Chart Music: the Top Of The Pops Podcast - #37: August 11th 2000 - ITV Digital And Chill

Episode Date: February 22, 2019

The latest episode of the podcast which asks: how did we manage to go on about 7 Days for 20 minutes without once adding the word 'Jankers' to it? Jesus in a jumpsuit, Pop-Crazed Youngsters - it's a Top Of Pops from THIS ACTUAL CENTURY, and your three contributors, who are by now frantially sucking at the bone-dry and chapped teats of traditional media, are still upset that there are no Massive Glam Robots on, and it's not available in pill form. Be warned: this episode contains a lengthy and unflinching dissection of the last days of Melody Maker, and it is not pretty.  Musicwise, it's not quite as grim as we were expecting, because this is the Garage version of the Madchester episode. Craig David pops up in a Statement Wooly to tell you who he is and how he got his end away - EVEN THOUGH HE'S NOT NUMBER ONE ANYMORE. Wookie and Lain and MJ Cole complete the hat-trick. But fear not, the Alternative Nation fights back with, er, the last knockings of Reef and Mansun. There's some properly good fire-breathing over some dogshit techno. Ronan fucking Keating pops up for no good reason whatsoever to pretend to be Deco out of the Commitments. And Robbie fucking Williams pulls his trousers down. Sarah Bee and Neil Kulkarni GO THE FUCK OFF on the bell-ends who ruined their magazine while Al Needham looks on with concern, veering off on such tangents as refusing to let bands into their own hospitality areas because their last album was shit, Mad Phil, why tweeting 'Fuck Off' in the early hours of the morning is never a good idea, having pop stars getting on their hands and knees and wiping tea off your shoes, scissor masturbation, and a thorough examination of the 'Craig David Having A Shit' cover. LONGEST EPISODE EVER. And quite possibly the sweariest. (the actual Top Of The Pops bit begins at 1:31:48. See what we mean?)  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.

What do you like listening to? Erm... Chart music. Chart music. Hey-o, you pop-crazed youngsters, and welcome to the latest episode of Chart Music The podcast which snuffles round the crotch of a random episode of Top of the Pops I'm your host Al Needham and I've got back up in the form of Sarah B Hello

And Neil Kulkarni Hello all Oh welcome back, me days. How are we? Anything pop and interesting happening in your lives? Hmm. Hmm. Well, January's a kind of, and February, they're kind of stay-in months for me.

Yeah. Been a bit grim, but I have been doing some interviews. I felt vaguely connected with pop music. Ooh. Yeah, I interviewed Little Sims, who's a fantastic rapper for a feature. And I also got to speak to Asher Senator who together with Smiley Culture

was just a great reggae guy from the 80s responsible for some fantastic records and I forgot to ask him the one question that I wanted to ask him and I just forgot you know when Boots, you know Sly and Robbie Boots, when that got on top of the pops the rapper on that, Shinehead, couldn't make it.

And it was long rumoured that Asher Senator had turned up and just mimed in his place. Forgot to bloody ask him. I'll get another chance, hopefully. If you're out there, Asher Senator, was it you? Or if anyone out there who did pretend to be Shinehead happens to be listening to this, get in touch and I'll link you up with Neil.

It wasn't me. I wasn't bold at that time. Sarah, what have you been up to, Doug? Not an awful lot. Hibernating in similar fashion like you do. I have made a start on my own

Patreon which, you know, watch this space and that so yeah I'll be actively vying with you for the kind of the thrown scraps

of the internet's pocket change so bye away Doug I will let you know it's not a podcast is it a podcast?

I'll probably I'll probably write things and then read them out in that kind of a way. Oh, lovely. Yeah, but no... Good skills. Probably not any pictures because it's just my stupid face, you know. But who knows?

We'll see what the demand is like. By the way, Al, I might be lured away... Oh, really? ...by another podcast. I mean, not lured away, but no, I I've been I recently read my crisps piece again on my blog and I noticed in the comments which everyone which everyone should read perhaps but I mean I noticed in the comments there's some guy who runs this snack based podcast yes and he wants me in as a special guest I mean it it'd be a strange thing doing another podcast

after doing so many chart musics i'll have a listen to see what they sound like um my guess is they're not going to be that funny so i will have to be deadly deadly serious because it's an important business crisps yeah it is you can't you can't joke about crisps no no no oh no no you should absolutely do that special guest as you, you know, as high priest of snacks. Yeah, Coventry's Mr Crisp. That's the offer, special guest, but it's kind of obviously the most important question is, what are you going to fucking pay me?

Oh, yes. Oh, yeah, that is the most important question. The second one is, are you going to, what crisp is best to eat out loud on a podcast oh yeah for the for that full asmr deal i mean the thing is that i've got that thing misophonia which is like the opposite of it which means that i'm i'm you know roused to like intense rage by certain eating sounds it's not consistent whatsoever yeah but some crisps can be one of them if you know chomping lustily on on a on a on a bit of um on a a mccoys is is liable to uh get you a a bop around the head but you know i won't be it's you know i

won't be able to reach you so you know you can just let rip really and then it um well well quite but i mean i can actually answer that question the crisp that would make the best ass asmr experience will probably be bobby's cheese curls because they provide yeah they provide a variety in the way that you can eat them you can either just chop them and crunch them or you can suck them in a really unpleasant way which would create probably quite revolting noises on a podcast but yeah food for thought anyway you have to do a series of podcasts of you just eating a packet of crisps and talking about it afterwards. I absolutely could. It'd be like 30 seconds of introduction.

They're like two minutes of crunching and then you talking about it afterwards. I'd listen to that. I'd subscribe to that. I think crisp innovation is obviously an ongoing thing yeah i think a weekly vlogging type thing where i simply review the newest releases in the crisp's market would be an invaluable resource that'd be great it'd be like the pit it'd be like the pengis munch you know but um yeah in fact you could have him on as as your as your special oh this is great this is like an entire...

You don't need anyone. Just Neil saying, here I am, this week's packet of crisps. An unpacketing. It would be, in terms of unwaxing, it would be an unpacketing. Yeah, unbagging. And then you describe the packet and then you just eat the crisps. So we get a good two minutes of you just chuffing away. And then you talk about the crisps.

Ten minutes. That's it, you're done yeah, with a sort of thoughtful I've just given away a brilliant podcast idea kind of thoughtful far away look you know, yeah yeah, yeah, yeah Neil you need to do this before someone else nicks this idea, no you're absolutely right

I do have way more to say about crisps than the music at the moment so yeah, I should do that I do have, actually I do have way more to say about crisps than the music at the moment. So yeah, I should do that. I do have, actually, I do have another, I do have another sneaky idea for a podcast, which I probably won't do,

but I might do, which is a Game of Thrones podcast, which, but it's, it's about how much we, we, we used to love it. And now we loathe it.

It's the last series of it ever. And so we might do a podcast called The Night's Hate Watch about how much we, you know. So the idea is that we watch the last series of Game of Thrones so that you don't have to. Good idea. This is like that moment when, you know, when Kiss split up and all four members made solo albums.

Yes. This is what's going to happen. Solo album cast. Yeah, yeah, yeah. God, which one are you then? No idea. My daughter loves Kiss, but I keep telling her they're shit and American.

Okay, let us get back on track then, because before we take one step further towards the episode that we're going to dissect this episode, I need to tell you all about the latest development on the Patreon front. Because we've had pop craze youngsters, you know, they've decided that $3 is not enough for the

entertainment that we give them and they've started ramming as much as $5 down our g-strings without us even asking, so I thought well this ain't right, you know so I created a new tier the other day, set at $5 it's called Simon

Bates' High Flying cats after the halloween episode and it gets you every single episode of chart music a full day before anyone else yeah it does platinum edition so so those people now uh are listening to this and and and just telling everyone oh don't bother listening to this episode of Chomps. They're just banging on about fucking crisps and kiss and rubbish. But those people piled on this week, so I'm going to break it down right now. Gareth Hott, Dan Turner, Jason Brooks, Jason Quinn,

Ross Patrick, Emma Murray, Darren Hubbard, Aaron Wright, Dan Alsobrook, Bruce Bowie, James Watson, Joseph Goss, Paul Todd, Rob Crabwalk, Graham Clark, Mark Cooper, Darren Williams, Fletcher Wilkinson, Golden E. Pump, Sylvain, Andy Barrett, Stephen Mahappy Banks, Bobby Treetops, Satchmo Distell, Keith Howey, Matthew Davis, Peter Hedden, John McCarthy, Daniel Noble, Steve Parsons, Dr Volume, Mike Melia, Mark Wood, Stephen Dowell, Andrew Smart, Tim Kayser, Evian Bedford, Mark Savage, Just Heslop Old Uncle Tom Cobbley and all they've all taken a crisp £5 note, they've rammed it down the G string, we've got paper cuts around areas, we don't want paper cuts, but we don't care

thank you babies good people, good kind people those people are now looking very pleased with themselves in the playground and quite possibly breathing on their fingernails and buffing them up against the lapel of their blazers because they are the first to know what is going on in chart music land. They're like Simon Price, aren't they?

In the early 80s, on his bike, pedalling away from the chip shop, back into the playground, knowing what's entered the top 40 this week before anyone else. Yeah. But let's not forget the Pop Craze youngsters who are adopting £3 this week, and they include Gavin Hogg, Mark Brennan, Northern Manky, Nathan Radcliffe, Stuart Dade, John Cooper,

Neil Clough, Jonathan Roberts, Annette Mackin, Logan Mount Stuart, Mark Perkins and Guy Millard thank you so much you beautiful, beautiful pop crazed youngsters we love you very very much

in all ways and just one more thing, I know that early access usually means everybody else gets it a day later, but I just want you to know I have just this very morning invested in some new editing software that doesn't crash and fuck everything up when I'm 95% through and edit like I have been before. Swanky pants.

Not fucking about in 2019, pop-craze youngsters. Oh, yeah, and a memo to my future self who's now editing this. Stop fucking about on YouTube. Get some fucking work done, you bald cunt. What do you think you're doing? Yeah. And don't forget, if you're down with Patreon, another beautiful benefit is the fact that you're allowed to tinker with the chart return books

on the latest chart music top 10 are we ready for this? yes down 6 places to number 10 for Taylor Parks' 20 romantic moments new entry this week

at number 9 it's Gamony Sludge. Get in. A drop of 5 places for this week's number 8 sound by the Alligators with Tits. Last week's number 1 dropped 6 places to

number 7, Your Dark Bates. Also going down from number 2 to number 6, it's a four place drop for Fred Westlife. Up two places from number seven to number five, here comes Jizzum.

Climbing from number eight all the way up to number four, Bomberdog. Into the top three and it's a new entry at number three for Clit Richards. New entry straight into number two, Bergerac meets Rockers the top three and it's a new entry at number three for Clitz Richard. Jesus Christ. New entry straight into number two Bergerac meets Rockers

Uptown which means Britain's number one. Straight in out of nowhere the new chart music number one The Doolies We're Ghoulies. Yay! Oh so much change in the chart this week.

Absolutely. Here comes Jizzum and Bummer Dog still maintaining their hold, though. I'm impressed by them. Surging back, actually, aren't they? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, the Pop Craigs Youngsters just can't let them go. And I can't blame them. So, new entries.

Gamini Sludge. I think we can guess what they sound like. Clit Richard. No. What's she sounding like? Jesus Christ. No, just no. Not even at all.

No, that's just white noise to me. Sorry, I'm, you know. I don't know. That's probably some sort of experimental drone noise kind of deal. It's a great name for a female. No female no no it really isn't no it really is though sarah come on you can't just say you got oh come on just change your mind about things no so if you want to fiddle with the charts pop crazy youngsters you know what to do patreon.com slash chart music money down the g string. This episode, Pop Crazy Youngsters,

takes us all the way back to August the 11th, 2000. Yes, you heard right. A top of the pops from this actual century that we're in now. Fucking hell. And it's been amazing, isn't it? 2000 seems like a couple of years ago, doesn't it? It does to me. And I suspect that's probably down to my age.

But a repeated thing that I find thinking of that era, I think that's now, do you know what I mean? I don't think that that's like years ago or decades ago. A lot of the things we'll see could be now. There isn't that sense of, oh, that's weird, that's dated. It could be now. There isn't that sense of, oh, that's weird, that's dated. It could be now, really. This episode has been brought to us by one of the Pop Craze youngsters, a chap called Paul Putner,

because this has been dug out of his very own video collection, meaning that he's one of the very few people who actually bothered to tape an episode of Top of the Pops in its final decade. And let me warn you now, Pop Craze youngsters, this is not a podcast. It's a therapy session. Before we get into all of that, first question. When you were a kid growing up, what did you think the music of 2000 was going to be like?

Oh, wow. I probably thought it was all going to be uh you know it would be 100 electronic you know 70 made by robots you know it was um yeah i mean or or it was all going to be uh i don't know like when when uh when we were gonna party like it was 1999 what is what was that party like like you couldn't quite it was kind of beyond my ken really it was like you know that's gonna be some kind of music that i can't even imagine right now and it turned out to be westlife yeah but that's the thing by two i mean if you'd have asked me in the mid 80s what i thought 2000 music would be like everything that had that 2000 thing next to it sounded impossibly in the

future um you know brilliant yeah coated in bako foil and just just really really futuristic as it turned out um it some of it was um but an awful lot of it was incredibly retrograde so so i i remember sort of 87 you just sort of felt 87 88 you just sort of felt, 87, 88, you just sort of felt that not that guitar rock was going to go away, but I don't know, the technology of music was changing, and surely in about 10 years it would be completely and utterly different. It was in some places, but a lot of people were looking the other way, unfortunately. Yeah, I always thought, and I'm sure I'm not the only person, but ever since I was a kid, I knew exactly how old I was going to be

on the 1st of January, 2000. 32 years, seven months exactly. And I thought that the music of 2000 would have been like one of my favourite Judge Dredd episodes, Who Killed Pug Ugly? There was a band called Pug Ugly and the Bugglies and they had sort of robot attachments strapped to them

that played the instruments while they just kind of like stood about and threw poses. And they had a drummer who would just lie there on a bit of a settee kind of thing while the drum kit was just operating itself. And it was going to be skill. I knew Top of the Pops would still be going because it was fucking Top of the Pops.

But, you know, I think I probably thought, well, you could take a pill for an episode of Top of the Pops. And probably 3D telly as well. They'd actually come out and cavort in front of you. I sort of didn't think that musical instruments that I was used to would exist by then. I thought bands would come out, if they were bands at all, and would just have a sleek, slimline device with not even buttons on it,

that they'd just caress slightly and sounds would come out. You know, kind of like that instrument that Dion Dublin invented. Oh, yes. You know, but it wasn't to be. It wasn't to be. Yeah. You see, Prince could have done that. Prince could have invented and built and played that instrument. Yeah. But he chose to have loads of sex

instead. Good lad. Such a fucking disappointment. And of course, you know, the whole year started off massively disappointing because society didn't crumble due to the uh millennium bug and the whole millennium was a fucking huge letdown it was just a bonfire night that thought it was summer what what did you what did you do then oh fucking right i got invited to go all

around the world and you know go to different invites from all different countries and all that kind of stuff and i went no i no, I'm going to keep it real. I want to be with my family. Unfortunately, that meant I spent New Year's Eve around my mum's mate's house on the opposite estate. And with 10 seconds to go towards the new century, it was just me sat in an armchair, watching my mum dancing to do, do, do, come on and do

the conga, shouting at me come on you cunt, don't be so miserable it's the fucking millennium while my dad was having an argument with someone else about Elvis and it's just like, oh well this is a fucking appalling let down the perfect start to the decade to be honest with you

I mean, I don't know about you guys, but my memories of the noughties they're not good i don't remember it as a great decade um in all kinds of ways not i mean as ever the caveat there's always good shit going on yeah but but um yeah i just remember the noughties as being a real sort of desperate time not for me working as a journalist it was it was a kind of desperate time work was flying out the window but um beyond that i've never felt less like i belong than in the noughties it was a grim time but i suppose it was my 30s so my 20s were coming to an end by 2000 i was sort of 28 that year um so it kind of fitted i guess grim 30s better 40s slightly ace 20s you know yeah it's

it's just another the entire time is um another universe ago to me it's i do feel that thing of like oh it could have been yesterday but also um that thing of like i was an entirely different version of myself it's several versions ago and a lot of it is kind of a blur not for like not for good hedonistic reasons i kind of did i kind of got into that later when i'd got you know um but just for it was yeah and and kind of culturally and musically and stuff i feel like there was it was very you know erratic but i mean i you could say that about about any period but i do feel you know i still struggle now to sort of define what what happened what it was you know it's it's quite it's quite hard there isn't you know um it doesn't have a a sound maybe maybe when we get

further away from it we'll be able to nail that down i I don't know. Or not. Well, let's find out. Radio 1 News So, in the news this week, Jack Straw is about to release Reggie Cray from Broadmoor so he can die from cancer at home. The riots on the Paulsgrove estate in Portsmouth sparked by the News of the World's naming of paedophiles finally calmed down after a week. Eight people have been killed by a terrorist explosion in a Moscow subway. The Lebanese army finally take control of South Lebanon three months after Israel pulled out.

Leeds United beat TSV Munich 2-1 in the first leg of the third qualifying round of the Champions League. Robin Day and Alec Guinness have died. A woman in Tilly Coultery, Scotland sees the image of Elvis in some rocks and bracken. But the big news this week is that the country is getting properly ratched

up about Nasty Nick in Big Brother. Oh, the decade begins here chaps wow me do you ever watch the first series of big brother i think i watched bits and i didn't realize at the time how epochal in a way that that that thing was and and and the way that it would actually go on to influence not just television but all kinds of other aspects of culture as we'll see later in this episode i think there are some that it's the start of that blurring between reality tv stardom and you know uh and music as well and we'll see that later it was more important than

i realized at the time yeah i saw i'm the same i saw bits of it didn't really have any kind of handle on how big it was going to be but it was like sort of it was like a weird sort of panto you know there was that sense of of unreality about it and and you know kind of uh camp and weirdness but also it I was sort of bewildered as to like why would you watch people just being horrible to each other in a house I don't really understand it so I I was never into it, but yeah, and had no idea of what a scourge it would be on the culture. What I could never get into was the amount of dedication needed to watch it because I was used to things that I watched every week perhaps.

With Big Brother, you did kind of have to watch it constantly and I knew that if I got sucked in, it's always fascinating watching people there's no denying it so even up till now Big Brother and Celebrity Big Brother in particular are fascinating if you're getting grossed um and I never allowed that to happen because I simply couldn't put the hours in you know um you had to pretty much watch it every night and that was a new thing that I never got used to really I had to watch a full 24 hours of it for work. Yeah.

One of my freelance gigs. I was massively into it, but it was like, oh yeah, this is interesting. Not realising that it was going to be the fucking end of televisual civilisation as we knew it. I'm always interested in fly-on-the-wall documentaries. And to see one in real time, it was really interesting.

And then of course, you know, by the second series, you know, the people taking part, you could see that, oh, right, if I do this and act like this, I'm going to get some kind of career out of it. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I remember, I think it was the second series, I was doing, I did an article for Minx where I went out on a date with one of the contestants who was the first one to come out. She had it in her head that this was going to be a whole new life and a whole new career.

And I'm sitting there listening to it going, this time next week, you've forgotten about it. As soon as the next person comes out, you're done. We're watching television eat itself. And established programs like top of the pops they have to deal with that and they have to make changes and and and in this episode of top of the pops we are going to see a long-standing television show trying to claw back what it used to be uh while also exploring new avenues and with with with um with various results i'd say the big brother was kind

of the first tickling of that kind of national urge for voyeurism um that we ever had and it was our first indulgence of it whether it exerted a good influence is is debatable but it was the first yeah it was the first time that we were given that. And I think so many shows since then have adhered to that kind of thing of giving us that, being able to watch people in that way. Yeah, it's the disturbing thing for me about it, obviously, was, you know, that it's like people plotting against each other in this, you know, and trying to use all they have is themselves or their construction of themselves to try to,

uh, you know, to beat each other. It's, it's this really creepy gladiatorial thing. And, uh, yeah,

it kind of, it bothered me a bit, but, um, like my mate, once they, I don't know, it wasn't the first series,

but when, uh, when they would do like the, the live stream thing that you could watch whenever you want. And my mate would just go, I just like to watch them sleep. Yes. And it's just like this lovely relaxing thing and all these kind of raging

uh you know um psychological disaster areas all just slumbering like uh you know like uh like lions in in the uh in the in the wherever like what's the thing you know the lion thing so yeah that yeah but what was valued in that show in Big Brother was a kind of pushy egoism a kind of pushiness that you'd also start seeing a pushy egoism sort of without anything to back it up

apart from that egotistical nature and you'll see that affecting pop stars of this era, as we'll see later in this episode, that it's enough to just be pushy and ambitious. That's enough. You don't actually have to have anything about you, just the pushiness.

The pushiness and the drive and the ruthlessness is enough. That should be applauded. Also, being a cunt helps as well. Yeah, being callous. Being callous, yeah. But it does, and that frees people up to be like that themselves and to think that that is good and the other the other problem is that you know um because you uh the the voting thing as well is that that gives you that sense of being able to uh reshape the world as you see fit and uh you know make kings rise and fall etc and yeah no uh i think

it's probably it's probably got a lot to answer for yeah because i mean look we're post diana we're post blair we're not post player just yet though neil no not post there sorry post player being voted in i mean we've got a labour government now i'm not saying that means meant everything was wonderful but things were in general a bit cuddlier in that direction So he needed the odd hate figure The odd bit of nasty naked Ruthlessness on telly To cheer or applaud

I'm glad I kind of avoided it To be honest with you It's the end of history isn't it Neil Nothing wrong can happen now But I am a victim of that slightly. I'm a victim of that mindset to a certain extent in that, as we've said, from 2000 onwards, I can't say, oh yeah, 2003, who can forget? You know what I mean?

Whereas before then, individual years have loads of different serpentine memories for me. After 2000, it does all become a mulch um through till now something really major has to happen like you know a plane has to go into a building absolutely like that absolutely yeah so on the cover of the enemy this week richard ashcroft on the cover of smash it's a1 the number one lp in the uk is in blue by the cause and over in america The number one LP in the UK is In Blue by The Cause. And over in America, the number one single is It's Gonna Be Me by NSYNC. And the number one LP is

Now That's What I Call Music 4. Oops, I Did It Again by Britney Spears is number two. So me dears, deep breath, what were we doing in August of 2000? I don't know if i'm ready for this um i wanted you to go first sarah i'll go first i was um i was working at a little paper called

melody maker um i was living in uh was i still living in Euston at that point? My first sort of place that I crashed in in London was in Euston. I think I might have extricated myself by then. So I was probably in Camden because, you know, after Camden, Camden had already, was already like uncool by then, but I quite enjoyed that. It's like once a place isn't cool anymore, it just kind of kicks back and doesn't have anything to prove. So, you know, and it was before Camden turned into what it is now, which is not really Camden anymore.

So, yeah. So I was freelancing at Melody Maker. I was also probably freelancing at The Fly. I sort of used to do editing for them. And I had very little idea of what I was doing, except by this point I had cottoned on to the fact that the paper that i was working for that i had wanted to work for for for some time that you know blew my mind that i was doing it and it was dying on its ass before before you come in neil we've not we've not done this with you yet sarah explain how you how you got into the game.

