For days, my online feeds have been drowned in conversation about (excitement for) this gig. I move in 6Music Dad-ish circles, I guess, more than I like to admit. I can’t remember so much focus thrown onto one specific local cultural event, not for a long time.

We weren’t ever planning to go. Flaming Lips were already onstage by the time our flight touched ground at Gatwick and, though we could hear Bad Seeds wafting over the air as we stumbled down the hill from Brighton station towards home, we were too knackered to be much bothered. Not even when Kylie showed up.

I’m more of an occasional admirer of Cave’s work than a proper fan. Of course his catalogue (including his recent catalogue) has powerful gems. But when I was young, I didn’t take to his melodrama. At Reading 1992, I was impatiently waiting for Kurt Cobain, rather than soaking up the main support. And you can imagine, I find his more unreconstructed anti-woke type pronouncements disheartening. In an odd way, including musically, these days I sort of put him in the same box as Rod Stewart. Like: a sometimes thrilling reprobate rocknroll youth, turned comfortable, small-c conservative-leaning, schmaltzy balladeer. That’s harsh but you get my drift. As time’s gone by, Cave and the establishment have curved and mellowed to meet in the middle. Though, I mean, he’s got some killer songs, no denying.

Late last year I did review (mostly positively) the Bad Seeds concert album Live God for The Quietus but here and now, what I’m more intrigued by is the unprecedented peripheral hoo-ha that’s swirled outwards, beyond the boundaries of the concert itself, connecting artist to city.

This has been an exercise in consolidating localised affection, by and for an artist already deeply beloved and treasured here, beyond what one might call his ‘natural’ fanbase. The gig was sold predominantly on its hometown one-off status, which it is, regionally, though it also sits at the top of a solid European summer run of similar open air headlines and festivals. That they took a touring project and successfully generated a sense of the ‘true local event’ was super-smart strategy.

Brighton Pride runs Saturday and Sunday, so Team Cave was able to buy onto the same physical and administrative event infrastructure already built, annually, in Preston Park, for the Friday night. It must have been much cheaper and less complex than building a small one day festival set-up from scratch. Whoever came up with that initial kernel of when and where to locate the concert deserves their flowers.

Someone joked online that it was nice of Pride organisers to add a ‘straight day’.

The support bill was also more like a bona fide festival afternoon than a band’s one-off hometown jam. I imagine Team Cave could’ve easily gotten away with just a couple of supports (a newbie and one reasonable name). Instead, along came Flaming Lips, who still ought to be big and beloved enough themselves to headline stages of this size across the UK. For some reason, this summer, Flaming Lips seem to have done a few slots where one thinks: how are they this low down this bill? Preston Park isn’t one of those, but it’s still interesting that such a prop-heavy ‘big stage oriented’ band were happy to play second fiddle. There are a fair few comments in local feeds this morning arguing Flaming Lips stole the show. I saw some alt-rock mates really arguing about it. True or not, it was an audacious decision to have them play. The crowd also got English Teacher, Cate Le Bon and Warmduscher.

Then, so much additional faff around the event. It reminds me of when a global music behemoth rolls into a town. Nick Cave isn’t a Beyoncé, Swift or Coldplay, really, he’s not even as mainstream famous as the biggest artists headlining Pride over the next couple of days (Raye and Diana Ross, with Jessie J, Self Esteem, Paris Hilton and DJ sets from Ru Paul and Mel C). But none of them have put together exclusive merch pop-ups around town, or cinema tie-ins. Team Cave made the effort.

Even before his surprise balcony appearance on the North Laine in the afternoon, the merch takeover at Resident Records and its hectic queues to grab exclusive items were guaranteed to focus attention. Apparently, organisers forgot to warn the iconic antique shop opposite, Snoopers Paradise, which had shoppers suddenly stuck inside (and obviously nobody able to get in). This made it into The Guardian but the shop has been very nice about it. PR overwhelmingly positive, hundreds squeezed down Kensington Gardens to watch a four song acoustic set and some dicking about. I suspect, had our flight been earlier, we might’ve got a quiet heads up about this surprise and toddled along, since our pal Tim was filming it for BBC News from an adjacent rooftop.

Cave even recorded a welcome announcement that they used over the tannoys at Brighton railway station.

He’s a long term patron of The Duke Of York’s cinema, a ten minute walk from Preston Park (actually directly on the route out of town towards the gig). So over the weekend it is screening a lineup of five films that he’s selected, with his own filmed introduction to each one. This includes Irreversible, Gaspar Noé’s controversial 2002 rape revenge fantasy, though amidst the hubbub of enthusiasm, I saw only a tiny amount of discussion about that. It also includes Pinocchio.

So, the show. For a lot of people, it was gig for the ages. The breathless enthusiasm of the reinvigorated fan, the blown away neutral, is very widespread in the aftermath, which is the exact social, organic outcome Team Cave would’ve hoped for.

Local media website Sussex News published a dissenting bad review of the gig, however in the face of such wild public acclaim, the (weirdly unnamed) writer makes basic tactical mistakes that undermine their intent. First, they moan that they had photo access revoked. Mentioning this when you’re about to diss a show just makes you look spiteful, like it’s the reason you might be being negative. Then the critic spends a paragraph complaining that the VIP area didn’t add enough ‘VIP’ value to be worth it. I didn’t know there was a VIP area but that’s the modern way. Yuck. The comments section beneath the review doesn’t hold back: ferocious, near universal condemnation of the writer. Maybe that’s why they stayed anonymous.

Finally, you get the pindrop perfect Insta moment climax, as Kylie appears for the murder ballad duet, ‘Where The Wild Roses Grow’. By all accounts she gets the biggest cheers of the night. Susie Cave, Nick’s other half, designed the dress she wore. Kylie headlined this same stage for Pride back in 2019 and the Clash magazine reviewer reckons it’s been even longer since they sang together — it’s the first time since 2018. A surefire win, even for folks who don’t know more than two or three songs by this artist and by that point were running out of steam.

At some point mid-evening we’d left the house for the Co-op, in search of bread and eggs, and by that point there was definitely a steady, not insignificant, flow of people leaving Preston Park. I bet there’s a few kicking themselves that they missed Minogue.

My Instagram feeds quickly filled with blurry photos and thrilled comments, often photos of the big screen rather than the actual stage.

A hate tip to Sarah Mann on Facebook, for pointing out today that, as Cave sang ‘The Mercy Seat’, he was the same age, 68, as Johnny Cash was when he recorded his cover of it.

Between the Kylie moment and the North Laine balcony, offstage Cave did what he does onstage. He pulled out all the stops to retain kinship with / Kingship of the town he called home for so long. A remarkable marketing job.

icymi —

• BBC Sessions at Maida Vale are no more. A sad day, though at least the legendary studios will still be used for music, since they’re now owned by Hans Zimmer’s group. This BBC6Music ‘Morning Session’ Maida Vale Special with Steve Lamacq and Felix White is worth a listen.

• Some corners of the music snob internet have tantrumed hard that I used the p-word (‘punk’, that is) in my review for The Quietus of the new Charli XCX album Music, Fashion Film. Obviously I stand by every word.

• Michael Hann wrote an interesting essay about both albums from last week, The Strokes and Charli XCX, which I got so excited about that I commented on it.

• Victoria Marie Holmes writes brilliantly for The Zine UK, demolishing Boy George’s genocide denial song, ‘We Will Dance Again’. She goes line by line and it’s a tour-de-force, which as a bi-product also relieved me of the feeling that I ought to write about it.

• Conor Oberst on good form on Popcast

• Ben Folds testifies before the House/Senate Oversight hearing on the Kennedy Center

Thankyou for reading, it means a lot.

Email me: chris@christt.com

Get a creativity consultation with me

Subscribe to Border Crossing: twice a month, an email zine from the frayed edges of culture

Buy 20 year old Chris T-T LPs on vinyl for the first time: 9 Red Songs and London Is Sinking

Buy the new Tom Williams LP Out Of Nowhere produced by me

Listen to Refigure the bitesize arts review podcast I make with Rifa.

In September, Water From Your Eyes guitarist Amos releases the second proper album (and first for Matador) from his solo project, This Is Lorelei. It’s called The Singer in My Band and first single ‘Billy Came Back’ was released last month. It rollicks along and tells a great story. Later in autumn the tour comes to the UK and I won’t be missing it.

Amos can pivot from gravelly, poetic, stream-of-consciousness vibes to a gentler, plaintive tenor, and he’s comfy with a complex narrative. Yet, despite the live band alt-rock grounding, he’s also not scared to slam in layers of sample-y synth-y augmentation on tape, nor to overdrive the autotune on his vocal for effect, eyes open to the Brat paradigm (check out the gorgeous, driving ‘Dancing In The Club’, which does both).

He grew up in rural Vermont, in a bluegrass musical family, before forming the experimental, Ween-influenced Water From Your Eyes with Rachel Brown in Chicago, about a decade ago. It’s effectively a duo, augmented to a live quartet. They’ve made five or six records, steadily rising in cult popularity, done some decent touring, including internationally. This is where Amos leaned into his production chops, as well as his artist chops.

[Sidebar: thinking about Geese also carrying influence from Ween, I briefly ponder if this New Visceral alt-rock era will include a Ween revival over the next year or two.]

In the right mood, Nate Amos can come off like The National’s petulant Gen Z nephew. In a good way.

For context: just one-and-a-bit albums in, This Is Lorelei songs have been covered by folks including Waxahatchee, Cameron Winter, Tim Heidecker and MJ Lenderman. His peers are devoted, to the extent that they even released a deluxe version of his 2024 debut LP Box for Buddy, Box for Star comprising other artists performing the songs.

Around this time last year, when we first encountered This Is Lorelei live, Amos had released an interim record, Holo Boy, by re-taping a pile of his earlier tracks that had previously gone up on Bandcamp. You can feel the sense, in real time, of an artist realising he’s getting somewhere. Though I’m fine with bands living inside a counter-culture niche, I don’t want This Is Lorelei to remain an under-rated precious obscurity, I reckon he can be a giant, if he wants to. I can easily imagine the Lenderman / Winter axis becoming a triumvirate — with the heft of Matador behind him, this autumn This Is Lorelei could easily, easily mushroom into a global affair.

icymi —

• CMAT co-hosts with Annie MacManus on Sidetracked

• MJ Hibbett’s brilliant new musical podcast series Data And Doctor Doom, just in time for the movie. Yes, Hibbett is legit sharing his PHD thesis using the medium of musical comedy. He holds the world’s first ever PHD in ‘Doctor Doom’, for real

• Roxanne de Bastion’s new single ‘Simple Pleasures’ marks a sonic and image shift, though her arch observational wit is still there in spades. It’s a bop. Can’t wait for the album.

• Lenny Kaye on Fresh Air talking his lifelong collaboration with Patti Smith

• Charli XCX back on Tape Notes podcast with AG Cook and Finn Keane, talking Music, Fashion, Film

• Hansa Studios - By The Wall 1976-1990 documentary

• Yes, I loved both Phoebe Bridgers back-to-back TV performances on Fallon, they were gorgeous (annoyingly landing after I’d already written about the comeback single) but I’m not sharing any links, until Jimmy Fallon addresses his decision to platform and pander to Conor McGregor.

Thankyou for reading, it means a lot.

Email me: chris@christt.com

Get a creativity consultation with me

Subscribe to Border Crossing: twice a month, an email zine from the frayed edges of culture

Buy 20 year old Chris T-T LPs on vinyl for the first time: 9 Red Songs and London Is Sinking

Buy the new Tom Williams LP Out Of Nowhere produced by me

Listen to Refigure the bitesize arts review podcast I make with Rifa.

This time last year I’d been to Primavera Sound and Glastonbury, had intense adventures at both, yet in this half-year review I was moaning about a quality dip. This time around, I’ve barely engaged with new albums, my catch up list is still pages long, I haven’t been to any big festivals or gigs, yet it feels like a vintage year. Another reminder that really, how we interact with culture is drenched in our mood and mental state and it’s never remotely objective.

So, that being said, with loads still unheard, my favourite albums so far in 2026 are: My Precious Bunny — A Moment In My Eyes, Hen Ogledd’s DISCOMBOBULATED, Alex White’s pair of Invisible Man albums, the Drass LP On The Hill, and Charli XCX’s soundtrack for Wuthering Heights, though I didn’t watch the (by all accounts terrible) film. And yes, Olivia Rodrigo is up there too.

Actually, by far my favourite record this year is Adrianne Lenker’s triple vinyl cut-and-paste concert collection, Live At Revolution Hall, the album I stupidly queued for hours to buy on RSD when I could’ve just waited and bought it anywhere days later. Never again. However, it’s not a new studio album, and arguably not even a release from this year, since it came out on cassette and download in 2025. Only the gorgeous vinyl was released in 2026.

I’ve seen more gigs and it’s been especially good in the context of zero big festivals: I haven’t ordered my list yet but favourites include: Geese at Hammersmith, with remarkable support band Westside Cowboy high up there, Big Thief at Brixton, wonderful Brighton-based experimental songwriter Ceann Capaill at Folklore Rooms for Homegrown Festival in Brighton, and Manchester activist alt-rock singer Jasmine.4.t with her trio at The Albert for the same festival. I was blown away by White Magic For Lovers also in a trio format, had a blast when Frank Turner revisited his earliest acoustic stuff and, over in the more experimental niches, just couple of nights ago was overwhelmed by Midori Hirano performing her avant compositional electronica album Otonoma, Tomoko Sauvage playing her iconic custom built water bowls and Miki Yui doing her sound art project Transients, all in one night’s work at the outstanding (if squonkily scheduled) ‘Heroines Of Sound Festival’, at Radialsystem in Berlin. The intensely cool setting helped.

