One Mad Dog and His Master (OMD) is a project that has been many years in the making. It is a collection of the music that has influenced me over my life and came about as a spin off from the "Top 100" project.  A few years back myself and several of my chums from work started to try to put together an all time top 100 tracks where the only rule was that you were only allowed to choose 1 track per artist. It became apparent to me that I had a lot more than 100 tracks that deserved to be on that collection so I hatched a plan to do a TOP 500 instead. It also quickly became apparent that 500 wasnt going to be enough as this mark was breached in 2009.

The Project has been a great struggle. I have a huge collection of cassette tapes that I wanted to use for many of the tracks for this project but I simply cannot find all of them. That leaves OMD a bit hollow in some periods of my life.  Unlike the "TOP 100" exercise. this collection does not concentrate on the epiphany of music creativity and outstanding examples of the genre. Most of the original "Top 100" are in this collection but not all. My main focus of this exercise was to choose tracks that bring back memories or stir emotions within me and as a result of this there are many strange one hit wonders lurking in its contents. At times it can be confusing to figure out who the artist actually was  and as such there will be mistakes (Fairport, Albion Band, Sandy Denny etc). For many bands there isnt really a standout one track  and for these bands I have changed my mind a bit. I have a few really long tracks that have been chosen but they are my favorites and some rare live performances.

Some of the stuff was transferred from Records. Cassette Tapes, Compilation CD's , MP3 files, Captures from the radio and captures from the internet so the quality does vary a bit. I have attempted to clean stuff up and normalize the volume the best I can. I also have done a tremendous amount of work on the MP3 tags and they are getting pretty close. I suspect I will reach the magical 1000 one day but I seem to be removing as many tracks as I am adding these days. I have changed a few tracks for various artists as time has gone on and my tastes have changed.  Early on I was bending the rules for bands that changed significantly with lineups to allow two tracks e.g. Genesis, Marillion etc  but not is the current version. It is 8.43GB.

Whats in a name ?
One Mad Dog and his master comes from the Roy Harper Song "When and Old Cricketer leaves the crease"  and my old Samoyed Angus who was a bit mad at times. It is also the name of my Graphic Novel Blog.

"When the day is done and the ball has spun in the umpires pocket away" "And all remains in the groundsman's pains for the rest of time and a day" "There'll be one mad dog and his master, pushing for four with the spin" "On a dusty pitch with two pounds six of willow wood in the sun" Link to the song

Mp3tag - File Overview : Revision 22

2/25/2025