2014: A Year In Review

WITH the Christmas turkey scarfed and the New Years fireworks on order, the clock is ticking on 2014 AD.

At the very least, 2015 AD cannot be as dark a year for newshounds. This was a year dominated by seemingly ever-lasting threads of negativity, and one that seemed to produce a new strand of doom every week. In many ways this was a busy year for the news media, with the dark places reached in 2013 somehow accentuated.

With high-profile plane crashes, deaths, sieges, invasions, wars and more going on, it was easy to pray for a lighter story to dissect the poison, or for a distraction of any sort.

January was perhaps the year's quietest month, even though it was hardly a great month for people who hate rain. After a very wet December, more rain led to widespread flooding in Southern England. January had a record month for rainfall in Southern England as Somerset became an extension of the Bristol Channel - a state it would reside within for a few weeks. The Thames region and other coastal areas also flooded, while other areas reported high precipitation.

Bigger problems befell Devon when a major coastal surge destroyed the main railway line from Plymouth and Cornwall to the rest of Britain, which was shut for 3 months while rebuilding happened.

Other stories also saw weather dominate, with the central areas of the USA hit by a polar vortex, -25 temperatures and snow. There was also bizarre piffle of the French President Francois Hollande having an affair, which led to awkward political discourse ahead of his trip to meet Obama.

Snow was initially the dominant story in February, as the Winter Olympics got underway in Sochi, Russia. This was a surprisingly more entertaining affair than expected, although given it was the most expensive Olympics of any kind, you would have expected as much.

Russia also became involved in one of the year's biggest event in this month, although Vladimir Putin has continued to play down the extent his nation is involved with Ukraine.

For several months, Ukraine had been gripped by protests after President Viktor Yanukovych turned his back on pro-Europe reform in favour of closer ties with Russia. Then in February, things exploded. Three days of riots in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and other major cities lead to depressing images of fire and sniping.

This led to the end of Yanukovych's government, and replacement by a new government. Concerns had arisen of potential Neo-Nazi involvement in the protests for change were prevalent, but hushed by the next development.

Concurrent to the more high profile anti-government protests were pro-Russian protests in Russian speaking territories in the South and East of Ukraine. This then led to major clashes in Crimea, which wanted to rejoin Russia 20-odd years after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

A bitter fight for the peninsula took place before a vote in March where Crimea declared independence from the rest of Ukraine. Russia is now in de facto but disputed control of the state, but as the year progressed it was not the only issue in the Russian speaking areas of Eastern Ukraine.

By now, however, another bleak story was filling March's airwaves. Early in the month, a routine Malaysian Airlines passenger flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing suddenly disappeared somewhere off the coast of Vietnam.

This spiralled into one of the year's biggest stories, with American news media in particular taking grim speculative interest in where the plane had ended up. A huge quantity of conspiracy theories were created in the wake of the disappearance, but so far, there has been no revelation,  Aside from narrowing down the plane's location to the Indian Ocean a few thousand miles west of Australia's Western seaboard, no wreckage has yet been discovered.

By April, an already dark year was looking for some positivity. What duly turned up was two major disastrous events involving children in the same week. First, 276 schoolgirls and women were kidnapped from a remote Nigerian school by Islamic terrorist organisation Boko Haram, who would reappear throughout the year following a large number of terrorist killings.

The missing schoolgirls became the centre of the global #BringBackOurGirls campaign - one of many social media campaigns to take place in 2014. This campaign inspired many high profile figures to join, and many similarly high profile figures to voice snarky unhelpful disapproval. So far, 55 of the missing have returned, while Nigeria has had to retract an earlier statement they'd all been found.

Virtually the day after, South Korea had a tragedy of its own, when a passenger ferry capsized, taking 300 with it. There has been major calls for the death penalty to be used after a case that saw the deaths of mainly secondary school children.

After a uniformally bleak opening to the year, May turned out to be continuing the earlier threads mixed in with elections. India had the largest election in world history, as controversial Hindu nationalist Narendra Modi won the vote in a landslide.

The UK and other European nations were meanwhile voting in the European Parliament, where the biggest victor turned out to be apathy. Only 42.5% of Europe's population bothered to vote - a new record low.

