Waiting For The Future, Staring At The Past.

Regular readers who pay attention (there must be some...) might well have expected the final post in the Pitchfork 25 series today. Unfortunately I haven't written it yet. I had enough trouble sidling up to Chemtrails from behind in yesterday's post. I'm not nearly ready to take on Norman Fucking Rockwell (again) quite yet.

I also have Blue Banisters on my mind. Is it going to match up to the last two? If it does it'll be a trio to stand with Bowie's Berlin trilogy or the first three Roxy Music albums, air not many get to breathe. 

You might think I'd be in a position to judge by now, what with the album having been out for a couple of days, but I'm doing everything I can neither to listen to any of the songs or read any reviews, which is a lot harder than you might think.

It's a bit like the classic episode of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, the one where Terry and Bob try to go a whole day without finding out the result of a football match. Here it is, if you haven't seen it, or if you have and you'd like to again. And who could blame you?

 

That's a reference that both dates me and geo-locates me. I'm pretty sure I've seen exactly the same plot in a U.S. sitcom, though. Can't remember which one it was or I'd have used it instead. It sounds like it ought to have been an episode of Seinfeld but I don't really like Seinfeld so I wouldn't have thought I'd know it if it was. Do feel free to tell me what it might have been in the comments. Or, better yet, what it was.

I expected reviews to crop up on the various music news channels I follow - Pitchfork, Stereogum, N.M.E -  and they have, although it's easy enough not to click through to read them. Website monetization policy dictates everything has to have some kind of clickbait heading, though, so even glancing at the feed these past couple of days has been a ride.

It seemed safe enough to take a look at Lana performing Arcadia on Colbert. That's one of the tracks I've already heard. It's been out in the wild for weeks. I guess we could have that now.

If it sets the standard we're in safe waters. But why am I trying to avoid hearing the album anyway? You may well ask.

Bad timing. Mostly that. Bloody-mindedness. Masochism. A bit of those, too.

I put it on my wishlist, which in retrospect was probably a mistake. I should just have pre-ordered it like I did Chemtrails and NFR. But no, I thought it would be nice to get it for my birthday. Which is in mid-November. So now I have to wait. Like an idiot.

Of course, I don't have to wait. I don't have to own it, let alone buy it, or have someone buy it for me, to hear it. I subscribe to the official Lana del Rey YouTube channel and every track on the album is up there, in full. 

I've been reading science fiction since I was ten years old but it never prepared me for this. I knew we were promised jetpacks. I knew we were going to be living on Mars. I knew we'd have wall-screens and the people on TV would talk back to us (Oh, wait, that happened, didn't it?). No-one told me all music would be free.

 

Is it though? I mean, I imagine someone makes some money from those tens of thousands of views that no doubt will soon be hundreds of thousands then millions and if someone's making money someone must be paying. Just not me. Still, you'd think the record company would want to give the actual album a head start.

Only no-one buys albums any more, do they? I think we went over that yesterday. We all just listen to songs on streaming services. And yet here they are, the albums, still popping out as though it was 1977. And getting reviewed the same way, too, as though they matter. Strange times.

Ah, 1977. The year the Clash told us there's be no more Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones, just as  some guy named Hans Fenger finally gave up his dreams of being a rock star and turned his guitar hand to teaching classic rock songs to kids in the Canadian school system instead. I could tell you the story but I'd just be cribbing from this piece on Stereogum. Go read it and come back if you have no clue what I'm on about.

 

I probably heard my first track from the Langley Schools Music Project on the radio back around the turn of the millennium. I think it was the Beach Boys' depressive classic In My Room. By then those recordings were already over twenty years old. Now it's the twentieth anniversary of the time someone found a copy of the original, self-released vinyl album and decided it might be of interest to someone apart from the families of the kids who played and sang on it.

I own a copy. Not of the original vinyl version obviously. That would be unbelievably weird and also cool enough that you can bet you'd have heard about it long before this. Not even of the 2001 CD. No, I have a copy on cassette that my friend Andrew kindly made for me when I asked him to.

Clearly I didn't pay for my music then, either. And clearly I had no more shame about it than I do now. Home taping killed music, by the way. It's dead. There is no music any more. Just like we all go to work in flying cars and eat three-course meals in pill form while wearing silver jumpsuits with a big zip up the back.

There's a TV documentary about the whole affair that I haven't seen. Or hadn't, until now. It's on YouTube. I have it on in the background as I write this. You can watch it, too, if you want. Here's the first part.

 

There was a radio documentary about it on the BBC, as well. I heard that when it was broadcast. All of it. You can too, if you want, assuming the BBC allows you to, where you are. I know they don't always. In case they do, here it is.

I hadn't thought about the Langley Schools Music Project in a decade. I haven't listened to it in at least that long. Like all such things it lives mostly in my memory, for what that's worth.

Listening to some of it today, I think it stands up. Not every track. Honestly, I always found it a bit much to listen to as an album, end to end. Since I only had it on a C60, though, I didn't have an awful lot of choice.

If it had been discovered today, I wonder if anyone would bother playing it that way, start to finish? Who'd have the patience?

And maybe it would always have been better, a song here, a song there, an off-kilter chorus drifting in, out of place on some curated playlist, ghosting like a radio station from another dimension, some place people listen to music like that because that's what music sounds like, there.

It's the past, filtered through that past's past, filtered through the past of that past's past. It's a future that never happened even though it already has. Don't cross the streams. 

Or do. 

Probably do.

#2 Chemtrails Over The Country Club - Lana Del Rey

I've written about this one before. More than once. Although now I revisit those posts none of them seem to be just about the album or even just about the artist. Mostly they seem to be about me, being clever. Here we go, again.

Looking back at old music posts on this blog I worry how many grey slates there are. "This video is unavailable." All of them say that, the grey ones. It makes the world feel fragile. You can't count on anything to stay.

Maybe that's why vinyl's making a comeback. I don't count that a good thing, by the way. I'd hate to be mistaken there. 

I was so happy when vinyl went away. I never liked it. I had to have it but I never liked it. 

Downstairs from where I sit typing this I have over a thousand vinyl albums. Almost as many vinyl singles, although no-one ever says "vinyl singles", do they? It's assumed.

It might be more. It's been a while since I counted. (Yes, I did, in fact, count them all. More than once.) It must be ten years at least since I last played any of them. More like twenty, probably.

 I dearly hoped I'd never play any of them ever again. I could have. I could, still. We have the means even now.

There used to be three full sound systems in this house, all with decks. And I mean after the kids moved out. I guess when they were all here there must have been six. Everyone had to have their own. Some of us had two.

Last year during lockdown I got rid of one of them. Still have one left. Now I'm almost wishing I hadn't. Got rid of the other, I mean. Who knows? I might need it. There's security in redundancy.

