If this is news to you, please feel free to go back a few posts to when I first announced its publication and issued a call-out for assistance with book events:

I am happy to say that a fair few of you, either here or on the socials, responded to that call, and as a result, I will shortly be announcing an impressively thorough UK book tour throughout the month of September. Today, however, I want to focus on a preceding run of US events. They are all on the East Coast, not for lack of mutual interest in going further afield as due to the logistics and finances of the travel that would be involved.

First up, however: POW! is available for US pre-order. If you’re interested, please consider ordering directly from the Trouser Press Books site, where the physical book is $22.95 and, for those who prefer such technology, the eBook is a ridiculously inexpensive $8.95. Ordering directly from an independent publisher is the best way to ensure your money goes directly to those who take the financial risk in keeping the noble art of the written word alive!

However, if you have a local bookshop you would prefer to support because we can’t survive without them either, go for it. (The book is distributed by Ingram should they need that info.) And if you can’t get to that shop, POW! is also available for pre-order via the indie-outlet-supporting Bookshop.org.

POW! is set up for pre-order on all the major online retail outlets as well, including Barnes & Noble, and aforementioned behemoth.

While the book is already available for pre-order in the UK and beyond on certain sites, I will hold off on details until I announce the UK events, hopefully next week. For now, below the full POW! cover, here’s what is happening in the US…

Sunday August 16^th, The Orpheum, Main Street, Saugerties, NY. 2:00-3:30pm.

The prime Hudson Valley event and the book’s premiere. Following successful previous presentations on R.E.M., Keith Moon, and The Smiths, I’ll be returning to the wonderful Orpheum cinema to read from POW!, show videos from the era on the big screen and talk about their relevance to the book and the era. I’ll then be joined for a conversation and audience Q&A by noted author and filmmaker Steven Blush (whose American Hardcore film I wrote about here). We will continue that discussion afterwards at the Inquiring Mind bookstore and café next door, where I can personalize any requested book signings.

Tickets are available now, priced $7.50/$9.50/$11.50. Deets are here.

My events at the Orpheum have always been a joy to present, and I trust this will be no exception.

Tuesday August 18^th, P&T Knitwear, Orchard Street, New York NY. 6:30-8:30pm.

P&T is an especially cool bookshop, with a dedicated presentation section that has what some call “stadium seating” (for about 50), on the world-famous Orchard Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. For this publication event day, I will be doubling up with Trouser Press editor/publisher Ira Robbins. While I present my second memoir, Ira will be presenting the second compendium of his legendary magazine Zip It Up! Too, More of the Best of Trouser Press Magazine 1974-1984. I look forward to talking together about our different perspectives on the early 80s, from our different sides of the Atlantic, and how our individual independent magazines covered that era. There will of course be an audience Q&A, and to the best of my understanding, the $10 ticket prices for the event include a store credit, or if you pre-purchase a copy of POW! (or Zip It Up Too!), you get admission to the event for just $4. This will be clarified when the event page goes up.

(Ira Robbins was a guest on my Fanzine Podcast here.)

Thursday August 20^th, Sterling Records, 121 5th Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11217. 6:30-8:30pm.

For this downhome indie party event, I’m returning to my old Park Slope neighborhood, where our family lived just off 5^th Avenue for a vibrant decade from 1996-2005. It’s the same neighborhood where, upon US publication in 1999, I did a reading from Moon on 5^th Avenue and 3^rd Ave at the English-styled pub, The Gate (which is still there). The bartender that day, Gary Giddens, a Spurs fan from that north London neck of the woods, gravitated to his own bar in subsequent years and in 2024, opened Sterling Records, a long-overdue addition to the neighborhood ever since Something Else closed up shop years ago. When I stopped in at Sterling that summer and was bowled over not only by its music selection but its sizable book selection, I readily agreed to do a reading/event as soon as the chance arose. And so it has. I will be joined in conversation at Sterling by Tom Ferrie, the eternally enthused and energized co-founder of Maker Park Radio, which is sponsoring the event. Tom, whose vinyl collection could open several record shops, will also spin some music as, I hope, will I. Gary has promised to have some beers on hand. Admission is free and deets are here.

Sunday August 23^rd, Stonykill Coffee, Main Street, Chatham. 2-4pm.

Back Upstate, I’ll be crossing the Hudson River for a cozy event in the increasingly des-res town of Chatham. Stonykill may call itself a coffee shop, but it doubles as a selective record and music book shop, catering to a clientele that itself consists of many a musician and writer. My friend Mark Petracca, aka , who I have known since at least the late 1980s, qualifies as both – he was editor of Creem back in the 90s and just released his latest album - and given that he lives up the road from Chatham, and introduced me to Stonykill, was the perfect choice to host a post-reading conversation/Q&A. If you can’t make it to the big HV launch the previous Sunday, this is a lovely little alternative. Admission is free and deets are here.

Thursday August 27^th, Politics and Prose, Union Market, 1324 4th Street NE, Washington, DC 20002. 7-8:30pm.

Right before heading to the UK, I’ll be going down to the nation’s capital for an event hosted by “D.C.’s premier independent cultural and bookstore hub” at their newer Union Market location. There I’ll be joined in conversation and audience Q&A by , author of the psychedelic novel Death Trip, and host of the music Substack Dispatches From The Fringe. I want to thank Seth for getting the event together after that previous Substack call-out, especially as Politics & Prose is somewhat legendary in the bookshop world. Admission is free, with first come first serve seating. Deets are here.

After I return from the UK, I will – at last! – be doing an event with Kingston, New York’s flagship bookshop/bar/café/performance space Rough Draft, date and details TBA. There may also be a couple of further book events, but this is your lot for now. I look forward to announcing the much longer run of UK events in the next week or so.

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Oh, wait, it was? In 1994? Well, it’s not like anybody noticed it being held in the USA before, is it?

Apparently not, at least if your name is Brendan Hunt, a.k.a. Coach Beard from Ted Lasso. Here he is, talking in front of a South by South West audience back in March of this year, as a guest of the Guardian’s Football Weekly podcast, the most popular football podcast in the USA if not the world. As per the actual quote below the clip (lin case the clip does not open at the right place) Hunt is comparing his experiences at the World Cup in Germany in 2006 with that of his 22-year-old self back in USA 1994 :

Well, no offence to Brendan Hunt, whose Coach Beard is/was one of the most plausible of all characters on Ted Lasso largely because he looks, sounds, and behaves like any of the true, deeply knowledgeable footie fanatics who can be found in every corner of this here USA – but that cluelessness was on him. The USA most certainly did give a shit in 1994.

I should know, because unlike Hunt, I attended every single round of the tournament, including the Final in LA. I was there with the US squad before the squad was named, I watched as people across the nation caught on to just what a phenomenon had landed in their front yards, I watched as unknowns became household names, I joined fans of every nation in cities across the nation, and I had a great time every single step of the way. This not so much despite the fact that England hadn’t made it to the finals, but especially because England hadn’t made it to the Finals. I didn’t have to apologise for English fans’ behavior, which was still appalling at that time when overseas, nor wave a stupid flag of Saint George. I could support my adoptive USA as underdogs instead, which suited me just fine, because I was a Crystal Palace fan and I had spent my life supporting underdogs.1 But most of all, I could just enjoy the World Cup itself: the festivities, the fans, and – except for the Final itself – the football too.

And again no offence to Brendan Hunt, though I do want him to own his own ignorance should he ever get to read this, but I was hardly the only one. Every single game of the World Cup in 1994 was sold out. Every. Single. Game. Fun fact:

“The 1994 World Cup in the US remains the most attended of all 22 previous World Cups, drawing 3,587,538 spectators. The 52 matches played during that year were watched by an average of 68,991 fans per match.”

For context, USA 94 was the last tournament to feature just 24 teams, which makes it all the more impressive that even with the extra games brought on by a 32-team tournament since then, none of the subsequent seven World Cups has come close to breaking that attendance record. For additional context, not even repeated six-figure crowds games at Rio’s Maracana Stadium (Brazil 1950) and Mexico City’s Azteca Stadiums (Mexico 1970 and ‘86) could get those World Cups into the 50,000 attendance average, let alone 69,000. At USA 1994, short of someone’s car, bus or nerves breaking down en route to the actual match, there was never an empty seat to be seen.

It took one game at World Cup 2026 for that streak to be broken. The second match of the tournament, held at the Akron Stadium - not in Akron, OH, but Guadalajara Mexico - was noted for swathes of empty seats. Mexican fans are among the most passionate of all football fans and will rarely pass up an opportunity to watch a game (and even less so to participate in one). So why did locals not join the festivities sufficiently, especially as FIFA president Gianni Infantino claimed at his pre-tournament press conference on Wednesday June 10 that “We have sold over six million tickets,” and that “The demand has been unprecedented, not by a little bit, but by a factor of 10 or more.”

Perhaps – and this will come as no surprise to anyone who has paid any attention to the greed and gluttony, the corruption and the conniving, and the baiting and switching perpetuated by the deplorable Infantino, whose only real achievement as FIFA President has been to make his predecessor Sepp Blatter look semi-decent by comparison - this was the reason:

Tickets in the lower tier cost $500, with those on the sidelines at the top of the stadium’s bowl priced at $400. This for an opening group match between two of the lower ranked teams in the tournament. (South Korea and the Czech Republic.)

Here, by comparison, is the actual ticket I used for the first game played in the New York Metro area – or the Tri-State area if you want to call it that – of World Cup 1994, between one of the favourites, Italy, and Ireland.

Yes, that is a $30 ticket. Though $30 then is worth more now (approx. $67), it still wasn’t a lot. Two CDs. A good bottle of wine at the local shop. A Stüssy shirt back when Stüssy shirts were made by Sean Stüssy and lasted a lifetime. In other words, it was affordable. So affordable that Irish fans snapped up most of the neutral seats as well as their official allocation; this was their second World Cup Finals in history, and having gone out to Italy in the Quarter-Finals four years earlier, they were after revenge. The Italians, meanwhile, just assumed they would win the match as they had four years earlier, win their group, and make it to the Final. (They were right on only one of these three predictions.) Excited though the real die-hard Italian fans were for the World Cup in general, they weren’t ready to pay through their noses for tickets on the black market.

By the time the match came round, I had already bought a couple of tickets for a couple of other matches through official channels. And along the way, I had developed real World Cup Fever. Not the kind that gets hyped on you by the media - to offer an olive branch to the likeable Brendan Hunt, the US media in ‘94 presented the World Cup as a curiosity, a side-show of sorts for those who were not in the know – but the kind you get when you love football and the greatest tournament in the World Cup is coming to your home town. And so, the night before that Ireland-Italy game, I went to an Irish bar I knew well enough in Manhattan where I lived – the fact that I was an Englishman was irrelevant, I’ve never experienced problems with the Irish-English history in New York City the way I have in Kilburn or Boston – and asked around for a spare ticket.

It took about two minutes until I had one in my pocket. I don’t remember what I paid for it but I do know it was a lot more than $30. I’d gone with enough cash – I was childless at the time and making good money working for Rapido TV and with a ton of other freelancing – that I could strike a deal, but not enough cash to pay stupid money. Maybe it was as much as $100, but the game was just a subway and a bus away, the other side of the Lincoln Tunnel, and visiting Irish fans were taking over New York City for the weekend, and it was a beautiful thing, and I played football locally alongside some Irish expats and we were all mates and I was more than happy to support them at Giants.

What I am getting at is that it didn’t break the bank.

Nor did the bus ride over. There was a dedicated ticket office at Port Authority for the thousands taking the short journey; you paid your money – the usual regular cost over there, a few bucks at most – and then employees ferried/funneled/pointed you out the side doors, onto 41^st Street, and on to one of dozens of buses all revved up and ready to go. The entire process, from arriving at Port Authority to getting on the bus, took about five minutes. Nobody was searched. There was no hassle. We arrived at Giants Stadium to find the minor league sport of “tailgating” – setting up a mobile party out of the back of your car in the car park – in full swing. The whole thing was a memorable party. (Roger Bennett, British co-host of The Men In Blazers, in an interesting piece that covers similar ground to my own here and was just published in The New Yorker, says that that particular game “gave Americans permission to celebrate their identities in all of their dizzy wonder.”)

The cost of the journey from Port Authority to what is now called the MetLife Stadium costs around $18 these days. For the World Cup FIFA pegged prices instead at $80; they were only reduced to the near everyday price of $20 after public and political outrage and with the New York Governor stepping in to provide school buses. The cost by train from nearby Penn Station has been reduced from FIFA’s original $150 price to $98 – it is normally $13 – and defended by the NJ Governor who claims his State is picking up the tab for the extra security. (This “security” brought on by political concerns that we will discuss later.) Unlike 1994, the nearest parking is a mile’s walk away and will cost a jaw-dropping $225.2

Actual tickets for opening round games are similarly eye-wateringly expensive. Or extortionate, if we want to be blunt about it. The lowest price for the first game at Giants, which took place between Brazil and Morocco on Saturday evening of June 13, officially “began” at $105 for the worst seats and rose to $620, or more than twelve times what I paid for a Category 1 ticket for the Ireland-Norway game in the 1994 group stages ten days after Ireland-Italy.3 Hours before the kick-off for Brazil-Morocco, as I wrote this section, a single ticket would cost you over $1000 on the resale market, a market FIFA fully supports and indeed has structured so as to make money from where possible. 4 5

It’s called price-gouging, it’s called fleecing, and it’s just one of the many reasons that this year’s World Cup will be better watched from the sofa or the local sports bar than inside the ground. Assuming you feel inspired to watch at all.

Personally, I chose to spend the Brazil-Morocco game at the local Dietz “Stadium” in Kingston, watching our own (Kingston) Stockade FC take on Brooklyn City in the USA soccer pyramid’s 4th Tier. {Per the Stockade web site, “We are a pioneer in the "open source soccer" movement – bringing transparency & data to the process of building lower level soccer clubs to help grow and change the game from the bottom up.one of our lower semi-pro tiers of footie.”) Tickets are dirt cheap - $10 for adults, $5 kids - and the crowd of close to a thousand people a match is noisy, the local brewery is on tap and the quality, while not of World Cup standards, is better than you might think. Well, maybe not, it’s football at any rate.

But of course I followed progress of Brazil-Morocco on my phone. And I will be watching a multitude of other matches in real time, and most of the rest on highlights. After all, we watched in 2018 when the World Cup was held in Russia as a showcase for the tyrant Vladimir Putin and he rewarded our support by invading Ukraine. And we watched in 2022 when it was held in Qatar, despite what NPR, generally a voice of reason and not given to hyperbole, called “criticism over the logistics of holding a sporting event in a country where summertime temperatures regularly top 100 degrees; over allegations of bribery and corruption among FIFA officials who voted for Qatar; and over concerns about human rights abuses that have persisted in the years since.”

By comparison, the decision made exactly eight years ago today (June 13, 2018) to award the tournament to a triumvirate of the USA, Mexico and Canada must have seemed like a good idea at the time. That the USA would be celebrating its 250th birthday In the middle of the tournament was surely factored in to the joint bid, a chance for the USA and its neighbors to show the world the unifying power of democracy.

Sure, Donald Trump – who had launched his Presidential campaign three years earlier, by claiming, with his usual knack for deflection, that “Mexicans are rapists” - was somehow POTUS eight years ago and busy ruining the world as best he could. But his incompetency was such that he was bound to be impeached and out of office by 2026, and even if somehow he could win a second term, such a nightmare would conclude at the start of 2025. Nobody could conceive that he might be impeached twice, launch a deadly insurrection when voted out, be forgiven by a sufficient number of voters as to stay party leader in the interim, avoid jail for his crimes, and be aided by a fellow geriatric who occupied the White House hotseat in the meantime, that being Joe Biden of course and his “senior moment” at the one and only “debate” that largely decided the 2024 elections.

So now we have the World Cup being “shared” by a USA whose leader has claimed one of the other co-hosts as a 51^st State, and has deported residents hailing from the other co-host, many of them in the country legally, by the hundreds of thousands. A “leader” who is, frankly, a racist, with little interest in any other country that can’t put America First, and so much disdain for countries populated mostly by Black people that he has instigated immigration and visa bans on them. (Fans from Haiti, who have qualified for the Finals for only the second time in history and the first time since 1974, are unable to travel for the games even if they could afford it; it was news that the only player on the squad who actually lives there was granted his visa.)

This is also the so-called leader who has, in the run up to the World Cup, the tournament that is meant to unite us in our differences, started a senseless, pointless, murderous and economically ruinous war on Iran, a country that just happens to have qualified for said World Cup with its matches to be held in the USA.

To be clear, humans have never known true peace on earth, and the 1994 World Cup was held as Europe turned a blind eye to the civil war engulfing the now former Yugoslavia; and the US President at the time, Bill Clinton, may well have been a philanderer, an adulterer and worse. But the USA was nonetheless enjoying a period of relative peace and prosperity. In 2026, we have to suffer the soul-sapping imagery of one President (Infantino) sucking up to another (Trump, of course), going so far as to invent a FIFA World Peace Prize and award it to the US warmonger as if pacifying a screaming baby with Mother’s Milk. And if the embarrassing imagery of Trump muscling in on the Chelsea team’s trophy moment after winning the FIFA Club World Cup in 2025 is anything to go by, the actual final in 2026, being held on the east rather than west coast this time round, is going to be an international embarrassment of the highest order.

Frankly, I find it depressing to hear British media podcasts, from reputed outlets like the BBC, Channel 4 and the Guardian, laughing at Trump’s antics, as if he is the tournament mascot-turned-comedian. Similarly, while one can easily raise a smile at the meme that instantly appeared after the opening game between Mexico and South Africa -

— one should note that white South Africans are, quite literally, the only group being granted expedited refugee status and targeted resettlement in the USA right now. One should note also that a qualified World Cup referee for the 2026 tournament was denied his visa simply because he hailed from Somalia. And that while it may seem nice to joke about ICE, here are some of the examples of people being held at the Delaney Hall ICE detention center in New Jersey as of June 3, just ten miles from the MetLife Stadium, where the World Cup final will be held on July 19. It is no laughing matter:

“Pregnant women—whose presence in the detention facility was, until recently, denied. Immigrants with Alien Registration Numbers who believe they have been wrongly detained.

Medically vulnerable people—like Emanuel Rodrigues, 38, who requires crutches or a wheelchair and was deprived of both for forty days, then moved to medical isolation for four months.

People who have protected status—like Adriana Quiroz Zapata, who, because of the horrors inflicted upon her by her ex-boyfriend and his police buddies in Colombia, should have been protected by the Convention Against Torture yet was shipped to the Democratic Republic of Congo instead.”

Tony Fletcher, Wordsmith posts twice a week, minimum, usually on Thursdays and Sundays. To receive all posts in your Inbox, please subscribe. To keep the page going, please consider a paid subscription at just $6 a month, $60 for the year (less than £5/£50 at current exchange rates.) You get access to all the archives all the time, exclusive interview transcripts, and the monthly Crossed Channels podcast I host with . I promise not to spend your own hard-earned money on dynamic pricing World Cup tickets. Seriously.

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No wonder I prefer to talk about USA 1994, when there was no threat of ICE showing up at stadiums, no denial of referee visas, no FIFA Peace Prizes, and no violence of any kind anywhere that I saw.

My own journey through the tournament – which had truly begun with a piece I did for Rapido TV earlier in the spring, an adventure I want to recall separately – continued after the Group stages through two Rounds of 16 matches (Spain 3, Switzerland 0 at RFK Stadium in DC for a $35 ticket, and Italy 2, Nigeria 1, at Foxborough in Boston for $60), and two Quarter-Finals (Italy 2, Spain 1, again at Foxborough and, the very next day, Bulgaria 2, Germany 1, at Giants, each for a face value of $140).

Both Quarter-Finals were memorable. The Italians, despite losing that opening match to Ireland 1-0 and finishing third in their group, had finally gotten into gear, with their lead striker Roberto Baggio finally scoring goals, and after disposing of everyone’s favourite dark horses, Nigeria, in the round of 16, they seemed destined suddenly to go the whole way. Bulgaria, meanwhile, had proven the real dark horses of the tournament, and their victory over Germany in those Quarters, thanks to the phenomenal goal-scoring power of eventual Golden Boot co-winner Hristo Stoitchkvov, was surely the biggest surprise of the knockout stages.

