Thanks to all our nominators for a really terrific opening round and for the 49 brave souls who listened and voted (my target was 48, i.e. 4x the participants, so we hit it almost exactly!).

Here’s the results table, also revealing who picked each song!

As you’ll see from the poster, in 3rd place we have MARTY ROBBINS with “El Paso City”. In 2nd place there’s LAEL NEALE’s “In Verona”, which I hope someone picks for the 2023 end-of-year poll!

But the DOUZE POINTS and congratulations go to actualee simpson for nominating Johnny Adams’ “Georgia Morning Dew” – here it is!

This round turned into a battle between the oldest and newest songs on the list. Later I’ll be posting playlists and poll for Week 2, where the theme is 2020, so that won’t be an issue.

And participants should start hunting out songs for Week 3 – we’ll be revisiting CLOSING TRACKS! The list of previous nominations is here – back then “Dead End Justice” by The Runaways won Golden Beat.

Thanks again too all who took part!

Welcome to the LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY TRACKS!

Our 12 nominators have each picked a Placename based song for you. There’s a playlist post here (including the link for the Bandcamp only USS Horsewhip track!) but you can also go direct to Spotify or YouTube playlists. Don’t know any of the tracks? That’s the idea! Take your time, listen, discover, and then choose your favourites.

Please pick up to FOUR of your favourites. But remember –

NO CHOOSING A SONG YOU ALREADY KNEW!!

Take your time – it’s up until Saturday morning – and have fun.

Nominators: Week 2’s theme is 2020 and the list of tracks we had in that original poll is here. I need entries for that by Friday night.

This post is for the playlist for Week 1 of the League Of Extraordinary Tracks, Season 1.

The theme is PLACENAMES.

You’ll be voting on these in the poll post, up tomorrow. Comment on them there too!

This week we’ve got one track not on YouTube (and only intermittently on Spotify). It’s on Bandcamp though: USS HORSEWHIP – “Cop Cars In The Lettered Streets”

See the sticky comment on this post for the LPs each track comes from.

Thanks everyone who signed up to the LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY TRACKS, which will begin next Sunday. Demand was higher than expected – I was anticipating about 20 sign-ups at most and we’ve ended up with 30. That’s too many for one or even two seasons (because I want to limit the weekly playlist to a manageable length – one side of a mixtape, if you like).

So, I’ve taken the first 24 people who commented (w/special dispensation for not-on-Twitter folks) and randomised them into 2 sets of players for two eight-week seasons. SEASON 1 starts NOW – get finding those Placenames and 2020 tracks! It’ll run until August 13th (there’s a break at one point when I’m on holiday). Then SEASON 2 will run from August 20th to October 15th. Season 2 will also start with Placenames and 2020

Assuming it all works fine (!), the rest of the prospective players get first refusal on Season 3, which will run up to Christmas. By then I’ll have learned enough about the format to tweak and improve it too. I’ll open up player entries again towards the end of S2 as well.

Here are the player lists: I’ve used commenter names from the original post.

SEASON ONE! (JUNE-AUGUST)

• actualee simpson
• Alison Yoder
• Baltimore Jacks
• Dan Bright-Amaya
• ismathers
• Job
• jonathanb
• Pop-O-Matic
• Son Of Mecha Mummy
• TheHarderLine
• therealbreadco
• winterhaar

SEASON TWO! (AUGUST-OCTOBER)

• Dorsalstop
• Ed Still
• healingandy
• Helene Hoffman
• j_e_l
• Joe Kay
• Kit
• Mark Grout
• mondosalvo
• Steffen Rayburn-Maarup
• Vinnycrackers
• Willl

RESERVES LIST/FIRST REFUSAL SEASON THREE

• di qualcosa di sinistra
• bartlebooth45
• Mitchell Stirling
• georgethe23rd
• ajjr82
• somejerkoff
• Arron Wright

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

The 12 people in the Season 1 list should find a track which fits the theme PLACENAMES. There’s a list of the tracks in the original Placenames poll here – you should avoid these as the idea is to find something people haven’t heard! Standard rules apply – must be on Spotify, YouTube or Bandcamp. No need to choose a backup – in the event of a clash I’ll let you know immediately.

To nominate, either DM @peoples_pop on Twitter or if you’re not on Twitter, email freakytrigger@gmail.com

Deadline for this is midnight on Friday UK time. If anyone hasn’t sent a track in, I’ll substitute one myself.

The people in the Season 2 and Reserves lists have to sit and wait for now – sorry! But they do have the fun of listening, commenting, and voting safe in the knowledge nobody’s judging their taste… yet.

Now the Charity Crusher tournament is safely back on Twitter we can do something else here. Something… new! Well semi-new. We’re going to do a LEAGUE music game focused on discovering new things and this is the post where I ask – who wants to play?

Here’s what playing will require. Every week for about 10 weeks, you’ll nominate a track based on a theme. Each week’s theme will be the same as a previous People’s Pop Poll – the actual TRACKS though will be all new. The first theme is Placenames, the second is Tracks From 2020 and we’ll take it from there.

That’s all! One nomination a week for 10 weeks or so, and the first round goes up next Sunday (11th June). Sign up in the comments if you want to play.

What? You want to know more?? OK.

THE FULLER EXPLANATION

The League Of Extraordinary Tracks is a 10-round music competition. You can take part as a Player (we’ll want between 10 and 12 players) or as a Spectator. Spectators and Players can vote and comment but only Players can nominate songs. You don’t have to tell me if you’re planning to spectate or not!

Each round every Player nominates 1 track on a particular theme, which they’ll usually know about a week in advance. Nomination deadline is Friday night each week. Nominations should go to the Peoples Pop Twitter DM if you’re on Twitter, or to freakytrigger@gmail.com if you aren’t – don’t post them publically!

Each round I put the nominated tracks into a playlist which goes up here along with a poll. Every voter (Players and Spectators) gets to vote for up to 4 tracks a week, but the voting is on Golden Beat Rules – i.e. you shouldn’t vote for anything you already knew. Initially, I won’t reveal the nominator of each track, though nominators can ‘out’ themselves in the comments if they want.

New Rounds go up on Sunday and finish on Saturday – allowing 6 days of listening and voting. On Saturday the poll ends and I put up a results post revealing the scores and the nominator of each track.

The player who got the least votes in a round gets to choose a theme for the next available round. I’ll announce this ASAP after the round ends.

To make it a bit clearer (?), here’s the timetable for the first few rounds.

• Today: Call for Players opens and the players start looking for Placenames and 2020 nominations.
• 9th June (Fri): Deadline for Placenames nominations.
• 11th June (Sun): Round 1 (Placenames) BEGINS. Playlists and poll published.
• 16th June (Fri): Deadline for 2020 nominations.
• 17th June (Sat): Round 1 (Placenames) ENDS. Results posted. Last-place Player picks Round 3 theme. Players begin looking for Round 3 nominations.
• 18th June (Sun): Round 2 (2020) BEGINS.
• 23rd June (Fri): Deadline for Round 3 nominations.
• …and so on

After 10 rounds the winning players are announced, and will get some kind of fabulous PRIZE. There’s then a Grand Final where each player’s most successful track competes to be named the overall track of the tournament, and we open the call for players for Season 2! Obviously prioritising people who weren’t in the previous season.

Does that make sense? If you’ve got questions I’ll do my best to answer them and clarify in the post. Now – who wants to play?

It’s been suggested a quick INTRO and UPDATE post would be helpful here!

This is the blog homepage for the People’s Pop Polls. These are regular (roughly monthly) themed music tournaments. People nominate tracks, I arrange them into groups, everyone votes on them and discusses the songs. It’s fun!

The polls have generally run on Twitter. I recently tried to move them off Twitter and it’s proved difficult for a bunch of reasons. So the tournament style polls are moving back to Twitter for now.

The current poll is the CHARITY CRUSHER. This was an unthemed poll in which people could nominate anything they liked to raise money for ActionAid and the Ruth Hayman Trust. We raised over £3200 and got over 400 tracks to poll. That’s too many for a normal poll so I’ve split it into two sections, ANCIENT and MODERN. The Ancient poll is anything released before the year 2000, the Modern is anything released in 2000 or since.

We’ve just finished doing the Modern Qualifiers (opening round) on this site, and now we’ll do the Ancient Qualifiers on Twitter.

After the Charity Crusher polls finish we’ll go back to the theme polls. The first two of these will be LATE WORK (tracks released in the 25th year or later of an artist’s career) and the year 2015.

Meanwhile on here we’ll be running the LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY TRACKS, a more leisurely poll taking advantage of the things we can’t do on Twitter but can on a blog. I’ll be opening player slots for this later in the week.

For a history of the polls and a lot more detail on how they work go here.

For a complete list of what’s qualified so far in the current poll go here.

And here’s the playlist for the entire Ancient poll (not in match order)