Only this week I nearly looked at some old records in a shop. Vinyl records. There have been weak moments when I've even considered buying something new. New vinyl exists. Once you know that it's hard to unknow it.

Do you know, there are some new records, records by young people, that only exist on vinyl? It's wrong but it's true. I wish I could tell you I'd made it up but I haven't. Young people like vinyl. Some of them, anyway. Don't you love it when we generalize? Saying it makes it true, you know.

Old people, do you know what old people like? CDs. Compact Discs that were going to be the shiny, indestructable future when I was just out of college. Up until then it was all vinyl vinyl vinyl but once I got my hands on those fragments of the future I was done with all that. 

No-one likes CDs. It's common knowledge. Everyone says so. Of all the formats they're the one no-one cares about. Okay, mini-disc, although I knew someone who was wild for it, once. Then, I knew someone who wouldn't listen to anything but 8-track casette. He had a player put in his car specially. There's always someone.

I like CDs, still. Of the twenty-five albums on this list I own twenty-four of them on CD. It would be twenty-five if the Papertiger Sound were more popular. Or at all. Of course, I don't listen to any of them. Only in the car and then only rarely. Even in the car I mostly either listen to podcasts if I'm on my own or talk if I'm with someone.

I listen to music in my head like everyone else. The sound of music coming out of a big speaker is like the bellowing of dinosaurs. I miss it a lot. Not the dinosaurs although that was implied.

Sometimes I will play an album through the speakers on this PC I'm sitting at. They aren't bad for small speakers. The sound isn't bad for computer sound. It's different, though. I think it might be less although it's been so long I can't remember. It has to be less, doesn't it, or why would they make them bigger? Maybe that's not how it works. I'm no engineer.

It occured to me the other day to put a record on and play it out loud. I didn't, though. We have neighbors. Did I ever think of that, then? Not really. I wonder why I do now. If I had, would it have been a CD? I don't imagine so. I imagine it would have been that vinyl. 

That, again. I don't like it but it's inevitable.

The CDs are insurance, really. Nothing more than that. I have the files backed up in various places but I remember those videos. Greyed and gone. There are some things you never want to lose.

This album is one of those things. Chemtrails Over the Country Club with its mildly controversial cover and its classical monochrome style and its hard, plastic case with the sharp corners that can cut. I have every hope it will stay with me always. Always be there, when I want to hear it. When I need it.

I will always want it.

I will always need it.

#3 I'm All Ears - Let's Eat Grandma

Couple of years between releases seems... fast? Slow? About normal? I don't know what to expect any more. What even is an album, anyway? Sometimes they drop and no-one expects it, sometimes nearly every track's been trailed weeks, months ahead. Is that any different from releasing singles ahead of the album to promote it? I grew up with that but i also grew up with singles that weren't on the album, never were meant to be, with people who wore that like some badge of honor (Roxy Music, looking in your direction.)

First hint for Jenny and Rosa's sophomore effort (Take a note: 1. That sophomore thing is getting old. 2. "Effort" is so patronizing. 3. First names only after full names. There's an etiquette. Adhere to it.) for me, I guess for everybody, was Hot Pink. Came out, I think, as a single. Sounded so different. Harsh, hard, difficult. In retrospect that may have been the late, lamented Sophie, producer on this one track. 

 

Lyrically it's all, all, all J&R. (Better? No, I don't think so.) Line after line leaps out and bites hard. The whole lyric's in the details at the link but just listen. It's all there. So, Hot Pink, an abrasive calling card, left me wanting more.

I got more. Oh boy, did I ever.

There's a dream of promise fulfilled that rarely ever happens. When it does it feels so good. I'm All Ears is that dream. I mean, I love the first album but this is so much more. So much more than most things, really.

It's not that often I get literal shivers listening to music. It happens sometimes. When I listen to this album it happens every time. And I'm not even talking about Donnie Darko, which is up there with all the other ten minute epics from Sebastian and Land to Frankie Teardrop and I Love You Like Gala. I am a sucker for an overwrought, emotional epic, has to be said, but with Let's Eat Grandma it's not even the vocals, not always, not only. Not the words, true as light though they are. It's the dynamics, the changes, the shifts. The way every song feels like pushing through a forest at midnight or falling down a cascade.

 

Oh god! I had Falling Into Me playing in the background as I wrote that last paragraph and then the sax came in and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up and I had to stop and. And. And.

It does that every time. I had the album playing when I was driving and when the sax solo started I nearly fugued. Some songs shouldn't be played at speed. Not by me, anyway.

It cannot be denied there's something progressive about Let's Eat Grandma and not just in theatrics that would have gladdened the heart of any Peter Gabriel era Genesis fan (the only era that matters.) Listen to the structure. For that matter, listen to the guitar on this live version of Cool and Collected. Close your eyes, it could be Steve Howe, although I wouldn't want to suggest it, not to him or to them.

I won't go on much longer. Taking songs out of context doesn't do truly great albums any favors and this is a truly great album. It needs to be heard as a piece not in pieces. 

So what does that say about Donnie Darko, one of the most intense, transformative songs I've been fortunate enough to hear in half a century? It's the last track because what could follow that? 

Nothing. 

So let's not even try.

#4 Born To Die - Lana del Rey

Sometimes, when I used to do lists like this back in the '80s and '90s, I'd add some rules and restrictions just so one person or act or theme couldn't roll the rest over, crush them, leave them gasping on the margins, done.  It would have happened. You like something, you like it, or that's how it works with me. 

I didn't exactly do that this time but I was always aware I only had twenty-five spots to fill and three or four artists together could have taken every last one of them. Jane Weaver, Lloyd Cole, Lana... I had to show some restraint.

Let's see. How many albums has Lana del Rey released in the last twenty-five years? Seven, counting #21 in this list, Lana Del Ray (AKA Lizzy Grant.) I guess eight, if you factor in Sirens, the collection of songs she recorded as May Jailer but never released (and that would be on here if she had, trust me.)

And how many did I include? Four. That's pretty restrained of me. 

Looking at the list now, it's obvious it should have been five, at least, Why I left Ultraviolence out beats me. I mean, the title track, Brooklyn Baby, Fucked My Way Up to the Top, West Coast... some of the greats there. And it hangs together as an album, not just a collection of songs.

Honeymoon and Lust For Life don't, really. I can understand why. They're the plateau of Lana's uncertain period, I think, when she was still stretching out into who she wanted to be. A pop star, among other things, which explains a lot of the guest artists and the lack of coherency. There's a bit of a trying on hats, maybe.  

The songs are still great, some of them. The two albums between them gave me some of my all-time favorites - Terence Loves You, God Knows I Tried, Love, White Mustang - but honestly, reading the track listings now, I see a surprising number of titles I barely recognize. 

