Culturally, this is what I’ve been consuming so far in 2026. I’m trying to make the most of reading and seeing bands, as I’ve just been diagnosed with cataracts…
MUSIC:
I had hoped my first live music of 2026 would have been John Garner and John Pope’s lunchtime performance at Northumbria University on Tuesday 17th February, but despite being in town that day, the number of appointments I had made it impossible to get along (sorry fellas!), so my actual first gig was Vibracathedral Orchestra at The Lubber Fiend on Saturday 21st. This was supposed to be with Ben, but the poor lad cried off with a nasty bout of flu and I couldn’t even give my spare away, despite strenuous efforts. This being The Lubber Fiend, nobody it checked either. This was my first time of seeing the legendary free ensemble in person and I was desperately disappointed by the paltry turn out. Predictably, none of the No Audience Underground Beautiful People made it along, on account of the fact they weren’t on the bill, in all probability. Having watched the first half of the Man City game in The Bodega, I missed support act Joe Posset, for which I humbly apologised. Indeed, the Vibracathedral Orchestra had already started by the time I got settled. They were brilliant. Hypnotic. Loud. Innovative. And it’s the first time I’ve ever had to put a sticking plaster on a bleeding musician’s index finger mid set. An hour and a half of beguiling free noise persuaded me to buy their 10” Live at Total Inertia (from 2016) for the knockdown price of a fiver. Tremendous it is, and this was a tremendous night, over early enough so I could test my pensioner’s prostate on the last 38 home. It failed. Just.
Inspired by Vibracathedral Orchestra and my regular emails from Café Oto, I sourced their former collaborator, percussionist, as well as one time member of Dream / Aktion Unit, Chris Corsano’s 2006 solo album The Young Cricketer from Discogs after hearing snatches on Bandcamp. It is a fabulous, punishing, atonal racket. Frenetic drumming and squealing, home made reed instruments on a series of short and loud pieces. It made this old cricketer very happy indeed. He’s touring this year and I’d love to see him.
The next gig I did see came hot on the heels of the first; Mogwai at The Glasshouse on Thursday 26th, in the company of a largely recovered Ben, Dave, John, Marc and Charlotte. It was almost a year to the day since Ben, Dave and I had seen then in Leeds and two years since they last played The Glasshouse. Was it a case of familiarity breeding contempt at first? Possibly, but also the inability of The Glasshouse security staff to adequately manage the flow of punters into the main hall didn’t help. The stage left side was dangerously overfilled, to the point it was impeding enjoyment of the performance. Sensibly, Ben and I took the decision to shift round to the other side, ending up right next to Marc and Charlotte as it turned out, and this is when things got immeasurably better. From the fourth number in, the ferocious slavering monster that is Mogwai Fear Satan, we were back on familiar, tremulous ground. The Glasshouse has always been blessed with incredible acoustics and tonight was no exception. You could literally feel the floor shake, while hearing every nuance of sound. If you consider Mogwai played only 12 songs in their 100 minutes on stage, you’ll know what territory we were in. A single encore, but that was My Father, My King. There’s nothing left to say after that. Brilliant as ever, after a bit of an iffy start. Next up; GY!BE in Leeds. Best keep those ear plugs handy, eh?
As regards music I’ve bought, I showed loyalty to Wormhole World Recordings for releasing my (now sold out) Hello Cheeky CD in January, by buying their February bundle. Four fantastic slices of outsider art: Deficit Piala Endependence, Gidiouille Collective Now, Here, Greg Nieuwsma and Antanello Perfelto Things Heard in the Fan and the peerless Shunyata Improvisation Group Wild Garden.
