Into every life a little rain must fall...

Some days are better than others. The last time we looked, I'd just had a day full of corking albums. But as rain follows sun, Ying follows Yang and dogs follow you if you have a biscuit, then there was probably going to be some less than great tunes on the horizon.

This was that day.

So we spin the wheel, and what do we kick off with?

Dixie Chicks - Wide Open Spaces

I think I've mentioned this, but both Matt and I have stuff on our iPod that belongs to our better halves. And this was one of mine. Or rather, not one of mine. One of Katie's.

Country music. There's an old joke about it that goes:

What do you get if you play Country music backwards?

You get your house back, your wife back, you sober up and your dog returns from the dead.

For years, country music was the sole preserve of chaps who dressed like cowboys, strummed acoustc guitars and sang with a particular nasal twang. But a few years back a new trend emerged.

Young women.

I blame Shania Twain myself.

Suddenly there's lots of young girls playing fiddles, (or is it violins? What is the difference between a fiddle and a violin?), guitars and so on, singing about whatever it is that country singers bang on about.

It was ok. A bit overproduced, but some half decent tunes. All of which doesn't go down particularly well in Nashville apparently - not proper, but there you go.

DSP rating - 6

Surely things would look up after this? Well sort of...

Leftfield - Rhythm & Stealth

It's serious dance music, as opposed to, say, something like D.I.S.C.O. by Ottowan.

I bought it because it had Phat Planet on it. Well that and the fact that I'd bought their first album and quite liked it.

You'll know Phat Planet, even if you don't recognise the title.

Remember that Guinness advert? The one with the grizzled old surfer?

Something about sitting and waiting, because that's what he does? And then he finally goes out into the breakers, and there's all these CGI horses out there too?

And all the time, there's these heavily processed drums, going Dum de da dum de da da. Dum de da dum de da da.

Well that's Phat Planet.

I don't think I'd heard the rest of the album for ages. On reflection, I think I was pleasantly surprised.

DSP rating - 7

Ok, so maybe things are actually looking up!

Or maybe not.

Another of my beloved's CD's. And it made the Dixie Chicks look like Beethoven.

Let Loose - Let Loose

Oh dear...

Matt chose this because, apparently, they played a gig in his home town of Lowestoft and about eight people turned up. I may have got this wrong - I'm sure he'll correct me if he ever turns up.

Now to be fair, I quite liked the single, Crazy For You. It was catchy, in a disposable pop kind of way. Sadly the rest of the album was just disposable. I sat through it, because that's how Shuffleman works.

But I didn't enjoy it.

DSP rating - 4

Right. Time for one more today - let's make it a corker!

Hmmm.

William Orbit - Pieces In A Modern Style

William Orbit, or William Wainwright as they probably still call him at home, has been around for a while, but probably came to most people's attention when he worked with Madonna on her Ray Of Light album. You may remember the single 'Frozen'. It had a very distinctive style - a sort of electronica / strings mash up type of affair.

This was Mr Orbit's doing, and appears to be his signature style. This particular album is a collection of fairly faithful renditions of classical pieces, done with electronics. I have a String Quartet doing the entire 'Back In Black' album by AC/DC.

This is nothing like that.

I have to say I quite like it in small doses, particularly as it has two of my favourite classical pieces on it - Barber's Adagio For Strings, and Mascagni's 'Cavalleria Rusticana'.

As an hour's worth of music though? It would be great as something on in the background, or something to shut your eyes to if you'd just come in after a hard day, but it's not really something that you'd want to listen to, from end to end.

Even so, I give it a DSP rating - 7

Meanwhile, on an iPod in another part of town...

If you read the introduction to this blog (it's up there on right, go on, have a look), you will know that the Shuffleman project is a two-man operation. Indeed, if roles were being awarded then I would be 'Goose' to Matt's 'Maverick', being as this whole thing was his idea.

So you may be wondering why it is that this has all been a bit one-sided so far, with me describing the soundtracks to my days, and Matt being rather silent on the whole thing.

He'll probably show up at some point, with some nonsense about trying to move house, and being busy and so on.

Yeah, right.

Obviously all the time Matt's picking albums for me, I'm picking one for him. Not one for one obviously - he must have had four or five while I was ploughing through that Irish Folk thing - but he's had plenty.

And that gives me a little window into his world. A couple of times a day, he gives me five albums to choose from. Now I don't know about you, but when I visit someone's house, if I get the opportunty to trawl through their record collection then I do.

