Which Decade Is Tops For Pops – FreakyTrigger https://freakytrigger.co.uk Lollards in the high church of low culture Tue, 09 May 2023 08:12:47 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 Which Decade Is Tops For Pops? – the podcast. https://freakytrigger.co.uk/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops/2022/11/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops-the-podcast https://freakytrigger.co.uk/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops/2022/11/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops-the-podcast#respond Mon, 07 Nov 2022 10:57:07 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=33004

And so, 11 years after it was clobbered by the mother of all imposter syndromes (for which sincere belated apologies are due), Which Decade Is Tops For Pops? returns as a podcast, each episode comparing six singles that were in the same position in the UK Top 10 exactly ten years apart – and, as before, soliciting your votes (this time via the Facebook page or @whichdecadetops on Twitter).

New episodes will drop every fortnight, and you can subscribe in all the usual podcasting places. Alternatively, you can go straight to the launch episode, which pits The Searchers against Slade, The Rocksteady Crew, Mariah Carey, Holly Valance and Union J. Highlights include a Mariah Carey fever dream, the bakery success of The Searchers’ first drummer, a Poundland Harry Styles, the best chart “crew”, and a harsh judgement on Maroon 5’s “Sugar”. There’s also the long-delayed public countdown of Mike Atkinson’s November 1983 personal Top 10, a withering critique of boyband hairdos, a fond look back at crap playground breakdancers, and a salute to the mighty “ong-dinga-rong-dinga” bassline.

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Which Decade Is Tops For Pops 2011: the Number 5s https://freakytrigger.co.uk/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops/2011/08/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops-2011-the-number-5s https://freakytrigger.co.uk/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops/2011/08/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops-2011-the-number-5s#comments Tue, 02 Aug 2011 21:08:00 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=21136 1961: Warpaint – The Brook Brothers (video) (lyrics)
1971: Mozart Symphony No 40 – Waldo de los Ríos (video)
1981: Grey Day – Madness (video) (lyrics)
1991: Sailing On The Seven Seas – OMD (video) (lyrics)
2001: Get Ur Freak On – Missy Elliott (video) (lyrics)
2011: Sweat (David Guetta Remix) – Snoop Dogg (video) (lyrics)

Spotify playlist (minus Waldo De Los Rios)

One place up from The Allisons, we find another “Britain’s answer to the Everly Brothers” – but there’s no sibling fakery this time round, as The Brook Brothers are properly born of the same stock. This cover of Barry Mann’s “Warpaint” (a rare excursion into performance for the songwriter, which didn’t chart in the US) gave the former skiffle act their biggest hit, and deservedly so; it’s a likeable romp, boosted by a strong production from Tony Hatch, which adds an affectionately teasing quality to Mann’s harsher original. Why, I can even forgive the yakety sax.

If our 1971 entry reminds you of dressage music, or of TV theme tunes, then there’s context for that; other Mozart adaptations by Waldo de los Ríos were used for the BBC’s Horse of the Year coverage, and for Radio 4’s Brain of Britain. When he wasn’t MOR-ifying the classics, Waldo also led an Argentinian folk group – which perhaps accounts for the incongruous Spanish-style guitar, adding confusion to the otherwise smooth arrangement. Waldo was on a roll in 1971, having just helped Spain to second place at Eurovision with his work on Karina’s “En un mundo nuevo”, and although darker days lay ahead – struggles with depression, and eventual suicide in 1977 – none of that is apparent here. It’s kitsch writ large, of course – but you can’t altogether keep a good tune down, and the perky augmentations never quite tip over into full “Hooked On Classics” horror.

Its position in Madness’s discography might mark “Grey Day” out as a sharp break from (and maybe a pointed reaction to) the knockabout nuttiness – for singles-wise, this was the first full surfacing of their glummer, wearier streak – but the song itself was already three years old, dating from the band’s early days as the North London Invaders. Hitting the charts after “That’s Entertainment” and before “Ghost Town”, it helped to define a key theme of 1981: fed up, pissed off, all but defeated, offering sour commentary on the new recession. It’s not clear if the narrator is ground down by the emptiness of unemployment, or worn out by long hours of brutal labour – but whatever the cause, mental and physical suffering have brought him to the edge of insanity. Dirty, bruised and vilified, he sinks to the grass in the pouring rain, longing for extinction. And this got to Number Four?

Five years on from their last hit, OMD had shrunk from a duo-led six-piece band, to a solo vehicle for Andy McCluskey. Perhaps a certain measure of nice-to-have-them-back goodwill helped propel “Sailing On The Seven Seas” upwards – remarkably, only “Souvenir” matched it for chart peak success – because if it didn’t, I’m left struggling to understand why it did quite so well. McCluskey’s still-characterful vocals provide the only discernible link to the OMD of old, while the hired hands heave and ho through an insistent, uncluttered shanty, its rhythms carrying faint echoes of glam-rock’s stomp. Its forcefulness pulls you in, its momentum keeps you engaged, but it scores next to nothing for lasting impact.

Matching and arguably exceeding “Hot Love” for initial clout and lasting influence, elements of Missy Elliott’s “Get UR Freak On” persist to this day – you can trace some sort of wiggly line to MIA, and thence to “Run The World (Girls)” – and it duly bestrode the pop landscape of 2001 like a colossus, topping every end-of-year poll and hatching a thousand forensic dissections within the newly emerging blogosphere. Overplayed and picked to pieces, its tricks long since co-opted and subsumed, the track’s shock-of-the-new aspects are hard to re-imagine ten (TEN!) years on. So its exhumation still feels premature. Another decade should re-vitalise it, for sure – but as of now, I can’t recapture the thrill I once felt. (It still gets the six points, of course – and my favourite bit is still the dubby instrumental wind-down in the closing minute.)

First released as the altogether ruder “Wet” – and written, if you can credit it, to honour the impending nuptials of Wills ‘n Kate – Snoop Dogg‘s slinky, atmospheric and (needless to say) slobbering original (“I’m in like a cigarette” – don’t do yourself down in the downstairs department, dawg!) didn’t blow up properly worldwide until David Guetta got hold of it. Daubing it with hefty splodges of Felix’s “Don’t You Want Me”, Guetta dutifully fed it into his state-of-the-art ClubBangaTron – and out popped “Sweat”, his biggest hit of 2011 thus far. Speaking not only as a total sucker for GuettaBeat, but also as someone who has DANCED to “Sweat” in a PROPER CLUB in LONDON with HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE in it (I’ll be fifty next year, it doesn’t happen often, it’s a big deal when it does), I can give this nothing but praise. History has yet to record whether it graced the dancefloor of our new Duke and Duchess’s wedding bash – but hell, why wouldn’t it?

You can blame Vic Reeves for this: the Nineties have crashed from first to fourth place, while T.Rex have revived the fortunes of the Seventies and The Jacksons have sent the Eighties to the top of the heap. At the bottom of the heap, Katy Perry has done the Teens no favours, and not even a respectable showing for Depeche Mode has managed to lift the Noughties from last place.

1 (3) The Eighties (19.61)
2 (2) The Sixties (18.63)
3 (5) The Seventies (18.08)
4 (1) The Nineties (17.89)
5 (4) The Teens (16.16)
6 (6) The Noughties (14.63)

Can Missy Eilliott bring it for the Noughties? Will Madness strengthen 1981’s lead? It’s all to play for!

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Which Decade Is Tops For Pops 2011: the Number 6s https://freakytrigger.co.uk/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops/2011/07/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops-2011-the-number-6s https://freakytrigger.co.uk/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops/2011/07/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops-2011-the-number-6s#comments Wed, 27 Jul 2011 22:47:57 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=21127 1961: Are You Sure – The Allisons (video) (lyrics) (Lena’s write-up)
1971: Hot Love – T.Rex (video) (lyrics) (Popular entry)
1981: Can You Feel It – The Jacksons (video) (lyrics)
1991: Born Free – Vic Reeves & The Roman Numerals (video) (lyrics)
2001: Dream On – Depeche Mode (video) (lyrics)
2011: E.T. – Katy Perry ft Kanye West (video) (lyrics)

Spotify playlist (all 6 tracks)

Modelled so closely on the Everly Brothers that they even affected a fictional sibling status, The Allisons followed a career path that became familiar in the 2000s: a TV talent show, a record deal, a chance to represent the UK at Eurovision, a lone hit, and a quick slide from public view. Still, at least their brief star got to shine a little more brightly than Jessica Garlick’s, or James Fox’s, or Andy Abraham’s, as – in accordance with Sixties/Seventies Eurovision custom – “Are You Sure?” finished in second place for the United Kingdom, beaten by the entry from plucky little Luxembourg.

(Eurovision Stats Overload Parenthesis, For Those Who Care: Kathy Kirby and The New Seekers were similarly trounced by France Gall and Vicky Leandros in 1965 and 1972, while Anne-Marie David elbowed Cliff Richard into third place in 1973. It almost goes without saying – but let’s say it anyway, because there’s nothing the British like more than a decades-old competitive grudge – that none of the victorious acts were actually native to Luxembourg. Poor show, what?)

Having watched The Assassination Of Richard Nixon over the weekend, I can’t help but imagine “Are You Sure?” being crooned by Sean Penn’s simpering, simmering salesman-turned-killer. For while the track might start with soft, courtly entreaties to the departed lover – “Look here, old thing, are you absolutely positive about all this?” – an increasingly unveiled sense of menace starts to seep through the well-mannered veneer. The tone becomes accusing (“for you’re the one who went and broke the vow”) and then threatening (“You’ll be sorry, wait and see, spend your life in misery”), casting a different complexion on the final iteration of “hold you tightly in my arms”. Just how tightly, you flukey fraternal fakes?

And so we move to the most influential single to have appeared in this year’s Which Decade thus far. Boosting a standard shuffle blues rhythm with brutal wallop and clout, T.Rex set the template for British glam rock, birthing a beat that would re-surface time and again over the next three years: Son Of My Father, Rock And Roll Part 2, Blockbuster, The Jean Genie. And by trading Blakeian hippy mysticism for Lear-esque bubblegum whimsy, Marc Bolan ditched an older audience for a younger one – leading the charge, while offering a cooler, sparklier, more richly imaginative alternative to your Co-Cos and your Chirpy Chirpys.

To my nine-year old self, “Hot Love” had it all. A sonic representation of silver and gold, its playground verses bore endless repetition, as did its endless everybody-join-in coda (less self-consciously forced than “Hey Jude”, and accented with a cavernous stomp that Slade would soon make their own). Even the band name thrilled me: T.Rex, big like a dinosaur! I loved dinosaurs!

This summer, at the Lovebox festival in London’s Victoria Park, in a set which inevitably featured his cover of Bolan’s widow’s best known song, another Marc exhumed it. He must have been smitten too. We all smiled; we all boogied. I’m giving it six.

The Jacksons may not have been big like dinosaurs – although Michael was on his way – but in the immediate aftermath of the disco era, they needed to avoid extinction. Cue “Can You Feel It”, the opening track on Triumph, in which disco’s lightness and romance was replaced with a stiff, maximalist march, bearing an overtly anthemic, Utopian message. Michael co-wrote the song, and perhaps it’s here that we find the first manifestations of his burgeoning emperor/messiah complex; the Ruritanian epaulettes and tassles would follow, as would the Heal The Worlds and the Earth Songs.

“Can You Feel It” flopped in the States, perhaps partly due to its genre unorthodoxy, in a segmented pre-MTV world that didn’t quite know which box to put it in. In Europe, where boxes mattered less, it fared much better, giving the group their penultimate Top Ten hit in the UK. Seventeen years later, The Tamperer would sample it, subvert it and smuggle it to Number One. Unmoved by its rhythmic clumpiness, and unstirred by its lyrical platitudes, its appeal has always been lost on me. I suspect that’s also box-related.

As Vic Reeves was discussed on Popular just two months ago, there’s little to add when it comes to examining the hit which preceded “Dizzy”: a cover of Matt Monro and John Barry’s Oscar-winning theme song for a film about an adopted lion cub, mashed up with elements of Shuggie Otis’s “Strawberry Letter 23” (better known in its cover version by The Brothers Johnson).

Reeves plays it fairly straight here, avoiding the temptation to ham it up in his trademark “Northern club singer” style – but he also stops several yards short of sincerity, opting instead for a Mike Flowers-prefiguring pastiche. Thus “you” becomes “ye”, now rhyming with “free”, and Monroe’s “the world still astounds you, it’s time you looked at a star” becomes “the world still astounds ye, each time he looks at a car”.

A clue to the “star/car” switch comes during Reeves’ megaphoned voiceover section. This starts as some sort of mini-Wikipedia entry, before Reeves turns his mockery directly onto Monro. Not only is Monro, ho ho, a former bus driver (and hence astounded by cars, and even incapable of art?), but Reeves also claims – or rather his comedy persona claims – to be the better singer. Reeves’ subversive intent is then hammered home in the last lines, which riff on differing interpretations of the word “free” to allegedly comic effect.

I say “allegedly” because, as with much of Reeves’ work, any playfulness in the surrealism is – for me – smothered by the smugness, leaving me poker-faced and mildly irritated. Sure, he and Bob Mortimer got the laughs – but the laughter always felt cliquey, a collective “yeah, we’re clever enough to get it”, underpinned by a certain measure of “actually, we don’t get it, but we’d die rather than admit it to our peer group”. Oh, enough! This was supposed to be a short one!

By 2001, Depeche Mode‘s Dave Gahan had long since conquered the addictions which nearly killed him five years earlier (insert poignant Winehouse comparison here). If it wasn’t for the fact that Martin Gore wrote it, “Dream On” would therefore read as the personal testament of a rehabilitated survivor, recalling both the physical horror and the emotional alienation of his former, half-lived life. Perhaps that was Gore’s aim, and perhaps that makes “Dream On” some sort of oblique scold. Or, as seems more likely, it’s an empathetically drawn portrayal: part atonement, part warning.

As with many Depeche singles, which slip in and out of the charts so quickly that I never pay them much heed, “Dream On” forces me to give overdue respect to a band whose prolonged success mostly baffles me (at least when I give matter any thought, which is rarely). It’s a restless, skittering thing, in which Mark Bell’s production strikes the right balance of sparseness and detail, and Gahan’s theatrical tendencies are wisely reined in.

Halfway through her show at Nottingham Arena this March, Katy Perry left the stage for one of God-knows-how-many costume changes. On returning, she excitedly told us of the news that she had just received offstage: that “E.T.” had reached Number One in the Billboard charts. It was Perry’s one moment of true emotion, in a show that, while impressive in many ways, was marred by the hollow-eyed neutrality of its star performer. And this is the problem that I have with her: that for all the cleverness and wit that she has invested in her pop persona, her core self remains curiously absent. She’s a hoofer, a trouper, a gifted show pony, and she’s made some able pop moves – but I could never love her like Gaga or like Kylie, because she never drops her guard.

As for “E.T.” in particular, my least favourite of her hits, it feels fitting to hand over to the late Martin Skidmore – a man who I only met once, although Tom’s tribute makes me wish I’d got to know him better – who had this to say about it on The Singles Jukebox.

This Luke/Martin number is kind of like “We Will Rock You” with a bit of “All The Things She Said”, with Katy droning on about loving an alien, and with a heavily autotuned Kanye playing that role. I suppose it’s less obviously catchpenny than her usual, what with being darker and having no big hook or anything, but she still doesn’t interest me at all.

It’s scoreboard time. As predicted in the last round, Diana Ross has lifted the Seventies off the bottom of the pile – but the Nineties hold onto their lead, albeit with a much narrower gap (you can blame Zucchero for that). The last round’s positions are in brackets.

1 (1) The Nineties (16.27)
2 (2) The Sixties (15.73)
3 (4) The Eighties (14.57)
4 (3) The Teens (13.92)
5 (6) The Seventies (12.56)
6 (5) The Noughties (10.95)

Assuming that you all love “Hot Love” as much as I do, I’m expecting another climb for the Seventies – but beyond that, I’d say the field was fairly open. What say you, voters?

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Which Decade Is Tops For Pops 2011: the Number 7s https://freakytrigger.co.uk/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops/2011/07/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops-2011-the-number-7s https://freakytrigger.co.uk/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops/2011/07/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops-2011-the-number-7s#comments Fri, 22 Jul 2011 13:06:11 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=21111 1961: Don’t Treat Me Like A Child – Helen Shapiro (video) (lyrics)
1971: Remember Me – Diana Ross (video) (lyrics)
1981: This Ole House – Shakin’ Stevens (video) (lyrics) (Popular entry)
1991: Senza Una Donna (Without A Woman) – Zucchero ft Paul Young (video) (lyrics)
2001: Liquid Dreams – O-Town (video) (lyrics)
2011: Unorthodox – Wretch 32 ft Example (video) (lyrics)

Spotify playlist (minus O-Town & Wretch 32)

I commented on the phenomenon last year, when evaluating Steve Lawrence’s “Footsteps”, but now Helen Shapiro‘s debut single gives us another chance to savour one of the kitschiest delights of early Sixties pop. I’m such a sucker for the rinky-dink backing vocals which sometimes threaten to overwhelm “Don’t Treat Me Like A Child”, and here they’re used to cunning effect, undercuttiing the 14 year old’s earnest plea to be taken seriously with an almost malevolent schoolgirl glee. (I’m picturing Helen’s singers with bunched hair and painted freckles, waggling oversized lollipops – but then I’ve always had an overactive imagination.)

