"Bring Back Top of the Pops" says Culture Secretary...

How old do you want to feel?

[quote]
TV 'is failing new music stars'
By Ian Youngs
Music reporter, BBC News at In The City, Manchester

Britain is missing out on tomorrow's music stars because TV stations have stopped putting new acts on in prime time, the culture secretary has warned.

Andy Burnham said: "We need a programme like Top of the Pops again.

"This was a great thing that was always putting a great mix of new music before the public."

Mr Burnham, speaking at music industry conference In the City in Manchester, said great acts that emerged 20 years ago may not get the same chance today.

Broadcasters must "promote and champion new music in this country, rather than having just very safe options on prime-time TV", he told executives.

Talent shows like The X Factor were great, he said, but "not quite the same" as promoting artists that write their own songs.

Top of the Pops, on the other hand, was "really important for stimulating the wider interest in the wider population" when exciting new acts came along.

'Difficult place'

"I just worry a little that the relationship between prime time TV and radio and the music industry has at times become a little cosy," he told BBC News.

"It's relying on safe formats and not sufficiently putting out those new names that can then all of a sudden go from the margins right into national prominence.

"That was what was great about the past - The Smiths did become a national name, even though I can remember my dad moaning about them on Top of the Pops."

[/quote]

It won't happen. Or if it does the Cool Police will ruin it and it will be lucky to last six weeks.

No, it won't.

(I wish they'd fix them damn apostrophe's!)

the "cool police"??

TS: moaning about The Smiths vs. moaning about The X Factor

yeah you know, like Andi Peters (xp)

The only way this could work is if they stick to the original rules. "If you're in the Top 20, and going up the chart, then you can be on". But that's incredibly unlikely to happen, given the amount of messing around with the format they did in it's last few years.

The thing is, the best thing they could do is go out of their way to make it deliberately UNCOOL and square and naff and really old Auntie BBC because that would make 1) the program seem far more subversive and 2) the artists look odd and wonderful by comparison.

Go for retro production values - none of this OH! look how HIP and DOWN WITH TEH KIDS we are by having shouting and bright lights and BOUNCEY HIP presenters.

What really shines about watching old archive footage of TOTP is how understated it is - which makes both bands and audience look the more amazing for it.

Don't worry, The Cool Police are just the regular Police except wearing shades. They won't last.

kate otm.

Bring back Dance Energy

the "cool police"??

― Tracer Hand, Monday, 6 October 2008 14:33 (40 minutes ago) Bookmark

The suede-denim secret police--they have come for yr uncool niece.

You know that thing Frank Zappa said about how in the early days the eguys in charge would be "Heck, I don't understand it, but the kids seem to go for it, who knows lets try it" whereas now it's like "Hey, I understand the kids, and I know what grabs their attention, and this isn't it"

He never spoke a truer word. True it was all about hippies on the board, but the 'hip' dudes have taken over. With a high turnover factor, but ...

Extra E's on beginning of words, classic or dud!

Hippies vs Hipsters

never trust a middle aged hipster blogger!

(I do that too, Mark - the e's on the beginning of words - it's because i'm typing too fast and hitting the spacebar with my right thumb before my left hand has made it to the e)

You know that thing Frank Zappa said about how in the early days the eguys in charge would be "Heck, I don't understand it, but the kids seem to go for it, who knows lets try it" whereas now it's like "Hey, I understand the kids, and I know what grabs their attention, and this isn't it"

Today, the record industry may as well give up the kids. They are on Pirate Bay and they will stay there. Consentrate on older album oriented buyers in their 30s and 40s instead and let the kids' taste become increasingly irrelevant. That will also make music better because music doesn't need to change or rebel against older music all the time. If you have something that works for one generation, no point changing it for the next one as it will work for the next one too.

Yeah, that'll keep things fresh...

Geir reminds me that bringing back public executions wouldn't be so bad an idea...

http://www.swans.pair.com/IMG_PRODUCTS/public.jpg

http://www.skatenigs.com/albums/stup.jpg

I like kate's idea, coupled with the reinstatement of The Rule.

The Rule is U&K.

And also late TOTP forgot the number one thing, which is - TOTP is about the POPs. It's not about the presenters, crappy jokes, contests, blah blah blah - it's about giving random pop stars three minutes and twenty seconds to get on the telly and do what they do best - BE POP STARS.

Everything else is just distracting and pointless at best. Don't try to compete.

