Era? Well, it all began in the 60s with the Beach Boys. And then it just… never stopped.

So my parents might like it, then. It’s pretty hard not to like. Sunny, strumming sounds with lots of references to girls, surfing and the many delights of the O.C.

The TV show? Er, not really. California. Actually, even though everyone talks about the West Coast lots, it’s being made virtually everywhere, with Y Niwl being probably the only Welsh-speaking beachy supergroup in the whole world. 

Who listens to it? People who like that Little Mermaid meme, the Missing Bean and Hipster RunOff. But that shouldn’t put you off, even if it is so #totesindie. Increasingly, it’s got all the sunshine of the Beach Boys with a hefty dose of whimsy and a slight dash of wistfulness.

Hipster beard optional, then? Trust us. You’ll have to take off the thick-rimmed glasses to surf, anyway.

Check out our selection of five bona fide bangers:

‘California Girls’ – The Smiles

‘Misery’ – Veronica Falls

‘Undegpump’ – Y Niwl

‘Let’s Go Surfing’ – The Drums

‘Vacation’ – Beach Fossils

Hear all these tracks, and more, on the accompanying Spotify playlist.

Say ‘theatre’ and most people would probably reply that it is one of the most gay-friendly environments there is. Looking for a topic to write on this week I was bombarded by gay related theatre news; Alan Bennett, gay playwright, has confirmed that his new play, People, will be showing at the National Theatre this October, directed by Nicholas Hytner, also gay.  In the wake of a particularly good production of Richard II at the Donmar Warehouse, Michael Dobson reminds us that some of the best portrayals of said Shakespearian villain have been given by John Gielgud, Michael Redgrave, Ian McKellen, Derek Jacobi and, a cross-dressed Fiona Shaw, all of whom are gay. In other news, gossip rages on in Hollywood about the sexual orientation of some actors. But surely it doesn’t matter. This is the twenty-first century after all.

Say ‘theatre’ and most people would probably reply that it is one of the most gay-friendly environments there is. Looking for a topic to write on this week I was bombarded by gay related theatre news; Alan Bennett, gay playwright, has confirmed that his new play, People, will be showing at the National Theatre this October, directed by Nicholas Hytner, also gay.  In the wake of a particularly good production of Richard II at the Donmar Warehouse, Michael Dobson reminds us that some of the best portrayals of said Shakespearian villain have been given by John Gielgud, Michael Redgrave, Ian McKellen, Derek Jacobi and, a cross-dressed Fiona Shaw, all of whom are gay. In other news, gossip rages on in Hollywood about the sexual orientation of some actors.

But surely it doesn’t matter. This is the twenty-first century after all.Well, if we are to believe a recent equity survey, which stated that only 57% of gay actors feel they can be open about their sexuality to their agents, and that a third of actors have experienced homophobia within the industry, we might have to reassess our initial assumption. 

Rupert Everett said that coming out ‘ruined’ his career, and another actress, who wished to remain anonymous, was quoted highlighting that  ‘the representation of gay women in the media is usually of young feminine women. Casting directors are usually looking for a ‘type’ based on the heterosexual model, which means you have to act ‘straight’ regardless.’  Is this 57% any better or worse than the situation found in other professions? It is probably impossible to say, but there is evidence that awareness of homophobia in the workplace is increasing.

The Equality Act, passed in 2010, condemns discrimination based on disability, sex, age, religion, belief, maternity, pregnancy, and, for the first time, homophobia or prejudce based on gender reassignment. It applies to any employment body that receives public funding, and therefore to organisations like the BBC and the National theatre. Employers now have a ‘public duty’ to eliminate discrimination, advance equality, and foster good relations between groups.

Yet legislation is only the first step in tackling the stereotypes and typcasting rife in the world of acting, and the belief that someone’s sexuality affects their ability to effectively play a character. Theatre groups such as Pink Triangle Theatre and the Spare Tyre group (whose tagline is ‘theatre without prejudice’) have taken the medium and used it to tackle homophobia through educational workshops, perhaps an apt reminder that putting these issues on stage in a form an audience can’t escape from can tackle prejudice head on.

Aside from being a fantastic way to score a sponsorship deal with Gillette, tennis is a game best played with two people. It is appropriate, then, that Tennis (the band) is based around a married couple: Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley. This should immediately set alarm bells ringing in the head of anyone unlucky enough to know the back stories of Sonny and Cher, The White Stripes (sort of) or Abba – or indeed anyone who dislikes cosiness, tweeness or self-indulgence. The husband-and-wife band is never a great idea – it tends to result in either total self-destruction, or a kind of suffocating loveliness that can do nothing but boast of the wonderful love that these people share. 

Being a grumpy, misanthropic git, this is anathema to me, so I approached Tennis with a sense of foreboding. I need not have worried. Tennis may write love songs of a kind, but they seem to be more wistful than boastful: talking not of the perfection of their relationship, but instead of the sacrifices and difficulties faced in love. It’s quite touching, but not exactly musically mould-breaking. Indeed, anyone who enjoys Grizzly Bear will recognise the stabbing piano on ‘Origins’. 