Anti-EU parties were those who took most of votes, with UKIP and the French National Front taking the spoils, although so far their impact has been negligible.

2014 was a big year for UKIP, with the party winning its first two MPs later in the year after Conservative defectors, and Nigel Farage's status as a professional media-whore intensifying. But while 2014 saw it take a big leap that few other UK parties have managed, it still had a wide variety of public relations gaffes, and ended the year with mumblings of discontent towards Farage.

The other major British political parties all had terrible years. The Conservative Party had a dire year once more, capped off by George Osborne's Autumn Statement revealing that he had massively failed in his 2010 pledge to control Britain's borrowing, deficit and debt costs.

As a Prime Minister himself, David Cameron didn't have as bad a year as he had done in previous years, but his party were still lacking conviction. The defections to UKIP - a party primarily cultivated of hard-right ex-Tories - will have certainly hurt, The news that the UN has also announced the UK is to be the first country to be investigated for systemic violations of the rights of disabled people will certainly not help, while Iain Duncan-Smith has seemingly morphed into a public hate figure capable of only spouting gibberish rubbish.

Labour could well have established a commanding lead, and could've done were it not for the fact that Ed Miliband has some of the world's worst PR advisors. Throughout the year, the Leader of the Opposition was a walking PR disaster, which was perhaps capped off by his inexplicable failure to eat a bacon sandwich without looking strange.

As for the Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg existed in a state perhaps worse than his hatred in 2011. He was ignored.

June saw the start of the 2014 World Cup, which was an unusual tournament. It had threatened at first to be overshadowed by protestations over the cost and workers deaths, and in the late finishing of stadium construction.

FIFA's ill-mannered affairs also offered an alternative distraction for those who don't like football. There has always been the whiff of corruption surrounding FIFA, and that has been more than a whiff since the bizarre decision in 2010 to hand Qatar a World Cup.

November's publishing of a corruption report that excused FIFA and the winning nations was a total mess, undermined on the day of publication when investigator Michael Garcia complained.

As for the football itself, host nation Brazil were ok but not good, and were perhaps lucky not to get injuries and/or play a big name team until the semi-finals. Then everything fell apart, with a near-paralysing injury to star forward Neymar and a ban for skipper Thiago Silva ruling them out of the semi-final with Germany.

The Germans tore Brazil apart in a display few football teams pull off in ordinarily games, nevermind a World Cup semi-final. At one point they were scoring every other minute, netting seven to break Brazil's dreams.

With previous champions Spain utterly insipid, and a number of other runners and riders underperforming, the Germans were deserved victors of their fifth World Cup.

The regular football season in England had been exciting, with an entertaining three way title duel between Manchester City, Chelsea and Liverpool providing one of the most exciting title fights in years. By contrast, Manchester United had a hideous 2013-14 campaign, as David Moyes transpired to be overawed.

In the end, the slip seen around the world from one S. Gerrard led to Man City taking the title, and Liverpool haven't recovered from the twin blow of that and selling Luis Suarez.

While the world was mainly intrigued by football, there was another long-reaching story breaking alongside in the regular news.

At the start of June, an Islamic militant group known as ISIL took Mosul, the second largest Iraqi city. Despite going under a number of brandings - ISIS, ISIL and Islamic State - they exploded in power across Iraq and Syria, with oil money and ransacked American military goods giving them previously unforeseen power.

Throughout the year, their power begun to develop, and with it pressure on the West to act. This pressure increased when ISIS begun to take and kill American, British and French hostages. As of December, Obama is yet to become the third in four consecutive American to deploy troops to Iraq, although support to the locals has been given.

As if that story wasn't enough to make the news more depressing than normal in July, more appalling news dominated. Another war between Israel and Gaza saw cities in Gaza virtually destroyed following a bitter conflict that left many appalled by the actions of both sides.

This seemingly interminable squabble never really looked like stopping, with several ceasefires folding almost immediately. All over the world, protests were held for Israel to stop its campaign, and with it a range of people calling them Anti-Semitic. By the time the campaign finished, the rebuilding bill for Gaza was estimated in the billions.

Meanwhile, after a few months in the background, Ukraine resurfaced in the headlines in horrific ways. The bombing of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur in the skies over Donetsk in Eastern Ukraine was a major global incident.