Andy Burnham is right to be worried, the hundreds of teenagers I see every day seem to find it really difficult to find out about new music. I'm so sick of listening to endless Beatles and Rolling Stones mp3s coming out of tinny mobile phone speakers oh wait

This argument is much, much more about the BBC and UK Plc than it is about music. "The kids" don't need TOTP now any more than they need a cassette head cleaner, but TOTP was such a huge, globally legendary brand that it's hardly surprising it's being talked up again.

A fuckwit MP who doesn't appear to grasp basic points about the portfolio he's supposed to be dealing with don't equal "talking up".

when i read this story this morning, my first thought was: "what a cunt."

now i've had a chance to think about it a bit.

what a feeble-minded, arse-headed, doss cunt.

Oh for the days of 95-year-old Culture Secretaries who would bellow "What are these Beatles?" from their comfy chair in the Carlton Club, you knew where you were, etc.

Also I am really sick of the fucking Smiths being dragged up as some kind of totem of whatever when "This Charming Man" climbed a massive two places in the chart (from 32 to 30) after that "iconic" performance on TOTP. Billy Joel had two singles in the top ten, the kids wanted the Thompson Twins, Paul Young and the Flying Pickets, stop trying to rewrite history I was there and thusly forth.

I don't understand why anyone is a cunt for suggesting that TOTP should come back. Lots of people liked it, presumably he did, he wants to see it come back. Big deal, we've all got crazy ideas I want to see the return of Floyd on Food.

We don't elect politicians to like TOTP.

If "This Charming Man" on TOTP had such an impact on all these people how come it only got to #25?

Burnham's idea of "new music": music that sounds like the music he liked in 1983.

xpost to NTR: because he's the sodding culture secretary, not a half-cut uncle at a kids' party; this is a pathetic attempt at raising his own profile; it's pointless, brainless and embarrassing; seriously, if he thinks the biggest problem facing young musicians right now is the lack of sodding top of the pops, he's an imbecile.

i've a very, very low tolerance for ministers who make ridiculous "populist" pronouncements. just as well nobody's paying any attention, i guess.

What a great socialist you are, judging the worth of a cultural event by its chart movements based on how many more bits of consumer plastic it sold!

Events can have cultural relevance and cache that do not translate into purely economic terms.

It's be nice if we had a "culture secretary" who pointed out things like that. But hey.

it'd be nice if we had a culture secretary who looked forward, not back.

True, dat.

If the Culture Secretary wants to be of some use for the first time in his life he would do better to address the chronic underfuding of any theatre, classical music and ballet work undertaken outside London, since lottery funds seem only to want to fund things that the Daily Mail will like.

"This Charming Man" on TOTP was not a "cultural event." I know. I sat in the Senior Common Room watching it and 99% of the students in there were falling about in hysterics when they weren't burping "give us some proper fucking music - when's Simple Minds coming on?"

It is always tempting to reinterpret history at a safe distance.

But the fact is that if everyone who claims that their life was changed by watching that performance had gone out and bought the record it would have gone to number one. It didn't. So bang goes that shaky theory.

Just because it wasn't a cultural event in your common room doesn;t mean it wasn't a cultural event. I don't want to make too much of this (as I 'm sure Andy Burnham was thinking) but it certainly was for me because it was a rare event when bands moved from Peel to totp and it always seemed like A Good Thing.

How many people claim it changed thier life? How many copies do it sell? I think the figure could easily be similar plus they might not have bought them all that week.

My tyoing has gone to shit because I cannot beleive how riled you're all getting by this.

David Cameron says it changed his life.

So really they oughtn't to have bothered.

Personally I think Cameron hated the Smiths and was listening to the Alarm and Then Jerico when he was a student.

David Cameron says it changed his life.

He was a Labour supporter before it

I just want people to be honest.

It's easy to say The Smiths Changed My Life ten or twenty years after the event.

Harder to admit that really you were listening to Under A Blood Red Sky and Let's Dance and Into The Gap like everyone else.

Obviously The Smiths' part is being overplayed. Surely it didn't take more than a little over than half a year until "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now" did actually go Top 10, but indie didn't get commercially massive until the 1995 Britpop Blur/Oasis chart war.

And it spent precisely two weeks at number ten, underneath things like "Pearl In The Shell," "Farewell My Summer Love" and "I Won't Let The Sun Go Down On Me."

New Order sold more than the Smiths anyway

Singles-wise, New Order sold more than anyone in 1983 except Culture Club. "Blue Monday" was the real "cultural event."

