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.
They can be dangerous places, recording studios. Cables to trip over; microphones poised to knock your teeth out; a mountain of electrical equipment waiting to catch fire - some of it heavy too, so watch your back when lifting. If you have a wannabe Phil Spector producing, you might even find yourself dodging bullets as you reach for that high harmony.
Thankfully, today at Foel Studio, Tony Harris isn’t packing heat - it’s Sunday and he doesn’t carry at weekends - but that still...
“This next song," says Pete Gow, “is probably the only reason we were invited to play Country to Country.”
It’s 11.45am on Sunday 13 March, and I’m in Greenwich, at the O2 - or the Millennium Dome, as I hope history will remember it - for a brief look in on what’s being billed as ‘Europe’s largest country music festival’.
The three-day bash has gathered together some of the genre’s current big names - the...
“It seems I let time slip away…”
- Magnificent Bastard by Tommy Hale
Time is many things - some prosaic, some poetic. To the young it’s a comfort; to the grieving it’s a healer; to the toiling it’s a currency; to the creative it’s a storyteller. Albert Einstein once said that the separation between past, present and future is an illusion, which has got to be worth a shot the next time your mortgage payment is late.
The one universal,...
You know that a frontman is giving it his all when, after the first song, he confesses to accidentally swallowing his chewing gum. The song is titled Hidden Treasure, and it occurs to me - because I’m a childish sort - that in a day or two that’s exactly what he’ll find on a bathroom break.
And if you groaned at that, be thankful he wasn’t singing Stick Around.
Shockingly, it was nearly 15 years ago, in December 2000, that...
Y’know, I don’t know whether I’ll be able to write this piece. This morning, as part of a hospital outpatients procedure, I was injected with midazolam, a sedative drug whose skill set includes anterograde amnesia - or, as Wikipedia puts it, the “loss of the ability to create new memories”.
This evening, I’m sitting in the main theatre in Croydon’s Fairfield Halls watching a show called All Star '60s, a five-band travelling revue that includes Bob Jackson’s Badfinger - or, as I’m putting it now, the best chance I’ve ever had to see the music of one of my favourite classic-rock bands performed live. And I’m wondering whether I’ll wake up tomorrow unable to remember a thing.
I never sleep properly in hotel rooms. If I’m not roused every 10 minutes by a slamming door or laughter from returning merrymakers, I’m kept awake by the hum of something electrical (what is that?) or deep-voiced conversation from an adjacent room.
Tonight, as my bloodshot eyes stare at the bedside table, I’m serenaded by the sound of a woman next door being pleasured by a gentleman who, to be frank, doesn’t hang about. Unfortunately (for me, at any rate), he...
Goddammit, that headline is so obvious I’m almost ashamed. Almost.
Sometimes what’s obvious is what’s right, and what’s undeniably right is that this morning in old London town Mr Lee Rocker more than lives up to his name.
The bassist, who made that name with the Stray Cats in the early '80s, is here at the London Bass Guitar Show, at the Olympia Conference Centre in Kensington, to perform for around 400 fans and other...
No, they’ve not spiked the Red Stripe tonight - there really is a space-suited gentleman wandering around The Cellar. The Oxford venue, tucked in a side street just seconds away from the hustle and bustle of a city-centre Saturday night, is hosting a single-release party for Last Great Dreamers, and if there’s one thing astronauts love it’s a launch.
The band have christened the besuited character ‘Captain Helmut’ - from the German branch of NASA -...
And so Warner E. Hodges sets his trap.
I’m at Dingwalls in Camden and, so far, the six-foot gap in front of the stage has remained empty, despite two bands having already, in the parlance of the evening, rocked the place. As David Sinclair from openers David Sinclair Four noted, there are enough guitars racked up by the side of the stage to...
