Things I watched, listened to and read this week #11
Album recommendations
Getdown Services — Massive Champion
It is too early to tell, but if this isn’t in my top three albums at the end of the year, it means that Leonard Cohen, Kendrick Lamar and Lana Del Rey all did a surprise release.
There is sadly one track I would immediately put in a bin at the bottom of the deepest bit of the ocean, and that track is A Crazy Story, where a Northern accent repeats the word “choccys”. This casual use of language, where biscuits become biccys, Christmas becomes Crimbo and breakfast becomes brekkie, is the auditory equivalent of sticking my head in the rear end of a jet engine.
A shame, then, because, that aside, this is an album that is almost perfect. At times punk (The Definitive Map), followed by outright beautiful (What’s on Your Mind), and with the Philip Larkin/Tim Key/John Cooper Clarke-style poetic brilliance of the opener (Poor Banister), this is an album that covers every area of everything I love about music.
Available on all streamers and in your local record store.
Westside Cowboy- it Goes On
Released on Friday on Island Records after a couple of much-hyped EP releases and extensive tour support slots, this is a solid first album from Westside Cowboy, a four-piece alt-rock, indie-country outfit from Manchester.
If you enjoyed the Geese album last year, if country-inspired rock aimed right at the feels is your thing, I think you’ll love this.
Available on all streamers and in your local record store.
A book Recommendation
I've been on my holidays in Italy, a little more of that below, and whilst there I read Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things, but you don’t need to be a fan of her previous works to be a fan of this.
This book is about an exceptional and unique life and the complex relationship between a mother and daughter. It's about how it is possible to value, respect and love the person who caused you the most harm, about seeing the light in the darkest of all places, it's about feminism, tenacity and the road less travelled. It's funny. It's sad. It's brilliant. Written with Roy’s candid, conversational style of authorship it easy to see why nearly every publication you could name has labelled this Book of the Year. At present, it is certainly mine and comes highly recommended.
Available in your local book store or here.
A holiday diary
With a bit of dead time after the conclusion of a guitar retreat in France, I headed off on a holiday of my own to Lake Como and Milan, Italy.
Rather than talk much about the lost luggage and how we spent the first two days wearing the same clothes, my own covered in the remnants of packing down the castle in France and, embarrassingly, loads of pasta sauce after having got a bit too excited in the first Italian restaurant I found; instead of going on about how we looked and smelled like a pair of trolls in that most beautiful of all spots, what I would like to talk about is selfies and social media and the parasitic nature of the whole thing on the collective enjoyment of everyone.
We stayed in Varenna, a gorgeous town on the edge of the lake with a population of six hundred and fifty people. In the summer, because of images viewed billions of times on TikTok and Instagram, up to twenty thousand people tread upon its tiny streets. Every day.
To visit Varenna in the height of the summer is to see a town buckling underneath the weight of TikTok tourism.
The situation is, frankly, f***ed.
Because of this, seemingly nobody who works or lives there actually wants us there, and the people visiting are tense as hell because of photo anxiety. At some points, there are hour-long queues to take the big shot. In one instance, this left a thing I really wanted to see inaccessible. All of this adds up to a heady mix of anxiety, isolation (the joys of talking to strangers on holiday are not to be found in this climate) and a genuine infrastructural dilemma for the people of Lake Como.
All this may seem like we didn’t have a good time. We did, in fact, have the best time. We laughed tonnes, did a load of fun stuff, and there were some moments, such as renting a self-hire speedboat and exploring the lake, where I have rarely felt happier.
But I do hope that people soon wake up to see how they are cannibalising their own enjoyment of life via a deep-level need to demonstrate to people that they are, in fact, enjoying life.
If you’re going on holiday and spending over an hour queuing to have your photo taken by a particular gate that looks out onto a river, you are truly taking a match to the delicate, petrol-soaked rag that is all of our lives and setting it ablaze.
From Como, we went to Milan.
Milan was beautiful. I’m going again soon. I loved it.