Armando Venditti, host of The Music Den on YouTube has now been in the Five of the Best chair six times, and the list of what he’s brought us reads like a straight line: Saga, Queen, The Tea Party, Rush, Pink Floyd. This week he arrives from Edmonton and says the word “Madonna,” and I don’t mind admitting I had to read the email twice. Madonna Louise Ciccone was born in Bay City, Michigan in 1958, studied dance at the University of Michigan and then with the Alvin Ailey company in New York, spent a stretch in Paris in a disco revue, and played drums and guitar in a couple of going-nowhere rock bands before Sire Records signed her in 1982. What followed is the most relentlessly documented career in pop: the best-selling female recording artist there has ever been, the highest-grossing solo touring artist of all time, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame at the first time of asking, and — at sixty-eight, this month — the most-nominated artist at this year’s MTV Video Music Awards, eleven of them, ahead of everybody. The last time she topped that nomination list was 1990. It was for “Vogue.”

Armando has chosen five great tracks for us – three invitations to the dance floor (one per decade) and two lullabies written on consecutive days in 1988. And not one scandal anywhere in the pile. Join us and let Armando make the case for Madonna the songwriter.

Songs in this episode:

0:00 NZ Net Radio – Musical Musings: Five of the Best - Madonna

This time on Musical Musings we begin something bigger than usual, and it started, as the best arguments do, on the internet. A couple of weeks back a post went round on X with a graphic — “One decade, 30 essential albums” — passed off as Rolling Stone’s verdict on the 1990s, with Alice in Chains’ Dirt at number one. It looked suspiciously AI-generated, it got community-noted for not being Rolling Stone’s list at all, and it has since quietly vanished. My guest Sughosh replied to it with a single word, “Meh,” reckoned barely four or five of the thirty would make his own list, and made the mistake of saying so where the station could see him. So I set him a challenge: never mind Rolling Stone — show us yourthirty best albums of the 90s. He agreed, with a warning I’m going to hold him to: “my list would summarily ignore popular culture of the time.” He wasn’t kidding. Thirty records, arranged chronologically from 1990 to 1999, one track from each, and we’re going to talk our way through all of them over three shows. This first one is a two-hour special taking on the first twelve, from 1990 to 1992.

I’m not going to give the list away, but I’ll say this: these are the three years grunge is supposed to have conquered the world, and Sughosh’s version of them contains not a single flannel shirt. Only two of his twelve appear anywhere in Rolling Stone’s real top hundred of the decade. Instead there’s a San Francisco power-pop band who arrived at exactly the wrong moment, a Liverpool group who made one album and hated it, a record made in Ilkley that you can’t find on any streaming service, and a nine-minute folk song about a sixteenth-century Spanish expedition. There’s a Canadian harpist, a synth-pop masterpiece that started a riot outside a Los Angeles record shop, and a jaunty British pop single about a man drinking himself to death. Some of it you’ll know, some of it you’ll have forgotten, and at least one of them I’d never heard before he sent me the list. Let Sughosh make the (strong) case for the 90s the critics missed.

Broadcast 11 September 2026

Songs in this episode:

0:00 NZ Net Radio – Musical Musings: Top 30 Albums of the 1990s

A few weeks ago Jarrett McCall came on Musical Musings with an alphabet. His picks from the #USAtoZ challenge on X — American bands, one per letter, all from the 1970s — ran to eleven letters, and he cheerfully titled the show USA A-Z (Missing Some!). Well, a title like that is a promise, and this week Jarrett is back to keep it. Volume 2 opens with eight of the missing letters in a row, and once again the alphabet does the programming for us, so the hour lurches gloriously from Harlem to Indiana to a Jacksonville bar-room.

