It’s been a while since I wrote anything, so what better way to restart than a chaotically relaxing escape to the seaside?! Also featured as an article for Bradt Guides here: https://www.bradtguides.com/?p=45167&preview=1&_ppp=32bc9f7de1 Out on Solva Harbour, all is calm. Skiffs and dinghies lean into the mud of a low tide, their outlines silhouetted against the fading…
My winning piece in this weeks Telegraph Travel writing competition. I actually wrote this three years ago (but only submitted it last week), and have still not thought up a good name for it; ‘My new check mate’ (works better if set in Czech Rep!) and ‘You have reached your chess-tination’ (sometimes you can take…
On an early spring evening a little over six weeks ago, Will Varley stepped out onto the stage of the Royal Albert Hall. “It was amazing” he gushes, evidently still not over the enormity of the event. “Absolutely amazing. One of the first records I ever had was Bob Dylan live at the Royal Albert…
You’ll have to bear with me on this review, as my memories of it are somewhat sketchy and my notes, well, the less said about them the better. I can recall dancing with strangers while yelling along to the lyrics “Let’s get wasted on Rum & Ginger”, and I know that we missed our train…
“I’m Seán. I’m 22. I come from Southampton. I write songs and play gigs. I like football, advent calendar chocolate and I have size 9 feet”
….they’ve got instruments in hand, a beer on the table and a flagon full of rum.
…this is an album that lurches heavily from song to song, punch drunk and raucous.
…a show which was unpolished, unpredictable and at times unhinged, but overall, the show of a flat out entertainer.
Christmas is a time for giving. A time for raising a few glasses, dancing like an idiot and letting your hair down. Beans on Toast arrived back in Cambridge last week, and kicked off the festive season with generous lashings of all of those elements, and then some. In fact, a Beans on Toast gig…
Review for Slate the Disco Photograph courtesy of Richard Etteridge Photography As musical relationships go, then the one between Bellowhead and the city of Cambridge is a pretty well established one. With several appearances among the highlights of recent Folk Festivals, a dependable annual date on their nationwide tours, and more than a few local…
Thirty years is a long time in music. There’s not many that make it that far, and of those that do, it’s even less likely they’ll still have the ability to keep things fresh. This is actually year thirty two now for Manchester outfit James, and from a quick glance at the bill for the…
Rob Lynch is a busy man. Off the back of an exhaustive six weeks on the VANS Warped tour across the US, his gig at The Portland Arms next Tuesday kicks off a month long tour around his homeland and with it, the release of his full debut album ‘All These Nights In Bars Will…
A life on the road, trying to help save the foundations of music and becoming a role model.
A few words with Frank Turner.
“I’m a professional entertainer actually,” Frank Turner told me a couple of hours before the show, “That’s my job description.”
As Frank Turner stands centre stage at the Corn Exchange, you’d be hard pressed to find someone who disagreed
The World Cup, why my friend Greg is wrong, and well…one more thing.
I probably couldn’t have picked a worse place to break my leg. We were deep into the Bolivian Amazon basin for starters, a three hour boat ride from civilisation. Not only that, it was 11pm and we were half a kilometre from our river side camp, amidst thick jungle on a walk upon which we…
There’s a lot to be said for living on a floating island in the middle of a lake. For starters, you’ve got unrivalled lake views, as well as your very own swimming pool just metres from your front door. A plentiful supply of food and water is readily available all year round and most importantly…
Of all the pleasures in life, there’s not many that come close to a nice, long walk. It could be over the barrenly beautiful hills of England’s Peak District, hugging the idyllic shorelines of New Zealand’s Abel Tasman coastal track, hiking across Andean Plains or clawing our way through steamy Asian jungles, but the chances…
Five days, 55 kilometres and a whole load of history. This is a blog on our Salkantay trek to Machu Picchu
“You have to be kidding me, right?” Glancing nervously from the toy sized six seater aeroplane in front of me to the pilot, jovially taking photographs of our fellow passengers, I tried to block out everything I’d read online as we’d tried to research our flight over the Nazca Lines. Multiple crashes over the last…
“I came all the way in a lifeboat, and ate marmalade. Bears like marmalade.” [Paddington Bear, 13 October 1958] This wasn’t marmalade. Far from it. In front of us was stretched the baked crispy skin of a Guinea Pig, known locally as Cuy and all my childhood perceived opinions of Peruvian food had been thrown out…
Of all the things I expect to happen when I ask for a bus ticket, the ticket attendant collapsing in a mock suicide is not one of them. While I stood there utterly bewildered, nervously glancing from side to side while trying to work our what the hell is going on, the previously stricken girl…
I’m sitting here cleaning animal muck off my walking boots, and try as I might I can’t stop smiling. This isn’t any old stinking animal muck you see, the origin of the faeces is the Galápagos Sea Lion, and in its current pungently fresh state, it’s as good a reminder as any of the ten…
