May 2025

New music, a new gig announcement, and overcoming annoying audiences

I have booked Manchester’s The Old Monkey on the evening of September 20^th to perform material new and old. I will start compiling a set list in the next month. In recent years I have written so much material, that the only dilemma will be what to leave out:

Output

Over the next year, especially considering how busy my day job is, I will be reducing my online output significantly. On the Monday Mandarin channel, I have uploaded an advanced reading lesson using a contemporary poem and comparing it to an ancient one. But that channel seems to have run its course, so I will only be adding to it when overcome with inspiration.

This month I finished a new song, titled ‘Millicent’, and it went down great at the open mic at The Old Monkey. This month’s additions to the Kevin McGeary Guitar channel include a lesson on how to play ‘Misery’ by Green Day and a rendition of ‘Granada’ by Isaac Albeniz.

Soon, updates to that channel will be monthly rather than weekly, to focus on quality rather than frequency. The Kev’s YouTube channel will soon follow.

Activities

As a creative and performer who is also a complete unknown, when it comes to making on-stage magic happen, I require luck. Luck increases with resilience and experience, but even superstars have their share of bad nights at the office.

At some open mics, I have had to deal with obnoxious, drug-fuelled audiences. But with experience, there are usually win-win solutions, like a teacher learning to control a classroom. It is all quite stressful, and as rewarding as the bawdy ballads are, I would hate for it to be my only creative activity. It is just as well I have others.

I particularly enjoyed this month’s radio appearance on Radio North Manchester’s Hannah’s Bookshelf, which can be found at 1:29:10 here.

The Mandarin Club on Meetup is also going strong. This month’s China Book Club was about ‘The World of Suzie Wong’ by Richard Mason, which proved popular.

Wider World

Since 2011, war in Syria has created at least a million refugees. This has caused a backlash and increased popularity of anti-immigration parties like Reform in Britain, AfD in Germany, and Fronte Nationale in France. Reputable organisations have predicted that by 2050 at least 20 million people will become refugees due to ecological collapse and other factors. The likely political fallout is unfathomable.

U.S President Donald Trump also owes much of his popularity to promising to crack down on immigration. This month, he has blasted judges for blocking his policies. In the UK, subsequent to a strong performance by Reform in local elections, Labour Prime Minister Kier Starmer announced tougher controls on immigration.

As well as being an apparent vote-winner, immigration control is big business. Private companies are paid millions of dollars to run migrant detention centres. And because migrant detention is an administrative process, rather than a criminal procedure, it means that immigrants have fewer legal rights than criminals and are subject to more arbitrariness.

Rich countries have an obligation to allow their share of migration from poor countries, considering the plundering they have done. In 2009, the US supported a coup in Honduras, but has denied asylum from Honduras, en masse.

Moreover, with ageing populations and low birthrates across the rich world, migrant workers are needed to keep the care sector from collapsing. At school, I had a scumbag teacher called Gary Mogey who described people who did menial jobs as ‘dickheads’, and if I could remove one expression from the English language, it would be ‘unskilled labour’.

I am reminded of this poem by Michael Rosen, which can be read in full here:

The Migrants in Me

Maybe if I look as if

you could spin a story at me,

about how threatening and dangerous are,

as if neither I nor you would ever dream

of upping sticks and living somewhere else

and being, you know, a migrant.

…

what, is it only mad, bad and sad people

who do that sort of thing,

and neither I nor you

are mad, bad or sad enough?

…

They remind me of relatives,

who at one moment,

were as safe as houses,

and the next,

had no houses to be safe in.