BOOK REVIEW: Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal by Robin Ince

This article was originally published in The Big Issue in May 2025

Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal, Robin Ince, out now, Macmillan, £20.

The comedian Robin Ince was diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 52. Suddenly, everything – his lifelong burble of anxiety, self-criticism, social discomfort and ‘mad’ racing thoughts – made sense. A burden had been lifted. It’s OK to feel that way. It’s normal, whatever ‘normal’ is.

A wise, witty, thoughtful, comforting and compassionate book, Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal: My Adventures in Neurodiversity traces the author’s own story in sensitive tandem with a panoply of neurodiverse interviewees and academic research.

Ince never generalises, but common themes include childhood trauma, PTSD, bullying, a searing sense of justice and – more light-heartedly, but it’s all connected – a voracious passion for Doctor Who, horror films and accumulating a vast mountain of knowledge and ‘stuff’.

In his introduction, Ince declares (not at all seriously) that he will cure the reader of their anxiety. It’s not a self-help book, he just hopes it helps. It does. It’s a valuable piece of work.

BOOK REVIEW: Bowie Odyssey 75 by Simon Goodard

This article was originally published in The Big Issue in May 2025.

Bowie Odyssey 75, Simon Goddard, out now, Omnibus Press, £17.99

In the year of our Dame 1975, David Bowie was a sleepwalking cadaver in the blizzard-grip of cocaine addiction. Lost between New York and LA, and nowhere near reality, his psychotic, paranoid delusions were fuelled by a growing obsession with the Third Reich and all things occult.

A coven of witches haunted his every move. Satan lived in his swimming pool. The fridge was stocked with bottles of his own urine, lest the forces of evil steal it (for reasons only known to himself).

This is the David Bowie we meet in Bowie Odyssey 75, the sixth volume of Simon Goddard’s monumental year-by-year account of our hero’s eventful golden decade.

For those unfamiliar with the series, do not expect a conventional biography. Prepare yourselves instead for an utterly riveting and beautifully written piece of expressionistic docu-fiction all told in the propulsive present tense. Goddard places us inside Bowie’s addled mind while exploring – in meticulously researched and sometimes harrowing detail – thematic parallels with certain key events of 1975.

Nestling amid this swirling rotten funk of fame, fascism, murder, drugs, madness, mass unemployment and rampant Rollermania are the book’s other main characters: Bowie’s long-suffering and LOUD wife Angie; his agonisingly lonely and worried mother Peggy; nascent punk Svengali and shameless opportunist Malcolm McLaren; Tory leader Margaret Thatcher marching towards her everlasting reign of terror; Hitler-obsessed serial killer Patrick Mackay; and the leather mask-wearing ‘Cambridge Rapist’ Peter Samuel Cook.

Goddard ties these strands together to conjure up a vivid hellscape in which Bowie created his latest blurred lines persona, the fascistic, foppish Thin White Duke, while not really having to act at all in the role of a burned-out alabaster alien in Nicolas Roeg’s cult classic The Man Who Fell to Earth.

If that all sounds rather dark, well yes, it is, but it’s often very funny in an unflinching tragicomic way. A deadly serious, dirt-encrusted pop culture farce. Goddard is an irreverent yet fundamentally empathetic socio-political historian and storyteller. He’s a Bowie fan who isn’t blind to his subject’s faults, but who can also wax rapturously, and perceptively, about his art (Bowie somehow made one of his greatest albums, Station to Station, in 1975). Hyperbole be damned, Goddard’s unfolding odyssey is an idiosyncratic masterpiece.

LIVE REVIEW: Wrest

This article is copyright of The Scotsman and used with their permission for this purpose only.

Wrest

Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow

**

Edinburgh's Wrest are a genuinely independent grass-roots success story. They're unsigned, they've self-released three albums, they run their own promotions company, and they recently played a sold-out headline show at the Barrowlands.

That's all quite impressive, but Wrest are also a risk-averse MOR guitar band who needn't ever worry about being crushed under the weight of their own inventiveness. Blatantly indebted to the sensitive anthem-sized likes of Snow Patrol, Coldplay, U2 and Frightened Rabbit, they have no ideas or personality of their own. The paucity of ambition is bewildering.

