The CD Count and other stories

 There will be books and records to review here again, one day, I'm sure. Just not at the moment. In the interim we must amuse ourselves with mildly diverting trivia. The Thomas Hardy Collected Stories have been the most reliable fallback option with little else going on and two volumes of Alexei Sayle memoirs will get me to the Armitage Oxford lectures which are due soon. So, following up the book count, I counted the CD's this morning.

The pop LP's, singles and cassettes all went in that very moving episode a few months back when no amount of cash could equate to the sentimental value some of those records had. On the other hand, any amount of cash is a good deal for something you simply don't use any more, and to me as compensation for losing my status as owner of some choice Yellowman records.

Cassettes and then LP's were the media that served the first thirty years of buying music so that's where the Bowie, reggae, punk and much disco was. I never bought a Beatles record in my life. Somehow it didn't seem necessary. I did invest in the 2-CD de-luxe sets of T. Rex albums on CD and bought again certain Motown, Al Green and reggae essentials but the pop CD's can't be expected to reflect a complete history although that's not such a bad thing when recent purchase, Petula Clark, that I never had before, is clear top of the current playlist.

I really don't know why it was deemed so necessary to take it quite so seriously when Cilla Black knocks Pink Floyd out of the ground, Cliff Richard was miles better than Frank Zappa and Wig Wam Bam on its own gives the whole heavy rock genre half an hour's start and wins in a hack canter.

Maybe some of the choicest 'classical' records are on CD rather than cassette or LP, notwithstanding the hugely influential early cassettes of Pictures at an Exhibition, the Pastoral Symphony and the LP sets of the Brandenburg Concertos and Pablo Casals doing the Cello Suites. Those Bach recordings have been bought again on disc. 

By league table of CD's by composer is slightly misleaading. It goes-

1. Mozart        44

2. Buxtehude  39   

3. Beethoven  36

4. Handel        34

5. JS Bach      30

with Chopin on 16, Shostakovich on 15 and Josquin des Prez, Monteverdi and Vivaldi on 8.

Tne Bach- Beethoven shelves look like this. Although they are meant to be listened to, they are nice to look at, too.

Mozart and Handel benefit from their operas being 2 or 3 discs each and Bach suffers from not having written operas and my not having the Complete Cantatas, which would have counted for 72, as a retirement present. He is vastly under-rated in fifth place on that list and if the 29 discs of the Buxtehude Opera Omnia put him a couple of places ahead of where he might be, that set is a strong candidate for the desert island if I could have only one title. Chopin is flattered a bit by a good value Complete Works.

 

The 'classical' section is 500 discs, as near as I can count them.

In the pop section, T. Rex and the Magnetic Fields are as close to 'complete' as I can concern myself to make them.   

Spoken Word isn't many. Larkin and Hughes reading their own work. Somebody reading Chaucer's for him.

My Indian raga period amassed about a dozen.

Jazz gets played more rarely than there is a kind of blue moon. There's not much of that.

So pop records, 70's, 60's, soul, reggae and disco for the most part is 300 plus change.

And the number of CD's, still being bought regularly as they go out of fashion, is about 840.

I'm glad I know, detailing it here is as close as I'll get to cataloguing them for insurance purposes.

--

Times Radio and sports reports on other news oulets elsewhere, I'm sure, announced that Fulham were relegated last night. No, they weren't. Their next three matches are all in the Premier League. They will be relegated to the Championship at the end of the season and last night's result made that inevitable.

There was once a time when broadcasting was of a standard that could be trusted, including the pronunciation of place names. The BBC was known for being good at it but Radio 5 is no better these days, once telling us that Chris Froome had just won his 'fourth Tour de France'. But that wasn't what they meant. They meant that he'd won the Tour de France for the fourth time. He had ridden it previously without winning. I'm not saying he couldn't have but he was told to help the struggling Bradley Wiggins instead.

And neither am I saying that DGBooks is grammatically impeccable, factually unimpeachable or the whole truth and nothing but the truth. But at least I try.