In the second part of an unraveling thread I will continue
to consider 1979, a seemingly random year but one where singles sales were
unparalleled. This alone could give it the accolade of being the epicentre of
pop. I was 15 back then and it all seemed relatively normal to me, adults had
their music and we had ours and they fought a running battle in the charts and
consequently also on Top Of The Pops.
We like to think of the music of our youth being cool, it is
much easier to reminisce that the soundtrack of those formulative years was a
blend of cutting-edge creativity rather than bland MOR or production-line pop.
These things co-existed back in the day. 1979 may have been the year of the
first 2 Tone releases but the 3rd best-selling single of that year
was by Cliff Richard. Cliff was ahead of Lena Martell and her God-bothering
faux-country rubbish (another former no. 1) but behind the mawkish film-tied
Art Garfunkel. It was as if punk never
happened.
Film and TV tie-ins are now a recognised and highly
successful marketing route, back then it was less obvious even after the
stunning performances of Saturday Night Fever and Grease. It is relatively easy to spot that the limited
media landscape provided few opportunities for music but where they occurred
they were reaching a wide and captivated audience. An appearance on prime-time
TV with your new single was a seemingly guaranteed way to increase sales,
driving you further up the chart and resulting in the chance of more TV
appearances.
It probably all seemed so simple back then, cause and
effect, the glory days. The intervening years have clearly seen a decline in
the number of people willing to buy music. It has always been assumed that the
younger end were simply downloading it instead but it may be the case that the
older record buyer no longer exists in any great number or that they simply do
not buy singles. If 1979 was an epicentre of any kind perhaps it represents the
tipping point at which the older generation, still buying records as they had
in the sixties, met the younger who were embarking upon record buying for the
first time.
There’s no way of knowing – in a relatively short opinion
piece – whether any of this is true but it dawned on me that I could not remember
seeing this argument elsewhere. What if it’s not the fault of youth, perhaps
the record companies abandoned their older audience in error. Taking a random
sample of equivalent charts from now and then it might be noted that rock was still fairly prevalent in
1979 – Supertramp, Dire Straits, Gary Moore and Wings but the main fight was
between competing trends of disco and ‘punk/new wave’, the top 40 featuring 11
‘punk’ tracks vs 10 ‘disco’, but the prevailing emphasis could still have been
considered ‘pop’ in its variant forms.
It’s interesting (at least for me) to note that the novelty
songs that I intended to make a big point of were as likely to be ‘punk’ (Who
Killed Bambi, Banana Splits) as ‘pop’ (Some Girls, Hoo-ray Hoo-ray..). I had
considered that such novelties were a thing of the past and that appears to be
the case. These days if you want to do a spoof song it’s likely to be a youtube
only affair whereas once it might’ve littered the charts. Rock is demonstrably absent from the current chart though and there’s nothing
very obviously there that appeals only to an older audience where 1979’s chart of this week had Art
Garfunkel, Neil Diamond, Showaddywaddy, George Benson and The Beach Boys. The
single buying audience is young, whether this is by accident or intent is very
much open to question in my mind.
Naturally this is not a solid quantative or qualitative
study. It is a snapshot with carefully chosen examples to illustrate my point. Now vs then seems to indicate the dearth if
not the death of rock but very much that pop/r n b is unassailable right now. The point I wanted to see made is that it
seems ‘old’ people are no longer buying singles. Whether this is as a result of
the marketplace, the lack of releases or the promotion of those releases is
possibly worthy of further debate. It could also be that singles were once
ubiquitous, on every High Street – big displays in Woolies, etc. The physical
single pretty much doesn’t exist, much like the singles-buyer over 35.
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