It gives you an insight into their personality in a way that few other things do, as music's a very individual thing. If you find half a dozen 'Now That's What I Call Music...' CD's and a Jamie Cullum album, then you can be fairly sure that they don't like music at all - they just want some background noise at dinner parties.

So gradually I've been building up a picture of Matt's iPod.

And it's not good...

I'd estimate that it consists of:

30% Chillout

25% Indie/Pop from 1985 - 2005

15% Rap / R&B

15% Urban

15% Mr Scruff

The Indie pop is largely ok. The Rap/R&B/Urban is not to my taste, but it seems to be good quality examples of the genre. I can't knock the Chillout - courtesy of my wife, I have a handful of Chillout albums on the little white box, and now and again it's good to have some relaxing

background 'choons', but he seems to have tons of the stuff!

But Mr Scruff...

I've never heard of Mr Scruff. The first time (and indeed, for comedy value, every subsequent time) he came up, I had to ask 'Who the hell is Mr Scruff?' Matt pointed me to his wiki, which you can find here. He seems to be one of these DJ people who seems to want some sort of credit for playing other people's music!

Let's get something straight. I own a CD player and a pile of CD's. That does NOT make me a musician, any more than being able to walk into a supermarket and buy a cake makes me Mr Kipling!

This is a quote from Mr Scruff, or as his mother calls him, Andy Carthy.

"It’s about putting a lot of effort in and paying attention to detail. I get annoyed if I don’t take risks. I’m very hard on myself."

You. Buy. CDs. And. You. Play. Them. To. People.

Effort? Attention to detail? Taking Risks?

F&%$ Off!

Sorry. I don't have much time for DJ's, even if they do try to set themselves apart from the crowd by brewing and selling tea at his shows, as Mr Scruff does.

Watch out! He's ker-azy!

Reading that back, maybe it was a little harsh. After all, if a proper musician gets a sale because somebody heard one of their songs at a Mr Scruff 'gig', then I guess it's a good thing.

But why Matt has a pile of CDs of some bloke playing other people's music is beyond me. Although it maybe that it's actually Mr Scruff remixes of other songs.*

In any event - Holmes! Sort your record collection out!

Hilariously, he said the other day that he has some new music coming.

Including James Blunt.

Oh I can't wait for that to turn up...

* Remix : To take a perfectly good song and make it worse. Indeed, in some cases making it completely unidentifiable as the original tune. I don't think I've ever heard a remix that improved on the original.

That'll do, pig.

Another day, another selection.

Sometimes I get into work buzzing, and I think 'Let's have a bit of rock, or something that's really motoring.' Other times, to borrow a phrase from my wife, 'I'm not quite ready for my day.' And this was one of those days.

Music can really jar if you're not in the mood for it. Something slow and quiet when you're fired up can be as irritating as loud music when you've got a headache.

Interestingly (well, to me anyway), I remember reading something about this ages ago. If you want to use music to change your (or somebody else's) mood, the trick is to match the mood, then slowly alter it.

So if you're furious about something, putting on some relaxing Cowboy Junkies or similar is likely to exacerbate the problem.

But put something shouty like Iron Maiden on and you'll probably enjoy shouting along for a track or two. Then take it down a notch - maybe some Bon Jovi or Bryan Adams (the rocky stuff, not the ballads) - then a few tracks later, take it down again.

In half an hour you can go from hopping mad to chilled out.

Trust me! It works.

Anyway, like Ronnie Corbett in that bit of the Two Ronnies where he sits in the chair and tells a long, rambling story, I digress.

I'd come in, and I could have done with something easy on the ears. But it wasn't my choice.

I threw the five over to Matt and waited to see what he'd pick. And as luck would have it, he picked a good 'un!

I like film soundtracks. Sometimes I buy them specifically because I like the music, other times I'll buy them as they're a great reminder of a good film. This was a bit of both.

Babe. The one about the pig that's brought up as a sheepdog.

It's got a great mix of 'proper soundtrack music', and songs. Although many of the songs were sung by the farmyard animals, the mice being particular stars - "If I Had Words" sounds like a UB40 song being sung by Pinky & Perky on helium.

Which isn't as bad as it sounds.

Anyway - good start to the day.

DSP rating - 7

And I stayed on a film theme for the next album, 'Simply The Best Movie Album, Ever'.

Modesty clearly has no place in a music marketing department...

This was a mixed bag of songs from recent-ish films. The entertainment industry has become a very incestuous affair in the last 30 years or so, with songs promoting films and the films being used as videos for the songs (which almost certainly come from artists who just happen to have a new album coming out).

Some are huge - I suspect there are more people who own the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack than have seen the film.

And Top Gun, which ought to carry a health warning, given the amount of cheese it contains, is fantastic. This was soundtrack-put-out-to-tender. The film was almost complete and a good way through the editing suite when the studio touted scenes from the film and asked artists to turn up and 'audition' songs. Kenny Loggins did very well out of it. Not only did he sing the main theme - 'Danger Zone', which was written with Giorgio Moroder, but he also had 'Playing With The Boys', for the volleyball scene. He said he chose that particular one because he thought that not many other people would.

Takes all the romance out of the movies, doesn't it?

Anyway - good CD.

DSP rating - 7

Now we're talking...

The greatest band in the world - and this is not my opinion, this is FACT! - is Rush.

If you've not heard of them, they're a Canadian prog-rock power trio, and they're the greatest band in the world. Nip over to Amazon and buy their entire back catalogue (it's quite big, they've been going since 1974) - I can wait.

Back?

Rush vary between very, very good and excellent, although as I am completely unbiased, I can see that not all of their output is stellar. A few years ago they put out an album called Vapor Trails, and it was heavy on the riffs and light on the tunes. Not one of my favourites.

Though if you read up on what had happened to the band in the prevous five years, it was a small miracle that we got an album at all.

Anyway. Since then, they have most certainly got back in the groove, and the last album, Snakes & Arrows, from 2007 is the best thing they've done in years.

It's safe to say that the three of them are getting on a bit. I went to see them live in 1988, and again in 1992. And then it all went a bit quiet. Their European follwing isn't huge compared to the States, and for a while it wasn't commercially viable for them to tour over here.

But then, in 2005, they rolled the R30 Thirtieth Anniversary Tour into Europe, and more interestingly for me, to Wembley Arena.

For two nights.

One of which was my wife Katie's birthday.

Katie was going to have lots more birthdays... these guys might announce their retirement at the end of the tour!

So we went.

Both nights.

And then as luck would have it, two years later - they were back.

At Wembley.

For two nights.

Over Katie's birthday...

Clearly the likelihood of this being their last tour of the UK had increased.

So we went again.

Both nights.*

And this time the album they were promoting was Snakes & Arrows. Some time later, they put out 'Snakes & Arrows - Live', and some time after that, Matt picked it as my next Shuffleman album.

It's great. Really great. Really, really... well you get the idea.

Fantastic music, staggering musicianship, great lyrics.

And a drum solo.

DSP rating - 10 (like it was going to be anything else)

Well, well, well. Matt was clearly on a roll today! He was flying blind as he had, by his own admission, got no idea who this lot were or what the album was like, but it was another top pick.

Interestingly, fact fans, I had no idea what this album was like when I bought it, in HMV in Enfield. It's one of only two albums that I've bought solely on the strength of the cover, knowing nothing at all about the artists at all.

It was... Magnum - On A Storytellers Night.

Another slice of prog, though from Birmingham rather than Toronto this time. This is probably (though I'm willing to be corrected), Magnum's finest hour. It has a Swords & sorcery / faires & goblins feel to it, though that's probably more down to the cover than anything else. A good slab of tunes, from hard rock to some lighter-waving ballads.

DSP rating - 8

(The other album I picked up on the cover alone, if you were wondering, was Warren Zevon's 'Transverse City')

* For those who think that I've been incredibly mean to my beloved, Katie does actually like Rush.

A bit.

A word about those ratings...

Journalists of all varieties, who have to review things for a living, spend ages crafting their words. Be it a paragraph or a page, they try to distill their thoughts into a carefully thought out piece which gives the reader an insight into the CD / game / film / whatever, to hopefully aid them into deciding whether to spend their hard earned cash on said product.

But what does the reader invariably do?

Head straight to the bottom and look at the score.

Usually it's a score out of 10. Sometimes it's a score out of 100. Occasionally (and I've never understood the logic behind this), it's a score out of 5.

A videogames magazine that I used to read would give a score out of 10 at the end of the review. And then in one issue, as an experiment, they left the scores off.

The howls of protest on the letters page the following month were matched by the cheers of those who approved this brave move. I guess it takes all sorts.

Me, I quite like them. If I'm flicking through a music magazine and I know I won't have time to read it all, I'll skim through looking for the highest rated albums in case there's something interesting. Most magazines don't give 10's / 100's / 5's (delete as appropriate) lightly, so if something has scored well, then I'm curious.

Conversely, a friend of mine used to look through Q magazine, looking for the 1 star reviews, claiming that they were as entertaining if not more so, than the high scoring albums.

Takes, as I believe I mentioned earlier, all sorts.

So I've decided to give my reviews a score out of 10. They're not the product of any scientific thought, or the sum total of a number of sub-dissections - they're just the score out of 10 that springs to mind after I've listened to it.

Actually, it's the score out of 11, as I'm including zero as a valid score.

For interest, here are the thoughts behind each score.

The DSP scale of musical appreciation.

0 : This is not good. This is not good at all. The only possible reason for owning this is to play when you have guests who won't take the hint and go home at the end of the evening. And even then it's questionable. And you'll want to be out of the room while it's on. Preferably in the hall, getting their coats.

1 : Look long enough and hard enough, and you may - possibly - find some small redeeming feature on this album. Ask yourself 'Do I have that much spare time?' I doubt it.

2 : Well I've heard worse. But not very often.

3 : Maybe there's one good track on here, amidst an album of dross. These days you can just download that one track, but when I bought this, it was the album or nothing.

4 : This is… ok. You wouldn't run back into a burning building to save it, but you wouldn't throw it out either. Nearly average.

5 : Whereas this is average. Not awful, not amazing. Or maybe there's a couple of great tracks that are evened out by some tosh. Either way, the scales of taste settle right in the middle.

6 : This is more like it. The good outweighs the bad. Maybe there's some poor stuff on here, but you wouldn't worry if a guest rummaged through your CD collection and pulled this out.

7 : Quality album. A diamond in the waste. There's good stuff on here. One of the mainstays of a CD collection. If you haven't got this, you ought to seriously consider it.

8 : This is the cat's pyjamas. This is a no-messing, rock-solid-dependable great album. You may put this on at any time without fear of criticism. If anybody does criticise, it's because they've got poor taste, not you.

9 : This is the Mona Lisa with a hair out of place. A supermodel with a ladder in her stocking. A Four Seasons pizza with a single anchovy. Almost, but not quite, perfection.

10 : Buy this album. Buy it now! Sell children or body parts to finance the purchase if need be, but BUY IT. Now!

Go!

GO!

The highs and lows of Shuffleman...

From the off, I decided to keep a list of all the albums that Matt let me enjoy / subjected me to*.

Which is just as well, as it's taken me bloody ages to get round to writing this up...

So. Consulting the list, what was the next batch of albums to emerge, blinking, into the light, from my little box of wonders?

First up, The Avalanches - 'Since I Left You'.

I'd bought this when it first came out, in 2001, off the back of the title track / single. It had a fascinating gestation, made by two Aussies, and was basically a cut 'n' paste job of about 3,500 samples. You can read it's wiki entry here - do, because it's fascinating.

Like many of my albums, I'd listened to snippets here and there, and the singles, which, if memory serves correctly, were the title track, plus 'Frontier Psychiatrist'.

Before I met my wife, the lovely Katie, I had a gaping hole in my music collection. I had nothing that I would class as 'Dance music'. I had proper dance music - stuff that I would dance to at a wedding : 70's and 80's finest. The Bee Gees, Earth, Wind & Fire, Odyssey - you know the sort of thing.

I might have to put some on now - I'm a great dancer.

But not "dance" music. The sort of 80's / 90's stuff made by serious looking people hunched over keyboards in studios, and usually fronted by a woman with a big pair of lungs. I heard three or four songs and just wrote off the whole genre as 'rubbish'.

Katie, on the other hand, had bought quite a lot of this stuff. Usually after having been out all night listening to it and throwing shapes to it in some club until the small hours...

In January 2000, when I moved in with my wife-to-be, I winced as my CD collection became... contaminated... by this awful stuff.

But strangely, it appeared that, while Top Of The Pops had played exclusively crap dance music, some good stuff had made it though.

And Katie had bought a lot of it.

So my eyes became opened to the possibility that not all dance music was rubbish.

And it was under this heading that I assumed 'Since I Left You' would be filed. But you know what?

It wasn't.

It's just great music. Most of the time it's good, foot-tapping tunes, and every now and again a sample so recognisable would pop up that I'd have to stop and rummage through the recesses of my brain, thinking 'where did that come from?'

DSP rating : 7

But it was soon gone, and followed with...

Ah! I remember this.

Matt and I communicate at work with an 'instant messenger' type bit of software called Sametime. Unlike email, where you are presented with a finished document, Sametime pushes the text over to the recipient every time you hit the return key, and so when we send each other the next five choices, we see them

arrive

one

at

a

time.

