THIS JUST IN: SANTA DOESN'T EXIST

Curious goings-on over at Londonist, where a post yesterday claimed to have had sight of a list which suggested the NME Top 50 albums of the year had been manipulated for dark and not entirely clear purposes.

To be honest, we're not quite sure what Londonist's point is, entirely: the list seems to be a pretty solid relfection of what the NME's position on most of these albums has been over the year - if, say, a Fabulous re-release had appeared at number one, there might have been a raised eyebrow or two. The curious thing is that Londonist say they've seen a mysterious "real" list, which they refuse to publish or even give illustrative examples from:

We notice, for example, that Babyshambles appear at #9 in the published poll, despite fairing particularly badly in the 'genuine' poll. Dare we speculate that Mr. Doherty shifts too many papers for him to be outside the top 10?

But is number nine in the year-end chart really such a crucial position that PR people would be on the phone going "look, if Pete's at number 13 rather than 9, that's going to ruin his Christmas."

These entries might be excused on the basis that they are relatively recent albums that might have been released after the votes were counted. But hang on, the Brakes album came out back in July, did it not? So why do the Brakes now find themselves at #40?

So... an album really low down the list is a few months old which proves the list isn't genuine?

While Londonist seems to want to organise an indie version of the Orange Revolution, its comments section went insane, with everyone in the world logging on pretending to be Conor McNicholas and asking why Londonist just didn't publish its list?

Londonist eventually responded:

Regarding the issues which have been raised in the comments section - we will not be publishing the list we referred to and we won't be revealing how we came about that information either. This is simply because we were asked not to. This site does not have a history of printing lies in order to pursue personal vendettas and we're not about to start. There's no reason for us to attack the NME specifically (in fact, if you scroll down you'll see we plugged their tour yesterday), we're just stating what we've seen and posting our thoughts on it. If you don't want to believe it then that's fine.

Also, if that is the editor of the NME posting comments here (we're aware other commenters are posting under the same name and have deleted those comments) then he needs to email Londonist directly to prove it and address his concerns over what we've published directly with us.

At this stage, the electoral commission have not become involved demanding a re-run. We have no idea if the list was manipulated or not, but we'd be more surprised, to be honest, if any magazine didn't do a spot of statistical manipulation to its lists of things like this. Ultimately, these lists exist for three reasons: one, to fill space as the year starts to peter out; two, to provide an overview of the year in a fairly dynamic format (they could just do the list as an A to Z, but that would be slightly less fun); three, to give people something to grumble about.

We were delighted to spot in the comments that someone has already decided this whole story has been cooked up by Londonist and NME to boost each other's profiles. If the entire NME staff was cut down by gunfire and Kings Reach Tower set aflame, there'd be someone on the internet going "well, that's just because the new ABC figures are coming out soon, isn't it?"

We've just heard that Londonist has unearthed a memo which suggests that the number 73 and number 74 in ITV's 100 Greatest Commercials may have been swapped by a malevolent researcher. More on that as it develops.

music nme londonist