It doesn't carry quite the same import as the busting of the Trafigura superinjunction, or the on-the-spot reporting from the heart of the Arab spring, but it was a great Twitter moment nonetheless: Ben Goldacre, writer of the Guardian's Bad Science column, recently announced to an aghast cyber-audience that his mum was Noosha Fox, the Goldfrapp-influencing frontwoman of 1970s pop band Fox.
He did it with enviable panache, casually mentioning it on a Twitter feed more usually concerned with the machinations of big pharma, midway through Fox performing S-s-s-Single Bed on the 1976 series of Top of the Pops, currently being repeated on BBC4. "When she married my dad it was the only time the word 'epidemiology' appeared in the music press," he added.
Soon the name Noosha Fox – not one that's been much on the public's lips since her last hit, 34 years ago – started trending. That's partly because it's a great obscure pop pub fact; but also because Fox's performance had already caused consternation by dint of being the only thing on said 1976 TOTP series that didn't leave you wondering if those barmy theocracies that ban all music might have a point.
I confess, I approached the repeats with considerable excitement. I like seeing old music in the context of its times: it acts as a corrective to the nostalgia industry's discreet editing of history; and, furthermore, I'm an unabashed fan of the kind of guileless, forgotten, mid-70s, medium-wave radio-pop that punk understandably, but a little unfairly, obliterated from memory (and that the first Guilty Pleasures album attempted to rescue). That means music like Fox's, Sailor's Glass of Champagne, Clout's Substitute, and Couldn't Get It Right by the Climax Blues Band.
Or at least I thought I was. It took about a minute of Sailor's follow-up to Glass of Champagne, Girls Girls Girls, to make me strongly reconsider my position on the unfairness or otherwise of punk obliterating guileless, mid-70s, medium-wave radio-pop from memory. After two, I was pretty much ready to form Sham 69 myself.
If you haven't seen it, it's difficult to express how awful TOTP – and by extension – pop music seems to have been in 1976. Every week, something comes on that causes you to be gripped by the absolute certainty that an unequivocal nadir has been reached and that things can only get better: second-division glam-rockers Mud going disco in a desperate attempt to stave off the inevitable; Dave Lee Travis's mirthless novelty record Convoy GB. It's invariably followed by something even worse: JJ Barrie's No Charge; second-division glam rockers the Rubettes going country in a desperate attempt to stave off the inevitable; and, my personal favourite, Paul Nicholas's awe-inspiring Reggae Like It Used to Be.
This, just to clarify, features the bloke off Just Good Friends boldly announcing that in 1976 – the year of Lee "Scratch" Perry's Super Ape, the Mighty Diamonds' Right Time, Max Romeo's War Ina Babylon and Augustus Pablo's King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown – the only reggae worth listening to is that made by Paul Nicholas. His jaunty presentation of this controversial theory, for which he wore a bowler hat, could only have been improved had he been forced to perform in front of an audience composed entirely of angry Rastafarians.
And yet the TOTP repeats are worth watching, largely because they throw the 2011 charts into an unexpectedly forgiving light. Recently, listening to the top 40 has seemed like a grim business. For one thing, it's become weirdly sclerotic. Singles loaf around it uselessly for months on end, until you can't imagine who's buying them. Rihanna's S&M has been in the charts for 27 weeks: surely everybody who likes it owns it by now?
For another, the top 40 is in a stage of conformity. Traditionally, you look to R&B and hip-hop for edge and sonic innovation in the charts: they're the genres that come up with the ideas pop producers subsequently steal. But pop seems to have caught up with urban music (the influence of French DJ David Guetta's brand of commercial electro-house is all-pervading) which means that everything currently sounds like everything else. Nevertheless, if you think the charts seem moribund, a cursory glance at the TOTP repeats will confirm that they're wrigglingly, obscenely alive compared to 35 years ago: a useful thing to remember next time you're confronted by the kind of bore who tells you rock and pop was, by default, better in the past.
However sick you may be of Rihanna, or Katy Perry, or whatever variation on David Guetta's brand of commercial electro-house is currently setting up camp in the top 10, you can console yourself with the fact that: a) at least it's not Paul Nicholas in a bowler hat telling Peter Tosh where to get off; and b) 12 months on from the TOTP series currently being repeated, the charts looked distinctly healthier, not just as a result of punk and new wave, but because of disco, soul and all that reggae that wasn't like it used to be. All of which proves that, even when it appears to be in its death throes, pop has a habit of reinventing itself.