It’s an interesting and mostly good quality service. Sound is far better than MP3 format music because it uses superior OGG encoding. Mobile, I have actually walked through a park, searching for tracks on the fly as my friend and I discussed music, and playing them via 3G with no discernable lag. This kind of service is possible with the iPhone, any decent Android phone and half a ton of Nokia devices, probably.

Spotify’s social side is pretty basic. You can share playlists, connect to people and view their public playlists. You can send music to people’s inbox, which is a nice thing to do, but I wish I could attach a simple message like you can on Twitter or Facebook. You can “share” a playlist with others which means co-create and curate a playlist, nothing more than that – yet. I’d like to see some intelligent use of RSS.

Spotify is as yet available in a few European and Scandinavian countries. It has backers in the music industry and is coping well with a patient technical rollout. They do have some gripes among their key premium users – gaps between songs being a serious, ongoing complaint. “Gapless” digital playback (as per CD since time the 1980s) is not implemented with this service. Is it the Spotify client, or is it caused by Spotify’s encode methods? Fans of long format music listening, paying for an uninterrupted ad-free service, leave in despair, unable to enjoy classic recordings as they are meant to be heard.

But the most interesting thing to me is that people are beginning to tap into the possibilities of programme making with Spotify. Danny Ryan at Kudos Records has started Playdio. He sees the cultural possibilities in the Spotify format. Publishing spoken word sections to play in sequence with music, creating an interesting kind of radio show web magazine hybrid, they are exploiting a great opportunity.

Since the first blog was such a huge success, I scotched the title and left it to posterity, and I’m not saying I made a mistake. But, I do miss the title, Blog of Funk. It said what it was on the tin, even though it wasn’t just about music at all, but about the navigation of this contrary world we inhabit.

With the balance shifted towards the music, and my usual self emerging despite all attempts to encourage work elsewhere, enough time has elapsed to write this blog again under it’s old banner.

Welcome back, Blog of Funk.

Ian Dury is one of my heroes. He was a unique person, a true bohemian, a painter who went on to make hit records with unforgettable lyrics, punk attitude, and irresistable funk, who performed and sang like a demented music hall artist.

But along with his raucous, explicit, confrontational demeanour, Ian Dury also wrote tender, touching, sublime lyrics and before he died aged 57, he wrote in 1998 one final masterpiece of an album, Mr Love Pants, with his best collaborator Chaz Jankel, and his old band The Blockheads.

This song Bed ‘O’ Roses has him at his honest, self-aware best, and also combines a superb jazz-rock-funk groove with Dury’s hilarious but telling lyric on a disastrous love affair.

“You robbed me of my natural sense of humour
And then you nailed my bollocks to the door….”

I saw Ian Dury a dozen or so times – he never disappointed.

It didn’t help me that Caribou, aka Dan Snaith, had a fight with a mean-spirited rocker over their original choice of name, Manitoba, which they lost. It doesn’t seem to have had any detrimental effect on the music, which is full of variety, abounding with modern sonics, surprising arrangements, time-honoured musical narrative and sweet, original melody. I was so taken with the music, I called several friends and insisted they open their emails NOW and follow the links I had sent them. I haven’t done that “I-insist-you-listen” routine for twenty years.

Kids: that is what happens as you get old. Everything reminds you of something else. The freshness doesn’t last. So, when something shows up that’s as fresh as a Canadian spring daisy, go crazy, in a rock-electro-psychedelic-shaman kind of way.

I’ve bought everything I can get hold of, and I’m definitely checking them out live when they come to the UK in April.

Here are two of my favourite tracks, Barnowl from The Pink Room live sessions, and Skunks which has a rather lovely animated video. It was the latter track which pricked my ears up, and caused me to recognise Mr Snaith’s truly unique talent.

Relentless rasping saw-wave with a robotic call to pleasure makes Benassi’s ‘Satisfaction’ peerlessly effective. If you don’t get it, don’t worry. It makes a lot of sense on the dancefloor.