Tennis draws on a couple of indie trends to set themselves apart from the crowd. The first is a ‘vintage’ style of production that leaves a lot of the music sounding like something that might occur had the Beatles and the Beach Boys collaborated. This works rather well up to a point. The feeling of satisfaction when you realise that the opening guitar on ‘Robin’ is only a hair’s breadth away from being the opening to ‘Please Please Me’ is tempered by the fact that the whole effect is a little fake – like a Polaroid picture taken using an iPhone App. 

Tennis do, however, do the slacker ‘thing’ properly. They are laid back enough to be medically pronounced as comatose, but not self-consciously so. Not for them are the obnoxious stylings of Best Coast or Wavves. This is genuinely laid back indie pop, which, whether faux-vintage or not, is definitely worth your time.

4 STARS

As a Stonewall award-winning journalist (an award for those who have made a positive impact on the LGBT community) and celebrated author of four novels centred on LGBTQ issues, Paul Burston is a major figure in Britain’s gay literary scene. He also has a long history of campaigning for LGBT rights: the above image is of Burston at a 1990 demonstration. Following his compilation of the all-time top ten gay novels for The Guardian and establishment of the Southbank’s famous ‘Polari salon’, a monthly literary event featuring entertainment and a panel of writers discussing gay fiction and LGBTQ issues, Burston has been featured in The Independent’s annual ‘pink list’ for five consecutive years and dubbed ‘gay London’s Jane Austen.’

As a Stonewall award-winning journalist (an award for those who have made a positive impact on the LGBT community) and celebrated author of four novels centred on LGBTQ issues, Paul Burston is a major figure in Britain’s gay literary scene, with a long history of campaigning for LGBT rights. Following his compilation of the all-time top ten gay novels for The Guardian and establishment of the Southbank’s famous ‘Polari salon’, a monthly literary event featuring entertainment and a panel of writers discussing gay fiction and LGBTQ issues, Burston has been featured in The Independent’s annual ‘pink list’ for five consecutive years and dubbed ‘gay London’s Jane Austen.’

In many bookshops, one can find shelves dedicated specifically to ‘LGBT fiction’ – do you think LGBT fiction can be or should be considered as an independent genre?

  ‘Gay fiction’ tends to be treated rather like genre fiction, which is ridiculous really, as gay fiction can cross many different genres. There are gay thrillers, gay comedies, and so on. But if having a section marked ‘LGBT’ helps readers to discover new LGBT authors, then I’m all for it.

Do you think that gay liberation in fiction is dependent upon the creation of a ‘gay tradition’, where plot and theme are directly centred upon gay identity and occurrences that arise from this identity, or do you think it should rather permeate existent traditions? For example, should gay equality be constituted by a science fiction novel in which the protagonist is, incidentally, gay?

 The ultimate aim of gay liberation is that there should be no need for such a thing as a gay identity. Obviously, we’re not there yet! Until we are, gay people will want to read books about people they can identify with, and that will often mean books with gay characters and plots centred on questions of sexual identity. But then the same is true of most readers. People like to read books about people they can identify with, whether it’s straight men reading Nick Hornby or women reading Marian Keyes. That said, I also enjoy books where a character’s sexuality is incidental to the story. Someone like Clive Barker will drop a gay character into a horror novel or a  fantasy novel, and the fact that the character is gay isn’t the most interesting thing about him. That, to me, is truly liberating.

You have a considerable background in gay activism – how much of your work as a writer is informed by this activism, and how much is simply inspired by your identity as a gay man? Can you discriminate between these two identities?

 I still consider myself an activist, and I write a lot of what you might call political journalism, insofar as being gay and writing about LGBT lives and rights is still considered to be political. But I don’t consciously set out to be political in my novels. ‘The Gay Divorcee’ wasn’t intended to be a political book, but when it was first published, I did some radio interviews and the very first question I was asked was, ‘Is gay marriage an attack on the family?’ As for distinguishing between my life as a gay man and a gay activist, walking down the road with my partner and choosing to hold his hand is a political act, whether we like it or not.

Musically speaking, these are good times for birdwatchers. The pastoral is back in a big way – in some areas of the modern folksy indie landscape you can’t turn around without tripping over bands called Goose Archipelago  or Chirpy and the Tweet-Tweets. Fronted by an ornithologist and named after a family of seabirds, it’s easy therefore to pigeonhole Shearwater with the opener of their new outing Animal Joy; lilting, incantatory vocals deliver a cryptic narrative that namechecks dogs and swallows like a child completing a Springwatch garden survey.

Jonathan Meiburg’s outfit has been around for a long time, since 1999, starting life as a side-project of Okkervil River – and they’re no one trick flying pony. What’s most striking about their recent work is its prominent, forceful drumming, more integral to the production here than to any recent album since The National’s tautly percussive breakthrough, Boxer.

As many of Meiburg’s lyrics are suspiciously elusive, a metaphor might help. Imagine a secret Fleet Foxes gig, where young men gather around a fire in the woods to toast marshmallows and plait daisy-crowns for local maidens. Now imagine someone turning up to that event with a massive drum, and beating it vigorously until someone sets fire to his artfully-tangled beard.

