Top 40 of the noughties : Intro

Hi again people,

Back online after a somewhat inconvenient computer mishap (thankfully now sorted out), I'm getting ready to post my selection of the best and worst singles of the decade - in the spirit of positive thinking, the list of best singles will be up first followed by the list of songs that made my blood boil, fists clench and swearing vocabulary expand even further.

In preparation for the first selection of top pop moments of the last ten years, here's a few ground rules I've laid down for my choices :

1. The song in question has to actually have charted as a single at some point in the decade - the rules governing the singles charts were modified around 2006 to allow songs to chart even if a physical version (such as a CD single) was not available in record shops to allow for the increasingly popular MP3 format to count towards chart placings, so any tune that has featured on the UK Top 40 between 1st January 2000 and now is eligible. Album tracks, live-only staples and other miscellaneous titbits are not.

2. No more that one song per artist (excluding collaborations).

3. Rather than just reflecting my own record collection (hey, who wants to read a list consisting of nothing but Slayer, The View and obscure Dutch Happy Hardcore?), the entries have been selected on the grounds that they either shaped or exemplified a trend in popular music at some point over the last decade. Which doesn't mean that I don't like them, it just means that I acknowledge their influence on pop culture over the last ten years. None of them should be obscure enough to make the average reader scratch their head in confusion - most were established hit singles upon release and the few that didn't become big mainstream hits were tunes that I thought should have been in a perfect world. Ideally, once we get far enough into the next decade for 'noughties nostalgia' to kick in (I'd predict about the second week of February 2010), these are the songs that I hope would be on the setlist for a noughties club night.

Hope all that makes sense. Let's get it started!

Top 40 of the noughties : 40-31

40. Girls Aloud – Something Kinda Oooh ! (#3 October 2006)

Let’s kick things off with an admission that not all Reality TV pop is complete crap. If the artificial fame machine churned out a string of production line pop atrocities, the by-products weren’t always that bad : Hear’Say were outlasted by the infinitely superior Liberty X whose line-up was composed of the rejects from Popstars’ first series, and the sequel pitted two rival groups of girls and boys against each other in the run up to Xmas 2002 with the public using the singles chart as a means of deciding who was the better outfit. The winners’ debut not only secured the year’s Xmas #1 but also kickstarted a successful pop career that has yet to grind to a halt and produced some of the decade’s best singles.

Girls Aloud may have been conceived in the evil womb of Reality TV, but they managed to detach themselves from the concept fairly quickly – bypassing the variety performance ballad route taken by many of their solo contempories, the five-piece made their name in the kind of brash, colourful girlband pop that soundtracked the 1990s proving that teenypop could still work on the old model. Initial success granted them a string of hit singles and they soon came to dominate the pop market without reaching saturation point, which is probably the key to their longevity – even most of the big names in 90s teenypop struggled to make it past the three-album mark before everyone became whole-heartedly sick of them, and by the time the Spice Girls imploded in 2000 the gap between breakthrough success and calamitous fall from grace had narrowed even further. Where Girls Aloud succeeded was in their return to pop’s roots as good clean fun rather than a cynical marketing circus – they remained in the public eye for the rest of the decade, notching up cheery pop hits without ever getting in your face so much that you got sick of them. Rather than a post-2000 rehash of groups like All Saints and Eternal, they had more in common with their 80s predecessors such as Bananarama and Kim Wilde, artists who carved out careers at the forefront of pop for a full decade without ever slipping out of fashion. ‘Something Kinda Oooh!’ isn’t significantly better than any of their other releases, it’s just the first one that springs to my mind as an example of what they do well – check out this bombastic TV performance from Xmas 2007 if you need further explanation.

Whilst pop has changed hands over the course of the decade and undergone something of a rebirth since its low point at the start of the noughties, some constants remain and Girls Aloud are one of them. Girlband pop has endured where boybands have faltered – looking back at the girls’ original TV rivals, the hopelessly crappy One True Voice, it’s easy to see that the better side won. Whilst teenypop’s male contingent floundered in the early years of the decade only to resurface on a wave of 90s nostalgia later on, Girls Aloud along with their contempories the Sugababes have carved out admirably consistent careers of pop performance and left us with some cracking singles. Now that the decade’s nearly over, let’s give them the credit they deserve.


39. George Michael – Shoot the dog (#12 August 2002)

Every decade has its war, and previous ones have managed to carve out some decent protest songs to counteract all the bitterness and bloodshed. So it was disappointing that the war-mongering ways of our leaders in the early 2000s went largely unquestioned in pop music – there was nothing to rival Country Joe & the Fish’s denouncing of the Vietnam war in the late 60s or Bono’s emotive yarblings on the troubles in Northern Ireland….nobody seemed all that bothered. OK, Radiohead might have taken a half-arsed pot shot at Tony Blair on ‘You and whose army’ from ‘Amnesiac’ but you’re hardly laying your career on the line by whinging a bit about politics on an album track. It takes real balls to put out a single at the height of the conflict ripping on your country’s leader and his misguided toadying up to George W Bush, and surprisingly enough the only person to display sufficiently unfeasible gonad girth was someone hardly renowned for political protest.

George Michael’s star was on the wane in the early noughties, focused more on nostalgia for past glories in the aftermath of his immensely successful best-of in the late 90s than on what he could offer the new millennium. Musically he was stuck in limp R’n’B territory, but briefly broke free into calculated protest with ‘Shoot the Dog’ in 2002 – the track savagely criticized the master and servant relationship between Bush and Blair, backed by a 2DTV-produced cartoon video that ridiculed the hapless pair and poured scorn on the war effort. It was all too much for the flag-waving wankers on Fleet Street, with The Sun reacting particularly viciously to the star’s impertinence and lack of nationalist pride in Britain’s military intervention in the Middle East – their response to GM’s refusal to back our boys was to publish cheaply concocted photoshop images of his head disappearing down a toilet as his career crumbled in the fact of public outcry. Their smear campaign worked at least in the short term – the single fell short of the top ten, not a bad result but a proportional failure for someone with George’s pop pedigree and it triggered a general retreat from the pop charts for him which culminated in limiting future releases to internet-only download packages. Nevertheless, he returned with a couple more #1 hit albums and another best-of before the decade ended and retained his dignity throughout unlike the right-wing tabloid tosspots who tried to wreck his career for daring to disagree with them. ‘Shoot the Dog’ is more of a curiosity than a classic piece of pop, but it deserves its place on this list as one of the few real commercial risks of the decade and a testament to the power of pop music in challenging popular opinion. Nice one George.

38. Glasvegas – Daddy’s Gone (#12 August 2008)

Despite the fact that they looked and sounded like relics from Indie’s past, Glasvegas still sounded like a breath of fresh air when their debut landed in 2008 – against a backdrop of starry-eyed indie kids in tight jeans and ironic T-shirts, the band looked and sounded like grizzled veterans of the Glasgow indie scene of the late 80s, the perfect antidote to the excitable scamps clogging up the music press at the time. Their sound wasn’t anything radically new – the fuzzed-up guitar waves and black-clad dour delivery harked back to the Jesus & Mary Chain in their heyday, as did the band’s reverence for Phil Spector and 50s rock ‘n’ roll – but their sound stuck out like a sore thumb in the musical landscape of 2008, as did their morose choice of subject matter (social workers, racist attacks and Glasgow’s miserable sectarian bickering).

‘Daddy’s Gone’ preceded their impressive debut by several months and was picked up by the NME in late 2007 as one of their tracks of the year – it was easy to work out why on first hearing it, the track managing to craft a genuinely touching moment of pop tragedy on the thorny subject of absent fathers. It’s not easy to write a decent tearjerker without descending into schmaltz, and it’s even harder to put one into the upper reaches of the charts but the band managed it admirably – over a musical backdrop of Ronettes-style pop and thunderous reverb, singer James Allan bemoans the childhood realization that his dad has done a runner in a robust Glaswegian accent, packing in a hearty dose of bitterness and vitriol at the trail of destruction left in his wake. It was genuinely moving, bringing a tear to the eye of your emotionally-hardened scribe upon first listen and stands up to repeated plays as a finely balanced moment of pop sadness in the vein of ‘Every breath you take’ - it may not have matched Sting’s stalker anthem in terms of chart success but it set the stage nicely for their debut album to clean up both critically and commercially in 2008. They may have been guilty of laying it all on a bit thick in places, and reliable contacts of mine have remarked that they suck live, but Glasvegas still achieved the rare feat of cramming a universe of pent-up emotion into a four-minute hit single, one that will endure in the minds of many even if their star fades in future years.

37. Klaxons – Golden Skans (#7 January 2007)

Hit singles last the test of time, trends don’t – ill-advised haircuts and wardrobe decisions will have characterized the decade for many but they remain snapshots of what was in at the time and went out five minutes later. The whole ‘new rave’ movement was a classic example of this, another media launched trend that resulted in scenesters all over the nation covering themselves in ludicrous fluo and digging out their old Prodigy records. Many hopefuls laboured away at transforming the trend into a genuine crossover hit but few came close to Klaxons’ breakthrough success with ‘Golden Skans’ in early 2007.

In truth, there was nothing ravey about it – their cover of Kicks like a mule’s 1992 classic ‘The Bouncer’ would have been a better example of how dance music played through guitars could really hit home, but ‘Golden Skans’ was a safer bet for crash-landing the top ten. Built around a high-pitched vocal sample, the track detailed a night out back in the original rave era that the band were too young to have experienced first-hand – nevertheless, it struck a chord with indie kids everywhere and provided the soundtrack to many a night out for the new fluo-clad generation. NME creamed itself over the band’s pseudo-groundbreaking sound and named both the track and parent album ‘Myths of the near future’ as 2007’s best of the year – the album left me a little underwhelmed, leaving a lot of trendy pop fluff to pad out what was essentially a cluster of great singles of which ‘Golden Skans’ was probably the strongest. The cashing-in process was complete when the track turned up on a shampoo commercial earlier this year, leaving no doubt that the band had managed to pull a genuine hit out of what could have easily been nothing more than a passing fad in pop music. As the decade closes it’s still too early whether Klaxons and their 2007 contempories will be able to follow their original success with anything substantial but for the moment this track stands as one of the decade’s more palatable moments of trendiness transformed into accessible pop product.

