Andrew Dubber

David McInerney, Tom Arnott, Adam Regan and me – after a spectacularly successful DJ gig at the Hare and Hounds, Kings Heath

I often do top 10 or 20 lists (and sometimes even top 100 lists) of music from the year gone by. I generally spend quite a bit of time over this, and then I end up agonising about the order I’ve put things in, and the things that it later turns out I forgot to include.

Fortunately (I suppose), this year, the overwhelming majority of the music I listened to was at least 25 years old (I had a bit of a souljazz binge) – so it would be pointless to try and list my top current records, as it’d just be a list of records that I actually happened to hear, rather than a selection of the best out of a larger pile.

So instead, I thought I’d approach things a bit differently this time around. It’s a year in review, without mentioning records that I like.

Instead, here’s a list of a things I thought were pretty cool about 2008 as I experienced it. These are some of the things I got to do, places I visited, projects I’ve been involved in and interesting stuff I encountered.

They’re not really in any sensible and comparable grouping like pop records would be – and so they are in no particular order. And nor is there a nice round number of them.

This list represents my Top Several Things and Stuff of 2008.

New house

The quiet suburban streets of Hall Green

We moved out of a flat in hip Moseley and into a 3-brm house in suburban Hall Green near the beginning of the year. Despite it being something of a deathtrap, with dodgy electrics and things going wrong on all sorts of fronts, the move has been a really positive one for us all.

Having a large back lawn has been lovely (even though there hasn’t been much weather in which we can enjoy it properly) and it’s also been great to have the garage so we could get Jake a drumkit and an office that I can lock myself (or Jake) away in from time to time.

We’ve also been able to have people to stay far more often, which is great for when Kerryn and Haydn bring the boys up – or when Mum and Dad were over after the Wedding of the Century (about which, more in a bit). Incidentally, Mum and Dad managed to pick four days of torrential downpour and flooding to visit Birmingham, after a lovely sunny time meandering along the canals of France drinking red wine in the sun.

Shame we couldn’t have put on better weather for them – but it was great to have them here.

But that brings me on to…

Couchsurfing

Petr & Dasa – couchsurfers and go-karters

We started couchsurfing in earnest this year. I’ve stayed at a few different people’s places, and as a family, we couchsurfed in Hamburg (about which, more soon) – but the real highlight for us has been having interesting people from around the world come and live in our lounge for a couple of days at a time.

We’ve had film-makers, engineers, students, perpetual tourists, nurses, members of the clergy, musicians and all manner of interesting people stay with us. All of them have been utterly delightful and each have had interesting stories to tell.

Petr & Dasa (pictured above) enjoyed their time in Birmingham so much, they decided to stay here in town for a few months. I bumped into Petr in town the other day, and he was buying Christmas presents to send back to his family.

We’re starting to get more and more requests for couchsurfers coming through Birmingham. Every now and then we need some time to ourselves, but for the most part, we love having people turn up and hang out. Most of them are pretty self-contained, and all of them have stories to tell.

Chris from Canada just left yesterday after staying the night. He’s taking a year off from his university studies to see a bit of the world. We played card games, drank beer and talked about places we’ve been. Can’t really ask for a better night in.

Gail’s visit

My mother-in-law, Gail

Every year, Bobbie’s mum spends some time working at a lodge in the States, and makes her way back to New Zealand by way of the UK. She visits friends here, and she spends some time visiting us here in Birmingham.

This year, it was a nice relaxed visit. We sat around, we played Uno, there was a bit of shopping, but by and large, we just hung out. It was pretty cool.

Best of all, Gail gets on really well with our friends, and is lots of fun to have around.

Greg & Nadine’s Wedding

Greg and Nadine. Or Grenadine, as they’re now known.

This was the family event of the decade, by all accounts. Greg and Nadine live in the Hague, but Nadine’s family is from Hamburg – so that’s where the wedding was. It was one of those once-in-a-lifetime things where such a large proportion of the extended family were all in the same hemisphere at the same time – and it was the NORTHERN one for a change.

It was so great to see everyone. The wedding was delightful – Nadine looked amazing, Greg’s speech was superb, the DJ was really cool (oh wait… that was me) – but the real highlight for me was catching up with everyone. I love that I have such a cool family and that I like everyone so much.

