Uplifting Chart Commentary From James Masterson

[Niall]

Does anyone like "Vulnerable", by the way?

I think it's ace.

Yes, I think it's fantastic. It has a lovely pace to it.

[Patrick Bateman]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01nwfxs

The terrifying chart nerd appears on this programme replete with his extensive chart tape collection. I can actually see how Masterson became Masterson now and one can only sympathise with the poor sod.

[Drico One]

Not long after the offending contribution at the start of this thread, Masterton lost his job doing the chart analysis. Apparently, his commentaries no longer touched the zeitgeist and his bosses told him "why bother?".

Last I heard, he was gamely continuing on some blog for the sheer love of it all, I'm sure.

Drico.

[Patrick Bateman]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0 ... he_Top_10/

Check out 1:04:00

Holy crap, I've just googled him. His latest fascinating project involves Masterton revisiting the Masterton archive:

As promised earlier, to commemorate 20 years of chart commentaries I took the time to have an extensive wander through the archives of just about every word I’ve ever written on the subject of pop music and the charts. Presented here are a selection of the very best and often the very worst of what I had to say each week. Bold predictions, wilful ignorance and a childish joy in saying the stuff you are not supposed to – it is all in here.

Let’s start just a couple of weeks into the series. This from November 1992:


No. 2: CLIMBER. Whitney Houston – I Will Always Love You. Her first Top 3 hit for five years. Some are speculating it will be No.1 next
week. I still maintain it is not that good a song.

Demonstrating early promise in the “unable to spot a hit single when it smacks you in the face” stakes.

From May 1993:


No. 28: NEW ENTRY. Blur – For Tomorrow. At the end of 1990 Blur were ‘it’. The darlings of the indie scene with magazine covers galore and placing several hits on the chart including ‘There’s No Other Way’. Since then of course their fortunes have fallen and successive single releases such as this one are regarded with little interest by the indie press that at one time held them so dear to their hearts. The only reason I mention this is due to the current slobbering over Suede and I am tempted to wonder just how long it will be before they go the same way.

Yes, in 1993 Blur were finished, FINISHED I tell you. And neither were Suede, for a bit.

From November 1993:


No. 35: NEW ENTRY. David Hasselhoff – If Only I Could Say Goodbye

Now I am a child of the early 1980s so I am more inclined to remember this chap as ‘Mr Knight Rider’ rather than by his current tag of ‘Mr Baywatch’. The US TV series is unique in broadcasting history in that it was due to be axed until British TV companies, keen not to lose the most surprising ratings winner of recent times, put up most of the money for it to continue to be made. Thus it is that an American TV series continues to screen, despite audiences at home having little or no interest in it. The success of the series though has given David Hasselhoff a chance at once and for all having a pop career in Britain. On the continent he is a superstar, charting hit after hit with his single of a few years ago ‘Looking For Freedom’ standing up as one of the biggest Europe-wide smashes ever. He’s never charted in this country though – until now with this rather turgid piece of balladry which I suppose only goes to prove you can achieve more posing in flimsy swimwear than you can talking to your car…

Arf. And this was over a decade before Jump In My Car as well.

September 1994 and after years of decline, the singles market is about to get exciting again:


Right here’s a challenge for you. Guess how many copies ‘Saturday Night’ sold last week….. Wrong. It was far far more than that. Between the 12th and 17th of September this single sold 220,000 copies. When you consider that in an average week the No.1 single sells around 70,000 copies that is quite a feat in itself. That is the highest weekly sale for any single since Band Aid’s ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ sold 800,000 copies and Wham’s ‘Last Christmas’ sold 600,000 in the same week in December 1984. With sales of over 350,000 in just two weeks Whigfield has notched up the fastest selling single for eight years. Not bad for a tacky little melody penned by an Italian and that soundtracked most people’s summer holidays whilst they were tanked up on Sangria. There are no end of facts to reel off about the significance of last week’s entry at No.1 but they can wait for over the next few weeks as the girl from Denmark begins what may be a fairly protracted residency at the summit.

Even today a 200,000 copy sale in a week would be something we got excited about. In late 1994 it was unheard of. Five years later we were getting quite blasé about such numbers too.

