Mark West's Blog, page 11

Suicide Blonde, by INXS, at 30

Thirty years ago, on 15th September 1990, INXS released Suicide Blonde, their first single in over 18 months (following Mystify), from their forthcoming album X.


Suicide Blonde was written by Andrew Farriss & Michael
Hutchence and released in September 1990 across the world.  The b side for the 7” was Everybody Wants U
Tonight written by Jon Farriss.



The first of five singles from the album

Nostalgic For My Childhood - Some More Comic & Magazine ads

For the third installment of this occasional feature (you can read entries from 2017 here and 2019 here), here's another selection of print ads for the toys, sweets, books and games of my youth.

As always, there's a certain amount of charm on display here - the ads are often hand-drawn and with muted hyperbole - as well as a lovely sense of wistful innocence, though that might just be the

The Tresham dovecote

This year, for our family holiday, we'd planned to go to Spain but the pandemic put paid to that so I spent my fortnight off work at home, doing plenty of writing and going out for walking expeditions with the family.


Dude and the dovecote

One day, I had to go to Corby Diagnostic for a blood-test and Dude came along to keep me company.  As payback for him, we went on a Pokemon hunt around the

Will You (40 years on from "Breaking Glass")

Breaking Glass, written and directed by Brian Gibson, was released in the UK forty years ago this month.  A tense, gritty drama (Alison & I were lucky enough to catch a screening of it in 2018, with Hazel O'Connor in attendance for a Q&A and mini-concert), it's a fascinating snapshot of the music scene - and London - at the time and features a tremendous soundtrack including the stunning and

More Starburst Memories

In 2018, to mark it's 40th anniversary, I blogged about Starburst magazine (you can read the post here) and included some cover scans.  This seemed to go down well, a pleasant nostalgic nudge to a great magazine from back in the day (and some of our formative years) and so, because I need little excuse for this kind of thing, here are a few more.


issue 3, April 1978





Mark Hamill enjoys a

Nostalgic For My Childhood - More Summer Specials

A couple of years ago, having had a conversation with Dude (where he expressed amusement over the things I had to contend with when I was his age - including, but not limited to, very few available video games, cameras you had to carry separately and phones that were wired to the wall), I blogged about one great thing I had that he didn’t - the Summer Special (you can find the blog post here).

Old School Horror 8: Death Tour, by David J. Michael

The eighth, in an occasional thread, of blog posts celebrating those cheesy, sleazy old-school pulp paperbacks from the 70s and 80s, which are now mostly forgotten.  Yes, we’re not talking great art here but these books have their place - for better or worse - in the genre and I think they deserve to be remembered.

This time, I'm looking at a novel that not only appears to switch genres halfway

Nostalgic For My Childhood - Poster Magazines part 2

Last year, I blogged about "poster magazines" I remembered from the 70s and 80s (you can read the post here).  It seemed to touch a chord but I was just as surprised to find people my age who'd never heard of them, so I thought I'd show a few more.

Poster magazines were essentially A4 glossy colour magazines which folded out into a (large) A1-sized sheet.  One side would be the magazine (with

Born Standing Up, by Steve Martin (a review)

In a new edition of the occasional series, I want to tell you about a book I've read and loved, which I think adds to the genre (autobiography, in this case) and that I think you'll enjoy if you're a fan (though if you were a fan, you'd probably read this long before now...)



Steve Martin has been an international star for over thirty years. Here, for the first time, he looks back to the

The Real Life Mill

In 2011, Greyhart Press published my novelette The Mill as a stand-alone title.  It was originally published in the acclaimed Pendragon Press anthology We Fade To Grey in 2008, edited by Gary McMahon (who, in asking for it, succeeded in pulling me out of a writers block that had consumed me for two years).  A story about grief, guilt and coughing ghosts, Mark Morris in his introduction called it