Writing While Moving

 I’m am slightly in awe of the way we are becoming a TV watching proletariat. Though that’s a discussion for another time. I decided to see if I could do a blog post as I walked and this is the result. I hope my edits manage to make it readable

One of the problems with writing, walking, doing things they always take time.I was just wondering that out on my morning walk could I actually record this and use phone and Google Docs to record my thoughts.

I'm not sure if I can do paragraphs or how to actually make breaks but anyway this is going to be a stream of text which I can then take apart when I actually get home and you know so that we can actually see if this actually works.

I do write about music and that is a big part of my life. When the lock down hit last February or whenever I suddenly spent a lot of time and listening to 6 Music listening to radio and hearing what they had to play and share.

The I also you realised that my CD collection is too big. I mean I've ripped most of it to my network but when CDs are in boxes or even worse in an attic then you may as well just get rid. I've actually got a pile that I've for sale on Discogs now .I'm not looking for money as such, more just to make space ,and as I say, I've got a lot of boxes of CDs but what then happened is that whilst I listened to stuff through my Kindle fire and speaker system, I realised that my radio also had a CD player so I thought well I will listen to some of these CDs I've got for sale because it's very close, while I work.

Then I thought you know so even the ones I have on saleI will listen to those as well and it's progressed so that I spend my working day listening to music on CD.

A lot of people have actually said oh well you're not with the times. You should be using Spotify or a streaming service and yeah I can stream on YouTube or whatever the odd one, there are full albums on there they do get taken down.

I now listen to my CD collection as it  is very convenient and as I say I have lots of CD box sets and I do believe that my purchase of CDs a lot of the time it was more about supporting the artist then actually getting the CD and you know I've not listened to lots of my music.

I probably I have hundreds of thousands of tracks and I know this from ripping them to my digital store. I've also bought albums from Bandcamp recently by Edward II and Jordan Reyne because Spotify does not support artists. Spotify is flawed because there are a few people making a lot of money from it and artists not the ones. If you're an artist trying to break through you are not really going to make all that money you can't. I tried it and I got paid 0.00001 didn't get paid anything because he was too small to pay but basically Spotify make a lot of money.

A couple of years ago daft punk's random access memory what's the biggest selling album and biggest streamed album of the year and they got paid £13,000 . When you can see that the people in Spotify are all millionaires making millions from this it's not the artist who's getting the money.

I'm told that I'm behind the times and I should have a Spotify account and you can get it free with advertising whatever but it's a very bad model for the artists.

The model does not encourage new music.It’s alright it's just using what's there and if there was no new music produced ever Spotify would still go on it would be ok.It would still make money because shall we say the market the market has now got so much music.

 I mean we've got music from a couple of centuries and even just normal popular pop music is like 70 years of Music so Spotify has this huge amount of music for people to actually stream and listen as and when they want and it's convenience but I once actually said that CD was the McDonaldisation of music by its convenience you can actually skip tracks sequence tracks in the order you want make playlists.

The move to mp3 and digital even made that's more convenient and Spotify you don't even have to o that you just let Spotify choose what you want to hear and you know it's a perfect medium for people to actually or the corporations to decide what you want to listen to.

When I was with EE the streaming service was Deezer and I saw an advertisement for it and it was just it just chooses exactly what I want to hear no it doesn't it chooses what it thinks you should hear and that is my problem

I see Amazon suggestions and old you bought this so you might want to buy this which force you to actually do it like listen to it and decide it's not what I want or he might listen to it in here something and decide yeah if it's what I want but you know side of my preferred way is you know when I listen to the radio or walk into a record shop and hear something and think what the hell's that .

Luckily these days with digital radio you can find out what you actually playing with online lists or it shows you on the actual DAB player and the DJ usually tells you.

When I was a teenager when you heard something and then the DJ didn't say who it was or it because they said at the beginning of the song in you came in like 20 seconds in then you know it was a little more difficult and that happened so many times with me where I heard things and I'm going like what the hell is that you know.

Today we've got you got things like Shazam which will recognise music most of the time so you know and then you should have it and then you can actually get it from wherever so there is no need for it for my old site apart from a legacy thing where people wanted to hear know what the music was so many years ago and such an advert you know but again it's just like people who want that it's so few now that the sites not worth maintaining all I've got it on Facebook and if I see a decent advert I will put it on there because the advert will be on YouTube and it's it is one of those things that even with adverts these days there are very few that are worth noting and again if you want music on your device then you got it

So the first song that made me start the Song of The Salesman site was a Guinness advert that used “Burke’s Law” by Prince Buster so I will signoff with that. Though I can’t find it so we will share “Guaglione” by Pérez Prado with the fabulous Dancing Man advert.