Strange, when you think I listened to both those albums dozens of times. Although now I come to think of it, mostly I didn't do that. What I did was cue up the songs I liked best and skip the rest. 

It's not that there were any I didn't like. About the only thing I've ever heard Lana do that I never liked are a couple of covers. I don't believe anyone in the world can sing Blue Velvet straight and not make it sound like the dullest tune ever written.

It's just that Lana doing mainstream pop with respectful guests and overfussy production is not my favorite Lana. And that has a tiny bit to do with why I had to think for a while before I put Born To Die in at #4. 

There's certainly no question of my not recognizing any of the titles here. Fifteen tracks on the CD release I own, the one with the bonus tracks, and I could sing you at least a chorus and a few lines of any of them. Okay, maybe not Million Dollar Man. All the others, though. And every single track is stunningly good. Or, perhaps I should say, every single song. Because here's the thing: I knew quite a few of these songs from demo versions I'd listened to a hundred times on YouTube before the album came out and when I finally got to hear the official, released versions...

I didn't like them quite as much. Oh, hey, will you look at that? "Better in beta" works for music, too! Or maybe it's just the old "The original's always the best" trope kicking in. As in, the first version sets the needle. Everything after gets compared.

If I'd heard Born To Die first and then the demos later, the way it usually goes with records, maybe I'd be here eulogizing the official version and not even mentioning the sketches. Never gonna know, are we? But I did hear those takes first - a little rougher, a little rawer, a little faster, a little brasher - and I can't unhear them.

None of which should undercut the power, the glory of Born To Die as we have it. It's just the most glorious sequence of confident, driving, assertive performances, the rising storm of the music always driving the words forward like scattered, flurried leaves, fragments breaking free, spiralling, soaring, falling back.    

 

And the subjects, the stories, the characters. Brave, lost, lonely, knowing, self-deluding, empty, hopeless, yearning, wishing, needing. Lyrics that haunt and harrow and beat back the darkness, just once, just once more, just one more time...

A thing that puzzles me now is how, then, and this would be, what, almost ten years ago, I didn't see how sublime, how well-crafted, assured, skilled Lana's lyrics already were. Sure, now, in the two albums that top this list, it's obvious, apparent, undeniable. Everyone knows. Hard to believe but back in 2012 I thought a few of the lines were a little awkward, an image here or there over-familiar, used. 

I know better now. Of course, I am terrible with lyrics. I only ever hear them in shards, fragments, momentary squalls of language, meaning fractured, bleeding out. You can put them right in front of me and I stare right past. My copy of Born To Die even has a full lyric sheet and I still didn't pay attention.

Oh well, you live and you learn. And, honestly, sometimes I think it's the words you don't hear that carry the greatest charge. The space between, that's where the meaning falls and where it lies. 

Enough, I think. We'll be dancing about architecture next. Talk about cliches.

Three more and then we sleep.

Bad Image

When I sat down this morning to get my fix of New World there was a big, yellow message across the bottom of the screen warning the servers were about to come down for a scheduled patch, expected downtime five hours. I got half an hour in before the deadline and it's now exactly five hours later so let's see if the servers have come back, shall we. Last time they went over by several hours more so I'm not holding my breath.

Twiddles thumbs as he waits for the game to patch. I could have thought of doing this earlier, couldn't I?

I might have, had I not used my unexpected free time to knock out another post for the Pitchfork 25 series. That will go up on Saturday, when I'm working. I'm at work Sunday, too, so I need to get another done before the weekend. Then I can put up two posts no-one's going to read.

I really need to miss a day's posting deliberately, just to break the run. I haven't missed one since July and now I have this thing going where I have to post every day, whether I want to or not because you can't break a streak. Everyone knows that.

I knew it would happen but I thought it wasn't going to be a problem because, as I was boasting back in Blaugust, I never run out of things to write about and I like blogging at least as much, probably more, than I like gaming. Hubris.

It was true enough until I started playing New World. The thing is, once again as I've mentioned a few times along the way (I do repeat myself, don't I?) much though I enjoyed my time in the original alpha, as New World grew and changed, I felt it was becoming less and less like a game I'd want to spend a lot of time with and more and more like something I could happily dip in and out of as the mood took me.

Which is not what happened. 

Patch is 80% downloaded, by the way.

No, what happened is that New World turned out to be one of those games I think about when I'm not playing and wake up wanting to play. They don't come along all that often although Valheim was one so that's two this year.

Valheim, though, as I keep saying, is not an mmorpg. It feels a lot like one but it's nowhere near as huge, sprawling and open-ended and it doesn't have infinite things to do. As many people commented, for all its addictive properties, once you'd killed the last boss it felt like you were done.

I didn't even kill the last boss. There didn't seem much point since you got nothing for it except a few changes that made the game harder and less fun. I got to the point where I could have killed him and then I stopped. That would never happen in an mmorpg.

Patch finished. Logging in.

Valheim may not be an mmorpg with endless patches adding more and more things to do but it is in early access so there will be a stream of updates and additions over the coming months and most likely years. Unfortunately, unlike an mmorpg, it looks as though they may be on the kind of cadence that allows us to forget we were playing and, judging by the first milestone, Hearth and Home, why we bothered in the first place.

And now Easy Anti-Cheat throws an error for the New World patch. Unknown File Version. Let's try that one more time.

I've played maybe an hour of Valheim since H&H. I was willing to give it a go but when I got into the game I found I just wasn't feeling it. I already built my home there. I've seen all the interesting stuff or nearly all. I read about what had changed and it was just not very interesting. 

I never bothered with the animal breeding that we already had. I don't think I've ever gotten involved with animal breeding systems in any game. The whole concept doesn't appeal to me in any way. The food changes looked dull, the new housing items uninspiring, the changes to biomes minor and forgettable. I have, in fact, forgotten what they were.

 

Another error. Bad Image of the .exe file this time. Not looking good, is it? Third time lucky?

Steam tells me I played Valheim for 381 hours. That's a lot. Some of it would have been tabbed out while I wrote posts about it but even so. I played Bless Unleashed for 80 hours. That's two games this year I've given huge amounts of time. 

New World, so far, 72 hours. How long is it since it launched? A couple of weeks. Still way behind Valheim at the same stage but when Valheim came out it was cold, dark and wet outside and we were locked down and nothing was open. Now it's unseasonably warm, unexpectedly sunny, and everything's open. Not really a fair comparison.

New World throws yet another error. Reddit tells me I should "rightclick on the game in the steamlibrary, properties, local files, verify integrity of games files" so that's what I'm doing. We'll see if it helps. I bet it doesn't.

