The news that Golden Discs and face of music anoraks everywhere. The simple fact of the matter is that record-buyers love lists. Nick Hornby raised his best-selling novel High Fidelity on the guyropes of lists. The whole existence of Top of the Pops is predicated on our enduring fascination with the Top 40 singles, even if most of them now sound like someone drilling the road or randomly dropping pebbles on a tin roof.
The more socially inept among us could pass a happy night arguing the relative merits of The Go-Betweens versus The Triffids as Best Antipodean Band Of All Time (touch and go, this one, but I'd tend to opt for The Go-Betweens on the basis of Love Is A Sign); Marvin Gaye's Here My Dear (written to cover the divorce settlement with his ex-wife) versus Til Tuesday's Everything's Different Now (a kick in the guts to the ex-boyfriend of TT singer Aimee Mann) as Bitterest Album to Result from a Break-Up (I go for Everything's Different Now on the basis that Here My Dear is so cynical it could corrode a diamond stylus); and Never Let Me Down versus Tin Machine II as Worst Thing Ever Committed to Vinyl By David Bowie (although this one is complicated both by the fact that Bowie recorded The Laughing Gnome and has been guilty of repeat offences against good taste since the 1980s).
Revisionism
The difficulty presented by the proposed Irish Top 100 list is that these things give people the opportunity to indulge in the kind of revisionism at which even Stalin might have balked. Out goes Celine Dion, despite the shrill insistence of her voice and her overwhelming presence in the country's collective record collection, and in comes Van Morrison. Out go the Corrs - although the aesthetic appeal of 75 per cent of the group justifies holding on to the cover - and in comes hoary old Bob Dylan. Recently, in the course of a questionnaire, I was asked to nominate my favourite record. The temptation to go for a Dylan record, early Van Morrison or a slice of Jimi Hendrix was briefly considered before being rejected in favour of honesty. I opted for A Walk Across the Rooftops by The Blue Nile.
Now at this point various readers are going to be reaching for something solid on which to steady themselves because The Blue Nile tend to inspire varied reactions. For those who admire them, they make tender, sometimes minimalist paeans to lost love and regret suitable for sensitive, doomed romantic types. Songs like A Walk Across the Rooftops, Saturday Night and Automobile Noise resonate through the sympathetic listener, evoking memories of rain-swept evenings, painful love affairs and unsuccessful dates on which the only thing you kissed was your money goodbye.
There is worse
On the other hand, there are those for whom The Blue Nile sound like a dying man tapping on a storage heater in a vain effort to summon help. In their view, if The Blue Nile were played on hospital radio all of the patients would die. I hate to break it to the nay-sayers, but there is far worse than The Blue Nile in my record collection and I'm not afraid to admit it. In my view, it would have been a far more interesting idea to have people nominate The Worst Albums of All Time, forcing record buyers to acknowledge purchases which, all things considered, erred on the side of "unfortunate". It would be a list of albums which are pushed behind the sofa before parties, the poor relations of the greater musical family.
I, for example, have not one but two Nik Kershaw albums. Not only that, but I have a limited edition twin-pack of singles containing live versions of a number of his lesser-known works. Among them is Dancing Girls, a song notable for the fact that it has no discernible tune whatsoever.
Since I'm unburdening myself, I also wish to have a number of other offences taken into account, m'lud. I own a copy of Bangs and Crashes, a double remix album by sad eighties popsters Go-West. A remix album, mind you; not even the original, which was bad enough, but remixes of songs which weren't much cop in the first place. I have albums by Ultravox, Billy Idol, Men Without Hats. I actually possess a copy of the aforementioned Never Let Me Down by David Bowie, an album so bereft of tunes that small birds drop stone dead from the skies when it's played. I bought Everbody's Rockin' by Neil Young and the Shocking Pinks, a record which is not even 30 minutes long, has no musical merit whatsoever and is such a cynical attempt to rip off money from punters that listening to it is the musical equivalent of letting a stranger rifle through your pockets and steal your small change.
I own an album of popular musical classics - House of the Rising Sun, How Much is that Doggie in the Window? - recorded entirely on the Hammond organ. I have a recording of Rolf Harris singing Two Little Boys. There is no end to my musical depravity. Worse, I own a copy of Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, an album that regularly appears in the list of the 10 best records ever made, and I haven't even listened to it all. I nod off when I put it on. It's as if I get stricken with narcolepsy with the first notes of Sweet Thing. Similarly, I still haven't got beyond the first side of Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde, I have listened to Highway 61 Revisited (once) - and I don't own a single Velvet Underground album.
Mitigating factor
There are parts of my record collection that are like musical Chernobyls, contaminating anything with which they come into contact, and I still don't have a copy of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles. I have The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, though I don't think that's much of a defence. It's like confessing to multiple slayings of old people and then asking the fact that you didn't steal anything from them to be taken into account as a mitigating factor.
Yet there is some consolation for me in my honesty. When the Irish Top 100 list is compiled, the usual suspects - the Dylans, the Morrisons, the Beatles, maybe even Oasis or The Prodigy - may crowd the top positions, but the secret heart of the nation will continue to beat in time to Celine Dion, Whitney Houston, Simply Red, No Doubt and a hundred other acts who, in a reasonable world, would find themselves in contention only if a mysterious burst of radiation killed their betters, destroyed their recorded musical output and then erased the long-term memory of the population.
And I'll still bet a reasonable sum of money that the Titanic soundtrack will figure somewhere.