Entertainment For Lively Minds
...amd the point of the Randomiser is ?
Am I missing something here ? I can see the interest in generating the first five tracks on my iPod - quite a good exercise occasionally, throwing up some songs I had completely forgotten about (especially on an iPod with nearly 17000 tracks - yes I am that sad git who has digitised just about everything he owns) but does anyone really read off the several hundred other posts ?
All it serves to do is to remind you that there's so much music in the world that you can't possibly hear it all. What else ?
I consider myself reasonably well schooled in this music thing, but I've made it this far without even having heard OF The Bathers, never mind anything they've ever produced. Did ANYONE actually go and seek out music by this act, or any one of countless others in the lists of whom I would bet 90% of the well-informed readership of Word Magazine have no inckling whatsoever.
Rant over.
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...oh and my five were :
Todd Rundgren - Bang The Drum All Day
Buzzcocks - Just Lust
Vonda Shepard - Ask The Lonely
Manics - Faster
King Crimson - Moon child
Sorry - couldnt resist !
No sodding Bathers, though.
An old romantic writes...
You’re missing nothing. You have hit the nail through the palm. There is no point in the Randomiser. It’s just another list – and that’s its whole point. What can be finer than a list of records – given that you are an avid music collector (as we all are) and are either male or you teeter closely enough to being male to understand the significance of meaningless lists.
Do you understand what makes your favourite music so wonderful to you? Be it T.Rex or Martha and the Vandellas or Tom Waits or whatever it is? Take that understanding and apply it a meaningless list of records. There you have it, purely distilled. The most important and, at the same time, the most trivial thing in the world. Pop music. I love it so!
The point is...
...a bit of fun. Which probably explains why people do it.
It is actually a pointer
There is now a sufficient weight of bloggees to have identified tastes and styles of many: anything played by a certain proportion and that I am unfamiliar with can often merit a search.
Personally a brief 5 word or so description of the song would be nice, but I appreciate not all have heard all the songs they have digitised so diligently..........(OoooooooooH!)
I have...
... listened to all the 13k+ songs on my i-pod. I set up an auto-playlist of the unplayed and went through them all. Having finished that, I now have a playlist that picks up anything I've not played within the last 2 years, which is what I use for random listening - it throws up all sorts of half-forgotten gems as well as loads of stuff that I can't believe I haven't listened to for ages.
I still mostly pick out and listen to whole, often new, albums though.
...
I spend a lot of time on the train to and from London with work
...
I'll fetch my anorak...
I have wondered...
... if there's some way of making more out of it, like encouraging other posters to post a "Reply" if they have all 5 tracks on their own iPod, and suggest some further listening, as they will clearly have some tastes in common...
Other than that, I'm sure it's a good occasional straw poll and informal market research for those at Word Towers to ensure they're keeping up with their demographic...
A Bathers fan writes
I tend to scan through the randomiser posts fairly quickly, mainly to see if there is anyone out there whose mp3 player has chucked out something like, well, The Bathers.
One of the aspects of this board that keeps me coming back is that there are others out there who fell in love with the same, fairly obscure bands that I did when I was of the age to do so. If the Randomiser prompts a quick exchange about how brilliant these bands are then it has done us a service.
The Bathers
Chris Thomson is a musical genius who should be huge. Been a fan since Friends Again.
Not really that obscure though, there are far more obscure bands out there.
More Obscure Bands
SimonL - You're quite right...there ARE far more obscure bands out there. I'd like to throw 2 into the pot. How about Jonesy and Patto ? Anyone remember them, and/or can any of you propose bands that are even more obscure ?
ZigZag bands
I don´t think I´ve ever heard anything by these bands, unless Peel played something by them which passed me by, but I know the name from reading ZigZag from the time it was edited by Pete Frame and later Andy Childs. They were the sort of act that got championed in those pages, if only in the form of a good album review.
Patto!
Excellent choice. The great Ollie Halsall, "Admiral" John Halsey, Mike Patto, clearly. And the other one. Both Patto and Halsall now departed, cancer and drink respectively.
Anyone got a copy of the Sweet Thursday record I could, um, back-up, having had it on vinyl some 30+ years ago.
"Sweet Thursday was a short-lived late-1960s English rock band. It included famed session keyboards player Nicky Hopkins, folk guitarist Alun Davies (subsequently a frequent collaborator of Cat Stevens') and composer Jon Mark (later of Mark-Almond). Other members were Harvey Burns and Brian Odgers. The group's lone album "Sweet Thursday" was released in 1969 in the U.S. on Tetragrammaton Records and is most remembered for the moody, evocative, ten-minute-long progressive rock radio turntable hit "Gilbert Street" which was featuring well in the Billboard 100 when the original record company went bust, after only a very limited record pressing."
Not available anywhere, certainly not as a download.
Rah for the Randomizer
I likes it. Also, as a fairly new contributor to this site, I think it provides a gentle "easing in" opportunity for posting on the blogs: anybody who has a shuffle function on their music player can join in and, precisely because of the volume of responses, probably nobody is going to scroll through to the 258th post and roundly mock you for whatever embarrassments your 'Pod has unearthed.
I'll be watching out
for your entry now, Sam :-)