'Ha ha, look - these people have interests! Losers!'

[Emergency Lalla Ward Ten]

A nasty, sneery little Guardian article from Johhny Sharp (nee Cigarettes):

Chart and soul

For psephologists, the chart rundown can be 'better than sex'. But how can they keep this obsession at number one for so many years running? New entry Johnny Sharp found out

Alan Smith is not happy. The 50 year-old chartologist from Wolverhampton, ("Actually it's psephologist," he insists, "p-s-e-p-h...") is still smarting about scandalous errors in the current edition of the Guinness Book Of British Hit Singles And Albums.

"The worst crime of all," he seethes, "is that they say that the Rolling Stones' 19th Nervous Breakdown only reached the No 2 position, yet on the 19th and 26th February 1966 and the 6th March 1966, it was No 1 in the charts published in Disc magazine, Melody Maker, and New Musical Express. It was also No 1 on Top Of The Pops. But the Guinness book tells us it wasn't, because they've used the chart from Record Retailer magazine, which was based on a small sample size."

Some readers might argue that this attitude lacks perspective. But Smith is not alone in his obsessive devotion to the UK pop charts. Like toby jug collectors or people who can name more than three Motörhead songs, there is a small but fiercely passionate group of people for whom the charts are more than just a weekly list of the bestselling records.

It is an essential rite of passage for all young pop pickers to tape the Top 40 at teatime on a Sunday. However, such habits tend to lose their grip around the age of 14 or 15, when considerations such as exams, sex and substance abuse take over.

Not Matt White from Suffolk. In fact, his interest in the charts became obsession as a 15-year-old when Bryan Adams enjoyed an extraordinary 16 weeks at No 1 with Everything I Do (I Do It For You). You get the distinct impression it was this statistic rather than the lumpy-faced balladeer's romantic epic that thrilled his teenage soul to its core.

He began taking down the charts in a log book in pencil, painstakingly recording artist names, song titles, previous week's placings, movement up and down the chart and weeks on the chart. Naturally, by the time he reached adulthood he had graduated to a more sophisticated methodology - he began using biros and coloured highlighter pens. Now 31, he has finally embraced the computer age. "I do them on spreadsheets now. It all sounds a bit nerdy really, doesn't it?"

PhD student Elliot Costi, 26, from Plumstead has had a similarly arrested development since the age of 13. "I still listen to the Top 40 countdown on a Sunday, and I still note it all down. I am that sad," he laughs. "Anorak? Yeah, I suppose I am. Do I live at home with my mum? Yeah I do actually. But only for financial reasons, while I'm at college..."

"I was 9 or 10 when I started writing down the charts," admits 39-year-old Essex soul boy Andy Gregory. "And I just never stopped. Tragic, isn't it?"

To each their own. So what is the enduring appeal?

"It's the excitement of the ups and downs," enthuses Dutch radio DJ Gerard Ekdom. "It's better than sex."

Are you sure?

"In a way, yes," laughs the 26- year-old Amsterdammer. "I always loved the British charts, then I discovered The Guinness Book Of British Hit Singles And Albums. It's like porn for music fans. I'm serious. I look at that book every night before I go to bed."

How does your wife feel about this?

"She's OK, she likes music too. We called our son Lennon - he's one year old, and he already loves Beatles songs."

Such obsession may seem all the more eccentric because until recently, the singles charts were less interesting than ever.

Not so long ago, the charts really seemed to matter. Even Michael Buerk knew about the Blur/Oasis chart battle in 1995. In recent years, though, record labels have let radio stations play their singles weeks up front of release, meaning their popularity invariably peaks with a high new entry, followed by a slow drift down the chart. Even battles for the top spot have been boring - did anyone outside tabloid HQs really care about Posh Spice versus Sophie Ellis-Bextor in 2000? Top Of The Pops' demise also suggests the charts are no longer such a big deal.

"It did get boring," admits Matt White. "In 2000, there were 42 No 1s in a 52-week year. The No 1 lost its value."

This year, though, the thrills seemed to return, courtesy of download sales being counted towards the charts. With singles being released as downloads shortly before the CD version, songs are entering the chart relatively low on initial download sales, then shooting up the charts when the CD is released.

"The download chart has really brought back the excitement for me," says Matt White. "Songs are now going in low and leaping a huge amount of places."

The life of a chart obsessive would appear to be a solitary one.

"Who else are you talking to?" asks Andy Gregory. "Not many women, I bet."

He's correct on that score. Most appear to be confirmed bachelors, several yet to fly the family nest. But at least some chart fans have actually turned their passion into a career. Ray Spiller, who is 52, spent three years buying up every No 1 single since Al Martino's Here In My Heart, the first No 1, in 1952. It cost him over £3,000, but he has since made that money back with mobile discos and afterdinner speaking. "I can play you whatever single was at No 1 when you were born, or were married, and tell you some facts about it."

