The UK Top 40, 7/12/03

This is a really bad top 10. I only like 2 of them (the Youngster and Ver Aloud) and normally I like most it which isn't 5 fat Irishmen.

Out of interest, does anyone know which Alicia Keys song was played during the album countdown, in connection with her entry at #12? I thought, with great surprise, that it was a lovely tune, with blatant and laudable 70s soul influence... great piano, great harmonies. I never really rememember/know much about her music, but I get the impression she gets a bad press - on the evidence of the track Wes played (for once was he perhaps OTM?!) she seems very good indeed.

Best new entry for me this week; has to be Black Eyed Peas. Virtually nothing else was even tolerable in terms of new entries.

"You Make Me Feel Brand New" doesn't need to be revived when "Let's Put It All Together" and "Na Na Is The Saddest Word" exist. Muse just make me depressed that one of my cousins has chosen *them*, of all the bands in the world, for his first ever gig tonight. that said, though - the number one single and three out of the top four albums have a public school connection, *and* readers of the Times' sub-Country Life "Weekend" section would have had to get past the Sex Pistols' "Never Mind The Bollocks" album cover, one of 16 celebrated album covers on the front of yesterday's tabloid section of the paper, before they got to read about Victorian follies and Derwent May's Nature Notes (this would never have happened until three months ago, when "Times Weekend" was shoved to the back of a tabloid section also including pop-cultural stuff - previously it was in its own, unimpeachably separate broadsheet section). has there ever been a worse weekend, culturally and symbolically, for the romantic Tory rump?

RC: Cultural change is clearly being manifested ever more with things like you mention.

I don't see the renewal of the BBC charter being a problem; possibly if the Tories got in in 2005 (yeah, about as likely as David Bowie making #1 next week, but it just *seems* that bit more likely this year, with the unravelling of New Labour on Iraq, and on plenty of domestic issues). Don't forget that the Tories had in their 2001 manifesto a pledge to privatise Channel 4 and at least to look at the license fee (didn't they?). I sense that Labour would renew the Charter; any opposite scenario to that would see a potential backlash against the Govt. with people saying the Kelly/Gilligan etc. affair was behind the planned changes. I don't sense it would be easy for a weakened Labour or a fledgling Tory Govt. (though really is there a way they would have any hope of winning a majority? possibly in votes, but certainly not in seats) to make such a radical change to our current broadcasting system as effectively changing the nature of the BBC from its public service mandate.
While I would say that some level of populism is going to be necessary, I don't see why standards shouldn't be protected against the worse excesses of this...
Robin, do you see the Tories as supporting channels such as BBC4, and crucially the sense that they *should not* be on mainstream BBC but on such a ghetto-ised level as they are?

Didn't Songs In A Minor get released around Xmas time? You'd think vaguely slushy neo-soul balladry would go down well at this time of year.

the BBC has always had considerable populist tendencies, the more so since the emergence of commercial TV, offshore radio et al - it's easy to apply a rose tint to the past. the "standards" of the Top 40 could easily have been protected by giving it to a presenter who doesn't use it as a means of promoting his own ego, and remembers that it's about the chart, not himself - Mark Goodier always understood this and still does (albeit not on the proper chart anymore), Scott Mills understood it, Kevin Hughes understands it when he does the Welsh Top 40 (basically the official UK chart in a different order based around sales in Wales, not a chart specific to Welsh acts!) on BBC Radio Wales. the album chart section is so obviously a means of playing past and future hits such as would be played on the other charts - it isn't actually about album sales like Gary Davies' Monday lunchtime album countdown on Radio 1 in the late 80s / early 90s was (he even played a track from a Carpenters compilation and the various Pavarotti albums each week they were at #1, even then as out of sync with the rest of his show as Daniel O'Donnell was with the rest of the Top 40 today), and like Simon Mayo's album chart show on Radio 2 still is. best to shorten it to a brief rundown like it was when Goodier presented the show, and leave the rest to a station aimed at the older audience which tends to buy albums in greater number at the moment - and that's why the album chart show is on R2, surely? the album section of the Radio 1 Top 40 is only superficially about the album chart, and cynically exploits it as a means of moving further and further towards the non-sales-based singles charts in terms of what gets played.

I think the New Right who are now in total control of the Tory party support the idea of BBC4 but only as a ghettoised thing - in fact, that's what they want to do to the entire BBC, slim it down to a few "highbrow" channels like BBC4, Radio 4, Radio 3, and push the output of such channels further and further onto the fringes, akin to PBS and NPR in America, which unlike the BBC only speak to those who would be interested anyway, not to the rest of the nation. they certainly wouldn't want to move BBC4's output further into the broadcasting mainstream, because if they had their way the "mainstream" would be entirely commercial (this goes back to the 1986 Peacock Report which called for the privatisation of Radios 1 and 2). the great thing about "slimming down" the BBC by privatising Radio 1 and getting rid of 1Xtra altogether is that it appeals to both wings of the Right in an age when increasingly little does; the old fogeys can be appeased by the fact that the music they find frightening and dangerous will no longer be funded from their licence fees (which was the real subtext of the "privatise Radio 1 now" op-eds that the Daily Mail ran every five minutes in the mid-90s - at least one of these was written by Jonathan King) and the younger ideologues can further the attack on "quasi-state institutions". getting the music that offends old Tory voters off the radio because commercial companies wouldn't risk it, *and* making money out of those same commercial companies which have replaced Radio 1 - what could please them more? they must not succeed; there is a political risk of inadvertently supporting an odious right-wing agenda if you complain too much about "BBC populism" that certainly wasn't around before the 1980s.

