50 quid bloke

What’s the minimum amount of time you have to listen to a CD in order to have a valid opinion on it? A full listen? A skip through the start of each track? Three full listens through headphones with a blindfold on?
I’ve been shockingly guilty since starting this blog of making snap decisions on albums - either good or bad - but never really listening to them. I’m not in favour of writing long arty reviews, mainly because I’m terrible at them; so as a result I graze one CD after another forming sentence long opinions along the way.
The thing is: you have to have an opinion. It’s just not on to say in polite society: ‘I’m sorry, I really don’t have much to say about Grand National/ whoever..’
But, it’s harder and harder to have an opinion. There are too many CDs and just too little time.
The more CDs I own, the less I know each of them. As a teenager I had a few dozen albums and new every crack, hiss, swear word and sleeve note on them. Now I own hundreds of CDs: some of which I’ve barely listened to.
iTunes helps things - you find yourself listening to something you bought months ago but never really listened to and find it’s really rather good. But it’s still not quite enough.
Here’s the problem
1. I can afford pretty much any CD I want
2. As I’m no longer part of a youth ‘tribe’ there are no rules about what I can (and importantly) can’t like which means it’s ok to buy anything
3. There’s actually quite a lot of quite good music out there
4. There’s also a few good mags, and loads of great blogs giving you good ideas on what to buy next.
OK, while writing this, I’ve had a solution. It’s the men’s revenge for the reading group: the 50quid CD group.
Works exactly the same as a reading group: once a month, a group of 50quid blokes and blokettes (no sexism here!) have a list of CDs to listen to (worth a combined value of 50quid, of course). They then get together at someone’s house, listen to the CDs mentioned (I can’t make up my mind on whether they listen in advance, or there…maybe a mix of both). They then discuss.
Oh, and every meeting has to pay £20 to 50quid enterprises.

Thanks to the technical wizardry of Cal Henderson, let me introduct MP3blogs.org an automated aggregator of MP3 blogs; which you can check every day or so, to see all the latest postings from Soul Sides, Tofu Hut etc etc.
It’s working but still needs a bit of work on it. First, I need to do a bit more explanation on the site (what’s an MP3 blog etc). Second: it needs a bit of designing - so if you’re reading this, and you’re a designer who fancies tweaking the template into something a little more, well, rock and roll, then please get in touch (in other words: you need to be able to code it up as well, no point just handing me a photoshop file).

Saturday night: discussing with a soon-to-be-groom about their choice of song for the first dance at his wedding, we started to think of some of the worst possible songs for the occassion. We started on a list….
1. Eye of the Tiger
2. Lip-up fatty (Bad Manners - with The Can-Can as an alternate)
3. D.I.V.O.R.C.E
4. Fat Bottomed Girls by Queen
…but then ran out of steam. Any other suggestions most welcome.

Norman Cook announces that there’s no decent dance music out there in today’s Guardian.
Which is why, apparently, his new album is going to be a bit more rock and roll.
At the same time, he adds on the basis of the size of his DJ gigs: there’s no shortage of people who want to dance.
If he’s honest, I think he should say: there’s not shortage of teens and 20somethings who want to take pills and try and get off with each other, and as long as the soundtrack is acceptable (ie goes up and down in all the right places, and doesn’t ask too much of the listener) then it’s fine by them. It’s not big. It’s not clever. And it stopped being cool a long time ago. But it’s still a great night out if you’re 19.
He’s right: dance music has been creatively floundering for quite some time, after a quite remarkable and incredibly influential run. Every so often, I listen to whatever’s new and find it’s remarkably familiar to the stuff I was sweating to a decade ago. Slightly better, perhaps, but it doesn’t feel like there’s been a decade of genuine progress.
[Yes, you say. but what about R&B and hip-hop? And I say: Sorry, I’m too old, too flabby and too white to even half appreciate it. Call that a song? It’s just some bloke whining! And have you seen what they’re getting up to in the video? It’s obscene!…at least Duran Duran videos had a proper plot…]
Of course, I’m can remember (as my dad used to say, before he realised just how old that phrase made him sound) a world of clubbing before four-to-the-floor, automated drum beats and synth bass lines.
We grew up in that post-punk, post-disco world of funk and new wave and all various combinations of the two. I seem to remember it was quite good, although my dancing at the time was rather over-enthusiastic, very, very serious, and fuelled primarily by Vodka and bitter (often in the same glass) rather than the concoction of chemicals available these days (by which I mean Red Bull and Smirnoff Ice, of course). And, as yet another 80s sound-a-like band appears every week, it seems that’s exactly where we’re heading back to.
The big mistake is to think that ‘dance music’ has a monopoly on dancing. When Primal Scream released the utterly Rock and Roll Give Out But Don’t Give Up at the peak of the dance craze, Bobby Gillespie, I seem to recall, stressed the fact that in their time: The Stones were dance music. And if you read Nik Cohn’s book, he stresses the same point all the way through. Yes, I find it hard to think of the Ministry of Sound full of people strutting to Dogs Die in Hot Cars: but maybe that’s just a lack of imagination on my behalf.
Now, where’s my double breasted shirt and pleated trousers?

After too many hours in front of the PC last night, I rather timidly offer the world this OPML file for MP3 Blogs as part of my campaign to try and make a little sense out of the world of audio/mp3blogs. It features about 20 different blogs, in a mix of RSS and Atom feeds from the likes of The Tofu Hut, said the gramaphone, soul sides, Teaching The Indie Kids to DAnce Again and so on. They’re not all MP3blogs, and I’ve included DJMartian’s feed of updated music blogs. It makes life a little easier. I sense this isn’t the final solution…but it’s a start.

