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March 28, 2024, 11:51:25 PM

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Chart Music Podcast

Started by DrGreggles, September 05, 2017, 07:33:38 PM

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Brundle-Fly

Quote from: Neomod on February 23, 2019, 01:25:01 PM
That episode definitely trailed off in the second half. Not really the team's fault as they were hamstrung by a relatively uninteresting TOTP.

I think CMP has to cover all bases with TOTP eps though, no?  I've been trying to wade through the BBC4 mid-eighties TOTPs and have just given up. Humming that Wookie track all day though. I am 52.

Horses for courses, I suppose?  Is that an IPC publication/t-shirt?

Neomod

Quote from: Brundle-Fly on February 23, 2019, 02:18:49 PM
I think CMP has to cover all bases with TOTP eps though, no?  I've been trying to wade through the BBC4 mid-eighties TOTPs and have just given up. Humming that Wookie track all day though. I am 52.

Horses for courses, I suppose?  Is that an IPC publication/t-shirt?

Oh yeah definitely. It seemed pretty representative of the paltry state of the charts at the time.

Oddly I've been humming that wacky freestyler 'cheese string' track mentioned in the run down.

Epic Bisto

It is quite a lot to take in first time around so will need to listen to this again.  Brilliant stuff regardless.  I just want to give them a hug to make them feel better.

Quote from: jamiefairlie on February 23, 2019, 02:29:52 AMNot my cup of tea this one I'm afraid. 2000 is just yesterday as far as I'm concerned and the music and culture is shit. When you find yourself vehemently defending Craig David, I think you maybe should rethink your position.

Also think Neil and Sarah are my least favourite contributors. Maybe it's because they're younger but I can't get on the same page as them a lot of the time, whereas I find myself usually agreeing with the others.

This would have been around the time that I stopped watching TOTP (maybe a year or two earlier) but it is still fascinating. When you think about it, the Peebles episode covered previously is far more all over the place and it's just confusing to imagine who that particular episode was aimed at (a Dana single that's not in the charts, anyone?). Also, I would pay for a garage-stylee Mad Phil v Gummy Woman single.

Brundle-Fly

Sarah Bee comes out with some understated zingers on this ep. Izal!

DrGreggles

Quote from: dr beat on February 23, 2019, 01:49:17 PM
That '50 ways...alternative nation...' piece looks like it was written by an algorithm.

Like all of late-era MM.

jamiefairlie

Quote from: Neomod on February 23, 2019, 02:30:25 PM
Oh yeah definitely. It seemed pretty representative of the paltry state of the charts at the time.

Oddly I've been humming that wacky freestyler 'cheese string' track mentioned in the run down.

That was easily the worst chart they've featured so far. Not one track of worth and so much ego bursting out everywhere, the style to substance ratio was trending towards infinity.

I really don't get the whole MM thing here either. I kind of understand the temptation to do an 'us against them' rallying the troops kind of thing but throwing your lot in with Limp Bizkit, nu-metal and all that lumpen post-britpop indie landfill?  On the other hand we have the likes of Craig David, Ronan Keating and Robbie Williams, all just variations on the same sort of mainstream mum pleasing fodder. So a pretend made up war between essentially two different variations of crap. Like Trump vs Hilary, whoopee!


The real sadness with the MM story here was that even 10 years previously, there would have been enough quality indie bands around to not have to bother with any of that mob but Britpop really did a number on UK music and the music press and they started to chase the Loaded/TFI Friday crowd and lost a lot of readers in the process.

jamiefairlie

Quote from: Ballad of Ballard Berkley on February 23, 2019, 07:48:26 AM
They didn't vehemently defend Craig David, they said he was 'alright' while making a wider point about the narrow-minded, borderline racist orthodoxy of white indie music journalism at the turn of the 21st century and its dire influence on the sort of boring cunts who think Noel Gallagher is some sort of keeping it real genius.

Also, I dunno how old you are, but Neil and Sarah are in their early to mid forties.

