The BBC? Hurrah!

As one who long ago abandoned the wastelands of Radio 1, save for the curmudgeonly delights of John Peel's various programmes - even that avenue of pleasure now being closed since the tragedy of last October - I've been amazed to find myself rediscovering the pleasures of the Beeb's national radio stations. Radio 1 is still a no-no, even though I love the genuine enthusiasm of Colin and Edith; their afternoon show is still too full of the kind of waffle the station's long been synonymous with, however wondrous their co-presentation of BBC3's Glasto coverage undoubtedly is. But beyond the digit 1 lie wonders...

Radios 2 and 3 have gradually been shrugging off their awful fuddy-duddy images of yore. Thanks to the recruitment of early-middle-aged enthusiasts such as Jonathan Woss and Mark Lamarr, radio 2 now covers quite a spectrum of pop, rock and R&B from the last five decades, plus it gives excellent coverage to the burgeoning roots-music scene which is gradually rehabilitating folk music. Then there's Radio 3, which actively participates in various jazz festivals (e.g. the London Jazz Festival), World Music festivals (Celtic Connections, WOMAD), inaddition to regular programs pulling together myriad strands of World, Folk, Jazz, and some of the more leftfield experimentalists (Late Junction and the mighty Andy Kershaw's weekly show). Oh, and all that classical stuff I love so much, too. (I spit on Classic FM, with its "mellow classics" mentality and its jarringly inappropriate torrent of commercials).

And now I've discovered another musical delight, in the shape of BBC6, one of the Beeb's new(ish) digital-only stations. When I was a teenager in the late 60s through the early 70s, I always used to wish Radio 1 could be more like its own best shows all the time. Why did I have to settle for the little oases of Peel and Alan Freeman, blokes who steered away from Osmonds and Bay City Rollers and preferred the brighter lands of pop-rock, prog-rock and generally more "album-oriented" stuff. Well, BBC6 is that station! From Phill Jupitus's breakfast show to Craig Charles's funk show, their playlists are stuffed with the best retro pop-rock combined with the best new bands. I think it fair to say the target audience comprises the thirty- and forty-somethings who regularly watch Later With Jules Holland, and who tape every minute of Glastonbury coverage each year. Listen: in the space of a single show on Friday lunchtime, Vic McGlynn played tracks by The Undertones, Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, Kaiser Chiefs, Pigbag, Suede, Groove Armada, The Skids, Radiohead, The Damned, Pentangle, Traffic, and Carter USM. Pure gold! Then Craig Charles hit us with Freddie Hubbard, Beastie Boys, Spencer Davis, Little Richard, Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis, Freakbass, Gil Scott-Heron, and Nat Adderley.

I'm instinctively suspicious of any station with a playlist, and sad to say BBC6 has one. But it's a bloody eclectic playlist! Plus the presenters are given free rein to add a proportion of their own selections.

Just got to find time to listen to all this extra musical input, now!

Get Me A Librarian... And A Library

My CD collection is starting to preoccupy me. Not the music - though there are always three or four earworms vying for headspace, even when I'm not actually listening to anything. No, it's the sheer logisitical nightmare of Owning A Large CD Collection that's tying my brain in knots at the moment.

Once upon a time, I only bought and listened to - broadly speaking - pop and rock albums, be it folk-rock, prog-rock, punk-rock or rawk-rock. The old vinyl collection lived in two large vinyl-coated LP-cases, which bookended 2-foot row of those albums which wouldn't fit in the cases. No problem.

Then I switched to CDs and, simultaneously, started getting into (again, broadly speaking) classical music. Planning ahead, I bought three glass-doored shelf units which would hold about 600 CDs in total. One for classical, two for pop/rock/whatever. No problem.

This was somewhere around 1988. Seven years later, the units were getting a bit on the full side, plus my wife-to-be had moved in, and two CD collections were beating as one. A short while later, we moved house, and bought three much more spacious CD-shelving units. These beauties would easily hold 1500 CDs. Surely that would see us through to our dotage?

Er... no, actually. We got into world/roots music. I got into jazz, and also discovered the wonders of eBay stored searches. Areas of our bookshelves had already been annexed for storing those big box-sets that wouldn't fit the CD shelving. Suddenly these was no space for any more CDs, and there was nowhere to put any more tall CD-shelf units. Eek! Time for desperate measures!

I launched a three-prong attack: first, I bought a load of those jewel-cases for double-CDs. The ones which are only the same thickness as a single-CD case. These replaced about 70 of the old-style double-thickness 2-CD cases. Second, we scoured the shelves for freebie compilation CDs which we'd simply kept out of pure hoarding instinct but never listened to more than once, plus those "mistake" CDs - bands by whom we'd heard one song which turned out to be atypical, bands who'd turned out a dud album we'd bought for "completeness". That trawl netted about 100 CDs we could safely pass onto the charity shops. Thirdly, I decided to add a third category to the filing system: jazz would have its own storage area, for which I evicted books from three shelves. These three measures gave us another 400 CDs-worth of grace.

But now things are nearing "tilt" again. We're probably up around the 2000 CD mark now, and there's probably room for about another 50 or 60 before something has to give. The books are starting to look nervous!

I've contemplating buying some of these 264-disc CD wallets (which I already use for discs of burned radio comedy), each of which could comfortably hold 132 CDs plus their booklets. But I really don't like the thought of having to haul a great big case of discs around every time I want to play a single disc. It seems clumsy somehow. Or I could buy up a ton of those slimline CD cases that are only about half the thickness of the traditional jewel case. But the back-inserts wouldn't fit them properly, thereby screwing up the process of edge-browsing. Clear another ghetto amongst the bookshelves, maybe for "Folk" or "World" music? No, no, no - there are already far too many confusing cases of crossover, where I can't decide whether Jamie Cullum goes under Jazz or Pop/Rock, or whether Jacques Loussier's Bach discs go under jazz or classical.

Or maybe I should just stop buying CDs. But that really IS thinking the unthinkable.