When I was younger, I always wondered how my parents had managed to lose their interest in music. There was a collection of LPs in their possession that hinted that there once had been an interest. But over time it appeared that that interest had waned. Actually, it was something that seemed to happen to so many people of their age. The Beatles and Rolling Stones generations had started listening to not much more than Radio 4.

I always had a massive interest in music. My record collection has, over the years, grown to take up a wall of our lounge here at Jenny Towers, and numbers quite a few thousand albums. But more and more I’m finding that new music just doesn’t cut it for me. I’m left wondering exactly why I find so much unappealing now. Then it hit me, that perhaps it really is an age thing. Not losing interest in music, but rather a case of having heard it before.

Let me explain: when I was sixteen, I didn’t have a lot of music experience to go off. Most of what I heard therefore sounded fresh and innovative. All the time my parents were shouting “turn that noise down!” they had experience of the music of their youth telling them that they had heard this done before with more originality. Now that I am the age they were then, I too have heard most styles and tricks already. What is there that is truly new in music? When you’ve heard Rick James’ Superfreak covered or sampled for the umpteenth time, it actually sounds like nothing but shit. Really (Though MC Hammer’s Can’t touch this is still a pretty good sample)

There are still, thankfully, new groups that do interest me. But they are getting further and further apart. I liked ‘Empire of the Sun’ and stuff that ‘The Killers’ do. More recently, I’ve discovered ‘Florence and the machine’. But much of what I do buy is filling in gaps in my collection of classic albums from the seventies, eighties and nineties in the main.

Right now as I type this I’m listening to some banging dance club anthems classics from around 2000. Dance music is an area that I confess I do like. Once upon a time I DJed in clubs with a set that often included Fragma, Grace, Way Out West and the Chemical Brothers. I still listen to dance, but what the hell has happened to ‘new’ dance music? In the main it sounds to me like poor copies of stuff I was spinning on the platters in clubs in 1997. Please people: come up with something new and I might actually go out and buy it again.