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.
I like to have at least a couple of books on the go at all times and two of my current crop – ‘Transcendence’ by Gaia Vince and Bernard Cornwell’s ‘Enemy of God’ – have provoked an unlikely fusion of ideas: was King Arthur’s unbreakable sword, Excalibur, a mythic expression of the lost art of Roman steel-making? Did Merlin wield ‘magic’ by exploiting the human brain’s ability to convert mental anticipation into physical reality?
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:
Despite part-inspiring one of my favourite Clash songs, ‘Spanish Bombs’, until visiting Andulucia this summer I knew nothing about the legendary Spanish poet and playwright, Federica Garcia Lorca, other than the intriguing reference in Joe Strummer’s lyric: “Oh please leave the ventana open / Federico Garcia Lorca is dead and gone”. Today in the small tourist village of Pampaneira, a dense huddle of whitewashed stone houses cramped onto impossibly steep terraces on the southern edge of an escarpment of the Sierra Nevada, I was intrigued again by Lorca – this time generating enough impetus to read up a bit.
This is going to need some fleshing out on subsequent visits, but getting back to the original roots of markontour.com, here are fragmentary reflections on Barcleona, from three days working there and one day of leisure.
A day off in New York meant the chance to return to the Museum of the American Indian and two fascinating exhibitions: ‘Native New York’s’ half-millennial history of indigenous people on the east coast, and Mowhawk artist, Shelley Niro’s, extraordinary retrospective, ‘500 Year Itch’.
“Welcome to paradise” proclaimed Sea Power frontman, Jan, during their Saturday night set. It could have seemed an incongruous statement, being made from atop a scaffolding-constructed stage in a cow-barn, and yet Krankenhaus 2023 has a good claim to be festival perfection.
There was sunshine, there was rain, bands I’ve loved for 30 years, amazing bands I’d never seen before, top-notch comedy, and plenty of opportunity to dance and sing. I loved Latitude! Herewith the markontour guide to one festival goer’s Latitude 2023.
Ms Markontour and I have been enjoying a blissful bank holiday weekend at Knepp Wildland Safari in southern England. We’ve been wanting to visit since reading Isabella Tree’s ‘Wilding’ a few years ago – an account of how she and her husband, Charlie Burrell, decided to see what happened if nature was permitted to manage itself on their 3,000 acre loss-making farm. The result is the most exhilarating nature site in Britain. A place that echoes all day and night to bird-song, has welcomed back multiple species that were on the brink of extinction in Britain from the Turtle Dove to the Nightingale, and where bramble and scrub have proven to be the catalyst for abundance, variety and beauty, rather than a nuisance to be cleared away. I could have happily stayed forever.
I’m not sure I’ve ever laughed so much at a music gig. Caitlin Rose self-deprecatingly protested that half her act was comedy and it was almost true. Almost except the most compelling voice in alt-country back on stage for the first time in seven years, to the delight of a sell-out crowd at Bristol’s The Fleece.
markontour 