One piece of good news. With New World down, I took the opportunity to log Mrs. Bhagpuss's account into Guild Wars 2 and have another go at the mount race in Mad King's Lab. A stunning success!

The race popped within seconds of me logging in. I paid my gold to hire the vendor and that completed another of the Annual achievements. Apparently you need to hire a bunch of vendors for one. Hadn't spotted that. 

I managed to get to the start line with only two visits to the rental guy. A plastic spider bit the first one and when I used the tail swipe to kill it the mount despawned. It really is the worst implementation of the mechanic I've ever seen. 

Fortunately I had plenty of time to get a replacement before the whistle went for the start or the race. There isn't really a whistle. Maybe there should be. 

 

Steam finished validating but the validation failed. It says "Two files failed to validate and will be reacquiired" Is that the historic future tense? Guess I'll try logging in again and we'll see.

There was a Commander running a squad around the Lab so some of the lanes were clear. There was another player racing and they drew some of the aggro ahead of me. I loped round without getting knocked off or even stunned, which meant I made the two minute timer with relative comfort.

And somehow that completed both the Daily and the Annual achievements. Don't ask me how. I am certain I'd only had one success before then and you need three for the Annual. I was so astonished I logged out in case someone popped up and told me it was a mistake. 

Login fails again. Same error as the first time. Unknown File Version. Time to check the Amazon forums.... Okay, it's me, it seems. NA West and EU have extended downtime but NA East is finished and my server, Zuvendis, is up. One more try at validating and if that doesn't work it's a full re-download and re-install.

I realize this doesn't make for the most thrilling of posts but what can you do? Well, I guess one thing is finish up here and go write that other Pitchfork 25 post. Gotta get it done sometime. Might as well be now.

Here's hoping I get into New World some time today. Or ever again. I was locked out of EverQuest for several weeks once with an error no-one could solve. Eventually it fixed itself. They always do, eventually.

That's online gaming.

#5 The Last Days Are Taking Forever - The Papertiger Sound

If one mood links almost all the albums on this list it must be melancholia. Looking back at the posts for each of them it strikes me how, even for the ones that aren't steeped in, drenched in, drowned in loss, longing and regret, I've unnerringly picked out tracks that are. 

I seem to have some kind of lock on bittersweet despair. I don't know why. I'm pretty cheerful most of the time. I thought I was.

Even by these heartsick standards, the Papertiger Sound stand out. Or back. Shuffling their feet, twiddling the toggles on their duffle-coats, humming a tune only they can hear. Defeated, dejected, unable to meet even the lowest bar for pop music, a false smile. And among their slim, neglected catalog slumps this, their masterpiece: The Last Days Are Taking Forever, a sentiment to chill the soul if ever I heard one.

Just seven tracks. Hardly counts as an album, does it? Scarcely twenty minutes long, all told. There's no video footage I can find of any of the songs. The best I can offer is a YouTube playlist with the same static picture of the album sleeve for every one. The seven songs have racked up a grand total of 116 views between them over the six years since they were uploaded.

This is my fifth favorite album of the last twenty-five years? Yes. Yes, it is. It really is.

Forlorn, lovetorn, careworn, hopeless, hapless, helpless, trapped and failing and falling, the fading echoes of these seven songs drift as clouds across my inner landscape. Forever, or so it feels. I love this album. It hurts to listen.

Fragments break away. The glorious chorus of Lower Canada. I can't entirely make it out. It might be "a le Corbusier" although why it would be I can't imagine. I've been singing that for years, now. I don't care if it's wrong. It's right to me.

This is right, from Wrap Yourself In Light, the track with the title, not the title track. There is no title track. Spiritual companion to Lana's incomprehensibly wonderful "The Greatest", in whose company it stands proud, as almost no song could."I watch the city as it burns at night. The last days are taking forever. I count to ten and hide away. You wouldn't know anyway. You wouldn't know anyway. Close your eyes". Those are the words. Some of them. Not as they come.

 

The mournful, elegaic swell of Emperor as it opens "Days they wasted in the sun..." before resolving into the heroic, brave, affirmation "I know I want to do it again." 

Bright River stares at sunlight reflected in the water until there's nothing, nothing else. "Oh, this bright river" ripples on, again, again, again.

I haven't even mentioned Hockney  even though it might be the best song on the album. Or Ivy, perhaps the bleakest. I suppose I can't embed them all. Shouldn't, anyway.  Always leave something in reserve. Something to be found.

Finish with the warped, scratched glitch of Cold Rehearsal, then. Just one coherent, revelatory annunciation: "I'll know when I get there".

I did. I am. We are. From the first moment until this. The Papertiger Sound. Remember the name.

Everything they've done is pure magic but this is the most magical of all. The dense, layered arrangements, the building tension of the drum patterns, the soaring, rising, reaching, vocals, searching for a world where something, anything, makes some kind of sense. Because nothing does. Nothing ever does.

No, nothing ever does, not when work as deep and pure and true as this goes unheard, unloved, unnoticed. 

Well, not by me. And perhaps not by someone reading this, maybe not you, maybe not now, but sometime, one day. 

We can hope. We can always hope. 

Can't we?

The last days, they're taking forever.

#6 Iced To Mode - Misty Dixon

According to Wikipedia, Misty Dixon was a "folktronica project" Jane Weaver was involved with for a couple of years in the very early 2000s. The band released several singles, most of which I have but not quite all, and one album, this one, Iced To Mode.

Folktronica is almost self-explanatory and it must have been popular around that time because even Madonna was doing it, supposedly. I should probably check that one out. I've always liked Madonna.

If I hadn't read Wikipedia, I'd have called what Misty Dixon were doing psychfolk, which to my way of listening is pretty much what Jane Weaver's being doing all her life. Even some of the Kill Laura stuff sounds like psychfolk to me. 

Call it what you want, it's magnificent. I liked it so much I fitted one of the tracks to some video I took and put it up on my YouTube channel. To make absolutely sure no-one would ever see it I didn't use either the band's name or the name of the song. That might have cost me anything up to half a dozen views in the first few years, given how popular Jane Weaver was until recently.

It was the first video I ever uploaded to my then brand new channel. It went up in February 2012. In nine and a half years it's amassed a staggering twelve views, making it the second-least watched of all my videos, beaten in utter lack of interest only by this year's entry on the addition of music content to the Art mmo Occupy White Walls, which I made to accompany this blog post. 

From all of this I conclude that making videos is possibly not the best use of my time but I enjoy doing it once in a while so I suppose I'll carry on. At least now I get the opportunity to embed it here and pretty pleased about it I'm feeling, too. It's not as though there's a plethora of Misty Dixon videos to choose from, after all.

There's not an awful lot I can tell you about Misty Dixon other than it's a tragedy that a tragedy finished their career far too, far too soon. One album was not enough. Not nearly enough. Not when they were making music like this.

What happened, according to Wikipedia, (I'd fact-check it but where?) was that Dave Tyack, who played drums and piano in the band and co-wrote two of Iced To Mode's tracks with Jane, disappeared in the summer of 2002, almost immediately after the release of Weaver's mini-album, Like An Aspen Leaf, on which he also played and which could easily have featured in this list because it's brilliant.

He'd also finished the recording of Iced To Mode, which wasn't released until the following year, at which time Tyack was still missing. His body was eventually found on Corsica, where he'd been... 

I don't know what he'd been doing. The Wikipedia entries don't say. Taking a well-earned holiday after finishing work on two superb albums, I imagine. Relaxing by going climbing or hiking through the rugged Corsican countryside. Falling to his death somewhere so remote no-one found his body for two years. 

Rock and roll, eh? Nico fell off a bicycle. You never know when it's coming, do you?

 

For all the album's a group project by an actual group that played gigs and suchlike, every track bar one is written by Jane Weaver except for a stunning cover of Prince's The Beautiful Ones and every track bar none sounds like no-one other than Jane. She overwhelms everyone as she should.

I kind of wish I'd put all her albums in the list now but then who would I have left out? There needs to be room for more than twenty-five albums in my top twenty five albums, that's all there is to it. 

Damn this space-time continuum and its inflexible laws of physics!

#8 Some Dusty - Birdie

My favorite band of all time is Dolly Mixture. They'd not long started gigging in their hometown of Cambridge when I arrived there as a student at the tail end of the nineteen-seventies. Before the end of my first year at university the Dollies were everyone's favorite band, the one we'd go see whenever and wherever they played. 

They had friends or acquaintances in common with friends or acquaintances of ours so they'd turn up occasionally at parties we were at, sometimes even parties to which we'd been invited. I think they even played at one of them. Hard to be sure. We crashed a lot of parties, especially in my first year. It was a blur, even then.

I saw them supporting the Fall at the Corn Exchange, about as unlikely a pairing as you could imagine and one I might believe I'd dreamed if it wasn't for the retrospective magic of the internet. £1.65 on the night. £1.30 with dole card. Those were the days, eh? I saw them at Downing College and I saw them at the Locomotive, where the roof nearly came off. One of the top five live shows I've ever seen.

 

That was more than three years later. I think we'd all graduated by then. I'd gotten married and so had two of the crew I hung with. We'd mostly left Cambridge. I think we were back for a visit or maybe it was just before we went back to the places we used to call home.

Dolly Mixture were the gang of three. Hester on drums and Debsey on bass, Rachel with guitar... Just the cutest thing you've ever seen, in their own words.

After the band split up in the 'eighties, Rachel and Debsey formed Coming Up Roses and when that ended Debsey joined St. Etienne's touring ensemble. I'm unclear whether she was ever a full band member but she's worked with them on and off ever since.

 

Birdie was the 90s band she formed with another St. Etienne alumnus, Paul Kelly, also her partner in life. They recorded and released two albums, Some Dusty and Triple Echo, both of which are superb. I know Some Dusty far better, though, having owned it almost since it came out in 1999, whereas for some reason (*cough* EverQuest *cough*) I never caught up with 2001's Triple Echo until many years later.

Birdie's sound is unearthly, ethereal, drifting and sublime. I find it transformative, transporting, transcendent and impossibly beautiful. Like everything any of the Dollies ever did, in other words. When I said they were my favorite band of all time I didn't mean just the three years of stunning live shows, the astonishing double album or the scattering of singles and EPs they gave us when they worked together. I meant everything.

Everything Birdie ever recorded has the sense of a summer in decline, dust in the fields, the harvest over, sun low on the horizon, a pale, red haze in the air. It's watching a 1960s social realist movie a decade too late on a black and white TV on a weekday afternoon with the blinds drawn. It's a long, empty corridor in a silent government building in late August, shafts of light picking out the dust motes that just hang there, undisturbed.

Yeah, I'm not going to convince anyone by talking about it, am I? You had to live that life. 

Maybe just watch and listen and you'll catch a glimpse and wish you had.

#9 Tranquility Base Hotel + Casino - Arctic Monkeys

I was incredibly late discovering the joys of Alex Turner's songwriting. The band had the temerity to emerge during my wilderness years, the 2000s. I'd kept myself almost preternaturally au fait with the major trends and players in popular music of all stripes right through from my early teens until I turned forty but then EverQuest came along and a decade was lost just like that.

That's not entirely true but it's uncomfortably close. I did hear about the Arctic Monkeys when they exploded onto the scene (Copyright Disc and Record Mirror, 1975) with their debut #1 hit "I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor". I knew enough to chuckle patronizingly when then-Chancellor Gordon Brown embarassed himself (not an unusual occurence by any means), claiming to be a fan of the band and then not being able to name a single one of their tunes.

Mind you, I couldn't have, either. Not then.

Other than that, I pretty much skipped their entire career until sometime around the middle of the following decade. By then I'd begun to wake up from my long mmorpg-induced trance. I was busy trawling YouTube for nuggets I'd missed from every decade, when I chanced upon Alex Turner's side project, the Last Shadow Puppets, doing a live cover of a song by an obscure band I used to go watch in student halls and local dive clubs when I was still in my teens.

The song in question was This Is Your Life by the Glaxo Babies (later forced to change their name to the Gl*xo Babies by the trademark owners, GlaxoSmithKline, a multinational pharmaceutical company not widely known for its sense of humor). It's a cracking cover and it made me think that if Alex Turner had good taste enough to know something that obscure and that good and to cover it that well I probably ought to pay him more attention.

So I did. I went through a bunch of Last Shadow Puppets and Arctic Monkeys videos on YouTube and liked pretty much everything I saw. Still didn't buy any of the records. 

 

Why I ended up buying Tranquility Base Hotel + Casino I'm really not sure. Thinking back for this post, I thought it might have been because I read a particularly persuasive review by Alex Petridis in the Guardian but when I look that up it turns out Petridis did review it but only gave it three stars out of five, plus I have no recollection of ever reading the review at all.

I must have heard of the album somewhere, and presumably heard something from it, too, because I put it on my wishlist and someone bought it for me. I listened to it and then I listened to it again and then it became one of the albums of the last three or four years I've listened to more than any. 

Reading that review, I noticed Alex Petridis cites Serge Gainsbourg and Pet Sounds era Beach Boys as the obvious and inevitable influences at play, which threw me a little. Of course, everyone gives Pet Sounds as an influence these days. It's about as useful a marker as saying "Oh, it sounds like the Velvet Underground". 

