It does not speed through our darker towns
swerving round the fallen, past the crowds.
It is the service of the outstretched hand,
the conversation, the trying to understand.
Wednesday 24 April 2024
Frank Field – d. April 23rd 2024
It does not speed through our darker towns
swerving round the fallen, past the crowds.
It is the service of the outstretched hand,
the conversation, the trying to understand.
Derek Underwood – d. April 15th 2024
line and length day after day; others deceive
with variation, changes of pace and angle,
occasional days that skid through fast,
that you can only stand up and applaud.
Peter Higgs – d. April 8th 2024
its mass in excess of what is visible,
its meaning opaque, intangible.
Most of us exist and die, illegible
and void. Others are indelible,
named by every atom, irreducible.
Clarence ‘Frogman’ Henry – d. April 7th 2024
and making it big is the biggest joke,
but a bluesman’s a bluesman right to the end,
and life’s hard, and then you croak.
Friday 5 April 2024
Keith LeBlanc – d. April 2024
an orchestra, a symphony of drums,
super-heavy, hi-hat like a ticking bomb,
paranoid snare and depth-charge toms,
kick-drum beating rebellion in sixteenths,
no compromise, no sell-out, no relief.
Chris Cross – d. March 25th 2024
to an Eden of our own; yours
will be lush and romantic, bass
amped up and folded back until
it becomes a hymn to lost youth.
Steve Harley – d. March 17th 2024
I heard that glimmer of guitar, a six-string
smile, riffing like a wink. Song devises codes
of joy; you broke every one, over and over.
Karl Wallinger – d. March 10th 2024
shouting their own names,
angry, but with no solutions.
Others wear different skin,
turn inertia into flames,
kindle private revolutions.
Eric Carmen – d. March 2024
usually too long,
torn between the loud and the lush,
and always too much.
You sang anguish into a soft spell
all by yourself,
and when I dial you on the telephone
nobody’s home.
Tony Green – d. March 4th 2024
In Two! The only colours; black and red.
In Three! The working man and his pleasures.
And Bully’s Special Prize! The drama of small measures.
Friday 1 March 2024
Dave Myers – d. February 28th 2024
to room temperature in the old kitchen.
In the yard a motorcycle clicks as it cools.
I hear laughter like the clink of cutlery,
and I set a place at the table for one.
Alan Brownjohn – d. February 23rd 2024
your old shirt cuffs ironed to a shine.
We are all in a sonnet for the unlucky,
far from who we want to be, known
only to ourselves and those who mine,
like you, the language of subtlety.
Tuesday 27 February 2024
Stan Bowles – d. February 24th 2024
defiant, playing impudent one-twos
with two fingers in the air,
a betting slip and a phone number
hidden in their wrinkled sock.
Pamela Salem – d. February 21st 2024
of childhood; serpentine, seductive,
waiting around the corner in a place
where television was a two-way mirror,
and yearning was love without a script.
John Savident – d. February 21st 2024
Scotch & Threat and hearty laughter,
a slug of pain for a luckless lover.
Life is large, but you were larger.
Thursday 22 February 2024
Ewen MacIntosh – d. February 19th 2024
The empty man at the empty desk,
gloriously flat, outrageously bland,
playing a ‘Don’t Know’ in a slough
of ‘Strongly Disagrees’.
Alexei Navalny – d. February 16th 2024
the right word is a wedging of doors,
a filling of lamps, a bending of bars,
a flare shot into the sky, a hand
raised to say no more, a tuning fork
before the choir sings, maybe not
today or tomorrow, but sometime.
Steve Wright – d. February 12th 2024
and the airwaves open up.
The music is drowned out
by the wild sounds of a zoo
where animals cannot sing
and the jocks are not serious.
Damo Suzuki – d. February 9th 2024
in chant, howl, shriek, moan,
sung as in future days, old
now but once new, stoned
yet stone cold sober. Don’t
turn the light on; leave it alone.
Thursday 8 February 2024
Michael Jayston – d. February 5th 2024
a particular Englishness;
weary, morose, soft hands
but hard eyes, finesse
but not flash. I wonder who
might fit the part? You.
Barry John - d. February 4th 2024
I fyny yn mynd y Garryowen; daw'r bêl lawr
mewn dimensiwn arall, yn wrthwynebol ymlaen
wedi'i rendro'n ddiffrwyth, yn ansymudol.
Blink, ac mae'r oes aur wedi diflannu.
The breakdown comes; it always does.
Up goes the Garryowen; the ball comes
down in another dimension, opposing
forwards rendered limbless, immobile.
Blink, and the golden age is gone.
Up goes the Garryowen; the ball comes
down in another dimension, opposing
forwards rendered limbless, immobile.
