I’m pretty sure the music charts are now effectively dead. Although they still exist, I get the impression nobody pays much attention to them nowadays. It’s hardly worth mentioning that the ways we listen to music nowadays means that the charts mean nothing. Just another example of the loss of a significant unifying plank in our national life.
Then again, they were always at heart a commercial gimmick. They didn’t reflect quality of music and were in a way a cynical, essentially capitalist form of marketing. That said, the same could be applied to the ‘New York Times’ bestseller list without detracting from the quality of the novels on it, which I naïvely assume to be good. I also wonder if my loss of interest in the charts is an artifact of my age. Did I get past them just because I grew up?
Another aspect of this is that the music charts represent an incongruous juxtaposition of the cool and the nerdy. More recently, with the rise of video game popularity and the ubiquity of IT, distinction between the two has blurred, but there was a time when coolness and nerdiness were diametrically opposed, and this was the case during the bulk of the charts’ history and popularity. There’s an air of neurodiversity about being keen on knowing stats about the hit parade which doesn’t sit well with the socialising, emotional resonance and dancing associated with pop music. Sometimes I wonder what nerdiness actually is. Sitting on a train platform collecting numbers from engines is definitely “nerdoid”, but is it really that different from paying close attention to how many weeks a single spends in the charts or at number one, how many number one singles a particular artist has and what quality releases got stuck at number two? Sometimes it seems there’s a côterie of cool kids who somehow get to decide where to draw the border around their coolness, and if something within that border happens to be neurodiverse, so be it. But I don’t know what the process is whereby a nerdy thing infiltrates the apparently impregnable Fortress of Cool.
The idea of music charts seems to have begun with the advent of the Billboard hit parade in the 1930s. It seems quite startling that they go back that far. In fact they might even go back quite a bit further, as there was apparently a time when the sales of sheet music were noted in this way, before there was even recorded sound. This was an exclusively American thing at the time, and it took a couple of decades for the British charts to be established. This means it is kind of possible to extend things way back before December 1952 CE and guess what was popular before then, assuming that US companies marketed records in Britain and vice versa. To be honest, I don’t know whether that’s true. There was of course a British Invasion in the 1960s, but I’m not sure how many British acts were popular over the pond before that. That in itself is a nerdy chart fact, and the answer appears to be that Vera Lynn got into the Billboard Hot 100 in July 1952 with ‘Auf Widerseh’n Sweetheart’, and I presume this means she was also popular with that single over here shortly before. Comparing the UK and US charts over the years, there’s a fairly unsurprising phenomenon where a hit becomes popular in one country a few months before entering the charts in the other. This means that the Zeitgeist of music tends to be blurred and come across as slightly incongruous if you’re paying attention. It can mean, for example, that an American single reached number one in Britain the year after it did so in the US, and the same thing happens the other way round, meaning that the associations one has with a particular year are different. This also provides a time span of a few months for the Zeitgeist, which could actually be measured and averaged. The same process presumably applies with other pairs of countries. As I type this, Men At Work comes particularly to mind.
As far as one’s individual perception of hit singles is concerned, this might depend on the media whereby one received the news. I have never read NME or Melody Maker and presumably those who did would’ve been aware of the goings on in the lower parts of the Top 100 whereof I was entirely ignorant, but because of the likes of Janice Long, John Peel and Anne Nightingale, I would’ve heard many of those singles along with many others, particularly on John Peel and ‘Walters’ Weekly’, which never got anywhere, without being aware of what was popular and well-known. This also gives singles a longer lifetime than some of us were aware of. For me the main sources of information were the Radio 1 Top 40 programme, Tommy Vance’s American charts and of course ‘Top Of The Pops’. I got the impression that I was actuall rather uncool for focussing on these sources, and to be a proper fan of music you really had to be reading every issue of NME. However, like most younger teenagers I didn’t have much disposable income so that was never going to happen unless my priorities were very different. I was also aware that I was much more focussed on the singles charts than the albums, and also on the main charts rather than the sub-genres. This kind of made me less of a proper music fan and more of a wannabe. I don’t