I have been resident of four different towns in my life, three of which were in the Netherlands. Two of those were new towns in the west of the country, whose atmosphere –or the lack thereof– was created on 1960s and 1970s drawing tables rather than by history. From one of these two, Spijkenisse, I moved a way when I was barely one year old; hence my memory of the town was formed later in life, during many visits to its shopping mall, which was bigger than the one in Hellevoetsluis. I might have bemoaned growing up in said town many times, but I always got the impression that Spijkenisse was worse in everything but the fact that they have three metro stations.

The Cuties are from Spijkenisse. They just released their debut album Ah-ah-aah, which contains fifteen indiepop songs not quite dissimilar to AGSFB or Pony-Up! Indeed, that is the kind of thing I tend to like – and do like, also in this case. But much more important to me is the geographical connection: the fact that these four girls, save for a few years age difference and a few miles geographical difference, have had the same background that I had. That they could have been delivering mail at my house (Postgirl), or that I could be that not-so-social boy who ruined their party (Ugly Boy).

Even though I haven’t been in a very indiepop mood recently, I found myself listening to The Cuties a lot. It is touching that, in a region where everyone seems to listen to music that is both loud and aggressive –usually punk, metal or hardcore house– some people just decided to play sweet pop songs. I ran away from the region, something which I have not regretted a single second, but The Cuties did something much more productive instead. Bless them.

Ah-ah-aah came out earlier this month on Livingroom. Thanks to André for sending the CD over to England. If you send him some money, I’m sure he’ll send it you a copy as well. Even if you have never been to Spijkenisse. Or to Voorne-Putten, for that matter.

I don’t care about jazz. I’m not too much into YouTube videos either and Landcroft House inhabits my RSS-reader for all but a very few of its posts to be left unread. Still, in one of life’s unexplicable quirks, when said blog wrote about some jazz singer and linked to a video of one of her songs, I read the post and clicked on the link. That is how I discovered Blossom Dearie.

Blossom Dearie was born, under that name, in 1926. She is still alive and I from what I understand she is still singing occasionally. I wonder if, with the exception of my grandparents, there have been any singers that I liked who are in their eighties now.

I found her album That’s Just the Way I Want to Be on the internet, as that is how things go these days, and have been pushing it into my Last.fm charts since. It is brilliant music to play while working, or reading a book. Or to just dream away, listening to Blossom’s clear yet girlish voice, while thinking of times long past.

I suppose it helps that I am going through of these phases where all those fine pop songs do not manage to do very much to me. On the other hand, for a jazz record it is still very pop. It is not too hard to imagine Blossom Dearie as a Pam Berry of her times. I know one’s taste is supposed to get broader upon getting older, but in my case it appears to be getting narrower. I just manage to fit more and more things that can be included by it.

Blossom Dearie – Hey John
Blossom Dearie – Yesterday, when I was young

Yesterday, when I was young is my personal favourite. It is a translated cover of Charles Aznavour’s Hier Encore, a video of which can be found here. Hey John is written by Blossom herself and is about John Lennon. There must be hundreds of artists that have written songs about Lennon, but this may well be the only one by someone who was almost fifteen years his senior. That is so sweet.

Bas gave this blog a a subtle kick. The kind of thing where one answers a number of questions on their blog and then chooses friends who then are supposed to answer the same questions on their blogs. In this particular case, the questions where about 2007. Which is a bit of a problem, now that the moon has almost completed its first cycle of the new year: 2007 is so 2007. Also, unlike Bas, I didn’t get any offspring in the past year, or any previous year; hence I didn’t have any obvious things to write about.

Therefore I decided to cheat a bit and answer the questions about 2008. About its first 28 days, that is.

Three artists I discovered in 2008. Blossom Dearie. The Cuties. New Bad Things. (The latter two are lies, as I knew them before, but I got The Cuties’ debut album in the mail the other day and hadn’t listened to New Bad Things for half of my musical life until Nancy wrote about them. More on the former two soon.)

Three things I won’t forget easily. Seeing Exeter City play (and beat) Oxford. Spending three-and-a-half extra hours on public transport due to flooding. Reading J.M. Coetzee’s Youth.

Three things I feel bad about. Still being a pain to Dimitra at times. Still spending too much time wilfing. Not having worked as hard as I should (and, honestly, wanted to) on mathematics.

