THE END OF END-OF-YEAR LISTS AND FOR THAT MATTER LISTS

 

In order that I don’t ruin anybody’s Christmas, I should now confirm that I won’t be doing an end-of-year album list for 2025.

 

Now, there are plenty of music critic-friendly reasons not to do one. These include my feeling that this year hasn’t really deserved an end-of-year summary. It’s been one of those unglamorous consolidatory years for music – another 1969, 1974, 1983, 1992, 2002, 2012 (so many twos in there; does that indicate a cycle?) – with lots (and lots) of meaningful activity but little if anything in the way of actual breakthrough. A year of moments – we used to call them “singles” – has 2025 proved to be.

 

Another, more elemental reason is that I got it so spectacularly wrong last year. I listed Geordie Greep’s The New Sound as merely one of hundreds of very worthy also-rans (not to mention Doechii’s Alligator Bites Never Heal) whereas I have continued to come back to it far more often than anything produced this year and it has proven to be one of those very rare albums that the listener is compelled to inhabit, to explore every last architectural and emotional corner.

 

You know, like we used to do with albums when we were teenagers. If nothing else (and be assured that there is a lot else), The New Sound has very firmly put paid to the idealistic, or more likely convenient, theory that once we “grow up” we don’t listen to albums in that way any more; they come, make their modest impact and retreat to the seldom-visited shelves.

 

The New Sound is an album in that profoundly uncommon order of Escalator Over The Hill, Rock Bottom, Selected Ambient Works Volume 2 and The Lexicon Of Love, and I think my reaction to it has been the most intense and concentrated reaction I’ve experienced since Time (The Revelator) nearly quarter of a century ago.

 

In the nineties I had this sort of experience with a lot of albums, mainly because I walked everywhere, including to and from work, and listened to them repeatedly on Walkman headphones until I knew them as thoroughly as they could be known; this certainly applies to the first half of the nineties, if not nearly as much their second half.

 

In addition I was in my late twenties, going into my early thirties, at that time, and quite demonstrably hadn’t “grown up”; half a lifetime later, I’m not completely sure that I ever managed, so I’m uncertain how effective a case study this might be. What I am trying to say is that – I think it was albums that changed, not me. I didn’t get beyond the urge to absorb myself in an album’s fibres, but albums perhaps grew up or regressed instead. I don’t listen to albums the way I used to? At the age of sixty-one, The New Sound has instantly cured me of that popular misconception. The inquisitive magic in my mind still exists and prevails. The albums just needed to be…right, and the careful listener should expect to wait months, if not years or even decades, before they can feel themselves able to assess an album as it should be assessed.

 

Which latter of course hardly ever happens because capitalism demands immediate return on investments, hence we must react to albums immediately they happen because otherwise nobody will know about them or indeed buy them (hence they won’t make any money and the musicians won’t be asked to make another one), they will sink into benign oblivion and the musicians will be obliged to waste their creativity doing “real jobs” in order to remain alive. There are racks in record shops still to be filled, journalistic quotas to meet.

 

But there is a third and deeper reason for not compiling an end-of-year list in 2025, which is something that’s been nagging at and irking me for several years now; the fact that all of the end-of-year lists you see elsewhere look…awfully the same. The same records, the same new artists you’re expected to love, the gnarly old-timers whose new offering really isn’t going to rock anybody’s boat but they’ve served their apprenticeship, God bless them, the transiently-hyped, the antique favourites from when the music critic was at university and life had yet to impose itself on them.

 

And it’s cumulatively very tiring. The same dogmatic orthodoxy, the pained emphatic reliance on a specific form of music which really has nothing to offer anybody any more, the equivalent of those New Yorker short stories which are…yes, I know, it’s in the top three of music critic clichés, but…DULL AND WORTHY. No excitement, mischief or real joy (and certainly no sex – if anything, the presumed apotheosis of this kind of music is asexual). Palliative restraint for the old folk, whether in age or spirit. No thrills; watch that pacemaker. Nothing to which any pissed-off thirteen-year-old could relate. Bix Beiderbecke doing “Jazz Me Blues” (which, from title on down, is actually one of the sexiest pop records ever made) except the pupils now just slope off to TikTok instead of rioting and search for something else on Spotify.

 

I cannot and will not relate to gently glum funereal meditations about dying, impermanence and bereavement; De La Soul’s Cabin In The Sky, probably the second greatest album of their career, and typically released too late for anybody’s end-of-year poll, is a brilliantly profound and importantly also very funny (and infinitely more heartfelt) retort to that whole line of anti-thought, as well as putting a lie to the fable that old people can’t make great music any more (tell that to Suede or Stereolab, who also released some of the best work of their respective careers this year).

 

“The Silent Life Of A Truth,” Cabin In The Sky’s fourteenth track, is also a timely refutation of one of the deadest, most dishonest pop albums I’ve ever heard (sorry, Barney Hoskyns in the NME of 1984 talking about Spandau Ballet’s “I’ll Fly For You,” but those words were too good not to remix – and anyway, I owe you an apology, B.H….you were absolutely right about her), a record which we knew was instantly rotten, released not by the world’s biggest pop star, but by a madwoman who thought she was the world’s biggest pop star. And I had placed her previous album joint second in my 2024 list with brat. I needn’t have bothered. Is she still the most important pop star ever? My feeling is that she is now out to assassinate pop music.

