Playlist: 40 Years of Dancing

Having talked about how I wanted to try out combining blogging with the music service Spotify in my last post — I thought I’d better make a start.

Last year, for my 40th Birthday, I gave myself a project to come up with a playlist for what I would like to have played at my birthday party. Not that I actually had a party, sadly. The rules were that there should be 40 tracks – one for each year between 1971 and 2011, that they should be played in chronological order going by year of release (although I ended up being a little flexible over this – there are two tracks from 1981 and two from 1983 for example), that they should be some kind of dance track, and that they should be songs I liked or that meant something.

I made a start, but this proved to be a more difficult and time consuming task than I had anticipated. Each track being carefully chosen. So the playlist never got finished. Recently, as a result of playing around with Spotify I decided to have another go at completing this little project – which I finished this week.

I’m quite pleased with the result. It is not to be taken too seriously — it is more pop chart than a serious exploration of dance culture — and has a distinct disco flavour. But there should be one or two songs at least that will get you tapping your feet.

This content was originally posted on my old Strange Thoughts blog.