Don't look back in anger

So as another year draws to a close, it's time to have a look at what music I enjoyed this year. These are in no particular order.

The Alt-J album "an awesome wave"won the Mercury music prize this year and quite rightly so. To be honest it was my eldest son Matthew that got me into this album and I'm very glad that he did. It's different, a bit hip-hop , a bit acoustic but generally a really lovely album.

My prog rock collection has grown this year with new albums from Neal Morse and Marillion. Both are probably each artists best album for a while and were both welcome additions to my collection.

2012 was also the year of prog rock artists re recording some of their finest works. Steve Hackett decided to do a second album of Genesis revisited where he takes some of his former bands finest songs and rerecords them. They're pretty faithful to the originals to be honest but his choice of vocalists to replace Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins are well chosen and the overall result is a really high-quality album. His version of "The Lamia" from The Lamb lies down on Broadway album with Nick Kershaw on vocals is inspired!

Rick Wakeman also decided to do a studio version of "Journey to the centre of the earth" the original album having been a live recording. He's added extra music to the original version as well and a mighty fine album it is too.

This was also the year that Ben Folds put back together the Ben Folds Five (the joke being that there's only three of them) and released a new album. His last couple of studio albums, released under his own name, have not been as good as previous recordings but this is a real return to form.

Other albums I've enjoyed this year were the Bruce Springsteen album which was Bruce at its finest, he's angry and when he's angry he always writes good songs.

Muse's album "the second law" was also released this year and continued their excellent work. A bit more funky in places nonetheless it still rocked when required!

Finally I can't let this post go without mentioning Led Zepplin's "Celebration day'. This is a live album recorded back in 2008 when they reformed for one off concert at the O2 arena in London. It's immense and truly acts as a wonderful epitaph to the band.

Experiments in Mass Appeal

For the last 22 days I've been carrying out an experiment on Facebook and Twitter. Each day I post a Christmas song in what is wittily entitled "Mark's musical advent calendar".

It gave me a chance to share with my friends, some of the music that I like to listen to around this time of year. I have an extensive Christmas playlist that I like to listen to mainly as I drive around and I thought that it would be an opportunity to share some of these songs with my friends, mainly via YouTube clips.

It's gone fairly well and certainly on Facebook I've had lots of comments and "likes". Every day has resulted in some kind of response from my friends. That has made it more fun for me and inspired some of the music posted.

The response on Twitter however has been completely different. It's been the social media equivalent of tumbleweed blowing down the deserted high-street! I think I've had one, response may be two?

What does that tell me? Well I think maybe it just reflects the fact that on Twitter you can follow anybody whether they know you or not. That means that my Twitter feed is full of posts from people that I don't really know and can skip over if I'm pressed for time. Clearly my posts get read that way too!!

On Facebook however my timeline is full of posts from closer friends and I'm therefore more interested in what they're saying and I take more time to read them. That seems to work for my friends as well bearing in mind their reaction to my posts.

Not an earthshattering discovery I know, but I did expect a bigger response to my twitter posts.

Change we must

One of the reasons that there has been huge gaps in this blog, has been the inability to update it other than sat at my laptop. There is a smartphone app but the inability to write something and save it via the app to be revisited later, meant that you had to write the whole thing there and then. Too difficult!

Well that has changed with the latest update to the Blogger app and here I am using it! Hopefully now when I am inspired, I can whip out the old iPhone and right away, write away!!

Well it all sounds good, lets see what happens!!