Here is the Mayhem chart for August 2024. Regular and constant readers know that the chart is based on my Spotify listening habits over the last month gathered by obscurify.com. Apparently, my tastes have risen slightly to 96% more obscure than the rest of the UK! The chart remains contemporary-ish (but if a classic artist releases something new they might feature in the chart). However, last month’s top three “Legacy” artists were David Bowie, Bikini Kill, and Stevie Wonder. Obscurify also suggests the most obscure artists I have listened to for August and those were Liz Davinci, Kindelan, and Modern Marriage. There is a top ten artists chart and a top 5 songs chart. There is the usual eclectic mix of artists, including just one that was in the top ten last month, Delilah Bon! Delilah has been in the artist charts now for nine consecutive months. The only artist to appear in both lists for July is, you guessed it, Delilah Bon! The number one song is “Nureyev Said It Best” by the mighty Avalanche Party. So without further ado here are those charts in full! Click here for the Spotify song playlist.
Mayhem Artist Chart August 2024
1 PJ Harvey 2 Frank Turner 3 Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds 4 Modern Marriage 5 Mothica 6 El Pony Pisador 7 Ravyn Lenae 8 Bambi Thug 9 Delilah Bon 10 Yes Ma’am
1 Nureyev Said It Best – Avalanche Party 2 Ballad 1 (Sorry) – HerOrangeCoat 3 Two Sips – Revivalry 4 Everything I Hate About You – NOANNE 5 Volatile – Delilah Bon
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Thanks to those marvellous people at The Modern Record I was given the opportunity to see and review PJ Harvey at the Piece Hall in Halifax. Click here to check out my review. All photographs by John Hayhurst.
If you have enjoyed this article, feel free to follow the blog, or follow us on;Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, EMail. Are you interested in writing and reviewing for With Just A Hint Of Mayhem? If so then please get in touch.
Now that the wind had changed direction Matt's face would remain like that
It’s that time of year when we reflect as individuals on the highs and lows of our year and more importantly we decided what the best album and song of the year was. Many publications take part in this annual festivity and my newspaper of choice, the Guardian, is no exception. I expected to see the top 2o albums and songs of 2011 as voted by Guardian readers (including me) to show a similar profile to the lists of other publications and possibly of the critics employed by the newspaper.
Matt sold all his clothes to buy votes in the Guardian poll
However thanks to what I would call (rather begrudgingly) and excellently executed piece of guerilla voting by all of Matt Cardle‘s fans which must number in the high hundreds (ok that was wishful thinking on my part). They have managed to succeed in voting him into first place in both lists. Regular readers of this blog will know the general disdain I show the X factor and all it spawns and for me Matt Cardle is no exception. I find him insipid, limp, lacking charisma and at best an ok karaoke singer. Before the devout fans get on their high horses let me say that I have listened to his album before forming this opinion. I am not like the Christian Fundamentalists in the USA who burned Harry Potter books without having the good grace and common sense to read them first.
Being beaten by Matt Cardle had hurt Polly very deeply
Fair play to the Matt Cardle fans, but in my humblest of opinions his stuff shouldn’t even be close to the top twenty for the year or even the top 50 for the year, unless of course we are talking about the turkey awards. The number two slot in the albums list was taken by Polly Harvey‘s ‘Let England Shake’ and for the songs it was the sublime “Video Games” from Lana Del Ray. Click here to read the Guardian report on what I will refer to as Cardlegate.
The full lists are shown below. I have 11 of the albums and 12 of the songs if you’d like to begin to understand my own eclectic tastes. My own favourite song for the year is “Pumped Up Kicks” by Foster The People, which is in the list and my favourite album is ’50 Words For Snow’ from Kate Bush. The latter sadly isn’t in the list;
Vinyl records are on the increase in the UK. Sales of vinyl albums this year have already reached 240,000 compared with 234,000 for the whole of last year. Whilst this is good news for many of us the treasured vinyl album format is unlikely to ever come near its 1975 peak when 91.6 million vinyl albums were sold. To be fair there were no MP3s or CDs, just vinyl, cassettes and a few 8-Tracks. To put that into perspective this years sales are just 0.26% of the total for 1975.
The top 5 vinyl albums sold in the UK this year so far are;
Strangely I do have all the top 5 in either electronic or CD format, but I have none of them in vinyl. Read the rest of the story and see the full top 10 by clicking here.Radiohead have also announced that they will be touring next year, although no details have been given yet. Will they be a surprise guest support act on the Stone Roses bill? Somehow I don’t think so! But joking aside I will certainly be trying to get tickets for Radiohead. It would become the fourth time I had seen them.
The best-selling UK album in 1975, depending upon your source, was either ‘The Best Of The Stylistics’ by, strangely enough, the Stylistics or ‘Elvis Presley’s 40 Greatest Hits’ unsurprisingly by Elvis Presley. However the best-selling album that wasn’t a greatest hits package was Rod Stewart’s ‘Atlantic Crossing’. I have focussed just on the albums released during that year. That Rod album featured my Dad’s favourite song of all time; “Sailing”. We played it at his funeral back in 2001 and it’s only recently that I have been able to listen to it without getting rather emotional. But whenever I hear it I always get a great picture in my head of my Dad singing along to it. So Dad if you are reading this (I like to keep my options open on the afterlife) then I hope your singing is more in tune now!
With Just A Hint Of Mayhem 