After The Noise
Everything Is Equal
Tuesday 03 February 2026
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Angela Hewitt – Piano Sonata No. 9 in D Major, K. 311: Rondo. Allegro – Excerpt. (2026)
No idea who Angela Hewitt is. Does it matter? Probably not. Mozart will do.
A new month. Feeling good and oddly positive. Lost a massive Listening Log entry somewhere along the way. The machine not working. I should be mighty peeved but for a change, I’m not.
Doesn’t matter. Life’s too short to worry about things like that.
I wake up to Mozart and it’s exactly what you want. Calm. Settling. A gentle way to start proceedings. That sense of everything being briefly in the right place.
Out in the car now. Traffic already doing what traffic does. Someone can’t wait, swings into the opposite lane, gains exactly one car length. Congratulations.
I laugh to myself at how stressed people get on the roads. I used to be like that, till I saw a different way of thinking. One where you amuse yourself at the stressed road antics of others. Battling to get that one car length ahead. It’s not worth the hassle.
It’s a queue. It always is. It’s never that serious.
Mozart carries on regardless. That’s the lesson, probably.
Curtis Mayfield – We Got To Have Peace (1971)
Curtis Mayfield is frequently overlooked in the general scheme of things. I went through a soul phase not so long back. Not a deep one, but enough to know he’s something special.
Made a series of astonishing albums in the 70s. All class.
A car in front is pumping out truly foul emissions. Taking smoking to new extremes. Brand new as well. You can smell it inside my car. I’m staying well back. Nearly at my destination anyway.
One of the few downsides of quitting smoking three years ago is my sense of smell returned.
I started my 99 km dog-walking challenge yesterday. All donations welcome!
A day late but it matters not one wit. I’ve got the whole of February to complete. I thought about fudging it, just a bit. Can’t. Too honest.
Managed just under 8 km so far. I like it. Very therapeutic, just wandering the ghetto streets of North Manchester with my furry freeloading friend sniffing everything in sight.
With not a care or a fuck in the whole world. That’s the way to live!
More traffic nonsense. Learners. Confusion. No one-way system but no one quite knows what to do with that freedom. Someone’s knocked over a post. Plenty of room. Still happens.
Valentine’s Day coming up. Then Easter. It never stops, does it. Adverts everywhere. Go away.
Curtis keeps playing. That helps. Soothing soul music done right.
Ride – I Came To See The Wreck (2024)
And now something different. Ride, I Came to See the Wreck from Interplay. Another fine record from one of Oxford’s finest exports.
Big fan of Ride. I’ve loved all their albums, so Ride always get the Listening Log seal of approval.
Someone behind me doesn’t seem to know what a red light is. But that is the norm when cruising the dusty roads of Manchester.
It’s bloody freezing today. I mean, seriously cold. Typical UK winter weather. Grey. Miserable. Only thing missing is rain.
A woman steps straight into the road instead of using the crossing a few yards away. Doesn’t even speed up. People are exhausting. Thank God I’ve got Ride on. This is epic Ride. Really epic.
A band I’ve never seen live. I should be able to answer that, but I can’t.
I did interview Mark Gardener once when he was in the band The Animal House. Should have been huge but quietly split after just one album. Not on Spotify, sadly.
However, I did come across an album he made with Robin Guthrie of Cocteau Twins. Which made my day cos I’m sad like that.
Bands like this know what they’re doing. They know what they want to sound like. They don’t really sound like anyone else. They got lumped in with shoegaze, but Ride were always a bit apart from that.
Any band that puts out an epic like Leave Them All Behind and gets it into the Top 10 is fine by me.
George Michael – Shoot the Dog (2002)
Bloody hell seems like last week George Michael died. What a man. From pure pop sensibility to glam to stuff like this. And that video. Brilliant.
There was ITV show in the early noughties, 2DTV. A cartoon piss rip of celebrities. Hilarious. Like The Sweeney, Morse and Minder, in the “better idea” file in the archives.
A toe-tapping, head appreciating pop classic.
An endless stream of cars to get onto Queen’s Road. You wait. You wait some more. Then suddenly a window opens. Someone lets you out. Faith in planet Earth briefly restored.
George Michael knew exactly what he was doing. People forget just how good he was. It was only when he died that all the stories came out. How generous he was. How kind.
My wife showed me that video the other day where he wasn’t allowed into his own gig. Just laughed it off. Told the driver to move on. No tantrum. No ego. Imagine that happening to Madonna or Mariah Carey. Different outcome entirely.
More traffic nonsense. People parked where they absolutely shouldn’t be. The level of stupidity we just accept now is impressive.
I’d forgotten how effective the usage of Love Action is.
I arrive at my destination with a smiley smirk spread across my face.
George Michael made exceptional pop records. A brilliant man, in every sense.
The Listening Log 