2005 The year in pictures

Christmas Eve, Grasmere

One of those rare, utterly perfect Lake District days. And how his'n'hers have Dave and I become with our walking gear?!

REBECCA

Embracing The Past

Rebecca and I recently witnessed a very disappointing performance by Embrace, the indie-guitar band from Huddersfield. The Alexandra Palace event was said to be Embrace’s biggest headline gig to date. The show featured a balanced set of new songs and older classics supported by plentiful material from the band's most recent studio album, Out of Nothing. I only know this much about the songs they played because I subsequently found a set list online. The gig was so dreadful that it drove us, and many others, to the exits after little more than half an hour.

The concert was billed as a triumphant return for a band that two years previously had found itself without a recording contract. Certainly it should have been a night of celebration for those band members who had once resorted to the dole queue despite a discography that boasts a magnificent debut album, three further solid albums, and a clutch of hit singles. However, although the band seemed to have a good time, many audience members did not.

For a professional band with ten years of touring experience this performance was a shocker. The sound was terrible. The vocals were loud and leery - simultaneously too prominent yet indistinct - and the other instruments were poorly mixed. At times it seemed that individual band members were playing different songs. Established, well-known tracks were barely recognisable, lost in the ponderous sonic soup being served up on stage. The new material was turgid and unimpressive. The lighting and visuals were amateurish and did nothing to enhance the experience.

Alexandra Palace has a reputation for offering indifferent acoustics and generally being a difficult venue to play. However, this cannot be an excuse for Embrace because only a fortnight earlier we saw Franz Ferdinand dynamically master the same space with an outstanding show featuring excellent sound, great visuals and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of tubthumping energy. Moreover, reviews of other dates on Embrace’s current tour reveal a common theme of below-par performances marred by poor sound.

During their brief heyday in the late 1990s Embrace flirted with greatness. Their early repertoire, captured on their 1998 debut album The Good Will Out plus a series of earlier singles and EPs, featured mature songs, beautiful compositions and intricate arrangements. Soaring anthems such as All You Good Good People, Come Back To What You Know, and My Weakness Is None Of Your Business demonstrated breathtaking confidence, vision and ambition. Poignant and intimate ballads such as Fireworks, Dry Kids, and Butter Wouldn’t Melt indicated an emotional depth and delicacy of touch that most bands could never attain. Energetic up-beat tracks such as The Last Gas and One Big Family suggested that, amongst the tear-jerking sentiment, Embrace could also rock.

Somewhere, sometime, somehow, Embrace lost their way. After their third album, If You’ve Never Been, the band was summarily dropped by their then record label, Hut. The fourth studio album, Out of Nothing, released in 2004 on the Independiente label, was commercially successful but did little to progress the band’s sound and musical direction. Therein lies Embrace’s greatest problem. The band’s failure to revise and advance its style has left it musically and creatively bereft.

I don’t believe Embrace became a bad band overnight. Indeed, I suspect they were never quite as good as either I, or the music media, or, crucially, the band themselves believed. The main problem is that Embrace have been left trailing in the wake of a new generation of bands who are simply more innovative, more skilled, and more engaging. The Franz Ferdinand comparison is highly instructive here, as their energy and innovation allied with fantastic technical performances leaves Embrace looking like washed-up pub-rockers struggling to keep pace with recent musical developments.

I used to love you, Embrace, but not anymore. On a December night at Alexandra Palace you left me cold and sad. I bet you never expected to play a venue of the size and stature of Ally Pally. I certainly never expected to see you there. Perhaps me and you should have never got this far.

Undone
You're out of my system
Learning how to live with how it feels
And we tried
For so long
To reach eleven on a scale of one to ten
But we never get so far
Me and you
Should have never left the start
Me and you
Should have never got this far.

(Embrace, Dry Kids: 1997)

DAVE

Round Robin

And so, suddenly, December is further along than I would like and Christmas is nearly upon us. Our first one without Mum. And for many of Mum’s friends and relatives, their first one without her annual Christmas letter. Every year without fail, Mum bashed out this missive of doom and gloom using two fingers and an argument with Dad’s computer. It usually contained the stock phrases “I haven’t had a very good year healthwise” and “Stuart is still living at home.” Well, this year was certainly one hell of a motherfucker healthwise, but, believe it or not, Stuart is no longer living at home, since he moved out to a cottage with his girlfriend in the summer.

