Therapy For Me

W/C 26th May 2025 I completed my final run for the month yesterday, and also the final run in my current pair of running shoes, and I mention it because it is a bit of a bitter-sweet moment. I become quite attached to my runners, and whilst I am looking forward to a new pair (the first few runs in new shoes are always great) it always feels like I am being less than respectful to my current squeez...

This Time is the first song I ever heard from an unknown Canadian rocker named Bryan Adams. I was introduced to it by a friend called Steve Nicholson, he lived at the end of my road and he too was an avid Sheffield United fan. I ended up going to away matches with him and his Dad, and I even had a Saturday job at their family business back in the day (they had an independent Insurance brokerage, j...

W/C 12th May 2025 I haven't been able to ascertain exactly which group of football fans adopted this song first. Wikipedia cites the example of Everton fans in 1956, which is only a year after the song was written - so that might be favourite. I was belting it out (along with 26,000 others) at Bramall Lane on Monday and having a whale of a time. Aura Farming: Depending on the context, “aura farmin...

W/C 5th May 2025 I see that Amazon very astutely managed to get Conclave on their roster of films included on Prime, just in time for the selection of the new pope. I can only assume that the nature of the timing, you could almost say it was divine, will push the viewing figures no end. I haven’t seen it yet, but I have read the book which I thoroughly enjoyed. Robert Harris is a fave amongst my f...

W/C 28th April 2025 Between 13:00 and 13:40 today I witnessed a wonder of the modern world. In the Long Bar, which is situated in the East Stand at Headingley, an undisclosed but statistically significant number of cricket followers were fed a lunch of fish, chips and mushy peas, with bread and butter on the side. This was the scene that greeted me in the Members lounge, as this unnamed collective...

W/C 21st April 2025 As you are about to hear there isn't a real reason why I have picked this particular track to share with you as the episode title. There could have been, but as it turned out I ditched that idea because it was a bit too complicated. But I have stuck with it because I can't get past one aspect of the lyric, and as it happens it does resonate with (admittedly in a slightly labour...

W/C 14th April 2025 I am quietly chuckling to myself, because I never thought I would be able to feed a song title like this one into an episode of TFM. But in the context of the content for this week, and if you flip it around a bit, and imagine it from a certain perspective then it does make a lot of sense. Anyway it's a bit of a funny one this week, with the early week being the closing stages...

W/C 7th April 2025 As it turns out a Saltwater swimming pool does (in point of fact) still contain Chlorine. Not an opening sentence I thought I would ever use for a slice of TFM, but the experiences of the week have brought me here, and after all that is what this is all about. I have been informed by Goggle AI that 'a saltwater swimming pool utilises a salt chlorine generator to produce chl...

W/C 31st March 2025 26 minutes to go until this weeks TFM is due to be published and I have no idea what to do about the notes. Michael Sembello is pulsating out of the speakers on my desk, and if I flip tabs I can see the very MTV era video playing away in its non-widescreen format. We are due to be leaving the house for a family shopping trip to Meadowhall at quarter to, which is only adding to...

W/C 24th March 2025 One of the great things about recording TFM is that I get to rack my brains and come up with an episode title that is also a song. You know the rules, the song title (where possible) must be pertinent to some of the themes of the week's episode, and I try and make it a song I have some history with. Clearly this week was going to be fairly easy, I mean how many song titles are...

W/C 17th March 2025 I have heard this story three times now, and it floors me every time. This song was written as part of Radio 2's 21st century Folk project, where a group of songwriters were invited to write songs about other peoples lives. The song describes the day that Thea travelled to the North East to meet Delyth Raffell, and to hear about her daughter Ellen who passed away at the age of...

Welcome to fellow Marillion folk and all newcomers to this podcast... A few things to know, Therapy For Me has been running for just over five years and is a safe space for me to process what has been going on over the course of the last week. It is unscripted, recorded (mostly) in one take and published fresh everything Saturday morning around 9am GMT The episode titles are based around songs tha...

