Keep Music Live

A recent visit to my daughter's provided me with a fine opportunity to sample the delights of live music a la local pub. Monday night's aren't traditionally the busiest in any pub's week, and I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I've been in a pub on that particular day of the week.

However, last night Barbara encouraged us to visit her local hostelry to listen to one of the many acts the landlord at Ye Olde Fleece Inn has booked to liven up this otherwise quiet spot in the week.

David Finney is a solo performer who mixes solid, gutsy vocals with a spot of acoustic guitar playing. His repertoire of covers spans the last three decades or so, and a pretty fine stab he made at them all, too - whether that be Van Morrison's Brown Eyed Girl or a particularly effective Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me), popularised by the inimitable Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel.

What set Finney apart from the crowd, however, was one of his own works, Burn Out or Fade Away. Written from the standpoint of someone who has just turned thirty, the song charts their thoughts about the choices that lie ahead, and their determination to live passionately and burn out rather than just fade away into the background. Hearing it last night, I couldn't help wonder why it hasn't been covered by someone else, so powerful was its sentiment and the depth of its emotion.

David Finney is originally from Nuneaton, but now plies his trade out of Sunderland, and can most probably be caught on the circuit of pubs and clubs in the north east of England. Good luck to him.

For the oldest swinger in town

My son Justin has been on at me for some time to 'get with it', to embrace the modern technology and buy an MP3 player.

Personally, I don't see the point. I've got all the music I need in my extensive CD collection. Why I would want to replace it - probably at huge expense - with a new format, I can't for the life of me conceive. I have yet even to see MP3 music for sale in shops, ayway.

Yesterday, however, I found myself in the unusual position of actually buying such a player. Not for myself, you understand, nor even for young Justin. Instead, it is destined to be used by my grandmother, Ethel Blunt.

At 102, her arthritic hands make it somewhat difficult to change the tapes in her cassette player. She's also (more than once) become convinced that she's broken the darned thing, when all she's done is accidentally press the 'pause' button.

I considered a little CD player for her, but, I fear, the same difficulties would present themselves. Then, following a discussion with Justin, we agreed that perhaps the MP3 player is just what she needs. No tapes to change, no CDs to fumble with. Just 250 carefully selected tracks that (Justin tells me) me, we simply have to 'rip' and 'burn' to the player. She'll then just have one button to press, and she can be away in a world of her own.

And therein lay our dilemma. Her eyesight (she claims) is not so good - although she can spot a bit of fluff on the carpet at twenty feet, when she wants to). So we were looking for an MP3 player that could easily be used by a centenarian. The bigger the buttons - and the fewer of them to press - the better.

As we toured the shops in our quest, yesterday, Justin reminded me more than once that our search was counter-intuitive. The whole point of MP3 players, he said, was to contain the maximum amount of songs in the smallest amount of space. He was right. Virtually every model we inspected looked like it might be a key fob of some description.

Anyway, we finally hit upon one that looked like it might fit the bill. It was in Music Zone in Sunderland, where the disbelieving sales laddie shook his head more than once when we explained what we were after.

For those of my readers with aged relatives seeking a similar solution, I can commend to you the Prolectrix 1GB MP3/4 Player - just a shade under £45. I'm not sure that Prolectrix is a particularly big name in the world of audio technology, but I see that they also produce a line in Epilators, described as working "like a pair of large tweezers... the 36 discs rotate and twist bunches of hairs together, plucking them from the roots". I shall have to pass the news on to Mrs Blunt.

It's a brave man who accuses Bill Blunt of being a technophobe. I liked this little gizmo so much, I might even buy one myself. It will be sad to see the CD go the way of the old 33rpm record, I suppose. But you can't stop progress!