The studied deployment of self-deprecation, or naivety, or indifference, are among the great skills of the English upper classes, of whom James Blunt is certainly a member. Old Harrovian, ex-army, married the Duke Of Wellington’s granddaughter, handsome devil: the type of guy who’d turn up in the fringes of Swinging London circles in the 1960s, appearing in a few Beatles and Stones anecdotes, telling a few more. Perhaps he’d have made a record or two back then, too.

Even for the 21st Century, it’s an unusually patrician background. But not as unusual as it once was. Blunt is a herald of two of the bigger trends in contemporary UK pop, and one of them is the increased prominence of upper- and upper-middle class musicians in the charts. The usual marker of this is private education, partly because that’s something you can actually get data on, but underlying it is a wider anger that opportunities for working-class kids to become stars have been throttled as a by-product of decades of changes in benefits, arts and education policies. With the end result that some degree of independent wealth is a near necessity to thrive in the arts, the record industry very much included.

This is a story with a lot of complicated elements – it’s aligned to the art school/stage school transition we talked about back when the Spice Girls were big, and also involves the ongoing professionalisation of pop – and it’s one we’ll end up touching on often. But “You’re Beautiful” isn’t actually the best moment to dig into it, because Blunt really was seen as an outlier. The fact this guy had been not just in the army but in the Household Cavalry, and involved with the funeral of the actual Queen Mother, was a genuinely unusual background that served as a big marketing hook for him, second only to his military service in Kosovo. So he’s not the best example for a wider gentrification of pop.

But this is where the second trend Blunt represents comes in. Because the reason Blunt’s marketing leaned so heavily on his background is that his actual music was not hugely distinctive. The most flattering critical notices for “You’re Beautiful” likened him to the then recently deceased Elliott Smith, a comparison that feels wildly deceptive beyond the extremely broad territory of “sensitive young man with an acoustic guitar”. It’s only helpful inasmuch as it points up exactly what James Blunt isn’t being here: introverted, hushed, raw.

You can find easier stylistic pointers to him, most obviously David Gray, whose surprise success at the turn of the decade with White Ladder had showed there was an appetite for men unpicking their feelings over a no-frills backing. Blunt has a similar reedy, querulous vocal tone to Gray, and both “You’re Beautiful” and “Babylon” use the acoustic guitar as the central element of a broader production canvas, suggesting the lone troubadour without actually sounding like one.

This kind of blokewave singer-songwriter material is going to be a larger part of Popular when we reach the 2010s. Blunt may genuinely find his hit a burden, or he may be doing a social media bit, but on the face of it “You’re Beautiful” is nothing to be ashamed of. It shares its earnest DNA with bigger stars to come, and it can also claim to be a cleverer song than it appears. It shares a trick with the similar, though nastier, “You’re Gorgeous” by Babybird, handing an apparently sweet chorus to an unreliable narrator whose actual relationship to the song’s subject is starkly different from what’s implied if you half-listen to the words on the radio.

Unlike “You’re Gorgeous”, Blunt isn’t subverting a romantic sentiment, but he is ironising one. “You’re Beautiful” isn’t quite a love song either; it’s a hallucinated, one-way moment of connection turned into a grand romantic chorus to show the scale and intensity of that drugged-up instant. It’s a neat construction, as it means the song’s relatable both as sighing endearment and instant crush – Blunt explicitly paints it as a hopeless one, but ‘Missed Connections’ columns in newspapers worldwide testify to how strong the appeal of the meet-cute fantasy is.

Those layers make the positive case for the song. But let’s take Blunt’s apparent disdain for “You’re Beautiful” as sincere and admit it – he’s right. There is something smarmy and vapid about the record that made its constant presence in 2005 unpleasant, and makes it an irksome thing to be reminded of now; less half-remembered crush, more regrettable snog. Maybe the way the chorus is so memorable and so easy to imitate makes its glibness harder to dodge, and even if that glibness is in some way part of the point, that doesn’t make it easier to stomach. And it meant that Blunt, the kind of songwriter who would write “You’re Beautiful” with a self-aware distance, was immediately pegged as the kind of songwriter who’d write it without that. No wonder he’s ambivalent.

But there’s also something about Tupac that draws people to the idea of resurrection, of extending (or less charitably, meddling with) his legacy in a way we really only otherwise see with Elvis. In 2012, Dr Dre will cause a sensation by bringing a ‘hologram’ of Pac out on stage at Coachella; it’s the old Pepper’s Ghost stage illusion that powers the ABBA Voyage simulacra. In 2024, Drake will enlist an “AI version” of 2Pac into his disastrous feud with Kendrick Lamar, to general derision: the track was quickly taken down.

So there’s a fascination with 2Pac which extends beyond his earthly talent. Seven posthumous LPs, some double, suggests ruthless exploitation of the vaults, and – without knowing the discography well – I’m sure there’s truth in that. But there’s also careful curation and thematic management going on, and a will to establish 2Pac as myth and icon. A lot of this is down to the rapper’s mom, activist Afeni Shakur, her son’s executor until her own death in 2016, who performed a Yoko-esque role as guardian of the legacy as well as getting involved in multiple brutal legal fights with the many others wanting a share of the posthumous 2Pac money.

The legacy Afeni Shakur looked to protect is one of complexity. The thing every biography or piece on 2Pac stresses, beyond his actual rapping and song-writing, is how he’s a multi-faceted, irreducible figure. Every angle you take on him – activist, poet, self-described thug, crafter of liberation anthems or cornball pop hits – is incomplete without a mention of its counterforces. Tupac’s example as a hip-hop artist is that he’s allowed to contain multitudes; he’s not pushed into one role (the firebrand; the joker; the gangster; the pop star; the loverman; the technician) in a way most rappers of the generation just before his were. To reduce him to a part is to lose the whole.

