Chart Music: the Top Of The Pops Podcast - #28: August 31st 1995 - Find A Girl, Settle Down, Kill Salman Rushdie

Episode Date: July 13, 2018

The latest episode of the podcast which asks: is there such a thing as a trendy wank? This episode, Pop-Crazed Youngsters, drags us back to the dark  Civil War of the mid-90s, when brother fought against brother over whether Roll With It was slightly less rubbish than Country House, and Oasis-loving loving wives imposed a 'nookie strike' upon their Blur-supporting husbands. Yes, it's the aftermath of the Battle of Britpop, and we fly over the rubble, dropping crates of analysis and sniping at assorted wrongness along the way. If you're expecting non-stop Sons and Daughters of Albion adopting Mockney accents and walking about about monkeys, however, you're going to be sorely disappointed, as there are a lot of - gasp! - Americans on it, and even some Irish people. Dale Winton reaches the pinnacle of the journey he started when he was playing records in a biscuit factory. Berri and De'lacy provide an interesting - sort of - compare-and-contrast of Anglo and American House. Michael Jackson lolls about in a CGI Greek temple with Elvis' daughter. The theme tune from Friends pops up. Fucking Boyzone show up for no reason whatsoever. Montell Jordan arses about in a theme park. Echobelly break up from school forever. Michael Bolton, looking like a giant Womble, asks if he can fondle us. Blur show off. Sarah Bee and Simon Price help Al Needham to walk through the minefield of Britpop like Lady Di, breaking off to discuss the early days of Television X, our shameful careers in pornography, watching Friends whilst ripped to the tits on Leytonstone speed, all the awards we've won and what we do with them, and - finally - Simon gets to talk about Romo. And Oh! what swearing! 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 episode of Charts Music, the podcast that puts the wide front of intelligent commentary and analysis around the pendulous dog's bollocks that is a random episode of Top of the Pops. I'm your host, Al Needham, but so fucking what? It's always about the people who are the wind beneath my wings,

and those people are Sarah B. Good morning. And Simon Price. Hello. How are we, me dears? Like the Wicked Witch of the West, I'm melting. Oh, man, it's fucking horrible, isn't it? Yeah, I have that kind of pale, freckly Welsh skin

that can't handle this kind of temperature. Yeah, I'm doing that typical goth thing of bitching about the warm weather while everyone else is having a lovely time that's the ginger gene apparently you don't need to have ginger hair to have the ginger gene because I've got it as well it's the kind of pale freckly kind of thing yeah no I'm in here windows closed blinds down

jobs are good let's do it right pop crazy youngsters we are not fucking about this week we have got a lot to get through in this episode so before we go any further it's time once again to initiate

the latest batch of Pop Crazy Youngsters who are official members of our gang by dint of getting their hands in their pockets and kicking some dollar in on our Patreon account

at patreon.com slash chartmusic. This time they are Tim Young, Steve Clarke, Simon Treanor, Simon Galloway, Sean Barnum, Ali M, Mike Melia, Paul Gill, and Neil Kately. Oh, God, you're ace, you are. Aren't they nice? They're lovely, lovely people, aren't they? I feel like we're just starting to pick up in a way.

I actually, for the first time this week, met some pop-crazed youngsters in the wild. Yes, you did. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I was out at my girlfriend's club night called Total Blam Blam at the Hotel Pellerocco in Brighton. And there was a couple called, I'll give a shout-out, Ian and Lydia from Bournemouth,

originally from Mould in North Wales. Hey up, Ian and Lydia. God bless you governor they were so nice and they they came up to me and just said just want to say love chart music podcast and i don't know about you al but that's the first time that's happened to me and it just really you know it really made it all seem worthwhile um i thought about initiating some bummer dog bants but then i I thought, I don't really know these people well enough yet. So maybe save that for the second meeting. Yeah. It sounds like a code word, doesn't it?

When you just go bummer dog at someone. Yeah. Not very subtle one either. Yeah. Bummer dog. Definitely a third date thing, I would say. So yeah,

that's all good. But you know, we can still do better. So if you are one of the people who've been enjoying these podcasts and you haven't forked out on patreon yet well you know that's okay that's fair enough you know we've all got reasons but i just want you to picture me standing in front of you right now pulling the waistband of my g-string right out giving you a pleading look in my eyes and whispering stuff it in

good and hard so this episode Pop Craze Youngsters takes us all the way back to August the 31st 1995 I've got to thank somebody whose name I can't mention

because it's an under-the-counter job for this episode. Some bloke just got in touch with me and said, got some 90s episodes of Top of the Pops if you want them. And I said, fuck yes. Did he have like a long trench coat and like whipped it open and all these kind of like files hanging down? Yeah, I remember in the 80s when, you know, there was that one video rental shop on the estate

where if you asked the right bloke if you got anything under the counter, you'd get slipped something that you thought was going to be properly hardcore and it turned out to be Jungle Burger or some bollocks like that. Well, this is a modern day equivalent. So that bloke, thank you very much you know who you

are but yeah august the 31st 1995 this is uh the aftermath of the baccala brit pop isn't it very much so yeah yeah and we're going to spend the next uh few hours um kind of like going through the rubble and uh scavenging vital material and uh you know looting a corpse or two, I feel. Yeah, we're going to be ripping open bags, sacks with UN stenciled on the sides looking for grain to sustain us through the coming winter. Definitely, yeah. So let's flip things around a little bit. We usually say this a bit later on in the podcast,

but for this time, let's get this out of the way now. What were you doing in August, 1995? Sarah, what was I doing? Um, I was 17. I was,

uh, yeah, I feel like I don't need to say anything else. Really. Um, what's he going out? I dunno. I mean,

I, you know, I, for the, for the area, I was kind of a late starter and going out, you know, cause I used to go out in Halifax.

Um, I used to go to a place called the zoo bar, which was, was the zoo bar and the tram shed i don't know if i've um you have to forgive me if i've if i've gone on about this before yes it was this kind of a club that will now live in infamy it's now it's now like some offices or something because they they bulldozed it after there was a big raid on it and uh they discovered that yeah the youngest person in there was like 12 that night. So I was basically, I was a kind of grizzled old person at this point. Granny B.

Granny B. But yeah, there was like a rock and indie club at one side. You pay £3.50 at one end of the building and you get into the rock club. And there was like a sort of, there was like a beer garden and like a room in between with no music on. And then there was the tram shed. A chill-out area, as they say in the Mid-November. An area where one might chill out. And then there was the tram shed, which was like the dance club.

And you could queue at either end and you pay the same amount and you get in. You get to both these clubs. And it was great. I don't know why more people don't do this. So you'd get this lovely mingling of the tribes, you know, and I would go there and I would drink, you know,

I'd have like three diamond whites and that would be my night. Oh, and you're anyone's. Excuse me, I was extremely discerning for the first two diamond whites. Yeah, so that's...

The zoo bar though, that throws up horrible images of people in bad 80s shit just doing the same dance routine over and over and over no it wasn't like that at all it was quite you know they were but there were sort of some uh my mates were like the the sort of metal bands of uh of like bradford and stuff who actually who were who were uh nice gents very shiny hair and this is always the way and And, you know, my mates from, like, theatre school and stuff who I used to drag there. And, yeah, I do remember that we used to play,

because there was, like, a slightly sunken dance floor. And whenever they played Smells Like Teen Spirit, we'd do, like, it was like Nirvana chicken, because you'd leg it across the dance floor just before it kicked in and everybody started, you know, flinging themselves about like crazy and you you would you know be be in personal danger so yeah good times oh what were you into at the time um this is the thing like you need to understand that i was i could i could bullshit now about how you know about the things that i would that i was into but i i kind of wasn't't because I didn't feel cool enough for sort of, you know, pulp and stuff.

But I kind of sidled up to Britpop a bit and I sidled up to, you know, I sidled up to a lot of things I didn't really have. This is why I like this club is because you could, there were these two completely different cultures meeting in one place and I could sort of wear something that would enable me to pass between fluidly between these two places and it was uh yeah that was great but I know I I did like a bit of pulp and I liked um you know but I it took me a long time to realize that it was okay like somebody literally told me it's okay if because I was like I'm actually not

cool enough for this this or this and it's like no it's not really how it works. I was like, oh, great. Okay, that's brilliant. So I was just coming out of that kind of school thing and going into the sixth form and going, oh, actually, things are all right. Simon. Well, we've done this before, haven't we? Yeah, but we'll do it again.

We'll do it again. Yeah. Come and sit by the fire, storyteller. I was having a great time, really. I was working at Melody Maker, as I had been for quite a few years by this point, and I was now the reviews editor. I was living in a basement flat in Holloway, Babylon, North London, and playing football every Sunday with Damon Albarn and co.,

which we'll come on to. I know we've mentioned that before as well. This exact weekend, I and the rest of the Melody Maker crew would have been uh recovering from a very full-on Reading Festival weekend right um and uh I'll tell you another interesting thing that happened to me this month just a couple of weeks before this I discovered or was shown really a brand new music scene that was kicking off in Camden Town my involvement in which would become greatly mocked but I stand by it called Romo

How many episodes of this have we done before we've even said the word Romo? Well I've been keeping my powder dry my sparkly shimmery eye powder. Yeah, what it was, basically, Camden Town had been the hub of Britpop,

but by 1995, there were a few younger people who'd been fans of that scene, who were getting a bit tired of the kind of laddish nature of it, and the way it was becoming all kind of loaded and Oasis and Trainers and all the kind of laddish nature of it and the way it was becoming all kind of loaded and oasis and trainers and all that kind of stuff. And there was a bit of a return to the values

of the neuromantic movement of the early 80s. So I was told about this. Someone said, you've got to come along and see this. So I went along to the Laurel Tree in Camden, which was previously the kind of mod central. You know, it's kind of where menswear used to hang around and all that kind of stuff. But there was a gig by two bands called Plastic Fantastic

and Dex Dexter, who were all wearing kind of blouses with amazing asymmetric hair and playing music that sounded like Japan meets Roxy Music. And I looked around the crowd and, you know, these were people, they were way younger than me. I was about 27 at the time. These people were Sarah's age at the time, sort of 17-year-olds, dressed up to the nines and really rebelling against that kind of

dressed-down orthodoxy of Britpop. And I thought, yeah, I'm having some of this. So I got involved. I wrote about it. I dug into it. I found there were more bands, Orlando and I'm having some of this. So I got involved. I wrote about it. I dug into it. I found there were more bands, Orlando and Hollywood and all these other bands on the scene. And I wrote it up for Melody Maker.

The name Romo actually came to me via someone else. There was a guy called Martin Kelly, who was one of the bigwigs at Heavenly Records, was walking down the street with his colleague, Robin Turner, a big mate of mine and uh um they saw presumably european tourists dressed in full neuromantic garb um you know 15 years after the fact and martin turned to robin and said look at that romo there and uh this was reported back to me and i thought yeah that'll do we'll have that and then then we kind of back announced it that it meant something,

that it meant romantic modernist, but that was bullshit. Oh, very good. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, I got really involved. I started doing club nights myself. We did a tour sponsored by Melody Maker of all these bands going around the UK.

And really, it was meant to be a kind of a kamikaze attack against Britpop. We knew we weren't going to take over the world. We knew that people hadn't had their fill of Britpop yet. They were still loving it. So the timing was completely wrong for the next big thing. But then again, you can't choose the timing. If there's a bunch of kids forming bands,

you don't get to say, actually, guys, sorry, give it a year or so, will you? So we just had to go with it, roll with it, as it were. Taylor and I actually wrote a manifesto in Melody Maker, kind of putting forward the core principles of what we saw this to be, called a Ro Manifesto. Nice. I think Taylor's bits were in italics and mine were in normal font.

Yeah, obviously the NME absolutely hated it and just ripped it to pieces and we kind of we wanted them to in a way that the whole point was to be provocative and yeah it crashed and burned within 12 months but we had a lot of fun and a few of the bands got record deals with nice big advances they'll never have to pay back to this day so everyone's a winner baby yeah i mean you were i mean you are so tied in with romo aren't you simon to the extent where a lot of people think that you pretty much started it yeah people think that i somehow magicked into being these bad things you know i had a gun to their heads i just saw going up to random teenagers in camden town saying form a band you bastards yeah but no it's it's not really like that i mean what what journalists do is see something happening and identify what it is and apply a pattern to it

or give it a name um and this this was definitely a happening thing it wasn't just a disparate bunch of bands who had some similar ideas there was definitely so you you know when you see it this this kind of feeling that there's something's going on here um it turned out not to be anything very big it was a you know a bunch of people who all lived in uh various um house shares and squats dotted around north london um you know trying almost almost willing themselves to change the world and to turn things back to how things were in in 1980 or in the post-punk era and i i became something of a kind of low rent cross between Malcolm McLaren and Robert Elms as a kind of spokesperson for the whole thing um but yeah

was it to the detriment of your career Simon being known as the Romo man I mean who knows I think I'd already burnt enough bridges and annoyed enough people in various ways. Yeah, I suppose I could have played it safe and gone along with a kind of indie orthodoxy and it might have been better for my career. But then again, I look at what happened only a couple of years after Romo fizzled out. The whole electro clash thing came along and suddenly, you know, kind of Hoxton hipsters

and the NME and their equivalents in the States and in Berlin had decided that this whole aesthetic was indeed cool. It's just that we were slightly too early with it. So what can we do? I've seen a clip of the Sunday show in 1996 with Katie Puckrit about Romo. And it's terrible. I mean, not the actual Romo stuff, but the reaction from the audience. It was like that episode

of wogan where vivian westwood comes out and brings out brings out all these models with weird shit on yeah and they're just at the absolute derision and it's like oh no yeah is this who we are now yeah and bless her katie was going out to bat for us because she was, you know, a total 80s head herself. She'd previously gone out with a member of Classics Nouveau, believe it or not. Wow. So, yeah, she totally wished us well. And you can see from the clip that a few kind of the old stars

of that era turned up. Mark Allman came along. He was really lovely about it. Tony Hadley came along and was a prick about it. Fancy that. Yeah fancy that. Yeah Tony Hadley had a go at us for

digging up and revisiting the past so what's he been doing for the last couple of decades now? That's what therapists call projection isn't it? So that was my 1995 into 96 anyhow. Nice i was uh i was heavily involved in brick grot at the time i was still i was still working at dickie desmond's wank factory but the

stakes were raised considerably because uh well one morning i was i was still doing my job of sifting through bin bags full of fannies and And the deputy editor of Pentas put his head around the door. And he said, oh, by the way, we're starting up our own satellite TV station. And we want you to be a presenter on it. I'm like, what? And he said, yeah, yeah. We want you to do a sports show called David Dickey's Sports Night. And you essentially wear a

shit wig and moustache and you commentate on videotapes of topless boxing from Walthamstow British Legion and some catfighting videotapes we've got from trailer parks in Kentucky. I'm like yeah okay I'll do that. Why?

Why me? And he said well it's been noted that you spend all day going around the office taking the piss out of everything so we thought we'd try and make use of it so yeah I became one of the faces of television x the fantasy channel does any of this survive on youtube or anything I've looked and thankfully no I had a videotape of some of the episodes on it and recently I was digging around thinking oh god I've got to fucking digitise this and I found the tape and it was absolutely caked in mould

quite apt really the really weird thing was for the first time I actually got to meet the models in the wank mags because everyone assumes that if you're working in porn you're spending your day sitting in a jacuzzi with all the topless lovelies but you never see them, you see the

wank mags and they're all edited by the porn stars but no, that's not the case. One of the jobs when I was there was I had to pick up the phone for Pamita who was the editor of Asian Babes and tell people who were ringing up that she wasn't around at the minute uh she was out on a photo shoot when in actual fact Pamita was sat right next to me and he was a bloke in his 50s

in a cardigan doing the Daily Telegraph crossword and just didn't want to talk to wankers you've destroyed my entire belief system there yeah I know I know. I'm sorry about that. I actually wrote for Penthouse myself a little bit around this time. Yes, you did. Yeah, the later Penthouse. Yeah, yeah. When it tried to go all trendy. Yeah.

Yeah. I remember when that came out and I just thought, this ain't going to work, mate. Because, Max, we did. There was an honest day. You know, it wasn't like, oh, you know, here's this great core review or here's this talk with an actor. It's like, look, you know, we know you just want to have a wanker. You here you go knock your son out i agree with you but i wasn't going to say no to the work what happened was that um someone i knew who was coming from the kind of fetishy scene that skin

two kind of scene yeah um took over as editor of the uk version of penthouse yeah and tried to sort of take it back in that direction of having quality writing um so they got me in to be the kind of music person and all it meant was that for about three or four issues i wrote about a load of romo bands in penthouse so so you had like orlando and minty and people like that in it so basically penthouse for about half a year became melody maker with tits wow that's a real palate cleanser in between in between wanks isn't it you know just kind of a lot of sort of fey boys with with insane hair staring out at you i'm sure there's there was a bit of a bit of uh a bit of dissonance going on in the in the brains of

penthouse's readership maybe they i don't know maybe some of them like discovered you know new layers to their sexuality they never dreamed of. Yeah. You would hope. Yeah, I wrote for about, I don't know, was it about 18 months? I wrote for Club International. I had a column. Oh. So, yeah, now I'm... I was nearly the deputy editor at Club International. Oh, really?

Yeah, when I went for the job interview, they offered me the job and everything. The person who was leaving, he was there in the interview and I said to him, you got any questions? And I said, yeah. And I looked him in the eye and said, what's the worst part of your job? And he looked back at me and he said, well, Jenna Jameson rings you up about four o'clock in the morning for a chat. That's the worst part.

Yeah, she's a bit mental. All the American ones are And yeah she'll just ring you up And you know be your mate Sounds alright yeah So it turns out that all three of us Have worked in the porn industry in some tangential way We were young

See there's an idea for a chart music special Shall I get Yeah I'll see if I've still got any Of my old columns because it was a music column but it was basically like it was like the music sex column what is the best music when you're doing it

and it was just hilarious like you said, I just took the piss completely it was great oh my god, I definitely want to read that oh man, did you interview Mike Reid? not that i remember but as i was saying yeah you actually got to to work with the people who were in the magazines which was which was a bit of a fucking mind blower i mean you know for the first time i started doing any filming for them they wanted me to do some sort of trailer stings and stuff like that

so i'm there in all my fucking gear and they said all right we'll bring him in then and it was um charmaine sinclair and sam jessup who at the time were like the two biggest page three girls it was like oh my god i've seen your fan loads of times and it was like okay well you lay down out and uh they're gonna kind of like roll on you and they were in basks and stockings and everything. And I'm like, oh, okay, this is a bit better than going through the bin bags. But later on, I discovered that one of them was actually having an affair with Robert De Niro at the time. Oh, my God.

So this poor cow rolled out of Robert De Niro's bed, got on the DLR to Cross Harbour and then spent a morning rolling about on me. And I tell you what, Robbo, she loved every fucking minute of it. But it was odd. I mean, those women, you know, everyone's got their preconceptions about them.

I've got to say, they were absolutely perfect girlfriend material material as long as you didn't mind the fact that everybody else had seen them with the bits out yeah they were such a fucking laugh man and they didn't give a fuck about anything yeah i mean there was one time i was working with this uh with one of them and we'd done some filming and i couldn't help but notice that she was kind of like scratching between her legs every now and again. I thought, oh, fucking hell. So anyway, we're on a break, on a fag break in the dressing room and we're having a chit-chat and she's practically bollock naked

and she scratches again and she catches me noticing it and she just says, oh, I know what you're thinking. No, nothing like that at all. I did this photo shoot the other day uh and i i was wearing fishnet knickers and the photographer um gordon rondell he wanted me to take in the laundry and uh which is a term for um basically grabbing the the front of your drawers and yanking them right up and uh she said yeah i had to take in the laundry and i got a paper cut on me clit and i said oh and she said no no no look and she just

basically just stood there and just and just um yeah yeah basically showed me her you know clitoris wow so yeah did not give a shit and as well as commentating on the topless boxing and the cat fighting we also introduced new sports that were poised to sweep the nation which were things like we did Grand Pricks which was basically

scalextric but with dildos on it and the first thing I ever did was a sport called muff puffing, which was basically blowing with a straw a Rice Krispie off someone's pubes into their belly button with a target painted around it. And I'm not making this up.

I did it first fucking time. First time. And then later on, when we did our launch, our press launch at BAFTA, they put that on the big screen at BAFTA in slow motion with triumphalist music. Stand innovation. Is that your greatest sporting achievement?