I have other, non-footballing memories of the Italian matches at Foxborough. One is complete gridlock on the highway approaching the stadium for one of the games, which felt of Woodstock 1969 proportions (though we did ultimately get to see the whole match I believe, it was further evidence of just how many people were willing to travel distances for the games that year). And the bar staff “only following orders” when they refused to sell an ageing Italian man, who spoke no English, a beer because he could not provide ID; I gave my Colombian friend Carlos who was still under-21 at the time but like all good New Yorkers had a fake ID, and was next in line, some cash and bought the Italian the beer for him.

My memory of Bulgaria beating Germany, apart from the sheer shock factor of it, was a group of core Argentinean fans who had completely mis-predicted their own country’s path to the finals (like Italy, they finished third in their group but unlike Italy were knocked out in the round of 16), outsinging the Germans and Bulgarians combined. They are some fans, those Argentineans.

Having come this far, I had already taken what seemed like a ridiculous decision and paid the full $300 asking price for a Semi-Final ticket; it must have been the official market because the ticket actually has my name on it. $300 was stupid money, around $750 in 2026 money, but it was Category 1 – the best seats – and you probably don’t need me to tell you there are no Semi-Final tickets to be had in 2026 for anything close to that amount. The game was between Bulgaria and Italy – this was now my fourth Italian match out of seven! - and, destiny appearing to have been written for them, the Italians won thanks to two goals by Baggio. Bulgaria had given us all great entertainment and come to think of it, it was probably this match at which the Argentinean fans entertained us all so well. Unless it was both. That was part of the fun of the World Cup: unexpected groups of fans representing countries whose players who had already gone home.

It had been an amazing journey, for those fans as well as some of the teams: a peaceful, joyous, meticulously - even ridiculously - well organized tournament. And with only the Final weekend to come, I thought my own race was done. Two days after the Bulgaria-Italy Semi, I had to go to Atlanta to interview Chuck D. The following Monday, I had to go to Detroit for some stupid story on a rap group that was supposedly all black cops, doing gangsta rap from a cop perspective. Both were for the Rapido TV show Passengers, for which I had been appointed US producer. I figured I’d join friends somewhere at a New York bar to watch the Final in-between.

And then came the phone call about a pair of available World Cup Final tickets…

…To be continued.

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In this 29th episode we discuss not one of the first four classic albums by Liverpool legends Echo & The Bunnymen, but the troubled, eponymous fifth album. Tony actually witnessed the record’s long gestation in person while writing the band’s authorized 1987 biography Never Stop: The Echo & The Bunnymen Story, which makes Echo & The Bunnymen the first album to be featured on CROSSED CHANNELS that one of us was in the studio for. It is also perfect subject matter for Crossed Channels as it’s an album made by a British band in a British studio but with an American audience very much in mind.

Since he was present for its recording - both during the subsequently-abandoned sessions in Liverpool with producer Gil Norton, and then in London with eventual producer Laurie Latham - and given that he traveled with the band on their subsequent 1988 US tour for SPIN magazine, Tony has quite a bit of insider information to share during this episode. Some of it is explosive, and much of it will be new to Bunnymen fans, so this episode should be well worth the price of admission!

Released in July 1987, three years after the jaw-droppingly brilliant Ocean Rain, and nearly two years after the Latham-produced single “Bring On The Dancing Horses” signified a change in musical approach (and landed on the platinum Pretty In Pink soundtrack), Echo & The Bunnymen was the band’s most commercially successful release in the US, where the single “Lips Like Sugar” was a significant radio and dancefloor hit. In the UK, the album peaked at #4, just as Ocean Rain had done. But improved US sales aside, Echo & The Bunnymen was widely seen as a disaster.

Once considered the greatest band in the UK, Echo & The Bunnymen - whose drummer Pete de Freitas had returned to the fold after going AWOL in the USA the previous year and “totally insane” in the process - now seemed sadly adrift amid Laurie Latham’s generically “80s” pop production. Not even the presence of Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek on a remake of the beloved B-side “Bedbugs and Ballyhoo” — the band subsequently covered The Doors’ “People Are Strange” for the soundtrack of the 1987 teen horror film The Lost Boys — could re-light their fire during the recording sessions.

Tony maintains that the group’s live shows, especially in the States, remained electric during this period. Certainly, the album’s first two singles, “The Game” and “Lips Like Sugar,” did sound stronger than their studio incarnations when the band performed them in the autumn of 1987 on BBC-TV’s marathon 24-hour concert “Rock Around the Clock” (see below). Still, it was clear from critical and long-term fans’ reactions that with Echo & The Bunnymen, Echo & The Bunnymen had somehow lost their aura of invincibility, and shortly after a Japanese tour in April 1988, front man Ian McCulloch left the group. (It would be 1997 before there was another Echo & Bunnymen album featuring McCulloch reunited with original guitarist Will Sergeant and bassist Les Pattinson; sadly, Pete de Freitas died in 1989.)

How and why did things suddenly go so wrong for one of the most important and influential British bands of the 1980s? Tony clearly has plenty of thoughts on the matter. Dan has some opinions as well; though he was a relatively late convert to the magic and majesty of the Bunnymen,.having only just begun to investigate their back catalog when the release of Echo & The Bunnymen gave him serious misgivings about his newfound affection for their older material, he has since come back around to enthusiastically embrace the quartet’s first quartet of long players. On this episode, Dan asks: is this fifth album really as bad as he’d remembered? Or, he and Tony ponder, are there great songs lurking under the over-production?

As always, the first 10 or so minutes of this episode are free for all to hear. To listen in entirety, along with all of our previous complete CROSSED CHANNELS episodes, just sign up for a paid subscription to one of our Substacks — or, better yet, sign up for a paid subscription to both of them!

By doing so, you will not only get a new episode of CROSSED CHANNELS every month in your inbox, but also receive other exclusive posts from each of us, as well as full-time access to all the good stuff in our respective archives. Plus, your monthly paid subscription will allow us to afford our monthly post-recording repast over at one of our many fine (or at least decent enough) Asian eateries!

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Theme music for this episode is Dan’s project The Corinthian Columns and its latest release “Hydrangea,” available on Bandcamp here.

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There were no words. I guess none were needed. Indeed, when I wrote back, “Is this what I think it is?” accompanied by smileys, my older son did not reply because, he told me later in the day when we spoke by phone, he presumed the question to be rhetorical.

But while it is true, especially in cases like this, that a picture is worth a thousand words, I’m a writer, and I love words. I especially love the English language, because a single word can have multiple meanings, allowing for considerable wordplay. In the process, it allows for a Substack post like this to segue from one singular meaning of a word to another.

So yes, of course that’s an engagement ring on the third finger left hand of my son’s girlfriend/partner/roommate/now-fiancée Teagan. What Campbell could not have known, however, when he surprised me with the image taken (by Teagan) after a successful Saturday night restaurant proposal, was something I don’t think anyone can know until they become a parent, and especially a parent of kids who are now themselves adults. It’s something my own mother frequently said to me:

A parent just wants their kids to be happy.

It’s true. Waking up to that picture last Sunday made me so happy I found myself instantly welling up – not for my own joy as much as for my son and his happiness. There was something still deeper, however: an instantly responsive love, perhaps, for the enduring power of love itself? I would be interested to know whether other parents reading this page have had a similar reaction to similar news. Were you any more able to put it into words? Or did you too just harken back to The Who’s first single and Pete Townshend’s launch as a lyricist?

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Tony Fletcher, Wordsmith posts twice a week, minimum, usually on Thursdays and Sundays. To receive all posts in your Inbox, please subscribe. Please also consider a paid subscription at just $6 a month, $60 for the year (less than £5/£50 at current exchange rates.) You get access to all the archives all the time, exclusive interview transcripts, and the monthly Crossed Channels podcast co-hosted with (Echo & The Bunnymen episode coming this week). You also, I hope, get the better form of the word engagement.

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By coincidence, Teagan co-fronts a band, We’re Here! To Kill, who have a different kind of engagement coming up later this month. On Saturday, June 20, they are coming down from Burlington, VT to play my home city of Kingston, NY - officially my home city again, now that Paula and I have moved back in from the nearby ‘burbs of Hurley to a house in the heart of midtown – at the punky Kick Out The Fest all-dayer being held inside the music shop Planet Woodstock. (Check their excellent single fron late last year.)

The booking engagement in Kingston had nothing to do with me, I should note, especially as, unfortunately, I already have a previous engagement for that day: I have committed to “running” Manitou’s Revenge for the third, and what could well be the final, time of my life, and having put down the expensive entry fee several months back and been in training for it since I spent two weeks of November trekking the Himalaya of Nepal, I am not about to back out – though if you want to read this link to find out what’s entailed, or this recount from one of my earlier, trail running posts (Manitou’s is at #5), or listen to my old podcast about it, you might imagine any excuse to claim a conflicting engagement would be a good one!

Fortunately, I saw We’re Here! To Kill on a trip I took to Burlington, VT just a year ago. That time, they were playing a bicycle recycling shop – suitably called Old Spokes Home - and the footage I shot for fun was ultimately used in the Dear Boys’ video for our last single “I Hope You Know How Fucking Cool You Are.” (One of the other three young bands featured in that video, The Sick Fix from Manchester, have just released a new single “Liquid Gold”/”Shoe Shopping,” and brazen and bold and loud it is too!) On our Bandcamp page, due to that platform’s own templates, it’s none other my future daughter-in-law Teagan who fills the thumbnail image for said video (use BC link below to see as much).

There is something suitably poetic about this, given how Teagan is on her way to becoming Fletcher family, just as there was a frisson of novelty and excitement as I realized I have never typed the words “my future daughter-in-law” before. Nor have I ever been a parent at a wedding. I have much to look forward to.

My older son and his now-fiancée’s wedding engagement is all the more enjoyable from a parental perspective because my other, younger son is suffering from a lack of a third kind of engagement, that with much of what the tactile world offers, a form of social anxiety forestalling in-person relationships to the point that he is just about friendless. There is, I acknowledge, much to be grateful for: he is holding down a decent part-time job with responsibilities, has no shortage of musical skills (which I employ him for at every opportunity) or general intelligence and, at least when he’s with other people, good manners. Yet when not at work, on the occasional solo walk, or on a (junk) food run in the car, he’s at (his mother’s) home. Alone. And most likely online, going down unhealthy, potentially toxic rabbit holes on YouTube and TikTok. None of which is a good way for a 21-year-old to be. And none of which, by his own admission, makes him happy. And if, as noted earlier, “A parent just wants their kids to be happy,” then clearly my own happiness is impacted accordingly, my older son’s engagement (in multiple senses of the word) notwithstanding.

That 9-year age gap between these two sons feels at times like a couple of generations. The older son grew up at a perfect age for Brio train sets populated by Thomas the Tank Engine characters, and Bionicles and Transformers, for the first Pixar movies we all attended at the cinema, and for video games he could play with his dad on the TV, his early years experienced at a time when kids might not play on the street so much but still spent time after school at each other’s houses. The younger son grew up instead at the (im)perfect age for increased indoor time, for social media dependency, and also, sadly, at the (im)perfect age to be unduly impacted by the year of Covid isolation, spending his 16^th year developing red-eye in front of his home computer when he should have been out in the world furthering real-world friendships and romantic dalliances.

Some of this is his personal burden and my personal parental concern, but elements of it are universal. (The term ‘failure to launch’ is in wide use as a catch-all for a whole array of largely applicable symptoms.) Because, while many of his generation have recovered from the social deprivations of 2020 and ‘21, others clearly have not, and there is an opportunity here to talk about the word ‘engagement’ in a fourth, and less positive light than that with which we’ve examined it so far. (And if you too have a child who falls into the bracket I have described above, again I’d love to hear your own observations. It helps not to feel alone.)

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When I went off to Nepal for Novemner, a friend gifted me an Audible copy of the book Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari, although because my trip was partly intended as a digital detox, I did not start listening until my return. Harari, also the author of the bestselling books Sapiens and Homo Deus, is one of these impossibly intelligent people whose only real fault is an inability to succinctly summarize the multiple thoughts in their head. In other words, and there are lots of them, Nexus runs long: eighteen hours long, if you’re listening, which makes the adjective in the book’s subtitle, A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, one of the only inaccurate statements surrounding a book packed with hard facts.

Though Nexus traces human information networks chronologically, beginning with language and the oral “story,” every chapter finds Harari returning to the subject that keeps him up at night, the one whose initials conclude the book’s title: Artificial Intelligence. Throughout, Harari references social media as the most prominent example of AI’s impact on social interactions in a way the human race has never encountered before, so when I saw that he was recently a guest of Ezra Klein on the latter’s New York Times-sponsored podcast, and that they tackled this topic among others, I made a point of listening. The following is taken direct from the transcript on the podcast’s NYT home page, and it is all in Harari’s words.

“The goal given to the Facebook algorithm, to the X algorithm, to the TikTok algorithm, is to increase user engagement — which sounds nice. “Engagement” sounds like a good thing. But what it really means is that the algorithms experimented on millions, on billions, of human guinea pigs to see how we make humans more engaged.

And they discovered that the easiest way to make people engaged is to press the hate button or the greed button or the fear button in human minds, because hate is very engaging. Fear is very engaging.

If something threatens your life, you are engaged.

They have been flooding the world with hate and fear and anger and greed and so forth, and we are now living in a hyper-engaged world.

Engagement is a very close cousin of another word, which is very dominant in our language: “excitement.”

“Excitement” simply means that your nervous system is working in a hyper level. Excitement is good in some situations and to some extent, just as engagement is good in some situations. But ultimately, biologically, if you keep an organism excited all the time, the organism eventually collapses and dies.

We are just not built to be excited all the time.”

---

This is only the tip of the social media iceberg, but it gets at a key point. Younger people who spend too much time “engaged” in the oxymoron of social media have developed dependencies we had not anticipated as parents – we were more concerned by our own youthful experiences about our kids’ exposure to drink and drugs and gangs, etc., none of which my son has succumbed to, for which I’m appreciative – and in so doing, are suffering not just from a surfeit of over-excitement, but from resultant under-confidence.

If that result was not part of the tech giants’ plans, the dependency most certainly was. The New York Times (again) this past week unveiled its own investigation into “How Social Media Apps Hooked Teens at School,” which cites these worrying examples in its lede:

Snapchat sent phone alerts to adolescents during school hours, urging them to share what was going on in their classrooms.

Meta paid “teen ambassadors” to promote Instagram and hand out swag to their friends at school.

TikTok gave the National PTA millions of dollars, in part to throw school events about online safety and provide favorable comments to journalists.

The fact that more than 1,400 American school districts have filed lawsuits against Meta, Snap, TikTok and YouTube “amid a rising backlash against social media, with parent movements and best-selling books blaming the platforms for loneliness, bullying, eating disorders and sexual exploitation,” as the NYT goes on to state, is a good step towards reparations and course correction, but unfortunately has come too late for a generation whose real social engagement has been sacrificed at the altar of tech company enrichment.

Pope Leo XIV also has something to say on this subject. “Connecting young people to digital networks serves no purpose if they remain disconnected from themselves, others, and their own interiority,” the Pontiff observed just last week. Unfortunately, he used the former Twitter to do so. (My thanks to the Substack Timeless & Timely for highlighting and writing about the Pope’s tweet, and additionally to the Bulwark for its article on how You’re About to Unwittingly Make Elon Musk a Trillionaire.)

Pope Leo did not limit himself to 140 characters. He carried on his tweet by stating that, “We must help young people rediscover silence, reflection, the ability to ask questions, the depth of relationships, and openness to transcendence. To listen to the soul, we must lend an ear, because the soul’s voice is not a shout, but a whisper.”

This may be one lone instance in which the Pope and Yuval Noah Harari, whose disdain for theocracy, Catholic papal infallibility in particular, permeates much of Nexus, agree: that we have to stop over-exciting ourselves and learn to calm ourselves, that we have to get offline and away from the algorithms if we want to continue to develop as individuals and as a species. Engagement helps make us homo sapiens complete, but only in the real world, in real time, with real people alongside us.

That’s easy for me to say, a lot harder for our kids to live by.

(I recognize the irony, even hypocrisy, that this article is published online only, and that Substack now considers itself Social Media. Our world is imperfect.)

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Today, rather than skip my midweek post entirely, I spent a few minutes going back over some of my earliest posts, from when my subscriber base was a mere fraction of what it is now, to find something that would still have relevance two-three years later and which I could release from the archives, which are only available more than 12 weeks back to my paid subscribers (without whom, etc.).

I found what follows, originally published on August 3 2023, a week after after the premature death of Sinéad O’Connor, without whom, in this case, my life would have been much less musically enriched and considerably less lyrically impacted. The comparison with Prince is a bit of a headline grabber, I admit, because I love Prince too. But Sinéad’s musical achievements, especially in the States, were often reduced by the masses to “that woman who covered that Prince song, cried in the video and it went to Number 1” when as a composer, singer, lyricist and activist, she was so so so much more than that.

I have not edited anything from the original post; any typos, grammatical errors and, especially, anything I might say differently now, remains “stet.”

Looking at the figures, my subscriber base was less than 10% of what it is now, and the article, even with those who do use their paid subscription to explore the archives, has still only been viewed by a quarter or so of an average post in 2026. I hope you can enjoy it, and I hope it inspires you to listen to some Sinéad today. And that if you do, I trust, your life, too, will be musically enriched in the process.

8 Good Reasons Why Sinéad meant more to me than Prince.

Last Wednesday, July 26, the “entertainment” news cycle started with the much-anticipated 80^th birthday of Mick Jagger. While his Glimmer Twin Keef has somehow defied all laws of nature and is also still with us, we always expected Mick to make old bones. He’s someone who has clearly looked after himself, physically and financially, and who exudes – for all the crow’s feet and deep lines on his face - the radiant health of someone who always planned to be around a long time to enjoy his wealth.  

Only hours into the day I got an e-mail from my ex. (We were together over 25 years, raised two great kids, had a wonderful time most of the time, so don’t worry about us!) It simply read ‘Sinéad rip’. Given the lower case “rip”, I thought she might have accessed some rare recording, ripped it and was sharing it. But nothing was attached, no text beyond the subject. I replied with a simple question mark. Moments later, I got on my socials, and realized what she had meant. Sinéad O’Connor RIP. Oh.

Sinéad O’Connor was part of our mutual life soundtrack. My ex-wife told me this past week that the moment she heard Sinéad on the radio for the first time – we can assume the song was from The Lion and The Cobra, Sinéad’s superlatively distinct debut - she decided to buy a ticket to see her play at Trenton’s City Gardens, in 1988. And early in our relationship together, she and I attended the Garden State Arts Center in New Jersey on August 24 1990; it was the night Sinéad refused to allow the National Anthem to be played before her set. Nobody seemed any the wiser at the event itself; we were all too much enjoying a fantastic concert. It wasn’t until we went on to the Melody afterwards in New Brunswick that we learned that the ‘incident” had created a firestorm, and we weren’t yet to know that the next night, from the same stage, Frank Sinatra, displaying the kind of machismo attitude Sinéad railed against for much of her career, would tell his own audience he’d like to meet her so he could “kick her ass.”

Sinéad’s tours became thinner on the ground after the intense fame generated by the runaway success of that second album I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, combined with her abusive upbringing, led to her infamous incident on SNL two years later. But later in our own lives, in October 2014, we made a point of traveling from the Catskill Mountains to see Sinéad play at City Winery in  Manhattan, where she played almost exclusively from her back-to-back returns to “form” (or successful “formula”), How About I Be Me (and You Be You)?, and I’m Not Bossy, I’m The Boss. The show was fine – I also seem to recall an all-female or at least largely female band – though it felt a little short. But SetlistFM lists 18 songs, including the idiosyncratic encores, and that’s fine. It was Sinéad. It was intimate surroundings. She was on good form. Her fans worshipped her. She seemed perfectly happy with it all.

I did not see her perform  again, but after Sinéad’s death, my ex sent me a photo of a ticket for the last concert she attended before Covid: Sinéad O’Connor at the El Rey Theater in LA, Feb 9 1990, on the opposite side of the USA. Now there is some fandom!

So neither of us will accept any part of this backlash against those accused of mourning vicariously for someone they never cared about, never met, never listened to beyond the big hits. This social phenomenon absolutely exists – witness the UK’s collapse into collective chaos after Princess Di died, long before social media sped the process up – but don’t look at us.