Mock if you must, but the very nature of our charts has helped build Britain's enduring reputation for breaking new music.

"The American charts are based on airplay," points out chart consultant Dave McAleer. "That means their charts are decided by radio controllers - blokes in suits who stick to the tried and trusted. In contrast, our sales-based chart dictates what gets played on the radio. Major musical revolutions like punk or hip-hop or acid house would never have grown so big so quickly under the American system, because the records wouldn't have been played. That's one reason why so much new music is discovered here first."

Does chart analysis make for refined musical tastes? That's debatable. Elliot Costi's favourite No 1 is 2 Unlimited's epically daft No Limit. Matt White's is Sadness By Enigma. Dave McAleer's is the Timelords' Doctorin' The Tardis.

Still, at least one chart trendspotter has changed history in his own small way. Alan Smith goes where other chart obsessives fear (or possibly can't be arsed) to tread. He and fellow researcher Keith Badman recently made an amazing discovery.

"I found that there was an album chart that went all the way back to July 28 1956," he explains, "rather than the previously accepted date of November 8 1958. Incredible."

For chartologists, this must be roughly equivalent to Howard Carter's discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in the Valley Of The Kings in 1922.

"I was amazed that no one had ever bothered to find this out before..."

You might not share that amazement, but let's just be thankful that someone is keeping the chart flame alive. Even if that's just because it means that you don't have to.

[Ciarán2]

I have never really understood why Johnny Cigarettes ever decided to write about music at all. He doesn't seem to love rock and pop does he? It's as if he decided to be a journalist and then stuck a pin in a list of potential journalistic jobs. And he's written a heck of a lot of stuff in the NME down the years that has got my goat.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

coloured highlighter pens.

HAHA! The sad cunts!

After all, what good has come of record keeping in the history of mankind? Not very much, I'd bet.

[23 Daves]

I have never really understood why Johnny Cigarettes ever decided to write about music at all. He doesn't seem to love rock and pop does he? It's as if he decided to be a journalist and then stuck a pin in a list of potential journalistic jobs. And he's written a heck of a lot of stuff in the NME down the years that has got my goat.

He probably had mates in bands and realised it would make him look cool and get laid if he could infiltrate the music industry.  I met the bloke once back in the nineties when I took part in a pub music quiz and found him to be a drunken, obnoxious prick.  To be fair, I'm sure most of us aren't that pleasant when we're inebriated, but he positively whiffed of Nathan Barley-esque shallow arrogance.  Still, we beat his team.  Ha! (but according to him, that would probably just mean that we were sadder than him, and therefore in reality, he actually won.  And I'm very sure that's the kind of half-hearted "witty" response he'd give, as well).

Erm... anyway... I think the "sad collector who stays at home with his parents" stereotype has come about for a reason, purely because people who are single minded in any respect tend to be much more insular.  But it's interesting that you never tend to read about it in relation to other groups of people - lead guitarists, for example.  Obsessive football fans who know every team fixture and score since 1960, to quote a better instance, which is always seen as being a manly thing to do.  Or chess players.  They never seem to cop quite the same amount of lazy cliches, which I've always found telling.

[mayer]

Hmmm, I tend to disagree with that Daves, and think it's possibly because you're closer to the collector type and more aware of the awful clichés. I mean, Angus Loughran was hardly percieved to be a sex god, he was seen as a wimpy four-eyed loser, albeit a charming one. Chess-players were certainly not held aloft the shoulders of their peers when I used to play.

I didn't think the article was that sneery or nasty myself. A little crap, certainly, but I think you're overstating the sneer factor there. The TOTP interviews over the page were brilliant I thought, incidentally.

[23 Daves]

Hmmm, I tend to disagree with that Daves, and think it's possibly because you're closer to the collector type and more aware of the awful clichés. I mean, Angus Loughran was hardly percieved to be a sex god, he was seen as a wimpy four-eyed loser, albeit a charming one. Chess-players were certainly not held aloft the shoulders of their peers when I used to play.

That's probably a bad example, in retrospect.  Americans who can reem off endless facts about baseball games aren't seen as "nerds who still live with their parents" though, so that would have been a better example.  People who are obsessed with car maintenance, that's another thing that's accepted by the blokey mainstream.

I didn't think the article was that sneery or nasty myself. A little crap, certainly, but I think you're overstating the sneer factor there. The TOTP interviews over the page were brilliant I thought, incidentally.

It was very unimaginatively written, I felt, and didn't particularly tell us anything new.  And probably I am picking on Johnny Cigarettes in particular because he's written reems of hopeless crap.