 

Yet there is a fourth reason for not doing a list of albums this year, which far dwarfs the other three. That reason is that I am sick to my front and back teeth of lists, of rankings. Confine rankings to taxi stops. This craving to put everything in a comprehendible order is actually killing the thing we’re ordering (about). Yes I know, life is random and scary and in the absence of a convenient figure such as God the only way to make sense of something that is innately insensible is to make lists, to determine what is better than what else.

 

I mean, what were charts for (that could be a question on Mitchell and Webb’s Quiz Broadcast, couldn’t it – “what was hope?”) if not to place things in order, not simply for the benefit of the music industry, but also appealing directly to the “If so many others like this, so should I, else I am ABNORMAL” herd instinct (paraphrasing what Charles Shaar Murray, also in the NME but in late 1980, said about Top Of The Pops) – and we all possess that instinct; don’t kid on that you don’t, it’s part of the human condition – and our basic need to understand what’s what?

 

But there’s something also very juvenile about making those lists, isn’t there, about obsessing over where something “comes” in the imagined grander scheme of things, instead of simply enjoying the music. Yes, Older’s a great album – but what are “your” top five George Michael songs RANKED and IF NOT WHY NOT? Like William Holden’s Max in Network, I long ago put that sort of thinking away in the school playground, where it belongs.

 

If you look at most contemporary end-of-year album lists (i.e. at the time they were compiled), very few of what are now thought of as the accepted great albums turn up in them. Mostly they are transient favourites, solid fifth or eighth albums by long-serving reliables, placebos to their assumed (by the all-conquering marketing and accounts departments) consumer demographic, rather than future classics. That’s because most great albums don’t immediately bounce towards you bearing grandiose claims to greatness – see this year’s overhyped and overfunded fashion show soundtrack masquerading as avant-garde art – but take time to disclose their innate greatness. They, to use an ancient term, grow on you.

 

Whereas end-of-year lists, or any lists when you come to think of them (tip: don’t), are mostly assembled for purposes of commerce. The assemblers are businesspeople seeking enhanced trade. Which is, or ought to be, inimical to the essence of what art, including music, is about. I have no time left for lists; I’m living in stoppage time as it is. Stop trying to order things. Embrace the delighting chaos instead. Recommence tracing that random pop map you conceived in your twelve-year-old mind and carve out your own, independent road, which in the end is the only road worth taking. Where, unlike school, there are no rules, as opposed to lists, the presumed necessity for which is something that is generally impressed upon the minds of children in school. And we left school a very, very long time ago.

BILLY JOEL IS NO BRITNEY SPEARS

 

 

Rockism was a joke. A one-liner. Race Against Rockism. Pete Wylie having a laugh with fellow scouser Paul du Noyer nearly forty-five years ago. Two seconds in the pub. Probably neither man thought anything more about it thereafter.

 

Not that an amusing bit of banter was ever intended to become the foundation of a manifesto. But there was no telling that to Stockport’s Paul Morley, who in May 2006 wrote in The Guardian or possibly The Observer Music Monthly (it’s over nineteen years ago; I had other things to think about) that: “Suddenly, you had a word that you could use to swiftly (sic) and (sic) yet fairly dismiss (sic) Phil Collins, a word you could use to explain why Wire were better than Yes. If the idea of rockism confused you, and you lazily thought Pink Floyd were automatically better than Gang of Four, and that good music had stopped with punk, you were a rockist and you were wrong.” The standard sort of thing that frustrated twenty-three-year-old men come out with, without first thinking it through because the latter is for dreadful old people, one of whom I, Paul Morley, will never become if I can help it.

 

I mean, why waste valuable Ant time considering exactly why or if “Wire were better than Yes” (the former did Document And Eyewitness, the latter gave us “Owner Of A Lonely Heart”), let alone what magic former Yes roadie Keith Levene managed to weave by recontextualising a few old Steve Howe riffs on Metal Box (as opposed to recycling an entire Steve Howe solo concept album about getting lost in a computer, much of which turned up on Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Welcome To The Pleasuredome)? The thirteen-year-old me of October 1977 loved “Wondrous Stories” just as devoutly and fully as he did “From Here To Eternity,” “Holidays In The Sun,” “The Name Of The Game,” “Complete Control,” “No More Heroes,” “’Heroes,’“ “2-4-6-8 Motorway,” “Turn To Stone,” “Black Betty,” “She’s Not There,” “Best Of My Love,” the reissued “Virginia Plain” and whatever else was in or surrounding the pop charts of that month (see my forthcoming Young Punctum blog entry for contemporaneous words on all of those). He didn’t realise that this wasn’t “allowed.”

 

Oh, and lazily thinking that Pink Floyd are automatically better than fellow EMI recording artists Gang Of Four is in itself lazy thinking. In 1983 The Final Cut was certainly better than Hard, and Pink Floyd did their best to look after Syd, making sure he got all his royalties, etc., as opposed to Hugo Burnham being summarily dismissed from Gang Of Four with a “golden handshake” because they wanted to look “good” and have hits. Comparing the two, however, is like squaring the Beatles up against the John Coltrane Quartet. They’re…different. Piper At The Gates Of Dawn or Entertainment – and why does it always end up being “either/or,” this tired old tribal game most people should leave behind in the school playground and may yet end up killing us all?

 

I certainly didn’t think “good music” (which really is nothing more than “music I like”) stopped with punk – consider that wording, because many people did indeed think it. Dance and soul music in particular were in great shape but since most of their practitioners were Black they were excluded from the “discourse,” which only seemed to focus on pale white males.

 

Somehow New Pop was deemed to have emerged from this morass, although the starting pistol had inadvertently been fired by Ian Curtis in May 1980. Many “post-punk” practitioners wondered aloud what the point was in carrying on preaching to the converted when that’s how you ended up. Moreover, the pop charts of mid-1980 (and indeed for another year afterwards) seemed stuck in 1974. Hence the need to go overground became a pressing one – if we musicians were serious about wanting to change people’s minds and magnifying the greatness and adventure of pop music, then we had to get ourselves into the main market square and show people how we could do it bigger, smarter, sexier and better than any of those miserable cowards clogging up daytime music radio.

 

It didn’t help that most observers conflated, and continue to conflate, New Pop with New Romanticism. These were two parallel but separate movements which sometimes overlapped but were on very decisive courses of their own. Not that it initially mattered because up to the summer of 1981 the Top 40 was essentially marooned between 2-Tone and Stars On 45.

 

But when New Pop really began to filter into the aorta of mainstream pop, things became better, more attractive and more exciting. For proof, look at the charts between the months of July 1981 and June 1982. We lived through that period, bought the records as they came out, heard them being played on the radio, saw them being performed on peak time television, bought the magazines (Smash Hits was colourful and smart, while the NME was thorough, persuasive and, in the adjective’s least hackneyed sense, eclectic).

 

We genuinely thought that we had never had it better. And we, as individuals born in the sixties but too young to participate directly in them, felt we were right to think that. I’m sure that if you were seventeen or eighteen in, say, 1966, you’d feel the same, and with hindsight you’d probably be right in thinking so. Our 1982 selves, though, were far too busy with the indomitable wonder of Trevor Horn’s remix of Spandau Ballet’s “Instinction” to spend any time on dozy old student favourites like Led Zeppelin or even Jimi Hendrix (didn’t stop me from buying Robert Plant’s Pictures At Eleven or The Jimi Hendrix Concerts later on in the year, though). That was considered “yesterday’s music.”

 

It was “our moment” which is essentially what pop music comes down to – that moment, when you’re still in your teens and learning about the world and other human beings, when everything absolutely and solidly clicks. The feeling wasn’t as strong as that when you were a child, and the strength steadily recedes as you “progress” into adulthood and other people and things begin to take precedence in your life – so you have to grab, grasp and celebrate the moment as and when it happens. Not twenty or forty years later as a repackaged and airbrushed memory, or memorial.

 

Nevertheless, you could tell when the New Pop anaesthetic block was beginning to wear off – especially as its cheerleaders decided, as all tribes do, to erect fences and barriers. That Quick Before They Vanish May 1982 top ten review by Morley in the NME was highly, if superficially, amusing at the time, but the gates were already being locked. In that piece Morley had an extended go at his colleague Richard Cook under the guise of a commentary on “Papa’s Got A Brand New Pigbag.” Hadn’t the gigantic success of the latter been part of the whole point of New Pop – that uncompromising free jazz could be played by DLT on lunchtime Radio 1 and make the top three (at least for those who didn’t recall “Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick” at number one three-and-a-quarter years earlier)? Wasn’t that as great and decisive a clarion of intent as “O Superman” only being kept off number one by, essentially, Hatfield and the North?

 

The music press, as was their wont, fucked up. In the NME of early 1983 Pigbag spoke bitterly of Richard Cook, saying he was never interested in them as a group and viewed them only as a conduit through which Cecil Taylor and the Art Ensemble of Chicago could get into the charts. On one hand, that was never going to happen; on the other, David Bowie.

 

But no, Pigbag – and Junior Giscombe (to piss off whom? Paul Weller? Paolo Hewitt?) – were to be excluded from the New Pop Bastille stormtroopers, in favour of wan, slender Scottish or northern English fellows. The NME and specifically Morley never forgave Gary Numan for topping the charts and not being Howard Devoto, and not in that order. A man who spoke little – because nobody realised at the time, least of all the man himself, that he was on the spectrum – versus a loud-mouthed Anthony Blanche-style blowhard. One serviced the needs of the music press far better than the other; never mind that the other proved, in the longer term, the more influential and “important.”

 

Still, not everybody was going to be invited, and therefore the point of New Pop became muddled and vague. The pages of the early eighties music press are filled with sneering dismissals of anyone who didn’t fit in firmly with any of the tribes mooted at the time as fashionable. Those who were adjacent to New Pop, as opposed to being New Pop fundamentalists, got especially short shrift from the movement’s champions (although there may only have been one), whether they were Duran Duran or the Birthday Party, A Flock Of Seagulls or Kate Bush. Meanwhile, those of us who hadn’t lost touch with our feelings mostly shrugged our shoulders and got back to enjoying the best pop music of the period, regardless of who made it or why they made it.

 

I never put rock on a plane above pop, or vice versa. My schoolmates, if they remember me from almost half a century ago, will recall me as a vocal cheerleader for everyone who was worth cheers. When poptimism came stumbling into view almost a quarter of a century ago, I wasn’t particularly charmed or convinced by it, and that feeling intensified when certain North American commentators began systematically stripping the notion of any residual charm or conviction.

