Friday 25 March 2011

2nd March 2011 1:2:3

I like to have a general 'listening to things' routine - years ago you had the choice of music, analog radio and good old fashioned humming. Now, thanks to wonderful world of science and technology, there is a full catalogue of podcasts and digital radio stations that have been thrown into the mix.

Usually my Wednesday commute to work is taken up by listening to the Spurs Show podcast on the way in and BBC 6 Music on the way home. The fact that someone over 100 miles away took the decision to record their podcast a day later than usual caused me a commute crisis this morning....

....or it would have done if it wasn't for Choose My Music!

So the call went out this morning and was answered by Dom Walsh (who I mentioned in the last post). A guy who I have communicated  and done music projects with, yet have never met. He would be one of my Twitter Bffs if I was down with how them kids like to speak.

Dom chose the combination 1:2:3 (that's Bay 1, Row 2, Cd 3 for the new people). So today I listened to:

Badly Drawn Boy - Have You Fed The Fish?
Have You Fed The Fish

Badly Drawn Boy has always been one of those artists where it has really taken me time to get into them. Arcade Fire were a similar band - I got a copy of their Funeral album not long after release and it took me months to truly appreciate it - BDB is no different.

I remember when this album was released in 2002 - I had just started working as Manager for Music Zone in Burton on Trent (after a stint of managing Andy's Records in Ipswich). The album was quite highly anticipated after the eventual success of his début and the About A Boy OST, which was released just a few months prior.

After my first listen I was very unimpressed, second listen I started to slag it off, third listen I was sick of it...lucky for me my Assistant Manager at the time loved it and played it virtually every morning - I am not at what point it all clicked in my head but I landed up starting to enjoy it.

Now, it could be argued that if you feed a prisoner Marmite every day for a month they would eventually land up accepting it as a suitable bread based condiment - and perhaps my enforced listening to this album eventually got me to like....essentially how commercial radio play lists work, cranking out some dirge of a song repetitively which embeds so much into your brain the next thing you know, you are standing in the queue at HMV.

I'm not sure how long it has been since I last heard the album fully - but I do truly love it. I think the real reason it took me so long to like it is because listening to it while buzzing around in my shop meant I never really got to 'hear' it. There is depth, texture and great lyrics - something which is never immediately apparent upon a first listen.

This album did also make me feel a little guilty. I have a couple more Badly Drawn Boy albums which were released after Have You Fed The Fish? and never got into them....perhaps I need to try again.

1 comment:

  1. Badly Drawn Boy actually went to the same college as me in Bolton. The tune Disillusion off Hour Of Bewilderbeast is set in that area of Bolton i'm led to believe.

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