Chasing The Kerstman 2024: Christmas In Utrecht

It's a long story as to why we're in Utrecht, but it's not like that's stopped me in the past. The last time we spent Christmas in the Netherlands was in 2013. That trip was partly a rehearsal for a subsequent tour of Italy in 2015: in both cases, our transport between England and Europe was the Stena Line ferry between Harwich and the Hook. That worked out just fine both times, but the interesting bit was the train journey back to the Hook at the end of each holiday, which required us to change trains in Utrecht.

On that first occasion, I suspect it was The BBG who insisted we should leave Utrecht station to have a proper meal break, rather than a railway broodje. So we wandered around the city and ended up at Firma Pickles Burgers & Wines, where both the burgers and wines were excellent. To the extent that eighteen months later, on the way home from our two week tour of Italy, we got off the train at Utrecht and did it all over again.

It seems a bit much to have a favourite restaurant in a city where all you’ve ever done is change trains. Happily, when we paid a third visit to Firma Pickles at Christmas 2024, this time we stayed a bit longer.

Simian Substitute Site for March 2025: Wild Futures' Monkey Sanctuary

MONTH END PROCESSING FOR FEBRUARY 2025

Books: Well, sort of. Daniel Kitson’s Shenanigan might be one of several things – a radio play, a concept album, an audio adaptation of a stage show he performed at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2019 – but it definitely isn’t a book. However, The BBG and I listened to it in our usual bedtime audiobook slot, so it’s being filed under Books here. A couple of years ago, Kitson crowdfunded, made and released a home recording of the Shenanagan show: the story of a couple’s first meeting, their gradual breakup, and what happened after that, though not in that order. It feels like it’s been rewritten a bit – the ending isn’t the sudden shock that I seemed to think it was back in 2019 – but it’s still a glorious bit of narrative structure, especially with the detours that are substitutes for the bursts of improv he tends to drop into his stories when performing them live. It’s a beautiful package – Kitson's responsible for sleeve art, the music and everything else – only ever released on physical media as a limited edition, and probably impossible for you to get hold of now. (Unlike, well, everything else he’s ever recorded.)

Food and Drink: She doesn’t read these, but thanks anyway to my sister, who bought us a Six By Nico gift voucher for Christmas. A chain that specialises in six-course tasting menus that rotate every six weeks is already fun, but it gets even funner once you consider the menu that was available on the day we visited: Murder On The Midnight Express, a murder mystery with small plates attached (running until March 9th). The BBG was worried about how this would work in practice – if we didn’t solve the mystery, would we not get any pudding? In practice, it ended up being a series of puzzles for you to solve in between courses, the haute cuisine equivalent of going to McDonald’s and being given a colouring sheet and a set of crayons. No spoilers here, obviously: the mystery was fun, the food was excellent, and the wine flight was possibly gratuitous. Hic.

Music: As one of the things I did last month was hit you with a 65 hour Spotify playlist built over the last 43 years, please accept this 33 minute collection of more recent tunes as a sort of apology. (YouTube links also available.)

1. I can usually take or leave Matt Berry’s diversions into music, but this slab of psychedelia works just fine.
2. I’m a big fan of the way Kneecap have artfully edited around the swearing in the radio edit of this new remix of an old tune. This is not the radio edit.
3. I heard Chappell Roan for the first time this month. Honestly. Yeah, I can see what everyone’s raving about.
4. So when we came back pissed from Six By Nico on a Saturday night, and inspired by the musical soundtrack to the lovely orchid exhibition in Kew Gardens we'd visited earlier that day, we slapped on a playlist of Peruvian psychedelic cumbia to dance to. I woke up the next day to find I’d saved a Money Chicha track from it to this Audio Lair playlist, with no memory of doing so. I’ve decided to trust the instincts of Drunk Me.
5. Mike Scott’s been doing this for over forty years now, so he can make a Waterboys record be anything he damn well likes. A concept album about Dennis Hopper and the people he worked with? Sure, why not?
6. Nice to hear the newly genderwobbly Kiyoshi Hikawa singing over the end titles of What Happened To Our Nest Egg!?, as discussed in the review of the Am I Right? film season. (Find it yourself, I only do one link per paragraph in these things.)
7. Thanks to Nathan Shepherd for introducing me to this Ezra Collective, JME and Swindle collaboration when he was covering for Chris Hawkins’ early breakfast show on 6 Music.
8. Ditto for him doing the same for Emma-Jean Thackray.
9. Delighted to discover while listening to a recording of a Mr Scruff DJ set that he’s not above including cover versions of his own tunes: in this case, one by The Quantic Soul Orchestra.
10. And we’re back to Daniel Kitson again for the finale, as he played Erland & The Carnival during his own irregular breakfast show on Resonance FM. (He’s doing it again for another couple of weeks, starting on March 11th.)

