mostly david ephgrave

I spent the first evening of 2018 very pleasantly, listening to some of my old LPs on the record player my wife bought me for Christmas. For someone who used to collect vinyl, I’m ashamed to say I hadn’t played any of my hoard in years, as I no longer had a turntable set up, so to be able to listen to them tonight was a real treat. The first LP on my three-album itinerary was 'The Buddy Holly Story'; a compilation that was released less than a month after Buddy died, which my mum bought soon after it came out and gave to me as incentive thirty years later, when I didn’t want to go to the swimming lessons she’d booked to make up for the ones I’d missed at school, because I suffered from terrible ear infections as a kid. It’s testament to how great Buddy was that I’ve never grown sick of his music, despite playing his songs countless times when I portrayed him on tour. Listening to him is like being reunited with an old friend. The LP I pulle...

Sorting my 2015/16 receipts today to the tune of the Paul & Linda McCartney album Ram made it a far more enjoyable experience. One thing I don’t do much of at the moment, as I’m not doing any muso work, is to have a really good sing. I tend to listen to music when I get ready in the morning, and will often join in with it a little (much to the consternation of my neighbours or anyone walking past my bathroom window), but outside of the occasional bit of bath-based Karaoke, I’m not keeping my voice in shape. I did give it a stretch today however, whilst knee-deep in bank statements and receipts, and if you going to do this, an album like Ram is a good one to work out to. The vocal parts are liter ally all over the shop , which is meant as a compliment. It was McCartney’s second post-Beatles album, which was slated at the time - largely fed by him supposedly being the root of the Beatles' breakup - but has been critically re-evaluated over the intervening years. It’...

Like the rest of the music-loving planet, I was shocked to wake up to the news that David Bowie was dead. It didn’t and still doesn’t compute. I had no reason to think he was less mortal than the rest of us, yet somehow, irrationally, I almost believed that he was. It wasn’t just his breakthrough early-70s hits and those accompanying videos / TOTP / Old Grey Whistle Test performances that made him seem otherworldly; it was also his face. No-one had looked or sounded that way before him, and it’s a fair to say that no-one will again. I can't imagine anyone not respecting him for what he did. As a Beatles fan, I’m used to people taking the devil’s advocate route and saying they were overrated; contradicting a generally perceived opinion is an easy card to play. But not with David Jones. His constant reinvention and reinvigoration - combined with his recent dodging of the limelight - created a persona it’s impossible to knock. He even managed to rise above the soulless 1980s (and th...

Any regulars at Mostly Comedy tomorrow will be pleased to learn that after seven years, I’ve finally got around to changing the house music. We haven’t really played the same tracklist at every gig, though it isn’t far off. The reason it’s taken so long to switch things around is it’s not as simple as choosing a different CD or putting our MP3 player on shuffle. For ease of running on the night, all of our technical queues – be it music, video or pictures – are built into a slideshow, which I control from the stage by remote. This was originally done to simplify things, as everything comes from one source (which was useful when we did our shows in Edinburgh and ran Mostly Comedy in London, as we didn’t have a technician) – but it’s also because I’m a control freak. If I had my way, I’d be King of the World; like King of the Hill, only less cartoonlike. It’s not that we didn’t want to change it - we’ve had the best intentions – but when there’s a lo...