This has been mostly spoken into my phone and recorded by Google Docs so I will blame that for all my mistakes.

Beat The Clock, An Urge For Offal and THAT Goal

Some of My Watches

Chose the title from a brilliant Sparks and Giorgio Moroder collaboration from their album Number One Song In Heaven. In our fantastic digital age all of the clock resetting is done for us apart from the odd analogue device (like my Beuchat and iToc watches, wall clocks, heating clock) plus the digital cooker clock and the wall timer for the living room main light.

Many years ago I went a whole day without realising the clocks had changed, luckily I switched on the TV in the evening , thought there's something very amiss here, then realised what had actually happened.

New Album

Today sounds and looks very windy and I'm not looking forward to the fact that it's going to be darker an hour earlier but that's just the nature of the beast. I'm not sure daylight saving actually saves anything much anymore in the 24/7 world that we live in, although in a bit of good news Fiona's friend Tim informed me he'd heard a new Half Man Half Biscuit album, "Urge For Offal" on Spotify so that is about to be ordered when I've posted this. I I listen to it on Spotify the band will probably get paid about 0.0001p per track. The mega selling Daft Punk album Random Access Memory resulted in a payment of £13K from Spotify which might have paid the tea bill!


 I've nothing against the Spotify model , but it's pay per play model just doesn't work in favour of the artist. Apparently Spotify plays have generate me 1p in the last 12 months on a piece I did for the artist Rebecca Cother for the slideshow below, but I didn't do it to make money , just to see how easy it was to do.




Oh another good thing is that Preston's Joe Garnerweighed in with hat trick to give us victory against Fleetwood Town yesterday and put us second in the table, so it's an excuse to include THAT goal:




Anyway I hope you enjoyed your extra hour in bed and enjoy the rest of the day.

Streams

On twitter I keep seeing a poll for what is the best streaming app, Spotify , Amazon or Apple Music (or whatever it's called this week). There are lots of other similar more genre specific apps like Pandora, and people often want to share their Spotify playlists with me.

I don't do Spotify or any other music streaming service. Someone makes a lot of money from streaming and, unless you're Ed Sheeran or Adele, it's not  the artist. Daft Punk's "Random Access Memory" was the biggest selling album of that year and they made about £13K from streaming which might have paid for a lunch break.

People often like the "if you like that you'll like this" option, but that is so open to abuse, and let's face it payola has been around since records were first sold.

Most people listen on mobile devices and the unseen cost for that is streaming uses data, so if you are not on free or unlimited wifi you network provider can start coining it.

Also if you expect your streaming service why not listen to a radio station and trusted DJs and shows. The last I heard artists got paid £50 if their song is played on the radio. I don't know if it's the same now or the same on all stations but it's a damned sight better than streaming rates.

Also given that often today's youth can't listen to more than 20 seconds of a song how do you remunerate for part streams? Many years ago Peter Gabriel was involved with a company call "WE" who's plan was to set of a system where you paid a nominal small fee to listen to a song. I objected to this as if I like music I want to buy a single or album and play it in perpetuity.

Youtube seems to be OK, it's generally free with on ads, and I don't hear artists complaining about it so they must be getting adequate recompense or you would see music being continually pulled. However video uses a lot more data than music does so this can be another money spinner for mobile phone companies.

I done several posts related to this (click on the first Spotify link to see) but this is my own history of recorded music and this talks on how music should be rewarded.

Last week I heard Sam Fender for the first time, yesterday I ordered his debut album and this is about how I heard it on the radio.

If streaming is your bag that's fine but I will stay with radio, visiting record shops , gigs and enjoying music I buy.

Stream Girls

I'm not sure why , maybe because I'm a sexist , male chauvinist misogynist , but I find some of the phrasing and vocabulary of Lauren Laverne and Mary Ann Hobbs a bit grating and pretentious with "down with the kids" descriptions of certain musical pieces , however I'm OK with Craig Charles and Shaun Keaveny coming out with similar things.

It doesn't stop me listening to their music though , and they are far better that the dross available on commercial radio and  other BBC stations and today Mary Ann Hobbs had a guy on discussing the state of streaming. Now as you know I will not have anything to do with Spotify because it's an unworkable model and today I found out something more about the model that makes it even worse.

When you (or the person who's giving it your free) pays Spotify or whoever their monthly fee this is what happens. They take their cut and then the money goes into a big pot. It is the paid out to artists based on the the number of streamed songs they have. So what that means ids that you may have a a predilection for Egyptian and Iranian folk and listen exclusively to that music. Which is good for you but not the artist. Why? Because the money you may is split based on all streamings so if Ed Sheeran gets a million times the streams your artists get , then he will get that chunk of your subscription and the artists you listen to get next to nothing. So basically Spotify is even worse than I thought.

So a big , big thank you to Mary Ann Hobbs (and possibly Lauren Laverne) for illuminating me on this. They are extremely good and I can put up with the bits that niggle me. Here's my last post on the situation and to go with this I will share "Stealin'" by Uriah Heep , in my opinion a great record  with a vague connection to the situation.

Older Than The Internet

Today is the thirtieth anniversary or the World Wide Web as we know it, and it came into my head that my two wonderful daughters are both older than the Internet, which obviously means that I am as well by another twenty five or so years. I was born just as rock and roll really hit with Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry.

A  definition of the Internet comes from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C):

"The World Wide Web is the universe of network-accessible information, an embodiment of human knowledge."

Tim Berners-Lee came up with the protocol for accessing the Internet as we do today and can be read about via the W3C link above. This is a development of Arpanet (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network developed by the US Defence Department), and had been put forward by many artists and science fiction writers.

The Who's "Lifehouse" project (which was scrapped and salvaged as "Who's Next") posited a population connected by "The Grid" so in some ways this was an inevitable development, and now we are are connected by mobile devices and computers and smart devices.

People install "smart devices" in their home such as Amazon's Alexa , but that is a step too far for me even though I have a Kindle that has Alexa on it, although it has never been able to answer a question that I have asked it and cannot play my music, apparently only able to access Spotify playlists, and I don't touch Spotify.

I wasn't going to write anything until I saw the anniversary on Google, so I am going include a Chuck Berry song performed by Buddy Holly which you can listen to and watch thanks to Tim Berners-Lee's development of the US Defence Department's prototype.

Have a great Tuesday.

Mix

Today people often try and share Spotify playlist with me. I don't contenance Spotify, it's not my inner Ron Swanson but the fact that it's not a business model that rewards almost all the artists who are on it's available catalogue. I suppose the other thing is that as a teenager if I wanted to share music with friends it required recording records in real time, at first recording via microphone and later when I got a job a music centre which recorded directly from the radio.

I didn't realise that the compact cassette first appeared around 1965 (comprehensive Wiki history here) , I thought it was a Sony invention because of the Walkman which allowed music on the move.

To create a cassette you had to record in real time, the playlist was just the initial plan, even when MiniDisk and CD superseded cassette it was still real time although CD recording speeded up significantly but there is still the production and labelling of the CD to do.

In October 2016 when I was 59 I  started the #ALifeInNumbers  which ran into November that year and I've referenced often since I did it. I haven't burnt a CD for ages and am not sure if I can use iTunes to create playlists (I'm sure you can but it's such bloatware that it is more about trying to make me buy things that actually play music), I may try that soon and then I need to print the CD label (as I still have a printer that can do that!).

I have just remembered that I can use Youtube to create playlists such as this two song ska one here , I used to do mixes on Grooveshark but their model wasn't sustainable, but I am going to investigate Youtube further.

I was going to list some significant records for me to pad out this post but here are a few, and maybe I will create a playlist at some point:

• Abba - The Visitors & Happy - The Carpenters , two of my mums favourites that I still love
• Lights Out - Jerry Byrne & Sea Cruise - Frankie Ford , two that remind me of my missed friend Chris who we lost to lung cancer
• Negativeland - Neu! , I was shocked when my dad asked me if I had this record asthis was way out of his comfort zone
• All Along The Watchtower - Jimi Hendrix , if I only could have one record this would be it, Hendrix playing , Dylan's words
• Hound Dog - Elvis Presley - apparently the first record I ever liked (aged 3)
• Jig A Jig - East of Eden - The first single I ever bought
• Come On - Chuck Berry - one of the first songs I played and sang live and I would be condent of doing it now
• Egyptian Reggae - Jonathan Richman - The first instrumental cover I played live

I could go on and on but I'll stop and share "Happy" by The Carpenters (incidentally the title of my favourite Rolling Stones song , and they - the Stones - covered Chuck Berry's - Come On).

