Watching - September 2025

The Hard Way (1991)

Not a film often mentioned in discussions of Michael J. Fox's career, I think, which is a shame because it's good - not a classic, but deserving of being remembered, at least. He's great as a spoiled brat of a film star (having a tantrum about wanting to be treated like an adult is hilarious) and if there are a few too many trademark Fox pratfalls, well, that's what he does. James Woods is also good as the "real" cop - although of course, it makes you start questioning what he did to get the performance right! Recommended  - I ended up buying a secondhand DVD because it cost about the same as renting it on Prime or whatever.

He Said, She Said (1991)

Another film I remembered fondly, having not seen it for a long, long time (and coincidentally, from the same year). The dual perspectives results in a fun format and one that would stand revisiting today - even though there are plenty of things that date the film, not least some of the sexual politics, the core story holds up. Elizabeth Perkins is particularly good, subtlely changing her performance to suit the two perspectives. Rather sweetly, the two halves were directed by a man and a woman respectively, who later married.

The Trip (2010)

Long before David Tennant and Michael Sheen played fictionalised versions of themselves in Staged, Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon did the same in The Trip. And if Tennant and Sheen were willing to come across as overgrown children in the name of comedy, then what's perhaps more remarkable here is that Coogan is prepared to portray himself as a vain, touchy, womanising and ultimately somewhat lonely man. Without the distance that a character with a different name gives, that strikes me as quite brave. I'm not sure it makes for particularly good comedy though; the show is easy to admire but hard to love. Worth watching, though.

The King's Speech (2010)

I first watched this at the Filmhouse in Edinburgh with my long-time colleagues Graham and Richard. We all loved it, but I don't remember being as moved by the ending as I am now for some reason. Perhaps I've become more emotional as I've aged, or possibly I'm just a soppy old git now. Still, it's a lovely film.

Cousins (1989)

One of my long-time favourite films. As is often the case, I find myself agreeing with Roger Ebert's spot-on review; this isn't realistic, but it doesn't matter because it's a touching celebration of love, and because Isabella Rossellini conveys such a convincing range of emotions and sweetness that it's easier to ignore the fact that in real life this whole thing would be a horrible mess.

Ocean's Eleven (2001)

Good, clean, escapist fun. George Clooney makes it easy looking smooth even when he's obviously doing something slightly questionable.

Ant-Man (2015)

I just fancied something with Paul Rudd in it, as he has a great, everyman quality (similar to John Cusack, I'd say) that makes watching him great fun. Oddly, Ant-Man's director Peyton Reed has compared Rudd's character in this film with Clooney's in Ocean's Eleven, although I only found this out after I'd seen them both!

Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

Another choice because I hadn't seen it since - well, probably since it came out. Lots of fun action, occasional humour, bad guy gets killed, all that good stuff. Visually amazing of course, and the rate that the MCU was churning films out at this point was incredible, but fairly simple plot-wise. A good watch though.

Reading - September 2025

Small Inventions That Made a Big Difference by Helen Pilcher (2021)

A series of short essays - what would have been newspaper columns, in a different context - about unconsidered but influential items and how they came to be. The subjects range from paper clips to pacemakers, so the criteria used for selection are fairly fluid. Interesting but inessential reading, and somewhat bitty.

Daydream by Hannah Grace (2024)

Second time reading this in about three months, mainly because I'd since read the previous two Hannah Grace books and although this works standalone, it makes a bit more sense as a follow-on from them. Plus it's a really sweet romance and I just liked the characters!

Guitar by Earl Slick with Jeff Slate (2024)

As the selected discography at the back of the book shows, Earl Slick has worked with a bunch of famous and lesser-known musicians, but all of those fade into insignificance compared to the central creative relationship of his life, that with David Bowie. Slick played more times with Bowie than I'd realised, over 40 years, and unsurprisingly the book is mostly about this. Slick's a real rock'n'roll original and although he says he never considered a different life, you get a sense of how precarious it could be at times. It's an easy read, with some interesting titbits about working as side man Bowie and also with John Lennon, but I didn't get as much of a sense of the man behind the guitar as I did with, say, Steve Lukather's autobiography.

