My Favourite Things of 2024

 These become more farcical each year, as I continue to wipe out on the zeitgeist, to paraphrase Gilbert Adair. I don't seek out the new, the exotic or the strange. I'm not really interested in exciting developments in music and cinema, and the theatre I've seen lately is an atrophied stump. My instinct, and its always been this way, is to flash a bit of leg and thumb a lift to that foreign country: the past. 

As a child, I liked Bible stories, Greek Myths and Norse Legends. I loved the way they broke down the universe, made practical explanations of natural phenomena that were infinitely strange. Those people didn't think like me. They had different certainties, different cultural systems, peculiar values. They might think I had no values at all, and they'd be wrong, but they wouldn't have the necessary tools to get where I'm coming from. It goes both ways. 

I love the strange ways those ancient, authorless fairy tales impact on the society we've fashioned from our misreading and misunderstanding, those dodgy translations, the Gnostic and the non-Gnostic, the weird, awkward hapexes that tantalise and beguile. I'm a hapex twit. 

I also hate it, because wilful misinterpretations of the Bible, in particular, have lead to the persecution of millions, and America's bizarre reconstruction of that text is still being used to ban books and deny women bodily autonomy...

But still. I'm a mole, a sapper. I tunnel, and I tunnel back into modern culture too. 

I shun the now. I have no idea what's cool. Back when mix-CDs were a thing - and, obviously from my perspective, they should still be a thing - my friends would compile playlists of gleaming novelty. And mine would feature 60's French music, weirdo blues, haunted country, Krautrock and disco. And if  I made a compilation today it would contain all that stuff too, plus 90's hip hop and Eurobeat. And The Promise by Girls Aloud. 

This week I got emotional listening to Too Lost in You by Sugababes. So that's who I am. 

With that in mind, let's break down my cultural highlights for 2024. Fun!

Film of the Year: Frewaka

I saw a few films this year. Longlegs wasn't very good. Timestalker was excellent, if magnificently niche. I do love niche. I seem to be the only person in the world who thought that The Substance frittered away all the good will the blisteringly great first hour earned with a bloated, fatuous second hour and a half.

The Wise Guy I saw in Bafta, the highlight of an otherwise miserable evening there, and it was very good.

Frewaka is my pick though. It's a film about stuff. Things. Clutter. The objects that surround us. Irish Catholicism is full of tat: glow-in-the-dark-Virgin-Marys full of holy water, winking Jesus rulers, holy medals and prayer cards. My mum erected a Marian shrine most Maydays. My Grandparents - and I suspect everyone's Irish grandparents - had The Big Three on the wall: Jesus, Pope John Paul II ("the good pope") and JFK. They were household gods, smiling down, pale and benevolent, JFK proof it was possible to be Irish and have good teeth. Frewaka remains the first horror film where key scenes of menace are garlanded with pictures of Padre Pio and The Child of Prague. Only Peter Walker's The House of Mortal Sin uses a cross so effectively as the sign that bad shit is about to go down. This reliquary is a constant in Catholic countries, and I think stems from a time when objects were scarce and the things you owned, that were actually yours, carried significance and weight. Objects had power and meaning. They protected you. All fairies hate iron, so things made or iron, nails or horseshoes, kept them away. The more stuff you had the more protected you were. 

Ash Clarke's writing and direction are unsentimental and detailed. She drops narrative clues, she makes suggestions, she subverts herself and the tropes she's working with. She is assured. And she brings class and gravity to Irish Folk Horror. Folk Horror might have been born in England (or a bit of made up Scotland, imagined by English people) but it belongs in the Stygian sod of Ireland, where Fairy trees are respected, where the old rules survive, where subterranean earthworks still greet the low winter sun. Folk Horror's coming home.  

Album of the Year: Lives Outgrown by Beth Gibbons. 

I like old people music. Old people making music. My favourite albums of the year are Kim Deal's Nobody Loves You More and Bill Callahan's Resuscitate! But it's Beth's haunted folk opus, her voice so desolate and insinuating against the wood and string oubliette she's trapped in, that's my favourite record of the year. It's dark, dank and unknowable, forever shifting, unsteady beneath your feet. It's everything I hoped it would be after her long years of silence. The songs sound like they've been fashioned from steam-bent wood and cat gut. Is that music or a nasal whistle? That children's choir? Can anyone else hear them? Can anybody see them? This record sounds like the first music recorded on Stone Tape. It's ancient, it's bereft, it's beautiful. It's sobbing in your attic. It wants you to open the door, open the window, though it's blowing a gale. And you will. 

Whispering Love is the best song on it. But its all wonderful. 

Single of the Year: Eddie and the Toys c/w Silent Night by Ebbing House. 

What? Oh, right. I'm in the band. That's your beef? Well, I don't care. I haven't heard any other singles this year so, accurately, if by default, this is my favourite single of this year. But I also really love it. Ben and I have been producing music since 2021 but 2024 was the first year we'd reached November and not put out an E.P. We decided to knock off an easy, quick, Christmas single. I quickly re-wrote the lyrics to one of our earlier songs, Eddie and the Boys, turning it into the story of a cheeky Christmas fixer, who'll do whatever it takes to make sure those gifts are delivered on time. The B-side would be a cover of the venerable Yuletide chestnut, Silent Night. Sung straight. My watchword on it was Frankie Goes to Hollywood's video for The Power of Love. We thought it would be easy. 

It was not easy. I had a pretty straightforward time on Eddie: re-writing the lyrics in minutes and singing it handsomely and well, but Ben, as is his wont, dismantled and rebuilt the entire song, fiddling and finessing to the point of nervous exhaustion. Silent Night was the killer for me. In November I developed a cold. That's really too small a word for it. Remember that bit in Tam Lin where Janet is forced to cling to the enchanted Tam as the Faery Queen transforms him into a lion, a swan and a burning brand? Of course you do. Well, that's what the cold was like: protean, ever-changing. I still have it now, manifesting as partial deafness in my left year. But when I was singing Silent Night it was solidly in my throat and sinuses, and the mucus is clearly audible on the recording. This is a shame as Ben's bedding of subtle drones, treated keys and skirling guitar are awesomely pretty and bode very exciting for next year's album. Yes, we're making an album next year. I'll be 54, for those keeping count.   

I'm very good at writing songs. 

Television Show of the Year: The Last Ever Inside No. 9 (until they take it to the stage next year)

I've made no secret of my admiration of The League of Gentlemen and their various hardy cultivars. They're name-checked in both Teeth, and its semi-sequel Spine (out next year, fans) and Inside No. 9 is a particular favourite. The sheer stamina, the astonishing quality control. There are perhaps two episodes out of 54 I know I'll never watch again. There are several I've watched dozens of times. 

The finale was perfect. An exercise in quiet mythologising and endlessly self-reflexive in peculiar, subtle ways: entire scenes redressed, call backs to dialogue, celebrities apparently haunted by their own characters, and Reece and Steve's relationship - back in their LOG dress suits - telling the world they weren't friends in the toilets of their own party. Also Robin Askwith's arse, and somebody FINALLY eating an onion as though t'were an apple. 

That was very well seeded. 

Book of the Year: Erotic Vagrancy by Roger Lewis

Obviously, in a year where I published my first two books, you might anticipate it being one of mine. After all I think both those books are very good. Fine, in particular has been worried at, pared and filleted. It is the best version of that story I could have written. I'm as pleased with it as it is possible for me to be pleased with anything. I'm not very good at liking the things I do, but I recognise the effort, the polish, the perseverance. I've worked hard to make it appear as if I've not worked on it at all. The prose should be cool, clear water: drinkable and refreshing and occasionally making you splutter. 

I read and very much enjoyed Aug Stone's Sporting Moustaches which does what is says on the tin, and features a collection of short stories about sports enthusiasts and their fecund facial foliage. It's silly, shaggy-doggy, and relentlessly goes for the joke, where others may fear to tread. Stone is fearless in his pursuit of comic wordplay. I also read Vincent Czyz' astonishing, Sun Eye Moon Eye, a hazy, nebulous novel, the writing heightened and dazzling. It draws to an extraordinary conclusion where the narrative melts away, leaving us in a desert populated by phantoms, by tricksters, by the dead, where language is mere symbols smeared on a crumbling wall. In a good way, of course. 

I did read Paul Manning's How To Be A Wally and The Beaver Book of Horror, both totemic books of my childhood. Other writers just reel off the correct books for the last year, don't they? And I guess Intermezzo by Sally Rooney should be on there. But I haven't read it. I'm not in the club. I'm not obliged to have an opinion on Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. 

All Fours by Miranda Joy sounds good. Did that come out this year? I haven't read it, regardless.

The best book I read this year was The North of England Home Service by Gordon Burn, which was an absolute treat. But it came out in 2003, and Gordon's been dead since 2009, so I doubt it counts. Who makes the rules for these things? *

I have read an unpublished novel that blew my tiny mind. But that's not out till next year. Spoiler. Unless something pretty fucking wild happens that will be my book of the year. 

