Number 1: Matthew Sweet - Devil With the Green Eyes

Before I begin, I should say that what I've learned from this little exercise is that perhaps I ought to try to listen to a bit more current music rather than things released years, even decades ago. Maybe I'll start listening to Radio 6 or buying Mojo magazine or something.

So the song I've played most this year is from 1993. In many ways Matthew Sweet should be one of my favourite artists - I love that jangly Byrds and Big Star influenced power pop sort of thing that he specialises in. He has also collaborated with the Jayhawks, one of my favourite bands of all time, and I once saw him live when he was part of a short-lived supergroup called The Thorns.

Yet each time I tried listening I came away thinking that it was nice enough, but nothing really to make me put it on again. Funnily enough I have the same sense of not liking his work as much as I expected to with the other Matthew Sweet, the historian and author of Inventing the Victorians.

This year I have given the musical Matthew Sweet yet another whirl in a bid to find out what it is I'm missing and I have warmed to him a bit more, in particular the 1991 album Girlfriend is consistently good and some of the songs on the Time Capsule best of compilation are very listenable. But nothing has compared to Devil With the Green Eyes, which I have listened to over and over again, this year, often hitting play again after the song has ended. 

With its haunting melody and guitar intro, distinctive use of harmony and background vocal, and dark lyrics about the destructive nature of jealousy, this is an awesome song that has been the runaway winner of my personal listening chart for 2024. The version I've linked to features Richard Lloyd from Television, who contributes a great closing guitar solo.

Number 2: Vigilantes of Love - On To Bethlehem

I take a further turn into obscurity today, albeit again with an artist who really deserves to be much better known. In many ways the best songwriter you've never heard of.

Vigilantes of Love, whose name was taken from a New Order song, was a vehicle for singer-songwriter Bill Mallonee. He at least started out under the alternative Christian music label and the lack of commercial success might stem from him having been too secular for the Christian market and yet too Christian for the secular market. 

And yet he has clearly had some mainstream affirmation, Emmylou Harris contributed vocals to one Vigilantes song, while Peter Buck out of REM co-produced an early album, and he has been named in one list of 100 best living songwriters.

He has also perhaps been too prolific, putting out around 50 albums in a career of about 35 years and while each one that I've heard has its high points, it can begin to sound a bit samey and there hasn't been much stylistic evolution. So one Vigilantes of Love or Bill Mallonee solo album can sound much like another.

Yet he has been a consistently very good songwriter and sometimes an outstanding one. Two albums from the 1990s, Killing Floor and Audible Sigh really deserve to be hailed as masterpieces. The review of the former that I've linked to describes their style as 'trying to get the biggest, most aggressive sound they can while using acoustic string instruments almost exclusively... a terrific set of Power Folk.' This seems as good a description as any of the Vigilantes sound..

This song is from a kind of outtakes album from the Audible Sigh album, 'Cross the Big Pond, recorded in 1999 in Cheltenham, apparently. This may at one level be considered a Christian song, but is also about soldiering on through adversity and looking positively to the future. Despite the title this isn't really a seasonal song, and it's one I listened to more in Lent than Advent.

Still, please listen and then explore further the Vigilantes of Love/Mallonee back catalogue at Bandcamp.

Number 3: Felice Brothers - Crime Scene Queen

Around 20 years, there were two bands I heard about via music magazine sampler CDs and whose work I started to follow and by one route or another acquire their music as it was released. One was the Decemberists and the other the Felice Brothers. Both were very distinctive musical styles and lyrics that made them not really like anyone else. Colin Meloy from the Decemberists sounded as if he had swallowed a thesaurus from the extensive and arcane vocabulary appearing in his songs, which also had unusual subject matter, songs about pirates, people being swallowed by whales and the like. Ian Felice used a lot of quirky wordplay, a bit Dylanesque but more playful. Both had a penchant for story songs.

As I no longer kept abreast of the charts or any other measures of popularity I never really knew which of the two was the more commercially successful. If anything the Decemberists seemed more likely to be the niche act and the Felice Brothers stronger candidates for mainstream success.

So I was surprised when seeing the latter at Islington Assembly Hall a couple of years back that they said this was a relatively large venue for them, and they normally play bars. The Decemberists by contrast have had hit records and perform at much bigger venues.

