O is for the Ozark Mountain Daredevils. One of my beta readers for Dead Man Singing described the musical references as deliberately obscure. Generally, that’s not true, but there’s one reference – the aforementioned Ozarks – which was purposefully chosen because I thought a ...

April 2023: I nervously went along to just a couple of events at the first ever Bournemouth Writing Festival. Dead Man Singing was due for publication a few months later and I wanted some ideas for how to promote it, as well as for future writing projects. Those two sessions were great, and after th...

M is for Music. Nailing Dave’s sound was important for me: think of a British take on American rock, leaning more to country rock than blues and to melody more than bombast. The best triangulation I managed to find was the Faces or early-70s Who crossed with the Band. Dave is strong on rootsy ...

Mal Evans was the Beatles’ road manager, from their post-Hamburg days at the Cavern club, through their whole recording career and beyond. I picked up Living the Beatles Legend: the Untold Story of Mal Evans by Kenneth Womack hoping for another angle on the familiar subject of the Beatles. Ins...