 

Am I Right? #JFTFP25

It's that time of year again, when the Japan Foundation bundles together a set of recent and classic Japanese movies and takes them around UK cinemas, and I watch some of them while taking the mick out of whatever umbrella title they've chosen for the collection. This year, I have to at least admit that the subtitle - Justice, Justification and Judgement in Japanese Cinema - does the job of telling us that we'll have all sorts of moral dilemmas to chew over.

The main title, though - Am I Right? - feels less like the deep self-examination that they're aiming for, and more like the post-punchline catchphrase of a hack comedian. TV Tropes certainly thinks that's true, and caps that with a suitably relevant observation: "The Japanese language has the word ne, which pretty much means the same thing. Using it at the end of an English sentence still counts as gratuitous Japanese, ne?" So the title could have been even shorter, really.

Anyway, for 2025 they've got 26 films showing in 33 cinemas at various times up until March 31st. Here are reviews of eight of them.

Picks Of The Year 1982 - 2024: The Video Playlists

[Updated 23/02/2025 to include the playlist for 2024.]

At least one of the links below tells you the full story, so I won't go through it all again. But in brief: since 1982, I've been producing an annual series of Pick Of The Year compilations, collating my favourite tracks from that year's music releases. From 1982 to 1989, they were gargantuan twin-tape affairs: between 1993 and 1997, they were single 90 minute cassettes: and since 1998, I've been burning them onto CDs. (I didn't make compilations at the time for 1990-1992, but two decades later I created some CD-length ones as a best-guess approximation with the benefit/hindrance of hindsight.)

1998 was the year that I started writing about these compilations on the interwub, as they were being produced. The years before then have been subsequently been documented on this site, with a lot of ironic pointing and laughing at the sort of junk I used to listen to. Put all that together, and you've got a hefty collection of tracks covering my musical interests from 1982 to the present day.

And thanks to YouTube, you can hear most of them right now. The playlists below aren't complete, inevitably: some artists are less happy than others about letting their product be heard for free. But the vast majority of the songs I've chosen are there in some form or other - from official record company videos, to slapdash fan-made tributes consisting of a single still image with the song playing over the top. (I guess my own Felix Project videos fall somewhere in between those two stools.)

Anyway, you've got a couple of days' worth of music here that I've liked at one time or another. And I'll be updating this page each time I produce a new POTY compilation. Enjoy.

For those of you who don't want to look at videos, there are also Spotify playlists available for each year, although many of them have at least one track missing. See the relevant pages covering the years 1982-1989, 1990-1999, 2000-2009 and 2010-2019. And if you make it all the way to the bottom of this page, you'll be rewarded with a single 809-song, 65-hour playlist of the whole damn lot (though the widget only displays the first hundred tracks, the coward).

London Film Festival 1989-2024: An Index

I started going to the London Film Festival in 1989, and I've been there every year since. Thanks to a combination of Spank Gold articles (after-the-fact writeups of the 1989-1997 festivals), reposts (pieces written for the old site between 1998 and 2005) and live blogging (since 2006), I've got a record of every single film I've seen at those Festivals.

Trying to pick your way through all of those is obviously going to be hellish, hence the index below. Similar to the equivalent index I've assembled for the Edinburgh Festival, each year links to the relevant piece on that particular LFF, including a roughly chronological list of what I saw (plus, of course, any additional films reviewed by Spank's Pals). As a bonus, you get a thumbnail-sized history of programme cover designs.

This will be updated each year after the LFF, so most of the time this page should be resident at the top of the LFF folder on the site. Have yourselves a good old browse through, and try not to think too hard about how much the tickets for all this lot have cost me over the last couple of decades.

[updated 22/02/2025 to include 2024 reviews]