The FA Youth Cup Final 2022

Tonight (May 11 2022), the youth sides of two European Cup winners meet in the 70th final of the country’s elite competition for scholars and young pros.

In 1952, the English FA launched the first competition for academy footballers. As with Real Madrid and the European Cup, Manchester United made the FA Youth Cup their own, winning the first five before some of those medallists lost their lives in the Munich Air Disaster.

In the next 40 years, only three sides ever retained the trophy: Chelsea in the 1960s, Crystal Palace in the 1970s and Arsenal as the centuries turned. It is Chelsea who have invested in their academy – however shadily they gained that money – and reaped the rewards in the last decade, finally seeing young talent advance to the first team.

Already, some of their 2021/22 scholars have played for the Blues, including Lewis Hall and Harvey Vale, and Chelsea deserve to shout about their consecutive run of over 200 games with a homegrown player in the matchday squad in recent seasons. Alright, so Manchester United’s run stretches to over 4,100, but it’s not a competition.

The Youth Cup, on the other hand, will likely be won by one of those teams, who both advanced to the semi-final. Manchester United had Wolverhampton Wanderers in their way, which was apt given that the first two Youth Cup finals back in the 1950s were between those sides. United trounced Wolves 9-3 over two legs in 1953, then narrowly retained the trophy with a 1-0 second-leg victory after the first game finished 4-4. Both clubs won the First Division that decade too, back when the FA had imposed a ban on signings from outside the UK and Ireland.

In the decades since that first final, United have become serial winners and Wolves have clambered back up to the top tier after a decade yo-yoing up and down with a series of managers who couldn’t stop the rot. United are now owned by Americans and Wolves belong to the Fosun holding company who employ various managers from Portugal.

In the end, United ran out 3-0 winners at Old Trafford, a week before the senior team tumbled out of the UEFA Champions League in the round of 16. Anthony Elanga and Scott McTominay both started that game to prove that there is still a credible passage from youth ranks to the first-team dressing room, and I am sure that plenty of the kids will get some senior involvement in the coming seasons.

The first goal came from the number nine Charlie McNeil who received a ball over the top and touched it around the Wolves keeper to his right. He still had a lot to do, as they say, but you don’t get a scholarship at United without being calm under pressure and the ball rolled into the net. He could have had a second goal early in the second half but blazed over.

The discovery of the tournament has been Alejandro Garnacho (below), an unused substitute in several recent first-team games including the 4-0 losses at both Liverpool and Brighton. After his team won possession when Wolves had committed too many men forward. Garnacho (wearing number 11) curled the ball into the corner of the net after beating his marker for United’s second goal in the semi-final. McNeil got his second when he was in the right place at the right time after Garnacho’s shot had been saved. For the first time since a team including Ravel Morrison, Jesse Lingard and Paul Pogba won the Youth Cup in 2011, United’s kids were in the final of the tournament.

United would have home advantage once more and would play the winners of the other semi-final, which gained an extra frisson because it involved Chelsea.

After beating Blackpool in the last eight, the Blues took on Nottingham Forest, who overcame Blackburn Rovers in their quarter-final, on April 4 at the City Ground. Forest have never even reached the Youth Cup final, which seems odd considering they won two European Cups in their glory years. This century has seen boardroom turmoil and not much stability, but the guiding hand of Steve Cooper helped the first team go unbeaten in February 2022 and rise to the play-off positions as Easter approached, and they had three games in hand on two of the teams above them.

Chelsea were going for an eighth Youth Cups since 2011. Their procession of young homegrown talent (Tomori, Abraham, Nathaniel Chalobah) had been sold on as assets after their passage to the first-team had become blocked by imports. Ed Brand was overseeing the latest batch of golden geese.

At Forest, down in the under-18s, the esteemed Warren Joyce has organised a strong team. You might recognise that name if you followed football in the north of England in the 1980s and 1990s. Joyce played for Bolton, Preston, Burnley and, notably, Hull, helping the East Yorkshire side stay in the Football League in 1999 by guiding them in a Great Escape.

Joyce then worked at Manchester United for eight years in the Reserves, first alongside Ole Gunnar Solskjaer then on his own. His United connections got him a job coaching the under-23s at Salford City (which is owned by Giggs, Butt and the rest) before Forest stalwart Gary Brazil offered Joyce, with whom he did his coaching badges, the under-18s job. Brazil described Joyce as ‘an outstanding developer of elite football’ who ‘creates high expectations’ of players, especially important given that Forest had secured Category One status in their Academy, matching those of United and Chelsea.

The scholars at Forest include Jack Nadin and Detlef Esapa Osong (below), who scored the goals in the quarter-final. The latter turned pro in January 2022 after being spotted by Forest playing grassroots football. Team captain Jamie McDonnell joined the club in 2020 from Glentoran in Northern Ireland.

He is part of the under-23s side coached by former Forest winger Andy Reid, who himself came through the club around the turn of the century and re-joined the team in 2011. McDonnell was born in February 2004, making him younger than ‘18 years of age at midnight on 31 August of the current season’, as per the rules of the competition. All three of the above players started the game at the City Ground against a Chelsea team full of familiar names but not Harvey Vale.

As per his role in the tournament so far, current Eton student Tudor Mendel-Idowu would be called upon as supersub if needed, watching team-mates including midfielder Lewis Hall, wing-back Silko Thomas, wide forward Malik Mothersille and centre-back Alfie Gilchrist. In a season where they were finding it tough to keep clean sheets, ensuring Forest didn’t score would make the job a lot easier.

The excellent @ChelseaYouth account communicated updates throughout the game, which was streamed on the Forest TV Youtube channel. There was also a feed broadcasting to Canada, Malaysia, South Africa and, via ESPN+, the United States. How strange for the young Forest players to have their names beamed around the world; Chelsea’s players would have been prepared for this from a young age.

Not a great deal happened in either penalty area in the first half-hour and there was a seven-minute stoppage before half-time when Forest playmaker Nadin turned his ankle innocuously and had to be brought off the field on a stretcher. The Youtube feed showed that the lower level of the cantilevered stand was almost at capacity, testament to the local interest in Forest’s Youth Cup run.

Five minutes into the second half, from nothing, Esapa Osong hit the bar with a wonderful shot. Chelsea then woke up and attacked solidly for ten minutes, with Warren Joyce bellowing advice on marking up from the corner. From it, Gilchrist’s shot was saved at the near post; with three Chelsea defenders rumoured to be leaving the club at the end of the season, perhaps some young Academy products would reach the first team sooner than they might think.

‘Get on it!! Get over!!’ came Joyce’s shouts in his Lancastrian accent. It was all in vain as Charlie Webster, whose dad I had sat next to at the fourth-round game against Watford, took the latest corner, got the ball back, crept into the penalty area and shot. It was deflected into the far corner and Chelsea were ahead on the hour.

Chelsea’s lead should have doubled after Mothersille’s shot was smothered by Aaron Bott, and it took two defenders to deny the same striker moments later. He was withdrawn, perhaps because he was tired or because manager Ed Brand really needed his team to score second goal with 15 minutes left. Forest withdrew a defender who suffered cramp in that block on Mothersille and tried to get themselves back into the semi-final with the odd shout from a rather quiet crowd who were shivering in the cold.

But Chelsea cannot keep a clean sheet this season. It felt inevitable when, five minutes from the end, Esapa Osong steered the ball into the path of Dale Taylor, who fired confidently into the Chelsea net for an equaliser. It got better for the home side. After some miscued headers at the back by Chelsea, Taylor prodded the ball forward to onrushing left-back Kyle McAdam, who will have surely played for England under-16 with some of his opponents.

McAdam hit the byline and pulled the ball back to substitute Jack Perkins. I was a second ahead of the play as I noticed Esapa Osong waiting on the penalty spot for the ball to be tapped back to him. One deflected shot was all he needed and Forest led: Jubilation, elation and a transformation. On came the Etonian supersub Tudor Mendel-Idowu, with 240 long seconds of stoppage time to play. Mothersille’s misses were murder.

Had Forest planned for this eventuality? They started wasting those seconds, 10 or 20 at a time, when they had throw-ins. Get it in the corner, Warren Joyce must have been thinking. But no.

Esapa Osong got a loose ball after a lucky ricochet, beat some tired Chelsea players and fell over a trailing leg. Penalty to Forest. Esapa Osong took the ball under his arm, plonked it on the spot and showed immense coolness to blast it into the top of the net.

History books be damned: Chelsea would not be going for Youth Cup number ten. Nottingham Forest would go for their first, but the famous Manchester United were favourites to win number 11. How ironic that their old employer, who helped to bring through the 2011 Youth Cup winners as the Reserves boss, was going to be in the opposition dugout.

Football, eh?

The FA Youth Cup final takes place at Old Trafford on May 11. From Kids to Champions: The History of the FA Youth Cup is out on May 16, priced at £16.99 on Pitch Publishing.

45 - 20-Year Cycle

Let’s take 2000 as our target year to illustrate the 20-Year Cycle in culture.

In 1980, Alan Parker directed a movie about kids who attended the High School of Performing Arts in New York aka The Fame School. The Irene Cara theme song won the Grammy and two years later, the Kids from Fame were visitors to UK TV screens. Thousands of people were moved to buy the TV soundtrack that summer and it whizzed up to number one in the charts.

In 2000, Hear’Say were formed on ITV’s Popstars: five kids who would not have been out of place in the Fame school. Their debut hit Pure and Simple sold hundreds of thousands of copies because people identified with them and saw the formation of the group onscreen. Manufactured pop, either constructed in dance studios and audition rooms or on primetime with Simon Cowell giving his imperial approval, was the order of the day. Hence, Hear’Say were the 20-Year Cycle in action.

As you will see in this week’s playlist of 40 songs which prove this theorem, often it’s for reasons of nostalgia that something comes back into fashion; sometimes it’s nakedly commercial or because the initial inspiration has receded into the past and is fair game to plunder. Admittedly I’ve reached a bit too far for some examples, but I hope you agree that in each case lightning has struck twice.

A full playlist of songs is available here.

Let us begin in 1983, a time when the babyboomers had settled down to have kids and might wish to introduce them to the music of their childhood. A singles act who put out several albums a year, the Beach Boys would team up with the Fat Boys on a version of Wipeout that kept them relevant in the new era. Far better was their number one double-LP The Very Best of the Beach Boys, although the cover of a woman’s derriere would not make it out of the marketing meeting today. The album included all the classic surfing hits and sonic masterpieces from the 1960s, while in 1983 members were at war with each other while Brian Wilson had been fired due to ill health. Dennis Wilson, the only member of the group who actually surfed, sadly drowned at the end of the year.

In 1984, it was time to bring back Beatlemania in the form of Duran Duran and Wham!. Both groups included pretty boys whose videos were on heavy rotation on the new Music Television channel MTV. Wham! Just missed the Christmas Number One in the UK with Last Christmas, at which point Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go had spent three weeks as the number one song in America. The Durannies built on the success of 1982’s album Rio with Arena, a live album documenting their 1984 world tour which also included new song Wild Boys. Both acts featured on the Band Aid charity single and went on to have number ones in America in 1985: Duran Duran with the theme to A View to a Kill, Wham! with Careless Whisper and final single Everything She Wants. George Michael would go solo, having not planned on it (yeah right), that autumn.

In 1985 there was a much simpler example of the 20-Year Cycle in action when UB40 & Chrissie Hynde took the Sonny & Cher song I Got You Babe to number one. The original came out in July 1965, the cover in 1985. QED.

Let’s move to 1986 where two top performers from the 1960s returned to the UK Top 10. James Brown was Living In America two decades after he sang of feeling good with a brand new bag in a man’s man’s man’s world. Marvin Gaye’s 1969 chart-topper which he heard through the grapevine made a star of model and singer Nick Kamen when he stripped off in a laundrette to it in a Levi’s ad. Additionally, Lulu’s 1964 version of the Isley Brothers song Shout was re-recorded and re-entered the chart a place lower (8 to the original’s 7) in the UK Top 10.

Another simple exemplum from 1987, as pop starlet Tiffany took the Tommy James tune I Think We’re Alone Now back into public consciousness exactly 20 years after the original charted in the US top five (but never in the UK) early in 1967. Tommy was 19, Tiffany was 15, and by 1987 records were released on a worldwide schedule: Tiffany topped the charts in the UK and the USA.

Bill Drummond would never get past reception if he was trying to storm the barricades of US music. One of the truly great stories of British music is Bill’s involvement in The KLF, referred to as pranksters but really a situationist art project which used pop music to push their message. This was less relevant when, in 1988, they smushed together the theme to Doctor Who (written in 1963) with Gary Glitter’s Rock and Roll (a UK number 2 hit in 1972) for Doctorin’ The Tardis. The putative ‘singer’ was Ford Timelord, a car owned by Jimmy Cauty, the music whizz of the KLF. It makes it the only UK number one, and the only Hot 100 number 66 hit, to be credited to a car.

Stock-Aitken-Waterman once put out a dance single called Roadblock without revealing they were behind it. The SAW method was by design very similar to Motown: they even called their operation The Hit Factory. Such was their success as indie musicians not affiliated to any major label that they were kicked out of the indie charts even as they had every right to rub shoulders with 4AD, Mute and Rough Trade. In 1989, SAW released 24 singles, 22 of which made the Top 40 and six went to number one. At one stage they produced four of them in a row, ranging from hits by Kylie Minogue, Sonia and Jason Donovan, plus the single in aid of the Hillsborough Disaster Fund, a cover of Ferry Cross the Mersey (originally released in 1965). They also did the year’s Comic Relief Song, a cover of Help! by the Beatles (another 1965 release) with Bananarama and French & Saunders on vocals.  

In 1990, the England World Cup Squad were at number one, as they had been in 1970 with Back Home, as EnglandNewOrder. World In Motion included a rap from John Barnes and a chant of ‘En-ger-land!’ which was less militaristic than the marching beat of Back Home but no less singalongable.

1991 was the year Bart Simpson had a number one hit written by Michael Jackson (hence the reference to Michael in the song). In 1969 a bunch of studio musicians recorded the bubblegum pop song Sugar Sugar which was credited to the stars of Archie comics. Just over 20 years later, history repeated itself.

Returning to Motown’s influence on popular music, the wonderful vocal harmony groups imitated by Backstreet Boys and the like started on street corners in the early era of recorded music. By the 1960s, Berry Gordy made the Supremes, the Temptations and the Miracles his big earners. Incredibly, in 1992 it was still working and Boyz II Men had an enormous US number one with End of the Road, which was in the tradition of songs about love and heartbreak which built the Motown Sound. I’ll Make Love To You, released in 1994, was even bigger. Also present in culture in 1992: ABBA, whose songs made up an EP by Erasure which topped the UK charts almost 20 years after the Swedes won Eurovision.

Jimi Hendrix died in 1970. Though Prince was almost his equal on guitar, the rock deities were mainly chaps with curls from London and  the home counties (Clapton, Hackett, Richards, Beck). Lenny Kravitz burst into the marketplace in the late 1980s and Are You Gonna Go My Way, released in 1993, is almost a Hendrix tribute. It sat in the top five of the UK charts – he would get to number one in 1999 with Fly Away – the week that Shaggy’s Oh Carolina was bringing back Bob Marley’s reggae sound and where the top 10 included a hard rock song by Iron Maiden.

Talking of rock music, Oasis were once described as ‘a school play about the Beatles’ but the clue to their big influence was in their cover of Cum on Feel The Noize as the B-side to their number one Don’t Look Back In Anger. With solid chords and plenty of attitude, Oasis brought back guitars in a big way and replaced Seattle grunge with the death of fellow Beatle fan Kurt Cobain. In 1995, the Beatles Anthology TV, book and compilation albums swept British culture, including two new songs (Free As A Bird and Real Love) produced by Jeff Lynne of ELO.

Having introduced himself in 1993, Shaggy called himself Mr Lover Lover AND Mr Boombastic in the same song which went straight in at the top of the UK chart in autumn 1995. Bob Marley’s Legend compilation, released in 1984 and collecting his 1970s material, has spent more weeks in the UK charts than any other album except ABBA Gold, and even then there’s only a 16 weeks in it. In the mid-1990s, as well as Shaggy (real name Orville Burrell), a rush of reggae acts including Chaka Demus & Pliers and the great Dawn Penn had chart success. Shaggy had also brought back the Mungo Jerry chart-topper In The Summertime, which laid the groundwork for Boombastic, which knocked a Michael Jackson song written by R Kelly (oof) off the number one spot.

The biggest-selling single of 1996 was Killing Me Softly, a song about Don McLean first released in 1973 by Roberta Flack recorded by the self-proclaimed ‘Refugee Camp’. With the vocals of Lauryn Hill and Wyclef Jean intoning ‘one time, two time’, the song hit in a big way around the world but it was never released physically in the USA. Had it been, then it would have been a US number one too, but the game at the time was to release a single to radio and make people buy the album. That record, The Score, brought back the political stands of Sly and the Family Stone from two decades earlier. It also featured a setting of No Woman, No Cry, proving the global influence of Bob Marley.

When Various Artists took Lou Reed’s song Perfect Day to number one in 1997, I didn’t know the original (I was nine years old) but I loved how Heather Small and Tom Jones both bellowed ‘you’re going to reap just what you sow’. Lou had never released it as a single but people knew it from the 1972 album Transformer, produced by David Bowie, who along with Reed is also on the new version.

The next year, 1998, saw All Saints revive the 1975 Labelle classic Lady Marmalade, bracketed with the much more recent Under The Bridge. Three years later came the version which appeared on the Moulin Rouge in 2001 featuring Christina Aguilera, Pink, Lil Kim, Mya and Missy Elliot. There was no dance routine to that tune but there was a famous one to Tragedy, when Steps put their hands beside their head and kicked the Bee Gees disco classic into the new millennium.

By 2000, the music industry was collapsing in the face of file-sharing and the reluctance of consumers to spent $20 on an album with one good song. Thus did music executives return to the bottom line and the easiest group to manipulate: kids. In the UK we saw a group assembled in front of our very eyes and Hear’Say took Pure and Simple to number one; in the US, a coterie of Mickey Mouse Club graduates had success as solo acts (Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera) or as one-fifth of a male vocal harmony group in the case of Justin Timberlake. The man who brought us The Spice Girls, Simon Fuller, unveiled his next trick: a TV show following the exploits of pop group S Club 7. The model must have been Fame, the 1980 movie which became a TV show.

The trend was also shown when Tiffany from Eastenders became first a popstar then a movie star. Martine McCutcheon covered the Donna Summer song On The Radio, bringing it back in 2001 fully 22 years after Donna’s original. 1983’s Uptown Girl was a 2001 Comic Relief single and number one for Westlife, while the Change tune The Glow of Love (1980) was sampled on Janet Jackson’s tune All For You. If today is no good, go back 20 years and pilfer old music.

Or just steal the identity. In 2002, harnessing the power of the internet, The Libertines were so indebted to the music of The Clash that the old band’s guitarist Mick Jones produced their second album. The first, including two vocalists who had swallowed everything Joe Strummer ever wrote, was loved by the music press, whose influence on British music was also coming to a close. The Libertines appear at the vortex of the music press and the celebrity (gutter) press, as Pete Doherty was as much a fascination for his words as his lyrics (a memoir follows this autumn). Amy Winehouse followed this pattern, but the music she liked stretched back way beyond the 20-year cycle.

For 2003’s example of the 20-Year Cycle, I point you to the controversy surrounding TATU, a Russian pop act who shared a kiss in the video to All The Things She Said. In 1984, Frankie Goes To Hollywood had their hit Relax banned by Radio One (‘when you wanna come’? You bet) and the furore around TATU drove eyeballs to the song, which was fine.

Also in the 1980s, the fabled Roxanne Wars kept fans entertained. A band who had a song called Roxanne Roxanne didn’t show up to a show, a girl called Lolita released a record under the name Roxanne’s Revenge, the original group responded with a song by The Real Roxanne, tens of MCs jumped onto the feud. Exactly 20 years later, Eamon swore many times about how he didn’t want his girl back; answering the record, Frankee put across her side of the story in FURB. The 20-Year Cycle even influences fun rap trends and if the trend has any meaning then Eamon and Frankee will duet in 2024 to mark 20 years of the feud.

The number 20 was in the air when Bob Geldof reprised Live Aid with Live 8, a concert in Hyde Park to highlight the issue of debt in the developing world. If Live Aid brought the rock spectacle to the stadium, Live 8 reminded music fans of the power of music to raise issues and also give newer acts a platform. Keane, Coldplay, Travis, Dido, Stereophonics, Snow Patrol, Razorlight and Joss Stone all appeared, as did Strong, The Who, Madonna and Elton John. The coup was to get the original line-up of Pink Floyd onstage one last time, although the headliner was Paul McCartney who kicked off the set with the line ‘It was 20 years ago today’ from Sgt Pepper and closed it with a chorus of Hey Jude. Nobody remembers Live 8, though, even as it was preceded by a re-recording of Do They Know It’s Christmas.

In the late 1980s, the magnificent Neneh Cherry broke through with Buffalo Stance, a song full of attitude and melody. Neneh's dad was a free jazz saxophonist and the father of Lily Allen was alternative comedian Keith. In 2006, Lily had two number ones with Smile and LDN, which were full of swear words, attitude and melody and helped to make her one of the most popular acts on MySpace, which had replaced the music press and a place for music fans to congregate and, especially, to socialise.

Comic Relief, however, kept on raising millions for worthwhile causes, helped by annual telethons and charity singles. There were two of them in 2007: a collaboration between Girls Aloud and Sugababes reviving Walk This Way, and Peter Kay and Matt Lucas performing I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) by Matt’s beloved Proclaimers. The Run DMC and Aerosmith version of Walk This Way came out in 1986, while I’m Gonna Be was a UK smash in 1988 (it was a US hit in 1993 after an appearance in a forgotten Johnny Depp vehicle). Average the 21-year and 19-year gaps between the covers and originals coming out and you get 20 years.

In 1988 U2 were the biggest band in the world. In 2008 Coldplay were the biggest band in the world. Both acts were propelled by the messianic zeal of their singer and primary lyricist. The popularity of Viva La Vida was propelled by a TV ad for Apple rather than a concert film called Rattle & Hum, which saw U2 tour America and get the blues.

In the late 2000s, songs were eligible to chart no matter how long ago they were released. Hence we get the phenomenon every December of a Top 40 full of Christmas songs when ordinarily they would have to be reissued and in the shops. The streaming era maximised this craze but it began when single-track downloads began to outsell physical singles; Chris Moyles got a Billie Piper song back into the Top 20 when the rule was changed in 2007. By Christmas 2009, with a decade of Pop Idols and X Factor stars holding the monopoly on the cherished Christmas Number One, a campaign took root around a song from 1992. Killing In The Name Of by Rage Against The Machine was the 2009 Christmas Number One, not quite 20 years on from the original release but more or less. When the group performed the song on the BBC, they had to be faded out because of the explicit lyrics.

In 1990 Madonna was the biggest solo act in the world. In 2010 Lady Gaga was on her way to being the same with a formula that was suspiciously like that of her fellow Italian-American. Gaga would use cinema and her stage shows to push a message of self-acceptance, while Madonna was more interested in provocation. Born This Way would have a stunning similarity to Express Yourself but early in her career Gaga pitched herself as a singing, dancing purveyor of dance-pop. She’s a better singer and dancer, although she isn’t immune to creating headlines with dresses made of meat.

In 2022, Jennifer Lopez has rekindled the romance which launched a thousand magazine spreads. In 2011, she brought back the 1989 Kaoma hit Lambada on her song On The Floor (produced by Lady Gaga’s producer RedOne). Also in 2022, Little Mix are on what could be their final tour before they settle into motherhood while Harry Styles is a performer in his own right and not one-fifth of a New Kids On The Block knock-off created to make money for Simon Cowell. Both Little Mix and One Direction were attempts to sell the same sort of teen-pop to the new generation; TikTok stars do that today, while the Spice Girls are approaching 50 years of age and New Kids are headlining a package tour which they launched with a song called Bring Back The Time.

As with Rage in 2009, an old song came back to prominence in its original form in 2013 after Ant & Dec performed their debut hit Let’s Get Ready to Rhumble on primetime television. They followed four members of 5ive (first hit in 1997), Atomic Kitten (1999) and Blue (2000), who were all taking part in a TV series of their own called The Big Reunion. Wearing their old uniforms that they wore as PJ & Duncan AKA, the Geordie scamps threw themselves into a hit that came out when they were 18 and still known as their Byker Grove characters. Royalties went to ChildLine.

By 2014, the trend for recycling old pop music was alive and well, given that streaming was decimating both downloads and CD sales: For her hit Anaconda, Nicki Minaj borrowed a couple of the hooks from Baby Got Back by Sir Mix-a-Lot, which in 1992 was outsold only by End of the Road by Boyz II Men in the USA; German DJ Parra for Cuva (born in 1991) put out a trance version of Wicked Game by Chris Isaak (a hit over Christmas 1990) with vocals by Anna Naklab under the title Wicked Games; Tom Odell was picked to turn John Lennon’s song Real Love, one of the aforementioned new Beatles songs from the Anthology series in the mid-1990s, into a ballad for a John Lewis advert.

In 2015, the big movie was Straight Outta Compton, the story of reality rap act NWA, who admittedly came to prominence at the end of the 1980s but whose music permeated America to such an extent that by 1995 hiphop was becoming a rival to rock as the world’s dominant genre. In May 2022 a child of that generation, Kendrick Lamar, is releasing a new album. 2015 saw his masterpiece To Pimp A Butterfly capture a moment in American society, with songs like Alright becoming an anthem for Black Americans to chant on protests for equality.

On a more fun side, one of the dancefloor smashes of 2016 was a mash-up. The genre had proliferated in the late 1990s and early 2000s with the rise of digital production software and mp3 files. In the tradition of acts like Soulwax, Danger Mouse and Freelance Hellraiser, 99 Souls spliced together The Boy Is Mine by Brandy & Monica and the song Girl by Destiny’s Child and had a top five hit with The Girl Is Mine. Going back a little further in time, Bruno Mars recorded 24K Magic, a love letter to the swingbeat sound of the early 1990s which won the Album of the Year GRAMMY. The music video to the single Finesse, featuring Cardi B, was a homage to the great promo videos of TLC and other acts from that era.

In 1996 Macarena was a 14-week number one in America. Justin Bieber was born in 1994, so is too young to remember doing the dance that year; perhaps that was why he was chosen to bring the Luis Fonsi song Despacito to prominence in 2017. That year was big for Spanish-inflected pop: Camila Cabello’s heart was in Havana; J Balvin called together Mi Gente to dance; Little Mix hopped on a version of the CNCO song Reggaeton Lento; and DJ Khaled sampled the Latin groove of Maria Maria by Santana (produced by Wyclef Jean) on his hit Wild Thoughts. Drake was also preparing to release a track called Nice For What, which featured a sped-up sample of the 1998 track Ex-Factor.

