In the days before the internet, anyone wishing to access pornography generally had to walk into their local newsagent and acquire a hard-copy publication from the top shelf (usually purchased with a newspaper so you could hide the glossy mag inside it so that no-one would mark you out as a user on the walk home. Although if they did the standard response was to claim you bought it for the articles…). Clearly this was relatively tame stuff compared to the sort of thing available on the internet today. For a start it didn’t “move”. Yet it served some sort of social purpose; many a teenager’s first encounter with pornography was via a countryside hedgerow, which is where users would toss (pun absolutely intended given how the pages used to stick together) their magazines once they were “finished”. In fact the demise of hedgerow pornography is one very notable benefit from the rise of the internet; on the downside teenagers today have the altogether more daunting task of accessing their first glimpses of red hot action via Dad’s laptop, which does have the potential to leave one scarred for life. However I digress. One curiosity of Playboy or Penthouse or whichever publication took your fancy was the section entitled Readers’ Wives. To anyone who has grown up in the internet age, this is probably going to sound “just plain weird”, but the Readers’ Wives sections in these magazines was literally just that: photos taken by husbands of their wives in various states of undress (including complete) and sent to the magazine for publication. With probably a £10 reward for all those published. What motivated anyone to even contemplate sending photos of their beloved in (other than the £10) is hard to fathom, but presumably these men regarded their other halves in the buff as the loveliest thing on earth and therefore felt compelled to share that loveliness with other men. The problem of course is that none of the Readers’ Wives ever matched up to the standards of the glistening lovelies who posed for a living. A problem that wasn’t just down to the poor standards of photography being employed. Beauty is always in the eye of the beholder, but quality requires an objective view. Which brings us to the music and the whole reason for this preamble. Once you have completed the 1,001 album challenge, you can nominate one album which does not appear on the list and you can elect to listen to all the other nominations which other users have put forward once they have finished the original list. Now the original list does have its faults and not everything is a certified banger. However it does cover a wide range of musical styles and you always get the feeling that whatever the style, this is the best that style has to offer (however crap the style might be). It has also been decided on by a panel of experts who do this kind of thing for a living. In short, the original list is your genuine pornography. The nominated list however is very much the Readers’ Wives section: in short, fan favourites filtered through adoring ears. I can understand why all these albums might be someone’s favourite, but let’s be honest here, none of them really stand up to any scrutiny, something the piss-taker who put forward “Come And Get It” by Rachel Stevens presumably understood straight away. And I include my own nomination in this. This isn’t a particular dig at Afraid of Sunlight. It just isn’t essential listening and I’ll be honest I kind of wish I’d stopped at the end of the original list, because of the 63 albums that have come later there is nothing worth going back to. Although the memory of the looks on the faces of my younger colleagues when I explained the Readers’ Wives concept will stay with me forever, so maybe something good has come of it after all…

In the days before the internet, anyone wishing to access pornography generally had to walk into their local newsagent and acquire a hard-copy publication from the top shelf (usually purchased with a newspaper so you could hide the glossy mag inside it so that no-one would mark you out as a user on the walk home. Although if they did the standard response was to claim you bought it for the articles…). Clearly this was relatively tame stuff compared to the sort of thing available on the internet today. For a start it didn’t “move”. Yet it served some sort of social purpose; many a teenager’s first encounter with pornography was via a countryside hedgerow, which is where users would toss (pun absolutely intended given how the pages used to stick together) their magazines once they were “finished”. In fact the demise of hedgerow pornography is one very notable benefit from the rise of the internet; on the downside teenagers today have the altogether more daunting task of accessing their first glimpses of red hot action via Dad’s laptop, which does have the potential to leave one scarred for life. However I digress. One curiosity of Playboy or Penthouse or whichever publication took your fancy was the section entitled Readers’ Wives. To anyone who has grown up in the internet age, this is probably going to sound “just plain weird”, but the Readers’ Wives sections in these magazines was literally just that: photos taken by husbands of their wives in various states of undress (including complete) and sent to the magazine for publication. With probably a £10 reward for all those published. What motivated anyone to even contemplate sending photos of their beloved in (other than the £10) is hard to fathom, but presumably these men regarded their other halves in the buff as the loveliest thing on earth and therefore felt compelled to share that loveliness with other men. The problem of course is that none of the Readers’ Wives ever matched up to the standards of the glistening lovelies who posed for a living. A problem that wasn’t just down to the poor standards of photography being employed. Beauty is always in the eye of the beholder, but quality requires an objective view. Which brings us to the music and the whole reason for this preamble. Once you have completed the 1,001 album challenge, you can nominate one album which does not appear on the list and you can elect to listen to all the other nominations which other users have put forward once they have finished the original list. Now the original list does have its faults and not everything is a certified banger. However it does cover a wide range of musical styles and you always get the feeling that whatever the style, this is the best that style has to offer (however crap the style might be). It has also been decided on by a panel of experts who do this kind of thing for a living. In short, the original list is your genuine pornography. The nominated list however is very much the Readers’ Wives section: in short, fan favourites filtered through adoring ears. I can understand why all these albums might be someone’s favourite, but let’s be honest here, none of them really stand up to any scrutiny, something the piss-taker who put forward “Come And Get It” by Rachel Stevens presumably understood straight away. And I include my own nomination in this. This isn’t a particular dig at Afraid of Sunlight. It just isn’t essential listening and I’ll be honest I kind of wish I’d stopped at the end of the original list, because of the 63 albums that have come later there is nothing worth going back to. Although the memory of the looks on the faces of my younger colleagues when I explained the Readers’ Wives concept will stay with me forever, so maybe something good has come of it after all…