Chart Music: the Top Of The Pops Podcast - #13: November 16th 1978 - The Demon Prince of the Third Division

Episode Date: October 31, 2017

The thirteenth go-around of the podcast which asks: Showaddywaddy? Again? Really? This episode, Pop-Crazed Youngsters, finally sees the good ship Chart Music sail way past the three-hour exclusion zone – but it can’t be helped, because the episode of Thursday Evening Pop Valhalla we dissect here is a classic. Some of the big guns of the Seventies are pulled out, but are immediately bricked by snotty New Wave oiks in charity shop clothes, the foul spell of Revolting and Neutron-Bomb is banished forever, and Kid Jensen looks on from his Fortress of Solitude in approval and then asks some girls if they think he’s sexy. And they say ‘No’. Musicwise, everything you’d expect from ’78 that isn’t caked in Grease is here. Freddie Mercury points out that he likes big butts and he cannot lie, Child pitch up in Brian Tilsley haircuts, Elton John looks like a droog suffering a mid-life crisis as Cathy McGowan sits at his feet, Elvis Costello calls Tony Blackburn a ‘silly man’ while pretending to take drugs, Debbie Harry stares at us unnervingly over a carrier bag, Heatwave drop an era-defining wedding song while dressed up as Turkish waiters, and the Boomtown Rats bring the Ted-Punk wars of the Kings Road into every playground in the country. And there’s Toast. Al Needham is joined by Neil Kulkarni and Taylor Parkes for a rigorous examination of a classic episode of The Pops, veering off on tangents which include worrying about your Dad being got at by Peter Sutcliffe, cardboard cut-outs of Roy Race, the time when the BBC made you put stickers on your radio, and a discussion on Dean Friedman’s seduction technique that went on a lot longer than it really needed to. Swearing a-plenty! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What do you like to listen to? Erm... Chart music. Chart music. Hey up you pop-crazed youngsters and welcome to the latest edition of Chart Music. The podcast that gets its hand right down the back of the settee on a random episode of Top of the Pops. I'm your host, Al Needham, and as always I'm joined by two people.

One of those people is Taylor Park. Taylor, how are you mate? Yeah, I'm alright. Really fucking ill and raring to go. And the other one is the welcome return of Mr. Neil Kulkarni. Hello, Neil. Hello, Al. Excellent. Well, Al, what are we, chaps? All good?

I'm cock-a-hoop. It's half term, which as a pre-teacher, I hated because it meant town was full of kids. But as a teacher, I fucking love it. Excellent. Well, what do you do? Absolutely nothing. I'm blessed with a daughter who just wants to sit around watching telly. Do you ever watch old episodes of Top of the Pulse

with your kids? Most definitely. My daughter is obsessed with the 70s. I mean, she's 11, and she's obsessed with the 70s and 80s. Her biggest sort of... The music she's most fond of is by Michael Jackson and ABBA.

She insists on 80s radio being on in the car all the time. She's very much, you know, really engrossed in that age and I think slightly wishes she was born back then, actually. Yeah. I bet you wish she was born back then as well, Neil, because you wouldn't be paying for her anymore, would you? Too bloody right.

I've watched it with my six-year-old niece and she loves everything. She's at that age where she just dances to everything, even if it was, I don't know, the exploited. But I have a 16-year-old nephew, and I got into a huge argument with him over Hazy Fantaser because he was casting aspersions upon them. And I suddenly found myself shouting,

well, at least they're not shaking their arses at the camera like what you lot do. And I just thought, where, well, at least they're not shaking their arses at the camera like what you lot do. And I just thought, where the fuck did that come from? I'd never gave a toss about Asia Fantasia before and I suddenly felt the urge to defend them. The weird thing is, though, you do get to see little kids' reactions to this stuff. And one of the most sort of touching things is

my daughter, when she sees something that I think she loves, she doesn't watch it quietly. She starts laughing almost immediately. It's like those pop stars. You just can't quite believe them with your young mind. So when she first saw Adamant, for instance, her first reaction was just straight-out laughter. I mean, she loves Adamant, but at that age,

you kind of can't almost compute something. It's so intense. So laughter becomes the kind of first response so it's kind of revealing in a way just as well he's not scared of ridicule really isn't it absolutely anyway this episode pop craze youngsters takes us all the way back to november the 16th 1978 yes the winter of discontent is about to begin, but we're still stuck in the summer of Travolta and Newton John. Chaps, as we all know, John Travolta and Olivia Newton John spent 16 weeks combined at number one in this year.

I was 10, you were not 10. How did this impact upon your life? Well, I remember Greece kind of being just this sort of cultural juggernaut in a way. It was just omnipresent and everywhere. I obviously wasn't old enough to go and see it. I think it was a double A, wasn't it, Grease? Something like that, yeah. Yeah, there's some swearing in it

and the stuff that Channel 4 always censor out whenever they show it, the rhyming of shit and tit and all of that sort of stuff. But my sister went to see it and it was one of those films that it wasn't like people just popped in to see it they'd go and see it like five times in a week yeah um and and it was an absolute sort of cultural juggernaut that you you couldn't avoid um so but because like cinema didn't really let me go and see greece i was happy with the records

i thought they were good songs so i mean i was only six you know but i can understand how for a lot of people the success of greece the success simultaneously of things like happy days and the whole kind of 50s um throwback of it would have antagonized people and would have antagonized musicians almost certainly yeah but um the the whole thing of john revolting and olivian neutron bomb winding people up didn't really affect me as um a six-year-old kid and of course it was an event because they stayed at number one for so long and anything staying at number one for that long and occupying such a big chunk of the charts you know i think five or six of the top 10 records are from greece

um you know that is an event, whereas now, of course, records that kind of won't fuck off are kind of de rigueur. You know, I mean, if I asked you, Al, what is number one right now, you possibly don't know. I've got no fucking idea at all, mate. But it's Post Malone.

He's been number one for three weeks. Who's he? Well, quite. Before that, Sam Smith was number one, and he was number one for seven weeks. And these things... No, no, no, no, no. I know this Sam Smith was number one, and he was number one for seven weeks. And these things... No, no, no, no, no. I know this one.

He looks like the bloke who presents the Song for Europe thing in that episode of Father Ted. He does. And that's all I know. That's all I know about him. He looks exactly like that. Yeah, but I mean... Go on, try some more.

Try some more on there. I am a proper high court judge when it comes to the charts of today. I don't know the previous number ones before Sam Smith, but I mean, like, you know, people like Charlie Puth, who I'm sure you're familiar with. Oh, yeah, him.

Oh, go Charlie. Exactly. No, these people. Charlie Puth. That's his name. This is like a throwback to about 10 years ago, where there were all those reality show pop stars who didn't seem to understand the concept of a stage name.

Do you remember this? There was David Sneddon. Yes. Jessica Garlick. stars who didn't seem to understand the concept of a stage name do you remember this there was david snedden uh yes jessica garlic um your favorite the irish chap what was his name oh yeah um i think it's actually pronounced less unpleasantly than it's spelt um and i don't want to offend our many irish listeners but on paper it's the ugliest name i've ever seen in my life ugan quinn i can't remember how you say it but yeah i mean i think it's like owen or ian or something like that but my deep deep ignorance of uh the land of my forefathers is coming out right now charlie poof is a pop star now and he was like number one, I think last year,

for like something like 10 weeks or something. It just sounds like a toy dog that shits on the floor that kids want for Christmas. But I mean, these things can happen now and barely anyone sort of registers it really. Whereas back then, of course,

the charts were everything and something staying at number one for that long was a mahoosive deal so i wasn't so resistant to it because i was a kid and those songs were not bad songs man no taylor i know this has already made us sound really old but um if i wasn't really old i'd be checking my phone now to see whether greece actually was a double a because i went to see greece uh with my mum and yeah yeah there was no it was full of kids i don't i'm not sure that it was i think they might have done a you know spielberg used to do deals to get his films in at a lower certificate than they would have been if they'd been made by anyone else um then i don't know maybe you know stigwood or someone was pulling strings because i certainly went to see

greece it might just have been unscrupulous people in the uh in the ticket office at the kid of abc but i don't know i think to be honest i think greece works as a palate cleanser because it's the, uh, it sort of stands at the border between the seventies and the event is right. Everything before grease is the old seventies. Everything after grease, uh, is, you know, the same until 1982. Um, it sort of, it came in and it blotted out the sun and then it left without leaving a trace. And when it had gone, it's like, you know, it's like the camera moved in and everything went dark and it was like a way to cut without anyone noticing.

Next thing you know, all the kids look like extras from the video to another brick in the wall. It's like, what the fuck? What happened there? Yeah, and that soundtrack album, I mean, it just started instantly appearing in people's houses as soon as the film came out. It was just such a big record that, I mean,

sort of every house had it. I mean, I'd say it was up there with, I don't know, Night Flight to Venus and perhaps... Saturday Night Fever, yeah. And Saturday Night Fever, yeah, exactly. It's those sort of just records that were almost like issued by the government

to like everyone yes it just seemed that everyone owned those albums yeah but I mean because Saturday Night Fever

that was still a 1978 thing as well because you know I always equate it with 1977 but I believe Night Fever

got to number one in early 1978 so it's like as soon as that film's finished oh he's got another one now and he's decided to be Elvis instead of... I think Travolta's ubiquity

is what wound people up perhaps so much so the venom that you see towards him during that year it's the equivalent of the way that Justin Bieber got treated in a way, do you know what I mean? That kind of easy signifier for rock fans, if you like, of teeny-bop kind of ephemera, which they could just kind of, like, slag off.

And I think that's what you see in this episode, to a certain extent. Radio 1 News So, what was in the news this week? Well, the peace talks between Israel and Egypt have broken down. There's been three days of protests in Tehran at the Shah. The People's Temple are getting ready for a bit of mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana. Tommy Doherty, yay! Tommy Doherty has been suspended by Derby County

after losing a libel case against Granada Television over his treatment of Dennis Law when he was manager of Man United. Milton Keynes unveils its concrete cows. Oh, the 80s are coming, everyone. But the big news this week is that the BBC National Radio is moving all its frequencies around due to an international agreement and in an attempt to improve broadcast quality across the nation. Radio 1, for example, was moving from 247

meters to 275 and 285 and Radio 3 was taking its frequency. Now, to ensure that the pop-crazy youngsters didn't wake up on the morning of November the 23rd, turn on their trannies and be subjected to Dvorak Slavonic dancers by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, the BBC have spent £3 million on a campaign to alert people to the forthcoming changes, including newspaper adverts and a nationwide mail-out campaign.

And they still got 6,000 phone calls from people asking where the fuck their station had got to on the first day do you remember this oh yeah i remember it i remember it being a massively big deal and i remember getting those getting those stickers through the door to stick on the radio um so that you knew where to tune every station carried ads some station bbc stations of course even had little moments where they tuned in to other stations to show what was going on. There's a great moment where Radio 3 DJ, I think,

tunes to Radio 1 to the new 275 thing, and he gets the first verse of Fat Bottom Girls by Queen, and he can't quite contain his laughter. But, I mean, those numbers that they're trying to you know get in our heads they got into my head because so much of my pop listening then was entirely dependent on radio other than radio one and dial a disc which you know i was caught dialing dialing but apart from those two things we had nothing and this is pre-tape days really so the charts as something that you could confect yourself hadn't started happening.

My dad had a reel-to-reel player, which he used to occasionally use. And somewhere lost in the attic, there's probably a recording of me singing Where Have All The Flowers Gone, aged about three or something. But, you know, radio was what it was all about. Records at this stage was still

very much bought for us in a way by our western friends in order to kind of introduce us to that culture so it's a real mix it was kind of like jeff love and tijuana brass play the hits of lennon and mccartney and you know music for pleasure negro spirituals collections things like that occasional occasional begging led to the odd chart compilation being bought home from town but if i saw a better matchbox car that i fancied i'd probably have got that instead this was pre this was pre-music center days for us we had a record player we had a big bush radio in the kitchen or the back room we had no kind of separate so any of that shit my dad had this reel-to-reel like i say that that had harry harry bella fonte on it and and Indian stuff so radio was absolutely where it was at

so I remember this having a mahoosive effect and those numbers absolutely get in it somehow because of the campaign and because just the sheer pleasure of sticking those stickers on the big red dial of our Bush radio. Yeah if any stickers get shoved through your door man in 1978 it's a fucking

glorious day isn't it? Free stickers were a tactic that Melody Maker tried to use later it didn't work then No, it didn't, did it? Towards the end, fuck me it was all free stickers, free posters it never fucking worked This was a really big thing

somewhere and unfortunately it's on a hard drive that I don't have access to at the moment and I wish I could find it somewhere I've got a recording from I think Radio 4 Unfortunately, it's on a hard drive that I don't have access to at the moment, and I wish I could find it. Somewhere I've got a recording from, I think Radio 4, or it might have been Radio 3 from the time, of the announcer trying to explain to what he clearly believes to be an extremely elderly audience, very slowly and patiently,

what's going on and what you have to do and there's all these he talked he says something about your tv if you have one and things like this and it's it really is the oddest thing to imagine that this was part of the bbc output in our lifetimes you know yeah it's unrecognizable as it's even unrecognizable as post-war culture. It's like a last stand for the world of beef dripping and park drive and people dying without ever having had an orgasm. And there's also an episode in Nationwide, which I've got somewhere, which I've got somewhere, which was devoted to explaining what's going on with BBC Radio Wavelengths.

And they had a phone in with a phenomenally uncharismatic BBC bigwig talking a lot, but not making it any clearer at all. And at one point, Sue Lawley says, it's obviously very very confusing which is not what you want your bbc flagship presenters to be saying and then they have a phone in and it's just all these people phoning in going what's going on i don't understand i hate you and it's like typical bbc like whenever the subject is itself um it just goes to pieces

you know yeah there's also a single by which i know is on youtube of uh the king singers yes you know this right called some enchanted wavelengths uh yes trying to get this across in an acapella, choral style. I think they played that every night at close down for weeks beforehand. It's a national moment like decimalisation or something. Yes, that's exactly what it is, isn't it? And a real reminder that they were our state broadcaster, do you know what I mean? And they felt like their own state to themselves, the BBC. I mean, you just saved three million pounds and said, look, right, just get your fucking radio tomorrow.

Turn your fucking knob. And when you hear Dave Lee fucking Travis, that's it. Well done. Yeah. It's like, how long is a radio dial? It's like, it's this baffling ordeal of like, what's this bloke? He's speaking French.

No, that's not radio one just keep going oh right yeah quack quack oops yeah i mean in the in defense of radio three they actually um they were coming off of long wave to medium wave so that must have been a a terrifying thing yeah but their listeners went to university so they could handle it. So, on the cover of NME this week, Pauline Murray of Penetration. On the cover of Smash

Hits, Blonde. It's also the first ever issue of Smash Hits. There you go. There's a pub quiz question for you. The number one LP in the UK is of course Grease. In America, the number one lp in the uk is of course greece in america the number one single is macarthur park by donna summer and the number one lp is live and more also by donna summer so um november 1978 what were we doing chaps i i think just started junior school and

i was only one of one of only two asian in the entire school, along with my sister, who was three years ahead of me. And I remember the first day of my junior school life, I called some kid a bastard or something. Yeah, I called him a bastard. And he immediately grasped me up to the headmaster. And he immediately grasped me up to the headmaster. And that night I had to write an essay on two sides of an exercise book page called Bastard. I had to write Bastard at the top of the page. And then write a kind of thing about what Bastard meant and how you shouldn't call people bastards. Because it turns out this kid was a bastard or something.

And he got particularly offended by it. So in a weird way, because my sister says something really odd to me the other day, that she remembers at the age of eight saying to my mum, and I would have been five at this time, that I was winding up because I had opinions about everything. And I suspect that this was, I wouldn't say the start of perhaps being a critic, but this was a start of really getting properly engaged with pop music, I think. And I was, you know, absolutely religiously watching Top of the Pops and getting really excited by pop music a lot.

So that's kind of where I was at the time. Whereas previous episodes in the 70s, the memories are kind of foggy for me because, of course, you don't really remember stuff when you're three. Six, I have real concrete memories of this time. And certainly watching Top of the Pops is one of them. Taylor, was Top of the Pops a thing in your life this time? Yeah. Oh, of course it was.

Yeah. No, I remember 1978 extremely well. In fact, I was just thinking, going around to see my nan seeing a kid walking down the street in full john travolta get up with a leather jacket and a quiff and a da and thinking wow imagine being as cool as that being as cool as some scrote on birch and coppice with his dad's haircut yeah no i remember really well i mean it's what i mostly remember is how depressing everything looked um i've got a really really clear memory of the late 70s everything looking like shit um and i had i had nothing to compare it to it It's not like I'd travelled.

But it was just the damp brickwork and the polluted, overcast sky and mildewed sheds with ARP warden's helmets in. Mouse-infested greengrocers and rusty British cars. Almost at the age of six, I instinctively knew that the island of Kauai existed somewhere, and this wasn't it. The West Midlands in the late 1970s was not where it was at. Oh, man. The weird thing is when you look at the world itself in 1978, it was still full 70s, right?

You look at objects and cars and buildings, it might as well be 1971 or 1961 or 1951 to some extent. But people look different because it's partly as a result of punk, but really it's because the high street was starting to change. The high street was starting to catch up with pop music. Like you went into your local clothes shop in 1977 and regardless of what the Sex Pistols were doing, they'd have sold you a big wing-collared white shirt

with a repeating pattern of vintage cars like kids' bedroom wallpaper and a pair of grey slacks that were possibly over slack. You go in the same shop in November 1978 and they'd have a bright red sweatshirt and maybe some drainpipe jeans, you know. Yeah, I mean, I was a few years older than you and I've got to say, you know, like the Wu-Tang Clan said, you know, 78, that's my favourite shit.

Everything was lovely. Forest, champions of England, five comics a week. I'd be in the fourth year of junior school. So, you know, finally it was my, you know, me and my peers' time to shine and lord it over the playground. You know, three hours of football every day and top of the pops. It was fucking mint. 2008 D had just come out

so I was religiously reading that and the other comic I loved at the time was Scoop. Do you remember that? No. Scoop?

No, it didn't ring a bell. It was basically the football comic for kids who really love football but already knew that they were shit at it so they'd want to be sports reporters instead. about it was basically the football comic for kids who really love football but already knew that they were shit at it so they'd want to be uh sports reporters instead i think that was the

comic that um had the first computerized um league where they they'd kind of like divide the country up into different areas uh like the you know and Scotland and all that shit. And then they'd feed the data into the computer and then tell you who won and who scored and all that kind of stuff. Thrilling times to be alive. Did they have a picture of this so-called computer and it was actually a cardboard box with a reel-to-reel tape machine on the top? That was exactly what it was like.