It was really great hanging out with Greg, Grant and Cameron (the male cousins on that side of the family), and it was cool to see Mum and Dad, Aunty Mick and Uncle John, Aunty Lynne, Lee and Mark, Kerryn, Haydn and the boys. Shame Aaron and Lucas (Lee’s two), Hilary and Fi couldn’t make it – but the majority were there, which was really nice.

Given that the wedding took place both on a boat and in a rowing club overlooking the river, that it took place over two amazing days – and that there was even a massive fireworks display and a partial eclipse of the moon to commemorate the occasion – it seemed that no expense had been spared.

After the event, Bobbie, Jake and I took a couple of extra days to explore Hamburg, couchsurfing at the home of a advertising copywriter who miraculously had room for the three of us in the living room of his flat. Lovely guy by the name of Thomas who couldn’t have made us feel more welcome.

Seriously – if you’re considering it and you want to travel comfortably on a budget – try the couchsurfing thing. It’s very cool.

I So Wish…

Go on… make a wish

After 3 years of living in Birmingham and having heard the name Stef Lewandowski everywhere I went, the time finally came when we got together in the same room together and had a conversation. We know all of the same people and we’re interested in most of the same things – and people were often really surprised to find out that we’d never met till this year.

And as soon as we did – we started making stuff. Stef and I work really well together, and we kind of operate like an ideas factory. He has the added skill of actually being able to make websites, so we started things off with a little thing we called I So Wish – a site on which you could make wishes.

We also made 5alist – a site for making top 5 lists (which needs a bit of developing – one for 2009) – and we have a few more in the pipeline (some really cool stuff that I can’t disclose just yet).

But we had a message from a guy called Dan a month or so back, and he wanted to help us develop I So Wish into a successful business venture. He’s an A&E doctor by trade, but with a strong business background and an awful lot of connections. So we said – yeah, okay – and got to work on building it into what it has become today.

After a week of tweaks, and another week of putting it out there, we’ve had 87 of around 220 wishes granted by the community in the days leading up to Christmas, and all the signs are that it will take off like a rocket in the new year. We are VERY optimistic about this site and its potential.

But best of all – it’s about people helping each other out. For instance, someone wished they lived in America, and another member of the site offered up their airmiles so she could go and check some places out in the States before making the commitment. That’s just one of many stories of generosity we’re already seeing in our fledgling community. It’s very cool.

KTF & The Treehouse

I’ve been lucky enough to be involved this year with a project that buys out half my time at the university. It’s an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Knowledge Transfer Fellowship. The AHRC provide research funds to universities, and fairly recently they’ve come up with the idea that people in universities know things – and that those things might be useful to industry and social enterprises.

So my job as a Knowledge Transfer Fellow is to take the stuff we know at universities, go out to businesses and institutions in radio and music and say ‘How can we be helpful?’

From there, we can design online prototypes and suggest new ways of working that (theoretically) help these organisations in ways they may not otherwise have thought of.

The KTF is based in a room at the university officially called either the Interactive Cultures Research Unit – or, less grandly, Room B314 – but which we now all call ‘The Treehouse’.

It started out as a bit of a boys club in there, and we all talked Transformers and dinosaurs quite a lot (hence the name) – but it’s now much more inclusive. Of course, some people think we actually work in a real treehouse – and who am I to have them think otherwise?

It’s a bit of a dream team in there, as far as I’m concerned. Dr Nick, Jon (pictured), Jez, and I are the mainstays of the treehouse (although I’m usually only there on Thursdays and Fridays). The Prof (Tim), Paul, Sam, and Oli are regular visitors and Annette and Katie are frequently on hand to restore some order and defuse the robots and space monsters obsessions that Nick and particularly Jon fall prey to.

It’s such a great environment, I’ve given up my big, private office (“the mauve suite”) and I just set up my laptop in the treehouse and fight over rights to play my iPod on the stereo along with everyone else.

Through the KTF I’ve got to work with some of my favourite record labels (including Gilles Peterson’s ‘Brownswood’ label) and consult with some really great people doing really interesting things. It’s been an amazing project to work on with over 25 industry partners – and we’re not even halfway through it yet.

And partly as a result – it looks like we’re going to be setting up the Centre for Music and Radio Innovation on the back of that in 2009. I really hope that goes ahead. Could be amazing.

BBC Research

Zane Lowe in his natural habitat

Another university project I’ve been really proud of this year was our work with the BBC on a project about radio audiences online. We worked in a team that looked at a range of different aspects of fandom and listenership – and how those things are mediated via the internet. One strand was about The Archers, another about Terry Wogan and Chris Moyles, and Tim and I looked at specialist music.

