The Music Diaries -31,3,16

We’ve all got Laptops and Tablets and phones that play music – I love music and I love making up playlists on my Laptop – Hippie Favourites, Classical favourites, 60’s, Santana, opera, whatever. I’ve got my big ‘Fuck off Favourites’ list – 127 songs and 8 hours long that I play almost every day- I’m always adding to it and shuffling the order about. It’s more or less all the songs that I have never tired of listening to, whether I heard them for the first time last month or in the Sixties when I first became aware of the wonderful world of music – Georgy Girl, Downtown, It’s not unusual, Elusive Butterfly, Lazy Sunday Afternoon, Leavin’ on a Jet plane, Penny Lane, to mention just the tip of the tip of the Iceberg of the songs I was familiar with from an early age. Lilly the Pink, Where do you go to my lovely, -what a decade for music. Those were the catchy classics that were on the Radio all the time – I now love a lot of the music from the Sixties which was big at the time but I wasn’t big enough to understand or be aware of- Cream, The Who, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan. There are a few Sixties songs on my big playlist but only Four Santana songs, a bit surprising when you consider I have 22 of their CD’s and have seen them play Three times. I have a few songs or pieces of music on the playlist which would be on a separate ‘drifting off to death music’ playlist. ‘The Flower duet’, ‘Rave on John Donne’, Pie Jesu, ‘Send in the clowns’ [ the Barbra Big nose version], the ‘Buffalo Robe’, ‘The Girl with the Flaxen hair’, ‘Incident at Neshabur’. Neshabur was where Toussaint L’ouverture led his slave army to victory against the might of Napoleon over a month ago -the early 19th Century to be more precise- and if ye want more precise than that ye can eff off and Google it – ah’m Scud Broon fae Pumphy and no ‘Simon F in’ Schama. The final song on the playlist has and probably always will be ‘Albatross’ by Peter Greens Fleetwood Mac. I’d want that to be among the last songs I ever heard.