JIM BOB IN POP CHARTS SCANDAL

Thank you so much if you bought a copy The Panic Room EP. Whether it was the vinyl or the download version, or if you streamed it or watched the videos. Without PR, reviews, interviews, or radio airplay – God…I’m starting to sound like the woke Morrissey – it really has been you and me against the world again. Big up us. I don’t want to be bitter. Can I be angry though? Here’s why you won’t see it in the charts.

I know the pop charts are a bit daft these days. You can be number one for a year without selling a single record, or you can be Fleetwood Mac, topping the charts with a fifty-year-old song because it’s the soundtrack to a billion TikTok videos of cats falling off furniture, or because Olivia Rodrigo ‘brought you out’ at Lollapalooza.

Having said all that, in 2023 I was genuinely surprised and genuinely over the genuine moon when my ‘Beach Ready EP’ went to number one in the Physical Singles chart. I was presented (by the postman) with a number one shaped statuette. It was nice to get some recognition from an industry that I often feel is determined to deny my existence.

Apart from having something showy-offy to put on the shelf behind me when I do podcast interviews on Zoom, having a hit record meant I could write ‘three top ten singles in three years, including a number one in 2023’ on my press releases that nobody reads.

With The Panic Room EP I realised a second statuette was a possibility. I could get the opposite bookend I needed to stop all my books from falling off the shelf behind me in podcast interviews on Zoom. And surely ‘four top ten singles in three years, including two number ones’ would get me onto Later With Jools Holland or on the bill of one of the festivals I’ve been told will never let me play because the promoters didn’t like Carter in 1992.

The official charts website is updated on Fridays at 5:45 pm. Me and Marc stared at our phones (me at home and Marc on an overheating, massively delayed train due to trespassers on the line). The chart update was late. We both refreshed the page a hundred times, accidentally opening pop-ups for Ted Lasso, Anglia Trains and an interview with the bloke from Snow Patrol. That website is absolutely covered in pop-ups. Eventually, I got bored and went to bed. I’d look in the morning. Before I’d managed to change into my prototype Carter USM 101 Damnations pyjamas, I received a WhatsApp message from Marc. The charts had updated at last. My EP wasn’t number one or two though. It wasn’t number three or four. It wasn’t anywhere in the top 100 of the Physical Singles chart. It wasn’t in the Vinyl Singles chart either. It was nowhere.

Knowing that it had possibly sold more copies than the Nick Cave record sitting in the number one spot made things worse. I’m certainly not suggesting that me being at number one would have spoiled the incoming feel-good Nick Cave story, and the chart people had to find an excuse to get me out of the way. I’m not suggesting the biggest chart fix since the Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save The Queen’ was demoted to number two in the charts because of the Silver Jubilee. I’m not suggesting that. That would be insane. In Stuart Adamson’s biography there’s a bit where a Big Country single is excluded from the charts because the sleeve had too many folds in it. Maybe something like that happened to Panic Room. The charts are daft after all.

It’s five days later, and I’ve just found out why my EP didn’t appear in the charts.

6.3 Pre-signed/Personalised Products

Any pre-signed or personalised physical product will not be eligible for inclusion in the chart (i.e. products featuring artist’s signature, initial, autograph, writings, doodles and drawings made by artist in any part of physical product prior to sale and/or any other feature that makes the product unique such as numbering).

Way back in February, we had wondered whether this might be an issue, so we asked the charts people, and they said no, it was absolutely fine. This will not affect your chart eligibility. Mark Reynolds went ahead and added signing and numbering boxes to the back of the sleeve. In June, I went to the Cherry Red offices and signed almost eight hundred records.

With hindsight, we could have got the correct information by asking CHATGPT instead of asking the people who compile the chart.

I know music isn’t a competition, and no one cares about the charts anymore and so on, but it still really matters to me. Getting to this rather depressing and deflating moment has taken nine months. I wrote the songs in December last year, spent days trying to find rhymes I was happy with, rearranging verses and changing the keys of songs. I recorded demos at home and then went into the studio with the band to record the songs properly. We mixed the songs, and I sent them away to be mastered. Me and Mark Reynolds came up with ideas for the sleeve artwork, and Mark designed it. I chose a vinyl colour. Test pressings arrived, and I checked they sounded okay. I made videos for three of the songs; I used no AI, painstakingly editing images and clips by hand (and mouse). I plugged the EP relentlessly on social media, paying to boost posts on Facebook so people might see those posts. In June I went to Cherry Red to sign and hand-number every copy of the EP. Because it would be just fine for me to do that and would definitely not disqualify the record from the charts.

Last month I went to see The Odyssey at the cinema. After almost two and a half hours (plus twenty-five minutes of pre-film adverts), the film stuttered and broke down. The cinema spent half an hour trying to fix it, but eventually they gave up and refunded everyone; we left the cinema and went home. I can think of no better analogy for how I feel right now.

Here’s a picture of what it looks like.

Love you loads,

Jim Bob xx