In 2018, two songs quoted years roughly 20 years in the past. Charli XCX and Troye Sivan wanted to go back to 1999 when Baby One More Time was in the charts and JTT (Jonathan Taylor Thomas) was the kid on Home Improvement. The video referenced The Sims, TLC, Titanic, Backstreet Boys, Eminem, Spice Girls, The Matrix and the Nokia 3310. Anne-Marie, with an assist from Ed Sheeran, quoted Baby One More Time, 99 Problems, Bye Bye Bye, Ride Wit Me by Nelly and The Next Episode by Dr Dre on the chorus of 2002. With streaming services making the entire history of pop available to fans, it was only sensible for record labels to beckon songs which quote old tunes which could also make them some money, especially if Anne-Marie’s audience were not alive in 2002.

Country music is one of the worst offenders at referencing past songs and artists. Morgan Wallen brought back the mullet in 2019, sported in the 1990s by Joe Diffie, as he prepared to become a bankable A List star with a double-album that spent most of 2021 at number one (albeit in a singles-led genre). Luke Combs, meanwhile, profited from performing the muscular country-rock of his heroes Brooks & Dunn, a big deal in country music whom he namechecked on his song Lovin’ On You. Luke more than held his own when he teamed up with Kix and Ronnie on a version of their song Brand New Man.

In the 2020s, culture collapsed in on itself. While Old Town Road broke the record for weeks at number one in the UK, the world could not go out to see live performances and instead scrolled through applications like TikTok on their phones. The biggest story of the current era has been the renaissance of Craig David, who was a teenage prodigy with a debut solo album in 2000. Alongside this has been the acceptance of young black talent like Dave and Stormzy, whose records have been produced by the very white Fraser T Smith, the superstar hook writer MNEK and producer Inflo aka Dean Josiah Cover. He spends his time producing tracks for Adele and masterminding the Sault project which defies categorisation. I suppose one can compare him to Aphex Twin aka Richard D James, a composer who also likes to be anonymous and who had a brief chart career in the late 1990s.

Rapper ArrDee is 19 and he wasn’t yet born when Born To Do It came out. Nor did he exist when Flowers, a song by Sweet Female Attitude, almost topped the UK charts in a time where the twostep garage of Craig David spread to pop production. ArrDee sampled the song on his own hit Flowers (Say My Name) at the end of 2021 and followed SFA into the top five.

For ArrDee’s generation, culture moves so much faster than it did when the previous generation were growing up. iTunes only opened its store in 2004, and Netflix and Lovefilm were rivals in the DVD rental market, given that technology did not allow streaming.

In 2022, the 20-year cycle is still present in global culture. Witness the pop-punk revival which accommodates a new album from Avril Lavigne doing the same thing as a 37-year-old mum that she was doing as a 17-year-old teenager. The four-year reign of Donald Trump as US President was chronicled on network TV and newspapers, but also by Sarah Cooper, who lipsynched his words and got a Netflix special out of it. Jackie Weaver woke up as a viral sensation one morning for kicking someone out of an online meeting and became the only story in time for several days.

A full playlist of songs is available here.

You can hear my song 20-Year Cycle here, which quotes a beloved song which was played in the clubs (!) in 2002.

45 - Smash Hits Pop

Before first Simon Cowell and then the Internet meant anyone could be a star, there was a period when stars needed to be moulded and sculpted. In the sixties we had The Beatles and The Monkees; in the seventies there was Gary Glitter and Bay City Rollers. In 1988, a magazine set up to promote popstars launched its own awards show.

Youtube is a repository of old broadcasts of the shows and I parked myself in front of them for a few days and lapped up kid-targeted pop music from the 1990s. It was the period between the final Stock Aitken and Waterman single release in 1994 and the first act to have won a show with Simon Cowell involved in the production.

Teen-targeted pop has existed since the term ‘teen-ager’ was invented. We’ve gone from the Fab Four to the Bangtan Seven. BTS are seven Koreans who sing and dance and also quote philosophy. Girl groups, meanwhile, have gone on a journey from Motown conveyor belt to the surprisingly durable Little Mix, who were put together from four solo entrants in 2011. Two of them are now mothers and are moving to a stage in their lives which is incompatible with endless arena tours.

In my list of bands who made teen-targeted pop, I draw on Smash Hits magazine and radio playlists of the time, but I must discount the following acts in order to fit in as many great unheralded acts as possible.

-          The stable of SAW/PWL acts: Jason Donovan, Kylie Minogue, Sonia, Mel & Kim, Rick Astley, Sybil, Scooch and of course Steps. Stock-Aitken-Waterman is a genre of its own

-          The Spice Girls and S Club 7 were both managed by Simon Fuller who also came up with the Idol concept. In any case, the latter had an unfair advantage as the various TV series (Miami 7, LA 7) were plastered over kids’ TV. S Club Juniors were also on TV.

-          Hear’Say, Liberty X, Girls Aloud, Phixx and One True Voice all starred on Popstars are were effectively A&R-ed on TV; ie we saw the usually hidden stage of putting a band together

-          Ditto Pop Idol winners and runners-up: Darius, Gareth Gates, Will Young, Michelle McManus and of course Rik Waller

-          Ditto Fame Academy contestants: David Sneddon, Alex Parks, Ainslie Henderson, Lemar, Sinead Quinn

-          Ditto soap stars who turned into popstars: Martine McCutcheon and Adam Rickitt (respectively stars of Eastenders and Coronation Street) both fall foul of this rule, as do Robson & Jerome, who were managed by Simon Cowell.

-          So were Five, who released a 2022 album as a three-piece but still under the name Five. There’s a contemporary dance remix of Keep On Movin to pique your interest.

-          Mero, a duo from Scotland, and girl band Girl Thing were both also Cowell projects.

-          Zig n Zag were also A&r’ed by Simon Cowell and appeared on The Big Breakfast, so they’re not on the list. Nor, alas, are Cowell band Ultimate Kaos, whose lead singer was nine and who has since starred in the Michael Jackson jukebox musical show Thriller Live.

-          Last of all, PJ & Duncan were on Byker Grove and became Ant & Dec.

One important codicil: Louis Walsh’s stable of artists, for whom Cowell worked behind the scenes, are exempt, because it wasn’t Cowell controlling their career.

Second codicil: When a member of a band goes solo, (s)he will be part of his/her band’s entry.

So let’s go back back BACK to the time when floppy fringes and ambiguous sexuality were the order of the day. It’s the Smash Hits Pop Top 40, full of groups which dominated the late 1990s and early 2000s!! In true Radio 1 Official Chart style, I’ll go from 40 down to 1, but before I do, here are some honourable mentions who sit just outside the Top 40 but were all over the charts in the Smash Hits Era: Bellefire, Tina Cousins, Femail, Hepburn, Charlotte Church, MN8, Worlds Apart and little Justin.

You can hear every track in full in this Spotify playlist.

40 Lolly – Viva La Radio. Lolly is a lady called Anna Kumble from Birmingham whose father was born in India. Her cover of Mickey was excellent but the album was, even for a child, a bit of hard work. Her debut single, pushed by Smash Hits magazine, was a hymn to DJs and the radio, with the most direct chorus shouting ‘Viva, Viva, Viva La Radio’. It was the first of five top 20 hits. In 2018 she put out her first single since 2000 called Stay Young and Beautiful; in the interim she has presented TV shows and been a fixture of pantomime. She is now a mum of two.

39 V – Hip to Hip. Another boyband in the traditional New Kids on the Block sense, V opened up for Busted in 2004 with songs like Blood, Sweat and Tears and the excellent Hip to Hip (‘ch-cheek to cheek). Ballad You Stood Up was the final single, released after vocalist Jack was sacked. V’s album flopped and they split in 2005. One of the band became a manager, another became MC at McFly’s live shows and one became a drummer in indie band Little Comets. The other two were photographers and Kevin was the boyfriend of Mark from Westlife in the 2000s.

38 Fierce – Dayz Like That. In 2000 there was a big push for girl bands in the mould of Destiny’s Child. The album Right Here Right Now gave Fierce four hits: the excellent title track, the terrific Dayz Like That (Dayz!!!!) and the ballad So Long, which reminds me of a young En Vogue. They got into the top three with Sweet Love 2K, a garage-pop mix of the Anita Baker classic. They toured with Another Level and Whitney Houston, which means they must have a great set of anecdotes. Member Aisha Peters is now a vocal coach and singer of her own stuff, who put out an EP in 2018. Sabrina Weathers boasts of ‘hanging out with the Sultan of Brunei’ on her online acting CV.

37 Kavana – Will You Wait For Me. Perfect for the pages of a magazine aimed at 11-year-olds, Kavana was 99% good looks and 1% good voice. This song is streets ahead via his Spotify streams and is painfully of its time: ‘time will pass me by…but I know I’ll make it through if you wait for me…in heaven’ is the chorus, sung like a well-trained pop starlet. It’s as if I’ll Be Missing You by Puff Daddy has been watered down, but the sentiment is still strong and I am sure it helped some listeners at the time, even though it only charted at number 29.

36 BBMak – Back Here. This song, co-written with the great Phil Thornally (who had a worldwide hit with Torn by Natalie Imbruglia) actually topped the US Adult Contemporary chart in 2000. That’s a radio station format that may be called Now That’s What I Call Mum. It’s so gentle and alluring with its MOR guitars and lyric about not being able to let go and being ‘so wrong’.

35 D-Side – Invisible. Managed by the same lady who guided other acts in this Top 40 to success, such as Let Loose and B*Witched, six became four became five in a tough beginning for this Irish band who opened for both Blue and Westlife. This song, co-written by Desmond ‘Livin La Vida Loca’ Child, was also a hit for American Idol runner-up Clay Aiken, and would not get out of the writers room today: ‘If I was invisible, I could watch you in your room’ was a product of its time.

34 Point Break – Stand Tough. A trio featuring two contemporaries of Ant & Dec who acted in Byker Grove, I loved their album Apocadelic which featured Stand Tough, a top 10 hit with a punchy chorus and a pop-rock arrangement with a brooding acoustic guitar intro. Linkin Park may have been taking notes.

33 EYC – The Way You Work It. As with Backstreet Boys, this trio were more successful in the UK than in the USA. Two of them were dancers who boogied behind New Kids on the Block. Their debut album Express Yourself Clearly brought them five Top 40 hits in the hiphop-adjacent pop style that Take That started their career doing. Indeed, tracks had space for dance breaks which would have made them an energetic live act.

32 Kele Le Roc – My Love. East London girl Kele had two big hits of her own but is probably best known for singing the vocals on Romeo, the great Basement Jaxx tune with the Bollywood-themed video. Fun fact: My Love was co-written by Robbie Nevil, who recorded the great freestyle pop tune C’est La Vie.

31 Let Loose – Crazy For You. There’s nothing that they can do, caught by the look in a lady’s eyes. The euphoric Crazy For You was one of the many songs to be held off the top spot by Love Is All Around in its 15-week stay at number one.

30 Samantha Mumba – Gotta Tell You. Samantha was an Irish Britney who sang pop songs written by Swedes, even replicating how Britney sang the word ‘me’ as ‘may’. She also recorded Divine’s US number one hit Lately. Samantha returned to prominence when she danced on ice in 2008. One of the women from How Clean Is Your House outlasted her, but did Aggie ever release a certified bop in 2000?!

29 Natasha Bedingfield – Unwritten. Daniel’s sister had some huge American hits including the title track of her album Unwritten, which was the theme to an MTV reality show I didn’t watch. ‘Live your life with arms wide open/ Today is where your book begins’ is basically the American Deam. Fun fact: the song was co-written with New Radicals songwriter Danielle Brisebois.

28 Bad Boys Inc – Don’t Talk About Love. Superproducer Ian Levine formed his own version of Take That/Boyzone/New Kids on the Block in 1993. Their debut album included six Top 40 hits including their funky debut Don’t Talk About Love. The week it hit number 19 in August 1993, the only other manufactured pop act in the Top 20 were Take That, whose song Pray had just hit number one. Songs by Madonna, Billy Joel and UB40 make up a weird Top 20 topped by Queen’s late singer Freddie Mercury. No wonder the British music industry pivoted to tweens in 1994.

27 Precious – Say It Again. A fine Eurovision entry which came fifth and includes a patented Eurovision key change (up a step). It was written by Paul Varney, a guy signed up as a staff songwriter by Simon Cowell who also had a hit cover as a performer with a version of Instant Replay as Yell! Precious, meanwhile, have nothing to do with Cowell. They  included Jenny Frost, who replaced Kerry Katona in Atomic Kitten after her first band’s album stiffed.

26 Amy Studt – Misfit. She has now disowned her pop persona but back at the turn of the century Amy had success as a sort of Charli XCX figure who was ‘just a little girl’. Not many popstars aimed at tweens and teens could get ‘superficial’ into a chorus but Amy did. Fun fact: Karen Poole, who with sister Shelley recorded as Alisha’s Attic, co-wrote this slice of pop magic which would fit snugly alongside Avril Lavigne’s early work in a Back to the 2000s playlist.

25 Shola Ama – You’re The One I Love. Spotted singing on an underground platform, Shola signed a deal at 16 and was all over the radio with her cover of You Might Need Somebody. Possessing a smooth voice with lots of character, as evidenced on the funky opening track to her debut album Much Love, Shola deserved a longer career.

24 Alisha’s Attic – The Incidentals. Aha, it’s Karen Poole’s band! The sisters’ dad was Brian Poole, a successful singer in the 1960s, so they had a way in, but you need good songs and Alisha’s Attic had plenty. I Am I Feel was their first big hit but this one, full of odd chords and spoke-sung lyrics, remains brilliant.

23 Honeyz – End of the Line. Written by Paul Begaud, who wrote the theme song for the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, this breakup song is very of its time with a triple-time swaying beat and a lightly feminist verse (‘I deserve some damn respect’). I don’t know why Little Mix didn’t think to cover it, since it is a girl band classic.

22 Jamelia – Superstar. Another song which was all over Heart 106.2 at the time, it was originally a number one in Denmark for their local popstar Christine Milton. The UK version uses the same backing track but replaces Christine’s vocals with those of Brummie singer Jamelia who feels ‘some connection to the things you do’ but doesn’t know what attracts her to the guy. Interestingly, some of the lyrics are rewritten: the chorus is changed up from the original’s ‘some kind of choreographer’ to ‘all eyes on you no matter where you are’; a lyric in the second verse removes a line about a ‘cross fader’ to replace it with ‘bad boys on their best behaviour’.

21 Blazin Squad – Love on the Line. This ten-piece rapping boyband turned the idea of So Solid Crew into something more marketable. A song about phone sex which is 99% Freak Me by Another Level, the lyric ‘Call me baby, we can get hot’ is not a line to be sung by pre-pubescent girls. Still, the song has silky groove and is a fine third effort following their number one cover of Tha Crossroads and a tune called Flip Reverse, which is filth.

20 N-Tyce – Hey DJ! (Play That Song). This London quartet had four top 20 hits starting with this one. It’s nothing TLC and All Saints didn’t already do, and they stand as an example of what happens when record labels flood the market with the same product. The album even had interludes like US r’n’b albums, but fans saved their money and bought the real thing, not the copycat.

19 Damage – So What If I. Best known for one of their members marrying Baby Spice, Damage were the JLS of their day. They had 11 hits, four of them Top 10, including a cover of the Eric Clapton ballad Wonderful Tonight. So What If I was written by Steve Mac and Wayne Hector, who have been responsible for much of post-Smash Hits era pop as well as a song very high up in this chart, which suits its title.

18 911 – Party People…Friday Night. Lee, Spike and Jimmy were another trio of hot stuff perfect for A3 posters on tweenage walls. Inoffensive, nice of voice and hair, 911 took Dr Hook’s A Little Bit More (‘when you think I’ve loved you all I can, I’m gonna love you a little bit more’) to number one, though their cover of Private Number is far better. Like Bad Boys Inc, Boyzone and Take That, two of the band were dancers and indeed they recruited Boyzone’s early manager to shape their career. Turned down by all and sundry, 911 formed their own imprint and eventually signed to Virgin Records, who laughed all the way to the bank. Fun fact: Party People…Friday Night, which fits in nicely on a playlist next to the music of S Club 7, was written with Eliot Kennedy, whose most-loved composition is When You’re Gone and who wrote a musical with Gary Barlow.

17 Mis-Teeq – Scandalous. Best known for giving the world Alesha Dixon, Mis-Teeq brought the club sound to the pop charts with brilliant anthems like this one. It’s a sex jam (‘Just get it up…a sone-night stand just ain’t enough’) driven by an air-siren hook and production from renowned duo Stargate. What a title for a song about the love the girls have for a tattooed ‘roughneck’ who gets Alesha ‘trembling like a little baby girl’. 

16 Busted – Year 3000. Having exhausted every permutation of sexy boy/girl dancing and singing, someone had a bright idea to add guitars to the mix. Thus Busted were born, originally a quartet but marketed as a trio after Tom Fletcher’s face didn’t fit. Tom was in the room for this fun song where ‘triple-breasted women swim around town totally naked’; the Jonas Brothers version changed this line so American missed out on the image! Still their finest moment, two of the band (James and Charlie) are solo musicians while Matt Willis, who won I’m A Celebrity in 2006, is using his theatre school training on the UK tour of the musical Waitress.

15 Billie – Honey to the Bee. Talking of theatrical stars, is there a career as brilliant as Billie Piper’s? Bursting into people’s lives at 15, she had a string of hits in the late 1990s including this sweet piece of pop music. Since her pop career, she has acted onstage and on screen, having been recruited for the Russell T Davies reboot of Doctor Who and writing her own TV drama I Hate Suzie. In the midst of that, she married and divorced Chris Evans and was married to Laurence Fox, who fathered her kids. A campaign by Radio 1 breakfast host Chris Moyles to get Honey to the Bee back into the charts worked and it found a new audience in 2007 when recurrent downloads (ie those of tracks not physically available in shops) could enter the Top 40.

14 Louise – 2 Faced. The white member of Eternal, unsurprisingly, was the first to launch a solo career. Though she was not part of the band when the group had a number one in 1997, 12 chart hits including the excellent 2 Faced (‘first you recognise me, then you criticise me…Stop your bitching!’) and a marriage to brilliant footballer Jamie Redknapp more than make up for it. Smash Hits wasn’t the only magazine Louise was in at the time.

13 Atomic Kitten – Whole Again. Who would have thought that three spunky girls who had an early hit with the chorus ‘see ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya!’ would make one of the best pop songs of the era? Brought back by England football fans in 2018, Whole Again is a reminiscin’ song where the girls still pine for their man who ‘still turns me on’ but ‘for now I’ll have to wait’. Fun fact: it’s written by Andy McCluskey and Stuart Kershaw of OMD, who must get a nice PRS cheque for their work.

12 Daniel Bedingfield – Gotta Get Thru This. Louis Theroux borrowed the song’s title for his memoir, which is testament to the power of the track which the bedroom producer took to number one in 2001. The addictive three-note riff that runs throughout the chorus was paired with a percussive vocal line and lyrics about heartbreak and ‘love pouring like the rain’. He had success with ballads like If You’re Not The One but this will always be his biggest hit.

11 Peter Andre – Flava. Mysterious Girl was the one that came back into the charts during his renaissance, but Flava was a number one hit for the man with the oily abs. It’s another Wayne Hector composition with an insistent hook (‘party all night, party all day’), in which Peter hears there’s ‘a jam that’s goin’ on’. More likely he heard This Is How We Do It by Montell Jordan and wanted to rewrite it as closely as possible without being sued. 

10 Another Level – From The Heart. Freak Me was a cover, so I’ve gone for the wedding ballad From The Heart, written by the phenomenal Diane Warren for the film Notting Hill.

9 A1 – Make It Good. The quartet who revived Take On Me are back together as a four, though their 20th year celebrations were hit hard by the pandemic. Their underrated third album Make It Good featured self-penned acoustic pop-rock songs (one of which was written with Chesney Hawkes!!) which moved them beyond identikit Smash Hits pop.

8 B*Witched – C’est La Vie. Riverdance in bubblegum form, and the first hit for a quartet featuring not one but two sisters of Shane from Boyzone. The bridge (‘gotta let me in’) references the Three Little Pigs, and there’s a key change.

7 East 17 – Stay Another Day. A song written by Tony Mortimer about his late brother, this chimes every Christmastime as an evergreen tune. Amid moody pop songs like House of Love and Deep, with covers like If You Ever and West End Girls, East 17 were from the same guy who brought you Bros and Pet Shop Boys, the recently deceased Tom Watkins.

6 All Saints – Pure Shores. All four members had solo careers (duo Appleton and solo acts Shaznay and Mel Blatt) but their five chart-toppers made them a huge force in the Smash Hits era. Like Little Mix, they were of many skin tones; like Little Mix, they were constantly on the radio. I Know Where It’s At was a fine first single, while Never Ever sounded like nothing else. Bootie Call and Black Coffee had great arrangements but Pure Shores, produced by Madonna’s pal William Orbit, remains stunning. Fun fact: Prince collaborator and former fiancée Suzannah Melvoin also has writing credits.

5 McFly – All About You. Like Take That, McFly benefitted from having the songwriter(s) in the band rather than flown in. Tom Fletcher has since become a celebrity dad and author, but after he was kicked out of Busted he helped McFly become the thinking person’s pop band. The song written for his wife Gio is by far and away his best, and the fact that he donated proceeds to the Children In Need appeal made him one the UK’s youngest national treasures. Back together after a successful reunion tour, McFly released new music in 2020 and this year play outdoor venues in the UK and head to Brazil too!

4 Blue – All Rise. Their debut single is their best, though props to their Eurovision entry I Can from 2011. In an era of manicured popstars – Sylvia Patterson describes the likes of Britney and Beyonce as ‘more hologram than human’ – Blue at least deigned to have fun. Each member has had solo success, with Simon from Blue’s catalogue being my favourite.

3 Westlife – Flying Without Wings. I wonder if the members of Westlife are allergic to stools. ‘Stand up for the key change’ became a gimmick – can you tell Louis Walsh is their manager? – and though I prefer their Swedish pop bangers (Bad Girls, When You’re Looking Like That), it’s the ballads that will make them famous when they are all grey and on the Noughties revival circuit with Atomic Kitten and Blue. And Boyzone.

2 Boyzone – Picture of You. So many hits to choose from and I’ve gone for the poppy one on the Bean soundtrack. Post Wham and Bros, and pre Backstreet Boys and the various idols of the 2000s, it was Take That and Boyzone who captured the most hearts. It was hardly Blur vs Oasis, but the choice was there if you wanted it. The biggest Irish pop band of all time were formed as a Take That copycat act, whose Irish TV debut witnessed six dancers who ‘have no talent whatsoever’ according to host Gay Byrne. It is incredible that those chaps flailing around to Clubhouse’s Light My Fire went on to dominate the charts between 1994 and 2000. Three of them went solo while even Keith & Shane covered Girl You Know It’s True. Poor Stephen Gately passed away and Ronan Keating wakes up millions of people on Magic.

1 Take That – Never Forget. In the absence of S Club 7, Girls Aloud, Spice Girls, Will Young and Robson & Jerome from this list, Take That are top of the Smash Hits Pops. They were by far the biggest band of the era even though they lost a member in 1995 and split in 1996 (remember the helpline?). Their manager was a Svengali who will probably launch a lawsuit if I say anything bad about him. Howard and Jason danced, although Howard took the vocal on Never Forget, which is like Ringo singing Yellow Submarine. The three vocalists had impressive solo careers: Mark Owen released the most interesting songs in Four Minute Warning and Clementine, and Robbie Williams did pretty well out of it too even if he has now slipped into Heritage Act territory and will be singing Angels until he finally croaks. The band’s secret weapon, of course, was chubby variety entertainer Gary Barlow, who spent the pandemic playing gigs from his home as part of the Crooner Sessions and is heading to the London stage for an autobiographical show later in 2022. I could have gone for Back For Good but whenever I’ve seen Take That play Wembley Stadium, this one always gets the biggest cheer.

Hear all 40 songs in this Spotify playlist.

If you want to hear my maximal Smash Hits Pop song, head here.

45 - Land Rover Rock

In early 2021 Billboard magazine invented another con-genre: Minivan Rock, the sort of tune released around the turn of the century. From the end of Oasis’ golden years to when Coldplay’s third album knocked Oasis’ sixth off the top, along with the rise of MySpace rock from the likes of Arctic Monkeys. Instead of selling minivans, in the UK such songs would sell Land Rovers.

Minivan Rock was made up of songs, said the rubric, that ‘were likely to be fun for the whole family’, particularly the suburban family (ie – yes – Caucasian). The list chose to ignore the big three because ‘they didn’t rock enough’: Smooth by Santana, Norah Jones’ first album and Jack Johnson’s smooth surfer vibes.

The Top 50 was topped by Hanging by a Moment by Lifehouse, a song whose second chorus iteration comes before a minute of the song has elapsed. In the peloton are the likes of Complicated (Avril Lavigne), Story of a Girl (Nine Days, never a hit in the UK), Slide (Goo Goo Dolls), All You Wanted (Michelle Branch), Never Let You Go (Third Eye Blind, never a hit in the UK), Everything You Want (Vertical Horizon, a US number one hit!), A Thousand Miles (Vanessa Carlton), Wherever You Will Go (The Calling), 3AM (Matchbox 20) and No Such Thing (John Mayer).

If you need more of a clue: Kiss Me by Sixpence None The Richer; the output of Semisonic, New Radicals, Fastball, Jason Mraz, Barenaked Ladies and (surprisingly low down in the list) Teenage Dirtbag by Wheatus. All of these songs can be screamed, to quote John Mayer, ‘at the top of my lungs’ from a van doing 80mph on a freeway.

What shocked me about the list was how Yankocentric it was. Two tracks from UK acts – White Flag by Dido and Clocks by Coldplay – made the list, which is natural for an American top 50 but less than ideal for patriotic purposes. We’re the land of Adele, The Beatles and Ed Sheeran! Only Coldplay and Dido broke through in the States between 1997 and 2004. Oasis struggled to gain traction and Blur almost split up after a disastrous tour of grunge-loving America in 1991/92. They will feature in this list of Land Rover Rock.

Here are 40 songs I think would pass muster for a comparable list of tunes to be yelled at while cruising down a provincial road somewhere in the Home Counties or The North. Plus:

1.       The song must have been released after Be Here Now came out in August 1997 and before X&Y by Coldplay, which came out in June 2005

2.       The song must be performed by acts from the United Kingdom or Ireland

Except in one case, I have limited myself to one track per artist.

