It's Just Me, Myself and I

So why set this up right now? Well, as ever with blogs, purely for selfish reasons really. Firstly it's to make it easier when I go back through the year and jog my memory as to how I loved/hated/ was indifferent to various albums. Which (hopefully) means I'll be busy for a while as I tend to spend a fair bit of disposable income on music - I've bought 70 albums released in 2010 alone, no idea how many that expands to if you include albums from past years.

And my perspective? Well, I'm way beyond the NME's target audience, but I still buy it because I want the latest cheap thrill. Mojo's still too fusty for me and Q's shifted away from my tastes into the lifestyle section, but The Word tends to be my favourite magazine at the moment, although it often skews just older than me. The first album I ever bought was Madonna's Like A Virgin, the first singles (in one fell swoop) were Do They Know It's Christmas? by Band Aid and Ghostbusters by Ray Parker Jnr. The song I loved as a kid was Eleanor Rigby by The Beatles (yeah, I *was* a strange kid, ok?), hence those moptops hooked me from a young age. The first song to really blow my mind was R.E.M.'s Losing My Religion (nothing to do with the video, I never saw it until 1995), hence the first album to make me realise music could be so much more than simply a disposable background hum was Out of Time. I adored Britpop, but always tried to look beyond it, to where it had come from and looking at what else was out there. And I still try to do that to this day. I don't believe in ghettoising music into genres, I find it becomes an excuse to prejudge a record. Oh yeah, and my first concert was The Alarm in February 1990, my last one Marina and the Diamonds a couple of weeks ago. And above all, if someone's passionate about a record, that's enough to persuade me it's worth a listen. Because if it inspires passion, there must be some point to it.

Yeah. So that's me.

And what am I going to chuck in here? Well, my thoughts on current albums and songs of course but also a few random thoughts on music, whenever it came from. That's the general idea, anyway. I have no idea how the music industry does (or doesn't work), nor of why a series of noises emitted by a particular instrument can be so compelling. I only have an idea of how I respond. So that's what this blog is; a document of my responses to music and maybe, just maybe me getting some vague inkling of why I respond like that.