2023
Jessica Weiss takes time out from her dream-pop trio Fear Of Men to unveil her solo project New German Cinema.
Tom Misch’s jazzy house update on Roberta Flack’s 50-year-old chart topper Feel Like Makin’ Love is the kind of thing you might hear at a beach bar in Ibiza.
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.