So this is leading to saying The Felice Brothers really do deserve to be better known. While they released a couple of fine albums early in their career, Tonight at the Arizona and a 2008 self-titled one, subsequent releases have been more inconsistent with occasional style changes that didn't quite work. But their 2022 record From Dreams To Dust is I believe truly outstanding album which I would encourage anyone who likes music in the broadly Dylanesque style to listen to. It ought to be regarded as a classic,

This year's long player, Valley Of Abandoned Songs is a more low key offering. As the title suggests it is a collection of songs that didn't quite fit on other albums, although I think all have been recorded afresh. But this is by no means an album of B-sides and rejects.

Crime Scene Queen is the opening track, a pretty good representation of what the Felice Brothers do. The addition of bassist and backing vocalist Jesske Hume a few years ago has brought another dimension to their music. This is also my top song that has actually been released in 2024.

Number 4: Bruce Cockburn - Closer To The Light

Bruce Cockburn has long been an artist I feel that I should like more than I actually do. He ticks all the boxes: sort of folk rock style singer-songwriter who writes intelligent and thoughtful lyrics. Yet I have never quite taken him to my heart. I listen to an album, think it's pretty good but then don't go back to it. Part of the problem is that I found some of his political songwriting in the 1980s overly didactic and dogmatic. (Don't get me wrong, as a fan of Bob Dylan and Neil Young I hardly object to political songwriting but I want to be moved rather than hectored.)

This year, though, I decided to give him another whirl, in particular his mid-1990s albums Dart To The Heart and The Charity Of Night. Both have a political as well as a personal dimension, but are less direct and in your face than his previous work, and the more rewarding for that. I've only just realised that both these albums were produced by T-Bone Burnett, which probably helps explain why I like them so much. Closer To The Light is an elegy to Cockburn's friend the songwriter Mark Heard who died tragically young at the age of 40 in 1992. I hope to write more about Heard another time, but this is a quietly powerful song that I ended up playing over and over.

Number 5: John Hiatt - Through Your Hands

John Hiatt is hard to categorise as an artist. He seemed to come out of the New Wave movement and could have been seen as an American Elvis Costello. But then he also seemed to be part of the Americana, new country thing and a bit like a rockier version of Steve Earle.

I suppose, though genres shouldn't matter. His best and most successful albums Bring the Family and Slow Turning were hardly off my turntable (or actually tapedeck) in the late 1980s. But then the quality of his albums dropped abruptly it seemed and I allowed myself to be influenced by poor reviews into not buying.

Because I did listen to him so much back then his work had laid fallow in my music app, but this year I have had a revival of interest leading me to listen to things I missed before. I don't know if this quite counts as a duet as the vocal contributions are unequal, but the lines sung by the Innocence Mission's Karen Peris really make the song.

While others in my list this year have been more nostalgic, this is looking positively to the future - a kind of pep talk from the angels.

Number 6: Pernice Brothers (featuring Neko Case) - I Don't Need That Anymore

Now I'm back on the more familiar ground of indie, Dylan-influenced music that I think of as the sort of thing I listen to.

Despite the moniker, the Pernice Brothers are really a vehicle for Joe Pernice, a songwriter who has previously recorded as a solo artist and as the Scud Mountain Boys and Chappaquick Skyline (an album under the latter name being described by one critic as 'terminally-depressed orchestral pop musings', which sums it up quite nicely).

The fact that he wrote a song about BS Johnson made me take to Pernice immediately, whatever he happened to be calling himself at any given time and he can be depended on for thoughtful, intelligent lyrics even if all a little downbeat. I see the line-up has at some point included James Walbourne, who is the current lead guitarist of The Pretenders as well as Richard and Linda Thompson's son-in-law. This only increases my positive feelings towards the band.

This year's album Who will you believe maintains the consistently high standards of his output, with this song, featuring the excellent Neko Case, being its outstanding track. I can only find an audio track but this is one worth savouring without the intrusion of video.

Number 7: Sailor - The Old Nickelodeon Sound

Writing up this list is bringing home to me quite how untypical many of the songs I've listened to the most this year are of my usual preferences. Perhaps the realisation that I am not far off 60 years old has made me feel wistful and nostalgic and led me to play tracks that nurse that sentiment.

