My Tunes Of The Year, 2013

A year in which we were only ever a single Miley Cyrus tweet from imploding as a species and John Lewis again opted not to use German industrialists Einstürzende Neubauten for their Christmas ad still had plenty of musical delights to keep its spirits up. These are my favourites.

Trillmatic, A$AP Mob (feat Method Man) 
Few can negotiate a corridor like a bunch of rappers with nowhere particular to be. They’re at this end and… woops! They’re at the other end. Now they’re in the middle. It’s like some Hong Kong Phooey shit. Built this on a sample of WAR’s The World Is A Ghetto and with a video that will confound corridologists for generations, this was a '90s gem, 2013 style.

Where Are We Now?, David Bowie 

Just when it seemed that David Bowie’s career had turned into an elaborate game of Chinese whispers, your accountant’s cleaner’s second cousin emailed to say that this gem had been released. Here was the proof, magicked online in a viral-marketing coup that saw Bowie reinvent himself yet again, this time as Ziggy Startup.

Just Make It Stop, Low 

Curiously, this is exactly what people said when I put this on the Empire stereo. Well, I still think it’s Christmassy.

Latch, Disclosure 

Spellbinding soul meets shimmery electronica on the dance floor and pulls amazingly freaky shapes in the hope of getting a cheeky snog out of it. This is first place on my year-end chart, with daylight in second and third. 

Black Balloons, Local Natives 

Being pals with The National – Aaron Dessner produced their second album – doesn’t seem to have been enough to get Local Natives’s Hummingbird on a single end-of-year list. EXCEPT THIS ONE, LADS.

All You're Waiting For, Classixx 

This is a genuinely terrible music video. We don't yet have the technology available to tell whether it's ironically terrible or actually terrible, so I'm just going to mumble something about hipsters and move on.

Reflektor, Arcade Fire  
Clear winner in the Best Track You Needed A ‘B’ Or Above In French GSCE To Appreciate category.

It’s Going Down, Midlake  
American ruralists Midlake’s permanent state of melancholy, presaged by the departure of lead singer Tim Smith and the failure of yet another corn crop, was softened this year by a sonic diversion led by newbie lead vocalist Eric Pulido. It’s not Young Bride, but then, what is? 

Lisbon, Eagles For Hands  
All I know about this is that it’s the work of a classically-trained Brighton producer called Laurie James and that if his friends don’t call him Laurie Eaglehands, they’re missing out on some easy lolz.

Byegone, Volcano Choir 

For people who love Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon but prefer him when he's not living in a cabin, wrestling bears and having relationship issues.

Clay, Goldfrapp

I discovered that Goldfrapp love Louis Malle’s films, which is nice because I love Louis Malle’s films too. This Tales Of Us closer soars higher and smoother than a crooner strapped to a spaceship. 

Peace Sword (Open Your Heart), The Flaming Lips 

It made all kinds of sense that lovable psychonauts The Flaming Lips found their way onto the Ender’s Game soundtrack. After all, this was a film in which small children in fancy dress battled alien insectoids, while a Maori Ben Kingsley watched on from a space pod. Or, as The Flaming Lips usually call it, "Tuesday".

This Is the Last Time, The National 

Me and @AliPlumb went to see The National at Alexandra Palace in November. Inspired by their delicate anthems to heartache and widescreen live presence, our discussions ranged long and loud on a journey home complicated by getting massively lost on Muswell Hill. One was a possible new direction for their next record: @AliPlumb thought grimecore; I suggested oom-pah folkstep. Either way, this feels like a good time to expand the formula.

COOL, Le Youth

Aka Just Got Lucky.

Shell Suite, Chad Valley

A zom-com with a side order of rom, Warm Bodies had a very decent soundtrack that featured Bob Dylan, Springsteen, The National, M83, planet-bestridding power balladeer John Waite and this gem from Oxford glo-core outfit Chad Valley. Yes, glo-core.

Open (Jeff Samuel Faded Mix), Rhye

The original by soul duo Rhye was kinda lovely but this filtered house remix pushes its Everything But The Girl-y tenderness into the nearest bush and gets serious with a big bassline and some serious hands-in-the-air activity. 