Obviously I was familiar with SIG, whose release is their first in their current iteration as a trio, and Gidiouille, whose album is a meditation on News from Nowhere by William Morris. These are both excellent riffs on the furrow these artists plough, but I was unaware of the other artists. Deficit is a Russian Asian sound artist and Piala Endependence is a tribute to bazaars. I quite like it but prefer the more menacing improvisational noise of Things Heard in the Fan by Greg Nieuwsma and Antanello Perfelto. Whatever the style, whatever the artistic merit, the fact that Wormhole World work so devotedly in putting obscure stuff out there is what really matters. I feel awfully guilty I missed out on their March bundle but will be poised for when the April one is announced. As you can see, I’ve become rather detached from the mainstream, which is no bad thing of course.
BOOKS:
Obviously the year began with the reading of my Christmas presents. First up was Whitley Bay’s number one exponent of Tyneside noir Austin Burke and his latest Shiver in the Dark, which is a follow up to 2024’s Crazy on the Waltzer. Like the first book, this is a realistic, hard-boiled tale of North Tyneside’s grim underbelly. It isn’t so much a police procedural, as a criminal caper. Starting with a botched robbery near Rotterdam, the action then switches location to the mean streets of Earsdon, where protagonist Paul Docherty (we’d best not call him a hero) finds himself in a real life, ultra-violent version of Traitors. After some hair-raising scrapes and several unexpected plot twists (a couple of which you’d never have guessed in a month of Sundays), he comes out the other side, ready to fight, steal and deal again. There will be a third book in this series and I’m looking forward to it immensely. If you like your crime fiction tough, brutal and in a series of locations you’ve walked and drank in, this is a book for you. I couldn’t recommend it highly enough.
Staying with the north east theme, Ian Fawdon’s detailed, if somewhat piecemeal, account of the region’s musical heritage from the early 60s to the present day, Too Far North, is an absorbing read. However, what intrigues me is as much what he misses out, the Riverside, dance music and No Audience Underground / Tusk movements in particular, rather than what he writes about. We get superbly detailed accounts of the Dolce Vita era 60s beat groups and a reasonably broad perspective on the 70s folk rock movements, with a highly praiseworthy account of Prelude after their moment in the sun, but after that the lens is less widely focussed. The punk period doesn’t include much about Penetration and their influence and subsequent activities, but it is fascinating to read what happened to the criminally underrated Neon. Strangely, Club Anti Pop and the Noise Toys from the Gosforth Hotel, not to mention Total Chaos and the Garage, are missing from this section, along with a whole litany of important bands of that time, such as The Model Workers, The Weights and the legendary Chris Gray Band. In contrast, the NWOBHM is given massive coverage that, from my perspective I’d wonder if it merits. I think I’ve still got the Mythra single somewhere you know, but having endured a Venom show at Heworth Miners’ Welfare in July 1980, there was little else I wanted to learn about that scene. Kitchenware, despite a total lack of input from the elusive and evasive Paddy McAloon, is dealt with in detail, before the book finishes by talking about the Sunderland scene (bizarrely including Maximo Park), based around Pop Recs, in hagiographic terms. As I say, Riverside is not mentioned, so I’d suggest you look up Carol Lynn and Carl Taylor’s brilliant, exhaustive account of that period of north east music instead. Dance music (Rezzerection, Bloated and what have you) is totally missing, as is the experimental side of things, starting at Spectro Arts, by way of Zoviet France, Tusk and the present day work of TQ, which is an unforgivable omission I feel. An interesting, thorough read, but perhaps concentrating on too few elements and in too much detail.