Broadcast 7 September 2026

Songs in this episode:

0:01 NZ Net Radio – Musical Musings: USAtoZ Picks

Something a little different – for this edition of Musical Musings I’m joined by Joe Rubenstein, the man behind Real Time 1960s — a project that does something wonderfully simple and completely mad. Every day, Joe reports the 1960s exactly sixty years to the day after they happened: podcasts, news bulletins, a daily timeline, video, the lot. So while we’re living through August 2026, Joe’s audience is living through August 1966, with no more idea of what’s coming next week than anyone reading a newspaper at the time had. A composer and producer based in New York, and a graduate of Amherst and the Yale School of Music, Joe came to this from documentary and educational film-making, and the sheer volume of what he’s built is staggering. We talk about how he gathers the material, how far ahead he works, and what he does when two perfectly respectable sources flatly contradict each other — because they do, constantly. We also get into the discipline at the heart of it: whether he lets himself peek ahead, or genuinely stays inside 1966 and lets the story land the way it landed then. (And yes, we discuss the news-reading voice. It’s a good one.)

Between all that, Joe picks the music, and his 1966 is a proper cross-section of a year when pop stopped being simply pop. We open with The Beach Boys‘ “God Only Knows” and Donovan‘s “Sunshine Superman”, then the sitar and tabla of The Beatles‘ “Love You To” — from Revolver, barely a fortnight old in Joe’s world — and the sunlit, slightly suspicious jangle of The Association‘s “Along Comes Mary”. After that it darkens: The Byrds turn a centuries-old ballad into folk-rock with “John Riley”, and The Rolling Stones hand out “Mother’s Little Helper”. We finish with Simon and Garfunkel‘s “Scarborough Fair/Canticle” and Buffalo Springfield‘s “For What It’s Worth” — two records that sit a few months further down the road than the rest, and which point squarely at where the decade is heading. In between, Joe talks about the enormous stories nobody remembers now, the moments when the culture shifts and nobody in the room notices, and how different 1966 feels from 1960 — the mood, the unease, the first real stirrings of unrest. It’s an hour that will change how you read this week’s headlines.

We encourage all listeners to follow the Real Time 1960s project, and even better support Joe’s hard work. You can do this at their website at https://www.realtime1960s.com.

Broadcast 2 September 2026

Songs in this episode:

0:01 NZ Net Radio – Musical Musings Realtime 1960s

Armando Venditti is back on Musical Musings: Five of the Best for a fifth time, joining us from Edmonton, and after Saga, Queen, The Tea Party and Rush he has set himself the hardest job the format has to offer: five songs by Pink Floyd. The band came together in London in 1965 around Syd Barrett, Roger Waters, Richard Wright and Nick Mason, taking their name from two Piedmont bluesmen — Pink Anderson and Floyd Council — whose records sat in Barrett's collection. David Gilmour arrived at the end of 1967 to cover for a founder whose mind was slipping away from him, and by 1968 Barrett was gone. What the remaining four built in his absence is one of the most extraordinary bodies of work in rock: cash registers and heartbeats, walls and pigs and prisms, records that treated the album as a single unbroken argument and sold north of 250 million copies doing it.

Armando's five turn out to be beautifully constructed. Every one comes from a different album, and the running order walks backwards through the catalogue: the great Waters-and-Gilmour truce of "Comfortably Numb" from 1979's The Wall, then a jump forward to "High Hopes," the Cambridge-haunted closer of 1994's The Division Bell — the song that gave Douglas Adams the album's title, with a hidden phone call tucked in after the last chime. From there we go back to 1975 and "Wish You Were Here," a song the band were mixing in the same building on the June afternoon that an unrecognisable Syd Barrett wandered in, head and eyebrows shaved, and nobody knew who he was. Then "Money," the improbable American hit in seven-four time, counted in by a hand-spliced tape loop of cash registers. And finally, furthest back of all, 1971's "One of These Days" — two basses through an Echorec, one line of vocal from Nick Mason put through a ring modulator and aimed squarely at a BBC disc jockey. Not a Barrett-era track anywhere in the five, and yet he stands in the middle of it; five picks that are, at heart, a case for David Gilmour's guitar. Replay the show and let Armando take you backwards through Pink Floyd.

Check out Armando's work on his Youtube channel The Music Den.

