Sunday evening was always about the charts - in the old days, Sunday sandwiches of cold roast, Songs of Praise on the TV - and me off to my raido to listen to the the Top 40 countdown. I never recorded the Top 40 like some people claim, and I never pretended to be the DJ - but I was always concerened with who had hit the top spot. Whipped into a frenzy by Radio 1 - I knew most of the tunes in the Top 10, unless an amazing new entry had stormed to the top. In the 1980’s the chart was actually released on a Tuesday - and on Tuesday evening you could get a run-down with Bruno Brookes. Ignoring possibilities of chart rigging, I used to believe this was the center of the music universe.

Slowly the sanctity of the Top 40 chart was eroded - moving to Sundays, competition from the Pepsi chart on Capital Radio, format complexities and the addition of downloads, but just occasionally the interest in the Top 40 would be rekindled…battles between Blur and Oasis would make the papers, or comparisons of sales between cleverly scheduled releases by Britney & Kylie.

But this week - it died, the British music reached its absolute nadir - the bottom of a seemingly endless trough of its own making - and the British music buying public must accept some of the blame.

Four celestial anti-bodies have aligned - and left us with a black hole in the fabric of our music pschye.

My evidence:

A man-band that retired ten years ago, shed (arguably) their most talented member and release a record that sounds very similar to a Nerina Pallot tune (strangely she was dropped by Take Thats record label) - they end up at number on in the singles chart.

Four oirish chancers - led by the man that puts the leper into leprechaun are at the top of an album chart that features only releases and best-ofs in its top 5. The other 4 slots are made up from ‘artistes’ that have to have long memories to recall their peaks. Oasis who spewed the remainder of their arrogant, creative juices almost 5 years ago, The Beatles - Love : a ‘remaster’ of an album by supposedly Britains greatest band. U2’s U218 : a hastily cobbled together greatest hits by the ‘worlds biggest rock group’. George Michaels - 25 - sugared soul held together with a couple of camp Wham hits. Its shocking, turgid stuff and we should be ashamed of ourselves for buying this crap.

Then somehow - there is enough public demand for Peter and Katie to release a record. Record company executives are generally not stupid people (dangerous and misguided maybe) - and so they must have had a ‘focus group’ or some market research that said : ‘Now, late 2006, just before Christmas…thats when the world needs to hear an album by a top-heavy model and a light headed aussie’. So here it is - like a musical dog turd.

And finally - and most tragically - a star gets snuffed out. Alan Freeman, the legendary radio broadcaster and DJ has left us. Maybe its better that he popped off this week - who could have stood another week of the shameful british music industry and the even more culpable british music buying public.

Goodbye pop-pickers