Oh, yeah. Well, apart from that, I also chipped a golf ball first time into a bucket that was strapped to a model's arse when she was on all fours last time I saw you in person what have you done?

last time I saw you in person I tried to lob a beach ball into a plastic bucket and if I'd known what I was up against I wouldn't have even bothered I mean come on it was a good effort I think we should just fuck off the music thing now

yeah yeah just talk about your kind of porn sports achievements you know but I mean it was a it was a much reviled program

because it was you know some poor sod spent ten quid a summer to have a late night wank and then I'm popping up telling him what a fucking sad bastard

he was yeah that's that's it was awful because I mean one thing when you do work in porn I mean no magazine industry hated its readership more than the porn industry we couldn't fucking stand them man I spent so much time

I remember the first time I met our readership the editor of Penthouse at the time would give uh guided tours to readers and they were fucking horrible um you could always tell when they were happening because there was a lot of women who worked uh you know worked in the office and that when there was a reader's day you come into work in the morning it's like oh there's no women about what's going on they'd all gone shopping or they'd all had thrown a sick hair or they were all outside smoking fags because you'd just be sitting there working away then all of a sudden you get like a dozen fucking horrible cunts usually almost always dressed up up in motorbike jackets, just leaning over you going,

oh, you've got the best job ever, haven't you? Where's the girls then? And I mean, there was one time when I went upstairs to the meeting room because I thought we had a meeting scheduled. And it turned out that the editor had taken people up there as part of the guided tour. And he brought along a couple of the, shall we say, fourth division models in

some of the fourth division mags and they were essentially lying on the desk, bollock naked and our lovely readers were eating sugar cubes out of their fannies. Oh, Jesus. Yeah, yeah. And then right at the end of the tour, they'd be given essentially a trolley dash through the library

to take back as many wank mags as they could. A supermarket suite. Yeah, yeah. That's a call forward. Yeah. A supermarket suite. And you'd just be there working and looking out the window on a Friday afternoon

and you could see our lovely readers just walking to the DLR with fucking stacks of wank mags. There was one bloke he actually bought about four big shopper bags which he filled with porn and he was just lumbering down the road as happy as a pig in shit.

It's like, yeah, there are readers. The fucking letters we got. Yeah, that's another entire thing isn't it i may read one out in a bit i am in possession of the greatest wank mag letter ever so so yeah but anyway i mean music wise brit pop yeah really meant fuck all to me i'd already decided i hate to blur okay oasis i thought were all right i got really into Dub at this time. Still into Jungle.

Still clinging on to hip-hop, hoping it was going to get better. I think my only concession to Britpop was having a Forest t-shirt in the Oasis font. That's as far as I went. I mean, I was like, I was what, 27? So I did feel it was a bit kid stuff, Britpop. Which was a very snobby thing to say but you know a lot of the stuff I'd heard I thought yeah I've heard this before man

I've heard the Lambrettas thank you don't need them again well you know I think by the point we're at now in 1995 that assessment of it was entirely accurate but I think it started off

a lot better than that. I really do. Yeah. Radio 1 News In the news this week. Jets from NATO countries continue to bomb Bosnian Serb targets near Sarajevo.

Edward Shevardnadze, leader of Georgia, survives an assassination attempt in Tbilisi. Microsoft released Windows 95. Elizabeth Taylor was separated from her seventh husband, Larry Fortensky. Michael Barrymore has just come out. But the big news this week is that Nina Simone

has been given a suspended sentence for shooting at teenagers outside her home in France for being noisy. Come on, Nina. Don't fucking stand for that shit. What a legend. On the cover of Enemy this week, Green Day. On the cover of Smash It, Blur. The number one LP in the country is Said and Done by Boyzone.

Over in America, the number one single is Kiss from a Rose by Seal, and the number one LP is Cracked Rearview by Hootie and the Blowfish. So Simon, take us through the latest issue of Melody Maker for this week. So this episode of Top of the Pops

came out just after the Melody Maker reporting on that year's Reading Festival came out. Right. So the front cover, it's a live photo of the Foo Fighters, Dave Grohl, at the Reading Festival. Strapline on the bottom, winner Gibson Les Paul, signed by Noel Gallagher. You lucky people. Yeah.

And much of the issue is taken up with the Reading Festival, but the main news story is about the upcoming War Child charity album for the Bosnia Crisis, which features Blur and Oasis, The Manics, Charlatans, Radiohead, Portishead, all the heads, assorted melody maker type bands.

Also in the news that week, Dave Garn from Depeche Mode has gone missing following an apparent suicide attempt two weeks earlier. Oh, shit to know. Kim Shattuck from The Muffs, who ended up being in The Pixies, has been arrested on the Lollapalooza tour after throwing a television out of a hotel window. Well, that's original, isn't it? Yeah. Old school.

Chumbawamba have pulled out of the Christianity based Greenbelt Festival after the organisers kicked off about the band inviting on stage the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence who are an order of gay nuns dedicated to the pursuit of sexual pleasure

so good old Chumbawamba and bassist Annie Holland has left Elastica due to, in inverted commas, exhaustion. Right. There's also the Rumour Mill gossip column that we had every week where we learned that Melody Maker's Everett True was kicked out of a Smashing Pumpkins gig at the request of the band.

Good Lord. In terms of what chart music contributors have written this week, I wrote a preview of the X-Files episode The Host, which is the one with that giant human tapeworm who lives in the sewers, or Pooh Man, as Gillian Anderson privately called it. David Stubbs discovers

a band called Towering Inferno who are an ambitious attempt to make sense of Europe's history and commemorate the Holocaust. So, typical light-hearted Stubbsy material there. Yeah, something for the postman to whistle there. He also writes a review of the Keanu Reeves' Sandra Bullock film Speed, which is out on video. Neil Kulkarni has written a spectacularly venomous live review of Ash,

in which he calls for an end to the lie of indie but he's also written rave reviews of an album by the New York hip hop act Snow and AG I'm guessing that's not Snow as in Informer. Show and AG No, Show and AG. Really?

Oh my god, in that case Melody Makers screws up I swear. Oh Not the Informer. Not Informer. No. Oh, man. A licky boom-boom down Melody Maker. Absolutely.

Jeez. Showbiz in 18, that's a fucking brilliant album. Is it? I don't know it. Digging in the crates. Well, Neil loves it, and he also loved the new album by the jazz rap act Philadelphia Blunts, if you know that one. Oh, yes. Taylor Parks has written nothing in this issue, The Lazy Sod.

Oh. On the inside of the front page, advert-wise, there's a massive advert for Morrissey's Southpaw Grammar. And further on in their magazine, there's an enterprising coach company are cashing in on the Blur versus Oasis hysteria by running trips to see blur and oasis in paris in october and november respectively wow um single of the week is i'll stick around by the foo fighters cover stars uh with goldie and built to spill in second and third

place um there's the satirical talk talk talk section at the back which is mainly written by david stubbs in which we have blur and oasis battle to reach number one in america battle is on to see who can sell one copy of their single in the usa first it's very good uh the gig guys uh gig guy tells us that you al could have seen uh skin and sugar ray or atomicomic Candy or Dissident Prophet and Guided by Voices in Nottingham that week if that took your fancy What a shame I was living in London at the time Ah well in London, where I was as well take that were Headlining

Ill's Court but nearly everyone else of any note was having a rest after Reading including me Meanwhile in the North Sarah, Sarah you could have gone to see Cast and Pure Essence in Leeds or Sugar Ray supported by the then unknown

Placebo should you so wish to do I don't know but yeah the bulk of the issue is taken up with reporting on the Reading Festival much of the coverage written by Stubbsy and Neil Kukarni David Stubbs holds his nose and writes vaguely

positive things about menswear and jean because Melody Maker is sponsoring that stage. But he raves about Heather Nova and the Swedish band Whale a bit more sincerely. David also reviews the comedy stage where he likes Eddie Izzard, loves

Jerry Sadowitz, but describes Frank Sidebottom as a complete twat. Neil Kukarni, still in vitriolic mode, compares the dress sense of the crowd to Mr Claypole from Rent-A-Ghost. And he describes the punk band Pennywise as horrible smelly music for horrible smelly people. Angry. Angry young man. Yeah, he is. He's much more impressed by

Pavement and Buffalo Tom and Soundgarden but not the headliner who is in his words, some old gimmer called Neil Young. Neil Kulkarni that is, says I've pissed rusty water out of my arse that was better than this. And we have a

separate gossip column for Reading itself. Cynthia Plastercaster was hanging around backstage looking for rock star Cox to mould. There was the traditional 1.30am fire alarm at the Ramada Hotel which caused pissed up music biz types to hold an impromptu

rave in the street around the flashing blue lights from the fire engines. But had David Stubbs out there waving his umbrella at them, shouting them to all go away. Credited in the coverage as they also served

are me, Simon Price would have been coordinating the reviews I suppose and Taylor Room Service Parks, he's called it called freeloading shamelessly as i remember i never knew there was so much in it simon how many people how many people were involved in creating that issue of melody maker or an average issue of melody maker that you know of that era oh i mean i'd say including the design department and kind of admin staff.

Photographers, everyone. You're looking at 30 to 40 people, I would say, at that point. It was a bustling, busy office. And we took probably half the staff down to Reading and booked out several rooms in the Ramada Hotel. Because Melody Maker was kind of our Glastonbury. I think the NME actually had Glastonbury in some kind of sponsorship deal.

So we had Reading and we really made a big deal of it. So I pulled Glastonbury. I think the NME actually had Glastonbury in some kind of sponsorship deal, so we had Reading and we really made a big deal of it. So I pulled out all the stops. Right, and where are we going to start with this Britpop nonsense then? Well, just over a fortnight before this episode of Top of the Pops, BBC2 broadcast Britpop Now, a collection of live

performances from bands who had basically been lumped under the Britpop banner. There was Blur, Elastica, The Boo Radleys, PJ Harvey, Menswear, Echo Ballet, Gene, Supergrass, Sleeper, Marion, Powder and Pulp. Oasis were invited on, but they turned it down. So that left the field clear for Blur to be the headline act. And Damon Olburn actually finagled, if you will, his way into a presenting role. And his opening statement went like this.

Three years ago, in the spring of 1992, Blur had embarked on a second tour of America. We'd been there the previous autumn and had been really well received, but this time it was very different. In short, Nirvana. Nirvana. Everywhere Nirvana. America had found a voice and a face capable of expressing its anxiety and self-loathing. An angelic face amongst the shopping malls.

If America felt like this, then the whole world had to feel the same way. In short, if you were in a band that was not Nirvana or a diet Nirvana, you were nothing. Well, I think all that's changed now. British bands are no longer embarrassed to sing about where they come from. They've found their voice. Panel, your thoughts? Well, I'm probably going to go against the grain of the rest of you, but I think he's got a point. I really do.

I think cultural imperialism had taken hold not just of the mainstream, but of the alternative sector to a large extent. I mean, first of all, in the post-Live Aid era, there was this huge kind of clampdown in British culture of anything non-conformist was thrown out, and everything became very Americanised. It was basically one big John Hughes movie. The toxic message of John Hughes' The Breakfast Club, of course,

being that if you want to succeed, conform. So basically all the rhetoric of the left in the 80s about the 51st state of America being Britain, I believe was basically valid. And now, in the late 80s, early 90s, alternative culture was becoming Americanised too, at least a large chunk of it was. I suppose you had things like Manchester and Acid House,

which were very British, but they weren't British in terms of the kind of text or the references or anything that was going on lyrically. That scene was all about being inside your mind or being out of your mind um it was not really about describing um your life or the world around you but that started to change in in the early 90s there were bands i think saint etienne would be the one i would credit as being first with this um even though a lot of their their stuff was just kind of cryptic references and name drops and little samples of films and stuff, they were building a world that was recognisably British. And then you had, I think the real breakthrough would have been Suede,

who were a classic rock band, so they had a certain kind of battering ram effect that Saint Etienne could never have had. And they brought with them all these other bands who were quite disparate really in the early days of people like denim who were doing kind of bell records rack records glam rock pastiche uh you had the auteurs who were more kind of almost george harrison meets david bowie singer songwriter stuff um and uh i think even in that lineup that you just read out of Britpop now, there's quite a lot of diversity going on there,

both in terms of music and the gender makeup of those bands. It's not all lads, lads, lads at that point. And I think there was really something to be said for a kind of cultural fight back at that time. It was overplayed in certain quarters. Select magazine ran the infamous Yanks go home front cover with Brett Anderson superimposed on the Union Jack, which he had nothing to do with.

And, of course, looking at it through the lens of 2018, it all looks very Brexit. Yes. But it seemed so much more innocent then and so much more optimistic. It really did seem that, as Damon puts it, British culture was finding its voice. And at least to begin with, I was all for it. Do you not think, though, that it was all Nirvana, Nirvana, Nirvana because they were Nirvana

and they were up against things like The Wonder Stuff and Ned's Atomic Dustbin? Oh well Nirvana were obviously a great band but when he talks about Diet Nirvana there I think he's bang on the money because there were so many rip-offs and they weren't all American ones

they were a lot of British Nirvana rip-offs as well um and i remember the man who went on to do song two which was nirvana zero yeah well there is a certain uh poetic irony in what blur later became absolutely meldie maker was as guilty of this as anyone else um uh you know we we had certain writers um everett true being the main one who spent most of the year going back and forth to Seattle and other American cities and bringing back, you know, grungy bands who he wanted to foist on our readers, sometimes with success, sometimes not. And it meant that within the paper, there were factions now, you know, that there was almost a war breaking out inside

Meldingmaker between people who really bought into this kind of very primal, very sort of gutsy, authentic, in inverted commas, American rock, and people who wanted something a bit more arch and a bit more playful and maybe with a bit more life of the mind, which was the kind of early Britpop fraternity slash sorority. Yeah, I kind of partly, I can completely see how that you know i totally see the uh the the issue where it's like well suddenly there's there's a band that has kind of swept all before it and yeah and then this is kind of ripple effect with um you know it's it's

i mean this this is a kind of standard pattern it's like there's there'll be one massive band and then everybody who sounds a bit like that or who could bend a bit to sound a bit like that will get signed and snapped up and then everything becomes sort of homogenous and it's this kind of diminishing returns thing yeah of course that's frustrating but i think it's very it's quite sort of glib to zero in on the kind of american cultural imperialism thing but you can't meet if you know i'm not saying that that isn't the thing but you can't really meet it with british parochialism it's just not really going to work it's like they're not being american at you they're not being angsty at you they're not being nirvana at you like they don't the sorry you know the sorry thing is that they you know the people who

are into this and they're you know people in america kind of don't don't know that you exist which is worse than not exactly not like yeah yeah it's worse than not liking you so you make it into an argument you go yeah there's that you get this kind of david and goliath kind of you know yeah what do you what do you think of this then look what we're doing we're fighting back and they're like oh oh cool but we weren't actually but we weren't fighting you and it's like oh yeah yeah well check this out and just i find that a bit embarrassing it's like you can just this is a very this is something that it's like it's not an attack it's actually a retreat it's a retreat into this which which there's this kind of british reflex which

obviously we're seeing in evidence all around us at the moment um it just this kind of like yeah well well fuck you because we're this is what we do. And it's like, it's OK. You can just do that without it having to be a battle. But having said that, like as as we see with, you know, the sort of blur and oasis kind of concocted, contrived bundle for number one. It's like there is something, you know, it's good to have something to push against. It's good. It's stimulating to have something to kind of kick at. And, you know, in some ways it's quite infantile and regressive, but in other ways it's like, yeah, I completely understand.

This is like, this has been, you know, there is a primal thing about that. It's like, this is our tribe and we are not like you. Yeah, but up until the mid-90s hasn't the history of popular music or or at least the good bits been like britain receiving influences from america uh taking the good shit putting a twist on it firing it back to america and this pinging back and forth yeah that's always been a thing there is a sort of cross-pollination that happens it's like that's fine it's like you can... Because I don't recall Pete Townshend saying, oh, yeah, we're making our music because we've had enough of the Beach Boys and we're not having it. that sort of cultural exchange and kind of co-mingling is always to the benefit of all.

It's like, you know, you can't lock down your, you know, this is why the English language itself is so rich. It's because it's very porous and it has allowed, you know, it's allowed everything else to kind of dirty up the pond, you know, which all works out well in the end. So, yeah, I did wince a little bit at um that and it's partly it's partly because damon at um introducing this uh brit pop now show it's kind of sitting on a chair all sort of squiffy and like leaning and this very it's sort of and just being you know

peak cocky damon you know yeah i find it a bit embarrassing i think I think we're better than that. Just this sort of like, you find it a lot in film where you see that in British film, where there's this terrible kind of self consciousness. There's like a chemical reaction that happens in you have to reach from yourself to find pride, like the more fragile that connection is between you and, you know, your source of feeling good about yourself. And you get this kind of, and in that gap, you get this kind of desperation comes in and like a certain aggression and a kind of self-pity. So there's a lot of like stuff that you want to stuff that you want to avoid if you want to make art. That's not art, that's just ego.

This is the stuff you need to get out of the way before you come to the table or the recording studio or the film studio. So I think he's got a point, but also, oof. Yeah. I think one thing that's interesting about Damon presenting that Britpop Now show and doing his little speech there is that usually bands will always, in the fullness of time, deny being part of the thing that they were part of.

They will always say, oh, that was just a label that the press invented and stuck upon us and we never thought we were that. duck upon us and we we never thought we were that well let the record show that here we have Damon Albarn saying yay Britpop you know and presenting this show saying the word Britpop Britpop over and over so you know he can't do that and then performing country house in a deerstalker and plus yes one of the textbook analysis's of uh of Britpop is our very own Taylor Parks and the piece he wrote on The Quieters. And, you know, he makes the point that Britpop wasn't really a reaction to Nirvana because everybody liked them. It was more a reaction to the shit music

that was being produced by indie bands in Britain in the early 90s. Yeah, fair point. The juggler shit shit as he called it well yeah i think um a british um indie music for want of a better word had become um quite lame and embarrassing it was that whole kind of uh sultan's appearing frank and walter's time both those are irish bands by the way so i'm kind of all right thousand yard stare then you know all that kind of stuff um and it was all kind of very wacky happy-go-lucky nme friendly stuff i had to get a little dig in at the nme there um it was all very what's on the end of the stick vic you know

it was um yeah it was small-minded um unambitious and um really uncool uh we'd only just come out of that era of gribo with sort of stripy tights dr martin's and uh long long sleeve t-shirts underneath short sleeve t-shirts that whole thing um it was a style disaster so if nothing else brit pop was you know it was one of those things that comes along every now and then to make everyone sharpen up a bit and um yeah it came it came along again um actually, from America in the early noughties with the Strokes and the White Stripes and all of that stuff. Bands actually taking the trouble to look cool again. And that goes in cycles.

And I think in the early 90s, we were at the end of a horrible cycle of everyone dressing down. And that's why bands like suede and manic street preachers and pulp and various others um coming along with an actual look actually putting a bit of thought into how to present themselves um was really exciting but there was there was a a collective will uh amongst people of our age for for for it to be the 60s. And you can see that in Britpop, I think. I do think Britpop is the first youth culture in the UK that was almost entirely about looking back.

Yeah. Because even things like, I suppose you had the Teddy Boys dressing in, in inverted commas, Edwardian fashion, but they were into what was then brand new, exciting rock and roll music. Yeah. So, and pretty much any,

any other movement that took hold before Britpop was at least in some way about the future. Even with Two Tone, which was about reviving sort of 60s ska, it was the future in terms of trying trying to push towards uh a more racially integrated britain it was it was futuristic in terms of the meaning of it uh but but brit pop was almost entirely nostalgic and um and i i think that that kind of set the tone for nearly everything that's come since uh so that's kind of a watershed moment in culture.

Let's talk about the actual music because our tailor's quote in his article says, looking back, Britpop is almost unique amongst these musical trends which lasted half a decade or more in that you couldn't fill a Nuggets-type compilation with genuinely good tracks. Trying to find 20 memorable singles from 20 different

Britpop bands, you'd end up on the very fringes of what anybody ever meant by Britpop. Get Yourself Together by Velocette? Possibly. CFK by Delicatessen? No, no, they were something else. Yeah, well, I think in a way, because he set his own parameters there um he's he sort of you know answered his own question because as I say in the early days Britpop was very diverse so um some of those bands that he was talking about um although they they hadn't yet formed they had they come along in 92 they yeah they would have been part of Britpop because I think all that was meant by it was anything that somehow in, in even the vaguest way has a connection to the immediate world around it, i.e. Britain and, or just,

just the world at all because you've got to bear in mind that so much music, you know, the kind of shoegazing thing, was about obliterating the self and one's kind of perception of the world entirely. So it was just British music that was alive to the world and to what was going on and that could have meant anything.

You know, you could put Pulp next to Oasis to pick two of the most massive bands and there's not a lot of similarity apart from singing in your northern accent. But nevertheless... How British was Britpop, though, really? I mean, wasn't it just a London thing? Because practically every band involved in it was in London.

Yeah, I mean, it was quite London-centric and it was quite, you know, kind of Chaz and Dave and kind of, you know, Lazy Sunday Afternoon by the Small Faces and all that kind of stuff, you know kind of um chas and dave and kind of you know uh late lazy lazy sunday afternoon by by the small faces and all that kind of stuff you know and the kinks and all yeah i suppose but then eventually oasis come along and they you know they they stick a massive they're the kind of constantinople to uh camden's rome there uh and cast as well you can't forget can't forget about cast cast from liverpool yep hope from sheffield and all of that so yeah but they were all living in london at the time weren't they

yeah yeah that's the thing is that it was also um this has become a cliche to say it but it's literally true that it was easier to you know um you could actually come and live in london and you could you know you could still squat or you could um you know you could you could rent somewhere cheap and you could you know that wasn't going to actually kill you and you know so it was it was doable and you got paid enough money as well great days they were yeah we didn't know we were born so what else was on telly this day well BBC One has kicked off with Over the Wall, the magazine show with Michelle Gale as star guest, then X-Men, Play Days,

the Happy Shopper Play School, then Zoo Watch with Emma Forbes and Rolf Harris, then the phone-in show Talk About with James Whale, then Going for a Song with Michael Parkinson, Leslie Ash and Tony Slattery, the One O'Clock News, Neighbours, a repeat of the drama series The Vet, Columbo, the word quiz turnabout, The Animals of Farthing Wood, the interactive tech show Total Reality with virtual presenters Ice and Cube, their news round, Biker Grove, another episode of Neighbours, The Six O'clock news and regional news in your area.

