Here’s the playlist for Midnight Campfire episode #101, first broadcast Wed 14 Sep 2016 on Juice 107.2. It’s an ‘all new music’ show including the first new Shirley Collins single in 38 years, so there’s no Campfire Songbook entry this week but there’s another track from Chris While & Julie Matthews’ Shoulder To Shoulder, which is Album Of The Month. You can listen online via TotallyRadio.com and here’s what I played…

Here’s the playlist for Chris T-T’s Midnight Campfire, show #15, first broadcast Wed 26 Nov 2014. This episode includes an hour dedicated to the life and music of Robert Wyatt, including an interview with Marcus O’Dair, who wrote the new authorised Wyatt biography Different Every Time.

My punk/folk rising star friend Frank Turner just released his fourth album England Keep My Bones. It’s a great record but more importantly, I sang on it. Buy it from iTunes HERE.

To mark the occasion, journalist Brad Barrett has re-published his 2008 joint interview with me and Frank from 2008, where he got us to question each-other. Read it on his blog HERE.

I’m very proud to announce a selection of my ‘Empties’ photos are being used in a new collaborative book from the Dark Mountain group, edited by Paul Kinsgnorth and Dougald Hine. Dark Mountain Issue 2 is at the printers and will be available this month, so watch this space.

In a conversation with Anth Melton a couple of months ago about augmented reality, Anth said something that turned my view of the technology on its head. It’s stuck with me, got to be shared and he won’t be bothered, so here goes.

We tend to come at augmented reality from the point of view of the benefits ‘within’ it, ie. what it does for you once you’ve got your Google Goggles or iSpecs on and you’re wandering around a world you’ve programmed, seeing a range of content and adverts picked out and filtered for you. But Anth suggested we should regard the development of AR from the other direction, from a town planning / eco-improvement perspective. Perhaps it offers an incredibly powerful tool (or at least impetus) to sort out the real physical world. I honestly haven’t heard this perspective on AR anywhere else and it amazes me, the more I think about it, it’s almost Mayer Hillman counter-intuitive.

You know the way that sometimes urban spaces look suddenly, unexpectedly beautiful if you look up above the ground floor? The truism that if you’re walking around a shoddy town centre, overcrowded with consumers, full of advert hoardings and with every building covered in shop signage, that the buildings themselves are actually gorgeous? You just have to look slightly upwards – to the first floor and above – to get smacked in the face by how lush these streets of varied historic architecture are, especially at a quieter time of day. For me Oxford Street and in particular Charing Cross Road are like that early morning, when there aren’t the usual bucketloads of numpties. Brighton is like that too because we have ramshackle, alleyway architecture which fades into the background when the town is rammed brimful of tourists and shoppers.