36. System of a Down – Chop Suey ! (#17 August 2001)

This list is going to be filled with a predominantly poppy content due to its very nature – the selections have to not only be decent songs, they also need to have crossed over to a major audience in order for them to be considered. Heavy rock doesn’t feature particularly highly as it’s not best-suited to success in the singles charts, but there are a couple of notable exceptions where artists have managed to bag themselves an unconventional radio hit with something loud and skuzzy. One such example is Armenian-American heavy mentalists System of a Down’s breakthrough hit ‘Chop Suey!’ which thrust them into the unsuspecting confines of the UK top twenty in autumn 2001 and marked their passage from cult metal-circuit success to major force in international rock music, a field they would dominate in for the next few years.

The best thing about ‘Chop Suey!’ is the total randomness of it all – aside from the lack of any reference to the Chinese dish in the title, the track sounds like a Tasmanian Devil romping through a record store and chewing through various music styles over three frantic minutes of freeform mayhem. What starts off sounding like a ballad suddenly jackknifes into bulldozing metal bombast before breaking into rapid-fire stop/start noise bursts and vocals that go from operatic baritone to guttural brute force and 100 mph yelped diatribes. It was hard to work out what the fuck was going on upon first listen, but repeated spins left you in awe of one of the most bafflingly brutal slabs of heavy rock to make the charts since Rage Against the Machine first broke into the mainstream a decade earlier. The band would capitalize on its success in typical fashion – they followed the success of the single’s parent album ‘Toxicity’ with the gargantuan twinset of ‘Hypnotize/Mesmerize’ and the massive tour that accompanied it, then promptly disappeared from view completely. Many have striven to take their place at the creative forefront of heavy metal since then but none succeeded in marrying vicious delivery with accessible chart-friendly prowess in the same way that ‘Chop Suey!’ did back in 2001. This one stands as an example of how you can be loud, proud and crazy as fuck whilst still bagging yourself a hit single in the process. Result!

35. Sigur Ros – Hoppipolla (#24 May 2006)

There was a heavy weight of expectation on this decade to produce sonic marvels that had never been heard before, pieces of music so progressive and innovative that the human ear would not be able to handle them and would instead collapse in on itself out of sheer desperation. All of this was bollocks of course – apart from Radiohead basically alienating most of their original fanbase with a bit of guitar-free abstraction and people like the Aphex Twin carrying on doing what they had been doing for a while anyway, there wasn’t really any kind of post-millennial new form of music to usher in the new era.

We got close a couple of times though. The market for abstract, otherworldly rock music was growing as legions of listeners grew thoroughly bored with the trad rock ruling the airwaves at the time, and in the early years of the decade the more experimental factions of both indie and heavy metal drew away from recognizable song structures to favour something more ethereal and majestic. Metal gave us the mighty Isis, Cult of Luna and arguably later the much more commercially palatable Mastodon, but none were ever likely to batter the singles charts into submission – indie on the other hand has enjoyed a lucrative decade, bringing in a new generation of skinny Myspace-loving kiddies into the mix whilst retaining older fans who moved into the Observer/Radio 2 hinterland for those who felt a bit old at a Subways gig but still wanted to keep their finger on the pulse. The one band they all agreed on was Iceland’s Sigur Ros, a millennial variant on lo-fi, shoegazing and post-rock that modern indie fans embraced as their new favourite band that nobody else was supposed to know about. Their first album landed as the decade commenced and by midway through the noughties they had notched their first crossover hit with the twinkly end of the night classic ‘Hoppipolla’, a none-too-obvious choice for a single but one that seemed like it was always destined to be massive once it broke into the mainstream. Two separate chart runs saw the track peak at #24 in early 2006 but it was one of those whose chart longevity granted it classic status – and, in the vein of Moby’s ‘Play’ era material, it became even bigger thanks to numerous runs on adverts, film soundtracks and as the backing music to compilations of sporting moments, career highlights or anything that needed a bit of magic dust sprinkling over it to make it look majestic.

All this must have seemed odd for a bunch of Icelandic indie weaklings who didn’t even sing in a proper language (their material was delivered mainly in ‘Hopelandic’, presumably what Icelandic sounds like when spoken by toddlers before they actually learn to talk properly) and made zero effort to sell their records via press appearances and publicity campaigns. But then I suppose that’s what made them every indie boffin’s favourite band – you could whip out one of their CDs from amongst your collection of Coldplay and Badly Drawn Boy albums and attempt to impress your mates with it : ‘Hey, have you ever heard of these guys? They’re really unique and great and….oh wait, you’ve had their album for a year already? Shit!’. And they also had the added bonus of not being Swedish – if this had been made by a bunch of clever bugger blond cherubs from some Ikea-furnished treehouse outside Stockholm, I’d have hated it on sight but there’s something a lot cooler about the Icelandic that makes this much easier for me to like. Oooh don’t get me started on the fucking Swedes! Those BASTARDS. Maybe I’ll save that for another post – let’s just state for the record that Iceland rules and so do Sigur Ros.

34. Scooter – Ramp! (The Logical Song) (#2 June 2002)

Stop sniggering at the back. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of Scooter. Some of us fell for the Teutonic techno outfit’s charms back in the mid 90s around the time that gems such as ‘Move your Ass!’ were notching up moderate success in the singles charts, and it was always somewhat of a surprise that they didn’t reap greater rewards for their efforts in what was a fairly commercial field. But as always, the wheel carries on turning and those who persevere always end up rising to prominence at some point, which is what happened when the boys finally split the UK charts in two with ‘Ramp!’ in 2002 and kick started their most lucrative period in Britain.

Scooter’s bombastic style of ‘Stadium Techno’ is now so easy to recognize that they could adapt it to pretty much anything – Supertramp were first through the mangle, their ubiquitous ‘Logical Song’ given the Scooter treatment and transformed into a barrage of squeaky samples, cacophonous keyboard noises and incomprehensible gibberish barked over the whole thing by their hilarious MC HP Baxxter. The end product was wholeheartedly ridiculous yet very difficult to dislike and it was quite satisfying to see the British public finally embrace the band when ‘Ramp!’ launched a string of hit singles for the band in the early part of the decade. Their success also paved the way for a resurgent wave of clunky Euro-Rave in the shape of Basshunter, Cascada and a cluster of other acts who seized on the commercial potential of boisterous techno pop, a sound that had faded from fashion before Scooter revamped it with their breakthrough hit. And it wasn’t just a flash in the pan either – their best-of compilation coined it in and they even managed the impressive feat of knocking Madonna from the top of the album charts in 2008 when their ‘Jumping all over the world’ album gave them a surprise #1.

Now an almost inconceivable 15 years into their career, Scooter’s charms are as irresistible as ever – their unmistakable brand of ludicrous techno pillaging looks unlikely to go away as new generations of ravers, toddlers and embarrassed serious music fans fall prey to their undeniably enjoyable records. They’re not exactly Radiohead in terms of musical complexity, but sometimes you have to cast all that to one side and drive off in a huge rave bulldozer blasting out ‘Siberia! The place to be!’ at ear-splitting volume whilst a field full of nutters lose their shit raving to the nonsensical gibbering of a platinum blond German. What could be more logical than that?

33. The Automatic – Monster (#4 June 2006)

The line between addictively anthemic and horrendously irritating is a fine one, and staying on the right side of it depends on whether or not prolonged exposure to your biggest hit makes the public want to turn on you and beat you to death or not. The Automatic managed to stay just the right side of that line with ‘Monster’ in 2006, a track that proved so massively successful that it almost became their undoing – fortunately, it fell just short of passing into the realms of records that make you want to smash your radio into tiny pieces when you hear them and will instead go down as one of the decade’s most infectious singles.

The band emerged onto the fertile indie scene of the mid-noughties with a sound tailor made for the pop charts, a territory that had become newly accessible to guitar pop in a way that hadn’t been seen since the peak of Britpop ten years previously. Bands like The Kooks and Razorlight were making inroads into the upper reaches of the singles charts and challenging the most established pop acts for position at the very top of the chain – ‘Monster’ landed at the right time for a young band like the Automatic to decimate the mainstream with their debut single, and it soon became so unavoidable that even the band’s critics had to admit that they had penned a classic. Some indie bands looked on scornfully at the band’s commercial delivery, but they seemed largely unaffected by any negative press and capitalized on their success with a hit album and a string of high-profile TV appearances – but it was the song rather than the band that stuck in people’s minds and became so widely reappropriated that you heard it everywhere from football games to nightclubs to festivals and anywhere in between. Rumour has it that the song was even taken up by inmates to welcome sex offenders into prison at the height of its popularity. Now there’s notoriety for you.

Inevitably, they couldn’t follow it up with anything quite as successful and the band have faded from the limelight since their 2006 heyday although they are still touring and releasing records – some will saddle them with the tag of one-hit wonders, but in truth there’s nothing negative about the way they managed to conquer the mainstream so easily. ‘Monster’ remains four of the decade’s most infectious minutes and will live on in parodies, reproductions and compilation appearances for years to come. In the end, the beast they created fell some way short of destroying them – its status as a classic is assured.

32. The Ting Tings – That’s not my name (#1 May 2008)

Pop took on various new forms over the course of the last decade, and many of them saw it stepping away from big studio production and back towards making music in your bedroom. The original peaks of punk and rave both saw newer, more immediate channels to success opened up to generations of kids who didn’t have years of classical training behind them but did have some basic ingredients and a couple of good ideas – fast forward to the present day and we have a similar situation where thanks to internet publicity and easily accessible technology, you can fling out a #1 single in about five minutes if you put your mind to it.

The Ting Tings emerged seemingly from nowhere in 2008 with their addictive debut single ‘That’s not my name’, five minutes of squawked vocals, thumping drumbeats and rhythmic sampling that stuck in your head as soon as you heard it for the first time. Hyped up as one of the next big things that year along with a cluster of other hopefuls, they were the only ones to coin in with a genuine hit – the immediacy of their debut gave rise to the image of a fresh art school music project who had hit the big time, rather than a calculated studio affair (which was in fact a misconception – drummer Jules de Martino had been on the music scene since the mid 80s whilst singer Katie White previously supported Steps and Atomic Kitten in failed girlband TKO). Whatever the reality behind it, ‘That’s not my name’ showcased a duo with enough understanding of what works in pop to crank out hits in their sleep – parent album ‘We Started Nothing’ (another chart topper) contained ten potential hits and no filler, and success on the global pop market soon followed.

