Looking back on 2005

Ricky Wilson

Wilson is the lead singer of the Kaiser Chiefs. Although Ricky and the band have been playing together under a variety of guises for nearly 10 years, it was in 2005 that their world exploded - making the Chiefs the most successful new band of the year. This is the story of their year in Ricky's words...

"This time last year, we'd just finished recording our album and were bottom of the bill on the NME tour with Bloc Party, the Futureheads and the Killers. We thought that was the pinnacle. We reckoned our album might sell about 75,000 in total and that would be that. A year later, the album is still selling around that many copies every week. You know those people who buy, like, three albums a year? Well, they're probably buying our record and never even listening to it. We've got the third-biggest-selling record of the year behind Captain Blunty (the Yin to our Yang; though he's sold a lot of records to an awful lot of people - or is that awful records to awful people?) and Coldplay. It's a hilarious position to be in for a five-piece indie band from Leeds.

Just over a year ago, I was teaching in an art college and working in a bar at nights. I used to have to phone in sick to work if we got offered a tour and some of the kids would know because they'd see the gigs listed in the NME. So I want to say sorry publicly about that but I was struggling to pay off my debts and the unpaid tax from Parva [their name before they became the Kaiser Chiefs]. It pisses me off that I worked day and night to get out of debt while the money's coming in somewhat easier now.

We were lucky in that there seemed to be a lot of good British guitar bands this year and we were at the front of that. There always seems to be a push-and-pull thing between US and British bands and 2005 seemed to be the turn of the Brits. And as Nick [the Chiefs' drummer and co-songwriter] is so fond of saying: if you can see the bandwagon rolling, you've already missed it.

But the US mob are all about to return and they might pull it back a bit in 2006. We don't care, though. It will hopefully breed even better work from us. I'd hate to have no competition.

It's like when people ask us if we're threatened by the Arctic Monkeys. The fact is that the average kid is now into great British guitar music and the Arctic Monkeys getting to number one can only fire us up for when we record our second album. Also, a lot of it is just panic-buying by record companies. Most of them are lazy and, while the small independent labels are always on the lookout for something new, the rest are always looking for the new something else: the new Kaiser Chiefs or the new Arctic Monkeys, That's when you get a glut of crap bands.

It's hard to pinpoint a moment when we realised that we had really made it; things always seem different from the inside. Having said that, Glastonbury felt like a turning point. That seemed to be the time when people's concept of us changed from contenders to a proper big band. We won a lot of the festivals this year, not that they are a competition. But we wouldn't bother going if we didn't want to be the best thing there.

The highlight of the year, though, was being able to go up and talk to famous people at the same level - rather than just blurting something out at them. I'm still giggling inside, but I got to hang out with the Gallaghers - even though they called us 'a bad Blur'. We had a laugh. Just to occupy some Gallagher head-space is a privilege. We also went bowling with Dave Grohl. Hitting a strike and turning around and high-fiving Grohl was hilarious and surreal and something I'll remember for a very long time.

We also managed to get a few days off in Ibiza, and that was a beautiful time. I've never really seen the point of holidays; I think they're a waste of money. You spend £500 going wherever and being bored when you could have the time of your life in Leeds for £500. But after touring non-stop and then suddenly getting a few days to sit in a villa, swim and have barbies, I think I might finally get the point of holidays now.

There's been some weird moments too. We were doing a photoshoot in Germany when we heard about the bombs going off in London, for example. That made us realise how silly it can all be. We were having our pictures taken when we heard, and my dad was in London that day so we obviously all quickly lost interest in the shoot. There's a picture of us in this German magazine and we're all on our mobile phones trying to get news. But then we were in Paris while the riots were going on and we saw nothing; and we were in London when the place was supposed to be covered by a black cloud and we saw nothing then either. Doesn't stop your mum from ringing to find out if you're OK, though.

The worst thing that happened to me was when Nick and Simon [the bassist] got upgraded for a transatlantic flight. I was fuming anyway, and then, to top it all, my chair wouldn't recline. That was the closest I got to saying, 'Look, I'm the lead singer!' But I didn't, because off stage I'm not the singer, I'm just the Ricky, and I never forget that it's incredible how the five of us stuck together when anyone else would have given up. The fact that we've finally actually made it means I'm really excited about going home for Christmas this year. My family are the proudest of all and to be able to go home and say, 'See, I told you,' is going to be incredible. And you know how there's always that great uncle who will be, like: 'So, you're in a band. When am I going to see you on Top of the Pops, then?' Well, this year I can tell him, 'Christmas Day at one o'clock. Now fuck off.'

Seriously, I wouldn't want to have to buy me a Christmas present this year. All I've ever wanted is to be the singer in a successful rock band and, now I've got that, there truly isn't anything else in the world I could possibly want."

Laura Solon

Solon won this year's Perrier Award for Comedy for her one-woman show, 'Kopfraper's Syndrome'. Prior to that, she had little professional experience apart from writing and performing in the Oxford Revue while at university

"This time last year, I was working part-time, putting up posters on the streets and handing out leaflets outside West End shows. In the evenings, I was doing various sketch nights in London, at venues like the Betsey Trotwood in Farringdon. I'd recently split from my comedy partner and so I was quite new to being solo. I was starting to wonder if I was going to be any good. I thought I'd give myself a few years to have a go at it.

So then a production company paid for me to put on a show at the Edinburgh Festival. It was meant to be a two-hander but it wasn't really working out and at the end of May the other guy had to drop out anyway for personal reasons. So I had to come up with an hour-long show on my own. I had some of the characters in my head already from the sketch circuit and I had June and July to write the play up. I stopped doing flyering in July so I could concentrate on giving it a good shot. It was my first time - I'd never done an Edinburgh comedy show before.

I was still writing the day before the show. The last line I added was, "They say you are what you eat, in which case, at some point Wendy ate a speccy Welsh Nazi."

I could easily spend two hours in the pub tweaking a line to get the rhythm right - and I wanted no clichés, no padding. Writing essays at Oxford was good training; tutors saying "this is padding, take it out", " this is bollocks, take it out".

The show was a lunchtime slot and, when it opened, there were normally between two and five people paying, plus a few friends who me and my boyfriend Dan had managed to convince to come along for free. So there were normally about eight people in the audience, which was helpful - enough to get an audible response from.

When they rang to say I'd been nominated for the Perrier I was stunned. I thought it it was going to be the newcomer prize, of course. But when they said it was the main prize, it was so surreal it almost stopped being terrifying. For the next few days, I felt slightly sick all the time. And suddenly everyone wants to see your show. Mine was a 50-seat venue, so it sold out really quickly. There were queues to see my show! It was a headrush, really. I just concentrated on not letting it affect my performance.

The night I won, there are all these photos of me looking like a rabbit in the headlights. I honestly, honestly can't tell you how weird it was. At the party, I just sat in a corner feeling very overwhelmed. I went to bed about 4am and I couldn't get to sleep. It felt like everything had got so carried away. I just came up to do a little show.

I've got a few exciting offers and prospects but what I'm going to start with is a series on Radio 4. I don't want to rush things.

The really great thing is that I now don't have to do any temp jobs anymore. I can finally say comedy is my full-time job. Mustn't get too cocky though. Today I was doing a photoshoot for Tatler. But I could easily be back handing out flyers this time next year."

Nick Laird

Writer Nick Laird published both his first novel, 'Utterly Monkey', and poetry collection, 'To a Fault', in 2005. He also won both the Jerwood and Rooney prizes

"The first collection was quite scary. It's nice to be told that your book has been well received, but it doesn't make it any easier when you have to sit down with a blank page! Having the book published was a slightly strange position for me because obviously my wife [Zadie Smith] is a writer and, though the best reviews I got just didn't mention it, some of the bad reviews immediately started to talk about her, which was a weird thing.

It's been a busy year for prizes. I was over in Dublin for the Rooney Prize for Irish literature. That was a nice one to get because it was for the novel and the poetry book, and it was an Irish prize and I'm Northern Irish. I have an Irish passport and a British passport and I think of myself as a writer in both traditions, so it was nice to be recognised by the southern Irish as an Irish writer. That was important to me. It was the year's most significant prize financially! But it was also nice to get the Jerwood.

In 2005, I've tried to crack on a bit. It's been busy, and I've finished the first draft of the second poetry book. But I haven't got as far as I'd like with the second novel. I've done about 15,000 words so I'm getting there, but for the next six months I'm going to try and just settle and not leave the house. So we're going to get a dog who's going to make us stay at home and work. We'll be sitting next to each other working with the dog in between us.

