I never see much point in writing a blog post for Christmas Day - I'm sure you've all got far better things to do with your time than read my inane ramblings. Still, I would like to thank you all for putting up with this drivel for another year. You're a very special bunch. I hope you have the Christmas you deserve.
Here are some Christmas songs I'm not yet sick of, starting with Rhett Miller's band, The Old 97s, who made a surprising guest appearance in last year's Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special on Disney+.
If you act nicely through the night And don't jump on your bed Santa comes with sugar plums And hurls them at your head
But if you're on his naughty list He shoots missiles at your toes He might just roast your chestnuts With his powerful flamethrower
They also do a song with Kevin Bacon, because who wouldn't want to do a song with Kevin Bacon if they got the chance?
BBC Radio Scotland DJ Ian Anderson plays Australian songwriter Paul Kelly's How To Make Gravy every year at this time. It's about a convict writing a letter home to his family at Christmas and it's become a firm favourite.
Now here's his Bobness with his madcap cover of Mitch Miller's festive tune from 1960...
Andy Burrows & Tom Smith made one of my favourite Christmas albums in 2011. The post-relevant NME gave it 1/10 which makes it a winner in my book.
Finally, the best Christmas song ever written by The Handsome Family...
A Swift one today as I imagine you'll all be busy with last minute shopping, wrapping, basting and pre-drinking. Who are the ten musical people below and what connects their songs?
10. Truck that took the late James Broad's indie power-pop band to gigs.
9. If we have a White Christmas, these ladies will have no problem getting around.
8. Go ahead, punk, make my day by giving me something that is helpful or beneficial.
7. Someone's sneaking round the corner. Could it be Mack...?
I blame it all on Wet Leg. Since they conquered the world from their Chaise Longue in 2021, "indie" girl bands have become much more exciting than "indie" boy bands. To be fair, with a few noteworthy exceptions, the lads have been pretty dull for a decade or so - the "Landfill indie" movement of the early noughties was mostly a masculine affair, so good on the ladies for stepping up to show the lads how it should be done.
Today, it seems like we finally have an equal gender playing field when it comes to making noisy guitar music. Makes you realise what outliers and pioneers the likes of Debbie Harry and Chrissie Hynde really were. Here are some of my favourite songs made by noisy young women his year...
Let's start with a band I've already seen crop up on a few other End of Year lists... which almost makes me feel like I have my finger on my pulse. English Teacher initially came to my attention because they'd chosen to name themselves after me. How could I not listen to their records? If you are thinking of starting a band next year, can I suggest calling yourself Failed Writer or Shit Fashion Sense or Miserable Bastard? I'll be there in the front row.
Even better, Lily Fontaine, who fronts English Teacher, was born in Huddersfield. Putting her right up there with Jodie Whittaker and James Mason in my estimation.
This is the best thing English Teacher put out this year. I have high hopes for their imminent LP.
7ebra are Inez and Ella Johannson, 25-year-old twin sisters from Malmö, Sweden. They're the point of the Venn diagram where Wet Leg overlap with First Aid Kit. I Have A Lot To Say is one of the best songs I've heard all year. That the rest of their debut album couldn't quite live up to it isn't really their fault. Sometimes you write a song that's so good, nothing else can come close.
Skipping across to Germany now, where we meet the charming Ms. Anna Erhard...
From Abba to Nena to Vanessa Paradis, there's definitely something about women who sing with European accents. I think it taps into the mythical "Exchange Student" fantasies that we had as teenagers. Not that I remember ever meeting an exchange student. And if I had, I wouldn't have dared talk to them.
Anyway, Anna Erhard writes songs about campsites and picnics and guest rooms and idiots - everyday things from an idiosyncratic point of view. She's only released one song this year (the one above is from her 2022 album), but it was enough to make me grin for at least three minutes and fifteen seconds...
The Beaches come from Toronto. They're not exactly a new band as I'm pretty sure I remember listening to their debut LP in 2017. It's taken the six years to release a follow up, but, y'know, the world did rather fall apart during that time.
They also win the My Top Ten award for best inspirational slogan of 2023...
