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Live at Alan McGee's club The Living Room 1983, a function room above a pub just off Tottenham Court Road, London - our first gig was with Primal Scream (a duo at that time). And a pic from Alaska studios control room while mixing Think!

@e17RnR_books Ooh when did you do this one ?

MUSIC MAPS PODCAST ep. 112 open.spotify.com/episode/7oo5dL…

@GrahamW1969 Is on my RSD list but will have to get online from tomorrow.

The House Of Love - Live At The U.L.U '88 ( Record Store Day 2026 ) Taken from a soundboard recording , thankfully much better than the YouTube recording , sounds amazing ! ,im an indie kid at heart

It's Record Store Day! Last year for RSD 2025, a remastered version of Voyager 1 was released. The live album was originally issued on vinyl in small quantity in 1993, and was highly sought after by record collectors until its re-issue. Do you have this album?

RIP Andy Kershaw. Here he is introducing The Fall and Michael Clark’s dance troupe on the Old Grey Whistle Test in 1984 - wearing a Marc Riley & The Creepers t-shirt. Brilliant. youtu.be/1cVegCDlbkA?si…

14 June Walthamstow, London @jesse_malin 🎟️ eventbrite.co.uk/e/1987677723578 @simonmusicmaps

Godspeed Andy Kershaw. Here's a note his friend Ian Clayton posted today: I heard on the BBC one o’clock news today that my friend Andy Kershaw has died. I had last exchanged texts with Andy at the end of January when I let him know that I’d become a grandfather. He had told me then that he had cancer, but was determined to stay alive longer than Netanyahu, Trump and Ant and Dec. It was a typically defiant message, but tinged as well with something else. He put a x at the end of his messages. Andy didn’t usually bother which such trivial pleasantries. We first met in 2011 through Jim Mclaughlin and Sue who organised the Musicport festival at Whitby. Andy had just published his autobiography ‘No off Switch’ and Jim was keen to feature an interview with Andy about the book. He wanted me to conduct the interview. I was delighted to be asked. I’d first come across Andy in the middle of the 1980’s when I listened to him on my wireless playing South African township jive records. I remember his dulcet east Lancashire tones saying ‘That was a track called ‘Ingvawuma Blues by Kid Malume’ it’s out now on a compilation from Audiotrax records.’ I thought then it was one of the best sentences I’d heard said on the radio. I prepared really well for the interview with Andy. I held a magnifying glass up to his book and looked and listened to everything I could get my hands on, including old VHS recordings of Live Aid, which he famously presented as a wet behind the ears, 24 year old novice TV presenter and the Old Grey Whistle Test, including a strange off the cuff chat he did with Bob Dylan after presenting him with a jar of bramble jam. I needn’t have bothered. The hour long interview I did with Andy at Musicport turned into a wildly improvised and chaotic conversation where Andy started answering questions that I hadn’t yet asked and I struggled to keep up with the pace he set. People still tell me that it was great fun, really educational and a wonderful insight into the possibilities of music. I’m not sure about that, but it was a thrill a minute, like being on a wall of death motorbike ride at an old fairground. Afterwards Andy and me carried the conversation on in the green room for another few hours. It turned out we had a lot in common. We were roughly the same age, both born in 1959, me in September, him in November. We both remembered Chris Bonnington climbing ‘The Old Man of Hoy’ on a live BBC TV broadcast in 1967, we had vivid memories about the moon landing and we had both queued for tickets to see Bob Dylan on his 1978 British tour and been changed by hearing him play live, him at Earls Court, me at Blackbushe. We both loved Sterns African record shop in London and shared a passion for the recordings of Lightnin’ Hopkins. We also shared a similar sense of humour, a fondness for old music hall songs and jokes, an appreciation for the downright bizarre and we liked smoking, we smoked like kipper house chimneys. A week or two after Musicport, Andy told me that his publisher had organised a British tour, thirty odd nights in theatres and large art centres. He wanted to read from his book, but the interview with me had given him an idea. How would I like to join him as his ‘inquisitor’ as he put it. I said ‘You don’t need somebody to interview you, just do it yourself.’ He said ‘But I don’t know when to stop and you know how to interject and rein me in!’ In the end I agreed. We set off the tour on a bitterly cold night in Penzance in January 2012. The interview followed much the same template as the one at Musicport. I asked a few questions. Andy spun stories about being an eye witness to much of the social history of the late twentieth/early twenty first century. The time he was ambushed in Rwanda and followed lorry tyre tracks on a dirt road to avoid stepping on a landmines, shaking hands with Nelson Mandela, threatening to punch Simon Bates in the face in a BBC studio after he had maligned the coal miners during the strike, a run in with the Ton Ton Macoute in Haiti, an introduction to the man ‘who knows everything’ in a library in North Korea. One fantastic story tumbling out after another and all spiced and punctuated with an encyclopaedic knowledge of music from blues, to folk to soul and of course global sounds. And he had the best playlist you ever heard, an edited one for the theatres and a longer one for the car, Neil Young, who he modelled his dress sense on, Joni Mitchell, I can’t hear Carrie get out your cane, without thinking of Andy and the soul singer James Carr, Warren Zevon, Alpha Blondy and on it goes… On the night in Penzance, I also got a clear insight into why Andy’s book was called ‘No off Switch’ (as if I needed one). The show ran over by at least an hour, we then sat around drinking little bottles of Belgian beer Andy had stuffed into a suitcase and then at midnight he wanted to go for a curry. I don’t know we found an open curry house in Penzance at that time in the winter months, but we did. Then he wanted to drink some more beer and as we turned in for the night, he said, ‘Oh, I nearly forgot, we need to be up at 5, because I’ve got a live radio spot in Plymouth at 8.’ And so it went, like that for the next few weeks, in Dartmouth, Bristol, Oxford, Derby, Barnsley and no sleep until Goole. I asked him in an unguarded moment, ‘Do you ever sleep.’ He looked at me as though I had gone daft, ‘Nah, I’ll sleep when I’m dead.’ I was a bit relieved when the tour had to be cut short before the end, because Andy ran out of books to sell. I look back now though and remember it with a lot of affection, because amongst all of the lack of sleep, the hundred mile an hour performance and the surreal storytelling about international events that none of us, except Andy get to experience, I did get close to him and we became good friends. Occasionally on stage and certainly in the back of the tour car, Andy told me beautiful stories about more personal things he had done, about how had had taken Biggie Tembo the leader of his heroes The Bhundu Boys, to meet his gran one Christmas and how he’d mused on butterflies landing on piles of discarded clothes on a roadside during the Rwandan genocide. And when boredom set in during motorway miles, I got Andy to remember the names of the songs that had been sung to him by a choir of singing waitresses in Pyongyang. I’d have to put my thinking cap on to recall more, but ‘Peace on the end of my bayonet’ was one, ‘The love in my trench’ was another. Great fun, so much so, that towards the end of the tour we were performing the names of these songs as a kind of dada poem. The never-ending possibilities of music as Andy said. We have stayed in touch, not in each other’s pockets, but to wish each other Happy Birthday and doing the odd appearance together, to talk about, well Bob Dylan and all that other bullshit. We also had a running joke about Belarus. Andy was the most well-travelled man I ever met, but was always impressed that I’d managed to make a film in Belarus and stayed in a hotel in Minsk with Belarussian Olympic athletes. I need to let this sad news about Andy settle. I may write more as we go along. For now, sleep well old lad. X. Photo of Andy and me by Al Wilkinson on another visit to Musicport 2017.