This magazine sounds brilliant you get like a a double page center spread uh pull out pin up of brian glanville i think i was football magazine it was all roy the rovers for me at that time i wasn't even aware of of that and of course for the comics i mean it was it was the start of a kind of rich internal life, if you like, for me. There was a lot of reading and a lot of listening going on at home. In 78, I moved from the old people's home that I've mentioned in the past to a suburb of Coventry called Ernst for Grange. And that just brought me into contact with more kids. And there were good sides to that, of course, but there were also sort of less good sides we'll go

on to talk about these i'm sure but i'm not saying that i was aware of the wider political realities going on but there was a sense in the kids that i met there was a sense that things weren't that great with their parents and and with just life in general you know and it brought me into contact with more kind of aggravation i guess 70s now aggro this period of time is really important to me as well mostly because as i was saying earlier i was yeah i was really aware of everything being hideous and it was raining every single day i mean it always seemed to be sunny in my memories of the mid-70s. And then when the weather broke at the end of the great summer of 77, it broke for all time, you know.

And from then on, it was just dark and rainy. But I think this is why I'm so fond of that Aventus idea of British luxury, right? You know, like if you watch programmes from that time and you see people who are supposed to have done quite well for themselves and they're living in this world of pale carpets and they've got a waterbed with a radio in the headboard and whiskey and a decanter. And it's probably, like, White Horse or something,

but they've put it in a decanter and this was the dream of escape to me right like because the what big American cars and Hollywood movies were to British kids of the 50s I mean now that stuff was just grease you know

it was a fantasy we couldn't really look to America because by 1978 all they had was malaise so we had to dream of living like a successful london criminal or someone someone in an advert for imperial leather soap and i still get excited now if ever now i'm in a place which hasn't been redecorated and would have looked moderately glamorous in 1978, I still get really excited. Yeah, for me, for me that year,

there's a couple of signifiers of that year that aren't even records or anything else. They're objects. For me, it immediately recalls the stupidly big cabinet slash unit we got in our living room to put our trinkets and shit in. Yes.

And two particular objects. One was an ashtray. It was a martini ashtray, which was, you know, just lovely. And I loved the smooth surfaces on it and everything. And it just seemed to signify, yeah, the kind of luxury that Taylor's kind of hinting at. Opulence. Opulence, that's the word.

And also there was a tartan ice bucket that was an object of real fascination for me. So all of those objects, suddenly they become memorable in 78. I'm not saying I don't remember anything from before 78, but 78 is when I start accreting all these memories in in a sense where i'm remembering really tiny details as opposed to sort of general vaguenesses so what else was on telly today well bbc one has screened jackanora emu's broadcasting company john craven's news round and blue peter where they show you how to make make Christmas presents for people you can't be asked to spend money on. They've just screened Nationwide, which

has run a new Larges Lovely Beauty contest for outsized women. And Tomorrow's World looks at salt mines in Eastern Europe and a new gadget that can sew a button that never falls off. That's nice. Tomorrow's World. Salt mines in

Eastern Europe. Yeah, truer than they World. Salt mines in Eastern Europe. Yeah. Truer than they thought. Truer than they thought. BBC2 has been running international tennis all afternoon followed by Lola Narda, Tammy Wynette, Beneath the Pennines and is currently halfway through a repeat of When the Boat Comes In.

Zippy, George and Bungle have found out more about soft, hard, smooth and rough on Rainbow on ITV. Oh, listen to us. Come on. Followed by Looks Familiar, The Sullivans, Jabba Jaw, Little House on the Prairie, an episode of Crossroads where Shuey McPhee finds a photograph hidden by Mr Booth and Trevor Thatcher is trying to stop a poaching outbreak on Emmerdale

Farm. They're currently showing Sale of the Century. Looks familiar. Fucking load of old cunts talking about even older shit. I know, I know. It'll never catch up. Enjoy it while it lasts. Yeah. Looks familiar and the

Sullivans. It's just even just hearing the names i feel like i've got a cold this is for me those schedules are interesting because this is for me i think also a time when um the times of the day and the shows that are on become much more memorable so that 5 30 for instance is a time where i knew ludwig would be on or something like that oh yeah and i knew that was the sure signifier my dad would be on his way back from courtaulds and it'd be through the door soon and dinner would be ready so telly and and timing becomes much more linked in this time yeah i used to be like that because my dad was a lorry driver and so i got through a phase from probably round about this time for about a good three years,

expecting my dad to be killed on the motorway every fucking day. And just sitting there, just half an eye on Ludwig, other eye looking out the window. So, yeah, I mean, so I take that violin playing egg as a, you know, a portent of doom. As it was originally attended, I think. I remember about this time, or well, it would have been a couple of years later, for some reason being paranoid that my dad was going to be killed by the Yorkshire Ripper. What? And I shared this worry with my mum one night and she said no because he only kills people in

yorkshire which i thought was which i thought was a a really tactful a really tactful way of explaining uh part you know it explained to me well enough why i was wrong to be worried about this without going into any unpleasant detail yeah yeah fucking hell yeah i've forgotten all about that you know i'm saying 1978 was a wonderland and everything you know there was just all this shit going on i mean like you know we're about to everyone's about to go on strike. Yorkshire Ripper's knocking about. But, you know, I contend that the kids won the 70s hands down. Yeah. It didn't seem much fun being an adult in the 70s, but being a kid was fucking skill.

Right then, pop-crazed youngsters, it's time to go back, back, back, all the way to November of 1978. Don't forget, we may coat down your favourite band or artist, but we never forget they've been on Top of the Pops more times than we have. Good evening and a good welcome to the cream of the crop on this week's Top of the Pops. It's Thursday, November 16th, 1978, and your host for this week's Top of the Pops is David Kidd Jensen. We've already covered him in the first ever episode of Chart Music,

but by this point he's been drafted in from Radio Trent in 1976 To fill in for Emperor Roscoe for three months But when Roscoe didn't come back from America He got a full time job there At this point he's handling the drive time slot on Radio 1 And chaps when we discussed him in the first episode Sarah and David we kind of reached the opinion that he was one of the good ones your opinion please well he's one of the good ones in

the sense that you can't imagine him doing anything bad or naughty yeah or i mean he's a mild-mannered scando Canadian, right, which is like double-smoked mildness. If your mate, if your mate said to you, oh, you've got to come out tonight, you've got to meet my mate,

he's in town, he's a Danish Canadian, you'd think, well, I bet he's a nice guy, but, I don't think I'm going to end tonight

naked in jail. So, oh, he said, no, he's a DJj oh yeah is he is he like the dj version of kelly monteith in almost every conceivable way yeah no yeah he is actually yeah he is likable um and i think his friendship with john peel might have something to do with that um but i mean i still think to a certain extent back then we were kind of needy in britain about america and we kind of liked the fact that an american guy oh he wasn't you know a usa guy he was canadian but like taylor says but it was nice it was nice he was over um

and do you do you remember al because he did have that history on Radio Trent did you ever listen to him I can't say I did, it was more of your late night kind of DJ on Radio Trent, I mean I can remember Dale Winton clearly, I remember the day after, he was the kind

of like, he was in the Simon Bates slot on Radio Trent by the early 80s and the day after the riots in Ice and Green, which were copycat riots from the Brixton riots in 1981, the news came on and it was about the rioting that had gone on in Ice and Green. And I remember Dale Winton saying, Oh, well, if you were there last night, I hope you die. It's George Benson or something like that.

And I actually interviewed Dale Winton a few years ago. And I reminded him about that. And he said, oh, fucking hell, did I really say that? And I said, yeah, you did, mate. Well, I mean, Kit Jensen, he kind of went under everyone's radar. My wife, for instance, has different memories of him because she was witness to him and Peter Powell powell doing one of their nest cafe nights right you know and him handing out small sachets of coffee to girls in nightclubs and she thought she thought back then

that he was a rewind rewind i want to hear all the details about my wife went to a club in country called tiffany's and this was like, this would have been around about 78, 79. And it was a night whereby Peter Powell and David Kidd Jensen just played records. It was all sponsored by Nescafe. So I don't know why Nescafe needed to reach the youth market. But yeah, they were just doling out free sachets

of Nescafe instant coffee. And she remembers him being a little bit sleazy but I mean in comparison to what surrounds him at that time he's definitely one of the good ones why is Kid Jensen making a masturbatory gesture at me

he's got a handful of coffee beans done yeah I mean there was that Garfunkel thing going on at the time of course but I mean he had a kind of lesser stature, I think, than the other DJs. And he was, initially, wasn't he, a kind of prog rock fan and kind of played serious music, quote-unquote. That's right, yeah. But, I mean, you can sort of see his stature, in a sense,

by looking at the box of the David Kidd Jensen pop trivia game, which came out, I think, around about 78. In contrast to Mike Reid's later pop quiz game, which is obviously based on the TV series, the box for Mike Reid's one has Mike Reid on it. And it also has Ben Volpier, what's his name, out of curiosity killed the cat, as one of the kids playing the game on the box.

Whereas David Kidd Jensen's is much more sober, much more serious, kind of looks like a trivia pursuit box. And he just of i think he just kept his head down didn't make as many waves as anyone else and kept his position at radio one for that long precisely because he was quite anodyne bland and kind of easily digestible he wasn't as spikily strange or unsettling as a lot of the other djs at that time also the elephant in the room here of course is that he went on to be the host of the roxy um which like after hosting top of the pops i mean like for instance you know i mean i worked on the music press for many years don't worry not

going to talk about it for 45 minutes but um but you see now at the moment i'm on the doll and there's always the terrible fear that they're going to put me on the work program and i'm going to end up handing out copies of the nme at tune stations which which no that would be no i would not let that happen to you tell i would I would kill you before that happened. Don't worry. Thank you. You've got my word on it. Please do.

But you've got to feel that that must have been how it felt for him, being the host of The Roxy in the late 80s. A very similar kind of feeling. But let's not forget that he also presented 45 a couple of years before this episode of Top of the Pops on ITV. Kind of gone from like, you know, non-league to suddenly in the

First Division and now he's in the Rocksies, dropped down to Division. The TV show called 45, we've spoken about it, it was very Liftoff with A. Shea esque. Yeah, well rather like a student on Pointless being asked a question about the Second World War. This is a bit before my time. Sorry about that.

He's standing here on this top of the pops in a Radio 1 sweatshirt with a shirt on underneath with the big shirt collars coming out from under the sides of the neck of the sweatshirt, which was a popular look at the time. So the impression is of a great white bird with the head of Kid Jensen. And he says, without wanting to mess up any of your links here, Al, he says, good evening and a good welcome

to the cream of the crop on this week's top of the pops in that and he uh accent he emphasizes that like as if he'd already used the word pops right it doesn't yeah like if for instance if you're introducing freeze and you say and here's freeze with southern freeze right yeah he does it like that he says it's the cream of the crop on this week's top of the pops it's like no you didn't you didn't say pop and i never i never know whether they script these links for top of the pops because they always seem so on the hoof they always get something wrong they're always nonsensical or they sound like they've been through google translate it's not right i mean how long would it have taken to just get a bit of paper and write down what you're

going to say first before you say it yeah we need to we need to we need to look into this a bit more about the scripting of top of the pops but also also where is he because he does he does these links mostly alone um later on they bring in a couple of girls to stand next to him but he's not he's clearly not in the studio where the action is happening um it's either filmed before um or after the actual ads um now i possibly this is because he did the drive time show at the time and they might have been filming Top of the Pops while he was on the air is the most likely one. But the effect is that,

especially because the studio is all jagged lines and sort of chilly blue, it looks like he's in some sort of ice world sealed off from the rest of the human race. And he's got a set of amplifiers behind him and a white piano and a drum kit. And I think it's actually the Boomtown Rats set from later in the programme,

except they don't have any amps on stage. So none of this makes any sense at all. And it was bothering me all the way through it. It's really unsettling. The Ice World you mentioned, perhaps a reflection of the popularity of the film Superman at all and it was bothering me all the way through it. It's really unsettling. The ice world you mentioned, perhaps a reflection of the popularity of the film Superman at the time with his Antarctic

hideaway. Having a shirt and a sweatshirt over it is the definer of being dressed by your mum, isn't it? Yeah, but it's like the Aventus uniform as well. And I keep using that word. You made that word up, not me, but it's like the Aventus uniform as well. And I keep using that word. You made that word up, not me, but it's perfect.

Yeah, it's... Thank you. You see it... No, actually, no. Fame brought in a new look, which was to wear a shirt with another shirt over the top of it. That's right, yeah. But, yeah, no, they also had the sweatshirt

with the shirt poking out. When Peele used to wear that look, he always wore it somewhat sardonically, I thought. There was something a bit sarky about it, whereas Kidd is right in between. He could be one of the Bateses and one of the Steve Wrights and one of those, but I think he's erring more towards the Peebles, Peele, Vance end of things. Yeah, the specialists.

Yes, exactly. Speaking of Bates, I just yesterday downloaded an episode of Just A Minute where from the 70s was Simon Bates is one of the panellists. So I wanted to check out his quick wit and his verbal dexterity and I listened to the first eight minutes

of it and he hasn't said anything yet. Who's he with? Is it with Kenneth Williams? Yeah, Kenneth Williams, Derek Nimmo. Peter Jones? I can't remember who the other one is. Yeah, Peter Jones.

Oh, he's fucked then, isn't he? Yeah. No fucking chance. He said nothing. He hasn't interrupted. I don't know whose idea was that. Who should we get on? Yeah, who should we get on?

Who's a quick wit and raconteur? And what about Simon Bates? So, kids, in all the things that Taylor pointed out earlier, wishes us a good evening and a good welcome and introduces a top 30 rundown to the sound of giving up giving in by the three degrees we've already covered the three degrees in chart musics four and six so all i'll say is that this is a follow-up to toast of love which only got to number 36 in may of 1976 and it's stuck at number 12. Have you ever heard a better

Three Degrees tune than this? Because I wasn't familiar with this one. I mean, I would have heard it when it was out at the time, but I don't remember it very well. I was surprised how much I like this, because there's nothing to it but the production makes it sound like

the USS Theodorevelt coming straight at you at 200 miles an hour it's really good and also if if prince charles likes something how bad can it be right yes he knows about everything that bloke he's an expert on everything architecture gardening uh comparative religion, the perfect murder. Yeah. Who would argue with him? Actually, no.

Who would argue with him apart from Sheila Ferguson of the Three Degrees? Because he tried to hit on her, didn't he? He did. And she knocked him back. Yes, he did, yeah. God bless her. Yeah, yeah. She said, because I was reading about this about a week ago,

she said she didn't want to be another notch on his bedpost. Like, as if he was like Warren Beatty or something. Yes. But in a way, if that had happened, how brilliant would that have been? Because I think we can... Oh, we've discussed this before, Taylor. It would have been fucking amazing.

You see, I would have heard that, but just like this record, I've forgotten all about it. I certainly agree. Princess Sheila would have been that, but just like this record, I've forgotten all about it. I certainly agree. Princess Sheila would have been much better than what we've got. Although, I suspect she would have died even sooner. Yes, yes. Funny you should say that about Prince Charles Taylor, because they just played Prince Charles' 30th birthday this very week.

Yeah, and slapped away the party hands afterwards, I'm sure. Fucking dirty bastard. I think this record's possibly the best Three Degrees record precisely because it's kind of shorn of their personalities, if you like. It's

a monstrous kind of robo-tune. There is very little disco in this episode. When you around the chart shockingly little yeah the jacksons are in there boney emma in there alicia bridges i think is in the 30s and and uh but this is the only one there what the rundown really reminds me of is i think i've mentioned in the past you know doing the old thumbs up thumbs down for stuff that you liked and stuff that you didn't like but i remember at this time it got beyond that to where you'd actually have to stay if something came up you know that was good you had to say oh god i hope they play that please play that at the beginning of every episode you know your next half hour of happiness is kind of hinging

on what they play and what they didn't play so the rundown was a real moment of kind of like oh god i hope they play that and they often obviously frequently didn't um but yeah the rundown was charged with with that with that hope that things that you liked will come on but also that constant thumb up thumb down don't like that like this yes the other thing about this chart rundown is that the way that the pictures are so shoddy as well it's like they just all the pictures of the acts that come up it's like they've just got any old picture just shove it on a slide never mind when it's from just crop it roughly to four three and so there's a that's there's a picture of the stones where you can only see three of them like keith is off the side you can't see there's a picture

of public image limited where john lyon is leaning out of the frame he's not even in the picture get some picture you took of them yourself when you saw them in Fine Fair filling up their fucking car at a petrol station my favourite one out of those is the one of X-Ray Specs

where it looks like they're just on a fag break at their jobs in the fucking cat food factory there's a great one of X-Ray Specs, where it looks like they're just on a fag break at their jobs in the fucking cat food factory. There's a great one of Elvis Costello in the attractions, where they all look like sarcastic Nazi doctors. Like kind of sneering down at the camera with these glasses on.

Yeah, and Dean Freeman looking like a cat sitting in his own piss. And there's Heatwave doing a human pyramid. Yes. Yeah, but Heatwave are banned and made a little bit of extra cash as a motorcycle display team. So the following week, Giving Up, giving in dropped to number 17. Oh, top of the pubs, you've let

them down again. But the follow-up Woman in Love spent three weeks at number three in February of 1979. So the show begins properly, with no introduction for the first band, the Buzzcocks and their latest single, Promises. Formed at the Bolton Institute of Technology in 1976, Buzzcocks became one of the first of the new punk groups to set up their own record label when they released the

Spiral Scratch EP in January of 1977. They eventually signed with the United Artists in August of 1977, but their first single, Orgasm Addict, was kept off the BBC playlist and failed to chart. Can't

imagine why. However, they scored their first top 40 hit in February of 1978 with What Do I Get. This is a follow-up to Ever Fallen In Love, which got to number 12 earlier this month and is still in the charts at number 20, but this song is not due for release until tomorrow. Do you notice at the start, the camera has serious difficulty trying to get

pete shelly into focus and then a little a little bit later on it's really wobbling it's like top of the pops has become real supermarket tv by this point it's really being bashed out and you know not a lot of good well that the last time we were all in this place we watched that black and white one where it was really professional and everything was beautifully framed and beautifully lit and beautifully directed this really is just yeah put the band on the stage point a couple of cameras at them and and hope for the best it felt like a work experience moment at that point because you can see him not only be out of focus but then get

overly in focus and pull back and you can sense his panic in a sense. It is an odd moment that. Kind of punks arrived in top of the Pops land doesn't it? Yeah that's fast turnover as well isn't it? I never realised that they put those singles out so close to each other.

