Holy heck, it's top of the God pops

Today is Easter Sunday, which is an annual day of celebration for that time a chocolate egg fell from heaven and killed the Easter Bunny to forgive our sins.

The UK singles chart is a pretty godless place. A quick scan of the current top 40 singles chart and I can see songs about Dracula, swimming, dancing and loving each other, all of which sounds terribly non-Christian. Erm. Probably.

To celebrate the day Jesus rose from being cross and ascended to Heaven nightclub – I really need to brush up on my Bible knowledge – here are the ten most successful Jesus-themed songs in the UK singles chart.

Disclaimer: I looked up the words “Jesus” and “Christ” and didn’t go much beyond that, so if I’ve missed something, feel free to condemn me to all seven circles of hell. Oh and they're in order of chart success, so we'll be ending on a couple of number one smashes.

10 – Longpigs: Jesus Christ (number 61, 1995)

While there were more prominent proponents of the Sheffield’s Britpop scene, the ‘pigs were absolutely brilliant. Jesus Christ was full of their typical yearning and the lead singer looked a bit like a future Matt Smith. Their guitarist went on to be in Pulp and their original drummer used to play for Cabaret Voltaire, which makes them the most Sheffield band ever.

9 – Delirious: White Ribbon Day (number 41, 1997)

An obscure choice here, but this did precede a four-year run of top 40 singles for this Christian praise & worship outfit. White Ribbon Day is proper religious – there’s praying and the cross and hallelujah and all that kind of thing. The gospel truth is they sounded like U2 from the late 1980s, which ticked boxes for people that found 1990s U2 too MacPhisto-ish.

8 – Green Day: Jesus Of Suburbia (number 17, 2005)

“Everyone's so full of shit,” preaches Billie Joe Armstrong on this nine-minute epic beloved by Green Day fans. This is, apparently, Green Day doing a Bohemian Rhapsody,  and the track is split into five movements, like me after a bowel exam. I was never a massive ‘Day follower, but it feels like we need their agit-angst more than ever now. 

7 – Kanye West: Jesus Walks (number 16, 2004)

Before things went south for West, he made tracks full of braggadocio and brilliant beats. Jesus Walks was super militaristic, but this was okay in the mid-2000s because the US army had definitely never done anything bad ever. Ahem. These days West is just full of braggadocio and bullcrap. Shame because his College Dropout years were banging.

6 – Ash: Jesus Says (number 15, 1998)

The video for Jesus Says has the camera spinning around and around, like you’re inside a washing machine. The effect prompted protests from fans who complained of nausea, but they needn’t worry coz they could just pop their vom-splattered t-shirt into said washing machine. “God give me strength,” sing Ash on Jesus Says. Fair comment.

5 – Depeche Mode: Personal Jesus (number 13, 1989)

For far too long, I thought a Personal Jesus was a personalised Christ service in which He followed you around all day and made bitchy comments like ‘You look fat in that jumper’ and ‘That blusher’s far too gay’. Anyhoo, this is Depeche Mode at their peak, and it gave the impending 1990s permission to blend rock and synths and change music forever.

4 – Marilyn Manson: Personal Jesus (number 13, 2004)

For far too long, I thought a Personal Jesus was a– oh hold on, we’re already done this. I’d lost track of Marilyn Manson and where the allegations were up to, so I googled “is marilyn manson a wrong 'un” and Google’s AI bot responded by saying that the truth is “subjective”. So that’s settled then. I do not want Marilyn Manson to reach out and touch me.

3 – Morrissey: I Have Forgiven Jesus (number 10, 2004)

Oh holy hassocks of hell. Am I in some kind of purgatory? Is writing this blog post punishment for my multitude of sins? Here comes another person I would not to choose to be stuck in a lift with. I wouldn’t even follow behind him on the stairs. I much preferred Mozza when he was a lyricist and not a polemicist, although maybe he has always been both.

2 – Cliff Richard: Saviour’s Day (number 1, 1990)

Finally. A perfectly normal pop star. Cliff’s religious output is universally awful, and his triptych of Christian chart-toppers – Mistletoe And Wine, Saviour’s Day and The Millennium Prayer – have the same linear drop-off as the Godfather trilogy. Still, I’m glad Cliff exists. If he wasn’t around to be God’s representative in the pop charts, we’d have to choose Ye and that wouldn’t do at all.

