All Time Top 100

Monday, December 12, 2005

Piccadilly Records and those End of Year Charts.

I know what you’re thinking. Lists, lists, lists! It’s all so blokey, it’s so trainspottery, it’s so bloody High Fidelity. And well, you may be right. I suppose there is a slight element of that in what we do. But there has to be really, we could hardly call it All Time Top 32. That would sound shit. We could hardly call it All Time Top However Many You Can Muster. That would also sound shit. And we could hardly call it All Time Top Just Keep Going Until You Can’t Think of Anymore. Cos that would sound REALLY shit.

More to the point the charts aren’t All Time Top 100 songs about ex-girlfriends, or songs that make you want to go out, they are what they say on the tins – All Time Top 100s. I don’t know about you but I don’t go through them going ‘Need, got, got, need, need, got, need’ like the songs are Panini Stickers. I try to think of them as a resource. So if I’m, ahem, ‘browsing’ the internet a quick peek at an esteemed Pop Picker’s chart is usually enough to spur some productive ’window shopping’. So it is with other lists around this time of year.

We at Top 100 love December. There’s Mince Pies, Christmas Shopping Lists, Getting Really Drunk with your colleagues, getting really drunk with your family, getting really drunk with everyone from school and generally getting really drunk.

We also love those inescapable End of Year Charts. Drab muso bible Uncut magazine love theirs so much they print them in November, the NME got into a scrape last week for rigging theirs (the MAN paid for Bloc Party to trump the Arcade Fire etc. allegedly) and the Q one was so sickeningly predictable it read like smashing your Citroen Picasso into the HMV chart wall at 120MPH, with Capital Radio going full tilt on the stereo.

Where is the discerning contemporary music lover to look for the definitive, pan genre, not too indie-than-thou (but a little bit anyway) end of year chart? Step forward Piccadilly Records.

Piccadilly is a Manchester based record shop. (Remember them? They have doors and roofs, these weird black plastic circles between bits of card, signs behind the counter that say things like: “You Don’t Have To Be Aloof To Work Here, But It Helps!”) As well as actually physically selling records from a physical location, they provide an INDISPENSABLE weekly mailout featuring the best of the week’s New Releases across genres of your choosing, complete with MP3 clips and everything. When I say INDISPENSABLE, I actually mean ESSENTIAL. Even if you don’t intend to buy any of their recommends, which of course you ought to, the mailout itself is pretty good way to get a grip on the very best of the weeks releases. You can get it for free at http://www.piccadillyrecords.co.uk/ where you can also peak at the Piccadilly Records Top 100 albums of the year. Of course the usual suspects appear Sufjan Stevens, LCD Soundsystem, MIA etc. but there’s plenty of other stuff to investigate: Espers, Jneiro Jarel, Felix Laband all feature PLUS one of ATT100’s Album of the Year the grossly underrated ‘Ambulance Ltd’.

Peace in our time y’all.

posted by: Jim Brackpool @ 1:56 PM

+ + +