2015: an alternative review (part 1)

2015, eh? It’s been a year of ups and downs, and all that… blah, blah, blah. You’re probably sick of reading about the highlights of 2015 by now, so in keeping with my own personal tradition, here’s a slightly different take on some of the year’s events in the world of music and popular culture in general, with a tiny smattering of politics (but not too much) thrown in for good measure. Part 2 to follow very soon.

Adele

To be clear, I have no issue with Adele as a person. I’ve no idea what kind of human being she is but I’m more than willing to tolerate her continued existence. What I do have an issue with, however, is the hype which surrounded the damp sleeping bag of a third album she saw fit to unleash on us this year. I don’t think anyone was expecting a radical change in direction (a psychedelic jazz-funk opus, for example) but surely the most hardened Adele fan (I’ve no idea how such a concept would even manifest itself) was hoping for more than a tepid regurgitation of EVERYTHING ADELE HAS EVER DONE IN THE HISTORY OF ADELE BEING A THING? Everything about this album smacks of a total lack of imagination, from the uninspiring title (looking forward to ’86’) through to the same lazy preoccupation with trying to patch up shitty relationships. And that’s before we even get to the music, which is basically the aural equivalent of the bitter disappointment experienced on discovering that the cup of tea you’d be looking forward to has now gone cold. It’s a truly sad indictment on the British music industry when this utter puddle of whinge breaks all sales records. She’s getting away with murder and we’re all letting it happen.

Sam Smith

Maybe I just hear things differently to other people. I remember having a conversation with someone at university about M People caterwauler Heather Small and how her voice really grated on me – an opinion met with genuine surprise from the other party who genuinely felt she possessed a perfectly fine voice. History is now repeating itself in the form of Sam Smith. A work colleague agreed with me that his songs were dull, dreary and largely forgettable and then added “but what a voice though, eh?”. See, where a lot of people are apparently hearing the saviour of British soul music, I’m just hearing the incessant whining of a child about to break into a full scale tantrum because his mum won’t let him go to a family wedding dressed as Spiderman. His voice is not only unremarkable, it’s also downright unpleasant to listen to, like a shrill, never-ending apology for wetting the bed. Sometimes, if you listen hard enough, the sounds he emits form actual words. He also has the distinction of making a Bond theme worse than Madonna’s ‘Die Another Day’, something anyone with ears had hoped wasn’t physically possible. Like I say, maybe I just hear things differently, but there are times when it would be preferable not to be able to hear at all.

Donald Trump

There was a time when The Donald was little more than a figure of fun because he didn’t really understand how hair worked and, let’s face it, Trump means fart (if you’re British). And fart jokes never stop being funny, right? In short, he was seen as an eccentric but ultimately harmless character, a bit like Simon Cowell, Lord Sugar or Mr Bean. Somewhere along the line, however, he’s turned into some sort of bright orange bouffant Hitler, spouting the type of venomous rhetoric which ended in old Adolf lying face down in a ditch, on fire. I don’t know whether Trump actually means it, whether he’s just saying what he thinks ‘his’ kind of people want to hear or whether he’s just trying to see what he can get away with, but one thing is clear: if you were standing next to him at a urinal, you’d sure as hell splash the fucker’s shoes.

NME

Yeah, it went free and, in the process, defied accepted science by actually being worse than it was before. Cover stars since they stopped expecting people to pay good money for the ‘pleasure’ have included Sam Smith and that gimp from Twilight who went back for seconds when they were handing out eyebrows. Inside, the magazine is so dumbed down that its few remaining staff may as well come round to your house and act out its contents using brightly coloured sock puppets. As a product, it’s clinging on for dear life but as the go-to music magazine of record, it died a long, long time ago. What a shame it wasn’t allowed to float off to the great newsagent in the sky with at least a modicum of dignity still intact.

TFI Friday

Admit it – if you had your own TV show, wouldn’t you just fill it with your mates and things you like? That’s basically always been the formula for TFI Friday, which made a long-awaited and much-trumpeted return to our screens this autumn following a successful anniversary special in June. But now the dust has settled it’s becoming all to clear that the new series has failed quite miserably to live up to expectations. The format remains largely unchanged and all the familiar ingredients are still there, but it no longer seems to work. Evans grates in a way that he didn’t back in the ‘90s (even when he was in the grip of his very public meltdown) and the whole ‘look at me, I’m rich, I have famous friends and can get away with anything’ vibe no longer feels like good-natured, laddish banter, but now has a distinctly vulgar tone. The music has been dire (U2, Justin Bieber, Coldplay, James Bay, Texas, to name but a few), making Later With Jools Holland look like the Bangface Weekender in comparison, while the celebrity interviews feel stilted and awkward, punctuated by pointless little skits and routines shoehorned into the show for the sake of it. In the 90s, TFI Friday worked perfectly because it captured the alcopop-fuelled lad culture of the Britpop era, but in the 21^st century it just feels like you’re listening to a particularly embarrassing speech full of jokes which fail to land given by an obnoxiously inebriated relative at a family party. Come in TFI Friday, your time is up.