Hello dear reader,

I hope today finds you of sound mind and serene disposition. This comes to you from a coffee house in Nashville where I’m pausing for breath (and coffee) between epic bursts of grooving. Recently I returned from Norway where Josh McCartney and I made a deliciously unsolemn video for the last track on The Confuser, a hymn to celebration entitled “Wasted”.

Then I found myself in the sea several meters offshore on my home planet of the Isle of Wight where I went for a 36-hour swimming and songwriting binge. I checked into a weird hotel run by the ghost of an old lady and her invisible kitchen staff as nothing happens quickly on the Isle of Wight. Except possibly songwriting: I edited the lyrics to “I Am This Thing” in the sea last time I was on the Island. I always dive into the waves, again and again, for maximum sensation.

Back in the USA, on Sunday night my band and I played the launch party for The Confuser at East Nashville’s esteemed Vinyl Tap. It felt like playing a show in London in 1980, minus the cigarette smoke - intense, loud and far too close up. Close up to what? Everything and everybody. Rock & roll is just so demented - period. Full stop. You’re uncorking a flask of pure insanity, if you do it right. I can’t recommend it highly enough if you like taking a few risks, once in a blue lifetime. Ten out of ten, would do it again.

This afternoon I’m going back into the studio here in Nashville with Brad Jones to put the last voices and guitars on a new project. We’ll announce it soon - I think you’re all gonna love it. It certainly contains elements of the unhinged, let’s say. But who wants to be hinged, unless you’re a door?

Talking of the Doors, next week marks the 56th anniversary of when I saw them - and Jimi Hendrix - at the 1970 Isle of Wight festival. Hendrix was amazing, the Doors a tad perfunctory; but given that Jimi and Jim were both gone within a few months I was lucky to see them at all. To commemorate these strange days I’m making an unannounced appearance with the two surviving members of Country Joe & The Fish, guitarists Barry Melton and David Bennett Cohen, in New York at the Bitter End this Thursday. Then on Saturday I’m opening, solo electric, for and her band at Berlin on Avenue A in the same majestic city. It will also mark the 46th anniversary of The Soft Boys first visit to the USA, back when John Lennon was still smoking Gitanes in the cafes off Central Park West. Strange days indeed - most peculiar, mama. I’ll be playing a clutch of old songs. The older the better…

On Sunday August 30, you will find me at Exile in Bookville in Chicago, in conversation with Lior Phillips and reading from my new memoir Stranded in the Future. Details for that one are here.

Then after that, a short break, before a reasonably extensive run of dates in the UK and Europe. If you’re in that part of the world, here’s where you will find us:

Sept 19 - St Leonard’s-on-Sea, UK (SOLD OUT)
Sept 22 - Liverpool, UK (FULL BAND SHOW)
Sept 23 - Cambridge, UK (SOLD OUT)
Sept 24 - Ipswich, UK
Sept 25 - Cardiff, UK (FULL BAND SHOW)
Sept 26 - Manchester, UK (LOW TICKET WARNING)
Sept 27 - Gateshead, UK (LOW TICKET WARNING)
Sept 29 - Glasgow, UK (LOW TICKET WARNING)
Oct 1 - Belfast, UK
Oct 2 - Dublin, IRE
Oct 4 - Galway, IRE
Oct 6 - Hebden Bridge, Trades Club, UK (SOLD OUT)
Oct 7 - Reading, UK (LOW TICKET WARNING)
Oct 8 - Bath, UK (LOW TICKET WARNING)
Oct 9 - Twyford, UK (Winchester)
Oct 10 - London, UK
Oct 11 - Paris, FRANCE
Oct 17 - Landsberg Am Lech, GERMANY
Oct 18 - Berlin, GERMANY
Oct 20 - Bergen, NORWAY
Oct 21 - Trondheim, NORWAY (SOLD OUT)
Oct 23 - Drammen, NORWAY
Oct 24 - Randaberg, NORWAY
Oct 25 - Oslo, NORWAY
Oct 27 - Copenhagen, DENMARK
Oct 28 - Stockholm, SWEDEN
Oct 30 - Helsinki, FINLAND

Love on ya,

Robyn H

This song came to me late last summer in a San Francisco hotel room about an hour before checkout time. It was impatient to arrive: no sooner had I said to myself “Why don’t you make up something in the key of F?” than out it came, more or less fully formed. Occasionally I would put the guitar down in order to transcribe the words coming out of my mouth; and - voilà! - there it was. A month later I recorded it with my Nashville crew for The Confuser sessions; after a little pruning and a few judicious overdubs “Wasted” found its place as the last track on the album. It’s a summary of where the world and I are at so - why not?

San Francisco is also the home of Kelley Stoltz. As well as being a supremely talented songwriter and musician, Kelley is something of a catalyst: his UK band includes Josh McCartney on drums, whom I met when we were all playing the Egersund festival in Norway in 2024. Norway, too, has been a catalyst in my life. So here is a handsome video shot on location in Egersund earlier this month by Josh himself- who will, furthermore, be playing drums on the band dates in my upcoming UK tour (and also Kelley’s tour, directly after).

The McCartney clan are no strangers to the lens; Josh’s dad Mike, uncle Paul and cousin Mary have each had photographic exhibitions and books. Josh is a natural wielder of the camera and it’s a joy to be filmed by him. We had a couple of fun afternoons stalking around in the Norwegian light filming clips of my talking hand and I duetting together. Just to be sure we never ran out of eyes, Josh brought along a bag of adhesive ones. Egersund makes a fine backdrop - it’s really as quiet as it looks. Towards the end of our perambulations we blundered into an abandoned Victorian chemistry lecture room and filmed some creepy glass sphere sequences. At the very end Josh busted out the eyes once more for Grace Conrad and Kai Slater of Sharp Pins, plus my old friend Norman Blake of the Teenage Fan Club, all of whom graciously joined me on the last chorus. And if we look at all wasted, that’s surely just a trick of the Norwegian twilight…

Some places are too good to actually live in. Often they’re too expensive as well, so their goodness is not an option anyway. For me, two such cities come to mind: Sydney, Australia and Oslo, Norway. They are both maritime places with opera houses, at opposite ends of the Earth. Sydney is surrounded by combustible bush land; Oslo is precariously near Russia. Everywhere comes at a cost.

Despite having been largely reared by a series of kindly Norwegian au pair girls (all from the small town of Drammen, near Oslo), I’ve never married a Norwegian, or been close to marrying one - and there’s a good reason for this. I don’t think my outlook would jibe with that of a Scandinavian. I’ve tried to picture it, and I think any Norse bride and I would both have wound up shivering into the abyss, unable to console each other about the ever-dimming prospects for our world and our species. The comfort of doom has its limits.

My wife is Australian. Aussies are feistier and less likely to put up with the surfeit of anxious dismalia that gushes from my head every morning.

But I love to visit Norway whenever I can. To me Norwegians are about depth, not surface: there’s not much brash about their culture, once you get past the trolls in all the tourist shops (and trolls only exist so you can get past them). Another thing I like about Norwegians is that there aren’t many of them: fewer than 6 million in a land that’s over 1,000 miles long. However, vegetation abounds: when it comes to moss, ferns, ferociously green grass and streams of cold, fertile water Norway can’t be beaten. The country is long and spinal - it’s effectively one coastline from the North Sea to the Arctic Circle. The fjords form a kind of vertebrae up and down it.

I’ve mainly been down in the south, but have occasionally travelled up to Tromsø, the world’s northernmost university town. Snow is on the hills all the year round, and the summer feels autumnal. Come midsummer it never gets dark there, which is disorienting, though I’ve only once been taunted by the all-night sun. All-night rain is much more relaxing. Watching a seagull wander into a 7/11 in the 2am drizzle in broad daylight, as if to buy a newspaper, makes me feel profoundly at home.

When I visited Tromsø one late November, a month before midwinter, the sun never rose; but around midday there was a glorious four hours or so of pink, orange and gold dawn-as-dusk. To the lover of twilight, Norway provides maximum gloaming. Even down south the midsummer months give you no true darkness, just several hours of languid nightshade around midnight. I love this dusk harvest.

The Norwegian word for ghost is ‘Spøkelse’, which is where spooks enter the English language. Voices pop into my head over there: “Your soul went for a walk one afternoon and it never came back.” Quite a few of my songs have gestated in Norway. Some, like “Raining Twilight Coast” and “Goodnight Oslo” and many on the I Often Dream of Trains album, were released on records. Others like “Before I Turn To Glass” and “Feel It” are lost in cupboards somewhere. Meandering around the fjords in a yellow van on my first tour in 1982 changed me forever in ways I still don’t understand. It was as if an unearthly App had been installed in me. From the zigzag clifftop roads I would look down on the clouds far below, as they drifted above the water like shapeshifting white dragons. Spirit vertigo…

The psychic epicentre of Oslo, for me, is Frogner Park, where a horde of naked human statues, all slightly larger than life-size, are caught in frozen motion: they’re writhing, grimacing and capering in a sub-erotic way around a well laid-out park. At the centre is a monolithic column of stone people, naked and grey, rising up into the sky looking like they’ve been tipped out of a cigar tube. I recommend it to anyone who likes to use their eyes.

