Last autumn at TEDxBrighton I gave a talk (including songs) about my A.A. Milne Edinburgh Fringe show and the effect it had on my understanding of audiences - especially thinking about the generation gap.

Anyway, I forgot to post it at the time, so here it is now. I...

A great number of UK music artists I admire now use crowd-funding platforms like PledgeMusic or Indiegogo to raise cash from fans, to fund albums, videos, or touring. It's very quickly been normalised in the music industry, to the point that you'll almost never hear a bad word spoken about...

The other day I heard an eye-opening piece of thinking and wanted to share it with you. So badly in fact, I spent an intense, frustrating hour yesterday on the train looping this three-minute bit of audio over and over, trying to transcribe it. Daft, because you could just go...

I knew Kim Gavin's Closing Ceremony would be the antithesis of the crazy-beautiful joy that Danny Boyle and Frank Cottrell Boyce brought to the opening night: I knew it would be predictable and mainstream. But that was fine, we'd have a laugh, enjoy the music acts we like and I...

William Blake the printer tromps endlessly around London, stout and baby faced like a grimy, windswept William Hague. It's 1790; you still hit farmland up at the top end of Tottenham Court Road and Ealing is a distant village. I can't picture Blake without bad weather and haze: the romance...

Here's an opinion you don't hear very often, anywhere across the diaspora of inane cultural comment: in the past year or so I have rediscovered - and fallen back in love with, basically - BBC Radio 1.

I don't just mean the special interest shows that fill the evening and overnight...

I think I just played my longest ever show, at Hebden Bridge Arts Festival.

Hebden Bridge (stunning little Yorkshire valley town in the Pennines, fierce non-conformist spirit, steep hills) is recovering from horrendous floods. It's amazing the Arts Festival went ahead really; many businesses and cafés are still shut to...

Here is an exceptional resource, if you just started gigging and perform solo. Recently Tom Robinson ran this workshop for BBC Introducing and now he's written up a full-length guide, in which he really digs deep into first steps of developing solo stagecraft.

FRESH...

Before I kick off this entry, a quick plug: if you're going to Brighton's Great Escape 2012 as a delegate, I'm pleased to say I'll be a panellist again this year; contributing to the Focus On DIY panel. It's on Thurs 10 May at 11.15am. Come down...

This piece should be read by adopting the loping, declamatory tone of the British clergy and therefore the presenters of Radio 4's Thought For The Day. The superiority complex of the pulpit given intimate breath by microphone technology.

Someone recently gave me a gift of a balloon branded with...