The awards ceremony takes place this coming Tuesday – I don’t care who wins and who loses because the whole thing is a nonsense. Let’s start with best album of 2009 – Dizzee Rascal is nominated. Is that his real name? “Congratulations Mr Rascal, it’s a boy” – “great, I’ll call him Dizzee… a brother for my eldest son Dirty”. Anyway, who else? Florence & the Machine, Kasabian, Lily Allen and Paolo Nutini. Young Mr Nutini, who sings like he’s had eight cans of Special Brew and is wandering through the streets of Glasgow asking people for a quid for a cup of tea, is in second place on the list of artists who make me want to turn the radio off. Dizzee (real name Dylan Mills) is at the top.

But my real problem with this list of nominees is the glaring omission, mainly those Welsh wonders the Manic Street Preachers – a band who in 2009 released not only the best album of the year, but also one of the best of the decade (Journal For Plague Lovers). The lack of recognition for such a powerful and emotional collection of songs is a farce. Who are the people deciding on the nominations?

Best British band is a category which fares better in my estimation (Doves, Muse and Kasabian), but again, where are the Manics? Instead nods are given to JLS and Friendly Fires… what the hell is going on? Let’s be honest, I like Doves but they hardly set the world alight and their latest album wasn’t that great.

To be honest, I couldn’t give a monkey’s about best single, best female artist and some of the other categories. However, there is one more lunatic category which celebrates The Brits thirtieth anniversary… ‘Brits Album of 30 Years’. Think about some of the great British albums released in the last thirty years… OK Computer (Radiohead), the eponymous Supergrass album, The Holy Bible (more love for the Manics), Power, Corruption And Lies (New Order)… I’m sure you could come up with your own list. Even albums by The Smiths, The Stone Roses, Blur and The Clash could be described as significant even if they’re not my cup of tea. Love them or hate them (probably the latter), the Spice Girls made a huge impact in the history of British pop music.

So who, from the alumni of British bands and artists from the last thirty years gets a nod in this category?

• Coldplay – like visiting Belgium, interesting in places but an overall disappointing experience
• Dido – dreary music for dumped females
• Duffy – one-album-wonder, and sings like me mucking around with a helium balloon
• Keane – wimp rock dominated by a chap who plays the piano out of key
• Sade – 80’s somnambulism
• Travis – more dreariness – “why does it always rain on me?”… because you’re so effin’ miserable

The rest of the nominees are Oasis, Phil Collins, The Verve and Dire Straits. Fair enough. But overall that list looks like a joke. If you were responsible for drawing up that list of nominations, please leave a comment to explain yourself.

Thanks to my brother Florida Steve who noted that I made a slight error in the original version of this post, and also Mrs A pointed out my error while we were driving to Windsor. 1970 was, of course, forty years ago. I’m just in denial about the fact that I was four years old when Abbey Road was released.

To be honest I’m not a big fan of ‘greatest hits’ albums. In this day and age when you can download whatever set of tracks you like, and therefore effectively make up your own compilation, the idea of greatest hits is rather redundant. If you’ve already bought the albums of the band in question then a greatest hits album is almost completely redundant, apart from the one or two tracks that they add. And so I had mixed feelings when I heard that my favourite band of the last five years, Incubus, were releasing ‘Momuments and Melodies’.

However, as it turns out, this is rather like the Smashing Pumpkins’ greatest hits offering ‘Rotten Apples’ which featured a generous selection of previously unreleased and difficult-to-obtain tracks. ‘Monuments and Melodies’ contains the latest single ‘Black Heart Intertia’, some b-sides (such as the wonderful ‘Neither Of Us Can See’ featuring Chrissie Hynde), the two extra tracks from the Japanese version of ‘Light Grenades’ (namely ‘Look Alive’ and ‘Punch Drunk’), an acoustic version of the old favourite ‘A Certain Shade Of Green’, a cover version of ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ by Prince, and four other new songs I’ve never heard before. All-in-all that was six new tracks for me, which will tide me over until the next studio album is released in 2010.