 

I thought I was at least marginally up to speed with Serge Gainsbourg, though, and I confess I did a double take when I read that part. When I go back and listen to Histoire de Melody Nelson, though, the influence is so bloody obvious it's embarassing to have missed it. Perhaps it's a good thing I never did become a music journalist after all.

However it came about, I'm extremely glad I found the Arctic Monkey's "science fiction lounge music concept album" (New Statesman - and hey, isn't the New Statesman the first place you turn to for all your rock music reviewing needs?) It's louche, loose, flip and funny. It mooches and slouches and sometimes it struts. Alex sounds worn down, world-weary, cynical and spent. 

It's packed with great one-liners that jump out of the thick, treacly mix. This is the kind of thing that gives concept albums a good name, if such a thing is even possible. I think I placed it too low. I'd shunt it up a couple of places, swap it with the other space-named entry, the Moonlandingz' Interplanetary Class Classics.

That's the problem with all lists, though, favorites especially. Nothing ever stays put. 

I keep thinking about putting an all-time favorites list together but should I do the first twenty-five years separately and then a lifetime list? Fifty favorites for fifty years would be neat. For sure it wouldn't just be the two twenty-fives  bolted together, though. And anyway, lifetime should probably be a hundred. 

If I'm going to do it at all I'd better get on with it. Much longer and it won't be fifty years any more. Technically it probably isn't already. I think I was twelve when I bought Abbey Road and Motown Chartbusters Vol 5 from my mother's Freeman's catalog, the event I always take as my initiation into popular music as an active participant, so I'm in the fiftieth year now and I only have a couple of months of it left.

Neither of those would make it in, either. Or I don't think they would. I guess we'll find out when I do the list...

#10 - Music In A Foreign Language - Lloyd Cole

At this too-late stage I'm fairly certain I chose the wrong two Lloyd Cole albums for this poll. I fear I was unduly influenced by the presence on each of a handful of my all-time favorite songs without due regard to how the albums stood as a whole. I don't think there'd be much argument that either Standards or The Negatives was a more coherent set than Antidepressant (#15) or this one at #10, Music In A Foreign Language.

Neither of those albums has anything to match the My Other Life, Late Night, Early Town, No More Love Songs or Today I'm Not So Sure from Music As A Foreign Language or the aforementioned and previously shared Rolodex Incident or The Young Idealists from Antidepressant, though. 

Sod it! I guess I did choose the right albums after all!

Every Lloyd Cole album is someone's idea of his best work, of course, not to mention someone's favorite. Ever the self-promoter, Lloyd's never shy of quoting the more hyperbolic reviews on his website, although not for either of the two I've chosen. He does, however, add the rubric "My personal favourite" to Music In A Foreign Language.

I'm very happy to go along with that as least as far as his post-Commotions albums go. Much though I love just about everything he's ever done, I feel he's doomed to be one of those artists ever-defined by his debut. It's very, very hard to imagine anyone topping 1984's Rattlesnakes, a shoo-in for a place in my all-time Top Ten. 

I should probably do that list some time. It'll have about twenty albums on it.

 

I don't really have a lot more to say about Lloyd Cole that I haven't said a bunch of times already. I'll just mention that this one's downbeat and depressed even by Lloyd's self-flagellating standards. It's also overflowing with quotable lines, provided the point your trying to illustrate is that the world is a cruel place and there's not much hope in it for any of us.

It's a message he's been carrying for thirty five years and more, now. I don't imagine he's likely to cheer up any time soon.

#11 The Fallen By Watchbird - Jane Weaver

Ol' Jane and me, we go way back. Back to before the worldwide web was much of a thing at all. The best way I knew back then to find new music was go tramping round record stores in my lunch hour, pawing through the bargain bins. Of course, back then there were record stores.

That's where I first came across ol' Jane Weaver, only of course I didn't know then that's who she was. I picked up these two singles by Kill Laura because there's a name you don't pass up or not for a pound a piece you don't, anyway. I got them home and played them and they were good. They were better than good. Here, have a listen for yourself.

Now, that's a chord progression. Sure, it's the Velvet Underground's chord progression, but it's not what you steal it's what you do with it, isn't it? And then there's the fuzz and the crackle and the voice. That voice.

So after that I bought all of ol' Jane's stuff I could get my hands on and I kept on buying it. All the Kill Laura. All the Misty Dixon. (We'll get to them). All the Jane Weaver. 

So many Jane Weaver albums, I have. When I was doing this list I piled them all up and they stacked higher than almost anyone's except Lloyd Cole's. Who knew? 

Who cared? Not many. Here's ol' Jane in 2006, sitting on a plastic chair in a field somewhere. There she was, knocking out classics, one after another, all those years. They could all be on this list. No-one wanted to know.

Yeah, well, they love ol' Jane now, don't they? All she had to do was turn herself into a one-woman Hawkwind then throw in a bit of Can for credibility. Literally, with Malcolm Mooney on guest vocals.

All that came later and I love those records, The Silver Globe, Loops in the Secret Society, Modern Kosmology. The motorik. The merciless drive. But I love the faery lilt of the early ones, too, Seven Day Smile, Cherlokolate, any of them, all of them, they could all be on this list.

I had to pick and I picked The Fallen by Watchbird. It's the transitional shift from psychfolk to krautrock. It's prog, come on, let's own it. Psych prog, folk prog, prog punk, twist it how you want there's prog in it, at the core.

Ffs, that makes two prog albums on this list, with the Ultrasound. You think you grow up but you don't, not really.

What's it about, this album, then, with the funny name? Search me. Ask ol' Jane, I guess. There's a story in there at the back of it, just like there would be in a Gentle Giant album, I'm sure of that. 

There must be. There's a book. Oh yes, there's a book. I bought it. I tried to read it but I didn't get far. I didn't get far at all.

I'll stick with the songs. The songs are superb. Better than the later stuff everyone loves. The stuff that sells and fills halls and gets on TV and into the pages of the quality press. Not that that stuff's not great, too. It really is. It may even be better. But this is the one I remember.

This one and Misty Dixon but we'll get to that.

All in good time.

#12 Superorganism - Superorganism

In 2017, I pegged two new bands for future global domination. Each of them had single word names beginning with "S". One was Starcrawler. The other was Superorganism.  

This makes the third time I've name-checked Starcrawler in this series, although neither of their two excellent albums, both of which I own, features in the final twenty-five. The four-piece alt-rock combo has steadily built a reputation as an incendiary live band with a powerhouse rhythm section behind one of the most fearsome front lines you're likely to see and some really great songs. They're not ruling the world yet but they're working on it.

Then there's Superorganism, a peculiar quirky, self-conscious eight-strong art-rock collective frequently received by outraged music lovers as either a scam or a joke. They released their eponymous album three years ago. Since then... nothing. And yet it's Superorganism who make the list. Why?

