Home on Rum and Popcorn

Black Box Recorder

Thu, 21 May 2026 00:00:00 +0100

There are quite a lot of bands I had no real expectation of seeing. These tend to be the ones that had split up either before I’d heard of them or before I could reliably go to gigs. Over the years, a good number of these have played special anniversary gigs - one off shows to celebrate the passing of a large number of years since their albums. Though these shows always come with a hint of “Oh God I’m old now”, it has meant the opportunity to see a whole bunch of bands I narrowly missed first time round. The Research! Camera Obscura! (And booked in the next year both The Sunshine Underground AND Forward, Russia - very excited!). But Black Box Recorder? They remained firmly in the list of bands I never expected to see.

Unlike most of the others mentioned, who I read about in the NME when slightly-too-young to get to gigs - especially the many indie-friendly 18+ venues - Black Box Recorder had pretty much stopped in 2003. I’d never heard of them at that point. Instead, I got into them from the soundtrack of the fabulous Monkey Dust animation. As well as being rude, clever and wickedly funny, Monkey Dust had an absolutely incredible soundtrack. From the opening tune, Eels’ That’s Not Really Funny to melancholy chunks of Goldfrapp, there was a lot of great music in there, but it was a haunting female vocal that really stuck with me, murmuring “It’s only the end of the world…”. I looked them up. Black Box Recorder.

They did 3 albums. They’re all great. There are some top B-sides too. Sarah Nixey’s “opiated debutante tones” (thanks Wikipedia) carry a whole bunch of songs about cruelty, greed and turn-of-the-century life in England. It was an absolute joy to discover that being liked by Billie Eilish (!) has brought them renewed attention and got them a big London show, for which the Brudenell, Leeds was the warm-up gig. It also meant the crowd was a weird mix of ages - with a large part of it in their 40s and a significant number of children (OK, OK, they were probably late teens, but they looked like children)

I don’t really do gig reviews. It was great. Of course it was.

Reading in 2025

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

2025 was a better year for reading than many a recent one. Though I didn’t get through as many as I’d have liked to, I think I have to accept that I literally never will! I did manage 24 novels or non-fiction. Not quite one-every-two-weeks but for fairly arbitrary reasons I didn’t include graphic novels. They’d have definitely bumped up my score.

I also read more books by women than men. This shouldn’t really feel like a massive achievement but I was surpised by how it did take a bit of effort - deliberately pushing a book to the front of the queue here and there.

The full list is available over here. What follows are a few of my favourite discoveries of the year. There were a few re-reads (JG Ballard’s Cocaine Nights, Susanna Clark’s Piranesi) which I love, but don’t feel the need to feature here. These are new-to-me books and authors that I really enjoyed.

Benjamin Myers - Beastings

I read The Perfect Golden Circle right at the start of the year and really enjoyed it, but Beastings was something else. It’s brutal, bleak, gruesome. Described as a frontier Western set in Cumbria, it’s an astonishing short book. You can almost feel the lashing rain and smell the animals. Fantastic.

Shirley Jackson - We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Just about as close to the League of Gentlemen as a novel can get. Without the jokes. Deeply weird, gothic vibes and a tale of murder and suspicion. Would recommend to anyone.

Elspeth Barker - O Caledonia

It really was a year for the brooding and weird. In the same vein, this is a small and powerful story, of a creepy house and some creepy family. Full of gloom but with a real sense of humour too.

Books 2026

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Kate Atkinson - Cold Histories Gripping and incredibly well written. Perhaps too many shadows of 90s lad culture ?
Vicente Luis Mora - Centroeuropa One of the best I’ve read in a very long time. Magical realism in a muddy field in 1800s Prussia.
Andrew Michael Hurley - Starve Acre Grief and isolation and the crimes of the past. Very bleak and atmospheric.
Oliver Burkeman - Mediations for Mortals Essentially 4000 weeks chewed over and formed into daily nuggets. Very good all the same.
Ben Gazur - A Feast of Folklore Nice round up of a lot of peculiar traditions and beliefs. The devil will steal your potatoes!
Bae Suah - Untold Night and Day Loved this. Dream-like is an overused descriptor but this deserves it. Shadows, images, symbols, collapsing in on themselves in a hot Seoul night.
Ray Bradbury - Dandelion Wine Very lovely but a little empty. It’s a thickly textured slice of summer as a child, full of little scenes and stories. Pleasant.
Richared Brautigan - Trout Fishing in America A very 60s slice of American surrealism. Little vignettes of life, only loosely connected, vaguely revolving around trout. There is some amazing imagery and very funny bits.
Italo Calvino - Mr Palomar 27 little vignettes of Mr Palomar looking at things and pondering. Ranges from the visual to the metaphysical with a structure that becomes apparent as you read. Small, deep and rather wonderful.
Paul Loomans - Time Surfing A zen approach to time management. A lot of nice ideas but the main approach doesn’t really do it for me.
Dashiell Hammett - The Dain Curse A detective novel split across 3 acts, managing to take in ghost story, action, and all sorts. Fast paced and good fun.
Javier Marías - Berta Isla A spy thriller that avoids the spying bits (and really the thriller bits too). A novel of absences and missing people. It’s a good read but it astonishingly long for a story in which everything happens ‘off screen’
Percival Everett - The Trees At once fast paced comic thriller and an exploration of American racism past and present. Fantastic.
Nigel Slater - A Thousand Feasts Little snippets and moments of quiet appreciation and small joy, from rose bushes to cups of tea. A calming read.
Percival Everett - So Much Blue Three crises overlap in a story about secrets that’s funny, tragic and moving.