Singer-songwriter Stewart Douglas has forensically studied those bands and worked out the basic formula for writing A Big Emotional Anthem, which wouldn't really matter if he had at least one gem in his arsenal to match the undeniable phones-aloft triumph of, say, Chasing Cars or Yellow. But he hasn't.

Every mid-paced song sounds exactly the same – a generic grey mass of two or three strummed chords, simple lead guitar lines, pulsing With or Without You bass, derivative vocal melodies and 'soaring' arrangements designed to surge dramatically at just the right moment. It's all so predictable.

Whereas Frightened Rabbit once used this well-worn template to express complex feelings in a powerfully honest way, Wrest deal in mere Hallmark platitudes. Douglas is constantly urging us to "keep going" in the face of adversity etc. Well-meaning sentiments, but hardly useful in the grand challenging scheme of things.

Performance-wise they're just four nondescript – and probably very nice - men trudging through the motions, their ordinariness emphasised by the surrounding beauty of this old Glasgow venue (which wasn't sold out).

A triumph of marketing over artistic merit, the whole thing - the whole 'project' - feels more like a functional business plan than a heartfelt musical endeavour.

LIVE REVIEW: Brooke Combe

This article is copyright of The Scotsman and used with their permission for this purpose only. 

Brooke Combe

Barrowland, Glasgow

***

The story so far: raised by her parents on a nourishing diet of classic soul, the Scottish singer-songwriter Brooke Combe has spent the last four years making a name for herself with a well-received mix-tape and a recently released début album, Dancing at the Edge of the World, produced by fellow retro-head James Skelly from the Coral.

This was her biggest headline show to date, a promising showcase for a young artist with self-evident talent and charisma.

She may be mired in the music of Motown, Stax, Philadelphia International and Bacharach/David, but Combe never settles for mere pastiche. She reminds us that good, new, catchy songs can still be written in that vein – old tricks learned, absorbed and ensnared on fresh hooks.

It also helps that she has personality, sincerity, a sense of humour and a commanding voice. Brooke intuitively understands that the best classic soul singers never over-sang or show-boated. It's all about controlled power, and she has that in abundance.

Granted, there are a few too many mid-paced plodders in her nascent oeuvre – Texas-adjacent stuff that drifts in one ear and only tickles the other – but she's at her best when riding that intense, surging northern soul beat. This Town and Lanewood Pines are bona fide bangers.

And she's not afraid to express her rawest feelings. L.M.T.F.A (aka Leave Me the F*ck Alone) was prefaced by a frank and funny monologue in which she didn't hold back on the person who inspired it. “This is my therapy!” she declared, smiling.

The fact that this furious tirade against her hated step-mother is disguised as a sumptuous slow-jam just adds to its unabashed impact – subversive introspective soul music.

BOOK REVIEW: SMiLE: The Rise, Fall and Resurrection of Brian Wilson by David Leaf

This article was originally published in The Big Issue in April 2025.

SMiLE: The Rise, Fall and Resurrection of Brian Wilson, David Leaf, Omnibus Press, £19.35

The Beach Boys’ SMiLE is the most famous ‘lost album’ of all time. Intended as the ambitious follow-up to Pet Sounds and Good Vibrations – an album/single double whammy that cemented Brian Wilson’s reputation as one of mid-‘60s pop’s greatest innovators – it was eventually abandoned for numerous complicated reasons.

Wilson descended thereafter into years of substance abuse and severe mental health problems. SMiLE was a painful subject that he never wanted to revisit.

Hence why it was so astonishing when, in 2004, Wilson and his talented band of super-fans released Brian Wilson Presents Smile, a re-recorded version of his fragmented masterpiece. The reviews were ecstatic. Finally, one of rock’s great myths had become a reality.

An oral history curated by noted Beach Boys aficionado David Leaf, SMiLE: The Rise, Fall and Resurrection of Brian Wilson charts the entire saga from its origins in 1966 to its triumphant 21^st century denouement.

Key contributors include Wilson’s charmingly eccentric and erudite collaborator Van Dyke Parks and his brilliant bandleader Darian Sahanaja, without whom the resurrected SMiLE would never have happened. As for the fragile Wilson himself, he makes occasional contributions via interviews conducted for Leaf’s 2004 documentary Beautiful Dreamer.

