This is me. Hi. Apparently smiling isn’t cool, but those headphones sure are, ooo just look at them.

I love music, making it, listening to it, performing it, all of it, and thus, as I sit here in lockdown, I’ve decided to do a bit of a challenge. It goes as follows: I will listen to and review the top 5 rated albums on rateyourmusic.com, a platform where users rate albums (think IMDB for music), for each year from 1960 to the present. I’ll then rank them into my preferred order for each year, because I mean what’s the point in doing anything if you can’t rank things afterwards?

To tell the truth, I started this challenge a while back (although I started in 1965 as 60-64 featured a lot of jazz that I didn’t feel comfortable talking about) and have so far got up to 1973. Thus maybe the years 1965-1973 will be a little quicker to write for me than the rest as I typically have albums which I haven’t heard before in my circulation for a week or two before I review them. I expect this challenge will take me years, I mean there’s 60 years to cover, and I expect each post will take me at least a fortnight to do, likely more. Anyway, that’s the basic premise. I’ll now interview myself to make it a bit clearer:

Why would anyone do this?

I love lists, I love throwing myself in and listening to music in all genres, but most of all, I love discovering music that is new to me. This little challenge seems like the best way to do that in a way that in a few years time will mean I’ve got a super well rounded listening history. I’m also excited about learning a bit about the stories behind albums and their artists, and so those will feature (where interesting) in my reviews too. Just think of all the interesting characters I’ll discover? Oooo.

Will you rigidly stick to the top 5, even if something in it doesn’t appeal and something at, say, number 7 does?

Yes, that’s the whole point of the ‘challenge’, to force myself to listen and review things I maybe wouldn’t normally. However, although I’ll definitely be doing the top 5 of every year at the very least, that doesn’t mean I won’t do any additional ones. If I think ‘oooo that album at number 9 there sure looks appealing’, I’ll throw that in to the mixer too because I’m a renegade and I do what I want. As long as I stick to my own arbitrary top 5 rules, obviously.

What’s your review style?

Well, although I review around 50-100 albums a year, I wouldn’t consider myself an expert by any means. I know very little about the history of genres for example, though I hope this challenge will teach me more. I’ll mainly be reviewing albums the only way I can, which is by considering how enjoyable I find them now. I can’t really put them into the context of when they were released, as I don’t live in that context. Essentially, I’ll be reviewing albums as to how much I enjoy them and how interesting they are, two things which are very much interlinked for me. Reviews will have an informal chatty style, and will hopefully be fun.

On what scale will you rate albums?

Good question. I’ll keep it simple, rate them out of ten. Bare in mind though that I’ve only ever given around ten albums 10/10, so expect lots of 8s and 9s and not many 10s I’d say. We’ll see.

Anything else you want to say?

Errr…. No. Actually, yes, I hope you enjoy reading these, because I’m truly excited about the prospect of writing them.

Gracias,

Clive

This isn’t a letter or e-mail.

Oh, so I don’t have to sign off at the end?

Well I’ve already learnt something. Let’s go….