To open your pop record with acoustic guitars can signal a certain seriousness of purpose. To arrange your pop song with the help of a string section, ditto. Begin, like “Back For Good”, with both at once and the message seems unavoidable: this is the big one. This time, we’re Doing It Properly.

Or maybe it just looks that way with hindsight. “Back For Good” seems an awfully self-conscious record to me: a deliberate, almost overthought shot at classicism. It’s an unctuous record, with a naked craving for respect. But perhaps it only looks that way because, well, it worked. This is the point at which Gary Barlow stopped being the entrepreneurial leader of Britain’s biggest boy band and started getting himself fitted for his Statesman Of Pop robes. It’s the moment he became a talking point – of course, he’s always been a great songwriter – by squeezing his typical, meandering songs into an airtight pop structure and throwing strings and harmonies at it.

Great songwriter or not, he really has always been a canny businessman – if he bet the farm production-wise on this one, it’s probably because he realised you don’t uncover choruses as fantastic as “Back For Good” very often. It’s their most famous song because it’s their best hook – when it hits, your doubts about the record slip away. He’s also giving it his best as a vocalist too – if the “fist of pure emotion” is ridiculous, his pained, tender “can’t you find a little room inside for me?” is the perfect lead in for that hug of a chorus.

The song’s subject and its vibe align nicely, too – if this is the neediest of pop songs on a meta level, well, the lyrics are all to do with confused, desperate, pleading: that much-mocked (and mockable) “whatever I did, whatever I said” is also its most naturalistic moment, genuine if awful male confusion, much better than the hand-me-down pop poetics of lipstick on coffee cups or whatever.

Later, the song’s canonisation was joined by another inevitability. This was Take That “maturing”, and what happened to boy bands when they mature? They split up. The reality was doubtless muddier, and later events made it messier still – but at the time, the brief rest of their career felt processional, a coda to “Back For Good”’s deliberate, slightly laboured greatness.

The Great British Public has a long and warm relationship with smut – stuff that is somehow about sex without making anyone actually want to do it. A part of our national psyche is forever a 12-year-old boy. As times and manners change, the balance between cheekiness and directness has tipped, from seaside postcards and George Formby to Judge Dread and Roy “Chubby” Brown. The itch remains the same – show us something naughty. So it’s not that surprising that the Outhere Brothers (debut single: “Pass The Toilet Paper”) wind up with two number ones.

If the urges the Outheres appealed to were age-old, the ways radio dealt with them had changed. Blackouts and bans were counter-productive, and left the station on the wrong side of most arguments. The preferred solution? Radio edits – or, as in this case, full radio remixes. Which led to the odd situation that the record on the radio and in the chart wasn’t at all the one people had been hearing in the clubs and buying. That hefty call-to-arms of “Wiggle Wiggle!” aside, the original mix and the radio edit are strikingly different*, and if all you heard was the hit, the track’s filthiness might come as a wicked surprise.

The differences between the mixes go further than cleaning up the lyrics. The “Eskimo Nell” style call-and-response on the full version – “Put your lips on my face!” &c – is the track’s most unusual, though crudest, idea: the UK radio edit drops it for more wiggling. Its directness gets replaced by an in-your-face blurt of a synth riff, an addition which shifts the track into more familiar, ravey territory. Unfortunately that comes at the expense of the original’s clicky, chunky, nicely loping house beat, which was the best thing about it.

The worst thing about “Don’t Stop” remains whatever the version: Keith Mayberry’s hoarse, range-free bellow. It’s all strain, no fun – it’s just a man yelling at you about genitals. For that first ten seconds or so it’s effective – a foghorn cutting through anything else on the airwaves. But that’s all the song does. Or to put it another way, “Don’t Stop” shoots its load far too quickly and ends up an awkward mess.

*Very Boring Clarification: I didn’t hear this on the radio, so I’m assuming the version played is the 3’06” “Townhouse Radio Edit” that was Track 1 on the UK CD and ended up on Now 30, which leaves off the call-and-response verses. There is also a full but clean version, which keeps the verses but switches “pussy” for “kisses”. And of course the original version, which I heard played out. I expect we’ll have more ambiguities like this as Popular picks its way through the CD single age. Meanwhile knowing the different version of Outhere Brothers hits is my cross to bear.

“Love Can Build A Bridge” has one of the best line-ups of any charity single – three women who have each made, on their day, magnificent pop records. What’s more, Cher and Hynde and Cherry aren’t off-form, phoning it in or smoothing themselves down – their voices blend and contrast in exactly the intriguing ways you might have expected.

And yet this is a tiresome record. It’s a simpering bore, a dose of pop castor oil, a lacklustre plod whose only appeal is the background sense you’re doing some good. What went wrong?

Maybe it’s just a mismatch of singers and material. What makes each of these three singers special on their best work is their different flair for drama – the way they use the grain of their individual voice (raucous or smoky or squeaky) to bring characters and situations alive – whether the characters are them or not. “Love Can Build A Bridge” doesn’t use that side of their talent – it’s a solemn song about togetherness in adversity, and what it requires from its singers is oaken solidarity, not individual spark. Hynde has a useful roughness as the song opens, but Cher is too much in blunderbuss mode and Cherry is underused. And then they all have to get out the way for Eric Clapton, anyhow, whose uninspired solo fits the trudge of the arrangement in general. It helped people, I guess, though you wouldn’t know it to listen.

I should say from the outset, I’m unreasonably fond of this record. “Unreasonably” not because it’s a bad song or ‘guilty pleasure’, but because it’s not a record I want to reason with. I like it as a trip into full-bore, bodice-tearing ballad melodrama, and it does this job rather well, probably better for being a movie soundtrack without a movie. I want to hear it every few months, I hear it, I’m done – like the thunderstorms of “Think Twice” are dissipating some sort of emotional ozone buildup.