Especially as this is the point where they the drop-off begins with buzzcocks I think this song ever falling in love is you know by common consensus is the peak and then this one yeah I mean well when you hear it on singles going steady it's clearly the point where the graph starts to travel downwards. Although when you hear it on this programme, coming out of nowhere, all sort of flat and bright and speedy and compressed, it sounds pretty brilliant. Even after 40 years of terrible groups

doing artless, gormless copies of this sound i don't know about fall off i know what you mean but i mean for me there's the odd trap buzzcocks do later on um everybody's happy nowadays and things like that that i still kind of love and this is i think still them at their um at their peak there is minimal pogoing going on which i think the cameraman spots really early on that this supposed punk audience isn't really punking it up um so there's very much a focus on the band which i think is absolutely right for the buzzcocks which i mean a band really always about shelly about him writing these amazing um love songs um they're really unmarketable, the Buzzcocks, when you look at them on this stage. They're kind of uncomfortable and uncompromising,

kind of not in an attitudinal way, but the whole thing about kids getting up on the stage, it's like that. This is like an audience of Top of the Pops kids actually stood on stage. And they are kids, however old they might have been at the time. They come across like kids. actually stood on stage and that they are kids however old they might have been at the time that they come across like kids as we'll see later with kind of elvis costello and the boomtown rats

the new wave punk end of things had by this time really started to sound for me like kind of big big like early springsteen or something buzzcocks defiantly don't go for anything big on promises it's a small song about a little relationship in a small world and it's all the more affecting for it I'd say it's very 60s in their kind of look and sound it reminded me of kind of like a great lost kind of mid 60s psych record it's just a great song there is another hit in the chart already at this time by Eric Clapton, fresh off his most racist year yet.

I think this is a great song. Cannot get enough of the Buzzcocks. And I think, I could be wrong, but Parks, didn't Parks, Taylor, didn't you, Parks, you were a boy. You've spoken with Pete, haven't you yeah i interviewed him a couple years ago um i think i think he'd had a drink but he was all right um he was very nice very polite and friendly uh he had the air of a man who'd been interviewed a few too many times but um no he was exactly as you'd expect like self self-deprecating and chirpy, you know.

Yeah. Yeah, this is a bit like an early 60s record, but with all the machismo sucked out of it. Yeah. Because, you know, if this record had been made in 66, they'd have had a singer trying to sound like Howlin' Wolf or something, you know. They would have been an ex-R&B band rather than an ex-punk band. But yeah, I think the secret of Buzzcocks is that they could do both of the things that pop songs do best,

which is the miniaturization of huge feelings and the expansion of tiny details. So you get these two things happening at once and it's like the stairs effect in vertigo like a sort of zoom in and pull back at the same time and the sort of the sort of flat urgency of the sound works really well for about two albums and partly because it fits the peculiarly puritanical feel of some of their songs, which is the thing that really made them stand out,

because not only were they not macho, they were sort of lusty, but simultaneously a bit kind of, you know... This is more apparent in the really early stuff, the Howard DeVoto lyrics, most of which are about sexual disgust and repulsion and stuff but there's a bit like in pete shelley's songs as well he's always cowering away from people and stuff or you know getting pissed off with people for being too flighty and things and it's really good i mean for the time it would have

sounded more uh more remarkable than it does now because it was a very new thing, you know. And yeah, you're right, they look fantastic, partly because they look so crap, you know, but in such a great way. They look like the kind of kids at school whose mums make really funny-smelling teas with savoury rice or something. So peach ellies in a jumper,

it's like a vintage partick thistle kit or you know what it's like it's like a roll of fruit polos a stack of these colors and the um steve diggles got white jeans on that look like they've been turned up at the but like taken up not turned up taken up at the bottom, like taken up, not turned up, taken up at the bottom, turned inside. Steve Garvey's all in black with dark glasses like the Milk Tray Man, if Milk Tray was a bit out of his budget. It's almost as if he's tucked his flares into his socks or something, what's going on there? Yeah, it's like a bit SAS, isn't it? Sinbad trousers, yeah.

And the, what's his name, John Marr, the drummer's got a voluminous, wine-coloured lurex shirt with a massive white tie. It's quite something. Yeah, he looks great. The drummer looks brilliant. The best looking drummer in this show, this side of Clem Burke,

he looks absolutely fantastic. Oh, and the other thing, Pete Shelley's wearing shoes. Like, it's not thing, Pete Shelley's wearing shoes. Like, it's not... Do you know what I mean? They're not, like, sort of boots or trainers. They're shoes. And he's got that hair where he's going a bit bold at the front, but he's got a whale tail at the back,

you know, where the hair sort of curls to a point on either side of the back of his neck, like the business end of an anchor. Yeah, they look fantastic. They're totally different from everyone else on the show, and not just in their look and everything else, but the songwriting is just completely different. What's simultaneously both heartbreaking and amazing

about early Buzzcock stuff is how quickly they use up and jettison hooks i mean hooks that other bands would kill for and probably if they wrote songs would spin them out for four minutes or something because they're such good hooks but with the buzzcocks they just kind of blaze through these things in about two minutes and the conciseness of them is just breathtaking there's nothing else on this show remotely like the buzzcocks yeah Yeah, to me, they're almost like the last great British art school band in the sense of using little bits and pieces of art theory and applying them to pop music,

to expand it without breaking it and contract it to concentrate its power. Whereas after this, you'd get bands that were arty, which is not the same thing at all. They'd be like sooty or pretentious in the true sense. Whereas this is just pure pop music but improved by sitting down and thinking about how you're going to do it first. And like some other records it will come to, there is a course.

I mean, I don't know if... Were people conscious at this time of Pete Shelley's sexuality or not? I don't know because the songs are ambiguous enough to be applicable to any gender in any any relationship so as we'll see later well i mean i i didn't know that but then again i was 10 and uh you know if they weren't toting a handbag around and saying oh okay well then they weren't gay he virtually does he virtually does on on the line ooh strictly made for fools which the sheer campness of the delivery of that on the record is um amply uh emphasized by the

visuals here where he basically uh um does a little kind ofed mouth sort of into the camera. It's fucking brilliant. Yeah. That's fantastic. So two weeks later, Promises entered the chart at number 37 and it got as high as number 20 in January of 1979. The follow-up, Everybody's Happy Nowadays, would only get to number 29 and they would never bother the top 20 again, splitting up for the first time in 1981.

Why did you ever let me down? Why did you ever let me down? Why did you ever let me down? Those promises we made for us. And we're loving Bunch Park with their new single called Promises. And at number 24 in the chart this week, the Demon Prince of the 3rd Division, Elton John with his new single called Part-Time Love.

Part-time love Is bringing me down Cause I just can't get it started with you My love Did I hear you saying That I'm too hard-hearted Why The kid, on his own, describes the next act

As the demon prince of the third division Which sounds like the best Roy of the Rover strip ever Can you imagine that? A satanist takes over a mediocre football club and sacrifices virgin fans on the pitch to avoid relegation. Amazing. And they're battling against

Liverton or whatever. That would have been awesome. My favourite strip in Royal Rovers I think was The Safest Hands in Soccer. The one about the goalie? Because I was a goalie. Because this was a time where like mighty mouse you could be a professional top flight footballer despite being morbidly obese the uh the safe stands in soccer was my favorite because i i was a an aspiring

goalkeeper but and i was quite good at it and at the time i was one of the tallest in my class but seeing as i grew up to be just about five foot eight um it's probably good that i didn't put too much stock in goalkeeping as a future career it was brilliant the way they kind of kept the fiction alive i remember what do you remember when he got shot yes and and and then the issue forget who could forget and then the week after i remember the issue like the central section of it was just purely devoted to well wishes from celebrities and they were like they were like notes from all kinds of people more common wise and you know loads of famous footballers saying get well soon roy you know yeah you know you'll be back in

training soon and all this so they really kept the fiction going brilliantly with that. They always used to have photographs of celebrities with Roy Race. And in fact, it was with a life-size cutout of Roy Race. They used to, like, get people at the IPC offices. It was as if they hadn't noticed. It was as if, like, hey, here we are with Roy Race. It's like he just seems to ghost past Defenders. The thing that really surprises me looking back on that era is why didn't they do a Roy of the Rovers comic about pop stars? There was never that crossover.

Pop actually didn't really get into comics much. Look-In took care of that. So you never really saw pop stars cropping up in Roy the Ravish or, of course, Wizard and Chips or anything like that. It was kept very... It was like Looking owned pop music, really. Yeah. Yeah, I think it was a missed opportunity there

because boys and girls would read it, wouldn't they? Looking, when they did, used to cover pop. I never used to read Looking. It actually used to get disdained by me in much the same way that, sort of, in my house looking it actually used to get disdained by me in much the same way that sort of in my house ITV was faintly disdained so so looking would be as well and when I did get to look at a copy which I think was about 82 I remember there was a that their lead story was a three-page kind of comic about Bucks Fizz and I remember just reading it with

disgust just thinking it's pathetic and it The Adventures of Bucks Fizz? Yeah I think it was, I think it was It was The Adventures of Bucks Fizz They had the ability to time travel or something What? Yeah, that could be something I dreamt Well they've been sent into the future to kill David Van Dyne Pretty much any character in any comic back then was of course

one step away from finding a secret time portal through to the land of the dinosaurs somehow. So I think that's what was going on then. I remember feeling that was so pathetic it was beneath me, perhaps the start of my teenager-dom. The thing about Roy Race, he was alright but could he do it

on a wet Wednesday night in Stoke without turning into Papier Mâché? So, the next song introduced by Kid is Part-Time Love by Elton John. Born in Pinner in 1947,

Reg Dwight was a child prodigy who could play the piano at the age of four and won a junior scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music at the age of 11. By the age of 15, he had a weekend job as a pub pianist, and by the age of 17, he'd formed a band called Bluesology, which had become Long John Baldry's backing band. In 1968, he became a staff songwriter for Dick James, the publisher of the Beakles, and sang on a range of cover version LPs, including the Top of the Pop series. His first solo LP, Elton John, was released in 1970,

and a year later he had his first chart hit when Your Song got to number 7 in February of 1971. He then went on for a run of 21 top 40 hits before announcing that he was retiring from the stage in late 1977. This song is a follow-up to Ego, which got to number 34 in April of this year, and it's the first single off his new album, A Single Man, and it's currently a non-mover at 24. He's also the current chairman of Watford FC, hence the demon prince of the third division remark. Yeah, and it's a video. Yes. Yeah.

And what a video. Yeah. It's a mock-up of Ready, Steady, Go, isn't it? Yeah. Elton sat at the piano, and he's got some kind of clockwork orange appearance about him, hasn't he? He's got a bowler hat on, and he's had a bit of make-up, and he's got this weird sideburn thing going on, where the bottom of the sideburn

comes down and curls around the underside of his ears. Really heavy. Yeah, what it looks like is if in the universe of A Clockwork Orange, there was a dad who tried to dress young and didn't quite get it. Who tried to get into googly go-go. He looks kind of Bowler-esque, I think.

Really heavy eyeliner and dark. And he looks, frankly, like he's either speeding or coked out of his face. Yes. He looks sort of damaged in a way. And keen to get it all over with. The Cathy McGowan being sat there, I'm guessing, as the elder stateswoman, seen it all before. Cathy McGowan, the original host of Ready, Steady, Go!

is in the video, sat at Elton's feet. Yeah, looking like she's embalmed and, like, averting her gaze for the whole thing. She doesn't look at him at any point. No. It's a bit weird. She looks like there's something a bit wrong with her. Yeah.

Yeah, he definitely very much has that that uh koki look of looking simultaneously wide awake and really tired and uh yeah he also as well as the bowler hat he's got this kind of uh low-cut t-shirt thing with his chest hair frothing out the top of it, like the crest of a Japanese wave, or the fur that grows on a pool of small dog vomit that's laying unnoticed under the bed for about three months. Oh, you paint such a picture yeah it's not it's

not nice but yeah the main thing of course about this is the the the kids in the video yes who uh um it's supposed to look from the 60s so they've got in a load of mod revivalists yeah yeah who were obviously around at the time and trying desperately to look like they're from, what, 13 years earlier? Yeah. Which seems an absurdly short amount of time. It really does, doesn't it? Because of this telescoping of pop time. If someone now tried to look like they were from, what would it be, 2004?

2004. Yeah, all you have to do is get an older phone and yes and there you go you you can pass this is a recent thing though because i mean what's this 1978 you definitely had people in 1992 trying to look like they were from 1978 um or in fact a year or two later than that right you had uh these animal Men and Smash and stuff. Trying to look like they were from 1978. And that then seemed a far and distant place, you know? This is definitely a recent thing that this has contracted.

The thing is that they are really obviously from 1978. That's the trouble. You would never, never mistake this. The best one is the girl who's got it. It's like she's tried to go that extra step and it's ended up a bit wrong and she's got a shiny white plastic Mac like a butcher's coat

with homemade coloured polka dots stuck on it. But the effect is that she looks like a walking twister playmat. Yes. And also she's obviously had some speed as well for the full 60s effect because she's got a very determined look on her face

as she does those dances. I wonder where they got these kids from. Because some of them aren't kids. Some of them look quite old and and i don't really get the point of doing this kind of homage to ready steady go um how many people would have got it your dads would have got it you know mom and dad would have got it maybe i mean it seeing the dancers the mods of the button down collars the parkers etc

um i couldn't actually tell where they got the kids from. And crucially, whether the kids were actually taking the piss a little bit. Because three audience members for me really stick out. The guy with the parker, who just smirks continually through the whole thing. And I can't tell whether he's

kind of joking about it, in a sense. His face, it's really odd because obviously it's a 78 episode, but that look of smirking, that could be somebody doing top bants right now. There's something about that. The girl in the white jumpsuit with the pink badge on it,

I think the white jacket that Taylor's wearing also leaps out. There's a dude combing his hair, which I think was a nice touch. But there's this strange moment suddenly where the camera cuts to a variety of body oddities. It just cuts to a girl's crotch, Cathy McGowan's knees,

and then a girl just going batshit in a kind of gold puffer jacket who annoyed the hell out of me because she obscures a girl in a check dress who i really wanted to see i wanted to see what she looked like but yeah it gets in the way massively do you know i mean um she looks gorgeous they go in the background she looks like she's really got a fantastic look going for this video great 60s look and what little you can see of her, she's lovely but she's obscured by this this idiot flinging

herself around in a sort of a disco outfit. And there's one bloke who's completely out of sync with everyone else who actually looks like Razors in the long Good Friday. He's got that kind of long tash going off and he's massive. And the backing

singer, there was one bloke who's got kind kind of long tash going off and he's massive. And the backing singer, there was one bloke, he's got kind of a Bee Gees look on him. And I thought, is that a woman? Because he looked like Diana Rigg when she was being the brummy mate of Butch in Theatre of Blood. And there's a really blatant cleavage shot as well isn't there near the end oh yeah just a bit

but also even though all these kids are in the video trying to look like the 60s Elton isn't dressed like the 60s neither are his backing singers and neither are that featured dancer one of them is BG's duck one of them looks like Ringo Starr in the 80s

it's a really strange mix it's like if you're going to do this video One of them looks like Ringo Starr in the 80s. It's a really strange mix. It's like if you're going to do this video and if you're going to get the set and you're going to get all these kids in, why not go the whole way? Why not do it properly? Yeah. I think Billy Joel was probably watching this and going,

I could do this miles better. Yeah. There is a way in which... I can piss this out of my this fuck elton there is a way in which the dancers are kind of right in a way for the music because you could imagine this perhaps i mean you know it's a long shot but it has got a kind of northern soul disco-y feel to it and and it could it could have worked i mean if can we talk about the song a little bit because why not you know because i mean i i have you know big problems with elton john not not that he's and it could have worked. I mean, can we talk about the song a little bit? Yeah, let's. Why not?

Because, I mean, I have big problems with Elton John. Not that he's done anything mahoosively objectionable, I just don't like him that much. And kind of from his early work, the only one I'd sort of pluck out would be perhaps Benny and the Jets, and that's just because I like it because it's so damn slow. But I like Elton when he does disco and when his voice is in a lower register as it is here

but as with other bands that we'll go on to talk about I find it difficult very difficult to go beyond the hits I often find myself in the middle of the day thinking the oddest kind of existential thought which is that somewhere in the world somebody right now is making the choice to listen to

Elton John's Made in England and it does my head in just thinking right now is making the choice to listen to Elton John's Made in England. And it does my head in just thinking for a moment. So that one's one of those people. My wife is a big fan and she's constantly tried to persuade me of the virtues of Good Boy Yellow Brick Road and also the Captain Fantastic album. But for me, it's all about the disco, really. It's about this one. And of course, the Kiki Dee song about the only ones that I can kind of stomach by him.

Well, this does sound to me like the natural follow-up to Don't Go Breaking My Heart. It's got that sort of chugging undertow with the cello on it, a bit like ELO. But it seems awesomely ignorable, this song. It sounds like it was constructed to affect as few people as possible it's done with a lot of precision and it's got quite a fluid feel to it so it's you can tell it's like quotes good music but it's it just seems like it does absolutely nothing and yet

this is the proof that he's some sort of evil genius. Because I was walking down the street about three days ago and I had a song in my head. And I was like, what's that song? What is it? And wouldn't you know it, it was this. Really strange, yeah. But Elton strikes me as one of those rock stars who seems to have no real reason to do what he does.

Because he doesn't even write his own words because he's got nothing to say um he never never seems to be any point to what he's doing and all that success didn't seem to make him happy at all there's always something a bit desperate and anxious and uncomfortable about him however bland the music might be he seems very on edge yeah because ordinarily if somebody if somebody like didn't wasn't comfortable with fame that their normal thing would be i don't know i just want to sing my songs but you're right they're not his songs i mean he's writing the music but they're not his lyrics and that's like all important the lyrics to this are written by a

guy called gary osborne who sang backing vocals on sugar baby love by the Rubettes and wrote a ton of jingles early on in the 70s. And, you know, but he constantly has to do this. So what are you? Are you a pianist or a pop star? And if you're a pop star, surely you have to, I don't know, assert your own, you have to have a little grain of yourself in there, whereas he is always calling on other people for words, which makes me slightly

mistrust him, I think Well, I think that's probably one of the reasons why he's lasted for so long What do you mean? Well, because he doesn't get stuck in a rut, I mean, you know the 70s, as we'll discover later on in this episode, you know

70s was awash with male singer songwriters but they all ended up saying the same thing and they fucked off pretty early in most cases but to me elton john always seemed like uh it always seemed like grown-up music when i was a kid and when i became grown up it still sounds like grown-up music and the and the lyrical content doesn't help you know that that wouldn't mean jack shit to me as a 10 year old you know every love you had if you had a girlfriend it wouldn't mean jack shit to me as a 10 year old. You know, every love you had,

if you had a girlfriend, it wouldn't be a part-time love because, you know, you spend most of your time playing football and then do a bit of hand-holding and then, you know,

back on your chopper and fucking off around the estate. I think you're right about the adult thing because, I mean, he's, I think he's the only male singer to have been introduced, you know, by Ronnie Corbett on the Two Ronnies.