But, acknowledging all that, individual releases are going to focus on one version of Tupac Shakur at a time. The cover of Loyal To The Game, the album “Ghetto Gospel” is trailing, has the rapper with head slightly bowed, in a check jacket with the colour so saturated it looks like a snow white robe, next to a golden cross. He’s wearing granny glasses, which means he looks a little like Ghandi. This is Tupac in his saintliest aspect, the bringer of peace, and the verses on the Eminem-supervised album are all drawn from his work before he got into the East Coast/West Coast feud that defined his final years.

While Eminem’s involvement here wasn’t the focus of the “Ghetto Gospel” promo push, it’s a lot more interesting than Elton John’s role, which is down to a feature credit to lure in British punters and a sample from 1971’s “Indian Sunset”, selected by Eminem anyway. The song takes two verses, and occasional lines, from a 1992 Tupac original – apparently intended for a Christmas album, though there’s nothing festive about it – but the track works as a companion to Eminem’s own “Like Toy Soldiers”, part of the newer rapper’s reckoning with feuding and violence.

Eminem’s treatment of “Ghetto Gospel” gets described as a remix, but it’s an entire reconstruction, slowing 2Pac’s rapping down by about a quarter, which makes him sound gruffer and less verbally dextrous, like he’s rapping while carrying a weight. The original has a production which would have sounded mildly dated in the G-Funk era and positively nostalgic on a 2005 release, with looped samples all over the place – funky organ, a gospel singer, scratching. Eminem junks that, adding a portentious keyboard and string backing which lets him put heavy emphases on dramatic line-ending words – “baby”; “slavery”; “courage” – which are just part of the flow on the 1992 reading.

This is a tone shift, making “Ghetto Gospel” into the kind of solemn-sounding rap song the British public have tended to love. If 2Pac had asked before his death, “How can I get a big UK hit?”, a good bit of advice would have been “Make something like Gangsta’s Paradise”. But a more pointed change comes at the end of the second verse. In 1992, 2Pac rapped “this is not world peace / we tried your way and there was war in the streets”. In 2005, via the same kind of subtle splicing that lets him anachronistically call out Eminem and G-Unit elsewhere on the album, he ends the verse “Before we find world peace / We got to find peace and end the war in the streets.”

This shifts the meaning of the song in an important way. Part of the point of the original “Ghetto Gospel”, it seems to me, is that it’s a song that considers but moves past outside analyses of ghetto politics and life in order to advance Black self-reliance and community strength as the solution – “everybody needs a little help / on the way to relyin’ on oneself”. The title of the track is something literal – the good news from the ghetto, the way the experiences 2Pac is describing are proof that the community has the strength and resilience to deal with its own issues. And those outside analyses may even extend to God – the final verse on the original finds Pac praying but negotiating, defending his decisions and choices to God in the world he’s been given.

2Pac still asks “Lord, can you hear me?” at the end of 2005’s “Ghetto Gospel”, but there’s no negotiation with God on the table now. The new track is a lot more one-dimensional: it’s a plea for peace, both emphasised and ironised by the fact of the singer’s violent death, and framed as an important rap song along the lines of “Stan” and “Lose Yourself”. Elton’s sample, in the Dido slot, “peace to this young warrior without the sound of guns”, acts as a requiem for the man who’s rapping the rest of the track.

Whether this is poignant or clumsy – in the context of 2Pac’s life and work and death, and in the context of the charts in 2005, the height of the big-name big-sample rap era – is up to you. Personally, I land on clumsy. The original “Ghetto Gospel” is a bit of by-numbers early 90s rap that’s hardly 2Pac’s finest moment, but it shows his liveliness, his thoughtfulness, his defiant complexity. This version, an embrace of peace by a man who died by violence, sincerely elevates him into the most banal of binaries.

One of the things you could do in the Samsung Fun Club (and I did) was buy ringtones. In fact it was the only thing anyone was actually doing. The ringtone economy was booming, an early proof of concept for the idea that people would pay a lot of money and download a lot of stuff on their phones, and the profit margins were staggering: “Round Round”, back in 2002, made more money off its ringtone than the actual single. Ringtone money was projected to overtake CD single sales – looking at the parlous state of CD singles in 2005 it probably did, for a while. The NME started a “what’s your ringtone?” column. The PR people whose job it was lied about polyphonic tones being “an orchestra in your pocket”. Journalists wondered what they meant for the state of music.

Twenty years on we can answer that one at least: not very much. Ringtones were a music-shaped collectable, sonic pogs. They’re a harbinger of how willing people would be to download full songs, in that brief upcoming window when data transfer speeds and phone memories and the lack of streaming made it viable. But as a cultural phenomenon there’s not a lot to the rise and fall of the ringtone: people will pay for digital tat, and they will stop when different or perhaps even better tat comes along instead. Fair enough.

The ringtone era produced one enduring cultural figure, though, and we’re listening to him. The Crazy Frog is a manic grey lump with long, skinny limbs and the shiny, wet-clay texture you see on digital art to this day. His pupils are asymmetrical and wild, his eyes wide above a long, curved mouth, gap-toothed and always on the point of grinning. He wears an old-school motorcycle helmet, straps undone, but his actual bike is invisible, or perhaps non-existent. What is visible – at least in his adverts and the original 2003 animation; it vanishes in the “Axel F” video – is his small but unmistakable cock.

