“You’ve listened to my music,” said Bill Ryder-Jones. “You know who I am.” We have. We do. The co-founder and former guitarist with The Coral, he left that band in 2008, suffering a breakdown, the result of childhood trauma. He is 40 years old. He has on-going problems with agoraphobia. He writes beautiful songs full… Read more »
A Sigh Made of Stone
First published May 2023 in Steeple Chasing: Around Britain By Church
IT HANGS LIKE a fading memory, like a fragment of a dream, in the dim and dark and dust. It is a painting made of four paintings. Together, they show loose folds of white cloth. The paintings do not quite touch, and the space between them forms, in shadow, a cross. This work of art… Read more »
Frightened Rabbit
First published 21 June 2019 in The Guardian
Does Frightened Rabbit exist? Guitarist Simon Liddell and bassist Billy Kennedy, sitting in a Glasgow café, turn to one another for a moment then shake their heads. “No, it doesn’t exist without Scott at all,” says Kennedy. “Scott is Frightened Rabbit.” That present tense is telling. Scott Hutchison, the singer and chief songwriter of the… Read more »
Reading Orwell in the Age of Trump
First published October 2, 2017 in Boston Review
“It was a bright cold day in April,” said Richard Blair, “and the clocks were striking thirteen.” Blair is seventy-three and the son of George Orwell. To witness him stand at a lectern and read the opening line of his father’s great final novel, 1984, is to experience a sense of completion, an equation solved…. Read more »
Frightened Rabbit
Does Frightened Rabbit exist? Guitarist Simon Liddell and bassist Billy Kennedy, sitting in a Glasgow café, turn to one another for a moment then shake their heads. “No, it doesn’t exist without Scott at all,” says Kennedy. “Scott is Frightened Rabbit.” That present tense is telling. Scott Hutchison, the singer and chief songwriter of the… Read more »