Now That's What I Call A Compilation

This Father's Day I asked for nothing more than to be left alone. I just wanted to sit in the sun with a cup of tea and read one of the books from the teetering pile next to the bed. Anyone who has children will understand the excitement I felt at this prospect. Far from making me the most boring man in the world - although perhaps it does qualify me for the heats - this is surely what most dads want on their day. Certainly not a shaving mug, a 'novelty' card or God forbid, a CD compilation with the word Dad in the title.

If there is a God, I thank him or her that I wasn't the recipient of a Dad compilation on Sunday. Did you notice any of these pernicious things? I meant there's nothing necessarily wrong with We Will Rock You, Addicted To Love or Sweet Home Alabama but if anything proves Bill Drummond's notion of all recorded music having run its course, these compilations do. There is just nothing left of these tracks is there? Maybe for kids who've never heard them but surely not for the dads who were bludgeoned with them for 20 years by Simon Bates and now are insulted by them via the Tannoys of every chainstore and hold music of every helpdesk.

I speak specifically of EMI's 3 CD set Dad Rocks! and Universal's Dad's Jukebox - with tracklistings so predictable that it's almost as if a computer put them together. So who compiles these things? I'd suggest that in both cases it's a question of using what you have on the shelf (hence EMI including Coldplay's Clocks) but also it looks like these brands have been going for years and are subscribing to the Ain't Broke philosophy - rather like the annual appearance of the Best Xmas Album Ever and why you no longer find Jona Lewie in the kitchen at Christmas parties but gleefully rubbing his hands together at the bank. Perhaps you'll always find him in the kitchen at Barclays. On Father's Day you don't get Stop The Cavalry but you do invariably get Alright Now.

Every year these brands get rolled out and back in 2006 - Sony had a go with World's Best Dad - opening track? Van Halen's Jump - but relax, later on you do get a dose of Alright Now. There will be a few changes to the brand to keep the thing up to date, for example on this year's Dad Rocks! Pink Floyd's Money has been replaced by Razorlight's America - surely giving father a kick in the bollocks would have been cheaper? But do you ever get the feeling you've been cheated?

Despite the fact that I think I make a pretty mean compilation - or mixtape, as the kids now call burned CDs - I've never really been in the compilation game professionally. The closest I came was when the Head of Marketing at RCA asked me to put together a tracklist for a compilation of Irish and Scottish pop he wanted to do - you know the sort of thing - Van Morrison, The Proclaimers, The Saw Doctors, Clannad, etc. I leaped into action and immediately produced what I thought would be a good tracklisting. Then the research came back on what the title was going to be - Celtic Heart. My own heart sank. It's a title that reeks of marketing meeting, focus group and flip chart. But, it must be said, it would appear that this title has stood the test of time as it still appears to be available on Amazon and has at least two imitators which have stolen its title.

It might of course be my cunning and timeless tracklisting which has resulted in the continued availability of Celtic Heart- I mean, who can argue with the genius of kicking it off with Deacon Blue? Christ, what was I thinking? Still, at least I sneaked in Brian Kennedy who at that point had been dropped by the very label I was working for. Turned out that the exec who was masterminding Celtic Heart was unaware of Kennedy and liked the track so much he ended up resigning him to the label. Kennedy still didn't end up selling many records but he was a worthwhile artist who was given a deserved break. Those of you who've been paying attention will remember that the exact same thing happened to a band I signed, Club St Louis who got dropped by Warners label East West (a label they re-christened Least Best) and then re-signed as Honky to the Warners label over the road WEA.

But I'm digressing from compilations. I really don't mean to be down on them. Some of the best records are the ones that mash together a load of stuff you wouldn't think of putting together yourself. There are two reasons why compilation can work, one is where in amongst a quagmire of unlistenable bollocks you find a gem you've never heard of which immediately rises to the top of all your playlists. Examples of this for me are hearing Quincy Jones' sexed up version of Loving Spoonful's Summer In the City on the first of the three quite superb Blaxploitation CDs that BMG put out in the 90s, Stan Getz's bonkers I'm Late, I'm Late on frequently hard-to-like The Verve Album and Roger Eno outdoing his brother with Winter Music on an All Saints Records compilation I bought at SXSW. More recently, I was reviewing a compilation for Word Magazine called Destroy That Boy - More Girls With Guitars and in amongst the enjoyable if predictable collection of 60s girl bands was a track called Hold On by Sharon Tandy, which makes Janis Joplin sound like Sandi Thom and is a guaranteed air-punching winner. You never know where

The other, perhaps more valid, reason for compilations is when they work as bona fide albums; where the tracklisting works in a way that artist albums are supposed to. I'm not going to list my favourites because they are probably the same as yours but I'd argue that by far and away the compilations that work best are reggae and ska ones.

