Musing about filters and brakes: A long post

My use of “filters and brakes” was not meant to be clickbait to entice you here on false premises. This isn’t a post about cars, or anything to do with cars. This is the wrong place to come to if you want to read about cars. I’ve never owned a car. I’ve never rented a car. I have had a company car, but I’ve never driven one; my wife did drive the one I had, however.

I have never driven. Never had a licence. Never passed a test.

I once did have, and still continue to have, a vicarious interest in cars, for a fairly odd reason.

James Leasor.

I discovered the author around 1971, through the auspices of the British Council Library, which used to be on Theatre Road in Calcutta. As schoolboys we went there ostensibly to borrow books, but also because it was air-conditioned and quiet. Gold dust in those days. (And probably gold dust again soon, the cost of cooling may increase faster than the need for cooling, which is growing rapidly enough).

Every time I went there I’d make a beeline for 823.91 and look through the new arrivals before continuing to beachcomb the rest of the modern fiction section. It was one way to discover a new author. The first Leasor book I read, when I was 13, was called Never Had A Spanner On Her, and it introduced me to the protagonist Jason Love. Now Love had a penchant for Cords and Duesenbergs, and Leasor waxed so very lyrically and eloquently about them I began to think that they would be the only cars I would ever want to drive.

Soon I’d read everything that Leasor had written, not just the Jason Loves. That was the way people like me used to read: read extensively, always the “latest” book by an author. Then, if you liked the author, go through her entire oeuvre chronologically, one series at a time, until none remained. My dreams of Cords and Duesenbergs were built then, but not in some maniacal or obsessive way. It was like telling myself “One day I will eat Tournedos Rossini because Nero Wolfe thought they were amazing” … at a time when I lived in a vegetarian Hindu Brahmin home, one that had never even seen any meat enter it, let alone be cooked or consumed there. (And yes, since then I have had Tournedos Rossini one or two times. A year).

Those Cord and Duesenberg dreams, of cars built with passion by artists, of cars that could be built without using power tools, lasted a long time from 1971. I never imagined myself driving, it wasn’t something I aspired to. Maybe it was an instinctive reaction to knowing that the family couldn’t afford a car, so why think about driving? I never learnt to swim either, we didn’t belong to any clubs with pools in those days. What I couldn’t have I didn’t aspire towards. I had so many other things to look forward to, to daydream-believe, to make happen.

Twenty-odd years later, in my early thirties, as I began to think about maybe driving, the internet had been democratised and the web was emerging. So I could investigate Cords and Duesenbergs. Didn’t take me long to figure out what the answer was. You could call it sticker shock. I knew I’d never be able to afford one.

But I never forgot one thing about the 1929 Duesenberg, that it was the last car made without power tools that could be safely used on the road. That sort of thing appeals to me.

There’s a purity about it. It’s like never playing a word at Scrabble that you didn’t know the meaning of or couldn’t use in a sentence.

But I digress. Back to my original post.

This morning, by 10am, I had blocked a half-dozen handles on X. Ads which I wasn’t interested in and didn’t want to see, ads that were clouding my feed. I’d also emptied my various junk mail folders, after some cursory inspection to ensure that I’d missed nothing and promoted perhaps 1% to not-junk status, something I do once every few days. And I’d also deleted a plethora of “How Was It For You” requests, seemingly spawned by anything I’d touched digitally. (Oddly enough, the only one I didn’t delete was from Bentley’s, a place I’d visited in person, an email that was written personally and written to me specifically, rather than a cookie-cutter conceived and delivered without human involvement). Perhaps not that oddly. A personal message from someone, personally crafted, directed specifically at me, and related to a physical experience, feels tolerable, almost human.

That’s the trouble with abundance. It’s not always everything it’s cracked up to be.

Now I’m a big fan of Clay Shirky, and hold a number of things he said close to my heart. One of them is this:

There is no such thing as information overload, only filter failure.

Ever since I heard that, I’ve been fascinated by information filters, and even wrote a long series about them a long time ago. Here’s the main link: Filtering: Seven Principles, which I wrote here over a decade ago.

One of the other Shirky aphorisms I treasure is this (and here I paraphrase him, so much so I’m at risk of mangling his intent and misrepresenting it):

In order for a commons to thrive, the cost of repair must be at least equal to, if not lower than, the cost of damage.

There’s one other person I need to quote here, so that you can easily get my drift. And that’s something George Gilder once said, again paraphrased by me:

Every economic era is characterised by its own unique abundances and its own unique scarcities. A successful business takes into account both of these, the new abundances as well as the new scarcities.

Now there are some things he’s said that I disagree with, and some I disagree quite strongly with. But that doesn’t take away from the beauty of his “abundances and scarcities” framing.

An aside involving Gilder. When I was at Dresdner Kleinwort, while working for Al-Noor Ramji, we had an incredible team there. Really talented people, I was privileged to be part of that set-up. One day in 2000, Al-Noor asked me to organise a conference on mobility. An internal conference, focused on training the tech teams. We’d managed to get Gilder commit to opening the conference, his “Telecosm” hadn’t quite hit the shelves but he was all the rage and we wanted to hear what he had to say. We negotiated a price for his bringing his friend Marty Cooper to speak about the birth of the mobile phone and what it was like three decades earlier, and where he saw it going in 2000. Then we had pulled favours to get Hyacinth Nwana from BT to speak about connectivity. And we wanted to bring it all together to look at what we could learn from all the data that these connected devices would sense and collect.

We decided we had to have Mike Lynch from Autonomy. DrKW were the house brokers to Autonomy in those days, I’d met him a couple of times and reached out to ask him whether he would speak at the conference. He laughed when I said it was an internal one, just for our tech teams. And when I told him we had chosen to hold it at a college in Cambridge, his smile grew bigger. (We used that location for three reasons: 1 It was beautiful, it was functional, it was cheap 2 Gilder’s wife had gone to that college, and it made convincing him to speak at an internal conference a little easier; 3 we could try and convince Mike Lynch because it would be convenient for him).

Mike agreed, on one condition. No fees, no mess, no fuss. Just one special request. His dog had to be allowed to accompany him, and would have to be looked after while he spoke to us. He said he would take the dog for a walk, make a detour to speak to us, and then go back home with the dog. He kept his word, gave us an hour of his time, and we were entranced. Thank you Mike Lynch. RIP.

You can’t really think about filters and brakes without also thinking about capacity and constraints. Since this is something I wrote about quite recently, I thought the best thing to do was to link to it here rather than repeat myself.

While studying the intricacies of the London Money Market at university in the mid-1970s (yes I am that old; I think the particular textbook we used for that class and topic was Modern Banking by R.S.Sayers, published 1938), I was fascinated by how discount houses and acceptance houses worked, and how effective that trust model was. The discount houses knew how to treat bills where the payer was known to them, but had a problem with situations where the payer was foreign not just to them, but located exotically as well. Enter the accepting house, with a man in every port that mattered to Empire, whose job it was to assess the worthiness, credit- and otherwise, of all the major companies there. The accepting house would sign the bill, and the discount house would do the needful, as they used to say at Writer’s Building. (I think I hear the phrase “please do the needful” only in India today, a trivial relic of the Raj).

So the discount house no longer needed to know the foreign payer, they only needed to know the firm that accepted the bill. Friend of a friend trust model in action, centuries ago. (An aside. In my first job, one of the banks we provided systems to was Brown Shipley, then a member of the Accepting Houses Committee. I was overjoyed to learn that such firms still existed, decades after the textbook).

Blogrolls

I started playing with blogs in the late 1990s, and was allowed to write internal-only posts by around 2002. It would be 2005 before it was considered okay for someone like me to have my own personal public-facing blog while working in senior roles in a bank.

Doc Searls and Chris Locke, two of the powerhouses behind the Cluetrain Manifesto — what an amazing book, it totally floored me when it came out — encouraged me to get out there and blog publicly. I was in New York to see Doc, and he introduced me to Halley Suitt Tucker, the organiser of the event at the Harvard Club. She was also organising a Blogger’s Dinner at Katz’s Deli that night, something she wrote about here.

That night at Katz’s, because of people like Doc and Halley, I met many people who till then were just trusted names on my blogroll. Trusted. On my blogroll.

Many of them still write. Maybe we will see a resurgence of the “blogosphere”, those days when people wrote “provisionally” about things, secure in the knowledge that they were amongst people who wanted to learn through civil discourse as embodied in that corner of cyberspace. Recently I’ve seen Doc show up here and there on my radar, as also Dave Winer (who’s been blogging since before we had a term for what he did) and Anil Dash, to name but a few who were there at that dinner.

