Today marks the seventieth anniversary of the publication of the first British album chart. The Official Charts Company jumped the gun by a week or so by announcing the forty most streamed albums of the 1960s and 1970s in Britain. Not the forty albums which sold most copies, you understand, but the forty most streamed, because in these deprived days clicking on one song for thirty seconds is deemed equivalent to the financial, physical and emotional commitment necessitated by buying a record, putting it on and listening to it.
What the OCC missed, or probably didn't know in the first place, was that 2026 marks the centenary of the Edison Disc Diamond Record, an experiment conducted by the Edison Company. The long-playing Diamond Disc, which played at 80 rpm as was the era's standard, could offer a playing time of twenty-four minutes on a single 10-inch disc and forty minutes on a 12-inch. Unfortunately, in order actually to play these prototype albums, a special reproducer and a modified feed screw mechanism were required.
The Diamond Disc didn't take off commercially, because of problems with low volume reproduction - much like the k-Tel, Arcade and Ronco compilations of the seventies - skipping of the needle, breakdown of the grooves themselves and a lack of variety; only fourteen Edison Long Play discs were ever released. RCA tried again in September 1931 with what they called "Program-Transcription" records which played at 331⁄3 rpm for about ten minutes a side, and while sound reproduction was much better than the Edison discs, the records could not be played without a special RCA "Chromium Orange" chrome-plated steel needle, and what do you know but there was this awkward thing happening at the time called the Great Depression so the records never took off.
Although RCA continued to experiment with the long-playing format throughout the 1930s, all research was suspended when this other awkward thing called World War II happened, and finally it fell to Peter Goldmark at Columbia Records who, at a press conference held at the Waldorf Astoria New York hotel in Manhattan on 21 June 1948, unveiled what we now commonly know as long-playing records, in both 10 and 12-inch form. A large number of these "albums" were released simultaneously, and the first "popular music" disc to be released as such was the 12-inch reassembly of a set of 78s which came in a package that resembled a photograph album - hence the name - collectively known as The Voice Of Frank Sinatra. Orchestrated by Axel Stordahl and produced by Bill Richards, the album's eight songs explored a similar emotional theme, that of unrequited love, dreamed of, remembered or mused upon abstractedly.
The thirty-year-old Sinatra had been quick to spot that albums should not merely be a case of two famous singles and a forklift truck's worth of cynical filler - he made it clear that none of The Voice's eight songs should be released individually, and while there is some precedent, with Lee Wiley releasing a series of 78s dedicated to the work of individual songwriters such as Cole Porter or the Gershwins in the late thirties, The Voice can stand, not just as the first "pop" album, but as the first "concept" album, the embryo of the album as a thing in itself.
It was therefore fitting that Sinatra should have the first recorded number one album in Britain, week ending 28 July 1956, less than a decade after albums had been launched. Songs For Swingin' Lovers! had been fashioned by Sinatra, with arranger Nelson Riddle and producer Voyle Gilmore, as a conscious contrast to the preceding year's introspective In The Wee Small Hours; these fifteen new songs aimed to admit daylight so that it might eclipse the late evening's darkness, and, even though occasionally ruminative ("We'll Be Together Again," co-written by Frankie Laine, "Old Devil Moon"), the record's overall mood was bright, bold and optimistic. My father bought the 1969 reissue for my mother as a tenth wedding anniversary present and the record dwells in my bones. As Elvis Costello later remarked - and as his big band-singing father would surely have noticed at the time - you couldn't notate the elisions that Sinatra makes on the "I" coming out of Milt Bernhardt's explosive, spluttering trombone solo and Riddle's celebratory brass fanfares, or the tectonic "DOOOOOON'T you know little FOOL?" on his "I've Got You Under My Skin." If aliens from another planet were to land on what once had been Earth several million years in the future - as Ian MacDonald imagined David Bowie imagining this happening on the syllabic salads which climax Low's "Subterraneans" - I'd like to think the record would make an excellent introduction for those wondering who we human beings were, and what we sang, and perhaps even why we sang it.
