I have a relatively substantial birthday coming up, and I’ve been putting together a playlist to celebrate: one track for every year. It’s a complex process involving a lot of compromises and trade-offs, to balance fitting in something by favourite artists somewhere with honouring all-time one-off favourites. Inevitably there are years where I have to choose between ten or more things I loved at the time, even before I start reckoning with tracks by artists I didn’t discover until later. And inevitably there are periods where I draw a blank…

2000-7. Or 8-1 BRR, as it’s also known. A period in which I was listening almost exclusively to jazz, but also a period in which pop and rock music seem to have been distinctly rubbish, judging both from my memories of songs I did hear at the time (prompted by looking at lists of top-selling singles to remind me) and from the fact that my gradual rediscovery of pop and rock ARR didn’t lead to much investigation of music from that era, apart from Mogwai (and I’ve set a ‘one song per artist’ rule, so filling up the empty slots with Mogwai isn’t an option).

So… what have I missed? What should I have been listening to? What am I going to put into my playlist?