New Year’s Revolutions (or The Games We Play ...)
THE TWENTY GREATEST TRACKS....SURELY
I am on my second i-Pod Nano but the reality is I’m still a first phase MP3 user. The first was minimalist- completist, or put another way, ultra-vertical – it contained the complete works of Joy Division and The Velvet Underground – nothing more, nothing less. I have become something of a technophobe and put off the i-Pod until the last minute – the last minute being a six month speeding ban for totting up in a Honda Jazz (and not hell-raising on the Blackbird). I needed something to listen to on the bicycle hence the i-Pod, but recording was still a bit of a challenge so we kept it essential. Anyway it was either stolen or consigned to The Thames by my current ex’s distraught ex in a fit of pique along with a variety of other possessions (including a whole load of hers so he was pretty even-handed – the life and times of your straight down the middle middle-aged, middle-income, middle-of-the-road, middle-Britain, bit big round the middle, middling sort of chap). So I replaced it with a middle of the range new one. No point crying over spilt i-Pods lying in the middle of The Thames ...
The big advantage of the technology these days is that I didn’t have to re-record the eight or nine more important than life itself CDs (JD and The Velvets) as they were saved on my i-Whatsit. This time I’ve added to the library, and I’ve managed to keep this one safe from marauding predecessors. Being me, I’ve gone from one extreme to the other and I’m now the proud possessor of a jam-packed i-Pod including complete Grandaddy, Van der Graaf Generator/Hammill, Radiohead and The Prodigy, and others including comprehensive David Bowie and Creedance Clearwater Revival totalling about 1,100 tunes ...
I’ve discovered “Playlists” ... and the thing that counts how many times you’ve listened to each track and lists out the top 25. I didn’t discover this wiz-bang feature until I’d listened to “Jed’s Other Poem (Beautiful Ground)” 89 times, considerably more than any other. And this took me by surprise. Readers of these pages will know that I am a big Grandaddy fan but nevertheless it got me thinking, and the first thing I thought is that given that I’d had the thing long enough to have listened to one track nearly 100 times it must be a fair reflection of what I’m listening to generally.
Let’s have a look.
1. Jed’s Other Poem (Beautiful Ground) - Grandaddy
2. Shine A Light - Spiritualized
3. New Dawn Fades - Joy Division
4. On Some Faraway Beach - Brian Eno
5. Sloop John B - Beach Boys
6. Videotape - Radiohead
7. Ogden Nut’s Gone Flake - Small Faces
8. Up Around The Bend/Proud Mary/
Bad Moon Rising - Creedence Clearwater Revival
9. Lord Can You Hear Me - Spiritualized
10 The Wild Ones - Suede
11 Atmosphere - Joy Division
D Dreams - The Cranberries
13 Behind Blue Eyes - The Who
14 Fields Of Fire - Big Country
15 Sense Of Doubt - David Bowie
16 Miner At The Dial-A-View - Grandaddy
17 Forsaken Gardens - Peter Hammill
18 I’ll Be Your Mirror - The Velvet Underground
19 “Heroes” - David Bowie
20 So You’ll Aim Towards The Sky - Grandaddy
20 to 25 are pretty much more of the same.
I don’t know if the i-Whatsit on the computer effectively carries forward the score from the old one. If so the Joy Division and Velvet Underground numbers are going to be skewed in their favour, but since there is only one Velvets’ tune in there, and that the kitschiest of the kitsch Nico numbers (embarrassingly enough – couldn’t it have been something chic like “Sweet Jane”, cool “Sister Ray”, achingly beautiful “Candy Says” or at least plain naughty “Heroin”?), and the obvious two Joy Division classics (their best album track and their best single) the stats don’t lie much if at all. No Van der Graaf Generator, which is odd, and only one pretty atypical Hammill number.
I’m not surprised to see “Fields Of Fire” in there – Stuart Adamson belongs to the guitar aristocracy alongside Townshend, Hendrix, Fripp, and the other gods of the six strings – and I come over all Jockish when he makes the guitar sound like the bag-pipes – Dunfermline’s loveliest son (RIP, what a disaster). Creedence Clearwater Revival’s classic trio cheer me up like nothing other than the Cranberries’ “Dreams” (don’t you love Dolores). Odd that an experimental instrumental from side two of “”Heroes”” should be so high up, and Radiohead is being represented by a pretty obscure number – “Videotape” is hardly “Creep”, “No Surprises”, “You And Whose Army”, or “Fake Plastic Trees”, any one of which I’d have expected to see.
I listen to the Beach Boys a lot having come to them relatively recently and “Sloop John B” is a favourite, and I’d expect Spiritualized who like Grandaddy are very much a current favourite to be pretty well represented.
Anyway. There you have it. Why don’t you let us have your lists and your analysis of why you think it’s either surprising or not. I’m sure Rokpool will find something appropriate for half a dozen of the more entertaining self-reviews.
© JD Shanks 2009
