The I-Pod, A-Z for the holidays. & A-Ha

According to the I-pod I have 17 + days of listening. This is good. Because I've been having one of those times that I hate, when nothing at all springs to mind when I ask myself the question "what do I want to listen to?".
To battle this horrible condition I have decided that for the foreseeable future I shall be soundtracking my life in a simple, non-descision making manner. I set it off at the first bit of music I had and am going to keep going through the alphabet.

Tonight it was A-Ha, Act, Adam & The Ants, Afrika Bambaata, Algebra Suicide & Anandar Shankar. I took the editorial decision to skip the spoken word stuff as I wanted stuff to work to and spoken word tends to make me listen harder and ruins writing. So no Alan Davies or Alan Moore.

It certainly means I'm going to listen to some stuff I haven't heard for a while. And also points out some of the more embaressing / interesting / insane bits of the collection. Indeed from the artsists above I think you can see the prevalence of 80s acts and electronic pioneers quite well. & don't take the piss out of A-Ha. I've loved them from first hearing Take On Me. Of course, like Duran Duran, I initially dismissed them as far too poppy and light for a serious Cure fan to really love.

But with A-Ha the turning point came, as so many things do when you're a young teen, after being given the tape of Scoundrel Days by a girlfriend. After that we promptly broke up and I spent nights wandering around playing this on the crappy Saisho personal stereo, weeping profusely. Things like that stay with you.

So after that I started paying more attention. There's a couple of duff albums in the band's output (Memorial Beach, Lifelines) , but overall they're a pleasure to come back to.