Blink, and the golden age is gone.
Aston ‘Family Man’ Barrett – d. February 3rd 2024
it is felt before it is heard;
it is conjured from smoke;
it is organiser and upsetter;
it is soul, spine and culture.
Ian Lavender – d. February 2nd 2024
You were always a week away from
your call-up, juvenile lead in the
rustic drama of memory, mourning
an old movie and a dead soldier
for every sad stitch in your scarf.
Wayne Kramer – d. February 2nd 2024
from Twelfth Street to the Ballroom.
They said it was a stray spark from
an incendiary guitar, played fast by
a hostile witness to the apocalypse.
Friday 26 January 2024
Carl Andre – d. January 24th 2024
a stocktake at the builders’ merchants?
All the same, they queued geometrically,
nursing outrage yet hoping to glimpse
wonder in the cold of slab and firebrick.
Melanie Safka – d. January 23rd 2024
your name, misfiled your 45s and
mistook you for Joni. I skated past
your place last night; a sign on the
door: Gone away. Back Tuesday.
Frank Farian - d. January 23rd 2024
Welcome to the great European
Discotheque. It’s a shame
how we carry on; lip-syncing
to the faithful and the faceless,
finding the happiness we seek,
out together dancing chic to cheese.
Discotheque. It’s a shame
how we carry on; lip-syncing
to the faithful and the faceless,
finding the happiness we seek,
out together dancing chic to cheese.
Norman Jewison – d. January 20th 2024
the ghosts of Anatevka, Virgil
in Mississippi’s unrighteous
helter-swelter. Let me lace up
my skates with Jonathan E,
roll out of the screen into life.
Laurie Johnson – d. January 16th 2024
a magic orchestra several rooms away.
We all know the tune, what it means;
bold drama in every explosive scene.
Rising brass sets my child’s mind alight,
strings say everything will be alright.
Sunday 21 January 2024
Georgina Hale – d. January 4th 2024
and talk to me like you talk
to all those men you have smitten;
adenoidal, classless.
Slink to me in that frowzy frock,
while you put the sex into sex kitten.
Mary Weiss – d. January 19th 2024
love’s bitter candy. A girl sings
its yearning language, rides pillion
on slippery highways, aching to be
free. Get the picture? Yes, we see.
Saturday 13 January 2024
Annie Nightingale – d. January 11th 2024
the rumbling of change, snare
sampled from breaking bricks.
Is that your touch on the tone arm,
your voice in the crackle of vinyl?
J.P.R. Williams – d. January 8th 2024
cludo nwyddau, jinking chwith-dde,
holl sanau cig dafad a rholio,
dod o hyd i bêl lân, trosglwyddo i ffwrdd
y diafol, torri'r llinell.
Here he comes; a scarlet
freight train, jinking left-right,
all mutton and rolled socks,
finding clean ball, handing off
the devil, breaking the line.
freight train, jinking left-right,
all mutton and rolled socks,
finding clean ball, handing off
the devil, breaking the line.
Franz Beckenbauer – d. January 7th 2024
immer einen Pass vor dem Spiel,
Der Libero des Liberos hinter einer Viererwand,
Kaiser und Arbeiter, ein und dasselbe.
The free man is back with his team once more,
always one pass ahead of the game,
the libero's libero behind a wall of four,
Kaiser and worker, one and the same.
Glynis Johns – d. January 4th 2024
The actors with the factor are the ones that have gone.
A name that once knew fame becomes obscured and then ignored.
The lens moves on again until the Glynises are finished.
David Soul – d. January 4th 2024
I have a dream of you and me in
Bay City,
your blue eyes laughing as you drive.
My teenage days were all back alleys,
dark and full of empty boxes, promises
that one day we might still come through.
your blue eyes laughing as you drive.
My teenage days were all back alleys,
dark and full of empty boxes, promises
that one day we might still come through.
John Pilger – d. December 30th 2023
from courage and hot metal, totes
his typewriter to ruined places
where lives are cheap and grey,
writes wrongs in black and white.
Tom Wilkinson – d. December 30th 2023
the subtleties of voice and stance,
of characters worn lightly, the feel
of a line as it unravels, the dance
with the audience, the follow spot
that exposes everything you’ve got.
Richard Franklin – d. December 25th 2023
Nobody’s hero, but somebody’s buffoon.
I fell for your story; straight back, proper,
Telling a subaltern’s tale, over too soon.
Mo Moreland – d. December 18th 2023
into brush and shuffle, a flight
of rawboned youth made real,
atoms still colliding in the twilight,
a dance of elements. Oh Little Mo;
not a freak show, but a show.
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