My favourite hang in Norway however, is much less spooky. The small fishing town of Egersund is on the south-west corner of the country, only 300 miles across the North Sea from Aberdeen. Every summer there my friend Frode Stromstad runs a small music festival at which I’m lucky enough to be a recurring act. In fact, I was there last week! The festival is based around The Grand Hotel, a place of many rooms which is gradually expanding to absorb the centre of downtown Egersund, in a benign and gentle way. Frode himself is a benign and gentle fellow, whose mission seems to be to bring legions of jangle-rockers to Egersund from around the world. Perhaps he is part of the Grand Hotel hive mind.

Frode plays guitar and sings in the sublime jangle-rock band I Was A King, along with singer/guitarist Anne Lise Frøkedal and bass player Ole Gudmestad, and every summer they play the Egersund festival. In a way they’re the Scandinavian version of the Byrds - ethereal but darker and more soulful than their California ancestors. Sitting in with them is something I always relish.

Other Byrds-adjacent acts this year included Sharp Pins from Chicago and another old friend, Norman Blake from Teenage Fan Club. Norman and I produced an I Was A King Album You Love It Here some years back. And I do love it here. Every few years I find another song entitled “Sweet Home Egersund” on my phone. Perhaps the Grand Hotel is planting them there…

If one high watermark of 1960s culture was electric Bob Dylan, the other (for me) was The Beatles Revolver album. It was largely recorded in April 1966, just before they stopped touring and metamorphosed from a pop group into a rock band. The LP appeared in British shops on August 5th 1966. I first saw a copy at London’s Waterloo Station, from which I have just caught a train. Yes, I’ve got a ticket to Ryde…

Revolver is the Beatles album that I listen to most often - a favourite among favourites. It’s not just the songs: Beatles songs are almost always superb, from their earliest to their last. Timing played a part too: the record came as the drugs arrived for those a few years older than me, and I could see how this affected everybody, though I was too young to scramble my own mind as yet.

The record appeared in my life when I was 13 years and six months old - heading into puberty like an unguided missile. I was full of hormones and momentum. Hearing Revolver always puts a spring in my step - teenage acceleration fills me anew, and I just feel, let’s say, caffeinated.

Revolver also captures the Beatles’ own momentum. They were becoming distinct individuals (which they were all along, to themselves, of course) but not yet separate ones. Even though George’s “Love You To” and Paul’s “For No One” are performed largely without the rest of the band, the album feels like a team effort - possibly for the last time. The boys were about to stop being boys. The rivalry that pulled the three songwriters apart in the end must have already been in their systems; only Ringo remained steady at the bottom of the pile, keeping it all together on the drums, a threat to no one.

But look! A George Harrison song opens the record. And he’s allowed two other compositions on the same album - what gives? They’re brilliant too. When Revolver came out, the Beatles were still manifesting as a collective organism. Although they were no longer playing rock’n’roll, the whole album sounds like them, albeit in their different facets. Besides deploying a string quartet on “Eleanor Rigby”, music hall chords on “Good Day Sunshine”, Indian musicians on “Love You To”, and a pub singalong on “Yellow Submarine”, there was a new barbed jangle in their two-guitar-bass-and-drums performances that would soon be known as psychedelia. “Taxman”, “She Said, She Said”, “And Your Bird Can Sing”, and “Doctor Robert” all have this spangling intensity. This, to me, is the signature sound of Revolver - the heavy clang that also appears on “Rain” and “Paperback Writer”. It was a phase they never revisited, sadly - but an inspiration to many, myself included. Like The Byrds if they’d spent enough wet afternoons by the Mersey. George and John harmonising over their electric guitars on “She Said, She Said” is a high point in their musical relationship.

But it’s the last three tracks that really make the album spin round and hit you. They’re declarations of intent from each songwriter Beatle. George’s “I Want To Tell You” about his yearning to communicate, Paul’s “Got To Get You Into My Life” is a craving for communion and enlightenment. Finally, John’s “Tomorrow Never Knows” (title and genius trance drumming by Ringo) is a desire for transcendence. The Beatles were still writing love songs, but the love was spiritual now, not just from the heart and the crotch. “Tomorrow Never Knows” is a peak from which there is no return.

Of course, they couldn’t sustain that euphoric stampede to enlightenment. Nor could the counterculture that surfed on their musical waves. Human nature reasserted its wayward self, and here we are where we are today. The Beatles themselves stopped touring, grew further apart, lost their devoted manager, Brian, and, in the end, replaced each other with their wives.

But listen to Revolver and all the potential comes spinning back into your third eye: in some parallel kingdom, it’s getting better all the time…

Yesterday my oldest and dearest friend Martz (AKA Martin Stanway-Mayers) exited this life. Carcinoma had played with him cruelly - a rare form of subcutaneous cancer had eaten into his face, and for the last year of his life he had no top lip. A man who always had a pleasant countenance and buoyant outlook was decimated by horrific illness. But he bore it philosophically, right up to his last days lying ravaged in a hospital room, uttering indistinct requests from his poor, ruined mouth.

Martz and I knew each other for just over 60 years. He came into my life one snowy dusk in January 1966, on Cary Grant’s birthday (not that Cary Grant himself was present at our meeting), at a bizarre tea party given for new inmates being inducted into a boarding school in southern England. We finally parted from each other the evening before last in a hospital room in West London, where he lay stretched out like an effigy on a tomb, breathing through ragged nostrils. I kissed his forehead and stalked away as he stared up through unseeing eyes.

Martz and I embodied the attraction of opposites. He was a lifelong traditionalist who loved pomp and ceremony, sceptical and reality-driven: he believed in what he could see, and loved to read history books. He also believed, for most of his life, that if people acted reasonably everything would work out alright. I instinctively relish the surreal, only read fiction, and am more inclined to believe in what I imagine than in what’s before my eyes. I can’t help feeling that everything is for the worst, people especially.

Martz came from a no-nonsense Midlands background, while my parents were Southern art-bourgeois. Neither of us took the other very seriously, which was perhaps the key to our relationship. Somehow we gravitated to each other. He was sandy-blonde, of medium height and optimistic; I was tall, dark and anxious.

But we both loved music. As we learned to navigate the weirdness of our school and then, in turn, had that weirdness wired into us, the great record albums of the psychedelic age paraded through the house record player: The Beatles from Rubber Soul to Abbey Road, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Leonard Cohen, Traffic, and The Rolling Stones among many others rang out over the wooden cubicles in which we studied and dreamed. Of course, our most devout feelings were reserved for Bob Dylan. Two years into our time in the Victorian penitentiary that was Winchester College G House, we had both acquired cheap acoustic guitars.

I learned my basic chords from a Bob Dylan songbook, and have spent the next 58 years refining them. Martz instinctively knew how those chords connected, and moreover impressed me with the way he could figure out Beatles’ songs, just as the teenage John Lennon was blown away by the 15-year-old Paul McCartney knowing the chords to Eddie Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock”. One afternoon I was staggered to watch my schoolmate pick his way through “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill” in the locker room amid the aroma of socks and armpits, playing it by ear: he knew all the chords *and* how to join them up. I had learned the basic majors and minors, but had no idea how they fitted together. Martz showed me how the melodic spine runs through a song - or any piece of music, really.

He and I also both enjoyed words, and how you could place them next to each other to make them more absurd. Martz had a penchant for the grandiose: why use one word when three will do? “Profligate misanthropist snob” he inscribed neatly on one of my exercise books; was that his summary of my character or just three words that sounded good in sequence? A little from Column A, a little from Column B…

In our last summer at school together we started trying to write songs. The first - and one of the most successful - was a kind of Nashville Skyline knock-off entitled “Baby”, which might have brought us some mainstream success if we’d continued writing in that vein. But our education got the better of us: we both had a penchant for the convoluted and the abstruse that stranded our compositions on a high shelf where few listeners would notice us, yet alone care to reach. Martz came up with lovely tunes, over which he draped lyrics like:

Knowing how to pass the time
Is a satisfaction I’m
Rarely able to achieve
But it only goes to show
Emptiness will overflow
Each and every time you leave

…whilst I weighed in with:

As nature wavers, fat men dream in slits
We cannot hope to fetch the slash that fits
Unless, of course, the samples retch

Together we came up with lines such as:

People in mirrors all over the world say
Everything’s roughly the same

In the early 1970s, Martz and I played as a duo in folk clubs; we even got a gig at the Troubadour in the Brompton Road where Dylan had played 10 years earlier. With a couple of other guys, we also had a primitive rock band that could never agree on a proper name: each of us called the group whatever they personally chose for one of our occasional gigs. For our last show, Martz christened us The Symptoms, though sadly on the poster we were billed as The Symptons - which was Simpsons-adjacent, at least. By 1975, he and I were ready to go our separate ways, career-wise. (I’ve written more about our musical life together in my new memoir Stranded in the Future.) Going forward, I wanted to be the main man in any band that I was in. If I fancied myself as a Lennon figure - one of my strongest musical sub-personalities - Martz was the closest thing I ever had to a McCartney. Of whom he was a major fan, incidentally.