Reasons for this are twofold, firstly, many of the artists contained on these compilations were singles artists who made one or two definitive tracks which are great and secondly reggae and ska are so stripped down and muscular that disparate artists can sit alongside one another without jarring. Oh, and of course, the quality level is invariably high. I've lost count of the number of great reggae, ska and dub compilations I own or my good friend and reggae 7" collector Russell has bootlegged me, but it's certainly more than any other genre. Sometimes I yearn for more artist-based ska and reggae albums but then you have to remember than a lot of the time it's the same band I'm listening to - the Skatalites, the Soul Brothers, the Soul Vendors - they're playing on most of the great ska records of the 60s, either under their own name(s) or backing everyone from the Wailers to Desmond Dekker as well as ending up being manipulated by Lee Perry et al later in the 70s when dub came in. Those guys, Tommy McCook and Roland Alphonso on tenor sax, Don Drummond on trombone, Lester Sterling on alto sax, Lloyd Brevett on bass, Lloyd Knibbs on drums, Jackie Mittoo on piano, Jerry Hines on guitar and John 'Dizzy' Moore on trumpet, deserve the same respect afforded to the usual Mojo and Uncut suspects. Indeed, if anyone is looking for a good story like Nick Moran has just produced about Joe Meek, they need look no further than Don Drummond, the trombonist who was the creative force behind many of the Skatalites tunes, a schizophrenic who was locked up for murder and was then found dead in his cell amidst rumours of gangland revenge.

I'm sure I'm not telling you anything you don't know already but if for some reason you aren't a huge fan of this sort of music or you haven't got to it yet then I have two compilation tips for you. Firstly Jazz in Jamaica, a compilation of great good time ska instrumentals including Roland Alphonso's mind blowingly wonderful Yard Broom. For some reason it seems to be deleted but you can still get it secondhand - or from me if you ask nicely. And secondly Studio One's Dub Specialist which is packed with lots of the same ska recordings but put through the dub blender and rendered otherworldly yet still warm and melodic. Again it's deleted - clearly Celtic Heart fans aren't particularly moved by it.

Judging from this week's compilation charts, it would appear that Celtic Heart fans have been persuaded to get into ska but only on the terms laid down in 1980 by Jerry Dammers. Ska Mania is currently at number 3 in the charts, sandwiched between Dad Rocks and Dad's Jukebox - it's not a bad compilation, a nice mixture of Two Tone and original Trojan artists, and it's a much better paternal experience than anything with the D word in its title.

I was going to leave it there for this week but I want to leave you with one final piece of compilation advice - if you are tempted to buy Common People - The Brit Pop Story, make sure you go in with a firmly held remote control - or rip the tracks you want - because I can only assume that whoever compiled it was deaf. Or mad. A three CD set that starts with the criminally overrated Auteurs then, after the brief respite of Elastica, sucker punches you with Gene. Relax, it gets worse. CD1 particularly is insane - Dubstar are are loggerheads with Black Grape who precede Stephen Duffy - you couldn't make it up. By CD2 you are lulled into a false sense of security by Pulp's title track (but relegated to volume 2?), Supergrass' Alright and Sleeper's Inbetweener then before can say Parklife, you're hit with Echobelly, Northern Uproar and Powder. There is of course good stuff here and you know that the Britpop years in my opinion were healthy for British music but this compilation seems to have been put together with the meticulous hatred of a serial killer - someone who wants to bury the genre for good. Come out and show yourself, whoever you are!

South East London Song Contest

The band are now playing at full pelt, brass section giving it oomph, Telecasters are chopping and bass syncopating with snare. But the enthusiastic dancers have given the floor over to someone who is clearly having it larger than they are. The shape thrower in question, who looks like a combination of the foreman from Auf Widersehen Pet and Little Krankie, has now stripped off his polo shirt and is doing bare-chested press-ups on the pub floor. Ah, it's good to be back in South East London on a Saturday night.

The patrons of the Ladywell Tavern must be the only people in the entire country who aren't watching the final of Britain's Got Talent. Why am I missing this televisual feast? Don't I want to see how SuBo is going to fare? Am I, as my good friend Andy suggests, "a bit weird"? Why would I want to miss the ultimate bit of communal A&R? After all, I couldn't resist sitting down with my five year-old daughter and watching a generous slice of Eurovision this year. No one can accuse me of being some elitist twat who only accepts music that has been blessed by hipsters as you will know if you've been reading this for any length of time. I am, in fact, the polar opposite of this; far more likely to embrace a Girls Aloud album than one by Bon Iver - how many tunes does Bon have per song? Answer: two at best; how many do Xenomania give Girls Aloud? Five per song. Fah. Eye. Vah! Count 'em.

Eurovision had the usual pitiful selection of tunes but some unforgettable performances - Dita Van Tease's appearance with Germany's appalling entry was so popular with Maddy that she forced me to sit through it a second time the moment it finished. How I cursed the Sky+. At least she showed a modicum of taste when half way through Norway's inexplicably winning entry, referring to an earlier Graham Norton quip, she said, "Daddy, I agree with what that man said before, I want to give him a slap too."

But why watch talent on the telly when you can go out and see some of it in real life? We were off to see the band - The Grey Cats - that a friend of mine plays in. The clue of course is in the name - these men are not young. Some of them are even older than me. By day they are all mortgaged, parenting, reliable pillars of society but every now and then they put on some black clothes, pick up horns, guitars and sticks and practice some Clash songs. They've all got their own hair and most of them are slim enough to have tucked-in shirts without looking like cabbies. In short: for a bunch of old fellas singing London Calling they don't look too ridiculous.

The pub is packed for their performance, mostly friends and family of course - but how brilliant does this feel? It's like I suppose it was before entertainment was provided so easily on recordings - when, as the cliche goes, you had to make your own entertainment. To a certain extent I go along with Bill Drummond who believes that 'all recorded music has run its course' and that we should ditch it all and 'start again'. Clearly The Grey Cats are not out to produce anything quite so radical as Drummond's choir - you can't imagine The 17 doing a version of Stray Cat Strut with as much gusto as The Grey Cats - but the fact that we have all come to watch some blokes playing for fun, who have no worries about playing a few bum notes or wonky time signatures, says something.

Perhaps it's what all of us who never really liked sport are destined to do - instead of golf or fishing or watching the cricket we dust down our guitars, buy some new plectrums and get on the phone to some cheap rehearsal rooms. I'm playing music again for the first time in 20 years, as are many of my friends. I've yet to do any gigs (and boy, if I do, am I going to keep that one quiet) but I'm in a minority - one bunch of 40-something friends are in a band called Mass Data Storage (I love this band name) - who, despite having a jazz-obsessed bass player with the brain the size of a planet, only play three chord new wave covers.

The beauty of pop music being so old is that we are now all mature enough to recognise it as something which we shouldn't feel bad about maintaining a passion for until we die. Why should we put childish things away as we puff up, lose brain cells and develop ear hair? Most of us had some sort of aspiration to play rock when we were young but it's only recently become acceptable for normal middle aged guys, who aren't Stephen King or Simon Armitage to get up and play just as badly as they did when they were teenagers.

And talking of teenagers, last week I also got some first hand experience of another phenomenon at the other end of the age spectrum: the pop music school. I was asked to talk to a bunch of students at a North London music school about their Myspace pages .

The idea of going to school to learn about pop music still seems slightly bizarre to me. After all, School of Rock was only a handful of years ago. But these schools are a massive growth area in the UK and seemingly there is no end to the amount of kids who want to formalise their pop music knowledge so they can earn a living from it. Come to think of it, my mate from The Grey Cats has a daughter who goes to the BRITs school in Croydon.

This was the first time I'd ever spoken to students about the music business and frankly I was a little alarmed. Not just at the prospect of standing up in front of a class who might take anything I said as undisputed truth but also at what you say to kids who want to get into the music business when no one really knows what this business is any more.

Of course, the usual thing happened before any of the kids arrived - no one could work out how to make the overhead projector connect to the laptop. It's always the same, whether you are organising a surprise birthday party for your wife or an international A&R conference: whenever more than 6 people gather together in a conference room, all AV gear will stop working for as long as it takes for everyone from Post Room staff to Prada-sporting CEOs to be on their hands and knees under furniture shouting "Is it working now? Can you press AUX? No? Well, press PHONO, see if that works!"

Eventually we got it working (one of the students saved the day, of course) and in the blink of an eye the two hours I was booked to talk to them disappeared. In that time I found myself spouting all sorts of music industry lore I never even knew existed. I've heard this is what happens to lecturers and teachers - you are seduced by the sound of your voice - hey, I'm making these guys laugh... I AM A GOLDEN GOD.

This was a very smart bunch of kids and most of what I was saying was simple common sense - about logos, images and blogs - but they still seemed to something from it. We didn't speak much about songwriting and the music each Myspace was promoting but in preparing for the lecture I'd come across some notes I'd made back in the 90s when I was at Indolent and listening to far too many demos. I decided to close on this just to give them a little hint at the depths of my cynicism - it's a list of the most common lyrical cliches I found on demo tapes. Believe me, these blunders are so common if you have ever written a song you will have used one. So here as a little bonus are the Top Ten Lyrics To Be Avoided

10 Deep inside (combined either with "I've got a feeling..." or "Make you feel good...")
9 How much you mean to me
8 I hope and I pray
7 Don't matter what I do (plus optional) just can't get over you
6 Change... rearrange
5 You can't run, you can't hide
4 Just can't go on (and yet somehow, they manage to...)
3 Should have seen those lies in your eyes (plus optional) made me realise
2 Never thought it could be this way
1 Till the break of dawn.

The Grey Cats have a couple of their own songs which avoid any of the above - something I think we must thank the punk rock idiom for is the absence of navel gazing love lyrics. And talking of navel gazing, I find myself staring at the naked torso of Mr Krankie who is now being escorted from the pub by the landlord. He is clearly no stranger to White Ace and has a face which tells a thousand stories - most of them ending in being escorted from the building. "He comes to all our shows" announces Grey Cats singer Jac, and there is a ripple of mirth before the floor fills again to the strains of a Message to You Rudie and I start worrying about the babysitter.