Every year, the last Thursday in November is Thanksgiving Day in the USA. This is the equivalent of a UK bank holiday and although it is widely claimed to be a celebration of the anniversary of the arrival of the pilgrim fathers onto the shores of America, it actually has

Among the rest of the debris in my All The Rest Is Noise folder on my home computer, is a list of possible topics to write about and at the top is ‘Giving Away Setlists’. This addition was almost certainly prompted by being abused by someone from the audience at

Another article originally commissioned by Guitar & Bass Magazine. Reproduced here slightly updated, with the somewhat tongue-in-cheek ‘Day In The Life…’ sidebar included and with all of the text reinstated that had to be edited out of the original piece because of space restrictions. The tone of it is deliberately

A couple of years ago, a friend of mine got in touch to say that he was interested in finding out about Hawkwind and could I tell him more. So, I sent him a message in return which I hoped would be helpful. He replied a few days later saying

Recent digital innovations may very well have removed much of the fun from the messing-about-with-guitars-and-stuff business these days but luckily enough there are still enough traditionalists out there to support existing technologies, so the FX pedal market is still stuffed with manufacturers both large and small and despite some recent

The below piece was written in August 2008. This was when YouTube had been in existence for less than three years and before the explosion of social media. Facebook wasn’t a thing yet and most people were still tinkering with their first MySpace pages at the time. Its impossible to