Hollow Earth

Generally I am sceptical about the value of this kind of in-depth analysis of data, it can make the generally popular form of Music Criticism (witness the form's very public renaissance as embodied in Cowell/Walsh/Cole/Minogue) come over a little dry. However, faced as we are with nothing less than the collapse of civilisation I thought it was high time to roll out the hard facts - perhaps only then will the naysayers sit up and pay attention. It is time to play Diogenes to X-factor's quartet of Alexander the Greats.

Firstly, from a purely rigorously statistical point-of-view, in being open about the provenance of this information it ought to be made clear that I have come across this information "through the back door" so to speak. Working for a large multi-national corporation, and although bound as usual by the brace of non-disclosure agreements, I became aware that the floor above where I was temporarily stationed was the repository for the entire organisation's statistical analysis. Last Monday evening I first hid in the gentleman's toilet and, upon the clerk's vacation of his post, in an umbrella stand until the small hours when I crept about on all fours between filing cabinets using a makeshift tinfoil mirror to disguise my presence from the security sensors. For three nights I continued this procedure until I amassed a welter of fascinating, hitherto unseen information which I have painstakingly worked up here:

Well! There's hardly a huge surprise here for anyone who follows music-but it's interesting to see it conclusively stated once and for all. Peaking with Dark Side of The Moon- buoyed up in the eighties by Thriller. Trailing off after The Strokes debut.

They had it in the sixties. They bellyached about its absence in the mid-to-late seventies. Their parents got rich and then richer and then finally wised up.

It was beautiful seeing how this ebbed and flowed, as though engaged in a dance in time across time and space with plectrum sales in the United Kingdom across the same period.

If I had fudged the data (especially around the Ginger Cat's right ear) the parallel would have been even more striking: