Caring and sharing

So here's what we've been doing instead of, you know, telling you stuff. One of our inspirations, we suppose, for doing this has been This Is Uncool: The 500 Greatest Singles Since Punk And Disco by Garry Mulholland, a personal, provocative but always well thought out list of the 500 greatest singles between Anarchy In The UK and the end of 1999. (See also Fear of Music: The Greatest 261 Albums Since Punk And Disco, even if he does go "...and now we have to listen to Coldplay!" too much)

So what we did was source a list of the 500, plug them all into Spotify and create a playlist. And we did well, 432 in total (we think), the omissions either fairly obviously not widely available - Huggy Bear, Cobra Killer, J. Walter Negro, Revolting Cocks, chrissake, Campag Velocet - or so unusual omissions that they're actively notable - pre-1983 Madness, Mercury Rev, Funkadelic, Don Henley, even Oasis*. Here's the link via Share My Playlists.

* The sum total of currently Spotified Oasis, presumably as they haven't negotiated with Big Brother as yet, being She's Electric on a Top Gear compilation and, marvellously, Wibbling Rivalry, the celebrated recording (which reached number 52!) of a Noel and Liam argument during an April 1994 NME interview conducted by John Harris. "You can stick your thousand pounds right up yer arse til it comes out yer fuckin' big toe!"


And while we have this resource open and available, and on the back of our being a quarter of the way through the year, here's eight of our favourite albums of 2009 released to date and available to stream:

- Andrew Bird - Noble Beast
- Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavilion
- Grammatics – Grammatics
- Joe Gideon And The Shark - Harum Scarum
- Micachu & The Shapes - Jewellery
- The Phantom Band - Checkmate Savage
- Sky Larkin - The Golden Spike
- Telepathe - Dance Mother

And tomorrow later in the week we'll let you know if this one is worthy of joining them.