Category: Media

Review: Bedsit disco queen, Tracey Thorn’s creative career advice book

Tracey Thorn’s account of her years as half of the band Everything but the girl, Bedsit disco queen, has been praised as both an enjoyable, honest memoir and a fascinating journey through British music from punk to the mid-2000s. It is both, but it is also possible to read as a guide to a creative career, in this case in music. I’m going to review it as that.

Thorn started with a punk ethos of, we can do this ourselves. In 1980, her first band the Stern Bops provided a track to a compilation cassette sold for £1.50 through a couple of local record shops and an NME small ad; she recalls going to a tape copying facility in London to get more run off. The chapter is titled ‘DIY’.

Thorn and her partner Ben Watts formed the band Everything but the girl in 1982 at Hull University and continued until 2000. Despite this, she describes being a singer as “a job I wasn’t really cut out for” – she feels more comfortable writing and recording, and suffers periodically from stage fright. She uses this distance at some points of the book to assess pop music as a career option. Continue reading “Review: Bedsit disco queen, Tracey Thorn’s creative career advice book”

The secret of getting a self-published book into independent bookshops

Card declinedMy ID cards book Card declined is now available in four more bookshops: Politicos, the online political bookshop, and (appropriately for Independent Booksellers Week) three more independent bookshops in the Cotswolds – The Borzoi Bookshop in Stow, Evenlode Books in Charlbury and Madhatter Bookshop in Burford. Although still available from Amazon in print and Kindle, if you are anywhere near any of the physical bookshops – also including Jaffe & Neale in Chipping Norton and the National Museum of Computing in Bletchley – please buy from them, or Politicos. The NHS isn’t funded by taxes paid in Luxembourg… Continue reading “The secret of getting a self-published book into independent bookshops”

Remembering ID cards on election day with The Register

Card declined, a book about ID cards in Britain by SA MathiesonThe Register covered ID cards as thoroughly as anyone over the years – partly through running stories from Guardian Government Computing (and sometimes we just tipped them off), as well as dozens of its own articles.

I’m proud to say it is serialising my book on the subject, Card declined, to mark three years since the election which brought the scheme to an end. (You can tell it’s election day today – the BBC is leading on interest-only mortgages. Election day is a great day to get attention for non-political news, given politicians are off the airwaves until 10pm.) Continue reading “Remembering ID cards on election day with The Register”

Can ewe recognise Chipping Norton in the news?

Chippy has recently been profiled by two of the world’s most prestigious newspapers. One even got most of its facts right. The Times, rating Chipping Norton as the fifth-best town in Britain, was not that paper. [Log-in required to read full Times articles.] ‘This town is sometimes described as Britain’s answer to Beverley Hills because of its high-profile residents,’ it started, comparing us to an area in the middle of a city of many millions of people. Changing tack, it added that ‘the town is peaceful and picturesque,’ A44 HGVs presumably notwithstanding. It went on to claim the population is a mix of locals, weekending Londoners and wealthy international buyers, blessed with ‘London-standard pubs and restaurants’. The paper also put Kingham at number 20 in its separate list of best villages, with the inevitable picture of Alex James and mention of the ‘Chipping Norton set’. Continue reading “Can ewe recognise Chipping Norton in the news?”

Is the answer to a question-marked headline always no?

No. Not always. Just quite often, like just now.

Looking at recent articles about the NHS picked up by @ImpatientNHS with question marks in their titles, there are several variants of the question-marked headline, and they don’t all mean ‘no’. Continue reading “Is the answer to a question-marked headline always no?”