I found reading my work [at festivals] very odd. It got easier but I'm not a particularly socially well-adjusted writer, I suppose. I had to do an extremely embarrassing thing on BBC Northern Ireland the other day. They made me sit on a high stool, like you'd find in a bar, and then pumped dry ice around me and made me read poetry into a camera. I thought, well, this is probably as bad as it gets. This is probably the most humiliating thing I'll have to do and, after this, everything else will be fine."

Simon Starling

Starling won this year's Turner Prize with his eco-friendly, narrative-based conceptual art, most famously the piece 'Shedboatshed'. He lives with his family in Germany

"I spent New Year celebrating the birth of my son. He was born just before Christmas last year in Copenhagen, so we watched the extraordinary Copenhagen New Year fireworks through the window together. It was a very special moment. And he seems to be enjoying the artist's life so far - must have done something like 40,000 air miles by the age of one. It's been great to have a different set of eyes to show the world to.

We live in Berlin and my wife is Danish, so we moved up to Copenhagen a month before the birth and I stopped working, essentially, over the period of the birth. I started working again at the end of February.

A lot of the first part of the year was taken up with preparing for a really big show at a museum in Basle. Twelve big projects. My first retrospective. Ha! And I made three brand new projects there in Basle, which were all-enveloping at some points. Starting to think about how the different pieces go together was very stimulating. And thinking about the location of the show too.

I'd had this idea to make this boat-shed piece and was incredibly lucky to find this structure 10km up the river from Basle - like a gift. And I started to think about other works I've made that have similar narrative form to that piece; and then another work, connected with hydroelectric energy in Switzerland, was born out of that. It all started to gel. All of it came out of the idea that I wanted the show to be somehow about the incredible river that runs through Basle and splits the city in half. The Rhine.

If you go looking for something, you'll find it. It's almost like willing something into existence. Years ago, I was making a project with a balsa tree and I had no idea how to find one. I knew they grew in Ecuador but no more than that. So I thought, OK, the British Consul in Ecuador; that's as good a place to start as any. I faxed the British Consulate and two hours later I heard back: 'Simon, no problem. A balsa tree just got struck by lightning a fortnight ago. I'll pick you up at the airport - let me know when you arrive!' These things seem to happen quite often to me. I often have a clear idea in my head what a piece will look like ahead of time, so making it happen is almost a question of problem-solving: you just have to have enough conviction and will in your head to get to that point where it becomes real.

I heard about the Turner Prize when I got the call from Nicholas Serota. Can't remember whether it was before or after the Basle show. Just before, I think. And then that story started to unfold. The impact of it was slow, a cumulative thing. I decided to deal with it in the most professional way I could - to try not to think about it too much, but not to try to escape from it either. I just carried on.

I have two years to prepare for most shows. This was a few months. And the Tate was a bit of a non-context somehow, and that led to particular thought processes about how the show should be pieced together. I guess the show isn't so much an exhibition as a showcase for my work.

The evening of the Turner Prize itself was much, much better than I expected. I wasn't looking forward to it at all. In fact, I was in a bad mood for a couple of days beforehand. But once I was there and in the same boat as all the other artists, it kind of felt OK. Of course, you spend the whole night looking for clues - which way is that camera facing? Is it pointing at me? It's quite nasty actually. But, of course, all the cameramen know that and they play games. And then I fell off the podium. It was actually a badly made speaker cover I stood on, which looked like a step. I think it was a good evening.

This Christmas, we're back to Copenhagen. It'll be a nice, quiet, family Christmas."

Victoria Hamilton

Hamilton is one of our leading actors. This year she won a Critic's Circle Award, portrayed Kimberley Quinn in 'A Very Social Secretary' and made a film with Woody Allen. She also stars in 'Once in a Lifetime', currently playing at the National Theatre

"This year I got to do quite a lot of filming as well as stage work. I started off in South Africa filming To the Ends of the Earth. They built these huge floating sets and employed huge numbers of the Zulu tribe to be on ropes pulling it backward and forward on both sides so the thing was actually in motion. I always thought "getting your sea legs" was an expression, but I learned otherwise.

The trilogy was adapted very well, I thought. It ended up being about not glory on the high seas but how 12 people interact when they're in a very small space together.

In January, yes, I won the Critics' Circle award for best actress for Tennessee Williams' Suddenly Last Summer. That production was wonderful because it was directed by Michael Grandage, who gives you the courage to do things you wouldn't necessarily dare to do in other rehearsal rooms. They're all rather strange, those awards; I tend to get drunk quite quickly and then leave.