 

Poptimism arose a year or two before its reactionary cousin “guilty pleasures” and as a first-hand witness I confess that it was a puzzle to work out what it actually meant or represented. Over time it became apparent, in practice as opposed to theory, that what poptimism meant to its London and Oxford-based originators equated with pop music that they liked at the time – who remembers Sunshine Anderson now without prompting? – and which tallied with their hardwired notions of guitar-based indie music; hence the lionisation of Busted and McFly, because they appealed to what was basically a Belle and Sebastian fan club mentality - I was there (hello, James Murphy) at Club Poptimism nights when the dancefloor immediately filled with Morrissey-type routines to the strains of “Where’s Me Jumper?” and “I’m A Cuckoo”; the writhing of overgrown indie fans in acute denial.

 

By the end of the noughties it had all curdled off, as had its parallel, the overwhelmingly white, male and middle-aged inhabitants of Dissensus and similar who pretended to like grime but, as Greil Marcus had already done in the seventies – read his essay and notes on Sly Stone and Staggerlee in Mystery Train if you doubt me – were disgruntled at Black musicians going “bourgeois” (i.e. making records that people liked) as opposed to remaining “edgy” and obediently “other.” I clearly recall commenting on the Poptimists’ LiveJournal page in 2009 about how the incoming tide of new country music, including the band now known as Lady A and, by name, Taylor Swift, was going to come in and re-atomise pop. The wearied response would have shamed the Garrick Club in 1953. The poptimists had adamantly refused to move on from their moment.

 

“Guilty pleasures” was reactionary precisely because its central aim was to recast music of the recent past and “rehabilitate” those musicians and records which at the time were ridiculed, principally for the benefit of the streamlining music industry. Hence ABBA, Queen, ELO, Fleetwood Mac and the Bee Gees were elevated to gods, whereas punk was this nasty and inconveniently adolescent stain on the wall, a remnant of youthful aberrance that we were encouraged not to think about.

 

Now there is absolutely nothing wrong with the music of ABBA, Queen, ELO, Fleetwood Mac or the Bee Gees, writes one who loved and spoke up for their music at the time. Their best music is some of the best music there is. But the logical conclusion of this brand of thinking has been to elevate corny MoR tripe over art, to prize trash over value. This is reflected in so many places today and not just in certain internet radio stations. Always Chas and Dave, never the Associates. Always Frank Sidebottom, never AR Kane. Always “We Built This City,” never “New Day Rising.” Always Scott 3, never Tilt. Always “Raspberry Beret,” never “Condition Of The Heart.” Always the matey laugh, never the cold revelation. Always the Wonder Stuff, never My Bloody Valentine (Hup finished just one place below Loveless in the NME’s 1991 critics’ album poll). Always clinging on desperately to the residue of “your moment” in your mind to hide the fear that you are going to die in not too long a while. Always being a child, never wanting to grow up.

 

Over the last decade, poptimism seems to have been positively downgraded, and much of this is the fault of poptimists. The author of what was considered by many to be the manifesto of poptimism in October 2004 was most recently glimpsed in the whimpering pages of The New Yorker defending supporters of Hitler. In May 2017 Michael Hann wrote complaining that the movement had become what it beheld, i.e. reverse rockism. It may well be of course that readers of broadsheet newspapers have little interest in the brand of post-Americana puritanical nothingness that only music critics seem to like (“why all this fuss about the Beatles when you should be writing about…Mick Softley?”). But Saul Austerlitz of the New York Times Magazine had already gone further in October 2015, when he proclaimed, in a tone redolent of Lord Reith a century before, "Should gainfully employed adults whose job is to listen to music thoughtfully really agree so regularly with the taste of 13-year-olds?"

 

Well…yes. Because that’s who pop music is actually for. Young people. Children and teenagers. And I note that, in 1982, Paul Morley, who was then twenty-five, stopped writing full-time about music for the NME. He possibly should not have written anything about pop music after 1982 – there he is, in BLITZ magazine in late 1984, the time of Zen Arcade, Double Nickels On The Dime and the first RUN-DMC album – all out in the same week! – moaning about young ‘uns not being interested in the new Pete Shelley record or an Australian T Rex box set. Where did I put those Bix Beiderbecke 78s?

 

 

 

So there’s a really strong case for arguing that adults, gainfully employed or otherwise, shouldn’t be writing about pop music at all, or at least stopping writing about it when they reach a certain age because then they inevitably and invariably curdle into pub bores cackling about not “getting” Charli xcx (you wish, is all I can say to them). Or perhaps just go into writing about films and books like you always really wanted to do. No sin in that; I myself have reached the age when books are immeasurably more important to me than music (although I haven’t stopped listening). But just be honest with yourself – if you don’t get one of those new pop records (in small case) it’s probably your fault yet not even strictly your fault; humans age and that’s what happens. But the pop that’s happening now constitutes somebody else’s moment, not yours, and you have to acknowledge that.

 

Otherwise, simply accept that pop music is what it is – a biologically developmental form of music intended for developing young minds (“developing” as adjective, not transitive verb) and, mainly, fun. Possibly the worst way to approach pop is to regard it in the same manner as a book or film; witness the regularly depressing and I’d argue life-denying writing one sees in The Singles Jukebox, where various anxious observers with an overinflated sense of their own importance mark down pop songs like schoolbook exercises, complete with 3/10 and “see me” written in red ink, with writing so pompous, self-righteous, laborious and indigestible it would be enough to drive anybody off to classical music by just looking at it. It’s like having your records reviewed by your parents. Isn’t that what pop music, new or old, was never about?

REFLECTIONS ON NEW POP

 

 

It is impossible to convey adequately the continuous excitement that I felt about music between the months of July 1981 and June 1982. That was, in my view at the time and for a long time afterwards, the best year for pop; from the moment when this chimera that some called New Pop began to be regarded as serious currency, to the point where it was audibly and visibly drying up.

All such evaluations are by definition subjective, and I cannot flee from the fact that this period was at one end bookended by the death of my father, and principally consisted of my first bona fide year at university, uprooted and away from home. But it is commonly agreed that New Pop started to be considered an option after Ian Curtis died.

The consensus amongst "post-punk" musicians at the time was: why continue experimenting to the converted when this is where it gets you? Not that it was the music that got Curtis, an adulterous far-Right Conservative voter and diagnosed epileptic who felt profoundly guilty, as the father of a young daughter, about his duplicitous behaviour, where he ended up. But enough of his peers quietly agreed "enough" - we need to become known and successful, and the only way of doing that it to smuggle our art beneath the superficial veneer of commerciality. To prove that "we" can do pop music better, more spectacularly and more comprehensively than the big established people.

Hence the gradual shift towards the mainstream, pulling outliers like Adam Ant, who formed a new band with a new approach to seek his revenge on Malcolm McLaren, into its orbit. The Human League, critically approved but commercially invisible, more or less agreed to split into two complementary factions. The story adds to itself.

All of this made pop music between the summers of 1981 and 1982 a spellbinding place to witness and absorb. Adventure returned to the top forty; minimalist performance art ("O Superman") and free jazz ("Papa's Got A Brand New Pigbag") alike easily found their way to the top three. The Associates, nobody's idea of a pop group in 1981, became especially luminescent pop stars in 1982. Everything became exciting, sunny, thrilling and, most importantly, present tense.

Not a week passed without several proposals for new directions in pop materialising. We late-period teenagers had no time for the Beatles, Zeppelin or even Hendrix - all that old, failed music. We were sufficiently occupied being dazzled by the endless inventiveness of 1981-2's notion of "now."

Perhaps we were so dazzled by the shiny yellow New Popness of things that we allowed ourselves to be blinded. All those mock-corporations spearheaded by B.E.F., which were of course intended to be ironic - the public took them straight, as a welcome, colourful relief to the grey drabness of - whisper it - socialism. Pop groups as patented, marketable brands. The Human League pastiching Vogue on the cover of Dare - did we imagine they neither meant nor wanted that status? We liked to think so at the time, in order to cover other, deeper, more dubious concerns.

In 2013 I composed a lengthy blog post concerning ABC's The Lexicon Of Love. This was a major undertaking - I took a week off work to write it and even sought the views of Martin Fry himself. I absolutely meant it when I thought Lexicon the greatest of number one albums, the peak towards which its predecessors had been working.

Today, I'm not at all sure. It remains a subjective truth that the best New Pop albums - Penthouse And Pavement, Dare, Architecture And Morality, Tin Drum, Sulk, Lexicon, New Gold Dream - are "great" records. But I scarcely reach to listen to any of them now. A big part of why that is the case is because I hear so much music from a period when music was more important to me than at any other time in my life...and find it wanting, lacking.

That's the fundamental paradox of nostalgia; when you reach back to certain songs and records to rekindle a memory, it isn't so much the music you want to experience again - what you actually want to retrieve is the feeling that you had at the time when that music was current, and of course that can never be accomplished because the person you were back then no longer exists. You can't unlearn or unlive anyything you've done and been in the subsequent four-and-a-bit decades.

This fruitless craving is also at the root of what is wrong with so much of the world today - a ravenous desire to return to The Good Old Days (a.k.a. the womb) when morality was clearcut and...cough...you knew where you were. And I wonder how much New Pop has done to hasten that process. In Andy Beckett's history of eighties Britain, Promised You A Miracle, Martin Fry admits that, actually, gulp, he did pretty damn well under the Thatcher government.

So much of what occurred now seems so obviously and blatantly Thatcherite that it's a marvel (not in a good way) that we didn't recognise it then. The downsizing and streamlining of pop group personnel, the careful ironing out of awkward figures and facets, the exceptionally dodgy record deals, the systematic filtering out of session musicians in favour of Yamaha DX7 "horn section" buttons, the non-ironic cheerleading for profit, proliferation and material fulfilment. Several key figures in New Pop didn't even bother pretending to be socialists - "Two Tribes" was an exploration of the fascination inherent in the spectre of technocratic warfare, and media's response to same, rather than an anti-World War III howl of protest. "Do They Know It's Christmas?" was studiously and determinedly apolitical. I could go on.

Where do we find ourselves, forty-three years later? In a place for which New Pop had maybe been preparing us all along. Winning is everything. Cult is failure. No more sweaty, soulful, passionate human beings doing messy work and making mistakes; it's all been transferred over to sleek, gleaming, perfect, cold machines, seamless and human-free. The concept that superficial, transient trivia carries more weight than deeply-rooted wisdom. That lies are more fun and get you further in life than the truth. How else do you explain this new First World dictator who revels in his truth alone?

What I now increasingly see in New Pop is a gigantic bill of goods, a way to acclimatise the music-loving public into the ways of Thatcherism and neoliberalism, where fascination is everything - as a kitten is fascinated by a ball of multicoloured string - and meaning means nothing. And it has, as I suggested above, played a major part in making today's world rotten. These are MTV dictators that we have now, people we were invited to giggle at in the eighties, possibly with a view to softening us up, and who, through their systematic and violent rubbishing of "authenticity" and "emotion" in favour of lethal dayglo beads, have rendered life more or less unlivable. It would be easy to claim that New Pop was, in hindsight, a disgrace, but really we have all disgraced ourselves.

Pop has continued, and new things continuously compete in steadily crampier spaces. The audience has been filtered away and any sense of history or perspective has now eroded - they think Freddie Mercury and Fleetwood Mac are still present tense - and the early eighties have been retooled as a jolly era of primary-coloured tinsel when singers wore daft clothes and had daft names. Taylor Swift is perhaps the most important pop star there has ever been, but the world continues to prefer to keep mourning Elvis; these days it's equivalent to calling Jonah Barrington the King of Squash. Why? Because we are not "us" any more, and because, deep down, humanity has always valued obliteration over consolidation. Perhaps we should have just drawn a line after "Ghost Town" and taken up books or cinema instead. It was a fatal mistake to hide where life was "beautiful" and thereby avoiding fighting back.

OK COMPUTER BLOG ENTRY: THE ALT-TEXT

This blog entry adheres pretty closely to the song order and the lyrics to those songs on the album; rather than laboriously cross-reference each picture in that respect, it's probably quicker and easier to check the lyrics directly as you're listening/reading along - this is the best place to do so.

 

Much of the piece also references a bad road accident that I sustained at 12:30 pm on Saturday 24 October 1998. "But we're only in the summer of 1997!" I hear you tut; see Ken Bruce reference towards piece's end. Thematically it fits.

 

Anyway, the pictures:

1. Trevor Square in Knightsbridge SW1, just behind the spot of pavement where I walked off into the road and sustained that accident.

2. Didcot Power Station; much of OK Computer was recorded in Didcot, and it's also a train stop between Oxford and London.

3. Oxford railway station, where I went on the morning of 24 October 1998 to board a train.

4. Paddington station, where I got off that train.

5. Harrods, where I went after I got my haircut (which at the time was regularly in Knightsbridge - where I got my haircut, that is; Harrods hasn't moved anywhere else, except the duty-free sections of certain international airports).

6. Michael Holroyd's magisterial biography of Lytton Strachey, which I bought in the book section of Harrods - yes, back then they had one (it was really Waterstones, but better than nothing) - on 24 October. On my copy you can still see the bump where the bus hit it.

7. Old edition of what was then still called Vox magazine; Laura was getting into Placebo and asked me to try to find a copy of this issue in London (why wasn't Laura with me? Back then she worked on Saturdays). The only place that might have stocked it was in Denmark Street, which was why I had to cross the road and get a bus into town.

8. Denmark Street, at the bottom of which (on the right as you're looking at this picture) was a specialist music shop which sold only music books, music papers and magazines (new and old) and fanzines. Unfortunately I can't remember its name nearly twenty-eight years on and it closed in the early 2000s anyway.

9. Knightsbridge Barracks, on the other side of the road which I impatiently and impetuously crossed to board the number 10 bus which was loading up at the stop just to its right.

10. The westbound number 52 bus which I didn't see coming and which hit me as I was attempting to cross that road.

11. Self-explanatory consequence.

12. The Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, 369 Fulham Road, where the ambulance took me. I was on a life support machine for five days.

13. The Kidlington Roundabout in Oxford, where Thom Yorke's 1987 car accident happened.

14. Airbags.

15. Tried to find one without him in it.

16. *image deleted but it was a born again reference*

17. John Radcliffe Hospital, Headington, Oxford, where I was eventually transferred.

18. Frankie Vaughan, who was on the same ward at me at the Radcliffe, undergoing treatment for cancer.

19. The copy of that month's MOJO magazine which included that Bill Fay review (written by Jim Irvin).

20. Hadn't heard of BF before. After my discharge from hospital I went to HMV on Cornmarket Street and they had one copy of this, as if they had been waiting for me to get better and go in and buy it. 

21. "superhero"

22. Number one in the UK singles chart on the day of my accident was a terrible Hot Hits budget-level cover of "Gym Tonic" which itself couldn't come out as a single in Britain because the Jane Fonda sample was cleared for use in France only. Actually I had my Walkman on at the time of the accident - which I guess didn't help - and was listening to Thurston Moore's Root. Funnily enough, both Discman and Root survived unscathed, unlike my poor raincoat. I forgot to put that in and should have done; sorry.

23. Lot of people compared OK Computer (unfavourably) to this at the time... 

24. ...but Pop was already on sale in HMV for £3.99.

25. LAZY COMPARISONS TO PINK FLOYD (Waters doing his Taylor Swift impression there).

26. Self-explanatory.

27. Self-explanatory.

28. Street party to celebrate rebirth/second coming.

29. Drum pedal over which Jonny G scrawls his stuff at the end of "Airbag."

30. Keith Rowe of AMM, some of whose unorthodox guitar techniques Jonny G also utilised.

31. The old Ford car plant in Cowley, adjacent to the Shotover industrial estate, on which the album's cover design was based. 

32. Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy (Peter Jones)...

33. ...after which Level 42 were named (as was OK Computer). 

34. Sad robot (to whom Mark King's voice has also been compared).

35. John Peel, primary inspiration for Marvin the Paranoid Android.

36. Self-explanatory.

37. West Hollywood, where the incident that inspired "Paranoid Android" took place.

38. White Gucci jeans.

39. When the woman in the bar freaked out, Yorke looked at her eyes and saw the Devil.

40. Self-explanatory.

41. Rock out section of "Paranoid Android" inspired some young fellows in Teignmouth to do likewise (Muse on that for a while).

42. The article Lennon read which inspired the song that influenced about half of "PA."

43. The Breeders, who also covered "Happiness Is A Warm Gun."

44. "PA" sounds to me much closer stylistically to this than "Bo Rhap."

45. Rain down, come on rain down on me.

46. The Mellotron.

47. Yorke was originally going to sing "God kills His children" but the record company panicked so he changed it to "loves" but added a super-sarcastic "yeah" at the end.

48-49. The yuppies networking.

50. Self-explanatory.

51. What Yorke yelps at the end of "PA," and the book's subtitle served as general guidance for this piece.

52. "Subterranean Homesick Alien" was Radiohead's "let's do a Jeff Buckley song" song.

53. Bill Heine's roof shark sculpture, Headington, Oxford; intended as a metaphor for Hiroshima.

54. Kylepark, Uddingston - I grew up in Uddingston but not in that "aspirational" bit.

55. Fish restaurant in Beckenham where Lena and I went once; never again. Talk about getting funny looks.

56. "I can take you to the sun, but you don't want to go."

57. What happens when you tell people The Secret To Living.

58. "But you just try being free, my friends - everyone will hate your guts."

59. Howard Jones was born John Howard and John Howard was born Howard Jones.

60. "funny looks"

61. Perrin screaming.

62. It's too suffocating, suburbia, you've got to get away from it ("Smalltown Boy" video).

63. That shark's not going anywhere, unless it's burrowing into your soul.

64. "Exit Music" composed for and used in Baz Luhrmann's Romeo & Juliet film. 

65. Self-explanatory.

66. Montagues versus Capulets. 

67. The Parallax View test scene (key words).

68-69. Lyrics.

70. "EM" makes brilliant use of the Picardy third.

71. Sung by Ute Lemper, written and directed by Scott Walker, all about the last moments in the Dignitas clinic.

72. "it brings on many changes"

73. Juliet and Romeo.

74. "Let Down"; the album's most overt song about what a drag it is being on the road.

75. Alanis Morissette, whom Radiohead had recently and unhappily supported on her North American tour.

76. Audience of robots (band complaint about Pavlovian reactions to "Creep" etc.).

77. Travis.

78. Keane.

79. Coldplay (all three of these bands clearly followed in Radiohead's mellower wake).

80. Witty "skeet" as I believe they're called these days.

81. Insincere laughter.

82. Chris Martin accidentally falls through hole on stage.

83. "Karma Police" - a Beatles song, but not the way you think. Deliberately lumpen drums emulating Jeff Lynne's suffocating production of "FAAB."

84. The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, subject of Lennon's "Sexy Sadie" as referenced in "this is what you get."

85. "he isn't me, kill him"/recent Observer column on why waste time with difficult Rushdie books, read accessible, honest Dan Brown instead.

86. Unbeatable response.

87. "They."

88. don't like books.

89. really don't like books. 

90. Communist subversive Stephen Hawking, whose books are currently in the process of being withdrawn from the library systems of several North American states.

91. Self-explanatory.

92. "The girl with the Hitler hairdo"; Yorke later admitted he was thinking of Justine F.

93. "I lost myself"

94. Ending of "Karma Police."

95. Kampuchea - humanity being ground to a halt. 

96. End Of Part One.

The "Fitter Happier" section:

91. Warren Beatty, The Parallax View test scene. 

92. The Prisoner, "Free For All" episode ("we mustn't damage the tissue").

93. Neil and Jennifer in The Office, "Charity" episode - he's dressed for Comic Relief; they're about to make David Brent redundant. 

94. Douglas Adams, creator of Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, in the gym, where he suffered a fatal heart attack while on the treadmill, aged forty-nine.

95. Glengarry Glen Ross: "Getting on better with your associate employee contemporaries."

96. Where untrammelled spiv-accommodating capitalism gets us.

97.  "no more microwave dinners and unsaturated fats"

98. "A patient, better driver" (gory UK public information film from 1971)

99. "Baby smiling in back seat"

100. "No bad dreams"; Gray Ward, St George's Hospital, to which I was admitted in 2018.

101. "Careful to all animals"

102. "Keep in contact with old friends" 

103. "Will frequently check credit at (moral) bank (hole in wall)"; Botley Roundabout, Oxford, whose cash machines I know only too well.

104. St Francis of Assisi: "fond but not in love"

105. "Charity standing orders"

106. "On Sundays ring road supermarket" - East Dulwich Sainsbury's, my local in the second half of 1997 and where I bought entry #576.

