To widen my musicaltastes I am taking suggestions from Paul Cook, Frank Skinner and others. It’s educational butI’m dying to share my tips,too

1. I've started listening to my friends' music
recommendations shame no one's asked for mine
Adrian Chiles
To widen my musical tastes I am taking suggestions from Paul Cook, Frank Skinner and others. It’s educational
but I’m dying to share my tips, too
Thu 9 Jul 2020 07.00 BST
I
n the really quiet phase of lockdown I wrote about my disciplined, some would say rather joyless,
approach to music listening. In an effort to discover new stuff, I would find lists such as the Guardian’s
top 50 albums of the year and listen to each one twice and then listen through the whole list again. I
have since been working with a new idea: I am asking my friends for their five favourite albums,
skewed towards stuff they think I’m unlikely to be familiar with.
As before, I listen to all five all the way through twice, and then the whole lot all the way through again.
Over a pint in a park with Paul Cook, he of the Sex Pistols, he settled on albums by Television, David Bowie
and Marvin Gaye, all of which I enjoyed. And I really loved Roxy Music’s Stranded and Neu!’s Neu! 75, which
were exactly what I was after: a band I knew but had never listened to properly, and a band I had never
come across.

2. Among other gems, Frank Skinner delivered me Liege & Lief by Fairport Convention; Michael Henderson,
author of the brilliant That Would Be England Gone, offered Vaughan Williams’s Symphony No 5 in D Major;
the football commentator Bryn Law gave me Don’t Stand Me Down by Dexys Midnight Runners; and an
orthodontics professor called Martyn inflicted far too much Marillion on me, but redeemed himself with
Disintegration by the Cure which, incredibly, I had never heard through.
I have listened diligently to all of all my friends’ offerings. To skip even one track even on the second or
third play felt wrong, disrespectful. No, I have ploughed on through, struggling occasionally but making
many great discoveries. But here is my beef: not one of these people and more has asked me for my five
recommendations in return.
Disappointing; I have been dying to share. So, in bitter desperation, even though you’re doubtless no more
interested in my selections than my nearest and dearest, I am reduced to inflicting them upon you: Every
Bad by Porridge Radio; Guppy by Charly Bliss; The Köln Concert by Keith Jarrett; Hinterland by Aim; and
Crossfire by the Reads.
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Topics
Pop and rock
Opinion
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