Andrew Collins's Blog, page 65

Supermodel (left)

Advice: never stand next a supermodel and have your photograph taken with her. Actually, I'll have to check – is Karen Elson a supermodel? She's certainly a super model. And she's made a credible leap sideways into music, which is why she was in the 6 Music Kitchenette (it used to be called the Hub but is going through the change), playing some songs from her impressive debut album The Ghost Who Walks, produced by her husband Jack White. Clearly, being a famous model, and married to Jack...

We salute you

It was with enormous personal pleasure, and not a little emotion, that I welcomed Edwyn Collins to 6 Music this morning, in my second week of filling in for Lauren Laverne (who, incidentally, gave birth to a baby which she has called Mac at close to 2am this morning, so big congrats). Edwyn was in to play a selection of tracks from his brand new album Losing Sleep, which can be listened to via the 6 Music website, if not today, then soon. The album is dressed, handsomely, in a wallpaper...

Hellooo-ooo, Bloomsbury!

This is the terrifying if grandly appointed prospect that faces us if jaded, blasé, London-based fans of the podcast don't hurry up and buy a ticket for Collings & Herrin Live at the Bloomsbury Theatre in London's Bloomsbury, situated near where Ricky Gervais used to live.

It's such a nice space – I've played it many times under the militant-atheist wing of Robin Ince, and also as a support act, with Stuart Maconie and David Quantick, for Lloyd Cole (true!), while Richard and his Oxbridge...

Missouri breaks

Phew-ee, I've been out of the cinema loop, what with Edinburgh, and then going on holiday to a place with no cinema. So it was with some relief that I returned to the reassuring Curzon to see Winter's Bone last night, and rejoined the cinemagoing public. Lots of people queuing up to see Tamara Drewe, but I have low hopes for that, and fancied something a bit more nutritious. So I went for the low-budget, downbeat US indie, with Sundance stamps all over it and its director Debra Granik, whose ...

2001: a face odyssey

Thanks to Twitterer Patrick Barry for spotting me in this YouTube clip of the Perrier Award announcement at Edinburgh in 2001, the year I was up with Lloyd Cole Knew My Father, and, it seems, favouring a red tracksuit top. We just happened to be huddling by the gantry from which Iain Lee was presenting live coverage of the event for Channel 4, which was somewhere in the Pleasance Dome, as I recall, and picketed by a polite smattering of anti-Nestle campaigners, who as far as I know failed to ...

Your face here

Join these satisfied customers by buying a ticket to one of the Collings & Herrin live podcasts, coming to three towns which may or may not be near you, this autumn. The first is almost upon us, and it's the biggest one we've ever done!

Monday, September 27, Bloomsbury Theatre, 15 Gordon Street, London WC1H 0AH; tickets £15 (this is a full show, with solo stand-up plus podcast, which will be available to download the next morning, and exclusive Q&A if you behave), tickets available here...

Don, don!

So, Mad Men Season 4 began last night – watched, one imagines, by hundreds on BBC4. For those of us who've been with it from the start (and I don't mean that to sound superior; I'm very rarely in at the ground floor with the best US imports, as you'll know from past experience with The Wire, Battlestar, Curb, 30 Rock and, most conspicuously, House), the current media hoo-hah seems a little after the event. In fact, if I'd been watching it for the very first time last night, not having seen...

Sisterhood

It's been a while since I mentioned the Mitford Sisters in any meaningful way. I was intending, last year, to make them the subject of my first solo stand-up show at the Edinburgh Fringe, but the recession altered my plans, and by the time I was making plans to go up this year, Secret Dancing had eclipsed them somewhat. This is not to say I mightn't one day expand the 20-minute Mitfords set I worked up for Robin Ince's School For Gifted Children back in 2008, when I was in the first flush of ...

A definite article

It's the fastest selling autobiography of all time. It's A Journey, by Tony Blair. Formerly titled The Journey, but, after what publishers Random House (my publishers!) described as "a minor editorial decision", this was stripped of some of its portent and pomposity with a clever switch from "The" to "A". But they're fooling no one: if this book was just a journey, it wouldn't have sold so many copies in the first 24 hours of publication, outselling Peter Mandelson's memoir three to one, and ...

Juliette letters

You can't have failed to notice that a film with the uninspiring title Certified Copy has just been released at the cinema, as it seems to be the number one chattering point in the media. For a foreign language film, it's being sold really hard, due to the seismic combination of Abbas Kiarostami, the revered Iranian director, and star Juliette Binoche, whose reputation spreads much further and wider than the arthouse – although that is where she does her best stuff.

Gerard Depardieu, without m...