know if this matters. Presumably if you are actually a musician, and being from Canterbury I was surrounded by musicians and there were several bands in my 200-member sixth form, you can be into music in a different, more discerning and more informed way than I was. This, actually, seems to lead to a different kind of appreciation for pop music, where it isn’t so much about snobbishness relating to sub-genres as to do with recognition that a particular artist is doing what they set out to do well and also their skill and creativity, to the extent that powerfully uncool bands are sometimes appreciated by the apparently cool. There is a famous incident which remains unexplained in this connection. Peter Cetera, in the music video to the very formulaic and schmalzig 1985 (1984 in the US – see what I mean?) hit ‘You’re The Inspiration’, wears a Bauhaus T-shirt! What does this mean? The two styles of music are poles apart. My conclusion, drawn on this and some other evidence, is that the side the public saw was carefully controlled and packaged by the marketing bods, but on the other side of the veil something else is going on, and there was mutual respect among artists, or perhaps identical levels of cynicism. Somewhat similar clues to the reality exist in the very clear ‘eightiesification of Wham and George Michael’s loss of creative control in 1982. The first two singles are utterly unlike the others. Duran Duran seem to have gone through a similar process but did better out of it, and I vaguely remember something really weird happening in the late ’60s involving Bob Dylan’s support band being The Monkees or something. This makes me feel like pop music used to be packed into a tiny shell like the Universe at the Big Bang, then exploded and ended up with loads of styles which could never meet again. Also in connection with the Big Bang is an aspect of my playful Beatles-related cosmology, that they invented so many things that they defined the genre and it’s like the remnants of the sound waves produced by the Big Bang itself whose traces can still be seen in the voids and superclusters of galaxies in today’s Universe.
Speaking of the Beatles, I must’ve been in the ’60s because I can’t really remember them. I have two frustrations regarding the 1960s. One is that I can’t remember the 1969 Apollo 11 mission, although my father used to have reel-to-reel tape recordings of the radio traffic so that I have heard. The other is that I am very close indeed to being able to remember the Beatles before they split up, but can’t quite do so. The first number one single I can remember is Rolf Harris’s ‘Two Little Boys’, which entered the charts on 16th November 1969 and got to number one on 14th December. I do also remember other records from the same time, such as ‘Sugar Sugar’, ‘Ruby Don’t Take Your Love To Town’ and ‘I’ll Never Fall In Love Again’, and there’s also a weird anomaly I’ll get to in a bit, but I don’t remember ‘Let It Be’, which was released three months later. I do remember ‘Something’, but I don’t think I knew it from the time it was released. In fact the only “normal” Beatles song I remember at the time, rather oddly, is ‘The Long And Winding Road’ from July 1970. I say “normal” because of the two tracks which were heavily slanted towards being appreciated by younger children, ‘Yellow Submarine’ and ‘An Octopus’s Garden’, which anyone of a certain age will remember in the same way as they’d remember Ted Atking’s and Alain Feanch’s ‘Children’s Carnival’ or Hot Butter’s ‘Popcorn’. The latter is 1972 but the former I can’t place although I think it’s earlier. ‘Yellow Submarine’ was from August 1966 but was presumably incessantly played to children for years afterward, and ‘Octopus’s Garden’ isn’t even a single!
About the anomaly. I can’t explain this at all but it intrigues me. I seem to have a reminiscence bump for pop music dating from May 1967 even though I wasn’t born until the end of July. I seem to remember the following singles as current rather than from replays or as oldies: ‘Don’t Sleep In The Subway’, ‘Puppet On A String’, ‘If I Were A Rich Man’, ‘Music To Watch Girls By’ and possibly ‘Edelweiss’. Looking at the top 35 from 25th May 1967, there are of course plenty of other singles I know from later, but to me those four singles seem to be actual memories at first play. I’m not sure what to make of this. I’m aware that the fetus is able to hear from just over five months because our daughter jumped around a lot in response to fireworks in November 1993, and there are ultrasound scans of fetuses kicking along to the rhythms of percussion, so that does happen, but I also thought that at that time senses were blended – synæsthesia. This means I ought not to remember how they actually sounded because I wouldn’t’ve experienced them as sounds. I do, however, remember them as muffled. My brother is unusual in having survived being twelve weeks premature in 1973, so this might go some way towards explaining what happened. I doubt I’ll ever get an answer to that mystery. Looking at other singles from before July 1967 doesn’t yield the same kind of familiarity, including July itself. There’s just that one little island of apparent memory.