It Just Occurred to Me ... The Reminiscences and Thoughts of Chairman Humph by Humphrey Lyttleton (2006)

A slight but rambling book, being a very loosely connected series of anecdotes, memories and thoughts from a legendary figure in British jazz and radio. In fairness, the title tells you exactly what you're getting, and perhaps the more complete life story is in one of his other eight books. It's entertaining enough - and I learned more about him than I knew before - but a bit disjointed and somewhat unfulfilling. Much of the material is covered in his Desert Island Discs appearance, from the same year, and it's nice to hear him talk, so I'd recommend that over the book.

Check & Mate by Ali Hazelwood (2023)

Apparently this is more of a YA novel, which might explain why it's a bit less spicy than some of her others that I've read. But in fact that just allows for more story, and I enjoyed what was there, even though it doesn't feel particularly realistic (the main male character is too perfect) - although in fairness I thought it was ridiculous that the chess World Champion would be 20, when in fact the current World Champion was 18 when he won, so what do I know.

The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood (2021)

This is where the Ali Hazelwood phenom started then. If the initial setup is a little unlikely - although it's no worse than other romcom meet-cutes I suppose - the gradual development of the central relationship from pretend into a real one is believable and emotionally satisfying. Highly readable and very enjoyable.

How I Escaped My Certain Fate by Stewart Lee (2010)

I read this about fourteen years ago and enjoyed it, so the discovery of a copy in a charity shop prompted me to do so again. Still very funny in places, but having seen Lee perform in the mean time, I can see what it loses on the page. He's a very Marmite comedian (who would, no doubt, have something suitably trenchant and acerbic to say about the use of the popular yeast extract as a metaphor for "some people think he's shit") but I think he's great.

Let's Make a Scene by Laura Wood (2025)

From the cover and the blurb, I was expecting this to be a straightforward enemies-to-lovers romance. After a couple of chapters, it seemed obvious that it was actually a fake-dating story (my second this month!). And then, half way through, it turned out to be kind of both and kind of neither, but a really nice mix of those plus a couple of other romance tropes thrown in for good measure, all assembled with more emotional depth than I expected and a really satisfying story development.

The Price of Money by Rob Dix (2022)

A great primer on how the money system works, including why inflation happens and why governments deliberately cause it, what that means for everything else and finally some suggestions about how one might mitigate its effects. Short, chattily and engagingly written - highly recommended.

The Trading Game by Gary Stevenson (2024)

One man's story of his journey into the utter madness of trading in the money markets (probably the wrong term, technically) and of his discovery of a conscience after making millions betting on the world's economy continuing to get worse. Compelling reading, but the combination of this and The Price of Money is somewhat sobering: clearly, no-one actually knows how the current state of capitalism will end up, nor how to control it or the forces that are making it worse - let alone get the actual problems in the world (water scarcity, global warming, inequality, you know, little things like that) attended to.

Pedal Power 2025

Blimey, it's been over three years since I last surveyed my kingdom of effects pedals. I've been chopping and changing a lot, and of course, any pedal set up is ultimately completely dependent on the amp, speaker and cab they're running through, and it's taken me a while to properly realise this. It's only now that I have an amp and cab I'm really happy with. As such, it makes sense to talk about them first.

For some reason that I can no longer recall, about two years ago I got a bee in my bonnet about solid state amps. Valves amps sound great, but they are problematic - power hungry, hot, delicate and expensive. And despite the vast amounts of bullshit spouted about the supposed magical qualities of valves, there are a few people trying to promote the idea that a well designed analogue circuit - so not digital modelling - can achieve the same results and not just be for cheap practice amps.

The long-standing king of solid state is the Peavey Bandit, which has been gaining more respect over the years, and Orange have their Super Crush amps that are very well regarded. And around this time I started hearing more about Quilter amps, and it turned out that they'd recently released a smaller amp.

