This Sunday I will be welcoming an old friend to the studio. I first met Dave Batstone in 1986. He was then an activist and PhD student.Now he is a professor at San Francisisco University and an author and activist. He is also one of my oldest and best friends. However Dave is visiting us to talk about the organisation he heads up: Not For Sale.

Dave was asked to write a book of the same name a few years back to coincide with the anniversary of the abolition of slavery and the imminent release of Hollywood’s film of the struggle. When he started to research the subject he was amazed to find that far from slavery having been abolished, it was still hugely rife in many parts of the world. He has since set up his own Anti-Slavery movement (Not For Sale) and he will join us to talk about how that organisation is affecting the  business ethics word-wide. To bear witness to that we’ll will also be joined by Stephen Craig who is joint CEO of All Saints clothing company to tell us how he is responding to the challenges Dave’s organisation is posing.

Also…in the first hour we will speak to Professor John Swinton from Aberdeen University. John will talk about his current research and the ‘theology of disability.’ I’ll also get a chance to learn more about his recent publication ‘Living More Gently in a Viloent World: The Prophetic Witness of Weakness’ which he published with Stanley Hauerwas and Jean Vanier. John was, for sixteen years, a nurse involved in the field of mental-health and latterly with learning disability, so he has plenty of insight to share on current practice.

Later we’ll discover how a flower competition 100 years ago bequeathed a beautiful church in a borders village and we’ll also eavesdrop on Richard Holloway’s visit to an important Art Exhibition by David Mach celebrating the anniversary of the King James Bible. Oh yes….and there will be music: Enio Moricone, Frank Sinatra, Bruce Springsteen and Agnes Obel…all great. Sunday Morning from Seven on BBC Radio Scotland.

I’ve been off the airwaves on Sundays since last year. Now that I’m back you’re getting me for 2 hours. It’s a real pleasure to be on this show again. Especially when my great producer Amraine has come up with a Pakistan theme for our first programme. We will hear old and young voices, hear stories of survival from the disasterous flood of last summer and hear how young Scots are facing up to issues of identity now. Sadly the only thing we can’t do is eat the cuisine – we’ll save that for another time!

Joining me in the first hour is Habib Malik, the head of Islamic Relief Scotland. Habib is a tireless worker for a great charity. This year he was honoured by the Pakistani Government for raising so much money from Scotland for the Flood Appeal. We’re lucky to have him as he is about to hop on a flight to Nairobi to get stuck into the famine problems of Somalia and Kenya.

Later on I’ll be joined by two great Scottish Asians. Firstly Bashir Mann, who has served as Scotland’s first Muslim politician and as a Justice of The Peace and from Chicago Azeem Ibrahim a self-made millionaire and founder of the Solas foundation which specialises in educating young people away from violence. They’ll be talking about Scottish/Pakistani identities and the future of Pakistan itself. We’ll also hear from The Sunday Herald’s foreign editor, David Pratt about how he has seen Pakistan change and develop over his time reporting from there.

It’s also important to know where things are going artistically so we will speak to Alina Mirza who organised the first ever Pakistani film, media and arts festival in Glasgow in 2005.

Lastly Arifa Farooq will help me discover how young Scottish Muslims reconcile faith and lifestyle choices.

Oh, yes…..and we’ll give you a very wide sample of Pakistani pop, jazz and classical music. All in two hours from 7 on Sunday morning.

Have you ever been in someone elses’s recording session? I haven’t done a whole load of hanging around other studios. I have occasionally been in a control room which wasn’t my own. Good friends Gary and Al once told me about being invited – yes invited – to attend Joni Mitchell’s orchestral sessions at Air for her “Both Sides Now” project. As recording artists themselves they knew when to talk and when to smile , but they were still smiling when they told me the story a few years later.

I can’t boast anything like that but a few weeks ago my mouth was made to fall open as Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings took command of Audio Productions Studio in Nashville. As I sat in the control room hearing the loveliest sound two humans can make with 2 guitars and voices I turned to the engineer to give him the thumbs up. It was then I saw the face of a man who was beginning to question his own identity. He too was amazed at the sound but trying to figure out how it could be so good around the cheapest microphone in the whole building. You see…sometimes talent wins the day.

Gill and Dave were brilliant and we then talked for ages about the new record, their many collaborations and their live plans which include a tour with Buffalo Springfield. You can hear all of that on Friday as we are devoting our two hours to the music of Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings. And yes……in case you want to know. No hyperbole but I think it was the best session ever.

