BillyH

13/05/00: Watergate - Heart of Asia (2 weeks) KGHu5_szC6Y It's interesting to compare this era with how things stood around eight or nine years ago, a time when instrumental rave music flooded the charts to the point where Top of the Pops began to look a little silly. Today's TOTP mostly just shows the videos instead, which is less daft than the days when a bunch of nobodies would mime the likes of "Woo! Yeah" and other samples but makes the programme a hell of a lot more boring in comparison. So to the current crisis where it's now been a month and a half since the number 1 single - traditionally the show closer - had an actual studio performance (Smooth), and even that wasn't actually live, instead a clip recorded internationally specificially for the show and seamlessly slotted into the recording. Once again rumours fly around that the show's going to be "axed", and yet again it survives, as it surely will do for as long as there's a music chart. Much has already been written about the dominance of instrumental trance music since last year but it is simply a chart-topping and winning formula, evolving *just* enough to still sound fresh although it's difficult to know how long that'll last. This track by 'Watergate' - actually an alias for late 90s pioneer DJ Quicksilver - adds a Japanese feel, sampling the classic melody of 'Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence' with a 4/4 beat over the top and shouldn't work but achieves its goal effortlessly and brilliantly. Have to say I'm starting to miss vocals at the top though.

The next two and one that takes place in September 1994? Loving all of these, 1990's #1s really were spot on.

What songs, whether in their subject matter or composition etc smack an ugly amount of desperation to get a "hit" charting as highly as possible? It doesn't matter if they ended up genuinely being huge or sank into obscurity, and can be from new acts or previously more credible acts selling out to the mainstream. First two that come to mind are both by the much-missed (:lol:) The Wanted, who did actually produce some fun songs over their brief career but things went horribly wrong last year, first with 'Walks Like Rihanna' which a) name-checked a megastar, b) ripped off the title of million-seller 'Moves Like Jagger' and not even starting on their attempt-at-a-viral-hit video, and then with 'Show Me Love (America)' the reason is already in the title!

...there's no limit?

I read this quote on a music blog almost four years ago, when I was 22. At the time there was very little in the charts I didn't like and tried to imagine what music would sound like by late 2014 when I turned the age mentioned - with the (brilliant) commercial dubstep explosion just starting at the time, I wondered if, perhaps, things would get even more intense to the point that the #1s when I'm 26 would be impossible to comprehend, mad speedcore/dubstep/D&B combinations that the teenagers love but sound alien to my ears. Instead, almost four years on, everything seems very much the same but blander. What I adored in 2011 - that David Guetta (& now Calvin Harris) urban dance-pop sound - is still around with no obvious evolution, there's been no massive rock or indie breakthroughs (although it's a bit more than it was at the start of the decade), dubstep fizzled out into something Taylor Swift does to get a hit, and so-called "deep house" - bar the occasional one I'll admit to being brilliant (Jubel, you rock) - to the most part is immensely underwhelming and nowhere near as good as the actual deep house of the late 80s/early 90s I've been listening to since my mid noughties teens. Then you've got dull manufactured pop and The X Factor seemingly unstoppable and all the wrong songs selling over a million, seemingly those as boring and commercial as possible - I really, really dislike any of the Pharrell Williams crap over the last eighteen months, and this is someone who did like the stuff he did a decade ago, both solo and as part of N.E.R.D.. So yeah, the quote was right and something wrong has happened although I'd put it more as a slow fizzle-out since 2011 rather than a sudden change - there were less songs I liked in 2012 then '11, less in '13 than '12, and less this year than in '13. I asked my parents, they both turned 26 in 1993 and while loving everything the 80s had to offer were really put off by all the Eurodance that was around by then and agree wholeheartedly with the quote, while going further back to my Grandma, she was a huge rock & roll fan but by the time she turned 26 - in 1966 - the likes of the Beatles and Stones she couldn't stand and never got their appeal. So if you're over 26, when did you turn that age and did music make a turn for the worse when you did? And if you're lucky enough to be under, what can you see happening to music by the time you are and will it put you off - or, alternatively, did the age (or will the age) make no difference whatsoever?