April 1995, and Take That have just released the best record ever:


To say that anticipation for this single has been high is to say the least an understatement. The release of ‘Back For Good’ on Monday prompted the biggest demand for any new release for over ten years. By the end of the week the single had sold well over 400,000 copies – beating Whigfield’s ‘Saturday Night’ to register the biggest weekly sale of any single since ‘Do They Know Its Christmas’ sold 800,000 one week in December 1984. That total is of course not only enough to make the song No.1, but also to ensure it has outsold all the other singles in the Top 10 put together. Take That are now registering a consistency of singles success that has not been seen since the heyday of the Beatles. Six of their last seven singles have made No.1, every single one of those in its first week – no other band has ever had more than three instant chart toppers. Even last summers ‘Love Ain’t Here Any More’ which only reached No.3 eventually outsold a couple of those No.1 singles. The song is arguably the band’s masterpiece and whilst they may have further smash hits after this it is unlikely they will ever measure up to the scale of this one. Gary, Jason, Mark, Howard and Robbie are currently one of the biggest pop bands in the world with only one territory yet to succumb to their charms. Wake up America… the biggest commercial pop band since the days of Wham! are currently in full flight and you surely cannot ignore them for much longer.

Why did I care so much about America noticing? Although oddly enough Back For Good did end up becoming a moderately successful hit single for them. I wasn’t wrong about it remaining their greatest single ever, surely.

June 1995 and everything becomes official:


HEAVY NOTICE: These charts are offered on the Internet as a service to music fans. However, they remain the copyright of CIN Ltd and any reproduction of this information in television or radio broadcasts or in printed or electronic publications without CIN’s formal approval is a breach of copyright.

The original Dotmusic copyright message. Bottom line: don’t do ANTHING with this information other than look at it with your eyes. Or people who live under Blackfriars Bridge will get mediaeval on you.

December 1995 and sometimes the good stuff doesn’t get published:


Let’s face it, the Beatles could fart into a baked bean tin and it would still sell in its thousands. More than any other record released in the last decade, this new track is a piece of history in the making, bought more for what it is rather than what it sounds like. That fact alone has been enough to give the band at Number 2 single, with the added bonus that the track at the very least sounds better than the aforementioned metallic flatulence.

A line which was apparently too much for the sensibilities of Dotmusic readers and it was excised from the piece that was eventually published. I wasn’t wrong though, surely.

January 1996, and I was doing two jobs at once and was writing columns on a Monday morning with about two hours of sleep behind me. Hence I’d come out with the occasional “will this do” effort.


17 LUMP (Presidents Of The USA)

The New Year lull allows a few dance hits to slip through and penetrate the charts, the biggest of which is this current club favourite.

At least I then had a week to work out how to save face:


15 LUMP (Presidents Of The USA)
A cautionary tale. The participants are one J.Masterton and another "friend" who shall remain nameless.

*ring* *ring*
"Friend": Hello?
James: Listen, you know that Presidents of the USA record? I’ve not heard it, what does it sound like?
"Friend": Oh that, quite good actually I’ve got a great remix of it.
James: So it’s a dance track?
"Friend": Er… yeah.
James: Cheers.

Wiping the egg aside, ‘Lump’ becomes one of a number of records at the lower end of the charts to take advantage of the lack of major new releases to actually climb the chart this week, this one up two places and growing in popularity all the time.

FIVE YEARS LATER some people online were throwing that incident at me as proof as to how useless I was. Which was daft, there were plenty more recent examples.

It’s now September 1997. Diana is dead and Elton John has released the worst record ever as a commemoration. Except you weren’t allowed to say that because Britain was a bit weird like that at the time. Yeah, like that was ever going to stop me.


Such talk skirts around one very crucial point – it is actually not very good. Whatever the motivation behind its release, whatever the causes set to benefits from the profits of the record there is no escaping the fact that the song that originally celebrated one of Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s childhood idols has been turned into a rather tacky dirge in memory of a woman who was as famous for her eccentricities and flaws as she was for her charitable work. One should never denigrate something that will raise money charity but there are far far better ways of paying tribute to the life of a person than this single which only serves to spoil the memory of what was a rather lovely song to begin with.

I had the balls to say in public that Candle In The Wind was garbage. 4 million copies later (most of which are now landfill), it still is.

October 1998 and after warming up, it is time to try to get my editors into proper trouble:


33 NO TENGO DINERO (Los Umbrellos)

Before T-Spoon came along this single was set to be the big party smash of the late summer. No Tengo Dinero has been something of a worldwide phenomenon in 1998, a smash all over Europe and perhaps most astonishingly of all a largish hit in America where it sold over half a million copies. As a result the presence of the track so low down the charts comes as something of a surprise. Part of the reason may be the presence high up the chart of Sex On The Beach – maybe people can only relate to one Eurodisco novelty at a time. I suspect one other important factor is the delay in bringing the single out. Originally it was pegged for release in the middle of August which prompted the record company to license the track to appear on a number of chart- and dance-related compilations. Most notably the track appeared on Now That’s What I Call Music 40 at the end of July and so given that the single has been freely available on an album which has sold over 900,000 copies so far, is it any wonder there are few people left over with an interest in buying the track as a single now it is finally released?

Starting a common theme of “record labels are pretty thick sometimes”, this was I think the only occasion when the PR people from said label wrote to my editors to moan at such misrepresentation, although we stood by every word printed. I always got the feeling that this was prompted by the act themselves reading this and pertinently asking their British label why they had messed up their chances of a hit single.

November 1998 and the hitherto flawless band James are about to do something that made me angry. Spreading manure all over their most famous hit single by issuing a remix of Sit Down to promote a Greatest Hits collection. Don’t hold back…


Now at the end of a year when the band have successfully promoted a Greatest Hits collection it is appropriate that their greatest hit of all should make a reappearance. Sadly it has done so in a rather inappropriate form, you guessed it: the Great Remix Of Crap. It all makes perfect sense of course, take one of the best records of the decade, one of the few early 90s indie hits you can actually dance to anyway and shove a processed Gary Glitter-esque thump underneath it in a desperate attempt to ruin it for everyone. Even the fact that the normally inspired talents of Apollo 440 are behind the single doesn’t come as any comfort. It hasn’t stopped the single crashing into the Top 10 to give the band their fourth such hit single and indeed their biggest hit since the original Sit Down but I can only hope those that have bought it have done so in order to play the original mix which can also be found on the CD single. Am I being harsh? Possibly, but then again I am just warming up ready for the arrival of the Levellers’ single…=

The “Levellers single” referred to above was I think a similarly unnecessary remake of One Way which actually didn’t end up being released until the following February.

Also in February 1999 we witnessed the debut of a teenage singer who dressed in a schoolgirl outfit and swept all before here in a manner which was quite breathtaking. This is how I welcomed Britney Spears into our lives:


The superb pop masterpiece that is the debut single from American teen sensation Britney Spears has this week equalled her recent American feat and shot straight to the top of the charts. In doing so it has become the 11th new Number One single in as many weeks, each of these having entered the chart at the top and fallen down. By the end of trading on Monday the single had sold almost as many copies as Lenny Kravitz’s Fly Away did in the whole of the previous week. By the end of Wednesday the total was close to a quarter of a million. By the time shops closed on Saturday night and the cutoff point for this week’s chart rundown was reached Baby One More time had been bought by around half a million people. It is the biggest weekly sale achieved by any record since Elton John’s Candle In The Wind 97 sold over a million in its first full week on release in September that year. Indeed over the course of the last month the Number One singles by Armand Van Helden, Blondie and Lenny Kravitz have all sold over 100,000 copies to claim the top of the charts, quite a few more in some cases. Add those figures together and you will see that since the middle of January the Number One single in the UK has accounted for sales of over one million singles. Remember this is also in the middle of the seasonal sales slump.

Britney, Bigger even than Whigfield. That takes some doing.

‘99 also saw Westlife slither onto the stage. I guessed immediately who they were really aiming for:



Unusally for a band aimed squarely at the teen market their first single is a lushly produced harmony ballad which has led to the unusual situation of the bulk of the national airplay for the single coming from the adult-orientated Radio 2, probably the first example of a new band being sold to little girls on the strength of their looks but to their mothers on the basis of how their music sounds.

If only I’d also said “they will end their career in 11 years time with the worst song Gary Barlow has ever written”. I’d have made a fortune as a clairvoyant.

July 2000 and it is time for Kylie to enter Phase II, exiting the wilderness years and putting on hotpants. Even back then the significance of what she had just done was hard to escape:


Spinning Around is her fifth Number One single (four solo and one duet with Jason Donovan) but perhaps significantly it is her first chart-topper since Tears On My Pillow ascended to the top in January 1990. This wait of 10 years and 5 months is one of the longest ever endured by a female artist, second only to the gaps of 26 and 15 years between appearances at the top by Cher and Diana Ross respectively. The success of Spinning Around further means that Kylie is now one of a select band of artists to have had Number One hits in three different decades (80s, 90s, and 2000s), putting her in chart terms on the same level as the likes of Cliff, Elvis, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Madonna, Queen, Diana Ross and Michael Jackson. Kylie Minogue – chart legend?

I’d be less impressed next time around, you watch.