Caveats:

1.       The likes of Sound of the Underground by Girls Aloud, the early songs of McFly and Reach by S Club 7 are all omitted on grounds of them being more Smash Hits! than smash hits

2.       Smile by The Supernaturals was originally released in 1996, ditto Hedonism by Skunk Anansie, but they would both be near the top of the list were it not for the cut-off

3.       Because woke-ism didn’t exist in 2003, I apologise for the awful lack of female voices – I tried to include Groovejet as sung by Sophie Ellis-Bextor – but if you remember, a lot of guitar rock in the Land Rover Era was bloke-led

4.       Aside from Bloc Party’s Kele Okereke and Tajinder Singh of Cornershop, the list is entirely white. Again, don’t shoot the chronicler

Hear every track in one handy Spotify playlist here.

1 U2 – Vertigo. Everything about this song brings together the motifs of Land Rover Rock: the riffing from The Edge; Bono’s meaningless ad lib ‘Turn it up, Captain’; the short, sharp first verse; the ‘hello hello!’ in the chorus; the strain on Bono’s voice on ‘feel’; oh-ohs in the second verse; a middle eight with a pithy solo; ‘ramping up’ to the final chorus; lots of yeahs in the last seconds. It’s U2’s last truly great song and they are the world’s biggest rock’n’roll band for a reason.

2 Blur – Song 2. Speaking of songs that say nothing in words…The Woo Hoo Song was written in about six minutes as a grunge pastiche (much like Man on the Moon by REM, with its many ‘yeah’s). Song 2 became the band’s hit that broke America and accelerated the departure of Graham Coxon. It is the perfect ski slopes song.

3 Coldplay – Clocks. As one of the two British acts in the Minivan Rock playlist, Coldplay are here with Clocks, the song with the piano riff and a wordless chorus. Honourable mentions to Speed of Sound, Politik and In My Place, but none of them have that feature of Land Rover Rock: a chorus that says nothing in words and everything in music.

4 U2 – Beautiful Day. So good they’re here twice. Their songs include anthems of universal brotherhood (One, Still Haven’t Found) and love of one another (With or Without You, I Will Follow). In 2000, U2 returned with a new single that was the most wide-open rock song they’d ever written. The song is rather ruined by the ‘what you don’t have you don’t need it now’ bit, but the Abbey Road version from 2017 (with a small choir and an interpolation of Starman by David Bowie) emphasises what a fine song it is. Coldplay owe most of their career to it.

5 Ash – Burn Baby Burn. The Walker Brothers-borrowing Candy is sensational too, while There’s a Star and Shining Light are essentially the same, brilliant pop song. Burn Baby Burn, however, was the smash, to which resistance is futile: two-note riff, bass, drums, bigger riff, verse, chorus, solo, middle eight, chorus. Perfect power-pop from the heirs to the Undertones. The verses are about being ‘almost at the point of no return’ and having ‘feelings that I can’t disguise’, and the melody is stunning. Tim Wheeler’s best three minutes in a superlative catalogue.

6 Feeder – Just a Day. Assisted by a video which featured tons of fan-made footage, this anthemic slice of rock is driven by the ‘doo doo’ hook, where the vocal doubles the guitar. The chorus is stunning, and the verses are all about dealing with a hangover after a busy night out. Yet there’s some melancholy in the line ‘I don’t want to drag you down…cos you’re a friend’. Feeder are still going, with their 2022 album Torpedo landing in the top five of the UK charts.

7 Stereophonics – Dakota. The shortlist included Pick A Part That’s New and The Bartender and the Thief, but the structure of this song is pure rock’n’roll. Intro, riff, vocal, hook, vocal, hook and THEN the chorus, which I bellowed along to after I learned to drive in 2005. Underappreciated in the extreme, Stereophonics are still going 25 years into a fine career.

8 Doves – Pounding. A snare hit on every beat gives this track its name, as Jimi Goodwin sings a melancholic lyric about it being hard to ‘get by’. The middle section, with the pulsating guitar, is stunning. Even better than There Goes The Fear, which I never liked.

9 Supergrass – Pumping on Your Stereo. They know how to write a pop song, even if this is 99% Rebel Rebel, with a bubblegum chorus. It means nothing at all, and that’s the point.

10 KT Tunstall – Suddenly I See. I apologise for the paucity of women in this list but that was how the industry worked in the Land Rover Rock era. KT plugged away for years before she hit the mainstream with Eye to the Telescope. This song has a nagging hook and great production, with a crescendoing middle section.

11 Hard-Fi – Hard To Beat. Another song that is 99% attitude, straight outta Staines (home of Ali G), this song ushered in ‘Landfill Indie’ and was omnipresent in summer 2005 thanks to a chonk-chonk riff and Richard Archer’s snarling vocal. The band are touring in 2022, bringing back their Land Rover Rock sound.

12 Travis – Why Does It Always Rain On Me. Alan McGee unfairly derided Travis and Coldplay as bedwetter rock, but after the nights out of the Britpop era, men needed to grow up, douse their hangover and mellow out. This song from The Man Who will be sung in 100 years’ time as it will always feel like we live under ‘the lightning’, asking where the ‘blue sky’ went and finding it tough to see ‘the tunnel at the end of all of these lights’. Fran Healy’s vocal is fragile but anthemic.

13 Basement Jaxx – Where’s Your Head At. The third in the group of great dance-rock acts (after Chemical Brothers and The Prodigy), Basement Jaxx could be here with Red Alert, Romeo, Do Your Thing or Jus 1 Kiss. The song where the monkeys take over the asylum in the video, which would be banned today in the Woke Era, gets my vote. Driven by that three-note riff and surrounded by production wizardry, it’s another song which is 99% attitude, a key tenet of Land Rover Rock.

14 Robbie Williams – It’s Only Us. ‘Rock me Amadeus!!’ The theme for video game FIFA 2000, this song is about it all ‘kicking off’ and drives on and on to its final crazy chord. Like The Beatles and Oasis, even Robbie’s non-album singles were sublime. He was in his Imperial Period before he was ‘RICH BEYOND MY WILDEST DREAMS!’ which rather wrecked his career.

15 Garbage – Cherry Lips. Again, I’m sorry there are so few women in this list but Shirley Manson proves herself a fine rock vocalist regardless of gender with this stunning song. It starts with a dig-dig-dig-dig hook, explodes in the chorus and tells the tale of a ‘delicate boy’ who dresses up as a lady, based on the fake story of JT Leroy. It’s a power-pop classic, with handclaps and a proper middle eight which recalls Phil Spector. Butch Vig, who produced Nevermind for Nirvana, works his magic touch on the production. You don’t even need to hear the lyric to be swept away by the melody.

16 Gorillaz – 19/2000 Soulchild Remix. Feel Good Inc came out in spring 2005 but De La Soul’s rapping precludes it from being included in this list. 19/2000 was on the band’s 2000 debut album, and I love the remixed version: it changes the key, speeds it up and adds the ‘it’s the music that we choose’ hook and the ‘la la’ section. It’s one of Damon Albarn’s best tunes, based on a repeated chord loop and featuring stream-of-consciousness lyrics like ‘If time’s elimination then we’ve got nothing to lose’. Fun fact: Chris and Tina from Talking Heads and Miho Hatori from cult indie band Cibo Matto are on vocals and ought to get credit.

17 The Coral – Dreaming Of You. The bass riff, the organ, the guitar, the vocal by James Skelly, the harmonies, the structure, the solo, the repeated chorus at the end, the fact it’s all over in about two minutes. Almost perfect Land Rover Rock, Scouse style.

18 Manic Street Preachers – You Stole The Sun From My Heart. Written in memory of the missing, presumed dead, Richey by Nicky Wire, this has one of the band’s best choruses on an album full of them: The Everlasting is more melancholic, If You Tolerate This… has the word ‘fascist’ in the second line and Tsumani is saturated in strings. James Dean Bradfield is an underappreciated pop melodist.

19 Melanie C – On The Horizon. Why is a Spice Girl here? Gregg Alexander of New Radicals (a Minivan Rock act) wrote this song – you can tell! – which is delivered with passion by Melanie C, who only sees ‘sweet love’ in the air. The middle eight (remember them???) is sublime, as is the chorus, which features the famous ‘oh yeah’.

20 Kaiser Chiefs – Na Na Na Na Naa. Ruby is outside the cut-off point, so I have to pick something from their debut album, produced by Stephen ‘Parklife’ Street. I Predict A Riot is the obvious one but I’ve gone for track four, driven by a wordless chorus, which is characteristic of Land Rover Rock.

21 Bloc Party – Little Thoughts. The only black singer on this list is Kele Okereke, who is openly gay. Can you tell why Bloc Party haven’t enjoyed the same renaissance as the likes of The Kooks, The Wombats and The Courteeners? I remember being thrilled by this song when I saw it on MTV2, home of Zane Lowe before he moved to California. (This song is not on Spotify so I’ve put the mighty Helicopter on the Top 40 playlist instead.)

22 The Libertines – Don’t Look Back Into the Sun. I never got them because it was more soap opera than band, but this song is undoubtedly smashing. Pete Doherty’s vocal snarls and shouts, while Gary’s drums are worth the price of admission. The riff is rivalled by Chelsea Dagger (too late to be let into this list) and Seven Nation Army (which is by a couple from Detroit).

23 David Gray – Babylon. This took two years to become a hit and chimed with the millennial tension in the air. ‘The love that I was giving you was never in doubt’ is the lyric that makes this a super love song, sung by the wobbly headed Irishman. The final chorus is awesome.

24 and 25 Snow Patrol – Spitting Games and Keane – This is the Last Time. Every day without fail for about 18 months, Virgin (now Absolute) Radio would rotate Keane and Snow Patrol hits, with a smattering of Coldplay. I’ve chosen the lesser singles from the first two bands, each with soaring instrumentation and Coldplay-reaching choruses. It’s impossible not to join in.

26 Embrace – Gravity. A Chris Martin cast-off given to Embrace as they moved into Coldplay’s market, this is a nothing song about Newtonian physics, driven by piano. Ashes is good too, but Gravity has the Coldplay seal.

27 Kasabian – Reason Is Treason. Everyone knows Clubfoot and LSF but I prefer this one, driven by a beat and the familiar ‘ahhs’. Serge can write a tune, former vocalist Tom Meighan can sing one and this track deserves wider exposure. It’s also perfect for car adverts.

28 Toploader – Dancing in the Moonlight. As evidenced in the film Four Lions, this is a perfect song to shout in a van. The vowel sounds in the chorus are great, while the verses are how dancing is a ‘supernatural delight’. Yes it’s a cover but I cannot not put this in. Toploader are now on the nostalgia circuit because they don’t get songwriting royalties from their biggest hit.

29 Chemical Brothers – Let Forever Be. Drums, backwards guitar, bass, Noel Gallagher singing about nothing. Better than Hey Boy Hey Girl, which is more of a club song, this is a perfect synthesis of rock and dance music that recalls the best of the Madchester era. Check how Noel sings ‘gutter’ and the extraordinary Michel Gondry-directed video.

30 The Prodigy – Shoot Down. The third of the threesome, I wanted to put in a Prodigy song because they are a rock act disguised as dance music. Shoot Down features the Gallagher brothers on guitar and vocals, as Liam repeats the words ‘bang bang bang’ with the attitude of his best work. The production pummels the listener and it was a highlight of The Prodigy’s difficult fourth album.

31 Dido – Don’t Think Of Me. White Flag is a Minivan Rock song but I’ve always liked this kiss-off where Dido tells an ex not to think of her when he sees his new woman smile. I love how she hangs on ‘when you see-ee’ and ‘it’s too-oo late’. It’s also a much better song than White Flag.

32 New Order – Crystal. The original line-up of the band returned in 2001 with a heck of a rock song that means nothing but sounds great. 60 MPH is decent too, but Crystal is sensational, especially the way the intro builds.

33 The Thrills – Big Sur. West Coast rock from a group of Irishmen who in this song quote The Monkees and shrug that the city and street lights won’t ‘guide you home’. Great vocal, great riff, great chorus.

34 Turin Brakes – Pain Killer (Radio edit). Removing the line ‘giving me head’, as the radio edit does, makes this safe for all the family. Not many pop songs begin ‘Batten up the hatches’, while the ‘summer rain’ chorus is wonderful, especially the falsetto last line.

35 Idlewild – You Held the World in Your Arms. When I saw Idlewild in 2007 they started their set with three stunning singles. This was the best, with strings and Roddy Woomble going on about things changing. The verses are verbose but the chorus is scruff-of-neck-grabbing direct: ‘What if you held the world in your arms?’

36 Muse – Time Is Running Out. This just pips their version of Feeling Good (written by Anthony Newley, which I didn’t know). I hate the inhalation of breath but it mimics how Matt Bellamy is ‘drowning, asphyxiated’ while his time’s running out. A fine rock song which moved them into the stadium act roster.

37 Ronan Keating – Life is a Rollercoaster. Another tune written by Gregg ‘New Radicals’ Alexander, this just pips Lovin Each Day as Ronan’s entry. ‘Hey baby!’ is the second hook in the song, after the opening ‘na na na na na’.

38 Cornershop – Brimful of Asha (remix). Remixed by Norman ‘Fatboy Slim’ Cook, this ode to Asha Bhosle is the most successful song by a British Asian act, helped by the line ‘Everybody needs a bosom for a pillow’. Three chords are all you need.

39 Gomez – Whippin Piccadilly. Tom Gray has spent the last few years campaigning for songwriter rights via his Broken Record efforts. Back in 1998 he and his fellow blues merchants had a hit about ‘a day out in Manchester’. They lamented that there wasn’t ‘enough hours in our life’, while I love the line ‘looking like a lunatic’.

40 Franz Ferdinand – Take Me Out. I bought this single because I wanted it to get to number one. It stalled at three. It starts with an A section, moves to the B section and repeats the hell out of it. One of the best rock riffs of all time. Check the ending too, which emphasises how desperate the song is: Alex won’t be ‘leaving here with you’ after all.

So how can I write a Land Rover Rock song? It has to be in a major key and has to be urgent and propulsive. There must be an instrumental hook, so it has to pass the Old Grey Whistle Test, and the vocal has to inspire a singalong. It doesn’t have to be about anything either, as it’s mostly attitude.

The Land Rover Rock playlist can be found on Spotify here.

You can hear Concorde as part of the Songs playlist here.

45 - Yacht Rock

There is a term in linguistics called constructed or con-languages. In the same way, many music fans love to come up with con-genres. Yacht Rock is one example.

JD Ryznar, along with David Lyons and Hunter Stair, are the creators of Yacht Rock as a genre. During her Desert Island Discs appearance, the DJ Zoe Ball has spoken of her love of the genre, particularly the music of Steely Dan and Toto. But what defines the genre, which is perfect for people who pop out to the sea and listen to some smooth music?

Following the creators of the genre, the parameters are broken down as follows:

·       Era. The true Yacht Rock track was recorded between 1978 and 1982.

·       Personnel. Usually the band set-up was a session band containing keyboard players like David Paich, guitarist like Jay Graydon, Lee Ritenour and Steve Lukather, and at least two of the Porcaro brothers: Jeff (drums), Steve (keys) and Mike (bass). David Foster and Greg Phillinganes may also be involved. Vocalists like Michael McDonald were imperative to the yacht rock sound.

·       Sound: The Doobie Brothers pioneered what is known as the ‘Doobie Bounce’, a shuffle driven by a distinctive keyboard pattern and regular drumbeat.

·       Lyrical themes: Love is the key theme of Yacht Rock, as we shall discover, whether in love or just out of it. The fool rears its head above many Yacht Rock classics, as our protagonist realises he has done wrong and lost something good.

Greg Prato’s book on Yacht Rock includes a playlist of acts and songs, which helped inspire this list. Beyond Yacht Rock, founded by the team behind the web series to create new con-genres, began to ‘throw a bone’ to the genre by discovering new tunes.

Eventually, listeners put forward selections ‘for the boat’, some of which were laughed off the vessel. Peaceful Easy Feeling by the Eagles, The Beach Boys’ Kokomo and Margaritaville by Jimmy Buffett are all decidedly ‘nyacht’, or ‘not Yacht Rock’. Modern songs by Bruno Mars and Field Music were also nyacht rock. The complete list can be found on YachtOrNyacht.com.

Rather brilliantly, the guys restarted their show and have set up a Patreon page offering patrons listening parties where they offer a commentary on classic albums and news about their forthcoming book. There is also a Discord server for fans to communicate with one another and listen to thematic playlists. $1000 donations can be made by Kenny Loggins or Michael McDonald if they chose to do so; they would be a fool not to give!

A useful starting point for this list of 40 songs is that Channel 101 webseries from the 2005. Channel 101 was a monthly competition for filmmakers to roadtest ideas, and one team of competitors were three blokes who would go on to take their short films to the masses: The Lonely Island.

In conversation with Rolling Stone magazine to celebrate a decade since the series was first screened, JD Ryznar told the tale of meeting a crew of guys from Michigan, his home state: Dave Lyons, Hunter Stair and Steve Huey who, thanks to a blink-and-miss-him role as an extra in Pirates of the Caribbean, styled himself Hollywood Steve. The guys would meet every weekend and listen to old records where ‘there’s guys on boats on the covers’.

Dave came up with the term Marina Rock, and Steve got heavily into Steely Dan (‘This is my new identity. I’m gonna unwind…and leave parties early’). Hunter and Dave wanted to make a series about ‘a couple of jewel thieves who lived on a yacht’ or a detective duo called Loggins & Loggins.

The first episode was a standalone video which described the origins of What A Fool Believes, the ultimate Yacht Rock song. The episode was introduced by music critic Hollywood Steve: ‘If you look up a lot of nineties rap albums on All Music Guide [an early website that was a sort of musical Wikipedia], chances are Hollywood Steve wrote the review,’ says JD.

We see Kenny Loggins (played by Hunter Stair) approach Michael McDonald (JD Ryznar), while Hall and Oates prat around arrogantly saying that smooth music ‘sucks’. Michael is told to write a hit song and Loggins thinks he is the man to help him do it. But Michael knows what happened to Jim Messina (Lane Farnham), a broken man who cannot move on from his musical partnership with Loggins. ‘This is gonna be me, I know it,’ sighs Michael.

Loggins and music mogul Koko Goldstein visit him to reminisce about ‘the good times’. Loggins starts to mime a Loggins & Messina song but Messina throws up. At this point Michael McDonald calls Loggins ‘a sentimental fool’ for trying to rekindle his friendship ‘just by mustering a smile and telling some nostalgic tales. That’s what a fool believes!!’

Cut to the opening strains of What A Fool Believes and a happy montage where McDonald and Loggins play around with legal pads. Hall and Oates, especially John Oates, challenge the pair to a songwriting contest ‘but that’s another story’, says Hollywood Steve, daring the audience to vote them forward to enable them to film that story.

The idea for Koko Goldstein (Dave Lyons) came from the cover of a Doobie Brothers album; Hunter thought he looked cool and Dave brought the creation to life. According to JD Ryznar, Dave ‘put on a bunch of garbage Seventies clothes’ and a whistle around his neck.

Yacht Rock Episode One did win the night, so the guys could shoot that second episode. Koko is killed by a harpoon, becoming a martyr for Yacht Rock and telling his acolytes to ‘keep the fire’. Hunter thinks that episode is ‘the finest hour’ of the series and features my favourite line in the 12-episode series: ‘It’s so smooth!’

Christopher Cross, played by Justin Roiland of Rick & Morty fame, strums and mimes the song Sailing, a song Roiland had never heard before. ‘It’s an acquired taste,’ Roiland tells Rolling Stone. People went nuts for Cross and the team won again. ‘I think we might be rock stars,’ Hollywood Steve remembers thinking.

A few years after the webseries became popular, it was uploaded onto Youtube, which didn’t exist in early 2005. Word of Yacht Rock had spread: the guys were invited to Chicago to see all ten episodes back to back and, as JD says: ‘There was a line down the block…People were quoting lines.’

The 11th episode, which opened in Yacht Rock style with Hollywood Steve in a sticky situation (here ‘becoming estranged from my spouse’), told the tale of the theme song from Footloose aka ‘The Boy Who Dances Away Oppression’. Jimmy Buffett and Kevin Bacon open the episode then we cut to Michael McDonald, who is with James Ingram, played by a broke Wyatt Cenac, just before he landed his life-changing gig at The Daily Show. The pair are writing Yah Mo Be There and ring up Kenny Loggins, who pauses his karate workout and heads over to write with the pair of them.

But Jimmy Buffett blows a dart and captures Loggins, trapping him in a Buffett commune where only Jimmy Buffett music plays. Just like Kevin Bacon in Footloose, Loggins breaks free from this captive world with the help of…McDonald and Ingram who realise their friend has been seized by a man whose music is ‘mellow, but not smooth’. Cue a montage over the song Footloose as Buffett’s commune is turned into a bloodbath-cum-party with a thrust of Loggins’ groin.

Dave Lyons famously detests Jimmy Buffett: ‘I think it’s garbage music for people who have no interest in listening to anything good…[He’s] a rich dude getting richer off of the lack of taste of the poor and stupid.’ JD agrees, saying Buffett seeks to ‘paint a rosy picture of a reality that does not exist’. Never forget that you have to love music so much to hate music so much.

The final episode called Danger Zone is a glorious failure. It is ‘the space battle’, as JD calls it, where poor Hollywood Steve is killed off. Loggins tries to convince McDonald to soundtrack a Hollywood film, and we cut to Planet Synthos where Giorgio Moroder is told to find a ‘relevant pop star’.

Many of them are to be found recording We Are The World. Loggins is in, as are LaToya Jackson, Kim Carnes and of course Hall and Oates; McDonald, captioned the ‘Voice of the Seventies’, is not allowed in and spends a montage moping around, wailing and plucking hairs out of his beard.

His solution, in a throwback to the opening episode of the series, is to see poor Jim Messina who tells him to ‘charm that snake’. Here Christopher Cross pops out with a keytar and bellows: ‘Reinvent your image in a desperate attempt at relevance!!’ Cue a montage set to Christopher Cross’ awful Charm That Snake. The series is fun and educational, too.

Moroder appears ‘from the outer space’ looking for someone to record Danger Zone to stop his home planet from exploding. Then the plot dissolves into silliness, as Michael McDonald tries to prevent the death of Kenny Loggins with the help of Dan Aykroyd, who was at the recording of We Are The World because he stole McDonald’s invitation.

Loggins battles Hall and Oates with lasers and ‘really smooth music’ but McDonald, flying the Millennium Falcon (which he procured with Aykroyd’s help) offers sweet freedom from the lasers over McDonald’s killer soundtrack anthem Sweet Freedom. Then something happens at the end that ties up the series after 12 episodes (or does it??).

By 1985, the time of Danger Zone and Sweet Freedom, Yacht Rock as a genre was over. Nobody wanted smooth music any more: Toto were a shadow of their former selves, Steely Dan were no longer active, ditto the Doobies. Yet JD, the real JD Ryznar, was being invited to Hall and Oates and Steely Dan gigs.

Dave Lyons tells a story about how Michael McDonald and Steely Dan were playing a show in California and when they played Showbiz Kids they threw their captain’s hats down ‘and stomped on them. We just looked at each other and went: “They know who we are.”’

McDonald found the series ‘hilarious…It’s kind of like when you get a letter from a stalker who’s never met you.’ Likewise Toto’s Steve Porcaro, who collared Hunter Stair and asked if the Yacht Rock guys really did hate Toto. Hunter assured him that that was untrue; he argues that it was a smooth music version of the Blues Brothers: ‘We took the music that we really loved that we weren’t really part of and reintroduced it to our own generation.’

Such is the background to the con-genre Yacht Rock. The Only Yacht Rock Book You Need Vol 1will be launched later in 2022 via Constable Books and it’ll contain many, if not all, of the following 40 tunes.

The Hot 100 number one that is likely to be the most successful Yacht hit is What A Fool Believes. It came from the pair of Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins – my 40 songs includes versions of the former track by both men – but was a hit for the Doobie Brothers after they recruited the Bearded Wonder for the album Minute by Minute, whose title track follows What A Fool Believes on the album and is also perfectly ‘yachty’. McDonald wrote that one and I Keep Forgetting, which was later sampled on Regulate by Warren G (and parodied on the Yacht Rock webseries).

Loggins, meanwhile, had a series of hits under his own name after splitting from the duo Loggins & Massina. This Is It features in the webseries, with some great miming from Hunter Stair, while JD Ryznar takes backing vocals as McDonald. I also end the playlist with Keep The Fire, given that the motto of the webseries is exactly that. There’s a Loggins song called Heart to Heart but I’ve chosen a different copyright by Bobby King, a great production with a superb vocal.

A key contingent for the genre is the presence of the studio band Toto: three men called Porcaro, keyboardist/arranger David Paich and guitarist Steve Lukather were available around the clock to lay down the tracks. The Yacht Rock Wrecking Crew also played on Thriller: The Girl Is Mine was the album’s first single, a blockbuster duet between Michael Jackson and the man whose catalogue he would buy, Paul McCartney.

As Toto, their own garlanded work includes soft-rock evergreen Africa and Rosanna, which have both been faithfully covered faithfully by Weezer, and Hold The Line, a bouncy tune with a crunching riff and a Lukatherian solo (copyright JD Ryznar).

The other Yacht Rock studio wizards were Steely Dan, the project of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, two jazz-trained musicians who saw money in rock’n’roll. They came up with some of the most inventive pieces of the era, including Peg, which was later sampled by De La Soul on Eye Know. Tupac’s song Do For Love was based on the chorus of the equally smooth What You Won’t Do For Love by Bobby Caldwell.

Baby Come Back by Player (‘I was wrong and I just can’t live without you) and the shrug-in-song Nothin’ You Can Do About It by Airplay are both breezy pop songs with maximum smoothness; the former has a particularly brilliant middle eight which ends on a pause before the final chorus and wigout. Our old friend David Foster co-wrote the latter track along with Jay Graydon, who also produced and co-wrote Turn Your Love Around for George Benson along with Lukather and Bill Champlin, another regular cast member of the YRWC (see above).

The producer of Thriller, of course, was Q, Quincy Jones, of whom JD Ryznar does a mean impression. Q’s own album The Dude features keyboardist Greg Phillinganes, who became Michael Jackson’s MD on tour, while Q’s smooth mate Herbie Hancock also guests alongside Lukather. The album kicks off with Ai No Corrida, co-written by of all people Chaz Jankel from Ian Dury and the Blockheads.

There are songs written by Steve Wonder, Mann & Weil and Rod Temperton. Something Special is a Temperton tune with a smooth groove; vocals come from Patti Austin, who had her own album with James Ingram, who sings on three Dude tracks. Temperton also wrote Do You Love Me?, the opening track of the Every Home Should Have One LP with a so-called Doobie Bounce; things get slower later in the album on MOR tune Baby Come To Me, yet another Temperton composition. Give Me The Night by George Benson, which rivals Baby Come Back for best middle eight of the genre, was also written by Cleethorpes’ finest son. Research shows that he had five homes around the world. Surely he could have afforded a yacht too…

If so he would have gone Sailing (clunky segue). Christopher Cross had his career killed by MTV, but just before the less telegenic stars were overtaken by the likes of Madonna and Duran Duran, he swept the Grammy Awards thanks to the might of Sailing and Ride The Like Wind, which had backing vocals from the Bearded Wonder: ‘Such a long way to go’ never sounded so aching.

