An April Shower

Terribly, terribly busy. Like you care.

More book work, writing a silly thing about art-rock 'happenings' here, interviewing Steve Earle and the fab Frightened Rabbit here, and reviewing a few albums and contributing a guest column - and lugubrious by-line pic - for the ever-wonderful Word magazine, where I come over all self-righteous about the never-ending stream of bands that sing in abandoned grain silos, record in remote Arctic islands, and sport outlandish sprouts of facial hair, the unspoken subtext being that all this makes them somehow more 'authentic' and therefore worthy of our valuable time than, say, AC/DC or Girls Aloud. Tsk. Spare us the contrived back story and let us get our teeth into the music.

Also been chatting to the fantastic - really, they are fantastic - Phantom Band for a forthcoming piece for the New Statesman, and enjoying new albums by My Latest Novel, Balmorhea, The Low Anthem and Alasdair Roberts (a lovely man who once sent me a beautiful old postcard of the Govan Ferry c. 1910 which now adorns a little rectangle of my office wall.)

And half-enjoying (not as much as I'd hoped, I confess) the new Jarvis Cocker and Elvis Costello records. Sun is shining. Children are back at school. Peace, for a moment, reigns.