Petty has enjoyed a highly successful career in the States, starting in 1976. He has had numerous platinum discs, received prestigious awards for his performing and song writing and been nominated no less than 18 times for a Grammy award. According to Wikipedia, he is in the category of recording artists who have sold  50-74 million records, bracketed with such stars as Dylan, Bruce Springsteen and The Police. Yet in the UK he has never had a Top Twenty single and his albums have only achieved that status on four occasions, two of those being greatest hits compilations.

I first came across Tom Petty and his band, The Heartbreakers, when they were backing Bob Dylan on tour in 1986/7. He and Dylan then formed the supergroup, The Traveling Wilburys, with Roy Orbison, George Harrison and Jeff Lynne, which produced a hugely popular album in 1988. The following year Tom Petty made his first solo album, Full Moon Fever, which is among my all time favourites. It includes such Petty classics as Free Fallin‘, I Won’t Back Down, Runnin’ Down a Dream and A Heart with a Mind of its Own. Other favourite albums are Damn the Torpedoes, released in 1979, which contained Refugee, Here Comes my Girl, Even the Losers, Don’t Do Me Like That and Louisiana Rain; Wild Flowers (1994); and Highway Companion (2006).

If you enjoy unpretentious, tuneful, vigorous, classic American rock, then Tom Petty, with or without The Heartbreakers, could be your man.

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I cannot imagine a world without music and I surmise that as I grow older its importance in my life will increase. I have this vision of myself as a really old man sitting in a warm conservatory, or in front of a blazing log fire, listening to beautiful music and drifting in and out of peaceful slumber. It is a rather comforting thought.

An iPod is like a tiny portable jukebox but with a huge selection of music. You can create your own playlists or let the machine pick songs at random (the iPod “shuffle”). There is even some recent software, named Genius, which creates playlists for you from music in your collection.

I bought my iPod in early 2005; it is the 20 gigabyte click wheel version and is said to hold in excess of 5000 songs. I have always thought that it would be more helpful if Apple measured capacity by time rather than by the number of “songs”; the latter can vary considerably in length and, more significantly, are not the appropriate method to apply to classical music. A movement from a symphony can easily be six times as long as a pop song. I have not yet filled up the disk on my iPod but it is apparent that, if I were limiting the music to pop & rock, it would hold comfortably in excess of 5,000 songs. Perhaps of more relevance is my calculation that, if full, the iPod would hold almost 338 hours of music.

Since 2005, iPods have moved on at a rapid rate. The new iPod Classic has an enormous 120GB of storage which can apparently hold up to 30,000 songs, 25,000 photos or 150 hours of video.

There are two aspects of my iPod which have been somewhat unsatisfactory. The first is that the battery needs to be recharged too often for my liking. It is supposed to last for 12 hours when fully charged but, although I have not timed it, I am sure it does not last for anything like that time. Secondly, I find the earphones uncomfortable after about an hour of use and their sound quality could be a lot better. Having said that, I understand that the batteries in the more recent models last for considerably longer than the older versions and the headphones problem is easily solved by buying a decent set.

In any event, you do not always have to listen through headphones. Your iTunes library will be stored on the hard disk of your PC or Mac so you can listen through speakers connected to your computer. There are also compact portable speaker systems available into which you can plug your iPod, some of which are of very high quality.

Post revised: 12 November 2008