Three things I’m proud of. Keeping up with my resolution of reading at least one book a week. Writing a number of news articles that were published on the company’s website. Being asked to take the Exeter Goes Pop! roadshow to London next weekend.

Three things I bought or got. Jonathan Coe’s The House Of Sleep, for a pound at a local charity shop. A new handset for my phone, two months after I had sent the old ones off for repair. New shoes for Dimitra; we originally bought them in October and they had broken already, but Schuh were kind enough to send us new ones, even though we had lost the original receipt.

The train line from Exmouth to Exeter runs along Exeter City’s St James Park stadium —mind the lack of the apostrophe there, as to not confuse it with its near-namesake from Newcastle— and every time I pass the stadium I glance out of the window. It has become some kind of ritual, as if Exeter will lose their next game if I don’t look at the stadium for at least a second.

This morning, my train passed the stadium again, and my glance was filled with pride. Only one and a half day before, I had been in that very stadium, watching Exeter play Oxford from the grandstand. I’ve been telling people I support The Grecians for a while now, but up now to that felt a bit unofficial. Like I was claiming something without having the moral rights to do so.

That only made the evening worth having gone. Of course, it did help that we saw a really nice game of football, which Exeter won 2-0. And that was only because they didn’t try very hard after half time, otherwise it could easily have been 6-0. I felt really sorry for Oxford, who were rubbish, as someone three rows behind me needed to shout every two minutes. Exeter, on the other hand, played really nice football. I’m not the one to judge football teams’ qualities, but my cousin, who has seen a lot more games in his life, was happily surprised by them. It was Adam Stansfield who scored both goals (as you can see on YouTube), but I was mostly impressed by the hard working Rob Edwards and Steve Basham, who played as skilfully as unselfishly.

If I had the money to, which unfortunately I don’t, I would go to games a lot more often. One doesn’t need to care about football too much to be touched by 10-year-olds getting overly excited, 80-year-olds dedicatedly watching the game like they’ve probably done for most of their lifes and the mere fact that 3301 fans had come to the stadium to see a match in the fifth national division. There are some things that are just better in England.

Apart from the football, it was great having my cousin around for the weekend. We used to see each other regularly during sleep overs when we were young and we used to talk a lot. To the point where we were put in different bedrooms, something which we managed to circumvent by using walkie talkies. But we had hardly seen each other in the past ten years, as that’s what happens when you grow older. Luckily we hadn’t lost the ability to talk.

(And Jamie Mackie? Well, since you ask, he wasn’t part of the squad. We didn’t know why, but it turned out that he was left out because of his mind not being with the game. Which was fair enough. We don’t need him any more.)

The only football poster I ever had on my bedroom wall was that of Feyenoord’s squad of, probably, the 1984/85 season. I hardly have any memories of that season –or of that poster– but I remember Ruud Gullit, Mario Been and Joop Hiele were in the squad. And a lot of players wore moustaches; most footballers did these days.

I didn’t spend my formative years being a big football fan. Which is strange, given that I’ve always liked the game. But I also tried to be different and enjoyed being on my own more than anything else, two things that didn’t coincide well with following the most popular sport. Thanks to persuasion of my family, I did visit the stadium a couple of times during the early 90s though and that was quite a nice experience.

Things changed when I moved to England. Because football in England is different and much deeper rooted into culture. The country has over a hundred fully professional teams, all of them followed by a group of dedicated fans. Support your local team, the English say, no matter whether they’re Champions League regulars or Lower League strugglers. In that respect I’m quite lucky, as my local team, Exeter City, have never made it to the top two tiers of the English football system and since 2003 have found themselves desperately trying to get out of the fifth tier. How more indie can it be?

I started following The Grecians –as they are semi-officially nicknamed– soon after we had moved, when I regularly bought a local paper for its job ads. Not much later I found myself hoping they would win and by that dramatic Wembley game last May, I had become a proper fan. This season I have become even more dedicated and on any given moment, I’ve been able to tell you Exeter’s next fixture, their most recent results and their position in the league. I even know that if you spell Lee Elam’s name backwards, it becomes male eel.

