- The Observer, Sunday 21 August 2005
Letter of the month
The results of your survey were hardly surprising - especially 22 per cent of us Scots indulging in drugs to 'enhance' the pleasure of listening. Most of us, at some time in our lives, will have sat in a smoke-filled room while some hippie bozo suggests, 'Let's skin up and listen to "Dark Side of the Moon", maaaaan!'
But what interested me more was the finding that more men buy and listen to music than women. Sorry ladies, but 'Safe As Milk' by Captain Beefheart makes my heart race more than a pair of strappy sandals ever will!
Lorna Irvine, Glasgow
· Letter of the Month wins £100 in HMV vouchers
After wading through OMM 23 no one can accuse you of not taking music seriously! The OMM/ICM poll explored just about every nook and cranny of buyer-listener behaviour - to the point at which the data-stream became a tsunami.
Even topping this in terms of gravitas was Nick Hornby's interview with Bruce Springsteen ('A Fan's Eye View'): the high priest of bloke-lit meets the high priest of bloke-rock. It was all rather simpering stuff, and for hard-core fans only.
So, how appropriate: an OMM as overblown as the music of its featured star turn.
R Lloyd, Newport
My blood ran cold when I read your claim that 'the average man owns 317 albums' ('What Britain's Listening To'). Sure, my own hoard was still comfortably above the norm, but that left a sizeable proportion of my friends distinctly below par. But these are people of taste who appreciate the finer things in life, I started to splutter!
Fortunately, a closer look showed I could relax. You've quoted the mean average, but this is skewed by the small number of fanatics whose 5,000-plus discs line every wall of their homes. Judging from your breakdown, it looks as though the median number of albums owned is a little over 100, a more accurate guide to the 'average person's' collection.
Thankfully, there's still three per cent of the population sadder and more obsessive than I am.
Tom Hawkins, Stockport
The results of your poll are largely determined by the nature of the publication itself. It purports to be a music magazine but is devoted almost entirely to pop and its variants. Jon Savage is quite mistaken about the Sixties ('How We Listened Then'). By the end of that unfortunate decade, pseudo-intellectuals were falling over themselves to write about the profundities offered by the composers of 'Yellow Submarine' in terms which, until then, had rightly been reserved for Schubert's Winterreise
For commercial reasons, people are persuaded by the music industry that the satisfactions to be had from such intellectually and emotionally exacting music as, say, the Bach cello suites or the Louis Armstrong Hot Five are available through a music designed to divert the mind while the body is engaged in household chores, and to provide a soundtrack to teenage courtship rituals or the tribulations of white, apolitical student life.
Robert Greenwood, Chatham, Kent
Please stop going on about Kanye West ('The First 10', OMM23). Can't you see you people only like him because he is more acceptable than the likes of Tupac - basically, he's middle class, and you love it.
Thegoonerchris, by email
