I have to share with you some of my musical habits as the naughties draw to a close and the teenies begin. Where does a dyed in the wool Radio 4 listener get his musical inspiration from these days? I don’t particularly want to live in the past; the Katie Melua-laden nonsense of Radio 2 doesn’t appeal (not since that red-headed stepchild Evans minor has taken his place as the nation’s favourite tw*t) – although I openly mourn the passing of the Janet and John innuendo fest from that station – nor the Moylesian banality of Radio 1. I cannot listen to Heart/Radio Suffolk/Vibe FM (or whatever it is nowadays) and be inspired to purchase anything at all. So music radio is all but finished for me as a way of persuading me to buy fresh stuff to listen to.


No, Radio is past it’s sell-by date. I ‘d accumulated most of what they laughingly call a playlist (when was the last time you heard Fischer-Z on the BBC? Or Tom Robinson’s Winter of ’79? Still banned, I shouldn’t wonder…the subject of another rant-in-progress) over the years, and I’m still incredibly driven by new and undiscovered stuff. Spotify is my best friend, but how do I find out what I might have missed? Where is the Genius playlist when you need it? Well, there is this peculiar phenomena that fellow bloggers seem to use to publicise old and unfashionable stuff. They record their old Vinyl copies of things and pop them up onto rapidshare. To whit, this evening, I found myself humming an old Propaganda (*) tune, ‘Dr Mabuse’ on my way back home, and thought – “wow, that was a defining use of synthesiser in the 80’s…..where is my copy”? Well, of course, the answer for anyone of a certain age is to work out which of the XW’s (TM) have the offending vinyl…and then go and seek it out online instead. The Coward’s gambit, he said, grinning. I found it on a blog, and I’ve downloaded it, and I am listening to it as I write. It is brilliantly of it’s time – I suspect I hear Mr Horn and his Fairlight at play in a lot of it, but it still stands up as a piece of work to be appreciated. It still sounds great, if you cut it a little slack. Under-rated at release, I think it has stood the test of time.

The point of this, lest you think I have wandered off on a McCartney-esque ‘Long and winding’ one, is that while I was on the page, my eye was caught by “Fortran 5” – a name I haven’t heard for ages. And no, it is nothing to do with it being my least favourite programming language (it is unstructured basic, after all) – it is a band that went on to become “Komputer”. I am now listening to their first album, “Blues” and I am particularly over the moon at re-discovering a version of Syd Barrett’s “Bike”, the vocal being made purely from samples of Sid James. Ah the spirit of 1991 is strong in this one, Obe-wan. Now where did I put my glow-sticks?

I told you I was only trying to keep my ‘one a week’ batting average up…..

(*) Propaganda, A German band signed to ZTT and promptly under-promoted by Morley et al, when that bunch of Liverpool existentialist sloganeers seemed to be more successful at surfing the zen zeitgeist of the mid-Thatcher years.