I've had my chances, And they had me. Now stay up nights, Watch TV

Isn't it weird how listening to certain songs can bring memories flooding back, and that weird feeling of nostalgia, especially if you haven't listened to them for a long time?

I was at work in Canterbury today and have had the same CDs in the car for a while [Kosheen + Maximo Park], and so before I had a look through my albums and picked up 'Q:Presents Best of the Best 97', which was a free CD given away with Q Magazine in 1997. In 1997 I was in sixth-form at school, and was obviously a very different person then to who I am now. At that time I was really into films and music [obsessively], and would spend any money I had on videos and CDs, and would also buy a lot of film and music magazines too, which included Q, a magazine that could fulfill by obsession.

Every year Q magazine would review the albums of the year and make a CD containing what it considered as the best tracks, and then stick in on the front of the mag. 1997 was certainly a different time from today as mp3s weren't around, neither were CD burners, and so you had to either copy music to cassettes or actually *shock* buy the albums you wanted. The Q set of CDs didn't always pick the songs that had been singles and hits, and instead picked what they considered 'the best' track off the album.

The 1997 tracklisting is as follows:

1 The Chemical Brothers - Block Rockin' Beats
2 U2 - Wake Up Dead Man
3 Texas - Black Eyed Boy
4 Erykah Badu - On and on
5 Bush - Swallowed
6 Prodigy - Diesel Power
7 Supergrass - Tonight
8 Portishead - Cowboys
9 Depeche Mode - Barrel of a Gun
10 Blur - Country Sad Ballad Man
11 Mansun - Mansun's Only Love Song
12 Primal Scream - Burning Wheel
13 Roni Size & Reprazent - Heroes
14 Oasis - Fade In-Out
15 Radiohead - The Tourist

As I was driving in the car, memories I thought long gone, came back to me, and it was weird to think that the first time I'd heard the CD was nearly a decade ago. Some seriously weird shit, eh?

Music is very special and I don't think I'll have the same feeling with music that is produced nowadays. A large majority of my new albums are in electronic form and I will be quite unlikely to stumble across one of the albums in another 9 years and get the same feeling. Everywhere I turn I'm faced with music, not always a bad thing, but sadly a huge majority of it is rubbish, and it means that I have less respect for it, as I can get it anywhere at anytime. It has been cheapened by its easy accessibility.

I think I need to go rooting around in my CD collection more often as there are some gems hidden in there.

Why not have a listen to a couple of the tracks below?

Erykah Badu - On and on

Bush - Swallowed