Thoughts on 'PopMaster,' Sussex Cycling and Modern Music

It seems hard to believe that this is my first blog post of 2024 and it's nearly autumn already. So what of 2024 so far?

Following my appearance on Vernon Kay’s 'Ten To The Top' music quiz on BBC Radio 2 last year, I thought I'd give the original morning radio quiz, 'PopMaster,' a try. It was a pleasure to speak to Ken Bruce who has been a familiar radio voice to me since childhood. I managed to win with a score of 18, which was lower than my usual tally. I'm not sure if anyone would have believed me if I'd have said that I scored the maximum of 39 on one set of questions the day before! For the 'three in ten' I had Madonna. With over seventy UK hits to choose from I got lucky there.

Reassured of my musical credentials I've since released an updated version of my book '2021: A Musical Odyssey.' This started out as a lockdown project, where nights spent alone with a few drinks and an iPod resulted in me revisiting many albums that I'd discovered over the previous three decades, prompting nostalgia and memories which seemed ideal material for a book. But of course the 'musical odyssey' is something that never ends, so the book was expanded and re-released in 2023, and shoehorning a few more albums in, the 2024 reissue is now live - cheap as chips on Kindle and the bare minimum I'm allowed to charge on paperback (it's a reasonably hefty tome!).

However, imagine my despondency when I recently managed to lose my iPod with my entire CD collection on it somewhere near Chichester recently on a summer cycling jaunt.

The county town of West Sussex had proven fatal for me before – I lost a whole bike there once. I had left my bike against a gate to do what gentlemen sometimes do behind hedges and when I returned the bike had disappeared. Oddly I had felt a strange sensation of being watched before popping over the gate, but I put this down to the fact that a tractor was being driven up and down a field in the distance. When I returned I wondered if I had fallen prey to a ‘Derren Brown’ style mind trick, but there was no bike and no Derren. I would have been happy with either! I consequently had to walk the five miles back to Chichester Station along the Centurion Way in a state of total disbelief.

This time I couldn’t work out if I’d left my iPod on the train or lost it in ‘Spoons.’ After my evening meal I revisited both the pub and the station to no avail. As things grew crepuscular (it's always good to get that word into an article), I made my way to a wood near the Roman road to London (Stane Street) and camped. I returned in the morning to those same two locations to receive the same answer. At this point I felt like throwing in the towel and getting the next train home, especially as a huge grey cloud had been depositing wet stuff everywhere.

However, I jumped on my bike and headed eastward and it soon became a warm sunny day. By the end of the day I had almost reached Halland, which is just east of Ringmer, which is just east of Lewes, the county town of East Sussex. At 64 miles, this had been my longest ride since the nineties, eclipsing the 58-mile London to Brighton ride that I took part in in 2002. My longest ever ride is probably still the final day of a ride around Sussex that I did with a certain Mr Catchpole (now a slightly famous science dude thanks to COVID experiments) in 1994.

Anyway, it was with a sense of satisfaction that I dived into the bushes to camp after such a pleasant ride, aided by the wind. The section of the South Downs Way from Pyecombe to Lewes had been particularly rewarding in terms of scenery, with an ominous looking downpour staying just distant enough at this point not to cause alarm. The plan now was to cycle home to Kent from Halland the next day, but the weather had other ideas, and a rain-lashed start to the new day sent me scuttling back to Lewes for the train home. However, after the soaking I wasn’t leaving until I’d consumed a hearty ‘full English.’

Sometime later a familiar face at the local pub came to my rescue with an iPod that he no longer uses. I loaded it up with over 1,100 albums from my iTunes program (all of which I have CD copies of) and life could at last continue along the course it was on before this unfortunate aberration had occurred.

Not everyone was as sympathetic to my plight, with statements such as ‘Why do you need an iPod? Have you never heard of Spotify?’ It is probably old fashioned thinking, but to me if you actually have a physical copy of something you take the time to appreciate it more, and many albums, films and books require this extra bit of dedication to get more out of them.

What I frequently refer to as my favourite album (Pink Floyd’s ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’) left me cold upon first listening as a teenager. Imagine if it had been these days and I had been listening online – I would have simply moved on to something else – but as I’d parted with the best part of a fiver in John Menzies (remember that?) for a cassette I listened again. And again. And again… until its full awesomeness had revealed itself! I could say this about many of my favourite artists, particularly those of the zany variety such as Frank Zappa – again having physical copies made me put in the extra work and not dismiss it as ‘a cacophony.’ A lot of classical music requires repeated attentive listening too.

You could even argue that the modern way of listening to music has shaped the progression of popular music in a way that many of us over forty aren't so keen on. In past times, there were big changes in style every few years from rock & roll to Merseybeat, psychedelia, prog rock, glam rock, punk rock, disco, synth pop, techno, jungle, Britpop, and if you insist, rap, but it does seem that since the millennium I have heard very little that sounds genuinely new in style. Outkast's 'Hey Ya!' was perhaps the last time I heard something on the radio and thought 'I've never heard anything like that before.' I guess if rapid consumption is the name of the game, the market exists purely to put out something that sounds familiar, thus any 'top 40' you hear today could just have easily have come from fifteen years ago. In contrast, imagine playing the Sex Pistols to somebody in the early 1950s, or the latest jungle rave tape to somebody in the late 1970s.

Alternatively, I wonder if we have merely achieved everything that it is possible to achieve with music. Often technology led the progression, from the use of electric guitars to synthesisers and sequencers, but now that we've reached a stage where we can cut and paste anything into a song on a computer program, has the scope for innovation waned? Time will tell. In the meantime, check out the book for more reviews, nostalgia and musical musings. And don't forget to review the reviewer by leaving your ratings and thoughts on Amazon. Rock on...

Desert Island Discs - Singles [Adam's Music Reviews #3]

I recently learned that we refer to a collection of songs as an album because when music was only really available on 78 rpm vinyl records you could only get a few minutes of music on each side of the disc, so when it came to issuing Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite a series of records was required and these were stored in sleeves which could be turned like the pages of a photograph album. The term had been used before, but ultimately this is probably why it caught on.

Well, I've done a couple of blogs on my top ten favourite albums before, but listeners to BBC Radio 4 will of course know that guests on Desert Island Discs are asked to choose individual songs rather than albums, which in many ways is a tougher challenge. On a camping trip with two friends of mine we decided to each treat the others to our personal top five songs courtesy of an iPod docking station which is now as essential as food and beer on such trips. It is probably not so surprising that the top two of my similar aged friend were identical to mine. It was either reaffirmation or proof of a lack of imagination for both of us. Either way, I make no apologies for the rock leanings of my choices. Whilst I appreciate many kinds of music, I guess certain criteria like a rhapsodic nature and a searing guitar solo will generally nail it for me.

10) Kings of Leon – Slow Night So Long (2004) This was the first Kings of Leon song I ever heard, a little behind the times in 2007, while sitting on a railway station with a personal CD player. Having pretty much given up on modern music I wasn't expecting much, but by the time I got to the full on 'whatever it is' at the end of the first verse with its stubbornly unusual drum rhythm I knew this band were something different. The track contains a hidden tune at the end which shows the Kings in a much more laid back frame of mind. All these years later the band are a regular soundtrack to the aforementioned camping trips and I can even understand Caleb Followill's vocals.

9) Oasis – Masterplan (1995) Originally just a B side to the Wonderwall single, I would declare this to be a far superior song that gets only a fraction of the airplay. Noel Gallagher handles the vocal of this ballad which begins in a minor key expressing confusion and alternates with a major key chorus stating 'All we know is that we don't know.' The backwards guitar solo is no doubt a nod to their Liverpudlian heroes, as is the reference to Ringo Starr's 'Octopus's Garden' recited in a slightly silly voice at the end.

8) Dire Straits – Private Investigations (1982) I first heard this brooding classic on the Radio 1 top 40 chart run-down when I was seven years old. Mark Knopfler's lyrics and vocal delivery are slightly menacing sounding with some succulent Spanish style guitar runs. Once the words 'private investigations' are uttered half way through, the mysterious ambience is unleashed for several more tense minutes.

7) The Beatles – While my Guitar Gently Weeps (1968) George Harrison's finest song in my opinion, although I cannot claim to having heard all of his solo work. This White Album track includes Eric Clapton as a guest for the weeping guitar solo to augment George's lyrics expressing the frustration that any thinking person will have about humanity's behaviour. This seems to be a message that is more urgent than ever today, yet I have a sneaking suspicion that George was channelling his frustration about his bandmates at this time as much as anything.

6) Queen – The Show Must Go On (1991) It is surprising that the lyrics were as much Brian May's creation as Freddie Mercury's at a time when he was literally staring death in the face. Here Freddie gives the 'life is all a show' theme all he can muster, perhaps knowing that it is virtually his final chance, while Brian May whips off one of his most evocative solos. It doesn't get much more dramatic.

5) Lynyrd Skynyrd – Free Bird (1973) The guitar hero's favourite. This nine-minute track begins as a ballad with some gentle slide guitar with lyrics about a wish to keep moving on. Upon reaching the conclusion of being unable to change, the duelling guitar solos illustrate the metaphor of the bird breaking free. The whole band then go full tilt for almost six minutes of frenetic soloing. Each time you think it can't get any more intense the string-bends move up the fretboard a little further.

4) The Beatles – A Day in the Life (1967) I remember listening to this as a teenager on a Walkman in my grandparents' bedroom and thinking 'This is scary sounding. I'm never taking drugs!' This, the closing track to Sgt Pepper sees John Lennon pitying those whose lives he views as dull and unenlightened before an orchestral riot leads to McCartney's jaunty bridge, a little like the hurricane taking Dorothy to the Land of Oz. Lennon's lugubriousness has the final say before the orchestral chaos leads to one of the longest notes in rock music, hammered out on five pianos simultaneously if I remember rightly. Even the Beatles couldn't really top this for ingenuity.

3) Queen – Bohemian Rhapsody (1975) A superbly crafted classic that never grows stale. The first time I heard this was on the bus going to school. I thought 'What a depressing song!' How things change. Bo Rhap opens with feelings of regret gradually building into a whirlpool of despair with Brian May's solo leading into the operatic middle section which perhaps represents madness taking over or even fear of hell. Then the rocking finale breaks out as if to say that the music is even bigger than all of that. Yet, Freddie Mercury's melancholic vocal has the final word, before the gong at the end seals his character's fate.

2) Pink Floyd – Comfortably Numb (1979) A rare writing collaboration between David Gilmour and Roger Waters. The verse and chorus are a vocal duel between Waters trying to coax the central character out of his apathy and Gilmour declaring that all is fine in his fantasy world. The first guitar solo sets the tone before Dave Gilmour lets rip properly for the dramatic conclusion. Nick Mason's cymbals hammer out the devastation just for good measure at the end. The track fades just a bit too early in my opinion, but maybe it's best to leave us wanting more.

1) Led Zeppelin – Stairway to Heaven (1971) So good that I even walked down the aisle to the opening strains of this song. This begins in a quiet folky style and gradually picks up the pace and volume. John Bonham picks up his drumsticks about half way through and eventually Jimmy Page's guitar solo takes it into another dimension. Then, just when you think there's no way they are going to top that, Robert Plant gives it the full power vocal treatment as a crescendo. The lyrics are ambiguous enough that you can make it about anything you want. For me it seems to be about making choices in life, so it seemed perfectly fitting as a wedding song.

And here are a few tracks that nearly made the top ten:

The Animals - House of the Rising Sun (1964) An impassioned lament for a wasted life. A much older song recorded by Woody Guthrie among others, which appeared with this tune on Bob Dylan's debut album before the Animals took it to number one.

Procol Harum – A Whiter Shade of Pale (1967) A gibberish classic (which the Beatles might have even topped with I Am The Walrus), and the instrumental B side, Repent Walpurgis, is just as good.

Gerry Rafferty – Baker Street (1978) Irascibly, I include this one for the impassioned guitar solo which grabs you every time, rather than the much loved saxophone part.

Rolling Stones – Gimme Shelter (1969) This moody sounding track opens the Let it Bleed album and only narrowly pips You Can't Always Get What You Want for me, which is the track that closes it.

The Kinks - Waterloo Sunset (1967) Ray Davies' wistful song is evocative of gazing out over the Thames. This was one of the first songs I took proper notice of when aged about five, playing taped 'hand me down' records with a friend who lived across the road from me.

If you want a second Pink Floyd choice I'd go for The Great Gig in the Sky. If you want a second Led Zeppelin choice I'd go for Since I've Been Loving You. For Oasis try Champagne Supernova. For Kings of Leon maybe Arizona. For the Beatles just buy all their albums and listen to the whole lot! The photograph is of course where it all began in Liverpool's legendary Cavern Club.

And finally, just for sheer musicality a couple of proggy ones: Try Mockingbird by Barclay James Harvest for two of the most surprising orchestral chords in a rock song (after a superb build up) and then try 'Starless' from King Crimson's 'Red' album. If you don't appreciate this one during the middle building up section then we're definitely singing from different hymn sheets!

STOP PRESS: The musical musings and humour continue in '2021: A Musical Odyssey' - now available in digital and paperback formats.