DEAD WRITERS
If you ever sit around looking into the dregs of your coffee and wonder if we’re missing anything now Top of the Pops is no longer a thing on TV, please allow me to answer that:
Yes.
For in a world in which TOTP is still sitting pretty at 19.00 on a Thursday evening, millions of kids are allowing a (gasp) gatekeeper to make some decisions for them. I know this to be true because it happened to me and if you’re of a certain age, it also happened to you. However, if you’re of a different kind of certain age, the world has abandoned you to make your own choices and while that sounds great in theory, you’re missing out on some aging TV exec deciding to parade Dead Writers in front of your face, in much the same way that very same TV exec chose to blow my tiny teenage mind away by showing me Adam and the Ants (or indeed, insert band of your choice). Proving in every way imaginable that you have no idea what you want/need until somebody shows it to you.
One hit, is indeed, all it takes and if I’m correct (which I am) all it would take to send Dead Writers into the upper echelons of the chart for their fifteen minutes/fifteen years of ultra-fame would be for a whole generation to see the video for the song Lisa all at the same (because that’s how things work). Next week, we then get to see Dead Writers live in the studio as they hit number one with a bullet, shoving all manner of other droll nondescript acts aside and planet earth will breathe a huge sigh of relief that, at least for ten days, all was right in the world.
Alas, in 2026, you must discover your drugs of choice by other means. Many, many other means. Not via your favourite magazine - I know you don’t have one because they all died. Not from a TV show either because they too hit the rumble-strip of life and slid into the cultural ditch. Instead, you have to trust that your digital overlords know you well enough to think you might like soemthing… and even then you can miss the boat by being attracted to some other interesting looking thing on the same page.
That said, this is exactly how I happened upon Dead Writers. I stopped scrolling because he (Paul Shine) looked like somebody I used to know particularly well many years ago, It was me… but I know it’s not me, though I really wish I had the idea to call my band Dead Writers - that would have sat very well indeed. I also never got the chance to make a video nor write a song quite so good as Lisa - not then anyway.
So let’s get down to it. I adore the three songs they have available. I’m mildly outraged that it’s only three songs across five years of being active (not enough to throw all my toys out of the window) but I’ll take it all the same. There’s a split second in Lisa where the chorus opens itself up and suddenly the whole thing feels like the last great guitar band are waking up from a thirty-year nap — big, melodic, possibly dangerous and completely uninterested in the polite background music most modern bands seem more than happy to produce. And yep, I should spend the next few hundred words telling you what Dead Writers sound like but 2026 means I don’t have to when you can press play down below and figure it out yourself. I know nothing else about them other than the fact that they sound and look fucking fantastic - which are frankly, the only two boxes any band has ever really needed to tick.
In another life, I’d be calling up record company friends and urging them to throw some money in their direction. In another life, I’d be calling my best pal Taylor and telling her this would be one of the best support band decisions she would ever make. But in this life, I’ll settle for hitting the road to see what they’re all about at the Strongroom in London on 28 March.