10 years into our friendship, we continued to meet up and occasionally strum together, but our paths had diverged. Martz was qualified as a lawyer while I’d become a Soft Boy, pushing a harsher kind of music than the genteel ditties that he and I had purveyed. In the early 1980s he married and started a family, taking his focus still further from our old world. We became gentlemen who lunched, comparing graphs of our own matrimonial ups and downs.

In the 1990s we became more like gentlemen who drank, as his marriage crumbled. In 2001, right after 9/11, he took a legal job in Buenos Aires, even as a new relationship blossomed for him in London. Ironically, we began to see each other much more regularly as he kept flying back to the UK to spend time with Bella, the lovely woman who became his second wife. It was heartwarming to see him home at last, emotionally and physically, when he returned to England a decade later.

In 2013 I blew up my life in London and marooned myself on the Isle of Wight, before hovering in Sydney and then finally moving to Nashville. Martz very sweetly drove down to stay with me twice in my damp little flat in Freshwater Bay, where Charles and Emma Darwin had lived for six chilly months back in 1859. We even made up some music together, for the first time in forty years. I was extremely touched that he made the effort to come and see me. He was pretty much my only visitor.

Late-stage friendship is possibly the greatest reward for growing old. Your lives are entwined, and your memories are your bond - until, of course, they too dissolve. Martz and I saw each other regularly as I became an expatriate, but still nipping over frequently from Nashville to London. We were back to being gentlemen who lunched, intercontinentally.

The first signs of his carcinoma came in 2022, but tragically it took three separate doctors to get Martz the correct diagnosis, by which time the cancer was entrenched. He stoically endured chemo and radiotherapy, but the illness proved implacable.

I flew over to London to say what I thought was goodbye to him in March this year. Bedridden, he seemed to be all in. On my third visit I patted him on the shoulder and said “I’ll be back, old fruit - see you soon” just for something vaguely comforting to say. Oddly, wonderfully, he rallied a few days later and climbed off his sickbed. Thrilled by his reprieve, he and Bella set off on a tour of southern cathedrals: Lincoln, Norwich and Salisbury. They were planning to visit Winchester Cathedral but never made it. Martz stopped answering the phone when I rang. The cancer was coming in for the last time.

As luck would have it, I had to fly to a festival in Norway (where I’m writing this), and I scheduled a couple of days in London en route, just in case Martz might still be around. For one last time, he was.

Although the gaunt figure stretched out on the hospital bed was unrecognisable as my genial old school friend Martz, they were one and the same. This was the final him. I held his hand, rambled through whatever popped out of my head, and tried to decipher what he was telling me through damaged lips in his morphine haze (thank heavens for the morphine). After a while I was able to tune into his frequency. He told me that one of his songs had been heavily influenced by the Incredible String Band, a lovely, floating three-chord number entitled “My Lady Butterfly,” which he and I recorded as a demo in 1974. He’d like it played at his memorial service.

Then he told me he loved me and I told him that I loved him too. I told him what a great friend he’d been and how grateful I was for that. This was quite a major breakthrough for Englishmen of a certain age. I don’t even talk like that to my family…

He began to fade, and I was fading too with jet lag, so I returned to my lodgings. Yesterday morning I had planned to look in again on my way to Gatwick Airport, but Bella texted me to say that Martz had finally vacated his body just after noon.

I shiver to think of him in the past, in limbo en route to a fresh incarnation, in the ether: everywhere and nowhere as we are when we die. But we all go over that waterfall; only vampires are here indefinitely. Nothing is eternal.

I’ll be in touch through the usual channels, dear friend. Thanks for being you. I love you back…

Listen to “Baby” here:

Hello dear reader,

I hope this finds you serene among the swarming vegetation and long evenings of early August. This comes to you from a coffee shop in Cape Cod, my temporary office en route to my home planet of London and thence to the mythical coast of Norway. The air today in Massachusetts is thick with drizzle and low clouds: I can feel the fjords calling to me from across the oceans. Next weekend I’ll play a couple of sets there at the Egersund Visefestival: one solo, and one with my old friends I Was A King and new friend Josh McCartney.

As you may know - and I hope you do - my new album The Confuser was officially released last Friday. Reviews have been amazing - thank you, dear reviewers - and the album was the 3rd most-added one at US College Radio last week, a flashback to the Smoke Age, when dial phones ruled, video rocked, and your palm was yet to cradle all the knowledge in the universe in an oblong tablet. Like, Yaysville, daddy-O! To stream the album, visit this link. To buy the album in the US + internationally, here’s the shop. UK orders can be made here.

Vinyl Confuser LPs finally reached hive this week and long-awaited orders are now being fulfilled under the supervision of Tubby, who knows All and sees Half of It, and his handsome brother Ringo, who gets a bit peckish sometimes. If you have an order in, many thanks for your patience in this matter. We’re shipping everything this weekend. If you’re waiting to purchase from your friendly local music shop, the record lands there on August 21.

Thanks to everyone who attended the events last weekend in the North Eastern USA for my new book Stranded In The Future, and thanks especially to my three interlocutors: Jim McGuinn in Philadelphia, Simon Shaw in New York, and Brett Milano in Boston. It’s reassuring to bask in the printed word - some of it my own.

I have three more full band electric shows in the USA for this year:

August 23 Vinyl Tap, NASHVILLE TN (free album release party)

November 20 Chickie Wah Wah, NEW ORLEANS LA

November 21 Saturn BIRMINGHAM, AL

These will be with my rock-ass band, with whom I’m currently completing a new record in Nashville.

Between August and November I’ll have a hefty tranche of dates in the British Isles and Europe. Some will be with a full electric band, some solo acoustic. All ticket links are here. These shows are beginning to sell out, so best snaffle your ticket pronto if you plan to attend.

The donkeys of time are munching the leaves of space, and soon the trees of being will start to feel a tad denuded. If you want reality, you know where to find it. Meanwhile I remain at this end of the field for as long as possible,

Love on ya,

Mr H.

Yesterday, July 29, marked the 60th anniversary of Bob Dylan’s motorcycle accident in 1966. In a way, his fall from the wheels marked the high tide of 1960s popular music, and with it the culture, or at least the momentum that seemed to change everything (but human nature) in that era. Whatever befell Dylan when he came off his bike, that was when he began to abdicate from his role as the Explorer King of the Zeitgeist. An impossible role, perhaps, to play for very long: he had the expectations of so many young psyches (including mine) slung over his shoulders like eels in a sack, all writhing with their own demands. After the crash, Bob Dylan began to go backwards. And all the clocks began to go backwards with him.

In July 1966 I was 13, in the throes of yielding my young life to this barbed American god. A besotted hierophant, I flung my being on his altar. I too would have no direction home. I would pledge my time to a wayward goddess in a stuffy room. And, of course, I swore to say a prayer for anyone who wasn’t a parasite. That summer, The Beatles unleashed Revolver, while Brian Wilson led the Beach Boys in creating Pet Sounds and was brewing “Good Vibrations”. Pink Floyd and Jimi Hendrix were both incubating and would hatch out next year in 1967, along with the great leaps forward that regressive elements in our world are tragically trying to reverse even now: our rights over our own bodies, our sexuality, our beliefs (or absence of them), and humanity’s hard-won attempts at levelling out our imbalances of gender and race. Bob Dylan was so much an emblem of these leaps, in the way he sounded, looked and appeared to think. He was the figurehead on the prow of evolution - whether he intended to be or not.

Then, on July 29, 1966, he vanished from the human rat race, only to reappear about 18 months later - cautious, reflective, very much a man pulling back from everything. No doubt he had to shed his skin just to survive, and he was still a man at that point with several skins to shed. They grew on him so fast. Now he seemed to be disappearing inside himself, and his music headed in the opposite direction to psychedelia, wild imagery, crazed exaltation - all the feelings that he had set in motion when he helped the Beatles uncork their minds a few years earlier. “Turn that off!”, he allegedly snapped when somebody attempted to play him Sgt. Pepper’s.

When Dylan resumed releasing music in late 1967, it was sparse, thoughtful and, to my young ears, seemed rather colourless after Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. But his songs still went down deep; John Wesley Harding had a profound effect on the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and all who, in turn, followed them. Their 1968 records were predicated on getting back to rock’n’roll, shedding their kaftans, beads and coloured sunglasses in the process.

