Thursday 3 August 2023

Birthday Number 1s: 2022 - Afraid to Feel

Afraid to Feel - LF System

This is just one of those odd ones. Quite heartwarming really. It was Number 1 for 7 weeks in the summer of 2022 - I could have had We Don't talk About Bruno, Starlight by Dave, As It Was, the reissue of Running Up That Hill, B.O.T.A. which are all more characterful records, but I'm ok with this.

It just sounds like an excerpt from a fairly high quality, slightly middle-aged, club night. There's nothing wrong with that. LF System are two basically unknown Scottish DJs who put this together, based on the obscure Philadelphia soul track I Can't Stop (Turning You On) by soul band Silk, with sped up and slowed down vocals, and it's surprisingly pleasant and classy, but pretty difficult to understand what took it to the top of the charts in 2022 for seven weeks.

Still, good for them - breaking up the parade of stars, two blokes from Scotland who used to to be a roofer and a petrol station worker. Hopefully they made some good money from it, and maybe they'll make some magic again.

In recent years, the charts have fallen into something of a pattern, it seems to be, where at Christmas we have LadBaby, Mariah Carey and Wham, then, throughout the year, there are usually three or four massive records which take up about 30 weeks in total, with a few smaller hits dotted in between, including a couple of oddities (Wellerman) or revivals (Kate Bush).

A lot of the time, when I look through the Top 100 singles, it's quite dispiriting - there's certainly no place for indie and rock music in the way that there used to be, nowhere at all, a lot of songs just hang around the lower reaches clogging up space. But, saying all that, if you delve into the biggest hits of any given year, there are usually a fair few that are good, or interesting, or both.

Anyway, we are almost done. In the summer of 2022, the Lionesses triumphed, we went camping, we went to Dumfries and Galloway, and there was that proper long frightening heatwave that turned the grass white and made the leaves fall of the trees.

One more to go...

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