We will also pause to remember this man.

As I read the news of Clarence Clemons’ death here on my laptop on Sunday morning I did feel my whole life passing before me. Hearing his solo on Jungleland was a formative moment in my teenage life. I remember playing it extra loud in the front room on a Saturday to my friend Callum Laird and being embarrassed at my dad doing the thing I would now do too – interrupting the song and telling me to turn it down! We will take time to play you a significant Clarence moment on Friday. Thanks for the music Big Man.

After that….. I’m taking a few weeks off. Deacon Blue are hitting the road over the summer and I start back with the now 2 hour Sunday Morning show in late July. I’ll try to play some great music for you all then too. In the meantime do enjoy your summer.

On a summer train back from London. Now which country song am I thinking of? Is it  Kenny Rogers’ ‘The Gambler’ or Darden Smith’s ‘Midnight Train?’ You’ll have your own train songs too. But I found myself  not thinking of songs but of Larkin’s Whitsun Weddings…

And perhaps that’s how it feels to break from the AC for a few weeks. All of us bound up in these songs and stories now loosed to enjoy the summer and come back with new memories set to music.

By the time we are all gathered around the wireless this Friday I will (hopefully) have returned from London (and this bumpy train will have come to a smooth standstill) and my band will know the material they are playing at the gigs we’re playing next week. After next week’s show I’ll step away from this particular microphone for  a few weeks and take up a more familiar mic position for various shows in York, Liverpool, Glastonbury….Greenock  and Belladrum. If you’re around on any of these dates I’d love to see you.

In the meantime we will host The Wynntown Marshalls this coming Friday. The band are based in Edinburgh and they are heading over to Studio 1 at Pacific Quay to play some of their own songs live on the show this week. They also promise a cover of a great song by a great artist, so don’t miss that. We’ll get a chance to chat to the band and find out what inspires them and what they have been up to since we first played their album a year or so ago.

In other news we will hear some lovely new music from My Morning Jacket and Vetiver who have both brought out new albums in the last couple of weeks. If you are still a bit vague about The Morning Jacket sound it’s safe to say that Robin Pecknold must have been a fan as their is a real similarity in the voices of Robin and Jim James. We’ll also have a new song from that much-anticipated new Gillian Welch and good things from Perth’s Southern Fried line-up including The Blind Boys of Alabama and Abigail Washburn who’s album is one of THE highlight of the year so far for me.

Now …where are we with Bob Dylan? It’s 1978. For many of you youngsters I realise that is ancient history but for me it was the high time of post punk and making sense of what we were going to tolerate and what we were prepared to let go. I’ve mentioned before that certain friends adopted a year-zero approach to their record collections at this point. The Stones and The Beatles were definitely old news but what were we to make of Bob? His offering on that year was Street Legal. From memory – and it’s very hazy – it was a summer record too.

I know that I for one bought this record and enjoyed a lot of it at the time though the rather cumbersome big-band soundscape made it feel a little dated for those lean times. There was brass, gospel backing singers and the occasional inclusion of a kitchen sink on this record but it is intersting to reflect that in the last two years a song from it has been cut by Jack White and our good friend Matthew Houck from Phospherescent cited it as a key backdrop for “Here’s To Taking It Easy.”

So I’ll put it on over the next few days and give it a spin and you can sample a couple of songs on Friday. It all starts at five past eight on Friday evening on BBC Radio Scotland.

like record companies……

A couple of weeks ago I had a mountain of CDs on my desk, another assorted pile on my passenger seat and various others scattered about the house. I needed to listen. How often had I sent tapes and CDs and MP3s off and expected people to listen and respond? How often had I darkly muttered that people should listen respectively to records. For whatever reason, Mr Murdoch and I are now receiving even more CDs than ever before and for that we thank you.

They come from Major Record Labels, Independent Labels, Wannabe Labels and people just sending out records. Feeling slightly intimidated by the volume I found myself saying that perhaps record companies should be trusted…I know…..but it was a weak moment. I’d begun to think that if record companies had passed on all this material then perhaps it would save us the bother. Then it happened. I picked up the unlikeliest CD of them all.

