Harkive: A day in the life of my headphones

Today is Harkive day - when people all around the internet keep a 24-hour diary of their listening habits. It's for a running project by Craig Hamilton, which aims to track how our access to and experience of music is changing. You can read more about it (and interrogate the data) on the official Harkive website.

I'll be updating my day's listening below, if it's of interest.

07:15 - 07:37 Listening to Years and Years' Communion on a hot, sticky train carriage. Because I have borderline OCD, I'm rating the songs on my iPhone as I go. It's mostly 2 and 3 stars - but King gets a four.


10:35 Streaming The Letter by Joe Cocker on Spotify. I'm writing an obituary for the song's composer, Wayne Carson, for the BBC News website and need a quick reminder of how it goes. I seem to have chosen a live version by accident. It's brilliant.

11:15 A colleague announces that 1980s one-hit-wonders Musical Youth are coming back with a new single. We get a short blast of Pass The Dutchie from his phone. Age has not withered its beauty.

11:48 Watching a video by "soul -pop sensation" Seinabo Sey on YouTube / Vevo. "Pretend is a fascinating blend of Swedish noir pop with a slinky dancefloor beat," says an email from her record label. It's very good, but the recurring refrain of "knock on wood" makes me want to listen to Amii Stewart.


11:52 Watching a fantastically overblown performance of Amii Stewart's Knock On Wood. It's been dubbed off VHS by the look of it.

For some reason, when I first click on the video, I get an entirely different video - Collette Carr's Static - which is like a less commercial Ellie Goulding track.




12:04 The new Foals single is on Soundcloud. It is not my cup of tea.



12:07 Actually, it gets a lot better at the end.

12:09 Writing up an interview with Robyn and La Bagatelle Magique for publication later this week. The piece looks at how Robyn and Markus Jägerstedt finished off their recordings after the sad, untimely death of producer Christian Falk. Listening to one of Robyn and Christian's earlier collaborations - Dream On - for reference and "the memories". Beautiful song.


13:47 Another Robyn track on YouTube - Tell U (Today). A cover of the Loose Joints cut, recorded for an Arthur Russell tribute album. More research for the article.

14:05 Having lunch in a branded cafe chain. Their barely-audible soundsystem is playing such classics as Fleetwood Mac's The Chain.

14:58 I've been pitched an interview with up-and-coming urban act Little Simz for the BBC News website. The blurb is interesting: She's an unsigned London artist with BET nominations, who's been championed by Kendrick Lamar. I click on the Soundcloud link. The first line of her record is "I puked up on my sneakers indoors" and she's giving the finger in her profile picture. Reader, what should I do?



15:21 Watching a video that I can't tell you about because it is embargoed until tomorrow.

16:26 On the way home. Had planned to check out Apple Music to see what old bollocks Zane Lowe was spouting today - but it won't load on my phone. Instead, I've loaded up a playlist of current singles from my library. Chemical Brothers, Demi Lovato, Janet Jackson, Lianne La Havas.  

21:49 The kids are safely in bed - somehow having avoided watching any television or listening to their favourite songs (currently Little Mix and Bob Marley), although I have been subjected to the refrain from Let It Go approx 107 times, as it emanates from my daughter's Princess Elsa magic wand.

Now in the bedroom, reading Moonraker and streaming the new Tame Impala on the home stereo (via Apple Music). The selection was inspired by a tweet from my old 6 Music colleague Sinead.

Been listening to new @tameimpala non stop for a week now...pretty sure this will be my favourite album of the year. pic.twitter.com/7yF2bYxLJk

— Sinéad Garvan (@SineadGarvan) July 20, 2015

I'd quite forgotten that I blogged about the epic 7-minute opening track back in March. The rest of the record seems to be living up to its woozy, psychedelic promise.


22:50 I suffer from tinnitus, so I tend to listen to music as I nod off. Tonight, the sound of The Staves' second album (If I Was, on an old-school iPod classic) is being augmented by a tower fan, giving the music a certain windswept quality. I'll be asleep by track six. Nanite.

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Music from the Harkive

I am being harvested for science. Or rather, my music habits are being collected for an academic study. And yours can be too.

Harkive is the brainchild of Craig Hamilton, who's doing an MA in Music Industry Studies at the City of Birmingham University. For the next 24 hours he wants you to tell him "the story of how, where and why you listen to music".

Why? Well, it's not particularly clear. But think of it as a census of music consumption. And imagine how different the same study would have been just 100 years ago: where every entry would essentially read "Went to church, heard some hymns".

You can contribute on email, Twitter (#harkive), Facebook or a myriad of other routes. Details are here and my diary will be updated throughout the day after this full stop.

00:00 In bed, listening to Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Mosquito album, via iPod plugged into HiFi system. I started listening before midnight, so all the best tracks are finished. I fall asleep to music most nights due to tinnitus. 