Broadcast 31 August 2026

Songs in this episode:

0:00 NZ Net Radio – Musical Musings Five of the Best Pink Floyd

We couldn't leave it at one show. When friend-of-the-station Jim Bricker first asked how awesome 1971 was, two hours barely scratched it — so we're back for a second afternoon in the greatest year music ever had. If Part One leaned on the giants — Zeppelin, Bowie, Joni, the Stones — Part Two goes digging deeper into the crates. This is the year told through its singles and its sleepers: the number-one soul 45s, the brass-rock burners, the one-hit wonders and the quiet masterpieces. We'll tip our hat to David Hepworth's argument once more (his book 1971 — Never a Dull Moment is still the case for the defence), but mostly we'll just keep piling up the evidence and let you be the judge.

And what evidence. There are two completely different songs called "Get It On" from 1971, and we play both. There's Motown growing a conscience, Marvin Gaye and the Temptations and a young Michael Jackson; the sass of Mr. Big Stuff and Want Ads; the hush of Joni, Carly Simon and Neil Young; and a whole run of soft-focus radio gold from the Carpenters to Olivia Newton-John's very first single. Then we send it out the only way a year this big deserves — Rod Stewart, a bit of Isaac Hayes funk, and eight and a half minutes of "American Pie" with everyone singing. Pour something, turn it up, and settle in. Two shows, one extraordinary year — and still, we've barely covered it.

Broadcast 31 August 2026

Songs in this episode:

0:10 NZ Net Radio – How Awesome Was 1971? Part 2

Power pop got its name in an advert. In May 1967, promoting "Pictures Of Lily" to the NME, Pete Townshend said "power pop is what we play" — and In The Mix returns to the genre with the man who named it sitting at track five, playing a record made fourteen months before the name existed. Around The Who's "Substitute" there's Split Enz at number one, The Hollies doing a top-five single about being nosy on a train, and three songs nobody involved wanted to release: The Muffs' "Sad Tomorrow", which Kim Shattuck agreed to only "begrudgingly" and thought was a ballad; Squeeze's "Up The Junction", a song with no chorus at all that Chris Difford assumed would have to come off the album; and the Bay City Rollers' "Saturday Night", which flopped so completely in 1973 that it sat in a drawer for two years before America made it a number one. Neil Finn, for the record, thought the chorus of "I Got You" was weak. Nobody who makes this stuff has the faintest idea.

Broadcast 28 August 2026

Songs in this episode:

0:53 The Muffs – Sad Tomorrow

Dolly Parton died in Nashville on Tuesday at the age of eighty, and this week In The Mix gives the whole hour to her — not to the wigs and the nails, which she deployed as a very effective decoy for sixty years, but to the thing she insisted on every time somebody credited the wrong one. She reckoned she wrote about three thousand songs, and she said flatly that it was the songwriting, not the look, that got her out of the Smoky Mountains. We open with a song she wrote at seventy-six about a girl leaving home for Nashville with nothing, because she’d done exactly that on the second of June, 1964, the day after she finished high school. There’s the honest song about the poverty rather than the sentimental one. There’s “Coat of Many Colors”, the favourite of everything she wrote. And there’s “The Letter” — ninety seconds of Dolly reading out, word for word, the letter she posted home to her parents on her first night in the city.

Broadcast 26 August 2026

Songs in this episode:

0:00 NZ Net Radio – In the Mix Dolly Parton 1946-2026

On this edition of Musical Musings: Five of the Best, Armando Venditti — host of The Music Den on YouTube, joining us from Edmonton — comes back to the show to take on a band that is practically a Canadian institution: Rush. It starts in August 1968 in Willowdale, a suburb north of Toronto, with three high-school kids playing Cream covers in church basements. Six years later, four days after original drummer John Rutsey walked out, a bookish young man from St Catharines named Neil Peart — lately selling farm equipment parts for his father — turned up to audition in shorts, in a battered Ford Pinto, with his drums in rubbish bags — and a scrappy bar-rock trio became something else entirely. Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson and Peart went on to spend forty-one years and forty-two million albums writing about totalitarian futures, Coleridge and suburban despair, in time signatures you need a pencil to count, with no line-up changes and not the faintest interest in what anyone else was doing. Peart died in January 2020; this year Lee and Lifeson took the name back out on the road for the Fifty Something tour, and the songs turn out to have lost nothing at all.

