Sixteen Listens For Sixteen Weeks: An Everything I Do Liveblog

This song got to number one for 16 weeks, so I decided to play it 16 times in a row, writing as I went.

Play 1: And we’re off. I’ve honestly hardly heard this in the last twenty years so I don’t anticipate the full horror will strike me for a few plays. In case anyone doesn’t know why I’m doing this, “Everything I Do” – a soundtrack hit from Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves – holds the record for the longest consecutive run at Number One in the UK singles chart. At least one other record has come close, a few have threatened to, but this is still the champ. Sixteen weeks. Almost four months.

The record is – oh look, you know this, but anyway – it’s a power ballad, slower in fact than I remember. Very weighty. It levels up repeatedly, reaches a climax about two-thirds of the way through, then we have a lingering solo (which I didn’t remember at all and have really no desire to hear another fifteen times), a reprise of the pre-chorus and chorus, and that’s your lot.

Play 2: So on first go that wasn’t so bad! I was 18 when this song was around and I dare say a great deal less amenable to ballads in general and romantic ballads in particular. The song got to number one just after I’d left school – I was spending the summer listening to Bob Dylan and picking fruit for a pittance. “Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands” – now there, I thought, was a love song. I suspect “Everything I Do” might have a rather wider appeal. (Ah – the solo again – now I’m noticing little moans from Bry on it, dear me.) Anyway I hardly noticed this being number one for its first few weeks and certainly bore it no ill will.

Play 3: “This is a little bit sad music” says a passing four-year old. “I don’t like sad music.” Don’t worry, only thirteen more plays to go! Anyway, in the comments Billy Hicks asks the killer question – why this? As he points out the top ten seemed to be this plus half a dozen breakbeat tracks. At the risk of a stab at topicality which will date this entry event more, there’s yer argument for AV right there. If the second preference votes for Rebel MC had been counted in favour of the Prodigy perhaps we wouldn’t be having this discussion.

More seriously I think there’s a sense in which “Everything I Do” was put at number one as a reaction to a lot of the other stuff which was going on in pop, a ballad built on good old fashioned (well, circa 1986) values. Doesn’t quite explain the longevity, though.

Play 4: That piano intro is starting to sound a bit fussy. You also have to think about the subject matter, of course. Most of the really colossal 90s hits are love songs, and very big, demonstrative, Hollywood love songs at that. And there hadn’t been many of those at Number One recently, the last comparable thing was probably “Unchained Melody”, which was from 1965 anyway. Someone in the comments called “I Wanna Sex You Up” distressingly indiscreet, which seems a bit prudish but Bryan is definitely serving up something a bit more romantic – the sexing you up is all in the thrusting, hairy-chested sound of it, not in the devotional words.

Play 5: By this point in 1991 it was simply a big summer hit – I was aware of it, and pretty sick of it, but I still doubt anyone predicted it would have the legs it did. I don’t recall it breaking sales records – the overall levels of singles sales were quite weak, so the reign of the balladosaurs was partly a function of no real competition. Broad-based hits were rarer, so when one did come along it would really clean up.

I’m feeling a bit resentful of its bludgeoning properties by now.

Play 6: The film, right, let’s talk about the film. I never saw it. I understand someone shoots an arrow into a tree at one point.

So let’s not talk about the film yet. I’m definitely noticing little touches in the production – it feels wrong to call them “subtleties” somehow – there’s a kind of quiet keyboard bit going on behind the riffola just before the solo, for instance. It all serves to make the record bigger and more treacly.

Play 7: Someone has pointed out that there’s a SIX AND A HALF MINUTE version of this, if someone throws me a YouTube I’ll treat myself to it, but no, the bulk of these plays are a radio edit.]

What’s dominating the record now for me is Adams’ voice. It’s very effortful, really bringing out his fighting for you, dying for you, etc. It’s no walk in the park, this doing everything he does for you stuff! He’d been around for a while by this time, slogging away without really making much of an impression on me. He’d done “Run To You” and that showed he had the requisite huskiness for this kind of music, but he’s a bit of a nullity otherwise. That’s probably a contributory factor to the success here, though – if you’re buying this after seeing the film, you’re probably not thinking of Bryan Adams at all, you’re thinking of Kevin Costner clad in stubble and lincoln green. I see the sleeve goes very heavy on the film title and very light on the song title, for instance.

Play 8: There’s obviously a sort of Ren Faire appeal going on here, too – there’s something a little archaic, courtly almost, in the phrasing on “search your heart, search your soul, when you find me there you’ll search no more”, and we’re in the decade of Riverdance and Braveheart and a general bodice’n'broadsword revival (which culminates in Lord Of The Rings I guess, except luckily the songs from that are all IN ELVISH, thanks Tolk!). The reading of Robin Hood implied is less freedom fighter than a kind of Chivalry rockist, the man who understands duty, honour, love etc but is forced undercover by the decadent tenor of the times.

Play 9: OK, it’s time for the six minute version. on YouTube complete with Windows Movie Maker style floaty lyrics. The piano seems mixed up a bit higher, the guitars are a little more turbo-charged but it looks like the extra minutes are all at the end, which rather wrecks the song’s dying fall, replacing it with a bit of piano and guitar vamping and Bryan doing some kind of – improvised moaning? It’s a bit like a really bad Rod Stewart track but with a lot more crashing and soloing. Sorry, Bryan, this won’t do at all – all the precisely constructed build up of romance wrecked on this longer edit in favour of a bit of post-coital mumbling and grunting. It’s like Bryan is rolling over and stealing your duvet. Or your bearskin or whatever, this is the 13th century after all.

Play 10: Back to the shorter edit, and the clanging chimes of doom start up again. Lex in the comments points out rightly that, yes, obviously the film tie-in is why this managed such a gargantuan shift at the top (by week ten it had gone past “Two Tribes”, my benchmark for massivity in hits, and everyone had noticed what was going on). One of my pet theories is how pop is basically quite a small medium, easily bullied and shifted off course by the gravitational pull of other artforms – and cinema in the 90s exerted a particular force. So in a way it’s surprising there weren’t MORE Adams-sized hits.

I’m really wincing now when the BIG CHORDS come in, it’s like the song is a mash up of a films love scene and fight scene both at once.

Play 11: OK, definitely hitting a wall here. As someone else said in the comments, who on Earth was buying this after ten weeks? I’ve now managed to get myself into the same place of sullen anger I was in back in ’91, as the nights drew in, I started a crap job in the wines section of Tescos, and this bastard thing was STILL at number one.

Play 12: I mean, sixteen weeks is a really long time. It’s like six Olympics back-to-back, or a double summer holiday back when you were a kid and summer holidays lasted forever. They’re doing the TOTP re-runs on BBC4 and people are shifting uneasily as the Brotherhood Of Man are on it week after week (with, I admit, a worse song than this), and that was number one for way less than this. Maybe I should have taken it as a sign to stop caring about pop music, but there was a lot of stuff around I really loved and believed in. On the other hand, by week twelve you didn’t really hear it much in the wild, it was just out there somewhere, selling to someone. I wonder if there was ever peer pressure on people who hadn’t bought it yet?

Play 13: Time to take stock of what I think of it. The opening is the best part, I think – it’s gentle, it sounds humble (as someone pointed out, his voice does sound pretty fucked, but for me that suits the been-through-a-battle vibe). The piano chord announcing the second section sounds grossly echoey, though, and the rhythm it sets up is really donkey-ish and plodding. By this point Adam’s identical long vowels are starting to grate, too. The “no love, like your love” does the same stuff, but heavier – plate mail now, not leather armour – and it works better that way, approaching something like rock. Which is why the solo is such a drag, a real energy-killer – Bryan sounds even more knackered after it, like the drums are having to prop his wounded frame up. And then he dies, and it’s almost pretty again, or perhaps I’m just glad it’s ending.

Play 14: This time watching the video, a treat I’ve so far denied myself. The denim! Goodness me, I’d forgotten what a poster boy for denim he was. Bryan looks exhausted before it even starts, grizzled and baffled, a very un-starry sort of star. Most compelling is the bassist uncomfortably squatting up and down before the solo.

Play 15: My wife, who was 15 at the time of EID’s chart reign, went to a Bryan Adams gig in Summer ’92 – supported by Extreme. I asked her if there was any particular reaction when “Everything I Do” was played, but no – it was lighters aloft the whole time of course, but no great excitement. “He was a nice man who’d made a nice song and the whole thing was very nice” was her – not damning – verdict. “Everything I Do” is forceful, sweeping, and suchlike – and memorable too – but also rather unshowy and straightforward. A denimish sort of a song. You can imagine it not wearing out its welcome among its constituency, in the way that something more kitschy – a Jim Steinman jam, perhaps – might make fans feel uncomfortable or awkward after a while. It’s a low-calorie type of a power ballad.

Play 16: “Last play!” I announce to the family. “Good!” says my four year old. “Let’s see if the song’s getting better or worser.” I press play. “It’s getting worser.” Too right. Though actually it hit bottom a few plays ago, and now – just as then – a sort of acceptance has set in. By the sixteenth week, everyone knew it was absurd that this laboured but harmless thing had been at number one for so long, but there was amusement at that absurdity. Which isn’t to say I wasn’t grateful when the spell was finally broken – far happier with the band responsible than I’ve ever been before or since.

So sixteen plays later, what have I learned? Weirdly, I still find it quite hard to get a grip on. For all its bluster there’s an amiable space at the centre of “Everything I Do”, a knack of fading into the background which probably stood it in good stead. I boggled at it in 1991 but I don’t think I hated it, and I can’t really hate it now.

Sinead O’Connor is one of the finest song interpreters not just because she thinks hard about the material and the feelings locked in it, but because she’s so good at placing songs into a situation. A great example of this is her version of “Chiquitita”, warm and homely where ABBA’s is melodramatic, replacing its theatrical flourishes with a cosy tick-tock rhythm like a parlour clock. In the video she makes you, the viewer-as-Chiquitita, a cup of tea and settles down for a chat, and it’s perfect: that’s exactly what her version feels like.

This ability to find an angle gives her cover versions life and variety: she’s happy to switch up her singing style as the track demands, she’s never reliant on one-size-fits-all passion. She can belt with the best of them – think of her “You’re killing me!” ranting on “Success Has Made A Failure Of Our Home”. But she’s also happy to keep her distance if that’s what the song needs. This is why the famous video for “Nothing Compares For You” – tight close-up on O’Connor’s face, a tear sliding down her cheek, her spitting some words and flinching from others – can be misleading. It makes you think the record is brilliant because of its raw, unsimulated emotion: but really it’s more subtle than that, and the artifice of the video’s framing is as much a tell as those two teardrops.

Her “Nothing Compares 2 U” is a very moving track – it captures the stasis, anger and devastation of a bad break-up with awful accuracy – but it seems to me Sinead comes to that emotion through very calculated vocal choices, particularly the shifts between a gentle vocal tone and one more edged and occasionally so harsh it almost sounds treated. Take the chorus, for instance – it builds up as a big soft rock sweep: “But nothing compares…” – and then starts to zig-zag, O’Connor picking out individual syllables – “no-THING! com-pares” – before blurring the last two into a single stabbing cry – “TOYEW”.

