Tag Archives: music

New Year’s resolutions 2024

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I haven’t posted any New Year’s resolutions on here for a while, mainly because I’ve been very bad at keeping them – or not set myself any at all – for the last few years. (No prizes for guessing why!)

However, the point of resolutions is to set yourself some ambitious goals which spur you on to achieve improvements to your life which you wouldn’t otherwise have made – even if you don’t manage to complete or stick to them all.

So, in that spirit, I’m going to make an absurdly over-ambitious list for 2024:

1. Read 30 books, including the complete works of John Wyndham

I used to typically read 30+ books a year; there have been a few years when I’ve read 50+. Since 2018, I’ve struggled to read 20 a year – in 2023 I only managed 18. Combining this with an author reading challenge should help, since Wyndham’s books are generally quite short.

2. Get into Talking Heads

Talking Heads is the band that it’s most anomalous that I’m not already into. They’re exactly the sort of band that I would love. I like the few songs I’ve heard – the big hit singles – but I’m not familiar with their work beyond those. I get why their fans are typically intensely zealous about them. I’ve just never put enough time into listening to them myself. So this year, I’m going to make a concerted effort to really listen to their back catalogue – at least up to Little Creatures – and also watch Stop Making Sense.

3. Do two 10k races and reach 60 parkruns

I did one 10k in 2023 (and it nearly killed me); I want to build on that and do two more this year.

I wanted to reach 50 parkruns in 2023 (from a start of 33). Unfortunately I only reached 42. So I’m setting myself the even more ambitious (by 1) target of reaching 50 by the end of 2024.

4. Complete and submit 10 Private Eye crosswords

I’ve been a Private Eye subscriber since the early 2000s, and I occasionally complete the crossword – on average, it seems, about twice a year. If I start it, I usually finish it – it’s just a matter of making the effort to start it. So this year, I’ll make the effort more often.

5. Watch 10 specific films

Setting myself a specific list of films to watch in the year (typically, classics or cult hits that I hadn’t seen, or DVDs that had been sitting unwatched on my shelf for some time) worked quite well in 2017 and 2018. My 2019 list is still unfinished (by one film). But I’m going to set myself another list to work through:

Dracula (1931)
Frankenstein (1931)
The Mummy (1932)
Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
National Velvet (1944)
Godzilla (1954)
Stand By Me (1986)
My Cousin Vinny (1992)
Donnie Brasco (1997)
Children of Men (2006)

I also need to watch Paths of Glory (1957) to finish the 2019 list.

6. Publish a Hate List and a Love List

The last Hate List (Vol 20) was published in 2016. I have the material for another one; I just need to get my act together, edit it and get it out there. Similarly for the Love List, the last one of which (Vol 2) was published in 2007.

7. Complete Braid

I’d been meaning to play this for some time. I bought it in a Steam sale in January 2021, played for a couple of hours, got stuck, and haven’t been back since. Another one where I just need to set aside some time for myself to have a crack at it.

8. Learn how to pronounce Llanfair­pwllgwyngyll­gogery­chwyrn­drobwll­llan­tysilio­gogo­goch

Self-explanatory.

In Praise of Noughties Music

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Musically, of the four decades that I’ve lived through (80s, 90s, 00s, 10s), my favourite is the nineties. It was my teenage decade, the era of personal discovery, so the music that I grew up with – Britpop, basically – has a subjective importance to me that nothing will ever match.

However, I’m moving towards the opinion that of these four decades, the noughties was objectively the best for music. At least, for the indie/pop/rock genre.

Just think of all the great bands that came out of that decade. The list goes on and on: The Libertines, The Strokes, The Killers, The White Stripes, Razorlight, Arctic Monkeys, Elbow, Muse, Franz Ferdinand, The Arcade Fire, Kings of Leon, Kaiser Chiefs, Florence and the Machine, Mumford & Sons, Keane, Snow Patrol, MGMT, The Darkness, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs and of course Amy Winehouse, are just a few of the incredible acts which were absolutely massive in the noughties.

Close behind them, you’ve got the likes of Kasabian, The Vaccines, Bloc Party, Vampire Weekend, Doves, Editors, British Sea Power, Fleet Foxes, Goldfrapp, Interpol, The Coral, The Decemberists, The Kooks, Athlete… I could keep going. OK, I will… Bat for Lashes, Rilo Kiley, The Go! Team, Wolfmother, The Zutons, The Thrills, The Delays, Cloud Control, Magic Numbers, Hal, The Noisettes… Even The Duckworth Lewis Method (Neil Hannon’s cricket themed band) got their fabulous debut album out just before the decade closed.

Even the massive commercial bands that critics and musos get a bit snobby about were actually pretty decent. It says something about the musical quality of a decade when the very worst thing it produced was Coldplay.

Cultural Highlights of 2016

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In a year of relentless tragedy and despair, here are a scant few things I enjoyed.

BOOKS

Malcolm Lowry – Under The Volcano

This was my third attempt at tackling Lowry’s famously impenetrable novel. The first chapter is particularly gruelling, but after breaking through it for the first time, the dark humour and self-flagellating wisdom which follow make it all worthwhile. For anyone tempted to have a go themselves, I found these notes very helpful in decrypting the dense symbology.

Keith Roberts – Pavane

The best thing I read all year though, by far, was Pavane. It’s an alternate history novel, in which Elizabeth I was assassinated, the Reformation was quashed, and a triumphant Catholic Church retarded scientific progress. In the 20th century setting of the novel, England has steam-powered road locomotives, a network of giant semaphore towers for cross-country communication, and new stirrings of political and religious revolution.