Well, all right, let me try and do the short version. So I was studying in Wales in the middle of nowhere and I was wrapping up my English degree. And as a method of procrastination, I used to read The Maker and think, well, this is a thing that i would like to do and that i probably could do and how does one go about that and i cannot remember how it came about that i started i just wrote to you know with actual pen and paper and stuff like like people used to do in those days um i wrote to ben ben myers about something or other and he wrote back and we had a correspondence for about a year it was lovely like you know in the lovely. I don't think I've got any of these letters anymore,

otherwise I would have dug them out. But yeah, so we were sort of pals and then eventually after several months, I was like, so how would I go about doing this? He said, well, do a sample review, send it to the reviews editor, who at the time was Neil Mason. So that's what I did.

I reviewed Boku Fish by Underworld, which was an album I loved very much and still do which has been out for a little while uh I probably oh I because my writing's terrible it's worse now but it was pretty bad then so I think I typed it up all nice on my word processor and uh sent it to um and sent it in and that was on a Thursday and then this was 99. And you took it for a drink on Friday. No, seriously, right.

So, yeah, I sent in that review and a burbling letter of froth and nonsense uh to to neil and then on the monday i was um racing to finish my final essay for my degree on on said trusty word processor and the phone went out in the hall it's like i don't know mid-morning and i went picked it up and um there's a deep voice said hello it's it's neil it's neil at melody maker and ofody Maker. And of course that's one of your, that's one of your moments in your life where you go, Oh yeah. Yeah. Fuck.

Amazing. And so I was like, hello. That's like suspicious way. Yes. And, uh, and he said,

do you want some work? Wow. And I'll never, i'll never forget that lovely sort of splutter this sort of incredulous splutter because he read my thing and he was really impressed so um so yeah we had a chat for um you know this this obviously blew my mind but i managed to keep it together long enough to have a chat about how we do this and he's like well i'll send you a cd and you can review it and yeah and then and there was no one else around this was like a shared house there's no one else in so i just put the phone down and stood there with with

my bad self uh in the hallway just going holy shit and you know that that is still that's always going to be one of those one of those great moments in my life and then i had to go back and try to apply myself to this essay which was a bit of a struggle but you know oh you must yeah you must have been floating on air because I'm yeah yeah those moments those are the moments life changes and yeah no that rings so many bells Sarah because because you would you remember everything about those moments you remember the room you remember that everything yeah I'm I'm right back there now it's quite weird um so yeah and then um I I finished my degree I didn't even uh I didn't uh wait to graduate I uh went home to my folks in West Yorks and kind of packed a bag of you know dropped dropped off all my boxes of terrible stuff and and put some stuff in a hanky on a stick and and set off for london so were you were

you freelancer or on stuff i was freelance yeah so it was completely mental of me to uh to to make that kind of leap without knowing you know on on the promise of about 30 quids worth of work a week but i did it i've managed you know because you you can do that when you're young and stupid and you could do it in 1999 as well you can get away with it more importantly yeah yeah yeah so uh that is not something that you know i would advise anybody does now um but yeah so that was uh that was how that went and um do i remember yeah so i just it was it was quite a weird there's a slightly anticlimactic thing about going into the maker office for the first time this is in kings reach tower on um yeah um oh hang on stanford stanford street isn't it yeah which is now it's now luxury flats just like everything else um but yeah it was kind

of a shabby quite a shabby grotty beigey sort of office and you know and there was always music on and stuff and it's quite there was a kind of nice clutter of of uh stuff and like towers of cds and stuff everywhere. And it was all right. It was quieter than I expected, though. I kind of thought it would be a bit more, you know. By then it was. By then it was quiet.

I'd never been to King's Reach Tower, but there was a fuckton of magazines there, weren't there? There were. Did you ever see Thog? Thog? Yeah. Because King's Reach Tower, as all 2000 AD fans know, is actually a disguised spaceship.

Can't say I did. But yeah, the other magazines, though. A green bloke with motorbike gloves and a big kind of like rose of Sirius on his forehead. Doesn't ring a bell. But the other magazines were an endless subject. I remember getting the lifts with Taylor once and we came out on the wrong floor. And we found ourselves in the offices of What Horse magazine.

It was a totally different world, but there was a box of What Horse t-shirts, and we wanted to knit one. We wanted to knit one to get Brett Anderson from Suede, who had quite an extensive heroin habit at the time, to wear one for the next feature. We never managed it. So you were both freelancers at this

point i was freelancing again because i've been um i've been sacked as gossip editor which should have happened several years before to be honest with you but there's a few too many faxes from lawyers and stuff like that and um yeah so i i was back on freelance so you might not have seen me much that year in the office sarah how much time did you actually spend in the Melody Maker office? You know, on the average week? I don't know. I've been there like a couple of times a week sort of thing. And sometimes it'd be that, you know, if there was some sort of, you know,

if there were festivals and things, we'd end up in there sort of, you know, late at night sometimes, which was great. There was one time, because it was the 26th floor, and there was one time I was there writing up some some stuff and there were fireworks going off but i could see them from above they were all going off underneath so that was that was really cool yeah i just want to pull up something from the website everything2.com uh a piece about melody maker uh at the at the end point uh written by someone called tom dissonance. Right. Might be one of Team Chart Music, who knows. About the end, and it's as good a viewpoint as anyone's.

So, Melody Maker's problems towards the end were several. They mostly stemmed from its ridiculously overzealous campaign to destroy all pop music and replace it with 80 shades of grey indie wank. I.e. promoting worthy guitar bollocks like Top Loader and Embrace over genuinely thrilling pop music. The problem was compounded by an inflammatory cover based on a parody of a Craig David album sleeve, which featured a lookalike sitting on a toilet with a constipated facial expression next to the words, UK Garage, my arse. The cover was rightfully attacked for its borderline racism

and probably helped alienate a sizable proportion of its readership. Thirdly, Melody Maker editor Mark Sutherland's sinister reinvention as a kind of indie fascist proved to be the final straw for many. With his policing of the letters page every week by putting down all dissenters, praising those who slated chart pop and generally saying suspect things about our

music and the struggle, continuing as if his readership was some kind of Hitler youth he was trying to motivate. Towards the end, it only appealed to people whose idea of alternative music was a jamie oliver compilation it was good for so long but just before the end it really deserved to die spot on spot on yeah i don't know if this matches up with sarah's experiences but it was it was cheerless and joyless and kind of grim being in the office.

It felt like you were being watched. The smoking room was really where the truth got told. The actual office itself was it was cubicles of kind of tapping drone slaves, really. I'm making it sound worse than it was but by then I was seriously disenchanted with working there and a few things had started tipping me the wink that things were going tits up a few years before actually Melody Maker closed in 2000 but to be honest with you as soon as ever at True was passed over for editor and Mark Sutherland was made editor things just started on a downward spiral from that point editorial meetings that had previously

been quite a laugh because I was intimidated by the office these were my heroes that I was meeting and working with but by 97 Pricey had gone, Taylor had gone they were my closest mates at the paper and editorial meetings it was like being at school.

It was like being told what was sensible. Yeah. Your ideas were no good because they weren't sensible. I'll never forget a really emblematic moment for me. It was in 98, I think. Me and Carl Loban, who's a dear old mate and who's now my editor at DJ Magazine. We were kind of in an editorial meeting.

Ronnie Sizer just bought a really brilliant album out, and we suggested him as front cover star. And previously, you know, that would have been discussed musically or discussed with what the angle might be. This time, we just got a blank thing from Sutherland, Black Faces on the Cover Don't Sell. And that was that, you know? That was that.

And then I started noticing that kind of underestimation of the readership um i started noticing it in the copy and most importantly to me in my bloody copy i've mentioned in the past um the changing of things so that references that were pre-1982 had to be explained you'd also find these really ugly explanatory clauses being inserted in all your writing i mean it's it it's testament to the fact what precious little fucks we can be as writers but i still am aggrieved over a janet jackson review i wrote in 98 where i think one of the lines ended we're not in kansas anymore and when i read it when it came out it said um blah blah blah blah and like dorothy in the

classic film the wizard of oz we're not in canada and it was just like fuck off don't put my name at the bottom of that i would not say that i'm not talking to you like you're an idiot you know i mean i'm talking to you directly across the table in my writing don't make me one of you you cunt and and i mean sutherland there i talk across what started happening was that editorially the writing either talked down to the readership and i heard some horrible scorn directed towards punters and fans from people like sutherland when we were backstage at festivals and stuff they either talked down to the to the readers or more likely kind of talked kind of needily and pleadingly upwards to our readership. Like they were gods of good taste that we were happy to serve and we weren't going to threaten their kind of ideas about what was good music.

So you remember, Al, you read out that letter from, you know, that racist guy, basically. Your dog mates. racist guy basically your dog mates in sutherland's era we started kowtowing completely to that kind of attitude that oasis dominated lad rock bullshit because we were all terrified of the commercial fact of oasis that had happened to a certain extent without without our permission um and in general we just started generally thrashing around desperately trying to appeal to an ever dwindling reach readership flailing around, you know, stickers,

sex issues, you know, um, DJs on the cover, celebrities on the cover, new metal bands, always, always white blokes.

If it was musical and it felt like our paper melody maker was now in the hands of non melody maker people. And I can't really put it any any different than that it was so grim working there and when you were sent out the office because i was staffed till about 98 99 when i was sent out the office it was to interview like i don't kill a priest fine but at the london dungeon or cold chamber i had to take them to Hamleys at Christmas or Ultrasound I had to go to fucking Legoland you know

and it was all this colossal real lack of trust I've said it before it's lack of trust between staff and editor so I'll never forget a few things with Sutherland and whenever I've mentioned Sutherland Mark Sutherland who was the editor who killed the Melody Maker online,

inevitably people come up saying, actually, he's a really nice bloke. I think you're out of order. No, fuck that. We've got enough nice blokes. I judge people on what they've done. You know what I mean? I don't care if they're polite now. I judge people on what they've done and how they were.

And I remember him. The lack of trust was unbelievable. Alan Jones, our former former editor i'll never forget going to festivals say reading or glastonbury um as sarah mentioned you know you'd come back at like 11 2 3 in the morning have to get the copy ready by 7 or it'd be three grand printer costs every hour and stuff like that jonesy trusted us we got to the site thursday he went to the bar and stayed there for three days and he he trusted us to get the paper together when Sutherland came we'd go to festivals and he would spend the entire like three days just stomping around the site looking for us making sure that we were doing

our job if he went at all if he went at all and I'll never forget being in one of the backstage signing tents I was having a joint with Taylor And Taylor wasn't actually a maker writer at the time I think We just had some weed so we were smoking it And Sutherland stomps at what the fuck are you doing You know go and do this go and do that Just fuck off man

And that was the year actually That Melody Maker writers We had to compare as it, the second stage at Reading, which was a big stage, meaning we had to announce the bands. Now, I was doing it on the Saturday, so I went up on the Friday to the second stage just to see what the other person was doing. And it was one of Sutherland's fucking Weebles

that he bought up from fucking NME to kill the paper and I expected you know a vague you know just saying who the bands are but no this guy was are we all having a good time are we having it was just I couldn't do that I couldn't whip the crowd into a frenzy like yeah about fucking embrace or something I'm not going to do that um so the next morning when it's my turn to do the stint i remember waking up in the marriott hotel in reading drunk still about 5 to 11 in the morning i'm just thinking shit i'm meant to be on the second stage at 11 you know and that's the first band so a drunken stumble through reading to get to the

festival site get backstage all the bands are fucking hopping mad at me because because they can't start without me saying so and obviously for the rest of the day my comparing skills weren't great um I remember trying to do things just off stage you know just having the mic just this voice from nowhere but I wasn't allowed to do that um the only time I got a cheer was when I read the football results out because it was a saturday afternoon but um but it was it just was a different different thing and i i think that year it was either 98 or 99 that was the year i went to glastonbury and i say to this day i got spiked because i think i did um but um i makers mark the whiskey had given us a crate of free bottles because of the promotional tie-in, I guess, with our name.

So we were all necking bottles of that. I was completely out of it. And I was told, anyway, that I stood near the backstage tent in Glastonbury and refused to let bands in that I didn't like. I sort of stood by the flag. Actual cultural gatekeeper there that's it, I was stood there apparently I said to Supergrass, you're not fucking coming in

your last album was fucking terrible and stuff like this and then it was you're my hero then it all got massively messy I kind of remember getting back to the hotel and then all I remember is the next morning being woken up i was in my bathtub

covered in mud and um sutherland was fucking stood over me because i was meant to do gossip editing you know um sutherland was stood over me it looked like a murder scene in that bathtub and he was like neil did you take your boots off last night i was like i still had them on i think because apparently I'd caused 3,000 pounds worth of damage to the carpet in this hotel by treading mud all over him. And then it was like,

get to the site, we need a gossip column. You know, and that was the year he twigged, I think. Because I remember a week after we had a meeting and he said,

Neil, that entire gossip column at Glastonbury was just bullshit. You made the whole thing up. And I was like, yes, it's a gossip column. And pretty soon, Neil, that entire gossip column at Glastonbury was just bullshit. You made the whole thing up. And I was like, yes, it's a gossip column. And pretty soon after that, I stopped being a gossip editor. Sarah Kaywood got my job and was much better at it than me. Oh, man, you were Indy Smeater-Smith, weren't you, for a while?

Yeah, it was insane. Oh's art brute but it was insane that i had that job i was a kid from country i wasn't going to parties in london that much but but it was insane i had that job in the first place but sutherland was just a cunt i'm sorry there's no other way of putting it he was a prick in the way he dealt with people he he just created bad bad vibes so so the office in 2000 i could already tell the magazine was on its way out you could tell you could tell when it transferred to a kind of smaller size got glossy it was just a terrible terrible magazine i'd had some premonitions of that from 97 but 2000 was just fucking shit for shit for the paper but especially shit if like me you'd grown up and this was your bible you know this was your touchstone this was your wednesday

lift this was your this was everything and to see it just shat on and stained and and its memory it's 70 odd year memory just defiled in the way that happened so rapidly. It was just really, really upsetting. I've got a copy of Melody Maker from this month. And when it came through the lightbox, I was shocked and appalled. It's a fucking Indie Lads smash hit. It's not even that. It's an Indie Lads record mirror or number one.

Well, an Indie Lads smash hit is spot on. That's what they were trying to be yeah but you can't yeah but it didn't have it it it didn't have smash hits had such great anarchic wit yeah and such a it had its own thing like i won't uh you know smash hits is always used as this kind of shorthand for sort of uh you know trashy content and it really wasn't it had really intelligence in it and so the maker had had none of that by this point and you know i felt incredibly conflicted and kind of messed up about it because obviously this was what i really what i wanted to do and when i got there it's like oh fuck i don't belong here after all like there was that kind of weird car crash of of stuff in my head of like well i can actually do this and yet i kind of now i don't want to and i feel

like i have to go around you know we would go around like apologizing for it there was a great camaraderie that arose out of you know it was a kind of trenches thing of we all kind of or most of us i mean there were people there were there were people who were kind of on board with the you know the the sutherland um regime and you know they the, the Sutherland, um, regime. And, you know, they, uh, there was kind of a divide,

I think, between people who were and people who weren't. And we all got on okay, but it was a bit weird. Yeah. Neil, what you were saying about, about trust and like the breakdown of it,

that happened across various different axes, I think, um, where there was this kind of, yeah, the breakdown of trust between, um, between the,

the, the publication and its audience, partly because that audience didn't actually, they were going for an audience that didn't actually exist they kind of focus grouped it to fuck until and into the point of meaninglessness where it's like well we want to go for a younger audience to differentiate because it was supposed to i don't know if people know this but it was uh ipc also published nme um they decided um at this point not to i mean i'm sure that there were discussions about shutting the maker down for years before,

before it happened. But what they decided to do is, is give it one more go, basically run it into the ground. It was what they did. But it was like, well, let's try to split the,

it's too similar to the audience of NME. Let's kind of, you know, peel it off. But it's like, we're going for a sort of this nebulous, it's younger audience. And it's an audience that doesn't know this this and this and it's these people didn't really exist and what you have to do if you are a publication is um you have to lead you

you suggest you go how about this then and then people play into it or they don't but there's that you have to have that confident voice of going trust me this is good you'll like it or if you don't we can have a barney about it and that got lost because you were you know it was kind of like you said there was that thing of like both talking down and wheedling and so that's nobody likes that even the thing is that what i what i learned from this is that even even idiots don't like to be patronized you know it's like if you're going for people who are really into fucking Limp Bizkit or whatever, they still don't want to be talked down to.

And so that's a rare skill to do that. But also within the publication itself, that people were very wary of Sutherland. I mean, he was my first boss, basically. And I didn't know what to make of Sutherland. I mean, he was my first boss basically. And I, I didn't know what to make of him really. I didn't, he wasn't, he wasn't very friendly. He wasn't very encouraging. I mean, I had, you know, the, the sort of encourage, you know, everybody was, was, uh, was, was cool, but I was basically on, on my own. I didn't feel like it was a very, uh, it wasn't like a,

it's like, well, I'll learn, I'll, i'll learn on the job and i'll you know and i kind of did but i sort of scrabbled to do it the whole time it wasn't a very encouraging environment i did actually go for a staff job that i didn't really want i just thought it was something i should do i went for the news assistant job which would have meant the great thing about that would have been uh working with with uh the great carol clerk who was you know what amazing woman yeah what fantastic cantankerous but the thing is the thing is with carol sarah i remember one really late festival where she had to drive the bus and i remember i remember coming into the office sort of a few days later and the look on her face as to what had gone on and just how appalled she was at what was going on she was an absolute touchstone for me the one

of the few people in the office who just understood how how bad things were getting and and it's because sarah the the reason you didn't get on with suddlin the reason none of us got on with suddlin was because he hated fucking writers his main relationship editorially with melody maker was with publishers and with marketeers these pusillanimous fucking pie chart wielding cunts who who ran us into the fucking ground and and i wasn't there the day that melody maker closed and the day that all the chairs were put up on the tables and the computers were taken and this venerable institution of music publishing was just destroyed i was there i'll get into it later oh well i mean i came back to a haunted office and to be honest i was glad to see the paper put out of its misery because it was yeah it was just so grim there but what was

you know i know how long ago this was 20 odd years ago now but it's nearly 20 years nearly 20 years ago sorry but um and i should probably not still bear a grudge but fuck me i really do still bear a grudge oh yeah oh yeah i'm not gonna forget and i'm not gonna forgive because these what was really galling was that these fuckers all these marks that came up from the enemy to save us um when we once they'd done their work i.e fuck us over these agents from downstairs and i still think they were agents from downstairs, sent up to destroy us, they all slipped back downstairs.

They were fine. But we're fucked. And I think it was a cultural crime. And that might seem like an overstatement. I'm certainly not saying the maker could have carried on indefinitely with the very low sales figures that we had towards the end but i think it was a deliberate corporate move to let the enemy the brand leader win through and dominate and i just wish we hadn't gone out like that um yeah that that pathetic withered stayed on our memory in my stupider moments i do wish i'd been made editor because i would have taken that mag down in flames

i i would have i would have you know and i would have absolutely reversed that editorial stance of being so scared of black pop and and i would have reversed it and i would perhaps it to me what's heartbreaking watching this episode for instance is that we never got a cracker so solid crew we never got a cracker you know what. We never got a crack at what was about to happen that we could have put front and centre. Better that than the kind of needy whimper that we went out on. And like Sarah says, we started kowtowing to the stupidest elements of our readership,

and even they didn't like being patronised. We started kowtowing to the kind of idiots that when they open a magazine and a survey falls out they fill it in and we started kowtowing to those fucking people so you know i can't stop help but get fucking furious about it not because of what was destroyed necessarily but the future possibility that was just destroyed in the process. We could have been so good and we were undermined from within. All the writing staff of that paper were undermined from within and destroyed.

I will never fucking forgive Mark Sutherland. And I don't care if these people are people's mates. Mark Beaumont, there's several others who, they were enemy people and they should have fucking stayed there it yeah it's yeah the um yeah I'm sorry sorry Sarah I'm still here by the way it's all right it's all right mate I'm with I'm completely with you um yeah it's it's the look I mean I'm completely with you. Yeah, me too. Look, I mean, I'm quite an amiable sort. I generally, you know, in general. But yeah, I did not, I felt pretty hard done by that this was my deal. This was my maker when I finally got there. And this is what I found is that it was, you know, I mean, I've always compared it to like you show up at a party and it seems like it's still kicking.

And then you realize after half an hour, you know everyone is absolutely fucked someone's been sick in the bath the cops are at the door it's you know yeah it's over it's over man um but yeah those editorial meetings were definitely they were like death and i had kind of hoped for something more you know if i'd thought about it at all i mean i had no idea how these things worked before i got there but it was like oh is this is this it is it and also is this how um what people might not understand is that you know when uh you know you you write and you and then it's printed and it seems very definitive but there are a lot of different versions of there are possible different versions of each piece and possible different versions of you as a writer that have to be shaped and nurtured by

yeah by the environment of a publication and it's great what you can you can form of what you know there's house style is a thing but it can be such a wonderful mysterious thing where there's a plethora of different voices but everyone kind of is of a mind in a particular way in the sense that you you know you you all have a kind of shared sensibility you're all there for basically the same reasons i mean there is a division between um music fans who can write and writers who are into music and i was definitely the latter um so i i knew that i was going to be lagging slightly on the music on the music knowledge front but i would you know you can always research that you can you know you can pick it up and at the same and then you kind of

you hang around with with music fans and so that it rubs off on you and you rub off on them and everybody influences each other and that's a that's a healthy kind of editorial ecosystem and that was breaking down and i felt like i couldn't i had this sense of like you know you need to develop as a writer and it's like I'm not going to be able to do it here and I'm going to end up um writing things that even I don't really believe and I don't really agree with because it's like well you have to get enthusiastic about stuff and I can you know I I was still forming my uh my taste really even though I you have it your, your taste as a kid, but then that was,

you know, I was a pop kid and then you kind of go, okay, well now I'm, now I'm, this is, I have to be into this now in a particular way. And you couldn't just slag everything off.

And some of it, so, you know, you kind of go with the flow, but you end up going, ah, I, do I really think this?

Do I really like this as much as I'm saying I like it? Or am I just supposed to? And that's not healthy because you start, you start, that's disingenuous, you know. We were led by bad writers. Sutherland was a shit writer.

He couldn't communicate the excitement of pop. He, he mistook exclamation marks and stuff like that as being down with the kids. I know, I know people like that. Yeah. He was a terrible, terrible writer. I mean, I know I didn't he was a terrible terrible writer

I know I didn't have precognitive powers or anything but I remember a feature that I did and it's actually the feature that to this day I remain most proud of in a sense, it was an interview with Marilyn Manson that I did in I think 1997 and Marilyn Manson

was one of the smartest pop people I've ever met and I got a really good interview out of him, asked him serious questions and wrote the piece up accordingly. And almost immediately pulled into the office, Mark Sutherland, Neil, can you just knock this stuff out, this philosophy stuff and this stuff? You know, I was a cocky, arrogant cunt back then.

I possibly still am. but i just i i made minimum changes i didn't knock anything out and i knocked it back to him and it just got through because it was close to deadline day but it was just tipping me the wing no we don't want intelligence we want to pretend to be as dumb as we think our readership are and it was just wrong-headed on all counts yeah do you shag loads of girls yeah yeah yeah do you do drugs it's just drugs are great and it made us look needy it made us look like we were we were these needy nerdy sort of sideline watchers of pop that we weren't part of it and that we weren't That our opinions weren't valid and All we could fucking do is cheerlead

And as we'll see when we look at Bits from Melody Maker if we do over The course of this episode that the Tone is one that is Just not Melody Maker it's It's not funny it's not funny Well while you were going through all that shit I was I think

I was possibly at the peak of my career i'd been poached from aol a few months earlier by paul raymond himself and at this time i was the manager of the paul raymond internet service provider for 20 pound or so a month you could get um dial-up connection uh some extremely tame photos of tits from the mags, and most importantly, a razzle.co.uk email address. Ooh. Yeah. Always wanted to work in Soho.

Every time I came down to London in the 80s, I'd go to Carnaby Street and I'd walk around Soho and go, yeah, one day I'm going to be here. This is the center of the fucking universe and there i was and it was it was brilliant it was the best commute in the world because i was living in west dulledge at the time uh with my mate ricky clean and uh i'd just get on the bus outside my house and read a book for about 50 minutes and right outside my office just the fucking dream commute for london i had my own office i had a secretary but it just wasn't for me man i i i wasn't i couldn't be a

suit behind the desk man my place was on the streets of porn and all my mates you know i had mates who were working there uh but they were like two floors up, and I couldn't go and fuck about with them half as much as I wanted to. And I knew it just wasn't going to last. Everyone just assumed that the internet was going to shit out money all over their faces, and it clearly wasn't just yet. I only saw Paul Raymond once. He'd basically become a recluse ever since the early 80s when his daughter died

and he came in once and he was like Tom Baker's great grandad had this really long scarf got the feeling he didn't really know what was going on anymore but it was like oh my god you're fucking Paul Raymond you own all this well I mean didn't have a clue what was going on anymore

a lot of people in publishing didn't have a clue what was going on anymore. A lot of people in publishing didn't know what the fuck was going on anymore. That panic post-internet was just palpable everywhere. And a panic about, I mean, that obviously percolated through to the papers that we worked for as well. Just didn't know what to do about it. Have you got an internet? Neil, do you remember the Melody Maker website? Oh, God.

I remember there was one, but I don't remember what it looked like. It was melodymaker.co.uk. And mostly what it had was just... Because enemy.com was well up and running and was a thing at the time. Not what it has become which is hilarious but um yeah it was um yeah it was it was just this shabby dreary little kind of 90s forum kind of thing that was mainly that was like the as far as i recall the front page was just a forum and it was just full of people slagging off melody make yeah yeah and that was all it was people complaining about it and you know and this

is actually how i got to learn a lot of the stuff about the inner workings of it is that i ended up uh i responded to somebody who had written this very eloquent unusually eloquent uh you know here is why it's going wrong this is what they're doing blah blah and i was like bloody hell and i was kind of like i know we know we're doing our best you know we don't like it either and we ended up getting into a chat it turned out to be the writer Eamon Ford who was at the time doing a PhD on the decline of music journalism

in this country and I ended up and he taught me a lot of things that I didn't necessarily want to know and he but you know it was all useful information and he ended up quoting me in it actually because I was kind of a useful source you know, it was all useful information. And he ended up quoting me in it, actually, because I was kind of a useful source, you know. So, yeah, I've got my name in the British Library, I think, because it's in that PhD. So, yeah, that was unexpected.

In a previous, more enlightened age, you would have hired him if he was articulate on our forum. We would have hired him on the spot. But it was just panic at that point it was just total panic about the internet but also about what magazines were being successful things like heat absolutely shat everyone up uh because yeah they were covering music yeah they were covering film as well they were covering tv and they were covering celebrity in a way that we weren't and that was obviously being massively popular. We tried to do the same and we always got it really, really wrong. Yeah.

I mean, it was a dark time for the specialist magazine, wasn't it? Yeah, it was. It was. But if you actually hauled in your fucking sales and hung on there and continued to... That's the thing, is there was no willingness to dig in.

People would just fucking fold. You know, that's what we did. We just went, ah! But, you know, people like, you know, the specialist mags are the ones that survived survived you know because they they hung on in there rang survived yeah because they had a you know it's that that's you've got a faithful you don't have like this kind of kind of like you need to hang on to that faithful crowd and it's like you have to trust that they're there and that's not what we did yeah yeah you can't have faith

in what you're good at and we we just didn't. No, so we just flailed about. But at the same time, I was also freelancing like a bastard for loads of proper magazines that didn't have so many fannies in it. I was writing for Maxim and Minx, and I'd just started doing bits and bobs for Sky. And actually, this was the only time that I'd ever done anything resembling music journalism because Maxim would send me round to talk to the pop songstresses of the time.

I'd done an interview with Kelis when she did Caught Out There. And it was my first interview with anybody from the music scene. And it was just too good. It was too good to be fucking true because Maxim, you know, it's like the only one about 50 words.

So, you know, that's 10 minutes. But I got a whole hour with her in this massive room in, oh God, Notting Hill, where Virgin still had their offices. And so, you know, I could have just got up and walked out, but we ended up having a proper chit chat about hip hop

and she was fucking mint. And at one point, she had the most massive pop star cup of tea I've ever seen in my life. You could have drowned someone in it quite easily. And at one point, she knocked the tea over my shoes. I went down to wipe it off. She said, no, no, no, no, don't you dare. And she got down on her hands and knees and pulled out a handkerchief. She said, no, no, no, no, don't you dare.

And she got down on her hands and knees and pulled out a handkerchief. And she's carrying on the interview while she's, you know, wiping the tea off my shoes and everything. It's like, oh, this is odd. Wow. This is brilliant. She was fucking brilliant. What's heartbreaking for me is that the people, I mean, obviously once Melody Maker closed in 2000 onwards,

I had to specialise myself. I had to start writing for metal mags and hip-hop mags. So I was interviewing people like Missy and Timberland and people like that. And I would have just loved to have made them front cover stars of The Maker, but The Maker no longer existed. I was still tangentially aware of chart pop and I loved it, but I was really unable to write about it in the pages of Terrorizer magazines or something. The thing is about Khalees and other people I interviewed

you got the feeling that you were getting a bit of a better level of access than I would have done if I was at Melody Maker even. Simply because the sales figures were bigger. We would have taken Khalees to fucking Flamingo Land. Yeah because it's like I

thought about it because i loved that album that first album was so was so wild and amazing kaleidoscope yeah and it's like there was no room to even raise that kind of idea i think it's i mean credit to nme for putting khalisa they they did put khalisa on the cover didn't they um but i mean it was like how it was so it seemed so far away from anything that you could even suggest. It's just like there was this kind of oppressive atmosphere about what was okay and what wasn't okay. And it was just, she was just kind of in a different realm, in like a better realm. And we were, you know, we just, it's not that you even would have got laughed out of an editorial meeting for suggesting it. And it's not it i'm not saying that i was even you

know i was in that position i was quite timid you know but um yeah it just wouldn't have just wouldn't have washed really would it i mean none of this is like women it was hard to it was all uh it was hard to get women it was hard it was even harder to get black people and so yeah just wasn't room but also on the other hand i did start to realize that it wasn't as glamorous as i thought it was going to be with other artists i mean you know you go and see someone like mystique you turn up at a hotel and you'd sit in a lobby for an hour or so with someone from every other magazine in london at the time yeah and you were essentially waiting for your 10 minutes to to be given the opportunity to ask the same fucking questions

that everyone else had asked that day already. Oh, it's death. Yeah. I hate that. I mean, Maxim was a lad mag, but it was the best lad mag to work on because they paid really fucking well and most of the staff were fucking brilliant,

you know, really nice people. But it was always women you interviewed and they always wanted to know, you know really nice people but it was always women you interviewed and they always wanted to know you know certain things that didn't have anything to do with yeah with that i mean one of the first jobs i did and i think it was with maxim was interviewing jennifer ellison who just started on um on brookside and i had to go to this studio in i think it was camden on a saturday morning and she was doing the photo shoot at the same time which was your standard you know bikini shot hand you know hands down the knickers um fake porn shit and she's sitting there being interviewed

in a bikini and she was really nice you know she was just this just this kid from liverpool who you know seen an advert uh on the notice board at a college um to to audition for for brookside and she got it and she's there going oh everyone's so nice and i can't believe i've done this and i'm sitting there going oh you're really nice and i've got to ask you uh what knickers you wear on a date or if you ever snogged anyone a text or if you if you've ever passed out in a club. And it was like, you know, I felt grubbier doing that than any grot thing I did. Well, no matter what came out in that interview,

you know that the pop-out quote on the double-page spread would be about her underwear or something like that. Yeah. And you also knew, you know, whatever you wrote was the sprig of parsley on the side of the big plate of a photo. Yeah. So, yeah, that was pretty much me.

Music-wise, the fucking Holy Trinity of 2000 was Kaleidoscope by Khalees, Mama's Gun by Erykah Badu, and, of course, Voodoo by D'Angelo, which got played endlessly in my head. 2000 was a fucking great year for music. Yeah, it was. And of course, you know, as this episode was going out on a Friday, because yeah, let's not forget we're supposed to be talking about an episode of Top of the Pops here, because it's going out

on a Friday, as it has done since June of 1996. There is absolutely no fucking way I'm watching this. I'm 32 years old. I'd either be around my house with my mates playing Mario Kart or I'd be out on the piss with my new media chums or most likely I'd be around Jiggy G's house

in Hampton having a big curry and watching back to back Monday Night Raw on satellite wrestling was far more interesting Friday night was a disastrous time As I think we've previously Discussed and I certainly wasn't

Watching it by this point I was out and about Yes we have The kind of upsetting thing Really is because I actually Had not seen this episode before That we're going to talk about And it started me at how good It was and how good it could have

been and and how for it to make the best kind of sense yeah it has to be in that shared moment where families are watching telly friday night is not one of those moments friday night at seven people are getting ready to go out and families are spread out a little bit um a shared moment with this episode would have actually been great but it it wasn't going to happen on a Friday night. Yeah. So before we let Melody Maker go for a minute, let's immerse ourselves in August of 2000 a little bit more with the latest issue of Melody Maker that's on the shelves.

I did try to get this week's one. The only one I could get at such short notice was the one the week afterwards but hey it's Melody Maker 2000 it's all the fucking same isn't it so the front cover stars are a cut out montage of Brian Molko

of Placebo, Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit, Kelly Jones of Stereophonics, Chino Marino of Deftones and Tom DeLong of Blink 182. Is it 182 or 182? Who gives a fuck? 182

I believe but also who gives a fuck? The strap line Here comes the best weekend of your life. Reading and Leeds massive calling weekend preview other cover lines V2000

Travis Coldplay and Liam came too here comes Liam the Offspring reveal all about their new album the Bloodhound Gang storm the UK

In the news section, the main story will this weekend be the end of Oasis There are no plans for the band after they play Leeds and it is understood that they will be holding a make or break summit next week

Meanwhile Yes a make or break summit next week. It is understood. Fucking hell. Conjuring fuck all Africa. Meanwhile. Yes. Yes. Meanwhile, Noel Gallagher's guest appearance at the end of Paul Weller's set at V2000 in Chelmsford is cancelled when organisers pull the plug the minute he walks on stage and straps on his guitar, claiming that they are already cutting into headliner

Richard Ashcroft's stage time Eminem has filed for divorce from the wife he's done all them raps about in the big issue section where the stars speak out Lauren Laverne is asked about the naming and shaming of paedophiles

her opinion thumbs down Lauren Laverne is asked about the naming and shaming of paedophiles. Her opinion, thumbs down. Knowing where people who rape kids are, good. Driving them underground, bad. Jesus Christ. Bonnie Langford tries to lamp Chris Morgz at Radio 1 event. And Melody Maker's sales figures have gone up to an average of 32,000 a week. Oh, big time.

We were constantly told that we needed improvement. But when me, Taylor, Everett, Pricey were writing most of the fucking paper, we were selling 60-70, you know? Really? Sorry, sorry, I I'm short Inside the paper It's essentially a huge advert for Reading and Leeds and calling the main sponsors

Stereophonics take us through their most important gigs, while Blink whatever the fuck they are, tell us that they don't like looking at men's arses Oh great, fucking hell Looking at men's arses. Well, great. Fucking hell. Looking at men's arses is one of the great pleasures in life, whoever you are.

You know, they're just missing out. Clown, out of Slipknot, believes that the Gallagher brothers are offensive to women and wants to wrestle naked with them and eventually eat them. That's more like it. Dom of Muse talks about having the squits in Paris And Fred Durst talks about being in the Navy

The Deftones whittle on about how wild and crazy they are on the road Brian Molko approves of Clown of Slipknot eating Nolan Liam And there's an 8 page poster supplement Featuring Jarvis Cocker King Adora The Bloodhound Gang having a tug of war, Sophie Alex Spexter, Idlewild, and Rage Against the Machine. Christ.

I'm getting a lot of memories from this, Al, because most of the names you've mentioned. No, it's just most of the names you've mentioned I did interview at some point. Deftones are okay. Never really went for the blink 182 green day side of things because i once nearly blew out a green day cover feature for the maker at the time um because 10 minutes before they were going to do the interview um they'd read a review that i'd

written of them um in the melody maker wherein i'd called them necrophiles and they they were kind of refusing to be interviewed by the maker a lot of these people that you're talking about um were getting suddenly very big fred durst in particular and he just reappears all fucking year i was sent out twice to los angeles to interview fred durst the first time was before the album come out and they were kind of little bit known they weren't that famous but i interviewed him um at the sky bar um sky bar in the mondrian hotel in los angeles on sunset strip and it was he was a lovely bloke lovely bloke um and then two months later the album just

went stellar and the feature that i had sent in which had kind of been spiked um they they suddenly said neil you've got to go back out and interview him to mop up this feature. So I went back out, and this time he had been then made, because of the success of the album, he'd been made CEO of Interscope Records. He'd been given this cosmetic role there.

So I went up to the 26th, no, it wasn't the 26th floor, that's Melody Maggett. I went up to a stupid penthouse suite at Interscope Records, and there he is, the same nice bloke that i've met but overnight almost it turned into this arrogant blue vein dick just with his feet up on this leather desk smoking a cigar pitching demos into a bin unheard um he was just he would just become a cunt overnight and and i just saw that happen

countless times with a lot of the names that you've mentioned yeah i i had such a i never met him myself and uh nor did i get flown out to la even once but um you know i'm not bitter um but yeah i um he was just such a he was so emblematic of of the maker in its shiny fucking shitty eyes owl form you know and he was very there seemed to be this kind of um uh this kind of synergistic relationship between limp biscuit and mark sutherland yeah and the bloodhound gang as well were kind of were in that mix as well that was that he was sort of like the the sort of meathead figurehead of the whole thing um and i felt like every single it was almost like every other week he his his mug was on the cover and he And that really stupidly tight baseball cap.

What a rub. I mean, he just looked like such a pillock. If he took that off, the strappy thing at the front would be just embedded into his skin for the rest. Yeah, there's no amount of, you know, you'd be there in the mirror just going, I could have done all from rubbing it. But yeah, I think no amount of, you know, sort of, you'd be there in the mirror just going, I could have done all from rubbing it. But yeah, I think they were actually, he was on the cover of the very last issue of The Maker.

Yes. The Christmas issue that we all bust our arses over. Yeah. And yeah, so what a way to go out. Out like a sucker. The Gig Guide. In London, Sarah could have seen three ants riot, an Ikara cult at the Dublin Castle, Primal Scream at the Forum,

Queens of the Stone Age at the Highbury Corner, and direct action against overpopulation at the Notting Hill Arts Club. If I was back round me mam's in knots for the week, I could have availed myself of Dot Allison at the Social and Top Loader at Rock City, while Neil would have had to have made do with Peter and the Test Tube Babies at the Hand and Heart in Coventry

Oh that's mad I didn't know I was born So weird that you mention the Hand and Heart The Hand and Heart that year I met the drummer and bass player who I would eventually be in a band with until now it's 20 years ago now

and I'll never forget the night we met Eddie Tempol Tudor was playing player who I would eventually be in a band with until now. It's 20 years ago now. I'll never forget the night we met. Eddie Tempol Tudor was playing and he suddenly burst in on our meeting. He was having... He was in danger of falling into a diabetic coma and he needed sugar urgently. So we had to sort him out because my mate ran the gigs there.

That's so weird. Has anyone got a Wonder Bar? The singles are being reviewed this week by shed seven and they pick out you cut her hair by tom mccray as single of the week while calling music by madonna as sounding like an old biddy trying to do what the young kids want and deeming Just Hold On by Toploader as this week's absolute stinker. In the album section, Sing When You're Winning by Robbie Williams gets 3.5 out of 5, while Born To Do It by Craig David gets 2. From the chart music contributors, well, it's just two people standing.

Sarah is all over this issue nipping over to Paris to talk to Tahiti Ate watching the Cuban boys be really shit in the Melody Maker Darts League describing Underworld at V2000 as sex, shopping love, God and lager

describing another mellow summer by mellow as a bit like floating in a sea of pimps and having a brief chat with Dumb Dumbs who are doing their set at V2000 and their support gig of Bon Jovi on the same day Neil's sole contribution to this issue

is a one star review of Papa Roach's new LP Infest which he states makes him feel like he's being blown by a guy with a beard and is a shit storm of arse fucking hell

oh god memories are made of this that darts league thing went on for fucking ages didn't it oh I loved doing the darts I mean I can't play darts myself I don't know one end of a fucking dart for another but it was great you get to go to it was because obviously as you said we it was generally like you couldn't just sit and straight interview somebody it always had to be a there always had

to be some sort of framing device involving some humiliation all around but darts were really good you just go there you do the darts you chat in between and it was great it was just a relaxing way people would be relaxed about it. And it was great because I did it with the clinic as well around this time. And they were great. And yeah, the Cuban boys who actually ended up being good pals of mine, they were just ace. They were always really good value.

And yeah, it was that. I love doing the darts. I love doing the singles as well. As I've said before, I'm sure. Did I do the singles with Shed 7 that time? Was that me or was that someone else? I think they did it more than once um yeah yeah but um it was always really interesting to hear musicians talk about other other musicians and their work and there was such a spectrum of how they'd approach it and some of them would be very sort of offhand and

very you know and others would get really nerdy. And so, and others were, others were twats, of course, you'd always get twats. But yeah. Who was the biggest twat in the singles review then?

Ben Folds Five by a country mile. Yeah, sorry. Well, I think they were really hung over. They'd just played the Albert Hall the night before and I had to go up to, I think it was Nottingham actually. I think it was Nottingham.

And I had to schlep up there and interview them and they were very hungover and pissed off and it was just before Christmas and they were in Nottingham it was um and there were only there were only two of them um so it was Ben Foltz and one of the others and they were just very grumpy very shitty very monosyllabic and I'm sure I've gone into this before, so excuse me if I have, but I had to just make a very meta joke out of the entire thing because they didn't give me enough material to do it. So I just had to take the piss.

And they ended up just trailing off into silence and I was mortified. It was so hard. But they just kept going. It was like, well, it's good, but it's not valid. Like they were just writing everything off as like, it's not artistically valid. So, and I was just like, please give me something.

You know, the number of times, and I had to, I actually, you know, turned off my trusty dictaphone and went and had a little cry in the toilets. It was that bad. Oh, no. That was the absolute worst. I think by that point, indicative of the lack of trust of the writers writers weren't allowed to do singles columns anymore anymore that every week it had to be a band doing it yeah so which is a shame i mean i know something's gained but they

could have alternated or something i used to love doing the singles column and i used to love reading the singles column vital part of a pot paper i think but yeah it had been kind of farmed out at that point to bands we got to do a little bit I think we got to do like a little roundup sort of sidebar right of the extra bits I seem to recall because yeah I definitely slagged something off and then got into trouble when I saw them out they were like oi what have you been saying it's like I really sorry. I forget that these things have consequences. So what else was on telly this day? Well, BBC One starts the day at 6am with Breakfast News, followed by Godzilla, Smart Guy, Exchange, Little Monsters, Teletubbies and The Tweenies. Then it's Heartbreak High, followed by Quotation Marks, the wordy quiz show chaired by Vanessa Feltz, then the travel show Passport to the Sun with Lisa Tarbuck. After the news is Neighbours, Diagnosis Murder and Through

the Keyhole, then it's back to the kids show with the Tweenies again, Fly Tales, Anthony Ant, Chuckle Vision, Smart Heart, Steps to the Stars, the talent show hosted by Steps, Newsround and Animorphs. After a repeat of Neighbours, it's the news, regional news in your area and they've just finished an episode of the medical soap opera Doctors. 7am with a splurge of kids programs including Playdays Tasmania, Tom and Jerry Kids, Clever Creatures and Bruno the Kid before Kilroy goats people into having an

argument, Simon Biaggi tries to make a kitchen in Birmingham look a bit less shit in real rooms and David Dickinson says Bobby Dazzler a lot in Leicestershire in Bargain Hunt The 1948 Humphrey bogart film treasure of the sierra madre is aired at 11 then it's little bear barney and 10 minutes of household tips in home

front tricks before the 1944 war movie the master race after the news john for sharnu and felix dexter talk about being black and British in Esther. Then it's Ready Steady Cook, Ken Holmes Hot Wok and Rick Stein forages for free ingredients in London in fresh food. After a double bill of The Simpsons, they're currently halfway through a repeat of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. ITV begins at half five with the news, then GMTV, Trishaw, the Danielle Steele TV film Full Circle, the news, a repeat of Amadale, then the Aussie Soap Shortland Street, a repeat of Minder, more news, Barney and Busker Greetings from Space, Muppetop Shop, Dream Street, from space, Mopatop Shop,

Dream Street, Digimon, Foxbusters, On Safari, and you've been framed again after regional news in your area and the national news. Then it's High Road and the minute this episode of Top of the Pops starts, Deirdre is about to slake a cruel

revenge on Mike Barlow in Coronation Street. You're very fond of the image of Deirdre Snoggin Dev aren't you Neil? I am you know for obvious reasons it's just the heat of that image

it's undeniably arousing I have been mistaken for Dev quite a few times in my life actually by random straight especially when dev was a big prominence in curry i got it a lot i got i got i got yeah well i remember returning a coat to debonams once and the woman behind the counter was just staring at me throughout this transaction and then she she said are you and i said dev from coronation Street she goes yes are you and I was like no

and then I was parked at some lights I remember and a white van pulled up next to me this white van pulled up next to me and I could tell peripherally I was looking ahead but I could tell peripherally that the guys in the van were banging on their window to get me to wipe my window down so like a fool i did and um they immediately just shouted dev at me and i had to chuckle about it and and drive on but yeah i got i got that a lot i do look like jimmy harkish in it if there was ever a film in my of my life it would have to be him that plays me it's that yeah it's it's the glasses it's face. I'd love to meet him. Channel 4 starts at 10 to 6 with Alfie Atkins, Sesame Street, The Big Breakfast,

The Bigger Breakfast, North Hollywood High, Rocco's Modern Life, No Balls Allowed, Wise Up, Stargate SG-1, The Bigger Breakfast Again, Home Improvement,

Watercolour Challenge, Suddenly Susan, then the 1943 Tyrone Powers film Crash Dive. Again, Home Improvement, Watercolour Challenge, Suddenly Susan, then the 1943 Tyrone Powers film Crash Dive. Then it's the tech show I Wish I'd Thought of That, followed by 15 to 1, Countdown, The Montel Williams Show and the documentary series Monkey Business. At 6 o'clock, they've run a whole hour of Boyzone by request and have just started Channel 4 News.

