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The Revisionism of Pop History And What I Plan To Do About It

All histories of pop music are a little bit revisionist. You can’t not revise. There’s too much data. Faced with even just the UK Singles Chart, you come up against 12 songs per week from 1952, 30 songs per week from 1956, and the sheer numbers force you to start editing history to keep things manageable. Then, you bulk history back up by adding your favourite songs, even though they barely grazed number 96 for a week.

This gives you an excellent, really personal pop history. I’m thinking of Bob Stanley’s Yeah Yeah Yeah here; a deeply personal book in which he recounts his love of girl groups, makes the case for Sweet, and dismisses Queen as a bombastic irrelevance.

Bob’s book inspired me to engage with pop on a different level. I no longer wanted to filter my view of the past through the carefully curated and distilled pop canon we have in 2017. I wanted to find out what happened to the charts since we lost contact some time in the late ’90s, like an old friend you lost contact with only to find they live just down the road. I wanted the real story, Wombles records and all, and I didn’t want to stop the book at some arbitrary point where the charts stopped “being good”.

I have a plan. I’m going to build a massive Spotify playlist, and then I’m going to go through it in order and write about it, year by year, with an embedded playlist for your listening pleasure (or lack thereof). From “Rock Around The Clock” to “Roar”. I’m going to be informal, opinionated, and probably extremely angry about the 1970s. It’s going to be accidentally revisionist and deliberately autobiographical. Think of it less as an authoritative history and more of a Eurovision commentary turned outward to the real world. I hope you enjoy the ride.

The Methodology

I started out with a very simple set of rules. I was only going to look at the UK Singles Chart, I was going to do it in strict chronological order, and I was only going to count singles that were actually big. I didn’t want to pick out records that barely troubled the tills at HMV because they did something that later turned out to be important; I wanted to experience these things as they happened, at the point they’d have been the domain of car radios and Dansettes rather than collectors and obsessives.

To support this, I needed a notion of “bigness”. I picked a simple one: I benchmarked the number of weeks a record spent in the top 40 against its average position while it was there, compared to what would have been typical for a top 40 record released in that year. It’s not perfect, but it says that the Bryan Adams song and Wet Wet Wet’s zero value added cover of “Love Is All Around” are massive in a way that really early Travis aren’t, which is kind of good enough.

It doesn’t need to be any better, because I barely got two years into the 1950s before I realised a huge problem. Charts in the early 1950s were horrible. And I don’t mean that in a sense of, “look at all those silly people in the past listening to Mantovani.” There are a tiny handful of basic song templates, and these things survive. They see off rock and roll, they see off skiffle — hell, even after “Telstar” comes out people are still seeing hits off retreads of Al Martino’s “Here In My Heart”, big swelling string intros and all.

Almost without thinking, I started revising. An Anthony Newley novelty record that was a massive hit slips off the playlist here, a Fats Domino track that only made the shallowest of dents on the chart makes it on there. Here’s where I codified the final rule, the “Matt ain’t gonna make it past 1956 if we don’t have this” rule. Providing a track had at least some presence in the top 40, I had the right to include it. But I also had the right to exclude it unless it was absolutely enormous. It’s my one deliberate concession to revisionism and getting half a shot at telling a coherent story. The rest is accidental.

When Pop Moved Away And We Lost Touch

Before I delve into a history of pop, you need to know my history with pop.

The first record I ever remember liking, as a distinct thing to request that we listen to in the family living room, was “Somewhere Down The Crazy River”by Robbie Robertson. I think it must have been soon after it was released, in the short period of time between us moving to our 1930s chalet bungalow and my parents divorcing. I was six or seven years old; too young to handle the record myself, only able to request that we listen to the “blue train song”.

I haven’t listened to that record in nearly thirty years, and yet playing it now I can recall every little bit that appealed to me all those years ago. The interplay between bass and drums on the intro bringing to mind mists and swamps; Robbie’s smoky voice; the cut into smooth chorus. It’s a good record.

The first record I remember understanding as pop, as an artefact that was defined by how many other people liked it, was not a good record. I was in Year 6 at the time, the last year of what we used to call middle school. As seniors, we’d been given the run of an old music centre, a wood-veneered edifice with a turntable and a cassette player in it. One day a kid called David brought in it. A cassette copy of “Come On You Reds” by the Manchester United Football Squad. I did warn you this was not a good record.

What it was, however, was a pop record. This was the midst of United fever. The team was a brand, bordering on a religion in school halls. And now they’ve got their logo on something you could put on the music centre, wick up the volume, and all these kids are like, “yeah, this is here and this is now and this is ours” — at least until our teacher came back and gave us a massive bollocking for making a racket and dancing on the chairs like idiots.

Wait… step back.

It’s safe to say that the beginning of 1994 was not one of pop’s vintage periods on the surface, being rife with novelty songs (“Mr Blobby”, “Come On You Reds”, “Doop”) and schmaltz-fests that stunk up the charts for months (“All For Love”, “Love Is All Around”). Especially when for me it coincided with the rapid and deliberate maturing in taste that comes with Being Eleven, where novelty records go from a hilarious must-listen to silly kids’ stuff within months.