But the appeal of the ahistorical premise isn’t what makes Pavane such a great book. This year, I also read S. M. Stirling’s The Peshawar Lancers, in which a late 19th century meteor shower destroys civilisation in the northern hemisphere, the British elite relocate to India, and by the early 21st century, a steampunk Anglo-Indian empire is in conflict with a devil-worshipping Central Asian Tsardom. This premise is equally interesting. However, Stirling’s novel turned out to be a huge disappointment: a poorly-written mediocrity, no more than a third-rate Raj adventure story with added airships.

Roberts’s, on the other hand, is so beautifully written it’s almost poetry. By the time you’ve read his description of a steam wagon making its way across the Dorset heath on a foggy night, oiled pistons hammering and scalding water dripping from the tank, or of a semaphore tower, its clacking wooden levers, and the blistered hands of its Guild apprentice operator, it’s impossible to believe that such things never even existed.

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Temper-Trapped

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I propose the following definition:

Temper-trapped past participle verb tricked into a buying a music album on the strength of one song, to discover that it’s the only decent one on the whole album.

It’s derived from the band The Temper Trap: I bought their debut album Conditions after hearing the song Sweet Disposition, but was disappointed to find that the rest of the album is utterly mediocre and forgettable.

I’ve recently been temper-trapped again by John Grant. His song Down Here, an infectious indie pop ballad, was stuck in my head for weeks, so I bought the album, Grey Tickles, Black Pressure, which turned out to be weird electro nonsense: not even the same style of music as the one song I’d enjoyed.

What albums have you been temper-trapped by?

Cultural Highlights of 2015

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I know it’s a bit late, but here’s the best stuff I read/saw/etc in 2015.

BOOKS

Railsea by China Miéville

By the same author as the superb The City And The City, Railsea is a post-apocalyptic riff on Moby-Dick. A young cabin boy joins a train crew rattling about on a vast dried sea-bed covered in criss-crossing railway tracks and inhabited by ferocious burrowing monsters, while the captain obsessively hunts her great yellow mole. Ripping stuff.

23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism by Ha-Joon Chang

Since the era of Thatcher and Reagan, mainstream economics has been dominated by the ideology of the free market, championed by the right wing as the driver of economic success. Meanwhile the left wing has either opposed it on moral grounds of fairness and compassion, or accepted it while trying to mitigate its worst effects. The basic economic argument has never been challenged in public debate: the free market creates a prosperous economy. However, in academic economics, this truism is widely known to be false, and the contradictions and failings of the free market are well understood. Ha-Joon Chang is one of the leading voices attempting to bust the free market myths of public consciousness, and this book is a perfect primer.

One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

One of the hallmarks of a great book for me is how much is lingers in your consciousness after you’ve read it, and for weeks after finishing One Day In The LIfe Of Ivan Denisovich, I often found myself thinking, ridiculously, “this is just like in the Gulag.”

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Copyright madness has crossed the (blurred) line

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A court in the US has found Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams guilty of copyright infringement, and ordered them to pay $7m in damages to the family of Marvin Gaye, because their song Blurred Lines sounds like Gaye’s Got To Give It Up.

Now, I hate Robin Thicke as much as the next man, and want to see bad things happen to him, but this idea of having copyright on your art and anything which is a bit like it is bullshit.

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The Daily Mash on phone-recorded gig films

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The Daily Mash has really grown a beard in recent years. Once, it was merely an embarrassingly sub-standard attempt to do a British version of The Onion. Now, The Onion has disappeared behind a paywall and no-one’s reading it any more, and it’s The Daily Mash which gets shared virally around social media. Not only that, but the quality of its articles has vastly improved: its choice of satirical targets is spot on, its insights into the absurdity of contemporary politics and society are razor sharp.

For example, there’s this little gem: “Friends enthralled by gig filmed on phone”. Gig-filming is one of those phenomena which are especially bewildering, because everyone agrees it’s shit and people should stop doing it, and yet lots of people still do it.

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Fighting the system in Manchester Central Library

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Today, I experienced the most inappropriate and falsely aimed attempt to Stick It To The Man that I’ve ever seen.

I was working in Manchester Central Library. At one point in the late afternoon, someone started playing Elton John’s ‘Are You Ready For Love?’ very loudly on one of the library computers. People were tutting and looking around to see who it was. I think everyone was assuming it was an unruly teenager.

A librarian shouted out to tell whoever it was to stop, but it continued. Eventually the librarian came over and tracked down the source of the music: an elderly lady, who at first appeared oblivious to the fact that the music was even coming from her computer. The librarian showed her how to turn the music down, and left.

About a minute later, ‘Are You Ready For Love?’ was playing at full volume again. The librarian returned, thinking the dotty old crone was a bit confused and had accidentally repeated her error. But this time, rather than apologising and turning it off again, the old woman kicked off, cantankerously arguing with the librarian, calling her a ‘small-minded council bureaucrat’ and insisting on her right to play Elton John as loudly as she liked (on the computer facilities provided to her by small-minded council bureaucrats).

Then, she looked around at everyone else in the room, as if expecting us all to be right behind her in her crusade against petty officialdom. We weren’t. We all wanted her to stop playing Elton John as well.

Udaipur, City of Lakes

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It wasn’t the most auspicious introduction to a new city: I arrived in Udaipur on an uncomfortable nightbus, on which I’d been kept awake most of the night by a full bladder. I hadn’t found a couchsurfing host, and the recommended hotel had messed me around and eventually told me they were full, so I’d had to book a more expensive one down the road. Arriving at 7am, I’d had to wake up the duty manager who was asleep on a mattress in the foyer.

For several days before I travelled there, everyone had been telling me how beautiful Udaipur was. I’d been sceptical – I’ve seen a lot of places in India which are sort of beautiful, but ruined by filth and human activity – but eventually my expectations couldn’t help but be influenced by the repeated message.

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