After watching so many gigs through a computer screen, it was a joy to hear live music again in familiar haunts – from Ronnie Scott’s and the Southbank to Grand Junction, Paddington – in 2021. It made you appreciate anew not only the high-wire artistry and unfolding musical conversations happening on stage, but also the collective thrill of that shared "in the room" experience.

Katherine Priddy’s debut album came out in the summer, and it’s remained a high point for the rest of the year as 2021 plays out to the sombre drums and drones of resurgent pandemic warnings, fresh lockdowns, closed venues, silenced auditoriums. Her last gig of the year was at St Pancras Old Church on 16^th December. I intended to be there, but Omicron infection rates ballooned to the point that going anywhere seemed no longer possible. Hello, and goodbye, to 2021.

I am fortunate to be one of the musicians involved in Spell Songs, a musical companion piece to both The Lost Words and The Lost Spells by acclaimed author Robert Macfarlane and award-winning illustrator and author Jackie Morris.

To clarify: this is less a review, more a dispatch from a raucous wake. We all have a band that means something extra. Mine is The Men They Couldn't Hang, who I saw on Saturday night at the Powerhaus in Camden for the umpteenth time.

Liverpudlian singer-songwriter Kathryn Williams has always had a literary bent. This doesn’t just manifest in overt ways, like writing a concept album about Sylvia Plath in 2015’s Hypoxia, but in perfectly potted narratives, microscopically brilliant turns of phrase, and even titles that make you double-take going all the way back to 1999’s “Dog Without Wings”. 

Adams has long been Robert Plant’s guitarist in bands including the Sensational Space Shifters, as well as working with fellow Space Shifter Juldeh Camara in the band JuJu. He is steeped in American Blues as well as its West African and Desert Blues roots, having worked as a producer for Rachid Taha and on some of Tinariwen’s finest albums.

“How to explain Theresa May?” Grace Petrie muses from the Summerhall stage as she introduces decade-old opener “Farewell To Welfare”. “Well, in 2010, she was as bad as we thought it was going to get.”

If you were looking for a word to describe Black String in performance at Grand Junction in Paddington, before the high altar of the church of St Mary Magdalene, itself a pinnacle of Victorian neo-Gothic bravura, then that word would be “intense”. Intensely intense. More intense than a blooming bank of Intensia.

A year ago, the City of London Sinfonia’s quietly different concerts in Southwark Cathedral were a lifeline in the twilight of semi-lockdown; I’ll never forget how we treasured the last, on 17 November, knowing that everything would be closed again the following day for at least a month (there was a brief intermission, then darkness again until this May).

Laura Marling was one of the most active lockdown performance artists, doing her bit to play solo streams to a captive and culturally starved virtual audience.

The simplicity of her uninterrupted sets, low production values and absence of small talk suits her so well that she’s continued the social distancing of just her and a guitar on stage in this, her first real life tour with actual crowds in four and a half years.