W/C 10th March 2025 I love this song, and I love this album. Bearing in mind what I am talking about this week I wanted something sublime and beautiful, and this is surely it. Should I be using something other than Marillion to describe a Marillion weekend? Absolutely I should, anything by the band themselves would be a little too 'on the nose' Anyway I hope you are well and have had a good week,...

W/C 3rd March 2025 Todays notes come courtesy of Wikipedia; Coles Corner  is the name given to the corner of  Fargate  and  Church Street  in  Sheffield , in sight of the  cathedral . It was the site of the old  Cole Brothers   department store until it moved to  Barker's Pool  in 1963. The corner is famous in Sheffield as a place to meet...

W/C 24th February 2025 I found myself watching the first Rambo film last night, partly because it was there and partly because I haven’t seen any of that particular franchise. Clearly they were films of their time, but it is interesting that the original - which was called First Blood and has since been rebranded as Rambo: First Blood - bore little resemblance to the genre it effectively spawned....

W/C 17th February 2025 It really has been a revelation listening to some CDs again, the only real downside is that I had forgotten the effort it takes to read the album titles up on the high shelf in the back room. You will understand what has got me to this point when you have listened to this weeks TFM, but in real terms it means I have given the following a spin; Symphonie Fantastique - Hector...

W/C 10th February 2024 As I have mentioned before, there are some weeks when it comes around to TFM time that I literally have nothing. Over time I have learnt not to panic, trust the process, and hey presto something appears right when I need it and away we go. The same is also true of writing the notes. So even though I finished this weeks TFM last night, I am still waiting for process to delive...

W/C 3rd February 2025 Whatever we thought was going to happen when the world became more connected, this absolutely ain't it. I have spent the last few weeks speculating on the 'end-game' for the sector I work in. Not quite existential, but certainly diminished to a point that would have been unthinkable when I first wandered into a guitar shop back in the mid-eighties. Of course it is part of a b...

W/C 27th January 2025 You may well have heard of Rob Thomas, and if so it is entirely possible this is down to the Santana tune Smooth. Not only did he sing on that track, he also rewrote the lyrics and melody. My Rob Thomas story starts in Durham, on a Sunday afternoon and the purchase of the first Matchbox Twenty album from a little independent CD shop just this side of the bridge. It is a crack...

W/C 20th January 2025 I just need to accept the inevitability of not sleeping when I arrive here. But no, for the first two nights I tried to outwit my old LA nemesis by every single combination of pillow and bedding known to man, in the vain hope that I would unlock the mystical elixir of deep and unbroken sleep. You are aware in an instant, on awaking at 03:17, that sleep as an option has been p...

W/C 13th January 2025 Because I am not sure what to write this week, I am going to back fill a few bits of extra information on some of the stuff that came up... Duke Special was born just a few weeks before me in Northern Ireland, and the song of his I am banging on about was released in 2005. There is a Marillion tie-in as he often works with Ben Castle Pride and Prejudice (sort of) has just beg...

W/C 6th January 2025 It's always a little strange that the first couple of episodes of the New Year also mark the end of another year of TFM. Here we are at episode 52 of season 5, which means that next week will mark the beginning of my sixth year of banging away at whatever this curious little podcast actually is. Anyway, whilst searching to see if `I had used this weeks episode title before (wh...

W/C 30th December 2024 Having made the decision to go with Old December as the title track, it turns out I have already used it - way back at the end of December 2021. That left me with the dilemma of what to do, should I consider something different and if so should I re-record the final bit of the podcast? Of course that would have meant selecting another tune as an episode title, and nothing wa...

W/C 23rd December 2024 Here we go then, the Christmas TFM. Over the last couple of weeks I have been watching a lot of Christmas specials, you know the kind of thing Not Going Out, Gavin & Stacey, Frasier, Click & Collect, etc, etc. I have been over indulging in them for the reasons we do anything at this time of the year; they are there and they make you feel good. And I think some of tha...

W/C 16th December 2024 The biggest problem I had trying to replicate my Chrissy Mix playlist on Spotify came literally at the start of the process. Since my very crack at that particular selection, the first track had always been Gabriels Message by Marillion. No ifs, no buts, no negotiations. Of course that particular version started out life as a fan club only release, and still to this day is n...