There's another Top of the Pops in Britain that was arguably just as influential as the nonce filled BBC chart broadcast. Though you probably haven't heard of it, I think it's a really interesting story.
Now. Let's imagine that it's 1975 and you, dear reader, are a teenage boomer somewhere in the provinces. Your parents are going out for the evening and they've allowed you to have your teenage boomer friends over to have a party. It's gonna be wild. Your mate Steve has an in with the chap who owns the offie so he's going to bring actual alcohol, and that Nathalie Simmons is going to be there and you'd really like to get her on the sofa for a spot of snogging and possibly even getting your hand up her jumper. As the host, it is your lot in life to supply the latest and greatest hits to keep everyone dancing on the shagpile carpets. Unfortunately, there is a problem.
Records cost money. The price of a single 45rpm vinyl record is around 75 new pence. Or 6/8d in old money like what your granny keeps mentally recalculating everything into. And your allowance will stretch to that, but there's a whole load of cool songs coming out constantly and you have other expenses as well atop that. And if you can't keep a suitably on-trend stack of singles on your dad's record changer (younger readers may be interested to note that in the days of vinyl, the accepted way to create a playlist was to literally stack the discs on a special record player with a tall spindle and a complicated array of mechanical magic that would drop them one after the other on the platter and move the tonearm in and out) you'll not have sufficient face to get your tops and fingers off the delectable Miss Simmons. What do.
Well, you could tape them all off the Radio 1 chart show, but you'll have to find a blank cassette, and even then tape decks and tapes aren't quite there yet with having really good sounding music on them unless you have expensive gear. Also you'll have to be quick on the pause so the DJs' rabbiting doesn't interfere with the recording and thus the party.
So, it's the afternoon before the party and you're in Woolworths. And then you see it. A 12 inch vinyl record called Top of the Pops with a fetching image of a dolly bird on the cover and promising to have the latest and greatest songs that you know will go down a treat with the boys and girls that are coming over. You pick it up and flip it over. It doesn't quite look like Top of the Pops logo-wise, and there's no sign of any BBC branding, and the dolly bird doesn't look like Flick, Babs, Dee Dee, Andi, or the others of Pan's People, but it's close enough, right? Right? And it's only 95 new pence, or 9/- in old money. So you buy it.
Now what you have just bought is NOT an official BBC product, nor does it contain the songs that it promises as recorded by the artists whose releases actually got them into the charts. And no, the dolly bird on the cover is not one of Pan's People but is some model that the people behind this hired to be photographed looking coquettish with her jubblies about to fall out. And the music tracks on it are covers by a rotating crew of session musicians who were trying to sound as close to the original recordings as they could. In short, it was a knockoff.
You see, in the 1960s and 1970s, compilation albums were not really a thing. Sure, there were samplers sent out to radio stations containing a bunch of songs by artists on the same label, and occasionally a song might appear on a film soundtrack album, but the idea of 20 chart-toppers appearing on the same disc was anathema. None of the record labels would countenance it. They saw their big artists as their own property and if there was a compilation with them all on, well, that way huge wrangling lied. EMI might be all, why should we only get 1/20 of the royalties from this compilation when The Beatles is why people buy it. And then Polydor might be all, nuh-uh, Cream is why people are buying it. And so forth. Then there'd be arguments about one big band subsidising a whole load of also-rans and one hit wonders, and so forth. So the idea was never really explored. Then, in 1968, a producer at Hallmark Records, a budget label that specialised in novelty and comedy releases, pitched the idea of an anonymous covers album of soundalikes with a contiguous series conceit to it, and studiously avoiding using the names of the real artists to avoid legal trouble. The bosses bought the idea, and the first Top of the Pops album was released, with a second one following shortly thereafter. The frequency of releases was huge. Some of the session musicians were in the studio for months on end trying to get as close to the real thing of the latest releases as they could. A new TOTP compilation came out every eight weeks at one point, and then they started doing the best of for each year. Then it was off to the replicator and press, baby, press! Piled high and sold cheap in Woolies and other non-exclusive music stores for 95p in the mid 1970s. (I don't have a source on what they cost before or after that). Beloved by young boomers who wanted the latest hits but couldn't afford the genuine article and by confused grannies as birthday presents who thought that they were actually getting something based on that musical TV show with that nice man Jimmy Savile (please don't quote this out of context, please please please don't) and given to teenagers who did know better but smiled and thanked said grannies between gritted teeth.
"Mum, can I have The Rolling Stones?"
"We have The Rolling Stones at home, dear."
Rolling Stones at home: some session musos trying to ape Mick Jagger et al.
There is a Youtube channel which uploads copies of these albums as copies of them have made it to the digital era, in case you want to see how close it got. Basically, you can tell the difference totally if you listen to them back to back with the real songs, but if you were at a party or heard them in a background music system or similar, you probably wouldn't tell that it was the Top of the Poppers that was singing I'm Not In Love and Hot Stuff and Maggie May and Lady Madonna and not in fact, 10cc, Donna Summer, Rod Stewart or The Beatles. They're pretty close. And considering that it was the rotating group of about 20 or so session guys who did it against extreme time pressure, you have to admire their dedication to intellectual property theft.
Hallmark Records weren't the only label to do this. The success of the Top of the Pops albums led to follow the leaders, knockoffs of knockoffs if you will, like the Hot Hits and 12 Top series of albums. The business model was the same. Anonymous soundalikes on the vinyl, and fruity girls on the sleeve.
So, what killed it off? Well, six words did. Now That's What I Call Music!. In 1982, a young producer with Virgin Records had the idea of a compilation album of the latest and greatest hits in a numerical series of releases, and pitched it to Richard Branson, who bought it. Only this time, they would get the actual artists onto the compilation and have a proper liner note with photos and the artists actually named on them. They were able to do this where Hallmark could not because unlike Hallmark, who were a bottom drawer purveyor of novelty releases, Virgin were a serious label who had a lot of the biggest recording artists of the time under their belt. They also teamed up with EMI, another big label, to get permission and work out the revenue sharing. With two of the biggest labels around backing the venture, it became a selling point to have your song appear on a Now! compilation. Also they didn't need to sweat session musicians to get them out. Coincidentally, in 1982 was the last of the Top of the Pops records, in the form of volume 91, although a volume 92 did appear in 1985.
Now That's What I Call Music! has been going solidly to this day. Every Now! release up to volume 101 in 2018 has gone platinum at the very least. And it hasn't had to rely upon women in their unmentionables on the covers to garner sales either.
But then again, it's arguable that if it wasn't for the Top of the Pops records, there would be no Now!. It's like those late 1990s MP3 players that used flash memory cards made the concept of a digital music player popular, and then Apple came along and released the simple, uncomplicated, and convenient hard drive powered iPod and the first-gen MP3 players collapsed (though I would kind of be willing to pay for a Zune in working order just for the novelty factor). Such is life. "It is the nature of time that the old ways must give in," as Sabaton sang on "Shiroyama", and the old ways of mass copyright infringement and fanservice of the 1970s gave way to 1980s slickness.
You can still find Top of the Pops records in the wild in charity shops and boot fairs and Greedbay. There are of course people who collect them for the historical and novelty value to this day.
(IN24/13)