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Thanks to Lindsay Hutton for sending this through. Proof positive that it really happened!

I’ve seen Steve Earle play live several times, and met him just the once, in the embrocation-heavy atmosphere of the Clickimin Leisure Centre’s concrete corridors. That was in Lerwick, in 2003, and I was as nervous as a kitten. I interviewed him for the radio show, and for The Shetland Times, stumbling over words, gulping…

I thoroughly enjoyed the first episode of Simon King’s Shetland Diaries, despite the fakery and the wide-eyed southern wonderment at things we tend to take for granted here in The Great Bog. First, let me say that it is fantastic to see what a professional filming team (and it was a team; there was a…

Tom Waits’s Ol’ 55 is not to be taken lightly by anyone. Here’s the woman behind the current TM Show’s album of the week, Maeve O’Boyle (from Stepps, of all places) taking on Waits from the days when he wrote songs, not theatrical interludes.

Thanks to my old mate Stewart Cunningham, ace snapper, I now remember that I was once this thin and this pretentious on stage. It was 1987, Shetland, indoors at the Sound Hall and outdoors on the island of Foula.

Near Comrie. Cheers to Dave Hewitt for putting up with my general feartyness and lack of fitness. About 150 feet from the top, having seen both ptarmigan and lots of mountain hare (white in winter!)I had had enough. Warbeck’s very nice crampons didn’t stay on, and I was running out of energy. The weather closed…

I’m in Glasgow G12, the epicentre of Glasgow’s west end, the buckle of the bohemian belt. The relocation of the BBC’s HQ to sunny Govan seems to have made little difference to the general atmosphere. The architects of obscurantist sandwiches still flourish (though vans do make daily trips across the Squinty Bridge to Pacific Quaty,…

Eshaness, Shetland between 3.20pm and 4.20pm. You can see Foula, the westernmost Shetland island, and if you click on the pictures and enlarge them, you should just be able to make out the infamous Ve Skerries lighthouse on the horizon. Everyone who could was out and about this afternoon, soaking in the last bit of…

Amid tales that The Sunday Post is soon going to have a pay-to-read online version available, and the current subscription-only access to the Sunday Herald and Herald, I decided to make my contributions to today’s papers available here…though of course I’d urge you buy the hard copy editions of both papers if you can! I,…

An Olivetti Lettera 32, identical to the one used by Cormac McCarthy to write all his novels…only in almost unused condition. £15 I think I paid for it, off eBay. Made in Glasgow too. It is absolutely beautiful, though not as spectacular as the Olivetti Valentine. Nor as expensive. McCarthy’s (broken!) machine was sold at…