Ah, another year, another Cambridge Folk Festival. By our best estimates, our 18th year running, and the 13th of living directly opposite the venue, which is nice. Anyway, here are the 10 things I really enjoyed about this year’s festival. I may have missed things I might have enjoyed even more; there’s always far too [...]
Pic: @baggieboy61 Great gig. More – much more – at the Half Man Half Biscuit Lyrics Project gig review section. There was at least one song which nobody’s heard live for a long time (Footprints). Plenty of “Save BBC 6Music” flyers (below) in evidence everywhere – big respect to whoever’s had those made. Not a [...]
I don’t hold out much hope for 6Music. David Hepworth quotes Bob Harris as saying: “It’s my experience that when management has decided to do something like this, they’ve thought about it a lot and nothing is going to change their mind.” There doesn’t seem to be much logic in the public arguments from the [...]
The university lit up two of its most famous buildings this weekend – Kings College and The Senate House – with a lightshow created by Ross Ashton themed around scientific research. On the Sunday night there were several thousand people there, and it was a typically civilised Cambridge event. Alex and I loved it. Here’s [...]
I was disappointed enough that I couldn’t think of a single new album which excited me in 2009. But it was even more alarming to look at the pile of unread books by my bedside and realise that I’d probably read fewer books in 2009 than in any year since I learned to read. But [...]
Thanks to @borborygmus for reminding me that my musical review of 2009 is constantly being written on my Last.fm page, and whatever I claim to find cool, there’s no escaping from what I actually listened to. And it turns out that what I actually listened to over the course of a year (other than when [...]
At last, you get to discover if it was worth the wait. Frankly, no, it wasn’t. If you missed numbers 10 to 6 yesterday, they were here. 5. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (Peter Jackson, 2002) My favourite of the three, if only because of the astonishingly unsettling scene where everyone was [...]
OK, there was a lot of jostling to get into these coveted slots, but here are the lucky few which made it. The trophies are on their way to some doubtless pleasantly-surprised directors. 10. Children of Men (Alfonso Cuarón, 2006) Wow. Chilling tale, wonderful pacing, a relatively unrecognised gem. In 2027, in a chaotic world [...]
I liked these movies a lot. Just not quite enough to make my top ten of the decade. I’m sure the directors will be distraught. 20. Zoolander (Ben Stiller, 2001) Of course it’s silly. But very, very funny. 19. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004) I had no idea where this was [...]
A bit more fantasy in this bunch, and several selections from the many series of films (Potter, Pirates, Star Wars, LotR) which dominated the decade… 30. Bend It Like Beckham (Gurinder Chadh, 2002) Football! Keira Knightley! And very British too! 29. Kung Fu Panda (Mark Osborne, John Stevenson, 2008) My son watched this four times, [...]
