Advent Calendar Of Music: Day 18

Levy - Rotten Love

We had Smog yesterday, and we'd suggest James Levy has the odd album or two of his, filed neatly next to the Smiths. Why so many reviews mention Coldplay we're not entirely sure about. It shares a title with the album

In shops tomorrow: 19/12

Singles

As you'd expect there's not a lot of qualitative interest actually released this week, so let's go through them quickly - Fairytale Of New York is re-released for the Justice For Kirsty Campaign and apparently it'd be in the proper top 20 this week on downloads alon (NB. Chromewaves has two versions of Stars' cover), and are we so wrong to actually like Coldplay's Talk?

Christmas presents

You'd better get some. Before this time next week, ideally. The Weekly Sweep, by the way, will return in the new year.

Albums No.20 appendix

"...Tim Goldsworthy, who'd done an excellent Dawn Of The Replicants remix with David Holmes a few years earlier"

Advent Calendar Of Music: Day 17

Smog - The Well

Bill Callahan's jaded worldview got transplanted this year to Willie Nelson's studios, of all places for the noted lo-fiphile. He has in all honesty made better albums than A River Ain't Too Much To Love, but few more thoughtful

Albums Of The Year: Number 15

Let's start with a quick game of Tyne & Wear indie scene musical connections. So Peter Brewis was, and still is in some photo captions (including those in Getty Images' archive), the drummer with the Futureheads, Barry Hyde has been in other bands with various members and their 1-2-3-Nul! EP was produced by David Brewis. Maximo Park's Tom English drums on the album. Most of the above have been part of the J Xaverre live band. Give us long enough and we'll come up with a connection to the Golden Virgins too, although Kubichek! might be a struggle. Such diagram drawing is the traditional way to open a piece on Field Music, but tells you nothing about what they sound like.

Actually, what do they sound like? Over the album they veer from Mr Blue Sky ELO to English Settlement XTC, La's harmonies with prog time signatures and at least two songs that seemingly take inspiration from Robert Wyatt's version of I'm A Believer. As much as they're thrown into the mix they don't sound like just another post-punk band, turning the guitar effects down and producing the sort of sound that would be dubbed Americana if it wasn't laced with local accents and British Invasion and psychedelic pop suss. All this begs an interesting philosophical question - is it now seen as too obvious to be in thrall to the Beatles and Pet Sounds? You never hear them explicitly mentioned any more even when their fingerprints are all over the evidence. Field Music is proof that not only it is something not to be ashamed of, but there are still more ways and means to utilise the core values in 2005 and create something fresh sounding.

LISTEN IN: You Can Decide
EXTRA FEATURE: Not a lot about, but at least they've talked to Gigwise

Albums Of The Year: Number 16

The Boy Least Likely To have just been on tour with James Blunt, according to their blog "because I thought it would be funny". They were nominated by their label for the Smash Hits One To Watch award and finished a close second to major label post-Coldplay knockoffs Kubb. After releasing The Best Party Ever on their own label, they've signed to a label which also houses Bananarama and may or may not have a Simon Fuller involvement. Their album is being lined up for proper promotion in a couple of months. You will hate them by this time next year.

One of the best received compilations of last year was Rough Trade's Indiepop 1. The previous Rough Trade 2CD various artist efforts had dealt in far more worthy genres, but there was something about the scrappy, often purposefully naive, homemade sounding songs that made up a decent proportion of the tracklisting (oh, and it had our title song as the final track). It's that spirit that Jof and Pete have sought to recreate here, employing a phalanx of music classroom instruments and purposefully lo-fi recording facilities but preferring melodies and innocence to what seems to be regarded as indie now. Tracks called Warm Panda Cola, I See Spiders When I Close My Eyes and I'm Glad I Hitched My Apple Wagon To Your Star may make stronger men grind their teeth in anger, but there's real pop classicism, not in the Paul Weller sense but that of people who had the Smile bootlegs well before the live renaissance and would have slipped into the mainstream around 1981 or the Jimmy Webb West Coast scene perfectly, while never quite disabusing the idea that there's a fragile darker core. It sounds terrible in December, but if you're considering a picnic in the woods next July you'll go a long way before finding better accompaniment.

