Now Past Perfect has had the brilliant idea of putting its entire back catalogue of lovingly compiled albums on to an iPod Nano. There are more than 1,376 tracks ranging from Billie Holiday to the Andrews Sisters, Count Basie to Cole Porter, Fats Waller to Beniamino Gigli. And while I reckon it would cost about £600 to buy the entire back catalogue on CD the fully loaded iPod is available for just £279.97.
Reluctant to rush into print after my previous experience, I’ve been vigorously road-testing the Past Perfect iPod for the past two months. It hasn’t jammed once, recharges like a dream, and even tells you the time. Technology has moved on since my last iPod experience — the Nano is smaller than a credit card and not much thicker and you get reproductions of Past Perfect’s stylish album covers on the full-colour screen, so you can leaf through the virtual records and pick out the one you want to play just as if it were a real LP. Indeed the neatness and ingenuity of the tiny machine is a pleasure in its own right.
The sound quality is apparently significantly better than you will get by downloading the songs at iTunes. The default quality for encoding is 128kbps while Past Perfect offers 224kbps. The lovely Kathy also sent me two pages of absolutely idiot-proof instructions and I’m sure she’ll do the same for you if you ask her nicely.
Time speeds by as you sample the portable delights on offer. You could start for instance with Noël Coward and Gertie Lawrence in Private Lives (strange how potent clipped accents are), move on to some classic swing and bebop and end your session with a blast of George Formby whose cheeky inanity never fails to cheer me up.
With the extra sound quality, the iPod is full to capacity so you won’t be able to add tracks of your own, and my one niggle is that the great Louis Armstrong is seriously underrepresented in Past Perfect’s otherwise immaculate catalogue. But for those who feel daunted by technology, this preloaded iPod is a thing of beauty, wonder and unexpected simplicity, packed with music that is truly olden but golden.
This article is reproduced by kind permission of Charles Spencer - theatre critic of the Daily Telegraph, writing for The Spectator