So it’s not something I’ve ever played repeatedly or carefully considered until now. And the more I do consider it the more awkward a thing it is, a strange hybrid of at least three quite different takes on making a big ballad. You have the “Total Eclipse Of The Heart” angle – Celine building it up to knock it down, chunks of drums and power chords falling around her. I’m always fond of that. You have the more up-to-date approach – the ballad as skeleton for a vocal routine, which of course Dion has the technical chops to carry.

But before both of these you have a third ballad-form – one summoned up by “Think Twice”‘s brooding opening, a drift of soft-synth bewilderment cut through by a lonesome guitar lick, a warning of tears and lamentation to come. This is, frankly, Phil Collins territory – songs whose landscapes crackle with sullen potential before erupting into an almighty sulk. “Think Twice” promises something similar – a more wounded, less resentful “In The Air Tonight”.

Now, “In The Air Tonight” is a good song, and strange itself – a marriage of saloon bar bloke rocking and clipped post-punk aesthetics which sounds like not much else. But it’s a song that rests on a particular instant – its gorilla moment, the savage beating Collins gives his drums as his dam of resentment bursts. Does Celine have anything to match that? She’s a singer, of couse, not a drummer, but she’s trying to give us something which rivals that moment for soft-rock force – her gutbusting “NO NO NO NO” which stops the song dead before it bounces back swinging into its final chorus.

A couple of things stop it quite working, for me. First of all this being a megaballad they’ve thrown a stormfront of drums in too, and the two climaxes push each other out of the way a little. Also, Dion switches to a kind of ersatz soul register for her tub-thumping breakdown, reaching for a pseudo-Aretha moment after a song which has gone in quite different directions. Oh, and the lyrics fall down, too – suddenly she’s all about sacrificing everything for her man when before she’s been telling him to grow up and face what’s been happening.

But most of “Think Twice” is a job well done – Dion with a sharp, keening edge to her voice, picking her words with care as she treads delicately through the song. The arms-swaying chorus isn’t the record’s real draw – it’s the “this is getting seee-reeee-us” hook which gets into the brain first, and “are you thinking of you or us?” is a question that cuts to the emotional chase of the track. There’s no-one else for Celine to outwit or outsing, no other woman, just a lover who doesn’t want to be there. It’s a sorrowful, grown-up kind of a a subject, and for a couple of minutes the record is lonely and restrained enough to match it. A shame it partly fluffs its ending.

A few years ago I returned from a trip to Spain with a somewhat disreputable CD – Rice And Curry, by Dr Bombay, AKA Swedish Eurodance chameleon Jonny Jakobsen. Browned-up for this project, and singing songs like “SOS (The Tiger Took My Family)”, Dr Bombay is the most eyebrow-raising example of how older traditions of ethnic and cultural comedy took root in Eurodance – Jakobsen has gone on to perform as Scottish stereotype Dr.Macdoo (LP title: Under The Kilt) and ‘comedy’ Mexican Carlito. And Rednex are in very much the same game.

It’s a feature of eurodance that comes out of European disco – just as anything could be discofied, from film themes to classical music to rock, so anything is fair game for novelty Eurodance treatment, and if it made people laugh too, so much the better. The genre existed in the same amoral, self-serving zone stand-up comedy sometimes claims for itself: the effect on the audience (partying, laughter) is all that matters, and anything goes to get there.

I’m not saying this because I’m personally offended by Rednex’ appropriation of hillbilly culture, it’s just a fascinating and overlooked part of Eurodance aesthetics. I doubt any rock band in 1995 could have got away with the rat-eating, drooling hick-play of the “Cotton Eye Joe” video, but if nobody’s taking the music seriously anyhow, it’s never going to get that level of scrutiny. Or to put it less kindly, there were plenty of other reasons to hate Rednex in 1995.

But does “Cotton Eye Joe” work on that basic, energetic, ass-moving level? Yeah, pretty much. It’s repetitive, but it’s based on something very repetitive – the traditional “Cotton Eyed Joe” line dance, itself rooted in old ballads. (The male vocals on Rednex sound like they might simply be sampled from an older record, in fact.) The hollering diva interludes actually change things up a little, though that decades-old hook is solid enough to stand on its own. Like most European novelties across any age of pop, you can easily imagine why it got so big. And like many, a little of it goes a very long way.

(You might reasonably ask why I like Doop and get annoyed by Rednex? Any answer would be post-rationalisation, but I think it’s the vocals – dumb instrumental hooks seem happy to work on me while they’re playing and not swirl unbidden round my head. And Rednex’ vocals are particularly shrill and penetrating – the folksy charm of the twangy country voice is quite lost when looped and backed by pounding Eurobosh beats.)

My bottom scorers this year were a brace of 2s for Man U and Wet Wet Wet, and my top scorer was Baby D, which got an 8. This is now the 4th year in a row where I’ve not given a 9 or 10. (Every year from 1971 to 1990 had at least one 9+.)

Does every Beatles need a Stones? East 17′s manager Tom Watkins may have come to think so. His group poked their noses into the charts before Take That, but found themselves defined against Gary and the boys, and showed every sign of revelling in it. Take That looked back to disco; East 17 knew their way around a rave. Take That were a five-pack of flavours; East 17 moved as a crew. Take That flexed for your gaze but stayed at arms length; Tony Mortimer wrote songs about eating you out. North v south, cheeky v lairy, smooth v rough – playbook stuff, just the way the pop press like it. One effect of the division is that Take That moved onto ballad territory long before their rivals – East 17 always had a place for mid-paced bump’n'grind, but avoided the real weepies.

