A Cafetiere Of Living Dangerously…

…was a rubbish suggestion of mine for a pub quiz team name, when we were going with a theme of inserting the names of things you would find in the kitchen into the titles of films.  Others I can remember included The Collander Girls, The Italian Hob, Fridge Over The River Kwai, Sieve and Let Die, Spice Racks Like Us and, best of all, The Breville Wears Prada.

What am I getting at?  Well, I just noticed that the one year anniversary of this blog residing at WordPress has just passed, and thought it was worth noting.  After a nascent period tinkering about over at Livejournal, the first piece posted on this site proper was a review of the This Heat Out Of Cold Storage box set.  It has all been downhill ever since, some would say.  Anyway, I figure this gives me an excuse for some navel-gazing (I see no ships!  Oh, wait…), and delving into a year’s worth of stats. 

Top 10 most popular album reviews (by number of readers)  in the last 12 months:

1. Wilco, Sky Blue Sky
2. Bjork, Volta
3. Joanna Newsom, Ys
4. Panda Bear, Person Pitch
5. Battles, Mirrored
6. Tim Hecker, Harmony In Ultraviolet
7. Caribou, Andorra
8. Stuart Staples etc, Songs For The Young At Heart
9. Animal Collective, People EP
10. Max Richter, Songs From Before

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the bigger the artist, the more readers (hmmmm, I hope all those people didn’t feel too short-changed by the Bjork review).  Encouraging to see all those hits for Tim Hecker and Max Richter though; I wouldn’t have guessed at those being up there.

Onto the top 10 most popular live reviews in the last 12 months:

1. Cecil Taylor and Anthony Braxton at the RFH
2. Bonnie Prince Billy at Shepherds Bush
3. Fennesz and Philip Jeck at the Bedford Arms
4. Field Day at Victoria Park just last week
5. Keiji Haino and Chris Corsano at The Spitz
6. Matmos and Cornelius at the RFH
7. Supersilent and others at Cargo
8. Homefires 2007 day 2 (day 1 strangely unloved)
9. Tony Conrad and Islaja at St Giles
10. Tindersticks at The Barbican

I don’t really go to so many gigs by really big acts (too many people, too many queues, too far from the stage, too much security hassle), hence the list is a bit more varied.  A well-attended event will of course still do pretty well - that Field Day review is only a week old (an amazing number of hits have come from people googling “field day queues”, funnily enough). At number three though…a gig in a pub in South London.  That pleases me.

And if you want to see a sample of the best of 12 months worth of inappropriate search terms, they are over there at Page Not Found.

Thanks for reading, and thanks for all your comments, corrections and even insults over the last year.  Keep them coming.