Hello friends! Thanks very much for the support and appreciation of our band. We realize there are many great songs and bands out there and feel honored to be held in such high regard. We’ll do our best to keep it going and crank out some more good ones for ye. Thanks again!

Well, it’s all over bar the counting down of the top 100 for the Song of the Decade – Thanks so much for all of your votes, we’re now playing out the best loved songs from the noughties with the top ten in full on Friday’s Breakfast show with Christian.

As a bit of a thankyou and so you can waste time in the office or avoid the relatives this Christmas, you can now play the Song of the Decade Quiz and win a Roberts Radio.

How much do you know about your Muse and your Killers? Who did what and with whom? Play the quiz, challenge your mates and keep checking back to make sure you’re in the top 50 to get one of our amazing prizes? It’s a bit like a pub quiz, just.

Thanks for again for voting, now get clicking and winning. Good Luck

Sarah!

“Wales has a strong and distinctive link with music. The country is traditionally referred to as “the land of song”.

After hitting all angles with what could possibly be the hardest question ever asked? ‘What is your song of the decade?’ I have decided to add to the equation with my post! Hello, I’m Polly, Cardiff, 22.

During my show, the small hours of the weekend, I try to break it down into categories to help with the ‘choosing’ process when picking the ultimate song! We’ve done the best covers, the best collaborations and best song from a movie amongst others.

Anyway, I thought I’d take one for the team and refresh or even enlighten you on the songs that have come out the Welsh Valleys! It’s a fact everyone can sing if you were lucky enough to be born in Wales, I don’t actually know why this is, probably because we sprouted the likes of the good ol’ Shirley, Tom and Charlotte Church, so, without being too predictable I won’t put ‘Crazy Chick’ in my top 10 of songs.

Maybe I could start with the 1st lady of rock music in Wales, Cerys Matthews. Catatonia for me were the most traditional pop band of all the Welsh bands to emerge in the post-Brit-pop days of the mid-’90s, the band reworked the sound of jangling late-’80s alternative rock with the punchy, amateurish indie-rock attack… although they seemed to fizzle by the time the millennium hit, I believe cerys and her almightily crew shaped some of the unique and gutsy welsh sounds we hear today.

The first track I’m going with is Buck Rogers from Feeder. The memories, Rock Corps, in London, the only welsh girl in the crowd going nuts to the Welsh rock band, it was flipping immense! Grant was told by his doctor that under no circumstances should he sing that night (some sort of laryngitis), but he still came on and set the roof of the Albert Hall on fire with Buck Rogers. Also, the mediocre tries on the SingStar at this proves it’s a one off classic, unique and only made for Feeder to sing I’m afraid! Don’t pretend you can do it… Seriously though it was their biggest song by far and is now an iconic Welsh anthem to play anywhere. Especially in the clubs at the end of the night, usually when you have sweat pouring down you and you just can’t control yourself but to dance more and more and almost burst with pride when you hear it! It’s a pretty sight!

My next song which is in my top 3 of all songs out there is the Lost Prophets spiced ballad, ‘4am Forever’. This was the ‘hard Welsh rockers trying to be the cool American punk rockers’ track that really made me stand up and listen! One of a few tracks in my life that can make me cry on cue, I’m a soppy cow, it’s hauntingly beautiful and a song about losing someone you love. There is a tremendous guitar solo just before the end, which will blow your mind!

Next up, I’d feel bad if I left out Tom Jones, he is like a famous uncle to us all. His only number one to come out of the naughties is believe it or not, ‘Islands in the stream, with the Gav and Stace crew. But some of his best scrapped into the decade back in 2000… ‘Sex Bomb’? The superb collaboration with the phonics ‘Mama told me not to come’? Probably a little cheesy right now, but still the songs you’d spend your last 50p on the jukebox with down the local for a final track.

And now coming to the Royalty of Welsh music, they succeeded the crown from the Manics a few years ago in my opinion, even they say this is their best song, and let’s be honest with their musical knowledge they really are professors of music and why would we even sneer to doubt. The Stereophonic’s and ‘Dakota’ could easily be Wales’ second National Anthem. ‘Dakota’ is nothing like anything the phonics had done prior to it. Its an eighties electro tinged track, makes you dream of sweltering summer days, so hard hitting it knocked us all out and we came up obsessed with it and then this..’The Phonics, meet your first UK number 1’. Kelly said that most of the lyrics were written when staying in a crap hotel in Paris, maybe that’s the key to writing a successful song, taking yourself away from the glitz and glamour and live like the great unwashed for a while.