BBC Two was broadcasting new adventures of Black Beauty, The Botsmaster, The Champions, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Stingray, The Star Trek Cartoon, The Australian film Storm Boy, The Brollies, The Gene Kelly and Judy Garland musical Summer Stock and the quiz show Today's the Day.

Adam Faith is interviewed in the chat show Esther, followed by the Oprah Winfrey show, Rula Lenska walking about Colcar Abbey in Derbyshire in Secret Gardens and Buck Rogers in the 25th century, followed by a couple of Tex Avery cartoons. They've just started The Dead, a documentary film about the 3,500 people who died during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. ITV has run the news at one, followed by Home and Away,

a repeat of Emmerdale, a country practice, a repeat of the documentary series The Other Peak Practice, where some bloke has a vasectomy. God, at that time of day, Jesus. Take the iRoad, The Riddlers, Wizardora, Old Bear Stories, Animaniacs, Garfield and Friends, the kids' drama series Just Us, Shortland Street, the news at 5.40, Home and Away Again and regional news in your area. They've just started another episode of Emmerdale. And Channel 4 has put on the legend of white fang sesame street the wonderful wizard of oz the 1947 film daisy kenyon

the hospital docu-soap jimmies countdown ricky lake home improvement a repeat of rosanne and has just started channel 4 news sarah you 17, so you are spared my inquisition about what these kids' programmes were. But yeah, old beer stories. That's a bit go-ahead for ITV in the mid-90s, isn't it? Well, the thing is that every, you know, having spent the first 20 minutes just sharing your porn anecdotes, you know, it's like everything just sounds...

Everything's tainted, isn't it? Everything's porn now. I can't help myself. All right, then, pop-crazed youngsters, it's time to fanny about no further and get stuck into another episode of Top of the Pops. 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 than we have.

Hi, I'm Michael Bolton, live and exclusive on Top of the Pops tonight. It's Thursday, August 31st, 1995, and we are immediately assailed by the terrifying sight of the bastard son of Doc Brown at a Back to the Future and a Womble, who implores us not to turn over to Emmerdale Farm. Why? It's none other than Michael Bolton. Why do they do this? Because we saw it before with Celine Dion. It's like they've got some big American star right at the beginning saying I'm going to be on in a bit

and they think that's going to sell the episode to us rather than just make your heart sing oh fucking hell like you know wonder if any of my mates want to go to the pub or something rather than watch this shit this is what is known in the trade as a cold open isn't it which I guess is something that they've kind of nabbed

from you know from sitcoms i guess um or maybe the news it is almost like you know now this is the here is the here is the news of of what is hot and happening this week in music so you better pay attention um but yeah but isn't that like isn't that like news at 10 starting with saddam hussein going hi i'm saddam husdam Hussein and you're going to hear about me in this night's News at Ten. It was a faintly alarming sight because I like to watch

these episodes cold before the podcast and not look up what's on them before. So you do get this kind of slightly startling appearance of Michael Bolton. He's got quite a croaky soft voice actually. It looks quite awkward. But he's quite a large guy actually. He's got quite a croaky sort of soft voice, actually. It just looks quite awkward. But he's got sort of, he's quite a large guy, actually.

He's quite a sort of large rectangle guy. He's massive, isn't he? He's got like a sort of a cream suit on, like a sort of two shades of cream or possibly beige, you can't really tell, and kind of pisshole shades and this fluffy hair. It looks like some kind of yacht wizard, just kind of like what? Yeah, or there's just been a nuclear explosion that he's just observed.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's looking a little bit, you know, he's looking a bit rattled and a little bit kind of out of place, you know, but even, even then, even in, in sort of, you know, 1995, but there was this, because obviously you, Americans always have this slight, slight tinge of exotic, of the exotic about them, but them but you know for better or worse and it is just like is i suppose it would be like if it's if uh if if um if all the pop stars are animals in a zoo

this would be like a it's like what what is that i don't know is it some sort of primate i don't know top of the pops is still persevering with its reinstated policy of having the odd guest presenter. This year has already seen Jack D, Eternal, Kylie Minogue, Gary Olsen, Keith Allen, Lenny Enre, Anton Deck, Phil Jupitus, Wigfield, Stuart Lee and Richard Herring, Michelle Gale, Craig McLaughlin and last week it was Jarvis Cocker. This week, your host... Born in Marylebone in 1955, Dale Winton was the son of a furniture salesman and the actress Cherie Winton, but the former died on the day of his bar mitzvah

and the latter committed suicide when Winton was 21. He'd already started his career at the age of 17 as a club DJ in Richmond, Surrey and after a spell as a timeshare salesman, he landed a job at United Biscuits Network, the in-house radio station for biscuit and cracker factories across the UK. In 1977, he moved to Radio Trent, Nottingham's commercial radio station, taking over the recently departed Kid Jensen's weekend slot before moving into the Simon Bates position in the week,

where he became the de facto housewife's choice at the station for the next eight years at a time when 45% of the sitter would listen to Radio Trent. Fucking hell, the Simon Bates position, that's... After a contract dispute, left trent in 1985 and sued them for breach of contract which led to him not being picked up by any other uk stations so he ended up at blue danube radio in vienna before dropping the lawsuit and working at chilton radio in dunstable and beacon radio in wol Wolverhampton. After resigning from Beacon and walking away from radio in the late 80s he worked as a co-presenter on the BBC show Pet Watch, had a chat show on the

Lifestyle channel and became a warm-up man on various TV shows before landing the presenter's gig on the British version of Supermarket Sweep in 1993. At this point he's become one of the breakout stars of ITV Daytime and has just replaced Danny Baker as the host of the BBC game show Pets Win Prizes. This is his second go at Top of the Pops. He presented his first episode six weeks previous. What do we think of Mr Winton? I'm biased here so i'll let you go first um i by the end of it i i was uh well by the start of it actually i was just because you just read out the roll call there and i was just like oh i imagine it was you know wigfield or craig mclaughlin or one of those and it's like oh i feel like on in terms of nothing against dale winton he was a he

was a consummate pro but he's he's too there's a weird dissonance putting him on top of the pops it's like there's a weirdly cynical thing about maybe i just feel weirdly cynical about it but it's just like there's a real kind of he doesn't it's it i don't think it's a good fit i think he's because he's so he's so kind of waspish and i know that's the idea that is the thing with with top of the pop presenters is there is this slight kind of uh you know nudgy elbow winky sort of like this is all a load of bollocks isn't it attitude but somehow there's this a slight it's because i don't think it's i don't think his heart's in it really it's this kind of you know uh paycheck insincerity which is over and above the usual standard of, the usual kind of layer of insincerity that a Top of the Pops presenter should have.

So, yeah, he just looked a little bit dead behind the eyes, a little bit like, I genuinely don't care about any of this shit at all. When can I go home? I don't know, maybe that was just my interpretation of it, but I was starting to get slightly, even like the worst stuff, even like Michael Bolton, by the end of it, I was starting to feel a bit defensive of. Like, you leave that man alone. He's doing the best he can.

You stop being so bloody bitchy. I disagree with you on that. I mean, this is basically what Dale Winton would have wanted to do when he was a DJ at Radio Trent. Do you think? Well, to my mind, Dale Winton is part of that second generation of radio DJs who can actually see a career path through this.

And I think he's part of that second generation who says, if I do this, I can be a television presenter. He was always seen as someone who was very clear-minded about what he wanted to do. And I actually interviewed him about five years ago and I sort of called him out on this. And he said, yeah, you're dead right. That's exactly what I want to do and I actually interviewed him about five years ago and I sort of called him out on this and he said yeah you're dead right that's exactly what I want to do

work at United Biscuits and then get on BRMB and then try and get on Radio 1 and then become a television presenter that path had been forged by people like Noel Edmonds and stuff so definitely this to Dale Winton,

this would have been the absolute fucking pinnacle of the summit, presenting Top of the Pops. Really? And I feel he does it well. He's aware that he's not the main attraction. His introductions are very short indeed. He doesn't blather. He doesn't really try and get himself over.

It's like, look, I know what you're here for. Here it is fair point i gotta say i i agree with with sarah here in that um well first of all i i don't like the fact that general tv celebrities were now presented i didn't like that part that was the rick laxill era of top of the pops wasn't it that that that policy came in I don't like that anyway. And I know you shouldn't... I know it's poor form to speak ill of the recently dead and loads of people I've seen on my timeline saying that he was a brilliant bloke and all that, but I just don't like his presence here.

It's interesting that you say that he used to be a timeshare salesman because he's wearing a suit that makes used to be a timeshare salesman because he's there he's wearing a suit that makes him look like a timeshare salesman um with a tan like a junior monk house um and really he's just here to gleam and twinkle um right down to his gold microphone and um i didn't feel that he either liked or hated the music or music in general. I think he's completely oblivious to it, which does tie in with what you say about this just being another step on the ladder for him. But I think most of the viewers at the time would have come to this mainly knowing him from Supermarket Sweep. would have come to this mainly knowing him from supermarket sweep because that would be the main crossover between pop craze youngsters of 95 and uh his career um i had no idea that he had this

whole backstory the first i knew of him was supermarket sweep which was basically supermarket sweep was hangover tv for students and stoners and music journalists uh yeah i know it was on during weekdays, but if you were a student or a music journalist then, especially during Britpop, chances are that Wednesday or Thursday was your big night out. And it was a bit of kind of knowing, brightly coloured American-style kitsch

to have a laugh at in the mid-morning schedule. However, you know, once you get to a thursday evening and top of the pops was it a thursday or friday this still thursday still thursday um i i think that that kind of knowing chuckle doesn't work so well and and it seems a bit out of whack, a bit disrespectful towards an art form, which much as we might have a jolly old hungover laugh at Supermarket Sweep, a lot of us took pop music really seriously. We thought it was a serious business. It's a really, really important art.

And to kind of implicitly relegate it to something, it's basically by putting people like him on it, it might as well be the lottery. You know what, in the national lottery they get any old so-and-so to just you know stand in and present it it's a bit like that yeah it's entertainment like any other kind of entertainment it's not it's kind of taking that yes quality away from it a little bit totally but al right i'm surprised you haven't mentioned this unless you're saving it up what's that thing about when when the riots broke out oh i've already yeah i've already'm surprised you haven't mentioned this unless you're saving it up. What's that thing about when the riots broke out in London? Oh, I've already said this before, haven't I?

Well, on the show. Have you already said it on the show? Yeah, but yeah, I'll say it again. I was listening to Radio Trent one morning in 1981 during the holidays. And the previous night there'd been copycat riots in Ice and Green, where I used to live. And after the news came on reporting it, first thing Dale Winton said was, Oh, isn't it terrible about those riots?

If you were there last night and involved in it, I hope you die. And I did, when I interviewed him, I did bring it up and he was mortified. But I mean, the thing about Dale Winton was for a lot of people he would have been the first gay person

you ever knew he was a definite housewives favourite and you know he kept himself to himself you used to see him at Rock City though I've got friends who said they saw him introducing the Rocksteady crew at Rock City though. I've got friends who said they saw him introducing the Rock Steady crew

at Rock City back in the early 80s. And he did, I believe he did a Saturday club at Rock City for kids. So he was very much out and about. And he did go to a gay club in Nottingham called Le Chic Part 2. And yeah, I've got a quote here from the magazine I used to edit in an article about gay Nottingham written by my good friend Mike Atkinson. And it says, Recognised in its day as possibly the best gay club outside London,

Le Chic Part 2 mixed old school glamour with a new school aesthetic in a way that was unique for its time. It was the first club in town to embrace beat mixing with an upfront policy that Graham Parker cited as a key influence. On a typical night, you might find Sue Pollard whooping it up on the floor to the latest American imports while Justin Fashion, who silently prowled the cruising alley, and a regal Noel Gordon, the Crossroads matriarch herself, wafted around in a diaphanous evening gown flanked by stage door johnnies. In the upstairs bar you could even avail yourself of the services of a resident chaplain on hand to dispense spiritual

advice to the morally bewildered, as well they might have been given the pitch black fuck room Oh, can you imagine such a thing? A pitch black fuck room. I can, actually. Yeah, with Sue Pollard groping around. Justin Faschner and Noel Gordon. Fucking hell, man. Nottingham, the centre of the universe once again. See, doesn't this make zoo in Halifax seem a bit small time now? Hashino and Noel Gordon. Fucking hell, man. Nottingham, the centre of the universe once again.

See, doesn't this make zoo in Halifax seem a bit small time now? I mean, I'm guessing zoo in Halifax didn't have a pitch black fuck room. No, I never found it. I bet they didn't have any fucking zoo animals either. No. What a swizz. Oh. So other hosts this year included Joe Brand and Mark Lamar, Robbie Williams, Suggs, Lee Evans,

Louise Nerding, Ronan Keating and Stephen Gaitlay, Halen Pace and Gary Glitter. A lot of those are definite BBC people and I think that's why Dale Winton's there as well because he just started Pets Win Prizes, hadn't he? Yeah, and I suppose it's the equivalent of how, you know, with Strictly these days, the BBC will always turn one of their own into a slightly bigger star than they already are.

It's usually somebody from Breakfast gets roped in. So, yeah, I suppose it's all part of the world of being on the BBC books is that you end up doing this. Hi, good evening. Welcome to the award-winning Top of the Box. The starters are Barry's Sunshine After the Rain. I want to see the sunshine after the rain. I want to see bluebirds flying over the mountains again. Wynton, in a blue suit and tie, welcomes us to the award-winning Top of the Pops

and immediately introduces us to Sunshine After the Rain by Beret. Born in York in 1974 as Rebecca Slate, Berre teamed up with New Atlantic, a rave duo from Southport who got to number 12 in March of 1992 with I Know, and released this cover of the 1968 Ellie Greenwich single, which was covered by Elkie Brooks and got to number 10 in October of 1977. The New Atlantic version got to number 26 in December of 1994 but for some reason it was re-released under her name and it's the second highest new entry this week straight in at number five. Well dance music this kind of dance music it's been going for nearly

10 years now where where does it stand now in 1995? I think dance music is actually, it seems, I mean, this kind of thing seems sort of quite diluted and quite tame at this point. But this is the thing is that it was actually going fully mainstream at this point. And, you know, you had a lot of this kind of thing in the charts. There was also stuff like Don't You Want Me by Felix and Dreamer by Livingix and uh dreamer by living joy and that sort of thing um and oh move your body as well what a tune this was the

year that um orbital played on the um pyramid stage at glastonbury just before just before pulps uh big big thing which is it's quite an interesting moment that in uh you know um both of those playing at the same time um so yeah this was when this is when you you really saw the kind of start of it being solidified as um you know part part of the furniture and um you know kind of um and of course you know there was just you know the more you get of of a genre the more there's going to be kind of you know going to be run off from the original burst of creativity

but this just kind of in some ways it's like ground zero or year zero for what dance music would go on to be which is just part of the culture I mean by this point this kind of

dance music this definitely commercial strain of dance music it's essentially look just get to the good bit and just hammer it over and over and over again until the vinyl runs out yeah i mean this is part and also it's it's this is it's very very pop as well i mean obviously there's this is quite sort of this is a very sort of cheeky, frothy, Ibiza cocktail kind of banger, you know. And it's great. Yeah, we should mention, actually, that it's just a shameless lift of I Feel Love as well.

Yeah, of course, yeah. Which is, you know, it's almost a mash-up, actually. You know, which is... It's not so much mash as smash, isn't it? Yeah. It's a bit more instant and bland. Yeah, there's kind Yeah, there's quite a bit of... You've had to stretch it out quite a bit and put a tiny bit more water in than you probably should do.

But it's not... I'll tell you what, it's a good start to an episode of Top of the Pops because you do get Dale Winton, you know, looking very dapper and going, Yeah, it's Top of the Pops and here is a thing. And it's like, oh, yeah, that is a thing. And it's not something that anyone's really going to remember, but I was like, oh, you know, that's actually given me

the sort of pleasant lift that you want. Because it is kind of important what an episode of Top of the Pops starts with. And this obviously is quite a forgettable thing, but you can feel the atmosphere in there is actually quite, you know, this is like, oh yeah, this is something I could dance dance to it's a really good way to start it's essentially dance music for people who can't dance uh yeah and it's it's basically a bit of biff boff and fall to the floor and then for a decent amount of time you get to a bit where you can just stand there with your hands up in the air well this is like you were fronting up to people outside a football

ground. This is one of the gifts of, one of the many gifts of Acid House is that there was this it's okay if you can't, you know, you don't have to be able to, if you can get up on a podium and throw a load of amazing shapes then amazing, but you don't have to

be able to do that, you can just go and you know, move about and you will be part of it, you don't have to be able to do that you can just go and you know move about and you will be part of it you don't have to um you know i kind of i i'm totally um yeah you need you need the other thing as well you need you need there to be um magnificent posers who who look who look incredible wherever they go but also you just need most of us most of us are never going to be like that and so this is the hood there's just the kind of there. Most of us are never going to be like that. The hood. The hood. There's just quite an egalitarian thing about it. Also, this is... So, Berry herself is like this perfect evocation

of the mid-'90s look. It's almost like this is the exact point of the mid-'90s. She's got that particular shade of... I think she looks great. She's got a particular shade of plum lipstick. I don great. She's got a particular shade of like plum lipstick. I don't know what it would be called. It would be Rimmel, wouldn't it? Rimmel.

Get the London look. Yes. Get the London look. And she's got like a zebra print, a sort of thin zebra print dress. So not like an actual, like a baby dress. Yeah. Yeah. And baby doll dress and a sort of floor length cream fake fur coat.

And just looks like the most 90s woman ever. And her dancers as well are, she's got like four dancers in baby doll dresses who I must say, I always end up criticising the dancers, I know, and hey, they can dance better than I can. But the choreography here is not great because they are kind of... No, it's not, is it? What they look like to me is like, me is like when you're in a changing room and you're trying to look at your arse in the mirror to see what the back... That's basically the routine here.

Yeah, there's a very pyjama party vibe going on here, isn't there? Yeah, but I like... That's nice. And I do think this is probably a good thing for... And you can kind of credit the Spice Girls with this as well, is that sort of, you know, it kind of makes, if you're a girl and you're insecure about yourself, it's good to see women, it's that achievable next door kind of thing, you know, where it's like, oh, yeah, I could probably pull that off myself.

You know, it just gives you a little bit of a boost instead of getting these kind of extraordinary alien women who you can never have to look like. Simon, was this sort of thing covered in Melody Maker at the time? Actually, yes. There was one whole edition of Melody Maker that we gave over to Euro Disco. Even though this is Brit Disco, it's not Euro. But stuff in this ballpark sarah mentioned brands like living joy and so on and i actually initiated it that we had um two unlimited on the front cover of

melody maker and we had interviews inside with capella haddaway dr alban i think and culture beat um yeah yeah um and uh this was all my idea umy, Alan... Immediately flung into the corner of the student bed set. Well, Alan Jones, the editor, very kindly gave me free reign to just go and have this, just to do this one issue on this stuff, because I thought it was a really interesting cultural phenomenon at that time. And I thought that we were a music paper, not just an indie paper. And I thought that we were a music paper, not just an indie paper.

We did lose, apparently, that week about 4,000 readers of our normal sales figures. But it picked up again the following week. And, you know, I think it's all right. We made our point. I wanted to talk about the captions at the start of this. And at the start of every song in this episode, in fact. So it's not just enough anymore to have the band's name. A factoid. You have to have a little fact.

So on this one, it says, Berry, formerly called New Atlantic, like she's a hotel on the seafront of Blackpool. Yes. It was actually, they got it slightly wrong, because it was originally credited to New Atlantic forward slash U4EA, like euphoria. Yes.

So that's these guys, isn't it? Yeah, if your band didn't have a name that sounded like a really poncy fucking license plate, then you weren't going anywhere in the early 90s. So it's these guys, Saunders and lloyd this duo uh and but there's no sign of them here is it they basically cut her loose she's there she's berries like you know there's no guys behind keyboards on this one you know um accepting responsibility for it they've sent her out into the world and um that with her mate well i i i think they they've kind of mugged her off here

and they're hiding from it because they're too cool or something. The song, even though it's, I know obviously it's a cover version, it's that, you know, Ellie Greenwich slash Elkie Brooks slash I Feel Love mashup. But it's kind of a throwback

to that utopianism of early house, that whole Rosala thing. All that vague stuff about faith and freedom and sunshine, you know, for Eid up drug zombies. And I feel sorry for... Naked in the Rain. Naked in the Rain. Bit of a tune there, actually.

Oh, it really is. I feel sorry for Barry, Rebecca Slate here, because she looks pretty ace, i'll be honest that that very 90s look that sarah talks about um there's ever a dress and a long fur thing in the 60s hair a couple years after that i had a girlfriend who dressed a bit like that i like that look but i feel sorry for because she has the sad eyes of someone who's been kidnapped and made to do this. I think her voice is all right. It's limited and plain. She can't dance.

