2008 - week 16, from 20 April - Award Winners

[garth cartwright]

Charlie, I love what you do and am not calling on u to resign - just pulling you up when I see you getting a little too fundamentalist. I find - as a writer - that criticism from peers when aimed constructively can be beneficial: my editor is making me slash 1000s of hard won words from the current book. And y' know what? After taking a deep breath I find she's almost always right. So my point being: take it easy, have some fun with the shows, don't get petulant with the likes of Taha if they come from a different point of view on world muzak. And play some swamp pop. Bought Another Saturday Night 30 years ago and it sounds even better on the iPod today!

[Charlie]

And play some swamp pop. Bought Another Saturday Night 30 years ago and it sounds even better on the iPod today!

I played swamp pop for most of the seventies when nobody else was doing so, along with a quite a lot of other stuff you didn't often hear on the radio. And then, suddenly, I felt like, OK, that was good, now let's go somewhere different. I didn't know where to go at first, and for a couple of years played indie music on Capital Radio, before hearing King Sunny Ade, Youssou and the rest and realising this was where the new and amazing music was to be found.

If I'm currently slightly 'trapped' into a world music format that won't easily accommodate swamp pop, it's a small price to pay for being allowed to stay on the radio.

Please check out the show with Son of Dave this Monday Night (28 April, Radio 3) - if you don't find anything to enjoy on that one, we are further apart than I thought. But I'm confident you'll like at least some of it.

[Ted]

Charlie is a master magpie. He can spot a shiny thing amidst a heap of rubble.

There is a down side to this.How many times I've bought an album after hearing a track played by Charlie and then found it was the only decent tune on it

[Gordon Moore]

I know what you mean (lol).

To be fair to Charlie though, he has mentioned this(even perhaps apologised?) a couple of times - I think the last time for me was the Oki Dub Ainu band's second release where the standout track he played was not matched (in my mind, though not others) by the rest of the tracks (though they did grow).

After having been a bit disappointed by a few recent purchases for which I had high hopes, I am starting to wonder whether to just buy individual tracks - but I hate DRM and the (for me) low bit rate. If any lossless formats such as flac become more popular I wouldn't be able to rerip these tracks.

It's a quandary.