To be honest the Stone Roses disc was also more of a 90's album for me also. Visiting the UK in the summer of 1990 I picked up the Stone Roses "One Love" single on CD which was a big hit there that year and at was really only at that point that I started to give the Stone Roses LP a big listen.

As I mentioned to Brian the other night there is a also a bit of a cheat on my list with two compilations. The Orange Juice and Siouxsie and the Banshees records are both comps but for me these are the two discs by bands that I dearly love that got the most spins and, if you know neither band, are definitely a good starting point.

Bill Pritchard, who I believe is English, was actually biggest of all in France. I'm not sure he was ever CFNY material and I might have first heard him on CBC's Brave New Waves, back when I could stay up past 10 o'clock in the evening. As a big fan of Lloyd Cole it was pretty easy to fall in step with Pritchard's soft-toned story telling music.

As for classical music and it's fans knowledge or lack thereof let me be the first to admit that I am somewhat intimidated by the depth and breadth of the music that this all encompassing term covers. I never studied music in school beyond the pissing about in primary school years and as such always feel at a big disadvantage in truly understanding what is going on in the great works. I can enjoy it at an emotional level but feel I will always be left on the sidelines in really getting what is being conveyed by the composer. This is something I've never felt with jazz as it operates for me primarily on an emotional basis and I can leave it at that and not feel that I'm missing out somehow.

Having said that I don't feel that classical music fans are necessarily less knowledgeable just because a few pompous gits like to feel they can lord it over the rest of us with the sheer magnitude of their insight and connection to the classical world.

Reading an article in BBC music magazine the other day by a young Russian conductor made me want to pull what remains of my hair out. He had a valid point in that too many orchestras rely on the old war horses to make their money (Dvorak's 9th, Rachmaninoff's 2nd piano concerto etc). He also stated that too concert goers tend to scurry like rats whenever the program contains something new or less well known. The sentence that had me cringing was that this 28 year old felt that it was up to him and his ilk to "educate the concert going public".

I'd be quite happy to hear something like Dvorak's tone poem "The Golden Spinning Wheel", a Norgaard symphony or a clarinet concerto by Kalevi Aho. If the TSO is any indication too many orchestras fall back on the tried and true knowing that this will pull in the same old crowd. Why not throw in regular new or lesser known works instead of ghettoizing them like the TSO does when they shovel them all together in one week every spring. I think they might be surprised by the interest us plebs would show. I don't think educating us Soviet style has anything to do with it.