I’M old enough to remember the Alan “Fluff” Freeman years. We’d sit on the wall outside the house, lit by the lamp post my dad moaned about for years because it stopped him getting a parking space at his front door, and listen to the chart countdown on a Sunday evening, with Fluff telling us what had gone up and what had gone down.
My mate John was a huge Gary Glitter fan. He even put together a Gary Glitter costume for an end-of-term show, big glitter boots and all.
I wasn’t quite so taken with the artist formerly as Paul Gadd. Not because I had any notions of the darker reality of the man. I just didn’t care for Hello! Hello! I’m Back Again When it came on Radio 1 John would chase me round the block trying to force me to listen.
I feel, nearly 50 years later I can claim the moral high ground.
Freeman stopped presenting the chart show in September 1972 and Tom Browne took over, of whom, to be honest, I have no memory at all. But I do recall rushing home at lunchtime on a Tuesday in the 1970s to catch Paul Burnett unveil the new number one.
Ah nostalgia. Radio was full of it this week, prompted by the 70th birthday of the official charts. On Monday morning on Good Morning Scotland presenters Martin Geissler and Laura Maxwell were talking about the first records they ever bought (respectively, Adam Ant’s Kings of the Wild Frontier and Rock Me Amadeus by Falco) and talking to former Radio 1 chart presenter Mark Goodier. (Goodier’s first record: Ape Man by the Kinks. “Even Ray Davies said to me, ‘Why did you buy that one?” he admitted.)
The gist of the conversation was inevitable perhaps. Basically it was along the lines of haven’t things changed since the good old days when Rock Me Amadeus or Kings of the Wild Frontier ruled the airwaves?
That’s the thing about nostalgia. It is intrinsically conservative. The sweet taste of it is consoling, but really there’s a rot in it.
Goodier, though, was having none of it. Do the charts matter anymore in the age of streaming, he was asked? They do, he said.
“The charts changed from surveying what we went and spent our hard-earned money or our pocket money on to what we listen to. But why would what we listen to not be as relevant?” he asked.
His Gen Z kids, he said, are just as obsessed with music as previous generations.
In a way in this post-Top of the Pops era it’s the wider culture that has moved away from the charts, not the other way around. Us oldies have disengaged. And yet it’s worth
remembering that the official chart show is still a thing on Radio 1. It goes out on a Friday now (no, I didn’t know that either) and is currently being presented by Jack Saunders who, it turns out, is as enthusiastic about the job as Fluff Freeman was back in the day.
Goodier told Good Morning Scotland that he saw no reason why the charts shouldn’t still be a thing another 70 years from now. “We love a list, don’t we, in this country?” he suggested. “We always want to know what the most popular is. I can’t see that changing.”
Hmm, maybe. Time will tell. One thing we can surely all agree on, though. Taylor Swift makes a far better pop star than Gary Glitter.
Listen Out For: Hennikay, Radio 4, Tuesday, 6.30pm
Bill Bailey stars in David Spicer’s new radio sitcom about a middle-aged man suddenly reunited with his imaginary childhood friend.
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