9 OCTOBER 2004, Page 93

Playlist addict

Marcus Berkmann

pop radio stations have playlists, often notoriously, for one man's comfort and familiarity are another man's screaming descent into hell. There are only so many times in a day you can listen to the same Katie Melua record, that number being 0. But people have playlists, too, especially those sad people like me who feel life is incomplete if they don't listen to at least half a dozen CDs every day. Music is probably addictive, just like everything else that's fun. And I'm lucky, or possibly unlucky, in that I can listen to music quite closely while doing something else at the same time. My girlfriend cannot do this. She needs silence even to read the paper. We compromise by having music on constantly whenever she is not in the room.

(I know a rock critic, a far more serious consumer of new music than I am, who is constantly being told by his wife and children to turn that racket down. He ends up listening to most of it on headphones on the Tube. Indeed, I have bumped into him once Or twice on the Circle line. Is he just going round and round all day? He says he isn't, but I'm not convinced.) Once you have a playlist, of course, you tend it, you nurture it. There will be the new, or newish, albums you are breaking in. There will be the old favourites. There will be a couple of CDs you have had for a while and are trying hard to like, but without much success. In my case, it's Warren Zevon's last album The Wind, which doesn't seem to be the grand last-minute creative rebirth everyone says it is. But then what do I know? Pm constantly struck by how often I change my mind about albums. Sometimes, simply not playing something for a few years can make all the difference, Example: I see there is a new album out by The Blue Nile, one of my favourite groups, who famously release a record only every seven or eight years. First thought was to go out and buy it immediately. Second thought was to remember that I hadn't much liked their last one, Peace At Last: indeed, had barely played it. So I decided to give it another go, and this time I have been completely swept away by what I now believe is possibly their best album. Paul Buchanan's miserable, wracked voice croons across a series of primarily acoustic but characteristic Blue Nile tunes, with occasional added choir and strings. I'm at the point where, for certain songs, you drop whatever you're doing, turn it up loud and sing along at top volume. So perhaps I will buy that new one, after all.

Then there are The Delgados, another miserable Scottish group, who veer closer to the classic indie template. I bought their last album, Hate, on the basis of one listen in someone's office, but couldn't get to grips with it on the home stereo. Why does this happen? (It's a little like the experience, common to all music fans, of hearing a song in a record shop, liking it immediately, buying the album from which it comes, going home and listening to it again, and finding that not only is this the only listenable-to song on the album, but also that the bit you heard in the shop is the only listenable-to bit in the song. God mocks us.) The Delgados have a new album out, too, so Hate is also getting its second chance. Their schtick is a sort of distorted but epic indie-pop, if you can imagine such a thing. I couldn't find a tune in it to save my life two years ago, when the album came out, but now they are all there in glowing technicolour. It's an astoundingly good album, if you can get over the way they appear to have recorded it through a big old Aran sweater. So why didn't I like it before?

This is why, in the end, I don't think iPod listening is for me. You can listen to an album three times, hear the tracks that grab you immediately, reject the rest and then possibly miss out on a song you are going to fall in love with in two years' (The Delgados' Child Killer') or seven years' (The Blue Nile's 'Happiness') time. It's also why CD playlists beat radio playlists. Who knows? I may even come round to Katie Melua in the end, but, to be honest, I doubt it.