Young farmers and the Wurzels
Scott and Chris had played a Saturday-night set for young farmers at Harper Adams University. Their previous visit included Alan Titchmarsh, so both men suspected the sold-out crowd might be waiting for another famous passenger to emerge from the car.
This time the supporting attraction was the Wurzels. Scott and Chris arrived in time to hear the West Country band transform the Kaiser Chiefs’ “Ruby” into agricultural entertainment and watched the audience respond as enthusiastically as it had to “The Combine Harvester”.
The last notes available
Chris revived his concern that popular music was approaching a finite limit. There were only so many notes and combinations, he argued, meaning new songs had begun to resemble existing ones because the industry was running out of unused music.
His evidence began mischievously with Jonas Blue’s “Fast Car” sounding like Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car”, before moving to less deliberate examples. The Vamps’ “Wake Up” reminded him of fun.’s “We Are Young”, while CHVRCHES’ “Clearest Blue” moved towards the same euphoric pattern as Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough”. Another record appeared to contain a trace of Thomas the Tank Engine.
Radio 1’s head of music was leaving, and Chris decided that the incoming replacement needed an urgent meeting about the crisis. Scott wondered whether the departing executive had already heard the warning and chosen escape.
Bangers and toilet music
The daily song vote now had the provisional name Battle of the Bangers. Scott chose Justin Timberlake’s “Señorita”, while Chris used One Direction’s debut “What Makes You Beautiful” and won the listener’s vote. Scott objected that such an enormous singalong was too easy a choice for a feature intended to revive less obvious songs.
Greg James returned to Real or No Real after completing the Gregathlon. A claim that most toilets flushed in G-sharp was false only in its precise note: the programme asserted that the more common sound was E-flat and compared a recorded Radio 1 flush with a keyboard.
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