Six Degrees of Desmond Leslie.

That's enough about me... tell me something about yourself.

Nah, only joking.

So - more downloading of music. Thanks to a certain honestly-legal source (yeah, really!), I now have every single album by the Electric Light Orchestra. No, don't tut like that - they're the nearest thing to an officially-sanctioned Beatles tribute act who writes their own material. And thanks to Russell T Davies having his finger on the knob of the zeitgeist (or whatever), loads of people seem rather willing to admit that ELO were quite good actually.

Thanks to someone I've been chatting to / up recently, I've also discovered Sigur Ros, which is doubly strange because I was chatting to my pal Sam today about having only just discovered them, and he asked me if I'd noticed he'd been wearing a Sigur Ros sweatshirt all week, which he'd been given by muso friends of is who'd played with the band.

Sam does this a lot - becomes another degree of connection to whatever I'm obsessing about. Last year, I'd decided to try to collect as many of the stock music tracks used in early Doctor Who as I could. One piece of Musique concrete, which is just a pile of springs being played at different speeds, came from an album called Music of the Future' by Desmond Leslie. Now, as I began to read up on Desmond Leslie, I learned loads of fun facts about him, and proceeded to explain this to Sam one afternoon, just after he'd finished a quick phone call in the office. Apparently, the TV show The Sky at Night came out of a one-off show in which Patrick Moore and Desmond Leslie squared off in a debate about aliens and space. One of them got their own TV show, the other started writing for Fortean Times.

DesLes next wrote the soundtrack for a film called First Man Into Space . which starred Roger Delgado - the man who later played the first Master in Doctor Who, and it's his soundtrack that provided that track used in the Doctor Who episode 'Edge of Destruction' and also pops up in 'The Moonbase' and a few other places, including an episode of Out of the Unknown called 'Counterfeit Man'. Phew!

Anyway, for most TV buffs, DesLes is also famous for being the bloke who tried to punch Bernard Levin during a live edition of That Was the Week That Was:



Isn't he just lovely? So polite and erudite. None of this Jerry Springer nonsense. Just decent, gentlemanly and - ooof! There ya go! All this was over a review Levin had written about an unfavourable play his then wife Agnes Bernelle had starred in. Agnes Bernelle later collaborated with, among others, Marc Almond (on his Stars We Are album).

So... I'm telling Sam about this rambling list of connections that I'm slowly becoming obsessed with. Sam listens patiently, then blinks and says 'Desmond leslie? Did he live in Castle Leslie, in Ireland?' 'I dunno,' I says. 'Why?' 'Oh, I've stayed at his house. I'm a friend of his daughter, Camilla.'

Gasp.

Camilla is his daughter from DesLes's second marriage.

'In fact... that was Camilla I was on the phone to just before.'

Such a spooky coincidence deserves a plug. Sam's website can be found at www.samsemple.com. He's a singer-songwriter and even though he's a mate, I genuinely rate his music. There are downloads for you to listen to yourself.

So, of course he knew someone who'd played with the band I'd only heard of a week before. Cos he's Sam, and he's brilliant.

And thanks to Sam, I'm only two degrees of separation from Desmond Leslie.

DesLes's soundtrack to that film, by the way, is hideous if you don't like Musique Concrete. Really unlistenable. But dig those springs!

Criminal Mastermind / Rainman

I've broken the law today and I've only been awake an hour. Yesterday I broke it about 20 times. I'm a recidivist.

Music download sites are, of course, evil and wrong but when the songs you want aren't readily available, or they're not available without having to spend £10 on nine other songs you don't want, they're the only option. I think my CD collection validates me to some extent; the music industry has had a lot of money from me in return for one song and I've supported iTunes as far as I can.

It's the mini-austist in me that fuels it all. I remember a song by an obscure 1980s artist and before you know it I'm rifling through their back catalogue. Have you heard Erasure's attempts at 'Video Killed the Radio Star', 'Rapture' or 'No GDM'? Do you want to? They're hard to find, but they're there nonetheless.

Then there was the sprint of Northern Soul, inspired by a short article in Mojo about Tami Lynn's 'I'm Gonna Run Away from You', a song that now features on compilation CDs I do for friends. And possibly the most Aspergers thing I've done in my life was deciding to find a copy of every UK Number One song ever. I spent a lot of time going trhogh my own CDs and buying individual songs from iTunes, which is fine when you're covering the 1960s but a bit soul-sapping when you're wading through more and more R 'unt' B crap. I resent spending money to fund the careers of Jay Z and Fiddy Cent, so sod 'im.

It's not all crimes and misdemeanours though. My search for The Associates' 'Club Country' led me to discover their gorgeous 'Take Me to the Girl' and the haunting 'Breakfast' and before you could sing 'I had a shower, then phoned my brother up / within the hour, I'll smash another cup' I'd ordered the complete Associates albums from Amazon.co.uk. New CD reissues with additional bonus tracks like their cover of David Bowie's 'Boys Keep Swinging' and their cheeky version of 'Heart of Glass' (another song that Erasure had a go at too).

Here are just a few other tracks I wouldn't have had it not been for the joys of the download:

'London Girls' by Chas and Dave

'The Man With The Child In His Eyes' by Hue and Cry

'Be There' by Clive Griffin (who sang the 'finger of fudge' jingle when he was a kid!)

'John Wayne Is Big Leggy' by Haysi Fantayzee (I already had 'Shiny Shiny')

'Love Lies Lost' by Culture Club's Helen Terry

The full song from the theme to The Littlest Hobo

Nancy Sinatra's cover of the Beatles' 'Run for Your Life' (almost as good as her version of 'Day Tripper'

'Cool Meditation' by Third World (who did 'Now That We Found Love')

'Timeless Melody' by the La's (which made me buy the whole album

Blacklight (featuring Technoir)'s dance version of Killing Joke's 'Love Like Blood'

'I've Been Wrong Before' - Cilla Black's greatest song, courtesy of George Martin

'Michelangelo' by 23rd Turn-Off, another of the songs recommended in Paul Du Noyer's study of Liverpool music, Wondrous Place.

'Machinery' by Sheena Easton

'Twilight Cafe' by Susan Fassbender

... and about five different versions of Barclay James Harvest's 'Mockingbird' recorded across 30 years

Every time I go to a certain Vauxhall-based club night, I tap song titles into my phone to look up later and it's been a useful way of discovering old songs I never knew and rediscovering songs I've forgotten. 'The Celtic Soul Brothers' by Dexy's Midnight Runners would have certainly slipped away otherwise - and 'Saturdays' by De La Soul, which uses a sample from Jackie Wilson's Northern Soul version of the Doors' 'Light My Fire', also covered by Will Young, Jose Feliciano and Amii Stewart - who also did Eddie Floyd's 'Knock on Wood'.

Is it just a fascination for extended degrees of fascination, or should I see a doctor?