Review of the Year

2017 was a weird year and it has taken me a month to work out how I want to summarise it. It was a year in which I carried a deep and underlying feeling of melancholy. Firstly sadness that the strongest nation on earth should step back from leading, pioneering and guiding and unashamedly put itself first as a slogan. Secondly sadness that our own nation continues to step back from co-operation, sharing and stepping forward together with other nations in favour of the more aggressive, and surely eventually doomed, policy of taking back control. It was a bad year.

To make a mess of a metaphor, in the shadow of this are my highlights:

I was very grateful to Stuart Maconie for a throwaway comment on BBC 6 Music last month - 'New music' he said '...is music you haven't heard before.' He said this in response to a reader thanking him for introducing him to The Lemonheads.

With that in mind I note my Spotify algorithm introduced me to a lot of new music last year but not much of it from 2017 albums. But I pick out the following bands or artists I enjoyed for the first time:

Ultimate Painting

The Vryll Society

Wolf People

Beyond the Wizard's Sleeve

Mark Pritchard

Death Hawks

Sinkane

In a year in which I had three months sabbatical leave a lot of reading was catching up. Lee Child and Chris Brookmyre kept me page-turning when that was necessary. As did Robert Harris' Conclave. Tim Marshall's Prisoners of Geography educated me, James Rebanks' The Shepherd's Life moved me, John Lanchester's Capital impressed me, Paul Beatty's The Sellout made me think, Stanley Donwood's Slowly Downward worried me, as did John Sopel's If Only They Didn't Speak English but for different reasons. I finally read Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang and it is one of the finest books I have ever read.

Podcasts were a new thing for 2017. I started with the wonderful S-Town and moved on through Serial 1 and 2. This led me to subscribe to the excellent This American Life. I now regularly listen to The Political Party and Richard Herring's Leicester Square Theatre Podcast. I dip into Rob Bell's The Robcast but find it annoying that he crams 20 minute's material into an hour. My heroes really shouldn't do this.

Honourable mentions to 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy, The Infinite Monkey Cage, Crowd Science and More or Less, all of which were catch-ups rather than Podcasts.

Spent less time at the movies than I would have liked to (Ghost in the Shell good fun) but enjoyed DVD Scandi-noir a lot - Follow the Money, The Bridge, The Killing I, II and III. Line of Duty was also excellent.

Any year that we see Stewart Lee perform live he is going to be the best comedy gig and he was. David Sedaris reading his stuff was a good evening out. Music gigs were thin but Laura Marling supported by the excellent Ethan Johns was good. I enjoyed Ghostpoet but not The Marble Factory setting in Bristol.


Sad to see the end of The Barn pub at Wraxall. Coates House, Nailsea now gets our custom. Bordeau Quay in Bristol bit the dust (it had been going down for a while) but the Pony and Trap at Chew Magna goes from strength to strength as does WB at Wapping Wharf.

Grayson Perry's The Most Popular Art Exhibition Ever! at the Arnolfini was insightful, moving and strived to explain the two parts of divided Britain to each other.

Here's to more and better culture in 2018.

Revolution 1966-1970 at the V and A

A brief coda to my previous post reviewing this. A review in theipaper by Robert Bevan (copied from the Evening Standard) made two negative comments; that it was populist and that it ignored, inter alia, architecture. A brief response:

Firstly, I don't think you can critique an exhibition for being populist. Museums are full of high culture and whilst important and helpful it don't pay the bills. A certain amount of the common touch is necessary. Us commoners seem to have been, in the main, impressed.

And secondly architecture? Well most architecture built 1966-1970 was probably conceived pre-66. '...fashion is the most responsive barometer of social change ... you can react more speedily to the demands of the times with three-and-a-half metres of cloth than you can with, say, 5000 toms of reinforced concrete' (Marion Hume, The Independent, 2/12/94). Architectural ideas from 66-70 went up in the early 70s.

But I save the worst until last. The final scathing comment in a review that gave this exhibition 3 stars (out of 5) was that it failed to mention the Gay Liberation Front at the 1971 Festival of Light. Could it be that it was a year late? I only ask. I'm not a professional reviewer.

Revolution; 1966-1970

At the Victoria and Albert Museum at the moment, running until 26th February 2017, is an excellent exhibition about the years 1966-1970.

It aims to answer this question:

'How have the finished and unfinished revolutions of the late 1960s changed the way we live today and think about the future?'

It is hard to decide when the sixties (as referenced by writers) actually started. They usually mean the period that started in earnest once the Beatles hit the charts and drifted on into the next decade. So about 1962-1971 is 'Sixties' culture.

I spent that period being 7-16 so it is the time I grew up. But my first festival experience wasn't until 1972.

But the years 66-70 saw one of the most important periods in history for cultural change. Our understanding of race, gender, travel (to space), fashion and many other things began a process of change which continues to this day.

Visitors to this exhibition, wearing headsets to replace the hotel lobby background music with rock and roll, wander through the late John Peel's collection of vinyl sleeves. Clever technology aligns what we hear to on-screen voices as we approach a TV and so we hear archive footage of social commentators from the period. We go to the Moon, experience student riots and sit in on the Woodstock experience (The Who, Sly and the Family Stone and Jimmy Hendrix).

We gaze on the costumes from the cover of Sergeant Pepper and get to read Paul McCartney's handwritten resignation letter from 1970.

It costs £16.50 full price with a number of discounts. Those who were aware of all the sixties are now pensioners. Although I do recall someone saying that if you could remember the sixties you weren't there. Man. You need a timed ticket and it will take a couple of hours to enjoy properly.

Illustrations are a couple of our vinyl sleeves - Traffic's Mr Fantasy from 1968 and Free's Fire and Water from 1969.

Port City: On Mobility and Exchange

This astounding exhibition at Arnolfini looks at the migration of people and international trade from the perspective of a city which is also a port.

Ursula Biemann's work needs quite a while to appreciate as you find yourself sitting in the midst of eleven simultaneous documentaries. Headphones enable you to tune into the soundtrack of individual films but it is the lack of commentary that stirs. Each film, whether an interview with a new Tuareg or a satellite view of a people movement, is presented raw.

Viewers find themselves in the middle of the story.

Elsewhere, learn about the non-native plants growing in Bristol dockside because the seeds were transported in ballast which was then dropped illegally to avoid ballast tax. Maria Theresa Alves' work is fascinating

And enjoy Sweetness, by Meschac Gaba, a city which includes many of the world's great buildings, all made entirely of sugar.