2009

On a personal level, 2009 has been quite a shit year, for my whole family. Brother graduated university, but has since been in and out of mind-numbing factory jobs. Father got made redundant at the start of the year, and has only recently got back into work. Mother broke her ankle on her first day back at work in January, and later got made redundant too. Me? Well, it was all going so well, until a diagnosis of thyroid cancer spoilt it all. A month or two of prods and ‘mm-hmms’, and a nine-hour operation later, I seem to be doing better, which a kick ass scar to boot, but still, you can see that 2009 was a bit of a downer.
Elsewhere though, it appears that 2009 has been a pretty good year, with some excellent music coming out. The likes of Gaslight Anthem, White Lies and The Dead Weather emerging with brilliant albums and an exciting future ahead of them, while bands like Doves and Green Day return with excellent new albums, after a prolonged absence. One of the best albums of the year though, in my opinion anyway, would be Arctic Monkeys’ 3rd album, ‘Humbug’. With a more developed, mature sound, the band has gone from strength to strength. The decision to employ Josh Homme as producer has invariably led to misguided claims that it sounds ‘just like Queens of the Stone Age’, where in reality, there is more of a likeness to what The Fall would sound like if they were, well, good.
2009 has also been a year in which blockbuster movies have dominated. The likes of ‘Transformers’, ‘Terminator Salvation’, ‘2012’, ‘Star Trek’ and more recently ‘Avatar’ have been big hitters at the cinemas. However, it was also a year that saw the truly brilliant ‘Watchmen’, an adaptation of arguably the best graphic novel ever written, and the ever-so-lovely ‘(500) Days of Summer’ grace our cinemas too. The latter being one of the sweetest stories of heartache I have ever seen. Both of which had fantastic soundtracks too.
We have seen some sadness this year, as it seems more than the usual amount of ‘famous’ people died. The likes of Michael Jackson, John Hughes, JG Ballard, Les Paul and, well, Jade Goody, left us this year. However, the biggest loss, for me anyway, was the inevitable split of Oasis. It was always going to happen, but it still came as a huge shock to me. All I can hope is the rumoured solo projects do well, or conversely do so badly that it forces them to reconcile and reunite. We will just have to wait and see.
All I can hope on a personal level, is that 2010 brings much more of the good things in life, good music, good films, and a lot less bloody hospital appointments.