Wednesday, 1st March 2006.

Cheddars Plays Pop

On Saturday afternoon, we were listening to Chris Evans on Radio 2. Just before four o'clock, he played "the cheese record" - what I presume was a regular feature, playing songs from the archive that you loved but that just made you cringe. His offering this particular afternoon was Bucks Fizz's excruciating 'Land of Make Believe', which I hadn't heard in years and which brought back vivid memories from my childhood of dancing to it in the living room, pulling off a barely coherent mime (much to the delight of my parents and grandparents).

The lyrics are truly dreadful: "Run for the sun, little one / You're an outlaw once again / Time to change, Superman / He'll be with us while we can / in the land of make believe". Yes, I know it's a lament for lost youth and I know it's fun in a corny, eighties synth-driven kind of way (one of the best types of corn) but I still have an internal struggle with this record. My inner child thinks it's utterly fab, purely for the sake of nostalgia (one of the things about eighties trash, at least for my generation, is that dancing to it is in itself a recognition of how much our tastes change - it's almost as if we realise that we were stupid to think that Kylie's version of 'The Locomotion' was an improvement on Little Eva's, but that we don't want to appear too smug and self-righteous about it). The musician in me, on the other hand, thinks that 'The Land of Make Believe' should have been drowned at birth.

This set me thinking about how an error of judgement only becomes an error of judgement when it's too late - we don't realise how bad these songs are until we've loved them for years, which means we're caught in the trap of admitting that we once loved the song, which means endless trips to the dancefloor at School Disco club nights. It's difficult to truly hate something that you loved as a child, even if, in later years, you recognise it as a musical shambles. (On the other hand, hating something for your whole life can actually be quite fun once you get old enough to work out exactly why you hate it, as opposed to the standard childhood response of "It's rubbish".) So it's no wonder that nostalgia records sell by the bucketload.

All this was running through my head during those final choruses, and as the record began to fade Evans began to talk about putting together a compilation CD himself - it's apparent that he'd been having similar thoughts to the ones that I'd been experiencing. His co-presenter / producer / lackey (delete as applicable) suggested a two-CD set, with one record containing the cheese and one containing the good stuff - what they referred to as 'class'. Evans promptly dubbed this the best idea they'd ever had, and I can only assume that they spent the rest of the afternoon making copious notes during the the other songs.

It was then that I had an idea for my own two-disc set: disc one containing the sappy, excruciatingly embarrassing songs we all loved as children / teenagers, and the other the preachy, "vulnerable", self-important drudgery that seems to dominate today's chart. I don't know what's worse, to be honest: the insipidly bland manufactured pop that reaches number one for a week at a time and then disappears, never to be seen again; or the tortuously dull internal monologues of singer-songwriters who think that it's a good idea to complain a lot about being rich and successful and on top of their game. It's Joni Mitchell's fault: she opened her heart on Blue, with fantastic results, and thirty-five years later everyone is doing it. Unfortunately, everyone is not as talented as Joni was in her prime (very few people are, in fact), so what we're left with is hours of self-indulgent pomposity by people like Robbie Williams: "Oh, I'm really rich and successful and I've got loads of birds, but I'm actually a really lonely person, and I love me mam". (Listen, Robbie, I couldn't care less. You've got more money than I could ever dream of. Live with it!)

Anyway: this two-CD set that I'm concocting will be called Cheese and Wine. Actually picking records that are properly cheesy (as opposed to just irritating) is trickier than you might think: see for example Minnie Ripperton's 'Lovin' You is Easy 'Cause You're Beautiful', which grates on the ears but couldn't really be called cheesy, or 'There's No One Quite Like Grandma', which is plain bad. I have nonetheless come up with a few that I think deserve inclusion. The Wine list was even trickier - there's no shortage of emotionally overwrought garbage to plough through, but I tend to try and block it out of my head, so I can never remember the songs I want to include. (What a lot of musicians don't seem to understand is that while we do like a bit of emotional angst in a song, we don't necessarily want to hear about *their* emotional angst.)

You will find a partially complete list below, and any additions would be more than welcome, at the usual address...

Part 1: Cheese

Bucks Fizz - Land of Make Believe (Evans was right; there probably is no cheesier record)

Andrew Gold - Thank You For Being A Friend

Dean Friedman and Denise Marsa - Lucky Stars

The Proclaimers - Let's Get Married

Aerosmith - Don't Wanna Miss A Thing (except another airing of this wretched slush)

Michael Jackson - Gone Too Soon

Bobby Goldsboro - Honey

John Miles - Music (but if it's good enough for Jarvis Cocker, it's good enough for me)

Paul and Paula - Hey Paul

Barry Manilow - One Voice (don't get me started)

Part 2: Wine

Robbie Williams - Strong / Come Undone (possibly both of them; I can't decide which one I hate more)

James Blunt - You're Beautiful

George Harrison - Only a Northern Song (Harrison once more proves why Lennon and McCartney were always ignoring his work)

Manic Street Preachers - If You Tolerate This Then Your Children Will Be Next

Britney Spears - Lucky

Public Enemy - New York Post (I know you're making a racial statement, boys, but get a life!)

John Lennon - Working Class Hero (snore)

The Verve - Bittersweet Symphony

Phil Collins - Another Day In Paradise (all right, it's not strictly whiny as such but it's just so *preachy*...)