This vogue was confusing for me as a 15-year-old, as I’d only just managed to acquire my first kaftan and pair of red trousers. I compromised by ditching the melon-pip beads that my sister had lovingly made me the year before, but keeping the red pants and Indian shirt. I did buy a pair of blue sunglasses as an homage to Brian Eno, who had worn some the year before at his Happenings in the subterranean chambers and meadows of Winchester College.

Time rolled by and Dylan continued to roll backwards. 1969’s Nashville Skyline was a cute country record that contained several classics, but didn’t sound like Bob Dylan at all, to me. As 1970 cracked like an egg over our frazzled heads, even the Doors were getting back to good old rock’n’roll - and they were very good at it. Psychedelia mutated into Prog, and myriad strands of music were born. All the while, I felt the momentum of 1966 evaporating into a fog of stoned, aimless molecules. Politically, too, the forces of darkness were mustering their regressive forces for an onslaught that hasn’t let up to this day, from Reagan and Thatcher to Trump and Farage.

Not that Bob Dylan is to blame for any of this. I’m still grateful to him for unleashing his mind and then the minds of all who heard him back in the hallowed 1962-68 window. To this day, Dylan still writes amazing songs and, when he feels like singing clearly, turns in great performances. I don’t blame him for falling off his motorcycle, or using that as an opportunity to climb out of a life he couldn’t live any more. I just can’t help but trace so much in our journey as a culture back to July 29, 1966…

I Am This Thing

A flash of existential bliss that I want to share with the universe, set to a classic English wah-wah pedal pulse. You’re only you once!

My Dead Astronaut

Heroes keep you guessing sometimes. A rockin’ party song for a new dystopia. And a nod to J.G. Ballard

Yesterday’s Rain

…falls on tomorrow’s parade. The sins of the past call the shots for the future. And on the way, you get the flag, the lilac tomb, and the crocodile on skis. It’s all good! More classic Brit-rock, played as only Americans can.

Breathless

Sometimes someone takes your breath away and never gives it back. That lack of oxygen can make you giddy, especially if you’re in a back garden in Los Angeles. Music to capsize to.

Ghost in Sunlight

A ghost in sunlight is as close as you can get to being transparent, invisible, see-through. Sometimes authorities tear up the very rails you ride on. It can make you scream, and make Gillian Welch scream too.

Building From The Ruins

A celebration of collapse and restoration. You can’t have one without the other. Another dystopian boogie, fuelled by the ever-dependable wah-wah pedal.

The Vanishing Kind

Love among the ghosts. This track is a dream, one of my better ones. Tremolos rule!

How To Feel Alright

Set to a beat that’s the latest in the chapter headed Bo Diddley:

Don’t mistake your girlfriend for your Mum. And what’s wrong with your Mum anyway?

Monday For Me

We are fated to go round in circles: or is time really a spiral, a corkscrew even - pushing ever-forward as it grinds through life? Regardless, you get no further than Sunday before it’s Monday again. Almost a country song, for an almost country.

Wasted

An anthem for my generation, and those gone before, and those to come. Flight attendants, please be seated. Written for Dean Martin, who would sing this far better than me.

The Confuser is out now on Tiny Ghost Records, streaming everywhere, and hits retail outlets on August 21.

Finally! Today! At last my latest record album swims into the public ear, or at least somewhere public ear-adjacent. Yes: The Confuser is at hand - so what exactly is it?

Once again, I’ve corralled together 10 songs in an order that I think makes sense. This time it happened very fast. When 2025 swung through through its gate with the inane swagger that only a new year can muster, I was writing songs for a potential album with , my wife, record company boss, and frequent muse. She and I accordingly recorded a collection of duets in LA, but then decided the project needed to sit for a while before we could properly finish it.

So Emma asked me if I’d like to make an album of my own, a rock album, in Nashville with some of the people we’ve recently come to know over here. She suggested for starters our friend Jeremy Fetzer, a consummate local Telecaster player, who coincidentally does a lot of the graphic design for our label Tiny Ghost Records. Fetzer is a dapper cat, and plays that way too. I close my eyes and I can see the flock of notes he plays make patterns in the air.

Emma also mooted me working with Eric Slick, drummer with Dr Dog, among others. He’d played drums remotely on “Socrates In Thin Air” on my lockdown album SHUFFLEMANIA! - he did a fabulous job. So Eric and I met for coffee and bonded over Captain Beefheart. We drained our cups and he was in.

Eric recruited a new face on bass, Todd Bolden.

“Does he speak McCartney?” I asked. Oh yes, replied Eric, he certainly does. So Todd was in too. I had already talked Beatles with Fetzer and Slick; I can’t work with any musician who doesn’t love them as much as I do. Todd completes the pack of Fabs disciples.

Fellow Beatle person Brad Jones had played bass with three of my 1990s opening acts on tour: Matthew Sweet. Murray Attaway and Jill Sobule, whose life was tragically taken by flames last year. Brad has been my go-to recording engineer in Nashville for quite some time, so he was a natural to engineer this album and, ultimately, produce it.

What can I tell you about the songs? Mainly that most of them materialised in my notebook last summer while Emma was away on tour. I had the house and our cats, Ringo and Tubby, to myself. The felines are the ideal audience for protean compositions gestating in solitude. For me songs either appear or they don’t - if I try to force them into being, I’m rewarded with counterfeit ones: fake songs that have no true identity or core. Real songs manifest instantly, then take time - and craftsmanship - to crystallise into seaworthy vessels of words and music. The ones on The Confuser largely appeared in hotels, guest houses, and our own Nashville hive over the space of three months.

Nashville musicians learn fast. After a demo session with Jeremy Fetzer at his stylish Fetzicon Lounge, we did an afternoon rehearsal with Eric and Todd at Fortress Eric. That was enough to arrange most of the album, which we then recorded with Brad in two days at Alex The Great Studios. The band learned a couple of songs “Building From The Ruins” and “The Vanishing Kind” in the studio and recorded them on the spot. Those guys are that good.

A few more overdubs, and I played the session to Emma. “It’ll be great,” she said. “If you finesse the vocals. Let’s try my producer Jordan Lehning.” Jordan and Emma between them take no prisoners when it comes to vocal takes. They deploy a level of rigour that I have never attempted to reach, perhaps because I came of age as the tide of punk washed over Britain, and attitude was all that mattered in a voice. Now, nearly 50 years later, I was trying to actually sing properly, at least as well as I could. I’ve always thought of myself as a performer more than a singer. Listening back to this album I am staggered at how well executed my vocals are - it almost sounds like somebody else is the lead vocalist.

Two more garnishing touches. My Nashville chum Gillian Welch came in, with her notebooks, to harmonise, rant and channel her demons on “Ghost In Sunlight”. Also on that track is my old Soft Boys bandmate Kimberley Rew playing guitar. These two guests transform that song into what is probably my favourite track on the album. Kim also adds guitar touches on quite a few other songs. His additions to the string-scape that Fetzer and I set up on our Telecasters make this record into something else.

When the whole boatload of overdubs made its way back to Brad Jones, he took his tweezers to them and lovingly tweaked, pruned and sheared the music into an exquisitely contoured shape, amongst which my voice can canter.

It’s too early for me to assess the songs - that will take another 30 years, by which time I will be long gone - but I can confidently say that The Confuser is the most realised album I have yet made. I have to thank Eric, Jeremy, Todd, Kimberley, Gillian, Brad and Jordan for this; but most of all I have to thank Emma for everything she’s done to bring this one in to land. Thanks, Em - this one’s for you!

You can listen to the album here.

The album is available for purchase here.

Enjoy, y’all - and Happy Confuser Day!

It’s November 1967 every time I hear Syd Barrett’s “Lucifer Sam”. Young people in capes and gowns silhouetted against bonfires, their outlines whirling and cackling through the smoke. Hippies dreaming they’re demons and witches - it’s all too much! Second childhood was in vogue, and I’d barely left my first one.

Who knows what was in Barrett’s fermenting mind when this song came bursting out of it? Or perhaps it slithered - we’ll never know. How the listener receives the song is more important than what its creator intended, in the end. The ominous Telecaster riffs here are exhilarating and enchanting: a kind of Midwinter Night’s Dream. My synaesthesia peaks on this one: closing my eyes I can see those guitars burning trails in the darkened sky. Behind them a giant cat’s head looms through forked lightning flashes.

The band and I were rehearsing in the studio last week and we managed to play through a complete version of this classic number. We followed the original template in sound and feel as close as we could. Here it is: have fun with it and don’t get lost on the way home…

Listen to Lucifer Sam here:

The players on this track all played on my new LP, The Confuser, which coincidentally, is out tomorrow digitally and available to order directly from Tiny Ghost here, it lands in all good record shops on August 21.