That first documented album chart was published in Record Mirror and at the time only extended to a top five - remember, at that time albums were a relatively new innovation and still something of a luxury, dull long things that your square parents played while you impatiently waited to get off on the new Bill Haley or Elvis 78. Singles were and remain pop's lifeblood, even if we choose these days merely to refer to them as "tracks." And perhaps tracks are all we have left.
None of these five charting albums had anything to do with rock 'n' roll. Apart from Sinatra, there were two Rodgers and Hammerstein film musical soundtracks - to Carousel and Oklahoma! - both of which traduced the quiet radicalism of the Broadway originals. Nevertheless, most of the biggest albums over the subsequent years comprised songs from the movies, on sale in the foyer as you leave the cinema, with nice book-like packaging (albums, you see). The Rodgers and Hammerstein soundtracks to South Pacific, The Sound Of Music and The King And I are to this day, and in that order, the three longest-running number one albums. South Pacific spent a cumulative total of 119 weeks - nearly two-and-a-half years - at number one, and who remembers anything off that movie now?
The other two albums in that original Record Mirror top five were jazz. Both were coincidentally recorded at the Crescendo club on 8572 Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, a club which my late father-in-law frequented, although my wife doesn't think he attended either the Mel Tormé or Louis Armstrong concerts which appear here. Gene Norman Presents Mel Tormé At The Crescendo - which features the singer's own take on "Old Devil Moon" as well as the unexpected top five hit single "Mountain Greenery" - is a breezy and affable affair, while Armstrong At The Crescendo Vol 1 has Satchmo and his All-Stars in full boisterous swagger, in large thanks due to the involvement of a fiery on-form Barney Bigard on clarinet and the great singer Velma Middleton.
The overall feeling, however, was that albums were for grown-ups. This perspective persevered into the sixties and explains why stereophonic easy listening was more palatable to conservative middle-aged ears wanting to try out their expensive new hi-fi equipment than those noisy, scratchy 45s adored by their unruly children and designed to sound best on tinny transistor radios. Sophistication over scruffiness. Order over new ideas. The dying old suffocating the trying-to-be-born...the first double album to top the charts was a budget-priced affair entitled Down Drury Lane To Memory Lane by the Hamburg-based but American-directed studio orchestra 101 Strings, a deliberately bland collection of show tunes and light classical designed to appeal to elderly people born in the nineteenth century.
Still, the Beatles and all that went on to happen, and even if you weren't around in the twentieth century you'll probably know how the story went, mainly because algorithmic nostalgia won't allow even the young to overlook history and move on. My wife and I came up with the idea of the Then Play Long blog as a means of writing about all of the British number one albums in what finally proved to be a doomed attempt to understand just what in these records attracted enough people to make them more popular than any other ones (albums, that is, not people).
As of the time of writing, 1,439 different albums have made it to number one, the most recent of which was recorded by the remnants of a group which achieved its first number one in 1964. We decided to stop at the 587th - less than halfway through - because we are not as young as we once were and time isn't there to be squandered on attempting to analyse what is largely - though far from wholly - rubbish (and yes, we have managed to listen to all 1,439 of them - including the bad ones). Of the fourteen songs stretched over sixty-two-and-a-half minutes of Foreign Tongues I will merely paraphrase what Coleman Hawkins once resignedly remarked of Ornette Coleman, in that both band and record need seasoning.
Back to those "most streamed" lists, however, Of the forty listed albums from the sixties, I will note that twenty-three of them - more than half the list - do not appear on Then Play Long, as they did not make number one, and that several did not make the charts at all, at least not in the sixties. We really shouldn't fret too much about the latter, remembering, as we must, that the primary function of the charts, for both albums and singles, has and always has been to document what was popular in one particular week, rather than to track how pieces of music gradually burrow their way into the aortas of human society. Perhaps we have every right to fret if we happen to be the ghost of Nick Drake, at number 37 in that list with Five Leaves Left, a record that was studiously ignored during his lifetime. Phenomena such as the Velvet Underground, here present with their first and third - though not their second - albums, take time to become apparent, so much so that their back catalogue fell out of print until 1979.
