In 1993, this tendency reached an early apotheosis. Having recently got into pop music at the comparatively late age of 16, I had started listening to the UK Top 40 with Bruno Brookes every Sunday from 4 till 7. I was now in the Upper Sixth at a boarding school and as I wasn't a terribly conscientious A level student, I had little else to occupy me during these hours.
On October 3rd, I made a decision. No, that's giving it too much weight. I just thought it might be interesting to write it down. I worked out that a double sided piece of A4 paper would comfortably fit three weeks' worth of top forties. I transcribed the forty songs' names alongside the relevant artists, chart positions and indications of movement (up, down, non-mover, new entry). Then I went to have supper.
Why? What was the point? Well, a bit of context. This was 1993, a good two years before I clapped eyes on a computer equipped with the Internet. Things were more ephemeral then. If you didn't write it down, it was gone. I would later discover that Ceefax showed the chart for the week, but that's still pretty fleeting. And if you don't know what Ceefax was, I don't propose to explain now. You have Google now; use it.
There's no terribly good reason. I was interested; I wrote it down. That's it. But timing is everything. The fact that my debut chart was at the start of a quarter didn't help - my brain loves these arbitrary patterns. Then there's the fact that this coincided with the beginnings of a new movement in music.
Within a few months of starting this chart, Elastica's Line Up charted, followed by Stay Together by Suede, Primal Scream's Rocks and Girls and Boys by Blur. Britpop had begun. Slowly but surely I became a Britpop boy. By the time I went to university, the great Blur versus Oasis battle had been and gone and the top 10 would be full of bands from Pulp to Menswear for most of the next few years.
I recall friends at university being surprised that I had been doing this for two years. I could never fully explain why. As the years went on, it became something of an albatross. It's quite tricky to always ensure you're near a radio, some paper and a pen between four and seven on a Sunday. Nonetheless, I persevered. I enjoyed it.
By the time the millennium came around, music had got really crap. Instead of Britpop bands dominating the charts, everything was about B*Witched or Westlife. This might have been a good time to stop. Music picked up again in about 2003 and my 10th anniversary of writing down the charts came within three months of my wedding. This might have been a good time to stop.
The thing is, it's very hard to stop something when you've been doing it pointlessly for so long. Stopping – not doing it any more – just serves to highlight how pointless it was in the first place."I've got a list of all the charts for the past 20 years" - sounds sort of useful. "I've got a list of all the charts for a very specific period of the 90s and 00s" - not really very useful at all.
So why stop now? How have I managed to kick the habit?
The fact is, I haven't had time to do it for a very long time. Or, indeed, to do anything much. I am no longer a lazy A level student. Full-time employment, fatherhood, and various other things make it very hard to find time for such a pointless activity. As evidence for this, I should point out that I started writing this blog in October 2013. I didn't get around to finishing it and have just discovered it and decided to finish it in July 2014.
Also, what did I get out of it in the first place?(Aside, that is, from quenching my bizarre thirst for list making.) It was a really good way of keeping in touch with music, new music. I always knew what was going on. Even as I hit my 30s, I could still enjoy NME and often knew about new bands and movements before my students. During the past five years, however, I can't help but notice that music is, by and large, now shit. Pitbull. Jason Derulo. That sort of thing.
We always had crap stuff in the charts. Vengaboys. Boyzone. Peter Andre. But alongside it, there was good stuff. The charts were an unending battle between crap and brilliance. I've just looked through this week's chart. It's full of dance, hip-hop, boy bands, Ed Sheeran and people who sound like Ed Sheeran. The nearest thing in the charts these days to the sorts of music I like is Coldplay. Which isn't very near.
Why would I continue, on a weekly basis, charting a list of 40 pieces of crap? It's no fun any more. Does this just mean I got old? Probably, but there is an objective truth here too. For the first time since the 1960s, guitar music is almost absent from the top 40. Kids aren't buying that stuff any more.
I recorded my last chart at the end of September 2013. This marked the 20th anniversary. So, if you want to know who was at number one on 21 January 2001, I can tell you. (It was Limp Bizkit.) What knocked Elton John's Diana song off the top? Spice up your life. Who let the dogs out? It's still unclear. But unless I go to a lot of music themed pub quizzes, this knowledge is unlikely to do me much good.
Farewell then, the top 40. Someone let me know if music comes back again, will you?
No comments:
Post a Comment