Get Your Hits Out: The Problem With 'Best Of' Season

“Re-issue! Re-package! Re-package! Re-evaluate the songs. Double-pack with a photograph, extra track and a tacky badge.” No, these aren’t the leaked pleas of Robbie Williams from EMI’s Christmas Marketing Board meeting but they may as well be.

Four of the records dominating the Top 40 this week belong in this ‘Greatest Hits’ category, including Mr Williams himself who has slipped to number two after a brief spell at number one. Further cash-ins are also planned by the likes of the Pet Shop Boys, Suede and Barbara Streisand.

Why? Because ‘Essential’ compilations always sell like they’re going out of fashion. An irony which may be lost on Pink with her optimistically titled anthology: 'Greatest Hits: So Far!!!'
Unfortunately though, a cavalier attitude to compilations has marred the reputation of the singles collection to the point where even the 25 year anniversary of Simply Red’s existence is somehow deemed cause for celebration.

The key measure of any great pop compendium should be whether its listener finishes the album with an absolute certainty that the featured artist was the finest musical talent to walk this earth. Accordingly, an inordinate amount of my childhood was spent in the misguided belief that Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons, The Beautiful South and Supergrass were all of unrivalled genius.

With this borne in mind, perhaps acts with few true hits and contractual obligations to abide by should adopt a more honest approach when compacting their careers into a single CD.

For example, when Bon Jovi  unleash their 'Greatest Hits' record later this month, they should simply repeat ‘Living On A Prayer’, ‘It’s My Life’  and ‘You Give Love A Bad Name’ for an hours’ duration. Thereby the classic scenario of sandwiching the above between 20 fan favourites and an “exclusive new track” is avoided for the betterment of everyone’s iTunes libraries. Even for artists such as Vanilla Ice, who really have to scrape the barrel, such a methodology would work if he released an album of ‘Ice Ice Baby’ and its various cover versions.

By abiding by such a puritan ethic both an artist’s audience and bank account could be satiated without hiding behind the two-a-penny excuses of “now just seemed the right time to look backwards” / “our last album sunk and my mansion needs a second pool cleaner”.

At a bare minimum, by restricting The Kooks’ 'Best Of' effort to ‘Naive’ and absolutely nothing else, reviews would be overwhelmingly positive for a change.