Galactic Cinema, Maceo Plex 

I really love Maceo Plex. Not only is his techno funkier than the contents of my laundry basket, Signor Plex has remixed everyone from INXS to John Digweed to great effect and did this storming Essential Mix last year.

The Jaguar, Justin Jay 

I don’t think I’ll ever stop loving house music even when I’m old and can’t find my teeth. This is one of the reasons why.

Zero Dark Thirty

Let’s tackle the waterboard in the room first. Does Kathryn Bigelow’s CIA thriller condone torture? Well, if you believe controversy hunters, drawn like moths to its incendiary subject matter, its depiction of ‘enchanced interrogation’ is blandly unquestioning at best, actively supportive at worst. Leaving aside the idea that the director of Strange Days, pretty much a liberal manifesto clad in sci-fi clothing, is some kind of crypto-fascist, the flak flying in Bigelow’s direction misreads a subtle, intelligent film that deliberately leaves the viewer to tackle the questions of morality it raises. There’s no spoonfeeding on offer, no easy answers; just an acute reflection of the byzantine, murky world of spies, politicians and terrorists that should reasonably keep you awake at night.

Our conduit into it is ‘Maya’ (not her real name), played by Jessica Chastain (real name) with exactly the kind of cold-eyed gaze and restraint you’d expect in a real-life spook. Contextualised by a haunting audio montage of voices from the Twin Towers that definitely will keep you awake at night, her task is a stark one. She ghosts from one CIA black site to another, playing uneasy witness to interrogations run with brutal efficiency by Jason Clarke’s wonk, hunting a lead to the elusive ‘OBL’. One Al-Qaeda suspect after another is waterboarded, humiliated, and, in one particularly gruelling instance, incarcerated in a box barely bigger than a kitchen shelf. It’s not played for sensation – like Ken Loach’s Route Irish, we’re spared none of the mundane horror of the American inquisition – and when a name is finally spluttered up by a defeated suspect, lips loosened by a rare moment of kindness, you’d need to be Dick Cheney to feel a sense of uplift.

Lead secured, Maya’s hunt for bin Laden enables Bigelow to crank through the gears, flaunting her command of thrilling set-pieces with sequences that rival The Hurt Locker for adrenaline expenditure. One, involving two cars, a crowded souk and a mobile phone, is a masterclass in simple tension-building. It’s no spoiler to point out that the movie ends with another, more renowned, event, this time in bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound, or that it ends badly for the terrorist. Here, too, Bigelow eschews big musical cues and gung-ho thrills to let the event tell its own story. Like what comes before, it’s executed with the confidence and brio of an Oscar-winner.

My Unofficial Tunes Of The Year, 2012

My big hope for 2013, aside from peace for all mankind and a standardised spelling of the word ‘hummus’, is to get to a few more gigs. The best ones this year – Hot Chip and Beach House – made me think that, night bus anguish aside, I should definitely get out more. Now my old mucker Eve Barlow has gone on to NME greatness (come back, Eve!) and isn’t around to spoonfeed me hot new music (seriously, please come back), I’m going to have to venture out of my cave and hunt it down myself. Like early man with an iPod.

Get Free, Major Lazer

This was 7% better than anything else in 2012. Yes, including Sir Wiggo, mighty Mo, Gareth Bale’s left foot, Tony Stark’s tower, Top Shop's pick ’n’ mix, Boris Johnson on a zipline, and Sebastian the hedgehog. They should promote him to Colonel Lazer immediately. 

[Video]

Dark Star, Poliça

Give You The Ghost, officially the spookiest thing on my iPod, is a little like releasing a clutch of Edgar Allan Poe’s ravens into your headspace. It’s spacy and gothic and kinda brilliant. They even pronounce it “Poe-Lisa”.
[Video]

Tessellate, alt-J

The very talented alt-J - you call them ‘∆’ to their faces - won the Mercury Prize, but on the other hand, so did M People and The Klaxons. But on the other other hand so did Portishead, PJ Harvey and The xx. Is it a curse or a blessing? Or a curlessing? Who knows.

110%, Jessie Ware
Sexier than a billion swimsuit issues and more soulful than a Starsky & Hutch cast reunion, this is only let down by a title that’s clearly pinched from a football manager’s team talk. Look out for album tracks ‘A Game Of Two Halves’ and ‘In The Onion Bag, Son!’.