1 – George Michael: Jesus To A Child (number 1, 1996)

You’ve got to have faith, and you’ve got to have this caramel-smooth cheese-fest from king George. Without telling anyone, George Michael donated the royalties from Jesus To A Child to the ChildLine charity. That makes this paeon to a lost lover the most Christian track in this list.

Not much electronic music in this list. Jeez, get it together Jesus.

Further Fats: Delirious' bid for number one: the rock delusion? (2010)

Further Fats: Warning! Dinosaurs are taking over the UK album chart! (2021)

Selected tweeted works: synthesiser worms, big shops

Is it against the law to copy and paste a bunch of tweets into a blog post? Making the micro-blog a macro-blog? It does seem wrong somehow.

Here are some recent tweets from @FatRoland, which is me. Like all social media, reading this is mostly a waste of your time. Imagine every word covered in paint, then watching that sweet, sweet paint dry.

For the sake of completion, I have included location tags on each tweet. 

1. Ear worm
Had a banging electronic music anthem stuck in my head today. And then I realised it was the Channel 4 News theme tune.
Location: basement

2. Synth worm
What if every time someone pressed a key on a synthesiser, a worm came out? You hadn't thought of that, had you? You need to be aware of all possible worms.
Location: a different basement

3. Guest appearance
Yes, that *is* me doing guest kazoo on Kanye's new album, good spot.
Location: end of garden

4. Down time
It's a low fuse kind of day. Housework. Chilling. Writing. YouTube. Snorkling. Mind control. Turning my knees into UFOs. Just boring stuff, really.
Location: top of telegraph pole

5. Animal
WAKE UP, SHEEPLE. (This tweet should only be read by people who are a grotesque hybrid of a human and an actual sheep, and who are also having a nap.)
Location: inside tube

6. Maths
Big Nas XL > Lil Nas X
Location: left of dog park

7. Zither
I'm sorry to announce that I've quit the extreme speed zither scene and will no longer be performing my sixty second soundtrack of The Third Man.
Location: three feet high and rising

8. Big shop
Went to do my big shop but it's bank holiday closed. Am now big shopping in the park (twigs = pasta, autumn leaves = cornflakes, sparrow = toilet roll).
Location: a collection of numbers and an arrow

9. Cover version
Kinetic by Golden Girls but performed by clockwork cymbal monkeys and Rowlf from the muppets.
Location: 1970s Granada TV

10. Key strokes
I have used computers since the 1980s. If I average 20,000 keystrokes a day, that's probably about 255,500,000 times my fingers have have touched a computer keyboard. And not once in those 255,500,000 times have I wanted Number Lock off.
Location: metaphysical

11. Watching
I see your tweets. I see your tweets and I like them. I want to become them. I want to be the negative space in your weird new font.
Location: location, location

Further Fats: Selected tweeted works – young lovers and yawning (2020)

Further Fats: Selected tweeted works – 17 Fat Roland tweets as recommended by Fat Roland

Amma tell you about Kanye West because I am the greatest

Kanye West banned his kid from wearing makeup. Kanye and Kim have another spat. Kanye West disses Dancing With the Stars. The headlines are 120% Kanye West right now.

It's hard to avoid him. According to the wisdom of West, he's either the greatest or God's vessel or bigger than PJ & Duncan. Kanye's simply following in the size 92 boots of boastful rappers, a path well trodden by Public Enemy and Method Man and the like. It's all standard stuff.

Although perhaps Chuck D had more of a purpose: blazing a trail to empower people of colour, speaking truth to authority and building an empire along the way. With Kanye it somehow seems so much more capitalist, more commercial and perhaps more empty.

It does mean, though, it's difficult to listen to new Kanye material without sensing the eccentric Trump-ian ego behind the work. And that's a shame because I missed out on much of his earlier material, when he was proper good. When College Dropout appeared in the mid-noughties, I'd been through my hip-hop phase. And what a phase. Vanilla Ice, Snap, John Barnes.

Maybe I could learn something from Mr West. I should be more boastful, because fake confidence breeds real confidence. Yeah. I'm going to do it. Here it comes. Here comes the ego. Ready?

Amma let me finish, but y'all Fat Roland is the best. Fats is the dopest dope. More fly than the other guy. Fat Roland knows 20 digits of pi by heart. Fats, er, is, um, good, I think.

Jeez, I'm exhausted. How does he keep it up? Maybe he is the greatest. Maybe he was right about Dancing With The Stars. Maybe 120% is about right.

Further Fats: Glastonbury's got 99 bands, and Jay Z should be one of them (2008)

Further Fats: World Book Day: music books I have read and should have read (2019)

Student's guide to new music

You're settling in to your halls or your crumbling shared house, but you haven't quite burned all your music from dad's computer yet. What music do you listen to if you want to be cool at university?

Obviously, you'll be bombarded with chances to hear thrilling bands if you're in a decent city. Manchester Academy, for example, is due to host amazing shows from Bowling For Soup, Peter Frampton and Napalm Death.

But this is an electronic music blog, so no doubt you've come to me for a few special recommendations to set you a few paces ahead from your clone mosher friends.

The first and only rule of Fat Roland's guide to new music for students is: if you listen to any music at all, I'll smash your face off with that gatepost.

Seriously. If you go within a thousand miles of anything resembling a rhythm or some kind of assemblance of melody, I'll kick you in the liver.

Biology lesson. A remarkable thing happens to the human body between the ages of 18 and 20. Before then, your synapses are made from phlegm and tears; they lack the connectivity to enable you to appreciate anything good. So you'll foxtrot to Keane, fandango to Kesha, fast-step to Kanye.

From about 19 or 20, you become a complete human being for the first time in your life. Your ears start talking to your feet and your heart, and what develops is a perfectly passable music taste that lives on for a decade or two. Your mp3s become file names like Cripple Bastards, Shitmat and Burt Bacharach (but only ironically).

The danger is, though, and I want you to read this as though it's one of those ominous adverts for AIDS in the 1980s, a residual echo from your pre-18 days lingers in your brain, terminally damaging many of your cells and then hiding until it chooses to ambush you later. Imagine Simply Red hiding in your fridge all night, waiting to pounce when you get milk in the morning.

And so, when you hit 32, all those old musical numbers you jived to in your teens pop back into your memory, and you utter the incantation that has destroyed many a cool person: "D'you know, that stuff wasn't so bad after all. At least it had a melody..."

There is only one way to stop this happening. Your musical taste must be sliced off the moment you hit university. For at least one year, you must be sonically castrated and taught that all music is evil. You have to go through a reverse-Clockwork Orange, and watch Akira Kurosawa or Jean-Luc Goddard films while subjecting your pinned-open earholes to Will I Am, Tiao Cruz or The Saturdays.

You should probably be locked in your room and bubblewrap be glued to every surface, including yourself. Your computer shall have an auto-tune filter, so anything melodic will sound like kittens being slowly diced with an apple corer.

Save yourself from yourself, new students. Listen to nothing. Not even your lectures, for fear of catching accidental intonations or a dull recitation of a textbook unintentionally forming a pleasing pentameter that could easily be set to music.

And all you will be left with is the cleansing wash of a lonely silence except in the dark of the night when the only noise is the dull thud of your heartbeat. Except, of course, a heartbeat is a recognised rhythm, so unless you've surgically wrapped that in jiffybags, that'll have to go too.

I'll ween you when you're ready. We'll start with Boards Of Canada, then go deeper. Meanwhile, let the silence begi--

Boycott Kanye West

Following Kanye West's outburst during the acceptance speech of a mind-dribblingly bland country singer at a ceremony about which no-one gives a flying puppy, I would like to call my blog readers to take direct action.

It's time to boycott Kanye West.

That UK#22 single Heard 'Em Say with dog-faced Maroon 5 crooner Adam Levine? Put it in the bin right away. I know you've been listening to it. Stop it.

You know Can't Tell Me Nothing? Remember? It reached #107 in the charts in 2007? Stop listening to that right now. Boycott it. Never listen to it again.

I know as a faithful Fat Roland On Electronica reader, you've been following Kanye's production career with great interest. Well, it's time to do some boycotting. If he's twiddled the knobs, in the bin it goes.

That means no more listening to:

- Cam'ron
- Mariah Carey;
- Trina and Tamara;
- Jin (that must be the dog from Britain's Got Talent);
- Beanie Sigel;
- Mashonda.

I know what you're thinking. Is there any music left? Shockingly, I haven't finished.

