It’s not old if it’s new to me
One thing I very much enjoy is music. I can’t stand silence so either the telly is on, or a radio is. In recent times I’ve been listening to Greatest Hits Radio as they’re pretty much playing the sort of things I like to hear. I’m at that age now where I hear the singles charts and spend most of my time saying ‘who?’.
Musically, my formative years are the early 2000s, when I found bands like Barenaked Ladies, Foo Fighters, and The Divine Comedy. I’ve got a fairly eclectic taste, so I was also discovering the likes of Pink Floyd and Eagles.
But generally speaking I’d find something current, get the back catalogue (assuming I liked the band) then just carried on with new releases as they cropped up. Some I still go looking for, like The Divine Comedy, or Stephen Page (not so much BnL…), but others I lost along the way.
In the past year or so, I found myself exploring bands I knew, but I just knew a few singles. I’ve got a massive playlist on Spotify called ‘Uberplaylist‘ which is now 73 hours worth of curated songs. It started as something I could play and leave running – no skipping. Many of the songs on that playlist are the singles you know, but that’s all.
I started to probe a little deeper with some of these bands. One of the first ones I dug into was Tears for Fears. I’d heard the song Break it Down again and somehow it got stuck in my head.
I started picking up the albums and now The Seeds of Love (album) is a definite favourite. I can listen to that over and over.
Likewise, I’ve had a copy of Beautiful South’s greatest hits ‘Carry on Up the Charts’ for some years, and loved it. Listening to some of the albums, there’s some cracking songs. The album. Miaow opens with the song Hold On To What which has achieved earworm status to me. I’m constantly singing random bits from it.
Another random one to enter my listening pile is The Gunman and Other Stories by Prefab Sprout. It had a single called Cowboy Dreams which was originally performed by Jimmy Nail, but the album has Prefab Sprout’s version. I remember it when it first came out, and it caught my ear. The whole album is more or less following a concept, but it ends with an utterly bonkers song called Farmyard Cat.
I’m sure there’s other old stuff I’m going to stumble upon. It’s incredible fun finding it all though. I often find albums can be rich treasure troves of wonderful music that wasn’t deemed suitable as a single, so never got heard beyond fans who bought the album, and possibly at a gig. It’s nice to find those songs because I often find them better than the singles.