Until now. This is East 17 doing a slowie, and really going for it, piling on the trimmings of balladry until the song creaks. To this day it shows up on Christmas compilation albums because it’s got Christmas bells on – the clanging chimes of emotional doom. But it’s got everything else on too (except drums). Something about its shameless blowout ambition suits the season, though: all the overdriven heartbreak of a Christmas Day soap packed into five wailing minutes. By its final choruses “Stay Another Day” is piling the bells and strings and multitracked pleading chorales on like marzipan and icing, finding a space partway between Cliff Richard and Jim Steinman.

Linking it all together is Brian Harvey’s sometimes clumsy vocal. Given an Important Song to sing, he picks his way through the tune like he’s too big for it, a laddish King Kong doing his best not to hurt something frail and precious. The effect turns out to be perfect for the record – Harvey’s sad, sing-song, man-child vocals are wounded and baffled exactly when they need to be, when his character’s understanding of the situation breaks down: “Don’t understand what’s goin’ on… All that I do seems to be wrong.” It’s the same bewildered impotence Joy Division tapped in “Love Will Tear Us Apart”.

So for all its ungainliness, “Stay Another Day” has soul, of a sort. Sincerity, at least. I don’t think sincerity is an automatic pass in pop music – pop for me is about making shapes other people can fit themselves into, and honest self-expression is one route to that but not the only one. But sincerity can ambush me nonetheless. At the time “Stay Another Day” came out the relationship I was in seemed to have ended – I didn’t turn to this song, but I could feel the need in it, and give it a nod of recognition. It’s messy, it’s ridiculous, and it knocked every Take That single to that point into Brian Harvey’s backwards white cap.

After a run of mostly charmless number ones, it’s easy to rate this record: its vigour; its momentum; its status as a memento of good times people were having not as a marker in an album sales plan; its simple reminder that away from the charts the story of rave was still playing joyfully out. “Let Me Be Your Fantasy” was two years old – something people were sniffy about at the time – but history has a habit of squeezing such gaps. It now seems to have the stuff of life about it in a way little else in the 1994 list does.

Baby D were one of several groups on hardcore label Production House, which like many labels conjured new acts as whim and contingency required: its in-house producers would branch off, team up, hook up with vocalists, and lo, a band was born. Floyd Dyce – great name! – the writer and producer for Baby D, has a tremendous resume, with writing credits on close to a hundred tracks, including early-90s wonders like Acen’s “Trip II The Moon” and the House Crew’s “Euphoria (Nino’s Dream)”, songs that bumped around at the lower end of the charts selling a ton in all the wrong shops.

If you know those tracks, you’ll know the broad Production House outlook – uplifting, always ready to drop in a big hook, keeping the rushy spirit of UK house alive. “Let Me Be Your Fantasy” is in the same tradition, but more carefully streamlined and chart-ready. Old it may have been, but it’s also a fantastic bridge between the breakbeat-driven rave hits of 1992 and the hands-in-air, heart-on-sleeve pop house of mid-decade. Its breakbeat undercarriage gives “Let Me Be” a rough, robust chunkiness which plays well off Baby D’s powerful vocals. What she’s singing is the usual mash of ravey trigger phrases – feel the energy, I’ll take you up, fly away – sewn together with enough conviction that it feels like a song not a collage.

Like a lot of dance producers, Dyce seems a restless, tinkering sort, and he’s re-released this track repeatedly since 1994 – when it was already a hydra of versions and mixes. But then he had a strong core to build around. I wish there had been more hardcore and rave songs at number one, but if this record has to stand in for most of its genre it can do the job with pride.

(This review was originally written as “UB40 ft PATO BANTON” not “PATO BANTON” which actually makes a material difference to my commentary – see “EDIT” section below)

So, the Friday before last was the day that Popular died. Not in terms of its updates – feeble though they’ve been again – but it saw the end of the backbone of Popular, an ancient and unbacked-up hard drive which housed the corpus of MP3s I’ve been writing about, downloaded in a great gobble ten years ago and rarely updated, save when wrong. When I bagged and tagged this horde I had barely heard of torrents or streams – so their loss (and the vanishing of all my other music) is an irritation, and a liberating one at that, more than a tragedy.

But apt, I guess, that this should happen as it’s time to write up a song about materialism. Not in its original, Equals form, but Pato Banton’s scene-saving guest spot here puts a wicked spin on the song’s one-track narrator. “Come back! Yes with mi colour TV and mi CD collection of Bob Marley”. It’s a fine approach to the becoming-obligatory guest verse – an undermining counterpoint to Ali Campbell, taking the song’s Point-of-View on a heel turn. OK, as unreliable pop narrators go it’s hardly subtle, but Banton’s funny, unflashy presence makes “Baby Come Back” easily the most tolerable UB40 Number One.

(Also – is this the most explicit drugs reference so far to go unbanned? “Bag of sensi” is one of the items Pato’s lover has made off with and I can never remember hearing a radio edit.)

Banton takes on his duties with relish, and just as well: the rest of the record is a rather sorry effort. It’s brisk enough – it stomps rather than grooves, and busybodies you onto the dancefloor, but the Equals version did something similar. Ali Campbell’s delivery is more painful than ever, though: a strained bellow with a terrible fear of consonants. If ever there was a man who needed to be sidelined from his own song, it’s Campbell, and we can be thankful Pato Banton was on hand to do the unpleasant job.

(EDIT: As pointed out in the comments thread, this is NOT a UB40 song, except inasmuch as it has Ali Campbell and UB40 on it – it was supposedly just credited to Pato Banton and I was sure enough in my memory that I didn’t check Wikipedia, or anywhere else. Mea culpa! But that makes this a very strange single – is there any other non-remixed number one where the credited artist is on it so little? It’s a fair reflection of the division of quality on the record, however.)

