Simian Substitute Site for September 2024: Dee Monkey Autumn

MONTH END PROCESSING FOR AUGUST 2024

Books: It’s been three months since I told you that we'd just started the audiobook of Your Face Belongs To Us by Kashmir Hill. We finally finished it last week. Part of the delay is down to the fact that we tend to skip the bedtime audiobook ritual when we're away on holiday somewhere, like say Nice or Edinburgh. But there were other nights where we just gave it a pass because, frankly, it's dispiriting to be reminded night after night that all the major advances in current technology are in the hands of alt-right arseholes. We decided that our next audiobook had to be something uncomplicatedly light. So we went back to 2008, and Rick Wakeman's Grumpy Old Rock Star And Other Wondrous Stories. Wakeman's been in his anecdotage for several years now - The BBG caught him in Edinburgh in 2013 doing a spoken word show based around a similar collection of unlikely tales from his rock star past. It has to be said that in this reading he's being just a little bit too arch, and The BBG suggests that he'd become a lot more conversational by the time of the show she saw. But the stories themselves are great, starting with a glorious one from a trip to Moscow where he suddenly found himself in possession of an illegal KGB uniform. We're relying on you to keep us amused, Wakeman of 2008, please don't let us down...

Movies: Considering that it’s really just a cinema vehicle for an up-and-coming band, Kneecap has no right to be as wildly ambitious as it is. Yes, it's the (heavily fictionalised) story of how Móglaí Bap, Mo Chara and DJ Provaí got together to become Belfast's leading Irish language hip-hop group, with all three members playing themselves (and like everyone else is saying, DJ Provaí is such a natural actor it's hard to believe this is his debut). But it's also a thoughtful study about how the destruction of a language is the first stage in the destruction of a country. And it's a thriller about the sectarian chaos that still exists even in post-Good Friday Agreement Belfast. And, at the same time, it's a laddish comedy about two drug dealers with lots of helpful life lessons for any young people watching, such as 'don't put your speed and your ket in adjacent pockets'. Edited at a wild lick and enhanced with some smart animation (particularly for the subtitles some of us need to follow the Gaelic raps), it's got the sense of a bunch of artists 'printing the legend' and doing it quickly before anyone realises that it's just a legend. Best of all, if you enjoy the rawness of the music they were making in those early years, be prepared to discover that the album they released this year has shown a huge leap forward in their musical ambition. 

Music: It’s Proms season again. The BBG and I try to catch an unspecified number of concerts each year, which are easy to write about here because I can post links to the BBC recordings and you can hear them for yourselves (though be warned these particular recordings will be gone by the end of September). This year, our token late night Prom was Tinariwen, the group from Mali who specialise in what they call 'desert blues'. I wasn't expecting their music to have such a solid groove to it, but I guess that's the sort of thing that puts a concert into the late night slot - it's fantastically enjoyable, anyway. That show was fairly packed but not quite sold out, unlike the Saturday afternoon concert Beethoven For Three. But when those three are Emanuel Ax on piano, Leonidas Kavakos on violin and Yo‐Yo Ma on cello, you can see why people were fighting for tickets. It possibly also explains why the trio felt capable of ripping up the published programme (originally all Beethoven, including an arrangement of his first symphony - see entry here for August 31st) a few days before, and replacing it with a pair of piano trios (one Beethoven, one Brahms) and assuming they'd get away with it - everyone's here for the players, not the music. I decided to be mean about it, and assume that they tried to play the original programme but found it a bit hard. They pull off the replacement pieces, though, and if listening back to the recording isn't enough you can see them as well. More Proms action to come this time next month, hopefully.

Simian Substitute Site for August 2024: Monkey Sermon

MONTH END PROCESSING FOR JULY 2024

Edinburgh: We're currently at the tail end of preview season, with the Fringe itself officially opening on Friday. There are two shows I've already seen in London that should be recommended to anyone heading up there. Lauren Pattison: Big Girl Pants sees her just as anxious as she was in her whatevertheycallthePerriernow-nominated show two years ago, but determined to do something about it. She's still a fantastic storyteller, and it feels a little churlish to complain that her show has what I'll coyly refer to as That Edinburgh Shape, though at least she admits that herself. Her London preview was in the upstairs room of a pub in Camden, while Afrique en Cirque went for several nights in a row at the Queen Elizabeth Hall for their warmup. It's one of those big glossy international shows that just might be a little too slick for the Fringe, but it's done incredibly well, showcasing a set of wild circus skills within the structure of a day in the life of a small fishing village in Guinea. The ten minutes of visual mayhem that comes directly after they catch a big fish might be the most jaw-dropping thing you see in Edinburgh this year.