Was just listening to some millennium-era dancepop and rediscovered Gigi D'Agostino's back catalogue of hits, and bloody hell it's impressive - #1s and top 5 hits all over Europe, the tenth best-selling single of 2002 in Ireland with 'La Passion' and a Billboard Hot 100 entry for L'amour Toujours, which given how dance-unfriendly the US were then is an incredible achievement, and he regularly hit the top 20 with ease in his native Italy from 1995 to 2006. And in the UK, the closest he ever got was a peak of #87 for 'Bla Bla Bla' at the end of 2002, three years after its initial release. Otherwise nothing. How can someone be so massive all over the continent, as close to home as Ireland and even have a minor US hit but do nothing here? Anyone who was following the charts around then know the answer? For those who have no idea who I'm talking about, here are a few videos of some of his best tunes: 6DcfXVL0mh0 SzT0dvNrFc4 w15oWDh02K4

Bloody brilliant list - all up there with the best '94 had although I've never heard that Status Quo song before. Never thought I'd see any fellow love for 'Dreamscape '94' which I'm mystified as to how it charted so low, incredible track!!

Kill me, but I really really dislike 2005 for music :blush: It doesn't help that it was a crappy year for me, but for me there's fewer classics in '05 than there is in any other year of the noughties. Almost everything I listened to back then was either 90s dance music or underground hard house and trance on late night Radio 1. It did, however, give us Pendulum's 'Hold Your Colour' which is one of the best albums ever made, Erasure's 'Nightbird' which was a fantastic return to form and gave them a deserved top 5 with Breathe (in one of the lowest-selling top 40 weeks ever, but hey, still impressive) and there were some good indie rock tracks around, otherwise out the ones you've mentioned I'll give you 'Because Of You' and 'Biology' as the best two so far. Will check out this thread though to see if there's any classics I've missed or forgotten!

...anyone think they kept them all on for an extra three minutes at the end of the session to record a surprise Band Aid 30?

It is an incredible run of #1s - I heard almost all of them (knowingly) for the first time at the beginning of 2004 when VH1 spent the entire afternoon playing every #1 from some point in the 80s to present day, and was glued to the screen for about half an hour. Even back then, what I was hearing seemed so massively better than anything in the charts at the time and this was when I was fifteen. 'Enjoy the Silence' at #1 would have been bloody amazing though.

06/05/00: Dutch Force - Deadline sEx1sZ0qkpw One-week trance wonders continue with what's actually from the same guy who co-created 'Airwave' with a similar track. Running out of different ways to describe what's essentially the same thing, this adds some more nice piano to the mix and in general keeps trance-heads happy.

29/04/00: Hurley & Todd - Sunstorm C9LugpRR4B0 And once one gets big then it's unstoppable. Similar to this time in 1999, trance has recaptured the public's imagination and anything sounding remotely like it is hitting the top - this one takes the piano riff of Elton John's 'Song for Guy' and adds general trancey beats over the top. It's nothing huge and will probably fall quickly after this first week but for now it's the biggest seller in the country.

15/04/00: Rank 1 - Airwave (2 weeks) e7StnnAR_BE What a week!! A top 10 absolutely crammed with new entries, so many could have easily been #1s - Richard Ashcroft's 'A Song For The Lovers' and Steps 'Deeper Shade of Blue' especially but there can only be one winner, and at the end of the day it's Dutch trance that wins out once more. 'Airwave' may perhaps take the crown of one of the most beautiful trance melodies ever created, and other than a quick "I feel you over the airwave" near the start it's thankfully charted in a vocal-free version. Interest has gained on a bootleg mix of this featuring the vocals from an obscure track called 'True Love Never Dies' but it's unlikely that will get official release, especially now the original's out.

NC2U just outshines everything released that January by a mile, the closest any other track comes to its brilliance is probably Lonnie Gordon's Happenin All Over Again.

I listened to this a ton back when I was sixteen (jesus christ it's a decade old?! Feeling the pain), but only really in absense of much else dancewise in late 2004 that I thought was much good - the genre had fallen so much out of the charts that year that I started to feel a bit embarrassed even liking stuff like this. Having barely played it in the nine years since it's a rather wonderful nostalgia listen now. Video, sadly, is an early one in the long depressing run of "Just film some models in their underwear for three minutes to get us some TV airplay/DVD single sales for the teenage lads" nonsense that lasted the best part of four bloody years, until thankfully dance videos with imagination started creeping back in. Even back then it seemed desperate to me, like they were worried no one would like the song without tons of female bodies thrust into your face.