Similarly,  I found Morrissey’s well-reported public statement, harshly worded even by his own standards, ultimately disappointing. (Among other things, and I accept that with The Smiths and the song “Asleep,” Morrissey penned the lyrics to what is possibly now only the second-best song on the subject, he presumed O’Connor’s death to be a suicide.) While I encourage you to read it in full, and sense that he was initially trying to take aim mostly at the music business and mainstream media, by making the accusation, “You hadn't the guts to support her when she was alive and she was looking for you,” he nonetheless lumped all of us together.

Listen, Sinéad O’Connor had legions of fans who supported her when she was alive. And she also had a lot of passive fans who bought her second album because of a big hit and, regardless of controversy, were probably not much inspired to stay onboard after 1992’s Am I Not Your Girl?, an underwhelming album of jazz standards, (purposefully?) sabotaged the singer’s commercial appeal. Still, there is only so much that true, dedicated, long-term fans can do from a distance. In more recent years, they could even have been accused of over-caring, of reacting hysterically whenever Sinéad posted one of her suicidal thoughts on social media, creating a hyper-tense feedback loop.

I only met Sinéad once, so I make no claims whatsoever to “knowing” her. It was at the CMJ (College Music) convention in New York in late 1987. The Lion And The Cobra had just been released, was fast on its way to becoming a college radio hit, and Sinéad’s manager was walking her round the vast bar at the hotel where everyone congregated after the day’s panels concluded. I was introduced. I knew who she was and I would have been polite and full of sincere praise. I only recall that she was polite, shy, frail, and so very young. But the music business is a young person’s game: young people don’t have the fear, they haven’t learned to filter themselves, and for that reason they often make the best music with the most powerful lyrics.

And here I will talk extensively about Sinéad’s music and, especially, her powerful lyrics. I have been upset this past week by the number of press headlines along the lines of “’Nothing Compares 2 U’ Singer found dead” as if she only had one hit song – and a cover version at that. I am annoyed at the Observer in the UK for running a story on it under the headline Sinéad’s “Greatest Song” as if that’s not in dispute. It’s frustrating too, that Jon Pareles’s “10 Essential Songs by Sinéad O’Connor” in the New York Times contains six from her first two albums, perpetuating the general theory that she was spent after the firestorm. Nonetheless, it is worth including the following clip and discussing its place in her canon.

I will allow that “Nothing Compares 2 U” is probably Sinéad O’Connor’s greatest cover version. The competition is fierce, however: her raucous rendition of John Grant’s “The Queen of Denmark” on How About I Be Me…  is astonishing, and her delicately naked acoustic version of Nirvana’s “No Apologies” puts that group’s own Unplugged rendition in the shade. There are also many high-water marks across her album of Rastafarian reggae songs, Throw Down Your Arms, the many traditional and cover tunes included on Universal Mother, and of course, her remarkable adaption of “I Am Stretched On Your Grave” from I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got.

But, let’s go with it and allow that “Nothing Compares 2 U” is not only her greatest - her most successfully commercial, at any rate - cover version certainly, and let’s up the stakes: it is one of the greatest cover versions by anyone, ever. As Dave Fanning of RTE said on a live interview with Channel 4 on the day of Sinéad’s death, “she owns that song. It’s hers.”

And especially, the video to “Nothing Compares 2 U” is almost without compare. James Brown (he of loaded and my latest Fanzine Podcast) wrote last week on Facebook that one look at the video in a publicist’s office and he offered to put Sinéad on the NME’s cover its week of release. If you were to put together a list of the most powerful music videos of all time – and I know that people have – it would need to be on that list, additionally serving to remind that you don’t need to spend big bucks for a video to work.

But to tar Sinéad as some sort of one-hit wonder, and a one-hit cover wonder at that, not only throws her into a secondary role – almost as if she was just another of the many female protégés Prince was presumed to mastermind, regardless of their individual talents (future Fanzine Podcast guest Jane Appleby had something to say about this in her old fanzine Pussy Rock, archived here) – but completely ignores the quality of her own songwriting. I’ll be first to admit that Prince was a rare all-round genius, himself without compare for his stunning musicianship, his self-confidence, his dress sense, his ability to control his message. Sinéad, on the other hand, needed collaborators, sometimes with songwriting and especially in the studio, but that hardly makes her unique or any the lesser an artist for it. We should all have been saddened by Prince’s own death, himself “just” 57 at the time, back in 2016. He was, again, a singular genius, and there was likely a lot more music left in him.

But, I am going to say it: Sinéad O’Connor meant more than Prince. And here are 8 Good Reasons why.

Tony Fletcher, Wordsmith posts twice a week, minimum, usually on Thursdays and Sundays. To receive all posts in your Inbox, please subscribe. To keep the page going, please consider a paid subscription at just $6 a month, $60 for the year (less than £5/£50 at current exchange rates.) You get access to all the archives all the time, exclusive interview transcripts, and the monthly Crossed Channels podcast I host with .

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1) Prince wrote the romantic anthem “Kiss” and it’s universal and it’s wonderful: witness the many excellent cover versions, from Tom Jones to Age Of Chance, plus Richard Thompson (more of whom later) chose to include amongst the just 23 songs he selected for 1000 Years of Popular Music. But Sinéad could make kissing so personal that it sounded like she was actually doing it to you, as on “Kisses Like Mine,” from I’m Not Bossy, I’m The Boss, which manages to be, in a way that Sinéad was able to master time and again, vulnerable and cocky at the same time.

“You never had kisses like mine
So soft you'll find yourself crying
And after you weep
You'll fall asleep
And while my heart's flying
You'll be dreaming that I'm
The keeping kind.”

2) Prince wrote so explicitly about sex (per “Darling Nikki”) that he was a prime target of early PMRC hearings in the 1980s. But Sinead could also up the sexual stakes and again, in a way that was almost alarming it felt so personal. She sings the lines “I want to make love with you/More than I ever wanted to” in such a way that you knew he was singing not for casual effect but to a certain someone, as Sinéad did on “The Vishnu Room” from I’m Not Bossy, I’m The Boss. Nor the haunting vignette­ - “What does it mean when a man's eyes turn black/When you're making love?”  that opens “Where Have You Been?” from the same album. Or, indeed, at least to the best of my knowledge, a more effective song about that most painful of loves, the unavailable one, as in “This Green Jacket” also from the same album. (“And even though I know I'm not for you/Is it OK to say I really do adore you?”) Sinéad was in her mid-40s when she made this incredible album; there was a lot of physical loving going on in her life.

And though this next example does not come across as strictly autobiographical the way so much of her work does, I would like to put her back in Prince’s more general air of shock value, and suggest that “Daddy I’m Fine” from Faith and Courage (written with Dave Stewart) contains a more provocative chorus than anything Prince dared attempt, in part because it was coming from a woman, who was not meant to suggest such things: “I get sexy underneath the lights/Like I wanna fuck every man in sight.” It sounds sexy, too.

3) Did Prince write a more bitterly powerful song than “You Cause As Much Sorrow,” which has the audacity to state of someone once close to the protagonist that, “You cause as much sorrow dead as you did when you were alive.” It was a lyric I projected onto my father after his passing managed to have that same unfortunate effect upon myself. Rather than cause more pain, “You Cause As Much Sorrow” brought a lot of comfort.

4) Has anyone else written a greater divorce song (as I hear it) than “The Last Day of Our Acquaintance”? I shouldn’t have to describe it; you should know it. But the fact that it follows on from “You Cause As Much Sorrow” is a double whammy of naked emotion and story-telling that helps make I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got one of the greatest albums, period.

5) Prince may have written “Sign o’the Times” and it’s great - don’t get me wrong, for a while back on its release it was my go-to anthem - but he certainly didn’t write a song accusing the current leader of a neighboring country for ordering mass murder, the way Sinéad O’Connor bravely opened “Black Boys On Mopeds,” also from that second album, with an attack on Margaret Thatcher… Nor take that neighboring country to task the way Sinéad did on the monologue “Famine” from Universal Mother, one that not only corrects English imperialist history, but is brave enough to criticize her own home country, Ireland, for how it has failed to absorb said history, leading to “the highest statistics of child abuse in the EEC.” These, evidently, are not your average rhyming couplets, but it’s to the credit of Sinéad’s delivery, the arrangement, the surrounding performance and the production that this polemic is so musically effective.

6) Some people like being superstars, and Prince reveled in his protective bubble. I recently had the fun of watching video of him collect his multiple awards at the American Music Awards in 1985 accompanied by his enormous bodyguard humorously called Tiny, enigmatically leaving the thank yous and speeches to others. But when just about everyone else who was anyone in that building went on from the awards show to an all-night studio session where they altruistically recorded the Ethiopian famine relief charity single “We Are The World,” Prince went to a nightclub instead to revel in his V.I.P. status.

By comparison, Sinéad O’Connor, at the peak of her popularity, boycotted the 1991 Grammys entirely, even though she was up for Record of the Year and three other awards, writing a letter to the organizers that noted, in part, how “they have created a great respect among artists for material gain — by honoring us and exalting us when we achieve it, ignoring for the most part those of us who have not." Twenty years later, she wrote and recorded a song about misplaced celebrity entitlement, a kind of reworking of the old “camel through the eye of a needle” adage about heaven. “V.I.P.” closes out that superb 2012 album How About I Be Me (and You Be You)? and I have no idea if Prince ever heard it.

7) Many people have written songs about parenthood, but few have so consistently nailed the joy, the burden and the unimpeachable love of motherhood, the way Sinéad O’Connor did with such beauty over the years, from “Three Babies” (I Do Not Want…) to “My Darling Child” (Universal Mother) to “I Had A Baby” (How About You Be You…)

8) Of course we know that Sinéad could sing the phone book and make it sound like poetry. Which is why she was invited in by so many other artists to do more-or-less just that. The compilation Collaborations features her voice on tracks otherwise (co) credited to U2, The The, Terry Hall, Moby, Peter Gabriel and Afro Celt Sound System – among many more - though for me and countless others, none of those top the sound of her voice on “Visions of You” by Jah Wobble’s Invaders of the Heart, one of the most beautiful chilled-dub tracks of all time, in no small part due to that voice.

So that’s eight good reasons Sinéad was so much more than a one-video, a one-cover version, or a one-scandal artist. Well maybe nine now. Because on “8 Good Reasons” from 2014’s I’m Not Bossy, I’m The Boss, Sinéad O’Connor sang the most defiantly, painfully personal song of suicidal contemplations that I have ever heard, one that also returned to the subject matter tackled early on in “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” namely her treatment by the music business. I am going to quote the lyrics in full because if you have never heard or read them, they will stop you in your tracks.

“Don't know if I should quite sing this song
Don't know if it maybe might be wrong
But then again it maybe might be right
To tell you 'bout the bullet and the red light

You know I'm not from this place
I'm from a different time, different space
And it's real uncomfortable
To be stuck somewhere you just don't belong

But I got 8 good reasons to stick around
8 good reasons, well maybe nine now

I had a dream one night
About a bullet and a red light
You know it felt alright
You know it actually felt quite nice

If I could have gone
Without it hurting anyone
Like a child, I would have found me mum
Like a bird I would have been flown

You know I don't much like life
I don't mind admitting that it ain't right
You know I love to make music
But my head got wrecked by the business

Everybody wanting something from me
They rarely ever wanna just know me
I became the stranger no one sees
Cut glass I've crawled upon my knees

But I got 8 good reasons to stick around
8 good reasons, well maybe nine now.”

As you will know if you’ve heard the song (and if you haven’t, that’s why the video links are here), Sinead delivers this on-the-precipice confession as a half sung, half spoken diary entry that bounces up to the seemingly optimistic chorus. Musically, it works so well that theoretically, she could again be singing the phone book. Except she isn’t, because this is Sinéad O’Connor, and on her albums, that is simply never what she does.

Sinéad did decide to stick around, though sadly, given I’m Not Bossy’s multiple high water marks, we never not get another studio album from her. (Upon her death, it was revealed that the great Belfast ex-mod-turned-electronica-artiste David Holmes had produced the best part of an album with her in recent years, though the project had not been completed, and a release date not yet set.) Still, anyone who lived this deep with Sinéad’s music, and indeed, many of the people who did not, feared she might have taken her own life when they heard of her sudden death – and a song like “8 Good Reasons” would certainly encourage that fear. A coroner’s report will reveal more, we presume, but police are not treating her passing as “suspicious”.  

None of this would matter – not her lyrics, not that voice, not her brave stand over the US National Anthem a quarter century before Colin Kaepernick first took the knee at an NFL game, nor her accusations against the Catholic Church long before the rampant pedophilia among priests was finally revealed to be more than vicious rumor or the odd isolated case – if the music was not up to the same standards, but most of the time, it was. Sinéad worked with a vast array of renowned collaborators over the years, from Nellie Hooper to Marco Pirroni, Phil Coulter to Tim Simenon, Dave Stewart to David Holmes. Nonetheless, her strongest collaborator remains John Reynolds. He not only played on and/or co-produced her first two albums as well as on Universal Mother, but also co-wrote some of, played on, and produced her last two albums, and I would argue vociferously that these are the strongest five of her ten (or so) studio releases. Reynolds is also the father to Sinéad’s first child, Jake. It was the suicide of another, much younger son of Sinéad’s, Shane, at the age of just 17, in January 2022, that apparently sent the singer on a further deep spiral. But I don’t know the details and I don’t want to presume. What matters right now is what she achieved while she was here.

Death of course is a fact of life, and not all of us make it to three score years and ten. We should all be steeled for the ongoing passing of The Who’s “My Generation” – the certainty that everyone who changed the face of music as part of rock’s first generation is going to pass (if they have not already), the vast majority of them in the next decade. All the same, it’s the deaths of MY generation that feel so painful, because when I look at how many more years I want to spend here and do stuff, it hurts me that others won’t get that chance. In the past year, the list from my (admittedly UK-only) generation has included Terry Hall, Andy Rourke, and now Sinéad O’Connor.  Andy’s passing was especially hard to take as he was a friend, and we are from the same school year. If he could get cancer, so can I - as did my father, who didn’t make it past 61.

But to leave us somewhere positive, it's for these reasons that occasionally I buy a pricey ticket to see someone in concert just because I still have that opportunity, as was the case recently with the aforementioned British folk/guitar/songwriting legend Richard Thompson, who often plays around Woodstock, except the shows tend to sell out fast, and I keep missing him. I decided not to make the same mistake for his appearance at City Winery Hudson Valley on July 27, which turned out to be the day after Sinéad O’Connor’s death. Thompson is 75 now, but as those who have seen him recently assured me (and as my amateur video below confirms), his fingers are as nimble as those of a 25-year-old: a finer acoustic player in his field would be hard to find. Playing solo other than with Zara Phillips on additional vocals for perhaps a third of the set, Thompson was also the consummate solo entertainer, as such troubadours need to be: self-deprecating, funny, immensely personable. It did not quite feel like being in his living room, but with no PA stack in the way and the tables properly aligned toward the stage, sight lines were excellent. And it didn’t harm that the sound was exquisite.

I have a habit of clutching at coincidences, and I found something poetic about seeing Richard Thompson for the first time at a City Winery venue when I was in the midst of remembering seeing Sinéad O’Connor for the last time at a City Winery venue. It’s similar to how I noted last week that I had been busy writing about a photograph taken in Brockwell Park when I found out that Sinéad had been living in a flat right by Brockwell Park at the time of her death. But mostly, as I pointed out to Radio Kingston’s drive time host and fellow Sinéad fan Jimmy Buff, when he kindly invited me on air last Wednesday, initially to promote The Dear Boys but expanded for an hour spent discussing her life and music instead, this is how our lives go. We get up in the morning celebrating an 80^th birthday, we go to bed mourning the passing of a tragically over-talented artist at age 56. It’s yin and yan, the good and the bad, and it’s our lot. Not all of us can like this life – Sinéad was bold enough to say that she didn’t, in song – but for the majority of us, there’s enough sweet music to make our passing through it more than worthwhile. Thank you Sinéad O’Connor for providing so much of it.

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Accordingly, I have spent much of the last two weeks arranging donations of a considerable amount of my research materials to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, of my memorabilia to the ARChive of Contemporary Music, and of my remaining fanzine/small magazine collection to the RILM Archive of Popular Music, whose excellent work digitizing a wide range of international fanzines, with full permissions of the publishers, I profiled on the final episode of my Fanzine Podcast at the start of this year.

These ‘zines include an almost complete collection of the Red Wedge magazine Well Red that I co-edited on a volunteer basis in the late 1980s, and what I believe to be full collections of Offbeat magazine that morphed into Underground magazine, both edited – consecutively - at the very end of that decade by Dave Henderson; falling somewhere between indie zine and corporate monthly, they operated on the margins of the commercial music press. capturing exactly what they described in their titles, at least as far as guitar-based, alternative/indie music goes.

It was always fun writing for Dave, low pay be damned, especially as I moved to the States and roamed around for a while. A few of my pieces even had the feel of the “travelogue” about them, and I look forward to being able to access them digitally in the future via RAPMM, given that I don’t believe I have looked at them individually since originally sticking them in boxes for safe-keeping on a move across NYC three decades back. For those who are interested/intrigued or remember these titles well enough and will enjoy the visual reminder, here are some snapshots of their covers.

Taking two weeks off from my Substack to pack boxes, while coordinating donations (which have included several one-to-one gifts, as well as arranging to get press materials and cassette tapes back to six different artists I worked with over the years), while also rifling through personal correspondence and scrapbooks dating back to childhood, all at the expense of the expectation that I need to be writing something for this page every 3-4 days, has allowed me to be more of a “consumer” in terms of other people’s music and writing.

As such, I want to share a few items that have somewhat stopped me in my tracks during this process. The fact that they all have a strongly political bent to them indicates that despite radio silence within my own writings of the past few months, my disgust and disappointment with the state(s) of the US as it closes in on what is going to be a mournful 250^th “birthday” for so many of us - and the fearful sense of doom that my truly native UK is fast following suit, making all the same mistakes and heading, lemming-like, off a cliff into a deep sea of far-right populism - remains fervent.

I mentioned Bard Company’s latest album 21^st Century Bullshit Detector on the “Free for All” episode of our Crossed Channels podcast that dropped at the start of the month. An offshoot of northern England’s Ian Whiteley and his long-running personal poetic project The Crows of Albion, Bard Company is a group of ageing punk-poets with loud guitars, loyal drum machines, a chorus of rousing singalong hooks, and a veritable suitcase full of proudly defiant, socialist lyrics, ready to recount historical events though predominantly focusing on the present day. Everything on the new album is worth a listen, especially if you ever liked New Model Army, Half Man Half Biscuit, or that little London band called The Clash, but most pertinent to what I have summarized above about the UK is the third song, “The Dirty Empire.” I pick up the lyrics on the second half of the first verse, into a refrain that rings all too true:

“They say ‘Don’t dilly dally’/Rally round the tabloid shite

‘Stop the boats at Calais’/And preserve their Isle of White

‘There ain’t no black In the Union Jack’/Sing the dark Satanic choir

They long to take their country back/To the days of the Dirty Empire

I was introduced to 21^st Century Bullshit Detector by the radio show “Just Some Punk Songs,” whose host Mick Fletcher [no relation] was good enough to include my own act The Dear Boys’ “I Hope You Know How Fucking Cool You Are” alongside it. And I thank him for that, as the album does not show up on my generally inclusive Qobuz streaming platform.

I can thank Qobuz, however, for featuring “Wildfire Season” by Jobi Riccio on its weekly New Releases playlist, a song that truly stopped me from continuing with what I was doing and devote myself to listening. Falling somewhere between Courtney Barnett’s tonal delivery with the power of a Brandi Carlile, while shamelessly using every production/arrangement cliché in the book to devastating effect (possibly a result of being based in Nashville, where no proven musical trope is ever out of vogue), it turns out that the song was initially written in 2021, and first released at the start of 2025’s wildfire season. It now lands smack in the center of her brand new second album Face The Feeling, where it is, for me, far and away the standout song. Again, you can listen in full on Bandcamp, and again, I am picking up the lyrics from the second half of the opening verse:

I’ve been having a hard time this week
The smoke is so thick and the news is so bleak
and the richest in the history of man
Keep talking about space like it’s the promise land

While records break and waters rise
And we’re hunted by the hands of time
Cause

Wildfire season’s here again
Each year it’s harder to pretend that
We’ve been doing all we can
Each year it’s harder to pretend

---

And then, just two days ago, I was similarly taken aback – and gain courtesy of the Qobuz New Releases Playlist – by Aja Monet’s “Hollyweird,” which provides an electronica-jazz free-for-all as a backdrop for the acclaimed poet Monet, also on her second full-length, the color of rain, to deliver her own damning indictment not so much of LA’s environmental disasters – though they are referenced – but its political pollution. While the lyrics aren’t available on her Bandcamp page, they are quoted in full on the credits to the official video, which features a cast of dozens playing the roles of characters such as Joe Hill Leila Khaled Mike Davis Octavia Butler and Paul Robeson, only one of whom, based on my initial listens, is referenced within them.

The color of rain, fyi, is considerably more varied than Riccio’s Face The Feeling, drawing on an array of talented jazz musicians, but frequently leaning back into something closer to ambient. The lyrics, to be clear, remain uncompromising throughout, as this excerpt from “Hollyweird” should make clear:

The feel good volunteers did reiki before they dropped off outfits
For people with no events to attend
Skid row knows how to read the room-less
The undocumented avoid handouts framed in the halls of fascism
To be on house arrest with no house
Just arrested

While talking of Hollywood, the entertainment business and its inevitable politicization by left and right alike, much media attention was focused last week on the final episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and the feel-good factor of the almost predictable goodbye guest, Paul McCartney. I was more taken by Bruce Springsteen’s appearance a night or two earlier in which The Boss denounced, from “the stage,” Colbert’s bosses, both within and outside of the television network that foots the bills.

“You’re the first guy in American who lost a show because we have a President who can’t take a joke,” said Bruce by way of introducing “Streets of Minneapolis,” and whether or not that statement is 100% verifiable by human fact-checking, Springsteen’s stripped-to-its-core delivery, backdropped by dark stars and stripes and yard-sign banner words like “Resistance” and “Hope,” was no laughing matter.

Against smoke and rubber bullets
In the dawn’s early light
Citizens stood for justice
Their voices ringin’ through the night
And there were bloody footprints
Where mercy should have stood
And two dead, left to die on snow-filled streets
Alex Pretti and Renée Good

Pop doesn’t always have to make you smile to move you. From the UK’s Ian Whiteley to the USA’s Jobi Riccio, Aja Monet, and the ageing Boss himself, sometimes it just has to speak truth to power.

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PS: When the midterms, or any other election where you may live, comes around, you may want to consider the words of this song as well.

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My fondness for Hull comes not only from being born nearby, but from attending many a match there over recent years, only some of them against my true team, Crystal Palace. The ground is a joy, with not a bad seat in the MKM stadium, the fans are full-on, the vegan pies are wonderful if not served at first-degree-burn temperature, and unlike growing up in London, Hull City is pretty much the only team anyone with local roots supports for an extended radius north, east and west of the city. Most of my friends from Beverley and Hull are down in London already as I type and I wish them a fantastic day. The fact that they are not good enough right now to last in the Premier League is both irrelevant today, and stand to be proven wrong should they win today: when Palace went up in similar Playoff circumstances in 2013, we were expected to face our usual immediate relegation back down. Instead, we are about to end our 13th consecutive year as a top-flight club. On the subject of which…

I would then find myself at good old Selhurst Park on Sunday for the last day of the Premier League, at which my true loves Crystal Palace will be hosting Arsenal. Long anticipated as a match in which Palace could dent or oblige Arsenal’s title-winning dreams, it will in fact turn into a bit of a party, with the footie itself perhaps just a sideshow. For those who live under a rock, Arsenal secured their first league title in 22 years this past midweek and will be presented with the trophy after the match. Their eyes will be focused on an even bigger task a week away: the Champions League Final against PSG, in which they will be firm underdogs.

Crystal Palace’s focus will be on our own amazing impending midweek journey: a first-ever European final in our first ever European tournament. As a result of our first ever proper silverware a year ago (it’s okay, the repetition is part of our story), winning the FA Cup (see below), Palace were (ultimately) plced in the European Conference League, and after making incredibly hard work of group stages, and suffering the ignominy of being knocked out of this year’s FA Cup at first time of asking by a sixth-tier side, are now just one match away from adding to their, silverware should they defeat Rayo Vallecano from Madrid, in Leipzig this Wednesday. Almost every Palace fan I know in London and beyond already has their plane ticket, match ticket and overnight accommodation booked, and I wish I could be taking that flight from London myself.

I can’t. I made my own path in life and it has meant missing many a big match. I will be lucky this Wednesday if I can get down to NYC to watch with fellow Palace fans. I have no complaints. I have been able to attend as many a big match as I have missed, and none bigger in my eyes - this week’s European Final included - will ever be bigger than that visit to Wembley a year ago this weekend, when the team I have dedicated so much of my life to, the only consistent love of my life outside of the woman who gave birth to me, broke a 120-year drought that has extended since formation, and won a trophy. And not just any football trophy, but the oldest and most venerable in the world, the FA Cup.

And so, as my contribution to the “wish I could be there” reverse category of the impending Northern Hemisphere summer, I am reposting my memories of that perfect day, written after the dust settled and the post-match celebratory hangovers susbided.

I dedicate to all dedicated fans of all clubs worldwide, but especially to those for whom a final, be it a play-off or a Cup Final, is a rarity, not an entitlement. Here’s to Hull today, to Palace on Thursday, and to your lot.

Oh, and fuck UEFA; Palace fans will know the melody. And while we are at it, fuck FIFA too, but the World Cup 2026 is a different post altogether. This one is for the club fans.

Tony Fletcher, Wordsmith typically posts twice a week. To receive all posts in your Inbox, please subscribe. To keep the page going, please consider a paid subscription at just $6 a month, $60 for the year (less than £5/£50 at current exchange rates.) You get access to all the archives all the time, exclusive interview transcripts, and the monthly Crossed Channels podcast I host with . I promise not to spend your own hard-earned money on football matches or European travel!

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A PERFECT DAY

So… Unless you don’t follow sports, or live under a rock somewhere on Pluto, or chose to ignore my post on Saturday because you actively hate football, you will know that the team I have followed devotedly for 54 years of my 61 years on this mortal coil - Crystal Palace FC - did it. For the first time in our history, we won a proper trophy, the FA Cup, against Manchester City, the most successful English team of the last decade still helmed by almost unquestionably the greatest manager of the modern footballing era. And not only was I still alive to witness the historic moment, but I was at Wembley, in attendance, among the Palace faithful. What follows is the Perfect Day in Ten Images, some of them moving, with accompanying words. I have tried to limit the number of selfies but they are part of the story, part of the journey.

And if you are one of those who didn’t come here to Wordsmith to read about grown men crying over young men kicking a ball around, well, “normal” service will be resumed later this week. But in the meantime, Dani Rojas has some words for you, rendered all the sweeter by the fact that he sports them in Palace colours per Ted Lasso’s use of our facilities, and that Jamie Tartt, his antagonist, happens to be on loan from Manchester City.

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1) MIRROR IN THE BATHROOM

After an invigorating Park Run in nearby Highbury Fields, and having prepped myself with a utility belt for the long day out (sunblock, phone charger, snacks, water), I’m setting off at midday, wearing the same shirt I wore to Wembley 35 years ago, the day that previously ranked as the Best Day Ever. Under the red and blue replica shirt is the t-shirt from my Marathon March on behalf of the Palace For Life Foundation back in 2022, where I was given a rare honorary exemption to do my own course with my own target – completing all 26.2 miles of the Cats Tail Trail Marathon, walking only, within the running cutoff time. I succeeded with time to spare and raised $1500. On top is a Palace track suit top, and yes, that’s the old “Glaziers” logo and the old claret-and-blue on the cap.

2) CAPTAIN PALACE

On an early train out of Euston, with Palace and City fans sharing the ride together in suitably amicable FA Cup Final Day style. As befits someone – that someone being me – who wrote a/the biography of The Smiths, I happen to love Manchester, and its people, and City fans proved perfectly gracious all day long.1 I got talking immediately to the two ladies in the picture and it turned out the one on the left only moved to Manchester from South London last month; her dad was a mad Palace fan, and she had divided loyalties, having secured a ticket from her friend alongside her on condition she wear a City shirt. “I’ll be sitting on my hands a lot,” she admitted. Meantime, self-styled Captain Palace’s evident passion for our club was an early indicator that City fans hadn’t any hope of matching us for noise or energy - and with that, perhaps confidence too, despite their being the bookies’ odds-on favourites to win. In fact, as I walked into the main station and mingled with hundreds of City fans arriving from Manchester, I couldn’t help singing The Smiths’ fantastic B-side “London”: “Smoke lingers 'round your fingers/Train, heave on to Euston/Do you think you've made/The right decision this time?”

3) PRE-MATCH PEP TALK

On Friday, I found myself invited to this get-together, hosted by celeb Palace fan Ben Bailey Smith, at his small family home in Kensal Green. Under his alter ego Doc Brown, Ben recorded the official theme song for our last two Cup Finals, this year’s entitled “One More Game.” As well as being a qualified singer, rapper, actor and broadcaster, Ben’s also a lovely fella, a wonderful ambassador for the club. Standing behind me as I spin the camera round is my friend John Taylor, who I have known since I was 11 and is a season ticket holder. (John also records as Gaslight Messiah.) The part in the speech about how very few City fans would mark a win today as the best day of our lives, but 100% of Palace fans would surely do so… well, see Item 1.

4) PALACE FOR LIFE

At left, my oldest friend Jeffries; on the right, his best friend Dan. J had his son Cameron with him, who I think is now 22. Re-introduced to me, he asked of his dad, “When did you two first meet?” “1967” came dad’s instant reply. That was before my memories took hold, but it’s true: I’ve known Jeffries since I can remember. We were neighbours, and our mothers were best friends, attending Palace matches together throughout the 1970s; when J’s mother died way too early of breast cancer, my mum stopped attending but for the big days out - which, happily, I was able to treat her to in later years. Meantime, I have Jeffries to thank for my true Palace devotion, as immortalized in Boy About Town; though he lives officially in South London, he had been on business in the States but made sure to be back in England for this day.

5) TIFO TIME

The Holmesdale Fanatics unveiling their tifo before kick-off. Having raised £45,000 to put it together, it shows Dominic and Nathan Wealleans caught in an embrace by their dad on the TV cameras following a Palace wondergoal back in 2011-12. Said dad passed away from cancer in 2017 aged just 49; the sons were at the match together on Saturday and had absolutely no idea that the tifo being unveiled would have that image on it. The story says much about football in general, and the Palace spirit in particular.2

6) GLAD (IT’S) ALL OVER

Somehow more than two hours have gone by since kick-off, the ten minutes of added time which felt like ten years have just concluded, there’s been some controversy, and two Palace players have been taken to hospital for concussion checks after putting their bodies on the line for their club, but the only goal for the match remains the one Palace scored on their first break after 16 minutes of backs-to-the-wall defending. Crystal Palace FC have won the FA Cup, 1-0. Cue the Palace theme song and the tear ducts opening up. But for all the images you’ll have seen of grown men crying, most people around me seemed to react much as I did: with moisty-eyed disbelief and continued celebration rather than a complete emotional meltdown.

As my texts, What’s App, FB and IG, e-mail and more all exploded with congratulations from friends near and far, supporters of other clubs and far flung Palace loyalists who either couldn’t get a ticket and/or could not afford the journey (even my ex-wife texted me from a shop in Salt Lake City, where the staff were busy talking about the game as the final whistle blew), it was apparent that this Cup Coup rekindled the neutral fans’ passion for the FA Cup. Combine it with Newcastle breaking their own 70-year trophyless streak by winning the League Cup at the same ground a couple of months back, against EPL winners Liverpool, and there’s a genuine sense out there that for all the money and power plays corrupting and ruining the Beautiful Game, the Magic remains.

7) WE’RE ALL GOING ON A EUROPEAN TOUR.

I could write a whole essay about these players, who they are, where they come from, and what they represent. Maybe I can just say: This group of Palace players are happy players. They exude as much joy as determination, as much cheer as athleticism. They feel that same dewy-eyed sense of fulfilment of the boyhood dream as much as everyone up in the stands. The fact that Joel Ward, the club captain who, 13 years after coming to Palace, on a ridiculously cheap deal, announced his departure from the club just a week before getting to lift the FA Cup alongside team captain Mark Guehi, seems just one more poetic element among the many narratives of the day. You could see that joy on his face, as with the other Palace players, even from this high. And yes, I was high. Europe, here we come. At last

8) DAYDREAMER

This selfie, leaving the ground an hour after the final whistle, sums up for me that sense of giddy happiness and disbelief. You can maybe see somewhere in it the 9- and 10-year-old kid who endured consecutive relegations in his first full years of attendance; the 12-year-old who followed the 3^rd Division side’s historic progress to the FA Cup Semi-Final back in 76'; the kid who braved crumbling terraces and midweek defeats at places like Port Vale, Wrexham, Walsall and more in his pre-teen years; the fan who attended the historic 1979 championship match when we packed 52,000 into the ground, an attendance that can never be matched; the young adult who drifted away in the 1980s as the club alienated its support, but who, like so many, came back as manager Steve Coppell turned things around; the 26-year old who came back for that 1990 FA Cup Final; the expat Palace fan who looked at the football calendar every time he planned a trip back to Britain, so as to catch Palace games; the fan who sat up on Twitter during the 2016 FA Cup Final in the middle of the night because he was in Sri Lanka and couldn’t watch it live; the fan who, only two months ago, extending his already long trip home for his mother’s death and funeral one more week for the Quarter-Final at Fulham, left his hard tickets on a kitchen table in Yorkshire, realized as much when his train was five minutes from London the night before, and promptly took the next train back north and a 6am train the following morning to attend. Dreams do come true. Sometimes you just have to wait a lifetime and make a few journeys for them to do so.

9) ALL THE WAY FROM MEDILLIN

My travel story was far from unique, neither the greatest nor the most special. On the queue to get into the White Horse pub that’s part of the Wembley Stadium complex after the match (for my first drink of the day, though not my last!) I met Bill, a 65-yer old Kiwi raised in London who had come back from New Zealand for the weekend. I heard the story of someone sitting next to a 90-year-old woman who has been attending since she was 14. I know of a young adult came back from his South American gap year, all the way from Guatemala. But as a truly global sign of what football can mean to people, these two Colombians here came all the way from their expat home in Toronto to support Palace’s two star Colombian players, the official MOTM Daniel Muñoz and Jefferson Lerma. I can only assume they were some of the newest Palace fans at the match, given that both players are relatively fresh signings, and I didn’t ask how they got their tickets. But I suspect they too will be Palace For Life.

10) GLAD ALL OVER (AGAIN)

We end with a beautiful video accompanying a lovely story. The woman you see here seated but singing along is 72 years old, and lives in Horley (“solid Palace,” she assured me in case I thought it crossed into Brighton territory). Her husband was a passionate Palace fan all his life, and instilled that love in his bride and their now adult daughter, who you see happily singing along behind the table. Sadly, he passed away 18 months ago. Saturday May 17 would have been the couple’s Golden Wedding Anniversary. She was there for him, and believes he was there with her, just like so many of us were there in part for and with our own absent loved ones who likewise loved the club or/and helped instill our own passion for the game. Yeah, on a Perfect Day like this, football is your perfect metaphor for life.

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Almost two years ago, I put up the post below. Even by my standards, it’s a long read, but it looks like at least a few people got to the end to pass comment. It was also intensely personal, but as often the case in such scenarios, it turned out that my life – my travels and travails - contained traces of other people’s lives, which is one reason we like to read life stories in book form, is it not?

For those who were not on board with Wordsmith in July 2024, I have removed (My) Good Old Desk from the paywall.

I am also removing my Good Old Desk from my life. Because life is moving on again (again). As is buried within that article about moving on, my partner Paula and I signed only a two-year lease on a rented house in Hurley when we decided to try living together after four years of dating. Our second year has been disrupted by the owners’ decision to sell the house, and when we declined to purchase, we were subjected to endless rounds of realtors and viewings; it rather took the shine off the place which, though only a mile and a half from Uptown Kingston, still felt too much like the burbs for this “city or country, only” boy to have contemplated living for a third year regardless.

Nonetheless, this story has a happy ending to the current chapter. The house has been sold to musicians moving up from Brooklyn (why is that not a surprise?) who seem lovely, making the transition quite pleasant. And Paula and I are moving back to Kingston: to midtown, in fact, which will put me a very short walk to local music venue Tubby’s and the historic performance theater UPAC; a handful of topnotch bars with fantastic New York state craft beer plus one of the country’s pre-eminent sherry bars (you read that correctly); the brand new Upstate Films single screen cinema where I got my younger son a job this past year; and also, thankfully, the YMCA at which I already have membership so I can work off any excesses and practice yoga on Saturday mornings (he says, looking at the time while editing on a Saturday morning).

Paula wrote all about our latest chapter this past Friday on one of her occasional social media posts. You are welcome to read it here.

The Good Old Desk is not coming with me. Nor is much else. This is a massive downsize, absolutely out of choice, but even though it is one that I believe in and indeed, have actively encouraged upon myself, it is one that is proving emotionally difficult. I am someone who has kept a lot of “stuff” in life. But as I wrote, barely a year ago, after clearing out my late mother’s house…

And I say now:

Putting it in the trash is painful. But while carrying it with us all our lives can feel like a blessing, a tie to who we once were, an opportunity to reminisce on the rare occasions we get to do so, for anyone who has to empty out our house when we are gone, we can be creating a burden.

Still, given that I have no intention of popping my clogs just yet, let’s count the blessings. These past few weeks, I’ve come across school exercise books I’ve kept for 50 years, a couple only for the graffiti on the front of them.

I’ve kept not just my diary of my primary (elementary) school’s trip to Guernsey, which I wrote about here, but a first exchange trip to Nantes, France only two years later, written in French!

I have kept the birthday, father’s day and occasional Christmas cards hand-drawn by my sons, the younger one of whom went through an impressive period of trying to follow his big brother’s artistically amusing and amusingly artistic footsteps. We should all be so fortunate as to have a treasure trove as this.

And I kept letters. Letters from my mother from across the Atlantic because, if you think I write long, you have no idea! Letters from her older relatives with important family history. And letters from former lovers, which sounds almost creepy until I tell you how much at least one of them came in handy when I wrote POW!, my second memoir that comes out this summer and about which, genuinely, I could not be more excited.

I kept Filofax pages from 1988-1991, which I was about to throw out until I opened the sealed envelopes and revisited my insane schedule from those early NYC years, when I juggled several freelance jobs at once. In there is the 36 hours that took me from DJing and promoting our regular Tuesday night Communion at the Limelight, to spending the entire following day with Lloyd Cole producing an EPK (bonus points if you can remember the acronym) for his record company, on to attending a live show that night on assignment from New York Newsday – which meant, back then, writing up the review as soon as I got home and then being available on the phone to work with the sub-editors only a few hours later. I LOVED working with sub-editors on the phone, by the way; although we had faxes, we also had deadlines, so a short chat or two addressed the edits quickly. And these subs were great people to chat with in the first place. Life was good. But it was lived at a pace I don’t think I can maintain in my life any more.

That’s why I am going to take a brief pause in my posts until after the move is completed at the end of the month. This will be the first time I’ve come off the 2+ posts-a-week schedule in the near three years I’ve been on here. (If you only just started a paid subscription, please enjoy the more-than 250 previous articles, including dozens of exclusive interviews, and 28 episode of Crossed Channels!) If my Substack was all I had going on workwise, that might not prove necessary but, in almost immediate contradiction of the final words of that last paragraph, I am packing up house while also:

• finishing a Dear Boys album having just released a new song this very week

• booking a UK book promo tour and several US dates simultaneously while seeing that book POW! off to the printers;

• and accepting writing assignments that saner people would have turned down!

Oh, and there’s also the small matter of how I decided that in 2026 I would “run” Manitou’s Revenge for a third and who knows, maybe last time: it happens to fall on the summer solstice which means I should be in the midst of my peak training! Fortunately, May started with a perfect performance at the Breakneck Point trail marathon, which at 26.5 miles and 8000ft of elevation is exactly half of Manitou’s and was, genuinely, a lovely day out. All that climbing (and descending) with a heavy backpack at high altitude in the Nepal Himalaya last November had its uses!

I am pausing primarily because I don’t want to offer substandard work. Yet it maybe says something for my chosen “profession,” that when I sat down to write as much upon waking this morning, I re-read My Good Old Desk - and found what Word is telling me is now already 1021 of them to say on the subject came tumbling out in under an hour. (Writing has always come embarrassingly easy to me. I wish I could say the same of being a lover and a parent – and a self-editor.)