The brief overview of our findings can be found on the BBC Radio Labs blog, and we (finally – sorry, Tristan!) put together the full report in the last couple of weeks, but there were several reasons this project was a real highlight of the year for me.

First, we had unprecedented access to the BBC. We spoke to programme producers, interactive managers, radio station staff and the really rather clever people who make up the Audio and Music Interactive team at the BBC.

Second, it made it possible to hook up with my old friend Zane Lowe, who I hadn’t spoken with for around 15 years. I used to work for his Dad, Derek at Radio Pacific, I wrote the letter that I like to think was the deciding factor that got Zane into broadcasting school all those years ago – and I recorded a lot of Zane’s early hip hop recordings (did you know he’s better known as a rapper and hip hop producer in New Zealand?).

It was really great to catch up and talk about old times – and it felt like it had only been a few months, rather than a good decade and a half. I think both of us have remained pretty much the same over time, despite a lot of life happening in the meantime.

And third – it was a really interesting project that not only revealed a lot about the ways in which audiences interact with the BBC around specialist music programming (and actually, they don’t, quite a lot of the time) – but also helped me really think through the role of public service broadcasting in the 21st century.

In short – I’d take the word ‘broadcasting’ out of the equation and replace it with ‘public media’ so that any bias that says the internet is there to serve radio and television brands can be immediately subverted. Trouble is, the BBC has a fair bit of solid branding in that acronym of theirs, and it would be a shame to replace it this far down the track with BPM…

Amsterdam

Piet, Tim, Saskia and Guido

One of the other things we’ve been doing in the Treehouse, aside from the BBC project and the KTF is working with friends of mine at Veronica Holdings in Holland.

Guido is the boss there, and they have some great ideas about how new media can work with traditional broadcasting – and because of a coincidence of history, politics, geography and personalities, they have an amazing bunch of projects with an amazing bunch of talent to call on – and a budget to make it all happen.

I love Amsterdam. It’s my favourite city in the world. There are some amazing places around and they’re all full of really great people, but there’s something special about Amsterdam. I’ve been there maybe 8 or 9 times – and it just feels like home every time I do.

Best of all, though – they’re a really great bunch of people. Guido’s such a lovely guy and a magnificent host. He brought Tim and I over to meet with him, Piet and Saskia who were working on the project. As usual, with Guido, we were treated royally and had a magnificent time. We also came up with a couple of really interesting ideas for projects – both of which are underway now.

We were also lucky enough to bring Piet and Saskia over to Birmingham to show them around, and tried to give them as good treatment as we were given there. A tall order. We also took them around to meet some of Birmingham’s best and brightest in the music industries and creative sector over here.

Sadly, Saskia was leaving the organisation to go and start her own events company, so this was the last Veronica project she got to work on – and Piet was involved in a terrible climbing accident which left him in critical condition for a long time. Thankfully, he’s on the mend now – and I’m looking forward to getting back over to Amsterdam early in 2009 to catch up.

However, some of the stuff that’s happening with the research projects have been pretty groundbreaking – and it’s awesome to be doing cutting edge new media explorations in an international context. Guido’s a bit of a visionary when it comes to the collision of new media and broadcasting.

Islay

My birthday, once again, was awesome. This year, my friend Clutch and I had adventures in the Hebridean Islands. Specifically, in Islay – where all the best whisky distilleries live.

Clutch pretty much arranged everything, and what with the pushbikes we rented, the fact that there was a jazz festival going on on the island at the time, and the free flow of single malt, an entertaining and mostly memorable time was pretty much guaranteed.

We had some pretty legendary escapades including a secret ‘closed warehouse’ tasting of a 1966 Lagavulin, straight out of the cask (a month of my salary would not have covered the sip I had); getting locked in Bowmore distillery with a ‘help yourself boys – we’ll be back later on’; a cross-country cycle ride that ended us in all sorts of bother; and a ferry crossing that would have turned the stomach of seasoned whalers.

On the back of this particular trip, we’ve sworn to head back to Islay for the Whisky Festival in May 2009, and we’ve started not only drinking whisky, but collecting it, and even hosting tasting events. See Dubber and Clutch for more details on that…

Twitter

One of the most interesting things that’s happened this year has been an internet service I started using in 2007, abandoned because I didn’t really ‘get it’ and then came back to this year after a couple more tries and realised what it is and how I wanted to use it.

