Duet Poll Previews (Patreon)

Like with the 2001 poll, I’ll do a series of quick preview posts about the World Cup Of Duets I'm running as @peoples_pop. They’ll be a bit different, though, as more of these songs are new to me and I’ve arranged the groups in a broad chronological shape, rather than splitting them into brackets by genre. So it'll be more like a highlights preview than a quasi-historical overview. I'll make the first one public and the rest patron-only, until the poll actually kicks off on October 1st.

The stylistic range of the Duets poll is amazingly broad. There are a lot of ways to do duets. There are also a lot of ways to judge duets - vocal and musical interplay, narrative intrigue, ‘chemistry’, audacity, and more - and some of the fun of the poll is trying to work out which ones to apply when you make your choices.

Which will often be extremely difficult! The quality of nominations is high, and the way I’ve shaped the groups means - I hope - some merciless picks from the beginning, though with room for lesser-known tracks to push through and shine.

The 11 daily previews are a handful of tracks that jumped out at me as doing something special. They aren’t necessarily my favourites - I don’t have anything new to say about Ella and Louis, for instance, but I’m sure I’ll vote for them at least once.

The rest of this post is for process nerds! Head straight for the preview if you prefer.

HOW THE POLL WAS PUT TOGETHER

We had 320 nominations - 300 or so nominated on the threads, then another 20 which were either stuff people had been shocked was missing or things I just thought would make the poll more interesting. (Thanks to my Musical Theatre consultants for their help here!)

I spent a couple of days listening to the ones I didn’t already know - or bits of them, anyway - checking all of them fit our (very broad) criteria for duet-ness. Only a couple didn’t, and those got replaced by reserves.

While I did this I went through all 320 tracks noting down which year they were from - for things from musicals I went for the year the musical dated from, not necessarily the recording. And I noted the broad genre each track fitted into.

The next step was bracketing. In the year polls this is the trickiest part, as you need 16 sets of 16 vaguely compatible tracks. For Duets it was a lot easier, as I knew chronology would be important. All a “bracket” needed was to be a multiple of 4 tracks, so there was less need to force stuff into places it didn’t fit.

The smallest bracket (“Novelty”) ended up with 4 tracks - the largest with 24. (“Evening Session Indie”, if you want to know.)

I went through and broke down each bracket into groups of 4 - aiming to avoid any repeated artists, which wasn’t always possible, and aiming to avoid any really colossal mismatches.

That gave me my 80 groups. To get the order, I sorted the spreadsheet by group and year, and averaged the years of each groups. A few tweaks later and here we are.

(There’s more, relating to how the Round 2 groupings are going to work, but I’ll spare you that!)