The Tepid Take

The nights are drawing in, 2023 is drawing to a close, I'm drawing a musical blank. Usually it's so easy to reinvoke the albums that meant something to me in the year! I've done it for four years now, each time coming up with a mollycoddle of crap indie and semi-good post-punk/other that may or  may not  be from the year it's supposed to be from.           This year, however, in part thanks to Rough Trade East, and in part thanks to someone with better musical taste than me, I've tried to come up with seven albums from this year, actually from this year  that I think are actually  good... And then three that aren't. Look, need a bit of leeway for the ol' sentimentality. So listen up! Or read on! I really couldn't care less! BLOGGING. 1. Snake Sideways by Do Nothing     Come on Claude, at least start with one that you didn't nick from Rough Trade's list. Okay, here's Snake Sideways, the first full-length LP from Nottinghams...

In the UK, the county of Surrey has a special reputation. High streets paved with gold, land rovers stalking the tarmac hills, McMansions poking out of perfect little glades.       Surrey is everything that's wrong with England. At least, that was my expectation.      I thought, I'll go to the old Top Gear test track, it'll mean going through Surrey, but that's fine, necessary evils. The site of many a Reasonably Priced Car journey and innumerable drag races (not the fun kind), the test track is found on the site of the former Dunsfold Aerodrome, located close to Surrey's southern border with Sussex, before the downs clear the way to the sea. So to get to Dunsfold, I had to track along the length of most of Surrey. A HuffPost style line would assert here that "what I found will shock you" - but what I found wasn't shocking, it was just a touch surprising.      When I got off at Guildford, I found the town to be more varied than expected....

Hey there,      If you're the sort of folk to still buy a newspaper, you've likely got the big quiz of the year in the back pages right now. Or, you're ready to watch Jimmy Carr and some celebs slamming directly into something approaching "comedy" between Christmas and the New Year. Or you read quizzes online. Or you attend them, physically! Wow. GOSH .      In any case, allow me to add to your pile: a quiz, here on my blog. You can do what you like with it. Play it with friends, play it on your own, play it with your dog (do not expect the dog to answer questions). BEGIN . ROUND 1: MUSIC The creators of Fortnite purchased which music streaming service this year? Which artist was streamed the most on Spotify by Mexicans  this year? Which artist took home the BRIT Award for Best New Artist this year, even though they've been active in the hip hop scene for nearly ten years? Kanye West is insane and 2022 was the year when everyone actually noticed. West...

Neither new nor a river, they say of the New River. They say it’s a 400-year-old culvert, but it’s also a dividing line, an incredibly long and incredibly shallow reservoir, aquatically neurotic and geographically unreliable. It fragments neighbourhoods on the one hand – its embankments steep and impassable – and links them on the other – its vertical path an alignment from Canonbury to Ware. But it does so only every so often. Sometimes it is behind a steep fence. Sometimes it is underground. So while it’s true that the New River is neither new nor a river, it’s also not really a geographical feature of any kind, and its age is indeterminate, being as it is so varied and manipulated by the needs of the suburbs it surrounds.      Things start in Zone 3, Old Middlesex, Hornsey and Wood Green. The New River ran entirely above ground until urban development brought its tunnelling under. There’s one such tunnel in Wood Green; the land is for the most part landscaped gardens....

In one episode of Taskmaster, where the contestants are invited to bring in the "most spectacular picture of themselves", Hugh Dennis wears a picture of his face, on his face. He says he wears it because Hugh Dennis would never wear a mask of himself - so people assume that it must be someone else behind the mask. Hugh Dennis's admittedly banal picture of himself turns out to be an effective demonstration of the difference between comedians and people: the Hugh Dennis out doing his shopping, wearing the mask of Hugh Dennis, actually isn't the same person as the person he's wearing a mask of. He's wearing a mask of Stage Dennis; he's wearing the mask of character comedy. Hugh Dennis came last in the round for most spectacular picture. But his mask is a perfect demonstration of the wider context. Character comedy is very popular in the UK. The gist of the idea is that the comedian is playing a character that the comedian has created. Some of the most famous...

This is a piece I wrote for a life writing competition earlier this year. I don't have anything to show for it, but I liked it enough to zuzh it up and share at year's end. I hope you like it too, and here's to a merrier 2021... Pinned at the north end of the street I grew up on, the hill on London Road banks down, sharply, giving way to the River Gipping half a mile down the road. In the valley it creates, you can see miles to the west; the tree line is barely geography’s watermark on the blurred bound of the horizon. And there they rose up, stoic: four great silos, greyed out by time and bad business. It’s six months ago and I’m walking upriver. Something I used to do for adolescence’s sake, now an imitation, trying to draw nostalgia out from the undertow of adulthood. The Gipping is slack and in algal bloom. Just beyond the final railway bridge towards the edge of town, there is a path that veers right into a steep hillside of fresh weeds. I climb in expectation and find...

1: YOU'RE MY FAVOURITE NOTIFICATION There was a time when I had a Tumblr account - it was back in 2015, when I was in a retrospectively up-to-snuff relationship with a reliance on memes, references and other moment-to-moment signs. "You're my favourite notification" was a simple text post shared on the site, and it was one of those very memes. Customarily, we both liked, reblogged, and shared it ourselves. In doing so, we were recognising an appreciation for one another among a flurried fog of other visual cues. It was a kitschy message, but right for the times. In the gaps between the real and the simulated, between the relationships that exist and don't exist, between online and offline, it's almost impossible to maintain an identity. If I wanted to coin another phrase , I could say that notification fog has given way to notification fugue. They say that millennials have a problem with personal communication, but the truth is that personal communication has ...