Music: Another playlist for you. Alternatively, watch this stash of videos linked to below. But why?

• Orbital, because I enjoyed their Glastonbury set this year and was reminded of an earlier one they did.
• Kiioto, because Lou Rhodes from Lamb is back with a new partner (Rohan Heath) and still sounding bracingly unusual.
• Self Esteem & Moonchild Sanelly, because it's cheeky in all the right ways.
• Arooj Aftab, because she was also pretty great at Glastonbury, and perfect for a scorching hot afternoon where you didn't want to move around too much.
• Warrington Runcorn New Town Development Plan, because it's a band Spotify recommended to me and I still haven't worked out yet if this is the algorithm calling me a wanker or not.
• Lankum, because Glastonbury again, and the opportunistic live album they released around the same time.
• Bright & Black, because under the hood it's Kristjan Järvi and his orchestra reworking one of my favourite tracks of 2022.
• Pink Opake, because I saw them do a really good live set that I haven't told you about just yet. (Hopefully soon.)
• Linda Thompson & The Unthanks, because the concept behind Thompson's collaboration album is nearly as delightful as its sleeve and title.
• Lucero, because I enjoy it when the end title song of a film basically recaps the entire plot for people who weren't paying attention.

Theatre: This one wasn't seen at Edinburgh and it's not going to Edinburgh, but it feels like it could fit right in there. Besse: The Beer Opera is notable for so far only ever being performed in active breweries: we caught it at Signature Brew on the Blackhorse Beer Mile. The work of composer Daniel Blanco Albert and librettist Roxanne Korda (who also plays the title role), it tells the story of a brewster (or female brewer) working at a time in the 14th century where men are starting to grab the entire trade for themselves. It feels like it's the sort of idea that could drive a light musical, but this is a proper opera in terms of both music (lots of complex tunes, and you won't come out humming any of them) and drama (the proposed solution to the central dilemma turns out to be 'poison the men'). It's a thoroughly engaging night out, and if they did want to take it up to Edinburgh in the future, I can think of at least two possible locations (notwithstanding the hellish complications of setting up and taking down a stage set at either side of the brewery's working day).

Simian Substitute Site for July 2024: Summer Of The Monkeys

MONTH END PROCESSING FOR JUNE 2024

Music: Late last year The Belated Birthday Girl announced her (and, by implication, our) project for 2024: we were going to go to 12 DJ nights despite our advanced ages. Shortly after that, we began to feel slightly targeted, as more and more clubs started putting on dance parties where young people (typically under-30s) were banned, the music was aimed at an older demographic, and everything was wrapped up by early evening so we could all get a decent night's sleep. The biggest of these - or at least, the most-hyped - is Vicky McClure and Jonny Owen's Day Fever, which runs a number of events around the UK, including what's become a monthly residency at ludicrously-named London venue HERE at Outernet. It's spooky to realise just how precisely it's aimed at our particular age bracket, not only because of the music - solid cheese from the seventies to the nineties - but also the video backdrop of adverts and TV title sequences from our childhood. But there's no denying the sheer fun of it all, especially when at one point DJ Jon McClure calls a halt to the dancing so we can all YELL along to Total Eclipse Of The Heart. You wouldn't want to make a habit of this, but it's an enjoyable afternoon out.

Music (again): Glastonbury's all done and dusted for another year. Obviously we weren't there, and just vegged out in front of the BBC coverage at home. My big discovery this year wasn't a band, it was a nifty hack involving the live streams they run every day from each of the major stages. It's possible to actually wind backwards within the stream, so you can time travel through the day hopping between stages and catching stuff you missed. The bit I didn't realise until it was too late was that those streams are cleared off the BBC servers at the end of each day. Not every set gets saved for posterity, but a lot of them do, and here are ten that I'm linking to partly for my benefit and partly for yours. Some of these are things I watched over the weekend, others are ones I'm saving links to so I can catch them before they vanish at the end of July. Sugababes; PJ Harvey; Little Simz; The Streets; Janelle Monae; Yard Act; Otoboke Beaver; Orbital; Lankum; Arooj Aftab. Other sets are available here: remember, they'll all be gone by the end of July.

