So, my big end of the year list. My highlights package. The greatest hits album. My götterdämmerung. God, I enjoyed typing that - ümlauts röck. Set phasers to Fluff - let's go!
5. Probably the number one highlight of this blog, this year? The return of TANK GIRL. I've been coasting ever since.
4. My favourite film this year? I'm essentially a low brow guy, so I'll go with HOT FUZZ.
3. T.V. highlight of the year? Not DOCTOR WHO, not BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, but series three of THE MIGHTY BOOSH. Glorious, with The Board Of Shaman's beefed-up part being a major factor to the show's exponential improvement, alongside a hell of a step up in terms of both production values (someone working on this show is a fellow Brendan McCarthy fan, I'd guess), and the tightness of the scripts (now edited by the great Richard Ayoade).
2. Well, if I didn't include Paul Pope's PULP HOPE here, I'd be some kind of mental case, right?
1. As Tammy probably once sang, sometimes it's hard to be a country music fan. If you're an American music fan, presumably everyone expects you to like that awful shite I only ever glimpse at on the CMA Award show, that dreadful stuff that sounds like '80s hair-rock only with pedal steel and fiddle dubbed over it. If you are an Irish country music fan, it's maybe worse, as I suppose you can't admit it without everyone expecting you to admit a shameful love of all that dreadful sub-Jim Reeves crap we're known for churning out. If you are a masochist, and somehow curious about what exactly I meant by that statement, feel free to click on this link and listen to a Hugo Duncan radio show.
And weep.
Yet, from this unholy tradition came my favourite record of 2007. An album that had all kinds of virtues usually missing from "Country and Irish". Sure, it's a country record that comes from the north west of Ireland, but it has not an ounce of spare sentiment, the genre's usual failing. Instead, there in its place is a morbid black humour. The lyrics reveal a literary ambition - it's a concept album, for God's sake. And the concept is a particularly Garth Ennis-ian one: an illiterate, violent, Ulsterman gets press-ganged into the German army; various picaresque antics ensue; ultimately leaves a catalogue of autobiographical songs behind that are "discovered" and recorded for a new generation. The instrumentation frequently reminds me of nothing less than BLOOD ON THE TRACKS: muscular acoustic guitars drive things on, illuminated occasionally by Burtonesque electric guitars or pedal steel, often layered over a blanket of swirling hammond organs. The singer, rather than striving to sound like George Jones, sings in a native, gruff, Northern Irish brogue, with a tone reminiscent of Green On Red's Dan Stuart.
This doesn't help you, the reader, much, I know. This is an album that's going to be hard for you to find, without some specialist Irish backstreet record store to help you obtain it. It's an album I only even came across by listening to an obscure local radio show during a fortuitous ride to work. And even then, I probably only listened closely because the record seemed to name-check new friend-of-this-blog Dan McDaid.
It's THE RAMBLINGS OF DANGEROUS McDAID by P.P. Slaggart, and if you only ever buy one Irish country record based on a tip by a blogger this year, make sure it's this one.