Wrapped in a plain plastic sleeve with hand written notes and a pile (thick pile) of, what at first appeared to be biog notes. But no – these were not biog notes, these were lyric sheets and…chords and capo positions. And yet – perhaps remembering how sympathetic I hoped the recipient of my mumblings might have been – I carried on. To my surprise and joy it was not only better than I had expected but good enough for Richard and I to include it on Friday. Don’t miss the moment when I play ‘Beautiful Morning’ on this week’s show.

But allow me to cut to the chase. The event of the week here in Wild West of Glasgow has been the visit of KD Lang to the best looking but most ill-designed of concert venues in the city. (It’s a real trip externally but slightly dull inside and plain awkward backstage)

We caught up with her in her dressing room before the sound check and I managed to get back to see the show later in the evening. It was a real pleasure to chat to KD and her concert was a total triumph. We talk about the great ‘Sing It Loud’, we find out why she now co credits her work with the Sis Boom Bang and what happens what her next high profile collaboration will celebrate.

In other news: More from the great Hayes Carl, a wonderful sonic treat from friends from Sweden including Ane Brun and First Aid Kit and we will reflect on the sad passing of Andrew Gold.

Finally we remember the moment when Bob Dylan first got religion in a big way as we move into the seventies with ‘Slow Train Coming.’ It’s all going to be good and it starts at five past eight on Friday evening.

This week’s Bob Backwards feature lands on a big year for me. 1980.

In a weird way we pass like ships in the night. Bob found Evangelical fundamentalism just as I was losing it.I remember the atmosphere at that time. I had graduated in June of 1980 and  spent that summer commencing work for the first time. Except that it wasn’t really like work at all. I had decided not to take the teaching post offered to me and work as a volunteer for a city centre church in Dundee. It was a brilliant summer spent getting involved in various pieces of youth work, renovating a flat where I would be based along with a couple of pals and falling in and out of love with a girl. Oh yes, and there would be some time spent in an odd band I had become involved in who were mainly based in Edinburgh. (I know!)

The reason I probably never bought a copy of Saved by Bob Dylan was that I probably couldn’t afford it. I was on a volunteer wage and many of the records I did have were stolen or scratched to bits by various folk who came calling around our place at that time. I also (half- heartedly) joined in with my cousin Laura’s post punk year zero approach and started flogging off anything pre 1977….but that’s another story.

I bought more than I ever sold here

However there is another reason that I’ve never listened to ‘Saved’ until this week. Bob was going where I’d been and, if I’m honest, I’ve never really wanted to go back to that place. I’m not a good fundamentalist at anything. I think, however, it doesn’t agree with many of us when it snakes its way into religion. I was enjoying uncertainty for the first time in a long time. Living where I was and meeting the people I met meant the answers I’d trotted out for years came over as a little glib. Bob was singing about ‘salvation’ and having found it. What does it mean to be saved and still live below the bread-line, what does it matter to be told Jesus loves you if the reality you experience is that no one loves you enough to give you a job? I’m guessing I never listened to the album as I found the triumphalism of the sleeve too off-putting. It would be 9 years before I found myself enjoying a Dylan album, a lot of things happened in those 9 years and I felt happier when he started asking questions again and allowing the answers to blow in the wind a little.

I listened to the record for the first time from beginning to end today finally. I’ll tell you my full thoughts on the record tomorrow – not that it matters a jot what I think – safe to say there are some great things to play.

We have no guest artist tomorrow and it’s a good thing. I have a pile of records I want to play and gigs I want to tell you about. Look out for some fine old things from Emmylou Harris, Diana Jones and Neil Young. New things from Gregory Alan Isakov,Nathaniel Rateliff and the great Matraca Berg and some lovely new music from Scotland in the shape of Starwheel Press.

And …….I’m going to tell you about the night I didn’t have and the one I did have in this great building…

It all starts at five past eight on Friday evening. BBC Radio Scotland.

Dear Bob

This has been a big week. In case I haven’t made this clear; Happy Birthday and many happy returns. If you decide to retire then thank you for what you have done. It has given me so much pleasure to listen to your music from the age of eleven or so. It has been exciting waiting to hear what you will do next and there have been so many great memories.

It also occurs to me that you are seventy years old. I’m 53 and I know by your age I’d like to spend a fair amount of time in my garden, watching some football and doing a bit of painting. Perhaps you too would like to wind down, record and tour no more and spend your days enjoying the Californian sunshine. Who wouldn’t? If you do then rest assured you have my blessing. Anyone who makes one great album is a rare talent. Getting three out there is a wonderful achievement which a few have managed. But managing to make great records over five decades is something else entirely.

