaneously…

I scanned this totally preposterous list on Substack over the festive period, where Thurston Moore lists his 350 Best Records of 2025. Yeah! – there’s no typo in there – that real…

Viddy Well, Devotchkas And Malchicks, Viddy Well. That Bowie fella was a clever droog. In death he created one of his greatest pieces of art. The songs that make up Blackstar contained an outpourin…

Plain Or Pan turns 19 today. One blink, and already, it’s into its final year of being a teenager, somehow mid-way through second year at University and making its own considered path in life…

I’m backstage after a Johnny Marr book event a couple of Novembers ago. There’s a strict ‘Johnny will be meeting no fans tonight’ policy in place, but I have written a book …

The Dick Institute is a library, museum and art gallery in Kilmarnock. In recent years it has featured exhibitions of Quentin Blake’s artwork, the models of Aardman Animations, the writing of…

A few months ago I posted about the burst of classical music that The Smiths used to signify they were taking the stage. Walk-on music, when used as effectively as The Smiths did it, is an integral…

There’s a story that Adam Horowitz tells – kinda preposterous, but totally believable (it’s the Beastie Boys, right?) – where waaaay back in the early days of the Beastie Bo…

Buddy’s Rendezvous is the name of a diner, the place where the character in Father John Misty’s song meets up with his estranged daughter after a spell in jail. It’s an entire mov…