Mum’s parents were determined not have big-headed children and so they were extremely reticent when it came to paying compliments. Mum’s writing proudly continued this tradition, not wanting to seem boastful to her friends. She tended to focus excessively on whatever dark calamities had befallen Stuart or myself over the past 12 months. I had to beg her to include the fact that I graduated from York University with a First, but I don’t believe that I ever managed to persuade her to also mention that it was not only a First with Distinction, but also the highest-scoring degree my department had ever awarded. (Forgive me for finally blowing my own trumpet here, eight years on.) It’s not as if Mum’s friends ever exercised the same restraint – one regularly submits an essay of such nauseating pink-hued fluffiness about how marvellous her family are that on occasions I’ve nearly felt compelled to send it in to Simon Hoggart’s column in the Guardian. I’m waiting to see if we still receive it this year – as the eldest daughter recently had a baby, I’m expecting it to be a classic. Keep your eyes peeled if Hoggart ever publishes a sequel to The Hamster That Loved Puccini.

Dad said the other day that he has no idea who he should send Christmas cards to this year. It’s certainly true that not many of Mum’s friends were Dad’s friends too. Perhaps this year it’s up to them to make the first move. Despite my facetious comments above, I do miss hearing about Mum’s friends. It’s not as if I ever saw them that often, but as Mum always keep me posted as to what they were up to, I sort of felt as though I did. As they were people I’d grown up with, I feel some strange need to know about them still. It must be weird for them to no longer hear about us either.

I don’t know how I’ll feel on Christmas Day. We will be in Grasmere in the morning, so I will be able to visit Mum’s grave if I feel her absence too sorely. I’ll then spend the rest of the day with my in-laws, which will be perhaps a comforting sense of normal family life, even if they are tee-total. Last Christmas was simply horrendous. Mum was struggling after a hefty dose of chemotherapy and had to spend most of the day in bed. The underlying fear we all shared that this was to be her last Christmas with us was so overwhelming that we all ended up shouting at each other and crying. Stressed-out dysfunctionality nonetheless belittled by the fact that half of Asia was wiped out the following day.

I had my last bereavement counselling session on Monday. A gigantic horse chestnut tree outside the North London Hospice is completely covered with white bulbs, each one sponsored in memory of someone who has died. When Mum smiled, it was as if someone had switched a light on in her heart. She may have written morose-sounding round robins at Christmas time, but her spirit was still the brightest star. Ironically, when Dave and I were walking next to Brothers Water in the Lake District in September, a robin started chirruping loudly and excitedly at me, just as Mum would have done. If I ever wanted to believe in reincarnation, that was my moment.

REBECCA

Unpally

Embrace were rubbish. It was like listening to a student band in a dingy pub, overstraining a limited sound system and ending up with a deafening jumble of noise. You can’t even blame the difficult acoustics of the cavernous Alexandra Palace Great Hall as both Franz Ferdinand and Editors mastered them to perfection. No, it was just a group totally up their own arses, arsing around with hand-held spotlights and a glitter ball but failing to deliver musically in any way. Dave and I walked out after half an hour of excruciating din and got the bus home. We were far from the only ones.

REBECCA

Hooded Dementors

The letters page in TimeOut has called for nominations for London’s worst cinema, after the Renoir managed to close itself for six months for refurbishments (though TimeOut had misprinted this as “refreshments”) and re-open without any discernible difference. Shabby though the Renoir still looks, its atmosphere was not a patch on our experience at Holloway Road Odeon last night. We’d finally got around to seeing Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire and chose an evening performance to minimise the risk of disruption from over-excited, chattering children constantly needing the toilet. However, we hadn’t bargained on a group of 20 teenage hoodies turning up to trash the cinema. They jeered, smoked, coughed, talked (both to each other and on mobile phones), kicked seats, threw popcorn everywhere, flicked cigarette lighters and moved not only from seat to seat but also from screen to screen throughout the performance. You could barely hear the soundtrack of the film. The audience, unwilling to provoke the culprits into further misdemeanours, alerted members of staff, who tried to speak to the offenders but just received a torrent of abuse in return. You feel so helpless in these situations, when suddenly London turns into its trashiest alter-ego. You despise the fact that you’ve just spent £14 on a completely wasted evening. Of course it wasn’t directly the cinema’s fault, but they could have done more to evict the offenders from the screen. However, in response to our complaint, Odeon have very kindly given us two free tickets to see another film. ASBO, anyone?

REBECCA

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

The sky over Stationers Park at sunset, filled not with clouds but with smoke from the raging inferno at the Buncefield fuel depot near Hemel Hempstead, 30 miles away.

Touch Me

On Wednesday, I went with my good friend Vicky to see A-ha in concert. I realise that this is quite an admission, but you have to understand the context in which it arose. Vicky and I have known each other since we were four and have battled our way through many a moment of adolescent (and adult) angst together. Apart from a ridiculous obsession with the television series The Tripods when we were 13, our first loves were Morten and Mags from A-ha. Of course, way back when, our sensible parents would never have allowed us to go and see them perform live on our own, and there was no way in hell they’d have ever considered taking us. But we eventually forgave them. Vicky and I gradually grew up and out of our wish to wear leather bracelets along the entire lengths of our forearms and left the Norwegian ones behind for good. Or so we thought. It was only when I was suddenly given an A-ha DVD to subtitle a couple of years ago that I realised that the band were even still in existence. The discovery that Morten was still gorgeous was made even more eye-opening by the particularly tight pair of leather trousers he was wearing on the video. I stole a copy of the DVD from work and went straight round to Vicky’s flat with it and an obligatory bottle of wine. So when Vicky and I heard that they were coming to Wembley, we wondered if we dared, decided that we did, roped together a team of girlie friends and booked tickets.