I have just one thing to say before the ceremony starts. Any scenario in which a band as awful as Scouting For Girls are nominated for an award is a bad sign for the British music industry. Unless the nomination was for worst band of the year. I can’t remember the last time I heard a band that made me so badly want to tear my own ears off.

Ever since the wife acquired an iPod and speakers many moons ago, the Christmas play-list has been a feature of the festive season in the Adams household. I nearly used the word ‘treat’ there but then remembered it features some ghastly offerings such as ‘Last Christmas’ by Wham and ‘Wombling Merry Christmas’ by the Wombles. We have some debates about whether some qualify as Christmas songs, such as ‘Stay Another Day’ by East 17 – my argument is that just because it happened to be a hit at Christmas and features some bells at the end, that doesn’t make it a Christmas song. The wife disagrees.

Over the last couple of years I’ve grown increasingly irritated by the fact that if I hear one track I instinctively know which is next, so I suggested to the current Mrs Adams that she at least changes the order. Failing to get any progress with that idea, I decided to create my own Christmas play-list. Naturally Wham got the boot, along with East 17 (because that’s not a Christmas song) and ‘Fairytale Of New York’ which (and I know this won’t be a popular opinion) I can’t abide.

In comes ‘Proper Crimbo’ by Bo Selecta (it’s crap but it’s funny), ‘Little Saint Nick’ by the Beach Boys, Bert Jansch’s version of ‘In The Bleak Midwinter’, ‘Thanks For Christmas’ by XTC  and ‘Christmastime’ by the Smashing Pumpkins which the wife consequently said she wanted too. And there it is, fifty-four top festive songs.

But then I started thinking… if I had to pick just ten, what would they be? This is tricky. A Christmas play-list spans the decades from the Rat Pack offerings of Dean and Frank, through the 1970’s hey-day of Christmas songs (Slade, Wizzard), through to the present day when Christmas songs are seen to be a bit naff. And then you need a bit of choral action. Tricky indeed… but here’s my top ten.

1. I Believe In Father Christmas – Greg Lake
2. Happy Holiday – Andy Williams
3. The Christmas Song – Nat King Cole
4. Happy Christmas (War Is Over) – John and Yoko
5. I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day – Wizzard
6. God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen – Perry Como
7. Winter Wonderland – Tony Bennett
8. Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow! – Dean Martin
9. O Holy Night – Nat King Cole
10. Merry Christmas Everyone – Shakin’ Stevens

Okay, let the agreements and disagreements begin.

The iTunes Store has just sent me a very nice e-mail telling me that I can pre-order Dido’s new album ‘Safe Trip Home’. It says “Because you’ve downloaded music by Dido from iTunes in the past”. What? I bloody well haven’t. That’s tantamount to slander. It’s almost the same as saying I drive a Fiat Punto, wear high heels and worry about water retention once a month.

Funny that it’s called ‘Safe Trip Home’. Listening to Dido while driving would be anything but a safe trip home, as falling asleep at the wheel is incredibly dangerous. Here’s a money-saving tip… rather than buying an entire Dido album, just buy one track and play it twelve times. The effect is exactly the same.

Why would you want to pre-order something off iTunes? It’s not like they’re going to run out of files to download on the day it’s released.

Today my iTunes library surpassed 1,800 tracks, and as I travelled from Wakefield to Camberley (at a steady 69.4 mph of course) listening to a variety of music I wondered to myself “what would my musical taste look like as a wordle?”.

This took five minutes of configuration – export the iTunes library, manipulate the text file to take out the word ‘the’ and take out any spaces in the band names (this was necessary, otherwise ‘Smashing’ and ‘Pumpkins’ would be treated as separate entries). Copy, and paste into wordle. Play around with the fonts and layout a bit… and there you have it. I actually have fifty-two bands or artists represented in my iTunes library, but I set the maximum words to fifteen so that it wasn’t too crowded and full of words that were too small to read.

