Charles Spencer

Sleep deprivation

My word, you Spectator readers are an education, and a delightfully idiosyncratic bunch to boot.

My word, you Spectator readers are an education, and a delightfully idiosyncratic bunch to boot. To celebrate this 100th ‘Olden but golden’ column I invited you to send in your all-time top tens, and three dozen entries have arrived so far, some from as far afield as the US and Australia.

In 2002, we confined ourselves to rock and pop. This time classical music and jazz and indeed any other musical genres were actively encouraged, and favourite singles as well as albums were permitted as well.

I particularly like the bloody-minded independence of Spectator readers. One reader’s idea of an all-time top ten was to send me a photograph of his evidently treasured vinyl LPs of Benny Goodman’s famous Carnegie Hall jazz concert in 1938 with the caption: ‘What better introduction to non-classical music (a very long time ago)’. You are quite right, David Lamb. It is a great place to start. At the other end of the spectrum was Graeme Musker, who was so rattled by choosing just ten discs from his collection of 3,800 CDs that he didn’t get beyond those beginning with the letter ‘A’, adding that ‘what horrifies me is that I am stuck in a Sixties–Seventies time warp’. Take heart, Mr Musker. So was I until a few years ago but there is absolutely no need to remain in the same old groove. Just open your ears and your mind and there are endless new pleasures to be discovered, though the music we first heard in our teens will, I suspect, always have an especially powerful pull on our heart-strings.

I was delighted that so many of your top tens juxtaposed so many different styles of music. Miles Davis rubbed shoulders with Vivaldi, Ella Fitzgerald found herself in the company of Brahms, and Vaughan Williams was in the same list as Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma.

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