My earliest memories of pop music apart from those were that they were just tunes which were kind of “around”. I wasn’t aware that they were new or old, just that I heard them. One of the earliest is ‘Knock Three Times’ by Tony Orlando and Dawn. For years I though Dawn was a person! A particularly traumatic memory for me was ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’, sung by Middle Of The Road in October 1970, when I was worried about my mother disappearing forever and waking up in the morning to find her gone. This was because she was in and out of hospital at the time. Both of these are from autumn 1970, when I was staying with my grandparents while she was in hospital and my uncle, who still lived with them at the time, was listening to them on the radio a lot. It may or may not have been Radio 1. I can also remember ‘I Can’t Let Maggie Go’ from 1968, but that’s due to its use in the Nimble ad. For the same reason, ‘I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing’ is very memorable, and was released in November 1971. ‘The Pushbike Song’ is also clear in my mind, and is once again from late 1970, and from earlier in the year I remember ‘Yellow River’. However, these weren’t chart hits for me but just music. For some reason I can also remember ‘Bend It’ by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick And Titch, though presumably not from September 1976. I can only assume I know it from some members of the older generation who were still sometimes playing it. ‘Get It On’ is also very clear and I remember T. Rex still being called “Tyrannosaurus Rex”, but that’s probably because they were named after a dinosaur and little children are really into them. While I’m on that band, ‘Ride A White Swan’ is also very clear, and that dates once again from October 1970. This does mean there’s a run of three successive number one singles I can remember clearly from summer 1971. This period is actually before anyone in my immediate family was at all into pop music, so it would’ve been from the neighbours or my uncles.
Longer stretches of remembrance begin from about 1974. In fact it seems to start with ‘Long-Haired Lover From Liverpool’, a single which, embarrassingly, is probably the first pop record I ever owned, unless you count ‘The Woody Woodpecker Song’ from 1961, which I had on orange vinyl. The Osmond record dates from December 1972, and interestingly like a lot of other songs I heard first as a child, it sounds more high-pitched to me now than it did back then. The final gap in my memory occurs in January 1978 with ‘Up Town Top Ranking’, which I can’t remember at all from the time. This is probably due to my sister getting into pop music. I can remember listening to the charts with my sister in January 1977. However, on the whole at that point I regarded pop music as silly and vapid. I have a distinct memory of hearing ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ for the first time in late 1975 and finding it ridiculously theatrical and rubbish. This is the kind of child I was at the time.
I always liked ABBA although at the time I had a concept of pop music in general as simply trash I didn’t want to listen to, and perhaps sometimes with a nebulously threatening undercurrent. I think these attitudes must have been inherited from my parents. I actually now think that that was to some extent a fair assessment and certainly I find much contemporary pop music doesn’t hit the spot for me. Looking at that in context, there seems to be a period during which new music has one in its thrall for many years and it only relinquishes its grasp some time after one has settled down and had children of one’s own, but even then the bands one was previously into still demand some loyalty as they leave the limelight. Sarada also often says that the gap between the music of the previous generation to hers, which is as I’ve said Generation Jones, that is, that of her parents, is much wider than the one between our own music and that of our children. We seem to have happened to live through a historical moment when popular music underwent a huge revolution.
I can distinctly remember the moment when my ears were finally opened to contemporary pop music. It happened on the morning of Saturday 28th January 1978, while I was watching ‘Multicoloured Swap Shop’ on our black and white TV. I was ten. ELO came on with ‘Mr. Blue Sky’ and I was utterly amazed! I suddenly underwent a complete about-face with my attitude to pop music and decided it was brilliant. For some reason though, my interest manifested itself in an odd way, where I interpreted ‘Mr. Blue Sky’ as a form of art rock requiring a high degree of intellectual and learnèd appreciation when in fact they are generally regarded as a bit crap. Personally they remind me of Queen to some extent. This theme of art rock was to become separated over the next few years to concentrate on things which actually were art rock, such as Laurie Anderson and David Bowie. Actually, David Bowie had already made an impression on me much earlier with ‘Space Oddity’, with my shock at hearing a Cockney accent on a pop record. Hearing it now, it really sounds very mild, but you have to remember how Americanised even British pop was at the time, and also the dominance of Liverpudlian accents, which had no particular associations for me except ‘The Liver Birds’. I think I had to kind of fool myself into thinking the music was somehow deep in order to give myself permission to enjoy it. However, I did proceed to branch out into bands which were more or less universally regarded as awful, such as Bucks Fizz and Five Star. I didn’t censor my tastes after the first few years.