As rallying cries for Disaffected Youth go, “Don’t Treat Me Like A Child” is tame fare indeed. But if the generational schism which rock and roll had opened was closing again, and if the journey from the primness of “My own point of view has got to be known” to the fury of “Why don’t you all f-f-f-fade away” had barely begun, then Disaffected Youth would have to rally round any cries it could find. You tell ’em, Helen!

Landing her third British hit as a solo performer (like its predecessors, an Ashford and Simpson composition), Diana Ross‘s evolution from troupe leader to queenly diva was well underway, and the faux-humble high drama of “Remember Me” ably serves her purpose. Unlike its predecessor “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”, which slaps you round the face witihin seconds, a sense of impending drama lurks within the apparent gentleness of its opening bars, as Ross plays a “hey, I’m cool with this” opening gambit with her newly departed lover. As the arrangement starts to swell, a tension builds between her nonchalance and her pride, setting up a contradiction which is never fully resolved. Gradually, the implicit message becomes apparent: I’m the best thing you’ll ever have, and don’t you ever forget it. It’s the classiest of kiss-offs, which plays to all of Ross’s strengths.

There’s a sharper contradiction still within Shakin’ Stevens‘ sprightly rockabilly cover of Rosemary Clooney’s stridently perky “This Ole House”: a song that was reportedly inspired by stumbling across a dessicated corpse in a crumbling shack. In apparently blithe ignorance of the lyrical death-wish – deserted by wife and children, both the house and its occupant are “getting ready to meet the saints” – Stevens treats the song as an amiable romp (“this ole house is getting shaky”, he winks), displaying all the concern of a lazy dad who can’t be arsed to get down to Homebase for nails and paint. As a piece of rockabilly, this isn’t at all bad – Stevens had yet to trade his respected scenester chops for easy showbiz rewards – and if he seemed like the enemy of shiny New Pop at the time, then perhaps some measure of rehabilitation is overdue. It doesn’t excuse him from his crime of lyrical misinterpretation, but let’s cut the old ham some slack, eh? Just this once?

The theme of romantic abandonment persists, as Italy’s Zucchero (“probably one of the best blues musicians I’ve ever worked with” – Ray Charles) ropes in Paul Young for assistance on his self-composed ballad of survival. Like Diana Ross before him, Zucchero strives to walk on with head held high, but his wounds are fresher and there’s a barely concealed bile behind the bluster. Bitterly self-pitying and grumpily self-aggrandising, Zucchero does himself no favours, as he moans about having to do his own cooking while his “lady” plays away. And note, if you will, those tell-tale indefinite articles: it’s not her presence that he has been missing, merely the presence of “a woman”. So this is either an acutely observed critique of a chauvinist in crisis, or the whiney, breast-beating lament of a terminally unloveable fool, who is destined to repeat his mistakes. I know which way I’m leaning.

Here in the UK, the Reality Pop era dawned with Popstars, Hear’say, and a song about being pure and simple. Things were heading in a similar direction in the States, thanks to a show called Making The Band, its progenies O-Town, and a song about – not to put too fine a point on it – “nocturnal emissions”. (Roll over, Max Romeo.)

Surveying O-Town’s “morpharotic” (yer WHAT?) wankfest roll call, it’s interesting to see who has lasted the decade – Angelina, J-Lo, Halle Berry and Destiny’s Beyonce – and who has faded from the teenage imagination – Cindy Crawford, Janet Jackson and most especially Madonna. (That said, there’s already a certain edging away from the clutches of Old Granny-Claws; “just a little touch of Madonna’s wild style”, they cautiously aver.)

Last year’s “Which Decade” was strewn with offerings from grime acts gone pop, and here’s another specimen: Tottenham’s Wretch 32, for whom “Unorthodox” involves slapping a skanking backbeat under the riff from The Stone Roses’ “Fools Gold” (which in turn samples James Brown and half-lifts a lick from an old Can track – so, hey, it’s good to have some Krautrock in the charts, right?)

“Fools Gold” has been used before – by Run DMC on “What’s It All About” and by Bananarama on “Only Your Love” – and it turns out to be a durable old beast, adding a certain grit and menace to the unremarkable brags of Wretch and his buddy Example. (There’s also a cameo appearance on the video from Chipmunk, who got a right old going-over from most of us last year.) Placed next to the peppy brio of Mann’s “Buzzin”, it sounds a little stodgy and laboured – but we’ve had far worse, and credit is due for keeping the Guetta-bots at bay.

Time now to take our first peek at the current state of play between our competing decades, based on current scores from the first three rounds. Points are accrued by taking the average number of points scored by each track, and combining them for each decade. So, for example, if all three songs from 1981 had scored maximum points from every voter, then the Eighties would have 18 points at this stage.

1. The Nineties (14.06)
2. The Sixties (11.72)
3. The Teens (10.81)
4. The Eighties (9.93)
5. The Noughties (9.51)
6. The Seventies (6.96)

So it’s an early lead for last year’s champs – thanks to strong showings from De La Soul, Electronic and The Waterboys – and a poor start for 1971, who have been lumbered with Ray Stevens, The Fantastics and Andy Williams.

Given the awesomeness of Miss Ross and the dirginess of Zucchero, I’m predicting a marked narrowing of the gap in the next round. But I’ve been wrong before. Voting time!

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Which Decade Is Tops For Pops 2011: the Number 8s https://freakytrigger.co.uk/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops/2011/07/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops-2011-the-number-8s https://freakytrigger.co.uk/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops/2011/07/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops-2011-the-number-8s#comments Wed, 06 Jul 2011 00:00:50 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=21099 1961: Theme From Dixie – Duane Eddy (video)
1971: (Where Do I Begin) Love Story – Andy Williams (video) (lyrics)
1981: Night Games – Graham Bonnet (video) (lyrics)
1991: The Whole Of The Moon – The Waterboys (video) (lyrics)
2001: It Wasn’t Me – Shaggy ft Rikrok (video) (lyrics)
2011: Guilt – Nero (video) (lyrics)

Spotify playlist (all 6 tracks)

It’s a tenuous segue, but what the heck: just as the last round closed with a martial rhythm (of sorts, at least), so this round opens with one. And there the similarities end, as we switch from the fully contemporary to a song that dates from the middle of the 19th century. Not being au fait with the American minstrel tradition, my only prior exposure to “Dixie” was as a part of Elvis Presley’s funereally paced “American Trilogy”, so the chirpiness of Duane Eddy‘s version was initially startling – but despite its lyrical pining, this was traditionally a cheerfully rendered tune, and so Eddy takes fewer liberties with it than I had thought.

The track’s first half sticks fairly faithfully to Eddy’s “man with the twang” template, reminding me of the influence that he exerted on Hank Marvin’s playing style, and the combined influence of both players on the rock guitar heroes that would follow in their wake. (This stuff might sound corny now, but if you were a suburban bedroom musician with no access to the cooler stuff – your Hookers, your Wrays – then Hank and Duane on the Light Programme might well have been your beacons.) But during the second half, things start to go a bit loopy, as if the whole studio has suddenly slid into devil-may-care drunkenness: hollered yee-haas, a yakety sax, a half-mumbled lyrical fragment, a demented, almost parodic diva. It all leaves me wondering how much of this madness can be laid at the door of Eddy’s long-time collaborator, the late Lee Hazlewood. (Ah, NOW you’re interested!)

As he’s one of the few artists ever to have graced my dad’s in-car 8-track cartridge player during the early 1970s (along with The Carpenters, Simon & Garfunkel and, er, Mario Lanza), I have always had a soft spot for Andy Williams. A couple of years ago, just before he shuffled off to Branson, Missouri in perpetuity (the traditional retirement community for showbiz troupers; Ray Stevens packs ’em in there), I saw the man perform the last ever date of his last ever international tour. Then aged 79, his first vocal cracks were starting to show – but all came good for a staggering rendition of MacArthur Park, which showed surprising boldness for an artist whose habitual role has been to offer reassurance and comfort.

There’s not a whole heap of comfort to be found in “Where Do I Begin”, though – at least not if you knew its back story, as did most listeners in 1971. Originally the instrumental theme tune of Love Story, which had been THE big weepie of the previous year (spoiler: Ali McGraw dies!), lyrics were added posthumously to the track, turning it into a pledge of romantic loyalty that both the singer and the audience already knew was doomed to meet a tragic end. Hey presto, instant poignancy.

Despite its pretty tune, this was never one of my favourite Williams tracks – and I speak as someone who listened to his Greatest Hits 8-track at least twice a week for at least two years on the weekday morning school run, so it had plenty of time to ingratiate itself. I prefer Williams when he unstiffens and starts to swing – and speaking as someone who has watched the McGraw death scene in a room of bawling sisters, mindful of the need to respect their ersatz grief, I never rated Love Story much, either.

Fresh from a two-year stint in Ritchie Blackmore’s Rainbow, Graham Bonnet briefly reactivated his solo career before joining the Michael Schenker Group in 1982. Three years earlier, he had topped the Australian charts with “Warm Ride“, a Bee Gees song that had been omitted from the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. But having swapped watered-down disco for watered-down metal (not there’s anything wrong with either; you can’t argue with “Since You Been Gone“), Bonnet wasn’t about to switch back. Cue the suburbanite slaverings of “Night Games”, in which our “man in the busy street” joins our “lady in the library” in the mysterious “house of sin”, where readies are exchanged for “games OF THE NIGHT”.

(Ah, that none-more-Eighties suffix: see also Kiss/Laura Branigan (creatures OF THE NIGHT), DeBarge (rhythm OF THE NIGHT), Sam Fox (spirit OF THE NIGHT) and many more.)

Trouble is: once you start hearing “house of sin” as “house of Cyn“, the erotic edifice does begin to crumble (do they pay for their pleasures with LUNCHEON VOUCHERS?), only to topple further once you suspect that the lead menu item is, um, SEXY SNOOKER. (“Always play one last frame; it says in the rules!”)

Those of you with memories that stretch back two whole months (for yes, I have been on an extended “Blocked By Bonnet” hiatus, and let us speak of it no more) will recall my banning of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” from the 2011 chart, on the grounds that reissues skew the samples. In which case, you might have some justification in quibbling the inclusion of a reissued 1985 single from The Waterboys in the chart of 1991. To which I say: ah, BUT: six years is less than a full decade, and “The Whole Of The Moon” felt connected to pop in 1991, in a way that “Fast Car” doesn’t in 2011.

(I was THERE, man. I did the PARTY TAPES. All of which HAD to include something by The Waterboys and something by The Clash, in order to placate the miserable ex-punks who poo-poohed house.)

As with more of these old hits than I care to mention, I had never given “The Whole Of The Moon” my full attention before now – and despite my habitual genre-adversity towards Big And Important Celtic Chest Thumpers, I am minded to grant it a reprieve, on the grounds that the Bigness And Importance of the track is a justifiable fit for the theme of the song. For if Mike Scott is going to make a series of comparisons between his own aspirations/achievements and the grander, more ambitious, more over-arching visions of his unnamed damaged-genius-hero figure (some say it’s C.S. Lewis, but Syd Barrett would fit just as well and Scott says it’s a composite anyway), then it’s as well that he does so over a questing quasi-martial march which becomes more vaingloriously florid as the track progresses.

Hey ho, we’re back to fucking. Although credited to Shaggy featuring Rikrok, it’s the guest turn who does all the work here, his host confining himself to a couple of toasted verses and endless re-iterations of the track title.

It’s lazy but it works, casting Rikrok as the cheater who got caught on the job, now desperately seeking dubious scraps of relationship advice from the magisterially absent MISTAH LOVAH LOVAH himself. Thus the track title becomes a prompt, muttered in Rikrok’s ear as he fretfully reviews the case for the prosecution, while the rest of Shaggy’s counsel essentially boils down to “chill out/man up/stand your ground/lie through your teeth”.

Rikrok does man up before the song is through, but not as directed. Resolving to apologise to his wronged woman, he spurns his mentor and provider (never devalue the worth of a “ft.”) with new-found clarity. (“You may think that you’re a player, but you’re completely lost.”) And so, and despite appearances to the contrary, “It Wasn’t Me” turns out to be more than cheery braggadocio about “banging on the bathroom floor” (although to be fair, there’s quite a bit of bragging to be had), revealing itself to be quite the morality tale after all.

In stark and immediate contrast with the jokey breeziness of Shaggy and Rikrok’s take on infidelity, Nero offer – through the cavernous medium of Stadium Dubstep, with lingering echoes of Stadium Trance – a darker, more accusing riposte, this time from a woman’s perspective. (“Sometimes I feel you should be crawling back to me” / “The guilt you hide will come between us after all”)

This might have worked better if a) the eight lines of the song weren’t endlessly repeated, in the time-honoured and perfunctory Dance Anthem tradition and b) the video wasn’t all about pole dancers.

OK, you’ve waited long enough! The voting box is open, and the usual rules apply. My apologies for the delay (I’m blaming my block on Bonnet) and my particular thanks to Erithian, for his friendly and supportive nudges.

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Which Decade Is Tops For Pops 2011: the Number 9s https://freakytrigger.co.uk/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops/2011/05/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops-2011-the-number-9s https://freakytrigger.co.uk/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops/2011/05/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops-2011-the-number-9s#comments Tue, 10 May 2011 18:15:18 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=21085 1961: African Waltz – Johnny Dankworth (video)
1971: Something Old Something New – The Fantastics (video) (lyrics)
1981: Einstein A Go-Go – Landscape (video) (lyrics)
1991: Get The Message – Electronic (video) (lyrics)
2001: Clint Eastwood – Gorillaz (video) (lyrics)
2011: Run The World (Girls) – Beyonce (video) (lyrics)

Spotify playlist (all 6 tracks)

If Johnny Dankworth‘s aim was to conjure up some sort of recognisably “African” flavour with this track (better known to American audiences in its Grammy Award-winning cover version by Cannonball Adderley), then fifty years of shifting cultural signifiers have made it hard to divine his intentions. There’s barely anything here which suggests “Africa” to contemporary ears, barring a certain skulking-through-the-souk “imaginary soundtrack” quality (with attendant premonitions of Barry Adamson) which might conceivably place it on the continent’s northern shores. But then again, its Canadian composer (Galt MacDermot, who went on to write the music for Hair six years later) was a scholar of African music who graduated from Cape Town university, so what do I know?

Having traded as The Velours since 1956 – with some decent doo-wop releases to their name – this presumably down-on-their-luck vocal harmony group made a decision to move from Brooklyn to the UK in 1968, in order to capitalise on the new British soul boom. Thus did The Velours become The Fantastics, who by 1971 had been driven into the arms of the then-ubiquitous Cook/Greenaway songwriting partnership, resulting in this, their sole chart entry.

As you might expect from the duo who brought us “I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing”, the “soul” on offer here is more Batley Variety Club than Muscle Shoals – but considering this is also the same duo who brought us “Something’s Gotten Hold Of My Heart”, you might expect a better standard of songcraft than this routine boom-thwacker, which presaged Greenway’s later compositions (There Goes My First Love, You’re More Than A Number In My Little Red Book) for the similarly rehoused Drifters.

Having first become vaguely aware of Landscape as a jazz-rock outfit, I nursed a certain generational suspicion regarding their conversion to synth-pop (“pah, old men trying to be trendy” – oh, the cruelty of the young!) – but equally, I could hardly ignore band leader Richard James Burgess’s production work on all of Spandau Ballet’s early releases (still properly trendy in May 1981, at a time when I ascribed rather too high a value to such concerns). So the slightness of “Einstein A Go-Go” quickly palled for me (despite its arch references to IMPENDING NUCLEAR DOOM, but this was small beer next to Crass’s “Nagasaki Nightmare”), eventually to be eclipsed by Thomas Dolby’s similarly boffin-centric “She Blinded Me With Science” a couple of years later.

Johnny Marr once called Electronic’s “Get The Message “the best song I’ve written“. If he’d only added “since leaving The Smiths”, I might have been persuadable (not that I’m exactly au fait with the back catalogues of The Healers, Modest Mouse or The Cribs, but I’d be happy to take his word on the matter).