*This was true until today. Today, December 31, I picked up Erotic Vagrancy by Roger Lewis - Susan bought it for me for Christmas - and it's like fireworks. I'm not yet out of the prologue and I'm already into choppy water, bobbing like a cork. This book goes everywhere. I have to go out - socialising, you know, like people do - but I would rather curl up with a few fingers of whisky and disappear into this book. It's remarkable - funny, cruel and clotted with language. It's all over the place, in your hair, under your fingernails, tweaking your olfactory bulb. Whole thing's lousy with literature. 

Goth of the Year: Robert Smith

Watching Robert Smith, a 65 year old man with hair like a petrified willow, in a well cut suit and the sort of weirdo platform boots Gary Numan wears these days, doing interviews, is to see a man comfortable with who he is, and utterly uninterested in exacting revenge on the world. Sandwiched between Annie Mac and Nick Grimshaw - something I feel he would have been mortified by in the past - he is considered and thoughtful, appearing to be at peace with himself, if not quite the world. I don't suppose Bob's always been nice - he strikes me as fairly ruthless early in his career, and boozy ex-bestie Lol Tolhurst could probably tell a few stories, (I haven't read his book) but Smith appears to have mellowed considerably in his old age, refusing to be mean about anyone and saying gracious, respectful things about other artists he couldn't be expected to like. "I respect anyone who actually does anything. Obviously, this music is not meant for ME." When the hosts bring up the famous clip of him being witheringly British in the face of an American host's enthusiasm, he feels sorry for her. He didn't intend to be rude. He was caught on the hop and unaware he was being filmed. He's a rich, old man, who's grounded and humble. That's rare. Well done, Cap'n Bob. You are the anti-Morrissey.  

Villain of the Year: Elon Musk

I mean, WOW! This year there were fucking villains everywhere. Everyone was a villain. Fucking hell. The world is in a disgustingly ugly condition, with its illegal wars, its genocides, its endless storms and encroaching deserts, its extinguished animal species, its degraded humanity. And Donald Trump is the President. Again. I mean, last time he had a go, he was a disgusting moronic monster, and when deposed, orchestrated a treasonous assault on Capital Hill. And they elected him again, because he said he'd make groceries cheaper and, as soon as he won, he said, no, he wouldn't be making the groceries cheaper. Not interested in that. Everyday its some new aggressively crass thing with this guy. But then there's that other fella...

I miss the good old days when paymasters were shadowy. Now they're jumping up and down behind the President in a baseball cap. Musk is so rich, if he got dysentery and shat 100 dollar bills for the rest of his life, he would never, ever die. He'd outlive us all, with three generations of Trump's family running behind him with a dustpan and brush, scooping up his still warm fecal fortune.  

It feels like something new has happened. Elon Musk has dropped the façade money can't buy anything and everything, and has bought America. He seems to be attempting to make a political party out of the Five Guys Business that is The Reform Party, by giving them money. A stupid amount of money. For nothing. For a laugh. To see what will happen. We're Elon's ant farm and watch out - he's just filled the kettle. 

Something fundamental has changed in the world. Throwing money at something abysmal was laughable in the past. Now it seems its the only endorsement you need. Its just money. There's no attempt to make it look like anything else. It's just money. Musk is the richest man in the world (how? What does he do? What does he make? Exploding space cars? Toxic social media? Rockets? How do you make money making rockets? It's a bigger waste of time than writing a novel.) and he's spending that money on making more money and destroying world politics (he's endorsing far right parties in Germany as I'm writing this). This is like an M Night Shyalaman script - his invention of Lex Luthor implies the complimentary invention of a Superman to foil his schemes. But Lex Luthor has a code. He thinks he's right. Bond villains have a plan. Musk is just chaos. A monstrous id spaffing out fathomless riches in a consequence-free environment. Consequence-free for him, at least. There used to be laws, but I think he's too rich for laws. People used to go to prison for tax evasion. Now people with no money at all think Musk's a smart guy because he doesn't have to pay any tax. He probably earns money from tax. He has such an improbable amount of cash, normal financial laws no longer apply. It may as well be magic. He's Merlin the Monetician, the Saruman the Salaryman. Gandalf the Moral Grey Area. It's going to be absolutely fascinating to see what happens next. 

And terrifying. Of course. Always terrifying. Don't forget terrifying. 

This GUY. 

Hero of the year: Gisele Pelicot

It couldn't be anyone else. Obviously. What an incredible woman. An absolute hero.