This cock was the subject of concern. A few dozen people wrote to the Advertising Standards Authority to complain about on-screen Crazy Dick, and their complaints were rejected. The Frog, and his paymasters Jamster, had already been censured by the ASA and exiled to post-watershed commercial breaks only; no children would see the flapping grey genitals. The ASA might also have pointed out that almost all children already had: Jamster’s strategy was the ad equivalent of carpet bombing, buying up over 70,000 cheap slots on every possible small-audience channel as well as on the main terrestrial ones.

Just as ringtones fill the gap between the development of the mobile internet and the smartphone boom, this ad blitz is another example of how the Crazy Frog fits into, and epitomizes, a narrow, specific moment in internet history. Short video clips spread rapidly online; bluetooth makes them immediately shareable; but YouTube as a centralising platform doesn’t exist yet, so to get its video seen by everybody Jamster has to swamp the existing, broadcast advertising ecosystem. This gives it a level of immediate ubiquity almost no conventionally “viral” clip ever had.

Fortunately the Crazy Frog is loved by all so nobody really minded. Well, OK, some people minded, though “Axel F” sold 500,000 copies so the little grey cutie had a genuine, momentary fandom of sorts. The plague of frog ads isn’t the reason the ASA got involved, though: their ire was raised by the fact that the ads weren’t selling ringtones at all, but subscriptions to a ringtone service. So you bought your crazy tone and found yourself on the monthly hook for Jamba’s stable of equally obnoxious, and far less memorable, characters.

Predatory advertising? Media overexposure? That’s not in the spirit of the Crazy Frog, you might think, or at least you might if you were Erik Wernquist, the animator who created the character. Wernquist’s objections started with the name – “it’s not a frog and it’s not particularly crazy either” – but a 2005 interview strikes a note of general disillusion: “I would never do something like this again”, he says, stressing that the Frog was never intended to be commercial.

What was it intended for? Crazy Frog’s original name was “The Annoying Thing” – in the “Axel F” video, robot cops on flying scooters are hunting “the most annoying thing in the world” – and Wernquist posted him revving his imaginary bike to a board called CGTalk, where computer animators swapped tips and posted personal projects. Posters went back and forth suggesting changes to the creature, like the mismatched pupils to make him look more crazed, and The Annoying Thing became a hit. The stats Wernquist gave an interviewer are a reminder of the pre-YouTube scale here – hits on the animator’s site topped out at a “very fast” 6000 a day.

It wasn’t the animation alone that made The Annoying Thing a success (or annoying); it stood out because of what Wernquist paired it with: a sound his animation turned into the creature’s nasal voice, a kind of deranged, high-speed scat-singing babble and whine. The noise it made was in time with the revving of the invisible bike, and before Jamster saw (and heard) its ringtone potential the clip was just another bit of internet flotsam, a momentary distraction from school or office boredom.

We’ve been here before, back in 1999, when Baz Luhrmann turned a bit of stray glurge into the emetic “Sunscreen Song”. Just like that, “Axel F” is built around online driftwood, bits of silly fun accreting until suddenly it becomes a thing someone can make money off. The ultimate origin here is a Swedish teenager recording his party piece, an imitation of a two-stroke bike engine starting up. Daniel Mamedahl performed it on TV, and someone turned that into an MP3, which drifted around file-sharing networks under half a dozen names, all uncredited. A website in 2001 used it on a page called The Insanity Test (“If you start laughing consider yourself legally insane”). Mamedahl’s bike noises are the first thing you hear on “Axel F”: when he first saw Wernquist’s animation he rang the animator up and did the noises down the phone to prove his credentials.

There’s an innocence to Mamedahl’s and Wernquist’s activities, a poignant reminder of the early days of the consumer internet, which was full of mildly diverting bullshit, but, in general, bullshit nobody was making billions of dollars off. The story of the Crazy Frog is a story of the public internet’s development from people dicking around and making stuff for friends, through forums and file-sharing networks giving said stuff a way of circulating, onto people making a dubious buck out of the stuff, and stopping just before hardware and platform giants turn stuff-distribution into a machine to hoover up advertising money and squeeze producers ever harder.

Wernquist made no money off the Crazy Frog ringtones; Mamedahl doesn’t get a writing credit on the record. By the time we meet the Frog he is what he is, whatever sentiment you can wring out of his origins left long behind. So forget all that: is “Axel F”, the third highest-selling UK single of 2005, any good?

Or perhaps the question should be: is it meant to be? Whatever else you can say about Crazy Frog, he understands the brief. His job, as the video tells you upfront, is to be the most annoying thing in the world, a trickster figure disrupting your phone, your commercial breaks, your charts. So one way of looking at this song is to ask – once the decision was taken to do a Crazy Frog record, could it have been any better than this?

I think the answer is probably “no”. Whoever at Jamster came up with the idea of using a remix of “Axel F” for this – the songwriter credit goes to Wolfgang Boss, who went on to become Sony’s top A&R man – they did a good job. For a start, “Axel F” in its original form is a banger, one of the catchiest instrumentals of the 80s but hard-edged enough to work as a beat as well as a song. Which is the role it’s used for here, with Crazy Frog as an ersatz MC, finding space in and around the track, yanking away control with his signature “nim nim”s. But should you become sick of him – and let’s be honest, it’s a possibility – the original chassis of the track is well-constructed enough to get away with it.

There’s a balance here – too much Frog and the track stops working on any kind of ‘enjoyable song to dance to’ level; too little and why are we even doing this? I think they get it just right, letting the Frog be an agent of chaos who can grab “Axel F” without actually ruining it. Leave aside your visual image of the beast – it’s not easy, I know – and savour how weird this angry-wasp scat-vocal on a Number 1 hit is, honestly like little else we’ve heard.

