Music
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.
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.
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).
Given tickets for Green Man sold out in 2 hours for this year’s event, I am hesitant about adding to the growing list of rave reviews for this carnival of music, comedy, crafts and beer that consistently delivers the best vibes of the British festival scene. But Green Man 2024 was SO good.
I used to do an annual review of the world’s greatest musical festival with gig ratings and everything, but reading through this year’s blog I realise it has become more of a diary to remind me why I enjoyed my Glastonbury week so much. In any case, here follows markontour’s Glastonbury experience 2024.
I lucked-out last night travelling back by train from Stockholm to London by way of Hamburg – getting to see Portsmouth band, Hotel Lux, at the Molotov Musikbar on the Reeperbahn.
I had the privilege of seeing my favourite band, Sea Power, twice this week. First in Bristol’s Trinity community arts centre and then, closer to home, at the Islington Assembly Halls. There were no moshing polar bears on this occasion, but everything else was as it ought to be: lyrics welcoming Eastern European migrants (“Are you of legal drinking age? On minimum wage? Well welcome in”), a stage full of trees, stirring instrumentals of pounding drums, jangling guitars, hypnotic violin and rousing brass, celebration of the night’s sky, and an open-armed salutation from the stage that had everyone in their dedicated fanbase smiling all evening.
As the year draws to a close it’s time for markontour’s annual homage to John Peel’s ‘Festive Fifty’. As usual, my list is not festive and doesn’t even manage the fifteen tracks I habitual aim for and fail to achieve. But these are my favourite songs released in 2023. Given how much I have travelled this year, there’s a paucity of bands from beyond the Anglo-Saxon world, so that’s by New Year’s Resolution sorted, but I hope you enjoy them as much I have just the same.
A festival that merely by virtue of its stunning location is as much a celebration of Cymru/Wales as it is the glorious music that drifts out around Bannau Brycheiniog national park for four days at the end of August. 2023 was a year of discovering lots of exciting new bands, mixed with a bit of eye-misting nostalgia, the largest selection of beers of any festival markontour has ever been too (and thanks to the wonderful staff at the Mantle/Brecon end of the bar, who put up with our chat-filled procrastination for another year), and that gorgeous, gorgeous Welsh hill scenery for a backdrop. Here follows markontour’s round-up of Green Man Festival 2023:
markontour 