Enjoy this very rainy Thursday.

Turtle Power

Switched on 6Music this morning and Chris Hawkins was playing "Gravel-Pit" by Wu-Tang Clan which for some reason reminded me of  "Turtle Power" the theme from the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film, which was a surprisingly excellent song and the film wasn't that bad either.

My daughters Juliet and Kirsty were huge fans and the action figures were very difficult to get hold of, but I remember walking into Asda at Boldon just before Christmas and there were two huge baskets filled with the figures. Christmas was sorted, sometimes things do unexpectedly drop into your lap.

So it's Friday and this is effectively my diary entry to fine the Partners In Kryme song should ever want to listen to it, so just a very short post before I get off to work wondering if I've got that record, it's probably somewhere in my digital collection and that has just reminded me of a couple of streaming service surveys that i've seen.

Basically streaming music is being pushed in many forms , including podcasts and the like. The thing is when you stream music or video you have to remember that if you are not on wifi then you are using up or paying for your data and this is what the various communications companies are pushing. From an artists point of view the Spotify business model doesn't work but most of my friends are aghast when I say I don't have Spotify. Apple Music, Amazon and the rest will all devour your data.

I had a chuckle at the latest EE 5G advert advertising "Hannah" from Amazon Prime where Kevin Bacon says you can download it in seconds when the girl says she hasn't got time. If the network is that good why not stream, the data use would be the same. Also while you can download something in seconds it still takes 90 minutes to watch and generally it's better to watch on a big TV that a relatively little phone, I'd rather watch on a fifty inch screen than a five inch screen.

So now it's time for work.

I am not sure if you are aware of my writing on Vocal but these are a few of my stories if you would like to sample them:

1. The Never Ending Story - My Directory
2. The Never Ending Music - My Music Directory
3. The Never Ending Poetry - My Poetry Directory
4. An Owl In A Towel - A Beautiful Book by Lesley and Cheryl
5. Three Reasons Why I Love Settle - Scaleber Force, The Hoffman Kiln and Castlebergh Crag

 

March On .. And Support Artists

I don't buy much music these days, my collection is huge and I am selling a lot of CDs I bought on Discogs. I've written previously that I have bought albums because I think I should have them . The good thing about this is that the artist get's supported from the initial sale , although subsequent resales don't actually benefit the artist although often money I get from Discogs sales does by music. This week, although I don't need it I have ordered an album by Deodato and singles by The KLF and Roger Williams on vinyl. 

The albums I have for sale I have in a stack next to my desk and I actually listen to them to see if they are worth keeping. I think one or two have made me think "Why the hell did I buy that?" but most ate worth listening to. I am currently listening to a five disc budget reggae compilation called "The A To Zion" and it is rather good but it's still for sale.

Other's like "Meet The Humans" by Steve Mason (ex of the Beta Band) were so good that I pulled it from the store. I have the attitude that if you put something in a box or drawer that that's it , it's not going to be played, but yesterday I was listening to a Randy Newman box and after the five excellent discs of his Americana I remember I had a couple in the "N" box , and next to those two was an NWA compilation , so three discs for that box actually got played yesterday.

The main reason I am writing this is that I got a missive from Jordan Reyne on Bandcamp about her new album Chapter Zero  . Jordan does not put her music on leech like streaming services like Spotify or Apple Music that make a fortune for their owners but pay the artist a pittance. I cannot see how the model can properly work, but for almost all artists it doesn't so if you share a Spotify playlist with me you go down in my estimation.

Ever since I saw her opening for The Men That Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing at Think Tank? (see here) six years ago she has remained the most impressively original artist I have ever seen or heard. She is also a very approachable person , and her set that day was so stunning that I bought three CDs on the spot. So a new album is always an essential purchase , and buying from Bandcamp ensures that artist gets fair recompense for their work.

I am looking forward to hearing the new album and you gat a digital copy of all her work here for about thirty quid. Not only is she a musician she puts together videos for her songs on her YouTube channel here. You will be impressed.

Though it's the opener from here last album "Bardo" , "Then They Came For You" shows her video creation skills off, and is a song for our times.

Metallica Was Right? - A Personal History of Music Media From The 1950s To Today

My friend Royston posted a link to this blog post from KFMX  (Lubbock's Rock Station) about the legacy of illegal downloading. It sums it up in a nutshell. Although I'm in two minds about the grammar , sould it be Metallica Was Right or Metallica Were Right. Anyway this post isn't about grammatical correctness it's about the whole music stealing thing , and where we are at today and why we are here today musically/ It's probably best to do it roughly in temporal order so I'll do it by decades:

1950s:

A Complete Music Centre

Vinyl became established, first in 78 format with seven inch 45's becoming the single record content delivery device of preference. 12" 33rpm Albums named because sheet music was collected in albums was the modus operandii for Classical Music because of the length of the pieces , although spoken word albums came out that played at 16 rpm . If you look at a full featured vinyl record player that's what the 16 option is for. If you do want an classic record player take a look at RPM in Newcastle.

The thing is unless you had your own recording facilities in the 1950's the only way of stealing music was to actually shoplift or resort to burglary. Music theft was limited to plagiarism and blantant exploitation like Alan Freed's co composer credit on Chuck Berry's Motorvatin' because there had to be a white presence.

1960s:

Reel To Reel

Music took of in this decade, and you had a proliferation of transistor radios and portable vinyl disc players, and affordable reel to reel tape recorders were available. These allowed you to record either from the record player, radio or television. However this was not widespread so artists and record companies just saw it as another marketing opportunity, however the BBC threatened prosecution of anyone who recorded TV programs , although they then later asked for recorded copies when trying to replace lost shows . Albums became more popular especially with bands like the Beatles and Beach Boys shifting industrial quantities and incidentally albums were commercially available on tape reels. Really record companies were seeding the ground without looking to the future.

1970s:

 

Select a Tape

This is when supposedly the shit hit the fan for record companies. Music was becoming more portable. The introduction of the 8-Track tape and more importantly the compact cassette tape. These were introduced by record companies again to sell product, but when cheap portable recorders were put on the market you would have thought that someone would have realised that customers would not just record their own voice or birdsong.







Lots of companies produced tapes and recorders and customers started recording music from TV and radio and records and sharing it with their friends. This was countered by the "Home Taping Is Killing Music" campaign. What actually was happening was that record companies saw a threat and adopted a terrible attitude that their market was comprised of thieves. Home taping went through the roof with the introduction of the Sony Walkman , because this meant that you could take music that you had paid for with you by copying to a C90 tape. Record companies didn't like this either because they saw it as a potential loss of revenue.

John Martyn 1+1

Companies started marketing pre recorded cassette tapes which sold well , but in a completely odd ploy Island started the 1+1 series with the album recorded on one side and the second side blank for you to record whatever you want on.  The only image I could find was for the John Martyn album Grace and Danger, although these was a normal delivery method for Island completely encouraging people to tape music. I don't know if there is a caveat or disclaimer on the tape somewhere.

Killing Joke

The portability of recording apparatus meant that bootlegs now became more prevalent, so as well as official releases , you could , if, ironically, you were prepared to pay way over the odds for usually substandard recordings.

The record industry tried introducing a high frequency signal on the vinyl record to combat taping, and finally introduced a 5% PRS levy on all tapes.


Home taping didn't kill music, if anything it helped spread the word. Although you could only record in real time, so you knew what you were doing. Though for the first time you could put together tapes for parties , driving , bus journeys, running but you still knew that you should really buy the records. However often you would get a tape from a friend, listen to it and then go out buy the album. The record companies didn't acknowledge this.

1980s:

This was the decade that changed everything. The record industry introduced the new cure all, the perfect indestructible medium of CD. This was a cold planning campaign by the music industry, they introduced very cheap CD players, CD players were part of the all in one music centres replacing the cumbersome vinyl turntable. People bought music centres not realising that this made their vinyl records obsolete. So they needed to buy CDs to replace the vinyl , except CDs were expensive £12

Bright Silver Discs

compared with around a fiver for the vinyl equivalent. Mid price albums were a bargain at a tenner. Now you weren't offered a trade in for your vinyl so you were paying for the medium. Did this mean that the music had no actual value?

