Tales Of The Unexpected Spectrum: Part One This shouldn’t make any difference to anyone who already knows me. For better or worse, I’m the same Tim I always have been. But for me, it makes the kind of difference that I’ve been searching for all my life — to finally know, that I am actually… autistic. It’s good to know the reasons why we excel at some things and fail at others. Especially when you’ve gone through your entire life not knowing there were, in fact, reasons for the way you behaved. Like many undiagnosed autistic people, I’ve done…

Tales Of The Unexpected Spectrum: Part Three In November 1993 I was 18. I dived into a newsagent in Soho to get a new music magazine that I knew nothing about, but was seduced by the photograph on the cover; my two self-elected father figures at that particular time in my life: John Lennon and Bob Dylan. The magazine was Mojo. It was the next best thing to hearing my mother’s stories of her recording with Jimmy Page in the 60’s, or dancing at The Scene Club with The Beatles. Her portal to the decades I missed out on, was…

Tales Of The Unexpected Spectrum: Part Two I love vinyl. It was my way into music when my elder brother put a pair of massive headphones over my five-year-old head in 1980. The needle dropped on a song that made me grin when the words ‘Mickey Mouse has grown up…

Moonage Daydream’s ray gun fires a rush of optimism to the heart Whilst there were no new biographical facts or information about his life that I hadn’t already greedily digested about Bowie over the years, Brett Morgen’s Moonage Daydream made me feel more optimism about life than I’ve come to…

A 30-year journey to pay tribute to one of my musical heroes — In 1985, at the age of ten, I had recently moved from London to a remote village in the Andalusian mountains of Spain with my mother. This dramatic move came after several years travelling around Europe with her in a VW Camper van, as she gigged from club to club…

The Media and The Division that Distracts Don’t Look Up is a masterclass in how media and social media hold the cards of division. Division that distracts from the main event. I’ve endured a lifetime of insults as a result of multi-minority marks in my heritage, but, I have never taken offence at any of it. Because…

This time last year, in the lead up to Christmas, I took some time off social media with the intention of reconnecting with some ‘life ingredients’ I hadn’t used for a long time. The ingredients consisted of cassette tapes, painting, growing plants and learning something new on my guitar every day. I think I was trying to time travel. At the end of the 80’s/early 90’s and the start of my teens, I listened to music on cassette tapes on my Sony Walkman, painted most days as I prepared for art school, learnt something new on my guitar every day and often helped my mother in her garden to…

Part One: The Blank Canvas “The world, in our minds is the way we relate to it. If we design it to be exploited, we’ll exploit it. If we design it with no understanding of limits, we violate the limits. If we design with recognition of interconnectedness, we nurture relationships…

The reality of streaming music is far from a dream — I believe that Spotify’s recent decision to invest $100 million in AI defence tech company Helsing sends a dangerous message to every other CEO of a global music service, and forces us to question if we are all sacrificing ethicality for convenience. How ethical is our subscription to Spotify? The very fabric of music has always been…