Cool Cat Wild! is the best music blog on the web – I know, because it’s mine!

I spent much of last week doing one of those vaguely autistic male things (like arranging your CD collection in alphabetical order or carefully sorting your books into genres). I took most of the pop music blogs from this site and transferred them to a new site devoted entirely to the music I love – which could be described as the Hillbilly Boogie and its myriad couplings and resulting offspring.

Why? I hear you ask.

Well, I’m not really sure. Partly, it was because I’d temporarily run out of things to fret about, and partly because, despite several searches, I haven’t come across many blogs about my kind of music. There are plenty of decent fact-filled sites which are handy for tracking down information about obscure records released on the Grease label in Swarfega, Idaho, 1956; and ones publicising obscure rock and roll acts (Clyde Buttocks and the Soul-Stranglers, Renata and Her Rhythmic Ardvaarks etc.) – but there seems to be little criticism or celebration of the actual music that’s either readable or vaguely literate. (It could, of course, be that I'm looking in the wrong places.)

What you do get a lot of are “lifestyle” sites about hair gel and 1950s-style party frocks (neither of which really suit me), or photographs capturing a reunion of geriatric Teds in Sahfend or Clacton or wherever, or details of rockabilly revival bands’ tour dates (The Snotabillies: December 15th – The Knob & Tosser, Grimethorpe, December 18th - Royal Legion Social Club, Splonge). What you don’t get a lot of is fans enthusing knowledgably about the music – which is all that really interests me.

Now that I’ve set up Cool Cat Wild!, it shouldn’t be much work – when I publish a music post here on The Grønmark Blog, I’ll just pop it across to the new one. The only downside is that I’ll have to keep checking all the YouTube clips to make sure they haven’t been removed by Google due to copyright infringement. Unfortunately, this happens all the time, especially with better-known stuff – but that’s a small price to pay for having access to practically every record ever released anywhere (and a lot of unissued stuff as well). Unfortunately, there’s no other way of getting music onto Google Blogger sites such as mine but via YouTube (Google owns YouTube , so they’re keeping  it in the family, which is sweet). Even when it comes to tracks I’ve created myself here at Grønmark Towers, I have to turn them into a video and upload them to YouTube in order for you to have the immense pleasure of hearing them.

By the way, deep respect but no prize to anyone who can tell me – without Googling it – which two famous records by two different artists “Cool Cat Wild!” is a quote from. Okay, here’s a hint – they’re both from Sun’s heyday. And I’d be amazed if anyone out there knows which song the sub-title of the new blog – “Give me the downbeat, maestro!” – is lifted from. There are at least two versions of the song, and they’re both semi-obscure.

Good luck!

Cool Cat Wild! can be accessed here, and it's now a permanent fixture on the bar at the top of this blog.