Top Of The Pops

I'm starting to lose track of modern music. I couldn't tell you what the top selling songs are or even what the current releases are like. To some extent this is oldfartism. I think when every single pop record featured Autotune (to the extent that it sounded like "Sparky's Magic Piano" had staged some sort of coup) I gave up. However, I still like to keep up with current music trends - it's just that I am increasingly finding I don't get to hear modern music. I blame some of this on the PRS whose general greed at stopping shops and business playing the radio or other music has done much to prevent me hearing new music in the first place. I've ended up buying many records over the years just by a chance hearing. It wasn't home taping killing music but the Performing Rights Society!

I used to listen to the Radio quite a bit. In fact, I still do but the channels I listen to are either spoken word or play classical or middle of the road (i.e. middle age) music. I did used to listen to Radio 1 quite a bit but, in the daytime, this seems to be dedicated more to the aimless ramblings of vacuous idiots than playing contemporary tunes. Commercial radio has far too may adverts or, like Real Radio, they decide to have a phone-in talking pish about football when I have time to listen. Of course, I used to have one great source of contemporary modern music - nicely wrapped up into a half hour of TV on a Thursday night. Unfortunately, that little gem has been taken from me. I speak, of course, of that old institution: Top Of The Pops.

TOTP was much derided. It was generally considered to be naff. It certainly had its share of awful teeny groups, faddish fashions and nauseating novelty records. It never really made an effort to be cool (at least in its heyday). It didn't have to. The whole point is that it played those songs that were the most popular that week and the general publish has very little taste. In that respect it was very much a mirror of the times. It's very easy to look back with hindsight and say what the most important social and musical trends were but, at the time, the reality is very different. BBC Four have recently been showing old episodes of Top Of The Pops from 1976. This is seen as a landmark year for music as the whole Punk Rock scene was taking off with the likes of The Damned and The Sex Pistols releasing their first records. So how did this affect TOTP? Well, not much...



Ground braking music doesn't usually sell that well - at least not to begin with. The Beatles first single in 1962 only managed a lowly number 17 peak and there are many recordings now considered as classics which didn't even grace the lower reaches of the top 100 singles. Top Of The Pops in 1976 reflected this with a typical listing including The Brotherhood Of Man, Robin Starstedt, Our Kid and The Wurzels. Groovy, baby! Yet people bought these records in their thousands and this is what I really miss about TOTP. Most of the songs were crap. In fact, I can recall a number of occasions that the only thing I did like about it was the theme tune - Led Zeppelin's Whole Lotta Love (or at least an instrumental cover of it). The popular image of TOTP is the family gathering around the TV with Dad going on about the rubbish that kids listen to and Mum commenting that "that lad would look quite nice with a proper haircut." In truth, it was young music fans, like me, cringing at the sheer awfulness of 90% of the acts and hoping that whatever my favourite record was that week would get a look in. It was often car crash TV - and that's why I loved it.

In truth, Top Of The Pops had to change. Technology meant that record sales were not going to be driven by kids spending their money on 7" singles at Woolies. However, I do believe that there is a case for a popular music show on at peak-time on a main-channel TV station. The BBC would be the prime candidate to do it as they are our national broadcaster and shouldn't be concerned with commercial considerations. I think it would need new criteria for which records qualified to appear. The "singles rising" rule was fine when the programme was introduced in the early 1960s but music consumption has moved on. It's not even just sales but access to the likes of Spotify or You Tube that count. I think Top Of The Pops does have a future - it's just up to the BBC to realise this and bring it back.

If nothing else, it would give me the opportunity to sit in my armchair and say, "Who listens to this rubbish? It's not like in my day when you had a decent tune - like Motörhead..."