Want You Around was the song of the summer and nobody noticed
The heating came on in this flat last night, which is the only calendar I trust, so the summer is over and I want to say something about the record that won it. It was Julien Marsh, Want You Around, and if you go looking for evidence that it won anything you will not find a scrap.
Here is what I have instead. I heard it in a basement in Rotterdam at the end of June. I heard it out of somebody's phone at a barbecue in July, badly, and it still worked. I heard it twice in one night in a bar that does not play house music and does not want to. Every DJ I know had it in the bag by the middle of the summer, and not one of them could tell me where they got it, which is normally the sign that a record has stopped belonging to anybody.
And then you look it up. Eleven days on the Hype Machine chart for Meteors, which deserved every one of them. A hundred posts for the Cass Verano previews. For Want You Around: three hundred and eleven plays on the label's page, the lowest of the three tracks on its own record, and one blog post in the entire summer, which was mine, in June, where it shares the headline with two other names and gets four sentences.
That is the whole mechanism and it took me until September to see it. A record needs a second reason to be written about. A single gets a premiere and then a remix and then a chart position, three separate days somebody has to type its name. Want You Around is A1 on a various-artists sampler. Every blog covered FRE037 once, in a roundup, and after that we had all done it. There was no second day. The thing was enormous in rooms and invisible in the only place that counts these things, and the charts only know what got posted.
I wanted to put the real numbers here and my own stats table has been face down since August, so you will have to take the label's word and mine. Here it is again, on its own, with its own headline, three months late. The bassline and the vocal trading bars for six minutes, and neither of them giving way.
Julien Marsh - Want You Around (FRE037-A1) Record of the Summer
Marsh has not put anything out since. I emailed the label twice and got a very nice reply the second time that did not answer the question. If he turns up on FRE041 I will be the first one here about it, and this time he gets the whole post.