All Friends Wise and Wonderful
A rundown on last weekend's shows, and some things we enjoyed this week.
Hello friends! And the warmest of welcomes to all of you new subscribers who signed up over the weekend, perhaps after coming to see our shows at Wilton’s on Thursday and Friday. Weren’t they great? Even if I say so myself. But false modesty aside, we were really blessed last week with ten fantastic stories from our wonderful, brave storytellers, opening up their hearts to our wonderful audience, no less brave for venturing out in to the freezing wastes of East London and making our two shows as warm and welcoming a place in all the city.
Some highlights - on Thursday, Johnny Cochrane kicked things off with a warm and amusing reflection on eLZhi’s interpretation of Nas’s classic rap track Life’s a Bitch; Anna Cupani reprised her beautiful story of finding solace in the form of Mozart’s Aide while sat in a parked car in Belgium; Callum Hughes strummed his way through an explanation of why Radiohead’s Everything In It’s Right Place ticks all his boxes as a music fan; Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett weaved a gorgeous and hilarious story of young love and Hungry Hearts; and finally, and exhaustingly, Rob Deering held a plank on stage for all six minutes and eleven seconds of George Michael’s Freedom! ‘90.
On Friday, an even bigger and braver crowd joined in the dancing when Roann Hassani McCloskey introduced us to the delights of Algerian raï legend Khaled and his certified banger of a tune Aicha; Charlie Gilmour regaled us with a beautiful story about his childhood dog John (before subjecting us to All Things Bright And Beautiful); Kobi Prempeh told an all-time OneTrackMinds-classic story about his emergence into a creative life, while DJ-ing at a 40th Birthday Party “Symposium”; Pauline Eyre had us all in tears as she talked about her youthful romantic missteps; and finally James Rowland had us all on our feet once more, with a beautiful story about Carl Sagan, Golden Discs and Frightened Rabbit.
We laughed. We cried. We danced in the aisles. It was everything we know OneTrackMinds can be. And we’re so grateful to everyone who came along to make it such a special set of shows.
If you missed them, fear not - because we’re going to be back at Wilton’s in less than ten days time, with three more shows, and fifteen more stories about life-changing songs. We’re on Friday February 2nd at 7:30pm and then on Saturday February 3rd at 2:30pm and 7:30pm. Three entirely new shows, with all new stories and storytellers. It’s like a mini-OneTrackMinds festival, and though it’s causing me sleepless nights right now, I know it’s going to be fantastic. As always, you can get tickets from Wilton’s Box Office, and you can make use of our special discounted rate for best priced tickets at just £11 if you use the discount code OTMCast when you check out.
Also, Adam has put together a Spotify playlist for each of the shows, in case you want to listen back to any of the tracks again (admit it, you’re already blasting All Things Bright and Beautiful out of your laptop speakers…). Thursday night is here, and Friday night is here. Enjoy!
Some things we found interesting this week:
If we were still doing Album Club, next week’s choice would almost certainly be Wall of Eyes, from sort-of-Radiohead-side-project The Smile. As a fully paid up member of the Radiohead fan club cult, I thoroughly enjoyed this very detailed and considered ranking of Every Radiohead Album (Plus Solo Records and Side Projects) in Uproxx.
Thursday night’s show stealer Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett writes in The Guardian about the new generation of novelists writing about motherhood.
Next week sees the publication of Phew, Eh Readers? a collection of writing from Tom Hibbert, one of the most beloved and idiosyncratic music writers, who died far too young. It’s released on February 1st, but you can pre-order your copy now.
Sad news for fans of independent music journalism: Pitchfork, the much loved news and reviews site, has been lazily and inexplicably folded into men’s magazine GQ by owners Condé Nast…
…presumably another casualty of the growing influence of AI and algorithms in the world of journalism - a topic that’s much discussed at the moment, ahead of the imminent release of a fascinating book called Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture by social scientist Kyle Chayka. I’ve read a couple of excerpts reprinted in The Guardian and The New Yorker, and it’s clearly an essential read.
Right, that’ll do! We’ll be back next week. Until then,
KB.
Love it when you write with such energy and passion. OTM is good for the soul. End of.