1. Wilco’s Spiders (Kidsmoke) in its full glory at the Green Man. (It doesn’t matter if you didn’t hear it at the Green Man. Put it on in the car and turn it up loud. It’s fantastic.)

   

   Wilco from the second, grey-haired row.
   I did 13,000 steps in 90 minutes and felt quite young.

   
   Spiders (Kidsmoke) reminds me of being in my mid-twenties. It reminds me of a gig at Hammersmith Apollo that is one of the foundational stones in my relationship with That Man I Married. It reminds me of long journeys in cars to festivals in that first decade of the new millennium, turning it up at the beginning for its motorik beat, and turning it up at the end for its descending, slamming melody.
   
   I only made Green Man for a day this year because of a big family birthday, but their 90-minute set under Table Mountain was worth every minute. Although I did keep thinking: why do I love a band who do things that other bands that I detest do? As in they do endless, extended jams at the end of most of their songs. They play a kind of Americana that doesn’t grab me at all in bands like The National (she says, at the risk of instantly losing all my followers – tell me which songs I should listen to if I’m wrong). They’re fairly diffident on stage, which can be annoying in others. But then and then and then…they’re like The Byrds crossed with Neu!, or Porter Wagoner fronting Can, or R.E.M. without the brightness but with extra weird angles, and Nels Cline’s guitar passages are so out there – wild, screaming and free – that they’re somehow completely free of machismo.
   
   Also Jeff Tweedy was wearing a Charlie Brown sweatshirt in Crickhowell, and has made records with Mavis Staples and Richard Thompson, and his covers are brilliant (a few crackers below). I’ll stop there. But THEY ARE THE BEST.
   

2. Realising for the first time in two decades that the Tea Stop double decker bus in the Talking Shop field has an upstairs that you can sit in.

   

3. Interviewing Nigel (and Paul – I haven’t forgotten you, Paul!) from Rough Trade, and remembering with Nigel when I first met him…when I was a 24-year-old misery-guts, sad that I never gave music journalism a go, working in a crappy job she really hated, wandering into his shop one day asking him if he’d stock the fanzine I’d made with my friend, Matt. If that fanzine (Smoke: A London Peculiar) hadn’t had the support it had from people like Nigel, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing. THANKS, LOVE! (And here’s a podcast about the shop here, if you’re interested, in which Nigel is excellent.)
   

4. Catching the end of Tyler Ballgame’s set in the afternoon sunshine, which made me want to go and see him and his glorious band live very soon (here’s one song they played, live on Jimmy Kimmel).

5. Effi O Blaenau in the Cinedrome. What an experience. To sit and guess what story you were going to see, and then being blindsided by what came next. Leisa Gwenllian (below) as Effi is one of those performances that I know will stay with me for a long, long time. It was also directed by Marc Evans, who made Mr Burton (which I loved), with so many brilliant supporting performances, and all in in excellent Gog Cymraeg. I hope it wins all the awards.

   

6. 24 hours of summer Gower for my Uncle Mike’s 80th, seeing three generations of family – and the Mumbles – from up high on a bright blue day, and also (earlier in the week) advising John Doran of The Quietus where to go to on his South Walian summer holiday, including the amazing King Arthur’s Stone, with its view over the water. He declared the Gower hugely underrated, and indeed it is. One day, I’ll write my local, non-pretentious book about it (a rare one by someone who didn’t just go there on holidays from private school).
   

   

7. A trip up the windiest lanes on the Welsh borders with friends who stayed the night (hello, Beck!) to my favourite church around here, Patrishow. I could write for days about all the wonderful, strange churches near us, somehow built in the middle of nowhere between four hundred and a thousand years ago, in places which are still hard to get to in the 21st century. Patrishow, with its pre-Norman section, is one of the trickiest to get to, up a tiny, hilly narrow lane, full of the most microscopic passing places, the kind where you’re praying to yourself with every inch of grassy ‘road’ that no other vehicles are coming.

