I am suffering, as we all do from time to time, from a shortage of decent new tunes. Of course, ‘suffering’ may be a slight exaggeration here. Very little physical pain has been involved. But research has shown that music obsessives need a constant upgrade of their personal tunebanks in order to perform at full capacity. It’s all very well going back and playing the Electric Light Orchestra’s Out of the Blue at top volume and singing along to every vocal harmony, as I might have done once or twice this past week, but a long-term solution it is not.
It’s where to find these new tunes that has become the problem. I try radio station after radio station, and then I try them all again in a different order. Radio 1 has set its stall out to harvest the young of the species, with an amiably constant 4–4 bump of dance tunes, all of which sound the same as each other. It’s so undignified, as a middle-aged listener, to hear yourself saying that music was so much better when you were young, but really.
Radio 2, as I have frequently complained, has regressed to gerontophilia, and is playing more oldies than ever, presumably for the oldies who long since turned over to Radio 4. The digital station 6Music, a fine idea in theory, remains in thrall to indie guitar rock, 95 per cent of which leaves me completely cold, as it always did. Someone should probably maintain the Soviet-like cultural purity of the NME in about 1981, but ideally it should be a museum, not one of the handful of national music radio stations. All the commercial stations are as bad as each other: they play for us what they think we want to hear, which is what we have already heard millions of times before and never want to hear again.
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