Next time you’re having a wee night in – just you, a bottle of whatever and a pile of 7″ singles – make sure you take the time to flip Dexys’ Geno over (we’ve al…

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…