I've listened to the Superorganism album dozens of times but I've barely played either of Starcrawler's albums at all. Simple as that. Both bands are superb to watch - the eighth member of Superorganism is there just for the visuals ffs - but Superorganism are also endlessly entertaining to listen to. Starcrawler are that little bit too rawk! for me. Especially the second album.

There's absolutely nothing rock 'n' roll about Superorganism, for all they affect the annoyingly smug, self-satisfied pose of people who know they're cooler than you'll ever be. I find it all too easy to imagine them lounging around the decaying orangery of some minor stately home, a decrepit pile formerly owned by a louche and drug-addled minor aristocrat but currently being squatted by some art-left ne'er-do-wells whose trust funds have been temporarily suspended for indeterminate misdemeanors.

Which is actually not a thousand miles from the truth, minus the aristocracy and the trust funds (and probably the orangery), in as much as they do (or did) all live together in the same house. They met "online in music forums and via mutual friends over a number of years" and ended up both recording and living together. 

Four of the eight had been another band entirely, something I did not know until much later. What's more, it was a band I'd not only heard of but a couple of whose songs I'd downloaded from YouTube a year or two earlier.

Had I known half of Superorganism was really the Eversons, New Zealand controversialists known for their tasteless sense of humor and heavy use of irony, I'm not at all sure I'd have been quite as willing to believe. And that was before the revelations about one of the band that got them thrown off their New Zealand label. Guess which one of Superorganism it was. Yes, you're probably right.

All this is just biography, though. We're not going to get into the art/artist debate again, not this time. Let's focus on why this album is so high on my personal favorites list.

Three reasons: Orono Noguchi's bored, affectless vocals, the gleefully jarring arrangements and those big, booming, catchy choruses. I am such a sucker for lack of affect in a singer (not such a thrill in a work colleague, let me tell you...) and off-kilter arrangements always do something good to my nerves. And who doesn't like a great singalong chorus, eh? 

Also they are relentlessly entertaining in all the live clips I've seen. Then again, so are Starcrawler, but it didn't help them any when it came to getting picked.

Not everyone agrees, of course. One of my favorite memories of 2017 was reading the YouTube comments after Superorganism's incredibly flat, mannered performance of Something For Your Mind on Jools Holland's iconic muso love-in, Later:

"If this is the standard bearer for music in the 20teens, it's definitely going to hell in a tatty hand basket"

"Wouldn't think Jools would entertain any of this shit. Most of it is just pre recorded samples, with zero live merit"

"Absolute mindless drivel!!!! That's not music!"

And possibly my favorite of all...

"I was dissapointed to find the lead singer a young little Chinese girl.." 

Pretty sure all of that suggests they were getting everything right. They certainly were for me. As the very different and far more accessible version of the same song they turned in for the much funkier Triple-J set shows, they knew exactly what they were doing.

I can honestly say I love all of their songs... unfortunately that's because they've recorded so few of them. They're pretty much all on this one album.

As for global domination, it's looking very much as though it's already over for Superorganism. A footnote in the history of rock bands too clever for their own good is about the most they can hope for.

Unless that second album turns out to be a killer...

# 13 The Golden Mile - My Life Story

Original release date : March 1997

Since I seem to begin most of these posts either by describing where I first discovered the band or explaining why I can't remember, I guess I'd better go over this one again. I have mentioned it before, quite possibly more than once, but I don't flatter myself that anyone's going to remember.

It was some time in the mid-90s, back when I was still going out of an evening, now and then. I'd come home sometime after eleven, having had a few drinks with someone or other because back then I also had friends and I still liked a drink. Not sure how closely related those two facts might be.

I came in and switched on the TV. We still owned a TV. We even watched it once in a while. Anyone sense a theme developing? 

Mark Radcliffe hosted a show in the nineties called The White Room. It didn't last all that long. I mean, it lasted an hour, I think, when it was on. There were only a couple of seasons, that's what I'm getting at. It was pretty much all music as I recall. There were plenty of youth-oriented shows in the nineties that had bands on to break up the chat and tomfoolery but The White Room was nothing but bands, one after another.

I have no memory of who else was on that show, if indeed I saw any of the rest of it. It may be that I switched on right as My Life Story launched into 12 Reasons Why. That's how I remember it. That's all I remember, really. They did Sparkle, too, but I don't think I saw it. I only know from seeing it on YouTube fifteen years later.

It was one of those moments. I've only had a few of them in fifty years of listening to music. The first time I heard Heroin by the Velvet Underground.  The first time I heard Land by the Patti Smith Group. The first time I heard Frankie Teardrop by Suicide. The first time I heard Upside Down by the Jesus and Mary Chain. The first time I heard Virginia Plain by Roxy Music. Even, in a very different way, the first time I heard Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen on Rosko's Round Table and said "That's going to be a Number One record". Hmm. It's more than I thought and I keep thinking of new ones, too. I should do a post.

Topping them all, the time I asked to hear Lou Reed's latest LP in the old Virgin record shop, long before it was a Megastore, where they gave you headphones and you sat on a sofa like one of the hippies Richard Branson wanted you to think he was and the LP in question turned out to be Metal Machine Music and I lasted about two and a half minutes before I had a panic attack and ran out of the shop.

In those TV days I also had a VCR that was always cued up and ready to go in case anything worth recording popped up unexpectedly. I managed to hit Record to save the moment for posterity and next day I watched it again, when I was able to take it in properly. At the time, I was too stunned. I just sat there in a state of inebriated disbelief as the power and wonder of it all coursed through me like a class-A drug.

That VHS tape is long lost but now, of course, I've seen the clip countless times on YouTube. I watched it last night. Like most things that hit with that kind of impact when they take you unawares the effect fades with repeated exposure. It's still bloody amazing all the same.

In the mid-nineties I wasn't just still going out, I was still going to gigs. I don't think that stopped until the early 2000s. Over the next year, year and a half, I saw My Life Story three times and each time they were superb. Then I saw them a fourth time, a little later, that we won't mention, when they weren't. 

I bought all of their singles and the album, The Golden Mile, on which several of those singles also appear. Without exception, every track on the album and all the extra tracks on the singles were great. If you like overblown, hyper-dramatic, glam-inflected art rock, that is.  

Obviously I do. I also love rock songs with string arrangements and I have a long-held theory that trumpet is the most rock and roll of all the instruments that aren't guitar, bass and drums. My Life Story have every bit of that going on all at once and with the most aggressive attitude you can bring to playing the violin or blowing the trumpet.

If you watch the video of 12 Reasons Why, which you very definitely should, you'll see one of the band (the keyboard player, I think it is) stalking across the front of the stage like she's at some kind of coked-up fight club, holding up sheets of paper in sync with the lyrics with the numbers 1 to 12 written on them, tearing them in half and throwing them into the crowd. Well, as much as you can throw a flat sheet of paper.