This next album was the first or second on the list, but as soon as Matt saw the title, he said that he instantly disregarded whatever the next three or four were. He had no idea what it was, but the title was enough.

It was a coverdisc that had come with a copy of Classic Rock magazine, as it turns out, and it was called 'Rock Hellraisers'.

Which, I have to agree, as titles go, is pretty good.

This turned out to be a mix of of old campaigners like the New York Dolls, the Quireboys and the Black Crowes (I have an opinion on the Black Crowes which I shall expound upon at some point in the future), and unknowns (to me anyway), like Foxtrot Oscar and Jaded Sun.

I tend to be wary of free coverdiscs, largely because there's no such thing as a free coverdisc.

That CD wasn't put together by some music hack, thinking 'This is going to be an awesome CD full of the greatest music ever!'. It's a CD put together by someone juggling the requests of record companies who want a track from their artists' new album on there and the need to put a few recognisable artists names' on the cover to pull in the wavering punter. Which is why you often end up with things like an unreleased outtake of a early single's 'B' side by a BIG NAME ARTIST!

But over the years, I've found that Classic Rock tends to be a fairly reliable choice, and so it was. A bunch of good rocking tunes from start to finish. But then that sort of thing goes down well in our house. If we're not listening to Radio 4, there's a good chance we're listening to Planet Rock. A radio station that believes in, well, Rock with a capital 'R' and not a lot else, basically.

DSP rating : 6

So that CD came to a close, and I was (metaphorically) pumping my fist and banging my head. Let's keep rawking! I would have typed to Matt.

But it turns out that Matt, however, can be a complete ba***rd when he wants to be.

History does not record what the other four choices on this particular selection were. Just the one that he picked.

'The Irish Folk Collection'

As mentioned previously, when you get an unfamiliar selection, the first thing you do is check how many songs there are on an album, just in case it's a duffer. This, it turned out, was a 4CD set. And I'd imported them as one collection.

60 songs...

I could hear the laughter from six floors down...

Now there may be some people who are puzzled by this. Not Matt laughing - as I said, he can be a vindictive so-and-so when he wants to. But my heart sinking at 60 Irish Folk songs.

"Surely it's your iPod. Surely it's your music. What's the problem?"

Let me explain.

A while ago, Katie & I decided to undertake some voluntary work, and both being music fans, Katie noticed a request for volunteers at our local hospital radio station that sounded up our street. We duly volunteered, were accepted, and spent just about every Monday night for the next six years creating a two hour program with our 'presenter', Nigel, who became a firm friend. We'd get all sorts of requests, and despite the station having a wide variety of music, it didn't have everything.

So, knowing that a patient who requested something obscure would, in all likelihood, still be there the following Monday, quite often I'd take advantage of having the country's biggest record shop just down the road from my office, and I'd go and pick up some of this stuff.

Hence the Irish Folk.

At least most of the songs were mercifully short.

I don't remember much about this album to be honest. It's just a vague memory of people leaving, people returning, people dying, people going off to war, and a lot of singing about green things. Green trees, green leaves, the green, (and the rub of it).

And penny whistles. Lots of penny whistles.

When the iPod is on shuffle at home, and one of these songs comes up, it's a novel distraction for a couple of minutes.

When you have to listen to three hours, four minutes and 2 seconds of it, it's a whole different ball game.

Obviously you can't sit listening to music in the office all day - you have to talk to people, go to meetings, answer the phone, eat lunch. Which means that a three hour album can take more than three hours to listen to. If I remember rightly, this album took eight years to get through.

Well that's what it felt like, anyway.

But eventually, some time the next day, maybe the day after, I finished the seemingly endless tales of men walking over hills with pigs under their arms.

DSP rating : 3

What was up next?

Who cares? Anything was going to be better!

And it was!

'Lionel Richie & The Commodores - The Definitive Collection'

The good stuff was great! Brick House, Dancing On The Ceiling, All Night Long, Easy.

Even the bad stuff ("Hello", I'm looking at you!) was ok.

Today, music is made in bedrooms by spotty teenagers with a PC and a keyboard.

Back then, music was made by musicians. Musicians who had learned their craft, could actually play, and could write a good tune.

And when they'd written that good tune, and played it to the best of their ability, they'd go and hire a mahoosive orchestra to put lush strings - real strings mind, not 'Strings 4' from the YamaRolorg XY42J8(a) super-synth - on the back of it, to make it sound even better!

DSP rating : 7

On the whole, a good couple of days.

*Given that most of the music on the iPod is mine, there's not a lot of suffering. I have impeccable taste.