thewritinglist

[thewritinglist]

Inside.

I think of myself as an introvert, but it strikes me that this is a fairly limiting and flawed term. I struggle with socializing, yes, but also I hate being inside. Four walls isn’t comforting, it’s debilitating and tense and small. I move so little inside. I hate to be still. I love motion.

If you are like me, not only the above but also without a driver’s license, do not move to the Texas countryside. You’re in the world’s largest prison, staring at boundless landscapes you’re too hot or cold to explore. I lived on a road just off a state highway, set sufficiently far back, behind a landfill, that you’d never know it, except for the fact that you know that your escape begins on it. Any escape. Getting groceries, collecting medication, taking things, stuff, to and from a storage unit: these mundanities turned into blessed relief, the car a vessel of passive joy. Passive because you are not the pilot of your own happiness. You’re Buster Keaton, throwing a hand onto the passing car of freedom for short respite from your interior life.

You didn’t choose this. Nobody, directly, chose this. Nobody chose, regardless of what you’ve read on Conservative websites, to release a new version of a virus that forced the world to stop. The idea of the world stopping had appealed to you - the only way to change the system, you’d thought wistfully, would be for it to pause whilst something new is built. You don’t replace a spinning wheel. But the system is too clever for that. It adapts. Cap-19, how novel you are! How clever! You just ate up the sacrificial lambs and chugged on. The car slowed, but your journey never ends.

Someone did chose to let your wife go from her job, admittedly. It was an inevitability, yes, but someone made the call. But in tandem with the other forced decision, of USCIS to ask her ever so politely for more evidence of her ability to support you, you had no choice but to move in with her parents. Your in-laws. They’re in the process of selling their house and moving to the country, and so your help is much appreciated. Bitter whispers of how serendipitous it was for them sometimes form, and you suppress them, because you retain some level of common sense, and don’t want to take in their kindness and spit out bile.

But it’s hard. Fuck, it’s hard. Now she’s working, and the internet out there is shit, so your previous, distinct, internet hobbies of YouTube and jacking off are limited. Your shrinking attention span has strangled your ability to read. Depression suffocates your ability and desire to write. You often aren’t funny anymore, which stings in the void way that only the results of depression can. You’re lonely during the day.

Eventually, there is a light again. The green card application isn’t dead - they didn’t bother to inform you directly that applications and their expiration dates were paused during the pandemic, and you’d never imagined of such a courteous move from the US government. It hadn’t occurred to you. You soon gain the authority to work, which opens up your path to moving back to New York. And, at the end of it, you do.

And now you’re here. There is an outside. The rejected desktop backgrounds that previously surrounded you are now hustling streets. There is a public transport system. You can travel under the ground, a sub way. You can walk places, even whiz around on a bus or train. You love trains! You need headphones in when they boom into the station to silence the noise and push away the idea that someone will push you onto the tracks, intentionally or not, but you love trains! Being on them!

But the feelings remain.

Therapy helps. Sure. Yeah. But honesty is hard. You’ve sabotaged one of your closest friendships through inaction, letting a wonderful thing rust like a bike left out, but the bike can let you know how you fucked up. Is it better? Yes. Is it good?

We’ll see.

[thewritinglist]

The Women of Greenham

The idea of nuclear war being a fantastical hypothetical for fiction to explore is a privilege.

This is a story I’ve wanted to tell for a while. It is my mother’s.

Jinny Gray was only eighteen when she made the decision to pack up and join the Greenham Common Protest. We sat down in her home in Nottingham to discuss those months.

“I was involved with a CMD – Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament – group in Nottingham, and we used to have women’s peace meetings once a week, and a group of us would meet in a church hall. We knew about Greenham from the start, that there was a new peace camp being set up.”

Greenham was famously women only.

“The fact that it was women only felt like it would be a different kind of protest. I think it was women only because we considered the future and had this connection to any future children we could have. We had this responsibility as guardians of the planet for future generations.”

“I really wanted to be a part of it. Our CMD group hired a minibus and we went down at first for one of the big weekends, we packed ourselves up with tents and sleeping bags and sandwiches, but I stayed. I came home or visited London occasionally, but I just really loved it. That first weekend was one of the big mass demonstrations, with women holding hands along the nine-mile perimeter fence. We’d hold hands and sing or shout at the soldiers,” she says, laughing at the memory.

Considering it was a nuclear base, it doesn’t sound very secure.

“The fence was made of that green wire netting, and on the top there’d be one or two little lines of barbed wire, but a pair of bolt cutters could cut a person sized hole in minutes. There weren’t enough soldiers to patrol the entire fence, so after one walked past you could cut a hole and loads of women could rush onto the base. There was always somebody doing something. Sometimes it was a large, prepared protest, other times individuals or a small group sneaking in.”

She happily remembers their exploits when inside the base.

