Hello. I didn’t say hello last month. Sorry about that. It is important to say hello I think, because it’s polite and friendly and implies, I hope, gratitude and familiarity. I really am grateful for you who read this and reach out in engagement, in various forms. It means so much, truly. So, hello.

Before we get into the main threads of this month’s missive, I want to share a conversation I had recently with my friend Mark Jenkin, for Directors Notes. I’ve known Mark a long time, and I’ve known MarBelle even longer. When he asked me to come back to DN to talk to Mark about his latest films, I bit his hand off. Digitally speaking. Thank you MarBelle for inviting me, and thank you Mark for being so generous with your time and thoughts. Read our conversation here.

This month I want to reflect on disappointment. There will be lots of talk about Oasis this month, so non-believers may want to look away now. One of my key cultural events of the year took place this month. It was the annual two-day Falmouth music festival, hosted by the Cornish Bank venue, Wanderfal. My friend Kat and I have gone the last two years. The first year we did a day of the two-day event. Last year we did both days. The first year there were three wonderful discoveries and experiences that were unexpected because we didn’t know the bands we were seeing.

We were introduced to and blown away by The Heavenly Bodes, Cyril Cyril and Nubiyan Twist. It was early in our friendship, one of the first events we’d been to together, and we had a blast. A lot of our friendship’s depth and its contours were established that day. Last year we were giddy with excitement ahead of time, because the line-up included several acts we knew of and wanted to see. And they lined up so perfectly. Friday night - Mermaid Chunky followed by Getdown Services. Saturday night - MEMORIALS followed by Jane Weaver. We kinda knew we wouldn’t be disappointed, and we weren’t. In the first year we went, disappointment wasn’t a feeling we engaged with.

This year was different and we talked about it in the aftermath. In the cultural debrief we tend to do every time we watch a movie or see a band together. The line-up contained very few artists we had heard of or were looking forward to seeing. The main one was Stealing Sheep, who didn’t disappoint, they were amazing. The other was the aforementioned Heavenly Bodes, a fuzzy psych gang of criminally young roustabouts from [Kernow] Penryn who don’t look or sound like they listen to anything past 1968. Spectacular new band.

Beyond that it was a few whispers of knowledge, and a couple of online listens that didn’t set the pulse racing. Our overall feeling was that musically, the weekend could be a bit of disappointment. And yet, we knew the weekend wouldn’t be. Because we would make the most of it and we’d critique it if we didn’t enjoy it, through the lens of culture chat, our main lens of chat. When we were chatting about this I said that one of the reasons, I have realised of late, that I didn’t want to see Oasis when they reunited in 2025 was that I felt there was very little chance they would be disappointing. And where was the fun in that?

I could ask that from a position of privilege. I saw Oasis 14 times between 1995 and 2009 so I saw most of the versions you could see. Often they were transcendent live, but often they weren’t. On occasion they were fine, on occasion they were bad. But one of the things that made the days seeing them, and they were long days of travel and queueing and waiting, exciting, was not knowing which Oasis would come out. To paraphrase John Lydon ‘disappointment is an energy’. The feeling on those days as it approached headline time was one of anticipation but also fear, because we didn’t want it to be shit. Sometimes, it was. Whether shit, or as transcendent as they could be and often were, it always directed and redirected our energy, aware of it at the time or not, to where it matters in order for the experience to not be shit overall. Each other.

I said to Kat that I’m pretty sure we’d have a good time, because we usually do, even when the music disappoints. On the Friday night it was just us, and the music was pleasantly surprising on the whole. The Bodes were sublime, as were The Leisure Society. I knew nothing of them and they were genuinely great. In particular their beautiful song, ‘We Were Wasted’. The last band we we saw were Opus Kink, who were much better live than on record for me. I wouldn’t listen to them at home but was grateful to have seen them. A powerful and energetic set to round off day one.

Day Two was a different beast and so many of its joys were rooted in unexpected encounters. After catching the end of a conference at Falmouth University, held in partnership with and adjunct to the festival, Kat and I wandered down to the Touc, the pub that sits underneath the Cornish Bank, before heading to see some music. We bumped into our friend Dean, who we work with at the university. Dean was out with his son Wren and he’d bumped into two graduates and was having a catch up. Dean had secured passes from an old Plymouth pal who was playing earlier that day and we persuaded him to come out for the night - following a safe hand over of Wren - and the graduates tagged along too.

We laughed so much. We talked about so much. It was so unexpected and so wonderful and we headed off to watch some bands after two rounds of pizza [for me] and drinks to get us going. We started slow with The Golden Dregs, who were ace. Following that we needed something more upbeat and we wanted to move our bodies, which we did to Colossal Squid. Mad drumming to insane house, techno and D&B beats. Yes please. We wanted more dancing, so we wandered down to the waterfront stage to see Kasai Masai, who were stunning. From there we hit up Stealing Sheep, then we finished off the bands part with some incredible Glaswegian punk courtesy of Doss. So many new finds and surprises.

And not just music. In addition to Dean and the grads, I bumped into a woman called Bean Downes. I hadn’t seen Bean in a decade, to the month, since she acted in my feature film ‘Wilderness’. She now lives in Falmouth and we chatted when we bumped into each other across the night. Following Doss, Dean introduced me to a woman called Sharifa, the sister of a former girlfriend of his. It was crazy and surreal when Sharifa said she’d been listening to my voice that very morning, having just discovered my podcast. We chatted long into the night. Nothing about Wanderfal 2026 disappointed.

I realise now that sometimes I like seeking experiences where disappointment is a possible outcome, in part. Experiences where I’m safe that overall disappointment is a low risk because I like the company involved, even if its my own, but where the cultural event may disappoint. It makes me focus on what I want from those encounters, which is an internal feeling of having a good time with people I like, including myself, doing the thing I like - being out in the world seeing shit, knowing that the financial and being away from my family time outlays resulted in something great, and embracing that feeling where everything aligns. The people I went with are ace and have a good time, the people I meet are ace and have a good time, and the thing we are all seeing is ace. Wanderfal was an ace weekend.

The title of this month’s newsletter comes from the weekend too. I said it to Kat, in response to the amount of berets on display. We noticed the trend starting back in March, at the first Sound/Image Cinema Lab event I put on at Verdant Taproom. My friend Gwenno was a guest at the event, and she was sporting a beret. And lo, one of the audience members was too. And so, 2026, the year of the beret.

A Sound so Very Loud by Ted Kessler & Hamish MacBain

I was curious to read this book because I am that rare diehard Oasis fan who didn’t want to see them in 2025, and who also thinks much of their best work came in the years post 2000, with 2005’s Don’t Believe the Truth actually my second favourite Oasis record. The first is obviously Be Here Now (1997). Ha! A jape. It’s Definitely Maybe (1994), obvs. I hoped this book would take their whole career, musically, seriously, paying attention to their craft and sound and how it evolved, drawing out moments of greatness from the entire catalogue.

I read it quickly and with so much joy, as it gave equal weight, insight and care to the full discography and shared value, through engaging writing and smart analysis, of the whole of the output. It was interesting where I aligned with the authors in terms of 2000 onward material, and also where I was drawn back to work from that period that I had not regarded as highly before. I’ve always argued that Oasis were a much more interesting band than they were given credit for, post (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? (1995) - musically, sonically, sometimes lyrically - and how the arrival of Gem and Andy led to some wonderful music that felt band created, in ways the early stuff never did. It’s wonderful to have a book that argues the same so elegantly, with so many hilarious anecdotes thrown in.

Warpaint - Radiate Like This

I love this record so much. The cover is also one of my favourite ever album covers. It looks glorious as an LP sleeve and is often in rotation on my easel where I put up my favourite covers, above where my records live. In April I heard it fresh, anew, as the perfect Sunday morning record after a late, late night spent with someone I love.