Armando's five run from 1977 to 1987 — precisely the decade Rush turned from the last of the great progressive-rock epics into a synthesiser band with one foot on the radio — and this episode carries a little extra history to join the dots between them. We open with "Subdivisions" from 1982's Signals, the suburban-alienation anthem that Alex Lifeson has never entirely forgiven the mix for burying his guitar under; then "Distant Early Warning" from Grace Under Pressure, a Cold War broadcast named after the radar line strung across the Canadian Arctic, complete with a Dr. Strangelove homage in the video. "Tom Sawyer" needs no introduction, though it's worth knowing the band thought it was the worst thing on Moving Pictures until the mix rescued it. Then the deepest and oldest cut, the title track of 1977's A Farewell To Kings, its classical guitar intro recorded outdoors in a Welsh farmyard with the birdsong left in. And we finish on "Time Stand Still" from Hold Your Fire — the first Rush song ever to feature another singer, Aimee Mann, who was paid two thousand dollars and cheerfully admits she barely knew the band, and who walked out on stage in Los Angeles in June to sing it with them again, thirty-nine years on. Here's the lovely thing about Armando's list, which we save for the end of the hour: four of his five are album opening tracks, and the fifth is track two. This isn't a greatest-hits run — it's five opening statements, the songs Rush chose to greet you with. Have a listen and let Armando make the case.

The live performance of La Villa Strangiato on Youtube that Armando mentioned is available here.

Broadcast 26 August 2026

Songs in this episode:

9:29 Rush – Subdivisions

Jarrett McCall is back on Musical Musings: Five of the Best, and after last time’s romp through the American seventies alphabet he’s narrowed his sights to a single band — one of the most quietly influential groups of the last thirty-five years. Stereolab were born in London in 1990 out of a Paris romance: Tim Gane, guitarist with the fiercely political indie band McCarthy, met the French singer Lætitia Sadier at one of his own gigs, and the two of them built something new around the relentless forward pulse of German krautrock, banks of vintage analogue keyboards, sixties lounge and French pop chord changes, and lyrics drawn from Situationist philosophy. They named themselves after a Vanguard Records imprint that made hi-fi demonstration discs, ran their own label, Duophonic, from the very first ten-inch, and were happily dubbed “space age bachelor pad music” — as well as being among the first bands anyone ever called post-rock. In 1992 the last piece arrived: an Australian singer and guitarist called Mary Hansen, whose weightless counterpoint to Sadier’s voice became the sound people mean when they say Stereolab.

Jarrett’s five run chronologically from 1994 to 2004, and they are, quietly, a portrait of that second voice. We open with “Ping Pong” from Mars Audiac Quintet — the band’s biggest UK hit, ninth in John Peel’s Festive Fifty for 1994, and the sunniest tune ever written about the boom-and-bust cycle of capitalism. Then a deep cut from the album most people call their masterpiece, “Monstre Sacre” from 1996’s Emperor Tomato Ketchup, named after a Shūji Terayama film and made in Chicago with John McEntire of Tortoise. Next comes the loveliest thing they ever recorded, the harpsichord waltz “The Flower Called Nowhere” from 1997’s Dots and Loops, a track Gane described as an attempt at mid-sixties European exploitation film music. Then “Naught More Terrific Than Man” from Sound-Dust in 2001 — which nobody knew at the time would be Mary Hansen’s last album with the band. She was killed cycling in London in December 2002. So Jarrett closes on “Dear Marge,” the final track of Margerine Eclipse, the first record Stereolab made without her, and one mixed so that every song carries two complete arrangements, one hard-panned to each stereo channel. Five songs, ten years, and a sixth presence running through all of them.

Broadcast 24 August 2026

Songs in this episode:

14:50 Stereolab – Ping Pong