So she has stupid dancers around her and she just isn't a natural pop star. It isn't like, you know, sometimes you'd have these records and it's so-and-so featuring someone else and the someone else would clearly be about to go on to be a huge star themselves so you know for example i don't know the the beat masters with betty boo you could see that she was going to become a thing yeah or um was it cold cut with yaz and all that you know sometimes yeah the the featuring person is a ready-made pop star waiting to happen um

bless berry it ain't gonna happen because she just doesn't have that kind of charisma and um the song doesn't have the kind of staying power does it's in one ear out the other yeah that's the thing i think with a lot of this music though is there is almost it's not very top of the pops i mean it's getting a i don't know maybe it's evening out now but it's not necessarily very top of the pops friendly and it is just like you know we've made we've cooked we've we've cooked this up in a studio and now we've got to put together a performance and it's like well that's not really you know it's like that's

not the point of it it's not what it's for like this isn't really this isn't really its natural environment well this is essentially Hitman and Her isn't it yeah and we're in that era aren't we where the granny claps and the whooping is louder than the record a lot of the time oh yes

which is very yeah yeah i mean this is the same i mean you you weren't particularly using this term by the mid-90s but this is this is gary and sharon house you know for people who don't do drugs yeah that's the thing isn't it because there was this kind of um uh filtering out after um you know after everything sort of died down from from acid house and the criminal justice act and everything of kind of trying to uh sift out the music from from the from the drug culture basically and kind of going well you know so you do get some of this is quite you do get this it's almost quite self-consciously kind of not drugs you know it's like oh no no of course not we don't we just it's good clean fun

kind of thing which you know i think i think it does lose something but then you always get the kind of sneaky um you still you know it's still such a huge um part of it and you'd always get um you know the whole culture would trade off that foundation and that kind of alchemy that happened in kind of 88, 89, while still going, yeah, but of course we don't actually do this, we're just kind of paying lip service to it. It's like, yeah, but you can't, you kind of, you know, that entire thing was such a massive cultural explosion, you can't actually put that genie back in the bottle.

I guess you can tell the people who were really immersed in it and the people who kind of came afterwards. But although, I have to say, I did read that Born Sleepy came out this year as well. Yes. And Underworld are, to my mind, are an extremely E act. And Carl Hyde is an extremely E man.

But apparently he's never had any he's a he was a he was a boozer that's like frank zapper the sort of ultimate psychedelic um musician that never took drugs wow yeah i mean that's the thing is you don't it's like oh you don't have to take the drug and you know to to a degree yes this is stuff that already exists in in the human brain and in society and stuff it's something you can tap into it's just that um you know it's it's a bit it's a bit weak when people kind of pretend that you can just lift that element out completely and everything will still be the same because it because it is because it's not i think it's quite telling at the end that dale winton just goes fabulous uh because there's there's basically nothing else to say about Perry.

That's, you know, she is a vacancy. Yeah. So the following week, Sunshine After the Rain nudged up to number four, its highest position. The follow-up, Shine Like a Star, got to number 20 in December of this year, and she was done as a chart act. And the last we know, she was working in a folk duo. I want to see the sunshine after the rain.

I want to see the sunshine after the rain. I want to see the sunshine after the rain. I want to see the sunshine after the rain. Fabulous! And tonight's WBOP, that exclusive from Michael Bolton, Montel Jordan on satellite from the States, and would you believe, Boyzone in the studio, and now here's DeLacy!

DeLacy! I got a man who tries to run me, but that's the way to make me run away. After shilling the forthcoming attractions on this episode, Winton hands off to the next song, Hideaway, by DeLacy. Formed in New Jersey by DeLacy Davis, a police officer and part-time percussionist, and his girlfriend Rainey Lasseter, De Lacy first came to prominence in the USA when Lassiter was assaulted in a nightclub by the New York Giants defensive back Adrian White and was arrested by Davis.

This is their first showing on the UK charts, is the current number one in Italy and it's a new entry this week at number nine. Well, me dears, we're being given a straight comparison between British and American dance music here, aren't we? Who wins? It's a nil-nil, that's what I'm saying. Right. Maybe one-one. Yeah, on the basis of these, I don't think

either of them are kind of very good examples of what they are. No. My main takeaway, I mean, she's good, actually, Delacy, she's got, there's obviously, the thing is, you can tell nobody my main takeaway, I mean, she's, she's good actually, the DeLacy, she's got, there's, there's obviously,

the thing is, you can tell nobody can hear themselves, you know, like the monitors are for shit, obviously. You know, she's got a good voice, she's got this good kind of diva voice

and this incredibly assured kind of improvisation going on, but it's just not really much of a, it's not really a song and it's not really, it's like, you don't need to, if you're making dance music, you don't need to have a tune necessarily, but also there's not really a song and it's not really um it's like you don't need to if you're making dance music you don't need to have a tune necessarily but also there's not the there isn't anything underneath it either and there's like that's like the entire stage is crammed with

percussion and percussion isn't it yeah and yet and yeah it's all so muted it's like it's like it's in the next room and they're kind of giving it loads and it's like yeah but i i understand this is meant to be like this big kind of you know cacophony of beats and it's like it's in the next room and they're kind of giving it loads and it's like yeah but i i understand this is meant to be like this big kind of you know cacophony of beats and it's like it's just not it just doesn't get through at all yeah i mean i i like this kind of thing normally but it just never takes off for me no um she is obviously a big sort of lung-busting big brassy gospel singer um you have got the blokes looking all action-packed behind the bongos even though presumably it's all electronic um and you've got the lights strafing the crowd like it's a rave or like it's cold it's doing an escape um but yeah i i i feel i feel awful because even though i was

just saying i i want to rep for this stuff because i did put all this music in Melody Maker at a time when our readers were very resistant to it. This just isn't, as Sarah says, this isn't a good example of what it is. The fact on the caption for this one, from New York. Yeah, wrong. Can I point out how bad the font is as well? What is that font? I was like, oh, God god the aesthetics of this are just just gross like somebody just doesn't care at all like they're such kind of limp facts it's like

where are the front oh you know it's just i know what why isn't it why isn't it bell gothic black the the mid-90s font yeah but i mean to this song i mean that obviously because they're american they've gone oh we're a dance band uh so we've got we've got to put ourselves over big if we're going on top of the pops and the and the overall effect is i can imagine uh barry in the wings looking at delacy as if she's father ted and delacy or father dick burn in the song for europe competition and then they've come with a full fucking band yeah fair, fair enough. But then again, then again, DeLacy have gone,

oh shit, we've really got to put ourselves over. And then they've seen Barry and gone, oh fucking hell, we could have just done that. Yeah. I mean, she's wearing mum slacks, the trousers she's wearing,

which is quite a contrast with, with, with Barry's very nineties girl look. But I wanted to pick up on the lyrics to this song. There's a weird bit where it goes, my mistake was letting my par down, setting myself up for this runaround. And I've looked through it.

There's no mention anywhere else about how she's let down her par. It's really odd. Also, why would that lead to... I don't really understand. Oh, God, that's a lot of therapy there. I mean, there's a lot to unpack there. What does that mean? I don't think

she actually let her pa down and now she blames herself for every no good man who comes her way I don't think that's how it works If I had a daughter who was on top of the pops I'd be well proud on her I'd be like Roy Keane's dad when he got a sign from Man United

jumping up on a pub table and grabbing my bollocks and grabbing my bollocks and saying, you know, my bollocks are worth three and a half million pounds. Yeah, the rest of the song is all about how, you know, I'm an independent woman, I don't need no man to take care of me. It's all that kind of stuff. There were a lot of

independent women knocking about in the mid-90s. There were a lot of independent women. Couldn't move for them. Good for them. Yeah, it's a real, you can tell that she can do more with a voice than this and it's like there's nothing, there's no difference really between the chorus and the verse. It's all like very kind of one note and very yeah, so, because I remember this, I remember

this being something that I would turn off if I heard it on the radio just because I found it found it a bit irritating. It's got quite an irritating refrain. Yeah, this was always on those compilations, which I used to grab whenever they turned up in the Mail-to-Maker office, like Now Dance 95 and all that kind of stuff,

or Dance Mania 95 and all of that. This was one of the tracks that would always be on there. And I'd always skip it, to be honest. But when you look at the chart rundown that we're going to see later on in the show, there are half a dozen songs in that rundown on which, if she'd been allowed to really let go and have a go on those songs, she'd have been as good, if not better, than the people who did sing them.

It's just that this is a bit nothing-y. Yeah. So we've immediately had two dance singles in the most Britpop month ever. Yes, we have. Always funny how that works out, isn't it? Yeah, because pop isn't really like that, isn't it? Is it? We've had 1973 episodes that we expect to be full of glam rock

and they're not. We've had 1976 that we expect to be full of punk and they're not, and so on. Yeah. Always the way. Definitely, yeah. The audience, they're not feeling it as much as the Barry song, are they? it's always the way definitely yeah the audience they're not feeling it as much as the Barry song

are they wonder why yeah maybe they're knacking themselves out you know and that's all we can go on the sounds they're making because we hardly ever see them do we

go on by by by this point uh the top of the pops audience is just the scenery it's just a faceless mob yeah there's no longer people turning up wearing crazy outfits hoping to get their face on the telly or if they are they're going to be sorely disappointed yeah yeah so i mean obviously objectively it's it's not it's not a great record but it just occurred to me how much this would upset Morrissey and I suddenly like it a little bit more yes

even Dale Winton gets in on the really worthless facts because he goes that is her third television appearance anywhere in the world like if it was her first maybe that would be something but her third. So, the following week, Hideaway

stayed at number nine before dropping down the charts. That's a pretty good run for dance singles of the era, isn't it? They tended to stick around, though, didn't they? Yeah. In a way, this music is the true music of 1995 it's not

blur oasis it's this stuff it really is yeah but most people who weren't reading the music press at the time this was their life yeah the follow-up the look got to number 19 in august of 1996 and a remix called hideaway 1998 would get to number 21 two years later. So good, so good. That is our third television appearance anywhere in the world. Okay, he's number three over here. He's number one in America. Michael Jackson, You're Not Alone. Another day has gone I'm still all alone How could this be You're not here with me

We've already covered Michael Jackson in Chart Music 14 when he just released Bad. Since then, he started calling himself the King of Pop, released the autobiography Moonwalk, moved into the Neverland Ranch, became the first ever westerner to appear in a television advert in the Soviet Union, renewed his deal with Sony for a record-breaking $65 million, released the LP Dangerous,

told Bill Clinton to kick in more money for AIDS research at his inauguration, became the first performer to draw a higher rating for the Super Bowl halftime show than the actual game itself, founded the Heal the World charity, was accused of kiddly-fid by the dad of Jordan Chandler, found out that he'd seconded her out of court for $20 million without his consent, and got married to Elvis' daughter. Fucking hell, what have you done?

He's also had 13 top 10 hits since Bad, including a number one in November of 1991 with Black or White. This is the follow-up to Scream, the duet with his sister Janet, which got to number three in November of 1991 with Black or White. This is the follow-up to Scream, the duet with his sister Janet, which got to number three in June of this year, and is the second release from his new LP History, Past, Present and Future, Book One.

The double CD release, which is part Greatest Hits compilation, part new LP. This song has been written by R. Apist, oh, sorry, R. Kelly and is one of the few ballads on a very mental album which included a list of every award

Michael Jackson has won, written endorsements from Steven Spielberg and Elizabeth Taylor, photos of Jackson with a sort of precedence, a letter from a child asking Bill Clinton to end war, pollution and reporters from bothering Michael Jackson and was topped off with a cover featuring a statue of Jackson in the style of Heroes

of the Battle of Stalingrad Memorial. And it's this week's highest new entry at number three. Oh, where to start with this? Oh, man. First of all, written by R. Kelly and sung by Michael Jackson. What a perfect storm of wrongness that is. Yeah, why isn't Rolf Harris on the fucking wobble board? That statue you mentioned, by the way, do you remember it was sailed down the Thames on a barge?

I didn't go along to see it. I was probably, you know, lying on the sofa watching Dale Winton on Supermarket Sweep. But I'd heard about it and I thought, wow, that sounds amazing. You know, more pop stars should do that sort of thing. lying on a sofa watching Dale Winton on Supermarket Sweep. I'd heard about it and I thought, wow, that sounds amazing. More pop stars should do that sort of thing. I imagined it would be like the size of the Shard or something which didn't exist yet. I saw it on the news and it was really little.

It was like a bit of a spinal tap Stonehenge situation in terms of your expectations of it. I actually quite like that idea of these pop stars. If you're going to be a pop star, be an insane megalomaniac pop star like Jacko

was. But by the same token, you can see why Jarvis was prompted to go and waggle his arse at him at the Brit Awards not long after this. Because it is a bit much. You know, letters from presidents and you know pictures with lisbeth taylor whatever it was geez it says on the caption um 37th top 40 hit what it

ought to say is from planet mono benzone because uh he looks like a close encounter as alien um but with the hair of a boy and the face of a girl, I hope he paid them well for both. So we start off with him walking past paparazzi cameras, which was a kind of a running theme. This has gone back to the video for Leave Me Alone, where that was also about, you know, the tabloid attention. But then he kind of daydreams that he's in this Greek temple and he's lying down showing his smooth hairless chest with his apparently zebra patterned privates

covered only by a loincloth um with um a woman tending to him slaking his thirst with an amphora of jesus juice yeah his missus it's lisa marie yeah presley um and then he's singing on the stage of an empty ballroom, which is the, is it Pantage or Pantages? I never know how you say that in LA. And then he's in front of one of those fake waterfalls that looks like, you know, those moving paintings you get in Indian restaurants. Yes.

It's like one of those. Or he's in the desert and all of that. Yeah, it's very much like the video that Chris Needham does at the end of In video that Chris Needham does at the end of In Bed With Chris Needham that looks like it's cost £10 at the Trocadero. That's the amazing thing, isn't it? Because the amount of money that must have been thrown at this

at the time compared to how cheap it looks now. Yeah, it's terrible, isn't it? I mean, if we've got to talk about the song, it's none of the things that I love about Michael Jackson. He does one kind of trademark hiccup thing, but other than that, it's like it's it's it's none of the things that i love about michael jackson he does one he does one kind of trademark hiccup thing but other than that it's like it's not him um i mean i suppose you can compare it to previous ballads like she's out of my life but this is not in the same league no well yeah this is the trouble i think i said this last time we talked about michael jackson it's like when your standards are that high, like, you know,

the thing is that even, you know, even Michael Jackson on, on, on a bad day is better than your ass. Do you know what I mean? It's like, it's,

um, but I mean, I was going to say the thing is with this song, obviously it's not, it is, it is not his best work by, by very, very long.

It's not, you know, um, it's, it's nowhere near like his best ballad or anything like this, but I think you can, you can um it's it's nowhere near like his best ballad or anything like this but i think you can you can tell regardless i mean i think most people would accept that he was now kind of in in his decline you know but um yeah you know but still you can um you can always hear because it's all very it's quite it's quite low-key this is quite pulled back like you said

there's not there's not a whole lot going on and now you say it was um i've forgotten it was written by r kelly it makes perfect sense now actually because it's sort of it's kind of got a confidence about it but it's very kind of there's not a lot going on but you can hear there's this it's got the it's got the tang of i believe i can fly about it it does um i think it's better than that but you know but there's you can always tell with him there's with with michael jackson there's this kind of huge weight of, there's the power of that sheer talent. Just kind of, you can, it's sort of there. You can just, he's not letting it,

he's not letting it out on this, but you can just hear it. There's this kind of rumble of that just being held back. Yeah. It just, it bums me out, to be honest. It's like, it's so, it's like next year it's going to be 10 years since Michael Jackson died if you want to feel old and

sorry about that but we're here and he's not so I think we got the better end of it Sarah the last time we discussed Michael Jackson it was 1988 and you were particularly Jacko mad at the time, weren't you? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, very much.

Seven years down the line, you're 17 now. How did you feel about him then? Well, Dangerous was the last album of his that I bought. So at this point, I was kind of, I was, you know, not quite so in it. I mean, I don't think, I think most people wouldn't have been, unless you were like a really serious kind of die hard you know you were kind of pulling back a little bit but you know he was still he was still completely completely my dude you know and i i really yeah i always had this weird feeling of like when i was a kid and i part of the thing

is you know i sort of idolized him but also I felt this kind of, I felt protective of him because, you know, and you do in that sort of, you know, in that sort of immature way. And it's, it was, yeah,

it's, it's an odd thing. How did you feel when all this Jordan Chandler stuff came out? Because it would have, it would have ruined a lesser singer, I feel. Um, well,

you know, I mean, it was just, it was, it was it was uh you know he'd always he'd always been in the news and it was usually in kind of you know in in quite sort of negative terms just like who the hell yeah what there was always this double-edged thing of like yeah he's he's like you know um this incredible talent and a complete freak and we don't you know we're not sure how we feel about it and this was like a completely different you know different turn to that and it was like i don't kind of know what to think really it was just i don't think i had much of a perspective on it at the time i didn't kind of i don't think that i was just like well this is obviously horse shit because you know i'm that's that was my my loyalty um but i still yeah it was yeah, it was just a horrible thing.

And it was a... Do you think he got away with it? Just seeing him going into court looking so kind of fragile and twig-like, you know, it's like fucking hell. Do I think what? Do you think he got away with it? Do I think he got away with it? Yeah.

Why do we have to talk about this? Yeah, I think we do, you know. Because when we do, we do play favourites. I mean, all the U-Tree stuff I remember one week At the same time Jim Davidson Was accused of something And so was Rolf Harris

And my mindset was well Jim Davidson's A fucking horrible cunt so obviously he did it But oh no way did Rolf do that I mean if you want to ask the question Did he get away with it My answer would be that None of us are in any position to know. We don't know all the facts of the case. And I think there are two irreconcilable forces at play here.

One of them is innocent until proven guilty. And the other one is the old no smoke without fire and all of that. Now, whatever the truth is, and I repeat that i don't think any of us are in a position to um to speak on that yeah just the whole thing doesn't look great does it well whatever whatever really happened there it's not a great look no okay my right my conclusion and you know i i've i've turned this over a fair bit because i don't want to be one of those people who just goes, yeah, well, of course not. But he was, you know, we have to say that he was, you know, legally he was acquitted, wasn't he? So, you know, I know there were two cases.

I can't remember exactly the details of each one. I do know that what came out later about Jordan Chandler was that his father, who was a dentist, I think, gave him, sort of put him under, like gave him some drugs and then like quizzed him about it. So he tried to kind of extract what had happened, which is, you know, so there's the darkness kind of extends way out beyond, you know. And I do think anybody, any parents who were kind of letting their kids hang out with somebody of that, you know, on this level is kind of, it's like,

that's quite odd. But the thing, yeah, the thing that I think, I mean, I kind of, yeah, like, we will never know. But my perspective on it is that he, Michael Jackson was, I don't want to say that he was a special case and that he was so much different from anybody else, but he kind of was, and I think that he was, there was some arrested development going on there. I don't think, I think he was so much different from anybody else but he kind of and I think that he was there was some arrested development going on there I think he was so brutalised by his father who by the way died a couple of weeks ago

by then I try not to it's very rare that I celebrate when somebody dies but I was like fucking good good fucking riddance to that guy what a loathsome monster he was so yeah he was so so kind of um so destroyed in some way by by his father that i think what happened what came out

of that is that the talent responded to that you know the the to the the sort of the punishment and whatever else and that kind of bloomed in a particular way in a very strange way but in a very powerful way and the the actual human was kind of crushed in a particular way. And I think he spent, this is what bums me out about watching this video, is it's like there's this, you know, when you look at Bowie kind of changing himself very fluidly and naturally and playing with it and then trying something else.

And Michael Jackson kind of did that, but there's this desperation in it to try to find the self, you know. And he's like, this is one of the most famous human beings who's ever lived and he doesn't have an anchor he doesn't know and there's so that's why he was so weird i think is because why people saw him was so weird i really hate the word weird by the way but i know that's what you have to say um i think that he was he was on some level he didn't he didn't mature he didn't become an adult and um just something went really wrong and i don't think that he was i think he you know he was he was a real lost soul and i think he was

you know an extremely unhappy person he tried to do good things for other people i don't think that um i think that could mean that he was capable of you know of some really beyond inappropriate stuff just in the course of this kind of desperate scrabble for intimacy or for some sense of normality and just getting it so wrong. And I can imagine that people have been hurt by that. I can't say that's... I don't think that makes him a predator. People will sort of mention him in the same breath as Jimmy Savile.

And it's like, I don't think there's any comparison to be made there, really. But yeah, just in this video, and you see how kind of, how fragile he looks already, you know, and this is like, he's still got, you know, it's still 14 years before he's going to die. But, and he's very, he's so, so pale. And, you know, obviously now we know that he had vitiligo. and he's so, so pale and obviously now we know that he had vitiligo so a lot of that is makeup because once he, when your skin kind of loses its pigment

and you have to go one way or the other so at this point he would have been, there would have been more white than black. And this is an actual thing, isn't it? Because we had a conversation a while back about Michael Jackson and I just offhandedly said, oh yeah, but you know,

he had this chinny wreck on. And you put me straight on it, Sarah. Well, I feel like, you know, whatever else you're going to say about him or whatever we know and we don't know, what we do know now from the autopsy is that he did have vitiligo. And I remember him talking about that and going,

look, I have a skin disorder and blah, blah, blah. And people going, yeah, bollocks. And I understand why they would do that. But he also had, I mean, you know, I think you can't diagnose people, but a fairly obvious case of body dysmorphia, which, you know, I mean, his dad used to call him big nose. Once his dad realized that he had, that he was self-conscious about his nose, he zeroed in on it. And it's like, that's like, you can see that in what eventually happened to Michael Jackson's nose is that he went, right, I'm going to destroy this part of myself. You know, I'm going to make it as small and as, as, as, you know, as Caucasian as I, as I can. So yeah,

it's just, I can see all of that. There's like, you know, now we know that he was, he was addicted to painkillers and just, yeah, it's, and he's trying that, he's trying to play out like a normal relationship with, with the daughter of Elvis Presley and sort of it's, it's all, and it was never going to, you know, you's, it's all, and it was never going to, you know, you can see now from the perspective, it was never going to end well. And it just makes me,

it just bums me the fuck out, to be honest. I think one big factor in all this, particularly from a British perspective is that this, the first half of the nineties was the era of the big American trials where, where whoever's got the most money wins. You know, we'd had the Rodney King trial a few years ago. O.J. Simpson trial's going on at the moment.