I have one of those sheets, framed, on the wall over the fireplace in the front room downstairs. Not literally one from that White Room performance. Better. I caught it at one of those gigs I went to and let me tell you there was some heavy competition for it. I'd already missed several of the earlier numbers but I damn well wasn't going to miss the last one. Ripped down the middle, it's the best number. The title number: 12. 

There's also a card on the mantlepiece itself. It's from the band, wishing me a Happy Christmas. Sadly, it's not a personalised card. I got it because I filled out the slip that came with the CD, where you give your name and address and send it to the record company and they put you on a mailing list and tell you when you can next give them more money.

I was in my late thirties when I did all this. I'm not proud of it. Oh, okay, yes I am. I'm getting to the age now where i'm wondering if maybe I ought to do it again.

I was watching Starcrawler on YouTube for another of these posts the other night and I found myself wishing I'd gone to see them a few years back, when I would have been in my late fifties. They played not ten miles from here and I thought about it then I didn't go. I'd like to be able to say it's because I had some self-awareness or even a sense of shame but actually it's because it seemed like too much bother. That's really not a good enough reason.

My Life Story were never going to be big. Well, not commercially. They were big in another way, of course - too big. There were fifteen of them. Try trucking that around the clubs and town halls on the back of four or five singles that scraped the low end of the top forty and see how long you last.

They play reunion gigs quite often. They do all the songs everyone knows and the audience yells along. I wouldn't go to see anyone doing that, least of all someone I loved, once. Then again, I'm the one who refused to go see the Rolling Stones in 1981 because "they're too old and it'll just be embarrassing".

If I ever do start going to see live music again it won't be to see the Stones or My Life Story, long past their prime. It'll be to see someone who's at the stage MLS were when they made The Golden Mile. Someone just getting started, hitting their stride. Someone young, brash, arrogant, confident. Someone who still believes.

Waste of time, otherwise, theirs and mine.

Lessons Will Be Learned

And so another Blaugust drifts by, fading slowly into the gathering mists of autumn, shrouded in a cloak of bittersweet longing and tender regret. Or something. It's over, anyway.

So, how did you do? Belghast, like a proud coach at the end of a long season, has the final stats. Thanks, Coach! 

Is that even a thing coaches do? Schools didn't really have sports coaches in my day so I have no real idea what they do or how they talk except what I've seen in movies and TV shows. We had sports masters and my scool had what used to be called a "cricket professional", meaning someone who used to play professionally and parlayed that into a few decades of oiling the bats and shouting at people for running on the pitch. 

Maybe schools over here do have sports coaches these days. They have proms now, after all. 

God, that would have been weird - a prom. I kind of wish we had had them but I went to an all boys school and same-sex relationships were definitely not sanctioned by the authorities back then. Then again, half my friends ended up going out with girls from the same all girls school  that we seemed to have some kind of link-up with, even though it was on the other side of town. 

And so did I, come to that. And married one of them. The girls, that is, not one of my friends. Although we were friends then and still are now even though we divorced in the 1980s and haven't seen each other face-to-face for decades.

Ahem. Shall we get back to Blaugust? Should have done all this in "Getting To Know You Week" I guess, not "Lessons Learned". Lesson learned, then.

Congratulations to everyone who hit their targets and to everyone who didn't. Thanks to everyone who commented or contributed or read along in silence. Every eyeball matters. It takes a village to raise a blog, so they say. Okay, no-one says that but you know what I mean.

My own plan was to post every day and I did. It wasn't hard but then I do this for fun and anyway I don't work as much as I used to (even less, now I've had my requested reduction in hours to two days a week confirmed). Looking back to Blaugusts gone, I have no idea how I managed the full thirty-one posts when I was working almost full-time. I couldn't do it now.

Another Lesson : Random Pictures Break Up Text

Well, I guess I could. I could have done it this time but I'd have had to set up for it. Which I did. Even though I probably could have winged it.

This is Lessons Learned Week and for once I can confidently say I did learn at least one thing this time around: writing ahead really pays off. Also, another thing, so does finding a hook on which you can hang a whole bunch of similar posts.

I've often thought about doing series or features on the blog but until now it's always seemed like it would be more trouble than it was worth. I've done a few odds and ends over the years but only in a very ad hoc, fractured fashion. I've never given anything a specific name or made a separate section for it or allocated a particular day for the posts.

I didn't do any of those things this time, either, but the Pitchfork 25 series did have the benefit of a clear framework and a very specific remit, both of which made it exceptionally easy to knock out posts very quickly. Where the average time from blank page to published post here is probably no less than three hours, most of those P25 posts took less than an hour, start to end.

They were also so much fun to put together I sometimes banged out two or three on the same day because I was enjoying myself so much. At one point I had ten pre-written and ready to go. That really takes the pressure off.

My plan was always to use them only on days when I was working and to write "normal" posts every other day, so I was well aware I'd have more than I'd need to fill the gaps for Blaugust but I couldn't resist doing them. Music posts are so moreish.

As I write, I still have three completed P25 posts in the bank, which takes us to the Top Ten. I haven't quite decided how I'm going to go on from there. I might keep the rest back for days when I wouldn't otherwise post or I might just get bang them out and put them up as they come.

They Don't Need To Be Relevant - Just Pretty.

One thing's for certain: I will finish the whole twenty-five. It would be crazy not to. And there'll be another post on the final, official twenty-five, when it comes. I have no real idea when that's going to be. Entries closed nearly two weeks ago but all it says on the website is "check back later in the year for the results". 

I was hoping when I trailed the series that a few Blaugustians might join in and do 25s of their own (or 10s or 5s) but although I got more comments than I expected on my P25 posts the only one who came up with a list of their own was Mailvaltar. 

If anyone else fancies doing one it's not too late, you know. That's another lesson I learned from Blaugust. It's never too late to join in. I watched from the sidelines for several years before took the plunge. 

Actually, I didn't dive right in even then. My first year I shadowed Blaugust without signing up. Someone did that this year, I believe, although I forget who it was. It's a bit like when I play World vs World in Guild Wars 2 and run alongside a zerg without joining the squad. Sometimes that just feels freer, somehow.

There's no perfect way to blog and no perfect way to do Blaugust. That's another lesson. Do it your way. It's a platform and an opportunity and a club with no real entrance requirements other than a modicum of interest in blogging.

When it ends a lot of people feel a bit burned out or if not that then a little singed at edges. Others still feel the fire to write burning within. One incendiary metaphor too far? Thought so. 

No matter how we feel when it's over, next year most of us will be back for another round. Good old Blaugust! Good old Belghast! 

See you all back here, Summer 2022. Let's make it a date!