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Showing posts from February, 2012

Frank's Wild Years: playlist for a novel

Lionel Bart lights a 'harry rag' for John Lennon When it comes to deferment activities – the ones that allow you to kid yourself you’re working even if you’re not actually writing – there are plenty of options. In detail mode you can always go the legitimate research route: story development, character studies, time-lining, lunchtime drinking etc. Or you can focus on those actions that are loosely and more accurately termed ‘arsing about’. On balance, you’d have to say that mentally casting your novel-in-progress as a film constitutes arsing about. With Frank’s Wild Years three weeks from publication, I thought I’d share, if not the imaginary casting call, some songs from the accompanying soundtrack album. I put it together as a playlist around two-thirds of the way through writing the novel,   adding as I went along. It was a mix of songs that inspired the writing and served as a soundscape to the story. It also played a part in evoking the world of the novel when it cam

The New Official Small Faces Website

So there we were, at a loss for something to do, Saturday night in the suburbs. Must have been sometime around 1987. Al and me, he played drums and me guitar in I Can't Scream. So we took that drive down towards the Blackwall Tunnel, through Eltham and Woolwich, the flames and the stink from the refinery leading the way to the Tunnel Club. It was a place for a beer, to see a band. We would have got there, say, around half-eight or nine. We got a pint - they must have cleaned the carpet because my boots weren't sticking as much as usual. In a room the size of your average pub bar, a band were tuning up. There were maybe thirty people there. Al and me stood at the back. And that was how I came to see Stevie Marriott and his Packet of Three and witness one of the greatest gigs I've ever seen. The booze-toughened voice, on-the-money R&B guitar made for some rough-edged versions of pretty much every Humble Pie and Small Faces song anyone of us could think of requesting and

Nothing Like the Smell of a Short Sharp Interview in the Morning

... And so it begins. In the run up to the long-awaited (by me) publication of 'Frank's Wild Years', an interview with the gentleman they call Paul D Brazill.   Just click HERE .