And everyone just assumed, oh, well, that lad's got loads of money. All of a sudden, something's gone off. The accusations against Michael Jackson, it's an entire rabbit hole. The thing is that people still believe and always are going to believe what they want this is how it's always been um there was an extremely thorough investigation and you know he was exonerated as we've said but the thing is that people people absolutely lapped it up and the media had a field day yes they did um i think it was kind of um people kind of felt that they had carte blanche now.

He'd already been kind of a hate figure for quite a while. This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull-apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey and just five bucks for the small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. Just because of how bizarre he was. And so that kind of gave people, people could now kind of go, oh, I knew he was a wrong-un, you know, and then go on to, you know,

it leads very, very nicely from that. Oh, you know um he sounds like he's gay or he sounds like a woman he's obviously he's obviously ashamed of being black etc he wants to be left alone so that was kind of you know that that kind of torrent of ugliness was in full flow and um i think there's there's kind of there are various lessons you can take from this and one of them is something we should all have in our heads now anyway at you know at a time like this is to always kind of dig a bit deeper into things and not just settle on the first um the first bit of reporting that makes you feel comfortable and shores up what you already think i mean i've had to do that myself i've kind of made myself keep an open mind on this

and um it's kind of been quite instructive because um i didn't want to just kind of you know obviously i didn't want to believe this stuff no um but i'd rather just that's that doesn't really sit right with me it's like i'd rather know and of course as we've said i'm not going to know ever so i just have to live with that um but it is it's important to dig more into stuff and you know even if it's going to challenge your assumptions and your prejudices, just kind of, you know, it's a good kind of reflex to develop. Um, and there really was a lot of bad and easily disprovable reporting on this. Um, for instance, like there was, there was no evidence of child porn. That was complete horseshit. But ultimately, I do have to say, like, it's really important to remember that these were real people that we're kind of almost forgetting about in this.

Regardless of whether it was the right verdict in the end, you know, people had their lives ruined anyway and there are human beings walking around now kind of carrying this burden having to having to deal with with all the fallout that they'll have to deal with for the rest of their lives um you know obviously it's always it's always important it's always vital to take any accusations of abuse seriously and sensitively and gravely and yeah it's um it's just you know out of this whole ugly mess you have to remember that there were um you know some young people involved too um and it was uh none of it was their fault yeah i think there's um there's a lot of truth in what sarah's just said a lot of truth and um i think um going back to question did he get away with it um we can almost put to one side the question of what the it is

that he's got away with because um i don't think we'll ever fully know however um if the question is really did he get away with it in the court of public opinion as they say then in in some ways yeah i think so because um his music is still loved. It's not like Gary Glitter, where it's been completely written out of history. Depends who you talk to, though. Really? Sorry, I do think, no, there's loads of people for whom that's, you know, if you don't love the music, then yeah, that's who, that's...

If you go on YouTube, any Michael Jackson song, it gets mentioned in the comments very early. Okay, but you still hear his music everywhere. There hasn't been that kind of showdown at all. Yes, you do. I mean, I still, well, I still listen to Gary Glitter, so maybe I'm the wrong person to ask. But yeah, I mean, his music from his childhood

still brings me a lot of joy. I play The Love You Save by the Jackson 5, God, several times a week. And I also reach for things like Off The Wall, the song, and basically loads of stuff that he did up until about 1983. And I'm not being one of those snobs that says, oh, he never did anything good after that. Because the single just before this, you mentioned Scream,

I thought was a bit of a banger, actually. That was a bit of a tune. actually that's a bit of a tune oh totally yeah yeah um so i you know i i think he was a pop genius he wasn't a genius in the same category as as prince it's a different type of genius but nevertheless he did he did have that um sadly by this point we're not really seeing an expression of that what we are seeing yeah this but this is his mawkish phase, isn't it? He's singing You're Not Alone, but of course we're looking at it thinking, man, you are alone. Look at you.

Yeah, you're the loneliest man in the world. Oh, God. Oh, man, it breaks my heart. And then in the outro, Dale Winton referring to Jaco's skin colour as much as anything, I guess, saying interesting image, Michael. And I'm thinking hot kettle, I guess, saying, interesting image, Michael. And I'm thinking, hot kettle, mate.

Fuck off, Dale. That's a good fucking point. Did you have the album, Sarah? I didn't have this one, no. I really, I don't know if Stranger in Moscow came out before or after this. Moscow. Moscow as he sings it. Moscow.

That's, you know, that's how Americans say it, isn't it? came out before or after this. Moscow. Moscow as he sings it. Moscow. That's, you know, that's how Americans sing, isn't it? Also, he would have said, he probably would have said Leicester Square as well. But yeah, no, I thought that was a gobsmacking single. It's a lot better than this one. And, you know, there's kind of, yeah. So I still, you know, I was still a fan kind of to a degree. Because this song's extremely out of kilter

with the rest of the album, isn't it? It's a very angry album, isn't it? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, he's just basically telling everyone to fuck off and leave him alone. And then here he is saying, oh, you're not alone. And of course, if you want a barometer on Michael Jackson standing in the UK,

this is a song that they whack the first part of the charts over as if they don't mean shit it's really distracting pretty much the only video on the on as well so it is distracting yeah it really um kind of made me miss uh the breakers like i think the format at this point is is uh they're obviously trying to uh kind of keep it clean and tight and whatever but But it's like, yeah, don't kind of run. It seems a bit disrespectful, really. It's like in the ways that they used to just show, you know, it's like if you're going to show a snippet, then show a snippet.

But don't show like a whole video and like a running ticker of other stuff under it. It's just like, well, you know, one thing at a time, mate, you know. Yeah. One thing I noticed about it was this kind of war going on between Britpop and Eurodance which between the two of them account for more than half of the stuff so on the one hand you've got Charlatans and Supergrass

and I guess older figures like Morrissey and Dagenham Dave and Radiohead not exactly Britpop but an indie band and then there's a definite Britpop band, who I won't spoiler in there because we're coming to them. And then you've got all the stuff like, well,

you've got Out Here Brothers, you've got The Real McCoy, you've got Deuce, you've got JX Corona, all this kind of stuff. So, like I say, that Top 40 rundown really brought home to me that this was the time of Eurodance. It was so dominant at this point. So, the following week, you were not alone. Got to number one and stayed there for two weeks before being usurped by Bombastic by Shaggy.

Also that week, it became the first ever single to go straight in at number one in america can you believe that yeah that's a weird thing about the american charts isn't it things move a lot more slowly yeah they did in that in that era the follow-up earth song went straight to number one in december of this year and stayed there for five weeks however in 2007 a court in Belgium ruled that You Are Not Alone was a direct nick of the 1993 tune If We Can Start All Over by songwriters Eddie

and Danny Van Passel meaning that this song is now banned on Belgian TV and radio genius steals they've struggled on without it that would have been a great Michael Jackson LP cover wasn't it? Band in Belgium. Though you're far away

I'm here to stay But you're not Interesting image there, Michael. I might try that one. From Los Angeles, they're here on top of the pubs. Please welcome the Rembrandts. Formed in Los Angeles in 1989, the Rembrandts were a duo, Danny Wilde and Phil Solum, who were previously in the power pop bands Great Buildings and The Quick. Their first single, Just The Way It Is Baby, was a top 20 hit in the USA in 1990,

but they never troubled the UK charts until this year, when they were invited to perform a theme tune for the sitcom Friends in 1994, which was then re-recorded and extended into a single. It's another new entry this week at number six. Let's get the French stuff out of the way. Well, I can't really lead with this because I never watched the fucking thing. I took an instant dislike to it without ever actually watching it.

Yeah, I liked it. I've got to say, I will front up for this. Yes, you confessed earlier. Yeah, I know Neil Kulkarni absolutely hated it, I remember him having a right go at us good lad I've only seen one episode in full of Friends when I was at a mate's house and I was off my tits

on speed and I started hallucinating that the casts were cardboard cutouts and they were being moved in and out of shot on sticks so yeah, not the best judge but to me friends is where channel four started going down the toilet oh speed is the worst drug that's where your speed should start going down the toilet actually when that happens um no it's a perfect no it's a near

perfect sitcom and it gets a lot of it gets a lot of flack partly because it's so massive and people think oh it's cheesy and it's anodyne and stuff and it's like well it's not it is not quite perfect but it's it's a beautifully engineered bit of telly everybody in it is a an incredible comic actor with amazing timing and it's just yeah it's a joy i'll still watch it now i mean and you know it's it's 20 years old now some of it doesn't hold up so well some of it you go christ you can't no don't don't do that that's that's not what you should be doing but it's no well nothing that belongs to me holds up after 20 years yeah tell us about it but um but yeah but the thing about um about the the theme tune

uh which is what this is, it's not a very good song, but it's a really good sitcom theme tune. It's basically, I realise, it's Happy Days, isn't it? It's like a sort of self-conscious throwback to that. And I think some people there knew exactly what they were doing. Good comparison, yeah. It's got got that slightly that thing you do you know it's that kind of throwbacky sort of thing um and with a slightly it's very jolly it's like an irritatingly kind of american bland and jolly and it but with a little wistful little wistful

bend in the you know in the that bit it's a little tiny bit of a pang that you get there. It's a Pavlov's dog thing, isn't it? The opening bit. Yeah, you know, with the handcuffs. If you like Friends, it's just like the Pavlov's dog thing for half an hour of sitting down watching American

twats being sassy. I mean, the thing I didn't like about Friends, Sarah, if I'd have been your age, I would have been more open to Friends, but I'd already lived with other people, so I knew that Friends was a fucking lie. Nobody gets on like that. But that's it.

It was aspirational, you see. This is the thing. Oh, totally, yeah. No one shares a house that big. And the thing that really fucked me off, there was no one in Friends in that house who you'd only see every now and again padding from their bedroom

to the dressing gown. Looking really fucked off. I've got to correct you Al, they didn't all live in the same house. Some of them lived in different apartments and stuff and they just drop in. I mean, come on, get your facts right Needham. Yeah man. No, there were two apartments

and they would sort of swap between. One of them was the massive, outrageously good one and another one was a bit crappier, but still it's, you know... And Phoebe lived somewhere else entirely, so she would drop in. Phoebe lived somewhere else entirely in some sort of...

Well, the great thing about Phoebe is that she was this sort of, you know, dippy, sort of daffy character who also turned out, as it went along it turned out that she was a complete freak like she was this kind of sex fiend who would kind of um who was very very sweet and blonde and lovely but just absolutely you would not tangle with her or i think and also she's yeah and she used to live on the streets and was like really really handy and stuff you know so like so there was you know kind of more to it than than you would get from like a single viewing

when you're off your tits on billy whiz um i mean first of all it was created in an entirely different way to the kind of classic british sitcoms which were usually written by a duo weren't they it's you know golden and simpson or whoever or clement and lafrenne you know those kind of teams making british sitcoms this was really kind of workshopped, it was almost like writer's room isn't it? it's almost like the sort of Motown of sitcoms in that they were churned out

quite methodically you cannot compare Friends to Motown yeah you can, do it oh man you really hate us right now don't you I'm sorry but I'm not sorry friends was a soundtrack to me getting off the sofa and leaving my girlfriend to it and playing demolition derby on the playstation in the spare bedroom i think i wanted like no this is your time you can have it i'm fucking off i wanted that to be my life um i wanted my friends to be as funny as them um i think my friends were

actually funnier in a lot of cases but um yeah okay imagine taylor being in friends oh jesus yeah well he'd be one he'd be like one you know sort of miserable guy who turns up every six or seven episodes and you know says a couple of funny things and then yeah gets gales of applause when he walks yeah yeah yeah um but yeah certainly with his catchphrase fucking ba B.A. Robertson. No, I mean, Taylor's already been in a sitcom. It's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. He's Marvin the Paranoid's android. Oh, I'm not having this.

Life. We love you, Taylor. Don't talk to me about life. No, of course, we all love Taylor, but I'm just saying. Because what Friends did, very cleverly, was create these different personality types that it was all set up so you could say, oh, I'm that one. And my friend is that other one. And, you know, that's kind of how it latched on, you know, how people got onto it.

But there was development along the way as well. But it's really funny when you revisit it now and occasionally on Twitter, somebody will go, oh, my God, Ross Geller was actually a psychopath and it's like, yeah, yeah he was, yeah, he's this raving narcissist. I'm just going to sit out of this conversation now. Well let's talk, well you know. Completely wrong. The pot crazed youngsters will understand, so let's get on with it.

Yeah, yeah. There were two massive sitcoms on Channel 4 around this time, it was this and Frasier and I loved them both but I think Frasier. And I loved them both. But I think Frasier has kind of, it's become the one that it's still okay to say you're into that because it was a bit more refined and intellectual. Whereas Friends was kind of pure feel good, really.

Although it did, I think it was quite groundbreaking in sitcom terms in that there was real kind of emotional poignancy to it. And the real weepy thing, the whole will they, won't they thing with Ross and Rachel and various other developments from that. So that gave it a kind of hook. You know, it got under your skin so that you would want to come back every week. It wasn't a sort of take it or leave it. You know, I'll watch it and have a laugh or maybe I'll skip this week.

You really wanted to find out what was going to happen so that was very clever but now you can you can actually watch any episode now i suppose it's different when you've seen each one like many many times but you can watch any of them and they do all kind of stand alone i mean obviously it took a while to get going like a lot of things do um you know it's the first series a little bit wobbly but um after that it's just it's pretty much it's really solid until it's kind of like there are only a few um kind of long- really solid until it's kind of like there are only a few um kind of long-running shows that have that kind of purple period for you know obviously the simpsons is one that had like a purple period of like 10 years and friends i think

is about that it's like it was solidly brilliant for like eight years how long did you yeah because i i stuck with it till about series six i think and then i saw i think when um that oh who's the english actress that came in and got married to ross oh god a fucking helen helen baxendale emily god she's terrible oh god i hated her yeah that was yeah sorry but yeah i did yeah horrible kind of well the character was horrible as that sort of you know frosty english bitch which you know i just didn't you know I felt personally attacked I might just check it out

actually in a fucking pig's arse will I fucking fuck friends but we have to have this conversation about the TV show because if it wasn't for the TV show this wouldn't be on top of the pops would it

it's a bit of a Bangles B-side, isn't it? They're so uncool, by the way, with their nicely blow-dried hair. They look like they haven't got the memo that it's the 90s yet. Yeah, and they're supposed to be British. Totally. They're completely out of time, aren't they?

Damon Olber would be well pissed off about this. Why doesn't it meet the gang because the boys are here yeah they're like that band deep blue something you know deeply something who sang breakfast at tiffany's it's in a similar vein to that just so very much so um yeah oh god i hate that song so much i thought when that song came out breakfast at tiffany and i thought well what tv shows this then exactly it sounded exactly like a sitcom theme tune. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They do a bit of that Libertines face-to-face thing at the end, which kind of doesn't really come off. They've just been there for each other, though, Simon. Two songs in a row we've had. They'll Be There For You, You Are Not Alone. Fucking leave me alone, pop stars. I want to be alone. Yeah.

But yeah, I did kind of, you know, thinking about, because I've heard this obviously so many times that I kind of can't hear it anymore. Yeah. So, and just looking at, you know, I appreciate there's a little bit of stagecraft going on there. It's like, yeah, you know, good, well done for, you know, trying to distinguish yourselves a little bit.

But I started to think like, oh God, I wonder, I wonder how much, well, A a how much they've made from this and b how much they hate it because like this is like the curse of the one hit wonder i don't know how how well they did like in america or whatever what kind of careers they've had but like imagine if you're so uh deeply associated with the like one thing that you've done and it's not even really about you you've you've just you've made a theme tune maybe these guys thought that this song would kind of be a like a pop classic in its own right that's what you would hope for that's probably what they were going for and then it's like well it's great because it's so deeply associated with this thing that people love and it's like yeah but nobody remembers you and nobody knows like you

wouldn't recognize any of the rembrandts if they were on you know never mind the buzzcocks or something yeah yeah and they they came over and played gigs at like shepherd's bush empire and imagine what that gig must have been like so let's say they've got like a dozen or so songs of their own uh you know that um that they're really proud of and they play the entire gig and there's 2 000 people just waiting for the bit at the end where they can go yes yeah do friends yeah so do friends again yeah do the friend do the friends bit yeah they probably did they probably had to play it twice they'd play it like in the middle wouldn't they do now do laverne and shirley yeah so you know i i always i always um kind of start to feel for people like that because it's like yeah i shouldn't feel for them too much because they're probably preposterously wealthy but yeah but but again like that like the sitcom it was a committee songwriting job wasn't it they

were kind of like drafted in at the last minute so So yeah, they didn't get that much coin out of it, I don't think. I wonder why they're called the Rembrandts. That's quite a pretentious name, actually. It is. Who cares? Not I.

Great record, says Dale Winter. Yes. Yeah, whatever, Dale. Are you still here? Yeah.

So the following week, I'll Be There For You jumped three places to number three, where it stayed for two weeks. The follow-up, This House Is Not A Home, only made it to number 58 in January of 1996, and they never troubled the charts again. In an interview on The One Show in 1996, Jennifer Aniston revealed that none of the cast of Friends liked the theme tune. Oh. Jennifer Aniston revealed that none of the cast of Friends liked the theme tune.

Oh, that's interesting. I'll be there for you Cause you're there for me too Great record. Listen, congratulations to Boyzone. Said and Done is the new album. It's straight at number one. They're here to sing a song from it right now. Let's straight into number one. They're here to sing a song from it right now. It's not time to make a change.

Just relax and take it easy. You're still young. That's your fault. There's so much you have to know. Manufactured in Dublin in 1993, when louis walsh held an open audition for 300 irish lads who had to sing careless whisper then a song of their choice and then danced to i'm too sexy by right said fred boyzone made their first public appearance by dancing to a backing track and essentially carrying on like the gay exchange advert

on the Irish chat show, The Late Late Show with Gay Burn. Their debut single, a cover of the four seasons Working My Way Back To You, got to number three in Ireland but did nothing here. The follow-up, however, a cover of The Osmonds' Love Me For A Reason, got to number one in Ireland

but again failed to chart in the UK until they were offered a place on the Smash Hits Roadshow which propelled the song to number two in January of this year, held off number one by Stay Another Day by East 17. This cover of the 1970 Cat Stevens single, which was Ronan Keating's audition song, 1970 Cat Stevens single, which was Ronan Keating's audition song, is scheduled to be the follow-up to So Good, which entered the chart at number three a few weeks ago and is currently at number 38. And it's off the LP Said and Done, which is just knocked

It's Great When You're Straight, yeah, by Black Grape, off the top of the album charts. Top of the pops, they've gone back to this album of the week thing that they used to do in the early 70s. But for different reasons. I think back then it was, you know, here's a chance of getting something for the heads.

Nowadays, in 1995, here's something for the dickheads. Boyzone, five stools sitting on stools. Yes. They're all sitting on stools. Yes. They, yes.

Yeah, they're all sitting on these kind of like sawn off bar stools like they were, I don't know, some, it's a bit like

a football panel, isn't it? Or a Q&A. You know, the thing with the stool thing is that the prop

is meant to be so that there's this moment of excitement when they stand up for the key change. They don't even do it in this song because there isn't one. So what they do is they start clicking their fingers and girls in the audience scream.

I mean, it's not exactly an Elvis hip shake, is it? No. Well, they were extremely wholesome, but I mean, like, beyond wholesome, really. Fucking arse wholesome. Because, you know, it's like, who,

who is this? Who is it for? And it's like, it's for, it's for little girls and who would come to be called tweens, I guess, shortly. I don't know when the tween was invented,

but, you know, soon after this, probably. And mums, that's who it's for. Because you're, you're way past this shit at the age of 17,

aren't you, Sarah? Yeah, completely. I had nothing to do with it whatsoever and just found it, you know. Yeah, no, I had nothing to do with them at all. Was there ever a kind of a boy band that you were into when you were a bit younger? You're kind of in the big fun era, aren't you?

Bross? Yeah, no, I found all that a bit ridiculous because I love pop music. I just didn't. I found the whole boy band thing uh i was just a bit nonplussed by it really i did like i like take that i did come around to take that because you know they were they were fucking great and as i've probably said before they played at my school which was which was so what they played at my school no come on tell us about that i'm sure i've done this bit before surely no no No, no, no, no, no. Oh, okay. Well, okay. So the local radio station, Pulse FM,

where Chris Moyles started his career, ran a competition to find the best teacher in West Yorkshire. And what you had to do for this was vote. And there was no limit to how many times you could vote you had to like write the name of the teacher on a piece of paper and basically send you know and put it in a box and send it in and so for like how many weeks we just did this over and over again and we all agreed that it was mr bagnell who was the maths teacher who was just ace and um and yeah he um and there was all this kind of it came down to us and and Rastrick High just up the road. Those cunts.

