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Post by Whitneyfan on Nov 14, 2020 9:09:11 GMT 1
There was a time when I had to know who sang everything I knew, but I had no idea what that MK one was until it started playing and then it sounded as familiar as anything.
It's actually a song I like too, so it was a pleasant surprise to hear what it was.
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SheriffFatman
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Post by SheriffFatman on Nov 14, 2020 20:31:02 GMT 1
It only charted at #69 in 1995 - the #12 peak was a re-mix in 2014. And I had no idea how young he was when he originally released the track! You’re right, I missed that! It does seem barely believable that he was 15 when it first charted, but Wikipedia is very specific about his date of birth, August 3rd 1979.
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Post by SheriffFatman on Nov 14, 2020 20:59:26 GMT 1
634 - Oh Pretty Woman by Roy Orbison No. 1 in 1964
Mercy!
When they think of the charts in the 60s most people probably think of groups and Elvis. Roy Orbison is not one of the names that springs immediately to mind, but then when you look at his chart history it becomes clear that in that decade he was actually quite a sensation.
In black clothes, with dyed black hair and sunglasses, he was arguably one of the first pop stars to recognise a consistent, recognisable image could be as important as good music. Sometimes crooning dark, brooding ballads and sometimes, as here, taking the tempo up a notch for pop songs, he pretty much always had both.
Orbison was also a brilliant singer, and while this song might not stretch him much his vocals nevertheless up there with the brilliant guitar hook as one of the best things about it.
In an unusual chart run, Oh Pretty Woman spent 2 weeks at number 1, then 3 weeks at number 2 behind Sandie Shaw’s (There’s) Always Something There To Remind Me, before going back to the top for a third week. All of that must have added up to a lot of sales, and I guess a few more in the digital era have tipped it onto this list. Quite right too.
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Post by Whitneyfan on Nov 14, 2020 21:42:02 GMT 1
Roy Orbison is one of those artists I don't think to play very often, but when I do I realise how many great songs he had! 'Oh pretty woman' is definitely one of them.
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Post by onehitwonder on Nov 15, 2020 21:04:56 GMT 1
That's a nice one, I used to think this was a song sang by The Beatles. He has a few other hits that I enjoy. Love the movie as well.
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SheriffFatman
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Post by SheriffFatman on Nov 16, 2020 17:47:04 GMT 1
633 - Royals by Lorde No. 1 in 2013
Every now and then a song comes along that makes you immediately sit up and pay attention, and this was absolutely one of those moments for me. As soon as I heard this record I just thought it was awesome, I've just been having another listen and wondering if the intervening 7 years have done anything to dim that ability. It's a song that I can have on in the background now and not pay much attention to, but still if I give it the attention it deserves its brilliance shines through.
Lorde is actually Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O'Connor, from Takapuna, a suburb of Aukland, New Zealand. She was was 16 when this song was released, she co-wrote it and it's about the gap between her lifestyle as a teenage girl in a far flung part of the world and that of the pop stars and other celebrities people like her idolise. It's said to have taken her half an hour to write, but it really is lyrically brilliant, she has an incredible gift for describing her life in a way that's incredibly relatable, even to me, and I'm 20 years older than her and live on the other side of the world.
Musically the track is pop with a strong hip hop influence, which works incredibly well, maybe in part because it's the last thing you'd expect. For me this is one of the best singles of the last decade, distinctive, iconic, stylish, it has it all.
Royals must have had good pre-release publicity because it entered the charts at number 1. It only managed 1 week there, but had a very slow descent. Lorde has released some more excellent stuff since, in fact the next 2 singles, Team and Tennis Court, were both great songs, but she's never go close to a return to the top 10. I guess the brilliance of this one has so far overshadowed the rest of her output.
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Post by SheriffFatman on Nov 18, 2020 0:54:37 GMT 1
632 - Lullaby by Sigala featuring Paloma Faith No. 6 in 2018
A song with a deceptive title, this is not going to assist anyone trying to get to sleep.
For the second time on this thread, I’m contemplating the fact that Paloma Faith, an artist I really like, evidently feels the need to step outside her usual area of expertise and make dance music I don’t like in order to remain a viable proposition for the music industry. I don’t know this for sure of course, maybe she loves her dance hits and appreciates the chance to do something different, she does have an endearing tendency to look on the bright side of everything. I’m not keen though.
Sigala is actually DJ and producer Bruce Fielder from Norwich. He’s had 8 top 10 hits with a wide variety of vocalists, but only his 2015 debut Easy Love, credited to him alone, has reached number one. Lullaby is a slightly surprising (and relatively dull) entry on the millionaires list because it didn’t have a spectacularly long chart run and was less that two and a half years old when the list was compiled so it won’t have long term low level sales. The power of streaming I guess, this list will probably be absolutely enormous a few years from now.
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Post by onehitwonder on Nov 18, 2020 15:00:48 GMT 1
I discovered Lorde long before her stardom and my instant favourite was Tennis court which was a flop in UK. Royals does absolutely nothing for me and unfortunately it's her only top 10 single in UK as well.
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Post by SheriffFatman on Nov 18, 2020 16:07:03 GMT 1
631 - Uptown Girl by Westlife No. 1 in 2001
I said at the start of this thread I wasn't going to enforce many rules, but it would be nice if we didn't get ahead of ourselves too much and discuss songs we haven't got to yet. I'm going to have to contradict myself here though, because it's impossible to consider this track without first thinking about the original, which is number 445.
Uptown Girl was written, recorded and taken to number 1 in 1983 by Billy Joel. It was conceived as a tribute to Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons, recorded very much in their happy, uptempo soul style as opposed to the thoughful, multi-layered, meaningful piano led ballads that Joel was famous for. As such a lot of his ardent fans seemed to dislike it, but its simple, cheery nature certainly caught on with the public at large, and it was a worldwide hit. Personally, I think its a great record, and considering it in the context of his previous work just helps to demonstrate his versatility. Pop doesn't have to be serious, and in fact sometimes it's great when it isn't.
Westlife's version is rather astonishing, in that it is an exact, note for note, precise replica of the original. There really is nothing different here at all, it's identical. You may well ask what on earth the point was, but I would expand that question to include their entire career, they really are one of the most risible acts in chart history.
Their manager Louis Walsh's was obsessed with getting them to number one in the UK charts. He managed it 14 times between 1999 and 2006, through a combination of hyping their releases to achieve disproportionate first week sales and sometimes even moving release dates at the last minute if he was worried something might outsell them. This helped undermine the whole concept of the charts. Number one singles had previously been the ultimate proof a song had reached a broad audience, now we were faced with chart toppers that virtually nobody cared about or even knew. Westlife are only 3 behind The Beatles in terms of total number ones, but the statistic is meaningless. Many Beatles songs have remained in the public conciousness for over 50 years, most Westlife songs never even entered it.
As a result, of Westlife's 14 chart toppers, a grand sum of 1 - this one - appear on the Millionaires list. I would suggest that's for 2 reasons. Firstly, it was a charity release benefitting Comic Relief, and secondly it is, as mentioned, actually a great song. An utterly pointless recording though, and its presence here is more of a compliment to Billy Joel than anything else.
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Post by Whitneyfan on Nov 18, 2020 16:27:43 GMT 1
The only thing that could have been worse than that Westlife song being in there, is if it were higher than the original! Thankfully that isn't the case as I love Billy Joel's version.
Westlife's version is, as you say, more pointless than rubbish. Just a lazy way of getting a guaranteed #1.
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Post by onehitwonder on Nov 18, 2020 17:47:50 GMT 1
Louis Walsh is a disgusting money-grabbing human being. Luckily for the rest of the world Westlife mostly remained relevant only in UK through the years, although they have released a few good songs even for a boy band standards.
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SheriffFatman
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Post by SheriffFatman on Nov 19, 2020 11:34:31 GMT 1
630 - Firestarter by The Prodigy No. 1 in 1996
I always think there are very few occasions in chart history where members of the general public might have heard a number one single and thought "well I've never heard anything like that before". It takes a special type of creativity to achieve that, not just building on what's gone before but starting with something entirely different, and yet ending with something that despite its uniqueness still manages to achieve the ultimate accolade as far as reaching the audience is concerned. Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush is definitely on the list, maybe Pump Up The Volume by M/A/R/R/S, and I guess Fire by The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown. Perhaps Rock Around The Clock I suppose, although I'm not old enough to be sure. Firestarter is absolutely the one that did it to me though.
How do you even describe this song? Frantic, manic, urgent, crazy, apparently children even found it frightening. It is an assault on the senses, unlike so much pop music it gives you no choice at all about whether you pay attention. For me it's a work of genius, the intervening 24 years may have dulled the experience slightly but if I put it on and concentrate on how it made me feel in 1996 it is still and absolute thrill. Simply amazing.
Firestarter entered the charts at number one, stayed there for 3 weeks and ended 1996 as the year's 15th best seller, one place behind the follow up, Breathe. Interestingly, although its descent from the top 40 was fairly uneventful, by the end of 1997 it had managed an incredible 61 weeks in the top 100. It was unusual for physical singles to remain on sale beyond their immediate chart run, presumably on the assumption they wouldn't sell even if they were there in the shops, but Firestarter clearly challenged that notion. It also reappeared for a week at 58 in 2019 following the tragic early death of Keith Flint, it certainly stands as a moument to his manic talent and his fantastic contribution to popular culture in the 1990s.
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Post by SheriffFatman on Nov 20, 2020 17:02:35 GMT 1
629 - Should I Stay Or Should I Go? by The Clash No 1 in 1991 (first charted in 1982)
I've always felt this song answers its own question with the line after the title - "if I go there will be trouble, but if I stay it will be double" - well, on the balance of things you'd better go then. Job done.
Anyway, what an absolute delight it is to see The Clash on the millionaires list. I absolutely love The Clash, from their early punky stuff that sounds like it was recorded in a tin bucket, the reggae influenced political stuff, the sharp and tight punk of London Calling and even the later rock and roll pastiche of this song and a few others, for a few years they just never stopped being brilliant. Some people would argue it's a shame they're so well remmebered for this song because their punkier stuff was better, but I don't really mind. Several punk bands moved slightly awkwardly into rock and roll territory after a few albums, but The Clash did it with style. This is a thousand times better than late Sex Pistols material, and more.
It isn't here by dint of their own promotion alone of course. In 1982 it had a 9 week chart run that saw it peak at 17. In 1991, with punk a distant memory, a re-issue via a Levis commercial saw it gain another 9 week chart run, this time including 2 weeks at the very top. That period in 1991 was something of a dark period at the top of the charts, The Clask has deposed The Simpsons' Do The Bartman, and was itself knocked off by Hale & Pace and the Stonkers with The Stonk. The least said about any of that the better.
Neither of those 9 week chart runs seem likely to have garnered a massive amount of sales, so presumably Should I Stay Or Should I Go? is doing well in the digital era. Quite right too, it's fantastic.
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Post by SheriffFatman on Nov 23, 2020 17:08:00 GMT 1
628 - Every Breath You Take by The Police No. 1 in 1983
I don't know about anyone else but I'm quite surprised to find BMI's official Most Played Song On The Radio In History so low on this list. Having said that, I had to look up BMI before to discover it is Broadcast Music Inc., the US body for collecting broadcasting royalties, I had wondered why the British Medical Institute would be interested.
This son's massive, isn't it? Always on the radio forever, it seems to have been around my whole life, even though I was 6 when it was released. It's a bit like it follows you round, like a stalker, which is exactly what it's about. Huh, life imitating art.
That guitar lick, very subtle and understated but rhythmic in a way that seems different somehow, is quite simply a work of genius. Well Puff Daddy certainly thought so, he shamelessly borrowed it for his own million seller, which perhaps oddly appears way further up this list. I have to admit I like both tracks, I admire I'll Be Missing You's gall if anything, but there's no beating the original.
Every Breath You Take was The Police's fifth and final chart topper, an impressive run for a rock band. Maybe they were the Coldplay of their time, a proper band making mass appeal radio friendly rock music. I think they were better than that personally, their songs had more meaning. This one is a creepy and yet fooled many people into not noticing, which is a great trick in itself.
The single entered the charts at number 7 before climbing to the top for 4 weeks. A modest 11 week chart run was all it ever managed, since 1983 it has never been seen on the charts again. I think I thought it had always been on the million sellers list but in fact it's only digital sales that have bumped it onto here, clearly far bigger at radio than it was at retail.
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Post by SheriffFatman on Nov 24, 2020 17:17:45 GMT 1
627 - Controlla by Drake No. 18 in 2016
Drake again, his third of 14 appearances in this thread, I'm going to run out of things to say about him. Controlla was the fourth single from his album Views, one of the earlier ones being the chart dominating One Dance. While this one might not have managed 15 weeks at number one, it did have a remarkable chart run, spending 23 weeks in the top 40 despite going no higher than 18. In the streaming era this kind of chart run gives the impression that, rather than reaching a wide audience, the track was streamed repeatedly by a relatively fixed number of fans for several weeks. The fact that this generates "sales" for the purposes of a list like this one seems odd, but the alternative would be not to record any sales at all, and that would be odd too. If you believe streaming shouldn't be converted to streams then you effectively believe sales should no longer be counted at all, and that would be a shame.
It's also worth noting that Controlla's success came before the chart rule change that only allowed artists to have a maximum of 3 songs on the chart at any one time. Under the current rules, some of the track's chart run could not happen, because Drake had three or more other songs above it. That raises an interesting question about whether sales of "starred out" releases are still counting towards the all time sales lists. I don't know the answer, if anyone wants to enlighten me I'd love to understand more.
So what of the music? Well, it ambles along with not much happening and Drake murmuring about something or other for a couple of minutes, before Beenie Man appears from nowhere and suddenly starts some raggamuffin style toasting for a few seconds, then a really quite alarming air horn goes off, then it carries on ambling along until a cool bassy bit near the end. This type of music is a mystery to me, it just seems to lack everything that I understand people like about pop music. You can't dance to it, you can't sing along to it, the lyrics contain no revelations or artistry of any kind, it just sort of is. It exists, people listen to it, it's a million seller. Next.
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Post by SheriffFatman on Nov 25, 2020 16:06:57 GMT 1
626 - You Make My Dreams by Daryl Hall and John Oates Never charted in the UK
Daryl Hall and John Oates are pop rock duo formed in Philadelphia. It would be tempting to say that they are best known in the UK for a pair of top 10 hits they had in 1982, I Can't Go For That (No Can Do) and Maneater, but the truth is neither of them make the millionaires list, but this one, which has never even graced the weekly top 100, does.
The presence of You Make My Dreams in this thread has been a real head scratcher for me, it defies all conventional wisdom about how to that monumental achievement is accomplished. We have already had one none chart hit on here of course, Oasis' Champagne Supernova, but there's an important difference - I already knew that one. You Make My Dreams, on the other hand, is entirely new to me. There is, however, an interview with John Oates on the OCC's website from last month marking the fact that this song has passed one billion global streams. Asked why it was never released as a single in the UK he gives the slightly derisory answer "I never even thought about it", but interestingly someone called Wayne Dickson, who apparently knows more on the subject than either the OCC or the artist, has commented saying it was released, it just didn't chart because no one bought it.
So how on earth is it a million seller then? Well, digital downloads and streams obviously, but how does anyone even know it? The answer to that appears to lie in the long list of films and TV adverts it has featured. Oates says his personal favourite was its use in 500 Days Of Summer, which, never the film buff, I've not even heard of. The track really must be shifting a small but very steady number of units every single week to have become a million seller without appearing on the charts at all.
And the track? Well, forgettable, frankly, certainly not as good as several of their others, which is another reason the whole think mystifies me. There are many absolutely classic singles that don't make this list, the fact that this one does seems extremely odd.
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Post by SheriffFatman on Nov 26, 2020 17:57:44 GMT 1
625 - XO Tour Llif3 by L'il Uzi Vert No. 25 in 2017
An interesting entry now. Who would have thought it was possible to sell a million copies of a song the title of which looks like someone has fallen asleep while working and knocked their head on the keyboard. I did entertain the idea that L'il Uzi Vert might be Welsh, and Llif3 was pronounced Kliv Tri, but in fact he's from Philadelphia, so goodness knows what he's on about.
This is dark, atmospheric, mumbly rap music. I really appreciate the way this genre is able to create a feeling, it's clever how the music alone is sinister and ominous. You would think a million selling single would have slightly more than that though, but this one doesn't, apart from the general atmospherics and the repeated assertion that all his friends are dead it's really quite dull.
This was L'il Uzi's debut UK hit, and to date it's his biggest. It wasn't that big a hit either, but the clue to its appearance here is in its chart run,with 39 weeks on the top 100, 34 of them in the top 75. For the second time this week we're considering a song which doesn't seem to have caught on with the public as a whole, but rather has been streamed repeatedly by a relatively small number of very devoted listeners. It's the new normal, everything you thought you knew about successful singles is challenged by the success of this one.
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Post by SheriffFatman on Nov 27, 2020 17:01:50 GMT 1
623 - Drive By by Train No. 6 in 2012
Train are from San Francisco. They first appeared on the UK charts in 2001 with the rather lovely Drops Of Jupiter. A bit too adult MOR oriented to be supported by Radio 1, it did well to reach no. 10 in the charts and had a long chart fairly run as people discovered it via commercial radio. The follow up failed to make the top 40 and they were then absent from the charts for just over 8 years.
There was absolutely nothing about Train to suggest that they were not simply the latest in a long line of US bands to have a one-off UK hit and then never be heard of again, but against the odds in 2010 they reappeared and this new phase of their career has proved to be far more successful than the first, delivering them 2 songs onto this list, of which this is the first we have come across.
Musically, they appear to have simply heard the chirpy radio pop of Maroon 5 and realised they could do the same. Drive By is bland in the extreme, if that's not a contradiction in terms. It's got an upbeat chorus you can jump around to when it comes on, but you'll completely forget it until the next time it's on when you can jump around again. Financially this sort of music, meaningless guitar pop diluted to the point where you can hardly believe they're playing real guitars, must have been a fantastic move for them. Credibility wise they were obviously not bothered. I kind of feel like it probably makes some people happy to listen to music like this, but they are people who don't care too much for thinking. It's emotionless, flat, airheaded radio filler. I can see why it's on the millionaires list, but I wish Drops Of Jupiter was instead.
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