As The Year Recedes

This blogpost should have been a review of Nadine Shah's December gig in Brighton but her tour was cancelled as she had to return to the North-East to be with her family. I am not sure of the exact reason but I sincerely hope it is not something too disastrous. Instead, as the year recedes, here are three things I learned in 2018:

There Are No Grown-Ups - In Lord of the Flies, when Piggy bleats that "Grown-ups know things...they ain't afraid of the dark. They'd meet and have tea and discuss. Then things 'ud be all right", he is showing a touching faith in the adult world to solve problems and act in the best interests of the little people. As we hurtle towards the EU exit door, spinning like a car on black ice (I appreciate that we are running out of similes for Brexit but this is one I have personal experience of and it was the most scared I have ever been), I have realised that I am Piggy no longer. Once upon a time, I was: as a child, I adored Harold Wilson (still do, really) and felt that no harm would come to my family all the while he was looking after things. Although I hated Margaret Thatcher and was not over-enamoured with Tony Blair, I still believed that they would act maturely and make decisions that they thought were for the best, even if I did not agree with them. And, oh, if sturdy Gordon Brown was still Prime Minister I am sure we would not be in this mess. Now I am Ralph; not Jack, who greets the lack of grown-ups on the island with all the glee of a rapacious hedge fund manager who has just realised how much money he can make if he says bollocks to the rules, but Ralph. Ralph the leader, whose nervousness and indecision are borne from the knowledge that no one else is going to come along and make things better. Our current Prime Minister is not a leader: she behaves like a civil servant who has been given a brief and has the job of delivering it no matter how ill-conceived the original idea; a leader would question the specification but she is too timorous to be honest with the British people. The Leader of the Opposition, still wedded to the fantasy that he could negotiate a better deal at the last minute, is being equally dishonest. And when you look around, there are absolutely no politicians that could salvage this situation as they are all too busy with their pettifogging party squabbles - "What's grown-ups going to say?"

It's Never Too Late (or Write What You Know) - Having spent a lifetime writing, I finally finished and published a novel this year. Freed from the shackles of full-time teaching, I was able to sit, hunched over a laptop in my kitchen corner, for long stretches while the kids were at school; but that was not the only reason I was able to make the sort of progress that had eluded me before: the difference, this time, was that I was enjoying what I was writing. If I am being honest, I only really have three strong ideas for novels; the one I had been working on for the last few years - an imagined tale involving the Modernist writer Malcolm Lowry and the tattooed curiosity, Horace Ridler - necessitated detailed research. This, coupled with the dense, literary prose style I had chosen to write in, made the whole process slow and, frankly, unenjoyable. One day, I decided to start writing my second idea, for which I had long ago produced a reasonably detailed plan. Set in 1977, with David Bowie, punk, the Jubilee and the Lewisham riot as context, the story charted the coming of age of a fifteen-year-old boy - all stuff I know about. Between October 2017 and April 2018 I wrote two drafts and then a final one and in September this year, two months after my fifty-sixth birthday, When Two Sevens Clash was published.

You Have To Tell Them - I have had cause for regret this year: I never told someone I was very close to that they were my best friend and I dearly wish I had. I think they knew but they have gone now - in tragic circumstances - and I have missed my chance. I am not sure that me telling them would have made a difference but it might have done. My New Year's resolution is to let those close to me know how important they are and how much they would be missed; I respectfully suggest you do the same.

At the End of the Road

You know a festival is going to be bloody great when the Thursday evening warm-up acts are so good they could easily suffice as the final night line-up. The Wave Pictures/Slow Club supergroup, The Surfing Magazines, get things going nicely in the Tipi Tent with amiable Dave Tattersall’s frantic bluesy guitar work before we dash off to catch The Moonlandingz stomping it up all over The Woods stage. Back in the Tipi Tent Bo Ningen are utterly mesmerising: I have seen the Japanese noise monsters before but at Dorset's End of the Road the frenzy they whip the audience into is without precedent.