My favourite music performances onscreen include Lucy Dacus singing ‘Bread & Roses’ at Mamdani’s inauguration, Steve Morricone singing ‘It’s Not Easy Being Green’ live on Facebook after the by-election, Rosalía with Björk bringing ‘Berghain’ to the Brits, and Gwenifer Raymond getting her Tiny Desk and KEXP moments and nailing them.

I’ve ditched music videos altogether as a category — and I’m also listing my song obsessions but since those are chronological, I’ll leave that to the end of the year. I guess one question is: what are the non-obvious 2026 albums or tracks that I absolutely must listen to? If you have a suggestion, even if it’s already on my long list, I’ll jump them up a couple of places.

icymi —

• New Dinosaur Jr!

• Amelia Vandergast’s ‘The Guilt Trip’ is a brutal, fully evidenced piece for A&R Factory about the forces working against grassroots live music. Thanks Mark Davyd for sharing this. And speaking of Davyd…

• Mark Davyd of MVT makes his overall case to save grassroots live music for Andy Burnham. It’s a 10 point manifesto for government action.

• Matthew Sweet’s sweet, sad radio eulogy for Maida Vale Studios, as they’re sold off by the BBC to a group led by Hans Zimmer. A grateful hat tip to Alex Sarll for this one.

• Wednesday back on KEXP, taped in April.

• With his French accented voiceover, Loïc Prigent’s twenty minute ‘making of’ film for Charli XCX’s saucy ‘Wink Wink’ video serves the vibe of a classic Eurotrash segment. Allez! Salut maintenant!

• Outstanding new solo single from Lankum’s Radie Peat, ‘Still I Love Him’.

• Charlotte Ritchie presents Cosmic Shambles Network’s astonishingly high quality, funny yet ambitious, bootstrapped, independent, often quirkily off-kilter TV documentary series For The Record: An Incomplete History Of Music, which (unbelievably) you can just watch in full on YouTube. For about the first ten (slightly awkward) minutes I was thinking, uh, maybe this isn’t for me, then it gently settles into being one of the most comprehensive and consistently intriguing doc series I’ve watched. It’s hard to believe the range of voices on here.

• Dutch channel 3voor12 has screening rights to festivals such as Pink Pop and Best Kept Secret, so if you enjoy pro-shot live music shows onscreen beyond the normal UK channels, it’s worth keeping an eye on over summer.

• Tom Williams — ‘Who Needs Plans?’ the gorgeous missing song from his Out Of Nowhere album sessions. It’s me on piano.

Thankyou for reading, it means a lot.

Email me: chris@christt.com

Get a creativity consultation with me

Subscribe to Border Crossing: twice a month, an email zine from the frayed edges of culture

Buy 20 year old Chris T-T LPs on vinyl for the first time: 9 Red Songs and London Is Sinking


Buy the new Tom Williams LP Out Of Nowhere produced by me

Listen to Refigure the bitesize arts review podcast I make with Rifa.

• ‘Lost Boys’ by Phoebe Bridgers, the prodigal (always an) angel / (never a) god returns to save us all.

• Though she’s stepped up to working with the world’s A List pop producer, it’s fascinating how unerringly Phoebe it still sounds; that there hasn’t been a corporate (or artistic) decision made to consciously move her sound along, in one direction or another. It doesn’t sound especially Jack Antonoff.

• ‘Lost Boys’ and the coming album Lost Weekend arrive in the suddenly extra-long shadow of Olivia Rodrigo ‘bringing indie back’ and I wondered briefly if Phoebe might’ve accidentally been caught out — gone from defining a sonic palette of our age, to running frantically behind one, out-of-place. In real life, almost certainly not: she’s still out there on her own in enough ways to push through. There’s currently zero boygenius alum presence at Olivia’s Daisychain Fields all-woman fest, though I wonder if that’ll change as we get nearer the date.

• As with Punisher, and without putting me off the artist at all, the audio production is slightly too maximalist and cloudy for my taste. So much going on. The dynamic shifts aren’t enough so. I think the (very real) narrative and emotional heft of ‘Lost Boys’ will cut through better in live sessions, though those keep have loads of that maximalism on tape, anyway.

• On the other hand, I love love love that vocoder-ish effect early doors. Must learn how to make that sound properly.

• The boy joins the military, then a verse later…

That one time in East Berlin
When you threw a tantrum with a .57 and broke a rib
You told me you wish you were dead
But I don’t believe that
I still wonder how you’re sleeping
And I don’t feel bad, but I’m sorry

Wow. Pheebz’ storytelling so succinct at selling the singular, anecdotal example, then letting us expand it outwards towards greater meaning, rather than trying to carry all that workload herself and risk over-generalising.

But back to production —

• It’s easiest to imagine — and Tom pointed this before I’d pictured it — two distinct teams, Team Phoebe, and Team Business. Team Phoebe (hello Tony Berg and Alex G) gets quite a way in, before everything is shifted under the Antonoff umbrella.

• For example, Antonoff doesn’t get a co-writing credit here, though he’s all over the production, so the song itself was clearly fully structured and realised, probably quite a few bits tracked already, by Team Phoebe, before Antonoff gets on the knobs.

• Similarly, at the other end of the journey, Mike Mogis has sole mixing credit.

• Rob Moose on hand for string arrangement.

• Both other Boy Geniuses onboard, singing.

• I do hope we get a SongExploder or Tape Notes or similar, for some of the gory details.

• A sublime lyric aside, the video might be the best aspect of the package. It’s a beautifully shot, thoughtful storyline and gives flowers to Ren Faire culture (here’s the Wiki for confused Brits).

• Emily Spinach just wrote a terrific Substack essay on the video, focusing on its use of medievalism as play and escape.

• An absence is Matty Healy. Prior to the pop-up gigs and now the release, the only evidential tease we’d had for this coming album was one studio photograph, with Healy prominently present. The presumption was, this was from an album session, though even that wasn’t made certain. For me, I’d wondered if it was simply studio partying during the early chunk of the Eras Tour when Swift was still with Healy and Phoebe (and her boyfriend Bo Burnham) were on the road with them. The album title Lost Weekend does send me back to that, and to the teasing photo. He’ll show up.

• Unpacking a set of reflections seemingly about young manhood doesn’t prevent the narrator (it seems) boffing the protagonist. Her coy, elusive writing of a sex scene is gorgeous in this —

In a twin bed
Where all will be forgiven in an instant
Hands in each-other’s hair
We are born again
So who cares where we’re going?
In the morning you are not there

In a world of porno signifiers, this is a classic PG movie.

• Arrangement point: that one-night stand doesn’t happen until the middle-eight, instead of being a triggering event nearer the start. Phoebe’s really smart with time, she tells this story of toxic masculinity, a military-ish life, with great poetic economy and then only inserts herself into it, in a sexy, romantic way, near the end — in fact it’s the point where the guy protagonist vanishes and stays gone. In the chorus, that individual tale is expanded to reflect on wider toxic masculinity and chaotic life.

• I wonder if the oddball coda — song devolving to eight-bit chip tune, matching the plotline of the video — is just part of the video, or on the actual released version of the song. I also wonder if the screamy one! two! three! four! after the manchild vanishes is part of the song, or a bolt-on. I don’t think that screamy count-in quite works, even if it does a great job of outputting some angst from the narrative, where the actual sung vocal is unable to, because it wouldn’t fit the musicality of the song.

• The hilarious, ace new Charli XCX jam ‘Wink Wink’ (which maybe more deserves a Double Chorus than Bridgers does rn) ironically drops the phrase “Scream If You Wanna Go Faster” in her lyric. Phoebe just screams numbers.

icymi —

• I was mildly critical about the Scotland-based festival TRNSMT in the last issue, though I actually typed out (but abandoned) a longer critique of what appears to be poor structure and vibes all around. Since then, there’s been some controversy about Becky Hill’s secret popup set, which was intended to introduce new music and apparently got a bad reaction from the crowd. Becky addressed it in a video making the eternal point that even artists with a string of hits deserve to be able to share new music and not be regarded as jukeboxes, especially if they weren’t even billed. It speaks somewhat to the limited structures of TRNSMT that Hill couldn’t get away with something like, say, Lorde was able to achieve at Glastonbury.

Thankyou for reading, it means a lot.

Email me: chris@christt.com

Get a creativity consultation with me

Subscribe to Border Crossing: twice a month, an email zine from the frayed edges of culture

Buy 20 year old Chris T-T LPs on vinyl for the first time: 9 Red Songs and London Is Sinking

Buy the new Tom Williams LP Out Of Nowhere produced by me

Listen to Refigure the bitesize arts review podcast I make with Rifa.

Lola Young returned from her forced break (after collapsing onstage last autumn) with this single, which isn’t wholly specific but seems to be unpacking the harder side of sobriety — the boring grind of staying clean. ‘From Down Here’ gets me hard, and specifically it reminds me of a short but heartbreaking old Amy Winehouse clip, where Amy opens up momentarily about how miserable and especially how utterly bored she is, trying to stay straight:

But it’s my favourite place, so why do I hate it here?

Young’s lyric captures, better than any song I can immediately think of on the topic, that greyscale sobriety grind, laid in contrast with the vivid hues of the high.

The singer’s awkward interview with Jools Holland on Later the other week (aren’t they all fairly awkward?) made me suspect that producers (or someone) told Young she shouldn’t specifically mention booze or drugs, yet Jools then straight out asks her to discuss what the song is about, trapping Young in what comes off like slightly nervous generalising.

It doesn’t matter though, the performance is (for me) outstanding, her vocal is magnificent.

Or, here’s an earlier big stage performance from Radio One’s Big Weekend last month in Sunderland. The audience doesn’t quite connect with the song in the moment (a brand new song debuted ahead of its promo, after all) but that’s their loss.

That line:

Can I make them laugh?
Can I make them stay?

For a split second it reminds one of a narrator hinting at external judgement when Taylor Swift, on the otherwise very different ‘Shake It Off’, sings:

I go on too many dates
But I can’t make ‘em stay

Yet here, it’s not an individual but all of us, the whole audience. It has that hint of the showbiz trouper’s broken heart, even in its generalising. Make em laugh! Make em laugh! type lines, at once both heady and careful.

I also really love ‘From Down Here’ doing sectional modulation from verse to chorus (and back again), so the two distinct sections technically live in different keys, yet the melody line flows smoothly enough between the two to maintain what (to me) feels unusually natural for a song with see-saw modulating chords like that.

I played it through a few times in C before looking it up and realising it’s actually in A (verse is A, Bm, D, then the chorus is Em, A, D, G — no fucking about).

So, a notable point about ‘From Down Here’ is its role as a marker of an increasingly successful life in music production for the hilarious transatlantic television actor, presenter and podcast star (and very online personality) Jameela Jamil.

That is, Jamil working with her pop star partner James Blake as a production team. Lola Young went to them for her new record — and ‘From Down Here’ came from those sessions, with Jamil earning both a cowrite and a co-production credit.

I’ll admit I’ve barely listened to Blake’s music over the years, after finding my first encounters a bit dull early doors, but I will try a deep dive and give him a proper go. Jamil’s contributions to his records stretch back into the late 2010s, since at least Assume Form, his fourth record, where she’s credited on five songs. Of course, Jamil being a woman, and a confident, creative, successful one, probably even moreso a woman of colour, her music production work has attracted a gross, whiffy swirl of Internet misogyny, attempting to underplay her contributions. Blake has defended her work and she’s batted it off with humour and directness.

Personally, I’m all in on the notion of Jameela Jamil as record producer, it makes perfect sense. She’s one of those rare public figures who carries off being wise without being lofty (yeah, a height pun). She’s also exceptionally present — clearly a listener — and she’s always been properly musical — for example moving to Los Angeles not to become an actor (getting cast in The Good Place was basically an accident) but to work as a DJ and write screenplays.

Anyway, hats off to her, as well as Blake and Young, this piece is a beautiful doozy.

icymi —

• No, I’m not linking to Angine de Poitrine on Later. Yes, I loved it.

• If I had the cash (and wasn’t too scared to visit the USA right now, given my social media history with Mr President) in August we’d be well into Olivia Rodrigo’s new Daisychain Fields festival, just south of Los Angeles, with its excellent all-woman lineup blending O Rod’s faves, from Chappell and Doechii to Bikini Kill and Garbage (and Stevie Nicks!) all waiving fees so that 100% of net proceeds go to a series of women’s causes. Also ace to see Rachel Chinouriri on that lineup.

• Westside Cowboy on the iPlayer from TRNSMT Festival, playing in front of a small crowd. Starts a touch squonky, but as they get going (from the second or third song in) they’re sensational and just keep winding it up. They’ve also acquired a delightful, drawling, don’t-give-a-shit-ness (I suspect) from the Geese tour. Unprepossessing, as only proper magical indie bands can be. I already wrote somewhere: Frightened Rabbit songwriting at Senseless Things tempo. Unusually for a TV broadcast, you can hear bleed from the bigger stage. If it’s coming out on the livestream, you can be sure it was loud enough to be annoying in the field. God, honestly, every year TRANSMT looks so rubbish, at least on telly.

• With Andy Burnham’s current ascendence, in case you fancy judging the man via his music taste his edition of The Quietus ‘Baker’s Dozen’ feature is doing the rounds again. Burno’s insight that Adrianne Lenker has something of the Tracey Thorn about her vocal originality is solid stuff.