If you don’t know Twitter, it’s a bit like the status updates on Facebook, but without the rest of Facebook. Some people call it micro-blogging, because it’s a bit like a blog, only in 140 characters or less. But in fact, I think both of those overlook Twitter’s real characteristics – which are not about what it does, but how people use it.

Twitter is performance conversation. There’s no other way I can think of to describe it. You can direct your messages at people, but the messages are visible to anyone. You can follow anyone you think is interesting, and they don’t have to follow you back for it to work (unlike Facebook).

While some people balk at the lack of privacy this introduces, the more astute quickly notice that you’re not obliged to reveal anything personal on Twitter. Once you understand that what you are engaged in is public ‘performance’ conversation, then your approach adapts accordingly.

Here’s my Twitter page.

While there are many people I know with reader numbers that dwarf my own, I’m pleased to note that at the time of writing there are 1,355 people in the world who have deemed me sufficiently interesting to add to their watch list. To put things in perspective, Stephen Fry has 38,250 followers.

He’s in New Zealand right now. You’d know that if you followed him on Twitter…

But the best thing about Twitter is getting to know all of the really interesting characters connected with the creative industries here in Birmingham, striking up conversations and being introduced to people at 2 or 3 levels of remove – and then later getting to meet them in person and continuing the conversation.

Consulting

I’ve started doing quite a bit of consultancy this year. Face to face meetings over coffee, Skype calls, email consultancies on an ongoing monthly basis – and even several day intensives that require me to travel, stay a few days, try and be helpful in large, concentrated doses – then leave again.

It’s something I’d been thinking about doing for a while now, but this year, it’s really started to take off. I mention a few of the bigger ones below.

For the most part, I talk with musicians who are releasing their own albums, record labels that are making the transition online and new music-based online startup companies – but I’m starting to expand into other areas of creative business. It’s been really interesting. Online strategy, marketing and entrepreneurship, and social media stuff mostly.

I’m kind of busy at the moment, so I’m not really taking on new clients, but it’s good to do bits and pieces here and there. Here’s a more detailed description. If you’re interested, get in touch and I’ll let you know when I have a gap come up.

Meetsound in Paris

Antoine and me at the Arc de Triomphe

I was invited to do some consultancy on a new online music startup based in Paris.

Antoine arranged for me to travel to Paris by Eurostar (love Eurostar) and he put me up in a hotel right in the heart of the city. We spent a few days sitting in cafes, restaurants and bars, brainstorming what I’m convinced will be a very successful enterprise.

A lot of food and wine was consumed, and I managed to get in a fair bit of sightseeing too. I had a really brilliant time – and Antoine seemed to think I’d been very helpful.

I’d never been to Paris – on purpose, at least.

Bobbie, Jake and I got lost enough during one trip to France that we ended up going through Paris twice, despite designing a route from Calais to Avejan that avoided Paris entirely. As a result, we spent the rest of the journey dreading the sight of the Eiffel Tower.

But once I actually got there for real – I absolutely loved the place.

Chicago

Chicago by boat

By far one of the coolest things of 2008 was winning a trip to attend a bloggers conference in Chicago. The competition was to write a blog post about why you should win the prize. So instead, I wrote a post about why I shouldn’t, and why my New Music Strategies readers should try and win it themselves.

Whether they just liked me being perverse about it, or whether the fact that my entry just kind of stood out, I was delighted to win a trip to SOBCon08. I met some fantastic people who are now good friends and stayed with a really great guy who showed me around, indulged my jazz record shop enthusiasms and was an amazing host.

The conference was really interesting – and I learned an awful lot, not just about blogging and about the business of blogging – but also about social media generally. While I’d started to use Twitter again in earnest while my friends were away at SXSW in Texas keeping everyone up to date about what they were up to – it was at SOBCon that I was really able to piece together what I wanted to use it for.

I was also given a free blog consultancy with the brilliant Chris Garrett, who gave me some really fantastic tips about getting New Music Strategies into shape.

All in all though – Chicago rocked. It’s an amazing city and I’d go back there in a heartbeat. New York was impressive and everything, but Chicago blew me away. Love it. It’s Birmingham’s Sister City, you know…

Unconvention

One of the real highlights of the year from a music industry perspective was the brilliant Unconvention conference in Salford, just a mile down the road from Manchester’s In The City major label dinosaur-fest.

