Why the NOW! Yearbook series is preserving the good AND bad taste of our times – and all the better for it

To paraphrase something Simon Bates may well have said if 1980 was the ‘Golden Hour’ on his Radio 1 “mid-morning matters” style show – “It was the year we lost John Lennon, but we gained ‘There’s No-one quite like Grandma’ By St Winifred’s School Choir….”

It was also the year of ‘Geno’, ‘Baggy Trousers’, ‘Spacer’, ‘Ace of Spades’, ‘Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime’, ‘Celebration’, ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, ‘London Calling’ and ‘Too Much Too Young’ – you’d probably wanna ditch St Winifred’s right? (even though the picture suggests it featured a cameo from a pre-Oasis Noel & Liam on backing vocals)….well, maybe not.

Talking about that most worthless of ancient Pop artefacts, Jive Bunny*,  writer Taylor Parkes says “the stuff that’s unmemorable or beneath consideration 10 or 20 or 30 years later, that’s what made-up the majority of that era’s reality..the library of Alexandria burnt to the ground, destroying thousands of the most precious documents of the pre-Christian era…but we still have this, so we should hold it close and and keep it so in centuries to come people can thrill to it once more, while trying to chew off their own ears.”¹

The Now! Yearbook series  is well established now, gradually being released in non-chronological order. Each one takes a single year of the UK Pop charts and compiles the biggest hits over 4 discs – so focusing on a specific year rather than adding to the bottomless pit of generic 80s collections. What makes them truly exceptional is that they follow the spirit of the contemporary ‘Now That’s What I Call Music’ series which is to present an unvarnished reflection of what was actually in the charts that year. In doing so, they challenge the rather staid narrative about “what we were all listening to” that low budget Channel 5 clip shows and those who insist on using the word ‘iconic’ would have you believe.

The NOW! Yearbooks include songs that revisionists, hipster music snobs and those slavishly worshipping the accepted ROCK canon would rather forget. This means that the unarguable likes of The Specials’ ‘Ghost Town’ rubs shoulders with the deathly hand-clap medley ‘Stars on 45’. It means one minute you’re thumping the dashboard to unassailable classics by The Jam, Smokey Robinson, Odyssey, Adam & the Ants and Roxy Music – but the next, veering into the hard shoulder to skip The Nolans, Julio Iglesias, Cliff Richard and Elaine Page – and that’s just 1981.

The NOW! compilers do an exceptional job of making the running order feel coherent and enjoyable as a listening experience – linking similar genres and themes, and with a few ‘in jokes’ for long term listeners (Howard Jones is usually paired with the interchangeable Nik Kershaw for instance) and a few wry little playlist combos. For instance Yearbook ’81 has a run of what 90s alternative comedians would call “naff” songs; ‘Making your Mind Up’ by Bucks Fizz, ‘This Ole’ House’ by Shakin’ Stevens and ‘Do the Hucklebuck’ by Coast to Coast – which provides the revelation that not only was the Bucks Fizz Eurovision Smash very much in the 1950s Happy Days revival style (albeit with The Fonz replaced by Ted Bovis from Hi-De-Hi), it is the near twin of ‘Hucklebuck’. Try singing ‘Making your Mind Up’ along to this you’ll see what I mean:

This suggests that the team behind the NOW compilations have a thorough understanding of the context thid music existed in and they take their job seriously. That simple bit of playlisting is really important if, like me, you think Pop History is as worthy of study as Art History.

Have look at the current list of yearbooks -pick a year you remember fondly, marvel at just how many exceptional songs there were and the sheer diversity on offer. You’ll also find yourself re-appraising songs you may have written off in more tribal times. Try ‘Fantasy Island’ by Tight Fit. I swear people must buy ‘Abba Gold’ expecting it to be on there such is it’s Rutles-like perfect pastiche of Abba and, incredibly, it was produced by Tim Friese-Greene who oversaw those seminal Talk Talk albums – that most sacrosanct pinnacle of “Good Taste”

You might also hear something you missed at the time – fast forward to 1992 I was deep into Music Snob mode and way too mired in Ambient Electronica, the emergent Post-Rock genre and stompy Industrial Indie (all of which I still love) to have time for mere chart fodder. I was only vaguely aware of this Pop house gem which hit no.5 in the charts – listening back it’s a brilliantly minimalist track with a killer bassline and fantastic choppy piano chords with only the slightly over-used gospel Organ sample rooting it in the 1990s otherwise it sounds timeless, gliding and frictionless…

NOW! Yearbooks can never entirely represent the hits of the time but that’s usually due to rights issues rather than attempts to jettison Stars on 45 to the space junkyard where they belong. The spoilsports include Madonna and the brilliant but utterly humourless Depeche Mode who refuse to have their songs compiled, lest their “reputations” be sullied by association with the Goombay Dance Band or Haysi Fantayzee. Wherever possible though, like old episodes of Top of the Pops, they simply represent what was being purchased with pocket money over the counter at Woolworths or WHSmiths and played on the radio at the time – which tells you so much more about the times than a ‘carefully curated’ algorithm-driven playlist ever would

This isn’t about some outmoded idea of ‘Guilty Pleasures’ either (an alien concept to the Fleetwood Mac and Toto loving 20-somethings of the Streaming generation) rather it’s about preserving the true history and context of all those era-defining hits. Writing in The Wire magazine George Rayner-Law warns that the Folk song archivists of the 1950s and 1960s had a tendency to reorder the world to reflect “contemporary concerns around the loss of ‘traditional’ culture” at the expense of “industrial songs, pub songs”². Without being too glib, it’s tempting to compare these early preservationists with the likes of YouTube rock reactionary Rick Beato railing against autotuned R&B, or the increasingly Clarkson-esque David Hepworth and his ‘1972 as year zero’ narrative – with each successive year failing to meet his high bar set before many of us were born…-10, -20, -30 and so on.

NOW! are definitely not glossing over the Industrial people’s working songs and Pub anthems…speaking of which:

This also isn’t about revelling in ‘cheesy’ music for hack laughs or trivialising low culture at the expense of more worthy artistry (which let’s face it – has plenty of earnest folk willing to bang on about it and ram it down yr ears), but it is important that we preserve Pop in all it’s objectively good and bad forms – and NOW! do a great job of it.

So, get a Yearbook in it’s deluxe book format with the music hard-coded onto those silver Compact Discs. Yes, you read that right – CDs. They still sell by the pallet-load to those who like to collect music and, more importantly you can’t actually get all this music any other way – they often feature songs that, make no mistake, might actually be missing altogether from Streaming services, or may not be the same chart-topping 7″ mix – or worse, a later re-recording for contractual reasons.

Now that’s what I call music.

¹ Chart Music Podcast Episode 66

₂ The Wire Magazine Issue 493 March 2025

* Missing from Now YearBook ’90 – perhaps we have suffered enough