(Disclaimer: The following represents the rantings of a grumpy old music lover. Please look away now if easily offended by differences of opinion.)
I’m in a local boozer supping a pint, as is my wont on a Friday evening. I’m relaxed and relatively at peace with the world. Then ‘All Right Now’ starts playing from the pub’s low-fi sound system, and I feel my spirits drop like a stone. Suddenly I feel anger. Why? I quite liked the track as a young’un, even though there were many other Free songs I liked far better. No, things have now, quite radically, changed. I think the reason for my sudden - or is it gradual - hatred of ‘All Right Now’ is simply that I’ve heard it about three hundred times more than anything else of its era. In other words, it’s battered my brain so much I’ve grown to dread and despise it.
It’s not the only offender. If I never heard ‘Paranoid’ (the track, not its parent album) again I wouldn’t shed any tears. Ditto ‘Freebird’ (which admittedly I’ve never liked), Smoke On The Water’, ‘Locomotive Breath’, ‘Stairway To Heaven’, ‘Rockin’ All Over The World’, ‘Layla’ (always the shitty short version), ‘Riders On The Storm’, ‘Highway To Hell’ and any number of those oh-so-obvious rock “classics” that appear on cheap supermarket CDs around Father’s Day every year. A pox on the lot of them. Fergawdssake man, these dudes made any number of better, lesser-known tracks. Can’t we, just every now and then, hear them instead of the bleeding obvious ones?
OK, rant over. I’m off yem to play some Faust.
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