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A few things I’ve enjoyed in 2024.

Play of the year

Robert Icke’s retelling of Sophocles’ Oedipus, at Wyndham’s Theatre in the West End, was spellbinding from first moment to last. You know what’s going to happen yet it pulses with the tense energy of a political thriller. Hitting the same heights as Icke’s masterful Oresteia from 2015, the considered and dynamic production is brought home by captivating performances from Mark Strong and Lesley Manville.

Album of the year

The long-anticipated return of The Cure with Songs of a Lost World made me feel both old and young. Young as it hurled me back 35 years to playing Disintegration on the day of release, Robert Smith’s intonation unchanged, the layered guitars and synths bridging the years. And old because this is a dispatch from the edge of the abyss, a meditation on death and dying to sit with Bowie’s Blackstar and Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker.

Books of the year

With Come and Get It Kiley Reid built on the promise of her debut Such a Fun Age, delivering a freewheeling campus novel that skewers the power dynamics of money, race and class. David Peace’s Munichs also lived up to expectations, meticulously recreating the days following the 1958 Munich air disaster. Of the older novels I read in 2024, the standout was Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road, driving her Regeneration trilogy to its heart-shattering conclusion.

Song of the year

I loved ‘The Feminine Urge’ by The Last Dinner Party, from their excellent debut album Prelude to Ecstasy. A heart-pounding chorus that turns out to have been only a pre-chorus for an even more ridculously catchy skyscraping refrain. Music that takes you out of yourself, creating a moment out of time.

Here’s to more such moments in 2025.

Books

Human Acts, Han Kang. Elegantly translated by Deborah Smith, this is an achingly poignant account of South Korea’s Gwangju Massacre. Told from mixed historic viewpoints, the novel threads the hopeless search for one lost soul among many. 

Multiple Choice, Alejandro Zambra. Chilean fiction recast as a comprehension exam. Witty, revealing, curious, moving and utterly unique. 

Young Eliot, Robert Crawford. A masterful account of TS Eliot’s life and poetic development up to the publication of The Waste Land, impeccably detailed while immensely readable. Undoubtedly now the definitive Eliot biography, shedding myriad insights on the work. 

Albums

Blackstar, David Bowie. 2016 was both the best of years for bringing us Blackstar, and the worst of years for taking away its creator. A work of incalculable depths realised through unimaginable courage and control. In his final year Bowie built a bridge to the life beyond.

A Moon Shaped Pool, Radiohead. Pop music of intense delicacy. Radiohead made a timely reappearance with an apt soundtrack to a disturbing year. 

Night Thoughts, Suede. Retaining the swagger of Coming Up, Suede deliver deliciously fat guitar figures and chorus lines to restore your faith in humanity.

Theatre

The Children, Lucy Kirkwood. A densely packed marvel. I’m still musing over this important play about generational responsibilities and the legacies we pass on to our children and our future selves. For sheer dramatic heft I think it’s even better than Kirkwood’s multi-award-winning Chimerica. 

Unreachable, Anthony Neilson. The biggest belly laughs I’ve had in the theatre for a long time, born from a provoking plot about the quest for perfection in artistic creation. 

Lazarus, Enda Walsh and David Bowie. What does it all mean? What does it matter? The songs comprise the set list of the farewell tour Bowie knew he couldn’t make, while the scenes tease out and twist the perennial themes of his career.