Those guys are just the tip of the iceberg though. Lately, every time I switch on the tube of you, I find it's recommending me an exciting new female fronted rock 'n' roll band. Blame the algorithms. (Steve For The Deaf has also been responsible for alerting me to many of these.)
They're a little bit goth and a little bit Kate Bush but they can also rock it out like the kids used to do before they discovered drum machines. I also think they may be familiar with the work of Jim Steinman.
Over the past few months, The Last Dinner Party have swiftly become darlings of the cognoscenti, to the point where it almost feels like I should be rebelling against them, because it's never cool to like what the cool kids are telling you to like. But as long as they keep delivering singles like this one... I can't help but be swept along with the crowd.
Nothing too heavy or existential for our final Cynical Self-Help post of 2023, though it is about something our brain does, and I imagine it's something we all experience from time to time... probably with greater frequency as time goes by.
You go upstairs to get something from the bedroom. By the time you reach the bedroom, you can't recall for the life of you what it is you want or why you came upstairs in the first place.
It doesn't have to be upstairs - it can be as simple as going from the lounge into the kitchen. Or even opening the fridge door. Why did I come here? What did I want?
For a long time, I believed this frustrating phenomenon was the result of advancing years. Then again, considering that it's been happening for as long as I can remember (although, as we've just discussed, "as long as I can remember" is a relative term), I've long worried my years actually started advancing at a very early age.
Turns out it's nothing to do with old age at all though... it's what scientists call The Doorway Effect. A series of experiments by Gabriel A. Radvansky and David E. Copeland which commenced in 2006 concluded that...
Memory was worse after passing through a doorway than after walking the same distance within a single room.
One explanation for this effect is down to what neuroscientists call episodic memory...
Episodic memory involves the ability to learn, store, and retrieve information about unique personal experiences that occur in daily life. These memories typically include information about the time and place of an event, as well as detailed information about the event itself.
Simply put: if you have a thought in one room, then try to carry that thought to another room, it becomes harder to remember. You wouldn't have forgotten what it was you were looking for if you'd stayed in the room where you first realised you'd lost it. Of course, that causes something of an issue when it comes to looking for them...
Louise gets very frustrated when she asks me to do a job, or add an item to the shopping list, and the first thing I do is run for a notepad to write it down.
"Why can't you remember?"
At last - I have an answer to that question! But will I be able to remember it when I go downstairs to tell her?
Another potential explanation for the doorway effect involves a slightly more complex understanding of how our brains are organised. BBC Science expounds...
As we move through our days, our attention shifts between [different levels of thinking] – from our goals and ambitions, to plans and strategies, and to the lowest levels, our concrete actions.
That's a clumsy generalisation of the different levels of thinking, but the fact is that our brain switches effortlessly between these different levels throughout the day. That's why we can drive home some days without thinking about the journey (or the mechanical process of changing gear or swapping pedals) at all. Other days though, our thoughts might be dominated by those things - if traffic is bad or our car is making a strange noise.
The way our attention moves up and down the hierarchy of action is what allows us to carry out complex behaviours, stitching together a coherent plan over multiple moments, in multiple places or requiring multiple actions.
They liken this to the old metaphor of spinning plates... but every so often, a plate falls and we can't remember what we're doing or why we're doing it.
Our memories, even for our goals, are embedded in webs of associations. That can be the physical environment in which we form them, which is why revisiting our childhood home can bring back a flood of previously forgotten memories, or it can be the mental environment – the set of things we were just thinking about when that thing popped into mind.
The Doorway Effect occurs because we change both the physical and mental environments, moving to a different room and thinking about different things. That hastily thought up goal, which was probably only one plate among the many we’re trying to spin, gets forgotten when the context changes.
If you want to remember more - stay exactly where you are! (Sidebar: would I have done better in my GCSEs if I'd done all my revision in the hall where I eventually sat the exam?)
No. This is the frustration we feel when we leave a room after an argument or contentious conversation and - too late! - come up with the pithy reply or put-down we should have used at the time. I'm kicking myself I didn't say...
A fire officer came to visit our workplace last week. When he looked at our fire plan, he complained that it wasn't a procedure, it was just a series of actions. I wish I'd thought to hand him a dictionary and ask him to look up the actual definition of "procedure". Too late now...
