MONTH END PROCESSING FOR MARCH 2025
Books: How long ago was it that we listened to Stanley Tucci's first audiobook? [goes away to check] Nearly three and a half years! Doesn't time fly when, etc. Anyway, he’s written another one. What I Ate In One Year does pretty much what it says on the hamper: it’s a diary of one calendar year, during which the key focus is on the meals he had, with a side order of any other events he feels might be of interest. Unfortunately, the year in question is 2023, so the actors' strike means he doesn’t get to do that much acting, apart from his time filming Conclave during the first month or two. So much of this book is just listing what Tucci’s shovelling into his gob, it starts to feel disturbingly obsessive: one chapter, where he spends several minutes listing the ludicrous mountain of food he brought to a family weekend away, is only bearable because you can tell from his voice he knows it’s ludicrous. He also seems far too keen to develop a Grumpy Old Man persona, at one point going off on a rant about airport security because one of his daft kids tried to take a water bottle onto a plane. This is enjoyable enough as winding-down listening before bedtime, but his earlier book Taste had more of a reason to exist.
Food and Drink: The number of beer-related events in our diary seems to be dropping ever year. The Great British Beer Festival has given up on London, while BrewDog seems to have given up on quite a few things, including their annual Collabfest. They should be taking a leaf out of the book of Siren Craft Brew, who've just celebrated their twelfth birthday with a party at their brewery in Finchampstead. It's not our first visit there: they were mentioned here in passing when we went along to their fifth, and we've been back for most of the birthdays since, including the online-only eighth one. Their celebrations are always delightfully fun, and generally free of the sort of lairy drunk lads you get at these events. That's particularly the case for a talk called Maiden Through The Years, whose audience appeared to be made up of people who'd all at least considered joining CAMRA at some point in their lives. Maiden is the barrel-aged barley wine that Siren make around this time every year, and this tasting session went through several different editions of the beer, culminating in a 2021 brew that had been in enough old barrels that it had traces of the original 2013 version in it. Overall this do's an infinitely more relaxed affair than, say, the BrewDog AGMs, with a less hectic schedule of entertainment and a much slower rate of consumption of what, these days, is much better beer. There, I said it.
Music: Another Audio Lair of new tunes for you, with YouTube links for people who don't believe in that sort of thing.
- Noep -- presenting another one of his regular collaborations where he takes traditional Estonian folk and puts a massive donk on it.
- Little Simz - not sure whether this is here specifically for Simbi’s lead vocal, or Moonchild Sanelly’s infectious background burbling.
- Rebecca Vasmant - as is usually the case with her records, it’s more of a vibe than a tune, but it’s a lovely vibe.
- Doechii - she’s going to be ridiculously, world-conqueringly, everybody-knows-her-name-ly enormous soon, isn’t she? Or maybe I'm wrong about that.
- Mae Martin - yeah, that one off the late 2010s comedy circuit and the early 2020s Taskmaster, who now appears to be a fine singer/songwriter as well.
- Abel Selaocoe - back for all your Afro-classical cello-based needs.
- Ezra Collective - I feel like I should have picked up on these guys a lot sooner, given that they sound like several of my favourite bands glued together.
- Kae Tempest - a track that draws a definite dividing line between what they used to be and what they are now.
- Bryan Ferry & Amelia Barratt - from an album where she reads her poems over some rejected demos that he recorded in the seventies. Re-Make/Re-Model, eh, Bri?
- Ylvis - a song they recorded for the Skiing World Cup about the friendly inter-country rivalries you get there. The chorus translates as ‘Swedish bastard, shut up and go home.’