May 2023

  • The Holy Waters Songbook

    An excerpt, with Caramel Logs and Glenlivet Served on entry: Glenlivet 12 single malt whisky (‘Original Stories’ Licensed Dram) and a Tunnocks Caramel Log The idea for a live interactive musical extravaganza (one man, a guitar, several bottles of relatively cheap booze, cheese, chocolate, biscuits, possibly an audience) based on my book Holy Waters stemmed…

  • The Beatcroft Unsociable. An hour of quite good music with very little meaningful chat

    On 60 North Radio and Mixcloud Listen to the show on Mixcloud here: https://www.mixcloud.com/tom-morton2/toms-beatcroft-anti-social-26-may/ The death of two people overshadowed this week – one was Professor Donald (“Donnie Foot”) Macleod, Free Church theologian, journalist and charismatic (small ‘c’) communicator in both English and Gaelic. The other was Tina Turner, hugely influential performer, writer and survivor…

  • Sleeper

    A 24-hour raid on London from Glasgow by train I promised myself, when the pandemic hit, that if I survived, I would one day travel on the new Caledonian Sleeper train from London to Scotland. Preferably to somewhere like Crianlarich, Fort William or Bridge of Orchy, but if not, Glasgow would do. To seal that…

  • Music to ponder – a new Beatcroft Social

    Songs by Bruce Cockburn, Nick Cave, one Patty and another Patti Proper show this week, with speaking and everything… the Mixcloud link is here. Still find it odd that I didn’t know Andi Oliver had been in Rip Rig and Panic. Oh well. I met her, or at least was presented with a prize by…

  • Burning down the mission

    When God and guitars were all that mattered “Hallo, and welcome to a rather different audioletter, or Beatcroft Social, or self-indulgent trawl through my musical antecedents. I’m not going to introduce each track individually on air, so to speak (or not). The longish article below partly explains where this comes from and why I chose…

  • Hypoallergenic Dog

    Some verses regarding fashionable canines This was provoked by the sheer number of so-called hypoallergenic dogs (mutt breeds that either don’t shed their hair, or have little or none of the stuff) currently having their organic vegetarian excrement scraped off the Troon promenade. Our rescue sheepdog/Staffie cross Dexter is nothing like as hairy as the…

  • The Beatcroft Social, 5 May 2023

    A sonic missive from Troon I’ll be writing a wee essay about being in Troon this time (some odd memories resurface), but the one-hour show which went out on 60 North Radio this evening (Friday) was put together here, in the wee flat we have as our mainland bolthole. The weather has been, on the…