Category Archives: Music

The art of the excessively long playlist

Back in the olden days, I used to buy a lot of albums and singles, and most of those would end up on a cassette, as a recording of the full album or on a mix tape. Tapes were convenient, they could be listened to on the hi-fi, in the car, or on a personal or portable stereo. When going on holiday, or for a longer change of scene, a selection of cassettes would normally end up in the rucksack or suitcase.

The track list would be constrained by the physical properties of the format, and by the means of access to the original recordings. Thirty or forty-five minutes on each side of the tape, with a break halfway through. You could plan how to start and end each sequence, taking care to select the final track so that the tape wouldn’t run out before the song. Songs could be taken from your own record collection, borrowed from friends or taped off the radio, though I tended to stick with the first of these. Mostly, I bought the latest releases from local independent record shops. More obscure or specific tracks would have to be sought out in specialist music shops or at record fairs. Unknown songs or artists wouldn’t be considered. You’d buy the music you wanted to own by the bands and musicians your cared about. Once a tape had been completed the running order was normally fixed; for me it would be unusual to record over a mix tape once it had been added to the archive. The mix tapes would record the passing of the analogue years.

All the time, it was a slightly guilty pleasure. Home taping, we were told, was killing music, and it was illegal. In my case, though, it was just encouraging me to spend more. Maybe I was the exception. Luckily for me, the phonographic constabulary never called round for an inspection of my TDKs or I would have had to plead guilty to all charges.

Fast forward to the digital age. I was a late adopter of music streaming. After making playlist reconstructions of the mix tapes that had been gathering dust in the attic I started to think about making new themed playlists. Each track had to have a strong connection to the theme, either in the title, chorus or subject matter. They started off with a few dozen songs, and I thought I’d eventually find a natural, optimum length for the playlist and stop once I’d added enough tracks. However, over time, it seemed like the opposite was true.

These playlists didn’t face the same constraints as the mix tapes. Songs have been taken from the vast reservoir of recorded music that’s now available on streaming services. The running order isn’t completely fixed; new tunes and recent discoveries can be inserted at any time. These are dynamic, expanding entities that might be subtly different each time they are listened through. Most importantly, there is no constraint on the length of these playlists. I’ve been working on some of these for three or four years, and some of these playlists are over 24 hours long.

These are excessively, ridiculously long, and far too long to listen to from beginning to end in one sitting, unless you’re an extreme insomniac. They can all be divided in sections depending on the subject matter, a main list made up of many minor sub-lists, each with a beginning, middle and end, peaks and troughs. They can be thought of as reference books or novels rather than articles or short stories, to be consumed in chapters or chunks, dipped in and out of, not necessarily in sequence. It’s way of reframing these songs to maybe help consider them in a different context, grouping them by subject matter rather than by release date or artist.

These themed playlists have lined up songs from across genres into a series of musical journeys with a departure point and a destination. One song leads into another either by subjective selection or because of some arbitrary rule, leading to complementary transitions and jarring juxtapositions, but both often seem to just work. To me, the song, the sequence and the segue are intrinsic to the fun of listening to these playlists. They are not random selections of tracks.

The playlists feature hundreds of different artists, some international stars with billions of streams, some unknown or forgotten acts with barely hundreds. They mix up pop, rock, classical, folk, show tunes, theme tunes, comedy songs and more. I’ve added as many classic tracks as I can think of as they occur to me, dozens of songs by artists I’ve seen live over the years, many on albums or singles in my collection, some I’d heard once or twice on the radio, and some I’ve just found by plugging in certain search terms to add to the range of tunes that were already in the lists. This isn’t a definite collection of all possible tracks for each category and to some extent it’s a reflection of my personal taste but I’ve opened the doors wide to include as much variety as I can.

The other advantage of the digital playlist is that it can be shared online, and I’ve been meaning to add these to my blog for some time. I’m not quite sure what it says about me that I find this stuff amusing, but maybe other people might find some unknown pleasures in these sonic sequences, or might be inspired to make their own excessively long playlists to cover different ground.

