All is calm and all is bright backstage at St Pancras Old Church as Izzie Yardley lays her guitar in its case and sits. “Matt’s audience is lovely,” she says, smiling. Inside the chapel, we can hear the buoyant mood…
“I don’t get anxiety on stage but I do get it before and after,” says Matt, his last live outing in London’s Kings Place in February a triumphant return to live playing following the release of his biographical Sky Arts…
What, one asked oneself, is modern classical music (Fabrizio Paterlini’s forte) in relation to that which is deemed merely classical? The evening threw the question into sharp relief, shaped unexpectedly from the reverberative storm of piano chords sent roofward by…
“I don’t understand this stuff that’s out there that they call music. I don’t understand what young people sing and what they write. The songs never have a melody that I can whistle and, if you can’t whistle it, it’s…
The author of Ghost Town: A Liverpool Shadowplay is a man whose very being seems imbued with an antique air. He moves, almost floats along Bold Street as if he has always walked here and always will, his communion with…
When Robert Howard and I first met on a warm Soho night in what feels now like a lifetime ago, we spoke of how he began in music. “I was shy when I was young,” he told me then, “and…
As of old, the liquor flows and the young professionals sprawl and swarm across the ground floor bar. A poodle tethered to a table leg shoots me a long enquiring look as if to ask “Here we are, again?” We’re…
“Who is Matt Deighton?” asks Squeeze’s Chris Difford at the start of Overshadowed before promptly answering his own question. “He’s the musical badger,” he says with a smirk. Badger? Does he mean Badger from The Wind In The Willows, that…
It’s a bright cold day in April, and the clocks are striking thirteen. “It’s good to be alive in the year of our Lord, 2035,” says TONE as he sits down outside The Victory pub on London’s South Bank, a stone’s throw…
At the end of this month we celebrate the 50th anniversary of ‘Bitches Brew’ by Miles Davis. So what, you may ask. But the answer is emphatic. So everything. The record is one of many apogees of the jazz idiom,…