Simon Cosyns

IN the weeks before we lost The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson on June 11 last year, he had two special visitors. They were the group’s surviving founder members, his first cousin Mike Love, and hi…

JASON ISBELL is a song writer’s song writer. You can tell by the company he keeps. He’ll never forget the moment some years ago when he heard a certain person singing one of his choruses back to hi…

WHO can blame Paul McCartney for glancing in the rear-view mirror on his latest record? At 83, the likely lad from Liverpool, who became a Beatle and Britain’s best-loved songwriter…

“I’M still the same person as the 15-year-old me,” decides Blur guitarist Graham Coxon. “Still a romantic idiot, still reasonably innocent — and I think that’s a healthy way to be,” he continues. “…

THE word “splat” has been on Ian Gillan’s mind for a few years now. To him, it is a word to conjure with, one to fuel his wild flights of imagination. To most of us, it summons visions of insects h…

THE Rolling Stones and Amy Winehouse — somehow it was a match made it heaven. On June 10, 2007, the original rock and roll miscreants invited the supremely gifted but wayward singer on stage at the…

“HE just has that youthful energy,” says Ronnie Wood of his Rolling Stones bandmate Mick Jagger. It’s not a term often used to describe someone in their Eighties but, in this case, entirely accurat…

ON the same day as the 2022 World Cup final, England lost one of its most beloved singers – Terry Hall of The Specials. “Terry passed away right after the game,” recalls his bandmate an…

JULY 23, 2011, was one of those days when most of us remember where we were. It was the day Amy Winehouse died. In my case, it was a music festival in Gateshead on the banks of the river Tyne. The …

YOU can take the man out of Texas – but you can’t take Texas out of the man. Like so many singer-songwriters from the Lone Star State, Rodney Crowell headed to Nashville, Tennessee, to make his way…