You’ll recall that Tellier’s performance of Divine this year featured a slightly shambolic – and bearded – backing group, the singer arriving on stage in a golf cart, his unkempt long hair waving in artificial wind, him strutting the stage like the pop music hero he is in France.

But it wasn’t until he took, mid-song, a gulp of helium from the inflatable globe he had carried on stage, in an effort to hit the highnotes a little bit better, that it became clear: these were three of the most perfect Eurovision minutes in history.

The song was a brilliant piece of pop tat, the best song of the night – maybe years of Eurovisions – with high production and a catchy tune that you hummed for days (the recorded version is, admittedly, better than the live one below). But it was all, also, the perfect self parody; lyrics so calculated in their meaninglessness they must have taken an age to write (“No no no no no no no / I’m looking for a band today / I see the Chivers anyway / Through my eyes”) and that memorable stage show.

On the night, of course, it tanked; it only won a pathetic 47 points. Little wonder Terry Wogan wants to quit. But at least, now, you can be reminded of the glory of that night every time the car ad appears on screen, and Tellier’s moment of brilliance lives on.

Second, let me also preface this by saying: I know my iPod doesn’t have a personality. The most read post on this site remains my four-year-old rant over a New York Times piece which claimed the iPod’s shuffle feature gave the iPod the ability to anticipate emotional needs. (Favourite bit of that NYT piece: for balance, it also quoted some folk who didn’t like the feature because it was failing to anticipate those needs. Sigh.)

So if, at any point, you think I’m veering towards this kind of nonsense, I’d like you to all call a halt in comments. Or, in fact, just assail me with a cricket bat until I return to my senses.*

That said…

I think the new Genius playlist generator in the iPod is really damned fine, and perhaps comes closer (without actually getting there) to anticipating – say – your emotional needs from music at a given point. I’m wondering just how clever that feature actually is.

For the uninitiated, Genius actually refers to two different features; on the iPod, Genius builds a playlist of songs, drawn from all the songs on your iPod, based on one track you pick (Genius in iTunes, on a computer, also pulls in “related” tracks you might want to buy from the iTunes music store. It’s not very good).

Now, Lest you start reaching for the willow, can I say it’s obvious that Genius on the iPod is only anticipating what you want based on what you’ve already told it, just as a good illusionist cons you. Because of that, I may be ascribing far more intelligence to it than is actually built in – Genius is self-reinforcing because it’s already working only with your music library, and a track you’ve picked as the basis for the playlist.

So, if you pick as your first (or “seed”) track Girls Aloud’s Swinging London Town, I suspect the music Genius will derive from that pick will be substantially different – cheesy Girlband pop, to be specific – to the choice it would have made had you opted for… say, anything by Tom Waits.

But damn, however it works, it’s great at looking good.

This morning, taking as inspiration the slightly dodgy seed of Simple Minds’ Promised You A Miracle, it took me on something of an 80s tour de force (“or de farce”, I hear you cry?) which moved on from the seed to a little ABC (they’re pictured above – it was Poison Arrow – the US Jazz mix, natch), Spandau Ballet (To Cut a Long Story Short) and Kajagoogoo (Too Shy) for a spanking opening, before quietening things down with a much-needed and entirely appropriate downbeat section, featuring Bryan Ferry (Don’t Stop the Dance), Prefab Sprout (When Love Breaks Down) and The Style Council (12″ mix of Long Hot Summer). Then it picked up once more – Visage (Fade to Grey 12″) and some more ABC (Look of Love). Then I was at work.

So: it clearly understood my need for some 80s cheesy, synth-heavy music, with (mostly) male vocals (later in the playlist there was some Yaz, God help us, and Grace Jones). But I was taken with the less obvious slow section in the middle; had a friend pieced together this playlist manually, I’d have been impressed.

But the choice. Deliberate? Chance? Do these playlists cascade from one track to the next – meaning I’m more likely to get a more downtempo number after another downtempo number? Is there something in the algorithm which takes into account the criteria of a good mixtape of yore – as explored at length in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity – for a mix of moods within one thematic collection?