Nauseating footage emerged of Ukrainian fields scattered with pieces of plane and the belongings of those onboard.

It was very quickly declared that a missile caused the explosion, and that it the plane was mistaken for a troop carrier. But while that was established, the Ukrainian and Russian forces spent most of the rest of the year blaming the other side, while rebels picked through belongings and are believed to have made off with a lot of it while stopping air crash investigators from being let in.

As if that wasn't enough, July saw the Ebola crisis in Africa spiral into a major trans-national pandemic. An epidemic had been building throughout the year, as thousands of deaths from the disease were reported in three West African nations. In the summer, it spiralled out of control, with th nations running out of doctors. Unfairly, what tipped it into the Western news in September was the potential risk of European nations and America seeing similar pandemics as people from Doctors Without Borders returned home carrying the strain - a situation exacerbated by inept hospital staff in Texas letting a sufferer go free.

August is usually a quiet month where the world seems to take time off. But instead, this was an utterly hideous month that begun with the shooting of Michael Brown.

The shooting happened in Ferguson, Missouri, when unarmed 18-year-old black teenager Brown was shot seven times by local police officer Derren Wilson. This quickly led to things spiralling out of control, with the city hit by mass protests that turned violent and an utterly insane police response that an uninformed outsider could've mistaken for an invading army.

Throughout the year, the black community of the USA has protested perceived targeting by the American police, who have done little to help thaw relations by continuing to be seen to be doing so. November's failure to indict an officer who was caught on video putting Eric Garner into a chokehold before he died was particularly insulting. Violence and mass protests also accompanied a similar failure to indict over Brown, and a dark year in US history was seen as the race question appeared in an ugly manner. Unless you watch Fox News, where every attempt was made to put the protesters in the wrong.

For most of August, three stories dominated the news in the form of the Ferguson protests, ISIS and Ebola. They were then joined by an unwelcome fourth story in the form of the death of the much loved comedian and actor Robin Williams, who committed suicide in the middle of the month.

Williams was not the only much-admired celebrity to die in 2014, with fellow Oscar-winner Phillip Seymour Hoffman, comedian Joan Rivers, Jurassic Park star Richard Attenborough, actor Micky Rooney and actress Shirley Temple all taking their leave from the world. But Williams was one of the most poignant deaths of the year, with fans stunned by the suicide of one of Hollywood's most well loved actors.

The end of a dark August saw another major news story break in an unexpected way. For thousands of Twitter uses worldwide, one minute on August 31st saw Twitter timelines filled with the usual debates on the news and general inane stuff, and the next saw nude photographs of rich and famous actors spreading like wildfire. Or at least it was for me.

Known online as "The Fappening", this news item saw the private nude images of hundreds of famous women leaked onto the internet. It also led to vitriolic commentary, with a substantial amount of bile reserved for Reddit and 4Chan - the sites primarily responsible for the leaks.

Unfairly targeted was Actor-winning star Jennifer Lawrence, who seemed to be in every single one of the initially leaked photos, and who has since referred to the leaks as a sex crime.

This was in all a mostly terrible year for the internet, with the medium's creator Tim Berners-Lee later admitting he was unhappy at what his momentous creation had become. With the internet still problematic following the 2013 Snowden leaks, there were various scandals involving online posts before major concerns over privacy took to the fore when the celebrity nude leak occurred.

This would be exacerbated a few months later in a major debate for internet security and privacy at Sony. Until then, and previously on a more visible level, the tedious Gamergate scandal also broke in August. Initially breaking after the jilted boyfriend of video game developer Zoe Quinn claimed a previous relationship of hers with a male video game journalist had led to favourable reviews for one of her previous games, this very quickly spiralled into a debate on sexism in the video game fan community.

It was not a pretty sight. This was an ugly debate that raged for months in head-bangingly stupid fashion, and after a few years of renaissance, did as much to undermine video games as a succession of increasingly faulty new products (for instance, DriveClub, Assassin's Creed Unity and Halo all launched with major problems) and sub-par titles for high end new consoles did.

Most people supporting the use of the tag claim it begun as a debate of the ethics in games journalism, but the belligerent sexism and threats towards Quinn and other women in games destroyed any logic to this argument. It made for unedifying reading, and was just utterly detestable to trawl through.

