Category: Which Decade 2006

1st place – The 1970s. (38 points)

2005: 3rd place, 30 points.
2004: 2nd place, 31 points.
2003: 1st place, 35 points + 1 tiebreak point.

2nd place – The 1960s. (37 points)

2005: 2nd place, 33 points.
2004: 1st place, 36 points.
2003: 3rd place, 28 points.

3rd place – The 1980s. (33 points)

2005: 1st place, 34 points.
2004: 3rd place, 30 points.
2003: 2nd place, 35 points.

With apologies for the continued delay. We were out looking at prize poultry at the Manifold Valley Agricultural Show – don’t scoff, the poultry was STUNNING – and then Clare Boob Pencil popped round for tea (and stayed for sardines). You know how it goes.

Equal 4th place – The 1990s. (21 points)

2005: 5th place, 26 points.
2004: 4th place, 27 points.
2003: 5th place, 25 points.

Equal 4th place – The 2000s. (21 points)

2005: 4th place, 27 points.
2004: 5th place, 26 points.
2003: 4th place, 27 points.

OK, I have kept you waiting long enough. With victory for the 1970s looking increasingly likely, this is the last chance for our four other decades to make their mark. All rise please! It’s the Number Ones!

Some time in the spring of 1966, my parents threw a party. In the course of this, they somehow acquired a small collection of 45rpm singles, probably brought along by one of the guests. As my parents had only minimal interest in pop music, these 45s remained the mainstay of the family singles collection for several years afterwards. I must have played them many dozens of times over the next few years, A-sides and B-sides both, before commencing my own collection in the early 1970s.

The full list of singles from spring 1966 was as follows:

• Homeward Bound/The Leaves That Are Green – Simon & Garfunkel.
• Substitute/Waltz For A Pig – The Who.
• Wild Thing – The Troggs.
• Hold Tight – Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Titch.
• I Don’t Want You/Ball And Chain – The Anteeks.
• These Boots Are Made For Walking/The City Never Sleeps At Night – Nancy Sinatra.

No prizes for guessing which single was my favourite. “These Boots Are Made For Walking” was sassy, provocative, and faintly perverse – even to a four year old. It also sounded like no other record I had ever heard: those weird descending chromatics on the bass, for instance, matched by Nancy’s downwardly drawled “walk all over you” at the end of the chorus. This is a song which has never quite gone away over the past 40 years, its singularity rendering it impervious to the vagaries of fashion. In other words: a classic.

(So much so, that the song even resisted my attempts to massacre it a couple of weeks ago, down at karaoke night at The Foresters. Oh yes. As if one humiliation hadn’t been enough…)

And speaking of classics, and of songs which have never gone away: there is something about the arrangement of the Four Seasons’ “December 1963” which is just… perfect. Every little contributory element of the song’s irresistable groove is somehow weighted to precisely the right degree, maximising pleasure levels throughout, and turning what might have been a slight and rather corny little number about losing one’s virginity into something far greater than the sum of its parts.

(Full disclosure time: the boy I loved bought a copy of this, on the same afternoon that I bought my copy, so we ended up with two copies in the school common room. Such telepathy! We were meant to be together! It was a sign!)

By the spring of 1986, I was rapidly losing any last vestiges of interest in guitar bands, with the exception of The Smiths, REM and the Jesus And Mary Chain. The ground-breaking thrills of post-punk had atrophied into the weedy, wilfully under-achieving new orthodoxies of “indie”, as encapsulated in the wildly overrated C86 cassette that was issued, manifesto-style, by the NME.

Instead, my affections had transferred themselves to the alternative canon of soul/funk: from the classics of the 1960s and 1970s to the latest 12″ imports, including the new genres of hip-hop, Washington DC go-go – and, within a few months, Chicago house music. And my my, what a snobby purist I was already becoming, policing my genres of choice in much the same way that I had insisted on “real” punk during 1976 and 1977.

So, just as I had derided the Boomtown Rats for not being properly punk enough in 1977/78, I was now doing the same with Billy Ocean, and the suspiciously poppified pseudo-funk of “When The Going Gets Tough”. Where everyone else saw a catchy-as-hell slice of pure, participative fun – for this was a song which dared you not to sing along with it – I saw nothing but naffness.

How wrong I was, and how great this is – transcending even the same synthetic 1980s production job which has blighted most of 1986 over the past two weeks. And thank heavens that I have learnt to transcend such pointless snobberies in the meantime.

None of which is to say that I’m prepared to find any value in Babylon Zoo’s irredeemably gruesome “Spaceman”: a jingle from a jeans ad, which brought accidental and strictly fleeting glory to its creator, a boggle-eyed loon in silver trousers called Jas Mann. This sort of thing used to happen quite regularly in the 1990s. (Anyone remember Stiltskin? Robin Beck? Freakpower?) At least in our media-fragmented, de-centralised 2000s, it takes more than a thirty second jeans ad to get a single in the charts.

On the other hand… at least in the 1990s, it took more than slapping a dance beat over an second-rate old disco record to get a single in the charts. Step forward, Meck featuring Leo Sayer, and their graceless re-working of Sayer’s “forgotten classic” Thunder In My Heart. (Ever get the feeling we’re running short on forgotten classics?) Because obviously, what Thunder In My Heart needed all along was one of those bits where everything goes muffled like a wonky old cassette tape, WHY do people persist on doing this in the middle of dance tracks, WHY WHY WHY?

And there you have it: our final selection for this year, complete with yet another tell-tale gap in quality between our three oldest and our two youngest decades. 1990s and 2000s: you’ve let yourselves down again. With the best will in the world, there’s not much we can do to help you, if you can’t help yourselves. Tsk.

My votes: Nancy Sinatra – 5 points. Four Seasons – 4 points. Billy Ocean – 3 points. Meck featuring Leo Sayer – 2 points. Babylon Zoo – 1 point.

Over to you, for one last time. Voting will remain open for all ten selections, until I say “stop”. Which will be some time towards the middle of next week. So if you want to play catch-up, then now’s your chance.

Continue reading “Which Decade Is Tops For Pops? – Year 4 – the Number Ones.”

Once again – and this happens every year – there is still plenty of jockeying for position going on across the board, as a steady flow of late votes continues to trickle in. As various songs quietly swap places further down the page, this has a knock-on effect on the cumulative scores for each decade. So, if you’re late to the party, then be assured that late votes can still make a difference.

As I write this, the Spencer Davis Group and the Miracles are battling it out for first place among the Number 8s, with the lead regularly swapping – and the same holds true for the Cilla Black/Candi Staton bitchfest in the Number 7s. Meanwhile, Crispian St Peters is only just ahead of Tina Charles in yesterday’s Number 3s. It’s so exciting! But wait, there’s more! It’s the Number Twos!

A few days ago, some of you confidently predicted that there wouldn’t be a better song this year than Abba’s “Mamma Mia”. Well, here’s your challenge, right here, right now.

This classic number from the Rolling Stones represented a quantum leap forward from the beefed-up R&B of the band’s earlier hits, ushering in a darker, more menacing, more confrontational attitude. As a result, “19th Nervous Breakdown” broke their run of five consecutive Number Ones, and kicked off a sequence of six “dark period” hits, ending with the incandescent “Jumping Jack Flash” just over two years later. It’s about now that Mick Jagger became the British establishment’s premier whipping boy – indeed, I remember genuinely believing that he was the most evil man in the country, thanks to the sustained outrage of my parents and grandparents. Listening to this track, you can still see why the Stones must have seemed such a threat.

But how do you compare a swaggering rock workout like this to the intricately crafted pop of “Mamma Mia”? Both convey a certain sense of accusation – but where the one shakes its fist, the other merely wags its fingers. So which is the greater record? Which moves you the most? Are you Rock or are you Pop? Which SIDE are you on?

Ah, it’s the age old question – and one which I prefer to side-step, having a foot in both camps. However, of one thing I am certain: that there will be a string of 5 points for the Stones. Maybe even our first ever 100% score, who knows. Because, yeesh, have you seen the state of the competition?

Slik – featuring a fresh-faced Midge Ure on lead vocals, before he graduated into Pop’s Mister Worthy And Dull (sorry, but all the Live Aids in the world won’t excuse him ruining Ultravox) – were being heavily promoted as The New Bay City Rollers, with the tartan swapped for bowling shirts, and the cheesy grins swapped for “mean and moody” poses which generally included chewing on matchsticks. (Grr!) Other than that, both bands were Scottish, and both used the services of the same songwriting/production partnership.

Not that you can tell this at the beginning of “Forever And Ever”, which is impressively weird for a teen group, all monk-like chanting and, erm, clanging chimes of doom. But just as you’re thinking “You know, I could quite get into this”, the whole track lurches into a godwaful chunka-chunka-chunka satin-scarf-waving limp-wristed (sorry) Thing Of Complete Hideousness, which has NOTHING to do with what has come before it. 5 points for the verse, but 1 point for the chorus. I’m seeing a string of second places. Unless… unless…

“Can I do yer chalet?” Rejoice, rejoice, IT’S SU POLLARD, HERE TO SAVE THE EIGHTIES!

(In fact, so eager was Su to do her duty, that she barged in ahead of Slik on the MP3 medley. An unstoppable force, that’s our Su.)

I’ve written about “Starting Together” before, you know. But to recap: it was the theme tune from a BBC documentary series about a young couple getting married. This was particularly memorable for its video, in which Su, looking fetching in a furry white winter cap with matching pom-poms, indulged in a playful snowball fight in the woods with said young marrieds.

OK, so it’s shit. But at least it’s entertaining shit, unlike…

3T, who were benefitting from heavy attention due to being Michael Jackson’s nephews. Tito’s sons, weren’t they? Three of them, right? Hence the awful name 3T, which makes them sound like a bunch of straight-to-cabaret no-hopers off The X Factor.

I can’t stand “Anything”. Really, really can’t stand it. Worst record we’ve had so far. Hell, even Mariah Carey was good for a snooty giggle for a couple of seconds. This is just… ugh. And, especially given their pedigree, it’s disgracefully badly sung. Adenoidal, that’s the word. But, oh, just wait till we get to the witless necrophiliac slobberings of the collected might of (deep breath)…

…Notorious BIG featuring Diddy, Nelly, Jagged Edge & Avery Storm. One has been dead since 1997, and the rest are a bunch of vultures crowded round the still profitable cadaver, and dribbling mildly offensive pre-pubescent inanities all over it. Putrid stuff, which tempts me to re-activate my inner Unreconstructed 1980s Gender Politics Warrior… but maybe not, maybe not.

Nevertheless, at least “Nasty Girl” is built around a cute and catchy 1980s soul/funk retro backing, the niftiness of which lifts it up to third place in my voting. Sorry, Su. Fair’s fair. Luvya loadz.

My votes: Rolling Stones – 5 points. Slik – 4 points. Notorious BIG – 3 points. Su Pollard – 2 points. 3T – 1 point.

Over to you. Come on, it’s the Stones all the way, isn’t it? So perhaps the real battle is for last place. It’s gonna be tough!

Continue reading “Which Decade Is Tops For Pops? – Year 4 – the Number Twos.”