• I recommend the great prose stylist Michael Bracewell’s small, unusual new book The Smiths: A Novella. He’s having a purple patch since 2024’s excellent London-themed prose poem Souvenir.

Thankyou for reading, it means a lot.

Email me: chris@christt.com

Subscribe to Border Crossing: twice a month, an email zine from the frayed edges of culture

Buy 20 year old Chris T-T LPs on vinyl for the first time: 9 Red Songs and London Is Sinking

Buy the new Tom Williams LP Out Of Nowhere produced by me

Listen to Refigure the bitesize arts review podcast I make with Rifa.

In Brighton, the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks will be marked by a lineup of six indie rock tribute acts doing an all-dayer at Chalk. Perhaps it’s one adept showband in six costumes, I almost hope it is. A lot of songs to learn, though worth it for the payout. Anyway, this gig sounds horrendous enough but it’s the poster itself that has grabbed me enough to give them a load of free publicity...

For a start there’s the name, nicked off Perry Farrell’s long-surviving grandpa of touring festivals, Lollapalooza. Obviously following a long tradition of promoters pinching and adjusting that branding, it’s a useful mental shortcut — easier than bothering to come up a new title. Like when people gaffer-tape a word onto the front of ‘—stonbury’ or ‘—stock’. Down here, excellent local grass-roots indie label Goo Records already has a classier Lolla- remix on the go, with their ‘LollapaGOOza’ all-dayer series. Though they’ve earned the right, gathering a bona fide high quality pile of upcoming new artists, several a couple of times a year. Also, for many years Attila the Stockbroker ran his 'Glastonwick’ leftie punk/folk festival along the coast, in the village of — yes — Southwick. Here, though (back to the poster) since the original is already an alt/rock festival (to put it kindly), simply switching out ‘Lolla-’ for ‘indie-’ is beyond cringe. It’s a tribute gig. Fraudstonbury, please.

Then there’s the strapline. “UK’s Biggest Indoor Indie Festival”. This is utter filth. It’s what first got me going on this poster. Literally, just in the past three months, I’ve been at two different UK indoor indie festivals — Shiiine On at Butlins Skegness and Gigantic in a warehouse in Bristol — both way bigger than this, with real bands. Chalk holds about 800 people. Up and down the UK this summer there will be a dozen bigger ‘indoor indie festivals’ than this flatulent monstrosity. Why does size even matter, if it’s a blatant lie? I’m messing around — but in all seriousness it’s that boring, reductive mindset of feigning success to acquire success.

The photos are the real artists with their eyes blocked out, as if that makes it okay to throw their image up on the poster. One of them looks so bland, I can’t recognise him. Maybe he’s the domestic abuser they booted from Kasabian. Kasabiain’t is a funny name though, credit where it’s due. Subarctic Monkeys sounds like an admission of defeat and Scam Fender sounds plain nasty, like someone selling knockoff car parts.

The piece-de-resistance — a masterstroke of thug legitimisation — a bona fide ‘psy-op’ that I hadn’t even noticed when I first shared this poster with friends: at a glance, casually passing by the poster bluetacked up in the chippie, you’d genuinely assume that famous DJs Chris Moyles and Greg James are appearing, perhaps hosting the show. No. They’ve literally just each given a vaguely positive quote for it. Greg James’ quote isn’t even that bothered: “Sounds great to be fair” is hardly a clarion call to attend. It’s like some knobber ran up to hassle him somewhere, banged on about their Britrock tribute, and he’s politely tried to fob them off, praying they’ll leave him alone. Now he’s halfway up the poster with even his respective employer’s logo on there. I find myself genuinely hoping Radio 1 and XFM notice this and email the lawyers. I’ll definitely include both radio stations in the meta tags, fingers crossed.

Then there’s the weird small print bit down the bottom, where they announce an extra “kings of indie” slot given over to songs by other bands, because the six acts listed aren’t enough (no, true, they aren’t). Britpop dominates, still an all-male list, yet incongruously it includes The 1975, like this gammon audience will want any twenty-first century song.

[Alan Partridge dictaphone voice]
Idea, Lynn. Oayswift. A band doing Taylor’s hits in the style of Oasis.

The gig itself, just… no. I have no serious nuanced criticism. People will go and have a good time, I’m sure. I can’t be arsed to re-litigate the eternal tribute band debate. Times are tough, of course venues have every right to put on shows like this, if they bring paying punters and drinkers through the door. But also, I have every right to find this hilarious and stupid and manipulative. Meat and potatoes promotion to gather meat and potatoes people to a meat and potatoes event. The Reform-isation of rocknroll.

Seriously, I have no issue whatsoever with covers nights if that’s your bag. Bass players gotta pay the mortgage too. But fuck a duck, what a sausage fest. The only way even one woman gets onstage this whole day is if the Sam Fender tribute band includes someone doing a turn as (his backing singer and guitarist) Brooke Bentham. And if they have shown that much commitment to band member detail accuracy (unlikely, face it, since it would require this mob personally knowing a woman musician) she’s got one lonely afternoon ahead of her, drowning in pale bangers and undercooked mashed potato.

icymi —

• The café I’m finishing this off in is playing Sadé’s ‘Smooth Operator’. Haven’t thought about that song for a long time, but what a beautiful classic, hasn’t dated at all more than forty years later.

• An unusually strong run of Later With Jools episodes. I’m so used to finding slim pickings over the years, yet persevering for the occasional gems. But then Westside Cowboy ripped the living hell out of ‘Kick Stones (The Boys)’ which I’ve rewatched about ten times. It’s such a long, long time since an indie band walked on there and kicked this hard. It’s Frightened Rabbit songwriting at a Senseless Things energy level. Also Beverley Glenn-Copeland and his wife Elizabeth doing maybe the most pure romantic duet I’ve ever seen on the show, ‘Harbour’, also Mitski nailing ‘I’ll Change For You’ and even Lola Young’s ‘From Down Here’ is magic, her vocal is fire. Maybe they’ve hired a new booker or something.

• There’s a pile of wonderful, wholesome Olivia Rodrigo content out there, as she pushes the new album. Here’s a few great bits, in case you missed them —

• Olivia brings Robert Smith up (again) to duet on ‘What’s Wrong With Me’ at her surprise Primavera Sound show, which was broadcast live but isn’t officially available. It’s delightful.

• Actually, here’s the full set from Primavera Sound, which was thrilling. I’ll say, although these are pro-shot, taken from the Prime livestream, they’ve been put up by fans, so may not last.

• Olivia does a lengthy (over an hour) chat online with Kathleen Hanna for the RocknRoll Hall of Fame.

• Her belting version of ‘The Cure’ on Jimmy Kimmel. She nailed it in the Live Lounge too, but that was overshadowed by —

• — her outstanding, impeccably arranged Live Lounge cover of CMAT’s ‘When A Good Man Cries’.

Okay, enough O Rod stan service.

Thankyou for reading, it means a lot.

Email me: chris@christt.com

Subscribe to Border Crossing: twice a month, an email zine from the frayed edges of culture

Buy 20 year old Chris T-T LPs on vinyl for the first time: 9 Red Songs and London Is Sinking

Buy the new Tom Williams LP Out Of Nowhere produced by me

Listen to Refigure the bitesize arts review podcast I make with Rifa.

Phoebe Bridgers is back with a large-scale Lost Tour this autumn. But also, she’s reactivated Isaac Wood.

icymi Wood was the mercurial lead vocalist, songwriter and guitarist of Black Country, New Road, who suddenly quit the band in early 2022, four days before the release of second album Ants From Up There, on which he’d written and sung many songs. He cited his mental health and vanished from public view. BCNR abandoned that album, postponed a tour, then regrouped for their post-Wood era, sharing vocals amongst themselves and (remarkably effectively) rebuilt with a different focus.

Ecstatic about Phoebe’s return, people are exaggerating her break: it’s only a couple of years since boygenius wrapped their huge eighteen months. But she’d been ubiquitous prior to that — loads of collab verses and guest slots, across genres (including some unwise ones) and she remains super-beloved, super-influential, so her absence has been felt keenly. Also, post-boygenius, bandmates Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker both released music quicker, toured (and became a couple) which pushed up the contrast knob of Bridgers’ retreat.

Whatevz, here she comes, here she comes.

What’s more interesting is her approach to new low key shows across the USA, where Bridgers is going stridently phone free. She’s banned all recording devices, even down to items such as pencils and pens (to stop people writing down lyrics). It’s being properly policed and she’s also asked fans not to put anything online, not to give too much detail about the new songs being debuted.

This included managing a huge phoneless show raising money for an anti-ICE charity at Madison Square Garden, using Yondr pouches for an audience well in excess of 10,000, probably the biggest gig yet to take seriously the notion of removing constant smartphone filming from the equation.

If you haven’t yet encountered Yondr pouches, they’re soft lockable pouches which phones go inside and you keep hold of them. So you’ve still got your phone with you — but can’t use it until you unlock it on leaving. The venue also has stations dotted around where they can be unlocked in case of an emergency.

While the primary aim is clearly to stop leaking of new songs, and while there was an inevitable (if modest) online backlash, the general consensus has been pretty positive about this ‘new’ experience of gig-going without phones everywhere. Focus shifts back, of course. Audience interaction gets a reboot.

One lovely, nostalgic outcome from the move was, during slow songs, apparently a lot of people were waving cigarette lighters. Just like the old days.

Here’s Variety’s review of the MSG show.

icymi —

• No Tags podcast unpacks the ‘psyop’ discourse.

• Franz Nicolay gives concise, evocative testimony to the House Judiciary Committee (that’s US Congress) on the Ticketmaster / Live Nation settlement. Proud of Franz, a brilliant job — he’s rapidly becoming a persuasive expert voice for labour in music.

• The great Daniel Harding gets the LA Philharmonic job. I saw him conduct thirty years ago as a teenager, he led a small onstage chamber ensemble for a Trestle Theatre adaptation of Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’. He conducted wearing a Beavis and Butthead tshirt. So he became the only orchestral conductor whose career I followed with actual interest. Luckily it flourished. More recently he learned to fly aeroplanes. He now divides his time between being one of the world’s most acclaimed conductors (three weeks out of four) and a commercial airline pilot for Air France (one week out of four). The only other person I can think of doing music and flying planes both at a high level is Iron Maiden frontman Bruce Dickinson.

• Full-length Olivia Rodrigo interview on NYT’s Popcast.

• Front Row Feels’ brilliant essay analysing the online body shamers who targeted CMAT after Radio One’s Big Weekend. CMAT has linked to this essay. Back in 2024 after her debut appearance at Big Weekend, CMAT received a troll pile-on about her body, and in response wrote the brilliant song ‘Take A Sexy Picture Of Me’. At last week’s Big Weekend she told this story onstage before performing the song. In the days since the show, she’s received another troll pile-on.

I’ll add another angle, which isn’t mentioned: CMAT is eloquent, a brilliant intersectional feminist, also unflinching on (for example) the Palestinian cause and a potent trans ally. She is far more politically informed and vocal than the average artist booked for Big Weekend. This places her in a ‘progressive / woke’ bracket, where her name is likely included on target lists for right-wing bot and troll farms to traduce, smear and attack. That’s not to say there aren’t a bucket load of plain old body fascist misogynist dicks out there at the moment, targeting CMAT as well. But looking at some of the attacks, I suspect she’s also targeted for her confidence in telling truths that a powerful patriarchal system wants to suppress.

Thankyou for reading, it means a lot.

Email me: chris@christt.com

Subscribe to Border Crossing: twice a month, an email zine from the frayed edges of culture

Buy 20 year old Chris T-T LPs on vinyl for the first time: 9 Red Songs and London Is Sinking

Buy the new Tom Williams LP Out Of Nowhere produced by me

Listen to Refigure the bitesize arts review podcast I make with Rifa.

It was Jim’s second year in a row, re-booked by bona fide popular demand. We’d smashed it to bits last time. This year they’ve moved to a new venue but kept the same ‘single stage’ set-up indoors, with a range of food and booze stalls outside.

There’s a cheese on toast stall, which surely can only be disappointing once you’ve shelled out, because we can all make cheese on toast exactly how we most love it, at home for about 50p.

We almost lost our gig before it started: Ben had an emergency, so we needed a late notice stand-in drummer. My kneejerk recommendation was for Jim to just strip it back to a solo acoustic show, but (rightly) he wasn’t up for that. It would’ve been the wrong approach, given all the other acts were rocking out. Also, the rest of us would’ve all lost the adventure and income. Instead, Jim and Marc found Dave Morgan from Creation Records legends The Loft and The Weather Prophets and luckily Dave quickly nailed down our hour-long festival setlist. He did his homework with a rehearsal tape, but still only got a single play-through with the band, ahead of show day. Literally just one tilt at each song in a short rehearsal. Didn’t put a stick wrong. A supremely experienced indie drummer.

After an unchanged lineup for more than half a decade, it’s the second time in six weeks we’ve had a dep, since Charley Stone stood in for Jen on two shows of the UK tour, while Jen slummed it at the Royal Albert Hall with My Bloody Valentine. Lol, my laptop predictive text just amended ‘Valentine’ to ‘Vaseline’. Ew.

Personally I’ll admit I’ve found the lineup shifts discombobulating, though they played great and they’re both proper lovely people, who are easy to get on with. I already knew Charley, though not Dave. But, accidentally, it sort of underlines to me — injects direct into my subconscious — the ‘job’ aspect of gigging, beyond simply playing music with one’s chosen family. The “show must go on” vibe, I guess, at the expense of the fantasy that I’m dicking around in a gang of mates. In onstage moments performing, I find that feeling hard to shake off. Probably why I’m not a session pro.