Despite that, people wanted to use the internet for a positive at the end of August in the form of the Ice Bucket challenge, which arrived in the UK this time. This was a simple test of throwing a bucket of ice-filled water over your head and then donating to charity.

Even then, there was still a queuing up to knock the concept, be it debating the charity who was involved, how important the cause was, how many people actually donated out of how many participated, the mis-use of water - particularly debated in drought stricken areas - the idea of it being self-congratulatory, and the idea of it being a glorified wet T-shirt contest.

In saying that, if a portion of the £20-odd million raised helps cure motor neurone disease, it might not all be so bad.

September saw the very future of the United Kingdom then put under threat. For the year or so since it was announced, the Scottish Independence referendum was largely consigned to being a local issue. But with weeks to go before the big vote, the persistent message of the independence campaign and some very shoddy work by the pro-union campaign let the SNP-led independence campaign erode the advantage.

When some polls began to show advantage with the pro-independence camp, politicians of all hues flocked to Scotland to plead the case for pro-unionism. They were also joined by people from outside the UK seeking an example to support their own independence campaigns, with people from Flanders in Belgium, Catalonia in Spain and all sorts of other regions across Europe visiting to research things for their own campaigns.

Ultimately, a 10% victory was declared for the pro-union camp, who celebrated by having a riot in central Glasgow. Meanwhile, First Minister and SNP chair Alex Salmond resigned from his post in charge, and was jeered following the end of his independence dream, although he will be standing for election to Westminster in the next election. He may also have got his wish for more power for the SNP, with the pro-union vote coming with further devolution, and the SNP now trouncing Labour in Scottish polls.

While the newspapers were busy casting Alex Salmond as some kind of bogeyman, Apple users were venting their hatred at different Celtic bogeymen.

U2's 13th studio album Songs of Innocence is not going to be remembered as one of their best albums, but it will be remembered for one of the most interesting release strategies. Piggybacking on Apple's latest product launch/minimal ovepriced enhancement announcement, the Irish rockers released the album free on everyone's iTunes.

26 million worldwide downloads equals the total copies sold of U2's biggest selling album The Joshua Tree - which was released 27 years previously - but it didn't come without controversy. That impressive looking figure is still less than 5% of global iTunes customers, and as many as those who downloaded it complained about the album's forceful placement in their iTunes folders. It even got to the surreal and odd moment when Apple released a delete album button, although it doesn't seem to have worked.

The end of September saw protests become the order of the day, with wide scale protests against corruption in Mexico and Chinese enforced rule in Hong Kong.

The protests in Mexico were sparked off by the kidnapping of 43 students at a teacher's college, but with the nation still engrossed in a drug cartel war in the north of the country and political corruption, protests spread around Mexico. As yet, the victims have not been found, and at least one has been confirmed dead.

Known locally as the Umbrella Revolution, Hong Kong's protests enjoyed solidarity protests and support from outside the region. But China refused to back down, and a bitter peace has since broken out.

October was dominated by the jailing of Paralympic hero Oscar Pistorius.

The South African had been in and out of news cycles after the death of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp on Valentine's Day 2013. Pistorius always admitted he shot and killed Steenkamp, but denied murder.

After a long winded trial, he was ultimately found not guilty of murder, but guilty of culpable homicide, leading to his jailing for five years. Many called the sentence too lenient, and this includes the prosecution, who in 2015, will begin a challenge to get his sentence lengthened.

Elsewhere, the UK saw the end of a costly era as they exited Afghanistan. The closure of Camp Bastion and the airlifting away of thousands of British troops, supplies and equipment bought to an end the 13 years that the UK has spent in Afghanistan. This has led to plenty of pondering if the campaign in this country was really worth it, and in truth, nobody seems to have an answer.

November finally saw something positive happen, when a European Space Agency probe called Philae that spent ten years in flight landed on a comet 310 million miles away.

Unfortunately, the positivity from that was quickly eroded when it turned out the probe landed in the wrong place, leaving it to fall over and run out of battery power.

Meanwhile, the UK was busy taking an almost eager celebration of World War One to a newly uncomfortable level. A commemoration saw a sea of red ceramic poppies erected in the moat surrounding the Tower of London - one for each British person killed in the conflict.