After a while, and I think probably everyone has this experience, pop music became the soundtrack of my life and I came to forge strong associations between songs and my personal life. I felt, as most of us probably do, that songs were speaking to me about my emotional life. At this point I feel the urge to raise a note of caution. I’ve previously said that the adage that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the human race doesn’t mean they pass good laws, and in the case of love songs this does, I think, have affects on one’s expectations about relationships and sex, and these can often be gendered. I sometimes wonder if this primed me for particular kinds of behaviour, particularly towards Vicky, although this was still several years ahead. On the other hand, maybe it was just a case of me finding emotional expression in them during my adolescence and early adulthood.
A number of technological changes in my personal life then ensued. In 1980, we finally got colour TV and this probably boosted my keenness on music videos. Music in the late ’70s and early ’80s was going through a weird apocalyptic phase which I’ve never heard anyone mention even though it’s really glaring. This was of course also the New Wave era, which is linked. I’d been primed for the idea that music videos were “art” and integrated with the music because of Asimov’s depiction of the visi-sonor in several of his novels and later in his ‘Light Verse’, although the idea there is closer to Winamp visualisations. As a Gen-Xer, I took all this in my stride. In 1983, ‘Give It Up’ by K C And The Sunshine Band was the only single to make it to number one without a music video. Additionally, we got a stereo record player in 1980, although I’ve never been able to trust myself with treating vinyl with the delicacy required. Consequently my record collection was always very small throughout the late twentieth century and only began to grow in the late ’90s, and my chief experience of pop music was from off-air recorded mixer cassettes. I didn’t acquire a means of playing CDs until late 1999. Therefore my life was boosted considerably when I got a mono radio cassette recorder for my birthday in July 1980. I already had a few albums on cassette, actually just Mike Oldfield’s ‘Incantations’ and Tubeway Army’s ‘Replicas’ and it stayed that way for a long time. I think the next music album I bought was The The’s ‘Soul Mining’ along with a 12″ of Uncertain Smile. I was really heavily into The The, and later Prefab Sprout, which I think shows my inexplicable tendency to back losers.
The early to mid-’80s saw a number of remarkable chart events. Two singles in particular lasted a very long time on the top 100. The first of these was Tears For Fears’ ‘Mad World’, spending a relatively modest eighteen weeks there from October 1982. Just over a year later, after heavy promotion from John Peel, Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s ‘Relax’ was released on 24th October 1983. Just as it made it to number one, the BBC banned it when Mike Read noticed that the lyrics were suggestive and potentially obscene. This did the record a lot of good, and it ended up on the charts for seventy weeks overall. I’m not sure this was in one go, because it was re-released in 1993, but if it was this means it continued in the charts until mid-March 1985. This is practically all of the time I spent in the sixth form. However, this is nowhere near the record. Another oddity probably shows what counted as a successful formula at the time, and funnily enough also involved Frankie. This was the time when three singles, all called ‘The Power Of Love’, got into the charts, by Frankie, Jennifer Rush and Huey Lewis & The News. Although my recollection was that this was simultaneous, apparently it wasn’t. The Frankie track was a Christmas record, entering the charts on 1st December 1984. The fact that it’s a seasonal release makes it hard to track, but it’s spent a total of thirty-nine weeks on the chart, taking it to the end of August 1985. This is likely to be spurious. Jennifer Rush’s song spent thirty-three weeks there from 22nd June 1985, taking it to 7th February 1986 assuming no re-entries. Finally, Huey Lewis & The News’s ‘The Power Of Love’ was released in June 1985, and oddly seems to have no record on the official UK charts website. This is of course the song which forms the signature tune for ‘Back To The Future’. Hence this would’ve happened in June 1985 if it did. But it doesn’t end there! There are in fact a total of ten records with that exact title and two with it as a subtitle! I think the explanation for this is that pop songs are very likely to be love songs and the Jennifer Rush song at least is a power ballad, so it’s along the lines of ‘No Limit’ having the words “techno, techno, techno, techno” repeated in the chorus, which is the name of its genre just in case the listener doesn’t realise what kind of record it is. The other records with the same title may or may not be cover versions of the others. There are even more songs with this title which were not released as singles or didn’t chart, including one by the Everley Brothers in 1966, a country music song used as the title of its album in 1984, a 10cc album track, and so on to a total of a minimum of sixteen pieces of music excluding cover versions. It’s completely ludicrous!
