Quick fire round of things that helped my brain not rot in 2020, in no particular order:
Mutations - Sam McPheeters
Sam McPheeters (to paraphrase a t-shirt and sentiment by the excellent Pig DNA) Understands Discharge. In this collection of essays McPheeters accomplishes a remarkable feat discussing obvious touchstones of hardcore music - Discharge, Youth of Today, SSD, Die Kreuzen - in a non-obvious manner. It’s worth the price of admission for his first hand account of the Born Against versus Sick of it All live debate on WNYU alone (if you understand that string of words without a google search - congrats, you fucked your brain). This is the first Book About Music I’ve enjoyed in a long time that offers something beyond biography or review. I think McPheeters achieves this because he has actually listened to the music he writes about and developed informed opinions over the last three decades (!!). That should really be a pre-requisite for being a music writer but I’m not convinced most journalists like music very much. I don’t agree with all of McPheeters’ opinions (Youth of Today is Good Actually) but at least he has them.Riding a bike
I rode my bike more this year than any year since 2015, when I was a sprightly 24-years-old. The reasons I rode my bike a lot this year were for mental fortitude more than exercise or transport. I think everyone should own a bicycle. Any good leftist movement would do well to make state delivered bicycle ownership part of their program of universal basic services. As one of the most corrupt organisations in professional sports it is of no surprise that the UCI decided to go hell for leather and run much of the pro-cycling calendar in the face of a global pandemic. Big ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ from David Lappartient. Putting aside the farce of it all, the three grand tours this year were remarkable. The penultimate stage of this year’s Tour de France is one of the greatest sporting moments I have ever witnessed. The parallels with Fignon versus LeMond in 1989 are obvious but worth making. The beauty of cycling is that the simplest but most perfectly designed machine ever crafted can with ease lay bare the entire spectrum of human emotion. There’s a pretty good documentary about Lance Armstrong you can watch if you live in the UK.
Leonard Cohen - Live at the Isle of Wight Festival & Townes Van Zandt - Our Mother The Mountain
For some reason these two records are tied together in my mind and will most likely be inextricably connected to 2020 for the rest of my life. The former is a beautiful document of Leonard Cohen The Poet & Songwriter in full flow as the hippie movement died on the Isle of Wight in 1970. There are a couple of videos floating around of this set where Cohen wears a killer safari style jacket. I’d love one of those. Some of the humorous poems that Cohen reads in between songs are not his best work and illicit a gentle chuckle from an audience clearly pretending to get the gag. Alongside that you have some of the most serene moments in Cohen’s career - the version of “The Partisan” on this release is untouchable. I listened to this record a lot in the summer when there was nothing to do but listen. Alongside that then, now, forever… Townes V-Z a.k.a the greatest to ever do it. Thinking a lot about truth in music this year. Townes hit the truth mine on this record.W.G. Sebald
This was supposed to be a quickfire round but I’ve already gone off on tangents and let the text flow - which I could erroneously claim to be a direct influence of the novels of W.G. Sebald. Rings of Saturn redux: the shitty newsletter edition. I walked (and cycled - as above) around the Midlands a lot this year - I really enjoy one particular journey that involves Shakespeare’s birthplace, grave, and a spot where he is rumoured to have once fallen drunk in to the River Avon. Sebald is the master of tangents, all more poignant than my own, and wandering. The novelist I would most like to aim to emulate in both physical and mental miles covered.
Tangerine Dream
Coventry gave the world, in no particular order; Bolt Thrower, The Specials, Spacemen 3 (okay, they were from Rugby, but pretty close), Panjabi MC and Tangerine Dream live at Coventry Cathedral. Richard Branson’s greatest crime is the erasure of the original audio of this incredible document. Tangerine Dream is an incredible group and one that in my humble opinion came a fraction closer to the gesamtkunstwerk that people often attribute to Kraftwerk. There’s an organic transition from their early Virgin years to the later soundtrack work - the Cathedral recording (which you can hear on a box set that came out a couple years ago) is a good insight in to the slow crawl towards the synthesiser as a tool to achieve the work they are more famous for.“…on Tangerine Dream at Coventry Cathedral 1975: "Father Bernard Goureau, as cool a clergy man as you can find, remembers: “It is true that the youth smoked marijuana in order to better enter into communication with Tangerine Dream’s sound and the spectacle at large; it is also true that others, to satisfy a natural obligation, urinated against the columns of the cathedral; and finally, it is again true that to combat the cold, couples were seen in kissing embraces. But it is equally true that some 6,000 young people, remaining sat upon the floor for three hours in the dark, had enjoyed the music and could have caused much more serious damage, with far less decorum.”
Jen Calleja - Goblins
Rough Trade Books released this long-form essay earlier in the year as part of a collaboration with The Museum of Witchcraft. It has everything you could ask for from a treatise on Goblinry - personal goblin trickery, Cher, childhood memories of chasing David Bowie in to the Labyrinth… Jen ties these and other seemingly disparate elements together in to one cohesive text - funnily enough there’s something of the Sebald about that. It also served as a great opportunity for a discussion about Mortiis over coffee which is really the only thing a book should aim to achieve in its embryonic stages and beyond.Corporate Lunch podcast
GQ Style pod about clothes I would never personally wear hosted by NYC dwelling high fashion heads probably doesn’t sound super enthralling but listening to old episodes of this served as a reminder of the Joys of Hanging Out that will come again. Hell, maybe I’ll even buy a ridiculous Yohji Yamamoto garment in honour of CL podcast to wear in the post-vaccine days when I can sit with my friends and talk about bullshit again. The episodes with Mister Mort (crucial instagram follow) are legitimately joyful listening.Talking on the phone
If this year has taught me anything it’s that everyone needs to have a phone-a-friend life-line to laugh about the Cro-Mags (insert a relevant reference to your own life here) with on a weekly basis.
