Our Kid… memory playing tricks. Wafer thin production.

2. Better than Our Kid??? I haven’t heard their sole hit in years but in my mind it sounds like a Spector-lite pre-pubescent smash.

3. No Charge better than most Westlife no.1s???? Err, yes, of course you’re right.

Wikipedia page reveals that Mr Barrie is still alive and well, and approaching his 78th birthday in a few weeks. He’s also an ex-comedian, so I wonder if he’d have appreciated the Billy Connolly parody.

Bravo, my little caramel wafer! I was a bit of an Ethics Girl myself at one time.

I gave up quothing in 2003 on doctor’s orders.

“Grumpy Old Men” bang on about how great things used to be, whereas I’m more concerned about how things are going to be. Hence vinyl fetishists etc. have more in common with GOM than I do”.

Erm, Mr Child-Prodigy-Who-Went-To-Oxford, did they not teach you Logic amongst those dreaming spires?

“Grumpy Old Men” bang on about how great things used to be, whereas I’m more concerned about how things are going to be. Hence vinyl fetishists etc. have more in common with GOM than I do.

A friend of mine was once shocked to see me ranting away on an episode of GOM before he realised it was Ken Stott.

Which is why we have all those great films of Cab Calloway, Louis jordan, etc, and not of all those ‘white-only’ acts that always played to their people in the nice theatres….

(My personal insult of choice is “Joolsbait” though)

But it’s actually a good deal more complex than this, even in the 30s or the 50s or the 70s, and I’m not actually sure that music in the age of the free download entirely conforms to the same protocols.

Did you find that on K-Tel compilation LPs in particular the volume was markedly lower, so as to cope with groove cramming?

Incidentally, I love how after 340 posts we get from JJ Barrie to a silly Cnut.

There’s a more complex question about human attention span, though*: a song that’s one second long is a novelty, and a song that’s (say) five hours long is a rarity — it tends to be thought of as a “work”, and will have breaks built in (like the chapters and volumes in very long 19th century books). If anything the thing that’s seems to have become “sticky” is the notion of the “album” as a quasi-unified collection of short semi-autonomous pieces; this isn’t strictly speaking an invention of rock culture, but the modes of its elaboration and its bedding in to the unconscious levels of our reception both are. To the extent that non-rock musics are battling to free themselves from its grip — dance music probably is, rap certainly isn’t — they are fighting against something they need to be understood; the militant energy of resistance would evaporate the moment the earlier form was actually culturally forgotten.

*Stockhausen had a theory about what he called “octaves” of time — different clusters of timespan that demanded different mode of attention (the timespan of the note is roughly 0.05-1 second, for example; and there’s the timespan of the melodic phrase, the timespan of the song, the timespan of the movement, the timespan of the work, the timespan of the ritual, and so on up… ) (He articulated it semi-scientifically, and it actually falls apart as science I think — but as sociology or ethnology it’s interesting to see what the similiarities of attention-span are between different cultures)