To complete the teenage experience, we had a Hawaiian in Pizza Hut beforehand, mainly because it was the only eatery within walking distance of Wembley Central tube station. How can this godforsaken corner of North London be compatible with the UK’s largest sporting stadium when it is so bereft of facilities? At the moment, the entire area is still a building site, and even the Arena is closed for redevelopment.

The gig was in a giant tent-like structure alongside, which was so long and thin that we ended up about a mile from the stage, though thankfully we did have a giant screen above our heads on which appeared Morten in all his glory. The man is now 46 and seems to have discovered some secret to eternal youth, perhaps on one of his forays into the rainforest. Unfortunately he’d abandoned his leather trousers for a tatty pair of jeans that it looked like he’d been doing the decorating in. Apparently, he also has four children. Some of us wondered if he might like more. Mags is still rough and cheeky (though these days with a very dodgily shaped miniature beard). Pål, who never did look that great, now just looks worrying, with a bit of a comb-over thing going on, and hollowed-out, wrinkly eyes. We almost feared he was ill.

The audience was full of 30-something women, who were shocked to discover that the band had made 20 years (20 years!) of music, either individually or as a collective, since we’d last listened to our tapes of Hunting High And Low. Consequently we knew only five or six of the songs they played and the rest of the gig was fairly subdued. Maybe partly because we'd all suddenly realised how old we were. Still, it was a “nice” performance, even if we watched the majority of it on telly. A strong backing band of Swedes carried most of the music, though claims that there were tinges of Keane or Coldplay in their sound were perhaps a little extreme.

Here’s to the fulfilment of teenage dreams, and all that we have lived, learned, loved and lost since then. To redeem myself, tonight I’m going to see Simon Rattle conducting the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. From the ridiculous to the sublime, I suspect.

REBECCA

Alhambra

More Moorish than Soviet.

Pally Archdukes

“Got no lights like Ally Pally in our village” rang the chorus of one of the songs in a truly terrible musical I was forced to take part in at school. I’d never heard of Ally Pally before that point and it was only when I used to hurtle past Alexandra Palace on East Coast mainline trains between London, York and Newcastle that I put a building to the name. It really is a rather beautiful place, with its gilded and turquoise tiles, triangular roof and large round window, but not one renowned for its lights as far as I’ve ever noticed. Now it’s a permanent fixture on the horizon of the view from our lounge window. Given its history as the home of the first television broadcast by the BBC, the vista of its transmission tower makes it all the more hard to comprehend why we have no network TV channel reception in our flat. We had to get Sky just so we could watch BBC2.

Ally Pally has many purposes these days, the main one for us being a pleasant (and slightly invigorating given its gradient) Sunday afternoon stroll up through its park with visitors so we can show them the magnificent view of London you get from the top. Unlike the London Eye, this one comes for free. Alexandra Palace has a wonderful weekly farmers’ market and one of the best firework displays in London on the nearest Saturday to Bonfire Night. It has an ice rink, a garden centre and regular trade fairs for knitting, dinghy and model railway enthusiasts. It’s part-derelict from being bombed in the war and round the back of the palace you’ll find a Soviet style pleasure park, with concrete skateboarding ramps, a harsh-edged lake and miserable-looking pedalos.

Perhaps its Soviet hinterland is what inspired Franz Ferdinand, with their love of USSR constructivist art, to pick it as a gig venue this week. An original two-day booking expanded to five consecutive nights as each became a sell-out and we were lucky enough to be amongst the 8000-strong throng last night. It was one of the most incredible concerts I’ve ever been to, made all the better by the marvellous Editors in support. Such original sound, such energy, such tempo, such intelligence, such talent. The crowd went wild and I felt privileged to be amongst them. You felt as though you were at an experience that people will still be talking about in 30 years' time. Never again will Franz Ferdinand be able to play in such an intimate space - from now on they will have to fill gigantic stadiums.

And how great to finally have a massive concert venue just down (or technically up) the road. The only snag is that while they have enough bar staff to enable you to purchase a beer in under 30 seconds, they have so few toilets that it’s a 30-minute queue to emit it at the other end. I’ll be a bit more restrained with the Carlsberg when we return for Embrace in a couple of weeks’ time. Meanwhile, this afternoon, we’re heading off to Spain for the weekend to see another palace on a hill, more Moorish than Soviet, the Alhambra in Granada.

REBECCA