Luckily, mostly piano is embellishment, not backbone. A bit of unsettled status rear stage-left doesn’t impact anyone else.

•

After infuriating backstage and tech struggles in Skegness not so long ago, Gigantic’s house crew are excellent, totally on the ball. We’re a complex band to get up and running: a six piece with two keyboard setups (and Jon has three different keyboards) plus an effects-heavy lead guitar and four backing vocals. As I’ve banged on about before, no in-ear monitoring, nothing on tape. Things can go awry fast if we aren’t on it. We’re very efficient now ourselves though: we’ll hit a tight changeover target, as long as the crew has looked at the plot and can do a line-check without drama. This Bristol mob were brilliant. Brisk without being brusque is basically perfect. Gigantic had been running about ten minutes behind schedule after previous band Bluetones came off (not their fault, I think it was House Of Love over-ran earlier on) but after Jim’s show we walked off at exactly the moment we’d been originally programmed to finish, i.e. leaving the whole event back on time. I mean, maybe some songs were a touch fast…

•

So basically: lush crowd, Jim on fire, in great voice, perhaps pushing it a little far fantasising out loud about Nigel F*r*ge being hung up on a lamppost like a flag. Huge cheer.

•

I drove the van for this trip, which adds a frisson of personal nerves. Last trip but one, we got hit by a very expensive pheasant. Our usual driver/sound engineer, also a Dave, who knows everyone and has lived everywhere, was booked up, though in the end he was around to do our front-of-house sound. Anyway, that meant I picked up the splitter van the day before, on Saturday morning collected Zinz who lives in Hove, drove us up to Crystal Palace to load out (carrying and rolling our gear through the middle of Palace’s iconic Saturday food market) then piled across Greater London and out west to Bristol for about four.

You may remember in the olden days, when hiring a car required two paper ‘proofs of address’, household bills or letters from the council or NHS or whatever, with your address on, dated within the past 90 days. Well, I learned that some niche vans still need all that shiz to hire them. But none of our household stuff is in my name. My bank and mortgage are the same company, nobody from the government has written to me since at least January. Argh. I could not for the life of me find a second piece of paperwork. Two days before the hire I find myself absolutely panicking, searching around to locate / acquire something viable. Finally, in the end, a workaround: I asked HMRC to remind me of my national insurance number. Their system instantly generated an email reply, in a letter format that conformed to the online system’s hire requirements. Thank fuck.

•

Gigantic’s backstage layout included a long reverse up a drive and then a backwards swing into the loading bay. I had to do it twice, because we couldn’t leave the van there. It wasn’t tricky but doing it in front of loads of wandering punters, with a dramatic line of security staff to hold gates temporarily shut, was a recipe for intense self-awareness.

•

When I drive a hire vehicle, I’ll have bad dreams before and after. They’re never about a horrible crash, or injuries, or anything like that. They’re always about just failing to break in time and slowly crunching into something precious in front of me. It’s always a gentle collision. Rarely people, just other cars or buildings. A couple of weeks ago I described this dream to someone and they immediately said: ‘so they’re all about you getting in trouble.’

•

Anyway, a great thing about this trip. Somewhere near Swindon, Jim struck gold: a Travelodge with an actual hotel bar, and it did a breakfast. I can’t remember the last time we were in a Travelodge with a bar. This one has horrible reviews online that got read out in the van, but it must’ve been renovated, because it was fine. We ditched Gigantic after The Wonderstuff, just as Roger Cook — sorry, Peter Hook — was about to walk onstage, got back to the hotel ahead of last orders. Sunday morning breakfast was almost, almost, as decent as a Premier Inn buffet. Though some hotel staff whose shift only finished around midnight were up doing the breakfasts. Brutal.

Our band has professionalised a great deal in the past few years. While that does make everything easier, and has been natural and necessary, as gigs have gotten bigger, it comes at the cost of something subtle and intangible on the social side, though we’re all still real friends — comrades not colleagues. For Gigantic, Marc and Mr Spoons drove separately to get onsite by 12noon to sell merch. So I only saw them briefly the whole day.

Theoretically, I had the van til Tuesday morning. I was tempted to use it for some shopping, or to visit friends. But parking is pricey and tricky in Brighton. In the end I just took it back on Sunday afternoon, as soon as we arrived home.

•

In the aftermath, a bunch of Jim’s fans are reminiscing online about the years after Carter (and during the reform era) when they saw Jim play solo in very small venues, performing sometimes to just a few dozen people. I was there too. It’s so different now. It’s been twelve years since the final Carter USM reunion show in 2014 (now a significantly longer gap than between their original split and reform). It’s also been a decade since the 2016 solo tour where his audience re-emerged and remarkably quickly those small venues were too small, sold out, and shows upgraded to bigger spaces. Now he can sell out Shepherds Bush Empire and we regularly play to between 400 and a thousand people in cities around the UK. It’s unequivocally a far better experience, especially in the current climate — Jim is resolutely bucking trends in live music. It’s been five albums since Covid, most charted in the proper charts, he’s had a number one hit 10” EP (I’ve got the pink and blue plastic UK Chart #1 award on my bookshelf to show for it).

A new 10” EP is on the way and almost sold out.

But we feel the world changing, all the way there, all the way back.

Next confirmed Jim Bob action is late autumn, in London and also on tour for a few shows supporting the Undertones on their fiftieth anniversary run, then a mad one-off dash to Athens just before Chr**tmas.

Paid to be in Greece in December, what the actual fuck.

God Is In The TV reviewed all the acts at Gigantic.

icymi —

• Olivia Rodrigo debuts ‘Begged’ on SNL.

Nothing’s quite enough when I know that to get it I begged.

• The YouTube algorithm fed me this and it’s stunning, from 2009: PJ Harvey and John Parish play ‘Black Hearted Love’ on Letterman.

• Beautifully written career reflection essay by musician turned manager, turned musician again, Julian Deane of Raygun (and Toploader, and now Woodchester Piano Company). Some rich Luke Sital-Singh content in here.

• I’ve been listening to a bunch of Veronica Swift lately, the astonishing jazz singer journeywoman, Hod O’Brien’s kid prodigy now in her early thirties. Swift did a session at Emmet’s Place a couple of weeks ago and even in those slightly smug surroundings (drowning in piano trills) she brings bloody, fierce majesty. Adding her plaintive, almost harsh tone to flawless pitch and rhythm, with relentless energy, a Gaga vibe, though really this Swift’s singing — and her scatting — is just ludicrously brilliant, on a par with jazz legends. Annoyingly, she’s also formed a (so far) mediocre-to-awful pomp rock outfit called Dame with the bloke from Dresden Dolls, which suggests a taste issue and maybe ambition for the wrong kind of stardom. But basically everything else she’s got is perfect.

Thankyou for reading, it means a lot.

Email me: chris@christt.com

Subscribe to Border Crossing: twice a month, an email zine from the frayed edges of culture

Buy 20 year old Chris T-T LPs on vinyl for the first time: 9 Red Songs and London Is Sinking

Buy the new Tom Williams LP Out Of Nowhere produced by me

Listen to Refigure the bitesize arts review podcast I make with Rifa.

If you’re reading this the morning I posted it, right now I’m already long gone, up and out, bleary, annoyed, standing in a queue outside a record shop in my home town.

Today, Adrianne Lenker is putting out her intensely beautiful (and on the quiet rather innovative) live collection Live At Revolution Hall on triple album and, disgustingly, it’s an RSD exclusive. At least it’s on black vinyl, I suppose. It could’ve been some horrible multi-coloured edition. Small mercies. Previously it was only made available as a download and on cassette format. Brilliant.

Once I realised I was reluctantly getting involved, I went through the entire list of RSD items, to see what other gems I might want, since I’ll be there anyway. Nothing. In fact, this will only be the second new release album that I’ve purchased this year. Perhaps, after only four years, my vinyl obsession is peaking. The other day I was even considering… deep breath… purchasing a CD player.

Meanwhile, I didn’t have any industry insider cheat codes or backdoor access for Record Store Day, so I’m genuinely having to queue up for this beast like the desperate puntering middle-aged beardy obsessive I appear to have become. I’m not RSD literate and don’t really know how it works at the coalface. So I can’t help fretting about what happens. It says the shop opens at 8am. But how much earlier, before that, do idiots start showing up? Surely nobody’s there overnight? Surely I can get there, say, for 7:15am — that’s halfway civil — and hang about for a bored forty-five minutes reading my London Review of Books and I’ll be in time to grab my copy?

Also, if I do clamber inside the shop in time, do I have to scrabble around seeking it out in the shelves, or does everyone just go right up to the desk and ask for what they want? Surely they don’t restack everything for that day, given it’s a ludicrous bunfight with no connection to their regular sales the rest of the year?

That’s enough Shirleys.

In fact, I’ve even been injured in this particular record shop doorway before, while leaving after an in-store that I’d done with Jim, with my very heavy keyboard on my back, I slipped on the low doorstep and clanked down on one knee. Nothing serious but extremely painful. That’s the sort of thing I’m imagining now, even though it’s totally different.

So it goes.

All these things I shall find out, in pursuit of Lenker. Happy Record Store Day if you take part, you poor fool.

icymi —

• I reviewed the debut album by Drass (previously flagged up here) into a review for The Quietus.

• This is huge. As predicted right here: Gwenifer Raymond gets her Tiny Desk.

• Legendary cassette gig bootlegger Aadam Jacobs has digitised his collection — something around 10,000 concerts — and put it online at Live Music Archive. This is an incredible museum of live shows.

• Slowcore queen Ethel Cain covers Drive By Truckers’ ‘Angels And Fuselage’ for Like A Version.

• Couple of new bits of Holly Humberstone — still young UK pop’s great singular lyricist — Holly nails ‘Beauty Pageant’ on Kimmel, her best telly slot I’ve seen, I think. Also she went on John Kennedy’s Tape Notes with long-time producer/collaborator Rob Milton.

• Geese insanely brilliant tilt into ‘2122’ at Coachella weekend one, halfway through they collapse into a sublime verse and chorus of Justin Bieber’s ‘Baby’. This fucking band.

• Laura Marling interviews the great audio engineer Dom Monks for her own newsletter.

Thankyou for reading, it means a lot.

Email me: chris@christt.com

Subscribe to Border Crossing: twice a month, an email zine from the frayed edges of culture

Buy 20 year old Chris T-T LPs on vinyl for the first time: 9 Red Songs and London Is Sinking

Buy the new Tom Williams LP Out Of Nowhere produced by me

Listen to Refigure the bitesize arts review podcast I make with Rifa.

For some reason, we both got excited at the same moment for some live bands, then remembered Homegrown is on. With friends already going, it’s a no-brainer for an early Spring empty Saturday.

I’m sure a bunch of cities have these multi-venue minifests now. Homegrown is into its third year, programmed and organised by Music Venues Alliance Brighton. It’s spread across nine venues in central Brighton, six of which are within a three minute walk. They sold out the last two (and though there are still a few tickets left right now, they will go) plus, because it’s curated by people fully immersed in the live scene, day-to-day, it has a knack of catching local emerging stuff at the right moment, as well as booking a good blend of locals and incomers.

Anyway, thought I’d do a quick run through my own vaguely planned route: Eva Lunny does her beautiful harp and effects thing at The Hope. Then over at Revenge White Magic For Lovers the gorgeous psych-ish pop project of my prodigiously gifted friend Thomas White, off of Electric Soft Parade and Brakes and others. Then back to The Hope for the singer who probably tipped me into grabbing tickets, Bella Union’s My Precious Bunny, emotionally complex psych-pop from Lily Walter out of Penelope Isles. But I do also dig west country Specialist Subject-signed punkgazer trio Soot Sprite so I’ll try to catch the end of their set at The Albert. Must fit in old label-mates The Xcerts as well, somehow, I didn’t know they were still going. First big dilemma is a 7pm clash between Belfast’s superb post-Idles noise-rock quartet Enola Gay and chilled alt/electropopsters Cowboy Lyf at Alphabet. It’ll depend on mood. Then Irish noir drone-folk from Ceann Capaill kinda like the quieter end of Lankum at The Folklore Rooms. A quick burger break before Revenge again for Genn, and the second dilemma: a 9pm clash between Clt Drp at Alphabet and Attic’o’mattic at Green Door Store. After that, Manchester’s incredible Jasmine.4.t shows up at The Albert (a year ago I was banging on about her here). Late night = Hutch at The Hope and if that doesn’t land, down two hundred yards to Folklore Rooms for Thistle. who may be too loud for that room but we’ll see. I’ll still be out after 1am for indie-with-motorik-tints The Wrong Trousers at The Hope.

In real life, if I even get to see half of these it’ll be a great day. I’ll let you know how we get on.

icymi —

• Gorillaz and Sparks join forces to sing ‘The Happy Dictator’ on Kimmel.

• Fascinating music industry article about long-term reputation by Daniel Holter on his own website, ‘The Only Revenge Worth Having’.

• I’ve been enjoying the reminiscences on Jo Bartlett’s site Indie Through The Looking Glass. Thanks Dave Evans for the tipoff.

• I must write something about the emergence of Sinead O’Connor’s stunning song ‘Black Boys On Mopeds’ as a true protest classic. Not that it was ever obscure but Fontaines DC uploaded their version from the Help(2) compilation and in recent years it’s popped up time and again. Phoebe Bridgers, Sharon Van Etten, many others.

Thankyou for reading, it means a lot.

