Music in 2020

Here are my picks. 

Clearly the pandemic and lockdown has affected music this year - clearly in a negative way in terms of live music, but not in a wholly negative way in terms of recorded music.

Music has felt urgent and necessary this year, and a lot of records have risen to the challenge. When you look at the end-of-year lists, it's clear that intimacy has been what people have been after, and what many of the most acclaimed albums have offered.

Not that many years are these days, but it has not been a year for the rock music. I'm not sure there'd have been a glut of great man-rock records anyway, but I'd look at a band like The Strokes, who I think released their best album for at least a decade and a half, and that if they'd had big festival shows to back it up, and have people realise the new stuff sits better with 'Is This It' than almost anything else they've done, I think we'd be seeing them higher up the year-end lists.

No matter, it's been what it's been. 

I have two clear favourites, both of which I've listened to over and over throughout the year, as they both were released fairly early - Laura Marling's 'Song for our Daughter' and Waxahatchee's 'Saint Cloud'. 

The former was probably my favourite for the first half, the latter for the second half, so it's only fair to make them joint Number 1s. I was pretty hooked on 'Song for our Daughter' from the moment my daughter walked into my office just as Marling was singing the line "Lately I've been thinking about our daughter growing old" in the title track, and though not overly given to sentimentalism, that was hard to resist.

It is, for me, her first classic album, after several very good albums. I think it deserves better than it's received, both critically and commercially, so far, but so be it. There's not a weak track, the second half is just entirely beautiful.

And yet, right now, I may even rate the Waxahatchee album even higher. I'd listened to Waxahatchee (Katie Crutchfield) a fair bit before, but always just liked, without loving, her indie-guitar sound.

'Saint Cloud' is, sonically, clearer, straighter, more like country-rock. There's no hiding, no tricks. It's 11 stunning songs. I know it's a bit invidious to compare all great female singer-songwriter albums to obvious forebears, but this album really does strike me as the perfect blend of those two landmarks recorded in the same studio at the same time, 'Blue' and 'Tapestry'. The journey is like 'Blue' - a mix of self-examination, wistfulness, sadness and then bursts of something like euphoria, while the clear, true singing, the sense of a mature song cycle, reminds me of 'Tapestry'. I don't know, I'm not sure the comparisons really do it justice. It's not derivative. It's such a great album.

Most of the headlines at the end of the year are being taken by three (indeed four) other albums by solo women - 'Fetch the Boltcutters' by Fiona Apple, 'Punisher' by Phoebe Bridgers and 'folklore' (then 'evermore') by Taylor Swift.

I really liked all of them too, I just think the Waxahatchee and Laura Marling albums hit home a bit more personally. 'Fetch the Boltcutters', although it presents as "hard work" is not actually hard work, and is catchy, funny, clever and brilliant all the way through. With Phoebe Bridgers, both this and her previous work, I can't quite pin down why I'm not completely sold. Just something ... something ... anyway, it's an album full of tunes you're surprised to remember and lines which make you stop and check what you've heard.

And, yes, there are the Taylor Swift albums, rather like Beyonce's 'Beyonce' and Lemonade' where reluctant rock men put aside their suspicions and accept they're good albums full of good songs.

Who else is near the top of my tree? 

Run the Jewels, whose fourth album felt so of the moment when it came out, and Bob Dylan, of course. Just the sheer relief of there being an actual Bob Dylan album, and it being finely wrought and wide ranging. Has it been overpraised? Maybe in some quarters, not in others. It's as consistent an album as he's put out for decades.

There have been a lot of pretty decent albums by guys who, a decade or so ago, were topping lists and winning awards. People aren't that interested these days, but these genuinely were the best albums by Badly Drawn Boy and Rufus Wainwright for 15+ years, there were excellent solo albums by the lead singers of the best indie rock bands of the century (Tweedy, Leithauser, Berninger). I loved the Fleet Foxes album when I first heard it, but then began to find it quite hard work. The Khruangbin album, Mordecai, is a bit of a curiosity, but quite hypnotic.

