Jim Simpson... music man for all seasons

 WE live in a social media world, an artificial intelligence bubble, in which there is no such thing as yesterday, only today.

Cynics might also make the case for their also being no tomorrow as well. And the way things are going globally, they may well be correct.

But it’s this absence of any universal curiosity for the past that I find the most troubling and perplexing. I suspect that this a generational issue, as all the available evidence seems to suggest this is the case. Youth is indeed wasted on the young.

Nevertheless, it’s all a bit of a mystery to me. For in my estimation, although what has gone before may not be the finished story, it nevertheless has a feeling of completeness to it.

And that’s what makes it interesting, one of the very things that attracted me to journalism in the first place. And therein lies its eternal fascination.

So let me once again welcome to this site a certain Jim Simpson, the Birmingham musical legend whose name should be on the lips of all who have enjoyed or been part of the Midlands musical scene over the last six decades.

For quite some time, I’ve been trying to interest regional and national news media in doing something meaningful about Jim. And by that I don’t mean the usual sketchy, inconclusive soundbite that is daily churned out by BBC’s Midlands Today.

But I never learn, do I? As if the London-centric media luvvies are going to be interested in reporting on people in a foreign land with funny, nasal accents. That would entail opening their eyes, dumping their prejudices, and sending a news team up the M1 into that great uncharted wilderness north of Watford.

However, while we may indeed give up on the graduate-heavy world of modern broadcasting and the fast-sinking old money print media, all it not lost. For help is at hand...

So allow me to introduce you to Australian music expert Paul Merry, my old newspaper mucker, and one-time Beatles guru Tony Barrow’s right-hand man, no less.

For thanks to the gentlest prod from me, Paul’s written a cracking piece about Jim for his blog site Paul Merry Blues, chronicling the life of a man who not only seems to have been on the Midlands music scene forever, but was crucially present at the birth of some ground-breaking innovations in music history.

I will say no more! Ladies and gentlemen, please click this link and let Paul Merry take you on a road trip with a soundtrack that’s second to none…

https://www.paulmerryblues.com/heavy-metals-early-nurturer/