I don't remember there ever being. If Elkie Brooks or Barbara Dixon couldn't make it that week, I remember Elton John doing it. So you're right, he is very adult-orientated. And for adults, not kids. Apart from the Kiki D song, which I think was just a big hit with everybody. Yeah, and all the good shit that we would have liked as kids is him in massive bovver boots and stuff like that. He'd already been and gone.

So to us, he was the kind of person you'd see for kind of like albums in your mate's mam's record collection. Yeah. And it would mean just as much as Des O'Connor or Max Bygraves. To me, the great tragedy of Elton John is that he never got to sing a rewrite of Candle in the Wind at the funeral of Princess Sheila Ferguson. So the following week, Part-Time Love jumped eight places to number 16,

stayed there for a week, then dropped to number 20, and then back up to number 15, its highest position. The follow-up, Song for Guy, got to number four in January of 1979. You, me, everybody got a part-time love And the Felton John failed to get your circulation going, and here's Shawadi Wadi with an effervescent little move that they call Pretty Little Angel Lies Pretty Little Angel Lies fail to get your circulation going then here's shawaddy waddy with an effervescent little mover they call pretty little angel lies pretty little angel lies pretty little angel kid still alone reassures us that if the last song didn't give us a musical erection the next one will it's pretty little angel lies by show Waddy Waddy. We've already covered

Show Waddy Waddy in Chant Music number four, so let's just say that they're on a run of six top five singles on the bounce. This is a cover of the Curtis Lee song, which got to number 47 in 1961. It's a follow-up to A Little Bit of Soap, which got to number five in July of this

year, and it's the first single from the new LP Crepes and Drapes. And it's up from number 16 to number seven. Now, chaps, you know how there's nothing more boring than other people's dreams, yeah? Mm-hmm. Well, mine happened to be brilliant and fascinating. I've had so many dreams about Show Waddy Waddy

since we started doing chart music. Last week, I dreamed... I ended up getting into a really bad argument so many dreams about show waddy waddy since we've started doing chart music um last week last week i dreamed i ended up getting into a really bad argument with pricey we were telling each other to fuck off and everything because there was a ninth member of show waddy waddy that only i could see and we were talking about him we were talking about it and i was going what about the seat lad there was a nice member of the show what do you want to hear he was a seat lad right

he he was he was really tubby he did all the Ted dancing absolutely immaculate and the other thing I can remember was

he had you know those snake belt clasps on those elastic belts like Ranji Ram used to have around his turban

yeah yeah right he had two of them with stars on it so it looked like on those elastic belts like Ranji Ram used to have around his turban. Yeah, yeah. Right? He had two of them with stars on it so it looked like the Confederate flag. Oh, that's an interesting choice. And he was brilliant. And we were talking about show what he wanted and I said, oh, the Sikh lad, he's fucking brilliant, isn't he?

And Price is going, what are you going on about? And we ended up having this screaming row at each other. And so I'd just like to apologise to the Simon Price in my imagination for calling him a cunt. So Shawaddy Waddy, Neil, we've already discussed them, haven't we? We have. But you never run out of things to say about Shawaddy Waddy. No, no, you really don't.

You really don't you really don't i mean i i'd call this actually sort of lazy autopilot shawads because yeah um you know this song i mean i think this the guy who did it originally also went on to do under the moon of love it's almost like they're going through his hits collection just kind of yeah things to do cashing into an extent i mean shahna and i did this as well. And of course, they're in Greece this year. Greece is big this year. This was always going to be a guaranteed hit.

What you can see in the performance is that by now, the Wads are confident of conducting a performance completely above the audience, really. Yeah. The audience look bored, to be honest with you.

Even during the sax break, when the band start doing some strange version of the biscuit game around the sax player and tweaking his ear and stuff. There's one girl who thinks it's hilarious. The remaining kind of Pam Ewing-alikes, because there's a lot of them. Dallas begins to broadcast in 78.

They just look totally unimpressed. And the audience are looking at Shawoddy Woddy with the same kind of dead eyed mix of bewilderment and boredom you get from the midwich cuckoos so it's autopilot stuff could have been on Summertime Special not really a great Top of the Pops moment but let's face

it they like the three degrees were on every fucking episode of Top of the Pops in this period yeah and you do say that they're getting a bit of a leg up from Greece, but surely, you know, after seeing the films and the clips and everything, you know, John

Travolta and his mates are looking a little bit more virile than these dads from Leicester. Maybe so, maybe so. Yeah, well, the thing is, it's amazing how hopeless they are. They're not I mean, they're not serious, you know. It is, it's amazing how hopeless they are. They're not serious. It's like a load of teachers at an end-of-term assembly.

Or when all the kids' TV presenters did a number on all-star record breakers. It doesn't seem like this is their actual job. is their actual job. I mean, what they have instead of a bass man is just that oaf who just drops his voice and goes like, pretty little angel eyes.

There's no resonance at all. It's like a kid doing an impression of his dad. Yeah. They're besieged from all sides, aren't they? Because now this is the year that darts and Rocky Sharp and the replays are starting to encroach upon their patch you know clicking their fingers like in west side story you know they've got to defend their turf haven't they yeah it's they really did get piece of turf left behind very bad i as a kid though

there was two things about shawadigoddy that i remember first of all i was fascinated by the contrast between the colors of their day glow teddy boy stage wear because you know our six-year-olds think in a weird free associative uh almost lsd type way um to me their differently colored suits were linked in my mind to the differently colored foam microphone covers on the comedians um which also used to fascinate me and i remember as a kid thinking there must be some significance to the the uh doling out of the different colours. Like maybe the lead singer reminded someone of a banana that's just about ready for the bin. Let me stop you there, Taylor, because I've done a little bit of research on Shawaddy Waddy.

I think this is the third time we've spoken about them. You know, we haven't even spoken about bloody T-Rex or Prince yet, but we've fucking three goes around and show whatty-whotty. Apparently, they had... There was no choosing of the colours. They used to swap round. They used to swap their gear round. So they'd wear a different colour every time.

Yeah. Did they all fit into each other's suits? I don't know. I don't want to think about it to be honest that's disappointing because i thought you know it'd be kind of like star trek but if you ended up with the red thing you were gonna die that night or something and it's not like reservoir dogs either no but the the other thing that that always creep creep me out was the singers uh weird boyishness yeah well, the rest of the group

looked like Sweeney Villains or Third Division Centre Arves, you know, or South London Debt Collectors. Oh, except for the bass player who looks like a melancholy grass. But what's weird is looking at him now, what's his name again, the singer? Dave Bartram.

Thank you, Dave Bartram. Looks like one of those ageing, young-faced blokes, right, who look ageless until they're about 38, and then a couple of cracks appear, and then a few more, and then suddenly in their mid-40s, their whole face just collapses in one go. Like Paul McCartney being the most famous of these, right?

Yes. And he looks in this clip like he's in the few more cracks stage, like maybe a young 41, right? Like Jim Dale, which he reminds me of, or who he really reminds me of, which is Roy North. You know Basil Brush's piss mop, Roy North, right? Yes, exactly, yes.

And so I looked it up. Presenter of Get It Together. That's right. Another great pop show of the era. Yeah, and whole city fan, yeah. But I looked it up, and Dave Bartram is 26 in this clip. Wow. So he was five or six years younger than the rest of the band.

They were all in their early 30s. But he looked proportionately just as old for his age as they do. So whatever they were doing to make themselves look like shit, they were all doing it together. But I think people thought Dave Bartram was handsome. He was kind of like a Lester Oliver Tobias in a way.

Yeah. But pretty little... A nice bloke as well apparently Dave Bartram. A friend of mine's been around his ass many a time and oft. Nice bloke apparently. The trouble is though just one last thing about this record. The original was awful as well.

I checked out the original. For a song that is a Phil Spector production and is written by the Boyz Hart combination who went on to write so many great things for the Monkees, it's a really shit record. I mean, the thing about the Ted revivalism, it was definitely a look back to the 50s, but it was always a look back to the Americans but it was always a look back to the

american 50s i don't think anybody wanted a british 50s back anytime soon no this had nothing to do with skiffle or anything like that i don't know it was a totally totally tommy steel yeah no it's a totally totally different thing but i mean it stuck around for so bloody long as well because like you're talking about you you're talking about talking about darts and then flying pickets. And this shit never goes away for a long, long time. By the way, I did some more research, and I actually dug up an interview with Dave Bartram a few years ago about Top of the Pops.

And he was asked when he did Top of the Pops, what was it like? Was it an all-day job, or was it just a case of turn up for the cameras? And he said, Top of the Pops was an all-day job and very boring to boot. We'd arrive around 11am to go through camera positions and pretty much spend the rest of the day drinking tea and twiddling our thumbs between rehearsals. There'd be a dress run at about 4pm and then it was up to the BBC bar to socialise with the other artists

before recording at 8pm-ish. That part wasn't boring. And the interviewer said, I say, Mr Roy, those crow's feet look a bit out of place. He brought up about having to re-record the tracks for broadcast on Top of the Pops, because this is something that's always fascinated us. He said, yeah, the tracks had to be re-recorded in three hours under the supervision of a Musicians' Union representative who was supposed to be re-recorded in three hours under the supervision of a musicians union representative who was supposed to be on our side

it was a crazy situation but most artists found a way around it by giving the rep a master tape that had been swapped for a much better version sometimes the original master the unions were very militant at that time and so self-important

we despised them The unions were very militant at that time and so self-important, we despised them. Fucking scab. Scab, waddy, waddy. Scab. And he also mentions in this interview that round about this time, Show Waddy Waddy actually did a band photo shoot on Skegness Beach wearing German army helmets and nothing else. Oh, my God.

Yeah. wearing German army helmets and nothing else. Oh, my God. Yeah, apparently they were never released, but apparently a couple of them have popped up on eBay every now and again. So if anybody's out there wants to buy a photo of show-woddy-woddy naked in SS helmets, then there you go. That's a niche porn market right there. Yeah.

The following week, Pretty Little Angel Eyes nudged up to number five, its highest position. It would be their last top ten hit, however. The follow-up, Remember Then, would only get to number 17 in April of 1979, a diminishing return set in. Sadly, Show Waddy Waddy were beheaded on stage by ISIS in a gig in Luxembourg a few weeks ago. That was the other dream about a man.

LAUGHTER Shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, shibam, I was tuning in the shine of the light And I dialed the wind and it took my radio fast A kid, still alone, speculates that the next act May have written their latest single in wild anticipation Of a national radio network moving its frequencies about No kid, that's the first thing you've got wrong this episode. It's actually Radio Radio by Elvis Costello and the Attractions. Born in London in 1954, Declan McManus was, of course,

the son of Ross McManus, a band leader best known for writing and singing I'm a Secret Lemonade Drinker for the R. White's advertising campaign in 1973. After leaving school, he formed a pub rock band called Flip City, worked as a roadie for Brinsley Schwartz, held down day jobs at Elizabeth Arden as a data entry clerk and a computer operator for Midland Bank before signing to Stiff Records in early 1977. However, it wasn't until March of 1978 that he scored his first chart hit with his fifth single, I Don't Wanna Go To Chelsea, which got to number 16. This is the follow-up to Pump It Up, which got to number 24 in June of this year, and it's up from number 33 to number 29.

Now, this song has already caused mither when Elvis interrupted a performance of Less Than Zero on Saturday Night Live in December of 1977, and he played this instead when he was told not to, and was subsequently banned from the show for 12 years. It's also a repeat of the Top of the Pops performance he made three weeks previously. Very important to get over that for obvious reasons as time goes on. Well, this is, yeah yeah it's the tail end single isn't it from this year's model i think i prefer chelsea and i think i prefer pump it up it's probably my least favorite of those it does his usual habit of actually um getting to the chorus and then not singing the chorus his choruses are kind of quite often instrumental in a way, and he kind of leads up to them. But I think some places,

this was actually called radio, radio, as opposed to radio, radio. The importance of commas, of course, being proven to me by the Rolling Stones single, Paint It Black, which in America was sometimes called Paint It, Black, which was interpreted as a radio. What, like it was a command?

Like paint my fence or something? Yeah, absolutely. There's some single versions of that single in America. Yeah, no, I've seen it. They paint it comma black, and it was interpreted by some people. I didn't realise. Yeah, as being a kind of racist thing.

So they changed it in the future. But for me, Elvis, I've kind of got problems with him to a certain extent because when i started playing guitar and standing on a stage the thing that i've got from so many fucking people because i wear nhs specs as well is you look dead like elvis costello which used to bug me a lot to me he kind of errs on the side of worthiness rather than excitement. But a really literate pop writer. And I'm very, very not confused by Elvis Costello, but I can't love him.

I can love Pump It Up. I have no problem with that record at all because just physically, it's just a great thing, especially heard over a loud system. But the rest of it, I don't know. I'm not a mahoosive fan of Elvis at all, but this year's model is a cracking album. I think of all the acts that I dislike, Elvis Costello is the one I like the most.

Do you know what I mean? It's like I can see that the bloke is talented, and I can appreciate that he's not just talented like Sting is talented, you know, in some sort of meaningless muso way. He can actually write powerful songs that work about as well as that particular kind of pop song can. And I'm ashamed to say that I listened to one of his albums a couple of months ago, King of America,

and I enjoyed it, which his albums a couple of months ago, King of America and I enjoyed it, which was really a nasty feeling but I'm 45 years old, so fuck me is what I'm saying, you know what I mean, fuck me and people like me

but you, yeah I don't want to go to Chelsea, it's a good record this is a pretty good record oliver's army i know exactly what taylor's talking about because when i when i later on started investigating over scostello a bit on my own reconnaissance and seeking out albums i guess and i think the first album i properly listened to by him was a much later one blood and chocolate i think it was 86 or something like that i did sort of in a sense admire the craft but at the same time i felt i was listening because it was something i ought to do do you know what i mean like like like in order

to sort of appreciate not appreciate music but in order to kind of it was that i ought to listen to this this is you know proper music in a sense and i've always faintly resisted that and and that there's still that there's still that with Elvis Costello even at this young age for me there's no single Elvis Costello record that's pure off the hook young excitement in a way they're all kind of very you know carefully written and I and I find that with an awful lot of what what would be called new wave i guess it is really it's a new wave but it seems like a reassertion of a very old wave and and it seems like a reassertion of very sort of dylan-esque springsteen-esque kind of qualities in pop which have not always been the ones that for me have

led to the most excitement and i'd see elvis costello um as being kind of emblematic of that i really didn't like him because I thought he had a bit of a cheek calling himself Elvis and that kind of got on my wick a bit but then you know, pump it up, I don't want to go to Chelsea, perfect

10 year old punk, you know to me he was proper punk, you know because he was just pissed off even when he was on a stage he looked pissed off and particularly on this performance he's he's you know i'd have been very happy with this simply because you know he had a go at what i thought was kid jensen when he points him and sings the radios in the hands of lots of silly men and then injects his own arm, which I wouldn't have understood. That's right, because he's pointing across the studio.

That's right, because you said this is a repeat from the previous week or the week before. And it was Tony Blackburn, right, was doing it. So he's pointing across the studio at Tony Blackburn when he's singing about silly men. But because on this one, Kid Jensen clearly isn't across the studio at Tony Blackburn when he's singing about silly men. But because on this one, Kid Jensen clearly isn't in the studio, it doesn't quite work.

Yeah, but you wouldn't know that. I've been thinking, what are you having a go at Kid Jensen for? He probably plays you loads of times. Yeah, he seems really nice. And the thing is, I actually went back. I've got the top of the pops that it was originally on. And strangely enough, I've got both the UK gold version

and the BBC four version because I'm a sad bastard. And in both cases, it kind of like you don't see a cut back to Tony Blackburn at the end. And it just crashes into the next song. And there's half an introduction. So I've always wondered what Tony Blackburn at the end and it just crashes into the next song and there's half an introduction so I've always wondered what Tony Blackburn said in response probably, I don't know, Buddy Holly was better

than you, you specky cunt yeah, he just comes back and says like fuck you too Elvis Costello I may be a silly man but at least I don't use racist slurs and also I mean one thing about this song is that

I love this song I'm sorry I really do there's enough of that 10 year old you don't have to apologise now it's alright no this is his best period though isn't it this is definitely when he was at his best I mean when he started doing country and western,

that was a huge letdown. No, but the band are quite clearly going for it. Unfortunately, when the camera pulls back at the end, it's at the side, so it appears that there's only two people up the front, which is a bit upsetting. I did a review, like a live review of Elvis Costello once, when I was at Melody Maker,

in his real classicist period, when he was doing old 50s tunes and stuff, and it was really miserable. I gave him a really bad review, and I said all the stuff that I've said here but in a much more unpleasant way because I was like 22 and um about three weeks later I was backstage at some gig it might have been the blur gig in Mile End actually and somebody introduced me to Joe Strummer um and they went oh meet meet joe strummer okay and he said oh yeah no wait wait taylor parks incredibly joe strummer still read the music papers right in the night there's no idea why

he would have done this and he went oh yeah you wrote that thing about elvis costello the other week didn't you and i said yeah and he says he says i've been waiting 25 years for someone to say that about that cunt. So after that, Joe Strummer's, you know, never a huge Clash fan, but he went right on my list of the greats after that. But then he said, oh, come over here, I'll introduce you to Chrissie Hynde. And I said, no, please. Because you didn't read that one but I don't think the famously famously arse kicking

Chrissie Hynde would be delighted to meet me so the following week radio radio dropped down to number 35 see you have a go at Tony Blackburn man bad shit happens however the follow up Oliver's Army spent

three weeks at number two, held off the top spot by tragedy by the Bee Gees and I Will Survive by Gloria Gaynor. If you want someone rather special right now, here's some, you can cuddle up to by its heatwave, and this is called

Always and Forever. Always and forever Each moment with you Kid, still quarantined at the back, is obviously feeling lonely as he encourages the country to have a bit of a furkle on the settee to the next song, Always and Forever by Heatwave. Formed in London in 1975 when lead singer Johnny Wilder, a former US Army serviceman based in West Germany,

linked up with Rod Temperton, a keyboard player from Cleethorpes who was working at a Ross frozen food factory in Grimsby through an advert in Melody Maker, Heatwave were a multinational funk disco band. They first broke the UK chart with the number two smash Boogie Nights, which was held off the top spot in March of 1977 by When I Need You by The Old

Sailor. This song, which was written by Rod Temperton in his flat in Hull on a Wurlitzer keyboard with a telly on top of it, next to a pile of dirty washing, was originally the B-side of Mind Blowing Decisions decisions which got to number

12 in July of this year but when it was picked up on by the radio it was flipped over and it charged back up the charts. It's up this week from number 26 to number 23 Now Neil we've discussed before the British funk acts of the era

seem to be years behind their American counterparts. And this is another example, but who gives a fuck when it's as good as this? I love this. And, you know, I sense, probably at the time, I would have booed this. I would have hated it.