You should also boycott Roc-A-Fella Records, where he cut his production teeth. That means no more Alicia Keys singles. Hear that Alicia Keys warble trinkling out of your i-pod speakers right now? Stop that. You can cut out Keys, thank you very much.

That'll teach the pound-shop-spectacled one to mangle Daft Punk records. Together, we can bring down the music industry one drunken blog post at a time.

Next week: boycott Timmy Mallett.

Edit: Kanye, um, answers me back here [link since expired].

Live tweeting at the Brits - the full text

As promised a couple of shakes ago, I have just live-tweeted the 2009 Brit Awards on my Twitter feed, which, incidentally, is worth signing up to because I post a few extra links and news that I can't fit onto this site.

Here are my Twitter comments ("tweets") in full, with minor edits so it makes more sense.

- The Brits are copying Glastonbury and using a 'pyramid stage'. Pfffrt. Expect some highly smug tweets as I watch from my tellybox.

- U2 are putting all their words on a big screen like a worship concert.

- Ha ha, look at James Corden, doing a great Homer 'smock'.

- Simon Pegg has kept that weight off.

- Duffy best female?! - the clue's in the name.

- Best International Female up next, it's... NO NO NO WRONG NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO WRONG GET HER OFF NO NO NO NO NO AAAARGH STOP HER TALKING NO NO NO OH PLEASE NO. Katy Perry's stopped. Phew.

- Took Corden 15 mins to do a shag joke to Kyles.

- Girls Aloud look like flamingos.

- Second Brit for Duff(y).

- It's Coldplay - I may have to hide.

- Chris Martin came on naked, doing a rap version of Run To The Hills. Didn't expect that.

- Pet Shop Boys, Brandon Flowers and Lady GaGa later. It could be messy.

- Strong International Group category. It's Kings Of Leon, obvs'ly. Epitome of casual cool, "y'all".

- Why's Paul Weller at home having tea with Adele? (He was in a pub, it turned out.)

- Has Duff(y) finished? Can I un-mute yet?

- Joe Calzagglewaggle looks sheepish because he's totally forgotten which award he's presenting- heh!

- KINGS OF LEON YOU ARE IN BRITAIN NOT JUST ENGLAND. Gah.

- Who are those people with torches?

- It's our hometown boys, Take That. Robbie fever! Rumour was Robbie Williams would turn up. He didn't, but Take That's Brit performance was truly beautiful. Mat Horne is having an orgasm at it.

- Take That looked like Kraftwerk.

- Nick Frost looks like a geography teacher browsing a gardening centre.

- Eddie's just killed Iron Maiden.

- Matt Lucas knows how to find the camera, doesn't he?!

- Hoff and Elbow. What a contrast. Oh as I type, Guy Garvey says to the Hoff, dryly: "You up for a drink later on, David?" Fried Brits gold, ha ha ha!

- Next bit of gossip: Will Katy Perry "controversially" snog Florence & The Machine? Will the Pet Shop Boys, the Killers and Lady GaGa be a car crash? Stay tuned.

- They muted Florence's introduction. Hmm. No snogging.

- Gok's predictable and receding.

- Best International Male Kanye West did a terrible "inter-racial" joke. (International. Inter-racial. It's a pun, see? Kanye's no Tim Vine.)

- Ting Tings and Estelle's quite good mash-up is more sass than my bowels can cope with.

- Did Grace Jones do Estelle's make-up?

- Allan Carr comes on to 'Womanizer'. Does science teacher joke - I've already done that here, luv.

- Best single Girls Aloud is a major relief.

- Tom Jones is a McLaren F1 car (orange and grey).

- Right, Radiohead, it's your time to win... go on... go on... Duff(y)?!? Oh come ON.

- Duff(y)'s crying. Good. She's ruined all music forever by beating Radiohead.

- Stephen Fry's tummy is rumbling - oh the trivia of Twitter.

- Took Corden 110 minutes to do a shag joke about Brandon Flowers.

- Here's Pet Shop Boys' disembodied heads. Starting with Suburbia, with added pink wig, then Love Etc, then Always On My Mind, then (to a massive cheer) Go West . It's a classic Brits melody!

- Here come the sexy men dancers.

- The sexy men dancers have been replaced by Lady GaGa on What Have I Done To Deserve This. One second of I'm With Stupid, then Brandon doing It's A Sin. A couple more breakneck track changes.