LISTEN IN: Be Gentle With Me
EXTRA FEATURE: The band's blog is fine but irregularly updated, so while you're waiting delve into their psyches, and read an explanation of Panda Cola, on their Pitchfork interview

Advent Calendar Of Music: Day 16

dEUS - Sun Ra

Hard to think dEUS have spent most of their years on major labels, this album on V2, none of whom are surely able to trace a linear path through their melange of lounge pop, mid-80s Sonic Youth, free jazz, Americana, distorted garage rock and Captain Beefheart when the marketing meeting comes around. As usual, Pocket Revolution makes it sound the norm

How to test how big a band are

'Arctic Monkeys A4 paper with name on'

The only chart that counts (4/6)

We continue going back through the halcyon days of Christmas top forties before record companies seemed to know there was such a thing, namely 1982:

1 Renee and Renato - Save Your Love
"Very, very few performers now before the public today can touch Renato. He is a gifted singer with a lush, expressive and robust voice like a powerful, majestic instrument that resounds and fills every inch of a theatre." That may be so, but when you're now best known for being Ron Atkinson's mate it's not going to stand you in much stead. You know, when Pete and Dud both died all the news obituaries featured the Bloody Greta Garbo Dagenham Dialogue, when we lost Ronnie Barker we were reminded of Four Candles, and while we only wish him the best of health we can't help thinking Eddie Large's life will be illustrated by his slightly less celebrated take on this "#1 music video on the BBC's 'Top of the Charts'".

2 Shakin' Stevens - The Shakin' Stevens EP
Blue Christmas, Que Sera Sera, Josephine and Lawdy Miss Clawdy. Not doing down those 50s throwback jibes just yet, then. Why name an EP after yourself this far into your career?

3 David Bowie and Bing Crosby - Peace On Earth-Little Drummer Boy
Sir Percival lets David use his piano if he's not around. The idiot.

4 Culture Club - Time (Clock Of The Heart)
Their second hit, which means dads across the land hadn't worked out that singer's gender yet. Two years later Jon Moss would be the first proper voice you heard on Band Aid B-side Feed The World.

5 Madness - Our House
"There's always something happening and it's usually quite loud" Suggs reckoned over a record that somehow made number 7 in the Billboard chart the following August.

6 Phil Collins - You Can't Hurry Love
There's always been a Motown side to Genesis' music, of course. Triple Phils in Blues Brothers gear in what at the time was an irregular solo outing.

7 David Essex - A Winter's Tale
On a worldwide scale, indeed. Pre-The River, if you're keeping notes.

8 Modern Romance - Best Years Of Our Lives
Everybody still salsaing, then, to trumpet sporting beloafered Latin quarter bandwagon creators featuring Geoff Deane on vocals prior to his co-writing Birds Of A Feather and the like. Says he hasn't worked in comedy since Babes In The Wood, which proves there is a god. Did they really have a single in 1982 called Queen Of The Rapping Scene? Is that like Reggae Like It Used To Be by Paul Nicholas?

9 Lionel Richie - Truly
You can probably guess how it goes from the title, to be honest.

10 The Jam - Beat Surrender
Quickly on the way down, and that's just about that for Weller as angry young Keats for twelve years or so. Personally, we hated this for years, heard it on the radio a few months ago and found it to be fantastic, which proves both something and nothing simultaneously.

11 Cliff Richard - Little Town
As in Of Bethlehem, yes, but presumably he was keeping that quiet for now. Pop fact: if you discount Band Aid 20 as copyists, Saviour's Day is the last Christmas related Christmas number one.

12 Human League - Mirror Man
Soul moves from imperial phase Phil and the now permanently aggreived girls, surely overdue a critical reappraisal. If the Chalets are reading...

13 Wham! - Young Guns (Go For It)
Andrew pops up on George's latest self-aggrandising documentary film to explain just what he was doing there, leading to tentative tabloid thoughts about a reunion. Yeah, that's going to happen.

14 Dionne Warwick - All The Love In The World
A Bee Gees song, it says here. Again, you could write and score this yourselves.

15 Shalamar - Friends
Surely everyone was bored of Jeffrey Daniel's bodypopping showpiece by now, and indeed they were gone from the top 40 after 1983, leaving that clip of an American interviewer accidentally smacking Howard Hewett on the nose with the mike in their wake.

