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Will radio dare air the tune of the year?
By Paul Connolly, London Lite 19.03.07
All grown up: but is Scroobious Pip radio-friendly?
Look here too
Want to know what the track of the spring should be? Okay, I'll tell you. Thou Shalt Always Kill by Dan Le Sac vs Scroobious Pip (such unforgiveably groovy names but we'll cut them some slack for now) is almost certainly the most fantastic record I've heard this year.
It's undeniably gimmicky, being a kind of hipsters' 10 commandments set to crunching slo-mo techno, but is also very funny and very good.
It contains little nuggets of wisdom such as: "Thou shalt not question Stephen Fry", "Thou shalt not judge Lethal Weapon by Danny Glover" and "Thou shalt not think that any man over the age of 30 who plays with a child that is not their own is a paedophile - some people are just nice".
However, it also calls for boycotts of Coca-Cola and Nestlé products as well as the NME and it uses swearwords. Naughty boys. Now, they might get away with the odd f**k and p***k on specialist radio and XFM but on daytime radio? No chance.
Not that the swearing will stymie Dan and Scroobious's bid for one-hit wonder fame. That's what bleeps are for. No, what will scupper them is that the lyrical content is just too grown-up, confrontational and anti-commercial.
Radio 1 might get away with the odd daytime play (if there's any room amid the cheesy dance covers of old prog-rock "classics" and pallid Christian rock) but commercial radio? You're having a laugh.
Even assuming that radio stations such as Capital or Heart would dare to play anything that hadn't already been in the charts for a month or wasn't a hit 20 years ago (stop sniggering at the back) there's absolutely no chance they'd risk advertising revenue by playing a song that openly criticised major corporations.
Now, this would not necessarily mean that Thou Shalt Always Kill will fail. After all, if Radio 1 does see fit, its 10 million-plus listeners will likely be enough to ensure that it will chart fairly high. It might even go top three, or heaven forbid, to number one. And that's where it becomes interesting.
Of Capital Radio's top 10 most-played songs last week, all, apart from Take That, were from acts broken on Radio 1. Would Capital dare play a number one single that offended advertisers? It's difficult to imagine so.
But maybe if Dan and Scroobious lost the swearing for Radio 1, then why not a corporate-friendly version for commercial radio without the anti-Coca-Cola and Nestlé sentiments? It would be a real test of their principles. Just how badly do you want it boys?
•What do you think? Email sounding off@the londonlite.co.uk
