2025 - DONE

On leaning into the overload and demented sense of possibilities.

Hello, how’s it going? I’m currently sitting dipping Jaffa Cakes in brandy, so I can’t complain. Obviously the season isn’t easy for all to say the least, but I hope you at least have an opportunity of a breather in amongst it all.

Doing end of year stocktaking is a bit more intense than usual for me. 2025 was a… transitionary year in a lot of ways, personal, professional and creatively. The year before had just been a non-stop bludgeoning of bereavement and other reminders of mortality (I still haven’t officially turned 50 because that June 2024 landmark birthday came in a week of multiple funerals so I pretended it wasn’t happening), the Trump election and coming to terms with ADHD diagnosis, among other things, playing havoc with my mental health, and generally having to paddle frantically just to stay upright.

2025 began with a determination to push through and move on to new things, but then I got the news that soundoflife.com – which had been my one bit of monthly retainered work for almost exactly five years – was shutting up shop. This wasn’t awful news: they’d saved my bacon as the first Covid lockdown hit and had commissioned some really great work, but this was also the longest I’d spent with one main work routine for my whole life, so I was ready for the change. In fact it felt in keeping with the “keep it moving” feeling, but it did knock me a bit off course from the idea I’d be pursing “passion projects” all this year, because I had to hustle like crazy for freelance work to fill the gaps.

If that sounds like an excuse as to why I haven’t done anything massive this year, it absolutely is. That is to say it’s been an odds-and-sods sort of year, a lot of moving things around and putting things in place, and grand projects like new books or events or compilations got shoved once again to a back burner. There were still passion projects though. Of course Bass, Mids, Tops and the Rest continues, and every single one has been a joy to do, with Brian David Stevens’s pics now building up to a whole gallery’s worth of – to use the word correctly for once its sorry life – iconic images.

This year we met THE unsung instigator of the UK acid house explosion, one of the last true impresarios of the UK music industry, more from the Zelig’s Zelig, a jazz dub wizard, possibly the greatest singer in this country, a global explorer and mischief maker with tales to make your eyes spin, a shoegaze legend, a professor of AI and deeply radical soundmaker, a true model of finding one’s own path in the modern music landscape and one of this year’s Mercury Prize contenders, a mythic polymath with wild insight into all creative processes, possibly the greatest rock band drummer of his generation, an explorer of outer space and Fijian myth forging her own way in the electronc music world, a trumpeter / rapper / producer who joins dirt road blues to crypto hos, and one of the most pivotal figures in the British avant-garde of the past half century. Also, marking the heartbreaking passing of Terror Danjah, one of the true pioneers of UK soundsystem music, we published his sprawling interview in full with 9,000 words that hadn’t made it into Bass, Mids, Tops and a load of unpublished pics of him too.

A LOT of work also went into theartsdesk.com. In late ‘24 we reached our 15^th birthday, but we also had a website on the verge of total collapse, and after years of occasional commercial success but mainly doing it out of bloody minded belief that it needs to exist, the collective of journalists that keep it going were teetering on the same edge too. But a bequest in the will of a long time supporter felt like a sign that we needed to carry on, so with the help of a crowdfunder – and some really delightful endorsements that persuaded us that others in the arts saw the same sense of purpose that we did – we’ve been overhauling it. With a vast archive, tiny team and almost broken architecture it was a vast task to migrate it all to an up to date platform BUT – a tiny bit of bug-hunting aside – we’re now there, and next month will be the beginning of a full relaunch and new approaches to expanding our coverage and audiences. Watch, as they say, this space.

All of that – BMTatR and TAD – was done purely for the sake of it, barely covering costs (remember you can subscribe to both!!). But the paid work did come in too, thankfully. A chance to interview Little Simz for the fantastically stylish GREATEST mag in the USA came completely out of the blue. Bandcamp Daily and The SHFL were fantastic. More than anything, the mighty DISCO POGO has been a real saviour. Over the summer I wrote four hefty pieces for them – two for their LCD Soundsystem book, and features on The KLF and Japanese environmental / ambient music – then as that was wrapping up the news came in that my previous cover feature for them last year, on the significance of Sade, had won “Best Work Of Music Journalism – Text” at the Reeperbahnfest awards. Not going to lie, the validation meant a lot at a time of such total flux and trying to work out what I’m all about, and that feature has continued to reverberate and make a lot of connections since.

On top of that I really ramped up DJing. A lot of this has been local: taking my Midlife Crisis Soundsystem around fetes, social clubs and school discos to help pay the bills, as well as fun and funky things at microbreweries, record fairs, a tapas terrace, and the glorious Beats For Breakfast proper house music all-dayers at Coffee Mongers roaster which have been really, really special. I never imagined I’d be playing on a beautiful soundsystem to people sitting in saunas and ice baths on an industrial estate on the edge of a national park but so it goes. I’ve got good at mixing, too! But there’s also been some extraordinary stuff out and about – Stroud’s Hidden Notes and Neo Ancients festivals, a double weekend of Houghton and my third year of ambient session in the Once in a Blue Moon Tea Tent at We Out Here which I wrote about here, and best of all a dream (almost literally, it felt at the time) of a set in Tokyo.