At the start of this year, I would have been shocked to think I had listened to anything by Sailor, let alone that one of their songs might be among my top listening material this year. I was vaguely aware of their 1976 hit Girls Girls Girls, which seemed insufferably naff not to mention off-puttingly sexist even by the standards of the time it was recorded. I assumed that they were one of these artificial, put-together groups such as were formed to enter the Eurovision Song Contest.

So I am not sure why I even clicked when the Youtube algorithm suggested one of their songs to me - perhaps it was incredulity. But having done so I discovered they have a more interesting history and quirky output than I had imagined.

I'm not sure quite how much of this online biography is true, but evidently they have some kind of curious back story. At least they clearly were a proper group and while Girls Girls Girls remains a troubling listen, in the context of their wider output it seems more a reinterpretation of music hall style than boorish sexism. 

Their trademark was an instrument they called the Nickelodeon, a two-person keyboard, described as comprising 'a custom-designed all-purpose machine, the constituents of which were two upright pianos, two synthesizers, mini organs and glockenspiels all mechanically linked and contained within a wooden frame'. I have a weakness for such quirkiness so having clicked I was converted.

At least two of their members went on to interesting post-Sailor careers, the lead singer and chief songwriter Georg Kajanus, who himself seems to have an exotic background, went on to produce classically tinged electronic music with a band called Data, while one of the nickelodeon players, Phil Pickett, later played keyboards for Culture Club and co-wrote Karma Chameleon. (I've triangulated the latter point enough to think it is true not a Wikipedia editing prank.)

Anyway this song has chimed with my mood this year and climbed my personal chart. More typical examples of my musical taste will start again tomorrow.

The video is not of the best quality but I think conveys the spirit of the song and the band better than linking to an audio track.

Number 8: Justin Hayward - Forever Autumn

My theme of nostalgic and retrospective listening in 2024 continues.

I never really got into the Moody Blues, nor indeed musical versions of pioneering science fiction novels, but remember this coming out when I was starting to take an interest in the charts as a 12-year-old in 1978. This was before I realised that my peer group would disapprove of my liking such stuff and that I should keep quiet about it.

Anyway as the leaves began to fall this year I compiled a playlist of autumn-related songs, including this one that I ended up playing over and over as if to atone for years of denial. The video is not of the original but a live version recorded last year with Justin Hayward's current band. It includes an introduction in which he relates the story of how he came to record the song.

Number 9: Susan Fassbender & Kay Russell - Twilight Café

This is one that an algorithm suggested, possibly influenced by my recent listening choices of obscure 1970s and 80s artists.

I was surprised I had never heard of this, because back in 1981 when it reached Number 21, I did follow the charts and watch Top of the Pops etc. Not having heard the song before nor even heard of the artists I looked them up to read the sad story that Fassbender committed suicide in 1991. 

It seems that although this song made the charts and led to television appearances, the next two singles failed to repeat this success, the record company decided not to go ahead with an album and Fassbender and Russell left the music industry and started families.

That seems to have been the way it was back then. Nowadays, when recorded music makes so little money, musicians earn their living by performing live and finding other income streams. Back then live performance was done first to obtain a recording contract and afterwards to promote records. Touring was a loss-making activity. So presumably after this brief brush with fame, there was no choice but to head back into normal life.

It seems that many years later the act's surviving member, Kay Russell, collected demos and arranged for them to be released. I would highly recommend it, but I wonder if their music didn't belong to any obvious style or genre and their songwriting output was quite varied contributed to their not achieving sustained commercial success.

Whichever way, there does seem to be some online recognition of their output, including a Facebook Fan Page, which appears to be run with involvement of Fassbender's family. Sadly, Kay Russell died earlier this year and I can't help but wonder whether that unhappy news might have been what pushed this track up the algorithm and on to my screen.

Anyway I have enjoyed discovering and listening to the song, yet in view of what was to come the second verse feels all too poignant:

The music grabs me, spins me round and around
My spirit soars, no longer smashed to the ground
The cares and worries of a busy day
Just slide across me as I start to play

Number 10: Matt Bianco - Whose Side Are You On

Somehow I feel the need to explain myself with this one...

Way back when I was in my teens, liking certain sorts of music entailed not liking others - at least if you wanted to avoid having your friends mock your record collection and stop being your friends. So it was not OK to like The Clash and Yes, or indeed REM and Matt Bianco.

Both at the time and subsequently, the latter were often cited as the epitome of 80s Uncool. I remember reading an article by Paul Morley where he expressed this view as a fixed truth, requiring no further explanation. Which is a bit rich given that when he was in Art of Noise he tried to recruit Thereza Bazar from Dollar as lead singer. 