16 Ultravox - Hymn
In which Midge hears The Mighty Wah! and decides they'd only be improved by self-important lyricism.

17 Dexys Midnight Runners - Let's Get This Straight (From The Start)
Not that Kevin Rowland was ever really not earnest - c.f. full page music press manifestos, forcing Kevin Archer to change his name to Al so there was only one Kevin in the band - but this is where he started to slip properly into it with this brand new track as Emerald Express era started its slow movement towards Ivy League suits, Don't Stand Me Down and heroin.

18 Malcolm McLaren And The World's Famous Supreme Team - Buffalo Gals
While Lynne Truss exits crying, we should note Herbie Hancock credits this as the influence for Rockit, the Supreme Team's chief wordsmith was called MC Hamlet and McLaren is still banging on about teenage Chinese girls playing chipped Gameboys being the future of music.

19 Santa Claus And The Christmas Trees - Singalong-A-Santa
God knows what this was - a medley, we'd guess - but it seems not to be related to Santa Sings. Amazon report customers also investing in Tony Christie. Cabin Crew's Star To Fall, Crazy Frog and, um, Jem.

20 Bucks Fizz - If You Can't Stand The Heat
Jay Aston was by this point living her whole life in outfits made from diaphanous slips and buckles.

21 Duran Duran - Rio
Only ever reached number nine but it's the one everyone recalls for the very festive video. Doesn't sound any better in retrospect from The Bravery.

22 Blancmange - Living On The Ceiling

23 Donna Summer - I Feel Love
None darker than Moroder. This was actually a remix of the 1977 number one and an extended one at that, barely plausible given the original lasts several days as it is.

24 A Flock Of Seagulls - Wishing (If I Had A Photograph Of You)
They only ever had four charting singles, of which this was the biggest by a good sixteen places. You never hear jokes about Peter Murphy from Bauhaus' hair, do you?

25 Yazoo - The Other Side Of Love
I hear Vince Clarke is buying a synthesizer and an arpeggiator and is throwing his computer out the window because he wants to make something real.

26 Abba - Under Attack
The penultimate single, and even in those days before Paul Morley and excitable popist blogs it attracted attention for seemingly having goths acting as stand-in lyricists. Q once described this as the meeting point between Bucks Fizz and Joy Division, which seems fair enough.

27 Soft Cell - Where The Heart Is
28 Incantation - Cacharpaya (Andes Pumpsa Daesi)

29 Kid Creole And The Coconuts - Dear Addy
Lest we forget Augustus Darnell and his carnival ready girls were on Ze Records, now regarded as the house label for the No Wave scene, as well as providing a home for Was (Not Was)' early experiments and occasionally Suicide, and indeed Darnell/Creole was an in-house producer. The man who sang Annie I'm Not Your Daddy worked with sax-squawking punk-funk hardman James Chance!

30 Eddy Grant - I Don't Wanna Dance
This had been the third successive reggae number one following Pass The Dutchie and Do You Really Want To Hurt Me, which is something to think about now we're past the NME's Summer Of Ska. Comet-shilling Electric Avenue was a month away.

31 Supertramp - It's Raining Again

32 Kool And The Gang - Hi De Hi, Hi De Ho
Paul Shane not pictured.

33 Keith Harris and Orville - Orville's Song
The reason why nobody takes Public Enemy seriously any more. This was actually a new entry this week, so clearly novelty hit marketing worked very differently then.

34 John Williams - Theme From ET
This was the last in a run of five years or so when a chart wasn't a chart without some sort of symphony orchestra film theme. Worth mentioning the next time it happened, when in February 1984 the top 40 contained both Main Theme From The Thornbirds and Love Theme From The Thornbirds. And who remembers The Thornbirds now? Exactly.

35 Talk Talk - Talk Talk
Following this, their next two hits were in 1986 and 1990. Any more and Mark Hollis would probably have emigrated.

36 Barry Manilow - I'm Gonna Sit Right Down And Write Myself A Letter

37 Marvin Gaye - (Sexual) Healing
Those brackets are important. On its way out having been number four, although Marvin was probably too whacked out on the floor of a Belgian hotel cloakroom to care.

38 Musical Youth - Youth Of Today
In fact they had six top 40 singles, this Michael Manley-quoting anti-inflation spiel peaking outside the top ten, as something described like that is always bound to do. And Pass The Dutchie isn't actually about spliffs at all, of course, so shut up, Channel 4 ironists.

39 Maisonettes - Heartache Avenue
Evolved from City Boy (5705? No, alright then), bringing 60s soul to an early 80s mixing desk. Later eski.

40 Japan - Night Porter
The David Sylvian critical reappraisal, that's overdue too.

Albums Of The Year: Number 17

The biggest disappointment with You Could Have It So Much Better, apart from how they chose a title which was bound to be used against them in every underwhelming review, is that Franz Ferdinand made an album before it. The debut threw open the doors through which all manner of vagrants and chancers have charged in the nearly two years since, and what's more deserved to, finally finding a home in the nation's hearts for the skewed but oven ready sound of all those bands like Josef K and The Fire Engines who you'd read about occasionally but never actually properly investigate. Franz's biggest achievement was that they brought their influences to the collective table, refused to budge that far outside them and challenged an audience outside the small sphere of specialist radio listeners to take them in. In light of that, many couldn't help but be disappointed by an album that did something as callous as use much the same source material as a starting point.

The sound of that album could best be described as coming from an outfit that required a lot of practice room time to sound so loose, and here the same idea has been applied to the next level of influences on - glam, mid-80s indie, even Led Zep in elements. Where they previously sounded paper-thin in a workable way, now they turn the amps up to 11 and charge headlong at the chunky riffs. When they move outside their main reference points they're not so surefooted, although Walk Away does a good spot-welding job using a Byrds template. In summary, this is Franz sounding more brazen about rocking out while never quite escaping, or indeed willing to fully escape, from their Postcard Records heritage. Ultimately, just about every track on here would make a cracking single, it's just that they had to put them together to make an album out of it.

LISTEN IN: The Fallen
EXTRA FEATURE: More Franz treats than are contained in heaven and earth, or thereabouts, on The Franz Ferdinand Fan Community

Advent Calendar Of Music: Day 15

Animal Collective - Grass

Like Mercury Rev at their early 90s most dissonant, Avey Tare and co jot down a horde of ideas and attempt to squash them all into the same three minute song. Will frighten kids. Taken from Feels

Albums Of The Year: Number 18

It's the voice, stupid. Or: the way the voice is used. While in thrall to this album we looked up reviews of The Raven, Lou Reed's critically speared avant jazz-spoken word-Brechtian 2003 quasi-musical on which Antony, already an album down but unknown outside his New York cabaret circles, sings on a downbeat version of Perfect Day. Quite a few were cautiously understanding but the dread name 'Tiny Tim' does crop up occasionally. As far as we can tell, the only reference in relation to I Am A Bird Now comes on a Pearl Jam forum, and the people there like Pearl Jam.

It could just be about Mr Hegarty's presence, the fact there is a man built like a prop forward, looking like Sonia from Eastenders, who sings like that, but it's what he does with the voice that made the album stand out. Once you've got over the shock of the new at the start of Hope There's Someone, note the desperation and sadness in his words, the stirring of the strings, the coda where his voice seems to turn into just another instrument. On For Today I Am A Boy he turns almost rapturous at the thought of growing up "to be a beautiful woman". Notably, for an album long filed under avant-garde, while it might in certain circles be tantamount to heresy, listen to Fistful Of Love or You Are My Sister and then try to claim that Antony isn't a great soul singer too. Outside the specialist areas of the press, when they'd got over their "but he's American!" ire, they at least publicly professed they didn't get it after the Mercury Music Prize win. Frankly, they never stood a chance.

LISTEN IN: Fistful Of Love
EXTRA FEATURE: A history of Antony's pre-Johnsons performance art collective Blacklips

Advent Calendar Of Music: Day 14

Dirty Three - Great Waves

The ripple-making instrumentalists of choice to Nick Cave and the gentry find a vocalist! Even better it's Chan Marshall, some say Cat Power, suiting their new melancholic mood perfectly. From the album Cinder

Albums Of The Year: Number 19

It's been a good year for auteur-esque Americans, songwriters with big lyrical themes and musical ambition. Okkervil River's Will Sheff begins Black Sheep Boy with a cover of the Tim Hardin track of the same name, and then spends the rest of the album working around its themes and characters. In the wrong hands it would have sounded trite, leaning on someone else's best idea. Where Sheff and his band succeed is in possibly the purest of all expressive forms, emotion. The doomed poetry and dynamic music that reaches for the skies recall the more lauded The National, but unlike that band there's a more cohesive atmosphere about it all, driven by a determination on Sheff's behalf to get his darker thoughts over.

This idea of treating lyrics in the same way as a short story and then orchestrating the band around it does seem to be a kind of approach that only North Americans can pull off, as we've seen elsewhere this year and we'll see again on this list. Whether it's European bands almost fearing emotion or the result of labels of all sizes preferring their bands to cut to the bitter quick we're not sure, but the likes of Okkervil River glory in their ambition, and the best albums emerge when the results match up. Take For Real, which starts in an acoustic quietly seething manner, threatens to turn into power-pop and instead shifts over four minutes into barely restrained passion but backed by a proper hook. Final track So Come Back I Am Waiting neatly summarises the whole album, beginning with spare acoustic strumming and an echo-laden, almost hymnal Sheff, building into a Low-like stately lament and gradually introducing horns and subtler strings before returning to the scene of the titular character's supposed crime full of longing and privately confused emotions. Suddenly the concept has come full circle and you've barely noticed. In an album full of surprises and hidden depths, this might be the most conclusive test pass of all.

LISTEN IN: Black
EXTRA FEATURE: Lit-pop doesn't sell all that well, so Sheff used to supplement his income by writing about films for the Austin Chronicle

Advent Calendar Of Music: Day 13

Kubichek! - Nightjoy

The second part of our exclamation marks special, these are the latest despatch from the north eastern talent mines, or somesuch. Less angular, more driving than the rest of them. We'll regret the days when band members stop calling themselves Frog

Advent Calendar Of Music: Day 12

Half Man Half Biscuit - Upon Westminster Bridge

In compiling the album list we thought long and hard about whether it'd be fair to include Half Man Half Biscuit's Achtung Bono, then decided that as all HMHB albums are entirely seperate from the norm it wouldn't be fair to put them up in a like for like situation. Buy it, buy it, buy it

Albums Of The Year: Number 20

The countdown starts today and goes through incrementally until New Year's Eve. Tell your friends/readers!

Please?



The first time we were aware of the DFA, through the Radio 4 album, we were partly attracted to them because they included Tim Goldsworthy, who'd done an excellent Dawn Of The Replicants remix with David Holmes a few years earlier. More than that, though, was the sound - reminiscent of the Gang Of Four at a time when nobody else was, yet crackling with its own energy, layering effects on instruments, undercut with subtle electronics and in a metre of its own. Then we heard The Rapture, which established No New York and Ze Records' places in the musical tapestry beyond a line on Eno's CV and Kid Creole And The Coconuts. From here, although we imagine plenty are loath to admit it, came much of the music you've heard out of Britain this year. Suddenly, disco stopped sucking.

We suspect that most, like us, heard about Losing My Edge long before we heard it, not that we were disappointed. As well as royally taking the piss, it namechecked the Human League while sounding like a streamlined Being Boiled. As with most of Murphy's work, the LCD Soundsystem album's strength came in that it was brazen about its influences, it just melded them into an amorphous house style. David Byrne relocated to early 80s Sheffield, Mark E Smith joining Suicide, the man who previously claimed to be "the first guy playing Daft Punk to the rock kids" making music that sounded like Daft Punk playing to rock kids. Machines find their groove, influences both discarded and cooler-than-thou are rehabilitated as if they've never been away and if closer Great Release is a straightish Eno crib there's nothing much wrong with it. Oh, and more copies than you'd expect have the second disc of older tracks, starting with Losing My Edge. "You don't know what you really want"? Oh yes we do.

LISTEN IN: Too Much Love
EXTRA FEATURE: Losing My Edge with sound samples of every band mentioned. Be aware that Yaz are the same as Yazoo.

The only chart that counts (3/6)

As Christmas draws ever closer and the Crazy Frog Jingle Bells/U Can't Touch This mass murder is released, we dip into the Christmas chart of ten years ago:

1 Michael Jackson - Earth Song
"What about elephants? Have we lost their trust?" After their success, of a fashion, with Elvis last year twenty Jacko limited edition singles will be released from January 23rd, seemingly still not having realised how they're cutting off their nose to impress their face, and seemingly picked at random (Jam?) This is out on May 8th. Jarvis, be prepared.

2 Boyzone - Father And Son
Boyzone used to get plenty of stick for the number of MOR covers they did, but few mentioned just how inappropriate it is for a band to be singing this. Isn't it quite personal? Once performed by Jim Davidson and his actual son on the Generation Game, perhaps the moment they decided to drop it.

3 Beatles - Free As A Bird
Were there not supposed to be more Lennon demos ripe for re-recording? Maybe the critical reaction to this and - quick, ten points if you can name it, too late - Real Love stopped them. The video was supposed to be full of references to their proper songs, which ended up being the only reason to commend it.

4 Bjork - It's Oh So Quiet
A cover version, not that that knowledge will help her image any more. She can be as arty as she likes, but to many she'll always be screaming at a pillar box.

5 Everything But The Girl - Missing
What a chart this is so far. The remix had been about for months before Britain noticed and preceded an unwise move into light drum'n'bass. Ben Watt will be on this blog again before 2005 is out.

6 Queen - A Winter's Tale
From Made In Heaven, an album of recycled Freddie solo demos found after his death and featuring an in no way cynical cover of a silhouetted bloke in an open jacket with a fist in the air.

7 Coolio - Gangsta's Paradise
Fair to say this has outlived Dangerous Minds, the Michelle Pfeiffer vehicle is was commissioned for. He did get a proper career out of it, although it's fair to say nobody was that bothered by him or his spidery hair by the time of 1-2-3-4 (Sumpin' New).

8 Robson & Jerome - I Believe/Up On The Roof
You forget just how big they were in 1995, taking over the chart for large parts of the year then almost as suddenly deciding they'd rather act after all. The energy generated by national laughing at the dancing in the Up On The Roof video powered the nation for three weeks.

9 Childliners - The Gift Of Christmas
Boyzone, the Backstreet Boys, Michelle Gayle, East 17, Deuce, Dannii Minogue, Sean Maguire, Peter Andre, China Black, Let Loose, Ultimate Kaos, MN8, CJ Lewis and Gemini prove why we had to wait so long for the next Band Aid.

10 Oasis - Wonderwall
The Mike Flowers Pops Wonderwall came a week later, which spurred this back up to 7. Completists might like to note the video features Scott McLeod, who replaced Guigsy for a few weeks due to illness before becoming homesick himself while on tour and buggering off again. We're surprised he never wrote a book about his life with the Gallaghers. Everyone else did at the time.

11 Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men - One Sweet Day
Melisma ahoy! Such conjoined vocal gymnastics ensured it became Billboard's longest serving number one. The video was recorded as live, as all Mariah videos seemed to be at the time.

12 Levellers - Just The One
A jaunty pub piano singalong about drink driving, featuring Joe Strummer. But of course.

13 Eternal - I Am Blessed
One of our favourite showbiz stories ever was when Easther Bennett from Eternal did a Songs Of Praise gospel recital with her bandmate sister Vernie in 2000 in a low-cut top, and according to reports a shout was heard of "you should be more modestly dressed in the house of the lord!" You don't get that at the Comedy Store.

14 Pulp - Disco 2000
Re-released four years later, much to the band's chagrin. Pop fact: the week after Jarvis' arse-waving Brits antics Earth Song climbed back up 22 places to 18. Why would anyone buy it on that basis?

15 Enya - Anywhere Is
Just released her first album in five years, half of which is sung in a made up language called Loxian. We must say, it's no Hopelandic.

16 Luther Vandross and Janet Jackson - The Best Things In Life Are Free (Remix)
Wrexham's own K-Klass reworked a number two single from three years earlier. And the label went for this? Sod that, the artists agreed to it?

17 - Gold
Best to do these things accurately. This was during his enslaved years when he'd demonstrate his stance against authoritarian major label paymasters by sanctioning the release of any old toss. And now he wonders why nobody trusts him.

18 Molella featuring the Outhere Brothers - If You Wanna Party
Fair to say people weren't buying this at the time for Molella's input, this being the year of school playground favourite Don't Stop (Wiggle Wiggle). They're still going, albeit in fits and starts and in 1999 reduced to covering the Vengaboys' We Like To Party. They've even got two best ofs, both unwisely titled, The Fucking Hits and Dance History.

19 Smokin' Mojo Filters - Come Together
Paul Weller, Paul McCartney, Noel Gallagher and assorted backroomers, lifted from the Help album. The first single from that album was Radiohead's Lucky, now regarded as one of their pinnacle releases, then deemed too depressing and hardly selling anything. So much for charity.