I'm a couple of years younger than David Stubbs, so older than the rest I think.

I totally agree with the dire state of guitar rock at this time (I wouldn't even call it Indie, it's certainly not what I grew up with as Indie, either in style or in attitudes) but Craig David and all those Garage micro-genres were just as awful, just an updated form of the vacuous Sade type wine bar, sophisticated, elitist shit we had to put up with in the 80s.

Doing an episode from this time has a value for unearthing the feel of the time but I found it much less celebratory and funny than usual.

Epic Bisto

There was nothing special on that TOTP episode, but it was all harmless enough (except for ARE LAD ROBY who is a cancer). The 1987 episode probably featured the worst music so far.

buzby

Blimey, that was a bit of an epic. I can fully sympathise with Neil's (justifiable) anger, having been part of a well-respected company that was driven into bankruptcy by marketing wankers and management consultants. Like he says at the end, most of the people I used to work with still regard it as the best job and working environment they ever had. I do remember seeing that Craig David MM cover in the shop in our works canteen (we still had a shop and canteen then) and thinking it was reprehensible. It was good to hear him pulling no punches and naming names.

KaptainKulk, if you ever read this, look up any of Mansun's other albums (particularly Six) before Little Kix - the songs on that album were basically dictated to Draper by the record company after Six didn't sell. Somehow it doesn't seem much of a surprise to hear that music journalists of that had written them off with the rest of the landfill britpop of that era.
Quote from: Neomod on February 23, 2019, 01:25:01 PM
Paul Draper eh.. tut tut.
It's not like telling Caitlin Moran to fuck off is the first #metoo-related thing he's done since his comeback, or the oddest (sacking his band mid-gig in a 'tired and emotional' state) . He clearly has issues, unfortunately.

Al- it wasn't Pepsi & Shirlie with Robbie Williams, it was Tessa Niles and Gina Foster, his regular backing singers (on the record it was Tessa, Katie Kissoon and Sylvia Mason-James - all three have been popping up regularly on the TOTP thread of late).

Presumably it was TV's actual Paul Putner who provided this episode? And he used to go out with Lucifire too?

Custard

Neil hating Robbie Williams yet Sarah liking him is why their combo tends to work really well. A lot of combinations on the podcast tend to mostly agree with each other about artists or songs, and I find it more interesting when people's opinions differ

I wonder if news of this episode will somehow get back to Mark Sutherland? I can't imagine the stress and pressure of running a dying music paper in the 90's, but he does come across as an absolute ballbag. "Non white faces don't sell papers". I mean, fucking 'eck

Neomod

Quote from: Shameless Custard on February 24, 2019, 01:14:39 PM
Neil hating Robbie Williams yet Sarah liking him is why their combo tends to work really well.

Sarah seemed to be fascinated with Williams's and Keating's trousers more than the music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gB0MxBMMKHM

On coherence of format, TOTP probably only really had a totally consistent policy around 1981-1987 as to eligibility of which singles could appear, or whom their market was (teens to mid-20s). It was "family audience" driven before and after: in the 70s it was produced by the same people doing Light Entertainment BBC2 shows (hence non-charting shit like Dana) and from 1988 it had to accommodate the Neighbours audience when Kylie and Jason were dominating the charts.


Brundle-Fly

Quote from: jamiefairlie on February 24, 2019, 06:46:38 AM
I'm a couple of years younger than David Stubbs, so older than the rest I think.

I totally agree with the dire state of guitar rock at this time (I wouldn't even call it Indie, it's certainly not what I grew up with as Indie, either in style or in attitudes) but Craig David and all those Garage micro-genres were just as awful, just an updated form of the vacuous Sade type wine bar, sophisticated, elitist shit we had to put up with in the 80s.

Doing an episode from this time has a value for unearthing the feel of the time but I found it much less celebratory and funny than usual.

Of course, discussing a TOTP from 2000 will not resonate as much to a person in their early fifties but it might to somebody in their early thirties.