Did I write these words from my good old desk? No, actually, I did not, I wrote them sitting up in the spare bed at 6am on first coffee of the day. As I noted on that post about my (good old) desk, I can in fact write from anywhere. My desk is as much a reminder to work as it is an actual workplace.

So: My good old desk has been important to me. It’s been a companion to me. But it’s a heavyweight companion. And it’s a weight for which there is no space at the new place. That is literal, but it’s metaphorical too. This applies to many other items too. After my transformative trip to Nepal, I have been practicing letting go. As noted further above, it’s proving hard work, but that’s why it’s called practice.

subscribers are always welcome. you will be first to know when a new post is published.

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In closing, let me say that while I am not going to feel duty bound to post until June comes around and we’re in the new place, I suspect that, if this particular post is anything to go by, freeing myself up from duty will likely inspire me to the occasional pontification, observation or recommendation regardless. In the meantime…

Would anyone like to buy my good old desk? One careful owner, sturdy and reliable (the desk, not necessarily the owner), with good provenance as a desk not only to be written upon but written about. And, like most of us humans, my good old desk comes apart quite readily, but with a little attention and focus, it can easily be reassembled.

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“Procrastination” is the AA-side to its preceding A-side, the 2:08 power punk pop anthem “I Hope You Know How Fucking Cool You Are,” which came out back in March. The handful of people who purchased our latest physical release, a cassingle hand-made to order, would already have received and known “Procrastination,” but we held back the digital release just in case “I Hope You Know” got some airplay. It got so (fucking) much - though not on the BBC, nor FCC-governed stations in the States - that we ended up waiting two months!

That gap did at least give our in-house video director Jeni de Haart the opportunity and time to develop a video from scratch, to her own desire and design. You can watch the video below, and you can of course, hear the song without visuals on Bandcamp and/or your streaming platform of choice.1 The second of a batch of new songs coming from The Dear Boys in 2026, “Procrastination” is, according to its lyricist and my UK-based band mate Tony Page, “dedicated to those who could have been.” In this regard, as with its length and its groove, it is very much the flip to “I Hope You Know How Fucking Cool You Are.”

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I have written before about how much fun it is to make music all over again later in life. I know I am not alone in this, and that you can find many other people making similar comments as they too get the chance to return to the studio. What is discussed far less, and what I want to write about here, is how there appears to be a direct inverse ratio in the youth/ageing process between commerciality/compromise.

To quote The Jam, which seems relevant to my own life story, “When you’re young, you swear you’re never ever going to work for no-one…” But truth is, the moment a record company dangles an opportunity to sell out, the only question from most young artists, however much they may claim a cling to credibility, tends to be, “Where do I sign?”

Certainly that’s the way it was with my old band Apocalypse – in which co-Dear Boy Tony Page was a singer and second guitarist. The painful story of our own compromise is told in my forthcoming memoir POW! When UK Punk Went Pop, 1980-84. But so is that of so many other artists of that era, and while it was embarrassing to re-live my own sell-outs, I believe I have served that embarrassment some justice in print.

All these decades later, making music as/with The Dear Boys, commerciality is not necessarily out the window - I love a good pop song - but it’s not the point of making the music. The point of making the music is to make the music we want to make, with no one telling us how, for example, if we just allow this synth melody in the second verse (true story), or this session singer throughout (ditto), or this automated drum beat (same), we stand a better chance at success.

I find that the older I get, the less I give a f*ck about all of that – because success, by any meaningful metric, is simply not a likely outcome for a band starting out around the age of 60. I also find that refusing to compromise is not only integral to our motivation, but it’s liberating, too.

Interestingly, it also gets results.

I wrote “I Hope You Know How Fucking Cool You Are” based on one of my Rock Academy students using the phrase. It struck me immediately as a great song title and I figured to write it for their generation, an act of support and belief and empowerment when so many older people denigrate “kids of today,” forgetting everything about their own youth in the process.

As such, it was vital that the phrase stayed intact. To call it “I Hope You Know How Effing Cool You Are” or “I Hope You Know How Very Cool You Are” was to do it a disservice. Doubling down, I included the word “fucking” in a number of the lyrical lines as well. I wasn’t trying to be outrageous, I wasn’t trying to be cool, I wasn’t doing it for the likes, it just felt appropriate.

Accordingly, the song had a number of loud guitars (played by moi) and some suitably aggressive drumming (courtesy of Brett Buddy Ascott). I gave our hired mixer Danny Blume some musical reference points – essentially, two of the shorter and sharper songs from R.E.M.’s criminally unknown penultimate album Accelerate – and he too was off to the races. The video took some hard work, not so much navigating and negotiating to get the footage from younger groups - and landing serendipitously upon the Saturday Town portraits by Casey Orr in the process – but within the Dear Boys. There was a perceived danger of motives being misinterpreted, and other ideas were mooted as alternatives, but those seemed a compromise to me as songwriter. I explained it all over again to Jeni (who had supported the initial concept) and she nailed it. I (fucking) love this video:

I genuinely did not expect “I Hope You Know How Fucking Cool You Are” to get any airplay, really. We even talked about releasing “Procrastination” right alongside it. But we figured that the shorter and louder of the two songs had come out so well, so close to what we had been after, so uncompromising and all the better for it, that we should at least see if anyone would get on board. To our absolute delight and surprise, those DJs we know at stations that could play it, did play it. Though I didn’t realise until it just about fell off the charts, it was in the Top 40 of the Radio Indie Alliance for four weeks after release, and stayed in the top 100 a couple more weeks after that. A number of DJs reported it not only in their Top 10, but at numbers 1, 2, or 3. And once we realized we had some traction, I made a point of tracking down further punk radio shows, the result being a whole new slew of DJs who will hopefully become long-term acquaintances.

The process of contacting these people can feel arduous – nobody really wants to be self-promoting like this in their 60s – but personal communication counts for a lot in this automated world, and when recipients respond in kind with a personal and positive touch, that promotional process immediately becomes joyful, something closer to the fanzine days in which I started out. The world is full of people who love music, and many of those that love it the most find a way to share that love, be it as DJ’s, music critics or Substack writers. In that sense, we are all in this together.

With such an unexpectedly enthused response, there were suggestions that we could get even more airplay if we made a “clean” mix, but unlike the band James - who released the song “Life’s A Fucking Miracle” as a single in 2024, but accompanied by a radio-friendly “Life’s A Shocking Miracle” - we don’t have skin in that game. Offering a sanitized version would have diluted the song and with no guarantee it would get any extra attention. I’m happy with how it was, and what it’s achieved so far. Unfortunately, YouTube throttled the video due to the swearword, and it got considerably less views as a result, but that’s the price you pay - and on the positive side, I got to set it up on Vimeo, which is a much better platform all around - and ad-free.

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“Procrastination” has also come out just as we intended. Sure, it’s commercial - there’s nothing about it not to like on a surface level - but it’s who we are, what we wanted, how we feel. It was fun for me to build on Pagey’s initial ideas, getting his okay to give it a ska groove, later adding the fairground organ for a middle eight that Pagey then came up with a spoken word section for. A false ending arrived naturally – a tease of sorts for DJs already looking at their watches. (“Procrastination” is well over four minutes long.)

Of the five tracks recorded with Buddy Ascott last year, overdubbed over a long period and now fully mixed, the three that are still awaiting release have that same feel of authenticity, of doing what we wanted to do, how we wanted to do it, the only true determination being that it should be the best it can be. Sure, we hired a top-notch mixer in Danny Blume, but that’s an artistic choice, and there’s a distinct difference between doing that and giving that person specific instructions, and allowing oneself to be produced by an outsider hired by a record company who may possibly have been given their own distinct instructions to which you are not privy.

There is more to say on the non-compromising front, via other artists I have been paying attention to in recent weeks, and if all goes well, I’ll get to write about them soon. In the meantime, while it’s nice to be popular, and we would all have preferred more (financial) success in our younger days I am sure, it’s better to go to bed at night knowing that you’re making honest work. The field of creativity out there has never been more crowded, and the most that most of us can expect is to set up shop in just the tiniest corner of that field and hope that someone notices we are there. And when they do, it means the world.

Thanks for noticing these words.

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In other words, we decided to detour from our usual convention of choosing an act or album alternating from the two sides of the Atlantic, whereby we review that act or album in the context of the Transatlantic back-story and reception. Instead, we each came to our live, in-person recording with three topics the the other person had not been told about, several of them still having that Crossed Channels transatlantic theme, and jumped right on in.

Dan raised the subject of Rickenbackers; I hit back with the answer to the poll I posted (results below) asking which Welsh band’s frontman used the “c*nts” word to describe fellow Welsh natives Tom Jones and Shirley Bassey, and what this says about British bands’ arrogance versus whatever American bands have in its place.

We tried out this Pick n’ Mix concept in large part because we have had a warm reception to our themed shows - a few people have told us Crossed Channels is one of the top podcast listens - and thought it would be interesting to see how we fared if we just talked about music in general… like so many of us do over caffeine at the coffee shop, a beer with our frenemies over our conflicts in taste (!), or in the kitchen making dinner with our partners and getting the ingredients mixed up because we get too involved in the conversation!

Typically, Crossed Channels is only available in full to our paid subscribers, but we made this one an exception. It’s already had an impressive number of downloads but - certainly at my end - I want to make sure you all get to maximise your subscription here (or perhaps you are just passing by, in which case welcome) and listen along.

All episodes on Crossed Channels should be available on every podcast platform. I don’t share Spotify and many other platforms don’t have embed codes, but here it is on Apple. Almost all the other episodes will have the shorter free preview unless you are paid up and have set it up (instructions on the sidebar of all podcast posts.)

The one other episode we made available to everyone - by mistake, but hey, it certainly got its downloads - was the Oasis episode, where we discussed (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? before we had any idea that the group was going to reform.

Other subject matters have ranged from The Who and The Jam, to Redd Kross and The Replacements, Kate Bush and Blondie, and Otis Redding and Curtis Mayfield. We have discussed Sweet and Slade, the Raspberries and the Beach Boys, The Smiths and R.E.M., and had a decided conflict of tastes when I insisted Dan listened in depth to my favourite ongoing active recording band, James. You can find all the shows here:

https://tonyfletcher.substack.com/podcast

We have kept Crossed Channels to our paid subscribers in part because we won’t take ads on the show. We would, however, welcome an appropriate sponsor. Just in case you might be that sponsor.

Certainly, Dan and I greatly appreciate all our paid subscribers who keep us going, and a subscription to either of our Substacks will get you access to all episodes. (Dan is at .) But we appreciate ANY subscribers of any kind, essentially anyone who enjoys our work and wants to, usually, read it - and occasionally listen to it. If you have not yet taken that leap, the handy button is below.

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The penultimate subject matter of this Crossed Channels Pick 'n’ Mix/Free-for-all was Dan’s question to me: What recording session would you most like to have been a fly-on-the-wall for? I had almost no time to think, but stick by my answer. What would yours be? That’s why hosting a podcast on Substack is cool: you can leave comments where we can see them and respond.

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And feel free to share this out if so inclined.

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Happy listening and thanks for reading. Next episode is Echo & The Bunnymen, though not the album you might expect. If you have a subject - an act or album in a Crossed Channels theme - that you think we should cover, let us know. Cheers!

Mark Volman was a primary member of The Turtles alongside Howard Kaylan, a friendship and musical partnership that continued after that group’s break-up as Flo & Eddie, in which Mark was Flo - the more instantly recognizable, frizzy-haired member of a duo not known for reserve. For those who wonder why they called themselves Flo & Eddie in the first place, it was because somehow their legal names got caught up in a lawsuit in which they were forbidden to use them! In the video below, they explain, with their usual comedic bemusement, how they allowed themselves to get so caught up both in and by music management machinations.

But we are here for Keith Moon. Howard and Mark first met Keith at the Murray the K shows in New York in Easter 1967, furthered their interactions in London at the Speakeasy, continued them in the British capital when they all appeared (“acted” would be too strong a word) in Frank Zappa’s surreal 1971 movie 200 Motels, and concluded during Keith’s craziest years in Los Angeles.

While my interview with Howard (published here) covered all aspects of that relationship, my subsequent interview with Mark – conducted by long-distance phone between east coast and west – homed in on Keith’s solo album Two Sides of the Moon, recorded in LA in 1974, and on which Flo & Eddie featured heavily as backing singers.1 An expensive travesty of epic proportions, the album was initially produced by former Beatles roadie Mal Evans, who was taken off the job and replaced by Skip Taylor, the Canned Heat producer who happened to be Flo & Eddie’s manager, ensuring that the duo of Howard and Mark were rehired to re-record what Howard remembered as pretty much the exact same vocal parts all over again. Two Sides of the Moon was said to have cost $200,000 – an exorbitant sum in the mid-1970s and one that MCA Records was not likely to have recouped more than a fraction of, given the resounding critical and commercial thud with which Moon’s one and only solo release was greeted.

Many years later, a 2006 double CD re-release of Two Sides of The Moon added insult to injury by including out-takes, the original Mal Evans mixes, three pretty decent tracks produced by Steve Cropper for what was initially mooted as a follow-up album before wiser heads prevailed, and also, a 1974 seasonal throwaway, a 90-second “We Wish You A Merry Christmas.” In my interview with Larry Hagman for Dear Boy, the actor and Moon confidante recalled contributing the single word “You” to an initial recorded version, and that the outcome was “just awful” and “dreadful.” He expressed great relief that it had never been released. You can hear the souvenir single version below.

I was asked to write an introduction to the booklet for that Castle Records 2CD reissue. (Andy Neil supplied the typically copious detailed copy that followed.) While it was very easy to read between my lines, I did my best to avoid actively telling consumers they had just wasted their money by concluding, as diplomatically as possible, that:

“Two Sides of the Moon” stands as testament to the mid-seventies LA scene from which it emerged – and as a permanent monument to the working-class boy from Wembley, who got to sing out his inebriated fantasies, with nobody daring to cut him off.”2

But it is also fair to say that many of the dozens upon dozens of star names who contributed to the Two Sides of the Moon sessions – all at union rate or more - had a grand old time hanging with Keith, both in the studio and, in the case of Kaylan and Volman, outside of it also. It is all detailed in Dear Boy/Moon.

Sadly, Mark Volman passed away only a month after I posted the interview with his partner Howard Kalyan, in September 2025. He was 78 years old. In abstentia, I thank him for his time, for his sharp perspective, his candid comments (some of which remain off the record) and especially the sense of humour he retained throughout our conversation – and indeed, by all accounts, throughout his life.

As with most of my archived interviews, the manuscript that follows – over 3000 words of it, including details of an all-star recording session that paired Moon with Marc Bolan, Harry Nilsson and others, and which has never seen the light of day – is for the paid subscribers who keep this page going. A quick reminder that a paid subscription runs just $6 a month, or $60 for the year, and gets you all the archives all the time, exclusive posts like this one when they come along, and the monthly Crossed Channels podcast I record with , though we made our latest one a free-for-all as well as a free-to-all.

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And now, over to Mark.

“The Who were the family that bugged [Keith] so much he had to move to get away from them.”

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Welcome back to CROSSED CHANNELS — the podcast in which music journalists/obsessives Dan Epstein (the Yank) and Tony Fletcher (the Limey) clash and connect over music from either side of the pond.

For this, our 28th episode, we decided to change things up a bit. Instead of discussing one particular artist or album, we’re each bringing three music-related topics to the table without informing the other in advance, and going wherever those topics take us. We’re calling this new format the CROSSED CHANNELS “Pick n’ Mix” — it’s kind of like a spirited bar conversation, only without the alcohol.

So please join us and try to hang on as the conversation careens from the merits (or otherwise) of Rickenbacker guitars, to the The Rolling Stones’ most vital period, to what makes for a good live show when you’re in your 60s, and more. Tony even finally reveals the correct answer to this multiple choice question/poll that he posted on April 23…

Also different: we’re making this Pick n’ Mix episode available to all listeners, and not just paid subscribers to Jagged Time Lapse or Tony Fletcher, Wordsmith like we usually do. While we would obviously love it if you became a paid subscriber to either of our Substacks (if you’re not already), we wanted to give everyone a full dose of CROSSED CHANNELS action, in hopes of tempting some new subscribers. Our other entirely free episode — “Oasis: What’s The Story” from April 2024 — can be found here, while all our paid-only episodes can be found here. They are many, they are varied (The Jam, Replacements, Kate Bush, Otis Redding, Blondie, & Parliament just some of our previous 27 subject matters), they all home in on a specific album or period, and dare we say it, but we think they are a cut above.

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We’re putting another different sonic spin on this episode of CROSSED CHANNELS by studding it with snippets of tracks from our current musical outfits — Dan’s solo project The Corinthian Columns and Tony’s band The Dear Boys. The two Corinthian Columns tracks heard during this episode are the ’70s cop show tribute “Blue Diamond Fire,” which returns as the Crossed Channels opening theme music…

…and the new jangle-psych single “Hydrangea”.

…While the recent Dear Boys single heard throughout the show is “I Hope You Know How Fucking Cool You Are”.

And finally, since we also talk in this episode about legendary recording sessions we would have loved to be flies on the wall for, we were wondering: which would be the one recording session you wish you could have attended? Feel free to leave your answer in the comments section, which — like the rest of this episode — is open to all. Thanks for listening!

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Exciting news: On August 18, 2026, Trouser Press books will be publishing my next book, entitled “POW! When UK Punk Went Pop, 1980-84. A Memoir By Tony Fletcher.”

To summarise the book – we have gone with British English spelling throughout, so that is summarise not summarize for today – I will let Trouser Press publisher Ira Robbins take over, quoting the online sales info already up at most of the leading retail sites. That will follow with a couple of endorsements from those who have already received and digested an advance draft, and then a little more from me and a call for some possible engagement from you.

“POW!, the sequel to Boy About Town (2013), is the memoir of a precocious English teen in the early 1980s who published a music magazine, interviewed many of the era’s top artists, ran a record label, appeared on television, played in a band and found first love -- all at the same time!

Tony Fletcher‘s incredible adventures in the world of British post-punk make for a compelling adventure of highs (an exclusive interview with Paul McCartney, friendship with Paul Weller of the hugely successful Jam, playing to huge audiences, discovering love and sex) and lows (heartbreak, learning the financial challenges of running a label the hard way, the collapse of his band). Despite the passage of time, he summons up all the enthusiasm he felt for the music and women he loved and marvels at the incredible experiences he had as a hard-working young striver.

The generation raised on MTV, the New Musical Express and bands like Madness, Wham!, the Smiths, Echo and the Bunnymen, Dexy’s Midnight Runners and Killing Joke will love reading this inside view of a knowledgeable fan who got to know them all.”

Tony Fletcher, Wordsmith posts twice a week, minimum, usually on Thursdays and Sundays. To receive in your Inbox, please subscribe.

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And now, a few words about POW! from the author. (That’s me.)

The first thing to say is that I am absolutely ecstatic about the final edit of this book. There are several interweaving stories and yet there’s an overall arcing narrative; it is a slice of music journalism history and yet it’s simultaneously as personal as a memoir can be. Certain chapters contain the best prose I have ever written.

Plus, it arrives wrapped in surely the most eye-catching book jacket I’ve been fortunate to call my own (and I’ve had some good ones), a design that came together with almost as much ease as when the title morphed from Teenage Blue into what you have, one that sums it up perfectly: POW! When UK Punk Went Pop, 1980-84. A Memoir.

That is Pete Wylie’s POW! guitar you see on the front cover, by the way. Its depiction (with his permission) is appropriate as Wylie makes several appearances in the book, but if this POW! guitar looks similar to Paul Weller’s WHAAM! guitar, well that too is a character in the book, for reasons you will understand when you have the opportunity to read it. And if both guitars look a little similar to the cover of Jamming! 10, that is down to the influence and importance of designer Robin Richards (RIP), who shows up regularly throughout POW!. It is that kind of book.

Events

Events get booked out months in advance these days, and we already have several lined up. Feel free to put any of the following in your calendar.

In the USA, in August, these include a Hudson Valley launch event in Saugerties at the Orpheum Theater (16^th), a New York City launch party almost certainly on publication day, August 18th, plus Chatham (23^rd), and my current home town of Kingston (date tbc).