Ah, sod it, one more time, Music: You know how it is: I've been away for a chunk of this month, so I haven't spent much time doing things that won't be covered in a future travel piece. So here's one of those Spotify playlists I throw in when I'm short on content, with ten tracks that have some sort of recent significance for me. YouTube links also supplied for Spotisceptics.

1. Mdou Moctar - a glorious bit of Tuareg-tinged rock, passed on to me by the Spotify algorithm. Ta!
2. Noep - two London gigs this year and a couple of banging singles, he's obviously got plans.
3. Johnny Dowd - a late reaction to the legend's London show on St Patrick's Day this year.
4. Knower - included for the lovely reveal halfway through the somewhat crowded video.
5. Richard Hawley - still as soppy as ever when he wants to be.
6. Anna Erhard - the ability to rhyme 'hammam', 'mum' and 'bum' has piqued my interest for her next album.
7. Shabaka and Saul Williams - one for the Bible scholars, as Saul Williams will be followed on track 9 by...
8. Yannis & The Yaw - Afrorock enlived by the presence of the excellent but four-years-dead drummer Tony Allen.
9. Paul Williams - frustratingly had an excellent album launch gig in London recently, but can't say when the album's coming out.
10. Kamasi Washington - a track that's pretty confidently booked its place on POTY halfway through the year.

Simian Substitute Site for June 2024: Kai's Monkey Business

MONTH END PROCESSING FOR MAY 2024

Books: We're only a short way into the audiobook Your Face Belongs To Us, written and read by New York Times journalist Kashmir Hill, but it's already turning out to be quite the rollercoaster ride. Its subtitle - A Secretive Startup Quest To End Privacy As We Know It – hints that it’s going to be another one of those True Tech Crime books that we’ve enjoyed before (see also: Fancy Bear Goes Phishing). It begins with Hill discovering the existence of Clearview AI, a spookily accurate face detection program. Alarmed by the possibility of being able to identify anyone from a single snapshot, she tries to investigate it further, but is shut down every time she gets close. From there, we flash back to the story of a pair of right wing tech bros who, somewhat predictably, are the people behind its development. And just as we think we’ve got a handle on the timeline, Hill throws up a 350 BC caption on screen like we’re in an episode of Doctor Who or something, and goes deep into the history of dumb people assuming you can judge human character from facial structure, from Aristotle onwards. It’s a book that covers a huge number of contemporary hot button topics, but does it with the lightest of touches. At least, that’s how it feels three chapters in, and I hope it stays that way.

Music: "Did you know that Sexy Sadie was originally about the Maharishi?" asks The BBG. Well, actually, yes I did, though it turns out it was news to her. She discovered this towards the end of the Liverpool multimedia exhibition The Beatles Story, which we were visiting as part of a Christmas present from my sister (ta!). But that made me realise that the Beatles didn’t really have a story: they had hundreds of stories that intersected in various ways. And even an exhibition the size of a city block could never hope to cover all those stories to everyone’s satisfaction. This exhibition partly acknowledges that by putting all the important stuff in front of you, and relegating much of the other material to the audio guide, so you can choose to listen to it or not. For example, I don’t think there’s anything in the exhibition proper about the existence of Hey Jude. Still, the large number of stories we get make for an enjoyable couple of hours, enhanced by the substantial afternoon tea that was part of our package. Inevitably, the gift shop at the end is mostly full of Beatles-branded tat, but at least I was able to pick up that remastered copy of Revolver I’ve been promising myself for a while now.

Travel: And a few more highlights from our recent flying visit to Liverpool, with apologies to Eddie and Lee for not managing to touch base with them while we were in town. Aside from The Beatles Story, we did a couple more music related things. Over at the Jacaranda pub (which itself played its part in the Fab Four's early days), they're regularly running a fascinating event in their upstairs record shop called the Vinyl Listening Bar, where they play vinyl albums while pairing them with specially designed cocktails. The cocktails are excellent, but the noise leakage from downstairs stops you particularly enjoying the albums. Basically, I’d like someone in London to steal this idea and do it better. A slightly more successful musical event was the gloriously named Shit Indie Disco at Electrik Warehouse, although this being Liverpool they tried to persuade us at one point that Twist And Shout was an indie classic. In terms of pure touristy stuff, the tour to the top of the Royal Liver Building is worth the trek, and not just for the views. Finally, of the various beer joints we ended up in, we can recommend copying our crawl around the Baltic Triangle, taking in Baltic Fleet, Black Lodge Brewing, Love Lane Brewery and the one-of-a-kind Hobo Kiosk.