I was a kid. I wanted fastness and excitement. And, you know, I just really would not have responded to this song at all, apart from in boredom. But now, obviously, I mean mean holding hands with girls exactly but i mean rob temperton's a fucking genius considering what he made in his life and the astonishing songs he wrote the crucial thing that this hinges on is johnny wilder's vocal which is just wonderful it's a song that contains lots of chances for a singer to really wank it all up and get all melismatic.

But he keeps things really restrained and only breaks out into a falsetto towards the end. And it's beautifully done. However, like I say, at the time, I would have really resisted it. But as a grown-up, where you really are sort of grown-up, where you want records that don't just remind you of moments with people, but kind of express things you want to express to people in a way that's possibly too sappy for you to actually say face to face. But it's a great kind of, you know, last chance for slow dance record. And the crucial to it is rod semperton songwriting which just leaves things open in a lovely kind of big wide philly style kind of way um but also yeah the the the precision and

gentleness of johnny wilder's vocal you can imagine anyone covering this now would put it full of honking shouting kind of singing because there's that much space within it but he keeps it really really restrained it's a great record which I probably would have hated at the time it's one of those songs that when someone does it on the karaoke the whole pub turns round and looks at them

and thinks to themselves do you really know what you've let yourself in for it's like the male version of Loving You by Minnie Ripper it's like have you actually thought through version of loving you by mini rip it's like have you have you actually thought through the fucking heights you've got to reach in this song and you're going to make a complete cunt of yourself by the end of it unless you're very good indeed absolutely and johnny walter at no point does that thing that most shit singers do of closing their eyes and

concentrating he looks at the audience he sings it and it's believable he sings it with with conviction and consequently it's convincing he's just a wonderful singer singing a great song yeah although he does do it through that fixed richter's grip which kind of gets me down a bit it's like you know um miles davis said of uh louis armstrong you know i loved him but i couldn't stand all that grinning it's a bit there's something about that smile singing that that i don't know turns me off a bit taylor that face that grin i mean he would have cracked that grin on stage uh i don't know like sort of wheel tappers and shunters style style work in men's clubs he would have just had that fixated on his face and the moment he comes on stage and i don't think you know that expression would have changed no matter where he was playing or who he was singing to because i mean he's

looking out at kids who they don't look quite as bored as they do for other things and some of them are like swaying but it's it's not really a song for kids you know it's a song for for grown-up lovers and grown-up partners but he's still yeah but it's a really a song for kids. It's a song for grown-up lovers and grown-up partners. But he's still... Yeah, but it's a bit more understandable for kids than part-time love. Yeah, yeah, it is. It's like, oh, I really fancy you.

Let's go out and, I don't know, go to Wimpern. Have a big bend up and hold hands in the shopping centre. He puts it across with generosity, though, and tenderness, I think he does a great performance there. And what the fuck are the band wearing? Yeah, they're like the Blackshaw Waddy Waddy. They've got the differently coloured Dayglo fake satin waistcoats,

but with their Zodiac symbol on the tip of one wing collar. And the musical notes on the tip of one wing collar and the musical notes on the tip of one flares and it's it's pretty outmoded for 1978 you have to say only by a year or two but the audience are all the post-punk oiks staring up at them like they've stepped out of another century although although two of the band do have the star sign Cancer, the symbol of which does look like a paperclip. So that's sort of a little bit punk. I thought it was a safety pin.

Yeah. Oh, and Mr Orange on the keyboard. And I don't know who he is. He's certainly not Rod Temperton. He's not, no. I think because he became a Brian Wilson, didn't he, and just stayed at home writing some of the songs. He looks like he's dressed and wigged up as the 70s

for like some shit pot noodle advert or something. It's like he'd come on right at the end and say something in a comically deep voice. It's just, yeah, it's not a good look. Like the bloke in the baby sham advert yeah yeah yeah yeah he's almost it's almost like animatronic like it's or like a cgi member of the band he's like yeah i feel for him a bit because he's you know he thinks he looks great but yeah it's time has not been kind.

But, I mean, the show Waddy Waddy thing, exactly, because it does look like they've, you know, oh, fucking hell, we haven't got our costumes. Can we ask show Waddy Waddy if we can rip the arms off their drapes and wear them? So they either look a bit like show Waddy Waddy or, I've got in my notes, like a really um high-end turkish restaurant waiters they had they had quite a tragic history didn't they heat wave when you look at their biog they've got a series of disasters befell different members in turn like it's almost as if like you might expect of a band that had damien thorne on the drum, you know, just one after another,

these terrible, improbable things happening. It was quite upsetting. They must've been, they must've been cursed by somebody. I, I, I,

sorry, this is a digression, but I saw something the other night. It seems to talk about 78. Um, I never knew about the curse that apparently Jimmy Page put on Eddie and the hot rods. Have you ever heard this? No, Eddie and the Hot Rods? Have you ever heard this? No, Eddie and the Hot Rods.

Eddie and the Hot Rods. What was their single? It was like, do anything you do. Yeah, yeah, their big hit. And the front cover of that is at least the Crowley with sort of Mickey Mouse ears. And, you know, that was a big hit. Everything was being said about them

that it was all going to happen for them and they were kind of their new pistols and they were going to, you know, that was a big hit. Everything was being said about them, that it was all going to happen for them and they were kind of their new pistols and they were going to, you know, carry on before them. And then everything just started majorly fucking up for that band in every way, just like really horrible shit happening to them. And the band are convinced that Jimmy Page, as, you know, at least a Crowley aficionado and somebody who takes it really seriously,

was offended by their kind of puerile use of the Crowley aficionado and if somebody takes it really seriously was offended by their kind of puerile use of the Crowley image and cursed them and they were they remain convinced of this although Jimmy I think has denied it so maybe something similar happened to Heatwave I have no idea I had no idea about that until the other night no I didn't know I mean I should say I wasn't it's just a shame that it's just a shame that Jimmy Page wasn't a big fan of John Travolta because then he could have done us all a favour by responding to events later in this show. So the following week, Always and Forever leapt up to number 14

and would eventually spend two weeks at number nine. The follow-up, Razzle Dazzle, only got to number 43 in June of 1979 and the group were beset by misfortune. Rod Temperton quit the band to work with Quincy Jones and wrote Off The Wall, Thriller and Rock With You. The bass player Mario Mantese was stabbed by his girlfriend after a row at a party hosted by Elton John which left him temporarily blind, mute and paralysed and lead singer Johnny Wilder was left paralysed from the neck down after a car accident. Jesus.

That's fucking depressing, isn't it? We've got more romantic stuff just like that coming up a little bit later. It seems like the last few Top of the Pops I've introduced have featured Blondie, and tonight is no exception. This time, they're hanging on the telephone. I'm in the phone booth, it's the one across the hall. If you don't answer, I'll just bring it on the wall I know he's there, but I just had to call Don't leave me hanging on the telephone

Don't leave me hanging on the telephone Finally, a kid is surrounded by four women who look like they're in a bus queue and are bored as fuck as he introduces hanging on the telephone by blonde thing is it doesn't look like he's gone into a crowd right he quite clearly is still in the same place where he was before and these people have been brought to him and they look like they've been drugged and kidnapped and flown in an unmarked light aircraft out to his fortress of solitude they're they're not they're really not thrilled to be there they all are either no a bit a bit irritated or really worried about somethingibly whether they're ever going to escape from Jensen's icy place of exile.

Maybe. And they're weird choices as well. They don't look like the usual top of the pops girls. They're all really dressed down. And they've all got that mopey, haunted look like Sadie Atkins or Lynette Squeaky Froome Speaking of which speaking of Lynette Squeaky Froome

I was watching a thing recently of an interview with Sarah Jane Moore who was the woman who shortly after Squeaky tried to assassinate Gerald Ford Sarah Jane Moore also tried to assassinate Gerald Ford shortly Also, this woman, Sarah Jane Moore, also tried to assassinate Gerald Ford shortly afterwards

and similarly made a pig's ear of it. And they interviewed, she just got out of prison or something. And it was like a recent interview. And they said to her, so why did you try and kill President Ford? And her reply was, everybody asks me that. So, formed in New York in 1974 by two former members of the Stilettos, Debbie Arie and Chris Stein,

Blondie had their first chart hit in Australia when the chart show Countdown accidentally played the video to the B-side of their single, Ex Offender, in the flesh, and it got to number two there. After signing to Chrysalis records in late 1977 they had their first uk chart hit with denis which stayed at number two for three weeks and was denied the number one spot by wuthering heights by kate bush and match stalk men and match stalk fucking cats and dogs by brian and michael this is the second single off the l Parallel Lines and it's a cover of a 1976 song

by short-lived LA power pop band The Nerves. It's the follow-up to Picture This, which got to number 12 in September of this year and it's up from number 27 to number 18. As they're currently playing in Toad's Hall in New Haven on their 1978 American tour tonight, we get the promo video. Gentlemen, comment.

This is another record that leaps out of the TV speakers like a puma that's been starved in the boot of a car for three days. It's like you put it on. I mean, all the times I watched this Top of the Pops, there wasn't a single time when I didn't have to rewind this and watch it again because it's so great and like all good pop records it feels like it's over too soon

it makes it sound so easy as well because it's so carefully put together all the work that's gone into this none of which shows, it doesn't seem laboured in any way but part of the reason why this is so great,

like the last time I was here, we were talking about altered images. And I said the key to that record is the way the production made the band sound slick and sloppy at the same time. And the result was like a sort of homemade version of Parallel Lines. Well, this is the real thing.

And this is like the masterclass in how to do that. Like the work that Mike Chapman did on this record and on the band, drilling the band so they sounded tight, but leaving them just loose enough to sound cool and doing the same thing with the record, producing it so it sounded like a commercial hit, but leaving it just loose and rough enough to sound exciting. This is the difference between punk or new wave or indie

that doesn't make it and the stuff that does. And so few people understand how to do it well. It's just an astonishing record and just, as I say, a masterclass in how to break out of the cheap rehearsal room and into real people's hearts yeah completely and if you want an illustration of just how important Mike Chapman is to this listen to the nerves original from I think the year before two years before the the original by the nerves I mean it is a great song anyway and Jack Lee actually who wrote the song he also writes

um I think he wrote will anything happen which is also in parallel lines which is also a great song anyway and jack lee actually who wrote the song he also writes um i think he wrote will anything happen which is also in parallel lines which is also a great great song but it's it's again one of those musicians records and you can hear the band kind of enjoying it but what mike chapman does with it he mike chapman later on producers like trevor horn and martin hanner they become almost stars in their own right. And they'd be about kind of grand gestures in a sense. Whereas what Mike Chapman is all about in his production is about really finding out the moments that make a pop song matter and work. And just accentuating them absolutely brilliantly.

And, you know, there's a lovely thing about this record, about the whole Blondie period round about now, this kind of like, it's American ne'er-do-wells, really, sharpened up by good old British professionalism in a way, and it's such a great fucking record, such an amazing singer as well, and this is never pointed out, I think people focus on Debbie Harry's appearance, of course, because she just looks gorgeous, she just looks astonishing always and so totally fanciable to anybody looking at this

video she just looks amazing but you know she's 32 at this time and um which of course we didn't know back then i just assumed she was sort of you know early 20s but she was 32 by then but she's developed such an amazing set of pipes it's kind of like if you want to know how good a singer debbie harry is put parallel lines on and you will find yourself singing along inevitably try and sing along to picture this genuinely try and sing along to picture this all of it the way she would in a single take it leaves you faint it leaves you light-headed because it's it's tough it's really tough the thing she sets herself in a singer not in a histrionic sense but just so much powerful melody she looks amazing in this video Clem and

Jimmy look fucking so cool in this video and this is a producer's record to a certain extent but just a band that I would say the absolute peak of their powers and and just one of the greatest singles I mean that the whole run of singles blondie comes up with at this period it's just just so so good but this is one of the strongest i would say of blondie's singles and and from a brilliant album there's nothing to say about this really apart from just how fucking brilliant it is yeah and it manages to manages to collapse so many different associations and suggestions in such a small space in terms of the sound and the presentation.

And also the other thing about Blondie, as you say, everyone always goes on about Debbie Harry looking great. But what's important to note there is that it's no small thing that they pulled off, which is to consciously do a pin-up thing that's done really intelligently without demeaning either the the woman or the gawping wanking laughs right there's nobody is demeaned here it's a it's it's done with such class and intelligence although my confession is that i never fancied Debbie Harry. And I still don't understand why.

I do not understand why. And I feel really bad about this. Why haven't I got a crush on Debbie Harry, despite the fact that she's one of the sexiest women in pop history? And also, if I went to some sort of dating agency, right? Like the Wedded Bliss Agency or the Blaney Bureau for Friendship and Marriage, and they said, so what sort of person would you be looking for? Among the things that I'd say would be smart, confident, sassy, stylishly dressed in a trashy kind of way,

funny, talented, into good music, possibly from New York in her 30s. And they'd say, oh, okay, well, we've got just the person for you here, Debbie Harry. And I'd go and i'd go i'd go i mean fucking hell how dare i how dare i how dare i presume to not particularly fancy debbie it's really rude and it's like feels like an insult to blondie's presentation you know it doesn't make sense and i feel that i've let everyone down but but this i've got to say this video is the closest that i get because

there's a sort of fiery i'll tell you another one as well daisy juke no but this good video no i know it just never happened but this this fuck is wrong with you? But this video, I know, I know. But yeah, this video's got that fiery edge to it. It's a brilliant video, isn't it? Especially on the whoa-whoa bits towards the end of the record, which to me, that's the key to the whole song, because it's where Debbie breaks out of that glassy facade and gives it some real grit,

which means that it has twice the impact that it would have had if she had sung the whole song like Courtney Love, you know. A sort of emotional dynamics, right? Because the best thing about concise pop songs is that they're so small structurally that just a tiny adjustment has a massive effect. Like one of those little sports cars with a steering wheel the size of a foreign coin.

One quarter turn is like you're in a field. But the video's amazing. You know, just like the song, it's really simple, but it puts the band over fucking big style. I think the key shot is her putting a mascara on in the mirror next to a carrier bag full of, I don't know, crisps and cheap wine or something. Basically says, yeah, I'm attractive and what. Yeah, but at no point would...

And I think that was the appeal of Debbie Harry. Because, yeah, I mean, because... But at no point with, I mean, with somebody as startling as Debbie Harry, you would think that sort of over the course of Blondie's kind of time then, there'd be a time when it starts fracturing and it becomes too focused on her or something and the band start getting resentful.

Maybe that did happen eventually. But it never felt like that. It always felt like they were together and that they were a band and that she was in no way being backed by the boys um she was part of it absolutely sort of enmeshed within the music um and i think i think taylor's right in that this video i think gives us something that we don't get in a lot of blondie videos because after a little while blondie videos get very much aware that debbie is the centre. I'm not saying they get airbrushed, but they just get a little softer.

There's a grain to this video and a close-upness to this video that we don't really get again in Blondie videos. And it's just thrilling. It is like being on stage with them. And it's just really, really exciting. Definitely, by a big, big way, the high point of this episode. Yeah, we do get old pin-up boy on the organ, tastefully acting out the song title, literally complete with lolling tongues.

That's Jimmy Destry, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah, I thought that was dead good when I was 10. And I probably reenacted that when I was at home, and I'm sure lots of other kids did. So the following week, hanging on the telephone soared to number nine and would go as high as number five.

The follow-up, Heart of Glass, would spend the entire month of February 1979 at number one, and they'd have three more chart toppers before they split up for the first time in 1982. Such a lot of good music coming up on tonight's Top of the Pops, and I'm delighted to say that we have Dean Friedman with us in the studio here tonight to play from his superb album, Well, Well Said the Rocking Chair, the latest single released from it. This is called Lydia. Lydia keeps my toothbrush in her apartment And she never complains Hardly ever

And then jokingly she says Kid points out that there's been loads of mint and skill music on this episode and then introduces Dean Friedman. Born in New Jersey in 1955, Dean Friedman first came to local prominence in the mid-70s when he sang the advertising jingle for the electrics chain Crazy Eddie's. He had a near miss in the UK in the summer of 78 with Woman of Mine, but made it to number three the month before this episode with Lucky Stars,

which is still in the charts at number 27. This is the hastily put out follow-up called Lydia, and it's currently at number 70. They're trying to give over the impression that there's an orchestra to the side as well. Did you see that? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there is.

That's the BBC orchestra. Is it? Fresh out of the bar. Because I could see the bloke waving their baton about, but I couldn't see any other... No, you can't see, you know, probably Jonathan Cohen on the piano or something. No!

It's ridiculous, isn't it? Right at the very end, you see a cello player soaring away. Right. But it's like if you've gone to all that bother, why not actually show these people? Well, the focus is on Dean. This is a completely live performance. This is him singing and playing live.

BBC Orchestra are singing and playing live. Four Pints gone. And it doesn't sound like the record. If you listen to the record, it's a lot smoother. And it's got that sort of boomy late 70s reverb on it. Yeah, this sounds much more live. Are you saying the record sounds better in any way no this sounds better right because yeah i mean it's one of those ones isn't it who the

fuck bought this apart from men with partners called lydia i presume um yeah there he is yeah there he is looking like colin wellens disappointing little brother thank you neil that's been bothering me all fucking week there's all kinds of problems with this song i mean apart from the lyrics um you know i'm sleeping with i'm sleeping with a woman who thinks i'm a child yes she's then she's a pederast, surely. But I mean, it's a horribly ungenerous song and sentiment. I mean, it's kind of, I'm a bastard,

can I crash at yours and, you know, maybe shag you tonight. It's like a Maggie Mae type sentiment, but with none of the humanity, just selfishness. So I found this very, very difficult to like indeed.