Montel Williams, I completely forgot about him. He was big at the time. It was a big time for Jerry Springer, Ricky Lake, Montel, that fella, and Maury Povich in that. That's what I mainly watched on cable, as I recall. Yeah, I was so close to being on Maury Povich a couple of years previous to this wow i had mates on the internet on irc and uh i had a mate who was based in chicago

she said let's pretend that we're having a a cyber relationship and we'll meet for the first time on moray and you know the producers spoke to me but at the the end, they just couldn't afford to pay for me to fly out or something. What a shame. So fucking close, man. And I could have gone to Jerry Springer as well and had a fallout with her on it. Could have done the whole fucking circuit of American trash TV. Morrie was always great for the phobia shows.

Yes, and you're not the dad dancing Alright then Pop crazy youngsters Let's all meet up In the year 2000 But before we do so Do not forget We may coat down your favourite band or artist

But we never forget They've been on Top of the Pops more than we have Robbie in Tiger Pants Shocker But we never forget, they've been on Top of the Pops more than we have. Robbie in Tiger Pants shocker. It's still number one. It's Top of the Pops. It's Friday, August the 11th, 2000. And we're immediately introduced to a woman in a pink vest at the front of a crowd of the kids who spoilers this week's number one and reintroduces a catchphrase that was used right

through the 60s and into the early 70s it's still number one it's top of the pops as the camera zooms out onto a rammed l street studio why it Why? It's Jane Middlemiss. Born in Bedlington, Northumberland in 1971, Jane Middlemiss began her career on the YTS, sweeping up in a salon and then working in an electrical shop. After moving to London in 1991, she spent a year as a model, which included lobbing them out in the Daily Star but she packed it in after a year to work as an intern with Chris Evans at JLR radio working part-time as a nanny and a shop assistant and then as a trainee researcher at GMTV. In January 1995 she got a big break when she became a presenter on the BBC One kiddie pop show The Ozone, along with Jamie Theakston,

which led to her co-presenting the BBC's live coverage of Glastonbury and the Smash Hits Awards, as well as filling in for Joe Wiley on Radio 1 from time to time. In a couple of months after this episode, she'll be the host of Radio 1's spin-off of Top of the Pops, an hour of backstage goss from that week's TV show, which ran before the breakdown of the brand new Top 40 on Sunday afternoons.

So, yes, it's still number one. It's Top of the Pops. It used to be it's number one. It's Top of the Pops. You get a sense that there's a concerted effort to try and drag Top of the Pops back to what it once was, whilst getting in even more fucking about on the side. Recover some past glories to a certain extent, yeah.

There's always a poignancy in the word still. It's like, yeah, you still got it. And there's a tension in that because it's like, yeah, but for how long? Or it's like, that's obvious that your glory days are are behind you but you're still here you're still you know it's just it's a bit of a and oddly enough that the kind of the tension that actually used to make top of the pops interesting in that you had radio djs presenting on telly uh people that you might not ordinarily see and people who weren't that competent at telly and that was half the fun um that's now gone these are now i mean the series of people that you you've just read out al jamie thigston and you could also include obviously zoe ball and gail portran

and kate thornton all these people they were competent on telly they were confident on telly you know and and and so's jane middlemleness to the point where it's very difficult to find anything to say about her other than well yeah she has that thing um which i think is the thing that we'll recurrently see in this episode which is a slight sense of i wouldn't say snootiness about pop but snarkiness it's important to kind of take the piss a little bit we're in an era we can't take it too serious no and you know we've got pop world on c on channel four and we've got never mind the buzzcocks doing well on bbc2 and there's that kind of snarkiness about pop which as we'll see goes on to actually hurt some of the artists who are featured this week but she's got that in every single one of

her links there's a slight snarkiness to it, I guess. But I mean, this is from a time when, you know, people with actual working class backgrounds are still allowed on telly. You know, she's the daughter of a coal miner and a factory worker. And the way she looks, she doesn't stand out from the crowd that much. You know, it looks like she's just been pulled out of the crowd

and go, you'll do, here's a microphone. Yeah, yeah. But also, it is startling how much of the crowd you see isn't it you see yes an awful lot of the crowd and and i think if i think that's a great thing um i repeatedly find with this episode god this show could have been really good i should have been watching it you know it was on a thursday night maybe it would have been i think it could have developed really quite interestingly because some of the, what I really particularly like about the crowd in this episode is that it's not obviously populated with zoo wankers and they haven't pushed the attractive people. If you like to the front,

they haven't pushed the good dancers to the front. They just push people who are into the music to the front. And so you really do see some genuine moves and you see that lovely thing that i will always love whenever i see in any episode of the top of the top of the pops from the 70s onwards all the way through that lovely thing where you see someone dancing to a record and they're singing it they know every word because they're fans of that record that's so important and you do see that quite a lot in this episode. Yeah. Jane Middlemas. Yeah. That was the thing. She was one of that pack of sort of, of pros,

you know, of just professional presenters, as opposed to people who'd, who'd, you know, it's like she'd done other stuff, but that was, that was her thing.

But I mean, after you've, after you've seen, you know, she's, she's, she's all right. She's good.

She's, I like her. She's got a nice voice. She's got a nice presence, but you know, once you've, you know, once you've seen Julian Cope present Top of the Pops, everything else kind of pales in comparison for me.

Yeah. I mean, she was seen as... I fucking hate this word, even now. She was a ladette of sorts. That was the style at the time, yes. It was a weird kind of blip in sort sort of uh women trying to get a handle on themselves and on femininity in in the culture and a lot and it kind of went it was it was quite a sort of at the time provocative thing because it's like we can do the thing that blokes do

and we can belch and drink and throw up and show our arse in public. And I never found that... You see, I always found that embarrassing. It's like, why is it... And that's the thing that persists now, I think, in a certain form. It's just a very literal-minded way of going about it. It's like, we can do the thing that blokes do. And a lot of...

What bugs me is that a lot of the time... I have a real thing about this, is that in films that have a big female cast and it's stories about women like bridesmaids, why is it that there's always a scene in those films where a woman shits herself in public? Why is that? Yeah, honestly, it is a pattern. I have noted this.

I've never seen film. But it'll be in the trailer and everything and it's like, why is this this is just humiliating this would be humiliating if anybody did it, why is that you know there had to be though for those strong media presences, there had to be

that little grain of humiliation that Paula Radcliffe factor perhaps it was like these people that we're talking about Gail Porter, Jane Middleness Zoe Ball um they they were media professionals working and yet they were still expected also as part of their brand to like I'll mention before show their arse in Maxim and and do the do the lad mag thing and appear in their pants um that was a prerequisite of all of that laddiness as well yeah so but it was mostly it was it was mostly centered on on lager wasn't it it was a kind of a yeah a lager thing um yeah so i i don't know it's all kind of baby steps in kind of the right

direction i suppose but i couldn't um it you know i i couldn't really connect to it i was i was just a very awkward sort of still kind of overgrown teenager at that point. And I didn't really think that was the way to go. It didn't really inspire me, you know. We get treated to the penultimate Top of the Pops theme, which was introduced in May of 1998. A drum and bass remix of Whole Lotta Love, which was put together by Ben Chapman.

It's teamed with an opening credit consisting of blocks and lines and circles sort of moving about a bit to form a vaguely 60s-inspired Top of the Pops logo. This is a bit of an advance on previous logos and theme tunes, I think. Is it? Well, yeah, it's better than Red hot pop and now get out of that don't you think well it's the annoying the thing that bugged me about this is you you get a a bit of a whiff of that desperation that that we were talking about with melody making where it's like you know so so you get the um you know the guitar riff and then a sort of very uh

flattened kind of effect you know somebody's going top of the pops and it's like just in case just in case you weren't sure what you were looking at, you know, and what you're, you know, it's like people know what this is. You don't have to do this. Yeah. You know, it's. Yeah.

Well, there is, there is the Pavlovian effect from. For someone of my generation anyway. Yeah, I'm okay with that. But, but it does. Yeah, you're right. It does it does smack off oh do you remember when we used to be fucking brilliant and the most important thing in your life but as with everything

else they're focus grouping it and they're fucking it up in the process is this okay is this okay is this alright just do the thing I am not a maker of programs you know do the thing and then I'll see. And then I can relax.

You know, stop asking me what I want all the time. I don't know. What's kind of galling is that in the actual important thing of making Top of the Pops, i.e. choosing the best records to be on this show, they actually get it partly right during the duration of this episode. And if they'd have stuck with their nerve and perhaps made those decisions week by week and fucking got it back from the friday to the thursday night it could have been saved but yeah do you think that that turning uh putting top of the pops on

friday was basically the top of the pops equivalent of uh the put making melody maker uh a magazine well well it was the top of the pops equivalent of what we were doing at Melody Maker in as much as we were making ourselves foolhardily into a kids' magazine. We were trying to look like a kids' magazine. For the non-existent kids? For the non-existent kids, because the kids know everything

and we must follow them. Top of the Pops similarly has become, on a Friday night slot at seven, it's a kids' show and it's no longer a kind of it's no longer for music fans to a certain extent it's no longer for everybody I don't think any parents were sat around watching this getting outraged or getting excited or anything this was now it was put in Friday that slot hey kids watch it nobody else need bother was the kind of message

of putting it on a Friday night at that time, I think. We go straight into the first tune of the evening, Seven Days by Craig David. Born in Southampton in 1981, Craig David got his start as a teenager when he guested on the mic at gigs by the reggae band Ebony Rockers, who his dad played bass for. In 1997, he made his vinyl debut as a guest artist on the B-side of the R&B band Damage's cover of Eric Clapton's Wonderful Tonight. And a year later, he started a collaboration with Southampton garage duo Artful Dodger, which led to the 1990 single Rewind, the crowd say Bo Selector, which went all the way to number two for three weeks in December of 1999, hauled off the top spot by Cliff Richard's Millennium Prayer,

and then again for one week in January of 2000, denied by I Have a Dream by Westlife. After being signed to Wildstar he launched his solo career with Fill Me In which went straight in at number one in April of this year. This is the follow-up if you don't count his guest appearance on Artful Dodgers Woman Trouble which got to number six in July of this year and it went straight in at number one last week, toppling We Will Rock You by Five and Queen. But this week, it's dropped one place to number two. So why is it on fucking Top of the Pops? I could not fucking believe it when I saw this.

This breaks the cardinal fucking rule of Top of the Pops. All is lost. It's like having fucking rule of Top of the Pops. All is lost. It's like having fucking rugby on Match of the Day or something. It's broken a cardinal rule of a long running programme. Why have they done this, seriously? It's change, Al. Accept it. Sorry, that was my mark cylinder.

That was my mark cylinder that was coming up. Why? I think possibly because it was only at number one for one week. Like a lot of things at the time, though. Yeah, yeah. But I think what they're aiming for is it is an odd new era for Top of the Pops in which they're trying to kind of make the show a kind of look at what is prevailing, if you like, at what's going on.

So chart positions have become less relevant, I think, to their editorial decisions as to who makes the cut or not. You'd be so pissed, though, wouldn't you, if you were in that position where you'd got to number one and then you'd slipped to number two or whatever, and then it's like, no, you cannot be on top of the pops. There'll be so many people just spitting feathers at this. It's like having last week's tea warmed up again.

I've got a proper cob on that right from the off on this episode well i i kind of i i do think it might be um you know pointing towards something as neil says it it's it's uh starting to shift the parameters of what what is uh you know what it means to be relevant i suppose you know if you look at the charts now and it's kind of it now incorporates uh you know it incorporates downloads and streaming so it's kind of the first nod towards that sort of thing like well maybe the charts are not quite such a maybe they're more of a movable feast um in terms of their you know where they fit in the culture but um but also also i totally understand why you would um get extremely upset about this and why it would ruin your day.

It is a slight lack of nerve. I mean, they're aware that this record at this point, Seven Days, is everywhere. So it's not just on the radio. It's coming out of shops. It's coming out of passing cars. It's everywhere. Yes, it is. And they want to be part of that.

So it is a slight lack of nerve from totp's original remit i must admit yeah is it is it is it their attempt to stop people from turning over to the sultriness of deirdre it might be it might be i mean they were probably gutted he wasn't number one anymore um and this is a unique performance for this show this isn't i don't think the number one performance that he might have done the week before oh yeah he's in the studio and everything he is yeah they've got him in again i just think yeah there's that kind of blur i mean as evidence later as we'll discuss that you know the chart is is treated as yes it's kind of the hook of the show in a sense it's's still called Top of the Pops,

but the chart itself is absolutely denigrated to a certain extent. As we'll see later on. As we'll see later on, yeah. Fucking hell. Okay, okay. I mean, the LP, Born to Do It, is due to be released on Monday, so he's going to be glad of being on Top of the Pops again. And this is not a one-off.

Just a few weeks later we'll see Spiller and Robbie Williams appear when they're not number one anymore this is the way things are now offensive and talking of

offensive it's fair to say that Craig David is one of the hot new artists of you know he's he's one of the the hot new artists of 2000 but he's he's fucking a lot of people off and he became a whipping boy of sorts um a letter in the latest issue of melody maker entitled it's not just you is it just me or is craig dav David a complete and utter cunt? He asks us to fill him in, but I'd like to take him out with a bullet to the back of the head. I don't wish to offend his fans, but the guy is just a piece of shit who's obsessed with his own libido.

I'm not interested in his seduction of a beautiful honey with a beautiful body and his sexual exploits from Wednesday through to Saturday in his latest hit. What he does with his cock is absolutely none of my business. What does interest me is how we have allowed pop music to be taken over by such small- minded, vain people with nothing to say. At least artists like Daphne and Celeste and Eminem try to say something in their music. We should encourage these pioneers because otherwise a nation of little kids will grow up with Craig David as their role model. And what a sick thought that is why the hate?

why him? oh fucking heaven forfen that we get a vain person making pop music no fucking hell where do I start with this? why him? he left himself a little bit open to it

to be honest with you tracks like and i've mentioned that there was an increased snarkiness about pop in a kind of it quite pop became something that comedy could take pot shots at quite often um and um he left himself open to it to a certain extent with with bow selector because that's such an instantly parable track. Yes. And also with Seven Days, with this track as well. Because... It's silly. The track, you mean, Seven Days?

It's quite... I find it quite daft. But no, carry on. It is a daft... No, you're absolutely right, Sarah. It is a daft track and it should be understood as such. I think that the writer of that letter has kind of seen Seven Days

as this unproblematic lothario type song yeah but really i mean what the reason seven days works i think is because and the reason it appealed to who it appealed to it's got that um that thing you know you know teenagers cannot shut up yeah that they just start talking and they can't stop. They cannot stop. They can't shut up. It's got that to it. He can't stop himself singing. So you can either apprehend that lyric as being about a real thing that happened

or you can apprehend it as I think it should be taken. It's a teenage fantasy. It's a teenage fantasy of some sophisticated week he spent and then he rushes through the actual shagging in three days with not much mention. And it should be understood as that. It's braggadocio. You know what I mean?

That's what it is and that's how it should be understood. He is one of those silky professional singers, I guess. Yeah. We're used to artists bragging on about getting their end away. This is extremely low level i mean he's not he's not pulled out the jammer and killed the banana as a yeah it's very low level it's very low level it's it's a it's an amusing little record and i think he knew it as well um the lyrical conceit of it so for people to be so offended by it i i'm perhaps this is a phrase i'm repeatedly

using i think in chart music podcasts is perhaps i'm being paranoid but i can't help thinking you know something of the treatment of david worries me yeah um i'd love it if there were so many black solo british pop stars with long careers so i couldn't be so paranoid about this but i think a wide part of the audience don't like seeing successful single black british males succeeding and and i don't know i wouldn't want to tie it in with the kind of raheem sterling almost thing of this year but but they are targets in a way that other pop stars aren't to a certain extent so i'm not repping massively for craig david i loved um fill me in i thought that was a great tune that was full of drama i loved both selectors well not so keen on seven days but you know as

soon as his trouble was as soon as uk garage left his sound and he was revealed to be what he was, which was a fairly boring musician. I mean, I remember him doing a version of Seven Days on Top of the Pops, actually, where it's just him and an acoustic and it revealed his sort of true colours to a certain extent and he was just another boring singer. But with UK Garage under his songs, I thought he made some great, great singles.

So his kind of, you know, target nature that everyone took the piss out of him, I thought was massively unfair. Yeah, I mean, of course there's a really nasty element to the criticism of Craig David and people like him. You know, it yeah obviously it is there is because look we all got we would all kind of uh get arsey about you know about various records but i mean well i hope i mean god i i should have to think what i'm going to find when i when i actually um look back through one squinted eye at my old stuff but you know i would

hope that i wasn't you know i did get slapped down once for being too vicious about somebody who was new you know and it's like don't don't be like that it's like oh okay fine because you do you know you forget that these are you yeah it's terrible but you know you you can lose sight the fact these are real people and they have careers and you can make you can make or break them but people writing in with letters like that and it is very telling when somebody there is a level of vitriol that is like i there's something more going on there i mean it's um if i can if i can digress for a second we were talking about the the reading of this year daphne and celeste were on the main stage this was this legendary thing and i was i was there and it was i've never seen anything like like it. So there were two guys. It was basically the main stage, as it would usually be at Reading,

was wall-to-wall rock blokes, you know, and supposedly punk blokes. I can't remember who was on before them, but they were on before Blink-182 in kind of, you know, like early afternoon. And everybody knew what was happening. And there was just a hail. The sky was dark with detritus and people, you couldn't hear anything at all because of all these,

you know, all these people just screaming and shouting at them and throwing stuff. And they kind of thought these were like two, you know, teenage girls doing what they felt was not the right music. And it was just this kind of war zone. And it was quite, it was quite frightening because there was a tone to it which is like you know you do not you do not come here not you yeah not you you stay out well sarah you know in the in the issue of melody maker i've got in front of

me there is a little uh little side box with everett truce it says how will Daphne and Celeste survive the calling weekend to judge from the makers post bag the effervescent peer are in for a hostile reception so what are they expecting and they say bottles, beer, dirt and screams we're expecting lots of mud too

can bottles of piss actually hurt us if they actually want to piss in a bottle and throw it at us, then more power to them. And, you know, the interview is basically saying, are you ready to be fucking completely abused

by angry, scowling whiteys? The thing is, they could have been physically hurt. This was real. And, you know, this was terrifying and kind of sickening in a certain way. But they were heroic.

And they just took it all in their stride and they just thought it was fantastic. And that is, that's fucking punk. Blink-182 came on afterwards with their sort of, and sort of spoon-fed the audience their kind of anodyne pap. And they all lapped it up. This is our music. And it's like, i've never seen anything so

stupid in my life but it's that thing of um you know and people will will hide behind the notion that it's like well i just don't like the music and it's like it's it's more than that though isn't it mate look you know you might have to look a bit deeper in yourself and and face up to some stuff and you know i i've yeah look we've all we've all done that i'm i'm not saying that i didn't um and we'll get into the the cover later about uh the uh the yes we will uk carriage my ass thing um you know it's not like i i have had to i've had to sort of claw upwards i've had to work on myself in order to really zero in on this stuff and recognize that no you're not paranoid yes there is um there is bigotry there you know i i'm not going to i nor am i going to uh stick up for craig david very

much as an artist i mean he was he was so young i hadn't realized how young he was um he was very young he's a teenage boy lovely honey voice you know but very very forgettable but you know and i didn't i didn't think much jim was an artist but you know that doesn't mean that he didn't have a place and didn't have a right to be there and there were people who were like they're instinctively just like nope it's not it's this is not for you this is not your place and you can't come in the song's basically him bragging on about getting his end away and uh you know he's he's essentially having what we used to call back in 2000 itv digital and chill isn't he but that's it i mean i i

immediately understood that record as as it's gauche and it's a kind of adolescent fantasy you know i i work in a college where there's innumerable 16 and 17-year-old boys walking the corridors chatting shit, and this is the kind of nonsense that I hear. He's a nicely turned out lad, isn't he? You know, he is a bit mad. Yeah. Do you remember the KP Skips advert in the early 90s?

You'd know this now. Where all the different flavours, they zoom in on a skip, and there's all these different flavours having a massive rave on it I do vaguely remember that yeah like there's a there's a rasta one

and then there's there's there's Chinese spices and they're all doing a bit of kung fu it's a bit Shaolin Craig David's head is like a

like that skips but if they were all kind of like little afro-y things yeah yeah it's like he's got hundreds of tiny little afros on his head.

It must have taken him fucking ages to get done. Ow, ow. It is really important that he's nicely made out. He does look really smart and he's dressed well. And that is precisely one of the reasons why he would not necessarily appeal to the kind of readership and editors that were working at Melody Maker. Black pop was allowed to happen so long as it was flamboyant, outrageous, etc. If it was this thing that was sophisticated,

you know what I mean by that word, sophisticated. I don't mean it was necessarily musically sophisticated, but it was aspirational in a sense, and it was well-dressed, etc. That didn't appeal. What Melody Maker were interested in, in terms of black music, a sense yes and it was well dressed etc that didn't appeal what what melody maker interested in in terms of black music the only black music that they got in was their kind of grungy dirty side of things your cypress hills and things like that they weren't that interested in kind of modern sophisticated black pop which is what this was yeah um and that was fatal um yeah he's he does

have i should point out a well-dressed in this instance does consist of a statement. Wooly is all I can call it. Yes, it really is, doesn't it? I'm always, I admire slash I'm baffled by anyone who wears a sweater on a stage in a TV studio or on a stage even at all. It kind of makes me go

God aren't you aren't you warm aren't you a bit warm don't you want to take that off but he's got it's a it's quite thick

isn't it like a blue roll neck it's a roll neck and it's got like big and it's got white strapping down the side doesn't it

it's got like corset that's like corset ties it's like corsetry with like ribbon I'd wear that well actually no I'd have to cut the knot with like ribbon I'd wear that well actually no

I'd have to cut the knot with that neck because that would that would be really annoying but yeah the kind of the which is which is a look

you know oh and a big medallion as well he's got a medallion on yeah he's got he's got like a golden pendant with a with a CD on it

oh is that what it's oh wow I didn't I didn't pick up on that oh amazing I mean he should have worn an actual CD and

would have got the reference that could have been a thing but it is the kind of jumper it is a total pop star jumper isn't it

because you can only wear that once because it's so striking and noticeable yeah yeah it's like oh you've seen Craig David wearing that same jumper again

yeah and you couldn't wash it and he's got yeah he must be really skinned he's got he's got nice nice strides on that same jumper again and you couldn't wash it it must be really skint he's got nice strides on that kind of baggy sort of nicely cut shoes

but yeah he looks lovely and he sounds lovely we should say that this is everyone singing live he does the little shout out to himself at the end of course course he does, yes. Tom of the Pops. And he's, you know, they've got a big video screen again in the background.

I like that. The big video screens come back. And yeah, I mean, I hate this song. It's fucking cat shit. I think it's the shopping centre flamenco guitar that fucks me off about it. I realised for the first time uh watching this that he sounds almost exactly like donnell jones off of you know what's up he's got the same quality to his voice it's a really really you know it's that very um quite american sounding yes smooth

yes smooth voice you know it's it's you can see that that's where he's coming from um i i would i would postulate at least um but yeah it's in terms of um yeah i was trying to sort of break down break down the song and like you said neil this is kind of undermined what i was going to say i'm going to say anyway yeah it's it's it's um he's just kind of bollocking on about some shit that never in modern parlance did not happen um but it's it's i there's a little call and response bit that he does with himself with his own backing vocals i love a caller as well i think that's a lovely it's always a a fun thing to encounter in a pop song so i kind of got into the lyrics which are you know amazingly ripe for analysis um so he does the little call and response bit did she decline no didn't she mind i don't think so it's like that's it's that's quite a sort of low-key thing

it's it's a bit sort of like so okay she didn't say no um was she all right with it seemed to be you know it's not it's not very romantic but the whole setup of this is kind of suspect okay because um you know he, he's walking, he's in the middle of the afternoon, he's going to see his mates. And then as he walks through the subway, he sees a girl standing there. Hmm.

