MATTHEW HAWKINS applauds a psychotherapist’s disection of William Blake
Take the biscuit
JAMES WALSH savours the genius of Britain’s greatest living songwriter
Half Man Half Biscuit in 2015
[Paul Hudson/CC] 
New releases from Christina Alden and Alex Patterson, Odette Michell, Clementine Lovell
JOHN GREEN is fascinated by a very readable account of Britain’s involvement in South America
Strip cartoons used to be the bread and butter of newspapers and they have been around for centuries. MICHAL BONCZA asks our own Paul Tanner about which bees are in his bonnet
GORDON PARSONS acknowledges the authority with which Sarah Kane’s theatrical justification for suicide has resonance today
RON JACOBS welcomes a timely homage to one of the IWW and CPUSA’s most effective orators
Half Man Half Biscuit
Electric Ballroom, London
20/1/2023
IN CAMDEN TOWN on a cold January night, a man down the front is crying and bellowing along to the closing track of a band’s sixteenth studio album: Oblong of Dreams, a paean to place and belonging worthy of Wordsworth.
Up on stage, Nigel Blackwell, Britain’s greatest living songwriter, is an unassuming type, his genius known only to a lucky few. Half Man Half Biscuit’s wonderful, warm and endearingly obsessive fan base are all here, packed like expectant sardines after drinking weak lager in a Camden boozer.
While many of their era have long since sunk into a morass of nostalgia tours, new tunes met with a rush to the bar, Nigel and the boys are more vital than ever.
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