For 25 years, it has annually collated and capsuled a time in the lives of triple j’s listeners. Each countdown is a snapshot of where we were, who we were and what we were listening to.
But the best-of-the-year Hottest 100s that began in 1993 - like the people who voted for them - aren’t perfect. With hindsight, we can better see the trees in the forest. Asshole isn’t a better song than Creep. Straight Lines was robbed. The Cat Empire’s Hello was not the sixth best (let alone the 60th best) song of 2003.
And then there are the songs that missed the countdown altogether. And this is where we step in. To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the world’s biggest musical democracy, we’ve decided to right some wrongs, or at least acknowledge some oversights.
This is a list of the Hottest 100 songs that missed the Hottest 100. We wanted this countdown to read like any other Hottest 100, and to be reflective of the mix of gender, genre and general musicality that populates each year’s list. But most of all, we wanted it to stir a reaction along the lines of “you’re joking - how the hell did that song miss out?”.
As with every other Hottest 100, people will take issue with this countdown in some manner and we welcome the discussion. But, if nothing else, we hope people take this list in the spirit of appreciation, celebration and conversation that it was created.
Long live triple j, and long live the Hottest 100.
- Patrick Avenell, Tyler Jenke and Matt Neal
1. Everlong - Foo Fighters
All this makes the overlooking of Everlong all the more disappointing. Dave “Nicest Man in Rock” Grohl and his ever-expanding line-up of bandmates could have been crowned the lone champs of the Hottest 100 before they were put out to pasture if only Everlong had been acknowledged back in its day.
Its exclusion is baffling, and one that punters have tried to correct over the years. Since it missed the cut in ‘97 and ‘98 (other tracks from The Colour & The Shape polled in both those years), Everlong has been voted into the annual countdown in 2006 (a sadly inferior acoustic version at #61) and into the All-Time Hottest 100 of 2009 (#9) and the 20 Years celebration in 2013 (#6).
So why is this #1 on our list? That’s simple. This is the (equal) greatest band in the history of the countdown, and one of the biggest rock bands in the world. On top of that, Everlong has become their best-loved song - according to setlist.fm, it’s the song they’ve played the most in their career by a hefty margin. It’s usually their concert-closer. It’s the greatest moment on their greatest album.
“You know the funny thing about Everlong?,” drummer Taylor Hawkins told NME in 2015. “People consider that our biggest hit … but at the time is wasn’t really that big of a hit. It’s something that took (time). Dave did an acoustic version later, just by happenstance … and that got played more than the rock version at first. That song took years to build up the steam that now has become ‘the great Everlong’.”
The great Everlong indeed, 21 years in the making - MN
2. Hallelujah - Jeff Buckley
It took everyone else covering Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah for people to realise the late Jeff Buckley had already delivered the definitive version of the tune back in 1995 (there have been more than 300 covers of it recorded since 1991, according to one now-defunct Cohen fansite.
Even triple j listeners were slow to the fact. It wasn’t one of the two songs from Buckley’s Grace to make the Hottest 100 in ‘95 - that would be Last Goodbye and the title track. Nor was it one of the three songs from Grace to make the All-Time Hottest 100 of ‘98 (add Lover, You Should’ve Come Over to the list). It took the all-time countdown of 2009 for it to come to come to prominence - it was voted in at #3.
That was peak Hallelujah - by the 20 Years countdown four years later it had dropped to #36 and been replaced at #3 by Last Goodbye.
But away from the multitude of versions by the plethora TV music contest singers who have done their best to bludgeon the song to death, it needs to be acknowledged that this is not only one of those rare covers that surpasses the original, but a supreme example of the incredible talents of a musician with a remarkable gift that was sadly taken away too soon. Also, it’s a beautifully written song by one of the greatest songwriters who ever lived. What more do you need? - MN
3. Don't Look Back In Anger - Oasis
The first Oasis single to feature Noel on lead vocals was released straight after 1995’s Hottest 100 winner Wonderwall and peaked at #19 during an 11-week run in the Aussie charts. Hardly ground-breaking stuff but since then, over the past 22 years, Don’t Look Back In Anger has grown in stature to become Oasis’s signature song… in every jurisdiction but Australia.
The track’s Hottest 100 eligibility suffered from straddling the new year, making it kinda eligible for two years but ultimately unable to crack either. As a standout track on (What’s The Story) Morning Glory, released October 1995, Don’t Look Back In Anger received airplay in 1995, alongside #13 Morning Glory and Wonderwall. Then it was released as an actual single, back when that actually meant something, in February 1996. Sometimes, this straddling of the years meant the song would feature in the latter year’s Hottest 100, such as when, say, #1 No Aphrodisiac and #53 You Sound Like Louis Burdett were included in the 1997 chart and then subsequent singles #37 Buy Now Pay Later (Charlie No 2), #43 Melbourne and #56 Charlie No 3 were placed in the 1998 edition. Other times, however, the post-New Year singles fall into the Hottest 100 abyss.