A song isn’t just Yacht Rock by its subject matter – Sail On Sailor by the Beach Boys is nyacht (not Yacht Rock) – but this song is. The arrangement comes from Michael Omartian, another YRWC member who had played on records by Loggins & Messina and also (fun fact) was the accordion player on Piano Man by Billy Joel. The duo Neilson/Pearson brought us If You Should Sail, which has both the Doobie Bounce, some synthesised horns and the word ‘stowaway’ in the lyric. Bear in mind Yacht Rock as a genre was not named until 30 years later and it is remarkably prescient. Likewise the concept of ‘the fool’, which pops up in the title of the Larsen/Feiten Band song Who’ll Be The Fool Tonight which is only bettered by the Bruce Roberts song Cool Fool, which plays a key role in the final official Beyond Yacht Rock podcast.

Funk and soul were brought together by two artists who were critically and commercially acclaimed. On Silk Degrees, Boz Scaggs crooned tunes like What Can I Say, Lido Shuffle and Lowdown, while Raydio frontman and future Ghostbuster theme tune writer Ray Parker Jr looked to the holiday season on Christmas Time Is Here. Jingle bells never sounded so smooth!!

As you can see, Yacht Rock is a mainly masculine genre (hey, so was the music industry in 1981) but the odd lady gets through. The Pointer Sisters jive along to He’s So Shy, which comes across as a pastiche of What A Fool Believes, while Barbra Streisand and Barry Gibb have nothing to be Guilty of. Amusingly, that album has a song called What Kind of Fool!

There’s a fine line between MOR and Yacht rock, so tunes like Reminiscing by Little River Band, You Need a Hero by Pages and Moonlight Feels Right by Starbuck could also have made it onto the MOR playlist.

There’s the pair of Still The One by Orleans and Biggest Part of Me by Ambrosia, two anonymous acts on big labels who both scored smooth harmony-soaked top 5 smashes. As night follows day, there was money to be made in copying the smash. Steal Away by Robbie Dupree is a homage, let’s say, to What A Fool Believes with sitar sound effects, while even Hall & Oates caught the bounce on Kiss On My List, a number one hit single with a chorus full of weird chords.

There is weirdness of a different kind in Escape, the Rupert Holmes tune based on a loop and a lyric about a personal ad which asks ‘if you like Piña Coladas and getting caught in the rain…come to me and escape’. The punchline is so strange that the song remains in conversation four decades later, with a Jimmy Fallon skit pointing out the absurdity and depth of the song, which even has lashings of waves throughout the song

A similar voice belongs to Stephen Bishop whose gorgeous song Save It For A Rainy Day, complete with vocalised wigout, is far better than his soppy ballad Separate Lives which made him an extraordinary amount of money. By the way, listen to the groove of Easy Lover by Phil Collins (who was the male voice on Separate Lives) to hear how that bouncy rhythm was still popular in 1985.

As shown by the recent success of Bruno Mars and Anderson.Paak’s Silk Sonic project, great production that recalls the golden studio era can stand out in any period. Daft Punk’s album Random Access Memories was a eulogy in sound to 70s production styles and they roped in Todd Edwards for the smooth Fragments of Time, which includes a fabulous instrumental section. I always remember reading how a record executive commented on how the production on Omar Hakim’s drumkit sounded expensive. There was money in the industry in the Yacht Rock era. Bass wizard Thundercat was so enamoured by the genre that he got Loggins and McDonald to guest on Show You The Way; indeed, had he been born 40 years earlier Thundercat might have played on some of those Toto or Doobie Brothers albums.

There is even a band called Yacht Rock Revue who are touring some original material across America in 2022 which will sit alongside covers of the genre’s classics including Escape, What a Fool Believes and the Loggins tune Heart to Heart. If you ask the Beyond Yacht Rock crew, or look at their setlist, you will see they are a soft rock covers band rather than exclusively ‘yacht rock’. Yet their homage to the genre, the 2020 album Hot Dads in Tight Jeans, includes the sex jam The Doobie Bounce and the promotional single Step, delivered in falsetto and full of production trickery and, naturally, some saxophone.

The band have been inspired by a podcast based on a webseries outlining a genre which was popular while the creators of the podcast and webseries were too young to vote. Such is culture in the age of everything.

I’ll use the guidelines above to write a Yacht Rock song of the sort that Yacht Rock Revue wrote. The Doobie Bounce would have been a great title! You can hear my effort, Foolin’ Around, here.

The full Yacht Rock playlist can be heard here.

45 - Middle of the Road

45 is a series of 45 playlists, available on Spotify, and accompanying songs based on them, which you can hear at soundcloud.com/jonny_brick

Clive Davis turns 90 on April 2 2022. If you follow music business lore and myth, you’ll know Clive is one of the three or four most important executives in the history of the record business, along with David Geffen, Berry Gordy, Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler. They’re businessmen first, music fans second, and as with any businessmen they need a return on their investment and to predict what people will want before they want it.

Thus, a genre of music which appeals to as wide an audience as possible has come into existence and it’s this genre which kicks off my quest to examine music in all its forms. At the end of this show I’ll try to write a song that reflects the music I have learned about today.

As I spent a week listening to music which is classed as MOR, the second season of Bridgerton arrived on Netflix. It is made to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, and its multiethnic cast combine with instrumental string quartet versions of pop songs to tell a very familiar tale of women in corsets choosing their dukes.

Middle of the Road music, or MOR, is what you get on radio stations like Magic FM or KYXY 96.5 which we used to have when we headed to California every year. It was perfect for drives from LA to San Diego, nothing too loud and indeed it was a ‘soft rock’ station that played AC: Adult Contemporary.

The excellent Sean Ross, who blogs about music radio, wrote a piece in 2017 which rounded up the sort of acts who remained Middle of the Road during the rock’n’roll explosion. I’ll refer to his categorisation as I put together a compilation of 40 songs, many of which I’ll mention in this broadcast.

One sort of act started in rock but showed, writes Sean Ross, ‘their sophisticated sound’ which made money. Based on the Charles Trenet song La Mer, Beyond The Sea by Bobby Darin brought the band sound to the pop charts and Darin’s impressive vocal performance made it burst out of the speakers. I have omitted the French Elvis, Johnny Halliday, and the British Elvis, Cliff Richard, but I feel I can get enough singers to have a whole Top 40 of Elvises.

Paul Anka also took a French tune, Comme D’Habitude, and turned it into My Way. He also wrote the song (You’re) Having My Baby, an American number one in spite of its sexual politics which were out of step with the second-wave feminism sweeping the country at the time. The shuffling beat and gentle arrangement mimics the repeated use of the word ‘lovely’ in the first verse. The second verse is taken by the uncredited female vocalist Odia Coates who loves what’s going through her. Anka commends the fact that she didn’t have an abortion, mere months after women’s right to terminate a pregnancy was enshrined in US law.

Neil Sedaka was a teenpop writer for Connie Francis and also played piano on Darin’s tune Dream Lover. Elton John resurrected his career in the 70s, when he had a hit with a song about laughing in the rain called Laughter In The Rain where not even the weather can dampen his spirits.

Which of Elvis Presley’s many Vegas ballads should join the MOR playlist? Having ironed out the creases in his shirt, and exhausted himself with plenty of rubbish movies, his latest trick was to let the heck out of ballads. Always On My Mind, The Wonder of You, If I Can Dream, An American Trilogy (which quoted the Battle Hymn of the Republic best known as the football chant Glory Glory Man United). All are MOR ballads slathered in strings. I’ll go for If I Can Dream, a song about universal brotherhood, because of the twinkling intro and dynamic tension in the song, and because it concluded his ’68 Comeback Special in honour of the late Martin Luther King.

There’s a reason Frank Sinatra is Simon Cowell’s favourite singer. It’s the type of voice that reaches across the generations, linking crooners, big band, orchestral pop and singer/songwriter. It’s unfair to categorise Sinatra as MOR, especially because he was the original teen idol in the 1940s. When he grew up and grew into his voice, the fine string arrangements of Nelson Riddle were perfect for songs about depression, lost love and going out at night. Two marriages broke down, including to the beautiful Ava Gardner, so he could imbue the songs with autobiography.

Using the Great American Songbook as a guide, Sinatra used his instrument, his voice, to emote and connect with the listener. It’s the first of 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, as the 7” era became the album era and people had the patience to listen to a complete body of work. Of all the tracks on Wee Small Hours to define MOR, I’ll go with something which isn’t too sad or glum: I Get Along Without You Very Well.

Record executive and the A in A&M Herb Alpert did not actually form a brass section called Tijuana Brass. It was just a way to package music for popular consumption and was actually Herb overdubbing his own trumpet before he had to find a group to look the part and avoid claims of misrepresentation! Herb just turned 87 on March 31, having been born in 1935 to Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. He was part of the famous USC Marching Band in California and stayed there to write songs including Sam Cooke’s smooth Wonderful World, which trots around the school timetable before concluding that love is great. It’s no surprise that A&M was home to The Carpenters and Bill Medley, one of the Righteous Brothers.

Unchained Melody remains one of the most successful copyrights in the last century. Four versions of the song got into the UK charts including one by Liberace, while Gareth Gates also took it to number one when Simon Cowell got his hands on it. I’ve chosen the Robson & Jerome version which Cowell also took to the top: two chiselled actors who could sing were given an unruinable song, updated for 1995 production values. Cowell, like Herb Alpert and Clive Davis, knew what key ‘money’ was in.

Hence why he gave Susan Boyle Wild Horses to sing when he discovered her on Britain’s Got Talent. A country-rock ballad written by the Rolling Stones which had been influenced by a rich guy called Gram Parsons, Susan’s version has lashings of strings and high notes which spotlight her voice. I am sure Mick and Keith, who put the song out in their golden period in the early 1970s, didn’t mind the royalties.

The songwriting teams working in Manhattan all made MOR, according to Sean Ross, be they Bacharach & David, Goffin & King, Mann & Weil, Barry & Greenwich or Jim Webb. Wichita Lineman is a fascinating song which departs from the tonic key immediately after stating it: the song never returns to an F major chord after the intro, as Glen Campbell takes the role of the lineman who needs ‘a small vacation’ and who utters the famous yearning line: ‘And I need you more than want you, and I want you for all time’.

Phil Spector’s work, including on The Long and Winding Road, counts as MOR too. Paul McCartney gained a reputation for being the ‘safe Beatle’ and spiritual-leaning songs like this and Let It Be support this. Although I reckon most MOR songs shy away from politics, there is no doubt that when listening to John Lennon’s song Imagine it has a gentle production and a piano-led melody. It’s hardly Revolution 9, is it?

Drummer Karen and her brother Richard Carpenter were the king and queen of MOR at that time. This was the era where baby boomers were raising kids and needed to settle down. Carole King’s domestic take on love, her album Tapestry, remains a watermark in singer/songwriting. Having cut her teeth churning out teenypop anthems in the 60s, her life formed the basis of plenty of MOR tunes including So Far Away and It’s Too Late.

Paul Williams, meanwhile, wrote We’ve Only Just Begun which first found life in a TV commercial for a bank. The polished harmonies and languid melody make it a perfect backdrop to married couples who ‘started walking and learn to run’. The sound of the recorded version makes it a perfect segue from or into a Tapestry tune.

Of all the Barry Manilow tunes I could pick – the one about Mandy, the one about Lola who was a showgirl at the Copacabana – I think I Wanna Do It With You is by far the blandest. Manilow really wants to do it with you on I Wanna Do It With You, which might even be turned down by a country act for being too chaste.

On the topic of country, I always find that certain Garth Brooks songs are MOR songs in country clothing. If Tomorrow Never Comes, for instance, is a plea to ‘tell that someone that you love just what you’re thinking of’ delivered by a guy from Oklahoma. If he was from Orange Country, he’d get on pop radio. George Strait ballads like The Chair, in which our hero constructs a story to get a dance from a lady, are given a clear arrangement which foregrounds the vocal. Not for nothing was George marketed as the Urban Cowboy.

John Denver’s country career included the anthemic Take Me Home Country Roads and many lesser tracks but, for some reason linked to its MOR status, Annie’s Song lights up people’s senses 50 years after it was written. It’s an unabashed love song where John compares Annie’s effect to storms, mountains and oceans while wishing to ‘die in your arms’.

Before she got physical, Olivia Newton-John was also pushed to country music audiences, possibly because pop music already had Barbra and Diana. John Farrar, Olivia’s collaborator, knew what people wanted in songs which would showcase the personality of its singer. Hopelessly Devoted To You featured in Grease as a song for her character Sandy to sing of her heartbreak and foolishness over a 12/8 shuffle.

Kenny Rogers, don’t forget, had his biggest hit with a song about a Gambler whose advice was to ‘know when to hold ‘em’. I pick this ahead of Islands in the Stream (written by the Bee Gees) because the message is universal. Don Schlitz hopefully never had to work again after giving Kenny that one to sing.

Kenny also sang the Lionel Richie-composed Lady and that’s a good segue into the genre which was marketed as Quiet Storm, which is Black Adult Contemporary. Sean Ross notes the ‘Supper club music’ which was made by acts who had earned their chops by singing easy tunes from the 1950s. Diana Ross and the Supremes, for instance, whose career was masterminded by one of those men I mentioned at the top of this show, Berry Gordy.

Black Adult Contemporary was nicknamed Quiet Storm after a Smokey Robinson song. Having made his name as a Motown hitmaker, Smokey glided into middle age with songs like Cruisin’ and Being With You, which sounded like baby boomers settling down into their sofas.

The great American voices like Al Green (Let’s Stay Together), Roberta Flack (Killing Me Softly with his Song, the fluttering smash hit inspired by Don McLean ‘strumming my pain’), Chaka Khan (Through The Fire), Rose Royce (Wishing on a Star, which has one of the best bridges in pop music), Earth Wind & Fire (After The Love Has Gone), Billy Preston & Syreeta (With You I’m Born Again), Patti Austin & James Ingram (Baby Come To Me), and Anita Baker (Sweet Love) are all MOR, as is the song Lovely Day by Bill Withers, which was so mainstream that when I was growing up it was synched to an ad for Tetley’s tea. What can be more MOR than a cup of tea?

Toto were so successful they once won the Album of the Year Grammy. Less well known to those who sing along to Africa is their work on Thriller, the multi-diamond album from Michael Jackson. Cutting the edges off his black sound, this was calculated to cross over to a white audience who lapped up the African influence on Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’, the rock guitar of Eddie van Halen on Beat It and the funk bounce of PYT. Human Nature is a high-end Quincy Jones production in what is essentially Michael backed by Toto. The song means very little – Jacko spends town in New York (‘if this town is just an apple’) and is seduced by its people (‘see that girl, she knows I’m watching’) – but his vocal leaps are as alluring as he finds the city. It’s MOR in excelsis.

Petula Clark did something similar on her song Downtown, a song fizzing with optimism where ‘you can forget all your troubles’ in the city, where you can watch a movie or hop into a club with a bossa nova band.

Then there’s Barbra Streisand who, like Frank Sinatra, is one of the key studio vocalists in pop music, having retired from the stage for several years due to stage fright. A host of hit movies (Funny Girl, A Star Is Born) made her a bankable star and a hitmaker supreme. Teaming up with Barry Gibb, she released the album Guilty in 1980 on which Barry replaced the 4/4 disco stomp with what is now known as Yacht Rock (more on which next week in the second 45 show). I don’t know whether to pick the album’s title track or the first single Woman In Love, where Barbra coos the verse as if floating on air.

Record shops today still have a section called Easy Listening which houses all the stars of the pre-rock era as well as cosy singers like Val Doonican and Tony Bennett. Really MOR is a production genre rather than anything to do with lyrical content or melodic heft, as we shall discover with some modern examples of MOR. There is certainly nothing political about MOR, other than the politics of making as much money as possible out of melody.

When I was 16, I started listening to Radio 2 in the evenings, which meant I would Wake Up To Wogan. Terry Wogan was the UK’s most popular breakfast DJ, helping to set the mood for the day with whimsy and soft, slow music. Eva Cassidy sold millions of albums after her death thanks to Terry’s support of her interpretations of Over The Rainbow and Fields of Gold. I would suggest her take is the definitive version and I am sure Sting was grateful for the royalties.

Wogan was also a fan of Mike Batt’s protégé Katie Melua, a Georgia-born singer whose gentle voice was perfect for a Radio 2 audience. The Closest Thing To Crazy was gossamer-thin but was arranged immaculately by the man who made the Wombles rock; it’s a song about how love makes Katie crazy.

Another supporter of MOR acts was Michael Parkinson, who welcomed Michael Buble onto his show several times. In fact, just last month Buble plugged his new album on Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway. Buble is the king of what Sean Ross calls ‘Retro Martini’, a modern concoction that recalls the old Sinatra and Martin records. Buble co-wrote his song Home, which was also a hit for Blake Shelton. He wants to go home to his beloved because he feels all alone in ‘Paris and Rome’ and he’s ‘living someone else’s life’.

When Mum was filling up the car and Magic FM was playing James Blunt’s song You’re Beautiful (written on Carrie Fisher’s piano, by the way), I knew that resistance was futile. Once Magic gets hold of a song, as they did with Home, they hammer it to death and play it on the hour every hour. A song Blunt has called the high point of his Greatest Hit set (‘hit’ singular), it’s a gentle song about catching the eye of ‘an angel’ on a subway and sharing ‘a moment that will last till the end’. There’s no plot development because Blunt realises he’ll never steal this angel from another man. It doesn’t mean people won’t stop trying.

What else does everyone do from time to time apart from fantasise about having another man’s woman? They have a bad day. Daniel Powter came from nowhere with his piano singing about passions going away and blue skies going grey and the chorus of Bad Day was everywhere for a year, on the hour every hour.

There are now acts primed for a Radio 2 market, such as Celeste or Emeli Sande. She ruled 2012 with Next To Me, another song about how much she loves her beau delivered in tremulous verses and wide-open choruses. Gregory Porter is another Radio 2 lifer, with a voice that recalls Donnie Hathaway; I particularly love his MOR song Hey Laura, where he spends three minutes apologising for showing up to convince her to love him. Is he a schmuck, ‘a fool’, or is he fuelled by the fire of love? The lyric is ambiguous: ‘go ahead and lie to me and make me believe’. Even without his headgear, Gregory is an act worth paying attention to, and he also seems like a nice fella.

Earlier I mentioned Susan Boyle covering the Rolling Stones. In the last decade, John Lewis has commissioned versions of old songs to soundtrack their Christmas commercials. One year, pianist Tom Odell took on a John Lennon demo which was turned into the Beatles song Real Love. Tom grew up playing piano in pubs before he was given a major-label deal and is headlining the British Country Music Festival in Blackpool this September. If country is about storytelling, Tom is a country artist.

I bet you were waiting for me to mention the maestro of the middle of the road. Ed Sheeran’s entire career makes him look like a music executive with a loop pedal and a band t-shirt. Performing solo stadium shows, Ed has made a killing in the last decade and knows exactly what people want to hear. His second album, Multiply, was particularly packed with hits for the age of the algorithm but it was Thinking Out Loud that took off.

A love song about ‘loving you till we’re 70’, it opens up into a fine chorus where Ed wants to be kissed ‘under the light of a thousand stars’. He’ll be doomed to rewrite this song for the next 50 years, just as his good friend Elton John has been living under the shadow of Your Song since he wrote the melody as a young performer. Elton wasn’t even surprised when ITV viewers voted it their favourite Elton John song in 2017. Candle In The Wind was at 2 and Rocket Man was at 3; all three are MOR tunes with piano-led melodies and introspective lyrics. Rocket Man is basically Wichita Lineman In Space.

As adored as Elton, George Michael caught the MOR bug as he was leaving Wham when he recorded the lushly arranged Careless Whisper, a sort of final conversation with a lover through dancing, hence his ‘guilty feet’. There were plenty more MOR tunes on his Best Of – a version of Stevie Wonder’s As with Mary J Blige, the deathly slow, echo-laden pair Praying For Time and Jesus To A Child – but Careless Whisper was often voted the number one song in Capital Radio’s Hall of Fame, an annual public vote for the best pop song where people voted as much for George as for the song.

The outpouring of grief on Christmas Day 2016 when George’s death was announced shows how much he connected with the public. I reckon Paul McCartney, who is 80 in June, will have similar love thrown to him because he wrote songs which had empathy with the listener. He may have been lampooned as Fab Macca Wacky Thumbs Aloft by Smash Hits magazine, but Mull of Kintyre sold 2m copies.

So, summing up, what does it take to write an MOR song? Strings or piano help, some sort of deep emotion like love or closeness, a good structure, harmonies, a solid narrative voice but a vague and universal lyric. You can hear what I’ve come up with, a song called MOR Each Day, at the dedicated 45 playlist on the Soundcloud account.

Here’s the MOR playlist in one place for your delectation.

Next time: Yacht Rock

Charge Your Glasses: Tottenham Hotspur

On the occasion of Spurs’ trip to Old Trafford, I ask you to charge your glasses to the team from the Lane…

Tottenham Hotspur FC, the famous football team from London N17. They only ever win things when the year ends in ‘1’: the FA Cup in 1901 and 1921, the First Division in 1951 and, in 1961, the first team in the 20th century to win the pair. Continuing tradition, they took the FA Cup in both 1981 and 1991, making them one of the most celebrated teams in the English game.

The man who took them to that First Division title back in 1951 was Arthur Rowe, who is praised in Jonathan Wilson’s history of football tactics, Inverting The Pyramid. Wilson admires ‘the creation and manipulation of space’.

Rowe was one of many coaches to be swept up in the new Hungarian style, eschewing the long ball in favour of 15- or 20-yard passes which made them unique in English football. Famously, the man deputed to start any attack from right-back was Alf Ramsey. One of Rowe’s centre-backs? Bill Nicholson.

Wilson praises the tactics of the Tottenham team, which brought them promotion from the Second Division in 1950. Nicholson soon took over as first assistant manager then first-team manager, and was blessed with a great group of players. With Bobby Smith leading the line and the ever-present Danny Blanchflower wearing the captain’s armband, they scored 115 goals across the league season and led the table for all but the opening weekend.

The title, and the accompanying European qualification, was followed by the signing of Jimmy Greaves, whose goals helped the team to the European Cup semi-final where Eusébio and Benfica knocked them out at the penultimate stage of the competition despite Spurs winning 2-1 at White Hart Lane. A year later, Spurs did go all the way to win the Cup Winners’ Cup, adding the 1967 FA Cup and two League Cups in the early 1970s. The newly-created UEFA Cup was theirs in 1972, in an all-English final against Wolverhampton Wanderers.

The man known as ‘Bill Nick’ vacated the dugout in 1974, and he proved a tough act to follow. It took the signings of two Argentineans, Ossie Ardiles and Ricky Villa, for the team to succeed again; the pair helped Spurs to back-to-back FA Cup wins in 1981 and 1982. Tony Parks’ display in the second leg of the UEFA Cup final shoot-out in 1984 brought another cup to White Hart Lane, by which time Steve Perryman was about to make the last of his 866 appearances for the club over 17 seasons.

The rollcall of famous Lilywhites is astonishing. As well as the 1961 double-winners, which included Cliff Jones, the late John White and the Scarborough-born winger Terry Dyson, playmaker Glenn Hoddle became the ‘King of White Hart Lane’ thanks to his prodigious talent. Paul Gascoigne was soon signed to replace Hoddle and Ardiles, scoring a famous FA Cup semi-final free-kick against Arsenal then breaking his leg in his last appearance for the club.

By 1991, as well as floating on the London stock market, Spurs were keen to break away from the First Division. Chairman Alan Sugar is often said to be one of the key cheerleaders for Sky Sports when they outbid ITV to host live Premier League football. Spurs are (at time of writing) one of six clubs to have never been relegated from that new division, although in 1994 they were struggling under the management of Ossie Ardiles whose cavalier, ultra-attacking approach brought entertainment but not results.

The ‘famous five’ included England internationals Teddy Sheringham, Darren Anderton and Nicky Barmby, along with Romanian Ilie Dumitrescu and German striker Jürgen Klinsmann. The last of these was signed when he met Sugar in Monaco on his yacht. He brought his infamous celebratory dive to English football.

As the 1990s ended, Spurs won the League Cup again but never troubled the upper quartile of the Premier League. Sugar sold the club to Daniel Levy’s ENIC in 2001, then club captain Sol Campbell used the Bosman ruling to move across North London to Arsenal. Although young Ledley King replaced Campbell at the back, Spurs were a mid-table side who plodded along even as Hoddle returned to the club as manager.

Wretchedly, players suffered a bout of food poisoning as they sought to secure fourth place in the 2005/06 season but a final-day defeat at West Ham gave the last Champions League spot to Arsenal. The goals of Jermain Defoe, Robbie Keane and cult hero Mido were useful, as was the strong English spine of goalkeeper Paul Robinson, defenders King and Michael Dawson, and midfielders Michael Carrick and Jermaine Jenas.

In 2006/07 Spurs reached the quarter-finals of three competitions and repeated their fifth-place finish, with the mercurial Dimitar Berbatov joining the strike force. A League Cup win in 2008 followed thanks to an extra-time winner from former Real Madrid defender Jonathan Woodgate, while the European adventure ended against PSV Eindhoven in the round of 16. Spurs were so impressed by PSV goalkeeper Heurelho Gomes that they signed him as Robinson’s replacement a few months later. Gomes moved to Watford to help the Hornets gain promotion to the Premier League in 2015.

Spurs rebooted their squad before the 2008/09 season, bringing in Luka Modrić and David Bentley while losing Keane and Berbatov. New manager Harry Redknapp also brought Defoe back to White Hart Lane as Spurs reached the League Cup final which they lost on penalties to Manchester United, their opponents on March 12 2022. The Reds now had both Carrick and Berbatov in their squad. Spurs knew their place in the order of things.

They spent the 2010s playing entertaining football under Redknapp and Mauricio Pochettino, regularly finishing in the top six of the Premier League. Thanks to the emergence of Gareth Bale, Spurs famously reached the Champions League quarter-final after knocking out both Milan sides but came unstuck and lost 4-0 to Real Madrid at the Bernabeu. It was Real who signed Bale and Modrić, which allowed Spurs to sign Christian Eriksen, Erik Lamela, Paulinho, Etienne Capoue and Roberto Soldado, while Defoe, Scott Parker and Rafael van der Vaart all departed.

Pochettino was hired in 2014 and was blessed with a fine British contingent including Kyle Walker, Danny Rose, Eric Dier, Ryan Mason, Andros Townsend and Harry Kane. Teenage prodigy Dele Alli was convinced to sign for them over Liverpool, and his new team were in the hunt for their first Premier League title in the 2015/16 season. Spurs fell away near the end of the season and finished third; the following season was their last at the old White Hart Lane and they finished second thanks to Kane hitting form alongside South Korean striker Son Heung-Min.