Simian Substitute Site for May 2024: Maypole Monkey Gnome Ceramic Ornament

MONTH END PROCESSING FOR APRIL 2024

Books: Evelyn Waugh penned these words: ‘Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.’ It is daunting to consider the sudden wave of disillusionment that must have swept over such a brilliant man and caused him to write such balls. Sorry, Jane Austen, but the award for Best Opening Lines Of Any Book Ever has to be passed on to David Niven, for the beginning of his 1971 memoir The Moon’s A Balloon. I'm a bit late to this one, I admit, but I was on a train looking for something to read and it was on offer for a quid on Google Play. It feels like the template for what we expect from celebrity autobiographies these days, a combination of gossipy chattiness and surprising frankness. There's no denying that Niven is great at anecdotes, and it feels churlish to complain that they're all about people - I was hoping for a bit more about the films he was in. I ploughed through the lengthy section on his wartime experiences, looking forward to a discussion of his first post-war job, the magnificent A Matter Of Life And Death: a film he literally dismisses in a single paragraph. It's possible his followup, Bring On The Empty Horses, may have more about the movies: let's see if Google Play knock that one down to a quid as well.

Food and Drink: Obviously you should never kick a gift horse in the bollocks, but I'm going to grumble about Virgin Experience Days in general and one in particular. Having been given a couple of these over the past year, I've started to feel sorry for the people who buy them as gifts, who are given limited information about what they're buying - it's only when the recipient has to redeem the vouchers that the catches become apparent. Let's take a look at, say, Countryside Break with Vineyard Tour and Wine Tasting at Chapel Down for Two: a voucher covering a combination of a night in a country hotel, followed by a morning's worth of fun stuff at one of Britain's best vineyards. And then you try to book the bugger. How busy is the hotel? It's frequently booked out for fancy weddings, so there are only limited weekends when they can take you. Is the hotel near the vineyard? No, it's about four miles away. Can you get a bus? They're massively infrequent and slow. Can you get a taxi? The number of cabs in the village appears to be in single figures, and you need to book them a week or more in advance. Can you drive there? Even if we could, let me point you at the words Wine Tasting in the event title. Quite a few of Virgin's offerings seem to involve getting two unconnected things, packaging them together, and leaving it to the recipient to sort out the nearly impossible logistics of co-ordinating the pair. Having said that, the Chapel Down tour is absolutely delightful and worth doing on its own, but maybe make your own arrangements for getting there.

Music: Probably time for another one of these. YouTube links included for the non-Spotifiers among you.
1. Whenever Ringo Shiina has a new album on the way, you can always count on its first single to be something that stops you dead in your tracks. No denying that she's done that again.
2. I'm liking Lucy Rose's singles when they turn up on the radio, but find a whole album of what she does a bit too much. Those singles, though...
3. It’d be unfair to describe Norman Pain's contribution to the Sindhu Sesh series as a suicide note you can dance to, because you can’t really dance to it.
4. Not really familiar with Anna Erhard before now, but her satirical takedown of Arseholes On TripAdvisor has a jolly Wet Leggish energy to it. Hey, remember them?
5. "Hi, I'm Shabaka Hutchings, and I've decided to give up the saxophone I'm world famous for and just play Japanese flutes now." That's a hell of a career move.
6. Tom Cardy's track is the only one on this playlist that wasn't released this year, but I've always been a sucker for a song that tells a story.
7. For Caroline Polachek, see Lucy Rose above.
8. I've only really known Chilly Gonzales before for his piano work, so I'm very much enjoying his Shabaka-like pivot to classical music criticism.
9. This Ed Harcourt song's been knocking around for years: a live version of it ended up on Pick Of The Year 2018. Now he's finally got around to recording it in a studio (and naming his new album after it).
10. And finally, Yard Act with the song that was my inevitable earworm during our visit to Chapel Down.

Simian Substitute Site for April 2024: Makake

MONTH END PROCESSING FOR MARCH 2024

Books: Back in the day I used to enjoy the Joel Morris and Jason Hazeley podcast Rule Of Three, in which they talked to guests about their favourite funny things and why they were funny. Morris’ new book, Be Funny Or Die: How Comedy Works And Why It Matters, scratches a similar itch – and doubly so if you listen to him reading the audiobook version. It’s a comprehensive study of the science, psychology and ethics of humour, and is smart enough to know how dangerous a task that is. In an early highlight, Morris takes Ken Dodd’s famous line about the futility of analysing comedy – the one about how Freud never had to play Glasgow Empire on a Friday night – and analyses how Dodd himself tweaked its wording over a couple of decades to suit his audience. I’m only a short way into the book so far, but enjoying it a lot.