In case you were wondering I’d like to say these ones in particular strike me as really great: The Freewhelin’ Bob Dylan, Bringin It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, Blood On The Tracks, Slow Train Comin’, Oh Mercy, Time Out of Mind, Love and Theft and Modern Times. Most artists would be pleased to have so many great songs but you have done so much more. Of course there are many other really great songs – in my opinion one of your greatest – not on these records;  With God On Our Side, Knockin on Heaven’s Door, Forever Young, Positively 4th St…I could go on.

However if you do decide to write, record, perform, engage in more prose or broadcast again I, for one would be very happy. I have enjoyed almost everything you have done and where I haven’t enjoyed one project as much as another I have consoled myself with the knowledge that this is how it always is with great artists.

Finally thank you for the less celebrated things you have done: for playing old records on the radio by some great performers, for visiting Neil Young’s house, for finding The Band, for offending folk-musicians, for refusing to be the spokesman for anybody and for continually taking the opposite direction people expect of you.

One final thing. When I was at school people perpetually nagged me because they thought your voice difficult or unformed in some way. Over the last month I have had the mixed pleasure of sifting through many cover versions of your songs. There are some that are good and many that are really unbearable. Eventually they all fail because they don’t have the thing which your own version always has: your voice. You are a great singer and your voice has brought me so much pleasure since I first heard Watching The River Flow on Radio 1 all these years ago.

One last personal thing. I made a long journey last year from Rome to Paris by mini bus. At the time it looked about the worst possible journey to make as we were stuck on land because of the ash cloud over Europe. I had my  ipod and I listened and loved your last record, Together Through Life. I played it and I played it again against an increasingly darkening sky and high foreboding Alps. It’s a memory that will live with me forever.

My enjoyment could be repeated millions of times over by the millions who still love your music.

God Bless you Bob,

Ricky

On Friday you’ll hear Bob appreciated and covered by the Americana community and you’ll hear some sparkling great Dylan cuts. No adverts, no competitions just Bob Dylan for two hours. Next Friday? We’re going to do it all again. After two weeks surrounded by US Radio I love public broadcasting. Hope you do too!

So I’ve decided the best way I can introduce the next two Fridays is to put out this essay I wrote for The Scotsman in 1992. Why they asked me to write it then I can’t remember. But I disagree with very little that I wrote  except we now know he was about to make 6 straight great albums. Just as well I got round to realising he was as good as I’d first imagined. So here it is unchanged; my younger voice speaking about the Bob I grew up with.

In the stock room of my father’s warehouse I heard my dad asking cousin Brian, “Who is this Bob Dylan anyway?” It was the summer of the Isle of Wight festival and the reason for the assorted PVC jackets sailing into Cowes was a mystery to my old man. The social historians among you (who, I may add will find nothing else worthwhile in this piece) will no doubt notice that this  was an incredible question given  that what many people consider Dylan’s most worthwhile work had all been released…….but that would be to overestimate pop culture and underestimate  my father’s ignorance of the “poet”.

Brian knew who Bob Dylan was. Brian was at university, took flying lessons and would occasionally come to work in the summer sporting a
cravat and a jaunty goatee……….he also left a Thunderclap Newman elpee at our house never to have it returned. (Sorry about that Brian but believe me I needed all the youth culture I could get when I came from a Dylan free family – we’d only got the record player the Christmas before and were still getting off on the Jim Reeves Christmas album) I decided to be a Bob-familiar person too. I asked for an album and my aunty Ev finally obliged the following Christmas. More Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits arrived down the lum containing the first track I’d been aware of on the radio – Watching the River Flow.
At this point the purists will all have turned the page muttering darkly about dispatching their first ever letter to the Scotsman but the strange thing about my convoluted conversion to Bob Dylan is that I liked the sound of the whole thing. I liked the guitar, the moothie, Leon Russell’s piano and most of all the voice. I liked the rasp and whisper, the nasal whine and the the fender-twin honk of it all. I knew nothing of God on Our Side or The Chimes of Freedom but I loved this collective noise that was Bob Dylan.
I went on this way for some time enjoying the little extra that I heard: the seminal Blood on the Tracks, the work of the Band, the small newspaper clips in my Dad’s Daily Express about Bob being a right-on-millionaire (yet he still wears denim jackets pop fans) and I began to relax in the knowledge that I was maturing in my Dylan taste. I knew nothing.