So, here are my Top 40 albums, I think, subject to change. I'll put a list of favourite songs and a playlist underneath.

1. St Cloud - Waxahatchee (1st Equal)
2. Song for our Daughter - Laura Marling (1st Equal)
3. Rough & Rowdy Ways - Bob Dylan 
4. Fetch the Boltcutters - Fiona Apple
5. Punisher - Phoebe Bridgers
6. RTJ4 - Run the Jewels
7. folklore - Taylor Swift
8. Banana Skin Shoes - Badly Drawn Boy
9. The New Abnormal - The Strokes
10. Love is the King - Jeff Tweedy
11. Unfollow the Rules - Rufus Wainwright
12. grae - Moses Sumney
13. Song Machine - Gorillaz
14. Shore - Fleet Foxes
15. Old Flowers - Courtney Marie Andrews
16. England is a Garden - Cornershop
17. Women in Music Pt 3 - Haim
18. April / 月音 - Emmy the Great
19. Lianne La Havas - Lianne La Havas
20. Down in the Weeds Where the World Once Was - Bright Eyes
21. evermore - Taylor Swift
22. Shortly after Takeoff - BC Camplight
23. Future Nostalgia - Dua Lipa
24. The Universal Want - Doves
25. The Loves of Your Life - Hamilton Leithauser
26. Mordecai - Khruangbin
27. Idiot Prayer (live from Alexandra Palace) - Nick Cave
28. Dark Hearts - Annie
29. Deep Down Happy - Sports Team
30. Heavy Light - US Girls
31. On Sunset - Paul Weller
32. Letter to You - Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band
33. Set My Heart on Fire Immediately - Perfume Genius
34. Untitled (Black Is) - Sault
35. To Love is To Live - Jehnny Beth
36. That's How Rumours Get Started - Margo Price
37. A Hero's Death - Fontaines DC
38. Sawayama - Rina Sawayama
39. Live Forever - Bartees Strange
40. Untitled (Rise) - Sault

SONGS

1. Song for our Daughter - Laura Marling
2. Unfollow the Rules - Rufus Wainwright
3. War - Waxahatchee
4. 4 American Dollars - US Girls
5. Hell - Waxahatchee
6. I Contain Multitudes - Bob Dylan
7. Me in 20 Years - Moses Sumney
8. Betty - Taylor Swift
9. Bad Decisions - The Strokes
10. ICU - Phoebe Bridgers
11. Under the Table - Fiona Apple
12. I Need Someone to Trust - Badly Drawn Boy
13. Sunblind - Fleet Foxes
14. Walking in the Snow - Run the Jewels
15. First Class - Khruangbin
16. Can't Do Much - Waxahatchee
17. Fortune - Laura Marling
18. Guess Again - Jeff Tweedy
19. Sour Flower - Lianne La Havas
20. That's How Rumors Get Started - Margo Price
21. Dandelions/Liminal - Emmy the Great
22. Violent Sun - Everything Everything
23. Stairwell Song - Bright Eye
24. Black Dog - Arlo Parks
25. Don't Wanna - Haim

https://music.apple.com/gb/playlist/2020-songs/pl.u-11pe1sBM0JV

Brief 61: Christmas Eves

In my last post, about the streets of Ealing where I grew up, I reminisced about annual Christmas Eve parties when we were young children, the shock loss that haunts those memories.

I don't closely recall what Christmas Eves involved when I was a teenager - often not much, I think, though there's nowt wrong with that.

Then, for my 20s and a little beyond, it was Barnes for Christmas Eve.

Pub - Midnight Mass - Basil's.

I'm sure that's where many of us will be in spirit this year. 

I'm not the most convivial, never have been, but those Christmas Eves come close to an idyll of old-fashioned bonhomie I'd secretly aspire to.