As Jeremy Carr would say, Dean's not stepping up to the mark here is he no he's not but he's got that combination of twee tweeness and kind of cleverness that i've always found a bit repellent it kind of ordains that you have to take it seriously and if you don't you're somehow immature which is a word I was increasingly being called at that age. And it does this thing, you know, that if each syllable is populated with a new word, that makes it literate songwriting. And the reaction of the audience is really mixed. Some people kind of finding it funny.

who's kind of like a Weller with a Wiggins before even Weller had a Wiggins who is staring really intently at Friedman like he's discovered the secret of true music or something wow it's a horrible song and that boy grew up to be Paul Weller

in the 90s let me surprise you I like this record yay good luck oh yes but i like a lot of odd records and if this wasn't quite as ridiculous i don't think i'd like it as much there's a certain amount of distance in my what it comes down to is that I've always been strangely fascinated by this specific sub-genre of AOR, of mature-seeming, curly-headed, middle-class, East Coast Jewish guys doing slightly quirky, emotional, clever piano ballads with these rambling conversation with yourself lyrics,

often wearing the Kid Jensen outfit of shirt collars coming out from under a sweatshirt with sort of corduroys and sneakers. It's all sounding a bit like the theme from a bittersweet American movie from 1980 about a 36-year-old divorcee in Manhattan. You're talking about Christopher Cross, aren't you, really? Yeah, a bit of Christopher Cross. A bit of Andrew Gold, although he was Californian. But this genre had already peaked with Uptown, Uptempo Woman by Randy Adelman, which is a weirdly great record

if you can stomach it, and a memorable Top of the Pops appearance. He really does look like something special. I want to tell you who else. Bruno from Fane, I think, was aspiring to the condition of being Dean Friedman. And, of course, Lydia Keeps My Toothbrush In Her Apartment is perhaps the quintessential opening line of this genre.

But I do like it, partly because, like a lot of adult males, I've been in this sort of situation and toyed with taking my stupid emotions as seriously as this. Not for some time. But also because it brings back those early evenings on BBC Two in the days when I was young and wide open to any weird offshoot of culture and there was nothing else to do.

So I'd sit there and be enriched unrewardingly by Rhoda and programmes about educated neurotics living in brownstones. You know, it's a bit like that. But what I don't like, and I think you may be with me on this at least is the way he makes love to the camera there's something really uncomfortably saucy about this right

it's but I mean in a way fair play because you listen to this song and you look at this absurd fozzy bear motherfucker is that it like a Greenwich Village Terry McDermott. And you think, how did he get a woman like Lydia?

Because you assume that Lydia is quite something in the song. But you look at his freaky, twinkling eyes and his naughty, wet-lipped little smile and you can see he's got game in his own weird, rumpled shrieking way. The whole thing is a slightly

disturbing experience but I've had worse. Taylor, you actually on behalf of you kind of took one for the chart music team didn't you this week and investigated the LP Well Well Said the Rocking Chair which Kid Jensen mentions

please your report amazing cover for a kick off Kid Jensen described as his superb album Well Well Said the Rocking Chair yeah it is the cover is quite something Jensen described as his superb album. Well, well said the rocket. Yes. Um, yeah,

it is. The cover is quite something. Um, Donald Fagan once posted that steely Dan had the two ugliest record covers of the seventies. But I think he spoke too soon because this, this kind of, uh, claymation,

uh, lots of Dean Friedman's faces everywhere. It's like a bad trip morph. It's really, really unpleasant. It's essentially Dean Friedman standing by a rocking chair with his face on it that's underneath a cuckoo clock with his face on it. He's holding a mug with his face on it and he's standing on a clock with his face on it. He's holding a mug with his face on it. And he's standing on a rug with his face on it.

We're being asked to presume that everything in Dean Friedman's house has Dean Friedman's face on it. And I'll wager that the toothbrush that Lydia's got in her bathroom has Dean Friedman's face on it as well. Yeah, the bristles are where his moustache would be. Yes. But no, I listen to it, and I listen to all his hits from this period and stuff. It is hard going, I've got to say. Lydia is his best one, which is...

I mean, you get these lyrics like... What is it? Hang on, I wrote these down. Wait a minute. She wore a peasant blouse with nothing underneath. I said hi. She said yeah, I guess I am.

It's a bit like that. We got the munchies and I made some spaghetti. I bet you fucking did. Oh, yeah, that's two episodes of Rhoda there, isn't it? The way he does those little thoughtful chuckles to himself at the end of certain lines.

That's what's so revolting about it, though. It's that self-deprecation. It isn't real self-deprecation. It's self-deprecation mindful of kind of yeah of how it looks and and you know showing yourself as a kind of as a humorous person but actually kind of in a way without humor it's kind of it's not true self-deprecation no he's he's delighted with himself he's delighted with himself absolutely yeah but he Well, he would be, man. He's shagging Lidl whenever he wants to. Yeah, he throws the self-deprecation.

It reminds me, lyrically, although it's quite a dissimilar song, you know, the kind of... The Pina Colada song. Do you like Pina Coladas? Instead, it's that kind of thing. That kind of dating scene self-deprecation that I just find revolting.

And you've got to ask yourself, where's Lindy's mates in all this? Why haven't they said anything? Why hasn't anybody sat down and said, Lydia, you're being played like a sucker, girlfriend. What is Lydia getting out of this relationship? I don't get it. A whole hunk of Dean.

That's what she's getting out of it. But yeah, it's the way he seems like... He chuckles as though he's simultaneously touched by the poignancy of his situation and tickled by the perspicacity with which he's just summed it up. And it does make him seem very untrustworthy. It does go with the lyrics, you know, like the key line being,

sorry I woke you, do you feel like some company? It's the combination of, yeah, false self-deprecation, the attempt to appear sensitive, and this blatant horniness that he's projecting at the camera maybe this is all performance art because it fits the song so beautifully but I don't think so. He is one of these

blokes who can't just be a horny honest horny pig-like male and a responsible non-sexist human being at the same time he has to fold the former yeah into the latter like uh like a dirty mag in a copy of the guardian right um really those really dubious blokes where it's like they think that unhappy or emotionally damaged women are easy meat or something you you know what I mean? It's sort of fundamental dishonesty.

And there really is a bit of that. But in the context of a 1970s AOR ballad, it's quite interesting in its sort of work. Yeah, and in its defence, you know, in 20 years' time after this, Dean Freeman would be singing the same song, but it would be

oh, I've got a booty call on the down low yeah he'd be bragging on about it at least he's pretending to be a bit remorseful he also sort of he talks in the language i think he's directly called from kind of women's magazines in a way there's a line where he's am i wrong there's a line where he goes you know lydia sometimes i'm always talking about making conscious decisions, and it's all this kind of, not psychobabble, but it's just, it's revolting.

It's kind of very much called from the kind of problem pages of Cosmopolitan or something like that. And even though he's laughing about it, ultimately what he's saying is, I'm a selfish cunt. But if you don't understand that, I've already told you I'm a selfish cunt. know but if you don't understand that I've already told you I'm a selfish

cunt so therefore it's your fault exactly you knew what you were signing up for Lydia also it's all a little bit overwritten as well like when he says he says you know

what was it I sleep with a woman who thinks I'm a child. And he goes, maybe I am. That wouldn't surprise me much. I guess that much is true. That's too many lines. That's too many lines for this. That's him being American and everything's spilling out, isn't it?

It is. What he's saying is, well, the pubs have turned out. I can't be bothered to wait for a Chinese. I think I'll go over and give Lydia one and see what's in the fridge. But, yeah, this is better than the record because he's playing live, he's singing live, the BBC Orchestra are scraping away. And it doesn't have that kind of AOR sheen on it that the record's got. This is better.

This is definitely better. The only two things that let it down. First of all, something is a little bit out of tune. I think it's actually his piano is just very slightly out of tune. And the other thing is, as the song reaches its emotional climax, there's a kid in the audience doing rabbit ears behind his mate's head yeah, the spell that Dean has cast over the audience

is broken at the very end by some youth ruffling the hair of his mate in the manner of Stan Laurel and then doing the bunny ears thing and his mate sternly reprimands him, oh you kids, this is why we can't have nice songs, Taylor Taylor, I know you're a half manman, half-biscuit fan.

Yeah. And they did a song, didn't they? The Bastard Son of Dean Friedman? The Bastard Son of Dean Friedman. It's one of their really early songs, so it's quite simple. It doesn't have the sophistication of their later work, which is not a joke, by the way. No.

But it's all right. It's about this kid who finds out that his dad's not his real dad and he's the result of a liaison between his mum and Dean Friedman. But the thing is, when he got wind of this, I think a newspaper took him to one of their gigs. This is in about 2000 or or something years after the fact yeah the Edinburgh Festival he got taken to one of their gigs and introduced to the band

and they said oh yeah you know whatever but then he kept turning up and he turned up to a few more of their gigs like he's trying to latch on to them as if he's going to relaunch his career through half man half biscuit or something and you've got this sense that...

You can imagine the band standing there with, like, fixed smiles, like, hello, Dean. Hello again, Dean. And he did actually do a song called A Baker's Tale, which is an answer record to The Bastard's Son of Dean Freeman, where he discusses the origins of Nigel Black. Yeah, it's not really good. It's a bit like...

It's like Fruity Bun from Viz but without the joke. Yes, it is very much so. That makes it sound much better than it is. I've got to say. So the following week Lydia soared up to number 31 but it dropped down to number 35 the week

after and he never troubled the charts again. However he did come back to televisual prominence in the 80s when he did the incidental music for the central TV series, Boone. Really? Yeah, but he didn't do the theme song though, did he? No, it was Jim Diamond. He didn't do Hi Ho Silver, but he did.

Rocky gets off motorbike and goes into garage. Beautiful stuff from Dean Friedman. You know, it's always nice when a record that doesn't fit into an exact groove or form gets into the chart. And that's why I'm particularly happy to see the street band in the charts this week with a former record of the week of mine called Toast. Evening all. I'd like to tell you a story about when I was a very young boy. I must have been three or four months old at the time.

And I didn't know what I wanted. But if I did, I wouldn't have been out to tell anybody, because all I could do was gurgle. So I sat there in my eye chair, thinking one day, looking at my tray, and thinking what I'd give for a meal on there. So I started looking around the kitchen to see what I could have.

I was rubbing my eggy soldier in my head, trying to think. And then I looked over around the kitchen to see what I could have. I was rubbing my eggy soldier in my head trying to think. And then I looked over in the corner and there's a yellow and white bread bin with its mouth open just staring at me like I saw bread in there. I thought, I'll have some toast. A little piece of toast. Kid points out how nice it is when something mangle gets in the chops and metaphorically buffs his critical fingernails on his lapel as he introduces this song that was a previous record of the week,

Toast by Street Band. Formed earlier this year, Street Band were a pop rock band fronted by an 18-year-old Paul Young and produced by Chaz Jankel, Ian Dury's guitarist. This song came together during a soundcheck before a pub gig with Young making up lyrics on the spot and Jankle suggesting that it would make a suitable B-side for their debut single, Hold On.

When the record was released in September of this year, however, Toast was picked up on and played to death by Kenny Everett on Capital Radio. So the single was recalled, the sides were switched and it entered the charts and it's up this week from number 29 to number 25. What do we say about this then chaps? I remember loving this song.

I love this song to death. And the reason being it just, it seems a strange thing to ascribe to this record, but it broke the pop rule that was fixed in my head as a child, that pop music was about relationships and pop music was about love and things like that, into writing about everyday stuff. And it did it.

You know, I'd heard comedy records before, but nothing that was quite as understandable as this. Because I love toast of course just like everyone loves toast although god the stuff stuff we used to have then i remember asking my dad to make me in fact i used to regularly have sugar sandwiches just two slices of white bread with a bit of sugar sprinkled on top yeah and and just you know you speak terribly about them but yeah i mean toast was part of all of our lives. And it was really a song about, it's a song about making do and being happy with what you've got to a certain extent.

I didn't know until just recently that Chaz Janko was involved. And as soon as I found that out, it kind of makes a weird sense. I would not say, as some of the people have had, that this is the first hip hop record or whatever, as far as I'm concerned. No, no, no.

Hip hop, yes, it needs talking, but it also needs said that i've read it online i've read it online a few times that that i mean it wouldn't be on the internet it wouldn't even be the first rap record on those criteria but i mean surely the criteria of the first rap record is yes it has to contain spoken poetry but it has to crucially contain beats made by dj do you know i mean and this isn't quite that. Otherwise, you might as well say Crosstown Traffic's the first hip-hop record. But I mean, with Chaz Jankle involved,

it does, I'm not saying that had a, obviously it had an influence in getting it recorded, but it does have that, you know, Ian Jewelry, London-based charm to it. A lot less abrasive than Ian Jewelry, obviously. So I remember loving this, and I still love it. Yeah, me too. I just love the kind, I mean, it's something we have

all identified with in all kinds of ways. And crucially, when there is fuck all else in the house, and you've got nothing else, toast gets you through. And I think that's what this song is about. I really like this. Always have and always will, I think. For health reasons, I can no longer eat starchy carbs.

So there's something really depressing for me about this record. But it is a genuinely weird record. Not because it's surreal or disturbing. Apart from the close-ups in this clip of the hideous band members cramming their vile faces with the titular snack in that sitcom kitchen. Unusually for Top of the Pops, they're actually using a set as well. Looks like it's from a sitcom or something of a kitchen.

I thought it was Tricia Yates's mum's kitchen in Grain Chill or something like that. It's got that feel to it. I thought it was Trisha Yates as Mam's kitchen in Grain Chill or something like that. Yeah, it could be. It's got that feel to it. I thought it was Citizen Smith. Yeah, it could be anything. But it's also a completely straight record in the sense that there's not really any imagination in it. It's just people being silly without any particular humour or any actual jokes.

And there's always something a bit disturbing about stuff that's presented as humour and takes on the shape of humour but doesn't really have any humour in it. The same way as mannequins and faceless dummies disturb people because they look almost human but not quite. Why the policeman-like evening all at the beginning? Why the conviction that toast,

one of the least amusing substances in existence, is somehow intrinsically funny? And why present this as a story about a newborn with a craving for hard, sharp food? Well, yes. And also, the standard of toast making in this clip is... Oh, it's appalling, isn't it? ...subpar, yeah.

I mean, for a start, it's all made with Mother's Pride or some putty-like 70s white bread. And every slice is burnt black in the middle and is still bread around the outside. It's like a culinary bouquet effect. It's like they put a blowtorch to it or something. Yeah, it's awful. Also, the bloke who looks 50 in the chef's hat

gets the grill pan out from under the grill with his bare hands, which rather gives the game away that this is not an authentic breakfast scene. Yeah, and also that slightly padded blue semi-shiny zip-up jacket with the double white hoop that the grotesque permed cousin Kevin bloke is wearing in the clip. They were really big at our school. Slightly hipper than Snorkel Parker.

But the thing about street band is they're hard to dislike because although Paul Young at this point is doing that school of cockney or mockney Jack the Lad charm or would-be charm like Dennis Waterman and Nicholas Ball and I guess David essex is the eternal ruler of this domain um they're sort of you know they're quite likable they've definitely been in the bar you know i mean with the bbc orchestra maybe sneaked out tinkered with dean

friedman's piano but the thing is we know that we're already doomed, don't we? You know, there's this tasteful rock, jazz funk band, and they're bringing out a song about toast. There's no coming back from this, is there?

It's true, yeah. There's no coming back for Paul Young and his Tucker Jenkins hairstyle. Yeah, it's a real soft lad's do, isn't it? For all his sort of uh mockney the way he's coming yeah no he's even although it is nice to see him wearing a poppy i know it's the only person on this november top of the pops who's uh who's showing his respect for the

fallen yeah but i mean to me me This song to me Is as punk As anything else That's been on We've had bands like The Buzzcocks and Blondie They're singing love songs Whereas

You know When I was ten That was Toast was the only thing I was allowed To make in the kitchen My mum would have gone Mancle if I'd have tried

Anything else And of course The other thing We need to bring in This is a song from a time when having chocolate on bread was considered strange yeah paul young paul young has put the idea of nutella into someone's head there hasn't it yeah slightly i mean simultaneous actually if you uh the starsky and hutch annual from this year 1978 had a brilliant bit in the middle of it um it was actually a story called you are what you eat and it's starsky and hutch sat in a diner

chatting with each other and then it goes into their favorite recipes and uh i think one of starsky's which always stuck in my head because the picture just blew my mind was um chocolate pancakes which was pancakes with chocolate in between them. Jesus. That fucked my head up at that age. Oh, that America, eh? It was like hearing, you know, that old thing about Americans having steaks for breakfast and stuff like that. It was mind-blowing that they didn't just have, you know, a bit of lemon and sugar. So, the thing is... Chocolate Pancakes, or Crepes, as they're really known.

I mean, even Shawoddy Woddy had cottoned onto this. That was... They put him in the title of their new album. But I think also in 78, especially as children, I mean, children are basically hungry a lot of the time. They're constantly thinking about food. So hearing, it is actually quite, and I'm not licking my lips saying this,

but it is quite tasty the way he talks about all the different types of bread and things like that. It makes you a bit hungry. It makes you a bit peckish. It's an effective record. Imagine if he did this song nowadays. You'd have to have another extra two minutes on the song for him to list all the bread you can get nowadays. Gluten-free sourdough and chia batter.

Yeah, it's simpler times. The best thing of all is when uh kid jensen links out of this and his quip is i'm sure they'll be making a lot of bread out of that one yeah which to me is more than just a bad joke it's um for a start his delivery is so poor that it gets completely lost under the applause. Like the applause from people who aren't even in the same room as Kid Jensen. So it's been edited together really badly. Yeah, I've got a feeling a producer's probably told him to say that because it would go down really well.

Yeah, what's amazing about it is that it goes beyond being a bad joke in that it's as wrong as you can possibly get. In a way that it's as wrong as you can possibly get right in a way that it's like uh on a fascinating philosophical level right making bread out of toast is beyond any human being it's almost like a gnomic uh instruction from a zen master right like for the for the next seven years make bread out of toast unsplit and atom so the following week toast jumped up seven places

to number 18 it's highest position it would be the only bit of chart action they'd ever get and the band split up with half of them including Paul Young going on to form the Q-tips they got their fingers burned, didn't they? I can't think about it anymore.

I've got to go and have some. Yeah, I must admit, I'm getting a bit browned up standing here as well. Take that off. Shall we go and have some toast? Let's go. OK, then. See you. Night, all.

