Ten From Then: Ep 5 2001

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Plugs checked and axles greased, we flipped the Melochronometer to the “on” position whereupon it hiccuped binary and spat code until it had settled on 2001. What a place to land — and not one we can land in lightly, because this episode goes out on the 11th of September, twenty-five years to the day since the attacks on the United States. The news clips you’ll hear between the songs this week are all from that week in 2001, and we’ll come back to it properly at the end of the hour. The rest of the year deserves remembering too. It was a fortnight old when a free encyclopaedia that anyone could edit quietly went live. In December, after twelve months of Silicon Valley insisting a secret invention called “Ginger” would be bigger than the internet, it turned out to be a scooter you stood on. A boy wizard had the biggest film of the year, and the second-biggest was shot entirely down here — The Fellowship of the Ring opened in New Zealand cinemas on the 20th of December, a week before Christmas, with Matamata, Whakapapa and Upper Hutt playing Middle-earth. That same year the other big export shut up shop: Xena swung her last chakram on the 18th of June, six seasons and a hundred and thirty-four episodes all made around Auckland and the Waitākere Ranges. The first-ever New Zealand Music Month happened that May. We started the year with a Kiwi song at number one, Fur Patrol’s “Lydia,” and finished it with Che Fu’s “Fade Away” as the biggest local single of the year — and, in between, the Warriors made the finals for the first time in their lives, and were promptly beaten 56–12.
The records, as ever, are the reason to come back. This ten-song trip has a riff two Frenchmen dug out of a record bin, from a 1979 album by a man called Edwin Birdsong; a singer five months before the entire planet learned her name; and a song by the singer with the second-biggest-selling album in the world that year, which she had left on a demo tape in 1995. There’s a piece with no chorus and no beat you can tap that has its own peer-reviewed paper; a video shot in a former Communist Party headquarters in Kazakhstan with Jarvis Cocker and Jason Donovan dancing in it; and a gospel group founded in 1939 at a school for the blind, cutting an album in four days with a lead singer who was there in 1939. There’s a German funk band from Munich signed by a rapper from the San Francisco Bay Area, a song that changes time signature forty-seven times and still got on the Hot 100, and a twenty-year-old who fought her way out of one record deal and then wrote, produced and arranged a number one on her own piano. Four of these ten took home a trophy from the same ceremony one Wednesday night the following February, and a fifth won there on somebody else’s record — but that’s what the show is for. Ten songs, one year, and a reminder that in 2001 the best records were mostly made by people borrowing something and refusing to give it back.