In a year of stolen moments, spring bloomed early with Arcade Fire’s Funeral. Yes, I know everybody’s blue in the face from talking about it, but here was an album of strange magick and indefinable nature, a record that yielded more eccentric detail and evergreen melodies the more you played it.
Later, The Mars Volta delivered another ungainly epic in the form of Frances The Mute, Queens of the Stone Age’s Lullabies To Paralyze was a twisted metallic desert fairytale, Antony & The Johnsons rewrote the ballads of Dorothy Vallens with I Am A Bird Now and Maria McKee’s Peddlin’ Dreams tackled Bruce’s existential riddle – is a dream a lie if it don’t come true, or is it something worse? Surprise album of the season: Daniel Lanois’ near-faultless collection of symphonies for pedal steel, Bella Donna.
Glass teat department. Forget Lost, 24 etc – for this channel-hopper it was all about Deadwood’s second series, wherein Trixie the Whore learns accounting, Al almost bites the bullet, and more yet more transgressors get fed to the celestials’ pigs. Magnificent acting, David Milch dialogue that scans like expletive-splattered Shakespeare (“San Francisco cocksucka!”) and the wonderful Brad Dourif as the gruff but decent doc.
Come September, the Electric Picnic reminded us what a music festival is supposed to be about by virtue of what it excluded. No featherweight drinkers spewing puke. No heavy-handed security. No idiot text messages flashed across the big screen as you’re trying to watch the band. Nope. Arcade Fire delivered a full-blown evangelical tent revival. Kraftwerk connected the dots between a disembodied and out-of-body experience. Bob Mould pumped his forearm and cranked out the Sugar, Husker Du and solo tunes, thus performing wonders for the circulation of 30-somethings. Nick & The Bad Seeds weighed in with a highly theatrical and gospel-assisted Elvis-at-Budokan revue. All this and the non-stop erotic talk show extravaganza that was the HP chatroom. You call this working?
Elsewhere, Green Day graduated from being a bunch of intellectually challenged purveyors of plastic punk to one of the most blistering agit-pop acts of recent times, and ‘Wake Me Up When September Ends’ is the Ramones/Spector classic that never was (I have no higher praise). Like so many others, I lost interest after the rather endearing Dookie, but as the year wore on it became clear that American Idiot is as epochal an album as Who’s Next or Born To Run.
On a less inspiring note, Kate-gate made the soul despair for an age where no-one is allowed to mind their own business, hypocrites spout endless op-ed columns and snitches get rewarded with greenbacks.
Speaking of Kates, Ms Bush reminded us that just ’cos you have a real life don’t mean (a) you’ve given up on your art or (b) become a hermit with birds-nest hair.
Books? Oh yes, there were lots. Cormac McCarthy, Bret Easton Ellis, Mike McCormack… cue much rejoicing. The Dirty Three scorched our eyebrows in The Village. Dylan performed miracles at The Point. And shuffling in at the finish line, a rough diamond of a live album from Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billie containing irreverent, slipshod and exuberantly Bob-like reinterpretations of his own tunes.
All together now:
“Death to everyone will surely come/And it makes hosing much more fun.”