The atmosphere was great, the panels were fascinating – I met some amazing people and had an awesome time. But more than any other music industry showcase and conference I’ve ever been to, the vibe was just really incredible.

This video goes some way towards summing it all up:

Made some good friends, stayed up way too late, saw lots of incredible acts… and one of the people I met there – a Belfast-based life coach (of all things) – turned out not only to be a friend of some good Northern Irish friends of mine, but also to be a cousin I didn’t know I had. And now we’re in regular contact. How cool is that?

Swn

Bethan and Huw, wee small hours, Cardiff

On the city music festival front, I can’t mention Unconvention and then overlook Swn (pronounced ’soon’ – Welsh for noise, I believe). Swn was really great. Grander in scale that Unconvention on the music front (the whole city of Cardiff was overrun with independent bands), it was lighter on the talkfest.

I just did the one panel presentation in the warm up to the real event – which was several days of back-to-back live music, DJs and partying.

The whole thing was put on by Radio 1 DJ Huw Stephens, who I’d met on one of the panels I did at UnConvention, and I was sort of adopted by his some-time co-presenter and colleague Bethan Elfyn, her producer Clare, and their friend Vicky who writes for the Financial Times (lifestyle columns – not the baffling investment stuff).

They were great fun, knew all the cool bands to go and see (and when to cut your losses when the reality fails to live up to the hype). I think I’d have just been wandering around in a bit of daze if it hadn’t been for them. I guess I wandered around in a bit of a daze anyway – but it wasn’t unguided.

Shambala

Spot the kiwi tipi…

Our one annual outdoor summer music festival is Shambala. It’s a real highlight of the year – and not just because they give me a free ticket in exchange for DJ-ing in the middle of the day to a near-empty beer tent.

It’s a fantastic, eco-friendly, community-minded, smallish (6,000 people) festival with a lot of great music and performance. It’s run by some friends of ours at Jibbering Records, features some of our favourite acts from the worlds of reggae, funk, soul and dance music – and pretty much nearly everyone we know goes to it (it may as well be subtitled ‘Moseley goes camping’).

But best of all, we get ourselves a tipi – which officially sleeps half a dozen, but could easily fit quite a few more – build a campfire in the middle of it, and then just spend the time chilling out, hanging with friends and passers-by, roasting marshmallows, drinking wine, chatting, listening and watching the festival go by.

This time, we shared the tipi with our friends Juliet and Louise, and Jake’s friend Ethan. Juliet’s brother Matt was also there – he’s Jake’s age – as were Ethan’s girlfriend Sam, Jake’s girlfriend Hannah, and their friend Rosien. They didn’t actually sleep in the tent (officially) but they did use it as home base.

Far better to have a home base you can stand up and walk around in, rather than a one-person pup tent.

Really good time had by all.

Stockholm

My friend Jez at work noticed a one-day-only deal on Ryan Air flights for £1 each way including taxes – so I booked Bobbie and I a couple of days in Stockholm just for the hell of it. It cost £4 return for the two of us – plus a mysterious £16 fee for using my debit card to pay for it. Still… Sweden for £20. Not bad.

The Ryan Air Stockholm airport was a convenient 100km outside of Stockholm itself, so we enjoyed a long coach trip there – and the budget was pretty tight all round, so we slept in a hotel room that, in its entirety, took up approximately the same area our bed at home does.

Bobbie and I took it pretty easy in Stockholm. Walked around, mostly, and did a bit of shopping – but it was nice to be somewhere unfamiliar, nice – and with good record shops that stocked rare Scandinavian avant garde jazz.

Bandcamp

Doing what I do, it should be no surprise that I keep an eye on as many of the new online services for musicians and music business as I can find. One of the best I’ve come across in a long time is called Bandcamp.

I was delighted when the founder of Bandcamp, Ethan Diamond got in touch with me earlier in the year and asked for a Skype chat. Ethan was the developer of a service called OddPost, which Yahoo! had bought off him and renamed Yahoo! Mail.

As he tells the story, he was at a bit of a loose end after that. One day, he stumbled across my e-book The 20 Things You Must Know About Music Online (now over 18 months old and way overdue for an update) – and decided to make a website that did all of those things for musicians.

Once it was built, he got in touch with me, and (this was the purpose of the call) asked me to be on the advisory board for Bandcamp. After a quick chat with the family lawyer to sort out terms (thanks Cam!), I said I’d be delighted and so there we are.

