No Rock And Roll Fun

WHEN THEY SAY 'CHECK THE ALARM IS STILL WORKING', THEY MEAN POKING YOUR SMOKE ALARM WITH A FINGER... NOT THIS: Dastardly goings on at the lower end of the charts, with a seemingly innocent looking band turning out to be The Alarm all along:

A major achievment!! 45 RPM just played on BBC Radio 1 on the weekly top-40 show, It was #28 for weekly sales figures. This is the first time an Alarm-related song has been in the top-40 for nearly 15 years! The song was played in it's entirety and the DJ read a short blurb about the song actually being by "The Alarm" and how they changed their name for the single to get a "fair shake" from the music industry. It looks like it worked!!! The song sounded great too, and it stood-out among the mostly sythesized/over-produced crap on the rest of the countdown.

So, what's happened here is the Alarm have snuck in under cover of darkness (although not the cover of The Darkness). We always find it a bit amusing when people do this - like Stock, Aitken and Waterman doing 'Roadblock' and then going 'Ahhhh... it was us'; they always seem to think they're proving some sort of point about how if people could just see past their image, they'd learn to love them. Like, probably, Cyrano DeBergerac. Which would be fine, except for the total loss of dignity in the acts having to accept that people hate them more as people than hate their music. Yes, The Alarm, if people don't know its you, they enjoy your work. You must be feeling very validated.

We're not sure that getting a single to number 28 is really much of an achievement, either - how many copies do you have to sell to scrape into the top thirty these days? At the weekend we burned three of sets of our holiday pictures to CD for our family, and that was enough to shoot into the chart at number 36 (I'm doing 'Lemur drinking cocktails' on Top of the Pops this Friday).