FOOD FESTIVAL & A TASTE OF THE FUTURE The Annual Festival Enogastronomy Saborea Lanzarote: 2019 A gastronomical event was always included as part of the annual Rochdale Feel Good arts and cultural Festival in the years I spent covering it for all across the arts in The Rochdale Observer. Robin Parker and myself were jointly […]
ALL ART HAS ITS PLACE Greater love hath no man for his readers than to write an article when he could have been exploring his local landscape to catch glimpses of Angelina Jolie (pictured above). This week she and her co-stars, Salma Hayek, Richard Madden and Rob Stark, have been filming on Fuerteventura and Tenerife, […]
LENDANEAR: NOW AND THEN I fell in love with poetry through listening to the lyrics of old songs my dad would sing as he drove the family on weekend trips throughout my childhood such as On The Street Where You Live, Unforgettable and A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square. In one of my early jobs […]
SARA DEL SALINAS I have no idea if the Spanish have a phrase that is in any way equivalent in meaning or nuance to the English idiomatic saying of ´take it with a pinch of salt.´ In fact, when I first pondered the appropriateness of the phrase for this article, I realised I wasn´t even […]
HOW WE GOT HERE FROM THERE I spent the first half of what I laughingly call my ´career´ in the UK, writing songs with my musical partner Colin Lever. Calling ourselves Lendanear we played the folk circuit in the North West of England and recorded three folksy / country-ish contemporary albums. We wrote about fifty […]
OLDHAM BAND (LEES) LIVE AND ON C.D. Editor´s Notes. Any of our readers who have been following the Oldham Band (Lees) on http://www.oldhamband.co.uk/ will be aware that they have recently been attaching achievements to their ambitions. These musicians have recently been recording in St. Thomas Parish Church in Stockport, and even since then have worked […]
ARTS AND POLITICS: THE ODD COUPLE With the UK holding an election in December that, even if the parties each try to address social issues, will inevitably be about Brexit and November 10th the date of a general election being held in Spain and across The Canary Islands after a spate of ´hung´ results recently, […]
CHESTNUTS AND OLD SPANISH CUSTOMS All Saints Day in Spain (Todos Los Santos) takes place on November 1st. It is a very important national public holiday throughout Spain, when people, from all over the country, return to their town or village to lay flowers on the graves of deceased relatives. There are few religious days […]
SING MISS MELODY, SING A recent enquiry led us down new Sidetracks and Detours and gave us this idea for this new post. It also took me hurtling back in time all across the arts to the days when afternoons in Manchester city centre were peopled by someone at every street corner yelling out headlines, […]
TO THE BEGINNING AND BACK AGAIN How does one write the Divine? St John the Divine may have shown us the way in the fourth Gospel with his timeless phrase ‘In the beginning was the Word’ but how do we write the word in a world of seeming unbelief or disregard for formal religion and […]
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