Music: Max Richter’s managed to get a lot of mileage out of his eight hour composition Sleep. We’ve had an edited version that fits on a single CD, numerous remixes (both dancey and ambient), and an arrangement for solo piano. In March we also got 90 Minutes Of Sleep, the premiere of an audio-visual presentation designed for IMAX cinemas. The audio part is a 90 minute edit of the piece, lovingly remixed for a 12.2 IMAX sound system - the subtle subsonic pulse running throughout several sections is something I'd never really noticed before. As for the visuals, it's topped and tailed with fairly straightforward performance footage. But the bulk of the film is a lovely piece of large-scale animation, a series of night sky views that subtly change with the ebbs and flows of the music, making it a completely immersive experience. Curiously, the animator is only named in a throwaway credit right at the end, and I've not been able to find out their name from anywhere else, which is massively frustrating. Hopefully it'll get more screenings where credit will be given where it's due.

Telly: Continuing our project of investigating Taskmasters Of Many Lands, here’s one you can all play at home if you live in the UK. Channel 4’s streaming service, as well as the OG British version, can also give you access to Taskmaster New Zealand and Taskmaster Sweden – or Bäst i Test, to give the latter its proper title. And for someone who's comparing one version of the show with another, the Swedes appear to have gone completely off track. On the surface, there's the novelty value of our first female Taskmaster, Babben Larsson, assisted by David Sundin. But there's a completely different set! There are only four regular contestants, with a series of rotating guests in the fifth slot! The team tasks only use two teams of two! The prize task prizes are presented on video like it's Sale Of The Frickin' Century or something! It's not even apparent until the final episode of the series that there's going to be a big prize for the overall winner! Nevertheless, the basic structure is stlll there, and there's a fun mix of classic tasks and brand new ones. Series 1 is only four episodes long if you just want to dip your toe in - based on that, I'm happy to give series 2 a go.

Simian Substitute Site for March 2024: Monkey Man

MONTH END PROCESSING FOR FEBRUARY 2024

Books: What with taking breaks over the Christmas holiday and so on, it's taken us the best part of two months to get through the audiobook of Wilding. So how about something a bit fluffier to follow up, I said? Maybe a stand-up comedian's autobiography? It turns out I'm a bad judge of fluffiness. Strong Female Character - which we're listening to on our Spotify account because the audiobook is hellaciously expensive - is Fern Brady's retelling of her life, from her unhappy childhood through her unhappy time at university to the point where she found out it was autism that was making her unhappy. It's an extraordinary first-person account of what autism is like, viewed from a detached perspective that she obviously didn't have at the time she was growing up - a constant feeling that everyone else is working from a rule book that you don't have access to. If you're expecting lots of big laughs, you're going to be disappointed: there's plenty of humour in the book, but it's there primarily to stop her story becoming relentlessly depressing. The audiobook gains quite a bit, I suspect, from Brady's own narration: if nothing else, it's the best way to experience her impersonation of a boyfriend who liked singing along to the film Koyaanisqatsi. But maybe something a bit fluffier next time?

Music: After complaining last month about the lack of new music to start off 2024, I'm happy to report that things got better in February. YouTube links below, Spotify playlist below that.

1. Six years after we first encountered him on his home turf of Estonia, we finally got to see Noep live for a second time when he came to London for a one-off show. He’s a lot dancier these days, as this new single shows. Fun video, too.
2. Ed Harcourt will always be greeted warmly around these parts, as regular readers will know.
3. As will Ruth Theodore, who appears to be over her health scare from a couple of years ago and settling in nicely on Ani DiFranco's record label Righteous Babe.
4. For some reason, I've never been that impressed by Super Furry Animals, but the solo work of their singer Gruff Rhys has always worked better for me.
5. Conversely, I'm not entirely sure about The Smile, to be honest: the few things I’ve liked of theirs have been the ones that are basically Radiohead songs, like this version of Pyramid Song with a couple of the notes swapped around.
6. Yes, of course the new Pet Shop Boys single is here.
7. I lost track of Little Simz around the end of 2022, when she released an album in the last week of the year after I'd already made my choices for the Pick Of The Year CD. Yes, I'm afraid that my listening habits are that rigidly arranged around the calendar. Release something in February like she's done here, and you have my full attention.
8. Still not quite worked out yet what Yard Act are up to in their current incarnation. The album's out today, so maybe I'll find out.
9. Good to see Joe Gideon out and about again: the last time I saw him was in January 2020 at the launch gig for his Armagideon album, shortly after which the entire world was shut down. I’m sure it wasn’t his fault.
10. The original version of the Ash album Race The Night had its most rifftastic track and that track’s instrumental coda separated by five other songs. It seems a bit cheeky that for the extended version of the album, they’ve just glued those two parts together and treated it as a bonus track. Rocks like a bastard, though.