What Was That, Majical Cloudz

A discovery from Pitchfork. I don’t know much about Majical Cloudz except that they’re from Montreal, they’ve worked with Grimes, they’ve got a friend called Neil and they can’t spell. 

Call Me Maybe, Carly Rae Jepsen
The closest humanity has come to creating a hybrid of popping candy and crack cocaine. This wasn’t a download, it was a re-up. 
[Video]

Yet Again, Grizzly Bear
While there wasn’t anything on Shields I loved quite as much as Veckatimest’s ‘Southern Point’, I can at least pronounce the Grizzlers new album. Sometimes I miss the more jagged, baroque folk of Yellow House, but then there’s always Bon Iver for that.

Heartbreaker, The Walkmen

The Walkmen are EXCELLENT.



Tapes & Money, Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs

I once came across a Lemmy interview in which the Motörheader told Q magazine that if he ever saw a jogger smiling, he’d go for a run. Since then I’ve always gone running with a big grin on my face - this tune has been helping a lot with that – on the off-chance I bump into him and he becomes the first man to complete a 10k in leathers and Luftwaffe hat.

Time On The Fucking Moon, James Holdsworth
You could actually get to the moon in the time it takes to play out this lunar masterpiece. Takes me back to a progressive house phase when I used to worship Schiller (sadly, not that Schiller) like a god, despite never getting to the end of any of his tracks.

Kill For Love, Chromatics
The band that shoulda-coulda scored Drive might be burying the hatchet on Nicolas Winding Refn's Logan's Run - if he ever makes it - and that sounds like a pretty good fit too. Sci-fi synths a-go-go.
[Video]

Let Me Be Him, Hot Chip
A classic singalong closer live, this is Hot Chip's Building A Bridge To Your Heart. The CD seemed like a good Christmas present for my godson. I don't think he'd seen one before.

ALL OF The Art Of Rap
One of my highlights of 2012 was hosting Ice-T on the Empire podcast. His documentary, The Art Of Rap, was one of the nicest surprises of the movie year – I think I even saw Philip French’s head nodding during the preview screening – he's been a bit of a hero since New Jack City, and he was funny and charming as you could hope from an original gangster.
[Trailer]

Happy Birthday Charlie Dickens

It's Charles Dickens' Day today, 200 years since the date of his birth, and to celebrate we should all be clinking tankards of foaming ale in smoky hostelries, re-reading Oliver Twist and embarking on improbable romps around Southwark. Sadly, it's a bloody Tuesday and there's no time for Victorian jackanapes. Instead I've had an extra helping of homemade gruel for lunch as a small tribute to one of my favourite writers.

Of course, back in the times when most words had at least one unnecessary 'e' at the end, 'Dickens Day' was a monthly occasion. The great man was published in serial form, which made his work alive in a way we can barely conceive of; like DC and Marvel merged into one and enrolled into Mensa. Avid readers would fight their way through the bustling streets of foggy London, through the fug of burning braziers, crowds of soot-blackened urchins and other Victorian cliches I've picked up from BBC costume dramas, to buy the latest instalment of the great man's work.

They probably trudged a little more wearily to collect the final chunks of Hard Times* than, say, Pip's marshland terrors in Great Expectations or the rollicking climax to David Copperfield, but you-pays-your-ha'penny and all that. These days, comic-book fans can surely relate to the thrill of anticipation, the expectation of new twists and turns awaiting them, even if Dickens' superheroes were mostly portly solicitors whose superpowers involved eating enormous amounts of cheese.

Great Expectations (1946)

I loved Google's tribute to him today which assembles some of his most famous creations. A mutton-chopped Avengers.


Look, there's Tiny Tim, Scrooge and Professor Chuzzlebuster! Chestnuts for all! Happy birthday, sir.

* Unlike David Copperfield, Great Expectations and Oliver Twist, Hard Times was actually published weekly. Dickens' distributed it through his own Household Words mag, a kind of Guardian without the snark, between April and August 1854.

