Chart Music

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

I''d happily feed alex James feet first into a woodchipper, while telling Damon to repent his ways, but at least there is an actual musical ball somewhere on the pitch with Blur. the songs Parklife, girls and boys, and Country house have always made me angry, but Not all of their songs are terrible. Blur are a much better band if you can't see them.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

I was a bit rattled by Taylor's attitude towards the alleged victims of Michael Jackson's abuse in the Return To Neverland docu, which sounded to me like the sort of stuff a bishop in the Catholic Church might have said 15-20 years ago. "We know that the perp is a nonce, but can we really believe these complainants? No court has convicted the nonce, so even as we know he's a nonce, we'll regard him as innocent of all allegations." The comment about the incidental music served to undermine what I thought were plausible testimonies; at the very least, it was disrespectful to the courage these men showed in going public with their abuse. Taylor's disclaimer that our default position is to believe the accusers sounded mealy-mouthed in the context of what else he said.

The suggestion that Return To Neverland told us nothing new was surprising. We indeed knew that MJ was an alleged abuser of young teenagers, but we did not know that he allegedly sexually abused a seven-year-old (and not just fondling but by oral penetration), nor did we know the techniques by which he groomed these boys (and their parents). What was devastating about the docu was not the notion that MJ was a child molester, but the details of the alleged abuse.

I just listened to this episode again, and you're doing taylor a massive disservice there G-Man, he says nothing of the sort. he starts of by saying that it's obviously incredibly plausible that all the allegations are true.... but that essentially this is the sort of thing to proclaim your opinion on down the pub or in private, rather than talking about it in public like you were an expert on the topic, or you were there and knew for sure what happened. That's not a criticism of the people giving their testimony, that's a refusal to judge it publicly and letting it stand for itself. I mean the only time he mentions the word innocent is when he's saying that there if probably an innocent explanation for the system of bells he had installed to warn him of staff approaching the bedroom he was sharing with "Angelic pre-pubescent boys."

And Simon's point wasn't that there was nothing new in the programme (He said that you got to hear from the accusers directly) but that there was nothing new that would have changed your opinion (unless you had a) been living under a rock at the time or b) that you were too young too remember it) and in fairness he has a point. You knew everything you needed to know to make your decision about this in 1993, when a) He Paid Jordan Chandler $25 million not to testify on behalf of the police b) the police found his stash of photographs of naked boys c) la toya called him a paedophile.

[Jon]

"They spent nearly an entire hour talking about the horrendous but strangely popular and normalized hyper-toxic masculinity of DLT"

What I find most incredible is that, given how clearly out of touch he was in 1981, he lasted on Radio 1 for a further 12 years.

"She was generally getting decent reviews in the press and folk (for whatever reason) even liked her performance cameo on Shoestring."

Now I've never knowingly seen her act so I don't know if she's any good. Is the Derek Jarman seal of approval a ringing endorsement? Because she obviously impressed him enough as he let her pick any part she wanted for Jubilee and then, when the film ran out of money, he forewent his fee so she could still play the role she wanted in the film.

[Satchmo Distel]

"They spent nearly an entire hour talking about the horrendous but strangely popular and normalized hyper-toxic masculinity of DLT"

What I find most incredible is that, given how clearly out of touch he was in 1981, he lasted on Radio 1 for a further 12 years.

He was doing snooker on the radio on weekend mornings for much of that time. Talking to Tory Dads doing the DIY.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

I remember him doing a show on the world service in the early nineties.

https://vimeo.com/332188470]Here is the toyah documentary.[/url]

It's, It's like nothing i've ever seen before. the Past truly is a different country.

[Jah Womble]

"They spent nearly an entire hour talking about the horrendous but strangely popular and normalized hyper-toxic masculinity of DLT"

What I find most incredible is that, given how clearly out of touch he was in 1981, he lasted on Radio 1 for a further 12 years.

"She was generally getting decent reviews in the press and folk (for whatever reason) even liked her performance cameo on Shoestring."

Now I've never knowingly seen her act so I don't know if she's any good. Is the Derek Jarman seal of approval a ringing endorsement? Because she obviously impressed him enough as he let her pick any part she wanted for Jubilee and then, when the film ran out of money, he forewent his fee so she could still play the role she wanted in the film.