Some scoffed at the über trendy gimmickry of it all and you had to concede that the group were not going to be palatable to fans of the mainstream rock spectacle, but they proved their doubters wrong with a string of strong festival appearances and equally faultless follow-up singles, establishing themselves as one of pop’s heavy hitters as the decade closes. The best example of crafting a #1 out of nothing since White Town’s ‘Your Woman’ in the late 90s, ‘That’s not my name’ not only brought in quick returns in the singles charts but also set the group up as one to watch in future years.

31. Just Jack – Starz in their eyes (#2 January 2007)

You can hack away at crafting a hit single for years without ever hitting the target - most success boils down to either plain luck or hitting on an idea which leaves your rivals scratching their heads and wondering why they didn’t think of it first. Step forward Jack Allsop, aka Just Jack, a British hip hop artist who had been labouring inoffensively for several years until an appearance on Joolz Holland in 2007 launched him into the public sphere with a hit single that nailed the decade’s most prominent musical trend with a bit of savage analysis.

‘Stars in their eyes’ bit back at the rise of Reality TV which by its release in early 2007 had already dominated the media for the best part of a decade and was beginning to get a bit tiresome – as I’ve pointed out in other articles in this series, the TV phenomenon had also spilled into the singles charts which had suffered five years’ domination by the Pop Idol/X-Factor stable acts by the time Just Jack popped up and beat them at their own game. The track ripped into the artifice of taking glorified karaoke singers and mass-marketing them to the point of total saturation, leaving behind nothing but a trail of half-baked C-list celebrities and shitty records – sure, we were all thinking it but it took someone to actually knock together a hit single saying it. Allsop may have been one of the numerous middle class white kids trying to craft a convincing cockney accent to conjure up some previously non-existent street cred, but his delivery was smooth enough for us to overlook the Dick Van Dyke impersonation – ‘Stars in their eyes’ harked back to the nice guy hip hop of Jurassic Five and their ilk, the sort of people who you wish would breakthrough and put twerps like 50 Cent in their place but never seem to succeed. Follow up releases failed to match its popularity but ‘Starz’ remains one of the decade’s more likeable hit singles and one whose appeal will endure a lot longer than that of the Reality show muppets it derides.

Top 40 of the noughties : 30-21

30. The Darkness - Christmas Time (Don't let the bells end) (#2 December 2003)

What used to be a genuinely interesting contest over who would grab the prestigious mantle of Xmas #1 has long since descended into a dull one horse race dominated by the X-Factor’s build up over the weeks approaching the festive season leaving little doubt that the winner of that musical popularity contest will also walk away with the top slot in the Xmas charts. And if we’re being completely honest, even before reality telly took over the battle for the festive charts there was little in the way of interesting competition for the top slot, inevitably another notch on the chart bedpost of teenypop acts like Westlife or the Spice Girls or some ghastly toddler-friendly novelty record like Bob the Builder.

2003 stands out as the only year any of this would change, with the reality TV franchise cobbling together a weak cover of John Lennon’s ‘War is over’ only to finish third to a gripping face-off between two half-decent bids for the treasured festive top seller. The winner of the duel was the Donnie Darko-inspired remake of Tears for Fears’ ‘Mad World’ (more on that later) but the more vigorously festive of the two records was undoubtedly The Darkness’ barnstorming glam rock masterpiece ‘Christmas Time – Don’t let the bells end’. Reaching the end of 2003 on a massive high after a string of successful singles and a breakthrough debut album, the boys had made their name in the business of loud retro rock anthems and schoolboy humour, a style they would arguably showcase to greatest effect on their Xmas effort, a stadium-sized rock show closer packed with Finbarr Saunders style puns (‘Don’t let the bells end….just let them ring in peace’). It seized on the inherent silliness of the British Xmas experience and drew on the past classics of the 1970s where glam rock heavyweights duked it out for the top slot, giving a new generation another festive classic to indulge in bouts of drunken air guitar to at the office party for years to come.

Coining a Xmas classic is often confirmation of your ascension to pop royalty, yet for The Darkness conquering the festive charts would be the turning point in their career as the public began to get tired of the whole joke metal thing – they bagged one more hit from the first record before embarking on their troubled second album which, although not actually all that bad, met with critical savagery upon release and fell some way short of replicating the success of their debut. Nevertheless, Xmas compilations still honour their biggest moment and they can rest easy in the knowledge that Justin Hawkins’ rehab bills and hair transplants will surely be covered for years to come with royalties from this festive favourite.

29. My Chemical Romance - Welcome to the Black Parade (#1 October 2006)

Certain #1 hits surprise audiences, presenting us with proof that sometimes the most unlikely songs tap into the public mindset and become best-sellers. Others are so obviously written to become chart-toppers that it would seem a monumental under-achievement to even see them come in at number two, and ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’ belongs firmly in this category. A pompous, overblown broadway-style set piece created to usher in their third album, the single took the band from Kerrang-approved Goth Rock middleweights right to the top of the pop charts and made them into one of the biggest acts in mainstream rock for a while, turned singer Gerard Way into a genuine celebrity and pissed off most heavy metal fans so much that they became hate figures for the scene they were supposed to represent.

Crossing over from scene success to genuine mainstream fame takes a number of things, namely an accessible radio hit that draws in new audiences amongst kids who’ve never heard your music before whilst retaining enough of your original appeal to not alienate your more longstanding admirers. It also helps if you have a nice MTV friendly video and a look that chimes in with movements in pop culture – MCR had risen to prominence as standard goth rockers coated in eyeliner and black hair dye, but they revamped their image slightly in the run-up to their third album and presented their new look to the crowds at Reading 2006. The crowd turned on them violently, pelting them with bottles and slagging their poppier new direction, but behind the scenes they had put together a commercial package that would make it all worthwhile – ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’ landed at the end of festival season and shot straight to the top slot. Just as The Offspring’s ‘Pretty Fly for a White Guy’ had thrust its creators into the mainstream after years of singles chart invisibility with a sanitized version of the music that made them famous and made pop punk a lucrative sales device, ‘Black Parade’ marked the point where the whole Hot Topic Emo Vampire thing became officially mainstream and therefore not cool anymore unless you were about 12. The press started freaking out that teenagers were now being drawn into some kind of sinister vampire suicide cult and suddenly you couldn’t sell anything to teenage girls unless it featured black hair, fake blood and cartoon goth imagery. The band soldiered on regardless and, if I’m being totally honest, actually managed to knock out a few decent singles in their new Broadway Emo style – punk purists sneered at them, but for my money MCR are easier to deal with as a massive mainstream rock spectacle than they were as just another vaguely ambitious goth rock troupe prior to the single’s success. At least when you’ve had a #1 single you don’t have to justify whether your new direction is working or not. Let the bottle throwers do their thing, MCR proved their point with this record and walked away as winners.

28. So Solid Crew - 21 Seconds (#1 August 2001)

Eek ! Scary gun-toting cockney oiks top the singles charts! Head for the hills tabloid journalists and prepare your fear-mongering articles about how it’s no longer safe to leave the house! These days almost a decade later, the whole UK Garage thing looks a little ridiculous and most of its leading lights have long since faded into obscurity but it’s worth remembering how big and threatening it all was back in 2001 when bad boy posturing, copycat American gangster rap and 2-step breaks ruled the airwaves.

‘Grime’ as a musical concept had an air of the ridiculous about it, but back in the early noughties there wasn’t much else going on in dance music to write home about and it was genuinely quite exciting to have something distinctly British dominating radio at the time – and where the music journalists left off, the tabloid press eagerly picked up the baton and spewed forth endless column inches panicking about the nefarious influence was having on the country’s youth. OK, So Solid were perhaps not the best role models for kiddie Britain – the posturing in their videos was not just a front and the distinctly unpleasant activities of many of the members soon stole the limelight from their music – but up against the distinctly inoffensive likes of Craig David, Artful Dodger and that excruciating ‘Do you really like it?’ record, ’21 Seconds’ stands out as the strongest single of the movement. Based around the principle that none of the featured rappers would get more than the title’s time slot to leave their mark on the track, it sounded like the equivalent of eight twokkers trying to chat up the same girl in a loud nightclub – none of them were particularly skilled lyricists and most of the content consisted of wholesale pilfering from the likes of infinitely superior Yank rap acts like the Wu Tang Clan. Yet for all its faults, the single was a memorable moment in chart history and one of the few examples of an original idea translating into massive chart success.

The Crew didn’t stay at the top of pop’s pecking order for long, due to various reasons including the fact that they never seemed to be able to decide how many people were in the band and the obvious drawback that those who were designated members seemed to spend more time in jail than onstage. Nearly ten years down the line, ’21 Seconds’ sounds as daft today as 2 Unlimited did at the end of the 90s but we should remember them for the force in pop they briefly were back in 2001 – the British record industry was thrown off balance for a short while in the face of this lot, and it’s good to shake the lazy buggers up once in a while.

27. The Gossip – Standing in the way of control (#7 April 2007)

The media was maybe getting hungry for another style icon in the mid-noughties – the airwaves and magazine pages were full of skinny little indie boys twanging guitars and penning odes to their mundane everyday existence. It was probably time for a sea-change, and what better way than to pluck the physical embodiment of the polar opposite to malnourished male indie adolescence and thrust it straight onto magazine covers?

Another NME staple, fronted by the lady voted ‘coolest person in rock 2007’ by scribes of the aforementioned indie rag/lifestyle guide, The Gossip made their presence felt via this particularly head-turning rock’n’soul moment in late 2006 – the track rose slowly to prominence, making a gradual ascent towards the top ten the way records used to back in the good old days before peaking at #7 in early 2007. Tapping into the nightclub friendly disco indie popular at the time, the band stood out for a number of reasons but the most obvious one was that their vocalist was HUGE – Beth Ditto, a product of trailer trash America looking like the lovechild of Roseanne Barr and Pavarotti, got people’s attention straight away with her larger-than-life stage persona and devastating vocals. However, it wasn’t just a gimmick – let’s not forget that one of the inherent advantages of being stacked like a sumo wrestler is that you can pump out vocals that the skinny girls can only dream of matching – Aretha Franklin, Jocelyne Brown, The Weathergirls, fat chicks have always had a place in pop as they’re the only ones whose physique allows them to spill drinks at the back bar with their voices. Ditto’s trademark yowl backed with the track’s pummeling indie disco production made it an instant dancefloor classic and a gateway to the charts for the group – though it outstripped their other singles by a long way, The Gossip are in no danger of fading off the back of one successful single as their more recent output and bitchslap brutal live show have proven.

