Chart Music

[Benjm]

I was NME too, pretty much every week from 1983-91, tailing off slowly after that. It was tons better than Melody Maker then (to throw them a bone, MM was better than Sounds). The NME's quality really dropped off in the mid '90s when it was chasing a hypothetical readership by covering a lot of sub-standard British guitar music that didn't really merit serious attention. During the same period, Melody Maker was better at the knock downs and piss taking that the hyping of mediocre bands makes attractive. I'm not sure that it was ever a consistently better read; even the old lags' reminiscences seem to contain a fair amount of 'remember how we sneaked that in', suggesting that they were always fighting something of a rearguard action.

[Gangster Octopus]

I read NME from 1974 to 1996. As far as I was aware, Melody Maker was for people who liked Barclay James Harvest...

[G-Man]

I'm reaching into the depths of my youthful memories here, but I think I first latched on to MM as a result of a translated version of condensed editions being included in a German music magazine. I may be mistaken, bit I think that magazine's name was Musik Express. Which would make the inclusion of Melody Maker in its pages a little ironic.

[Furtho]

In an earlier episode of Chart Music there was the point about 1981 and 1982 being peak years for chart pop and by the time you get to 1983 and 1984 things are already in decline. Part of the latest episode kind of underlines that idea: in 1981 and 82 we had Yazoo, in 1983 and 84 we had (the beginnings of) Alison Moyet's solo career. Nothing against Alison Moyet, but the former is just intrinsically more interesting than the latter.

[Satchmo Distel]

I was too old to be reading Melody Maker in 1994; had I been 18, I'm sure I would have done so because the NME turned a bit wank during the Danny Kelly/Stuart Maconie era, which carried over into 'Q' IIRC.

But in 1984-85, it had to be the NME. Their take on Live Aid, for example, was spot on, and they had Bronski Beat on the cover (before their chart phase) when the tabloids were in their AIDS frenzy homophobia heyday. It felt like losing contact with a close friend when the paper turned to shit, essentially because it lowered its threshold of acceptable good writing so blandness became acceptable. Also I think it succumbed to political and advertising pressure after the 1987 election, when all hope in progress seemed lost. By then Danny Kelly was in charge, wanking over The Smiths split and so on and the slide towards being drinking buddies with Danny Baker and Chris Evans. Attitudes towards the next big thing - whether it be Happy Mondays, Stone Roses or Public Enemy - became less critical and more like bandwagon jumping.

[Lang Spoon]

Was Stuart Cosgrove on the populist shitbags or intellectual side of the NME Wars? Cos he certainly dumbed down and hollowed out Channel 4 when he was in charge of programming.

[Benjm]

He was definitely on the hip hop side in the 'hip hop wars' but I think a certain, shall we say, seriousness of purpose was common to all sides in the mid to late 80s. The anti-intellectual slide towards laddishness accelerated slightly later with the rise of The Stone Roses.

[Lang Spoon]

I loved “the Roses” so much from about 15-22, now they make me get a little sick in my mouth. Maybe the most pernicious bunch of fucks to hit alternative music in the last 30 years.Oasis took their template and junked all the unworldly, fey even, rhythmic weirdness, till there was just a similar simian cunt in a bowl cut acting the maggot over music that sounded like Carling, bad coke and John Player Blue smoke. Plodding obvious shite, lyrics that were almost physically painful. That piss poor overdriven snow blind production. If your band are obnoxious coke heads, might be a good idea to have a producer on different or no drugs, unless you are Steely Dan and the arrogance is deserved. Wouldn’t like to hear Bonehead try and play along with Aja.

They eye-fucked the corpse of UK alternative music into the millennium.

Kulkarni’s take-down of the Stone Roses’ remastered debut in The Quietus is heart-warming thump the table in agreement stuff. He is guilty of utterly Hobbesian wrongness with his take on Fool’s Gold however.

[Lang Spoon]

The Barbara Ellen Manics in Thailand feature, that was good. But I’m really struggling to think where else the Maker was eclipsed at all by NME from my intensive reading period of late 91-96/97 (by when the writing was mos def on the MM wall). I mean, Andrew Collins, man. Maconie. Hard man Johnny Cigarettes. The perennially enthusiastic stick thin Svengali Steve Lamacq. If it wasn’t for Steven Wells I’d be even more pissed off I bought both papers each Wednesday money permitting (or MM being properly distributed to the usual newsagents- when even west end Glasgow kiosks weren’t getting a regular supply it was crystal a doomed revamp was just around the corner.

[lackedpunch]

I thought the Maker was as good, if not better, than the NME, from about 92 to 95. The Melody Maker championed shedloads of great music and wrote about it such a passionate way that I was compelled to investigate it, like Moose, AR Kane, Seefeel, Pram, Bark Psychosis, and many more!

[Lang Spoon]

Oh yeah, Seefeel! Do they still sound any good?

[Hot Pepsi]

Kulkarni’s take-down of the Stone Roses’ remastered debut in The Quietus is heart-warming thump the table in agreement stuff. He is guilty of utterly Hobbesian wrongness with his take on Fool’s Gold however.

I read this kind of thing and wonder what you people actually do like. As much as I like Chart Music, I notice that the number of acts and songs that the contributors despise appears to be much higher than the number they actually enjoy. Which is fine, of course. I don't care for much of it either. But then it raises the question of why they watched TOTP every week.



I'm not a massive Stone Roses fan, but they have some good songs. I like the much-maligned second album OK too.

I like the baggy shirt and baggy pants look.

I've never understood the hype about Oasis - the only one of the "Brit-pop" bands that most people in the US may have heard of. Some ok songs that sound like they'd be better if somebody else had recorded them, but still alright. Not great. Not super original. But OK.

Blur is just a stupid novelty band, as far as I can tell, except Song 2 which is a good song to play after a goal. Or was until it got played out.


Oh, BTW. I just got that The Dandy Warhols is a play on words for Andy Warhol. I always got the Wharhol part, but not the Dandy. I just thought of that.

[Various Artist]

This might not be the best place to say so, but I've never bought a single music paper. I started really getting into the charts and stuff when I was 13 in 1992-3 and came of musical age in the Britpop era, so I guess the ship of quality writing had already sailed by then to a great extent, going on what's been written in this thread and threads passim. Which is something of a relief because I never had the faintest inclination to read either NME or MM, and I never felt like I was missing out at the the time and now I still don't. I mean, none of my mates ever bought or talked about them either, it wasn't like I was some weirdo refusenik. It feels like their era of relevance must've already passed by.

[lackedpunch]

Oh yeah, Seefeel! Do they still sound any good?

Yeah they do! "Quique" is a real grower. What I used to like about reading MM and NME is that they would make reference to old bands in a review or piece about a new one. So an interview with Moose, say,would set you off on looking into Scott Walker, Lee Hazlewood and Mickey Newbury.

[Lang Spoon]

I dunno what the album review was round the mid-nineties, but Taylor was on some half page riff on how English prog was often building to a leaden profound crescendo, whereas the likes of Can on Tago Mago, the moment of the groove is more important than the bombast of the climax.

It was maybe 6 months before I actually heard Can, but already I knew what I was getting in for. A perfect description minus the Mojo hagiography or muso explaining. A few paragraphs that cemented the feeling there was a whole new world out there.

[Lang Spoon]

This might not be the best place to say so, but I've never bought a single music paper. I started really getting into the charts and stuff when I was 13 in 1992-3 and came of musical age in the Britpop era, so I guess the ship of quality writing had already sailed by then to a great extent, going on what's been written in this thread and threads passim. Which is something of a relief because I never had the faintest inclination to read either NME or MM, and I never felt like I was missing out at the the time and now I still don't. I mean, none of my mates ever bought or talked about them either, it wasn't like I was some weirdo refusenik. It feels like their era of relevance must've already passed by.

Yeah, I was maybe the last of my friends to still “take” either the Maker or NME every Wednesday by 96, would have been about twenty. I may have been the only person in a half mile radius to have bought Select more than once.

[Various Artist]

I've never understood the hype about Oasis - the only one of the "Brit-pop" bands that most people in the US may have heard of. Some ok songs that sound like they'd be better if somebody else had recorded them, but still alright. Not great. Not super original. But OK.

Blur is just a stupid novelty band, as far as I can tell, except Song 2 which is a good song to play after a goal. Or was until it got played out.

Oh, BTW. I just got that The Dandy Warhols is a play on words for Andy Warhol. I always got the Wharhol part, but not the Dandy. I just thought of that.

Hahah, quick on the draw there HP re the Dandy Warhols!

At the risk of sidetracking, Oasis made what was – to me and my ilk, which was apparently a whole heck of a lot of people as it turned out – a genuinely thrilling noise when they first came on the scene. Songs like Rock 'N' Roll Star, Cigarettes And Alcohol and Live Forever had a swagger and an electricity that made many people instantly sit up and take notice; the latter in particular emerged as a fully-formed anthem straight out of nowhere that seemed, for a period, to speak to just about everyone. A clutch of great songs on their second album duly propelled them into stratospheric sales and an omnipresent cultural profile, which alas led to them burying themselves in a nasal snowdrift from which their sensibilities and sound never quite recovered their former heights.