Despite my natural writing mode being a more traditional, instrument-based practise, I have enjoyed electronic music since I first heard sounds which I knew weren’t acoustic in 1960s psychedelia. I first played a synthesiser at art school in 1981 – an old but gold Arp Odyssey. It had two oscillators and no midi, but it was capable of marvellous resonant filtering and a deep bass frequencies. Along came electro, bridging between Berlin and New York as I constructed art sound installations and cobbled together audio samplers with a ZX Spectrum and a biscuit tin. Nobody suspected that just around the corner lay ACEEEED, ecstasy and the illegal and highly popular underground rave movement.

Don’t quite know what it is about this that makes me feel so very emotional.. I’ve yet to work it out. It’s something to do with the uplifting optimism of the music with the intimacy and banal delivery of the vocal, and the “found” collaged speech.. it opens up a crack in reality, into which I fall.

If I can be as sanguine about my own fate, should it come to that, I will have achieved something of great merit.

In this episode, impossibly precocious child, Stewie, meets another baby and writes her a love song. In the event it turns into a screamingly funny version of “Everything I Do, I Do It For You” which totally sends up the hit. But at first, he strums away and sings about the music he is writing. It’s the most wonderful self-awareness, and in the middle of this hilarious comedy, manages to be genuinely educational.

Take it away, Stewie:

“Wouldn’t Do That” has a double meaning which runs all the way through it, and while I don’t want in this blog to be my own literary critic, I’m happy to point out the obvious: Is the promise made not to leave, or once gone, not to look back? is the question I was asking, and it’s one which is poignant to this day.

I’m quite proud of this song, because the major/minor chord progression expresses the bitter-sweet idea I was trying to articulate before I even began to say it. I quite naturally fell into singing a falsetto, and played the most soulful harmonica I’ve ever managed, which you can hear in this demo.

“I promise I will never hurt you”
“I promise I will never leave”
Promises made are broken so easily
Brave words are just wind in the trees

What are these worlds we live in?
Doing our thing separately
Surely we must have forgiven each other
Wasn’t our loving for real?

Well I’ve been so long in lonely world
Living without a loving soul
And I know it won’t be long ’til I’m missing you
But I made myself a promise
That I wouldn’t do that…

And it’s a long and lonely road
Living without a loving soul
And I know it won’t be long ’til I’m missing you
But I made myself a promise
That I wouldn’t do that…

© Dean Whitbread 2006, all rights reserved

Some songs stand out for having changed your life. This once changed mine in one, classy Thursday afternoon radio moment of inspiration which I shall never forget. Dave Cash, Capital Radio, London 95.8FM. Ian Dury and the Blockheads – What a Waste.

I was astonished at the music, physically entranced to the extent that I grabbed the pretty powerful mono transister set and pushed my ear up against it so as not to lose a moment of the incredible hypnotism that was pouring out of speaker and into my lug hole. He was singing in English, in my accent, or close to it, using words which spoke to me about my life – over a beautiful lilting, funky reggae beat, with a screaming chorus of sexual intensity

I adopted this band and this man instantly. I have very few heroes, but Ian Dury is one. He blended funk with punk, poetry with blasphemy, vulnerability with defiance, sympathy with the anarchy of the day. Like many a true innovator, to this day he is less celebrated than he should be. It was truly a golden cross-over moment for both pop music – punk spawning really interesting hybrids as it became new wave – and for me.

I lost my virginity to the album, New Boots and Panties; and the songs of Ian Dury became entwined with my destiny. He set many good and bad examples, which is just the way it should be. I went to art school in part because of Ian Dury, and leaving art school, went on to make music professionally, just like he did. Mr Dury died tragically young of liver cancer just as his second career as actor was taking off, but still, he was brave to the end.

Ian, old fruit, I miss your honest and wry majesty, and I salute you.