08:42 BBC Breakfast is doing a "bit" about the Proms as I eat my Shreddies. There's a montage of Nigel Kennedy; the Last Night; Maverick Sabre (Imagine! A rapper at the Proms!); and some truly off-putting opera. They also show a clip of the Doctor Who Prom, which looks like "fun".

09:30  Headphones on for the commute. I've asked my iPhone for a genius playlist, triggered by Michael Jackson. It imaginatively selects subsequent tracks by the Jackson Five and Janet Jackson, who smoulders her way through That's The Way Love Goes. A stone-cold classic. 

13:45 I'm on jury service this week, so I'm not as plugged in as normal. Still, it's lunchtime and I've taken the opportunity to have a look at other people's Harkive diaries. Talia Kraines from Heat radio just posted this mash-up of Solange's Losing You and Say My Name by Destiny's Child. Not quite as mindblowing as I'd hoped, but a welcome distraction from my limp, wet tuna sandwich.




17:05 Court has finished and the sun is out. I need something peaceful and mellow, and my current band crush is The Staves. I cue up In The Long Run on the iPhone and listen to it twice on repeat. Then I decide to embed it on the blog and end up listening to a live version on Soundcloud, too. I love the finger-picked arpeggio that underpins the melody and make a mental note to look up the fingering online. I make a further mental note to buy a guitar.

17:25 Hit shuffle. Get Demi Lovato's Heart Attack. RESULT!

17:38 Back at home. I'm going to start trawling through my inbox for submissions to the blog. This might not be pretty.

17:40 "My name is Sam Dickinson and I am a soul singer based in Newcastle and will also be going on a small UK Tour this summer. [My] album is currently available for pre order on iTunes and immediately went into the iTunes top 200 on pre orders, higher than Alicia Keys' pre order for her new record".

Hmmm... I'll ignore the fact that Sam should have hyphenated "pre-order" and listen to his new single, the "soul-infused" Learn To Wait.


17:41 It's fair to say Sam can sing. It's just a shame he had to sing this.

17:46 Next up, it's Lady Lykez - a very exciting female rapper (it says here) from London. Her song is called I Love My Butt and, awful title aside, it's got a slinky groove that's reminiscent of Missy Elliot's She's A Bitch.

"Arse so fat it's like a tank engine," she notes. "No vegetarian, I got a lot of meat". Funny and refreshing. You can hear it here.

17:54 "FIVE THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT BEN CARON" screams the next email. At least one of those things should be the name of his new single, and where to hear it. But no, apparently it's more useful to know whether he prefers Vodka or Gin.

17:56 Instead, here's Cleo Sol, a British soul singer who's been hovering on the edges of greatness for a while now. She's been called "the UK's brightest star" by Tinie Tempah, and her new single is a sexalicious swing that incorporates elements of Aaliyah's More Than A Woman, The Fugees' Ready or Not and Kendrick Lamar's The Recipe. I listened to it twice in a row, then downloaded it.



18:05 This is the last one. The band is called SPC ECO but you pronounce it Space Echo, which instantly makes you think "Oh, please fuck off".

Spack Echo are a new project from Dean Garcia, who was the main impetus behind 90s indie-goths Curve. For Spook-E=cow he's teamed up with Rose Berlin who, the press release reveals, "recently completed a BA Sculpture (with first class honours!)"

Delusional Waste is wispy, dreamy, dronepop with vocals thinner than water vapour. It passed through me like a double espresso.


18:20 To be honest, those were better than the usual rubbish that gets filtered into my inbox. But it's back to my own choices again. And it's MKS O'Clock (other times that are MKS O'Clock include 09:00, 10:00, 14:25, 17:33, 23:07, 11:11, 11:12, 11:13, 11:14, 11:18, 11:16, 11:16.5, 11:16.55, 11:15.551, 01:23, 11:17, 11:16.01, nighttime, daytime, hammer time).

18:52 Playing The Last Of Us on the PS3. It has a soundtrack by the majestically-named Gustavo Santaolallo, who won an Oscar for his Brokeback Mountain score. 

20:00 - 22:30 We are out with friends in a local pub. The local pub is playing "Anonymous Pub Background Ambient Classics" by "Various Artists" over a PA that is hidden in a tree. I Shazamed some of the tracks. They included I'm Easy by Jazzy Lee - an entirely shit version of The Commodores' classic; and Zombie by Elena - a cover of the Cranberries' IRA protest song, as delivered by an automated telephone banking system voice-over artist.

23:48 Bedtime. Tonight's soundtrack is Stevie Wonder's Innervisions. Plenty of records capture a cool Californian breeze - but only Living For The City clings to you like a night gummed up with oppressive urban heat.

And that's 24 hours in the life of my auditory-cognitive nervous system. It was interesting to write it all down - I hope it was at least partially interesting to read.

PS: Thanks to everyone who looked at this page before 22:00 and didn't point out that my iPhone had auto-corrected the phrase "most nights" to "moist nighters".

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