Paul Grenyer

ARD Following a nightmare which is parking in Manchester and getting a meal on a Saturday night without booking, we walked into the Bread Shed just as ARD were getting going, minus my vinyl and CDs for signing!. The masterpiece which is Take Up My Bones was instantly recognisable, as were composer and multi instrumentalist Mark Deeks and fellow Winterfylleth band mate Chris Naughton, both on guitar. The latter was centre stage, where surely Deeks should have been? From the off the band, who were put together to perform an album which was never intended to be performed live, were a little loose with the drums too prominent and the guitars not clear enough. There appeared to be a lot retuning necessary, especially from Chris and the lead guitarist who appeared hidden away a lot of the time. This didn’t really detract from enjoyment of the incredible compositions from the album.  By the time the final 10 minutes, consisting of Only Three Shall Know, came along something had changed,...

Glory! Hammer! Were fantastic! They played well and were lots of fun as you’d expect.  I mean who doesn’t like a gig to start with a cardboard cutout of Tom Jones and Delilah playing on the PA. The band were all dressed up - it must have been very hot - and playing their parts. I did find some of the gaps between songs and the interplay with the audience felt a little too Steel Panther. It was too frequent, superfluous and added time to a set which could have been shorter. Sozos Michael is a phenomenal singer and makes it seem effortless and perfect. I’m a big fan of widdly guitar and it doesn’t stand out as much on record as it did live which was a really nice surprise. It’ll be great to see them again when the promised new album is out and they tour again.

React Cookbook: Recipes for Mastering the React Framework by David Griffiths and Dawn Griffiths ISBN: 978-1492085843 This is a book of about 100 recipes across 11 sections. The sections range from the basics, such as creating React apps, routing and managing state to the more involved topics such as security, accessibility and performance. I was especially pleased to see that the section on creating apps looked at create-react-app, nextjs and a number of other getting started tools and libraries, rather than just sticking with create-react-app. I instantly liked the way each recipe laid out the problem it was solving, the solution and then had a discussion on different aspects of the solution. It immediately felt a bit like a patterns book. For example, after describing how to use create-react-app, the discussion section explains in more depth what it really is, how it works, how to use it to maintain your app and how to get rid of it. As with a lot of React developers, the vast majori...