“We’d cause mayhem. During the time I was there, it was a complete air force base, with shops and a bowling alley and a cinema. We’d break into the shops and steal Oreo cookies, because we couldn’t get them anywhere else. It was American soil, which we were also protesting.”

The politics surrounding the base was important to Jinny and the other protestors.

“We knew it was an American base, and that the Americans could base their missiles on our land. Our government effectively had no say how or when they were used, and that was part of the politics of the time that motivated me. Thatcher was Prime Minister, and we hated her. There was a real belief that when we got a female Prime Minister, when it eventually happened, things would be different. She would do things differently. And then the she we got didn’t.”

  A proud and vocal feminist, Jinny stills feels strongly about the then-current Prime Minister.

“Completely. She would say that she was a total feminist, able to do anything a man could, but she didn’t promote the rights of women to be self-governing. She had the same male oriented policies as her predecessors and successors.”

But, of course, there were no men at Greenham – it was began with women, and stayed women only.

“Men could come as invited guests, on the big weekends, unless it was explicitly stated to be women only. They were invited as supporters and could bring food, which we weren’t about to turn down. Arthur Scargill coming down to blue gate with a bottle of brandy, and his wife made us a cake, which we thought was quite ironic. He was the strong spirits drinker and she the cake baker, even if they were genuinely supportive. It did make us giggle. We did actually have a lot of fun.”

Jinny paints a picture of a cheery, youthful camp. Somewhat surprisingly, she says, “I don’t recall really much hardship, honestly. It could be cold and rainy, but we got very good at living outside. We had tents and benders, made from pulling young saplings down.”

Jinny is now a loving mother and hardworking therapist, but during her Greenham days she was a lot more carefree. She never really considered what she was doing dangerous, even though that green wire fence was separating her from armed military personnel.

“We had the invincibility of youth. And we’d do sensible things like invisibility spells beforehand, in the hopes that we’d be invisible to the soldiers. We were all a little mad. I think that, because it was all women, we had a belief that we wouldn’t be treated as badly as male or mixed protestors would have been. In retrospect, I think we were treated differently; sometimes worse, sometimes better. “

She stayed at the camp for eighteen months, at the same gate. The base had several gates around it.

“The main gate, where the protest originated, was known as yellow gate. As other gates sprang up, it was decided that we didn’t want a hierarchy of gates, with greater and lesser gates, so colours were used. It was the most public one because it was the biggest and the press tended to there. I was at blue gate, which was mostly younger women my age, a bit wilder and not so serious. It was closest to the bus depot, and for the younger women it was easiest to get to because they took buses or hitched along the A4. Green gate was very spiritual, and violet gate was older women, in their 60’s. Green gate managed to buy a little area of land, so they couldn’t be evicted, unlike everyone else.

Eviction, she tells me, was a common problem. “The local authority would come around with a dustbin lorry, which we called the Muncher Wagon, throwing our stuff into it whilst we ran into the woods and hid stuff, because they couldn’t follow us in. They had nothing on us legally, because it was a common, so it belonged to the people. It was just their frustration that we caused.”

Jinny is happy to talk about her time at Greenham, but recalling one memory causes her to grow nervous and slightly sheepish.

“A group of us decided to do an action, which is what we called breaking in, one night, to see what we could find. We happened to have with us pots of paint, and we’d go in and paint stuff like ‘STOP’ on the runway. Useful really. There was a plane on the runway and ran away before being arrested. Usually we’d be taken to Newbury police station and charged with criminal damage under British law, but on this occasion we were taken inside the base and were charged with criminal damage to the tune of $6M. It became apparent that we’d thrown paint on a secret plane painted to not be detected by radar. We’d thrown white emulsion all over it. They first terrified us by saying they were going to fly us to America and try us there, and we really believed it would happen. Eventually they relented and took us about five or six miles out of the base in the night, and dumped us on the road. We walked back.”

Jinny was not worried about her future, despite the multiple arrests. “I never gave my real name. Many of us used fake names, like Frida People. It wasn’t illegal to give a fake name if you intended to go to court under that name. “

But real life and responsibilities eventually took priority over. Jinny went to a polytechnic in London to study American Studies, but she says that she never really left Greenham. “I lived in a flat in Islington and that became a sort of second base for women to come to and stay in, and I’d often speak to the press from there in my first year. And after that I’d fundraise and do things for the miners, because coal was preferable to nuclear power and nuclear weapons production. Male miners would come stay with us, and we probably freaked them out because they didn’t know women like us. But, we won, and the common is a common again. I took my son there for a picnic there. It’s just a beautiful, ordinary piece of land.

The last women left Greenham in 2000, nine years after the last missiles had left the base, and having won the right to erect a memorial on the site. Jinny is proud of her time, and of all the women who protested.

The idea of nuclear war being a fantastical hypothetical for fiction to explore is a privilege. It is a privilege earned by others, for us.

[thewritinglist]

Thoughts on the Pigeons of Nottingham

I never realised how large and invasive the pigeon population of Nottingham is until I decided to watch them. They are everywhere. Dominating the Old Market Square, yes, but also nesting on hidden ledges and balconies you can only see from upper floors of the taller buildings. They walk their staccato strut, waiting for us to throw them our scraps. The way the pigeon reclaimed the city was like a long con, a slow burn of adaptation, a subtle pushback against urbanisation.

Pigeons and, to a lesser extent, seagulls, domesticated us, and they didn’t let us know it was happening until it was too late. These brilliant creatures have accomplished this task by letting other animals do the real hard work, then taking advantage. They were the ones who conned – or convinced – us into taking wild animals into our homes, giving them nourishment and shelter and only asking for affection in return. Objectively, this is an imbalanced relationship.

Cats and dogs softened us up. Our instinctive aversion to animals with claws and sharp teeth has dampened. Now, even lions and tigers are cute, adorable animals to be cuddled and played with. Pigeons saw this change in the relationship, and seized their chance. They’re not vermin: No, they’re foxes of the sky. Foxes are typically said to be cunning and strategic, but foxes are yet to migrate away from their natural habitat. The occasional story of a fox sneaking into a suburban back garden pales in comparison to the pigeons making home of city centres. Seagulls sit in-between these two –  adapting to humanity like pigeons, and sometimes nesting in the concrete jungle, but they spend most of their time on the coast, scavenging with less subtlety.

Pigeons took a risk with this plan. The urban environment is not safe for them. Some people hate pigeons, shooing them away in frustration or anger. The threat of culls hangs over their heads. This is a shame. Pigeons do no meaningful damage. Who cares if their shit does damage to car paint – that is the most aesthetic damage they could inflict. I’ve seen the dangers of their new lifestyle. An image that will stay with me perhaps indefinitely is the sight of a pigeon on a pavement, head removed from its body and nowhere to be seen. I looked around, but was running late, and couldn’t see the head of attacker. Its spine protruded from its neck awfully, a savage reminder that the rural dangers of the food chain were replaced by the urban dangers of the car bumper.

To the seagull. Whilst pigeons have learned patience and urban survival, seagulls have seen the people come to them, and haven’t learned to get food from humans with optimal efficiency. They expect the generosity of humans, and will steal if it takes too long. I’ve seen a seagull snatch a near-whole pasty, fly off with it and promptly drop it straight into the sea. This ruined the pasty, and theft like this sums up their flawed appeal. Seagulls need to learn the value of patience, for cast off chips and scraps of pasty. Otherwise, seagulls will become an irritating side-effect of a trip to the seaside, even if it is just animal nature.

You wouldn’t imagine Nottingham to be home to many seagulls, and sadly you’d be wrong. They’re everywhere. I can only imagine they’re trying to find a train to Skeggy, or Skegness as the rest of the country calls it. Seagulls are to pigeons what Skeggy is to Brighton. There is much less charm there. Rougher around the edges.

Coming home by train from the west and I’m rewarded with a view of its history. Face forward, as all good travellers do, and I spot the castle on the left. The train lines run under Carrington Street, so I pass through a mini tunnel before emerging out into the platforms. Up the stairs, through the barriers and out the lobby brings you onto Carrington. I exit to the right of the station, onto Station Street, which has been slowly pedestrianised, with a slow cull of the taxis who pooled there.

Slowly, Nottingham has improved its image, updating streets and neighbourhoods. Nottingham was a city born, like most of England’s cities, on a river, the Trent. The city sits just next to the river, a sign on Trent Bridge marking the city limits. The city divides Nottingham Forest (county) and Notts County (city). Confusing, I agree. The city is gentrifying itself and a hipster generation is encroaching on a traditionally working class midlands area. Hockley and the Lace Market are full of the type of establishments that put peaches on a pizza, presumably for the rhyme and not the taste. Despite this absolute scandal, I’m enjoying these changes. They’re so superficial, such surface level changes to the city, but they’re pretty, like a tattoo over a surgery scar. They’re now places to buy indie music and stock up on clothes from trendy second hand shops.

Walking up Carrington, the pigeons are congregating outside Gregg’s and the other food places. The road also passes over the canal, which runs through the city like a vein, carrying cheery old people in houseboats instead of blood cells, and clots with fly fishers. Pigeons love the canal, particularly the dark corner tunnel, where they can hide in the rafters and peer down, ready to put the fear of shit into me. Something about this tunnel has a strange intimidating effect on me. Everytime I enter the darkness, I assume a cyclist will come around the corner and knock me down into the canal. That or a pigeon will shit on me.

