Who am I to make recommendations?
We've all got access to the same streaming services and can no longer afford to buy new books or gig and theatre tickets, so what's the point of being told what to watch, listen to and read?
Once upon a time I used to get paid for having an opinion. For and by magazines and newspapers. But opinions are, as we all know, like arseholes. And, after a while, the media landscape was at full arsehole capacity and I had to find new ways to panic about generating income.
Once the advance review copies and comp tickets stopped dropping through my letterbox I also had to find new ways of discovering what to read, watch and listen to. Which mainly involved buying The Guardian on a Saturday and taking the lead of the people that contributed to The Guide and Review that could be found within (or could until they scrapped them due to rising print costs) because, as a Guardian reader, I had already decided that their opinions would be aligned with mine and, therefore, they would be spoon feeding me what I craved.
Then, of course, the internet got really serious and, yet again, the arsehole opinion count became extremely high and there were so many opinions that one could barely keep up with the amount of subscription services required to consume all that we were being told to.
So, it’s hardly worth using this Substack to recommend telly and albums and that, is it? You’ve already got a backlog of boxsets and an ever growing playlist to plough through without me suggesting that what I watch, listen to and read would be - and indeed is - so much better. No, you know best. Ignore me. It’s a waste of all of our time and we’ve hardly got any to spare, have we?
Music for pleasure
The Dare - What’s Wrong With New York?
I suppose listening to this is what got me started. I tend to discover new music these days not by letting some streaming service algorithm push a load of similar sounding shit my way but by scouring lists of new albums that are coming out (most album releases are on Fridays), digging about for a bit more info on anyone that sounds remotely interesting then taking the plunge. The reviews I read seemed to suggest that it was wrong to be silly and have fun and also to be influenced by LCD Soundsystem. This is not wrong - good grief, there are far too many ‘worthy’ and ‘serious’ musicians infiltrating the ears. What’s Wrong With New York? is a horny, provocative racket and very loveable for the fact that it will get the sleazy indie kids dancing. “I want it to be funny. I want it to be a drunk punch in the face. At times, I want it to sound dumber than it actually is,” The Dare, otherwise known as Harrison Patrick Smith, told The Guardian recently. Which it all is. And it clocks in at 27 minutes, which is also ideal for post-pandemic attention spans. It’s good to drive to, although beware accidentally accelerating if you do so (“listening to fast, upbeat music makes you subconsciously drive faster,” according to the empirical knowledge base The Windscreen Company Group).
Floating Points - Cascade
A large percentage of reviews of Floating Points’ latest album Cascade - which dropped on Friday via Ninja Tune - appear to mention that Samuel Shepherd was a neuro-epigenetics PhD student. And now I’ve added it to this brief paragraph. More important than any post-grad qualification is Shepherd’s ability to fill a dance floor, honed during nights spent not dwelling on how epigenetic changes to genes affect the nervous system but DJing. This is a collection of euphoric bangers, not least Birth4000, which is like a filthy, down and dirty I Feel Love bursting out of a broken, ripped ‘n’ torn, overdriven PA system. Again, drive carefully if you eat it in your car.
Box fresh
Apple TV - Slow Horses
I got a free Apple TV subscription for 12 months, forgot to cancel it then got caught up in the Ted Lasso frenzy, at the conclusion of which Slow Horses appeared. It’s based on the Slough House series of novels by Mick Herron and is about failed MI5 operatives who get sent to Slough House to sort through bin bags and do menial admin tasks to keep them out of trouble. Although they, in particular River Cartwright (played by Simon Pegg-a-like Jack Lowden), are unable to avoid sticking their noses or getting pulled in to events that threaten lives and national security. Watchable initially because of Gary Oldman’s portrayal of the unwashed, hyper-flatulent alcoholic Jackson Lamb, who you can smell through the screen, the sardonic style (reminiscent of Killing Eve), sharp one-line putdowns (mostly Lamb’s) and likeable hapless and quirky characters are all reasons to fall in love with this take on spydom.
There’s nothing staggeringly original, really, we’ve seen useless spies and dysfunctional security services before. But the precedent that anyone you see on screen could be killed off at any point, established in Season 1, does a very good job of sustaining interest. Thus, in Season 4 (new episodes arriving on Wednesdays), and no spoilers, when River gets his face blown off by his grandfather, a former Cold War MI5 operative played by Jonathan Pryce), we know shit’s about to hit the fan but quite how it will make its journey towards that fan is the puzzle.
Season 5 has already been commissioned by Apple and Oldman has hinted that this will be the last character he’ll play before he retires from the screen but will stick with it as long as Apple want it. So it seems I’ll have to forget to cancel that subscription for a while longer.
Creative juice
Reveal Hull - Diamond Life
It’s been a pleasure of late to be involved in the creation of an audio walk with Mutiny. Reveal Hull transforms your smartphone into a cassette player complete with a cassette box of mixtapes you can listen to whilst exploring the streets of Hull, or back at home on your sofa. The first tape out of the virtual box is the C60 cassette Diamond Life, an immersive sound and augmented reality walk dipping in and out of 60 years of Hull’s music history.
Diamond Life is narrated by the Hull comedian, actor and writer Lucy Beaumont and features interviews (which is where I came in) with Roland Gift (Fine Young Cannibals); folk legends Eliza Carthy and Martin Carthy; industrial music pioneer Cosey Fanni Tutti (Throbbing Gristle / Carter Tutti); Steve Cobby (Fila Brazillia); Lou Duffy Howard (Red Guitars); Lynda Harrison (Mandy and The Girlfriends); Paul Jackson and Paul Sarel (The New Adelphi Club); Nigel ‘Kobby’ Taylor; Jodie Langford and Wench. Come to Hull to experience it, or check it out from your sofa at https://www.revealhull.co.uk
Reading
(the cognitive process that involves decoding symbols to arrive at meaning, rather than the town in Berkshire)
Was lovely to be involved in Time and Place: The Towns and Cities That Inspire Us down at Humber Street Gallery last week. The event saw former Hacienda DJ turned writer Dave Haslam, award-winning Northern writer, Adam Farrer and host and author Lucy Nichol intersperse readings from Dave’s Art Decades series book Pablo Picasso's Paris Nightlife and Adam’s Withernsea-based Cold Fish Soup with some excellent conversation. The trio, amongst other things, spoke about the importance of place in writing, reinventing yourself in either a different town or city or via fiction and the importance of grassroots venues in far flung, unfashionable and otherwise ignored corners of a place. I’ve read a lot of Lucy and Dave’s work but look forward to getting to grips with Cold Fish Soup asap.
What else am I reading? Well, I’m accumulating a big pile of unread books, that’s mostly where I’m at. Kobo Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes was an unlikely holiday read and I’m dipping in and out of Billie Holiday’s Lady Sings the Blues. You can keep up with my reading, and buy some books, over at my virtual bookshop at https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/davewindass