When the 2020 pandemic began and the world tumbled into an awkward lockdown, it felt like we had to find new ways to stay in touch. No longer able to sit around a pub table arguing about music, culture or politics, we suddenly had to live our lives on Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet.
From out of this adversity, Sunday Night Music Club was born. A good friend suggested that a group of us gather on Zoom to pontificate on our favourite music. It soon developed into an indispensable weekly treat and has helped us all retain our sanity throughout these troubled years.
It works like this: each week a different person hosts, having set a theme at the end of the previous Sunday’s session. Members must make a 30 minute playlist around that theme and send it to back to the host. All seven are then put together, back to back, in a master playlist. Everyone gets a few days to listen, work out who each playlist belongs to and then send the answers back to the host. The whole thing gets discussed at the next Sunday meeting where correct answers are revealed and points awarded. It’s a bit nerdy, great fun, and a wonderful way of discovering new music and old classics. It gets a bit competitive – we’ve even had a few arguments along the way – but we’ve managed to remain friends and are still at it more than two years down the line. Eagle-eyed readers will notice that I blogged about our Halloween edition in October 2020.
Part of the game is trying to guess whether members are pretending they’re someone else, or are even picking music they don’t really like just to fool the others.
As a Graphic Designer I found it hard to resist designing bespoke guide sheets for each session. Below is a selection of some of my favourites, along with the relevant Spotify link for the musically curious.
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One Act, Thirty Minutes / 31st January 2021
Members were asked to choose a single artist. Typically, a diverse and interesting selection was forthcoming. Stevie Wonder, The Everly Brothers, Bill Nelson, Simple Minds, Felix Da Housecat, Kate Bush and Nick Cave.
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Dudley Do-Right or Dick Dastardly? / 7th May 2021
Heroes and Villains. They could be fictional or real. It didn’t have to be one or the other, it could be a mixture of both. Plenty of fun was had analysing each other’s choices.
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Cocktail Hour / 23rd May 2021
Simply put, music to drink cocktails to. Members were asked to name their playlist after a favourite cocktail, and to imagine what would be playing if they found themselves sipping it on some glamourous terrace with the sun setting gently over a calm sea.
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Around the world in 7 playlists / 18th July 2021
The host privately allocated each member a different country. We were allowed to select artists or bands whose name was also a country, as well as songs about a particular country. One lucky member was given imaginary countries.
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“Let’s do the show right here!” / 25th July 2021
Musicals! Playlists had to be made up of songs originally written for musicals. Not much more to add except that maybe this one stretched the imagination a little bit. I also had great fun researching the posters.
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One Louder / 28th November 2021
Rock music, heavy metal, guitar riffs and such like. I thought it would be witty to use sign language for the numbers in tribute to the fact that a lot of rock musicians end up losing some of their hearing later in their career. I later realised that I had used American sign language.
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Sound & Vision / 9th January 2022
This one was all about the visuals. Songs that were made memorable by a particular TV performance or promo video. I took lots of screen grabs from YouTube.
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Sexcrime / 23rd January 2022
The music of the year 1984. Which, upon investigation, slightly surprised us all by being quite a good 12 months for records. I enjoyed researching imagery of the time and chose to focus on newsworthy people and events that wouldn’t normally spring to mind. Note, I got the roman numerals wrong – it should be XXIII not MMIII, which is actually 2003 not 23.
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The Dreams of Children (Psssh-ti-cooof) / 6th February 2022
We were asked to choose songs and tunes that resonated with the memories and sounds of our early youth. This was probably one of our most personal sessions. There was a lot of misty-eyed reminiscing and some quite lovely and moving stories from people’s childhoods. The Psssh-ti-cooof phrase in the title is the noise Ivor the Engine makes as voiced by Oliver Postgate. It is used in the playlist interstitials.
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Side One, Track One. / 13th February 2022
Quite simply, each track in the playlist must be the opening track on an LP. No greatest hits albums or compilations were allowed. A great one for discovering previously unheard artists.
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This Land Is Our Land / 20th February 2022
Topographical features naturally occurring in a landscape. Fields, streams, woods, hills, seas, deserts, etc. I enjoyed researching the ‘nature’ images for the headers.
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London is a labyrinth, half of stone and half of flesh / 27th February 2022
The title is from Peter Ackroyd’s 2000 book London: The Biography. All tunes had to have a relevance or association to London – in the title or mentioned in the lyrics. It’s towns and boroughs, it’s rivers and canals, streets, roads and thoroughfares, etc. The tube map pastiche felt a bit route one but I couldn’t resist it.
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And the beat goes on…. / 20th March 2022
Heart(s) and all things connected. Stopped, broken, beating, attacked, loving, aching, forgiving, blackened, cheating fluttering, murmuring, grieving. With a licence to use our imagination if needed. A lot of popular music to draw from here.
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If ducks were songbirds, they would make a sound like an oboe / 1st May 2022
Classical music, or classic examples of any genre. Music that references The Classics (i.e. Greco-Roman). The image of the statue is from a photograph I took in Havana, Cuba in August 2019.
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Special thanks and big love to my fellow Sunday Night Music Clubbers for their exquisite taste, valuable friendship and for kindly allowing me to publish their fabulous playlists.
The Steven Aspinall Archive 