For myself, not being a musician or even knowing about music per se, I like songs, pretty much regardless of style and never had a problem liking prog and punk or alternative rock and lounge music, provided the tune was memorable, the words at least interesting and the arrangement pleasing to the ear. But I was conformist enough to hide my copy of the Matt Bianco single
Get Out of Your Lazy Bed at the back of my record collection along with my Jethro Tull and Al Stewart records just in case anyone spotted them and mocked.

Now, though, I am 58 and don't have to account to my peers for my musical tastes. Since back in 1984 as a poor student, I hadn't the budget actually to buy Matt Bianco's debut album and sensed anyway that this was a step too far into loss of such street cred as I might have had. 

Anyway, this year I have downloaded and listened to it and the whole thing is rather fun, admittedly more in the mode of background music than something to concentrate on. In the process I puzzled over why Matt Bianco were so despised and decided to look this up on the internet. One, essentially positive, blog post described it thusly 'It’s not overtly offensive, it’s not thrilling, it’s…nice. Whether that’s what Robert Johnson flogged his soul for is a moot point.'

The thing is, though, not all music has to shake the establishment or protest against authority. Matt Bianco's music can be enjoyable even if Get Out of Your Lazy Bed isn't a satire of ruthless capitalism or More Than I Can Bear a call to revolutionary consciousness. It could also be argued that just a few years after punk, using musical styles dating from the pre rock and roll era was at least a little daring. And worth remembering that even REM and the whole Paisley Underground had a jingle-jangle element that drew on the 1960s. I'll even push it so far as to say that Whose Side Are You On, as a wry comment on the murky and mercenary world of espionage, was quite topical for 1984 and also that it is now uncontroversial for artists to follow a range of influences including Latin and lounge music. Perhaps Matt Bianco were pioneers.

Whichever way, it's an enjoyable song and the video, which I never saw at the time, is rather fun too. I feel no shame in liking it.

Number 11: Buffalo Tom - Autumn Letter

Apparently taking their name from the first half of Buffalo Springfield and the drummer's first name, Buffalo Tom seemed to be regarded in their early years as a sort of discount shop Dinosaur Jr, whose leader, J. Mascis, produced their first album. But I preferred the influencees to the influencer and have nearly all their work in one format or another.

The release of a new album Jump Rope at the end of May this year passed me by until a few months later, by which time I had also missed seeing them on tour - they remain high on my list of bands I like to see live but haven't. Otherwise this one would be higher in the charts.

There hasn't been much in the way of stylistic evolution by Buffalo Tom, over the decades. Their new album sounds remarkably like their first one, released in 1988. But they can always be depended on to deliver grungy but melodic songs combined with literate, well constructed, if often opaque lyrics written by their lead singer and guitarist Bill Janovitz. I read somewhere that he has a master's degree in English literature so perhaps that explains it.

I only started listening to this one in mid-October so perhaps Autumn Letter was destined to be my favourite song on the album. The words conjure up an autumnal feeling and indeed seasons seem to be a sub-theme of this album with the next but one track Come Closer starting with the words 'Bleak, midwinter sun'.

Autumn has always been my favourite season and the closing lines

    Panic shouts out (panic shouts out)
    Pity drowns out (pity drowns out)
    But mercy wins out in the end

seem to offer a note of hope rather than fear or regret.

Number 12: The Innocence Mission - Black Sheep Wall

Led by wife and husband team Karen and Don Peris, The Innocence Mission could be compared to 10,000 Maniacs, having some kind of alternative folk style. Only they weren't as well known and had only one sort of hit, Bright as Yellow. With the exception of a couple of songs, I never liked 10,000 Maniacs as much as I expected, finding the lyrics a overly worthy and earnest and the tunes not particularly memorable.

The Innocence Mission, whose work I somehow stumbled upon a few years ago, seemed at once more musically creative and lyrically enigmatic. It's also typical of me when finding two bands with similar styles to prefer the one that's less popular.

Anyway, they had drifted from my consciousness until hearing Karen Peris singing a duet with John Hiatt, while revisiting the latter's oeuvre (of which more later in this series I hope), leading me to seek out another album, their 1989 self-titled debut.

