I’ve decided to start keeping a monthly music diary. This is more for myself than anyone else, so I can look back in future on what was going on in my musical world. It includes a playlist of the songs I’ve been enjoying this month, the shows I’ve been to, and commentary on musical events and discourse.

As I mentioned last month , I was involved in the Pop Music World Cup on BlueSky, so have been listening to a lot of music from Brazil, which I have already written about.

Other non-Brazilian things I have enjoyed thi month include the Girls Trip version of Zara Larsson’s ‘Midnight Sun’. Anything PinkPantheress is inolved in is usually worth hearing, and in general I’m enjoying the influence drum and bass is currently having on pop.

Looking back a bit, I’ve been listening to Power, Corruption and Lies a lot, and always forget how great a track 586 is, rarely mentioned among New Order’s best, but absolutely deserves to be.

Back to 2026, and Hen Ogledd have flitted across my consciousness from time to time but I’ve never really sat down and listened to before. Scales Will Fall in particular is brilliant, an eight minute semi-spoken epic that nevertheless manages to be catchy enough to find oneself singing the refrain(s) about the house for days.

Otherwise, a quiet month for me musically. I had to miss Colin Blunstone of The Zombies due to a family situation, so no gigs for me. There was Eurovision of course, which my daughter in particular loves, but the fact of Israel’s participation made it tough to enjoy. Probably I should have boycotted but didn’t particularly want to force my own moral choices onto the rest of the family.

A lot of people praised the recent Kylie documentary, on Netflix, but I found it fairly tedious, as is almost always the way with ‘authorised’ music documentaries. In general there have been few good music docs in recent times, and I remain saddened that the 9 part Prince documentary from Ezra Edelman has never (yet) seen the light of day.

Linked is my playlist of the month, on Apple Music, but you can use Tunemymusic.com to convert to a streaming service of your choice should you wish.