Of course, on the issue of the playlist’s perceived quality, maybe because it’s only drawing tracks from ones I own I’m more likely to enjoy whatever it throws up. By this reckoning it is, in its cold, algorithmic way, stroking my ego and telling me what brilliant taste I have.

I’m fairly confident that none of this blog’s readers, having read mouth-agape at the playlist above, will agree.

Despite that… anyone with any knowledge of these algorithms – or possession of a good link that explains the Apple one going on here – please add what you know below. I’d love to find out more, but all I’ve found about the Genius feature is speculation, so far.

* For legal reasons, I’d like to say now: I don’t mean this. I’d really rather you didn’t do this. K? Thanks.

Then Napster came along, then the iPod, then iTunes made it all legit. We could download, mix up singles and albums, build our own playlists and carry a zillion tracks with us wherever we go, all safely backed up at home. Singles become an impulse buy, your taste broadened, life changed, and I’m not hearing many saying it wasn’t for the best.

Until now. SanDisk – which clearly needs to sell some more memory cards, fast – has partnered up with the big four music labels to offer us… albums on a memory card! This genius wheeze, called slotMusic (note wild capitalisation in the name – Down Wit Da Kidz!) will see big retailers in the US – Walmart, Best Buy, doubtless Woolies if it ever reaches the UK – selling cards preloaded with entire albums from big artists.

Consumers need simply to go to a store, choose from the array of literally more than two dozen artists available, buy one for $7 to $10 a pop, locate the spare MicroSD slot on their mobile phone – it may be under the battery on some models, or simply not exist at all – plug in the disk – and play!

This will come as a huge relief to the many who were frustrated by browsing catalogues of more than 2m tracks in every imaginable genre, downloading songs and albums whenever they wanted, sometimes even over the air, to hard disk-based devices that required no tiny, fiddly cards or trips to big superstores.

What a relief! Progress, eh?

I give it six months.

Extensive Googling revealed it was produced by London musical group/collective/gathering/trip-hoppers UNKLE, whose stuff I’ve liked in the past, not least the atmospheric Be There featuring Ian Brown (the video, shot on the London Underground, is smashing, in a slightly postgraduate-film-school-project way).

Anyway, the BMW music now has a proper name – Trouble In Paradise (Variation On a Theme) (iTunes link) so you can all go off and play it very loudly while not driving a BMW.

* I’m staggered I posted that back in February of last year. If I didn’t have complete trust in WordPress’s ability to get the date right, in the cold, mechanical, unsentimental manner so typical of blog software, I’d be convinced it was earlier this year. How time flies, etc.

“notable for the strings, which sound like a holiday-on-ice production of ‘Psycho.’”

Just click on the link and listen – you’ll need to scroll a little for the music player. As Lileks says, “you’ll know what I mean”.

With just our podcasts and The Clash to talk about, we’d be able to pass a few minutes at least.

First, as the name suggests, the evening was supposed to follow the well-tried format of: listen to a song, argue a bit about the year it was released, find out at the end. Except our friends at VH1, purveyors of pop videos to those Not Quite As Young As They Once Were, didn’t do anything to hide the year appended after the album title. Shown in a caption at the start of every track.

Why did they do that, we asked? Why bother with the neat “What was the year” graphic at the end of each clip? At least they didn’t go to the trouble of hiring Simon Bates to do the “but what was the year” bit from his heyday. That would have been a waste.

Don’t worry – we developed a sophisticated system of looking away as each track started, but that’s the kind of hard work that video channels and technology were supposed to do away with long ago.

The second big question ran even deeper: why do we all dislike Phil Collins? By rights, the man should be hailed as great British musical genius; as lead singer Genesis he led the band to greater success than with Peter Gabriel and, by Gabriel’s own judgement, sang the old songs better than him. As a solo artist, he was even bigger – including that album, No Jacket Required – which I seem to recall featuring in every record collection of every house I visited for at least ten years, and every car for 15 years, from 1985 on. Then he won a Grammy, and an Oscar for his film work. All told, he’s jolly successful at writing music that lots of people like.

So why’s he so unpopular? Did it all start with the bleeding heart sentiments of Another Day in Paridise? Was it being quoted, in 1992, saying he’d leave the country if Labour won that year’s general election? [He denies being a Tory; he just didn't fancy Labour's tax plans. Which is maybe why he lives in Switzerland now.] Did that, and other politically motivated songs (Colours was about apartheid) earn him the potentially devastating reputation of being earnest? Was it that it was claimed (wrongly, he says) that he dumped his wife by fax?

Is it all a great misunderstanding? Will the papers be full of revisionist obits when he eventually goes? Why did they put the damned year up at the start of each song? Oh, I’ll never sleep now.

“Two weeks ago, club night Guilty Pleasures – founded on DJ Sean Rowley’s previously verboten love for David Essex and the Doobie Brothers, Christopher Cross and the Captain and Tenille – pulled 1,600 people to London’s Koko. With Guilty Pleasures clubs in Brighton and Nottingham, two compilation albums, plans for a New York night and a TV show in the offing, Rowley has found himself helming a burgeoning soft rock empire, a state of affairs no one seems more startled about than him. ‘Where it goes next, fuck knows,’ he sighs. ‘It’s mad. It’s bonkers.’”

Petridis puts it down to alt-rock not sounding very alt any more, combined with an increasingly irrelevant music press going all mainstream. If alt is now MOR, what’s going to be the new alt? It has to be what was once mainstream, but is now reviled. Cue bouffant hair, power chords and Huey Lewis.

Me? I blame the iPod. It’s what made guilty pleasures – and Guilty Pleasures – possible. First, at 79p a shot it’s cheap to snap up all the tracks you didn’t have the courage to buy in Woolies back in the day. Aloha Hall & Oates, Rah Band and Level 42.

Second, music collections have ceased to be public. The CD rack might continue to be tacit projection of self for dinner parties, but it needn’t reflect the darkest recesses of your musical fetishes. They get to live on your hard drive, hidden away behind a password.

The only downside? If someone nicks your iPod, that “most played” list could get you bribed. I’ll fess up now: most played in the last week on mine is Girls Aloud’s Biology. The Arctic Monkeys are there just for the CD case.

Although I maintain the purchase of Five Star’s Rain or Shine was truly an example of the dangers of combining “listeners also bought”, one-click buying and a lot – a lot – of wine.

Madly ambitious, and with an explanation promptly stuck on our Culture Vulture blog, the arguments about what should have been included and what not, and how it all interlinks, could well take from now until the second coming.

It’ll undoubtedly be one of the most-read blog posts on the network this year, and I can say that without even looking at the stats.

And it certainly threatens to make my iPod playlists rather more interesting. How about creating a playlist for specific journeys around the network? Coming home from work, I’d jump on the Electronica & Dance line at Goldie, going through Jamiroquai, Beastie Boys (change here for the hip-hop line), Coldcut (change here for the Reggae line) and Chemical Brothers, before getting off at Beth Orton. Which somehow sounds wrong, but anyhow.

Then I’d head south on British folk line – eh? this could damage house prices here, you know – going through Paul Giovanni and Nick Drake before alighting at Fairport Convention. Or I could continue on to Bert Jansch to go to Tesco.

What a musical adventure. And I much, much prefer the Jubilee’s renaming as the Avant-garde.

[G]ifted "pop" musicians
like Bush and U2 are far more demanding of themselves in the studio
than classical musicians can afford to be, and will spend days working
on a tiny fragment. On the other hand, they envy the technique that
allows classically trained composers to write something down that can
be realised by good sight readers almost instantly. The Edge was amazed
that the London Sinfonietta under Oliver Knussen recorded my part of
the score (some 30 to 40 minutes) in a couple of three-hour sessions
while he laboured for weeks to get his sounds just as he wanted them.

On the recording of a part of Bush’s 1984 album with a group of choristers…

None of the singers or
Richard had ever gone over and over four or five phrases so exactingly.
No measure of Bach or Mozart had, in their experience, been subjected
to such surgical scrutiny, and I began to worry that their voices might
begin to tire. But Bush knew and got what she wanted and Hello Earth
is, I think, a remarkable track on the album.

What I wonder (and what we’ll probably never know): would training in composition make Kate Bush, U2 et al better, or just faster? Does training only help you express what’s in your head already, or does it change what you want to express?