Yet again I spent a lot more time listening to old music than to new music. My routine now is that I will listen to at least one side of an LP while doing the puzzles in The Times after lunch instead of the radio, and during working hours I have been a lot more engaged with the job, and in more meetings and so paying less attention to the radio when it is on.

When something does catch my attention I add it to a playlist to remind me at the end of the year what were my earworms. In 2024 there were fewer tracks on that list than in previous years but it was really hard to choose between a few of them what to add to my ‘1962Onwards‘ playlist or one track for each year of my life.

The main contenders were Yard Act (We Make Hits), Nick Cave (Long Dark Night), Manic Street Preachers (Decline & Fall), Jack White (Archbishop Harold Holmes), IDLES (Dancer), Goat (Goatbrain), Honey Dijon (Finding My Way), and Moonchild Sanelly (Big Booty). I really could have gone for any of those, or maybe even Amyl & the Sniffers or Lambrini Girls but decided to add Laura Marling’s Caroline.

This is partly because I realise the last few years have all been quite upbeat tracks and the playlist could do with a change of pace, but mostly because it is just a beautiful, haunting track. I don’t know much about Leonard Cohen I but I always imagine his songs have a similar atmosphere. For some reason Laura Marling’s work has escaped my attention in the past, but her Patterns in Repeat album was inescapeable this year.

Apart from that 2024 seems to have been a good year for releases by acts named after body parts (KNEECAP, BICEP, Elbow) and archive releases of 1970s concerts with that massive Dylan box set, several Can concerts and Guru Guru. It was a bad year for legendary British DJs and Steves – with the deaths of Annie Nightingale, Johnnie Walker and Steve Wright as well as Steve Harley and Steve Albini. ALso not a brilliant year for rhythm sections with a a couple of ex-Bee Gees drummers dying and a couple of bass legends (Herbie Flowers and Aston ‘Family Man’ Barrett).

Because of me spending all that time listening to old vinyl I didn’t discover a lot in 2024: the main new artists were Last Dinner Party, Fat Dog, Gurriers and Psycho Weazel. Of these I think Fat Dog made the biggest impression. They have a sort of Sleaford Mods vibe but are a lot more melodic about it.

There were also some new-to-me artists who have been going a bit longer but I only noticed them in 2024, like LYR, Allie X, and KNEECAP who I only knew as a guest artist on a DC Fontaines single but the more I heard about them the more interested I got, and their film is very much on my watchlist on whatever streaming service it is on.

I think that new artists must find it a lot harder to get heard these days because the oldies are still around and still pumping out new material, and it makes me feel really old when I realise that people like Paul Weller and Pet Shop Boys must count as oldies now. Just to mention a few, there were new albums from Crowded House, Focus, Deep Purple, David Gilmour, Van Morrison (of course) Judas Priest, Steve Hackett, Canned Heat, Pet Shop Boys, Blue Oyster Cult, Hawkwind, and Jon Anderson. There was even yet another posthumous LP from Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry.

On top of all that were the releases from acts that have been conspicuous by their absence for ten years of more like The The, Gossip , Manu Chao and the Cure.

I did actually buy (or acquire as presents) a fair bit of new vinyl in 2024 as well as all the second-hand treasures. I got the Pet Shop Boys (the version with the extra ”Furthermore‘ disc), Jean-Michel Jarre’s Versailles 400 live album, Nadine Shah’s Filthy Underneath (a brilliant follow-up to Kitchen Sink) Manu Chao’s Viva Tu (his first proper album since 2007 and still as good as ever), Public Service Broadcasting’s The Last Flight (the other PSB! A beautifully packaged album), Betty Boo’s Rip Up the Rulebook (nearly as good as Boomerang) and the David Gilmour and Cure LPs. Also the Spizzenergi live LP that I bought from Spizz himself after a concert in Brighton.

New releases that I didn’t buy, but listened to and enjoyed in 2024 included the welcome return of Vampire Weekend, IDLES, Yard Act, Brittany Howard, Big Big Train, Bob Vylan, and a couple of LPs from the Smile. I think my favourite new LP was the Jah Wobble/Horace Andy LP Time.

2024 was a fairly good year for re-issues, box sets, special editions and live albums both from recent tours or from older archives. For live albums there were three different Can live LPs (Paris 73, Aston 77 and Keele 77) that were all the more poignant with Damo Suzuki dying earlier in the year. Obviously there was the massive box set of Dylan/The Band concerts, but also the Jean-Michel Jarre, Rick Wakeman, Erasure, Doctor Feelgood and the aforementioned Spizzenergi Live LP – recorded in Dusseldorf in 2018 (I think).

There were some anniversary-type reissues of Band on the Run, Synchronicity and Stop Making Sense that went down well, but my favourite has to the be the Thin Lizzy 1976 special edition that bundled Jailbreak and Johnny the Fox. I bought the blu ray version which has original and remastered versions. I have to say that in most cases I actually preferred the original mixes.

The big live music event of the year had to be Taylor Swift, about whom I still know very little. I do know that our daughter and her husband paid a fortune to see her at Wembley and that my wife ended up getting into the same show for free because she drove the bus for the support band, but got bored after one song and went backstage again. The other big live event was the Oasis ticket fiasco, for shows that might or might not happen in 2025.

The most spectacular music event was probably the Olympics/Paralymics ceremonies, though these were spectacular missed opportunities. I felt they leaned too heavily on the electronic dance music aspect of French music and could have done with a bit of Manu Chao, or some of the Francophone and France-based African/Middle Eastern artists like Angelique Kidjo.

The only show I went to see was on a much smaller scale: Spizzenergi at the Prince Albert pub in Brighton, but I think it was probably better value for money than forking out hundreds to see Taylor Swift.

In May I had a bit of a musical pilgrimage to Germany. I didn’t actually get round to Dusseldorf, but I was in the general area, based in Cologne. I managed to visit quite a few record stores and flea markets and picked up some German records that are harder to get in Britain like Extrabreit, Joachim Witt and United Balls. It would have been nice to grab some Can LPs but my visit was vary soon after Damo Suzuki died and so all the prices for their records had shot up. Maybe next time. I found it to be a fantastic place to visit anyway. Such a relaxed atmosphere and obviously some spectacular buildings.

I do have to mention King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard briefly. They released an album in 2024. Singular. are they slowing down? Most years they release two, three or even five albums in a year.

Anyway, that was my experience of music in 2024 and so my playlist grows by another 3 minutes and 21 seconds, taking it to nearly 5 hours. At some point in 2025 I should take the time to sit down and listen to the lot.