Oasis and their contemporaries presaged a genuine cultural movement that came to be known as Cool Britannia. It comprised music (Britpop alums Blur, Suede, Pulp, Ash et al, but also popular artists like Spice Girls, All Saints and Robbie Williams), film (the Austin Powers and James Bond franchises, and the mind-boggling Spice Girls movie), sport (England at Euro96 and the rise of crossover celebrities like David Beckham), tragedy (Princess Diana’s death) and politics (the rise of Tony Blair and New Labour).
Eventually Cool Brittania fizzled out, maybe because we all grew tired of the Gallaghers’ antics or because Mike Myers found new artistic frontiers in the Shrek series or because none of the Spice Girls tended to have much personality when interviewed separately (you can relive some of the more glorious highs of the era in the wonderful TV series Beautiful People).
Don’t Look Back In Anger would become something of a themesong for the era. NME readers said it had the most explosive chorus in UK chart history, it’s the second most played song live in Oasis’ gig history (behind Cigarettes & Alcohol) and the romantic ideal underpinning the song — be nostalgic, sure, but never vitriolic — is how a lot of us approaching middle age tend to look back on our formative years. — PA
4. Fake Plastic Trees - Radiohead
To date, Radiohead’s The Bends is the only one of the group’s consistently exceptional albums to have not yielded a song in a Hottest 100 countdown. At a cursory glance, this can be chalked up to the band having too many great singles in the running for that year’s list, but when you consider that only one of the album’s five singles scraped into the ARIA charts, this mystery gets a little deeper. Since then, Fake Plastic Trees (the lowest charting single from the album on a global scale) is the only cut from The Bends to have been redeemed somewhat, eventually being voted to #28 in the 2009 Hottest 100 Of All Time countdown.
Famously described as “pompous and bombastic” by guitarist Ed O'Brien during its production, Fake Plastic Trees has since become one of the group’s most beloved songs. Often noted as the point at which Radiohead transitioned from riding the coattails of grunge to blazing their own trail, the tune had a rather laboured conception, with tensions rising in the studio after being told by their producer to record a follow-up to Creep.
However, the famous story for the track goes that despite the track beginning as something of a throwaway idea, after members of the band attended a Jeff Buckley gig, frontman Thom Yorke was so mesmerised by his performance that he returned to the studio, sung the song, then broke down crying in a mixture of frustration and inspiration. Featuring Yorke’s world-weary lyrics and an instrumental performance that gradually matches the emotional intensity of the track, Fake Plastic Trees is not only one of the most under-rated songs in Radiohead’s oeuvre, but one of the most underrated songs of all time.
Why no songs from The Bends (which I maintain is the best album Radiohead have put their name to) never made it into countdown will always remain a mystery, but there’s no denying that Fake Plastic Trees was robbed back in 1995. - TJ
5. Feel Good Hit Of The Summer - Queens Of The Stone Age
Sounding more like a junkie’s grocery list than a rock classic, Feel Good Hit Of The Summer was the moment when Queens Of The Stone Age broke away from their status as luminaries of California’s stoner-rock scene and earned their reputation as future leaders of the hard rock genre. Having formed only four years prior following the breakup of Kyuss, Queens Of The Stone Age had big shoes to fill, and with 2000’s Rated R, the group proved they were well on their way, especially thanks to the anthemic nature of tracks like this.
However, Feel Good Hit Of The Summer occupies a strange place in the annals of Hottest 100 history. Not because it wasn’t popular (it scored plenty of airplay and even hit #75 on the ARIA charts), but because of its honorary status as a member of the class of 2000. See, when the Hottest 100 for 2000 was counted down in January of 2001, the track was sadly absent from the countdown. Sure, tears were shed and wiped away with fans’ tattered leather jackets, but when the annual CD release was unleashed later in the year, well, the track was included.
It wasn’t quite an oversight either, with Richard Kingsmill specifically mentioning the band by name in the liner notes, despite their notable absence. While plenty of fans couldn’t care less about the track’s inclusion, some wondered what was going on. Did it barely miss out and reach #101? Was it excluded from the countdown? Or was it just an error that somehow made it through to the printing process? Either way, Queens Of The Stone Age were more than redeemed in 2002 when they ‘officially’ debuted in a Hottest 100, scoring five tracks, and taking out the #1 spot with No One Knows - a fitting title for a winning track by a band whose earlier presence will remain a mystery. -TJ
6. Maps - Yeah Yeah Yeahs
Rolling Stone called it the seventh best song of the 2000s. Pitchfork ranked it #6 for the same era. Popbitch declared it “the single most influential song of the 21st century so far”. Anyway you carve it, this is a song that now has a legacy.
Its influence wasn’t visible when the song was released in 2003. At the time, triple j was more interested in Fever To Tell’s raucous first single Date With The Night (which also missed the Hottest 100). Everyone got more excited about Yeah Yeah Yeahs three years later when Show Your Bones turned up, producing the band’s first Hottest 100 entries (Phenomena at #66, Gold Lion at #24).
But when Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ career is summarised and celebrated years from now, Maps will be the song that is seen as the zenith of their creativity, and the one that best encapsulates the band - the perfect combination of noise and heart. - MN
7. Banquet - Bloc Party
Only Wolfmother fared better than Bloc Party in the 2005 Hottest 100. Six songs from Wolfmother’s self-titled debut somewhat overshadowed the fact Bloc Party’s excellent album Silent Alarm had four in the countdown, including three in the top 45 (and yes, for the record, The Cat Empire also had four songs in there, but they were lower placed, and Wolfmother and Silent Alarm also went one-two in the triple j top album poll of that year while The Cat Empire’s Two Shoes was nowhere to be seen on that list).
But what was really interesting was that just four years later, fans had moved away from those four Silent Alarm cuts that made the Hottest 100 (Two More Years, Helicopter, Positive Tension and Like Eating Glass) and gravitated toward a different song as their favourite from this album of riches. It was Banquet that was voted in at #42 in the 2009 Hottest 100 of All Time, and at #57 in the 20 Years countdown in 2013.
Almost any track off Silent Alarm could have been voted into the 2005 countdown, and similarly, any track could have been championed later as the true hero of this near-flawless collection of post-post-punk/new-new-wave (or whatever the hell that mid ’00s spree of bands was called) songs. Perhaps the reason this one has outlasted the rest is because it now sounds like the most quintessentially Silent-Alarm-era-Bloc-Party song of the bunch with its spiky left-right guitars, dry disco drums, and Kele Okereke’s diverse singing styles intoning his becoming-an-adult concerns. - MN
8. Back To Black - Amy Winehouse
Rehab (Remix) with Jay-Z at #67 - that’s it for one of the most important, vital, tragic musical figures of the past 30 years. The original Rehab was lifted from the album Back To Black, a cathartic, deeply honest collection of parables detailing Amy Winehouse’s substance abuse problems and her intense amour for the mad, bad and dangerous-to-know Blake Fielder-Civil.
Recalling the original soul girl groups that flourished out of Detroit during pop’s golden age, peppered with the blue-eyed soul ingénues that Winehouse no doubt listened to — Dusty and Patsy first among them — Back To Black could have been just another break-up song in the mostly harmless mould that Adele has used to sell truckloads of records and hoover up Grammys. But because Winehouse always drenches her music with a raw, gin-soaked vulnerability, you actually hear the pain she obviously felt at that loser leaving her again for some past squeeze.
Winehouse’s decline has become a clichéd cautionary tale but listening to Back To Black again while I tap this out, I can only wonder what might have been had she capitalised on Back To Black’s success by staying clean and making more magic rather going to back to Blake and blazing out like so many other rare talents afflicted with a hole that only substances can apparently fill. — PA
9. One Armed Scissor - At The Drive-In
In 2001, At The Drive-In had managed to become one of the biggest bands in the post-hardcore genre. Their powerful songs, featuring the incomparable vocals of frontman Cedric Bixler-Zavala, struck a chord with fans all over the world, despite the fact that their songs were often so cryptic that they became almost impossible to decipher. In September 2000, the group released its third album, Relationship Of Command, but this only signalled the end for the group.
In January of 2001, the group would play the infamous Sydney Big Day Out, which became notorious for the death of teenager Jessica Michalik during Limp Bizkit’s set. Hours earlier, the band had become legends of the festival after walking off stage having performed only three songs, as Bixler-Zavala bleated like a sheep at the crowd, criticising their dangerous moshing. Under a month later, the group had performed their final show of their initial run, and broke up weeks later, all before their record had even left the Aussie charts.
By the time Hottest 100 voting came around later in the year, the band were still on everyone’s minds, with Invalid Litter Dept. and Pattern Against User placing in the countdown, despite the latter having not been released as a single. Meanwhile One Armed Scissor, often cited as the group’s most popular track, was strangely absent. While the tune featured heavy symbolism in its lyrics which dealt with tensions within the band, one could argue that triple j listeners weren’t quite ready for what this track delivered. While hindsight clearly makes this one a notable omission, we do have to wonder just what listeners were thinking back then. - TJ
10. Don't Speak - No Doubt
triple j’s seemingly arbitrary line between their playlist and the mainstream is perhaps best illustrated by No Doubt’s break-up ballad Don’t Speak. The station was all over Tragic Kingdom’s previous two singles Just A Girl and Spiderwebs (the former was #25 in the ‘96 Hottest 100) but for whatever reason, Don’t Speak was a bridge too far for the js.
The song would go to #1 on the ARIA charts (and in at least 12 other countries) and was the eighth biggest selling single in Australia in that year. But triple j drew a line in the sand on the band, and that line was exactly between Spiderwebs and Don’t Speak. Rarely was the station’s self-regulated 1990s division between the alternative and the pop world so clearly defined.
But it denied No Doubt a second song in the Hottest 100. The band was never better than on Tragic Kingdom - a record that yielded a remarkable seven singles over three years, none of which were bigger and more powerful than this heartfelt alt-rock power-ballad. - MN
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