Best of 2018- Concerts

It’s probably high time I stopped introducing the best concert round up with complaints as to how every big band always avoids Budapest vs remarks as to how some bands actually don’t and the year wasn’t so bad after all, and I promise to do just that. Next year. As for this one, let’s tick…

Play It Like a Woman- Anna Calvi @ A38

When I was a kid, I used to play football with the boys, and, in all fairness, some girls too. We were all perhaps too young to get the implications, we just played. For manifold reasons in my case. Principally because I sucked at all the things girls were supposed to be good at, like…

A Matter of Energy: Best Concerts of Sziget 2018 Part One

This is somewhat of a novelty list for me: for the first time ever, I have managed to keep it down to an actual ten acts, and not go for some esoteric number like 12 or 17. I haven’t landed one of my favourite bands at number one, a crime to which I plead guilty…

The Fangirl Awakens: Sziget 2018 Days Five and Six

Day five started early with the yearly pilgrimage to the VOLT stage, this time at 3 PM, which in szigetian translates into bloody morning, to catch Black Bartók– previously it’d be for Hangmás, of which Black Bartók is basically a second coming, with a slightly modified line-up. The scheduling obviously meant a scarce crowd idling…

An Islandful of Wonders: Sziget 2018 Days Three and Four

Day three is the day when most festivals end, on Sziget it’s the ‘it finally began in earnest’ day, also the day when I could spend a good session of moaning over my spritzer that maybe the line-up isn’t all that it’s hyped up to be, and I literally (few things feel more satisfying than…

The Rules That We Break: Editors @ Barba Negra

In the run up to this Monday’s Editors show I was harbouring one of those ‘important’ existential concerns that envelop me every now and then with basically no sense or clear outcome either to myself, or the wholeness of being in general: I have written so many ecstatic reviews of the Editors, both of club…