As it stands, this is a striking case of selective amnesia from someone who once collaborated with one of the finest lyricists of the Eighties, only to fetch up in a songwriting partnership with someone who seemingly strings his lyrics together from fridge magnets. And that’s with all due respect to Bernard Sumner – without whom the line from post-punk to New Pop to pre-house to post-house to Madchester baggy would be a good deal harder to trace – but, let’s face it, he’s hardly the most quotable of lyricists, and “Get The Message” is no exception.

So perhaps the strengths of “Get The Message” lie more in its arrangment (does its bassline carry a faint echo of Magazine’s “A Song From Under The Floorboards”, or have I just got Barry Adamson stuck in my brain today?), its mood, and the cultural weight which has been attached to it – for this is as good a representation of 1991 indie-dance as you’ll find.

My initial reaction on hearing this, the debut single from Gorillaz, was baffled disappointment; I thought that a cartoon band would sound jollier than this, and I couldn’t match the subdued mood with the sparky graphics. It wasn’t until the second album, 2005’s Demon Days, that the penny dropped and I began to grasp the point of the project, and so “Clint Eastwood” appeals to me more now than it ever did ten years ago. That said, there has always been a certain Late Review/Front Row/Sunday-broadsheet-culture-supplement dryness attached to Gorilla, which prevents them fully working as proper pop, and I’m already hearing it here.

In place of 2011’s real Number Nine (it’s a reissue of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car”, and I make it a rule to exclude reissues), I’ve substituted the track at Number Eleven. My jury’s still out on Beyonce‘s latest female-empowerment anthem; it doesn’t immediately bowl me over, but neither did “Single Ladies” for the first few weeks, and the two tracks do share a certain elemental, schoolyard-chant quality.

Not being previously familiar with the track on which this is heavily based – Major Lazer’s “Pon De Floor” – I shall deftly sidestep any discussions of their relative merits, save to say that my first thoughts on hearing “Run The World (Girls)” was “Ooh, she’s doing a MIA on us” – an impression which its provenance rather confirms.

And so to the voting. Goodness me, has it really been a whole week since I unveiled the Number Tens? I shall endeavour to whiz through the remaining eight rounds a little more efficiently, but – to be frank – I’ve found this a rather uninspiring round to blurb about, despite the weightiness of some of the names involved. Perhaps you’ll find more to cheer or to carp about than I have; I shall wait with baited breath!

CLICK HERE FOR THE SCORES SO FAR.

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Which Decade Is Tops For Pops 2011: the Number 10s. https://freakytrigger.co.uk/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops/2011/05/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops-2011-the-number-10s https://freakytrigger.co.uk/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops/2011/05/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops-2011-the-number-10s#comments Tue, 03 May 2011 22:26:00 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=21068 If you were here twelve months ago, then you’ll know exactly what this is all about. If you weren’t here twelve months ago, then you’ll soon figure out what’s going on; just watch, absorb and imitate, and you should be fine.

But if you do need a quick summary: over the next two or three weeks, we’ll be collectively appraising the Top 10 UK singles charts from this week in 1961, 1971, 1981, 1991, 2001 and 2011. Today, we’ll be looking at the records at Number Ten in each chart; in the next post, we’ll look at the Number Nines, and so on until we reach the top. There will be voting, there will be scoring, and there will be cumulative, decade-against-decade ranking, all of which will be explained in due course.

OK. Ready? Let’s do it!

1961: Where The Boys Are – Connie Francis (video) (lyrics)
1971: Bridget The Midget (The Queen Of The Blues) – Ray Stevens (video) (lyrics)
1981: Lately – Stevie Wonder (video) (lyrics)
1991: Ring Ring Ring (Ha Ha Hey) – De La Soul (video) (lyrics)
2001: Star 69 – Fatboy Slim (video) (lyrics)
2011: Buzzin (Remix) – Mann ft 50 Cent (video) (lyrics)

Spotify playlist (minus De La Soul)

Three years on from her chart-topping debut (“Who’s Sorry Now“), Connie Francis was still knocking the hits out at regular intervals. “Where The Boys Are” (officially a double A-side with “Baby Roo”) was her sixteenth chart entry, and the Neil Sedaka/Howard Greenfield composition is sometimes said to be her signature tune. It was also the theme tune from a beach movie of the same name, set in Fort Lauderdale in Florida, in which La Francis made her acting debut as one of a gang of four girls with contrasting personalities and attitudes, on the hunt for boys in proto-Sex And The City style. (The trailer’s quite a hoot: you can see it here.)

Considering that the film advertised itself as a holiday-themed comedy romp, I’m surprised that its theme tune strove to strike such a lovelorn, wistful tone. If its lyrics had cut a little deeper, or if its singer had sold it a little more soulfully, or if its melody and arrangment didn’t mark it so clearly as a poor cousin of “Blue Velvet”, then perhaps I’d be more sold – but as it is, I can’t suppress a retrospective snigger at Connie’s delusions. (Really, honey? You think you’ll find true love “where the boys are”? In Fort Lauderdale? Hmm, well, good luck with that.)

Having just spent a dispiriting fifteen minutes acquainting myself with his recent renaissance as court jester to the tea party movement, I’m loathe to cut much slack to RayOsama (Yo’ Mama)Stevens and this still-more-mirthless predecessor to “The Streak“. The two tracks shared a couple of common features – the “announcer” format (compere/news reporter), the recurring doofus-with-a-catchphrase (“I dig it, I really dig it!”/”Don’t look, Ethel!”) – but where “The Streak” at least had topicality on its side, “Bridget The Midget” centred its gimmick around that well-worn old trick, the speeded-up vocal (as pioneered by The Goons and Pinky & Perky in the UK, and by Alvin & the Chipmunks in the US). I have a dim memory of a diminutive “Bridget” character gracing the Top of the Pops studio at the time – shoulder length black hair, china-doll face, cherry red mini-dress – but Google’s got nowt, so maybe I just dreamt her up.

Widely regarded as Stevie Wonder‘s last good – if perhaps not great – album, Hotter Than July yielded four British hit singles, of which “Lately” – an excursion into more traditional romantic balladry, which cast Wonder as a newly suspicious cuckold on the brink of heartbreak – was the third. Although its songcraft is hard to quibble at, and Wonder does an able interpretive job, I do question certain eccentricities of the bassline that his musical director Nathan Watts supplies (albeit mixed so low behind Wonder’s solo keyboard that it’s taken me thirty years to fully register its presence). Sure, the jazzily note-bending twangs work fine – but at other times, the notes simply plod falteringly behind the beat, occasionally fracturing into semi-fluffed mini-flurries. But hey, I’m quibbling for quibbling’s sake, and “Lately” deserves a good ranking.

In the corners of the Internet which I tend to inhabit, the continued affection for De La Soul‘s awkward, cranky, spiky, self-consciously expectation-busting follow-up to their classic 1989 debut album Three Feet High And Rising has been a source of some bafflement – although in fairness, I’ve not given De La Soul Is Dead an airing since the year it came out. So, yes, I could well be missing the point – but dammit, I was one of those people who wanted another cheerfully absurdist Daisy Age romp, and dammit, I felt let down! (With this in mind, PM Dawn timed their emergence just right, hoovering us all up by the sackload.)

As the taster single from De La Soul Is Dead, the Curiosity Killed The Cat-quoting sunniness of “Ring Ring Ring” does set something of a false trail – but then again, its narrative (depicting the newly successful trio being besieged by endless demo tapes from pushy hopefuls) is broadly in keeping with the more embittered elements of its parent album. So perhaps we had been warned.

Now then. Is it just me, or is Fatboy Slim‘s back catalogue wearing better than we might have expected? Last month, I found myself enjoying “Demons” all over again (even in the teeth of a guest vocal from Macy Gray), and recent chance exposures to “Right Here Right Now” and “Praise You” mesaurably improved my lunchtime sandwich breaks. And so too with “Star 69”, which shifts its creator away from the strictures of Big Beat, depositing him nearer the Underworld/Chemical Brothers end of the spectrum. Its flipside (“Weapon Of Choice”) might have ended up stealing the limelight, thanks to its award-winning Christopher Walken video, but “Star 69” generated the initial interest and sales, and to my mind it’s the track which still sounds freshest.

In marked contrast to De La Soul’s prematurely jaded take on the pressures of success, the 19-year old Mann seems prematurely in thrall to the bounties which it bestows (I say “prematurely”, as “Buzzin'” is his debut hit, which has performed much better in the UK than in his homeland). As I understand it, the remix’s prime function is to pre-load the track with a typically indifferent (but presumably sales-boosting) guest appearance from 50 Cent – but when you consider that a) Fiddy hasn’t had a major hit under his own steam, in either the UK or the US, since “Ayo Technology” in 2007 and b) that the tiredness of his preamble is instantly annihilated by the freshness of Mann’s delivery, you’re left wondering just who needs whom. I like this a lot, in a transitory, sounds-good-on-the-radio kind of way – but then again, I might be unduly swayed by the copious sampling of the 1986 Nu Shooz hit “I Can’t Wait”, which I hadn’t heard in years.

Blurbs dispensed with, let us proceed to THE VOTING! As ever, you are invited to listen to all six tracks (via the YouTube and Spotify links supplied upthread), before ranking them in descending order of preference and leaving your votes in the comments box. Please also feel free to append your own opinions and observations – although equally, please don’t feel obliged to do so. And when you’re voting, please remember these golden rules:

1) No omissions!
2) No tied places!
3) So far as you are able, please avoid being unduly swayed by nostalgic generational bias!

Let the voting commence! And let the best decade win!

CLICK HERE FOR THE SCORES SO FAR.

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Which Decade Is Tops For Pops? The Results, Decade By Decade. https://freakytrigger.co.uk/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops/2010/06/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops-the-results-decade-by-decade https://freakytrigger.co.uk/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops/2010/06/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops-the-results-decade-by-decade#comments Thu, 17 Jun 2010 17:53:23 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=19139 Finally, the moment of ABSOLUTE POP TRUTH is upon us! And my goodness, what a nail-biter of a contest this has been. Halfway through the voting, two decades broke decisively ahead of the pack, establishing a lead that proved impossible to catch up with. Although one of them looked to have the edge, its rival chased it hard, making up crucial lost ground in the closing stages and ensuring a RIVETING PHOTO-FINISH. Oh yes.

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!

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Which Decade Is Tops For Pops? The Results, Round By Round. https://freakytrigger.co.uk/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops/2010/06/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops-the-results-round-by-round https://freakytrigger.co.uk/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops/2010/06/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops-the-results-round-by-round#comments Sun, 13 Jun 2010 15:12:43 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=19039 Before we get to the final rankings for our six decades, which I’ll be posting in the next couple of days or so, here are the final totals for each round.

Round One: The Number 10s.

246 points, average score 4.82: Kelis – Acapella (2010)
“Great to have her back- a pop star with character seems a bit of a novelty these days” – crag

231 points, average score 4.53: The Undertones – My Perfect Cousin (1980)
“I have a massive soft spot for some of the more absurd rhyming couplets” – jeff w

173 points, average score 3.39: MJ Cole – Crazy Love (2000)
“I am transported via teleportation to a wine bar!!!” – JonnyB

171 points, average score 3.35: The Family Stand – Ghetto Heaven (1990)
“The remix has retained its power via the potent combo of orchestral and vocal grace with street beats” – Steve Mannion

139 points, average score 2.73: The Move – Brontosaurus (1970)
“You can tell the “progression” here is slightly forced” – punctum

111 points, average score 2.18: Steve Lawrence – Footsteps (1960)
“Steve sounds chipper enough but I wouldn’t want those backing singers following me around all day” – pink champale

A strong opening selection made this one of our most well-regarded rounds, quality-wise. It was also our most popular round, attracting 51 sets of votes. Kelis provided 2010 with an early lead, with only The Undertones giving her any cause for concern. “My Perfect Cousin” aside, the rest of the votes in Round One stacked up in exact reverse chronological order, suggesting that maybe – just maybe – pop music has been steadily improving over the past fifty years? It was a nice thought while it lasted.

Round Two: The Number 9s.

230 points, average score 4.60: Sweet Female Attitude – Flowers (2000)
“Like finding a spring flower, perfect, in a cracked vase on a rotting sill in a slum estate and looking beneath the grey gravel to unearth the fields beneath” – punctum

193 points, average score 3.86: Professor Green – I Need You Tonight (2010)
“Hideous production, terrible lyrics, no character at all. Prof Green has access to some of the best beat-makers in the UK right now and the ability to craft better verses than this so why does this even exist?” – Lex

184 points, average score 3.68: Creedence Clearwater Revival – Travelin’ Band (1970)
“It sounds stodgy and, for a rave record, strangely joyless and workmanlike” – Ciaran Gaynor

166 points, average score 3.32: Hot Chocolate – No Doubt About It (1980)
“I would have marked HC a lot higher until it slumped out of the quite taut and intriguing black-science-fiction intro into the chorus” – lørd sükråt

155 points, average score 3.10: Heart – All I Wanna Do is Make Love To You (1990)
“The most questionable lyrics in any song, ever” – Nick

122 points, average score 2.44: Lonnie Donegan – My Old Man’s A Dustman (1960)
“Is there any other great artist whose reputation has been so sullied by their biggest, worst hit?” – weej

In another victory for the contemporary, the 2000s and 2010s scored the most highly here. Sweet Female Attitude’s “Flowers” notched up more first-place votes than any other track in this year’s contest, with over half the voters (27 out of 50) awarding it the full six points. Meanwhile, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Travelin’ Band” earned a higher proportion of first and last placed votes than any other track, making it this year’s sharpest divider of opinion.

Round Three: The Number 8s.

TIED: 173 points, average score 4.02: Elvis Presley – Stuck On You (1960)
“The swagger never quite went away even after he was demobbed, and every Elvis single is an invitation to spend some time with the most remarkable personality you can imagine” – Billy Smart

TIED: 173 points, average score 4.02: Motörhead – Leaving Here (1980)
“Lemmy and pals channel Blues, Punk and Metal like no other band can with energy and infectious “f*ck you” bravado” – thefatgit

154 points, average score 3.58: Toni Braxton – He Wasn’t Man Enough (2000)
“I like the way TBs smokey vocal slips around the syncopated bassline, also the swiss-watch precision of the call and response between the lead and backing vocals” – lonepilgrim

146 points, average score 3.40: Diana Vickers – Once (2010)
“I’d like to hear this song performed by someone who isn’t using Dolores O’Riordan as a vocal role model” – Erithian

141 points, average score 3.28: Soul II Soul – A Dream’s A Dream (1990)
“An exercise in genre — a genre they invented mind you, but still” – scott woods

116 points, average score 2.70: Tom Jones – Daughter Of Darkness (1970)
“Tom’s more blusterous than illustrious here” – Steve Mannion

With just 1.32 points separating the lowest and highest average scores, this was our most evenly divided round. Although Motörhead led the way all the way through the voting, Elvis Presley waited until the very last vote to sneak up on them, resulting in a tied first place. Having lost both the opening rounds, the 1960s now began to fight back in earnest.

Round Four: The Number 7s.

200 points, average score 5.00: Brenda Lee – Sweet Nothin’s (1960)
“The first real indication we’ve had that the turn away from rock’n’roll at the end of the 50s was a good idea as well as a bad one” – Tom

197 points, average score 4.92: Snap! – The Power (1990)
“One of those records that revises your opinion of what a genre of music is capable of” – Erithian

139 points, average score 3.47: Rodney Franklin – The Groove (1980)
“Flick! Lonsdale! Farahs!” – wichita lineman

116 points, average score 2.90: The Hollies – I Can’t Tell The Bottom From The Top (1970)
“I imagine this would work best selling one of those pro-biotic fruit yogurts” – asta

98 points, average score 2.45: Chipmunk – Until You Were Gone (ft. Esmee Denters) (2010)
“I like the fact that you can sing “We’re All Going To the Zoo Tomorrow” over the chorus” – jeff w

90 points, average score 2.25: True Steppers Featuring Dane Bowers – Buggin’ (2000)
“Singin is a little nasal and unconcerned in a very pretty arrangement, though it sharpens up when the autotune starts to wrinkle it” – lørd sükråt

A second consecutive victory for 1960, as “Sweet Nothin’s” became the first of only three tracks to average 5 points or more. “The Power” chased it hard all the way, notching up 21 first places out of 40 compared to Brenda’s 13 – but it was Brenda’s overall popularity that won the day. Uniquely in this contest, none of you awarded her song fewer than three points. As for the hapless 2000s and 2010s, who had started so confidently, True Steppers and Chipmunk brought shame upon the contemporary, lagging hopelessly behind the pack.

Round Five: The Number 6s.