Theatre: I saw Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker in Plaza Suite in the West End recently, and as a serious theatregoer I made sure to tut loudly when both stars got a round of applause for merely walking onto the stage. They may well do that sort of nonsense on Broadway, but we don't do it here, I thought. And then literally two nights later, I saw a new play that had been deliberately constructed so that all seven of its principal characters each got their own big entrance with blatant cues for applause. That play was Drop The Dead Donkey: The Reawakening!, bringing the cast of the TV show back together again after a quarter of a century, so I guess we'll let them off this time. Original writers Andy Hamilton and Guy Jenkin are also on board, and they've brought the Globelink News crew up to date in an efficient manner, as they each discover that they've been hired to work on a new startup news service that's a little too careless with its use of algorithmically generated content. All the regular cast settle into their roles like they've never been away, and the result is so much more than a simple cash-in on a known telly show - it's a raucously funny night out in its own right. It's touring the UK for several months now, having started back in February at London's Richmond Theatre, and heading back there at the end of the tour in June.

Simian Substitute Site for February 2024: Happy Valentine's Day, (Curious) George!

MONTH END PROCESSING FOR JANUARY 2024

Food and Drink: In all the fuss - such as it was - about this site having its quarter-century birthday last year, we never really thought about its little sister that turned five at the same time. Which is silly, really, because The Bermondsey Beer Mile is easily racking up thirty times as many hits as this place, and close on one hundred times as many on Saturdays. In case you weren't aware of it, back in 2018 The Belated Birthday Girl and I put together an unofficial fan site for London's trendiest trail of small breweries, describing the bars you'd find along the way and what to expect from each one. There were plenty of web pages that described what the Mile was like at the time the page was written: but we were the only site that promised to update details when new bars opened or old ones closed down, and we were also the only site to map out the route to take. Since then, whenever we've visited the Mile ourselves, we've been amused to see people literally using our work on their phones to navigate. After a year or so where we haven't done much to update the site - we had an excuse, you know - we've just brought it up to date with the latest collection of openings and closings, noting along the way that 2023 was a volatile year for small breweries. On that topic, late last year we were interviewed by news site The London Spy for an article on the current state of the Mile. We're happy with the quotes they used, but amused by one bit where the initials of the Bermondsey Beer Mile and The Belated Birthday Girl get a little confused...

Music: Some years, January becomes the time when record companies suddenly put out tons of new music that they've been saving up, and you think 'yeah, this could be an interesting twelve months'. Other years, there's no new stuff out there worth mentioning, and you find yourself idly picking though your old CDs for things you haven't played for yonks. 2024 seems to be one of the latter. That's why this month's Audio Lair playlist is full of deep cuts from the likes of Mott The Hoople, Hurrah!, Richard Hawley, Jim Bob, GoGo Penguin, Simon Love, C.W. Stoneking, Jarvis Cocker, Judy & Mary and Magazine. None of these are songs I'd thought about much for years, and in some cases decades. There were a few surprises in store - for example, finding that racial slur in the second verse of All The Way From Memphis a lot more problematic than I did back in 1973 - but it's nice to hear them all again. See if you feel the same way.

