0005 - 1910 Fruitgum Company

The first victim here of my hard-drive wiping disaster; a single mp3 file, shorn of any ID tags - goodygoodygumdrops.mp3 - it's the one song I have by the 1910 Fruitgum Company.  Presumably it was at some point part of a larger 60s compilation, but it now lies orphaned and lonely, friendless amongst hundreds of gigabytes of cold, hard drive platters that just don't care!

On the other hand, there can be no better way to illustrate my (lack of?) purpose here and it allows me to establish my dull music geek credentials early on, by referring to early-90s Teenage Fanclub b-sides.

0004 - 17 Pygmies

More post-punk from LA, but a pretty stark contrast from the last lot - where 100 Flowers were fairly straightforward punk, 17 Pygmies are much more of a mixed bag.

0003 - 10CC

I found just the one 10CC song squirreled away in a hidden corner of my laptop, their biggest hit (I'm so mainstream), I'm Not In Love.

0002 - 100 Flowers

100 Flowers are a post-punk three piece from Los Angeles who started life in 1978 as The Urinals, changed their name to 100 Flowers in 1981, disbanded in 1983, reformed (after some members spent time in Trotsky Icepick), again as The Urinals, in 1996, changed their name to Chairs Of Perception (which is a great name) some time after 2003 and then back to The Urinals in 2008. Awesome.

0001 - Mystery Artist...

I suppose I knew when I decided to start this musical odyssey that I was taking on a fairly herculean task. If you'd asked me at the time, though, how many different artists I had in my music collection, I'd probably have guessed at about three or four hundred, which is only about one thousand short of the actual total...

What's all this then?

A while back, I was attempting to reformat a flash drive and I accidentally wiped the external hard drive containing all my digital music files.I was able to recover most of the files, but some are incomplete, some are corrupted, some are simply not there. The only way I can find out what needs replacing is to listen to it all, so that's what I'm going to do, in alphabetical order, artist by artist, and I'm going to blog about it.

Afghan Whigs

Sometimes, timing is everything. There are plenty of bands whose heyday was in the late-80s or early-90s who managed to pass me by and who, had I known them at the time, I may well have fallen in love with. Dinosaur Jr., Husker Du, Throwing Muses, Sebadoh, Afghan Whigs - bands whose work I was aware of on a fairly superficial level, but who never connected at the time in the way that, say, Buffalo Tom, Soundgarden, Sugar or Belly did.

I've got one Afghan Whigs album, 1990 release Up In It, and I suspect that had I owned it back in, say, 1992 I would now be writing about the Afghan Whigs in the glowing, fond terms I will one day use when writing about about Buffalo Tom.