Watch for Bandcamp in 2009 – I have no doubt it will be huge. Like – MySpace huge.

Belfast

Belfast Nick enjoys an icecream at St Patrick’s graveside

One consultancy I really loved this year was a visit to Nick from Penny Distribution. I really love Belfast, and have been there a couple of times. Nick was kind enough to put me up in his family home (also one of the headquarters of his trans-Atlantic music business enterprise) in a place called Downpatrick, just out of Belfast itself.

Once he’d squeezed my brain dry, Nick took me to a rock gig featuring friends of his – and we watched as as the London A&R types swooped in to see the ‘next big thing’ before retiring to the bar. He was also kind enough to introduce me to his friend Andy from Good On Paper, and the characters at the local cafe-you-can-never-leave, Charlie’s.

Wi-fi, friendly staff and good coffee. Who needs an office?

I also managed to squeeze a music industry seminar in for the Northern Ireland Music Industry Commission (NIMIC), crashed on the couch of a man known as Walter the Goon, sampled some local beverages and tried the Belfast version of the heart-attack breakfast of which there are so many regional variations across these sceptered isles.

Edinburgh

Keith at the site of what appears to be a tandem Tardis

Much the same carry-on took place in Edinburgh, where I stayed with musician Keith Douglas, who had a clever idea about starting an online music business that would help small independent artists promote their live concerts in an imaginative – and very tangible way.

It was one of those ideas that took shape over the course of the weekend, but there are still so many interesting ways it could go. Great guy – and again, a great host with a comfortable couch. We saw some great bands together, drank some very fine whisky and strolled the Royal Mile as we contemplated life, the music business and everything.

Lopend Vuur, Groningen & Leeuwarden

Lykle & Ard – Lopend Vuur masterminds

This was a definite standout in a year full of highlights for me. Ard and Lykle are based in Groningen in the north of Holland, and they had come up with a plan to showcase local bands and recording artists, and get them to come up with a pitch for a new model of music business.

The competition is called Lopend Vuur – Dutch for ‘walking fire’, from a saying about the way word spreads (we’d say ‘like wildfire’).

The idea is that the artists would compete for investment from Sony BMG, but that rather than be signed to the label in a traditional way, they’d do a 50/50 revenue split and own the masters afterward – unheard of in major label circles.

Each of the competing acts had a music industry coach helping them refine their idea and their pitch, and I was brought over to give an ‘inspirational’ speech to all concerned, and then weigh in on each of the acts’ ideas before they did their run-through presentations. There was another week to get feedback and fine-tune the pitch before doing the final presentation to the decision-makers at Sony.

I offered all of the acts free consultancy, and told them I would help each of them out in any way – all they had to do was call me. Only one did. Her name was Susanne – and she records under the name of Krause. I was delighted when she ended up winning the pitch.

I even told her she should write a song with the word radio in it on the grounds that radio programmers are pre-disposed to playing anything that contains the word in the title or chorus (it’s true)…

Ard and Lykle – with a little help from my friend Guido – are now setting up a business called New Music Labs, and it sounds like they’ll be getting me back over for next year’s new and improved Lopend Vuur. Can’t wait.

By:Larm in Oslo

Vegard in Oslo

I was invited to come and speak at a music industry conference in Oslo, and do a bit of consulting for a guy by the name of Vegard Sandvold who had some really great ideas about presenting live music online (he’s really smart on search too – and has pretty much nailed the next generation online music store, conceptually). There’s a lot of work ahead there, but I’m really looking forward to seeing that in action.

The conference itself was really great – but for me, it was overshadowed by my first experience of Norway, which was both really amazing – and really frighteningly expensive. I know I was paying hotel prices, but £10 for a pint of beer seems a bit excessive even so.

Amazing place though. The public buildings were pretty breathtaking, and I could have watched the guards marching up and down outside the palace all day. Hugely ritualistic affair.

But I was there for the music industry conference and all the bands – as well as to try and be helpful to Vegard

Best band I saw there, on reflection, was Shining. A bizarre fusion of jazz and metal with (on the night I saw them) a completely over the top Spinal Tap-ish stage presence. The frontman plays pretty great avant garde saxophone as well as shred metal lead guitar and he and the keyboardist are both members of the excellent electronic jazz band Jaga Jazzist.