This is new way of curating a sequence of music that just wasn’t possible before the advent of these streaming services. I’m obviously indebted to the hundreds of composers and musicians involved, who might get a few fractions of a penny if you end up listening to these playlists. If you find a new band in one of these sequences who might be worthy of further attention, please consider supporting them by buying a record or merchandise or going to see them live in concert, if they’re still touring. Keep music live!

Here are my six favourites, in no particular order.

A name playlist

There’s a simplicity and directness to songs written about a named person; a connection between the subject, songwriter, singer and listener. Many of these songs are about real people, some famous and some not, or about fictional lives, whether they have an established backstory or just exist within the confines of a three-minute pop song. An entire roll call of human lives and experiences. Songs about Caroline and Jack and Mary and Sally and Tom. Imagine therefore listening to a playlist of hundreds of songs about these characters, in alphabetical order, from “You can call me Al” to “Ziggy Stardust”. Start at the very beginning, search for songs about your own name, or I could recommend taking a deep dive into the J’s, L’s or M’s.

Colours and Sounds

A musical spectrum of songs, from red to violet, pinky blue to golden brown, all set down in black and white. Start listening to your favourite hue and end up with all the colours of the rainbow.

After Time

A chronological selection of songs with a myriad of references to the passing of time, from a million years ago to a million years in the future. Yesterday, today and tomorrow, Sunday to Saturday, January to December, now and forever.

Space, Man

Taking a journey into space, through the solar system and out into the universe. Become a star man or space girl on a rocket ship with a ticket to the moon and a night flight to Venus. Settle in to the planet suite and end the night dancing out in space.

I started collecting songs for this sequence to inspire me to work on the script for my epic outer space masterpiece but, like the playlist, it will probably never be completely finished.

All over and around the world

Take a trip all over and around the world via musical destinations in the UK, Europe and beyond. There’s a slight anglocentric bias according to my familiarity with music from British and American artists but maybe over time I’ll check out more world music to broaden the horizons of this international song cycle.

Inevitable Numerology

I finally caved in to my better judgement and made a play list of songs with numbers in the title. That’s all it is, it’s a simple idea that still produces an entertaining selection of songs. Less of a countdown, more of a count up.

The Alphabet Tapes

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As I recall, I was at a concert at the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh in the mid-1980s. Maybe something in the Festival or maybe a school concert, the details are all a bit hazy. The upshot was that there was a raffle or some such and I ended up with a prize, not the main prize, but a useful prize that ended up starting me on a path that I was to follow for the next 20 or so years. A pack of 3 AR60 TDK Cassette Tapes.

I must have decided that these cassettes should be used for something significant. I had shelves full of tapes but most of those were full of the bi-tone scream of encoded data for the ZX81 and Spectrum. If I’d used my prize for archiving my attempts at BASIC programming and efforts at typing in listings from old copies of Sinclair Programs those tapes would have been lying neglected in cardboard boxes in the loft for most of the time ever since. But there was something else in a 7” box on another shelf that would perfectly complement the duration of those three one-hour long tapes, and I’d just got a sleek new Matsui Hi-Fi from Dixon’s.

I started buying 7” singles in 1980. It was a good time to start. 1979 was the year that saw highest number of 7” singles ever sold in the U.K. with 79 million sales, and no real competition to the format. I’d had enough of listening to the limited selection of records available at home and my ten year old self had decided that the time had come to start my own collection.

Every so often I’d take some of my pocket money and head into town, destined for the bright lights and cash registers at Woolworths, Boots or John Menzies. The coolest of them all was “The Other Record Shop”, a new wave emporium on the High Street, with Space Invaders and a poster of The Doors above the stairs. That’s where I bought some of my first bits of vinyl.