Birdsong, BBC 1

Great art can take time to germinate, which is why after I watched Terrence Malick’s The Tree Of Life, I decided not to make up my mind for several moons. All those dinosaurs and lens flares and Brad Pitt hissy fits and is-it-real-or-is-it-all-a-dream beachscapes will slowly solidify into an opinion over the next bajillion years, probably somewhere behind my frontal lobe where the mind larva bubbles and farts like that 20 minutes of BBC creation opus that appeared in the middle of it all. Until then I’m keeping schtum, mostly because I genuinely can’t make up my mind about it. It’s beautiful to look at, but also as ephemeral as it is profound, and what Sean Penn is doing in it, even he couldn’t say – and he tried more than once. I write this all as a man who puts Malick’s films into two categories: masterpieces and almost-masterpieces. Even The New World, which is essentially 135 minutes of fort building and corn grinding.

What’s frustrating, though, is Malick’s pervasive, if inadvertent, influence on other filmmakers. Take Birdsong. Like the millions of people who read and loved the book, I had an image of the story in my mind. Suffice to say, it wasn’t anything like the three hours of sub-Malick fluff we settled down to this month. Obviously it’s not a director’s job to join the dots on other people’s visions, but I firmly believe that what happened in my mind’s eye would have made much better telly. At no point in my imagination did anyone stare longingly into the distance like they'd just spotted an old school chum’s face in a cloud, or grimace wistfully at the thought of missing tuck their lost love (grimacing wistfully is hard to do unless you’re Eddie Redmayne, which luckily Eddie Redmayne is). Plus, in my head, the war bits were good – especially the tunnelling – and the romance didn’t move with the speed of a wheezing snail. Only Jack Firebrace, played by the excellent Joseph Mawle, lived up to expectations.

Left to right: the underground one; the pouty one

The BBC's adaptation - long-awaited - felt like a good example of that ‘art’ thing leading filmmakers astray. Sebastian Faulks’s novel was basically a pretty straightforward piece of storytelling and the BBC tried to turn it into high art, like the Thin Red Line in British Army fatigues. The problem is that Malick isn’t interested in narrative and Faulks is, so replacing story with mood left a whole lot of pregnant pauses and not a lot else. The Thin Red Line has Jim Caviezel’s lovelorn GI, Private Witt, in common with Redmayne’s Captain Wraysford – both, after all, are drifting towards violent death with their minds on the past - but he's only a fragment of the picture Malick is painting. Three hours of Jim Caviezel moping about writing love letters and even the Japanese would have thrown themselves into the sea. But Wraysford is Birdsong and after three hours watching Redmayne staring meaningfully at Clémence Poésy I had much the same urge.

The Menin Road, Paul Nash

As an aside, and this is probably just me, but the impressionistic depiction of the trenches grated a bit too. I’d always thought of it as an expressionist’s war - the jagged lines of Otto Dix and Paul Nash (above), the staccato alliteration of Wilfred Owen, or the martial drumbeat of Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet On The Western Front and Stanley Kubrick’s Paths Of Glory - not this soft-focused, pastel-coloured, war-by-Laura Ashley vision of a hell where you have to take your shoes off first.

My top 10 tracks of 2011

Amazing tunes and some lame gags about dinosaurs. Be warned: skinny goths ahead.

1. Kaputt, Destroyer
I’m 99% sure that Wild Beast’s amazing Smother is my album of 2011 (how did this not make the Mercury shortlist?), but a tiny part of me thinks that Destroyer’s Kaputt might be even better. The video smacks of Pitchfork-friendly hipsterdom but the sentiment on the record was so guileless, the emotion so honest, the sax so over the top, I was completely smitten. Just ace. Big thanks to my friend Eve Barlow for the tip.

2. Still Life, The Horrors
In jeans so skinny they needed to be lowered into them like a spacesuit, The Horrors still looked like they were on their way to a Tim Burton audition, but this year they sounded like they really wanted to be Jim Kerr. Air-punchingly excellent in a John-Hughes-soundtrack kinda way.

3. The Words That Maketh Murder, PJ Harvey
This summer my girlfriend and I went to Town Square Festival in Picardy. I recommend it wholeheartedly: it’s like Glastonbury, only with a portcullis and squidgier cheese. We had a ball watching Elbow and Côldplay, Portishead shaking their melancholy la-las and PJ Harvey playing her amazing Mercury Award-winning album, Let England Shake. It was the anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, a major touchpoint for the record, and we were in Arras, close to the heart of things back in 1916, so I wondered if she’d mention it. She didn’t, but then I guess her music speaks louder than most. (A few trench maps wouldn’t have hurt, PJ.)