Track credits:

RH - guitar & vocals
Jeremy Fetzer - guitar
Todd Bolden - bass
Eric Slick - drums
Recorded in Nashville by Brad Jones

I was very sad to hear that Dave Kendall is no longer with us here on Earth. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he was the good-looking Englishman who hosted MTV’s 120 Minutes, a program that showed video clips by hip, non-mainstream acts. I first became aware of MTV in 1986 when Dave himself called my home number in London (where did he get that, I wonder?) and informed me that my low-budget Super-8mm videos for “The Man With The Lightbulb Head” and “I Often Dream of Trains” were becoming popular on his show. Really? Wow! As that gilded era recedes ever-further into the past, where they do things differently, I’m increasingly amazed at how far the ripples of MTV spread, and grateful that they carried me with them.

I didn’t know Dave well. He was a fellow Brit, dapper, smart and sarcastic, albeit with a far more together hairstyle than mine. He also struck me as a Brit who was re-wiring himself as an American, which I, too, have done to a degree. Dave was genial but never effusive: he was no High-Fiver, and I could identify with that. We both had that English reserve in our demeanour. He and I did get to chat a few times on air, and he definitely pushed my envelope, in the days when envelopes were still largely analog. The Egyptians and I even played several live shows on 120 Minutes, most notoriously in 1991 at Tramps in New York where our label A&M records had lovingly flown in a whole crowd of media people for the release of Perspex Island. These people (or their plus-ones) talked loudly throughout the show, ruining it for the genuine fans who’d managed to get tickets, and for us on stage. I turned up my guitar to 11 for the solos, just to try to compete…

My last encounter with Dave Kendall was in early 1993 when I hosted 120 Minutes myself, rocking a spectacular mullet that eased my out of my 30s, and furthermore out of A&M, MTV and the Egyptians. “Alternative” music went one way and I went the other. Dave’s circles and mine no longer overlapped. I wondered from time to time where he was: nobody seemed to know. It turns out he ended up in Asia. For the next 30 years I was a largely acoustic troubadour, as a live performer. Recently I’ve started touring with a band full-time again, and making little videos, like I did 40 years ago. 120 Minutes - where are you now? We miss you!

Thank you, Dave Kendall, wherever your spirit flows, for all your help on that old-time screen. Flow in peace.

We voyage through time in one direction only, and in the course of that we age, the way that buildings do. Just as the mummified pharaohs of ancient Egypt were sent into eternity encased in their pyramids, so the pioneering astronauts of 1960s were sent into outer space in their tiny capsules. Most of the astronauts returned to Earth; who knows where the souls of the pharaohs went?

Heroes always have to let you down one way or another, if they’re real. But by then, they’ve fulfilled their mission which is to encourage you to aim high. I don’t resent my heroes for being mere mortals - I’m mortal myself, and age is working on me, too. What to do about it? Put a rock-ass band together, baby - and rock!

So here I am in this video with the Nashville team that recorded this song with me here last October: Jeremy Fetzer on guitar, Todd Bolden on bass, and Eric Slick on drums. The clip was filmed here earlier this week by James Southard and directed by Jeremy Dylan, with art direction and assistant direction from Emma Swift. Fetzer, Todd and Eric brave the perils of Inner Space in their space suits and continue to rock even wafting in slow motion through a studio in the Tennessee summer heat. Jeremy plays guitar with a furry lobster and waltzes with a dinosaur; Todd dances with a model Russian trolleybus, while Eric wields a mean glove and gets to play a cowbell. I am indebted to my dear friend Ken Gormly, bass player with the fabulous Aussie combo The Cruel Sea, for the Tram Plunges Into The Sea vintage newsstand poster. Electric traction rules, as long as it doesn’t go over a cliff. Stick to the rails, boys…

It’s been great fun returning to the video arena. Check out Scott Jacobson’s clip for “Yesterday’s Rain” which was filmed back in May in Los Angeles, and came out last week:

Both tracks are from my forthcoming party album The Confuser (out July 24 on streaming services + via the Tiny Ghost shop, and in retail outlets on August 21). It’s the most fun you can have whilst thinking everything really sucks. Yet how amazing to actually be alive - arise, Mr Spaceman!

A week ago, my old friend James Ayliffe Smith turned 71. At six foot six, he remains one of the tallest people I know, hence his nickname “The Great One”. He introduced himself to me 54 years ago in my parents’ kitchen with the immortal line:

“Hello, I’m James! My current favourites are Genesis and David Bowie…”

And we’ve been friends ever since, despite my lukewarm feelings towards Genesis…

He was a moon-faced lad, dark hair in a kind of Joey Ramone helmet, stooped even then from peering down at the flock of humans below him. His small, round spectacles gave him a myopic charisma, which he still has, though the Ramone-esque locks are long gone, and a small 1950s author-style moustache now inhabits his top lip. There’s always been something very reassuring about him.

James A is, and was, a music fan with a way with words. Incidentally, he appears as a catalyst figure in my new book Stranded in the Future, which, appropriately enough, was published on his birthday. He was part of the Hampshire mob that I gravitated to in the early 1970s after my time at Winchester College. When we met, he was at Basingstoke Tech. He would regale me with stories of the bands he saw there, one of whom was Brewer’s Droop, an early prototype of Dire Straits:

“Sample of their lyrics: ‘I can see your pubic hairs’,” James confided to me with a gleeful twinkle in his lenses.

When I formed my art-school band in the autumn of 1972, he was there for most of the rehearsals, and would pick up my instrument in our tea breaks occasionally to try out the strange beast that guitars become when you amplify them.

He followed me up to Cambridge in 1974, and at the end of the decade I followed him down to London. In the early part of that stretch, he was part of the ad hoc bands I was in, performing at The Cambridge Folk Club in the Portland Arms, such as B.B.BlackBerry & The Swelterettes and The Worst Fears. His basso profundo croon and great height made him a striking figure onstage. “Ooh Bop Bop (I Wonder What You Got)” and “Mousy Daughter” were two of his first compositions that we performed. Soon he’d written enough to start his own outfit. “Rita’s Legs”, “I Love To Eat On British Rail”, and “Zip Zip” were three of his most popular numbers. However, my favourites were even more niche: “Michael, There’s A Fly In Your Sandwich”, a vigorous number which he would perform with Beverly and Stella, his backing singers, and “Where Did You Leave Them?” about a man whose friend has left a sack of potatoes in a phone booth, but he can’t remember which one.

James writes songs for the cognoscenti.

Ever a man with a roving ear, it was he who first drew my attention to two stars of the mid-70s Cambridge music scene, drummer Morris Windsor and guitarist Kimberley Rew. They eventually both became key figures in the Soft Boys.

On the morning of December 9, 1980, I turned on the radio to hear that John Lennon had just been shot dead by a creepy fan in New York. That evening saw James, our friend the wonderful music writer Tom Hibbert, and myself huddled with our pints and roll-ups in a pub at the top of the Archway Road, mourning John in alcoholic disbelief. The 1980s had been launched, well and truly.

The years ploughed mercilessly on, and the songs kept coming, for James and me both. Early in the decade, his new one “Dancing Nerves” was very popular in my household. After the Soft Boys dissolved in early 198I, I took advantage of James’ recording skills (he had a mysterious 3-track recording technique involving a reel-to-reel tape AND a cassette machine that were somehow linked up) to make demos of my songs at what became known as Smithsound Studios on the top floor of his flat on the Archway Road, just below the turning for Shepherds Hill. The roofs of the double-decker buses would rattle outside the window at times, but the traffic noise left little trace on the Smithsound tapes. A few of those recordings made it onto my albums too: “Dr Sticky”, “Blues In A”, “You’re So Repulsive”, “Melting Arthur” among them. They still sound great, I think. I was playing a heavy black Telecaster that James had bought in 1979. A few years later he sold it to me as I seemed to be playing it so much. It’s on most of my 1980s records and is still with me here in Nashville today.

In the summer of 1981, James lent his growling bass vocals to some of the tracks on the sessions in Central London that became my Groovy Decay album. He also furnished me with that title, while pointing out some fungal growth on a piece of wood in his back yard:

“Look at this - it’s like your songs: a kind of groovy decay!”

Thank you, sir - that’ll do nicely. I’m very much obliged…

Around that time James A. Smith became The Great One. It was the name of a character in Dr Who and it seemed a perfect nickname for my tall friend up the road. In 1981, the Great One - now working as a film researcher at Thames TV - went on holiday and met the love of his life, a Berlin artist named Bettina Schroeder. In 1982, Bettina moved to the UK and into the Archway Road flat where she set about creating her very individual combination of sculpture, painting and photography. She has genius hairstyles - black and white at one point, like an exotic chocolate cookie - and she wears striking outfits. Like James, she can turn her hand to visual art, music, or poetry. And, like him, she is one of a kind - they are two unique humans who have made room for each other in their own personal worlds.

James continued to come up with catchy songs that, like mine, might be hits in a parallel universe. “Gravity Takes Me By The Hand And Throws Me Down The Stairs” was one such gem from the mid-1980s. At a session in a barn in Sussex in 1983, I sang a version of his classic slice of suburban dismalia “The Party’s Only Just Begun” (sample of the lyrics: ‘Pretend to have a bop to Elton John/The music’s not the only thing that’s wrong/How can you call this fun?’) and he played monolithic drums on my song “Trash”.

