THE LONG THANK YOU

No matter how compulsive a reader you are, working through the extended dedications that music artists put in the CD sleeve notes is an unconquerable challenge.

Book authors will often provide a simple dedication - "For my father" or "To my mother" or "Thanks to Miss Gibson, the best English teacher I ever had". Occasionally you might see an extra few credits there by way of acknowledgement if the book's got some techie stuff, science or engineering detail.

But, the singers - they're thanking Mum, Dad, their manager, their barber, that kid they used to go to school with and lost touch with, their late dog... it's an endless stream of names they've managed to dredge up from every single facet of their life prior to the very second of releasing this album. There are comprehensive dictionaries shorter than those lists.

And who are all these people they're thanking? Don't any of them own telephones? E-mail? A letter box? Is the musician's schedule so packed that they can’t find five minutes in their day to drop round this person's house and say "Hey, I've got a new record out and, well, it's for you." Do they have to name every last person who offered them a piece of gum since the day they were born?

If you mix up all the words in the extended dedication you can create the lyrics to a whole new song. That would be a far better way of saying thank you, I feel. "Thanks for buying my CD - here's another tune."