the perils of shuffle

My introduction to the world of blogs and blogging came in the "halcyon" days of the mid 90s. I can't remember the first ones I read but my main interest was the world of the MP3 Blog - how curiously dated that sounds now!

Songs from sites like Bubblegum Machine and Spoilt Victorian Child are still in my collection - either the original files or because (as was often the case) I bought the music in a Real Format.

These sites had something of a sharing, curatorial ethos - similar to the old Compilation Tapes I would force into the hands of friends and potential / actual girlfriends. The blogs seemed to be more generous and personal than simply banging a complete album into a zip file for anyone to download (although it has to be said that those sites have their place too *hem hem*).

Anyway, I persuaded the other members of my band to do one called Domino Rally - as a group of fairly young men with very few responsibilities we had a healthily competitive attitude to finding and sharing new music. And - my logic went - it would enable us to promote our band as people with interesting opinions and taste.

We started the blog in 2005 - our last album of new music was released in 2004 and we played our last gig in 2006. So that worked..? But the blog carried on for a while, even if it was eventually only me posting on it

For reasons too long to go into here, I deleted every single post and comment in 2009.

And for reasons unknown to myself, I've been spending a fair amount of time uploading the posts again...

As part of that, I'm creating a Spotify playlist for most of the songs and it has been really nice to listen to them again and recall a time when music was still the main focus of my life.

This is a song which I heard for the first time in an age (my original scintilating prose is here):


Now I know full well that I was tired and emotional (a plateful of MS Fatigue with seconds) when I heard it. And I also know that any song can be made to mean ANYTHING to ANYONE at ANY POINT in time, depending on what you read into it. But the lyrics really stopped me in my seat the other day:

Oh, just want to push somebody
Your body won't let you
Just want to move somebody
Body won't let you
You want to feel somebody
Body won't let you
Who, who, who do you talk to?
Who do you talk to?
Who do you talk to?
When your body's in trouble

I guess I was having a physically frustrating day!

On a similar musical tip, I was shuffling away quite merrily at home when this song came on.



A beautiful song. The album this comes from was released around the same time as my diagnosis and this song in particular was in HEAVY ROTATION on BBC 6 Music. While I was being cheerily stoical about my diagnosis, my soon-to-be wife was trying to process it all for herself.

I know that she found this song comforting and not-a-little cathartic at the time. It still makes me sad now, but it has a soothing, almost uplifting feel to it. Like looking out to sea and feeling that your problems don't really mean all that much in the great scheme of things. I think it helped Mrs D come to a feeling of acceptance.

I remember we went to see Richard Hawley at Nottingham's sweatiest venue the Rescue Rooms shortly after - it was nice to hear a man with such sophisticated, honeyed tones greet the audience with "F*ck me, there's a lot of you!"