Please allow me to introduce myself - was the first line of the first track on the first present my first boyfriend ever gave me: a cassette of the Rolling Stones’ Beggars Banquet, which even at sixteen I appreciated was a pretty cool offering. (And thus my romantic standards were set exactingly high from the outset – but that’s a whole other story.)
Nearly thirty years on, I’ve spent the last twenty as a freelance journalist, writing mainly about the arts, including a lot about music, plus theatre, books, visual art and pretty much anything else I can turn my hand to. My main musical specialism – hand in glove with my predominant tastes – is the folk/roots field, an enjoyably sprawling, constantly evolving territory that routinely takes in Americana, world music and singer-songwriters as well as the more obvious trad/Celtic stuff. (Although I really can’t be doing with most of this wispy, dreary, navel-gazing ‘nu-folk’ nonsense, almost none of which seems to have even the flimsiest connection with actual folk music beyond a vague familiarity with the Incredible String Band. Just to make that particular prejudice clear.)
Over the years, though, I’ve reviewed everything from James Galway to James the band, Daniel O’Donnell to Dionne Warwick, classical orchestras to cutting-edge noise art. Similarly in the theatre line (Agatha Christie to Annie Sprinkle) and for visual arts (Degas to Damien Hirst) while on the books front I’ve been lucky enough to interview Alice Munro, Margaret Atwood, William Boyd, William McIlvanney, James Kelman, Irvine Welsh, Sara Paretsky and André Brink, to name some of my top personal highlights. If variety is the spice of life, my professional existence is certainly well seasoned. At the moment I write mainly for the Scotsman, the Sunday Herald, the Caledonian Mercury, Songlines and Northings. My work has also appeared in the Guardian, the Independent, Scotland on Sunday, the Sunday Express, Metro, the List, Penguin Eggs and the Strad, and I’m the co-author of The Rough Guide to Irish Music (2001).
My Mum was an actress and drama teacher from Glasgow, my Dad a playwright from nearby Hamilton, and I was born in London where they met. I was their second, roughly two years after my brother and two years before my sister, after whose arrival we departed the Smoke for smaller towns. We stayed in various bits of Sussex – including a particularly idyllic sojourn in Selsey, with the beach at the bottom of our road – and then Cambridgeshire, then I moved to Edinburgh for university, and I’ve now been here for twenty-five years. There can be very few such civilised cities, in so many ways, anywhere in the world. I still get wowed at least every few days by the architecture, the light, the skyline and/or the perspectives, which has to say something after a quarter of a century’s habituation.
Besides my journalistic endeavours, which are supplemented by various forms of copywriting – e.g. musicians’ publicity and website material; the brochure for the annual Celtic Connections festival – I’m also a longtime aspiring fiction author, who’s done a bit more in recent than previous years to turn aspiration into reality. I graduated from the MLitt Creative Writing programme at Glasgow University in 2008, and to date have had stories published in The Research Club (B&W, 2007), Let’s Pretend (Freight, 2008) and In the Event of Fire: New Writing Scotland 27 (ASLS, 2009). I’m also working on a novel, which I’m trying to get to a point where I can maybe pluck up the nerve to post it on the Authonomy site.
I’m a voracious reader, dividing my attentions between non-schlocky contemporary crime thrillers and more ‘improving’ literature, both of which I mainly acquire from charity shops, adding a nice element of randomness to the mix. The recently-read pile beside my bed currently includes George Gissing’s New Grub Street, P.D. James’s The Private Patient, Ian McEwan’s Saturday, Ian Pears’s Stone’s Fall, Thomas Hardy’s The Trumpet-Major, Neil Gunn’s The Lost Glen, Reginald Hill’s The Stranger House and Mary McCarthy’s The Group, which add up to a reasonably representative snapshot, if somewhat more heavyweight than average (there’s often more crime). It’s also a bit light on modern/contemporary American writers, who I broadly tend to prefer to their English counterparts (leaving the Scots aside for separate discussion): my joint Honours courses at Edinburgh University were in American literature and American history.
I also love cooking (my Mum was a great cook, an original 1960s Elizabeth David devotee, plus most of my pre-journalism jobs were in kitchens), and eating, heartily, especially with pals. Also live music (the work goes in train with the fun), festivals, islands, walking on beaches, swimming in the sea, going on boats, riding my bike, charity shopping, drinking proper non-Magners cider and having a damn good blether. The last of which, in a different form, is essentially what I gather this whole blogging shebang is about.
Lastly, a fair and accurate warning of what a constitutionally insatiable perfectionist I am when it comes to words. I just looked up ‘shebang’ in my Concise Oxford Dictionary, to check it was exactly what I wanted, before keying it in there. ‘n. 1 informal a matter, operation or set of circumstances’ – which seems fair enough – but also ‘2 N. Amer, archaic a rough hut or shelter’, which I never knew before, and is exactly the kind of choice wee discovery that often rewards the perfectionism.
March 2010