Yeah, those fuckers. The Rodney Bennett to your Grange Hill. Apparently there was all kinds of shenanigans with people kind of like taking boxes of each other's votes and like stealing them and dumping them and stuff. But anyway, we won in the end through fair means or foul. And the prize was to have... And you knew what the prize was? And the prize was, take that came and played at our school yeah and this was a brick house high school in uh i guess

night would have been 94 i suppose the year before this and um yeah it was i don't know it was it was a kind of do what you like era of of of right of take that um and gary had his his bleach his bleach do and they used to you know do the back clipsips across the stage and stuff so I mean I didn't you know I kind of hung back I wasn't at the front screaming but I was at the back going oh

this is great you know I never knew there was beef between Brighouse and Rastrick despite sharing a chart-busting

brass band yeah well this is you know Terry Wogan brought together the tribes didn't he

I know and it was all for nothing. I know. Well, this is the arc of history. You know, it's like this is how these things go down, isn't it? Anyway, but Boyzone, I had no truck with it all. Because the thing is, subsequently, I kind of realised that Ronan Keating weirdly sounds a bit like Eddie Vedder.

Yes, he does. Yes, he does. Ronan Keating really is. You know, it's that kind of it's like he's choking on a hard lump of phlegm isn't it it's horrible it's like

when you try to do a Ronan Keaton you have to sort of flex your throat in a kind of slightly alarming way and it's like it's a very put on thing and also I must say this is quite because you associate you know manufactured bands with this kind of glossy kind of eerie perfection and kind of smooth edges and stuff and and they're still at this point this is kind of before you get that sort of like robotic refinement that you see

a lot of the time now like even on you know on talent shows and stuff they're absolutely crack you know they've really they're really like drill and um you know this is this is actually pretty weak and again i'm sure that it's piss poor i'm sure they can't hear themselves and everything but he's actually then you hear when um when steven starts um you know doing a little bit of harmonizing you see he's got such a sweet voice and it's really pretty and it's actually oh i want to let him let him do his bit but ronan is the lead singer i've never figured out why ronan keating was the lead singer because it was a really ronan keating is is the alan sharer of 90s pop isn't he boring as fuck and massively successful yeah i i saw boyzone actually at the um smash hits poll winners party at wembley and it was weird because was this for work yeah it was for work um and i guess the

audience would have been only a little bit younger than Sarah would have been. I suppose like 14 to 15 years old was the kind of age group. And as a live act, Boyzone had these kind of silver puffer jackets and they were giving it some sort of sub temptations dance moves.

But most of their material is this stuff, isn't it? It's the sitting on stools stand up for the key change bollocks. Yeah. So he sat there, Keaton, with Gately to his right. And I just wanted to get that right by doing a Google image search to make sure that that is Stephen Gately. And one of the first pics to come up when I did that

was Stephen Gately with Michael Jackson. Oh, and they have the same Jackson. Oh, Tempura. And they have the same hair. Oh, God. Yes, they have. That's the thing. He's got the same. This is one of the, you know,

one of the worst things about that Michael Jackson clip for me is it's like, oh, no. Oh, honey. Oh, your hair. Why don't you pay someone to tell you this isn't a good idea? You have got Stephen Gately's hair on your head. What are you doing? But yeah, that's another thing about the stools, actually, is I was getting narked about that because it's like they're the wrong height. a good idea. You have got Stephen Gately's hair on your head. What are you doing?

But yeah, that's another thing about the stools actually is I was getting narked about that because it's like they're the wrong height. So what you want is you want to be able to kind of prop one foot, put the other foot on the ground. And then you've got like a nice that angles your body really nicely. It's quite a good effect. And they couldn't do that. They had to like man spread like crazy just to stay on

the stools. Also, is one of them barefoot? Yes. one of them barefoot yes one of them at least is barefoot and i was just because i know it was pricey i know how you feel about about men's bare feet so i was just like yeah oh jesus and you know like oh um so that that was uh nothing nothing about this is good let's be honest also but except for the bit so in the middle so there's there's a little middle eight where nothing happens. And Ronan goes, boyzone, live on top of the pops. Boyzone live on top of the pops.

And everyone screams. And my brain actually... Yeah, we noticed, mate. My brain actually capsized at this point. It's like, what have you done? You've just punched a hole through reality and let out the things that should never escape. He's like, look, Mark, I'm on top of the world kind of thing, isn't it?

Well, it's like Jimmy Percy, isn't it? Going, hello, mum. Guess who's on top of the pop scene? If he said, hello, mum, that might have been cute. But this was just like a weird sort of, it's just very, I was like, what are you trying to achieve? It's like a big shout out, isn't it? Shout out to yourself.

It's like something that a rapper would do. There is something quite endearing about it. You can hear the sort of the soft screams of, you know, like the mating call of the teenage girl, which is always kind of, you know, it's always kind of adorable, even if you think that the object of their affection is really not worth it and you want to take them aside and go look he's got blonde astroturf

on his head and he sounds like the guy from Pearl Jam if something terrible had happened to him so you know you can do better but what girl would be into fucking boyzone when there's take that and he's 17 knocking about sorry if any daughter of mine came home saying she was into Boyzone,

I'd go straight out and get her some fucking drugs. Saying, I'm not having this. It did. You can do what you want, but you're not liking Boyzone. What's wrong with Brian Arvett? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this absolutely, you know, within a few seconds, I was like, God, I really want to listen to Stay Another Day.

And I want to watch E17. Because, you know, E17 obviously get loads of shit, which is, you know, which is really not deserved. Here's the thing, right, with Boyzone recording Father and Son, because we've already established that Boyzone were put together by Louis Walsh. So we've got to look at it as a casting decision, in a sense, what's happened here. We've got Ronan Keating singing the line,

Look at me, I am old, but I'm happy. I am old. Yeah, he smiles ironically at that moment because he's 18 years old at that point. Look at me, I'm old, but I'm happy. Now, the thing with this song is that the cat stevens original is quite subtle and ambiguous there's that line you're still young that's your fault i've never been sure what that means does he mean fault in the sense of that's your flaw or does he mean you are to blame for your yeah it's interesting it's a song that gets

you thinking like that and it's like Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen in the sense that it's been covered because it sounds like it ought to be a big, dumb ballad, but it's actually about something else. And the act covering the song are riding roughshod over the meaning of the original. My dad used to get very sentimental about Cat Stevens'

Father and Son, and also Kansas' Carry On My Wayward Son, and Like Desperados Waiting for a Train by Jerry Jeff Walker. He'd play those songs late at night with a glass of scotch and hope that they were telling me things he couldn't quite say

himself. But will anyone ever have used the boyzone version for this no they'll they'll they'll they'll use it for a slow dance at a wedding sure but it's been deliberately fashioned to pretend that the true meaning of the song is not there because essentially louis walsh is a cretin of course there's a great Boyzone story isn't there where they just had their first hit and they're basically waving their dicks about and you know

playing Billy Big Bollocks and saying oh we want to meet our fans we don't get a chance to mix with our fans and he frog marched them out of the dressing room into the car park opened up the boot showed them all the CDs in the boot that he'd bought, and he just went,

there's your fucking fans. Now get back to fucking work. I mean, Winton, Dale Winton says at the end, that is a classy record. And basically that's all it exists for, is to sound classy. But it doesn't.

It's an awful performance. No, it doesn't. It's an awful performance. It's a terrible performance. Right from the first line, Ronan Keating fucks up. And he essentially comes off as that cunt on karaoke night in the tracksuit who goes up and you know he's going to do Angels by Robbie fucking Williams. And you know at some point in the night he's going to get up and do the same fucking song again. I don't know what's worse.

When a bloke gets up to do Angels, there's always that moment of tension. You can feel it in the room. All the air disappears in the room. It's like, is he going to make it? Is he going to make it? And I don't know what's worse, when they do or when they don't.

Because you know you get that, and do it. Ah! The triple salco of karaoke, isn't it, that? Yeah, it's Partridge doing They Long To Be Close To You. It's like, why do boys? That bit. But you can't really imagine this being done at karaoke,

the boys' own version of this. It's just like, everyone would just go to the bar, wouldn't they? Nobody needs parental advice off Ronan Keating, ever. No. And particularly nobody in 1995 needs parental advice off Ronan Keating. Ever. No. And particularly nobody in 1995 needs parental advice off Cat Stevens. No. You know, find a girl,

settle down, kill someone, rush there. Father and Son was eventually released in November of this year, went straight into the charts at number eight and spent three weeks at number two, held off the top spot by earth song fucking hell michael jackson he resurrected the elephants he brought the world back he restored the blood

to the field and he kept boyzone off number one over christmas is there anything that man couldn't do that's that's my boy the follow-up coming home, got to number four in March of 1996 and the follow-up to that, Words, became the first of six number ones for the group. Ronan Keating would cover this song again in 2004 in a duet with Yusuf Islam, the former Cat Stevens, and he got to number two once again in December of 2004. That is such a classy record. Boyzone from their brand new number one album. We're now going by satellite to Montel Jordan in Pennsylvania. We've already discussed Montel Jordan in Chart Music 21, and this is the follow-up to This Is How We Do It,

which got to number 11 in May of this year. By this point in Top of the Pops' history, and to reflect the dominance of American artists on the charts whilst not having to rely on promo videos, Top of the Pops is using satellite technology to beam in live performances from the other side of the Atlantic, including Bon Jovi performing Always from Niagara Falls in 1994 and Celine Dion doing Think Twice from Miami Beach in the same year. Montel and his dancing chums are coming at us live from Dorney Park in Allentown, PA.

According to a recent Google review, food is crappy, heinously overpriced and staff is all underpaid children. Oh, and the song's a new entry this week at number 15. So the obvious first question is, satellite performances, why? It is really bleak isn't it it goes via satellite in the caption there like we're meant to be really excited just by that basic technological fact even um dale winton beforehand goes we're now going live to montel jordan in pennsylvania you know as if that's really exciting in itself um and it is this mostly deserted fun fair in broad daylight that Dale at the end says

reminds him of Alton Towers which is the representation of it very weird it does look particularly bleak sort of underpopulated fun fair in the daytime they've thoughtfully sent along two TOTP signs to hang on the fence

behind Montel Jordan. Next to the pizza van. Him and his two male and two female dancers trying to look sexy in a fucking fun fair. Yeah. It's really lame. And towards the end you do see

there's some really non-plussed kids on a kind of zoomy thing because they're in front I love fairgrounds, I'll always enjoy looking so I'll just zone out and look at that so there's a really beautiful ferris wheel but otherwise that is the best thing about this it's a nice bit of

entertainment, engineering but yeah, the satellite thing was just a gimmick, it's just because they could wasn't it and it's like something a bit different were there any memorable satellite performances because the only satellite related performance from Top of the Pops

that's ever stuck in my mind is when Madness were in Japan introducing the video for House of Fun which had just got to number one. But yeah, they're just standing there holding up handwritten signs and running to camera back and forth holding up these handwritten signs, which you couldn't read because the technology was so shit.

But the idea that, oh my God, there's Madness live in Japan, that was incredible. By the mid-90s, it really wasn't a big deal at all, was it? Well, the thing is, if you were a football fan or any kind of sports fan, then the idea of watching something via satellite was just kind of assumed that you could do that. So they bring it into a pop music context and we're suddenly meant to have our minds blown by it. It's not going to work, really, is it? And it's like, hang on, what about Cheggers doing a massive swap in Swap Shop?

You know, that's ridiculous. And we're a decade after Live Aid now, you know, where we've watched the biggest music event in the world ever via satellite. So, yeah, we get it. It's possible. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do it. Well, exactly, yeah. But it's Top of the Pops' aversion mean you should do it well exactly yeah but it's

top of the pops as a version to to the pop video isn't it yeah they'll allow it for michael jackson because there's no way they're going to get him any other way but montel jordan's video the video for this song is a lot better than this actual performance i mean yeah it's it's your bog standard him and his mates are playing golf and looking at tits, basically. And in this, because he's still trying to look cool, even though it's, you know, he must be roasting. He's got his backwards Kangol beret on, which is very off the time. But he's also, I quite like his leather coat.

He's got his long black leather coat. But he must be absolutely sweating like a pig in that. Yeah, but he does look like a potentially violent frank spencer doesn't he looks he looks like he's cosplaying as blade you know but but hasn't kind of hasn't got the full get up because he's got like a white t-shirt on and it's like yeah no it's just whatever's happening there it's just not quite working and this is the arse end of g funk isn't this is the arse end of g funk it's no this is how we do it this is how we do it was a banger um yeah but this is the arse end of G-Funk, isn't it? This is the arse end of G-Funk. It's no, this is how we do it. This is how we do it was a banger. Yeah.

But this is not. This is how you shouldn't do it. Yeah, exactly. That's what it is. What's that? There's this lyric in it. It goes, I call up my crew. I tell them bring a brew and some Hennessy for the beach party.

So call up your girlfriends. And you know there always tends to be an ugly one. Bring her too. Fat or skinny, she likes to shoop with Montel and the SL Coupe. Fuck off. Well, that's nice of him though, isn't it? Well, as the moments of Whatnought said, the ones that aren't the best looking

are the ones that do the best cooking. Christ, I don't like that. All-inclusive, I find. There's also a bit where... There you go, Doc. There's the barbecue. Get on I find. There's also a bit where... There you go, Doc, there's the barbecue. Get on with it. There's also a bit where it sounds like... Does he really sing?

Could very well be the next Gary Neville. Could very well be the next Gary Neville. So the song's about... It's about Ronnie Jonson or Wes Brown. Yeah. There was a bit, you see, I came to this. when he said Montel Jordan, I went, oh, right, because I got him confused momentarily with Donnell Jones, as in, you know what's up, which is a jam.

Right. And it's like, oh, this is, no, this is not, it's the other guy and this is not really a jam. But yeah, my hackles kind of came up immediately when he starts talking about a woman as a female in the first. And I was just like, look, if you're, the rule is, right, unless you about a woman as a female in the first but and i was just like look if you're the rule is right unless you are a cop or a naturalist you can't describe women as females okay this is not how it works and then of course and then there's the slam dunk of like yeah

bring bring that bring the heifer that's in your mates because you know maybe she'll be good for a laugh or whatever i might whatever use i might find for it. Fuck off, Montel. Fuck off. I mean, to my mind, there's three fundamental things wrong with this song. Number one, it's not this is how we do it. Number two, that the setting is bringing back awful memories of Hold Tight, the ITV kids show with the theme tune by Bad Manners. And I often expect to see Bob Carol G's sort of wandering into shot at some point.

But the main point is that the previous month, D'Angelo has just released his debut LP, Brand Sugar, and has just raised the bar to absolutely ridiculous heights. And anything after that sounds absolutely piss poor. Yeah, this is not doing it at all. It's a bit of a nothing track, isn't it? And a bit of a nothing performance. Definitely. Definitely.

I think the one thing that sums it up is they're doing sort of different angle shots and stuff like that. And on one of them, you can see a cuddly lion looking mournfully at the camera as if to say oh Montel you've fallen the fuck off dog and the BBC don't even have the courage of their convictions

because just as they did with Michael Jackson they interrupt it with the scrolling thing saying Top of the Pops predicts top 40 entries on Sunday for blah blah blah, blah. Where on earth did they get that kind of inside information from? So, the following week, something for the

honeys dropped 16 places to number 31. Not enough. The follow-up, I like, got to number 24 in October of 1996, but his career was put on hold when he was disorientated by a flare on stage while he was supporting Boyz II Men

leaned against the backstage wall discovered it was actually a black curtain and fell seven feet onto the back of his head yeah oh my god oh okay I feel slightly bad now for cussing him out so badly, but god, that's not very nice, is it? He retired in 2010 when he gave a performance at the Arizona State Fair Stadium to seven people, one of whom was his manager.

Have either of you ever reviewed such a poorly attended gig? Well, it was the Romo tour. I don't know about you, but Allentown, Pennsylvania looks a bit like Alton Towers. Still, what can you do? Listen, Simply Read in a couple of weeks, exclusive. Meanwhile, here's Echo Belly! Winton points out the similarity between the location of the previous song and Alton Towers.

Fucking hell, Dale, you were only about an hour away from bloody Alton Towers when you were in Nottingham. Before he shills a forthcoming satellite performance by Simply Red and then introduces Great Things by Echo Belly. Formed in London in 1993 Echo Belly were a multi-racial multi-sexual band who released their debut LP Bellyache in 1993 on an independent label which led to a deal with Rhythm King. They were immediately lumped in with the Britpop movement and after scraping the top 40 with their debut single Insomniac,

they just about made it in when I Can't Imagine the World Without Me got to number 39 in July 1994. This is the follow-up to Close But, which got to number 59 in November of 1994. It's the first single from the forthcoming LP On. It featured on the Britpop Now show a couple of weeks ago and it's a new entry this week at

number 13. Well, finally. Fucking hell, we've had all these bloody Americans being all American and now finally we've got some proper British people singing about proper British things in their proper British voices.

Thank God. Yeah. So yeah, I know, I knew absolutely fuck all about them before starting to do the research for this episode of chart music. And I sat down and listened to this and I don't know how you feel about them. I'm sure I'm going to hear,

but I just thought, yeah, this is all right, actually. Well, yeah, that's, you know, what's, what's not to like, really. I don't think they you feel about them. I'm sure I'm going to hear. But I just thought, yeah, this is all right, actually. Well, yeah, that's, you know, what's not to like, really. I don't think they were, you know, they weren't especially kind of celebrated at the time. And, you know, there's kind of not, there's not an awful lot there.

But it's a lovely, I was happy to hear this again. You know, I was like, yeah, I've enjoyed it. And when it was over, I was like, I enjoyed that. And it's like, you know, it's like, you know, we sort of started with some froth and it's like it's brit you know it's it's it's like you know we sort of started with with some froth and it's froth this is like brit pop brit pop froth um and you know i hesitate i don't want to kind of do that thing it's like oh it's a it's you know oh she's a girl she's not she's not got any you know there's no substance there but it's like she's very she's this great presence she's really sort of adorable she's very cute i

mean they're all sonia madone sonia madone um and they're all i should point out they're all wearing school uniforms it's not just her but yes she um she's she's there in a in a shirt and a tie and just she's just as cute as a bug's ear she just looks lovely she looks happy to be there and she kind of come up she actually does kind of hold hold stage. And I remember seeing them. They were at the kind of half-built but still open McAlpine Stadium in sort of by Huddersfield. And REM were playing and Echo Belly were like the first support. Massive stadium. And she's there, just sort of skipped on.

Hello, we're Echo Belly. She's very, you know, and completely fearless about it. Because she was originally from Delhi from from delhi and had apparently a very strict upbringing and you know kind of couldn't really listen to pop music or do much until you know um until she was well into her into her teens and so when you kind of realize that that's where she's coming from it's not you know it's not a very deep song but it's especially from from the perspective of this hell year it's like you know there's something really charming

about it it's a very endearing kind of naivety and gutsiness about the kind of the sentiment of you know and the performance itself you know she's just really adorable yeah like you said she's in a school uniform

with shorts and Doc Martens. And a couple of weeks after this, Everett True, Melody Maker, had a right go at her in an interview for this outfit, asking her if it was appealing to certain paedophilic tendencies amongst her male fan base. Could you fuck off a bit, though? I do get quite... Sorry, I suppose it's like with the fuzzbox thing this is like oh look at you look at you displaying displaying yourself look

you've got your you've got your belly out or you've got your you're pandering to this or that and it's like well you know it's immediately shutting down any sense that somebody might know what they're doing or might just be doing it because that's what they want to do and that's what they want to present yeah it's like oh is, is it a sex? Are you doing a sex? Well, not necessarily, or maybe I am. Can you lay off a bit? Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, the fact that she's wearing shorts and not a flippy little tennis skirt, that's one thing. And when I first saw this, I thought, oh, she's come dressed as that. And whilst not realising that the rest of the band had done the same as well you know um you know they've they've got school uniforms on and at first glance you think oh they're being a bit menswear or a bit modder but no they've got their they've got the shirt

sleeves out they've got the bottom of the shirts out and all and all that kind of stuff and it suits the song really well because it actually sounds like the last day of school yeah forever yeah yeah it's it's and and you know and she's singing on about oh yeah okay that's a bit done i'm growing up now and i want to do this and i want to do that and you know i want to find out what love is and you know a bit of a masturbation reference and all that kind of stuff yeah but it was like oh no no, this fits really well, doesn't it? Yeah. Simon.