Exactly what the doctor ordered: Daft Punk remix Take Me Out on MP3, as found on said the gramaphone. Exactly what FF needed: squelchy bits, scratchy bits, and a big bass.

…I’ve been listening to far, far too much lovely modern acoustic music recently and while it’s all very lovely, the deluge of gentle but ever so slightly tortured stuff is starting to blur into one long angst-ridden acoustic whinge. And I mean that in the nicest possible way.
(Then again having just listened to Dogs Die in Hot Cars, I sense the whole 80s/ post-punk revival might be reaching saturation point as well).
I really appreciated Nick’s suggestion of Paul O’Reilly. The one download on his site, Beautiful, is well worth a listen, and more than lives up to it’s name. But in the end: it’s still more one man and a guitar stuff.
The new(ish) Ron Sexsmith arrived in the post yesterday. I haven’t listened to anything by him since his excellent first album. It’’s not a million miles from his earlier work: but it’s still distinctively his. The only person he sounds vaguely like (IMHO) is Ed Harcourt, who’s also on the album. In fact, I think him and Ed Harcourt should actually merge to reduce overheads, save confusion, and collaborate to produce the definitive modern troubadour album.

In true Tipping Point form, MP3 Blogs are suddenly everywhere.
The problem is, no matter how many handy sets of links people provide or how many features that give you lists of recommended blogs, there is no simple way of keeping in touch with all the blogs and music that’s out there.
It’s a real shame, because they’re doing a fantastic job of bringing music to light that otherwise we might never hear of.
But, having to click on even a dozen sites a week and then downloading interesting tracks is still a bit too much effort. Yes, I could just stick to one or two I like, but frankly, that feels like going to the world’s biggest sweet shop and only asking for a small bag of pear drops.
*warning: slightly techie content to follow*
My first thought, was put it into a Newsreader. So, last night, I had a concerted effort to get RSS/ Atom feeds from as many as possible, planning in an act of generosity, make the OPML file available for anyone. However, very few actually offer syndicated feeds.
I also thought about doing a separate MP3blog blogroll on this site - but frankly, there are lots of other sites offering much more comprehensive lists - and all I was doing was copying them.
As ever, someone was already ahead of me on this, and had found a technical solution. Jeffrey Veen was using a Unix program called wget to scrape MP3 files from whatever blog you like. Only I found even a set of idiot instructions for OSX too complex to follow (sorry, can’t find the link at the moment). *end of techie content*
What we need is something similar to the UK blogs aggregator: either that, or a few more hours in the day. Given the latter is probably impractical (although I can see it being a great vote winner), we’re left with the former..surely there’s someone out there who’s smart enough to do it. Or, knowing how late I am to these things, who’s done it already.
Failing that: if everyone running an MP3 blog could provide a feed that I can read in Feed Demon, then that will be lovely, thanks.

Well, have finished my Summer burn. I went rather literal on the whole Summer/ Sun thing but it all sort of fitted together (although, tragically no room for Blondie’s In The Sun or The Who’s Summertime Blues (although that sounds rather mushy). There’s a little rain added from Dylan and Dragonfly from M Craft, just because I like him. All mixed together with Mixmeister Pro (with rather, errr mixed results). If anyone else is doing the summer burn, and having seen this would like to swap - just mail me.

1. Sing A Song Of Summer, John Martyn (The Tumbler)
2. Sunshine, Band of Bees (Sunshine Hit Me)
3. It’s Summertime, The Flaming Lips (Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots)
4, Asleep On A Sunbeam, Belle & Sebastian (Dear Catastrophe Waitress)
5, Summertime, Sundays (Static & Silence)
6. Staring At The Sun, Simple Kid (Sk 1)
7, Freedom Summer, Har Mar Superstar (You Can Feel Me)
8. Hot Summer, Lemar (Dedicated)
9. Summer (The First Time), Millie Jackson (Caught Up)
10. Sunshine Day, Osibisa (Sunshine Day)
11. I Am The Black Gold Of The Sun, Nuyorican Soul (Nu Yorican Soul)
12. Another Sun, Tracy Chapman (Let It Rain)
13. Dragonfly, M. Craft (I Can See You All Tonight)
14. Buckets of Rain, Bob Dylan (Blood on the Tracks)
15. Orange Sky, Alexi Murdoch (The OC: Mix 1)
16. Indian Summer, Jesse Malin (The Heat)
17. Heat Wave, The Jam (Setting Sons)

A month or so ago, my mate Steve (he of the excellent book about Ibiza) lent me a preview copy of the Bees’ new album Free The Bees. He was raving about it after taking it on holiday. Well, I took it, and ripped it…but never really listened to it.
I didn’t really like The Bees first album. It was perfectly pleasant breezy summer stuff - just rather unmemorable, so I didn’t fell the urge: and, at the time Steve loaned it to me, I had a mountain of CDs to listen to.
Well spurred on by a recommendation in Word this month from Lauren Laverne (she of Xfm and previously Kenickie): I listened to it, properly. And it is fabulous retro stuff. They sound like a completely different band from the first album. It’s retro in a whole Beatles-meets-early-Led-Zep kind of way. They just about tread the line between the slavish dad-rock of Ocean Colour Scene and being flagrant Coral copyists. Go on. You know you want it.
The other two recommendations from Word this month are Homesongs by Adem and Please Describe Yourself by Dogs Die in Hot Cars. Both have been ordered.
DDIHC in particular have ‘Next Big Thing‘ written all over them. They seem set to be to Franz Ferdinand what the Zutons have become to The Coral: and, of course, when I had a chance to see them at Glastonbury, I was elsewhere, probably wolfing down another beanburger somewhere….