It’s easier to be kind to “Axel F” amongst a list of Number 1 records that is so moribund that the most exciting thing we’ve heard in months is the Stereophonics. I think “Axel F” is surprisingly well crafted but I don’t much want to hear it. But then I don’t want to hear any of these records: it’s harder to make a case that the world needed a sixth Oasis LP than a first Crazy Frog one. The annoying thing is as abrasive as you’d expect an obnoxious grey flasher on an invisible moped to be, but I don’t think he’s markedly worse than any of the four records either side of him. The frogs we get we deserve.

Like “The Hindu Times”, “Lyla” does just enough work to avoid being dreadful. The band’s main weaknesses in their long decline are sparkless, repetitive songwriting; a bored singer; and leaden production. These all combine with their cast-iron adherence to the British Rock Canon – by this point they even have Ringo Starr’s kid on drums, a truly heroic commitment to the bit – to create the special experience that is a late Oasis song. But it’s rare, on the singles anyway, for the band to hit all these weak points at once. “Lyla” is a monotonous grind but Liam sounds more engaged with it than he did on “The Hindu Times”, and even if his vocal force is a very old trick by now, it pushes the song over the line into bearable. High praise!

But since – for now – there’s only one more of these to go, let’s try a thought experiment. Could things have been different? Is there a way in which a 2005-era Oasis track might be exciting, or interesting, or even “as good as ‘Dakota’ by The Stereophonics”? Noel kept promising a return to form – is there anything here to suggest he might have achieved one?

In songwriting terms, the band were clearly out of juice. Like Belle And Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch, Gallagher had turned his group into more of a songwriting democracy, with contributions from the ex- Hurricane #1 and Heavy Stereo members, and Liam’s own continued attempts. Maybe this was the price of peace in the group – nothing these men did before or since suggests it was a wise creative move, with the other writers drawing from the same parched trickle of influences as Noel. But then Noel had been complaining of burnout since 2000. Even so, the three singles from Don’t Believe The Truth are all, predictably, Noel Gallagher songs.

If the needed injection of fresh ideas wasn’t going to come from the songwriters, how about the producers? Here’s where you can spot a flicker of potential. The production on this album was originally scheduled to be handled by Death In Vegas, which is on its own the most interesting idea Oasis had had for several years. Death In Vegas’ electronic/rock crossover swapped out the messy hijinks of big beat for a moodier, leather-and-chrome vision indebted to proto-punk and underground films. Like the Chemical Brothers, they had pedigree working with rockers – Iggy Pop narrates “Aisha”, their best-known song; there’s an inevitable Gillespie spot on one LP. It wasn’t the most original of aesthetics – less Grand Royal, more a cult video round-up in Empire magazine – but it was a hell of a lot more coherent and interesting than what 00s Oasis were pushing. 

More to the point, there was an actual example of what an Oasis song with DIV production might sound like – “Scorpio Rising”, the title track of the group’s 2002 album, with concepts via Kenneth Anger’s gay bike gang underground classic and vocals from one Liam Gallagher. “Scorpio Rising” is a curious proof of concept – it’s a reminder that for all DIV’s club roots a lot of the music they actually made was close to Oasis in sound anyway. But there’s a confidence in the mantric groove that’s born of making repetitive music by design, not because it keeps turning out that way. And while the song doesn’t make huge demands of Liam, it gives him more more trippy and interesting lyrics than his brother did, and he bites at them – his snarling about “paper dinosaurs” and “leather girls” and “psychic equalizer in my head” sounds more engaged than any Oasis single he’s been on since 1997.

But mostly it points towards the thing we keep coming back to with Oasis. What if, instead of the heirs to the Beatles or Faces or even Slade, instead of classic rock songwriters, instead of all the mythic bollocks Noel Gallagher allowed to accrete around them, they were exactly what they appeared to be on “Shakermaker”: an indie band with a caustic lead singer and a strong line in droning grooves? If Noel is going to keep writing songs like “Lyla”, grinding you through four minutes that sound like a busker airlifted into Wembley Stadium, why not get people on board who can lean into that repetition and inject it with a bit of menace? I’d like to imagine that was the thinking behind hiring Death In Vegas for the album. And while a whole LP of tunes like “Scorpio Rising” would wear out its welcome fast, it would still have more life to it than “Lyla” does.

Sadly, we return to reality. That didn’t happen. The DIV sessions petered out – Noel Gallagher blaming the band’s collective, faltering muse rather than their producers – and the salvageable tracks ended up getting re-recorded for Don’t Believe The Truth. “Lyla” wasn’t one of them, though there’s a lonely keyboard pulse in its production layers creating a ghost image of what might have been. 

And the simple truth is that even in 2002, “Scorpio Rising” didn’t break the Top 10: the days of “Setting Sun” and Noel muscling the Chemical Brothers to Number One by association are long gone. The Death In Vegas/Liam track sounds like a slightly sleeker, Stooge-ier version of Oasis and it was still too far out for much of the band’s audience. There was never going to be a more interesting version of mid-00s Oasis because nobody involved – band or fans – had any incentive to want one.

I suspect “Lonely” is a marmite hit. For the tens of millions of people who hear it as a romantic milestone in a classic pop-R&B decade, the sample is presumably a poignant and distinctive flourish on top of a defining vocal performance from Akon. For me, it’s a vastly irritating earworm that overwhelms Akon’s very genuine talent. One of my biggest problems with it – and again, probably a reason to like it from another angle – is that Akon’s own singing voice is unusually high and lonesome for a 00s R&B star. There’s a sentimental, crooner’s poignancy in how Akon sings which makes him stand out in his field, and the “Mr Lonely” sample sliding into it sounds like he’s taking the piss out of himself.