I got a stereo boombox in 1984, which marked another big advance in my perception of the music I was into. There were then a few weeks after I left home when I didn’t have any way of listening to recorded music, into November 1985, which actually made me utterly miserable. However, at the same time I started going to gigs, notably the Prefab Sprout one on 24th October 1985. Over the next six years or so, I got more heavily involved in live music, helping to organise a fundraising festival in Leicester and ending up getting into a series of free concerts for fund-raising purposes up into the 1990s. By this time I was getting to know professional musicians fairly well. This had in fact been the case since 1980 but in a more low-key way. For some reason, in spite of this involvement I never managed to achieve “coolness”. I also started going to folk clubs in the mid-to-late 1980s. And maybe the explanation for my persistence as infra-dig was my partly terrible taste in music.
1990 begins to show gaps in my memory of number ones, which up until that point were remembered continuously from early 1978 on. This is partly to do with workload and partly connected to a romantic relationship I was having at the time where I kind of lost touch with who I was for a while. I got back on track later that year and this continued for several years. 1991 saw the sixteen weeks at number one single from Bryan Adams, ‘Everything I Do’. However, this single only spent twenty-five weeks on the chart because it was deleted when it was still selling to give other acts a chance. This seems to have been a symptom of a very slow singles market in the summer of ’91.
The next gap in my recollection coincides with our daughter’s birth and infancy, which doesn’t need explaining. It starts to come back in June 1994, with songs I associate with her babyhood such as ‘Mr Bombastic’ and Eddie Reader’s ‘The Patience Of Angels’. Another gap occurs about the time her brother was born. I’m actually surprised to see how persistent my interest was. This may have been about the time another weird thing happened to the charts, when singles started to go straight in at number 1 on a regular basis and the general pattern was for songs to enter the charts at their highest position and go down thereafter. I don’t know why this happened, probably because I was losing touch at this point. However, it’s notable that the charts seemed to show an objective decline in perceived significance as they became less significant to me. By this I mean that it wasn’t just me who perceived them as less important at this stage, but part of a wider trend. Digital singles by well-known artists began with Duran Duran’s ‘Electric Barbarella’ in 1997, which however only entered the charts in January 1999. By September 2003, I was so out of touch with them, and they were making themselves irrelevant by this point by not including downloads, and later on streaming and online music services until it was far too late, that I perceived Dido’s ‘White Flag’ as a discovery of my own in spire of it being a number one song.
But there were a couple more surprises in store. One was provoked by the death of Margaret Thatcher and the campaign to get ‘Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead’ to number one, which had started in 2007 and finally succeeded in Scotland in 2013, and got to number two in the UK charts generally. It was of course banned. This also holds the record for the shortest ever top ten single at fifty-one seconds.
‘Top Of The Pops’ ended on my thirty-ninth birthday in 2006. It was closed down by the same person who had presented it at the start in 1964, the notorious Jimmy Savile. Less said about him the better. The last act to appear was Girls Aloud, the first one having been Dusty Springfield. It’s been said that the internet killed the video star.
A current oddity is the record-breaking ‘Mr Brightside’, The Killers’ debut single released in September 2003. It has now had three hundred weeks in the chart and is currently at number 76. I hadn’t even heard it until about a year ago, and associate The Killers with ‘Human’, their 2008 single which has never reached number one, but then neither has ‘Mr Brightside’. I can’t even pretend to understand what’s going on here and enlightenment would be helpful.
Finally, there’s Pinkfong’s ‘Baby Shark’, which was in the charts for seventy-three weeks and never got to number one either. It has the distinction of being known to my granddaughter, and like my earliest memory of ‘Yellow Submarine’ is a children’s song. It’s apparently part of K-pop, like ‘Gangnam Style’, which did get to number one but is now a decade old. In a way, then, the charts are kind of morphing into viral memes.
In closing, I just think it’s a bit sad how we don’t seem to have this unifying pop culture phenomenon any more, just like we lost ‘Morecambe And Wise’ and the rest. It feels oddly like we’re all blundering around in the dark discovering things, and that’s fine but it’s still a shame we don’t even know what we have in common any more.
A Box Of Chocolates 