Dear me, yes; re. Daniel O'Donnell. It struck me when this bizarrely out of place (in terms of basic production/sound, if not entirely the sort of song... Melua and others were similarly bland ballads) single came on that it would have seemed out of date in the late 1950s, if released in the midst of the era Tom E. is exploring through "Popular"... :)

But there comes a point with the BBC where there's no difference between it and whatever the commercial sector would have to offer, surely? Which means either you hitch to the right and and say scrap it, or you try to defend what was good about the BBC, ie innovation, risk-taking (in drama, current affairs, pop music). There's been more complaints since the 70s because the BBC has gone over the the government side, be it Tory or Nu Labour: under Thatcher the BBC's news was anti-organized labour; under Blair it is pro-Euro. Ina sense this is an old debate since C4 was set up precisely as a ghetto version of 'quality' BBC stuff -- virtually everyone working in drama in the 70s at the BBC went over to C4.

The fact that it's a bad time for old fashioned Tories doesn't change the fact that Gove's Saturday Times is a monstrosity! I once heard Bruno Brookes play the Pistols (c 1995); it's meaningless now.

Like "Kish Kash" you mean?

I don't think anyone isn't going to defend the interesting, innovatory stuff that the BBC does and campaign for there to be more of it; it's just that some of us like the idea that we can hear Beyonce and Justin Timberlake without adverts and from the same organisation which produces the equivalent of National Public Radio to be fundamentally A Good Thing, to be defended. that doesn't imply that we think "Changing Rooms" is the pinnacle of public service broadcasting. BBC news under Thatcher/Major/Blair has tended to be subtly pro-government on most things because they're more nervous of governments privatising them than they would ever have been before the 1980s (when it would have seemed quite inconceivable).

as for Bruno and the Pistols, you're probably thinking of the reissue of "Anarchy In The UK" which I remember hearing him play on the Top 40 - the autumn of 1992, I think. "God Save The Queen" of course finally got played on the Top 40 when reissued last year - possibly by Scott Mills (who should be doing it now, etc) sitting in for Goodier.

I like R1 as it is, but would they stop playing that 'Castles in the Sky' shit -- damn.

I still like Mandy. Shut Up is pretty good for earworm poirpoises but not as good as THIS IS IT by Danni.

If I started a "forgotten songs" thread do you think anyone would continue it?

... which would distract Kash due to it being an UNSCRIPTED EVENT, thus startling him for upwards of five minutes, more than enough time for the DJ bloke off Smile to come in and twat him with a house brick.

I remember 'This Is It'. But yes, start it anyway.

Although I have gone off him recently in favour of Tom Baker, BAD LUCK MIKE.

of course you'd have to be over 45 (probably older than that, actually) to be offended by the Sex Pistols now, but I think the particular demographic who'd be most likely to be offended by the Pistols and what they incarnate would be the ones who'd be most interested in the sub-Country Life "Weekend" section, and would probably already have been mightily pissed off by the fact that it's been shoved at the back of the tabloid when it previously had its own broadsheet - for some of them, the people who were reading the Times for decades pre-Murdoch, seeing that on the front of "their" section of the paper might have been the final straw. I'd agree that the Times' younger New Right readership - which probably outnumber the old guard now, although that is surely not yet the case with the Telegraph's readership - wouldn't be offended at all, but the key factor for me is that those younger readers probably wouldn't be so interested in the "Weekend" stuff, and even if they were they wouldn't get so protective about it.

Blimey! How dyou recall this stuff? I think that's probably it: the reason I remember it is that BB and his female co-presenter did this ghoulish laugh over the end of the record like it was one big joke, in order, presumably, to extract its sting.

Thankfully the British political Right have a very long way to go before they can get back into government and they can't actually impact their wildest and vilest ideas, so we're much better off on that front than the US or Australia.

What buzz? There's been a lot of buzz from people who've actually heard it - apparently it's all over the radio in America, and obviously here lots of people have heard it - but outside of ILM and the promo copy I got months ago there hasn't been anything to suggest it actually exists in the UK. No radio play that I've heard, no video anywhere, only token reviews for the album. Amazon says it's released Jan 4 (clearing the single of 2004 race up after four days) though, so hopefully it can take advantage of the January sales slump.

Tasty has received even less promo than Alicia Keys, but it's very good indeed.

make of that what you will ...