my writing

Tag: Music

  • Buddy Holly’s Apartment Tapes

    Buddy Holly died in a plane crash on 3 Feb, 1959. January 1959, late at night in a Greenwich village apartment, his pregnant wife asleep, Buddy Holly is recording. He’s been recording obsessively since he was 14, and for the last couple of years camped in the studio in Clovis, New Mexico, learning how to…

  • Building the Tower : pages from ‘Diggers and Dreamers’.

    July 1In my silence and withdrawal, the other vision has been developing, becoming more real …A tower. A tower made with my own hands, whose walls connect the inside and outside: filtering, refining, intensifying what is outside inward; amplifying and radiating what is inside out. A tower whose anticlockwise winding steps I climb to the…

  • Leonard Cohen at the Opera House, Manchester, Tues, 17 June, 2008

    Dark stage, brightly lit at the back – I expect a Manhattan skyline. The band take their places. LC quickly follows, there’s no spinning it out, he’s right on time, getting to business. He bounds on, he’s up for it, dapper in a suit and fedora, both grey, a double-breasted suit, wide trousers, grey shirt…

  • Connie Converse’s disappearance on 10 August, 1974

    ‘You don’t go out of your way to make yourself something you’re not.’ After her return from England in January 1972, Ms Converse was adrift. She wrote, ‘the basic nerves and will by which I had always been able to survive my difficulties may have worn out or broken, and might not be easily reparable.’…

  • Connie Converse’s 100th birthday

    Between 1 August, the 100th anniversary of her birth, and 10 August, when fifty years ago she disappeared, I want to celebrate the many lives of Elizabeth Connie Converse. In 1944, age 20, she dropped out of her prestigious New England college, where she was the star student, and went to New York City, alone…

  • Connie Converse: A Singer/Songwriter before her Time

    100 years after she was born, 50 years since she disappeared without trace (10th Aug, 1974), I am celebrating The Guitar Songs of Connie Converse. Written between 1950 and 1955, in New York, and unheard until 2009, I first heard them three months ago and have been playing them since, finding new qualities with each…