Does the Lionel Bart estate get royalties from all these ice cream trucks playing ‘Food Glorious Food’?

They kicked me out of culinary school. I’m persona non gratin

Imagining a cursed alternate reality where Jessie Buckley won 'I'd Do Anything' and got to play Nancy in 'Oliver!' on the West End, but it meant Jodie Prenger had to be Agnes in 'Hamnet'

[Serge Gainsbourg ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ voice]: Danny and Clive…

turns out if you put on a long black coat and walk into cupboard in a church, people will just tell you some pretty wild shit

Another episode of my @themountaingoats.bsky.social newsletter/podcast just went up, on one of my favourite tMG albums and one that marks a big sonic shift - as well as a new kind of self-reflection: thirtyyearslater.substack.com/p/2017-stenc...

[Craig David 7 Days voice]: Qui tollis peccata mundi,

Our next Songwriters in Conversation event, at Baba Yaga’s Loft, North Shields, will be on Feb 15th from 5pm with Gelfling and Nathy SG (Martha/Onsind) on the theme of love songs! Tickets here: www.eventbrite.com/e/1979524668...

Today's episode of my @themountaingoats.bsky.social podcast/newsletter is about work songs, desperation, and what an ageing wrestler can do when he can't see your way clear to a change in perspective. It's 2016 and the song is 'Blood Capsules.' thirtyyearslater.substack.com/p/2016-blood...

[Trump hearing about the Stars of Track and Field in his earpiece]: Beautiful people

[Fighting the craving, losing, cracking into a chocolate mint]: It’s after eight somewhere!

Handing back student work that’s been written by ChatGPT with a 0 followed by the comment “This essay will never stand in authentic wonder before the Beauty of God’s creation.”

They call it ambient music cause you can take an Ambien to th’ music

They put me in the rink, mama

New post on Now Here We Are 30 Years Later, my newsletter/podcast about @themountaingoats.bsky.social, taking a look at a song from one of my favourite tMG albums, 2015's 'Beat the Champ,' thru the lens of Roland Barthes' essay 'The World of Wrestling': thirtyyearslater.substack.com/p/2015-unmas...

4 Billionaires Crumble? I’d love to see it!

We had a great time on Sunday at Songwriters in Conversation: Folk Traditions, talking about the way ideas of community, impersonality, and using what you have to hand might feed into modern folk-inspired music. Here's Janice Burns at soundcheck, singing one of two beautiful unaccompanied ballads!

📣Come do a PhD at Northumbria! We've just announced this year's batch of full-fees scholarships: www.findaphd.com/phds/program... If you'd be interested in working with me on anything poetry, prose or songwriting-related, please get in touch to talk about your ideas so we can craft a strong proposal

This Sunday’s event previewed in NARC. magazine! Still time to get tickets… narcmagazine.com/preview-song...

Slowly but surely getting into the home stretch of my 30-year @themountaingoats.bsky.social newsletter/podcast. Today's post is about Ozzy Osbourne and the joy/shock of playing music around the world when you never expected to make it beyond Birmingham: thirtyyearslater.substack.com/p/2014-song-...

One week left to get tickets! www.eventbrite.com/e/songwriter...

If a soundcloud rapper can become mayor of New York City, perhaps the stage is set for a harsh noise President

Finally got around to The Secret History - I loved it for lots of reasons, not least the idea that one of the few viable paths open to you after a series of life-ruiningly bad decisions is to become a specialist in early modern literary studies

North East friends and followers, come along to Songwriters in Conversation #4: Folk Traditions to hear from two artists whose work in folk and adjacent styles has been heavily praised in the Guardian and elsewhere, Janice Burns and Jayne Dent! Only £6.13. www.eventbrite.com/e/songwriter...?

Young Momus when you want to introduce him to your friend Jeff: What Will Jeff Be Like?

Here's a bit of the Q&A where our guests, Paul and Nicky, talk about the role of different kinds of precision, like rhyme and references, in comic songwriting: youtu.be/Axmdqtj4w3c

I'm really excited to be able to share the first recording from our Songwriters in Conversation event series, featuring The Young Property Developers and Nicky Bray, recorded at Baba Yaga's Loft in North Shields by the lovely Kyle Heslop - theme is Comedy and Music! www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUQl...

