A reader has written in to ask once again (not the same reader, a different one), “What are you listening to these days on your iPod?” Such a question automatically assumes (correctly in this instance) that I own one, although my iPod is fast acquiring the status of a relic, a dinosaur — it’s one of the first that came off the Apple production line years ago, the iPod Shuffle, and consequently can only store so many songs.
My friend Barney, who gets to hone his skills of one-upmanship on me, is forever flaunting his mega-storage in-your-palm music gadget in my face with the advice, “You should get one too, Kevin. Never regret it, mate. Thousands of songs. Here, tell me what you’d like to hear.”
“ZZ Top, Legs,” I say, off the bat.
Barney presses a corner of his phone then runs his finger up and down the screen before handing me the headphones, saying, “Okay, here’s Legs.” Now I must tell readers at this juncture that Barney views me as a bit of an ignoramus when it comes to matters IT, or the internet. I’m one of those, in Barney’s not so humble opinion, that only knows so much, and I’ve never used enough initiative to push the boundaries. This thought is cemented in his head.
After Legs, I remove the headphones to hear him re-stating, “Thousands of songs. What would you like next?”
Admittedly, at this early stage of the goings-on I’m a bit naive about things, plus music with a cup of coffee is always a welcome, and pleasantly distracting thing, so I sally forth with another ‘off the top of my head’ request, looking for something rarer.
“Club at the end of the street,” I venture.
“Who by?” he asks, and this is when the first tendril of suspicion is aroused.
“Elton John,” I reply and after some more fiddling I am handed the phones to wallow in four minutes and forty nine seconds of music.
“You must have spent hours uploading all these songs,” I say.
“Hours and hours,” he echoes.
Now I know for a fact that Barney has a moderate music collection. I do know from past conversations, however, some of the artists and genres he’s not been willing to rub shoulders with — rap and hip hop, to name two.
Which is why, when I ask if he’s got Arrested Development’s Mr Wendal and he calls it up, I am convinced he is having me on. So I quickly request two songs that I know I can’t seem to find on Youtube: David Gray’s Love’s Old Song and an obscure version of Winterwood by Cilla Black.
“This isn’t Cilla Black, it’s Don Maclean,” I tell him, handing back the phones so he could hear the proof.’
“Erm,” he says, looking a bit like a Twenty20 batsman that’s just rushed out of his crease and got stumped.
“How many songs do you actually have on your iPod, Barney? I know what you’re doing. You’re using the internet to call up Youtube and pretending you have all these songs in your private collection.”
And there it is, the truth is exposed, he has this schoolboy look of being caught out and to make amends or cover up his embarrassment he orders two more coffees and pays for both.
“What are you listening to?” he asks, which is the question I started out with, so this would be an appropriate place to say, “Not really much.”
Mixed in with some retrospectives: Bryan Ferry’s Frantic album, best of collections from Wet, Wet, Wet, Fleetwood Mac and Tears for Fears, are some contemporary personal favourites — French Cowboy’s A question of time, Alucidnation’s Solitaire, Nitin Sawhney’s Days of Fire, The National’s Bloodbuzz Ohio, Spiral System’s Elephant (dub mix), Christophe Goze, For your love, and Bertrand Belin’s Avant Les Forets, to name a random few.
And a final cautionary word to all the Barneys out there: Underestimate, at your peril.
Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.