Carrington leads to Broadmarsh, a stubbornly ugly area that refuses to gentrify. The shopping centre is ugly. The car park is ugly. The bus station is ugly. The more I type it, the uglier the word ugly appears. In 2014, the city council decided to split the city into quarters. This should’ve been the ugly quarter. There is no beautifying here, no gentrifying these buildings. Their greyness fits the stereotype of the pigeon. The pigeon is a dirty, grey animal, a feral, flying rat. Some people still avoid the street pigeon, imagining that close-ish contact will pass over waves of disease. This attitude would’ve been helped during the era of the Plague, but it’s less necessary with the QMC.

Doves get the glory. Doves are sent by Noah to find land, to seek out the hope of a new life. They’re white, animal symbols for hope and peace. This, even though they are biologically close. They form the bird family Columbidae. Pigeon is French and derives from Latin, ‘pipio’, which meant a chirping bird. Dove is Germanic, and refers to its flight. The greatest glory a pigeon can hope for is posthumous, after being sent to die in a human’s war as they deliver small messages. A scarcely imaginable two-hundred thousand pigeons were provided to the British army in World War Two.

Humanity’s need to personify speaks to our anthropocentric worldview. We need to understand the world around us, beyond the relatively simple theory of food chains and animal instincts. No, they must be savvy, clever, cunning, or cruel, cowardly, vicious. We evolved beyond our base needs, for food, shelter, and pro-creation. Our needs are much more complicated and unnecessary. I don’t need to watch the latest season of the sitcom Silicon Valley, but it would make me happy. I don’t need to write, but it makes me happy. We have ascended Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and can’t imagine animals are yet to climb.

The Broadmarsh is Nottingham’s designated bad shopping centre. For some reason, towns require A) more than one and B) for one of them to be significantly worse than the other. The Broadmarsh managed, a few years ago, to swallow up the good music shop, Fopp, which gave it a little credibility, but it still feels cheaper than the Victoria Centre, with its regal name and fancy fountain. The Broadmarsh contains posters that promise an exciting redevelopment, but I struggle to become enthused.  

Stanford Street is one of Nottingham’s streets that attracts street performers. On any given day, you can be treated to some millennial busker, dressed scruffily and strumming a guitar as they sing Oasis. Stanford, like a decent amount of Nottingham’s city centre, is pedestrianised. This is a natural effect of being so old. Nottingham, named in Celtic Britain as Tigguo Cobauc, or City of Caves. Cities that predate cars naturally resist them. They’re built for the meandering routes that humans take. Old cities wind and bend in a way cars don’t want to. If you ever walk off the Market Square, past the statue of Brian Clough, you’ll see King Street slope down towards you, then make a hairpin turn to Queen Street, and slope up. It is the kind of truly pointless and convoluted piece of town planning that cars require.

Stanford leads towards the Old Market Square, the city’s heart and hub for pigeons and humans alike. This is where you get the clearest view of the human-pigeon relationship, and how one sided it is. Pigeons are like poachers, the goal-hangers of the food chain, not interested in the build-up play of seeking out and killing their prey. Here, the pigeons stalk the concrete, their little heads bobbing back and forth, and avoid the fountains. We feed them our leftovers, individuals serving as scouts for the huddled masses to follow, quickly overwhelming your feet if you don’t throw your bread far enough.

The Market Square, which only occasionally houses a market, serves as the centre to the city, home to the lion statues and council house. I’ve become fascinated by the reaction to pigeons. It disheartens me to see children running at them, trying to intimidate. But there is affection too. Feeding them is an act of affection, implicitly agreeing to their scheme. Feeding any animal as a human, as a dominant species, is a generous donation. We ordain ourselves as the masters, and allow lesser beings to feed on our scraps.

The city is the clearest example of humanity’s need to take dominion and domination over animals. The Broadmarsh centre is named for the area, which was historically boggy. But now you cannot picture in your mind how a boggy marsh could have existed where pale-grey concrete now carpets the ground. The history here is hidden away. The castle here holds within it all the folklore surrounding Robin Hood, history’s first and greatest socialist, but the city doesn’t promote the Hood mythos. There’s a few streets around the castle area: Maid Marian Way, Friar Lane, both roads where my father has worked, but that’s it. Torvill and Dean have a housing estate, there’s a banner near the train station for Byron, Stilitoe and D.H Lawrence. Some history is literally hidden – beyond a concreted over marsh, but caves, networked under the city.

Caves – they scream history. The ones that snake under Nottingham take you into the city’s medieval era, and there’s more than five-hundred in total. They’re so common that a new cave was found in March. They’re the kind of historical feature that instinctively grab a young boy’s imagination, for whom the Vikings were not raping, pillaging invaders but awesome, cool-helmeted heroes.   Caves, by definition, have to be old, have to have been put to use centuries ago, had to have been a necessity in some way. Some of Nottingham’s caves were used as pub basements, where the barrels were kept. Clearly, a significant necessity.

