Chart Music: the Top Of The Pops Podcast - #31 - August 11th 1983 - For No Bums Will Ever Tempt Me From She

Episode Date: September 25, 2018

The latest edition of the podcast which asks: that thing with the earlobes - the entire country didn't just imagine it, did they? It's the summer of '83, Pop-Crazed Youngsters, and your avuncular host is battling a series of crises: not only is he still recovering from a de-bagging on the school field and sulking over the re-election of the foul hag Thatcherax, he's fending off rumours about his sexuality before he's even had the chance to do anything with the bastard. Luckily, all that's about to change, as his spiritual guide Paul Weller has got a new record out. And there's a video. Oh dear. Musicwise, it's a proper pic'n'mix of early-Eighties confections, bagged up by elderly shop-lads Skinner and Vance, with a shocking lack of Dadisfaction. David Grant has a massive mid-life crisis and goes all Shakin' Shalamar. Mark King gives it some thumb. Toney Adleh Aaht Ter Spandaah Balleh ponces about in Spain. Siouxie goes all Jazzy, and wonders why she's the only woman on this episode. Robert Plant does some most unsavoury frog-kicking in some Dad trunks. The No.1 is a bit rubbish. And bleddy Depeche Mode AGAIN.      Simon Price and Taylor Parkes join Al 'The Cuppateano Kid' Needham for an awkward homoerotic roll-around upon the riverbank of mid-1983, breaking off to discuss such matters as being confused about Gus Honeybun, the boom in early-Eighties jumper technology, the fallacy of digging over a vegetable patch in calf-length white spats, being told off by the Mayor of Douglas, what leonine Rock gods have on their cheese cobs, and a very special episode of your favourite cartoon. Come for the incisive pop chat, stay for the swearing, and ram some money in our g-string. Video Playlist |  Subscribe  |  Facebook  |  Twitter Subscribe to us on iTunes here. Support us on Patreon here.   Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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. Tax is extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. What do you like listening to? Um... Chart music. Chart music. Chart music.

Chart music. Hey up you pop craze youngsters and welcome to the latest episode of Chart Music, the podcast that sniffs the droppings left behind by the hit parade. I'm your host, not even going to tell you my name because it doesn't fucking matter. What does are my special guests this week. Simon Price. Hello. Taylor Parks.

Hello. Anything pop and interesting going on? Yeah, I had a minor operation a couple of weeks ago that had to be a bit less minor than I'd been led to believe, so I'm in fucking agony. But other than that, it's... Mate, it just goes from bad to worse, doesn't it? Yeah, but other than that, it's all good news. Here I am, the toy that's always in reception for you, Alan. Simon.

I normally say no at this point, but I am actually going to take the opportunity to shamelessly plug um my my club night um yeah so as as I've mentioned a few times um and it's kind of relevant to this era that we're talking about today um I run a club night in Brighton called Spellbound which is an alternative 80s night and we've we've got a couple of themed nights coming up that I wanted to flag up um one of them is our halloween party uh which is on saturday 27th of october and that's basically your alternative 80s stuff goth post-punk new wave scar all that you know all that good stuff plus typical kind of halloween anthems and dress up stupidity but the one that's a bit more relevant um to chart music actually is the one i'm doing after that in november saturday 17th november um because november um 2018 i don't know if you know is the um 40th anniversary of the launch of

smash hits magazine oh which is very close to our hearts i'm sure indeed so we're having a smash hit special which is basically spellbound goes pop, I'm sure. So we're having a smash hit special, which is basically Spellbound Goes Pop. So instead of all the kind of alternative nonsense, it's going to be more kind of, you know, sharp, clever, witty, 80s pop. So it's all kind of ABC, squitty-plitty, haircut 100, altered images, all that good stuff.

So yeah. Pricey plays pop. Absolutely. So I'm hoping that a few of the pop-crazed youngsters in the Brighton Sussex area might want to check that out and you can get tickets at Comedia.co.uk

forward slash Brighton there we go end of commercial break nicely plugged well before we take one more step towards the monolith that is the latest episode of Top of the Pops that we're going to get our chatty little hands on we're going to stop for a moment

and give thanks to the latest bunch of people who have given child support to the massive shitting baby that is chart music those people are Celia Forbes Albie Bran, Aaron Wright Jared Driscoll

David Shaw Charles McLean, Finlay Napier, Bruce Bowie. I hope it's Bowie and not Bower. If it's Bowie, it should be Bower. So sorry about that, mate. That's how it's going down. Mike the Sonic Assassin, Avion Bedford, Ben Collins, Gary McKenzie, Andy Barrett and Steve Gibson. Thanks to all those very special people that now are in our very special gang. And if you'd like to join them and chuck a bit of money our way, all you've got to do is let them little fingers type out www.patreon.com slash chartmusic. And if you are part of our Patreon gang, you are voting on the top 10 that is causing a commotion, if you will, amongst the pop-crazed youngsters. And I think it's time for the latest rundown.

Hit the music. Down two places to number 10, the Hadley Fist. New entry at number 9, the Fozzie Bear Motherfucker Straight in at number 8 It's Denim Egg Down three places, number 7 It's Seven Days Jankers Last week's number 3 This week's number 6

It's B.A. Contison Stuck at number 5 Here comes Jizzin Straight in at number 4 It's B. Travis Bickle. This week's highest new entry at number three, Fun Loving Cannibals. Stuck in the number two slot, David Van Day's Public Enemy. Which means, still at number one, it's Bubba Dog. Yes, get in my son.

You know, Bubba Dog's going nowhere, man. Everything I do, I do it for him. Bummer Dog is all around. I was going to mention, I was actually at Spellbound a couple of weeks ago, and one of the donors to our Patreon did come up to me, and of course, you know, just wanted to say bummer dog. But they mentioned that they donated. I'm thinking maybe this is how I should monetize it from now on.

If someone wants to approach me and say bummer dog at me, you just can't, you can't, you've got to pay first. You've got to actually, you know, I want some kind of evidence. I want some kind of screenshot of the transaction before I'll even listen to you bummer dogging me. Funny you should say that, Simon, about proof of purchase and everything, because we are in talks with people at the minute, well, I'm

in talks with people at the minute, about getting some merchandise sorted out. Oh, nice. Yeah, yeah, get some t-shirts going just in time for winter. But yeah, sit tight, Pop Crazy Youngsters, there are going to be bonus tiers coming very soon. So, going through the top ten, sit tight, Pop Crazy youngsters. There are going to be bonus tears coming very soon. So going through the top ten, Dave Lee, Travis Bickle.

What kind of music are they playing, Taylor? What do you think? Coldwave. Yeah? Yeah. Fozzie Bear Motherfucker. What kind of music do they play? They sound a bit similar to Bummer Dog. You know, we've already established that Bummer Dogs are kind of an electronic blues band

from the turn of the 60s, 70s. Yeah. The 60s, if you will. Yeah, Fuzzy Bear, Motherfucker. I can hear a bit of Zappa in there. You know, it's their dream to be on straight records. This episode, Pop Crazy Youngsters, takes us all the way back to August 11th, 1983

and was brought to mind because of the recent heatwave that we've had and has long disappeared. But 83 was the last proper hot summer, wasn't it? Apparently so, but you know what? I don't really remember it like that. They all just sort of blur into one for me, the 80s summers. Yeah? Yeah.

Do you remember it being really hot? Yeah. Yeah, it was fucking roasting, man. I mean, one thing I... Well, there's many things I remember about this period in my life, but one of them was deciding that I was going to get a suntan for the first time. For those of you who've not seen what I look like, I am.

I am the palest motherfucker in the whole world. I was actually going off on a big tangent here, but I was in Dubai for a few weeks doing some work. And a family from Pakistan came up to me and started talking. And they wanted photographs of me with all the family and everything and they were really nice people and everything and then right at the end I said to him look I just want to know why why are you taking photographs of me and one of them just laughed and said well look we can't deny you are the whitest person we've ever met in our lives this makes me feel a bit less less bad about my my mum who on a holiday

in america once went up to um a native american guy who was minding his own business in a diner and uh and insisted on taking a photo of him uh just because she'd never seen one before and when she told me that story i yeah when she told me that story i was just mortified it seems that it's it's thing, really, to do that. Was that a... She'd never seen a Native American or a non-white Celtic? Oh, no, she'd... She'd never seen a Native American before, and...

Oh, fair dues. Yeah, I was embarrassed on her behalf, even though she had no embarrassment whatsoever. So, anyway, I was dead pale her behalf, even though she had no embarrassment whatsoever. So anyway, I was dead pale and I thought, right, this is a, this is a summer.

I'd do something about it. I think, I think club Tropicana might have had a hand in, in my decision. So, obviously, you like the look of them on the sleeve there, all oiled up and lying on their sun loungers,

George and Andrew. Yeah. You know, I could have a bit, I could, I could go for a bit of that i think so um i couldn't go um to spain or anywhere like that but i could go on the bus to bulwark lido which was uh the estate next next to us and had this old 30s outdoor swimming pool

and it was essentially every summer uh that opened the Lido up and all the locals would make essentially council estate broth. And I thought, no, I'm going to do a bit of suntanning and kind of like passed out. And I got such bad, such extreme sunburn from from one uh that my mom had to spend i think it was like three quarters of a week's wage to buy something that would put the salt back into my body and uh my skin was peeling so badly that my sister uh used to give me 50p so she could sit on my back and pull the skin off it was absolutely a a3 sized sheets of skin coming off there's never any point in me even trying because i'm freckly right so all that happens is at best the freckles join up a little bit but that's as good as it gets but music wise i like to see i i kind of

see 1983 as as the last really truly diverse year of pop music. I remember being at school and I remember seeing skinheads. There were still mods. There were a load of grebs. There were a load of futurists. There were a load of lads in funky belts. There were loads of kind of like reggae, rasta stuff going on. The electro stuff was coming through.

It was just such a proper pick and mix music of 1983, wasn't it? And I think it's going to be borne out in this episode. Yeah, well, that's the positive way of looking at it. I was just thinking, I don't really have many memories of 83, personally. It's a bit of a blank year for me. It's almost a missing well invent some yeah well see i don't really remember my school class or anything i did whereas 82 and 84 are pretty clear and detailed in my memory but i was thinking that's sort of appropriate

for a year which uh yeah didn't really have much of an identity of its own it was there's a sort of transition happening here from like the old new pop to the new new pop um which is a bit less lively and a bit more self-important and i suspect the rediscovery of cocaine had as much to do with that as anything else but um there's plenty of good stuff around but yeah you do get the you do get the sense of a a definite moment in musical history just uh just dissolving um and suddenly yeah just anything can happen and that can be good it can also be pretty bad yeah i'd agree um do you know what recently i i was looking through um the smash hits front covers of uh 1983 funnily enough because i was putting together a montage video montage for

for my club night and um i was looking at that um amazing uh blog um like punk never happened that brian mccloskey runs hey brian um and yeah it really struck me looking at the smash hits covers of 83 that the new pop really was throwing any old shit at us by this point because on the front cover you had like one hit or no hit wonders like

Roman Holiday Jimmy the Hoover, Matt Fretton even Tracy with an exclamation mark was on the cover twice I mean, with an exclamation mark, was on the cover twice. I mean, bless her, I like her, but, you know, on the cover twice in a year. So, yeah, there was a feeling that, you know, maybe all the great bands to come out of the new romantic era

and the kind of subsequent new pop thing were on a bit of a hiatus. They were sort of, you know figuring out what their second album was going to be which is usually kind of some kind of big tough hollow cocainey thing that had heavier percussion and louder guitars than the than the one that actually people liked um and uh in the meantime you know american pop was starting to make itself felt a bit more. It was a big year for Michael Jackson. Only Culture Club really were a sort of huge new British thing and were really peaking in that year.

So, yeah, it was a sort of sense of people looking around thinking, well, where are we going? What's next? What's coming? The Aventus is over at last, well and truly. I mean, that stuff's mostly all gone by 82, those traces of the old decade. But by 83, everything is... It's as if the Aventis never existed, isn't it, by this point? It's almost like that.

But now everything is 100%. 80 is for better or for worse. And you're starting to see a bit of the positive and the negative changes in british culture in the 80s already here like on the one hand it was this sort of dark period where deep thought and humility and empathy were starting to be drained from popular culture but on the other hand it was also the period period where spaghetti and salmon were no longer things that only came in tins. Targets of bigotry suddenly found they had a few more friends than was the case in the swinging 70s.

To some extent, this is all illustrated or at least suggested here, sort of, in one way or another. Radio 1 News So, in the news this week, Ku Stark leaves the country after it's revealed that she's been knocking off Prince Andrew. The USSR admit that one of their nuclear submarines sank with a loss of 90 lives in May. An American tourist in Londonderry is fined 100 quid for joining in on a riot and lobbing bricks at the police. Elizabeth Taylor announces that she's getting married for the eighth time. John Miller Kratocz-Vilova of Czechoslovakia and Carl Lewis break world records in the World Athletics Championship in Helsinki. But the big news this week is that the Funboy 3, the beat and tight fit have all split up.

Oh, my God, boys, the Aventis are dead. The Funboy 3 split up already. Jesus. Yeah, they didn't barely Barely been around, yeah. I know. On the cover of The Enemy this week, Test Department. On the cover of Smash, it's Duran Duran. The number one LP in the UK is the very best of The Beach Boys,

with 18 Greatest Hits by Michael Jackson at number two and Punch the Clock by Elvis Costello at number three. Over in America the number one single is Every Breath You Take by The Police and the number one LP is Synchronicity by The Police. So me boys what were we doing in August of 1983? Well we've done 1983 before haven't we? I certainly have but anyway you know recap i was 15 uh living in barry about to start the fifth form at barry boys comp and this was my time of marker pen graffiti and molotov cocktails um which we've discussed previously um absolutely skint um single parent family

uh no telephone no car no pocket money really um but it didn't really matter because there was this one park bench where if i went out i knew my mates were going to be there or thereabouts a bunch of ne'er-do-wells and hoodlums mainly um in terms of youth culture i was still dressed in like a sort of two-tone rude boy but two-tone itself had fizzled out so um in terms of what i was listening to i moved on to bands like dexys culture club big country and drumroll the style council um but i was in this kind of sartorial no man's land um short hair still um silk flying jacket um red fred perry stretch jeans canvas basketball boots and it wouldn't be till the following year that i started going full-on style council soul boy i mainly in my mind it's weird um sometimes you associate years with colors i associate 1983 And it wouldn't be till the following year that I started going full on Style Council Soul Boy.

I mainly, in my mind, it's weird. Sometimes you associate years with colours. I associate 1983 with the colour red. Partly because of that red Fred Perry. And partly because I was still pretty obsessed with Liverpool Football Club. And the red of my bad skin as well. It was a red year. You started your periods.

Yeah, I started my periods. And yeah, I was crying red tears after the Tories had won the election. Well, I was just about to start my fifth year and final year at secondary school and I really wasn't looking forward to going back to school because the previous end of term, I got debagged on the school field. Not by a dog? Not by a dog, no. By about 20 youths. And I had my pants thrown to each other above my head. And yeah, it was a fucking terrifying experience.

But the worst thing about it was I ended up obtaining the nickname Maggot Man. It was cold. I was scared. Yeah, but who went on to be a male stripper, them or you? Ask yourself that. Exactly, yeah. But anyway, yeah, so really not looking forward to going back to school. was cold i was scared yeah but who went on to be a male stripper them or you ask yourself exactly yeah but anyway yeah so we're really not looking forward to going back to school um but also absolutely dreading leaving school and having to face the reality of thatcher's britain so yeah this was like the last throw of the dice for my childhood i think me and my mates we'd spend a lot

of time pulling moonies at buses on a big hill on our estate, talking to girls but only talking to girls just general fucking about really music wise completely full on Style Council fan, massively excited this month because they've got a new EP

out, never mind a single just basically trying to be Paul Weller and failing dismally on all fronts i mean i i tried to gel my hair back like he does in the in the long hot summer video but i was using market hair gel instead of bryl cream so uh it would kind of like uncurl itself like a crusty wank tissue uh after an hour or so uh but also the other thing was i really wanted to drink cappuccino didn't exactly know what it was and was too scared to ask couldn't find anywhere that that made it or sold it in town but i came to the conclusion that cappuccino must be a i drank coffee and tea a mixture of both and uh i fucking hated it felt sick

uh but no man that was my commitment to the to to modernism there's me thinking that um hayley the tea lady of the call center on bbc3 and invented uh to coffee um. But there was... I call it cappuccino, Simon. A mutual friend of ours, mine and Taylor's anyway, Andrew Muller, Australian chap, music journalist, tells a story of the first time he went to Wales. And this would have been,

I guess the early 90s probably. And he went somewhere in the far west of Wales into a cafe that had just started selling cappuccino. It's like new cappuccino written in the windows. And he went in and ordered one, and what they did was they poured him a little cup of normal coffee, then they got out a tin of squirty cream and squirted some of the coffee on top. And he was absolutely stunned you know i forgot that story well then sprinkled on a bit of

chocolate vermicelli so what else was on telly this day well bbc one kicks off with breakfast time then captain caveman whirlybirds jackanora The Wombles and Why Don't You before checking into the third test with New Zealand then it's news afternoon followed by Bagpuss, Back to the Cricket then Play School Hyde, John Craven's News Round

the final of We Are the Champions the evening news regional news in your area Tom and Jerry and then coverage from the first World Athletics Championships in Helsinki. BBC Two kicks off with the Open University in Playschool, then shuts down for five hours before picking up the rest of the cricket, then Alan Titchmarsh visits the Castle of May on the Penland Thrift in Nationwide's Great Gardens,

then the history programme Distant Guns about the Foreign Legion. David Yip and Derek Martin of the Chinese Detective give us a guided tour of the East End in 655. And they've just started Wheels of Fire, a documentary series about modern India. ITV begins with Good Morning Britain, Sesame Street, Hop Along Cassidy, Mick Robinson in free time, Hegarty Haggarty, Get Up and Go, The Sullivans,

The News at One, Emmerdale Farm, A Plus Revisited, a repeat of the Jimmy Jewel sitcom Funny Man, then Shine on Harvey Moon, Hegarty Haggarty again, On Safari, the 60s American sitcom, That Girl,

The News at 5.45, Crossroads, Carry On Laughing, and then nearly through with the song and sketch show, P.S. It's Paul Squires. What the fuck is Hegarty Haggarty? Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Paul Squire.

Oh, shit. He's another one of these sort of Mary Hopkins, Chris Eubank, Stephen Hawking type people who, Wendy Richard, who... S. Dodgers. Yeah, spent his whole life having S tagged onto his tail. Let me check. I put a tenner on it.

Shit, you're right. I put a tenner on it. Shit, you're right. I put a tenner on it. Yeah, you're right. Yeah, P.S. it's Paul Squire. That kind of aggressive playground standoff. Put it there, go on, put it there, put it there. Yes. Ten quid.

Channel 4 starts at half five with Car 54, where are you? Bewitched, the good food show, and is now halfway through Channel 4 News. But meanwhile, what is Hegarty Haggarty, please? Oh, it was a load of storytelling. It was some kind of... Oh, Jackanory. It was some kind of, yeah, storybook thing, yeah.

A shit ITV version of Jackanory, yeah. Yeah, George Cole was the narrator. Here comes Jizzum. I do realise we are tramping on the memories of certain regional pop creations. Sorry, guys. I'm sure it was great. And, you know, I always wonder what other things were, because I used to look at Gus Honeyburn.

I used to... You know, you look in the TV listings and you see, like, Westwood or TSW, Gus Honeyburn was on. And I got it into my head for years and years and years. They must be an American crime series. And Gus Honeyburn was like this black detective who was really cool. And what was it?

What was it really? It was a fucking rabbit who used to do an equal amount of bounces to kids' ages. In the TV listings that we used to get, there were sort of four or five hours every day where it would just say as london and i thought there was a program called as london and i wonder what the fuck is that and it's it's taking up so much time must be amazing yeah puffins place as well that was the other one yeah what with the with a with the eye in bracket yes that's right and it. And it was Gus Honeybum with a puff in. Yeah, and Watu Watu.

Oh, what was that? I don't know, I never saw it. It was only on in Channel or Border or somewhere like that. In Wales, we had Hegarty Haggarty, but it was all spelt with Ws and Ys. All right, then, Pop Craze youngsters, you know what happens now. It's time to shove the fist right up the arse of the summer of 1983.

Don't forget, we may coat down your favourite band or artist, but we never forget, they've been on top of the Pops as of the early 80s, it's a two-host affair. Your first host for this evening is Richard Skinner. He's currently on Radio 1 presenting the documentary show Talk About right this very moment as Top of the Pops goes out and in this episode he's gone off to Mallorca on a package holiday

to watch the youth try to cop off with as many other people as possible. It's going to be a bit of a handicap having Richard Skinner standing about watching you. Yeah, especially as okay, in this episode Richard Skinner standing about watching it. Yeah, especially as... Okay, in this episode, Richard Skinner is 31.

Yes, he is. And his hair is greyer than mine is now. Yeah. He must have seen an awful lot of ghosts. He must have seen... Yeah. He's... Yeah. And an awful lot of wrongness.

Well, you know, him in Mallorca, it doesn't matter what he's wearing in Mallor the kids are just going to be going Feds 5-0 police aren't they and going grey for him it isn't a calamity of genetics but it's like a matter of principle his personality is the colour

of a skinned aubergine it's the colour of the sky over motherwell it's the color of a blocked drain yeah he's fish skin yeah the utility man of top of the pops isn't he rich yeah i mean it's hard to imagine there was ever even the faintest whiff of youth about him really but yeah it's really noticeable on this he looks like someone's tipped a bag of flour over his head and he's not losing any hair at all so all he needs is a

bit of just for men and he's a trendy young Radio 1 DJ I think this would be the point when I realised that the Top of the Pops presenters were a bit older than they could have been. You know, they really start to show their age

by the early 80s. Pops moved on. Top of the Pops presenters haven't that much. And you know how in the 70s the Top of the Pops presenters could pass themselves off as being a kind of swinging rock and roll kind of guy about town who just happened

to be dropping in and presenting a radio show presenting a TV show Skinner is totally the company man isn't he? I mean he's even wearing a white TOTP t-shirt here, it's like he's Mr. Yes he is Yes

he's got a white Top of the Pops t-shirt with the red Top of the Pops logo and for the first time the BBC has started flogging Top of the Pops merchandise an advert in recent episodes of Smash Hits round about

this time has a photo of two young sexy models demonstrating the t-shirts and the sweatshirts can you can you guess who they are or do you know pepsi and shirley wearing a t-shirt with a pair of bobby ball braces over them peter powell oh geez what was a little little dimpled smile he looks a bit hard actually oh wow it looks like you've come with the with the braces because they're quite high waist trousers yeah he's got this look on his face as if you've st with the bracers because they're quite high waist trousers. He's got this look on his face as if you've strolled onto his manor in the 1930s and he's not having it.

He looks like he's just about to say, oi, oi. But next to him in a Top of the Pops sweatshirt with a tasteful little Top of the Pops logo on the tit. Who else but Simon Bates? Oh, Jesusesus yeah first choice isn't it yeah to sell to teenagers yes the headline take the shirts off their backs television's longest running pop show is now well past its 1000th edition now for the first time you can buy the tops you have seen on the programme and which are a smash hit with all the DJs. These BBC t-shirts and sweatshirts are obtainable only by filling out the coupon below. Do you want to take a guess how much a sweatshirt would cost you,

including postage and packaging, in 1983? £9.99. Oh, £8.50. Not far. T-shirts? £4.99. £3.50. All right, nice.

Fucking hell, a bargain. What a shame they didn't do a range of BBC show T-shirts, like, I don't know, The Money Programme or On The Move. I think they did The Money Programme Baseball Cats. Yes. And briefs with the epilogue written on it. Yes.

Just a picture of the girl from the test card and that weird toy. Probably the wrongest merchandise you can imagine the other host this evening is Tommy Vance he's currently hosting the Friday Rock Show but he's also doubling

up as the voice of the all important Top 40 Rundown on Sunday afternoons but oh dear he's copping a bit of stick from Smash Hits readers as a letter in a recent issue points out, while listening to the Top 40 a couple of Sundays ago, I heard Tommy Vance play the wrong side of wannabe starting something by Michael Jackson

and was annoyed to say the least. But this week he excelled himself. After playing the wrong side of confusion by the truth he said that elton john had gone down from nine to six and called david bowie's record china doll all i can say is bring back tony blackburn harsh harsh tv on the radio off the radio and on the tv, and on the TV, innit? Yes. He was, right, so Tommy Vance was 43 at this time, right? Yes, he was. Yeah, so we've got a combined age of 74 up on that balcony right now.

So he's got 12 years on Skinner, but as a viewer, you pretty much put them in the same age bracket, because, you know, Skinner was so old. I quite like Tommy Vance for one one main reason which is that he once said that the greatest moment of his life was going on stage at donnington and the entire crowd chanting tommy is a wanker um i thought i thought that spoke well of him and of course he's he's incredibly good value in brass eye we've got to talk about that oh yes of course he's been pranked into

filming um an orientation video for new prisoners so he's doing his tough guy cockney voice going well they got you then they gone and banged you up good and proper yes and you've gone done it again i can't believe it you little ponce you're gonna do it again incha and then there's all that blatantly made up slang like uh gaza is a gas coin used as currency to buy cigarettes and Portillo means look out behind you. And my favourite bit is where he goes, I'd like to take your bad half outside and do an extremely physical discourtesy

and then buy your good half a pint of foaming nut brown ale. He's actually amazing in it. Whether he knew he was being pranked or not, he's just such good value. He really commits to it. I quite like him for that yeah everyone likes tommy vance don't they well yeah taylor yeah the trouble with tommy vance here is that he's turned up in a sweater that looks like a romanian flag that's been left out in the rain yes and he seems kind of restricted compared to his previous appearances, right? There's no sense of him being a monster of rock. No.

He is just a dark brown voice here. They might as well have got Michael Jayston or Tom Baker or Patrick Allen doing this, you know, one of the old voiceover reliance. In fact, they should have got Michael Jason to reprise his bravura performance from the St Ivor Gold Edward.

Can you imagine how brilliant that would have been? That's the new one by David Grant and it sounds smashing. He's wearing this sweater that my nan would have said it looks jazzy or maybe snazzy something ending in azi yeah um it looks so he looks like he's been doused in three different cans of colored paint it's the sort of thing giles brandreth would wear on telly to be oh and then also right he's wearing a pair of white uh white and blue adidas trainers i'm a

stickler for saying adidas because it's good enough for Run DMC. It's good enough for me. The exact style of which 20 minutes on Google could not help me to identify. But either way, they look a bit young for him, if you know what I mean. But I quite like him here. He's gamely giving it his stentorian voice of authority thing, even though he's totally a fish out of water. And there's only one masculine rock record for him to even enjoy on the show.

Yeah. I mean, we've done 31 of these episodes now, and we still haven't touched upon the booming jumper technology in the 80s. Really. And it's about time. I mean, we're just a year or so removed from the the the mass ski jumpers which were you know for the time was were you know extremely um cutting edge well didn't now didn't breakfast tv launching this year and uh um bbc's

one uh whatever it was called uh there was a craze among... Breakfast Time. Yeah, Breakfast Time. There was a craze among the presenters of Breakfast Time, like Russell Grant, and that guy did the weather Francis something, for wearing very pixelated... I was going to say Francis Bacon there.

For wearing very pixelated-looking machine-knitted jumpers. So, yeah, it's all part of that. Yeah, I mean, the machine technology had just come on in le all part of that I mean the machine technology had just come on in leaps and bounds my mate round about this time my best mate his mam would order him jumpers just like the one Tommy Vance is wearing

out of Case Catalogue or something like that and he must have had a wardrobe full of them I used to take the piss righteously out of him for not being a stylist like me. But, you know, I look back now and it's like ten years ago, if he still had those jumpers

he would be the fucking coolest hipster daddy-o in town. In Nottingham? Yeah, well, in Nottingham, yeah. Yeah. Well, in Nottingham, yeah. Hi, welcome to another exciting Top of the Pops and World Show we've got for you tonight. We certainly have.

Now, in America, Debbie Grant's stop and go is zooming up the charts. Over here, he's just outside the top 30 with this record, Watching You, Watching Me and Watch Him Dance. CHEERING AND APPLAUSE As the cataclysmic explosion of Yellow Pearl fades into the distance, we're treated to the sight of Richard Skinner and Tommy Vance surrounded by the kids did you notice one of them uh draping herself over Skinner she's got looks like she's got two hairdos she's got like a a sand from the fat slags wedge kind of thing going on but it looks like she's put a blonde

wig on the top of it there's a really overexcited bloke right behind her who's jumping up and down. And at one point she does this absolute grimace as if he's, I don't know, doesn't bear thinking about. It's a weird audience in this one. It's the usual sort of... Intest. Like some zoo members stirred into the general public. And you can usually tell which is which there's a sort of burly bearded bloke in the audience who dances like theresa may yes it looks like an olympic rower

but not very uh not very at one with his own physicality yeah you know what i was thinking about this crowd al when you were saying saying that 83 was the last gasp of there being lots of youth tribes and stuff like that. Because I don't think this audience reflects that. I think this audience is one step further on where everything's kind of mashed in together and everyone dresses in a way that you probably have to call eclectic or something horrible like that.

You know, there's lots of... A melange. Yeah, there's lots of... A melange. Yeah, there's lots of rah-rah skirts, lots of headbands and bandanas. Yeah, it's a lot of headbands. You couldn't look at anybody and say, oh, they're a Ted or they're a Mod or they're a New Romantic or anything like that.

No. You just look at them and go, they're a twat. Yeah, they are 1983 people. So eventually Vance instructs us to observe the topsy-chory and wonderment of the first act, David Grant with Watching You, Watching Me. Born in Hackney in 1956, David Grant was a former journalist at the East London and Essex Guardian and copywriter at the Island Records press office who came to prominence as a singer in the band Lynx

who had four chart hits in the early 80s and were covered in chart music number eight. After the band split up in early 1983, Grant lost two stones, put in some contact lenses, straightened his hair, got some spats especially made for him and underwent a severe makeover, emerging as a solo artist. In an interview with Smash Hits in March of this year, he claimed I just got desperate for a change.

You know the way you get some time. A lot of things have happened to me in my life. I've got married and learned how to do the garden. And hopefully the way I look now reflects this. No, I don't think I look like Jeffrey Daniel. This is his second solo single, the follow-up to Stop and Go, which got to number 19 in June of this year. And it's gone up six places from number 40 to number 34.

Well, chaps, I don't know how old David Grant is, but he's a bit too young to have a midlife crisis. But this is clearly what it looks like, isn't it? I don't know what he's on about with that thing about his look reflecting the changes he's been through, including learning how to do the garden. Because he may not look like Geoffrey Daniel out of Shalimar. He doesn't look like Percy Thrower either, does he?

No, he doesn't. Also, he's wearing all white. Yeah, this is not what anybody would wear to do the garden certainly not spats that spats are probably the worst thing to wear for gardening i think yeah knee-high spats as well yeah i like them that they're kind of those scottish pipers ones aren't they they go right up i think i think they're kind of fly gotta be honest uh i'd wear them um but yeah this image change he's gone through

I guess in Lynx he was soul boy at the office in fact you know straight from the East London and Essex Guardian from the day job

as a solo artist he's more kind of soul boy at the gymnasium slash nightclub and on the downside yeah I mean I do like the spats

but there is that mushroom head look caused by that toweling headband. That's not a good look. It wasn't a good look for Brighton Hove Albion Steve Foster in that USFA Cup final. No, certainly not. And it's not a good look for David Grant here.

His hair looks like Frank Spencer's beret because that headband sort of bisects his hair and creates an unfortunate ridge. And the top bit sort of droops over the sides a bit. So it's not good. But, you know, in a way, fair play to him for dancing in knee-high spats. You know what I mean? And for being a heterosexual black man,

perfectly happy to be this gay as part of yeah i don't know if he realizes quite how gay he looks but no he does it and fair play to him it's just a shame that this is all he does and this is all he's got yeah i mean tommy vance is very keen to draw our attention to the dancing ability of david grubb but there's not much of it there is there no he's not great i don't agree i i think he can dance um i think he's got some Grant, but there's not much of it there, is there? No, he's not great. I don't agree. I think he can dance. I think he's got some moves.

I mean, there's a knee slide, there's a star jump, there's that kind of semi-moonwalk thing. And the audience look in awe of him like they've never seen such Terpsichorean wonders. There's a girl at the front who's clapping so hard that her leather cap falls down in front of her face. We'll see her later, by the way. It's all a bit Mad Lizzy to me.

Obviously, we've seen Jeffrey Daniel in Top of the Pops, and that's another landmark moment that you can put up there with the episode that we covered in the last chart music. But what we're getting here is essentially shaking Shalimar, isn't it? I suppose. Well, what it is, he can do the steps when you see him doing his routine that he's learned he can do it but in between that when he's kind of moving from podium to podium and just trying to freestyle a few moves um he looks like a drowning man who

doesn't yet realize he's been fished out of the sea it's just it seems to have no fluidity at all no sort of grace in his natural movements when he's not following the routine that sounds a bit like um i saw britney spears a few weeks ago at brighton pride and um she you know she's very choreographed she's got got all these moves. But in between the moves, she stomps about as if she's got various marks on the stage that she has to get to. And it's as if she's being shouted at by a fitness instructor. Like, go there, go there. And she just kind of stomps about.

Like in the Generation game. Pretty much, yeah, yeah. Also, he's a bit upstaged because zoo are in full effect yeah you know i was watching downtown julie brown dance you know she's pretty good and last you know last time we saw downtown julie brown in a zoo state um she was dressed up in a an outfit that looked like a victorian pedophile had tried to build a sex doll out of toffee wrappers. And I thought it looked great, whatever that says about me. But it's a year on,

and this time she's done up sort of like Miami Vice ahead of time. And it's, along with the rest of Zoo, she's doing that dancing that belongs in a fitness class, not a pop music show. It's athletic, but ugly. It looks like if you were wearing two hats and they both caught fire at the same time and you had to throw them both on the ground and stamp them out alternately, but they landed inconveniently far apart.