How does this way of singing work with the grain of the song? “Nothing Compares 2 U” is – at least partly – about control and its limits. The singer has freedom and autonomy, she knows exactly how long she’s hurt for and is withering about others’ attempts to advise or alleviate it. By the end of the song she’s acting like it’s her choice whether he comes back or not – and this coda is the record’s prettiest and most desperate moment. So the ultra-precise vocals on “Nothing Compares” dramatise this. And they allow for some magical moments – the hopelessness of “I can see whoever I choose“, and the showy melisma on “whatever I want” and “restaurant” underlining their pointlessness in a life where all activity has become decorative and empty. The defiant, then trailing “every boy I see“. The chilling first line. And – of course – “GUESS what he told me!”

I haven’t even mentioned the music, whose stately, sympathetic pulse gives O’Connor the canvas she needs to be so devastating. Compare it to the Prince-produced original by The Family and you can easily see the work this rich, understated backing is doing – the melody is there on the Family’s version but the production strands it by turning the song’s sorrow into a fog. Everything about Sinead O’Connor’s track is clear, by contrast. But there’s still something irreducibly private about it, this portrait of a woman whose grief is all she has to hold onto.

Tom Says:
My memory may be cheating me but I think the first time we ended up in the Glasshouse Stores it was due to a power cut a pub or two along. Marvellous serendipity if so, and appropriate: an accidental pub becoming a shrine to the unintended social consequences of setting up an online community. This is the top pub of the 00s and is tied firmly to the 00s: I can quite imagine never visiting it again, which isn’t something I can say about several others. The regular ILX meet-ups we held there are mostly a thing of the past, for the happy reason that participants basically stopped being “message board posters” and started being simply ‘friends’. What that misses out is the random element, of course – the sense on entering a get-together that you never quite knew who would turn up. Sometimes new faces, occasionally unwelcome ones – the internet meet-up pitches itself halfway between the cosy drink with mates and the party.

Worth pointing out how the architecture of the pub helped enable that – we ignored the top floor (except for epic bar billiards duels) and would head for the catacombs instead, occupying the string of tables at the back of the basement level and then spreading out across to the bar and beyond. It worked perfectly: there was a lively core to each gathering but enough space to mingle, connive and catch-up in smaller groups. And – essential for groups of 20 or 30 – the beer was cheap: people could buy huge, generous, tray-busting rounds and end up with crisps and change from a twenty aswell. It’s a Sam’s pub, and the fame and decline of Sam’s mirrors the fame and decline of these particular large gatherings across the decade. Once the presiding spirit of Sam Smiths, the Ayingerbrau man in the box, departed, the Glasshouse’s role as a social hub began to wane too.

Pete says
I love drinking underground. One of my favourite places in London to drink before it was taken away from us was the Dive Bar on Gerrard St, and I guess the basement of the Spanish Bar also counts. But there is something about the cellar bar in the Glasshouse Stores which has always attracted me. Perhaps it was that it was infrequently open and staffed; only in the evenings and not always then. Often booked out for private parties, we still struck it lucky there for a lot of our large gatherings. Which meant we could spread, and spread we did like ebola. The basement of the GHS has two distinct chambers, and I favoured the one on the side of the toilets (the bar staff were more likely to be on this side too). But with a relatively loose arrangement of seating it was easy to build a party of five into a party of thirty and still have a chance to talk to everyone. Not many pubs can do that. And certainly very few can do it underground.

Katie says
Ah, the lovely Glasshouse Stores. Conveniently located bang in the middle of the Berwick St/Chinatown/Japan Centre triangle of after-skool places to shop (and do yoga). Many is the time I’ve been in there with co-conspirators for “just the one” and emerged hours later rather the worse for wear (ask Sarah about the Taddy Porter, she’ll know what I’m talking about). It’s always the first pub I think of when someone mentions Soho – and as Pete says, the underground dimension makes it still seem somehow secret and special, when other pubs that used to be secret and special (hello, the Fitzroy Tavern) have become crowded and ordinary. It was also the pub that I smoked my last EVER cigarette in. So hooray for the GHS!

Pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør says
There were other ilx pubs, but this is the one I associate most with loose meet-ups across a decade of people not necessarily otherwise in close or regular contact — with the pub’s slightly peculiar geometry amplifying the short-term provisionality (and sometimes, though not always, doomed nature) of the many companionships: at once spacious and oddly constricted. I’ve never quite felt at home or comfy there — and never remotely unwelcome, either.

Carsmile says
In the 2003/4 season, ILX at its peak, we needed somewhere big enough to take 20-odd people (and, of course, twenty odd people) about once a fortnight, sometimes more often. It also had to be central and easily findable (Nick D’s assertion that the GHS was invisible notwithstanding). But more, much more than this, it had to be a Sam Smiths pub. These were friendly days and I’ve seen some of the biggest rounds ordered outside of a wedding or funeral go over that downstairs bar and you’d still get change from £20. At £1.62 a pint of OB*, being generous wouldn’t automatically lead to an overdraft and given some acquaintance’s (heck, and some friend’s) inability to understand the concept of “the round” it was just as well.

*this is right isn’t it? even now it seems ridiculous that it could be that cheap, but it was, wasn’t it?

Also, one of the last remaining bar billiards tables in London, played to Jonny’s slightly over-generous rules (re-spot the red as object ball every time you pot it) led to many evenings clustered round one corner of the room, and is still my main selling point for taking people there today.

Tracer Hand says
The Glasshouse Stores: my first encounter with The Fat Man, i.e. the little alpine fella who lives in a glass box on top of the bar. It was my first month in London. I was told “Ask for the Fat Man”. “Really?” I said, suspicious, knowing how gullible I was and not yet confident I could identify a piss-take on the hoof. I’m still not. But I asked, and was served up a nice cold pint of lager. Maybe life wouldn’t be so terrible here.

Magnus says
The Glasshouse Stores was the spiritual home of FAPs when FAPs had a heyday. It was hard to find the first time around – the slightly hidden frontage and a near namesake across the road set a small challenge for newcomers, but only to make it more of a gem when settled in. It was segregated: upstairs and downstairs, and each of those with three or four compact areas, so it would jumble a crowd into groups and then push them together – always forming fresh configurations of pub chat. Plenty of schemes and ruses were hatched there – the obscure architecture that encouraged this – cloistered and conspiratorial, and flowing with cheap and welcome booze. For me it was the pub for the birth of the Internet as a social club: strange but so entertaining, and intoxicating too.

Kat says
To me, the GHS is the perfect example of a bog-standard Sam Smiths. Better kept beer than the BPNS, less stuffy than the Princess Louise and more room than the Bricklayers. However I could never bloody find it so I always went to the Champion instead.

How about you…

Meanwhile, the bottom four decades enjoyed a right old ding-dong, jostling each other furiously and never bowing out of the fight. The gap between the lower four was every bit as close as the gap between the upper two, making this year’s “Which Decade” our CLOSEST! CONTEST! EVER!

Shall we proceed? Yes, perhaps we should. Lord knows, you’ve waited long enough.

NOTE: For extra at-a-glance clarity, I have designated the 20 top scoring records as HITS, the middle 20 as MAYBES, and the 20 lowest as MISSES.

Sixth place: The Seventies.
Cumulative average score: 32.31 points.
Share of the vote: 15.39%

HITS:
Norman Greenbaum – Spirit In The Sky. 4.84 points, first place.
Christie – Yellow River. 4.12 points, 2nd place.
MAYBES:
Creedence Clearwater Revival – Travellin’ Band. 3.68 points, 3rd place.
The Moody Blues – Question. 3.41 points, joint 3rd place.
MISSES:
Dana – All Kinds Of Everything. 2.92 points, joint last place.
The Hollies – I Can’t Tell The Bottom From The Top. 2.90 points, 4th place.
Frijid Pink – House Of The Rising Sun. 2.80 points, 4th place.
The Move – Brontosaurus. 2.73 points, 5th place.
Tom Jones – Daughter Of Darkness. 2.70 points, last place.
England World Cup Squad – Back Home. 2.21 points, last place.

Some time towards the end of the Seventies, I remember the sprawling, noodly blues-rock of Chicago’s “I’m A Man” popping up as a Golden Oldie on Tony Blackburn’s Radio One show. “That was a hit in 1970, when the heavier stuff used to get in the charts”, Blackburn explained, as the record faded out. Lethal pause. “Aren’t you glad it’s not still 1970!” he chuckled, brightly.

Based on this miserable showing (one winning song, three losing songs, six misses out of ten), it looks as if most of you have taken Blackburn’s line. This was our most rock-centric Top Ten, with Frigid Pink, The Move, CCR, Norman Greenbaum and the Moody Blues all representing aspects of the dominant heavy-and-hairy mindset, to varying degrees. Perhaps heavy-and-hairy doesn’t play too well round these pop-centric parts. Or perhaps it was simply a matter of poor representation; if Sabbath or The Stones or Hendrix or Free had popped up, things might have been different.

But that’s not quite the full story, either. Although only seven years old when the Sixties ended, I can remember picking up on a general feeling of wow-how-fabulous-was-that fondness for the passing decade, followed by a rather self-conscious, laboured attempt at heralding the dawn of a shiny new techno-utopian future. “The sensational… SEVENTIES?” No, this didn’t yet sound quite right.

So, you could argue that pop culture was still in the grip of a post-Sixties hangover, awaiting new directions that had yet to manifest themselves. Exactly how did you follow the most progressive and revolutionary decade that anyone had ever witnessed? Decimalisation? Bond bugs? Edward Heath? Hotpants? Dana?

And speaking of the most progressive and revolutionary decade ever…

Fifth place: The Sixties.
Cumulative average score: 32.81 points.
Share of the vote: 15.62%

HITS:
Brenda Lee – Sweet Nothin’s. 5.00 points, first place.
The Everly Brothers – Cathy’s Clown. 4.24 points, 3rd place.
Elvis Presley – Stuck On You. 4.02 points, joint first place.
MAYBES:
Anthony Newley – Do You Mind?. 3.81 points, 2nd place.
Cliff Richard & The Shadows – Fall In Love With You. 3.34 points, 4th place.
MISSES:
Jimmy Jones – Handy Man. 3.05 points, 5th place.
Adam Faith – Someone Else’s Baby. 2.50 points, last place.
Lonnie Donegan – My Old Man’s A Dustman. 2.44 points, last place.
King Brothers – Standing On The Corner. 2.23 points, last place.
Steve Lawrence – Footsteps. 2.18 points, last place.

When I started reading the weekly music press in late 1973/early 1974, received rock-crit wisdom had it that 1960 was The Worst Year For Pop Music Ever. Caught in a post-rock-n-roll/pre-Beatles dip, the charts were easy prey for a re-assertion of Tin Pan Alley values, drowning us all in a soup of sappy moon-in-june-isms. Or so the canonical-boomer-rockists would have you believe.

If this particular selection is at all representative, then the received wisdom might have been selling 1960 somewhat short – for there’s a good deal more than mooning, juneing and spooning going on here. Adam Faith wants to steal your girl, basically for the shits and giggles. Jimmy Jones will get with anyone who’ll have him, in the guise of mending broken hearts (cute line, not buying it for a second). Anthony Newley wouldn’t mind, but he can barely get the words out. The King Brothers would love to, but they’ve yet to progress beyond the phwooar-cop-a-load-of-that stage. The Everlys are betrayed and bitter, dodging the public flak. And Brenda Lee knows it’s all a game, and that she’s been dealt the strongest hand. All this, from a cultural lull? Pfft, you can keep your Merseybeat!

Having dispensed with our two oldest decades, we now arrive at our two newest decades, starting with…

Fourth place: The Teens.
Cumulative average score: 33.01 points.
Share of the vote: 15.72%

HITS:
Kelis – Acapella. 4.82 points, first place.
Plan B – She Said. 4.71 points, first place.
Professor Green – I Need You Tonight. 3.86 points, 2nd place.
MAYBES:
Diana Vickers – Once. 3.40 points, 4th place.
Usher – OMG. 3.16 points, 5th place.
MISSES:
Aggro Santos ft Kimberly Wyatt – Candy. 2.92 points, joint last place.
Taio Cruz ft Ke$ha – Dirty Picture. 2.80 points, last place.
Pendulum – Watercolour. 2.49 points, 5th place.
Chipmunk – Until You Were Gone (ft. Esmee Denters). 2.45 points, 5th place.
Roll Deep – Good Times. 2.41 points, 5th place.

Whatever you might think of our 2010 Top Ten, you can’t deny that a) it has an identifiable overall character, b) it sounds like NOW, not even like twelve months ago, c) it’s really really YOUNG, d) it’s really really BRASH, and e) eeh, it’s REALLY REALLY NOISY.

“Visit my website!” “Text me your tits!” “Let’s get wasted!” “WOH-OH-OH-OH-OH!” The messages are anything but subtle, and the instrumentation is all PARP PARP THUMP THUMP POW-POW-POW: a return to club-banging dance, but in a condensed, compressed format. All peaks, all the time: shorn of syncopation, breakdowns and builds, light and shade. Rappers turned pop stars. Grime acts going fuck it, time we got paid. R&B shape-shifters, embracing Guetta’s and Gaga’s electro-throb. Late night shopping, high street bopping, sponsored T-shirts on Carnage bar crawls. Blaring, crass and instant. But when you compare it to…

Third place: The Noughties.
Cumulative average score: 33.72 points.
Share of the vote: 16.06%

HITS:
Sweet Female Attitude – Flowers. 4.60 points, first place, most popular.
MAYBES:
Fragma – Toca’s Miracle. 3.62 points, 4th place.
Toni Braxton – He Wasn’t Man Enough. 3.58 points, 3rd place.
Sisqó – Thong Song. 3.47 points, 3rd place.
Mandy Moore – Candy. 3.45 points, 3rd place.
MJ Cole – Crazy Love. 3.39 points, 3rd place.
Bloodhound Gang – The Bad Touch. 3.20 points, 3rd place.
Oxide And Neutrino – Bound 4 Da Reload (Casualty). 3.12 points, 4th place.
MISSES:
Craig David – Fill Me In. 3.03 points, 5th place.
True Steppers Featuring Dane Bowers – Buggin’. 2.25 points, last place.

…you might find that less has changed than you first thought. Mandy’s “Candy” and Aggro’s “Candy”: there’s always room for confectionary-based metaphor. Taio wants your dirty picture; the Bloodhounds want you doggy style, for mutual televisual convenience. Usher’s clocking “boobies” (like wow oh wow), while Sisqó’s all over your “dumps” (like a truck, thighs like what). Roll Deep are gonna leave the day behind, gonna have a real good time; Fragma need a miracle, more than physical. Oxide and Neutrino, the grime godfathers, setting wheels in motion; Chipmunk and Professor Green, their prodigal spawn, selling off the family silver.

From whispered sweet nothings at high school hops, to slurping single-entendres in gaudy pleasure palaces: as the taboos fell away from sexuality, so the songs became less allusive and more assertive. Other moral compasses may vary.

All that aside, our 2000 chart represents something of a high water mark for UK Garage, even as the first signs of schism were starting to appear. With UKG making up 50% of our top ten, I was expecting high marks all down the line – but as it turned out, only Sweet Female Attitude’s “Flowers” fully convinced you. As for the rest, most of the 2000 tracks ended up floating around in mid-table, neither particularly loved nor particularly loathed.

So much for the old; so much for the new. There was never any real doubt that our middle two decades would triumph: but in what order? Well now, here’s a surprise…

Second place: The Eighties.
Cumulative average score: 38.90 points.
Share of the vote: 18.52%

HITS:
Blondie – Call Me. 5.11 points, 2nd place.
The Undertones – My Perfect Cousin. 4.53 points, 2nd place.
Dexy’s Midnight Runners – Geno. 4.44 points, 2nd place.
Sky – Toccata. 4.17 points, first place.
Motörhead – Leaving Here. 4.02 points, joint first place.
David Essex – Silver Dream Machine. 3.97 points, 2nd place.
Paul McCartney – Coming Up. 3.94 points, 2nd place.
MAYBES:
Rodney Franklin – The Groove. 3.47 points, 3rd place.
Hot Chocolate – No Doubt About It. 3.32 points, 4th place.
MISSES:
Johnny Logan – What’s Another Year? 1.91 points, last place.

They might have topped the leader board all the way down the line, but halfway through the voting in the final round, the Eighties finally started to wobble. Johnny Logan’s disastrous showing in the Number Twos had weakened their position, and Dexys’ failure to overtake Madonna proved to be the final straw. The late votes in previous rounds didn’t help, either: David Essex was inches behind Stevie V, Blondie had Adamski in their sights… but each time, the Eighties had to settle for second best.

That said, any chart with Blondie, Dexys and The Undertones in it was always going to do well – but what of the shock result for Sky, whose polite take on symphonic prog provided a neat bookend to the Moody Blues’ early progressive dabblings? And for a habitually rock-averse crowd, who would have expected a Motörhead track to triumph – still less a live Motörhead track? Elsewhere, Seventies stalwarts David Essex and Hot Chocolate consciously attempted to Move With The Times, while Paul McCartney just did what he damned well pleased, and sounded all the better for it.

With seven tracks finishing in the top two positions, this was a strong showing indeed. But in the final analysis, the ULTIMATE POP VICTORY belonged to…

First place: The Nineties.
Cumulative average score: 39.25 points.
Share of the vote: 18.69%

HITS:
Adamski – Killer. 5.17 points, first place.
Snap! – The Power. 4.92 points, 2nd place.
Madonna – Vogue. 4.59 points, first place.
The Adventures Of Stevie V – Dirty Cash. 4.37 points, first place.
MAYBES:
Paula Abdul With The Wild Pair – Opposites Attract. 3.66 points, 3rd place.
Alannah Myles – Black Velvet. 3.41 points, joint third place.
UB40 – Kingston Town. 3.40 points, 4th place.
The Family Stand – Ghetto Heaven. 3.35 points, 4th place.
Soul II Soul – A Dream’s A Dream. 3.28 points, 5th place.
MISSES:
Heart – All I Wanna Do is Make Love To You. 3.10 points, 5th place.

Their results may have been more varied than those of their closest rivals – but when the Nineties scored, they scored BIG. “Killer”, “Vogue”, “The Power”, “Dirty Cash”… these were the tunes that really swung it, earning high marks across the board. And even at the other end of the scale, nothing from 1990 truly offended you: even the bottom-placed Heart record still managed to average over three points.

For those of you who have followed Which Decade in previous years at my old blog, this victory might seem all the more remarkable. Since the project began in 2003, the Nineties have never placed higher than the bottom two, making them the least successful pop decade of all time… until now, that is.

Could this be the start of a renaissance for the music of twenty years ago? Will the Nineties be riding equally high this time next year, when we examine the charts of 1961, 1971, 1981, 1991, 2001 and 2011? Time alone will tell. But for now, let us salute the decade of grunge, rave, Britpop, drum and bass, trance, big beat, IDM, gangsta rap, acid jazz, handbag house, girl-power pop, etc etc: NINETEEN NINETIES, YOU ARE OUR WINNERS! WE SALUTE YOUR INHERENT POP SUPERIORITY!

I’ll be back in May 2011, ready to continue our collective quest. In the meantime, as the credits roll, here’s a diagrammatic representation of the waxing and waning fortunes of this year’s pop decades. Round numbers are on the X-axis, and cumulative percentages of the total vote are on the Y-axis. Hope you’ve enjoyed yourselves! See you next year!

Here we stand at the summit of Pop Football achievement, looking back at 63 matches: some wonderful, some perplexing, some illuminating, very few boring. We’ve heard so much pop, enjoyed so many marvellous moments, and we have 30 losing managers to thank for all their research and taste.

Never mind all that, though. Here at the summit we can also look forward, forward to the Big One. Two teams remain, two managers giving it one last best shot each.  Matt DC’s Nigeria have powered through round after round; a drawn game in a tough group mars an otherwise-100% record, but they accelerated through the knockout stages and stand confident and consistent in the biggest game of all. Andrew W’s Germany have plotted an altogether mazier path to today; second to Ghana in their group, they found some form in beating the USA in the round of 16, then enjoyed winning two of the closest games in the tournament.

This match and this Championship close at midnight on Monday 14th June

NIGERIA: General Pype – “Champion” The Manager Says: “I couldn’t resist. Over the last few months I’ve come across so many terrific tracks that have sounded perfect for the Pop World Cup, but none that sound like they were written for the Pop World Cup Final itself. After all, what do you want from the final? You want a rousing brass anthem for your players to line up to. You want the crowd jumping on their seats, waving their flags. You want a touch of class, and a storming fanfare-driven dancehall banger to go with it. This isn’t premature triumphalism – win or lose, these players are all my champions. GREEN WHITE GREEN!”

Length: 4:28 Played: 1918

GERMANY: DJ Hell – “U Can Dance (Radio Edit)” The Manager Says: “I’m hoping no-one knocks points off for the Geordie vocalist here, as the rest of the track is unimpeachably German, and it’s DJ Hell who really makes the track. I’m also hoping that my continued strategy of going for tracks that sound totally different from each other will pay off here, as we play for the cup and glory.

Either way, we’ve done better than I ever imagined. The lads have given it 110%, and at the end of the day that’s what matters.”

Length: 3:59 Played: 1395

Commentary Box Analysis Here’s something we’ve learned in the tournament: the pop pundits here in the commentary box have as much chance of getting it right as our football-commentating colleagues: more than no chance, but not much more. Which is to say, no one cares what we think.

Anyway. Our collective chins bear the scars inflicted when they hit the floors the moment we saw the teamsheets – we certainly weren’t expecting Germany to draft in a veteran striker like this one, on today of all days! It’s a good tune, though, and Germany are setting out their team to soak up Nigerian pressure, to keep their shape and slowly impose themselves on the game, maybe hitting their opponents with a sly break when the opportunity presents. Nigeria, as expected, go at it hard for the full 90 minutes, inspired by a chunky great brass section set up to keep possession in midfield. A fitting Final, then, but which manager will step up to receive the Winner’s Medal from the President of the Federation of International Pop Football?

Ultimately, Pop Football will be the winner.

Coming up Some small matter of an actual football tournament. Then, well, it’s back to our national leagues and start scheming for Euro 2012…

In the comics series Phonogram, there’s a scene in which the – kind of horrible – pop DJ Seth Bingo and his indie collaborator Silent Girl are struggling to work a recalcitrant dancefloor into life. Their solution? “Play the Blondie!” – a copy of “Atomic” which literally glows as it’s withdrawn from its sleeve.

Every club and every DJ has this kind of record – the song you put on as an act of faith to galvanise the night, or as an act of celebration to help it to its peak. “Always On My Mind” has been one of mine. There comes a point whenever I play pop music to a crowd that I want to play the Pet Shop Boys, and the next question becomes, well, why not play this? Those five seconds of groans and drum tracks to alert the lapsed or doubtful and then – boom! The mighty, unmistakable synthesiser fanfare which is the Boys’ great addition to the song, kicking off one of the most simply and sympathetically joyful tracks we’ll ever encounter, a gallop of sequenced Eurodisco drum lines and bright blasts of keyboard in service of the original track’s warm chords.

“It’s A Sin” found the Pet Shop Boys pushing their hi-NRG arsenal into the red, conquering pop by overloading it: “Always On My Mind” unleashes the same level of force but this time they’re handling it with happy precision, while somehow preserving the song’s humility under all the flashes and bangs. They manage this partly through another marvellous performance from Neil Tennant. He can’t compete with the arrangement’s fireworks so he stands back from them, making himself a calm, sincerely regretful presence in the middle of the track, and making “Always On My Mind” seem as heartfelt as it is grandiose.

Of all their big singles it’s perhaps their most relaxed – there’s no particular cleverness or conceit, no great message to take away, nothing ironic or ‘subversive’. Their other hit covers have points to prove: “Where The Streets Have No Name” is a bit of anti-rockist mischief making, “Go West” a defiant coming-out parade. Here they are making a huge technicolour hit simply because they’re pop stars and that’s their job: “Always On My Mind” has no real gameplan or reason to exist other than to delight people. It feels – appropriately for a Christmas Number One – like a gift, and I think that generosity is what makes a friendly dancefloor always respond so well to it. I don’t play “Always On My Mind” every time I DJ – there are always too many new and rediscovered peaks to fit in – but if the night’s gone well I always feel like I did.

The list of albums is from Acclaimed Music, a kind of ‘metacanon’ which lists the top 3000 albums.

To make it more interesting, answer these questions in the comments box:

1. What’s the WORST record on this list?
2. Which of the records you ticked did you love first?
3. Which of them did you start to love most recently?

Poll below the cut.

BIS.

Manda Rin, Sci-Fi Steve and John Disco’s manifesto for a Teen-C Revolution may now be generally forgotten in the merry-go-round of the British charts, but after BIS WEEK you will have no more illusions of the vital importance of this small Scottish band at the turn of the millennium. Ground breaking, historic and influential in fields that may surprise you, BIS WEEK will demonstrate the tendrils of Fake DIY which have infiltrated nearly every facet of the arts. From film, to books, to reality TV, to even the British food revolution of the 00′s, Bis can be seen to be the secret architects of so much that makes current life so interesting. (Hell, I believe one of us may even suggest that Bis basically invented the internet). But we will not shy away from the negative side of this secret influence of Bis, that some of the innovations pioneered by this lo-fi band now require serious underpinning else the foundations of modern culture collapse.

Freaky Trigger will, for one week, be your one stop BIS STOP. Culminating on Friday night at Poptimism with first performance of the premier Bis tribute act A-NU-BIS (previously known as Bis To) performing what we believe would have been the Bis response to the current age “Monster Cup”.

If you are a regular FT reader you are in for a treat, but be nice to the hordes of newbies who are bound to flock here with all this BIS material. Let us look at the Teen-C Revolution from fourteen years hence and how the world has changed. Or as Bis put it so well themselves: “Sugar Sugar Kandy Pop, Push It Down and Pull It Up.”

Joe McElderry: He’ll be Number 1 next week most likely, but while the ‘battle’ was never about him this puts him firmly in the “Leon Jackson” box, not the “Will Young” one. On the other hand, the constant refrain from the judges during the series was that he had a musical theatre kind of a voice, and this might nudge him in that direction and away from the fickle world of pop. Before dabbing your eyes over Joe’s lost dreams, it’s worth noting that if he’d sold as many as Alexandra did with “Hallelujah” last year, he’d have been #1, Rage or no Rage.

Rage Against The Machine: It’s good profile-raising stuff for them and their other material will do well from it, though unless MP3s come with reading lists in their IP3 tags the ‘educational’ element of RATM may be a little missing. The downsizing of their song’s target from “institutional racism” to “Simon Cowell” is probably a fairer reflection of their listeners’ concerns anyway but it’s left them looking a little… cuddlier… than once they did (and their participation in a classic British radio brouhaha has only helped). They themselves have joined in with gusto, of course: “RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE THANKS ‘EVERY FAN AND FREEDOM FIGHTER’ FOR THE ‘ANARCHY CHRISTMAS MIRACLE OF 2009′” blared their press release.

Simon Cowell: Cowell has not come out of this terribly well (though obviously not materially poorer): he handled it remarkably badly, turning just another web campaign into an actual issue by taking public note of it. In the last few days he’s come on-message, talking about the excitement of the competition, etc etc. But it’s his early churlishness that’s the lingering – and rather delicious – memory. The outcome will hardly dent his personal power, of course, and his public image thrives on dislike – but the effectiveness of the campaign might mean his “first among equals” prominence on his own properties needs to be dialled back.

The X Factor: With 18 million viewers – 17.5 million more than the maximum number of RATM buyers this week – the X Factor isn’t going anywhere, and it’s wishful thinking to imagine this damages ITV’s biggest light entertainment show since Morecambe And Wise. The Dubai-esque follies reportedly planned – “World X-Factor”, 5 judges, a ‘novelties’ category – will do for the programme in the end, but that won’t have anything to do with Rage. As I’ve argued before, what this result exposes is the problem of the winner’s single being so vestigial to the rest of the show: the storyline is over, the narrative complete, the single is just a “happy ever after” and who cares about the details of that? The X Factor’s mistake was to get to the position where its winner NOT getting a No.1 was a much more interesting story than getting one.

The Christmas No.1: as a lot of people have pointed out, the Christmas No.1 isn’t generally much good anyway. I’m still not convinced this idea that there’s a “tradition” of battles at Christmas for the #1 slot has any very deep roots, but we had a battle this year and a lot of fun it was. The big loser here may be the BBC, as the knock-on-effect of this is that its attempt to keep the corpse of TOTP alive for a once a year family shindig is now going to require some tricky politicking.

Real Music: here we get into more contentious areas. The “RATM is a win for real music” argument – and it’s being made by Rage themselves so we should take it seriously – comes in many different forms. At its mildest, it’s just opposition to a light ent show getting droit de seigneur over the charts at Christmas, and saying that a loss for the X-Factor makes pop more exciting. This is true, though a lot of people who normally don’t give a monkeys about pop or the charts suddenly coming over all Paul-Morley-In-1982 about them might raise the odd eyebrow.

Beyond that, though, the idea that Rage beating Joe is good for real music rests on two exaggerations: an exaggeration of the hegemony of the X-Factor, and more seriously an exaggeration of its typicality. The X-Factor gets one or two number one hits per year, and is hit-or-miss in launching its stars careers: it is powerful but it cares mostly about itself, not the wider world of pop. And the music that gets to number one off the back of the X-Factor is almost as distanced from the rest of the chart as RATM’s is (very few of the pop fans I know had kind words to say about “The Climb”).

Two things I’ve seen held up as self-evident truths on why the X-Factor has stifled the industry: it means the charts are full of crap ballads, and it stops record labels investing in artists. The only problem is that the charts aren’t full of ballads – charity singles aside there hasn’t been a #1 ballad this year! And given that two of the #1s there have been were by Dizzee Rascal, a critic’s darling since 2002 who was given an awful lot of time to deliver financially by a big label, it looks like “not investing in artists” isn’t the problem either.

In other words, the idea that the X-Factor music sucks isn’t interchangeable with the idea that pop sucks. The only element of “real music” that l’affaire RATM helps is the ancient rock v pop, or alternative v pop binary. Will the win have any longer-term effects? Well, the closest parallel to this isn’t the Sex Pistols and “God Save The Queen”, it’s metal monsters Lordi winning Eurovision in 2005: a similar irruption of ROCK into a staid citadel of pop, pushed on by bottom-up public opinion. The consequences of the Lordi win were a rash of rock-esque Eurovision entries, and then business as usual. I expect much the same here.

The Charts: A spike in public interest and sales of close on a million look like a big win for the charts. But this would be an optimistic reading. The purpose of the charts – its mission statement, if you like – is to reflect which current music is most popular among British listeners. The reasons for said popularity may not be pure, but there’s a difference between the charts being swayed by something interesting happening somewhere else (like a TV show or a World Cup) and the charts as a playground of gesture. On the other hand, they’ve proved surprisingly robust so far so I almost certainly shouldn’t worry.

Social Media: You’ll hear this one a lot – the RATM win was a triumph for social media! And it was, though ironically the X-Factor is one of the most social media driven TV shows around – facebook fan groups, message boards and Twitter backchannels are vital in keeping a conversation around the show going, and the production team pay them close attention. The moment at which I realised the RATM campaign might actually work was when I read an ILX poster pointing out that most of the people on his Twitter feed saying “Go Rage!” were the same ones who’d been hashtagging and watching the show all season.

So this wasn’t really “old media” vs “new media”. RATM’s success is a victory for a particular style of social media – the quick-hit campaign, the flashmob, an impromptu community beating (or subverting) an established one, “doing it for the Lulz”. The people behind the campaign, as the BBC noted, had tried this before, with the rather less “real music”-ish aim of getting Rick Astley to #1. There’s a “social media for its own sake” feel to flashmobs and the same is to some extent true of this.

Sony: well, duh, good day at the office for them. And it’s also worth thumbing-up the organisers for linking their campaign to the Shelter charity as soon as it got momentum – 70 grand raised for the homeless at Christmas is the one unarguably positive outcome of all this.

The Great British Public: The hangover may be lengthy and tedious and culminate in a Richard Curtis film about the organisers. But for now real winners here are us: while there’s lots of interesting things to say about the RATM incident the overriding thing about it is that it’s funny. How could it not be? Cowell and Rage are (in public at least) both caricatures: when two such collide the results are often comical.

The basic gag is fine – though it got swamped by rhetoric soon enough – but the joy this week has been in the incidental details. Joe throwing darts at a picture of Zach De La Rocha. Rage calling their single’s buyers “freedom fighters”. Mail commenters praising RATM for being anti-EU. The BBC telling a band not to sing “Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me” and being surprised at what happens. The one word which sums the whole thing up is “pantomime” – everyone playing their big, campy part to entertain us all. And why not? It’s the season for it after all.

There’s a baseline assumption that people are buying a song to listen to it because they like it. But of course that’s not the only reason: often people buy songs because the song is part of a wider experience. A world cup, a summer holiday, a movie, a TV show, a human tragedy. This isn’t “hijacking” or manipulating the charts: the pitiless charts, after all, don’t differentiate between purchases out of loyalty, love, or grief. A song bought as a souvenir has still been bought.

This is important for understanding why the X-Factor winner gets to #1 every year. People who dislike the X-Factor often criticise it for reducing music to a soap opera, but this misses the point: it’s rather like people who slate wrestling for not being a proper sport. The X-Factor is a narrative which happens to involve music. It’s an interactive narrative, and it’s a multimedia narrative, with a central thread (the weekend shows) crossing over into magazines, newspapers, YouTube, Twitter backchannels, et al.

Millions of people follow and participate in this story – pick sides, vote, shout at Simon Cowell from their armchairs, wonder what it means that Lloyd gets through for another week and Miss Frank don’t, and so on. The music is a necessary part of the story but it isn’t the story itself: light entertainment is simply bigger than pop, always has been. 19 million people watched the X-Factor final, a figure four times higher than the total sales of this country’s highest-selling single EVER. They’ve followed the X-Factor not because of the amazing pop it might or might not produce, but on its own terms as narrative and spectacle.

So where does the winner’s single fit in? In the Guardian, Peter Robinson called it a “lap of honour”, and this is roughly the truth: it’s a way of celebrating the achievement of winning the show (itself as tough and pressurised a gig as reality TV has to offer) not a look forward to the winner’s career (or lack of it).

