Introduction

I'm not quite sure where I got the idea from, but somewhere a few weeks ago in the midst of all the excitement about the 25th anniversary of the first Now That's What I Call Music album, I became very conscious of the fact that I seem like the only pop fan under 35 in the country who's never bought any of the 71 volumes in the series to date (these are the UK Now albums, not the US series that began a few years ago). They seem like quite a touchstone for a lot of people, and I've always been aware of them (I remember those TV commercials with the pig and stuff) but my fundamental attitude to compilation albums has always been that they're some songs you've already got, some you don't want and just a handful that would justify the purchase. Even when I do buy them I hardly ever play the things.

On the other hand, I've developed a fascination with the idea of examining music in arbitrary ways. The daddy of this approach is of course Popular, which is making its way through the complete history of Number One singles, and Sweeping The Nation's occasional series of The Only Chart That Counted posts. I've tried to create may own spin on the idea with The Hit Parade, juxtaposing songs by chart position: and I'll be back to that once I've decided what Number 20 is going to be. The difference with this setup is that I'm using somebody else's choice entirely, and I'm not concentrating on music I like at all - rather the reverse in fact, as I've long considered the early 1980s one of my least favourite periods of pop music.

So what am I actually doing then? I've found the tracklisting for the first ever Now album [retrospectively known as Now 1] online, and I'm going to work through the tracks in order, listening to them (mostly through YouTube) and trying to write quickly (for a change) some sort of response to it. Or to put it another way, I'll be listening to music I don't necessarily like for fun. All these records have, by definition, been hits during my lifetime so many I'll remember, but some I won't. My opinions are unlikely to have remained static in any case, so I shall allow myself the indulgence of commenting on any old memories I have of them. What I'll try not to overdo is simply laying into the records - I want to try and understand them, if possible.

One final thing I should probably make clear is that this isn't some sort of astroturfing promotion for the forthcoming CD re-release of the album. That'll be obvious enough after the first few posts anyway, but always best to make sure. This link is provided purely out of personal greed.