When my mother died a few years ago her husband played some Joan Baez music at the end of the funeral as a way of communicating the sort of person that she was and the way she would like to be remembered.

Ever since then I've been wondering to myself what I would like to be played when the time comes for everyone to say goodbye to me.

Music is very important for me - I listen to music a lot while I'm working.

Actually, I think that music is a necessity for programmers that I think a lot of non-programmers struggle to understand. The reason for this is that programming is an activity that alternates between the highly cerebral and the dreadfully boring. Ramp up someone's mind to fever pitch and then give them something dull to do and you are in danger of causing depression. Music is the way that programmers rescue themselves from that. When you're thinking hard you turn it off; when you're committing your thoughts to keyboard you turn it back on again.

Despite the intervening decades I remain principally into 70s music.

The thing about growing up in the 70s was that there was so much good stuff around back then that you couldn't possibly be into it all at the time. I'm catching up with a lot of it now, particularly with the Rolling Stones (loved Black and Blue) and more recently Genesis.

And I think I have found in "Dusk", from the album "Trespass", my Requiem song (assuming Messrs Gabriel and co don't mind me pinching it off them as I'm sure they wrote it for themselves).

Music works, of course, when it engages you emotionally, and when you're considering something of this importance it's going to be a very personal. "Dusk" gets it spot on for me because it communicates the beauty of the tragedy of human existence (if that makes any sense to you).

The beauty of existence comes from its intensity, even if only for a few short moments:

"The scent of a flower,
The colours of the morning,
Friends to believe in,
Tears soon forgotten,
See how the rain drives away, another day."

The finality of life gives it its pathos. I will never see the wonders of the 22nd century and beyond and I wish I could. We are, as the song says in its final line, "passers by, born to die."

And when, finally, a false move by God does destroy me, there'll still be another day, albeit not for me. The leaf may have fallen but the tree isn't broken. I was what I was, loved life as much as I could, even though I knew I wasn't going to be here very long. I wish I could have stayed longer but the option wasn't offered. The world belongs to our children, and then they'll have to pass it on to theirs.

Richard

If you're still stuck with the notion that Joni Mitchell is a 60's Folk Singer and spokeswoman for the hippy movement and you haven't listened to anything beyond Blue then you need to think again. As the singer has gone through life, and got older, so has her music, so that you see in Joni Mitchell's discography a journey through life as fascinating as it is artistically brilliant.

What turns me on about her later music in particular is the originality of the melody coupled with lyrics which are engaging and interesting. She's not the sort of person to churn stuff out. If she's going to put out an album, it's coming out for a reason. She'll have something she wants to say, and she'll have packed into the album a lot of creativity.

Night Ride Home isn't a particularly celebrated album and yet it's probably the album which I listen to the most. All the songs are so beautiful and easy to listen to yet carry with them the message of a woman looking at the world and finding it wanting. It's not as "in your face" as her next album, Turbulent Indigo, but instead uses its melodies to deliver its message to you in a sweeter more gentle fashion.

Joni's albums are evocative and, I believe, themed. With Night Ride Home you can imagine yourself driving home, alone, through the canadian countryside, contrasting in your own mind the beauty of the landscape and simple elegance of its indigenous people with the furore of the civilisation you've just left behind.

I am not some stone commission
Like a statue in a park
I am flesh and blood and vision
I am howling in the dark
Long blue shadows of the jackals
Are falling on a pay phone by the road
Oh all they ever wanted
Was just to come in from the cold

There's so much more I could quote.

Richard

Strange Days is an album for the lost and the lonely. It will resonate with anyone who finds themselves thrust out of their comfort zone, regularly, wondering how on earth they got to their present predicament.

People are strange
When you're a stranger
Faces look ugly
When you're alone

You get the feeling that Jim Morrison, of course, would jump out of any comfort zone he found himself in as soon as he discovered he was in one. Until his later days, anyway, when he seemed to disappear into the massive comfort zone of three bottles of whisky a day.

All of the songs in this album have an element of isloation about them. Even the more romantic Moonlight Drive is hardly about getting down and having a party. The title track says it all:

Strange days have found us
Strange days have dragged us down

The album cover supports the message quite well. You can listen to the tracks and imagine having found yourself among all these strange people, all doing their strange things, and maybe all thinking that you are the one who's strange.

I was listening to this in my first year at University in Guildford and it fitted my mood perfectly. You can be at your loneliest when you're in a crowd and nobody really knows you.

When you're strange
Faces come out the rain
When you're strange
No one remembers your name

The last track of the second side, When the Music's Over, has a lot of Jim Morrison's poetic lyrics coming at you, sometimes fairly disjointed, but always evocative. What does he mean when he says "Cancel my subscription to the resurrection"? I think some of that becomes clear on his last album An American Prayer but for now it's nice to let that be a feed for your own thoughts.

Richard

When the CD revolution happened in the mid 80s with its promise of increased sound quality (on which it never delivered), the one natural topic of conversation was "What is the first CD you're going to buy?"

Every one I knew who already owned "Wish You Were Here" on vinyl always answered "Wish You Were Here".

I got the album round about 1979. By the time I was 17 I was listening to it several times a week.

Back in those days I lived with my mum in a council flat in Horsham - a flat which was basically a collection of boxes joined up by a corridor. We hadn't done much to make the place "homely", but I had back then my first proper hifi, an Oak turntable, NAD 3020A amp (the only one to buy those days) and a couple of big Mission speakers I'd got off the local paper. This, together with a rather beaten up 3 piece suite, was home enough for me.

Collyer's 6th form college was about 15 minutes walk away, and I would regularly come home during private study periods, of which we had many, even though leaving the college was in defiance of their rules, in order to stick the hifi on and, with a cup of coffee, relax and let that glorious music flow through me.

The coffee would frequently end up cold and undrunk.

Shine On you Crazy Diamond part 1 is a mellow introduction to the piece. It's nice but really just a promise of the pleasures to come. The two tracks that follow seem a little out of place. Wellcome to the Machine is the best of the two, and athough they're nice enough in their way, lyrically a little unsubtle, they're not of the same quality as the rest of the album. The title track is excellent and has all the best lyrics. Musically, the pièce de résistance is Shine On You Crazy Diamond part 2.

If you've never listened to music like this before then you need to imagine a collection of beautiful pieces flowing into one another whilst varying the musical mood from the upbeat to the ecstatic to the mellow to the funky. There is so much there to listen to that you can hear it over and over again, giving it your full attention, yet never satisfy everything it has to offer.

1978/79/80 were great times for pop music, yet although we might discuss the pros and cons of last night's Top of The Pops everyone I knew loved this album. It was almost a no-brainer. "Of course I think Wish You Were Here is an excellent album. Who doesn't?"

(wikipedia ref)

Richard