Text and audio, with a midsummer playlist inspired by recent reading and viewing. From recent records by Wet Leg, Leaf Rapids and Miley Cyrus to more elderly fare by AC/DC, Zeppelin and Floyd Dixon,

The first Spotify link is me reading the text below, and is six minutes long. The second lasts two hours and is all music.

The ‘simmer dim’; Shetland at midsummer. The midnight sun, except it’s not sunny at all at the moment. As I write it’s a grim murky smirr of mirk – endless daylight up beyond 60 North, sure, but dreich and dull and damp. It has been windy, there have been bursts of thunder and lightning, and the 300 or so bikers at the annual simmer dim rally, just a few miles up the road in Ollaberry, have shivered and suffered through it all, with the kind of joy you only find among motorcyclists.

There’s low cloud glowering down over the house, and I’m trying to work out, having just returned from three weeks in Troon and Glasgow, how to cope with the Shetland summer: there’s a boat to launch, but where? Off the beach at our house, down a steep slope of treacherous pebbles that have entrapped many a four-wheel-drive? Over at Heylor, on the sand of the Blade, if the tirricks and tourists aren’t around? Or is there maybe still space at the Collafirth marina? And with our perpetual half light at this time of year the grass needs cut every five minutes…to the strimmer!

Oh well.

Music, then. The following two hours brings together songs inspired by the soundtrack to The Sopranos, on which we are bingeing in this hoose via that ancient technology, the DVD box set. It is the greatest TV series ever, and with the best use of music. Though producer David Chase cut his teeth on the wonderful Northern Exposure which also uses music to great effect. For years you couldn’t watch Northern Exposure with the original soundtrack for licensing reasons, but now it’s streaming on Amazon Prime with all the songs reinstated. It’s great. But not as great as The Sopranos.

What else features here? Well, I’ve entitled this Men of a Certain Age, after the book by Kate Mossiman, which I heartily recommend. It’s essentially a collection of interviews culled from her work at the late lamented Word magazine and the New Statesman, and the clue is in the title. Kate’s a comparatively young woman with an avowedly odd and self-aware interest in old, male musicians. There is a certain fascinated frisson of discomfort for the reader with all this, but she addresses these father issues with the same ruthlessness she brings to some breathtaking encounters.

Other books, other writers have informed this selection. Amanda Petrusich of the New Yorker recommended Ben Ratliff’s astonishing Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen In An Age of Musical Plenty, so beautifully written and erudite. I’ve mentioned Joe Boyd’s encyclopaedic And the Roots of Rhythm Remain before, and it sent me to Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, which I ended up buying in a glorious six-CD version with a host of essays and illustrations.

But I’ll be honest, this selection is coming to you as a download or a stream. It’s a Spotify playlist and this is on Spotify too, this text, read by me in the At the Broken Record Inn podcast space. I’m wrestling with the whole streaming thing at the moment, though. I’ve tried, honestly, to restrict my musical consumption to vinyl, cassettes and CDs, but the next minute I’m Shazaming a track that popped up on the TV and…here we are.

I’ve also, probably to many people’s relief, cancelled my subscription to Suno, the spooky AI app that turns lyrics into fully-produced songs in any style you care to suggest. It was fun but sickening and in the end terrifying. One example is included in this newsletter. I won’t be doing that again. Real guitars and out of tune warbling from yours truly, if you can bear it.

I’m wondering if I should go ‘virtually analogue’: yes, stay online, remain a presence in the interworld, but do it using methods that can’t be absorbed into the great maw of artificial intelligence. I don’t want my dulcet tones stolen for automated railway announcements, or my writing ripped off so that you can type “like Tom Morton’s prose” into DeepSeek. But where to stop? Go back to film cameras, cassette recorders and typewriters; of which I possess half a dozen? Maybe. Why not? Go niche and flourish…

Anyway, there are boats to launch and motorcycles to haul out of the shed. The book of Stewart Cunningham’s 1980s Glasgow rock’n’roll photos to finish captioning. Dull this simmer dim may be, but summer won’t last forever. And given what’s happening in the middle east, maybe the planet will give up the ghost soon too.