They Thought You Might Like It Too Before the algorithm knew what we liked, there was a person. Someone sitting behind a microphone at two in the morning. Someone in a television studio deciding which band deserved three minutes of airtime. Someone hunched over a stack of records, looking for something that hadn't already been played to death. They listened. They took a chance. And then they thought you might like it too. Before the Algorithm We tend to remember the bands. The voices. The guitar riffs. The albums that changed everything. The songs that somehow survived decades of changing fashions. But music doesn't travel by itself. Somebody has to put the record on. Somebody has to tell you about the band you've never heard of. And sometimes, that somebody becomes just as important to the journey as the musicians themselves. There was a time when discovering music meant knowing where to look. You waited for a particular programme. You stayed awake for the late-night show....
The Blind Squirrel Finds an Acorn: Prog Rock Edition There is an old saying: Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn once in a while. I've always liked it. Not because I'm particularly fond of squirrels. Not because I've spent any meaningful amount of time studying their eyesight. But because, musically speaking, I occasionally prove the saying absolutely correct. You spend years listening to rock music. You dig through albums. You chase B-sides. You follow rabbit holes. You convince yourself that you've heard just about everything worth hearing. And then, completely out of nowhere, you stumble across a song and think: "How the hell did I miss this?" That happened to me recently. The acorn? Van der Graaf Generator – "Man-Erg." And suddenly the squirrel was awake. The Acorn Van der Graaf Generator aren't exactly some obscure band that existed for three weeks in someone's garage. They've been around since the late 1960s. They're one of t...