Things I watched, read, ate and listened to this week #5
A food review
I don’t often say yes when asked to do one-to-one guitar lessons because as we all know, the best way to learn is alongside other people. But recently, I have been saying yes. I think this is mainly for reasons of nostalgia. I started teaching when I was 15. With a packed lunch and a paper diary full of addresses, I would take myself on buses all over Yorkshire, sometimes travelling two hours to get to someone’s house to earn £12. It’s been nice to get out and about in London, doing the same again, only on a higher rate.
This is how I ended up in Notting Hill this week at Gold.
Gold serve British and Mediterranean food in a building that was once a pub. I was sat at the back, underneath a plant that tapped my head approvingly while I ate.
I ordered an oven-cooked sea bream and a starter of mastello cheese topped with tomatoes and capers. It was stunning. The fish was stuffed with lemon and thyme and as my fork broke into it and I inhaled those aromas in a cloud of steam, I thought on how good it is to be alive sometimes.
I was once a vegan. When I became one, my grandma, every bit the Northern matriarch that cooked a meat and potato pie with the ease and speed of a quick sandwich, fell out with me. As I looked into the bream’s glassy dead eye, I could see hers staring back at me, muttering “hypocrite” under her breath.
Opposite me, a bunch of friends who don’t see each other as often as they would like paid their bill and swore to do this again soon. And often. Funny how we all say that before not seeing each other for another two years, isn’t it?
Deep deep deep deep deep in the bottom of my bag, there is a packet of cigarettes I keep for special occasions. I decide this was one such occasion and ordered an espresso martini to be taken on the front terrace, right there on Portobello Road. They brought the drink, and then an ashtray, and I sat a while and thought about Grandma, and thought about that child with a guitar on the buses of Yorkshire, and I thought a little about life as it is now.
My bill including drinks was £72. You can visit Gold yourself by booking here
A book review
If you’re unfamiliar with Lemar’s work—you could go and quickly check this out, Kendrick Lemar SNL. I believe this might be one of the best live performances to have ever been filmed, but then, much like the author, I am a big fan.
If you do watch it, the musicians you'll see on stage with him are the same jazz and funk players that he surrounded himself with after selling a million copies of Good Kid, M.A.A.D City—an album widely considered a masterpiece—and going into production on To Pimp a Butterfly—a pioneering body of work that would marry hip-hop and jazz together and lead to him being the first rap artist to win the Pulitzer Prize.
When people (as fans tirelessly do, myself included) say that Lemar is the greatest of all time, it’s because the evidence is there. And this book, which although sold as a biography, reads a little more like an extended fan piece or an essay, is packed with statements to either enliven those already converted or leave those in the dark about Lemar with no doubt at all that if you draw up a list of the great American writers; Twain, Hemingway, Faulkner, you need to add Lemar’s name in there too.
So what do we learn in The Butterfly Effect?
Kendrick grew up in Compton as a “strange kid”, witness to murders, brought up in a landscape dominated by gang culture, but saved by a love of creative writing. He was picked up by Top Dawg Entertainment, a label/management company that operated with little budget out of a kitchen. It functioned as a place to nurture and develop talent. SZA was also in that kitchen.
When I think of Kendrick and SZA singing to an audience of 166 million at the 2025 Super Bowl and understand how they came to know each other, as two scrappy kids desperate to break free from a place that saw 97 murders in the year that Kendrick would have been five years old, it just makes that performance punch in the throat a little harder, and it makes me want to go back and listen again, a little louder, and it reminds me why I love a story that shows how staying true to yourself and working hard is sometimes enough to steer you into the pathway of incredible things.
You can buy your copy here
A film review
It is what it is in this new adaptation of the French Classic L’Étranger by Albert Camus
Meursault travels home for the funeral of his mother. Later, he associates himself with his villainous neighbour Raymond. Meursault’s girlfriend Marie falls in love with him, an emotional state of being that doesn’t quite reach Meursault himself.
Shot in monochrome underneath sweltering heat, water and the ocean play an active role as they offer respite both from the physically blistering conditions and the metaphorical island that Meursault lives on, where attachment to anything at all is yet to wash upon the shores.
Fans of a good cinematic aesthetic will adore this just for how it looks. But there is much more at work here. L’Étranger is a story about existentialist detachment. In the courtroom scenes, as the public demand meaning behind actions—none will be provided, because for Meursault, there simply isn’t any and its that idea you’re invited to chew on in-between fistfulls of popcorn although to be fair this one is more a movie to be enjoyed with Crudité.
These days the kids use the phrase “it is what it is” when I believe what they are trying to say is there is no inherent meaning behind surface matters so one is better living in a state of acceptance.
So there’s two ways you can play this. Go bask in the glory of the imagery as a hipster that loves good visuals, or go and ponder the absence of meaning while stroking your stroked-to-the-nub chin as an academic. It’s up to you, and either way, don’t forget, it’s all meaningless.
I saw this at Gate Picture house, Notting Hill
Album reviews
Charlie Crockett’s third album in just over a year, with songs that celebrate the outlaw, gun in hand, living out there where the cowboy should live, on the fringes.
There’s an authenticity to Charlie Crockett that makes the buy-in easier to these fabled tales; born in Texas, raised in a trailer park, went on the road pretty much as soon as he got his first guitar you can actually imagine him shooting Jessie James and yes, there is a song about that on this record. There’s a splendid level of musicality at play here that rings with a trueness to the form that I wouldn’t want to argue against, especially in a gun fight.
You can listen now or order here
I’m preparing for a marathon at the moment and let me tell you, by virtue of this album that barely lets its BPM drop below 180, I did a PB on a 20k yesterday. This is hyper-electro pop delivered with punk vocals on songs that celebrate hedonism and internet era identity and all that goes with it.
This is a strong album. If you’re going to the gym this week, do so while listening to songs about all the drugs and cigarettes other people are consuming.
Unlike drugs, you won’t regret it.
You can listen now or order here
Also out this week
Indie disco pop funk with bass lines that play like they are themselves a character in these lyrically sharp songs.
There’s something of the early Arctic Monkeys in the guitar riffs, the narrative-led lyrics, and the arrangements occasionally bang on the door of that burning-down house that The Talking Heads once partied in. When not being those two things, they are busy taking indie as the principal form and having a lot of fun bending it into new shapes. Where songs like the Pixies inspired Downtown Lover throw back to the past, songs like Body feel newer and are actually rather beautiful, hinting at another side to this band that it’s going to be good to hear more of on album three. Maybe.
You can listen now or order here