SF0202 The Bicentenary Poll, Ep1, #100-86

SF0202 The Bicentenary Poll, Ep1, #100-86

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Welcome to the first episode in The Bicentenary Poll.

Many rivers to cross and many votes for me to count then put in some sort of order. I don’t have anyone to do all that except me, and then eventually I realised a) I hadn’t noted who had sent what in my running tally file, and b) some people had sent nice notes with their entries, which I then had to spend some time digging up. On the plus side, every track’s appeared before, of course, so that took some admin away.

So, what do we start with?

First up, a 90s classic, ‘Born Slippy’, followed by an actual #1 from way back in our third episode. ‘Cars’ was considered lightweight by my ‘serious’ friends at the time, but it’s actually been far more influential than critics’ darlings from the time, such as Elvis Costello. Great to see the subtly subversive ‘Ping Pong’ pop up, while Honeyglaze marks the debut of our 21st century artists with the lovely ‘Childish Things’.

A warm welcome to our French friends M83 with ‘Run into Flowers’, then it was good to see Pinko Fowler favourite The Pop Group in the chart. And equally great to see a personal favourite of mine, the Friedberger siblings, aka the Fiery Furnaces after that. Shoegaze makes its first and very welcome appearance with ‘Alison’ by Slowdive. It’s funny how shoegaze (even the term is vaguely pejorative), which, like Gary Numan, wasn’t taken especially seriously at the time, has survived and flourished.

The complaint John Peel had about the old Festive Fifties is that they ended up being too many white boys with guitars. Obviously, we’re going to have plenty of them. But not exclusively (and we’ll have far more female folk). So terrific to see Ali Farka Toure and Toumani Diabete make an appearance.

Next a couple of bands I thought would be higher, but hey, it’s your chart: Camera Obscura and Pixies. Canada makes its first appearance with Alvvays, and the episode is rounded out by the Bard of Barking himself, Billy Bragg.

And we’ve only just begun …