The List prepares to release its Hot 100 - who will be number one?

But if the stuff that makes you tick are those pages stuck deep within a paper or where you immediately head for online (let’s simply call it ‘the arts section’), then these past 12 months have been as exciting as ever, and especially for all of us operating in the Scottish cultural environment.

Of course, there are the constant concerns of who’s getting properly funded and who’s not, which venues are threatened with closure, and which arts organisations either can’t carry on or are forced to achieve more with less.

But when you see what has been achieved by individuals and groups from the tail end of 2023 until now, it’s no wonder that we had a fight on our hands at The List to come up this year’s Hot 100 of cultural figures (to fully reflect what we do in the mag, there is also representation from those who ply their trade in the shopping, eating and drinking games).

Once the initial haggling was done (essentially between a number of our lead freelance critics, some staff members, and myself), we arrived at a bulging 170 names. Whittled down to the golden number of one hundred, it was then largely about filling the key spots of the top 20. And of course, we had to arrive at that all-important number one, picking someone we could get fully behind.

After rebooting the mag in 2022, the just-announced new Doctor Who Ncuti was a shoo-in to top our first poll since 2019; and for last year’s countdown, Young Fathers were clear favourites from the moment they released their five-star album at the start of 2023. Was this year’s poll-topper an obvious choice? We’ll leave that for others to decide.

But they are a fully deserving winner given the work they produced and the almost overwhelming reaction to it. Once you see the rundown yourself (in The List which comes with your Scotsman this coming Saturday) I’m confident that you’ll agree we got it right.