Queens of the Dead

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 16:00:00 +0000

A zombie romp set around a drag club night in Brooklyn. It’s a well made, well paced one. Having been very into zombie films for a long time its a while since I’ve seen one, and this is knowing, funny and silly, but places the zombie element with sincerity.

There are some very funny set pieces, weapons you might not expect, and it’s all round a decent little zombie film. Nice.

Ghost Elephants

Fri, 14 Nov 2025 20:30:00 +0000

A very Werner Herzog film. Is it about looking for elephants? Or about the very act of looking for things? Or about obsession? Or about mankind’s inability to live in harmony with nature? Or all of the above?

It’s a powerful film, with some jaw dropping scenery, some glorious wildlife, and a lot about the humans of the story - their different backgrounds, their hopes, their fears.

The journey itself sounds completely insane - 1000 miles across almost untrodden ground in pursuit of some very big elephants. They’re all quite mad, but I enjoyed watching their madness.

Calle Málaga

Wed, 12 Nov 2025 18:00:00 +0000

The wonderful Carmen Maura is a retired widow, living alone in the bustling city of Tangiers. Her daughter, keen to make money by selling the house, pushes her out and starts a sequence of events that are all about finding community and conversation and purpose.

It’s a small film in its way. But its an absolute joy to watch Maura pottering through the city, coming up with schemes and badmouthing those who wrong her to a silent nun.

An interesting counterpart to the Blue Trail which told a story of an older woman lead, muscled out of her routine by her daughter, forging her own path (in a very different way!).

All You Need is Kill

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 20:45:00 +0000

Quite good fun. It’s basically Russian Doll meets Day of the Triffids. A Groundhog day scenario playing out over and over again, every time the character dies. And there are some giant plant monsters which do seem quite intent on making that happen.

It’s well put together, has some pretty cool scenes and builds the fairly familiar repeating day theme nicely.

Trains

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 18:00:00 +0000

Archive footage spanning decades of European train journeys. This was an interesting effort but I’m not sure it was edited as tightly as it could have been. After a pretty tense and at times gruesome middle section which covered the war wounded, Nazis on a train and all that Nazis do, the final third or so just sort of fizzled out.

Though I could imagine it’d be pretty cool with live music accompaniment.

World Animation Competition 2

Sun, 09 Nov 2025 13:45:00 +0000

And part 2! A slightly weaker selection to my mind, with all 3 of my favourites coming from the other programme. Star for me here was the lovely handmade vibe of Progress Mining

Monday morning at the Progress Mining Company is a decaying, cubist nightmare of monotony. As one worker shows round a new employer, another campaigns for its closure and reconstruction, as the long-buried secrets of Sector Three quickly come to light.

World Animation Competition 1

Sun, 09 Nov 2025 11:30:00 +0000

Animation Part 1. It’s always a favourite, and always pretty hard to describe.
My favourite by some way was Retirement Plan:

Ray daydreams about how to spend his retirement once he finally has some free time. Wonderfully simple in style yet capturing a world of emotion as we delve through his list; this moving and sweet short invites us to consider how to live before the inevitable.

Anything That Moves

Sat, 08 Nov 2025 18:30:00 +0000

A love-letter to 70s and 80s giallo slashers. A mood, more than a story.

The story, such as it is, is ridiculous. Liam is a food delivery rider who provides services on the side. He’s good at his job and in high demand from a series of Chicago oddities, all keen to satisfy their kinks and perversions, with a pizza on the side. But what’s this? Clients are being brutally murdered? And Liam’s in the frame? The brutish police are closing in, a leather-gloved lurker holds a knife, it’s all getting dangerous.

I loved it. It made almost no sense but it was funny, rude, and fun to watch.

Dog of God

Sat, 08 Nov 2025 12:30:00 +0000

Pros:

This had some very cool visuals (I love rotoscoped animation!)
Lots of cool atmosphere (fog, churches, beasts, witchcraft)
Some of it was pretty funny.

Cons:

Too many strands of story, which meant each was underdeveloped.
Not enough werewolf.
Felt way too long, even though it was a pretty tight 90mins.

I do think there’s a good film in there, and a lot of talent, but this was too muddled for me. The werewolf plot, evil priest plot, witchcraft plot and impotent baron plot were basically all separate stories. In trying to do them all, none of them went very far.