Okay. All right. How does this play out? What is... She's probably drawn a massive cock on the wall. What is the deal? Now, I have been, we've all been in subways. They're not places that you want to hang around in even in weirdly they're scarier for for

a woman on her own they are scared i find them scary in the day for some reason because it's still dark yeah you can see light at either end and there's there's the kind of horrible fluorescent strip lights in there and the kind of grimy tiles and there's every every your footstep echoes and you feel like something bad's gonna happen they're not nice places so what's he doing and it's and it's still before the the the manky smelling sandwich um franchise as well yes yeah yeah we did we did consider this it's like is he not in a in a kind of sandwich joint but it's like no it's he's in the subway but Craig David won't go to subway no he gets someone to, surely he'd have an assistant to do it for him he'd go to the 24 hour garage

so right okay I have suspicions about how about this, I think he's a naive kid and she is a professional and so I think what happens and she is a professional and so I think what happens and she's

you know she seems like she can handle herself, she's standing there you see and then so he takes her a drink and then they make love all the rest of the week which is great and then he discovers unfortunately what the truth of the situation is

and when he's telling his mate he's kind of cagey about it. And also there's, you know, why does he say she's 24 as well? It's like, oh, she's a pretty girl, age 24. Right, okay, that seems like you're making a thing of that. Oh, yeah, she's older than him. Yeah, of course. She's probably got a car and everything. But he's going to be, I think he he's gonna be slightly embarrassed by this situation so he's telling his mate who is actually his own alter ego um

david craig um nice what how it all how it all happened but it's like okay so um so by so they chilled on sunday he got the bill on monday uh had to go had to go to the loan shop went to the loan shop on tuesday beaten to a pulp on Wednesday, and on Thursday and Friday and Saturday, he was in the fucking hospital. Yeah. Anyway, that's my, so there you go. That is my close reading of Seven Days by Craig David.

That's my academic perspective. Never thought of that before. Never thought of that before. Because his mix of vagary and yet specifics, like you say, because he does specifically mention her age. But when it comes to actually describing the girl, he's very, very vague. I think it's just a beautiful lady, isn't she? And that's it. Yeah.

Which which lends more credence to the kind of he's making this up interpretation of this song, I would say. So the following week, Seven Days dropped one place to number three. The follow-up, Walking Away, got to number three in December of this year. But by this time, Melody Maker had published an issue with a Craig David lookalike,

recreating the cover of Born To Do It on a toilet and the headline, UK Garage, my arse, the alternative nation fights back. Fucking hell. Shall we, shall we? Are we gonna? I've got it here. I've got it here.

Let me begin. I'll open the account with the editor's letter from Mark Sutherland. For the first eight months of this year, the alternative nation was depressed. UK Garage and Pop Shite was ruling the charts. And our music was being pushed off airways and common room stereos across the land.

This is what happens man A creeping garager But since the Calling Weekend, Reading and Leeds Festivals, there's been a new Wave of optimism Fucking hell man We've nominated 50 ways in which we think the

Indie nation is fighting back Were you aware of this before it happened? Um I don't remember Indy Nation is fighting back. Were you aware of this before it happened? I don't remember. I just, I remember this general atmosphere of queasiness and uneasiness with this. And people just, all of us kind of looking at each other with this kind of, you know, we were very embarrassed about it. you know we were we were very embarrassed about it and we were you know most of the most of the writers just kind of had no truck with it at all um but yeah i don't really remember i remember it coming out and i remember just having to talk to prs and stuff about it and just going yeah i mean

i didn't i this sounds sorry can i just sorry um i you know i i feel like i should have known better at the time but like i I said, it is a life's work and I had led a relatively sheltered life, I suppose. And I didn't quite, like I said, there was a queasiness about it. And, you know, you learn to pick up on these markers of like, yeah, that's a problem. That's somebody being, that's someone being a dick. That is a bad message. This is a dark thing. And, you know, you need to address it and is a bad message this is a dark thing and you know um you you need to address it and you need to uh this is not something that should be happening and i kind of knew that but i i hadn't quite it sounds like it should be really obvious what it was but at the

time it was just like is this is this okay i'm not sure that it is okay you know so there was there was that kind of i think a lot of us were in that place are we are we doing a race in other words yeah yeah well the thing is that it's the um uh the um the if you look at the the actual cover of of craig david's album that that this was a piss take off um yeah it was he does look quite pious and and again he's you know he looks quite daft he looks he's taking himself very seriously and he's sort of got this beatific look on his face and he's kind of holding very gingerly onto his cans and it you know it's quite an arresting image but it's not it's it's um it is kind of in some ways it is ripe for for the piss take um but just to do it in that way and like i said there's a there's this kind of the the sort of uh the lavatorial

thing is is is so kind of there's there's just such a grossness about it's really tawdry and um yeah i i think probably part of me i'm sure part of me um what what it was supposed to be how it was presented was as quite a punk thing and like you know yeah we're doing something outrageous and shocking but there was no room to do that at the maker at this time in in any way and least of all in in this way it was just it was just bollocks you know it didn't it couldn't you couldn't justify it on that basis i'm just interested to hear that sarah said she didn't know about her this is a common thing of this period we didn't know until wednesday what the fuck was going to be on the cover no these decisions were

quite often made by other people and this particular issue you're talking about now it is the without a shadow of a doubt the most shameful copy of melody maker to to ever come out we might as well call it the way it is it's fucking racist i've been told three four years before oh no black faces on the cover don't sell well what they do we've got a black face and it's having the piss taken out of it it's stuck on a toilet seat etc so to me that you know this was one of those things on a wednesday morning i saw it and i was just like what the fuck is this the history you know the history of uk pop is mainly populated with white musicians listening to the most cutting edge black music it's a given and here we are rejecting that we are rejecting the multiracial

for the monocultural we're rejecting the musically futuristic in favor of the musically retrograde it's absolutely fucking shameful and i can only conjecture that in some way it wasn't just down to a desire to match our readerships you know more slower members it was a reflection of the musical and social prejudices of the people making those editorial decisions they weren't our fucking people. Those boneheads in our readership, what we should have done with Craig David, instead of taking the piss and basically saying

we hate black music, you've got to listen to white rock. Those boneheads in our readership, we should have stuck Craig David on the cover. We should have got a good writer to go out and meet him, write about it, and him, and the scene that he came from, and give it an interesting strapline, an interesting story. And you put him on the cover and him and the scene that he came from and give it an interesting strapline interesting story and you put him on the cover and you fuck those people fuck those

fucking people um i know it sounds reckless but this to me was it was one of the most shameful things that ever appeared in the money i remember a singles column in 1996 i think quite early by um somebody that i used to work for um who i don't know whether i can mention them yeah i can mention her name michael bonner and um he wrote a singles column he'd just fallen in love and every singles review contained a declaration of love to his girlfriend it was the most painfully embarrassing thing i have ever read in the maker you know and i'm serious it wasn't beautifully written it was it was like every single review would end up with, I love you, I love you.

It was horrible. It was mortifying. And I thought that nothing could top that in terms of shame. But this issue and the list that's in there and the cover and everything about her, it's a disgrace. Looking through that issue, it reminds me of working on a Sega Mega Drive mag in the early 90s,

where so much of the mag was devoted to hating on Nintendo and hating on Mario. And going on about how brilliant Sonic was. And essentially creating arguments in the playground and giving our readership, who were mainly young teenage lads, ammunition to say yeah sonic pisses on mario that's it um it's always a bad sign when i mean basically it's a marker of

uh that was the maker putting itself right into the bin it's like you know because it's like well we don't accept you know if you're saying uh we're setting out our stall uh on the basis that we do not accept this and we don't accept you then uh you know it's just like well okay fine we'll go somewhere else that you what you're doing is you're putting yourself into uh you're sidelining yourself you're putting yourself into into a position of irrelevance um where whereby you know the the zeitgeist you know that what is happening now is is not your thing and you're opting out of it and that's what but it's always a bad sign when people it's always you know it's an it's a negative thing to define yourself by what you're not and what you're against as opposed to it's like what are you for you know

that's the that is the way to go if you define yourself by what you hate you know you don't ask you don't you don't open a conversation with somebody if you're talking about music you go what sort of music do you hate like literally no one's ever done that you know why would you do that i mean like i have to i'd say i did not have i didn't really get uk garage i didn't really it didn't you know it wasn't for me i didn't really like it i found it kind of for the most part i found it not all of it as we'll get on to but i will i found it generally kind of quite tinny and hectic and it just wasn't i that that is not a thing that I can get with. But that's fine.

Not everything has to be for me. And that doesn't mean, you know, I do not expect to be pandered to and indulged in everything that I want. And I understand that there is room for everything. And also that if something is dominating now, what will happen is there will come a day when that has

not happened and that's when things get interesting when you see the development of of something you know a genre that is you know on top now will eventually splinter into different things it will have an influence here here and here um and it will you know there will be something that will come after it so you just you know you just hang on if something is not relevant to you and and like i said a it doesn't have to be and b see what happens well we didn't have the confidence in the readership that that argument you know i'm certainly not saying the melody maker should have been totally positive about uk garage at all it but it should have battled for its space just like anything else with writers that advocated for it instead the party line was handed down you know as much as the party line was handed down that we've got to be positive about

oasis so invariably where we end up is the melody maker closing the enemy doing things like 10 years later saying you know when alex turner makes some bullshit speech at the brits rock and roll is coming back it's a fucking perennial and we also end up with cunts like Noel Gallagher saying Jay-Z shouldn't be playing Glastonbury. This pervading fiction that, no, this is our music, you stay over there. And it's just hateful in every regard. Yeah, and I don't recall seeing covers of Mixmag or DJ

with a Liam Gallagher lookalike wanking into a sock. You know? Yeah, yeah. Because they're more important things to fucking do. And so did we. We should have been covering UK Garage without a doubt in that year, not talking about it in this way. In this totally, more importantly, totally pig ignorant way

about what was actually going on in the music. But also, you wouldn't see any of the magazines I was working with at the time, like Razzle All Escort, you know, having a picture of a fucking bloke on the cover, and the cover line, a bloke's knob? We like fannies. The fight back for fannies begin here.

It's just desperate. All informed by market research. The editorial meetings were a blag. They didn't count. What counted was the meetings that we never got to go to. The meetings with the marketeers, the meeting with the publishers. How can we kill Melody Maker?

They did it all right. Fucking hell. Those fuckers. We're all writers, but before we were writers, we were readers. We used to consume the music press. And one thing about the music press is that I was always totally happy to sit down and read an article about a band I hated, you know,

that I was not interested in because they're always interesting stories. And you get so much more out of a good article about a band than just their music you know about the climate they've grown up in all that kind of stuff and just to say right okay this big chunk of music we're not going to talk about it and we hate it and you should

hate it as well that's fucking ridiculous what kind of comeback did Melody Maker get from that? Fuck all because the tone this wasn't writing anymore you know what was going on and we were we were writing words don't get me wrong and we were sending them through but what you'd actually see in the mag it was forensically kind of tested for its for its playability with our supposed readership and inevitably actually most of our real readership

were leaving in droves at this point, disgusted with what the magazine had become. I do wonder if they were like, is it OK for us to do this? Like whenever something outrageous like this happens and you just go, imagine the number of people who signed off on this. And it's like, did they all, did any of them think about it first? Was there a meeting where everyone went, is this OK? Can we get away with it? But I think there was probably a tacit understanding that like, well, but we hate pop. We're a, you know,

which obviously is a bullshit position in and of itself. But I think it was that because it was very sort of accessible light stuff. And because there's this whole thing about authenticity, which is, you know, always tedious whenever it comes up. And it pisses me off because authenticity is a is an actual thing it is a genuine thing it's not just but it's been co-opted by false twats who you know

mostly with guitars who use it to cover up the fact that they don't actually have any substance to them and they don't really they're self-conscious and they don't they are not uh they're not artists in the sense that they really have artistry that's something that has to come out they're doing it because uh they they feel that that's what they are but they're fucking not and they will cover themselves over with the kind of the glorious robes of authenticity and people fall for it you know i mean mark sullivan definitely fell for it it's like this is what authentic is authentic is not a genre it's not a genre it's not a guitar it's not a sound it is a way of being it's a spiritual fucking calling you know and i guess there was just a um a sense that that's our thing that's our religion even though they got it complete it's like a lot of religion getting completely

the wrong end of the stick it's like it's the right idea the wrong end of it completely and just going this is not that these guys are just dicking about who the fuck they think they are you know they're just dilettantes you know they they are yeah so there was there was a lot i think they probably justified that cover on the basis of a lot of that stuff which they which is not good enough you know well this is why i bear grudges because a lot of people will have signed off on that um but what we had ultimately at that point we didn't have an editor, we had a bully we had a bully in charge and this is what happened he did not belong in that job

and he was a very intimidating presence and like I said I felt like I was not in I was not being given a spot really I didn't know why that was, I mean there weren't very many women writing for it at the time I was not being given a spot, really. I didn't know why that was. I mean, there weren't, yeah,

there weren't very many women writing for it at the time. It was me and Emma Johnston who joined about the same time. She was much more of a proper journalist than I was. I was just kind of really, really blagging it and winging it. But yeah, there was no, he did sort of loom. He would sort of loom around the office and he got a very deep voice and and would sort of um you know editorial meetings he would sort of introduce

he would announce by stomping around the office and go right people meeting and it was like it was like doom and it's just like you do not you're not a good but he was not and he he also i should i should say that there were things and i know that he I'm sure that he was under pressure in terms of budget, but, you know, when we were on one of those late nights where we'd have to go home at, you know, four or five in the morning or whatever, and you used to get a cab laid on, apparently, but I had to get, you know, I had to get my own, and I was, like I said, living off absolutely fuck all,

and if I wanted to get home safely, I would have to get my own cab, and stuff like that, that were just, like I said, not all of not all of it i have to you know not all of it was his fault but he was maybe he's a nice guy outside of that but as as my first as a as a first boss and there's an introduction to uh publishing and and the music industry and everything it was really fucking unpleasant are we gonna dip a hand into the the 50 ways the alternative nation is fighting back? Oh, fucking hell, Al. Shall we, Sarah? This is hard work, I've got to tell you.

Yeah, fuck it. Yeah, go on, let's get it all out. Come on. The thing is with this, though, Al, yeah, it was probably dreamed up in an afternoon by a few of the cunts lazily sat around a table. But I actually thought, when I think about this piece, I actually think of Mark Sutherland wearing a massive dark cloak

and pulling this out of some vat of horror, a document that just seals the fucking horror of the age. Every single line of it is so badly written and so needy, it's just mortifying that this appeared under the melody maker name i think starting off you know number four cold play at number one proving that nice guys can finish first i mean fuck me primal screams civil disobedience revolution revolution bobby g making politics sexy. Bobby Gillespie's never made anything sexy.

It just gets fucking worse. Oh my God. Sorry, I'm scrolling through it now. Let's go straight to 23. Top loader on the road. Joe and the lads taking rock and roll chaos to the streets. Has there ever been like a Top Loader covers band called Bottom Feeder? That would be good.

And all they played, but they just played Dancing in the Moonlight 10 times. Yes. And by the end, everyone's crying. Yeah, Top Loader, there is nothing good you can say about Top Loader whatsoever. Apart from the only good thing you can say about Top Loader Is that they eventually went away Number 31 President Fred Durst

The undisputed king of new metal sneering charm Conquering the world God almighty, man Do you remember a time when President Fred Durst sounded like the most appalling thing ever? Not my president. Fucking hell, man. No, no, he'd be a fucking shoo-in next year.

Not quite. Oh, Jesus Christ. Now you've said... Oh my God, Al, now you've said that. That's actually going to happen, isn't it? It's either going to be him or it's going to be the Fyre Festival guy. Or maybe both of them.

Maybe they'll take it in turns. Yeah. Or the fucking reanimated corpse of jimmy saville but the way 32 is interesting isn't it napster music for free nuff said oh yes yes i bet that went down a treat didn't it with the fucking prs and the labels well well played mark i mean fucking and and you'll notice as well the repeated use of the word nuff nuff said and a repeated swearing as well

I know I'm in no position to criticise exactly but that no but you know how to swear swearing is a fucking art form I can do it you can do it we all of us are fucking really good at it that man should not have it

it's like wash your mouth out. You know, take that fucks out of your mouth. Number 40. New metal fashion. Subverting the gatecrasher styles for our own perverse means. About time to... You mean a fucking wallet on a chain. What does that mean, about time to? I don't get that a chain what does that mean about time two exclamation

mark i don't get that no i think that's a little dig that is another that's a little dig at dance culture which also was bad and wrong i mean gang crush obviously you know hard again hard house is not anything that i was into that was um you know i i did not you know i didn't want my brain to be pummeled in that specific way but again it's like these are people this is a this is a scene um that that we're going to shit on because we don't get it and we don't understand it and you know look at number 34 moshing crowd surfing live chaos you don't get that at your local uk garage club no fucking hell man but what you do what you know what you do get at a rock club is 48 blink 182 ripping the

piss out of boy bands in their videos and he's right up after that there you go hilarious vids cool guys brilliant music he sounds fucking 50 odd i mean and yet he's he's trying absolutely to speak in a kid's language i don't think this was done by committee I think this was him of an afternoon summoning the spirit of Satan and just getting this out it's a horrible document you leave Satan out of this we know that Satan has the best tunes that has always been true

Satan would hold his horns in his hands at this 42 XFM it's getting better and better but we're still keeping an eye on you and this is it this is it right it's not like you're being forced

to listen to music you don't like by 2000 yeah there's loads of satellite stations loads of radio stations loads of record shops it's like no one is forcing you to listen to Craig David ridiculous you have to dig to a certain extent when i actually did speak to mark sullivan it was very briefly and not very

often you did kind of get a flavor for where he was coming from in a sense he came he made fanzines you know when he was a kid mark sullivan he was a fanzine writer and he was very very much fixated on the indie kind of C86 scene. And that's where he's coming from. So where the rest of us in 87 were listening to Public Enemy, he was listening to Tallulah Gosh or whatever. And he stayed there. And that indie faith stays with him to this point.

But 100 Reasons, Brick Rock, Kicks Back, Pearl Jam, Start Watching Their Back backs. Ace. I mean, fucking hell, man. This is 50 reasons to stop reading Melody Maker. Yeah. I will say, though, the one bit that is not terrible in this is the description of Slipknot as evil panto. And having seen Slipknot, I was like,

that's not entirely what Slipknot were, but that was a fair description of, you know, and they were like a kid's party gone mad in some ways. And I saw them at Reading, I think probably this year again, and they did this thing where they got everybody in the crowd to like crouch down. And then when they said, you know, like, chop the fuck up and it was it was

hilarious as everybody did it there's a whole field of people just sort of crouching down waiting to be told and it was like it was it was like a kind of it's because the you know and they mostly were like grubby teenage boys who were out on their own for the first time and it's like they kind of perfectly bridge that gap between childhood and adulthood which is what teenagers you know are struggling to do and they want to be kids a lot of the time and there was something really delightfully kind of horrendously grossly childish about Slipknot. Slipknot were fab live and I was I was one of the first people to see them unmasked I interviewed them once and and nobody had seen them without their masks on um but I'll never forget an interview i did with clown actually um it was a phoner and

he phoned me and he was actually driving at the time and uh partway through the phone he had a car accident um his car fell apart eight people got out oh man that would have been too perfect but no yeah he did have a car accident he did have a car accident and he was like i've got to talk to the other person in the crash are you all right and i said yeah i've got enough mate and that was that but no they were they were fun there was some fun you know but what melody maker i'm not i'm simultaneously not saying melody maker shouldn't have reflected all of this new metal stuff that was coming out but it should have just been part of everything else you know and left to battle with everything else

with the confidence in your readers that they can make their own minds up judging by the writing that wasn't allowed this was 50 you have to follow these diktats and it was just ghastly Oh and Craig David will go on to score

10 more top 10 hits including collaborations with Bastille and Sting even though he'd been mortally wounded by Melody Maker. It's rough! Turn the amps up to 11, get signed for some family motion, arms in the air, it's ROOF! Middle Miss at the back of the Elstree studio tells us that it's time for some unadulterated rock and assumes that we've got amps in our living rooms and our families are all up for a mosh as she introduces Set the Record Straight by Reef. Formed in London in 1993, Reef relocated to Glastonbury and signed to Sony's S2 label in late 1994. After supporting Paul Weller and Soundgarden, they first came to public attention in 1995 when their debut single Good Feeling was used in an advert for the Sony minidisc.

It was the advert where a record company executive lobs their demo out of the window like Fred Durst did, where it's picked up by one of the kids who slides it into his mini-disc player and deems it to be wicked and sordid. Good Feeling eventually got to number 24 in April of 1995, sparking a run of five top 20 singles on the bounce, peaking when Place Your Hands got to number 6 in November of 1996 this is the first cut from the forthcoming fourth LP Get Away and it's the follow up to New Bird

which only got to number 73 in September of 1999 and it's a new entry this week at number 19 wow if I'd have turned this on back in 2000 I would have said to myself oh fucking hell tfi friday fuck off what's on bbc one oh it is isn't it it's the sort of band that chris evans would book without a doubt well they were practically on every week reading the

letters or something didn't they i don't know i didn't watch it. They did a version of I think they just recorded it the one time. It was a version of Put Your Hands. Place Your Hands, which went, instead of Put Your Hands On, it went, It's Your Letters. Which, it's so... That's right. Comic genius.

It's your letters. And I have to admit, I always found it... You know there are stupid things that you always find funny that was one of those for me it was so it was so dumb that I just chortled

merrily at it every time I saw it but well this is this is the alternative nation fighting back isn't it right here

with their proper instruments and proper songs with their proper instruments they all they look they look pretty tired don't they

I mean they they look awful they look almost a definitive't they they look awful almost a definitive non-sandwich band for me they look grubby I can never figure out a band thinking early on in that evening right we're going to be on top of the pots tonight

what should we wear and you know turning out like that well he's had gary's got his hair cut at this point because he always had long sort of surfer hair and he's now got yeah he's he's now he's now got a sort of tousled tousled short do but um yeah just kind of and he he had he's one of those one of those singers who kind of i i know i said this about someone else recently who's who i forget but when you've got a sort of texture to your voice and you've kind of been told that you've got this unusual powerful voice and everything you sort of some people sort of

rest on their laurels with that and they think that will carry them all the way through he actually sounds really muted it's quite it's a very sort of low key doesn't have a lot of energy in it i know it's supposed to be like that but it just feels really tired the interesting thing about this for me is that um kind of the one interesting element of this song which otherwise is you know i've forgotten it already is that it starts with the backing vocal there is um a female uh backing singer who has the first line of course as well good lord uh yeah and you know this guy but she's and she's got like sweet voice, but she doesn't have the belting voice. This needs to be, if you're going to do this, then you need to belt it. But also, why would you bother?