01/04/00: Santana - Smooth (2 weeks) 6Whgn_iE5uc A major chart battle between three contenders, all hitting top 3 - the others being Melanie C's 'Never Be The Same Again' and Moloko's 'The Time Is Now' - comes to an end with the veteran of the three just about emerging victorious. First charting way back in 1974, this collaboration with Rob Thomas of Matchbox Twenty was a massive hit in the States last year, twelve(!) weeks at #1 and duplicates its chart position over here. Extremely summery, it's a wonder why it wasn't held back an extra couple of months just to hit the season right but perhaps we've already waited long enough for it. Indeed you've perhaps heard of a certain craze called 'Napster' that's been gradually building up among the techies in recent months, an on-line World Wide Web application that allows people to distribute and down-load low quality audio recordings of various songs. While some have marked this as a potential danger to sales I see no real future in it other than a fun novelty - it takes far too long to down-load even one song using the program, internet usage while steadily growing is still well under a quarter of the country and in general, if you want a song in the crystal-clear quality it was intended, you're going to buy the CD, surely? Chances are there's at least one if not two music shops on your local high street so at the most it's a quick bus ride away. 'mp3' files as they're called may be useful as the occasional digital backup just in case you don't have a CD burner on your PC, but that's about it I think.

25/03/00: Dr Dre feat Snoop Dogg - Still Dre _CL6n0FJZpk 2000 keeps throwing up surprises as a rare rap track replaces three weeks of Muse, the first for both Dre and Snoop. While it's not a genre I know too much about, it's about Mr Dre claiming that he's "still" several things that people claim he isn't and Mr Dogg backing him up on said claims. But riding the whole song is a killer basic instrumental riff that while simple jams itself into your head, making it, in a weird way, the gangsta rap version of Better Off Alone. Nice ending too where Snoop goes on a bizarre extended tangent about some of that real sticky-icky-icky, ooh wee! Put it in the air, air, air...

(re-digging this back up after a month - I managed to get up to July 2008 with just the #1s but I'm only on June 2002 with the descriptions, so I'll post a few a day up until the end of 2001 for now - if I'm done with 2002 by that time then I'll do that too :) ) 04/03/00: Muse - Sunburn (3 weeks) N9SZaOJEWXU ROCK! At last, and already this group are being hailed as rock's saviours for finally breaking the drought at the chart summit that's been around since Blur a whopping twelve months ago, that's if you don't count the Thunderbugs. And of all places they come from exotic Teignmouth in the South West of England, led by 21 year old vocalist Matthew Bellamy. Not their first release, they built up a small following last year and released a fantastic track called 'Muscle Museum' in December that got completely lost in the Christmas rush, but a new year and they've charged into the charts with this opener from debut album Showbiz. Starting and ending with a memorable piano intro, it soon explodes into life with a singalong chorus and is made all the better from it being so long since we've heard anything like this so high up in the charts. If this isn't the start of a glorious career for Muse then the world is a deeply cruel and horrible place. They surely now need to capitalise on this by releasing either new material or re-releasing the singles so far. Surely a second try of Muscle Museum wouldn't go amiss?

COORYOH PAHHLA VITA du du du du du dudu dudu dudu dudu dudu du du du du du dudu dudu dudu dudu dudu du du du du du dudu dudu dudu dudu dudu du du du du du dududududu AND DO THE HARLEM SHAKE Repeat until bored.

Years that stand out are 1955 (birth of rock and roll), 1963 (Beatlemania begins), 1973 (Glam Rock domination and the Slade/Wizzard Christmas chart battle), 1978 (Grease, Boney M and disco bringing massive sales in), 1984 (a ton of huge singles and Frankie Goes To Hollywood owning the year), 1997 (sales going absolutely through the roof at the end of the year) and 1999 (same reasons as you!). 2009 seemed quite big at the time but I'm not sure that many hits from then have lasted as long as I thought they would, even Lady Gaga's vanished a little since. 2011, not sure - loved it, but other than those big Adele songs there's not much about it I'd really call big. I've noticed that certainly in clubs recently, the year 2003 seems to massively stand out in terms of "old" songs - I've heard In Da Club, Satisfaction, Seven Nation Army, Be Faithful, Hey Ya, Crazy In Love and Turn Me On all in clubs over just the last few months, with the likes of Bring Me To Life, Are You Gonna Be My Girl, Like Glue, Breathe, Ignition, Where Is The Love and more all lasting really well too. There's no other year before about 2011 I can compare that to with current club airplay.

