Cazz Blase: The big end of year roundup post

Hello and welcome to this years end of year roundup post!

It goes without saying that 2020 has been a very weird and frequently upsetting year, and it is because of Covid that there's no gigs category in this years lists. When I looked back at last years list I realised that I didn't include a gigs list last year either, but that this was due to the opposite problem: An abundance of riches rather than the desert of live there's been this year.

I'd have to be more than optimistic to be thinking about what might or might not happen to live music in 2021, so I won't make any promises about a best gigs list for next year either. We will have to see.

Hopefully you'll find some interesting things to listen to and read amongst what follows. As has been the case over the past couple of years, I will be running my songs of the year as individual blog posts counting down over the next few weeks, starting from tomorrow.

Albums of the year

12) Half Waif, The Caretaker

11) Katy J Pearson, Return

10) Nadine Shah, Kitchen Sink

9) Emmy The Great, April / 月音

8) Laura Marling, Song For Our Daughter

7) North Americans, Roped In

6) Fiona Apple, Fetch The Bolt Cutters

5) Kelly Lee Owens, Inner Song

4) Jess Williamson, Sorceress

3) Overcoats, The Fight

2) Harkin, Harkin

1) Allie X, Cape God

12 books I've read and loved this year

Pierce, Tamora, Tortall and other lands

Hillis, Marjorie, Orchids on your budget

Ben Moor, More Trees To Climb

Davis, Caitlin, Bad Girls: a history of rebels and renegades

Collins, Bridget, The Binding

Fisher, Carrie, The Princess Diarist

Shafak, Elif, Black milk: on motherhood and writing

Rubenhold, Hallie, The Five: the untold lives of the women killed by Jack the Ripper

Peters, Ellis, Dead Man's Ransom

Haynes, Natalie, A Thousand Ships

Ribchester, Lucy, The Hourglass Factory

Banine, Days in the Caucasus

12 classic podcast serials and episodes from 2020

Podcasts have really come into their own this year, with audio production seemingly proving easier to finesse in a lockdown environment than audio-visual productions. As such, it goes without saying that there's been some really good podcasts this year, and that many of them have some kind of Covid related link. The BBC World Service's, Coronavirus Global Update was established in March 2020 with the specific intention of processing and distributing information about the pandemic, and while rarely included in lists of Covid podcasts, has been quietly punching above its weight ever since.

Similarly, the existing US design podcast 99% Invisible made some great pandemic related content this year, including their episode about China and East Asia's relationship with face masks ('Masking for a friend') and a delightfully quirky episode about the history of toilet paper in the form of their 'Wipe Out' episode.

Page 94: The Private Eye Podcast did a good summary of their print Covid coverage in their 'COVID-19' episode, while work podcast Is This Working? looked at redundancy and unemployment in their episode 'At risk: Our job loss stories'. Ideas podcast Reasons To Be Cheerful looked at a number of pandemic related issues throughout the year but their episode on the current parlous state of the music industry, 'Sweet streams aren't made of this', was particularly strong.

Tech podcast Reply All devoted an episode to the QAnon conspiracy in 'Country of liars' [If you'd like to pair this with another good podcast covering a related story, you could do worse than listen to Page 94's episode 'US Election Fake News Special'] and the BBC ran a series, Two Minutes Past Nine, that looked at the long shadow of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. The BBC also gave us the highly compelling investigative podcast series Girl Taken, which revisited a well reported case that emerged during the 2015 refugee crisis and revealed a very different picture to what was originally thought.

At the more quirky end of history, new podcast We Are History gave us an episode on 'The British Invasion of Iceland 1940', which is well worth a listen. I can also heartily recommend the episode on the Suez Crisis, if only for the opportunity to hear one of the key political players being described as "Off his tits on amphetamines". I think that tells you what kind of history podcast you're dealing with.

Film wise, there's been nothing to touch Best Pick this year, even on the episodes they had to record over Zoom from three different locations. Their episodes on 'The Apartment' and 'Tom Jones' were particularly fine.