After famous wins against Manchester City and Ajax, Spurs reached the final of the 2019 Champions League but a Moussa Sissoko handball in the match’s very first phase of play put them behind against Liverpool that day. For the last three seasons, pandemic permitting, they have welcomed fans to the new White Hart Lane, where Kane and Son are still dovetailing and a succession of big-money signings have come and gone.

Ladies and gentlemen, please charge your glasses in praise of Super Tottenham from the Lane.

Charge Your Glasses: Watford v Arsenal

Sunday 6 March 2022 will match two clubs who train either side of the same hedge in Hertfordshire.

London Colney is home to both Arsenal FC and Watford FC. Watford moved into Arsenal’s old facilities and have upgraded it with money from both the Pozzo family, who own the club, and the bounty Watford have won from competing in the Premier League for six of the past seven seasons. The Gunners moved to new premises onsite after they built it with the proceeds of the sale of young striker Nicolas Anelka to Real Madrid in 1999.

The sides played one another in Watford’s first season in the top tier of English football. 1982/83 remains the Hornets’ most successful ever, with a second-place finish and UEFA Cup qualification. Arsenal finished in 10th place and lost two domestic semi-finals to Manchester United. Their 5-0 loss at White Hart Lane is better best forgotten by one half of North London.

Quite incredibly, Watford beat an Arsenal side coached by the great Don Howe both home and away that season. In November 1982 they won 4-2 at Highbury, which moved one commentator to compare Watford’s players to sparrows landing on a winter’s snowy lawn. Watford manager Graham Taylor asked when fans at Highbury last saw six goals in one game. In a remark that foreshadowed some famous criticism by Troy Deeney, the Watford Observer report noted that Arsenal striker Graham Rix ‘looked surprised when subjected to tackles’.

Pat Rice, the future Arsenal coach, played behind Nigel Callaghan on Watford’s right side, with Wilf Rostron supporting John Barnes on the left. Arsenal had a goal disallowed for offside, perhaps incorrectly, but Arsenal’s eight shots on goal eventually led to a breakthrough by teenager Stewart Robson. Barnes equalised before half-time after Ross Jenkins had flicked a Steve Sherwood goal-kick to Luther Blissett, and his team were 3-1 up thanks to a Blissett deflection off a Kenny Jackett shot and a second goal from Barnes himself. Paul Davis got the Gunners back into the game but a Robson own-goal sealed a famous away victory for Watford.

The return game at Vicarage Road at the end of April 1983 finished 2-1, as did the game in May 1984. Arsenal managed to win the 1983/84 game at Highbury 3-1, then hosted a seven-goal thriller (as it must be known) on September 1 1984 which they won 4-3. The game at Vicarage Road was played just before Christmas and ended in a 1-1 draw.

In the 1985/86 season, Watford beat Arsenal on the Monday and the Tuesday in a double-header which echoes through the ages. The Boxing Day fixture at the Vic was called off and re-arranged for April 1. One Watford player reckons Arsenal’s lads were hungover after losing the Highbury fixture 2-0! This can never happen again due to the new rules on rest days between fixtures.

In another quirk of the fixture list, Watford played Arsenal in Division One a week after an FA Cup quarter-final triumph at Highbury. Blissett and Barnes were still present and correct as the Hornets went behind to an Ian Allinson goal after a rotten mistake from centre-back John McClelland. Blissett flicked in an equaliser later in the first half before Watford took the lead thanks to a John Barnes header which John Motson called ‘a beauty’.

Then came the controversial third goal as the referee did not blow his whistle after the flag went up during an Arsenal attack. Remembering to play to the whistle, Blissett ran through a static defence and beat John Lukic at the second attempt. As if avenging their North London rivals, Tottenham trounced Watford in the semi-final in a game where the amateur goalkeeper Gary Plumley made his one and only appearance. Graham Taylor could have thrown David James into the game but chose not to risk a teenager who would one day play for England.

The 1987/88 season ended in relegation for Watford. Six of their 32 points came against Arsenal: 2-0 at home, 1-0 away as part of four games in the space of ten days in April. As you’ll discover, it took 30 years until Watford beat Arsenal again in any competition.

Graham Taylor was back in the Watford dugout for the 1999/2000 Premier League season where Arsenal, who had won the Double two seasons previously, did the double over Watford. It was 1-0 at Highbury thanks to a late Kanu goal (one of 30 attempts at goal by the team!) then 3-2 at Vicarage Road where Arsenal led 3-0 at half-time. Thierry Henry scored two of those three.

Watford’s next season in the top tier, 2006/07, also brought no joy against Arsenal. Theo Walcott made his debut in a 3-0 win at the Emirates Stadium, while on Boxing Day it took a late winner from Robin van Persie to bring three points to the away side. Ben Foster, who is in line to start Sunday’s game at time of writing, was the keeper that day, on loan from Manchester United, who kept the score down.

By the mid-2010s, Watford had regained their place in the Premier League but, unsurprisingly, class told. After keeping it goalless until the hour, Arsenal scored three times without reply at Vicarage Road. They followed it up later in the season at the Emirates with a 4-0 win that made amends for the FA Cup quarter-final loss the previous month, which was settled by an Adlène Guedioura thunderbolt. It only took them four minutes to break through that day, with Theo Walcott scoring the fourth goal ten years after his Arsenal debut.

On the last day of January 2017, a Younes Kaboul free-kick set Watford off to a famous win away from home. Troy Deeney’s goal turned out to be the winner and debutant M’Baye Niang became an instant cult hero. In August, a few weeks before Arsène Wenger marked 20 years in charge, Arsenal had won the reverse fixture 3-1, again with three first-half goals.

2017/18 had home wins for both teams, a last-minute Tom Cleverley goal live on TV helping Watford to a 2-1 win, and Arsenal striding to a 3-0 victory at the Emirates which included a missed penalty from Deeney. The striker was then sent off ten minutes into the game in April 2019, moments after Ben Foster had kicked the ball into the onrushing Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang for the game’s only goal. After being held for 80 minutes, Arsenal scored twice late on to win the home fixture 2-0, the second a beautiful move started and finished by Mesut Oezil.

During the pandemic-disrupted 2019/20 season, an energetic Watford managed 31 shots in a 2-2 draw at Vicarage Road. The game at the Emirates was a dead rubber, with Watford already relegated and playing for pride. Arsenal were 3-0 up after 33 minutes in a game played in July. Their former striker Danny Welbeck and their arch nemesis Deeney scored Watford’s consolation goals.

After Watford gained promotion at the first attempt, the teams next met in a scrappy game at the Emirates in November 2021. In a throwback to their glory days before Wenger, the game finished 1-0 to the Arsenal. Since then the club have sold Aubameyang while Watford have dispensed with manager Claudio Ranieri.

The past is absolutely no indicator of how the game will go this weekend, but it’s good to discover the previous meetings between two famous sides, full of drama and needle in equal measure.

So, ladies and gentlemen, please charge your glasses to a fixture which pits neighbour against neighbour.

ABBA Silver

The other week I espied a book in The Works which originally came out in the early 2000s to capitalise on Mamma Mia-propelled ABBAmania, which rears its head every eight years or so. The quartet disbanded in 1982, but a combination of tribute band Bjorn Again and a covers EP by Erasure pushed them back into prominence in the early 1990s, around the time that ABBA Gold hit shelves. More ABBA Gold followed in 1993, with assorted tracks that weren’t golden enough for the original compilation, which has just spent its THOUSANDTH (1000th) week in the UK Album Top 100, thanks in recent years to huge streaming numbers.

A decade later, the jukebox musical landed in London with its Greek-set tale of one girl with three possible fathers. It pre-dated We Will Rock You, Our House, Rock of Ages, Viva Forever and Never Forget, which respectively put Queen, Madness, hair metal, Spice Girls and Take That music on stage.

For those who had somehow never been to see the show, Mamma Mia was turned into a movie which Mark Kermode loved despite calling ‘terrible…It’s strangely wonderful. I was skipping down the street!’ He doesn’t love the band ‘in a post-modern ironic way…I thought they were the greatest band’ and was a fan as a child in North London in the mid-1970s.

Mark delivered his review in 2008 with a wide grin, quoting all the ABBA songs as part of his plot description: ‘Her mother doesn’t know which particular man after midnight gave her a child so she decides to take a chance on three!!!’

It is impossible not to enjoy Mamma Mia, provided you leave your brain at the door. My partner Vanessa saw the movie, is off to see the musical and I bet I’ll end up buying tickets for the Hologram show in East London in 2022, Thursday to Monday with matinee performances on Saturday and Sunday. Accompanied by a ten-piece band, ABBA have been rendered into computerised versions of their former selves – Elton John, take note! – and will perform many of the hits on ABBA Gold and More ABBA Gold.

That show might feature some of their new album Voyage. The two pre-released tracks Don’t Shut Me Down and I Still Have Faith In You entered the UK charts at 9 and 14 respectively and filled the top two slots in the Swedish charts. A few weeks later Elton John had a UK number one and two songs used Whitney Houston’s song How Will I Know to create new dancefloor tunes. Is this where popular music is now, maximising catalogue tracks and heritage brands?

This new music from ABBA, their first in four decades, finds them more popular than ever following the two ABBA films and an immersive experience in Greenwich called The Party. As diners eat their four-course meal at the Nikos Taverna, they watch the plot advance and hear the songs from the show. Tickets cost between £110 and £250 depending on where the table is and if you fancy a meet-and-greet with the cast.

But what about the other songs? Will they throw bones to their hardcore fans who swear by iffy album tracks? What if there was a compilation of lesser-heralded ABBA tracks, called ABBA Silver, which fans of Dancing Queen and Thank You for the Music would lap up and immerse themselves in?

I present, therefore, to complement the new ABBA album Voyage, my third compilation of ABBA tracks. Grab your platform shoes and sparkly dresses and press play. You can hear ABBA Silver by following the link to the Spotify playlist:

Tiger: ABBA opened their 1977 tour, which promoted Arrival (Dancing Queen, Fernando, Knowing Me Knowing You, Money Money Money) with a fluffy glam-rock stomper with plenty of menace and a big finish.

That’s Me: This disco groove followed Tiger, allowing the two female voices to wrap around one another while maracas flutter behind them and a superb hook inseminates its way into the listener’s brain.

Hey Hey Helen: Meanwhile, this mound of chunky but melodic glam rock is how they opened their 1975 tour, before Mamma Mia became their first UK number one. At the time, they were still best known for their Eurovision success; indeed, Ring Ring and I Do I Do I Do I Do I Do (which both featured on More ABBA Gold) scraped into the UK Top 40.

Hasta Manana: You’d’ve thought Europeans would have loved the folky Spanish feel to this song, but the song’s big success came in the Antipodes. It’s no wonder Muriel’s Wedding was such a smash hit down there, because ABBA targeted Australia and New Zealand with this song from the album Waterloo that didn’t get its own moment in the sun anywhere else in the world.

Bang-A-Boomerang: A fluffy bit of fun which proves that the guys could write a nonsense chorus that made you feel better. Indeed, the opening verse mentions ‘making somebody happy’, ‘every little touch’ which means so much and ‘sweet, sweet kisses so tender’. In the second verse, there’s the truism that ‘every feeling you’re showing is a boomerang you’re throwing’. No wonder they targeted Australia, the land of the boomerang.

I’ve Been Waiting For You: This emotional showstopper, an A-side in Australia and the B-side to So Long elsewhere, featured in the second Mamma Mia film. It’s a ballad which is essentially the love of an expectant mother transferred to melody, with a great second verse about the newborn being ‘prepared to greet me’. ‘You thrill me, you delight me’ captures the feeling of cradling someone within you and the future happiness the baby will bring.

My Love My Life: Like Slade or Madness or The Spice Girls, ABBA were not an album band, despite selling squillions of albums. You can tell this because the sequencing is atrocious. Dancing Queen, one of the greatest pieces of popular music in the history of recorded sound, is followed by this song on Arrival, which also appeared near the end of the sequel to Mamma Mia. The tender line ‘with all my heart God bless you’ is nakedly emotional and it’s the closest thing the guys wrote to a lullaby.

Elaine: The staccato delivery of lyrics about tying hands and feet match the shouts of ‘Elaine!’ which come with exclamation marks. There’s a lovely instrumental section in the middle of this song, which is from the Super Trouper era (The Winner Takes It All, Our Last Summer, Lay All Your Love On Me).

People Need Love: Their debut single, which stalled at 17 on the Swedish chart, appeared on Ring Ring, their debut album. It’s got a singalong la-la section, a bouncy piano line and a Eurovision key change (up a tone from B to C-sharp). It’s folk music with a universal theme.

Why Did It Have To Be Me?: As sung in the most memorable (non-Cher) setpiece in the second Mamma Mia movie, this stomper from Arrival is good fun, with a shuffling beat, a key change and morsels of saxophone which karaoke singers should make their own. This song is Islands In The Stream with a bit more ennui, or Summer Nights without the coldness, and deserves reappraisal.

As Good As New: Chintzy, sparkly, full of hooks and a chorus in two keys (E and F!). Kicking off the Voulez-Vous album, the lyric rhymes intention/dimension as Agnetha delights in love being rebooted.

If It Wasn’t For The Nights: From the second side of Voulez-Vous, Benny’s piano kicks off a fine arrangement which is grounded by a disco beat and a call-and-response chorus. Bang for your buck, too, as it exceeds five minutes in length.

Intermezzo No 1: Benny’s instrumental might well have been a chance for a costume change for the ladies in their 1975 tour. In sonata form – theme, variation, recap – the piece is both underappreciated and a signpost to the musical scores he and Bjorn would work on later in their career.

Slipping Through My Fingers: When I went to see the musical Mamma Mia, this was the only number I didn’t know from ABBA Gold or More ABBA Gold, which explains its presence here. From swansong album The Visitors, this ballad shows the tenderness of the duo’s writing. There’s ‘guilt’ in the second verse and laments for the end of ‘wonderful adventures’, while the final note lingers on the word ‘smile’. You’d never guess that the two marriages have fallen apart; in fact, Agnetha and Bjorn divorced in 1980 while Anni-Frid and Benny did so a year later.

Dance While The Music Still Goes On: So why not ‘give me one more dance…This is no time for crying’, ask the boys in a lyric set to the sort of chords that most tracks from the early seventies are set to. There is a double key change.

Suzy Hang Around: A song of childhood innocence (or is it cruelty) sung by Benny, whose voice has that Elton John circa 1973 timbre, in which he scolds Suzy for not having friends of her own. It’s teenpop that could have come out of the Brill Building in the late 1950s, and closed the Waterloo album in a melancholy manner.

RocknRoll Band: Bjorn’s turn now to sing a dance number full of the chugging guitars played by the band mentioned in the title. It’s the familiar type of song when the guy approaches a glum girl and invites her to ‘have fun’. It’s sweet.

Watch Out: Part of the 1975 tour setlist, there’s more crowd-pleasing guitars and a rock’n’roll drumbeat underscoring lyrics about eyes flashing and taming a ‘wild thing’, with sweet la-las backing Bjorn’s main vocal. Rainfall ends the song.

Happy New Year: This was missing from More ABBA Gold, which did include I Do I Do…, The Day Before You Came, So Long and Honey Honey, as well as Eurovision entry Ring Ring. A party has ended and ‘the dreams we had before are all dead, nothing more’. As 1979 ticked into 1980, universal brotherhood was on the band’s mind: ‘a world where every neighbour is a friend’ is sung in the chorus, but Agnetha is ‘lost and feeling blue’. Like Robyn’s Dancing on My Own, this is a ‘sad banger’ and would enhance the Hologram show.

Don’t Shut Me Down: That show might well feature Hologram Agnetha shimmying to the new tune from Voyage. She has been ‘reloaded…a dream within a dream that’s been decoded’ and ‘fired up’, which contemporary production updates the disco stomp from 40 years ago. The song ends with a line about how Agnetha has ‘learned to cope, and love and hope is why I am here now’. Love and hope, strewn across ABBA’s catalogue, has made their melodies a lot of money, which will continue to pour in thanks to the tour.

Voyage is released on November 5, with the Hologram Tour receiving its world premiere in Stratford, East London on May 27 2022. Tickets are at abbavoyage.com.

An Introduction to the music of Del Amitri

News that Del Amitri had signed a new record deal was one of the best pieces of non-pandemic news in the last year. Their first album since 2002 is their seventh and emerges on Cooking Vinyl over Bank Holiday May weekend 2021.

It is a perfect time, for new followers and old acolytes, to count down their top ten tunes, in chronological order, with apologies to the many great songs I have left out of my list. Great source material comes from the band’s biography, These Are Such Perfect Days, authored by Charles Rawlings Way (Find the book here).

Hammering Heart

Del Amitri’s self-titled debut came out on Chrysalis in 1985. Recorded in Glasgow, the ten tracks were full of Justin Currie’s verbose sets of lyrics, influenced by Elvis Costello. The songs had been constructed in chunks, with no discernible choruses, over a period of two years in the early 1980s.

Hammering Heart is a jangly three-minute pop song. The lyric includes lines about dustbins, canyons, hounds and foxes and a ‘hammering moon’ that is a lady’s heart. It was brought back for the 2014 reunion tour and the quirky video was added to Youtube in July 2020. Roll To Me may have had the guys in prams but here they are in boxes of vegetables. The lads are in sleeveless vests and Smiths-y haircut while Justin’s low burr is eschewed in favour of Proclaimers-style singing and a brief bit of falsetto at the end. Indeed, the band would support The Smiths in 1985 and jangly popper Lloyd Cole in 1986.

Justin grew up as the son of a singer and a choirmaster. Gilbert O’Sullivan was a favourite of the family, while Justin’s older sisters loved Dire Straits and Dr Feelgood. Then came the Beatles. Guitarist Iain Harvie, meanwhile, detested Radio 1’s ‘horrid pop and creepy DJs’, preferring the best of 70s rock and soul. Justin became a bass player like Paul McCartney or Peter Hook but, in his band with Iain, someone had to be the singer.

In conversation with Ricky Ross for BBC Scotland, Justin admitted that a record deal meant he could earn money doing what he loved. He was also able to tour America, where people enjoyed both ‘the Clash AND Bob Seger’. The fact that ‘people would go mad in the instrumental bits’ was an early realisation, which pushed them to the heartland sound of Tom Petty and, by his admission, ‘frighteningly mainstream’.

Hatful of Rain

The track which gives its name to the band’s best of collection is on the second side of Waking Hours. Ricky Ross hears a lot of The Faces in Del Amitri, something Justin admitted ‘we mercilessly ripped off any ideas we could get away with’. Ditto early 70s Rolling Stones, an influence I had previously not detected in their work.

Among the ten tracks picked by Justin on Radio 2 stalwart The Tracks of My Years were Suicide Blonde by INXS, Life’s What You Make It by Talk Talk and a lovely version of the Jimmy Webb composition Do What You Gotta Do by Roberta Flack.

With loyalty to Scottish indie rock, he chose Brand New Friend by Lloyd Cole and the Commotions and A Girl Like You by Edwyn Collins, who was in Orange Juice and popularised ‘post-punk’ music while Justin was a young musician. Lloyd Cole and his band were ‘getting better and better’ the more gigs they played and had major-label backing to spend time on crafting their sound.

In their early days in Glasgow, where Justin would cook burgers for money, Del Amitri would print menus of songs for their audience, initially friends and family, to pick from. A support tour with The Fall didn’t work out in spite of Justin’s love of the mercurial band. Another Fall fan, John Peel, took them to heart, played their demos and invited them in for a session down in London, produced by Mott The Hoople’s old drummer. A keen-eared A&R man heard it and offered them a deal, whereupon they recorded some first efforts with Television’s Tom Verlaine as producer. The sessions were scrapped and the band returned to Glasgow to make their debut album with a new producer.

Label politics can be dull but a useful cautionary tale. The band were on the cover of Melody Maker six months before their album came out but, stupidly, no single was released to capitalise on this. The band became victims of the hype machine in the UK but were picked up by college rock stations in the USA and were big in Portugal.

Dissatisfied with their label, the band went on strike and were able to leave. Incredibly they toured America as free agents on tourist visas over summer 1986. They met up with guys who didn’t care for picking sides in the music wars (ie they liked both Bob Seger and The Clash). The band were impressed with young fans who liked pop and rock, giving them the confidence to be more than just a jangly pop band.

Nothing Ever Happens

The closing track of Waking Hours, which has been a staple of rock radio for three decades, is excellent described in the band’s biography as having a ‘low-lit sadnes’. ‘We’ll all be lonely tonight and lonely tomorrow,’ sighs Justin Currie of a song that was a hit from the moment he wrote it, even though it lacks drums and is in triple time.

Rather handily, the US version of Waking Hours was about to come out. By now under new management, Del Amitri pulled the initial UK album from sale. This meant that when Nothing Ever Happens hit radio, everyone had to buy the single because it wasn’t on an album. It became their biggest hit, peaking at 11 in early 1990; number one that week was Nothing Compares 2 U while future number one Dub Be Good To Me was a new entry at 15.

On this second album, Justin’s songs were more spacious and less prolix, with a skew to the macabre and dark. ‘I didn’t have to make stuff up!’ he told the band biography. He was also influenced by Glasgow’s decline, which is clear on Stone Cold Sober:

Whole generations thinking of themselves as infidels and popstars…
We are the dead life, locked in dogfights, lost in disbelief…
Loaded or totally legless

This was his attempt, complete with the corny chorus ‘Looking for bottles of love’, at country music. Listening to ‘new country’ in the late 1980s, Justin expanded his horizons beyond line dance anthems. Steve Earle and Dwight Yoakam, both rocking country guys, as well as Lyle Lovett (in a jazz-rock-country class of his own), were also on their turntable. Bringing in keyboard player and philosophy postgrad Andy Alston beefed up their sound.

The sessions for Waking Hours were far less successful than the demos, which had been recorded with Scouse producer Gil Norton. With a couple more producers, the band tidied up the demos, adding digital drums. This prompted real-life drummer Paul Tyagi to leave; he was one of five line-up changes between the formation of the band and the release of Waking Hours.

The album came out on A&M, the famous label started by Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss. Justin told the label to go all in on Nothing Ever Happens, a later single. ‘It’s the only time I’ve been right on a single,’ says the songwriter, who still gets residual cheques today.

‘Success is an accidental phenomenon,’ Justin told fellow successful Scottish songwriter Ricky Ross in May 2020. When the band were booked for Top of the Pops after charting at 23 with their hit, ‘you were instantly famous!’ It was luck that put Del Amitri – ‘some little Scottish band with an acoustic protest song’ – on the musical map.

Always The Last to Know

The album Change Everything was thrust into the world at the same time as Pixies and Nirvana were taking over guitar rock. Gil Norton was the Scouser who had produced both Doolittle, released on British label 4AD, and Ocean Rain by Echo and the Bunnymen. Having worked on the band’s early demos there was a sympatico relationship between band and producer. Listen to Everlong by Foo Fighters to hear similar perfection.

Change Everything opens with a sombre first three tracks: Be My Downfall, Just Like a Man and When You Were Young, but the second side kicks off with the one-two punch of The Ones That You Love Lead You Nowhere and radio smash Always The Last To Know, which was accompanied by a black-and-white performance video.

A line from the second verse gives the band the title of their biography These Are Such Perfect Days. The song charted at 13 in the UK and at 30 in the US, thanks to MTV and rock radio support. It has taken me 20 years to realise it’s a partial rewrite of Stand By Me.

In the UK, Del Amitri had spent the first few years of the 1990s becoming a popular pop group, popping up on daytime TV ‘with a hangover after a night out’ and, according to Iain, playing to ‘the nation’s housewives, gym bunnies and slackers. It wasn’t rock’n’roll.’ Otherwise it was all-day junkets, early flights and helping A&M make back their advance, as per the role of a band signed to a major record label.

Tell Her This

This very Scottish rock anthem charted at 32 in 1996, the era of Oasis and Blur. Tell Her This, like Driving with the Brakes On, was initially thought of as a B-side. ‘The record company needed at least six new tracks for every single you released. They tended to be my kind of acoustic ramblings.’

Del Amitri were never considered a Britpop band, or indeed a particularly Scottish rock band like Deacon Blue or Simple Minds. Perhaps that was because of their success in America, something Blur famously failed to have in their early years when they retreated into Englishness in the face of wilful indifference from a grunge-loving America.

Del Amitri played at the LA Troubadour and CBGBs in New York to promote Twisted. ‘It’s just the right shape,’ Justin says of CBGBs. ‘The walls are filthy. Everything reflects back onto the stage and it had a bit of a warm sound. The location was important but the way it sounds…’

Similarly, in the era where Del Amitri entered the marketplace, there were two brands of music in the UK, as Justin told Ricky Ross: white soul like Simply Red, or Velvet Underground-type bands like The Jesus & Mary Chain. Bands laughed at Del Amitri in the mid-1980s – ‘you were a bit of a joke and maybe that drives your ambition’ – but they remain their own genre who leapt over the trends of the decade.

Roll To Me

‘We didn’t really think in terms of verses or choruses,’ Justin told Songwriting Magazine in 2014. ‘We thought in terms of hits.’

Twisted emerged in 1995 and included Roll To Me, a radio hit with a crazy video starring the band’s heads superimposed onto babies’ bodies and pushed in some prams by gorgeous women on a sunny American day. Once you see it, you can’t listen to the song without the Dels’ heads popping into your mind.

Helped by the punchy mastering of Bob Clearmountain (Bruce Springsteen’s mixer) and the drums of future Oasis member Chris Sharrock, it still sounds amazing as a record, particularly with those guitar lines cuddling one another. Because of the way the song is mixed, ‘multiple times we realised a lot of radio stations would only be broadcasting the left or right channel’ so only one side of the song could be heard in stereo. ‘Bob freaked out!’

It was the third single from Twisted and, helped by the video, became a top 10 hit in the USA and number 22 in Britain. Justin was looking to write a ‘deceptively lightweight Paul McCartney song’. The melody and chords came way before the words, which had ‘an incredible overuse of the word “baby” because I couldn’t get anything else to work.”

Justin told Ricky Ross: ‘All the DJs said: “I love your record because I can always fit it before the news!” They got really into market research and so it researched well among people who didn’t have jobs or who were [funny American accent] homemakers.’ Once again, this alternative rock band from Scotland were helping suburban housewives go about their day.

Some Other Sucker’s Parade

Released in June 1997 just as Britpop was about to implode (or give way to the prog-and-pedals of Radiohead), the album Some Other Sucker’s Parade went top ten. It included a response to Where It’s At by Beck called Not Where It’s At as well as the melancholic title track. Iain’s electric guitar riffs coil around one another in a symphonic manner while Justin croons a sad tale: ‘It ain’t no sin to drink when you’re suffering/ Patience they say is a saintly virtue but hell why should I wait?’

