KazG

One week left for the March comp, with one excellent entry as yet.

Wow, that’s not far from me at all. Half an hour by car. A pilgrimmage might be in order

That’s probably one reason it was chosen as a refuge for the band. And yes, it does sound worth a visit.

If you’re curious, this page has a photo of the house as it was when the band was there, though it appears to have been taken from the back garden. A click will blow it up.

Libby said:

Thanks, Richard. Have you been to Farley Chamberlayne? It’s worth a trip for anyone in the area. I can’t remember what the house looks like, and the internet isn’t obliging, but FC is a deserted medieval village with a pretty church. It feels remote and wild despite close proximity to Winchester.

R

Libby said:

Thank you for the blog, Richard.
A school friend was a fan of Fairport and Denny. I enjoyed listening but not enough to keep up an interest after school. Was the house in Hampshire Headley ?Grange. Led Zep recorded there. I still listen to them occasionally but after I left school I switched to classical and have stayed there ever…[Read more]

@bellam, perhaps you can help me. I remember as a child hearing about a pirate radio ship that had been caught in a storm and had to put into Harwich, when it was impounded. I was there with my Mum and she pointed it out to me. I just remember a small, red ship. This was in the mid 1980s. I can’t find any references to it. I know we still had…[Read more]

You brought back so many memories Richard. Begging for my own radio so I could listen to Radio Luxembourg at night. Was the Power Play a RL thing? Anyway thanks for the chance to remember my youth!

I don’t think that parallel had occurred to me until I heard it pointed out by Ashley Hutchings himself. I recently found a video on YouTube of the song being performed at Cropredy, I think about five years ago, and before they begin Hutchings chats about how they discovered and recorded the song, ending with, ‘It was to take on a new meaning…[Read more]

Lovely, elegiac blog, Richard. I don’t think I realised how hard it could be to access pop music, especially anything out of the mainstream, until the late 60s.

As you know, Fairport is one of my favourite bands as well. I’d never heard the live version of Percy’s Song but just listened to it, and I know what you mean – both versions have…[Read more]

Interesting to see this pop up again – thanks for those podcasts Libby, looks interesting – and it has sort of kicked a thought into the foreground.

As a writer, my books *are* me (when it comes to fiction, that is). They are fragments of my being that I have extracted and slapped down on paper. I find it impossible to conceive of someone who…[Read more]

Publishers vary a lot in terms of the extent they will consult and take account of author suggestions. Mine have ranged from asking me for examples of covers I like and making changes to the design at my behest, to not even showing me the cover until the book is published. In the middle was making some changes to a first iteration, showing a…[Read more]

With crime fiction, it seems that the ‘THIS IS WHAT THIS IS signifier is a silhouetted man walking down a tunnel or over a bridge or along a lonely road BUT IT IS ALWAYS THE SAME BLINKING MAN!!! and I wonder authors don’t put their foot down. Even more so when I see what can be done by a small company with ‘This is our undoing’

It’s a great cover because it hints at characters and themes and atmosphere enough to give a sense of the book, without doing so too overtly

@Daedalus, that’s so unutterably awful it’s tipped all the way over into wonderful!

@libby, @athelstone, thank you. I’m delighted with my foxy. 🙂

I think you’re right in that figures are often used as a massive ‘THIS IS WHAT THIS BOOK IS’ flag, like for bodice rippers or YA urban romantic fantasy, or twee historical rags-to-riches stories.…[Read more]

So. Many. Ways. That’s horrifying.