BillyH

I’ve got a hazy memory of going to a show called the Disney Channel Kids Awards in 1999 and seeing 911 perform, but the first one I count and I went solo to was nine years later, at ‘Clubland Live’ in March 2008. I was 19 and Cascada were the headliners supported by Scooter, Ultrabeat and a ton of other 00s dance acts, only £25 as well! The next one was Alphabeat a few months later, £10 for that which given they’d already had a big top ten hit felt like a real bargain even then. My mum and grandma were also 19 when they went to their first concerts - Cliff Richard in 1959 for my grandma, and Mental as Anything in 1987 for my mum. In 2022 I went to Ed Sheeran with my now-wife, and Evanescence with a friend of mine - in both cases it was their first gig and they were both in their late twenties, which I found astonishing as I always considered myself quite late to the party going to them aged 19 but I guess it happens at different ages for everyone.

Feels like they’ve played an absolute blinder with the publicity of this, it feels way bigger than their last ‘Four’ attempt in 2013(?) and if you’d have told me they’d pack out three days at the O2 and counting even just a few months ago I’d never have believed you. Having all five of them does feel like something of an event, and enough time has passed now for them to feel like a huge nostalgia act for so many - they really did have so many big and memorable songs over such a short space of time!! I bought a ticket for the third O2 night, row 4 of the first block right in front of the stage for £79 - that’s only £25 more than the cheapest seats up in the circle, which was nice to see as I was worried it would be some ridiculous three figure sum to sit so close, the standing pit was about £120 but I’ll leave that to the super fans. I’ve still got my ticket for Steps at the same venue back in 2012, and that was £45.25 for block 105 on the ground floor. Given they’re similar era bands and there’s been 13 years of inflation since then, I don’t mind just over £30 extra for Five at all!

CD sales were plummeting, (legal) downloads were starting to get popular but hadn’t got really big yet, and they weren’t fully integrated into the chart yet - this was still just when all songs needed a physical release to be chart eligible. Also around this time both Top of the Pops and Smash Hits gave up, and generally singles felt like a dying market in comparison to a then flourishing album chart. Seeing some of my favourite #1s of all time in the above list is quite sad (Black Parade, Bring Me To Life) but to be honest in that era I was listening to them on music channels most of the time rather than going out and buying the CDs. I’d like to know what on earth was happening in January 2021 for that recent low for Sweet Melody? Given the world situation at the time I assumed people would be streaming more rather than less in absence of anything else to do, or was everyone just too depressed to listen to anything?

Well, the upside of the new "code only" onsale is that the online queue sped through in five minutes, probably because everyone who didn't have the code (which did indeed catch some people out it looks like) couldn't access anything, but even then I wasn't lucky today unfortunately! As I'm flying there on Saturday morning I can't do any rehearsals or finals before that, and annoyingly at one point I had two for the Friday jury final in my basket which I normally go for but can't this time, and briefly had one for the Saturday rehearsal but the person I'm going with wouldn't have been too happy had I just got that :P Also a brief panic when the code stopped working for a few minutes but I just had to wait for my basket to expire before it worked again, by which time everything for every show had gone. Also looks like if you refresh the ticket page a few too many times it suddenly locks you out. probably to stop potential bots. Everything does seem fully gone in this wave now but I'll still check during the course of today, a few years ago I logged in at about 1am and grabbed a ticket so maybe the same will happen this time. My original hotel in Basel itself ended up cancelling on me due to a convenient "overbooking" (in other words they realised what was on that night) but Mulhouse in nearby France has tons of cheap options so I booked somewhere there, and there's a £4 Flixbus from Basel to Mulhouse at 1:25am that we might make unless the interval act is a one hour Celine Dion feat. Nemo medley.

Going to have to go to 2014, which wasn't a year I enjoyed at the time (mostly due to my personal situation) but later on I realised how many great songs there were during that time. It's not my peak student era anymore, but still an age where "my era" of artists like Katy B and Example could get top 10 hits, and the Eurovision domination was great that year too. My chart knowledge really drops off a cliff from mid-2017 onwards, Clean Bandit's 'Symphony' marks a bit of an end of an era for me as the majority of #1s from that time onwards I'm not massively aware of. But then I did turn 30 the following year so maybe it was just a moment that happens to many, my parents equally start to know less songs from the late 1990s onwards when they turned that age.

Both times I've seen Twenty One Pilots they've played Stressed Out as early as possible (usually the second song in the set) and sung it with basically no energy and a glum look on their face, which I feel like is their way of basically saying let's get this over with. Luckily my other fave of theirs 'Ride' does always get done properly.

Looking forward to the usual "We should send Steps/Robbie Williams/Adele/One Direction/Ed Sheeran/etc" crowd continuing to not understand it's a song contest and not a Who Is The Most Famous contest. Name value means nothing if the song isn't memorable as Flo Rida found out a few years back, so if Franz Ferdinand or Chvrches or whoever send an absolute banger of a tune it's game on. Blue almost got away with it but apparently they half-assed their jury final performance thinking it was just a random rehearsal(!), which cost them a ton of votes once everything was combined. There's a dark parallel universe somewhere where Ed Sheeran represented us in 2016, attempts to send a new song he's written called Castle On The Hill, but gets told by the label that it's "not Eurovision enough" (secret code for "this is too good for Eurovision, save it for the album") and instead is forced to sing You're Not Alone. Ends up coming only slightly above Joe & Jake, career ruined and Divide onwards never happens.

I think the 'live' KLF songs are all studio creations with fake crowd noise, although I also used to think they were real live recordings. The 'S.S.L.' was actually just the brand name of the mixing desk used. A weird one is Black Legend - You See The Trouble With Me, which in its original white label form sampled a 1990 live Barry White concert for the vocals, but for the single release used a soundalike for copyright reasons.