In the mid-1980s, I began to tour the USA and drift away from North London. The Great One and Bettina became intermittent stars in my orbit, less frequently recurring neighbours. But we’ve stayed friends and meet up whenever I get back to town. It’s heartening to see them still a pair, weathering the hazards of time and life together. They are doyens of the experimental art/music/poetry world, in the tradition of the London and Berlin underground scenes of the 1960s and 70s.

James A. Smith has recently published a fine collection of poems, I Saw Michael Caine, and the album he made under the name The Beach Bullies, We Rule The Universe has also been re-released with bonus material.

Happy 71st, Great One!

Stars of Joy! My new video lands today - the first performance film I’ve done in years. It’s a tonic to watch and was a pleasure to make. Directed by my friend Scott Jacobson beside a pool in Los Angeles, it refracts the myriad directions and themes in the new single “Yesterday’s Rain” from my upcoming album The Confuser.

Confusion is the law here. Yesterday is always showering today with its consequences. Meanwhile, people boogie in and around the water; the sun (Maria Bamford) shines down and the pool cleaner (Eugene Mirman) stalks the perimeter narrowly missing me with his elongated scoop while I spout doomy couplets from my poolside seat. The Doomed Idiot (Dave Herman) wallows anxiously among the frolicking party folk, and the Fortune Teller (Emma Swift) sits at the end of the pool, with her cards and her grapes, awaiting customers.

In challenging times like these we owe it to ourselves to groove, profoundly if necessary. I think Scott and his crew have captured the mood of the song perfectly.

Micro-touches abound: the Doomed Idiot is dealt his card by the Fortune Teller, then she pulls the Crocodile On Skis. A balloon man drifts by on the pool while I stroke a ceramic Egyptian cat. I squint through a cone, and twirl a polka dot umbrella. A tortoise pads by, surprisingly fast. His name is Lance, by the way. And the pool cleaner is wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the motto ‘We Often Dream of Drains’: nice!

I hope you have as much fun watching it as we had making it. Emma and I would like to thank the following kind and wonderful people who helped create this video:

Director: Scott Jacobson
Editor/Compositing: Joe Lee
Director of Photography: Stephen Tringali
Producers: Rob Hatch-Miller, Puloma Basu
Animation: Renata Zeiguer
Titles/Props/Art Direction: Rebecca Schiffman
PA/Art Dept: Hannah Marinetti
B Camera Operator: Judy Phu
A Camera 1st AC: Alex Cason
B Camera 1st AC: Kelsey Juddo
Gaffer: Andrew L’Heureux
Key Grip: Gio Barot

Makeup: Danielle Haxton
Stills Photographer: Simone Tringali
Colorist: Logan Highlen

FX: Justin Sarceno

Cast: Robyn Hitchcock, , Maria Bamford, Eugene Mirman, David Herman, Diana Siegel, Caitlin Linden, Shawn Stoner, Michel Lichand, Jessica Hemingway, Danielle Haxton, Rebecca Schiffman, and Lance the Turtle

It’s 20 years ago today since my musical hero, Syd Barrett died.

Lately, I’ve been diving back into the primal ocean of Syd Barrett songs. They’re so encoded in my DNA that at times they feel like my own compositions: but, if anything, the reverse is true: they wrote me, effectively. And I absorbed every note, nuance and line of the three albums that he recorded (the first with Pink Floyd) before he disappeared into himself in the early 1970s, never to return.

Singing his songs now, I’m forced to confront how much I almost became Syd Barrett even as he vanished. It was spooky in a way, and I still don’t understand it: my search for a musical identity seemed to dovetail with Barrett discarding his handsome, talented Syd persona and becoming Roger, the reclusive former art student. Syd became vacant and I moved in. Or did he move into me?

More likely I was just an impressionable young musician with identity issues who fell into the thrall of a damaged genius, and the rest was projection in my part. Regardless, I still love Barrett’s songs. They gave me something to aim for and miss, but they raised the bar in the process and took me somewhere as a songwriter that I never imagined.

Below is a demo of ASTRONOMY DOMINÉ recorded in Nashville last week…

My June tour 2026 concluded in the broiling midsummer, as the earth tips once again towards Christmas. Here are some impressions of the shows we played on the concluding limb of the June excursion:

Ardmore Music Hall, Philadelphia PA

Jeremy Fetzer joins us for the next three shows. Jeremy plays guitar on my upcoming long-player, The Confuser. He’s a classy, precise Telecaster maven, as befits a graphic designer, which he is too. Tonight’s gig also has Rick Lollar on all the songs, making it something of a guitar thicket which might need pruning in places, but packing enough riff’n’spangle to puncture a blimp and send it whooshing back to Blimpsville.

White Eagle Hall, Jersey City NJ

Tonight’s venue is imperial - a grand stage that makes me wish I knew how to skateboard: the opportunities for movement are legion. Fetzer is on guitar from the top of the show - Rick joins us half-way through, allowing Fetzer to shine on maracas during The Shuffle Man. Thereafter it’s a TelecasterFest, but more focussed than the night before.

It’s also the night that the Knicks win the basketball Championship, so their home city of New York becomes a benign meltdown. Our bass-man M. Todd Bolden bounces a basketball onstage, then lobs it to a willing member of the audience. I don’t really speak sports but it’s wonderful to see people happy. There’s so many happy people in NYC tonight that we have to stay out of the bars and huddle in a hotel room for a late night cheese platter.

Brighton Music Hall, Boston MA

It takes us all day to drive up from NYC to Boston since that journey is always longer than you think. We stomp into the venue with our oblong blocks of amplification and merchandise, set up and soundcheck while the crowd gathers outside.

Emma Swift and her guitarist Rick Lollar open the show, as they have throughout this tour. Listening to them from the dressing room upstairs, they generate a spectral intensity that moves me to tears. The audience, too, sense they’re witnessing something special: the bar hubbub drops and rapturous applause bursts out after every song. The dynamic between Emma’s voice and Rick’s undulating guitar sound is exquisite, conjuring a sonic landscape I’ve never heard before. To my mind’s ear they suggest how Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix might have sounded together, if they’d made it past the fatal age of 27.

Emma and Rick set up the evening beautifully for the band section, which, as ever, is a blast. Walking through the crowd for the communal finale sing-along of Hymn Number 57 (“A Day In The Life”) I’m impressed by the length of the Boston crowds ‘DONNNG!’ at the climax of the song…

The Ram’s Head, Annapolis MD

Here we are back in Crab-Town as it’s sometimes known. My old friend Bob Waugh from radio stations WHFS and WRNR surfaces and we conduct a short interview in his car. It’s heartening to see Bob still out there broadcasting, just as I’m still wailing away onstage. These days much radio is recorded/transmitted from the DJ’s home, as I was reminded when I did a session for Alex Cortright of WTMD at his house this morning. It’s always great to be on the wireless - thank you, gentlemen.

The Ram’s Head is very much a sit-down supper-club venue but I like to think we’re rocking everybody’s digestive systems - in a good way, natch. I spent a lot of time in the Delmarva area at one point and always feel welcome there. It’s poignant when people come up and tell me about seeing shows I played in their area ages ago in venues now long-abandoned. I feel like a ghostly knight returning to a distant castle that looks the same, but all the locks have been changed.

The Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro NC

This venue has changed little since I first played there in the early 1990s with The Egyptians. Frank Heath still runs it, stoic and enduring; the room remains a classic mid-sized rock venue with professional, cool staff and sound people that get it right without being prompted. I know exactly where the pineapple chunks, tahini, apples and rest of our rider will be waiting for us when we arrive. The wooden partitions in the backstage area are just as they were when I was there with Sebadoh and the Flaming Lips in 1999, the Venus 3 ten years later, and Nick Lowe and Eugene Mirman a little after that. The train tracks still bisect the road a few yards along the street, and the Hampton Inn still sits patiently off the nearby parking lot if you need it.

It was heartening to see a bigger crowd at the Cat’s Cradle than usual. People seem to know the band is coming, and they come along too. They lurch and sway along with me - a few brave souls even dance. That’s way beyond my skill-set but I definitely appreciate it. Emma moves gracefully onstage when she joins us for the harmony section of the show - all I can do is loom and totter to reciprocate. Her voice and mine go well together though.

The Grey Eagle, Asheville NC

…and it’s a wrap for the van tour. Emma, Rick, Todd, Patrick and I unleash ourselves on the crowd one more time and celebrate by getting the rear right-hand wheel of the van stuck in a gulley as we zig-zag up an unexpectedly steep hill in the dark after the show, while Paul & Linda McCartney’s classic RAM blasts from the sound system. Thankfully the AAA dislodges the vehicle and we make it home to Nashville after a sadly short night in some hilltop accommodation.