Usually The Red Lion first, then The Sun Inn, then The White Hart, by the river, the one closest to St Michael's. Annual encounters with old friends, London Pride and Young's Bitter. Candlelight and pubs too full to move. Face after friendly face.

Worse for wear by the time we get to the church, checking that the toilet's in the same place as last year, keen for the Communion wine as a top-up, keen to secure a lift home.

In 2002, I wore my Clash t-shirt, 3 days after Joe Strummer's death, I remember that. I don't remember too many other specifics, year to year. Lots of us would be in an absolute state, but we loved the mass. It wasn't a duty, it was a pleasure.

Then Bas's ... the short walk through Barnes, in procession. Port, snacks - people you'd not seen for years and were glad to see. Bas asking you to remind him who so-and-so over there was, his old skill.

I've been thinking, I was Ealing all the way through school, and it really did make a big difference, that Ealing/Barnes thing. It seems ridiculous now, but it did sometimes seem, among us, there were two slightly different types of people. It wasn't until I left school that I was fully part of the other side, completely comfortable in it.

Something I wouldn't have missed though. I'll make it back to St Michael's for Midnight Mass, or maybe the Easter Day dawn service (that was a mad one) one day ... Basil won't be there.

Great Basil, who died last month, aged 85. I've seen a little this month how loved he was,  and how influential he was on so many, how many lives he changed. 

As a teenager, being from the other side of the tracks - those mean streets of Ealing - it was more in passing and in admiration that I knew Bas. I was probably one of those kids about whom he'd ask "remind me what his name is again" before approaching me warmly and saying "Aah, Dave, so good to see you ...", but I had my share of his kindness, humour, brilliance and hospitality in my 20s, vicariously experiencing and hanging onto his and other people's faith and sense of community, making sure I established a bridge between the happiest moments of my chequered, but devout, teens and the different, faithless, person I'd be as an adult.

Those Christmas Eves, man, I think that's when we'll all miss Basil the most.

Brief 60: Oh Mary, this London ...

 So, I've tried to make a playlist about London from the point of view of non-Londoners - the cold, hard, side of London mixed with the excitement of London to be discovered.

• Mountains of Mourne - Don McLean
• A Rainy Night in Soho - The Pogues
• Ballerina - Van Morrison
• Londinium - Catatonia
• Woozy with Cider - Woozy with Cider
• Strange Town - The Jam
• Until I Believe in My Soul - Dexys Midnight Runners
• Mornington Crescent - Belle and Sebastian
• Baker Street - Gerry Rafferty
• At the Chime of a City Clock - Nick Drake
• Brompton Oratory - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
• London’s Brilliant Parade - Elvis Costello
• England - The National
• London Belongs to Me - St Etienne
• Streets of London - Ralph McTell
• 8 Miles High - The Byrds
• Sunny Goodge Street - Donovan
• London is the Place to Me - Lord Kitchener
• I’m Trying to Make London my Home - Sonny Boy Williamson
• Sultans of Swing - Dire Straits
• Mile End - Pulp
• Best Days - Blur
• Fake Plastic Trees - Radiohead
• West End Girls - Pet Shop Boys
• Herculean - The Good, the Bad and the Queen
• London Irish - The Divine Comedy
• Get Outta London - Aztec Camera
• Born Slippy - Underworld
• Primrose Hill - John & Beverley Martyn
• Living in America - Fontaines DC

This is a list to add to ... a nice idea. 

 

Brief 59: The roads and parks of Ealing

So, as I said last time, I was thinking about little old Ealing. Little old Little Ealing. My place, where I've only been once in a long time.

Steve McQueen's series of 'Small Axe' films, which were the best thing on television in a great year for television, were produced by "Lammas Park Productions", which twanged at my heart. (I can do no justice to Small Axe, but I will probably write a little about it in another blog).