Music bonus: It's February 1st, so it must be time to announce that Dave's won another competition. On Christmas Day last year, the no-longer-a-surprise drop of Kiss Me While The World Decays: Pick Of The Year 2o23 was accompanied by the inevitable contest to win a copy of the CD. The question concerned the ancient rapping duo Pete & Bas, and required you to tell me the title of Bas' solo album. What's the catch? All you need to do is find out Bas' full name and you're just a Google search away. Unfortunately, most official sources - from the BBC up to Wikipedia - will tell you he's called Basil Bellgrave, and that's a fib. A man with Bas' past needs to use a fake name so people can't tell what he's been up to, and that's what's happened here. As uncovered by some internet detectives on Reddit, his real name is Basil Preuveneers (although he's the director of a company called 81 Belgrave Road Management, which may explain his choice of pseudonym). Bas is a semi-retired notary public who's stepping back from his business to pursue 'a love of music,' according to their website. He certainly had a history of musical achievement before his retirement, and now he's progressed to being one of the best-dressed rappers in the UK. But that's not all: in 2022 he recorded a solo piano album under his real name, allowing him to use the title... Preuven Classics Vol. 1. If you'd clicked on the right link in the Peter Gabriel paragraph on the competition page, you'd have found yourself in Bas' notary website, from which you could have got his real name and traced it all along from there. Dave possibly took a more scenic route to the answer, but nevertheless had it all wrapped up by 2.54pm on Christmas Day. So well done to him yet again, and apologies to his family for keeping him away from another Christmas dinner. As for the rest of you losers, you could probably do with some nice music to console yourselves...

Simian Substitute Site for January 2024: Monkey Run

MONTH END PROCESSING FOR DECEMBER 2023

Books: One of my favourite gags by the comedian Andrew O’Neill is based around the social media pastime of sharing deliberately unpopular opinions. Whereas most other people’s opinions are weak sauce like ‘The Matrix Reloaded is just as good as the first one,’ Andrew goes in hard with ‘AGRICULTURE WAS A MISTAKE.’ It’s the gargantuan leap of scale that makes it such a fabulous joke, along with the slight twinge you get when you wonder: what if it's true? What has our insistence on generating as much food as possible done to the rest of the planet’s ecosystem? It’s a question that’s come to mind as we’ve been listening to the audiobook of Wilding by Isabella Tree. As owner of the Knepp estate in West Sussex with her husband Charlie Burrell, they tried and failed to make it work as profitable farmland. So they decided to go in the other direction – letting the land grow wild, and adding free-roaming animals into the mix. Wilding is Tree’s retelling of the story of how this experiment progressed over the space of a couple of decades – and if the bare bones of the story sound familiar to you, it may be because The Belated Birthday Girl saw a documentary based on the book at the LFF a couple of months ago. She’s enjoying the book because it fills in the detail that a 75 minute film has to leave out. For me, it’s a terrific piece of storytelling: Tree (who narrates the audiobook herself) lays out the details of how they managed their project in an admirably clear fashion, making it more of a story and less of an agricultural stocktaking exercise.

Music: We’ve already celebrated the triumph of The BBG’s 2023 Undiscovered Gigs project, where the plan was to see twelve live shows by people we knew nothing about beforehand. But it’s worth spending a little more time talking about the 13th show on that list, where we didn’t know where the venue was until the day before, and didn’t even know the names of the people on the bill until we were in the building. Welcome to the slightly unnerving world of Sofar Sounds. Since 2009, they’ve been building a community of performers and gig-goers, bringing the two together in a series of secret-ish shows where the audience has to trust completely in the curation process. All you’re told at the time you buy the ticket is the approximate location and the type of venue you’ll be in – it could be anything from an already established performance space to sitting on the floor in someone’s living room. All other information on the show is subsequently dripfed to you on a need-to-know basis. For our first one, we played it safe and went for a venue-type venue in the Barbican area, which turned out to be Piano Smithfield. All three of the acts we saw that night - Jeanie White, Okiem and Jackson Rouse - were excellent: it’s possible that if we’d encountered Jackson Rouse before I’d locked down the track listing for POTY 2023, his single Wash My Hands might have ended up on there. We may have to do this again, possibly somewhere where we’re expected to bring our own cushion to sit on.