167 points, average score 4.17: Sky – Toccata (1980)
“I was fully prepared to loathe this but found it made me feel quite nostalgic for an age when the charts included music and musos like this” – lonepilgrim

165 points, average score 4.12: Christie – Yellow River (1970)
“I should like “Yellow River”, but all I’m reminded of is schoolboy sniggering as you cross piss streams in the boys bogs” – thefatgit

138 points, average score 3.45: Mandy Moore – Candy (2000)
“Sounds like a randomised version of a Britney Spears song but I’ve heard worse” – DietMondrian

136 points, average score 3.40: UB40 – Kingston Town (1990)
“I think of UB40 as the group fueled by Xanax rather than ganja; this song is coma-inducing” – asta

122 points, average score 3.05: Jimmy Jones – Handy Man (1960)
“It’s interesting to hear how, um, VIVID the song’s original version is, compared to the James Taylor lullaby one I grew up knowing” – Lena

112 points, average score 2.80: Taio Cruz ft Ke$ha – Dirty Picture (2010)
“Is this the first hit song based around the scary barter economy of sexting? Addictively callous” – Tom

By general consensus, this was the stinkiest round quality-wise, as reflected in the close scoring. Sky and Christie were neck-and-neck all through the voting, but the symph-progging Bach-manglers edged ahead of the homecoming Britgummers at the final hurdle, providing us with one of our more startling results. With two wins in the last three rounds, things were starting to shape up very nicely for the 1980s.

Round Six: The Number 5s.

166 points, average score 4.37: The Adventures Of Stevie V – Dirty Cash (1990)
“It’s a halfway through the night song. The club is full, the drinks are kicking in and you know pretty soon the DJ’s gonna drop some Techno/Acid House and we can do that bigfishlittlefishcardboardbox dance” – thefatgit

151 points, average score 3.97: David Essex – Silver Dream Machine (1980)
“Ah! Dear David, lovely *and* brilliant, trying to do something interesting and unexpected with pop” – Billy Smart

132 points, average score 3.47: Sisqó – Thong Song (2000)
“Loses marks for a key change” – lonepilgrim
“One of the best key changes in pop ever” – wichita lineman

127 points, average score 3.34: Cliff Richard & The Shadows – Fall In Love With You (1960)
“COME TO HAWAII WITH ME FOR SOME CHASTE HANDHOLDING” – Al Ewing

TIED: 111 points, average score 2.92: Dana – All Kinds Of Everything (1970)
“THINGS OF THE SEA <— this is what reminds me of you! I would like this uberperky kidsong more if she expanded on this insight” – lørd sükråt

TIED: 111 points, average score 2.92: Aggro Santos ft Kimberly Wyatt – Candy (2010)
“How many of These People have I unfollowed on Twitter for basically doing nothing other than advertise themselves?” – punctum

This is the round where my personal preferences diverged the most sharply from the final scores. The 1990s scored their first win with “Dirty Cash” – my least favourite track in this round – while only two of you fully shared my enthusiasm for Cliff’s “Fall In Love With You”. There was a tie for last place, making it two defeats on the trot for 2010 (now at their lowest ebb) and the first of two defeats for winning Eurovision entries.

Round Seven: The Number 4s.

181 points, average score 5.17: Adamski – Killer (1990)
“Spooky and spooked, beautiful chords” – wichita lineman

179 points, average score 5.11: Blondie – Call Me (1980)
“Frenetic and unapologetic; the usual irony in her voice is really pushed to the limit, though” – Lena

112 points, average score 3.20: The Bloodhound Gang – The Bad Touch (2000)
“A genuinely sweet song – a conversation the singer is having with a lover who’s in on the joke and thinks it’s funny” – Al Ewing
“These frat thugs are wrapping up a truck load of hostility in clever phrases and not very funny imagery” – asta

98 points, average score 2.80: Frijid Pink – House Of The Rising Sun (1970)
“Blessed relief to hear the sound of a grungy guitar again – I think the point was they were trying to destroy the original” – intothefireuk

87 points, average score 2.49: Pendulum – Watercolour (2010)
“These guys routinely demonstrate that they have more in common with Coldplay than Grooverider and have somehow managed to create a dnb formula that’s almost completely devoid of all that was great about the genre in its heyday” – Steve Mannion

78 points, average score 2.23: The King Brothers – Standing On The Corner (1960)
“Don’t backing vox me bro! The smoothies at the front might actually do more than watch the girls if it wasn’t for Idiot King Brother whoopin’ it up behind” – Tom

The two highest-scoring songs in this year’s contest – “Killer” and “Call Me” – both featured in this round, finishing streets ahead of the competition and earning average scores of over 5. Indeed, their domination was so total that between them, they hoovered up all but three of your six-point votes. At the other end of the scale, “Standing On The Corner” failed to earn more than four points from any of you; a distinction it shared with just one other song.

Round Eight: The Number 3s.

160 points, average score 4.71: Plan B – She Said (2010)
“When the modern/old fashioned blend works, it really works. One that we’ll think of fondly in twenty years” – JonnyB

134 points, average score 3.94: Paul McCartney – Coming Up (1980)
“Never as good as you think it is but it shows two of his most endearing sides – chipperness and a willingness to give new things a shot – very well” – Tom

TIED: 116 points, average score 3.41: The Moody Blues – Question (1970)
“This is an infinite loop, the question being asked and love being the question and the answer but where is the love, repeat as necessary” – Lena

TIED: 116 points, average score 3.41: Alannah Myles – Black Velvet (1990)
“Superior Can Con pop-blues although fellow Canadians the Cowboy Junkies might have something to say about the melody” – punctum

103 points, average score 3.03: Craig David – Fill Me In (2000)
“Sometimes I feel like the only person still willing to admit that I like him” – Tom Lawrence

85 points, average score 2.50: Adam Faith – Someone Else’s Baby (1960)
“Pleasant in tone, hiding some backstabby words. This is what the Four Tops tried to warn us about” – Al Ewing

Lousy news for the Sixties, shunted into last place for the fourth time – but a convincing win for the Teens, who badly needed some good fortune after five miserable rounds. The battle was a good deal more closely fought in mid-table, resulting in a dead heat between Alannah Myles and the Moody Blues.

Round Nine: The Number 2s.

155 points, average score 4.84: Norman Greenbaum – Spirit In The Sky (1970)
“I’ve always liked this song’s dopey lope. Have to tune out the lyrics, though” – DietMondrian

122 points, average score 3.81: Anthony Newley – Do You Mind? (1960)
“A fascinating suggestion of a road not taken in UK pop – and far more compelling than Adam Faith’s watered down Buddy Holly. This is more like beefed up Noel Coward” – lonepilgrim

117 points, average score 3.66: Paula Abdul With The Wild Pair – Opposites Attract (1990)
“Cheesy Cheesy; the cartoon version of a cartoon entertainer. Paula’s entire career has been posing with a beat” – asta

116 points, average score 3.62: Fragma – Toca’s Miracle (2000)
“For me, THE song of 2000. Brings back many happy memories of a great time in my life. An all-time dance classic” – RobMiles

101 points, average score 3.16: Usher – OMG (2010)
“The production has managed to exorcise any soul, feeling etc. out of it (if there was any to begin with)” – intothefireuk

61 points, average score 1.91: Johnny Logan – What’s Another Year? (1980)
“Playing What’s Another Year was the first time I’ve felt embarrassed listening to a “Which Decade” song” – grange85

The curse of Eurovision struck for a second time, earning Johnny Logan the dubious accolade of being responsible for this year’s most unpopular song: the highest proportion of one-point votes (over half of you placed it last, and none of you placed it higher than third), and the only song to average a score of less than 2. But where the Eighties hit a late slump, the Seventies managed a late surge, thanks to “Spirit In The Sky”, which became the first song from 1970 to win a round.

Round Ten: The Number Ones.

156 points, average score 4.59: Madonna – Vogue (1990)
“Tapping into, absorbing (or appropriating, depending on your social politics) the moment and making it her own” – asta

151 points, average score 4.44: Dexy’s Midnight Runners – Geno (1980)
“Such intense emotions over such a minor figure” – wichita lineman

144 points, average score 4.24: The Everly Brothers – Cathy’s Clown (1960)
“The Everly Brothers carry the cross of public mortification for us all. Bless them!” – Lena

106 points, average score 3.12: Oxide And Neutrino – Bound 4 Da Reload (Casualty) (2000)
“Comically awful record was my immediate impression, subsequently revised to comically brilliant record” – pink champale

82 points, average score 2.41: Roll Deep – Good Times (2010)
“There’s a fascinating undercurrent of misery and desperation here – everyone in the song is wanting to escape, to forget their miserable jobs, their short lives. Everybody spending more than they earn, because tomorrow we’re probably going to die anyway, so…” – Al Ewing

75 points, average score 2.21: England World Cup Squad – Back Home (1970)
“A really underrated record. Listen to the clever internal rhyming, the way the vocals counterpoint the rhythm” – Erithian

Like the Blondie/Adamski face-off in Round Seven, this was an Eighties/Nineties two-horse race all the way. Although she only finished five points ahead of “Geno”, Madonna bagged 16 first place votes to Dexys’ 8, proving that when you loved “Vogue”, you really loved “Vogue”. After a slow start, this gave the Nineties their third victory in five rounds – but would this be enough to break the Eighties’ seemingly unshakeable stranglehold on the leader board?

To find out, you’ll have to wait until this year’s final “Which Decade” post, which will reveal the overall rankings for each decade. Yes, I know I’m spinning this out a bit. But oh, the tension!

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Which Decade Is Tops For Pops? Round 10: the NUMBER ONES. https://freakytrigger.co.uk/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops/2010/06/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops-round-10-the-number-ones https://freakytrigger.co.uk/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops/2010/06/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops-round-10-the-number-ones#comments Thu, 03 Jun 2010 23:45:16 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=18850 With just one round left to run, the Seventies continue to claw back some of their lost ground. Our leading decade took a knock in the Number Twos, as Johnny Logan notched up the lowest average score of any track to date – but with the voting far from over, all this could change in a heartbeat.

Cumulative scores so far:
1(1) The Eighties – 35.52 points.
2(2) The Nineties – 33.72 points.
3(4) The Seventies – 31.05 points.
4(3) The Teens – 30.01 points.
5(5) The Noughties – 29.53 points.
6(6) The Sixties – 29.16 points.

Mindful of the fact that this is a post about UK Number Ones, on a site that already contains the ultimate guide to the subject, I’m going to try and keep these final blurbs short. Toe-trampling ain’t my style!

1960: The Everly Brothers – Cathy’s Clown (video) (Tom’s write-up on Popular)
1970: England World Cup Squad – Back Home (video: at 3:46) (Tom’s write-up on Popular)
1980: Dexy’s Midnight Runners – Geno (video) (Tom’s write-up on Popular)
1990: Madonna – Vogue (video)
2000: Oxide And Neutrino – Bound 4 Da Reload (Casualty) (video)
2010: Roll Deep – Good Times (video)


(Download the MP3)

While I’m aware of the reverence shown to them by the generation above me, The Everly Brothers have never really floated my boat. Perhaps it’s because I don’t get the premise: two brothers, singing love songs to the same girl? Doesn’t that rather dissipate the emotional impact? That said, I’m not about to quibble with their way with a melody, or with the blue-eyed sweetness of their vocal style. It took me a while to unpack the meaning of “Cathy’s Clown”, as it wasn’t immediately obvious that the fourth line of the chorus switches to reported speech. But now that I’m over the hump, I’ll grant them points for competent songcraft and pleasant delivery. I’m sure they’ll be pleased.

Although the England World Cup Squad‘s “Back Home” sounds as if it belongs in a different musical universe to the rest of 1970’s pop, it was in fact the work of Bill Martin and Phil Coulter: best known for “Puppet On A String”, “Congratulations”, Slik’s “Forever And Ever” and various Bay City Rollers hits. This was the first football record to chart, setting the template for “Blue Is The Colour”, “Good Old Arsenal”, “Leeds United” and Monty Python’s “We Love The Yangtse”, and while I’m not about to make false claims for its artistry, I’ll give it credit for avoiding hubristic triumphalism. The message is “We’ll do our best”, not “We’re going to win”. There is a difference.

Like many people – including the committee of my university’s hall of residence, who duly booked Geno Washington as the entertainment for one of our formal dinners at the end of 1980 – I assumed that Dexy’s Midnight Runners were offering unqualified praise for Kevin Rowland’s erstwhile hero. But the warning (“And now you’re all over, your song is so tame”) was there all along, garbled by Rowland’s diction as it might have been – and if we had but realised, we could have been spared a dismal let-down at the student hop. “There There My Dear” was, for me, Dexy’s Mark One’s finest hour, but “Geno” will do just fine.

(A passing mention, if I may, for its producer Pete “Eighteen With A Bullet” Wingfield, who played keyboards for the Everly Brothers for the thick end of twenty years. Met him once, at a family funeral. Nice chap.)

In the wake of Tom Ewing’s excellent (and Pet Shop Boys sanctioned!) Pitchfork piece on the subject, “imperial phase” has been quite the phrase de nos jours in some of the circles which I inhabit. Madonna‘s own imperial phase reached its pinnacle with “Vogue”, which soundtracked my 1990 more than any other record. Even my partner, who hates clubs and doesn’t dance unless he’s pissed to the point of near-collapse, would ritually make an exception when “Vogue” came on in our local gay fleapit disco. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s the ultimate accolade.

Yesterday, while appending a comment to Dorian Lynskey’s Guardian blog post about feeling on the wrong side of a musical generation gap, I forgot to include a prime personal instance of what-the-fuck-are-these-kids-PLAYING-at bafflement. Strictly speaking,Oxide and Neutrino are the fifth UK Garage act to appear in our 2000 Top Ten, but it seems daft to mention them in the same breath as MJ Cole’s “Crazy Love” or Craig David’s “Fill Me In”. Where Cole offers aspirational sleekness, Oxide and Neutrino offer gunshots, gabble and (ahem) grime, crashing the swanky uptown party with their rough mates. If I remember correctly, the leading lights of the established UKG scene were so concerned at this shifting of the ground that some sort of vetting committee was set up, in order to draw up lists of approved and banned records. And so came the schism, as UKG begat grime, and grime begat…

Roll Deep, from whose ranks sprang Dizzee Rascal, Tinchy Stryder and Wiley (who remains their leader to this day). And guess what? Yup, you’ve got it. Not to be left behind in the breaking-big-and-getting-paid stakes, Roll Deep have “done a Dizzee” (and a Tinchy, and a Chipmunk, and an Aggro Santos, and a Professor Green…), ditching the grime and chucking out yet another (all together now!) club banger.

If I had been writing this blurb three weeks ago, then I would have been making a stronger case for the raucous cheer of “Good Times” – but listening again to these six songs on the train back from London a couple of days ago, I found that its take on clubbing-as-escape-from-the-daily-grind suffered in comparison to Madonna’s more elevated and empathetic approach. Where Madonna speaks of longing “to be something better than you are today”, Roll Deep merely urge you to grab, to consume, to flash your cash and get twatted to oblivion. But hey, if all you want to do is jump around in the middle of Walkabout, in your sponsored T-shirt, on your Carnage bar crawl, then “Good Times” will serve you well.

Over to you for the last time, then. Voting will remain open on all rounds until the end of Thursday June 10th, and I’ll be revealing the final results on Friday June 11th.

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Which Decade Is Tops For Pops? Round 9: the Number 2s. https://freakytrigger.co.uk/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops/2010/06/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops-round-9-the-number-2s https://freakytrigger.co.uk/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops/2010/06/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops-round-9-the-number-2s#comments Wed, 02 Jun 2010 17:59:37 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=18843 After days of stasis, there’s change at last! A good result for Plan B in the last round has reversed the declining fortunes of the Teens, and the Seventies are finally off the bottom of the pile, where they have been languishing since Round Three. This is all at the expense of the Noughties and the Sixties, who are going to need all the help they can get as “Which Decade” approaches end-game.

Cumulative scores so far:
1(1) The Eighties – 33.55 points.
2(2) The Nineties – 30.26 points.
3(5) The Teens – 27.41 points.
4(6) The Seventies – 25.88 points.
5(3) The Noughties – 25.96 points.
6(4) The Sixties – 24.95 points.

And so, with everything still to play for, let us place our Number Twos under the microscope:

1960: Anthony Newley – Do You Mind? (video) (Tom’s write-up on Popular)
1970: Norman Greenbaum – Spirit In The Sky (video) (Tom’s write-up on Popular)
1980: Johnny Logan – What’s Another Year? (video) (Tom’s write-up on Popular)
1990: Paula Abdul With The Wild Pair – Opposites Attract (video)
2000: Fragma – Toca’s Miracle (video)
2010: Usher – OMG (video)


(Download the MP3)

Listen to all six songs on Spotify.

If you’ve got the time after listening to the studio version linked above, then do take a look at this performance clip (titled “Most Promising Newcomer 1960”), in which Anthony Newley cavorts with a bunch of dancing girls (while a couple of on-stage suits mutter that “he’s an actor, not a singer”) before singing a similarly arranged version of “Do You Mind”. It might help to explain his peculiarly downplayed, almost embarrassed studio rendition, as we see the actor-turned-singer adding comically exaggerated hand gestures to his already-verging-on-the-hammy delivery, suggesting that the song’s corniness is rather beneath him.

Corny as the song may be (compare and contrast with Brenda Lee’s deft handling of her own whispered “sweet nothings”, for instance), Newley does succeed in mining it for points of interest (that sudden snap of luv-ya is a cute touch), casting himself as a diffident, buttoned-up Englishman forced into Sinatra’s shoes. Too stiff to swing, he shies away from declaring his romantic interest too forcefully. (When the lyric demands it, the hamminess merely steps up a notch.) As for his handling of the intrinsically cautious title line, I am reminded of George Mikes’ observations of the English from How To Be An Alien, published fourteen years earlier:

The English have no soul; they have the understatement instead. If a continental youth wants to declare his love to a girl, he kneels down, tells her that she is the sweetest, the most charming and ravishing person in the world, that she has something in her, something peculiar and individual which only a few hundred thousand other women have and that he would be unable to live one more minute without her. Often, to give a little more emphasis to the statement, he shoots himself on the spot. This is a normal, week-day declaration of love in the more temperamental continental countries. In England the boy pats his adored one on the back and says softly: ‘I don’t object to you, you know.’ If he is quite mad with passion, he may add: ‘I rather fancy you, in fact.’

Having first encountered “Spirit In The Sky” through Doctor And The Medics’ flashy, irreverent cover version, I find it hard to listen to Norman Greenbaum‘s original without thinking of daft costumes, silly dance routines, and indeed of the glam-rock glitter-stomp (“Son Of My Father”, “Rock And Roll Part Two”, “Blockbuster”, “The Jean Genie” and particularly “My Coo-Ca-Choo”) which its fuzzed-up bluesy shuffle must have helped to inspire.

This does rather distract from the song’s presumably sincere evangelical intent – although lines such as “never been a sinner, I never sinned” suggest a cockiness on Greenbaum’s part (there seems to be no doubt in his mind that paradise rather than purgatory awaits) that could just be satirically meant. Where’s the repentance, Norman? You’re skipping a key step in the process!

Every now and again – 2010 being the most recent case in point – a Eurovision winner is heralded as a victory for the contemporary, which will assuredly “bring the contest up to date”. (They never do, of course.) The false dawn of Johnny Logan‘s triumph is a good case in point, for in the context of 1980 MOR pop, “What’s Another Year” was really rather on-trend. (We’ll hear echoes of its production style in some of Sheena Easton’s ballads from a year or so later, for instance.)

“A winsome fella”, commented Wogan, whose old pal from RTE days (the TV presenter Shay Healy) composed “What’s Another Year”. The song was inspired by the grief felt by Healy’s father over the loss of his wife, and Logan does a decent enough job of conveying a certain measure of that sense of loss. But although the track might have sounded refreshingly modern to the Eurovision juries of 1980, its signature devices quickly palled. Yes, gloopy jazz-sax solo, I’m looking at you.

The premise of “Opposites Attract” – she’s a lady, he’s kinda shady, ain’t it crazy! – is hardly a new one, if you cast your mind back to romantic comedies of the Fifties and Sixties (for some reason, I’m picturing Rock Hudson and Doris Day in matching pyjamas, back to back, arms folded, mugging to camera), but Paula Abdul was fully entitled to update it for 1990, “aided and abetted” by the “lovable” cartoon character MC Skat Kat. It’s chirpy, it’s cheeky, it’s clever enough in its way – and it leaves me absolutely stone cold. Can we leave it there, please?

Oh, mash-up culture, so much to answer for! For every “Freak Like Me”, there has to be a “Toca’s Miracle”, in which Fragma‘s perfectly serviceable instrumental trance hit from 1999 is needlessly plastered over with the vocal line from Coco’s humdrum “I Need A Miracle”. For this, we have to thank a DJ from my home town of Nottingham, who slapped together an illicit bootleg mix that became “big in Ibiza”, leading Fragma to recreate the magic for themselves.

To my ears, there’s something brutally ice-cold about “Toca’s Miracle”. Like “Dirty Cash”, it reminds me of false excitement in crap clubs, with Coco’s artlessly strained vocals striking a jarring, almost desperate note. She’s pretending to feel something – we’re pretending to feel something – and somehow the experience diminishes us all. (Then again, 2000 was the year I retired from regular weekend clubbing, and “Toca’s Miracle” played its part in soundtracking my disillusionment – so feel free to dismiss me as an unreliable witness.)

As for Usher‘s club-banging collaboration with wll.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, I sense we are headed for a sharply polarised verdict. If 1991 was “the year that punk broke” in the States, then it has taken almost as long for electronic dance music to achieve equal mainstream success – but in the wake of Gaga and Guetta, Eurodance derivatives are now big box office, and the scramble to jump aboard the bandwagon is everywhere to be seen.

Most of you approved of Kelis’s similarly inclined “Acapella”, which won Round One of “Which Decade” with ease – but what will you make of Usher’s “OMG”? Are you gearing up to dismiss it as an act of lazy, cynical acquiescence from an artist who should know better? Or do you, like me, welcome “OMG” as a daring, thrilling, joyously life-affirming piece of pow-pow-pow, which has you sighing wow-oh-wow?

And on that note, it’s over to you. Will Johnny Logan and Paula Abdul keep the Eighties and Nineties out in front? Or will Usher hasten the Teens’ advance on the Top Two? Let’s find out together!

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Which Decade Is Tops For Pops? Round 8: the Number 3s. https://freakytrigger.co.uk/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops/2010/05/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops-round-8-the-number-3s https://freakytrigger.co.uk/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops/2010/05/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops-round-8-the-number-3s#comments Mon, 31 May 2010 21:33:07 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=18836 Back after an extended break, we’re finally ready to tackle the Top Three – but before we do that, let’s check the cumulative scores so far:

1(1) The Eighties – 29.20 points.
2(2) The Nineties – 27.65 points.
3(3) The Noughties – 23.32 points.
4(5) The Sixties – 22.56 points.
5(4) The Teens – 22.46 points.
6(6) The Seventies – 21.82 points.

Since the last round was basically all about Blondie and Adamski, it’s no surprise to find the Eighties and Nineties increasing their lead over the rest of the pack. And while it might seem strange that the Sixties have gained a place on the Teens, straight after a round in which the King Brothers are currently placing last, that’s down to some of the late votes that we’ve been receiving in earlier rounds, which have worked in the favour of our 1960 chart.

So, will our Number Threes upset any apple carts, or will they merely confirm the emerging status quo? Let’s take a look.

1960: Adam Faith – Someone Else’s Baby (video)
1970: The Moody Blues – Question (video)
1980: Paul McCartney – Coming Up (video)
1990: Alannah Myles – Black Velvet (video)
2000: Craig David – Fill Me In (video)
2010: Plan B – She Said (video)

Listen to all six songs on Spotify.


(Download the MP3)

Lurking beneath the surface sweetness of 1960 pop, we’re beginning to unearth some right old players: Jimmy Jones and his on-call love-on-the-rebound service, the King Brothers drooling over their “imaginary dish”, and now Adam Faith, preparing to make a move on his mate’s girlfriend and openly relishing the upset that he is about to cause.

Commenting on this year’s Eurovision final over at The Singles Jukebox, I found myself observing – no longer in the full flush of sobriety, it should be said – that Lena, the German singer of this year’s winning entry, had the “strangest enunciation since Adam Faith”. Exaggerated as that claim might be, it does provide me with a tenuous link to another Lena: long-standing citizen of the FT comments box, and author of the fine Music Sounds Better With Two blog (a sister project to Popular, which is reviewing all of the UK’s Number Two singles in chronological order).

Since Lena’s write-up of “Someone Else’s Baby” says everything that I could wish to say about it – and at more length and with more eloquence besides – I hope she will forgive me for lifting a lengthy extract.

“John Barry did the arrangements for this song and their pizzicato insouciance is miles away from the four-square hog-calling no-need-for-microphones from the previous decade. Faith sings this song with a grin in his voice and a very Buddy Holly “bayyyyehby” on his mind (not to mention his pronunciation). Lyrics like “I wonder who’s in the loveseat/Who’s got a heartbeat, like thunder” sounds as if Meatloaf is just around the corner; “If I acted bad/I could steal his fairy queen” on the other hand, is just so English as to be nearly a cliche. It’s a song about wanting another guy’s girl, stealing her practically from his arms – being a cad or a knave, at the least, but Faith makes it sound as if he just can’t help himself and is going to be a love opportunist and have his tryst in his lovenest (or backseat) because he can’t resist the idea of doing the act in the first place. Would Cliff ever be so bold?”

According to BBC4’s archive clip compilation Prog at the BBC, The Moody Blues cobbled together “Question” – the second biggest hit of their career – from the fragments of two other songs which they didn’t know how to finish. This makes for a peculiar structure, as the opening section gives way to a slower passage that you think is going to be an early middle eight, but which turns out to form the bulk of the track. This eventually segues into a reprise of the introduction, so that you’re left with a kind of ballad sandwich, bookended by a protest song.

While this kind of approach can sometimes yield amazing results – “A Day In The Life” springs immediately to mind – “Question” strikes me as a somewhat awkward marriage. Although they share a similar air of doe-eyed, abstracted profundity, the two sets of lyrics don’t fully hang together. If this was an attempt to fuse the political (the opening and closing sections are said to reference the war in Vietnam) with the personal (could the singer be another returning soldier, mourning the loss of his comrades and searching for new meaning in his life?), then perhaps it would have benefited from being less self-consciously “deep and meaningful”. But that’s 1970 all over for you: an era of earnest if well-intentioned overreach, easy to mock with hindsight. Hell, at least they were trying.

Paul McCartney was always fond of his whimisical little genre excursions. A year earlier, on “Goodnight Tonight”, his acoustic-led disco-tinged dabblings had resulted in one of my favourite Wings singles – but as with Hot Chocolate and David Essex before him, the funky disco-pop of “Coming Up” doesn’t quite match up to my memories. Still, John Lennon was reportedly sufficiently inspired by it to come out of retirement and commence work on Double Fantasy, so perhaps I’m being a little harsh.

The track’s light-hearted silliness is emphasised by its video, in which Paul variously impersonates Buddy Holly, Ginger Baker, Andy Mackay, Frank Zappa, Ron Mael and his early Sixties self. In the US, radio stations seized upon its live flipside, which topped the Billboard charts in June. But it’s the studio version which we shall be voting on today.

So unenamoured was I of Alannah Myles‘s sole UK hit, that I never twigged until a couple of weeks ago that “Black Velvet” was in fact a tribute to Elvis Presley. As tributes go, there have been far worse – I still shudder at the memory of Danny Mirror’s 1977 cash-in job, for instance – but “Black Velvet” still strikes me as little more than hack-work, offering scant insight.

“Every word of every song that he sang was for you”, she claims, over an agreeably swampy, bluesy backing that reminds me of contemporaneous offerings by Robbie Robertson and Daniel Lanois. My co-workers at the time thought this was great, and I remember a copy of Alannah’s album being passed between them – but then, we never agreed on much.

Poor old Craig David. Before Leigh Francis turned him into a national laughing stock, he enjoyed a brief period as UK Garage’s golden boy, hoovering up critical acclaim and commercial success alike (and being snubbed at the 2001 Brits for his troubles, despite being nominated in six categories). “Fill Me In” was composed and produced by The Artful Dodger, whose “Re-Rewind (The Crowd Say Bo Selecta)” launched David’s career. It’s a showy yet easy-going affair, blending skittering cross-rhythms with laidback acoustic guitar, and giving David the best possible platform from which to showcase his talents.

Dazzled by his dexterity – the ease, the flow, the effortless discipline of it all – we thought we were witnessing the birth of a major new force. Little did we know that in ten years’ time, he would be flogging a collection of over-familiar soul covers (“with a modern twist”), but them’s the breaks. Poor old Craig David!

Intially, having adored “Mama (Loves A Crackhead)” from 2006, I wasn’t too sure about Plan B‘s relaunch as a pop artist – but once I’d got past the post-Winehouse/Ronson retro-tinged leanings and the oh-oh-oh-oh-OHs, and started homing in on the sparingly constructed courtroom mini-drama of “She Said”, all remaining doubts melted away. Shamefully, Radio 2 have been playing an edit of this track which dispenses with the crucial central rap, without which the song is rendered meaningless. (They’ve been doing the same with the current Keane single, snipping out K’Naan’s rap so as not to scare their listeners with anything so dangerously modern.) But once the rap is factored back into the equation, we’re left with a brilliantly told tale of obsession and recrimination, that casts Plan B’s “Strickland Banks” character as the victim of a spurned and vengeful fan, pleading his innocence in the witness box as the pressures mount up against him. I particularly love the way that the arrangement of the refrain gathers in oppressive intensity as the track progresses, leaving in you in little doubt as to the verdict.

Over to you, then. I’m hoping for a strong showing for our two most recent decades, who could do with a boost as we enter the final stages – but you may well have other plans. Listen carefully, and vote wisely!

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Which Decade Is Tops For Pops? Round 7: the Number 4s. https://freakytrigger.co.uk/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops/2010/05/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops-round-7-the-number-4s https://freakytrigger.co.uk/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops/2010/05/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops-round-7-the-number-4s#comments Mon, 24 May 2010 21:27:08 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=18695 Looking at today’s cumulative scoreboard, we find the Teens – who led the pack for the first two rounds – continuing their gradual slide down the rankings. The Eighties are beginning to look unassailable, the Seventies could be irredeemable… but, as ever on Which Decade, ANYTHING COULD HAPPEN.

Cumulative scores so far:
1(1) The Eighties – 24.19 points.
2(2) The Nineties – 22.54 points.
3(4) The Noughties – 20.54 points.
4(3) The Teens – 20.35 points.
5(5) The Sixties – 20.18 points.
6(6) The Seventies – 18.89 points.

Now let’s open the traps, and bid a cordial welcome to our plucky Number Fours.

1960: The King Brothers – Standing On The Corner (Spotify)
(video: same song, different group) (video: same group, different song)
1970: Frijid Pink – House Of The Rising Sun (video)
1980: Blondie – Call Me (video) (Tom’s post on Popular)
1990: Adamski – Killer (video)
2000: The Bloodhound Gang – The Bad Touch (video)
2010: Pendulum – Watercolour (video)


(Download the MP3)

For the first time this year, I regret to say that YouTube has let us down. For while there’s footage of Essex’s King Brothers (Michael! Denis! Tony!), and similarly arranged US TV footage of the 1956 Broadway show tune which they covered for the UK market, there are – WACK WACK OOPS – “no results” for the two combined. If you have Spotify, then you’re in luck – but otherwise, you’ll have to mentally conflate the two videos, and make what you can of the snippet on the MP3 medley.

I have a dim and distant memory of “Standing On The Corner”, which must have been staple fare on the Light Programme of my early childhood. Perhaps it was played at Sunday lunchtimes on Two-Way Family Favourites; perhaps the Cliff Adams Singers covered it on their nightmarish, never-ending, youth-sapping Sing Something Simple, while I was waiting for Alan Freeman’s Pick Of The Pops countdown; or perhaps it featured on TV light entertainment specials of the day (a Young Generation routine is already forming in my mind).

It could be a false memory, but I suspect that this song evoked some faint, formative homoerotic stirrings. A group of lusty lads in their nattiest gear – maybe with arms carelessly draped across each others’ shoulders – acknowledging their shared but unfulfilled desires? TOTALLY HOT. Hey, it didn’t take much.

These days, the dinky arrangement puts me more in mind of Jack Douglas and Bernard Bresslaw up a ladder, wolf-whistling at Barbara Windsor as she bats them away with a throaty giggle. NOT QUITE SO TOTALLY HOT. But packed with period charm, none the less. Your childhoods may vary. We can’t all be so kinky.

As regards Frijid Pink, whom I had assumed to be a dubious troupe of opportunistic pop approximators of “heavy” from Holland, it appears that I have been labouring under a long-held misapprehension. (I must have been confusing them with Shocking Blue, the original creators of “Venus”.) But as it transpires, their underground proto-punk garage rock credentials are impeccable. From Detroit! Hung out with the MC5 and The Stooges! Who knew!

Perhaps I’ve been blindsided by my acute allergy to “House Of The Rising Sun” – a song that brings me out in hives, in any version. I’m not going to venture a rational justification, but I’ll be interested to see whether my allergy is shared.

Almost all of you are bound to score it highly, but Blondie‘s fourth Number One has never been one of my favourites. For me, this was the point where they lost touch with a lot of what made them lovable – the ramshackle charity shop anti-glamour, the unforced sexiness – in favour of an icily efficient superstar remoteness, purged of wit and heart, signifying the peak of their imperial phase but also perhaps hastening its end.

Blondie and Moroder are an unsatisfying mix here (although Moroder redeemed himself over twenty years later with his addictive-at-the-time remix of “Good Boys”), but perhaps it’s Paul Schrader’s bleakly glossy American Gigolo – for which “Call Me” is perfectly suited as a theme tune, it has to be said – which should shoulder much of the blame, if only for heightening my sense of fearful alienation.

Fearful? Oh, yes indeed. At the age of eighteen, seeing him for the very first time in Schrader’s movie, I thought that Richard Gere was the most sensuously beautiful creature that ever walked the face of the earth – but impossibly, inaccessibly, unlovably, heartbreakingly so. I worshipped his flawless Armani-wrapped ultra-glamour, but feared the territory that went with it, naively taking Schrader’s cruel take on the high life at face value. To say nothing of the scenes shot in a gay club, whose patrons seemed terrifyingly sexualised – but also isolated, desperate, miserable, unable to connect. I had yet to visit a gay club. This put me right off trying.

So, ahum, yeah, that’s why I don’t much care for “Call Me”. If The King Brothers gave me the horn, then perhaps all that Debbie and Richard had to offer was the harsh twang of (failed) aversion therapy.

As with “The Power” before it, we had better move swiftly past Adamski‘s “Killer”, as its time on Popular is not too far away. In the context of the tale I have just told, it works rather well as a successor to “Call Me” – casting Seal as a benevolent interventionist deity, coaxing lonely souls back towards the light. In this context, you could view the uplifting rush of the beepity-beep-introed toytown-piano/doggie-say-bow-wow section (yeah, that bit) as the track’s key transitonal point: its lift-up-thy-bed-and-rave moment, if you will.

Enough for now: it’s time to break with the cover-art pinkness (had you noticed?) and head for something altogether…

bluer, as we eagerly rub ourselves up against the Bloodhound Gang‘s defining work. Loathe as I am to confer too many critical bouquets upon a band whose songbook includes the likes of “Kiss Me Where It Smells Funny”, “I Wish I Was Queer So I Could Get Chicks” (*) and “A Lap Dance Is So Much Better When the Stripper Is Crying”, taken from albums such as Use Your Fingers and Hooray For Boobies, I have to give them this much: “The Bad Touch” is, to every last devilish detail of its immaculate construction, bloody great.

For if frat boy culture has gifted us nothing else (and I’m struggling to come up with examples… Jackass? Limp Fucking Bizkit?), then let the faggoty-ass Kon Kan-ripping magnificence of “The Bad Touch” stand as its towering contribution to the sum of human happiness. From 1960’s “I’m the cat that got the cream” to 2000’s “Do it doggy style so we can both watch X-Files” … how far, how very far have we progressed.

(*) Actually, that one’s almost quite funny. Hyurk.

Aargh crap, it’s bloody Pendulum. I’ve been dreading this one.

OK, let’s start here. Essentially, I’m all in favour of bands who steadily accrue commercial success on the back of their live reputation, blindsiding the more shut-in elements of the critical consensus along the way. Muse and Kings Of Leon are two of the most prominent examples, and Pendulum aren’t so very far behind.

But having seen none of these acts live myself, I have to count myself amongst the blindsidees – and this has a lot to do with why I struggle to get a purchase of Pendulum, on the rare occasions where I’ve been forced to assume a position on them.

(Oh, don’t. Well, do if you like. It’s been that kind of round. Thank God for the F in Frijid, or we’d be here all night.)

Because while I can picture “Watercolour” being an absolute stormer in a live situation – look, I’ve seen Hadouken!, I have context for these things – in the comfort of my lovely home, its tinny emo-and-bass clatter deflects off me like… like… like debris from a pea-shooter, fired at a slumbering giant. (Too barmy? Ah, let it stand.)

“Watercolour” is also a late example of a once common phenomenon: the fan-fuelled high new entry, which sinks after the first week. (In this case, from 4 to 9 to 22.) A statistical blip, rather than a “real” hit. And that, my chickens, is just about all I can think to say about it. Shall we proceed to the scoring? Over to you, then.

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Which Decade Is Tops For Pops? Round 6: the Number 5s. https://freakytrigger.co.uk/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops/2010/05/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops-round-6-the-number-5s https://freakytrigger.co.uk/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops/2010/05/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops-round-6-the-number-5s#comments Fri, 21 May 2010 15:30:19 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=18693 Although our scoreboard currently remains unchanged from last time, the inconclusive voting pattern of the previous round has left our middle-ranking decades in a constant state of flux, and the gap at the bottom of the table is beginning to narrow:

Cumulative scores so far:
1(1) The Eighties – 19.81 points.
2(2) The Nineties – 18.44 points.
3(3) The Teens – 17.44 points.
4(4) The Noughties – 17.42 points.
5(5) The Sixties – 16.33 points.
6(6) The Seventies – 15.56 points.

After the grimness of our last selection, will today’s Number Fives restore our spirits? We can but hope…

1960: Cliff Richard & The Shadows – Fall In Love With You (video: expired link fixed)
1970: Dana – All Kinds Of Everything (video) (Tom’s post on Popular)
1980: David Essex – Silver Dream Machine (video)
1990: The Adventures Of Stevie V – Dirty Cash (video)
2000: Sisqó – Thong Song (video)
2010: Aggro Santos ft Kimberly Wyatt – Candy (video)


(Download the MP3)

Over the last few years, I’ve become a good deal more enthusiastic about going to see “legends” playing live, while there’s still some life left in them. With this in mind, I felt compelled to attend last year’s 50th-anniversary-slash-reunion-slash-farewell-tour by Cliff Richard & The Shadows – just to witness a bit of history, and to cross Cliff of my seen-him-done-that list.

To my delight, Cliff and the boys opted to play it straight, eschewing all expected showbiz cheese in favour of fond, faithful renditions of their joint back catalogue. There were no Millennium Prayers, no Don’t Cry For Me Argentinas… indeed, nothing that was released after 1966. Hank Marvin was a revelation, and the numbers that the Shadows performed without Cliff were the highlights of a superb show. But, just as Mick Jagger has become the least interesting aspect of the Rolling Stones, Cliff proved to the least interesting aspect of the Shadows. Like Jagger, he had perfected all the moves, delivering them in a confident, capable, entertaining manner – but also like Jagger, I sensed a certain void at the core of his performance.

Occasionally, though, glimpses of something more heartfelt would seep to the surface – such as on a touching version of “The Next Time” from the Summer Holiday soundtrack, which topped the charts in 1962 as a double A-side with “Bachelor Boy”. And although the song itself is nothing special, I can hear similar qualities in “Fall In Love With You”. Cliff’s vocal is a delight here: a supine sigh, a velvet-toned and vulnerable swoon of surrender, accented here and there by Hank’s sparing twangs.

If, as someone said in an earlier round, Elvis was turning into Cliff imitating Elvis, then here (and on its accompanying video clip) we find Cliff, not yet fully sullied by Tin Pan Alley acquiescence, drawing continued inspiration from Presley, and sounding really rather marvellous with it.

One of the fringe benefits of shifting “Which Decade” to May is that we get to examine the occasional Eurovision entry – and so here’s the first of two in this year’s selection, courtesy of the first of Eurovision’s pair of victorious Danas. Dana International’s “Diva” famously brought it home for Israel in 1998, while in 1970’s contest, the honour fell to Dana Provincial (old joke, sorry), after a closely-fought battle with the UK’s Mary Hopkin and her sprightly “Knock Knock, Who’s There?”

And what a battle it was! Forget Blur vs. Oasis, forget Joe McElderry vs. Rage Against The Machine, forget Victoria Beckham vs. Sophie Ellis-Bextor… for this was the MOTHER of ALL such showdowns, dividing lovers of Simply Great Music everyhere – and even, on occasion, splitting families down the middle. How well I recall the struggles at the family gramophone, as my younger sister’s copy of “All Kinds Of Everything” fought for airtime against my copy of “Knock Knock, Who’s There?”… you WEREN’T THERE, man, you JUST COULDN’T KNOW.

“All Kinds” might be tweeness incarnate, its debt to “My Favourite Things” barely concealed, but its kitschy innocence still resonates. And, soppy old sausage that I am, I’ll take “dances, romances, things of the night” over “take a dirty picture, take a dirty picture of me”, every time.

David Essex is someone else that I’ve ticked off my see-him-before-he-sods-off list; sharing a bill with David Cassidy, The Osmonds and Les McKeown, he soared above them all, demonstrating a noble dignity that the others conspicuously lacked. His hit singles had a habit of lurching between boundary-nudging artistry and cheerily undemanding froth, and I’m not entirely sure in which category I should be placing “Silver Dream Machine”.

Taken from the soundtrack of Silver Dream Racer, in which Essex starred alongside Beau Bridges and Harry H. Corbett as a dashing motorbike racer of the Barry Sheene school, the song hasn’t worn as well as I had hoped – but typically for Essex, there’s a certain skewed oddness to its arrangement, underpinned by a rather fetching post-Moroder/pre-hi-energy ONG-DINGA-RONG-DINGA synth line. And you can’t go too far wrong with an ONG-DINGA-RONG-DINGA, can you?

I was a bit sniffy about The Adventures Of Stevie V‘s “Dirty Cash” when it came out, and I’ve never really understood why it did so well. Granted, its hook does the job – but there’s a doleful drag to its swagger, which drains it of life. In particular, there’s a fatal instrumental passage – just after the rap – where nothing seems to happen at all, transporting me right back to those dismal, blank moments on club dancefloors when the energy dips, and everyone around you looks a bit grim and a bit lost, and it’s clear that nobody’s much into the track, and you can’t remember why you’re dancing in the first place, but you’re kept in place by inertia and the vague hope that something better will come along in a moment. It’s not a memory that I welcome.

Consequently, I’m at a loss as to why Dizzee Rascal chose to update “Dirty Cash” as “Dirtee Cash” in 2009 – except that in Dizzee’s hands, the track becomes tighter, more purposeful, more provocative and heaps more fun. (We’ll pass over the recently charting Dizzee/Florence “You Got The Dirtee Love” mash-up, as nothing remains of Stevie V’s original composition.)

If, as has become axiomatic, we accept the assumption that 30 years ago = “timeless classic”, 20 years ago = “retro cool” and 10 years ago = “OMG, so naff, what were we thinking”, it would help us to understand why two acts from our 2000 Top Ten – Dane Bowers and Sisqó – fetched up drinking in Celebrity Big Brother‘s last chance saloon at the start of the year. The Reality TV gamble might have paid off handsomely for the Peter Andres of this world – but for the hapless, fifth-placed Sisqó (who largely came over well in the show), the rewards stretched no further than a chart re-entry for “Thong Song” at a lowly Number 97.

Although it would be silly to view it as anything more than a novelty hit, “Thong Song” has a counterbalancing elegance – a grace, even – which raises it a cut above your Lou Begas and your Afromans. I’m particularly taken by the stateliness of the string arrangement: as unlikely as a chamber ensemble in a titty bar, and all the more welcome for it.

One question remains, though. What are these pantechniconal DUMPS, of which our lisping, pint-sized, priapic Lothario so fondly speaks? I’m a man of the world; I know what HUMPS are. (Fergie has them!) But I am a stranger in Sisqó’s universe, and I require guidance.

As if two grime acts gone pop-dance weren’t enough, here’s a third: Brazilian born Aggro Santos, playing Taio Cruz to ex-Pussycat Doll Kimberly Wyatt’s Ke$ha. Once again, mucky photos are our loved-up twosome’s principal stock in trade. Once again, lazy raps and blank, bored, phoned-in vocals are plonked over lurching, juddering electro sound-farts. Once again, “candy” is deployed as a metaphor for slap and tickle. Once again, the influence of David Guetta and Fraser T. Smith looms large (although neither worked on this particular track). And yet, and yet… something about this particular configuration has drawn me into its clutches. It’s arguably 2010’s dumbest track yet – but there’s an unyielding ruthlessness to that dumbness, which I am powerless to resist.

Nevertheless, “Candy” is guilty of breaking one fundamental rule of contemporary pop: Thou Canst Never Sing About The Internet And Get Away With It. (Remember Mousse T’s “Horny”? That’s when the emergency legislation was passed.) Pop music should never reference the internet, just as politicians should never reference pop music (and to close the circle, perhaps new legislation should be drafted, limiting the internet from spouting off about politics).

Also, if you must sing about the internet, then a) don’t indulge in free product placement for bloody Facebook and b) don’t plug your bloody website, especially when all that greets you is a video for the same bloody song. (“Have you been to visit me at Aggro Santos dot com…” YES! I’M BLOODY HERE, YOU TURNIP!)

Sorry, folks. I had less than five hours sleep last night, I was in the office by 6:45, and I’m beginning to lose it. Let’s move on to the voting. Over to you, etc.

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Which Decade Is Tops For Pops? Round 5: the Number 6s. https://freakytrigger.co.uk/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops/2010/05/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops-round-5-the-number-6s https://freakytrigger.co.uk/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops/2010/05/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops-round-5-the-number-6s#comments Wed, 19 May 2010 18:15:25 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=18649

First things first: let’s see how Round 4 has affected the cumulative scoreboard. I’ve put positions from the previous round in brackets.

Cumulative scores so far:
1(1) The Eighties – 15.84 points.
2(4) The Nineties – 14.94 points.
3(2) The Teens – 14.24 points.
4(3) The Noughties – 13.96 points.
5(5) The Sixties – 13.59 points.
6(6) The Seventies – 11.44 points.

So it’s good news for the Nineties, as “The Power” nudges them up a couple of spaces at the expense of the Teens and the Noughties. The Eighties are holding steady at the top, while the Seventies have a lot of catching up to do.

Eyes down for the Number Sixes, then…

1960: Jimmy Jones – Handy Man (video)
1970: Christie – Yellow River (video) (Tom’s post on Popular)
1980: Sky – Toccata (video)
1990: UB40 – Kingston Town (video)
2000: Mandy Moore – Candy (video)
2010: Taio Cruz ft Ke$ha – Dirty Picture (video)


(Download the MP3)

I have two overriding problems with “Handy Man”. Firstly, there’s something fingernails-down-the-blackboard irritating about Jimmy Jones’s voice. It sounds modelled on Sam Cooke, but Cooke’s sweetness is replaced here by an oddly grating quality – particularly on the higher end of Jones’s falsetto, which wafts in and out of focus like the wavering signal on an AM radio dial. And secondly, there’s the whistling, of which I’m rarely a fan – although in fairness, it should be noted that this was a hastily conceived replacement for a flute player who failed to show up.

I’m also a little unsettled by the video clip, in which Jones ingratiatingly skips around – almost in a Freddie Garrity style at times – in front of a sullen, gum-chewing representation of middle American youth. “I’m your handy man”, he chirps – and perhaps that’s how his audience would like to see him, as a happily subservient service provider.

But if this is so, then what of the lyric, in which Jones offers his services as a 24-hour on-call mender of broken hearts? This is a very strange service to be offering the newly dumped daughters of America! And what, pray, is his remedy? “I’m handy with love”, he boasts. “I whisper sweet things, you tell all your friends, they’ll come runnin’ to me!” Quite the player, isn’t he? So there’s a certain subversion here which intrigues me – but it isn’t quite enough to turn “Handy Man” into an enjoyable listening experience.

I have a different set of problems with Christie‘s “Yellow River”, which is so deeply embedded into my memories of 1970 that I experience it almost synaesthetically. Appropriately enough, it makes me think of waterways – and boat clubs, and outboard engines, and dirty-blue reflections of petrol on the surface of a muddy canal. The sense of acute nostalgia which it invokes is mirrored by the intense longing for home which the song’s returning soldier expresses – as if both he and I are yearning to return to a simpler, happier time and place.

The effect it has on me is almost unbearably powerful. I well up; I get shivers down the spine; and I find it impossible to disassociate these feelings from the objective qualities of the record itself. What would it be like to hear “Yellow River” for the first time in 2010? Is it a great pop record, or merely a catchy little period piece of no great import? Well, that’s for you to tell me, isn’t it?

One of prog rock’s more foolish aspirations – and I speak as someone with a great affection for the genre – was the way in which it sometimes seeked to position itself as classical music’s contemporary equivalent. Think of Emerson Lake and Palmer’s assault on Mussorgsky’s Pictures At An Exhibition; think of Rick Wakeman, butchering Brahms on Yes’s Fragile; and more generally, think of the way in which musical technique was prized as an end in itself.

Although not exactly prog in its purest form, Sky represented a logical (ahem) progression from – or reduction of – these ideals. Their aridly flashy reworking of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor is just the sort of thing your music teacher would have approved of, as “a cut above the usual pop nonsense” – and yet if the now barely remembered Sky were indeed aiming for posterity, how cruelly has history served them! “Toccata” barely rises above the level of a theme tune for a TV arts documentary, and while the playing is nimble enough, it’s far from exceptional.

