Fantastic Metropolis

4. Felt Mountain, by Goldfrapp

This album delivers what Portishead promised a few years ago but never quite achieved. Haunting trance music with sombre and strange harmonies that do something sweet and painful to the heart, locking it in a room on its own perhaps, or leaving it on the ledge of an Alpine peak in the winter. There is an undeniable Germanic flavour to much of Goldfrapp’s songs. They are stylised, creepy, expressionistic, as lovely as anything by the Cocteau Twins but more harrowing. This is sad rather than bleak music, suffused with feeling, rich and quietly intense. It also redeems the tradition of whistling, brought into disrepute by buffoons on buses and orchestral flautists with nothing better to do. Like the Cocteau Twins’ Victorialand, an album made for snowbound landscapes, not that we get those in Wales anymore.

5. O melhor dos encontros

This live recording was given to me by my friend Dulcilene Urbainski and is a fabulous example of tropicalismo. This reunion of Elba Ramalho, Zé Ramalho, Geraldo Azevedo and Alceu Valença is superb, filled with energy and beauty, and many of the songs, such as “Caravana” and “A Terceira Lâmina” are soothing and esoteric, the smoothness frequently punctured with wise or raw folky touches. The main instrumentation is guitars, but there is throbbing, judicious use of a sitar on the sumptuous “Banquete dos Signos”, a tradition started by Baby Consuelo, formerly of seminal group Novos Baianos, and lonely, distant brass on “Bicho de 7 Cabeças”. Tropicalismo is good at combining danceable, upbeat rhythms with gentle, poignant melodies. This juxtaposition should be odd but it works without any awkwardness, I can’t say why. And the album ends with a pure party medley anyway, so the question is academic.

Other

I saw lots of great movies in 2002, the most memorable being Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding; Amenábar’s Abre los ojos, probably the finest SF film ever made; Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores perros; and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie. I also enjoyed Zhang Yimou’s Shanghai Triad, one of the few Gong Li films that had passed me by.

The best piece of theatre I saw was the Royal National Theatre’s production of Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera with the stunningly talented Natasha Lewis as Polly Peachum and Weill’s songs delivered with all the guts and fury they demand.

By far the best fiction magazine to be published was Des Lewis’ Nemonymous, which prints all the stories without names, which are only revealed in the following issue. This honest trick makes the fiction more real. Nemonymous is even superior to The Third Alternative which was my favourite for many years.

My two most treasured websites, or at least the two I’m willing to name, are Fantastic Metropolis and Dusk.

I turned 36 and had three books published, my record so far. I made some close new friendships and developed an irrepressible liking for Blackfriar’s cappuccino flapjacks, events which are unconnected. I began jogging as good exercise but then stopped because of better laziness. I spent two nights sleeping in the open, both in thick fog, one in company on a sand dune, the other alone outside a famous art gallery. I wrote my longest poem and was asked to compile this review. Because I am behind the times it is probably inadequate.

I vowed to stop buying more books than I can read.

It was a vintage year.