Steve Bewick presents A VIRTUALLY REAL FESTIVAL Reviewed by Norman Warwick ´I´ve got so many treats in store, I´m gonna leave you beggin´ for more´ would have sounded enticing even on a poster for the Ribble Jazz And Blues Festival that should have taken place in the UK over the May Bank Holiday, but when […]
Norman Warwick looks at LINES FROM THE LOCKDOWN collated by Eileen Earnshaw Writing on our sister all across the arts page in The Rochdale Observer of Wednesday 13th May, Eileen Earnshaw, (seen far left with Shirley Anne Kennedy) a colleague of mine when I lived and worked in the UK, said that the lockdown has […]
LIVING AND BREATHING LANZAROTE ARTS Not surprisingly, this beautiful place with its vibrant colours and its strange sense of timelessness has produced many artists throughout its history and their work has been incorporated into the very structure of the island. Stop in it any little church and you are likely to find the religious iconography […]
COSTELLO by Andrew Moorhouse Late in 1978 a pal brought a new LP into the house for us to listen to. The cover showed a geeky looking guy in a charity shop suit and polka dot shirt behind a fancy camera on a tripod. The image says that he’s looking at you, he’s not asking […]
FAIRGROUND ATTRACTION WAS PERFECT by Norman Warwick It was a few weeks before we were all locked in and locked up in the lockdown. We had left the house at nine p.m. at night, for a quick trip into town, but in some ways found ourselves heading all the way back to the future ! […]
FREAKS, FROLICS AND FADING BLUES by Michael Higgins Norman Warwick’s recent article on the University Of Leeds dialect survey (Sidetracks and Detours 30 April 2020) and his brief mention of my role (chairman) in the Edwin Waugh Dialect Society has reignited something from my own past, not only of dialect but of voice and the […]
WE ARE VIRTUALLY THERE Before presenting his ´virtual´ Ribble Vallay Jazz And Blues programmes when the Festival was cancelled, Steve Bewick actually used these Sidetracks And Detours pages for a kind of triall run, and so he and I spent a fortnight or so swapping e mails and facebook messages putting together an article called […]
FINE LINES FOR FINE PRESS POETRY By Andrew Moorhouse I’ve been a bibliophile for as long as I can remember. My face, and mind, buried in books. I was a collector too; stamps in my early years then, as a teenager, the autographs of footballers and cricketers, then records and, all the while, books. If […]
MAN OF GLASS – A NOVEL FOR OUR TIMES It was only five years ago, in retirement, that Andrea took up creative writing at Open University. Shortly after subsequently joining Touchstones Creative Writing Group (TCWG) she contributed prose and poetry to a Rochdale Co-Operative initiative anthologising new work commemorating the centenary of the battle of […]
KING KONG A GIANT OF A JAZZ OPERA by Steve Bewick One of the most famous movies ever made, involving a big ape being transported to New York from an obscure island, was called King Kong and carried indelible images of the havoc wrought by the fictional creature. However, I recently came across a work […]
SIDETRACKS & DETOURS: 7 / 12 / 25 classical, jazz, folk, rock, americana; songwriters & invisible angels7th December 2025 - 7:00 am
SIDETRACKS & DETOURS Pass It On 2/11/2025 Jenny Bray, Nash and Asher, Opus 222nd November 2025 - 7:00 am
A LITTLE BUNDLE OF SUMMER. sidetracks & detours 3rd September 2025 featuring Jazz Artist, Jenny Bray. Broadcaster and writer, Steve Bewick, Expo Folk and Sound Roots3rd September 2025 - 7:00 am