76. 10 Songs about Winter

White Winter Hymnal - Fleet Foxes
Winter in the Hamptons - Josh Rouse
Winter Wooskie - Belle and Sebastian
Winter Home Disco - The Pictish Trail
A Winter's Sky - The Pipettes
Walk out to Winter - Aztec Camera
A Hazy Shade of Winter - Simon and Garfunkel
Winter is Blue - Vashti Bunyan
winterlovers - Manic Street Preachers
Winterlight - Clearlake

Right, the blog's hitting a determinedly downbeat stride now, cos winter is, after all, just cack in every way. Snow is, as previously attached, cack, rain is cack, cold is deeply cack, central heating is, in its own way, cack, and Celebrity Big Brother is cack. That's winter.
And I am not a softie. I didn't put my heating on till the start of December. Grrrrr. But January and February are just never good months. Good things never happen in those months. It's a time for starting smoking again, for drinking on your own, for not being able to communicate properly, alienating people, wishing you were far away. The best thing about winter is the fact the Oscars are at the end of February, so there are always lots of good films to see in the few weeks before. That's good. And the fact that when you're young-ish, healthy-ish, not homeless, not a softie and living in South London, pretty much everyone else in the UK has it worse than you. That's good, too.
But it's still cack. I knew a few Scottish winters, they were rather silly, and i developed a whole different way of walking back then. Some of these songs are Scottish - Scotland invented winter and sold it to the rest of the world.
I remember when i was at university coming down to London in March for holidays, during which period winter changed into spring, then going back to Scotland in April - and it was still winter. And so it would remain until mid-May, albeit crisp, sunny winter by that point.
A great song here is Winterlight by Clearlake - it's the potential of southern English indie-rock which southern English indie rock never seems to achieve, epic and imaginative, not Razorlight, not Keane, not Coldplay. Although, having said that, it strikes me that those three bands are very wintry- perhaps if examined in those terms, they might be reevaluated. Perhaps.

Anyway, i doodled this out several years ago about how cack winter was. It could be about any winter really - apart from 2007-8, when for some reason winter didn't happen in London, that was a weird one. I didn't miss it, but i did wonder if it meant the end of the world was coming. But last winter was more archetypal, and this one is worse.

It was a rough season; the hole in the window
let winter run riot, and the cigarettes i needed to need
didn't improve the shivering humour.
No one went to church and the communities
quietly slipped their hands out and shrugged
and all the little girls and boys shuddered
at their future. It was a savage season
though no snow fell and London never rocked
with horror, like it's forgotten it will someday soon.
I hid in pubs first, but giggsy shrank and
all my teams sank, then cinemas,
but i couldn't bear the promptu reviews,
so i nestled 'mongst indies and nmes and dusty cushions
on the sofa, trusting in dvds and freeview
flitting through fads (yoghurts and fruit teas,
guitars and sit-ups) and - unconscious- alienating
all i once held precious.
I asked and begged beneath my notice
and pushed myself toward some worthy suture,
while the hungover streets filled with discarded coins
and everything got ever coarser,
optimism exposed - the best you can say
is that fear may be conquered, the worst
I will say is, I fear, yet to come.

Wow, i'm so fun, i'm such a fun guy, who couldn't warm to someone who wrote something as plain FUN! as that ...