Totally Shuffled: A Year of Listening to Music
Extract from Totally Shuffled: A Year of Listening to Music on A Broken iPod (Kindle Edition):
I was a bit stumped when this came up. Not
because it was unexpected, but because I wasn’t really sure what or how I
was going to write about.
It’s not as if this is some widely experimental track that is so
far off the radar that it would warrant something off at a tangent-it’s a
great rocksteady classic. It’s not as if I’ve got a bad case of
writers’ block or anything either; over the last
six months I’ve always managed to string a few words together about any
track that comes up. Sometimes the track that comes up is so
self-evidently good that there’s nothing more that really needs to be
said about it. It’s like the Ronseal of music-it does
what it says on the record.
There are two things however, that sort of
stem from this track. Firstly, a treasured CD I have that was ripped
from On The Wire (a BBC Radio Lancashire show). I’ve written about this
programme before but for now, it suffices to say
that On The Wire was not typical local BBC Radio fare. This particular
CD was ripped from a three-hour special broadcast sometime around 2001
and entitled “The A to Z of Jamaican Vocal Music”. It started with The
Abyssinians and went all the way through the
alphabet to The Wailing Souls. Not strictly therefore an A- Z ,but
close enough. It was a brilliant journey through ska and rock steady. As
I had recorded it on three different cassette tapes and just copied it
to a hard drive without editing, it still has
got the intros to all the tracks from the DJ’s; which to me is a good
thing, as it was a useful primer and gave me an avenue into the myriad
worlds of Jamaican labels, artists and producers. However, as I didn’t
edit it, there still is the local news from
Lancashire on the Sunday afternoon when I recorded it. Becoming
slightly more technically proficient and having the software on the
laptop, I have often thought of editing it out, but somehow if I lost
the link between Carlton & the Shoes “Love Me Forever”
and traffic conditions on the outskirts of Fleetwood something would be
lost forever. Alton Ellis did crop up in the broadcast with this very
song although it’s on the iPod from another route altogether, but I
wouldn’t have got it unless I’d heard that On
The Wire show.
The second thing is that for ages this show
has been something that I’ve kept copied in lots of different formats;
you know, “just in case”. Every single PC and laptop I’ve had has had a
copy of it and every mp3 player (from really
cheap ones with limited capacity to 80 gig iPods), and there are at
least three copies of it burned onto CDrs scattered around the house.
Just in case all the hard drives are wiped and all the mp3 players break
I’ve got it backed up. (It’s also on a pen drive
somewhere I think). All this now seems slightly redundant, as not only
can I get all the tracks without too much messing about from the
internet, but the proliferation of excellent box-set compilations at
prices that years ago would have seemed impossibly
cheap means that there really is no need to be so paranoid about losing
it. (Just in case the unexpected happens, I have all the tracks written
down in case I have to resurrect it. I’ve also saved the track listing
as a word document and in excel on the laptop.
And on a pen drive as well).
Rick Leach's blog can be found at:
posted by On the Wire at 12:32 PM
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