A third album in as many years – for all that they were an honest phenomenon now, for all the still-spiralling popularity, Take That kept their workrate brutally high. Invisiblity is death in pop, and in the pre-net era visibility meant product. Commercially, said product would be as close to a cert as one could want, so even amidst the Stakhanovite grinning and flexing there might be room for experiment. Namely, a seven-minute video to show off the boys’ comedic talents (which proved feeble) and a chance for Gary to do an R&B number.

Alas! R&B and Barlow were uneasy bedfellows. For a few seconds “Sure” keeps its footing, sounds excitingly on-trend even – a confident whomp of a beat with producers Brothers In Rhythm doing a decent Teddy Riley impression. But then comes Gary, whose voice is all wrong for this – too bluff and needy, hectoring where it should plead, plodding where it should cajole. The backing vocalists (“Sure! So Sure!”) carry all the hook – Gary roams aimlessly in between, a street dancer in wellington boots, issuing his list of tedious requirements to a returning honey. “It’s gotta be social, compatible, sexual, irresistible” – is there a less sexual word than “social”, a more resistible one than “compatible”?

Perhaps they felt the need to act grown up – something their next singles would try more convincingly. By this time Take That no longer had the field to themselves – their rivalry, or rather brand differentiation, with East 17 added a necessary twist to the story. But maybe it irked that East 17 were the bad boys, the streetwise boys, the dirty ones. (Their “Deep” is preposterous, but still sexier than this.) Maybe Take That wanted to show they could still play that game, too. But they couldn’t. They made duller singles, but not worse ones.

DEE DEE NANANA!

“Saturday Night” has two big things going for it. The main thing is that it’s one of those iconically simple pop hits, like a “Louie Louie” for the Thomas Cook set. How can you tell when something is iconically simple and not just, er, simple? I’d say when it never actually ends up irritating you. Obviously that’s entirely subjective and I expect to be swamped with annoyed Whigophobes in the comments, but for me this record has lucked onto something sweet and primal. Not, though, irresistible – I’ve generally been pleased to hear “Saturday Night” and am content that it has made the world a happier place in some small fashion, but I wouldn’t own it, or put it on for fun, or even learn the dance. If anything, I like this most for its influence – the enduring post-Whigfield school of plinky-plonk smilecore Eurodance which produced feelgood gems (Ang Lee’s “2 Times”, ATC’s “Around The World”) through the rest of the decade.

But actually “Saturday Night”‘s resistibility is its second fine quality. It is that rare holiday smash which doesn’t hustle its listener. Most of them – from Conga to Macarena – carry a strong tang of coercion amidst the Piz Buin and Pina Colada, a vampiric need to co-opt their audience into the Fun. Not so “Saturday Night”, which is charmingly unassuming, thanks mainly to Whigfield’s matter-of-fact performance. If you do stick around, your reward is a lovely bit of house piano heading for the fade. But this song is never pushy. It’s Saturday night. Whigfield is having a great time. Maybe you are too. You don’t have to be. It won’t spoil anything. Have fun if you like. It’s up to you.

I have as you might have noticed a kind of default setting for cover versions, amounting to “you can’t keep a good tune down”. Certain approaches are almost guaranteed to ruin tracks – think “advert pianos” – but in general pop songs are resilient little bastards, able to withstand much greed and deformation. So hearing The Troggs’ “Love Is All Around” for the first time, after years of weathering this other version, was a bit of a shock. Here was a song – a very lovely, surprisingly artless song – that it seemed really had been ruined by the pawings of commerce. Not that Reg Presley saw it that way, and why should he? If memory serves he objected loudly and publically to the eventual decision to withdraw this “Love Is All Around” lest it be number one for ever.

As it was, fifteen weeks seemed quite ever enough. So with the knowledge of the original to make Wet Wet Wet even worse, what exactly goes wrong here? I think the clues are all in the first few seconds. Instead of the heartbeat rhythm of the Troggs, you get a fanfare for string beds and guitar. It’s actually an uncanny glimpse at the gross future of British rock, late 90s edition, with its lazy, gluttonous guitars and its grievous addiction to string arrangements. But what makes it so unpleasant on “Love Is All Around” is that it sets a tone which the record never strays from: one of triumph.

Here’s a vast generalisation: most good love songs aren’t triumphant. They’re doubting, hoping, fearing, bittersweet somehow – even the most unabashed and delighted have a kind of humility to them, and actually the original “Love Is All Around” is a great example of that. There’s nothing of this in Wet Wet Wet’s reading – Pellow acts the lover as winner, all his ad libs and showy additions meant to point us to the fact that he’s got his girl, his happy ending, his full stop. Curtain up, show’s over.

Obviously this is something a soundtrack single can get away with to some extent. Its emotions don’t have to be earned – they can be outsourced, and a recording as bumptious as “Love Is All Around” can work because it’s a payoff for the film’s narrative. But soundtrack singles should also stand on their own – and stripped of context Wet Wet Wet’s “Love Is All Around” feels overblown and empty. When Presley sings that love is all around, he sounds humbled by his sincere discovery of one of the universe’s great principles. When Pellow sings it, he sounds like he means it more tangibly – love is something he’s being showered in, like applause or champagne or confetti or maybe just money.

At the time – and since, really – what hit me was a sense of unfairness, based mainly on how hard Smith and his colleagues had worked. Also – and this didn’t last, at least not in this form – an irrational gloom, the feeling that things would never change, and that somehow the moribund, comical Tories would pull through again.