Because it's not really much of a song. But like I said, credit for that unusual thing. I cannot think of another record that starts with a backing vocal like that. It's like, ah. And then after that moment, you go, and then after that moment you go, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah,

absolutely. It could be, it becomes place your hands over your ears, doesn't it? It could be, it could be anyone. It could be, what this reminds me of is in 2000,

I think I'd properly started DJing in a nightclub. And I DJed like six hours every Saturday night for like 50 quid or something in a crate of beer um but it was the kind of side room where bands will come on and what this reminds me of is just that crucial 10 seconds when a band would come on and you'd make that decision yep they're doing that thing i'm going to go to the smoking area and go and have a fag yeah all their entire set yeah because within five seconds of this song starting you know all right all right they're doing that thing yes that thing that everyone else is fucking doing and everyone else is done and they're still doing now yeah so yeah instantly forgettable for me yeah did you ever have any dealings with reef

um i did the singles with them once and then also i uh had a phoner with with gary at some point subsequent to that which i just remember him being i remember them being slightly arsy doing the singles and um not really engaging with it in a very sort of in in any sort of deep way but he was um he was uh he was dead nice when you you know uh on his own i did find this often with bands actually is that they would be they'd be quite arsey and kind of almost macho together and then you get one of them on their own they're fine you know it was a that was a marked a very marked thing that i that i noticed were they west country surfers or am i remembering that wrong um i'm sure they're from cornwall or something like that well one of them wasn't i could be totally wrong about it well they they lived in Glastonbury didn't they but I don't know if they where they were um from

originally I say the one thing I remember about that is that um I was slightly late calling them and I said um you know something about uh sorry to be a pain and he said it's no pain and it was like that's so nice of you because like I said I was quite I was quite sort of fragile at the time i was i found it i found a lot of the work really hard i've got to say a lot of it oh it was all you know there was loads of loads of amazing times loads of great fun and loads of everything but actually interviewing people i found incredibly hard yeah me too and particularly phoners because you just think oh why they won't want to talk to me and it's like yes they fucking do you're giving them publicity that's what they want yeah so it was always nice whenever anybody

like was was kind in that way i it really fucking helped so you know uh yeah i knew one of reef before they were reef uh. Kenwyn House. He went to my university. My housemate was knocking him off at the time. And he came round one night. We were having a smoke and everything. And he detected my accent. And he said, are you from Nottingham?

And I said, yeah. He says, oh, so am I. I said, what part? Oh, Carlton. Oh, right. You wouldn't happen to know Mad Phil, would you? And he no you don't know my phil d i said yeah yeah i went to college with him he was my mate and he was he was fucking mental um his his main characteristics were he used to come to college dressed up like Oscar Wilde he was obsessed with Rush

the Smiths and Barry Manilow and if you were in town he'd turn around and say if you don't buy me a marathon right now I'm going to start screaming in the middle of the street and you'd just go oh fuck off and he'd just stand there and scream and scream

and scream and he's like. And he's like, right, okay, here's your fucking marathon. And the one thing we really bonded on was his penchant for just sitting with a load of people and just suddenly going... So, yeah, we had a right old chit-chat about mad Phil. And his girlfriend got really pissed off uh with me because you know he was he should be attending to her needs instead of reminiscing so yeah nice bloke

he was and you know when things started to happen for reef he was like oh fucking hell good on you didn't mean i had to like him but it was like oh well done i would rather hear a band fronted by mad phil by the sounds of it um yes mad phil mad Mad Phil nailed on entrant for next week's top 10

I can imagine Mad Phil and the gummy woman doing a Christmas duet actually that would be great because you know some voices just rub you up the wrong way the lead singer of Reef's voice I just find it gross I just want him to clear his fucking throat

but that's gritty authenticity isn't it it's phlegm is what it is he's got a really tiny little jacket on and his shirt's hanging out the bottom and it's like no you're skinny you don't have to do that anymore that long bit of shirt hanging out under a coat or a jumper that's That's a fat lad's thing. You don't need it, mate. But the trouble is, with lad's couture at that time, everyone wearing expensive duds, like Oasis did. The trouble was,

they didn't make them... Like, Craig David's jumper may well have been, I don't know, 20 quid from C&A. It probably wasn't, obviously. But it looked slick. Whereas Re reef could have

worn anything and still made it look scruffy as fuck yeah yeah yeah i think they might have been told to uh you know that that what they look like at this point might be the result of somebody saying can you change it up a bit can you not because they used to be more than that they used to be proper kind of uh you know ravey sort of baggy you know surfy clobber so this is like they're somebody has had a go and they've gone gary why don't you cut your hair yeah yeah i don't know maybe he who knows look his his his master of his own barnet maybe he did it maybe he just wanted to change but you never know do you with with these things rock bands have this thing of kind of like yeah the, the artifice, the cosmetic stuff, that's what pop musicians do.

But I know innumerable tales of bands who've just been cleaned up and have been given a shitload of money by their record company to get new clothes and change their look to fit.

And I think that's exactly what's happening with Reefer. And they look a little bit uncomfortable. He looks a little bit uncomfortable. There's a slight lack of confidence there. I kind of felt for him actually because it's like

he used to sort of, you know, gallivant about in this uh you know this kind of slightly uh you know guerrilla-y kind of way um and and just that is that energy is not there yeah so it's kind of a it's a little bit of a little bit of a yeah there's a lot of going through the motions here isn't there i mean there's a bit where there's some standing up on the bass drum, like Freddie Mercury did in the video for Play the Game. But Freddie Mercury, this is not. No, no, no, no, no. And I believe they named themselves,

obviously the Reef Connection of the Surfing, but I think they named themselves as well because it was an anagram of Free, one of their favourite bands. And you can just see what's gone wrong with Lad Rock here because Free were a silky gorgeous funky band they were amazing and to see it turn

into this lumpiness and like UL I couldn't believe they were still going 2000 I thought they were all over by about 97 or something

like that I think they're still going now though nothing dies anymore the thing splits up It goes away

It just waits for its next chance for a bank raid And it's back So the following week Set the record straight Dropped 23 places To number 42 The follow up superhero Only got to number 55 in December of this year

And they would never trouble the top 40 again, splitting up for the first time after three more flopped singles in 2003. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I set the record straight. I set the record

straight for you. Set the record straight, that's Reef. Named after Han Solo's furry friend, this next guy has taken soul to soul into the new millennium. Featuring Len, it's Wookie! Born in London as Jason Chu, Wookiee began his career as a producer for the singer Wayne Marshall until they fell out over

the publishing for the single Ooh R G-Spot, which got to number 29 in October of 1994. After linking up with the Soul to Soul collective in the mid-90s, he remixed tracks by Destiny's Child, Public Enemy and Nas, and by 1999 he'd become one of the prime movers in the UK garage scene scoring a club hit with a single Scrapper and remixing Sunshine for Gabrielle which got to number nine in October of that year. This collaboration with the vocalist Lane Gray is the follow-up to What's Going On which got to number 45 in June of this year and it's a new entry this week at number 10. Wow. You just listen to this and you just think,

what the fuck has anybody got against Garage? This is fucking skill. Well, quite. And the crowd's response to it shows you this skill. They're loving it and they're dancing and they're singing along to it. And their performance is great. Like most of the Garage people on this episode,

they can do Top of the Pops all right. They can do it brilliantly. Yes, they can, can yeah what you can hear in this is the strange mutations that garage is going through informed by you know look up look higher up the chart as we'll see later in the rundown you've got a leah you've got destiny's child we've had five years of timberland by now you know changing the way that people hear beats and bass and you can hear it percolating into this music so the reason melody maker has a problem with this sort of thing i mean apart from the you know, changing the way that people hear beats and bass. And you can hear it percolating into this music. So the reason Melody Maker has a problem with this sort of thing, I mean, apart from the obvious racial problem it has with it,

is that it's a hybrid music, which is always going to be a bit of a problem. The press don't tend to like it. Because what you can hear here, you know, not to use a music crit phrase, it's the hardcore continuum, as they say. What you can hear here is where Jungle and Bashment and Techno and all of these, the sound of the Pirates, basically, for most of the noughties, for most of the nineties, has ended up here. And overnight, it's kind of gone into the charts.

It's gone from the streets to the charts without the press having a say, really. And they don't like that either. So I found it an endless battle in 98 i was writing about people like mj cole and people like wookiee in the singles column i was allowed to by 2000 i wasn't allowed to i was writing about people like zed bias and and and just brilliant brilliant music um by 2001 the year after this UK Garage is already mutating onwards perhaps into grime it's bitterly

disappointing to me that we never got a chance to cover UK Garage because an awful lot of the writers I know for a fact that several of us writers

love this music and would have loved to have written about it and were dancing to it regularly and we just never got the chance instead we copped this anti-garage stance,

which really is an anti-technological Luddite stance about music. It's a great tune and it's one of the highlights of this episode. I think it's the highlight of the episode. Sarah, was this kind of music doing anything for you at the time? Less at the time. I couldn't really find a way into it at the time i i couldn't i couldn't really find i couldn't really find a way into it at the time uh but as mj cole is coming up later i really really like that track um a lot of the rest of it i kind of couldn't connect to i do remember this i do remember finding this verse

really i mean some things would not hit me in the right way it's like you know sometimes you get something that's really original and sort of startling and you go i don't know about that um and so i i was slightly it's like i said there's a there's a sort of hectic energy about it that kind of doesn't didn't quite sit right with me but you know i listen to it now and go yeah this is really good it's really inventive and it's got a really good energy to it and you know it was like the i know the verse threw me because it's very sort of, so, of, sto, car, to, like, this. And I kind of went, where is that? You know, what's that? You know, there's just, it's like if you play music to a dog and the dog will go, uh?

So like my dog brain was going, uh, what? And then it's like, no, there's, no, this is actually, this is actually good shit. There's, you know, and I feel bad that I kind of didn't appreciate it at the time and that I didn't explore it more. Like I said, because it's, I was saying like, well, not everything has to be for me, but sometimes you don't, I definitely would not pursue stuff because I suppose I didn't have, it's a, it sounds weird, but it's a kind of a confidence thing and I would sort of go okay that isn't for me and it probably

I should sort of leave it alone because I'm gonna if I have to kind of struggle to get into it then there's probably I've missed out on so much stuff through having that kind of timidity about it and not going why not I just barrel on ahead and see you know and i've

sort of sort of bounced off things um but yeah there's um there's like you were saying like it gets the crowd going there's a girl in like a in a satin handkerchief crop top yes giving it loads and i was like yeah that girl and like right in front of the of the dj and singing along as well yeah yeah yeah which is which is quite odd for a song that's only just come out. Yeah, because somehow they've got fans in there. But that's what's thrilling about this. What's thrilling about a lot of the UK Garage stuff that year, I find, is that you see it on top of pops.

And what you see again is always this thing that's thrilling on top of pops. Weird noises exciting people. So it's the strange effects in garage records and we'll see that definitely the mj cole thing later um that are so thrilling about this and and this is this is analogous to something as distant as perhaps you know like the middle bit of this town ain't big enough for the both of us by sparks but it's all gunfire and guitar solos it's a strange sonic moment and to see a crowd of kids getting down to it it's a fantastic thing and i'm feeling the same thing

with with this track and also the mj cole track later um so you know this is precisely the kind of thing that melody makers should have at least been writing about and not denigrating in the way that they did this would have washed over me at the time i just wasn't in a position to hear it i wasn't listening to radio at the time and if i had have heard it it would have been oh uh that's that's oh that's a thing is it but now i listen to it and i just go fucking hell this is mint and i wish i'd have investigated but the whole ethos of garage put me off i mean dance music by the late 90s and, you know, turn of the century, it started getting really exclusive. You know, the Garage clubs were, you know, no trainer, tracksuit or visor.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there was all this super club bollocks that I was just not interested in at all. So, yeah, in a way, it was getting a bit like studio 54, wasn't it? Yeah. It's a clean scene. It's not, there's no dirt in this music.

Do you know what I mean? There's nothing fuzzy about it. It's very clean and pristine. And I understand how that initially could put a lot of people off. But the key thing is, I think is obviously we're hearing on top of the pot when you hear this stuff on big speakers it i don't i don't want to say you had to be there but when you hear it on big speakers in a club it suddenly makes a sense that it perhaps doesn't

make you know when you're just listening at home perhaps yeah there was definitely that thing as with jungle before it i think which was kind of a, not necessarily a backlash against Acid House and Rave, but a pushback where it was like, right, instead of just wearing our pyjamas to go out, we're going to actually dress up. You know, we're going to put on some heels. We're going to get made up. We're going to get our hair did, you know.

So it's that, isn't it? It's like, it's a club thing. It's a bar thing as well. I mean, my bloke was pointing out this is probably um this was this was stuff that was played a lot in it's it's not just clubs it's it's bars yeah yeah it's like where you go and it's when bars because bars start to become more like club environments and this is the kind of you know this is the kind of stuff it's like that's pre-club yeah yeah and he was also saying that like um there's it's kind of it's there's an interesting thing about uk garage which is it's like two genres kind of cut and shut together at one end

there's kind of the sort of coffee table sophisticated end of it and sophisticated in in possibly another sense you know that uh what do i mean you know what i mean that the smooth sound basically yeah and then there's kind of the hard urban edge at the other end and, you know, all sorts in between, which is quite, which is very interesting. And a lot of people kind of didn't know how to make sense of it, you know, including me. So, you know, it was definitely a thing that,

I mean, there was no way I was a scruff bag. There was no way that I couldn't connect to the sort of that getting properly done up thing. I was never that sort of, you know, that that's not, I would not have been let into any of these clubs. You know,

I didn't really know how to do that. You know? No, no. I mean, I mean, Wookiee and Lane, I mean that they like,

like a lot of male garage artists, they look and dress like premier league footballers. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You look at them. If you didn't know who they were and they didn't have microphones in their hands, it says, oh, are they playing for Arsenal at the minute?

Are they French? Or something like that. And, you know, this is an era when saying that someone dressed like a footballer wasn't an insult anymore. You know, it means you could afford decent shit. Yeah, I mean, the split really, I mean, I keep making it racial,

the split really... Well, keep making it racial the split really it is it does have that racial thing to it but the the deeper split i think that melody maker were trying to to address one side of is is that old ancient split between i guess what you call townies and what you'd call everyone else and and this would be this would be seen by so many people as townie music essentially do you know what i mean for those clubs that we don't go to yeah um and i think that that was part of the problem in the perception of the uk garage at the time yeah and as and as time went on you know throughout the decade it would be music would be chavs and indie boys and there'd be no no diversion

from that no you see that is a that is a real shame when you start to get i mean it couldn't you know um obviously acid house could not last it wasn't look it wasn't uh you know the big bang and also it couldn't last forever but how but there is a sadness in that there is something that is lost that was once very briefly regained where everybody went to the thing together yeah and there was no there weren't these you know there weren't these divisions and that was you know uh i don't care what anyone says that was a beautiful thing so when you start to to get this re-stratification and it's like yeah you don't belong in this bit and you don't you know it's not yeah it's fine if that's if

that is your everybody has preferences but when there's this kind of uh there's this kind of different sorts of gatekeeping, it's always a bit of a bummer, isn't it? It could have been thrilling in that, you know, Melody Maker could have put, I know I keep going on about this, but we could have put So Solid on the cover, say, in 2001. Because So Solid were a crew. They could have done all the things that we like our front cover stars to do.

Outrageous quotes, amazing pictures, all the things that we like our front cover stars to do. Outrageous quotes, amazing pictures. All the things that we were supposedly getting from Oasis, we could have genuinely got from So Solid. But we never got the chance to have that confrontation. Rather, what we opted for was this separatism, this kind of going into our own congregation and our own church, and it proved fatal. So the following week, battle dropped nine places to number 19.

Fucking Britain. You deserve Brexit, you cunts. Then it nunched up one place to number 18 and then fell out the charts. The follow-up, get enough, only got to number 80 and the duo would have one more chart

hit when back up to me got to number 80 and the duo would have one more chart hit when Back Up To Me got to number 38 in May of 2001. I'm a little bit disappointed but you shouldn't believe everything you hear. This is my son. I travel from Dublin, you say to change the world. You sing like Sinatra, always. You pull them for miles now, like I don't need a name. You play them for zero Just like a rock and roll Middle Miss, off to the side of the stage by some pillars tells us not to be fooled by the title of the next song

I Can Only Disappoint You by Manson Formed in Chester in 1995 by two photo retouchers who were working for rival companies on the same industrial estate Grey Lantern were discovered by two A&R men who had come to see cast in their rehearsal studio and overheard them in the next room after signing a publishing deal they changed their name to Manson with the same spelling as the mad American bloke and put out their debut single Take It Easy Chicken on their own label Sci-Fi Hi-Fi. It was played by John Peel and without playing one single gig they found themselves the subject of a bidding war eventually signing to Parlophone. After binning off a drummer

who threw a pineapple at guitarist Dominic Chad's face while they were supporting Shed 7. Their new drummer refusing to join unless they promised not to play Britpop shite and Chad getting the group banned from every happy eater in the country. They were forced to change the spelling of their name by the estate of Charles Manson. Their first visit to Chartland happened in December of 1995 when Skin Up Pin Up got to 91, sparking a run of 11 top 40 hits, three of which made the top 10. And this single, the first cut from their third LP, Little Kicks, which is out next week, is the follow-up to Six,

which got to number 16 in February of 1999. And it's a new entry this week at number eight well i must admit before i watched this episode i wouldn't have known manson if they'd have shagged me man to be honest oh did you say 11 top 40 hits yeah 11 i don't oh man really all i remember by manson um is wide open space i think that was probably one of their biggest hits, which was okay-ish. But at least, I mean, at that point when the record labels were looking for the next big white rock guitar band to a certain extent, Manson were at least, they seemed ambitious in their music. Their songwriting was a bit different.

They didn't do that Larry Ladd thing and they wore makeup and they kind of mixed glam and post-punk up a little bit in a way that probably prefigured a lot of noughties bands. I'd never heard this single before but I actually really, really liked it. I liked the

fact that the band don't really seem to quite fit together. The guitarist really just seemed like he's been airlifted in from another band because he's fully 60s psych. He's kind of got that Brian Jones thing going on, whereas the rest of them haven't. And the lead singer, Paul, certainly he's like Morton Harkett or something. He's very poised and very 80s.

And that's mirrored in the sound of it. You've got the guitar kind of doing quite psychedelic stuff but his singing in the actual song itself, it's classic European pop in a sense in the ABBA aha mode. So I need to check the album that this is out from even though it's recommended in Melody Maker's 50 Reasons for the Rock Renaissance because clearly it might be a bit of a corker. I kind of had had i wouldn't say

i've got more i had more important things on my mind at the time but i certainly wasn't looking for another big indie band so um but i was slightly persuaded by the fact that people that i really trust like pricey mainly loved this band so clearly i clearly i need to investigate them them further out of all the guitar music on this show this is head and shoulders you can add me to that um i i liked them very very much i would put them in the kind of they're that sort of side long alley of against brit pop you know sort of cleaning to the side of it but but trying to do something different a bit more inventive a bit more unusual and a bit you know they do have that sort of whiff of of queerness about them you know there's a slightly you know they're not like a a kind of standard macho

laddie sort of sort of outfit and yeah they did some they did some really interesting stuff and um and i i like them a lot you know because they kind of did some willful um uh fucking about with their own sound which is always interesting when when people do that you know with mixed results but you always it's like that's a good thing to do in and of itself is to just you know um i mean i i kind of i sort of put them in the lineage you know it they're kind of there's a bit of suede in there and i sort of put them sort of next to long pigs although i mean long pigs were um who who I loved you know to distraction Mobile Home still one of my favorite albums and occasionally I'll meet someone who goes

that Mobile Home it is like the great lost albums it's like yes yes it is and we'll get excited about it and that was like that was like my fucking comfort teddy bear at this time as well because it came out in 99 and I I just kind of um you know that that was like my safe place to run into was that album. But this album also, yeah, was really great. And this is a, you know, this is a great song. It goes to show how the kind of doctrinaire stance of the melody maker was unfair to everybody. Because much as in the 90s, bands like Super Furries getting pulled into Britpop was disgraceful and kind of didn't really reflect what the super furries were all about now we've got bands like manson pulled into this kind

of rock renaissance thing where clearly they don't quite fit in that and they're doing something completely different there was there was a resistance to the ladification of rock in bands like manson i'd also include things like gene and Geneva and King of Dora and all the others. I was going to say. Yeah, these little people who did glam it up, who did get the makeup on and aimed for something different musically and visually. But because of the stance of the makeup at the time,

they just pulled into all this rock silage when they were a little bit above that. The only thing I can add to this was, if I'd known that this band existed at the time and I certainly didn't I would have immediately been pissed off at them by using the letter U instead of Y-O-U

because it's like well no no no you're not Prince you're not allowed and it was at this time where I think I'd just got a mobile phone and I was already getting fucked off by my friends texting me and sounding like Prince after a brain haemorrhage

and also that spelling of Manson is, I mean, looked at like that, Manson I mean that is a terrible name for a band I always had big problems with bands named after serial killers anyway they could have called themselves the Ukesha Ripper or

Dennis Nilton ultimately rock has to make a decision it is fred wust are these are these killers worth celebrating it's something i confronted marilyn munson about you know because all of his band they were like called twiggy ramirez and they're a combination of models and killers and i just said is this worth celebrating he couldn't really come up with a decent reason why it is I don't think it is excusable granted serial killers

have often been a motif in rock and roll just being a killer has been a motif in rock and roll all the way back to Jerry Lee Lewis but by this time

is Charles Manson a racist boring failed musician yeah leader of a cult that killed innocent people

is that worth celebrating or emulating I don't think so but I'm nitpicking really it's a good song he's a fucking boring hippie as well and a racist cunt as well so yeah I don't know I wouldn't toy with that shit in my band name and I think they could have come up with a better

band name but by then it was probably too late even Manson is better than what they were called before but um i'm nitpicking this is a this is a good song this is a suggestion that there is a way of doing guitar music without fucking being reef um so yeah to be applauded i think in the context of this episode yeah cassabian i'll just fucking less that yes you know, that's the world we live in, Neil. You know, there are people right now listening to podcasts about serial killers. They're getting far more listeners than us. If only a few more fucking serial killers had made pop records,

we'd have a bigger audience. It's not fair. Don't get me wrong. When I was 13, 14, I obsessively read about serial killers. I even had my favourites. In fact, maybe that'll be my next top ten. Top ten serial killers. Ed Kemper's got to be top.

But by the time you're forming a band, I think you can think better. Edmund Kemper. American serial killer. Go on. The reason he was my favourite was just really i mean the details of his crimes were pretty appalling but there was one little detail that always tickled me and that was that he used to decapitate his victims and bury their heads in his back garden with their eyes open looking up at his window so he could successfully have a wank every night

and little details like that just sealed into my teenage memory quite a lot um obviously it's appalling being it's appalling being quote unquote into these horrific things but i think by the time you're 16 17 you should have bloody grown out of it to be honest with you so um yeah that's enough no excuse well i i i get that i get that there's a fascinating i mean i i have quite a a fascination for ghoulish stuff like that. And I've got a really strong stomach. And there is just a kind of pure fascination about it. And it's it, which is bigger than the horror, you know, so I don't get repelled by that. I just go, wow, what makes a, taking that sort of thing, putting it in a different context. But it can be, you've got to be so careful. You've got to have had a good breakfast to be able to get away with that. You've got to be tough and intellectually rigorous about it.

Well, this is it, I mean. Which, of course, most people aren't. Most people are just like, oh, this is a shocking thing. So it is an odd thing. Like Manson are so oddly named because they're quite a sort of serious and sensitive and off-kilter band. And so it's quite, and they, you know, who also have a real knack for a good pop hook, you know.

You know, they're a pop band, basically. And so it is a there is a bit of dissonance there like why i can't really connect this name to this band i'm not really sure what they're doing but ultimately it just becomes it just becomes a you know it just becomes a name doesn't it it's yeah really attached to anything essentially it's superficial and kind of which is fine and probably screenplayed with the same kind of thing, name-dropping Charles Manson, and just trying to sum up that Manson ultimate moment where the 60s turned into the 70s and it went all wrong.

But of course, if you dig any deeper into Manson, you realise that he had extensive racial theories, that the blacks were going to rise up and take over America and we had to fight a race war. That kind of stuff seemingly doesn't get mentioned whenever rock and roll wants to re-pedal charles manson it's it's neatly forgotten about yeah yeah and of course um a year before this episode went out i think it was a year before uh he appeared in court under the name, yeah, they could have sued him.

Before we move on, Neil, I need to know. You know when this bloke was wanking at the window while looking at these heads in his garden? Did he have the window up? No, I need to know. I'm not sure. I don't know about that. That's going to bother me now. I think, well think Considering where he lived

I think it was Wisconsin It would have been quite cold Not that I've thought about it that much But I presume he kept the window shut Wiped his cock on the curtains All done Did he have to actually be able to see it It's an imagination thing

It's the knowledge that they were out there With their eyes open staring up at his bedroom window yeah did he yeah did he have to actually be able to see it or it's an imagination thing yes it's the knowledge that they were out there with their eyes open staring up at his bedroom window thing is also you'd have to time that really well like you know i eyes don't last they're very they're mostly water they don't last very long they would oh god you see do you see i've like it doesn't take much to get sucked into this stuff. And what do you have, a sprinkler system or something to keep the birds away? I think he had a lot on at the time. Yeah. So the following week, I Can Only Disappoint You dropped 17 places to number 25.

The follow-up, Electric Man, only got to number 23 in November of this year, diminishing return setting, and they split up in 2003. But it appears your man Paul Draper, the lead singer, he kind of made a bit of a reappearance of late, didn't he? Yeah, that's...

Yeah, we kind of have to... We should, in the interest of balance, really say this. Yeah, he's been, how you say, showing his arse on Twitter. 3am tweeting is, it only goes one way. So yeah, I mean, basically, long story short, two female journalists discussing basically misogyny in music, terrible men in music being awful. And the Manson... Yeah, in the wake of Ryan Adams.

In the wake of Ryan Adams, with specific reference to Ryan Adams, but in general, just men being terrible. And the Manson Twitter account bade them fuck off. So, you know, and people have kind of read into this as, you know, it's not, there's no good way to spin it really is there that's no no what what's what's he doing um also you know there there are quite a lot of stories of him you know being terrible in one way or another um and you know i i have um you know i have some first-hand accounts of this um so, yeah, I mean, it's difficult, isn't it?

Because, you know, I'm not in... I don't want to sort of mindlessly endorse, you know, so I might row back slightly on my recommendation. But also, I'm not going to ceremonially burn my copy of... my promo copy of Little Kicks. So, you know. Yeah, because it was essentially Caitlin Moran. I haven't got the

tweet in front of me basically saying that she's seen a lot of this sort of thing with ryan adams in other indie bands and uh and the tweet was just fuck off and you know a lot of people piled on to him i mean but personally as someone who knows absolutely fuck all about Manson or the music scene of the time, I could take that as him saying, don't tar me with the same brush. It is a bit of a self-call-out, though. You see this all the time on Twitter and on Facebook, to be honest. It's very sort of not all men.

Excuse me, we're not all like that. It's like, well, if we if if we're not talking if we're going oh god the terribleness of men and then uh you know you you sort of chime in and go well we're not all like that then what you're basically doing you're basically saying that you have you're a bit stung by what has been said about the terribleness of men yeah but also it it tends to look like you're defending yourself against a personal accusation and that reflects badly on you it's like is that you know have you immediately jumped your own defense because you feel a bit guilty about something and a lot of the time this is subconscious and oh god and we're all look everyone is extremely tired by this um the tweet the tweet has now been deleted by way, but obviously it doesn't matter.

There's a million screenshots. It's a weird thing to be discussing, isn't it? Just kind of like a guy said, fuck off at 3 a.m. And who among us has not said fuck off to someone at 3 a.m.? I know I have. But the thing is that when you get this kind of tidal wave of a kind of raising of consciousness and awareness about these things, this kind of tidal wave of a kind of raising of consciousness and awareness about these things. It is quite, there is a sort of scariness about it when you kind of go, oh my God, who,

who's going to be held up for what? And it is, there is a general desire to hold people to account for the bad shit they've done. Obviously there are different levels of that. You can't, you're not going to compare everybody to Jimmy Savile, who was an entire one-man army of horrible stuff that you must not do to people. But that doesn't mean that people should not be pulled up on their shittiness that they have got away with for a long time. And a lot of the time it just gets absorbed because people, mostly women, to be honest, absorb it because that's what we've been taught to do. And, you know, for this sort of nebulous idea

of the greater good, or because you know that you won't be taken seriously, all that kind of thing. And we are getting to this, these kind of very nuanced things now, where it's like, well, does this constitute, you know, have you done a bad? Is it just that you're kind of a dick you know these are the we are getting to this kind of level of like well this would always be this could be excused away for decades it's just like wow

that guy's kind of a dick and it's like is it is it more is it okay to brush that aside should we actually you know look at it a bit more closely? So, I don't know. Like I said, I'm not going to... I don't want to be a fence-sitting, neutral prick. Because, you know... But also, you do have to kind of wait for things to shake out in a certain way. There is some sort of a re-release um happening soon so he can't listen the guy cannot be in a very he's there's got to

be something wrong there if this is the kind of this is what's happening in the run-up to a re-release of your music yeah so um i don't know he seems he seems like he seems like he's got some issues. I hope he gets some help. Right. Oh God, it's all so complicated and so tiring. It is fucking so complicated, man. It's so tiring. Fuck this century.

Yeah, absolutely. Fuck it in all the ways. We've spent the past God knows how many minutes talking about someone saying fuck off on Twitter. Yes. At the end of the day, that's what it is. Yeah, but that's not a thing in isolation. It has a context. Yes, it does.

You know, and therefore, and also we can't just, it is a bit of a shirking of responsibility to just talk about people's music and go, well, what they do in their personal life has nothing to do with me. That's kind of, you um i i feel like we're we're you know you do have to get into people's extracurricular um activities a little bit you know i feel like it's a yeah and i'm sure we'll be doing that in the future and i'm really not

looking forward to that but um it's got to be done sometimes. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, Middle Miss looks painfully embarrassed at the shitty Edmundsian punnage she's about to unleash upon us as she introduces a tune which is storming up the charts and burning up the dance floor it's time to burn by storm formed in frankfurt in 1991 storm were a house jew comprising of rolf elmer and marcus loffel otherwise known as trancy spacer and spacey trancer and were originally and probably best known as jam and spoon after skirting the top 40 twice in 1992 they had their first uk hit in 1994

when right in the night got to number 31 for two weeks in february of that, and then got to number 10 in June of 1996. They spent 1995 recording under the name of Tokyo Ghetto Pussy, having a number 26 hit with everybody on the floor, Pump It, and changed their name to Storm in 1998, when their single Storm got to number 32 in August of that year. This is the follow-up, and after it got to number 77 last month it was re-released on a different label and it's crashed into the charts at number three, the second highest new entry of the week. Now because two German lads on some decks and a keyboard isn't really cutting it visually in the year 2000 they've recruited Luciferifer a former research chemist from dundee who is currently a grotesque

burlesque performer and she's combining both careers in this performance where do we start here chaps the music or the thing i think we can deal with the music pretty quickly yes there was there was loads of this about there were piles of it there were skips of this music yes you're sitting around we've we all have piles of it out back you know there were skips of this music yes you're sitting around we've we all had piles of it out back you know there was just loads of this kind of yes nosebleedy type techno and and yeah and it was there and and like most of the things that we see emerging in 2000 they've never gone away they're still around we've still got piles of it and um yeah as a track fairly indistinguishable from other tracks like that and really only making

sense off your tits in a club yeah i i enjoyed it it's a nice mindless banger is this oh it's just i know that i said i wasn't really you know i i wouldn't necessarily i wouldn't want to go to a night full of this stuff um the drugs have not yet been invented that would enable me to have a good time doing that. However, it's a, you know, it's a nice fun bit of throwaway, um, yeah. Trance really.

Um, and yeah. And as for, um, yeah, as for the, I love that they've got lucifer on there doing fire eating and, and mouthing it's time to burn.

Um, it's cause it's some fucking spectacle and you don't get you know there's a lot of a lot of top of the pops has got away with a lot of performers have got away with not really putting on a show and you know it's um and obviously sometimes they've done some really desperate and weird stuff that hasn't quite worked and this is just so simple and so basic and exciting like if you were in you know you'd think you'd lucked out that night because there's a sexy girl in a sort of pvc co-ord with flames on it and you know juggling fire and spitting it out everywhere and yeah it's

just what's not to like about i mean this kind of music should have been yesterday's thing by the year 2000 but clearly there's enough people who still want this sort of thing in their life. And the weird thing is, even though it's often drug associated, I don't associate this kind of music, I don't actually associate it with being on drugs and dancing to it. What I associate it with is being on drugs and suddenly realising how fucked you are and how high you are and hearing this kind of thing,

and sort of almost waking up and thinking, where the fuck am I? Do you know what I mean? Those moments in a club where you lose yourself. It's a sort of lucid moment. Yeah, and you suddenly spring awake-ish, and you realise, oh my God, this is going to now last for about seven hours.

Where am I? It's that kind of sound. And it's got an element of Lagerhaus to it as well, hasn't it? It's a bit... There is a sort of a puddle. It is kind of standing in a puddle of Lagerhaus. Yes. Yeah.

But I found the performance by the Fire Eater... I mean, it was compelling, don't get me wrong. But I was on the edge of my seat. Because I've seen Fire Eaters on Paul Daniels and stuff and yeah it's very impressive but the repeated long insertion of flames into her gob and then running them up her arms

and stuff, I was just oh my god, that's got to fucking hurt I thought she might have been pushing herself because it was Top of the Pops and maybe taking risks like Top of the Pops, you know, and maybe taking risks. Like Top of the Pops as well. Yeah, it looked like I was fretful for her throughout the performance.

Kept me on edge, definitely. But they know what they're doing, though. I mean, they kind of, they have special stuff that they cope themselves with. And so someone that I might... Yeah, but she's got a tongue stud as well, man. It's like, fucking hell, that must be red hot.

That is hardcore, isn't it? But she looks so calm. I mean, that's the thing. She's a pro. She just looks completely serene. But there is that great shame and deceit. I love it when you get

an element of that because I know we've all kind of seen it. Anyone who's been to a festival has seen that kind of thing. But there's something... You're never going to get over it because it's, you know, holy shit, this is a thing that humans are not really supposed to be able to do. So, you know, it's going to a festival has seen that kind of thing but there's something you're never going to get over it because it's you know holy shit this is a thing that humans are not really supposed

to be able to do so you know it's going to blow your mind every time well round about this time she was getting very well known on the freak show circuit the burgeoning freak show circuit of the late 90s and the turn of the century and uh round about this time, her routine contained blood play and cover your ears, pop craze youngsters, scissor masturbation. Ooh. Not the lesbian variety, but having a bit of a jill off with a pair of scissors. Sadly, we didn't see that on Top of the Pops. That would have been quite the performance. She did suspension as well, didn't she?

Yes, she did. Yes, yes. For the uninitiated, that is where you let somebody stick a certain number of hooks in your skin. And there are various different poses that you can do. But the most basic one is they just bung it all, bung a few of them in your back. And then suspend you from bungee cords. Yeah. It's, it's,

I have seen this in real life. What I've, I've, I saw like a band of, sort of, there were several women who had this kind of, they were sort of sitting down and they had this coming out of their backs. They weren't actually suspended,

although you can, you know, you, you, you have to, you have to do some very complicated maths to figure out how, how much it's going to take for it not to be painful. But again, it's a very shamanistic thing.

And you could just see people kind of going into this altered state. But somebody else was like plucking the instruments. And you could see that they were kind of glassy-eyed. So they'd gone into this different place. And it was really, really amazing. I think I saw her as well. think i saw lucifer or or um or um it might not have been her but the cradle of filth did um yes that's her yeah did this you know they did a kind of outrageous satanic circus type show at the astoria and that was

great i love that sort of thing it was you know i can't get enough of it she also did the metal hammer christmas do one year neil you might have been there no i don't think i was ever at the that was great I love that sort of thing I can't get enough of it she also did the Metal Hammer Christmas do one year Neil you might have been there no I don't think I was ever at the Christmas do's

but I might have been hanging around but I mean yeah the tail end of the 90s this is like nine years after you might remember

the Jim Rose Circus used to perform at Lollapalooza and there was that reconnection of trying to get that 60s vibe in a sense I think, but luckily it was more extreme

because if I go to a gig and I'm seeing some juggler, I'm off but Jim Rose, yeah I remember him having a powerful influence on this kind of thing. Big respect to the floor managers and the camera people because they know when to cut away when she's doing the boring stuff

of rinsing her mouth out and doing all that kind of stuff so yeah it's uh it's it's basically taking your your mind off uh a bog standard techno record yeah yeah especially to the big finish with where she does that water vapor thing where she gets a massive plume of flame coming out yeah that was scary and also takes our mind off the audience who are doing those fucking granny claps another one of my

niche references is that the DJ has got one of them fat lad shirts with all flames on it and that goes with her hot pants and everything but teamed with his uh bald head and his big fatness that makes him look exactly like bam bam big low the wwf wrestler the only thing that was missing that was uh tattoos of flames on his head he would look just

like there we go that's my wrestling reference for this episode out of the way anything else to say about this I was going to say that I'd be worried about the amount of synthetic fabrics in there that could go up but you could say that about any episode since the 70s you know so yes exactly yes exactly so the following week

Time to Burn dropped three places to number six but clung on to the top ten for two more weeks. The follow-up Storm Animal got to number 21 in December of this year and a re-release of Storm got to number 32 again in 2001. Meanwhile Lucifier went on to work in hook suspension, crotch grinding and filling a big glass water tank with her own blood into her act whilst having a side job presenting a gcse chemistry program for schools tv wow and she is actually the reason why we've got this episode uh a good friend paul's uh

girlfriend at the time uh lucify was a mate of her and they recorded it for her so there we go so lucify wherever you are God bless you we salute you care garage around and his album's already been nominated for a mercury music prize twice as nice I want to take a ride On the wild side Just look what he's done for me Baby Middle Miss, sitting in a hole,

tells us that this is one of the finest cuts of UK Garage Around and the artist has already been nominated for a Mercury Prize. It's Sincere by MJ Cole. Born in London in 1973, Matthew Coleman was a classically trained pianist at the Royal College of Music who started his career as a tape operator and sound engineer at the drum and bass label Sour in the mid-90s.

This single, with Elizabeth Troy on vocals, was his debut release in 1998, getting to number 38 in May of that year, but it's been picked up by his new label, Talking Loud, and put out as the follow-up to Crazy Love, which got to number 10 in May of this year, and it's a new entry this week at number 13. A lot of people say that this is the actual best Garry's track ever but I think at this moment in time I'm all Garry's down

and he's just washed over me this one. I know what you mean. It is kind of the standard, isn't it? It is sort of like when people think about it now, I guess that is one of the standout sort of, it's like, you know, whether it's the best or not. I mean, I would say with my limited knowledge of it, I'd say it's, you know, probably one of the,

it is one of the best ones. It certainly is my favourite one, definitely. And, you know, it's got a sort of, there's a kind of hypnotic elegance to it where, you know, and sort of this very pleasant sort of sparseness. And this performance is really, really good. It is. hypnotic elegance to it where you know and a sort of this this very pleasant sort of sparseness and this performance is is really really good it is and and i i love this first time it came out 98 i think it first came out and um reviewed it on the singles page when it came back i was just

really glad to see it get in the charts it's it's all down to this little weird backwards thing that happens just before she starts singing the chorus yeah it's just it's just fucking addictive that you keep waiting for it to come back, because it's such a lovely, lovely moment. And the lyrics are great as well, because in a world drowning in sincerity and authenticity, this is a song about, please don't be sincere. And, you know, in an honest way,

in that some relationships are conducted, I think it's really good. And we're seeing a lot more on this performance, you know in an honest way in in that some relationships are conducted um i think i think it's really good and and we're seeing a lot more on this performance just like all the garage tunes of the kids than we do with any other performance because mj cole isn't fascinating to look at let's face it um as a composer and i'm not saying his his his learning did him well but there's a compositional sense to this which lifts it a bit above quite a lot of Garage Tunes there's the beautiful laced in piano licks

and all of it, it's a beautiful little arrangement the singer's fantastic although I am unsure about the singer in terms of who it is I know you named the name there Al because there's varying accounts of who sung on this I think

so the person well Jane Middleman says it's Elizabeth Troy at the end but she just says it in a really thick

Geordie accent that you have to play about eight times to make absolutely no I think it's somebody else called Nova

Casper who's now back in singing in a Tina Turner covers band well she's a front woman of a Tina Turner covers band but the vocal might be a ride on time thing though it might be it might be but um i i really like this shoe now of all the garage

ones that are on this week i do like this you might be right in that you are all garaged out by this point and it's almost becoming an episode which is totally dominated by that music all night going yeah but but but i kind of like that weird that weird tilting of this episode towards that i'm guessing the next week's episode didn't have that but as a one-off you know like people fondly remember episodes where our bands were on where there were loads of indie bands or there were loads of this type of band this for us for a garage fan looking back this would have been some kind of zenith for garage music the fact that it wasn't just in the clubs and out in the underground it would it made it it made it on top of the pots and it was dominating top of the pots it was most of the

music that you hear this week it's quite funny um in terms of the um in terms of this performance uh they've uh you know the the singer is um who who we believe is Elizabeth Troy is given like the whole stage and there's sort of three blokes to varying in varying degrees of they've kind of hidden them at the back because like it took me half the song to realise like oh look

there's some movement behind it that's a drummer sort of behind a sheet of gauze and then oh and a guitarist look very shy guitar, sort of behind a sheet of gauze. And then, oh, and a guitarist. Look, he's a very shy guitarist, sort of woodland creature, just kind of lurking somewhere in the deep background. Mr Cole is at the side on the keyboard, so you can see him, so he's visible.

But they've quite wisely, you know. Yeah, and here's a big compare-contrast, isn't it? Because, you know, we've had, when the rock bands have been on, there's been a big fetishization of the instruments it's like all close-ups of of uh your brian jones bloke yeah in manson wrestling with his guitar and uh you know jumping up and down on a on a bass drum for reef and everything it's you know it's like oh look at us we we can play these instruments yeah whereas here it's you know the instruments are hidden away. Yeah, I mean, presentationally,

Top of the Pops is caught between two worlds when it presents dance acts because it has an option. I mean, either it can put them on a stage and just have everyone in their normal places, in which case what you get is what you described with the previous track, people clapping, people just doing the granny clap thing.

But I think what starts happening with the garage tracks on this episode is you do get that thing of them being in the middle and people being behind the man in front of them and you get more of a i guess a club related vibe which that is undeveloped they're still mucking around with it but could have become something it could have become something maybe top of the pot rather than continually seeking for this seven o'clock market could have been a different kind of pop show that maybe appeared later and maybe not in the word slot but you know what I mean?

You didn't go out to a club at 7.30 or 7.00 you were more likely to be going out heading out about 10.00ish so I don't know, that could have happened but we never knew. This is a thing that I'm noticing now Ray kind of crediting the singer this sounds like it was a

complicated situation but it does always um i always pick up on it now like yeah you really need to credit the vocalist especially when it's when they basically make the track and when they are you know yes so i think you should always endeavor to you know i know that sometimes legalities and stuff are going to make it make it but it's like being a writer of picture books. Because you can breeze through your life in this very oblivious way and then you will get pulled up on something. And it's like, yeah, credit the illustrator. And it's like, yes, make sure that fucking happens.

Which is what I did with my last book. I said, you know, let's... And the illustrator himself, it like yes make sure that fucking happens because you know so i which is what i did with my last book i said you know let's and the illustrator himself it says it was his first book he wasn't actually going to he would have been he wouldn't have said anything but it's like no you're yeah we we did this together my name and your name go on the cover that's how it works and you know you'd be amazed the number of times where you only hear about the author of a picture book and not the illustrator. So that is a thing. And she really gives it loads. She's really, really good.

And I would like to have heard more from her. She's got amazing hair. She's got amazing plaits. Terrible hat, but it was 2000. Yeah, it's a very Buffalo stance, that hat is, isn't it? It is. Or something the Queen would wear nowadays. It's a giant kind of swanky, asymmetric purple hat, a sort of cartoon fedora, I guess.

But yeah, she really gets the crowd going. She gets them to sing with her at the end, which is, that's a heck of a thing to kind of go in. I mean, it must be very challenging to kind of just do one performance it must be very challenging to kind of just do one performance like that nobody is there for you you're just you know um and to get a crowd going to that extent where they're singing where they're singing along with you or whether she does like a call and response you know um and they all and they're all game and it's like that's

credit to her i think because she's so good most of the focus of the presentation should have been on her later on when we get to the number one we'll see somebody being focused on who transparently doesn't deserve it um this this performer she she does deserve it mj cole's piss boring to look at so i would have just liked the camera to have just followed her around and focused in i want to see those flared nostrils. So the following week, Sincere dropped 13 places to number 26. And the follow-up, Hold On To Me,

got to number 35 in December of this year. And the LP lost out in the Mercury Prize to The Hour Of Bewilderbeast by Badly Drawn Boy. Thank you. Born in Dublin in 1977, Ronan Keating became the youngest member of Boyzone in 1993 when he joined at the age of 16. In 1999, after 15 top 10 hits and 6 number 1's. He was approached by the makers of the film Notting Hill.

To cover the 1988 Keith Whitley song When You Say Nothing At All. And it was released as his debut single. It went straight in at number 1 and stayed there for 2 weeks. This song is going to be the follow upup to Life is a Rollercoaster, which got to number one for a week three weeks ago, and is currently at number four, and it's on the debut LP Ronin, which has gone straight in at number one this week.

And as Top of the Pops has recently reintroduced an album section, we're treated to another performance from the Alan Sherer of pop. What the fuck is this all about, man? We've met Craig David when he's on the way down, and now we've got this twat. Well, firstly, I'm astonished that Love is a Rollercoaster only stayed at number one for one week. We've got a lot of number ones dropping off pretty quickly,

haven't we, revealing probably lower sales. What the fuck is this doing here? This dead, dead spot. I mean, this is the kind of stuff that probably stopped me writing for Uncut magazine because this is very close to Americana, I guess. It's utter fucking shit. It's Americanta.

It's America. Yeah, I'm not going to say that. But it's terrible. It's soanta. It's America. Yeah, it's America. Yeah, I'm not going to say that. But it's terrible. It's so dreary, this big empty thing, where his voice, presumably the selling point that got him a solo career in the rest of Boyzone, kind of got forgotten about to a certain extent. His voice is revealed in this big epic windswept thing

as the tiny crap thing that it is he hasn't got a great voice at all um this is a track and i must admit i know i try and do my duty by chart music by watching every episode start to finish but i've got to admit this track i walked out why would i spend any time no i'm sorry you walked out of your own of your own house no no i walked out of the room i must i went and did something else much more important like i don't know stare at my cat or something this why would i waste my fucking time letting this sap my will to live um absolutely appalling and al you've got a really good point what the fuck is this doing on top of the pops well you know the album section uh was around in of the Pops in the early 70s.

But that was because, you know, it was the only way they could get in a bit of music for the heads. And nowadays, in 2000, it's for the dickheads. Well, just a chance for us all to check exactly how shit the Ronan Keating album is. We knew that already, you know what I mean?