In the video, Justin has had a haircut and walks around various shops with an earpiece in to help him remember the words and looks directly into the camera lens for every shot. Iain’s solo is played in a laundrette on an acoustic guitar while a girl dances in a cowboy hat. It’s a strong visual that showed how big the budget was for music videos in the dying days of the record industry.

Ricky Ross compares Justin to Elvis Costello, a songwriter who plays up the spite. ‘I was listening to far too much Elvis Costello growing up,’ Justin agrees. Ditto Hank Williams, whose music Justin played in a cover bands. ‘Depth and genuine pathos’ leaked into Justin’s songwriting, and you can hear that in the finely structured pair mentioned above, both with mighty middle eights.

Don’t Come Home Too Soon

The last time Scotland qualified for the World Cup was in 1998. The acerbic song about how ‘even long shots make it’ proved optimistic in the extreme but the melancholy of the tune makes it an anti-Three Lions.

‘The slagging I got was unbearable!!’ Justin chuckled when asked by Ken Bruce. ‘I got blamed by many an old geezer in a pub! I wasn’t on the bench!’

The song was the final of the 17 tracks on Hatful of Rain, the band’s Best Of, which was sold in a deluxe edition with a collection of B-Sides (remember B-Sides?). It was my introduction to a band whose big radio hits I knew. I gravitated instantly to the joyful sounding trio of Some Other Sucker’s Parade, Here & Now and Kiss This Thing Goodbye. Perhaps I was perhaps too young (at 14 or 15) to appreciate the slower tunes which had a more Adult Contemporary feel.

Just Before You Leave

This is the opening track of, and the sole single released from, Can You Do Me Good?, the band’s 2002 electronic-y release which landed in a climate where soft-rocking bands like Coldplay and Travis sold millions with their downbeat upbeat tracks. It follows that Del Amitri should have been huge successes in the new era. But Ian and Justin zagged instead of zigged and the band were dropped due to poor sales of the album.

There’s much to recommend on a patchy album. There’s the fuzzy shoutalong power-pop on Drunk in a Band, which consisted of a list of people doing jobs more important than singing for money. A lot of the tracks are driven by the type of drum loop that digital recording can make possible: Cash And Prizes sounded like indie-dance while I like the poppy Baby It’s Me and the abrasive shuffle of Wash Her Away. Album closer Just Getting By is seven minutes of string-soaked bliss, classic Justin Currie and a lost gem in the band’s catalogue.

Move Away Jimmy Blue

Upon leaving the band, Justin Currie didn’t want to make a solo record. He told Ricky Ross (the Deacon Blue frontman who has also put out album under his own name) that the idea of a band was preferable to being alone onstage. His view was coupled with business sense: launching his majestic solo album What Is Love For in 2008, Justin told The Aquarian that ‘there’s no demand for Del Amitri’.

I saw Justin promote the album at the Edinburgh Liquid Rooms, where the compositions released under his own name were as lovely as the renditions of Driving With the Brakes On and Move Away Jimmy Blue. I remember being impressed by the boisterous singalong of Tell Her This but the real emotion behind If I Ever Loved You was particularly evident.

Justin and the band did reunite for live shows in 2014. Seven years on, the album Fatal Mistakes is the result of three years’ writing. Starting with Close Your Eyes and Think of England (opening line: ‘Day by day we’re winnowing away’), the album rollout teased a return to the definitive Del Amitri sound: interpersonal relationships shot with melancholy. It’s Feelings (‘that cut you’) demonstrate the pain and well as joys of love, while album opener You Can’t Go Back is Radio 2 catnip, with the line ‘Promise me forever you will stay right here’.

For the first time in almost 20 years, the world has a new Del Amitri LP, which they will tour in the autumn. As well as a date at London Palladium they have three Christmas shows scheduled at Barras, Barrowlands Ballroom. Back in 2014, their set began with Always the Last to Know and Kiss This Thing Goodbye, while a typical 2018 set included Be My Downfall, The Verb To Do and a cover of Heathens by twentyonepilots, who released their own new album a week before the Dels did.

Live favourites include What I Think She Sees, Surface of the Moon and Food for Songs, as fans in the Del Amitri Facebook group made clear. Move Away Jimmy Blue is a scarves-aloft, arms-around-mates song about getting out of a small town before it ‘swallows you’. Indeed, its I-IV chord pattern makes it an easy segue into You Can’t Always Get What You Want.

Kiss This Thing Goodbye (live for Children In Need)

The biography of the band is a good place to start when looking at what makes Del Amitri a cult favourite. ‘We looked back on how ambitious we were and we didn’t know!’ Justin recalled to Ricky Ross when recounting how the group told their story for the band’s biography. ‘We were very eager to prove the doubters wrong.’

Being on the radio was more thrilling to the band than selling albums: ‘You’re in the public domain, taxi drivers’ faces, guys on building sites’ faces…Guys come up to you in the street going “I really like that song, mate.”’ A policeman in Australia ran over for an autograph, he told Ken Bruce, which may have been even more surreal than passing Michael Hutchence and Kylie Minogue at a posh hotel when he was touring there.

‘I genuinely believed music could change the world,’ concludes Justin Currie. Well, his music certainly changed mine.

Fatal Mistakes is out now on Cooking Vinyl. The band tour the UK in September and October. Find ticket info here.

Another Sort of Brit: Jews at the BRIT Awards

When the Haim sisters held their BRIT Award for Best International Group this month, having lost twice before, they joined the ranks of famous Jewish musicians to be garlanded by the UK Music Industry. For all the fuss about representation of black culture and the female perspective in the Awards, relatively few Jews have succeeded in a country where fewer than one in every 250 people are Jewish.

While the Guardian music critic Ben Beaumont-Thomas was crying out for greater appreciation for East Asians, I remarked to myself that neither he nor his colleagues had congratulated Danielle, Alana and Este for their famous win, the first group of International Jews to win the prize.

Country Crows’ principal songwriter Adam Duritz helped his band get nominated for the International Group, which was won in 1995 by REM. The frat-rapping Beastie Boys lost out to The Corrs in 1999 and to TLC in 2000, while The Strokes, who have two Jewish members (one from birth, one converted), lost to Destiny’s Child in 2002 and The White Stripes in 2004. Kylie Minogue’s Fever pipped Is This It to the International Album prize in 2002, while Eminem beat Pink in 2003.

Pink was the first Jewish woman to win for Best International Female in 2003, having first been nominated in 2001 and losing to the ‘Jew-ish’ singer and fan of Kabbalistic teaching, Madonna. Four more defeats followed: in 2007 to Nelly Furtado; 2009 to Katy Perry; and 2014 and 2018, to Lorde both times.

For the men, there is one man that leads the pack. Beck, who was raised Jewish, took the Best International Male Solo act three times in four years: 1997, 1999 and 2000. He has been nominated seven further times, losing to Eminem in 2003 and 2005, Justin Timberlake in 2004 and 2007, Kanye West in 2006 and 2009 and Pharrell Williams in 2015.

In 2007, the then 65-year-old Bob Dylan was nominated for Male Solo and Album for Modern Times. Back in 1994, it was a famous win for Lenny Kravitz, who then lost to Prince (or, rather, the unpronounceable symbol) in 1996.

Drake, the Torontonian who has a Jewish mum and is thus fully Jewish and probably the most successful musician of the last ten years, took International Male Solo in 2017 and 2019, having lost out to Bruno Mars (2014) and fellow Canadian Justin Bieber (2016). He lost again in 2018 to Kendrick Lamar. He released music with Future in 2017 and the pair lost the International Group award to A Tribe Called Quest.

Maroon 5, led by Adam Levine, lost to Scissor Sisters in 2005 in the Group and Album categories and to Foo Fighters for the 2012 Best Group. Ben Goldwasser, half of MGMT (his mum married a Jewish man), lost to Kings of Leon in 2009 in both Group and Album, while Jack Antonoff’s band fun were defeated by The Black Keys in 2013. I suppose I can count Adam Granduciel aka The War on Drugs, who has Jewish ancestry, as another Jewish loser who in 2015 was also beaten by Foo Fighters.

There are two ways to link International and British acts. It was a Barry Manilow composition (via Chopin) which won Take That an award in 1993 for British Song of the Year, defeating the Gary Barlow composition A Million Love Songs and a cover of the Tavares tune It Only Takes a Minute.

The other Transatlantic link is through Mark Ronson, who was born in West London but moved to Manhattan as a child where he was barmitzvah. His work on Back to Black helped Amy Winehouse win awards in 2007, and he thus put himself in a position to win in 2008 thanks to his own album Version. As had happened to Amy, Arctic Monkeys triumphed in the Best British Album category, but Mark beat the likes of Mika and Richard Hawley to a well-deserved British Male Solo prize. He is the only Jewish man to triumph in this category.

Then came Uptown Funk, the British Single of the 2015 BRITS, which is amusing as Mark had not lived in the UK since the mid-1980s and Bruno Mars is from Hawaii. Such are the vagaries of Britishness and the BRIT Awards.

No Jewish artist has ever been nominated for the Rising Star, formerly known as the Critics’ Choice. Had it been awarded in the early 2000s, young Amy Winehouse from Camden might have been nominated. She went on to gain five nominations for British Female Solo, twice posthumously (2013 and 2016) and three times in her lifetime: 2003, losing to Dido; 2004, losing to Joss Stone; and winning in 2007, the year of Back to Black.

Likewise, in 2001, Craig David would have been given something, rather than losing all six awards he was up for. He has been nominated five times in his career for Best British Male Solo, including in 2001 when he lost to perennial winner Robbie Williams (who has 18 BRITs in total). Craig’s album Born To Do It, on which he wrote every track, was twice nominated, losing to Coldplay’s Parachutes in 2001 and Dido’s No Angel in 2002.

To make matters worse Craig, whose mum is Jewish and whose Dad is from the Caribbean island of Grenada, was up for Dance Act in 2001 and 2002, and Urban Act 2003 and 2006. Respectively the awards went to Fatboy Slim, Basement Jaxx, Ms Dynamite and Lemar. Surely Craig is due a Lifetime Achievement Award. He is now best known as a DJ whose TS5 sets are much enjoyed out in the Balaeric Islands every summer.

Hampstead-born Jess Glynne was a Best New Artist nominee in 2016, when she was also up for British Single for Hold My Hand. As would happen in 2019, she lost out for Best British Female, that time to the era-defining Adele. Hello was the song that defeated both My Love and Rather Be, which both featured Jess’s voice, in 2016, while I’ll Be There lost out to One Kiss by Calvin Harris and Dua Lipa in 2019.

It was a happier occasion for Rachel Stevens in 2002. As part of S Club 7, she won a second BRIT Award for Best British Single in 2002 thanks to barmitzvah anthem Don’t Stop Movin. The septet had been Best New Artist in 2000 and for three years lost out in the short-lived Best Pop Act, won by Five in 2000 and by Westlife in both 2001 and 2002. Strength in numbers does not guarantee prizes.

Another Jewish woman nominated as part of a band up for Best New Artist, this time in 1996, was Justine Frischmann of Elastica, who were beaten to it by Supergrass. Justine famously went out with both Brett Anderson of Suede and Damon Albarn of Blur, and today works in visual arts rather than rock’n’roll.

Jessie Ware (above) also changed careers, starting out as a writer for the Jewish Chronicle and, since becoming a pop performer of the highest quality, she has five BRIT nominations but no awards so far. Jessie is the daughter of fellow JC regular John Ware of Panorama, but there is no investigation needed for Jessie’s loss to Dua Lipa for both Best Female Solo and Best British Album this year.

These defeats are added to four past defeats: 2013’s Best New Artist (Ben Howard) and Best British Female in 2013 (Emeli Sande), 2015 (Paloma Faith) and 2018 (Dua Lipa again). No Jewish woman has won the BRIT Award for Best British Female Solo Artist. But for Dua, whom some have called ‘too big to fail’, Jessie would have broken the glass ceiling.

It did not take long for Jewish artists to win a BRIT Award. The third ceremony in 1983 gave Mark Knopfler and his band Dire Straits the Best British Group award in 1983. They regained it in 1986, where Money for Nothing (‘I want my MTV!’) had been nominated for Song of the Year, which is today known as Best British Single, followed by a win for Best British Album of 1987 for Brothers in Arms. Dire Straits lost out to both Simple Red and The KLF at the infamous 1992 BRIT Awards, the first to be televised.

Not far behind the Geordie Jew was Jon Moss of Culture Club in the band’s golden year of 1984. Led by Jon’s boyfriend Boy George, the band won Best Group and Song of the Year for Karma Chameleon. 30 years on, there are plenty of Jewish performers working in music today across the world. Every time Drake releases a song it shoots towards number one, while Bob Dylan is about to celebrate his 80th birthday.

Mazaltov to Haim on becoming the first group of Jewish non-Britons to win the award at the third time of asking. Whoever will be next?

The 2022 edition of the BRIT Awards is due to take place in February next year. 

The Almost Invincibles: Arsenal FC 1990/91

30 years ago, the season which welcomed English teams back into European competition, Arsenal won the First Division.

Before the revolution swept away the Tuesday Club, swapping drinking for thinking and some va-va-voom, the Arsenal won their second First Division title while Nick Hornby was finishing the draft of his memoir Fever Pitch. ‘Liverpool collapsed ignominiously and we were allowed to run away with it,’ he writes, ‘despite almost comical antagonism and adversity.’

In 1991, at least, Arsenal were not ‘a Nottingham Forest or a West Ham or even a Liverpool, a team that inspires affection or admiration in other football fans; we share our pleasures with nobody but ourselves.’ Perhaps that is why nobody talks about the 1990/91 title winners. Arsene Wenger made Arsenal, to misquote him, ‘the prettiest wife’, a delight to everybody in the way that George Graham couldn’t manage to convert neutrals to.

I would like to celebrate the unloved Arsenal, ‘boring’ Arsenal, the pre-Premier League Arsenal. Nobody talks about that side because in 1989 they did the same thing in a more exciting manner. In 1998 the Wenger Revolution brought the club two trophies within a few weeks. Six years later came the W26 D12 L0 season.

But 1990/91? Those few months are probably legendary only on the North Bank terraces, one of the dates around the middle of the Emirates stand, just after the 1988/89 season and before the cup double of 1992/93.

George Graham was the manager who once again set his team to victory. History decried it for being ‘boring’ but it wasn’t actually until October when a league game finished ‘one-nil to the Arsenal’ thanks to a win over Manchester United. The goal was scored by Anders Limpar, the only non-Englishman in the starting line-up on a day which became known as the Battle of Old Trafford.

Nigel Winterburn’s naughty tackle on Denis Irwin, followed by some kicks by Brian McClair, led to a brawl which involved every player except David ‘Safe Hands’ Seaman, who had replaced John Lukic in goal as Arsenal’s number one, and Paul Merson, who ‘didn’t fancy’ a punch-up with Steve Bruce. Tony Adams writes in his memoir Addicted that the brawl ‘was really nothing…You see worse incidents over on Hackney Marshes.’ Points were docked but no pizza was thrown.

The Arsenal midfield that day contained three black players: Paul Davis, Michael Thomas and David ‘Rocky’ Rocastle (who died in March 2001 from cancer). Perry Groves came on as a substitute at Old Trafford, one of many cameo appearances. Upfront Paul Merson partnered Alan Smith, who ended the season with 27 goals in all competitions, 22 of which were scored in the First Division. Five of those goals came between Boxing Day and New Year’s Day, including in a 1-0 win over Manchester City on the first day of 1991.

An English front two now seems quaint at the top level, but ‘Merse and Smudge’ (M&S? S&M?) had the telepathy of the greatest partnerships. Indeed, a front two of any nationality seems quaint in an era of 4-3-3 and the non-number nine. Yet 4-4-2 was how George Graham had played, and thus how he managed.

Smith scored a consolation goal in Arsenal’s only league loss, at Stamford Bridge in February. On that day, the Gunners defence conceded two of the 18 goals they let in all season. In his memoir Paul Merson says in mitigation: ‘We were knackered with injuries that day and our defence was down to the bare bones.’ It also didn’t help that Steve Bould picked up an injury and young David Hillier came on to partner Michael Thomas for the second half. At least Jurgen Klopp can empathise.

No longer equipped with a mean defence, Liverpool conceded 40 goals in the league and lost ground on the champions when Chelsea beat them 4-2 and Nottingham Forest won 2-1. They also had a fun game against Leeds, going 4-0 up after half an hour before being pegged back to 4-2 and then 5-4. Because of stadium modifications, only 37,000 fans saw the 1-0 defeat to Arsenal where a Paul Merson goal moved the Gunners level on points in Tony Adams’ first game back after his prison term. Michael Thomas would move to Merseyside in November, just after Arsenal paid £2.5m for one of Palace’s strikers. The goals of Ian Wright and Mark Bright led Crystal Palace to third place at a time when only the first two teams in the First Division advanced to European competition; indeed, 1991/92 would be Liverpool’s first time in Europe after a six-year ban, as they finished seven points behind Arsenal.

In much the same way as Liverpool have been at Anfield, Arsenal were irrepressible at Highbury: 4-1 against Chelsea and Sheffield United 4-0 against Southampton and Crystal Palace, 3-0 wins against Liverpool and Derby County 3-0, a 5-0 against Aston Villa 5-0 and, on the last day of the season, a 6-1 destruction of Coventry City. ‘Go out and look like champions. Go out and be the Arsenal,’ Graham told his team who according to Adams was ‘probably the best Arsenal team I played for’.

David Seaman had already played for England while he was at QPR, travelling to Italy as third-choice keeper behind Peter Shilton and Chris Woods for the 1990 World Cup. In front of an elite defence, he was able to add some glittering medals to his shelf of caps, going on to become a cornerstone of Arsene Wenger’s first great Arsenal team. Highbury housed a ‘divine ponytail’ before Manu Petit.

The Bould-Adams partnership was well drilled and Dixon, Bould and Winterburn played every game, thus limiting David O’Leary to 11 starts. In 1947 the Arsenal had played 18 games before losing their invincibility; in 1990/91, it took 24. It was even more impressive because Arsenal’s captain was jailed for drink-driving, as he detailed in Addicted. Perhaps only when Eric Cantona was banned from playing in 1995 is there any direct precedent for a team’s key player to miss most of a season due to off-field indiscretion (with apologies to Rio Ferdinand and Carlos Tevez).

Weeks after the Old Trafford game, Manchester United came to Highbury for the Rumbelows Cup tie and scored six. Smith scored Arsenal’s pair but United dominated. Youtube highlights, with commentary from Clive Tyldesley, document a wonderful second-minute goal fired in from about 30 yards by Clayton Blackmore and an even better third goal from Lee Sharpe: ‘an absolute pearl’ with his right foot going in off the underside of the crossbar. He added two more and it was the only hat-trick conceded by the back four all season.

In his memoir, co-written with David Conn, Sharpe describes the night as the one he ‘hit the big time’, all the more because ‘football wasn’t all over the TV’. He reveals that Graham, who managed Sharpe when they were both at Leeds, ‘used to make his teams defend by trying to push his wingers inside all the time. He was paranoid about the opposition getting down the line and crossing it.’ United would play chess with Arsenal, ‘probing for when the defence would crack and leave an opening’. The victory, quite rightly, is claimed by Sharpe as ‘the beginning of a new era in English football’. Yet an Alan Smith hat-trick avenged the League Cup defeat to Manchester United (a 3-1 win), so the pendulum hadn’t fully swung yet.

The FA Cup semi-final was a North London derby held at Wembley Stadium. It is of course known for the Paul Gascoigne free-kick that Barry Davies memorialised with the words: ‘Is Gascoigne going to have a crack? He is, you know…’ Smith scored Arsenal’s consolation in a 3-1 win.

Those with long memories will know that Arsenal had required three replays to beat Leeds United in the fourth round. The original tie finished goalless, while the replay at Elland Road was 1-1 and the second replay at Highbury was also a 0-0 draw. Paul Merson’s goal, one of 16 he scored that season, sealed a win in the third replay.

If you meet any Arsenal fan who watched the Graham Era team, ask them whether they were at all four ties that year. Being Swedish, potential purchaser Daniel Ek might have followed it via newspapers. Perhaps we should ask Mr Ek how many goals Merse scored in the 1990/91 First Division season.

Merson himself was nicknamed ‘son of George’, writing in his book: ‘They reckoned I got away with murder…I was probably the most badly behaved player in the squad. For some reason, George took a shine to me.’ Despite his antics away from the pitch, with drinking, drugging and gambling as leisure pursuits, Merson still performed when it came to it.

I hope he cherishes his First Division winners’ medal and that he gets to hang out in a socially distanced manner with the back four, Safe Hands, Perry Groves and Alan Smith this spring to celebrate 30 years since the victory.

Never mind the teams of ’89, ’98 and ’04. Let us celebrate the Class of ’91.

On the Death of Diego Maradona

What is it that makes someone the best in the world at what they do?

At one time, between 1984 and 1988, Diego Maradona was peerless. From the tributes being paid on his death at the age of 60 (and what a life he packed into three score years), it appears that his life off the field had a detrimental effect on his game. It involved drugs, affairs, the Neapolitan mafia, boardroom politics and the perils of being very famous.

In the chronology of football, he took over from Johan Cruyff and gave his crown to Marco van Basten. Both Dutchmen left an imprint on the game in the low country and around the world, but eventually Cruyff was chucked out of Barcelona, where he had masterminded a revolution, and van Basten was kicked out of football through injury. Today, the top players – Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, Kylian Mbappe – are protected both by the rules on bad tackles and the way the game has evolved to be more about turnovers and pressing than the art of a good tackle. Yet the world’s best defender, Dutchman Virgil van Dijk, could put in a tackle should he see fit.

All of these players had, or have, their exploits beamed around the world. In Pele’s day, fans glimpsed his glories on TV every four years or had to pay for the privilege of watching Brazil in the flesh. Pele, who himself was ‘kicked out of’ the 1966 World Cup, never moved to Europe, in much the same way that Elvis Presley stayed in the United States for his career, never gigging in England.

Michael Jackson, however, played Wembley Stadium. The self-styled King of Pop was a global popstar in the way Prince, Madonna and Bono also were (and, to a lesser degree with the final two, are). Like Madonna and U2 today, Maradona became a heritage brand, still someone whose opinion mattered. Because of his reputation – the rags to riches story blotted by excess and ignorance of the cult of celebrity – he was even more famous than Pele. He played in Spain, Italy and Argentina, starring in four World Cups when that tournament’s commercial appeal had not been usurped by the UEFA Champions League.

In 1982, when he was sent off against Brazil in the second group stage, Maradona was wearing the number 10 shirt even though the other numbers had been allocated alphabetically (Osvaldo Ardiles famously wore 1). In Mexico in 1986, having hardly played for his national team, Maradona was the star who won the trophy almost on his own. At Italia ’90, Maradona implored Italians to get behind Argentina in the final against West Germany even though they had knocked Italy out of their home tournament in the semi-finals.

In between 1990 and 1994, however, Maradona was banned for recreational drug use, returned to play in Argentina and became a fixture in the tabloids, which no longer respected an omerta due to alleged links with the Camorra. This may well become clearer when Guillem Balague brings out his biography due next autumn, since he might have an easier ride when it comes to libel laws.

In Argentina, three days of mourning was declared. Jonathan Wilson’s book Angels With Dirty Faces, about both football and politics in Argentina, devotes entire chapters to Maradona’s travels and rule-breaking. Writing in the Guardian, Wilson compared him to Cruyff but also someone ‘draped in symbolic importance…a quasi-messianic figure’ who took charge of Argentina at the 2010 World Cup, where Germany beat them 4-0 in the quarter-finals.

Receiving the news that Diego Maradona had died, L’Equipe wrote ‘Dieu est mort’ while The New York Times praised his ‘roguish cunning and extravagant control’. In the Times, Henry Winter recalled his greatest hits, having reported on the 1990 World Cup, and how Maradona ‘was the greatest player I have ever had the privilege to report on…If you love football, you love Maradona’.

He’s one of those players who would draw a paying audience even as he warms up and, indeed, a video of him doing just that was doing the rounds in the hours after his passing was announced. Ditto a four-minute eulogy from Gary Lineker, taken from the BT Sport coverage of the Champions League, where he recounted Maradona’s skill of whacking a football up high in the air 13 times in a row, barely moving a yard, during one of those warm-ups. When Lineker and his Barcelona team-mates tried to match the record, they could only manage three.

The Times’ Chief Sports Writer Matt Dickinson, who also has a book out in the spring about Maradona, used the word ‘compelling’ and calling his subject ‘football’s most epic life…The closer I got to him, the more I was transfixed,’ he writes, even as he was twice stood up when he had flown to Argentina for some research. Dickinson writes this off as part of his ‘outrageousness, rebellion, fearlessness’ whose life was ‘the aftermath of a series of wild parties’. I’d call it rudeness and hubristic, with no self-control.

But such is the nature of genius, which does not run on Greenwich Mean Time.

What makes the best truly the best? The usual: talent, luck, nurture, genetics. Usain Bolt benefits from being taller than the average sprinter while Michael Johnson was interested in marginal gains to improve his races. Those who threw or hit various balls or pucks – Joe DiMaggio, the Manning brothers Peyton and Eli, Tom Brady, Wayne Gretsky – are still spoken of in awe because their talents were harnessed by great coaches in great teams. Tiger Woods, Andre Agassi and the Williams sisters, Venus and Serena, all had help from their dads; Andy and Jamie Murray, of course, learned how to play tennis in Florida but with the blessing of their mum.

Yet the Murrays don’t represent the UK, or Scotland, in the way that Maradona represented Argentina. Michael Jackson (driven like his brothers by a megalomaniacal father) never represented America, although his presence on MTV gave a platform for the likes of Prince, NWA and Jay-Z to become important figures in the hitherto mainly Caucasian cultural conversation.

Consider this: Maradona was the heir to Eva Peron; Pele was the spokesperson for a little pill that kept you scoring all night.

As in his stunning documentary on racing driver and Brazilian icon Ayrton Senna, Asif Kapadia places Maradona in the context of his time. Diego Maradona looked at both sides of the star: Diego, the boy from the slums; and Maradona, the name on the back of the shirt which billions admired and which brought the vultures out.

When ranking footballers, as with musicians, it pays to remember the context. Miles Davis and John Coltrane pushed the American music of jazz to new territories, while Aretha Franklin’s death was marked with notices that she took the church to the Hot 100 (but stayed very much in the church, as the recent footage from her Amazing Grace album sessions shows). It took Atlantic Records to nurture her talent and market her to America, much as Epic Records picked up the baton from Motown and used technology to make Michael Jackson the biggest entertainer the world will ever see.

