Down, Down...

Just when you thought 2016 couldn't take away another rock star... Rick Parfitt of Status Quo is gone.

The Quo were formidably good at what they did... but it wasn't really for me, and I never saw them live.

But many musicians rated and respected them – including, maybe surprisingly, John Lydon, who perhaps saw something punkish in the Quo's refusal to ever do anything but stick to basics and go for the lowest common denominator.

This year of the wins of Brexit and Trump and the losses of Bowie, Cohen and Prince (and many more) has been bloody awful. I dare to think that 2017 has to be better – rather than a case of down, down deeper and down.

That's The Way To Say Goodbye

Russ Payne and Unison Bends shared the bill with Leonard Cohen at the weekend – courtesy of DJ Paul Mansell and Marlow FM radio. Paul – who has a John-Peelish quality about him – invited us to play a 'live' set from our new album 'Liquor and Iron' on his eclectic Magic Bus show.

But with Cohen having just departed, it was inevitable that Paul would lace the programme with some of his greatest songs So we kind of alternated.

When Paul took some time to enlarge on the genesis of the Cohen classic 'Suzanne', I was inevitably reminded of my first year at university in London; I lived in a hall of residence with cardboard-thin walls and a neighbour who had just one album, 'The Songs Of Leonard Cohen', which he played through the night. I more or less knew 'Suzanne' off by heart.

On the odd occasions when I saw my Cohen-obsessed fellow student, he looked wan and miserable. Perhaps no great surprise there. Cohen at that time had a reputation for being relentlessly doomy, but he went on to show he was at his best when combining darkness with light, and gloom with a wicked humour. At that, he proved to be the master.