It was roundly considered a success in raising tourist numbers and positive press reviews, yet it all felt oddly uncomfortable that national celebrations had been created out of the death of millions of people in a war that could have been avoided. In saying that, it was in better taste than the Sainsbury's Christmas advert using the WW1 Christmas Day truce to sell chocolate.

Traditionally, November is a busy month for the film industry, with marketing campaigns beginning for the big Christmas releases and pictures considered for the Oscars. The third Hunger Games movie and Interstellar proved giant autumn success stories, although sadly the highest grossing film of the year worldwide was one of its worst, as Michael Bay's hideous Transformers movies saw off the more entertaining Marvel stories and The Lego Movie to top the global cash pile.

One of Sony's biggest Christmas planned releases was The Interview - an action-comedy starring Seth Rogen and James Franco as two bumbling celebrity journalists who land an interview with Kim Jong-Un, and then are asked to assassinate him. When the trailer came out in July, North Korea had predictably not taken it to very well, with the kind of ranting and wailing that comes with their territory.

In a normal world, that would've been the end of it, and it would've no doubt attracted the audience that has made Rogen bafflingly successful. Then in November, Sony employees turned up in their office to find their computer network had completely died.

Things turned out to be more severe than a simple power outage. Soon, a group known as the Guardians of Peace that may or may not be affiliated to the North Koreans - nobody seems to know for sure - was releasing everything. Films, scripts, private details, thousands of largely catty e-mails, salary information and more was put all over the internet.

Drowned somewhat in the intense publication of e-mails was the more interesting debate about internet security and corporate cybercrime.

The world could have used a gentile December to end the year. What it got was yet more misery. It started off badly enough when the CIA in America released its much anticipated report into torture. This revealed the horrifying and nauseating extent to which torture was used at American bases across the world to find out information.

Repentance has not been the order of the day. Former Vice President Dick Cheney has been in unrelenting support of the behaviour, while a litany of ex-CIA and former Attorney Generals have also been on American news television to justify a program that saw, among other things, waterboarding, "anal feeding" and chaining people to cold floors par for the course.

The role of the UK is believed to have been redacted, but state secrets were still making attention in the UK. For most of the year, rumours had been surfacing over a sex ring involving prominent British politicians and celebrities in the 1970s-90s. This has been a long running case to find answers for after the Jimmy Saville revelations, and seemed to have reached a big moment when Rolf Harris was jailed in the summer. But soon police begun to start finding credible witnesses and more claims that a child sex ring of the powerful had killed children that threatened to blab.

This could be a major story in the next few years, and many of the claims make for extremely uncomfortable reading. Whether or not anything will be uncovered remains to be seen on just how credible law enforcement can be.

Globally, things were still as bleak as ever, and were about to continue as miserably as the year had been. The enormous and horrific massacre of innocent schoolchildren at a military school in Afghanistan stunned the world, while the world was also shocked later in the same week by news of an Islamic terrorist taking hostages in a chocolate cafe in Sydney. The taker was later killed, along with two hostages.

The bleakness was still not done, after the terrible news two days before Christmas Day of a man driving a bin lorry suffering a heart attack and running over six people in the centre of Glasgow.

It can be safely said that after a huge year filled to bursting with shocking stories, the world will be glad to see the back of 2014. So what will 2015 bring?

The one definite in the UK is that May 2015 will bring a general election that looks extremely close to call. For the most part, polls have shown Labour enjoying a marginal polling advantage over the Conservative Party, but both have had their voting shares eaten up by UKIP and the SNP in their respective heartlands.

All that is certain is that the three big parties are losing support, with the Liberal Democrats in particular expected to have a painful election.

Beyond that, another unpredictable and tumultuous year is likely to be seen on the global stage. All that can be done now is to wait and see just how unpredictable and tumultuous it can be.

Still, a little positivity in the increasingly bleak global landscape wouldn't go amiss.

Kasabian at Brixton Academy - Gig Review

WHERE do you go to after reaching the career peak?

This year has already been an exceptional one for Kasabian. They topped the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury, headlined a hometown gig in Leicester to 50,000 people, and have had their fourth consecutive number one album. In all, its very good going.