In the UK in September, we already have Brighton (Sound Affects at East Street Tap, Weds Sep 3^rd), London (Rock ‘n’ Roll Book Club at Walthamstow Trade Hall, Tues 8th), with precise dates in Hastings, Hull, Glossop and more to be confirmed.

And this is where you come in. POW! When UK Punk Went Pop, 1980-84 is a fine book, with the potential to appeal to many people who lived or are just interested in the period it covers. To that end, I’m willing to go back to my fanzine days and tout it round the UK (and select parts of the USA). I am ready to go almost anywhere (within reason and a certain timeframe) where we know we can get some kind of an audience, so as to give a talk, read a few sections, show a few videos from the era if a screen is available, take questions and sell books. Having a local host “moderate” all this is always welcome, and usually part of the fun. Talking of which, test-reading POW! In public while it was still a work in progress suggested there is plenty of humour between the pages, and I would expect any book event to involve a few laughs along the way.

And so: if you are involved in or know of a venue in your town – a bookshop, a record shop, a craft beer hostelry, a Trade Hall per Rock ‘n’ Roll Book Club – that hosts such events and might like to host me, please connect. Use the button below or pipe up in the comments that follow. With thanks.

Similarly, if you are in the business of reviewing or otherwise covering books like this, please reach out to me, and I’ll pass your info along to the wonderful Ken Weinstein of Big Hassle Media. With POW!, I seem to be reconnecting with people like him and Ira - and others - who I have known to be good people for decades, and it all feels very organic, very much the way it was meant to be.

I look forward to sharing more POW! – extracts, back-stories, related memories, playlists, photos etc. – over coming months. You’re welcome to pre-order if you like, but honestly, for now, I would be thrilled if you’d spread the word.

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I stayed overnight, which I rarely do any more in NYC because of the outlandish cost of accommodation. I found somewhere cheap enough and decent enough down on Canal Street where, as often the case on nights like this, I slept fitfully but happily. I had already been feeling warm and fuzzy towards New York City from the Monday night gathering, and when I woke up for the final time and it was still super early, I bounced over the road to grab some rocket fuel caffeine from a 24-hr deli and decided to grab the day by its horns. My first apartment in the city had been not far up East Broadway from my “hotel” and after a quick shower, I decided to revisit it, to have a wander round the old neighborhood, to take my time, take breakfast somewhere, and take some photos along the way.

Almost immediately that I did so, it occurred to me that THIS IS WHAT I DID WHEN I FIRST MOVED HERE! Almost the first weekend that I had called Grand Street home, after a two-month summer sublet in Stuyvesant Town just the other side of the East Village, I had grabbed whatever camera I owned, and wandered (and wondered at) the side streets of Lower East Side and Chinatown, photographing people and shops and places and venturing from there up into the infamous Alphabet City, soon turning back when I came across two female crackheads launching broken bottles at each other. (I did mention that this was 1988, yes?)

Being that I had already fallen in love with the downtown bohemia culture of New York City – it was a large inspiration for my moving over – then when those photos were developed, I wrote a little essay about my day out, printed up 20 copies on A5 folded to A6 and one for keeps, stuck a different photo at the end of each individualized copy, and sent them out to friends back in the UK.

Last Tuesday, it struck me that I can sum some of this up in fewer words than you’d expect from “the most verbose writer I know”:1

London schooled me. But New York City made me.

So, in honor of that city’s mentorship of the person I was meant to be, I decided to embark on a new version of that original 1988 excursion. Except that this time out, NYC rarely holding true mystery for me any more, I would celebrate not that which struck me as novel, different, exciting and even scary, but that which had stayed the same.

After all, it’s easy for us to bemoan a “modern world” that does not respect its ancestry, and New York City certainly has a track record for knocking down the old, however glorious and beautiful it may (have) been, simply for the purpose of erecting something new. And while it is okay, to some extent, to lament that CBGBs, Max’s Kansas City, The Palladium (either one), Studio 54, the Limelight, the Savoy Ballroom, Café Society - add your own - no longer exist, last Tuesday was an opportunity to glorify those places that have, in fact, persisted.

Serendipitously, as seems to happen in my life – perhaps because I am open to it – my day of photography with me behind the phone camera morphed into a day of photography with other people behind the camera, including the greatest machine photographer ever invented, one that bests the selfie on its worst of days. Read on. View on. And thank technology, for once I guess, for saving me the costs of photo developing, photocopying, envelopes and overseas postage and packing. Your photo essay may not be unique this time round, but it is also not limited to just twenty of you.

Tony Fletcher, Wordsmith posts twice a week, minimum, usually on Thursdays and Sundays. To receive all posts in your Inbox, please subscribe. To keep the page going, please consider a paid subscription at just $6 a month, $60 for the year (less than £5/£50 at current exchange rates.) You get access to all the archives all the time, exclusive interview transcripts, and the monthly Crossed Channels podcast I host with . I promise not to spend your own hard-earned money on expensive Photobooth shots, though I can’t promise it won’t finance the occasional bagel.

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1

In August 1988, I answered an ad for a room-mate in the Village Voice, passed the audition, and moved to the very corner of East Broadway and Grand Street. My room was the one you see above the street sign for East Broadway; it was barely big enough for a bed, a side desk and some storage space, but at $400 a month, it was already more than I could afford.

The neighborhood was historically fascinating, a hidden triangulation of immigration, where the orthodox and traditional Judaism of Lower East Side Grand Street met the last of Little Italy as one walked west but then, as one wandered down East Broadway, felt it morph instead into an expanding Chinatown.

It was also insanely dangerous. I sometimes went to bed to the sound of gunshots, and given that I couldn’t afford cabs from the gigs I could nonetheless get on the guest list for up in the East Village and beyond, made a point of walking home late at night not via the cross streets but down the Avenues – though none of them felt especially safe.

Still, my street smarts from growing up in an ultra-violent London kept me unharmed, and I quickly thrived. I met an American girl who had some money and bought me meals out (and paid for cabs back to my place, though her brownstone apartment in Hoboken was much more preferable), I picked up work from various American magazines while staying engaged with what would become Rapido back in the UK, and I then landed a second book deal with Omnibus Press: a biography on R.E.M.

That book, published at the end of 1999 as REMarks, was typed from my bedside desk at 503 Grand, on a heavyweight Word Processor I bought on East Broadway from one of the Orthodox Jewish shops, some of which are still there. Our landlady lived above us and was unimpressed by my constant typing to the sound of music, and given to equally loud kvetching about it. My roommate was more empathetic to my lifestyle. I seem to recall his name was Mike, and he worked on the floor of the Wall Street Stock Exchange, which seemed none so glamorous as the 1980s had promised given that he came home wiped out every day, and after an enforced nap would make himself equally inexpensive food as myself. A younger girl he knew would come around periodically – usually unannounced – at which he would grease her loud engines almost out of a sense of duty; he remarked that my own girlfriend must have class before he ever saw her, based on her shoes he saw left on the doormat the first time I brought her home.

The 99c store was a locksmith at the time; we were on good terms with the guys there and they looked out for us. The A1 Pizza Shop was the A1 Pizza Shop then as it is now. I was incredibly heartened to see as much, along with the fact that 503 Grand Street itself remains, from the outside, completely unchanged.

2

169 Bar on East Broadway was the only watering hole for miles. From the outside, it looked like a dive bar, and on one of the only occasions that Mike and I went for an evening drink together, absolutely lived up to that external impression on the inside. It sold cheap beer and liquor at cheap prices, possibly had a jukebox, and didn’t ask for anything more from us than a few bucks in turn. We were okay with that: Chinatown was rife with gang wars at the time, and it was enough that 169 appeared exempt from them.

As such, it was a joy to walk only a few minutes from my Canal Street hotel room last Tuesday and see 169 still there. But it no longer looks remotely like a dive bar, and later that same evening, the grown son of my best friend from my Brooklyn days confirmed what seems somewhat evident from the palm trees outside – that it’s now a hipster hangout. Indeed, much of that patch of eastern Canal Street and up towards Grand Street is now gentrified, judging by the expensive coffee shops and food joints I passed either the previous night or that morning.

I’m okay with this. Gunfire and gang wars get old quickly, whereas it is hard to tire of friendly traffic wardens and crossing guards of all cultural persuasions working to ensure that today’s crop of happy little kids, hand in hand with their parents, get to their elementary school safely.

3

One unexpected bonus of my otherwise out-of-the-way location was that the roving Payday nightclub occasionally rented out the circular space above what was then the Co-Op supermarket, barely 100 yards further east down Grand Street from 503. I found out as much because one of the few people I knew in the NYC music biz when I moved there – Hello Kitty! – was dating the guy who ran the night, who later became something of a bigshot in the whole electronica-house-techno-superstar-DJ phenomenon.

The one time I recall attending Payday in this location – for $5 entry fee, I don’t believe there was a guest list – it was like a London tourist’s dream come true. While I can’t remember who was on the decks, Afrika Bambaataa was in the house, as was Chuck D, and most likely members of Run-D.M.C. also. Their presence was all the cooler for the fact that Payday was not strictly a hip-hop night. I’d eventually get to interview all these major players, some of them more than once, but at the time, it was enough just to know that people who were already New York legends could be found at the same somewhat illicit parties as the rest of us.

4

I lived opposite the Hillman Cooperative Houses which were occupied by peaceful, quiet, ageing Jewish families of what I trusted to be the same progressive leaning as their buildings’ namesake, Sidney Hillman. I would not have known as much at that pre-Internet time, but Hillman had been brought to the USA as a child by his Lithuanian Jewish parents, and went on to become the founder and first President of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, which itself played a significant role in sponsoring and building these structures between 1947-50. He was a classic American immigrant success story.

I took a picture of Hillman’s words last week, etched into the entrance wall directly opposite 503, to remind all of us that the battle for equity and harmony is as old as the country itself, and while it is always an uphill battle and one which may currently feel like the rock of Sisyphus is rolling back down upon us, the USA will hopefully get over that summit one day. The words of Hillman also serve to remind that Jewish people have historically been at the center of that battle for progress; there would have been no music scene in NYC my worth writing the book All Hopped Up and Read To Go about either, if not for the patronage and participation of progressive New York Jewish enthusiasts.

Nor did I know until some modern internet research that the Hillman Cooperative Houses – three buildings on Grand Street with 805 apartments between them, part of a larger conglomeration of ACWA-sponsored buildings that account for 4500 apartments across the Lower East Side - strictly followed the Rochdale Principles, which are indeed named for the town in the British Industrial North, laid out for their own cooperatives some 100 years earlier. This gives me an opportunity to say hello to Mark Hodkinson, who has written more books about Rochdale FC than one might consider possible and who could probably write another about their season that has just ended in dramatic failure.

5

From the Hillman Houses, and past the Henry Street Playhouse that looks completely unchanged from when I photographed it back in 1988, I walked further west along Grand Street, hoping to find the kosher bakery that sold not just bagels, but bialys, babkas and onion discs, a bakery whose name I could not remember, but which was open 24 hours a day back then; this I know from the fact that I could and would pick up a 50c dose of carbs and calories on that long walk to or from the Lower East Side clubs. I recall it especially well as I was so broke at one point that I couldn’t eat until I got a $100 check out of Spin magazine – no easy matter with Bob Guccione Jr. at the helm – and cash it at the bank on Grand Street, after which I went straight to this place and bought not one, but two bagels, both of which I think I ate on the street.

Kossar’s, as it has evidently been called since its establishment 90 full years ago, now has a Sugar Sweet Sunshine Bakery for competition next door, is itself very colorful in ways I absolutely don’t remember, and is staffed not by babushkas but friendly Hispanics. The world changes, but it also stays the same.

Because Kossar’s was further along than I expected and I feared it had disappeared, I had already advantage of a great deal at a Lebanese place called Manousheh where I got a massive vegan fatayer breakfast pie with a free coffee thrown in for $9, less than I would spend attempting anything similar in Kingston. Nonetheless, I bought a bagel – and a bialy - to have the next day back up in the Hudson Valley; neither was still 50c, but combined they only came to $3.65, or 15c more than a single bagel at the newly chi-chi place in Kingston that is so outrageously expensive I won’t name it. While the Kossar’s bagel was not necessarily anything to write home about, the bialy – which I digested on the bus back home later that evening - tasted better than I ever remembered. It was kosher, in all senses of the word.

Kossar’s apparently has at least four more outlets across New York City, but if the Grand Street location is not the original one, I don’t want to be informed.

6

One might just assume that Katz’s Delicatessen, much more of a tourist attraction than Kossar’s has ever been – a fame that predated When Harry Met Sally’s infamous Meg Ryan verbal orgasm – would still be there on the corner of Houston and Ludlow. And indeed it is.

But very little else in the neighborhood remains the same. The photograph I took from the island in the middle of Houston shows as much: both the Equinox Gym above the Marshall’s next door to Katz’s being part of a shiny tower block on a whole street full of them. And while Katz’s continues to thrive (I only ate there once, can’t remember anything about it), I doubt that more than a handful of the establishments from the streets just below Houston that I recall from 1988 – and tbh, there only were a handful back then, most of it was boarded up! - are still operating.

Sadly, the list of former glories includes El Sombrero – the famous Mexican dive restaurant aka The Hat – whose Ludlow/Stanton location, despite being only a block south of the comparatively safe Houston Street, was so dicey that when I recommended it to a certain Norman Cook, visiting NYC for the CMJ Conference in, probably, 1989, he had his cab turn straight around when it got there and berated me the next day for suggesting it in the first place. As Keith Richards would say: Lightweight. (PS: Love you Norm, you are a good man despite this!))

7

Crossing Houston into the East Village, I figured I had time to get as far as Tompkins Square Park, home to the homeless back in the summer of 1998, which was when Mayor Koch ordered the police to evict them, only for the cops to be beaten back by a motley crew of local punks and activists and street people. The police returned the next Saturday night – August 6 - determined to wreak revenge; having known that something was up, I ventured down there to see what might transpire for myself.

What I witnessed was what the Police Commissioner eventually admitted to: a police riot. With badges covered – plus ca change, huh? – the cops waited for the first provocation and then stormed the park and surrounding streets, beating just about anyone they could find. Many locals were willing to fight back; it was like nothing I’d seen in all my time in London, football matches and Brixton Riots included.

I have an inquisitive nature but I don’t like to throw punches nor get hit by a billy stick or six in the corner of a doorway, as I quickly saw happening, so after being granted temporary sanctuary inside a newsstand/deli, I seized my moment and dived next door into what was already my local dive bar, conveniently situated directly opposite the entrance to the park: namely, Lucy’s. Staffed by one lone Polish lady – whose name was actually Ludvika but in that manner of so many East European immigrants, was Anglicized by the locals – it was a hangout for lots of local toughs, many of them “punks and skinheads” by her admission and my own observations, and she ruled them - us - all with an incredible display of tenderness and discipline.

Nobody fucked with Lucy, not even when she pulled down the shutters that night before some of her patrons could get back out on the streets (possibly with a pool ball or two stuffed into their pockets) to fight the police. She may have calmed us down by offering some drinks on the house, which was her nature if you were there often enough or long enough, a once persistent trait of authentic American bar culture that is threatening to go the way of the passenger pigeon.

Lucy’s never succumbed to the gradual gentrification of the neighborhood; even when the shutters weren’t down, it looked like it was closed. But after the building was sold for $19 million and her landlord doubled her rent, Ludwvika shut up shop in 2024. Thankfully, the love that locals felt for Lucy and Lucy’s alike ensured that a deal was struck, her bar was revived, and the 84-year-old Ludvika can now attend as Lucy’s patron saint of Avenue A Bars. The New York Times ran a wonderful story about her story, and how the bar was not just saved but preserved, graffiti-strewn bathroom – a rival for that of CBGBs any night - included. Had it been later in the day last Tuesday, and had those shutters been raised, I’d have gone in and raised a Rolling Rock – the beer of choice back then, I recall - to the memories. Instead, I moved on.

8

It seems anticlimactic by comparison, but while I knew Lucy’s was still there – I’d read the Times piece with fascination and gratitude – I did not know that the Cherry Tavern had survived also. (So has 2A, on the street corner of its name; its plate glass windows meant it was always somewhere to be seen, a validation of one’s late night – or perhaps midafternoon - street chic.) I only went inside Cherry Tavern once or twice, probably with my friend James Noone, who was a member of SHARP – Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice – and a fantastic running buddy for a couple of years in Manhattan once I moved up to the East Village proper later in 1989.

True to his political convictions of the time, James - Jamie or Jim back then - has been a union organizer ever since, nowadays located in Denver. In confirming some of these details via messages, I shared the Times’ story about Lucy’s with him, and he wrote that he too spent the night of the Tompkins Square Park locked inside the bar; as already noted, we had yet to be introduced (by his older sister, who had been my first American girlfriend up in Boston, later an A&R Executive and Artist Manager and more recently, my realtor. (All true.))

Back to the bars. You don’t have to drink to appreciate a good dive bar – Jamie gave up many a decade back – but while I might joke that it helps, the fact is that they cement a neighborhood’s working class credibility in a way that no johnnycomelately upstart chi-chi bar or bagelry can ever aspire towards. Cherry Tavern, like Lucy’s and 2A, is a survivor. And unlike 169, no palm trees anywhere in sight.

9

In-between my Lower East Side haunts and Houston Street, I allowed for a detour. Figuring I had time and money for one downtown museum and one only, I literally tossed a coin on Canal Street to choose between the New Museum’s new 60,000-ft museum space and its exhibition New Humans: Memories of the Future, and the International Center for Photography with its flagship Hard Copy: New York celebration of photocopying. Appropriately for this particular day, the coin came down tails, and ICP it was.

In Hard Copy: New York, which has had previous iterations at ICP, co-curator Aaron Stern takes artwork supplied by known artists, then photocopies and reinterprets them, bringing them down to a sharply black-and-white relief just as did the early punk fanzines. While the examples – many of them collages – on display were not restricted to depictions of New York, some of the strongest images were very much representations of the historic streets outside the ICP’s uber-modern, and (purposefully?) photogenic building. These included a wall of Warhol Factory photos shot by Stephen Shore (who has an entire book of them available), photocopied by Stern, then reshot by myself and shown above.

10

The onslaught of images had my mind buzzing with possibilities and, unrestricted by a limit of 20 shots per roll of film on my iPhone, I set about photographing up close and from a distance alike, subjecting everything from the building’s inner staircases, vast external windows onto Essex Street below, and even the staff security, in the hope of securing something artistic, wondering in the process whether I wanted to turn today’s images back into a zine of kinds, or cut and paste them onto a posterboard at home (despite the fact I have a hundred other deadlines). It’s the kind of thing that New York does to me more than any other city – it inspires me.

And so, while all the while I was aware that I am not a photographer, per se, I was equally aware that nor was Eugène Atget, who, almost exactly a century after his death, has his own exhibition of Parisian photographs on display at ICP, none of which have ever been accepted into a single artistic category even as they have become celebrated as a unique slice of (photographic) history. I came away likening Atget to Harry Smith, who had his own long overdue posthumous retrospective at the Whitney a couple of years back. If you’re in downtown Manhattan yourself and have the time and energy, venture into ICP and hopefully you will emerge, like myself, suitably invigorated and energized…

11

…And perhaps, like me, you may then wander around the corner to Allen Street, only to stumble upon AUTOPHOTO: the Photobooth Gallery and Museum, which features a display on 100 Years of Photobooths, including some non-working vintage machines, and enough historic ones in operative order to ensure that just about everyone who comes in the door, myself included, pops not a few quarters in the slot but uses contactless payment to spend an inflationary $8 or so, so as to relive the joys of a time when the Photobooth allowed you and perhaps your besties too to pose as you saw fit for barely a minute, and then wait all of three minutes in eager anticipation for the results.

12

The Photobooth as was did not know of the word “selfie,” but what it delivered was very much in that spirit. In fact, the four shots I received for my $8 are something more than even that: there’s a genuine two-tone authenticity to the imagery itself that none but the most carefully posed of full-color modern cellphone selfies has ever successfully captured (at least of me). In scanning them into my computer a couple of days later, still inspired by Hard Copy: New York, I additionally scanned them as black and white, and was again taken back to my early zine-scrapping days.

All in all I took well over 100 photos last Tuesday. Reducing them to a baker’s dozen has been an artistic – and editorial – endeavor all of its own. For reference, I took them in color, then rendered them into black and white on the computer, using the Google Photos “Vogue” filter for every one of them, with an additional sharpen on just a couple.

