“What’s this then, Ian? ANOTHER tribute band you’ve joined?? You band slag!! Can’t you do something original for a change????”

“Erm…well, I’ve recorded 3 solo albums and will be starting recording on a 4th one soon…?”

“Oh…right…yeah, but no but yeah but no but…” etc etc ad nauseam

Now and again during my years in broadcasting, something drops in my inbox or my voicemail that completely blows my mind.

Back in 2013 when I released “Prove You Wrong”, my first solo album, I talked of the desire I had at the time to scratch an itch and record some of my songs properly and commit them to an official release.

At that particular time of the album’s release, I did do a show as support to Wishbone Ash in Islington which was a very proud yet nervous moment for me and a couple of years later I had a couple of appearances at Putney’s Half Moon venue to play my songs live with a band.

I’ve already done two blog lists of drummers who I don’t think get their proper recognition as players who should be better known than they are. You can check those blogs out elsewhere on this site.

With this 3rd list, the same principles apply as before - in order to qualify for the list, I need to have seen the individual concerned at least once live…so Animal still isn’t getting in, more’s the pity

Anyway, here we go…in no particular order

Gregg Bissonnette (DLR, Satriani and more)

“Ian, do you fancy taking care of our second year students’ ‘talk radio’ course for a few weeks?”

After 25 years plus at the coal face, few things within the sphere of broadcasting and football should make your eyes go as wide as dinner plates, but when old press box colleague and senior lecturer Brendan McLoughlin at the University of Gloucester got in touch before Xmas with the above question, I had to take a brief pause from whatever I was doing at the time!

London at Christmas and New Year is mostly eerily quiet

Londoners tend to escape the capital as soon as they can before the festive period kicks in and so, whilst it isn’t exactly a ghost town or like that scene on Westminster Bridge from 28 Days Later, you can actually drive around without your blood pressure spiking 99% of the time and the relative lack of pedestrians affords you the chance to look around you at some of the stunning but less heralded architecture - both old and new - in the City.

But then there’s Alexandra Palace.

(This blog comes courtesy of a reminder about this weekend from fellow Blues fan Mark who emailed me via this website …thanks Mark!)

Saturday (7th December 2024) will mark precisely half a century of me going down to watch the Blues.

And what a 5 decades I have had loving, hating, bigging up, knocking down, praising, criticising and so much more around the players and managers of Birmingham City Football Club

August 7th 2024 marks 2 decades since I first took root at talkSPORT, an occasion that was marked by my great friends Hawksbee and Jacobs on air last Friday whilst I was in the News Building working on our live coverage of the Paris 2024 Olympics. It was only a little 10 minute chat with Paul & Andy, but we crammed so much into that 10 minutes; my last-second cover shifts for Alan Brazil; Throwing up on air; reading an entire Steve Bruce murder mystery novel as “Steve Bruce” for listeners during lockdown and cosying up to Gene Simmons.

Laundry was the most pressing concern for Team Red when we finally got to our Dusseldorf base for the last few days of my trip - all 3 of us were down the last t-shirt/socks etc, so we were grateful to be able to use the hotel 24hr housekeeping service, although as most folk know, such services don’t come cheap!