A whole week with no posts = busy.

The first thing to happen was that I recognised one of the holes in my life was that I missed writing about music so I figured I would do something about that. Not being of a mindset to launch anything as complex as a magazine right now - one is quite enough to look after thanks - I had a look around The Place (aka: the internet) to find a good place to do such a thing and made a call. You can't say jack on twitter, even less on instagram, I could post them all here but that wasn't really the point, tumblr has less attention span than both of my kids and the dog put together (which is a shame), which just left Medium to try out.

I have a love/hate thing with Medium but it seemed like a good a place as any online and so far so good. If you take a look here, you'll see that I branded it with my dearly beloved Burn logo - hey, it wasn't doing much else aside from lying around in a folder - and is populated with the album reviews I pulled together this week. As more weeks pass by, my plan is to press on with three or four a week... and that is the total extent of my plan with it for now.

Let's see what happens. If you're in for the long haul with me, there's a BURN link up top in the navigation bar.

For the record, this first week features Cheap Trick, Nickelback, Uncle Sam and Mark Lanegan.

I finished my Father's Day present this afternoon. It looked like this and I loved it very much. As they say in places like Paris and Rome, it was "fucking excellent". The only reason I didn't finish it sooner was because I had too much work to do...

If music is the rock you stand on and you were born between 1960-ish and you can remember Live Aid first hand, you'll relate somewhere along the line, I promise.

I sat in Mark Ellen's office once with my proto-mag, Rock n Roll Babylon, when I was trying to bravado my way into EMAP on a wing and a prayer. He was very nice and encouraging about the whole thing and after reading this, I can see why.

We all stand on the shoulders of giants at some time.

Anyway, I've now moved onto this...

...which has had some good write ups around The Place and so far, is living up to the quotes on the cover. I have lot's of work still on the desk this week but I plan on tearing through it pretty swiftly all the same.

Meanwhile, work continues on various projects and my feet are getting itchy for another road trip. Must do something to rectify that.

Fast.

This morning I began to pull together an interview with one of my favourite tattoo artists in the world: Noon. You can find his blog here but for the sake of getting this post off to a good looking start, here's one of his recent pieces:

It always surprises me that almost 100 issues on (just 15 more to go) from when I started, I can still find great things to talk about. Or at least I can when my co-conspirator is still passionate when it comes to their end of the bargain. Noon is one of those guys. I'm hoping it will be every bit as good as I want it to be when I'm done.

File under pending... for a couple of weeks.

Aside from magazine things, this week I've been pounding the keys on a script that I believe has legs. Another couple of days and I'll be done with the second draft... writing such a thing (one day I'd like to be able to point you back to this post with hindsight as my friend) has left me with a lot of off-cuts. There's so much on the cutting-room floor, if I'm still feeling uber-positive about the whole thing after the weekend (because these things have a tendency to back you into a corner) I might carry on into next week and see where those bits might take me because what I really need right now is another project to stare at me and ask when I'm going to pay it some more attention... honest it is.

Earlier this evening, my mother sent me a text. One of those mysterious ones out of the blue that suggests the whole thing would become much clearer if you had been in the room with her while she wrote it. This has happened a lot more than it used to since she got an iPhone.

The content of the message went like this:

"You will look like Billy Connolly when you get old"

My best guess is that he happened to be on TV at the time. I did see something a couple of days ago about some paintings of him that had turned up in Glasgow (I think) so I'll assume that was the trigger... but I haven't seen a pic of Billy for a long time - so I went to find one.

So first, Robert Plant (as detailed here) and now Billy Connolly. I'm starting to see a pattern of hair + beard emerging.

Billy is 74. I could live with that look. It's coming down the line regardless. My mother knows me well.

Items Of Interest From Other People Whose Work I Dig:

I saw today that Jonathan Carroll has a new book out in August - this has jettisoned itself to the top of the wish list with ease. If you're not familiar with his work, he posts regularly on Medium and it's always worth the trip.

But... you don't have to wait if you're intrigued. The man has a huge backlist and never disappoints. If you're looking for something new to help pass the evenings under the quilt with a torch, this is a good place to be.

On the music front, I tried to be adventurous at the start of the week and listened to the new Katy Perry album for some reason and wished I hadn't then diverted myself back to more familiar territory. There's a new Goo Goo Dolls EP on the racks but when I had finished with it (twice), I couldn't remember a thing about it. Putting music out because you can and not because you have something to say is wrong in every way you can think of.

Then a bird came into the kitchen, knocked a box of dog snacks off the shelf and I remembered Cheap Trick have an album out... it's not all out yet, but there are some advance tracks strutting their stuff. It looks like this:

But while I was hunting down that album cover, I saw there was also an album out last year which had totally passed me by in every way you can think of... and it's all there. Cheap Trick have lost nothing over the years. Nothing at all. That one looks like this:

Life is good when Cheap Trick are around.