But then everything did seem to change, and quickly, with the facts of politics shifting last of all.

Two summers ago, as the phone-hacking scandal spread through the British establishment like fire through cobwebs, a friend tweeted that this was like “Britain: the season finale”. It was a moment where everything seemed connected and fragile and impossibly dramatic. The Summer of 1994 didn’t feel like that. In fact it felt torpid – the same films, the same records, the same bloody record from the same bloody film crowding out anything else – but with hindsight it was more like “Britain: the season opener”. It introduces charismatic new stars, it teases fresh plots, it establishes a few themes.

The theme of the 1994-1997 season of Britain – there’s no real question of what the finale was – was somewhat inward looking. It was Britain itself – what kind of country it was, could be, and wanted to be. This is the sort of thing politicians always want as the theme, but in this case politicians weren’t in charge: the ideas kept bubbling up through culture. On the day after John Smith’s death, Four Weddings And A Funeral was released. Four Weddings isn’t explicitly about Britishness, and “Love Is All Around” – its soundtrack hit – is no Britpop anthem, but the film plays fondly with types and stereotypes of Britishness, suffuses matters in a British marinade that’s essentially a feelgood strategy. Britpop was precisely the same, though with enough distance to allow an ironic getaway if things turned nasty. Four Weddings is at the cosy end of mid-90s British culture, but still feels like its product.

By the end of May, “Love Is All Around” had reached No.1. During that song’s smothering reign, Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party and Oasis released their debut album. Blair, Hugh Grant, Noel Gallagher – the new cast of Britain taking intriguing shape, with more in the wings.

Politically, the mid 90s seem like a phantom prelude to the Blair Administration, where a paralysed Tory government could do little except let its citizens daydream about good times before and good times to come. Culture, not politics, took centre stage, and pop was (for the last time?) at the centre of culture. So for all sorts of reasons – mostly dramatic neatness – it’s very easy to take things one step further and make Britpop the centre of pop, to turn the narrative arc of the mid-90s into the narrative arc of Britpop. Doing this makes for an excellent story.

But is it the right story? The great thing about doing Popular is that its merciless slicing of the charts into their most successful records takes decisions of focus out of my hands. By this time the charts themselves aren’t an accurate fossil record of UK cultural concerns – and, if you just look at No.1s, Britpop ends up underrepresented – but at this particular moment they do a better job than storytelling.

Because what we see over the next few years is that wider cultural spasm – all those jostling dreams of “British” – pushing through into the charts again and again, giving a sense of something far wider happening than a bunch of indie bands trying to work out how to cope with fame. It’s not a bad story, exactly – but the bigger picture, British Pop not Britpop, holds so much more. Ravers, actors playing old soldiers, boyband heretics and true believers, second-generation immigrants, comedians, and most importantly and successfully young women – all shouldering their way to number one; all offering ideas, stated or implied, about Britain; all shown in the topsy-turvy mirror of the charts. What a time!

We’ll get to them all, but first of all I have to decide whether that pesky Wet Wet Wet record is actually any good….

As a football-shunning nipper in the 80s it seemed to me that an FA Cup Final song barged its way into the charts every year, swayed through the top ten full of song like a beery fan on a train carriage, and was gone. And looking at this Wikipedia page – a memento to the rise and fall of the genre – I was basically right.

By the time I got to University, my terribly narrow social circles were broadening a little, and football was gentrifying a lot, so I had friends who bought FA cup records. The songs themselves were no better than they had ever been, often – to the extent that they sounded ‘up to date’ – quite a bit worse. But why should they improve? Who would it benefit? To criticise a club song for its music would be like criticising a souvenir scarf for its insulating properties. Cup Final songs were souvenirs, and maybe something to fuel your sense of belonging and anticipation in the lead-up – “belonging” being the emotion these bluff, comradely, incompetent things managed best and most often.

The year before, one Arsenal fan had come back from town with a cassingle of the stupefying “Shouting For The Gunners” – an honest title, at least. He put it on repeatedly while we played point-and-click games on his PC, making us hunt through its bellowing wreckage for a forgotten fragment of tune. Next to that, “Come On You Reds” was Bacharach and David – and certainly it’s crafted enough to have all the elements you’d want in a Cup Final song. The dab-your-eyes reminder of past triumphs or tragedies. The noble attempt to make the current team roster scan. Yeomen of light entertainment doing their duty for the lads – a manful job by The Quo here. Only a decision to marinade the song in trebly, plastic keyboards spoils the mood.

It’s still terrible, but it’s the right kind of terrible, just about. Which doesn’t explain why it got to number one when the likes of “Ossie’s Dream” and “Anfield Rap” had fallen short. Its platonic incarnation of Cup Final hit-ness can’t explain that on its own. But consider that the friend who bought it had also bought an “Eric The King” duvet cover, and that he’d shown no interest in football at all the year before, and things become clearer. Man U and the Premiership were rising together, the club winning on the pitch and exploiting the new football audience and its hunger for stars. I’d also guess – though I still wouldn’t have cared enough to know – that England’s failure to qualify for USA 94 was good business for Man U, as a huge potential audience turned more of its eye on the domestic game. They weren’t yet the most popular club in the country, but they were hungry, many were young, and some walked like rock stars already. Pop rewards such things. Even I knew who Eric Cantona was.

Pop’s triumph is when a private language turns out to have been public all along. When the way you express yourself – visual, lyrical, physical, vocal – becomes something hundreds of thousands understand, like a word that was somehow always waiting to be said. This was Nirvana’s triumph too, and part of Kurt Cobain’s doom. His scraping, negating, self-scouring howls and sneers turned out to be a Rosetta Stone, a way for his fans to start making sense of themselves.

