Just thought I'd greet a fellow still-awaker directly.

OK, here's a question of great social and political import...
Sometime around the middle of next year, Mrs C is due to give birth to our first Mini Cooper. It's only a small bump now, but apparently the little fella or felless will be able to hear soon, and that's where you lot come in - given your reliably excellent musical taste, what should be the first song our currently 6cm long sprog will hear?
I think there's three things to bear in mind:
1 It has to be timelessly brilliant (obvious I know).
2 It will have to sound good through headphones on a bump to ears that have never heard music before.
3 When our offspring is a teenager and likes whatever the latest grime-hop thrash-funk disco bilge is at the time, I should be able to enjoy saying with slightly annoying condescension: 'Of course, the first song you ever heard was ...'
The first candidate we've come up with is Ashes To Ashes - you can't go wrong with the Dame, and its plinky-plonky otherworldliness should sound good through a muffling barrier of amniotic fluid. But all suggestions gratefully received, so over to you...
(A final thought - if it's a girl and we call her Ellen, would we get a free subscription? I would offer to call a boy after Mr H, but Hepworth Cooper sounds a bit too Wuthering Heights.)

No, not a 'modern life is rubbish' rant, but I was wondering if there are any albums everyone agrees are great. Given that music is so personal, there'll always be someone who doesn't like, for instance, Revolver, or Hunky Dory, or Dark Side Of The Moon, or Thriller, or Nevermind.
If it just comes down to taste, then you can't argue the true merits of anything, because someone can simply say: 'Well, I don't like it.'
Maybe sales is the only subjective way of judging quality. Top of the lot is Thriller, which in my opinion is an undeniably great album - brilliantly written, performed, produced and recorded. Next biggest, according to Wikipedia, is Back In Black - so far so good. But the next is Bat Out Of Hell, and while it's an entertaining romp, surely it's all a bit silly to be great? It gets worse, because a few places down we've got Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom Of The Opera -ugh! - and the Backstreet Boys' Millennium. I don't think even the Backstreet Boys would claim to have made a better album than The Beatles.
So, how can you objectively judge the quality of an album, and say with Hepworth-like certainty: 'This is great.'

Things seem to have gone a bit quiet on the podcast front - as far as I can see the last one was on the 1st of September. I'm sure Fraser's been up to his eyes with the new website and the Old Grey Whistle Test Hitmakers are busy with their executive duties at the mag, but surely you could have spared us a half an hour or so.
I know it's free so the standard response is: "You get what you're given", but I see it as a key part, along with this site and the magazine, of the world of wonderfulness that is The Word. I started out as a podcast listener, then looked at the website and bought the mag occasionally, and am now a subscriber.
It's only because it's so good that I miss it so.

Now, we all love Spotify, but before you go throwing away your record or CD collections and proclaiming that the whole need to actually 'own' music is ridiculously outdated, I've stumbled across a slight flaw.
It does, I'm afraid, involve B** D****, but only as an example of why things might not be as perfect as they seem. I was idly spotifying away, as you do on a quiet day off, and found his Bootleg Series Vol 4 - The 'Royal Albert Hall' concert. It's all fine, until you get to the end of the penultimate song: Ballad Of A Thin Man. Dylan and his band have crashed and bawled away to fine effect for seven minutes, then there's a bit of applause and it fades out. The next thing you hear is the snare crack for the start of probably the best version of Like A Rolling Stone he ever played.
What's the problem? Well, they've only cut out the best-known piece of crowd interaction in rock history - there's no Judas on Spotify.
If the most famous bit of one of the most famous live albums ever isn't on there, what else might be missing? I know Spotify is generally wonderful, but it's no substitute for the real thing.