But you're correct, the TOTP article was very insightful, to the extent that I'm considering cutting it out to keep it.  But that'll be my collecting tendencies, I suppose.

[The Mumbler]

Knowing that the charts are contrived and prone to hype didn't make listening to the chart rundown any less exciting.

I was that "sad cunt".  Record Mirror's printing of the entire Gallup Top 100 singles and albums charts during the 80s made it as much of an essential puchase as the NME or Smash Hits (an iffy mag otherwise, mind).  Charts aren't everything, but what's replaced such a fascination is a different sort of list obsession - All-Time Top 100s, Best-Ever Whatevers, Remember That Time? etc.   With the added snob factor of rock being more important.

The best thing about old charts is the way they freeze in time your past.  I have a pretty good recall for dates, and I'm sure that has something to do with associating pop with times in my life.  I associate May 1982, for instance, far more readily with Adam Ant's Goody Two Shoes or ABC's The Look of Love than with the sinking of the Belgrano.

I hate Johnny Sharp.  The Charlie Brooker of music criticism, he basically pilfers from David Quantick (who, unlike Sharp, actually did/does love pop), and has set up a template for all faux-aloof music journos currently stinking up weeklies and monthlies alike.

[Bert Thung]

What's the difference between hating pop and hating Big Brother? I suppose I'd class myself as a pop hater, much for the same reasons as I hate reality television.

What's the difference in saying "you've got to admit it's great pop" and "you've got to admit it's great television"?

[The Mumbler]

What's the difference between hating pop and hating Big Brother? I suppose I'd class myself as a pop hater, much for the same reasons as I hate reality television.

What's the difference in saying "you've got to admit it's great pop" and "you've got to admit it's great television"?

Well, they're both awful phrases.  

Quantick liked pop* at a time when such a thing really was frowned upon at the NME.  Actually, what set him apart was his utter hatred of most indie rock and U2, the stuff that, at the time, sold most of the paper's circulation.  This made a refreshing change.  Of course, now, every music journo feels the need to say that they like Girls Aloud when all's said and done.  

*By pop, I mean that he loved Pet Shop Boys (whom I love), Wet Wet Wet (whom I loathe), and the concept of singles generally.  But he drew the line at most of Stock Aitken Waterman's output - in other words, he didn't rate disposability for its own sake.  Just because 12 year old girls like something doesn't make it inherently better than what students like.  Or vice versa, if you like.

[The Mumbler]

I used to work with Andy Gregory actually.  A really nice bloke, and I wonder what he's doing now.

[Bert Thung]

Strange that in some ways it's more of a taboo now to hate The Monkees than it is to hate The Beatles.

[cleverjake]

coloured highlighter pens.

instead of those uncoloured ones...

[Emergency Lalla Ward Ten]

I don't think I'm overstating the sneer factor  at all - that article's one big raised eyebrow to the gallery. 'Why can't they just like music normally, eh lads?' Plus he adds bits of 'affection' (all the 'thank God somebody's doing it' stuff) to show that he doesn't really hate them. He does, though. It's full of 'Ha ha, they don't have girlfriends' stuff.

But that's a problem with bollocks like the Guardian Guide generally. It's there for a gentle chuckle over your dolcelatte ciabatta and not much else. It's not there to provide actual information, or to inspire you to think differently.

And yes, Sharp was always an ersatz Quantick. Somebody who tried to bottle the style of old NME and use it to his own advantage. He never seemed to be interested in music at all - he could just write what people like Richard Littejohn call 'copy'.

[gazzyk1ns]

"She's OK, she likes music too. We called our son Lennon - he's one year old, so by the time he's old enough to develop his own musical tastes, it will take him several years to shrug off the fact that he was force-fed Beatles stuff from a stupidly early age, if indeed he manages to do that at all. It's very likely that during his teenage years, he will develop a dislike for me because I unreasonably insist that he should be into the music that I was into when I was his age. The fact that my own father disapproved of The Beatles when I was mad about them seems to have been lost on me."

[A Passing Turk Slipper]

shit, ignore this post, sorry

[mayer]

I think the article is much less

one big raised eyebrow to the gallery.

and much more

what people like Richard Littejohn call 'copy'.

which is why it's total shit. I mean, if you had a handful of interview transcripts and were told to write the most obvious, pointless "copy" that you could, and have it on my desk by five, you'd have that article. There's no personality, or point, in that article at all. Like I say, less a sneer and more a damp pay-check endorsing sigh. It could've been written by a machine, probably.

But that's a problem with bollocks like the Guardian Guide generally. It's there for a gentle chuckle over your dolcelatte ciabatta and not much else. It's not there to provide actual information, or to inspire you to think differently.