For me, the moment of the year was acting with Woody Allen. I am in the film with Scarlett Johansson, only I don't know the story or what it's called yet - I just got the script for my scenes and nothing else. Woody Allen is one of my heroes, so acting opposite him was just surreal. Half of my brain was thinking, improvise, improvise - and the other half was thinking " You're Woody Allen! What the hell are you doing talking to me?"

Then there was A Very Social Secretary. It was very weird doing Kimberley Quinn's voice. The director and I got hold of some old tapes of her doing a radio politics show on Radio 4 and, when we listened to it, my face just dropped, because it was the weirdest accent on the face of the earth. Sort of Anglicised American West Coast - odd to the point where the director actually said, don't do that because everyone will think you can't do an American accent.

I thought long and hard about whether to do that job in the first place. You always have to, I think, when it's people who are still alive. But it's very important for the arts to satirise people in power. I think it's healthy. And also, factually it was all true, and the strange thing was also that everybody I spoke to who knew her said, "She'll love it, don't worry - she'll love the fact it's on TV!" And also, it was fun. The whole tone of the thing was very heightened and surreal - the musical soundtrack made it very tongue-in-cheek. I don't think it was vicious. Sometimes I look at scripts about real people or royal people and I think, actually, this isn't on. This is too much. When I read the script for The Queen's Sister, my jaw was on the floor. I had to drink a huge Scotch just to get through it. They had softened it hugely by the time it was broadcast.

I decided then that I wanted to do a piece of theatre that was very small, very intimate - so obviously I've ended up in Once in a Lifetime: massive theatre at the National, rotating set, cast of 30! The women I'm playing is a wise-cracking, fast-talking New York lass. The show is set in 1930s Hollywood but it's staggering how little has changed. It takes the piss out of the whole Hollywood system and it's amazingly pertinent when you look at this insane celebrity-fuelled atmosphere which we now live in. It's a great American vaudeville piece and it moves at a hell of a lick. So I'm roaring into the New Year with that. We're doing eight shows a week straight through till March!"

David Mitchell

Mitchell's third novel, 'Cloud Atlas', was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2004. It was selected for Richard & Judy's book club early this year, putting on massive sales, and won the 'Best Read' prize at the British Book Awards. On 6 December, he won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize

"On the first of January 2005, I had a book to finish, and I knew I would have to push the deadline back a few months. I suppose I felt a bit excited about the paperback launch of Cloud Atlas and I felt grateful to the mercurial gods of publishing and publicity for doing so much for the book. I would have known about it being picked for Richard and Judy's Book Club, but it was a secret at that point. I knew who they were and that great things had happened to Joseph O'Connor's book (Star of the Sea) through their good offices, but I wasn't expecting what then went on to happen - which was to put it through the roof. I thought it would hover modestly in mid air on the ground floor. It's gone on to sell 400,000 copies.

I've been shortlisted for the Booker twice now, and it's a miserable four weeks. Little gremlins wake you up at night at the end of your bed, chanting: "You might win the Booker! You might win the Booker!" and you can't get back to sleep for an hour or two. No matter how stable and unflappable a person you might wish to believe you are, that really gets to you. The Richard and Judy "Best Read" prize was really humane, in that there was none of that going on. I wasn't even that sure that there was anything other than the book club - that there was such a thing as an overall winner. People in presentation speeches often say, "never in my wildest dreams did I imagine..." but even had I known there was such a thing as an overall winner... not Cloud Atlas! Not when Robbie Williams is on the short list. That [Feel by Chris Heath] was a really good book, I have to say. I don't thing I've ever read anything as good about mega-fame, about the whole palaver.

Writers generally are quite shy, retiring types. For every extroverted writer who can hold an audience, I think there's lots who are the exact opposite, and hey, that's me. So I'm aware it would seem as though I were biting the hand of luck that has fed me so generously this year to suggest that such high-profile, glitzy occasions are a bit of an ordeal, but actually, oddly, if you happen to win, they are. When I won at the British Book Awards, my mind went blank, and I just wanted to go home. I had a very friendly bunch at my table and my publishers are great. They were there to help me through it. I don't want that to sound like, "oh god, another award to get through"; I was and am really honoured. But actually enjoyable? If I'm honest, not really. But that's fine, it's not designed to be enjoyable, it's designed to raise the profile of the award, and of books, which is good for all of us.

