Marcus Berkmann

Sweet temptation

There really should be a technical term for it: the compulsion to buy an album when you know beforehand that you aren’t going to like it.

issue 07 March 2009

There really should be a technical term for it: the compulsion to buy an album when you know beforehand that you aren’t going to like it.

There really should be a technical term for it: the compulsion to buy an album when you know beforehand that you aren’t going to like it. In 2005, Paul McCartney put out a record called Chaos And Creation In The Backyard, an unwieldy title for what I thought was the best music he had made in a quarter of a century. I speak as someone who has bought an awful lot of McCartney albums. What are we searching for when we buy a McCartney album? Lovable moptop tunefulness, unaffected by the passing years? Possibly, but I rarely play my Beatles albums any more, while for the last month I have been playing little but Ram from 1971.

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