Credit: Cut'n'Shut job with Photoshop

Oh the Great British public, how often you let yourselves down, be it buying into tabloid hatemongering and beating up a bunch of paediatricians as you mistook them for paedophiles, or starting Facebook groups about how you (wrongly) perceive that immigrants now have more rights than British nationals (therefore, again wrongly, assuming it’s okay to be racist…). But sometimes, just sometimes, you do yourselves proud.

Yes, I’m talking about Nickelback losing out to Duffy in the singles chart.

I know I know, no-one gives a flying fist-f*ck about the charts these days. Meaningless statistics….blah blah….manipulated by the labels…blah blah….unfair prominence given to major label releases…blah blah blah. But today they have given me an opportunity to gloat over Chad Kroeger missing out on a number 1 single, so for today at least I’m cutting them some slack.

It has been creeping up the hit parade for a while now – ‘Rockstar’, Nickelback’s brainless country-twinged ditty to the boons and pitfalls of rockstardom. In fact, if it had gone to number 1, then it would have had the dubious honour of being the song that has been in the official chart for the greatest number of weeks before finally reaching the top.

But thanks to the glorious pipes of Duffy, none of this has come to pass. Music Towers took to the Welsh singer from the off (we ran a review of her debut single and an interview back in December) and it’s great to see that everyone else has recognised her talents too. It hasn’t even had a physical release yet – it’s download-only until the end of the month. Forget all those lazy Winehouse comparisons, people like ‘Mercy’ as it’s a bloody good Big Song.

Make no mistake, ‘Rockstar’ is our generation’s ‘Achey Brakey Heart’. If the Lord Bill Hicks were still stalking the Earth, he’d be aiming for Chad Kroeger’s scrabbly little rat-beard. It the same shit-crank sub-par rock-country hybrid inbred cousin of a song. Some drunk girls were singing it on the nightbus I was on at the weekend, and I thought something I never thought I would ever find myself contemplating: I wish those teenagers who insist on playing rubbish crunk through their mobile phone without headphones were here, because it is preferable to this old rubbish.