Anatomy of a writers poll... (part 1)

The CLUAS writers poll to find the best Irish releases of the last 10 years has, as I expected, sparked off quite a bit of commentary (I particularly enjoyed The People's Republic of Cork forums and the comments section of Jim Carroll's On The Record blog).

No matter what one makes of its results I can say it was a considerable, but worthwile, effort to pull the poll together. It was worth that effort alone to see the poll results reveal (definitively of course) that 2001-2002 was the vintage period for Irish music in the last 10 years. For those of you enjoyed the number-crunching that delivered such a conclusion here below are some more numbers on the poll:

• 35 writers cast a vote in the poll
• 9 of these writers were "CLUAS Alumni" who haven't written anything for the site in over 5 years but were active in our first half decade. The remaining 26 writers who voted only got published on CLUAS for the first time in the last 5 years.
• A total of 280 votes were cast, meaning...
• ...each voter cast a preference for an average of 8 albums (no writer voted for less than 3 albums, nor for more than 10)
• Approx 130 different albums were voted for.
• 55 albums secured votes from 2 or more writers
• 30 albums were voted by just 2 writers, therefore...
• 25 albums were voted by at least 3 writers.
• 9 acts managed to get two albums into the list and they are The Divine Comedy, The Frames, Simple Kid, David Kitt, Cathal Coughlan, David Holmes, U2, The Tycho Brahe and JJ72).
• Since its inception 40 albums have been shortlisted for the Choice Music Prize. Of these, 27 secured at least one vote in the poll but only 11 made the top 50.
• There was only one point seperating the no. 1 and no. 2 albums in the poll!

Next week, in the second part of this 'poll anatomy', I'll publish the list of albums that were outside the top 50, all 80+ of them.

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