Club Ciné

This month I came across a new film-writing site I was unaware of, drawn there by a recommendation from The Daily, over at Criterion.com. The site, Club Ciné, has great interviews but the series that really stayed with me was The 100. This series is a group of critics and filmmakers and actors discussing the year ahead in film, listing 100 ‘works’ and that’s the apt word given the focus on video stores and film posters in the third and fourth parts Leave your Algorithm at the Door & What makes a great movie poster?. In the latter article, there’s a link to an amazing gallery of unused concept posters from the company in the piece. Gravillis - Gravillis: Unrealised Posters. The quote above really resonated with me at a time when I’m often thinking about how to justify a need for Cinema in the world as it is. It comes from part two - Bad Dads, Queer Screams, Broken Systems. It’s a site I’ll be keeping an eye on. I really like the way they see what they see.

Unfamiliar Images: Strongroom

I learned of the existence of this film recently, via the BFI announcement of its release. One of the elements of intrigue was that there was a planned cinema release alongside the Blu-ray and streaming release. This felt welcome, but also strange, given that the film is much more obscure than the usual films re-released in cinemas and on Blu-ray. I scoured the filmography of director Vernon Sewell who I thought I was unfamiliar with and realised yep, I have never seen a film by them. So when it popped up on BFI Player I thought it was a valid Unfamiliar Images pick for this month.

Can you hear me straining in that last sentence to justify to myself my own intention of something being unfamiliar for this newsletter. I think it may be to do partly with what I was saying above about disappointment, because as soon as I saw the poster image and read the tagline in all its pulpy goodness “twelve minutes to live…or die!” I knew there was little chance I wouldn’t enjoy this. British crime movies of the late 50s and early 60s are like catnip to me. And then you add in that one of the leads here is the actor Deren Nesbit, who delivers a standout character turn in one of my favourite British films, Victim, directed by Basil Dearden who I discussed last month, from the year before Strongroom, 1961.

All I’m asking is, how unfamiliar could it really be with all that predisposition? And I’m asking that of myself. Possibly rhetorically. Anywho, as you may have surmised, I loved this movie. A tight, lean, heist thriller with a great added layer of air running out for hostages taken unwittingly, at the time of the robbery that opens the film. A series of nifty plot turns, whereby the robbers’ intentions of having their prisoners found by alerting the police go south, means that it becomes both a gripping race against the clock and a fascinating morality play as the crew decide whether to return to the scene of the crime to rescue their captives. It’s a humdinger of a B movie and I am glad, and can see why, the BFI have spent time bringing it out in glorious Blu-ray, and getting it back on big screens, where I would have loved to have first encountered it.

Unfamiliar Sounds: Puma Blue

I was intrigued to read this article 13 Great New Albums Flying Under the Radar [The Wax Museum] when it popped us a a recommendation somewhere, mainly because of the site’s logo. Scanning it I realised that I had never heard of most of the artists so I settled in for some unfamiliar listening. There were some good experiences, and one standout, Puma Blue’s album Croak Dream (2026). I was doubly intrigued by the label of Trip Hop, for reasons - see below - and triply intrigued by the description of it as ‘Jeff Buckley’s falsetto over Portishead beats’. This album blew me away.

The description above is apt, but I also heard something I have not heard in 20-odd years, which is the direct influence of Radiohead’s Kid A (2000) in sound, texture and vocal. And it’s not derivative. It’s fantastic. It was strange and, in the eyes of some I’m sure, fateful that my listening was sandwiched directly between chatting with Kat about records that sound of a place, where she was talking about her love for Massive Attack’s Mezzanine (1998) in that regard, and the announcement of a new record by Tricky, which is exciting. For now, this is a brilliant addition to the British Trip Hop canon, while also being a beautiful beast in its own right.

