So the BBC have published their annual poll of the music industry to see who are their top tips for the new year. This year they have picked:
1. Corinne Bailey Rae2. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (right)3. The Feeling4. Plan B5. Guillemots6. Sway7. Chris Brown8. Marcos Hernandez9. Kubb10. The Automatic
Now I don’t know much about [...]
I nearly fell off my chair when I read this last night! My local MP, ‘the infamous’ George Galloway has entered the Celebrity Big Brother house! At first it was quite astounding, but why should it be really? It’s in keeping with his self-publicising, self-serving character. Some have pointed out / complained that he’s away [...]
There was an amusing piece in the Guardian yesterday about The Fall. A journalist (Dave Simpson) spent a good month or so of his life trying to track down all 40-ish ex-members of the band. What an effort! I’ve never really been into The Fall, apart from liking the odd song here and there, but [...]
Thanks to Time Out, I got a preview screening of 13 (or Tzameti – but what does that mean?) the debut film by Georgian-French filmmaker Géla Babluani. It’s a pretty impressive debut, shot in atmospheric black and white and it’s a pleasingly tense thriller, which for a considerable time changes into a bit of a [...]
If it’s hard enough to choose my best albums of the year, how hard is it to choose a top 10 of songs? Take for instance the Arcade Fire album, all amazing tunes, but how can you single one out? There were so many songs to choose from, but in some way these tunes stood [...]
I created this category last year, because I was listening to a lot of compilations of music which wasn’t necessarily the same type as I was listening to on my favourite artist albums. I wanted to a more representative sample of the music that was moving me. In 2006 however, I wasn’t listening to nearly [...]
Here are my best gigs now. Again, it can be hard to choose, but these are the ones that had that spine-tingling brilliance and were such a joy to be at. Notice the correlation between these and the album. No coincidence then, and plenty indication of the music I was loving in 2005.
1. Arcade Fire [...]
Another top 10 list, artist albums this time. Like other years, there was so much good music released in 2005 to choose from, it felt bad leaving some albums out. But here are the ones that made the biggest impression on me in 2005, whether through sheer originality, compelling music or lyrics or just that [...]
Well, it’s that time again. Time to get 2005 out the way before a new cultural year can begin. Here are my Top 10 movies of the year. It didn’t seem such a great year for films, but maybe that’s because I didn’t go to the cinema as often as usual. However a few long-distance [...]
