Hello, there. I’m Darren, and this is a collection of stuff I’ve written over the years, mainly about music but there’s some other stuff too, such as film, TV and merch. You’ll also find the odd bit of promo for videos and music I’ve made. Thanks for dropping by.
Our jaunt began with a week in Tennessee, a return trip (we first visited in 2004) that we decided to make with my parents, who wanted to visit Graceland, the home of Mr Elvis A Presley. The site hasn’t changed much in four years, despite being...
It was the second time that Jackdaw4 had played the Soho Revue Bar, halfway up ‘adult entertainment alley’ in London’s West End. Drink prices aside, it’s actually a decent venue, with a snug but...
My love affair with The Black Crowes began in 1990, when they were cutting a swathe through the long-haired rock ’n’ roll scene as the new Faces. My fandom peaked around 1994 and the release of their third album, Amorica, an intense career high. By this point, the band were the living embodiment of a late-’60s stoner...
It sounds lovely. What could possibly go wrong?
My apologies to Mr Kris Kristofferson, but I came mighty close to dozing off during his...
“These might make you drowsy. You’re not driving, are you?”
“No, I’m not driving.”
What I neglected to mention was that I wasn’t travelling at all - not in the physical sense, anyway. My plan was to pop a pill, sit in a darkened cinema and spend 90 minutes goggling George A Romero’s Diary Of The Dead - hopefully without puking at the handheld camera work...
Empire magazine’s Olly Richards, there, igniting a flame up my backside that propelled me to my local Vue on Saturday afternoon.
Unfortunately, the Cloverfield experience echoed ones I had watching The Zombie Diaries and, to a lesser extent, The Blair Witch Project on the big screen. I’m just not cut out to have stomach-churning shakycam engulfing my field of vision for any length of...
Towards the end of our trip, as we headed south to London, we decided to call in at the Marquee on Charing...
“This is about a girl that left me. Pretty much every song is about a girl that left me.”
Reassurance from bassist John is swift: “We won’t leave you, Tommy!”
The introduction is for Miss Independence, a choice cut from Tommy’s new album, Stolen Conversations, Three Chords And The Truth. The song sounds even more striking in a live setting, its falsetto hook a badge of the Texan performer’s confidence.
An annual visitor...
Tara and I kicked off last night’s celebrations with The Simpsons’ Treehouse Of Horror VIII on Channel 4, before firing up the DVD player for 1982 spookfest Poltergeist, a film I saw at least...
I ummed about it the night before, as Sunday transport meant a four-hour round trip. But using the old ‘I’m more likely to regret something I didn’t do than something I did do’ logic, I woke up on Sunday, jumped on a train and got to MK around 11.45am. And I’m...