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Or:

Gravity ate my hard drive.

It wasn’t from a great height and I don’t think it even hit the ground, but the rapid deceleration

a) buggered the drive spindle
b) severely stuffed the surface of the disk
c) probably shagged some sectors
d) undoubtedly bollocked the file structure

€2000 to fix (or rather try to retrieve what’s retrievable.)

No big deal.

Just 180GB of hand-chosen music.

So we start from scratch.

Hans-Willi from across the road – good lad that he is – kicked off with “For what it’s worth“, iLinkPod helped me drag back 4GB from the iPod and I think I’ve still got an iTunes library (2006 vintage) on a mothballed PC.

So the digitised Mix’n’Match tapes might be OK, the Stop you in your tracks² certainly aren’t.

Ditto (i.e certainly aren’t) podcasts, Peel stuff, video clips that I saved from an untimely “Removed due to terms of use violation” death, radio recordings, the entire Billboard Top 100 from 1957 to 1976, Jefito’s “Friday Mixtapes” dating back to 2006. And so much more.

And the worst thing is that I KNOW what’s gone up to mp3 heaven, because my old iTunes library shows me everything.

But with an exclamation mark next to it that says”Sorry, can’t find THIS track. Or THAT one, either”

It does tend to get one thinking (a rare occurence these days) and focuses the mind somewhat and I’ve finally realised that I’d probably be quite happy if I only had Joe Walsh, (Lowell George-era) Little Feat and David Lindley on the Mac.


All the rest is pretty much nice to have.


Especially when you see a clip like this:





It’s got it all – , the Alvin-Lee-School-of-Facial-Expressions grimaces, the raw passion of doing a song that you’ve only recently written (just look at the polished, almost-studio-album-perfect version just 5 years later with his new band), all of Pete Townsend’s moves (apart from the windmilling) and then – at 2:47 – one of those magic moments:


Joe’s got the reverb on, he’s squeezing impossible sounds out his guitar, the guy turns to his bird and goes something like “Ohwowthatwasjustamazingdidyouseethat?” and the bird gives him this blankly disdainful look and pointedly wipes the side of her mouth, as if to get rid of the bad taste.


Been there, done that and I’ll bet you a hard drive full of music that they’re no longer an item…..