Those who claim pop charts are “all the same” and “nowhere near as exciting as when I was younger” should be directed forthwith to the vinyl charts. Here, they can discover a beautiful mess of miscellany. It stacks up to a parallel universe that comes close to the kind of romanticised and idealised charts some people carry in their heads and use as yardsticks for judgment.
The vinyl chart was launched in April by the Official Charts Company in response to the growth in vinyl sales, and while the actual sales numbers might be slight, the eclecticism on display is exciting and unpredictable.
The vinyl album chart includes a significant number of independent labels punching well above their weight. This week, it has new albums by Unknown Mortal Orchestra, the Fall, Ash, Faith No More, Hot Chip and Thee Oh Sees in the top 10.
Against this rush of the new and the independent is, however, a bottleneck of fusty nostalgia further down the vinyl album charts. Here, Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York, the Stone Roses, Rumours, Definitely Maybe, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Physical Graffiti are refusing to budge, creating a consensus around classic rock that is transferring itself to new generations. The cliche of the vinyl-album buyer is of someone buried underneath an avalanche of unchallengeable classics, obsessed with realness and authenticity: parts of the chart, unfortunately, do little to dispel this caricature.
The vinyl singles chart, however, is where chaos truly reigns. There is a similar leaning towards reissues, but these are bracingly unexpected. The chart boasts two singles from Iron Maiden, as well as tracks from Tom Verlaine (albeit as a split release with David Bowie), Hüsker Dü, Public Image Ltd, Roxy Music, Marianne Faithfull and a cover of Louie Louie by the Kinks. Most surprising is a Record Store Day reissue of 1982’s Swans EP, now at No 12, having risen as high at No 4 last week.
Pumping fresh blood into the vinyl singles chart are Aphex Twin, Marina and the Diamonds, Summer Camp, Yak and Roots Manuva. Noel Gallagher, the royal prince of real music, might be at No 1, but around him there is tremendous buzz and assortment that even his presence cannot dull.
It adds up to a compelling chart package that stands in defiant contrast to the radio and iTunes-driven main singles chart, in which genre narrowcasting looks increasingly like the norm.
The past 12 months have been a time of upheaval and recalibration in the UK charts, with the addition of streaming data to the singles chart last June, and the same changes in the album chart from this March. The UK charts have been changed from being an entirely sales-based steeplechase, as it has been since the charts were launched in 1952, to better representing, now, how music is consumed via services such as Spotify, Deezer and Rdio.
But the vinyl charts have opened fresh windows on what is popular among a certain strand of buyer. Vinyl fans may drone on about the “warmth” of vinyl and decry the “thin” sonics of digital, but their buying habits are far from dreary.
The new charts display more exciting dynamics of rise and fall. Singles enter the vinyl top 40 and quickly push others out, suggesting a healthy circulatory system and a heart whose valves are not fuzzed up. And the vinyl singles chart moves faster than its mainstream sibling, with almost a quarter of records flushed out of the top 40 each week. This week’s vinyl singles top 40 has nine new entries, against four in the main singles top 40.
This could be a fleeting period of transition in which anomalies reign until the biggest record companies, majors and independents, figure out how best to game the charts, as they have done in downloads and streaming. Then the vinyl charts could turn out to be a feeble mirror image of the main chart. Until then, they should be applauded as lawless spaces where eclecticism past and present can sit cheek by jowl – pleasing microcosms of pop’s family tree.