Yeah, it's very pineapple dance studio, isn't it? but they landed inconveniently far apart. Yeah, it's very pineapple dance studio, isn't it? Very much so, yeah. It's like she ought to be wearing a crop top that says Agnes B on it. But the thing is, is that during the middle eight, when David's going into one of his move-busting routines, the camera cuts from him to Julie Brown, so the floor manager's already come to a decision about Mr Grant I feel

well I wanted to talk about the sort of floor management and the direction of this because it's interesting that David Grant runs through the crowd and onto the stage it's like an evangelical preacher or like Leslie Crowther in The Price is Right or the Pink Windmill Kids

right yeah because they actually start under the balcony, doesn't it? He's like a troll under Tommy Vance's bridge. Yeah, it's like he's crashing the party in a way. So we're in that phase of Top of the Pops where there's no attempt to pretend that it's a live performance for solo singers, certainly. Because there are no musicians in sight here. There's just loads of balloons, so many balloons. Oh, certainly. Because there are no musicians in sight here. There's just loads of balloons.

So many balloons. Oh, yes. While the singer hops around from podium to podium. And we'll see that later on in the show as well. Very ungainly, I felt. I mean, one thing about the balloons was he holds one halfway through. And we get to see that they're all branded with the Top of the Pops logo, which was a nice touch.

Yeah, yeah. Should have made some condoms to go with the Top of the Pops logo, which was a nice touch. Yeah, yeah. Should have made some condoms to go with the T-shirts and sweatshirts. Mind you, it's only 1983, isn't it? Yeah, condoms weren't needed yet. We didn't know about all that stuff, yeah. No, crisp bags did us. But the constructed reality of Top of the Pops, where you're meant to be able to look at it

and at least kid yourself that there's some kind of live performance happening that's kind of been put to one side hasn't it because solo singers are just sort of dropped into this party universe where it's quite blatant that they're just

lip syncing the jumping from podium to podium it it was very awkward for him. And you can actually see it on his face as he prepares to jump from one to the other. He's not happy. And he wouldn't be because all the zoo wankers are in the way and there's balloons and all that kind of stuff. I mean, I can't imagine Cole Lewis going through the same visual obstacles

as David Grant did here. No, and it would have been one of the greatest moments in Top of the Pops history if he'd missed. Yes. Like, you know, done a Jimmy Percy. Or like that weatherman on This Morning, that now disgraced guy who fell in the Albert Dock in Liverpool. I think the really awkward thing at the end,

he does one last leap from podium to podium and then drops on his knees and and i i do believe he's trying to do a sex but he actually the facial expression is of a sheep that's being tossed off by simon bates into a test tube it's really yeah it's not it's not a good look does anyone else remember this song by the way because i know that every episode there's at least one song like this. I've got no... I mean, this, I've got no recall of it, nor will I have.

If you ask me again tomorrow, it's very forgettable. Yeah, I remember this very well. It was the... Do you? One of the very few funk songs inspired by Jeremy Beadle and Game for a Laugh, isn't it? Fuck's sake. Yeah, I was thinking that.

for a laugh isn't it like say yeah i was thinking that the trouble is that um brit funk was sort of deflating the same way that a lot of new pop was and it sort of sounds nice but it's just it was less intriguing and less exciting and a bit short on ideas and i mean really all you can say for this record and this performance is that for 1983 it's nothing if not contemporary you know there's really only one two-year period in history where this makes any sense and people call that dated but i i like it because it's meant to be pop music and time and place is important but But yeah, there's no time or place in which this is an exceptional record or indeed a terrible one. Because, I mean, this might possibly be the most average record of the year, you know.

You can't put it down too much because there's countless records like this which are much worse. But at the same time, there's countless records like this which are much worse but at the same time there's nothing really interesting or unique about it you know the only one of his from roughly this time that was interesting was you know that record mated yeah yeah it's a it's just because it's a totally different sound. So it's like part soul ballad and partly heavily produced adult pop. But I mean, that's a little bit later, I suppose, where the well was dry and a new approach was kind of forced on him.

So the following week, Watching You, Watching Me soared 17 places to number 17 and would eventually spend two weeks at number 10, his biggest solo hit. The follow-up, Love Will Find A Way, got to number 24 in October of this year and was his last top 40 hits as a solo artist. But he'd get to number five when he covered Could It Be I'm falling in love with jackie graham in april of 1985 i've been liking you baby liking me see what i mean about that dancing let's go J.B. Grant watching you, watching me. Now the highest riser in the chart,

the biggest new entry in the chart is this one. It is the Style Council from Opari. This is the Long Hot Summer. Thank you. Fans, flanked by assorted 80s twats, is still impressed by David Grant's dancing and then introduces the video of Long Hot Summer by the Style Council. While the corpse of Jay Aston stares at him

and then when he announces what the song is, she suddenly does this excessively astonished face like uh like a mum pretending that she's never seen the christmas present that her three-year-old daughter has just unwrapped it's a beautiful moment and then introduces long hot summer by the style council we've already covered the Style Council in Chart Music number 22 and this is their third single the follow up to Money Go Round which got to number 11 in June of this year.

It's the lead single from the EP The Style Council A Paris which reflected Paul Weller's new Europhile direction but the video which we see in full here was filmed by the River Cam in a tribute to the 1981 TV series Brideshead Revisited, with Paul and Mick Tolbert pissing about on a punt while drummer Steve White portrays a bongo playing Eurostalker.

It's this week's highest new entry at number 8. And fucking hell, I don't even know where to begin on this so pack a lunch pop craze youngsters we could be some time on this one they are punting on the cam to quote Marillion from the same year I think

in Espadrilles Mick doing all the punting you notice Paul reclining and catching a tan. And yeah, the drummer, Steve White, dressed as a sort of Brett Unshirted beatnik, isn't he? Pestering them with his bongos. At one point, they reenact Edouard Manet's Dégéné Suleb.

But most of the time, it's reminiscent of the film of Another Country or the Merchant Ivory adaptation of E.M. Forster's Maurice or the TV series of Eve ian forster's maurice or the tv series of evelyn war's bride said revisited anything that involves posh people being a bit gay in england um yes usually starring jeremy irons or rupert everett or hugh grant that lot um and and the comments underneath this video on youtube are hilarious. Usually along the lines of, it's a bit gay. And of course, we've got to talk about the fact this isn't even the uncut version.

Al, do you want to talk about that? Oh, fucking hell. So yeah, round about this time, there were rumours that around the school that so-and-so was gay because of some of the said or they'd accidentally grabbed someone's bollocks in rugby or they still liked that band even though there was one bloke in it who was gay.

And, you know, it was my turn. I can't remember how it started, but I know for a fact that I was absolutely terrified of the girls in our school. And one of them just used to tease me like a bastard. And one time in a drama class, she just suddenly leant over to kiss me on the neck and I scraped my chair back about 20 feet. And one time in a drama class, she just suddenly leant over to kiss me on the neck.

And I scraped my chair back about 20 feet. And the best fighter in the school who was sat next to me, he just looked me in the eye and said, Fucking El Needham, now I know you're gay. And that was it. So now the three things that were known about me at school. Number one, I was maggot man. Number two, I might possibly be gay and number three i was the biggest style council fan on the estate so yeah when this video came out i was like

oh fucking no no no no it confirmed everyone's suspicion well yeah pretty much so because there's one scene in the uh well there's a couple of things i mean let's talk about the scene that we we actually see yeah okay in in on the top of the pubs performance um paul weller's kind of like leaning on uh leaning sort of laying back in a punt with uh he's got a kind of like a button down short sleeve shirt that's completely opened up he's got sort of espadrilles and he's wearing cutoffs and everything and um yeah you know fair enough it's a hot day he's got sort of espadrilles and he's wearing cut offs and everything and yeah you know fair enough it's a hot day he's got his ghetto blaster next to him you know

you've got to do all that kind of stuff but he's basically lying there rubbing himself up he is Paul Weller's essentially being provocative at us isn't he you see I was thinking of this song recently because we were in the midst of a long hot summer yes and it seemed that i'd

misremembered the video and so had everyone else um which is you know an interesting phenomenon a case of mass false memory syndrome because yeah you talk to anybody my age we all remember mick talbot stroking paul weller's hair um in the video but when you look on YouTube all that happens is that Weller strokes his own shiny hairless torso in the manner you describe so I started a Facebook thread about this I did a bit of investigation and on further investigation turns out there was a more homoerotic version of the video and it was shown only once by Timmy Mallet on TV. But enough of us saw Yeah, Timmy Mallet. But enough of us saw it

that that stuck in our minds. Yeah, I saw that. And it's as if he's trolling the Jam Lads, isn't it? Yes, totally. This was the highest new entry straight in at number 8 and alright, not exactly the heady days of the Jam straight in at number 1 a year earlier but he

still retained a loyal fan base but they were becoming an increasingly confused fan base by all this yeah yeah um i mean the the earlobe stroking that that i know that happened because every time i ran into my mates the first thing they would do is lie on the ground and pretend to be Paul Weller and Rimbik Tolbert and stroke each other's earlobes in an attempt to wind me up and yeah it kind of worked I have to say

so is this song traumatic for you now? well no because the thing is I heard the song before I saw the video you know I was

my favourite band have got a new single out. You go out and you buy it. And, you know, maybe the first time you hear it is when you play it yourself because it's not even been on the radio yet. And the minute I heard it, I thought, oh, my God, this is the best Paul Weller song ever. I fucking love this song.

It's glorious, isn't it? It's fucking amazing. We will talk about the song in a moment yeah but but then i saw the video it's like oh no what's going on yeah well let me let me take you back here because i already said i don't have many memories from 1983 here's one i do remember i got into the jam sort of just slightly late because of my age so it was about 83 that i started to like him um and then my mate bought the cassette of snap their posthumous greatest hits album uh appropriately titled because it was a double play cassette so the tape was rather thin prone to breaking especially in

the portable cheapo cassette players we all had so the tape got passed around and borrowed by different people and it was like Russian roulette because the kid who owned it was quite hard and if it snapped in your tape player you're going to be in trouble that's like the school guinea pig at my place it was going to die on someone's watch it was just past the parcel

it was really cruel but I was sort of an atypical jam fan at my school in that I wasn't the exact type of person Paul Weller would write songs attacking, which they all were, you know, sort of pointlessly violent and ultra-macho and obliteratively homophobic.

But it so began a long history of playing it both ways because it meant that, because I liked the jam, I was in with those kids, so there was no chance of me being beaten up. So that was useful. But anyway, the jam were over. So what was current for jam fans of our age was the Style Council.

Now, yeah, as you say, one of the most entertaining things about the Style Council was the glee with which they trolled the old jam fans right and again i was out of step with my peers in finding that good and thinking yeah good for him you know um so i remember the first time i saw this video i was at my mate's house after school so it might even have been this very edition of Top of the Pops. So it came on and we said, hooray, it's the Style Council. And this odyssey of awkward homoeroticism commenced.

And I looked over at my mate, the jam fan supreme. And he stroked his ear. fan supreme and and he stroked his ear i think it's fair to say that michael cain in get carter looked more relaxed watching that film with his niece in it and when it was over i remember my mate who later went to prison started to explain to me or more to himself what paul weller was trying to achieve with this video and he said he's taking the piss out of puffeders he's acting all puffy as a piss take to have a go at bummers like joran joran exact words i've never forgotten them right now this interpretation was sort of a bit predictable coming from a kid who swore blind that the lyrics of practically every jam song

were a hymn of hate towards male homosexuals really yeah i remember him assuring me that the words to English Rose were, I will return to my English Rose for no bums will ever tempt me from she. I'm not going to be gay. I'm going to have it off with a woman. And also his reading of David Watts, the Kinks cover, was interesting too, because he insisted that it went, he is so fancy and so gay, even though it plainly didn't go like that. And I only wish that I knew then what I know now. So I could have explained to this lad with moody pictures of Paul Weller all over his bedroom walls for him to stare at every night that yes this was indeed a song about a young gay man but no the tone is not condemnatory

very far from it actually no thinking about it i don't wish i knew that then because if i had said that it'd punch me in the teeth but there you go. But the nice thing, yeah, just like the rest of you, I would imagine, at some point in the long, hot summer that just recently passed me by, I was inspired to hear this song again. So I fired up YouTube, watched the video, and found a beautiful comment underneath which said, Paul Weller was my hero as a kid. No wonder I have turned out to be gay a touching personal testament but the nicest thing by the way about this video aside from the fact

that it's filmed around the university of cambridge so that paul weller could say oh yeah i went to cambridge what did you do at Cambridge? I made a pop video. Reclined shirtless next to a cherry bakewell, which is the best detail in this video. But what's funny is that Merton Mick has got this authentically aesthetic look to him, just naturally. He's got that sort of flossy blonde hair and quite an aesthetic look to his

face and he looks totally comfortable totally natural in the blazer with the pocket square and the white trousers and you know uh whereas paul weller looks like a razor boy still you know so it gives these overtones another twist because they don't look like carefree young lovers. They look like a prison couple. Yes. Especially as Mick has to do all the punting. He gets a bit creative with the handle of the barge pole, doesn't he, for a bit?

Yeah. But he doesn't really bring it off. Not that creative. So to speak. No, no, no. Simon Bates would know how to do that yeah i mean look if anyone was going to turn me gay in 1983 it definitely would have been paul weller rolling about on a picnic blanket but you know to a 15 year old lad on a council estate being gay

didn't look like the wisest career move and and anyone who was must have been fucking rock yeah and you know speaking now as you know as a bisexual who's never had a homosexual relationship you know i look back at that time and i see that yeah i was homophobic but in the proper sense of the word i mean to me homophobia doesn't mean hating gay people or being scared of another man coming on to you it's the fear of another man coming on to you and you actually liking it and realizing that your whole world's going to change just because of you want to lob it up and you know just fretting about what your mates are going to think well they already thought it to be fair yeah i would love to be gay not Not when I was a kid, but now. It looks fucking brilliant.

Alas, it wasn't to be. But the song. What a great record this is. Fucking brilliant. It's a great record. Isn't it the first use of synths on a Weller record? As far as I can remember, it is anyway. I think it is, you know. Which is interesting in itself.

This week, I was absolutely fuming that it only got to number eight. Because you thought it was that good and it deserved it, yeah. Yeah. It's that weird thing, isn't it, when you're a pop fan of this age? You kind of want your favourite bands to go to number one, but you don't want too many people to like what you like. I quite like the fact that Weller was trying his hardest to kind of reset his fan base, because it came at the right time for me.

Because I did quite like the jam, but I wasn't by any means one of those jam lads. And that whole vibe around their fans was really off-putting to me. So when he came back with quite a radically different sound and look and aesthetic um it was great because it allowed me to get in on the ground floor of it if you know what i mean and and and totally commit to it and i did i mean we've mentioned in a previous episode that i got that uh white mac um like he wears on the front of money go round um i got a knockoff version from melandi of carnaby street and one of my mates took great glee in pointing out that it looked like a lab coat. But I also got a pair of black and white tassel, like brogue tassel loafers,

which were amazing. And if I had them now, I would wear them now. But yeah, he had a huge effect on the way I thought and the way I dressed. But this song, I mean, you know, I suppose one thing I was looking to him for was politics and there's none of it on this so in a way it was a bit of a long go and a bit of a lull

I loved it but it almost felt indulgent it's like come on it's all very well making this beautiful record but what are we going to do about Thatcher always allowed to have a to do about Thatcher? Always allowed to have a day off from Thatcher bashing, isn't it?

I guess so. Yeah, and have a nice picnic. Yeah, yeah. I love things like Paris Match or Paris Match on the Café Bleu album, which, again, there's no politics in that. No. But, yeah, my copy of Café Bleu was cassette as well, and the tape was as well-worn as Taylor's copy of Snap, by the sound of it.

Absolutely loved it. I mean, looking back now, the embarrassing thing, the really embarrassing thing, isn't the sort of rolling about, feeling yourself up bit, but Paul Weller dancing. He's not a very good dancer. Well, the thing is, I'm going to cut him some slack here because he's trying to do some Northern Soul moves

on a fucking picnic blanket wearing deck shoes. It's not easy. No, well, it's surrounded by Rammel, you know, Mr Kipling boxers and God knows what else. I think this is probably the best Style Council track because although it's trying with all its might to be what it can never be which is a modern american soul record it only fails in irrelevant ways yeah by which i mean it doesn't sound 100 authentic but it sounds completely beautiful and it's of course it's

got his usual yeah sort of pinched, rat-like, Surrey gutter snipe vocals. I think it might have been David Stubbs who once described listening to Paul Weller sing in soul as like watching a fat man trying to climb over a wall. But here it works brilliantly because it fits the frustration and the repressed anger of the lyrics. And it doesn't sound like this powerful impassioned roar. It sounds like a skinny white bloke sort of drifting in dazed melancholia,

you know, unable to take control. And there's nothing phony about it because the backing track is as good as anything coming out of America at that time, even though it clearly didn't, you know. Yeah. It sounds just as good. I mean, I love all the Star Council singles from this period, really. The only one I'm not so keen on is Money Go Round because it's terse and humorless. money go round because it's terse and humorless and it sort of doesn't have the brains or the wit to pull off those sort of slightly six-formy lyrics and this is the problem they had later i

think with like our favorite shop album had the same sort of thing going on it was this musical eclecticism even more so yeah but it got to the point of just splashing around, you know, doing pale pastiches of different styles that they weren't cut out for. And it all had those sort of half-baked political lyrics that sort of spoil the last jam album, right? So I have a completely different attitude to Simon on this, is that I can take Paul Weller seriously as a teen angst merchant and as a sort of basic kind of social comment writer and as a storyteller um and as a writer of sort of vague essential essentially meaningless motivational lyrics which are redeemed by the spirit of the music right like absolute beginners

which shout to the top yeah yeah but what i can't take him seriously as is a political writer because suddenly he's talking about concrete complicated uh very real things and he can't do them justice because to do that within a pop song you you need to be very, very articulate and very knowledgeable and very in control of how your words and music interact, which are three things that he never was. So you get stuff like Walls Come Tumbling Down, which is brilliant, but genuinely one of the unintentionally funniest pop songs I can think of. Yes, it is. and it's still brilliant. Yeah, I enjoy listening to it, but I just can't take it seriously. I mean, to me, as a lyric, it's barely in advance from Time for Truth, you know, his pro-Tory, anti-Callaghan song.