Shearwater at their best sit in the middle of this false polarity – ‘Animal Life’ is an enthralling blend of ancient and modern, rural and urban, and ‘You As You Were’ sounds like LCD Soundsystem begging for their supper when their tour bus has broken down somewhere in Texas Hill country. However, somewhere in the middle of unnecessarily extended rock epic ‘Insolence’, the album itself gets a little lost and a little uncertain. 

It’s been a while since Shearwater flew the nest; I’m just not sure if they’ve quite succeeded in building a place of their own.

3 STARS

I would have liked to have been psychic as a teenager. There’s something reassuring about knowing that, in one of those scalding adolescent moments, you can make somebody’s kidneys explode with a thought. Secretly being psychic, or a superhero, or a wizard, or possibly a martial artist, would be fantastic in that awkward period when you’re hoping to become an alpha male, but seem to be able to do little but grow slowly hairier.

On second thought, it is probably just as well teenage boys are not psychic. Take, for example, Chronicle, where three high-school kids find a crystal thing down a hole near a warehouse rave (‘What did Jung say about glowsticks?’) and develop the power to move objects around slightly unconvincingly with their minds. Naturally it all goes fatally wrong before 83 minutes are up.

Chronicle’s gag is that, like Cloverfield or The Blair Witch Project or all those other movies, it has been filmed by the characters themselves. So in dull moments you can play a game of ‘What exactly are the chances that someone happened to be filming this dramatically significant moment?’ It is partly explained by the fact that one character is a misfit with a thing for filming his life. ‘You don’t think it’s weird? Like it puts a barrier between you and everything else?’ ‘Maybe I want a barrier.’ Or maybe he just has his eye on the film rights.

With its shaky handheld camera, Chronicle keeps its superkids in a real-ish world of high-school angst. (Although each looks roughly twenty-five.) There is less battling the forces of evil than doing magic tricks to impress girls and then sulking. Angst-bitten teen superheroes may not be head-explodingly new. But in Chronicle the multicoloured lycra and the supervillain never actually turn up. The boys are too busy devastating the Pacific Northwest themselves.

Chronicle is a surprisingly good debut film. But it shows its immaturity a little. The boys’ CGI psychic powers look a bit wobbly. Floating objects tend not to move at quite the same rate as the purposeful limbs or clenched temples thrust towards them. And the characters I could swear I have seen before in my pyjamas in some More4 teen drama or other.

But overall, rather like finding a big psychic crystal down a hole near a warehouse rave, Chronicle is an unexpected treat. It just may not quite blow your mind.

FOUR STARS

When I say Gary Numan, you probably say ‘Cars.’ On the cusp of releasing a ‘Best of’ DVD, composed of ‘various bits of rare TV footage and a collection of promo videos,’ one might expect Numan, like the average listener, to be looking back over the acres of a career that has spanned over thirty years. The opposite is true.  

‘When I listen back to old stuff, which isn’t very often, the only thing that really glares out to me are the mistakes, the things that I could have done better. Chord structures that could have been more interesting; melodies that could have been more beautiful, or dynamic. Every album is an attempt to make up for the mistakes of the last one, to try to find new sounds that I’ve never used before or heard before and to try to put those sounds in ways that I’ve not done before.’ 

The difficulty lies in finding something for everyone. ‘Some fans will quite happily stay in 1979 forever, while others are always very eager to look at what you’re doing next. You’re constantly trying to do things that will please all the different factions that you have. The longer the career goes on, the more factions there seem to be, and it becomes increasingly difficult to do things that please everybody.’ It’s tempting to pigeonhole Numan based on his early work. ‘I don’t think anyone realized that it would go on quite as long as it has, now that it’s been 34 years, since I started. It’s funny because, for me, you don’t get quite as excited about that sort of thing as you do about a new album.’  

Having released Dead Son Rising in October of last year, Numan is back in the studio, and constantly looking forward. ‘I’m working flat out at the moment, trying to get a new album finished by the end of May. I’m massively into that and it’s very exciting. It really gives you a reason to get up in the morning. It’s that side of the business that’s getting me going and keeping me interested for such a long time.’ And the new album’s style? ‘My intention for it is that it should be the heaviest, darkest thing that I’ve ever done. It’s hugely powerful in the right environment – to take it on tour every night is thrilling, really. It’s not gentle music at all, or happy or beautiful – it’s a bit of an onslaught, and I love every second of it.’  

The studio experience is changing, though, not least due to the array of technology now at Numan’s fingertips. ‘There is so much choice now: it’s just ridiculous the amount of things you can do. One of the disciplines that you have to learn as this new technology has come along is how to know when to stop. You can spend a week just listening to different snare drums – there are fucking thousands of them! The other thing with technology is that you spend most of your time being back at school. Big piles of manuals by the bed – it’s not the sexiest thing in the world. You’re just learning all the time. You spend your entire life feeling ever so slightly stupid – or I do, anyway, because I never feel like I’m quite on top of any of it. I’m always just about hanging on by the skin of my teeth. The technology really helps, but it can really hinder it as well. It’s a tortuous old path, from start to finish.’