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.
Once a town, now a city, Newport is where markontour’s parents were born and bred. They fell in love in the sixth form of Newport Grammar and fifty-six years later the three of us plus Mum’s older brother, my Uncle Malcolm, undertook a pre-Xmas tour of the haunts of their youth. Along the way I learned a thing or two about the Newport Uprising of 1839, how the snow fell so deep in 1947 that schools were closed for three blissful months, how the New Year was celebrated in the 1950s, and what constitutes a dingle.
I heard a lot of great music in 2016 and so it was hard to settle on just 15 tracks for the annual markontour ‘Festive Fifteen’.…
Being a creature of habit, every year on our summer holiday I read a biography of a favourite band. It tends to drive my partner mad, because serial playing of their entire back catalogue accompanies the historical investigation. This year, I’m pleased to say, conflict was avoided, because while The Stone Roses: War and Peace was an engrossing read, the band only knocked out two albums, the first of which was of such sublime, epoch-defining quality that it is what the ‘Repeat All’ button was invented for.
markontour 