I’m headed home. Where I live – middle class, fairly affluent, tennis club – we don’t have pigeons, let alone seagulls. It’s the kind of suburb that attracts foxes, but I’m yet to see one. We don’t see many pigeons because it’s not their home anymore. The pigeon has evolved to get its food from thrown away scraps and nibbling at weeds and worms that have found homes in miniature edgelands breaking through the concrete. My home is, in a surreal sense, more rural than a pigeon’s.

Maybe pigeons need a rebrand, a marketing campaign. Pigeons are not at home in the suburbs as cats, dogs and smaller, cuter birds are, but maybe that should be their next move, the next step in their evolution from street rat to domesticated pet. They do have a curious history with being owned as pets: seeing someone with a pet pigeon casts them as eccentric, off-kilter, slightly abnormal. Domestication may be crucial to the pigeon’s long-term survival. Animals, sadly, need either humanity’s hunger or affection, ideally both, to survive. Anne Matthews defined the moment animals lose this as when "humans stop saying 'Aww' and start calling 911." The cultural carrying capacity has kept cats and dogs warm in our homes, and pigs and chickens plump and juicy.

The lack of pigeons in my suburb, which has fields and the Trent beyond them, is a curious testament to their own urbanisation. Eric Simms, in ‘The Secret Life of the Street Pigeon’, describes seeing a pigeon board the London Underground at Kilburn, go two stops and exit at Finchley Road. I love this story because I love evolution and adaptation. It’s fascinating to me to see a winged creature take the tube, presumably without paying. It’s a sad necessity that humanity has forced upon wild animals, but they’re finding ways around our development.

The Industrial Revolution, the historical nail in the coffin for pastoral life, gave Nottingham its textile industry, but also slums. This is the folly of urbanisation and capitalism – there is always a loser. They are, respectively, the environment, and the worker. The two combine when we decide that nature, systems much greater than ourselves, are either financially advantageous or problematic. Forests can be destroyed until the consumers decide they can’t, and then pictures of executives holding spades and young trees start appearing. Capitalism cannot allow for such trivialities like saving the planet, or supporting the worker. Look at the Market Square: Why does it have to be so concrete? Why can’t grass grow in Nottingham’s centre? Plant turf, plant trees, litter the ground with seeds and let us all breathe a little easier!

I think I’m attached to my hometown, when a song comes on, and it makes me question my affections. The song – You Don’t Know My Name, The Kinks, 1972 – takes me away. I’m on a train in London, it’s dark, and I’ve just been to visit my godmother. This is a vivid image in my mind, looking out at dark London from Blackfriars, happy after a fun visit. But I don’t have an image like this in my mind for Nottingham. Perhaps, after nearly twenty-two years, it’s all melted together in my memory, which is admittedly poor. Maybe I should move away if I want to create memories that have a song tied into them. Maybe, like the pigeon, I need to adapt to my surroundings. They surpassed edgelands to fully take the city. If edgelands represent nature and man’s struggle, pigeons are the envoys, ambassadors from nature to our lands. We cannot allow ourselves to war with nature anymore – it is one we will both lose. Instead, let’s take in pigeons, marvel at their adaptability, and find the path to peaceful co-existence.

[thewritinglist]

One Man Band

“Yes,” Ringo thought to himself, “this is absolutely your best idea yet, Ringo”.

The country had just about left its state of mourning after the death of Paul McCartney, everyone’s favourite left handed vegetarian who isn’t me, your humble narrator. This had left Ringo as the last surviving Beatle, no matter what Pete Best claims. He was now the flag bearer for the Fab Four. Well, the Fab One. The...One One.

People often asked, “How did The Beatles get so bloody good?” Wags of the day would say that they must have made a deal with the devil for their musical abilities.

As Ringo fell to his knees in the chalk drawn pentagram, he thought about how right they were.

That and, “Ow, my knees.”

SATAN HIMSELF FORMED IN THE RED MYST THAT ROSE IN FRONT OF THE PENITENT MAN. “HELLO RICHARD,” HE BOOMED.

“It’s Ringo,” Ringo muttered.

“I KNOW YOUR TRUE NAME, RICHARD STARK, OF LIVERPOOL ENGLAND. IT IS TIME TO RECEIVE YOUR GIFTS.”

“Thank you, wondrous Lucifer! Peace and love.”

“AS YOU KNOW, WHOMEVER IS THE LAST REMAINING BEATLE SHALL INHERIT THE ABILITIES OF THE OTHERS. NOW THAT PAUL IS DEAD-

“Sorry conspiracy theorists,” Ringo thought to himself.”

“-YOU SHALL BE IMBUED WITH THEIR TALENTS. FROM GEORGE, YOU RECEIVE GUITAR PLAYING. FROM PAUL, LEFT HANDED BASS PLAYING. FROM JOHN, SPOUSAL ABUSE.”