I'm sure they'll be making a lot of bread out of that one. That's street band and toast. Right, lucky for some, particularly for Queen, the number 13, I'm sure they'll be making a lot of bread out of that one. That's street band and toast. Right. Lucky for some, particularly for Queen, the number 13, because they've been there for the second week now with their double-A-sided single, Bicycle Race, and this, Fat Bottom Girls. Oh, you're gonna take me home tonight

Oh, down beside that red firelight Oh, you're gonna let it all hang out Fat bottom girls, you make the rockin' world go round Kid claims that number 13 must be lucky for Queen as they're there for the second week. No, Kidd, that means the record isn't shifting enough units. It's Fat Bottom Girls. Formed in London in 1970, Queen first entered the UK charts in March of 1974

when seven seasons of Rye got to number 10. They went on a tear of 10 more chart hits in a row, including a nine-week run at number one with Bohemian Rhapsody. This is a double A side with Bicycle Race, and the first releases from their seventh LP, Jazz, which came out a week ago. It's the follow-up to Spread Your Wings, which only got to number 34 in March of this year, and it's currently stuck at number 13. Seeing as the band are playing Madison Square Garden on the Jazz Tour tonight,

and the video for Bicycle Race has got loads of naked women in it we get the video for Fat Bottom Girls instead now chaps simple question Fat Bottom Girls or Bicycle Race where do you stand on that font line Bicycle Race

a song that I've had hour long conversations about Fat Bottom Girls I think i prefer but i mean it's it's prefer is perhaps too strong because when it comes to queen i find it i find it difficult to love them um i find it difficult to love them full stop um the queen of one of those bands where the comprising elements of it i can't disagree with any of it and i should love them, and I feel like I should love them,

but there's just something that doesn't quite click with me, something clinical, something not warm, something sort of admirable, but not really moving in a sense. For them, with them, I love the singles,

and I know it's the old cliche, the best Beatles album is the best of the Beatles. With Queen, I genuinely do think, you know that Hits album that came out about 81, I think, where the old cliche, the best Beatles album is the best of the Beatles. With Queen, I genuinely do think, you know that hits album that came out about 81, I think, where the latest thing on it was Another One Bites The Dust. I love that album. I love those singles, but I've never bothered

or I've never been that entertained by the albums at all. And I always felt there was just not enough space in their music. It was so florid and full and ripe and just a big sort of demonstration of their astonishing accomplishment as musicians i just found it really difficult to like them and beyond that for a couple of reasons they used to annoy me at that time for starters whenever they were on top of the pops my mum would say as soon as she saw him um he's gay and of course he was but i

didn't think she had the fucking right to say that just based on his appearance so that would always cause an argument my wife actually has completely different memories in that her mom always used to say oh look at that body um and uh and you know it used to frustrate her that um she was barking up the wrong tree to a certain extent i also wish i know people have said in the past that kind of they almost wish freddie would have outed himself a bit sooner maybe and perhaps you know to most people and maybe i was just being dim i don't think most people were aware in 78 that freddie was gay at all and and i kind of wish he'd outed himself on that scale but actually beyond that like i said earlier i moved out from an old people's home to a sort of suburban estate at that point and i was encountering you know a fair bit of racism on the street and stuff uh there was a

lot of anger and this was like you say the kind of um you know winter discontent and stuff and people getting blamed for things and i kind of i know he couldn't have done this and perhaps you know he did he wasn't ashamed of his background but i wish freddie would have announced himself i don't know as asian do you know what i mean uh he wasn't strictly but i really do wish he had we had nobody up there you know i was well aware by 78 that black kids like white kids had no problem taking the piss out of asian kids because we were kind of the whipping boy almost of both groups and we had nobody on top of the pops or who do we have on telly we had spike milligan blacked up in curry and chips and we had the guys on mind your language we needed somebody up there

i'm not saying that was his job and i'm sure you know i don't know whether he was told you know don't emphasize that aspect of your past or your roots but man i wish he'd just say that if we could have had one pop star who was cool in a way um where we could say yeah he's asian he's one of us that would have made a world of difference so maybe it's just my residual resentment about that but i've never really warmed to queen you're forgetting michael bates he got uh screamed shut up by windsor davis every week yeah yeah well i mean yeah i mean it would just be nice, I think. But I mean, given the racial politics at the time,

that wasn't his job to do that. But it would have been, it would have been, it would have made a difference, I think, a little bit. Yeah. Because I think people were quite, a lot of people were quite shocked when that was revealed. The gayness or the Asian-ness? The Asian-ness.

Yeah, I think you're right i mean i just kind of assumed as an asian kid at the time obviously i just assumed he was white i just thought he was another big white rock star if i had known that or if it had been accentuated in any way it would have made such a such a big difference i think yeah yeah but taylor the song uh he likes big butts and he cannot lie. Yeah, I know that Freddie didn't write the words to this one, but I think it's a song that only a gay man could get away with singing. For a start, there's the suggestion of him being fiddled with by an overweight nanny when he was in a nursery.

This is delivered in a wholly positive, humorousous way and then it goes on to develop this theme which many heterosexual men will recognize and understand but few would want to discuss openly that deep inside us is this kind of jack reagan who can't be arsed with a sexual partner having any concerns for poise or propriety and just wants someone who doesn't give a fuck and goes for it. But the association of that with fat-bottomed girls is slightly uncomfortable, although it must have delighted Anita Dobson when she finally married the author of those words. But at the same time, that weird sound to these records is probably their best feature.

Because it is strange. And it's complemented by the weird way that in Queen videos around this time, way that in Queen videos around this time they were all filmed in sort of close up from weird angles with a bit of shade on the camera and it's all a bit disorientating and slightly upsetting

when you're young but I think now it's kind of right for a band that are all about dumb sensation and have nothing to say in any way at all. I don't know i yeah i've never really warmed to queen although with all the shit that they dumped on the public in the last 10 or 15 years of their career it's easy to forget that at one point they weren't bad um

i mean where are they in 1978 well they're just about to sort of, they're just in the process of developing from not bad to really fucking awful I mean Bicycle Race is their last one of theirs that I can stomach really They're getting bigger and bigger, they're touring with Finn Lizzy I think that year in America

and they're just getting bigger and bigger and bigger, not quite a stadium rock band yet but very soon They're playing getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Not quite a stadium rock band yet, but very soon. They're playing Madison Square Garden tonight. That's a pretty big game. I imagine that's probably with Finlitty, actually, which is a tour of rivals in a sense, but certainly it happened for one of those bands

and it didn't quite happen as big for the other one. The thing about the really early queen stuff is that what it sounds like is uh led zeppelin with a bubblegum center it's uh completely shallow and uh it they're like they're a pop group playing hard rock if you know what i mean or a hard rock group playing pop whichever way around you want to you want to put it which is why they were never taken seriously i mean you know how now queen are always the subject of those witless memes about how music isn't as good as it used to be yeah yeah it always says things like there's like a beyonce record or something it's like this this record as if it's self-evidently shit, you know.

This record needed 12 writers and six producers. Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen, one writer, Freddie Mercury. And what these people don't understand is that, at the time, they were not taken seriously by critics. They were seen as a complete joke for these reasons. They were partly because their music was basically bubblegum pop delivered as hard rock uh also because they had a singer who was somewhat less than manly and they didn't take themselves remotely seriously they didn't take

anything seriously including themselves um and then you add in uh the conspicuous consumption um that they were really into at the time this was almost like a perfect storm for 1970s rock critics they hated queen they hated yeah by this point um is this man a prat yeah well. Well, I mean, you know, he sort of was, but that was kind of the point. I mean, it's interesting to think when it dawned on people that Freddie Mercury was gay because it was before he died, certainly, but I don't know exactly when it would have been. I know that in the mid-'80s,

a mate of mine got slammed up against a wall by one of the hard kids at my school because this hard kid was into Queen. And my mate said to him, hang on, you hate gays. Why do you like Queen? And he said, what do you mean? And he said, well, Freddie Mercury's gay. Got slammed up against a wall. And the kid said, don't you ever say that about Freddie ever again.

Wow, wow. But I mean, other than coming out, what more could he have done? He grew a moustache, pranced around the stage wiggling his arse and called his band Queen. It's like, even to the non-functioning gaydar of mainstream 1970s culture. The thing is, I found Freddie a fascinating voice

and a kind of fascinating songwriter in a sense. I wouldn't say when he went solo, but when he detached himself from the band format. Something like Living On My Own, you know that song? Living On My Own,

which is one of his solo works and it's completely just like a high energy disco record. I think it's a fantastic record and it kind of gets close to expressing the true him in a sense. But it's odd, isn't it? I think his homosexuality

only really became apparent to most people. And I don't mean people in the know. I mean, just us as pop listeners out there, really late on in his career. And kind of, it wasn't even that I want to break free video where he's in a dress i don't even think then we all thought oh you know i don't think the penny dropped he had been part of such a sort of thrustingly heterosexual set of songs if you like with queen

that that i didn't make that association maybe i was just being dim and people like my mom who seemed to know from about 1976 onwards that he was gay uh with the majority but i just remember i just remember it not really not really being part of their shtick and not really you know that looking back it's staggering that nobody mentioned this because the songs the sound the lyrics everything about them is so yeah especially in freddy's performances is so camp but yeah camp. It just never seemingly occurred, basically because it was surrounded by the man lion

that is Brian May. And the masculinity of the rest of it. By the way, the best Brian May moment, I think, in his entire career is that moment in that song that he did with Anita Dobson where, in the video, where Anita throws her head back and it

transmogrifies into Brian May. It's a great man in that video. But you know you say he's gay and all this kind of stuff but he's singing a song about a woman with a fat arse. He can't be gay. Yeah I think that was. He likes him with a bit of meat on him don't i but i mean it's of course revealing that he had to keep the lid on that so tight um yeah because even a glimmer of it would have completely fucked up the whole thing would have completely wrecked queen's progress so yeah a bit of a damning indictment i think what what it is, yeah, he's standing next to Brian May, who, as I've mentioned else, is obviously obsessed with playing the guitar very well.

And, and instrumental grandstanding is not a quality associated with gayness in the 1970s, right? Yeah. Brian May's standing there looking like the back of the old one pound note, playing this guitar that he made out of his didn't he make his guitar out of his dad's fireplace right and yeah

playing it with a throbbity bit or whatever the fuck it was this is that level of of dedication and seriousness and earnestness is it's enough of a counterpoint to freddie that that um that i think it it acted as a as a beard but one thing i will say in their defense and in

brad may's defenses the textures he gives his guitar playing through those classic runner queen singles they're just gorgeous the solos that he puts on stuff i love the sounds he gets out of that guitar um but like you say it's accompanied by this this earnestness if queen could have just been that guitar solo in killer queen in fact if they could have just been killer queen i'll probably be a lot um a lot more um fond of them but they insisted on making long and dreary albums it's kind of like my slightly heretical and probably utterly wrong thought about led zeppelin i love led zeppelin don't get me wrong but imagine if they'd been a band who released one seven inch single which had immigrant song on one side and black dog on the other

and then had died in a van accident or something they'd be one of the true greats so the following week fat bottom girls slash bicycle race nudged up two places to number 11, its highest position. The follow-up, Don't Stop Me Now, would get to number 9 in March of 1979, and the follow-up to that, A Live Version of Love of My Life, would only get to number 63. But they would finish the 70s with the number 2 hit, Crazy Little Thing Called Love, and go right the way through the 80s. Get on your bikes and ride! a little thing called love and go right the way through the 80s ever since their big hit record, It's Only Make Believe,

things have really taken off for Child in a very big way. And I have a feeling this next single is about to do the same for them, called Still The One. Still The One Someday we will be together You just carry on They took me away from you, don't know for how long Kid, sat at a white piano, introduces the next act

Child with Still the One Formed in Wakefield in 1972 Child were pitched as a teeny-bot covers band who did the circuit of kids' TV shows such as Cheggers Plays Pop, Get It Together and The Basil Brush Show. In May of 1978, they got to number 38 with a cover of When You Walk In The Room

and then got to number 10 with a cover of It's Only Make Believe in September. This is the follow-up and it's just about to be released. Now, I didn't really go too deep on the research of this because I didn't want to type in child pictures and the like into Google. By the hairstyles, this should have been called Gordon McQueen and the Tilsleys. Not a hit at all. No wonder.

It's a fucking awful song, isn't it? It is, yes. It's very, very dull. And if you need to rely on... Actually, Conway Twitty's It's Only Make Believe is a great song, I think. It's got a real build to it. But if you're relying on that to get your hit, and you've got nothing else in the trunk, as it were,

and I think this is what's getting revealed here, they have nothing else. They may well, as my sole bit of internet, carefully done internet research um revealed they may well have been voted the second most popular band by fab 208 magazine that year um apparently a teen bot magazine i was not aware of um that might be the case but i suspect it's because of their omnipresence on the tv shows that you mentioned earlier um yeah i wonder who was number one there. It would have been.

Probably Flintlock or someone like that. Hmm. Or, but with a magazine like Fab 208, I don't know, it might have something to do with makes the money sign. Perhaps so, but yeah, nothing really memorable about this at all.

This could be the actual record for which the phrase was invented. I mean, what the fuck is it? I mean, it's like a passing cloud. They're like a grown-up flintlock or sophisticated basic rollers. And I mean... Yeah. And nobody wants a sophisticated Bay City Rollers do they?

Basically it's two ugly guys and identical twin David Van Days they're not, I mean and what's depressing is that they're, first of all this record sounds like it's actively trying to avoid

doing anything interesting in case that made it less commercial there are all these little avenues little interesting ways it could have gone and it doggedly sticks to a straight course and what's also depressing

is that they're playing this diaphanous soft pop on Les paul black beauties which are like both guitarists have got a les paul black beauty which is uh no doubt bought with the first real money they ever got from the record company and possibly the last but it's a rock guitar it's a pure hard rock guitar um and it And although it's not audible on the record, it's as if they're trying to send out signals, right? It's like they're blinking SOS in Morse code with their eyes

as they tell the camera their captors are treating them well. It's like, this isn't really us. This isn't really us. But it's a prison of their own making and their love of money is their only jailer or despite the fact that any hard rock

record that these saps made would without a doubt be even worse than this because at least this is inoffensive I mean what's the point of this in 1978 who needs this I mean, what's the point of this in 1978? Who needs this? Because the teenage girls or whoever,

they're mooning over John Travolta. No one else is going to be interested in it, are they, surely? We've got smoke here. We don't need this. Nobody needs this, and crucially, Top of the Pops doesn't need this nobody needs this and crucially top of the pops doesn't need

this no and it's a real dead it's a dead spot in the show it's a total fucking dead spot yeah and i know it behoves any of us to look at the charts for that week and think oh that should have been it yeah fucking hell i don't know give x-ray specs a bell or something and get them down yeah you know anything but this dreck i love how the blonde boy dolls are twins right and they're still dressed identically at the age of 20 or whatever that must have really pleased them yeah um it's yeah it and also the whole band look unnervingly fit like physically fit for 1978 right nobody did exercise in 1978 or or exercises as it was called except for some black guys and some gay men yeah like these kind of spots from wakefield nobody did any fucking exercise you were just skinny until you were 30 and then fat afterwards.

That was it. And you need to be skinny to carry off the Black Les Paul thing. You need to be kind of bent in half to a certain extent and a bit skinny and etiolated. They're not. They're just big blokes with big guitars

and it's incredibly dull. What this reminds me of is a 90's boy band record do you know what I mean? it's got that feel about it like it should be a bit better than it is but oh this will do you know but at the time it wouldn't do because it never got into the charts

and they'd have one more hit in May of 1979 with Only You and You Alone which got to number 33 but after it got slagged off on Jukebox Jewelry, they faded from view. They were one of the bands who were in the background, you know, waiting in the wings to come out. Oh, right, yeah.

Yeah, and... Proto Glenn Medeiros. David Wilkie was very unimpressed by the song, and yeah, they had to come out, yeah. And when David Wilkie's just cussed your fucking band down you might as well just pack it totally

well I just know they'll be celebrating in Banlirry County Dublin tonight because their favourite wayward sons have made it to the top quite an achievement

for the Boomtown Rats this week, number one, with Rat Trap. Formed in Dun Laoghaire as a five-man band called Nightlife Thugs in 1975, they invited Bob Geldof, a local lad who had just come back from Canada where he'd worked as a music journalist and kids TV presenter, to manage the band. He turned them down but offered to be their lead singer as long as they changed their name to the Boomtown Rats. After relocating in London in 1976, they signed with Enzyme Records a year later and immediately scored four top 20 hits on the bands. This song, the follow-up to Like Clockwork, which got to number six in July of this year,

has knocked Summer Nights by John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John off the number one slot after seven weeks. And the band are back in the Top of the Pops studio to rub it in and, in my mind, perform one of the iconic images of Top of the Pops studio to rub it in and, in my mind, perform one of the iconic images of Top of the Pops. Well, they start the performance by, well, covering their faces, actually, with a lot of posters from pop magazines of John Travolta, who's obviously, you know, man of the moment. And they start the performance by tearing these things apart.

Well, by yawning first. Oh, yeah. And then tearing them up and the front row just punches the air did you see that people actually applauding this it's like to my mind this is on a par with the berlin wall coming down because bear in mind i'm 10 years old and up until this point it was like oh well it's all music you know you like what you like what you like and you don't have to take any decisions but this was like the line in the

sand for me and a lot of people at my school you know because we were into Grease but we were also into you know all the new wave stuff up until now you know, all the new wave stuff. Up until now, you know, you never got like little Jimmy Osmond saying, oh, well, David Cassidy's a cunt. Don't buy his records.

You know, everybody seemed to like each other and get on with each other because you'd see them on Top of the Pop. So obviously they're all mates and everything. But the idea that, you know, someone in a band could, you know, slide down someone from another band or another singer or plastic and fake compared to the ugly posturing and embarrassingly empty self-regard of the Boomtown Rats. Now I mean I admit

that I would have thought that was hilarious at the time but as soon as this fucking dreary record began I'd be longing for yet another round of wella wella wella huh confronted with this fucking again, I'd be longing for yet another round of wella, wella, wella, huh. Confronted with this fucking, the B.A. Robertson for even bigger wankers, right?

The sheer fucking effrontery of this clown to think he can do these horrible impressions of Thin Lizzy and Bruce Springsteen and still strut around as though he was making some kind of contribution in his fucking green trousers, with his horrible band with that idiot in his pyjamas, you know what I mean? Although I like the guitarist on the right-hand side, he looks like he works for the Bulgarian secret police. But, yeah yeah generally it's

like i mean this fucking hell it's almost physically painful to listen to i mean there's a reason why two or three years after having their number one hits the boomtown rats have been completely abandoned you know they were cold as yesterday's mashed potatoes and all these copies of the fine art of surfacing was stowed in the loft all the My Guy centre spreads went to landfill and whatever their obvious sense of superiority this is a completely empty record with no value

and nothing the Boontown Rats ever did was any use to anybody anywhere and not only was it not useful it wasn't beautiful either and yeah they can get fucked So what did this get to number one then? I could understand by the way out i totally understand your excitement at that moment yeah um because that is i think you're right something not seen in top of the pots before

and there is that notion that it's all one big happy family of music and you know seeing that would have been shocking but but it's kind of watching it now it just seems rich him tearing up those john revolting olivia nutram bomb images but then basically just playing an american song in a really american way it is so sub springsteen and like so much of springsteen's work it goes on too fucking long like monday's like i don't like monday's does later on it goes on probably the only geldof i was gonna say i ever want to hear again i don't really want to hear it again i like the odd little touch that mutt lang's production puts on it the odd little zingy guitar line i like some of the rhythms in it. But yeah, to decry kind of American pop

and then just make really dull-sounding American rock, I don't see it as a victory as such. And also it's a scab for miming the saxophone part on a candelabra and all that sort of stuff because the musicians' union forbade him from playing saxophone. That's right, yes. But yeah, I know it got to number one, and so did, you know, they had a lot of hits,

but look at the audience during this performance. They're barely moving. They're barely moving at all. I think we're just meant to be, as ever with Geldof, just impressed, I guess. But sitting around listening to this for pleasure, I don't think is something I would ever ever do also he's the

the only man ever to make me contemplate the quiet dignity of Midge Ewer because we all remember this right at Live Aid when he first of all he actually put the Boomtown Rats on the bill as though they were pop stars.

