Last weekend we made our annual pilgrimage to The Hague (and for the first time, Antwerp) for the pioneering festival dedicated to Music and Literature, Crossing Border. This year Loops hosted a series of events, readings and performances. Wild Beasts played a predictably brilliant set, confirming their burgeoning reputation as one of the most stimulating British bands since The Smiths. Check out one of the great albums of the year here.

Richard Milward at Crossing Border

Elsewhere Graham Massey of 808 State provided a unique soundtrack to preface Kevin Cummins’ conversation with Paul Morley about Manchester’s pop iconography and James Yorkston played an intimate and memorable set.

The highlight, for me, was Richard Milward’s classic meeting and interview with psychedelic legend, Sonic Boom, of Spectrum and Spacemen 3. An interview in the true gonzo spirit of Hunter Thompson, Milward was largely unfazed by Sonic’s benign reticence and Louis Behre, founder of Crossing Border, was impressed enough to proclaim the performance one of his personal highlights of the festival’s 15 years.

Richard Milward & Sonic Boom

A joy to behold! Steve Earle, Stephen Malkmus, Natalie Merchant, Monsters of Folk, The Low Anthem, Mumford and Sons, Jay McInnerney, James Kelman, and the editorial presence of the most vital journal of the day, The Believer – yet again Crossing Border confirmed its reputation for quality, innovation and passionate commitment to music and spoken-word performance.

Nick Kent & Faber's Lee Brackstone

It has now become commonplace at festivals like Latitude, Camp Bestival and Green Man to mix music with literary performance in the same space; Crossing Border was the original and still the best. No mud or tents either. What’s not to like?

www.loopsjournal.com – Issue Two out in March 2010.

Christmas begins with a ‘G’ this year as the QI boffins and their gang of familiar faces unleash not only a brand new series on BBC1, beginning Thursday 26th November, but also two new books: The QI Annual 2010 and The Book of the Dead.

Laugh Yourself Clever

Edited by John Lloyd, the new QI Annual is, in their very own words, ‘a gargantuan gallimaufry of G-ness that gambols gamely between Galaxies, Gods, Gravity, Gin, Gnus and Gravel’ …

The book features all sorts of favourites from the new series, including Clive Anderson on Gordons; Rowan Atkinson as The Gambler; Bill Bailey’s Air Guitar Tutorial; Craig Brown’s G-acronyms; Goatherd Sean Lock; Chris Donald of Viz on Geordies, Grocers and Garden Gnomes; and Graham Norton on Golden Grahams.

And of course it looks great with great illustrations from (among others) Geoff Dunbar, Beano’s Hunt Emerson, Gray Jolliffe, Phill Jupitus, Spitting Image’s Roger Law, Matt from The Daily Telegraph, Tony Husband and Nick Newman of Private Eye, Katie Scott, Adrian Teal, Robert Thompson … [...]

A Matter of Life and Death: How to Wean a Man Off Football is a strange hybrid of a book – a book with a split personality, part-memoir, part-comedy self-help manual, from the TV duo of Alistair McGowan and Ronni Ancona – one a former football addict, and the other the unfortunate other half who’d rather do anything that watch the beautiful game.

The book is filled with banter about the differences between men and women. Alistair McGowan appeared recently on the Christian O’Connell show on Absolute to describe some of his own football-related symptoms of addiction – the kind that afflict men universally – and he also managed to treat listeners to some of his repertoire of impressions: