New entries in the UK singles chart week commencing 24/4/94

welp i remember maybe half a dozen of these without youtubing them

probably voting hold that sucker down but i do want to hear all those i'm not familiar with first

Seeing as 'Spangle' is on that Seefeel EP, that.

should be Kaliphz, not Kalipzh. same group that had a hit a couple of years later with a version of Golden Brown, under the name Kaleef.

I don't know if this is an example of people writing their own wikipedia entries or just someone trolling:

The group had a constantly shifting membership, and various name changes reflected this. The decline in fame and musical talent was due to the ever shifting members, Bert was the carrier of the group, as his lyrics and vocals were dearly needed, and proved to be the reason the group was successful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaliphz

was there a guy called Bert in Kaliphz?

I voted for Dig. I bet I'm the only one.

i think the MUFC one was Status Quo's last single to reach the top 20?

anyhow it's good to see them mentoring the next generation of music stars like eric cantona and dion dublin

Quo had a few more yet - Jam Side Down (who can forget its legendary appearance on Now 53?) and The Party Ain't Over Yet (which I remember from a newspaper freebie as part of a megamix for the whole Quo album)

Eric Cantona sang something on Michael McIntyre's The Big Show a few months ago - that Quo mentorship goes far

this is not a zeitgeist I recognise or understand at all. the UK pop landscape before wannabe and after 80s synthpop is a baffling wilderness and I can't make sense of it

voted babs for sentimental and name recognition reasons though it's probably the opposite of what the cool kids wanted to hear at the time

for some reason i cannot recall i think i've got the CD of that Kaliphz single somewhere in the house. possibly an unwanted pub quiz spot prize.

might vote Counting Crows because lol why not

This was a couple of years before I started buying music so I have no real memories but that OT Quartet song bangs and features heavily in a memorable Queer as Folk scene, so that.

so i've gone through all the ones i didn't recognise

KALIPZH - VIBE DA JOINT (#100)
not surprised this was performed on the word - this is like the archetypal forgotten 1994 UK rap record. a bit shouty, bit beery, a bit credit to the nation, bit collapsed lung

MUTHA'S DAY OUT - LOCKED (#93)
deadpan rap rock verses versus eddie vedder throat milling in the chorus. dishwater

DELTA LADY - SWAMP FEVER (#89)
i know the pretty excellent 'anything you want' but not this one. it's good menacing prog-house with a hard house-y bass arpeggio and some peripheral acid touches. sort of halfway guerrilla halfway perfecto in sound. it's really good, but tracky stuff like this rarely troubled the top 40 at this point.

DIG - BELIEVE (#83)
i'm quite charmed by the kind of weedy production and the way some jangle sporadically floats to the surface above the distortion. i can see they're from l.a. but it sounds a bit british.

BUFFALO TOM - I'M ALLOWED (#81)
lumpen

7669 - HEREE AH CUMM (#76)
there seems to be a very distant airhorn drone that could have been a strange topline if mixed loud enough (a la public enemy's lost at birth). another good'un

BROTHERS IN RHYTHM FT CHARVONI - FOREVER AND A DAY (#51)
factory line '94 diva house. the brothers could, and often did, much better. still, being as i find it hard to be negative about almost any 90s commercial dance music, i don't really think this is bad. but there's no reason to think it isn't degrees of motion or tons of other acts.

JULIA FORDHAM - DIFFERENT TIME DIFFERENT PLACE (#50)
RICHARD MARX - SILENT SCREAM (#44)
Nope

I've heard the Deadly Sins track a few times but I wanted to jog my memory. Really rudimentary hardbag/eurodance interzone stuff and maybe the corniest this music gets with non-rapped vocals - the refrain, delivered passionlessly, is "we are going down, down to this funky town" - but the blankness actually becomes quite funny. There's lots of rising and falling 'whoooah' samples that sound like part of 'Nellie the Elephant' being played forwards and back and that's really its one idea.

Still might vote for Sucker, but am also tempted by Delta Lady, Soundgarden and Jah Wobble.

the Eternal girls were really good at walking stridently in that video

Skin maybe the most popular (at least in terms of having a small but passionate enough fanbase to propel them into the charts consistently) band at this time I still don't have a good handle on what they sound like (tho I know they were 'UK hard rock' and I don't like it). Six Top 40 hits in all.

They were maybe the last in a line of unambiguously hard rock bands to crop up in the UK and do quite well, after Gun and Little Angels, before Britrock (Wildhearts/Terrorvision/Skunk Anansie etc) really sank its teeth in and Kerrang had relatively more interesting homegrown bands to write about. Ofc one of those bands had their own Skin.

Feels dumb/basic to consider it a contender in this space, but I really like that Fall song

this is not a zeitgeist I recognise or understand at all. the UK pop landscape before wannabe and after 80s synthpop is a baffling wilderness and I can't make sense of it

I've always felt the same way about this era, I think because this is when I old enough to be vaguely aware of the pop charts but not old enough to be actively following them, I've been able to fill in the blanks for pre-90s stuff, but this period still feels obscure to me.

there are tracks I like here but there's a cumulative feeling of rootsy drabness I get from this era of the charts, maybe a reaction to the flashy, gaudy archness of 80s pop? I definitely found it dull at the time and remember being bored sitting with my dad as he watched the chart show (I think it was on immediately after the kids cartoons? and maybe immediately before something else more child friendly?), aside from the occasional eurodance track it all seemed lacking in zip compared to the 80s pop music I'd occasionally hear.

I think Richard Marx, 7669 and Deadly Sins are my favourites here

the Richard Marx songs sounds kind of out of time to me, a bit like Squeeze or Nick Heyward or something

there's a cumulative feeling of rootsy drabness I get from this era of the charts, maybe a reaction to the flashy, gaudy archness of 80s pop? I definitely found it dull at the time

I don’t think I know a single song that’s on here, though of course I recognise a lot of the names. Nothing that’s included here would have been of interest to me at the time. It was a strange time for me as well. I’d been into (and trying to make) house and street soul and things like that for a number of years, but I was beginning to change direction. I’d heard Portishead and that was a huge shift that seemed to open up a lot of possibilities. On the other hand, I loved things like De’Lacy (‘Hideaway’) and Alex Party (‘Don’t Give Me Your Life’). But the stuff that’s on here seems for the most part like it would be drab and boring, as you say.

I've come to like some of the dance and RnB stuff from this era that was maybe too low-key for me when I was a kid, there's still so much dirge-y midtempo alt-rock though (I think the Elvis Costello song maybe benefits from being heard in this context because sounds sprightly compared to all the other rock songs here, with the exception of the Fall track, which sounds disconnected from everything else here and like it could just as easily been released in 1984 or 2004)

I do feel like this represents a particularly shit 1994 chartweek (and with half the entries unknown or unmemorable to me) but it's proabably just bang average.

quite partial to that Ride song as it was on the legendary "Go Ape" cd that came free with Donkey Kong Country

I like that Costello track

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

this is minor Fall but I just don't see any reason not to vote Fall here

This might have been the last Ride song I liked.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Good to see Man U in the relegation places.

I thought I'd voted for 7669, but maybe I forgot to vote?

Didn't realise that Skin were so popular

Maybe 6 people just saw the name Skin and thought it was a solo EP by the singer of Skunk Anansie?

I nearly thought that

People voted for this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BD320vbmjtE