In April we had a long-yearned-for family fortnight trip around Japan, which I should really write more about at some point just to preserve the memories. The week before we left, my wife Natasha messaged me the name of a bar she’d found in her researching and said I should approach them. After a little Facebook messaging with Google Translate, it turned out Tangle Music Bar & Floor in Shibuya was more up my street than I could have hoped for. After untangling some botched explanations on my part, they liked my approach too, and miraculously had a slot that Saturday, the night after we arrived in the country. After riding the metro across Tokyo on my own, jetlagged, clutching my USB sticks, I found an actual slice of heaven: Michael and Mio, the warm, welcoming (and very stylish) couple behind Tangle, ran the cosy space that barely fit more than 20 people like an extension of their own home, their record collection stacked round two walls, the DJ booth built for perfect comfort right down to the precisely placed home-crocheted beer mat. You can hear my two sets from that night here and here. Then I did this:

Do I need to be going into all this detail? No, of course not. But it’s been the nature of this year that there was constantly a LOT going on, punctuated with little oases of OK-this-is-why-I-do-it calm and clarity. Throughout all of that I was also doing some bits and bobs with the Protein agency, a wonderfully William Gibsonian organisation that I’d kept an eye on from afar since the late 90s, and which has somehow mantained the exploratory sense of that time – the antithesis of tech bro virulence. I’d joined their SEED Club talking shop and bounced ideas around with some brilliant minds, and they were happy to commission me to riff on themes like “Culture As Casino”, “Why We Need Sci-Fi More Than Ever”, “Who are the Doers?”, and “The Real Abundance”.

This chance to bounce, exchange, play with ideas without urgent purpose or having to have a topical peg to hang it all on seemed to play off the intimate conversations I was having for BMTatR, the soul searching about what we do and why at theartsdesk.com, the deep panel discussions at Houghton and Neo Ancients, the shared memories around KiF’s Still Out,the beautiful little musical experiences whether in Shibuya, at our local coffee roaster or school fete, or just in my own garage, the increasing return to small forums and long back and forth emails with friends (what I started calling slowcial media quack quack – and it started to feel just a bit like there might be some sort of purpose underlying the relentless hustle and juggling.

Reading Liam Inscoe-Jones’s Songs in the Key of MP3 and Naomi Alderman’s Don’t Burn Anyone at the Stake Today also made concrete ideas about not getting caught up in the information blizzard but putting real world, intimate experiences and real persobnal research and discernement front and centre. Watching people who know just how much grassroots music, but also the culture and commentary matter put a rocket under that – shouts to Elijah, Mark Davyd, Emma Warren, Jude Rogers, Cyndi Ellesse, Sean Adams, Ynes, Man Power, Jonny Banger, Errol & Alex, Kate Hutchinson, Marcus Golden Barnes and a ton of others who do it because they’ve got to, and more than anyone to the late Keith McIvor aka JD Twitch: writing his obituary was hard, but immensely galvanising in all of this.

Add in finally getting ADHD medication in October, with the dimming of noise and extra focus that brought, and it actually felt like I was back to where I’d hoped to be at the end of ‘24 in terms of being able to break the routine and launch some bigger, more coherent projects that involve a bit more, and matter a bit more, than just me sitting in front of a word processor listening to records. The “Little Rooms” manifesto that I delivered for a Hacks & Hackers event last month made for a nice little statement of intent and has already sparked off some new things. Ditto the hymn to “Soft Music For Hard Times” for the We Out Here magazine which eventually went online this month. Both joined the magic I felt in Tangle and the Once in a Blue Moon Cafe tent to all the wider research and conversations I was having - the aesthetic, the theoretical and and concrete realities cohering.

I’m putting my money where my mouth is by getting out and about more next year, too starting with a trial mini-tour of talks / discussions / DJ things at the end of February around Bristol and Cardiff. Lots more locally too in the Forest / Southampton / Bournemouth/Christchurch/Poole. A long dreamed-of and very personal compilation is about to be announced, very possibly with another to follow in short order. Two more books are on the cards, maybe not immediately, but each already marking out a clear zone of research in areas very close to my heart. More teaching / mentorship. More DJing generally. Of course theartsdesk.com is going to be growing too – and our bloody-minded belief in that and BMTatR as bastions against sloppification and enshittification only grows stronger (PLS SUBSCRIBE OK?).

As I said in one of my silly little videos recently, it seems ridiculous to be optimistic in these fucked up times, but what can you do? It has been a stupidly busy year, I’m exhausting myself just writing it down tbh, and next year will be busier still but hopefully, hopefully a bit less scattershot and continuing the sense of building bigger things.

Jeez… thanks for reading if you did. Thanks for getting involved. Stay tuned, see you on the other side!