June 2001 and I appear to be in love:


Back to Dido, and the success of this single confirms her deserved status as one of the biggest stars of the year. Note too the video for the song that has clearly been shot by a director who knows he is filming one of the most beautiful women in the world and who doesn’t care who knows it.

All I will say is that she went downhill after the second album. In every sense.

From the same week in 2001, another sacred cow had hoved into view and it was time to start slaughtering.


Why are people so scared to say how useless Radiohead are? True, they have produced the odd gem over the years but for the most part they churn out nothing more than an endless string of tuneless dirges, all of which are made the more excruciating by Thom Yorke’s vocal style which is not so much singing as the squeals of pain from some bizarre testicular injury. Remember all the people last year who went around saying just a little too loudly how good the Kid A album was? Actually they were just embarrassed to admit they had spent their hard earned cash on fifty minutes of impenetrable guitar feedback. It was like the Emperor’s New Clothes all over again. Happily there were no singles released from Kid A, but the cycle begins all over again with their new album Amnesiac which was actually recorded at the same time. Thus Pyramid Song is their first chart hit since January 1998s No Surprises although I’m not sure it was worth the wait. Never in contention for a place at the top, instead this single is content to be their fifth successive Top 10 single in a run which stretches back to Street Spirit (Fade Out) in early 1996. As you may have gathered, I’m not going to be a sucker for the hype, I’ll just judge them on a single by single basis. Pyramid Song isn’t a potential classic like the aforementioned Street Spirit but neither is it as painfully discordant as Karma Police. Let the hate mail commence…

The subsequent “war of Radiohead” raged on for another three weeks until everyone involved got bored. Regrettably the ‘testicular injury’ line proved to be far too evocative and it now gets in the way of me developing a proper appreciation for any Radiohead tracks as the image of Thom Yorke getting hit in the nads every time he goes to sing is too powerful to repress.

Finally to round off this first decade of madness, and having made people living in grotty basements cry it is time to tread on the dreams of people who still live with their mothers. From March 2002:


To be personal for a moment, I must confess I really do not understand the cult of Kylie. Derided for years as a manufactured pop puppet, albeit with a great deal of camp charm, she re-emerged two years ago with some dizzy techno hits and a new wardrobe that doesn’t quite cover up her slender frame enough. That it seems was enough to have the entire world falling at her feet and hailing her as the sex symbol of the decade. I suppose it would make more sense if I even found her in the slightest bit attractive. I’ve met the woman and without the makeup and with ordinary clothes on she is just a rather plain, ordinary lady who you would not give a second glance to if you got into a lift with her. So shoot me, whatever mystifying spell she has cast on many other men has quite the opposite effect here. Even the Agent Provocateur advert was more ludicrous than arousing.

Naturally this was breaking the first rule of pop writing. Namely that you don’t diss Kylie. The subsequent thread on the Dotmusic forums tried to work out what my problem was. Was I gay not to fancy her? No, I was pictured with women on my website. Clearly I’d tried it on with her and been rejected, so this was just my bitterness showing through. I love forums.

Stick around, there is another decade of archives still to plunder. More on the way.



http://www.masterton.co.uk/

[Patrick Bateman]

And he's still slagging the boys off.....

It had been some time since I ritually slaughtered a sacred cow, which is probably why the near legendary Pet Shop Boys row came as such a shock. In March 2009 they released a new album which was feted by many in the music press as yet another masterpiece. I, on the other hand, saw it as yet another tedious legacy release by a group of which I’d once been a fan but who had ceased to be relevant ten years earlier:


Just check out the stats. 1999′s ‘Nightlife’ spent two weeks on the album chart, 2002′s ‘Release’ just one. Their 2006 offering ‘Fundamental’ may have been hailed as an impressive return to form when first released but it too just had a four week chart run before vanishing forever. It saddens me to see it, as the Pet Shop Boys were my favourite group growing up and I avidly collected every single one of their releases during the 80s and 90s. I don’t point this out from the position of someone who dislikes their music but the sad truth is that the cultural and creative contribution of their music these days is almost precisely zero. ‘Love Etc.’ may well be one of the most fun, pop-focused and commercially appealing records they have made in a long time, but I can almost guarantee that you won’t find it on the Top 75 within a fortnight and whilst ‘Yes’ may well have a Top 10 debut on the album chart next week, you won’t find it in the shops by Easter. That my friends is Depeche Mode syndrome, and you have to wonder why they continue to bother.

The one bright part of the resultant abuse was a certain Janet Street-Porter suggesting on the band’s official forum that I had “all the artistic sensibility of a salted slug”, a branding of which I was so proud it formed the title of this blog long after anyone knew what it referred to.




The supreme irony being that Masterton is now himself a tedious legacy act, endlessly regurgitating his pointless ephemeral witterings on Record X selling more than Record Y in Week Z. His own cultural and creative contribution has now dissipated to precisely zero. The halcyon days of obscure chart blogging for nerds are over and Masterton must pack up his neatly-arranged tapes and find a new role for himself, perhaps as a traffic cone counter on an A-road in the West Pennines.

[Blogo]

What an awful blog/ troll!

PSB are more creative than ever!

[Undertaker]

‘Love Etc.’ may well be one of the most fun, pop-focused and commercially appealing records they have made in a long time, but I can almost guarantee that you won’t find it on the Top 75 within a fortnight and whilst ‘Yes’ may well have a Top 10 debut on the album chart next week, you won’t find it in the shops by Easter. That my friends is Depeche Mode syndrome, and you have to wonder why they continue to bother.

LMAO. Oh lets not bother then because the album wont be in the shops more than two months.

His guarantee about Love etc was bollocks as well. I think it spent at least a month in the top 75. No wonder the stroker got the bullet.

[Patrick Bateman]

What an awful human being.

Oh, I only feel sorry for him. He's clearly semi-autistic and the chart is his security blanket. I just find it amusing that PSB are fulfilled making a new album/Turing score while Masterton blogs about mid-1990s chart entries and it's him that thinks he occupies the moral high ground!

[Drico One]

There are plenty of PSB fans that think like Masterton, though, like it's somehow Neil and Chris's fault that they no longer have big hits. There are plenty who see the chart as some kind of meritocracy where good records are rewarded with huge sales. They see Pet Shop Boys as pop - not art - when the reality is they've always been both.

They view an incomplete picture of Pet Shop Boys - from the first play of a lead single to the last track of the album. That's fine from a listener's perspective, but they miss the crucial section before any note of music ever finds its way on to the Internet. They ignore the creative impulse and the creative process which is what the artist lives for. They see only the reception, not the inception. As such, if the reception is lukewarem - which it invariably is for pop stars in their fifties - then there must be no purpose to Pet Shop Boys.

The way to kill an artist is not to kill his sales - but to take the creative impulse from him. That's just not happening with Neil and Chris...

Drico.

[Radiophonic]

If it is "Depeche Mode syndrome", then I feel proud of the Pet Shop Boys as I think DM and New Order are the very best.

As Kylie Minogue once said, "Longevity is my credibilty"

[daveid]

What an awful human being.

Oh, I only feel sorry for him. He's clearly semi-autistic and the chart is his security blanket.

Yes, but there are a few semi-autistic people on this forum too, or at least a bit aspergers.

[Nickname]

There are plenty of PSB fans that think like Masterton, though, like it's somehow Neil and Chris's fault that they no longer have big hits. There are plenty who see the chart as some kind of meritocracy where good records are rewarded with huge sales. They see Pet Shop Boys as pop - not art - when the reality is they've always been both.

They view an incomplete picture of Pet Shop Boys - from the first play of a lead single to the last track of the album. That's fine from a listener's perspective, but they miss the crucial section before any note of music ever finds its way on to the Internet. They ignore the creative impulse and the creative process which is what the artist lives for. They see only the reception, not the inception. As such, if the reception is lukewarem - which it invariably is for pop stars in their fifties - then there must be no purpose to Pet Shop Boys.

The way to kill an artist is not to kill his sales - but to take the creative impulse from him. That's just not happening with Neil and Chris...

Drico.

PSB had more creative impulse when they were successful.

Nowadays, they think they don't need to put so much effort because they are not going to sell many records anyway. For me, it's a real fact.

[Patrick Bateman]

PSB had more creative impulse when they were successful.

Nowadays, they think they don't need to put so much effort because they are not going to sell many records anyway. For me, it's a real fact.

No, that's your subjective opinion. I agree though; apart from recording two new albums and writing a score for the Turing project, they really are slacking.

You're subscribing to the Masterton Aesthetic Theory in which the only forms of creativity to be celebrated are those which appeal to the masses. Masterton is very much the anti-Adorno; he's probably just moved on from Dan Brown to 50 Shades of Grey and is already starting to grow moist at the thought of this year's Christmas number one by Artist X. Whatever it is.

[Patrick Bateman]

Hi James!

http://www.masterton.co.uk/2012/11/the- ... en-pounds/

[Palpatine]

Hi James!

http://www.masterton.co.uk/2012/11/the- ... en-pounds/

Congratulations!