As a result, most of my early musical education came courtesy of Capital Gold on the way to and from my dad’s house every other weekend. My dad had this habit of buying old, fairly interesting cars that somehow all featured busted tape decks; so we’d end up in this bright red Honda Prelude listening to AM radio and discussing the finer points of whether “Itchycoo Park” or “Lazy Sunday” was the better Small Faces record, or his ever-favourite topic of who from the band had died, gone on to something better or decided to pack it all in and work in a furniture shop instead.

At this point I was so divorced from the charts that the first album I went down the West Byfleet branch of Woolworths and spent my own money on was a cassette copy of Queen’s “Greatest Hits”, the digital remasters having just been released. The charts were full of soppy songs and baby stuff. Plus, they had another problem. Secondary school.

Middle school was never really big enough to support distinct social groups. You had kids who didn’t like each other, but it took the weight and mass of secondary to make us fracture into cliques. That’s when I found out there were groups you couldn’t be a part of. See, I was a nerdy oddball kid. It wasn’t okay to be into computers or electronics or anything like that in the early ’90s, and to cap it off I had this kind of nasal South London accent in an era where basically everyone who lived in Surrey spoke RP. Nobody’s fussed about any of this when you’re little but once you hit secondary school, that stuff gets noticed big time.

Each clique had its own musical terms of reference. For the popular set, those terms were Capital FM, East 17 and Take That. Where this left me and my ragtag gang of equally oddball friends was with a view that pop music and the charts therefore weren’t for people like us, and ought to be ignored. Instead, we’d bond over a shared love of Queen, dismiss Abba as too overtly pop and ponder the possibility that all good music had already been made by the end of 1991. Then… something changed.

We’d like to go to town but we can’t risk it,
Oh, cause they just want to keep us out,
You could end up with a smack in the mouth,
Just for standing out now really

…as Jarvis Cocker so eloquently put it in 1995. NB: Please do not read the lyrics whilst listening to the recordings. “Mis-Shapes” was big. But forget the single: its parent album, “Different Class”, was enormous. We learnt about this thing called the album chart. The album chart was for people like us. It was packed with bands like Pulp and the Manic Street Preachers whose lyrics spoke to us, gave voice to our struggles, made us feel like we belonged to something bigger in the same way “Come On You Reds” had done eighteen months and an eternity ago.

I started watching Top Of The Pops. Every time something whose natural home was the album chart made its way onto the singles chart, an “Everything Must Go” or an “Alright”, it felt like a daring raid. Getting a video or a band appearance was a victory. But when it happened in the opposite direction, and you got something like Spiceworld on the sacred album chart, it was a crushing defeat.

I still stayed up to listen to Mike Sweeney’s late night show on Capital Gold, and I still collected Queen, but neither of these compared to the thrill of waiting for the release day of “This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours” and getting the special embossed cover edition, waiting to see what singles would be released from it and how far they would go.

It was too good to last. We started to grow up and in the midst of that, Radiohead’s “OK Computer” happened.

When pop left town and went to art school

“OK Computer” was a revolution in more ways than one. Before it, Britpop and indie had largely been a shared common ground of the freaks and geeks at our school. The popular girls listened to boy bands, the popular boys listened to house, and the rest of us hung out on the fringes with Blur and Suede. “OK Computer” didn’t look like changing anything about this at first.

Then “No Surprises” hit number 4 in early ’98 and with it, launched a tribe. Guys who grew their hair long and shaggy, scuffed around the playground looking at the floor and wrote Manics lyrics on their pencil cases. Membership was split evenly between the outer fringes of the popular crowd, and the oddballs who felt they were growing up and growing out of computer games and soldering. They denied ever having enjoyed a single Queen song, or having had a hobby other than single-minded devotion to indie.

Me? I’d just got a new Christmas present. Something called a “modem”. There was no way in hell I’d be accepted as part of this crowd.

Divorced from a source of discussing new albums, and becoming disillusioned with how quickly acts like Dodgy had become “old bands” just as snigger-worthy as Queen or Marillion, I ended up seeking solace in previous eras. I got my hands on an old music centre and begged unwanted records off my parents. I learnt the joys of getting the needle to track a way overplayed copy of “Abbey Road”. I discovered “Disraeli Gears”. In a somewhat less proud moment, I eased the pain of the first girl I ever asked out turning me down by playing “Walk Out In The Rain” from one of those Clapton albums where he’s so laid back it’s doubtful he even got out of bed for the recording. I made a concerted effort to get into Hendrix. Napster came along and I even switched off the radio.

Then I went to University. And I found my story had been repeated thousands of times across the country. Sometimes people had found solace in metal. Some goth. Some industrial. One guy had even built up an encyclopaedic knowledge of jazz. And some had, just like me, gone searching back through the decades, becoming ever more esoteric in search of music that was truly theirs.

It was at an event held by the last of these groups that I first heard the 13th Floor Elevators’ “You’re Gonna Miss Me”. A record thirty-five years old at the time but for me it was here and it was now and it was mine. I never talked with pop again. Until late in 2017 I had the idea of going back and listening to all of it.

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