I knew you were going to bring that song up. Yeah, from when he was 18, which is politically far worse, but artistically not so very far away. But when he took those political feelings and put them in the context of people's lives, in songs like Burning Sky or Man in the Corner Shop, or even come to Milton Keynes, which is a silly song, but a really good one, he was brilliant.

In this sort of gruff, inarticulate way. It sounds like what it is, like a naturally bright but almost totally uneducated British kid, like a product of the English class system and the suburban secondary modern school, creating sublime popular art within the limitations of his own experience and his own vocabulary.

And that's what makes him really beautiful. That dazed melancholia that Taylor refers to there is something that Weller was surprisingly good at and people don't often give him credit for, and he had been for a while. I mean, even if you go back to something like, I don't know, the bitterest pill I ever had to swallow which um was was um a problem for some jam fans that I knew you know he's what's

he doing making this kind of emotional record this kind of you know it's a bit girly and a bit wet but um I mean I loved it he's about girls he must be gay yeah Yeah, yeah. Yes. I remember there was... I only just remember this, actually, when we were talking about it. There was a kid at my school who had a parka. He was a total mod. And on the back of his parka, he had written in the same kind of cursive,

calligraphic font as the record sleeve, the bitterest pill I ever had to swallow in huge letters. And that struck me as a really weird thing to stick on the back of your parka as a mod, know but you must have really liked that song you talk about our favorite shop and everything and the style council did keep the uh the homoerotic stuff up didn't they because on the cover of our favorite shop there is a post there's a postcard of a line drawing done by uh one of the designers or something, which you can only see like Paul Weller standing up

and Mick Tolbert kind of like lying on a bed face down. And on the top left, it's got like a magazine-y kind of font that just says HOMO. Yes, it does. Remember that? I only had it on tape. I missed out on that. And of course for the walls to come tumbling down they made

Mick Tolbert up to look like Uncle Monte about two years before the film came out. Yeah. But surely at that point everyone knew that he was knobbing the backing singer, not the keyboard player. So a bit of the air

was let out of that ambiguity I don't know I'm thinking you see I'm not I'm not sure the style council were ever

consistently as good as the jam in terms of the actual record but consistency wasn't what they were going for so it doesn't really matter you know

and I mean there's things I never liked about them like their stupid name right like when for a start when you think about what he could have called his new band he was like the biggest pop star you know in britain he could have called them anything like they could have been the sex heroes you know what i mean or or egg christ and he went for something as as wazzy as the style counts i mean like it's a style famously being something like sex appeal or authority you know the more you have to tell people you've got it the less they believe you um and you know his response to the understandably

frustrating situation of being in the jam and trying to move into playing soul music when it was just him and a rhythm section that sounded whiter than sam maritz on christmas eve you remember when he got in that daft horn section on the last few jam records it sounded like the fucking muppets because he thought it was gonna turn him into sly and the family style Muppets because he thought it was going to turn him into Sly and the Family Stone really didn't but with the Star Council he still went for that very sort of

suburban white boy sound you know that version of soul music which when deeper and more interesting options were available and I don't like the sort of maddeningly patronising positivity that they used to go in for.

You know, all that, where you get the record on the back, it would say, like, look sharp, be young, join CND, or something like that. And to me, that stuff's just laughable, you know. I think a lot of that was, yeah, Paolo Hewitt, who I think was the cappuccino kid, was he not? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I believe so.

I kind of disagree with you about the horn section, because I'm not saying that they were super funky or anything like that, but they're a bit of a gateway drug for me, because hearing stuff like the Jams version of Move On Up on the double gatefold single of Beat Surrender was the first time I'd heard that song, and it had a real energy to it, and it did sort of take me into real soul music.

Yeah, this is the thing about the Style Council. If you were there in the early 80s when they were happening and you're in your late 40s, early 50s now, you've gone one of two ways. You know, you've either listened to Paul Weller and said, oh, I'll listen to this song, I'll listen to that song

and you've built up a fucking brilliant record collection or you're wearing a Pais scarf in weatherspoons with a fucking haircut that makes you look like ivy tilsley banging on about how um sikhs can don't have to wear helmets when they're on the scooters just moaning about it it's either or you've got you've gone one way or the other yeah yeah because you know i remember i mean mean, my favourite band, Sly and the Family Stone, first time I ever heard them properly was at the Royal Concert Hall in Nottingham in early 1984 because it was being played probably by Gary Crowley

or someone like that as a warm-up for the Style Council gig I was at. And I just went, oh, fucking hell, they're good. If he likes that, then I'm checking it out I'll tell you what though the two sorts of people that you're talking about that grew up listening to Paul Weller the people who went deeper into music and deeper into thinking

versus the sort of the well ends free Tommy people it's I reckon that that split aligns perfectly with the split of who was trolled by the style council and who thought it was fucking brilliant

right I reckon precisely you can you can separate those people along those lines because I always thought the saving grace of the style council just apart from how good a lot of the records were, was exactly what the old Weller fans hated about them,

which was the dry sense of humour. Because the jam had no sense of humour. None whatsoever. There's not a shred of wit or a smile on any of those records. There's the odd ham-fisted attempt in the videos, but that's another matter. So because of that, when Paul Weller started taking the piss, it

really came out of nowhere, and it wrong-footed everything. And it turned out, he did actually have quite a good, dry sense of humour. You can't imagine the jam doing this song, can you? No, well, if they had done, it certainly wouldn't have sounded like this

that's the thing you certainly can't imagine bruce foxton and rick buckler agreeing to this video although it's i mean the video to the bitterest pill is funny funny enough you know where aside from paul weller's masterful acting performance where he gets in a huff with his girlfriend and they're having an argument next to the tennis court. And with this completely blank expression on his face, he bangs his fist down on the table like a sort of a toy rabbit or something.

Just bang, bang. And she gets up. But the other greatest bit is where he's walking down the street peering in through the window and he sees his girlfriend having a romantic evening in with Bruce and Rick like you know the suggestion being

that you know a bit of bit of spit roast action happening later backstage at a From the Jam concert yeah yes yeah yeah ultimately the the the best things about paul weller i would say it all comes down to him being you know a worker not just a authentically working class british songwriter but a worker in the sense that he would really labour over these songs and spend a long time on arrangements and so on.

It was the same pride and vanity that led him to spend so long in front of the mirror. But it was good. And just as that vanity occasionally sent him down some bad roads, like I'm thinking of the bleached white spiky feather cut and silver sharkskin suit combo, you know. Sometimes he would overdo it musically and try things that he couldn't pull off.

And it means that there is always something a little bit airless about his songs with not much spontaneity. But it's also the reason he managed to do so much good stuff because he was prepared to put in all that time and effort you know and make himself a proper songwriter and learn how to do those things

and I think the point in the 90s where he dropped that and let it all hang out and just became weller I think that was the point after which he and let it all hang out, and just became Weller. I think that was the point after which he never did anything interesting again. Anyway, let me just end my tale of gay confusion at the age of 15, so I can get on with the rest of my life.

So anyway, I was pretty sure I wasn't gay, but everyone was saying I was, so I started well fucking hell i might be i don't know but i had a mate called boise williams and his next door neighbors who were called cliff and una not the cliff and una uh they'd have really noisy sex every friday night so the very night after this episode me him and my mate ganjo camped out in his back garden so we're there in the tent and we're waiting for the sex to start and it doesn't and so while we're waiting

me and Boise end up having this massive argument about Wham and the Style Council because I was pissed off that Long Hot Sun Rank got to number one and that people were just thick as fuck and everybody was saying that they were gay when I knew that Wham were gay because they wore hairspray so me Wham were gay because you know they wore

hairspray so me and him were just basically having this massive argument about who was the gayest out of the Style Council and Wham and then Boise said well if you had a party and you played the Style Council in one room and Wham in the other room which room would have the most

fanny in it? He's got a point well exactly just completely fucked my train of thought up but then at the end when the argument was which room would have the most fanny in it. He's got a point. Yeah. Well, exactly. Just completely fucked my train of thought up. But then at the end, when the argument was getting really intense, he just whipped back the sleeping bag to reveal all spunk up his chest. He'd been wanking the entire time. And I mean, the other thing was,

when this happened, he started singing that song off the Maltesers advert for some reason. You know, the one that goes, chocolates, ooh, Maltesers. And then my other mate, he started wanking as well. And I'm like, oh, fucking hell. I just wanted to leave, but I didn't want to step over a wanking lad. So, you know, I kind of like sat there and watched and thought oh fucking hell you know

what i'm not gay at all because men don't owe the math right they look fucking horrible no not interested and you know they wipe themselves down with a creosote rag afterwards and so yeah i thought well i'm not gay then there we go and i was absolutely fucking right about george michael boise if you're listening you owe me a fiver right can we stop talking about style council now please we stopped 10 minutes ago so in conclusion for me uh i thought oh my god God, everyone's going to think I'm gay now, but this song is so good, I don't give a fuck. You know, he could have called the song

I'll Need Him Is A Big Gay Lord, and I'd have still loved it. Or Long Hot Knob, brackets, In I'll Need Him's Arse. Oh dear. I think the only disappointing thing is, from here, if you wanted to alienate the jam fans, he should have done a heavy metal record after this, shouldn't he? Oh God.

So, the following week, Long Hot Summer jumped five places to number three, where it stayed for two weeks. The highest chart placing the band ever reached the follow-up a solid bond in your heart got to number 11 in november of this year according to legend after polydor made disapproving noises about the gayness of the video for long hot summer the band sent the label a demo of their new video which was a compilation of hardcore pornography, asking if that was more to their liking. You see, he has got a sense of humour. In 2014, Paul Weller's son announced in Attitude magazine

that he was bisexual and that it took ages to come out to his dad due to his working-class hero image. Why didn't he see this video? Why didn't he just take his dad out say come on dad let's go out for a boat trip I'm with you baby Yeah! That was the Style Council and you can hear them performing live on my show this Saturday. Performing with us in the Top of the Pop studio today, it's Level 42, The Sun Goes Down! The sun goes down Skinner, on his own Plugs the Style Council's appearance on his Saturday show,

which I still have on a tape somewhere in the spare room, and introduces to The Sun Goes Down, Living It Up by Level 42. Formed in London in 1980 by Mark King and Phil and Roland Gould, all from the Isle of Wight, and Mike Lindup and Wally Badaroo who played synths on M's pop music, Level 42 got their name from the answer to life, the universe and everything in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. After almost immediately signing to an indie label and releasing their debut single Love Meeting Love which got to number 61 in September of 1980. They were picked up by Polydor in 1981 and got to number 38 with Love Games in May of that year. After four singles

on the bounce that just missed out on the top 40 they made the charts again with The Chinese Way which got to number 24 in February of this year. This is the follow follow up to Out of Sight Out of Mind which got to number 41 in April it's the second single from their fourth LP Standing in the Light it was a new entry last week at number 38 and it's gone up five places this week to number 33

now the most striking thing about this from the off is the lad at the front. He's got yellow trousers on and a sweatshirt with Wembley foot tappers on the front. He's a menace. Yeah, what a crap name for a black dance band. Sounds like bloody line dancers. Yeah, it does.

And where are the rest of the Wembley foot tappers? What's gone off? Maybe there was an England friendlyly on that night or something and he just couldn't get on the Metropolitan line. He mugged him off. He's there on his own. Terrible. But anyway, Level 42.

We cut from the Style Council straight to the hands of Level 42's keyboardist, Mike Lindup, don't we? Before Skinner does his intro, which is an interesting editorial decision there. And Mike Lindup's face always used to upset me because he looks too beatific, like he's just heard the good news about Jesus. And Mark King looked like a balding fish. So aesthetically, they're quite unpleasant. These were not my people, basically. White trousers and rolled up shirt sleeves um i didn't like soul boys or at least i didn't like this kind of soul boy

um the kind of lads who um stereotypically customize their cars with furry dice and sun strips with their and their girlfriend's names and who went to soul weekenders at caster and stuff like that basically i didn't and we talked about this before i didn't like people who into contemporary soul instead of vintage soul which on one level makes me a bit of a luddite wanker but i maintain that i had a point when it when contemporary soul music meant level 42 but inevitably I quite like him yeah now and this I quite like this now there are some fucking stone-cold grooves on their records love games that you mentioned seriously right whatever you remember that sounding like go and play it again now love games is amazing play the five minute version hot water as well as a fucking

banger um this song the sun goes down living it up is an interesting period relic i think in that it exemplifies the way in which everything in 80s pop even the most hedonistic and feel-good stuff was living in the ever-present shadow of nuclear war i know because there's that hilarious couplet i saw a soldier standing in a bar look so tired he'd come so far he said i need to love someone before they drop the atom bomb you see these days right these days if you came back from war in that state um they treat you for PTSD. Maybe Help for Heroes would chuck you a few quid. But in those days, your therapy was to go to

a shit nightclub and talk to Mark King. But this is another song partly about not wanting to go to war by people who wouldn't be useful and wouldn't be asked. I don't want to go to war. Don't worry about it. Unless the draft gets really fucking desperate your falklands have been

and gone mate yeah and we it never got so desperate that we called on mark king i mean this is like the road to clark datchley you know i mean musically and spiritually uh i don't know i'd say what though you'd be fucking great at morse code mark kingwood smooth steady hand yeah i'm strong thumb i never liked level 42 but the lazy and thoughtless thing to say about them is that they were bland um but that's not really the right word they're not actually that bland their music is actually quite individual in the sense that it's hard to think of anyone else who sounds exactly like this but i think part of the reason nobody else sounds exactly like this is that it's not that appealing um i mean to me this this record is too slick to have charm but it's too sort of twitchy

and graceless to be slinky it's like a a useless object and pop songs that are useless objects it's fine but they have to be interesting in order to justify their existence and to me that's one thing this is not i don't dislike it it's like my ears just stare at it blankly like the way my eyes would stare blankly at a pigeon in a grey v-neck jumper it's unusual but not thrilling um so i can't i can't really get much out of it apart from a apart from a chuckle at Mark King. I've never got on with this. His much lauded bass playing just makes me long for a thumbscrew. And his singing is a uniquely unenjoyable sound.

He doesn't seem like a bad guy or a complete twat or anything he just seems to do a lot of stuff musically that only someone cut off from the complex beauty of life could really enjoy you know and i know that other bassists in other words yeah i know that doesn't really mean anything as criticism it's just sort of silly rhetoric but it's the only the only way i can express it i can't locate any kind of spiritual link between this and anything worth caring about um yeah that's the worst and the best thing i can say about it well i love this song i have to say i didn't at the time but then um in the 90s my housemate was a huge uh jazz funk fan and massively into mark king and i had a copy of this that i taped of this episode well not this episode but i think it was one a few weeks later when they came back on again uh i had a copy of

it on video and it got played loads simply because I like Top of the Pops and he liked Level 42. And I guess it reminds me of that time. But I also like the song as well. And now it kind of reminds me of 1983. Just feels like a warm weather song. One thing that really pisses me off about this particular performance and it's something that we've not brought up on chart music yet on episodes of this this era how quiet is the fucking music being played in the studio when you can hear a balloon being popped over some some relentless fucking

slap bass because that happens quite a lot doesn't it yeah you know i've heard it before on like heavy metal records that they played on top of the pops it's insane how big are these balloons the other lyric i wanted to draw attention to apart from the amusing atom bomb verse is um when mark king sings um there's a girl at the back making eyes at me and her hair long and black is a sight to see i'm pretty sure she's looking straight past him over his shoulder at the hot bar man making cocktails because the idea that somebody would be making eyes at mark king um even if he's a successful musician is just you know just just beyond but he's very he's very much a nice personality guy. You know what I mean? Ask his wife.

I'm sure that's what she'd say. But the most interesting thing to me about Level 42 is the fact that they're from the Isle of Wight, or most of them are from the Isle of Wight, because I know they formed in London, but they had been formed in their formative years. And the Isle of Wight strikes me as exactly the kind of place formed in London but they had been formed in their formative years and the Isle of Wight strikes me as exactly

the kind of place that bands like this come from because if a bunch of jazz heads or jazz funk heads from London like Born and Raised had formed a pop group it wouldn't have been like this it would have been cool you know either genuinely cool or

self-consciously cool um whereas the best and the worst things about this record reek of you know isolation on a grassy rock yeah surrounded by sea forts um i mean in more ways than one what i'm saying is this record sounds like something that came out of cows. Very good. You could say that they were the most successful group of their ilk, but practically the only one that you could remember. The fact that you could actually name one of them. You're not going to get that from Windjammer or any of the other jazz...

Even Freeze. Yeah, true. I mean, there was Bill Watts' name out of Even Freeze Free E.E.E. Yeah true. I mean there was Bill Watts his name out of Shack Attack. I knew him but only because I only knew his name. Bill Watts his name. Yeah everyone remembers his name. Yeah I only knew him because of his collaboration

with Gary Newman. Bill Sharp. Gary Newman. Yeah. I mean Christ I didn't know the names of the two women in Shack Attack. That's wrong. That's something that you should know as a pop fan. But you never did. I interviewed Dave Wakeling from The Beat recently.

And they kind of formed on the Isle of Wight, even though mostly they're from Birmingham. Really? Yeah, yeah. Dave Wakeling and one other member were down there doing a bit of cash-in-hand work, installing solar panels, very early primitive solar panels. Wow. And he told me that at that time, we're talking late 70s,

it was quite a kind of stoner scene down in the Isle of Wight. It's where people, it's a lot of spliff heads down there. A lot of people who were on the kind of london new wave or punk scene would head down to the isle of wight and just sort of crash out for a few weeks and get their heads together and just sort of you know yeah almost sort of rehab while still getting high the whole time um and and um i think that kind of island setting with a lot of weed going around does lend itself to sometimes interesting and sometimes terrible musical mutations.

And I just wonder if Level 42 were in any way part of that. Because they're the right era. Yeah, it's like what Britain has got instead of Hawaii. There's a great um thing on youtube which is some reggae artist doing a song called welcome to the isle of wight which i think was for the isle of wight tourist board which is just him like uh just this rasta guy leaping around in front of uh you know nice pleasant island scenes it's the welcome to the isle of wight it's uh scenes. Welcome to the Isle of Wight. You ever been to the Isle of Wight?

Yeah, I have a few times. It's like Toy Town, isn't it? It's lovely. I went there on holiday. It's a place where they still openly sell gollywog fridge magnets. Yeah. But then that's probably quite a lot of Britain right now. Yeah, but compared to the Isle of Man, I imagine it's quite progressive. God, you've been there as well?

No, but i've heard terrible stories i've been arrested on the island man have you yeah for for going for a piss on an airplane what there was like a music journalist junket to the isle of man to watch um the band manson you see what they did um play a gig uh in a hotel hotel. And there was lots of free booze at Heathrow beforehand. We all got well pissed up. And the flights only, I don't know, maybe half an hour long. But we couldn't come into land straight away. We had to keep circling and circling to get a runway at the Isle of Man.

And I really needed a piss because I'd drunk too much. And I was looking out the window and I could see the waves crash on the rocks and that was making it worse it was just making me absolutely have to have a piss so even though the fasten seatbelt sign was on and we were told to stay in our seats I just had to get up and go

and I got up and ran down the island, locked myself in the toilet and the crew were really freaking out and I was like look I'm sorry but this is better than the alternative here and they said well we're coming to land now and i said oh don't worry i'll just sit down here and uh so i i sat tight we landed and i came out of the um cubicle got off the plane and when i got off the plane there were two armed police standing there yeah um to have to take me aside and have a very stern word with me and um i assured them that i was embarrassed enough already yeah uh and don't worry i wasn't

going to willingly do this again they didn't have to tell me uh but then the following day when we were all leaving the isle of man um i go back through the airport, and there's the fucking mayor of Douglas who's there to represent the entire island and to take me to one side and give me another stern talking to. I was like, mate, seriously, there's no need. Taylor, were you on that? You weren't on that trip, were you? No, I wasn't.

But this sounds like the most interesting thing that happened on the Isle of Man for about 10 years. They got the mayor out. It was a massive deal to them, obviously, yeah. This is before 9-11, you know. But still, it was terrifying to them that somebody might need a place where the place was. Yeah, of comparable scale. I always imagine that they used those three-legged things, like Rover in The Prisoner,

like you misbehave on the other man there's like some of those come rolling out of the trees kick you back in line yeah well the way they treated me they may as well have had those three-legged things black in a white circle and a red background you know what i mean yeah you just imagine a load of those, like, kicking the life out of you. 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. While I load on motorbikes, go zooming past. It's a horrible place. Horrible place. And where's the money for that coming from? It's not tax dollars, is it? No. I went to the Isle of Man for the TT with Mayfair about 20 years ago.

And I'd heard all the stuff about, you know, people were saying, you're not going to take any weed in or anything like that. And I'm like, yeah, of course I am. I don't give a fuck. You know, I can hide it and everything and my way of hiding it was putting a lump of hash in a camera case and putting it in the side pocket of me hold all and so uh it's it's stashed away and everything on the catamaran i thought oh i'll get the local i'll get the local newspaper see what's going on and everything and every fucking article was uh the police finding weed somehow and chucking people in jail for three weeks i mean there was

one time they went into someone's tent and dug up the the ground and found a jar full of grass like buried down two feet and they found it and so i started getting massively paranoid and we get there and there's fucking coppers and dogs everywhere and the dogs are sniffing the bags and all this kind of stuff and I'm just going into an absolute fucking panic and my bag's not come I'm waiting 10 minutes everyone else has got the bags and my bag's not come and I'm saying to my mate what do I do what do I do what do I do and he says oh isn't that your bag there and there was one bag on the carousel and I watched it go round about 20 times

and so panicked not realising it was my own fucking bag what a dickhead I am yeah that would be a hard prison to escape from as well you'd be like

the bird man of Alcatraz it's like it's like Singapore but with the weather of Stranraa yes but anyway level 42 aren't from there like Singapore but with the weather of Stranraa. Yes. But anyway, level 42 aren't from there.

So the following week the sun goes down, leapt 12 places to number 21 and would eventually get to number 10 for two weeks in September. The follow-up Micro Kid got to number 37 in October of this year and they go on to score five more top ten hits from 1985 to 1987. Living it up, living it up, I can feel it

Living it up, is it a false emotion? Number 33 in our charts, that is level 42, and they are Living It Up, The Sun Goes Down. Now we turn to Spandau Ballet, they're on video video and they are gold! Thank you for coming home Sorry that the chairs are all warm And with them here I could have swum Vance, surrounded by all the women, introduces another video, Gold by Spandau Ballet. We've already covered Spandau Ballet in Chart Music 24, and this is the follow-up to True,

which got to number one for four weeks in May of this year. Because they're now officially in the top rank of poppadom, this single, which is the fourth release from their third LP, True, is accompanied on top of the pops by the video, which was shot in Colmona in Spain and features an early-ish sighting of the actress Sadie Frost doing a bit of a goldfinger. It's a new entry this week at number 12 by the way the most disappointing thing about

tommy vance's introduction here is that he hasn't prepared for the sentence so he says it is a spada ballet and they are gold in a sort of drawn out uncertain uncertain way. And I was thinking this is when you absolutely would want Michael Jaston because this is an introduction that is just made for him. Yes. Could almost literally have been scripted for him. From half-spoken shadows emerges a canvas. A kiss of light breaks to reveal a moment when all mirrors are redundant. Listen to the portrait of the dance of perfection, the Spandau Ballet.

I just had to get that in there. That, for listeners who don't know, is the spoken word introduction from the journalist Robert Elms from Spandau's gig at the Scala in 1980 as immortalised in a documentary made by Janet Street Porter. And I just thought we really need to have that to lead us into it nicely. And they've changed a bit since then, haven't they? They certainly have. Yeah, the neuromantic days are well and truly gone.

This is their big, huge pop star phase, isn't it? Yes. So the video is directed by Brian Duffy, who's the photographer who did the sleeve of Aladdin Sane and who passed away recently, actually. And Gary Kemp is a massive Bowie fan, so that would have been a factor in getting him in. And Duffy's the man responsible for all that mysterious symbolism

in the video with the missing jigsaw piece and all that. I've got to declare a bit of an interest here actually um because there's the old thing you know do you prefer duran duran or spandau um i actually do prefer duran but i've got to be diplomatic here uh i used to be a diplomat but now i'm down the laundromat oh very good um because yeah um i've got to declare interest because i know know Steve Norman, the sax player. He lives in Brighton and we've been drinking together. He's a lovely fella. I know Gary Kemp as well, who's a brilliant bloke.

Very erudite and knowledgeable about music. I've interviewed his brother Martin on stage in a theatre, one of those an evening with things. And I know John Keeble's father-in-law, who is, get this, Yoffie from Fingerbob's. No! No! Yes, he is. Yeah. Really?

A.K.A. Rick Jones, who was a musician himself in a 70s country rock folky band called Mealticket. They are a bit of a cult following. They were on Whistle Test. I knew that you knew Yoffie from Finger Bobs.

I didn't realise there was a connection between him and John Keeble. So because of my Spandau fraternising, I've got some inside info on this video. So the indoor scenes were not actually filmed in Spain. They're filmed at Leighton House in Holland Park, West London, which is one of the UK's

finest examples of Moorish style architecture. It's also been used in the video for Golden Brown by the Stranglers and it's in Terry Gilliam's Brazil, which is one of my all-time favourite films. So this all came from me having a chat with Steve Norman the other week, because I knew we were doing this.

And that location was chosen because it could blend seamlessly with the outdoor footage of Tony Hadley running around Andalusia. And, in fact, only Hadley got the away day trip out of it. He went over to Spain with Brian Duffy. Really? And I have it on good authority that Hadley pissed off Brian Duffy, who didn't want to work with him ever after this. Get away.

I know. So when you see the Kemps strumming guitars and Steve Norman stepping out with his sax, they're actually in W14, not in southern Spain, but of course Gary Kemp did get a wife out of it because, as you mentioned, the model playing the gold plate is Sadie Frost

who would just have turned 18 at the time, and this is where they met, and who I mainly remember for her role as Lucy Westenra in Bram Stoker's Dracula, in which she's insanely hot. The gold video was the first time they met. Is that the one where she gets humped by a wolf? Yes, that is the one.

You know exactly what I'm talking about. Bummer wolf. Bummer wolf, yes. It is absolutely bummer wolf. So as a record, I think there's something simultaneously horrific and magnificent about gold um it's kind of a bond theme that never was isn't it um it was the fourth single off the album and a surprisingly big hit for a fourth single um the thing about it is we all

love taking the piss out of foghorn hadley and and he is a Wally, there's no other word, and it's a very period accurate word but this record works not despite Hadley but because of him, Foghorn in a way, everyone loves having a go you know, doing an impression particularly when drunk of that

performance and some credit has to be given to the production duo, Swain and Jolly who we're not allowed to talk about anymore because Steve and Jolly turned out to be a wrong cock but they did most of Bananarama's early stuff they did all of Imagination's early stuff

so it's a bit of a shame if they've been completely written out of pop history I reckon, there we go The thing I like about this video is that although i guess tony hadley is meant to be some sort of suave indiana jones type um yes for me this video has hadley as entitled enforcer of the british empire he looks like he's been caught between shooting elephants and uh deflowering a peasant girl for a bag of gold coins slipped to her father which later turned out to to have been full of

pebbles um and the thing is it suits him because he has that revolting face and that air of sort of flared nostriled cuntishness so it really works for the video it's like watching the early years of a monday club stalwart you know what i mean the salad days of the 1922 committee joint executive secretary member for harrow east um but even though it is more london flash than genuine class and it sort of makes you giggle where you're meant to be gasping this video is great and it looks lovely and there's really is something completely wonderful about these archetypal pretentious 80s music videos where nothing means anything but is presented as if it means everything because they are a mini genre in themselves and they have a very distinctive aesthetic which no one's ever really been able to parody accurately because it's a bit too rich you know but this example

is as perfect as you could ever find and it's it lacks a bit of the punch and the wit and the wink to the viewer that you get with Duran Duran videos but there's as much fun to be had here if you like absurd low culture and you're not ashamed by it being from the 1980s, which I'm not. And I think you'd have to be one hell of a purist to dislike this record. Do you know what I mean? Because, I mean, aesthetically, it's sort of dirty, not in a sexual way or in terms of the sound,

but just that it feels very impure and confected in a way that smooth commercial pop ballads usually don't right it's a little bit forced and a little bit posy but i can't imagine being the kind of person to whom that would seem like a wholly bad thing or for whom that would ruin an obviously good song you know whose only mistake is to sound funny where it means to sound heroic right but who cares right who could possibly care about that uh bores and purists right and you might want to take the hadley fist and ram it up the Hadley arse. But as Simon says, he's fine on this record because it's made for that sort of bellowing, mock heroic delivery. There is no reason to not enjoy this.

And everything's much easier if you do. And something else, whatever anyone says about the music of Gary Kemp, like Paul Weller, like I was saying about Paul Weller earlier, he really worked on his songs. And you can tell, right? All the hallmarks of time and effort are there on the best Bandai Ballet records, right? You've got unusual bridge sections

and sort of mini experiments with rhythm and syncopation. And there's always loads of passing rhythm and syncopation. And there's always loads of passing chords and little flourishes, all the stuff which doesn't happen when songs are written quickly and without much effort. I think craftsmanlike is the word, right? Now, I don't know if that came from the same thing of Weller, of being a lad of relatively humble origins into a subculture which put a lot of stock into pride and detail and work you know but I think it makes it makes

the best Spandau Ballet songs stand up today I think and you know as they stood up all through those years where uh the trappings of spandau ballet were considered so ludicrous that nobody listened to them the point is that when you do listen to the best of their songs um they're really good yeah i think taylor makes a valid point there about their their backgrounds as much as anything else because the Kemp brothers were working class kids but they were also stage school kids they both went to Anna Sher and I think that kind of inculcated them with a mentality that the good things in life are there for them for the taking and that they shouldn't have to you know be humble cockney urchins and thatins. And that kind of translates into the music as well,

that their music could be lavish and complex and they should have no shame about that. They should just go for it, and they did. Yeah, speaking of which, I've got a DVD somewhere with an episode of... What is it? I think it might be the kid's show, You Must Be Joking, or something like that, some 70s kid's show.

And it's got Gary Kemp and Phil Daniels doing the acoustic music. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's a song by America or one of those groups about drugs. Right. But, you know, they didn't let on. And it's them and the drummer from Flintlock playing bongos. I think it's Gary Kemp's first TV appearance. Very good.

Gary Kemp's actually visible in that David Bowie special that was filmed in about 1973 or 74 at the Marquee. I think it's the one where Bowie does time in a really theatrical way. Maybe I'm getting my Bowie mixed up here, but to be immortalised like that down the front. He was only 14 or something, but yeah.

I've got a huge amount of respect for Gary Kemp. And yeah, I mean, I probably prefer the earlier Spandau stuff, but this is a very, very good record. I was in a coffee shop in Brick Lane the other week, which is not often the case because I sort of hate that whole pseudo culture.

But I was returning a Hermes parcel and that's the nearest shop that does it. So I stopped to have a coffee nearby and this song started playing in there. Not your frying pan, was it? You were bragging on about in the previous episode. No, it wasn't. Relieved. And I looked around because I thought

okay, you know, this shows how out of time and old I am, right? I looked around and thought okay, it's bricklaying, it's sort of a bit you know, these kind of hipster kids and it's like, does somebody think this is funny or ironic? No, nobody thought it was funny or ironic. We're well past that point,

where there's any sort of irony at play, because these people don't remember Spandau Ballet, right? Let alone why you're meant to hate them. This has just become a standard, right? Whereas Highly Strung or Through the Barricades... Fight for Ourselves. It's just simple natural selection right exactly they're not great records this is a great record therefore people like it people hear it and they think that's good and it's as simple as that another thing i've just remembered that

i really enjoyed about this record at the time was that smash hits used to transcribe it as you're indestructible with loads of vowels in it. It was amazing. And it has less than half the fat of margarine. So the following week, Gold soared 10 places to number two, its highest position, held off the top spot for two weeks by this week's number one

the follow up only when you leave got to number three in June of 1984 by which time gold was getting more airplay due to it being on heavy rotation during the BBC's coverage of the Los Angeles Olympics Olympics. Spandau Ballet and gold.

That's their hit at the moment. Here's a record now that first made the charts in 62 for Mel Torbe. It's Susie and Budgie, the Creatures, Right Now. Right now. Right now. Let me take you by the hand. Right now. Put your lips at my command. Right now Put your lips at my command

Right now Fly me off to lover's land Skinner, surrounded once more by the kids, introduces Right Now by the Creatures. Formed in London in 1981 during recording sessions for Suzy and the Banshees' fourth LP, Juju, 1981, during recording sessions for Suzy and the Banshees' fourth LP, Juju, the creatures comprised of Suzy Sue and Banshees drummer Peter Clarke, otherwise known as Budger. Their first release, the Wild Things EP featuring Mad-Eyed Screamer,

got to number 24 in October of 1981, but the duo were put on hold for a year while the Banshees worked on the LP A Kiss in the Dreamhouse in 1982. In 1983, Sue and Budger pissed off to Hawaii to record the LP Feast and their first single from it, Miss the Girl, got to number 21 in May of this year. This is the follow-up, a cover of the boss and overtune which was written by herbie man in 1962 and then covered with lyrics by mel torme the same year and features a brass section led by gary barnacle who played with the clash the ruts m simple minds the stray cats and level 42 and it's up three places this week to number 17 simon you weren't gothed up yet, were you?

No, I wasn't. Were you dipping a toe, though, into the dark pool? Not really. I quite liked some of Susie's singles by this point, things like Happy House and Spellbound. Yeah. But I wasn't somebody who had any of the albums at that point. I sort of felt like it was for older kids.

