The flashing dancefloors. The terrible lip-synching. The presenters’ wardrobes. All are about to bite the dust. Having wet-nursed 40 years’ worth of UK pop-pickers into musichood, Top of the Pops (TOTP) pumps up the volume for the last time next Sunday.
The scuttling of the BBC’s pop flagship is stark proof of a radically reshaped youth culture. Generation @ struggles to comprehend the influence of one half-hour weekly music show, having grown up on music channels and websites, such as the outrageous www.fuse.tv, and high-speed internet connections that bring the sounds and videos they want from across the world 24/7.
CHANNEL WARS
MTV’s Overdrive channel, at www.mtv.co.uk/mtvuk, offers a blueprint for the future: fast-loading news, an exclusive studio performance from rockers Muse, live footage from Ireland’s Oxegen festival and a wide-ranging archive that includes embarrassing extracts from Zane Lowe’s 2003 interview with Carl Barât and Pete Doherty (then both of the Libertines) following the latter’s brief prison stint.
Ironically for the broadcaster that brought the attention span of a generation down to three minutes, the best aspect of MTV is the length of the clips, which are not cut still further into meaningless 30-second sound bites.
The video-logging revolution has made personal “channels” de rigueur. Run from Pete Townshend of the Who’s Twickenham studio, www.intheattic.tv can count on big-name guests such as the Flaming Lips, while www.rocknrolltv.net is a downloadable video show with a distinctly punk-rock ethic.
TOTP’s one-size-fits-all approach seems hopelessly eclectic compared with the highly focused beam of the web. Take world music: the slick, French-run www.mondomix.com features many artists who will never get anywhere near the Top 400, but video delights (only in Real Player format) include footage of India’s Debashish Bhattacharya making sounds with a guitar fretboard that Jimi Hendrix would have been proud of.
LIVE PERFORMANCES
Fab Channel (www.fabchannel.com) is typical of the new breed of live-music webcaster. Here is a blissfully easy-to-use video library of 400 concerts at Paradiso and Melkweg, Amsterdam’s premier gig venues, and it is difficult to better the site’s own reason for existing: “There is a lot of great music in the world. Much more than you hear on popular radio and television. Because of formats, time slots, playlists and other old media concepts, you are not getting what you should.”
Before being totally bowled over by the quality of acts such as Bloc Party, Editors and Damien Rice, remember that this is Holland. So the past four years of the Dutch air-guitar championships are also available.
Remember seeing Nirvana playing Smells Like Teen Spirit on TOTP in 1991? How can broadcasters today capture the buzz of a live act exploding off the stage? Each month, Tiscali Music’s London-based Showcase nights (www.tiscali.co.uk/music/showcase) dig up the best new bands and record every act for online viewing. The site’s design is too busy, but Delays and a pared-down Zero 7 are recent high-profile live highlights, while exposure for a band such as the supercharged, punk-spirited Louie, who won’t make it to Television Centre for a while, shows perfectly how the web can take the underground global.
BACKSTAGE ACCESS
In recognition of the web’s musical dominance, TOTP survives online at www.bbc.co.uk/totp, only pages away from its Collective fanzine (www.bbc.co.uk/collective), which feels a bit like Margo from The Good Life: po-faced at times, but with impeccable taste, reflected in the interviews and sessions that are catalogued on the site. Searing polemic from the rapper Plan B (with lyrics that would never make it onto BBC1 television), demands to be heard: here, it can be. In contrast, watching Jamie Liddell sing Multiply with the help of a tin of freeze-dried coffee is a gloriously throwaway pleasure, perfectly suited to web-rummaging.
Channel 4’s show Popworld captured much ground from TOTP in recent years, and its affectionate irreverence has infected www.channel4.com/music, which makes prodigious use of backstage clips, including the chart-friendly, ever-watchable Pink responding to viewers’ questions about whether she kisses her dogs or not.
An early pioneer of live music streaming was music.aol.co.uk, which has recently opened up a huge vault of live sessions to the public (rather than AOL customers only). The selection of artists occasionally goes a bit dad-rock (Richard Ashcroft, Keane, Starsailor), but smooth site design makes it sticky, and inviting AOL members to e-mail questions, even if these can be pretty dumb, invariably sheds new light. Who would have thought, for example, that Jose Gonzalez hates writing lyrics, or that he recently serenaded the Dalai Lama on his visit to Gothenburg?
MUSIC VIDEOS
A Top of the Pops video exclusive used to be a national event. Now, Yahoo!’s Launch site (www.uk.launch.yahoo.com) has done away with the need to wait for videos to come round on television.
The 300,000-strong selection is heavily chart-focused, in pin-sharp colour, so you are unlikely to run out of viewing quickly. For a whiff of true rock’n’roll antiauthoritarianism, browse the music bins at the great repository of potential copyright infringement that is www.youtube.com. At this giant video swap-shop, anything goes, and amid amusing reworkings of Zidane’s World Cup headbutt, it’s an epic place to find songs and bands that have passed you by, although sound and video quality is erratic.
I happened on a great live version of Steely Dan’s Do It Again, featuring Jeff “Skunk” Baxter on congas: not bad for a band that retreated to the studio for good in 1974. Not only have they become my next iTunes target, they are touring America this summer.
FAN POWER
Internet killed the television star, because everyone can contribute online. The creators of MySpace proclaimed it the death of MTV, and the melange at www.music.myspace.com has become the spiritual descendant of TOTP, where the biggest bands in the world compete with complete unknowns on a level playing field. The music-blog aggregator elbo.ws supplies a stream of news and views from web critics, while sites such as www.popjustice.com and www.cliptip.blogspot.com deliver a wealth of insider video clips, news and gossip to deeply involved, vocal, active audiences.
Heck, today you can find the Top 40 from any date you choose at www.everyhit.com — one man’s Herculean effort to catalogue every British chart hit since 1952.