I guess it's a fair-enough endorsement. Toyah has stated that Jarman empathised with her and her performance so much that he financed her Jubilee role - but also because, unlike the majority of 'faces' among the cast, she could deliver a line to a reasonable standard.

I've never been much of a fan of her acting or music, but she's always seemed genuine, likeable and modest about her own abilities, so all power to her. (I met and worked with her, among others, on the day of 9/11 - which remains one of the more surreal memories of my career.)

(Viz DLT, I know one or two fairly grim details of his 'demands' of female assistants while on R1, so I'll withhold further comment.)

[G-Man]

The new one will drop within the next few days. I hope it will be a bit shorter than the last one which could have done with some ruthlless editing.

[Stumpy Pepys]

I'm quite relaxed about Toyah getting a critical kicking.

She was also in the dreadful Dear Heart: https://youtu.be/zmLhO2A-f3E?t=184

[Furtho]

The new one will drop within the next few days. I hope it will be a bit shorter than the last one which could have done with some ruthlless editing.

Agreed, I like it very much but the podcast could be lighter on its feet. At the start of the new episode, Spearmint Rhino going over what was on every page of the week's issue of Melody Maker is a bit much for me.

[Furtho]

But still, good to know that some contemporary performer or other turned out to be a telly MILF.

[Simon G]

Considering how shocking the TOTP episode was, I enjoyed this Chart Music. Pricey and Sarah Bee were on the first one I ever listened to around this time last year and they do have a good rapport.

[Satchmo Distel]

It's become normal for them to have an hour of chat before they get down to analyzing the episode. If you're not interested in their personal histories, that becomes a tough listen. Then again I struggle with episodes that cover years after I stopped watching the show. I wonder how many years they can do more than once before tedium and repetition sets in.

[Lucy Waterman]

I listened to one and enjoyed it, but they really are very long. I wouldn’t want them to cut anything, but chopping each one into four parts and releasing it week by week wouldn’t harm the content and might help build the audience - regularity plus losing the offputtimg size of it? Just an end user’s idle thoughts.

[Satchmo Distel]

This was the first one that I got absolutely nothing from, probably because I'm too old to find anything interesting about a year when the mainstream charts contained hardly anything that reflected the cutting edge of the music scene but also when all the acts were such non-entities as personalities. 1975-76 were equally dire musically but you had some eccentricity and oddball performances to discuss, and the acts were household names in the main. These acts do not ring any bells of recognition from me; no images come to mind that I can use to visualize the TOTP performances the guests are describing.

[Snake Plissken]

I think that it didn't help that the quality of the music was so beige. One of my favourites is the episode with Johnny Hates Jazz because they can get their teeth into something they loathe as much as the ones they love.

But this TOTP has nothing particularly offensive. It's just dull. Madchester-lite, the fifth cut off a Black Box album, Gary Davies saying nothing other than "That was X, this is Y". Even kicking Chesney Hawkes is like kicking a puppy. The team have just got nothing to work with.

[Furtho]

Here's a piece of current, official merchandise.

[laverte]

i've been looking forward to a chart from this period because musically it is My Era. In 1989 i had left boarding school, where most things pop, and especially pop on tv, had been out of bounds; and now back 'home' i was spending a lot of my spare time hiding behind earphones so that i wouldn't have to try to get to know my mother. By the time of this Top of the Pops i had a boyfriend who was really into music, and in a landfill somewhere you might still find traces of the mountains of compilation tapes with which he had wooed me. i know that Can you dig it was on one of them; i guess the horribly martial Waterboys tune must have been too, because he could not let go of the mid-80s. It was easy to forgive his missteps. In fact we had a great time arguing about pop because we were 17 and understimulated, and it seemed to matter so.

Perhaps it's the contrast with my (faulty?) memories of these back-and-forths, but i'm a bit underwhelmed by this episode of Chart Music. We forget how deep the rock-dance schism ran. How astonishing that a student Ents overlord could have no interest in dance music in 1991! As Simon Price admits, the indie music press had chosen to shunt the biggest youth cultural movement in a decade into a corner, and i think the road to Craig David sitting on a toilet might have begun there. i certainly had no interest in reading about Cud or Birdland when i knew i'd be floating across a dancefloor all weekend.

