There was a period of time before the whole East - West thing froze solid again, and after that original coldness had started to thaw out, that it seemed like Western Europe / USA and Russia / USSR would be friends. It was Mikhail Gorbachev who really wanted to be our friend and started the unthawing, or perhaps more accurately he wanted his country to be less poor and stuck in the 1950s. So, what you ask, has this got to do with music? Well, for much of the so-called Cold Wa

I thought I would start another occasional series of playlists, that slowly trawl through a bunch of songs that have come into my life at different stages. As has been mentioned before, I think I probably was already quite obsessive about music from a fairly young age, hence why this first bunch of tunes start in 1978, when I hit the golden age of 5. Not all of the tunes in each playlist period, as you will see, actually come from that timeframe, they more relate to how they