What are you listening to now? Page 1,348

Quote: A Horseradish @ 22nd January 2020, 1:30 AM

I am aware of that track but I wouldn't have got the answer in a thousand years. Dabutt, I feel, did very well indeed to find the right answer. If I were to be asked which Bowie album I know and like best, it would be "Space Oddity" and that puts me in a very tiny minority. Similar era, though, ie early and I do play the mosr well known tracks on "Hunky Dory" a lot.

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Do you still play physical copies of albums, or do you only stream. If it's mainly streaming, how often do you play whole albums?

I play cds most of the time, vinyl occasionally, and even cassettes from time to time if my other sources aren't available, or I have an urge to hear something I only have on that format.

I had a vinyl copy (still got it) of Hunky Dory I bought when Bowie broke through with Ziggy. I played it hundreds of times which is why I knew there was something very familiar when I heard the Texas one.

Quote: john tregorran @ 22nd January 2020, 3:27 AM

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Normal service is resumed.

Well, GK, that is yet another aspect of my ludicrous nature. I have 300-350 albums on vinyl which I bought between 1977 and 1990. A mixture of new and second hand based on sufficient but limited money. I have around 1900 CDs purchased in the last 30 years. Perhaps three fifths were new and two fifths second hand with the latter often bought singly for between a penny plus postage and a pound. In the first CD decade I did buy nearly all of the stuff I have on vinyl in CD format .

While everything I have is kept like a library with alphabetical sections, I was never careful to maintain my vinyl in good order. I used discs like a DJ, throwing them on turntables - often for individual tracks - and off again quickly to minimise sound gaps. Many were chucked in that process on top of others until the end of the day when they would all go back in their sleeves. I approached it all as if I was doing a broadcast and I didn't have the luxury of time provided by ad breaks. Whatever, it means that I wouldn't touch the vinyl now as I would expect a lot of crackles and jumps. But this is not to say the CDs get played much of the time. For many years they were played regularly but then came Napster and later Spotify.

The CDs were always part artwork anyway. The ten towers of them in my living room reaching to the ceiling are like a monument to things I have been or I did and especially to people and places I have known. A diary in many ways but I see them too as an art installation of a jigsaw puzzle that has only now been competed with nowhere to go. It annoys me intensely actually on the rare occasions when I do let people into the house that they talk and listen to me rather than to the CD collection as I feel that the CD collection is the real me and I am someone else. Others should really include it.

So I listen to things on Spotify, yes? Erm, no. Not much, I continue to pay the monthly subscription and yet I generally find I go to You Tube more than anything else. None of this makes a great deal of sense. I keep telling myself that I need to listen to the CDs and to Spotify more so as to make more sense. But then, as I said, I am not me. The CD collection is.

Cassettes seem to be much maligned these days but they changed the course of listening to whatever music you wanted wherever you were and at any time..

Quote: A Horseradish @ 22nd January 2020, 5:53 PM

Well, GK, that is yet another aspect of my ludicrous nature. I have 300-350 albums on vinyl which I bought between 1977 and 1990. A mixture of new and second hand based on sufficient but limited money. I have around 1900 CDs purchased in the last 30 years. Perhaps three fifths were new and two fifths second hand with the latter often bought singly for between a penny plus postage and a pound. In the first CD decade I did buy nearly all of the stuff I have on vinyl in CD format .

While everything I have is kept like a library with alphabetical sections, I was never careful to maintain my vinyl in good order. I used discs like a DJ, throwing them on turntables - often for individual tracks - and off again quickly to minimise sound gaps. Many were chucked in that process on top of others until the end of the day when they would all go back in their sleeves. I approached it all as if I was doing a broadcast and I didn't have the luxury of time provided by ad breaks. Whatever, it means that I wouldn't touch the vinyl now as I would expect a lot of crackles and jumps. But this is not to say the CDs get played much of the time. For many years they were played regularly but then came Napster and later Spotify.

The CDs were always part artwork anyway. The ten towers of them in my living room reaching to the ceiling are like a monument to things I have been or I did and especially to people and places I have known. A diary in many ways but I see them too as an art installation of a jigsaw puzzle that has only now been competed with nowhere to go. It annoys me intensely actually on the rare occasions when I do let people into the house that they talk and listen to me rather than to the CD collection as I feel that the CD collection is the real me and I am someone else. Others should really include it.

So I listen to things on Spotify, yes? Erm, no. Not much, I continue to pay the monthly subscription and yet I generally find I go to You Tube more than anything else. None of this makes a great deal of sense. I keep telling myself that I need to listen to the CDs and to Spotify more so as to make more sense. But then, as I said, I am not me. The CD collection is.

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Nicely put, as always.

