I enjoy a good mash up and this one, ‘Virgin O’Riley’ is one of the best I’ve heard. I did some work on electronic music and production a few years ago so I know how difficult it is. It’s possibly sacrilege to dedicated Who (or Madonna) fans but you can still listen to the originals.

I’m visiting London in a couple of weeks for a bit of retail therapy, ie record shopping. It’s been about 5 years since I last visited the capital and I’m guessing the pool of decent record shops has diminished. I’m planning to visit Rough Trade East and hopefully favourite places like Honest Jons and Soul Jazz are still open. Any other recommendations?

This 1967 film features Robert Hughes, Olivier Todd and Lewis Nkosi wandering around ‘swinging’ London and pontificating about what it all means. Very evocative. It also includes segments with Arnold Wesker and Osbert Lancaster as well as a sweaty club scene with Herbie Goins and the Nightimers, including Harry Beckett and Mick Eve (one of Georgie’s Blue Flames). Well worth a watch.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p00rzw31/three-swings-on-a-pendulum

I’m probably not alone in having tons of digital music files, from all kinds of sources. However, I’ve not yet found a truly satisfactory way of playing these via a connection to my hifi setup. I’ve tried a lot of options, including JRiver, Audirvan, Fidlelia etc, and probably wasted money along the way. I know iTunes is an option but the vast majority of my files are FLAC which is not catered for by the current version, and probably never will be. All I want is a pleasant, robust and easy to use system. If it is at all relevant, I use Macs and control playback on a MacBook Pro. Anyone have any suggestions?