20 Crescendo - Are You Out There
Hark, the year of Eurohouse.

21 Madonna - You'll See
Most artists have to wait until they're dead for ballad specific compilations, but Madge brought one out in 1995 called Something To Remember, and this was one of the new tracks. To think that she was huge in 1985, and she's huge in 2005, and in the middle she'd been written off. We'd make more greatest hits plans for 2015 now if we were her.

22 Corona - I Don't Wanna Be A Star
23 East 17 - Thunder

24 LV - Throw Your Hands Up
The featured artist on Gangsta's Paradise, who wisely put his own version on the back of this.

25 Skee-Lo - I Wish
He wished he had a girl with a beard, apparently. This is the rap record that features elements of Buffalo Springfield's For What It's Worth and was sampled on Les Rhythmes Digitales' Hey You (What's That Sound), a one-off hit about eight years out of time and all the better for it.

26 Passengers - Miss Sarajevo
U2 and Brian Eno amade an album of songs for soundtracks, this one featuring Pavarotti, and then offered the songs out for tender, apparently not under the U2 name as their label didn't want it officially adding to their catalogue. Shame, as it's probably the last great thing they did.

27 Whigfield - Last Christmas
Whose idea was this?

28 Michael Barrymore - Too Much For One Heart
No Kenny The Kangaroo or Doin' The Crab, this (full discography here), but a proper heartfelt ballad released just after he'd come out but before the unpleasantness set in. As a heartfelt ballad from the bloke they liked for being hyperactive, nobody went for it.

29 Blur - The Universal

30 M People - Itchycoo Park
Can you even begin to imagine this?

31 Frank Bruno - Eye Of The Tiger
He was world heavyweight champion at the time, and everyone loved him for finally achieving his dream. It didn't mean they'd flock to buy this, of course. Stock and Aitken produced it for the future part-time DJ, and we're don't think he even sang on it.

32 Queen - Heaven For Everyone
Heaven, see?

33 Jimmy Nail - Love
34 Simply Red - Remembering The First Time
35 Mary Kiani - I Give It All To You

36 Tina Turner - Goldeneye
From Brosnan's first Bond theme, and sounding like someone who might have heard a Bond theme once thinks they all sound like.

37 Pauline Henry - Love Hangover
38 Wet Wet Wet - She's All On My Mind

39 Mr Blobby - Christmas In Blobbyland
Two years earlier the false children's favourite turned actual children's favourite had famously grabbed the top spot from Take That, a chart we will do during this run, and with Noel adding his voice to this one they must have thought a repeat success was a banker. The banker offered top 20, Noel decided no deal but ended up at 36.

40 Motiv 8 & Kym Mazelle - Searching For The Golden Eye
Just a coincidence, that title, of course. We've got the rest of the chart here, with Morrissey's falling-out-with-record-company-unofficial-release Sunny at 42, PJ and Duncan just escaping a write-up at 49, the Corrie cast doing Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life at 51 and at 59 the aforementioned Roy Wood Big Band. At 64, meanwhile, What's That Tune? by Dorothy, for those who needed a house remix of the Blind Date theme in their lives.

Advent Calendar Of Music: Day 11

¡Forward, Russia! - Fourteen

Yes, we did copy and paste it. Near the head of this New Yorkshire movement, their songs are named after the order they wrote them in, which is handy. One of them's called Whiskas

In shops tomorrow: 12/12

The Christmas rush begins in earnest, possibly because the labels think they can claim their charge was Christmas number one for most of the day itself. So what chance a label called FDM Records run by two blokes out of Leamington Spa? Well, plenty of chance as it's Nizlopi's JCB Song (alert Dotmusic here, who dismissed it as a cynical major label release), breaking big at the second attempt after years of trying. You all know about its viral success, and with William Hill now offering 7-4 for it to be the festive chart topper, even if looking at the rest of the list they appear to be guessing releases more than anything else, we'd bet it'll outdo its May chart position of number 160. It's based on Luke Concannon's actual childhood, stop describing it as a novelty hit!

Pretty much the only other release of note, bar The Boy Least Likely To doing Little Donkey as a download only release, is the White Stripes' Walking With A Ghost EP, leading with a Tegan & Sara cover and mostly filled with live tracks.

Albums

Everyone seems spent in this regard, but a cheap three CD set of Love's eponymous debut and classics Da Capo and Forever Changes is sneaking out. Unfortunately it seems Arthur Lee's mental health has deteriorated of late, so help out his medical bills and see how he changed a decent sub-section of music.