Theatre: Christmas is very much a time for certain types of theatrical experiences, and though we didn’t get around to seeing a panto this year, we did at least manage a family show with puppets and a performance of The Nutcracker. To be honest, we really should have caught up with My Neighbour Totoro during its first run at the Barbican last year, but were too slow off the mark: we were better prepared for the show's return visit, now running till March 23rd. It seems like an impossible task to take the wild fantasy of Hayao Miyazaki's animated classic and reproduce it theatrically, but director Phelim McDermott has form in making the improbable happen on stage, and his team rise to the challenge spectacularly. Crucially, this adaptation maintains your attention even during the long stretch in act two that doesn't involve puppets. As for Nutcracker, it's safe to say that this isn’t anything like the Russian State Ballet of Siberia’s traditional version we saw in Cardiff five Chrismasses ago: the cheeky tone's set very early on when a TV set can be heard playing the old Frank Muir Fruit & Nut advert. They've converted the former Spiritland bar on the ground floor of the Southbank Centre into a lovely popup venue called The Tuff Nut Jazz Club, where a cast of six dancers (choreographed by Drew McOnie) kinda sorta retell the story of the Nutcracker, to a jazz rearrangement of Tchaikovsky’s music by Cassie Kinoshi. It's all compressed into a ridiculously entertaining hour that's incredibly camp but somehow never cheesy with it. And after some performances you get the bonus of Nutcracker Nights, where guest artists convert the room into a proper jazz club. It's running till January 6th, so you've still got a few days if you missed it.

Simian Substitute Site for December 2023: Sea Monkey Christmas

MONTH END PROCESSING FOR NOVEMBER 2023

Books: Let’s make this clear up front: there are two books out there called Topographia Hibernica, and the one you want is the new one. The old one was written by Gerald of Wales in the 12th century as anti-Irish propaganda, describing the people as savage ignorant brutes and thus ripe for colonisation by the Brits. It's the sort of Irish lore that Blindboy Boatclub often raves about in his podcast, which is why he's reappropriated its title for his third collection of short stories. This particular Topographia Hibernica is a huge step forward from Blindboy's earlier books, although the stories still fall into two broad categories: dark character studies with a surreal twist, and slabs of dystopian grimness. The grim ones are still grim, but now they feel less like an author being a bastard to his characters, and more like organically formed tragedies: podcast listeners will work out fairly soon that one of the saddest ones, The Cat Piss Astronaut, is taken from an incident in Blindboy's own life that he's talked about before. But when he throws his surreal humour into the mix, the results are like nothing else out there - whether it's the visual image at the heart of The Donkey distracting you from what the story's really about, or the way the macho posturing in I'll Give You Barcelona ultimately resolves itself. It's the first time he's had a book published over this side of the Irish Sea, and hopefully we're going to get more.

Comedy: Blindboy’s got a successful podcast, sure, but he’s got a long way to go before he can pull down the numbers of Off Menu. The simplicity of its premise probably helps – Ed Gamble and James Acaster interview a celebrity about their dream meal – but the sheer variety of the responses they get to that question is what keeps fans coming back week after week. And, I guess, also has them packing out theatres during their just completed run of touring live shows. We caught them during a weekend in Brighton, and given that the live show guests have been locals, I was hoping that at some point we’d be treated to a shout of “POPPADOMS OR BREAD? POPPADOMS OR BREAD, NICK CAVE? POPPADOMS OR BREAD?” Not to be, sadly, but Joe Wilkinson proved a fine alternative, and was a perfect illustration of what makes this work as a live format: the audience, cheering on his basic bitch dinner of chicken Kievs, chips and peas, but turning on him when he announced that cheap Kievs were just as good as expensive ones if you overcooked them enough. All the live shows have been recorded, so if you follow Off Menu's podcast feed you should get to hear it eventually. (In the meantime, our own food recommendations from our Brighton weekend would have to include the fabulous Asian vegan nosh at Bonsai Plant Kitchen, and the combination of bao buns and brilliant beer on offer at The Pond. We didn't have the pizza at Dead Wax Social, but it's a fabulously unpretentious place for drinking and dancing, so we'll recommend it anyway.)

Music: Max Champion wrote and performed dozens of lightly comical songs on the London stage at the start of the 20th century, but until the recent release of the album What A Racket! you couldn’t have heard any of them. There’s a good reason for that: Max Champion never existed, and neither did his songs. What we have here is Joe Jackson – yeah, that Joe Jackson – writing and recording eleven pastiche music hall songs from scratch, and putting together a short film full of tremendously subtle horseshit to persuade the gullible that they’re the real thing. Given all the genres of music Jackson has experimented with since his debut in 1979, it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that he’s found another one. What is a surprise is how much fun it all is. Despite Jackson's hints that Max is somehow ‘speaking from his London of the early 20th century, directly to us in the early 21st’, that angle’s never pushed too hard. Everything just feels right for the period – the cheeky humour, the laments for the lot of the working man, and the odd bit of sentimentality where you least expect it. And thankfully Jackson still has an ear for a solid tune and a quirky arrangement, so it all works musically as well. Observe: