2001: A Chart Odyssey (The Charts)

Member Name: pje

Product:	The Charts
Date:	01/01/02 (588 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Some quality product.

Disadvantages: Safe, middle of the road pop only.

2001 didn't start well - Bob the Builder was at number one. It got worse, he was dethroned by a terrible trio:- Touch Me by Ru Da Silva, Everytime You Need Me by Fragma and It's The Way You Make Me Feel by Steps.
But 2001, so we were told, was to be the year ROCK returned. and,
as if to prove it, Limp Bizkit were Rollin' (Rollin', Rollin'; Rollin', Rollin', Rollin') all over the airwaves, with the first ever DVD-single. But any thoughts that the charts were going to harden were swiftly demolished, Goodies' style,
as U2 and Wheatus were licked by the kittens from Liverpool. Wheatus may have been listening to Iron Maiden according to the lyrics of Teenage Dirtbag (one of the songs of the year) but the kids weren't rushing to buy The Number of the Beast, they were buying Atomic Kitten's Whole Again - the first big seller of 2001, and no.1 for virtually the whole of February.

Sadly nothing could keep Jamie Oliver off the television, and one of his interminable adverts kept Toploader Dancing In The Moonlight, and round our heads, for weeks. Someone else who we couldn't get out of our heads was Dido, whose album No Angel was the biggest seller of the year. Lovely voice, but a bit middle of the road. You expect kids to rebel, not buy music that could have been played on BBC local radio any time in the last 30 years. Westlife continued their reign as the biggest boy band around, selling nearly 300,000 copies of the annoying Billy Joel song Uptown Girl during Comic Relief week. We had a band like that when I was a kid, they were called The Bachelors, and your nan would listen to (Sir) Jimmy Young playing them on them on Radio Two.

The trouble is that the tin pan alley days are back. Rock 'n' Roll is starting to look like an aberration. The kids took control for a few years, playing their own instruments and writing their own songs. But now the record companies are back in charge, manufa
cturing pop stars to perform like puppets - and this year they did it quite brazenly on prime time television. When one auditionee on Pop Stars talked about writing her own songs, she was sneered at by one of the judges.

The spawn of ITV's Pop Stars programme was Hear'Say, whose first single Pure and Simple shifted 549,822 units in its first week on release in March. 160,995 of those in a single day - making it the third fastest selling single ever! Talent + Marketing = Big Bucks. (Innovation + Ugliness = Sweet F.A.) At least Pop Stars and Pop Idol showed us the people who are responsible for manufacturing these acts, so now we know who to blame!

Of course there was one man who denied everything last year: Shaggy.
Shaggy doesn't do things by halves, when he makes a record he makes
a good 'un. OK, so sometimes he has a lot of help from pop's recycle bin, but there's no denying that he does it boombastically well. It Wasn't Me sold over a third of a million copies in its first week at number one, after equalling Lou Bega's thirty-place jump to the summit. (Both records had been selling on import for a few weeks before their official release.)

The Manic Street Preachers bunged out two singles on the same day for no apparent reason, and then buggered off to Cuba in March. Meanwhile cartoon band Gorillaz slipped a tune called Clint Eastwood into our heads just in time for the summer - which, like the rock revival, didn't happen. (Well, not as far as the singles chart and radio playlists were concerned, even though bands like Staind and Slipknot were topping the album chart.) Instead, the summer saw an awesome string of catchy pop tunes that would have shifted shedloads in any era...

DJ Pied Piper and the Masters of Ceremonies asked Do You Really Like It? and everyone replied "we're lovin' it, lovin' it, lovin' it...", but not as much as we loved S Club 7's Don&#
39;t Stop Movin' - surely one of the catchiest pop singles ever, and recently voted the Record of the Year. And then there was Kylie. Oooh er. The little bird, who escaped the clutches of the evil Pete Waterman, sang Can't Get You Out Of My Head and we knew how she felt. Travis told us to Sing, si-ing si-ing sing, and that the circle only has one Side, and DJ Otzi, erm, should have been shot.

Henry Ford told his customers that they could have the Model T in any
colour they liked, as long as it was black, and the record industry have
adopted the same policy. You can have as much 'product' as you like -
as long as it's pop. Variety is dead, long live pop. Naaa naaa na, naaa naaa na-naaa-naaa, naaa naaa na, naaa naaa na-naaa-naaa...

As usual there were boybands. cover versions, and films to promote too. Bridget Jones's Diary spawned stick-insect-Spice Geri's umpteenth number one with It's Raining Men, Destiny's Child had another chart-topping song from a soundtrack and another Baz Luhrmann movie flooded the airwaves. Oh, and Michael Jackson made a comeback, but no-one took any notice.

The year ended strangely with Daniel 'he did it in his bedroom' Bedingfield selling oodles of copies of his garage track Gotta Get Thru This, the lyrics of which would be NU'd on dooyoo, while wrinkly Gordon Haskell launched a one-man-band assault on the Christmas No.1 spot with How Wonderful You Are, but got beaten by the perfect photo-fit of a pop single in the eyes of record company bosses: two stars duetting on a cover version.

So the year ended with Somethin' Stupid at Number One as usual.
It's a cliché to say that cover versions are never as good as the original, but this was a case of: once a rubbish song, always a rubbish song.

2001 was the year that Terrorvision and Geri Halliwell both asked whether 'you wanna go faster'; Love Don't Cost A Thing by
Jennifer Lopez segued indistinguishably into All Rise by Blue; and we all cringed at songs about friendship sung by people whose friends must surely have disowned them - namely All Stars (Best Friends), the Tweenies (Best Friends Forever), and, saddest of all: Right Said Fred (You're My Mate) - surely the most embarrassing single ever heard. Although Help I'm A Fish by the contradictorily named Little Trees was just as jaw-droppingly naff.

2001 also saw the inevitable demise of 5ive, Steps and George Harrison.
He will be sadly missed by those of us too old to know our White Strokes from our Stripes, or our Linkin' Brakes from our Turin Park, yet. It would have been much more fitting for George Harrison's My Sweet Lord to be the Christmas No.1, but EMI dragged their feet to ensure that Robbie was at the top, just as they refused to press enough copies of Kylie & Jason's single at Christmas 1988, because they wanted Cliff's Mistletoe and Whine to wear the advent crown. It's pop music's equivalent of a professional foul in football. Thus a handful of big record companies carve up the charts between them, co-ordinating relase dates months in advance and stoking demand with saturation publicity for weeks before a single's release date.

But it's not true to say that the charts aren't as good as they used to be. There was always rubbish around, even in the good old days (whenever they were - certainly not the 70's and 80's I remember!) But these days there is more of everything, good, bad and indifferent. The trouble is that certain types of music are marginalized by record companies and record stores - greedy fat cats, who are only interested in maximizing profits.
In other words, if you don't have mass market appeal you can bog off.
Welcome to the machine, son, have a cigar.


For the record, here are ten chart hits I didn't get fed up of this year:

Alcohol
ic - Starsailor
Sing - Travis
Handbags and Gladrags - Stereophonics
Juxtaposed With U - Super Furry Animals
Frontier Psychiatrist - Avalanches
Mr. Writer - Stereophonics
Clint Eastwood - Gorillaz
Don't Stop Movin' - S Club 7
Side - Travis
Butterfly - Crazy Town

Sorry if I missed out your favourite song of the year, but there's always the comments section...
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| STATS |
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The Top Ten Best-Selling Singles of 2001
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`1 It Wasn't Me - Shaggy featuring Rikrok
`2 Pure and Simple - Hear'Say
`3 Can't Get You Out Of My Head - Kylie Minogue
`4 Whole Again - Atomic Kitten
`5 Hey Baby - DJ Otzi
`6 Uptown Girl - Westlife
`7 Don't Stop Movin' - S Club 7
`8 Angel - Shaggy
`9 Teenage Dirtbag - Wheatus
10 Because I Got High - Afroman


The charts did swing slightly back towards sanity in 2001, having
reached a manic peak of activity in the year 2000, when there were
a record number of number ones, top ten hits, and top 40 entries...

........................ Straight ... Top ... Top
.......................... In At ...... Ten .... 40
Year ... No. 1s ... No.1 ...... Hits ... Hits
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2001 ..... 31 ........ 29 ....... 200 ... 601
2000 ..... 43 ........ 41 ....... 221 ... 595
1999 ..... 35 ........ 31 ....... 204 ... 619

1992 ..... 13 ......... 1 ........ 146 ... 594
1991 ..... 17 ......... 6 ........ 146 ... 484
1990 ..... 19 ......... 0 ........ 141 ... 445

1982 ..... 22 ......... 2 ........ 154 ... 360
1981 ..... 20 ......... 1 ........ 148 ... 360
1980 ..... 25 ......... 2 ........ 148 ... 376

1971 ..... 14 ......... 0

1961 ..... 22 ......... 0
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Total .... 916 ...... 218
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Biggest jumps to the number one spot:
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29/06/1982 ... #33 to #1 ... Happy Talk - Captain Sensible
29/08/1999 ... #31 to #1 ... Mambo No.5 - Lou Bega
04/03/2001 ... #31 to #1 ... It Wasn't Me - Shaggy featuring Rikrok
..../05/1961 ... #27 to #1 ... Surrender - Elvis Presley
28/09/1982 ... #26 to #1 ... Pass The Dutchie - Musical Youth
28/07/1981 ... #22 to #1 ... Green Door - Shakin' Stevens
..../09/1968 ... #21 to #1 ... Hey Jude - The Beatles
16/12/1980 ... #21 to #1 ... (Just Like) Starting Over - John Lennon


Biggest selling singles of all time (UK)
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4,800,000 - Elton John - Candle In The Wind (1997)
3,510,000 - Band Aid - Do They Know It's Christmas (1984)
2,130,000 - Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody (1975/1991)
2,050,000 - Wings - Mull of Kintyre / Girls' School (1977)
1,995,000 - Boney M - Rivers of Babylon / Brown Girl In The Ring (1978)

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