Email me: chris@christt.com

Subscribe to Border Crossing: twice a month, an email zine from the frayed edges of culture

Buy 20 year old Chris T-T LPs on vinyl for the first time: 9 Red Songs and London Is Sinking

Buy the new Tom Williams LP Out Of Nowhere produced by me

Listen to Refigure the bitesize arts review podcast I make with Rifa.

The wrinkle is time difference: streams start roughly 4pm Pacific Time, which equates to a late evening kickoff, here in the UK. But then, they do loop the feed (or at least, they did in previous years) on each channel. So if you don’t have energy for an allnighter, you can get up Saturday and watch Friday night’s action only a few hours behind.

They stream here on 10th-12th April and 17th-19th April.

And here’s the weekend one stage times (as a YouTube Short) if you fancy diving into the detail.

I get that not everyone enjoys live music onscreen. And I will say, neither camera work nor (especially) sound quality can compete with what we’re familiar with from the BBC’s brilliant tech crews at Glasto, Reading and others they cover. Moreover, set lengths are shorter than European festivals, with even big headliners often doing just an hour, and smaller acts down around thirty minutes, like local festivals in the old days. Despite its long-term party creds, Coachella seems to have a natural conservatism — everyone in bed by 1am, in fact Sunday night is done and dusted before midnight.

On the other hand, many artists throw production at this show, because Coachella is seen as career important.

For 2026, its headliners skew pop: Sabrina Carpenter, Justin Bieber, Karol G, plus second headlines including returns from The XX, Nine Inch Nails’ collab with Boys Noize (who I don’t know at all) as ‘Nine Inch Noize’, The Strokes launching their new era (funny, Julian Casablancas contributes to Brat and suddenly his band’s new music has overdriven autotune all over it) and Young Thug. To me, it’s quite interesting, rather than a great lineup.

Looking at stage splits, I also noticed annoying gaps scheduled onto other stages, when big headliners come on. So, if you’re not into Bieber, instead of having three or four alternative options, there’s just one, with most stages dark for his whole set, and to a lesser extent for Sabrina. Elsewhere, it’s a mild surprise to notice how low Geese are billed. In my myopic bubble they’re already massive but — despite everything — in fact they’re a rising cult thing in the USA, not yet proper breakout.

Top line UK names are Disclosure, FKAtwigs, Central Cee, Labrinth out of retirement, Pinkpantheress and Wet Leg (arguably better billed here than in the UK right now). Dev Hynes’ Blood Orange is there as well.

I like checking current emerging (and veteran) Brits, to assess how they’re doing in California versus back home. I was watching that time Blur headlined but weren’t remembered enough by the kids and Albarn got cross onstage at the lack of reaction.

But for newer UK acts, this one is such a biggie: proof that a USA team is getting somewhere. This year CMAT is in the mix, along with flowerovlove (also doing better in the US than UK, I reckon). Good to see Holly Humberstone onboard too. So, though she’s not yet broken out of her cult status either, at least it’s international. Lambrini Girls were billed but won’t play, since Phoebe apparently fractured her neck (!) in Australia and they’re off the road for at least six weeks. Fucking hell, poor lass. They do throw themselves around but that’s nasty.

ps.

Of course, I’m not remotely interested in defending Ye and his nasty racist gibberish. But I’ll admit I’ve found it quite unsettling that this government gets so loudly and quickly involved, and so casually bans an artist from entering the country for things he said, as opposed to things he did. Of course it should’ve never reached that point anyway: Melvin Benn’s team at Wireless was either badly obtuse, or being deliberately provocative, in booking Ye in the first place.

Wireless being a predominantly Black music festival, held in a richly diverse locale where people generally get along very well, its cancellation can only be seen as a loss, socially and economically. That this was effectively imposed by government, supposedly ‘on behalf of’ Jewish people, does risk propagating a false binary notion (god, how this government loves false binaries) and a wrongheaded oppositional narrative. I do wonder if the ban will end up spreading more prejudice than it prevents.

Yuck. Such is the paradigm we’re in.

In the end, objectively, Keir Starmer and his crew have spent the last few years actively supporting and arming racist mass murder by a colonial power. They’re still allowing them use of our airbases, while handwringing on telly about ceasefires. As far as I’m concerned, the Prime Minister’s own personal hate crimes are far worse than those of the pathetic trump troll he banned from performing. They have an actual body count.

icymi —

• Some nice romantic nostalgia about early 2000s Brighton by Mia Clarke of Electrelane for The Guardian.

• This is fun: Stuart Stubbs writes ‘A Brief History of Music in Space’ for his Loud And Quiet newsletter.

• Robert Plant does ‘Ramble On’ with his band Saving Grace, for Colbert’s long goodbye. Hard to argue with this version and it makes even more sense when you remember Stephen Colbert is obsessed with Tolkein.

• Maggie Rogers sings ‘One For My Baby (One More For The Road)’ for the departing Stephen Colbert.

• Andy Von Pip interviews Holly Humberstone for Under The Radar.

• If you’re unaware of Flea’s lesser-known alternate skillset as a jazz trumpeter, this’ll be a treat: he performs ‘Thinkin Bout You’ from his new solo album on Jimmy Fallon.

Thankyou for reading, it means a lot.

Email me: chris@christt.com

Subscribe to Border Crossing: twice a month, an email zine from the frayed edges of culture

Buy 20 year old Chris T-T LPs on vinyl for the first time: 9 Red Songs and London Is Sinking

Buy the new Tom Williams LP Out Of Nowhere produced by me

Listen to Refigure the bitesize arts review podcast I make with Rifa.

Music has been so eradicated from popular television through the past decade that outside of Graham Norton, Later with Jools and occasional (very vanilla) Strictly guests, it’s hard to find any at all. If it thrives, SNL UK will offer an important — rare — fresh place in the bunfight to get artists heard.

Traditionally, the original USA version of SNL books one music act per week, doing two songs. Occasionally when it’s a big name and/or someone who can handle it, the music artist will do what they call ‘double duty’ and host the show as well (doing a funny monologue and taking part in sketches). It’s seen as a big demand for a singer or musician and there have been some epic fails (Kanye!) — but more recently people like Donald Glover, Lizzo, Sabrina Carpenter and Charli XCX have done solid jobs combining both roles. A very hard night’s work though. Over the decades, SNL’s music performances have become so storied that just over a year ago, for the fiftieth anniversary, Questlove made a brilliant doc about them, which I wrote about for Double Chorus here.

Initially I was disappointed with the pre-announced SNL UK music bookings list, not because there aren’t good acts on there, more because it’s so ‘current basic mainstream’ Britrock (Kasabian, Wet Leg, and so on). Meat and potatoes. But to be fair, obviously they need to punt hard for a mainstream crowd at first, to help the show itself bed in and find an audience. It’s too early days to get judgey. On the much-hyped opening show, Wet Leg’s turn doing ‘Mangetout’ and ‘Catch These Fists’ was (I thought) pretty excellent: well shot and with powerful live sound, though the band does feel very familiar now, we’ve seen a lot of Wet Leg pushing this second album. But I particularly liked that — as Tina Fey stated upfront in her monologue — swearing will be fine on this version of the show, so Wet Leg weren’t censored. A big plus point for me, versus the US late night shows, and oftentimes Later and Norton, which still censor lyrics to the point that it grinds my fucking gears.

Those two Wet Leg songs have accrued over 180k and 145k views respectively on Sky’s YouTube channel, in a couple of days. I thought of this as a win for Sky. Compare it to BBC’s Later and you’ll find almost nobody gets that many views. The occasional superstar or blowing up artist may get a few hundred thousand after many months, but mostly it’s far lower. So if SNL views kept rolling in, and if SNL UK could keep up that kind of average, it’d be an optimistic sign that the music industry has a valuable new audience-growing outlet.

However, my reliable TV data expert friend Gary Sausages did caution that I’m being over-optimistic. Gary points out that a lot of these views are likely due to it being the launch episode, which has had a great deal of publicity thrown at it, not to mention Sky has most likely (allegedly) paid for a bunch of those views out of SNL UK’s £750k marketing budget, which would be fairly typical on a marketing spend like this. Gary predicts later episodes will most likely get markedly less than half these views.

Meanwhile, I didn’t watch the week’s other big new thing, The Claudia Winkleman Show. I adore Claudia but was (A) on tour and (B) totally put off by the guest list, which I correctly predicted wouldn’t remotely work. Crucially, this show didn’t have a live music performance at all and by all accounts could’ve desperately used one, just to break the tension. Especially given half her guests were actually musicians, it seems like a mis-step. It even makes me a touch suspicious of the Norton producers working on Claudia’s show, since if they had a musical guest too, it’d remove one of Graham’s USPs. I’d presumed that Claudia — who has bona fide excellent music taste — would’ve taken this great opportunity to book a proper off-kilter unusual musical guest each week, rather than the same major label hype stodge as everyone else. If it transpires there’s no live music at all, ever, that’s going to be a gross, gutting tactical error.

Anyway, whatever happens, it’ll be fascinating to see how music bookings on these new entertainment shows develop; if they get more sonically courageous, try to break newer acts; also, if a show gets very successful, we may see its music slots hijacked by global names. For years now, Graham Norton has been seen as the single best booking for helping to break a homegrown music act, though at the same time, as with Later with Jools, its power is gradually but inexorably diminishing season by season. It’ll be ace if SNL UK can offer an alternative to that, with a decent audience and online clips that get widely shared. Especially if they don’t just end up booking all the same people.

icymi —

• Jim Bob just announced a killer London weekender in December, tickets onsale tomorrow, Tuesday 24th —

• Shabaka plays ‘A Future Untold’ from his gorgeous new album Of The Earth.

• Ace composer, synth boffin and electronic music expert Alex Ball re-invents the Cellar 92 session, playing ‘Oligopoly’ (and exploding their viewer numbers without breaking a sweat). I’ve plugged it before but if you like nerding out over synths, Alex’s own YouTube channel is a joy.

• Julia Raeside reviews Lily Allen’s shoes.

• Brighton: if I wasn’t seeing Geese in Hammersmith on Wednesday night, I’d be going to Holly Humberstone at Chalk. I’m stunned there are still tickets.

• Unsettling Shardcore essay on AI prompted song construction with some examples of how mimmicked classic artists sound, when the system generates outright nonsense, masquerading as English.

Thankyou for reading, it means a lot.

Email me: chris@christt.com

Subscribe to Border Crossing: twice a month, an email zine from the frayed edges of culture

Buy 20 year old Chris T-T LPs on vinyl for the first time: 9 Red Songs and London Is Sinking

Buy the new Tom Williams LP Out Of Nowhere produced by me

Listen to Refigure the bitesize arts review podcast I make with Rifa.

The audience is more diverse — noticeably more young people, women and people of colour than on previous tours. Heartening. Actually, a little bit thrilling. I wonder if it’s down to the general resurgence of Gen Z / Alpha fandom for older alternative bands. I noticed it at the My Bloody Valentine arena show as well. It’s not like Jim has had a Tik Tok smash or gone mad viral or anything, but there are a ton more teens and twentysomethings, including down the front, scattered amongst the old baldies. They’ve customised their band tees and they know all the words.

Manager Marc and Jim got drummer Ben a caterpillar cake for his birthday. Whatever the Sainsbury’s knockoff of Colin is called. We hid it in the van, on the back shelf. Then all day, people kept mentioning caterpillar cakes. Someone was playing stand-up comedy off their phone and it was a bit about caterpillar cakes. In the dressing room, our rider randomly showed up with M&S Colin The Caterpillar napkins. When we revealed the cake with Ben’s age in candles on it, Ben assumed we’d been inspired by all the mentions. The audience sang a full-throated ‘happy birthday’ and as a special birthday gift, Jim took the piss out of Ben for quite a long while onstage.

This setlist is a belter. I don’t know about anyone else but I’m digging it bigly. Some of the more wayward freakout elements have tightened up, without losing energy. Occasionally, in the past, some bigger, heavier songs lost a measure of their internal seriousness, because they devolved into rocknroll wigouts — and (quite reasonably) we can’t resist leaning into that vibe. It’s still there, but now the intensity stays more in keeping with the song’s content. It’s a subtle thing but this, I adore.

•

No surprise, nicest venue so far (easily) has been Leeds Brudenell, famously one of Britain’s best: they treat you very well (pie and mash for dinner) they know their shizzle — actually like music — and they’ve built into a proper hub for gig-goers in Leeds, which must help sell tickets for the more obscure stuff, because people trust their booking quality. Their list of the month’s shows is wonderfully varied. You know, it just feels like a properly run thing. Of course, I don’t know where the bodies are buried… but it’s bloody ace to show up and perform there. It’s been the fastest sellout on a couple of tours.

•

Actually, I swear we’re playing better than we ever have. Well, I mean, that *ought* to be true, given we’ve been a band for 15 years, some of us have made music together for 30+ years (holy shit) and we’ve been backing Jim in this lineup for eight years now. But Jim doesn’t tour anywhere near as much as full-time road artists, so even with those shared decades behind us, still it feels remarkable we’re in such good sync.

That said, I will mention an unusual, weirdo loss of confidence I suffered on Night #1. As soon as we got on, something off-kilter lodged in my head. So when it comes to playing live, I’ve never had nerves, or needed to deal with performance anxiety, or imposter syndrome. Nothing like that. I make mistakes like everyone but I’m generally beyond confident, calm about performing, to the point of arrogance. But then during last year’s T-T reform, for the first time I had real nerves in warmup gigs and found myself struggling to get through certain songs.

