Steve Litchfield

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not averse to technology, even within music - I'm a fan of electronica, think Klaus Schulze, think Jean Michel Jarre, even think modern trance. So I'm not against sequenced, synchronised music per se.  However, when it comes to rock music - you know, guitar, bass, and drums, I contend that it was the advent of the click track that heralded 'the end' of real music. With feeling, with excitement, with a sense that everything could go horribly wrong. Or right. Which is partly why so much of the best rock music in history was recorded in the 1960s and - especially - the 1970s, with click tracks that drummers had to stick closely to coming in at the start of the 1980s.  The idea was that by playing along to click tracks (in headphones), the dummer would be forced to stick to a specific tempo and cadence, stopping any unwanted speeding up or slowing down, and - mostly - ensuring that keyboard parts and sequencers could be overlaid and stil...

[Yes, yes, a little self indulgent, but I was musing on such a list recently and thought 'Why not do it properly and do it in a blog post?'] I was chatting to my daughter and talking about the 'old days' when we used to make 'mix tapes' on cassette, painstakingly copying on tracks from other tapes or LPs to create curated compilations. She paused for a brief moment and then said 'you mean like a playlist?'(!) Ah. So yes, turns out the mix tape is redundant in 2023, but the idea of picking 10 (or 15, as has ended up here!) favourite tracks from a band, an artist, an era, or a genre, and then theoretically putting them into a playlist is a good idea still. Not least because it filters out a lot of the rubbish that every artist inserts. Because none are perfect and all are guilty of putting in 'filler' songs, let's face it. The better artists or bands have less filler, but it's still there, and therefore warrants a retrospective curation. In...