But the language he’d helped discover was too powerful – it went too far for him, made him fans he hated, and then rippled out still further, beyond Nirvana and Seattle. “Grunge” mutated quickly, from music to catch-all generational tag – I bought a lumberjack shirt from a British chainstore sometime in 1992, not really understanding why. It was very comfortable. I would never have had the nerve to buy Levis, though. They were for the fashionable, not the misfits.

As grunge spread, and labels moved past their initial panicky gambles, the ideological booby-traps Cobain set in his music (for himself as much as anyone) were quickly cleared away. No more self-questioning, no more gender politics, no more playing rock like you hated rock. What emerged was a brute, very male sound: a glowering take on hard rock – more commercially burnished than grunge but just as sullen.

Utterly charmless to my ears, but here’s the thing about pop’s new-language moments: the people who come in their wake are copyists but also largely sincere. The legion of post-Elvis clones were fulfilling commercial imperatives but, I bet, their own urges too. Which makes the curious affair of Stiltskin – grunge’s great mocking cameo on Popular’s stage – all the more remarkable.

This record seems to be a case where the “manufactured” label – and all its tiresome baggage – is completely deserved. Writer Peter Lawlor put the track together specifically for the Levi’s ad “Creek” (old-timey, women, trousers, bathing hunk, twist ending – it’s a great commercial, I admit). He needed a singer and found Ray Wilson – later Phil Collins’ replacement in Genesis, closing some kind of circle of grudgeful blokiness. It’s Ray’s clench-arsed voice you hear being “broken minded” on “Inside”, but every other instrument is Lawlor.

The result is a spectacularly brazen jacking of grunge tropes, ribboned and bowed in a preposterous choral intro. Guitars thresh, drums thud, quiets loud, Ray’s butt flexes. Midway through there’s a tiny break where the bombast stops and a tres Novoselic bass lick pokes in – just a little memory trigger, a brand reminder: KIDS do you remember GRUNGE it made you buy CLOTHES. Cobain’s body was found in his garage a couple of weeks before “Inside” was released, the kind of sad coincidence that – if you were as serious as Ray Wilson, or grunge – might make you reframe song as insult.

And the lyrics – my God! Pick your favourite – “Seam in a fusion mine / Like a nursing rhyme / Fat man starts to fall” – nursing rhyme, not nursery rhyme, you’ll note, and perhaps feel unreasonably cross at. “Ring out in a bruised postcard / In a shooting yard”. Actually I think the best bit might be “strong words in a ganja sky”. It’s a cataract of nonsense – somewhere, Simon Le Bon sucks air through his teeth in awed admiration.

But look on songmeanings, YouTube, tumblr – you’ll see “Inside” quoted sincerely, cited for its “meaningful lyrics”. Act serious enough, and with enough intensity, and you become serious – no matter how debased your origins. And anyway, the advert teaches you how to appreciate “Inside” – ride the crescendo and grin – and for most of its buyers that’s all you needed.

I never liked grunge, I never even listened to Nevermind until twenty years later. What I remember was how it fitted into a world and an attitude I caught a flavour of, even in Britain. Angry, mistrustful, painstakingly suspicious of authority and commerce but reflexively against turning those feelings into a ‘movement’. “Generation X” was diagnosed with apathy – on the ground it felt more like paralysis: all stances and ideas riddled with their opposites. Nirvana’s records found a language for that. But this gross, shameless, blackly hilarious record is speaking that language too.

Before reality TV commodified the rags-to-brief-riches pop story, the charts threw out an organic example or two. Here’s one: a bathroom salesman from Buckinghamshire with a bedroom studio, his song riding a remix to fleeting glory. Within a few months of hitting number one, Tony Di Bart was shorthand for facelessness – as the stars fell into eclipse, would pop be taken over by herds of such worthy, ordinary try-hards?

But rather than a sign of ill-health, “The Real Thing” may just have been the charts working smoothly – a brokerage for clashing networks. When people talk about “fragmentation” – which they did in the 90s, though not quite as much as now – what they’re diagnosing isn’t the eternal separation of tastes: people like different stuff, surprise! It’s more a fragmentation of distribution, scenes building knowledge systems which bypassed one another. Radio 1 (itself in shock from listener bleed as it abandoned its cross-generational mission); commercial radio; the University and indie circuit; mainstream clubland and a mess of party undergrounds.

These overlapping systems have always been with us too, so I think “fragmentation” is what it feels like when their hierarchy is upset and shifting, which it certainly was in the early 90s. If you don’t understand the channels through which things become popular, their popularity might start seeming random, threatening almost.

And so, Tony Di Bart, who I wasn’t threatened by exactly but who certainly seemed random. I was quite unattuned to the places where this record had built a following, and I couldn’t imagine what anyone heard in it. Has time made things easier? The backing – “anthemic”, “pumping” and so forth – has had a rougher ride of it than Di Bart’s spooked, slightly murmured vocal. In fact, the vocal uses the confident production like a cheap cologne and a shiny suit, something to cover up how nervous and unsure its trailing-off platitudes are. There’s a vulnerability to “The Real Thing” which isn’t necessarily sympathetic – in the end, Di Bart sounds too wimpy, and his lines too rote, for me to really care about him. But it seems to me that this relative weakness and diffidence is also what let “The Real Thing” cut through and give the guy his hit.

Sometimes U have to state the obvious: this should not have been Prince’s only UK number one under his own name (or glyph). But a check of the stats shows he rarely came that close – he was an undisputed star, archetype, household name, whose most remarkable and famous singles settled in the middle of the Top 10, or at its outskirts. This is the charts’ fault, not his: so much of the spice of 80s pop, its distinctive decadence, seems to loop back to Prince. He should have a chain of entries here.