On Sunday, we might see the last game of club hero Jamie Mackie playing for the Grecians, as rumours are he will leave soon for a six-digit figure. At the same time, it will be my first visit to St James Park, as my cousin is flying over to come and see some decent lower league English football. In the mid 90s we spent many an evening playing Football Manager, trying to manage a small team into, ultimately, winning the Champions League. For the foreseeable future, it would suffice for Paul Tisdale to take Exeter to League Two, as the fourth tier is confusingly named.

Incidentally, but interestingly, the game will be against Oxford United. Due to my work close to Oxford, I regularly see people wearing Oxford scarfs. In fact, they’re the only team in the league of which I know at least one fan in person. Moreover, given the most recent clashes between the two teams, it is bound to be a very interesting game. If you happen to live in the UK, and are able to receive the Setanta TV channel, you can even watch the game live on TV.

The photo which, I think, features Mackie, Moxey, Basham and Elam, is grabbed from Exeter City’s official website.

Some two years ago, I mumbled something on this blog about losing some of my hair. It made Simon, who is in Mutt Ramon, send me an email, in which he shared the downsides of getting older and, while he was at it, advertised his band. Ever since we’ve been exchanging emails on a semi-regular basis, in which we shared our love for the West Country and discussed the loneliness of working away from home. Tomorrow he will play some songs during Exeter Goes Pop!, with his new Dorset-based band La Famille Catastrophe. We have never met before, so I’m really looking forward to it. And he promised to play The Flatmates too. Perhaps he won’t even react too bitterly to the fact that that thing about getting bald was, in the best of cases, a huge exaggeration.

(As usual, it’s at the Phoenix. Doors are open all day, but we won’t start playing songs until eight. We’ll have finished by eleven and won’t charge you for listening.)

I didn’t vote for this year’s TweeNet poll. I had meant to, but then I forgot; it says something about how much I’m up with what’s happening in indiepop these days. Still, the results are still nice to read. I too have gone through phases where I felt the need to apologise for listening to mostly indiepop, but that’s something of the past now: I just like the thing and I wouldn’t want to change it for anything else.

If you allow me to use a slightly hyperbolic comparison, that annual poll is a bit like the Booker Prize for indiepop. It’s a damn useful thing to browse through, if only because it gives such a good overview of the year. (It’s been like a Pulitzer Prize some years too, when the results were heavily dominated by American votes; more than a decade of the internet hasn’t made the Ocean any smaller. It really felt like they were talking about a different thing.)

So Matinée was the best label, Jens Lekman the best live experience and Moscow Olympics and The Pains of Being Pure at Heart best newcomers. It sounds like a fair description of the year. I was mildly surprised by seeing Cats on Fire winning the awards for best band and best album. In a good way though: as a band from a usually overlooked country (Finland), who released their album on a chronically overlooked label (Marsh-Marigold), it sounds right for them to win. I listened to the album again and they do have some pretty fine songs, don’t they?

Cats on Fire – Higher Grounds (YouTube video)

Chris wrote about #Poundsign# and posted the utterly brilliant Carry On that, even when I just think of it, almost makes me cry. So I was reminded by how great they were and what a masterpiece that Wavelength album still is and I was going to write something, too, of course. But I was busy, because it was Christmas Holidays. And then came the new year, which saw me sitting behind a computer screen, dizzily staring into infinity, something which, as the a thermometer confirmed soon, was due to a cold. And then came the weekend, and the cold went away, and now we’re already on the ninth day of the year and… well, #Poundsign# are still a damn great band of course.

#Poundsign# – Isolation

The five best books I read in 2007:

1. The Rotter’s Club (Jonathan Coe)
2. Boyhood (J.M. Coetzee)
3. So Many Ways to Begin (Jon McGregor)
4. Snow (Orhan Pamuk)
5. Havoc (in its Third Year) (Ronan Bennett)

Rachel Seiffert’s Field Study is the best –and only– compilation of short stories I read, while Frank Westerman’s Ararat is both the best work of non-fiction as well as the best book I read in Dutch. I must have written it here several times before, but reading books has become a new obsession and it’s a really good one. I honestly wonder how I used to spend all my time when I read five books of fiction a year. Especially those years when I didn’t own a computer.

Also, speaking of books, I realised that I lied when I wrote earlier that I never read a French book. I read Frédéric Beigbeder’s €8.99 –the oh-so-postmodernist novel whose title was also its price– a few years ago. It wasn’t very good.