List

Basically if I've got more than one thing to remember on any given day then I have to have a note. The prison-letter censorship is just in case anyone looks in who doesn't need to know my ideas for Santa...!

And as regards that other list:

#11: 'The Ghosts We Must Carry' by State Broadcasters

...reminds me a lot of one of last year's best albums, 'Diamond Mine' by King Creosote and John Hopkins; in a good way, though, hushed and collective. At times there's the same sense of wonderful, steady accretion of musical and lyrical detail as a song like their 'John Taylor's Month Away'. Certainly this band are developing in a Fence Collective-type direction along a kind of 'literate indie for grown-ups' continuum. In fact, it's almost more like folk music than chamber-indie if you compare it to the pop-punk joys of a 'real' indie band like Too Many Boyfriends. Possibly the difference is to do with nostalgia - in the way an earlier State Broadcasters song, say, like 'Let's make T-shirts' undercuts the potential for twee by making itself a careful seventies-referencing song of lament for childhood. I've no idea why this band aren't much more well known - though it might have something to do with only ever playing the odd gig south of Glasgow...