Egyptian reggae

Believe it or not, I do put quite a bit of thought into the music that I chose for the video soundtracks.

I always follow international news and with developments in Egypt at the end of last week I thought I should use Jonathan Richman's "Egyptian Reggae" yesterday.

But it was fairly short and my first cut of the video came to over 7 minutes and I had a real battle against time to get everything done yesterday and couldn't dither. One of the problems with multiple tracks is that if one of them is blocked for copyright reasons by YouTube you are not always aware which one it is and the whole audio is dubbed.

I watched Jonathan Richman at the refectory at North Staffordshire Polytechnic in the later 70s. I've just checked and that tune got to number 5 in 1977 but after playing it early in his set the show was going downhill and people were leaving. In an attempt to lift the audience he played it a second time. Those that were left shouted for an encore and guess what he played! So it didn't seem unreasonable to play the tune three times over the soundtrack.

He had another hit with "Roadrunner". I wonder how many times I would have to repeat that for a marathon?