28 years ago today the world lost Bill Shankly.

I’m a Liverpool fan so Shanks is always going to have a place in my heart but it goes beyond that.

Shankly represented everything great and everything I respect about humanity.

You only need to watch him speak to get a sense of his honesty, charisma and contagious passion. Who wouldn’t run through a brick wall for such a man?

He insisted on positivity. He was a man of the people. As his statue outside Anfield simply says: He made the people happy.

He was also a socialist and his socialism was expressed in ways that anyone can understand:

“The socialism I believe in is everyone working for each other, everyone having a share of the rewards. It’s the way I see football, the way I see life.”

Shankly was a force of nature. I met him once before a Liverpool match at Anfield.

He was holding forth like Caesar, surrounded by a crowd of people hanging on his every word. This was in the Anfield car park just in front of the Main Stand.

I was only about 5 but I squeezed through the throng and came face to face with the great man.

“Hello Mr Shankly” I said. “Can I please shake your hand?”

I’ll always remember not just his response but the manner of his bearing as he gave it.

He acted like he was the one pleased to meet ME!

I was five and used to being spoken to like a 5 year old.

But Shanks acted like meeting me was the best thing to have happened to him all year. He spoke to me not like I was an equal, but like I was some sort of film star who he’d finally got the chance to meet.

He fixed me with a proud look, reached out his hand to clasp mine and rasped: “ayyyyye son!!”

We’ve never seen his like since. We never will.

There was something really interesting about the iPhone ad in yesterday’s Guardian. It had nothing to do with the iPhone.

I don’t know if anybody saw it. It was a full page ad on the back page of the newspaper advertising 16 things that make life easier.

They were referring to apps that were available via the iPhone.

Yet not a single one had been created by iPhone themselves.

The iPhone app system is where they opened up their programming interface to outside programmers and let them get on with creating useful things for people to use on the iPhone.

And now, sixty odd thousand applications later, their advert shows that they see their value not in the stuff that Apple’s own team have created and slogged over, but in the value that has been created for them by opening up to others.

In fact, their slogan (as you can see on this advert) is: There’s an app for that.

It’s a classic case of the rewards of creating a platform and getting out of the way.

Facebook’s value comes from people outside of the Facebook company (its users), YouTube is the same, and now iPhone are paying for full page national adverts on the back of it.

Even the all powerful Google, where all of us go for web based content, doesn’t own 99% of the content that makes it so useful. It just organises other people’s stuff.

It’s an interesting question for musicians and activists to ponder – what ‘platform’ could we build, get out of the way, and make what we do a million times more valuable as a result?

Here’s a video from my recent gig in Cardiff at the Rumney Folk Club.

The song is The Limerick Soviet. Enjoy!

Thanks to the good folk at Jammy Custard Productions.

The new album We Can Make The World Stop has just been reviewed in the current edition of influential national music magazine R2 (formerly known as Rock N Reel).

Reviewer Eddie Cooney gave it a whopping four stars (woohoo!) and said some rather nice things about it too.

Describing me as “an incurable champion of ordinary people” he went on to place the sound of the album as somewhere between Billy Bragg and early Go-Betweens.

“He chooses immaculately researched historical subject matter…He is also capable of clever, tension-filled drama.”

You can buy R2 magazine at News From Nowhere, Borders, and W H Smiths as well as all newsagents with a good range of mags. It’s got a free CD on too, including a track by my mate David Ferrard, who recently wowed us all at the Liverpool Working Class Music Festival.

Saturday’s gig at The Red Shed in Wakefield was ace. I loved it lots. And it really is a red shed. See the picture. And there was a Scouser sat at the end of the bar called Peter O’Toole. You couldn’t make it up could you?

Half the songs may well have degenerated into comradely debate but it was utterly hilarious and I had a great time.

The support acts were fab. James Bar Bowen and Gary Kaye were top drawer.

I love intimate venues like this. The people were fab and I’m indebted to Tony for working so hard to put the event on.

Thanks to all at Wakefield for being so warm and getting stuck into the gig so heartily. I’m still smiling at the memory of it.

Particularly the Virtual Bingo!!

Wondering what Virtual Bingo is? Well, it’s what happens when they’ve forgot the raffle tickets and James Bar Bowen invents something to take its place!!

So here’s the rules.

You think of a number in your head and keep it there. Then if Bar shouts out the number that is in your head then you shout house and win the prize.

Never has a game been so open to cheating and abuse.

Yet not a soul did. In fact, it took so long to complete the game of virtual bingo that Bar was eventually pleading “can you please just lie!!”

Hysterically funny and so much fun.

Bar announced one number and the guy next to me threw his head in his hands and went oooooooooo to signify a near miss!!

It underpins the honesty of people doesn’t it that even when anyone could have cheated, we just didn’t.

Utterly bonkers, but life affirming!!!