Stornoway have been playing wonderful little gigs around Oxford for the last few years, but in 2009 things really took off for them. Their clever, melodic folk-pop has started to gain attention nationwide, and they’ve shown up several times in the papers and on shows like Later with Jools Holland. For a while they had a …
Mike Mignola has been creating something remarkable with his Hellboy series of comics for over a decade now. For me, his short The Troll Witch is a perfect ten-page distillation of what makes Hellboy so special. I read it for the first time this year, in the compilation of shorts The Troll Witch and Others, which …
The first item on my list for 2009 is the poem Rain-Charm for the Duchy by Ted Hughes. As mentioned in the intro to this list below, not everything I’m going to mention was published in 2009. 2009 is simply the year in which I first discovered it. I’m a big Ted Hughes fan, but …
A List for 2009 – Rain-Charm for the Duchy by Ted Hughes Read More »
I’m a part of what was probably the final generation of teenagers to listen to their music on cassette tapes. As such I spent a good deal of time in my formative years agonising over tracklists and the correct order in which songs should appear. I wasn’t quite as bad as the guys in High Fidelity, but the …