Author Archives: pateswritings
This review was initially slated to appear online at the beginning of the year. Other commitments got in the way and it got pushed back. I later started writing it for my general blog ‘Postings From An Edge’, but ended … Continue reading →
Back in my twenties, once I realised that I wasn’t going to make a living as a pop star, I scaled back my ambitions to making sure that I created my first album before I reached thirty. I finished work … Continue reading →
Back in 2004 and with the London march against the invasion of Iraq still fresh in my mind, I made an approach to UK music organisation Peace Not War (PNW), to offer them a track for their then pending ‘Volume … Continue reading →
‘Second Hand Sunshine’, a title that popped up one day in search of a song, was written as a global warming song. It’s not a subject that seems to have been tackled a great deal yet by songwriters, so it … Continue reading →
I was born in Brighton, a seaside town on the South coast of England. Despite this beginning and several later visits to then-still-resident grandparents, I grew up getting to know an entirely different place – Cardiff, the city I got … Con…
Reading Eric Schlosser’s ‘Fast Food Nation‘ a number of years ago, I was quite struck to find out that many of the smells of American fast food are actually manufactured in large plants off the New Jersey Turnpike and then … Con…
An early attempt at a political song with Shelf Life and our first original song written together. ‘Vonnegut’s Blues’ was written as a (loosely disguised) diatribe about the Bush administration, inspired by a piece written by the late…
Living in Tokyo for almost five years was a major and transformative period in my life. The city inspired me in so many ways and, perhaps bizarrely for a place that is considered so impenetrable for most non-Japanese people, opened … Continue rea…
The best way to get from the heart of Tokyo to the main international airport is by the Narita Express, the smooth-as-glass train that glides through the concrete cityscape to break into the open countryside and paddy fields of Chiba … Continue r…
I’ve never counted how many gigs and live shows I’ve been to in my life, but it could easily run into four figures. The very first one I remember was at the tender age of 15, seeing a band called … Continue reading →
