Forty-something years ago the arrival of new product from someone Hughesy and his peers deemed musically significant would have been followed by repeated plays and intense scrutiny of anything relevant in the pages of NME, Melody Maker, Sounds, Rolling Stone, Creem and whatever other relevant music periodicals we'd managed to lay our hands on and fairly lengthy discussion as the item in question played through.
Reactions to a new album were shaped by the interaction of a variety of sources, tastes and opinions, but once things progressed into what I've termed The Wilderness Years those factors gradually dropped off.
Things improved markedly once we moved into The Internet Years, and these days there's a wealth of information out there and easily accessible. What I lack at the moment is someone to discuss it with. For a while it looked like Community Radio might do that. Hughesy's failure to return to the airwaves is the result of the failure of the airwaves to turn up people who wanted to talk music. So it's reached a point where I have to figure these things out for myself, and the lack of a pile of handy reference material (he piles of back copies of those periodicals I used to rely on) means I've had to work out a new approach to these matters.
It took a while, but I've now got the situation where I can play a new album in full go to whoah sequence around a dozen times before it starts to head into the heady territory of Hughesy's Top 1500 Most Played, which is an exercise in shuffle mode and takes the sequential bit out of the equation. As things go through those first dozen plays I've got my own reactions tapped out, along with a fair chunk of cut and paste action from various on line sources that fill the same role as the piles of periodicals previously mentioned.
Somewhere between play #2 and play #12 that data file will coalesce into the entry you'll find in these pages.