4. The Lazerbeams, Fresh Espresso
I think I read that this is on Ben Gibbard from Death Cab For Cutie’s playlist for when he goes out jogging with Zooey Deschanel. Beyond that I don’t know anything about them except that it's the good stuff.

5. The Wall, Yuck
The new Dinosaur Jr.. This means that the old Dinosaur Jr. are now Dinosaur Senior. Here they sing about some problems they’re having getting over a wall. No wonder, with those tiny arms.

6. Never, Scuba
Sasha loves this. He wants us to love it too.

7. Shuffle, Bombay Bicycle Club
After going lo-fi with their second album, Bombay Bicycle Club came belting back to take a clear lead in the battle of the ‘clubs’ in 2011. Can Chapel Club, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and Toyko Police Club strike back in 2012, perhaps by forming an association?

8. Santa Fe, Beirut
Gotye aside, I think I’m right in saying that Beirut's Zach Condon plays the most instruments of anyone in the world right now. Here he added the humble sequencer to the trumpet, guitar, Balkan trombone, harmonica, flute, timpani, recorder, yazoo and party streamer.

9. Far Nearer, Jamie XX
Jamie XX is a seriously talented man. Here he conjured the sound of Streatham by way of St Lucia. Steel drums for the win!

10. End Come Too Soon, The Wild Beasts
True fact: any track with the word “end” in the title goes on forever. I’ve been listening to that Doors track since I was 17 and I’m still only at the bit where he's trying to find the blue bus.

Honorary mentions: Rolled Together, The Antlers; Helplessness Blues, Fleet Foxes; Survive It, Ghostpoet; The Look, Metronomy; Coastin’ Master, Cities Aviv; The Birds, Elbow; Apartment, Young The Giant; Try To Sleep, Low; There’s Nothing In The Water We Can’t Fight (feat. Mother Gunga), Cloud Control; Scale It Back, DJ Shadow & Little Dragon; Polish Girl, Neon Indian; Come To The City, The War On Drugs; I’ll Take Care Of You, Gil Scott-Heron & Jamie XX

Bill Hicks RIP

The life of Bill Hicks, comic, provocateur, satirist, annoyer of rednecks, is coming to the screen in a terrific new documentary, American: The Bill Hicks Story. The movie is a mix of Chuck Jones-style animation, interviews with friends and family, and footage of Hicks from his days as a teenage stand-up to his last appearance before he died of cancer aged 32.


I first came across Bill Hicks thanks to a tape stuck to the front of Select magazine at the time of the (first) Gulf War. Now, you'd have to be 100 to remember either of those things but, trust me, it was a discovery. GW1 felt scary at the time: the first large scale post-Cold War conflict, complete with fears that other, more sinister forces could get involved (Israel, Russia, the Wolverines from Red Dawn) and then was Saddam and his radio-controlled Scuds which he'd fire indiscriminately at Tel Aviv. So indiscriminately, it turned out, most landed just outside Baghdad.

While everyone else bought the official line on the war, overlooking the fact that Bush, Rumsfeld etc had created the thing they now had to blow to smithereens, Hicks alone seemed prepared to question it. What made him maddest, though, was the compliant way the media parroted every line the Bush administration fed them. And he was funny when he was mad.

People said, "Uh-uh, Bill, Iraq had the fourth largest army in the world." Yeah, maybe, but you know what? After the first three largest armies, there's a real big fucking drop-off, all right? The Hare Krishnas are the fifth largest army in the world, and they've already got our airports, okay, so I think that's the greater threat right now.

This was before comedy became the cosy domain of Michael McIntyre and skits about traffic jams. When comedy was a means of saying something about the state of the world, exposing hypocrisy and blowing up myths. All while smoking enough fags to fell the cast of a '30s film noir.

My favourite Hicks routine, though, is this very silly riff on the Gideons which don't really do any of those things.
I guess it was the product of too many nights spent in too many hotels, but it was his observational genius to a tee. And proof that no sentence can't be made 26% funnier simply by adding the word 'ninja'.

American: The Bill Hicks Story is out on Friday 14 May.