13

Still, the final image is in color. As I left Bowery Palace the preceding, Monday night, it leapt out on the street corner that separates that venue from the block that housed CBGBs, demanding to be photographed under the bright lights of big city New York. Much like the blue plaque of Keith Moon where once stood Wardour Street’s Marquee Club, it serves to honor my home cities’ cultural past while acknowledging that the future is inevitable.

Early in my tenancy in New York City, I sold the prospect of an interview with Joey Ramone to Record Mirror – on the basis of nothing else than that I wanted to meet him. He recommended a diner further up the Bowery (by which point it becomes Third Avenue), where not a single head turned his way despite Joey being one of the most distinctively recognizable characters in all rock ‘n’ roll. Nor did heads turn when I became a regular myself at CBGBs and Joey would show up to play pool… Nor a year or so after that when I took Joey, Marky Ramone, Chris Stein and Debbie Harry on the public boat to the Statue of Liberty to shoot a TV piece for Rapido.

That’s because New York City really did have it all. Just like Payday down on Grand Street, there seemed no separation between artist and public, perhaps because so many on the scene refused to recognize any separation in the first place.

New York, I still love you.

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Shortly after Fred Smith’s passing in early February, from cancer, at the age of 77, I posted the following on my Substack notes:

Generally I stay away from commenting on musicians’ passing on, because there are so many of these events occurring in our lives. But there are exceptions, and Fred Smith was one of them. Fred was a known musician to many for his work primarily in Television and beyond, and I knew him for that also, but he and I had an additionally personal bond over wine, for Fred was also, with his partner Paula, a winemaker these last few decades.

Spending quality time with Fred and other Hudson Valley residents at the wine table over the last 20 years, I learned that he was a gentleman in the best definition of the term. Polite, calm, always composed, always friendly, he was just a lovely person to be around. He will be deeply missed by music fans and compadres around the world, and missed by all of us in the Hudson Valley who knew him personally.

Below: Fred and Paula outside their home and wine barn just down the road from Kingston, NY, and their Cereghino-Smith wine company’s bsignature wine, Rock ‘n’ Roll Red featuring Tish & Snooky on the label. Please raise a glass in Fred’s memory and hono(u)r.

It was Tish & Snooky who closed out a beautiful memorial to Fred last Monday night with a lovely rendition of “Auld Lang Syne,” one which would no doubt have had my late Scottish mother applauding - while singing along in harmony - and brought tears to my own eyes.

The rest of the night, however, was a pure upbeat, positive celebration, one that confirmed the Note I published above. Fred was indeed a Gentleman, as confirmed when musician after musician after poet after writer after CBGBs soundman from back in the day, all got on stage to emphasize his often unsung kindness and generosity. As my friend Rhonda Markowitz wrote on FB,

“I'm sure the collective force of this celebration drew his spirit down to enjoy a deeply tender and all-out rocking tribute. A true nobleman, no pretension, no "rock star" attitude - to know him was to love him.”

It’s fair to say that one’s personality often comes across in one’s music, and Fred’s subtle but highly intelligent nature certainly was evident in his bass playing. We could write essays about it, and obituaries in major newspapers have thankfully highlighted it. Only a couple of weeks ago, I saw Luna cover the Television anthem “Marquee Moon” onstage at Assembly in Kingston, and watching Britta Phillips play Fred’s part with loving intent confirmed as much. Meanwhile, back at Bowery Palace on April 20th, the musical portion of the “Irish Wake” for Fred concluded with a true all-star LES NYC CBGBs-era cast who commemorated that bass playing within a performance of the Television song “Friction,” a term that does not apply to Fred Smith himself. Enjoy this very short clip.

From left to right: Willie Nile, James Mastro, Lenny Kaye, Tony Shanahan on the bass and, hidden behind him on drums, Jay Dee Daugherty.

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My thanks to Paul Bearman of the excellent Talking About The Who podcast who “hosted,” “moderated” or whatever you want to call it, and did what I thought was a fine job. His third season is about to get going, and you can find out the details here.

I am making the 93-minute video conversation available here to paid subscribers, without whom… Seriously, all of you who chip in, either by the month or the year, give me the lift I need to keep putting in the extensive hours. A reminder that paid subscriptions to Tony Fletcher, Wordsmith not only get you exclusive posts like this and the historic Keith Moon biography interview transcripts, but access to all the archives all the time, and the monthly Crossed Channels podcast too.

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As a follow-up to the well-received piece I posted a week back on Tom Jones, I thought I would open this Midweek Special with a multiple choice, one question quiz based on something that I came across in these last 7 days:

I will keep the voting open for a week. Meantime, in case you are new or missed it, here’s my aforementioned piece on…

KEITH MOON! DEAR BOY!

A big thank you to everyone who joined my debut Substack livestream last Sunday, April 19th, on the subject of Keith Moon and the “remastered” edition of my biography, Dear Boy. I haven’t held one of these livestreams before because, frankly, I don’t expect people to show up - we all have one life to live and too many choices on how to occupy it - so was extremely gratified that we closed out with 30+ in attendance. I will soon be sharing out the 95-minute conversation to paid subscribers of my Substack; Paul Bearman, who did a wonderful job of asking the questions and keeping it all flowing, will later do the same for his Talking About The Who patreons. We both appreciate our paid subscribers, without whom…

Tony Fletcher, Wordsmith posts twice a week, minimum, usually on Thursdays and Sundays. To receive all posts in your Inbox, please subscribe. To keep the page going, please consider a paid subscription at just $6 a month, $60 for the year (less than £5/£50 at current exchange rates.) You get access to all the archives all the time, exclusive interview transcripts, and the monthly Crossed Channels podcast I host with . I promise not to spend your own hard-earned money on throwing TVs out of hotel rooms.

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If you missed Sunday’s event, and really don’t want to subscribe to receive the video because you’re saving up for a copy of the book (or, and don’t worry I get it, have bills to pay), you may want to know that I was recently invited back on to the Word In Your Ear podcast to talk on the same subject. This is at least the third - if not the fourth - time I have connected on video and/or audio with hosts David Hepworth and Mark Ellen, and I would go back on tomorrow if they wanted me to: there’s a great energy when I talk with them and they are experts at keeping one of these talks lively, free-flowing yet on point, funny, and well under an hour. You can watch our latest conversation below but it’s also an audio pod, on all platforms.

As those who were able to attend on Sunday may have heard, I put in considerable homework for the livestream: it involved re-reading my 2005 UK Afterword in full (the primary “new” content in the “Remastered” edition for those who may only own the original hardback/paperback, or the US version), as well as going back over some of my previous public conversations and contributions about Keith’s life and work, both online and on TV. This was one of the best, a particularly good podcast/video interview very much about Keith Moon the drummer, and many of you may enjoy watching or, as per Word In Your Ear, just finding it on your podcast platform.

…On the down side, I was somewhat disenchanted and disappointed by how many truly crappy, sensationalist “Keith Moon Was The Craziest Man in Rock” videos that YouTube pointed me towards as part of its algorithmic response to my searching out a couple of specific items. Many of these exist primarily to attract eyeballs for advertising; they tend to draw on my biography without crediting me; and they continue to perpetuate the “living vicariously through Keith Moon” trope that, as I noted in my book of 1998, was something that contributed to Keith’s need to live up to expectations, which in turn played significantly into his early death. (Disclaimer: as a kid, I was one of them. It looked gloriously glamorous from the outside at an impressionable age. Older people should know better.)

But back on the plus side, I came across this truly excellent video below, which combines a detailed analysis of Keith Moon’s drumming style with tabulations of specific examples, additionally shown from a bird's eye camera of host Brandon Toews performing them himself. There are also personalized contributions from drummers like Chad Smith and Todd Sucherman. Best of all, this video has had 2.3 million videos in the two years since it was published, phenomenal numbers and well-deserved. Whether you are a drummer or not (I am half a drummer, so I fit right down the middle), you will learn an enormous amount about Keith’s unique musicianship by putting the time aside to watch it.

As I explain in its 2005 afterword, the publication of Dear Boy unleashed a TV documentary The Real Keith Moon, and perhaps the success of the book kept his name in the limelight sufficiently that he was obvious subject matter for various TV series that followed with titles like Living Famously, Final 24 Hours, and Rock ’n’ Roll Myths. I addressed a couple of these shows in my livestream and you may well be able to search them out on YouTube; be warned that one of them has my face as thumbnail!

Before all of these, however, there was Behind The Music, the series presented by VH1 that was must-watch US Sunday night TV in the late 1990s/early 2000. I appeared by completely fortuitous coincidence: VH1 started working on their Keith Moon episode just as my book was coming out and my upstairs neighbor in Brooklyn, who was friends with the director, found out what I did for a living. She put me in contact with him, I was duly interviewed, the book cover was prominently featured, everybody and their cat watched it, and I was famous for 15 minutes (and throughout its multiple repeats).

The show was all the better for the fact that VH1 had clout, and that Behind The Music, certainly at that point, was highly respected. They thereby got access to many of the people I had worked hard myself to track down - including Kim McLagan, Keith’s ex-wife, who maybe took the attitude that having talked about Keith in such detail to me, she was now freed from the burdens of secrecy or just privacy such as she’d carried with her for so many years, and could share her stories with others as well.1 That said, she has, like most of us, maybe three minutes of actual airtime, whereas the interviews I conducted with her at her house for the book, were more like six or seven hours’ worth - perhaps more - and ultimately, priceless.

All of this is a long preamble to the fact that the Behind The Music: Keith Moon episode has been archived on YT. The presentation is somewhat more enjoyable for its enforced two-three-minute breaks in which we get transported back to 1999 American TV commercials. Hint: bad though they may be, they are worse now. (And it definitely was 1999, not 1998 that it aired.)

It’s a tangent but YouTube’s algorithms subsequently pointed me to the ‘10 Funniest UK ads of the 1970s’ and although I don’t appreciate how we used to exploit chimpanzees to sell teabags - and laugh about it - I did get a kick out of (re)watching many of the others. On first go-round, Paula and I counted at least 6 ads for alcohol and 1 for tobacco; more national, regional and gender stereotypes than appropriate; and a memorable finale of “Luton Airport.”

MELISSA AUF DER MAUR!

I recently found myself reading one, and listening to another interview with Melissa auf der Maur about her book Even the Good Girls Will Cry: A ‘90s Rock Memoir. By all accounts it is quite the account of her time with Hole and Smashing Pumpkins, among other aspects of a fascinating bohemian life, and certainly Melissa makes for a great interviewee. I recommend reading Robert Burke Warren’s piece on her here at Oldster magazine Substack; and listening to the interview conducted by Simon Cardwell on the Music Maps Podcast affiliated with Walthamstow’s wonderful Rock’ n’ Roll Book Club. For each episode the show uses a place “as a jumping off point for a conversation about music - anywhere from the obvious to the obscure.”

In Melissa’s case, it’s Montreal, her home city - a Revolutionary City, she says – and one that helped make her who she became… That is, a figurehead of 90s Cool, but, further down the New York Thruway and closer to my current home, also a greatly admired 21^st Century figure for her and her husband Tony Stone’s work with the old factory in Hudson known as Basilica, a building that hosts concerts, a 24-hour annual drone festival, films, workshops, and flea markets. Dry Cleaning are playing there in the next few days.

Auf de Maur has also always been a photographer and there is apparently a photo book – and exhibit – of her 90s scene pictures to follow. And a post from me to follow about photographing New York City in turn. Meantime, here’s a short clip of local teenagers Mona Freaka (minus regular bassist Jill) covering Hole’s “Celebrity Skin” in Woodstock last week.

ATYPICAL GIRL PENNY KILEY!

While we are on the subject of musical memoirs that serve to the redress of gender domination imbalance in the music world in the late 20^th Century, a shout-out to Penny Kiley for her memoir, entitled Atypical Girl: Punk rock, Liverpool and trying to be normal; I believe that she may be the first female music journalist of the punk and post-punk era to have written such a book. There weren’t exactly many female music journalists to begin with.

Penny’s story is especially interesting, being a “southerner” who went up to Liverpool for Uni, then found herself writing about the Eric’s scene for Melody Maker and becoming what Will Sergeant, who contributed one of many “blurbs” you can find on this page, calls “part of the furniture” (but in a positive way I am sure!). I hope to read Atypical Girl when I am next in the UK, but in the meantime, I have always enjoyed Penny’s Substack, and especially appreciated the conversation she had with fellow Liverpool writer Paul du Noyer and the team from Rocks Back Pages on their own latest podcast.

AMY RIGBY! WRECKLESS ERIC!

Finally, while songwriters are generally, by default, natural story tellers (except for the younger ones caught in the “liminal space” whereby their stories never conclude), not all of them know how to tell those stories in the form of elongated prose. The married couple of Amy Rigby and “Wreckless” Eric Goulden are wonderful exceptions. Each has a Substack and Amy is now two memoirs in on her own life; the same aforementioned Oldster magazine recently ran an excerpt from her new tome, Girl To Country. (I offered to print an extract here on Substack but unfortunately it didn’t happen.)

Both Amy and Eric have also been on the road of late, separately, and they each write eloquently and humorously – and with great honesty – about the trials and tribulations of doing so, of trying to sell books and music in their older age to an ever more “selective” audience. It’s hard work for sure, and while Amy can at least see beyond that workload to title one of her recent posts, with a wink and a nudge to Mott the Hoople, All The Way To Suffield, Eric’s latest epistle opens with this blunt admission:

I’m starting to face the possibility that I don’t want to be, or won’t be able to be a touring musician for much longer.

It turns out it’s not the (lack of) audience, or the (satisfying) performances, that is the problem. It’s the lifestyle, the solo travel, and it starts with the f**king car rental, as anybody who ever has to deal with British bureaucracy at its worst (especially, in my case, after getting off a sleepless overnight flight) will appreciate. Still, even the most PTSD-struck of readers will laugh out loud at Eric’s inner thoughts as he deals with a particularly smarmy twat at Norwich Airport. Sorry, Norwich International Airport.

We’d been waiting for twenty five minutes by the time the associate returned from lunch, no apology, just clack clack clack on the computer keyboard and a petulant and expectant ‘How can I help?’ that had me wishing I could smack him right in his manicured ginger beard.

I am sure we would have forgiven him if he had. Especially as this is only the beginning of his Kafka-esque journey. I recommend the full read; it’s brutal, brittle and bloody hilarious.

Peace out!

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Me, a cynic? Far from it! On Record Store Day in 2019, alongside my good friend Tony Page, with whom I now have the musical duo The Dear Boys, we visited Platform One Records in Pagey’s hometown of Bexhill-on-Sea that was not participating in Record Store Day, spent good money on used vinyl, came home, and recorded this PSA.

I unearthed it a couple of months back and decided to save it for today. I hope you enjoy it. Now go out and buy some good records on good record labels at good INDEPENDENT record shops, regardless of when those records were released or how many copies were pressed…

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And for any of you who can’t get enough of me on video, I will see you here tomorrow for my first ever live video stream on this platform…

Tony Fletcher, Wordsmith posts twice a week, minimum, usually on Thursdays and Sundays. To receive all posts in your Inbox, please subscribe. To keep the page going, please consider a paid subscription at just $6 a month, $60 for the year (less than £5/£50 at current exchange rates.) You get access to all the archives all the time, exclusive interview transcripts, and the monthly Crossed Channels podcast I host with . I promise not to spend your own hard-earned money on Sham 69 singles.

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Good day everyone, this a bonus post, to invite/remind you: this Sunday April 19th, at 11:30am PST (West Coast USA & more), 2:30pm EST (East Coast USA & more), 7:30pm BST (UK & more), and other related time zones, to celebrate/commemorate the newly published “Remastered” edition of my Keith Moon biography, Dear Boy, I will be holding my first ever live video stream on Substack. I will be joined by Paul Bearman, host of the Talking About The Who podcast, who will interview me about the book for approximately 45 minutes. Then we will hand over to questions from subscribers for the next 45 minutes or so.

I have been on quite a few podcasts over the years talking about this book, so I asked Paul to ask me hard questions and I invite you, similarly, to prep whatever it is you wanted to know about Moon/Dear Boy that has still to be answered. If I have to declare any questions “off limits” I will but no penalty for asking! The entire event will last 90 minutes.

This being my first such livestream, there’s always a possibility of snafus - and if you received any test e-mails over the last couple of days, apologies - but we have been through some practice runs, and the process here on Substack appears straightforward. You should have a message come up on your Substack apps and home pages once we go live, but I will additionally send out an e-mail to all subscribers as we click that button; the e-mail will provide a link. When you open that link, not only should you see Paul and myself, but a chat page sidebar should be there for you if you want to write a question. Please save the chatroom only for questions so Paul and I don’t miss them.

The stream is only open to subscribers. Basic subscription is free.

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However, we are going to proritise questions from paid subscribers. Those paid subscribers keep this page going. Truly, I could not keep Wordsmith up and running at this level without it providing at least a small part of my income; there is just too much work involved. I am massively grateful to my paid subscribers, and this is a further chance to offer you/them a “reward” and, for the rest of you, another incentive to consider joining. The paid subscription starts at just $6 a month, $60 for the year (less than £5/£50 at current exchange rates.) You get access to all the archives all the time, exclusive interview transcripts, and the monthly Crossed Channels podcast I host with .

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This is the Crossed Channels episode we did on The Who:

The podcast, btw, is now 27 episodes deep, with previous transatlantic subject matter including everyone from The Kinks to Kate Bush, Blondie to Otis Redding, and The Jam to our latest - and we think our greatest - episode, on the Parliament (Funkadelic) classic Mothership Connection. if you are already a paid subscriber, I hope you are taking advantage of this bonus: you can listen from your Substack page/app, or via your podcast feed if you follow the instructions on the right-hand sidebar of each episode page.

THE KEITH MOON/WHO ARCHIVES

Wordsmith has picked up a lot of new subscribers in recent weeks, many coming over from The Who FB group, and I suspect most of you have not gone deep into the archives to discover the immense back catalogue on The Who, and Keith Moon in particular. (Posts disappear behind the paywall after 12 weeks.) Best way to find it all is to go to tonyfletcher.substack.com and in the searchbar up top enter “Keith Moon” or “The Who.” In the meantime, here are my own Top 10 Keith-Who related posts in terms of eyeballs or/and quality. The first and third John Entwistle extracts are also the most popular of all my posts.

Also in the Dear Boy archives: my interviews with Alice Cooper, Sir David Puttnam, Bill Curbishley, Larry Hagman and more. Plus, two interviews with Pete Townshend for Jamming!

KEITH MOON INTERVIEWS POLL

There are still many more interviews from the Dear Boy archives waiting to be cleaned up posted. So, time for another poll:

KEITH MOON PLAYLIST

For those of you new here, I was asked to compile a “Keith Moon” playlist by the publicity people at Omnibus Press, who originally published Dear Boy in 1998. (It was published as Moon: The Life and Death of a Rock Legend in the US in 1999, and has also been translated and published in France, Germany and Brazil.) The request was for fifteen songs, and they did not all have to feature Keith. I obliged. I offer it here to you with a link to the streaming platform I use and like to champion, Qobuz. https://open.qobuz.com/playlist/60654013 (You can also click on the image below.)

Omnibus Press have put the playlist up on their own channel on Spotify. I am ardently against Spotify, and invite you to read this recent article I wrote helping explain why.

However, because the playlist already exists on that platform, and some of you may not yet be ready to make a change - though please consider it - you can access the same playlist on Spotify here:

Last time I posted these, I invited subscribers to import/assemble the playlist to their own streaming platform and share it out with us if they so desired. My thanks to Mister Stick for doing so over at Tidal. You can access it at Tidal from here or via the image Stick made below:

I am still open to your suggestions for that ONE song I did not include among my 15 that you would if you could.

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See you on Sunday…

It was the spring of 1993. The night I had been co-promoting at the Limelight with my former roommate, Neville Wells, called Communion, was three years old and running out of ways to prove itself. Started as an “alternative” music night before the term was fashionable, with myself as DJ and Neville as host, we modeled ourselves on the Anglophilic clubs that existed in numbers across the bridges and tunnels in New Jersey and Long Island, except that we were stationed in the heart of Manhattan’s nightlife, at no lesser a club than the Limelight, where Neville had long been employed as a waiter in the VIP Room.