The Arts Center, Lawrence KS

Where there’s a wrap, there’s an after-wrap. In this instance, the OG Confuser recording quartet - Todd on bass, Jeremy Fetzer on guitar, and Eric Slick on drums - convene for one final show this summer in the college town of Lawrence, where I last played in 1990. Back then, William Burroughs lived nearby. Sadly I didn’t run across him, but others did. Tonight we play a great show, I think; it’s long evening and by the end of it the beginning seems at the bottom of a deep well.

Prior to the band performance, I read from my first book 1967: How I Got There and Why I Never Left and do a Q&A with local writer John Harrison, who had attended the 1990 Lawrence gig. There’s one more audience member from that show present tonight, and afterwards he, John and I take a photo. I love to follow the tracks of time.

There’s no business like Classic Alternative Rock at point-blank range between consenting music lovers. Thank you to everyone who’s came along so far in 2026. There’ll be a few more rock-ass shows in North America later in the year and hopefully a slew more in 2027. My next big run of tour dates is the British Isles and continental Europe this autumn - yip-a-dang!

All photos in this post are courtesy of Chris Sikich, who attended the shows in Philly and New Jersey for Magnet Magazine. Onya, Chris!

I meant to post this three weeks ago, but touring life got ahead of me. Hopefully it gives you an impression of how this run of dates felt to me. More to follow shortly…

Good morning, dear reader,

I hope this finds you reading, and comfortable with it. It comes to you from Woodstock, upstate New York. It’s dark, being 3:48 am, and I am surrounded by wooden items that I can’t see but must be very careful not to smash into when I go back to bed. This pre-dawn field of consciousness is where I do most of my writing these days. Distractions are few in the dark.

My ears hum with the tinnitus that appeared in them a few years ago after a few flights over the Pacific with a sinus infection. This is compounded by the severe late-life rocking out that I’ve been doing lately.

The current limb of my ongoing North American tour comes after a run of dates in California last month, pivoting around the boutique Hipnic Festival in Big Sur, in the redwood forests through which meanders Highway 1. (Where is Highway Zero, I wonder: if it exists, could it be revisited?) Driving in the gloaming yesterday evening through the verdant canyons of trees that encase Woodstock gave me Big Sur flashbacks: both locations are sheltered colonies of artisanal groovers, sequestered on opposite coasts of this vast continent. As we’re further north here in Woodstock, the midsummer twilight is longer than in California. Being a twilight soul, a drawn-out dusk is my natural habitat. Dusk and mist: oh, the joys of uncertainty…

(A sudden footstep occurs all by itself, alone. A ghost? Goosebumps blossom up my spine. No other footsteps follow. This old wooden barn may or may not be haunted, but every sound at night is a shock up here in the quiet countryside.)

And there’s so many leaves: leaves everywhere! Last time I was here, just after Christmas, the whole place was carpeted with snow. That visit was to celebrate the 58th anniversary of Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding album, which I performed in its acoustic entirety at the Bearsville Theater. I return there with a band tomorrow, playing my own songs, live and electric.

This run of dates has brought us all the way up from Nashville in a rented black sprinter van, obligingly driven by those of us who can drive. Us on this run being Emma Swift on harmony vocals, opening the show, tour managing and wrangling the merch; her guitarist Rick Lollar on guitar (doing double duty as my guitar foil also), Todd Bolden on bass guitar and Patrick Berkery on drums. Here are my impressions of the dates so far:

Southgate House, Newport KY: Audience seated. Patrick the drummer has had the ordeal of taking off from Philadelphia Airport that morning only for his aircraft to return there after a few minutes aloft. He then has to hang around for 5 hours before finally jetting to Cincinnati just in time for the show. So his soundcheck is the gig itself. Patrick plays magnificently and we all triumphantly clatter through the old church in a sea of reverb.

Magic Bag, Detroit MI: Audience standing. People don’t dance to my songs - they never have, even when they were teenies back in the Smoke Age. Maybe because I don’t dance myself. But I do like to sway, and lurch - I’ve just never been nimble on my feet and am unlikely to develop hoofing skills at this point. So the crowd sway, lurch and bob up and down like gulls on the waves - all good and seasick. Thank you, folks!

Beachland Ballroom, Cleveland OH: Once again the crowd is standing. More bobbing and swaying, while I mainly lurch. The band is terrific - they give me momentum. The Beachland is an old Croatian community centre, opened in 1948 (the year Brian Eno was born). It has the perfect proportions and stage size that suited early rock’n’roll. Buddy Holly reputedly played one of his last shows there. It reminds me of the village halls in Great Britain where the Beatles performed in their pre-fame days.

(Grey dawn arrives. I shuffle back to bed, now able to distinguish the wooden obstacles and not ram into them. Yaysville! Bedside apples and water glass. Here comes sleep Part Two.)

(…and now here comes tomorrow…)

Sportsmen’s Bar, Buffalo NY: a sit-down gig, for an audience on two levels. There’s the folks at our feet, looking appreciatively up at us, and the balcony people upstairs, who gaze down at our foreheads. Their faces are coated in blue light. Rick Lollar and I exchange some non-shredded guitar licks which seem to please the crowd. American audiences encourage guitar solos/duels: in the UK the Punk/New Wave administration rather stamped that out. Or are Brits just harder to please? I should know - I am one.

Now here we are in Woodstock. A new dawn seeps into the sky and colours the forest. Deer emerge from the foliage and stalk across the narrow roads…

(To be continued…)

Dear reader,

I hope this finds you hydrated, irrigated and satiated to perfection as we glide over the solstice and the Earth tips the other way, spinning its way back to midwinter, up here in the northern hemisphere. This comes to you from outside of a supermarket in Nashville, where I’m fixin’ to buy some fizzy water and cat food - namely Fancy Feast, natch.

I’ve just spent the last few weeks rocking around north east America in a black van, stopping every few hundred miles to bombard smiling people with amplified beat music. My ears are hissing and my fingernails are tattered, but these shows have been a walking miracle. I’ve waxed rhapsodic a lot recently on social media about the joys of returning to rock performance full time in the USA - let the rhapsody roll on. It’s exhilarating and unhinged - a celebration of a kind, a sacrament almost. Thanks to EVERYONE who’s played with me on these shows over the last few months and to ALL who’ve attended them. We have one final gig this summer, at the Lawrence Kansas Library this Friday, June 26 - it’s sold out. More dates will be announced for the winter.

After that, I’ll be promoting my forthcoming book Stranded In The Future (out July 7) and fab new album The Confuser (out July 24). The book is a semi-fictional look back at my early attempts at a career; the record is that same career’s latest chapter. Early reactions to both have been positive: I hope you enjoy them both as much as I did creating them. I’ll be making book instore appearances at Rough Trade in NYC (July 24) talking with Simon Shaw, and Porter Square Books, Boston, MA (July 27) in conversation with Brett Milano.

Over the next few months I finally reach Norway, the British Isles, France, Germany and more Norway again (Yaysville!) before one-offs in Sweden, Denmark, Finland (my first visit in 32 years!) and Italy. I’ll be solo acoustic for most of these shows except the ones indicated, where I’ll have a full band. Here’s where we’ll be:

September 19 - St Leonards-on-Sea UK
September 23 - Cambridge UK (full band show)
September 24 - Ipswich UK
September 25 - Cardiff UK
September 26 - Manchester UK
September 27 - Gateshead UK
September 29 - Glasgow UK
October 1 - Belfast UK
October 2 - Dublin IRELAND
October 4 - Galway IRELAND
October 6 - Hebden Bridge UK (full band show)
October 7 - Reading UK (full band show)
October 8 - Bath UK (full band show)
October 9 - Twyford UK (full band show)
October 10 - London UK (full band show)
October 11 - Paris FRANCE
October 17 - Landsberg GERMANY
October 18 - Berlin GERMANY
October 20 - Bergen NORWAY
October 21 - Trondheim NORWAY
October 23 - Drammen NORWAY
October 24 - Randaberg NORWAY
October 25 - Oslo NORWAY
October 27 - Copenhagen DENMARK
October 28 - Stockholm SWEDEN
October 30 - Helsinki FINLAND

Tickets for all shows are available here.

With that I am diving into the aisle marked pet supplies. Happy Midsummer: may all your feasts be fancy!

Love on ya,

Mr H

P.S. The first three singles for the album are out now:

“I Am This Thing”
“My Dead Astronaut”
“How To Feel Alright”

Bob Dylan and the Beatles both peaked within a few months of each other, 60 years ago this summer. The psychedelic music eruption of 1967 grew largely out of their twin masterpieces from 1966: Revolver and Blonde on Blonde.

Both albums reached my teenage ears that autumn at the bizarre academy in southern England where I was an inmate in the late 1960s, and they’ve stayed in my head ever since. My ears, of course, were just one of millions of pairs of ears through which these albums percolated into the soul of modern music. The compositions in those black vinyl grooves tipped me over into becoming a songwriter, and are now the core of my musical DNA.

