Welcome To The O.C.

Time once again to display my obsessive compulsive tendencies with a musical compilation. Help yourself to Part I and Part II in mp3 fomat.

Choosing twenty of the best recent tracks is easy. Agonizing over the running order, as if there was one - and only one - completely correct way for this particular bunch of songs to sequence together, is the time-consuming part for me. Par example, the first few have little in common on the face of it but I decided that they shared some prominent percussion and a kind of Western feel, so they segue. Beck's Black Tambourine gets things shaking next and we head off into silly chart territory for a while before three contemporary songstresses bring the mood back down again. Et cetera! I am not making this up.

Sometimes a track is so over-the-top as to be impossible to follow. Those go last. This time it's Mr Blue Sky - which, incidentally, would have broken the Top 40 singles chart after being featured in Doctor Who last summer if downloads were included then as they are now.