After several months of largely empty dance-floors with showcase slots featuring any band that could muster a few punters, Communion had taken off once I had settled into a goth-industrial-indie-dance groove from the turret of a DJ booth, and especially so once we’d been unceremoniously booted back from a Wednesday to a Tuesday, to make room for Michael Alig’s Disco 2000. Somehow, Tuesday was more attractive to the underage FIT students from up the road, the outsiders from the suburbs, and the industry insiders who enjoyed adding another night to their weekly rounds.

Gradually, we’d found ourselves booking proper acts, those worthy of headliner and fly-poster status, some even making their US debuts. Renegade Soundwave. 808 State. The Charlatans. Consolidated. Inspiral Carpets. Meat Beat Manifesto. KMFDM. Front 242. Slowdive. The Shamen. Nitzer Ebb. Then, in late 1992, we had taken the club on the road, on a package tour in which I DJ’d in-between sets by Ultramarine, Orbital and Meat Beat Manifesto and we’d had a total blast traveling, setting up, breaking down and traveling through the night together. During the tour, we simultaneously hosted shows by The Sugarcubes and Morrissey back in New York. Frankly, we were on fire.

And I was growing bored. Industrial had given way to techno, alternative to grunge, my dancefloor was becoming segregated, and it was not as enjoyable: I hadn’t set about DJing just so people could mosh. I was getting ready to move on – or rather, to move back to my writing. I had ideas for a third book.

Then a call came, from booking agent Steve Ferguson. Steve was one of many agents initially reluctant to book shows in with us – the Limelight’s owner, Peter Gatien, did not have a great reputation in the gigging industry, and besides, it was impossible for us to offer the kind of standard concert deals bands were used to. There was also the small matter that we wouldn’t put the headliners on before 11pm. But several of Steve’s bands had found their way to us anyway, hanging out at Communion following their previous NYC gigs, insisting they play our night next time round, and we’d proven we could pack the venue, and that Peter would pay a decent flat fee. Throw in the fact that the venue didn’t close the moment the bands came off stage – rather, it often got busier, and the crowd somewhat crazier - and that the drinks flowed freely and more besides, and the bands were generally happy campers.

But Steve wasn’t calling about a band booking that day.

“Tom Jones is going to do two showcases to get a new record deal. One in New York. One in LA. He’s been informed that Communion is the night for him in Manhattan and wants to play it. Are you in?”

It was one thing to have put on a Morrissey show as part of the former Smiths singer’s multiple NYC appearances. It was another to be offered a genuine superstar on the understanding that he wanted to play your club night because it was apparently the hippest in Manhattan, the most likely to get him a new record deal. Forget whether Tom Jones was, himself, hip; that was debatable. What was indisputable was that he was a legend.

Peter Gatien could not quite believe his luck when I called him to say I could book Tom Jones into Limelight – it was the kind of A-list name he was always after - and I have a feeling we were pushed by Steve to a new record, flat fee of $12,500. Gatien knew that, quite apart from the prestige this booking would bring him, he could make back the extra at the bar; unlike the FIT goth kids, Tom Jones fans had some spending money.

There was one thing that worried me, though, and I raised it to Steve Ferguson almost immediately.

“What about the rider?” I asked, referring to the addendum to every performance contract, the one that lists an artist’s backstage and onstage requirements – which could range from crates of beer to M&Ms-but-without-the-brown-ones. Generally speaking, the bigger the act, the more fancy the rider. And Tom Jones, well, he was Vegas. “I can imagine the rider is going to cost us a fortune,” I said, noting that if it went over $500 I was likely to be in trouble; this wasn’t strictly true, but I enjoyed the negotiation process.

“It won’t,” Steve assured me. “Tom has a small band. He’s been doing this for years. The rider is very simple.”

When the contract came in, I only glimpsed over the PA & lights specifics, noting that Tom would be performing with band plus backing singers plus brass section, at least 11 or 12 musicians in all. It was a big band, but I would send all of this on to our tech crew, who were also sufficiently excited by the prospect of working withe the man.

I turned to the rider. Steve was right; it was very simple. It was also very specific. Alongside the usual backstage smorgasbord of food, and some modest beer and soft drinks for the band and backing singers and brass section, and the familiar agreement that if we weren’t going to supply a proper meal for them we’d give them a “buy-out” (at least $200 of expenses for a large band like this, or more than half our usual rider budget), there were some unusual demands:

• The cases of bottled water had to be at room temperature. NOT iced, not even refrigerated. Room temperature.

• The bottle of white wine was to be Meursault. No imitations. I had never heard of Meursault - and I thought I knew a little about wine. That did not bode well.

• The bottle of champagne had to be champagne, i.e. from Champagne, in France. Again, no imitations. There may have been a specific “House” mentioned, but If not it was clearly implied that it should be top shelf stuff.

• There was an additional requirement attached to these drinks requirements, and that was for six crystal glasses. Again, no imitation.

Most bands wanted more booze and food on the rider than they could possibly consume at the night; the thought was to load the leftovers on the bus and hope it would get them through to the next show and beyond, possibly without sleeping. But Tom Jones’ rider? This was in a league of its own.

Tony Fletcher, Wordsmith posts twice a week, minimum, usually on Thursdays and Sundays. To receive all posts in your Inbox, please subscribe. To keep the page going, please consider a paid subscription at just $6 a month, $60 for the year (less than £5/£50 at current exchange rates.) You get access to all the archives all the time, exclusive interview transcripts, and the monthly Crossed Channels podcast I host with . I promise not to spend your own hard-earned money on knickers to throw at Tom Jones.

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A couple of weeks before the concert, booked now for early May, Tom’s manager and son Mark Woodward called to advance the show. I started out by trying to impress upon Mark about our quality sound and light system.

“I’m not worried about that,” said Mark, politely but firmly cutting me off mid-sentence. “We wouldn’t be playing your place if we didn’t think you had the sound together. Tom won’t be there for soundcheck anyway, and the band are all old hands at this. Now, about the rider…”

At which Mark promptly schooled me in a whole different level of sophistry than your average Manchester band on its first hedonistic Stateside trip.

“The water? ROOM TEMPERATURE. Tom doesn’t get to keep his tonsils in working order by drinking ice cold water. It’s not good for the throat. He needs lots of water, and he needs it at room temperature. This is not about cost, it’s about temperature. Got it?”

“Got it.”

“The Burgundy and the Champagne… It’s only a couple of bottles. You buy the best. No cutting corners. No Californian Chardonnay; no sparkling wine from God knows where. If it doesn’t say Meursault on one bottle and Champagne on the other, we’ll have a problem. Got it?”

“Okay. About these crystal glasses…”

“Yes, about these crystal glasses… Let me explain it. Tom barely drinks. But what he likes to do at the end of the night is relax with friends and family, to serve them a good glass of wine or champagne, and to do so with the proper glassware the drinks merit.

“Now I know you and your nightclubs. [As if I owned one.] And we will not be accepting your little plastic glasses. Or even your rinky dink glass glasses. I suspect Peter Gatien has a cupboard somewhere with the good glassware. If he doesn’t, tell him it’s time to invest in some.

“You get these details right, we have a lovely night. It’s all relatively simple, and it’s all very important.”

At no point during this call did Mark come across as rude, or arrogant. I’d had my share of those calls from managers and tour managers, and witnessed at least one or two instances of vile behavior that were essentially power trips. Mark was cool, calm, collected, and very very clear.

Naturally, Peter Gatien blinked when he heard these requirements. He was used to stocking our band’s riders with the alcohol bought in for his bars at a vast discount, and trusting us with limited petty cash for the buy-out and any finger food. Suddenly, we were having to send someone to a proper wine shop with a $100 bill, for Meursault. When it came to the crystal glasses, Gatien and I had a little back-and-forth in his office; there was something quite playful about Peter’s penny-pinching – he thoroughly believed that if you counted the cents, the dollars looked after themselves – and at the end of it, when I insisted on its importance, he okayed another $100 bill to pay for the glassware. The rider, while relatively small, came in at well over $500.

It was worth every penny. Come the night of Tuesday May 3, the housewives showed up from the suburbs in droves, our regular goths came to groove with their slo-mo elaborate self-absorbed dance moves, and the last of the industrial dance kids came along as well, not to mock but to mosh. Even some of the ravers came out; Tom Jones was just too uncool a booking not to be totally cool. And then all our British friends put in their typical last-minute calls asking for guest list status, as did multiple celebrities (or their agents). The night was typically oversold, and well before our compromise of a 10pm showtime, the dancefloor was packed with a true only-in-New-York-City melting pot of an audience.

When Tom Jones took to the stage, he delivered. Sang his heart out, and boy could he sing. He opened with Prince’s “Kiss,” later played Prince’s “Purple Rain,” included the “Theme from Thunderball,” his big hits like “Delilah,” and closed a solid 90 minutes after starting with EMF’s “Unbelievable.” I know as much because, and only while looking for videos to accompany this piece in the 24 hours before posting it, I have discovered that someone on the balcony filmed the entire show (badly) on 8mm film and it has been sitting on YouTube for the last five years! You can feel the energy and excitement in the club from the beginning, and you can also quickly tell that as much as he may be a showman, Tom Jones is - or he was back in 1993 - a get-down-and-get-sweaty-with-them singer from the old school.

We didn’t have a pit at Limelight, so he was within grasp of the front rows, which gave the night a definite edge. And though it may have been a while since he’d played a club night like this, the knickers duly flew his way courtesy of the suburban housewives, and the industrial moshers threw their arms and the ravers sucked on their pacifiers and the goths did their funny moves and it looked like Tom was having the time of his life.

I certainly was. Being invited to book Tom Jones, filling the room with such a wide demographic, getting to DJ before and after his set… all of it felt like a pinnacle from which I could not see another height. I was getting married in a month. I already had the feeling that I would not be continuing with this venture after my honeymoon.

An hour or so after Tom came off stage, I managed to take a break in my DJ set. I handed off to the lighting guy, who loved to spin a record or two, and fought my way round the balconies, to the opposite side of the club, and up to the VIP Room. There, exactly as his son Mark had intimated, was Tom Jones, sat at one of the tables with no more than four or five of what were clearly his intimates. Limelight security hovered outside the velvet rope erected around the table, just in case. On that table stood six crystal glasses with various levels of liquid in them. The bottles of Meursault and Champagne looked largely empty. Everything about the set-up oozed class.

Tom got his record deal – with Interscope, no less. The next year, he put out an album called The Lead And How To Swing It which, while perhaps not the catchiest of titles, nonetheless came armed with one of the most embarrassingly rich list of production credits of all time, including Trevor Horn, Jeff Lynne, Teddy Riley, Youth, Richard Perry, and Alan Moulder with Flood. There was a vocal collaboration with Tori Amos, and musical contributions as varied as Mike Campbell, Marshall Jefferson and Lol Crème, plus the occasional remix from Bob Clearmountain. It was the 1990s, a period when fans were buying compact discs by the multi-millions, and Interscope’s Jimmy Iovine could afford to indulge his evident admiration for Jones’ already long and illustrious career as Executive Producer. I remember being especially taken by Jones’ cover of the Yazoo song “Situation,” and the record seemed to be well received, but it certainly didn’t become one of those 1990s multi-million-sellers. Tom Jones did not record for Interscope again. Our $12,500 – plus that rider - looked more and more like a bargain.

I did not talk with Tom Jones that night at the Limelight. I did not need to; it was enough to learn about his professionalism and class from a close distance. But five and a half years later, in December 1998, I found myself back in London. I had become friends with Catatonia’s management duo after I duly quit the Communion night only a few weeks after the Tom Jones show, taking up a much more cushy part-time role as an A&R scout for RCA Records for three years, with a guaranteed income I wouldn’t turn my nose up at even now. I loved Catatonia from the beginning, touting them to my A&R bosses in New York who, being RCA and uncool, declined involvement. Catatonia had nonetheless quickly gone from indie singles to major deal to top 10 hit singles and were now playing two nights at Wembley, in prestige support slot for fellow Welsh post-Britpop stars the Manic Street Preachers. And thanks to my early championing and my friendship with that management duo, I landed a pair of VIP passes.

My best friend Tony Page had not been to Wembley Arena since it was Wembley Empire Pool and our own band Apocalypse had opened for The Jam and Big Country for three nights, sixteen years ago that December. So when I called Pagey and offered him the +1, he quickly accepted, before admitting that he had never listened to Catatonia. His wife, Sarah had, however, and loved them almost as much as I did. She asked Tony if she could go in his place, which would have been okay by me. But Tony pulled rank; he knew we would have a good night out. Especially with the VIP passes.

After Catatonia’s set, we used those passes to go to the backstage bar. It wasn’t that busy, but one person stood out prominently in the room, not least because he was standing up: Tom Jones.

His presence was a surprise. But maybe not that much of a surprise. Earlier in the year, Catatonia’s lead singer Cerys Matthews had had yet another major hit single, guesting with the Liverpool band Space on a song called “The Ballad of Tom Jones.” What with all the mutual Welsh valley heritage on stage that night, and there was no real reason for Tom Jones not to be at the show.

My friend Tony was immediately starstruck. He also admitted to me that his wife Sarah happened to love Tom Jones more than she did Catatonia, and it was evident he now felt double guilty for not letting her attend in his place.

I offered to see if I could introduce us; after all, my promotion of that New York show would hopefully work as an “in.” Tom was not in deep conversation, and my gambit worked; he recalled the occasion fondly. I introduced Tony, who as a singer himself – he and I now have our own band again, The Dear Boys - felt he could get away with getting some advice.

“How do you keep your voice in such good shape?” he asked Jones.

“Water,” came the reply in that lovely lilting Welsh accent. “Lots of water. At room temperature.”

Inside, I smiled.

Tony felt his confidence come on, and said to Tom…

“My wife is a massive fan of yours, and really wishes she could have been here tonight. I took the ticket instead and she’s mad at me for it. Is there any chance you would call her and say hello? It would really help my marriage.”

I grimaced. Tom Jones did not.

“Delighted to,” he said instead, as if he had just been asked for a simple autograph, and after Tony dialed the number, Tom put the phone to his ear, and waited for someone to pick up. And waited. And eventually handed the phone back.

…“I was home and didn’t answer the phone,” Sarah wrote to me this week as the three of us relived the night via text and conversation. “Tony and I had had a row before he went out, we didn’t have an answer phone unfortunately.” When I asked if they had Caller ID so that at least she knew who she was ignoring, she wrote back: “I just guessed it was him, no one else would have called at that time xx.” Sarah is ruing that decision to let the phone ring to this day; the odds of getting a call from Tom Jones any time soon are not that good.

Meanwhile, back at the backstage Wembley bar, we were having a very nice conversation, and so Tony suggested to Tom that we all sit down; after all, Jones was the one real VIP in the room and surely he would want to get off his feet.

“No,” he said. “Thank you, but no. I don’t sit down in rooms like this. I can’t easily get out of a conversation if I’m sitting down. So I stand. Where I can see everything.” At which we realised, sure enough, that his back was to the wall, from which Tom could read the entire room as only a legend on a night out without a security detail might need to. Going back over his words as I type them, it looks like he could have been implying an imminent desire to get out of our conversation, a gentle hint that he might walk away at any moment, but it did not come across as such. It was just another insight into a superstar’s mentality, further evidence, along with the Meursault and the six crystal glasses – and not forgetting the room temperature water – that Tom Jones was in a league of his own.

We returned to the backstage bar after Manic Street Preachers’ set. Tom Jones was now sitting down, deeply immersed in conversation with Cerys Matthews. Maybe they had already made the plans, but maybe this was the night when they started making them, for either way, when Tom Jones made his next comeback, the following year, it would with an album of duets with hot British acts, Cerys – and separately, the Manics’ James Dean Bradfield - among them. Indeed, the Christmastime still a year in the distance, Tom and Cerys’ duet of the old holiday chestnut “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” would make the UK Top 20.

The album in question, Reload, would also feature performances recorded alongside The Stereophonics, Cardigans, Divine Comedy, Portishead, and the aforementioned Space, plus less of-the-moment but certainly notable acts such as The Pretenders, Barenaked Ladies, Simply Red and even Zucchero, and it would become the biggest selling of Jones’ entire career, certified quadruple platinum in the UK and with over four million sales worldwide. Ultimately, it is always a matter of timing, and the timing was right for Reload. Still, it would be nice to believe that Reload might not have happened without The Lead And How To Swing It showing what Tom could do with a younger generation’s songs half a decade earlier.

That post-show night at Wembley, Tom had once again read the room, and decided it was safe to break his own rule of not sitting down in such an environment. It was, after all, the end of the night. He was Tom Jones. She was Cerys Matthews. The others at the table were the other members of Catatonia (no one ever remembered their names). You would have to be either a total fanboy or a total idiot to interrupt.

A teenage fanboy walked up to the table and interrupted. He asked for Cerys’ autograph. She obliged. And as my friend Tony Page recalls it, Cerys then asked the teen if he would like Tom’s signature as well.

“Not really,” said the teen.

“Do you know who this is?” asked Cerys.

“No,” said the teen, looking blankly at Tom Jones, who would have been 58 at the time, a few years younger than I am now.

“This is Tom Jones,” said Cerys. Tom smiled.

“Never heard of him,” said the teen, clutching Cerys’ signature on a piece of paper as he walked away.

It was one of those nights.

I met Tom Jones one more time. In 2016, I started working with the great soul singer (and songwriter) Eddie Floyd on his autobiography, at my own suggestion. The following year, when Eddie told me he would be partaking in a special BBC Proms: 50 Years of Stax Records night, at the Royal Albert Hall natch, that it would likely be his last performance in the UK, and that Sam Moore, Booker T. Jones, William Bell, and Steve Cropper would also be making the journey from the States, I ensured that I would be in London that week as well. [I had both a funeral and wedding invitation I was hoping to honour, and the Stax event fell conveniently in the middle.] I was invited by Eddie to watch two days of rehearsals and attend the single sold-out concert.

By the time that show, on September 1, rolled around, a convenient half-century after the original and highly influential Stax/Volt tour of Europe in 1967, Sir Tom Jones – already an OBE, he had been knighted in 2006 - was among the small handful of “special guests” to have been added to the bill. That brooked no complaints from Eddie, nor anyone else in the Stax camp. As far as they were concerned, he may have been a white boy from the coal valleys of the British Isles, but, as Eddie put it in the book…

“Ain’t no doubt about it, Tom’s got soul.”

Indeed, the pair had performed Eddie’s signature song “Knock On Wood” onstage together several times, including with the Blues Brothers Band for an Australian TV show, ‘Hey Hey It’s Saturday.’ (Watch it here.) Tom Jones performed “Knock On Wood” that night at the Limelight as well. He was still performing “Knock On Wood”, on The Voice, as recently as 2020.

However, as Eddie had pointed out to me previously, if you really wanted to see and hear Tom in duet mode, you’d be best going back to the late 1960s American TV show, This Is Tom Jones, the one that turned the Welshman from a heartthrob pop star into a true household name in the US. On most occasions on which he joined his guests on that TV stage, Tom would toy with them, holding back like a heavyweight boxer in the ring who knows he could deliver a knock-out any moment he wants to, but more importantly, wants the crowd to get its money’s worth first.

Only rarely did Tom Jones meet his match. Janis Joplin was one such match, when she joined him as something of an unknown in 1969 to perform Floyd’s “Raise Your Hand.” It’s a hell of a performance, and as Tom Jones recalled only a few years ago for his own YouTube channel, it required some bending to Janis’ demands.

But I digress. Those couple of days at the Albert Hall, I noticed that Tom, despite his strong build and youthful face, was moving slower. He was 78 now, and his years of gyrating on stage – and standing up in bars - were catching up to him. Eddie himself had just turned 82, though I knew from watching him walk his grounds with hand-weights before breakfast every morning just how fit he remained for his age. Each sat in the stalls during rehearsals as the Jools Holland Orchestra went about things, and the BBC set up their shots, and other guests took their turns. The runners on the BBC staff worried that they weren’t prepared, that maybe they should be doing vocal exercises. But when it was time for Eddie and Tom, separately so, to soundcheck, each of them slowly, casually, ambled up to the microphone, cue’d the band, opened their mouth…

…And out came soul.

Tom was a busy man at the Royal Albert Hall, and I didn’t need to bother him with memories of a New York City nightclub show now a quarter century old. Still, when I invited him and Eddie to pose for a picture, he contentedly obliged, and the resulting shot made it into Eddie’s book.

Ain’t no doubt about it, Tom’s got soul.

[And Tony and Sarah are into the fourth decade of a happy marriage.]

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