A musical odyssey

Streaming? Er...

I watched an episode of Top of the Pops from 1986 earlier.

At the time it was originally broadcast, I was 18. Yes, I am that old. At that point in my life, I’d grown up absolutely loving music. TOTP was one of my essential sources of the all important new songs and chart placings, along with Radio 1’s Top 40 show.

I was buying lots of vinyl. Recording lots of cassettes. Things were fantastic. But I was just getting the first inkling that there were new styles, bands and artists appearing that – and this was quite a shock to me – I wasn’t particularly enthralled by. Why? Well, up to that point I’d assumed my love of all types of music would be everlasting. To discover otherwise was a bit of shock.

Still, the years rolled by and there was still a lot of great music around. True, Rave/House never did anything for me, and most Rap doesn’t float my boat. Sections of the 1990s were rubbish, from my point of view. I was buying lots of CDs. And still recording tapes too.

Time marches on. At some point I gave up watching TOTP unless I knew someone I liked was going to be on. I didn’t worry too much if I missed the Chart Show. My car no longer had a cassette deck.

Eventually, Radio 1 itself became too grating and I was startled to discover I preferred Radio 2. Me? Radio 2?! How did that happen?

Wind the tape forward to the present day, and I gave up radio altogether a couple of years ago. Still buy CDs now and again, do download some stuff, have a hard drive full of MP3s. Haven’t quite managed to switch to streaming.

Have I given up on new music? Definitely not. YouTube is my friend now. If I look for a song on there, it’ll suggest some others when I finish playing it. That route has led me to discover The Ting Tings, Public Service Broadcasting, Hayley Kiyoko and loads of other great artists. Different genres. Older bands. Brand new stuff. No preconceptions or opinions (as long as you avoid the comments).

Just this week, I’ve discovered that two of my favourites, veteran French synth genius Jean Michel Jarre and Within Temptation, the Dutch symphonic metal band (and an entirely different style), have new albums out soon. It’s like my youthful discovery of amazing music all over again. Without the inane DJs, or my Dad telling me to turn it down.

This post first appeared as my "A wry look at the week" column, in The Mail, on Friday the 21st of September 2018. The print version was re-titled as "My hit parade is different now" (and accompanied by a picture of cassettes), whilst the online version... wow... well, that got re-titled as "Peter Grenville looks back to when music was brilliant", but missed the first line off, starting with "At the time it was originally broadcast..." rendering it a bit nonsensical. It was also listed as "By Peter Grenville's Friday column". Yeah. Go figure...

Struggled a bit with this one. I was knackered when I wrote it, and uninspired by anything in the news, so it was perhaps a little desperate. Must try harder. I'd like to say I've slept well, but a failing battery in a smoke alarm meant I was rudely awakened at 5am this morning.

(CD A-Z: Listening to Altered Images' "Pinky Blue" as part of a box set that arrived recently. Ooh, the album version of "I Could Be Happy" is rather fantastic. Only taken me 36 years to discover that.)

Shouting in the social media mirror

It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...

A fisful of change at the shops

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Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

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