Before you mention it… yes, I like a-Ha. No shame in that. They’ve moved on to a more mature sound since their 80’s pop days. No surprise about the biggest names there, and there is no truth in the rumour that Westlife were #sixteen in popularity.

I’ve just read the very sad news that Richard Wright, co-founder and keyboard player of Pink Floyd, has died of cancer aged 65. Richard Wright was the unsung hero of the band. For many years Roger Waters was the creative powerhouse, but it was David Gilmour and Wright who largely provided the music to Waters’ ideas (even though they weren’t often credited). Wright’s song-writing and musical contributions shaped classic albums such as ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’ and ‘Wish You Were Here’. He suffered writer’s block and was driven out of the band by Waters during the recording of ‘The Wall’ but made a triumphant return with ‘The Division Bell’ in 1994.

Celebrities die all the time, but seldom has a death touched me so personally. Of course I never knew the man, but I have spent many, many hours enjoying his music. David Gilmour, who describes Wright as his musical partner and friend, has provided a fitting tribute on davidgilmour.com.

It seems that a couple of times a year the world holds it’s breath while Steve Jobs takes to the stage, probably wearing a black jumper / sweater / pullover / cardy (choose garment based on your nationality and age). Thanks to some numbskull, photos of the 4th generation iPod nano had already hit the Interweb, and someone was speculating that it was going to have GPS built in (wrong).

Today’s set of announcements, by Apple’s standards, were not incredible. Even the BBC News pages didn’t go overboard, but of course they gave Apple more coverage than they gave the Archos 5 a couple of weeks ago even though Archos’ announcement was a bit more revolutionary.

Firstly, the 4th generation nano… hey, what do I know? I’m sure Apple have done market research on what people want and the devices they have to fit into the market to suit peoples’ requirements. The nano’s raison d’être is that it’s small. So what have Apple done? Made it bigger. To be fair, the capacity has jumped up to 16gb and the screen is a bit bigger, which is nice. They’re also claiming it’s the slimmest iPod so far, but looking at the pictures it looks less flat than the 3rd generation iPod nano (I shall have a look at Lauren’s tomorrow). They come in loads of colours which is nice for people who want to choose a nano based on a colour preference, but bad for indecisive girls who will buy a pink one and then spend the next year wishing they’d gone for purple. Or orange.

Apple have added some interesting features to the nano… shake it and it will shuffle your music selection. I presume you can lock it otherwise that ‘feature’ will be a complete pain in the arse if you’re jogging. And like the iPod touch, if you tilt the new nano the screen will go into landscape mode (that’s quite cool for a small device).

The iPod classic is now available as 120gb, which isn’t terribly exciting news. The iPod touch has a slightly different case, external volume buttons and a built-in speaker. The iPhone 2.1 software update has less bugs and doesn’t crash as often (Mr Jobs is refreshingly honest at times).

All of the new devices, and iTunes 8, (which thankfully now features an install option to prevent it creating iTunes and QuickTime shortcuts everywhere) support a new feature called Genius. Setting up Genius involves the rather frightening announcement that iTunes is going to look at your music library and send the results to Apple. Mind you, I have nothing to hide, all my music is legitimate… and it’s not like I have anything by Westlife or Scouting For Girls to be embarrassed by. After a while, Genius tells me that it’s been turned on (ooo-err) and I can now create Genius playlists and use the Genius sidebar. Errr, okay, and this does what exactly?

“To make a Genius playlist, select any song from your library and press the Genius button at the bottom of the window. Genius playlists and recommendations will get even better over time, as more iTunes library information is gathered from you and other Genius users.”

Oh right, so just a couple of hours after launch I shouldn’t expect too much right now. So here goes, this is live… I clicked on ‘Talk Shows on Mute’ by Incubus. It told me I was missing ‘Earth to Bella, Pt. 1′ – which actually I have, but spelt ‘Part 1′. And if we’re going to be really anal (and I am), it’s not correct to use a period (.) after ‘Pt’ because the last letter of the abbreviated word is there. Genius also suggests that I should buy something by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, but it’ll learn in time (because it’s a Genius) that I don’t like them.

