Picks Of The Year 1982 - 2018: The Video Playlists

[Updated 16/01/2019 to include the playlist for 2018.]

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 they all have at least one track missing. See the relevant pages covering the years 1982-1989, 1990-1999, 2000-2009 and 2010-2017.)

Simian Substitute Site For January 2019: Brainy Monkey Post Production

MONTH END PROCESSING FOR DECEMBER 2018

Comedy: Happy New Year to one and all! (Now buy a diary.) As has been our tradition over the last decade or more, we saw out the old year with a stand-up comedy show. There was plenty of competition in North London for our business this time round, with Good Ship Comedy joining in for the first time, marred only by their venue's insistence that the show wrapped up at 9.30pm to allow more time for the purchase of booze. Monkey Business could have been on our list too, but after the emotional rollercoaster of their previous NYE show we felt that might be a bit too risky. So in the end the Pals and I settled for the familiar comforts - and, let's be honest, familiar jokes - of Ivor Dembina and his Hampstead Comedy Club, this year temporarily relocated at the Albany pub, as it was three years earlier. It was a splendidly balanced quadruple bill - the verbal dexterity of Dan Evans, the eye-watering filth of Arielle Souma, the too-rude-for-Radio-4 songs of Ant Dewson and the previously-seen-in-late-2016 rants of LJ Da Funk. The twin-DJ set in the upstairs bar leading into 2019 had its moments, but they kept playing music that was recorded before either of them were born, and claimed never to have heard of Janelle Monae. Millennials, eh?

Food and Drink: One of our biggest achievements in the year just gone was the creation of www.bermondsey-beer-mile.co.uk, in which The Belated Birthday Girl and I planned to keep a regularly updated record of all the bars currently operating on Sarf Landan's most fashionable pub crawl. It's been quite the success, I have to say: it's currently getting ten times as many page visits as this bloody place does, with amusingly sharp peaks in the hit count every Saturday, suggesting that Beer Milers are actually using it for real-time navigation. It also comes first on a Google search for 'Bermondsey Beer Mile', despite us putting zero effort into search engine optimisation. The one thing we've been a little behind on is those regular updates, although even then comments from helpful readers have helped ensure that the biggest recent changes have already been documented somewhere on the site. Anyway, early in December we went on another fact-finding mission (hic), and the site's had a bit of an update as a result. The main things we've covered are the new bar from Cloudwater, and the reopening of London Beer Factory's The Barrel Project after a lengthy period of refurbishment. I've also replied to the various comments left during our first six months of operation, and only been rude about one of them.

Telly: The ancient Christmas Day tradition of slumping in front of the telly after a massive feed took a new twist this year, as we found ourselves on Christmas night in a hotel room with a Smart TV featuring the Netflix app. I've only ever used Netflix on computers before now, and it's terrifying how addictive the TV version of the interface is by comparison: you could burn up hours just scrolling through looking for something to watch, and on one occasion we did just that. Eventually, though, we settled for a double bill of Netflix Original productions that overlapped in unexpected ways. The Christmas That Almost Wasn't started out life as a 1966 Italian movie in which Santa Claus is about to be evicted by a Scrooge-type landlord, and has to seek the aid of a lawyer: what could be more festive than that? Well, everything could, which is what makes it prime material for a Mystery Science Theater 3000 reworking. Released as a Christmas special as part of their 2017 comeback season, it has Jonah and the bots cheerfully attacking all the obvious targets - the bad dubbing, the worse songs, and the jaw-dropping horror of the special effects at the climax. To be honest, the CGI effects in Netflix's current seasonal offering The Christmas Chronicles also have a bit of a will-this-do quality to them, but that's all part of the tongue-in-cheek approach: taking a similar Christmas-in-crisis storyline to the earlier film, but gently mocking it with every directorial decision it makes, starting with the casting of Kurt Russell as Santa. It's good-natured enough to tickle the same parts of your post-food coma brain as, say, a good Doctor Who Christmas special would: and if you're prepared to cut it the same amount of slack, there's plenty of fun to be had all the way up to the cheeky cameo in the final scene.

Living For The Weekend: A 2019 Diary By The BBG

I published my first book back in 2009. You might remember it. Monkey Round The World: Travel Writing 1993-2009 was intended to be the first of a series of books using the facilities of lulu.com to rehash my favourite bits of this website in hard copy form. Since then - more accurately, in the twelve months following then - I brought out three volumes of LFF reviews and two collections of Edinburgh Festival reviews, meaning that I currently have six books in print. That's quite an achievement, isn't it?

Except that now she's published Living For The Weekend: 2019 Diary, The Belated Birthday Girl now has two more books in print than I do. I may have to do something about that over the next couple of years. But for now, let's put that to one side and get on with the annual post announcing that you can buy her new diary for £3.99 plus postage and packing from the usual source.

First Let's Kill All The Tailors: Pick Of The Year 2018

I believe this is what the young people today call a 'surprise drop'.

And I can't argue that it's not a surprise. Christmas Day works to a fairly standard formula round these parts: I find a song related to the season, post up the video with a short message of festive cheer, and that's me done in plenty of time for lunch. But I decided that the twentieth anniversary year of this website deserved a little more effort - particularly since it's also the twentieth anniversary year of the CD versions of these annual compilations of my favourite tunes. (Not to mention the 37th compilation overall, but let's not get into that. Hey, try not to make any more Pick Of The Year compilations on the way to the parking lot!)

So, Merry Christmas to you all from myself and The Belated Birthday Girl: and as a present, here's eighty minutes of vintage 2018 sounds, available as both YouTube and Spotify playlists. And if you're reading this before January 31st 2019, you may even be in with a chance to WIN A COPY OF THE CD in yet another one of those competitions that Dave tends to end up winning. Will his luck change this year? We'll come back to that at the end of the page. But for now...

Portugal 2018: Porto (The Sandeman Can)

Yes, I know, the timeline for these Portugal 2018 posts has become so ridiculously convoluted it could be a season of Westworld.

Let's take it slowly. Towards the end of July, The Belated Birthday Girl and I set out from London on an epic train journey to Lisbon, which took about 72 hours and included stopovers in Barcelona and Madrid. That journey's covered in the first half of Nobody Expects The Spanish Expedition. Once we got to Lisbon, we spent six days there, and they're documented in Free As In Jazz Or Free As In Beer. There's then an awkward gap, and after that there's another epic three-day journey from Porto back to London, via Vigo, Hendaye and Hondarribia: that latter journey is the second half of Spanish Expedition.

So this final part of the trilogy will address that gap in the middle - the three days we spent in Porto. Compared with Lisbon, there's a lot less cultural enrichment, and a lot more travelling around between nice places to eat and drink. You only get the one video this time - that one at the top there - but it shows you one of the best bits of travelling we did in those three days.