Looking For Ears

A playlist and a thank-you.

I put together a playlist of some of my favourite songs of the last few months, as I do every year, and as I was listening to it I realised how many of them were introduced to me by people who write about music on Substack. Today in the Guardian, John Harris has written a lovely piece about CMAT’s album EURO-COUNTRY, but I already knew about it because of wordsworthesq, who has been a relentless champion. And other songs have (probably) come from Will Hermes and Ted Gioia . The great NR MINT has introduced me to a lot of jazz I would otherwise have missed.

And all my listening life, I have used the ears of people I trust, writers and friends (many of whom are also writers, or were to become writers.) When I was a teenager, it was Charles Shaar Murray and Danny Baker in the New Musical Express; I still remember buying Albert King’s I Wanna Get Funky as a result of Murray’s excited hymn of praise in 1974. I have probably played it every year since then. I was seventeen, and the money I had for records came from a Saturday job in Boots The Chemist. You had to really trust a review and a reviewer to back a significant proportion of your income - I’m guessing fifteen or twenty per cent? - on their taste, and their ears. The album really is great, by the way. If you think you’ve heard all the blues you need, and it all sounds the same anyway, think again: I Wanna Get Funky is richer and, yes, funkier than most, with brilliantly-arranged strings and horns - a proper blues/soul hybrid. And you probably aren’t seventeen and you probably haven’t got a Saturday job and you probably have access to a streaming service, so my recommendation will cost you nothing. I’ll even post a YouTube link to the first song, after the paywall ha ha.