Naturally, the way to go is to take your wares to the rest of the country, with the band embarking on an arena tour except for in London, where the band have chosen to do a five night residency at Brixton Academy. The band have played this venue at least once on every tour, so a biggest ever run here makes perfect sense.

Nevertheless, this could have had the air of an awkward occasion. On the tour's opening night in Glasgow, a "production error" meant that the backing screen showed the phrase "London is full of cunts" during a song. That presumably went down very nicely up in Scotland - and had it been kept, most likely everywhere else in the UK - but down in the capital, it could have reduced some of the buoyancy.

Could have, that is. London however is certainly in a forgiving mood from the word go. Night four of the five night stand begins - as the others did - with Tom Meighan and Sergio Pizzorno doing the first verse to new album opener bumblebee acoustic, before the rest of the band join in and get the crowd into a fabulously frenzied mayhem.

By now, you will almost certainly know the drill. Teased by the rhythm to Kanye West's Black Skinhead, there's a pulsing Shoot the Runner, and then the anthemic squawk of Underdog's guitar riff.

Disappointingly, Where Did All The Love Go is again preferred to the superior Fast Fuse, but there's little time to feel down. The rush of Days are Forgotten is a beefier version than the song that opened Kasabian's last appearance here in 2012, before recent single eez-eh blisters past in goofy singalongs, rave synths and Pizzorno running around the stage like a kid filled with sugar.

The counterpoint between Kasabian's co-frontmen is seen in all from dress - Meighan favours a black-and-white checkered blazer as part of a suit, while Pizzorno wears a t-shirt with "stickers" written on the front and a bushy felt fox tail - to singing style to even dancing on stage. But between them, they know how to give the audience a show, and encourage them to go nuts in response.

There's no sense of dulling down the expectations for the smaller room. If anything the concentrated energy feels like even more of a frenzy then in bigger spaces like the O2, and the singalongs as loud and punching through the night air.

Pizzorno's stint also includes time for a funky dance number, with a remix of Empire single Me Plus One providing a surprise highlight. This is then followed by the chill out songs of Thick as Thieves and a semi-acoustic Goodbye Kiss, which is perhaps the only time that the pace and power is relaxed.

The latter directly leads into 2004's Club Foot, which still packs a powerful bassy thump. A re-worked version of Re-Wired, which has a new string intro and has a segment of Camaro's Word Up sung by Pizzorno, is an excellent follow-on.

The live set remains studded with excellent anthems, with a one-two of Empire and Fire - the latter of which features an extended reprise - closing up the main set in style.

Not that proceedings are finished. Barely two minutes elapse before the string section returns to play an extended intro to recent single stevie - accompanied by lasers. The rest of the band join in and do a good show, but the following blast of Vlad The Impaler is much better, with dirty guitars and thumping bass sending the room into a state of delirium.

Supplemented by guitar work from two of the Maccabees, L.S.F. brings down the show in rabble-rousing fashion, with a reprise and all, and the crowd goes home happy. Indeed, they still chant the refrain from the song heading out of the venue and into the cold South London air long after the last member has departed from the stage.

While this may not have had the best setlist or performance Kasabian have ever done, this is still an admirable show, with plenty of punching anthems to get the crowd going. There's also a good deal of sonic variation, some excellent use of the standard arena-rock tricks (screen, lasers, big box of lights, etc), and a sense that band and audience are both enjoying their side of the bargain.

The question now is this - "can they do it bigger?"

Assuming they avoid the UK festivals next year, perhaps one of the bigger outdoor places will be a calling. Lord knows they've got the catalogue of anthems, tricks and fans to pull it off, as this year has very nicely demonstrated.

4/5

Opening for the Leicestershire rockers are The Maccabees, who have previously headlined their own show in this room and indeed in larger places. Having spent most of the last year struggling their way through the creation of a new album, the newly-enlarged band play four new tracks as part of their set.

Surprisingly, these four turn out to be the better songs of their set, with a nice mixture of dark textures yet dance-y sounds. But perhaps not surprisingly, the crowd are more in tune with the old ones, with mid-set track Precious Time getting highlights. The band take a few songs to warm-up, and at times were overshadowed by their elaborate but entertaining light show, but they rise to the challenge and finish strongly, with a monstrous Pelican closing the night with gusto. They will certainly be back next year playing bigger rooms than this one.