- Wow, those mostly naked dancers don't leave a lot to the imagination, do they?

- Pet Shop Boys didn't need Brandon Flowers and Lady GaGa.

- So that's it, done. Elbow had the best moment with the Hoff, Take That were the best performers and Duff(y) was a travesty.

A finally message to a friend on Twitter: "Twittering was the only way of coping with the awfulness." See my Twitter page here.

Monthly mop-up: cross-shaped houses, cross ambientalists, and not getting your wires crossed in the studio

I have scooped up this month's unused snippets of bloggery-pokery and baked them into one tasty pie of goodness, especially for you, my dear reader.  Think of this as my 'deleted scenes' extra for fatroland.com.

Before I get stuck in, absolutely my favouritest release this month was Lukid's Foma - more so than Squarepusher's Numbers Lucent.  A music producing chum described Numbers Lucent as "the sound of the inside of someones ass" if it had a bad Casio stuck inside it.  I think that was a compliment, but most of it sounded like the weaker noodly stuff that didn't qualify for his Just A Souvenir LP.

On to business...

Will HMV survive 2009?

Consider this quote from retail trend analyser Greg Hodge when he spoke to the BBC a few weeks ago:

"Is there room for a music store on the high street? The answer is probably no."

Things look grim, with the CD album under threat from the unbundling of albums on services like i-Tunes, the collapse of Zavvi because of a Woolworths-related supply disaster, and HMV-owning Waterstone's cutting jobs in their goods-in departments.  Will HMV survive 2009?  Yes.  They have reduced their losses and sales are actually up.  Is there room for a music store on the high street?  Yes, it's just that there will be less actual music in them, and lots more Wii.

Have you advice for recording in studios?

No, but Alan Parsons has.  My favourite bit is "don't suck the life out of a recording by overuse of limiting and compression."  You don't know how many times over-production annoys me, especially, oddly, in the Christian music industry.

Please make the fighting stop.

It did stop, but the headlines made for uncomfortable reading.  The prince of all that is ambient Brian Eno spent January being quite vocal about Gaza.  Go and read his Stealing Gaza piece at the angry Counter Punch site.  He has expressed his support for Palestine in various newspapers, including the NME.  Between him and Vince Cable, the Lib Dems seem to be kicking ass right now.

Where do Justice live?

In a big cross-shaped house, of course.  Well, not exactly, but some crazy French architects have built a house (abstract pictured above) in tribute to the duo. There's a wonderful quote from Kanye West:

"I want to live there so badly, but people would have to know that the house is a cross shape because of Justice, not because I was some sort of religious fanatic".

This from the guy who brought us Jesus Walks.

Recommend a band that's not strictly electronica.

I recommended the heavenly Here We Go Magic to the A New Band A Day website.  They liked what they heard and prompty posted it on their blog.  You should spend some time on A New Band A Day: there are many gems to be found.

In other internet news, you can get more random links and musical thoughts by following me on Twitter (see link in the sidebar of this site).  As I said to myself when choosing my sexuality, if it's good enough for Stephen Fry, it's good enough for me.

Crouching at the base of a cardboard themometer muttering something about there being too many guitars

Manc convention insists I be excited about the Manchester International Festival. If I had an oversize cardboard thermometer with 'not much electronica' written at the bottom in black marker pen and 'lots of lovely electronica' written on a piece of star-shaped yellow card blue-tacced to the top, I would hum and haw and then stick my strip of (Top Gear style) card saying MANCHESTER INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL quite low on the chart, perhaps very near the bottom.

So no trendy experimental music for my tastes. I will have to make do. arms crossed, lip curled, with Lou Reed (old man's music), Kanye West (hmm, maybe not) and PJ Harvey (oh yes yes and thrice yes).

Or I could save up my pennies for the holy Mancunian marriage of the Fall and the Happy Mondays (record cover pictured) shambling through a joint gig. There'll be nothing civil about that partnership, I can assure thee.

All the events can be seen on the events calendar, as quite rightly they should be.

Oh, incidentally, one of the debates featured in the line-up is called 'Is TV good for society?'. Well, let me just start the debate by giving an in depth opinion on the subject:

Yes.

Does any of the Festival take your fancy? And shall we go together? I've got a megarider, so we'll have to get the bus in.