Blur, as has been commented on in many places, were many more 'different' bands than Oasis, if that makes sense. They went via baggy-aping, Kinks-channelling, Mockney, Americanish lo-fi, artily angular and beyond in a way that some people regarded as commendably adaptable, an ability to reinvent themselves and shift the musical goalposts; others on the other hand regarded the same thing as making them superficial, just blowing with the wind and having no real musical identity of their own. I usually liked them though often found them hard to love, perhaps for just that reason. I'd take issue with "stupid novelty band", though, which undersells them rather – but it's true that there were a fair few 'novelty songs', you could say, in the form of the increasingly excruciating 'character songs' that reached a nadir on The Great Escape, ironically the album that went head-to-head with Oasis at the height of the "Battle of Britpop". Their profile west of the Atlantic is a curio, of course, since they're known by the almost entirely unrepresentative Song 2.
Personally, it's usually the slower, less 'affected' and more affecting songs that mean most to me. Try, perhaps:
To The End (from Parklife)
This Is A Low (album track from Parklife)
The Universal (from The Great Escape)
Tender (from 13)
No Distance Left To Run (from 13)

[Gerontophile]

I agree with your Blur assessment VA. Hard to love, easy to like individual songs, and I even agree with your choices as the first 3 you mention would be in a Blur Top 5 (but beaten by "There's No Other Way").

My elder brothers, who are 15+ years older, introduced me to both Sounds and the MM. Not through choice, it was just what they bought. From about 1978 until 1982, I read the MM, NME and Record Mirror avidly, but not buying any of them. I just waited with excitement for them to be available in the local library. And in the Record Mirror, I learned about the existence of a Boystown chart, which kickstarted my adult life.

I bought Smash Hits from issue one until... well, I don't remember when I stopped. Only that I just got too old for it. I'd still read it if it was left on a bus or whatever, but the golden days of Paul Weller interviewing Nick Heyward were long gone.

As to HP's question about what we actually like, well, part of the fun of the podcast is knowing that they are going to rip into 'your' sacred cows, and totally have done. I can think of 'Ding Ding a Dong' as one moment where they left me slack jawed with their sheer evisceration of the look and sound of Teach-in (Eurovision '75 winners, and one of my favourite songs). But this is why I listen. Their allusion to other acts, other times out of my experience, and their sheer joie de vivre in ripping the fuck out of everything they don't like is 'music' to my ears. And of course Nishlord drops in a c-bomb, and I end up biting the carpet with laughter.

I haven't watched any of the videos they refer to, since, as I usually remember them. I will look up an artist which passed me by, but my prejudices are still in play when I do so, and I haven't been guided to any thrilling insights into new (to me) music, just yet.

It is, to put it simply, 2 hours + of vitriolic hilarity. With added intelligence.

[Wouter D]

I read this kind of thing and wonder what you people actually do like.

I like Blur.

[Jah Womble]

Blur is just a stupid novelty band, as far as I can tell, except Song 2 which is a good song to play after a goal. Or was until it got played out.

Blur may be many things, but they are not a 'stupid novelty band'.

I thought the Maker was as good, if not better, than the NME, from about 92 to 95. The Melody Maker championed shedloads of great music and wrote about it such a passionate way that I was compelled to investigate it, like Moose, AR Kane, Seefeel, Pram, Bark Psychosis, and many more!

I had a year-long obsession with AR Kane between 1987 and 1988. I remember seeing them play the Brixton Fridge - possibly the loudest small-venue gig I've ever attended. I left about three songs from the end, after a girl in front of me started vomiting as a result of the sheer volume.

[Stumpy Pepys]

I like Blur.

Agreed. Once you've discarded the cruft, there's a lot of good, inventive material there.

I don't listen to Parklife much, but there's still five or six great tracks on it.

[Satchmo Distel]

There is always a disclaimer early in each episode saying, yes, we are going to rip the arse off your sacred cows, but we acknowledge they have been on TOTP more than we have.

But equally, ffs, it's a highly irreverant podcast and we want the contributors to express themselves freely, not have to put everything through some "fair and balanced" metric. They are clearly not going to be racist, sexist or homophobic so there should be no danger of being offended when you listen.

[Lang Spoon]

It’s probably to pre-empt the flood of green ink letters from Dollar obsessives and the inevitable Morrissey loving arseholes.

[G-Man]

It's a properly self-aware expression of humility. I like it.

[Gerontophile]

I think the only Dollar obsessive left is David van Day.