XP Yep. But, even though most of them liked it, "Blue Monday" didn't seem like such a cultural landmark for 80s indie fans. After all, it had synths, and even a drum machine.

Well, you're wrong there, pretty much everybody liked New Order

The Smiths were the Smiths but I am suspicious how everyone's falling over themselves now to canonise them rather than at the time, when the group actually could have benefited from it. It smacks of ambulance chasing. And politicians shouldn't be liking TOTP on our taxes.

that was on jonathan ross though, no?

xpost

matt DC so OTM it hurts. i'm going to go away and do two solid hours' study now :)

Might have been, xpost, yes.

CrazFrog was certainly on TOTP though...

Lowest point of ol' TOTP?

When the first of the elvis re-releases got to number one, and the record company refused to allow even an elvis photo to be used, so the show had to use a bad Elvis impersonator...

It's actually bullshit on both counts.

My family and all families we knew sat round and watched TOTP as a unit when we were growing up.

Secondly, apart from the odd daytime half hour there is virtually no pop on mainstream TV.

Pop musicians are frequently on TV but mostly asked to do other things. They're hardly ever called upon to play music. And Later etc. are tailored around a dated idea of rock rather than pop as such.

STINKING CORPSE, TOP OF THE POPS

― J0hn D., Wednesday, 8 October 2008 02:26 (9 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

How many people are there really who 'don't know what they want' at all? Very few I suspect.

i often feel this way actually. obviously i've been listening to music long enough to know i like but finding it often seems more difficult than it should be. there is a lot of stuff i am potentially interested in and the increased ways of accessing it actually do make the whole thing seem more like a chore at times. yes the advantages of this are also clearly evident but part of the problem there is that i'm spending maybe 60% of the time finding and listening to old stuff - more than i did in the past, because that's also become a lot easier.

but this argument is about the visual presentation of music anyway, as a service. it'll be okay once TV and the internet actually converge properly and you can enter tagwords (NOT genre by genre) and use Genius-like system to bring up broadcast-quality video clips based on advanced and detailed criteria of your own choosing. then think users last.fm radio stations but in richer TV form. but then you'll still be missing the relative thrill of 'band you like performing live in a TV studio' perhaps.

also my grandparents did used to sit through TOTP now and then in that very cliched way (cliched for a reason).

They weren't required to play music for most of TOTP's history either.

(xpost this may all be moot for me anyway since I have zero interest in the visual presentation of music outside of gigs and clubs. I can't remember the last time I had any interest in what was in a music video).

i thought shorter attentions spans were going to be rewarded in this modern age!

this may all be moot for me anyway since I have zero interest in the visual presentation of music outside of gigs and clubs

then i would say it is moot yes

They weren't required to play music for most of TOTP's history either.

That's meaningless. On TOTP they played their hits, or at any rate mimed to them, or if all else failed got Pan's People or whoever to dance to them.

Anyone wanting to go into a boring debate about mimed vs. live etc. - Saga Magazine is available from all good newsagents. No one gave a shit except Musicians' Union killjoys and in the brief early nineties "sing the sample" era that accidentally gave birth to some of the best TOTP performances.

"injected with a poison" live vocal..

Climie fisher miming Richard Harris (?) "C'mon buddy, get with the beat.."

they should've made The Orb shout the "waoh-woah-woah-woaaaaah" bits of 'Blue Room'

Phil Harris but that was 1987/early 1988 so didn't apply.

Thinking in particular of "Sesame's Treet."

I nearly said Bob Harris, so ..

JT & The Big Family to thread, four leathery Italians miming what was essentially a collection of funk and soul samples over a slow Italo house backdrop.

One word: "GO!"

Timo Maas (was it he?) waving his arms around and occasionally touching one of two turntables, for "Dooms Night"

Haha, I used to love it when they'd get a DJ at the back pretending to mix. What were they supposed to be doing exactly? THERE'S ONLY ONE RECORD PLAYING.

a nation of children denied this kind of conversation in years to come. HOPE YOU'RE SATISFIED GORDON BLEURGH BROWN.

"I can confirm that I am making robust efforts to establish unambiguously that I was fond of Big Country, especially when they did the bagpipe thing with their guitars."

but why would i choose to switch on totp to watch alicia keys or kanye west if it meant i also had to sit through iglu & hartly and oasis? when i could just get on the internet and find an mp3 or youtube performance/video of what i wanted in the first place?

Maybe that's why people had a more varied taste in the past? Maybe that's why the hitlists contained a larger variety of different musical genres in the past? Maybe that's why record labels and managers were less obsessed with "formatting" back then, because the kids' tastes were not predictable anyway?

i shouldn't do this, i know, but i'm kind of enjoying this thread. so LET'S GO CRAZY ...

that's why people had a more varied taste in the past

... eh?

that's why the hitlists contained a larger variety of different musical genres

... you what?

Maybe that's why record labels and managers were less obsessed with "formatting" back then

dude! back in ye olde halcyon days when the sun beat down on the gladioli and there was a smith on every corner, there was only one format, and it was the 7" single! unless i'm missing your point?

I am speaking of genre formatting. You don't need to go back longer than to the first half of the 80s: Then, the bands the kids screamed at all had their own sound, wrote their own songs, were formed by the band members and not by their manager. And so on. And they didn't all sound alike. Some used synths only, some used a combination of guitars and synths. And there were even some (Haircut 100) who didn't use synths at all.

And besides those, there was also a 50s rock revivalist (Shakin' Stevens) who was huge. And it was not like all the new romantidcs fans hated him because he was "different" either.

petridis weighs in

TV On the Radio come on. They sound impossibly adventurous and thrilling. I can't help thinking that if their performance was shown on prime-time TV, it would be one of those famous music television moments, when the sense of an exciting artist suddenly barging into the nation's living rooms makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

But then I remember Malcolm Gerrie explaining that music television doesn't really do that any more: "The audience has fractured, music itself has fractured into a million different genres. It's all about niche programming now, being bespoke, catering for a minority group." You have to be content with smaller thrills, but at least it's still capable of delivering them.

well, quite.

Malcolm Gerrie, by the way, is the man behind The Tube.

Petridis says music TV shows are notoriously expensive. well the Chart Show can't have been, despite the ground-breaking CGI...

bring back snub tv - that was cheap to make

Maybe this is a daft question, but why are music TV shows so expensive to make?

paying the artists for live performance?

tis all those candles and flowers that push up the costs.

Well, they said about how expensive Science Fiction was to make, and that's why they wouldn't bring back Dr Who.

the bands should perform for free. they're lucky to be there at all.

do artists who mime get paid for a live performance?

the bands should perform for free. they're lucky to be there at all.

― Annoying Display Name (blueski), Friday, 10 October 2008 13:35 (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

a lot of the cost IS 'paid for' by the record label--ie taken out the bands advance.

Doctor Who can be syndicated around the world and they make a bomb on DVD sales as well. The same can't really be said about TOTP.

It's expensive cos of all the drugs on the riders.

TOTP WAS exported as a format to other countries tho. And there have been a few DVDs and comps.

Doctor Who can be syndicated around the world and they make a bomb on DVD sales as well. The same can't really be said about TOTP.

― Matt DC, Friday, 10 October 2008 14:47 (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Top of the pops got (gets?) franchised around the world.

xpost

There was a magazine too

I had a keyring once, that's gotta be worth something?

Well, that's what I'm saying: They put a business case for bringing back Dr Who!

Ting Tings call for TOTP's return

The Ting Tings have said they would like to be the first band to play on a revived Top of The Tops.

The duo's drummer and guitarist Jules De Martino told Absolute Radio: "We'll force our way onto it."

"Bring back TOTP and let us be the first band to play on it," he said of the show, which was axed in 2006.

Nail in coffin etc

In Time Out this week Noel Gallagher blames knife crime on lack of Top of the Pops. "Before everyone was sitting down and watching TOTP and getting into pop music at the same time. Now they just stab each other", or something like that.

Cowell wants to take TOTP to ITV

X Factor judge Simon Cowell has said he would like to buy the rights to the Top of the Pops Christmas Special from the BBC and broadcast it on ITV.

"I would rather it came to us than just sit in the dustbin," he said.

On Tuesday, the BBC announced The Top of the Pops Christmas Special - a regular fixture in the festive viewing calendar - will not be shown this year.

"If the BBC wanted to do a deal, and I can get ITV to buy it and broadcast it, I'd put it on ITV," said Cowell.

Would any non-Cowell acts be allowed on it?

Maybe Cowell can hire Ross and Brand to present it, dressed in gimp suits. And when they're not presenting, keep them locked in metal boxes. While Louis Walsh comments that "they had it coming".

What will probably happen in the end:

Strictly Top Of The Pops: Bruce Forsyth and Tess Daly present 14 celebrities and their professional partners singing that week's hits before a panel of judges.