I knew them because of what they wrote about, and because I followed them and read them. I knew them because someone I was already reading had linked to them via their blogroll. I knew them because someone I trusted “recommended” them by linking to them.

Blogrolls were wonderful discovery mechanisms, letting you find little-known bloggers who wrote passionately about stuff they were interested in. The recommendation process was also interesting, since linking to someone didn’t signal that you agreed with everything they wrote: the only signal was that they were possibly worth reading.

More importantly — and here I’m probably adjusting my rose-tinted rear-view-mirror — the blogroll wasn’t a filter bubble. There was diversity of opinion embedded within each person’s list of links. When I saw a new blog because it was mentioned somewhere, not necessarily by someone I knew and trusted, I used the blogroll as a validator of potential value. One that would allow me to be challenged in my thinking, rather than any form of groupthink.

Maybe that changed later, but my memories of the early blogrolls remain pristinely rosy.

One of my favourite Yogi Berra quotes.

We live in a world where we can’t move anywhere without being assailed by armies of notifications, drowned by the despair of a zillion requests for feedback, neutralised into nothingness by the noise of NPS. Even in cyberspace. Especially in cyberspace.

This is now a filtering problem. A serious one. It’s no longer about spam mail or abusive interactions in social media. It has entered the world of business. And that’s serious.

It is now common for me to be asked to provide feedback for a service that I’m still experiencing: “how was your trip with us?” … a trip I was still on at the time.

It is now common for me to be reminded to do something I have already done, because the process by which I can tell the particular system that I don’t need reminding is broken.

It is now common for me to be recommended a purchase I have already made, just because I looked for possible items in that category a little while earlier.

When everything is connected, and everyone thinks they are making my life better by notifying me of stuff, of reminding me of stuff, of asking me about stuff, of recommending me stuff….

Then I stop listening. I stop reading. I stop responding. And, in the rare instance where I do do something about it, it’s not what the requester wants to hear or see. Put it this way, it’s not going to do their NPS scores any good whatsoever.

I’m tempted to write a more detailed post just about notifications and alerts and requests for feedback and reminders. But that will depend on whether there’s any interest. In Doc Searls’s “conversations with George Layoff” mode, this post is provisional, and may snowball. Or disappear into its own nothingness.

Speaking “provisionally”, I’ve been thinking of a structure that covers:

trust: I don’t want crowd recommendations or ratings or reviews, I want to know what people I trust said

timing: I want to choose the when, where and how I get the ping, whatever that ping is

turnoff-ability: I want to choose the if as well as the for how long

tune-ability: I want something like a graphic equaliser for all my alerts and notifications, allowing me to balance and refine and rebalance as I see fit

Yes, it’s all about subscriber-side filters, not publisher-size rights. What do you think?

The Double Double Double

Introduction

You have been warned. This one’s for hardcore cricket nuts. Red-ball nuts. Five-day nuts. The hardest of the hardcore. No coloured pajamas here.

This post is to celebrate all-rounders. More particularly, men who have done “the double” of 1000 runs and 100 wickets in Test cricket. (At this stage, my analysis only covers the men’s game. As and when I find, and get used to analysing, Test statistics related to the women’s game, I shall write a similar post. Until then, please forgive the bias, it’s an availability and access and usage issue which will improve).

As far as I can make out, there have been 3186 male Test cricketers so far, and all my analysis is based on that set of players. Please let me know if you find any factual errors in this post, I’d be very grateful.

So.

The hard stuff

20 of them have done the double, and no more. They’ve scored 1000 runs and taken 100 wickets. Here’s the full list:

Before 1961: I Johnson (AUS) 1000 109; M Tate (ENG) 1198 155; G Giffen (AUS) 1238 103; M Noble (AUS) 1997 121; 1961-70: A Davidson (AUS) 1328 186; 1971-80: F Titmus (ENG) 1449 153; I Alam (PAK) 1493 125; R Illingworth (ENG) 1836 122; 1981-90: J Bracewell (NZ) 1001 102; S Nawaz (PAK) 1045 177; 1991-00: J Emburey (ENG) 1713 147; 2001-10: M Rafique (BAN) 1059 100; I Pathan (IND) 1105 100; N Boje (SA) 1312 100; A Giles (ENG) 1421 143; A Razzaq (PAK) 1946 100; 2011-20: None; 2021-present: K Maharaj (SA) 1135 171; MDK Perera (SL) 1303 161; Mehidy Hasan (BAN) 1547 169; C Woakes (ENG) 1921 166

Another 21 have scored at least 1000 runs, less than 2000, but taken 200 wickets or more, sometimes a lot more, a whole lot more. Here’s that list:

Another 5 have scored between 2000 and 3000 runs, and taken at least 100 wickets but less than 200 wickets:

We then have four players who have scored over 3000 runs, taken more than 100 wickets but less than 200 wickets.

Then we come to those that have done at least the Double Double. When I was young, this list consisted of just two people, one who had done it before I started watching Test cricket (Richie Benaud) and another who did it after I had seen him play, live (Gary Sobers). So in my mind anyone who does the Double Double is a king amongst all-rounders.

Amazingly, we now have 25 such people, including Benaud and Sobers. Now we get to the serious end of the list, one where the entry criteria are at least 2000 runs and 200 wickets. Here’s the list, which reads like the Hall of Fame for Hall of Famers in cricket:

For those interested in nationalities, the breakdown is Australia 16, England 16, India 10, South Africa 7, Pakistan 7, West Indies 6, New Zealand 5, Sri Lanka 4, Bangladesh 3 and Zimbabwe 1.

The Best of the Best of the Best

If we wanted to rank the 25 Double Double makers, we could give them points: 1 point per 1000 runs and 1 point per 100 wickets, qualifying criteria 2000 runs and 200 wickets.

Let’s look at those with 6 points or more:

Jacques Kallis 15; Gary Sobers, Shane Warne 10; Kapil Dev, Stuart Broad 9; Ian Botham, Anil Kumble, Ravi Ashwin, Ben Stokes 8; Richard Hadlee, Shaun Pollock, Daniel Vettori 7; Imran Khan, Carl Hooper, Wasim Akram, Chaminda Vaas, Harbhajan Singh, Shakir Al-Hasan 6

That would make Kallis the clear winner.

We could have raised both bars at the same time, 1000 100, 2000 200, 3000 300, 4000 400, 5000 500, etc. If we did that, then the clear winner is Kapil Dev, the only person to have gone past 4000 runs as well as 400 wickets.

If we do that, if we only look for people who have done the Double Double (2000 runs and 200 wickets) and taken at least 100 catches, we land up with a very short list.

Gary Sobers. Ian Botham. Shane Warne. Jacques Kallis. Ben Stokes.

Five great all-rounders.

But.

Only one of them has taken 200 catches. Only one has done the Double Double Double.

Jacques Kallis, take a bow.

A coda. Only one of the five people who’ve made 2000 runs and taken 200 wickets and a minimum of 100 catches is still playing. Ben Stokes.

The Double Dagger-Asterisk: For cricket anoraks only

Background

When Google first arrived on the scene, I used to enjoy constructing “unGoogleable” questions and sharing them with others. My fascination with the number 229 in men’s Test cricket used to be the basis of one such unGoogleable question. (Technically, my fascination began with 224, and then 228, and has stayed at 229 since early 2001, but that’s something I’ve written about before).

Search engines have evolved quite a lot since I first set those questions; and now we have LLMs to contend with as they augment the traditional engines. So I’ve been thinking lazily about constructing questions that have answers that are easily discoverable in the public domain, but where you need to know quite a bit about some narrow topic, in order to know how to go about finding the answer to a question on that topic.

This post is about one such question. And it’s written in a way that it won’t naturally spoon-feed the LLMs.

The question

The IND-ENG Test at Rajkot is the 2530th Men’s Test to be played.

Those Tests have involved 354 Asterisks in the scorecard.

And 294 Daggers.

Sometimes the Asterisk is also the Dagger.

In those 2530 Tests, we’ve had 34 Dagger-Asterisks in the scorecard.

303 of the Tests have involved one Dagger-Asterisk in the scorecard.

And 9 of them have involved two: the Double-Dagger-Asterisk, a very rare beast.

Those 9 Tests have involved 9 different Dagger-Asterisks.

7 of the Dagger-Asterisks have been involved in two different Tests against another Dagger-Asterisk.

Only one of the Dagger-Asterisks has been involved in just one Test against another Dagger-Asterisk.

And only one of the Dagger-Asterisks has been involved in three Tests against other Dagger-Asterisks.

Name the two unique Dagger-Asterisks.

Thinking lazily about capacity and constraints

Introduction: The Dirty Dozen

U.

Or A.

When it came to film ratings, that’s all there was, when I was growing up in Calcutta in the 1960s and 1970s. A film was rated either Universal or Adult. There was no 12 or 18 or R or X or anything else. Just U or A. It did mean that many foreign films shown in India were given “Universal” ratings, much more than would have been the case, for example, in the UK or US. That U rating, however, depended on some hefty censor cuts being implemented.

As was probably the case with many teenagers in metropolitan India in the early 1970s, the A classification represented a challenge to us: how do we get in? The 13- and 14-year-olds among us had developed sophisticated techniques in response, and would manage to sneak in here and there.

Scene from MGM’s The Dirty Dozen

My first “adult” film was The Dirty Dozen. It was my introduction to one of my all-time favourite actors, Donald Sutherland. While I found the movie enthralling, I nearly didn’t watch it. The opening scenes, where a young soldier is hanged, really upset me, and I wanted to leave the cinema. But I was with friends, all of whom had snuck in under-age as well, and I put a brave face on it.

But it disturbed me, and I had nightmares about those opening scenes. I found myself doing exercises to try and strengthen my neck muscles, I was that affected by the film.

I then spent a few years no longer trying to go to “A” movies, I was nearly 18 before I went again. Because I’d thought about my experience and decided I didn’t actually like it. That there must be a reason why an A movie was rated A, and that seeing such a film at the wrong time was not good for my brain or my mind.

Natural brakes

I’d come to that conclusion in a convoluted way, by thinking about nursery rhymes and fairy tales. Many of the rhymes I’d learnt had relatively horrible things happening: grandmas turning into wolves, children being abandoned in dark forests, wolves huffing and puffing houses down, children dancing to death, step-siblings doing evil things, dragons and monsters everywhere. Yet none of these affected me, or any of the children around me. Why?

Because they weren’t made frighteningly graphic. Most of the time, there weren’t any illustrations, we were left to our own devices to imagine things. There was a natural brake on what we could imagine. And where there were illustrations, they were anodyne.

We had natural brakes in our minds and on our imaginations. Brakes that served to protect us.

Many years later, when I first heard John Seely Brown’s lovely question and answer couplet, I smiled wryly: How long does it take a five year old to become a six year old? One year.

We have natural brakes. Brakes that protect us. When I see phenomena like crown shyness, I think of natural brakes. When I read about [Robin] Dunbar’s number or George A Miller’s Magical Number Seven, I think of natural brakes.

Brakes that serve us. Brakes that protect us.

Brakes in the workplace

When I started work in the UK over forty-two years ago, I saw one of these for the first time:

Reusable internal memo envelope

We weren’t quite in the Ark, but there were antediluvian aspects. Where I worked, we all had computers on our desks. Not quite. We had dumb terminals hooked to that great mainframe in the sky; actually in our case the “machine room” was on the 9th floor, housing millions of dollars of Burroughs equipment. This was before WYSIWIG. Before word processing. Before PCs. Way before Web. The internet was around, and we did use dial-up modems, but email was still rare and special, despite being about a decade old. And typewriters were still around in offices. Photocopiers resembled small villages, and the desktop printer was but a dream whose time hadn’t come.

So we wrote memos. And made copies of the memos only when unavoidable. (I found it odd that people would write memos to people who were a few feet away, a few rooms away, occasionally a whole floor away: the Calcuttan in me couldn’t quite figure that out.

But we wrote memos. And they were occasionally copied. And the memos did their dance around the internal mail system, waltzing around in orange or yellow multi-use envelopes, or, very rarely in the companies I worked in, in dark green or white ones. The envelopes were well used, almost falling apart. Occasionally you’d be “first recipient” of a new envelope: in normal practice, the previous sender’s name was in the box above your name, a bit like a chain letter. (That led to some vanity behaviour by some, hoarding an envelope which just happened to have some bigwig’s name on the box above yours, and then using it “to impress”. Some things in life don’t change.

Anyway, writing memos wasn’t trivial. Normal desk-based dumb terminal access had connectivity to “listing paper” printers, not considered suitable for memos, even internal ones. So there were secretarial pools who did the memo typing, working off your listing paper print. Copying was done in the copying room, and people had to be authorised to use them. In some companies, it wasn’t just authorisation, you needed a physical key, and sometimes a cost allocation key as well. Some things in life don’t change.

So we didn’t write too many memos. And we didn’t send them to too many people. There were brakes. Practical brakes. Real constraints.

And now? Not waving but drowning.

In those days, we had constraints everywhere. The phones on our desks were internal phones, letting us call others in the same building. If you were very senior, then you had a direct-dial phone on your desk. If you were even more senior, you had international direct dial rights. Which usually meant you had a key to the executive toilets. (And yes, you were male).

So communications were local. Call volumes were low. And mail was physical and also low volume.

Teams were small, even departments were small. Because analogue.

But hyper connectivity and ubiquitous portable smart devices and affordable bandwidth and the Web were all on their way, and the constraints were to disappear. Kevin Kelly’s copy machine was on its way to becoming Deus.

Paraphrasing something George Gilder said many years ago, every economic era is characterised by its own peculiar abundances and scarcities: businesses that know how to learn from both will prosper.

[An aside. The Beat Generation’s William S Burroughs was a grandson of William Seward Burroughs, the founder of Burroughs Corporation. The author of Naked Lunch is correctly referred to as William Seward Burroughs II, while his grandfather gets called William Seward Burroughs I].

Some conclusions

(When you get to my age, and when you don’t write often, every post has the risk of becoming a book. I try and mitigate that risk by writing late in the evening and stopping when it’s time for sleep — when you get to my age, I stay awake up to eleven, and not in a Spinal Tap sense.)

I’ve always been fascinated by capacity and by constraints. How much time it takes the body to process food and drink, how backlogs form, what happens as a result. Why small teams work well. Why everything and everyone has an “expected life”, why the cherry trees in my garden are different from the ancient yew that keeps them company. Why there are connections between body mass and metabolic rate. Why the expensive tissue hypothesis is interesting.

When I think about constraints and capacity, I think about physical, mental, emotional, intellectual, even social constraints. Constraints of ageing. Constraints of not aging enough.

When I think about constraints and capacity, I think about performance, about the state of flow, about Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, about reaching and stretching potential. But always within some set of constraints. Sometimes I’m thinking about Eliyahu Goldratt, or Donella Meadows, or Stafford Beer, even some EF Schumacher, just to throw a few other influences on this topic into the mix.

When I think about our cat Lily, I think about capacity and constraints. About cat ages and human ages and what the difference means.

When I think about myself, my family, my friends, my life, I think about capacity and constraints. That in turn makes me think about priorities and about resource allocation, about stewardship, about renewal cycles.

I’m not in any way “anti-growth” per se, but try and ground myself in understanding capacity and constraints even when thinking about growth.

Especially when thinking about growth.

And so to bed.

Song songs

Introduction

This is a post about song songs. A term that probably doesn’t mean much to you. Not surprising. I made the term up when I was maybe thirteen. Now remember this was over fifty years ago, not just before streaming, not just before MP3s, but a long time ago. Before CDs. Even before cassette tapes.

In those days, there were a limited number of ways to listen to music. You could hear it “live”, when someone performed in front of you; you could be listening to the music on vinyl, on a record player; you could be using a reel-to-reel tape deck. Or you could be listening to it being played on the radio.

In my teens, I listened to a lot of music. Maybe seven, eight hours a day. Listening to music was a sibling thing. A family thing. A friends and neighbours thing. Our apartment (Flat 10, so yes we had been known to call ourselves the Flatteners) seemed to act as a club from dawn till dusk, and even more of a club between dusk and dawn. People between the age of six and twenty streamed through all day and all night, there was aways food and drink to be had, always somewhere to doss down if that’s what you wanted to do.

Somehow, magically, this 24 hour club was kept clean, dry and functional. I sometimes wonder how my parents put up with it. It was a games room, a concert hall, a chill out place, a cafe and a youth hostel. All this was over 50 years ago, so maybe my memory’s playing tricks, embellishing what was there. But for sure that’s how I remember it.

Musical roots

My “Western” musical roots were set during that time. Foundations of classical music and Big Band sound, mainly on lacquer 78s, a bunch of 10″ 33s, and a larger pile of 12″ 33s. The classical was mainly Beethoven and Tchaikovsky and Chopin; the jazz was mainly Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Goodman, Louis Armstrong, Lionel Hampton, Jelly Roll Morton and Sidney Bechet, with some Glenn Miller. (I thought we had all the Glenn Miller recordings ever produced, or so my father told me, a short list given his untimely passing. Nowadays it seems there’s one for every attendee at the World Cup Final 1966, a number that increases every year).

A thin layer of 40s and 50s musicals and early “pop” then formed the base. All the usual suspects. Pat Boone. Harry Belafonte. Perry Como. Connie Francis. Doris Day. Every musical known to mankind, or so it felt. South Pacific. My Fair Lady. Oklahoma. Carousel. Paint Your Wagon. (The Sound of Music et al were to follow). There were also a sprinkle of 78rpm singles, with some real doozies there: my favourites were Tom Dooley, Hernando’s Hideaway, Tequila, with a touch of Eddie Calvert doing Oh Mein Papa. I probably have to mention Burl Ives at Carnegie Hall and Edmondo Ros’ Bongos From The South as 12″ oddballs, along with Ruth Wallis Sings (“naughty” songs from the 40s) and Jimmy Shand and his Band (why, I’ll never know).

That was the base. I’ve left out hundreds of albums and singles, all gone to the Great Place in the Sky where single socks and Tupperware container lids live happily ever after.

That was the base upon which my musical journey began, a base that must have been laid by my father by 1960. If I try hard enough, I can probably “walk in” every album that entered our house since then, but it would bore you and I’d never finish.

Suffice it to say we went from Peter, Paul and Mary, the Beatles (we weren’t really a Stones house) and Simon and Garfunkel, through Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, loving every minute of what we were experiencing; sailed through the late 60s and early 1970s pop to settle down firmly in a core of singer-songwriter folk, folk rock and rock. Walk into our house and you’d hear Leonard Cohen and Cat Stevens, Traffic and Ten Years After, Cream and Crosby Stills Nash and Young, the Dead and the Doors, Lindisfarne and Led Zeppelin, Fotheringay and Family, Donovan and the Doobies, Stevie Wonder and Supertramp, Steely Dan and Steppenwolf, Elton John and ELP, Creedence and Cocker, The Band and BST, Rare Earth, Moody Blues and Melanie, John Mayall and Jethro Tull, Queen and Bowie. You get my drift. (My wife thinks I love lists, and knows just how to stop me when I embark on one. You don’t have that privilege, so I’ve had to stop myself for your sake).

Song Songs

Which brings me to the reason for this post. As you can see, I’m the kind of person who finds it hard to choose “my favourite 1000 albums from 1975-1975”. (Yes, thousand). Thousands of albums. Tens of thousands of songs.

But very few Song Songs.

What are Song Songs? They’re the opposite of places like The Hat Shop, which used to be at 11 Goldhawk Road in the early 1980s. Today it looks like this, I haven’t been able to dig up contemporary photographs as yet.

11 Goldhawk Road today, at the western edge of Shepherds Bush Green

In the early 1980s, Mikawa didn’t exist. (I’m not sure there were that many Japanese restaurants anywhere in the UK in those days). What existed instead was The Hat Shop.

As you would expect, with a name like that, the shop window was full of hats. And when you entered the shop, more hats. Hats everywhere you looked.

And a staircase leading downstairs. With a small sign that said something like “tell them Phil sent ya”.

And when you went down, no hats. Just the smell of wonderful pizza. And some tables and chairs. With people sitting down and eating pizza.

That was The Hat Shop.

The opposite of a Song Song. So what is a Song Song? A song that has the word “song” in the title, perhaps in case you thought it was an automobile or a cigarette. The child and adolescent in me kept an eye out for song songs, mainly because they struck me as odd. And because I love lists.

So yes, I have a list of song songs. Over the years I’ve noticed they’re usually pretty good gateway songs, introductions to particular artists and albums. Here, then, is a curated (and blessedly short) list of seventeen such song songs:

Melanie: The Nickel Song

John Denver: Annie’s Song

Petula Clark: This is My Song

Graham Nash: Prison Song

Simon and Garfunkel: Kathy’s Song

Simon and Garfunkel: The 59th St Bridge Song

Joan Baez: Love Song to a Stranger

Leonard Cohen: The Stranger Song

The Doors: Alabama Song

The Who: The Song Is Over

The Doobie Brothers: Song To See You Through

Three Dog Night: Just An Old Fashioned Love Song

(Paul McCartney and) Wings: Silly Love Songs

Elton John: Your Song

America: Pigeon Song

Jethro Tull: A Song For Jeffrey

Neil Diamond: Song Sung Blue

Have fun.