I know you've quoted heavily from the Guide this weekend (as always), but why no comment on that TOTP feature, which me and Daves both enjoyed? My only criticism of it was that it was far too short, but I understand the constraints of space, and maybe any more would've dulled the effect. I thought it was a fantastic article, full of information, emotion and genuine-ness, and I'm suprised that you've quoted the two shit articles from Guide without a single mention of the rather good one anywhere, one which would be right up your street, or so I believe.

Also, I always, always like Jacques Peretti, because his articles are smart, witty and funny.

[The Mumbler]

Trevor Dann writes quite an insightful TOTP piece for (The) Word magazine this month.  (He was Head of BBC Music & Entertainment in the late 90s when Chris Cowey was producing the programme.)

[Emergency Lalla Ward Ten]

I know you've quoted heavily from the Guide this weekend (as always), but why no comment on that TOTP feature, which me and Daves both enjoyed? My only criticism of it was that it was far too short, but I understand the constraints of space, and maybe any more would've dulled the effect. I thought it was a fantastic article, full of information, emotion and genuine-ness, and I'm suprised that you've quoted the two shit articles from Guide without a single mention of the rather good one anywhere, one which would be right up your street, or so I believe.

Some nice bits in that article, yes (especially the image of Mike Read strumming Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds while everyone looked at the floor), but why is it strange that I haven't posted it on here? After all, what could I say about it?

The only reason I posted the Prose and Cons/Chart and Soul articles is because the attitudes therein pissed me off. The TOTP article just didn't provoke enough of an extreme reaction, really. Other than redressing the balance in a 'hey, the Guardian's not all bad' way (and why should I be obliged to do that?), there'd have been no point.

Also, the reason why that TOTP article's quite good is that - aside from the occasional pair of square brackets - it features no editorial comment whatsoever.

[rudi]

Is it up on the GU site (the TOTP article)?

Only I didn't get the pape yesterday.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

It's not there to provide actual information,

Was I hallucinating when I read the new film releases, film listings, theatre listings, TV listings and radio listings then? Fuck, I hope I wasn't!

[trotsky assortment]

I have never really understood why Johnny Cigarettes ever decided to write about music at all. He doesn't seem to love rock and pop does he? It's as if he decided to be a journalist and then stuck a pin in a list of potential journalistic jobs. And he's written a heck of a lot of stuff in the NME down the years that has got my goat.

I've seen him rubbishing rock bands of a certain vintage in the NME and yet praising the same ones (using his real name as opposed to Cigarettes) in other publications.  Journalism like that really fucks me off.

[Johnny Yesno]

The name Johnny Cigarettes has always been too close to Johnny Vegas for me to take him seriously. Ooh! Your surname's a vice - rock on, Johnny!

[Emergency Lalla Ward Ten]

Was I hallucinating when I read the new film releases, film listings, theatre listings, TV listings and radio listings then?

The ones that weren't reviewed in any detail whatsoever? No, I saw those.

[23 Daves]

The name Johnny Cigarettes has always been too close to Johnny Vegas for me to take him seriously. Ooh! Your surname's a vice - rock on, Johnny!

Wasn't that his nickname at school because he was the only one tall enough and old-looking enough to buy cigarettes for everyone else?  Not that this is an excuse - what other journalist can you think of whose pen-name was also their school nickname?

If memory serves, he hasn't always bothered to be critically consistent even within the confines of the same magazine, so his contradictions across different periodicals don't especially surprise me.  He's a hack, really - he'll write what he thinks the target audience or the editor wants to hear on any given day.  See also:  Just about every music journalist employed by the NME at the moment (in fact, I'd even go as far as to say that Cigarettes was the blueprint for the style of the NME's current shite period).

[Johnny Yesno]

Wasn't that his nickname at school because he was the only one tall enough and old-looking enough to buy cigarettes for everyone else?  Not that this is an excuse - what other journalist can you think of whose pen-name was also their school nickname?

Well, there's, um, Tony Smelly and Julie Fingers and Paul Wedgie and...

He's a hack, really - he'll write what he thinks the target audience or the editor wants to hear on any given day.

He always appears on any TV clip shows about music doing that very thing. I was looking for a picture of him but google can't find any. For someone who mocks geeks I seem to remember he looks pretty geeky.

[Johnny Yesno]

Haha! A Cigarettes mention from here:

During the '90's I must have seen them [Thee Headcoats] 60 times, I even went over to Japan with them in 1993. There was something really natural about them, no bullshit. We did the 'We hate The Fuckin' NME' single after a sad old journo (Johnny Cigarettes) walked out of their gig in Archway after insisting that he should get in for free as he was from the NME and then reviewing Thee Headcoatees by saying their was no girls in the band (he left before they came onstage!!).

[Emergency Lalla Ward Ten]

He was the Argos Steven Wells.