I knew McQueen grew up in Ealing, that he'd gone to Drayton Manor Secondary School, where my siblings and I, with varying degrees of willing, went for Ealing Junior Music School on a Saturday morning. I'd even heard him incongruously mentioning "Ealing, Queen of the Suburbs" on a platform he shared with Cornel West to talk about Paul Robeson.

Still, Lammas Park, eh ... my little park, figure of eight shaped, between Northfields and South Ealing, playground, line of horse chestnuts where we'd gather conkers, bowling greens, perimeter paths I'd run round in 7 minutes flat, tennis courts we'd spend our summers in, grass we'd run Trampy on till we realised she was less likely to get in a fight with other dogs if we took her across the road via Blondin Road (where Charles Blondin lived) to Blondin Park, by the tube hangar, and, on a good day, on to Boston Manor Park, down by the path under the M4 overpass to the Grand Union Canal.

I found an old interview with McQueen, when he was just an artist with a growing reputation, not an Oscar-winning director, where he talked about the merits of Ealing and the pleasure of hanging out with his group of friends in Lammas Park after school, where he found belonging.

He talked of Ealing as an open, diverse place, which is exactly what it was. He's nine years older than me, but I always feel lucky, for my own part, that I grew up in a place where different cultures were already a given, completely ingrained. Irish, Japanese, Caribbean, African, Polish, Jewish, of course and most notably Indian, Pakistani, Ealing had loads of all of them since before I was born. I have studied at and lived in lots of places since where that is not the case. Just the benefit, inherently, that not seeing Britain as a country for white English people gives you ...

Ealing's not a place to be idealised, mind you. McQueen had a very negative experience at Drayton, and the school I went to, briefly, in Ealing has had more than enough abhorrent and bad headlines to mention here ...

McQueen has had an exhibition at the Tate recently where he's collected pictures of every Year 3 Primary Class in London. He himself went to Little Ealing Primary, the noise of which, as I mentioned in my last blog about Denis the drunk, we could hear from our house (Little Ealing was next to Mount Carmel Catholic Primary, so I'm sure it was the noise of both we could hear ...)

I miss Ealing, that little Ealing I moved to from the bigger Ealing with my mother and three siblings when I was 5, where I lived for most of the next 20 years or so, and have only been to once since my mother moved in 2008.

The sounds: the aforementioned Primary Schools, the planes heading into Heathrow, constant, not quite overhead, not quite unbearable, but enough to mute the TV on a summer's day when the window was open, the tube trains, 100 metres away or so, all day, pulling into and pulling away from the almost contiguous Northfields and South Ealing stations. Our cats, mewing and purring, owning the neighbourhood.

The streets - the grid of old-fashioned suburbia, houses terraced and compact where we were but increasing in size as you zig-zagged towards the park, the corner near the 12th century St Mary's Church, just along from Ealing Green and the Studios, there was the largest of the houses with its red door, on the corner of Clovelly Road, just before the parks, where Neil Kinnock lived, where I stuck my tongue out at him when he gave me a cheery thumbs up, where his driver pulled out his car door into my mum's red Renault 4 as she drove my sister to her first A-Level.

The parks, Lammas, and, right next to it, Walpole, with its own dusty tennis courts which we'd go to if the better ones at Lammas were full, Walpole which held Ealing's Jazz and Comedy festivals - the roads by there, the party in the house near the park we'd go to on Christmas Eve, year after year, after watching Box of Delights or The Chronicles of Narnia, fancy dress, party games, carol singing, the boy, my brother's friend, who died, we heard one Saturday, the first Saturday I played sport at school rather than going to music school. I saw a magpie that day, I remember.

Brief 58: McGowan and the London Irish

More than anyone else, Shane McGowan wrote songs for and about the London Irish.

While watching the film 'Crock of Gold' about McGowan recently, I thought, for the first time in many years, of Denis, who lived on my road as I was growing up.

Denis was, I suppose, my phantom Irish drunk dad. I never spoke to Denis, avoided passing him on the pavement if I possibly could. He was a shambling street drunk in an ill-fitting dirty suit, a small, pathetic-looking man, who seemed far older than he must have been, since his children were younger than us.