But anyway this was a McDonaldisation moment for music, suddenly you had remote controls , you could program the way a CD was played , you could skip and repeat tracks, it was convenience for the ears. And you could program a CD and record it to cassette to make your mixtape.

The new medium had no clicks or background vinyl noise, and the first song I played on my new CD player was The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again", played loud. A mistake I never made again. Previously the song was introduced as the needle hit the groove, this time the opening power chord just hit with no warning at all. That was my first impression of CD.

But again the music industry just saw a huge cash cow, but they were selling discs containing music converted to digital signals and guess what happened then......

1990s:

CD replaced floppy discs as a medium for computers. They could also be written to. Home computers were taking off, the internet was connecting people and at this time the music industry decided it was time for another change. CDs would deteriorate and were not as indestructible as we thought. They needed replacing. Incidentally I've had CDs for thiry years that are still fine.

The music industry told us we now had to but DAT . It's tape! Tapes break , get tangled , and you cant easily change the order, and a blank tape cost as much as a CD. DAT did have it's place but just became a specialist niche and never threatened CD's dominance. However......

The CD data was copied into a digital file stored on computer , this was MP3. It was not created by the industry so there was no regulation. People could copy albums to there computer and duplicate them to CD, but more importantly could use the internet to share music using peer to peer networks such as Napster.

People were ripping , sharing and downloading music and not paying for it. The music industry had given everything to the public on a plate. Like with cassette they tried legal downloads but included DRM which limited what devices you could play YOUR music one. It didn't work. Elton John and Metallica were the biggest voices behind the movement that eventually shut down the peer to peer network Napster citing the amounts of money they had lost. The thing is most of the people who downloaded stuff were actually doing it because they could, they would never have bought the music if they couldn't download it so the figures were irrelevant , and these artists didn't give a fig about their fans when the issued old product on CD , then brought out a new version with an extra track, ten brought out a remastered version , expecting fans to cough up money each time.

However in the days of pay per minute internet connection a friend of mine spent £30 to download a Basement Jaxx album he could have bought over the counter for a tenner.

The nineties were the decade where certain people began to expect music to be free, not realising how this affects the people who produce it. This was a direct result of the music industries pushing of CD uptake in the 80s without any thoughts of impact analysis.

The New Millennium:

The turn or the century digital music became the norm. The internet has become very fast , and they perception that music is free has driven down the price of CDs. These days a new Cd will set you back around a tenner, a new vinyl album will cost you twice that. If the cost of albums had kept pace since say, 1975,  you would be paying £80 for a new album today. I've used Job Seekers Allowance as a guide for this , in 1975 I bought the new Pink Floyd album "Wish You Were Here", it cost me £3.25 , now JSA stands around £70.

People can listen to music of their choice free on Youtube , Spotify and any number of streaming services. The problem with these for the artist, is that royalties are paid on a pay per play basis. So if a track is streamed on Spotify an artist will get paid a very small fraction of a penny, if their record is played on the radio they'll be paid £50 (that is completely made up but it is a reasonable amount). I don't know what the answer is to this.

But this leaves us in a world where to make money bands have to charge a lot for gigs and merchandise and kids think that stuff (music and video) should be free.

However music is still vibrant and alive, record shops are still going strong especially with National Record Store Day . New music is still being produced and I still buy a CD a week of usually new music the latest being the Wooden Shjips album  "Back To Land".

The music industry is continually bleating about lost profits and stealing , but in digitizing everything they have created something that can be stolen over and over again, although as recent trends have shown , sensible pricing and convenience will actually result in sales and income, otherwise iTunes would have died a death long ago, and they still cause havoc and inconvenience with their licensing and terms and conditions.

So that's it , possibly my longest ever blog post. Hope it didn't send you to sleep.

Mount Zion

In amazes me when there's certain music streaming services advertising the fact that they have 25 million songs you can listen to. I don't subscribe to any because I prefer radio which means generally the artists gets a reasonable amount per play rather than the 0.00007p or whatever they pay for each play on Spotify. I don't know what the answer is because a pay per play means that the model has to be financially sustainable. Anyway, as usual , I'm straying from the point.

Jah Wobble's Umbra Sumnus

I buy albums, usually in CD format with the odd download so the artist has been paid for every song I have of theirs in my collection. I then put a selection on my player (in this case a Samsung Note) which I select at random (I select it, not the player). Yesterday I saw Mount Zion by Jah Wobble a single from the album Umbra Sumnus. This is one of the most wonderful things I've heard in years despite having it in my collection for years. I was hoping to find a copy on YouTube but there isn't so I will put one up. If you click through on the song title you can listen to a sample. The song reminds vaguely of the euphoria generated by The Shamen's Destination Eschaton which I will include as a video here.





