With a Song in my Heart...

Right, I damn well WILL get this down, even if I still don't much feel like writing. Everyone gets to do an end-of-year round up, don't they? So here's mine.

2011 was the year in which I understood that it is actually possible to overdose on 'interesting times' and to end up feeling that you're standing on a rickety fairground ride which hasn't been maintained properly for thirty years, and in which all the moving parts are suddenly vibrating at great speed. You've paid your money to the greasy geezer in the booth so you've no prospect of getting off until the ride's over, but you can't help noticing that certain nuts and bolts are starting to fly off the main chassis, and there's a horrible clanking noise coming from deep within the engine. I dare say you know the feeling, if you've lived through this last year and read a newspaper occasionally.

I've little to say here about the redemptive possibilities of 2011's Arab Spring or the scientific riches heralded by the Higgs' Bosun - you'd have to take me to the pub for that -  but at a micro level, the level on which most of us live and experience daily life, it all feels rather serious, sour, and 'stuck'. I know that one friend's memories of 2011 will be defined by the moment (last week) at his firm's Christmas dinner, when he glanced at his phone to check an email that had just arrived, and found it contained notification of his redundancy. His boss was seated beside him at the time, and apparently stared fixedly ahead at the cracker on the table between them. Who hasn't got a story like that to tell now? If it wasn't you, it will have been someone you know.

For me personally, there've been some great moments in 2011 which I wouldn't have missed for the world - among them driving across the Mojave desert in an open-topped car with Link Wray playing full blast - but quite a few other moments which were not so great, most of them unfortunately arising from the sudden, serious expression on my GPs freckled summer face when she uttered the heart-sink phrase "I'm afraid there's something there...". And though there is indeed 'something there', it now looks like it's not the worst kind of 'something', so though I don't feel great right now I'm up for some surgery in a couple of weeks which should get me back to normal. But it's been a bit of an anxious, slow-mo time, which probably explains the gradual tailing off in blog activity as the months of 2011 went by. I certainly didn't want to write about feeling unwell, but as that's most of what I've been doing, I was a bit stumped.

It also explains - partly - the relatively paltry number of gigs I've been to this year. There've just been too many evenings when standing in a crowded venue seemed like the very last thing I'd have wanted, or have been able, to do. I'm still grieving for a few I had optimistically bought tickets for but been unable to go on the night, chiefly the sublime Wooden Shjips who were playing the Scala in August. They come round these parts so rarely, and they're never less than brilliant. I'm just hoping they'll be back after January is out, so I can catch up with them and their far-out noodling.

But proportionately, the gigs that I have attended in 2011 have been of very high quality so overall I'm pleased. Kraftwerk's 3-D show in Munich was akin to a spiritual experience; the word 'gig' just doesn't come anywhere near it. Killing Joke in April were an almost visceral re-introduction to the pleasures of being pinioned to the wall by the sheer force of sound, as were Mogwai on that warm night in July at the De La Warr Pavilion. On a much more low-key note, Pete and the Pirates were my new 'find' of the year, and the growth in confidence they showed between my seeing them first in February and then again in September this year was a joy to behold. In fact, I've rarely been to a gig as genuinely cheering as that second one of theirs - a night where even the coolest Brighton hipster in the room left the venue beaming with pleasure at just how good they'd been. Similarly, those lovely Electrelane women played a blinder to an adoring home crowd here in Brighton in July, and put many a smile on a pretty girl's face.

An amusing experience of being completely out-of-sync with an audience who were, to a man-jack, appearing to be having a great time was provided by Adam Ant's spring gig, which apart from a sense of uneasy embarrassment, left me cold while all around me were rekindling the pirate fires of their youth. And I'm not sure I'll be bothering with The Fall again for a while, as their audience nowadays is largely composed of middle-aged men who fart constantly and don't wash.

But I'm still in the market for gigs and songs, and though this lot disappointed me live, the song below will sum up the contradictions of the 2011 in my tiny insignificant corner of the world. As I sat listening to it on my headphones a few weeks ago in a sparse hospital waiting room, trying to self-soothe before an unpleasant appointment, I remembered that the time I'd listened to it before that had been from a huge swanky bath in a huge swanky hotel room in Napa, California. The windows had been open, the room was full of sunshine, and I had a California Girl's tan. The irony made me smile.

Life keeps changing, we just have to try and keep up. Thanks for reading my blog, and have a good End of Year Thing, however you choose to spend it. Pip pip.

Here's the song that proved to me that I'll never escape my 80s roots.