I never knew about the bike crash, The Big Pink, or even who the Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands was. It was big Alan that told me all these things. Big Alan owned and played a copy of a Les Paul Sun Burst with humbuckers (that’s electric guitar to you, square) and even knew that All Along the Watchtower was ripped off a dude called Isaiah! I quickly came to “know” these things too.

Off course it was ludicrous that in the current release Bob claimed to have written  Sad Eyed Lady of  the Lowlands (we just called it lowlands) for his wife Sara….. I mean people had waited years to get that kind of hard news and he gives it away like, well like Alan lent me his phase-pedal  never to see it again. (Sorry about that Alan) Alan “knew”, and your man here was not a million miles behind him, that the most important record onˇ the College of Commerce jukebox was Like A Rolling Stone/Gates of Eden. I came to “know” that Like a  Rolling Stone was the greatest record ever made. It didn’t perturb me unduly that at the particular time of its release I was more keenly tuned into the Alan Price Set’s “Don’t Stop the Carnival”.

It was shortly after this a truly wonderful and awful thing happened – Punk. Let’s face it (as one of Mike Leigh’s best characters says) these were not Dylan friendly years. Icononoclasm was in and there was no bigger statue around than the one with the guy with the big nose and the striped T-shirt. He did his best; he jammed with Patti Smith at the Bottom Line, he tried wearing make up  but it was always a lost cause. His head finally rolled onto the pavement one day when some poor sod complained to NME about a less than flattering review they had carried about the “Street Legal” album. The fatal blow was ‘cruel but fair’;  the enfants terrible of the paper, Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons simply quoted the lines of a less that successful song on the album. It contained the immortal couplet: ‘Do you cook and sow, make flowers grow?/Do you understand my pain?’ You will understand me if I tell you that it hurts too much to continue at this point.
There really was only one way out of a ghastly career situation like this but sadly for his Bobness there was no convenient  all night drug store/ dangerous sports car/ fat-burger stall / roving gun-man to remedy the sinking
credibility. Instead Bob discovered Christianity.

Some of that isn’t actually true. Bob Dylan came face to face with Jehovah of the Old Testament which in some ways is just as well because he was soon to find out the meaning of unforgiveness for himself. As someone who was preparing to question the fundamental certainties of my younger years and become on of the people my parents warned me about Bob Dylan had made an album that restated the tenets of the family faith. Rock ‘n’ Roll phew!!During  this period Bob lost me and I certainly name no attempt to find him. The little I heard had God played by Norman Tebbitt and guitar by ..er Mark Knoplfler!

In 1986 I joined a pop group who got a recording deal on the CBS Records label, home to Shakin Stevens, Mel Torme and Bob Dylan. It was the great irony. To have access to all the Dylan back catalogue and no longer have the desire to collect it. To have people that would get me a ticket to a show and put a beer in my hand afterwards and not to want to go. To have the possibility of an awful lig which might put me in proximity of his legendary howling breath but find important things to do like washing my hair seemed to me to be a paradox worthy only  of the big guy that Bob had got to know and had given Job that particularly hard time.Worse. We were to tour in the states . We sought a support slot. It was possible that we might join the Bob Dylan tour. My life was going out of control.This being the kind of tale it is you’ll realise that the tour never happened.

Last year a kind Dylan acolyte in Germany sent me a numbered box-set CD of the bootleg series. It contained a lot of the unreleased material that had been illegally enjoyed for years. In the course of this refresher course I discovered one of the most beautiful songs ever to be written and performed by anyone. A song called ‘Every Grain of Sand’ was a truly touching litany of Christian faith and doubt which would drive the weakest brother back into the chapel and bring him to his knees. ÎIt was performed on a guitar with a piano accompaniment and a wild dog barking in the next room. Not only did it reverse all my negative doubts about Bob but I realised that any man willing to leave the dog on couldn’t be all the things the NME had called him.Ironically the song had been released as a different version on one of the aforementioned Knopfler/Tebbitt sessions but its genius had been disguised as only seminal rock acts seem to know how.I began to perform the song in the same stumbling fashion as the bootleg and on some of the happiest nights of my life when I truly enjoyed playing concerts like I hadn’t done for some time we would play Every Grain of Sand and people were patient enough to give me the time to sing

