Last night I dreamt of Coldplay...

Last night I dreamt of Coldplay..

It’s worrying, but this morning I woke up with that da-daar da-daar dadidy daar in my head.  I have no idea whether it’s their latest single or just something which has been receiving heavy rotation of 6music recently.

I’m not supposed to like Coldplay & yet it’s all I want to listen to today…  

When I say “not supposed to”, I should go into a little more detail; I hated yellow, I got told by many around me how fantastic Parachutes was… It hated it.  It was bland a full of (what I considered to be) emotionless contrived & all too visible ‘emotion’.  It felt fake…  I am aware that I am no musician, so yes I did agree with all the “it is far better than anything you could do” statements I heard, but still I hated it…  

There is no denying that I do have that not uncommon but unfortunate reaction which prevents me from allowing myself to like things which I am told that I should like.  But in this case I was sure that it was my own judgement which made the decision.

I believe that people have the choice to listen to & like what ever the choose, we’re not all the same blah blah blah etc etc…  But it surprised me how, what seemed to me, to be bland fakeness has taken the hearts of the musical mainstream.

I did like the cover and title of the second album, and (to my shame) decided that it was not going to be anything that I like, and therefore to this day I could not say that I have listened to even a track from it.  I’m sure I hate it anyway… There’s nothing like a bit of blind musical prejudice… Yay…

Then X & Y came out…  Wank title, wank cover, so (having not listened to this either) I decided it must be a wank album.

Yet last night I dreamt of it.

And I blame the BBC, I blame 6music; for giving me a music channel which I actually enjoy listening to.  

For years I have listened a lot of radio, I don’t watch TV, but I do have Radio 4 (nd in recent years Radio 7) as an almost constant companion…  Yay for Radio 7 it’s like Radio 4 for days where you want to pretend the real world has stopped happening…

Radio 4 is the one thing that I have missed about the UK whenever I have spent a longish period out of this country.  (Luckily the internet now means that I can listen from anywhere in the world, now if only their listen again schedule could be quite as nicely set out as R7’s to allow a complete day’s worth of time-lapse listening, rather than having to select the actual programmes…  But that’s another matter..)

So my aural pleasure has been provided mostly by either R4 or my own choice of music, (comprising of old favourites, random CDs that I like the look of or bands with some association to bands which I already like (recently Myspace music seems to be a bit of goldmine). Etc etc).  Choice has meant that I have been able to write off stuff that I have made a snap decision to not like…  

Yet 6music is changing all that…  Tom Robinson’s show is great, I listen on a daily basis & because of this I listen to Steve Lamacq’s show too; Steve Lamacq is now growing on me.  I now find myself ‘liking’ bands such as the Arctic Monkeys, a band who I would have steered clear of simply because of their new status as unlikely media darlings.  They play me stuff that I haven’t chosen and now I find myself waking up wanting to listen to Coldplay…

I’m afraid that, although I have a huge music collection, there is music out there which I decided not to enjoy which I now am not going to be able to live without…

Sitting here on a Sunday morning wanting to listen to Coldplay & thinking that I could pop over to Sainsbury’s and buy a copy, is not a situation I wanted to be in…  Not only am I thinking about listening to stuff I don’t want to like, I am thinking about buying music from a fucking supermarket…  bah…  My life is changing…

I cannot do it…  

Happily it’s just occurred to me that Jenny Owen Youngs’  wonderful ‘Batten the Hatches’ cd is sitting in the player (last week’s $15 well spent).  

All I have to do is press play to get bathed in stuff that sounds (to me) like proper music with proper emotional sensibilities (and a nice bit of cello accompanied swearing on ‘fuck was I’ (which is available for a free download from this page on her site))

(check out Jenny’s Myspace or Website listen to the samples… If you like them then buy her album $15 via paypal includes delivery, bargain..)

Yay just one push of a button and I have been temporarily saved from coldplay (I have resolved to ‘give them a go’ at some point soonish, it’s only fair, but for now, it’s back to Jenny..)

“One, two, three…  
I still hate me, but there’s no-one else that I know how to be.  
Four, five, six,
Your body makes me sick, but don’t take it away from me just yet…”