It’s hard to believe but the Crotchety Man blog is now 5 years old.

This particular anniversary is usually celebrated with gifts made of wood. Something like this statue of Ian Anderson might be appropriate; it would certainly be a welcome addition to the Crotchety Art Display Shelves.

But, first, let’s take a quick look back on year 5 of this blog.

It’s always nice when you discover a band you would have loved if only you had known about them at the time. That is what happened with gentle prog rockers, Wally, from the mid-1970s. They prompted the one and only post in the Band/Artist category this year.

Another singular event was the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission that put a man on the moon for the first time. That was commemorated with some personal memories of that night and the lone Playlist, Magnificent Desolation.

The five Album of the Month posts included a live performance by Hidden Orchestra, a second review of Bill Bruford’s Feels Good to Me (which has disappeared from Spotify since I first blogged about it) and three albums by bands/artists that were new to me (How Far to Hitchin, Henge and Alan Simon). Did you spot the track titles in the Bruford album post?

The Track of the Week posts covered everything from the funky pop of Level 42 to the improvised jazz of Ill Considered, taking in folk, blues, new wave, indie rock, prog rock, fusion and classical crossover pieces along the way. There may have been an undue emphasis on slowish tracks but overall it represents the breadth of the Crotchety taste quite well.

A few posts deserve a special mention:

• Half Moon Run is the only band to have inspired two track-of-the-week posts (Narrow Margins and Then Again),
• Flook‘s prog-ish folk album, Ancora, triggered the immediate purchase of the CD (see the Sharig … track-of-the-week post),
• Villagers lovely indie folk track, Nothing Arrived, prompted a poignant little story,
• The Lepidoptera EP by Annie Lennox gives a whole new perspective on the Eurythmics singer (as described in Parnassius Apollo),
• Beverly Glenn-Copeland has used the celestial voice of a trans man to create a song that would be perfect for the Crotchety Man funeral.

The summary tables for 2019 are here. It hasn’t been a particularly productive year for blogging but the Man is still Crotchety and he plans to continue in that vein in the years to come.

Now, as we begin another year and look ahead to a whole new decade, I have an anniversary present for you. It’s a Spotify playlist on the theme of ‘wood’ with 17 songs lasting 1 hour 12 minutes. You can open it now and sample it a bit at a time or leave it until you have time to listen to it all. Either way, I hope you enjoy it.

And finally, still on the ‘woody’ theme, I’ll leave you with a tribute to the wonderful Victoria Wood, who left us for the great woodpile in the sky in 2016. There has never been a more amusing song than this.

May your vinyl, CD and digital music collections grow fat, may your hi-fi systems continue to faithfully reproduce those recorded sounds and may your ears be sharp, free of wax and undamaged by live bands who turn the volume knobs way too high.