My yacht's just pulled up outside, there's a racehorse in my garden, I'm having mirrored ceilings and marble toilets put in, but don't worry, baby, it will never change me... I've never been rich, but Cloud Atlas has made me enough money to be able to feel confident about supporting my family.

Me and my wife, we're almost afraid of acquiring large numbers of expensive objects because it's really not good for you and you have to insure them and we don't have space and we don't want them - we just want health and contentment. In so far as the money can ward off the things that can threaten health and contentment, it's great. It won't change our lifestyle a jot, and it would be unwise to allow it to. I just love writing and in a way that's the answer to every possible question.

Then I learnt I'd won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial prize - obviously in enough time for all the hush-hush, "keep this under wraps" information to be put on the proof copies of all the jackets of Black Swan Green [the new novel, published in May 2006]. But with that email was a list of previous winners and I thought, oh my God, look at these people: J G Farrell, David Storey, Seamus Heaney, Tony Harrison, Timothy Mo, J M Coetzee, Tom Paulin, Will Self, Graham Swift... This prize is really something. And by then, I was taken up with the birth of our new baby, Noah - the little love. That's been the best thing of the year, really.

In my own head, I have a schedule of what books I want to be working on in roughly what time and in roughly what order. I'm 36 now and I know which book I'll be writing probably up to my mid-forties. I do give 90 per cent of my energies to the book in hand, of course, but it's good to have 10 per cent of your brain quietly thinking about books you haven't started yet. I love writing, and Cloud Atlas will continue to allow me to put that sentiment in action and allow it to be what I do all day."

Vashti Bunyan

In 2005, 60-year-old folk singer Vashti Bunyan released her second album, 'Lookaftering' to widespread acclaim, some 35 years after her cult debut 'Just Another Day'. That album was famously composed on a journey to the Hebrides by horse-drawn caravan...

"I can hardly recognise myself from this time last year, when I was j ust beginning to think that I might be able to make another album. I had recently met Max Richter and we decided to start working together to see if we could come up with some arrangements for the new album. By that time, I only had about five or six songs written.

I decided to have another stab at the music industry about three years ago. I went into the studio with Simon Raymonde from the Cocteau Twins and I was determined to make it as unlike my old music as possible, to have lots of bass and percussion. I really loved what we did then - but nobody else seemed to, so I went back to square one. It took a couple of years to find my way to the right people. It was Simon who introduced me to Kieren Hebden, who then introduced me to Animal Collective. That was how the links of the chain got made.

I feel really lucky to have met and worked with them, and with Devendra Banhart. I wish they had been around when I was the age they are now. They understand what I'm trying to do, and I understand what they're doing. When I'm playing or singing with them, all those years just vanish. There seems to be a much more generous attitude to different kinds of music among musicians now, than in the 1960s. I don't know if it's because of the internet, but it's given everyone an equal chance to make themselves heard. I just find that people are, in general, much more generous-spirited.

Even so, I was very frightened about doing an album. Sometimes I thought I should just leave my old music behind. But then I couldn't not take the chance that was given to me.

Since the first album, I'd been bringing up children, living a pretty rural life - until 12 years ago, when I moved to Edinburgh with my partner. We've brought six people to adulthood, which was a fairly major job.

I'm fond of Just Another Day now. For so many years I couldn't listen to it, because it was like finding a poem that you'd written when you were 15 - it was so innocent and sweet. And I'm very proud of the journey I made to the Isle of Skye. I remember meeting people who had lived through the first part of the last century; people who had such enormous wisdom, like farmers and blacksmiths and Romany travellers, who I would not have met any other way, and who taught me an enormous amount.

This year Antony and the Johnsons really struck a chord with me, as he is such an outsider; and Gwen Stefani's album really surprised me, in how much I really loved it. And of course, there's Devendra and Animal Collective. I don't just love their music because they're my friends - they're my friends because I love what they do. My first live show is going to be at the Barbican in February, and from then on, I'm going to Europe and to America. I'm so excited and terrified, but it's what I always wanted to do, so it's a good feeling. I'm getting all these wonderful offers, having not done a thing for so many years. It's really strange to be suddenly in the limelight. I'm loving every moment, but how many people does it happen to when they're 60? It doesn't feel real."

Interviews by Nick Coleman, Hermione Eyre, Suzi Feay, Rebecca Pearson, Simmy Richman and Luiza Sauma