“But I like my wife.”

“I DO NOT MAKE THE RULES, RICHARD STARKEY.”

“Alright.”

SATAN HIMSELF faded away as the mist dissipated. Ringo picked himself up, wincing at the pain in his knees.

It took Ringo two weeks to come up with his plan. His main issue, as Ringo saw it, was that the British public would see Ringo playing guitar and bass and assume some satanic involvement. After much soul searching and in time drum playing, he found a solution.

This is how Ringo Starr came to be on a bus, headed to Liverpool John Lennon Airport, with a one-man band kit on the seat next to him. An old woman got on at the docks, and tutted irritably at this blatant seat stealing.

Ringo dragged his kit, which could use wheels, in front of the big John Lennon Airport sign. He looked up jealously at it, before moving on. He stopped next to the departures entrance, and set up the kit. Over his left shoulder hung a bass, over his right an acoustic guitar, and in front of him was a bass drum.

“Err, hello, ladies and gentlemen. I’m here to sing for you. It’s me, Ri-” he began before suddenly cutting himself off. He shrugged off the bass, and prepared the guitar. “I am Richard Starkey. One, two, three, four!”

“Oooh, I need your love, babe...”

For a dreadful moment, Ringo forgets the words to Eight Days a Week.

“Guess you know it’s true!” He slams his foot down pedal. Ringo finished the song, and a few people tossed copper coins his way.

[thewritinglist]

Albums of the “Year”

It’s very limiting to list my favourite albums released in the last twelve months, because years are an arbitrary concept, invented by humanity, and I also struggle to get away from my comfort zone of a few bands I’ve obsessively listened to and mentally catalogued. So, here is my top ten albums of 2018. They’re not necessarily from 2018, but they defined my year.

10. After Laughter by Paramore

For a long while, Paramore existed in my cultural awareness as one song, and a post on this very site about how Hayley Williams once caused a tour to be cancelled by getting her teenage self grounded.

That’s an unfair assessment.

The one song was Still Into You, passed on as part of a mixtape made by a dear friend to celebrate my first anniversary with my girlfriend. But after hearing Fake Happy on the radio at my former place of work (I didn’t love The Co-Op, but I have to hand it to their DJs and their fine taste), I had to google some lyrics to find it. The twelve songs tell an often deceptively sad story underneath the jangling guitars and synths that throw you and Paramore back together to the eighties. I listen to the music for the lyrics, and Williams really excels in adding sadness in the tone and not as something yelled. 

Best song - Hard Times.

2017 - Fuelled by Ramen - Pop rock

9. Silver Dollar Moment by The Orielles

I discovered the next two bands by a moment of delightful chance, when indie band Little Comets opened their twitter account to female fans on International Women’s Day, and one recommended these two.

Opening track Mango really nicely sets the scene for forty-five minutes of dreamily delivered indie rock, especially in Esmé Dee Hand-Halford’s vocals and bass. It’s the sort of music that makes me want to close my eyes and gently drift my head from side to side, which is why I have a soft rule to listen to it mostly in the comfort of a closed bedroom. Labelling anything indie gives an impression of competent but basic guitar/bass/drums, but The Orielles do much more than that, there’s an injection of funk and weirdness that occasionally brings to mind Talking Heads, if you played them at half speed, and replaced Byrne’s sudden manic energy with languid relaxation.

Best song: Mango

2018 - Heavenly Records - Indie rock

8. Love in the 4th Dimension by The Big Moon

The second chance discovery, The Big Moon are definitely more conventionally indie than their precedents in this list, but I like the simplicity of not adding too much to a song. This album blasts, first track Sucker building quickly and simply to a massive chorus, which is easy to imagine reverberating around Rescue Rooms or Rock City to a highly appreciative crowd. 

But it slows, too. Formidable’s verses have a solemn quality, with imagery of a capsizing boat and vague references to “did she make you swallow all your pride?” changing the atmosphere to something more confrontational, before the chorus rugby tackles the subject, with still soft vocals.

Best song: Silent Movie Susie

2017 - Columbia & Fiction Records - Indie rock

7. Harry Styles by Harry Styles

“Have you listened to Harry Styles’ album?”

The same friend that brought me the Paramore song asked me this on a Texas road trip with my girlfriend, having grown understandably tired of my musical choices. I said no, with an implication of “of course not”, because he was a he One Direction guy, and I hated them and all they stood for.

That is a poor assessment of Harry Styles’ abilities as a songwriter and musician. His self-titled debut, such a classic going solo move, is a mature change-up from the former One Direction star. An aeon away from upbeat teen-pop, now Styles is singing maturely and softly about sex, not explicitly but provocatively in Carolina. The use of “Good Girl, she makes me feel so good” is not at all subtle, and the album often feels like these are ideas and feelings that Styles wanted to get off his chest. These are not One Direction songs, and much as the Harry Potter series mature as the books passed and readers aged, Harry Styles feels like an album aimed at One Direction fans who are growing less interested in the innocent, good boy image they’d cultivated.

