Written in response to a prompt from my fellow writer, Michelle Scorziello. Find her on Medium here. Dad was a capitalist. Not the idiot, opportunistic, growth-grubbing kind, but one who believed in the rewarding virtue of hard work. He did not love lucre; for him lucre was love, his way of expressing the desperate, anxious…
This piece was originally published by Twogether. As ever, I think the main point still stands. Not least because I still see a steady flow of briefs in which the stats are patently useless. Content marketing thrives on statistics. But they’re seductive and deceptive, because they look as though they mean something, when often they…
This is a piece I wrote while at Twogether. It's not current, but the main point is still relevant, I reckon. And it's mildy amusing to remember the Fake News panic... One of the things that annoys me most about marketing blogs is knackered old marketers and fading advertising gurus bleating on about the old…
This is a piece I wrote while at Twogether. It's not current - the About Us descriptions have probably changed by now. But the main point is still relevant, I reckon. Website analytics demonstrate that ‘About Us’ is one of the most frequently visited pages of any site. Which means that for all the lovely…
This article originally appeared in Living Blues magazine #205 in February, 2010. I had wanted to write it for years. The recordings made by Marcelle Morgantini in Chicago during the 1970s are a definitive evocation of the real blues of the day. Her recording of The Aces is one of my favourite albums. Chicago Blues…
Hello and thanks for visiting. Here you will find a selection of my writings over the years, including journalism, some memoirs from my musical and writing careers and some personal reflections on life and the unfolding of the Universe. I have always enjoyed telling people's stories, like Ol' Jack Frightenum or Marcelle Morgantini, or even…
Once, every Sunday afternoon was a seminar for every schoolboy who loved football. They sat hunched before the television, absorbed in The Big Match, picking apart the performances of the athletes on the screen.Each boy was taking in the craft of moving a ball swiftly and accurately around a field, absorbing every nuance of the…
Years ago, when I first took up the harmonica, there was no way of knowing how to play. No internet, with helpful videos on YouTube. No Amazon to show me books. Having been inspired by Sonny Boy Williamson II, I spent what memory tells me is years trying to make my harmonica sound like his.…
I never wanted a pet, except a couple of times. When I was at primary school, I forced my parents to buy me a white mouse. The only one in the shop was a mother nursing a baby so we bought both. I called one Mousey Tung and the other one Ho Cheese Min. I…
We were drawn by the mystery. It was a journey not so much into a forest, but into the very fabric of our psyches. Yes, forest there was, but it was the unseen that called to us. From the depths of time and space it beckoned us on a two-and-a-half-hour journey from the gentle Chilterns…
Stuart Maxwell 