P40 - Doolittle Released on this day in 1989

TONIGHT TO HELL WITH POVERTY Jon King with Miki Berenyi @RedLionE11 eventbrite.co.uk/e/1984385867548

ROUGH TRADE x EBAY LIVE Rough Trade's first-ever eBay Live show takes place next Thursday, April 2026, at 17:30 BST. Expect a mix of pop, rock, jazz, rap and a few hidden gems. Great value, rare vinyl records, perfect for collection building. ebay.co.uk/ebaylive/event…

Cocteau Twins - Cico Buff Available to watch now for the first time on the Cocteau Twins official YouTube channel 🐚 youtu.be/kkxixKRfEnk?si…

For those who have been asking, 'Night Call' is now finally available on vinyl. It's an extremely limited edition of just 20 copies and can be shipped all across the world. 🔗 elasticstage.com/skypatterns/re…

1988: my bloody valentine released a debut that seemed to redefine sound itself. A wild, raw and new approach to guitar music and studio production from a band in their infancy (a thread). @MBVofficial @Dominorecordco #RoughTrade50 blog.roughtrade.com/gb/50-years-of…

@liamgallagher @vervedaily @shakermaker94x @Harry19243931 @BoneheadsPage Get him, Nick, Simon and Pete back together so they can jam like it’s 1992

@shakermaker94x @Harry19243931 @BoneheadsPage I love Richard his songs n soul are BIBLICAL

NORMAN 30TH ANNIVERSARY EXCLUSIVES: 'Doolittle' by Pixies We (probably) wouldn't be here if it wasn't for this completely essential indie masterpiece. Limited-edition pearl/sunrise coloured vinyl LP on 4AD. @PIXIES @4AD_Official normanrecords.com/records/63993-… normanrecords.com/features/anniv…

Dream-pop at its most divine: Cocteau Twins’ 20 greatest songs – ranked theguardian.com/music/2026/apr…

Richard Ashcroft at Verve's 1993 gig at Cardiff University

@RLK303303 Carriage and station look a bit empty for Upton Park. It’s market day - it’s normally heaving. More hijabo-steria for clicks.

Woman on the Tube this morning wearing a hijab. Fiddles around on her phone for a few stops. She then puts on a niqab (face covering), leaves her rucksack on the seat and stands by the Tube door whilst it’s still moving. Tube comes to a stop and she starts leaving without her rucksack. So I’d been sitting there for what seemed like an age, looking at her about to leave, at the rucksack and wondering what the point would be of blowing up a nearly empty Tube carriage. In the most low-key British way I shout after her - ‘excuse me, I think you’ve forgotten something’ and she runs back into the carriage to retrieve her rucksack. Phew!

What a way to start the day 😎 @AliceInChains "Dirt" An absolute classic from the grunge era, released 34 years ago in 1992 - still sounds as incredible now 🤘 Lovely Yellow vinyl in stock on the shelf, as well as plenty other Alice In Chains classics