Subjectively speaking, I’ll grant it two redeeming features. Firstly, the drummer once played on a Kevin Ayers album, and so he can’t be all bad. Secondly, my exhuming of “Toccata” has served to unlock a long-held musical mystery: so that’s where Jam and Spoon got the riff for their wonderful 1994 dance anthem “Right In The Night”! I’ve puzzled over that for years!

You can keep your Beanos and your Dandys – my favourite DC Thomson comic was Sparky, and one of my favourite Sparky strips centred around the adventures of Willie Getaway: a short-sighted heir to a fortune, who misread the “WANTED – reward offered!” posters bearing his image as a sign that he was in trouble with the law. Every week, well-meaning members of the public would attempt to flag him down, and every week he would give them the slip.

I was reminded of Willie Getaway when reading the story of Lord Creator, who recorded the orginal version of UB40‘s “Kingston Town”. By the time that UB40’s version was a hit – and it was a massive hit, topping the charts in France and the Netherlands – Lord Creator was living the life of a homeless destitute, unaware of the substantial royalties that were owed to him. When approached on the street by Clancy Eccles, the record’s original producrer, Lord Creator assumed that Eccles was chasing him for an unpaid debt, and fled the scene. Happily, Eccles gave chase. Justice was duly done, and Lord Creator’s fortunes were restored in a way that was always denied to the hapless Willie Getaway.

With this heart-warming tale in mind, I’m inclined to think more kindly of UB40’s fond, if somewhat workmanlike, cover. It must have been galling for them to realise that the only way to maintain chart success was to crank out the covers – “Kingston Town” is taken from their sequel to 1983’s Labour of Love, and one wonders how much the labour had come to replace the love – but there are far worse ways to spend one’s time than by engaging in wealth redistribution operations on behalf of the ripped-off Jamaican heroes of one’s youth, and so I must salute their endeavours accordingly.

Let us now turn to hallowed quartet of so-called “pop princesses” that emerged at around the turn of the last decade: Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Jessica Simpson… and Mandy Moore, charting here with her debut release. I find little to love here: the track is conceived in blatant imitation of Britney, right down to Mandy’s horrible mis-pronounciation of “me” as “maaay”.

My memories of Mandy’s brief reign are mostly centred around an in-flight movie which I half-watched a couple of years later, in which she played an annoyingly perfect “America’s Sweetheart” character. I resented the way that she seemed forced upon us by an invisible marketing committee; nothing new there of course, but these calculations struck me as particularly clinical, and Mandy did little to stamp her own character on her work.

Reviewing the pop princesses ten years on, only Jessica Simpson seems largely unchanged by the passing of time (although I’m no expert, and maybe I missed a scandal or two). Britney flipped out – Christina went DIRRTY – and (oh my goodness, can this be true?) Mandy ended up marrying Ryan Adams, and denouncing her early recordings as “so bad” and “just awful”. And frankly, who are we to contradict her?

As few of you showed much love to Chipmunk in the previous round, I question whether you’ll be any kinder to composer/producer Fraser T. Smith’s second offering, as joylessly intoned by Taio Cruz and Ke$ha.

Smith and Cruz are not without some degree of form – I enjoyed their work on Tinchy Stryder’s “Take Me Back”, for instance – but Cruz’s godawful chart-topper “Break Your Heart” marked the exact moment when I fell out of love with the predominant pop sound of 2009. Truly, it was a club banger too far – and despite some vaguely appealing electro-dance rasping and parping (which pale into insignificance next to the likes of Fedde Le Grand, Mason’s “Exceeder” and the Crookers remix of Kid Cudi’s “Day n Nite”), “Dirty Picture” is scarcely any better.

In its defence, I suppose you could argue that the witless, charmless, endless repetition of “take a dirty picture, take a dirty picture of me” accurately portrays a state of feverishly monomaniacal erotic obsession – but why make the effort, when Taio and Ke$ha have made so little of their own?

Over to you, then. Christie might be a five-star classic in my head, but does it tower over the rest of today’s selections like a colossus for the rest of you? Something tells me that, by virtue of its overall mediocrity, this round is wide open. Let’s find out!

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Which Decade Is Tops For Pops? Round 4: the Number 7s. https://freakytrigger.co.uk/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops/2010/05/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops-round-4-the-number-7s https://freakytrigger.co.uk/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops/2010/05/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops-round-4-the-number-7s#comments Mon, 17 May 2010 21:37:30 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=18593

With three rounds of voting already underway, let’s take our first look at how the six decades are matching up against each other. In accordance with the mood of the times, i.e. in order to make every vote count, I have replaced the hated and discredited “Cumulative Inverse Points” system with the progressive and inclusive “Cumulative Average Scores” system. (This is probably even more baffling to the layman than the old method – but if you’d like it explaining, please see me in the comments box.)

Cumulative scores so far:
1. The Eighties – 12.62 points.
2. The Teens – 11.78 points.
3. The Noughties – 11.72 points.
4. The Nineties – 9.80 points.
5. The Sixties – 8.71 points.
6. The Seventies – 8.37 points.

It’s been a good run so far for the Eighties, who have yet to place outside the top three in any round – whereas the opposite is true for the Seventies, who have been stuck in the bottom three throughout. Meanwhile, it’s neck and neck between the Noughties and the Teens, who are virtually tied for second place.

Time for a new round, then. Let’s take a look at the Number Sevens.

1960: Brenda Lee – Sweet Nothin’s (video)
1970: The Hollies – I Can’t Tell The Bottom From The Top (video)
1980: Rodney Franklin – The Groove (video)
1990: Snap! – The Power (video)
2000: True Steppers Featuring Dane Bowers – Buggin’ (video)
2010: Chipmunk – Until You Were Gone (ft. Esmee Denters) (video)


(Download the MP3 medley)

A child star in the US since the mid-Fifties, Brenda Lee‘s first taste of British chart success came at the age of fifteen, with a coquettish little ode to teen romance that recently resurfaced on the soundtrack of An Education (and very well-placed it was too, as I recall).

As with the Professor Green track, this is dating viewed as a game – and once again, it’s the girl who’s calling all the shots. Brenda plays her hand well, assuming a knowing, somewhat conspiratorial air that masks both her true feelings and the likely depth of her actual experience. Delighting in her beau’s attention, she relishes the newly-found power which it affords her – but still she plays her cards close to her chest, leaving us to wonder just what is being said, and leaving her beau to wonder how seriously he is being taken.

Viewed in this light, the title of the song works as a disingenuous disclaimer, throwing all of us – including Brenda’s anxious mother – off the scent. (“What’s he been saying to you, honey?” “Oh, nothing…”) Nice work, Brenda. You’re growing up fast.

If you’re thinking that there’s something a bit Elton John-ish about “I Can’t Tell The Bottom From The Top”, then you’d be quite right: as an in-demand session player of the day, Elton played piano for The Hollies on this recording, just as he had done for its predecessor, “He Ain’t Heavy He’s My Brother”.

I’ve recently had cause to re-assess my opinion of The Hollies – partly thanks to Marcello Carlin’s fine appraisal of their Greatest Hits collection from 1968 – but at this stage in their career, with Graham Nash departed for CSN&Y and the hired songwriting hacks drafted back in, the band were on the artistic slide.

There was life in them yet, of course – I’ll not have a word said against the magnificent “The Air That I Breathe” – but although this song starts promisingly enough, its chorus slides into a banal juxtaposition of opposites (cloudy/bright, day/night, wrong/right) that instantly puts me in mind of Eurovision. It therefore came as little surprise to learn that its songwriters (Doug Flett and Guy Fletcher) went on to pen Cliff Richard’s second Eurovision entry, “Power To All Our Friends”. Cute in its way, but we’re already a long way from “King Midas In Reverse”.

During the first half of 1980, I worked behind the counter of the Hamleys toy store on Regent Street. For much of that time, I shared a till with a bona fide, card-carrying, burgundy trousered, white-socked-and-loafered Essex soul boy, who was forever championing the latest import tracks, weeks before they charted: Stacy Lattisaw’s “Jump To The Beat”, The Gap Band’s “I Don’t Believe You Want To Get Up And Dance” (later retitled “Oops Upside Your Head”) and Rodney Franklin‘s smoothly stop-starting jazz-funk instrumental… otherwise known as the WANKAH! song.

For according to my source, an Essex clubland ritual developed around “The Groove” whereby, whenever the music stopped dead – as it does no fewer than eleven times in the course of the 7-inch version – the whole club was duty bound to fill the space with a lusty cry of WANKAH! And so, while I’d be amazed if the ritual ever travelled further than my mate’s local disco, I’ve never been able to listen to “The Groove” without inserting a mental WANKAH! of my own, in each and every one of its eleven allotted gaps.

None of this has ever impeded my enjoyment of Franklin’s ivory-tickling craft, though – especially during the rippling solo break, which manages to stay WANKAH!-free for a full eighty seconds. Although never much more than a niche interest, jazz-funk wasn’t unheard of in the charts – Spyro Gyra’s “Morning Dance” and Mezzoforte’s “Garden Party” spring immediately to find – and I’ve always been more than fond.

As it won’t be long before FT readers have a chance to discuss it in detail, I don’t want to say too much about Snap!‘s “The Power” at this stage. Like “Ride On Time” before it and “Gypsy Woman” after it, “The Power” enjoyed a few weeks of unassailable supremacy on all the dancefloors I regularly visited – and so inevitably, we all got a bit sick of it by the end of its chart run. But it has held up well – and better than I had expected, given Snap!’s shall-we-say erratic subsequent output – slotting neatly into the post-Soul II Soul landscape, while paving the way for the likes of C&C Music Factory’s “Gonna Make You Sweat”.

Until his appearance on this year’s Celebrity Big Brother (YES, I WATCHED IT ALL), I hadn’t given Dane Bowers a second thought in years – and yet from 1998 to 2001, both with Another Level, True Steppers and on his own – he was a big draw, clocking up a dozen big hits and collaborating with Jay-Z (*cough*), Ghostface Killah (*splutter*) and Victoria Beckham (*snort*) amongst others.

For the True Steppers phase of his career, Bowers turned towards the UK Garage scene – and much as I am minded to sneer at his opportunism, “Buggin’ Me” is far from disastrous. OK, so it’s no “Crazy Love” (and it’s most certainly no “Flowers”) and Dane’s mopey vocals are admittedly its weakest link – even if his use of Auto-Tune was several years ahead of its time – but really, this is nothing to be too ashamed of.

From pop stars going urban in 2000, to grime MCs going pop in 2010: taking his lead from Dizzee Rascal and Tinchy Stryder’s massive commercial success last year, Chipmunk moves right into the middle of the mainstream with this collaboration (also featuring the Dutch pop singer Esmee Denters), obliterating any remaining vestigial links with the scene in which he first made his name.

The history of pop is stuffed with examples of this kind of unabashed careerism, and aggrieved cries of “sell out” are all part of the ritual, but as sell-outs go, this one feels shabbier than most – more defeated, even. There’s little joy and little life to be found here; instead, you feel that Chipmunk has merely sighed, rolled over and ceded control to his production team (headed by the ubiquitous Fraser T. Smith, whose signature style seems to be swamping British chart pop at present).

Much as I hate to use words like “disposable” in a pejorative sense, I can’t think of a more fitting moment to break the habit. In fact, what the hell, let’s go the whole hog: it’s AURAL CHEWING GUM!

Ooh, I do feel better for having said that. But what do you think? Please leave your scores in the comments box.

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Which Decade Is Tops For Pops? Round 3: the Number 8s. https://freakytrigger.co.uk/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops/2010/05/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops-round-3-the-number-8s https://freakytrigger.co.uk/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops/2010/05/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops-round-3-the-number-8s#comments Fri, 14 May 2010 15:08:44 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=18543

Timely reminder: I’ll be keeping the voting open on all rounds until a few days after we’re done – so if you’ve just breezed in and fancy playing catch-up, there’s no immediate rush. Experience has shown that late votes in earlier rounds frequently affect the final placings, so NO VOTE IS A WASTED VOTE.

Got that? OK, then let’s unveil the Number Eights.

1960: Elvis Presley – Stuck On You (video)
1970: Tom Jones – Daughter Of Darkness (video)
1980: Motörhead – Leaving Here (from the Golden Years EP) (video)
1990: Soul II Soul – A Dream’s A Dream (video)
2000: Toni Braxton – He Wasn’t Man Enough (video)
2010: Diana Vickers – Once (video)


(Download the MP3 medley)

BONUS CONTENT! As we’ve struck lucky on Spotify, here’s a playlist of all six of today’s entries.

Discharged from the US army in March, Elvis Presley was back in the studio before the month was through. By April, his first post-military single was charting, eventually peaking at #3 in the UK. Impressively swift work, to be sure – but what of the results?

The standard critical line on Elvis instructs us that he was “never quite the same” after national service: a tamed beast, sliding into showbiz respectability. Thus it’s tempting to apply this storyline to “Stuck On You”, which does lack some of the unschooled vigour and raunch of his early work.

But if a certain obedience has crept into Presley’s delivery, there are still bursts of fire – most notably when hollering “a team of wild horses couldn’t TEAR US APART”, which in former days could have formed the bridge to a rip-roaring upwards gear shift. But, no: the moment passes, the piano continues to vamp merrily along, and the dear old a-doo-doo-ing Jordanaires ensure that the anchor is never loosened.

How much does any of this matter? “Stuck On You” remains likeable, catchy and fun, and even a tamed Elvis can still sell the hell out of a decent tune.

By the turn of the Seventies, Elvis and Tom Jones were working the Las Vegas cabaret circuit, hanging out together, and ploughing broadly similar artistic furrows. Jones was entering his Medallion Man phase, and beginning to sound faintly preposterous with it.

For how seriously can we take the sweaty “oohs” and “ughs” which crop up towards the end of “Daughter Of Darkness”? How seriously can we take the hammy grandstanding of Tom’s delivery? And indeed, how seriously can we take the song (the work of Les Reed, who brought us “The Last Waltz”, “Delilah” and even “It’s Not Unusual”), which largely fails to build a convincing case against the object of its scorn?

We know she’s wronged you, Tom – but we don’t really know how. Could you be more specific? With Delilah, the charges were clear (even if the rough justice you meted out was questionable, to say the least) – but here, you switch from breast-beating self-pity to finger-jabbing scorn, without actually telling us what went down. More back-story, please!

Back at the end of 1976, Motörhead were mostly regarded as a bad joke. A washed-up freak whose dissolute behaviour had earned him the boot from Hawkwind (no mean feat), playing sloppy, incompetent metal on the toilet circuit – well, who in their right minds would buy into that? Some critics went further, dubbing them the worst band in the world. There was talk of a debut single (“Leaving Here”) on the Stiff label – a catalogue number was even assigned – but the project went tits-up, and few seemed to care.

Three and a half years later, a live recording of “Leaving Here” – a Holland/Dozier/Holland composition, first recorded for Motown in 1963 by Eddie Holland, subsequently covered by The High Numbers in 1964 (before they became The Who), and best of all by The Birds in 1965 (featuring a young Ronnie Wood) – was released as the lead track on Motörhead’s Golden Years EP. Light years better than the slower, clumsier, messier 1976 studio version, its debt to punk rock – and specifically to The Damned – was plain to see, blurring the boundaries between punk and metal. Somewhere along the line, the band had learnt to play – and in this instance, they were rewarded with their first Top Ten entry, and second biggest hit single.

As someone who is emphatically not a metal fan – and yes, I know that Motörhead don’t classify themselves as such, but they’re close enough for me to have given them an equally wide berth – I’m amazed by the greatness of this recording, and my prejudices are confounded by the way it absorbs its influences – early Motown, British R&B and garage rock, thrashy two-chord punk – and channels them into something new and distinctive. We live and learn, eh readers?

Two places above their Family Stand remix, Jazzie B and Nellee Hooper show up again with Soul II Soul, their main operation – and another track which is founded upon that instantly recognisable and ubiquitous downtempo rhythm. You could argue that it was all getting a little formularised (and Jazzie B’s spoken “Voice of God” interludes are beginning to border on the tiresome), but there are still enough added touches – the “I can see right through you” folk-soul operatics which suggest a familiarity with Rotary Connection, the lift from Rose Royce’s “Wishing On A Star” – to move the music onwards, and enough general goodwill towards the band to keep them commercially comfortable.

What I love about Toni Braxton‘s “He Wasn’t Man Enough” is the state of unresolved emotional turmoil that it conveys. Braxton starts assertively enough, setting us up for a typically Millie Jackson-esque love triangle vignette, in which the wronged woman heaps scorn upon her successor. But as the song progresses, the singer’s true emotions seep through, undercutting her bravado with flashes of raw pain, and giving the lie to her attempts at screw-you-sister attitude. I’d never particularly rated Braxton before, but this is a masterful performance.