   

   

   But this church is worth every agony. It has a rood screen, eerie murals and also a Figure of Doom or a memento mori on one wall, holding a sickle and shovel that locals say used to be whitewashed over, but kept coming back. I would recommend the whole trip thoroughly, in one short, sharp, panicked heartbeat.

   

8. Being able to get to Llanthony Priory again, that was impossible to get to for ages because of a landslide, and thinking how on earth JM Turner got here when he was seventeen. (His painting from a sketch of the abbey is in the Tate, and not entirely accurate, but we’ll give him a pass, given the hormones.)

   

9. Summer holiday times often offering opportunities for trips down memory lane, including one afternoon sorting boxes to go back into the loft, which is how I found this: my first proper passport, acquired for a Penyrheol Comp GCSE Art and Design trip to Paris in June 1994. Clearly. my grunge phase hadn’t quite finished, and the top of my head was to come

   

   .

10. I also found my 1994 diary, including my searing account of that year’s leap year day.
    

    

    
    No, you’re not seeing the rest of the pages, but they’re mainly going on about revision, how much I love Michael Stipe and Morrissey, my paper round, and it reveals beyond revelation how I have always been incredibly, deeply uncool.
    
    Oh go, on then.
    

    

11. A week as a taxi driver (i.e. parent) going back and forth to the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff, where the National Youth Arts for Wales team and the Royal Welsh College’s Jazz team were running a brilliant jazz course for young people (our son loved the week so much he got his first vinyl record yesterday in Malvern’s Carnival Records: A Kind Of Blue).
    
    Anyway, this is here to tell you that RWCMD do so much in the building, including free jazz concerts every Friday, and it’s gorgeous. Go!

    

    

12. Helios by Luke Jerram in the foyer of the National Museum. I stood here gawping for ages, watching the sunstorms swirl and flame.

    

    

13. Watching this video of school kids interviewing “Paul” Morrissey and Johnny Marr in 1984 (“Who are The Smiths?” “Why do you hold flowers when you sing?”) from the short-lived Saturday morning ITV kids show, DataRun. It also includes footage of M&M off-mic, doing an excitable, sweet version of This Charming Man.
    

    I came to this after I’d listened to the new BBC Sounds podcast The Rise and Fall of The Smiths, my soundtrack this week travelling from central Cardiff back to where me and the boy were housesitting for a friend of a friend in Grangetown. There’s some great archive in the podcast, including revealing interviews with Johnny through the years, and Tony Wilson remembering Morrissey coming round to his house to tell him he was going to be a pop star (Tony thought this was madness). I found a lot of the series quite sad, but it really got across how exciting the band clearly felt in each other’s company their early years, as ‘Paul’ and Johnny do here.

14. My son getting obsessed this week with Peter O’Hanraha Hanrahan from The Day Today (after a long chat about what Armando Iannucci from Taskmaster is well known for).
    

15. Spending hours feeling a bit ill watching and posting reels of Dolly Parton (I’m full of medication now and getting better!). If you follow me on Instagram, I apologise for the onslaught, but I’ll put some of my favourites from the week here.
    
    a. Dolly talking about her mother telling her that Irish, Scottish, English and Welsh ballads came over from the old world “carrying the news” and how hearing her mother sing was “like watching TV”.

    b. The mountain voices of Dolly Parton’s mum and dad, and Dolly with them and her siblings all together, singing In The Pines in 1976 on her US variety show.
    

    c. Hearing her, Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt singing Bury Me Under The Weeping Willow Tree, and watching her magical guitar fingerwork…

    d. …then hearing Dolly and Emmylou, years later, speak about becoming friends, and their Trio recordings with Linda.
    

    e. Cher calling in to CBS on Tuesday to say how much she loved her.

    
    f. Shirley Collins’ words about Dolly (her sister’s namesake) in the Guardian, especially linking Parton to the “women in the Appalachians in the 1930s who rode pack horses or mules in this wilderness country and took library books to all the isolated cabins with huge families”.
    