For me, the most listenable track was Black Sheep Wall, which I assumed from casual listening was about a reprobate lover, but now I look at the lyrics it seems to be a reflection on parenthood and protective feelings towards a child. Moving and haunting.

My top 12 tracks from 2024

I have long given up any pretence of keeping up with which music artists are popular, in the charts (if that's still a thing) or even appearing on Jools Holland. For a time after I had passed the age for following these things I still subconsciously the information by hearing what my stepchildren were listening to and even trading recommendations with them. Even after they left home I still read the music press, for example the late lamented Word magazine, which catered for older people who took popular music seriously. But I haven't found a good substitute for that publication.

Yet I've never grown out of obsessiveness about music. It's just that now, as I have hinted at in other posts about books, I'm catching up with things I've missed over the years rather than identifying new artists to follow. This year I have even overlooked new releases by artists I do like, and am now belatedly catching up on latest offerings from the Decemberists, Sleater-Kinney, Cassandra Jenkins and Nick Cave. I also tend to listen to music more when working at my computer - not like the old days when one bought vinyl or a CD, took it home and pored over the lyric sheet and other credits. So I don't pay as close attention to songs as I once did.

At the same time my nerdiness seems to have increased, as I have started using the LastFM website, with its Scrobbler function, which keeps a record of which songs you have listened to, and unlike Apple Music, lets this be applied to specific time periods. This has become my new toy, enabling me to compile my personal listening chart for 2024.

To confirm my above observations, pretty much none of the tracks that I've played the most this year have been released in the last 12 months, but with the help of Youtube suggestions and the like I have still found what for me have been new discoveries, as well as rediscovering other things. In the remaining 12 days before Christmas, I will roll out my top 12. 

For reasons set out above this is without any detailed lyrical exegesis or commentary on the musical arrangement, but at least sets me a challenge of keeping up the blogposts for a time.

Could the wilderness years be over for Coventry Rugby?

I am delighted to see that Coventry Rugby Club have applied to be approved as eligible for promotion to the English Premiership under the rules about stadium capacity. As they sit at the top of the second tier, for now things are looking up although there is a lot of the season still to go.

I have written here before about the travails of being a Coventry rugby supporter. I am always tempted to blame myself. Fifty years ago when I really became aware of their existence as my maternal grandfather was a supporter they were one of the great names of English rugby and winners of the then Rugby Football Union Cup for two seasons in succession. After I started supporting them it seemed to be all downhill.

When the league structures came into place in the late 1980s they lasted one season in the top tier before being relegated. While the club had clearly lost its way, there was every reason to hope that before too many years passed they might climb back up again, but it was not to be.

In part this was due to Cov's further off-field problems, including nearly going out of business twice. But the real issue was that a few years after the game went professional, the route back to the top tier was blocked by the restrictive practices of premiership clubs (£), whose owners believed that as they had invested in the game at a crucial time, their clubs should be protected from the jeopardy of relegation for all time.

They did this through a system that provided much lower funding for promoted teams and rules governing stadium standards and capacity, requiring clubs seeking to join the premiership to have a ground capacity of more than 10,000. Given planning and land ownership constraints this is all but impossible for many clubs and unfeasibly expensive for everyone. It has had the effect of fossilising the top tier of the game. 

It is also a nonsense, because premiership teams compete in European competitions against clubs with stadiums that would not reach premiership standards - and apparently without adverse consequences. For example, as I can testify from recent experience, Benetton's 5,000 capacity Stadio Monigo in Treviso (above) has an amazing atmosphere when full and looks pretty good on television too.

Earlier this year there seemed to be a relaxation of the premiership's protectionist rules, with acceptance that a promoted team could have four years to increase capacity from 5,000 to 10,001. But then the RFU stuck in a clause saying planning permission had to be secured before promotion for the new criteria to be met. This again puts prohibitive costs of obtaining planning permission in the way would-be promotion candidates, particularly as the whole thing may prove unnecessary if they don't go up or do but go straight back down again. 

Cov's latest application comes with a clear suggestion that legal action may be necessary to get the RFU to back down and an expression of confidence that this will be successful. I note that at least one legal commentator has suggested that the minimum capacity rule

is likely to breach competition law, as the restriction of competition and/or abuse of dominant position it entails cannot be justified by reference to a legitimate objective

Perhaps the RFU will see sense in time to avoid a costly legal battle, but I'm not holding my breath.