Let’s try another… ‘Perfect’ by Smashing Pumpkins from the ‘Adore’ album. It suggests five songs that I’m missing, three of which I have (genius). And it also suggests I’d like the Stone Temple Pilots, Interpol, Pearl Jam, Pixies and Alice in Chains… which I guess is a fairly accurate stab at matching the genre. Oooh, and ‘In the Meantime’ by Spacehog – that IS a great song that I don’t have. Genius indeed.

Now, call me cynical, this doesn’t seem to be creating a playlist, it seems to be creating a list of music that Apple can sell you. I know an organisation who could learn from Apple’s marketing, but I’m not saying who.

Addendum: actually there is a little button down the bottom which does create a playlist of stuff I already have. Sorry Apple. Mind you, why it would put ‘Go With The Flow’ by Queens Of The Stone Age with ‘God Only Knows’ by the Beach Boys is anyone’s guess.

“…you have to say that this is no longer a music contest” – Sir Terry Wogan

Did you know, we’ve won the Eurovision Song Content five time? That’s an honour we share with France and Luxembourg, but we’re still two wins behind our Irish friends.

However, I doubt if we’ll ever win it again, and I doubt if Ireland, France, Luxembourg or any Western European countries will either. It’s not gone unnoticed that the contest has been more about the political vote in the past few years, and this year that voting pattern seemed to crank up several notches. The Scandinavian countries voted for each other, but even more noticeable was the ex-Russian countries voting for Russia and the Baltic countries voting for their neighbours (which I find bizarre considering that fifteen years ago they split up Yugoslavia as they all seemed intent on murdering each other).

As we watched the voting, it became all too easy to predict where the 8, 10 and 12 points would go where the ex-Russian and Baltic countries were concerned. I’d have put my house on Montenegro’s top marks going to Bosnia & Herzegovina and Serbia, and it was one of many occasions I got it spot on. The break up of the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia has forever changed the face of the competition.

Back over to Sir Terry – he always provides a cheery and enthusiastic tongue-in-cheek commentary that suits the cheesy nature of the content, but after the voting tonight he sounded totally deflated and questioned whether the UK should drop out of future competitions. Interestingly for a short time tonight, the Wikipedia page for Eurovision stated that the ‘big four’ (UK, France, Germany and Spain) who provide most of the funding had indeed pulled out, although that statement has now disappeared. The highest placing this year for any of the big four was 16th (Spain), and the UK and Germany came joint-last. There was a time when we could have at least counted on Malta for a few points, but this time it was just Ireland and San Marino.

It would be a shame if we did pull out – perhaps we can form a Western Europe pact and start getting our own back. But then it would further remove the ideal on which the contest was based… a song for Europe, and not who wants to suck up to their neighbours.

Earlier today I was reading through Marty Moore’s update on Activities version 2. I’ve said before that the idea of Activities was a real eureka moment, and version 2 just builds upon that great work. But that’s not what this post is about (more on Connections 2 another time). Further down Marty’s IBM-internal blog was a rather neat widget showing his iTunes content for the world to see. “How cool is this?” I thought. Mind you, I need to have a word with Marty… he has some good stuff listed, but also… Dido?

Anyway, I fancied a bit of this iTunes widget action, so I did a bit of investigation. And it seems the My iTunes widget isn’t ideal for me. Basically what it does is reads your purchase history from iTunes and displays it in the widget. Sounds good but I rarely buy anything from iTunes. This may sound a bit pre-historic but I actually purchase CDs… and then import the music into iTunes. Very quaint and old school. Also, I very recently changed my iTunes account ID as the old one was based on a soon-to-be-dead e-mail address. So my purchase history, which was fairly small anyway, amounted to very little… just ‘We Are Scientists’ floating across the widget in a lonely fashion. This reminded me I had a few tracks in the shopping cart which I went on to purchase – but there’s obviously a lag as the latest purchases haven’t hit the widget yet.