Wednesday 6th January

Now, long before playlists became the “thing”, long before i-players and mobile phones, I have had a playlist.  Indeed possibly from the first time I started buying records I have had a playlist of sorts.  But my system became established around the time I started taping all my vinyl albums onto cassettes; this was around ’76 or so.  And at the time I was constantly selling my old (taped) vinyl and buying new records with the proceeds and then taping those too, so how to get round to listen to everything?

Hence – the system; and now you must concentrate.  The first thing to remember is that it involves two revolving cycles, imagine two cog wheels of different sizes knitting together so that alternate teeth meet and at that point the album which is represented by one of the alternate teeth is played.  One cog wheel is my current collection, which is always alphabetical by Artists (and then by release date) and used to be all on cassette but is now CDs.  The other cogwheel is a smaller one of only eight new or recently purchased albums, and this is constantly being renewed as each new album is listened to nine times.  And the only real decision I have to make is which of the many new records to add to the playlist.  So, if the collection is represented by letters and the new stuff by numbers the sequence would be something like this…A 1 B 2 C 3 D 4 E 5 F 6 G 7 H 8 I 9(a new ‘new’ one) J 1 (now listened to 9 times and to be filed alphabetically and becomes part of the collection) K 2 L 3 M 4 N 5 O 6 P 7 Q 8 R 9 S 10 (another new one) T 2 (now filed) U 3 V 4 W 5 X 6 Y 7 Z 8 A 9….etc.  Well, if I have lost you now give up and read something else because it doesn’t stop here.

While I am here in France I listen to the collection bit on my laptop (burned from the CDs) but when at Walton the collection is old cassettes (again filed alphabetically) and throwing out any unplayable (remarkably few) and ones which are now on CD (remarkably many).  When I finish with the cassette collection I will revert to my CD single vault (don’t even go there, there are thousands) listening to three at a time.  Now as I am constantly adding (every ninth {or eighteenth to be accurate} play) to the collection it takes longer every cycle to go through my CDs from A to Z, but hey, as Magnus used to say, “I have started now so I will finish….”

Of course even me, super-brain, cannot possibly remember all of this and I have a spreadsheet (several in the past, as even these get filled up) of the current playlist.  Some of the more astute of you may be wondering exactly why I do this.  Well, it is a way of forcing me to really listen a few times to new stuff (which could otherwise be rejected after one or two listens) and also to constantly (if slowly) to re-listen to all my old favourites.  Occasionally, and far less often then you might think, I actually relegate one of the collection as un-listenable anymore and it is consigned to a box in the garage.  I feel that I am locked into my playlist and imagine that I will continue this system until a particularly grim reaper knocks at my door, but I have allowed myself one variation – on my flights back to UK I set the i-player to shuffle all songs which makes a change I suppose……If music be the food of love, play on….