A year later came the Welsh music equivalent to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles… kids loved them; they were incredibly infectious and fun and looked like real rock heroes to be around for a while. Although, I do feel that The Automatic are not taken seriously enough, four years ago everyone was singing the slightly daft lyrics ‘What’s that coming over the hill, is it a monster’… but the lads do have ownership to some quite sophisticated and meaningful records. On that note, not taking anything away from ‘Monster,’ their live signature piece is a perfect example of their raucous sound. It deserves to be placed high on the top 100 countdown quite simply because it’s a great little rock gem. It’s full of little flourishes and weird screeching backing vocals and an epic guitar solo, short and sweet and never outstaying its welcome.

And last but not least the ‘Manic Street Preachers’, let’s call them the politicians of music here in Wales, they make the rules and made the world listen up to rock music in Wales and the UK for that matter. They are known as self-styled “Generation Terrorists.” Fashioning themselves after the Clash and the Sex Pistols, the Manics were on a mission, and although the past 10 years haven’t been as busy for them , for me it’s a tough call this decade to decide between 2000 hit ‘Masses against the classes’ or the funky feel good number ‘Your love alone is not enough’. ‘Masses against the classes’ is harsh, powerful and seductive. One of the best songs they have ever performed. ‘Your love alone is not enough’ is sweet and bliss and comes at perfect timing just before we hit summertime, it was our faith restored in the Manics, not that it ever went away.

So, those are my songs of the decade from Wales, and just looking back, most of the songs will unite the lot of us and although Wales is the tiny country which is filled with 50% mountains, we defiantly make up for it in the music department. C’mon Boyos!

And just so you don’t think I’m biased, my ‘ultimate’ song of the decade is not a Welsh track…

Looking down the list of the Song of the Decade choices made by Absolute Radio staff I noticed that only three tracks by female artists or bands have been included. One of these was Celine Dion, which we’re all pretending we haven’t seen in order to maintain a good working relationship with the person responsible. Another is an Icelandic string quartet. And the last is strangely also Icelandic – Bjork.

While Bjork is brilliant (apart from ‘Oh So Quiet’ but I won’t go into that now) she has been around since the late 80s. So I was surprised. Because hadn’t I read article after article, citing Florence and the Machine, Bat for Lashes, La Roux and Little Boots as evidence that this was the decade to be a woman in music?

The 2009 Mercury Music Prize shortlist was certainly used to fuel this fire with declarations that it was dominated by female artists. (Although in actual fact, only 5 out of 12 were women and my B grade maths GCSE helps me to calculate this is less than 50%.)

However, I do have another statistic. That there was a 30% rise in female members of the Performing Rights Society this decade and 20% of this rise occurred in the latter half.

So why aren’t these women being chosen when it comes to picking our Song of the Decade? Are these singers just tabloid fodder that we refuse to take seriously as musicians? And is that because hacks got bored of portraying female TV presenters and IT girls as behaving badly and moved on to the lady singers? Amy Winehouse certainly made it easy for them.

Or is it just that the rise of the female artist this decade is too recent to impact on lists like these? It wasn’t until 2006 that we were introduced to Lily Allen, the same year that Amy Winehouse found mainstream success with her second album.

But surely women’s contribution to music in the first half of the decade isn’t just Jordan’s attempt to represent the UK in the Eurovision Song Contest, t.A.t.U and the shocking revelation that they were not, in fact, lesbians, Daphne and Celeste being bottled on stage at the Reading Festival and the hardly Oasis vs Blur race to number one between Sophie Ellis Bextor and Victoria Beckham?

Well no, as that would involve completely ignoring PJ Harvey, Gemma Hayes, Ms Dynamite, Dido, and Joss Stone. And actually I will ignore some of those if you don’t mind. As well as the endless girl bands that, in the wake of the Spice Girls, have multiplied to such an extent they’ve now seemingly morphed into one big pulsating, terrifying mass with added highlights and false eyelashes, very occasionally spewing out the delight of the odd All Saints or Girls Aloud record. (A guilty pleasure that I don’t feel the slightest bit guilty about.)

But at the very least, we’ve come a long way since 1988 and an early version of the Brits, the less catchily named BPI awards, when the original purveyors of girl power, Bananarama performed with several scantily clad male backing dancers, in a move so shocking at a time when it was perfectly normal for these scantily clad dancers to be female, that host Noel Edmunds was almost speechless. A fact to be remembered should you ever find yourself in a locked room with him while he’s eulogising about the Cosmos.

However, 1988 also saw Neneh Cherry perform Buffalo Stance while heavily pregnant on Top of the Pops, which unbelievably led to many complaining to the BBC, probably that she wasn’t bed-ridden in a smock. But I suppose people had to have something to complain about pre ‘Sachsgate’ and Strictly Come Dancing.