Now everyone owns superstars. Beyonce doesn’t belong to Tennessee; she belongs to the black diaspora and her art reflects that. Precisely because she controls the narrative, we know only what she chooses us to know. With Maradona, as with Paul Gascoigne (who looks haunted today), there was no technology available for fans to react instantly to his every move, so instead the press were a constant presence in his life.

Maradona, who was only at his peak for four years, was like a musician whose rush of creativity would trap him in that era. Brian Wilson’s Pet Sounds era, David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust era, Stevie Wonder’s run of albums in the early-to-mid-1970s, Michael Jackson’s three Quincy Jones productions (Off The Wall, Thriller, Bad), Eminem’s first three albums; I see much merit in discussing music and football together, with individuals operating as a frontman in a team. After all, what use is David Bowie without the Spiders from Mars, Stevie without the boffins with whom he developed the technology to make his albums, the studio musicians who made Thriller with Jackson, Dr Dre to mentor Eminem? And that is before noting the impact of Brian Epstein and George Martin on bringing Lennon & McCartney’s art to the masses. Paul McCartney is the English Maradona, I would argue.

Maradona, taught on the streets, beloved by the masses looking for a hero, already looks out of time in the era of social media, a VHS hero in a Netflix world. The tributes and arguments piled up in the days after his passing. Channel 4’s All4 service made the Maradona documentary free to air for UK viewers so they could marvel at the tragedy of Diego Maradona.

In November 2020 the journalist Matthew Parris brought out a compendium of tales about great lives which have been discussed on the Radio 4 show of the same name. He called it Fracture because he noted that genius was fostered by trauma. John Lennon lost his aunt, Paul McCartney his mother Mary, and figures as disparate as Marie Curie, Carl Jung and Vladimir Lenin were all fractured by their childhoods. Does this confer greatness upon them? Plenty of fractured kids grow up to become fractured adults who are incapable of greatness.

A happy child who lived opposite Ajax Football Club, Johan Cruyff played in North America (like Pele) as well as Europe. He then turned Barcelona into a dynasty through management and administration but eventually put a few noses out of joint there. When he passed away, another legacy artist whose reputation had grown like some latter-day Nick Drake or Vincent van Gogh, Jonathan Wilson noted that nobody had changed how people think about the game more than him.

Maradona was, in his prime, greater than Cruyff. His greatness came from the poverty he suffered in the slums of Argentina, who turned him into a cipher and weren’t able to stop Diego’s impulses. It’s just Diego being Diego. The best are the best because we say they are the best, no matter their flaws.

In today’s micromanaged football world, superstars use Instagram, Netflix and corporate branding deals to gain riches – and in notable cases take a stand for political action. Messi and Ronaldo are great players without question but will they be held in the same esteem as Pele and Maradona? Or is it because we, the fans, love them because we want a second coming of players who brought our dads and grandads (and mums and grandmas) the same excitement to our lives all these decades on?

More than mere footballers, like Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi – neither of whom could do it on a wet Tuesday night under the lights – Maradona and Pele are secular saints whose talents brought joy through football. Now the final whistle has blown, like so many past stars, for El Diego.

Beyond Blur v Oasis: British Music in August 1995

The Blur v Oasis chart battle, when Blur moved the release of Country House to match the release of Roll With It, the second single from (What’s The Story) Morning Glory was a stunt pulled by the music press, Creation & Food Records and Radio 1 to enliven a hot summer.

I was a chart fiend, even at seven years old, and I want to look at what pop music was like in late period John Major’s Britain. Tonight Matthew (as Stars In Their Eyes would have had it in 1995) I’m going to be…Mark Goodier!!!

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Interestingly, CD single sales of songs from Definitely Maybe were also moved to the front of record shops. Live Forever (88), Shakermaker (87), Supersonic (85) and Cigarettes & Alcohol (83) re-entered the Top 100, standalone single Whatever rose to 77, while former number one Some Might Say rose to 73.

The lower reaches of the Hot 100 were occupied by the likes of Haddaway, who had peaked at 20 with Fly Away, another song that wasn’t quite as good as What Is Love. Two places above them was Luke Vibert, on the Mo Wax label, whose ambient tune A Polished Solid entered at 98.

A Polished Solid

At 93 was I Want To Be An Eddie Stobart Driver by The Wurzels, a novelty song. At 89, in August, was Morten Harket with the symphonic A Kind of Christmas Card. There is no way this would come out in August today. These were still outsold by summer smashes including T.O.F.’s jungle-meets-2-Unlimited Funk It Up (82) and Lovely Thang by Kut Klose, an r’n’b trio from Atlanta discovered by Keith Sweat who seemed to be Elektra’s version of TLC.

In rap, Notorious BIG was down with One More Chance (50) while the top 10 smash I’ll Be There For You/ You’re All I Need brought Method Man and Mary J Blige to the attention of record buyers. For cool kids Aphex Twin offered Donkey Rhubarb, which entered at 78 possibly off the back off John Peel play, a typically wacky video with giant dancing teddy bears and a reputation cultivated by the buoyant music press.

Fans of what was by 1995 called modern rock (previously ‘alternative rock’) were treated to Tongue by REM (70), Gotta Get Away by The Offspring (68 but 99% Nirvana) and two Irish acts. Sinead O’Connor entered at 51 with Famine, a political tract delivered spoken word over a looped beat and quoting Eleanor Rigby’s chorus, while the Cranberries were at 67 with Ridiculous Thoughts.

Ridiculous Thoughts

Old songs made new include Big Yellow Taxi by Amy Grant, Get Down On It by toasting duo Louchie Lou and Michie One and a remix of Blue Monday by New Order. Old timers in the top 100 included Rod Stewart – with the Maggie Mae soundalike Lady Luck, which had missed the top 40 the previous week – and relative veterans Michael and Janet Jackson, whose song Scream was still being sold in shops a few months after its release. Prince’s band New Power Generation, meanwhile, were enjoying The Good Life at 49.

Poppier acts from the pages of Smash Hits were dotted throughout the Top 100: MN8 were Happy (69), PJ & Duncan were Stuck On U (48 and better than you think it is) and Robson & Jerome were still hanging around with their double-sided number one Unchained Melody/ White Cliffs of Dover (46). I loved Dana Dawson’s top 10 hit 3 Is Family (42), while once place above her was Mary Kiani’s dance-pop ballad When I Call Your Name, on Mercury Records. I know her from her vocals for the dance act The Time Frequency. Fans of Italo house, the particularly Italian brand of house music, would love Keep Warm by Jinny, which peaked at 11 when it was re-released in summer 1995 and left the top 40 the week of Blur v Oasis.

Speaking of British rock, many of the big names of the era are in the top 100’s less important half. Common People by Pulp was still selling (71) while Garbage, the band featuring Nirvana producer Butch Vig, opened their account with Subhuman (76). British rock institution Julian Cope had entered at 24 a fortnight before with Try Try Try having, incredibly, performed the song in a funny hat on Top of the Pops in July 1995.

Try Try Try

Interestingly, Just Good Friends by Fish and Sam Brown is not the Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder song but a weepy ballad which promoted two albums released in late August 1995 on the same day called Yin & Yang. Alison Moyet landed at 44 with the Britpopping Solid Wood, driven by the sort of rhythm that was driving many records in the charts of 1995. It promoted her Singles compilation.

Big hits from hit albums tumbled out of the Top 40: In The Name of the Father by Black Grape, whose album It’s Great When You’re Straight Yeah was number one the week of Blur v Oasis; You Do Something To Me by Paul Weller, from his number one album Stanley Road; and Paninaro ’95 by Pet Shop Boys, which promoted their brand new album Alternative which was kept off number one by Black Grape. That album, in turned, had knocked I Should Coco by Supergrass off number one,

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Time to get into the Top 40 and, amazingly, at 40 was Matt Goss with The Key, which seemed to mix Bjork and Michael Jackson. One place above was Cyndi Lauper’s reggae-inflected Come On Home, which promoted her own Best Of titled, magnificently, Twelve Deadly Cyns…And Then Some. Also in the lower reaches of the Top 40 were Australian act Tina Arena (Heaven Help My Heart, 33) and Jamaican reggae legend Shaggy covering Mungo Jerry’s In The Summertime (38). After the early 90s success of UB40, including their number one Baby Come Back, Ali Campbell entered at 25 with a cover of the song Let Your Yeah Be Yeah, which had a very quirky video which referenced Mondrian’s art.

Let Your Yeah Be Yeah

Mid-90s cult acts including Levellers (Hope St at 29), The Shamen (Destination Eschaton, one of 12 Top 40 hits, at 28) and Happy Clappers (the piano house track Hold On, in at 27) charted, as did the world’s biggest rock band. U2’s offering from Batman Forever, a cast-off from their Zooropa album, had the winding title Hold Me Thrill Me Kiss Me Kill Me. It still sounds impressive in 2020 because the production is so enormous, thanks to Nellee Hooper’s magic touch. It was one of Iceland’s biggest sellers of 1995.

Classic tracks still played on UK radio today include Edwyn Collins’ A Girl Like You (35), power-pop anthem Ash’s Girl From Mars (31) and the underrated ’74-’75 by The Connells (21). Two important artists are next to one another: Bjork at 23 with Isobel and Alanis Morissette at 22 with You Oughta Know.

Push

More Canadian rock can be found with the track Push by Moist which slipped to 30. They were from Vancouver and had listened to a lot of Pearl Jam. Vocalist David Usher, born in Oxford, has made his money as the founder of Reimagine AI and creator of the Climate Clock. He has written a book on unlocking creativity called Let the Elephants Run. The band are due to tour Canada in 2021, so good on them.

Freedom by Shiva, which is about 99% M People (no bad thing), drops to 37. The dance anthem Don’t You Want Me by Felix, down to 24, also sounds great 25 years on. Combining alternative rock and club-friendly dance, Zombie by ADAM ft Amy was, yes, a dance cover of the Cranberries’ anthem. Someone decided the world needed to hear this, and thousands agreed.

Zombie

Elsewhere Eusebe enters at 32 with Summertime Healing. Points to you if you remember this song, which is delivered by a man with a voice like Anthony Kiedis and two ladies who sound like Neneh Cherry. The chorus lifts the ‘when I get that feeling’ bit from Sexual Healing; noticeably, the women are dark-skinned black women, which was very rare at the time for a Top 40 act. And still is.

Summertime Healing

If you bought Smokie’s expletive-laden reworking of their song Living Next Door To Alive with Roy Chubby Brown, which eventually clambered to number three and was at 34, I wonder if you still own it.

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In the week of Blur v Oasis, Supergrass were dropping down the charts with their song Alright, which scandalously stopped at number two. History will decide on whether they were better than Oasis. On Beggars Banquet, The Charlatans were in at 12 with Just When You’re Thinkin Things Over. Their career pre-dated Oasis but they had now been surpassed by them.

Otherwise the ten places below the Top 10 were a mix of r’n’b, dance music, soap stars, Beatle covers and vocal harmony groups. First, the dance anthems: at 19 a cover of Come and Get Your Love by The Real McCoy and at 18 Boom Boom Boom, the Outhere Brothers’ number one smash.

On The Bible

Boyzone continued their chart career with the funky So Good, sliding from 3 to 17. The late Tom Watkins, who managed Bros and East 17, put together a quartet who were in the running to represent the UK for Eurovision 1995. Promoted with a fun video set at a wedding, the dull On The Bible was the third Top 20 hit for Deuce, who included Lisa Armstrong in their line-up. She went on marry, and famously divorce, Ant McPartlin from Ant & Dec. Today she heads the style team at Strictly having worked on The X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent in the 2010s.

Stuck On U

The Beatles cover at 16 was the inspired reggae version of I’m Only Sleeping, while the r’n’b tune was Shy Guy by Diana King, which hit a high of number two. Soap star Michelle Gayle was new at 15 with her fifth hit Happy Just To Be With You, which is 99% Good Times by Chic. It was written by the great Nerada Michael Walden, best known for his work with Aretha Franklin and Whitney Houston. Michelle starred as Hermione in the London production of the Harry Potter play The Cursed Child, which is a speaking role which does not require any singing.

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Into the Top 10. At 10 was Corona’s Try Me Out, the fun follow-up to Rhythm of the Night where the singer exaggerates the word ‘yours’. At 9, another song from Batman Forever: the US number one hit by Seal, Kiss From a Rose. Majestic production by Trevor Horn means this song still sounds terrific when Magic play more of the songs you love.

Kiss From A Rose (live)

At 8, a song by Alanis Morissette’s label manager Madonna. Human Nature’s chorus included the words ‘bitch’ and ‘shit’, while its bridge had the singer intoning the words: ‘Oops I didn’t know I couldn’t talk about sex’. Not yet 40, Madonna was still in her imperial phase and she purrs the lyrics of one of her best songs.

Human Nature

Two dance bangers in a row follow. At 7 was the incendiary dance smash Son of a Gun by JX, while Clock entered at 6 with hi-NRG tune Everybody. Both songs are hi-NRG tunes perfect for shaking one’s tush in the hot summer sun, while also being chart-friendly enough for Radio 1 daytime play.

Son of a Gun

At 5 was Waterfalls, the AIDS-referencing tune by TLC that remains their greatest moment (better than No Scrubs, I think). At 4 was the previous week’s number one. Take That still end their shows with Never Forget, Howard’s vocal contribution to their catalogue and an audience participation number. Robbie Williams had just quit the band as the single was being promoted and launched a modestly successful solo career. Their album Nobody Else was available in the UK version and, entering the chart at 26 on import, the US version, which featured Pray, Babe and Love Ain’t Here Anymore.

Never Forget (live)

At 3 were the smooth vocals of an uncredited Everett Bradley on I Luv U Baby by The Original. Originally issued in 1994 it returned as a summer smash in 1995, peaking at two behind Take That and then stuck behind the two guitar acts. Fun fact: Everett is currently a backing vocalist with Bon Jovi and is best known for his work on Stomp.

I Luv U Baby

I always preferred Oasis growing up. I prefer Country House to Roll With It, as did the British public. This week 25 years ago was the zenith of British rock music in the 1990s, after Oasis, Blur and sundry others stepped forward to fill the gap left by Kurt Cobain’s suicide. Yet there were so many other types of music in the Top 100 that week that it is too simplistic to say 1995 was all Britpop.

Just as 1964 wasn’t just Merseybeat, and 1977 wasn’t just The Sex Pistols, so 1995 was more than just Blur v Oasis.

In case you have no idea who won the Battle of Britpop (it was actually Pulp), here’s Country House in a video directed by Damien Hirst.

Country House

Lady Gaga returns to form on Chromatica

I adore real strings on pop records. You can tell this is a blockbuster record because the album opens with an orchestra setting the scene. Budget!

The album, Gaga’s first since Joanne in 2016, is split into three acts. Act One has the big hits Stupid Love and Rain On Me, which have been Gaga’s biggest solo smashes since 2011’s Born This Way. The former has been concocted by Max Martin and layers hook (‘freak out’) upon hook (‘look at me’) upon hook (‘higher higher!’) upon hook (the chorus). It wasn’t a number one but Rain On Me was, probably because Ari is on it but also because it’s a camp, kitsch bop which will do very well in Asia and mainland Europe.

Alice is the name of my brother’s girlfriend. Here, Alice is a dance-pop tune which sounds like catwalk muzak. We’re in Lewis Carroll territory in the lyrics, which bang on about Wonderland. Free Woman, like Rain On Me, was written with Axwell, one of the Swedish House Mafia guys. ‘This is my dancefloor I fought for’ packs an awful lot into seven words. It’s a poppy song which will get stuck in your head.

Fun Tonight ends Act One with a mix of euphoria and pensiveness. Why isn’t Gaga having fun tonight? Why does she want to break up with her man or woman or other? It breaks up the slew of positivity on the album, as Act Two kicks in with another orchestral interlude.

911, which is saturated in vocoder, is another track co-written with Justin Tranter whom we know is a good songwriter from hits like Issues, Sorry, Bad Liar, Believer, Lose You To Love Me and Make Me Feel by Janelle Monae. Along with Beyonce, Janelle is Gaga’s only competitor in the pop landscape.

Plastic Doll, meanwhile, is what happens when Bloodpop (the album’s main producer) gets in a room with J Kash, Skrillex and Rami Yacoub, who along with Shellback a key Max Martin acolyte. ‘I am top shelf, they built me strong’ sounds like a feminist anthem coated in candyfloss. ‘I’ve spent too long dancing all alone,’ sings Gaga, who is ‘no toy for a real boy’ which is an Instagram caption. File with Toy by Netta and all of Beyonce’s catalogue in the playlist Powerful Music for Ladies.

Sour Candy is a team-up with K-Pop superstars BLACKPINK and pivots (as Halsey did) towards East Asia, where Gaga is beloved. She goes piano house euphoria on Enigma (‘Is it all just virtual?’) and Cher-like disco on Replay (‘the monster inside you is torturing me’). Who needs drugs when you’ve got the sugar rush of Gaga?

Act Three concludes the album and brings in another queen. Sine From Above (sic) was written by 12 different people, including guest vocalist Elton John and top songwriter Ryan Tedder of OneRepublic. ‘When I was young I prayed for lightning…I lost my love, no one cared’ is the opening verse from LG, while the chorus showcases, once again, her fine vocal style which was groomed in the cabaret bars of New York City.

‘When I was young I felt immortal,’ croons Pinner’s finest former resident. There’s so much pathos in a 70-year-old singer who really did set the standard for performing singer-songwriters to essentially hand over the torch to Gaga. The pair are great friends and helped organise the recent ‘Corona Live Aid’ for UNICEF. Gaga, like Elton, is more than just a musician and cultural star; she is an agent for change who can do whatever she wants. Having been a Vegas performer and the latest lead actress in the evergreen movie A Star Is Born, she will probably get back to setting the world on fire. I saw her Born This Way show and, though it didn’t have as many great hits as I wanted to hear, appreciated what she was trying to do. She is the Head Monster and her Little Monsters will love her ‘return to form’ (copyright: every music journalist).

It just happens that Chromatica is the sort of album full of tracks to send the endorphins rushing, as the final drum’n’bass break of Sine From Above shows. It segues into 1000 Doves, which is proper Eurovision, and the album concludes with dance anthem Babylon: ‘We can party like it’s BC’ is a wonderfully quirky line.

Humans have always danced, whether to praise the deities or to get lost in the four-to-the-floor groove. If music is ‘socially organised sound’, ie sound that unites communities or just a community, this ticks the box. Like Madonna’s best work, Chromatica unites the world in dance, though nothing is as brilliant as Vogue or Express Yourself; like Elton John’s best songs, there is a touch of melancholy and self-awareness; like Lady Gaga’s first two albums, this is contemporary pop with a lot of Swedes helping out.

Props go to BloodPop aka Michael Tucker from Kansas City who, at 29, is the world’s most important pop producer (at least aside from Max Martin). Having already worked with Madonna on Rebel Heart and with Justin Bieber on Purpose, the world’s dancefloors are his oyster.

If only we could go to a dancefloor, or an arena, soon. This is Gaga’s decade and we are all her subjects.

Stupid Love

Genre - Eurovision in the 2010s

Satellite, So Lucky, Party For Everybody, Only Teardrops, Rise Like a Phoenix, Calm After the Storm, Heroes, 1944, Slow Down, Beautiful Mess, Amar Pelos Dois, Toy, We Got Love, She Got Me, Too Late for Love, Spirit in the Sky, Say Na Na Na

If you haven’t watched Eurovision since the glory days of Bucks Fizz and Katrina & the Waves, this essay serves as an update. The UK treats Eurovision like the World Cup: it’s something we used to win but people better than us usually win today.

The big event midway through the 2010s was the addition of a qualified jury to comprise 50% of the voting, with the usual 50% going to the ’12 points from Greece go to (pause) Cyprus!!!’ vote. Graham Norton has been elevated to national treasure status in the UK with his BBC commentary; the broadcaster is mandated to support Eurovision and if the UK entered Graham we would get points just on the strength of him saying ‘helloooo!’ for just under three minutes, plus key change.

I attended the 2011 Contest in Duesseldorf, which was taking place there thanks to the 2010 Contest win by Lena, a teenage German singer who triumphed with a cute song about ‘love, oh love!’ called Satellite. It was an unassuming yet catchy song, with a great middle eight, driven by a strong melody to which Lena sang of all the things she did while ‘in orbit’ around her man; she even did her hair for him! The way she sang the word ‘day’ as ‘daii’ was a horrible affectation, as if she had been forced to listen to Kate Nash and Lily Allen for weeks on end and told to replicate the vocal.

Lena returned to represent Germany in 2011, with a song written with Greg Kurstin. Taken by a Stranger was fine but probably designed not to win – only Ireland have hosted for three consecutive years and the third time it was in a converted barn! Lena’s final album of the decade is Only Love, L; it was stuck at two in the German charts, selling more than Billie Eilish that week but fewer than Andrea Berg. Good for Andrea, but Lena will always have Eurovision 2010.

The big song of 2011’s Contest was Running Scared, a ballad bought by Azerbaijan because you can source songs from anywhere and sing in your non-native language, something that came in in the 1990s; the UK hasn’t won since that time. We sent Blue with a carpe-diem song called I Can; Ireland sent talent show berks Jedward with an irritating pop song called Lipstick. I will include Moldova’s entry So Lucky, performed by Zdob si Zdub and sung in a mix of Moldovan and English, purely to mention the headbanging guy in our bit of the audience who rocked out to some horn-assisted rock for three minutes. The act itself included a woman miming playing an oboe on a unicycle; they scored three fewer points than Blue and came in 12th.

To Baku in 2012, and the UK sent crooner Engelbert Humperdinck, whose best days were in 1967. Only Norway scored fewer points in a content which by now required contestants to trot around Europe promoting their three-minute tune on various sofas from Amsterdam to Ankara. Ireland sent Jedward again, Sweden won with a dance-pop-by-numbers track called Euphoria but everyone remembers Eurovision 2012 for one entry in particular.

I watched in West London as a group of grannies performing as Buranoskiye Babushki sang Party for Everybody (‘Come on and dance!’) like a novelty act on Britain’s Got Talent. Opening with some tuneless singing, the second verse was equally tuneless but with an oompa beat behind it. Russia usually hoovers up votes from former Soviet countries but not even the babushki could halt Sweden, who invite public entrants to their Melodifestivalen every year. All the same, the song and the performers diverted Europe for three minutes, thus doing its and their job.

To Sweden (again) in 2013, where Ireland finished last and successful German dance act Cascada finished 21st, two places below the UK, who encouraged Bonnie Tyler to sing the soppy ballad Believe in Me before she returned to the Eighties nostalgia circuit. A barefoot Dane named Emmelie de Forest sang a pretty folky pop song called Only Teardrops with an addictive chorus (‘How many times…’) and it was to Copenhagen that Eurovision would go in 2014.

Alongside Waterloo and all those songs with nonsense titles like Ding-a-Dong, Rise Like a Phoenix by Conchita will go down as a Big Eurovision Anthem. This would never not have won: a bloke called Thomas with a beard in a dress, singing a camp song about self-empowerment, having done the light-ent sofa tour to drum up support for Austria’s entry in the 2014 Contest. It was dramatic, brilliant arranged and sung with phenomenal precision. 13 nations awarded Austria douze points, including the UK; we sent a boring ballad which came 17th and nobody gave us douze points. Rise Like a Phoenix is the finest Eurovision winner of the 2010s and Conchita the most notable performer since Dana International, who unlike the drag act Conchita was transsexual.

Brief mention here should go here to The Common Linnets. The Dutch duo announced themselves with a proper song, the gorgeous Calm After the Storm, sung in tight male-female harmony. The song was notable because I can’t remember many country-inflected songs amid the kitsch and glamour of Eurovision. 

To Vienna in 2015 where it was Sweden’s glory again. I adore Heroes by Mans Zelmerlow, a song the Swedish audience voted as their entrant. Hundreds of songs are offered, with the best put to a public vote and crowned with a grand final in a massive arena on Swedish television. The UK will never match Sweden’s love for the competition, one which put them on the musical map. Graham Norton had told BBC viewers that Heroes was impressive, with some nifty interactivity with an animated character. Sometimes this can be a gimmick but the brilliance of Mans’ delivery in singing ‘the greatest anthem ever heard…We are the heroes of our time’ won over the voters in the last year before the professional jury was brought in.

Germany and Austria both scored nul points in 2015, with the UK managing cinq points with a weird song called Still In Love with You. Humorously Mans is now a key part of the UK’s coverage of Eurovision, an adopted Brit every May. ABBA’s music, meanwhile, can be heard in an interactive sing-a-long dining experience inside London’s O2 Arena complex.

It was to Sweden again in 2016 where a politically charged song won for Ukraine. Jamala, dressed in blue, sang emotionally of the plight of the Tatars of Crimea in a song called 1944. The verses were in English (‘They come to your house…Humanity cries’) and the chorus was based on a Crimean folk song. Performed in tears and with expressive moments to a percussive backing that was very contemporary, audiences at home and on the professional jury were won over by the song, which did not impress Russia in the slightest, who unsuccessfully wanted it banned on political grounds. Strangely the song benefitted from a split in voting: Russia won the popular vote and Australia (don’t ask) took the jury vote. The UK finished third last and Germany dead last.

Brief mention here should go here to Douwe Bob, whose pleasant song Slow Down (‘If you can’t go on’) was one I loved, especially because it moved through three keys. Sometimes I am allowed personal picks for the 2010 songs, and this one was witnessed by millions, including those in Australia.

To Kyiv in 2017, where another emotional story captured the hearts of Europe. I never forgot, especially after I had attended the show in 2011, that Eurovision is television and performers can bring their personal stories and journeys to their attention. Thus it was that Bulgaria’s entry – the pop ballad Beautiful Mess (‘our love is untouchable’) by the cherubic Kristian Kostov – was beaten by that of Portugal. Salvador Sobral, his hair in a topknot, sang the strings-soaked Amar Pelos Dois solo in the centre of the arena in an oversized suit. His sweet voice and eccentric performance sold the Portuguese-language heartbreak ballad which was written by Salvador’s sister; while La La Land took the box office by storm, the jazzy song offered the same sort of thing to viewers of Eurovision.

In Lisbon, a lady from Israel with weird hair and lots of electronics won the Contest with a song that namechecked a Pokemon character (‘I’m taking my Pikachu home!!’) and had an irresistible chorus: ‘I’m not your TOY! You stupid BOY!’ It was Netta’s year, as she sang a self-empowerment song whose first line was ‘Look at me, I’m a beautiful creature’. It was both pentatonic and diatonic, with flavours of the East and West, and Netta’s performance, complete with chicken clucks that I never liked, ensured that for three minutes the eyes of Europe were on her.

That’s all Eurovision is: a ‘did you see that?!’ TV moment, today telegraphed months in advance thanks to holistic coverage. No wonder the UK always loses: we’re just not bothered. We should send Prince Harry and Ed Sheeran and James Blunt and Stephen Fry and David Attenborough, introduced by Graham Norton onstage. We’d still get fewer points than Sweden and Russia.