    g. Finding out more about Dolly’s early songs, like Down From Dover, about a young pregnant woman abandoned by the man she loves (she talks about how it was banned, and why it shouldn’t have been, here), and this, a song inspired by her not being ashamed about having slept with someone before her marriage. There can’t be more direct a line than “my mistakes are no worse than yours, just because I’m a woman”.

    h. And just the whole of 9 to 5, watched in an antibiotic fug last night. So absolutely bonkers and brilliant, made by Harold and Maude’s writer-director, Colin Higgins, including so much stuff you wonder would get past the producers today. Like this.
    

    
    Also: mums being given joints by their teenage sons. Corpses in trunks. Lili Tomlin dressed as Snow White, chatting to Disney animals, playing with rat poison. Content about flexible working initiatives and equal pay. The whole film is brilliant, but even more so is the way Dolly’s character Doralee is revealed, which works so well because of what a good actor Dolly is. We see how clearly she is judged by women, as she would be today, before she’s allowed to reveal herself. And how she reveals herself.
    

    
    

    
    

Part 2 of my Judith Chalmers-style continental travelling tips. Last week’s local school holiday recommendations come tomorrow, before we return to our Sunday service. All aboard!

1. Fossils on the side of Lake Garda, a few minutes walk from our campsite, where we spent a week doing more or less the same – swim, read, eat, ping pong, and very little else – every day. The surprising loveliness of this for a restless middle-aged woman like me also helped me tolerate the continuing dominance of The Birdie Song and I Am The Music Man at the European holiday kids club, half a century on.

   

2. Accidentally wandering through two thousand year old gates in Verona on our way to get a sandwich. (La Figaccia has excellent foccaccias, sausages hanging from the ceiling, a meat and pistachio pesto option called Nympho, and an entertaining logo).

   

   

   

   

3. The uncomplicated joys of Northern Italian shop signage.

   

   

4. Slow culture appointment! The whole run of the Palazzio Maffei building on the Piazza delle Erbe, from its entrance hall (below) to its posterior-filled roof terrace (see above).

   

   
   Palazzio Maffei houses a gorgeous huge Casa Museum – house museum – stuffed with the art collection of businessman Luigi Carlon. A film in the top-floor theatre of said businessman – a sweet, odd character in a parade of quirky shirts and ties – made me not despise him.
   

   

5. The amount of amazing quirky furniture, and the odd Venetian musical instrument, inside every room, eccentrically mixed up with paintings and sculpture from Roman times to the 21st century.

   

   

   

   

   
   

6. The magical impact of finding stunning artworks sitting quietly in corners of rooms, like an original woodcut of Hokkasai’s The Wave, works by Kandinsky and Magritte, and a sculpture by Mimmo Palladino, Testimone, that’s still haunting me.

   

   

   

   

   

7. Sitting in the Roman majesty of the Verona Arena, forlornly watching the stage being set up for a performance of Carmina Burana that would take place after we’d left, only to have my sadness punctured by the sight of my son, who’d casually taken a book out of his bag to read to pass the time while being dragged around ancient monuments by his parents. His historical choice: Elis James and John Robins’ The Holy Vible.

   

   

8. Northern Italian food. It’s the best! Half of the insanely rich cuttlefish risotto at Torcolo in Verona would have been enough – and I’d recommend the restaurant alone for the mad menu and the crazy Versace plates – but Il Melograno (The Pomegranate), in Turin the next night was the pick of the whole holiday. Six tables, one waiter, a tiny menu, homemade agniolotti, and finding out that I’d always needed Piedmontese platters in my life ( the mad-sounding but delicious vitello tonnato, Russian salad, fossana beef tartare, dumplings, local cheese and sausages, mmmmmmm, zzzzz).
   

   

   

   

   

   Oh, and the old cafes in Turin, like Il Banco dell’Espresso, made my heart melt for the Welsh-Italians, who took their wooden-panelled style over with them to the Welsh coasts and the valleys.

