Tom Ewing

The Christmas We Get We Deserve

It was sometime this Summer that I decided to do a Christmas poll in December, which later expanded to include other Winter festivals.

I didn’t think the idea through because it was a long way off – and I also felt there was a real chance I wouldn’t run it: more »

WESTLIFE – “Mandy”

#965, 26th November 2003

The tears are on their mind and nothing is rhyming. Sometime between previous single “Hey Whatever!” – a very non-Imperial number 4 – and this cover version, Brian McFadden decided it was time for the dream to end and handed in his notice. Sometimes when boys quit a band it’s a shock – a profitable enterprise cut cruelly short. But Westlife shedding a member felt like part of an ongoing process, a group winding gently down.

BUSTED – “Crashed The Wedding”

#964, 22nd November 2003

“You Said No” was an uneven mix of Busted’s charms and their weaknesses; “Crashed The Wedding” is all upside. All of Busted’s singles so far have played like episodes in the band’s imaginary TV show – a vaguely naughty comedy story; a goofy sci-fi pastiche; a high school melodrama. “Crashed The Wedding” is more like the climax of the group’s first movie, the riotous denouement of a pop-punk rom-com. Though the ‘punk’ side is getting even more vestigial – this is scruffbag power-pop, and all the better for it.

World Cup of 1980 Preview

This is the third time I’ve run a poll event based on a single year – 1980 follows 1990 and 2001, and they’ve all presented different challenges in terms of building out brackets that are fun, fair (well, fair-ish) and tell a story about what happened that year.

Go to a site like Rate Your Music and they make sense of 1980 in a familiar way. Their “Top 20 Singles” are entirely white and 95% male: Joy Division, Talking Heads, The Clash, Bowie, and so on.

All these people are represented in our version of 1980 – it’s entirely possible one of them will win the tournament – but to claim they tell the story of the year is nonsense.

#16: Can’t you see I’m trying?

The final bracket spotlights the great hopes of indie rock – at least as far as the NME was concerned – The Strokes. Googling magazine covers for the lead-in illustrations to the poll brought home a couple of points. The first is how quickly and heavily the NME went all-in for The Strokes. The second is how little else they had to talk about in the same breath – their natural tendency to roll a few acts up into a “scene” seems initially thwarted. That would change, fairly quickly, but it accounts for the way Detroit’s White Stripes, already on their 3rd LP, would be swept up and treated as a new band.

#15: Looks good, sounds good, looks good, feels good too

It’s the electroclash bracket! Er… kind of. Maybe half the tracks here would have some claim on that hotly contested genre, but the vibe of this bracket is “what might have been played at a hipster club night?”. Did I go to hipster club nights in 2001? Ah, not really.

#14: Es swingt dich in die Knie, denn der Riddim is Hardcore

For the fifth poll in a row – it’s become a tradition! – we have a bracket dedicated to non-English language pop. This started as simply a couple of groups in the People’s Pop Poll in May, but it’s grown as we’ve done the polls. In the 1990 poll there was almost enough for an entire bracket – in this one we had too many for one, and a certain amount of sleight of hand was needed to accommodate it all.

#13: Hey, must be the money!

This is the mainstream hip-hop bracket, with a chunky three tracks each from the critical King and Queen of the genre in 2001, Jay-Z and Missy Elliott, and appearances from a host of other royals – Nelly, fresh off months at #1 with his Country Grammar LP; snarlers Ludacris and Mystikal; Outkast and Wu-Tang. Debutants too – the Timbaland-produced Bubba Sparxxx and kinda-conscious rappers City High.

#12: Every word seemed to date her

Roots and Americana don’t make up much of my musical diet – too fibrous – but I’m delighted we’ve got enough for an entire bracket of them here: it gives us something a bit different in the tournament mix. And it’s also reflective of a real 2001 trend which you couldn’t miss even if you didn’t like it – the steady swell of interest in Americana, country and other acoustic musics which had crested at the turn of the millennium, partly thanks to O Brother, Where Art Thou?…

#11: Leave your situations at the door

This bracket shares very porous boundaries with Bracket 5 – the pop/R&B one – since R&B was a driving creative force in 2001 and we easily had enough nominations to spill over brackets. In this group the emphasis is a little more on the singers: Mary J Blige, Aaliyah, and India.Arie get two songs each, there’s neo-soul from Sunshine Anderson and Angie Stone, veteran soul from Sade, and sitting atop it all, in popularity terms at least, Alicia Keys megaballad “Fallin’”.