It wasn't for me. Maybe I'd grow into it one day. It was older sister music. You know you get older brother music? Yes. Well, Susan the Banshees. Literally one of my mates' older sister was banging into them and had their albums knocking around the house. So sometimes we'd nick her records and have a listen.

But no, I would not say I was a fan I kind of admired them from a distance I think it would be true to say at that point and I like the creatures for being part of that that whole wave of very percussive music that came out of the

post-punk scenes, things like Bow Wow Wow and Adam and the Ants and so on there's all that kind of tribal drumming going on but this is something different isn't it? that came out of the post-punk scenes, so things like Bow Wow Wow and Adam and the Ants and so on. There's all that kind of tribal drumming going on, but this is something different, isn't it? Tight fit, yeah. Yeah, tight fit, yeah, yeah. Budgie and Susie were a couple at this point.

They often fell out with Steve Severin, the other main player in the band She's, and guitarists kept dying or leaving. So I suppose it was a natural thing for she and him to go off and make records without the rest of them. I never saw this coming, having heard their other stuff. I never saw them doing an old kind of bossing over jazz standard like this, it sort of hit me out of nowhere and then Tommy Vance

refers to that, he says at the end, an astonishing record for them to record and I agree with him, but in a way I suppose it's part of that shift from British bands white British bands,

mining soul music, soul mining, to quote the The The album, and shifting towards jazz. You have things like Kim Wilde and... Love Blonde. Love Blonde. And, of course, Carmel, basing a whole career on that. And I really liked the first Carmel album, actually. So, basically, maybe soul was depleted.

It had all been stripped out. And the only, you know, so jazz was the next kind of scene to be digging into. And yeah, I think it's a really cool record. It's got that real kind of finger-clicking kind of snap to it. But, and she looks great. She's got this cool old microphone.

Oh, it's brilliant, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the black and gold jumpsuit. I think she looks awesome. But it's kind of ruined by the dancers. These awful, awful dancers in film noir costumes that somebody in their wisdom at the BBC has decided to flank Susie

with when she really doesn't need it yeah they look like they've been asked to dance to We Are Detective by the Thompson twins, they've got the cue sheets mixed up and there's no need for that and I bet Susie was well pissed off about that you're right Sam and at this time

jazz was starting to become a thing on the pop charts. Yeah, well, in this chart, there's Roman Holiday. Yes. In the chart rundown, who was doing a similar thing. I agree with you. I think she pulls this off really well. Without doing much to change her voice.

Susie always sings this kind of semitone flat. That's her thing. And it just lends a certain edge to everything she does. Yeah. So that even when she's singing really upbeat sort of major key song it's got that slight air of menace to it and i think it works really well on this yeah definitely in you come taylor i can't bear suzy and the banshees i can't stand them i just don't like i think they're tedious and sludgy. And I find her completely charmless. And I mean, I accept that, what's his name?

John McGeoch was a genuinely inventive guitarist. But so was The Edge. And I can't listen to U2 either. I mean, to me, Suzy and the Banshees is just the same as other 80s rubbish like Echo and the Bunnymen. It's just gloopy pomp with stupid lyrics and no wit. Although it's possibly partly that I'm just a couple of years too young for that generation. I mean, I quite like some records by The Cure who were artistically almost the same thing,

just a year or two on in time. Although The Cure records I like are not the ones that sound like Suzy and the Banshees. But as early 80s reworkings of old songs go, to me this is only marginally better than Dave Stewart and Barbara Gaskin. You know, it's the... Fucking hell.

Yeah, I'm keeping out of this. The music is objectively worse than the original because it's only any different in the sense of being thinner and less powerful. And she doesn't have the authority as a singer to sell a singer's song because she's got that sort of thin and flat voice and to me it's not even good at sounding cold and distant because it's too weak and there's too much wobble

and audible effort so she sounds too much like a real person singing or trying to sing when you compare her with like the the real ice ladies like nico or you know christina or people like this um and the maltorme version is only a dinky little ditty but although it's very tame it still sounds hot which this doesn't um so i don't know i mean this is an unfair comparison because it's not as bad as this but in some ways it reminds me of when those dull aor bands like travis and keen there was a trend for them to do versions of popular songs by like britney spears and so forth uh and that was morally far worse because you always got the sense with that that it was

some sort of joke like they genuinely thought that their music was better and they were somehow redeeming the song you know which you absolutely don't get here but it's the same thing has happened which is that most of the detail from the original is stripped away and it turns into a plod you know and it's almost like they realize well let's strip it down and they thought well there's nothing there so they had to put all the brass back in and not do it cold and bare so you just end up with a version of right now that hasn't got any base on it and has no groove and yeah it's like it's like a jam donut with no jam in, it's like a jammed donut with no jam in it. It's like, what's the point, you know? It doesn't appeal.

Simon, your response? Well, it's all opinions, isn't it? So the following week, Right Now nudged up three places to number 14, its highest position. A month later, Susie and the Banshees put out Dear Prudence, which went all the way to number 14, its highest position. A month later, Susie and the Banshees put out Dear Prudence, which went all the way to number three, and the creatures were put on hold until 1989 and the LP Boomerang. They never troubled the top 40 again, however,

and they split up in 2005. Right now, come and give yourself to me And right now on the top of the pub studio, will you welcome this young band from Liverpool with their first ever record. They're called The Lotus Eaters. This is the first picture of you. It's warm in and out The pulse of flowing love Spread the calm to meet the others Pleasure fills with love till dawn. Vance, suitably impressed by the creatures, segues nicely into the first picture of you by the Lotus Eaters.

Formed in Liverpool in 1982 from the ashes of the Wild Swans and the Jass Babies, the Lotus Eaters were invited to record a peel session in October of that year, which featured the first picture of you. On the back of that, they were immediately signed to Arista Records, and after supporting Big Country's early 83 tour, this is their debut release, and it's up this week from number 23 to number 21. Well chaps, I think I'm detecting a turn of the page in music here

because this is possibly the first song that could have been played on the John Peel Show and Pebble Mill at one. Couldn't it? It probably was. I hadn't heard this record for years before watching this. And over several watches of this episode, I went from finding it a bit wet to finding it a bit wet but liking it to finding it a bit wet but really liking it.

So I went and listened to a load of their other stuff, and all of that makes this sound like Pig Destroyer. So they were not ashamed of being a wimpy-sounding band. You can say that for them although they couldn't really do much else when you look at them i mean the singer looks like john stone's bad at football little brother um yes there's the way he sings it's that suspiciously clear enunciation right when he sings the chorus line on this, he says, the fast picture of you.

Now, if you're from Liverpool, when you say the word first, your mouth is in a smiling shape, right? It's drawn wide and thin. Feast. This is the exact opposite. His mouth is like an O, like an opera singer. The fast picture.

I don't know if he's from, you know, Hoy Lake or some posh bit over the water or something, but it's very, very noticeable, especially when he's standing next to that guitarist who just looks too scouse to take anything seriously. And he's on the verge of laughing throughout the whole performance. But it's all right, isn't it?

Yeah, I mean, the stance is the singer deplores. He is standing there kind of like with his arms folded and the hands under the armpits. Like sulky kid who doesn't want to play football because it's pissing it down. Usually in goal. Yeah, yeah. He would volunteer to be

in goal for the side that didn't have to do much defending so he could just stand there and think about trees or something as a kid I always thought they were called the locust eaters and I don't know if that's better

or worse as a name the locust eaters are prime exponents of a genre that I invented, which is called white pyjama music. Now, yes, I need to explain white pyjama music. It's something that I've banged on about on social media quite a lot, but I really need to write it up into a proper think piece at some point. But basically, it's a term that I coined to denote bands like the Lotus Eaters but also H2O, Fiction Factory, China Crisis and Wang Chung.

And they're all bands who made that kind of very wet, wimpy, floaty new pop and more often than not would appear on TV wearing kind of shapeless white baggy clothing Ricky Gervais' failed band Shona Dancing were another one of these and yeah I think it's one of those kind of

retrospective genres that you can apply now like Freakbeat nobody in the 60s talked about freak beat but it's something that kind of you know um cool record collectors decided to call a bunch of stuff years later i think we can talk about white pajama music and lotus eaters are definitely bang in the middle of that this uh this performance is actually possibly chronologically the the peak of of white pajama um the first sighting of it, I think, was China Crisis on Top of the Pops.

Their first appearance is kind of the white pyjama anarchy in the UK moment. Yes. Which is a ridiculous comparison when you think what this stuff sounds like. And China Crisis are scousers, of course. And I wonder why so much of this stuff um came from liverpool um because this is also not a million miles from the pale fountains who another scouse band um another way of describing it would be janice long music and janice long um yeah yeah janice because she was also big on sort of pushing bands like it's immaterial and anyone who came

from merseyside she had as much civic pride about Merseyside as Anthony Wilson did about Manchester. And she was pushing a lot of this stuff. Their kind of almost aggressive lack of aggression, their kind of strident wimpiness is even kind of emphasised by the way they wear their instruments. They wear their guitars very high on their bodies, don't they? And they were, of course, a total one-hit wonder.

Can anyone even name another song by them? I've got a friend, in fact, he's married to my cousin, John Poole, random John Poole, he calls himself bassist. He's been in many bands, including the Wild Hearts and the Cardiacs and dr hook at the moment but for a little while he was in the lotus eaters and i'm talking about three or four years ago and i thought what must those gigs have been like because when when you see um for example um men without hats playing a comeback gig, that's going to be one long slog

to the encore of Safety Dance, isn't it? Yes. So it's going to be like, you know, you can imagine probably what they've got to do is they'll go on and play Safety Dance straight away and then say, okay, stick around because we'll play that song again later. I don't know.

I'd have to go on set list. But I would imagine it's a similar deal for the Lotus Ears. Well, it's a bit like us, isn't it? I mean, people are sitting there waiting for the bomber dog to be mentioned. We don't disappoint. I was thinking about this white pyjama stuff, right? It does make sense. They're almost like a bridge into that kind of music

from stuff like Orange Juice. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, they're a bit more jangly and indie than yeah yeah yeah they couldn't have been doing this at this point without it's more quash isn't it than orange juice yeah quash they are they are quash um but yeah they're definitely leading into that sort of china crisis type music no that's that's a good way of putting it because i was thinking while i was watching this well look it's this is a pretty record and it sounds rich and a little bit wrong sort of like the best french pop of the 80s is what it reminds me of and it was no surprise that this record was a massive hit in france i discovered uh yeah but they're

one of those bands where i just think what was their game what did they think they were doing what musical tradition did they think they were a part of and who precisely was meant to like them now that's the thing I like best about them in a way but still one thing you can hear Liverpool in there

definitely and they make more sense in that context because there's a sort of a small bigness about the sound or a big smallness, if you prefer, which is absolutely associated with 80s Liverpool music. But they don't quite fit in there either. They're a nice riddle in that respect, but nothing else really came out of this hole. So this must have been the beautiful fluke that it really sounds like and

also it's the opposite of what i was saying before about paul weller and gary kemp right this song sounds like it fell off them while they were doing something else it's completely effortless totally effortless and pure uh which is great too but if you depend on divine inspiration, you don't get a career because that big flash only happens once. Or in this case, a little flash. But it only happens once. Only once. It's definitely one of those songs that you like, but you don't want anyone else to know that you like.

Yeah, maybe. You know, if you caught yourself humming it in front of your mates while you're playing football, then you'd shut yourself up very quickly. Well, it's weird because I like loads of soft lad music, you know, loads of it, and always did, really. And this sounds a bit like a Sarah Records band lost in an expensive studio, right, which is not a terrible thing,

especially with that nice 80s South of France dreaminess to it. There's just something about it. It doesn't sound contrived and simpering like the worst of that music does. It's just a nice sort of limpid pop song with a lush production on it. And they had the decency to not hang around too long so i like it i just don't trust them i don't know why it might just be that they look a little bit

too pleased with the world and themselves for my liking it's a strong memory from 1983 for me but i think that's because i've mistakenly bundled it up with One Summer, the Willie Russell TV series that was on Channel 4 about Billy and Ike who fuck off from Liverpool to Wales to avoid the Swan Jacks. And, of course, because it's Liverpool and it's the 80s, it all goes wrong in the end. Yeah. But this is another summer record, right?

Like this and the Style council both records clearly designed yeah as summer records and just lucked in because it was the hottest summer since you know um yeah and it's it's a really really really a stroke of luck you know it's like you know when rihanna put out umbrella in late spring of 2007 and people are like people must have been like why are you putting out a record called Umbrella at the point where it starts getting really hot you know

this is a really bad idea and of course it turned out to be the wettest summer in this country at least that anyone could remember and that record was never off the fucking radio so turned out to be a masterstroke. So yeah, same thing. You put out a long, hot summer.

You're lucky it's a long, hot summer. So the following week, the first picture of you jumped six places to number 15, where it stayed for two weeks, its highest position. The follow-up, You Don't Need Someone New, only got to number 53 in October of this year and they never troubled the top 40 again and split up in 1985. Sing the flowers we made At number 30, we have The Walk by The Cure. At 29, it's Over, The Funkmaster. A chart entry at number 28, Give It Some Emotion by Tracy.

Baby Jane and Rod Stewart, number 27. Another chart entry, Wait Until Tonight, My Love by Galaxy26. Down to 25, Flashdance, Irene Cara. At number 24, Love Blonde, Kim Wilde. Up to 23, Freak by Bruce Foxton. Do It Again and Billie Jean by Clubhouse, down to 22. At number 21, The First

Picture of You by the Lotus Eaters. And here we have in the Top of the Pop studio tonight the number 10 record by Depeche Mode, Everything Comes. Applause Music Music Everything Cops. Vance mentions that the first picture of you is being rinsed on Radio 1 at the moment before finally piling into the arse end of the top 30. Oh, any tunes on there you don't remember?

Wait Until Tonight, My Love by Galaxy. No fucking idea. I noticed Bruce Foxton with his solo record Freak in the lower reaches there. Bless him. What a tragedy he couldn't have been on this week. Yeah. Was he ever on Top of the Pops? Yes, he was, yeah.

I'm sure he was, yeah. One day he and we shall meet. And there's that club, just one place above him, Clubhouse, Do It Again, Billie Jean, one of the first mashups to get in the charts, I suppose. Steely Dan, Michael Jackson mashup. Although it strictly wasn't a mashupup it was like a re-recording wasn't it? Yes. Obviously I know it now

but at the time I managed to miss that record you know Gary Bird. The Crown? Yeah yeah yeah and that's a weird record to have missed when you're 11. Yeah I hadn't heard that

about 10 years ago. Yeah, it's good. Finally, Vance introduces Everything Counts by Depeche fucking Mode again. No, he doesn't. He introduces Everything Counts by Depeche Mode. Oh yeah, sorry. Depeche fucking Mode again.

Yeah. I'll tell you what though, one thing I can say, it's an unusually attractive audience this week, right? In this bit, there's a girl on the left who could have been going out with Brian Ferry if she hadn't been wearing a purple tie-dye vest and white safari shorts over a pair of tights. And there's another girl behind skinner and vance who isn't exactly conventionally beautiful but has one of those haughty hooded eyed rather

superior smiles which i can never resist well not that resistance is really an issue these days. And then elsewhere, there's that girl in the gay bondage cap who keeps popping up. I like her a lot. Always looking great. Yeah, I do too. Always with that same unbroken gaze into the camera lens, right? That's an unbroken, unblinking gaze. And I don't know if it's affectation or early is alienation or if it's just old-fashioned

stupidity you can't tell but it looks fantastic yeah we've already discussed depeche mode over and over and over again so we'll just say that this is the preview single from their third lp construction time again which comes out a week tomorrow it's the follow up to Get The Balance Right which got to number 13 in March of this year and it's up this week from number 16 to number 10 fucking out again

and the frustrating thing is when it's always Depeche Mode clanking away I mean I quite like most of their singles from this period but they're not so radically different from each other that it feels like starting afresh every time one comes up, like it would with Prince or The Beatles or something. This is when they went full-on clanky, though,

because obviously they were on mute records and they had their background in that whole scene and also they were linked with some bizarre records prior to that so they kind of came up through that world of Einsteiner Neubauten and indeed Test Department who as you mentioned were on the cover of this week's NME

and they were shamelessly but I think legitimately borrowing that thing of hitting bits of metal together and using found sounds and converting it into pop rather than an art statement. And I think it really works on this record. I think it's a really great single.

Even despite the slightly embarrassing lyrics about a turning point in a career being insincere I mean one takeaway from this performance is they're doing all that like you say but also visually they're starting to back away from the synths

they are aren't they they've got one of them Arabic bassoon things that you or someone else will know what they're called well I was hoping somebody else would know and that's Andy Fletcher isn't it playing that or pretending to play that pipe thing because I think I'm right in saying

that Fletcher doesn't actually do anything on their records that's what we're led to believe anyway there's that quote from Gavin Edwards in Rolling Stone that he goes, Depeche Mode's unique division of labour has long been established with each of the three remaining members having a distinct role. Martin Gore writes the songs,

Dave Garn sings them, and Andy Fletcher shows up for photo shoots and cashes the cheques. In this performance, he's there to hold that long, red, wooden instrument and pretend to play it. But yeah, they're bringing acoustic instruments in, at least visually.