There was definitely a lake there a minute ago. Definitely. In fact a minute ago we were rapidly shedding clothes in the late afternoon sun, and now here we were in the depths of thick, grey cloud, with freezing rain spitting sharply against our bare skin. For the view we had currently we could’ve been…
“We’ve been in Colombia one month now, and we still haven’t tried the country’s most famous export.” “What, you mean Co…?” – I cut her off there. “Yep. Surely we can’t come all this way and not even try any, can we? Colombia is kind of world famous for it after all…” So off we…
What were we expecting from Colombia’s Caribbean coast? Sunshine, obviously. Calm, clear waters? Hopefully. Maybe a bit of wildlife – tropical fish, turtles, a bit of bird life – and perhaps even a hammock and some typically local fruits, you know, a few coconuts and bananas. But no, we were not expecting this. All of…
Ciudad Perdida – The Lost City. Straight away your ears prick up. A lost city in the depth of the Colombian jungle, a city built, lived in and left behind by an ancient civilisation vanished to time. What more do you need to hear? Occasionally you come across these places where the sense of intrigue…
One of the great pleasures of traveling is experiencing news things, it’s pretty much unavoidable. Whether it be sampling strange local delicacies, immersing yourself in a culture foreign to your own, or simply learning some swear words in a new language, it’s inevitable that discovering new places and new countries will expand the mind. While…
The instruction was to just run. Don’t run and jump, don’t run too fast or slow, and whatever you do, do NOT run and then stop. My immediate concern at this point, and in my view a very legitimate one at that, was that the platform we were supposed to be running on ended after…
“Welcome my friends! Welcome to Riiiiiiio, and welcome most of all, welcome to CARNAVAL!”. Meet Max. Max is a portly, cross dressing carioca barman with a smile as wide as his outstretched arms. Before him is the main square of Lapa which right now is a seething mass of noise and movement, all overlooked by the…
It was a piano player from Rio de Janeiro who surprised us by saying it, while clutching a frosted glass of Antarctica in a ramshackle canvas bar close to the old town of Paraty. “I love my country” he sighed, “and I know how lucky we are. We have no wars and no extremist political…
It doesn’t take long for the novelty of a South American overnight bus to wear off. For us, it was right about the time that while sat on a broken down bus on the side of a motorway in 36°C heat, a group of teenage Swedish backpackers cracked open some champagne and started singing ABBA songs.…
I’ve never really been too fond of Argentina to be honest. Be it the hangover in the British press from the Falklands war, an uncanny ability for their national team to knock us out of World Cups, or the fact that they’ve always seemed a bit rugged alongside their glamorous Brazilian neighbours, it’s just a…
Of all the places that might be on the Gringo Trail – that much famed backpacker route around South America – the Best Value Motel a few miles from Houston international airport is not one of them. We were supposed to be touching down in Buenos Aires around now, but instead I found myself smuggling…
I don’t know the reason why The Leisure Society are named as they are, and I doubt I ever will, but it does seem to be a name well suited. Their gig at the Junction 2 on Monday night was relaxed, good humoured and pretty laid back so yeah, I reckon you could indeed say…
Interview and gig review on behalf of http://www.slatethedisco.com Welcome back to Cambridge, Emily – you’re pretty much an adopted local, right? Thank you! Cambridge was the first ever place I lived when I moved over to the UK all of 11 years ago. I haven’t lived there for about 7 years now mind you,…
It’s not often you’ll see the mobile phone of an audience member drowned on stage at a gig, and nor is it often you’ll see a performer abandoning songs half way through, asking to be reminded of his lyrics by the crowd, or even less likely asking them not clap along as he’s really bad…
It’s best I warn you about this first before we go any further. By the time Beans on Toast reaches us in Cambridge on Oct 29th, he might not be standing. This summer he has played 15 festivals and 28 shows – probably mostly while fuelling himself with god knows what – and the Portland…
“We still can’t believe we get to play rooms this big” exclaims Bastille frontman, Dan Smith, trying to make himself heard over a riotous Cambridge Corn Exchange. The band are approaching the close of their fifth night on a nationwide UK tour, and if I’m honest I can’t remember the last time I saw a…
It has been said that ‘the greatest ideas are the simplest’, which generally speaking is a rule that tends to work. There is however a fine line between a great idea and a daft one, and it was along this very line that Frank Hamilton trod at the start of last year when he embarked…
Images courtesy of Rich Etteridge One of the wonderful things about festivals, any festival, is the chance to find new music. Cambridge Folk Festival is no different, as despite an obvious inclination to revive and regurgitate songs that go back decades, if not centuries, there is an awful lot of original material to see here…
ally rambles 