I’ve been here in Nashville since Tuesday.It’s not always easy to understand or describe “The South.” Downstairs in my hotel is an informal breakfast buffet arrangement which seems to mean that there are more people needing to sit than there are spare tables. I can’t imagine wanting to talk to anyone over breakfast so I reluctantly asked to share a space with a bloke doing the crossword in USA Today. He recognised I had “an accent” and struck up conversation. Turns out his half-brother lives in Peebles and he was in town on business from Mississippi. We chatted about oil spills, hurricanes and the usual stuff and I remarked that I found the south the bit of the USA I really found the most fascinating. I remarked that it was here that seemed to be the birthplace of so much of the cultural America came from. It’s a great place, I offered.

As I got up to pick up my toasted muffin I almost missed him saying. “Shame that most people don’t know that.”When I asked him to explain he gave me some interesting insights. ‘Most people think we’re racist and everyone knows we’re poor – compared to the north.’ I realised there is a lot of truth in what he said. When I grew up in the seventies the south was understood by my generation through the words of Neil Young’s Alabama. Now, I think – perhaps because of Randy Newman- but also because I’ve spent some time here that it’s a much better place than that. Equally, the northerners are no angels. ‘The KKK was started in Indiana,’ my breakfast pal told me. Maybe it’s good I didn’t get that table on my own after all.

I picked up a great book last night down town. It’s a portrait and mini biogs of classic country singers of the first half of last century. In the introduction Douglas Green makes an astute observation: ‘ Country Music may have existed before 1925 but it didn’t become country music until the advent of the radio and new stars were born.’ How true that is. It’s the radio that is omni present in these great films from our movie club – Coal Miners Daughter, Walk The Line and The Last Picture Show.(that one’s for next year!)

And it is to the radio that I go most often when I’m here. The great station is WSM 650 on the medium wave. ‘Some things sound better on AM.’ I bet there’s a few radio bosses would have killed for that cool strap line. There’s a truth in it too. I’ll play some radio highlights tomorrow including, Nanci Griffiths, Faith Hill and the most important record store boss of in this town (apart from Jack White), Ernest Tubbs.

We’ll also have a visit from East Nashville’s Diana Jones who will sing tracks from her new album and we’ll get a chance to talk to her about the Nashville Flood of a year ago which informed her great new record, ‘High Atmosphere.’ We’re not forgetting Bob backwards. In the current edition of a Nashville Listings Paper there’s a great piece about ‘Blonde on Blonde’ being the first time many people outside country realised what a great recording centre Music City was. Sadly this week’s album is no Blonde on Blonde but is Empire Burlesque…still, some nice things to play.

I’ll also tell you about my own adventures in Music Row which today takes me to a writing session with Cary Barlowe, the man who wrote American Honey.

It all starts tomorrow at 2…that’s my time….5 past 8 for you. BBC Radio Scotland.

It may be raining now after all these endless weeks of sunshine but here are a few important pointers to re establishing your happiness quotient:

It may be raining but we’re going to play Hank Williams.

It may be raining but we’re going to play George Jones.

It may be raining but but we’re going to play the longest song I have ever played on radio.

It may be raining but I am not going to play the bad stuff from “Knocked Out Loaded.”

It may be raining but we have an interview and session with Shelby Lynn.

OK…that’s enough weather. Let’s flesh in a little detail here.

First Shelby. Did anyone go to the gig? I was never going to go to the gig but I did have the pleasure of doing a Shelby crammer course during last week. She really has got a lot of lovely stuff on record and Love Shelby is a very good album. If you are going to get one I would suggest you listen to her Dusty Springfield album (Just A Little Lovin’).It really is gorgeous.

Interviewing Shelby was not the easiest thing I’ve ever done but I hope you’ll enjoy the chat tomorrow. The nice thing is she seemed to like it! (Phew….)

What else…

I think you will like the music of this man:

He is Gregory Alan Isakov and he sounds like a re born Ryan Adams. His album is called This Empty Northern Hemisphere….check it out, as they say.

We’ll also have a track from the new album of a song writer who has written a massive British No 1 hit single and lots of other great songs for artists including Morrisey, David Bowie and Ringo. You do the arith’ as my good friend Biffo would say.

Lastly………Join these dots up and stay fashionable.

All will be made clear round the wireless at five past eight on Friday night. BBC Radio Scotland.