And so it was that I ended up buying - new! - a Quilter Superblock US, which, despite its size, is a 25W amp. Around the same time, I decided I should have a decent cab and so ordered a Fat Baby 1x12 from the excellent and super-helpful folks at Zilla in Cornwall. As you can see from the picture, the contrast between the tiny amp and the somewhat oversized cab is quite striking! The combination sounds fantastic: the base Superblock US sound is Fender-based, so the cleans are lovely, and when pushed with a drive pedal, it really rocks.

With the core sound established, I re-examined my pedal board. I already had plenty of options, so it wasn't a case of throwing everything out and starting again, just identifying what worked well. For a while, I went minimal: just two pedals and the amp, and in fact the Blackstar boost shown here wasn't really necessary, because the Line 6 HX Stomp provides a comedically over-comprehensive set of options. It's wired so that the signal goes into the Stomp, then the Superblock's pre-amp is in the loop of the Stomp, and then the Stomp is in the loop of the Superblock. The upshot is that I can use the Quilter's pre-amp or bypass it and use a Line 6 amp model, and choose which (modelled) effects go before and after each.

This provided an incredibly wide range of different sounds, what with something like fifty different amp models and several hundred effects to choose from. But I realised after a while that I wasn't really happy with any of the sounds; I'd spend more time fiddling with options than just getting lost in the music. I'm not sure if that's because I know there's always another thing to try, or because I just didn't like what I was hearing, not that I could tell you what it was I didn't like. So I retired the HX Stomp for now and tried again.

Going back to individual pedals has been a bit of a relief, surprisingly - there's a lot less range, but what there is sounds really good. Also, the Pedaltrain fits nicely on top of the cab, so I can either just leave it there or put it on the floor when I play.

The pedals then, in signal order:

Digitech Freqout

This is a brilliant pedal that I've had for a while, but hasn't been on any board I've documented for some reason. All it does - brilliantly - is mimic the sound of a guitar edging into feedback. It's a sound I love and it's hard not to over-use it. It has to be first in the chain in order to get the cleanest sound.

Cry Baby Mini (CBM95)

Some people find this version of the Cry Baby too small, but I don't mind.

Fredric Effects King of Klone

What's better than one Klon Centaur-alike? Two! A staple of my boards for a while now

Blackstar Dept. 10 Boost

I bought a lot of pedals over the last ten years, but none for about a year, and this last one. It was shown on (YouTube channel) TPS and compared favourably to a (much more expensive) Kingsley pedal on the guitar forum. When I found out Blackstar were selling an ostensibly £190 pedal direct on Reverb for £99 (they still are, actually), well, I couldn't resist. It's not a clean boost, but it's a lot flatter (depending on the EQ settings) than the Klone, and adds a nice crunch to any sound. And so, having said I wanted to avoid valve amps, I've ended up with a valve on the board anyway!

Tech 21 Double Drive

An old favourite now, very versatile. Sounds particularly good when boosted by either the Klone or the Dept. 10.

Strymon Ola

I fancied a decent chorus and when this came up secondhand, and knowing the quality of the Strymon stuff - I've had five of their pedals at various times - it was a done deal. The Ola isn't one of their more celebrated pedals and it's a bit of a one-trick pony (a bit like the DIG) but it sounds superb - well up to an Analogman Chorus I A/B'd it with.

BOSS GE-7 (modded)

A fantastic utility pedal. After this, we go into the Superblock's input, and then out of the effects loop into the ...

Strymon Brigadier

I've had (and still have) analogue bucket brigade delays, but this is a better all-round pedal. Sounds gorgeous. Strymon recently released the Brig, which supposedly has reworked algorithms, but I can't hear much of a difference.

Neunaber Immerse (mk 2)

I've not even considered another reverb pedal since I got this (blimey) over four years ago. Interestingly, Quilter recently bought Neunaber, which makes me wonder whether the excellent reverb in the Superblock is theirs.

TC Electronics Ditto+

A great little looper.

The little shaving cream tin on the board holds picks and a tuner - the traditional/cliché utensil for this is an Altoids tin but I have several of these spare. Do these need to be on the board? Debatable. But it keeps it all together.