Akon’s first hit showed us that voice in stronger circumstances. “Locked Up” tackles one of America’s 21st century crises directly, candidly and at ground level – an epidemic of incarceration targeted at young Black men like Akon, whose keening voice sells the hopelessness of his plight. Akon claimed to have spent the early 00s inside on a three year stretch – when websites found no trace of this his story shifted, but his exaggerations don’t dent the emotional honesty in Akon’s stark, vulnerable singing.

They do however tell us to approach Akon and his marketing with a slight cynicism, a feeling justified by his management’s candid admission that “Locked Up” was a “street record” designed to build credibility as a backstop for when the much more pop oriented “Lonely” hit. It’s easy to imagine “Lonely” launching first and being treated as the gimmicky record it broadly is – “Locked Up” lets Akon present it as a display of versatility.

The thing that makes it a gimmick is also what makes it distinctive – the decision to take Bobby Vinton’s “Mr Lonely” hook and do it chipmunk-soul style. We looked a bit at the Kanye West influence on R&B and hip-hop production back in the “Like Toy Soldiers” entry, though there the emphasis was on the familiarity of the sample – not as much an issue here, “Mr Lonely” is 40 years old at this point – rather than the treatment of it. But it’s the chipmunk part of chipmunk soul which gives the technique a lot of its impact, making a familiar sample sound strange and emphasising that you’re flipping and using it, rather than just standing on its shoulders. In Eminem’s track the sample illustrates the song’s theme, but it’s also there as just a marker, a blast of punctuative hook in between the verses.

In “Lonely”, though, it’s a lot more intrusive – the song feels like a duet between Akon and Vinton, except Vinton’s been turned into a kind of Jiminy Crickit companion to the miserable singer. Speeding the sample up also has the effect of rendering Vinton somewhat uncanny, making him sound even older than the song is – and it was already a surprise to me to find it was post-Beatles at all. He seems like an old music box, a mocking ghost of pop’s past come to remind our young swaggerer that heartbreak is ancient and eternal.

This ageing effect suggests another comparison for “Lonely” – White Town’s “Your Woman”, which sounded like a lost artefact from the shellac age. But that song was a lot more successful – it got some of its power by Jyoti Mishra letting himself be caught in the time warp, his own voice sinking back into the crackle of a bygone time. “Lonely” keeps Akon firmly in the present day, and the result is like one of those animated films where live actors and cartoons meet: they can be charming, but they can easily feel artificial and awkward. With this song, I say the latter: the fact I’m discussing this means I was well outvoted.

Nothing musical about “Is This The Way To Amarillo?” speaks of an idea whose time had come. The song reached a mid-range position on release because, for those early 70s charts, it’s a mid-range song, catchy and muscular but monotonous too. As a ’71 hit “Amarillo” sits at a midpoint between the cloying singalong of Tony Orlando and Dawn and the coming whomp of The Sweet or Slade, with some light country elements in the songwriting and a trouper’s performance from big-voiced Tony Christie.

It’s the kind of record people didn’t make any more, and that was entirely the point. Amongst its contemporaries, the beasts of an earlier age, “Amarillo” cut an ordinary figure; it wasn’t even Christie’s signature hit. Awoken from its slumber and unleashed on the low-selling, fanbase-tossed charts of 2005, it was a kaiju. Oasis and McFly might style themselves in their different ways as classicists, but nobody making contemporary records would come up with that wordless, pub-ready second chorus, let alone finish it off with that final tacky stomp. A producer like Richard X might build a knowing version of the 70s aesthetic, distorted and filtered through the decades of accumulated pop knowledge since, and fans like me would absolutely love it. But here was the real thing.

Peter Kay was an aesthetic technician just as much as Richard X, though. Early-00s comedy was very often a construct of vibes; you built a character not just around what they did or said but around the kind of things they would be into. I’ve written in previous posts about how British entertainment in the Blair years was marked by a fascination with ‘real life’, or at least the skewed, mediated version of it put forward via docudramas, reality TV and talent shows. I think the big comedy hits of the early Blair era – Phoenix Nights, The Office, The Royle Family, I’m Alan Partridge – shared some of that feeling, the metropole waking up to the existence of life in Slough or Bolton or Norwich, and commissioning shows that operated at different points on a spectrum of affection, curiosity and scorn.

Kay and his series Phoenix Nights was at the affectionate end of that scale. His comedy is in mocking, but loving conversation with an older style of cheap-and-cheerful entertainment, and the people who made and bought it. His signature routine involved his Dad on holiday, flummoxed by the exotica of garlic bread. And his breakthrough role, as Northern working men’s club entrepreneur Brian Potter in Phoenix Nights, was one of British comedy’s long line of Del Boy-style vainglorious dreamers. But while the show took the piss out of Potter’s pig-headed self-belief and the wretched acts he booked, it was more affectionate about the milieu and traditions those hopeless wannabes inhabited. Fashions come and fashions go, but family fun days and wild west nights are forever. And so are the people hoping to make a few quid off them.

Phoenix Nights brought “Amarillo” back into circulation, sung by two characters in a pivotal scene. Brian Potter would have approved of the song landing at Number 1. So would his customers. And if Peter Kay’s family holiday happened in 1971, his Dad could have heard and liked it too. Tony Christie’s song wasn’t a big hit in England, but in Germany and Belgium it was a Number 1, embraced as a rare example of English schlager. People sometimes like to say there’s no real UK equivalent of schlager, but a glance at the No.1s lists suggests that whatever you want to call it, jovial sentimentality finds a regular place in the hearts of the British public. In any case, Christie spent most of the late 70s and 80s in continental exile, at least in the career sense, releasing singles only in Germany and the Netherlands. 

