C90

   While writing up the last post , I noted that it wasn't until the very last track that I included anything very contemporary (and three-quarters of the list was pre-2000). Consequently, in order to demonstrate that I'm not just a nostalgia-obsessed old fogey I thought I should do something a little more up to date... Every year, around late November / early December, my social media is filled with posts and articles listing the best songs / albums of the year. I've never written one of these, mainly because I'm hopeless at remembering what's been released in the preceeding twelve months. Over the last couple of years I have tried to remedy this by having an ongoing 'Best of...' playlist, but I haven't always been as assiduous as I would have liked in keeping it up to date. Nontheless, I have dipped into my 2021 and 2022 playlists to put together a compilation of the releases I particularly enjoyed over the last couple of years. I found that I had a lo...

  Making compilations is a bit of a hobby for me. Most of them I make for myself, to listen to when driving, working or cooking; when given the opportunity, I make them for other people too. I do make an effort to spend some time listening to complete LPs in the right order (as a quirky little new year's resolution, I did nothing but that throughout January and February this year), but it does seem that people do so less and less these days. As Paul Hanley said to me when I interviewed House of All , 'nobody listens to albums any more, do they?' Often, my compilations focus on a specific artist , genre (e.g. jazz or prog ) or era . But I also enjoy compiling based on set criteria, especially something linguistic. For example, I have spent many an hour constructing playlists where the last word of each song title is the first word of the next one (there'll undoubtedly be a post or two in the future taking this approach). This might seem like a rather pointless and rando...

Inspiration for the next C90 theme came from watching David Bowie's  performance of 'Five Years' on The Old Grey Whistle Test - what is the five year period that has produced the greatest music? Before I launched into compiling my own answer, I asked online what other people thought. Given that the majority of musical connections I have come via my writing about The Fall, it was no surprise that the responses were heavily weighted towards the punk / post-punk era. Over half of the selctions fell somewhere between 1977 and 1983, with 1979, 1980 and 1981 being the years that - by some distance - featured the most often. One interesting feature of the responses was that 85% of them included the turn of a decade, when statistically an even spread would have only seen only 40% do so. I'm not sure that this tells us anything profoundly significant, but there might be something culturally/historically notable going on there... Now, I certainly don't dispute that the perio...