Ticket sales this year have required a Taylor Swift style 'pre-registration' which closed a few days ago, which even then doesn't guarantee you access to the on-sale but at least gets you closer to the chance of it. I wonder how many fans were aware of this in advance as many may just try logging on the day only to find out they needed to sign up weeks earlier, it's all been done to stop bots/touts/multiple accounts etc and successful customers who pre-registered will find out if they get a ticket link a few days beforehand. I did sign up for Taylor Swift and never even got as far as getting a ticket link, so hopefully I'll be a bit more successful this time! I'm still a bit scarred from all the drama of last year, so I hope things run smoother this time and we can go back to a fun-filled evening again...

In a few weeks I'm seeing James Blunt live supported by Toploader, which is going to be double the fun knowing the above :lol: The weirdest example of the life/career speech before playing The Big Hit was when I saw the band Daughtry in London a few years back, they did the whole spiel as above making me think, ok, here comes What About Now (by far their biggest UK hit and the one later covered by Westlife) and...they play #128 UK smash 'It's Not Over' instead :blink: . What About Now never got played at all!! I guess because It's Not Over was their big US breakthrough where it charted at #4 there, and they just reused the same script for London even though it didn't really apply over here.

Brilliant documentary that perfectly spanned 'my' era of pop, from being a 5 year old hearing Relight My Fire played a lot right up until Robbie rejoining Take That when I was a uni student. They could have done a fourth episode featuring JLS, The Wanted and One Direction as already mentioned as there'd be a huge amount of material spanning the last 15 years, but I suppose it wouldn't really have had the nicest ending given what happened to poor Tom Parker and Liam Payne (who in both cases are the only two members of each band I've met, both four years ago when my workplace was doing some filming while it was shut to the public). Ending as it began with Take That reunited and the other boybands now mostly doing well for themselves did give it much more closure, and while it did mean the whole documentary could have been made circa 2010 perhaps it's not quite time yet to tell the story of the later boybands in such great detail, both because it's a bit too raw and recent for the band members themselves and also because the 2010s don't have that 'full' nostalgia factor for many just yet, although admittedly the earlier part of the decade is perhaps starting to for those who were kids or teenagers then. I also found the tabloid intrusion quite sickening especially the Five honeytrap story, which felt like full on entrapment that they probably got away with legally as it took place in a foreign country. I already knew much of their story from The Big Reunion, but I feel like if they hadn't imploded the way they did then they'd have probably carried on maybe another year or two before calling it a day anyway around 2003, as music landscapes were shifting around this time with anything 1990s being cast aside in favour of new artists and reality TV acts. Agreed that a Girlbands Forever would work too starting with Eternal and the Spice Girls in the first episode, and if they did want to include the last decade this time they could feature Little Mix as well and finish with the 2019 Spice Girls reunion.

Luckily in 2016 this was uploaded which, although with a longer intro than the Now 49 one, is primarily the 'right' version of Castles in the Sky: 0aa7KWLkzXc It's still further down the first page of the results as the other mix is at the top despite having less views, probably because it's from an official artist channel.

There's a whole thread that can be made out of "Songs that charted in the UK in a different mix but now the main one that gets played is the original instead" except with a snappier title. I remember about a decade ago, it was irritatingly impossible to find the 'right' version of Ian Van Dahl's Castles in the Sky on YouTube, I think I ended up finding it on something like page 11 or 12 of the results as all the other versions were this weird other mix that might have been the original. ATB's 9pm has been mentioned here before where the original, 1998 version seems to have replaced the Sequential One 1999 mix that was the main one people bought and danced to on its UK smash release. As for Corona, it was the UK mix I heard all the time until some point in the 2010s, possibly even as late as 2017 when the film 'The Disaster Artist' used it.

Two weeks that stand out as having exciting close races but the 'wrong' result for me were 25/09/1993 (the Pet Shop Boys missing #1 thanks to Will Smith) and 27/12/2003 (Darkness/Gary Jules). The '93 one is a bit before my time but I do remember Xmas 2003 quite well, watching CD:UK and hearing Cat Deeley say The Darkness were in the lead as of midweek made their defeat even worse! I did fear it would be Pop Idol that year, so Gary Jules at least felt like a semi-victory and Simon Cowell never troubled the festive #1 spot again. I just about remember Blur/Oasis when I was 6 and I was happy that Blur won as I couldn't understand a word that Oasis lot were singing. I also wanted Mike Flowers Pops to be Christmas number 1 that year as I preferred it to the original.

Spotify and streaming mean many just listen to the same things everywhere in the world now, with not as much localisation as recently as the 2000s when even the English and Scottish #1s were often very different. There were always worldwide hits and international artists who smashed everywhere, but it seems inconceivable that you’d get a situation now where someone is massive in the UK or US but comparatively unknown in the other country, like Take That being one hit wonders in the States and Robbie Williams infamously failing to build a huge following over there. The 2010s/early 2020s had the likes of Adele and Ed Sheeran dominating on both sides of the Atlantic, and Simon Cowell was able to break some big UK acts stateside, but I guess there’s not been many in more recent times judging from the few modern hits I know. The dominance of TikTok hits is a good shout too, they at least do occasionally also help non-US acts like Maneskin a few years back where arguably it was both TikTok and Eurovision that helped them be so successful. I think 2007 was the last time a US #1 missed the UK top 100, unless there’s been any since? It was even worse over in Ireland for a while, no Irish acts were #1 there from Hometown in April 2015 to Dermot Kennedy in November 2020, and since then at least there’s been Jazzy and Hozier!