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.
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).
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.
markontour 