2023
Skoota Warner is a multi-talented drummer turned rapper turned drummer again, harnessing hip-hop and southern-fried funk from New Orleans.
The Jim Jones Allstars are the third iteration of the band that began life as the Jim Jones Revue and who I last saw as Jim Jones & The Righteous Mind.
Iggy Pop returns to what he does best with Strung Out Johnny, a powerful song about addiction, from his 2023 album Every Loser.
I wasn’t planning to watch Jools Holland’s Hootenanny on New Year’s Eve. And when I did switch over after the fireworks I certainly didn’t expect to witness an exciting new talent.
Here’s my last playlist of the year, for December 2023. It’s a vibrant mix of ’70s hard rock and ’80s kitsch’n’disco, vintage funk and soul and ambient house, old-skool blues and nu-soul, plus a bit of dub reggae and some festive themed numbers for Christmas recently past.
Obviously these are just the ones I have read, and I am a slow reader. But I enjoy a good novel, with good characters, and I try to alternate my novel-reading with the occasional non-fiction book.
Looking at the list, it’s only now I notice that while the first (The Bee Sting) is very much an Irish book about an Irish family, the next five all have themes of race.
Vivian Stanshall was one of those great British eccentrics. I came across him in my teens on John Peel’s radio show, where he regularly narrated extracts from his satirical saga Sir Henry At Rawlinson End.