As if they were pop stars in 1985. Like, he had the lack of shame and the lack of self-awareness to do that. And then, stop the music halfway through, I Don't Like Mondays, on the line, the lesson today is how to die. And Stan there, in silence his with his fist in the air like he's giving a fucking black power salute stage center um demanding and then milking a fucking standing ovation and using the word die in direct reference to the actual death of real human beings starving to death in the late 20th

century as a trigger for his applause like he actually did that this fucking posturing man child right this fucking dismal fucking has been pub rocker actually did that and rode that wave of fucking sycophancy. It's one of the most revolting things I've ever seen in my fucking life. Sorry, I'm actually getting genuinely a bit angrier. I'm going to stop before I go. Yes, please do. You know that when the Live Aid single came back,

40 years on or whatever, that they did a couple of years ago. I'll never forget his busy tweeting action, naming and shaming pop stars who hadn't returned his calls. And, you know, setting himself up as somebody so concerned and yet modern pop stars seemingly weren't. I thought that was bullying and horrible of him.

So I've long had my doubts about Geldof luckily he's not he you know some of these people you can kind of look back and say i like that track like that track never really a fan of the rats at all because when you listen to something like i don't like mondays it's simply quite a pompous almost proggy record um and yet it seems to be, what, part of the new wave, supposedly. But really, it's a horribly too long, you know, sanctimonious record. And I find it is one of the least easy to like pop stars ever, I think. I had to review a CD that came out about 10 or 15 years ago. that came out about 10 or 15 years ago.

They did a series of CDs of where pop stars chose records that had been their biggest influences, right? And I had to review the one that was him. And first of all, what was hilarious was that he had all these records on it, like Max Romeo and Roxy Music and stuff. Because of course you can really hear the influence of that on Bob's music.

And also he had Candy Says by the Velvet Underground and on his sleeve notes he said Lou Reed could really sing in those days. Yeah Bob, perhaps that's because it's not Lou Reed singing on that fucking moron. And there's that song Shoulder Pads, by The Fall,

that goes, couldn't tell Lou Reed from Doug Yule. And I've never been able to hear that song since without thinking of fucking Geldof. In his defence of the performance, he knows where the camera is at all times. You know, he's one of the great emoters on top of the pops. Every time the camera changes, he's there. I think that's his training of being a children's TV presenter in Canada.

Yeah, he's looking for the red light, yeah. Yeah. What a wanker, though. But to me, this was punk it was seen in the tabloid newspapers as the first punk number one single even though it clearly isn't

punk and you could argue that it isn't really much new wave either, would you see them as a New Wave band? Called a New Wave band? We have to sort of decide what New Wave means exactly. Well, yeah. This is what we should have done at the top of the show, but never mind.

We can do it now. But New Wave records, even if they've shorn their punk roots, as it were, and they're not as gnarly as old punk records, they're still, I don't know, they have a tightness and conciseness about them yeah um that that bintam that's never had bintam that's just seemed like a big sort of florid um wank fest to a large extent and these songs are too fucking long i cannot stress that enough yeah rat trap might have been a diamond tight little two minute single but it just goes on and on and on. I think it's four minutes of long. And this is a common problem when bands are purely run by absolute egotists

with no idea of conciseness. I think that's what's going on here. I wouldn't call them a new wave band, even though I'm sure that's where Spotify would put them, for instance. Related artists would probably be bands like fucking Blondie. But the difference between Blondie and this is immense. Yeah. I think my definition at the age of 10 of what New Wave was,

was that if you went up to them and asked them for their autograph and they told you to fuck off, they'd be New Wave. Show what you want, they'd sign anything. Elvis Costello fuck off Dean Freeman he'd come round your fucking house and play

Blondie fuck off I remember interviewing a really terrible band in the 90s in the Hilton Hotel by Hyde Park in London

and I was interviewing them and over in the corner I spied with my little eye Debbie Harry eating breakfast with somebody and I could not let it pass obviously so I just abandoned the interview I was doing

and I went over to her and asked her for her autograph and she had a fork going towards her mouth when I asked her the wonderful thing was she wasn't lovely, um and nice to me she was so pissed off and i wouldn't have it any other fucking way she was really pissed off she was a fucking empress yeah and she she deigned to give me a little girl not in a snotty way but

just in a kind of pissed off way yeah with those icy blue eyes boring through your soul oh oh it was perfect it could not have been any better it was better that way than if she'd have if we'd have had a chat or something it was absolutely the way i wanted my soul encounter with debbie harry today so yeah she was fantastic oh do you remember you might probably don't there's a band called smash mouth look i did it for money. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. As with most of the bands I interviewed, it was for money, purely.

You would walk away from them for Debbie Arie, wouldn't you? Yeah, and I didn't even tell them. I just said, got to go. They didn't even notice Debbie Arie. No, they didn't. And I didn't want them inveigling in. I didn't want them inveigling into this moment

that pretty much I've been waiting for since I was that six but she was fantastically cold and faintly disdainful, it was great So, Rattrap stayed for one more week at number

one before being usurped by the next song we're going to hear The follow up, I Don't Like Mondays would be number one for four weeks in the summer of 1979. Amazingly, Rat Trap only got to number two in Ireland, held off the top spot by Sandy

by John Travolta and then hopelessly devoted to you by Olivia Newton John. Lovely bit of revenge, isn't it? But it would get to number one for three weeks in 1996 when it was re-recorded by Bob Geldof and Dustin the Turkey. Have you heard that version?

It's great. The Turkey sings Geldof take a wash, take a wash, take a wash. And points out that his latest stuff is absolutely brutal. Well, they really are top of the pops this week. And that's all for this week. I hope you've enjoyed the program, and I hope you'll join us again next week. But for now, we leave you with the highest new entry in the chart. Rod Stewart, do you think I'm sexy no

born in london in 1945 rod stewart got his start in the pop game as the potential lead singer of the Kinks, but he eventually got knocked back and became the harmonica player for Jimmy Powell and the Five Dimensions. After a spell as a singer with Long John Baldry and the All Stars in the mid-60s, the Steam Packet Collective and the Jeff Beck Group in the late 60s, Stewart spent the late 60s and early 70s juggling a solo career and being Steve Marriott's replacement in the former Small Faces, renamed Faces.

By 1972, the solo records were outselling the Faces material and they parted ways in 1974 and he pissed off to Los Angeles in 1975. This is the follow-up to Olé! Olá! Stewart's collaboration with the Scotland World Cup squad which got to

number four in June of this year. It's a veering off into disco territory for Rod and was co-written with Carmine a piece of vanilla fudge as well as a blatant nick of Taj Mahal by Jorge Ben and Put Something Down on it by Bobby Womack and

it's this week's highest new entry at number 14. It's actually Da, You Think I'm Sexy Is it? I hate that Yeah, it's written, the title of this record is written Da You Think I'm Sexy, which must have been uncomfortable

for Irish listeners Yes But I think this is a great record because it's simultaneously for Irish listeners. Yes! But I think this is a great record because it's simultaneously a joke and not a joke. Perfectly balanced. It's outlandish and a bit sort of grotesque. Performed by this bunch of bananas-haired goo in his pink leather skin.

You're never quite sure to what extent he's taking himself seriously. Like at this point, it could be anything from 0% to 100%. You just can't tell. But also, it's a very sweet story song about a real human connection yeah and um if you're going to do a disco rock track do it extremely professionally with incredibly slick musicians and and do it like this and also i've got a soft spot for records that sound better the drunker you get um this is definitely one of them it's as if they represent the opposite of all the things I don't like about myself.

As the booze goes down, it's like you loosen up and you start to understand what it should mean to be alive rather than what it actually means. Yeah, and one of the keys to it, I would say, is not anything Rod does it's that string part it's that string motif that that hook that bit is is an incredibly strong hook as well

yeah which now of course would would have been a sample because it's from the bobby womack record and now they just have sampled it um and had to pay 50 of the publishing to to bobby womack whereas in fact they just ripped it off yeah i never had to pay any of it because apparently you can't sue for stealing a bit of the arrangement yeah you can only sue for stealing a bit of the vocal melody uh or um i think there's they will let you sue if it's like the main riff, like if you add the riff from Satisfaction or something like that. But you can just lift a string part and nobody cares. A bit sneaky, really, isn't it? Yeah, it is.

We'll say no more about this for now because it's bound to pop up again in future episodes. And let's just not shoot our bolt all over rod and his leopard skin just yet so the following week do you think i'm sexy sorry duh you think i'm sexy soared up to number four and a week later it was number one for one week until it was knocked off by mary's boy child by bony m the follow-up, Ain't Love a Bitch, got to number 11 in February of 1979, and he'd have to wait five years to get to number one again with Baby Jane. All royalties from this record were donated to UNICEF,

and he eventually settled a lawsuit with Jorge Ben, but he still contends that it's all right to nick off Bobby Womack. And it fucking isn't, let me tell you. No, but that chorus vocal line, it's just exactly the same as that Taj Mahal, isn't it? It's just... The first time you hear it, it's like... I can't believe this.

It feels like someone's just having a laugh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And apparently he said, oh, you know, I must have subliminally taken it on when I was at the Rio Carnival, when I was at the Carnival in Rio. Yeah, I must have heard it on a radio in a car going by. Yeah, I must have accidentally thought that this record

that mostly only people in Brazil have heard. Yeah. You know. Yeah. have heard yeah you know and that is the end of this episode of top of the pop so what is on television afterwards well bbc one is now screening the episode of the good life where margot gets shown up by her neighbors again which means it could be any of the fuckers and then world war ii lord byron and the life of Admiral Horatio Hornblower are amongst the subjects in Mastermind.

And then it's Miss World 1978, presented by Sassy Distel and Paul Burnett. Paul fucking Nett? Well, surely he was doing the... Could have been a lot worse. Surely he was doing the voiceover, you know, and coming up here is number 18. Yes.

BBC Two is shown in an investigation of South Africa in Newsweek, followed by the 1963 Paul Newman film Hood, and finishes off with Accident, a series of documentaries about how car crashes affect people's lives. On ITV, George has got a job as a traffic warden in Georgia Mildred. Jonathan Dimbleby interviews Indira Gandhi in TVI. Jack Reagan teams up with a Turkish police officer in a repeat at the Sweeney. And after news at 10, they finish off the night with The Love Boat.

Oh, exciting and new. What are we talking about in the playground tomorrow, chaps? Yeah, ripping up Travolta. It's got to be, hasn't it? And it was. And it was. But only because kids are stupid, you know. I mean, let's face it.

Oh, and also those men who spoke a song about toast and went in a kitchen. Yeah, exactly, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What are we buying on Saturday? I'm probably buying toast. those men who spoke a song about toast and went in the kitchen exactly yeah what are we buying on Saturday I'm probably buying toast and although I probably didn't at the time right now I'd buy Promises like a shot, Buzzcocks and Blondie

I'm not sure about anything it's one thing to appreciate Dean Friedman it's quite another to go out and buy it's a commitment isn't Dean Friedman. Yeah. It's quite another to go out and buy. It's a commitment, isn't it? Yeah. Buzz Cox, I'd probably have bought previous singles.

I'd probably take this one off the top 40 in order to kill music and leave only a cassette-shaped skull. So what does this episode tell us about November 1978? Actually, before I ask that question, where the fuck are Legs & Co? What's gone off there? Yeah. They must have thought that Dean Friedman

was enough sex for one night. I mean, you've got, you've had the largest lovely competition on Nationwide beforehand. You got Miss World afterwards. Maybe they thought too much Dad is faction. Yeah, it'd be all tapped out. Maybe so.

Taylor, you and I kind of tried to look into this, didn't we, before the show, and we worked out that there's a possibility that they assumed that one of the three Grease records that was clogging up the top five would be number one because Sandy, I think Sandy was number two and Hopelessly Devoted to You was number three. So, and they'd already done dance routines for that. And we, did we take a look at the dance routine

that Lexico did for Hopelessly Devoted for You? No. Have you seen it, Taylor? Two words, two words, Taylor, you and No. Have you seen it, Taylor? Two words. Two words, Taylor. You and tree. Yes. Very much so. Very, yes.

Yeah. And that's all I'm going to say. You've got YouTube. You've got fingers. Yeah. But what does this episode tell us about November 1978? It's still very, very much the 70s.

There's not a hint of the future, I would say. There's no... Maybe there is, but I can't hear any... Do you know what I mean? Electronics in this episode. No. There's no hint that I Feel Love has come out the year before. Or that, I don't know, Man Machine is coming out this this year i'm not saying these things are going to get crash the charts

necessarily but it's it's a very it's a 70s episode with not a hint of the bands who were perhaps about to break forth the following year so we're still kind of tail end the punk i guess but nothing else new has started i suppose yeah and i was this i was disappointed there was a 78 is a disco year really it's you know it's kind of it's almost like disco peaking cresting almost um and there's barely any of it apart from the the the point assisters thing at the beginning three degrees three degrees bloody hell man sorry yeah it's been a long one yeah it's kind of bookended by disco isn't it i was i was quite surprised by that but do you think

people were assuming that oh saturday night fever's gone down the pan so disco's dead perhaps so perhaps so but i mean you know could this episode have happened apart from blondie and the buzzcocks, I'd say these records could have existed at any point in the previous few years, really. There's nothing sort of, there's nothing specifically of this time. You know, from 75 onwards, a lot of the Top of Pops episodes,

I'm not saying they were called much of a muchness, but there's a lot of interchangeability in them. And I think this is one of them. There's not that kind of thing that you start detecting towards the end of 79 where you just feel shit things are changing yeah musically it's we're still on the mainland 70s definitely i think visually the leaves are turning though um there's uh you can see like that it's very much late 70s when you look at early 78 um yeah nothing's really changed but by late 78 it's long faces badly fitting clothes perpetual drizzle confusion and unrest freewheeling towards thatcher um and definitely when you look at this episode,

that comes across. I've got to say that I fucking love this episode. It was like, it was the equivalent of finding all your Subutio stuff in your mum's attic and just dusting it off and going, oh my God, I've forgotten all about this.

I've forgotten all about that. Definitely jump up and down music all the way through um yeah you could say child were um a load of shit but they're the kind of exception that proves the rule i think in this you know i think you need a bit of that to to remind yourself how bad things were um i think the only thing that was missing was if Legs & Co were dressed up as bread knives and slices of bread and pots of jam and butter and did toast, that would have been,

that would have made it probably the best Top of the Pops ever. But no, I was totally happy with this. It was, oh, 78. Love that shit. It contains all of the great things about Top of the Pops yes from this era

I'd say and it contains the thing of the buzzcocks being on Top of the Pops you know being in millions of people's living rooms

people who look like that I'm not saying they look terrible but what I mean is people who look like that in our living rooms I think that's amazing and of course

there's just the heart jacking excitement of the Blondie moment that's just a three minute total thrill just delivered like a little pipe bomb through your letterbox on a thursday evening it's just

wonderful so yeah it contains a lot of what is great about top of the pops i think and uh as if that wasn't enough you also get kid jensen saying the title of Fat Bottom Girls and then doing a Kenneth Williams face. Yes. Yes. Although I quite like the moment when, you know, before Rod Stewart, when he goes, do you think I'm sexy? And those girls are standing around him.

And they go, no. I actually quite liked that. It was slightly unmannered. It wasn't as forced as some of these things have been with some of the other DJs. I found that quite amusing it's quite anticipating the cover by british standard unit uh which ends in precisely that fashion all right the the thing that unnerved me a bit about that was the tiny little valerie solanus type um standing just to Kijensen's left keep an eye on her

well me ducks that is the end of chart music for this episode all that remains for me to do now is to try and remember what fucking URLs and all that shit I've got to throw at you so off the top of my head the website www.chart-music.co.uk

You can get involved with us on Facebook www.facebook.com slash Chart Music Podcast and you can join the many people who follow us on Twitter not that many, but you know, enough more than enough, you wouldn't want them all in your arse at the same time

put it that way Chart Music T-O-T-P. Thank you very much, Taylor Pike. Taylor Pike? Don't tailor him, Pike. Thank you very much, Taylor Parks. My name will also

go on the list. Sorry, say that again. Thank you very much, Taylor Parks. No problem. Thank you very much, Neil Kulkarni. No worries, Al. This has been Chart Music. My name's Al Needham, and I am the Demon Prince of the Third Division.

Chart Music. music. So may I beg the indulgence of the experts and ask you to bear with us while we try to give a little bit of help to those who are more agitato about what's happening. Next week, as part of the general frequency changes, Radio 3 will be moving on medium wave

from 464 metres to 247 metres. Our VHF position remains unchanged. Now, if you're listening to us now on medium wave and you want to discover where we're going to be, I hope these next five minutes will help. You should by now have one of the little cards with stickers on. You can peel off one of those marked with a 3 and be prepared to stick it on your dial

at the point where Radio 3 will be after the 23rd. Now your set may be marked in meters or it may be marked in kilohertz. Meters measure wavelengths and kilohertz are the measurement of frequency. Look carefully at where you're tuned now on medium wave. If your set is one marked in meters, it'll be just over halfway between 400 and 500 metres. We're actually on 464 metres, so that's just over halfway between 400 and 500. Now, you'll need to tune down past 400, past 300, to just over halfway to 200. The new wavelength is 247 metres. Now, in a moment or two, we'll let you hear what's going on there on Radio 1, so you can hear what to tune to.

Now, your set may instead be marked in kilohertz. In that case, at the moment, we're on 647 kilohertz, about halfway between 600 and 700. See it? Now, perversely, kilohertz moves in the opposite direction to wavelength, so our new home will, if your set is marked in kilohertz, mean tuning up the scale. The new kilohertz number is 1215.

It's the date of Magna Carta. You can't possibly forget that. So if everybody's happy, on 247 metres and 1215 kilohertz at the moment, this is what's going on Right.