Nick Wall

"I listen to all kinds of music" - how often have you heard those words ? But what if the sum total of all the musical forms that you've listened to in your entire life amounted to less than 1% of the kinds of music that are out there ?

I'm a full time civil servant and part time music blogger from Merseyside who felt the need to share music from lots of different cultures. That's why, In 2013, I came up with the idea of a list of music from every country in the world. I could barely have imagined back then what riches I would find. Before the age of radio, communities were often very isolated, so a person could just travel a few miles and find that costumes worn were different, dances had changed, even musical instruments were not quite the same. Think of that variety, and compare it to Eurovision today, where practically every song is produced in ways designed to appeal to an international audience and a global marketplace, and where in 2017 no less than 35 of the 42 songs in the final were sung entirely in English.

My goal then was to find music that was embedded in local cultures, which represented something of the character and history of where it came from. And I wanted to put the songlist online, and to write a book that would provide context while telling you whom all these artists were.