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Two hours of music from Nashville to Kelvin Way New show for the week of 26 August. 7-9pm on 60 North Radio, also on Mixcloud and the 60 North archive after 9.00pm. From Nashville to Kelvin Way via some Lost Horizons. Listen here or via link after playlist: Al Stewart — Terminal Eyes Nick Drake…

Byron Rogers is the ex-feature writer’s feature writer They lurk in the double-page spreads of newspapers no-one cares about and few buy, his disciples, imitators and conscious or unconscious clones. Not that Byron Rogers is without his own influences. Earlier Fleet Street giants like William Connor (Cassandra) and Anthony Carson, masters of observed eccentricity and…

All tracks from CD, vinyl or tape. Stuff I actually own. The full-length Bought, Begged and Stolen show goes out on Friday nights, on 60north.radio 7-9pm, available on the Shetland Webcams, through Radio Garden, the 60 North Radio smartphone app and various other high-tech facilities. It’s also streaming on Mixcloud now (link follows) and will…

Retrieving a stranded, ledge-bound lamb may come at too high a cost Sheep. There are a lot of them about here in Shetland. Around 150,000, it’s said, which makes six woolly gods per human inhabitant. Shetland is a rocky archipelago, Atlantic on one side, North Sea on the other, with over 1600 miles of indented,…

(Bruce Don’t Go) Darkness on the Edge of Morningside (Bruce Don’t Go) (Audio/video on YouTube here) Me and Stacey drank, Colin said he’d drive St James Park 1985 Furstenberg, Tennents, we thought we walked the darkness of Candy’s Hall Red wine and whisky Burgers, flags and tears One of those gigs that get you through…

Eight days and still it goes on. Restrictions beckon. A third of Scots have Covid, but that’s a guess, really. It’s hard to escape the feeling that getting tested is being made deliberately difficult, so that Governments can pretend normality has returned. If you have symptoms, stay at home and shut up and thole it.…

40 years ago, in a Whiteinch railway arch, we made a record… You can blame Liz Truss. I certainly do.  Her speech about the UK possibly sending warplanes to Ukraine threw a switch somewhere in my dodgily-wired head, and suddenly I was humming the elderly song that appears, with haphazard recent video, on YouTube if…

How can you provide invisible, practical help for those in need? “It’s 10 to eight; time now for Thought for the Day…” ALEXA! OFF! I detest the patronising, often glutinous, stale religious croissant that is Thought for the Day on BBC Radio Four’s otherwise unmissable Today Programme. As smartspeakers proliferate, there will eventually come a…

In which I finally fold and buy a Brompton I am 16 stones and 13 pounds in old money. Call it 107 kilogrammes. Oh, all right, 107 and a half kilogrammes. Yes, I am loosely (very casually) trying to lose weight, in imitation of my wife who has managed to shed three stones just by…

From Nevil Shute’s post-apocalypse novel to Alex Salmond on Russia Today There are childhood books that leave a mark, and books that scar you forever. Wolf Mankowitz’s novella Make me An Offer, encountered at the age of 12, left me obsessed with the Portland Vase and the seamier side of the antiques trade. Alistair MacLean’s…