The music is clean and engaging, but more complex than those previous recordings. In all, the album manages something tough: It reveals a former teen star’s true maturity without the need to scream it explicitly. It feels confident in its identity, which is an achievement in itself.

Best song: Two Ghosts

2017 - Columbia - Indie pop/soft rock

6. Mean Girls - Original Cast Recording

Mean Girls, the film, holds up. Comedy, as I’ve learned just across my time at university, is the first genre to age badly. Punchlines need a target, and our understanding and acceptance of who and what is allowed as a target is ever shifting. So for Tina Fey to ingeniously target not the cattiness of teenage girls, which is a cheap stereotype that the mainstream media still loves to find and blow up (see: the majority of Taylor Swift coverage), but rather the expectation that they’ll do that, and the mentalities of teenager in general, savvily keeps it fresh.

Mean Girls, the musical, opened in 2017 and moved to Broadway in 2018. Music is written by Jeff Richmond, Fey’s husband and collaborator on both the seminal 30 Rock and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Nell Benajmin provided lyrics whilst Fey wrote the book, and together they brilliantly recreated the quotable magic of the original. Fey’s credit is limited to the book but at times her voice is loud and clear in the lyrics. The dumbest plastic, Karen Smith, sings an ode to Halloween, which begins with her muddling over putting it before world peace as a priority, and builds to her love of costumes: “I’m sexy Eleanor Roosevelt or sexy Rosa Parks” is such a Fey joke, fitting of the film. It’s also delightful to hear some extra input on protagonist Cady’s initial best friend Janis (Barrett Wilbert Weed, the best performance), a wonderful character who has the backstory most ripe for exploration in any future works.

Hey, I managed not to say fetch. 

Wait.

Damn.

Best song: World Burn

2018 - Atlantic - Broadway

5. Be More Chill - Original Cast Recording

Be More Chill is an honest story of teenagers and mental health. Adapted mostly faithfully from a 2004 novel by young adult author Ned Vizzini, the story is of Jeremy Heere, a high school loser whose initial goal is charmingly low-key. He just wants to be a bit less awkward and able to survive high school, but quickly decides to sign up for a school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, following in the steps of his crush Christine Canigula, a theatre lover with, in her words, “A touch of ADD”.

It’s this detail that sets the musical’s story apart from the book. Mental health is a subtextual theme of the book, but Christine and her love of performing as someone else and occasional scatterbrain, makes it explicit. The main thrust comes when a jock named Rich offers Jeremy a Squip, AKA a supercomputer, taken as a pill, that invades your brain and tells you how to act and speak. It helps Jeremy enter the cool kids’ circle, but at the expense of his friendship with the proudly dorky Michael, who is delighted that humanity has stopped evolving because, in his words, “there’s never been a better time in history to be a looooooooooooooooser!”

In the final song, Voices in My Head, Christine and Jeremy finally bond properly over the voices they’ve both heard, and it completes a surprisingly moving story of mental health in a musical that is often bombastically big and ridiculous - the Squip is supposed to have Keanu Reeves’ voice. Joe Iconis’ music and lyrics are witty and engaging, perfectly fitting the clever and original novel, and the sadly departed Vizzini.

Best song: Michael in the Bathroom (George Salazar)

2015 - Ghostlight Records - Broadway

4. Worhead by Little Comets

Little Comets are the most exciting band in current music.

This is a bold claim, but I like to be bold. Little Comets, who hail from Jarrow in Tyne and Wear, write the most incredibly moving, lyrically dense and thoughtful songs you can find today. Every song on Worhead is affecting.

If you listen to their first album, In Search of Elusive Little Comets, the musical and lyrical progression in six years is astounding. The fun early indie rock has complicated and deepened, like a lake dug out from beneath its surface. By 2017, lead singer and writer Rob Coles’ grasp on lyrics had become masterful, and he uses images to  generate feeling so well. The title and opening tack immediately point to a specific image: “Standing in a field of grass, looking for a blade of grass”. Coles is upfront about his political beliefs - a 2014 song titled “The Blur, the Line and the Thickest of Onions” explicitly denies and attacks the language of Blurred Lines, and their music is often loudly feminist. Worhead asks us “My sweetheart, can we lean more, to the left side, to the left side of everything”. À Bientôt angrily speaks to anti-migrant rhetoric from their perspective, even including the temporary sympathy caused by the image of the dead boy washed up on the beach, whilst Hunting is written from the smug, entitled view of Tory ministers, cutting, unafraid of retribution, safe from the consequences.