But the charts being the charts, people still have to buy the single in sufficient numbers to get it to No.1. One of the odd things about the Rage Against The Machine anti-X-Factor campaign is its apparent belief that Simon Cowell has mind control powers and that the people buying Joe McElderry’s single are somehow under his command. The focus on Cowell rather than on the Joe buyers is a sensible one – best not to dwell on how the machine you’re raging against is actually your auntie or your kid sister. But honestly the Joe fans aren’t buying a song because Simon tells them to, any more than Russell T Davies is forcing me to buy a Doctor Who DVD set. They’re buying a song either because they like it, or because it’s a souvenir of an experience they enjoyed, or both. They’re playing one last part in the series’ shared narrative.

And why are RATM buyers buying that? Much the same reason – they have a narrative too. It’s a cruder one – stop the X-Factor winner from getting to number one and piss off Simon Cowell. It’s a shorter one – built up over the space of a week or two. But there’s a lot of inarticulate power around it: for many buyers it taps into a more general frustration with pop and music and reality TV and the charts and a sense that “real music” doesn’t get its just reward any more. And to some extent “Killing In The Name” has always been “Frigging In The Rigging” with dreads and a conscience, so there’s an understandable element of adolescent glee around the whole thing.

It might work (though I said that last year too): there have been a lot of these kind of gesture aesthetics campaigns in the last couple of years and sooner or later one of them will come off. The charts are a perfect ground for it: because they’re so digitally driven now there’s no physical cost in buying several copies of a single, no pile of “Killing In The Name” cluttering up your home when you already own it. Buying RATM is basically casting a vote in a big poll, except you have to pay to vote. Much like an X-Factor phone-in, in fact.

So the whole thing comes down to a clash of stories, or rather a clash of people paying to be part of a story. The big difference is that what’s at stake – “getting to #1″ – doesn’t really matter in the Joe McElderry narrative (where the single is a reminder of a story that’s already had its happy ending) but is the entire point of the Rage one, which means the Rage story has force and momentum on its side.

Plenty of people have pointed out that these are good times indeed for Sony, who make money off both tracks. But it’s also a fascinating case study for marketers, because it pits two of the big “social media marketing” ideas of the late 00s up against one another. On the one hand the crafted, immersive, interactive experience – on the other the power of the flashmob and the viral. Who’s gonna win?

So firstly, before we go to far. These are not the 25 best pubs in London if you are a tourist. They are probably not the best if you live and work in London. Hell, some of these pubs no longer exist. But these are the pubs that the core of FreakyTrigger, and lots and lots of friends visited the most, and had the best times in. A great pub is a space which allows the magic to happen, and does not necessary thrust itself upon you. So a lot of these pubs tick the boxes by virtue of being geographically convenient for us.

That said this list is about good times we have had. So the write-ups will be based upon those good moments, memories perhaps of the beer, but perhaps of the conversation, what happened next and so on. Some of the pubs will be given special placement by when they were our regular haunt, some pubs have fallen out of fashion, or as mentioned above no longer there (note, neither version of the Intrepid Fox turns up in this list). That said, if you wanted to go drinking with us in any of these pubs, we happily would go, pubs are now a place of memory for us too.

A note of methodology: As ever those of us who regualrly go to the pub together wracked our memories for our regular pubs. This was boiled down to a list of about 50 pubs, which were then voted upon by a ground, in a “neutral” pub – The Exmouth Arms in Euston. this then ranked the pubs, and this ranking was then used to provide a list of the eight best pubs, which then were pitted against each other tournament style. There is a winner, which hopefully we will get to by Christmas. But before then, there will be a few pubs that didn’t make the cut which need talking about and the list itself. And feel free to disagree massively in the comments.

“Do They Know It’s Christmas” is significant in one way, and insignificant in another. First, it raised a lot of awareness and money and established the pop single as an excellent mechanism for doing those things. This was significant. Gargantuan “supergroups” like this fell out of favour but charity records will be a constant from here on.

This isn’t an unalloyed good, and not just because most of the records are atrocious: private charity can generally do very little about the root and structural causes of bad situations, and Band Aid’s chosen name is a dark pun. Band Aid – and subsequently Live Aid – provided a readymade narrative of success: a way to give the famine story a happy ending. The Ethiopian famine set the tone for media coverage of Africa as a failed continent: a basket case constantly requiring the help of Western governments and citizens.

But it would be absurd to have expected Geldof and Ure to be able to change this, and wrong to have preferred that they did nothing. They did their best, it was a very good best, and there are individuals alive now who would not be if it wasn’t for this single, which isn’t something I can say with confidence of “Mouldy Old Dough”. However, feeding the world is well outside what I’d generally expect pop to do – so this whole introductory hand-wring is a way of saying that I’ll be listening to charity records as records, not as charities.

And as a record, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” has stuck it out better than I thought it would, mostly because it’s become a record about Christmas, not a record about tragedy. As a record about tragedy it’s notoriously heavy handed, but heavy-handedness is exactly what Christmas hits thrive on. It starts with a lift from Joy Division’s “Atmosphere” and then gets jauntier and jauntier until by the end it’s positively festive. Because I’m lucky enough to enjoy Christmas, and because this record came out when I was small and enjoyed it even more, the main feeling I get from “Do They Know It’s Christmas” is one of immense well-being and the sense that all is right in the world.

The cognitive dissonance works because it’s what the song’s very clearly about: “Here’s to you – raise a glass to everyone! Here’s to them – UNDERNEATH THE BURNING SUN!” (a line that always makes me imagine the song as a comic strip). So the more “Christmas” turns into a drunken singalong, the more we giggle at the scratched-up, awkward greetings on the 12″, the more we bellow out That Line, the guiltier we then feel, and the more we give. Well, that’s the theory. Since the recording session turned into a massive party when Francis Rossi got his bag of coke out, it’s fair to say that the song’s immense capability for inappropriate bonhomie has been coded in from the start.

The main contemporary criticism of Band Aid – voiced by Chumbawamba, but also by every playground cynic – is that the stars involved were doing it for the sake of their careers. This is surely completely true, but that’s how celebrity charity operates. It’s also worth pointing out that from this perspective the Band Aid single didn’t actually work: it’s not just Marilyn whose career headed dumperwards. This is where “Do They Know It’s Christmas” is insignificant: it felt and looked like the sealing of pop’s new establishment, when in fact it was their peak. The bands split, faded, took ill-advised sabbaticals, leaving U2 and George Michael the great survivors. Within only a couple of years the British pop landscape would look very different.

Michael Jackson came to the title “King of Pop” in the style of a medieval ruler, carving out his realm piece by piece across a hard year of campaigning. He won some of his new subjects when he performed this song as part of a Motown anniversary special: others when he formed common cause with Eddie Van Halen or Paul McCartney. His fiefdom suddenly extended across my school playground with the release of the “Thriller” video and its body popping zombies. Through it all the album and its spin-offs sold, and sold, and sold. “Billie Jean”, its Wikipedia page claims, has now topped 800,000 sales as a digital download, a format invented close to 20 years after its release.

What few mentioned was how strange Thriller was, how odd and sincere and childlike in some places, and how nightmarish in others. Half the record is heartbreakingly tender, the other half hard-edged and horribly tight-wound. Jackson’s stuck in the middle, and the pain is thunder: uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

“Billie Jean” itself is the album’s darkest moment, where the goblin babble pressing in on Jackson during “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” goes fully internal and the barely-together bundle of tics that became Jackson’s star persona steps into the spotlight. Jackson’s one-take vocal is a long shudder – the gollum-gulp on “her schemes and plans”, the betrayed moan of “his eyes were like mine” – and the real craziness happens on its fringes. That contradictory “do think twice!”/”don’t think twice!” collision; the constant “ooh”, “oh”, and “no!” echoes; the clucks and gasps; and especially the madman’s comic book laugh punctuating the track, that eerily deliberate “hee hee hee”.

And of course this near-meltdown is the album’s most grippingly commercial moment too. Jackson’s claustrophobic performance is boxed in by stalking bass and arid drums, underlined by clawing and skittering guitars, counterpointed by those sensuous flushes of strings. A song about the fatal irresistibility of a dancer really does need to be irresistible on the dancefloor: at a hundred million weddings and discos since, “Billie Jean” has proved its mettle in that respect. But when you follow Jackson’s performance down and in, none of that matters – “Billie Jean” is a disquieting, troubled record.

The final drop-off is for 2009, where there’ve only been 3 new entries so far, so the last relevant data point is the one before that – 2008 – which shows a dramatic fall from 2007, but on an already declining recent curve. The number of new entries in the Top 75 last year is less than half what it was in 2004. In fact, last year’s total is the lowest since the chart became a Top 75, back in 1979. (Before that significant changes in the total were largely down to the expansion of the chart’s parameters – from 20, to 30, to 50 to 75.)

What does the graph tell us? That the 90s saw a “pop bubble”, for one thing: the number of new entries peaked in 1997, with an average of more than 20 new entries every week. It seems to me that the bubble was caused by two things: better first-week marketing of new singles (including aggressive discounting and multiple formats) and the explosion of interest in dance music, a genre which thrived on singles formats.

So what’s caused the bubble to finally burst? The really key factor has been the inclusion of downloads in the chart – this started in April 2004, and that’s when we see a really precipitous drop in the number of new tracks charting. From 2007, any download – rather than simply ones tied to physical releases – has been eligible for the chart, and increasingly no physical release is required. This has accelerated the drop in new entries.

But why? After all, the new download rules mean that far MORE songs are eligible for chart status than ever before – almost any track can get into the chart. But this obviously isn’t happening. Some of this is down to the contracting music biz meaning that less acts are getting promotional push, but the main issue is one of shelf life. The freedom from a physical release that opens the charts up to far more songs is also a freedom from the restrictions placed on records by their reliance on physical distribution networks. In the days of Woolworths (RIP) and HMV, a song slipping out of the Top 40 was quickly axed from stock to make way for newer releases: but in a digital world, songs can (and do) bounce around the lower reaches of the Top 75 almost indefinitely. The expanded longevity of each hit song means far fewer spaces for new songs to break through.

In other words, what the charts have become is a demonstration of how the increased choice offered by a Long Tail system actually leads to LESS diversity at the top end (the “hit head”). The forces acting as gatekeepers over what could be bought were also hidden gatekeepers over when things could be bought: this power sped up the pop turnover and helped make the charts more vibrant. (NB: I like having a fast-moving chart with a lot of different records: your mileage may of course vary).

What’s the overall lesson? That when you remove artificial barriers in a content-based system the speed of turnover slows down, perhaps? If you think about a distribution curve, a gatekept system punishes innovators and to some extent early adopters by stopping the kewl things they discover from reaching an audience quickly. But it also punishes late majority adopters and laggards, by artificially curtailing the shelf life of content. And there are more of the late majority and laggards than there are the innovators!

(UPDATE: I’ve now run the figures to find out the “hit rate” for each year – the percentage of new entries as against *potential* new entries – with 100% being some kind of madhouse scenario where the entire Top 75 changes every week. This supports the “bubble” hypothesis – the hit rate is now at a 34-year low, of 12.4% (in the bubble years – 1990 to 2005 – it was above 20% every year). But it’s within the 10-13% range it was in for most of the charts’ first 20 years: the exception being a slump to under 10% at the start of the 70s – the lowest it’s ever been. Whether it will keep dropping is the question – and whether a low hit rate is a healthy sign for a much more stylistically diversified biz than was the case in 1974. Of course, if you believe the singles chart doesn’t matter much, this is all irrelevant, but I think it’s an interesting finding anyhow!)