It’s an uneven book – the lengthy prologue in which famous fans sing Wilson’s praises is blatant padding, and Leaf’s (affectionate?) digs at Parks’ elliptical manner of speaking are unnecessary – but it does provide some interesting insight into the making of an undeniable musical landmark. 

BOOK REVIEW: Yoko: A Biography by David Sheff

This article was originally published in The Big Issue in April 2025.

Yoko: A Biography, David Sheff, out now, Simon & Schuster, £19.03

Yoko Ono is a revolutionary conceptual artist, peace activist, feminist icon and musician whose work has inspired several generations.

She’s also one of the most unfairly vilified public figures in living memory, a woman who for decades was forced to endure a vile torrent of racist and sexist abuse for the alleged crime of breaking up the Beatles.

These days, only an ignorant minority of people (mostly men) still cling to that patently untrue opinion, but the rehabilitation of Ono as an important and respected artist in her own right was a long time coming. David Sheff’s Yoko: A Biography crowns that process.

It studies her life and work in the depth it deserves while authoritatively dismantling numerous scurrilous falsehoods. By the end you’ll have renewed admiration for this often misunderstood human being.

Sheff and Ono became close friends after he interviewed her and John Lennon in 1980, and his prologue emphasises that he’s fully aware of the potential conflict of interest when it comes to telling her story honestly. To his credit, Sheff hasn’t written a hagiography. He’s on Yoko’s side, quite rightly, but never ignores her flaws (at worst she could be weirdly naïve and occasionally self-absorbed).

Ono, who is 92, retired from public life a few years ago. She takes centre stage via archive interviews and perceptive contributions from loved ones such as son Sean and daughter Kyoko.

The most revealing chapters are devoted to her early career as a provocative avant-garde artist; Lennon’s infamous ‘lost weekend’ told for the first time from her perspective; and the harrowing aftermath of Lennon’s murder.

Sheff stresses that Ono was in a state of almost catatonic grief during that unimaginably awful time. For years afterwards, she received death threats from cranks while being betrayed by confidantes out to make a fast buck. Simultaneously, ill-informed critics continued to drag her name through the mud.

That she managed to survive so much trauma is testament to her incredible strength and resilience. And that above all else is what Sheff captures here: Yoko Ono is a survivor. And she rocks, hard.

LIVE MUSIC REVIEW: Sacred Paws

This article is copyright of The Scotsman and used with their permission for this purpose only.

Sacred Paws

Drygate Brewery, Glasgow

****

Sacred Paws are an irresistible force of jubilant nature. An all-inclusive Afrobeat-meets-indie-pop polyrhythmic party band wreathed in boundless optimism, they're just what we need in these dark, forbidding times.

The Glasgow-based duo of Ray Aggs (vocals/guitar) and Eilidh Rodgers (vocals/drums) have been releasing records, at their own sweet pace, on Mogwai's Rock Action label since 2015. During this zesty Celtic Connections show – which swept away the debris the day after Storm Eowyn forced the festival to shut down for 24 hours – they were augmented by bassist Moema Meade and guitarist/John Peel circa 1971 lookalike Jack Mellin.

A tight and fluid band of exceptional musicians, they feed off each other and the energy of the crowd. Towards the end of the show, Aggs was understandably delighted to witness the spontaneous formation of a grooving quasi-mosh pit at the front of the stage. Sacred Paws have that power. These tunes were made for boppin' and that's just what they do.

Aggs radiates pure joy while performing. A beaming beacon of good vibrations, they race around the stage while peeling off clean, crisp, rippling streams of highlife guitar. They've recently recovered from a bout of the flu - “Non-binary flu, the secret third kind of flu.” Self-aware sort that they are, Aggs turned references to this utterly non-life-threatening illness into an amusing running gag.

I urge you to see this band live if you can. They will lift your spirits and make everything feel better for a while.

To paraphrase the comedian Stewart Lee, the last taboo in an age of tiring cynicism is to see an artist perform something sincerely and well. The sheer exuberance, the overflowing warmth and talent, of Sacred Paws is testament to that.