It wasn't an accident that Smash Hits and Melody Maker and Top of the Pops couldn't find a way to sell dance music: the culture deliberately made itself unmarketable through those established routes. For all that there was something cult-like and ultimately rather unambitious about it, and good reasons to be sceptical of the extent of its 'disruptiveness', i think there was a missed opportunity here to talk about the oasis that rave music represented in shunning celebrity, corporate packaging and, for a time, the cliqueyness of the 'cool' club world. For this inevitably dance-heavy episode, i found myself wishing that Al could have called on a contributor who had, say, done some research into the history of electronic music.

[Lang Spoon]

Yeah, it's been an effort to get through the last two episodes. And if that's a ref to Stubbs Laverte, yeah he might have given a bit more value than Pricey on this one. And Kulkarni probably hates Inspiral Carpets tremendously and disproportionately, which might have been fun.

[Lang Spoon]

Maybe it was just Glasgow, or maybe cos I wasn't a student there till the mid 90s, but it didn't seem a thing for twee 13th Note club bowl cuts and hair slides Pastels types to also go to Slam or the dancey nights in the Art School. Even the bloody QMU put on Megadog. Maybe the scenes were more divided elsewhere.

[George]

Dance and Hip Hop/Rap were a double whammy for a traditional music press more at home covering various forms of rock - which by the early 90's had heavily descended into post-baggy student-uni bar guff. It's easy to forget that a large print media developed dedicated to Dance (Mixmag, Jockey Slut, DJ Mag) and by that point it didn't need the NME or Melody Maker. Not that it ever really did.

[Lang Spoon]

Kulkarni (and Price Cube to an extent) at least tried to force some hip hop on their pasty MM audience with passion, the fuckin NME had pretty much abandoned the genre once fucking Collins and Maconie and Haircut Harris types took over in the James Brown/Danny Kelly years. Hip hop meant Public Enemy and The Beastie Boys at most to them. And Credit to the Fucking Nation.

[laverte]

i remember the 13th Note as being full of ginger-dreads and hemp-culottes acid jazz types straight outta Anstruther. Perhaps it depended on which night you were there. i don't think the anti-rock feeling was ever particularly strong among ravers - strong feelings weren't really their forte - and in any case dance music was splintering rapidly. Price was on there talking about the death of house music in April 1991, but we'd only just been introduced to the KLF and the Shamen, and we were still several months away from Altern8 and Charly says and those first 'hardcore' hits. i think Unfinished sympathy had only just dropped out of the chart, Shut Up and Dance were just getting going. There was crossover mileage left in dance music.

i'm glad i wasn't the only person who got exasperated with NME's efforts to hype up Credit to the Nation. Thing is, their soul, reggae and R&B specialists were all good writers and seemed to me to be clued up. They were just confined to the margins of the review section.

i tried reading Mixmag but a lot of it was technical as i remember; presumably it survived on ad revenue from companies that made decks and speakers. It was definitely for the Bloke Half of the techno act; i don't recall seeing reviews of lycra crop tops or lessons for how to dance by yourself on a podium without seeming like a fanny.

i find it interesting that the Chart Music contributors are so attached to Melody Maker, and yet it's always the readership that gets blamed for the conservatism of the music it covered. What was the relationship between writers and readers? And where did the publisher (and the bottom line) fit in at that time? This is the era when Top of the Pops, Radio 1 and Smash Hits were revamped, among other reasons in order to get rid of part of their ageing audience. Did the inkies do the same?

[Lang Spoon]

Tbh I meant more that weedy Weegie indie kids didn't seem anti rave (at least non happy hardcore/handbag house) than vice versa. And there always seemed tons of ex metallers in the techno/deep house crowds. And aye, those crusty jazzbo wanks weren't there on the few nights I was at the 13th Note. More Bis types really.

yeah the NME was always fuckin Andrew Collins getting a two page interview with the fucking Wonderstuff or the likes, while decent writers like Dele Fadele were lucky to get a half page near the back. What an awful shit show of a mag the NME was.

[Lang Spoon]

I remember the MM having a kind of four page dance section, mostly dominated by a really shit writer (Mark Beaumont? & Push?) if I recall, and boring shite like Underworld/Leftfield heavily promoted (around 93 /94 anyways).

[Satchmo Distel]

We also know that MM lost readers when it put a BAME act on the cover and that the editorship caved into this racism by operating a white-centred rock policy with black music confined and patronized into a corner.