Set against the energy of Motörhead, the class of Soul II Soul and the passion of Toni Braxton, poor old Diana Vickers can only suffer by comparison. As with Ellie Goulding before her, the single’s over-glossy production sheen does Diana no favours – and although “Once” boasts an A-list songwriting pedigree, being co-written by Cathy Dennis (“Can’t Get You Out Of My Head”, “Toxic”, “I Kissed A Girl”) and Eg White (“Leave Right Now”, “Chasing Pavements”, “Warwick Avenue”), the song fails to fully engage.

That said, “I’m only gonna let you kill me once” is a well-chosen hook for Diana’s intriguingly skew-whiff performance style, and it’s heartening to see her make good on the promise she displayed on 2008’s X Factor. I’d just hoped for something a bit more special, that’s all.

Over to you. The Sixties have been tanking thus far, but could Elvis restore their fortunes? 2010 has been doing best of all, but will Diana Vickers impede its progress? Two rounds in, The Eighties and Noughties are tying in second place, and both have fielded strong candidates in today’s draw – so where will this leave the scoreboard at the end of Round Three? Vote wisely!

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Which Decade Is Tops For Pops? Round 2: the Number 9s. https://freakytrigger.co.uk/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops/2010/05/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops-round-2-the-number-9s https://freakytrigger.co.uk/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops/2010/05/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops-round-2-the-number-9s#comments Wed, 12 May 2010 20:53:11 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=18514

Historical background note: Phase One of “Which Decade”, which ran for seven years on my old blog, was nearly always timed to coincide with my birthday week in mid-February. So I’m glad that Phase Two has shifted to May – partly because February’s charts tend to suffer from the back end of the post-Christmas dip, but mainly because they rarely capture the musical essence of the forthcoming year, which usually takes a little longer to define itself.

Looking at Monday’s opening selections, all of which possess at least some discernible measure of merit, it looks as if the decision might have been justified. But as we count our way up our six Top Tens, will quality prevail? Only one way to find out! Let’s wheel out the Number Nines.

1960: Lonnie Donegan – My Old Man’s A Dustman (video) (Tom’s post on Popular)
1970: Creedence Clearwater Revival – Travelin’ Band (video)
1980: Hot Chocolate – No Doubt About It (video)
1990: Heart – All I Wanna Do is Make Love To You (video)
2000: Sweet Female Attitude – Flowers (video)
2010: Professor Green – I Need You Tonight (feat. Ed Drewett) (video)


(Download the MP3 medley)

He might have made his name as the King of Skiffle, but twenty-one chart entries down the line, Lonnie Donegan had begun to sound a lot more music hall – doubtless to the dismay of the purists, but when did chart pop ever give two hoots about what they thought?

Fittingly, the song was recorded in front of a live audience – and I’m proud to report that the venue in question was the Gaumont cinema (later renamed the Odeon) in my home town of Doncaster. (I’d love to know whether my dear old Dad knew anyone in the audience, but I never thought to ask.) Twelve years later, Chuck Berry deployed the same tactic with “My Ding-A-Ling”, which was recorded live in Coventry – and eight years after that, a live recording at the very same venue topped the charts for The Specials. But I digress.

What bugs me the most about “Dustman” – and Lord knows, there’s a long enough list to choose from – is the way that it so blatantly signposts its punchlines, as both performer and audience build up to crescendos of forced mirth that explode over the song like a salvo of sneezes. Perhaps that was the tradition – but oh, how grating it sounds to modern ears.

There is one moment that does tickle me, though, and you’ll hear it on the MP3 medley. It comes at the end of the intro, when a lone audience member shrieks with laughter at the word “flipping”. Ooh-er missus! Sounds a bit RUDE! I’m so glad it’s not 1960 anymore.

And speaking of the bafflingly dated: what was it about the amiable but unremarkable bar-room boogie of Creedence Clearwater Revival‘s “Travelin’ Band” that sent it scuttling into so many Top Tens around the world? I’ve nothing against amiable bar-room boogie per se – although I prefer its toughed-up mid-Seventies pub rock mutations, from the likes of Eddie & the Hot Rods and Dr Feelgood – but as an actual song, “Travelin’ Band” is slight stuff indeed.

Not to mention derivative; its similarity to Little Richard’s “Good Golly Miss Molly” gave rise to a threatened lawsuit, which was settled out of court. Can’t say I noticed the resemblance myself, but my partner spotted it instantly, and without any prompting.

The bafflement continues! I’ve never fully understood how Hot Chocolate managed to sustain their hit-making career for so long, notching up twenty-five hits over fourteen years, given their seeming lack of any identifiable fan base. I’ve never met a Hot Chocolate fan, and I’m not convinced they ever existed in any significant numbers. Did any form of anticipatory buzz surround their releases, or were they only ever as good as their last hit, perpetually having to prove themselves anew with every single? And if this was the case, then did this free them from the pressures of stylistic consistency, as their eclectic run of hits would suggest?

Here in May 1980, we find them flirting with sci-fi lite, like The Real Thing (“Can You Feel The Force?”) and Sarah Brightman (“I Lost My Heart To A Starship Trooper”) before them. Aliens and spaceships and related extra-terrestrial matters were a big deal at the time (the first Star Trek movie was still big at the box office, and The Empire Strikes Back was due out at the end of the month) and so the band picked its moment well – but once again, I’m fair itching to type the “dated” word.

Perhaps you’ve just caught me in a particularly jaded mood, but my memory of “No Doubt About It” – as a burbling, surging disco-pop curio – fails to match the somewhat strained and limping track which I hear today.

Oh crap, it’s a bloody power ballad. This isn’t going to lift my spirits one little bit, I fear. And yet, and yet… despite a long-held and unyielding aversion to the form, I find myself warming to Heart‘s hoary old schlock in a most peculiar way. Perhaps it’s the Glee effect, as I enjoyed the show’s reworking of Heart’s first UK hit “Alone” – very much against my better judgement, but that’s Glee for you – or perhaps I’m finally on the verge of shedding an unhelpful prejudice. That said, I do feel that the song would be improved by an uplifting Eurodance/NRG cover version – but wouldn’t they all?

(UPDATE: I have found an uplifting Eurodance/NRG cover version! But it isn’t very good! Oh well!)

But my main suspicion with Heart – and I have much the same problem with Starship – is that they were never really committed to the genre in which they found themselves operating, choosing commerical pragmatism over artistic preference. So it’s interesting to find this quote from Ann Wilson, who sings the track, in the liner notes for a 1995 live album: “Actually we had sworn off it because it kind of stood for everything we wanted to get away from […] but there was a lot of pressure on us to do the song at the time.” If that’s the case, then all credit to her for turning in a credible performance, cast in the role of baby-hungry hitchhiker-picker-upper. (No, I never listened that closely to the lyrics before, either. Surprising, isn’t it?)

Happily, there’s nothing remotely dated about Sweet Female Attitude‘s lone hit, which sounds as every bit as life-affirmingly glorious today as it did ten years ago. One of UK Garage’s finest ever moments, this is difficult for me to talk about without defaulting to dribbling gush – but I love its freshness, its urgency, its drive, its innocence, its spontaneity, and most of all its overwhelming sense of joy. I also like the contrast between the roughness of the rhythm track and the unforced sweetness of the vocals, and the way that the tumbling vocal cut-ups propel the track forwards.

Of the various mixes, the Sunship Edit was the one which got all the airplay, and frankly it’s the only one you need. Six points all round, then? Please don’t let me down.

Although I’m banking on unanimous love for “Flowers”, I’m a good deal less certain as to which way you’ll bend for our 2010 selection. On the evidence of “I Need You Tonight” (for I am a stranger to his earlier work), Professor Green is the sort of chirpy cheeky cockney chappie to whom many of you might well take violent exception – but I find myself mostly won over by his shtick.

The track is a cutely turned comic fable of come-uppance, with Green cast as the player who gets played right back. And “play” is the operative word here; this is dating viewed purely as a game, which leaves Green strolling away with a shrug and a grin and a can’t-blame-a-boy-for-trying attitude. The phone conversation at the start of the track is nicely done, as is Green’s disclaimer at the end – and while nothing particularly clever is achieved with the INXS sample that runs all the way through the track, the riff is still strong enough to withstand the repetition. Sure, it’s more Just Jack than Jay-Z – but there’s room for that, isn’t there?

Over to you, then. Kelis and The Undertones have pulled decisively ahead of the pack in Round One, with Steve Lawrence and The Move still battling it out for last place – but will this be a tighter race? Does Lonnie make you laugh? Is there room in your bar room for Creedence’s boogie? Are you that Hot Chocolate fan? Do power ballads float your boat? Does 2-step make you quickstep? (Look, it’s been a LONG DAY and I have a HANGOVER.) Or has Professor Green mapped your personal emotional landscape with almost unbearable accuracy? Tell me, do!

(Note: As before, I’ll keep a running total of the scores in the first comment of this thread.)

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Which Decade Is Tops For Pops? Round 1: the Number 10s. https://freakytrigger.co.uk/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops/2010/05/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops-round-1-the-number-10s https://freakytrigger.co.uk/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops/2010/05/which-decade-is-tops-for-pops-round-1-the-number-10s#comments Mon, 10 May 2010 20:41:17 +0000 https://freakytrigger.co.uk/?p=18475

Hello! I’m Mike Atkinson, and over the course of the next three or four weeks, I’ll be overseeing an IMPORTANT EXPERIMENT IN PARTICIPATIVE DEMOCRACY, right here on Freaky Trigger. If you’ve ever visited my old blog during the month of February, then you might be familiar with the procedures – but with a new decade underway and the old blog sinking into disrepair, it felt like the right time to move operations to a new home (and arguably its natural home), and to start the process all over again from scratch.

If you’re new to the game, then this is what’s going to happen. I’ll be taking you on a guided, step-by-step excursion through the Top Ten UK singles from this week in 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000 and 2010. Today, we’ll be looking at the singles at Number Ten in each chart. In two days’ time (all being well), we’ll examine the Number Nines… and so on, until we reach the Number Ones.

I’ll be providing YouTube links throughout, as well as a brief memory-jogging MP3 medley, containing roughly thirty seconds from each of that day’s six tracks.

At the end of each post, you will be invited to rank the six tracks in descending order of preference. I’ll be totting up your votes (using an inverse points system, but let’s not sweat the details just yet) and providing running totals at regular intervals.

As we step through the chart positions together – day by day, place by place, from the Number Tens to the Number Ones – your scores will be accumulated into running totals for each decade. So when we get to the end of the exercise, we will have SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN which of our six decades – the Sixties, the Seventies, the Eighties, the Nineties, the Noughties or, um, this one – contains the GREATEST POP MUSIC OF ALL TIME.

Now, if you’re thinking that the whole exercise sounds a bit arbitrary – for how can ten songs in one given chart, in one given year, be in any way representative of a whole decade? – then fret not, for next May we do the whole exercise all over again, looking at the Top Tens for 1961, 1971, 1981 etc etc. And then we combine this year’s scores with next year’s scores, and the scores from the year after that, and so on for the next ten years (oh yes!), until we have accumulated grand totals for each decade. So think of today’s inaugural post as merely the first tentative step on a Grand Quest for ABSOLUTE POP TRUTH.

Excited, much? Then let’s press on with Round One, in which we look at this week’s Number Tens from the past six decades.

1960: Steve Lawrence – Footsteps (video)
1970: The Move – Brontosaurus (video)
1980: The Undertones – My Perfect Cousin (video)
1990: The Family Stand – Ghetto Heaven (video)
2000: MJ Cole – Crazy Love (video)
2010: Kelis – Acapella (video)

(Download the MP3 medley)

And so to my unshakeable earworm of the past four weeks, courtesy of Steve Lawrence. Every time my thoughts turn to the Which Decade project, my mental jukebox invariably cues up the opening refrain of “Footsteps”, whether or not I wish to be reminded of it – and now (hah!) it’s your turn to be similarly plagued.

What strikes me first about “Footsteps” (once I’ve accepted its presence in my brain for the next hour or so) is its musical simplicity. The repeated ascending modulation of its opening refrain sounds a bit like something you might have been given for piano practice, reminding me in turn that sheet music sales would still have been a significant factor in the popularity of many hit songs. Easy to score, easy to learn, easy to play – but to modern ears, does the easiness merely translate as triteness?

That aside, what strikes me most about “Footsteps” is the way that the rinky-dink backing vocals almost threaten to upstage the lead singer. We got this a lot in the Tin Pan Alley pop of the early Sixties – Helen Shapiro’s “Walking Back To Happiness” immediately springs to mind – and I’m a sucker for such campy charms. Close your eyes, and try to imagine a chorus line of chickens from The Muppet Show parading across the screen, clucking away in unison, or perhaps Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise, vamping behind their special guest of the week, or… OK, suit yourselves. Shall we move on?

Ten years on, has The Riff supplanted The Tune as chart pop’s compositional foundation stone? The Move have cropped up twice before on Which Decade – with “Fire Brigade” two years ago, and with “Blackberry Way” last year – but they’ve never sounded quite this heavy before.

Well, I say heavy – and in 1970, at the tender age of eight, I certainly thought that The Move were as heavy (and indeed as hairy) as heavy could possibly get – but in truth, this is a pop approximation of “heavy”, and not a very able or convincing one at that. Granted, the riff has all the lumbering qualities of the titular prehistoric beast itself – but really, that’s the problem. Where a good riff should soar, this riff can only plod. There’s a bit of an attempt at a “freak-out” near the end, but one senses that the band’s hearts aren’t fully in it. Even more than “Blackberry Way”, this feels like a stylistic excursion rather than a statement of musical belief – and we can’t have that from our hairy heavy rockers, can we?

Just as I have finished waffling on about the dwindling simplicity of early 60s tunesmanship, up pop The Undertones, ready to challenge my assertions. After all, tunes don’t come much simpler than “My Perfect Cousin” – against which “Footsteps” looks positively baroque.

Thus did the post-punk pendulum swing, affording exposure to those acts who could best make a virtue of the New Simplicity – and of those acts, there were few better exponents than Feargal Sharkey’s bunch. But most winningly of all, “My Perfect Cousin” is rooted in the everyday realities of its audience, depicting an instantly recognisable slice of life as it was actually being led.

And best of all from my perspective, “My Perfect Cousin” describes – with near-faultless accuracy, right down to the bloody Christian name, if you please – the affectionately competitive dynamic between my life partner of five years’ hence and his younger cousin from the house next door. He thinks that I’m a cabbage, because I hate University Challenge… like, how did these people KNOW?

Although obliged to put The Family Stand‘s original version on the MP3 medley, as it was the only version I could legally source (for yes, every 30-second snippet has been acquired without recourse to piratical means), my memories of “Ghetto Heaven” are all centred around the superior Jazzie B/Nellee Hooper remix, which was also the lead track on both the 7-inch and 12-inch versions. (You’ll also find this version on the YouTube link.)

Following Soul II Soul’s massive success in 1989, their downtempo, tough-but-mellow signature sound was ubiquitous for much of 1990. Or at least it was in our house, as I made it my personal mission to snaffle up every last mutation thereof – yea, even unto dodgy cash-ins such as the cover of “Loving You” by Massivo featuring Tracy. (I’m not proud. But such were the times.) But “Ghetto Heaven” was always a class apart, so it has been great to dig the 12″ out of the attic and languish once more within its smoking groove.

All of which leads us nicely into the equally classy mellowness of MJ Cole‘s track, which exemplifies the smoother, more song-based, more overtly soulful, and arguably more aspirational end of the 2-step/UK Garage spectrum.

Touching on my original thesis for a moment, there’s an effortless intricacy to the construction of “Crazy Love” which – in my opinion – places it far in advance of the likes of “Footsteps”, suggesting that pop’s overall progression might indeed have been an upwards one. And I could never quite get a purchase on that skittering 2-step rhythm, whose lack of obvious four-to-the-floor kick came as such sweet relief in an age which had become suffocated by the diminishing returns of Ibiza Trance. (There may be more examples of this to follow, by the way – but let’s not indulge in spoilers.)

And to close today’s entries, let’s go out with an absolute walloping belter. Back in the UK Top Ten for the first time in three years, Kelis sounds fully, thrillingly contemporary once again, with a track that has all the forward-thinking, shock-of-the-new impact of “Milkshake” and “Caught Out There” before it. An electronic club banger about motherhood, you say? Well, why ever not? For if there’s one thing I like better than a forward-thinking, shock-of-the-new electro club banger, it’s a forward-thinking, shock-of-the-new and emotionally affecting electro club banger.

Over to you, then. Take a good listen to these six tracks. Take several good listens, if you need to. And then, in the comments box, please arrange them in descending order of preference, i.e. starting with your favourite and working down.

When voting, please remember these three golden rules.
1) No omissions!
2) No tied places!
3) As much as you are able, please vote on merit, rather than being overly swayed by nostalgic generational predispositions!

Have fun! (Oh, and rest assured: voting for each round stays open right the way through to the end of the whole extended caper, so there’s no immediate hurry.)

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE SCORES SO FAR.

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