How do you get on the BBC Radio 1 A-list? It’s the question on every business-minded pop upstart’s lips as they try to write a Calvin Harris-via-Mumford & Sons megahit. What if there were a formula, a pattern, a system that would guarantee that George Ergatoudis and his team took notice? Something that would make the creative process a little easier?
On 20 April, the radio station published a handy word cloud of some of the most popular words that appeared in songs on that week’s A-list. While there was nothing massively enlightening about the results – no mentions of “non-doms”, “cooledmiliband”, or any subtle insights into the youth generation – there was creative potential in this multicoloured Wordle.
British folk-rock group To Kill a King’s current single, Compare Scars is getting a bit of play on BBC Radio 1 at the moment, so we asked them to pen a song using these commonly used words in the hope they could write a hit single.
“Before we got going it was a lot of staring at a bunch of words, hoping they would make some sort of sense, more than hoping they would just assemble themselves into some wonderful song,” said frontman Ralph Pelleymounter. “The result was this slightly fractured tune where we tried to write four short stories using the words on the page.”
You can listen to How to Write a Hit below. Let us know what you make of it – especially you, Ergatoudis, if you’re reading.