   

   

   Excellent too were the sandwiches in Mollica, just by the market less than ten minutes walk from Verona Porta Nuevo – the sandwiches of the holiday, I think.

   

   

   

9. The view from the great glass elevator in the Mole Antoniolli, soaring into the sky from the central hall of the National Museum of Cinema, but not quite bursting through the ceiling.

   

   

   It was just as magnificent as the floor of film posters and the collection of early kinetoscopes and the little rooms showcasing film genres. Even more magnificent still is the story of its founder, Maria Adriana Prolo – a woman! – who rose from being the youngest daughter of a middle-class family to become an early film historian and set up this incredible place in the 1940s. Read more about her here.

   

   

   

10. The last 24 hours of the holiday in Paris with a friend who has lived there for decades, who I’ve known since I was ten, and meeting her lovely fiancé. Top more tips to pass on, mainly thanks to two fluent French-speaking locals: eating steak at twilight on a table in the garden at Au Fond Du Jardin, and a morning saying hello to Edith Piaf, Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, Michel Legrand and Modigliani at the Pere Lechaise Cemetery.

    

    

    
    We left our friends for the station at two-thirty, and were in bed Wales by half-ten. The next month will be full of beans and toast and work but it was worth it. Trains are the best.

Hello, subscribers! For one week only, this Sunday Spells newsletter will run today, tomorrow and Tuesday, full of tales of European messing-about and excellent summer things. Yes, this freelancer perpetually terrified that the next job will be the last job (touches all wood in the Amazon) decided to actually take some time off, encouraged by journalist legend Sheryl Garrett’s brilliant weekly Making It newsletter (subscribe at the bottom of her homepage). Of course, this means I returned from holiday to immediately finish a big piece about Wham! (with a satisfying opening paragraph about Communism and buttocks) and a radio column about Andy Burnham (featuring no Communism or buttocks) between making nine litres of chicken stock and watching lots of Taskmaster with a 12-year-old. Nevertheless, I’m somehow still feeling in semi-holiday mode. I recommend it.

But for now, back to ten things that made the first week of this month magical…

1. Finding brilliant museums in tiny towns you’d never heard of before this year.

When I had the idea in the murk of last February of our family of three going Interrailing this summer, I had the thought of writing a piece about navigating Western Europe by lovely, lesser-known museums. A trip of slow culture, in a sense, taking in places where we could also get hotels in August for bargain basement prices. Wandering around online maps, lucked out completely finding out about Karlsruhe, which I mentioned briefly at the end of the last newsletter, a town just over the border in South-West Germany, where there’s a huge video art museum, ZKM, in an old munitions factory. It’s over three floors, hosts events and temporary exhibitions, and also sells the best cheesecake I’ve eaten at a museum. Here’s a little video about it.

(And on the way to it, we also walked across a bridge which happened to cross over the town zoo, and saw some elephants.)

2. The collage work of Lynn Hershman Leeson, an American multimedia artist I’d never heard of before, on ZKM’s ground floor. She’s from Cleveland, Ohio, and her photographic collage work made me think of what Pauline Boty might have been doing she was still around, alive and active, in the 1980s.

3. Bill Viola’s Stations from 1994, in a huge dark room full of his LaserDisc videos featuring people swimming. The people were all different ages, upside-down, naked, every now and then bursting through the water in an explosion of sound.
   

   

   Thinking of it again a few weeks ago it’s made me think of the video to R.E.M.’s Nightswimming – the mystical strangeness of it, the intimacy, the energy of it, and how much Michael Stipe’s unearthly art was a part of me falling in love with his band.

Us adults went a few times throughout the day, while the 12-year-old was bombing round elsewhere enjoying flashier stuff. (It might help families to know that the top floor is an excellent interactive exhibition of the history of video games, where my son hammered me at Pong.)

