BOOKS:
David Rees’ How To Sharpen Pencils,
Penguin’s new edition of Arthur Machen’s White People,
Savage Continent by Keith Lowe,
a deliberately unreliable history of obscure ’90s comedy called You Are Nothing by Robert Wringham,
Julian Cope’s Copendium,
Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics The Untold Story.

TV:
Endeavor (Young Morse) on ITV.
BBC’s Sherlock Holmes,
Call The Midwife,
Hollow Crown,
She Wolves,
Vikings,
Limmy’s Show,
and Upstairs Downstairs.
E4’s Cardinal Burns,
C4’s Grayson Perry’s All In The Best Possible Taste,
Sky’s Touch of Cloth.

LIVE MUSIC:
The Fall at Islington Town Hall,
The Ex at Café Oto,
Howe Gelb and KT Tunstall together and unannounced in a Stoke Newington cafe,
Han Bennink solo at Bishopsgate Festival,
Jane Bom Bane’s harmonium and bespoke hats mash up on the Edinburgh Free Fringe,
Fushitsusha at St John’s Church Hackney.

RECORDS :
Matthew Bourne – Montauk Variations,
Earth – Angels of Darkness Demons of Light II,
Bill Fay – Life Is People,
Giant Giant Sand – Tucson,
Belbury Poly – The Belbury Tales,
The Bohman Brothers – Back On The Streets,
The Woodbine & Ivy Band – s/t,
Rich Hopkins & Luminarios – Buried Treasures,
Neil Young & Crazy Horse – Psychedelic Pill.

THEATRE :
Dublin Gate’s Watt in the Edinburgh International Festival,
Teatr Biuro Podró?y’s satirical stiltwalking sci-fi space rock opera Planet Lem,
Jeff Achtem’s Beefheartian kids’ puppet show Swamp Juice.

Sunday Times End Of Year Round-up 2012

1) Matthew Bourne – Montauk Variations (Leaf)
Alone at the piano, Bourne’s uncharacteristically meditative improvisations used cautiously melodic figures to trace penumbral shadows of memory and regret. Cecil Taylor slips Erik Satie something heavy on the way back from the gents.

2) Earth – Angels Of Darkness, Demons of Light II (Southern Lord) Earth’s rustically tinged folk metal, scratched out of iron at impossible volumes and immobile tempos by the infernal method, attained a new level of dumbstruck, devotional awe.

3) Bill Fay – Life Is People (Dead Oceans) The sainted singer-songwriter descended from the top of his North London pole to deliver his first album proper for forty years, a gravitationally weighty set of holy-minimalist bar room ballads.

4) Giant Giant Sand – Tucson (Fire) The durable Arizona outfit Giant Sand expanded in size to assimilate everything they’ve dabbled with, from cocktail crooning to ambient tex-mex grunge, re-imagining Tucson as a Lynch-Lurman musical.

5) Belbury Poly – The Belbury Tales (Ghost Box) Belbury Poly sound like dispirited psychedelic era survivors, attempting to subvert the soundtrack demands of the seventies television executives now employing them, whilst eating ploughman’s lunches.

6) The Bohman Brothers – Back On The Streets (Peripheral Conserve) This year the kranky spoken word artists enjoyed a silent cameo as pointing men in the art house hit Berberian Sound Studio. But these apparently random recitations of everyday verbal detritus threatened to reorder our very reality.

7) The Woodbine & Ivy Band – s/t (Folk Police) Manchester indie types played British folk standards, and a Wicker Man song, late ’60s Californian style, creating a historically implausible but highly satisfying hybrid.

8) Rich Hopkins & Luminarios – Buried Treasure (Blue Rose) A textbook liberal who rocks like a redneck, Hopkins 28th album feeds small town heartaches, border country crises, and personal anxieties through the filters of Detroit proto-punk, blue collar country, and Crazy Horse-style feedback jams.

9) Witch – We Intend To Cause Havoc! (Now Again) Who even knew ’70s Zambia had its own indigenous hard rock, hairy funk, garage punk band, let alone that they’d left a legacy of four cd’s worth of invigoratingly unvarnished stash.

10)The Azusa Plane – Where The Sands Turn To Gold (Rocket Girl) This vast document compiled the complete works of the late Jason Demilio, who imagined My Bloody Valentine or The Velvet Underground without the pop scaffolding, and all that abstract sonic dressing dragged center-stage, where it could carry whatever emotional weight you cared to place upon it.

Wire magazine 2012 End Of Year Round Up

TV
Morse Year Zero in ITV’s Endeavor.
BBC’s Sherlock Holmes, Call The Midwife, Hollow Crown, She Wolves, Vikings, and Upstairs Downstairs.
E4’s Cardinal Burns,
C4’s Grayson Perry’s All In The Best Possible Taste,
Sky’s Touch of Cloth;

Books
David Rees’ How To Sharpen Pencils is the book of the century so far,
Penguin’s new edition of Arthur Machen’s White People,
Savage Continent by Keith Lowe,
You Are Nothing which was a deliberately unreliable history of obscure ’90s comedy by Robert Wringham,
Julian Cope’s Copendium,
Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics The Untold Story;

Film
Troll Hunter,
The Artist,
Avengers Assemble,
Looper,
and Andrew Kotting’s comically and calmly meditative Swandown, which I was in for 5 minutes;

Gigs
Giant Sand’s Howe Gelb & pop’s K T Tunstall together and unannounced in a Stoke Newington cafe,
Han Bennink solo at Bishopsgate Festival,
Jane Bom Bane’s harmonium and bespoke hats mash up on the Edinburgh Free Fringe,
Kunt & The Gang’s scatological Depeche Mode grooves on the Free Fringe,
The Caesareans acoustic at a birthday party, Fushitsusha transcending time and space at St John’s Church Hackney,
Patti Smith shaming everyone in Bethnal Green;

Theatre/comedy
Dublin Gate’s Watt in the Edinburgh International Festival,
Teatr Biuro Podró?y’s satirical stiltwalking sci-fi space rock opera Planet Lem,
Jeff Achtem’s Beefheartian kids’ puppet show Swamp Juice.

Bad thing – Paddy Power desecrating the Uffington White Horse.

Good thing – Obama, relatively speaking.