After a few years my box was half full and I worked out that I had around 3 hours worth of music. So I sorted them out, roughly in order of release and filled up the tapes with some of my favourite songs. I optimistically named them, and carefully labelled them in HB pencil, Tape A, Tape B and Tape C, wondering if I would ever complete that alphabet.

I bought a blank 90-minute cassette to become Tape D, which gradually filled up with singles as I bought them. I put some extended mixes on a separate tape and filled another with mostly album tracks. Tapes E, F, I and J were used for recording songs off the radio, which I later decided meant they weren’t part of the official sequence, but for the most part, the Alphabet Tapes became a repository for my growing selection of singles. The set of tapes began to expand, each one representing a soundtrack for some part of a year or two, a keepsake and reminder of times and places.

At the start I bought more singles than albums; they were more affordable, they were more collectable, they represented that one song I’d heard on the radio and wanted to listen to again. Not always the big hits, I’d often go for the more obscure releases with quirky sounds and memorable hooks. Most of the songs were new releases, but they were punctuated with purchases from second hand shops and record fairs and the odd album track. A few were from the records in my parents’ and sister’s collection.

The tapes and the records fed in off each other in a symbiotic way. I probably wouldn’t have bought quite so many if I hadn’t had the tapes to fill. They were my personal radio show. Some bands became regular contributors, others were one hit wonders. For some artists, I only ever bought singles, not albums. For others, I would buy all the releases, to ensure I had all the B-sides and remixes to complement the LPs; these would sometimes end up on alternative tapes with pithy titles. Yet again, there were bands whose albums I listened to constantly but never bought a single, so they only made fleeting appearances on the alphabet tapes. Up until around 1993, all the tracks were on vinyl, then the odd CD started to creep in to the collection.

I saw most of the contemporary bands perform live, and sometimes ended up with additional singles from the support acts. As the indie dance rock crossover that started in the late 1980s coincided with my student years, I found a rich seam of music to enjoy, with all those bands from Manchester and my adopted home of Bristol becoming particular favourites. I was a festival regular at Glastonbury from 1992 to 2000, often with a ticket to perform with Rag Morris, and many of the artists featured in my record collection performed there over these years.

I finally completed Tape Z, the collection representing 18 years’ worth of songs; the continuing mission had been accomplished. I kept making tapes for another few years until one day, or so it seemed, the displays of chart singles just disappeared from most of the record shops.

The pop charts started counting digital downloads and streaming to add to the sales figures, which eventually superseded physical sales altogether. Although I’d stopped watching it regularly, the end of the weekly edition Top of the Pops in 2006 was another effect, or cause, of the decline of the single. The definition of what a single was became rather elusive. It was no longer about the purchase and possession of a physical object, with the cost supporting the retailer and the supply chain back to the performers, writers and copyright holders. The streaming model didn’t seem to benefit the producers in the same way. I was always a late adopter, and in no hurry to sign up.

Around that time, then, I made my last mix tape. Visits to record shops became less frequent, especially as many of the best ones were closing down. Other priorities took over. It was time to move on and leave the pop charts to the next generation, which is quite as it should be.

Eventually the tapes were left in various cassette boxes which then started to be neglected as the cassette players started to break or get replaced with more high-tech alternatives.

And so it was that during the lockdown we ended up with a family subscription to Spotify. Feeling a bit guilty at first about listening to music that I didn’t feel I already owned, I started a process of spotification of my alphabet tapes. I’ve found that the vast majority of the tracks were already available in one form or another, even if some of the more obscure remixes aren’t available and various artists appear to have a policy of holding back on an album or two.

The tapes have got a bit scattered and some of my favourites are currently missing in action. Some of them I hadn’t listened to for twenty years. Some of the later tapes are a bit lacking in diversity, but each tune was chosen on its own merits. I was pleased found that I still appreciated the musical tastes of my younger selves.

Given the open-plan nature of Spotify playlists I thought it would be fun to put them up on my blog and preserve them for some sort of posterity. It’s an eclectic mix, probably not all to everyone’s taste. I hope you find something you like.

Records from A to Z.