4. The Gerry Schum and Ursula Wevers exhibition, about two German filmmaker artists ( pictured below on the left of Gilbert and George, and a couple, her looking like the grooviest member of Stereolab you haven’t met yet) who were determined, amongst other things, to introduce art to television, in unexpected ways, in the late 1960s.

I was particularly taken finding out about their interventions on TV – especially one by Keith Arnatt (which I’ve read today is also in Tate Britain). Imagine turning on the TV and seeing, without any context or warning, a man disappearing into the earth.

It made me think of those strange afternoons as a child when I’d put on Channel 4 and find some odd Eastern European cartoon that felt completely distant from my world, but that I firmly wanted to be a part of it.

5. So much more in ZKM, I can’t tell you, but I must mention the middle floor, where some of the Kunsthalle Karlsruhe collection is currently hung (including a gorgeous Gauguin and a painting by the Cubist artist Juan Gris, who I loved when I was making rough-and-ready collages for my Art GCSE) while its HQ next door undergoes repair and development. Best of all was this beautiful portrait of an unnamed man by the German Expressionist painter, Hans Thoma, which felt as alive in the room as if it was painted yesterday, even though it was painted around 1870.

6. A sunny day travelling by train from Karlsruhe to Munich, then Munich to Rovereto through the Brunner Pass. Man, the Alps (plus the world’s most terrible pictures of the start of them through a train window).

(As a public information intervention here, I know this post is headlined with the interrailing banner, but can I say that the Interrail app is pretty dreadful – it doesn’t sync up with the website version, and doesn’t always work if you’re only on 4G and not Wi-Fi, and when we had a train cancelled, and the app wouldn’t let me add a new journey, the customer service is pretty poor. In future, we’ll be buying separate tickets through train lane sales, but don’t let that slightly off-putting piece of insight put you off the actual travel, which is wonderful.)

7. Playing ping pong in Hungerburg, at the top of the funicular railway, in Innsbruck (a rare appearance here for our boy, E). You heard.

Also, in the international rankings of city backdrops, I’d put Innsbruck pretty high up there. Also an enthusiastic, if exhausted, thumbs-up their insane Tyrolean spinach dumplings (stale bread, milk, eggs and veg, followed by an afternoon coma).

8. AudioVersum in Innsbruck on a weekday morning, a peculiar, sweet little museum dedicated to the science of sound. Some it worked, and some didn’t, but there was enough in there to keep us all fascinated. I loved listening to music through my jaw, hearing Beethoven and a mother’s voice as you’d hear it from the womb, feeling the vibrations of a jet engine’s decibels, seeing how loud my scream was in the sound booth (the same as a jet engine, unsurprisingly) and dancing up a set of stairs where every step was a note in the major scale (and yes, a family of three could be on it this same time, buggering about with dissonance and harmony).

9. Our last stop before a week in a campsite where swimming, throwing a ball into water, and eating pasta in a chalet were the main attractions. Can I encourage you all to go to Rovereto? A lovely Alpine Italian town that houses a three-floor modern art museum, MART, that would have taken us a day to enjoy properly, for starters (although my favourite things in here were an Ai Weiwei Lego work, Mona Lisa Smeared in Cream, in reference to this 2022 incident, and this amazing painting by Renato Guttuso, Boogie-Woogie a Roma (I’ve totally been that girl in the bottom right-hand corner). It felt so early 1960s to me, but the Italians got there earlier – it’s from 1953.

   

   

   10. And – even better – a small museum of Futurist art, Casa Depero, brought to life by an Italian Futurist artist, Fortunato Depero, originally opened in 1959. Set in an amazing building, housing his gorgeous tapestries (see header image), typography, puppets, commercial art, furniture and so much more… it felt like a proper curio on a gorgeous side street. And even better, local B&B owners are given free tourist cards to give to their customers, so we did all this (below), and MART (above), for free.
   

Back tomorrow with a bit more Italy. Ciao for now.

1. The joy of making this map on the Interrail app (although it’s not quite right, as we don’t stop in Milan, and we go rogue in the middle).