Brundle-Fly

Quote from: Shameless Custard on February 24, 2019, 01:14:39 PM


I wonder if news of this episode will somehow get back to Mark Sutherland? I can't imagine the stress and pressure of running a dying music paper in the 90's, but he does come across as an absolute ballbag. "Non white faces don't sell papers". I mean, fucking 'eck

It was a well-known and sad fact in the indie music press that sales would drop if they put a non-white face on the cover. For such a progressive rebellious artform, most rock/ serious music fans were and evidently still so conservative.
 

Mark Steels Stockbroker

Liked the stuff about Melody Maker, though it didn't tell me more than I'd learned from internet forum posts from Pricey and Parkesy over the years (including a few on CaB).

Didn't bother listening to the stuff about the episode of TOTP I'd have never watched at the time.

Another thing: totally agree with the bit when Kulkarni said that after a certain age you just stop noticing the years, and it all blurs together and the past seems nearer than it is. For me, it was after 2006, though it gets a bit complicated because of my illness and how I can't really have a "mid life crisis" as a result.

DrGreggles

Quote from: Mark Steels Stockbroker on February 24, 2019, 03:07:28 PM
Another thing: totally agree with the bit when Kulkarni said that after a certain age you just stop noticing the years, and it all blurs together and the past seems nearer than it is. For me, it was after 2006, though it gets a bit complicated because of my illness and how I can't really have a "mid life crisis" as a result.

Mine was probably 2003ish when Mark & Lard left Radio 1.
Never heard it since (and it was pretty fucking unbearable then), so any knowledge I had of the chart scene* was lost forever.

*and George Esra

Brundle-Fly

I don't even think it's a middle age concern. Even my twelve year nephew once bemoaned that time was flying by. At his age, a two hour car journey to a holiday destination felt like an age. It's the 'no boredom anymore' thing.

As Al said, there has to be a massive event like 9/11 for the year to stick in the memory at all. Certainly I could not measure the years in music era terms because none of the supposed eras have any meaning after Britpop, and even Britpop is a somewhat dubious genre containing incompatible acts.

Johnboy

I was wary of this episode but I got into it

That Melody Maker list is grim stuff - it's like the polar opposite of the NME party line during the Neil Spencer/Richard Cook mid 80s era i.e. soul/jazz/hip hop is superior to rock

Love hearing Al get noticeably upset about TOTP showing a song that dropped from the the number one slot, he's dead right

TOTP and MM - flippin' entropy, eh?

studpuppet

I listened to the latest one and have only one observation:
If you say out loud 'I know how to swear properly', then you probably don't, and every 'fuck' you utter clangs like an anvil falling on a solid steel floor (particularly when you awkwardly shoehorn a multitude of them into the next three sentences after you say it).

Blue Jam

I had got a bit bored with the Chart Music Podcast after too many early 70's ones, so it was good to see one about an episode made after I was born, and to hear them talking about an era of Melody Maker that I remember all too well- maybe I'm biased but I thought this was the best episode yet.

All the talk of sneering attitudes to Craig David got me thinking about Daphne and Celeste even before Sarah Bee mentioned them. Unlike Neil Kulkarni I had been an Oasis/Britpop fan, but after that I was into big beat, then other electronic music and hip hop, and I hated a lot of bands like Embrace, Coldplay, Toploader etc so by 2000 I definitely wasn't on board with all that sneering about real music. I also thought Daphne and Celeste were fucking hilarious- their music was funny and there was something a bit subversive about them, they always seemed to be taking the piss. I remember one interview where they were asked "Why did you do a cover of School's Out?" and they answered "Because our record company told us to!". I remember being pretty angry when I read about the Reading Festival incident, with people forgetting they were a pair of teenage girls as they pelted them with bottles of piss.

Years layer I used to post on a different forum where one poster would occasionally boast that he had been in the crowd that day, gleefully joining in with the piss bottle-throwing. I always used to read those posts and think: "Cunt".

