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Iggy Pop returns to what he does best with Strung Out Johnny, a powerful song about addiction, from his 2023 album Every Loser.

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It’s always dangerous to try messing with perfection but this take on a Gil Scott-Heron classic stands up alongside his tribute to Lady Day and John Coltrane.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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There’s a compelling argument that we’ve had enough Christmas songs to last a lifetime and don’t need any more. But this one has that same seasonal sense of sadness and nostalgia as Fairytale Of New York.

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This is utterly heartbreaking. Once heard, never forgotten: Candi Staton’s first-hand memory of one of the worst racist terror incidents in US history, in which four little girls lost their lives.

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