Whether they're really using them on the record, I don't know. Because I looked on the credits. I think it's a joke. I think it's a visual joke. So it's actually a synth noise? Yeah, apart from the melodica, which Martin Gore plays. Yeah, he gets that out near the end, doesn't he? Yeah, which I think is actually the sound you hear on the record all that other stuff it's all sense

that they're playing real drums and that weird horn and reed instrument and a xylophone and yeah they're they're all electronic sounds they None of those actual things are on the record at all. So I think that's a little visual gag. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Martin Gore has his top off. Again. Again, and it's... He loves getting his nips out on top of the pops, doesn't he?

He does, and he's got his top off in a kind of a meaningless way, if you know what i mean yes because right it isn't it isn't butch he's not showing off any muscles and it isn't punk either do you know what i mean um it's like he's forgotten to to dress yes he's forgotten to get dressed and and he's confused like basically like he's having an anxiety dream yes about finding himself half naked in front of the entire united kingdom television but can you imagine a muscle-free man going topless in a pop performance now it's unthinkable no and the best thing is he's not even properly skinny because they've obviously

been on tour or in the studio like eating crap and maybe drinking too much and he's just got the beginnings of moobs just gently jiggling there as he bops around trying to out do Paul Weller for puny homoeroticism yeah why are they doing that this week

man just throwing themselves at us it's not right it's the hot weather and it's such it's not right something in the air it's hot weather and it's such a weird contrast with dave garn right because uh dave garn's got that button down shirt skinny tie nice suit and all of that in fact um i've probably mentioned this before but he really reminds me of me at that age or certainly my best case scenario idea of what i could aspire to look like. Although he does remind me of a goose as well a little bit.

But yeah, I quite dug his kind of smart, slightly preppy, but still vaguely alternative look. And I thought I could rock that. But yeah, it's just a weird contrast with Gore going for the kind of you know, escapee from a fetish club look. I think this is possibly my favourite Depeche Mode

single just because it's a mix of all the things I quite like about them without so much of the stuff I don't. It's got a nice clattering arrangement with a bit of extra texture in it and the words are really silly and puffed up but they're not they're not overbearingly pompous and stupid and it's got a genuinely gorgeous chorus and um you know it's just a record and a performance that's full of ideas, most of which are good,

and the ones that aren't good are still entertaining. And in a way, that accidental mismatch between the good ideas and the silly ideas works as well as the very deliberate mismatch between beautiful sounds and ugly sounds, which is musically what this record's all about uh the reason it's so ear-catching is that it it's all about the trade-off between those sort of ugly industrial clanking sounds uh and the the lovely harmonies and the the little the

little uh melodica solo and stuff um it's a really well put together I mean put together is the word but it's a really well put together record and everything else I ever would have to say about Fresh Mind I've already said on previous podcasts but yeah you know still at this

point fair play to them it is put together I mean the album that it came from is called Construction Time Again, which is obviously a little joke there. And on the credits, it doesn't say anything about what anybody individually does. It doesn't even mention any instruments. It just credits Depeche

Mode as songs. And someone else, I think it's Daniel Miller, credited as Tonmeister. What a shame it doesn't say No Synths like a Queen album of the 70s anything else to say? no, I'm saving it till next time with you Depeche Mode

save it for the next episode so the following week everything counts nipped up four places to number six, it's highest position and the follow up loving itself got to number 21 in October of this year. Everything. Everything that loving hands

grab all they can. Everything counts in large amounts. The Feshay know that everything counts. Talking of counting, Everything counts in the Hitchin' Mounds try to stop it. At number 19, come live with me, Heaven 17. The police at number 18, wrapped around your finger. The creatures are up to number 17 with Right Now. And this week's number 16, Mike Oldfield, Moonlight Shadow. Up to number 15, Rocket, Herbie Hancock. It's late, Shakin' Stevens at number 14. At 13, Cruel Summer, Bananarama. Brand new at number 12, it's Spandau Ballet and Gold. And at number 11, here, Robert Plant was a labourer for Wimpy in the late 60s while singing with bands such as the Crawling Kingsnakes, Band of Joy and Led Zeppelin,

neither of whom recorded any hit singles. After his last band split up in 1980, Plant was accepted for a teacher training course but was encouraged by Phil Collins to have a go at a solo career instead imagine that yeah first day at school and like robert plant is there yeah in front of you screaming at you screaming at you in sort of like lace-up trousers you know very with a very tight crotch but sort of kick flares at the bottom and um yeah some kind of waistcoat probably. What would he have taught? Biology. He released his first solo LP, Pictures at Eleven in 1982 and his debut single Burning

Down One Side got to number 73 in the UK in October of that year. This is the follow up to Pledge Pin which was unreleased in the UK and it's the lead off single from the new LP of the same name. We're being treated to

the video which has been shot in Las Vegas, Death Valley and the Calico Ghost Town in California and it's up this week from number 15 to number 11. I like how Richard Skinner introduces this because he goes and at number 11 here's Robert Plant with and there's a little pause and he goes and at number 11 here's robert plant with and there's a little pause and he goes big log and i i like to imagine skinner is showing just the slightest trace of a sense of humor there because yeah because the fucking title is hilarious so i mean is it about crimping one off you know making a little brown fish dropping the kids off at the pool because that's what it suggests to me big log well i i read somewhere that the title is actually a reference to a driver's log book where they

write down the hours they've spent on the road which would make sense considering the lyrics and the video but i'd also say there's maybe also a 60-70% chance that he means his cock. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not having a dump. It was quite easy to be a 15-year-old in 1983 and not have heard one tune by Led Zeppelin. Didn't have an older brother who was ahead. Didn't listen to those radio shows. You never really saw them on the telly.

They were just a hippie band to me. Well my best mate was a sort of metalist so I knew about it but I think I'd only heard of Led Zeppelin because they were local heroes or Robert Plum was of which more later but yeah this is

it's a bizarre single isn't it because it sounds like nothing on the first three listens. And it's really just a showcase for Robert Plant's stupid lyrics and that meandering Stratocaster playing by Robbie Blunt and his troublesome parrot, which is very nice, but it's a bit Knopfler and it's not exactly catchy

I actually had to check that it wasn't Knopfler when I heard this again and the video is this video is directed by Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell otherwise known as Hypnosis

who designed all those 70s Pink Floyd sleeves and others by people like UFO and the Scorpions. Their trademark being that sort of queasy tableau, which looks like something cooked up by an ad agency on LSD. Like How Dare You by 10cc being a classic yes but what's interesting is how easy it is for them to slide straight from that to those early 80s pretentious music videos um which were for them what punk was for Iggy Pop. You know what I mean? It's like they'd already done it.

It's that same sort of meaningless symbolism and sort of laid-back surrealism. But the whole effect is really strange and not what you would associate with something you were going to release as a single. Yeah. I'll tell you what's incredible, though. This late middle-aged man is 34, and I know we do this a lot.

I know. And he'd had a stressful few years leading up to this, in fair. Yes, he had, yeah. But fucking hell. He's not the Leonine rock god of how the West has won on this, is he? He's got footballer hair it's really bad hair and this kind of cut off shirt and high-waisted jeans it looks like big country's mom yeah and his jawline is collapsing he's got lines on either side of his mouth like lenny cohen

and his skin looks like he borrowed it off someone two inches taller. All the signs of ageing, which we normally associate with at least being in your mid-40s, and here he is looking like that. He probably looks better for his age now, doesn't he, than he did at that exact point. Yeah. Yeah, well, he's embraced the Lord of the Rings creature thing now, hasn't he? This video cracks me up. As soon as I saw the very first shot of a deserted petrol station,

no, a gas station, I should say. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, he's driving in the desert in America in a big car with tail fins. It's such a video cliché, which you see time and again on things like uh roger waters the pros and cons of hitchhiking and it was it's just such a trope that you know that sort of tumbleweezy look and um to the extent that uh when um noel gallagher and his high flying birds did a video like that about

four years ago with no apparent irony i absolutely pissed myself that you know he was doing that for real um so we start off and he's in he's in that deserted petrol station gets himself a drink out the fridge then we go to this kind of um sort of mexican looking ghost town because it's all shot in nevada and california and stuff like that and um Plant sees some guy in a cowboy hat dragging this Spanish-looking lady around by her elbow. And she's trying to shake him off. And it looks a bit worrying, really. And then they come to the actual door

and go through the door where Plant is sitting. And does he help her? Does he fuck? He just sits there tearing up some old photos into shreds, which then become feathers when he throws them in the air yeah but he's used to that sort of thing because he's seen roadies procuring girls for jimmy page and then and then we're in some kind of roadside diner bar and and he's leaning against the wall yeah moody and and we see that he's made a cat's cradle with some string like yeah why like he's showing his mum like look mum look what i've done that he's made a cat's cradle with some string like he's showing his mum

look mum look what I've done like he's a clever boy and then it's like an old school room somewhere and then a swimming pool with glass sides and it is him swimming isn't it yeah why are the pop stars showing us their nakedness this episode

man it's just because he's wearing proper dad trunks as well, isn't he? I had to rewind three times to check that it is him, but it is him, definitely. Yeah. Oh, really, Simon? And he's wearing these really nasty dad trunks and he's doing the frog-leg kicky thing

that's most unseemly. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it is. What this video's like, it's like watching your mate playing Grand Theft Auto and he's gone out to the desert and he's just fucking about and doing

nothing of interest. Oh, get in my car and drive for a bit and then oh, look, I'll go for a swim. And it's like, look, just do something. Just kill someone. Do the fucking mission. And turn this fucking music off. It's getting on my tits it's the kind of shit you'd see on Whistle Test

or the Tube well it's weird isn't it because it can't have been the loyalty of Led Zeppelin fans that made this a fairly big hit because his previous single didn't and neither did the subsequent one so what is it about this that somehow caught on I really don't get it

it's not like it was in a film or anything, was it? No. It's got Phil Collins on drums. Phil Collins who advised him to try a solo career in the first place. And it does sound so much like Dire Straits that I had to check that it's not not Fleur. It is indeed. The guitarist is Robbie Blunt, who was in Silverhead.

Now, Silverhead, in case you don't know, were a short-lived 1973 glam metal band led by Michael Debar, who was later of the Power Station. And they also had future Blondie member Nigel Harrison on bass. And Silverhead are best known for their startlingly sleeved album 16 and savaged oh fuck yes has as a sort of sexploitation photo of a underage looking girl in the mirror and it's yeah it's really quite startling um and an album which as well as the callously sleazy title track has a song called called more than your mouth can hold

wonder what attracted the attention of members of led zeppelin the important thing here though is that my mum used to make cheese rolls for robert plant no yeah she worked behind the bar in a pub in Kidderminster And she was responsible for the catering And he lived nearby Because contrary to popular belief He wasn't actually from Kidderminster Like me he was born in West Bromwich And I think he grew up in like Hale's Owen

Or somewhere But he bought a place when he got big That was just outside Kidderminster Why not? Well where else? Live the dream. And he would come in at lunchtime for a couple of pints and a cheese roll, and all the staff would whisper.

And according to my mum, he had lovely hair. What did he have in his cheese rolls? Cheese, I think. Yeah, nothing, no accoutrements? I didn't get down to that level of detail, unfortunately. Why not? I know, I know. He had a bit of lemon squeezed that ran down his leg.

It's a funny one, though, because he is a local hero because there isn't really anyone else. And although he wasn't from Kidderminster, he did used to play, like he was in Band of Joy, who were mostly a Kidderminster he did used to play uh like he was in band of joy who were mostly a kidderminster band um so he so he did cut his teeth there uh in fact band of joy's lead guitarist taught me to play guitar when i was 11 because he gave guitar lessons in a room above a music shop in kidderminster because when jimmy page made his trip to the black country to scoop up john bonham and robert plant he didn't need a guitarist that's a shame uh but robert plant

started off playing in the clubs there when there were clubs to play in and the thing that i've never understood is how he got away with it because kidderminster is one of those places where if you poke your head up you can expect to have it knocked down again immediately right so when i was learning the guitar if i even mentioned it to my mates they'd scream with laughter and rip the piss uh they never heard me play they just thought it was hilarious that someone from kiddumits was learning the guitar like getting ideas above your station you know so when when I think of Robert Plant's singing style and stage act, which was all in place by the time he joined Led Zeppelin, as you can see from the best thing Led Zeppelin ever did,

which is the black and white clip of them playing in a TV studio in Denmark or somewhere, round about the time of the first album, when they're great, before they got really, really indulgent. i can't understand how the people of kiddie ever stood for this all that preening and hair tossing you know what i mean and the screeching and the baby baby baby and later that would become the language of heavy metal and it was all across the west woodlands it was just the normal way to sing. But him doing that in a pub attic in front of like 80 troglodytes in the 60s when everyone else was in an earnest blues band,

my theory is that he had to ramp it up like that so that you were left in no doubt that this was a performance, right? Like a pantomime. Yeah. Like he was wearing a mask. Because if anyone from kiddy even for a second thought that this was a man honestly expressing himself i'm pretty certain he'd have been laughed off the stage in a minute um but yeah he was he was a local hero and still

is last time i was back in kidderminster i was looking at this gimmick that they've invented to try and interest people in the now otherwise practically deserted town centre right like all provincial towns like when I was a kid it used to be perpetually bustling because Kidderminster is the one large-ish town in the area and people from all the little towns would drive into shop there and now of course it's just it's like every other post-industrial town in Britain. It's full of empty shops and phone shops, pound shops, pick and mix sweet shops, trainer shops, e-cigarette shops and Greggs. About three people with St. George's flag tattoos

shouting into mobile phones, you know. And me and my mum walking around because we're old and stupid and we live in another era where walking into town is a logical thing to do, you know, as if this was still a community in any meaningful sense. But the council or someone has paid for something called the Kidder Minster Musical Heritage Trail, which is a few little plinths shaped like stacks

of vinyl albums with blurb printed on the label where the track listing would be giving you the lowdown on kidderminster's glorious musical heritage for which it's justly world famous right and one of them says uh led zeppelin's drummer, John Bonham, played in many venues around Kidderminster. Born in Redditch, he lived and is buried in nearby Russia. So not from Kidderminster then. And the one next to it makes the boldish claim that Clifford T. Ward is widely regarded as one of England's finest ever songwriters he was born in

Stourport-on-Seven and taught at a school there so also not from Kidderminster although he loved our little town so much that he did write a song about the nearest major city which is his song Birmingham,

which is sort of okay, but it doesn't necessarily sound like the work of one of England's greatest ever songwriters. It goes, Birmingham, tell me the one over in Alabama. Yeah. And then the one next to that says, Kidderminster Choral Society was formed in 1899.

Sir Edward Elgar became the society's president in 1927. Well, he wasn't from Kidderminster either. And you realise that Kidderminster's musical heritage is just a load of people coming to the venues in Kidderminster, performing and living, coming to the venues in Kidderminster, performing and living, which makes it not so very different from quite a lot of English towns. Because basically it was a big music town in the 60s, but in a mostly passive way,

because it was a second division stop on the concert circuit. And it just had a lot of clubs like frank freeman's dancing school uh which was where my mates went to get disco dancing lessons in the late 70s which is a little attic room that were like captain beefheart and people like that played and there's like a famous live bootleg of captain beefheart playing there um but yeah the best thing about this redecoration of the town center is they've now put up all these badly painted murals on the these buildings by the canal bands which once played there literally once played there in many cases so it's a bit embarrassing but it does mean that kiddo insta is if nothing else the only medium-sized post-industrial town in the country

with a picture of Captain Beefheart and his magic band in the shopping mall opposite a branch of Card Factory. So something to be proud of, at least. But Robert Plant's still there. I believe so. I think he's still got his place. What are they going to do when he dies, man? They'll probably embalm him and put him on the buses or something.

Just make sure that for anyone who didn't see it the first time round, you put in the video playlist that wonderful YouTube clip of him performing in the shopping centre in Kidderminster for charity with a backing band of off-duty

policemen. One of my favourite things. Anything else to say, Chaps? His album at this time had the incredibly pretentious title, The Principle of Moments. And I had to look it up, so in case anyone wants to know, The Principle of Moments, a.k.a. Varignon's Theorem, states that the sum of talks

due to several forces applied to a single point is equal to the talk due to the sum resultant of the forces. Do you understand that? Not a fucking clue, mate. I mean, that's fairly simple, right? Yeah. So, the following week, Big

Log dropped one place to number 12. I'm still childish enough to laugh at Big Log, I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah. No worries, mate. The follow-up, In The Mood, would only get to number 81 in December of this year, and he'd have two more top 40 hits over his career.

However, his old band finally made it into the UK singles charts when a re-release of Whole Lotta Love got to number 21 in September of 1997. And Robert's going to be leaving that exotic location and later this year he'll be on stage with this new band here all over the United Kingdom.

Robert Plant, The Big Log, here now. The Big, rest of the chart. And at number 10, everything counts for Depeche Mode. Up to number 9, I'm Still Standing, Elton John. This week's highest new entry, at Paris, The Style Council. At number 7, Who's That Girl, Eurythmics Steady at 6, The Crown from Gary Bird and the GB Experience At number 5, Wham! in the Club Tropicana

It's number 4, Double Dutch, Malcolm McLaren Down to 3, IOU, Freeze Last week's number 1 is Down to 2, Paul Young, Wherever I Lay My Hat. They have the numbers ten to two, but we have a new number one. It's KC and the Sunshine Band, Give It Up! Everybody wants you Everybody wants your love I'd just like to make you mine, all mine

After Schilling Robert Plant's forthcoming UK tour, Vance and Skinner break down the top ten before introducing the brand new number one, Give It Up by KC and the Sunshine Band. We've got to talk about Tommy Vance's handover here, where the party mood is cranking up a bit because people are throwing tinsel over him. And he clearly hates it.