2. The hazy, melancholic spell of Blood Orange’s Essex Honey taking hold in the car all week, as I ran errands to get ready to go away, an album about going home, grief, time and memory.
   

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1. Laura Chrostowski’s brilliant prints of our 1980s St David from the St David’s Shopping Centre car park in Swansea, a big visual symbol of the city for us kids growing up there in late twentieth-century. The red-bricked car park finally closed down last week – as I discovered when trying to park there last Saturday – and Green Scene Swansea’s Jodi Moss …

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1. The sound of a hundred men quietly standing on stage, being solidly aware of each other, holding themselves in that moment, and taking a collective, soft inward breath, then letting their voices emerge together in one soft, shared sound.

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1. Five days before we get to Frankie… I met a Yamaha CS-80, aka the greatest analogue synthesiser there has ever been.

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1. In a mad week involving scaffolders, seven vans of workmen and a big birthday party, the first three minutes of this was just the thing: the actors who voice the Simpsons doing a joint interview in the voices of The Simpsons.

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1. “You know when you desperately want to snog someone who you think will never like you, and then you find out they fancy you back? Being in this band is that great.” Reading this article on Elastica in the best music magazine of all time, aka Select, after a great hour listening to its old editor, and my old features editor, Andrew Harrison, on last week…

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1. The sweet anticipation of hearing Rock On around 3,500 screaming women of a certain age at Swansea Arena this September. (My mum Alison’s main birthday present – a night out seeing David Essex. Accompanying her will be a terrible chore, of course.)

2. The song I think of when I think of my mum and my late dad, Roy, Bus Stop by The Hollies, not because it w…

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1. The cover versions that have been popping up wherever I’ve been all over the week. Like Ray Charles in my Manchester hotel room on Friday night – on BBC4, not in a strange visitation – covering If You Go Away, Rod McKuen’s English reworking of Jacques Brel’s Ne Me Quitte Pas, best known being sung by Scott Walker on Scott 3. Here’s Ray doing it again in…

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1. Spotting Scott Walker in the window of a café in this Swinging 60s-themed Britvic 55 advert from 1987. (Walker nerds, do note: this was in the years between the releases of Climate of Hunter and Tilt.)

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1. And we begin, long before we get to that girl in blue, at the Hay Festival, where I spent five days this week. And the first thing I think about when I think about Hay are many passages from Jenni Fagan’s The Delusions, a book that opened me up to ideas about death and life and wonder, and a back catalogue bubbling over with imagination and invention, a…

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Ten Sunday Spells is my weekly post of ten things I’ve enjoyed from culture and beyond over the last seven days, that I have some bizarre compulsion to log properly, write about and share here, rather than just throw them up on Instagram stories without thinking for them to pop and disappear. Thanks for reading and entertaining me in this endeavour!

And …

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Part 2 delayed by 12 hours, thanks to making Sunday dinner, and collapsing thereafter in front of Criminal Record (admiring Peter Capaldi’s sharpness and thinking of him talking about the edits back in December). Oh, and chicken, olives and lemons and rosewater rice pudding with pistachios and cardamom, if you’re wondering (although the recipe for the l…

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1. Finding out again that a book – unlike an article, or a review, or a radio programme – can have the longest tail, and, in this case, end up with you being invited…

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1. There being nothing better to put turning 48 into perspective than climbing into one of the oldest trees in Europe.
   

   I’ve been to Defynnog before, a small village ten mile…

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I haven’t written my usual newsletter this week because I’ve been too busy (sorry) but do:
i) listen to the one-off comeback of the brilliant pop culture podcast, Bigmouth/The Culture Bunker which I recorded with the old gang on Friday and ii) enjoy these Springs songs, which I’ll be listening to to try to extend the effects of the sounds of the lapwing…

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1. Moya Brennan, who died on Monday, singing to Tommy Tiernan on his RTE show in 2020. I was asked to write a tribute about her for the Guardian on Tuesday, …

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