Nicolas Cage

Sometimes only peak Cage will do. I was scouring for something to watch and I needed the unique velocity of late 80s early 90s Cage. That was all that would suffice. I was giddy when I saw that Vampire’s Kiss (Bierman, 1990) had popped up on Amazon Prime to coincide I guess with its lavish Blu-ray release by Radiance. I hadn’t seen it in years and it really is one of the most iconic Wild Cage turns, you know the meme. As a film I felt it really holds up, seeming out of time for its moment of release and still singular in its tone and critique of late 80s New York psychosis and dread masculinity. Cage is not just in a different movie to everyone else, but in a different universe.

Watching it really made me want to rewatch Wild at Heart (Lynch, 1990), which I haven’t done since Lynch died, and which was such a formative film for me when I saw it in my mid-teens. I could not believe it when the day after Vampire’s Kiss, Wild at Heart popped back up on Prime. What a thrill. So for the second night in a row I settled in and strapped in for a Cage-fest. It’s ‘wild’ that he did these two movies in the same year. So much energy and power. It made me think who now, who since, has anywhere near that level of ecstatic mania, that spectacular blend of unhinged explosion and abyss-deep vulnerability. He is a special one for me, a wonderful actor and movie star.

Gig - Wanderfal

Gig - Joshua Idehen

Gig - Riot! [Paramore Tribute] & Blonk 182 [Blink 182 Tribute, obvs]

Gig - Dr John Cooper Clarke

Links to Stuff I’ve read online, and podcasts I’ve listened to, this month and enjoyed - The Pleasures of Existence: Agnès Varda Archive Interview [e-flux] Frederick Wiseman: American Lives [Dario Llinares, Substack] The Square Ring w/Alex Barrett [The Boxing Movie Podcast] Adrian Martin on Filmmakers Thinking [Writers on Film Podcast] Ashley Clark and the World of Black Film [Writers on Film Podcast] The Films of Peter Watkins w/J. Hoberman [Film Comment Podcast] William Petersen: Manhunter [It Happened in Hollywood Podcast] Film/Video [Ben Blaine ‘The Midpoint’, Substack] The Rolling Stones on the Brink of Superstardom [Criterion] Thought Control [LRB] Wuthering Heights [Reverse Shot] Cass McCombs Interview [Tone Glow] Dry Leaf [n+1] Professor Beverley Clack [The Death Studies Podcast] We All Have Our Weird Little Passions: A Conversation with Pamela Hutchinson [Silent Sundays, Substack] Dry Leaf [Reverse Shot] At the Movies: Rose of Nevada [LRB] We’ll Always Have Paris, aka Radley Metzger Goes Hardcore [Metrograph] 10 Great Films set in Fishing Towns [BFI] Guest Playlist: Mark Jenkin [the Quietus] Peacocks [Ben Blaine ‘The Midpoint’, Substack] Monty Python’s Life of Brian: The Wrong Messiah [Bilge Ebiri, Criterion] Lucrecia Martel: Interview [Metrograph] Steven Soderbergh: Interview [Filmmaker Magazine] Is Pillion a good example of what D/S dynamics can be? [Savina Petkova’s Obscenes, Substack]

Events, Gigs & Travel in May

May 14, Falmouth, Kernow - The Utopia Strong @ Cornish Bank

May 17, Plaza Cinema, Truro, Kernow - A Clockwork Orange (Kubrick, 1971) @ Pat’s Film Club

May 20-24, London - I am in London to see the Super Furry Animals at Brixton Academy [Sat 23] and do some work. Let me know if you are around and want to hang.

May 26, Verdant Taproom, Penryn - Sound/Image Cinema Lab x Brewing Folk Presents: Nos Fylm / Film Night

Events & Travels Further Afield in Time & Space

Sydney - June 4-14

New York - June 15-21

Falmouth - British Popular Culture(s) Conference - July 9-11

Berlin - November [Dates TBC]