Have a great day everyone, it looks foggy but I'm sure it will improve

Three

This was going to be the third post I posted yesterday for #August50 ,which I think I've decided will probably be impossible without resorting to one line posts, which plenty of bloggers do. The other alternative is Vlogging but I doubt anyone would want to see me, and hear me talk, it's bad enough me actually rambling on in single words.

Today I don't want to walk into work, I don't want to mow my lawn, and lots of other things but they have to be done so I will attempt all of them. Obviously the black cloud is still floating aroundbut I don't have to let it cast it's shadow over everything.

I also need to change the music on my phone, although there's probably a lot more on there than most people have in their music collection because they now subscribe to Deezer or Spotify or Apple Music or Amazon Unlimited or YoutubeMusic and it plays exactly what the want to hear. Think about that for a second. Why not get a radio?

Music like BBC4 is a sort of bane of my life because you put them on and then you're happy to stay watching or listening until you are forced to switch off. 6Music has provided me with todays music, "Pool Hall Richard" by The Faces.

Enjoy your Tuesday.

Je M'Ennuie

No, I'm not bored ( je m'ennuie is French for I'm Bored in case you were wondering what I am on about)  but I think others might be in this COVID-19 Lockdown. On my Discogs store I sell a CD maybe once every two weeks but this week it's more than one a day. I think people are getting bored and browsing Discogs and buying CDs , a sort of online retail therapy. It's good that people actually buy music as opposed to getting a Spotify subscription, alth I suppose buying from me doesn't really benefit the artist, but it is helping people get through the Lockdown.

In my last post I said how good "Crocodiles" by Melt Yourself Down was , and they had a great conversation with me on twitter although  Melt Yourself Down is a great name for a song and reminds me of "Melt The Guns" by XTC , but Crocodiles is a great name for a band. Anyway I am gonna be pursuing their music much wither but the sax riff on "Crocodiles" is something else, it could almost be classic Van Der Graaf Generator (unusually for a rock band they had no bass and no guitar in their early incarnations but still managed some of the most impressive music you will hear).

So I'm going to share "I'm Bored" by The Bonzo Dog Band , because I am sure that is hitting a lot of people at the moment, but a litle good music can definitely dispel the ennui and we drift into lockdown Easter, and on Amazon I've just seen a Cheese Easter Egg!!

Back Home

After a great week , relaxing wise , back home from Ampleforthwith a garden to mow. The journey back was uneventful and easy . There's a few photos from last week here .

My friend Julie posted a Springsteen Spotify playlist which included Rosalita , the first song I heard by Bruce Springsteen when he was the "future of rock'n'roll". This is today's June's Tune. Can't find the orignal Whistle Test broadcast but this is close enough. Enjoy, I just love it:

Grey

The sky is a uniform grey (or is it gray), surfaces outside still are covered in rain / dew, the lawn is finally looking very well but is obviously too we to be mowable and I am drinking decaffeinated coffee as I write this. I've taken the Grammarly spelling  / context checker off because it became too intrusive and was slowing down my typing everwhere. Maybe I should prepare my blog posts in Word to ensure  that it's reasonably grammatically correct and the spelling is correct.

It's my sister Yvonne's birthday tomorrow, which I knew was coming up, but last night my dad said he was worried because he couldn't remember how old she was going to be. I told him she probably wasn't bothered and she would just love a card.

It is amazing how you can miss words out but it still makes sense to you , but to someone else it may look as though you don't know what you are talking about.

I'm not sure if it's raining outside, so I'm not sure if I will be walking into work today.

This weather seems to create an oppressive quiet, though I will disperse that by leaving on my Donna Summer and Malcolm McLaren mix on my player. That's another thing, it now takes a minute to put together a Spotify / Deezer whatever playlist but in the seventies a live DJ had to do that in real time, then we got cassettes (I know there was reel to reel but they were hardly portable) and you could create your mixtape but a sixty minute tape took more than anhour to put together, and if you made a mistake it took even longer.

I'll leave you with Donna Summer's take on Jon & Vangelis' "State of Independence".

Have a great Tuesday