This article was the jumping off point for an article in the Guardian by Dorian Lynskey – Ed

“Rat Trap” is billed – in the Guinness Book Of British Hit Singles, no less – as the first punk No.1. I couldn’t recall it – my memories of the Rats themselves were vague; Geldof I knew for later good works. So I approached “Rat Trap” cold but with a frisson of definite expectation. Geldof tore up a picture of John’n'Liv on Top Of The Pops, didn’t he? So “Rat Trap” – great title, Sir B – was surely something tight and angry, a sliver of nimble menace in the shadows of 1978′s poptopian monsterhits.

Five minutes later my expectation had turned to shock and laughter. Whatever I’d anticipated it wasn’t this: five woeful minutes of scraggy street-rock pastiche, Born To Run with the melted-down Crystals records replaced by stolen chip fat. Far from the first punk No.1, this risible track sounded like an early warning of one of indie’s less palatable side-effects: a deadly combination of overreach and the feeling of virtuous entitlement that being (relatively) outside the mainstream would lend to mediocre bands.

But once I’d lived with “Rat Trap” a bit, my initial scorn softened – starting with that scouring horn riff, the truest bit of E Street channeling here. After all, I really like “Born To Run” and prime Boss, so why should I care about someone biting it? And honestly, there’s more going on than I thought: Springsteen’s possibilities of escape closed off – the rat trap doesn’t open up again, even when Billy meets Judy. And come to think of it Judy’s dreams aren’t of getting out of town, they revolve around independence via work in the local factory. Yes, “Rat Trap” is laying it on thick, when even the crossing signals are holding The Kids down, but ridicule is a reasonable trade-off for one of the song’s most exciting peaks, the “BILLY TAKE A WALK!” chant.

I still think “Rat Trap” is a mess, overlong and a victim of its own ambition, Geldof trying to cram in every pop trick he’s ever heard of. 4 in 5 times when it comes on I get frustrated with it before I’ve hit halfway: the fifth it catches me in the right mood, and I love its preposterous kitchen sink epic feel – “Hand in her pocket! SHE FINDS FIFTY PEE!!”. It’s still a mile away from my idea of punk, but it’s hard not to feel charitable towards such an eager record.

On one level the ‘plot’ of “Dreadlock Holiday” is hugely important to any judgement of it. On another, not at all, but let’s recap anyway. The narrator is a tourist in Jamaica – he gets mugged for his silver chain and returns to the comfort of his hotel where a woman tries to sell him weed.

Nobody comes out of the story well: the song’s parent album was called Bloody Tourists, and the narrator is a simp, trying and failing to fit in (“concentrating on truckin’ right”) and then fleeing to the hotel at the first sign of trouble. But the island isn’t exactly a welcoming place either, and the message seems to be that if you’re a white tourist, any approach is misguided and nowhere is entirely safe from the scary dark other looking to hustle you at every turn.

This, to my mind, makes for a rather mean-spirited song, a lose-lose game whose main purpose is to make 10cc seem clever and cynically realistic. I haven’t ever been a great fan of 10cc, precisely because I feel there’s this callous smirk behind a lot of their music, and “Dreadlock Holiday” crystallises the feeling for me. That makes me dislike it more than whatever racial or cultural politics might or might not lurk underneath the song: I am sure an extensive comments thread will tease them out!

On the other hand, “Dreadlock Holiday” is often superlative popcraft: that shimmering, unmistakable percussion intro that makes the song a sampler’s or mash-up act’s dream, and the massive chorus – seized on out of context by Sky Sports for an effect darkly comic enough that I’m sure the band enjoy it greatly. Even here, though, the cynicism runs deep. The song, light reggae which slides skilfully from awkward bounce to clammy paranoia, is an inversion of the lyrics’ theme: if you want to be a tourist, it says, stick to the studio and you can happily steal stuff from them. “Dreadlock Holiday” is in some ways the unpleasant opposite of 1978′s other reggae-related #1, “Uptown Top Ranking” – a wiser, crueller denial of its open celebration. Impressive work in its way, but it leaves a nasty taste.

In my teens I read a science fiction novel with a startlingly elegant twist. (I won’t mention the book’s name in case you come across it yourself.) It was about a brilliant scientist who vanishes: the book’s protagonist goes looking for clues to what happened, and becomes close to the scientist’s wife. And at a crucial juncture in the plot, the narration shifts, mid-paragraph, from third person to first: the scientist’s “vanishing” was literal, and with a thrill of horror you realise he’s been observing the action all along.

What on earth does this have to do with “Dancing Queen”? The song turns on a similar effect. Of all ABBA’s twenty or so hit singles this is the only one with no first-person content – none of the “I” or “me” or “us” that populate almost all their records. Of course on one level this is coincidence – but the apparent lack of personal perspective is very unusual for ABBA. They’re a band who like to ground their songs in experience and who pay close attention to a lyric’s perspective; even a character song like “Head Over Heels” makes sure to establish its subject’s relationship to the singer, right in the first line. “Dancing Queen” is entirely in the second-person – the song is directly addressed to a girl, but its narrator has, like the scientist in the novel, become invisible.

And yet there she is, all through the song, the prism for its observation – watching the dancing queen from the sidelines, vicariously feeling her freedom, her peak. What makes “Dancing Queen” a masterpiece is how it is both joy and the witnessing or memory of joy, and so much of this is down to the seamless, extraordinary shared lead vocal: Frida and Agnetha’s voices combining to strengthen the chorus as it arcs upwards, but also shifting to softer, fonder registers as they wistfully look on – “leave them burning and then you’re – gone…”.

The music, when she first heard it, made Frida cry – but to stress the sadness in “Dancing Queen” would be to do it a disservice. It’s not envious, or regretful, or bittersweet – it’s a more generous ache, the recognition that “having the time of your life” is literal, that this moment might be as good as it gets, but still being warmed by the moment’s incandescence. “Dancing Queen”, like “Teenage Kicks”, is one of those songs that captures the feeling that being young, dancing, loving is also to be living more intensely and wonderfully than anything else. But “Dancing Queen” goes further, tries to share that fire – “You can dance! You can jive!”, suddenly the “you” is, well, you. And him and her and me.

The vocals in “Dancing Queen” betray that this inclusiveness is, ultimately, doomed: the music does its best to deny that. Certainly its beat is democratic – you rarely see anyone dance well to “Dancing Queen”, which is a different thing from the cheap shot of its being ‘undanceable’. Everything in the arrangement is vibrant, exciting – the trilling intro, the sashaying keyboards in the “turn him on” verse – but of course it’s all in service to the magnificent piano part, its fusion of rock rhythm with light classical swagger, its top-end chords as pure a joy as anything pop’s given us.

That piano line turned up again three years later, changed slightly in a pop world that seemed overturned, and it almost pushed Elvis Costello – a perennial sideline-lurker who’d long seen the tears as well as the grins in ABBA - to Number One himself. Even by then “Dancing Queen” had become ABBA’s monolith, and by their 90s revival it was omnipresent. There’s an irony, maybe, that a song about the fleet intense beauty of youth, love and movement should have become such an ossified monument to ‘perfect pop’ – but when I play it that really never seems to matter.

I was aware of this song long before I heard it – as a young boy it was quoted at me by my Dad should I ever object to tidying my room. Since my room was rarely tidy, I became very familiar with the central notion of “No Charge”. Like my Dad, I can find immense amusement and pleasure in this style of song – talking country with a sentimental edge – but this is far from a great example.

You might think, at first, that the style stands or falls on the strength of its concepts: not so. “No Charge” has a fine concept – mawkishness and moralising are assets here! – but where JJ Barrie falls down is on development and details. Once our young entrepreneur has presented his list, and been slapped down by Mom, the track has nowhere to go, and explores that nowhere thoroughly for two minutes. Contrast it with something like “Teddy Bear” by Red Sovine, where tears are ruthlessly jerked right up to the final words. Barrie, on the other hand, adds no new details and just repeats himself. This is partly because “No Charge” is a cover version, and you can hear what I assume is the original melody being hollered in the background: it sounds rather as if it’s trying to escape.

And so to the Famous Bowl. This is the first I have heard of this product – a typically sniffy but one assumes probably correct AV Club review**. For the Famous Bowl is – well let the copywiters at KFC have their moment in the sun:

“We start with a generous serving of our creamy mashed potatoes, layered with sweet corn and loaded with bite-sized pieces of crispy chicken. Then we drizzle it all with our signature home-style gravy and top it off with a shredded three-cheese blend. It’s all your favorite flavors coming together.”

. This picture is how it is supposed to look. Click through to how it actually looks.

(Image nicked from Les Jones, who has also discussed the Famous Bowl along with 95% of the web ).

Its basically KFC scrapings on mashed potato (the lack of mash as an option in the UK KFC is still a travesty). You can also get it with rice, and for the ultimate in indulgence the chicken and biscuit bowl. All of course to be eaten with a spork. Now granted, I don’t reckon they necessarily get baked beans in the States but…hey why not watch an advert for a Famous Bowl, which mocks both your taste buds AND THE DEAF at the same time!

Anyway, more reviews of this item. First a view of the nutritional aspects, which is handy considering the KFC nutrition calculator is not calculating at the moment. And someone else who suggests its like throwing up in reverse…
And perhaps a more balanced review…

By the way, for people doing I-Spy US States in Indie Chicken shop names, I-Spyed New Jersey Chicken in Willesden last night.

*And actually I am not completely sure this is the point of global fast food brands. I am pretty sure the point is to make lots of money.

**The review is by Patton Oswalt, the voice of the culinary genius rat Remy in Ratatouille by the way – and perhaps he got the gig by virtue of turning out some obvious but none-the-less amusing stand-up about said Famous Bowl. Which you can see here.

Method

Step One

One regular packet of Mars Planets was refrigerated, to make the chocolate easier to remove from each Planet.

Step two

With the aid of a regular table knife, the chocolate was removed from each of the planets.

 

[Note: it became clear that, for the two soft-ish centres, the  most effective method of chocolate separation was to squeeze the Planet until the chocolate broke, and then just pick it off. Once de-chocolated, we kept the caramel and nougat bits separated. The Maltesers were set aside (i.e. scoffed).

Step Three

The caramel and nougat were squidged together and re-shaped into the vague proprtions of a Mars Bar, and then assembled into our Mars innards. This was fairly straightforward, it all held together nicely, and shaped without any problem. 

 

Step four

The flakes of chocolate were placed in a bain-marie and warmed.

Hold on! THIS CHOCOLATE DOESN’T MELT! I remember childhood days of warmed chocolate turning to liquid in the pocket or the tiny hand, but something must have changed since then, in some mysterious, probably chemical, way. FURTHER SCIENCE REQUIRED.

Step five

After ten to fifteen minutes in the bain-marie, the chocolate had reached the texture of un-set icing. So, slightly disappointed that we didn’t get to dip our tiny creation in a vat of molten deliciousness, the best we could do was was spread the choco-sludge over our naked Mars innards using a knife and a spoon.

With three sides covered, the bar was cooled in the freezer to set the chocolate before the final (top) side was covered.The top side was distressed slightly with a knife to give a vague impression of the texturing of a regular mars bar. Then back to the freezer for a little while for the final set.

The size of the completed Mars Bar was about two inches long. VFM Alert! Mars Planets are about the same price as regular bar, but contain substantially less Mars for your money.

Conclusion

And then the proof of the pudding: general concensus was that our mini-Mars was an entirely serviceable facsimile of the real thing.

 Success!

It is apparently possible to reconstruct bring a Mars Bar back from the Planets. The only noticeable difference was that the chocolate was a bit granular, which was probably more a result of our having cooled it too quickly.

But – oh! – it’s been eaten! And a more fundamental atomisation has begun.

Entropy – I fought the law, and the law won.

The inlay sleeve for my new tape had the tracklisting neatly written out in capital letters: black biro for the track title and red for the artist name all the way up until track 2, when the track titles were black and the artist names were red. On the inside of the inlay was written:

“HAPPY BIRTHDAY KATHERINE!!
p.s. Mum & Dad will really hate this! So PLAY IT LOUD“

Grace had taped the continuous mix from a CD (I didn’t figure this out for some time) and as such there was no side A or B on the tracklisting, which confused me greatly. How would I know where one track started and one ended? Where was the mysterious break in the middle? Who were this ‘Tinted Oval Window‘ band, whose ‘Cassette Shell’ album Grace had cruelly taped over? I could hear their indie warblings on the space at the end of the tape, and decided to scribble ‘???‘ at the end of the tracklisting, for completeness.

The technicalities were important to me: a few months previously, Dad had hooked up a 2-deck tape player to an old amplifier he had made himself years ago* and a pair of speakers. Now I had my own disco! Music whenever I wanted! The vinyl downstairs had always been deemed too precious for my grubby mitts to put on the turntable, so this was a new freedom! I obsessively studied my meagre collection of tapes, rearranging them in the drawer and inspecting every detail. I spent hours trying to transcribe the words to ‘It’s The End Of The World As We Know It’ on my pink notepaper** so I could sing along properly.

Despite my paltry tape collection (ah, the materialism started young!) I was no stranger to pop. I had watched Top Of The Pops since the age of five, under the close supervision of Grace – Thursday night was Mum and Dad’s ballroom dancing night, and my conscientious babysitter said I was allowed to stay up and watch it as long as I went to bed straight afterwards. I clearly remember asking Grace a) whether Vanessa Paradis was actually French or not, and b) what on earth was she talking about taxis for? Then when Grace left for uni I inherited her old clock radio and happily listened to Kiss FM every morning before school.

By 1992, the concept of ‘Rave’ excited me much more than the ‘Indiebop’ on Grace’s first tape. I knew who the Prodigy were all right. I sang along to Ebenezer Goode and 2 Unlimited in the playground with my mates and I was certain that my sister was having the time of her life going to crazy discos every night and having fun. One day I marched up to Mum and semi-seriously asked, “When I’m twelve, can I go to all-night raves?” This being at (unbeknownst to me) the height of the media furore following the Castlemorton Common Festival, Mum calmly replied: “We’ll see.” I made sure to remind her of this when I was twelve. Her answer? “Ask your father.”

As you can probably guess, at the age of ten I couldn’t tell you what Acid House meant. I had never heard of ecstacy, or any of the clubs my sister was too skint to go out to. I thought ‘rave’ was just another word for ‘party’. But all that didn’t matter to me. The music was fantastic, and when Grace asked me what sort of tape I would like for my birthday, I confidently said “RAVE!”

And… that’s what I got. The cassette is sat on the sofa next to me as I type this; the tape itself has a hole in it, worn through furious rewinding back to the beginning of The Orb’s ‘Blue Room’. To my joy, a friend found me an original CD copy on ebay a couple of years ago. Though I owned most of the songs separately, it felt very good to be ‘reunited’ with my favourite compilation ever.

Which I plan to tell you all about, track by track, in a new 24-part FT series!

*Random pieces of electronic equipment reside and multiply within Dad’s cluttered study to this very day. It drives Mum potty.

**I once wrote a poem about Nigel Lawson’s resignation on the same notepaper. I rhymed his surname with ‘awesome’.

Craft — the mastered techniques of ordinary pop, word AND music, from a sprawling and unusually broad clutch of decades — is Costello’s thing: his focused strength and his limitation. And at this moment (early 79) — when punk was revalorising the 3-minute single, and “getting into the charts” was considered (by everyone except the bleedn Clash) a radical act, a reignition of a latent power — the compacting into one another of a song built round an Abba riff and a lyric exploring the states of a soldier’s mind, — this was an announcement of thrilling potential. LOOK WHAT WE’RE OPENING UP! Where we’re going is just so RICH, pop but deep, pretty but dark, direct but clever, we can sing about ANYTHING NOW etc etc.

I don’t want to take away from that feeling — it’s my own youth and idealism and excitement, and I’m not going to repudiate it — but I do want to look at how it became a problem, how openness went closed. Costello today is imprisoned by his gifts, and I think all of why is on show already here, in this his biggest hit.

OK what I like about the words are, yes, the compression, the perspective shifts — I don’t know exactly when this device became part of rockand/or expressivity, but of course the Pistols had just pushed it to a kind of dizzying limit, every line of every Pistols song a different idea in a different mind — and the resultant ambiguity of cryptic image-collage and POV in OA achieves sympathy as well as critical distance. Only push a bit further in, and I think the crit begins to blur: the Mersey/Thames/Tyne couplet, in full, is as follows: “We could be in Palestine/Overrun by the Chinese Line/With the boys from the Mersey and the Thames and the Tyne.” Actually google and lyric-sites have “Chinese Lion”, but that doesn’t make much sense either, in terms of geopolitical precision, or cliches about world affairs we know and love [any better ideas or explanations, put em in comments]. I’m not sure that’s such a weakness in this song — it’s just a line that’s never quite parsed — but the punning, rhyming crossword-puzzle density would turn into a shtick, a habit, a way of staying away from the centre of some of (a lot of?) his later material.

The song was written after Costello — real name Declan McManus — visited Belfast, and experienced for himself what it was like to be in a militarised zone, the British Army — descendent of the professionalised forces, loyal to Parliament, fashioned in the English Civil War by Oliver Cromwell (a blood-soaked figure justly loathed in Ireland, whose rep in England is on the whole far more complicatedly positive, precisely bcz the political revolution he set in motion, the ending of the divine right of kings, the establishment despite er hiccups of modern democracy, also established Britain as the hub of an Empire) — wielding guns which pointed, as he suddenly saw it, at himself and those like him: “All it takes is one itchy trigger/One more widow,/one less white n!gger…”

Verses one and three are about the romance of the military — wanting to join up (“My mind goes sleepwalking/While I’m puttin’ the world to rights”), and the sheer vivid energy of possibility, of escape into exotic glamour, of swift-sketched peoples and cultures shimmering and clashing: Kipling said that Empire was great for the British because it encouraged them to escape from their ingrained fubsy parochialism, to encounter the teeming variety and imagination of all humanity. Verse two, the reality from an outsider perspective, recalls the then-famous takedown joke of a Army Ad Campaign of the era: “Join the Army, Travel the World, Meet Exciting, Interesting People — AND KILL THEM!”

And verse four — well, I don’t really get verse four. It mentions Churchill and Johannesburg, and closes the song down in a somewhat formless hint at more knowledge than it delivers: it may be an attempted portrait of how the would-be squaddies are kidding themselves, about how it works when they join up: out of luck, out of work, join up, hey presto you’re side-by-side with the Historical Greats of empire, a tourist in other culture’s energies. I don’t know. What I do know is the perfectly balanced fusion of polar opposite pulls in the chorus: “I would rather be anywhere else than here today” — this is Costello the working-class Irishman, seeing himself as a restless native and thus potential target on Murder Mile, hating it and wanting out; and the unwanted teenager in the Recruitment Office, dreaming of warrior nobility in the world’s dazzling troublespots, and wanting out. I wonder if verse four is there as a wised-up counter to the extraordinary — and I think daring — chorus link: to reassure the punkier, more insecure punters — viz me then — that we’re not being led into WRONG THOUGHT by this linkage, that we DO KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS, and so on and all…

This is getting a bit long, but bear with me two and a bit more paragraphs. The second embedded flaw — which at the time seemed such an enticing portal — is Costello’s commitment to “clever pop”. The problem being — tho this wasn’t clear at the time, indeed I think he was bending the stick in the correct direction — that his rehabilitation of despised craft technique, whether from Cole Porter or Stax or Nashville or Abba, was underneath it, a kind of a revised stands-the-test-of-time announcement, that here were a bunch of ways of approaching the song which deserved to enter the pantheon of deeper intelligence; that complacent rock culture could be opened up. And yes, along with this opening up, we get to rescue pop from being shunted over into the “mere brash ephemeral stupidity” column, where pre-punk rock had shunted it. All of which seems like a great idea — except (over the long haul) it undermines that other thing chart pop provides which considered art is much less good at, that idiot flash of energy and insight (the two inseparably yoked) that you get from a line or a hook or a bodymove: Johnny Rotten’s scornful laugh, Mel and Kim’s hair, Adam Ant’s [select and insert from list too long to include]…

[Threes near-subliminal examples of such flashes in this song: the odd way he pronounces "Arabs"; the way the chorus goes "Oliver's Army is...."/Oliver's army are..." -- another perfect economical statement of an army as both a group and a unity, as disparate unity; and of course Steve Nieve's triple-stab piano]

Oliver’s Army — maybe Armed Forces as a whole, it’s a long time since I listened — is an impacted sketch of ambivalence, of the lure of bad things, ugly emotions and desires, and “I would rather be anywhere else than here today” is the posterchild motto of this, memorably and chart-toppingly both-ways-looking as we reach for escape from the mundane into, well, something maybe much worse (worse for others, if not for us). This was his highpoint — the ebullient, slightly overpumped and convivial fullness of sound, singalong anthemic pubrock punctuated with these startling flashes of otherwhere, seizing the attention of coach-potato poets and organ scholars– and gradually Costello went with his best skills, and why shouldn’t he, except it was a step away from something also. Heroic workrate, enviable facility in wide range to styles, persistent fascination with complex states of mind and nasty states of life assembled themselves into a large, detailed lego-palace labyrinth of work which exactly muffles exactly this kind of WTF this-here-now surprise inreach, into ourselves (artist-audience) when wide open and maybe unalert, ourselves when undefensive and undefended.

It was called The Battle of Waterloo, and it was one of the plays offered by J. K. Green’s Juvenile Drama: in other words as sheets of figures to cut out, colour and deploy, on little slides, in a miniature proscenium theatre you’d built yourself, from paper or card on a wooden frame.

A miniature proscenium theatre like this features as a prop in the classic 70s version of The Railway Children — one of them is bedridden, the others put on a show for her, and the show is Waterloo.** It also features in Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous 1884 essay ‘A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured’: as he writes, “I have assisted others in the illumination of The Maid of the Inn and The Battle of Waterloo.” Two things are immediately worth noting: in the first, the version the children stage clearly involves their own made-up script; in the second, Stevenson — having listed at length the dramas he himself owned (and painted) — admits that Waterloo was one that someone else would have, an oddity for specialists (viz: nutcase nerds) only.

I’ve hunted my own rambling nerdburrow, and the many cupboards and attics of my dad’s house, but I haven’t yet unearthed the folder which contains the remnants of the edition of Waterloo I owned (and cut out and coloured in) as a child. So hurrah for interwebs! Where I can discover that this particular play was issued as the character and scene sheets of a “juvenile drama” in 1842 to cash in on the success of a real actual show, first staged in c.1824, an ‘Equestrian Melodrama’ performed in the round with real actual horses and real actual cannons etc, in the years after the real actual battle. A re-enactment, in other words, of Waterloo itself, where possible featuring — on the horses — some of the very cavalrymen who had helped win the War against Boney. It appears to have been written by one J.H.Amherst, and it took place at Astley’s Royal Amphitheatre, formerly a riding school on the Westminster Bridge Road,

So why the search, online and in lumber-room? Because of THIS, Jo Mitchell’s ICA re-enactment of Einsturzende’s infamous on-stage riot, 23 years ago. WHICH IS TONIGHT.

Now the ICA is often a very slly place, and there are plenty of reasons to suppose that tonight’s shopw will be a bit lame: not least the problem of pre-publicised shock art in a venue devoted to “challenging” our “assumptions” — the one thing we can’t get is the creative energy of actual surprise (welcome to the doom of everything that announces itself as the avant-garde). All the same I bridled a bit at the first responses to the project — at Simons’s harrumph of amusement (“like one of those fake Medieval villages you can visit”) and Mark’s flat scorn (“covers over an actual Event and replaces it with an officially-sanctioned commemoration”). They both came it at the problem from the wrong side.

After all, the Waterloo re-enactment also sounds fairly ridiculous, to modern tastes and minds, all twirling moustaches and military dressage. But what tugs at me, about the latter, is the longevity of its allure, the afterburn of this utterly commercial spectacle that traces down the decades, as long as Green’s theatre sheets stayed available, as the toy theatre shop flashed through other half-forgotten names… Skelt, Redington, Pollock. The chain-links are forged of child-world intensity and as such avoid i. being coaxed back into official cultural history (inc.‘theory’), as well as ii. vanishing altogether.

Several major cultural figures besides Stephenson actually discuss toy theatres and/or the Battle of Waterloo, among them Thackery and Dickens, almost always in a context of fond What Were We Thinking?-type nostalgia for childhood pleasures — in other words, cast as a counterweight to Proper Adult Art, if not by the nostalgists themselves, then by the cultural gatekeepers who keep watch after them. Clearly late Georgian Equestrian Melodrama was never going to appeal to Arnold or Leavis — haha or Z. Zzzzyzzy ZIZEK? Or whoever it is we’ve appointed to help us prejudge where our aesthetic values should lie; anyway, as regards what ART should be doing, Historical Re-enactment is surely just not it. Apparently.

So what IS the issue here? Call it the class dynamic of the relationship of the participating audience with history-as-she-ought-to-be-explored — and here’s while you process that is another very vivid childhood memory, in fact one of the few engagements I personally had with history-as-a-school-subject (which was taught at all my schools but for some reason almost never to ME): here I am, aged nine or so, dressing up as a little celt or saxon and warring with my classmates at BEACON RING.

Who’s going to deny that BATTLE RE-ENACTMENT is a non-starter, if you’re at all nervous about being thought NAFF… small-town IT guys in cuirasses bussing over to Naseby to pretend to be gunned down by chain-shot fired a platoon of togged-up provincial chartered surveyors? And yet and yet and yet…

All the same, there are elements to be learnt from re-enactments that official history finds it very hard not to omit, from the smell of hot metal and cordite and andrenalised horses to the viscreal feel of being one small confused person without perspective, weighed down by your kit, lost at the centre of a swirling smoky action that will mean something very different to Big H History than it does to you… Theory has a kind of built-in whiggish condescension-of-posterity towards those who aren’t up to speed with today’s ways of seeing the past: with the result that critics and writers are inclined to map retrospectively onto the worldview of generals rather than footsoldiers; artistic intention rather than audience use (even radical poets are secret royalists, argued Hazlitt). There are APPROVED WAYS of accessing information — with linked-in systems of initiation — and others, less chic, very much home-made, often a bit tentative and self-deprecating, often prey to capture by unstated assumptions. What I’m getting at is that what Simon is after all doing with Rip It Up or Energy Flash is ALSO A SPECIES OF HISTORICAL RE-ENACTMENT. And what I’m calling out is is the easy belief that there’s an intrinsically PROPER way to make an artwork, to explain a story, to appreciate the meaning of a show; in other words, that the only acceptable route into understanding Einstürzende and the riot is to READ about it — to access accounts that gather together the wider issues of the day, that plug you into the MARCH OF HISTORY blah blah.

What’s the alternative? To expose yourself — untheory-begirt — to the semi-randomness of the effects of the sounds or smell or feel of the event, the stuff that BIG PICTURE THEORY edits out, downplays and disdains? The scattered constituent elements of the world of history’s losers, for example. OK, I know it’s NOT an either/or. I attended the ICA re-enactment of the Ziggy Stardust Farewell Concert: and it too failed to re-enact any of its infamous audience participation (scroll down to “sucking-and-wanking” heh); and i don’t pretend to be very effectively “untheory-begirt” — but still i took one thing away from it that I’d possibly never have been struck by any other way. Here was a Bowie lookalike exactly matching the zigster move for move — and because this was an actor working to re-enact, I suddenly recognised (by the magickal Brechtian process of Aesthetickal Estrangement) how much tentative nervousness was part of Bowie’s then-demeanour, and how much a response to this side of his shtick belonged in the self-construction of the little frightened glamfan (scroll down further). Which is partly to say — I’m a writer too; and reading matters, and to understand is in the end to write and to read. But this seemingly small stuff — the responses of the non-critic, the wide-open child, the shy child buried in the jaded adult’s memory — is easily, easily lost, and sometimes, with it, an understanding of quite unexpected dimensions to the event in question. High-cultural aesthetic autonomy is a deeply class-coloured species of radical achievement: one of the great breaks in of 19th-century drama and music was the point where the desired audience were successfully intimidated into sitting quietly, as a mark of their superiority: the other art and/or pleasure seekers went to other venues.

“Then came the time,” write E. P. Thompson quoting Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor’s 1844 The Employer and The Employed, “‘when rich folk frightened poor folk our of their sense with “He’s a cooming” and “They’re a cooming”.’ ‘Who are “they”, Robin?’”‘Why, Boney and the French, to be sure. Well, that time when rich folk frightened poor folk and stole all the land.’” (TMotWC, p255)

Just pop back up through the Amphitheatre link above, and reread a key sentence: “Bonaparte was brought upon the stage face to face with Wellington, and made to utter very generous sentiments, and to do all sorts of generous things, which were loudly applauded by the galleries.” Napoleon was the Saddam-esque bogeyman of his day; his nemesis, the Iron Duke, was Prime Minister from 1828-30 (the worst ever, many say): so what (besides secret poetic royalism) meant this cheering and this counter-intuitive warmth towards a national foe, on this particular long-vanished equestrian stage, by this particular, deeply unArnoldian audience?

Whereas the upper-upper version of same, 1839, at Eglinton — a big day out for the Gothic Revivalists convulsing into daftness when the entire very expensive spectacle was but rained off. SEE YOU THIS EVENING AT THE ICA**

*This is part two in a bunch of things I’ll EVENTUALLY post, in a series called A DALEK MADE OF LIGHT. Er I’ll explain why another time. Possibly.
**Er actually it isn’t, it has knights in armour instead. I remembered it as Waterloo but on rewatching it clearly ain’t. I was going to elaborate a bunch on E.Nesbit’s politics, and Stevenson’s, and kid-lit as the undercurrent of radical something-or-other … oh well. NO TRUTHS HAVE BEEN HARMED IN THIS FOOTNOTE.
***Or actually I won’t as there is lollardry afoot.

So Tarmac is a company name? Yep, but it is also short for the process of Tar Macadamizing, which was a development of Macadamized roads. The process, of a three layer road surface, with drainage and run-off built in was revolutionary, but very labour intensive. Pitch Macadam came next which used sand and tar for the top layer, to stabilise the load. Purnell Hooley developed this further by pre-mixing the tar and aggregate, pouring it on and then bringing in the steam roller to compact it. Actually it is the roller part which marked Hooley’s technique out, the pressure helped the tar set quicker, and had the happy side-product of making the road surface very level. For some reason it was Scottish inventors doing all this transport stuff, but if you consider the difference Dunlop’s pneumatic tyre made to wheeled vehicles, also consider the difference a flat and clean road surface made.

So Hooley set up his company, and called it the Tar Macadam company. Not very punchy eh? Like many scientists and engineers he was also a rubbish businessman, so the company floundered – until it was bought out. Now I am not saying that the company failed because it was called Tar Macadam. But as soon as the name was changed to Tarmac, it boomed. Who makes all of our roads? Tarmac. What do we also call bitumen road coverings, asphalt concrete and pretty much everything on the road? Tarmac. What do they lay? Tarmac?

NO! There actually is very little Tarmac on the roads now. It is mainly asphalt as mentioned above. But much of it is still laid by Tarmac, and most of the urban roads in Britain had a Tarmac layer once. And the name has done its job. We know the company because we know the roads. When plains land on the Tarmac at airports, they are actually landing on concrete. Yet Tarmac has this brand identity, this brand awareness which means that they often get the job. They are the leading suppliers of heavy building materials in the UK, quarrying sand, aggregate and providing thousands of tons of concrete all over the shop. But their brand is great because not only is it seen to be ubiquitous (when it isn’t), but it is short for a scientific process which revolutionised transport all over the world. The brand has wormed its way into the language AND they have a surprisingly good website. And hey, its the floor, and its all over the place!

*The worst marketing idea ever also did not help Hoover. Repeat the mantra. A vacuum cleaner cost 100 pounds. A return flight to America costs £300.

In The Beginning There Was The Word. NOT THE BIRD FROM L7 PULLING DOWN HER KECKS AGAIN.

But neither of these are strictly true. Because the first book of the Bible Of Badness is Genesis. And if you were ever to question how bad this Bible could get, Collins and the rest set a mighty low standard. One wonders if it really was the Serpent that caused the fall of man, or if Adam just wanted to get away from the prog-rock band noodling in the Garden of Eden.

Ah, but to the Genesis of Genesis we need to thank Jonathon King. I am of the opinion we should thank him in the same way we thanked him for kiddie-fiddling, let’s bang him up for a few years for unleashing Tony Banks and Peter Gabriel upon us. And whilst I am no class warrior when it comes to music hating, even I can recognise that Charterhouse graduates aren’t going to make the coolest of rock stars. Unfortunately the band also recognised this and ploughed an unending furrow of anti-cool which would make them hot, if that was not also a metaphor for good in the contradictory pop world. It was a pity that their first album From Genesis To Revelation did not consist – as the title promises – of their entire career. It was even more disappointing that they were not judged at the end of time for the horrors contained within.

And so the band continued, despite being even worse that YES, with prog outpourings such as The Knife, Peter Gabriel’s nine-minute epic ode to non-violence. I have often wanted to offer my rebuke to this song, co-incidentally called The Knife and consisting of something I bought from John Lewis being used in a stabbing fashion on all of Genesis. Wonder is that they even made it to any later albums, though the title of Nursery Cryme should have been taken as a warning (and yet another veiled Jonathon King reference).

Ah yes. Phil Collins. Well need I say too much about this Tory traitor, this unartful dodger who bald-facedly (has he any other face?) told us that he couldn’t dance or couldn’t sing. Well there is no room for you in pop music then. Much of the eighties I spent trying to kill them with the power of the mind, which unfortunately backfired when the wrote Invisible Touch about me. I have been thwarted through much of their career, for example booking them to play the Lamb Lies Down On Broadway on Fulham Broadway. During rush hour. This assassination attempt like all others have failed.

And so we get to 2006. They apparently stopped gigging in 1999: (old giffers probably aware of an inappropriate party atmosphere).
So why have they returned? They clearly say its not for the money. And one assumes it is not for the artistic kudos (HA!) No, one can only assume it is to continue to torture us with they tedious metronomic slow chugging soft rock shite-lyriced coma-inducing er-tunes. And that is much worse than being thrown out of the garden of Eden.