Quote: john tregorran @ 22nd January 2020, 7:02 PM

Cassettes seem to be much maligned these days but they changed the course of listening to whatever music you wanted wherever you were and at any time..

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Quite a few new, unsigned bands offer cassette versions on the merch stalls these days, so they're making a comeback.

The Sony Walkman was very glamorous when it came out, and very expensive.

I waited for cheaper versions. They certainly improved one's tube and bus journeys immeasurably. I have lots of fond memories, such as walking around Bologna listening to The Cure's Japanese Whispers repeatedly.

I bought a Philips cassette player(couldn't record).It had a handle and a plug -in ear piece for just one ear,quite a few years before the Walkman.Philips didn't think that one through obviously.

Quote: john tregorran @ 23rd January 2020, 1:05 AM

I bought a Philips cassette player(couldn't record).It had a handle and a plug -in ear piece for just one ear,quite a few years before the Walkman.Philips didn't think that one through obviously.

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All devices in those days had earphones for just one ear - pocket transistor radios for example - which is the way it should be. One only needs one ear with which to listen and, that way, you don't shut out all the important stuff that's going on around you. I saw a woman once waiting to cross the road at pedestrian lights with earphones in both ears. The little man went to green, the lights bleeped, the traffic stopped, the lights stopped bleeping, the man turned back to red, the traffic re-started. And she was still standing there, oblivious to any of this having happened!

The problem with cassettes, of course, was that, if you wanted to listen to just one particular track, or wanted to skip a track, it was virtually impossible.

True, but if you had a tape of someone you tired of,you could block up the holes on the top and tape over it.

Stiff little fingers - barb wire love

Some brief clips - rare - of the Beatles:

Get Back - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xhhwQKfD8Y

Eight Days a Week - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-4hP7gWKyA

Quote: A Horseradish @ 24th January 2020, 11:55 AM

Some brief clips - rare - of the Beatles:

Get Back - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xhhwQKfD8Y

Eight Days a Week - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-4hP7gWKyA

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Are you Shaw about that?

In a similar vein, something I posted a few years ago, in case you missed it.

https://www.comedy.co.uk/forums/thread/24812/41/#P1173730

The same guy (assuming it's a guy) has done vids for classic punk and hard rock bands, but although they all look great at first, they don't sustain my interest the whole way through, unlike the above.

Quote: George Kaplan @ 24th January 2020, 1:44 PM

Are you Shaw about that?

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Oh yus.

Here's a thing, GK.

While some other decades have produced a large number of great composers, the decade in which the Beatles were born - the 1940s - ranks highest in terms of pop and rock music. As for classical music, well, that was very obviously to anyone half normal the 1870s. I only mention this cast iron indisputable fact - just anyone try to question it - because equally obviously what this means is that we are on a 70 year music cycle. And what that in turn means is that the decade we have just come through, 2010-2019, may not have been as atrocious in all ways as it often seemed.

No. Rather I venture that all of the bawling babies and kids who are currently aged zero to nine and who one hears and sees as not merely badly parented but victims of the world's future bleakness are actually a miraculous musical movement waiting to occur. We and they don't know how they are going to do it. Nor do we have the slightest idea which form the new music will take. And, of course, none of us will know properly until they are older in the 2030s.

But life works in mysterious ways. Be in no doubt that fortune alone has decided that they are the chosen ones. Born in the decade - as crass as it was - and let's face it neither the 1870s or the 1940s were up to much as decades themselves - of the 70 year music cycle. You have ten years to prepare your ears and dust down your vibe tubes.

Quote: A Horseradish @ 24th January 2020, 2:23 PM

Here's a thing, GK.

While some other decades have produced a large number of great composers, the decade in which the Beatles were born - the 1940s - ranks highest in terms of pop and rock music.

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Born: 14 October 1940

Quote: George Kaplan @ 24th January 2020, 3:31 PM

Born: 14 October 1940

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Oh but is it - or was it - 1940 really? One of the many people on my worldwide surreptitious investigative network - which I pay for all by myself - has advised me that an ex BBC Radio 1 breakfast host, Renaissance man and Cliff clone - sorry, fan - claims to have been born in 1952 when the entry in his school record book appears to suggest that he left at 16 in 1966.

That's possibly why it is Wright rather than Read who still has a regular afternoon gig at dear Auntie after nearly 40 years.

In mini culottes, the marvellous voice of........:

Maxine Brown - Oh No, Not My Baby:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtY1Jj9uppU

She's 80 now.

And the father of Keisha Lance Bottoms, the great Major Lance:

Monkey Time - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0KlRpQeyvo

Wonderful dancing in this - and a dog with sunglasses.

They were very nice.Thanks.
I see the second was written by Curtis Mayfield.
He had some bad luck

I would like to dispute your 1870 theory.
A lot of what we consider as the classical composers were born before the 1870's.