I want to do great things, she sings, to which the answer is, go on then. I don't want to compromise, she sings, to which the answer is, you already have. Because this is the most compromised landfill indie rock ever. It's the most bleached out, vapid shit. It makes Sleeper sound radical. In the Britpop off-license,

it's the most ordinary of the van ordinaire. They've got no flavour. Sonia Aurora Medan, her voice is just so vanilla. And it's the rich, you see. Rich people have nothing interesting to say. She had a flat on Baker Street that her parents had paid for,

and this is how she was able to launch a Britpop career. Morrissey was a fan. Madonna wanted to sign them to Maverick. I don't know why. This was their biggest hit by far, but it's just absolutely empty. The one thing I will kind of defend them on is the school uniform thing,

because I recently re-ad an old interview with them where it was explained that this song is from the point of view of somebody in their childhood thinking about what they want to be when they grow up. So it's like a conceptual thing they're doing there. The one thing I get from this performance is that Debbie Smith on guitar looks awesome. Debbie Smith is awesome. She was brought in, she was formerly of Curve,

and she's since then been in many, many bands. This week she smashed a guitar up at the Reading Festival. Rock and roll. But she's just an all-round awesome person. But it wasn't really her band. It was Sonia and the fellow with the scandinavian name whose name escapes me temporarily but this song yeah i'm sorry boring boring boring boring boring i still like him i still like it better than sleeper like i would listen to this over anything sleeper did sorry

i mean it's just you know i just didn't like sleep at all and i've her voice meaning yeah gone i've you know and nothing against nothing against um nothing against her i think uh i think louise winner is generally a good thing but I just really hated Sleep I've heard this like two or three times compared to the millions of times I've heard Rod Worthit and Country House but this is better than both of them

yeah I'd go along with that and I am no Britpop aficionado but it's like this is alright much as I loathe Oasis i'd say the role with it has got a bit more substance to it a bit more guts and just something to it than this yeah but the thing the thing is as i as i wrote down arsishly here i notice um is the the value of music isn't only in its quality this is the thing it doesn't like music doesn't have to be good to be good

like to have good in it you know and it's it's like this is it you it doesn't like music doesn't have to be good to be good like to have good in it you know and it's it's like this is it you know it's but it's bubble gum basically it doesn't have to be you know it doesn't have to be more than what it is yeah i mean echo belly are not going to come anywhere near my list of you know favorite bands even of you know even of this time but um yeah like i said my response to it seeing it again after you know x many years it's like oh that was nice you know similar to the feeling that i had after um the the first one after um the berry they got a pretty positive ride in the press actually they were usually written about in fairly positive terms um because

the people who could be bothered writing about them tended to be fans but the rest of us were very kind of so the following week great things dropped 11 places to number 24 the follow-up king of the curb got to number 25 and they'd have one more top 20 hit with dark therapy in march of 1996 before they split up for the first time in 2004. It's their first time on Top of the Pops. They'll be back there. That's Echo Belly and Great Things. A world superstar, an exclusive on Top of the Pops. This is Michael Bolton.

Born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1953, Michael Bolatin began his career as a solo act in 1975 before joining the rock band Blackjack in 1978. Two years and two LPs later, he anglicised his surname, returned to a solo career and first came to prominence when he wrote How Am I Supposed To Live Without Ya for Laura Branigan in 1983 and then I Found Someone which Cher picked up in 1987. After cranking out a selection of cover versions in the late 80s he first sprayed his musk upon the UK charts

when his own version of How Am I Supposed To Live Without Ya got to number 3 for 3 weeks in march of 1990 this is the follow-up to lean on me a cover of the bill with a song which got to number 14 in may of 1994 and it's not in the charts yet well me days we can talk about this brit pop stuff that all the kids are going on about all we like but to top of the pop's mind this is the main event this man who looks like Fabio's mam who's Fabio? Fabio was that male model who got hit in the face

by a seagull do you not remember? he was on a rollercoaster oh my god that sounds amazing Sarah you know all about Fabio don't you sure though? I don't know I'm trying to picture him please don't tell me I'm the only person here who all about Fabio, don't you? I don't know. I'm trying to picture him. Please don't tell me I'm the only person here who knows who Fabio is. I'm straight on to YouTube after we finish doing this, I tell you.

He was a male model. This will be the bonus. Is there actual footage of this incident? Yes, there is. Do you mean he looks like Fabio literally with mid-seagull? With seagull on his face. Maybe so, yeah. I mean, the fucking haircut.

Americans, they would not let go of that mullety look for such a long time. He's a yacht wizard, I'm telling you. It's not just a mullet. It's a mullet that's doing that thing of growing it long at the back because he's going thin on top, which kind of makes it worse. It's a mega mullet. What he looks like is old man pant moustache.

It really does. It's not flattering. You just think like, for fuck's sake, cut your hair. You've got a good bone structure on your face. Make the most of it. Poor Boletin. I feel bad for him. So, yeah, so this starts off starts off I hadn't realised this is actually

kind of built on an element of it's not a sample is it but it's an element of why by Carly Simon yeah it kind of interpolates it doesn't it that's a deliberate thing isn't it of course which goes why does your love hurt so much it's not necessarily the best association you want to have in people's heads when he's asking

if he can touch you there yeah exactly yeah questions to which the answer is fuck no you want to have in people's heads when he's asking if he can touch you there. Yeah, exactly, yeah. Questions to which the answer is fuck no. Yes. Also, so we've got, you know, we've got three kind of classic lady backing singers and a lady sax player as well who has very little to do either kind of, you know,

so she's just kind of she's quite static and occasionally does a little part. Yeah but it's a fucking massive saxophone isn't it? Yeah it's a massive honking big bass sax. It takes a half a song to be able to fucking lift it up to a mile. What kind of a sax is that? I don't know it's a big one. Well it's a bass one right?

Yeah and occasionally it's like and I was kind of waiting I thought oh maybe there'll be a solo. But as we were saying before, because the last time I was talking about when do you think the last saxophone solo was on Top of the Pops, I would actually really like to know this.

Anyway, we're not going to get one here. Yes. So it's just a few kind of, a few little rude parps. And it's... You do get a lot of fluty bollocks as well, don't you? Well, I didn't realise because panpipes were kind of cruise control

for either peace or sex or sex peace or some combination but on this occasion you actually get or relaxing in your car when you're eating loads of Toblerones on the way up to Dundee considering some like you know spiritual matters you know

from your yacht. But on this occasion, I didn't realise you could actually have a stab of pan pipes, but there is, in fact, a stab. There is a kind of a cacophony. I'm not sure that's what they're supposed to be used for. No. Hey, look, he's a radical. He's a musical radical, Sarah.

Get with it. I don't know what's going on in this song. It made me feel slightly uncomfortable. Although not as uncomfortable as if... Because in the caption that comes up at the beginning, it just says, can I touch you there? And there's no punctuation at all. And I remember, can I touch you there?

Do you mind if I touch... Is it all right if I touch you there? But what's worse, can I touch you there or can I touch you dot, dot, dot? There. I know. Yeah. No, no, you can't. but what's worse can I touch you there or can I touch you dot dot dot there I know yeah no no you can't

it's just yeah in the asking if you can touch someone's steaks I think even after what we know now Gary Glitter

still shades him fucking hell well at least he's inviting to be touched isn't he well you know as we know now there's a lot of debate around consent, you know, and enthusiastic consent, which is, you know, the best consent there is.

So, you know, but I cannot give my consent enthusiastically or otherwise to anything about this. Yeah. He doesn't just want to touch you there. He wants to reach the very deepest part of you. Oh. Yeah. Which, you know, it's extraordinary, really. I don't know, using some kind of probe.

Well, is he actually kind of inferring that, like, well, I don't want to boast, but do you know what I mean? It's going to go all the way in there. It's going to be like, you know, it's going to be tickling the bottom of your lungs, love, you know. The thing is, he's not convincing as as a sexy lover man he's convincing as heartbroken that's what he does isn't it yeah like anguish that pure kind of yes how am i supposed to yeah no it doesn't really yeah yeah but not not like hey baby that's not

really his thing uh yeah so and and this and also reggae It's kind of yacht reggae that he's doing here. I don't know if it really suits him any more than I know if that sort of beige-white suit suits him. It reminds me of what the Liverpool football team wore about a year later at the FA Cup final disastrously. Oh, God, yeah.

Yeah, that Ecru cream suit where they got battered. Well, they didn't get battered, but they got beaten by Man United in a show of hubris wearing these awful suits before the cup final. Yeah, Michael Bolton, he's a poor man's Michael McDonald. He's a destitute man's Daryl Hall. I'm not sure.

Is he a good bloke? He seems like he maybe might be a good bloke. You always have to check now if they've gone Trump, don't you? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I should have done a bit of checking there. He sort of seems all right, but this is horrible. And amazingly, it went on to reach number six.

I can't believe it, but it did. Also, the weird thing about this is that the aura of being a big star has kind of lingered around him up until 1995 in much the same way that his hair has lingered on from the 80s. That even though he hasn't really had a massive hit, I think you said his last single got to number 14 and he hadn't actually had a top 10 hit

since 1991 when he covered When a Man Loves a Woman. Nevertheless, he was officially a big star such that, you know, he got to announce himself at the start of the show and all of that business. Isn't it weird that if you're a certain kind of artist, that status is kind of irrevocable. It just sort of stays with you. That, you know, possibly if top of the

pots was still going now he could turn up and it's like it's michael bolton yeah so two weeks later can i touch you there enter the chart at number 14 and we'll go as high as number six his first top 10 hit since 1991 but the last one in the UK. The last time we heard of Michael Bolton, he was on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, singing the words of Donald Trump's National Security Advisor, John Bolton.

So it's fair to say he's on our side. Yeah, he's one of ours. Alright then. Good. Bless him. He's alright. He's fine. Good on you, Michael. Yeah. And he'd had his hair Good. Bless him. Okay. He's all right. He's fine. Good on you, Michael. Yeah. And he's done his haircut.

Thank fuck. I'm going to show you just what love can do. Come on, baby. Oh, you get me right there, Michael. Love that track. Let's have a look at the top ten. At ten, everybody from clock nine oh she was here earlier that's delacy and hideaway a new entry eight never forget take that could we ever seven waterfalls tlc

six i'll be there for you the rembrandts they were here earlier too five the sunshine after the rain didn't she start the show? That's very. Four, I Love You Baby, the original. Three, You're Not Alone, Michael Jackson. Two, Roll With It, Oasis. The number one's on in just a moment. Meanwhile, have a look at this.

Thank you, Top of the Box viewers. You gave us that this week when you voted us the most popular program in the national television awards that's great we say thank you for that keep watching and now country house is blur they are top of the box Winston brandishes a national television award that you wouldn't use to wedge the bog door open and runs down the top ten that award's fucking horrible isn't it well most awards are to be honest

they're quite, they're usually quite unlovely. I have to say, having held someone else's Oscar and someone else's BAFTA, they are kind of impressive in a particular way, but they're not pretty. You can't just leave that hanging. Come on, name names. Yeah. And a Grammy,

actually. I've got, like, the set. Whoa. Fucking hell. No, this is, who's, who's, yeah, yeah no it is a friend uh no my uh sorry my friend's brother is a is a producer and is a film producer and um so i've visited his house and uh very very carefully and gently hefted the back baffters are incredibly heavy i'm surprised people don't drop them more often especially when you're like shaking yourself and going oh my god I've won a thing

but yeah the television award is just like a big it's sort of a big hunk of glass isn't it and you can't and of course on telly it doesn't I don't know why they make them so they don't look good on telly it's like that's how people are going to see them but yeah so Dale taking

credit here I I think, for kind of swanning in and going, look at this that I didn't win, but I'm holding it anyway. Yeah. Yeah, the only award I've ever won is magnificent. I won the Erotic Award about 10 years ago. I was award-winningly erotic in 2008 for Best Blog. And it's a golden cock with wings nice it's

beautiful i was going to give it to my mom but she's only got well she's got a flat screen telly so uh i've got it on top of my really old massive telly which is probably the only reason i've still got that telly somewhere somewhere to put me golden cock i won I won a few awards a few years ago for music journalism. They used to have these awards for, you know, best live review of the year and stuff like that. And I won it three years running. And the first year it was... Whoa.

I know, I'm just casually dropping that in there. The first year it was just like an engraved pen. And the third year it... Like you wrote cracker chat. Yeah, yeah. Crackety blank. Yeah, yeah. Yes. Oh, man. And the third time it it was like you were on cracker chat. Yeah, yeah. Crackety blank. Yeah, yeah. Yes.

Oh, man. And the third time, it was a fake Olympic medal because it was 2012. But the one in the middle, it was a blue plate, like a dinner plate, that was done up to look like one of those blue plaques you have on your wall. Oh, yes. Thanks to Simon Price who lived here. But the best thing about it was it was presented to me um by i hope i've got this right that he actually presented to me but either way i've got a photo of bears from the happy mondays

handing me that yes i remember this because i was saying like if you if you had a blue plaque for bears it would just have to say bears bears yeah yes bears. And then in brackets, bears. Simon, have you ever eaten your tea off that award? No, I haven't. Oh, for fuck's sake. I'm terrified. It's the first thing I'd do. Well, this is why you and me are different, Al. Yeah, I'm terrified of breaking it.

Every time I've moved house or anything like that, I've very carefully transported it. So what you're telling us there, Al, is that basically you eat your porridge off your golden cock every morning, right? Spooning it into your mouth, going it's the sweet taste of recognition. He uses it for stirring his

cauldron of porridge. The other question that's hanging in the air regarding my award is, no I haven't I wasn't going to go or no nobody else has either and nor was it moulded on yourself by Cynthia Plastercaster

certainly not based on me you can actually see it from your sofa while it's on top of the telly does it follow you around the room with one eye well it's awful because I forget it's on top of the telly. Does it follow you around the room? With its one eye. Well, it's awful because I forget it's there now. And I'm looking for someone to move into my house.

There's a spare room going. And, you know, there's been people come round. And the minute the lever went, oh, yeah, me cock. I didn't put me cock away. So, after the top ten rundown, Winton introduces this week's number one. Of course, it is Country House by Blur. We've already covered Blur in Chalk Music 21,

where they did Girls and Boys, and since then they've scored their second top ten with Parklife, had their first number one LP with Parklife, swept the board at the Brit Awards and pissed off Liam Gallagher, who was sitting two tables away from them with a face like a smacked arse, telling them, you fucking look me in the eye and tell me you deserve that award every time Blur came back with another one. This single, the follow-up to End of a Century, which got to number 19 in November of 1994, was debuted at the band's gig at Mile End Stadium,

and was scheduled to be released by Food Records in mid-August as the lead-off single from their new LP, The Great Escape. However, when they found out that Oasis were planning to release the first single from their new LP, Definitely Maybe, Roll With It, a full six weeks before the LP and a week before Country House, they moved the release date of Country House back a week, meaning that both singles would go on sale on the same day. At first, both parties claimed the joint release date was mere coincidence. The Blurred Camp said their hand was forced as giving Oasis a week's stop would deny them a number one

as they would have appeared on top of the pops first while the Oasis camp claimed that their new single was ready to go and there was little point in sitting on it but the first public shot was fired when Chris Evans played Damon Olberner burst of roll with it over the phone on the Radio 1 breakfast show and Olberner responded by singing a few lines from status quos rocking all over the world, which led to Noel Gallagher describing Blur as, quote,

a bunch of middle-class wankers trying to play hardball with real working-class heroes, end quote. As the war of words raged on and both singles were featured on the top of the Pops before last, the newspapers of the day went mental over it and peaked with The Sun's story about a married couple in Bristol called You Blurty Rat.

See what they did there? Which read, Oasis mad Mandy Vivian Thomas and Blur fan Richard have waged war at home as the band's battle to be number one. Mande, 24, was so angry at Richard constantly playing new Blur disc Country House that she went on a nookie strike, banished him to the sofa and threw his Blur CD collection out of the window. Richard took his revenge by putting her Oasis CDs in a microwave oven and brazenly wearing his Blur t-shirt. The phrase nookie strike just doesn't get used enough these days. No, it really doesn't.

Meanwhile, Bosnia. Although William Hill had established Oasis as favourites for number one, Blur had released Country House on two separate CD singles and on cassette, while Roll With It came out on 7-inch and 12-inch and a CD, which was a pound more expensive than Country House. This helped Blur sell 50,000 more copies that week and win the Battle of Britpop. This is the second week at number one, and we're getting a repeat of last week's performance. Before we get stuck into this, it's worth pointing out that this is the only song on this episode so far that isn't a new entry or not in the charts yet fucking hell the charts were mental in them days weren't they 450 000 copies sold it says

um if i read correctly yeah yes that that's that's phenomenal isn't it it's ridiculous people actually bought stuff in those days it's that's phenomenal isn't it uh it's ridiculous people actually bought stuff in those days it's it's another world um i wonder how many of those copies still exist try telling the youth about that nowadays yeah it's it's kind of hard to explain to younger people and part of my job as a music journalism tutor is to do this um just what a big deal this was at the time and obviously it was completely orchestrated very cleverly by the pr people behind both bands but nevertheless um it was on uh the bbc evening news the itv evening news um nme had led with it on the front cover with a mock-up of a muhammad

ali fight saying the uk heavyweight championship and um it was the sort of thing where you were expected to have an opinion and take a side. And as if you had to like one of those two bands, you couldn't just say, well, none of the above, thanks. Yeah. You know? Nor could you say both of them. Yeah.

Even though obviously a lot of people did. Well, yeah. I'm interested by that claim in your intro there by the way that one of the records being £1 more helped Blue is number one as if you go into the shop thinking I want one

of those records but I don't know which one oh that was cheaper that'll do yeah that's quite bleak isn't it really if that's what it came down to in the end it's like so i didn't really i didn't i've never heard that before it's like what seriously you know i i was actually there at that um mile end gig where they um yes you were a witness to history yes um i've forgotten they did that but um i i do remember hearing them play it at V97 a few years later.

And I really cherish this memory because I love it when bands have an albatross, which is a song that's unusually chirpy and poppy for them. And they then get all pissy about it. And they then try and sort of wash their hands of it and act like they're too cool for the song. Well, the other example being REM with Shiny Happy People. And I just think, well, fuck you. You wrote it. You deserve to have that hanging around your neck forever. We've had to listen to it on the radio.

So screw you. If that means if you play a gig and you have to play it, tough shit. And I remember V97, Blur, were into their kind of serious phase now. And they're trying to sound like Pavement or whatever. It's just the time of Song 2 and Beetlebum and all that stuff. Yeah. I remember I was leaving the field. I was on the shuttle bus back to the Chelmsford train station,

and you could hear Blur in the distance doing Country House, and I thought, yeah, fuck you, because you deserve this. You wrote it. I basically like blue i think i think blur are um are a good band they've done a lot of good stuff they've done a bit of annoying stuff this is well up there in the annoying category um yeah well before we go into the song we we have to let's discuss roll with it oh okay go on Fucking cat shit, isn't it? Yeah. Well, I think... This song, though, kind of...

It turned me against them a bit, to be honest. I thought, this is fucking boring. I think it's kind of, you know, some of the worst and the laziest of both bands. And I do like... I am one of those who... I like both of them in their own ways and to differ differing and varying degrees depending on what's going on but um at the time yeah it's

like roll with it is i'm gonna say oasis have done some really good b-sides but it's like it's a b-side really and yeah no i've got there's there's nothing much to say about it really i mean there's not much to um you know i mean country house is basically a novelty record but um you know oasis did a role with it did kind of sound like oasis it was almost i mean you can never imagine them doing self-parody but that's about as close as they would get to it yeah i mean my my feelings on oasis are no secret you know i do think that they're the greatest cultural evil to happen to Britain in the last 25 years.

But that said, roll with it. It is what it is. It's them doing their thing. It's got a bit of guts and bravado to it. Whereas, even though I think Blur are the better band, this is actually the worst of the two songs um country house gonna take another quote from our good friend taylor parks from his brit pop article so as blur and oasis battled it out for number one with singles that were almost supernaturally shit everyone was

informed that this was terribly important yeah it's nice when a band you liked as well but no this was more than that. This was really important. At the time, other kinds of music were having laws made against them or having their venues closed. But this, this was important. So Simon, how did Melody Maker cover this? Do you remember hearing the news that both these bands were putting out singles on the same day? Did a ripple go through the office? It did, yeah.

We didn't go as big on it as NME did. And I think part of that was just down to the fact that we were always second in line when it came to getting exclusive interviews. And we must have known that NME had something big lined up. So, yeah, I've got the copy of Melody Maker from the previous week here. Ooh, lovely.

Yeah, and it's in quite small letters on the front cover. It's Oasis slash Blur, who's number one? But it's among a jumble of other things on the front cover. So we relatively played it down, I think. I remember, and I've told this story before on Chart Music, I remember the day that the charts were read out because I used to play football every Sunday with Damon Albarn in a kind of music biz kick around that happened in Regent's Park

organised by Andy Ross, who was Blur's manager and record label boss. as manager and record boss record label boss so there's a thing in Melody Maker's Rumour Mill column that says Damon turned up to Sunday football brandishing bottles of champagne and singing roll with it and laughing, that's bollocks

he didn't, he was very coy about it but there were celebrations afterwards down at Soho House That was the one where Graham Coxon tried to chuck himself out the window. The thing with Graham is, right, Graham, in this performance here, he's trying to look above it all somehow. He co-wrote this song, for fuck's sake,

but he's trying to have it both ways and maintain his Mr Indie cool. He's the indie member of Blur, isn't he? I prefer Damon. At least Damon is committing to being a twatty lead singer. He's doing his bit. That's his job. He's there in his kappa tracky top like a middle class boy pretending to be an old school football hooligan. He's doing his... It's a very nice top though. That's the first takeaway I had. The main takeaway I have from

this performance is, oh, that's a nice top. had the main takeaway I had from this performance is oh that's a nice top I'd have liked that he's doing his jazz hands and his mugging and looking very pretty with his big eyes and all that and it's fine he's doing his bit and yeah like I say at least he commits to being a Twasili singer

I like Damon as a person I used to get on with him quite well I've got this memory of being at some music biz piss-up. It would have been a year or two before this, and Blur were there, and we got chatting, and I can't remember. We're probably reminiscing about the early 80s

because they'd started dressing like they were a two-tone band. Yeah. And he sort of broke away from the conversation and said, this is great, isn't it? Because, like, you're a goth and I'm a mod, but we can get on. It's quite sweet. But, yeah, Cheese Tory, of course, can fuck off. Oh, man.