In 2018 the UK had sent a song called Storm, which had to be performed twice on the night after a prankster interrupted poor SuRie through the first run. As if to prove Eurovision had no logic, Portugal finished last at their own party, while the great, rather Swedish disco-pop song We Got Love by Jessica Mauboy only came in 20th place for Australia. She was by turns a bit too shouty, pitchy, nervous and awkward on the night, and most people who vote haven’t followed the many months of Eurovision fever so only judge on the night.

Tel Aviv hosted the 2010s’ final Eurovision Song Contest, which ought to have been won by Sweden. Too Late For Love (‘I can be the sun that lights your dark’) by John Lundvik was a gospel-pop song of some stature, and another correct choice from the Swedish public, but four songs outscored it: one was by Russian popstar Sergey Lazarev (who will be discussed in a future essay); one was Luca Hanni’s catchy She Got Me, which included some jolly dance moves; second place was Soldi, a rap from the Italian Mahmoud, whose performance included some clapping choreography and three male dancers behind him; and a dull, Ed Sheeran-lite song by Duncan Laurence sent Eurovision to Rotterdam as the Netherlands finally sent a winner.

I would not like to suggest that five black performers dissuaded voters from picking Sweden’s entry, but I can’t think of any other reason the best song didn’t win; ten juries gave them 12 points but only 93 came from the public vote. UK viewers now watch Eurovision with a social network open, absorbed in the kitsch and how the UK finished inevitably last. In 2019 we did, scoring 11 points with a ballad called Bigger Than Us (three from the home vote, eight from the jurors). Germany again did badly, scoring nul points from the voters at home, but at least there has been no Deutschausgang (a German exit from the EU).

Those of Norway and San Marino didn’t disappoint Eurovision parties across the UK. KeiiNO’s Spirit in the Sky was a dance-pop number which featured a bald man yodelling exactly the same emotive syllables in each chorus before he was given his own eight-bar solo in the Northern Sami language. For San Marino, Serhat’s Say Na Na Na was a fantasy duet between the Pet Shop Boys and Leonard Cohen, with added key change. What a shame he was on last!

I include those two in the 2010 songs from the decade as examples of fun pieces of music which were broadcast across Europe and down to Australia which brought distraction from the fact that in 2016 the UK voted to leave the European Union. There’ll probably be an Act of Parliament decreeing that we will still be allowed to participate in Eurovision; I hope people didn’t vote Leave just so they could watch something else for a few nights every May. Plenty of folk around Europe will keep watching a televised music contest, originally founded to unite broadcasting unions, into the 2020s.

Imperial One - BTS in the 2010s

Blood Sweat & Tears, Fire, Save ME, DNA, MIC Drop, Fake Love, Boy With Luv

In no universe circa 2010 would any lay pop fan have predicted that 2019 would see the coronation of a Korean septet who finally pushed that country’s style of hyperkinetic pop music to a world who didn’t know they wanted it. Or who had only had Gangnam Style.

With One Direction splintering and solo acts cheaper to run, only a few major-label acts like Why Don’t We and Brockhampton were able to bring a cool edge to the boyband market with their own smouldering starlets. Over in Korea, market penetration was dominated by familiar faces like Bigbang and Girls’ Generation, whose music will be discussed in a future essay; like One Direction, however, the key factor in BTS’s success seemed to be intense fan engagement.

I read a review of the 2018 London show where my eyes lingered on the cost of some plastic Bluetooth-enabled torches. These were savvy businessmen selling a product that no Westerner see without hopping on a plane and going to East Asia. Someone is writing a book on boybands and the Korean interpretation of the art form will certainly form a key part.

In June 2019, while browsing HMV’s dedicated section for the band, I met some European fans who had come to London to see one of the two gigs at Wembley Stadium. At 31, I told them, I was too old to understand it but they seemed attracted to their cuteness and their web presence. In those two London shows, and around the world, BTS gathered the next generation of tweens and teens to sing or rap along to Korean love songs. Their big US moment was a sustained campaign in spring 2019 where they popped up on Saturday Night Live and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. For the latter performance they played the exact room The Beatles had played in 1964 when millions of lives were changed and a thousand rock bands were born.

It was testament to the modern era that many viewers would already be familiar with seven boys all described by Colbert as ‘The Cute One’. RM, the rapper who had learned English by watching Friends, was the band’s spokesman when they did the talk-show circuit; member Jimin excitably told Jimmy Fallon that their names sounded similar. It endeared him to me – I see what the girls I’d chatted to were on about.

Aside from being cute, no boyband had ever danced so hard in the US. One Direction famously didn’t dance at all, while the 1990s boybands like New Kids on the Block, Blackstreet and *NSYNC were by turns cute and gangsta. None of their dance moves looked like hard work, though, as BTS’s did. Impressively, RM and Suga of BTS were rappers who, by the rules of K-Pop, had to take part in the dance lines, while the singers – V, Jimin, Jungkook, J-Hope and Jin – also had to rap. What with all the TV appearances, including on their dedicated V-Live channel, they had to act, too.

Put through their paces by choreographers while living together – all in one room in their early days – Bangtan Boys aka BTS put out a steady stream of product from their TV debut, which came a year after formation, in 2014. They used online marketing to their advantage, dropping ‘bombs’ onto social media and staying in touch with their fans, christened BTS ARMY. These bombs mixed behind-the-scenes footage and dance routines, proving that K-Pop is far more than the recorded song but a journey.

Their initial goal was to win one of the many talent shows on Korean television, which was a tough sell when they were products of the independent Big Hit group rather than one of the three big groups with all the money to develop and market top acts. As they made more TV appearances, the seven-piece connected with their audience, stopped off in Austrasia, Europe and South America and, significantly, pushed a lot of recorded output onto their rabid fanbase.

Three EPs packed with intros, skits and outros did well in Korea and Japan, as well as anyone clued into the K-Pop scene in the diaspora. Unlike One Direction’s debut album, the two main rappers and singer J-Hope (a tremendously talented dancer) had credits on Dark & Wild, which gave them enough material to play concerts in Korean arenas and crank out music videos which have impressive viewing figures on Youtube.

Fire and Save ME were from another EP, this time from 2016. Like The Beatles in the 1960s, fans were not starved of new songs but, this being the 2010s, they could instantly become part of the band’s journey by watching videos and sharing them on various social networks. Fire (612m views as of October 2019) is a perfect song for a sync opportunity, with the chorus repeating the song’s title four times and a pre-chorus of la-las before Suga and RM rap about being fearless. In the video a car drops to its demise in a warehouse while the guys do their dancing then jump around and pose like a hiphop posse, hopefully satisfying the rappers’ artistic ambitions. K-Pop is truly visual music and every new video is an event; we will definitely see this in the West more often in the 2020s.

Save ME is a softer song where the non-rappers can shine. Over a triplet-y rhythm and sultry chords, there’s a mix of Korean and English: ‘I need your love before I fall’ goes the chorus, which is followed by a squelchy sound and an increase in the tempo. This is a great piece of pop music in the contemporary style. No wonder BTS were doing well on those TV competitions.

The 2016 album Wings came in four packages containing different photos in each one. It was a concept album influenced by Herman Hesse and dealt with weighty themes: adult love, personal growth, good and evil. The lead single, with another glossy video, was Blood Sweat & Tears, which opens with a choir and strings before a catchy chorus with huge production comes in. You can make out the word ‘chocolate’ in English as they sing of love and stuff in Korean.

DNA and MIC Drop both come from the 2017 EP Love Yourself: Her, part of a trilogy of EPs. These broke them to an American audience. DNA boasts the band’s most-viewed video with 848m watchers; there are only 51m people living in South Korea. The song itself opens with a whistling hook before adding some One Direction-type guitar lines and beats over which the band rap about love and stuff. The production is as good as any Western dance track.

MIC Drop, one of two tunes BTS performed on Saturday Night Live in 2019, was remixed by renowned DJ Steve Aoki, himself of Asian descent, who added a flute-type synth line. The beats thudded as the boys dropped in some English words (‘Billboard…worldwide…How you dare’, ‘Haters gonna hate, players gonna play’ and indeed the title of the song) in a diss track, showing their awareness of the hiphop genre. The song’s video is irresistible (570m views and counting), with the boys never keeping still and dancing around various indoor and outdoor settings.

All three of the above tracks were collected onto an album for the Japanese market called Face Yourself, with all tracks sung in Japanese. In Korea, they were winning Best Group awards while their fan ARMY started hashtags on social media. The boys, who spoke of the pressures of being in the band, also partnered with UNICEF to campaign to stop violence against young people. By this stage they lived in three rooms between them.

The song Fake Love made such a dent in the UK that one contestant performed it on The X Factor on primetime TV. I often think how jealous Simon Cowell must be of the Korean production line for talent, while his own Syco line offers acts with diminishing returns. Fake Love, a hopelessly devoted love song, has an enormous, direct chorus over minimal production, along with ‘love you so bad’ in English.

Love Yourself: Tear (rhymes with ‘beer’, from which Fake Love was taken) was a number one album in America, meaning BTS could no longer be just a cult favourite of teenagers. Even a CBS reporter who visited Seoul in April 2019 acknowledged to an imagined audience of parents: ‘These phenoms may not be familiar.’ Their fans are ‘enthusiastic consumers’, as American viewers witness plush toys and Barbie dolls (‘$20 a pop’) dedicated to each member.

Fans put up subway signs to commemorate the members’ birthdays; someone alert fans of Harry Styles. Sombrely the CBS interview notes the mandatory military service that will interrupt the momentum of the band, as when Elvis became a GI soldier. Harry Styles has not had this problem.

Fans around the world seem to understand the lyrics (that’s a wise use of Internet surfing) and are able to chant along phonetically if they have not learned Korean,. Meanwhile Western acts are keen to jump on the bandwagon. Lil Nas X released Seoul Town Road with RM, while Halsey sang the hook on BTS’s song Boy With Luv, the single to promote Map of the Soul: Purpose, their 2019 EP.

That song is packed with hooks like the best Western pop song, contains raps from both RM and Suga and breaks down to a sweet rapping bit from some of the singers. In a novel twist, the Westerner is reduced to being a featured artist, finessing the indelible ‘ooh-muh-muh-mai’ hook and having some fun while extending her own personal brand in the Far East (Halsey’s new album comes out in January 2020). The video to Boy With Luv has had 580m Youtube views in six months; it’s full of colour and dancing and sexy looks, and is the pinnacle of the six-year rise in plain sight of the biggest vocal harmony group in the world.

And, in case you’re wondering, BTS are so much better than Gangnam Style.

Imperial One - Adele in the 2010s

Rolling in the Deep, Rumour Has It, Someone Like You, Set Fire to the Rain, Skyfall, Hello, Send My Love to Your New Lover, All I Ask

I was in a flat in Edinburgh watching the 2011 BRIT Awards and was mildly impressed by Adele’s rendition of her song Someone Like You, essentially I Will Always Love You written by a lady from Tottenham and the man who wrote Secret Smile and Closing Time, Dan Wilson of Semisonic.

I didn’t know the rest of the UK would fall hard for Adele, whose first album 19 contained some magical songs like Hometown Glory and Chasing Pavements. Second album 21, which came out in 2010, included the magnificent Rumour Has It (a Ryan Tedder co-write) and the lead single Rolling in the Deep, which featured sublime melodic lines in the verse, bridge and chorus. Someone Like You outdid them both, topping the UK and Billboard charts for five non-consecutive weeks.

Did you know that no song with a piano as a lead instrument had ever been number one on the Billboard Hot 100? With only voice and piano, Someone Like You ushered in a revolution. A simple song about a girl moving on without her man, whom she wishes ‘nothing but the best’ but hopes isn’t forgotten, struck a chord with millions of adult contemporary listeners.

Because it was current, a poll in 2012 found that only Billie Jean and Bohemian Rhapsody were more beloved UK number ones. The GRAMMYs invented a Best Pop Solo Performance category for this song.

Set Fire to the Rain was written by Adele with Fraser T Smith (the man given the shout-out in Blinded by Your Grace by Stormzy). It’s about finding ‘a side…that I never knew’ in a loved one. The middle eight is particularly good here, and this was also a huge hit song around the world, helped by strings which sounded like the song’s title and a graceful piano line.

Rumour Has It was a song I remember listening to for the first time in Edinburgh as well, walking in the Meadows. I loved the beat and the harmony voices in the background, as well as the ‘Tedder handclaps’ in the second verse. The breakdown section is electrifying and when the song finished I went WOW! I thought this would be a monster song and it was.

Rolling in the Deep was written with the mighty Paul Epworth, who has worked with Paul McCartney, U2, Coldplay, Lorde, Mumford & Sons and Florence + the Machine. It was both Song and Record of the Year, from the Album of the Year, as the GRAMMYs saw which way the wind was blowing. The video to the song begins with Adele sitting on a chair in a large unfurnished room. The floor of another room is covered with glasses of water and then a chap dances in a room filled with sand. The long, held notes of the chorus (‘We could have had it all’) are underscored by the Motown-y backing vocals (‘You’re gonna wish you never had met me’). Adele’s vocal is sensational here, and a big improvement on the shy delivery of the first album. The production foregrounds the voice while giving equal importance to the backing vocals. The sound is phenomenal.

Adele and Paul Epworth also wrote the theme to the Bond movie Skyfall, which emerged at the end of 2012. It won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. She performed the song at the 2013 ceremony, with the familiar four-note motif transposed to piano and ushering in her vocal: ‘This is the end, hold your breath and count to ten’. With an orchestra and choir behind her, she sings the defiant chorus (‘We will stand tall, face it all together’). The song works in the title of the film without disrupting the musicality. Don’t tell Shirley Bassey but Skyfall could be the finest Bond theme of all.

Adele had dominated music for two years with her soulful voice that has no comparison. It’s a little Dusty Springfield and a little Amy Winehouse but it is definitely her own sound. One day in 2015 she popped up in a TV advert singing ‘Hello, it’s me’ and after three years away had returned.

Written with the great Greg Kurstin, it copied the Skyfall formula: emphatic piano, strong lead vocals, backing vocals, belting chorus (‘hello from the other side’), heartache and magnificent production from Greg. Another Pop Solo Performance, Record and Song of the Year GRAMMY hat-trick followed.

Famously beating Beyonce to Album of the Year at the GRAMMYs, Adele’s speech was a masterclass in British humility that no American would have dared do. Receiving it from Tim McGraw and Faith Hill she wept with thanks to the many producers, including Max Martin, Ryan Tedder and Shellback: ‘It took an army to make me strong and willing again.’ She spoke of becoming a mother (‘it’s really hard’). I can’t possibly accept this award. [The] artist of my life is Beyonce; the Lemonade album was so monumental! You are our light. The way you make my black friends feel is empowering, and I love you!’

The slinky Send My Love (To Your New Lover) has a looped acoustic guitar vamp over which Adele updates Someone Like You but with a Swedish touch. All I Ask, meanwhile, is another piano and vocal number written by Bruno Mars. I misheard the chorus as ‘hold me like I’m more than just a breath’ (it’s ‘friend’) and, though Adele’s take is superlative, I think Bruno has made the definitive version of the song, turning it into a Babyface or Boyz II Men type ballad that ramps up a key for the final chorus.

Adele, beloved around the world, may not record another note due to vocal trouble, an unwillingness to perform live and with her baby Angelo to raise. How fun must it be to take your child round to Adele’s for playdates and be able to ask: ‘So love, how does it feel to be an ordinary mum?’

Imperial One - Little Mix in the 2010s

Wings, Move, Black Magic, Shout Out to My Ex, Touch, Power, Strip

Jesy Nelson tried to kill herself while in Little Mix. She couldn’t deal (or dealt incorrectly) with the haters online. In the 2010s, pop stars found enemies online; some thought Jesy was ugly or overweight, and could say it to her through a screen.

When Little Mix won The X Factor in 2011, Leigh-Anne, Jade and Perrie would all wear shorts; Jesy would wear leggings or bottoms. Jesy told the Guardian while promoting her BBC documentary in September 2019, eight years into her stardom as a quarter of the most durable girl band of all time (I think), that when the band won she was in despair.

In 2013 Jesy almost walked out on the band, then almost walked out of the planet. Through it all – arena shows, chart-topping albums, some phenomenal pop music – Jesy was depressed. Leigh-Anne, meanwhile, has spoken of her issues with colorism, how she is ‘too black’ for magazine spreads. Perrie, for her part, broke off an engagement with Zayn from One Direction and has had therapy to deal with panic attacks arising from social anxiety; Jade overcame anorexia as a teenager.

Teenage girls dealing with any one of several issues of adolescence need role models and guides. Many are social media influencers who preach ‘love yourself…and give me some money’. Popstars have acted as big sisters and agony aunts for years. Little Mix, prominent popstars, have played that role this decade.

For that reason they deserve to be celebrated. A list of 2010 tunes must include those by the quartet, who have produced smashes which have hit public consciousness beyond their demographic of under-16s.

Wings, their debut single, is a great concoction about self-empowerment (spot the theme in this section) where a girl should ‘spread your wings’ which were ‘made to fly’. The verses are syncopated and give way to a lovely bridge (‘words don’t mean a thing’) and the song is driven by euphoric handclaps. Heys and yeahs make pleasant appearances and it was a brilliant first single, which reached number 7 in Japan and number 79 on the Hot 100 in the US.

Amid covers of Word Up (for charity) and Cannonball (for some product to coincide with their X Factor win), their original material emerged on DNA, their ‘winners’ album’ of 2012, and 2013’s Salute. The former featured the irresistible Move (number 19 in Japan) whose music echoes its title; it’s impossible to keep still while listening to it, jerky and irrepressible and definitely inspired by the soundtrack to Pitch Perfect.

The first two albums are packed full of great pop songs, immaculately produced, with Simon Cowell overseeing every aspect, since he was the one who put them together in 2011, spotting that there was a gap in the girlband market as well as the boyband one. (More on One Direction another time.)

Camille Purcell, now a recording artist in her own right under the name Kamille, was the secret weapon for Get Weird (2015). Black Magic was an enormous smash when it came out, fizzing like a Cyndi Lauper song about girls wanting to have fun and even alluding to something euphemistic (‘I’ve got the recipe…you belong to me’) while maintaining the gang vocals of Wings and Move. It had the strongest hook of any Little Mix single and deservingly secured them a third number one and number 67 entry in the US (but only number 47 in Japan). Three follow-up singles were also well received, but I am not motivated to include in my 2010 any of Love Me Like You, Secret Love Song – co-written with guest vocalist Jason Derulo – or Hair, where Sean Paul hopped on a remix.

Glory Days (2016) brought more amazing melodies as Syco and their Modest management team (more on them shortly) tried to push them in America. Touch (‘just a touch of your love’) could have been a song by A.N. Other American harmony group or singer but Little Mix took the bajon beat and rode it to number 4 in the UK charts. Far better was the album’s first single, the excellent Shout Out to My Ex, which was once given a dramatic reading on BBC Radio 1 by Bryan ‘Walter White’ Cranston. Another addictive confection, the quick delivery of the lyrics in the bridge, with the throwaway line ‘I’m cool, by the way’, was the fullest realisation of the characters of the band: four fun girls who are constantly opening themselves up to journalists and fans. Their fanbase are so lucky to have them, and they ended the 2010s with a huge arena tour of the UK.

Better still was Power (‘You make rain but I got the, I got the, I got the thunder’) which drew inspiration from Miserlou and put forward a new, sexier Little Mix (‘I’m a machine when I do it’). Their track Oops, a Motown pastiche complete with key change, was the great lost single from that album but the market had moved on and dark broody songs like Power were in vogue in 2017 when the song came out and hit radio.

Album five was LM5, the CD of which had four sets of bare legs upon it. The first single was Ed Sheeran co-write Woman Like Me, which was chosen against the girls’ wishes to lead with Strip. That song is inspired by the trap style, as the girls sing in triplets while the chorus strips the instrumentation right down to the beat (the song opens a cappella). It’s another self-empowerment anthem that includes the words ‘jiggle’, ‘provocative’ and ‘big ass’. The girls are all grown up!

While promoting the album the girls posed naked with slogans written across their body, drawing the ire of some right-wing commentators. Eventually, frustrated at the circus of promoting their single as young women not taken seriously, Little Mix split with their management. Almost instantly Jesy was able to make her documentary and lift the lid on exactly how damaging the social media trolls can be. Very few pop acts get to album six and still remain relevant; can Little Mix upset the status quo?

Big Acts from the 2010s - Billie Eilish and Lizzo

Billie Eilish – Ocean Eyes, Bury a Friend, Bad Guy, When the Party’s Over

Lizzo – Juice, Truth Hurts, Like a Girl, Good As Hell, My Skin

‘Duh!’ Billie Eilish didn’t even write a chorus for Bad Guy, her Billboard Hot 100 number one, leaving it as an instrumental. The verses (‘so you’re a tough guy, like it really rough guy’) are sung plainly with a layer of computerised vocal line on top, but that ‘duh!’ stands out unadorned by digital effects. Billie was a teenage popstar for a teenage audience who appreciated her candour and her way with melody.

Billie often talks about mental health issues and sexuality: she suffered depression after injury halted her dancing, while her baggy outfits counter any hint of sexualisation. She and her actor brother Finneas, who serves as her producer and co-writer, are children of two actors; their mum was in the same improv troupe, the Groundlings, as Will Ferrell.

As a kid of the social media age, it is scary that 38m people (as of September 2019) follow her Instagram page, which used to be called @wherearetheavocados. She told NME.com that she doesn’t look at it because of the trolls and haters; she also deleted her Twitter account around the time of her album release.

Traditional media is also attracted to her: she was on the cover of the August 2019 edition of Rolling Stone magazine, tidying her room while talking to her interviewer. Finneas describes his sister’s vocal range as ‘between a whisper and a hum’; her tour manager likens her to Portishead or Nine Inch Nails. You can definitely hear it on her breakout hit Bury a Friend, in which layers of Billies intone the album’s title: ‘When we all fall asleep where do we go?’ The satirical line ‘I want to end me’ leads into the breakdown section of the song, which is superbly produced and sounds like Billie’s friend is inside a coffin, so claustrophobic is the percussion.

Before the album and her EP came Ocean Eyes, an astonishing song with a brilliant melody and steady beat. It reminds me of Teardrop by Massive Attack, which I hope is a high compliment. Billie sings ‘I’m scared’ even as she looks into her beau’s huge eyes.

When The Party’s Over, opening with several Billies humming and oohing in harmony, has a chorus which repeats the hook ‘I could lie, say I like it like that’. It’s a break-up song whose video (watched over 380m times as of October 2019) has Billie crying bloody tears as she sings ‘Let’s just let it go, let me let you go’. The one-syllable words match the elegant piano chords on a song which is the centrepiece of her album.

Rather scarily, Billie Eilish is still only 17. Can she be the star of the 2020s, or will she tire of life on the road and in the magazines? Maybe she’ll go to college and tour in the summers, but she seems unstoppable at the moment.

Likewise Lizzo, who plugged away for the entirety of the 2010s before emerging into the mainstream suddenly in 2019. Lizzo plays the flute, wears golden outfits and is Missy Elliot incarnate. Yet it took her years of hustling to break into global consciousness. Previously she had been a sort of cult figure, big in the gay community and with those who knew their hiphop. Then came Juice, the first single from her Cuz I Love You album of 2019. I very rarely have moments when music stops me dead but, when Radio 2 played Juice at 9.20am, I almost stared at the radio. Every line of the song – ‘If I’m shining, everybody gonna shine’, ‘I’m like Chardonnay, get better over time’, ‘yadda-ya-ee’ – is quotable, and Lizzo’s delivery is technicolor. Helped by a fun video, Juice became my favourite song of 2019 on the fourth or fifth day of the year.

Yet it was never a big hit. By September 2019 it only had 35m views. She played it at Glastonbury and in her NPR Tiny (‘Ass!’) Desk session, but why was the world not connecting to it? Was it because a big black woman singing about confidence in spangly outfits was too shocking and new? Was Lizzo just a cartoon version of a fierce black woman?

The album kicks off with the title track, which proves Lizzo can sing as well as play flute. Like a Girl, track two, opens with the line ‘woke up thinking I might just run for president’; presidential candidates, including black woman Kamala Harris, have spoken of their love of Lizzo, while the album is small-p political in the way pop music has tended to be in the 2010s. Lizzo namechecks Serena Williams, TLC and Lauryn Hill and has an awesome chorus which will hit hard in her live shows, which she calls ‘church with a twerk’. Sasha Flute, as she calls her instrument, has its own Instagram page; Lizzo is using social media brilliantly, even if she didn’t like that some music critics didn’t unanimously praise her work (something Lana Del Rey copied later in the year). 

The enormous hit from the album wasn’t actually on the album. Truth Hurts had come out in 2017, with a glossy video showing Lizzo in a wedding dress. Over three chords (C, G and A minor) and a ubiquitous digital-cymbals trap beat, the lyric contained more quotable lines (‘I don’t play tag bitch, I been it’ is my favourite) and the melody is singable in the extreme, because the same melody is sung seven times in the chorus, hammering home the melodic point.

After a performance at the BET Music Awards, in which Lizzo descended from a massive cake, more people were interested in the song; after her MTV Video Music Awards medley with Good As Hell, another hit from before Cuz I Love You, Truth Hurts rose to number one on the Hot 100 to become the second rap sung by a woman to get there since Fancy by Iggy Azalea in 2014. What’s more, Truth Hurts is eligible for the 2020 Grammy Awards with a song that is outside the eligibility period. They have bent the rules for someone who doesn’t play by them anyway.

Good As Hell, which followed Juice onto the Radio 2 playlist (aimed at families), is grounded in the fun chorus: ‘I do my hair toss, check my nails/ Baby how you feeling? (Feeling GOOD as HELL!)’ is a lyrical and melodic hook to match the bridge, where Lizzo encourages her addressee to leave a man ‘if he don’t love you any more’. I wonder how many women (or, indeed, men) have felt the empowerment to do this by the biggest pop star of 2019…

Oddly, like Good As Hell, My Skin came out in the cycle for her second album Big Grrrl Small World. Prompted to write it by a bare-all online video (lines from which appear in the song), Lizzo anticipates the focus on body positivity towards the end of the 2010s. ‘I woke up in this…I can’t wash it away’ goes the chorus over a very minimalistic musical backing, while Lizzo sings and raps of how ‘I gotta love it, no conditions…I wear my skin like a peacoat’. Though the song lacks the funkiness of the big hit records, it is a suitably naked track that reveals Lizzo to be more than a flute-and-twerking cartoon.

Like Lady Gaga and Billie Eilish, Lizzo is using the artifice of pop to smuggle in some decent messages of self-worth to an audience. In 2020, Lizzo’s audience will be listening in greater numbers than in 2015 and 2016, which is certainly good as hell for all concerned.