This was never intended to be a blog. My original intention was to archive some of the lyrics that I’ve written over the years, most of which now only exist on scraps of paper, or don’t physically exist at all other than on recorded studio tracks. It was as I was listening to old songs and jotting down half-remembered lyrics that I decided to add photographs of the musicians that have defined my musical life.

It was only then that I thought that, as I already do a photography blog, perhaps I could do one about music. From my mid-teens and well into my twenties I bought the three weekly rock papers; the New Musical Express, Sounds and the Melody Maker and pored through every article and review as, no doubt, did the near on quarter of a million of my fellow readers. The views and reviews of journalists such as Nick Kent and Charles Shaar Murray were hugely influential on so many of us and, as a teenage diarist, it was a part of my future ambition to do what they did.

So, and as I’ve just passed my sixty-fifth birthday, when my father’s generation would have been starting to contemplate old-age, I find myself playing in four bands full of amazing musicians and enjoying my musical world more than ever. I also have a lifetime of views and opinions about bands and music as well as the history and historiography of music that I’m happy to bore the backsides off anyone who’s interested in reading them

Historiography will be central to my first proper blog because I have a problem with Punk…