Ask anyone what position 'Mr Brightside' or 'Seven Nation Army' got to and you'll probably not get anything lower than #2, when both of which were low top 10 hits that disappeared off the charts quickly.

I'm sure there was a point in the past where music got to number 1 for sounding different and interesting, rather than sounding as absolutely generic and inoffensive as possible, but then looking at most of the million-sellers over the last 62 years, probably not. Saying that, All About That Bass actually sounds like some effort of a tune's been put into it which elevates it up over a lot of most #1s this year.

'Let It Go' for X Factor 2015 Christmas #1. Calling it now.

I've seen a few "Best years for music" thread, and the usual happens - someone will say "2014 because One Direction is teh awesome!!11", someone else will call them an idiot and talk about how wonderful 1981 was, someone else will call them an idiot and go into a huge essay about the classics of 1927, big argument, eventual group understanding that everyone's tastes are subjective and every year has good and bad music, etc etc, until someone starts the same thread subject a few weeks later and it all kicks off again :P So I thought I'd flip it round and ask what years people think were actually less good than others. As with best years it is of course completely subjective and someone's absolute musical pinnacle will be someone else's worst, but could be interesting either way. Here are some of mine and if you feel like recommending me some good songs in any of these years, then please feel free - let's try that with as many as we can! First off, 1985 is the weakest year of that decade for me. You've got the synthpop brilliance of 1981-82 and a lot of 1983, and everything from 1987 onwards is golden all the way through, but looking at the biggest-sellers of '85 there's less there than any other years - it seems to be a lot of rock ballads and Band Aid bandwagon-jumping charity singles. To be fair, Jennifer Rush's 'The Power Of Love' is one of the best power ballads EVER MADE and you've also got You Spin Me Round, There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart) and a bit of a guilty pleasure with Baltimora's 'Tarzan Boy', but otherwise little I've heard from '85 interests me and this is from someone who, while not born at the time, did catch the repeat of that year's Christmas Top of the Pops when Channel 5 showed it a few years back. 1986 isn't the best either but it has the Pet Shop Boys, Erasure and New Order's 'Bizarre Love Triangle' as strong foundations. Next is 1992. Again there are some good songs up there with the best of the 80s - 'Stay', 'Out of Space', and the ahead-of-its-time dance pounder that is Fellix's 'Don't You Want Me'. Otherwise it's dull ballads, a ton of old re-issued songs and the year rave music, having absolutely owned the second half of 1991, turned into something of a joke with the likes of Sesame Street, Tetris and Super Mario cash-ins. I suppose there's still Acen's Trip II The Moon, Praga Khan's Injected With A Poison etc, but there's more classics in late 1991 than there is for the whole of '92. 1993 isn't massively better but there's a ton of good Eurodance, the album 'Very' by the PSBs and the (extremely) early stirrings of Britpop. For the noughties, 2005. I would have said 2004 for a while but that's just looking at the number #1s, otherwise some of the best tracks of the decade can be found lower down the 2004 charts. Not so much for 2005 which saw a stale pop scene past its sell-by-date, the worst dance music's probably ever been in its loop-a-sample-for-three-minutes phase, leaving some admittedly brilliant indie-rock but even that's not as good as the two years either side. Oh, and the Crazy Frog. Barely anything released in 2005 I would say was among the best of the noughties, maybe Erasure's 'Breathe' and the whole of Pendulum's 'Hold Your Colour' album. 2006 is better, 2007 not quite as much but there's some great stuff at the end of that year. What are some of your least favourite years for chart music? Bearing in mind if anyone mentions 1999 (my favourite chart year ever) expect a huge list from me :P

One charge of groping - alleged to have happened years after any of his episodes were made - is not a valid explanation to block his episodes anymore. Not trying to defend it, but they can't use the same excuse for blocking Savile's episodes with DLT.