Some of the inclusions are predictable and other bizarre. I imagine At Last! by Etta James, a 1960 album which did not sell at the time of its release - unlike 101 Strings - is there because of the title song and the Coke advert. However, random easy listening items (Ella Wishes You A Swinging Christmas, Release Me and what I imagine the OCC to mean as being Dino: Italian Love Songs) are not fully explicable. More Hits By The Supremes dates from 1965 and I guess is the nearest call for "Stop! In The Name Of Love," but I do not understand what Georges Moustaki's 1969 album Le Métèque is doing at number 34, as pleasing as that placing is to discover - I expect people are attracted to the album's title song, which Moustaki himself described as "a small, subliminal settling of scores [which] became the hymn of anti-racism and the right to be different, the cry of revolt of all minorities," "métèque" being a pejorative term for Mediterranean immigrants, but in Britain it is not played on the radio or mentioned in critical dispatches at all (although to my mind - and please bear in mind that I am the son of a Mediterranean immigrant - it should be).
The only Sinatra album present, at number eleven - behind Electric Ladyland and Pet Sounds, it is the third highest-ranking non-Beatles disc here - is, rather bizarrely, 1965's double retrospective-of-sorts A Man And His Music, mainly featuring inferior re-recordings of his great fifties Capitol sides (by now, Sinatra had long since switched to his own Reprise label); I suppose if you're not fussy about what "Come Fly With Me" or "Under My Skin" you hear, it fills a gap. At fourteen we find the Disney soundtrack to Mary Poppins, which is the first music I remember hearing - not at home, but at the George Cinema in Bellshill on the afternoon of Saturday 10 December 1964, watching the film; there still exists a reel-to-reel tape of my eleven-month-old self singing "Let's Go Fly A Kite" - which was a big seller but not as big as the Beatles or the other lot, or indeed The Sound Of Music (which latter pops up at 28).
Of the Beatles albums, Abbey Road unsurprisingly comes top, followed by Pepper - but at number five is the Magical Mystery Tour album, which in Britain was only available on import in the group's lifetime and therefore made little commercial impact (although, given that the record compiles all six tracks on the double E.P. as well as the A and B-sides of their non-Pepper singles from 1967, it might well stand as the Beatles' best album). And Meet The Beatles!, at number nineteen, was an American-only release, but the global reach of Spotify does not give a damn where a record came from, just whether or not you stream it (see also the wildly inaccurate chart peaks listed by the OCC, who appear to confabulate American chart positions with British ones, and number one albums with number one singles).
In the seventies list, twenty-one of the forty albums did not make number one. Many were long-term consistent sellers which never quite sold enough copies to come top in any individual week. This too is a consequence of a transitory sales-documenting culture which only measures popularity in terms of here-and-now. Dark Side Of The Moon famously never made number one because in the week of its release too many people preferred k-Tel's TV-advertised discount bowdlerisation of the sixties. Tapestry got held at number four because the British Market Research Bureau changed the chart compilation rules and allowed budget-priced fly-by-night covers of hits to go top instead.
As for Bat Out Of Hell, Exodus, Hotel California, Songs In The Key Of Life and Ziggy Stardust, such albums persist and to an extent survive, more so than, say, Dead Ringer, The Final Cut or any other sequel whose first-week sales figures actually represent a vote of confidence in their predecessors. Some albums like Moondance, The Stranger, We Are Family, A Night At The Opera, Rockin' All Over The World and London Calling I suspect are there for one track alone - in four cases, their title tracks - and I wonder whether all the Bob Marley albums act as a substitute for Legend - what other reason is there for Kaya, an album that has never been mistaken for greatness, being at number nine than an unquenchable thirst for "Is This Love?" Even Rumours, which heads the list, has only ever managed one week at number one - the week of my fourteenth birthday.
While the Grease soundtrack has survived, the one for Saturday Night Fever has not, and one wonders whether radio stations have overrated their listeners' enthusiasm for the work of the Bee Gees and Electric Light Orchestra (although Supertramp are there, Gerry Rafferty and Lou Reed rather surprisingly are not). Given the declared crossover with BBC Radio - whatever the latter means in 2026 - one can only arrive at the conclusion that the main purpose of these lists is to provide fodder for middlebrow music radio stations (that adjective applies to practically all of them now) to justify their algorithmic adherence to the same three hundred or so forcefed slices of aural comfort food.
This in itself would be saddening, if understandable. But the real trouble is that the old is getting in the way of the new and suffocating it at birth...and by "the new" I could include most music made in the present century, which is already a quarter of the way through. My friend Mike Atkinson informs me that, whenever he DJs, kids come up to him asking for Michael Jackson, Fleetwood Mac and ABBA songs (I note that the highest-ranked ABBA album in the seventies list is also their worst - Voulez-Vous, a furtive attempt to chase the fleeing disco ambulance with four hearts not in it). Look at the current top ten if you're sceptical about that claim.
Hence the overwhelming feeling, which appears to have been gradually imposed upon us, that it's all been done and nothing new is worth doing. Meanwhile bands in possession of top five albums and industry awards cannot afford to give up their day jobs while veteran entertainers like McCartney, the Stones and Madonna make overlong and somewhat neutered-sounding records which do little save look back (Andrew Watt seems to be the go-to producer for 2020s pop hasbeens, our age's equivalent of stalwart Andy Newmark and Willie Weeks). Poor old Amy Winehouse, who was overlooked by everybody in her time because Joss Stone followed by Lily Allen were deemed cooler and had better, more connected PR.
This sense is, however, in turn crushed by the overwhelming sense of numb horror which is suffocating all of us. When the world's biggest pop star - whose entire selling point was that she was different from and better than that - turns out only to be interested in conquering the world and swooning over magic wands, we feel like we've been sold a bill of goods. When the world's allegedly most avant-garde pop star serves up a quotation-marked rehash of the dreariest excesses of early seventies glam-rock you sigh sadly at how quickly it took brat to show its age.
We stopped Then Play Long over a year ago because we could see, in the fetid stench of 2025, that not only was there no point in continuing it, but also because there no longer seemed much point in anything. I'll get back to that eventually. In the first instance, too many 1998 albums - Version 2.0, Talk On Corners, Five - consisted of really good E.P.s hidden away in a lot of padding. How could one justify sixty-six minutes for a boy band's debut album - more than twice the length, with at best one-tenth of the point, of Please Please Me?
But the number one album from 1998 that convinced us that there really was no point going any further was an album we love very deeply but that even we could see was far too long - Hello Nasty by the Beastie Boys. A treasured and cherished album with many heartstopping moments...but did it really have to be sixty-seven minutes long? Just because you can do something with new technology doesn't mean you should. Moreover, after giving the album a couple of fresh listens I knew I could not write about it, could not succeed in articulating what was so great - and deficient - in it, would only have succeeded in cheapening the music by trying to describe my reaction to it.
Likewise, I groaned at the sixty-six minute running-time of The Mountain by Gorillaz - I yawned at the title alone - and two-thirds of the way into some of the most portentous and pretentious of introductions I have ever heard I wondered where all the cartoon fun had gone; that having once been Gorillaz' point. A muddy and gluey path, littered with sampled corpses; Albarn is always at his least convincing when he's trying to be sincere.
Not that I flinch at long album running times. The New Sound by Geordie Greep and THIS MUSIC MAY CONTAIN HOPE. by RAYE both deserve every one of their respective sixty-three and seventy-three minutes; they have things to say and endlessly entertaining and startling ways in which to say them, and in many ways these albums are if anything not long enough! They are two of the most remarkable albums I have heard in the past two years - there is a third, The New Atomic by Ferg's Imaginary Big Band, which you have almost certainly never heard of, but more about that elsewhere and later. And one can hardly look at current albums by Kneecap, Lime Garden, the Lemon Twigs, Mandy, Indiana or Melanie Martinez and not sense that something is happening. As far as elderly entertainers are concerned, how come Squeeze have managed to come back with the greatest album of their career, or They Might Be Giants with one of their very best and most focused (and funniest) records, or Haircut One Hundred with the natural successor to Pelican West, forty-four years on? Or, for that matter, Boards Of Canada or Sturgill Simpson (as Johnny Blue Skies), both with exceptionally angry records?
I could go on - underscores! Louis Tomlinson (and Harry Styles)! Jessie Ware! Irreversible Entanglements! DoYeon Kim! SLAYYYTER! Lucy Liyou! Vince Staples! From this week alone, Steve Lacy, Syd and Yard Act! - but who else is going to know about any of this? Even those who should know have walled themselves up in their own sectioned-off booths...note that I mention both RAYE and SLAYYYTER, because I've always been a "both...and" type of person rather than an "either...or" one. As much as I love Tim Finney, and what he knows about the music that he actually knows about, I have to laugh rather gruffly when he says something like: "And yeah, sometimes I think the kids are wrong. If I thought a cohort was always right about things then my views and opinions would, by definition, cease to have independent value."
Sorry to be the one to have to break the bad news to you, Tim, but...this music is for the kids, it isn't meant for us; what we think is not only irrelevant but also intrusive. It's like the Guardian critic - who is currently in her late thirties - scolding Gracie Abrams thusly: "That mix of melodrama and songs sung like secrets means Abrams’ audience skews young: her music carries the sensation of being the only person in the world grappling with huge emotions, as life often feels in adolescence. For anyone older, her music can feel a little starter pack."
Newsflash: this music, as with most pop, isn't meant "for anyone older," and especially not the white male property-owning pensioners who remain The Guardian's core audience. It's hesitant and inconclusive because that's the way Gracie Abrams' teenage fans think and behave. It's for the young 'uns. Older music critics are advised to listen to the kind of eventless, drudge-like, New Yorker-fiction-but-with-guitars fourth-rate Americana which they and seemingly only they enjoy. Myself, I'm with Adorno (not a common occurrence): "In a real world in which matter-of-factness (which was fully justified as a critique of false plenitude) has degenerated into a statement of bankruptcy, a kind of spiritual meanness, the need for compositional freedom converges with the need for this sense of the inexhaustible. The sterility of functionality is a mere surrogate for the rigour of the work of art. The happiness of the latter lies in the qualitative variety which is not terrorised from outside, by the lie of purity and the pure...I would be inclined to retort simply that what is well cooked with many ingredients will find people to eat it, if it is not withheld from them, and sooner perhaps than things which make it a point of aesthetic morality to frustrate the need for unfettered satisfaction."
You are at this point entirely justified in yelling at me: "Where the hell is this piece going? You started off talking about albums...what is it you're trying to say?" Be patient; I'm trying to hear myself. Jonathan Bogart said on Bluesky: "making a 'good album' was only ever even a secondary goal for a very specific branch of popular music for a roughly thirty-year stretch; the vast majority of the world's greatest musicians never did or tried to, and assuming the album as the basic unit of musical artistry is weird and retrograde."
That assertion is muddled and vague. If Jonathan had qualified it by referring to "the vast majority of the world's greatest musicians in a very specific branch of popular music" he might have had a point, but he is otherwise ruling out practically all musicians. This is what occurs when you make absolutist statements; tedious facts dull the cathartic vibe. As I gingerly prepare to make an absolutist statement.
Because maybe albums don't matter all that much, if at all. Like nothing matters all that much any more. Albums were a neat marketing angle for maybe forty years, but then it all got dissipated and all that remains is wandering around our individual padded cells, the padding there to conceal the fact that we're all in the same room, completely unaware of each other. Or we got back to individual songs meaning more than extended exercises. Or, in the cases of Michael Jackson, Fleetwood Mac and ABBA, trusting each other with the legacies of folk songs from history which might have been an eternity ago, or yesterday - how simple it often is to confuse the two.
And nobody is going to know about "Numerology" by My New Band Believe, or "The Radiator" by Getdown Services, or "'if you wanna party, come over to my house'" by Fcukers because how, these days, can anybody know who doesn't already know about these things, or anything else that might be happening? Is a pop record that is never given a chance to make itself known and therefore become popular pop?
The common language disappeared, was eradicated. No Top Of The Pops at peak time to let everybody in the country know what was happening in music, whether they liked it or (more often) not. No three channels only so you had no choice but to watch them. No four music papers only - Melody Maker, NME, Sounds, Record Mirror - which all oddly complemented each other. Even if we can look back at all of these things now and wearily concede that they were fundamentally and desperately wrong, they were what we had and people who weren't us learned about what we did and didn't like - and culture spread wider as a result.
Now nobody knows what anybody else likes. Not your colleagues in the office, maybe not even anybody else in your family. They don't even know that anything else exists. That's the cost of specialisation and demographic narrowing, fencing every single artistic endeavour off until it means nothing except to one person, because identity has been pronounced more important than other people, that most hideous and avoidable of modern inconveniences. Identity even supersedes what you are as a person, as though flesh and blood mattered less than labels. Those feudal monsters who scheme to run everything can make far more money from you if they only have to negotiate with an identity.
What this ends up meaning is that people can only bond with memories, photographs of songs from one or even two generations before, because any notion of a present or future has been politely bled out of them. Not so much "who done 'Rein Me In' then?" but "what even is 'Rein Me In'?" It's a sturdy, purposeful five-and-three-quarter-minute-long song, nicely structured, lyrically clever and a proven certainty of a live favourite - but it sounds much more like an album track than Frankie Laine's trembling postwar proclamation of "I Believe," where he audibly struggles to convince himself that he is a believer but is over in less than two minutes and struck a mighty chord with a hurt nation. It doesn't sound like a pop record. Nobody sings it on the bus (unlike "WHERE IS MY HUSBAND!" - you see, it does still occasionally happen) and nobody who doesn't already like Sam Fender or Olivia Dean - and objectively there is no good reason why you shouldn't - probably even knows it exists.
Oh, the communal spirit is still there to be found; witness the middle-aged mums at Glastonbury last year happily singing along to The 1975, before struggling to remember any of their songs half an hour later. What reaches fans no longer reaches out to the rest of us, if "the rest of us" are still deemed to matter. But The 1975 don't appear on peak time evening television or open provincial supermarkets - there is no real opportunity for us to get to know them as anything other than characters in that morning's gossip pages. Their records and shows - their very being - come and go, and are mostly gone, through no real fault of their own.
But the separate pieces are strongly encouraged not to connect any more. That's why it's now impossible to make a living as a music writer unless you furiously and adamantly specialise. Having a wide range of knowledge is viewed as a positive disadvantage, and with suspicion, these days. People only want to know about what they want to know, which is usually interchangeable with what they already know. They want lots of pictures of Bowie in 1972 because they don't really like anything he did other than Ziggy. Indie doesn't talk to pop doesn't talk to hip hop doesn't talk to classical doesn't talk to folk doesn't talk to jazz, and even if they did, aren't the results historically the blandest of broths - a cynic recently equated World Music with different countries' ideas of Muzak?
The consequence, however, is that we are amicably dissuaded from talking to, or preferably with, each other any more, and further, that we can only manifest ourselves as online characters rather than the humans we might once have been. Which for the consequences of this meditation means that individual pieces of music exist only for individual people, and otherwise might as well not exist at all.
My fear is that this separation is going to lead to atomisation, if it hasn't been doing so for some time already. With specific references to the pop music of the first decade of this century, it is a wonder that we have ended up believing in anything, let alone anyone.
There are neurological explanations as to why people find it difficult or oppressive to listen to new music; this useful piece, though necessarily dated now, describes how it all has to do with plasticity of the brain and the amount of dopamine released whenever we hear a piece of music; anything new and unfamiliar tends to provoke overproduction of dopamine because there is no cortigofugal point of reference for it, hence confusion and in many cases hostility.
I do not subscribe to Jeremy Larson’s Logan’s Run theory of musical appreciation – “Most people have all the songs they could ever need by the time they turn 30” – although Tim Rice, in his introduction to the 1981 edition of The Guinness Book Of Hit Singles, puts the cutoff age for pop at eighteen and points out that this is indeed how the vast majority of humans behave; after eighteen, music gets put to the background of most people’s lives because other factors – career, marriage, family – then take precedence. People “grow up.”
In that sense I have to admit that Mr Larson may have something of a point, or Danny Baker, when he remarked that “something terrible always happens to music when you’re twenty-six.” The music we hear as children and teenagers – and, if we persist with music, into our twenties and possibly even our early thirties – helps to form who we are and who we remain for the rest of our lives. For that reason it’s no use complaining about people not wanting to read books because they were forced to do so at school; those experiences, imposed at a highly impressionable age, colour how we react to everything thereafter. People cannot “move on” from being told what to read. Or, for that matter, what to listen to.
Perhaps you might agree with Helen deWitt, who used to live upstairs from me at Lady Margaret Hall forty-five or so years ago and who says that all publishers want are things which rekindle the wonder of childhood – hence, for instance, the continued deification of children’s television from as far as half a century ago. You knew where you were because your parents paid for everything. When it became your turn to pay, your cortigofugal circuit pressed the alarm button.
As David Stubbs said about ABC’s The Lexicon Of Love, music means more to you at nineteen than it did at nine or twenty-nine. Or it means something different, but its focus is concentrated and not reproducible. And it is a hardwired characteristic of humans to react in gruff confusion when faced with something new that they don’t understand; every breakthrough in new music has had the same effect, from Gregorian chants onward.
Until quite recently, however, the tendency to pull down the shutters on any new music was not a general characteristic. No matter how bitterly individuals might have viewed it, the underlying notion was that music had to keep moving forward and developing, to avoid ossification; furthermore, a life which does not allow encounters with new discoveries is not a life worth possessing. The excitement and thrill of the new outranked and superseded closed-off comfort.
Nonetheless, I have no need to remind you that, six years ago, something fundamental changed in – or was done to - human beings, something we are unlikely ever to get back. The events of March 2020 played as though life had been abruptly switched off. What we got back later was more of a photograph of life as it had been; 2019 seems like a century ago.
So we bunkered down, and despaired, in the same ways as some of us had done since 2016, or 2008, or 2001, and became not just afraid of life, but something less than human. Forced into our eternal online boltholes, we pretended to talk with other people since in real life, or what remained of it, we could be arrested for touching other people. And business, technology and resurgent (or hitherto dormant) feudalism has, since then, made sure that we have stayed locked into the internet. Like prisoners in a cell, or rats in a cage.
It has subsequently and gradually impressed upon us that might is right, that right is wrong, that humanity is anti-human…and I no longer have any idea whether (pace Depeche Mode) people are people any more. Our basest, most barbaric levels have been exposed and encouraged more fervently since maybe the seventeenth century – that is, if we ignore or overlook the vast plains of barbarism harvested across the last century alone.
We have learned nothing, other than we have not evolved since the lizards crawled out of the slime, and feel very powerless and afraid. Once we applauded the comparative freedom of the internet, before the moneyed jaws of steel clamped our brains into obedient neutrality. Now there is little to discover or uncover there other than a huge residual bitterness, a perverse adoration of doom and apocalypse (some people can’t wait for the end to come), a puritanism that could have escaped from Salem and, above all, people openly acting out their very worst aspects as what were once human beings.
It is impossible even to view social media, as a lurker, now without becoming thoroughly depressed and hurt. I myself have given up on contributing to social media since doing so now seems like nothing but a waste of time, emotion and energy that could better be concentrated on other things in actual life, such as some of it is still, against all the odds, lived. Communicating with the people I love and who love me, rather than struggling pointlessly to momentarily impress strangers.
It is likewise not wholly irrational to think that we are writing the final pages of history. This unutterable helplessness, this gradual realisation that everything we were brought up and taught to believe and do in order to live a good life, was a lie, that humanity has never been more than venal, grasping, selfish or violent. That lies, or how you presented them, turned out to be more important than any truth.
This isn’t just to do with the climate change, the effects of which are now inescapable, or the global re-adoption of fascism. But I have to face up to the fact that, depending (or not) upon what happens in this United Kingdom in 2029, my chance of dying horribly in a concentration camp is now more than zero. That is a statistic we should never have had to revisit or reconsider. The notion that we have been forcibly painted into a corner from which we can only escape by means of violence should have been buried forever in 1945, but what I’m arguing here is that all of this has ineradicably contributed to people’s fear of the new, including music. So much easier to escape back into the past when hope still seemed containable and viable, despite the deep flaws of some of the musicians we are now made to worship.
I have never had much of an urge to dwell in the past – as Mark Sinker rightly said in the NME long ago, if the past had been any good, we’d have stayed there. At least not in the marketed “past” broadcast in all its forms, which has little or nothing to do with the actual past as some of us lived and experienced it. I am resistant to jolly recollections of the seventies because to me it rekindles memories of how violent my father was to my mother and myself in that decade (and for some of the sixties and very early eighties as well – it is all tainted). I was messed up for life in the seventies – all the enthusiasm, joy and nerve I possessed were literally beaten out of me. Quiet types who crouch in a corner all their “lives” get by and don’t cry (or aren’t heard to cry).
I keep moving on because life is, or should be, about dealing with new things. The notion that streaming numbs the mind is not relatable to my own experiences, which are that streaming is a really handy way to get through new records, sort the wheat out from the chaff, and that if we hear something arresting on the radio, or read about it wherever we read about it, we can listen to it again immediately rather than spending endless frustrating hours searching through the overpriced and unfriendly husk of what used to be known as record shops. If it’s good enough that we want to hear it uninterrupted by commercials, we buy the record online. Everyone gets rewarded in the end.
It isn’t that there’s “too much music” – just that there’s no conduit for filtering it all. If we can listen to all new music pretty much immediately, then who cares what a middle-aged music critic has to say about any of it? The gatekeeping is no longer necessary, although the less-heralded role of critic as guide still does tend to get underacknowledged. We can make immediate and fairly accurate judgements – the first three tracks of the new Nia Archives album, for example, constitute some of 2026’s most thrilling music (and in themselves would arguably have made for the year’s best E.P.), but the album tails off quite spectacularly thereafter into playlist-friendly meekness – so we remain resistant to media hype (which nine times out of ten happens for extramusical reasons, for instance needing to appease a PR company run by a former work colleague who can furnish interviews).
If you have enough judgement about yourself, however, you should have no problems sorting through the streaming forest – in a lot of ways it is actually quite liberating, and infinitely more so than wasting money on looks-good (a.k.a. “trendy”)-but-maybe-not records. Our assemblage of CDs from this year (so far) might count as the least fashionable, but they are certainly (in our view) the best and probably the most lasting.
It’s this “fear” again, the knowledge that, however much you listen to, it will never be “enough” to fill the hole in your being, and that you’d much rather pull the blinds down on this wreckage of a century and remind yourself, not how things once were, but how you would have liked them to have been. It would be nice for me to offer the opposite opinion, namely that there is more than plenty going on to sustain anybody’s interest, but my words are “read” (i.e. momentarily looked at and forgotten five minutes later) by only a couple of hundred people, because they (the words, not the people) are not as “exciting” as putting the iconoclastic boot into something or someone and because I am hopeless at promotion.
So there is little inclination for me to write anything any more, because I am increasingly reaching the conclusion that, not only would it prove highly unlikely to matter, but also that this pop music was a momentary immoral blip in civilisation’s history that isn’t worth writing about. It is thoroughly depressing, for example, to encounter name after name of musicians from the 2000s and early 2010s whose music I loved and wrote about at the time but have subsequently turned out to be deeply, deeply flawed. Some of them appeared at the World Cup final this Sunday past. Others turned up at Madison Square Garden a weekend or two ago.
It really is a case of wondering whether my life has been wasted attempting to understand and elevate what is, in its essence, amoral muck. It is almost certainly too late for me to turn back – I am ageing, my health is suboptimal, time is necessarily limited. And yet I can listen to something like “Memory Box” by Delhi’s Peter Cat Recording Co, a song and a group of whom you will most likely never have heard of, never will hear of or ever want to have heard of, and sense…a glimmer of magic, which is what we all look for in any manifestation of art. That magic is what hooks us, keeps us coming back. It would be foolish to deny the warmth of magic in favour of the cold boot of rationalism. The song “Memory Box” appears on an album made in 2019 entitled Bismillah. Albums can still be great things – if you allow them to come to you.
