The Kaiser Chiefs marched right up to the top of the charts with Ruby
Tricky days, these, for the pop traditionalist. Having seen the demise of Smash Hits and Top Of The Pops in the last twelve months, news the other week that the charts were to be adjusted in favour of downloads was about as welcome as a Primark pinafore at the Oscars.
No longer, it seemed, would vast armies of - let's face it - young men be able to march upon their local record shop, as their fathers had done before them and propel their favourite band to the top in the grand tradition of Slade, the Jam and Oasis. The Communal Pop Moment was dead, it seemed, as much a part of history as overcrowded terraces and Grandstand.
Instead, the charts would become a fickle virtual playground, a free-for-all of MySpace crazes and industry-generated oddballs, with egotistical deejays in the role of teacher, sadistically pursuing their own agendas (see Chris Moyles baffling attempts to canonise Billie's Honey To The Bee).
So, you could almost hear the roar in the Shires when news came through on Sunday that the Kaiser Chiefs' Ruby overhauled Mika at the top of the charts on Sunday. A chirpy sing-along sharing the same sonic bathwater as Oasis's Lyla, Ruby is as overwhelmingly British as Bovril, bus queues and youths daring to poke fun at Tory politicians. The musical equivalent of a nil-nil draw, it taps into the national psyche in the same inexplicable way that lower-league football grounds around the country celebrate a goal to the strains of the Piranhas' Tom Hark (or, if you're a Middlesbrough fan, Pigbag's Papa's Got a Brand New Pigbag).
Just imagine the horror of latest industry darling Mika - a skinny, Freddie-Mercury obsessive of Argentinian extraction - on discovering that his symphonic-pop nugget Grace Kelly had been dislodged from the top slot by a song designed to echo around the nation's Tandooris until Doomsday.
Whilst it's probably too much to ask that every copy was sold in a 7" picture sleeve over the counter at Woolies, it's still a reminder that, no matter what jiggery-pokery the industry shrouds them in, the charts remain the best cultural barometer we've got. As the song goes, never let it be said that romance is dead.