In 1999, though, he made a return to the UK charts, Jarvis Cocker and the All Seeing I writing “Walk Like A Panther” for him: a song that fictionalised Christie’s own situation, turning it into a scenario straight out of Phoenix Nights. The returning singer, disgusted at the low state his town and his profession have fallen into, snarling at a new breed of performers who lack respect and nous. Like many Cocker songs, “Panther” feels double-edged, proud of a threatened world of working-class entertainment while acknowledging that it was threatened: the song only works by casting Christie as a remnant, in the same way Phil Oakey in companion single “First Man In Space” is both a genuine pioneer and a castaway in the end-of-the-90s world.

But now it’s six years later, and Christie the remnant is sweeping the charts before him, with the help of Peter Kay’s bumptious charity video. It’s worth comparing the “Amarillo” video with a previous all-star video extravaganza No.1, 1997’s “Perfect Day”, as both of them feel like products distinctly of their time. “Perfect Day” was a statement of intent by a newly confident BBC coming off the back of an era when music felt central to British cultural identity (certainly in terms of column inches and export figures). Everything from the choice of song to the diversity of its singers communicates a notion of curation – the Corporation as something that selects, brings together and packages its idea of the best, creating juxtapositions that only the BBC can.

This is most certainly not the vibe of Kay’s video for Comic Relief, which revels in joyful, populist tackiness. A beaming Kay in a purple suit jogs toward the camera miming the song against an ever-changing green-screen background, flanked by a cast of celebrities from Coronation Street’s Ken and Deirdre to Heather Mills. Music is represented, with Shaun and Bez from the Happy Mondays and Brian May and Roger Taylor from Queen. But most of the impromptu cast are comedians, cabaret turns and kids’ entertainers: Jim Bowen, Mr Blobby, Bernie Clifton, Keith Harris and Orville. These are familiar faces, but not fashionable ones; many are presenters or comedians whose stars fell as alternative comedy rose in the 80s and 90s. Kay’s video is a sign the wheel has turned again: light entertainment is back, back, back.

In that sense “Amarillo” is pulling on the longest thread in this whole blog series – the way Britain’s light entertainment establishment, centred on the BBC, is so crucial to pop and to the charts. The infrastructure of British pop was born from it, from the old music hall venues pop stars performed in, through the Light Programme their records were played on, down to details like George Martin’s background as a Goon Show producer. For a long time it felt like ‘light ent’ was a skin UK pop had shed, transforming itself into something new and young and highly exportable. But when you take ‘what’s popular’ as your metric, you find that light entertainment is always there, tapping patiently at the window of pop. We’ve never been far away from TV hits, talent show winners, comedians, family entertainers: not many of the Amarillo line up were best known as musicians, but they’d all made records.

What we’ve seen in the 00s is the light entertainment tradition partially re-absorbing British pop music. Auteurist pop, as we’d understood it from the 60s to the 90s, was simply outgunned on a sales basis by the singles reality TV spawned, though a limited public appetite for multiple shows meant the reality-pop glut of 2001 and 2002 scaled down to an annual Winter infestation. But the reality TV shows at least pretended to be about looking for new, contemporary stars. What makes “Amarillo” extraordinary isn’t just the way it has no engagement whatsoever with current pop – most Comic Relief singles are fairly tenuous about that – but that despite this, in fact because of this, it’s easily the biggest single of the year. 

The chart success of “Amarillo” feels like a broad public rejection of contemporary pop, though this probably wasn’t Peter Kay’s intent. The video, I’d say, makes that rejection part of a broader cultural mood, a backlash against the 90s conception of cool. Its parade of pre-loved old stars might have felt ironic on first encounter, but you can’t sustain irony for seven weeks. In the second week of “Amarillo” at No.1, another old BBC icon joined Jim Bowen and Keith Harris and The Two Ronnies back in the spotlight: Doctor Who was on Saturday teatimes again, with a Northern star, telling us that the kind of everyday people you see in reality shows might save the Universe if you give them the chance. It was a time of nostalgia and national treasures, and the “Amarillo” video caught the mood.

Yet some national treasures bear curses. You can see the video for “Is This The Way To Amarillo?” easily enough on YouTube, but you won’t find it as the official upload. That version is an edit, carefully removing one Sir James Winston Vincent Savile OBE KCMG, the worm at the centre of light entertainment, a man who’d embraced his national treasure status as a means to prey on hundreds of children. The tracksuited, wrinkled, cigar-chomping, chain-rattling spectre of Jimmy Savile – instantly familiar to anyone who was a late 20th century kid – is a moment to shudder at in the video, even when you know he’s coming. Kay to this day regrets putting “that shithouse” in the film, but how could he not have? Savile was in his charitable element, a predator who used charity, the BBC and the British public’s unbending belief in fun to abuse his way to the grave.

The 2012 revelations of Savile’s crimes became part of a decade-long (and continuing) era of attempted reckoning with abusive men and their ability to work within and through the structures of the media. Abuse thrives on the imbalance of power; few industries work as hard to conceal how power operates within them as the media, and so few offer such opportunities to the abuser. The fact British light entertainment prided itself on being so jovial and anodyne made the reveal of monstrous acts more shocking, but every branch of the media contained men who could match Savile’s drives, if not their stupefying scale.

