Payola - Money For Hype/ Top Twenty

 

Incredibly silly DIY post-punk record by mysterious "group"

Label: NB Records
Year of Release: 1980

Payola was actually a relatively big scandal in the late seventies and early eighties, breaking out of the pages of the music trade press and becoming the topic of national headline news. So numerous were the cases that Frank Bough ferociously grilled a music business executive about it on "Nationwide", and the chart positions of some records in the official BBC chart - my legal friends have advised me not to name the group The Pinkees at this point - were called into serious question. 

While fiddling chart positions might feel like small beer compared to unemployment, the Cold War and city riots, there was a certain justification to the outrage. The charts are supposed to be a fair barometer of the popularity of both major talent and up and coming acts, irrespective of the label they sit on or the budget they have. If a clumsy punk recording on Single Sock Records happened to be popular enough to get inside the Top 75 despite being distributed by a low key organisation, then it should be allowed to do so and the group in question should get that promotional leverage, not be knocked out of the official chart by a group a major label had bribed record store owners to create false sales for. 

Perhaps it shouldn't be any big surprise that the artists most likely to produce an irritated satirical noise about this sort of thing were those in the DIY/ punk set, then. The mysterious Payola here (who are almost certainly nothing to do with the Canadian group The Payola$, despite other sites suggesting they are) deliver two sides of fumbling post-punk faux-irritation, so childish in its mocking that you can almost hear the giggling and glee in the studio. Both tracks are backed with a basic metronomic drum machine, some funky guitar lines, and lyrics pretending to be all for the joys of hyping - although the single created such a weak impression in the Tuesday rundown that I highly doubt any money exchanged hands to this end.

It's one of those low budget DIY singles that feels as if it exists because some individuals woke up one day and realised it could, therefore why not? In these days of YouTube, streaming and instant access to any idea somebody just had that afternoon (including my wittering on this blog) it's sometimes hard to appreciate that there were days where having a basic creative idea and getting it exposure was actually hard work which involved a certain financial outlay. In that context, "Money For Hype" is the sound of some people sat firmly outside the music business doing everything they could to poke it in the eye with a shitty stick. I highly doubt it made anybody at the major labels have a long, hard think about just how they'd behaved, but it probably helped to bolster the outsider's reputation of the indie sector.

For me, the B-side "Top Twenty" is the most fun, with the group celebrating each chart position with slightly repressed enthusiasm. 

As the decade wore on, the new chart compilers Gallup did more and more to tackle the problems caused by chart hype, but new problems emerged in its place - free gifts with certain records at chart return shops, for example (Rod Stewart's "Baby Jane" came with a free Adidas T-shirt if you knew where to look), then free records doled out to shops by the major labels to be marked up at near-giveaway prices in the first chart week, then fiddling with streaming stats by employing bots to cook the digital books... the majors will always seemingly find new ways of dominating the chart picture. 

The hype issue remained prominent enough even in the late nineties that Roger Cook attempted to run an expose on it with the help of Edwina Currie's daughter, but that ultimately came to nothing. These days, I get the impression we've wearily accepted that the corporate sharks with the biggest bank balances are always going to find ways of fiddling the books, and we're more likely to collectively sigh deeply than expect the 2023 equivalent of Frank Bough to shout on our behalf about it. 

If the previews below aren't working properly, please go right to the source. Apologies in advance for the slightly scratchy sound on both sides of this 45.