SteveDave

The same thing happened to Daphne and Celeste at Cardiff student union when they played there. It was awful. They got through about 20 seconds of "U.G.L.Y." before a room full of insecure boys wearing big shorts and caps starting chucking stuff at them. They cowered behind the DJ booth before leaving.

Blue Jam

It seems weird when you consider how different things are now, when Taylor Swift can play Glastonbury and no-one bats an eyelid.

...and it seems Daphne and Celeste have now reformed and made an album produced by Max Tundra....

Blue Jam

#1763
"In your ear with a can of beer/Up your butt with a coconut"

I'd take those lyrics over Embrace any day. Wtf is wrong with people...

EDIT: I see the clip of the Reading performance is on YouTube, and the girls come across much better than that ugly crowd. Top trolling, watching this made me consider that they might be the most punk rock band who have ever played Reading:

https://youtu.be/_hnxies4Wtk

daf

That whole crowd would be straight up before the beak these days - boorish oafs!

gilbertharding

I was in a crowd at Reading in 1990 who was throwing lumps of dried mud at a band called An Emotional Fish. This was early on in a day where the other bands included Mudhoney, Mega City 4 and the Cramps. An Emotional Fish were an ersatz grunge band whose tour was sponsored by Radio 1. I didn't join in with the mud throwing, but I heartily concurred with the sentiment behind it. The singer, in white trousers, at one stage picked up a clod of turf and wore it as a wig.

I wasn't there two years earlier when Bonnie Tyler was pelted with bottles of urine. Awful, of course - but in 1988 urine throwing at festivals was merely a continuation of a fine British tradition. There's footage on the Led Zeppelin Live DVD of crowds at Knebworth hurling open bottles at each other. That's rockers for you, I guess.

Daphne and Celeste are great, of course. Totally punk.

Jockice

Quote from: gilbertharding on March 01, 2019, 02:40:08 PM
I was in a crowd at Reading in 1990 who was throwing lumps of dried mud at a band called An Emotional Fish. This was early on in a day where the other bands included Mudhoney, Mega City 4 and the Cramps. An Emotional Fish were an ersatz grunge band whose tour was sponsored by Radio 1. I didn't join in with the mud throwing, but I heartily concurred with the sentiment behind it. The singer, in white trousers, at one stage picked up a clod of turf and wore it as a wig.

I wasn't there two years earlier when Bonnie Tyler was pelted with bottles of urine. Awful, of course - but in 1988 urine throwing at festivals was merely a continuation of a fine British tradition. There's footage on the Led Zeppelin Live DVD of crowds at Knebworth hurling open bottles at each other. That's rockers for you, I guess.

Daphne and Celeste are great, of course. Totally punk.

I'm jealous.I actually had a ticket for that but the bastards at work wouldn't give me the day off so I went down on the Saturday. Inspiral Carpets headlined that evening and were actually (and fairly surprisingly) jolly good, but I wish I'd been able to see The Cramps, a band I very nearly saw three times but never did. And it's too late now

I was at Reading the Bonnie Tyler year too. But I didn't go that day. I believe Deacon Blue got it bad too. The day I went to had The Ramones and Iggy Pop as the two main acts but nobody would dare bottle them.

Brundle-Fly

Talk Talk got booed off at a Genesis gig. Cardiacs got booed off at a Marillion gig. 

The average fifty-six-year-old Prog Rock magazine subscriber now claim that they always adored this quartet of bands (similarly, other 'post punk targets' : pre Aha stuff, pre-Crowded House, early Split Enz shit, Nick Beggs from Kajagoogoo, Francis Dunnery from It Bites)

Cape-wearing hypocritical cunts.*


*obviously, people mature and should not be held to ransom to opinions they held nearly forty years ago.








DrGreggles

Of course Daphne and Celeste are great.
They were terrific fun to start with (I loved how much they took the piss), but now their songs are actually decent too.

Brundle-Fly