Alex fucking James. Where there's cheese, there's a bellend. Yeah. Now, this song, I know the guy who it's written about. Dave Balfe is a mate of mine now, weirdly. The last couple of years, he lives down in Brighton. He's actually become a Labour councillor down in Shoreham. So good on you, Dave.

Lovely fella. I'm not sure. What's his house like now? I've not been to his house, but if it is a very big house, it'll be by the seaside, not in the country. But yeah,

I'm not sure how accurate the depiction of him in this song is, whatever breakdown he was supposedly going through with his, you know, expensive luxury lifestyle in the nineties. But he seems like a lovely chap nowadays, that's all I can say. Good. Oh, that's nice. There's actually a bit from this week's Melody Maker in the news pages where Dave Roundtree gives his feelings about Blur being at number one. He says he never had the slightest doubt that Blur would be number one, but he says he spent the the slightest doubt that blur would be number one but he says he spent the week

hiding in a mystery retreat in france only emerging when the result had been announced and he says it was quite a relief actually because we'd been shooting our mouths off for a while but it's good no more than we deserve in my opinion and then he goes on about the hype in the papers the insane you know radio tv and all that stuff. And even Bookie's giving odds on it. And he says that the chart battle happened because it was either that or a punch-up, really. Yeah, I think if there were odds on that one, I know where my money would be.

He also says Oasis had everything to gain and nothing to lose because Blur are a bigger band who have sold more records and played bigger gigs he says and now they Oasis are a household name basically means off the back of this and he ends by saying I wouldn't really want to dwell on the Blur v Oasis thing I think that's

last week's thing now if anything now is the time for reconciliation I mean personally I took interest in the news story but to me it was nothing more than sonic versus mario right while all this is going on just six months previously tupac chicory's been shot and he's blaming puff daddy and biggie smalls for it and now we've got this kind of handbags between these two quite affluent bands. And by the way, the whole thing of Oasis being working class heroes, that's a laugh.

I've seen the big leafy area they grew up in. Big front gardens, big back gardens, nice big house. Just because it's in Manchester and they've got a northern accent, people in the south bought into it big time. Oh yeah, the salt of the earth council estate. No, they weren't you know

they they're quite quite a nice life yeah only the really true thing that they've got in common with john lennon then really yeah yes yes it is indeed because they were trying to the media the the mainstream media uh were were basically saying this is this is beatles versus stones all over again and it clearly wasn't, because them two bands got on with each other, didn't they? Yeah, they did. But they also did kind of collaborate to stagger the releases of their records,

as opposed to make a stunt out of this. Exactly, yeah. Just like everyone did. Sarah, you're the target audience here, aren't you, really? Did you have a dog in this fight um i don't really remember i think it was it was kind of uh obviously it was a it was a very kind of contrived thing i think there was quite a good natured sort of tribal thing about it was sort of an interesting thing you don't normally get this kind of gamification of the charts you know yeah

so it was a fun you know i think overall it's um it was like it was a fun it was a fun stunt that we could all follow along with. I don't remember. Yeah, I seem to remember there being a lot of kerfuffle around it. I don't remember feeling very strongly myself. But I think I was definitely interested because, like I said, it's just like, which one will it be? You can't, you know, it's quite, if you're interested in this stuff at all, it's like it doesn't necessarily mean anything.

But it's like, oh, you mean anything yeah but it's like oh you know oh who's gonna um and now it all seems you know it seems like quite a cynical kind of farrago but and especially the thing is that both of the songs are quite cynical and sort of lazy iterations of each band's thing um and you know country houses it's kind of um you know listening to it again now and watching it it's like um that you know there country houses. It's kind of, you know, listening to it again now and watching it, it's like, you know, there is a real kind of smugness and a kind of indolence about it. It's almost like madness without any of the charm of madness. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, I mean, my bloke, blur is a dirty word in our house,

and my bloke absolutely loathes them. But he's caught that kind of, but anything that they've done. And I think the thing with blur is that, you know, they needed to, I think they realised that after this, you know, they kind of but anything that they've done and i think that um the thing with blur is that you know they needed to i think they realized that after this you know they kind of needed to do something different and they did and they really did you know and it's not that they haven't done good stuff before i mean there's lots of their stuff i really love i'm just i will absolutely discard all of this business and also i'm not sure i go back and forth on the whole like fuck you play the hits thing you know um because in some ways, like when you create a thing, it doesn't really belong to you anymore. It belongs to the people, you know, but also you do get it's like Radiohead not playing Creep and it's like, fuck you, just play it.

All right. But I go back and forth on it because on the one hand that and on the other hand, like, well, they can do whatever they want. If they feel like they're not, you don't want your juvenilia to kind of none of us, know really imagine you know when we started out when we started up doing the things we do and we started out writing it's like fucking hell i never want to see any of that again you know i don't want people waving that in my face i don't want to have to like get up and read that out you know like the stuff that i the stuff that i wrote when i was 21 it's like oh god it's like your teenage diaries no really it's like no so they're probably in some ways it's like your teenage diaries. No, really, it's like, no. So they're probably, in some ways, it's like, I think, give people a break, really. And also, nobody needs to see New Order,

you know, in sort of recent iterations, flogging Love Will Tear Us Apart again as a kind of barnstorming festival walloper it's like i've seen that happen and it's not a pretty sight um anyway um yeah but the blur thing it occurred to me that like this is um what happens when you know the stuff that blur went on to do um which which you know i think is really is a lot of it's really great. It shows what can happen if artists have the resources and everyone else has the patience to actually develop and mature. And it takes a long time.

It takes a lot longer than you think a lot of the time. And so few people get to do it. I mean, imagine there's probably all kinds of... There are bands that kind of crashed and burned after doing whatever bollocks they managed to get out. And they become punchlines. And it's like, well, some of them might have gone on after doing whatever bollocks they managed to get out. And they become punchlines. And it's like, well, some of them might have gone on in a different universe if they'd had the time

to work on their craft and work on their ideas. Who knows what they could have done? There's just this kind of, I just imagine this kind of infinite graveyard of all the stuff that could have been. The talent that people might have been able to dread you know the that they might have been able to access given you know a certain amount of time but you know imagine if blur called it a day after this this is what they'd be remembered for and it'd be like what was the point in that yeah yeah that and park life yeah exactly yeah jesus because this this performance

this song is essentially shaking Harley and Mockney Rebel, isn't it? I have to kind of, I do kind of, like you said, he really is committing. You have to give him that. He's committing to his twattery. I mean, that's really, he's really going for it. And on that Britpop, the Britpop show, it's like,

I'm Damon Albarn and here is Damon Albarn and Blur. And, you know, Deerstalker capering about and he did the whole kind of i mean it wasn't just him but uh the whole kind of um eyes eyes skyward thing this kind of coquettish like coquettish but cynical gesture at the same time it's kind of and the the spin that he puts on the word terminally you know terminally and i was quite impressed by that with the eye roll it's like that's that's that's that's properly cunty and i have to you know i have to take my deerstalker off to it but did you buy either of these songs nope oh sarah you let you let the music industry down there. Did I really?

The history books claim that this was the moment when pop music was ripped away from the Inky's hands and thrust into the tabloids. Did you get a feeling of that when it was happening? It was death of a thousand cuts, really. I think it had already started to happen. Yeah, to be honest, I think they were already beyond our reach but by this time we would still go on about them but to diminishing returns because if people wanted to read about blur they no longer had to go to the music press to to get their fix so yeah it was i think a lot of people think that brit pop was great for the music press but it was actually

kind of awful because uh it meant that that our thing was no longer our thing. Didn't sales go up, though, around about this time? Unless I'm mistaken, no, they did not. They kind of plateaued, yeah. Was this the last great hurrah of the British music scene? You know, was this the last time where music meant all things to all people and was, you know, absolute headline news. I think it probably was because two things happened. First of all

there was the post Britpop come down which meant that a lot of the bands who are very kind of you know chirpy and effervescent in 95, 96 were suddenly making their kind of I've taken too many drugs and I hate myself

records and then you had this wave of bands like Travis and Coldplay coming along who were um a lot more kind of how can I put it uh that b word boring again um maybe that's a bit harsh on on Travis but um but but you know what I'm saying bands no longer cared what they looked like but it was all about following the lead of Oasis and aiming for a stadium audience stereophonics as well all of that

lot came along and by the time pop did sharpen up again it was due to outside forces it was due to you know the electro clash thing coming in from Berlin, and it was due to sort of cool bands like The Strokes and The White Stripes coming from New York and Detroit.

And even when the Libertines scene started kicking off in Britain, that was very much second wave. That was very much trying to be the British Strokes. So, and then the internet had come along, by which there's all kinds of reasons why why the internet uh is the death of kind of scenes the death of of music scenes everything becomes uh international at once and at the same time somehow meaningless because of that and and also changeless and yeah this kind of um never-ending present tense that we live in because everything is available

at the click of a finger at all times so maybe you're right it's a long-winded way of saying yes al you're absolutely right it's all right as long as you got there in the end simon the following week country house dropped to number two toppled from its perch by you were not alone the follow-up the universal got to number five in november of this year and they'd have to wait until February of 1997 before they reached number one for the second and last time with Beetle Bomb. The following month Blur announced a tour of small seaside venues including a gig at the Bournemouth Show Bar 200 yards away from the Bournemouth International Arena where Oasis were already booked in on the same night. When Damon Albarn suggested in an NME interview

that Blur were going to fly a balloon with the number one over the venue and project the Blur logo on the international arena's walls, Oasis pulled out of the gig, claiming that Blur were trying to engineer a mods and rockers situation. And Oasis, of course, followed up roll with it with Wonderwall in November of this year,

arguably losing the battle, but winning the war. Damon Olber got a lot of shit for the rest of the year, didn't he? Graham Coxon claimed that he came round one night in an absolute state because he was walking to his house and people were singing Wonderwall at him and a couple of people tried to lamp him at the same time. Became an absolute hate figure, didn't he? Yeah, he did. And I think kind of blew a scale down

and they scaled down their ambitions. And for the better, really. Their music kind of improved a little once they stopped trying to have number ones. They still did have number ones, but that kind of desperation to please had left them yeah and i think that's for the better and yeah oasis went on to become this kind of steamroller this steamroll with it in um force you know with nebworth and all that all that

business and they they just went up to an even higher level um but yeah i i think it probably worked out quite well for both bands I think the music industry won this battle yeah oh fantastic listen next week Joe Brown is hosting the show at an exclusive

from Eurasia. Have a great night. got to learn how to see in your fantasy. Winton gets his arse pinched, automatically paying for all DJ-related crimes upon the general public. Then he threatens us with Joe Brand and Erasure next week and wishes us a great night as the show closes with Scatman's world by scatman john we've already discussed scatman john in chart music number 21 and this is the follow-up single to scatman ski bop bop da bop dop which got to number three in may of this year this is a follow-up and the second track from the lp of the same name where scatman reflects upon the problems of our rubbish planet and invites us to

join him on his far superior world instead although the video shows him at liverpool street station london bridge and oxford street fuck's sake i hate oxford street it's like six lutein high streets lashed together isn't it it's the seventh new entry on this episode and it's gone straight in at number 14 dale getting his arse pinched yeah blimey do you remember have you ever seen that that clip of uh um this was a 60s thing where they um it was like a kind of soft news item and they sent uh they sent a female reporter out to go and pinch the arses of men and then ask them how they felt about it. What was that?

Yes. What was that? I think it was ATV Today or something like that, wasn't it? She was just going up behind them and going, it's like, oh, hello, how do you feel about that? And of course they'd go, oh, aren't you adorable? And yes, of course you can pinch my arse anytime you like, which I don't think that it necessarily uh did very much good for anyone or

for the cause of of anything no you know a woman pinched my ass in a bar the other day really I was yeah um I was carrying a load of drinks so I couldn't even react and like you know say what what you're doing um I had to come deliver the drinks first but um it turned out because she then came up to me and it turned out that she'd been at a talk that I was on earlier that evening by Catelyn Moran and I just thought because Catelyn talks a lot about kind of the Me Too thing and all

that kind of stuff, not that I'm comparing the trivial matter of me having my arse pinched to Me Too but nevertheless I thought what bit of her talk did you not understand that you think it's okay to go around pinching men's arses that's kind of not the deal but I thought, what bit of her talk did you not understand that you think it's okay to go around pinching men's arses? That's kind of not the deal. But I thought, rise above it, rise above it.

And yeah, didn't say a word. You can't kill the spirit, Simon. You are like the mountain. There is, you know, there is definitely a difference. It doesn't mean no arse pinching ever. But you've got to be it's it's it's more than people think it is you know it's kind of more of a more of a thing than than people think like you know i have had my ass fully grabbed by a man that i didn't know in the street and it was

you know an extremely unpleasant experience especially when he did it again after i after i asked him what the fuck he thought he was doing so Oh, for fuck's sake. So that was really unpleasant. But then also, I've had a cheek pinched by, you know, an indie musician who I knew and liked very much and I was like, that's, you know, that could have, that might not have landed in the way that it did, but fortunately it did and I was, I took it in the spirit that it was meant in, but it's probably not the sort of thing you should go around doing

if it's somebody that you don't know or you don't know well enough. You know, there needs to be a certain... It's like telling somebody that they're a cock, you know, you can't... Essentially write some songs that the person might like. So who do we think is pinching Dale? Could it be Michael Bolton trying to touch him dot, dot, dot there? Oh, good point. Who is it?

Well, there's somebody who's got their hand very sort of, I couldn't figure out, I was trying to like, because there's quite a crowd around him. For the first time, actually, I think in this episode, he's not doing the kind of crowd thing and they just do it at the end. So, you know, and there's somebody kind of with the hand very kind of possessively on his shoulder and i couldn't figure out if it was like the woman right behind him or the bloke next to him like i can't you know when you can't see who's hand it so i'd have to go back and watch this again but of course we'll never know but i don't

know if um you know it's kind of yeah i'm not sure how i feel about him sort of uh you know if he was just reacting to to what was going on, then you can't really fault him for it. But it is interesting what with the history of it that we know now, it's like, what are you saying there, you know? But the fact that it's, yeah, this is a full reversal of what we now know used to be the norm there. Yeah.

Are we saying all this to avoid talking about Scoutman John? Yes. Yeah, we are, aren't we? Is there anything to say about this? Because we only get 30 seconds of it after all. Yeah, I mean his first hit was I thought actually pretty great. But this isn't.

I had a really bad stutter when I was a teenager and I wonder and I still do have it to some extent. It comes and goes depending on if I'm in a situation that makes me nervous. Like getting your arse pinched. Getting my arse pinched by Captain Moran fans. Yeah, exactly. And I do wonder whether I would have found Scatman an inspirational figure.

But I'm guessing because he was about 50 and I would have been about 13 probably not no but bless him for trying yeah he was living his best life i mean it's hard to begrudge him anything isn't it so the following week scat man's world jumped four places to number 10 its highest position the follow-up song of scatland fucking hell that can be so misinterpreted in so many ways, failed to chart and he was never heard of again in the UK. Although he became so popular in Japan that his face appeared on Coke cans and he advertised cosmetics and puddings. And that is the end of this episode of Top of the Pops. What's on telly afterwards? Well, BBC One piles into EastEnders.

There's half an hour of Zoo Watch Live. There's a Maureen Lipman comedy, Agony, again. The Nine O'Clock News, a repeat of French and Saunders, the first part of Carry On Hollywood, where Carrie Fisher unpacks her life story as the daughter of famous parents, a repeat of the BBC proms 1995,

and finishes with the 1987 adventure movie The Lion of Africa. BBC Two is about to screen Richard Ingram's on the trail of Malcolm Muggeridge's wartime spy career in Mozambique in the documentary series African Footsteps. Then Wildlife Showcase focuses on the singing apes of Khao Yai in Thailand. And then there's a repeat of whatever happened to the likely lads. The Blitz of England's historic buildings in one foot in the

past grace under fire a news night special on the first anniversary of the ira ceasefire and finishes off with two ceasefires and a wedding the northern irish comedy drama about love through the barricades itv is running the bill a repeat of the Upper Hand, the final part of Catherine Cook's and Cicinda Path, News at Ten, the Canadian law firm series Street Legal, Just a Minute with Tony Slattery, Lisa Goddard, Wendy Richard and Dale Winton, and then piles into Nighttime, while Channel 4 is showing The Black Bag, the documentary series about Feltham Young Offenders and Remand Centre, the fashion show Very Jean Muir.

The documentary show War Cries about the mining industry. Then the 1993 film Visions of Murder. Just for laughs with Emo Phillips. And rounds off the night with good and bad ideas of the 20th century. So me dears, what are we talking about in the playground tomorrow country house inevitably in that whole business I think even though it's

two weeks past now yeah well you know but out of out of what there was I think that's probably what I don't know I don't know it's not going to be Scatman John I'm afraid sorry no I mean I think and this is a sign of partly No, it's not going to be Scatman John, I'm afraid. Sorry, Matt. No. No.

I mean, I think, and this is a sign of partly where my life was at and partly where Top of the Pops was at, nothing. You know, it was a show that was becoming less central to people's lives, certainly mine, and I don't even think I bothered watching this episode. What are we buying on Saturday? Again, I'm not being a smart-arse, but I'm going to say nothing. For the first time, for the first ever Chart Music podcast, there's A, literally nothing in this show that I particularly liked, and B, I didn't need to buy records

because I was getting them sent to me for nothing. So there we go. Sorry. It's like, yeah, Even if you imagine yourself as a 10-year-old boy at this point, it's still nothing. Probably Echo Belly. I mean, I didn't,

but I might have done if I had to choose then. What does this episode tell us about August 1995? I think in a way stuff was still up for grabs. I think there was still a battle between the good guys and the bad guys in culture

and that there was a possibility that we could save things and it wouldn't all go to absolute shit. There was still a certain amount of optimism but I think, it's easy to say this in retrospect of course, but you can see also that we were doomed.

We're doomed! We're doomed! Doomed! Yeah, I think it says probably that it's a year that kind of won't live in as much infamy as it thought that it would at the time. And that, my dears, is the end of another episode of Chart Music. All that remains for me to do now is fling the usual URLs at you,

which are www.chart-music.co.uk facebook.com slash chartmusicpodcast and you can join us on Twitter at chartmusic, T-O-T-P, but more importantly fling us some dollar at patreon.com slash

chartmusic. Thank you very much, Simon Price. You're welcome. Ta ever so, Sarah B. Cheers, love. My name's Al Needham, and if you're banking on a wanking, I'm the man that you'll be thanking. That was my catchphrase when I was David

Dickie. I forgot to put that in earlier. Chart Music. chart music right I promised to see the pop craze earlier. I can't walk away from it. Here is the greatest porn letter ever written to a wank mag. I'm not so sure about the actual factual content. I'm kind of convinced that this might not have happened, but it's still wonderful.

So, here we go. four times until she went to work at a local hospital. I had cooked myself some sausages and was lying there in front of the TV quite relaxed, chomping on my sausages. I looked down and my old fellow was staring back at me with its one eye closed, almost as if it were winking at me to play with it. I was impressed. I had never seen it so big before. It was laying on my belly, stiff as a board, staring at me. The head was laying just below my chest as I lay on my back. I wonder, I thought, as I removed my jeans and rolled my legs up over and behind my head. My penis slid straight into my mouth. It was a curious feeling giving myself a head job. The head made it in just over my front teeth. I was used to deeper penetration when my girlfriend was giving it to me,

but I wasn't complaining. I sucked myself off for five minutes, thoroughly enjoying myself. I don't know how it happened, but I think the Viagra was making me really horny, but I decided to shove one of the cooked sausages up my arse while I sucked myself off. It felt great. I was dizzy from being upside down, but the sausage up the arse really did it. I was going to cum any minute now and started moaning out loud. This was definitely the best sex I had ever received, and it was all from myself. Before I knew it, the dog trotted up over to me. Before I knew it, the dog trotted up over to me.

After being woken by my moans of pleasure, and started eating the sausage out of my arse. Initially, I was shocked, and attempted to hit the dog with my belt that was laying beside me, but I missed the dog and hit myself on the arse. Oh God, it felt great. So I kept on hitting myself on the arse. Oh god, it felt great. So I kept on hitting myself on the arse, not too hard mind you to scare the dog away, which had finished the part of the sausage that was sticking out of my arse and was attempting to remove the other half inside with broad sweeping movements of his long wet rough tongue. It was great,

of his long, wet, rough tongue. It was great, lying there on my back giving myself a head job, being growled out by my dog and whacking my arse with my belt. I began to moan louder with pleasure while the dog began to growl in frustration at not being able to remove the stuck sausage. The dog gave up using his tongue and propped itself up on my arse with its two front paws and began nibbling at my anus with its front incisors, gnashing them down quickly, searching for the elusive bit of sausage, growling and chomping. I thought it couldn't get any better until all at the same time the dog removed the remaining bit of sausage I came into my mouth and Michael Owen scored the winner for Liverpool. It was the best night of my life.