Then, on the first night of this tour, a similar thing emerged: I was losing the thread in a kind of angsty way and having to mentally run to catch up to where I was meant to be. Not the newer songs, nor any difficult parts, literally a couple of the easiest, most long-serving songs, with straightforward piano passages, which have remained roughly the same for years. Through the set, I kept fighting my brain, to climb onboard again. It felt akin to an avalanche, or maybe being out-of-balance on a gymnastics beam — and it arrived with a side-order of punch-in-the-neck powerful self-doubt and loathing. Like, literally, for example, I lost control of the introduction to ‘Touchy Feely’ — and if you’re remotely familiar with Jim’s music, you’ll know we’ve played that song a thousand times and the intro doesn’t vary and is not difficult.

At the same time, the gig was going perfectly well, especially for a first date — overall — most folks were pretty happy as it unfolded into a rocking night. For me, a long dark night of the soul.

Thank the gods, looking back now after I’ve strung together a much, much better show, where I didn’t make significant mistakes and was on top of the little squidgy bits of multi-tasking (like triggering a sample while playing, etc etc.) the ick rapidly faded. So we’ll see. Could be a smasher of a month, if the A game stays around. But I’d love to know wtf was going on, psychologically.

•

Best food so far: an excellent classic big brunch at a brand new looking American-style diner at, ahem, Ram Jam Services, A1 northbound. It’s not an OK Diner like most places, it’s a new mini-chain called Brightside. Also, the most spotlessly clean loos I’ve ever seen at a service station, though I did briefly get trapped inside by a stiff lock and held up the van leaving.

Today in live music, in-ear monitoring is so prevalent, including on the grass-roots circuit, it means conventional monitors (you know, the wedge-shaped speakers lining the front of the stage) aren’t used so constantly. In turn, this means venues sometimes have fewer of them, and/or they’re falling into disrepair. Sometimes (well, just very occasionally to be fair) house crews are irritated by the extra labour of having to set up conventional monitors, though for decades that was the bread and butter. Lots of acts with in-ear monitoring still use one or two traditional wedges — but not for everyone in the band.

I’ve mentioned before but currently the Jim Bob band doesn’t use any in-ear monitoring, so no click tracks, no pads or ‘augmented’ instruments, literally nothing is ‘on tape’ (ironically, given Carter USM’s infamous drum machine). Unless it’s a spoken sample between songs, every note you hear is being played in that moment by a musician onstage. You might be surprised how rare that is nowadays, including with rock, punk and indie outfits. It’s fantastic for us: makes things real and slippery. We flow, and things can go wildly wrong, it’s music without the safety net. You don’t get that separation (isolation) from the real space of the room that wearing earplugs inevitably brings. Yet also, our old-school approach is increasingly anachronistic as tech gets more affordable and ubiquitous. Soon, I imagine it’ll become near impossible to tour without in-ears, as the skillset and equipment in venues gradually dissipate.

•

Each night Jim has debuted a new, explicitly ‘political’ solo acoustic song, and they’re stunning. He’d already been in a long purple patch of songwriting since the pandemic (which obviously I’d say deserves much wider recognition — including from the songcraft snobs who continue to stupidly overlook his work). But ‘Not All Men’ (Jim’s response to reading Virginia Giuffre’s memoir) and ‘Not Your President, Not My King’ are desolation row classics in the making. I’m in awe: it’s like being a beginner again, hearing Carter’s ferocious poetry for the first time.

•

We’ve got enough tequila now to take it off the rider. I’m trying to think of something clever or unusual to add instead, but nothing comes to mind.

Each night, Marc’s merch stall is selling my 12” albums. They didn’t need to do that, it’s very kind, given I’m not actually playing as ‘me’. I’ve been asked to sign a couple and got confused about whether to sign ‘Chris T-T’ or ‘Chris Thorpe-Tracey’ or something else entirely. Just write something stupid. I was meant to make a flier to promote them but didn’t do it in time. Hopefully I’ll get one printed tomorrow.

Interrobang‽ doing an excellent job as support, in a duo format mixing live and backing tapes, heavy on stylish but unflinching political chicanery, super-smart incendiary lyrical work, chanted choruses and quite complex beats and synths underpinning it. They’ve got in-ear monitoring, by the way, which is a first for a Jim tour support. Even with the important (sometimes bleak) messaging, it’s very entertaining. If you’ve not seen Dunstan Bruce’s offbeat 2023 documentary film I Get Knocked Down, reckoning with Chumbawamba’s enormous global smash hit that made a bunch of Yorkshire anarchists briefly world superstars, and then left them to cope with the aftermath, it’s available to stream and comes highly recommended by me. I suspect the Interrobang‽ duo is dividing the crowd a bit, which is spot on in my book.

•

Next: Southampton, Oxford, Nottingham.

icymi —

“It has come to my attention that the White House has used one of my songs on Tik Tok to incite violence and threaten war. Trying to make light of war is disgusting and inhumane. I absolutely do not approve of my music being used to promote violence. Love always trumps hate. This is the opposite of what I stand for. Also don’t let this distract us from the fact that criminal predator Donald Trump appears in the files over a million times.”
— Kesha

• Fugazi have released the long bootlegged alternate versions of In On The Kill Taker they recorded with Steve Albini in late 1992, as a download for charity via Bandcamp. The page also gives a good explanation of the session and addresses why it wasn’t used. You can listen to ‘Facet Squared’ and ‘Smallpox Champion’ and download the whole record for $10.

• You have to read Joel Gouveia’s widely discussed essay ‘The Death Of Spotify’ (on the great Jimmy Iovine’s recent pronouncement about the end of streaming services). Thanks to Mishkin Fitzgerald for reminding me I was going to share this.

• Turnstile cover Stone Roses’ ‘I Wanna Be Adored’ for Like A Version.

• Mitski does the Maria Bamford Questionnaire for Vulture.

• Stewart Lee interviews Sleaford Mods live at Rough Trade. I don’t know, I love them but it still grinds my gears that there’s never a glancing reference to Carter (Jason apparently dislikes it when fans mention them) because they’re so keen to trace the lineage directly to hip hop. Lee does a smart thing here, linking them to Gilbert & George, or even Beckett (he doesn’t name it but obviously Waiting For Godot), though Jason still leans hard into the rap connection.

• MJ Lenderman on the Adam Friedland Show throwing topics and references around until some of it’s like listening to a different language.

• Laufey and the BBC Concert Orchestra turn ‘Both Sides Now’ into what sounds like the tentpole ballad from a fifties Broadway show. Gloriously wholesome, though I appreciate some folks may hate this. Her own new single ‘How I Get’, taped in the same setting, is safer territory.

• Fontaines DC cover Sinead O’Connor’s ‘Black Boys On Mopeds’ for Help(2).

Thankyou for reading, it means a lot.

Email me: chris@christt.com

Subscribe to Border Crossing: twice a month, an email zine from the frayed edges of culture

Buy 20 year old Chris T-T LPs on vinyl for the first time: 9 Red Songs and London Is Sinking

Buy the new Tom Williams LP Out Of Nowhere produced by me

Listen to Refigure the bitesize arts review podcast I make with Rifa.

Eric Drass’ day job is being the remarkable disruptive art world figure and enigmatic tech prankster ‘Shardcore’, working across multi-media. One of his first pieces that I encountered many years ago, was when he painted a portrait of the Home Secretary, except after you looked at it, then walked around the corner of the gallery, you found a portrait of yourself that it had made by secretly taking your photo. We have a few Shardcore works in our home now, including a beautiful portrait (I shit you not) of a deeply stressed looking Jeremy Clarkson, which I’ve written about before — I wanted to use it as an LP cover for a concept album that never got completed. Quite reasonably, Rifa won’t let me hang this one downstairs, so it lives on our top floor hung just outside the attic. He’s even painted me and Rifa a couple of times. I could (I will one day) write a proper profile of Shardcore’s adventures in visual and code art — but that’s for another time and the other newsletter.

Because last week Eric announced his first solo music album under the artist name DRASS. The record is called On The Hill and comes out on April Fool’s Day, via Death & Praxis Records. It’s real though, not a prank...

You can check out lead single ‘The Spectacle’ with its eye-opener of a video, where DRASS digitally forces his words into the mouths of a series of global figures. Apparently inspired by Guy Debord’s ‘Society of the Spectacle’, he’s ripping into the paradigm we’re all trying to survive right now, with images replacing truth and lives lived via screens. His deceptively soft spoken vocal cuts through hazy chords and a slippery, scattergun drum’n’bass backbone. But what I particularly love about ‘The Spectacle’ is that it’s not a dry essay, nor too shrill a diatribe, it balances his steady, philosophically literate call-to-arms, delivering a hue of Burial via Sleaford Mods, though in real life he’s a Gary Numan guy. For me, this is a terrific jam, to ease you into On The Hill’s gumbo of counterculture storytelling, vintage electronica, alien conspiracy and sardonic humour.

Funnily enough, Eric Drass is also an in-demand (though often wildly acerbic) international speaker on AI, deep fake, and machine learning as a tool in art-making. Not so long ago he showed up as a guest expert at the BBC Royal Institution Christmas Lectures and he’s been on proper telly explaining deep fakes to Ian Hislop. He recently published this essay and ‘Slow AI’ manifesto, exploring his own long-time collaborations with machines, in the light of current debates around AI. He’s been curating and writing on this stuff since the early 2010s. Again, I digress into visual art. Come on, Chris.

Drass worked on the music for On The Hill through 2025 in his secret lair in Sussex, which is genuinely accessed via a hidden doorway in a bookshelf. I’ve seen it myself — it’s like a batcave, or something out of a Hammer Horror film, he could run a secret society from in there, and may well do. Anyway, last summer (as I wrote about before) DRASS road-tested songs from On The Hill in the ScienceFutures Arena at Glastonbury, which I was also booked for. I gigged with him again just before Christmas, at a party in my Brighton neighbourhood. His ferocious, often disturbing, sometimes very funny live show — in which he’s constantly affecting and altering his live vocal in a fascinating way I’ve not heard before — culminates with an onstage alien autopsy that inevitably descends into gory chaos.

Don’t tell him I shared this but here’s a sneaky ahead-of-release album stream, which may disappear this week but while it’s here, grab a listen. My favourite jams I think are currently ‘Tridactyl’ and ‘Nucleation Point’.

DRASS is delivering frazzled glitches, treacle-black state-of-the-world realism, moments of dazzling psychedelia, dick jokes, old school crunch to the beats, truth bombs, and no global leaders escape unscathed. I have a subtext too: it’s great to be able to share new music by an older artist, someone of the same generation as me, who isn’t relying on past glories. Eric Drass inspires me to work on new art.

icymi —

• Rosalía sings ‘La Perla’ at the Concert for Palestine in Barcelona. Takes a couple of minutes to get started.

• CMAT on Harry Hill’s podcast. I probably don’t need to share it, this podcast is probably huge.

• Brighton’s own Simon Raymonde (Bella Union / Cocteau Twins) does What’s In My Bag? for Amoeba. I’ve interviewed Simon, he’s lovely, this vid has some brilliant stories — and the Bella Union store has a magic vibe, captures that mystical thing indie record shops long for, of being a genuine hangout.

• Since I’m glazing Bella Union, here’s a huge recommend for the magnificent debut single by My Precious Bunny, solo outing of Penelope Isles’ Lily Wolter, this is ‘I Go Up, You Go Down’.

• A little miracle: Mavis Staples singing ‘Beautiful Strangers’ from Sad And Beautiful World with Kevin Morby and Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats.

• Which sent me back to her doing ‘Human Mind’ (same album) on Colbert two months ago, which I didn’t share at the time.

Thankyou for reading, it means a lot.

Email me: chris@christt.com

Subscribe to Border Crossing: twice a month, an email zine from the frayed edges of culture

Buy 20 year old Chris T-T LPs on vinyl for the first time: 9 Red Songs and London Is Sinking

Buy the new Tom Williams LP Out Of Nowhere produced by me

Listen to Refigure the bitesize arts review podcast I make with Rifa.

Yesterday Springsteen released ‘Streets Of Minneapolis’ and pretty much nailed the job, bringing in a full alt-rock band sound and (odd to say but) channeling his best Steve Earle, lyrically specific to the point of sounding almost like David Rovics, yet maintaining enough anthemic heft and vivid poetry to capture something of the timelessness of great protest songwriting.

And there were bloody footprints
Where mercy should have stood
And two dead left to die on snow-filled streets
Alex Pretti and Renee Good

Meanwhile, Uncle Bill threw up ‘City Of Heroes’ online. He sticks with his plain hard strummed acoustic, fast and simple, an ‘All Along The Watchtower’ or ‘Rockin In The Free World’ nod in the verse chords, and thoughts around Martin Niemöller including a lyrical retooling of Niemöller’s infamous prose piece on his own complacency, ‘First They Came…’.

Bragg does a marvellous pivot in the bridge, repeating “I got in their face”, which, by the way, perfectly suits his delivery —

What excuses would you tell yourself
If this ever happened to you?
Well I live in a city of heroes
I know what I would do

When they came for the immigrants
I got in their face
When they came for the refugees
I got in their face
When they came for the five-year-olds
I got in their face
When they came to my neighbourhood
I just got in their face

Of course, both legends are running to catch up the fiery youth leader of current (American) protest folk-pop, Jesse Welles, whose turnaround is ridiculously quick. He plays satisfyingly fast and loose with his own career, in order to foreground the messaging: Welles released four full-length albums in 2025, got himself a Grammy nom, and before Christmas was on Stephen Colbert’s show singing this sarcasm-drenched minor masterpiece ‘Join ICE’. He’s also got this one, from just two weeks ago, ‘Good vs. ICE’.

David Rovics wrote his own song ‘ICE’ years ago, by the way, during the first Trump administration, focused on their child separations. It’s a gentler affair but no less unflinching.

Admittedly, ICE is an easy target for western folk-protest right now. It’s not a divisive issue by any measure, for anyone in the remotely sane part of the political spectrum. It doesn’t require the nuance of arguing a point that centrists — or further-to-the-leftists — may disagree with. Police chiefs themselves in Minneapolis have spoken out passionately against how catastrophically sketchy ICE is behaving in their city. So a lot easier (in terms of not offending the bulk of your stakeholders) than tackling, say, Iran’s mass murder of protesters, or Israel’s mass murder in Gaza and the West Bank, or any number of more complex issues that are killing people. But that’s not to take away from the visceral value of a name as huge as Springsteen weighing in. There is still a MAGA element to his fanbase, even today. Also, he is still a big enough mainstream name in the USA that this song has made news headlines. He so plainly hates ‘King Trump’, it’s a bit thrilling.

icymi —

• I was tempted to write about the Geese debate after their SNL appearance, with loads of Gen X early nineties alt-rock moaners criticising them in comparison to, for example, Sonic Youth, or Television, or Pavement. But it’s not a conversation that I’ve noticed taking place in the UK, so I can’t be bothered to weight in. You know I love them. Here’s Geese doing ‘Trinidad’ on SNL. They did ‘Au Pays du Cocaine’ as well. For me, both tracks were beautiful but ‘Trinidad’ is an immense, messy tilt.

• Also this week King Princess was in the Radio 1 Live Lounge and covered Geese. Fascinating to hear ‘Au Pays du Cocaine’ tidied up into a more straightforward song.

• Holly Humberstone’s back, huzzah, singing her earworm new single ‘To Love Somebody’ on Jimmy Fallon.

Thankyou for reading, it means a lot.

Email me: chris@christt.com

Subscribe to Border Crossing: twice a month, an email zine from the frayed edges of culture

Buy 20 year old Chris T-T LPs on vinyl for the first time: 9 Red Songs and London Is Sinking

Buy the new Tom Williams LP Out Of Nowhere produced by me

Listen to Refigure the bitesize arts review podcast I make with Rifa.

By his ‘two modes’ I mean: the bit where he cosplays (‘Barry National’) Matt Berninger’s emo nephew, and the other bit where he does a sparkly, yet somehow more diffident — almost (though not quite) to the point of being stilted — version of Harry Styles’ loose-limbed gender chill strutting sexpot liquidity. Perfect for a mainstream stardom narrative, of course. People love a false binary.

But to my shame, I can’t put together his two ‘aspects’ without it becoming really funny, really fast. Basically, I guess that means I’m not quite buying it yet. Though that’s not to say I don’t love the effort.

The machine-tooled artist name gives the game away, right? Digitised anti-grammar vowel removal trope, married to a plain statement of over-riding emotional starting point. I suppose, just like ‘boygenius’, without the tongue-in-cheek intellectual plinth. Or is the tongue-in-cheek right there?

Anyway, if you aren’t onboard already, check out Sombr, it’s interesting stuff and if you come at it as I have, it’ll at least give you a big smile, even unintentionally. I’d love to know your take.

icymi —

• Ben Murray on the inspiring, chaotic power of the great drummer Animal Muppet.

• Language expert Sophia Smith Galer unpacks the stories of saints and the playful use of multiple languages on Rosalía’s masterpiece LUX.

• Hayley Williams goes on Amy Poehler’s Good Hang.

• David Byrne does Tiny Desk.

• Lucy Dacus goes on Las Culturistas.

• Holly Humberstone does Cat Stevens’ ‘Wild World’ for Like A Version.

• The great unsung (deep underground) songwriter Matt Eaton, of Actress Hands and Pure Conjecture among others, turned fifty a couple of weeks ago and was celebrated by the sprawling community of (often but not always Brighton-based) artists he’s influenced and supported, who’ve released a compilation album of his songs in tribute. Frustratingly, I didn’t know about this in time to offer to contribute. I was only ever out on the periphery of his scene. But Matt was super-kind to me at a particular moment in my early career, when I first landed in Brighton in the early 2000s. He’s also been lifelong inspiring in his laconic yet unflinching approach to music making (entirely outside the commercial industry) — and some jawdroppingly divine tunes.

• Terrific Jonah Raskin essay from Rock And The Beat Generation on William Blake, Allen Ginsberg and Patti Smith. Misses out Smith’s classic anecdote of Mappelthorpe stealing, then in shame destroying (!!) a small original Blake image. Still excellent though.

Thankyou for reading, it means a lot.

Email me: chris@christt.com

Subscribe to Border Crossing: twice a month, an email zine from the frayed edges of culture.

Listen to Refigure the bitesize arts review podcast I make with Rifa

Late July. Author and songwriter Roxanne De Bastion put on her ‘Five Years of Folklore’ tribute night and I begged onto the bill, which as the only man scored me the role of ‘toxic ex’ for the evening: I sang ‘Betty’ and duetted ‘Exile’, taking the Justin Vernon part, while Rox sang Tay. I’ve banged on about Roxanne’s music and prose writing here before, she balances an observational light touch with big emotional heft — plus this beautiful, unusual turn-of-phrase in delivery that makes her stand out from the wholesome singer-songwriter crowd (also she’s the only person I’ve co-written a song with, as far back as I can remember).

Austel (Devonian, London-based singer-songwriter Annie Rew Shaw) has this honeyed voice, languorous pacing, kind of a Courtney Marie Andrews-ish (though more English folkie rooted) heart-bruised atmosphere to her songs. Her music has a consistently coastal flavour. She put an album out in 2024 called Dead Sea but more recently has rebooted and released the terrific single ‘The Beach in December’, shooting the video in Brighton.

I’d already clocked and really loved (Wales born, London-based) Rookes’ own music several years back, but I didn’t know she’d successfully pivoted to production and mixing work. In conversation she’s wild, super-fun and at the same time uncompromising — a solid comrade. She’s also cofounded the 2% Rising network for women and non-binary folks in audio production, which she co-manages with the mastering engineer Katie Tavini.

Similarly, I first crossed paths with Herts folk-pop singer Minnie Birch a decade ago (I was co-hosting ‘Folk In A Box’ on a Battersea Arts Centre tour, I think, with Gill Sandell) then much later on, was a fan of Minnie’s album You’re Not Singing Anymore built from acoustic readings of football terrace songs. Weird thing is, I think of that LP as recent, but it’s half a decade old. Turns out Minnie had to take a career break to deal with a rare cancer diagnosis and has gone through major physio to get back in the game. In 2026 she’s touring a folk duo project called Awake Mother, so I’ll be checking that out for sure.

My revelation of the Swift night was (also Wales born, London-based) Meg Ella who I’d not heard of, let alone hung out with. To be fair, we move in very different circles: a fine singer and cellist (multi-instrumentalist, really) Meg thrives in the ‘arrangement, choral, orchestral organisation’ type corners of the music world. She’s had a heavyweight range of experiences and collabs, with senior roles at Citizens Of The World, the refugees and allies choir, as well as London Contemporary Voices. In parallel, she’s developing a sepulchral (very ‘composed’ in both senses of the word) singer-songwriter strand. Here’s The Familiar EP from 2024. I’m floored — daunted actually — by her unadorned, unfussy, yet outrageously gifted artistry.

Mid September, rural Oxfordshire. Katy Rose Bennett. Okay, so twenty-two years ago, I taped a duet version of my song ‘The Tin Man’ (originally off of London Is Sinking) with young folk singer KTB, for a Truck Festival comp CD. Katy is younger sibling of Robin and Joe Bennett, who founded the Truck Records mini-empire and still run Wood Festival and SeptemberSong. Back then, they were the band Goldrush, nowadays The Dreaming Spires. Way back then, Joe Bennett produced our duet at Truck Studios, on the same farm where the festival (now corporate-owned) is still held. Katy was already a terrific songwriter in her own right. We played a few shows together but mostly lost touch, but for occasional chats on socials. Years fly by. Katy works mostly in choirs and choral music now, though she does still release her own material. She’s a member of the Natural Voice Network, for example. Here’s her 2021 album Alone On A Hill and a more experimental commissioned project from 2023, Dissolution. Her show at SeptemberSong was outstanding — one of my highlights of 2025, jostling high up my ‘end of year’ gig list with much more famous artists. A vivid reminder of how great an unsung crafter of classic-style song she is.

I’d genuinely forgotten that version of ‘The Tin Man’. Though the song is on an album I reissued last year, I had zero plans to include it in any live show. The song wasn’t on my radar. But catching up at SeptemberSong, Katy mentioned it. Then backstage, ten minutes before going on, I strummed it through and realised I can play and sing the whole track without problems. Somehow, I’ve still got all the words and chords inside me. Of course I dropped it in Then, completely unplanned and unrehearsed, Katy came on and sang it with me, harmonising beautifully. That was beyond special.

I must link to Robin and Joe’s band The Dreaming Spires too. They’re mainstays of the UK Americana scene, which they have a fair claim to have invented, alongside perhaps The Broken Family Band and Alan from the Rockingbirds’ ‘Come Down And Meet The Folks’ club night in 1990s London*. I didn’t see them perform at SeptemberSong but re-connecting with the brothers sent my attention back into their orbit and in November they released Normal Town, comfortably in my top forty albums of 2025.

•

Late September. The following weekend, I drove to Edinburgh for Frank Turner’s Lost Evenings festival. I scarcely need to rave to you about Frank, or Nina Nesbitt or Beans On Toast, but I’ll prop the great folkie and handsomely bearded virtuoso guitarist John Smith, far outside his comfort zone at a Turner festival, with whom I shared a late night pub stage, hours after both of our ‘main’ sets. We smashed it, of course. I went radical (I’d been polite on the main stage earlier) and gulp, within four songs a chunk of the crowd was chanting “Death to the IDF!” and I found myself in the odd back-pedalling position of trying to calm everything down a bit (though not too much). That’s what you want from a late night pub show. I drove John to the airport (on the way to my own Premier Inn, south of Glasgow) so we got to chat properly, which was lovely. We’ve hung out just once previously, god, fifteen years ago, on The Broken Family Band farewell tour, I think in Liverpool. The same night Steven Adams of BFB walked in on blues legend Gary Moore doing a poo (or in the shower, I forget which).

•

In Brighton, Guy Lloyd hosts Radio Blah Blah, a live music radio show broadcast from upstairs at The Actors. Here I encountered super-cute thoughtful yet endearing chaotic indie outfit The Roebucks, who are looked after by Tony and Dorian at Goo Records. It wasn’t a full band show, just a couple of acoustic songs, but they’re terrific fun.

Late October, three weeks later. I crossed paths with the Goo mafia again, a late booking to fill in coincidentally for The Roebucks at their alldayer ‘LollapaGOOza’ at the Hope & Ruin in central Brighton. That afternoon, I especially enjoyed the hard driving psych-pop of The Mink from Norwich, Anglo-Dutch dreampop duo Zo Lief and the super-cool, sometimes groovy, sometimes agit-punky (loves the Beta Band), London-based radical singer Gemma Rogers.

Quick shout out Goo doing immense work locally, helping ‘emerging talent’ (yuck) take those crucial first couple of steps into the limelight. They deserve a Double Chorus newsletter just about them.

•

And then 15th November. For my 100 Club gig, in the absence of Zinzi (diving in the Philippines) I’d recruited Johny Lamb, my original Hoodrats bassist, before he moved to Cornwall in the 2010s and became an edgelord pop academic. Johny’s nerveless, insouciant, brilliant solo projects include Thirty Pounds Of Bone and J.Lynch. It was lush to have him back, hard-thunking the downstrokes. In the absence of Jen (after her MBV arena tour call-up) Charley Stone came and played lead guitar. Charley is a journeying songwriter sweetheart and ferocious savant guitarist, whose 2024 solo album Here Comes The Actual Band is a plain wonderful treat of the deep London indie alt/rock underground. I’ve mentioned it before but honestly, I thought this album was ‘just’ good, but it grows and grows.

•

Back to the start for a moment. Glastonbury festival, end of June. Edie Blue is an early career electro/art/pop singer who almost nobody has discovered yet. Still at art school, and sometimes hard to locate, she’s just released a fully DIY debut full-length LP Conversations With Myself, diffident yet brimming with promise. With zero interest in going the frantic Tik Tok self-promo route, it’ll be a slow burn til someone spots her — she’s played just a handful of shows so far. But Edie’s material is very strong indeed, plus she has a unique voice and presence to what she’s doing. I hear the more experimental end of early 1980s electro pop (which I think she’s influenced by) with a tint of horror film fairground carny spirit. Dry wit. But then Edie also has this excellent low, crooning-ish vocal, which unexpectedly adds a strong essence of French yé yé, Brel, the Beats, Nico, Scott Walker, Faithfull and the like. I don’t think Edie listens to any of that stuff at all, but it’s in there.

Her live show is laptop and voice, but at Glastonbury I ended up collaborating as de-facto accompanist. We did three gigs there, plus a couple more songs at the ‘Nine Lessons’ variety night. Then in December, right as I was putting the T-T reboot back in the cupboard, we played one last lovely mini Brighton show, in a tiny room upstairs at Presuming Ed’s.

