I had to miss Glastonbury this year, which is usually my best introduction to new bands, but it has still been as difficult as ever to choose my fifteen favourite songs released in the last twelve months. If I get time there will be a B-Sides collection too, but for now herewith markontour’s Festive Fifteen 2025, in everlasting homage to DJ-supreme, John Peel.
This was a sun-drenched, chilled-out Green Man festival, which reverberated to Free Palestine chants, celebrated tolerance and diversity, and delivered joyous moment after joyous moment. As always, the line-up was full of wonderful introductions as well as old favourites. The food and drink were next level compared with most festivals (the variety of cakes on the Llangattock School stall making up for the lack of mango ale or cider this year) and the rolling hills of the Bannau Brycheniog providing the ultimate framing.
Slovenia, where markontour was holidaying recently, has the distinction of being both one of the most materially equal societies in the world (a 2nd placed Gini coefficient of 0.24, which is incidentally the same score Britain enjoyed in 1979 prior to Thatcherism. The UK’s score of 0.34 now puts us outside the top 40), but also has enshrined the rights of nature in its constitution. The result is a country that is visibly thriving (although I am sure there are a thousand problems not visible to the casual tourists’ eye) and brimming with biodiversity.
Four music-filled days in the idyllic grounds of a Suffolk hall, spent with many of my oldest and dearest friends – Latitude 2025 was, unsurprisingly, a joy-filled experienced. This was a year to particularly enjoy discovering new bands (a large chunk of the best of whom hailed from Ireland), although one headline act served up surprise euphoria. As usual, Latitude also delivered so much more than music, including stimulating nature and science stages, world-class acrobatics, and a space-faring puppet dog. Here follows markontour’s review of Latitude 2025.
We know spring is imminent where I live in the Bannau Brycheiniog not just from the growing warmth of the sun throughout the day, but because of the return of the familiar, high-pitched refrain of “a little bit of bread and no cheese’ whistling around the hills. It is, of course, the call of the Yellowhammer – Melyn yr Eithin in Welsh – and it’s a song to brighten any day.
I’m probably kidding myself, but I like to think I know a little bit about the birds after 5 years escaping to the Welsh countryside, but an uplifting visit to the Liverpool World Museum revealed that I didn’t even know what I didn’t know about the bees. Fortunately, from the fact that these industrious little creatures have survived since the time of the dinosaurs, to the highly endearing knowledge that they have a honey stomach, “Bees: A Story of Survival” had the answers. Sadly, unlike the Bass Museum of Brewing History (now much missed), where you used to get beer tokens to round off your visit, there was no honey at the end of the exhibition, but in all other ways it was a fact-filled, sweet delight.
Just in time for Xmas, it’s markontour’s annual Festive Fifteen – my favourite songs released in 2024. Not festive. Not fifteen. All as usual. It seems quite a laidback, reflective playlist, which hardly reflects my year, but if music is therapy.. And it leaves out some of the bands whose albums I have listened to most in the last twelve months (Public Service Broadcasting’s typically epic ‘The Last Flight’; Nick Cave’s cathartic ‘Wild God’; Jamie Webster mixing pop and politics on ‘Ten For The People’) but which I couldn’t identify an individual track that would work in the compilation. And Bruce didn’t release anything new this year. I hope you enjoy (at least some of them).
Despite the underwhelming outcomes from the COP29 climate talks in Baku, multilateralism remains the most critical tool we have for addressing climate breakdown. To reinvigorate it, lets shift COPs from negotiation to implementation using city leadership.
Last weekend I stood mouth agape on the shore of Llyn Syfaddan gazing in wonder at one of nature’s greatest glories – a vast murmuration of birds. Flying in east to west over the space of an hour tens of thousands of starlings wheeled and reeled towards their winter home, pulsating like a single living organism stretching across an arms-length of sky and then, as one, dived to roost in the reed beds that line Lake Llangorse’s shore. It was simply breathtaking and to paraphrase Robert Smith in ‘A Forest’, which I have heard on repeat this week (thank Radio 6 Music), I want to see them do it again, and again, and again, and again.
Everyone knows the panda from the multitude of iconic images that this loveable-looking bear has inspired around the world. But surely there is nowhere where the panda’s image can be more ubiquitous than in Chengdu, an enormous city of 21 million residents in south-western China and home to the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, which I was privileged to visit this week.
markontour 