Density of ideas is a Little Comets staple, and the unapologetic thickness of the accents often need a trip to their website or Genius for understanding, but Coles also writes poetically when he pares his words down for romance. “Common Things” describes globetrotting, but in the context of not wanting it, because of the joys of being home, only needing an atlas under the mattress. Elegant domesticity is the only kind of love song that continually appeals to me. They are a continually astounding and unique band.

Best song: 

2017 - The Smallest Label - Indie rock

3. Illinois by Sufjan Stevens

I hardly ever enjoy music purely for the feeling that the music imparts on me. Before I was listening to music critically, I saw an episode of Charlie Brooker’s excellent series Screenwipe, which discussed and took the piss out of all elements of television. In an advertising special, he mentioned that advertisers love music as it bypasses the logical part of your mind and is processed emotionally. There’s something romantic about that, but at the same time sometimes I wonder if that subconsciously put up mental guards, and I have to understand lyrics to understand the emotions.

Illinois is a rare exception.

Sufjan Stevens relased Illinois in 2005 and it serves as a sort of concept album about the American state. It covers points from its history: “Come on! Feel the Illinoise!” covers the historic World’s Columbian Exposition, and “John Wayne Gacy Jr.” is about the infamous serial killer and affords him almost shocking levels of empathy. Stevens later said that we’re all capable of what Gacy did, which is debatable.

But we’re all capable of the grief woven into Caismir Pulaski Day, which tragically tells the story of losing someone who died on the state holiday celebrating their Polish revolutionary war hero.

An independent singer songwriter with track titles as terribly long as “The Black Hawk War, or, How to Demolish an Entire Civilization and Still Feel Good About Yourself in the Morning, or, We Apologize for the Inconvenience but You're Going to Have to Leave Now, or, 'I Have Fought the Big Knives and Will Continue to Fight Them Until They Are Off Our Lands!'” seems like someone addicted to acoustic guitar, but Stevens utilises piano, strings and horns, especially effective in the aforementioned ‘Come on’. The album is vivid and alive, and is really a practical tie for second.

2005 - Asthmatic Kitty/Secretly Canadian and Rough Trade - Indie rock/folk

2. Masseduction by St. Vincent

This year, I made a real effort, admittedly only in September, to get into new music. Reading an interview with David Byrne, I was intrigued by his mention of St. Vincent, aka Annie Clark. Anyone who can engage David Byrne is worthy of attention.

Inside the striking image and colouring of the artwork, Masseduction was first introduced to me in the opening scene of Bojack Horseman’s fifth season, replacing the standard use of Back in the 90′s by Grouplove with Los Ageless. The song, Clark’s depiction of Los Angeles, feels bleak and distant, the electronic music giving an disconnected vibe. It’s her relationship to the city, and the album as a whole is a series of looks at relationships. Pills is about a relationship with drugs, the title track and Savior are about sex. Happy Birthday Johnny, both slower and acoustic, feel related, as though they’re both about the same person, Clark coming to terms with the sadness of that loss.

Masseduction is endlessly listenable. It spans various pop genres, with enough variety to reward many listens and picking on many of its songs to focus on individually. Pills really does feel like withdrawal, with pumped up verses, an almost manic chorus, and a suddenly balladish final section, where the tone becomes surprisingly sombre. It works, powerfully so.

Best song: Pills

2017 - Loma Vista Recordings - Electropop/Glam Rock

1. The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society (50th Anniversary Edition)

The Kinks released Village Green Preservation Society on the 22nd of November, 1968, which sounds fine until you learn that The Beatles released The White Album on the same day, spelling inevitable and crushing doom, and the permanent departure of founding bassist Pete Quaife from the band. Quaife, who had grown tired of the industry and the Davies’ brothers warring ways, scrawled ‘daze’ on a tape recording of Days. But he left on perhaps the band’s highest note. 

I don’t know what else can be said about this album. Even if every song isn’t a standalone masterpiece, with the strange fairy tale of Phenomenal Cat and the childlike Mr. Songbird only working in context of stories of the past, but they form a collective that is masterful in painting a rich story. It has the delicacy of a great painting, something that former art student Ray Davies must appreciate. And it is so distinctly Ray Davies in its voice, something only he alone could have written. It was their first album after a still somewhat mysterious five year ban from American touring, then the only real form of promotion, but it dismisses the cultural shift towards psychedelia with an almost passive-aggressive tone. 

The weighty re-release is fitted out with sixty tracks, but they’re largely alternative versions of songs from the original album and the recording sessions, many unreleased, including the finished Time Song, and a lovely demo of Days, that proves that Davies was always a better writer than singer, bless him. Harmonies with his brother Dave always lifted the words, but they stand alone, as short stories, brilliantly formed.

VGPS contributes to their stereotypical image of proud Britishness, but there’s a look to the future and underlying sadness that add depth to the album. The original final track’s closing lyirc?

Don’t show me no more, please.

1968/2018 - Pye Records - Folk Rock