I splashed out on some CDs the other day, the most recent of which is two years old. The others are three, thirteen, twenty-three and thirty one years old (I wish I could say thirty-three). The twenty-three year old album is The Pretenders and it was the first album I remember owning that didn't fit on to one side of a C90 (what's that?) I can distinctly remember taping it and crying 'noooooo' as the tape recorder clicked off about fifteen seconds before the end.

Things were different in those days. You consumed music in a much more rigid fashion then. You put a record on and listened to it for the next 20 minutes or so. You then made a decision as to whether or not you wanted to listen to the other side and moved on. Sure, you could make a mix tape (a god knows we did), but try finding the track you want on a cassette, and why were tapes always wound to the wrong side?

CDs were the start of the revolution (heh). They changed things in three ways. First, the early players made much of the ability to select your own track sequence and the very early Phillips machines would remember your selections for a particular disk and offer them up to you again the next time you played that CD.

Secondly, there was no side two, so that interval where you lift the arm, flip the record over and replace the needle was no longer a consideration in the running order of the tracks.

Thirdly the extra time available meant that tracks that should never have seen the light of day were included in the release in what can be described as The White Album syndrome (George Martin advised The Beatles to release The White Album as a single album of brilliance instead of the patchy and uneven entity we know today). This wasn't so evident early on as the vinyl versions had to be the same as the CD versions, but they diverged eventually. It's particularly noticeable in the re-issues that include B-sides or alternate takes to fill out the time.

Then the MP3 format made the CD nothing but a distribution mechanism. Now even the purists chop up albums and listen to á la carte everything.

The idea that the album is no longer a coherent whole presupposes that it was once. I find it very hard to prove or disprove this. I would have said that it was, but that may well be a happy (or unhappy) coincidence. Maybe the coherence I have read into some albums can be attributed to timing (whatever was on the artist's mind at the time), coincidence (hey, we have 40 minutes of music here, that's a wrap) or familiarity (I heard them all together the first time so that's obviously the way it was meant to be). To compare this to the written word, you can have a novel (The Who's Tommy, or Pink Floyd's The Wall), a collection of thematically related short stories (Van Morrison's Astral Weeks), or just a bunch of stuff that was written by the same author (any B-side collection).

I'm looking at an example now. The Doors' first album has a consistent feel to it, but is that just the sound they created or were they trying to make a coherent statement? Looking at the track listing, I can't tell.

Anyway, the point (such as it is) is not so much that there may or there may not have been reason behind the tracks chosen and the order in which they were put on the album, but that even if there was, it no longer matters because people don't listen to music like that anymore.

On reflection perhaps the album is an artificial construct anyway. While there are many albums I hold dear, very few of them don't harbour a weak or incongruous track or two. As with everything there's a sliding scale. There are albums where you wouldn't change a song (Whipping Boy's Heartworm); albums where you wouldn't miss one or two of the tracks (Octopus' Garden off Abbey Road); albums of uneven songs saved by one or two outstanding tracks (Peter Gabriel's So); albums of decent music rendered unlistenable by one track (La Peste from The Alabama 3) and albums you wouldn't touch with a barge pole (Chas and Dave -- Greatest Hits).

In other news, you know it's summer when you drive in bare feet. Sadly yesterday seems to have been our summer. I hope everyone took advantage.