Is there a more potent way to track the passing of time than through pop music? To cast your mind back to your first ever gig, to that first single purchased, or the tracks that prompted a rush to the dance floor at primary school discos, is much like looking in the mirror and inspecting your latest crop of grey hairs.
And so it is when checking out the pop anthologies of one’s youth. Today brings the 100th edition of Now That’s What I Call Music!, the compilation album that has been released at a rate of three a year since 1983, and which holds a Guinness World Record for the longest-running music series. Since I can just about recall the first one, this is a pop milestone that brings further confirmation, as if it were needed, that I am properly, undeniably middle aged. Thanks a lot, music.
The late-teenage me would have sneered at throwing money at such mass-produced pap, of course. By then I had lost my mind to music and developed this insufferable thing called “taste”. This meant digging deep into an artist or band’s back catalogue and searching for clues about their lives in order that, should I ever be invited to appear on Mastermind, they would be my specialist subject (oddly, the invitation never came).
But 10-year-old me had no such scruples. Compilation cassettes were, along with Top of the Pops, my early introduction to pop music. They acted as a portal into a world of heartbreak and hedonism, of outre clothing and ginormous hair, to which I wasn’t yet privy. I was, at the time, one of the only children I knew growing up in a household that contained no music – Radio 4 was my parents’ station of choice, and not a record or cassette entered the building until I went to Our Price with my birthday money in 1983 and bought my first album (The Kids from Fame – Live!. Don’t @ me). But later that year, the chatter at school would be about a garishly designed double LP containing singles by all the usual Top of the Pops suspects and more. It had Culture Club, Duran Duran, Heaven 17 and UB40. It had Bonnie Tyler nailing the power ballad. It was the first Now, and I wished I had it.
In some ways, Now and its rival compilations did music a terrible disservice, offering as they did only a partial picture of what was happening culturally. 1983, I later discovered, brought albums such as Tom Waits’s Swordfishtrombones, Bowie’s Let’s Dance, Madonna’s self-titled debut, REM’s Murmur and Talking Heads’ Speaking in Tongues; the resolutely undiscriminating Now 1, compiled from the hits of the day, gave us Limahl’s Only for Love, Men at Work’s Down Under, and Phil Collins’s cover of The Supremes’ You Can’t Hurry Love.
But the worthier stuff could wait. Subsequent Now collections serve as a reminder that each year brings us the full pop smörgåsbord, from future classics to one-hit wonders, from the wildly groundbreaking to the unspeakably naff.
It is a sad yet common phenomenon among middle-aged parents to look at the music cherished by their offspring and loftily declare that it was all better in their day. The compilations of yesteryear stand as a glorious corrective to this. To work your way through the singles on the early Nows is, with a handful of exceptions, to reacquaint yourself with the mediocre and the downright unlistenable.
Things seemed to improve in the 90s as indie music stepped into the mainstream and began popping up on compilation albums. But anyone under the impression that, say, 1995 was a high-water mark in music, with the likes of Radiohead, Oasis, Blur, Björk and Pulp infiltrating the charts, might care to remember, courtesy of the Now albums, that we also had Stuck on U by PJ and Duncan and The Outhere Brothers’ Boom Boom Boom. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Britpop dad.
In the end, my first compilation album didn’t come from the Now stable. It was The Hits Album, a double cassette released in 1984 by CBS and WEA, and the first of a series that would come to an end in 2006. There is barely a track on there – Miami Sound Machine’s Dr Beat, Deniece Williams’s Let’s Hear it for the Boy, Chicago’s Hard Habit to Break, The Cars’ Drive and, God help me, Neil’s Hole in my Shoe – that I don’t know word for word. These would not be the songs I would earnestly discuss as a late teen in school breaks, or later in university halls, since that would have been to upend my carefully constructed narrative of a sophisticated musical journey. But how I cherish them now, even the godawful ones.
For those of us whose adventures in pop music began long before the age of Spotify playlists and recommendation systems, these industrially produced mix tapes are woven into our formative years. They are the early musical diaries we forgot to keep, battered monuments to a period before we became hobbled by taste and how we might be judged on it. The Now comps weren’t cool and they didn’t care who knew it, which is exactly why they’ve lasted so long. Now that’s what I call a triumph.
• Fiona Sturges is a freelance writer
