How To Be 60 with Kaye Adams

On this week's episode, we're joined by AC Scott, better known to Scottish audiences as broadcaster Alison Craig, who vanished from our screens in 2012 after a rare lung condition collapsed both her lungs and a consultant told her she had ten years to live. What happened next is the strange part. A songwriting weekend on the west coast of Scotland, a phone call from an Emmy-winning American producer telling her she was a songwriter, and the A&R veteran who discovered Jeff Buckley and signed Moby and Beth Orton taking her on. Alison talks about the breakdown she couldn't name at the time, the specialist in Nottingham who gave her back a future, and why the songs on her debut album are written from exactly where she is now, as a wife, a mother, a granny and, in her words, quite often a pissed-off individual.
Her album Out of the Blue is out now, with a launch in Edinburgh in September and a live date in London at the end of September. And because she can't fly, she took a boat to America and drove coast to coast just to say thank you to the man who made that call.

Alison's album Out of the Blue and all her music at https://acscott.co.uk, follow her on Instagram at @acscottsings, or listen on your platform of choice at https://linktr.ee/acscottsings.

Get in touch with your thoughts at podcast@htb60.com.
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On this week's Midweek Catchup, we find out why Kaye's head is glued back on. After more than a year of putting it off, she's had half her thyroid removed, and when the hospital rang five days later with the results, she let it ring out. Twice. Karen, meanwhile, has talked her way out of a prescription for antidepressants and into a pharmacist's alternative plan, and is dispatching garden slugs with the cheapest lager Lidl sells.

Also on the agenda: a worldwide mango shortage that may only exist in Kaye's kitchen, a squash the size of a small football that Karen is too frightened to cut into, and some very promising noises about a live tour. This Friday we're joined by AC Scott, releasing her first album in her sixties.
Get in touch with your thoughts at podcast@htb60.com.
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On this week's episode, we're joined by bestselling author Milly Johnson, who planned a year-long celebration of turning 60 and credits an arthritic knee with saving her life. Before the Yorkshire Pudding Club and three million book sales, there were decades of proper jobs, years of rejection, and a marriage so bad she filed for divorce while five months pregnant. Milly spent thirty years looking after everyone else — first her boys, then her parents — and decided this decade would be hers. Venice by train, northern soul dancing, and a diamond ring her partner didn't know he was buying yet.

Karen's off poorly this week, so Kaye goes solo and gets the lot: the millennium fireworks that marked the start of Milly's freedom, the agent who said yes when she'd written five words, and the line from her dad's love letter now tattooed on her arm — I don't feel like being sensible anymore. Milly's 23rd novel, Let the Bells Ring Out, is out in October.

Get in touch with your thoughts at podcast@htb60.com.

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On this week's Midweek Catchup, we come back down to earth after the Fringe — to a filthy house, a poorly husband and the guilty remains of a packet of chocolate-covered pecans. Kaye's been in London doing ITV, where she talked a very nice photographer into taking her passport photo while she still had her telly makeup on. That's her sorted until she's 72. Karen, meanwhile, has been collecting firewood. In August.
Mostly though, this one belongs to the emails from people who came to the Edinburgh shows. There's one that nearly finishes Karen off, and a sorry tale from Katie, whose train from Aberdeen stopped after ten minutes and sat there for four and a half hours — she never made it to the show at all. If we ever do a tour, Aberdeen, we're coming to you. And there is talk of a tour. We're saying nothing else for now.

Get in touch with your thoughts at podcast@htb60.com.

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On this week's episode, we're joined by Jan Birley, who decided at 58 that she was going to produce a feature film, and had one finished by 60.

She'd spent thirty years as an IT project manager, and by her own count she has been in the film industry for two. She raised a budget of around £800,000, put her own money in, and when an experienced line producer told her she wasn't ready, she told him she'd crew it up herself and do it. He came back a couple of days later and said he was in. The film is Hot Flash, shot in Yorkshire, with Gaynor Faye as a woman starting again in her forties with no money and a business idea nobody has asked for. Jan also tells us about the fear of heights that turned into a climbing habit, the triathlons she signed up for before she could swim, and the mentor who told her years ago to put "writer" in her email signature. She never did. She does now.

Get in touch with your thoughts at podcast@htb60.com.
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