That was the year that was Once

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January 2013 started with a rainbow.  Early morning, on the coast path, heading home to coffee and toast,  we were stopped in our tracks.  It was a sign.  Of a better year than the last.  Indeed, an excellent one.  So in classic web-log fashion, after The Times 'best books of the year', or Q’s 'top fifty albums', or NME’s 'records of the year'...  Herewith, a few reasons why there was indeed gold at the end of the rainbow.  MUSIC  It started with Bowie who tricked everyone.  Everyone.  Where Are We Now sounded weary and tenorous.  Like an old man singing listfully for the artist he was once was.  A decade or more before.  But then the album landed.  Guitars, tunes, solos, choruses.  It rocked.  The Stars Are Out Tonight, in particular.  Still, an artist.  A wonderful retrospective of 'stuff' at The V&A in March only reinforced the sense of wonder.  Bowie grew up less than a quarter of a mile from where I've lived for the past twenty years.  I pick up my dry-cleaning at the end of THAT road.  My kids remain unimpressed however much I eulogise.  Meanwhile, Night Beds produced a lovely record and then Foals released a monster single, Inhaler, and one of the albums of the year, with horses on the cover and a pop tune called My Number which was never topped all year.  Ben Howard won awards and filled my office with Keep Your Head Up.  Imagine Dragons teased momentarily, then The Boxer Rebellion released a magic record called Promises, which played better out of speakers and on video than it did live.  Why the band didn't hire a keyboard player for the tour rather than have Nathan Nicholson 'trying' to rock out while stood behind an electronic rack on stuff, I don't know.  It killed the shows for me.   The National plumbed new wonderful depths of morose shoe-gazing gloom with Trouble Will Find Me.  Karl Wallinger played live in London, World Party stripped down and brilliant.  He seemed a well man, alive in his music.  My daughter bought a guitar the same colour as Taylor Swift's.  More records this year tested on flights to New York, Hong Kong and Shanghai included ballsy-ness from Editors, electronic squeakiness from Chvrches and absolute knock-outs from Volcano Choir and London Grammar (I know).  Peter Gabriel and The Waterboys both did '25-year anniversary' tours of classic albums.  Fisherman's Blues won hands-down.  FILMS  Last year I found a historic melodrama from late eighteenth century Denmark as my film of the year.  This February I fell for Elizabeth Olsen in Josh Radnor's Liberal Arts, an altogether more cheery offering than Martha Marcy May Marlene and I've not had much come close.  Woody Allen's To Rome From Love was an entertaining postcard to a place I hold dear, but not scripted with the wit and wonder of Midnight In Paris. [I have yet to see Blue Jasmine, but hear great things.]  Gravity lived up to all the pre-release hype and even 3D-phobe Mark Kermode made it one of his films of the year. Sound City (a documentary homage to an analogue sound-desk) was fascinating.   Blockbusters mainly blustered, though the Costner mid-section of Man of Steel was wonderfully done.  Hobbit II was stunningly done - and looked extraordinary, but was way too long and spoilt by a strange 'Monty Python'- esque second act, with Stephen Fry annoying, not entertaining.  BOOKS were fab in 2013, with complete immersion in the Hugh Howey's Wool trilogy (now optioned by Ridley Scott) and Benedict Jacka's Alex Verus series took another step forward to awesome with a fourth volume. But amidst much that was wonderful, it was in the Phoenix Theatre in London, where I found the best moment of 2013.  Once is the stage adaptation of the film of the same name, which won an oscar for Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova for the song Falling Slowly.  The stage adaptation won 8 Tony awards on Broadway and the London show is awe-inspiring.  Usually, for a stage musical show, the band is in the pit, hidden from view.  Here they are on the stage (which is a pub), playing, and singing and performing like their lives depend upon it.  The lead, Declan Bennett (who plays Guy), is charismatic and holds attention throughout.  The cast are brilliant character actors and can PLAY.  The interval drinks are served on the stage, from the bar, blurring the line between performers and audience in a way that is not contrived or trite, but somehow genuine.  The music is the thing.  Not the Oscar song, but Gold, the song that ends the first half and is reprised in the second.  Wonderful.  Once will close in mid 2014.  It has none of the special effects of a West End 'spectacular' like Charlie [see review], but it is the best thing I have seen in a long time.