In his heyday, as a creature of mad playground rumour, no priapic feat seemed weird enough for Prince: he is the only star I can remember where one whisper was that he was really a virgin, making it all up. What made Princely sex so mysterious and scary to the naïve teen mind was that he went way beyond the cartoon smut you got in rock music and the accessorised seductions of 80s soulboy pop. Not just in terms of kink, but in his evocation of the force of desire, its power – playful and frightening – to mutate and twist reality. The line that sums up his whole deal and appeal, for me, is in that magnificent first verse of “When Doves Cry”: “Animals strike curious poses / They feel the heat, the heat between me and you”.

But that isn’t the version of Prince we get here – no vogueing fauna in sight. This is a man devoted and restrained, singing to and for his wife-to-be and playing it as sweet as he possibly can. “The Most Beautiful Girl In The World” is a high, heady, perfume-drunk ballad drawing from the well of Thom Bell’s work with the Delfonics and Stylistics. Prince disciplines himself, staying almost throughout at the absolute top of his register, a high-wire act he pulls off without a hitch but also without any moment which completely sells the decision. The music is opulent boudoir funk, the best line – “How can I get through days when I can’t get through hours?” – is very good, and there’s a casual classiness to the record missing from most of what we’ve covered lately.

Even so this is a good single, not a great one – and as it turned out, one of his last hit singles. That – as well as all the name-change foofaraw – makes “Beautiful Girl” a slippery record. On the one hand, well-behaved enough to become a slow-dance standard; on the other, overwhelmed by the high tide of its maker’s eccentricity. In his day the strangeness, the seduction and the unearthly pop instinct had created uncanny fusions, curious poses indeed. The pose on this record is well-struck, but more ordinary, its only real problem the many things I’d always play instead of it.

The fifth (of six!) single from Everything Changes, and yes, it shows. Breezy, disco-inspired, but this is the fussy, low-fat studio hack’s version of disco which dotted pop albums through the 90s and beyond. A sax solo fills in time and helps to cement the impression that this is a sketch of a song, bulked out as required by passing sessionmen.

What can be said about it? The B-Side was a medley of Beatles songs – as with the Lulu team-up, this feels a bit of a “we belong” move, though the band is asserting a continuity of boyband frenzy and light entertainment domination rather than any kind of songwriting chops. More importantly for Take That’s immediate future, this is the first number one with lead vocals from Robbie Williams. Cheeky in front of the cameras, chafing (by his later account) behind them, Robbie does nothing at all here: with hindsight you might take his perfunctory devotion as a sign of boredom, but it’s just as likely he simply wasn’t ready to own a performance yet. “I love you”, he mutters at the end: the words have rarely sounded less convincing.

One of the divisive things about disco was the apparent will to discofy anything and everything: no style, era, film theme or rock classic was safe. To haters it was proof of disco’s stultifying lack of creativity – why make something new when you could slap strings and a beat under the old? But there’s something a little utopian about it too – a sense that disco was the philosopher’s stone of pop, the perfect unifying sound that could turn anything into dancefloor gold.

Something of that survived in commercial dance music. While club music continued mutating and innovating at bewildering pace, its leaps forward took it into the charts less often. The gap was often filled by novelties – raved-up TV themes, videogame music, cover versions, and finally stand-ins for whole genres with a 4/4 thump grafted on. Hence “Doop”, some Europeans building their money-making vehicle from a xerox of a memory of a decade that had happened somewhere else, souping its engines up and letting it loose.

Of course it’s a very good record. I’m writing this on the 60th anniversary of the charts – how could I let it go without an entry? – and novelty is something they’ve always smiled on. If the Internet has damaged pop in Britain then some of it is that the web is simply a more efficient delivery system for the transient grin or thrill of annoyance.

Nobody buying “Doop” expected to be playing it in one year, never mind 18. A month would have been a shock. But it fully commits to its one idea, owns it and crafts it. While it’s never anything more than “the Charleston with a donk on it”, it’s also far more generous with its hooks and energy than one-line descriptions suggest. It does enough with its squealing horns and showy, tumbling drum samples that the entry of the scoo-be-doo vocals feels like a delightful bonus.

And when the 1990s grafts take hold fully the track is harder than you’d expect: by choosing the rapid, aggressive kick and pump of hardcore over softer, more inclusive house beats “Doop” stays as true as a cash-in can to its source material. The 20s, after all – the 20s we had handed down to us – were a giddy, dangerous decade and Doop treats that image with more respect than you might remember.

The problem with the phrase “vocal gymnastics” – if used as a pan – is that plainly gymnastics are awesome. Their poise, control, grace, swiftness and fluidity – why wouldn’t these be things you’d aspire to in pop, why wouldn’t you expect applause? But these are manifestations of technique*, and pop thought ran aground on technique years ago, setting up a series of straw oppositions to deny it. Technique versus emotion. Technique versus passion. Technique versus excitement. Why not have them all? Mariah could, and sometimes did – if you could do the giddy things she does with her voice on “Emotions”, say, why wouldn’t you?

You need the songs for it, though. The part of Mariah’s success that British critics really couldn’t deal with wasn’t so much the range as the material; a higher concentration of ballads than the average star, and ones which seemed particularly placid, at that. A listen to her ’98 Greatest Hits record persuaded me that (disappointingly perhaps) I still wasn’t down with many Carey slowies. Once the bpm rises she’s enchanting, but at ballad pace most of her singles still sound torpid.