Media sleazebags may have made a great deal about how awfully progressive they were being by promoting Beth as a style icon despite her noteworthy girth, but it all would have been totally token if she didn’t have the tunes to back it up with – and thankfully, she did! No Rik Waller this one! And if the by-product was that magazines decided to ditch the boney bitches for a while in favour of ladycurves then so much the better – The Gossip became your girlfriend’s favourite band overnight because she could bust one out on the dancefloor to their music and then go home and feel comparatively slim looking at the CD cover. Everyone’s a winner!

26. The Killers - Mr Brightside (#9 September 2004)

Indie has historically been the refuge of those cast out from the mainstream due to their reluctance to compromise artistically in favour of musical sincerity and sticking to their vision. This is all very well if you’re a bunch of Wakefield holier-than-thou types like The Cribs (don’t get me wrong, they did some good singles too but none of them made this list) but when you’re a mormon cabaret act from Las Vegas it doesn’t really cut it spending years doing the upstairs at the pub circuit when your music is tailor made for gargantuan stadium venues and moments of indie disco ephiphany where entire dancefloors bellow your lyrics out at the top of their voices, eyes shut and fists raised like participants in some religious cult with snakebite spilled down their T-shirts.

That The Killers were aiming for the stars from the very beginning is hardly surprising. That they succeeded in reaching them is what’s impressive – even the indie luminaries of the early 2000s (Strokes, White Stripes, Franz Ferdinand) pitched their product at the NME set of punters, and though their records sold in massive quantities they still failed to bring in the sort of not-too-bothered-with-music types who were buying Lightning Seeds albums in the 90s. This is where the Vegas boys, and ‘Mr Brightside’ in particular, came in – despite the fact that their keyboard-propelled Hollywood indie seemed rooted in a land far, far away and lacked the kitchen-sink realism that virtually everyone in British indie was trying to cram into their material, The Killers were the sort of immense proposition that became accessible to pretty much everybody whether or not they were Match of the Day slobs or pretentious indie hipsters. ‘Mr Brightside’ was their breakthrough success and took over the mantle from James’ ‘Laid’ as the kind of record that could ignite indie club dancefloors despite being more of a mainstream chart hit than anything else. Impressively, it was far from the only solid gold pop hit on their debut album ‘Hot Fuss’ – they bagged another two massive hits and even managed to lodge album track ‘All these things that I’ve done’ into public consciousness (it even returned to the charts this year as a charity ensemble effort, surely proof that they’ve entered pop royalty).

‘Mr Brightside’ isn’t the band’s only great moment – like many entries on this list, it was simply the first of their singles to cross over into the mainstream and many others since then have done the same. As the decade closes they remain one of the nation’s best-loved groups, still able to rope in serious indie audiences and Tesco music section plebs whilst their music stays just the right side of pompous and ridiculous. If we ever get a ‘Life on Mars’ style TV series set back in the noughties several decades down the line, you can bet that one of their songs will be playing in the background whilst proto-mulleted youngsters lounge around playing Sudoku on their I-phones. The soundtrack to an era? Probably.




25. Michael Andrews & Gary Jules - Mad World (#1 December 2003)

Pop music is at its most satisfying when something truly unique and unexpected rises to the top of the charts just because it strikes a chord with the public. Nobody would have bet on a minimalist rehash of Tears for Fears’ 80s classic ‘Mad World’ becoming a massive success over the festive period in 2003, and for that matter I don’t think most people expected Donnie Darko, the film whose soundtrack provided the track to make much of an impact either. Just goes to show that we need to sit back and let nature take its course sometimes, letting film and music make their waves with the general public without interfering too much with them and surveying the results afterwards.

Culled from the same Xmas chart campaign as The Darkness’ marvelous ‘Christmas Time (Don’t let the bells end’), ‘Mad World’ actually pipped the glam rockers to the top slot and romped home to massive sales in the lucrative festive singles market. It seemed an odd choice for Xmas #1, a bit of a morose number for what is usually a fairly jaunty time of year – however, take Xmas out of the season and you’re left with the bleak mid-winter, a period where folks like to curl up in the warmth and chill out to something peaceful. The unlikely 80s cover tapped into that mindset perfectly – one of the reasons 80s chart hits have been such popular choices for cover versions since their first spell in the top 40 is that a lot of the originals were so marked by the production of the time that a modern rehash can turn them into totally different tunes – the new version of ‘Mad World’ stripped the track back to its bare bones and brought out a hitherto unseen element of sensitivity and reflection at the heart of the song, putting this at the fore over a stirring piano backing to pretty powerful effect. The subject matter of madness at the heart of society chimed in with the film’s own theme, one that many audiences completely misunderstood when they saw it – and I’m glad they did, it’s nice to have to dig for meaning a little rather than to be slapped round the face with ‘message movies’ just to make sure you weren’t asleep during the key moments. The mates who watched the film with me spent most of it cackling at the giant bunny rabbit and thought the whole thing was a waste of time but it struck a chord with me and has stood up to repeated viewings – ‘Mad World’ works for the same reasons, it’s not an obvious choice for a festive hit but it stands out as one of the only truly memorable Xmas hits of the decade and one that it would have been hard to predict even weeks before it landed. Try imagining that when you’re watching X-Factor’s blanket TV coverage in mid-November and see how exciting the whole thing feels in comparison.



24. The View - Same Jeans (#3 January 2007)

If I were compiling this list based purely on personal preference and filling it with the tracks that crop up on my I-Pod most frequently, this would be top by several country miles. Not exactly the most original indie anthem from the fertile post-Arctic Monkeys period of 2006/07, ‘Same Jeans’ was derided by purists for nicking the chord structure from Cornershop’s ‘Brimful of Asha’ – whether it did or not is irrelevant of course, a good riff is a good riff, it’s what you wrap it in that determines whether or not the song is going to be a hit. Which ‘Same Jeans’ was, shooting to #3 in early 2007 to complete a trilogy of fantastic singles from the young Dundonians and paving the way for their debut album ‘Hats off to the buskers’ to top the charts a couple of weeks later.

Performers over the course of the decade have made a lot of their supposed origins, laying on exaggerated versions of their own actions to lend their music a gritty, real quality and provide a sense of location to what could otherwise be empty, vapid sentiment. The View may have let their distinctly Scottish twang seep into their music but there was nothing forced about it – their debut album focused almost exclusively on stuff that happened on the Dundee estate in which they grew up, yet there was none of the kitchen-sink melodrama you’d expect from such subject matter, rather a glorious collection of pop songs and nuggets of everyday life for the boys. ‘Same Jeans’ picks a snapshot of personal philosophy amidst all that, extolling the glories of being an essentially scruffy bugger and staying true to yourself, saluting buskers for their tenacity in the face of grim reality and generally reveling in the moment at hand. It was as life-affirming as it was deceptively simple, all topped off with a ‘Paradise City’ style wig-out tagged on the end to pump up concert audiences to a state of delirium. And, as I have pointed out elsewhere on this blog, it remains the only top three hit ever to feature the word ‘c*nt’ (listen to the second chorus – that’s Scotland for you). Despite flinging out what to my mind was a brilliant second album earlier this year with several potential smash hits on it, the band have faded from view (no pun intended) since their meteoric rise with this single but I wouldn’t bet on them staying away from the charts for too long. In the meantime, this slice of Caledonian rag-tag indie rock remains one of the most ‘barry’ moments of the noughties.


23. Lily Allen - Smile (#1 July 2006)

The decade would have been considerably duller without Lily, a fine example of British womanhood who showed the world why our females are so great – she’s a good laugh, she likes to party and she doesn’t take any crap from people. Another star to seemingly emerge from nowhere with a smash hit single, ‘Smile’ launched her into the charts in 2006 where she has managed to stay since then without losing the cheeky appeal that made her stand out from the pack in the first place.

Having spent most of her childhood getting kicked out of public schools for drinking and smoking, the singles charts seemed to be a natural outlet for Lily’s bratty persona and ‘Smile’ gave her the perfect vehicle to take her there. A four minute paen a dead relationship where her estranged lover seeks to reconcile with her, she takes great pleasure in rebuffing his miserable arse and rubbing his nose in it – such subject matter in the mouth of an American R’n’B diva would have seemed unnecessarily bitchy, but Lily managed to make the whole thing quite endearing and it brought her cheeky personality into the limelight for the first time. Future releases have only built on this, even making a minor celebrity out of her younger brother Alfie thanks to her ode to him staying in his bedroom all day smoking dope and wanking. Her brash, colourful debut ‘Alright Still’ featured an impressive roster of similar jabs at life around her, backed up by an online blog on which she seemed to take potshots at virtually everybody – her most popular target remains Girls Aloud’s Cheryl Cole, darling of the media but an obvious hate figure for a generation of young women for whom she’s just too bloody pretty. I quite like Cheryl Cole and there’s even a Girls Aloud tune in this countdown, but I’m still glad that ladies from both ends of the spectrum get to co-exist in pop music – Lily, at least when she first arrived on the market, broke the mould from what was expected from female performers and surprised many by becoming a sex symbol despite being obnoxious, lairy and not exactly skeletal. She’s lost a bit of podge since then (boo!) but she’s retained the status of the sort of bird you could go for a pint with and still take home at the end of the night. Good girlfriend material overall, although as more than one person has pointed out you’d have to be careful if you ever dated here – one false move and you’d find yourself the subject matter of a song on her next album where she goes into great detail about how crap you were in bed. Maybe best leave her to songwriting then, and ‘Smile’ remains the finest slice of gobby chart bothering of the last few years. Without Lily, the charts would be a much more boring place.


22. Sean Paul - Like Glue (#3 July 2003)

Reggae is one of the few chart trends that never truly goes out of fashion, it just comes around again and again. Roughly once every ten years to be exact : Bob Marley’s first ascent into the European charts dates back to the early 70s, the wave of Jamaican influenced British Ska laid waste to the UK charts in the early 80s with The Specials, Bad Manners et al and back in 1993 you couldn’t move for Shaggy, Shabba Ranks and co at the upper end of the charts. Back in 2003, it was the turn of a Jamaican former water polo player to pick up the baton and stamp his mark all over the global pop music scene.

You literally couldn’t escape Sean Paul when his commercial breakthrough album ‘Dutty Rock’ landed in 2002 – it gave him four massive hits in his own right and also provided him with lucrative guest vocal slots with Beyoncé and Blu Cantrell, clocking up half a dozen global smashes in barely twelve months. As with most Jamaican musicians, it’s the delivery that does it and Paul’s pop-ragga intonation struck a chord with worldwide audiences to the point where it seemed he could read out the contents of his tax return in thick Jamaican brogue and it would probably go top ten. ‘Like Glue’ is the third of his hits from 2003, landing in the middle of summer to provide the soundtrack of many a bump’n’grind dancefloor session and bringing in outside audiences to an extent not seen since Shabba’s infamous ‘Mr Loverman’ and Reel 2 Real’s equally inescapable ‘I like to move it’ ten years previously. Even if you didn’t like ragga, it was hard not to have a bit of hip wiggle to this one.

The success of ‘Dutty Rock’ and its faultless run of singles was always going to be tough to repeat, although he did have a decent go with 2005’s ‘The Trinity’ which provided the infectious ‘We be burnin’ and US Chart Topper ‘Temperature’, but by then his status as the man to turn your song into a hit had been usurped by the likes of Timbaland and Kanye West. As talented as those two are, they haven’t given us anything that can plaster a silly grin over you face like Sean Paul’s chart-friendly Jamaican pop, and ‘Like Glue’ remains one of those tracks you can whack on at a party and get everyone winding and grinding in unison.

21. Kelis - Milkshake (#2 January 2004)

There’s a key moment at the end of one of my favourite films of the decade, ‘There Will Be Blood’, where Daniel Day Lewis’ terrying incarnation Daniel Plainview turns on his nemesis Eli Sunday and works himself up into a fit of murderous rage as he details how he has already drained his rival’s oilfields. The metaphorical use of the milkshake has never been quite so powerful – that is, not since Kelis rolled it out for her signature tune in 2004 and sent booties across the globe into a state of uncontrolled shakyness, leaving carnage in its wake and providing us with one of the most infectious records of the decade.

‘Milkshake’ is one of those annoying records that I had to include on this list despite not really being able to describe why I like it so much. It’s just fucking cool. I don’t even know what exactly she is referring to as her ‘milkshake’ (although I have my suspicions that it might be quite rude) but it sounds really quite alluring and in any case she is quite insistent on the fact that her milkshake is infinitely better than mine ever could be, so much so that a full explanation on why this is would be the subject of a fee-bearing service. The nerve of this lady! Anyway, using a fast food pun with such panache deserves no small amount of credit – imagine a male R’n’B artist like R.Kelly attempting acts of seduction with his ‘Flame-Grilled Whopper’ and the results would certainly not be the same. Having already established herself as a force in pop with the cathartic masterpiece ‘Caught out there’ (you know, the one where she yells ‘I hate you so much right now! AAAARRGH!’ over a funky beat) and her groovetastic collaboration with the late Ol’ Dirty Bastard on ‘Got your money’, ‘Milkshake’ heralded an unstoppable run of three top three hits in 2004 and made her into one of pop’s biggest treasures. Like Jamelia’s utterly fanastic ‘Superstar’, which I nearly included on this list but elected to leave out in place of Sigur Ros at the last minute for the sake of diversity, ‘Milkshake’ is one of those instances in pop where the ingredients just seem to gel perfectly – R’n’B as a genre can be a bit hit and miss, but those rare moments where you chuck the right combination of elements into the mixer and whisk yourself up a classic single are satisfying in a way other styles cannot match. This was one of them, and should be treasured as such. And for the record I would gladly take up the opportunity to partake in some milkshake with Kelis, or indeed any other beverage of her choosing. No please Ma’am, put your wallet away, it’s my treat. Shall I call us a taxi?

2000 : The Death of Pop

Reality TV pop is going to come in for quite a bit of (richly deserved) stick on this blog, but we should at least acknowledge that it only conquered the pop landscape of the early noughties because there was very little to stand in its way. Pop music at the turn of the millennium was in such a sorry state that someone needed to come along and put it out of its misery so that the genre could be stripped back to its roots and revived at a later date to greater effect - which it was, at least in my opinion. It was hardly surprising that given the dearth of new ideas and industry preference for quick fix gimmicks, cheap and tacky marketing techniques and a universally recognised decline in the quality of hit singles (it's not just me, honest), pop would be taken over at one of its lowest ebbs to be rebranded and repackaged for a new generation of punters.

Those of you who've perused my laborious trawl through 90s boy and girlbands will have picked up on the perceived sea change in general culture over the course of the decade which I feel was reflected in pop music, most obviously in the lucrative sphere of teeny pop. Pop music has always been important as a soundtrack to the times, even if the general quality of the recorded output can vary drastically. Look back at the 1980s and you'll find no end of great pop music from the first half of the decade (Early Hip Hop, New Romantic, Synth Pop, British Ska, New Wave, MJ's 'Thriller', Prince, Kim Wilde, Cyndi Lauper, Blondie, The Police, The Jam, the list goes on) - whilst most of the aforementioned produced sounds that were configured for maximum chart success, they nevertheless allowed room for creativity and innovation, allowing popular music to evolve and advance at the same rhythm as popular culture in general. Go to any 80s night on the planet and chances are you'll hear a lot of stuff the pre-1985 era, pop gems you can throw shapes on the dancefloor to without indulging in any kind of raised-eyebrow post-modern irony. Look at the later years of the 80s however and you'll be struck by a shift towards production line SAW pop in the UK (Rick Astley, Kylie & Jason, Bros, Sonia etc) and the emergence of shopping mall teeny pop in the US (Debbie Gibson, Tiffany) - the charts were swamped with grinning, inane pop muppets plying the kind of faceless, plastic crap that provided a quick sales fix at the time but sounded cheap and tacky only a couple of years down the line. Sure, hen night parties still go mental to 'I think we're alone now' but you can't compare the finished product to 'Thriller', 'Dare' or even 'Welcome to the Pleasuredome' - the latter are finely crafted pieces of universally accessible yet stylistically complex pop music, the former is tacky, plastic musical afterbirth that only sound goods on a sticky nightclub dancefloor as you screech along to the lyrics with your similarly tasteless cronies and spill Reef down your bra. Case closed.

This was the musical climate that we inherited as the 90s dawned - pop as a sales device, not as a cultural artform. New Kids on the Block were at their global peak, notching the decade's first #1 and dominating the charts of 1990 with back to back hits - their competition came in the form of Kylie, Jason and anyone else from 'Neighbours' that Pete Waterman could get to stand in front of a drum machine for 3 minutes flashing their dental work and lip synching to some tinny disco garbage. Jason Donovan had brought home the best-selling album of the previous year, a nadir in pop terms which also brought us the exruciating Jive Bunny, Big Fun and a host of other musical atrocities - the final blow was the revival of Band Aid's 'Do they know it's Xmas' in December 1989, a neat summary of everything that was chronically wrong with the state of pop at that dark time. The first outing of the charity classic succeeded in creating a landmark moment in pop culture, one that can be seen as the last piece of classic 80s pop before the second half of the decade before things went pear-shaped - the second was an example how bad things had become since then. Check out the video here to take it the full undiluted shittyness of it all. The only redeeming feature is the Bono isn't on it.

Things needed to change, and change they did - the stars of 1990 faded quickly, with NKOTB all but finished a year later and Kylie & Jason forced into frantic image rebranding as SAW struggled to match their earlier hit rate. The mantle passed to British boybands such as Take That and East 17, themselves the product of UK based production companies keen to replicate the global success of New Kids on the Block - they would conquer domestic markets but fall short of planetary domination, something the Spice Girls would acheive a few years later as Britain reached the peak of the 'Cool Britannia' marketing frenzy. The ladies' sales stranglehold over the worldwide charts in the middle of the decade (alongside the rise of Blair, Euro 96 and Britpop's similar success in foreign climates) represented a peak in British popular music unseen since the early 80s - singles sales were at a high due to new techniques such as multiformatting (releasing 3 CDs with different B-sides for each single) and the exposure of chart music to new audiences via bastions of lad culture such as Loaded and TFI Friday or the increasingly important ankle-biter market wedge (the average age of a the person buying a single in the charts of the late 90s was about 8 years old).







But it was never going to last, and true to form it didn't. 2000 saw pop plough new lows of creative laziness and cynical marketing - the boy/girlband phenomenon of the previous decade had evolved from innocent fun into either postmodern image manipulation or predatory sexploitation. 1999 had seen the emergence of a new breed of American pop performers such as Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera who had learnt their trade in the squeaky clean confines of Disney's 'Mickey Mouse Club' - now older and barely legal, they burst onto the pop music scene cooing lasciviously over Max Martin's studio production line backing with a sound aimed at the pop charts but an image that turned more than a few heads. The infamous video for 'Baby one more time' brought the slightly uncomfortable premise of kiddie porn into pop for the first time since 'Like a Virgin' - the difference being that, whilst Madonna was well into her 20s and fully aware of what she was up to when her debut hit the charts back in the mid 80s, Britney Spears hit global paydirt at the tender age of 16 with the inherent naivity that you'd expect from someone that young (and, unlike Madonna, her pretensions to virginity were deadly serious). Back in Britain, we had the likes of Steps and S Club 7, the former a charmless sales device pitched somewhere between gay men, hen night tarts, ironic students and squealing schoolkids, the latter a more blatant persil-washed pop gangbang backed by a TV show that topped ratings amongst both pre-pubescent kiddies and the readership of FHM, who broke the mould when they began doing raunchy photoshoots of Rachel Stevens et al in 1999. Pop had been sexed up and deprived of its innocence in favour of bluntforce marketing techniques aiming at getting your attention and your cash quickly.







The results were clear to see - 2000 saw a relentless turnover of #1 singles, 43 in the space of 52 weeks of the calender year, a record which has yet to be beaten. And if 2000 raised the bar in terms of sales turnover, it also plumbed new lows in the quality of material hitting the upper reaches of the charts. Westlife begun the year at #1 and would bag themselves a brace of identikit ballad chart toppers before the year was out, whilst the Spice Girls' era as solo performers yielded #1 hits for Geri (once), Mel C (twice) and a high profile near-miss for Victoria whose 'Out of your mind' garage tangent famously lost out to Sophie Ellis-Bextor's infinitely classier 'Groovejet'. Whilst their days as a pop juggernaut in the mid 90s had yielded a run of memorable hit singles which will be forever linked with the era, the ladies' solo output was a directionless attempt to rebrand each of the five as independant recording artists in their own right - though it didn't backfire in purely sales terms, the results were toe-curlingly dreadful : Geri veered between chubby showgirl, anorexic aerobics instructor, faux-latin vamp, gaybar cabaret tart and woefully unconvincing human rights activist, whilst the others hacked away frantically trying to rebrand themselves as serious R'n'B (Mel B), 60s style sex kitten (Emma), mainstream pop rock (Mel C) or classy club diva (Victoria). Whatever the direction, the recorded output was plastic pop bereft of any kind of personality, hopelessly grasping for relevance and individuality in the cynical pop landscape of 2000 but ending up looking as clueless and two-dimensional as Kylie and Jason did ten years earlier. The tragic spectacle of all five members clogging up the singles charts with their unlistenable attempts at musical rebirth almost made you long for the time when they functioned as one combined unit (after all, one shitty record in the chart is preferable to five) - however, the girls put paid to that little fantasy by unleashing the unspeakably awful 'Forever' album and their final chart-topping single 'Holler/Let love lead the way' in October 2000, a hapless attempt to rebrand themselves as a credible R'n'B collective in the vein of Destiny's Child who had begun their spell in the limelight around the same time. Check out the video here and see if you can make it to the end without barfing.







Elsewhere, the teeny pop genre showed its age with a general lack of creativity in the form of tired cover versions such as A1's 'Take on me' (the first of their two #1 singles that year), Westlife's versions of gear shift classic 'Seasons in the Sun' and Mariah Carey duet 'Against All Odds' (2 of their 4 #1 hits in 2000), 5ive's ham-fisted rehash of Queen's 'We will rock you' (#1 in July) - even Madonna got in on the act with her career-low cover of 'American Pie' (#1 in March). Stars of yesteryear were reheated and served up to varying degrees of success : All Saints managed to bag two more #1s ('Pure Shores' in February, 'Black Coffee' in October) whilst preserving the classy, urban edge their debut had trademarked in the late 90s, whilst Billie Piper inexplicably returned to the top with the faceless 'Day & Night' in May, offering no further clues on what her fans saw in her than her original sales peak in '98. Perhaps significantly, neither artist would reach the top ten again. Post boyband figures such as Ronan Keating and Robbie Williams both hit #1 with their solo efforts ('Life is a rollercoaster' in July for the former, 'Rock DJ' in August for the latter), and although their records continued to sell large amounts, it became obvious that both had permanently abadoned pop to move into new territory (Country & Western and Variety for Ronan, an endless string of flavour of the month genres for Robbie). Britney and Christina continued to dominate with their Max Martin-branded slut pop (the former bagged two #1 hits, 'Born to make you happy' in February and 'Oops...I did it again' in May) whilst their male counterparts N*SYNC and Backstreet Boys broke sales records with their albums and tours in the US over the course of the year on the back of the clunky key samples and breathy vocal routines characteristic of MM's studio production which successfully homogenised pop in the same way Stock Aitken & Waterman had ten years earlier.







If you still want proof that pop was in a wretched state in 2000, look no further than the year's best-selling single. The traditionally lucractive Xmas chart period has always meant that you can condense sales of several months at any other time of year into two or three weeks in December when the market becomes increasingly fertile as people buy music as gifts - it's also synonymous with the novelty pop record, the irritating likes of which would not be tolerated outside the festive season. 'Bob the Builder' had been a runaway hit on kids' TV that year and the theme song was released unaltered as a single in the hope that its charm might replicate the programme's success in the music charts. It provded a wise investment - the track was Xmas #1 and outsold all other singles that year.







This prompted a reflection amongst the casual observer - how can a self-consciously irritating novelty hit comprised of the theme music to a kids' TV show outsell EVERYTHING else on the market? The track hadn't been tampered with or remixed, it was a straightforward version of the theme music yet it was more popular than any of the studio engineered pop singles released that year. 90s kiddie TV crossovers had scored high returns in the pop market before (Mr Blobby, Teletubbies etc) but none had been so successful that everything else paled in comparison - pop always had one trick up its sleeve to outsell the TV themes. Until now.







The status of 'Bob the Builder' as 2000's best-selling single coupled with the rapidfire turnover of forgettable pop records at the top of the charts hinted that something had to change if pop was to be regarded as a threat in the musical landscape of the future. A look at the end of year charts revealed an emergent trend in urban pop fronted by some bloke called Craig David, the continued domination of club culture (Modjo, Fragma, Zombie Nation, Sonique) and Eminem's rise to prominence with his potent form of hip-hop self analysis - all would leave their mark, but none could claim surpreme power over the pop landscape in the same way that Take That and the Spice Girls had back in the 90s. Reality TV pop would land the following year with the screening of 'Popstars' in early 2001 culminating in Hear'Say's 'Pure and Simple' becoming the fastest-selling non-charity single of all time in the UK (a record Will Young would break a year later, again following weeks of relentless talent show promotion). Mainstream pop music, a bright colourful genre back in its heyday of the 80s and 90s, was about to sidestep into bland variety performance and shameless imitation of past glories - once Reality TV laid its mark on pop, things would never be the same again.







So let's remember why things go that way in the first place - pop music in 2000 sucked ass, it's as simple as that. Something else was bound to come along and take its place, and that's what happened with the TV talent shows. If the Simon Cowell-sponsored hordes are ever to vacate their spot at the top of popular music's foodchain, one they've held for the rest of the decade, it'll take either something really potent and new to dislodge them or we'll need a public acknowledgement that the whole reality TV thing has gotten dull, repetitive and faceless. Not wanting to be the eternal cynic, but we might be waiting a while longer than ten years for times to really change again. I for one am not holding my breath.

Reality TV Bites

When George Orwell was writing the original draft of what would become his masterpiece of dystopic fiction set in a nightmarish version of the future, he predicted a lot of things that would happen in the second half of the 20th century - ironically, he also provided the worldwide media with a tag name for a phenomenon that would irrecovably alter the broadcasting landscape into the new millennium. 'Big Brother' first hit screens in Holland in 1999 where it was originally conceived, and the craze spread to almost every other TV-savvy country in the world over the next year or so - contestants went from everyday nobodies to overnight stars, and although for most their fame was short-lived, it lit a fire inside many heads : this is how to get famous (and potentially rich) very quickly.

It also introduced the concept of audience voting to mainstream TV - sure, phone votes were hardly unheard of prior to BB but they went from a peripheral feature (opinion polls, phone-in discussions) to the centre of the programme. The audience was now seemingly in control, able to select who they would like to continue the on-screen adventure....and perhaps more significantly, who they would just love to see shot down in fucking flames. From the very first season, BB provided us with pantomime villains, scheming tricksters and gormless bigots whose shortcomings were exposed on national television for all to see - the pleasure to judge these fools for having the temerity to expose themselves in such a way took many of us by surprise, and we were suddenly given the possibility of contributing to the downfall of our hate figures for the cost of a text message. 'Big Brother' and the subsequent rise of reality TV as the decade dawned showed us that the apparent democratization of primetime TV was an attractive development, as was the chance to fuck over the contestants we didn't like without the chance of them ever catching up with us to exact revenge. Screaming the telly now seemed like wasted energy - you could clusterbomb the voting polls to make these fuckwits suffer! Hoorah!!

But, you might ask, why are we talking TV when this is supposed to be a music blog? Well, dear reader, my answer to that would be that wherever TV goes, popular music follows. Ever since the dawn of the pop charts in the early 50s and the profileration of TV around the same time, the idiot box has proved the most effective way of sending people bouncing off down to the record shop to buy your product. From Elvis prompting legions of teenage girls to cream themselves by strutting his shit on the Ed Sullivan show in 1956, through 'Top of the Pops', TV commercials, soap opera stats turning to music, MTV and much much more, telly took over as the best way to bring your pop product into the homes of millions of viewers. And then getting them to buy your music.

The impact of reality TV was slow at first - whilst the producers of 'Big Brother' eschewed musical sidelines aside from the obligatory club remix of the show's theme tune, wisely acknowledging that whatever talents the contestants claimed to have, few were founded in music. However, around the same time a seperate production team was gearing up for another Saturday night media event called 'Popstars' tracking the formation of a new pop product, wittling down contestants from a field of thousands of hopefuls with the aim of producing the next big thing in pop. The concept was coined in New Zealand and had proven massively successful, prompting record-breaking sales from the acts it produced in almost every territory, although few acts from its stable notched up significant sales outside of their own country - prompting the reflection amongst cynical gits like myself that it was the TV and press coverage that appealed to the public rather than the generally fuck-awful music.

'Popstars' was a big event at the time - I remember billboards in Manchester advertising the encroaching start of the series and tuned in out of curiosity. What I saw made me long for the now familiar option of inflicting suffering on complete strangers - droves of shrieking hyenas turned out at the casting sessions, desperate to emulate the success of the major pop acts of the period (Steps, S Club 7 etc), most of whom specialised in the studio-tinkered hi-octane pop that dominated the singles chart at the dawn of the decade. Sadly, there was no such option at the viewer's disposal - a group of self-appointed pop experts presided over the auditions, which were broadcast as part of the show's format to highlight the gulf between the talented few and the punchable attention-seeking many. Seeing such a proliferation of gormless, big-mouthed gonks charge willingly towards their own high-profile humiliation like a pack of lycra-clad lemmings was undeniably satisfying at first - for a while, you wondered whether every village in the UK had nominated its idiot to take part in the proceedings - but we felt ultimately let down by the final product : five Argos-brand 'entertainers' whose individual characteristics made them vaguely likeable on their own merits but when packaged together came across as a bog-tedious hodge podge of faceless vanilla soul. The final selection were named 'Hear'Say' (pffff. I could have done better), their debut single and album sold shitloads over a brief period but they were soon discarded and forgotten because they were dull. And we didn't choose them.

However, a lurking pop svengali (or oppurtunistic, self-satisfied yuppie shitstreak depending on how generous you're feeling) latched on to the idea to allow public voting to determine the outcome of events the following year. Simon Cowell, attracted to the idea of huge ratings and huger record sales, decided to go one better and launch his own TV talent show 'Pop Idol' in 2002, tinkering the formula to accomodate public voting and allowing viewers to pick their favourite candidate who would ultimately be rewarded with a record deal at the end of the series. The reaction was seismic - huge audiences tuned in, voted and most importantly ran to the record shops afterwards to buy the end product. By the end of 2002, Will Young and Gareth Gates were household names and their string of hit singles dominated the charts to an almost embrassing extent - Hear'Say's debut 'Pure and Simple' ranked #2 on 2001's end of year sales lists behind Shaggy's tale of romantic indiscression 'It wasn't me', however 2002 saw Will Young emerge victorious, following by G-g-gareth who himself managed two entries in the year's top ten. Even 'Popstars' reject Darius Danesh got in on the act, himself notching up a chart-topper before the year was out.

Cowell's tilt on the formula also included another feature that would prove key to its success - the obnoxious twat of a judge. Presumably seizing on the public's appetite for judgement of their fellow citizens on 'Big Brother' and the tepid reaction to the the judges' choices on 'Popstars', Cowell created a role for himself on the new franchise where he would act as scourge to the weaker contestants, gleefully humiliating the talentless in front of a TV audience of millions. A few years' previously this might have all seemed a little cruel - a rich, arrogant businessman with an apparent contempt for any kind of creativity passing judgement over simple members of the public, grinning as he crushed their self-esteem at the drop of a hat. But, surprise surprise, in the post-millennial media landscape it turned out to be a huge hit - the public lapped up the tough love approach, and even if they didn't agree with Cowell's outbursts, the spectacle provided them with a pantomime villain to boo and hiss at in the same vein as the stock of baddies on each series of 'Big Brother'. Coupled with the rise of bitchy publications like 'Heat' to replace the more innocent likes of 'Smash Hits' in the field of pop music, the new merciless approach became the norm, allowing Cowell to not only maximise his profits as owner of the franchise but to also rise to celebrity status in his own right as Mr Bad Guy.

By the end of 2002, pop had changed hands entirely - the boy/girlband boom of the previous decade had pretty much breathed its last, with past high-sellers such as Atomic Kitten and Blue notching up their final chart-toppers. Only Westlife continued to conquer the singles charts, although even they suffered a fallow period over the middle of the decade - whilst they still made #1 with every release, I'd like to meet someone who can actually remember any of the fucking tunes (actually, cancel that - I'd rather not). Pop's mantle was taken up briefly by the emergent trend of boybands with guitars, and the likes of Busted and McFly bagged themselves a brace of chart-toppers over the course of 2003-2004 (with the latter going on to bag even more as the decade evolved) whilst a younger generation of female pop ensembles (Sugababes, Girls Aloud - themselves the product of series 2 of Popstars) began their own run of successful single releases. Solo artists also re-emerged as valuable commodities in the post-girl/boyband landscape, with past participants in the now dead genre revived as mature, fully-formed adult pop perfomers (Robbie Williams, Ronan Keating, Ricky Martin, Justin Timberlake or the similarly marketed Christina Aguilera & Britney Spears, by then grown-up veterans of USA's 'Mickey Mouse Club'). But nostalgia being what it is, the genre hadn't lain dead for too long before its corpse was revived by way of reunion tours for the likes of Take That, which to the surprise of many matched the peak of their 90s success and produced another brace of massive hits. Even Peter fucking Andre made a bewildering return to the charts with his cast iron turd of pop 'Mysterious Girl'. All flourished in their own way for much of the decade, but none could match the all-out market dominance of the 'Pop Idol' star stable (and its successfor 'X-Factor' which landed in late 2004), whose singles ranked amongst the year's top-sellers for the remainder of the noughties. If obsevers were waiting for a new era in pop music to dawn post-2000, the reign of the reality show provided us with one.

I'm gonna take a bit of time to look back over the last ten years and aim to pick out a few developments and trends, mixed in with a spot of well-earned vitriol directed at the individuals whose contribution to pop music over the last 10 years has to my mind been less positive than it could have been. If you feel like joining me, watch this space.

xxx John

Decade's End

Hi folks,

Prompted to return from a lengthy absence by the slightly feeble splattering of 'best records of the noughties' lists that are starting to pop up in the press, I thought I'd mark a long-delayed return to blogging with my own review of the last 10 years in music.

Subjects currently lined up for my own unique brand of vitriolic deconstruction are reality TV talent shows, filesharing & streaming, the rebirth of British indie at the expense of heavy metal and dance music and a few others along with a retinkered version of my albums of the decade post. If you can think of any more, let me know.

That's all for now, watch this space for upcoming posts (promise).

xxx John

Best of 2007

Alright, first of all apologies for posting an end-of-year list in early February - one of the major changes for 2008 chez moi is no more internet in the flat so it's been a trifle complicated to post new articles up here (not that this has stopped me from writing, I compiled the following list right after New Year but in typical style did not stick to my resolutions and post it straight away). So sorry for being such a slackarse and I hope you enjoy it.

xxx John

Best of 2007

The View – Hats off to the buskers

My favourite record of the year, hands down. First saw these guys on the TV footage of their Glastonbury appearance and they blew me away – went out and bought the album straight away and was not disappointed when I heard the recorded version. Great pop tunes, cheeky Scottish wit and the kind of relentless run of singles I haven’t heard since the first Supergrass record – it came out back in January and had consequently faded from the spotlight by the time the end of year polls came round, but for me this is easily the best album of 2007. Bonus points for having the first ever top three single containing the word ‘cunt’ in the shape of ‘Same Jeans’ (check out the second chorus !).

Underworld – Oblivion with bells
Dropkick Murphys – The meanest of times

If your favourite bands have already notched up several faultless albums over the course of their career, why hesitate in picking up their latest release when it comes out ? Both Underworld and Dropkick Murphys have laid down what to my mind are some of the greatest ever records in their chosen genre, and neither have released a weak album so it goes without saying that I bagged both of these as soon as they hit the shelves. What’s more, they’re both absolutely amazing live so the chance to check them out when they tour these albums is one I shan’t be missing either.

MIA – Kala
Klaxons – Myths of the near future
New Young Pony Club – Fantastic Playroom

It’s easy to be cynical about all this fluo new rave business but you can’t deny that there are some decent tunes in there beneath all the scenester bullshit. Both MIA and Klaxons have been the subject of considerate music biz adoration over the last twelve months – I won’t go into whether or not I think they’re the future of music or not, let’s just say that their records are fucking cool (I particularly like Klaxons’ revamp of rave classic ‘The Bouncer’, even though it isn’t included on their album). NYPC are more of a standard electropop affair, but their music is pretty ace and their live show supporting Happy Mondays a couple of months back gave me and my friends a good oppurtunity to discuss which of the three female band members we would like to shag the most. All three at the same time would be my personal preference, not wanting to upset anyone.

Bloc Party – A weekend in the city
Arctic Monkeys – Favourite worst nightmare

The wave of angular guitar bands that came out of Britain in 2004-05 are now at the point where they can no longer ride the slipstream of hype that took them to the top a couple of years back - they actually have to prove they can write more than one decent album. The Monkeys laid down a faultless second record without even sounding like they were trying that hard, whereas Bloc Party made their sophmore album a more complex, personal listen. Like their first record, I was initially fairly cynical about the whole thing as they sounded like they’d sanded down their edge à la Razorlight to hit more radio playlists, but one listen to ‘A weekend in the city’ is enough to dispell those fears – the music is as immediate as before but the difference is that the lyrics are a lot more specific, which kinda adds a whole new dimension to them that I never noticed before. Good stuff guys.

Municipal Waste – The art of partying
Megadeth – United Abominations

Seeing as fluo is the new thing, it was inevitable that a bunch of Hoxton trendies would latch onto thrash metal and try to kickstart a revival, unaware that headbangers around the world had never stopped listening to it in the first place. Municipal Waste became the flagship act due to their big dumb fun approach and their records provided the soundtrack everyone was waiting for, but Dave Mustaine’s return with a proper line-up was equally devastating when the ‘deth unleashed ‘United Abominations’ this summer. The right-leaning political stance of the reformed Mustaine probably kept him out of the NME, but the tunes were just as solid as anything else out there – in any case, I’ve never noticed an artist’s political bias affect their ability to shred like a bastard and there were certainly no problems here.

Gogol Bordello – Super Taranta !

2007 was the year that New York socialites suddenly latched on to Balkan Gypsy punk, and Gogol Bordello were the band to reap the biggest dividends from the new trend, even getting to hang out with Madonna. This sort of stuff has been around for ages though, and Bordello are hardly the only ones playing it – Emir Kusturica has been on the case for years – but a bit of media exposure certainly didn’t do it any harm. I saw this guys at Hungary’s Sziget festival along with loads of other similar sounding bands, and as the soundtrack to some Central-European beer lairiness it was pretty much unbeatable.

Radiohead – In rainbows
Prince – Planet Earth

What was the coolest thing to happen in music in 2007 ? Major league artists releasing their material for ABSOLUTELY FUCK ALL, that’s what ! Actively silencing the lazy industry fatcats who’ve been complaining about downloading for the past few years, both Prince and Radiohead proved that making their music available for free wouldn’t kill off their careers in the way many had feared – indeed, they only become stronger : Prince sold out 21 consecutive dates in London and the ‘head still topped the album charts when ‘In Rainbows’ came out on CD. Whereas donuts like Lars Ulrich got themselves singled out as money-grabbing company boys when they kicked up a fuss about downloading, Prince and Radiohead have only gained credibility and respect for their decision to trust the customer – hopefully, 2008 will be the year that the industry catches up with them.

Worst of 2007

Mika – Grace Kelly

OK, the album wasn’t all that bad and I suppose I’d be being a little unfair to call out wee Mika for making one of the year’s worst records – that said, if I ever hear this excruciatingly irriting song once more, I am going to track down the guy and shove the fucking CD down his throat.

The Fray – How to save a life

I swear that music in general is getting weedier every fucking year that passes. Back at the beginning of the decade we had Chris Martin foisting himself and his drizzly brand of radio rock onto the world and ever since we’ve had to put up with increasingly bland, faceless radio knob cheese that sounds like the modern equivalent of Barry fucking Manilow ! Starsailor, Keane, James Blunt, James Morrisson and now these guys – if music gets any more neutered and flacid, the next batch of pussweed popstars to arrive are going to be physically bereft of any balls whatsoever !! Listen guys, any band featuring a bloke playing the fucking piano is always going to suck ass, whatever way you try to present it – this dreary spunkstain of a record sounds like a Christian rock band in one of their less dynamic moments !! Even Cliff Richard would probably call you guys out for being boring, you gormless gaggle of fucking geeks !!

Hoosiers – Worried about Ray
Hellogoodbye – Here in your arms
Scouting for girls – She’s so lovely

When did rock music turn so fucking congenial all of a sudden ?? I like rock stars to be relatively approachable, but first and foremost I expect them to fucking ROCK and these guys are a long way from fulfilling that particular requirement. When you ask bands who inspired them to pick up their instruments back in the day, most people come out with stuff like The Clash or Oasis or at least something with a bit of bite to it – with these guys, you half expect their moment of rock ‘n’ roll epiphany to have occured whilst watching Let Loose mime ‘Crazy for you’ on Saturday morning telly ! Where’s the fucking edge ?? I recommend dropping all of these bands down the front at a Gallows concert and seeing how long it takes them to run screaming back to their bedrooms and their Lighting Seeds records !

Linkin Park – Minutes to midnight

Who, I repeat WHO still gives a flying fuck about Linky Pinky Park these days ??? This sort of petulant teenage squeaking over a bunch of two-note riffs and freeze-dried turntable samples might have been in vogue about seven years ago, but I would have imagined that most of the original fans had grown out of slamming their bedroom doors to this wanky tantrum-metal by now ! But no, apparently they’re still selling out arenas and topping the album charts !! How can these tossers still take themselves seriously after building a career on the sonic equivalent of throwing their toys out of the pram when they’re 30-something millionnaire rockstars who should be busy worrying about their mortgages and going fucking bald !!!

Concert for Diana/Live Earth

A head-to-head tie in the race for this year’s most nauseatingly overwrought attempt to right the world’s wrongs by staging an enormous rock concert with all the artistic relevance of the Royal Variety performance – as if Elton John hadn’t already reminded us that rock ‘n’ roll dedications to Diana are the death of credibility, we now get an endless procession of musicians indulging in the sort of Ben Elton-style toadying that should get you kicked out of the serious artist club for all eternity. And as for Al cunting Gore and his little eco-shindig, I’ve got about as much time for his environment speeches as I have for the Jehovah’s witnesses that come banging on my door on Sunday morning when I’m hideously hungover ! You help your frigid bitch of a wife to actively censor mainstream music for most of the 80s and then you expect a new generation of music fans to take you seriously just because you got Genesis back together ??? Al, I never thought there would be a contender for the title of most hollow-voiced, pretentious bloated monstrosity involved in the music business but you’ve made me think again ! Bono, you’re off the hook for now !

Spice Girls – Headlines (Friendship never ends)

So, Take That reform minus their most punchable member and defy expectations by raking it in with a tour and subsequent new album….Record industry fatcats were soon rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of new profits off the back of the Spice Girls’ back catalogue, so a reunion was pushed through without further ado along with a Greatest Hits compilation, assorted TV specials and no small amount of media hoo-ha. OK, the concert tickets might have sold impressively (although I reckon that was just because people had bets on which one of girls would break a high-heel first and ended up falling off the stage with her tits hanging out of her dress) but as for the comeback single…..one week at number eleven. ONE WEEK AT NUMBER FUCKING ELEVEN !!! You call that a comeback ??? After the cynical marketing campaign behind your original period in the charts gave you nine number ones and a ‘flop’ number two, the best you can manage is number eleven ??? Even Chico would be fucking disappointed with that !!! And your Greatest Hits album stiffed too, not surprisingly seeing as most of the music on it is total fucking toss !!

Tokio Hotel – Scream/Room 483
Avril Lavigne – Girlfriend

Look, for the last time, I keep telling you kids that guitars are for grown-ups, not punkoid ankle-biters who’ve eaten too much fucking chocolate ! If I wanted to listen to squeeky little chipmunks playing crappy punk-pop about refusing to do their homework, I’d go babysit my neighbour’s kids and listen to them trying to learn the latest Fall Out Boy single on guitar – at least I’d get paid for putting myself through all that torment ! I’ll look the other way for Tokio Hotel seeing as they’re all about 12, but as for Avril Lavigne, you’re a fucking married woman playing mall-punk songs about the trials of being a teenager ! Grow up and get a proper job ! Haven’t you got some curtains to put up or something ?

Britney Spears – Gimme more
Amy Winehouse – Back to black

If one thing’s become apparent in celebrity culture, it’s that we’re more eager than ever to watch stars fall flat on their arses in public so that we can all have a jolly good laugh at them. Nothing wrong with that at heart, but reading some of the media backlash against these two after they hit the skids, you’d think the press had some sort of personal vendetta that had been brewing for years ! It’s all starting to get a little bit uncomfortable – should, heaven forbid, one of them finally confirm our worst fears and pop their clogs in some celebrity drug orgy, you half expect the staff of Heat to be found dancing on their fucking grave ! OK, I can sort of understand why you might want to have a crack at an arrogant stage-school brat like Winehouse (especially after she warned her own audience what would happen ‘when my husband gets out of incarceration’ when they booed her at a crap gig – what do you think this is, Menace 2 Society ???), but the fact is that most of the snide, poisonous journalists writing about her are probably leading the same sort of lifestyle themselves. If we rounded up every spoilt media bitch in London who spends most of her free time doing designer drugs, attacking her boyfriend and falling out of taxis, most of the celebrity magazines would close down in a week ! And at least Winehouse can carry a tune – that’s more than you can say for Britney, who managed to top even her most embarassing moments this year by shaving her head, driving her SUV around Hollywood completely shifaced and to top it all, showcasing her comeback single at the MTV awards looking like she’d just come out of a 36-hour drug binge with Happy Mondays’ road crew !! That dance routine of yours had all the sex appeal of a 13 year-old Ukrainian prostitute doing an anorexic lapdance for some sweaty old accountant in a sticky-floored porn parlour ! Please, take whatever dignity you still have and disappear from the spotlight forever before it’s too late – if there’s a new low you haven’t reached yet, it’s only a matter of time and you can bet the paparazzi will be there waiting for you !

R. Kelly & Usher – Same girl

Remember a few years back when all the mainstream rock periodicals suddenly got all guilty about only having records by white guitar bands in their collection and developed a love for R’n’B almost overnight ? They might have uncovered a couple of decent albums from Missy Elliot and NERD in the process, but overall you can’t deny that R’n’B as a genre is pretty fucking tired these days and nowhere more so than in this risible duet between two of the scene’s most established crooners. Both of these guys have laid down some decent tunes in their time but we’re talking a while back (in R.Kelly’s case, almost a fucking decade) and it’s pretty obvious they’ve run out of ideas. As you can probably imagine, the two protagonists find themselves amourously linked with the same lady and proceed to bear their souls over some identikit MTV production – the results sound like the love theme from some cheesy 50s musical with a few synths thrown in for good measure, and conjures up about as much genuine romance as a plate of cold spunk ! Enough of all this fucking barrel-scraping guys ! You’ve been hammering the whole boy-girl bump ‘n’ grind bullshit for about fifteen years already – get some new ideas !! Hey R, how about writing a track about you boffing 14 year old schoolgirls, that’d be pretty entertaining !!

Annie Lennox – Songs of mass destruction

Oh how very politically scathing !!! ‘Songs of mass destruction’ eh ?? Not only is that title almost impossibly pretentious, it’s also about four years out of date !! Pretty much everyone from Green Day to Faithless has hijacked the whole ‘mass destruction’ metaphor and milked it for all it’s worth, but now for some reason you still think the general public needs to hear the musing of a 45 year old industry hag on the state of global politics ??? I bet a fucking four year old could come up with something more profound than this hopelessly self-aware pile of rhinocerous diarrhoea !! You think you’re going to lecture us all on politics after you spent most of the 80s soundtracking yuppie coke orgies and Jeremy Clarkson drivetime rock radio ?? What’s next, a world tour on your carbon-guzzling private jet to remind us all of the dangers of global warming ??? Fuck off back to the 80s wilderness along with Simple Minds, Midnight Oil and all the other bloated music casualties who still think they’re relevant in 2007 ! The only thing destined for mass destruction is gonna be the enormous reserve stocks of this album that HMV has to dump in a landfill when nobody buys the fucking thing !!

Just Jack – Stars in their eyes
Kate Nash – Foundations
Jamie T – Calm down dearest

Not bad tunes if the truth be told, but it’s kind of hard to take all these London stage school brats seriously when they lay on the Cockney minicab driver accents so bloody thick. Over the last year or so it’s become practically obligatory to develop some designer accent to get your music on the radio if you’re a young solo artist, but in most cases the kids in question are actually privately-educated snotlings from one of the nicer bits of the suburbs rather than Dickensian urchins rummaging through the fucking dustbins. I guess it’s just another reminder that Britain’s music scene is inextricably linked with the capital – let’s just imagine that this weren’t the case for a moment, and that the national music industry was based in Newcastle rather than London…..Would we be listening to droves of public schoolkids rapping in imitation Byker Grove vernacular ? I somehow doubt it. Look, there’s nothing wrong with being middle class and sounding it – Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s managed to forge a career out of home counties disco vocals, so why don’t you posh kids just drop the fucking chim-chimminy accents and sing in your real voices for once ?

Norah Jones – Not too late
Michael Bublé – Call me irresponsible
Katie Melua & Eva Cassidy – What a wonderful world

Another year, another gaggle of million-selling lounge jazz muppets clogging up the album charts – I’ve had a pop at this sort of stuff before, but it keeps selling by the truckload so I see no reason to avert my wrath elsewhere for the time being. Norah Jones is gacky Ally Macbeal soul for yuppie scumbags in plasma screen wine bars, Michael Bublé is neutered by-the-book 21st century Ratpack bullshit and as for Katie Melua, as if it weren’t enough having to deal with her insipid vanilla soul squawking on local radio every fucking day, she has to go and dig up Eva Cassidy for a beyond-the-grave duet available solely via that graveyard of musical creativity, the music section in fucking Tescos !!! What more proof do you need that this dreary wet fart of a record is the sonic equivalent of another pack of overpriced organic cress to be devoured by the vapid middle classes as they meander towards the fucking checkout ??? Listen Katie, placing your own soulless Blue Peter crooning next to the late great Eva just highlights what a piss-feeble talent show muppet you are in comparison – take your odious drivetime radio turd of a record and fuck off back to Children’s TV ! This sort of fuck-tedious dinner party chintz should be made illegal ! Anyone who comes round my flat for dinner expecting to hear shite like this is gonna be treated to Slayer on full whack and a plate of dismembered kittens for fucking starters !


Leon Jackson – When you believe

Simon Cowell, I am going to kill you.

This blog is not dead

Hi folks,

A quick word just to point out that this blog is still active, I haven't posted anything in yonks but I have been doing a lot of writing recently so some new stuff will be forthcoming fairly soon.

Stay smiling!!

xxx John