The sun was shining brightly at the Garden Stage at lunchtime the next day but Julie Byrne was being a bit precious about some sound problems and played only a truncated set. This was a shame as her album of delicate folk, Not Even Happiness, has been one of the most played at our house this year. A bit later on the same stage, Ryley Walker had no such problems and delivered a blistering set of freeform folk jazz. His band, particularly the bassist, were full of energy and I suspect Walker himself was full of “pints of beer the size of your arm” that he expressed his love of. Over in the Big Top, Aldous Harding’s gothic folk was captivating but the lure of Parquet Courts was too much as their Modern Lovers/Velvet Underground New York sound drifted across the site. Mac DeMarco was the Friday night headliner but I found it difficult to concentrate during the Canadian singer-songwriter’s set as my mind kept drifting back to the band I had just seen in the Tipi Tent. Housewives, a young South London five-piece, were late replacements for Mdou Moctar, who could not appear due to visa problems. They played a bewilderingly intense set of experimental music that left the audience reeling. Their disrupted time signatures and sonic weirdness was one of the best things over the weekend and I can only compare their performance to This Heat, who I saw at the ICA in the early 80s.

Saturday dawned with clear blue skies and a shimmering heat haze and Sinkane, with their blend of afrobeat and reggae, got us all dancing. But I had a horrible dilemma hanging over me: with Bill Ryder-Jones, Nadine Shah and DUDS all playing at the same time I was spoilt for choice. In the end, I caught all of Ryder-Jones' set before legging it up to the Garden Stage to catch most of Nadine Shah; I missed DUDS but, fortuitously, they are playing Brighton later this month. Bill Ryder-Jones was immaculate: playing intimate, tender songs on the largest stage at the festival takes some guts but, mixed with powerful slacker anthems such as Two to Birkenhead and Catherine and Huskisson, he pulled it off - must be time for a new album, though, Bill. Three albums in, Nadine Shah is firmly in her stride: Holiday Destination, which made up the bulk of her set, is a jagged slice of post-punk anger about the xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment that seems to define the modern world. By the time I got into the shade of the Big Top stage, I realised that the heat of the day had caused me to visit the cider bus a few too many times. Let’s Eat Grandma were two teenage Kate Bushes let loose in the music cupboard and were very entertaining. Saturday night wrapped up for me at the main stage with Ben Bridwell’s Band of Horses, the perfect band for that twilight moment at a festival: in the fading light, spine-tingling melodies and harmonies rang out across the site on numbers such as St. Augustine, Is There A Ghost, No One’s Gonna Love You, Funeral and, standout track from this year’s Are You Ok? album, In A Drawer.

I was woken on Sunday morning by the patter of tiny raindrops on my tent and, from then on, the drizzle never really went away. But if clothes and boots were damp, spirits were not. A band completely new to me, Nova Scotia’s Nap Eyes, were a delight on the Garden Stage. Their lo-fi guitars and post-punk drums were the perfect canvas for Nigel Chapman’s weary Lou Reed vocals. Nadia Reid’s folk was mature and hypnotic but she still has to sell a lot more tea towels and tote bags to be able to bring over more of her band from New Zealand than just guitarist Sam Taylor. The Tipi Tent was a lock-out for teenage (mostly) girl band Girl Ray, and deservedly so. Their infectious indie-pop melodies lifted everyone’s mood and their set was as fantastic as their album; Don’t Come Back At Ten must be one of the tracks of the year. I was eating my final Goan fish curry of the festival when The Jesus and Mary Chain came on but their white light drew me down to The Woods stage. The resurgence of the Mary Chain has been one of the highlights of the year and the once contrary band now seem like elder statesman of alternative rock. Jim Reid oozes effortless charm (“I hope we’ve been able to cheer you up a bit”) as brother William and his guitar are lost in a Spectoresque wall of sound. Nine Million Rainy Days was apt, Just Like Honey was timeless and the opening line of the closing song was perfect for the captive audience at this superb festival: “I love rock 'n' roll/And all these people with nowhere to go.” I wouldn't be anywhere else; I have already bought my ticket for next year.