“Without You” may be a slow number, but sticking to the Nilsson blueprint provides enough material for any performer. In fact, Carey is controlled and respectful here, even at the crisis point – her voice bending and fluxing but always reforming before it deliquesces entirely. If – as a wise commenter on the Nilsson thread pointed out in response to my underrating “Without You” – Harry’s melodrama on his take carries double weight because it’s a breadown of an urbane, soft spoken persona, the same thing works for Carey in reverse: we all know how much she could freak out on this record, but she just about doesn’t. She stays devastated but strong, bolstered by her multi-tracked, gospel-tinted backing selves: the record’s best touch.

A good track, then? The truth is, I can’t love it, or even move much beyond admiration. It’s not the song, and it’s certainly not the singing, but I run into the same wall I did when I was writing about the operatic ballads of the 50s – there’s no side to it. “Without You” is monolithically straightforward: it comes from a place of noble and complete seriousness I can’t totally relate to.

*the other thing about gymnastics, of course, is that they are a sport with judges. It’s not fair to blame Whitney or Mariah for the hijacking of their singing style by Reality TV performers – you don’t choose your imitators – but the unrestrained, often glorious showiness of their performances maybe lends itself to benchmarking. But such worries are for later.

A song of many lives: we’re catching it at the end of its first, after a failed release in 1993 and a bounce around the charts. In three years time it’ll be changed for good, the soundtrack to Tony Blair’s first election win. From then on its critical fortunes are linked to its grinning patron’s, and at some point in the early 00s it stops being a naff take on real optimism and becomes a different kind of reflection: brittle, shallow, endlessly on-message.

The problem with it in ’97 was that it was too small for its moment. It was a record for diligent staffers to let their hair down to after a long campaign, it said hardly anything about the giddy hopes and vengeful glee of May 1st, which means it can’t – for me at least – summon them to mind now. It sounds tacky, not poignant or bittersweet.

So can we scrape all that away and put “Things Can Only Get Better” back in its 1994 place? We can try, but it was never much of a record. It’s part of a strain of tune-heavy, hands-high dance-pop which was hitting big at the time – sometimes excellent (Sub Sub’s “Ain’t No Love (Ain’t No Use)” for instance), usually at least momentarily seductive. This is as memorable and catchy as any, but pushy with it, which is the risk you run with gospel-tinted music. Gospel does not come easy to the British, who focus on the uplifting handclap qualities and ignore the spiritual elements that elevate the ecstasy and frame more complex or painful emotions. The result are records, like this and some M People songs, that walk a very fine line between inspiration and aerobics. Not to mention that Peter Cunnah’s voice isn’t really up to it – his strained micro-grunts surfacing dark memories of the Goss twins. I bet it all sounds pretty good if you’ve just won an election, but what wouldn’t? By the same token, there are worse songs out there for events to ruin.

Looking back on the Summer of Ragga (and indeed the Winter Of Ragga), what strikes me is how cuddly its chart presence was. Dancehall was a controversial import: for a pop audience used to reggae as good vibes unity music, the arrival of young lions like Shabba Ranks was a shock. Particularly as the sex, swagger and silk trousers might be mixed up inextricably with vicious homophobia. But none of that drama showed up in the charts. While The Word took time out from dousing students in beans to grapple with the issues, pre-watershed ragga was a brighter, sunnier experience.

Chaka Demus – the rough one – and Pliers – the smooth one – thoroughly retool a pop standard but it’s hard to imagine anyone being annoyed (or thrilled) by the resulting jollities: “Twist And Shout” is the kind of song which is so often covered you’d think it can’t have purists anymore. It has survived dozens of styles and, for that matter, will endure its current life in reality show limbo.

This particular version is all twist and very little shout – cheerful, almost languid, cantering along without any real spark but entertaining all the same. Musically it’s not taking many risks – there’s a lascivious intro from richer-voiced guest Jack Radics, a nagging backing yelp that sounds like a persistent terrier locked in the studio, and a twangy arrangement positioning the track as an “Oh Carolina” style blend of old and new. Pliers cajoles, his voice fluttering around Chaka Demus gruffer commands, but both men are more memorable elsewhere and their performance is a microcosm of the track: nobody does anything wrong, and somehow it fails to stick anyway.

(For those still intrigued by the idiosyncracies of Popular’s marking system, this was on the absolute 5/6 cusp until I listened to it with the sun out.)

I gave every song a mark out of 10, now you can say which you’d have given 6 or more to, and reminisce about the year in general, post lists, discuss the merits of Back To The Planet, etc etc.

For their Christmas tearjerker, Take That – now comfortably the country’s biggest band – deployed their secret weapon: Little Mark Owen, a singer so awkwardly earnest he strips a layer of skin off even the hokiest of material. And what he has to work with here is pure melodrama – a song of a long-absent man who tracks down his lover to find not just her but – we presume – his unknown son.

This is material with ancient roots, ballad or folk territory – though a ballad would have granted the lovers more motivation, told some of their backstory too. Here we’re pitched into the middle of things: “I come to your door to see you again / But where you once stood was an old man instead”. The storytelling is clumsy – indeed the whole song is rather clumsy, it meanders through its verses before a squib of a half-written chorus. But these blocky strokes of narrative give “Babe” an urgency that the music exploits. The melody is murky and sad – this is as fog-bound and haunted a number one as we’ve seen since the high Gothic of John Leyton – and the tension gives the story a dignity it probably doesn’t deserve. The swelling optimism as father recognises son is a slightly corny break in the clouds, but the tension creeps back and we’re left with a ringing phone – is he forgiven? Will they get back together?

Behind the atmospherics, and Owen’s puppy-eyed, pleading intensity, this is far from their strongest single. But at a point in their career when they could have done anything, a record as relatively odd as “Babe” is welcome – where most boybands profess ultimate devotion, Take That promise to father your child and abandon you.