THIS IS A JOURNEY INTO SOUND

During the last great age of alternative pop and indie (1990 - 2010), loads of great  little bands popped up who, despite much acclaim from the music weeklies, never quite achieved the success of some of their contemporaries. One such band was The Long Blondes. A five piece formed in Sheffield in 2003, they traded in a brand of catchy, literate alt indie-pop, or to put it in singer Kate Jackson's words:    " Nico ,  Nancy Sinatra ,  Diana Dors  and  Barbara Windsor . Sexy and literate, flippant and heartbreaking all at once." Blondie were also an  influence on their sound and style. They also peppered their lyrics with references from  film and tv. They claimed to have all chosen an instrument and learned how to play it, lending their first few independent singles a rawer feel. The then unsigned band - Kate Jackson (vocals), Kathryn "Reenie" Hollis (bass/backing vocals), Dorian Cox (lead guitar/keyboards/principal songwriter), Emma Chaplin (rhythm guitar/keyboar

Even if you live under a rock, the news that one of the biggest and greatest pop bands who ever existed are back! back! BACK! can't have escaped your attention. ABBA, who ruled the charts and airwaves from 1976 until their split in the early eighties, have reformed, with their first album of entirely new material since 1981s'   The Visitors,  and a virtual live experience to follow (basically, they had an arena built in London last year, where a "virtual ABBA" based on motion capture tech and made to look like the band at their 1979 peak will "perform" nightly, rather than put their 70-odd year old selves through the stress of touring.) The excitement and anticipation caused their new ABBA Voyage website to crash just hours after the announcement, such is the love for the quartet and their music. Two of the new songs have been put online, and they are ok: "I Still Believe In You" is a typical ABBA power ballad, a song about themselves and the bond

I'm not a fan of following the herd. If an artist, film, tv series, etc is huge or the current trend then my contrary tendencies will rise to the surface. There have been many times when a mildly successful band suddenly become huge and i will lose interest, or when, wary of hype, i won't get into them until the fuss dies down. But at the same time i want the things i love to get recognition. As i said, contrary. I have always steered clear of mass appeal, lowest common denominator stuff. I wasn't interested in Manic Street Preachers when they first appeared - and i still think Generation Terrorists is packed with filler - only to take interest during their next two albums which were less successful. And then lose it during their This Is My Truth...... era. When i stood in a record shop trying to choose who to spend my hard earned on that week i would rarely pick the current favourites, usually plumping for record that would, if lucky, be a footnote in the history of music.

For as long as there has been recorded music and a music industry there have been musical artists who, despite hype and promotion, have underperformed or sank without trace. Since i began reading the (now sadly defunct) music weeklies in the early nineties there was barely a week without a new band or solo artist being excitedly talked about as "the next big thing" . Before, during a and after Britpop this went into overdrive as record companies fought to sign the next Oasis/Blur/Pulp/Stone Roses etc, acts coming and going, sometimes without a sniff of chart success. On rare occasions bands would be declared "your new favourite band" before they'd even recorded a note! (Menswe@r spring immediately to mind.) Too often, a promising new act would be signed on the strength of a couple of raved about independent singles only for their new paymasters to demand changes to their musical style to make them more marketable to a mass audience: edges smoothed off, more expe

  Any music fan who grew up between the mid-seventies and the mid-nineties, every amateur band who ever made a demo or rehearsal, anyone who sat in front of the stereo taping the UK Top 40 singles chart on a Sunday evening, or made a mixtape for a love interest or a friend. Anyone who owned a Walkman. They all owe it to the man in the photo. The man who invented the compact cassette, and changed the way music was not only listened to but the way it was shared. Lou Ottens, who passed away aged 94, was a Dutch engineer who was working as head of development for Philips when, irritated by the cumbersome and expensive reel-to-reel tape technology of the day, he began creating a smaller, recordable cassette that would fit in a jacket pocket. Unveiling his invention at the 1963 Berlin electronics fair, he changed the world. In-car cassette players, mixtapes, the concept of the playlist, boomboxes, and the first personal music player - the Walkman - all came as a result of his genius. Various

Back in the late eighties people were told that their vinyl was outdated. Antiquated. Chuck out your dusty, crackly, scratched records, said the advertising folk, they belong to the past. No one will be making records in a few years. Get rid of it all and buy it all again on compact disc. They sound better! They're indestructible! They're the future! So that's what the majority of us did. Fast forward four decades and the trend has reversed: those same people are now re-buying their music collections on 180 gram half-speed remastered from the original tapes vinyl. I left school and got my first proper job at a time when records were disappearing fast from shops, but cassettes were still big sellers due to the still extortionate price of cd's. But like the majority of folks i bought into the myth that this shiny digital format was vastly superior to vinyl. It was certainly an improvement on cassettes, although you couldn't record onto them - that was a few years away