So perhaps our female artists are stuck in a cycle of one step forward, one step back? Meaning that for every Beth Ditto there is an Atomic Kitten reinforcing all the usual stereotypes about women in music.

And what about outside of the UK? We’ve seen some big female solo artists emerge from already hugely popular groups. Beyonce, Gwen Stefani, Fergie – adding to the confusion many already had between the football manager and Duchess of York.

We’ve also had Katy Perry, who kissed a girl and it turned out that she liked it, showing what a strong female role model she is and not at all pandering to stereotypical male fantasies. And there’s also been some great music from Jenny Lewis, Beth Orton, Feist, Cat Power, Nina Persson’s, A Camp and Regina Spektor.

Meanwhile this decade though, the older ladies disgraced themselves. Madonna appeared all trussed up on the cover to her album Hard Candy. Janet Jackson, intentionally or not, flashed her nipple to the Superbowl audience, disgusting millions of Americans with this revolting part of the body and introducing the world to the concept of the nipple guard and the phrase ‘wardrobe malfunction’. And more recently Whitney Houston on the X Factor, if I remember rightly, ripped off a strap from her dress to thrust her dirty back in our horrified faces.

But a lot of the most exciting female talent in the past 10 years is home grown. Aside from the larger than life characters of Amy Winehouse and Lily Allen there have been plenty of female singer songwriters who’ve been quietly getting on with it. Nerina Pallot, KT Tunstall, Kate Nash, Duffy and Amy MacDonald have all had a good decade.

And maybe the BRIT school can take some of the credit for this rise in female artists. It certainly has, in terms of success, an impressive alumni; Amy Winehouse, Kate Nash, Katie Melua, Leona Lewis, Imogen Heap, Adele and Polly Scattergood.

But back to the question of why they’ve all been largely ignored in the Song of the Decade picks. I put this question to Geoff Lloyd. Without hesitation, he told me it’s because most of these artists have emerged relatively recently and so people feel embarrassed choosing their songs, not wanting to appear as if they haven’t got the imagination or interest to look back any further.

And he’s probably right.

I can’t wait for 2019.

Leona Lewis won’t forget 2007 in a hurry, she won The X Factor and under the careful eye of one Simon Cowell had her first major worldwide hit Bleeding Love (written by One Republic’s Ryan Tedder). Love them or hate them Nickelback released the wannabe anthem Rockstar which was perhaps the best music video of the year.

Bruce Springsteen anoraks The Plain White T’s – so named after the Boss’ penchant for plain White T-Shirts – enjoyed huge success with Hey there Delilah, The Fray played the V Festival and an excellent session in the Zoo at One Golden Square as a result of their success with top tune How To Save a Life and Take That (minus Robbie) were on the comeback trail with hits like Shine.

Other favourites of 2007 included The Foo Fighters’ The Pretender and Kaiser Chiefs’ Ruby.

Away from planet music… Apple unveiled their new invention the iPhone, the late Jade Goody and Shilpa Shetty were involved in a Racism row on Celebrity Big Brother and ‘The Departed’ won Best Picture at the Oscars – Jack Nicholson delivering a superb performance..”When your looking down the barrel of a loaded gun, it doesn’t matter if you’re a cop or a criminal…what’s the difference?”. Brilliant stuff!

In ‘07 Vladimir Putin was Time Magazine’s ‘Man Of The Year’, the ‘Live Earth’ concerts took place in nine venues in July, and on a more sombre note terrorists tried to kill and maim by driving a Cherokee Jeep into the main terminal at Glasgow Airport.

Vote for your song of the decades now and you can win FREE money… always a nice thing to have!

Spotify are working with Absolute Radio to find the Song of the Decade. Here, the team pick their favourite songs from the last ten years…

Daniel Ek, CEO & Founder
Daft Punk – Harder Better Faster Stronger
This is my mantra – the music industry is experiencing unprecedented change and in order to be a significant part of this shift, we need to continually make Spotify better, faster, stronger.

Paul Brown, Senior Vice President, Strategic Partnerships
The Boxer Rebellion – Flashing Red Light Means Go
I caught this lot live recently. Awesome – one of my favourite bands at present.

Jon Mitchell, UK Sales Director
The Enemy – You’re Not Alone

Faisal Galaria, Global Head of Business Development
Flight Of The Conchords – Business Time

Jonathan Forster, Global Sales Director
Richard Hawley – Open Up Your Door
Because this man can do no wrong! He’s a wonder-tune forming cyborg.