He does some kind of weird twitch in the middle of it, as if he's being hit with a sort of cattle prod or something. It's this kind of involuntary twitch at the horror for moving from his comfort zone of Robert Plant into this disco bollocks that he's going to hate. Robert Plant, the big log himself.

We've already covered KC and the Sunshine Band in Chop Music No. 6 and since we last covered them in 1975 they've gone on to rack up 6 top 40 hits in the UK and five number ones in the USA. After moving from TK Records to Epic in 1980 when the former label went bankrupt, they ran afoul of the Disco Sucks phenomenon and this single from the 1982 LP All In A Night's Work is their first appearance on the UK charts since please don't go got to number three

in january of 1980 however for some reason this song is selling like a bastard in the uk and it's just jumped from number five to number one knocking wherever i lay my hat that's my home by paul young off the top spot meaning that harry casey but not the sunshine band is in the studio he's brought a couple of backing singers with him though well he was essentially a solo act at this time when he's credited as casey in the sunshine band in this country and a few other places but um a lot of other countries he was just casey so that that explains the absence of any kind of sunshine band is that what it is i always assumed assumed Casey stood for knobhead cunt, but I can see him.

I can see Mr. Cunt, but there's no sunshine. Oh, right, okay, that explains it. Harry Wayne Casey, though, does sound like a serial killer's name. You can see why he went with the Casey thing. So, yeah, the weird thing with this record is that the Disco Sucks movement that you alluded to was so prevalent that in the States, Epic refused to even release this because they thought Disco was so dead. And he had to stick it out on his own label the following year. And it got a great team.

I wish he'd not bothered in this country, to be honest. I hate it. I like a lot of their stuff more historically they were insanely prolific in bursts, Casey and the Sunshine Band they released two albums in 1975 and two albums in

1981 and they released ten albums in nine years, which I suppose for that era wasn't that weird but it does seem like a lot and they were huge, I didn't realise this they were the first group to have four number one hits in America in a single year, which was 1975, since the Beatles. And he's talked quite a lot about this kind of almost Beatlemania

that followed him around. And you just can't imagine. You just think of them as a sort of fairly second division disco band. But they did do some amazing stuff. I mean they they were kind of the house band it was him and them guy called uh is it richard finch was the bassist and engineer um they were the two kind of bedrocks of the uh sunshine band and they became essentially the house band at tk record so that um they were responsible for that miami sound in disco which is brilliant sub-genre

of disco if you go looking into it and of course he wrote and produced Rock Your Baby by George McRae which if I'm in a certain mood is the greatest record ever made and he also did It's Been So Long by George

McRae which is also bloody fantastic and and even their own stuff like uh queen of clubs and that's the way i like it even please don't go schmaltzy as it may be um i i got a lot of time for but um i i had this song on the ronco compilation album the hit squad chart Chart Tracking which also had the Depeche Mode track on it and I used to skip over this one I like his I quite like his

get up in this performance he's got that skinny shiny tie the red shoes, the rainbow jacket but they express that Casey himself doesn't seem to possess. I know that he'd had a serious car accident a couple of years before this, and he'd been in a coma.

He got hit head on, and he'd been paralysed for six months, and he had to relearn how to walk and dance and play piano. And put on his boogie shoes. On his boogie shoes. His father died around this time as well, and he suffered a lot of depression. He got massively into cocaine. It took him 10 years to come out of it.

He had a breakdown on the Oprah Winfrey show talking about that. And he doesn't really gaunt here, doesn't he? For a song that's this big kind of summertime party hit um he hardly smiles he has haunted yeah haunted eyes he has the eyes of a man who knows does not look relaxed he's got the eyes of a man who knows there's a dead body in his dressing room and that sooner or later he's going to have to face up to what he's done yeah the the really terrifying bit is where he occasionally will break into a short-lived smile like a forced smile uh and then after a couple of seconds it just drops it just and it's gone and that's the really chilling bit it's like yeah i didn't realize

any of that i just thought he just looked nervous you know i thought he looked like like just before he went on stage so and went oh by the way the inland revenue are in tonight it just doesn't look doesn't look like he's uh fully concentrating on his performance yeah yeah this is shit isn't it i mean i hated this song at the time because it felt so dated compared to all the new stuff that was going on you know it was still too early for a looking back to the mid to late 70s yeah it

does sound really dated but I mean whether or not you like this record I think probably depends on how you feel about wedding reception if you like that moment where everyone's finally pissed and it's got dark outside and the floor fills up and even if you're actually there,

the mood is such that it seems to have been filmed on an old VHS camcorder and sent to you've been framed. And at any minute, a 66-year year old woman is going to go arse over tit and reveal her massive baggy white cotton knickers for the the amusement of people who find such things amusing and if that's your scene then this record's going to sound wonderful and very evocative um and if not there's not really very much there you know uh but the terrible thing is the first time i watched this episode i was grimacing and swearing all through this song then went into the kitchen and realized i was humming it right like exactly as

critics are always said to do with million sellingselling turkeys like this. And I found that a bit depressing, although not as depressing as a West Midlands wedding reception. I'll tell you one thing that's kind of tickled my curiosity from researching this is that, you know, certainly around 1981, a lot of previous kind of disco or cheesy pop acts had a crack at being new romantics. So there was a Village People

new romantic album. There was a Manhattan Transfer new romantic album. Well, there's a Casey solo album from 1981 called Space Cadet Solo Flight. And the front cover has him looking like a neuromantic

or a sci-fi character. And I've illegally downloaded it right now. I can't wait to have a listen. Because the other great one in that genre is the Brotherhood of Man. Oh, did they? They had a go. Oh, yeah, I've seen it.

I've seen it, yeah. They changed the name to BHM. Wow. And there's lots of plaited pink and cream headbands yeah yeah martin looks exactly the same though it will be hard to do much yeah it's hard to do much well you can't polish a turd can you tb31 by now so you know the best bit in this whole clip of nobed cunt of the sunshine band is the in the instrumental break where a zoo male tries to flip a zoo female over his head you know that thing where you're back yes and you lock arms

and one person bends forward and levers the other person up and over and it doesn't go very well. Because the ladies in Zoo are not featherweight failed ballerinas like Legs and Co. This is the 80s. And they're a bit more solid and muscular. And that move isn't quite as easy for this geezer as he's anticipating it to be. And they just about avoid collapsing in an undignified heap. But she still has her skirt go over her head like a you've been framed wedding reception granny yeah and that's all that matters in the end isn't it for the dad still hanging in there trying to glean as much daddisfaction as possible i think

daddisfaction needs to show up in the chart music top 10. This episode, in fact this period of pop music, is kind of short on Dad is Faction. There's a lot more still single older brother to his faction. Yes. There's a lot of

dad infuriation, isn't there? What was shaking Stevens in the sunset? Yes, definitely. It's breaking all the rules of heterosexual rock and roll. dad infuriation isn't there yeah what was shaking Stevens in the sunset oh yes definitely yes it's breaking all the rules of heterosexual rock and roll so give it up would spend three weeks at number one before it was usurped by red red wine by you

40 the follow up you said you'd give me some more only got to number 41 in October of this year and Harry Casey retired in 1985. There you have the new number one, Casey on the Suncrime Band. They've been giving up, but tonight we go out with Herbie Hancock. He has got a good record out.

It is called Rocket. Good night. You take care. Bye-bye. Vance signs off by telling us that the following artist has a good record out. Why? It's Herbie Hancock and Rocket. Born in Chicago in 1940, Herbie Hancock started his jazz career with Donald Byrd before joining the Miles Davis Quintet in 1963

and spending the rest of the 60s working with practically everyone on the Blue Note roster. After signing to Warner Brothers as a solo artist, he went all electric in the early 70s when he formed the Headhunters. However, he first came to the attention of the pop-crazed youngsters in 1978 when I Thought It Was You got to number 15 in September of that year and followed it up with You Bet Your Love, which made it to number 18 in March of 1979. After he guested on the Simple Minds track Hunter and the Hunted on the LP New Gold Dream, he went all electro-funk and put out the LP Future Shock.

This is the first single off that album, assisted by a Godley and Cream director video with disembodied robot legs kicking up in the air and all sorts. And it's up this week from number 25 to number 15. First question, why didn't they finish with the video? I know, right? The video's amazing. It is amazing.

Those robot mannequins dancing around the living room. I knew someone who was scared of this song because of the video. Yeah. It's fantastic. around a living room. I knew someone who was scared of this song because of the video. It's fantastic. And that hideous dummy baby spooning up his gloop. Yeah, it's really grotesque. But why wouldn't you show it? Yeah, it's one of the greatest videos.

And we've already seen plenty of the crowd. Come on. Yeah, we've seen enough of them, haven't we? Yeah. Nice to get another look at gay bondage cap girl moving in a yeah of course nice slow and sinuous

way to this record yeah I mean I was quite enchanted by the blonde girl in the black PVC Nazi hat right but

the fucking Wembley foot tappers sweatshirt guy yeah getting in the way yeah cock blocking yeah

still there thinking oh well surely my mates will come soon and we'll do that routine but ooh they'd better hurry up getting in the way. Yeah. Cock blocking. Yeah. Still there thinking, oh, well, surely my mates will come soon and we'll do that routine. But, oh, they'd better hurry up. Yeah. And if I get in front of the cameras.

Because he'd have been waiting. Yeah. Yeah. He'd have been waiting all through the episode for this. Yeah. But if he's only just going to

tap his feet at it, then that's, it's not going to work, is it? Everyone in the crowd looks peak 1983, whether professional or amateur dancers and yeah

it's not just that it hasn't dated well but it's just that even at the time you think alright come on give us the video because videos were so scarce at that time you had to kind of get up at oh god was it 7.50am they'd show one on ITV's breakfast TV thing

and you didn't even know what it was going to be. Just like, a video, don't care what it is, they're going to play a pop video. That's what a precious commodity they were. And when it's one as stunning as this, it's like, oh come on, feed it to me. Because it is a great tune, isn't it? And for electro-funk of that era,

holds up really well,'t it it's an absolutely amazing record it's just so exciting just bursting with kinetic energy and it was it struck me it's kind of weird even at the time for a jazz guy like herbie hancock to create an electro track and to basically by doing so getting on board with hip-hop because a lot of sort of proper jazz musicians it's proper musicians from the early generation didn't want anything to do with hip-hop whatsoever they saw it's fake and you know hated sampling and all that kind of stuff um but i didn't know that thing about simple minds having an influence on him that's really interesting um i guess i could have seen it coming if i thought about it, because I do remember the single I Thought It Was You,

which is very vocoder-based. It's kind of like almost a... Yes, it's brilliant, that song. Yeah, it's like a proto-Darth Punk track in a way. I say it's weird for a jazz guy to make a track like this, but if you actually strip it down and listen to the melody, rather than the kind of nuts and bolts of it, the riff is actually pure 70s cop show, isn't it? It's almost kind of starsky and hutch

sounding very much so i think part of why he was so receptive to stuff like electro and hip-hop he'd gone a slightly different way to a lot of jazzers of his generation in that he went funky in the 70s yeah um and to me that's uh that's the stuff that i know best of his uh apart from the stuff he did with miles davis i mean of his own solo stuff it's albums like you know headhunters and man child are the ones that i had when i was younger and yeah get you well not that much younger you know but it's to me that there's a much more obvious line from that to electro and hip hop than from where a lot of jazz people were in the 70s. But the weird thing about this, like a lot of people, or like most people,

I know this record very well, but my autopilot brain always places it later than 1983. And it was a real surprise when it came up at the end of this even though when i start to think about it i know that it's early 80s and i know he's drawing on electro stuff that was you know from the time but yeah he invents the sound of the the mid and late 80s on this record um yeah it's insanely ahead of its time only a couple of years but it's so dramatic because nobody else sounded quite like this it's that mixture of the electro stuff and the what he does with the melody it's you can hardly listen to it without seeing wiggly neon lines dancing around and brightly colored computer generated blocks flying through virtual

space all that stuff you associate with you know 86 87 i mean it doesn't sound like much of a compliment to say that someone effectively created the sound of the late 80s with one record but uh that's not his fault i mean if everyone who ran with this sound had made it sound as fresh and lively as this it would be a lot more of a compliment obviously um because this is amazing and yeah the fact that half the music of the next five years was patterned on it without the charm and without the guts you know what can you do yeah and embraced wholeheartedly by the british record buying public oh yeah it ended up in the top 10 i know well i mean it's irresistible for a start yeah it's nice that in 1983 one of the great jazz musicians who's 43 the same age as tommy vance Tommy Vance can not only make a great and innovative and totally modern commercial record

they can see it become a smash hit based purely on merit and I don't know if that would have happened the same way a year or two later because the times maybe were a bit less open and anyone who was associated with jazz suddenly had to go through that yuppie coffee advert sort of anti-bohemian bohemian thing to get any attention you know so yeah this record is clearly pointing forwards but at the same time it's maybe a last gasp of something as well so the following week rocket le left seven places to number eight where it stayed for two weeks the follow-up auto drive got to number 33 in october of this year his last top 40 hit in 1985 however rocket was performed at the grammys with a quartet featuring Hancock, Stevie Wonder Thomas Dolber

and Howard Jones Up yours Kershaw What's on the telly afterwards? Well BBC One piles straight into fame where Troy played by little Jimmy Osmond falls in love with Juliet then Judith Hamm fancies having a go at being

a surgical theatre nurse in Tomorrow's World at large followed by the nine o'clock news the drama series The Life and Times of David Lloyd George a study of two professors in the documentary series Campus Tom Jones Now with special guest Teddy Pendergrass and finishes off with Lord Hsham banging on about the events of 1963 in the 20th Century Remembered and the last in the series of So You Want to Stop Smoking. BBC Two has just started Birdspot with Tony Soper and then the 1958 Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor film Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. That's brilliant. I absolutely love that film. Sorry, carry on.

Then highlights of the cricket. Some of Britain's top country and western acts performing blazers in Windsor for country cousins. News night and more sexy sexy open university action. ITV piles into the TV film The

Hunted Lady for their murder mystery suspense strand, followed by the documentary series European Connections, News at Ten, then the documentary series about the blind I simply can't see, and finishes off with The Gangster Chronicles, and Father Anthony's story blathers on about God in keyholes into life. Channel 4 looks at traditional fishermen in Chile in The Last Sailors,

then Soap, the Tom Bell drama Out, alternative comedy in Bookham and Risk It, and finishes off with What the Papers Say. So, what are we talking about in the playground tomorrow, me dears? Inevitably, the Style Council. Probably a bit too awkward among my friends to be talking about the gay stuff.

But also considering growing out my hair so that I can slick it back like Paul Weller and maybe wondering what sort of wet look gel he's using there. Yeah, Brylcreem, Simon. See, I wouldn't have used Brylcreem because that would have been too granddad for me. You know what I mean? That's what I was impressed with. I thought, come on, we're in the 80s, it's got to be gel. You know what i mean that's what i that's what i was impressed i thought come on we're in the 80s it's got to be gel but you know what i mean real cream my dad was still using it yeah but maybe that was a thing of course it's all academic now you know those that ship has sailed for me sadly but you know yes style council's gay

shame as would have dominated the conversation i mean mean, my mate would have been impressing on everyone that this was a piss take to have a go at bummers like Duran Duran. And everyone else would have been raising an eyebrow. Do you think he got that from the pissing about in the punt?

Did he think that was their jokey recreation of Rio? I don't know about that. Also, this is Duran Duran, who famously had a video with women smeared in shaving foam and stuff, writhing around in a boxing ring and God knows what.

Maybe he hadn't seen that. They've got to do something while Duran Duran and Bomming each other, Simon. You know, got to make your own entertainment. Yeah, that would have been it. That and also why that old bloke was singing about a log.

Yeah. And what are we buying on Saturday? Well, immediately Style Council's A Paris EP as kids at my school said it. Because nobody paid

any fucking attention in French lessons except me. And in a car boot sale years later, The Creatures and Herbie Hancock. Yeah, I'd have been buying Long Hot Summer to show how broad-minded I was. And I imagine I would have sort of picked up that Locust Eaters record and then maybe put it back down again and not really known why. I just don't feel comfortable. I don't feel comfortable around it.

And what does this episode tell us about the summer of 83? That it's okay to be gay, but you don't have to if you don't want to. Yeah, well, confusion reigns. And in the short term, that's still beautiful, about and that me dears is the end of this episode of chart music all that remains for me to do now is cock up in my

usual manner the urls i want to throw you at so our website is www.chart-music.co.uk you can reach us on facebook facebook.com slash chartmusicpodcast. You can get involved with us at Twitter, chartmusic T-O-T-P and you can chuck us some money patreon.com chartmusic. Thank you very much, Taylor Parks.

Yeah, hello. That's wrong, isn't it? I was just looking out of the window. I forgot I had to say something. Yeah, sorry for boring you Taylor yeah no no no so I was just thinking about what I was going to have for tea such is the dedication to chart music yeah whatever thanks for bothering

thank you Simon Price the pleasure was partly mine my name's Al Needham stroke my earlobe shark music Bum a dog, bum a dog, he's coming to your school. Bum a dog, bum a dog, with his dropping tool. Your school playground, he's having a way ground.

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