Portly German Tops Chart Top of my Scrobbler weekly chart this week is the German composer George Friedrich Handel, and I must say that he pretty much kicks arse, in a very beautiful way. I like to continue to expand my musical borders, I have listened to quite a lot of Mozart, Wagner, Chopin and Stravinsky over the past few months and when I saw a copy of Handel's Messiah going cheap I thought I would plunge in. Handel isn't easy classical, by that I mean you can get right in to Wagner's big lietmotif themes, or Tchaikovsky's brilliant and easy to remember tunes. Handel though is more like Stravinsky, he's at least a Grade II composer, more complex, more subtle, requiring more attention and perseverance. Messiah in particular is made up of numerous small pieces of music and song which don't run together in a coherent style, although feel free to tell me I'm wrong about this if you're a Handel uber fan. With the benefit of modern equipment, particularly a decent sized amplification system which raises the voices of sweet little choristers far beyond anything they could expect to reach in real life, you can really get into him. The good citizens of Ilkley usually have their ears pummelled by the likes of Motorhead and Metallica as I drive through town, this week though they have been treated to the aria 'O Though That Tellest Good Tidings To Zion' and the chorus 'For Unto Us A Child Is Born'. Any form of classical music (with the exception of Wagners Ride Of The Valkyries, which all the staff seem to think is from Star Wars) is still the most unpopular stuff I inflict on the staff at work, I receive less complaints about Arch Enemy, The Exploited and Sepultura than I do when when Beethoven, Vivaldi or Berlioz make an appearance on the kitchen i-pod. My weekly Scrobbler list is as eclectic as always, lower down the chart are Paradise Lost, a Yorkshire doom metal act who have been largely ignored in the UK for the past 20 years but who are very popular indeed on the continent. Only last week I discovered that singer Nick Holmes now lives in lovely Ilkley, I'll have to keep an eye out for him when I'm out and about. So there we are, fat dead Germans and gloomy Tykes, viva eclecticism.