Julian Cope presents Head Heritage

Yeah I'm guilty of that one. What's it's done for me though is have a bad effect. I'm sick to death of music in general and feel saturated to the point where nothing musically excites me anymore.

I'm very much with you on that.

I listen to everything I buy, find or get given but according to iTunes it would take me 208 days (presumably without sleep) to listen to everything I own including spoken word. When I joined the move towards digital in 2002 and loaded up my cds on to my hard drive I had a about a tad over a quarter of that. So in six years I've quadrupled a collection that had taken decades to build. A lot of it live recordings and radio plays etc but still. That's a crazy amount to get a handle on.

Every day I find myself starting off with good intentions and then part of a tune or a riff or a vocal inflection will remind me of another artist or album and I'm off. Just this am I went from Lisa Gerrard to This Mortal Coil to Chris Bell to Cheap Trick to Big Star to Matthew Sweet to Richard Hell in less than an hour. It's like a game of aural six degrees of separation on fast forward. And I'm doing all this while working so I am not really listening at all.

There is something in me that craves a return to having 400 or 500 great vinyl lps across the genres, binning off the cds and digital.

Digital is great for spoken word and for bootlegs but I feel that I need to
get back to some serious listening. And that either requires a narrower focus or the kind of discipline as a listener that I simply don't have.

maybe that's the thing right there -- "punk" severed popular music from musicianship, and it became more of a "star system."

1. "Punk" didn't severe popular music from musicianship. Loads of 'punk' bands had members who were good musicians. It was more a reaction against the likes of ELP and Yes where the contents seemed to be more about musicians abilty than the actual music.

2. There was a star system waaaay before punk. 'Punk' was surely as anti-star as it ever was anti-muso.

3. How did 'punk' lead to a star system. I really don't follow.

4. Technical ability is even more over-rated than Randy Newman. Idea's are far more important than musical ability will ever be.

You wouldn't say you prefer one author to another because his handwriting is neater, would you? ; )

Who knows what the next few years will bring in terms of technology? What kind of music, for example, would a device harnessing brainwaves and converting them into sound, make?

then calcification/convenience: the silliness of goth, electropop, SAW, industrial, smiths, C86, gated reverb, keyboard bass instead of real: all areas of lessening ability

Rubbish. There's load of ability there. And I don't just mean Johnny Marr's guitar playing, though if we all just just cared about musicianship, then we'd all sit at home and listen to John Williams LP's all day.

That's why I think there's more to music than musicianship. TBH I prefer SAW's way with a tune to Keith Emerson's Piano Improvisations any day.

Lots of great singles in a Nuggets / Pebbles kind-of-a-way but very little evidence of extended creativity unless you count Art Rockers like Wire and Pop Group and Go4. But they were not Punk.

4 Can could play, Magic Band could play, Blockheads could play, Cheap Trick could play, Television could play, Pere Ubu could play. The list is endelss and none of them could have made the music they made without being able to play. Virtually anyone with a career stretching beyond one album can play. Being able to play should be the minimum requirement.

Taste is the key issue not techncial facility but learning to play gives you choices that the whole monkey-with-typewriter thing does not.

That's exactly is what got lost in the shuffle when Peel was championing all those no talent, can't sing, can't play, can't write indie acts in the early 80s. A monkey with a Telecaster could get in the Festive 50 circa 1984.

It's like everyone took the most reductive and easily Xeroxed aspects of The Velvets, The Fall or The Smiths tried to make a career out of it without having an iota of the intelligence or charisma. As the classic heckle of the time goes "practice at home".

If only they had.