One final act was present at both Glasto in June and that Brighton bash in December. By the time Eric ‘Shardcore’ Drass got up to perform his Glastonbury set (as Drass) he was exhausted and stressed, having spent hours trying to run the sound-desk and help stage manage a chaotic variety evening with unexpected folks getting in the way the whole time. But the thing is, Drass as a performer feeds on exactly that confrontational buzz, so his being on the cusp of proper anger made it a pitch-perfect belter of a show. He’s best found via his YouTube channel, where his coded, generative videos are outstanding and deeply unsettling. A rare artist who can truly frazzle you — even in this modern Age of Befrazzlement — Drass beat-matches warped, generative and coded visuals, so animated real-life characters onscreen match his own (very affected, often pitched down) declamatory vocals. It’s unique. A discombobulating subversive electro bop, in the chewiest, finest way possible.

•

Chris T-T in 2025 —

• ScienceFutures Arena, Glastonbury — 50 minute ‘9 Red Songs’ set
• ScienceFutures Arena, Glastonbury — 50 minute solo set
• ScienceFutures Arena, Glastonbury — 2 songs for ‘Nine Lessons’
• ScienceFutures Arena, Glastonbury — 50 minute A.A. Milne set
• ‘5 Years Of Folklore’, Green Note, London — 2 Taylor Swift songs
• SeptemberSong Festival, Oxfordshire — full solo set
• Lost Evenings Festival, Edinburgh, main stage — half-hour solo set
• Lost Evenings Festival, Edinburgh, pub — late night 20min solo set
• Radio Blah Blah, The Actors, Brighton — 3 songs for Guy Lloyd’s radio show
• LollapaGOOza 3, Hope & Ruin, Brighton — half-hour solo set
• Cellar 92, Brighton — 4 songs for the Cellar 92 YouTube session
• The 100 Club, London — solo headline show with band
• Nine Lessons & Carols for Curious People, Kings Place, London — 2 songs
• Drass Christmas Party, Presuming Ed’s, Brighton — half-hour solo set

* a quick, disconcerted aside: earlier today I wrote this passage, mentioning ‘Come Down And Meet The Folks’ alt-country club night. As I type, I haven’t yet published this newsletter. I didn’t type it anywhere, except inside Substack’s newsletter platform and I didn’t search for any information about it, or its organiser Alan Tyler, or anything connected to it, anywhere else online. An hour later, on my Facebook, I saw this friend suggestion:

To my memory, he’s never once been suggested to me as a friend before. Perhaps that’s just me not noticing, but then this happened too, over on YouTube…

Blimey o’reilly, this stuff is scarily sophisticated.

No icymi, since I already just hit you with a bunch of music links.

Thankyou for reading, it means a lot.

Email me: chris@christt.com

Listen to Refigure the bitesize arts review podcast I make with Rifa

Subscribe to Border Crossing: twice a month, an email zine from the frayed edges of culture.

ps. I’m very proud of that phrase from near the end, ‘Age of Befrazzlement’. Even just the word ‘befrazzlement’ is cool as shit…

Still I missed a handful of shows I’d been keen to see (including ones I had tickets for) but that corner is turning, we’re getting back out there. I do have tickets for a few heavy hitters in 2026 (Geese, Big Thief, a night of Icelandic experimental contemporary orchestral music at the Barbican, the usual). On the other hand, next year we’re skipping Primavera Sound for the first time since 2019. It might’ve been a wrench, except when they announced the lineup I was relieved we’d picked 2026 for a break — the bill is still decent and varied but purely for my own taste, it’s artists I’ve already seen, don’t need to see at a festival, or I just think are yuck. Only perhaps sad to miss The Cure, and be there when our Jen headlines with My Bloody Valentine. Maybe we’ll find another festival instead (always tempted by Green Man or something up in the Nordics) but maybe not.

Here are the thirty live music shows I got the most out of in 2025.

As usual, it’s super subjective with gigs, not necessarily about how pure great the artist is. Context and mood play such a major part in enjoyment of live music. Also, this year it’s only once you get towards the Top 20-ish you’re getting to shows I scored 8/10 or higher — and then there are loads of those. Only the Top 7 or 8 scored 9/10 or higher…

30/ The Young’Uns at the Komedia Theatre, Brighton
29/ Los Campesinos! at Primavera Sound, Barcelona
28/ Rachel Chinouriri at Glastonbury Festival
27/ The Jesus Lizard at Primavera Sound, Barcelona
26/ Caribou at Primavera Sound, Barcelona
25/ Wet Leg at Primavera Sound, Barcelona
24/ Horsegirl at Primavera Sound, Barcelona
23/ Non Canon at Folklore Rooms, Brighton
22/ George Houston at The Albert, Brighton
21/ The Frank & Walters at Shiiine On, Butlins, Skegness

20/ John Wilks at Brunswick Tavern, Hove
19/ Drass at Glastonbury Festival
18/ Moulettes at Glastonbury Festival
17/ Bob Vylan at Glastonbury Festival
16/ Jopy at Green Door Store, Brighton
15/ This Is Lorelei at Primavera Sound, Barcelona
14/ O Sees at Glastonbury Festival
13/ Million Dead at Chalk, Brighton
12/ Kate Nash at Glastonbury Festival
11/ My Bloody Valentine at Wembley Arena

10/ Jasmine.4.t at Glastonbury Festival

09/ TV On The Radio at Primavera Sound, Barcelona

08/ Katy Rose Bennett at SeptemberSong Festival

07/ Doechii at Glastonbury Festival

06/ Waxahatchee at Primavera Sound, Barcelona

05/ Floating Points at Primavera Sound, Barcelona

04/ MJ Lenderman & The Wind at Chalk, Brighton

03/ Anohni & The Johnsons at Glastonbury Festival

02/ CMAT at Primavera Sound, Barcelona

01/ Chappell Roan at Primavera Sound, Barcelona

Notes

Frank Turner’s terrific duo set at Lost Evenings, with Matt Nasir accompanying, would’ve made it onto this list (technically giving him two entries) except I was briefly a guest onstage, singing backing vocals for ‘Rivers’, which rendered it ineligible. Obviously, again, I can’t include any Jim Bob, MJ Hibbett or Edie Blue shows for the same reason. I’ve also left off performances from Roxanne De Bastion’s ‘Five Years Of Folklore’ Taylor Swift tribute, which were too brief and ‘one-off’ to think of as live sets and — again — I was a contributor. I did love that evening though.

Thankyou for reading, it means a lot.

Email me: chris@christt.com

Listen to Refigure the bitesize arts review podcast I make with Rifa

Subscribe to Border Crossing: my email zine from the frayed edges of culture, in your inbox twice a month.

On the other hand, I admit (with mild consternation) my list looks very mainstream this year. The smaller, more experimental, genre, and ‘early career’ TV performances have got swamped by the year’s big hitters and big budgets. Even very good live bands can struggle to bring it in a TV studio or the video session environment, partly because the energy is wholly different.

I’ve never forgotten, one time we did this show in a reasonably small London venue (the old Camden Barfly I think) that was broadcast live on what used to be XFM. We all came away saying the first half of the show was a bit too loose, but then we locked in and the second half was brilliant. In the room, that was the consensus. But then listening back to the radio broadcast, the opposite was true: our first half sounded incredible on air, just flew, energy in the compacted sound burst from the speakers. Then at the point we believed we’d got ‘better’ and locked in, in fact the tighter, more controlled, energy didn’t quite translate and the second half lost something. It wasn’t suddenly bad per se, just not magical in the same way.

Looking at this list, I have no clue why just one ‘Tiny Desk’ performance (and zero KEXP sessions for example) made it on. There were a bunch of them squashed together lower down, scoring solidly in the 7.5/10 area, but not making lasting impact. Last year there were loads.

Anyway, so here are my twenty favourite onscreen performances…

20/ Lola Young at Radio 1 Big Weekend

19/ Olivia Rodrigo at Glastonbury Festival

18/ MJ Lenderman on Tiny Desk

17/ Sprints at Glastonbury Festival

16/ Haim in the rain at Radio 1 Big Weekend

15/ Self Esteem at Radio 1 Big Weekend

14/ Lady Gaga at Coachella

13/ Lorde at Glastonbury Festival

12/ Kae Tempest at Glastonbury Festival

11/ CMAT at Glastonbury Festival

10/ Lucy Dacus — ‘Ankles’ on The Tonight Show

09/ Geese From The Basement

08/ Cynthia Erivo & Ariane Grande at the Academy Awards

07/ James Yorkston & Nina Persson — ‘Love That Tree’ on Later with Jools

06/ Bjork — Cornucopia (at the cinema, thank-you Camilla and Will)

05/ Geese — ‘Taxes’ on Jimmy Kimmel Live!

04/ Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl half time show

03/ Samara Joy’s BBC Prom

02/ Charli XCX at Coachella (w/Lorde for ‘Girl So Confusing’ and Billie Eilish for ‘Guess’)

01/ Cameron Winter — ‘Drinking Age’ on Jimmy Kimmel Live!

Thankyou for reading, it means a lot.

Email me: chris@christt.com

Listen to Refigure the bitesize arts review podcast I make with Rifa

Subscribe to Border Crossing: my email zine from the frayed edges of culture, in your inbox twice a month.

Up at the top end, no question the greatest music of the twenty-first century is being made right now.

In 2024, my favourite LP was my favourite LP of the decade so far.

Now in 2025, my favourite LP is my favourite LP of the decade so far.

I think 2025 has been a year about purity. Artists pinpointed and communicated their own singular vision, in a more sharp focused way than before. That can be anything from Lily Allen’s vicious truth bombs, layered over what might otherwise have been a fairly bog standard Lily Allen pop record, to Geese and Big Thief leaning into those loose, percussive grooves, despite their other rock’n’roll gifts, to virtuoso soloist innovators such as Clarice Jensen, Gwenifer Raymond, starting to gain long-deserved global traction with instrumental work.

Even Rosalía’s towering achievement Lux could be called minimalist and maximalist, both at once. I’ve learned these aren’t necessarily opposites.

Meanwhile, the guitar/alt/rock re-emergence that’s been quietly threatening since the aftermath of the pandemic is fully present — despite a still desperately crumbling business infrastructure for ‘live based’ music in British late capitalism. Gen A forming and glazing your actual live bands. Kids going in actual rooms with each-other to play music together. It’s cross-generational too: Turnstile, Horsegirl, Geese, Wednesday, Silk Cuts, Prolapse — my chart hasn’t heard this much guitar rock since the early 2010s. Youngsters showing up to gigs — even gigs by the oldies.

So in a small way, it’s hopeful.

More artists understand better that being their whole badass selves is The Solution, rather than a search for performative something-elseness.

Anyhoo. So, in 2025 I rated more than 100 albums a 7/10 or better (minimum three full listens) and I feel okay expanding my usual Top 30 to a Top 40. And for the first time, I’m typing them all out upside down for you, working down from #40 to #1 like Bruno Brookes, no, like the proper magazines do. Just for fun, innit. Nothing on here scored less than 8.2/10…

40/ Lorde — Virgin
39/ Lucy Dacus — Forever Is A Feeling
38/ Lady Gaga — Mayhem (The Quietus review)
37/ Band of Holy Joy — Scorched Jerusalem
36/ CMAT — Euro-Country
35/ Ethel Cain — Willoughby Tucker, I’ll Always Love You
34/ Lambrini Girls — Who Let The Dogs Out
33/ The Dreaming Spires — Normal Town
32/ Madi Diaz — Fatal Optimist / Enema Of The Garden State
31/ Hayley Williams — Ego Death At A Bachelorette Party

30/ YHWH Nailgun — 45 Pounds
29/ Jon Wilks — Needless Alley
28/ KPop Demon Hunters original soundtrack
27/ Lily Allen — West End Girl
26/ Stephen Evens — Weekend At Bernie’s Two (Double Chorus)
25/ Dave — The Boy Who Played The Harp
24/ Non Canon — Certain Stories
23/ Nourished By Time — The Passionate Ones
22/ Kae Tempest — Self Titled
21/ Mavis Staples — Sad and Beautiful World

20/ Turnstile — Never Enough

19/ We Contain Multitudes — Minako (Double Chorus)

18/ Immersion — WTF

17/ Silk Cuts — Tell Me It’s Not True!

16/ Horsegirl — Phonetics On And On

15/ Prolapse — I Wonder When They’re Going To Destroy Your Face

14/ Oklou — Choke Enough

13/ Alex White — Colour Of Evening

12/ Rich(ard) Dawson — End Of The Middle

11/ Gwenifer Raymond — Last Night I Heard The Dog Star Bark

10/ Wednesday — Bleeds

09/ The Beths — Straight Line Was A Lie

08/ Clarice Jensen — In Holiday Clothing, Out Of The Great Darkness

07/ Cub Zoa — Unfold In The Sky (Double Chorus)

06/ White Magic For Lovers — The Book Of Lies

05/ Big Thief — Double Infinity

04/ Snocaps — Snocaps (Double Chorus)

03/ Jasmine.4.t — You Are The Morning

02/ Geese — Getting Killed

01/ Rosalía — Lux (Double Chorus)

Notes

Four albums I’d worked on came out in 2025 and would’ve (easily) made this top forty if they’d been eligible: both Jim Bob albums, Automatic and Stick, Tom Williams’ Out Of Nowhere, and Cousin Ben’s self-titled debut, I reckon all would’ve been comfortably sat in this chart, if I was just a punter. That said, none of them scored particularly wide critical notice (though Jim’s LPs have popped up on indie scene end-of-year lists, here and there). I think Tom’s missed a lot of lists by coming out DIY-style so late in the year, while Ben’s was not a physical release, with zero gigs or promotion, it basically snuck out.

Thankyou for reading, it means a lot.

Email me: chris@christt.com

Listen to Refigure the bitesize arts review podcast I make with Rifa

Subscribe to Border Crossing: my email zine from the frayed edges of culture, in your inbox twice a month.