ChaO

Sat, 08 Nov 2025 10:30:00 +0000

An impressive, hand-crafted animated retelling of the Little Mermaid, transplanted to a version of Shanghai in which big business and the King of the Sea are quarrelling. Only the union of the Fish Princess and uh… some junior guy at a shipping company can bring peace and unity.

It’s fine. I did like a lot of the animation, and there were some lovely scenes (including a surprisingly good car chase!), but I grew pretty tired of the lead guy’s entitled male whinging. I know, I know, the whole story was a journey of developing his character and learning to be a better person but… if you don’t like the breakfast your fish princess wife makes for you, maybe you should make your own breakfast, you chump. Instead of waiting for her single female friend to step in and teach her how to cook like a good wife. Urgh.

Our Heavenly Bodies (with Live Music Accompaniment)

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 18:00:00 +0000

A 100 year old cinema wonder, exploring the mysteries of space through cutting edge film effects. We cover the history of human understanding of space, the individual planets, the seasons, moons, and more. It’s truly stunning stuff, although the highlights are all the bits with people in (jumping in low-gravity on Mars! walking on the walls of the spaceship!).

Matthew Bourne’s live moog soundtrack was absolutely wonderful as well.

Night Stage

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 15:30:00 +0000

Well this was utterly ludicrous.

In Porto Alegre, Brazil, Mathias is an aspiring actor, competing for roles with his flatmate, Fabio. Mathias hooks up via an app with a new man, and they quickly discover how much they enjoy the thrill of having sex in public. Unfortunately, this isn’t very compatible with Mathias’ fledgling TV career, and still less compatible with Rafael’s attempt to run for mayor.

There’s some serious points in here about social acceptance of gay men (someone says something like “gay men are accepted now. As long as they’re private”) but its rather buried beneath the lurid, fast-paced plot - with sex in car parks, covert filming, blackmail and violence.

It’s quite good fun.

The Virgin of the Quarry Lake

Thu, 06 Nov 2025 15:30:00 +0000

Very much my sort of horror. This is a solid entry in the “it’s rough being a teenage girl” genre, with a gentle touch of supernatural thrown in. For me, the pacing was spot on. It felt slow but with a constant sense of threat, that only very rarely bubbled to the surface. Natalia and friends are all falling for Diego, but he’s been swept away by worldly, older Silvia. Natalia’s anger and hurt surface in sudden moments of violence and power (or are they just accidents and power-cuts?). It’s menacing and threatening without ever being gratuitously nasty. I loved it.

Though Diego seemed like a berk.

Dandelion’s Odyssey

Thu, 06 Nov 2025 11:00:00 +0000

An animated, dialogue-free journey, following dandelion seeds on a (surprisingly cosmic) journey to where they can grow new plants. Or, as an allotment gardener: proof that even if you nuke the planet, the damn dandelions will manage to escape through a black hole to an alternate world and grow more weeds.

This was very beautiful, with a frankly jaw-dropping blend of live-footage and animation. We see ferns unfurl, oyster mushrooms grow, and even make a getaway with a pair of slugs. There’s no escaping that it did still feel a bit long though, even at just 75 minutes. This felt like a very cool 30 minute episode that someone had extended into a film. And I could have done with a bit less anthropomorphizing the seeds. That got old fast.

The Black Hole

Wed, 05 Nov 2025 13:15:00 +0000

A curiosity. An Estonian triptych of loosely connected stories. It’s a weird mix of serious issues (Estonian economy, emigrating for jobs, domestic violence) and uh… aliens.

There are some fun bits (removing all of one willing alien-experiment volunteer’s limbs, putting the other volunteer in some sort of alien washing machine), but also quite a lot of ponderous bits.

Our Land

Tue, 04 Nov 2025 20:30:00 +0000

A really powerful documentary. It centres on the right-to-roam movement, and how their aims come into conflict with the landed gentry of the country. Several landowners pop up and manage to be not-totally-awful human beings, treading a fine line between holding on to their inherited wealth and, somewhat grudgingly, consenting to share it.

The villain of the piece, who’s name I didn’t catch and don’t care to research, calmly looked in all directions and said “I own all that I can see. This is my garden. And it’s a fucking big garden”. He went on to explain how Black people didn’t really belong in the countryside, and how the general public were mostly too “fucking stupid” to appreciate the land. A horrible person, through and through.

The true star of this is Nadia Shaikh, who is both fierce and compassionate, outspoken and humble. She’s prepared to admit that she understands the landowners' very human desire to hang on to what they possess, all the while advocating for change that will benefit those not born into land ownership. An inspiring spokesperson for the movement.

Bugonia

Tue, 04 Nov 2025 16:00:00 +0000

A CEO is kidnapped in small town America. Her conspiracy-theory obsessed captors don’t want money. They want an invite to her mothership. Things get weird. It’s Yorgos Lanthimos. Of course things get weird.

I loved this. Having seen a lot of hostage-and-kidnappers films, this never felt even slightly familiar. It was always going somewhere new and unexpected. Jesse Plemens and Aidan Delbis were astonishing as the cousin kidnapper duo, and Emma Stone is fabulous again.