Sometimes, exhaustive detail is to be welcomed and that is certainly the case with Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe. This is primarily the story of the abduction, murder and eventual discovery of the remains of Jean McConville, a widowed mother of 10 who was taken from her home in West Belfast’s Divis Flats in December 1972 by a vengeful Republican mob who claimed, correctly it appears, that the woman was a paid informer for the British state. The tragedy of the whole story is not just the dire economic circumstances that forced the starving widow into accepting blood money, but the sheer, undimmed outrage by resolutely unapologetic Republicans, many of whom had no sympathy for her fate. This was not only true of active IRA physical force veterans such as the late Dolours Price, named as the one who pulled the trigger, or Brendan Hughes, but of ordinary, working class West Belfast Nationalists, who despised the occupying British army with every fibre of their being. More than half a century on, there is still little pity for Jean McConville, nor for her blighted children, whose subsequent lives were lived in the torment of not knowing what had become of their mother. In such a story, despite the relative normality of the Six Counties post Good Friday Agreement, there are only losers, apart from perhaps one man. The former MP for West Belfast, TD for Louth and President of Sinn Fein, but never (as he is at pains to insist) IRA Chief of Staff, Gerry Adams. What Say Nothing establishes beyond all doubt is the centrality of Adams’s role in the execution of Jean McConville. He didn’t carry it out, but he ordered and planned it. This, as Keefe Radden so eloquently proves, is evidence of the sheer, self-serving, sociopathic streak that runs through Adams like a streak of seaside rock. And, at the end of the day he, like William Bloat’s wife, is still alive and sinning.
It is of course hard to imagine Gerry Adams without the beard. The Gerry Adams Beard is part and parcel of the Gerry Adams Persona. It symbolises his revolutionary ardour, his passion for constitutional change. And now as it whitens it cements his status as eminence-grise, aging philosopher king.
The above quotation is taken from David Ireland’s play, Cyprus Avenue. When first staged in Dublin, the central role of Loyalist terrorist and PTSD sufferer Eric was played by Dolour Price’s ex-husband Stephen Rea. In the play, Eric becomes firstly convinced his baby granddaughter has been fathered by Gerry Adams and then, as his mania worsens, is actually Gerry Adams. The shocking violence that ends the play makes it a chilling meditation on national identity, delusional beliefs and the desensitising effect of mindless violence on the individual. It is a strong piece, and I’d love to see it on stage.
J. G. Ballard’s final novel, Kingdom Come, also deals with delusional beliefs, mob rule and senseless violence. Set in the familiar M40 corridor of consumerist, cultural deserts out past Heathrow, Ballard takes a shopping centre (the Metro Centre, ironically) as a symbol of Little Englander avarice and intolerance. A whole cult of consumerist ethnofascism has grown up around a mall, where support for the English values instilled by sport, shopping and chain restaurants has been codified by regular worshippers at this Babel attiring themselves in flags of St George and flying them from their houses, as well as engaging in riotous racial vandalism towards Asians and East Europeans in the community. Sound familiar? It is, chillingly so. Of course it wouldn’t be Ballard without unbelievable acts of near Civil War and an implausible death list, but it provides a prescient warning about the potential future strategies of Farage, Lowe and Yaxley-Lennon.
The novelist Marc Nash recommended Geometric Regional Novel by Gert Jonke to me. Like his countryman Peter Handke, Jonke specialises in the brief, emotionless nouvelle roman, where symbolic description completely overtakes character delineation, credible plot development or almost everything else a normal story book includes. It is also, unlike Handke, extremely funny. Endless microscopic descriptions of mundane events in a nameless village square, along with bizarre invasions of vicious birds, a tsunamic artesian well and the removal of all trees and park benches, happen for inexplicable reasons. Then the book ends. Extraordinary.
Finally, I’ve done some proper reading. To prove I still had it in me, I tackled Satantango by 2025 Nobel Prize Winner, László Krasznahorkai. In English not Hungarian I must add. Published in 1985, it was Krasznahorkai’s debut novel. It ticks all the essential postmodernist boxes; narrated from multiple perspectives, structured to resemble a tango, with six steps forward followed by six backward, while every chapter is a long paragraph which does not contain line breaks. Orthodox heterodoxy. Set in a dystopian failed former collective farm that endures incessant rain, a group of hopelessly lost and inadequate characters are duped out of their money by a semi mythical returning son of the area. Did I enjoy it? It was hard work and I probably won’t bother with the 7 hour Bela Tarr cinematic version, but I’m glad I read it. Now it’s time to prepare for soon-come novels by David Keenan, James Ellroy and Irvine Welsh.
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