Hi, First of all apologies for the tone of the last message. I concede that using a phrase like hitting rock bottom made me sound like a bit of a lead balloon. Oh the joys of electronic communication, if anyone can come up with a workable system for hedging in emails then theyd be doing us all a huge favour. :-) :-) :-) :-) :-) I do however have a couple of serious points Id like to make and would like to know what everyone thinks, and Im definitely not pointing any fingers, so bear with me. Steve Smith wrote:- But is it completely unwarranted to make such an assertion based on public behavior and statements made in the mass media? Or should we assume that they're "just playing rock star" in those contexts, but in real life they're sweethearts? Well my own view on this is probably out of step with most people but I dont think we should be in the least bit interested in the personalities of people who happen to be in the spotlight. As far as Im concerned whether a musician whose music I like is nice or unpleasant is no more or less important than whether the guy who fixes my car or the person who runs my local Indian take-away is a saint or a total bastard. They all provide me with a service and, even though those services are completely different from each other, it is on those that they should be judged and nothing else. I am also dubious of trying to gauge what someone is like in the flesh from the way they have been portrayed in print. I can vouch for this having not chosen my words carefully enough last time around. One slip like that and it would be easy for a journalist with an axe to grind to do a hatchet job. The worst album thread touched a couple of raw nerves on my part: a) Im finding increasingly that personalities dominate issues. Here in Britain we have regular bouts of discussion as to whether we should scrap the monarchy or not. The fact that most of our constitutional problems stem from a system which is so archaic it belongs in a museum seems to be of little interest to our media. Much so-called academic debate is also handbags at 20 paces. b) The received wisdom in the British music press is that Prog Rock was universally crap and was successfully killed off by Punk, as though it was some kind of cancerous growth. The trouble is its hard to argue for an alternative point of view without coming across as an apologist for the whole movement. Whilst I think Love Beach has one of the worst titles and covers of all time I would put it several notches above any boy/girl band in the worst album of all time contest. c) It may stem from my being a naïve academic (who doesnt live in the real world, as Im often told) but it just seems like such a waste of time, effort and the amazing technology that allows us to have this list in the first place just to tell a bunch of people who probably quite like musician X that you think hes boring. It hardly pushes the debate on. Anyway, profuse apologies and thoughts please. Dave "Results! Why man, I have gotten a lot of results. I know several thousand things that won't work." Thomas Edison. _________________________________________________________________ MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx