Chart Music: the Top Of The Pops Podcast - #34: December 18th 1980 - You Can Hear Them Shagging In Japanese

Episode Date: December 18, 2018

The latest episode of the podcast which asks; who is more important - a dead Beatle, or your Nana? It's cold and dark, pop-crazed youngsters, so it's time once again to binge upon one of our favourite eras of Top Of The Pops. Your hosts are simultaneously deciding which 50 badges to wear for the school Xmas disco, still in hiding from the fake accusation that they had a good cry about someone dying, and going about their business unaware that Santa is going to let them down big style in a week's time. But for a glorious half-hour, we're all distracted by the sight of Pig-Wanker General himself, perched on a gantry, giving us our weekly shot of Pop randomness. Musicwise, the highs are high and the lows are lower than low. The Beat and The Specials remind us who the daddies were in the Eighventies, but we also get the sickening one-two punch of the second most annoying singer with a lisp of 1980 and a festive celebration of drink-driving, sexual harrassment and homophobia. The Nolans have finally managed to get them dead tight satin trews off, but have replaced them for even tighter designer jeans. Chas and Dave lob out terrifying animal masks. Jona Lewie sets himself up for life. Legs & Co are attacked by ferrets as they pay tribute to Ghandi John. There's the most un-arsed xylophone solo ever. And Little and Large are asked what they think about Pop at the moment. It's brilliant. Simon Price and Neil Kulkarni join Al Needham a pass-around of the UHU-filled crisp bag of late 1980, veering off on tangents such as gerontophiliac porn line adverts, Terry Hall turning your back on you, why having 'OMD' printed on the back of your Harrington is just plain wrong, the Summer of Chinese Death Stars, the wrongness of Gideon, and being sexually initiated by Yoko Ono in a Nottingham council house while eating a 10p mix. The swearing is up to its usual standard, you'll be pleased to hear. 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. Taxes 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-crazed youngsters and welcome to the latest episode of Chart Music, the podcast that gets its hands right down the back of the settee on a random episode of Top of the Pops. I'm your host that would not like to see a ghost because that's the thing I would fear most. I'll need him. And standing with me today are my dear friends, Simon Price. Hello. And Neil Kulkarni. Morning all. How are we chaps?

Anything pop and interesting happening in your life since we last spoke? Not pop. I did go to the opera, which was nice. Did you now, you big ponce? I did. Which taught me one really important lesson. Don't fucking drive to Birmingham. Why not? because that town

it can't deal with cars it can't deal with driving so just don't drive to Birmingham go to New Street don't ever drive to Birmingham you sound like you're on the brink of going into some kind of 1970s Jasper Carrot routine about Spaghetti Junction

or something it's hell Birmingham what they do is they signpost stuff about Spaghetti Junction or something. It's hell. It's hell. Birmingham, what they do is they signpost stuff and then they stop signposting stuff just to get you lost in the hellhole that is Birmingham. The only ring road worth bothering with in the world is Coventry's. Birmingham's is now as bad, I have to say, as Leicester's.

Good Lord. I like how... That's a statement. This is really clever because i like how you're kind of foreshadowing a bit of coventry birmingham rivalry that's going to happen indeed nicely done very nice simon any christmasy um dj action yeah lots of that just been djing like a mofo i've been uh yeah um i've i've launched this new uh 70s punk night called Up Yours! which was a lot of fun

and Spellbound the alternative 80s one is going strong, we've got some exciting things lined up for next year, we've got Steve Norman out of, as you would say, Spandau Ballet lined up as a guest DJ for our Blitz special in March, so that's quite exciting

and very topically for the first time in 10 years I've been wanting to do this, we're doing a two-tone ska special in May. Oh, Lord. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, man. Exactly, right. There's room on my sofa, guys. You should come down.

It's going to be awful. Yeah, I want to see you two nutty dancing all the way down the South Coast. That's right, yes. The first night of Up Yours Yours you had quite a special guest didn't you yeah we had Jordan Jordan the punk legend the Jordan

not rubbishy fake titted Jordan not Katie Price no no actual Jordan out of the 70s yeah she's so awesome she lives in Seaford

yeah Seaford's not far from here and she's a vet she looks after and she breeds Burmese cats but she's always about out and about in Brighton going to gigs she's really cool and she came along and going to gigs. She's really cool.

And she came along and said, this is the best punk DJ set I've ever heard. And me and Janie, my other half, Janie Blamblam, we were like, oh my God. I mean, she must have heard a lot of punk DJ sets in her time. So yeah, I'll take that as a compliment. Absolutely. Fucking hell.

If she'd have come up to you and said, bummer, dog, I would have finished chart music there and then. There would be nothing left to achieve in this world. It's only a matter of time. The first order of business, chaps, the pop craze youngsters have done us proud this month. Fucking hell, they have piled in ever since we started doing that bonus podcast palaver. as podcast palaver.

So, you know, it's time to, once again, introduce people into our club in an anti-Steve Strange manner, I feel. So, the latest batch of people who have signed up to Patreon, they include Jason Quinn, Andy Worsley, Martin King, Neil S, Ian Ruddock, Dr Rock, Ali Lowe, Mike Landers, Steve Harris, John Davies, Joe O'Donnell, Jamie Buckle, John Thorpe, Bob Jenkler, Suzanne Osborne, Emma Pomares Thomas, Judy Parfitt,

Simon Feele, Eric Trelfall, Padraig Reader, Jules Boyle, John MacArthur, Alex McKinnon, Kieran and Big Chimp. What? Hold it down, Big Chimp. You feel me? Dr Rock and Big Chimp. What a duo that is. Oh, man. You'd see them, wouldn't you?

Thanks, guys. This is the feel-good story of Christmas. It is, isn't it? And, you know, if you want to join those people, you get them little fingers on the keyboard, www.patreon.com slash chartmusic and kick a little dollar in.

You know, down the old G-string. And only dollars, man, we don't want any pounds. A chafe. It's the milled edge. Come on, it's nearly Christmas there's a world outside your window and it's us

tonight thank god it's us instead of you perhaps Dr Rock could actually be encouraged also to ask his colleague Dr Beat to also contribute and maybe his brother Sergeant Rock yes, of XTC, came to him. Yeah, I want to say he's going to help me, but is he?

So, before we move on with this week's episode, you know what happens next, don't we? It's time, once again, to have a look at the brand new, freshly minted Chart Music Top Ten. Hit the fucking music. Freshly minted chart music top 10 hit the fucking music A new entry at number 10 for 15 lighters for a pound man Down from number 8 to number 9 B. A.

Cunterson last week's number 5 this week's number 8 it's bummer dog Down three places to number 7 it's seven days jankers no change at number six for the seat glad I show what he would a and it's a drop of two places to number five for Lenny bombing a rastafarian straight in at number four for one intestine into the top three and down one place to number three, it's Here Comes Jizzum. This week's highest new entry at number two, Your Dark Mates. Yes!

Which means... It's number one! It's the second week at the top for Taylor Parks' 20 Romantic Moments. It's a fix, man. It's a fix. Your Dark Mates was robbed. Second week at the top for Taylor Parks' 20 romantic moments. It's a fix, man. It's a fix. Your dark base was robbed. This is like when God Save the Queen by the Sex Pistols was held off the top by Rod Stewart.

I don't want to talk about it. Absolute travesty. But, you know, it's fair to say that the battle for the chart music Christmas number one is well and truly joined. That said, I'm glad to see 15 lighters for a power man in at 10. It's nice to see urban music and

urban artists reflected in the chart in the top 10, marginalised though they normally are. Yeah. But I mean, you know, I think Christmas is going to be it's obviously going to be about one intestine, isn't it? The human centipede boy band, which was discussed in the last episode.

And the more I think about it, the more it needs to happen. You know, you get a load of lads and you go, all right, you've got the cutest face, you can get at the front, you've got the nicest arse, you get at the back. Ken's, get to to be sewn up I think my really piss poor photoshop skills

could be of importance here oh no because no I've got form with boy bands because I remember mocking up a

Fred Westlife picture a few years ago oh lovely that went down a storm so yeah leave it to me get on it good skills.

Should do one of us. We should be in one intestine. Oh God, what a host of revolting images that brings to mind. And you save money on microphones as well. And also on stools. They just have one stool, right, on which they perch in a massive human tower,

like a kind of totem pole. The girls would love that. And then the totem pole kind of stands up for the key change at the end and sort of waves all his arms around. But I think the rider's gonna be... He's gonna cost fuck all, isn't it? Yeah. You're only feeding one mouth after all. But you know,

if Brian Harvey's mouth was sewn to Tony Mortimer's arsehole his statement on ecstasy would have been and Tony would have gone yeah Brian's right

we do think that ecstasy is terrible and we hope our fans aren't taking it that band will be still going today well yeah you literally can't

go solo from one intestine exactly yeah yeah you know if Robbie wanted to go off and play football with Oasis, he's bringing the rest of the band. So don't forget, if you do want to get involved in the Chart Music Top Ten, there's only one Chart Return Shop. It's on Patreon.

So sign up, join the fun. Well, it's not really fun. It's just clicking a few boxes. But fuck it. Come and do it anyway. It's not really fun. It's just clicking a few boxes. But fuck it.

Come and do it anyway. So this episode, Pop Craze Youngsters, is taking us all the way back to December 18th, 1980. The dead centre of the Aventus. For my sake. And it's safe to say that 1980s were one of chart music's favourite years, isn't it? Yeah, I think that whole period, 79 to 81, is the greatest era

for pop music ever, so we're right back in the middle of that. Which is just as well really, because it distracts you from the fact that Top of the Pops is, you know, it's a bit of a cat's arsehole at the minute, isn't it? You know, we keep saying that it's making a transformation

from singing in front of Sullen Hughes to Flags and Balloons, and this is right on the cusp, isn't it it's it's you know we we keep saying that it's making a transformation from singing in front of sullen news to flags and balloons and this is right on the cusp isn't it i suppose so yeah and we're going to see that in in great evidence in in this episode yeah but uh you know the reign of michael hurl's begun and we've already had the first run of guest presenters and there's been a brief music slot where they tell you where diastrates is playing that week it's fair to say that the show is not keeping up with the fast turnover of modern pop as a matter of fact in the previous issue of smash hits that came out a couple of weeks before this one uh david hepworth wrote a column in smash hits uh and and it goes like this. One of the few arguments in favour of unleashing a nuclear device on the BBC television centre on an average Wednesday night

is the likelihood that such a strike would be likely to rid us once and for all of that loathsome circus commonly known as Top of the Pops. Just imagine it, Dave Lee Travis and Beard obliterated in one single blinding blue flash, leaving only a telltale burn and a smouldering car coat to mark the spot where for years he stood and insulted the intelligence of an entire nation. The faint chance that Simon Bates might be standing in the vicinity at the moment of impact is an additional argument. The remaining two presenters we might just spare.

Jimmy Savile does much sterling charity work and survives as an encouraging example to the senior citizens of Britain, proving conclusively that steadily advancing years and total ignorance of your subject matter need not disqualify any person from hosting TV's premier pop show. Peter Powell, I am assured, is a pleasant individual and a genuine enthusiast. He is obviously only pretending to be an embarrassment. But the rest have simply outlived their usefulness. Legs & Co. dancing with all the funky abandon of a troupe of librarians.

Cameramen daydreaming of the good old days of black and white and mowing down whole sections of the audience in an effort to zoom in on the bass player at the climax of a drum solo. audience in an effort to zoom in on the bass player at the climax of a drum solo. Clapped out variety acts going disco with their aging bodies crowbarred into wet look jumpsuits. The studio dancers nudging each other and pointing each time they catch a glimpse of themselves on the monitor screens. Petulant punk bands unable to even mime with any degree of conviction. Anybody who ever allowed a phrase like super sound to pass their lips. This category also includes cringe-making remarks like

the one and only, hope you're all having a great time at home and really beautiful sound. The overpaid sportsman, American TV actors and miscellaneous personalities queuing up in order to leap on and advertise their latest book, album, tour, t-shirt or bring-and-buy sale. Any two ladies who have ever allowed Dave Lee Travis to put his arm around them while introducing a record. Kelly Marie. The only way to break it to these people that they're not wanted is to nuke them. Anything else, like writing abusive letters to each one of them or dumping your television in the North Sea, simply wouldn't get the point over. But, believe it or not, there is one individual

lurking in the bowels of the BBC who represents a greater threat to rock and roll than even these turkeys combined. If the Soviets can't oblige with a conveniently placed SAM missile, we may have to take direct action against this person immediately. I speak of the bright spark who decided that the vibrant atmosphere of the show would be substantially improved if a tape of audience noise was played throughout the programme. This awful bubbling, clinking, giggling sound can on occasions be a blessing. When the DJs are talking it could indeed be turned up quite considerably, but when it is employed as a background to music it is only slightly less infuriating

than having your nails filed with a blackened deck of sanding attachment. When it is employed as a background to music, it is only slightly less infuriating than having your nails filed with a Black & Decker sanding attachment. Imagine David Bowie slaving over the recording of fashion, making crucial electronic adjustments to obtain as strong a sound as possible, only to find that some half-baked dot on top of the pops has carefully arranged things so that it sounds as if it were coming from a faulty radio at a rowdy party three streets away. We have suffered long enough. Direct action is called for.

Well, that reads like a letter to the music press, to be honest with you. Yes. And the thing is, it's all very well him saying get rid of Top of the Pops but if Top of the Pops had been got rid of what would we have had in 1980 we'd have had nothing there were no other pop shows so

it was a pop show it wasn't a music show it was a pop show that's what's important so although taking on some of his criticisms I think it's kind of he's been asked to do this piece has rambled on somewhat but i think he's you're right though al in the top of the pops is in a period of you could call it transition at this time there's certainly things in this

episode that are horrifically dated and things that increasingly we wouldn't see in top of the pops anymore as we'll come to discuss later. Yes. Simon, I was reading that, and yeah, I agree with a lot of what you said, particularly the background noise, but the main thought flashing through my mind was, oh, mate, you don't know you're born. Yeah, I was kind of...

Everything he said, I thought, he's got a point there. Yeah, he's got a point about that as well. Yeah, he's got a point there. But like Neil, ultimately, I was sort of thinking boo hiss because um david hepworth was 30 when he wrote that um he had had his pop youth already and for those of us who were at the very beginning of ours um as neil says top of the Pops is all we had. It really is. Yes. It's the only way you're going to see your bands on telly and maybe hear stuff that was in the charts that you didn't know if you liked yet

and you could reserve, you could sort of sit back and make a judgment on it. Yeah. So, by the way, that's a really long article to be in Smash Hits. I was surprised by the length of that. That's bloody huge.

So I kind of agree with everything he says. And yeah, I'm thinking Top of the Pops was brilliant. It was an absolute lifeline. And also, let's be honest, if we think about what David Hepworth did television-wise only two or three years after this, where, you know, Whistle Test, I would take Top of the Pops in 1980 for all its faults

over Whistle Test 365 days a year. Definitely. And I would always prefer a band who aspires to be on Top of the Pops than a band that aspires to be on Whistle Test. Well said that man. Radio 1 News

In the news this week. The first IRA hunger strike ends in the Mace Prison when the government pretends to be on the verge of offering a settlement. Fidel Castro threatens to send even more Cuban prisoners to Florida. OPEC jacks up the price of petrol by 10%. A new Mori opinion poll gives Labour a 24% lead over the Tories. The first UFO sighting is made outside RAF Woodbridge in Suffolk. Non-league Altrincham FC,

who have been drawn against Liverpool in the third round of the FA Cup, reveal that they've been advised for the past two seasons by Bill Shankler. ABBA cancel a live appearance on the German TV show Show Express after Swedish police learn of a kidnap attempt and they do a satellite performance from Stockholm instead. But the big news this week is that the night before on ITV, Godfrey Raziroka of South Africa won the 1980 Thorn EMI World Disco Dancing Championship in the Empire Leicester Square along with £2,000 and a teal-coloured TR7.

Oh! I used to love those fucking disco shows. I still do man even more so now I never watched them at the time but I do remember that the TR7 was my kind of dream car as a child the ultimate Aventis car wasn't it

I just thought when I learned to drive which I still haven't by the way I thought that kind of like that wedge of cheddar shaped thing was just so beautiful I mean by 1980s you know disco's already beginning to curdle and this is this is the kind of disco that that i believe people refer to when they were saying disco sucks by this time yeah we'll start talking about precisely that kind of disco later in this episode yes we will by the way i just want to rewind to that story

about cuba i'm somebody with a sort of passing interest in Cuba, sort of slight Cubanophile, I've been over there and stuff. So Fidel Castro was threatening to send prisoners to Florida. Well, he'd already done so. Isn't that exactly what they wanted? If they're Cuban dissidents, presumably they'd be only too delighted to go to Florida. Well, not even dissidents,

just out-and-out criminals. Just criminals, right. Yeah. They'd probably be delighted. Yeah, kill someone and, you know, you get to go to Florida. It's a bit like that thing in the news at the moment of... Disneyland. I mean, this is going to date so badly by the time the podcast comes out, but this thing in the news at the moment of Theresa May saying,

back me or Brexit won't happen. Well, yeah. Or, you know, I compared it to the guy in um uh to the black sheriff in blazing saddles when he's pointing the gun at his own head saying let me let him go or the n-word gets it it's like you know it's it's almost too much of a head fuck to figure out which way you're meant to go on that but you know good old cast, whatever you say about him, you know, if he didn't send loads of people to America, no Cypress Hill and no Scarface. Yeah, no Scarface. Good on you, Fidel.

You know that ABBA kidnapping story? Yes. Do you know any more? I mean, do we know if it was like just Benny or whether it was all four of them or what well I looked into it and the Swedish police weren't sure whether it was all of them or one of us but yeah

and Germany at the time just think well who could that be could it be the Red Army faction or someone like that imagine if they had done a brainwashed ABBA that'd be amazing to spend the whole of the 80s singing propaganda radical Marxist

pop it'd be fantastic extremely tuneful radical Marxist pop as well could have changed everything the capitalist exploiters take it all the proletariat standing small. Yeah.

Could have been a different world. Yeah, the lyrics of I Have a Dream would be very different. So me boys, what were we doing in December of 1980? Well, I was only eight. And frankly, I was a precocious little shit. If I confronted myself now, I would just want to slap me. The best little shit to be Neil yeah I was very into classical music

so you can picture me standing on a fucking chair conducting I mean yeah horrible precocious little cunt I was getting obsessed with supermarkets because supermarkets had started I mean like big supermarkets you know we'd had

you know your bee jams and things like that but i remember that year as being the year that a massive massive asda opened near me um so that became a real cathedral of pilgrimage really every every friday i massively enjoyed the supermarket i remember that year as being the first year that i answered i felt confident enough to answer the the front door and i remember that year was being the first year that i answered i felt confident enough to answer the the front door and i remember um slamming the door in the milkman's face when he asked for the christmas tip because you know the milkman used to knock the door and say happy christmas and you're meant to give him a couple of quid or something yeah i just said happy christmas

and slam the door in his face because i didn't really understand um that process it was also my first year of twigging seeing as we're getting close to christmas it was my first year of kind of twigging that the whole not to spoil it for any of our listeners but the whole santa claus thing was a little bit suspect um because i asked for not a scale x trick but a matchbox kind of version of a scale x trick that year um with with little cars. Not even TCR? No, no not TCR. It was really cool, it was like quite a big matchbox kit with little cars

rather than big scale X-Tric Formula 1 type cars and I remember getting it, dead excited Christmas day and it didn't have a power pack in it No! No, no power pack, it was missing in the little section it should have been in and of of course, this being near... Back then, things didn't just open up on Boxing Day.

So I pretty much had to wait until the new year to get my power pack. Oh, for fuck's sake, man. Just looking at my Scale Extra copy in a box that I couldn't play with. Torture. The little boy that Santa Claus forgot. But I surmised that Santa wouldn't play with. Torture. The little boy that Santa Claus forgot. But this is, I surmise that Santa wouldn't forget that, so something else was

going on, so I was starting to have my doubts by now. If we're talking about a Kulkarni childhood Christmas, would this have been around the time of that amazing photo that you put out on Facebook recently? No, this is much later. I mean, that photo would have been... Explain, explain. Say what you see. Well, the main thing later. I mean, that photo would have been...

No, explain. Say what you see. Well, the main thing I remember from it, I haven't got it in front of me, but it's a fairly ragged looking artificial Christmas tree that's clamped onto a table with like a black and deck kind of thing. Yes. Yes. Is that fair?

Proper Kulkarni Christmas. That would have been earlier. That would have been like mid-70s, I would have thought, with my Liverpool scarf on. Yes. Yeah, the thing is, there's a thing you spotted with some of my photos, Pricey, which now that I think about it is odd. There's a lot of photos of me and my family in the 70s

where we're not looking at the camera. And that's not that normal, I don't think, in a lot of photos. So, yeah, no, I want everything back that was in that room yeah um yeah but no by 1980 yeah things was it the halcyon days were gone to be honest with you and that missing power pack created a Christmas trauma that I still can't forget really metaphorically you've been looking for that power pack ever since absolutely um I've I've talked about this phase of my life before uh because we did an episode about september 1980 but um by this time i was one term into my life at the middle

school of barry boys comp and i was still the new kid or the new slash old kid the comeback kid because i've been away in england for a couple of years and most of my old friends had changed and they'd moved on and they might as well have been strangers by the time i got back and and i i hadn't really uh made or remade any friends yet so i was a bit of a loner um i wouldn't say i was the victim of bullying in a sustained way from any particular individual but i was definitely in that kind of underclass of kids at any school who are considered cannon fodder you know always good to pick on for a laugh because I was so obviously soft and I had freckles and wavy ginger hair and I had this kind of I had this innocent naive trusting look about my face do you know what I mean I was yeah yeah and then I remember on my first day this

really ugly kid fronting up to me in registration on my first day before the teacher arrived and the whole class egging him on. And I just thought, what kind of fucking snake pit am I in here? You know, another time I was sitting down in the yard eating my packed lunch, which was probably processed sliced chicken sandwiches

and lukewarm orange squash from a plastic flask. Or if I had a bit of money on me, maybe a can of Top Deck Shandy. Oh, of course. Yeah, yeah, I thought I was right hard with that. And I was sitting there and someone ran past and stamped on my ankle and I asked up the doctor. So, yeah, so this is the kind of shit that was going on. The school itself was this kind of

Massive, inhuman, uncaring machine A bit like the fucking Pink Floyd Another brick in the wall The teacher's job wasn't so much teaching As crowd control The school existed to kind of warehouse you During the day And maybe churn you out

As an employable worker drone for one of the local industries later on um woodwork and metal work were compulsory and i remember one kid severing his finger with a lathe in metal work and spending the rest of the year with his hand in this kind of claw-like contraption while it healed and even walking home from school every day you felt like you might get murdered there's this kind of there's this kind of lawlessness i think when when you're that age there's there's this lawlessness it's kind of interregnum where the the rules don't apply if you're 13 and you're walking down the street and someone punches you right grown-ups aren't going to intervene because

it's just kid stuff it's kid stuff to them. You have no recourse. Your parents aren't there. The teachers aren't there. And the police wouldn't care. They just drive on by. So, and in a weird way, this is why the mood of the first specials album and loads of two-tone music really resonate with me. That kind of... Concrete jungle.

That kind of, yeah, broken bottles, concrete jungle. You're going to get your fucking head kicked in. Kind of edge that music had. It's like, well, yeah, fucking hell. That's how life feels to me right now and um yeah by christmas i'd had my wavy ginger hair cut down to a a rude boy suede head and uh i'd had my slightly flary school trousers taken into drain pipe with and i was going everywhere in a harrington covered in scar badges um partly because that that was what i was into but also i guess it had the side effect of making me less of a target.

I mean, things improved for me later on, but this was a bit of a bleak time. The only things that kept me going were my record collection, my dog, we just got a new Spaniel puppy, and Liverpool FC. I lived for Top of the Pops and Match of the Day and the weekends when I could go out and kick a football around with the one mate I did have who lived next door. So, you know, again, going back to that article that David Hepworth wrote, it's all very well him saying that, but to some of us out there,

we fucking needed it. You're right, Simon, about tactics that you have to use to make yourself less of a target. I mean, I was a year into wearing glasses and i know wearing glasses seems like a little thing but mine were you know horrible big yeah there were nhs specs and and uh i'd had them for a year i'd had a lot of bullying about it um as a tactic i changed my specs to a like round john lennon type glasses, thinking this would make me look less of a target. But actually, I just kind of look like a young Jacob Rees-Mogg.

So it just made it happen even more. Because you know what you were saying about metalwork somewhere. This would have been the time that my mate, Danny Brader, got done at school when it was discovered that he'd spent all his time for an entire term making Death Stars and selling them on. Chinese stars were so big. Yeah, and he flogged them to everyone. So, yeah, there was a lot of flinging of Death Stars into trees and youths at this time. Summer of Chinese Death Stars. They were so

popular. And as a kid, you could just go buy them. Exchange and Mart, I remember, in Cofftown Centre, you could just go and buy crossbows and shit like that. Nunchucks were big as well, weren't they? Yeah, they were. But it's interesting, Simon's story about his mate getting his finger severed, I bet that precise

story was used for the subsequent decade by that teacher as you know don't do that otherwise you'll get your finger chopped off much as our PE teacher we actually have javelins at our school and we used to have to do shit like that and of course there was the inevitable story about somebody getting a javelin through their

neck like the omen that vicar there's a lightning strike yeah it would have been around about this time that I got hit in the shoulder when some youths were

playing cricket with a dart yeah just kind of like lobbing the dart at the cricket bat the bloke hit it the lad hit it Yeah, yeah. Just kind of like lobbing the dart at the cricket bat. Ouch. The bloke, you know, hit it. The lad hit it. And I was just walking by, it went into my shoulder.

Ouch. And I just pulled it out and gave it back to him and carried on about my business. Fucking hell, you're nails out. I didn't think about getting a tetanus injection or anything. That fucking dart could have been anywhere. That's how rock hard you are. You're like Sylvester Stallone in Rambo 3

when he has to sort of do his own surgery after a bullet wound. By the by, the worst school injury I ever got was a few years previous to this. I was a little kid. I was walking around the playground and we had a school bell that the teacher used to ring. You know, a hand bell. And I sort of walked under.

Proper police business. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I walked under where this teacher was ringing the bell and she just cracked it on top of walked under. Proper police business. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I walked under where this teacher was ringing the bell, and she just cracked it on top of my skull. Oh! Bit my head open. I just have vague sort of dreamlike images of me being dragged up a corridor with blood pissing out my head.

And, yeah, next stop, hospital. And a ringing sound in your ears. Next stop, hospital. And then a couple of weeks weeks later get my stitches out happy days oh well this time i know exactly what i was uh preparing to do on this very night uh because i it was uh it was the night of our school christmas disco oh so yeah so this is this is this is preparation time for that so i would have been picking out what tie to wear. You know, do I have the skinny black jam one

or do I have the black and white checked one I just bought that previous week? Yes, the black and white one, I believe. And that would have teamed quite nicely with my brown corduroy jacket with specials and madness patches on it. And a clankening of jam badges down one side and uh the clankening is a great word for it and the final touch would have been my madness comb in the back pocket of my

non-flared jeans a madness comb yeah yeah there was a shop in uh in the market in town called pendulum records and it just had a huge bank of badges and that was that was one place you had to go yeah yeah to see to check out the new badges badges were so important yeah massively massively so uh maybe about this time I may have just bought a metal jam badge because I was always you know I was I was dead against gre, you know, I was really envious that all their badges were metal and they had a kind of like a little spike at the back of them that clipped in. Yeah, they had a jam one, which was the jam aerosol logo on a brick wall. So, yeah, that would have been the centrepiece of my badge collection.

Yeah. But they also sold combs inside like like a pvc holder with a band logo on it so i had the madness one that's amazing i i really want one of those now but it wouldn't be a lot of use to me in my current no literally two bald men fighting over a cone yeah well if if they did a madness ear and nose clipper, I'd be very interested in that. The badge shop in Coventry was called Poster Place, and it was under the Coverpolo or Hippodrome theatre. Yeah, it was a vital part of the route round town, not just the record shops, but the badge shop.

I mean, you just had to go there for stickers and badges and things like that. And I think there comes an age, doesn't there, later on, because I was always massively into band T-shirts and stuff like that. But I think there comes an age where, there later on because i was always massively in a band t-shirts and stuff like that yeah but i think there comes an age where i i don't know uh should there be an age where you stop wearing band t-shirts because i kind of just never never okay i'll bear that in mind because i've still got a load and i don't wear them that often no neil don't don't let it go man no i won't i've got a lovely princess superstar one that says fuck off I want princess superstar on it

that I think I'll wear to my kids next parents evening yeah I've got loads of banned t-shirts but the size I am these days

I don't look great in them but it's great hearing you use the word clankening about badges because that is so accurate to how I was

at that age I didn't understand the concept of less is more at all more is more there was. More is more. There was a shop in Cardiff in one of the arcades called Oriental Arts

which funny enough was also the place that sold nunchucks and Death Stars and all that. But it's where you got your badges from and every weekend I just Why didn't they do banned Death Stars? For fuck's sake that would have been the perfect thing. Wu-Tang. They should have been on there. Well no, back then then, you know, a madness, modness, death style.

Yeah, and I remember when I upgraded from a Harrington to a flying jacket. Oh, yes. Yeah, I just covered the entire front of that with badges in such a way that I did make a sort of chain mail sound when I walked along. And it was so uncool when I think about it. I'm a bit more minimal these days, so I've got my Harrington. Well, I've got a new Harrington and I've got one badge on it, just one badge. And it's a plastic cutout of Walt Jabsco.

Ready should have a massive badge with a photo of all your other badges. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what else was on telly tonight well bbc one doesn't start until 12 45 with the news then it's pebble mill at one and mr ben they shut down at two o'clock for two hours until roaring back with play school touche turkle hyder and john craven's news round then simon groom sarah green and peter duncan show you how to make a christmas card Hyde and John Craven's News Round. Then Simon Groom, Sarah Green and Peter Duncan show you how to make a Christmas card hanger on Blue Peter. Then Jonathan Price reads the hounds of fate in Spine Chillers.

Then it's the news, regional news in your area, nationwide and we've just sat through a demonstration of last minute Christmas gifts including a car you can sail in on Tomorrow's World. So that's actually the legendary Blue Peter that always comes up on clip shows where they show them making a Christmas decoration out of coat hangers and tinsel. No, I think that's the Christmas

wreath or something like that. Oh, okay. With tinsel around it. I'm probably guessing the Christmas card hanger was more coat hanger. They were well into the coat hangers as well. They were. And the coat hangers, weren't they? And also, just flashbacks. You mentioned Heidi. Fucking Heidi, man.

What a shit show. Who was that for? Christ, no one liked that. No one liked Heidi. Fuck off, Heidi. It was one of those European shows they just bought in in bulk for about 10p, I think. Like White Castles and White Horses, rather. BBC Two begins at 11 with Play School,

then shuts down for over six hours before coming back with a Laurel and Hardy short. Fucking hell, man. Surely they could have put in, you know, seven fucking house-buying programmes like they do nowadays. Then it's the last of the present series of Grange Hill. Then a look at some medals from the Napoleonic Wars in the documentary series for Valor 100 great paintings

the news and they're currently half an hour into the Doris Day film Caprice. Neil Grange Hill, me and Simon have discussed it in the bonus podcast. Your thoughts on that show. Well I love that show and actually I knew kids posh enough that their parents

wouldn't let them watch grange hill for fear of its effects on them um i loved grange hill from the off um and all of those characters mean so much to me um so i mean because and the teachers crucially because you could find your own analogues in your own teaching staff at your school yeah um with the ones you know in grand jill so that we had our own kind of bridget the midget and we had our own um baxter and you know that they were it was a really well done show because really it preachy though it might have been sometimes it was very much like school was at that time yeah before it got all daft and before we got you know campaigns for radio stations and shit like that. But for that first few years,

it was like watching your own school on telly. It was great. ITV starts at half nine with Flashback, Batman, Fangface, Roger Whittaker in concert, Sesame Street, Roger Whittaker in concert? What's that doing there?

Wow. For fuck's sake. Sesame Street, Gideon, Stepping Stones, The Riordans, News at One, Regional News in Your Area, Armchair Thriller, Afternoon Plus,

Charm, a play about a charm school featuring Max Wall. For fuck's sake. Friends of My Friends, a short film about two paper lads from venezuela what yeah oh i hope they did a panpipe version of the paper lads theme university challenge the news at 5 45 crossroads regional news in your area, and they've just started a festive Emmerdale farm. Oh, lovely.

I mean, surreal though all that is, the actual most bizarre programme in all that lot, it was Gideon. Yes. What was that? I've never heard of it. It was just another weird fucking cartoon, this five-minute window into insanity. It was a French cartoon,

and it was done over here by Timbrook Taylor, wasn't it? Yeah, that's right. But it was as odd as Ludwig. It was bizarre. Right, yeah, because I never watched ITV, I hardly ever watched ITV, because my mum didn't like it, and I agree with her. So

I might have missed out on some amazing stuff. Yeah, I saw an episode of Gideon the other day. And him and his mates were in a forest or whatever. And all of a sudden a ferret comes out and jumps on a rabbit's throat and kills it. I mean, you don't see any blood or anything, but you know it's dead. So yeah, Gideon and his mates decide to get their own back. And they get a big length of pipe.

And they bait it with a bit of meat. And they stick it in the lake. And they trap the ferret in it and the ferret kind of drowns and his corpse gets dragged out the river by a fisherman and then gideon does his happy dance and song you know that theme tune that really gloopy theme tune that made kids cry for no reason and they couldn't understand why well those shows were depressing remember that that Little Mole show? That was really depressing. That Czechoslovakian cartoon about a little mole and his friends.

And it was always... It just left me upset as a child. I don't know whether that was their intention, but it certainly did. Armchair Thriller, I did watch that. And just you mentioning Armchair Thriller there has made me think I'm going to fucking go out there and download as many Armchair Thrillers as I can.

That was brilliant. That and Tales of the Unexpected, two sides of the same coin. And Hammer House of Horror, I've already got a box set of that. Loved those shows. Armchair Thriller was the one where they had, it might have been the opening credits, but there was definitely a still that they used to advertise it. An armchair with a big mouth. It just fucking scared the shit out of me back in those

days man yeah we were brutalized as kids weren't we we were i remember one time there was uh it might have been stepping stones or something like that or or or some kids program of that elk where uh they talked about being sad and about what made us sad and at the end they showed drawings done by kids about what makes them sad and the last one they showed was uh this kind of like stick lad standing on the end of the road uh and his cat about to be knocked down by a massive car and and the kid wrote oh no fluffy please don't die, I love you. And that just upset me for weeks afterwards, man. Someone's done a book about this, hasn't they?

There's a book called Scarred for Life. I can't remember the author, but it's all about this stuff. It's very much on my Christmas wish list. There was no intention back then to make kids hopeful, really, about their futures. The intention was to bracingly make them aware of just how grim and shit life was

yeah and also trained to do metal work even if they lose a digit in doing it that's all you're that's all you're good for

is being scared and making stuff out of metal yeah yeah yeah but kids today they're just fucking lied to man

you know they're all if one dog's really ill or in danger, a load of other dogs will get in a fucking helicopter and rescue it. What fucking bullshit? Well, the message now is be yourself and you'll be okay. Whereas the message then was... As long as you buy shit. Yeah.

Whereas the message then was be yourself, it'll end badly. Yeah. I remember one of my... Be yourself as long as you be like everyone else. Exactly. buy shit yeah yeah whereas the message then was be yourself it'll end badly yeah yeah i remember um one of our yourself as long as you be like everyone else exactly i remember one of our head teachers um when he was just trying to control us rather than say quiet down he'd say conform conform i'm gonna start using that in the classroom tomorrow. All right, then, Pop Craze youngsters. It is finally time to go back to December of 1980. Always remember, we may coat down your favourite band or artist,

but we never forget, they've been on top of the pops more than we have. Right, hello, welcome to Top of the Pops more than we have. Hello, welcome to Top of the Pops. It's going to be a great night because we've got some great live acts for you. We've got Gary Newman and we've got Stacksmore because it's the last Christmas Top of the Pops before the Christmas Top of the Pops, if you see what I mean. The show opens with the camera dollying back on the kids,

lobbing balloons about and wearing dunce caps, cardboard pirate hats and other assorted Christmas cracker head joy, as Runaway Boy by the Stray Cats blares out, finally revealing a gantry occupied by three girls in Top of the Pops t-shirts And tonight's host, Simon Bates. Oh, Simes, if you will. I think it's safe to say that out of all the chart musics we've done so far, and this is number 35, I think Bates has been in more shows than anyone else. I'd say, yeah. He just won't go away.

He's a safe pair of hands, you see. He is. I've said before he's good safe pair of hands, you see. He is. I've said before he's good at kind of coasting things along and being able to laugh at things that transparently aren't funny. Which he does right away in this episode. He chuckles when one of the girls puts a licorice or a salt hat on. Yes. As if, you know, it's kind of,

hey, this crazy party could go anywhere. And the night is young. But he's not. He's a safe pair of hands no unscripted initial links i think which he balls the balls is up yeah but i was most annoyed why do those girls get those excellent totp t-shirts yes i know i know this is still a couple of years before they start selling them officially you know from a from a warehouse in long eaton as i discovered the other day at this time simon bakes is still in the post breakfast he's still doing post breakfast uh you know he's

not leaving there either uh and he's doing at the moment he's doing the golden hour after dave lee travis but instead of his usual two hour stint he hands off to andy peebles at half past 10 and then has to hang around until half past two for the second half of his show where he takes over from Peebles and then passes the baton to Peter Powell at half past three. You know, is that wise really? Knowing what we know about Simon Bates

and how he spends loads of his time sitting in the studio ringing up people and bitching about things. Passing on the gossip he is the pig wanker in chief let's not forget that yes he is

I don't know if there's any urban farms around the top end of Regents where he could go and you know amuse himself for half an hour

what a weird schedule that is though it is bizarre isn't it so there he is in his fucking Chas and Dave badge he reminds me

of the teachers at the comp, actually, at the school. The worst ones, that is. And that's why I hated him, I think. Well, yeah. I mean, we've said this before about not only him, but about Skinner and various others. But if there are any photos in existence of Simon Bates as a child or a teenager, they're fake news.

Because he has never been young. He was born a teacher. And he made Top of the Pops feel like double maths on a Wednesday afternoon. I hate him. Even though he hasn't gone UKIP, as far as I know, and he hasn't been implicated in any Utrecht shenanigans, I just hate his presence on these shows to this day.

He isn't even, right, he isn't even a monster like dlt which at least holds some sort of grotesque fascination that how can somebody be so bestial as dlt but he has this aggressive mundanity which he is going to impose on you without consent it's the same as his presence on Radio 1 throughout my youth. The breakfast show on Radio 1 was usually quite a fun show, whoever was doing it. And the lunchtime and the mid-afternoon shows were fun too. But Bates came in mid-morning with this air of, okay, now that's enough messing about,

we're going to be sensible for two hours. Even the way, way right he interrupts runaway boys by the stray cats here which is literally a record about youth delinquency with his school masterly presence is a buzzkill fuck off baits i mean we always hammer home the teacherly air around baits but in this one in particular the way the studio's laid out it does look like he's drawn the short straw to supervise the school disco, isn't it? Yeah.

And he's standing on the gantry on a constant search for snoggers and lads with crisp bags full of glue. Ready to throw a board rubber. Yeah, basically doing all the things the Stray Cats are singing about in Runaway Boys. So, by the way, that sort of intro to the show, was this a short-lived gimmick of having a song playing? Yes, it is.

We sort of just fade into a song that's already playing and the presenter starts chattering away. This is the No Man's Land area between Whole Lotta Love and Yellow Pearl. It's the perineum, yeah. Yes. The first link, he is joined by those three girls in the Top of the Pops t-shirts but what caught my eye wasn't just the t-shirts but the fact they're wearing high-waisted jeans

and they've got long, blank hair so never mind the 80s, for some people it was still the 70s straight up. It may have been, by now Those jeans are very straight-legged. No, they're very 70s, though. The high-waistedness, that's such a 70s thing.

They're disco jeans. It may have been the 80s for a whole year, but for plenty of... I mean, plenty of people hadn't got the memo. A bit like me, I suppose, pre-Sway's head, just a month or two earlier. Yeah, but they would have been very, very straight-legged jeans. Yeah.

We'll also have the top three selling records of Britain today, and to kick us off with, here's the beat. Over there. Very, very straight-legged jeans. Yeah. We'll also have the top three selling records of Britain today. And to kick us off with, here's the beat. Over there. As Bates, in a suit with a badge featuring three rabbits in a speech bubble on the lapel, lays out the fare for tonight, including Gary Newman and the whole of the top three, his young friends start showing off. The one on the left pulls assorted faces and does a really shit rabbit ears on her mate while the one on the right plonks a pink and yellow fez on Bates' head

as he introduces Too Nice To Talk To by The Beat. We've already covered The Beat in Chart Music 15 and this is the follow-up to the single we covered then, Best Friend, which only got to number 22 in September of this year, breaking their streak of three consecutive top tens in 1980. It's a stopgap single between the LPs, I Just Can't Stop It and Wappen. And according to Dave Wakelin, it's based on his experiences of being too shy to pull in the Birmingham nightclub Barbarella's. And it's a new entry in the top 40 this week, up 19 places from number 50 to number 31.

Well, let's have Neil in first. We've licked the bollocks of the beat a bit too much. Well, I mean, I know Price is such a massive beat fan. I was hoping Price would say a lot. It's interesting you say Barbarella's, though, Al. I genuinely haven't thought of that place for a while. Reason being... You've never been?

I've never been. I mean, no, I've never been. I didn't really go clubbing in Birmingham much. But my wife at the time was bunking off school and going to Birmingham a lot. And places like Barbarella's were where she would end up. She used to tell me stories of... Well, Nick Rhodes was her boyfriend for about

four months Nick Rhodes a young Nick Rhodes this is pre-Duran fame although Duran were going was her boyfriend and Barbarella's was a place yeah absolutely

Barbarella's was a place that shebara yeah absolutely barbara ellis was um a place that she mentioned the winter of 1980 there's so much when you look at the chart there's so much two-tone related stuff going on it's everywhere um specials madness the beat this record i love the beat i have to say and this is a great fucking record and as with most stuff by the Beat, for me, it's actually not really that placeable in two-tone. For me, it sounds more like a kind of just a really great post-punk record in a way. It's not a million miles away from things that the pop group were doing for far more critical acclaim elsewhere. Obviously, the most important Beat record around my house

was Mirror in the Bathroom because of my sister's name. So I could sing this at her just to irritate her. But yeah, I love the beat. I love this record. It's a great performance. the beat are in that really interesting place where I think without Ranking Roger and without Saxa I don't think there'd have been a ska band in a sense or associated with Two Tone

the rhythms behind it and the way the song is written it's more of a kind of it's like very very poppy post-punk music come on Simon where does this stand in the canon of beat singles for you? it might be their greatest single, actually. Yeah, I definitely believe it's a bit of a return to form after Best Friend.

Oh, I love Best Friend, but yeah, this is something special. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nothing against that song, but this is far superior to my mind. I mean, what I loved about the beat was, first and foremost, that they were a dance band. I always tend to compare them to an overwhelmed clockwork toy. They were sharp as fuck, and they had this kind of fidgety, uptight energy to them.

It's no coincidence that the logo for their label, Go Feet, was a diagram of dance steps. But secondly, what I loved about them was they didn't just sing about the standard two-tone subjects of unemployment, racism racism and nuclear war um they had an inner life they sang about paranoia and alienation and introversion and repression and being shit with yeah sexual frustration totally and this song has a lot of that going on um the lyrics um emotions are guarded my heart is retarded it's a great line um so is the couplet

this evening hasn't gone like I planned. Should I take the situation in hand? Which I take as a little doublant tarnter about wanking there. I think Laura's singing that, to be honest. I mean, the song's essentially about him being in a club and being absolutely terrified

of saying the wrong thing to a woman that he fancies. Such as, Margaret Thatcher came from Nottingham, don't you know? I won't forgive you for that, Wakeling. What this record also shows, and Neil is absolutely spot on with his observation there, is that the Beat weren't just a ska band.

I mean, for me, this shows they were a great funk band. Too Nice To Talk To doesn't belong with the ska records of the time. The records that exist alongside this, for me, are Chant No. 1, Favourite Shirts, Tears Are Not Enough, Papa's Got A Brand New Pig Bag, and Precious. It's an absolutely blistering piece of new wave funk noir. It's just irresistible I'm amazed it only got to number seven

it was as you say a non-album single a stopgap so there was every motivation for the fans to buy it but it was also it was a bit of misdirection because the second album Wappen wasn't anything like this that album was much more kind of relaxed and reggae flavoured which is kind of interesting

they went that way but it's just a stunning record and when i'm when i'm djing um do my 80s sets i chuck that in it's it just never fails yeah you know gets the floor going if this was played to me um and i didn't know who's by or what time it was from i'd say wow you can really hear the fine young cannibals influence because because yeah divorced a vocal that background i mean it is finding kind of was never this good but it's got that exact bubbly funky sound that they later got yeah for obvious reasons yeah yeah and of course you know wakelin's dressed as a russian soldier with uh with a matching furry hat and a red star badge next to a CND one

on his balalaika shaped guitar. Yeah and I noticed this the CND badge next to the hammer and sickle which would doubtless have had the more right wing viewers spluttering with rage saying so you want to disarm and then let the Russians invade do you?

Yeah but those things co-existed in a lot of places. I mean, I was heavily influenced by my sister and I remember her, her like pencil case had the hammer and sickle and the CND thing next to it. And I remember when I ended up getting pencil cases in rough books, I would unthinkingly write CCCP on it. As if I, you know, as if Brezhnev was my best mate

or something, but just being on that side meant something in a way it was a statement offensive that probably would be these days it won't surprise anyone to know that I was very much that way myself I'm a little bit more unrepentant than Sir Mabelle

and there would have been some Muslim families if they did have Top of the Pops on you know, tutting. You know, the Muslim version of Seven Days Jankers would be very irate about that, seeing as they're in Afghanistan, and have been for a year. That's true, yeah. He looks amazing, though, as does Ranking Roger. I don't know if any band has ever had a more handsome front duo than The Beat at this point in time

but of course the kids let it down don't they because you expect them to be just skanking away like bastards but the main takeaway I got was right off to the side there were two girls with dyed blonde hair and they're standing at the front and they're just fucking gassing at each other

talking to each other about fucking lads and discos and what they bought in Chelsea Girl last weekend, no doubt. In Dave's case, he's too nice to interrupt their fucking jibber jabber. It's like, shut up the fucking beat,

for fuck's sake. What's wrong with you? I hear, although I can't really confirm it, because I don't go to popular music concerts much anymore, that this kind of activity goes on at gigs to a huge degree these days. Oh, it's worse now, yeah.

Yeah, all because of Top of the Pops. The repeats of Top of the Pops. These youths obviously looked at Top of the Pops and just thought, oh, that's what you do at gigs then. You just gas on. It's disgusting. The thing is, at least we get to see the crowd to a certain extent the thing i did like about the crowd was that bit at the beginning of this when the stray cats thing has faded out and and you get to see

the crowd move to the stage they're ushered yes towards the stage and they have to do that walk which is exactly like when a band starts and you go see them live and everyone gets to the front so i like that bit but from then on yeah um yeah are we going to talk about the little prank that um the beat played on top of the pops here oh please do well do you notice he's on bass in this performance yes horace panter from the specials exactly yes and we'll see the reciprocal mirror image of that a little bit later on yeah and right at the end a nice touch here the camera kind of like swoops backwards and up and like it hides behind the top of a massive christmas tree so you know you you get to see the you get to see the beat from the viewpoint of a cat yeah

but i think that yeah i think you're right al in that the beat are ill served by the audience here because it's it's a barnstorming opening to the show it's such a fucking great record it's a great opening record but the crowd don't really reciprocate their loss enjoy what's coming next so the following

week Too Nice To Talk To jumped 8 places to number 23 where it stayed for 2 weeks due to the Christmas break then it surged back up the charts and eventually got to number seven for two weeks in January of 1981 the follow-up the double a side drowning slash all out to get you would only get to number two in May of 1981 and they'd have to wait until May of 1983 for their next and last top 10 hit, their cover of Can't Get Used to Losing You,

which got to number three and they split up a few months later. They'd already recorded Can't Get Used to Losing You, hadn't they? Yeah. It was on the album. It was on the first album. Why did they sit on that? It was just because they had Best Of coming out

and they whacked that out as a single to promote it. Because that might have been a bit more suitable for this time of year, maybe. Yeah, it was his dad who told him to release it, actually. Really? Yeah, yeah. It was Dave Wakeland's dad who said, you know what you should do? You should record that. And he couldn't say he can't get loose to using you, because everybody struggles with that title.

But, yeah, yeah. You know that Andy Williams one. And they did, and lo and behold, it turned out to be right too nice to talk to too nice to talk to too nice to talk to too nice to talk to too nice

too nice to talk to that's the beat. Now, there's one more BBC Top 40 that's coming out before the end of Christmas, or the start of Christmas, and the new number one might just be this. It's St. Winifred School and the song about Granny. Thank you. Grandma, we love you Grandma, we do Though you may be far away

We think of you There's no one quite like Grandma And I know you will agree She always is a friend to you And she's a friend to me Oh, fucking hell, here we go. Alright, chaps, let us prepare ourselves to be the world's podcast authority on the St. Winifred School Choir.

Bates, on his own, tells us that there's one more chart before Christmas, and this could be its number one single. There's No One Quite Like Grandma by St. Winifred School. Actually, Simon, it's the St. Winifred School Choir. Wouldn't be the entire school. Your studio's not that big. You twat. Formed in Stockport in 1972 by members of

a Catholic junior school under the management team of headmistress Sister Aquinas and music teacher Terry Foley, the St. Winifred School Choir released the EP Come Love Caroling on an independent label in 1974. They went through myriad line-up changes before hooking up with Brian and Michael on the posse cut Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs, which got to number one for three weeks in

April of 1978. This led to them signing to Music for Pleasure, EMI's budget label, and releasing the double A side Bread and Fishers slash And All the World Sang in November of 1979, but the world wasn't ready for them yet. Then, earlier this year, Gordon Lorentz, a former travelling evangelist who became a musician and was currently working at Border Television recording fill-in music for their daytime shows, passed on a song he had written to commemorate the Queen Mother's 80th birthday and sent it to the managing director of EMI, who originally knocked it back. Then he changed his mind a few weeks later when he realized the song had burrowed into his skull so instead of getting prince charles and his fuckwit siblings to sing it they called in

st winifred school choir and they put it out just in time for christmas people in their 120s today still talk about the first time they saw the st. Winifred School Choir on top of the pops and how they subverted the original royalist propaganda and honed the song down into a shotgun of affection discharged straight into the face of your gran. It stayed where it was last week at number two and was poised to take its rightful position at number one before Mark Chapman had a

cob on with John Lennon. So here's a repeat of their performance two weeks ago, mob-handed in the studio, to take back what is rightfully theirs. St Winifred was a 7th century Welsh saint

who was beatified for running her nun onto the bingo and nipping out to spa for her when she was badly actually no she was actually decapitated by her fiance when she decided to become a nun and her uncle put her head back on and she came back to life and her fiance

died on the spot and she is the patron saint of unwanted advances. Oh, how up for Top of the Pulse. That's the kind of stuff that happens in Wales every week. Yeah, yeah. Well, Jesus. This is Christmas.

Yeah, and it's the only 80s Xmas single, I think, until Mistletoe and Wine, to be aimed squarely at the kind of people who really only buy singles at christmas um but it's an odd one for me because it's a reminder of how grandparents grandma and granddad they were constructs for me i never knew my grandparents they were in india so they were kind of for other people in a sense so never really seen or remembered i think i saw them when i was about a few months old

but only really cognizant of my grandparents when they passed on and my parents got upset i never knew them so but i did know even at the age of eight that from what little i knew about other people's grandparents um i was aware that most grandmas would much prefer a 40 senior service or a large bottle of Harvest Bristol cream for Christmas than this fucking single. Not only because it's a horrific song, but because its portrayal of the titular grandma in its title is so withered and pathetic.

At least in Grandpa by Clive Dunn, you have the sense of a life lived. You know, a life that remembered where motor cars were funny things frightening this song really portrays grandmas as nothing but a kind of reader of books an offerer of love

someone who's around at parties and at Christmas and that's about it it's kind of debatable as to whether Imagine by John Lennon is worse than this song both of them keeping Stop the Cavalry off the top spot. But what a horrible six weeks this crowns in the charts. Because previous to this, I think you've got...

It's Kelly Rogers, isn't it? Before. Coward of the County. Yeah, and it's just... It's a fucking horrible record. Children's Choirs on Pop Records really only work, I think, perhaps on Abba I Have A Dream

and Keith West's Grocer Jack and if you go in more underground The Langley Schools Project from 76 or 77. But I remember distinctly this performance. Repeat though it is on this episode. I remember watching it and just sitting there and saying hate you hate you, hate you, hate

you. With any kid being too fucking smiley and some of them are being too fucking smiling and i also remember hating the clunkiness of that line to us a book she'll read yeah kind of fucking yoda type shit i've always hated and i remember realizing perhaps for the first time in my pop experience that beyond faces, beyond sounds, a key change could be irritating in itself. So yeah, I've got nothing but

bad memories of this record. I just can't believe that a DJ, a mashup DJ, hasn't made yet, as far as I'm aware, there's no one quite like Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five yet but i'm sure that will happen i might leave that to pricey but yeah and also i mean just with just with this performance

it really doesn't help that that massive black and white shot of this supposed grandma in the background well there's loads of different nans isn't there yeah they're um they're by this time the top of the pops has brought back the big screen at the back like they had in the early 70s and uh you know for this occasion they've got a they've got a uh a melange of nans who basically it comes across as a kind of slideshow of harold shipman victims basically it's not it's not great first thing that crossed my mind when i saw that was me i just immediately thought all those nans are dead now yeah yeah yeah and also that i mean the way they've done it because it's in stark

black and white isn't it it just makes you wonder where did they get them those images from yeah all we know that could be a documentary about elderly poverty from man alive in 1972 or something but because it's in black and white and all the lads have got these weird false teethy smiles on, they do look over the choir like benevolent dictators, don't they? Yeah.

And it is a bit North Korea or Granache. There is a bit of that. The only thing I'm pleased about is that I don't actually remember the records that this inspired because next year I think you get My Mummy is One in a Million

by the children of Tansley School and I don't remember a thing about that and I'm going to attempt to keep it that way Neil, it must be stressed that you're the same age as these kids and 8 year old kids hate to see other eight-year-old kids. Absolutely, yeah.

And especially when they're being vaguely competent with it as well, and they're kind of smiling and performing. It's just vile. And I think most people hated this record. Most people, you know, sang dirty or rude versions of it. And most people in particular, when you're a kid, this bullying mentality comes out. I just really fucking hated that girl, that lead singer girl.

Dawn Ralph, yeah, yeah. That's right. I just remember despising her in particular. And also, right, these kids, to be fair to them, they were going to a Catholic school in Stockport in the 70s and 80s at a school where all the teachers were called Sister This and Sister That. I've got a friend, Hay John Tatlock, who went to a school a bit like that, I think, in St Helens,

also in the northwest of England. And from what I hear about what those schools were like, Catholic-run schools in the west of England at that time fucking hell my heart goes out to them really so they probably had a pretty grim life apart from their brief moment of fame on top of the pops so you know fair play guys

well imagine going to a school like that and not being in the choir oh man we bang on about how much we hated them what about them kids the thing is Catholic schools are still a bit nutty because there's one near me and every now and then you do see you know those days when they get married to jesus or whatever confirmation days or something you do see them going up the street with wedding dresses on and stuff and it's still

a bit nuts it's designed to just vex and irritate children this record but vex and irritate anyone you know a smart record to release in as much as you'll find enough saps to buy it at Christmas for their grandma

because they can't really think of anything else yeah a very bad time to be the owner of a bath salts factory in 1980 wasn't it you were fucked that year

but I defy anyone to find a single redeeming quality about this record it's fucking awful yeah i mean you might think that no one hates a successful eight-year-old more than another eight-year-old but you'd be wrong because actually a young teenager hates an eight-year-old more than anyone else um i mean yeah dawn ralph um i despised her. And this seems like a terrible thing to say because I'm sure she grew up to be a perfectly nice woman.

She never sought fame. She didn't want to be famous. No. But at the time, she made me feel physically sick. Oh, come on now. I've got to take up for Dawn here, man. She's no little Jimmy Osmond. Imagine jimmy osmond had done this well obviously that that would have been yeah that'd been horrific as well but what we get here is the camera zooming in on her

toothless lisping mouth which right here's the thing i'm childless right i'm not sentimental about kids i don't have the cute gene i don't have that thing that i you know where you find children immediately adorable um in some ways i feel that makes me un-british because i think it's a really british thing just to just sort of the default thing is that you find children adorable but i was a teenager and there's nothing more revolting to a teenager than younger children they're just kind of old clammy and slimy and horrible

they're just revolting it's a reminder of the primordial goo that you've somehow crawled out of that you've hauled yourself from that you've evolved you've become something else but they're this thing this horrible reminder over your shoulder of what you were not that long ago and um yeah and i i wondered who was buying it obviously

um you know you're saying it was a big christmas present that year and presumably you can't be wrong about that but um like neil says my nan um would have preferred a packet of fags no doubt about it i had two living grandparents at that time i I had my nan on my dad's side and my granddad on my mum's side. And, yeah, neither one of them would have wanted a record like this bought for them. I wondered whether grandmas were buying it for themselves to kind of assuage their loneliness and the neglect. They'd rather be visited, probably, by their grandchildren, but instead

they switch on the radio and there's this horrible reminder of everything that their own grandchildren are probably not. Their own grandchildren are probably out riding BMX bikes and can't be arsed going to see them. Oh, not in 1980. It would be, do you know where your lad is tonight? Smash!

Yeah. So, I mean, that's the record itself. And we do need to talk about Gordon Lorenz, who wrote it. Oh, yes, yes, yes. But before we do, Simon, you know, I mean, you have touched on a point there because I've sowed my seed and reaped no harvest as well.

And, you know, no choir of kids in 20 years' time is going to sing, childless best friend of my dad, we love you. No, and I'll take that. I'll take that on the chin, you know what I mean? That's fine. I mean, as somebody who has sowed my wild oats, as it were. As a grandparent, Neil, no less.

As a grandparent, I still find this fucking repulsive, and I'm sure most of my kids and grandkids would too. So, you know, it's selling a false thing. The only thing we should be grateful for really is that they were signed to Music for Pleasure because any album that they would then bring out, Winifred's school choir, wouldn't get in the charts. Music for Pleasure had this habit of sticking doggedly

to their maximum dealer price of 99p, which meant that they were ineligible for the charts. So if they did come out with an album after this, it wouldn't have gotten the charts which I suppose we should be grateful for. You're both right that grandmothers aren't like I mean just the way that grandmothers are described in that song it's basically

the nannas who knit shredded wheat in the advert isn't it right? Yeah. Partly this is a cultural shift and a generational thing but I've got friends who are grandparents now, and they're out having it large all the time, you know. Yeah.

You know. Oh, God, yeah. I remember having this one-night stand about 15 years ago and feeling very pleased with myself in the post-coital haze. And then a mobile rings, and she answers it and then her mobile rings and she answers it and then puts it down and said, oh, I've just become a grandparent. It's like...

And you thought, wow, that was some super sperm I was busting out there. Yes, yes. My experience of what people tell me about their grandmas now, I mean, they could redo this song as there's no one quite as racist as grandma. But that's your only option, really, isn't it?

Yeah. Towards an argument for Brexit, she'll spurt. They had previous, of course, this lot. They were on Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs with a different line-up. But you're talking about choirs in songs, children's choirs. One I would say that works for me is Wizard,

which could be Christmas Every Day. Oh, yeah. That one works. Because they are the most Birmingham kids ever, aren't they? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But in terms of what this inspired, do you remember It's Horrible Being In Love When You're Eight and a Half by Claire and Friends?

That was probably the main kind of after effect Of this in terms of charts Yeah I mean In Eurovision you know You know if your song's a load of cat shit You just get a load of kids in don't you I mean for the actual performance They're standing under the screen

And you know the girls are in pink cardis Over pink patterned dresses And the boys are in grey slacks Blue v-neck jumpers White shirts and red ties The girls are in pink cardis over pink pattern dresses and the boys are in grey slacks, blue v-neck jumpers, white shirts and red ties. Apart from the boys being dressed up like they're about to go on fucking a question of sport, they actually do look like kids.

You've got to give that to them. Eight-year-olds back in 1980 looked like eight-year-olds. You see kids nowadays, and they've always been made cool by their parents. Yeah, and also, if this was America, the girls would be dressed as prostitutes. Because Americans were even weirder about children

than British people. Oh, God, yeah. Dawn, you've got to give it up to her. She's not... I mean, she's got that bendy note thing going on. And we know you like what the kids do, which always gets on your tits. The thing is, I don't think she's been chosen

as the front person or the front kid for the quality of her voice. It's her lisp that has got her to the front because it adds just an even extra tincture of cuteness supposedly. We're still on that Violet Elizabeth Bott tip, aren't we?

Yeah, but it's just infuriating. And Gordon Lorenz, right? This guy, he's a fascinating character, the guy who brings us together. For a start, he's a bizarre looking man if you google him uh he looks like brian connelly from the suite inflated with helium yes he fucking does man or at least he did yeah yeah sadly sadly he's no longer with us but um his track record he was he mainly sort of produced sort of very easy listening type things like pebble mill at one

kind of music but um yeah there's one thing that i found on his discography which is really bizarre and everyone needs to watch it right uh there's a polish german glamour model 21 year old called claudia seesler who he made a single with and uh she traveled to llandudno where he was living to film the video for her song um i love dancing in hispania at his house now um far be it for me to speculate why um of all the artists he worked with and all the possible video locations it was a 21 year old polish german glamour model who had to come all the way to his house to make the video but the video itself it's not you don't actually see the video so much as you see the making of

and yeah clan did no has never looked more like north wales and never looked less like spain than it does in this clip it's the gray skies and the gray slate gray sea in the background and and and uh her hair uh blowing just all over the place in the wind as stylists just vainly try and smooth it down with brushes and yeah next to a swimming yeah next to a swimming pool. Yeah, next to a swimming pool. On the cliffs. And there are just people sat there

in kind of white suits and dresses, just sort of not even moving, and her and her mates are dancing about. It's really odd. I'm sure we'll put it out in the chart music on the blog and all that sort of stuff when we put the videos out, because it needs to be seen.

And then at the end, there's this jump cut at the end where she goes oh yes and i am single yes i'm single as if like you know they basically held a gun to her head and say you have to say that you're single it's it's so grim and it's only about 1 minute 15 but there's so much to unpack in that video and then the other amazing fact i found out about gordon lorenz is that he was he was posthumously sued by the producer of the Birdie song, Henry Hadaway, over

the profits of a Showtunes album they'd made together. Which is just these two empires of novelty song wrongness coming together in one legal case. Incredible. Oh, and while we're talking about how grandmas have changed, once again I have to draw on my

On my experiences in the wank factory Where the fuck is this going If you look at the wank line adverts The dominant subject Is grannies At the time in the 90s My favourite wank line advert Of all time

Even better than bend me over the washing machine and give me a full load was granny wants your spunk and it was niche at the time it was niche but nowadays if you look it is non-stop granny filled see the people have spoken

my favourite one is granny's fuck behind the bingo hall. Now, who's not going to want to ring that up and hear what goes on? See, the people have spoken. Grannies don't want a shit seven-inch single with a children's choir on it. Grannies want your spunk.

Yeah, they want a seven-inch something else. Well, I mean, the thing is, you know, grannies in Coventry, at least, that could be anyone above the age of 35 to be honest with you so it's not that um it's not gerontophilia yeah i mean my both my grannies like this song because it was about them it was you know it it was real elderly people's issues that were being put on top of the pops at the minute but you know you're right they got fags that year

and you know the experiences that were being discussed in the song certainly didn't square with my grandma's because that would be there's no one quite like grandma for smoking fags and watching Mr and Mrs and eating

Bourneville and playing cards. Yeah, it didn't occur to me for one second to buy that record for my gran. She'd have looked at me like I was insane. Yeah. Well, she should have known how much it cost as well. Oh, I'm worth a pound, am I? I'll fucking remember that.

Someone asked us on Twitter the other day what our favourite Christmas number one of all time was and Sarah pretended that the Ethiopian famine didn't happen and the power of love was the Christmas number one of all time was and Sarah pretended that the Ethiopian famine didn't happen and the power of love was the Christmas number one that year. Taylor said either day tripper or don't you want me. And I know you're two. Don't you want me isn't it?

Definitely yeah. Well I'm going to say this is my favourite Christmas number one of all time. Why? Because in 1980 we were given a straight choice between a millionaire banging on about having no possessions and you know who did you love more the country weighed it up and you know john lennon he did write a day in the life and he did promote global peace but you know always gave you a mint out of a tin and some money for holidays.

No fucking contest. Do you remember when Channel 4 at the turn of the century did a series of documentaries about top 10? You know, top 10 best metal songs, top 10 this. And they did one called Top 10 Worst Songs, hosted by Keith Chegwin in a youth club disco. And Grandma We Love You was one of the songs and they interviewed some of the kids who were on that song and they seemed really decent people and everything you know they had a good laugh about it but they interviewed the music teacher and she said oh

you know we were number two in the charts Sister Akina's got a phone call from the record company And she came up to me And she said John Lennon's been shot She was more horrified about Fucking Grandma We Love You Not going to be able to go to number one Than the shooting of a fucking beetle It was great In terms of ones that you actually want to listen to

This for me is as bad as Feed the World It's one of the absolute worst oh yeah i mean don't get me wrong it's not on my playlist oh what's wrong with you guys you keep getting stop getting song titles wrong right stop getting song titles wrong it's there's no one quite like grandma right and it's yeah and it's do they know it's christmas right i'm sorry man what is wrong with you people god with amateurs you want me amateurs no baby on it you're never coming on my pub quiz team i'll tell you that but grandmas have a universality that the death of john lennon wouldn't have had death of john lennon yeah affected people i guess but music fans mainly. Everyone's got a grandma.

So, you know, it was always sort of bound to be Lennon, even though he'd just been shot at Christmas. But pretty rapidly, Lennon took over again. So, yeah. Yeah. So the following week, there's no one quite like grandma got to the top of the summit and became the Christmas number one of 1980, fending off not one, not two, but three John Lennon singles.

It stayed there for one more week, because of the Christmas break, before being usurped by the re-release of Imagine by John Lennon, but it eventually sold over a million copies and won the Ivor Novello Award for best-selling A-side of 1981. By which time, front girl Dawn Ralph and her crystal tips and Alistair Hare was knocking back offers to go solo left and right, including the title role in the West End production of Annie. She kept her feet on the ground, that girl. However, the choir took their eye off the ball for much of 1981

Concentrating instead on making regular TV appearances Including Jim'll Fix It And the follow-up single Hold My Hand failed to chart in late 1981 Although they had the last laugh that Christmas When they recorded a two-minute long advert for the co-op which was played non-stop on Christmas Day. They switched to Columbia Records in 1982

and in a desperate attempt to stay relevant they turned their back on the people who put them where they were the non-Oz and fell under the spell of a religious cult leader when they put out the single Welcome Home John Paul to commemorate the Pope's visit to the UK.

But it flopped. In a last throw of the dice, they reunited with Brian and Michael to release the song Mama, but time had moved on. And in a genre now dominated by the mini-pops, their time had well and truly passed. However, choir member sally lindsey ended up playing shelly unwinning coronation street in the noughties and in a 2003 interview

for the observer she said people take the piss now but that was our christmas and at the end of the day at least we shat on grandad fucking hell there's a there's a wank line yeah and never has it been truer that they've been on top of the pops more than we have and all of that yeah yeah absolutely well a mate of mine went to see some Winifred School Choir last week and it's

not one original member in it. I'm a fool. Grandma, we love you. Grandma, we do. Grandma, we love you. And we know you love us too Baron Knights and they're here live with Nevermind the Presents. Gentlemen! Bates, sandwiched between two lovely young ladies, fondles a green balloon as he introduces us to a band who he claims has had a Christmas hit every year, the Barron Knights with Never Mind the Presents. Formed in late and buzzard in 1960 as the Knights of the Round Table,

and then changing their name after they realised it was too long for the posters, the Baron Knights were a beat combo who wound up in Hamburg in the early 60s, playing the Star Club and Top Ten Club. After being spotted by Brian Epstein in the Cavern in 1963, they were invited to support the Beatles on their first UK tour, became the only band to ever support The Mopfabs and The Rolling Stones, and were signed by Fontana Records, but their first three singles failed to chart. Then, in 1964, one of their onstage comedy routines,

Call Up The Groups, about the top bands of the day being forced into the military in a seven-days jankers wish fulfilment, proved so popular that it was put out as their next single, and it went all the way to number three for two weeks in August of that year. And after their next single, Come To The Dance, stalled at number 42 in October, they threw in their lot with the comedy stuff and had two more top ten hits in 1965 with Pop Go The Workers and Merry Gentle Pops.

They spent the late 60s and much of the 70s trying to be a serious band again, touring abroad and going through wheel tappers and shunters land. But on August 16th 1977, the day Elvis died, they tried out a new medley called Live in Trouble in a club in Tenbe and it went down so well that it was rushed out and ended up getting to number 7 in November of 1977. One year later they put out the medley A Taste of Agro which was that year's Christmas number 3 behind Mary's Boy Child and YMCA, but their second attempt at a Christmas hit, Food for Four, in 1979, only got to number 46. This is the follow-up to the six song,

their tribute to Barbara Woodhouse, which got to number 44 in October, and it's up this week from number 36 to number 27. Oh, God. And of course, this famously is the first single that a young Taylor Parks ever bought

Explains a lot See The thing is though Al I remember loving the Barronites And laughing at them In a Grumbleweeds way So I was kind of looking forward to hearing this And as the performance started,

everything was in place. There's Rodney Marsh and there's Lenny Bennett. Oh, there's one of the drunken bakers. Oh, yeah. Well, I was going to say Cockney Wanker from Viz as well at the front. Good Lord, yes. Christ all fucking mighty. In turn, what we get,

well, we get take-offs of Another Brick in the Wall and Didn't We Have a Lovely Time the Day We Went to Banga Day Trip to Banga is called Get the Time Arrive thank you my fact checking curse thank you but Christ Almighty

what we actually get is a celebration of drink driving, sexual harassment and homophobia it's a horrible record What we actually get is a celebration of drink driving, sexual harassment and homophobia. It's a horrible record. Taylor's first ever purchase really does explain so much. They do. Another Brick in the Wall, which was last year's Christmas number one.

Day Trip to Banger by Fiddler's Drum, which got to number three in January of this year. And The Sparrow, which the Ramblers took to number 11 in December of 1979. It's like they wrote this a year in advance and have sat on it. Yeah, because Another Brick in the Wall is the ultimate Avanteese record, isn't it? It's the record that literally spans the end of the 70s and the start of the 80s. Number one. Yeah, it's so lame, this, isn't it? It's no A Taste of Agro, is it? What it is, right, it's the a text of Adro is it? What it is right

it's the musical equivalent of one of those Britain's Got Talent impressionist acts where someone rummages around in a box grabs a fez sticks a fez on their head and does a Tommy Cooper face and that's it there's no actual joke

it's like yeah we're doing the sound of Pink Floyd and we're singing some shit thing about Santa Claus. Christmas turkey, you can scuff it. That's it, that's literally it. And, you know, the fact that they've managed to achieve a sounder-like thing is meant to be hilarious to us. It's meant to do half the work for them, half the work of the joke.

Yeah. It's just to do half the work for them Half the work of the joke It's just fucking pitiful And yeah the second bit The day trip to Bangor bit About the Christmas office party It goes we finished our work And all went berserk and grabbed the nearest secretary So you know Hashtag me too

And the third bit The sparrow bit I'm only a poor little fairy i mean jesus to be fair though they didn't he didn't camp it up as much as he could have done true enough that yeah it's yeah they spared us the limp-wristed thing but i think we can see where they were going with it well because he's standing behind one of those big pictures with the whole and and one of those um one of those wands that's got a hinge on it so it kind of, like, droops over on command.

I'll tell you the other thing about this. OK, so we know that Taylor Parks bought this. It was his first single, in fact. Another one of our... I wonder if he reviewed it. Another one of our former Mel D'Amico colleagues, Pete Perfides, I think I'm right in saying

that Baron Knights was his first ever gig. And he trailed a little story about this from his forthcoming book. But apparently, you know, he went along to this gig that his parents took him to at some kind of, I don't know, glitzy kind of top-ranked place somewhere in the Midlands.

And he was so excited to see real-life pop stars, and he went up to them afterwards with all his Baron Knights records, trying to get them signed. And essentially, I hope I'm not misremembering, but all the band just mugged him off. They all just like, get lost. No! Except for one. There was one member, and I don't know which one it is Who was actually a decent human being And kind of restored his faith in humanity a little bit But the majority of the barren knights

Were just interested in getting pissed And chatting up some women and just told them to sod off So I already thought Even before I heard that story I don't feel right about older men with permed hair That tightly permed hair Or men of any age, really.

But there's something about that guy, I guess he's the Lenny Bennett one, as you say, who just something about his hair makes me just instantly do a kind of shortcut in my mind of like, Brexit, Brexit, Brexit. I mean, the one thing I love about these top of the pops of this era is you do see a lot more of the kids and they are

kind of like sat behind them while this is going on and I do see those annoying girls in the Top of the Pops t-shirts are dead centre at the back and we can still see them they're just pissing about man they're blowing kisses and they're essentially a proto-zoo aren't they

without the dancing yeah and this record's giving them nothing to concentrate on that's the thing They're essentially a proto-zoo, aren't they? Without the dancing. Yeah, yeah. And this record's giving them nothing to concentrate on. That's the thing. Just let those unfunny grown-ups think they're funny for a bit. You need to skirt round this record as you would a dog turd on the street. Not even pausing to stick a lolly stick in it for amusement's sake.

It's just awful. My favourite bit is actually, after the first time they do the Pink Floyd thing, the entire audience cheers really loud, because I think they think it's over. Yeah. But it isn't now. The thing is, what are they getting out of it?

Because in terms of, like, how much money did they make out of this single? Because after they've paid off all the songwriters that they're ripping off, what do they get? Spread between about seven of them. It's all about the gigging, isn't it? They're essentially advertising themselves for their forthcoming run of summer season.

I guess so, yeah. Golden Sangs in Gourmels, aren't they? I did notice there was one lad next to the t-shirt wankers who was playing along on a party blower. Which is good. You're clutching at straws, really, aren't you? am yes very much so

yeah come on fuck off Baronites so the following week never mind the presence let's see if Taylor was here we're calling him to defend it and he wouldn't would he he'd hate it even more than we would we'd probably get about an hour's worth of stuff so the following week never mind the presence leaped

10 places to number 17, its highest position. It would be their last ever top 40 appearance as the 1981 medley Blackboard Jumble and 1983's Buffalo Bills Last Scratch, a diss track on Keith Harris, Orville Rennie and Renato, just missed out on Chartland. Oh, they got dissed, Guy. Yeah, but the thing is, their

satirical edge isn't really that far away from what Dave Hepworth was saying in his letter earlier. Thank God the comedy's over for this episode, eh? Oh, we are the nuts and the goblins who come down from Greenland each year

We sit on the shelves and beat up the elves And all have a happy new year That's Christ Christmas turkey Christmas turkey It's getting very much like Pandemon tonight on top of the Pops, because here, live before your very eyes, only Little and Large... Oi, oi, oi, oi, oi, oi.

Shut up. What are you doing here? We're looking for Christmas trees to stand on top of. Siddy, tell Simon what we're doing here. We've just finished our Christmas television show that comes out on Saturday, Simon. It does. What time?

7.40. And what are you going to do after that? After that, we start rehearsals for our two-week show at the Apollo Victoria. Commencing when? Boxing Day. With Sheena Easton. And she lent me this.

The BBC television series coming off, yes? Yes, yes. The end of January. And what do you think of pop at the moment? What do you think of the challenge? Pop's brilliant, and she lent me this. How about another BBC television series coming off, yes? Yes, yes, the end of January. And what do you think of pop at the moment? Pop's brilliant, brilliant. Pass, pass. Oh, some of the cover versions. I mean, police have done the one that Eddie Wheran should have done. Da-doo-da-da-doo-da-da-da-da. It's very exciting. The Boomtown Rats have been chased up the charts by stray cats.

And what about those three in the line? There's baggy trousers, followed by flash, followed by embarrassment. All right, then let me ask you about one more question. Go on, Simon. How do you feel about the specials? Oh, I love specials. He likes special brew and he went to a special school. Get a load of this with you.

It's the specials, of course. Bates excitedly alludes to Panto season and introduces us to Cyril Meade and Edward McGuinness, otherwise known as Licklin Lodge, dressed in a shiny gold jumpsuit and a brown and gold panto rig out. Formed in Manchester in 1962, Licklin Lodge were originally a singing duo around the North West club scene before switching to comedy in 1971 they appeared on itv's opportunity knocks and won which led to them popping up on assorted tv shows throughout the early 70s and they presented one series of the little and large telly show in 1977 in 1978 they switched to the bbc and here they are to plug their christmas special which featured Sheena Easton

Lena Zavarone and their shaking gossip dance troupe Foxy Feeling as well as their recreation of Cliff Richard and Olivia Newton John Suddenlay a sketch in a doll's hospital with a gollywog Sid Little taking off Barbara Woodhouse

and the obligatory Jimmy Savile impersonation. That episode is available on YouTube. I watched it last night. Christ on a bike. I mean, the heart just sinks, doesn't it? With the fucking fantastic line in the Gollywog sketch, you hear dat chalky,

you should never have come off da marmalade jar. That list of people that you mentioned, actually, appearing on this special because uh i mean sheena easton is going to be hanging out with prince in a few years yes it's crazy but but their own records because they made records as well they were always part of the shit prizes on crackerjack um so they always use the bbc to flog stuff which i guess you'd call cross-platform brand sinitisation now but fucking hell. Eddie Large

one of those impressionists like currently John Culshaw has to say who they're impersonating first. I wonder what Deputy Dogg would say about this. But the only good there's no good things about Little and Large. The only kind of

benefit you might gain from them is because Sid Little is just the shittest straight man ever he reveals what a genius people like Ernie Wise were in being such great straight men Sid Little had nothing to him

no discernible talent and Eddie Large was just an infuriating gobshite just an endless stream of unfunny impressions so yeah this moment and yet again you see I love the Baron Knights I think I liked Little and Large

as well but re-apprehending them doing this fucking hell thin pickings isn't it yeah because I mean at this time you know the ages we were we did spend a lot of time doing really shit impressions of people yeah and he could do a cliff playground and he was he was he was a beacon to us that you know if we carried on doing shit impressions of jimmy samuel maybe one day we could be on bbc one on top of the pops

of that um tv show lineup that you mentioned, this is a mad thing that I found out the other day. Lena Zavaroni, talking of child stars that we've been talking about just now. Lena Zavaroni, her debut album, which was called Ma, He's Making Eyes At Me, was released in the US on Stax.

I know. It's mental. How did that happen? How? That's like the crankies being on motor. It's mental. No idea that happen? How? That's like the crankies being on motor. It's mental. No idea how that happened. But I hated Little and Large. I can say that. I'm sorry.

You were on the right side of history. I was on the right side of history. They're so ITV that it feels... It's amazing to me to find out that they were on BBC from 1978. Poached. Poached by the BBC. I'd written that out of my mind that that ever happened because they just seem like ITV to the core.

They were on BBC One. They had their own show on BBC One from 1978 to 1991. What? Yes. I must have been in my room playing Subutio right up until 1991, I think. Jesus Christ. After getting the plug out of the way, Bates asks them what they think about pop at the moment. Little says, pass, pass, because he's had to improvise.

While Large says, it's brilliant. Before getting in an impersonation of Eddie Wearing, the rugby league commentator, and it's a knockout stooge. And then skillfully linking assorted chart hits of the day with getting your cock out. So Eddie Large makes some kind of joke, and he nearly forgets it. There's this awful eggy moment of a few seconds where you just think, it's gone.

His mind's gone blank. He's forgotten his own joke. But then he kind of blurts it out really quickly, it's something like yeah, it's baggy trousers followed by flash followed by embarrassment. But he nearly fucks it up. Yeah, and it's like, well no it wouldn't be because that's two singles by Madness.

Yeah, they're not going to be the same. Skiff Records wouldn't release two Madness songs at the same time, that's foolish. He does nearly forget it. You can see it. It's like the Cheeky Monkey comedian on Alan Partridge. Yes. Bates then asks them what they think about the next act. Lodge proclaims that they're fusing a musical genre of the past

to the post-punk ideology of today, demonstrating the power and creativity of post-war multiculturalism as it deals with the realities of Thatcherism. Actually ignores the question completely and verbally diminishes Sid in its only banter manner again. Good lord.

Good lord. How did we forget that Little and Lodge were asked about the specials on top of the post? Why isn't that burned into our fucking brains? Finally, Bates introduces Do Nothing by the Specials. Actually, for this single and before Simon starts on me, it's the specials featuring Rico with the ice rink string sound. See, I didn't even know that, so there.

Formed in Coventry as the Automatics, then the Coventry Automatics, and then the Special, a.k.a. in 1977, the Specials exploded onto the charts in the autumn of 1979 when Gangsters got to number six for two weeks in September of that year,

beginning a run of nothing but top ten hits, which peaked in February of 1980 when Too Much Too Young got to number one for two weeks in February of 1980. Special AKA live EP. Don't start on me, Simon. This double A-side,

released along with the cover of the 1965 Bob Dylan single Maggie's Farm, is the follow-up to the the double A side stereotype slash international jet set which got to number 6 in October of this month and it's the second cut from the LP More Specials and it's a new entry in the top 40 this week up from number 70 to number

34 so the specials are the panel particularly bothered about them? I don't know who should go first. We've been waiting for this, haven't we? Yeah, we have, because I don't know who should go first, because we've both got so much to say, I'm sure. I think Neil's from Carve, I should defer.

Well, I mean, straight off, I have to say, this is, and it's up against some tough competition, but I think this is the greatest thing I've ever seen doing chart music podcasts it's probably my favourite performance out of all of the scenes but there's

there's a massive disconnect really between my thoughts now about the specials and I should mention I have made a little film about this that's on YouTube

called Two Tone in Five Words which kind of summates what I think about the specials and it's fucking brilliant so if you want to check that out but my thoughts then video playlist yeah but then as an eight-year-old Coventry kid of course I was massively excited that a band from here was making it but I was utterly disconnected with the reality

of 210 culture in terms of the clubs the gigs the culture I mean my wife was six years older than me and remembers being immersed in it but that six years was a big difference you know 14 and 8 um I was eight so my sense of inclusion with it extended as far as what we were talking about earlier really badges and letters sewn into the back of my harrington everybody had a harrington um and you could go to taheem drapers down falzer road and get special sewn in the back of your jacket for 5p a letter 40p well spent the other popular things at the time to have sold in the back of your harrington were madness or rock on tommy

which was massive but as a listener it really was a relationship conducted through those singles that you mentioned Al so you know through my sister and through other people I got those singles that year and I only really came to apprehend the majesty of the album that

had come more specials much later through I have to say Simon Price's amazing piece in a book that was given away free with a melody maker where he really just dived into more specials and illustrated what was so fantastic about that record which I'm sure simon might come on to talk about but neil you say these names were stitched in to the back of your arrington yeah but it ran my way no no no actually sorry i don't think they were stitched no they were kind of ironed in i think yes yes that yeah exactly yeah because uh we had that obviously we had that at our school and the thing to do instead of having your name a name of a band on the top you would have if you were a bit flush you would have your name on the back and then another band transfer um underneath that i see i see yeah i mean almost like the

the bottom rocker if you were in a if you were you know being a hell's angel or something yeah yeah but the thing was i mean and kids would do that for everything i mean i had a i had a mate gormy dawner and uh he had an arrington and he he he put omd on the back and it's like mate no no that's not how it works but as a kid the crucial thing with two-tone is you never felt excluded as a kid no you felt like you could be part of it it was a great culture in that respect but as a listener i mean it was a relationship that i conducted through singles i was really only listening to singles and albums at the time i only really came to apprehend just exactly how good more specials was the album that um you this comes from. We need to talk about that because my love of the specials had a bit of a blip

because I bought all the singles up to and including the live EP. And then when I heard the first, I was listening to Radio 1 and I think it was Mike Reed said, oh, we got a track from the new specials LP. And it was International Jet Set

and it's like oh what's going on here I don't like this it was slow we've talked before fast music and two tone was the epitome of fast music and it's like oh they've slowed down a bit and it's a bit weird

they've got synthesizers and I did not get more specials until it's like oh they've slowed down a bit and it's a bit weird they've got synthesizers yeah yeah yeah totally different and I did not get more specials until until about god about 10 years later I think half the band didn't get more specials either that's the thing

and then I heard it then when I was like 20 21 or whatever it's like oh my god this is fucking better this is better than the first LP. It's fucking so ahead of its time, that album. But they'd stopped being a kids band in the sense that, you know, kids, kids just immediately picked up on it

and like, oh yeah. But having said that, this single, I loved it. Yeah. I loved it. Well, that's the weird thing for me watching it. Like I say, at age eight, I'm disconnected with it. Now loved it well that's the weird thing for me watching it like I say at age 8

I'm disconnected with it now watching it at 46 it's like watching Family because these people people like Linville and Roddy and even other people

like John Shipley out of the Special AK and Pauline Black these are people I've now you know sat at pub tables with that I've nodded hello to

whilst popping to the shops these are people who are still about around here and you know watching this Linville's guitar that lovely lime green Telecaster that I've nodded hello to whilst popping to the shops. These are people who are still about around here. And, you know, watching this, Linville's guitar, that lovely lime green Telecaster, that was my guitar for a while.

I owned that. It ended up in my hands. No! Yeah. Oh, my fucking God. Yeah, that ended up in my hands. And like anyone in commentary, you end up having to flog it on, you know, so I haven't got it anymore.

Oh, that must have killed you to watch this then whoa yeah kind of upsetting but it is just an implement for making music but there's a two-tone museum in cov now and it's all but that guitar has been on top of the pops more than you have it has it's been on several times yeah i mean i own that and and that's the weird thing now for me watching this off neil sorry we've got to go into this a bit deeper I ended up with it because it had gone through

a few hands after Linville had sold it I think and it just went through a few muso hands in Coventry and I ended up with it off a mate called Dansko

who ended up with it and I must have paid what about 150 quid for it and it's a beautiful thing but inevitably yeah I ended up skint as Dansko was at the time so I ended up selling it on I must have paid, what, about 150 quid for it? And it's a beautiful thing, but inevitably, yeah, I ended up skint, as Dansko was at the time, so I ended up selling it on.

Somebody else will have it now. It's like the spear of destiny of musical instruments, you know, the spear that pierced the side of Christ on the cross. It did feel awesome playing it on stage, knowing that it had that history. A history that is now kind of not exploited by Coventry, but there's a two-tone museum and there's a tour that you can do. But really, I think the closest thing I've read or seen

as a proper appraisal of the specials is a piece by Pricey in a book that came free with Melody Maker called Unknown Pleasures, I think, where Pricey wrote about more specials and that just totally opened my eyes to this strange album you know so informed by Jerry traveling the world and listening to music in elevators and and it's just um just the crucial thing about the specials is they weren't just this gritty band from the street. There's genuine diversity there, not just racially, but in a class sense as well. But also a diversity of commitment in a way, because there are songs that are political by the specials,

but there are just as many songs, like Do Nothing, which is massively political, but it's also about a kind of indifference and a kind of, you know, not giving a fuck, which makes it such a cov record. There's no other way for me to really describe it. But Damers went to the same posh school as me and developed the same antipathies as me.

And consequently, the Specials end up with this great mix of kind of leftist politics, yet really brutal lyrics in a sense. I'm thinking of the misogyny of some of their songs that remind me really of the Stones more than anything. To my mind, they're the UK's finest band remind me really of the stones more than anything to my mind they're the uk's finest band this side of the stones and perhaps i don't know our last great band can i stop there because my doorbell's just gone okay i think it is safe to say that in 1980 the specials were the people's band even more so than the jam yeah um i think they they weren't as popular

in the long run as madness i suppose no but um they felt like they they were at the dead center of of this movement it was their movement yeah basically they owned it They owned the moment. And, um... 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 with a small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. I think, like Neil, and like what you were saying,

I didn't get more specials at first. At first it jarred with me because it wasn't what it said on the tin. It wasn't more specials. It wasn't the specials part two, which is what I wanted. Didn't they put a sticker over it so it read MOR specials? I'm sure I heard that from somewhere Yeah it's that pink

So yeah it wasn't the Specials Part 2 Which I wanted the Specials Part 2 Remember right this is only 12 months After their first album 12 months in which they've been Having hits with like you say Fast music with abrasive Energetic ska punk tracks Like Rat Race and Too Much Too Young with, like you say, fast music with abrasive, energetic ska-punk tracks

like Rat Race and Too Much Too Young. And also the kind of lyrics to some of the stuff Too Much Too Young and things like Nightclub and Little Bitch. Oh, man. I was going to say borderline misogynist but no, they're out and out, really.

And, you know, more than anything they remind me of something like bodies by the sex pistols yeah the kind of spirit of it and it was hilarious i think nightclub might be my favorite special single just every time i hear it i just think of top valley community center uh discos uh where just loads of 12 year old lads jumping up and down and squeaking out all the girls are slags and the beer tastes just like piss. Oh, anything with swearing on it at that age,

you're just delighted, aren't you? Yeah, yeah. But on this album, there's that track, Pearl's Cafe, it goes, Oh, the lads are bonnets. How delighted were you at that age to have a record and swearing on it? It was so great.

That might be the song that plays when I go down the fucking conveyor belt to the cremation pit. It might just be that one. What I was trying to build up to, what I was trying to say was, they'd be releasing these records with these kind of anti-social vile, mean-spirited

lyrics like that, and then they come out with something like this, Do Nothing, which is reflective. It's beautiful. It's got this kind of existential mood to it, living in a life without meaning and all this kind of stuff.

And it's the first time that I felt that they'd written a song which I could play to my mum and dad and say, look, this stands alongside, whatever you think the Beatles are to you, this is of that kind of calibre and deserves to be treated as such. Yeah, but make sure they don't hear the B-side, Maggie's Farm.

Yeah, yeah. Because you don't rip into it. I hate that version. Yeah, my dad was a massive Dylan fan, so I think he'd have appreciated the sentiment, but preferred the original. But, yeah, this whole thing of the specials using easy listening and elevator music and exotica, it didn't sit well with me to begin with. I struggled with it.

Well, essentially, Simon, it's like seeing Edwin Starr in the mid-'80s. Right. You know, because visually they're in colour. They're in colour, in blurry colour. Winter jumpers, not festive jumpers. They've got dairs on them and stuff like that. Oh, on top of the pops now, yeah. Well, yeah, some of them are Christmas jumpers,

but Terry's not wearing one. And I actually think, just as a little aside here, that that kicked off a whole fashion movement. It did. A year or two later, we were all wearing those jumpers with little flecks on and little patterns and stuff. Snowflakes and stuff, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But not only that, but they're wearing plaid trousers.

They're wearing the kind of trousers that your dad wore, what he's probably still wearing now, but obviously, you know, not flared. But it's like, oh, what the fuck's going off here? Because the thing about the Specials was it was easy to sort of look like them. now but obviously you know not flared but it's like oh what the fuck's going off here because the thing about the specials was it was easy to to sort of look like them yeah it was and and suddenly they wrong-footed us by changing all of that yeah because how dare they the the album sleeve as you say it's got this blurry cheesy color photo where they're sort of having a few drinks in a hotel bar and grinning and smiling what are they doing smiling yeah yeah why are you

up here yeah yeah yeah you're the specials don't be smiling yeah it all just seemed a bit wrong it jarred with me of course the first taste anyone would have had of of that was um stereotype single uh and that was a bit odd for me as well because definitely it was hard work it's hard work for a pop kid at the time because the melody the melody was in a sort of arabic scale rather than a western one and it was about adult themes like alcoholism and vd that i couldn't identify with yeah obviously it's an ad that's great to sing i love it yeah yeah well i don't know but i struggle with at the time um but the thing is um i'm i'm pretty certain that i well obviously i heard stereotype first because it came out before the album, but I think I even heard Do Nothing before I heard the album because even though it was a track lifted from the album,

I couldn't afford to go out and buy LPs because I didn't have enough pocket money. So I'm pretty certain I got the album, More Specials, for Christmas 1980. So I would have already known the single, but I would have had no real idea where the album was going to go and the thing is, as much as that album might have been a struggle at first to get into if you were a teenager and you only had

a dozen or so LPs you played the ones you had over and over and you forced yourself to like them you persisted and you were rewarded and now it's one of my favourite albums of all time. Yeah. You know, tracks like Man at C&A and International Jet Set

and I Can't Stand It are probably the best things a special's ever did, really. And this song as well, Do Nothing. I mean, going back to the lyrics on it, stuff like, Policeman comes and smacks me in the teeth. I don't complain. It's not my function. Yeah, I love that stuff.

That blew my mind. That sort of stops you in your tracks when you hear that. Because fashion is my only culture. Oh, yeah. New pair of shoes are on my feet because fashion is my only culture. Just great, great lyrics. And, yeah, Neil very kindly mentioned the essay that I wrote about this album it was 1994

we did a free book with Mel DiMecca called Unown Pleasures and the idea was it was great lost albums did you do a chapter in it Neil? I didn't, no I wasn't I was still only just started really so I wasn't asked to do anything well Taylor did one on ABBA which was brilliant

but I chose more specials and it seems bizarre now to choose an album that was number one in its day as a great lost album but that's really

how it felt because by the 90s it felt like a forgotten record I would say that the influence of that album did start to seep through

in the mid to late 90s via things like tricky and and blur yeah and like right don't don't get me wrong i'm i'm not claiming credit for rehabilitating the album because because i i know tricky and damon were the same same age they were massive specials fans like me yeah and and it was great to know that i wasn't alone it was yeah and yeah exactly and it was great to see that album getting in props or whatever. A thing happened, right? A couple of years later at the Q Awards,

Jerry Damas came up to me to thank me for writing that chapter. And that blew my tiny minds, right? The idea that he even knew who I was, you know? And a little while later, still kind of swollen with pride from that, I saw Terry Hall backstage at a blur gig at shepherd's bush empire and i went up to him and i said hi terry i'm i'm the guy who wrote the chapter about more specials in the melody maker book and he basically turned his back on me he turned he turned his shoulder diagonally and shut me out blanked me he didn't want to talk

about it and what i didn't realize did you say hey terry where did you get that blank expression on you well done well done and i didn't realize at the time that he doesn't like that album or at least right what it is is that it brings up bad memories of when the band was falling apart yeah um but i wasn't so clued up on that stuff at the time and it was noticeable of course that when when the specials made their comeback without jerry dammers uh the set list was very light on yeah more specials material very heavy on the first album well yeah it was essentially enjoy yourself wasn't it which was the most first album mid-track on that i mean the second one more specials did tear the band apart roddy hated it and several people hated it in the band

and understandably now it's staggering to think, you think of that first album, the black and white front cover shot and then you think of more specials, they could not be more contrarian and perverse about their second album than they were and again like Simon was saying

about Edwin Starr, oh you know being black and white specials yeah yeah i mean but this performance as mentioned it's just fantastic and and those jumpers are fantastic um and it's an amazing song the perfect big sort of slow motion big dancehall tune but these lyrics of limbaugh that are just so good it's almost as if terry wrote them in a sense. Yeah. If this had been the first song released off the album, I would have bought the album because I love this song.

It's immediately catchy. And then I would have been disappointed because it hasn't got the, you know, the roller rink. Yeah. Things on it. This song, I've got this,

this song is one of my funeral songs as well, to a certain extent, because, because it's so honest about the singer's dishonesty and superficiality it kind of it nails this mindset and i don't want to say it's a cov mindset because it's not unique to this city but for a coventry and it's difficult to describe but that but that mix of living somewhere that's very cynical and down on itself and it's always kind of two steps down the road ahead of you,

more miserable than you are, and a city where you're continually told about this bright pastel future that's going to happen. Nothing, nobody sums that mix up, that mix of post-war idealism and 60s optimism, boomtown optimism, and the post-60s derailment and demise of all that better than the specials. They were just

fucking great to this day if i'm djing out um ghost town remains a guaranteed clock you know coventry floor filler although it's one of those songs that people think is an anthem and they kind of rush to the dance floor to gleefully dance to it but it's such a hollowed out dark dubby record um it's just especially resonant still still listening to the specials in cough i remember going to see my sister once in sheffield and i was in meadow hall um shopping center and love action by the human league came on which is a fantastic record anyway but i have to say in that context in sheffield it just gained that extra resonance and and i still feel that kind of with the specials today.

Of course, they're popular all over the place, but in Coventry, still particularly resonant. And you know what? I missed the entire reunion tours thing. And I know there were great shows, but for me, I'm very puritanical about this kind of thing. It's like, no Jerry, no specials. Yeah, I felt pretty weird about it.

I had to kind of sort of swallow something hard and jagged and make myself just go to those shows because it did feel a bit wrong. They were brilliant, though, got to say. I saw them at Rock City and it was like, yeah, I know Jerry Dummers isn't it, but fuck it, it's the specials. Yeah.

And it was really weird because the first time they played Nottingham was at Rock City, which was just the perfect venue for them. You know, big enough to get loads of people in, but just intimate enough to make it feel like a proper gig. And I went to a,

me and my mate went to see them, but beforehand, there was a school reunion going on in a pub just down the road. So we went in there for a bit and said hello to loads of people we hadn't seen for ages and i said oh really sorry but we've got to go now says oh why where are you going so we're going we're going to the gig you're like what gig and i just looked at them i could not believe that they didn't know that the fucking the fucking

specials were playing down the road and it didn't mean shit to them. If it had been UB Forte, they'd have all gone to that. But the gig was fucking amazing. I'm just standing there staring at my mate, just going, fucking hell, they look like the specials and they sound like the specials. Oh, and everyone's wallet got nicked.

And then I saw him again. I saw him again at the arena, which is just a fucking horrible barn. Yeah, yeah. And I'd totally forgotten how many middle-aged, miserable skinheads there were in Nottinghamshire. It was just such a horrible fucking atmosphere.

Yeah. Just people just looking to fucking looking for someone to lamp basically and i'm sat i'm sat on the side next to this middle-aged skinhead and he turns around to me halfway through and he says hey have you got anything i can throw at that cunt down there he's my mate you got any pound coins or anything he's my mate he's a cunt i want to fucking hit him jesus christ there's always that danger though it's that mad stock kind of audience i heard yeah that um so i think it was the brighton show that i don't know whether simon was at it but

there was a show anyway in one of the recent tours where they were showing kind of footage before the show of things like steven lawrence and things like that I know exactly what you're gonna say yeah and it got booed which startles me a little bit no what it was is it's a montage of things that's happened since the 80s right since they were going and the first thing you see is uh it's big image of Margaret Thatcher and everyone's booing and then the next thing they show they show that photo from the Falklands after they'd just done a yomp and someone's got a Union Jack hanging out of their backpack. And everyone's going, Hey!

And it's like, hang on a minute, they were there because of the person you fucking booed at earlier. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I had a similar experience of seeing them twice on the comeback. Similar to yours, Al, in that the first gig I saw was, I think the first gig of all it was uh in newcastle uh yeah in in a sort of medium-sized theater and it was amazing and

yeah i was a bit intimidated when i went in there because it was full of really hard-looking skinheads but i thought fuck it it's a specials i'm pushing my way down the front i got down the front and it was quite kind of it was aggro in there but it was a proper mosh pit in that there are rules in a mosh pit and if you know most people know what they're doing and if someone falls over you fucking help them back up you know exactly yeah and and you know any sort of elbows and fists that fly and you keep it below like neck level you know and it's they're just certain codes of conduct which you know sadly a lot of people these days just don't know but it was great yeah there was fucking hard bastards but and it was it was quite tasty and quite full-on but yeah everyone was looking out for each other and it was just amazing and then yeah i did go to that

brighton gig and suddenly it was all fucking brexit and i don't know if that's just because it's a bigger venue or what or or if like um the first time they play it's the diehard fans who bother going and then by the time they're playing the arenas then it's any old Tom, Dick and Harry turns up I don't know

I don't know but yeah that's certainly happened but yeah essentially Neil the specials were to you what Paper Lace was to me they remained

they remained a fierce thing of pride for me I'm just so proud of coming from the place rightly so I'm just so proud of coming from the place. Rightly so. I'm just so proud of coming from the place that that band came from. Because I know we talk a lot in chart music about how it's not cool to be cool in a way. But the specials were fucking cool and remain so.

Yeah. And this song, right, in a way it spans both eras of the specials because um in a way it's it's not that different from uh message to you rudy which of course was a cover version anyway um yeah but in terms of the the speed the pace of it and the rhythm of it but the keyboard sound is different isn't it the keyboards on this and i i don't know enough about sort of vintage keyboards to be able to pinpoint it, but to me, it sounds more like Come Dancing, and I mean the old Come Dancing, not Strictly, than Jamaican Ska.

It's ice rink music. It's ice rink music, yes. Yeah, that's exactly what the keyboards are on this. Oh, we've also got to mention, by the way, to follow up the thing about the beat earlier on. So, yeah, Horace Panter from the specials was in the beat on top of the pops in this episode. David Steele from the beat with his wobbly legs turns up on this one as a member of the specials.

I wonder why there was no wobbly legness on that beat. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's because he's in the specials for one night. And I love that. I don't know if you even spotted it at the time, but for me, even though they had parted company in the sense that the beat had left two-tone i love thinking that they're all still mates you know what i mean

the song that you mentioned earlier uh pearls cafe uh is really important um in a sense of what's so lovable about the specials yes they had misogynistic songs yes they had aggressive songs they had all these songs that kind of were attacks almost on people. But Pearl's Cafe, I think, reveals their true heart and their true colours. It's such a compassionate song, that. It's such a song that's saying, you snotty little bastard, stop looking down on people. These people all have complex lives that you should be, you know, cognizant of.

And they always, no matter who they were attacking or whatever, I always get the feel from the specials that they were sticking up for the underdog. And that's what seals into my heart, not just as something I listen to, but something, you know, almost spiritually that I will always give the nod to. Yeah.

Neil Kulkarni knows, don't argue. So the following week, Do Nothing leapt 10 places to number 24 and eventually got to number 4 in January of 1981. The follow-up, Ghost Town, got to number 1 for three weeks in July of that year, but the original band's days were numbered. I'm falling and I'm dreaming Specials and do nothing. A couple of quick things to tell you.

First of all, if you haven't done all your Christmas shopping yet, try this on for size. Only the best of Top of the Pops. It's out now available with wonderful gramophone records inside it. And what's more, Legs & Co. on the front. So that's pretty good. And congratulations to bbc too over the other side of the way uh for their not the nine o'clock news series and the bbc records because they've just gone platinum with this not the nine o'clock news album that's 350 000 copies

which is a good christmas present for anybody and now a chance to introduce you to a guy you might have thought you'd never see on top of the pops again he's just got his pilot's license today he's chuffed to bits it's gary newman and it's wreckage live Bates, standing neath the Christmas tree, gets in a plug for two LPs. The first is the best of Top of the Pops Volume 8 on Super Beeb Records, with a cover that features a massive legs and co stomping on planet Earth in white leotards with old tassels

hanging off them. Would you allow me to run down the track list for you chaps? My Girl by Madness, Someone's Looking At You by the Boomtown Rats, Cooling the Calf Down by B.A. Robertson, Turn It On Again by Genesis, You'll Always Find Me in the Kitchen at Parties by Jonah Luet, you by the boomtown rats calling the caftan by ba robertson turn it on again by genesis you'll always find me in the kitchen at parties by jonah luer brass in

pocket by the pretenders midnight dynamos by matchbox too much too young by the specials over you by roxy music my oh my by sad cafe mirror in the bathroom by the beat together we are beautiful by fern kinne atomic by My Oh My by Sad Cafe, Mirror in the Bathroom by The Beat, Together We Are Beautiful by Fern Kinnair, Atomic by Blonde Air, Silver Dream Machine by David Essex, Let's Get Serious by Jermaine Jackson,

and Dance Yourself Dizzy by Liquid Gold. Not too shabby. There's some ropey old shit on there, but there's some brilliant stuff on there. And also the fact that it has the beat, madness, and the specials on it just shows you how central Two-Tone was at that time. Also, right, I looked into the other album he holds up. Are we going to talk about that?

Oh, hell yeah. He then shows the BBC Records LP, Not The Nine O'Clock News, which has been bought by 300,000 people, one of whom was me. I think it was the third LP I ever bought after One Step Beyond and Sound Effects. Can you guess what I was going to mention then, if you've got the LP? Ooh.

Ooh. All right, I'll put you out of your misery. I could sit here and stroke my chin for hours, but no, I'll put me out of my misery. There is a song on it called The Bouncing Song, which is the piss-take of Two-Tone. Yes, of course it is, yes. It's the Two Tone, Scar Numbers Rowan Atkinson singing

I like bouncing, boing, boing, boing Up and down till I get a pain in me groin So yeah Two Tone was so kind of central To Britain at that time They should have released that As a single, it would have gone in the charts It would

That Top of the Pots album that you mentioned By the way, are those originals Or are they played by the They should have released that as a single. It would have gone in the charts. It would. That Top of the Pops album that you mentioned, by the way, are those originals or were they played by the... All originals. Ah, I see. Oh, interesting. Yeah, because BBC hadn't copyrighted the Top of the Pops name, had they? So at the same time, you had genuine Top of the Pops albums coming out. Yeah, you had those fake ones that were not the original artists.

Yes. With, like, some Dolly Bird on the front off page 3 or something or off a Big D Peanuts vending thing and a version of Death Disco which defies description I think that's fantastic that version of Death Disco but apparently there's

an even better one, there was a range of cover versions that were made for supermarkets that would just be tapes that'd be given to Gramways that they'd play. And apparently, in 1977 or something, like 78, there was a version of Gary Gilmore's Eyes

where the singer just screamed all the way through. No lyrics. Just went, Ah! I'd love to fucking hear that. Yeah, I want it. So after the plugs, he introduces us to someone we may not have been expecting to see on Top of the Pops ever again.

Gary Newman with this wreckage. We've already discussed Gary Newman in Chart Music 14, and this is his second appearance in a row on Top of the Pops. Last week, he popped up in the studio after a status quo video to confirm to Richard Skinner that he was retiring from live performance after three farewell gigs in

Wembley Arena in April of 1981 and he was now spending his time learning to fly before Skinner said Well Gary, I don't know what you think about Matchboxbox but they're flying over the rainbow right now. This week he's back in the studio to mime to his latest single the follow-up to I Die You Die which got to number six in September of this year. It's the third single from the LP Telecom and it's gone straight in at number 35 this week. I mean at this time

the synth boom really hasn't fully kicked in yet as it would in 1981 and Gary Newman's still pretty much the flagship isn't he? Yeah he was a little bit ahead of the curve I suppose and I guess the wheels have come off the Noom a little bit here as a hit machine

because as you say it was the third single off the album and he had five top ten hits in a row this one only made number 20 um i mean to be fair to him the album did make number one telecom and um yeah i think he was a bit burnt out right because uh he was ridiculously prolific it was his fourth album in 21 months. Fucking hell. Yeah. So there's two Tubeway Army, two solo ones, between 1978 and 1980, 21 months. Yeah, but it's synth music, Simon. You know, you just press a button. And I think Telecom's a good album.

It's a good album, but he was getting burnt out, and, you know, this wreckage, I Call Me, no wonder he felt like that about himself and it's telling that he took a year out between Telecom and the album after it I think I also think this might be

a trick of the ears, maybe I'm wrong but I feel like he's been a bit mugged off by the musicians union here it feels to me like one of those ones where they've made him re-record the song that afternoon and it's shit it's not as good as but I

played the original track back to back and I couldn't really find proof of that it just kind of maybe this record just isn't that good in the first place lyrically it's pretty fucking dark it starts and what if God's dead we must have done something wrong this dark facade ends

we're independent from someone so it's always kind of you know Merry Christmas everyone and there's that weird wailing Japanese bit he does at the end which means I leave you or goodbye apparently in Japanese I thought it was I'm leaving now

right so yeah words to that effect or goodbye, apparently, in Japanese. Right. I thought it was, I'm leaving now. Right. So, yeah. I don't know. Yeah, yeah. Words to that effect, anyway. Yeah. So it's kind of, yeah, there's a feeling of Newman running out of steam a little bit.

Yeah. I think. It's a cheery couple of records, isn't it, in the middle of this episode. Do nothing into this. Only interrupted with simon bates like most people my age at the time my interest in newman extended from well it was singles related obviously from our friends electric to cars maybe music for chameleons later but not

much further but it can't be stressed enough what an impact those tracks those singles had on us as kids they were the future those songs we weren't listening to bowie or eno and we certainly weren't that cognizant of craftwork or can or anything so they were they were the kind of first electronic rock testament a whole new way of making music and also it can't be stressed enough how much his performances used to matter because i remember talking about how kate bush's eyes used to scare me well gary newman's eyes used to scare me as well and his kind of cheerless misery stuck out so much in the kind of whooping

shit fest that was usually the rest of Top of the Pops. The other Gary Newman thing that we knew about and were possibly absolutely fucking terrified of was him doing the vocals on the Lee Cooper advert oh yeah oh they shit me up so badly.

I've forgotten about that. All those punks with the weird contact lenses just staring at you in a fairground. It's amazing, actually. The seven-inch single version, sadly, isn't by Newman. It's by John Ducan. Right. But, yeah, the vocal you hear in the advert is Newman.

It's only, like, 20 seconds long, but it's great. Yeah. It's like, yeah, I thought that's what the future is going to be like like living in that advert yeah yeah like slightly scary but really amazingly bold and futuristic and all of that yeah you know like seven out of blade runner which I don't think it even come out yet the trouble with this single is it sounds a little bit too similar to previous singles in a sense and and but I do like his steadfast refusal to kind of get dancey with electronics, he was really just about

giving rock a wider screen kind of sound but I think the reason he's so gloomy almost permanently but in particular he looks absolutely disgusted that he's got to do this shit for a living it must mean he's playing doesn't it he's encountered

in the previous year fuck the ground but't it? He's encountered in the previous year... Fuck the ground. But it's because he's encountered in the previous year so much hostility from the press for the kind of twin sins of happening without their permission, which, of course, can never go unforgiven. And also he's attacked quite a lot as kind of inauthentic rip-off merchant

of other people's better, artier work. So Danny Baker talks of Newman as making intelligent music for people who aren't intelligent in the same year. But there's a John Savage live review from 79 in Smash Hits that really nails, I think,

why he was a good pop star. It's because us viewers and as kids, we could see his fantasy he didn't inhabit it completely when he was not on stage he couldn't help grinning he couldn't help coming across on things like swap shop as friendly and normal and kind of dance with i.e somebody who had to make the effort to be this stage character and as a kid it was great seeing this but by the time of this single and this appearance he clearly yeah he's a bit pissed off about doing it the kids you don't see any of the kids watching this you only really see the stage show um he might even be happy that the

spotlight's kind of moving on for him because it seems to cause him nothing but aggravation and paranoia but he seems to be yeah he he's coming to kind of being in his own bubble and floating off. I mean, even now, while he's saying, oh, I'm retiring from live performance, you can see all the music press going, oh, yeah, just like Ziggy did, eh? Yeah. I mean, it's weird. But, I mean, I end up, a long time time after loving Newman and it this seems like a really

facile thing to base it on but there was a thing we used to have a melody maker called rebellious jukebox which is where people used to pick like 10 of their favorite records and talk about them and I remember one that Gary Newman did and I think Simon Price sorry because it's Simon Price yeah Simon Pricey doing the interview and there's just this, yeah there was just this fantastic moment in that piece where apparently some alarm went off or something and Gary Newman pretends he's just farted and kind of wafts it away and I just remember that, I just loved him after that, loved him after that. Wow.

And I'll just remember that. I just loved him after that. Loved him after that. Wow. It's so great because he was telling me all these stories as well that put him in quite a bad light in a way. He didn't care. Like, you know, he told a story about how he was kicked off the Kenny Everett show by David Bowie.

Yes. And he told a story about how he went over to Japan with the band Japan who then got rid of him. They just shrugged him off. And he was looked after by Freddie Mercury and Queen, who also happened to be over there. And he felt really fond of Queen because of that. But yeah, all these stories that sort of paint him

as this kind of hapless loser. And I just really warmed him because of that. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, as a kid, I remember the impact that Our Friends Electric had on me. Seeing that on Top of the Pops, him because of that yeah um yeah but yeah as a kid i remember the the impact that our friends electric had on me seeing that on top of the pops just just i i i thought it was punk because i didn't know what punk was and i asked my dad is this punk and he's going no it's it's something else and uh and it was it was you know and then um when cars came out i bought that um yeah which

wasn't really in tune with my other musical taste at the time but i i sense that it's a fucking tune isn't it oh it's amazing yeah yeah and which sadly this one isn't you know it's not not in the same league he looks pretty decent in this so if you if you if you you know disregard the fact that he he just looks so fucking burned out you know he's got he's in a kind of like a shiny white boiler suit with red strapping yeah doing a doing a kind of a crisscross thing like the cover of his album and uh unfortunately the the robo kens they have to make do with black kung fu pajamas and uh one of the keyboard players has got a very ill-chosen red beret yeah they're letting the side down a little

bit those guys and the way it's being presented there's a lot of close-ups on a finger just stabbing at a keyboard as if yeah as if saying, oh, look how easy it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, at one point there's a bit of a karate chop on the keyboard at one point as well, isn't it? As if the cameraman's going, oh, look at this, what a cod. I think he was happy on stage, though. I mean, he didn't look happy, obviously, but he was happy on stage.

But it's when he steps off the stage, he couldn't stand that. He couldn't stand the rest of his life so consequently he's going to drift off soon you know you know there's this whole thing of how in later life um he's basically diagnosed himself as as being as having uh aspergers as being on the autism spectrum uh and um a lot of this comes out in the in the documentary android and la la land which is brilliant by the way that which follows him leaving the uk and going to live in la um and kind of in in the light of that and and other interviews um i interviewed him on stage once for for the quietus website and that it was filmed it's probably out there somewhere and he talks about this stuff a lot and um in the light of that knowledge,

I look back on his work from around this time as he's kind of working things out. He's working things through. He doesn't realise he's autistic, but he's working through these feelings of kind of being disconnected and these feelings of alienation from the rest of humanity in a way which I think is really useful to other people with similar

issues and I don't know if I can say this in a way that isn't going to seem offensive but when I go to Gary Newman shows his crowd are people who often overwhelmingly seem to be people who lack social skills they're a little bit awkward and and all of that and and but there's something in newman his persona and his work that resonates with them and i'm i i don't think i'm on the spectrum myself but i've i'm certainly kind of awkward enough and shy enough and introverted enough that i i can see how that how this stuff that from this time but gary newman would speak to you so the following week this wreckage jumped 7 places to number 28

and would go as high as number 20 in January of 1981 the follow up She's Got Claws would get to number 6 in September of that year and one year later he did a tour of America just like David Bowie, eh? Oh, darling Now then, this is Mummy Claws.

It's a good family life we have on Top of the Pops. There's a gentleman called Robert Palmer who had a beautiful single out a while back called John and Mary which wasn't a massive hit. Try this new one, Looking for Clues. Bates! I worry that the call I might have won't move Oh my Bates, with his arm around the throat of a girl with curly red hair dressed as a sexy Santa, points out that the next act's last single died on its arse and wonders if his new song will do any better.

It's Looking For Clues by Robert Palmer. Born in Batley in 1949 Robert Palmer acted as frontman in a sort of band in Scarborough before being recruited into the slough-based psychedelic band the Allen Bowne with an exclamation mark on the end in 1969 one year and two LPs later

he switched to the 12-piece jazz fusion band Dada with Elkie Brooks and all her looks and her husband Pete Gage. And a year after that, those three spun off to form Vinegar Joe who put out three LPs before they split up in 1974. He immediately signed a solo deal with Island later that year

and achieved moderate success in America in the late 70s but he didn't have a sniff of the UK charty arse until 1978 when Every Kind of People got to number 53 in June of that year. This is the follow-up to Johnny and Mary which got to number 44 in September of this year and it's the second cut from the LP Clues which featured the drumming of Chris France of Talking Heads and features a cover of Gary Newman's

I Dream of Wires. And it's been stuck at number 33 for three weeks on the bounce. Bit awkward, wasn't it? Baked and Santa Girl. Yeah. It's the way he's got his arm around, but it kind of rests

just between his shoulder and his neck, as if he's given her one of those nerve pinches that bouncers know how to do. Full contemporary. To get people to go where they want them to. It's very uncomfortable. Yeah, because whatever we may say about Bates, he's not sleazy.

No. In a way, it would almost be preferable as a viewer if he was because at least you understand what's going on there. You've got the kind of visual and emotional grammar of that moment you think all right he's sleazing up to some woman i know how this plays out it'll finish in a second but he yeah he's he's like it's like he's frog marching her he's you know yeah it's like stand in this spot conform yeah when i do this link conform yes and also um i've got to point out that he's now got two links in a row wrong. Because he said the Gary Newman song was called Wreckage.

And he said that Robert Palmer's previous record was called John and Mary. Oh, no. This Wreckage we call Bates. I mean, what kind of person gets song title wrong? I know. He should be a chart music podcast contributor, really. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But this whole thing that you mentioned, right,

of the Gary Newman connection with Robert Palmer, I didn't know at the time. In fact, there are two Newman songs on that album. One of them, there's a co-write, isn't there? Yeah. And it would have blown my mind, actually, to think that this guy, this guy who's, you know, in so

many ways very old school is also a kind of a creature of the new wave or somebody who's adopted the new wave with open arms you know yeah yeah well it's it's exactly like when i found out that um paul weller had played guitar on a track on um on peter gabriel's latest lp at the time right that did my fucking head yeah it's you know, you see photos in smash hits of like Lemme having a pint with someone from Secret Affair. Did your head in because it's like, no, they're grebs, you can't like them, you should be hitting him.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can't get your head around the fact that musos hang around with musos and it really doesn't matter. But not just hanging around but actually collaborating yeah the comparison that leapt to mind for me was the way that Mark Bolan very near the end of his

life adopted the punks you know he sort of like took people like Generation X and Suzie and the Banshees and the Damned under his wing Robert Palmer of all people who's supposed to he's only sort like that. Robert Palmer, of all people, who's supposed, you know, he's only sort of one step down in sort of authenticity and grittiness terms

from someone like Joe Cocker. But working with the Noom, it's incredible and good on him. And also, you mentioned Chris France from Talking Heads, which is another bit of evidence of that. And you could even bring in the producer on this. Producers, well, actually, he is credited with producing it, but engineer was Alex Sadkin,

who had worked on Bob Marley and the Wailers' Survival. Right. And also he worked on three Grace Jones albums around this time, Warm Leatherette, Nightclubbing, and Living My Life. So that Robert Palmer album is very much within that kind of Island Records world, if you know what I mean yes man I didn't know that at all I'd written down that this track

is like really it's very remaining light and it's also very warm leatherette I mean people like Robert Palmer obviously having no problem transitioning to the new style and you know you look back on the tunes of 1980 and you know people like Peter Gabriel with Games Without Frontiers this new music has not upset them or, you know, they've managed to adopt, haven't they?

Yeah, it's funny because you've got people like David Bowie who just seamlessly transitioned into the new romantic era with things like Ashes to Ashes and Fashion. Almost as if to say, hey, I was here first. And then you had Roxy Music with stuff like Same Old Scene. Also very much informed by stuff like Japan that was obviously ripped off from Roxy in the first place. So you had that kind of circularity going on. But other people from that generation, I wonder, it's one of the great unknowns, the great what-ifs of rock history,

but if Mark Bolan had survived, what would his new romantic era be like? Would it be brilliant? Would it be awful? Who knows? I've spent a lot of time thinking about that. The only person I'd add to the list, it seems like a strange one, but I'd actually say even the Rolling Stones

would say Emotional Rescue or something like that yes you know that's the fucking tune and and it and it sounds completely modern it doesn't sound dated or anything they adapted to the sound as well meanwhile the american artists were just plugging along doing their flirty birdy shit well the thing is people like bob dylan and lou reed and leonard cohen and people like that generally had a bad 80s in that it didn't really matter the quality of the songs they were writing. They didn't adapt to the new sounds except in the most grudging way,

which meant that they were doing what they'd always done, but with really horrible kind of synths and gated drums stuck over the top. So it was just the worst of all worlds. Whereas people like Robert Palmer are actually embracing it. They're like, right, what can we do with this? Yeah yeah and also they're making pop whereas those americans are making rock um so they feel threatened by it if you're a pop performer and you're interested in making pop

records you shouldn't feel threatened by any of this new technology or this new music it's a fucking weird one isn't he robert palmer and and i saw this, I was absolutely not previously aware of this song until about a year ago on a late night video thing I saw it on the much missed vintage TV and it blew my fucking head off, I love this track I absolutely love this track and I think it's his best and obviously as soon as

I'd heard it I immediately started trying to find entire Robert Palmer albums that were like this and of course I didn't because he's a perverse little fucker trying to find entire Robert Palmer albums that were like this. And of course I didn't, because he's a perverse little fucker. He resists any kind of, always kind of resists being put into any kind of category in a sense.

He's good at making these kind of brittle cocaine-y records at the time, but this is by some distance his very, very best. It's not actually Chris France drumming on this track, but it does have that, that motoring talking heads feel feel that little sneaky guitar lick in it as well it's fantastic absolutely fantastic record and i love the way that i've always actually liked the way that palmer performs his songs he he delivers his lines like there are sides like he sneaks them to camera in a sense um and these are great lines

it's crazy but I'm fighting by the sound of the telephone I love stuff like this yeah that could be the beat to me that could be something out of Mirror in the Bathroom or something like that yeah I worry that the corner might have awful news I have to make an effort now

just to be serious nobody's going to give you the benefit of the doubt these are massively doubtful records this isn't a wannabe Rod Stewart or something. These are doubtful lines in just a brilliant, brilliant song. A lot of his songs are like this, actually. Kind of unplaceable. He always resists, I think.

And that's the trouble. You put the album that this is from on, and you're hoping for more. And then, of course, he does some shitty, vinegar-Jewish-type tracks. And I loved this song uh when it came out and yeah that opening line did resonate deeply with me as i think it would with any kid of my age because it because you know if i'd come back from school there was a gap of uh you know

an hour and a half or so between me coming home from school and having the house to myself and my mom and dad coming back from work so So if the telephone rang, you automatically thought, oh, fuck, something's gone off. There's been a lorry crash or a lathe's fallen on me mum or something. So, yeah, Robert was speaking to me. We didn't have a phone, you see. So when I hear people singing about phones... You'd have been terrified by the sound of the telephone.

I would have been absolutely terrified by the sound of the telephone. Because they won't want. So, you know, for me, when I'm hearingbert palmer singing about his telephone he might as well be saying about his yacht yes but the thing is the thing is with robert palmer he's kind of it you can tell for instance in this performance that none of that band i don't think maybe the drummer but i'm not sure played on the record because he kept changing his band all the time I remember reading an interview with him recently from this period, an interview by Ian Penman where he's

basically saying I don't keep bands together because all I care about is the next song in a sense, so he really was about the next song, he wasn't really about himself in a career sense to a certain extent, so a really odd fucker Robert Palmer and you know for the amount of hits he's had,

he's still strangely unplaceable. I would say that this, looking for clues, is by miles his best record. It's a fucking fantastic gene. I remember this being played at the Christmas school disco and me just jumping up to dance to it and being the only kid that did. And not giving a fuck. It's very good kid that did and not giving a fuck it's very

good but i'm not giving a fuck it's just a great song to bounce around to just because it's not scar doesn't mean you can't bounce i say i would actually disagree about it being his very best though for me that is some guys have all the luck um which of course is a well yes a cover version uh originally i guess it was the persuaders and then later on there was the Rod Stewart version but his version is so the Incel version yeah

Robert Palmer's version is so different from both of the other famous versions batshit yeah and it is you mentioned him being cocaine-y

there's always that undercurrent to pretty much everything he did but yeah batshit the vocals the way he's doing these weird kind of

grunts and these weird little sort of vocal tics you can't even make out what the words are and the verses he's doing these weird Grunts and these weird little Vocal ticks You can't even make out what the words are in the verses He's basically rewritten it Well yeah Why don't you just change the fucking chorus And have a completely new song

That's an extraordinary record I think And I probably didn't appreciate it at the time I probably just thought it was middle of the road bollocks Yeah well the performance He is clearly a man amongst boys isn't he yeah yeah he's he's what um my mum's generation of women would have called yes yes yeah but he's very much a sort of a grown-up woman's um bit of stuff isn't yes but i mean he is dressed you know he's dressed in the style of the time uh he's got uh and actually

he's a bit ahead of his time as well because he's got a shirt and a tie on but he's got a black leather box jacket and throughout the early 80s that was very popular amongst the youth at our school you know if you had a bit of birthday money you know

a lot of the time you would spend it on a black leather box jacket maybe with a skinny tie like a leather skinny tie you know, a lot of the time you would spend it on a black leather box jacket. Maybe with a skinny tie, like a leather skinny tie. Not one of those shit silk ones. The two strikes against this performance were the fact that it was cut off halfway through. And it finishes with, I think it's the keyboard player, he turns around to do the xylophone solo

and it is the most un unarsed xylophone solo I've ever seen in my life I mean, admittedly, I've not seen many of them but it's just there and he's just waggling it about you know, miles away from the surface of the I want to say keys but whatever it is

Why doesn't he hit them? The slabs Why doesn't he hit them? It bears no relation to what you're hearing at all, does it? No It's almost subversive It's almost like when people go on Top of the Pops and fucking play a candelabra like it's a saxophone

or play a chocolate guitar, but it's not. He's got it wrong, hasn't he? It's just bad. It just looks like bad miming. Yeah, yeah. If he'd have actually played the slabby things like it was a keyboard with his fingers, that would have been something.

That would have got talked about in the playground the next day. Or if they'd suddenly cut to Patrick Moore on the xylophone playing that solo. Yes. Yes. Yes. He's on the payroll. Come on, BBC. So the following week, looking for clues, stayed at number 33.

And because the charts pulled up the shutters over Christmas week, that meant it stayed at number 33 for five weeks on the bounce that's incredible isn't it the follow-up some guys have all the luck got to number 16 in march of 1982 and the next time he bothered the shots was when he led the power station in 1985 oh simon the conversation we're gonna have about the power stations at some point yeah exactly you want to talk fucking cocaine-y music yeah It's got a plumber. Now, in case you haven't noticed, next Thursday is Christmas Day,

and we're not in our usual slot. Where we are is 2 o'clock in the afternoon as the first of two special Top of the Pop shows, having a look at the records that made it in 1980. Christmas Day, 2 o'clock, and also a 45-minute special on New Year's Day. Don't miss them, and don't miss the new chart either. Down goes Kate Bush to number 30. Rod Stewart's at 29.

And Young & Company at 28. Here come the Baron Knights at 27. And Dennis Waterman is down to 26. Barry Manilow's at 25 and matchbox at 24 ELO at 23 and down go UB40 at 22 Diana Ross is down to 21 and Stephanie Mills down to 20 Neil Diamond's up to 19 and here are Chas and Dave at 18 with Rabbit. Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit, rabbit. You've got a beautiful team.

You've got a beautiful skin. You've got a beautiful smile. You've got style. You've got a beautiful smile You've got style Bates plugs the Christmas Day and New Year's Day top of the popsers and then runs down the chart from number 30 to number 18, settling upon Rabbit by Chaz and Dave. We've already discussed Chaz and Dave in chart music number 27

and this song was originally titled Jaw Me Dead, but changed to Rabbit after the Cockney rhyming slang term Rabbit and Pork. That means talk, Americans. The song was recorded with the Rapid Fire interplay only at the end of the song for the original release on their Rockne label but when they used it as a jingle for the latest in their series of adverts for Courage Bitter they realised it worked better as an intro as well. So they re-recorded a new version in full and it was

given its first public airing on Tizwas while they were interviewed by Sally James in a rabbit costume. By the end of the show when ATV realised that Tizwas was running fast they were encouraged to reprise the song as an extended 10-minute long jam, with all the presenters pogoing in rabbit costumes and the kids doing a conga led by Cannon and Ball, which pushed it 23 places up the chart to number 43. This week, it's jumped nine places to number 34, and here they are turning the top of the pop studio

into the set of the night of the lepers but before we talk about this actually out the rundown that precedes this yes man i mean we're talking about top of the pops in a transition time it's starting to look so dated that rundown um i kind of like and wish they'd kept the thing of not actually saying the records names and just saying the artist but but bloody hell, CCS's Whole Lotta Love really is sounding like it's from a different era now. Yes, it is. In the lower reaches of the chart, it's nearly all stuff

that I at the time would have perceived as being for old people, right? Yes. I think the first one, the number 30, is Kate Bush. All right, yeah, she's not necessarily an artist for old people, but that song, December Will Be Magic Again, was a sort of syrupy Christmas ballad. Then it's Rod Stewart and the Baron Knights, Dennis Waterman, Barry Manilow, Matchbox,

Yellow, Diana Ross, Neil Diamond, Chaz and Dave themselves, Status Quo, Kenny Rogers, Queen. It's all oldies music for me. There are a few borderline cases. You've got disco stuff like Young & Co, Stephanie Mills, Cool & The Gang, and you've got Eddie Grant, reggae stuff, which that I would have perceived as being for young adults,

like people older than me but still sort of youngish. And then stuff that was for me or for me and my mates would have been very little, really. UB40, ACDC, and Blondie would have been sort of even vaguely aimed at my generation but suddenly you get to the top 10 and boom there's all this stuff that belongs to us yes it's all this stuff all in a row adam and the ants stray cats spandau ballet boomtown rats not sure madness uh police borderline case where you know but yeah suddenly like we own the top 10 and it's amazing well before well we don't own the top five that's for sure but but you know what i mean it's it's a weird old chart from that point of view pains me to say this but the pictures of the acts

have improved possibly because they've been shoved into the top right hand corner so there's little juice to be had from this week, apart from the Baron Knights, who are in their cabaret costume. And they have got massive condor collars. Fucking hell, Gary Newman could learn to fly in them fucking collars, mate. Jesus. Well, anyway, this performance, I mean, if anyone at Chas and Dave's record label is expecting a Christmas bonus this year,

they've got no fucking chance. Because it's been spunked, hasn't it, on this. An absolute promotional blizzard. There's rabbit badges, rabbit T-shirts, rabbit masks. And there's two girls on the floor in front of Chaz's piano with furry rabbit heads. Yeah, those two in front of Un. They're kind of like, yeah, between Un and the piano.

They look like they're about to escort Edward Woodward to his fiery death. Totally. Yes, they do, yes. They actually look like two extras talking to each other in a school play. Doing that really badly, conversational, you know, hands out. Yeah, yeah, yeah, completely. And then... Those masks.

Yeah, the ones in the background with the masks, they're different ones, aren't they? And they, for me, uncannily foreshadow Frank the Scary Rabbit from Donnie Darko. Yes. They're really unsettling. The masks, they're not cardboard shit. They look a bit pricey, they do, don't they?

They do. You know, no offence, Simon. Thank you, thank you. This performance, it might haunt my nightmares forever. It's definitely got that Summer Isle vibe. It's Summer Isle of dogs, isn't it? But I was expecting one of those people, those two girls that you mentioned,

I was expecting one of them to pull a frog out of their mouth at some point as the smell of singed fanny hair drifts across the studio. But in contrast, I remember me and Pricey covered that Minder record, which will now forever be called Here Comes Jizzum in my mind. Chas and Dave are miming, I don't think. But I'm sorry to say, it's a likeable record. It's an avuncular record.

Who could dislike this? It's like disliking the theme for Moany Falls. It's a cheery good record with a good performance, nearly derailed by these terrifying fucking rabbit masks. Yeah. I didn't know that thing about the Tiswas effect, by the way. That's new to me. Yeah, that's amazing.

That's very interesting. Of course, you know, Chaz Hodges died not long ago, and you can tell a lot about someone from how people speak after they're dead um of course you know chas hodges died um not long ago and um you can tell a lot about someone from how people speak after they're dead of course and it is really noticeable no one had a bad word to say about him there was just enormous outpouring of warmth and affection i think what is with chas and dave is it just comes down to having a laugh they were never yeah they were never too cool to have a laugh or to give their audience a laugh i went to about one of their gigs and i probably had the most fun I've had in the last five years

I wasn't expecting to And the thing with novelty records Is Chas and Dave made novelty songs Like Snooker Loopy And no fewer than five Tottenham Hotspur singles I believe But they weren't a novelty band That's the difference I think

So they do all this humorous stuff like Rabbit and Gertrude. And my personal favorite, the Cyborg song. That's my favorite. But they could also write big sing-along fucking ballads like Ain't No Pleasing You, which is obviously brilliant. Arms riding your mate songs. Yeah, yeah. And Chaz was just a great musician.

And if you saw great musician And that became If you saw him live that became clear He was a proper rock and roll pianist In the vein of Jerry Lewis In fact he learned to play He was in Jerry Lewis' band And he learned to play piano from him And Chaz played on any number

Of classic pop singles Joe Meek singles and stuff like that And obviously there's the whole Abbey Sifray M&M business and all that. But he was respected by other musicians. They were invited to be the support band for not only the Libertines

but Led Zeppelin. Which is just bizarre, isn't it? Tell people that, they think you're having a laugh. I think respect is due and it's a likeable record Most definitely The one thing I would question it on And I didn't really worry about this at the time

You've got more rabbit than Sainsbury's Because I didn't know what Sainsbury's was At the time Because we didn't have Sainsbury's in Wales But it's only in respect I've got to question whether Sainsbury's Actually sold rabbit Maybe in pet food Maybeainsbury's actually sold rabbit. I mean, maybe in pet food.

Maybe in pet food they sold rabbit. Yeah, if it had been you got more rabbit than Vine Fair, that would have been a bit more universal. But I'm sure Sainsbury's were absolutely delighted that they were suddenly known as that place that just sold dead rabbits. That goes against their modus operandi and their brand. they were known as that suddenly known as that place that just sold dead rabbits you know that goes against their uh their modus operandi and their brand but fuck them they did that fucking advert about the christmas eve truce oh you still have some ponzi biscuits fuck saint chris yeah

although there is another lyrical problem slightly with this song in there i think he says um why don't you get it off your chest, which surely, for somebody who talks too much, is not what you should be saying to them. Apart from that, yeah. Well, just the whole thing of trying to shut down women in general. We assume he's speaking to a woman there. It's not great, is it?

But having said that, you notice those two fucking girls who were gassing on all the time. They're not about anymore, aren't they? They've been towed. They've been put in the fucking box. Unless they're in the big rabbit heads. Maybe, yeah.

Maybe underneath that they've got their mouths gaffer taped shut. Yeah. So the thing that really struck me about this performance was the bit you mentioned, the back and forth, the bunny bunny jabba jabba, all that kind kind of stuff how the fuck do they do that how many fucking rehearsals and gigs have they got to do to get that down that's incredible apparently they nailed it in about 10 minutes apparently when they were recording it it's astonishing that's it true pros not like waterman and cole you see um yeah they nailed it um also i'm just wondering

probably wrong but talking about top of the pops being in transition one of the things that we see in this episode is as you've in this performance as you've mentioned is that thing of loads of kids sat down yes the show is going on i'm just wondering how often we see that after this episode i don't recall it that much but it tends to be for novelty stuff. I seem to recall when the Birdie song comes a few years later, that the audience was sat down.

But yeah, that stops happening, I think, fairly soon after this. And did you notice the one out of the Barren Knights who's dressed as a schoolboy? He's in the audience as well. Is he? Oh, Christ. Yes.

You've had your moment. Fuck off. This would have been the one song that if I was watching this with my dad it would be the one song that we both agreed on was alright and it's all inclusive and familial in a way that

Grandma We Love You tried to be and wasn't absolutely and they're not trying to be dead funny and nobody could begrudge Chatham Day precisely because of the history that they had and because of the amount of

they've been involved in music in this country for so many fucking years and played with so many amazing people to see them actually in a sense towards the tail end of what might have been their careers get suddenly massive as they did it was actually really gratifying to see so nobody no one could begrudge it. And they were from London,

but they didn't get on your tits about it. Which is a very, very difficult stunt to pull off. So the following week, Rabbit bounded 16 places to number 18 and would get to number 8 in January of 1981. The follow-up, poor old Mr Woogieier failed to chart and they had to turn down recording the theme tunes to only fools and horses because they were touring

australia but they finished 1981 with stars over 45 their medley of musical tunes, which got to number 21 in December of that year. You're becoming a piss. Bebbit, Bebbit, Bebbit, Bebbit, Bebbit, Bebbit, Bebbit. Yep, yep, yep, yep, Bebbit, yep, Bebbit, Bebbit, yep, yep, yep. Banny, Banny, Jabba, Jabba, Banny, Jabba, Bebbit. Ha-ha-ha! Unbelievable. Rise up high.

That's Chas and Dave and Rabbit. Now then, have a look at this, because we'll pick up the charts at 17 and see exactly what's going down, and more to the point, what's climbing in this week's chart. And down go ACDC to 17. Kool and the Gang are at 16. And Status Quo up to 15. Blondie's The Tide is high as at 14.

Kenny Rogers' Lady is at 13. Flash by Queen at number 12. And Eddie Grant's Do You Feel My Love at number 11. Just talking about rabbits a moment ago, wherever you look in the Top of the Pop studio tonight, there are Nolans everywhere. Everywhere. I don't believe it.

Minds are pint, chuckles Bates as he launches into the charts from number 17 to number 11 before comparing the next act to rabbits in a casually racist to Irish Catholics manner oh lordy lordy lordy yeah so he says something about rabbits and he goes there are nolans

everywhere which yeah it is it's you can't have meant anything else it's got to be about Irish Catholics and birth control isn't it yeah and coupled with... They won't stop fucking, why don't they give it a rest? But coupled with that incredibly bizarre camera move,

where he says this, Nolan's everywhere still, and then there's a second of silence, and then suddenly we're behind him, seeing through Bates' vision. It's like looking through Simon Bates' vision. It's like looking through Simon Bates' eyes. Rah, rah, rah, rah, rah. It's like something from a fucking Nick Rome movie or something. It's terrifying.

The band is the Nolans, and the song is Who's Gonna Rock You Now? Spawned by Tommy and Maureen Nolan of Rahini, Dublin, and Blackpool between 1950 and 1965 in an irresponsible manner that Simon Bates doesn't approve of clearly. The Singing Nolans were a nine-handed group consisting of the parents and seven children including two older brothers Tommy and Brian and they spent a decade on the northern club circuit and released an LP in 1972 as well as a single Blackpool for the local football club.

On Christmas Day 1973, the group performed at Blackpool's Cliffs Hotel, and Tommy was approached by the businessman Joe Lewis, who offered his daughters a residency at the London Clubroom, and the rebranded Nolan sisters decamped to London, where they were offered TV appearances and a residency on the BBC One show It's Cliff Richard, and ended up supporting Frank Sinatra and Rolf Harris. However, they couldn't translate TV exposure into hit records, and after eight flops on the bounce,

they were signed up to Epic Records and entered into the 1979 Song for Europe competition with the song Harry My Honolulu Lover. They were so strongly favoured to win that they had already been booked onto several BBC shows in advance, but a strike

by BBC technicians minutes before the show meant the regional panels had to vote only on audio recordings of each song, and they came in fourth behind eventual winners Black Lace and the song was their ninth straight flop. However their next single Spirit Body and Soul finally broke them into the charts when it got to number 34 in October of 1979 and the follow up I'm in the Mood for Dancing got them to number three for two weeks in February of this

year this is their third single of 1980 and the follow-up to gotta pull myself together which got to number nine for two weeks in October of this year and it's nudged up one place this week from number 40 to number 39 oh the Cliffs Hotel in Blackpool, which is the second time it's been sort of featured in this show. Because the other thing about the Cliffs Hotel is that it's the venue for a YouTube video that Sid Little did to promote it, which is quite incredible. It's the centre of everything. Basically, yeah, that Cliffs Hotel is to British pop what the Chelsea Hotel is to smack rock in America. So this song, do we know who wrote it? Yeah, it's Nicky Graham, right?

Billy Ocean, apparently. Oh, really? All right, well, that's my research down the fucking toilet. You could call this denim disco, which I think is something that Dr Hook started. It's soft disco for parents and for homes, not for clubs. Well, we do talk about dad rock a lot uh this is mum disco isn't it well it presumably got a push not just from radio one but

from radio two as well via woven yes so i put it mentally probably you might disagree but i'll put it with baccarat and i'll put it with like liquid gold's dance yourself dizzy and disco by otter one and castanet by coffee and that fern kinney record that you mentioned earlier records all with varying degrees of success i think despite now knowing that billy ocean wrote it i put it kind of near the bottom of that pile in a sense despite its lines about party people freaking in their groove i doubt this was getting played much in actual disco clubs. That's very Sean Ryder, isn't it, that lyric? Yeah, it's my mistake. Yeah, Billy Ocean did write it,

but Nicky Graham produced it, who was also responsible for Let's Get Ready to Rumble by Ant and Dec, and by PJ and Duncan, I should say, and I Owe You Nothing by Bross. Oh, what a legacy. Yeah, and the producer, Nicky Graham, was also a spider from Mars for a couple of months.

Played keyboards for a couple of months on Bowie's tour. Yeah, amazing. Fuck. So, yeah, I never thought there'd be a connection between Ziggy and the Nolans, but there it is. But I think disco is a word. I'm sure it's still floating about in 1980, but kind of getting...

Well, this is... You say disco is a word. Disco is an insult in a way, isn't it? still floating about in 1980 but kind of this is this is you say disco as well this is disco as an insult in a way it's not as bad as other examples of the genre but it's black pop isn't really sounding like this at the moment i mean there's other records that come into charts this year like brothers johnson stomp and gibson brothers cuba it's going more in a kind of funky jazzy direction rather than that but despite all of this despite the shitness of the record and the shitness of the song

I kind of like the Nolans I like their gameness I like their shit dancing I like the fact that their dancing is not so perfect that it's all you know perfectly choreographed they look like our sisters and our friends and our on a night out

they were ours to a certain extent they've been off those ridiculously tight satin disco trousers and they're now in designer jeans and a case catalogue top the jeans right they're very tight jeans but not in a sexy way

it's in an Asda advert way you know like where that woman pats her bum to make the change go cha-ching it's those an Asda advert way you know where that woman pats her bum to make the change go cha-ching it's those kind of changes and it's so funny to me that you said you've heard of dad rock this is mum pop

I had that exact phrase written down in my notes great mindset that's totally what it is for me it's the wrong song sadly as ever on chart music we get an act where you think, oh, if only it was their previous one or the next one. But for me, Don't Make Waves is an amazing record.

If that was by anyone else, even if it was by ABBA, because ABBA have a lot more critical respect, people would just be sort of praising that song to the skies, Don't Make Waves. But what can you do? And, you know, attention to me, you know, that's hard to knock. I don't make waves um but what can you do um and you know attention to me you know that's that's hard to knock i don't know yeah i suppose that's got a bit of sort of george mccray vibe to it um and of course i'm in the mood for dancing you know it's i don't think disco was

dead or even dying at this point no not at all that's what i'm saying yeah i mean it's it's a complete false view of history if anyone does think that because something I mean Upside Down by Diana Ross that was this year and that is you know that is pure chic at their height that's not some that's not mutating anywhere that's not going jazzy or anything that is just you know bang

centre of what disco was so alright in America the whole disco sucks movement might have kicked in we didn't care over here you know we're like no right you don't want your disco? We'll have it, thank you very much. I mean, as for the performance, it's kind of sloppy. But, you know, that's all right. You know, they've got the Girls' Night Out vibe going on.

Which I always find endearing. I live in Brighton, and I love seeing hen parties going about. And it's got that kind of hen party vibe, because it's just people having an amazing time and not giving a shit and it i just find it endlessly cheering to see that and at the time this came out i probably would have sucked and hated it this is really nice but it's it's hard to dislike it at this kind of distance um i i remember um uh my best mate uh who lived next door to me because i did have one friend believe it or not uh um went to see them with his parents at some kind of yeah at some kind of holiday might have

been butlins or pontins or something like that where they were they were performing and um and another band who were doing that circuit of course with with the doolies and i'm i'm not just making that comparison because they're sort of family-based troops with irish surnames but it was very much that that kind of thing wasn't it it was Butlin's Disco the other thing I've got to fess up to is that I've got a massive crush on Colleen Nolan

oh no by the way, no, yeah seriously not the well mum's neck, Kim Woodburn baiting, comparing gay rights campaigners to ISIS, offering to pay for her son to lose his virginity to a prostitute in Amsterdam. GCSE's

Colleen Nolan, is it? Yes, that Colleen Nolan. That one! And weirdly, it's not this one, because even though she was, right, I was 13 at the time, she was 15. Oh, that's fair. No, I was 13 at the time, she was 15. I did not perceive her as being anywhere near my age. I just thought they were all mums.

All of the Nolans were mums. Yeah, yeah. That was it as far as I'm concerned. But Colleen Nolan, the TV presenter of the last 15 years or so, who did all those things that you just mentioned, yeah, I've got such a crush on her. I've got to say, there we go. Yeah.

Well, you know, that's two things you've got in common with Jimmy Savile. As MC Pitman would say. She's the one far right in this performance, isnmy saville as mc pitman would say she's the one far right in this performance isn't she yes yes and the one who's far right in real life by this point you know she'd already been firmly clinched by jimmy saville on top of the pops and turned down an invitation to his hotel room at the age of 14 and a week after this episode uh on the on the christmas special yeah the nolans pitched up and uh savel and peter powell kind of like got on the podium next to them and uh while peter powell was you know doing his powell-y thing savel was talking off camera offering to give the nolans away to uh sort of camera crew and uh essentially slathered over

each of them and then right at the end, he took Colleen's arm and sort of walked her off the stage before the interview had ended. Fuck hell. So, yeah. Yeah. Of course, you know, after all the savvleness came out, you know, the Nolan sisters gave an interview where they said

yeah, he was just creeping around her all the time, and we essentially formed a wall of Nolan. Yeah, yeah. Away from her. Wall of Nolan. Wow. Maybe that's what they need on the Irish border after Brexit.

Yes. That was sorted out. So you've got the Nolans on one side and the Doolies on the other and they just sort of, you know, make sure everything's all right passing through. They've got a band with them as well. There's absolutely no need for it, is there? No.

I mean, there's one bit where I think the bassist has obviously found a rabbit on the floor from the previous performance, and he's bouncing it up and down on the keyboard in a Gus Honeybun manner. But these slightly crap versions of disco, in a sense, are actually really pleasurable to watch. It's like if I wanted to... I'm sure there's better documentaries I It's like, if I wanted to...

I'm sure there's better documentaries I could send people towards if I wanted to know about disco. But I'd actually... One of the first things I'd send people towards is the Joan Collins films, The Bitch and the Stud. Yes.

There's something grubby about those films and seeing Oliver Tobias weaving around a nightclub dancing to disco that I think has something important to say about the whole phenomenon. And seeing Jacko out of Brushstrokes having sex in a swimming pool with David Hunter's wife out of Crossroads.

Yes, yes indeed. A scene that you can never really rub from your mind once you've seen it. No, no. I mean, but no, you're right, Neil. This is essentially Briscoe, isn't it? British disco. Well, it is now, yeah yeah so the following week who's gonna

rock you now jumped up eight places to number 31 and would get to number 12 the follow-up attention to me would get to number nine in may of 1981 and they'd have two more chart hits before being dropped by epic they signed a six album deal with a Japanese record label making cover versions of Japanese hit records before splitting up in 2005. But over here they become individually best known for soap opera work and rabbiting on on loose women before having a massive fallout over a reunion tour in 2009. But then the remaining sisters came together again when Bernie Nolan died in 2013. They are still fielding offers to reform including one proposal where Bernie would appear as a hologram but they still feel it's too soon.

I'm gonna rock you now All right, there's the Netherlands. And now a few success stories. Well, they're from the top ten, so there really are success stories in pop music terms. Featuring the rise and rise of Adam and the Ants, up six places with Ant Music. and the ants up six places with ant music. Bit of rockabilly from Stray Cats.

They're climbing up one place to number nine with Runaway Boys. Down goes Bandau Valley with To Cut A Long Story Short to number eight. And a surprise plummet for Boomtown Rats. They're down two places to seven with Banana Republic. Madness has slipped two places as well. Embarrassments at number six. Things to celebrate. The police are giving live gigs in this country over the next week

and they're up four places to number five with Dee Doo Doo Doo. From number one down to number four this week, Abba and Super Trooper. You might recall a single call, You'll Always Find Me in the Kitchen At Parties, about nine months ago. Here's the new hit from Jonah Louis at number three, Stop The Cavalry. Hey, Mr. Churchill comes over here to say we're doing splendidly. But it's very cold out here in the snow, marching to and from the enemy.

Oh, I say it's tough, I have had enough, can you stop the cavalry? Oh, I say it's tough, I have had enough Can you stop the cavalry? After breaking down the charts from 10 to 3 with video clips and everything Baits are lights upon Stop the Cavalry by Jonah Louis Born John Lewis in Southampton in 1947 Jonah Louis started his career as a blues and boogie singer and pianist who joined the blues band Brett Marvin and the Thunderbolts in 1969.

In 1972, he wrote the song Seaside Shuffle and recorded it with members of the Thunderbolts under the name Terry Dactyl and the Dinosaurs, which was picked up by Jonathan King's UK records and it soared to number two for two weeks in August of that year held off the top spot by Alice Cooper's Schools Out. After the follow-up on a Saturday night stalled at number 45 in January of 1973 the dinosaurs became extinct and Louis spent the mid-70s as a solo artist. In 1977 he signed to Stiff Records appearing on their package tours and he scored his first solo hit in 1980 when You'll Always Find Me In The Kitchen At Parties got to number 16

in June of that year. This song inspired by the Tomb Of The Unknown Soldier under the Arc De Triomphe was originally written as an anti-war tune, but Stiff picked up on the line, Wish I Was At Home For Christmas, and frosted it with tubular bells and assorted jingling, and it soared from number 69 to number 15 last week, and this week it's jumped another 12 places to number 3. Before we get into it, chaps, I need to point out that this is a repeat of the December the 4th performance

where Peter Powell asked the audience if we could pick out any artists on the stiff roster in the backing band and I couldn't I'm not really going to know what the fuck Reckless Eric looked like to be honest well exactly yeah

I mean I think it was the stiff records label I'm absolutely terrified now that people are going to look at that and go, oh, look, there's fucking, I don't know, Elvis and Gary Glitter and people like that. I was looking carefully. You've got to look right, twat. Yeah, I mean, God knows if they're

members of the Attractions or you know, I don't know, Rockpile or something like that. Lena Lovitch clearly isn't there. No, not quite, yeah. And neither is Elvis Costello. Madness aren't there, yeah, you know, either a rock pile or something like that. Lena Lovitch clearly isn't there. No, not quite, yeah. And neither is Elvis Costello. Madness aren't there, yeah. Exactly, yeah, that's what I was worried about. I can't see any of the blockheads either.

No. So, yeah, this song is pretty much of a stealth Christmas record, this one, isn't it? Yeah. I didn't know that thing about, you know, originally it wasn't meant to be Christmassy And Stiff decided to Christmas it up That's quite interesting

The line Wish I was at home for Christmas If you're doing a war song Particularly an old school War song Wish I was at home for Christmas We'll be at home for Christmas That's a standard line Yeah I guess so

Stiff Records Had, you know, it had an image of having quite a lot of integrity, so I'm quite surprised they would make as nakedly commercial a decision as that, but good on them, I guess. Yeah, yeah. When I say Stolf Christmas Record, it's a tune that gets wheeled out every year at this point.

But, you know, compared to others, it doesn't get on your tits. No, and I suppose I kind of like it, I kind of approve of it in a way I never need to hear it again in my life but you know but lots of people clearly do

it's hearts in the right place it's a political record again by stealth you know there's that verse bang that's another bomb on another town while the czar and jim carter i guess have tea um if i if i get home live to tell the tale i'll run for all presidencies if i get elected i'll stop i'll stop the cavalry so you know that's that's basically as kind of modern day as it gets with the the pacifist message of it. But most people will just think of the dum-a-dum-a-dum-dum.

That's all anyone ever hears. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes. Yeah, and you know, in the nuclear fallout zone, once again, Simon, he's always there, isn't he? Whining, whining, nuclear attack. Even at Christmas. Yeah, it's basically man at CNA.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's man at the Salvation Army. Yeah, crossed with a bit of, I don't know, preempt with yes with a bit of i don't know um preemptor orally a bit of pipes of peace in there even though pipes of peace hasn't been created yet and a heavy floral dance influence i think as well yeah based on mozart in it yeah yeah a bit of mozart and some composer you probably have neil heard of him hugo Hugo Alfven? I haven't actually. You're into your classical stuff. But those trenches, they're going to get pretty crowded in pop music really in the 80s. It's a frequent thing that's returned to you.

But I think what Pricey was referring to is it is just dead tuneful. And as a kid, it's kind of all you need really. And the lyrics are kind of interesting at that age. I remember wondering who the hell Mary Bradley was and actually enjoying myself picturing horsebacked cavalry in a nuclear fallout zone. But I'm now kind of dubious about his ability

to run for all presidencies. Purely on a... Especially not purely on a... Unless he's Russian. I just don't envision... He's got a Facebook account. I mean, otherwise Arnold Schwarzenegger would have done it by now. Well, yeah.

And I don't think he's going to succeed purely on a Stop the Cavalry ticket, to be honest with you, but I'm nitpicking. It's a good Christmas song. Well, no, no, if you're going to nitpick, let's pick the biggest nit of them all, right? He's wanting to stop the cavalry, but isn't the cavalry that the people who always come and rescue you yeah perhaps so you know here comes the cavalry and and he wants to stop them

but maybe it's an animal welfare tip maybe that's it yeah definitely unless it's a charge of the light brigade reference yeah the crucial thing it's set which means he's flicking from war to war to war i think i think the only one he doesn't reference is vietnam yeah but christmas songs uh like that light pipes peace or even i don't know driving in for christmas by christmas it makes you appreciate your shitty christmas a bit because at least you're not eating rats in a trench somewhere um although we can say or having to sit next to Chris Rea as he booms on the N1 and swears at people I mean we can be

eating rats next Christmas obviously but the only thing that disappoints really in terms of the performance for me if we're willing

to give up our arses of course to the bed of course of course behind a fucking insurance billboard but the only thing

that disappoints about his performance is his trousers, I have to say. Why didn't he have car keys on? Why has he got these bright yellow trousers with the army coat on? They're anachronistic, aren't they? But to be honest with you, I'm a sucker for Christmas songs, Al.

I like nearly all of them, apart from Band-Aid. And it's not that I like them, it's just they're a part of Christmas. They've always been there. Like this year, this Christmas, I know I will hear Shakin' Stephen's Merry Christmas, everyone. Now, it's not a great record at all,

but it's part of Christmas. It just makes me feel Christmassy. So I'm a bit of a sucker for these. I agree with you, Neil, but I wish it didn't make me feel Christmassy in fucking mid-November. Well, quite, yes. No, indeed. But I will hear that soon. I'll probably didn't make me feel Christmassy in fucking mid-November Well quite yes No indeed but I will hear that soon

I'll probably even blow me near mistletoe and wine And I won't Snap to turn it off it's just part of The shittiness of Christmas As well as the other bits it's just Yeah it's a British Christmas It's those records As I've mentioned before

Virtually all of those songs including this one were ruined by my time in the casino having to listen to them when i was trying to be sophisticated being sworn at by cunts so yeah yeah um it's it's you know that element is roomy and and and again that's another that's another chalk up in the favor column for um there's no one quite like grandma. Because that's not one song you hear over and over again at Christmas. Thank fuck.

The thing is with this one, there's a lot of words in it. And I remember doing a Christmas show a few years ago, live, and we attempted to cover this. And I got all the words wrong, because I couldn't remember them all. And people were furious afterwards. They were angry i'd almost like pissed on their christmas they're getting these songs wrong um it's a bit overwordy and like pricey says i agree with pricey

in that i i am not fussed about whether i ever hear this again you mentioned it as a stealth christmas record along with 2000 miles by the Pretender I would get really upset if I never heard 2000 Miles again because I fucking love that one but this one not that fussed. And of course the other thing is which we always have to bring up when records of battle rear their head in Top of the Pops

again, you know, how bad is the war going that Jonah Lewis on the front line looking like the bastard son of Kevin Rowland and Fred Harris yes it would have been brilliant if all the puppets in ragtime suddenly

popped up in combat fatigues and get shot at him the other very niche reference I've got to make but I've got to make it anyway the guys in the background in the first World War uniforms playing their brass instruments, I just thought British sea power. But hardly anyone's going to...

I don't think the average chart music listener's going to know what I'm on about, but there we go. Oh, I don't know. I don't know. I actually... We mentioned Kitchener Parties before, and I think that's a brilliant record. That's a really great record.

I love that one. Yeah, this one I can kind of take it or leave it to be honest. But his heart's in the right place. So the following week Stop the Cavalry stayed at number 3 meaning it hung in at number 3 for 5 weeks. Oh there's some numerology shit

going on isn't there? Robert Palmer at 33 for 5 weeks him at number 3 for 5 weeks. What does it all mean? I don't know. I need to know now Robert Palmer at 33 for five weeks, him at number three for five weeks. What does it all mean? Fuck all. I don't know. I need to know now if there was a song at number 333 for five weeks as well.

The follow-up, Louise, We Get It Right, failed to chart in the UK, along with his four remaining singles for Stiff, and he retired from the pop game in 1983, at the same time that john smith were using stop the cavalry in adverts for their lager according to an article in the daily mail this song earns jonah louis 120 000 pounds a year in royalties yeah yeah fucking hell he doesn't have to get out of bed, basically.

He can spend the whole year just waiting for that. And that is only the eighth most royalty-generating Christmas song of all time. Do you want me to go through the list? Go on. Number 10, Stay Another Day. £97,000. 2,000 miles by the Pretenders. £102,000 per year.

Stop the cavalry. Mistletoe and wine, £100,000 a year. Wonderful Christmas time, £260,000 a year. Last Christmas, £300,000 a year. White Christmas, £328,000 a year White Christmas £328,000 a year All I want for Christmas is you £376,000 a year Fairy Tale of New York

£400,000 a year Merry Christmas everybody Half a million pounds a year Oh my god Really? Yeah Christmas, Christmas, Christmas, Christmas Half a million pounds a year. Oh my God. Really? Yeah. Christmas, Christmas, Christmas, Christmas. Ah, la, la, la.

Come on, help me. Help me write this Christmas song. We need to do a chart music Christmas song. It's got to be a bummer dog Christmas. Yeah. Yeah. Bummer dog, bummer dog, bummer dog,dog, bom-a-dom-a-dog. I wish I was at home for Christmas.

John and Louis, of course, at number three. At number two, it's St Winifred School. Now, don't forget our two Christmas specials. Our life together Is so precious Together we have grown We have grown After referring to the number two act as St. Winifred's school again, Bates signs off by plugging the Top of the Pop specials one more time and then drops into his out-tuned tone of voice to introduce this week's number one,

Just Like Starting Over by John Lennon. We've already covered John Lennon in Chart Music 10 with his first solo single, Instant Karma, and since then he's spent the 70s relocating to New York, getting involved with mentalist activists, donating money to the IRA, getting pissed up with Ringo and Harry Nilsson, and packing in music in 1975 to doss about his flat,

spunk his money up the wall on fur coats and cows, and concentrate on becoming a right custard gannet. After a sailing trip to Bermuda in the summer of this year, however, he decided to return to recording and planned to cut an LP in Jamaica with some reggae lads. But his missus insisted on lumping her songs in with his, so they put together a fuckload of tunes in New York's record plant with Rick Nielsen and Bunny Carlos of Cheap Trick

between early August and mid October of 1980. After signing with the then unknown Geffen Records mainly because owner David Geffen approached Yoko first, told her he wouldn't think of not putting them both together on their first LP and offering them a deal before hearing one single track, they put out this single single the lead cut from the lp double fantasy it's the follow-up to imagine which got to number six for three weeks in november of 1975 and both it and the lp were panned in the british press culminating in a scathing review in the enemy by cho shanmue which read it sounds like great life, but it makes for a lousy record.

I wish Leonard had kept his big happy trap shut until he had something to say that was even vaguely relevant to those of us not married to Yoko. After entering the charts at number 30 in the second week of October, just like starting over took three weeks to get to number eight, allegedly with the help of Yoko Ono buying it up the charts in the UK as her husband was desperate for a sizeable UK hit over here, but then it slid down to number 10. A week later, Lennon bumped into a fat lad from Hawaii called Mark Chapman and autographed a copy of his LP. The most disastrous signature in the history of the world

until whoever's Prime Minister next year signs the Brexit agreement and the Beacles became the Three Cloths. The next day, just like starting over, dropped 11 places to number 21, but this week it soared

all the way up to number one on top of the pops of engaged legs and co to perform a slinky christmasy homage to the man and his music well chaps it's been 10 days since the death of john lennon which was probably an even more shocking death to us lot than elvis's was. And Simon, heard you took the news really badly. Oh, here we go. Here we go. Well, there's a line on the Manic Street Preacher single, Motown Junk,

I laughed when Lennon got shot. Which, by the way, they've kind of lived to regret and they don't sing that line when they do it live anymore. I didn't laugh when Lennon got shot. Neither did I cry cry i was quite kind of neutral on the subject but one day i was walking to school it was the day after the news broke and um you know how even when you're an adult if you're walking along the street and somebody you kind of know is walking the same way as you it's really awkward because you sort of

think well am i meant to walk alongside them and make conversation or do i make some excuse to duck into a shop and not do that pre-walkman era yeah yeah exactly so i was walking to school and my journey my path to school merged with this other kids that was in my class and we sort of um accidentally ran into each other at the corner and we walked along the same way. And it was one of those awkward moments, what are we going to talk about? So I said to him, oh, do you hear about John Lennon?

That was a shame, wasn't it? And he just said, yeah, yeah, and sort of changed the subject. And I thought nothing more of it. Now, my mum was absolutely beside herself at the death of John lennon and i imagine my dad as well everybody for a generation was just completely destroyed by this news but to me it was just some sort of fairly theoretical distant thing i didn't really know who he was bloke it was just one of the beatles you know just okay one of the beatles has died i don't really know

which one he is i know he he's not McCartney. That's all it is. Because McCartney was still famous. McCartney was still making records. But the rest of them, they were just the Beatles. So I went to school, had the first couple of lessons of the day. Then it was break time.

And suddenly at break time, other kids were running up to me going, John Lennon, John L lennon and rubbing their eyes and doing crying sounds like john lennon rubbing their eyes at me and i i was like what what what sorry what what are you talking about and it turned out that this other kid that i run into had gone around and told the whole school that i cried when john lennon got shot lying little shit right and bear in mind what i said at the start of whole school that i cried when john lennon got shot lying little shit right and bear in mind what i said at the start of the podcast that i was struggling to make any friends

in this school uh i hardly knew anyone hardly anyone knew me they knew nothing about me well now they knew something about me the one fucking thing they knew about me was fake news it was this idea that i had broken down in tears at the death of John Lennon so my nickname to a lot of people they didn't even know my real name they just said see that guy over there go and call him John Lennon that was my fucking name to some of these kids

John Lennon fuck's sake the only way I shifted that nickname was in registration one day We had a competition To see who could do the most frightening horror face And I won

And from that moment on my nickname became scary Right That's the only way I managed to shift John Lennon As being my fucking nickname So don't talk to me about Just Like Starting Over Fuck Just Like Starting Over Fuck John Lennon Ruin my life That's terrible about Just Like Starting Over. Fuck Just Like Starting Over. Fuck John Lennon.

Ruin my life. That's terrible. I mean, Simon, yeah, I mean, yeah. Yeah, unlucky. But, you know, at least they didn't keep it up. I mean, in early 1981, they could have gone, Oh, Simon Price cried when the Pope was shot. He roared. Yeah, at least I wasn't the assassination guy.

The guy who everybody runs up to when there's been an assassination. And what's the doubt? That kid who did it, right? Name him, Simon. I'm not going to name him, but he runs a pizza parlour in Barry. Does he now?

And you are Simon Price. We have school reunions sometimes. Well, there was one kind of official reunion, and then quite often, especially around Christmas, there are sort of unofficial gatherings in the pub and that. And if ever I saw him now, I'd say I'm over it to some extent, but I would not shake his hand.

I would not speak to him. I would refuse his handshake. I would walk away. There's no starting over with you. his hand i would not speak to him i would i would refuse his handshake i'd walk away there's no starting over with you although i can i can sort of totally echo what simon said about his mum being really upset um oh yeah my mum was massively distraught about this um about john lennon dying um and i just kind of vaguely like some of his songs for this one for instance although when you think about it

When you think about Paul McCartney making Coming Up and Temporary Secretary Sort of near this time John Lennon making this Fucking It's a Vanden Plaas shawadi wadi really isn't it That's all it is He's got slightly better writing and production Looking back it also seems to be a song

About his relationship with his audience perhaps And his relationship to rock music altogether um coming back into it paul seemed confident in the new wave and john lennon would never get a chance to even see if he could do it but to be honest with you know you asked the question earlier somebody mentioned earlier what would bolan have done in the 80s i love thinking of those things i love thinking love thinking about what would Jimmy have done in the 70s? You know, I think he would have made funk records with Earth, Wind & Fire myself.

And I lose myself in reveries about what Mark Bolan would have done in the 80s. I can see him working with Scott Aitken and Waterman and I can see him, I don't know, with Gloria Hunniford on Afternoon Plus and stuff like that.

And maybe even finding a new way to be a pop star. But with Lennon, it's the least interesting one. I suspect he'd have taken a musical route that was even more traditional than George Harrison. Obviously, you know, I remember when John Lennon died. In the morning, you know, my mum was getting ready to go to work. She left the house at about seven o'clock.

And I could hear her shouting up the stairs. It's like, oh, fucking hell, not not already let me have a lay-in and uh i was on the landing going what what are you going on about she says john lennon's been shot dead and i just went oh fucking hell because i knew who he was and everything and then she says i bet yoko did it god it's the old courtney love conspiracy theory two decades early yeah yeah yeah because i mean you're right i mean you're like john lennon beforehand i mean you know before this before this song came out meant fuck all to me i think you know we talked about the meaning of the beacons in a in a very previous uh episode of chart music but i mean by this time i remember

the daily mirror in i think it was a summer of 1980 they did a week-long series you know the beacles where are they now what they're doing now and uh when they got to john lennon there was just this shot of him in a restaurant and he's he had long hair and a beard and he just looked like a fucking geography teacher it's like oh who's that tramp so you know and when this song came out it was absolutely no big deal it was just like oh you know oh okay john lennon's released a single get great big deal would have been like bill haley releasing a new single or someone like that you know what i mean yeah yeah um do you know what um taken out of the context of um the horror a of his shooting and b

the horror of what happened to me at school the next day yeah i quite like it as a record um do you uh yeah it's um obviously uh um neil's right that it's nowhere near as forward looking as the stuff that mccartney was doing around this time but to me it's in the same vein as the um rock and roll stuff that lennon did in the early 70s with Phil Spector. This isn't with Phil Spector. It's, oh God, what's the guy's name? It's Jack Douglas is the producer.

And yeah, it's just, I like that kind of echoey Elvis kind of vocal. It's all right. It's nostalgic. It's quite nice. I think it was worthy of being a middle-sized hit and ducking out the charts again. Probably not worthy of being fucking number one. But then I never really... The more I found out about John Lennon,

the less saintly he seems and the more the beatification of Lennon seems wrong. We all know he was a wife beater there's all kinds of really unpleasant things about him but he is treated as his kind of Gandhi figure the Gandhi of rock or something and I hate that

so the whole sentimentality around it I can understand why people of the 60's generation rushed out and bought his records in December 1980 but I was just waiting for it to pass understand why people of the 60th generation rushed out and bought his records in uh december 1980 yeah um i was just i was just waiting for it to pass really it's like like when when when diana died it's like oh shit i'm just gonna fucking lock myself away for a week i can't i can't be doing with this it's that kind of feeling you know yeah and it's like that in the charts

it's like oh yeah can we surface yet can we stick our heads above you know when's this going to be over i mean i remember that I remember there's a clip. I've got to find it on YouTube. I think it was an American news programme on the day after getting the reaction from England. And, of course, everyone's saying, oh, yeah, he should have stayed here. He wouldn't have got shot and all this kind of stuff.

But there's a really brief clip of an interview with Jimmy Tarbuck, who's there demanding that Mark Chaplin gets the electric chair yeah the song did nothing for me then does even less for me now I think it's cat shit

but you know we can agree as Jimmy Tarbuck would say we can agree to disagree I feel sorry for the ladies doing the dance performance in front of the christmas tree yes there's really not a lot you can do and it's into well i mean this is this is supposed to be the dad is faction moment and it's you know how many dead animals are they wearing by the way well yes i'm sorry to come at you with a kind of petter animal rights angle on this but

no no you know if i'm going to slag off madonna for wearing 40 chinchillas I've got to slag off Legs & Co for wearing God knows how many mink or whatever it is they're wearing. Well they've dressed appropriately for the occasion in satiny red dresses slashed up the legs with lengths of white fur hanging off them it kind of looks like they're being attacked by ferrets isn't it

yeah it's basically a half-arsed dance in the fake snow around the massive Christmas tree and unflattering black and white portraits of Lennon fade up and down they couldn't sex it up anyway to this song, a man's died for fuck's sake

but there was never the thought those black and white photos that come up are key because it reminds me of the Love Me Do clip that we saw the other week the Beatles were a retrograde notion by then. And this is really not that far away from a rock and roll years type thing. He would never, I don't think, Lennon, if he had lived, I don't think he would have connected with a young audience at all.

The only two things that do stick in the mind about this song is that for ages and ages and ages, I thought that the flight announcement sound effect at the end two things that do stick in the mind about this song is that for ages and ages and ages i thought that the uh the flight announcement sound effect at the end uh was the teacher in charlie brown and i couldn't work out why they'd done that but the other thing was is that my mate at school had this record and not long after the shooting he came up to me in the playground and he says our dad's bought that john lennon song and i went oh yeah yeah yeah he came up to me in the playground and he says, oh, Dan's bought that John Lennon song. And I went, oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

He says, yeah, but guess what though? You've got to hear the B side, kiss, kiss, kiss, because quote in his words, you can hear them shagging in Japanese. So when the dinner hour came along, we nipped to the chip van near the entrance to the school gates

and had a 10p mix of peas and chips. And yeah, went round to his house and played it over and over and over again for an hour before we had to go back to double maths. You see, if Gary Newman had thought of that, if he'd had shagging in Japanese rather than just saying goodbye, maybe his reputation would have gone higher than number 20 in the charts. We honestly believed that they were than number 20 in the chart yeah we honestly believed that they were actually doing it

in the studio very little satisfaction unless you really hated John Lennon and were glad that he was dead well

I got some erotic charge off that yeah there's just this expected kind of thing that we're meant

to feel reverent at this point and in solemn reflection about it and that's not what Top of the Pops is for so the following week just like starting over dropped one

place to number two shot in the back by the St Winifred school choir but Lennon would rise from the grave and slake his revenge when imagine took them down two weeks later with Happy Christmas War is over at number two

and Just Like Starting Over still at number five. The follow-up, Woman, was immediately rushed out and it knocked Imagine off the top spot in February of 1981 meaning that John Lennon spent the first six weeks of 1981 at number one and Mark Chapman kept in the air tonight by Phil Collins and Ant Music by Adam and the Ants off the number one and mark chapman kept in the air tonight by phil collins and ant music by adam and the ants off the number one spot and he wonders why he's still being denied parole fucking ant music should have been number one for fuck's sake absolutely

what would john lennon's 80s been like neil well difficult to predict really difficult isn't it well if i think about it, he was a cantankerous old fucker and you didn't know really what his political stances were going to be. He could have ended up, I don't know, loving Thatcher. He could have spoken out against the miners' strike. It wouldn't have surprised me.

And I think he would have ended the decade singing increasingly bland output to an increasingly ageing audience. I don't think he would ever have reconnected with young people at all and probably wouldn't have been interested in doing so um would you have reconnected with paul mccartney though no i don't think so and perhaps a heart attack or drug overdose by the early 90s who knows but um whereas i love conjecturing about what dead pop stars would have done if they'd have stayed alive like Jimi Hendrix

and like Mark Boland, I couldn't be less interested really in what Lennon might have done I don't think anything would have rocked him off that promontory of smugness that he'd made his own for pretty much his whole career, so I think he would have just he'd have had a similar 80s

to Elton John, I think just making increasingly well just making bland records that sound like his old records and not really pushing himself in any sense to make anything that reflected what was going on at the time

it might have reflected the 80s in as much as the production would have got more horrible, the drums would have got bigger and that's it but in terms of the smugness of his attitude and the sanctimoniousness of his attitude I don't think that would have gone anywhere so I'm not that intrigued by kind of what he might

have done in the 80s because I think it probably would have been pretty bad. Simon anything to add to that? You know what basically I think everything Neil said makes complete sense, but I'd never given it a moment's thought and I don't intend to either, don't care. So, on TV afterwards, BBC One follows up with Last of the Summer Wine, where old men from Yorkshire make a space chuckle out of a tin bath or something.

I don't know. Then the Peter Davidson sitcom Sink or Swim. Then the Nine O'Clock News. Then the last episode of the documentary series Great Mysteries, which examines the life of Nostradamus, followed by international show jumping, and they finish off with Question Time from South London. BBC Two continues with Russell Harter,

their great railway journeys of the world, and rounds off the night with Oscar Peterson, Words of Music, where the jazz pianist has a blather with yahudi menu in itv is plowing through doctor down under the colin welland sitcom cowboys about dodgy builders then tvi focuses on ulster and then we're treated to the hour-long atv documentary toyah from that day's tv listings quote toya is Toya Wilcox she of the pink hair and punk peculiarities a commercial cult figure with an obsessed following. She lives in a London warehouse opposite an undertaker's in Battersea. It is a world which can be both daunting and

inaccessible to outsiders. Tonight's documentary captures the weird imagery of her songs and her bizarre lifestyle. Or you can just see an eight-year-old Taylor Fox sharpening his critical knives. Then it's the news at ten, a celebration of Christmas, what the papers say with Bill Tide, Barney Miller,

and they finish with Bluey, the Australian TV show about a big fat bent-as-fuck prostitute visiting copper. So, me boys, what are we talking about in the playground tomorrow or the Christmas school disco tonight? Scar. Yeah. Exactly what we've talked about in this episode, in a way. I'll be talking about the specials. Specials, specials, special special specials never mind you know we did that episode about happy mondays and

stone roses fuck that this was i mean i would say it was a defining moment for my generation but there were probably plenty of episodes of top of the pops with more than one scar band on it this time so it was just yeah we're still winning, guys. And what are we buying on Saturday? Again, easy, specials and the beat, both of them. Yeah. If I hadn't already, I probably had, you know, probably the reason that they're already in the top 40 is because I already bought them. Yeah, specials and the beat, definitely.

With the head that I've got now, Robert Palmer as well. And what does this episode tell us about December of 1980? Two-tone rules, okay. Yeah, and it was pretty fucking good So me dears that is the End of this episode of Chart Music you know the usual Drill by now www.chart-music.co.uk

facebook.com Slash chart music podcast Reach us on twitter chart music TOTP shove a bit Of money down the old man's G-string. Patreon.com slash Chart Music. Thank you ever so much, Neil Kulkarni. Happy Christmas.

Thank you very much, Simon Price. Thank you. Merry Christmas. My name's Al Needham and Granny wants your spunk. Ha, ha, ha. Chart music. Oh, yeah. Yes, it's that time once again. It's seeing along a city.

And right now, men all over the country are going to punch along with a very good place to buy a bag what are they doing that for because when you start singing the oral shelter the pubs that was my favorite record of 1980 that that. Two points of lager and a packet of crisp lads. That was never a record. Wasn't that a record, girls? Yeah! Who won it? I like that one as well.

Oh, the fun we had when we was back in school again. Funky trousers, oh, funky trousers. Funky trousers, funky trousers. Who sang that? Albert Tetler. It wasn't... It was madness. They're great, they are madness. Their latest record's about you. Is it? You're an embarrassing... I shouldn't say that about Siddy, because

do you know what he is? He's very easily embarrassed, aren't you? Do you know he's too embarrassed to go into a shop and to ask for his favourite record of the moment? Tell him what it is. No, I'm embarrassed. I'll tell them. It's Flash by Queen. Hey, isn't he great, that Flash Gordon? What? He's settled more uprisings than milk and magnesia. He should have had that part. Flash Siddy. He'd have made

Buck Rogers look like Paddington Bear. He's well known as Flash, you know. Everybody wipes the floor with him. Flash Siddy. He'd have stopped the Titanic from going down. Malcolm Allison's asked him to do the same job for Crystal Palace. You know what record they're all doing, don't you? What? D-I-S-C-O.

D-I-S-C-O. Now that's one of my favourites. I like that one. Because he's done a version of it, Eddie Waring. Has he? Yeah, about rugby. He has. R-U-G-B-Y

R-U-G-B-Y U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U-U Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavava E-N-N-Y D-E-N-N-Y B-I-M-B-A-M-E E-E-F-S-I-M-P-L-E N-never know E N-never know E Why do I do it? I don't know why do I do it, do it, I do it, I do it. I do it, do it, I do it.