Today, June 20, Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde turns 60. Amazingly, Dylan himself continues to tour, a tough, impenetrable enigma who still occasionally unleashes interpretations of songs from the album that, to me and many others, marks his creative zenith. But the persona who created the smoky, surreal landscape of this extraordinary double-LP (the first in pop/rock history) is long discarded, another skin shed by the ever changing Inner Bob. Blonde on Blonde: is that a reverse acronym of his first name? His comment a few years later was: “It has to do with the word, but it was in good faith.” Hmmm.

Each of the two Blonde discs, to me, represents half of a world. Disc one sets the night-time mood: it feels like a party to which you’re forced to go, whether you want to or not. As the night proceeds, the clanging, relentless groove mood wears off into something deeper and sadder, while the party freaks come and go. Side 1 climaxes in a snow storm, where two people have a great deal of trouble communicating. On Side 2 there may be some glimpses of sunlight, though it doesn’t feel like anybody has got any sleep. Dylan is very adept at conjuring up dystopian scenarios which are nonetheless as beautiful as they are disturbing. The honky tonk lagoon, the stolen post office, the saviours who are fast asleep, the cheating doctor wearing a leopard-skin pillbox hat; they all parade before the mind’s eye, until the bittersweet finale on Side 2 depicting the woman with her fog, her amphetamine and her pearls.

All lovers are faithless in the Blonde on Blonde world, including the singer himself. Dylan cracks wise, like a hallucinatory Groucho Marx on “Pledging My Time”:

Everybody’s gone but me and you
And I can’t be the last to leave…

He continues in that vein on “Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine)”

You say you love me and you’re thinking of me
But you know you could be wrong

Side 3 follows on with more cynical observations, romantic entreaties and casual bombshells like this gem in “Absolutely Sweet Marie”:

To live outside the law you must be honest

One of the reasons this album creates such a compelling world to inhabit is the contradictory emotions it embodies. Many of the songs are as funny as they are sad - Dylan, a notorious kvetch, is celebrating even as he complains. And the record is peppered with some of his most direct appeals ever, all laced with the devotion of a chain-smoker as in “I Want You”:

I want you, I want you, I want you so bad

He can be playful, seductive, cruel, nihilistic, and philosophical all within a minute.

Side 4 brings the record to a grand conclusion that is another world within a world. “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” isn’t mean or funny - it’s a transcendent, heartbreaking love letter. I wonder if it’s Dylan’s farewell to whatever had sustained him through his career so far to bring him to this peak.

Who among them could ever think he could destroy you?

He almost sounds like a wistful hippie, amongst many other possible sub-personae. The song takes up one whole side of an LP. Outside of jazz or classical, nothing like that had happened before in commercial music.

The record stops, for my teenage pals and me burning incense sticks in the school library back in 1966. Three years later, one of my friends managed to sneak some LSD in and reported that lines like:

With your flesh like silk and your face like glass

…make total sense when you’re tripping. Yes indeed. Time to play it again.

In 2014, the record stopped once again, in a semi-derelict kitchen in Charles Darwin’s old home on the Isle of Wight, as I sit alone with an empty bottle of wine at 4am, watching the summer dawn seep through the tired curtains. Time to play it again.

Bob Dylan reached a climax with Blonde on Blonde and then disappeared for a long while. Since then, he has reappeared in many guises, and written many more aching songs. He’s still a majestic poet, though in concert he’s often indistinct and the lyrics are hard to grasp, like the elusive lovers he is so good at describing. When he was young, his performances reached out and grabbed you - like him or not, you couldn’t ignore him. These days you have to lean in to work out what he’s mumbling: “What that, Bob? I didn’t quite catch what you were singing there.”

He even creates new worlds, every so often: Blood on the Tracks, Time Out of Mind and Rough And Rowdy Ways are all self-contained masterpieces in their own way. Still, Blonde on Blonde remains the one I listen to the most. I know that we all have Our Own Personal Bobs, and there is no right or wrong in this matter.

Happy Birthday, B.O.B - here’s to the next 60!

P.S. I’m on tour at the moment, and this version of “I Want You” was recorded on the fly yesterday before our show at The Cat’s Cradle in Carrboro. The band and I are playing tonight at The Grey Eagle in Asheville. Like Mr Dylan, I remain in perpetual motion.

The Beatles were a mouth full of very talented teeth - it was only a matter of time before the rock’n’roll dentist had to remove them to make room for each other. One of the ways Paul McCartney crowded out his bandmates was by being able to play all their instruments as well as, if not better than, they could. Not only was he the most adept bass player, guitarist and keyboard player of the quartet, but he was - and still is - a great drummer. And as for his songs, it was almost like they came to him too easily. But if his words sometimes seem glib, his melodic genius can’t be denied.

Here are three personal favourites of mine that I’m listening to as he turns 84. Everyone will have their own personal Macca Top 3, and I’m not claiming that these are his best, but I do return to them over and over again…

THINGS WE SAID TODAY

I was 11 years old when I first heard this. I had fallen in love for the first time the year before at the ripe old age of 10, and, of course, it had gone badly. My love was returned, but not for long. Still, I fell in love easily, and was sustained by sporadic crushes on older girls, often around 18 or 19. As they did for millions of youngsters around the world in 1964, the Beatles dominated my emotional and psychic landscape. I didn’t really differentiate between them: Beatle Paul was just another facet of Beatle John, and their brothers George and Ringo.

“Things We Said Today” gave me the special chills, though: it projected feelings of lost love and love regained into my young head. It felt - and still feels, a lifetime later - incredibly romantic. I could picture myself singing it to my own lost love from the year before, or to the big girls who would sometimes cuddle me - as their little brother figure, no doubt. I just loved to be enfolded by women, to be engulfed by them. This Beatles song embodied all the feelings I wanted to have. “Love me all the time, girl - we’ll go on and on”.

Years later, as a musician, I realised that the transition from the minor-key verse to the major-key middle section helped give the song its triumphant momentum. “Me, I’m just the lucky kind…” indeed. If only…

YOU NEVER GIVE ME YOUR MONEY

When this track was released on Abbey Road five years later, the landscape was very different, for everybody. I was now a 16-year-old groover in training, wanting to grow my hair, write songs and get stoned. These were ambitions I shared with hundreds of thousands of other teenagers, of course. We all just wanted to go where the Beatles had gone.

When the Fabs recorded “Things We Said Today” in 1964, their songs still had a very limited vocabulary. Listening to Bob Dylan, and later that year, smoking his weed in a New York hotel room with him changed all that for them drastically. McCartney’s butterfly mind began composing songs with different movements, and fragmented narratives that could be interpreted in different ways. When my schoolfriends and I first heard this song in the autumn of 1969, none of us knew it was triggered by the Beatles financial collapse and the appearance of the dodgy Allen Klein in the heart of their stricken Apple Corps. The line “Oh that magic feeling - nowhere to go” did sound an ominous note for the end of the decade, however. I could sense that 1970 was only going to take us all further away from the cosy elysium of 1967. It seemed like Paul McCartney, too, could sense we were going the wrong way.

Paul’s piano and bass are high in the mix on this track, and of course they’re brilliant. I suspect he had a hands on at least one of the electric guitars, too. George gets in some gorgeous chiming arpeggios though, and John’s chant at the end of ‘“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven/All good children” is eerie in the light of what befell him.

To me this track is the terminal Fabs at their best.

LET ‘EM IN

Seven years further on it’s 1976. I’ve grown my hair and a beard, cut them off again, got stoned and switched to Guinness, and written (and discarded) hundreds of fledgling songs. Paul McCartney, by contrast, has shed his old bandmates is enjoying a whole second slice of his career as the leader of Wings.

“Let ‘Em In” was a hit back then but didn’t strike me particularly. It’s only watching him perform.

It in concert - I’ve seen Sir Paul three times in the last 10 years - that it’s really taken root in my mind. The intriguing piano chords vary over a single-note bass, and the tune takes a very long time to change down into the chorus, but when it finally does, it’s perfect. “Sister Suzy, Brother John, Martin Luther, Phil and Don” form a parade of the living and the dead entering the McCartney sanctum. It feels poignant to me, as if these are all departed souls coming through to take a bow on the way to eternity.

A whistling riff is also dropped in neatly over the monotonous bass. McCartney is a genius at keeping things simple and elaborate at the same time. Ideas seem to grow out of his head like tropical ferns.

In some ways his lyrics are as unfathomable as Bob Dylan’s. I could imagine Dylan croaking his way through this and making it sound intensely significant. McCartney doesn’t like to get heavy on his listeners, he seems happy to let his songs glide by and entertain. But watching him and his band perform this song live is very moving, and I recommend it to anyone who can invest in a ticket.

Those are three of mine: what are yours?

Happy birthday, Sir Paul, rock on forever!