The next Songwriters in Conversation is on November 16th, 5-7:30pm, at Baba Yaga's Loft, North Shields, with two 30-minute sets from Janice Burns and Jayne Dent of Me Lost Me, followed by a Q&A about Folk Traditions and how they can shape contemporary songwriting. www.eventbrite.com/e/songwriter...

Oh, these? Ya, organic and GMO free, I bought them from goblin men and they’re delicious.

REQUEST FOR BLUESKY HELP i have put a couple of courgettes in the fridge and am very nervous that, when i get off work at half 6, i am going to forget to transfer them into my rucksack.

Quite unreal that Tony Harrison has gone. A poet (as he termed himself) of complete conviction, percussive and passionate and someone who lit the way and made a deeply important and lasting space for others. May he and his legacy go well. www.theguardian.com/books/2025/s...

Bit of exciting news - I'm coordinating a project to get lines of poetry from local poets, from the I Love North Shields newspaper archives, painted on four walls across North Shields! We'll start the installation in November. ilovenorthshields.com/poems-on-wal...

It’s not Otto to you that I’m standing von Bismarck

RIP Tony Harrison: I loved how his poems addressed the shifting sands of class, education and family, and made a case for universal access to high culture. I wrote about his verse plays a bit in my PhD, which take up some of the same questions - sharing a few excerpts here.

Doing a cool gig of songs about ghosts and graves in a tunnel in Newcastle if any of you fancy it! From the blurb: 'Prepare to be enchanted, entertained and unnerved by a seasonal set which will make Vincent Price look like Fisher-Price, or the other way around.' ouseburntrust.org.uk/events/event...

I keep getting an ad for this weight loss company on my history podcast that starts ‘it’s just been one diet after another,’ which must have been how the Hungarians felt in 1848

I had a fun, delirious few days writing 224 lines in Onegin stanzas about an internet-only @themountaingoats.bsky.social release from 2013, and everything else I was up to that year. The only music criticism you’ll read this year in sonnet sequence form: thirtyyearslater.substack.com/p/2013-you-a...

Today's instalment of my Mountain Goats newsletter is a tour through 2013, and one particular online release, in Onegin sonnets. If you're a fan of either the band or the stanza, why not give it a try? open.substack.com/pub/thirtyye...

Europeans like to eat pasta "al dente" which means, "at the dentist's"

[Rat that should be happy cause he has a herb garden]: Despite all my sage I am still just a rat in a cage

Addiction memoir called Not Vaping, But Drowning

Do you want to hear a barbershop song about crisps? Nicky Bray has you covered. Do you want to hear it live in North Shields, and hear how and why such things get written, in discussion with acerbic Northumberland indie punk artist The Young Property Developers? www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqOE...

Here is another poem by Hanan Al-Kafarna in Gaza, whose writing I featured in my most recent newsletter. Since then we have worked out the best way to donate to Hanan directly: her university has a student support fund at this address: iugaza.ensany.com/campaign/7102. DM me for more details -

[Audiophiles in 1936]: I’m goin’ where there’s no compression

NARC magazine here putting 'Songwriters in Conversation' in their August Highlights section! Come along if you want to find out if the rumours of a 'local folk legend' are true: www.eventbrite.com/e/1495346875...

Today's episode of my Mountain Goats podcast is about the feasts in the books I've been reading, and the famine happening in the real world right now. It's centred around a walk through Portland in 2022 in the footsteps of our song for 2012: 'Steal Smoked Fish.' open.substack.com/pub/thirtyye...

Here's Kyle Heslop's beautiful poster for Songwriters in Conversation: Comedy and Music. We'll have two 30-minute sets from The Young Property Developers & Nicky Bray followed by a Q&A about Comedy and Music. At Baba Yaga's Loft, North Shields, 17th August, 5-7:30. www.eventbrite.com/e/songwriter...

When you hear a bird singing and automatically open Shazam instead of Merlin, that’s when you know it’s a banger