107. "No longer afraid of the dark or midday shadows"; still from The Parallax View test scene.

108. "Car wash (also on Sundays)"; London Colney, not actually in London.

109. Hospital scene, Werckmeister Harmonies.

110. "Nothing so ridiculously teenage and desperate"; The Parallax View test scene. 

111. "An empowered and informed member of society."

112. "Pragmatism not idealism."

113. "no chance of escape"

114. "Shot of baby strapped in back seat"

115. "Tyres that grip in the wet"; Shepperton...

116. ...home of JG Ballard, whose novel Crash inspired elements of OK Computer... 

117. ...and whose near-neighbour Dickie Valentine was killed on Glangrwyney Bridge, near Abergavenny, in May 1971; his death was apparently the chief inspiration for Crash.

118. Memorial to Marc Bolan, Barnes Common, London SW13.

119. "No longer empty and frantic" - the voice realises he's been used and begins to turn the tables.

120. Narcissus erasing his own reflection.

121, "Frozen winter shit" in Oxford, which is what Laura and I used to say a lot of the time - that one was ours.

122. The ducking stool.

123. "the ability to laugh at weakness"

124. Boxer on his way to the abbatoir in the cartoon film of Animal Farm: "Fitter, healthier and more productive." 

125. In the transition between "Fitter Happier" and "Electioneering" you may consider Phil Selway's restless cymbal as symbolising the pig on antibiotics rattling the bars of its cage.

126. "Electioneering" was worked up by the band while they supported R.E.M. on tour in 1996 hence is naturally their "R.E.M." song.

127. Great use of the cowbell in "Electioneering."

128. "I trust I can rely on your vote"; Conservative Party election rally, Wembley, June 1987.

129. The song is more about the machinations of the music industry than politics; "When I go forwards, you go backwards/And somewhere we will meet" (JADE and Not Simon Cowell For Legal Reasons at the BRIT Awards, 1 March 2025)

130. In essence "Electioneering" is another life on the road lament.

131. The late Gene Hackman in the closing scene of 1974's The Conversation, a major inspiration for "Climbing Up The Walls." 

132-3. You are always your own worst enemy.

134. "Such a pretty house and such a pretty garden"; Morrell Crescent, Rose Hill, Oxford, where Thom Yorke once lived.

135. "A job that slowly kills you."

136. The real killer.

137. Capitalism can only ever eat itself; the semi-derelict Sunshine Desserts sign (The Fall And Rise Of Reginald Perrin).

138. "Bring down the government; they don't, they don't speak for us"; the Bastille, Paris, 14 July 1789.

139. Too scared to change anything.

140. "I'll take the quiet life"; Britain five springs ago. 

141-2. Lyrically self-explanatory.

143-5. Symbols of benign containment; Roehampton ASDA, Strictly, Kitchen Disco/bake cakes.

146. Sheridan Smith from the Inside No 9 episode "The 12 Days Of Christine" (memory of unused airbag).

147. Self-explanatory.

148. St George's Hospital, Tooting, London SW17, to which I have now been admitted on three separate occasions; "it's gonna be a glorious day."

149. Landing on the Hudson River, 15 January 2009: "Pull me out of the air crash, pull me out of the lake." 

150. Self-explanatory.

151. "I'm your superhero...": Burt Lancaster and young trainee, The Swimmer, 1968. 

152. Peter Sellers circa 1980, still just about believing he could be immortal.

153. Jonny Greenwood.

154. Peter Green - there's something very Fleetwood Mac about the instrumental break in the middle of "Lucky."

155. "We are standing on the edge" of the Grand Canyon.

156. "The Tourist" was based on an experience the band had while in Paris, witnessing tourists rushing around the city and not really seeing any of it.

157. "It barks at no one else/But me/Like it's seen/A ghost."

158. In Held, a woman is berated by her boyfriend for watching movies on her smartphone while they are on a train travelling along the coast of Nice. 

159. "Sometimes I get overcharged/That's when you see sparks"; Thornhill Park and Ride, Oxford.

160. "HE THOUGHT OF CARS" - the traffic edging out of the West London of work, towards the Oxford of repose.

161-2. Blur if Brett Anderson had been their lead singer, Suede if Graham Coxon had been their guitarist - that's what "The Tourist" sounds like to me.

163. Self-explanatory.

164. Malin Head, Ireland, as mentioned by Damon Albarn on "This Is A Low."

165-6. Self-explanatory.

167. I'm still seeking the answer to that conundrum.

168. ping

169. toll

170-1. Song cycles.

172. cage but no antibiotics.

173. ping

174. The last trump.

175. Microwave oven bell.

176. Heart monitor.

177. Triangle.

178. He crashes the car - that's what the last sound represents, and we go back to the beginning.

179. It's still 1997.

180. "It's time...Christine." "I'm sorry, I just stepped off the pavement, I wasn't looking where I was going..."

181-2. Self-explanatory. Fly easy, Bill.

183. Obligatory RAYE/"Genesis." reference.

184. Self-explanatory.

185. Cornelius Cardew.

186. Thomas Paine.

187. Olive Morris (all three are genuine superpeople).

188. The playing fields of Botley Park, Oxford, near where Laura and I lived.

189. Back to the beginning...

190. Not so fast!

191. Self-explanatory.