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.