They couldn't have looked more Irish, those kids, ginger and pale-skinned, taking after their long-suffering mother, who always looked tired and immaculate.

The road was a short row of terraced houses off Northfield Avenue - it dipped in the middle and Denis and his family were down in the dip, while we were near the top (we could hear the children of Little Ealing Primary School at break time, a subject I will get to in my next post). Those houses are probably worth £1m+ now, 2 up 2 down as they all were, yet Denis was a street drunk, a regular at Bramley Road Open Space, near the station.

He may have been about the same age as my own dad or even younger, though, at that stage, looked older. My dad was a tall, strong man, and, into his 50s, still capable of being light on his feet. He'd played rugby until he was 45 - indeed, I remember him telling me the year he died that one of his greatest regrets and sources of ruin was playing rugby a few years too long, which I thought, in context, preposterous at the time, but understand a bit better now. 

Also, my dad, Paddy, rarely looked angry and confused, as Denis often did.

And my dad was not, to my knowledge, a street drunk. He was a pub man, a convivial regular, a drinker of routine who, most days until he was older, managed the short walk home from either The Duke of York, The Windsor Castle or The Royal Exchange to his flat off the Edgware Road without an excess of drama.

Still, Denis always haunted me, made me think of a life that might have been lived daily in the shadow of that, but, for me, the youngest, was not.

McGowan's, I suppose, the most famous London Irish drunk, lionised, pitied and romanticised in equal measure. Through my life, and still now, that's exactly how I describe my own relationship with that archetypal figure, both real and imagined, known and unknown. Best never to tip too far to one extreme.

Brief 57: MacGowan - a generation of men

That generation of men ... it was the first I was into, properly into, that were young punks when I was born. New wave, post-punk - to start with, when I first discovered The Jam, and wanted music a bit like that, I was indiscriminate, it was The Jam but also The Police, Dire Straits and Boomtown Rats.

I love this photo of Weller and Cave, two men of the same age, now at roughly the same level of fame, by very different journeys, bumping into each other at a service station, Cave the one more out of stage character, Weller an endless mod. Of all that generation, those are the two I'd put furthest apart, two completely different sides of my taste, but really, they're not that far apart.

And so many of these men are linked - Cave was in the MacGowan film, duetting with Shane at his 60th birthday on 'Summer in Siam'. So was Bobby Gillespie. So was Bono. Bob Geldof got a bit of a slagging from McGowan, as did Costello.

McGowan was a young punk all the way, front of the crowd at Pistols, Jam and Clash gigs - he once sold Weller a union jack t-shirt he'd got off a tramp, for a ridiculous sum. For MacGowan, an IRA supporter, it was a bitterly ironic item of clothing, for Weller, it was part of the mod look. That union jack element bedevils people's idea of Weller's fanbase. That Fred Perry for cool kids but also, horribly, for Proud Boys ...

Who was doing what MacGowan was doing? Kevin Rowland - original, joyful, angry rebel music for the diaspora. Who else was doing what Kevin Rowland was doing? Adam Ant - distinct, stylish dance music for the masses.

They were not the last, but almost the last, generation in Britain who didn't have to choose between being pop stars and rock stars, they could be, and were, both.

So many Number 1s ... Geldof was the first of all of them to have a Number 1 - The Boomtown Rats were really pretty decent. He tries to get people to remember, but no one remembers now.

The Irish and the Irish diaspora in it all - Lydon, Costello, Rowland, MacGowan, Geldof, Hewson ... and Morrissey, of course. There's that scene too. And O'Dowd, an unlikely friend of Weller, And McCulloch. There's that scene too. 

Collins and Frame, that scene too. Dammers, Hall, McPherson, that scene too.

There was a great generation of women too, of course:

... and so much else going on, but I think, right now, of that generation of men who came out of punk, and who made brilliant, angry, popular music...

There was punk and rock against racism and red wedge and there was live aid - less than a decade between punk and live aid. They seem a million years apart. Some of them were never so great again - some just kept going, some had barely got started by that point.

And Joe Strummer, of course, I almost forgot Joe - pretty much my favourite of all of them - pretty much the oldest of them, 18 years gone now.

Aah, those men ...

Brief 56: Diverse viveurs

I've watched documentaries recently about two men who are still alive - 'David Crosby: Remember My Name. and 'Shane MacGowan: Crock of Gold'. Both have lived and are hitherto still alive.

The MacGowan one in particular has led me down several paths which, in the past, I'd have combined into one long, circuitous post, but now, older and wiser, I'll separate them out. But. for now, old Crosby ...

... it's a fine film, 'Remember My Name'. It navigates the path of making you warm to its subject while still showing him in all his warty ridiculousness.

While I see him as a man who talks in faux-profound aphorisms (and as archive footage shows, has done so all his life), and he is a man who has alienated all his musical collaborators - one of the highlights of the film is the one of those collaborators who deigned to appear in the film, Roger McGuinn, drily saying "David had become insufferable by that point" - Crosby has nevertheless been around some of the key moments in the rock'n'roll tale, has an incredible story to tell, and retains, against all the odds, a voice in tremendous fettle.

When I first bought a '1000 Greatest Albums' book, compiled by a man by Colin Larkin, which would be a fine resource for me for years to come, Larkin revealed his own personal favourite was Crosby's 'If I Could Only Remember My Name'. I bought it a year or two later and while I quite like it, , I don't really hodl it in high regard, and I also have always found Crosby writes the least appealing on the CSN and CSNY albums, but the man can sing, that's for sure, and has excellent musical instincts.

There is a fragility and tenderness to the Crosby of today that one can't avoid warming to, though there remains the self-importance and mythologisation. As the rock survivor most willing to shoot his mouth off, a lot of my understanding of the golden era of rock'n'roll is filtered through Crosby's gaze, for good or bad.

He is, as he says himself, a man who could die any day. But he's still, right now, throwing out the twitter funnies, so, all in all, after all, fair play to him.

Brief 55 - Small Music (small playlist)

This playlist has been much harder to make than Big Music, and in fact I've stopped at 30, not 60 songs. Really I'm just talking about 'Pink Moon' by Nick Drake. Very little else matches it for intimacy, for suffocation in detail.

There's a lot of men and women with acoustic and intimate but very few make music that is truly tiny. I don't think I've got this quite right, and may return to it another time ....

1. Place to Be - Nick Drake
2. Mid Air - Paul Buchanan
3. Johnsburg, Illinois - Tom Waits
4. Naked As We Came - Iron & Wine
5. Lua - Bright Eyes
6. Medication - Damien Jurado
7. You Missed My Heart - Phoebe Bridgers
8. We'd Be Home - Joan Shelley
9. Highway Patrolman - Bruce Springsteen
10. Flicker - Kathryn Williams
11. Three Questions - Bonnie Prince Billy
12. Surf Song - James Yorkston
13. Moon Song - Karen O
14. Me in 20 Years - Moses Sumney
15. Sunken Treasure - Wilco
16. Glow Worms - Vashti Bunyan
17. Tricky Kid - Tricky
18. I Want You - Elvis Costello
19. Celllophane - fka twigs
20. Once - Laura Marling
21. The Chalet Lines - Belle and Sebastian
22. Working Class Hero - John Lennon
23. No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross - Sufjan Stevens
24. Chelsea Hotel No 2 - Leonard Cohen
25. Love Love Love - Mountain Goats
26. It's a Motherfucker - Eels
27. Trellick Tower - Emmy the Great
28. Radio Cure - Wilco
29. We Are Going to Be Friends - White Stripes
30. Hey Self Defeater - Mark Mulcahy