I ended up buying the CD for Jake and it’s now one of his favourites. But it wasn’t my gig of the year.

Gig of the Year

No question: gig of the year was Kora. Both times they played here in Birmingham. They were just amazing.

I saw some other live music this year. A band or two here or there. Sometimes 7 or 8 a night. Mostly I can’t remember any of them – because, y’know… Kora.

Pregnancies and announcements

While I don’t have any news of this nature to report myself (just as well – I have a sixteen year old son and a lovely wife already so I don’t need to go around getting engaged or entering parenthood again), there has been a lot of this about with friends and family.

My sister Kerryn and her husband Haydn, cousin Hilary & her husband Brian, cousin Greg and Nadine, friends Clutch & Collette and Stef & Emily are all expecting (any moment now for that last couple) – so that’s all good news. Cousin Grant and his new fiancee Rita announced their engagement at the family Christmas celebrations in New Zealand, and there have been weddings and other related goings-on seemingly all year.

I Am Burial

The real Burial: Will something-or-other

There was a bit of a media/music biz storm in a teacup about the mysterious recording artist known only as Burial, who was up for a Mercury Prize (he didn’t win). The tabloids were quite keen to find out who he was – and theories ranged from the surreal to the ridiculous (he is neither Fat Boy Slim nor Rolf Harris).

My friend Craig thought it would be a great idea to sell T-shirts with slogans on them that said ‘I Am Burial’ and ‘I’m with Burial’ – and with a little help from Stef (of I So Wish, above), we launched IAmBurial.com – a site which, within two days of it coming into Craig’s head and tumbling out of his mouth over beer, was on page 19 of the Sun – a newspaper with a 4-million strong readership.

We received an email from Burial’s record label Hyperdub, asking us to take it down – and so we did on the spot. We’d had our fun – and sold one t-shirt, clearing a tidy £5 profit, split 3 ways. That was enough for us.

And besides, everyone knows who he is now – and nobody really cares.

BBC WM

I’ve been a pretty regular guest on Ed Doolan’s radio show on BBC West Midlands this year.

Ian Myatt of BBC Future Media and Technology and I do a one-hour phone-in about gadgets and technology, fielding such stumpers as ‘My granddaughter bought me an iPod. How do I play my 78s in it?’ and ‘Why can’t I pick up digital radio in Redditch?’

In fact, the audience are pretty switched on, and ask lots of questions that I either try to answer – or, if they’re about hi-def television, I shrug and pass over to Ian as I know nothing about telly. Don’t even own one.

Ian and I work well together on-air, I think, as we enjoy arguing, and we both like picking on Ed. It’s fun to hassle Ian about the Digital Rights Management that the BBC is forced to inflict on everyone in order to make iPlayer work (a brilliant service – but I’m predisposed to mistrusting all DRM) – and because he works in a department that claims to be of “the future”.

All going well, we’ll be doing another show – a post Christmas ‘how do I work this thing?’ special from 11.30 on Tuesday 13th.

Rhubarb Radio

I’ve also started doing a weekly jazz show on the radio again this year. I used to do one in New Zealand for about six years, and I’d started to miss it – so it was great to get back on that particular horse again.

It’s called Is That Jazz? – and it’s on Rhubarb Radio every Sunday from noon till 2pm.

Now all I need is for all the record companies to find me all over again and start sending me the free records.

All in all…

…it’s been a huge year. I didn’t quite meet my target of visiting at least one city every month that I’ve never been to before (I kept close to home in December), but I did make it to three strange cities in a couple of those months, so I figure it evens out.

I have to say, I’m quite optimistic for 2009. There are definitely some places I’m looking forward to going back to (Chicago, Amsterdam, Paris…) and some places I’ve never been to before that I intend to go to next year (Canada and Mexico, for starters).

There are quite a few irons in the fire – some I’m not allowed to say anything about here, and some that are just too speculative to even start talking about – but I have some very big plans, and I’m really excited about them. I’m looking forward to seeing how some of my online projects shape up (particularly I So Wish) – and I’ll keep you posted.

I’ll be spending the next couple of days figuring out what my goals and plans are for 2009 (I don’t make resolutions, particularly – but I do write down the stuff I intend to do, which seems to help).

Hope your 2008 has been brilliant – and I wish you all the best for 2009.

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Tagged: 2008, Birmingham, Business, Internet, Music, New Zealand, Personal, research, review, Seminar, Travel, University, web, Whisky