I blog for the Huffington Post, in the UK Entertainment sector… usually but not always about matters related to the band I drum and guitar for, Fink.
Here are some of the best/most recent ones:
MAKING A FINK RECORD WITH FLOOD IN LONDON… an account of the recording of Fink’s latest album, Resurgam
IN THE NEXT 10 YEARS, LOTS OF ROCK STARS WILL DIE – WE’RE GOING TO HAVE TO GET USED TO THIS… me getting very cross about people who get cross about people who grieve dead rock stars
POLISH POST-PUNK, ESTONIAN ELECTRO AND CZECHPOP: ONE NIGHT IN BUDAPEST… my visit to the Budapest Showcase Hub to see some storming Eastern-European bands
ABBA – 10 SONGS THAT SAY IT ALL… in which I unleash my opinions about the greatest ever pop group
THREE DAYS IN AUSTRIA WITH FINK… some nice pictures of Fink’s Austrian tour by Matthias Hombauer, accompanied by my usually irreverent twaddle
THE LONG WEEKEND IN INDIA… an account of Fink’s three day trip to India, in the charming company of The Staves
Finally, there’s the small matter of me having written two music-related novels for Random House:
By the time most people hit 30, they’ve managed to do one of the following things:
1. Grow up
2. Quit idolising rock stars
3. Move on a bit from the music they were obsessed with at the age of 17.
Clive Beresford has failed to do all three. But that’s about to change.
One unremarkable Saturday morning Clive sees the biggest alternative-pop star of them all walking down the high street with his dry-cleaning: Lance Webster, disgraced ex-singer of Thieving Magpies (‘the biggest British band to emerge from the late-eighties indie-boom’ Rolling Stone). Clive hatches a ramshackle plan to befriend his idol and grab the scoop of a lifetime – why did Webster burn out? The ensuing chaos forces both men to revisit the sweat, feedback, T-shirts, stage-dives, hitch-hikes, snakebites and hangovers of British alternative rock at the start of the nineties; to quote Lance Webster himself, ‘before Britpop came along and fucked everything up’…
Being an unsigned band isn’t a situation – it’s a mental illness. Few people realise they’re suffering from this affliction. Russell Groom knows, and he wants to change things fast. But Russell doesn’t fit the traditional rock-star mould, and his woefully unexceptional band are headed nowhere, inhabiting a world of cramped and sweaty rehearsal rooms, crap day jobs, empty gigs and interminable trips down the A303 to dodgy festival slots in Wiltshire. Enter Josh – the enigmatic and arrogant son of a successful record producer – with an offer it’s impossible to refuse…
Tim Thornton’s new novel is a hilarious fly-on-the-wall trip round the outskirts of the music industry, with a valuable lesson: unsigned bands never become signed bands. They have to die first.
Conversations can continue @timwthornton on Twitter.
TIM THORNTON 