Pleasure City Hip Parade, November 2010

Bad kitty!

The Pleasure City Hip Parade of most-hummed tunes this month could quite easily have exclusively contained twenty tracks by Orange Juice, as I was fortunate enough to receive the Coals To Newcastle box set for my birthday. However, The Notes' Wishing Well has also been much-loved in November (possibly a coincidence, but the words "the notes" feature in the opening couplet of this month's number one tune. I wonder if that's where they took their name from?).

Bearing in mind Edwyn Collins's love of our feathered friends, I have compared November's top five songs to birds:

1. (-) Orange Juice - In A Nutshell (a perfectly-plumed pair of puffins, cuddling up for warmth in a remote island burrow)

2. (2) Betty and the Werewolves - Should I Go To Glasgow? (a splendour of summer swallows, swooping for pond insects)

3. (4) The Notes - Summer Love (a gaggle of gorgeous gannets, divebombing for fish)

4. (-) Orange Juice - Dying Day (a bashful spoonbill)

5. (-) Dum Dum Girls - Throw Aggi Off The Bridge (a flotilla of frustrated winter pochards, milling around waiting to be fed by snowbound humans)

6. (-) Jesse Garon & The Desperadoes - Laughing And Smiling

7. (6) The Notes - Dancing Shoes

8. (-) Orange Juice - Consolation Prize

9. (7) Dum Dum Girls - Stiff Little Fingers

10. (-) The Notes - Those Days, Those Nights

11. (20) The Go-Betweens - Casanova's Last Words

12. (13) Darren Hanlon - All These Things

13. (1) The Go-Betweens - Wait Until June

14. (-) Orange Juice - Three Cheers For Our Side

15. (5) Darren Hanlon - House

16. (-) Orange Juice - I Can't Help Myself

17. (3) The Maladies Of Bellafontaine - Black Biro

18. (-) Househunters - I Am A Mole

19. (-) Fabienne Delsol - Take Your Seat

20. (-) Associates - Nude Spoons

I had Coals To Newcastle on my desk at work recently, when one of my colleagues came up to me, picked up the box and said "ooh, I didn't know you liked George Jones!" Noticing my blank stare, he looked at the cover again and said sheepishly that he...er, didn't have his glasses on.

Will Orange Juice dominate the charts again in December?