Andres Sehr, communities manager
Monsters Of Folk – Losin’ Yo’ Head
A great track by a quality new superband.

Sophia Bendz, Marketing Manager
Yann Tiersen – Comptine D’un Autre Été, L’après-Midi

Jim Butcher, Communications Manager
Lemon Jelly – Pushy
Because it made both my mum and my girlfriend cry, in a good way! The little girl kills me every time.

And one extra song, picked by the team – Together by William Shatner.

OK, let’s get the horrible stuff out of the way first… 2006 was Chico Time, unbelievably he is still opening supermarkets and kissing babies nearly four years on! It was a great year for Snow Patrol who had a massive worldwide hit with Chasing Cars.

Former beach bum and surfer Jack Johnson had a hit album and a massive summer song called Better Together, Razorlight were getting better and better and In The Morning was one of the most played songs of the year on the radio. One song that has been attracting a lot of votes in the Song Of the Decade over the last few weeks is Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy. It could well end up in the BIG Top 10!

Away from music, England made the quarter finals (again) of The World Cup in Germany. The Commonwealth Games were in Melbourne, Google bought You Tube for a very large sum of money…$1.65 billion! Nintendo launched their new interactive computer game called the ‘Wii’ and 2006 was the year of the ‘Bird Flu’ scare.

So get voting and try and win some FREE money!

2005… The year that YouTube went online, Pope John Paul died, Ireland went ‘metric’ and surgeons in France performed the worlds first face transplant.

It was a big year for sport: England’s cricketers won The Ashes, in rugby Wales won their first ‘Grand Slam’ since 1978 and Rafa Benitez somehow inspired Liverpool in Istanbul to champions League victory against AC Milan, the Reds winning on Penalties after being 3-0 down at half-time!

The Killers came to the fore in this year notably with Somebody Told Me. James Blunt got inspiration on the London Tube for a massive worldwide hit You’re Beautiful, The Kaiser Chiefs predicted a riot, The Arctic Monkeys said we looked good on the dancefloor and Daniel Powter just had a bad day.

Comedy record of the year was Tony Christie’s (Is This The Way To) Amarillo featuring Peter Kay, a great ‘feel good’ song with a trademark Kay inspired comedy video. The song was originally a hit for Tony in the ’70s.

Stand out tunes of the year? Try these… Athlete and Wires ( bet you’d forgotten about that one?!) and The Stereophonics and Dakota.

Vote for your Song Of The Decade now and you could win FREE money!

Take Me Out to Run Somewhere Only We Know.

Strange way to start a blog post isn’t it? And no, I haven’t become an overnight fitness bore. They were in fact three of the biggest songs of 2004 – Franz Ferdinand’s Take Me Out, Snow Patrol’s Run (aka The Swaying Lighter Song) and Keane’s Somewhere Only We Know. Proof as I’m sat here writing to you that 2004 was a vintage year for music.

Green Day sang about an American Idiot whilst new band Maroon 5 had a massive hit with This Love in the late summer. I’m sure you remember the very catchy Hey Ya by Outkast- what a great video and a superb live performance at The Brits. A low point was Band Aid 20….why oh why try and tinker with a brilliant original idea from almost 20 years ago is quite beyond me.

2004 was the year of The Invincibles as Arsenal went an entire Premier League season unbeaten. Facebook was founded in the US, at The Oscars Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King won 11 Academy awards. Greece won Euro 2004 against all the odds and it was a leap year…er…I’m still single…but it would have been nice to have been asked!

2003 was a momentous year… Gulf War 3 started, the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated over Texas whilst re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere, Chicago won Best Picture at The Oscars, Concorde made it’s last commercial flight, Arsenal won The FA cup and it was “International Year Of Freshwater.”

There was some really exciting and fresh music in 2003 as well, songs like Jet and Are U Gonna Be My Girl, Evanescence Bring Me To Life, Robbie Williams Feel and The Darkness had their first hit Growing On Me. Mind you their second single I Believe In A Thing Called Love was an even bigger one for them. How I miss Justin’s falsetto screeching.

Ben Jones and our Boss Clive have both voted for Johnny Cash’s Hurt as their Song of the Decade and in terms of genius delivery it’s difficult to argue against it. Hurt was written by the Nine Inch Nails but Cash’s version is one of those rare songs that when covered is actually better than the original. A wonderfully shot video accompanied it too.

Please do vote for your Song of the Decade as we really value your opinion and we want to play the most definitive list of Noughtie’s songs on the radio. Vote now at this very website!!

One more thing… a major reason to celebrate in 2003… The Lighthouse Family split up.