I could pretend the crimes of Savile are an albatross for the song, but it would be manifestly untrue: “Amarillo” would shrug the attempt off and keep on jogging along. The “Amarillo” video has survived Savile to become a meme. In fact this happened almost at once: some BBC staffer knuckles were rapped in 2006 over something called “Is This The Way To Al-Jazeera?” and that same year Christie himself popped up again with “Is This The Way To The World Cup?”. Away from the spotlight, the video format is never far away from the thoughts of those poor souls entrusted with leaving do videos or digital Christmas cards. It’s been particularly popular with NHS workers, and Kay put together a Covid-era fundraiser featuring key workers doing the Amarillo Jog. And the jaunty record in the middle of all this is both completely insignificant next to that video and also a year-straddling hit, a song that you can connect to so much else in 2005 while realising that, in the end, it refuses to be anything other than what it is.

It’s not a charge the McFly video does anything to evade, though it’s no worse than most charity showreels. Meanwhile, “You’ve Got A Friend” is a song which needs a very delicate touch to feel intimate and healing rather than mawkish – part of King’s power as a performer is knowing just how to thread that needle. There’s a holy spontaneity to the best parts of Tapestry which makes them sound, despite the arrangements, like they’re coming into being as you listen, on some perpetual stolen afternoon that just happened to be recorded. McFly’s version has no such magic, even before you’re ambushed by its choir. It’s what you’d imagine an X-Factor winners’ version would be like – sincere, reverent, featureless.

Tom Fletcher’s earnest vocals are the only thing which gives “You’ve Got A Friend” any character, and “All About You” is a Fletcher stab at writing something with that same connective power. It’s obviously a touchstone song for them as well as a top seller – Fletcher wrote it for his girlfriend (now wife) and the band named their TV show after it. It certainly sounds like a band and songwriter trying hard to show they’re a serious proposition – not in the rock sense of maturity of lyric, or harshness or difficulty of sound, but in a more Gary Barlow-esque fashion. “All About You” is a band making great efforts to demonstrate their respectability.

Certainly McFly have developed quickly from the snotty social observation of “Five Colours In Her Hair”. “All About You” is a mid-tempo ballad in their “Obviously” style, and its heartfelt tenderness would land better if they hadn’t recruited an entire orchestra to labour the point. So would the jaunty, buskerish qualities of the song for that matter.  British pop is never shy of plastering on the strings, but as a first single from a second album “All About You” seems to me a good example of a band using full orchestration as a positioning tactic. McFly aren’t just heirs to Busted’s scruffbag legacy, they’re in a longer, worthier tradition of British pop craft: check the single sleeve, with its obvious A Hard Day’s Night homage. Fletcher is putting down a marker that he intends to be around a while, even if in this case it means drowning his song with a bucketful of gloop.

So before we ask how “Dakota” caught on outside Stereophonics’ regular audience – a pretty entrenched one, eight years and five albums in – it’s worth looking at what they usually did. If you want to hear a Stereophonics song that isn’t “Dakota”, you’re best off with their proper debut single, “Local Boy In The Photograph”, Kelly Jones singing about a kid who died by suicide and other lives going on after he left them. It’s earnest and heartfelt and you can hear why people responded to it.

There’s the germ of something interesting here – an idea of kitchen-sink rock, writing directly but artfully about the real lives of kids in post-industrial Britain. You can see why it would work – and in a few months we’ll see it working a lot better. But there’s a tension even in early Stereophonics between that idea and the grimly basic musical tools the band have at hand to realise it. The group were like the post-Richey Manics, but for people who didn’t like any of that funny post-punk stuff, or hip-hop, or even glam. Whatever sensitivity Kelly Jones had as a writer didn’t transfer to his singing, a raspy rock bellow as tender as a sandpaper handjob. And it didn’t translate to his band, who sound like they considered meat and potatoes decadent luxuries.

Something had to give, and it was the songwriting. Maybe there are flashes of insight and empathy from Jones later on – I admit I wouldn’t know – but what I did hear made it sound unlikely. “Have A Nice Day”, a garbled account of a San Francisco cabbie who doesn’t like tourists, has one of the most naggingly moronic choruses this side of “The Birdie Song”. Their version of “Handbags And Gladrags” is the exact rock equivalent of an Atomic Kitten cover. Their lyrics scanned like William McGonagall poems (“I stood where Oswald took his shot / In my opinion there’s a bigger plot”).

Critics were, it’s fair to say, underwhelmed. That prompted the monster whinge of 2000’s “Mr Writer”, a broadside against the rock press to which its targets reacted with predictable delight. Even more of a dirge than usual, “Mr Writer” was deliciously embarrassing, a gift-wrapped cautionary tale for ego-pricked rockstars. Not that the band’s fans saw anything wrong with it – it went Top 5 and the album hit No.1 again, cementing a Mexican standoff between the sneering metropolitan hipsters and the forces of good honest Britrock.

Which makes “Dakota” even more remarkable – a Stereophonics record getting flowers not just from Q but from Popjustice?? But you can genuinely hear why – Kelly Jones’ experiment in motorik synthpop really does sound like nothing the band had done before, and while they backed rapidly away from this bold new pop direction it’s proof that even the most dead-end predictable of bands could potentially surprise. Noel Gallagher wrote to congratulate them on their first No.1 – “but you used a fucking synthesiser!” he added.

Now, sad to say, there’s a gap between “the best Stereophonics record by a mile” and “a pop classic”. “Dakota” is good but it isn’t great – once the music has announced the song’s approach it doesn’t develop much, and the dynamics are left to Jones’ singing, which means the rousing bridge (“You make me FEEL like the one”) is a blunt instrument and the “I don’t know where..” chorus sounds strained. But even if Jones still isn’t pleasant to listen to, the grain of his voice works against the ripples of the music – he’s not just one bludgeon among many any more. There’s a similar effect and similar dynamics on a later song, Future Islands’ “Seconds (Waiting On You)”, whose wide acclaim confirms Kelly Jones was onto something here.

In fact, what’s impressive about “Dakota” is how it turns Jones’ weaknesses around, just this once. All his usual tics are here, the things which make his songs read like first drafts – the scene-setting banality (“wake up call coffee and juice”), the vagueness (“think it was June”) but in this song, against this setting, they work as a way to evoke the bittersweet memorious haze he’s writing about. “Drinkin’ with you / When drinkin’ was new” is actually, dammit, poignant. It’s a combination of the right topic, the right mood, and the right music to make the band’s approach work. But in that it’s naturally a one-off. This isn’t just the best song Stereophonics made, it’s the best song they could ever have made.

Outside the US, McGraw’s legacy probably rests on a Taylor Swift namecheck: within the world of country music, he was a seriously big deal at this point, half of a Nashville power couple with Faith Hill and the writer of some of the top country songs of the late 90s, none of which I’d heard of before I started writing this. Which illustrates how much mainstream country simply didn’t travel – there’s no other English-language genre I’d have been so ignorant of – and underlines how weird it is that Tim McGraw has a Number 1 hit.

It’s an artefact, of course, of Nelly’s top-class marketing team and their negotiation of the release schedule to nab a second No.1 from Sweat/Suit. Like “My Place”, it’s an exploration of Nelly’s sensitive side, and his role as singer rather than rapper – his cadences shift to a leisurely flow on the verses, but the division of labour here is more complicated than the already-traditional rapper and hook singer. Nelly and Tim finish each other’s lines on the chorus, mirroring the effect of the split-screen video which presents the two going about their suddenly lonely parallel lives after getting ditched, brothers in wealth and misery.

Elsewhere McGraw gets a line or two, but mostly this is Nelly’s show, over a looped guitar lick and inobtrusive backbeat. The chorus and video make the essential point, though, offering the song’s answer to this duet’s implied question: what is the common ground between country and rap? In this case, wounded masculinity. Two sensitive, hurt, manly men articulating their identical pain but never touching: this is a duet, but in no way a dialogue.

A dialogue might have been more interesting. Anything might have been more interesting. “Over And Over” captures the miserable drag of the days after a relationship ends with too-dreary accuracy. It lives up to its title, returning continually to its one middling hook, wasting McGraw’s rich voice and Nelly’s charisma. Both men give polished, uninspiring performances and the track leaves no impression beyond an evanescent sense that an opportunity might, somewhere, somehow, have been missed.

What that opportunity might be is open to question. “Over And Over” is far from the first attempt to create a space where rap and country music can meet, and it won’t be the last. Some encounters are much more successful than this – eventually we’ll meet one – but as far as I’m aware most remain one-offs.

Still, the thought persists that something valuable must emerge when two such mighty American musics come together. Perhaps it’s also just that the opposite idea – that absorbing and drawing on hip-hop is a step too far for modern country – has implications that play into broader polarisations. But in this case the result feels more like a cross-brand promotion than music with any reason to exist.

(This entry is an example of where a gap between Patreon and site posting changed the context a bit – obviously since me writing this in November, the release of Cowboy Carter has shifted the conversation on the relationship between Black American music and country. I’ve not altered the entry, though, as that record has produced a later #1 and the questions and answers it creates are very different to the ones from this half-arsed collaboration)

This is not that single. “Get Right” is, at best, the shadow Amerie’s “1 Thing” casts on the cave wall of pop. At worst, I can’t believe it’s by the same producer, it sounds so much like an adequate knock-off of Harrison’s deconstructed-funk style – the kind of reasonable imitation you’d guess a somewhat unfashionable superstar could fix up when the real thing turned her down. But “Get Right” is Harrison, it is the real thing. It’s just a bit second-rate. The car-alarm horn sample from Maceo & The Macks that drives the beat is insistent but compared to “Crazy In Love”’s fanfare it’s nagging rather than ecstatic. And compared to “1 Thing”’s thrilling rhythmic play “Get Right”’s beat feels linear and ordinary.

Of course, there’s a considerable distance between “not as good as two of the greatest R&B singles of the decade” and “bad”. “Get Right” is in the same broad region as “Goodies” and “Flap Your Wings” – enjoyable tracks which disappoint mostly because you know the people involved are capable of much more. But there’s a weaker link here than in either of those – even if Rich Harrison had conjured a beat as startling as “1 Thing”, J-Lo is surely not the singer to handle it. Her performance on “Get Right” does nothing to rescue the track – in fact it’s at its best for the 25 seconds or so before she turns up. She sounds overpowered by the production, her voice weak and her singing hemmed in, restricted to a cluster of high notes.

So we don’t even need to compare “Get Right” to Amerie or Beyonce – standards it was never going to meet. We can compare it to the best of J-Lo’s own material – “Jenny From The Block”, with Lopez in a more confident lower register and some of the strain being taken by Jadakiss and Styles P, is a track in the same area as “Get Right” but hugely more likeable and successful, even if you think J-Lo’s claims to realness are silly.

And yet, even though Jennifer Lopez is the worst thing about “Get Right”, the beat doesn’t spark to life when a more commanding singer handles it. Usher’s “Ride”, using the same production, leaked online in 2004 having been left of the singer’s LP. Usher can deal with the Maceo sample’s hustle better, but he still has trouble imposing himself on the track and it’s easy to hear why “Ride” didn’t make the Confessions cut. Perhaps there’s just not enough space in the beat for anyone to manage it well – one of those musical ideas which a producer can’t quite make work no matter who he uses or what he does.