Stop wasting our time Well before Sarah comes in I'm sure Sarah's got quite a bit to say about our Ronan. I've got a recent article from the Daily Mirror from round about this time and it reads like this He's the kind of guy most

teenage girls would be proud to take home to meet their parents the front man of a squeaky clean boy band renowned for their chart-topping ballads. Or rather, he was. Boyzone star Ronan Keating has admitted that he isn't content with his status as British pop's leading teen heartthrob.

Now fans should prepare for a new Ronan with added attitude. Just as Robbie Williams has done since leaving Take That, the young Irishman aims to repackage and relaunch himself as a serious solo singer. And he has given the first hints of a new outspoken image by taking a swipe at modern chart acts and the marketing men behind them. Ronan says, It's easier for bands to be successful than it is when we started.

Record companies know how to market a band, how to do it so a different band is number one every week, and they spend a lot of money making that happen. Nobody stays at the top for more than a week, and it's difficult for anyone to make a lasting impression there's a lot of cheesy pop around and it's affecting bands who should be up there for longer everyone knows who i mean when i say cheesy pop and they know who they are too but but that will change it has to. It can't go on like this.

So, yes, this is a new Ronan, Sarah. Sit down, Ronan. Nobody wants to hear your whining. Either in print or on the top of the pop stage. I don't know what to say about this. I was looking at his trousers as you have to check of the pop stage. I don't know what to say about this. I was looking at his trousers as you have to check out the strides. And I was like,

they boot their boot cut, aren't they? This was the era of the boot cut jean. And I'm sure I've had a couple of pairs of these at some point, but it's like fucking hell, that was a real... Anyway, they're not boot cut jeans after all. They're boot cut leather trousers.

As far as I can tell. Are you sure they're not bootcut jeans after all they're bootcut leather trousers oh as far as i can tell um you sure the leather are not pvc no gives a shit um i mean he shouldn't be wearing you shouldn't be wearing any of any of these things really he's not rock or roll enough to be wearing these i know what i want to know is um like what well no actually there's a very this is just a marketing decision um there are um there are several people who've gone on from boy bands and girl bands to do interesting, groundbreaking stuff, or just slightly weirder, slightly more interesting stuff. And Ronan Keating is not one of those people. He played it 1,000% safe. He knew his audience.

It is a product that is not made for us it's for it's for mums it's for school kids it's for eventual school reunions it's like he knows he knows that this is a thing that is going to you know sell into the it will it will end up in supermarkets in the future and it will it's for humming at the you know it's for humming when you're doing your shopping it's for doing your housework it's very very mundane music and it has a purpose it has a uh it is a particular peg for a particular hole and you know whatever i guess there is a place for it but what's it what it what it's doing on top of the pops i don't really know also what it's doing it's called the way you make me feel why this exists when 18 years later

janelle monae would do a track of this name that is so killer they have now officially retired this song title in perpetuity and retroactively so actually this this shouldn't even be a thing well this is a sandwich between uh that and the way you make me feel by michael jackson well yeah and the way this makes me feel is like I want to fucking ram a knitting needle through my ears because well he is he is trying to be deco out the commitments here isn't it yeah he is he is but I mean that the whole boy's own Westlife axis is there a more worthless um pair of boy bands I mean it's kind of nothing is salvageable from any of their

recording careers apart from that initial first appearance on Gayburn's Late Late Show where they have you seen that

now of course yeah of course where they yeah I mean that's got to go on the CMP playlist

this month because it's always a joy watching that just the sheer lack of talent and shamelessness is just fantastic. My favourite bit is the Ken who

got dropped soon after that in the dungarees, who right at the end does that framing thing that you see movie directors do, but over his genitals. In front of Mrs Doyle and her mates out of Father Ted, essentially. The audience are just old people who just don't want to see that sort of thing.

No, but they're not shocked as such, they're just amused. No, they're just bored shitless, aren't they? This is just a dollop of runoff from the Pebble Mill, isn't it? This. Even though Pebble Mill at one's gone, its spirit lives on. Oh, without a doubt, yeah. Through Ronan. I'm trying to think of a television programme version, Westlife and Boyzone.

I'm only coming up with Fresh Fields and French Fields. You know, the same shit, but with a different name. With a slightly different spin, yeah. I mean, just utterly irredeemable. I mean, even most of the worst boy bands of the 80s and 90s, you can pick at least, I don't know, one song that vaguely got you. But with them, no, sorry. No, there's nothing.

There's nothing. There's nothing of worth at all. Hard Border, that's what we need. Ow! See, if we'd have had Hard Border in the 90s, we wouldn't have had this shit. Ow. And then, while the song

is still going on, this happens. Now, here's this week's official Top of the Pops Top 20. Number 20, Savage Garden, Affirmation. New at 19, it's Reef and Set the Record Straight. At 18, Aaliyah and Try Again. At 17, Samantha Mumba, Gotta Tell You.

16 this week, Darude and Sandstorm. At 15, The Cause and Breathless. Limp Bizkit at 14, Take a Look Around. And at 13, a new entry, MJ Cole and Sincere. At 12, it's Santana and Maria Maria. At number 11, Destiny's Child, Jumpin' Jumpin'. 10's a new entry, Wookie and Battle. At 9, Louise and Two-Faced.

Number 8, straight in for Manson, I Can Only Disappoint You. At number 7, it's Eminem and The Real Slim Shady. 6, it's 5 and Queen and We Will Rock You. At 5, Ronan Keating, Life Is A Roller Coaster. Number 4, Bomb Funk MCs and Freestyler. And the second highest new entry debuts at three for Storm, Time To Burn. At number two, last week's number one, Craig David and Seven Days. And don't miss the first play of the brand new chart every Sunday at four,

only on Radio 1. The fucking chart rundown. The Phantom Goodyear. What the fuck? Because I spent the whole episode going, where the fuck are the charts? You've not mentioned the charts. Where's the chart rundown? Where's the chart rundown? To their credit, they've

slapped it over Ronan, but they could have come in at least two minutes earlier. But he's still like, fuck. That's odd. And that's odd and that's disrespectful to the Chas and why only the top 20 consequently it's over in the blink of an eye and it really seems

not there to tell you what is in the charts necessarily it's really there to prove that they've had all of these people on top of the pops already because instead of the still shots of people you've got just footage from previous performances on top of the pops of the biggest names. And there's some great records in there,

but it's, it's kind of an afterthought that they were uneasily between worlds and that they had to mention the chart, but they really didn't want to and didn't know what to do with it. So it's relegated to this strange part of the show before you actually get to the number one um it it's an odd decision it reveals the kind of transitional state that top pops is in at the time and a state of confusion about what the fuck to do with these chart figures because they seem unsure

what they mean anymore anyway well it's like it's like uh the foot set in relation to the news at 10 you know yeah loads of people aren't fucking interested in it and they wouldn't care but you've got to have the footsie in. The Dow Jones. Yeah, or the fucking Hang Seng. That's what the charts are now. Can I just point out that

there's Limp Bizkit are in there and obviously because they're fucking everywhere at this point. He really is the poster boy for biscuit are in there and obviously because they're fucking everywhere at this point um fred i he really is the the um the poster boy for kind of unwarranted success white male mediocrity all of that shit and and the thing is for somebody who always said kid rock comes along until kid rock comes on it's astonishing that that he was so successful for someone who sounded who and he had this very tough guy kind of trucker fucking um image

when he actually sounded like he was about to burst into tears all the time i don't know why you want to hate me because it's all the world seems to see like it's just yeah the whiniest so a lot of them like i reckon when i met them you know they come out this music about rolling rolling and they're sort of down the street and they're all hardcore they are they were a bunch of spoilt little

they're bitches there's no other word really to call it you'd meet them and like they'd always be in every band right there'd be one nice person

and the rest would be dicks so in Limp Bizkit Wes Borland the guitarist was a lovely chap yeah who was also a good guitarist he was kind of wasted in there

wasn't he yeah he was and with Korn for instance Fieldy the bassist was one of the biggest pricks i ever met um because pretty much as soon as they get signed they start getting spoiled people start doing everything for them so you know then their tiniest whim gets catered for so yeah a lot of them a lot of them had that kind of they were supposedly hardcore but yeah just spoiled rotten little little cunts so the way you make me feel was eventually released in late november with his cover of fairy tale of new york with moya brennan on the b-side you scumbag you maggot you're cheap and you're haggard and it entered the chart at number six before slithering down

like those octopuses you throw at the wall the follow-up loving each day got to number two in april of 2001 and you'd have one more number one in 2002 when if tomorrow never comes got there in may of that month i just remembered i'd forgot I'd wiped that from my memory entirely until you said that and then it just came but loving each day and then my brain just went loving each day is a bit less it was quite it's not fair is it, it's not fair the way these people

can leave these stains in our memory like that yeah bastards that was the chart, that was this week's top of the pops and no surprises as to who's at number one

today Mr Entertainment himself he's doing a roaring trade for Tiger Underpants Mr Robbie

Williams so yeah Middle Miss back amongst the herd We got everybody I got the gift, gonna stick it in the goal It's time to move your body Middle Miss, back amongst the herd Drops some more shitty pants-related puns And introduces Mr. Entertainment himself Robbie Williams with this week's number one Rock DJ Born in Stoke-on-Trent in 1974

Robert Williams joined Take That straight from school and sang lead vocals on Could It Be Magic, I Found Heaven and Everything Changes. By 1995, after Take That had scored six number ones, Williams was becoming a right pain in the arse due to him wanting the band to calm down on the ballads and be a bit more hip-hop whilst chucking his weight about and being a right custard gannet he was asked not to participate in their summer tour which made loads of girls dead upset when it was announced he had left the group and he was sued for 200 grand by his now ex-manager while his old band carried on racking up number ones williams was at a very loose end

as his take that contract stated that no one could release solo material while the band still existed so he spent the next year playing football with oasis doing endless interviews and establishing himself as a regular tabloid fixture and four months after Take That split up in February of 1996, he finally signed with Chrysalis. His debut single, a cover of George Michael's Freedom, went straight in at number two in August of 1998, but no further. And it took six more goes before he finally landed at number one with Millennium in September of 1998. This is the follow-up to She's The One which became his second number one in November of 1999 and it's the lead-off track from the LP Sing When You're Winning which is due for release in a fortnight or so. A heavily edited cut of the video which features

Williams showing off to some models at a futuristic roller disco by getting his kegs off and then ripping off his own flesh and lobbing it at them, was aired on top of the pubs two weeks ago. And it's gone straight in at number one, usurping Craig David. It's a very interesting compare and contrast, isn't it? Because here we've got the two youngest members of two of the biggest boy bands of the 90s. And they've both gone solo and yeah quite a difference and I think the latter is very much benefited from the performance of the former does make him look good because if if Ronan Keating is Alan Shearer then Robbie Williams

is David Beckham isn't it it's that kind comparison. There's also a comparison to be made between the treatment of Robbie and the treatment of Craig David, in a sense. As I've mentioned before, Craig David couldn't handle the snarkiness about his music. What Robbie did always was that snarkiness, it was baked into Robbie's records. You couldn't really take the piss in a sense because he deliberately made his songs really about nothing but his own ambition and his own cheek, his charming cheek,

which I'm sure we were all meant to fall for. I've got to say, I kind of want somebody else to say something positive about him because I loathed Robbie Williams and always have and always will. For me, that key thing that you mentioned Al is that year he spent playing football with Oasis what that taught him was that even if you're apologetic inside because your music's horribly derivative and has nothing new

to it if you've got a self-aggrandizing front if you simply say over and over and over again that you're a rock star and do all the things that a rock star does then you become one and i loathed him for that reason i was sent to review him live um i was sent to review him live because other people were reviewing him live it was a weird little thing that we did it was a page feature actually of him live at wembley which is always a terrible place to see anybody but they sent one person who really liked Robbie they sent one person who hadn't kind of made their mind up and they sent me Taylor but they sent me who absolutely hated him and nothing that I saw um at that show um really changed my view of him as a figure that was totally unappealing to me. He was this applause-hungry jester slash redcoat slash Freddie Star.

And his constant need to let his audience know that he was getting away with it and that they were bolstering that fiction, I just found it nauseating. The trouble is, of course, this is catchy as fuck. Guy Chambers can craft A catchy pop song But it's one of those ones that I actually I won't give myself the pleasure Of singing it or Whistling it or singing along to it

Because I loathe the front man So very much And I'm going to step back now Because I feel that I've loathed too much this episode And I'm sure people have nice things To say But I'm sure sure people have nice things to say but I'm sure people have nice things to say about him, you're right in that he was

a rap fan and he tried to do the rock thing to a certain extent, here he's swinging back actually to a more rappy thing but as a rapper he's as bad as most rockers tend to be at rapping, he's on a level of he's kind of like on a level with Jay from Five I would say i would say opening credits to are you being served actually

well he slips those english phrases in which is always going to play well and always has since the days of captain sensible the stuff about have a proper giggle i'm going to stick it in the gold and all that but um yeah i i just find it unbearable to this day i i really really don't get along with his persona and with that whole thing of yeah you've got in a front you've got to admire the front you know you've got to admire the ambition and the drive and all of that i guess so but i'm not gonna fucking applaud that i i i just think yeah i always resist that kind of thing well i'm i'm quite i have a certain i have a certain fondness for for robbie i must admit um the thing is he's one of those pop

stars for um who who i think absolutely belongs there he is a proper pop star he's got you know amazing charisma and a lot of talent um i enjoy him more as a pop star than as a maker of music, if you see what I mean. Yeah. He's like Pink and Shakira as well, who I think are brilliant and amazing. I don't necessarily want to listen to their music.

I just think they're great. Do you know what I mean? It's like the music isn't quite for me, but they're brilliant pop stars. And I kind of celebrate them on that level. I've seen him once. I think Pricey actually took me as his plus one to see him at the O2, which was pretty fucking wild a few years ago.

You wouldn't believe, well, you probably would believe how expensive the tickets would have been if we'd had to pay for them. It was quite shocking. And it was full of, the O2 was absolutely packed full of proper scrubbers out on a night, all dressed in their best, cackling, running about, necking Prosecco. You know, it was that kind of crowd. And it was, you know, it was lovely. And it's like they bought, this is their one big, this is their biggest night out of the year. And that was who it was for.

So it's a secondhand night, isn't it? Yeah, it was that kind of thing. And, you know, he was was i didn't massively enjoy it because i felt like he was really phoning it in and this is quite a few years ago and he just again it's that kind of tiredness thing and like you said there is the front there's this kind of shiny chrome exterior and not an awful lot going on behind it but there's also there's kind of he's a he's a frustrated kind of crooner you know because he did a lot let's say he did Swing When You're Winning and all this kind of thing and

he was kind of it's not Vegas exactly, but it's kind of Vegas adjacent, you know, it's definitely not end of the pier, it's not Blackpool but it's not quite Vegas either, he's kind of stuck between Blackpool and Vegas I mean he's still only about a third of the pop star that George Michael was, but that's

still a pretty good effort. He is shaking Michael here, isn't he, in this performance? Yeah, I mean, obviously, without George Michael, he really would have been nothing. I have got a playlist, actually, of his stuff that I've made because most of his stuff I actively dislike. I really like a lot of Take That. Most of Robbie's solo stuff I just find really grating,

but there are a few songs of his that i still that i will listen to anytime so you know i've got stuff like let love be your energy i think it's an amazing song um uh she's madonna as well stuff like that he did with the with the pet shop boys you know his stuff that he did with the pet shop boys is brilliant um as to this performance um you know it's and this song it's about this is this is's about, this is probably his worst song. I did not enjoy listening to it. And I didn't especially enjoy watching him perform it. Although, you know, so he does, he kind of in this slightly joyless way,

kind of takes his keks down, flashes his pants, which have a tiger on the crotch and sort of jiggles about a bit. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, keks of pants on there. Let's get this straight, Sarah Kex can be trousers as well, I think Really? I've heard that used in those contests Not where I come from

Sorry, I just needed to make that clear Okay, yeah, no this is a point of confusion, clearly No, where I was from it was Kex could be out of where? Right. Okay. So, under crackers.

So, anyway, we get a flash of the pants, which are quite small. Excellent. This has been trailed right from the beginning, isn't it? This is the reason why we're tuning in, a grown man showing his pants off. I know. It's not a big enough moment to it's trail it so extensively it's it's not even you know but it's kind of char it's kind of charming and amusing and school boyish which he's still getting away with at this point and

to you know you have to credit him he has cracking legs those are those are some thighs on which i should like to gnaw lightly for an hour or two. You sound like Fraser out of Dad's Army there, Sarah. Good, strong face. No, he's got a good body. There's no denying that. Oh, well, yes. He's got a good body. Yeah, dude is fucking hot.

I know that's not much to give somebody credit to. I mean, basically, pop stars of this calibre are professional athletes just without the drug testing, you know. Just as well, eh? Yeah. Well, yes, that's that's kind of the point. He's good looking and he's confident and that's always a winning combination. But but when he starts stripping down and getting down to his grundies, there's... It's so... There's something predictable about it and a bit sad and lamentable about it.

He is that lad who would drop his trousers for attention. This is what he's doing. He'll do anything for attention, yes. And when he wiggles his arse, it's like fucking Dougal doing his Elvis impersonation on that episode of Father Ted. It's like, oh, look at my arse. It is. It's funny, isn't it?

My arse is great. This is what a lot of his songs seem to be about. It's like, let me entertain you. And the video for Rock DJ as well. It is all about stripping himself bare because he'll do anything for his audience. He'll do anything for the show. Yeah, he didn't get his cock out, though, did he?

But it does play into that spirit of national voyeurism that we described earlier when we were talking about big bro um uh so it kind of fits in that's his thing though that is his his entire thing it's quite it's sort of meta thing about performance and and doing anything for i i've the thing is with him is that yes he would sort of do anything for attention, but it's like, he really, really wants your attention, but he is willing to give something in return,

which not everyone who, who goes out to get attention in such a blatant way is willing to do. A lot of it is all taken, no give. And I think he was, you know, I think there's a generosity about him to an extent. Like I said,

I think that pretty much burned off by the time i saw him um but i think it was i think it was there and the thing about this yeah the video which was um quite you know which which was quite a disturbing watch because he ends up he strips off and then he strips off and that doesn't get attention so he starts peeling off his skin doesn't he yeah so you know there's an article that's that's kind of he's trying to at a very sort of low level make a comp he's he's trying to he's you know he's commenting on the state of being a pop star which is you know well no no no his his advisors oh come on it doesn't mean look i don't think he's that bright but it's like people do occasionally like have ideas you know in that way i don't know

whose idea that was but you know i mean the thing about robbie williams is uh the worst thing that could have happened to his career would have been if he was allowed to release records the minute he left Take That. I contend if he'd have done that, he'd have been like Bloody Ronan, you know, a couple of big hits and then gone. But because he had a year where he couldn't record, he had to keep his profile up.

And, you know, luckily for him, we're arriving at the age where, you know, Lady Diana's gone and the papers are absolutely casting round for people to cover endlessly. And he fit the bill perfectly. He did. And lyrically, I mean, the thing is with this song, there's a callousness to it.

And that's what I don't like. There's a line in it. And I know it's just a little line. I shouldn't be overanalyzing popular experience analyzing popular experience been my job for quite a while um but you know if you said if you're selling it it's all right and and that that to me sums up something about robbie that i've always kind of faintly disliked that said you know oasis used to take the piss out of him didn't they and they were that he became a sort of laughingstock to those indie heroes that he wanted to be friends with but really when you think about it you know these bands have often tried to do something dancing something disco-y and failed

miserably primal scream would kill for a song like rock dj because it's catchy as fuck and it and it and it's got a good you know it's got a good groove to it so he he got much better when he reverted to to this kind of stuff i would think more enjoyable but there's that distance that stops me loving it and that's the callousness of his presentation and just the kind of yeah that the the celebration of sheer naked ambition i i shouldn't perhaps have a problem with it, but that's all I got from Robbie. That's the trouble.

That's all I got from him. And consequently, I'm never, ever warmed to him. The song, apparently it was his and Guy Chambers attempt to do a rewrite of Reasons to be Cheerful, part three. Really?

Yes. What? Yes. Him and Ian Jury were knocking about at the time uh yeah jury was uh was uh was an ambassador at unicef and um he was mentoring robbie williams he kind of like signed up for that kind of thing so they they kind of knew each other and uh of course the song heavily samples it's ecstasy when you lay down next to me. And apparently Guy Chambers heard it in a club and nicked it. And when the song got to number one, he slipped a check to the DJ, which was nice.

It was a horrible trait of mine at the time. But my opinion was, oh, you know, if I met anyone who thought Robbie Williams was brilliant, always a female, the instant reaction was, oh, you're only saying that because you want to shug him. A female. Yeah, sorry, a lady. Let's not go there, Sarah. No, let's actually. A female.

But it was like like I had my mates and they'd get and say oh I went to see Robbie Williams it was great it was brilliant oh what was he like then why

why did you like him oh he's an entertainer and that's always what was his performance like then oh it was it was entertaining and it was like

it was hammered this entertain entertain entertain it was like as you know as Joseph Goebbels said if you say

Robbie Williams is an entertainer long enough people believe it entertain entertain it was like as you know as joseph gerbil said if you say robbie williams is an entertainer long enough people believe it were you entertained when you saw him neil i wasn't and i mean i've always been entertained by my own simmering loathing so i was kind of stewing in that nicely but but yeah it was the it i wouldn't say it was desperate. It was more the kind of... It was like watching a child's entertainer or variety performer. Because there was a mix of, yes, these songs, but in between... I'm not saying he told gags. But he was always about putting on quite an impressive pop performance. But then making sure that in between songs,

you would never go away with the impression he was up his own arse or anything he was down to earth and he was one of you you know and he was you know he was just having a laugh like you and kind of getting away with it you know and i've never particularly liked that um but i mean that said i would say that if somebody was asking me about those times, late 90s, to summate those times with some records, I think Robbie would make an appearance. Because that move from, I don't know, from the... Because when you think about it, really,

music fans weren't reading the music press at this point. They were on B3TA and they were reading Pop Bitch maybe. They were on forums talking about pop perhaps. They weren't really reading the music press at this point they were on b3ta and they were leading pop bitch maybe yeah you know they're on forums talking about pop perhaps yeah they weren't really reading the music press so if i wanted to sum up this era i would go for robbie williams songs i mean and an awful lot of people would i don't look back at 2000 think oh yeah who can forget but for those that do i think robbie will make an appearance and this is why Angels and things like that is so oft played at Funerals and things like this you know he never floated my boat

by this time of course you know EMI, Chrysalis have banked everything on Robbie Williams and it's got to the point now where the labels have now worked out what sells in large quantities in a way that they never did before or after and um they go all right and well we don't need to sign loads of bands and artists and hope that you know one or

two percolate through it's like yeah him him he's gonna make it let's just give him loads of money yeah yeah because you know two years from now there's that massive deal he gets. 80 million quid, wasn't it? Yeah. And, you know, Mariah Carey, Virgin signed up Mariah Carey for stupid amounts of money and dropped loads of bands at the same time. Yeah. And, you know, of course you can see why so many people are being to Robbie Williams. But no, he's just B.A. Robertson with tats for me. Sorry.

Oh, and did I see Pepsi and Shirley as backing singers that's what I thought yeah because I was just making the George Michael connection and then I saw Pepsi Pepsi and Shirley I don't think it was actually Pepsi and Shirley really was it?

the blonde woman looks dead like dead like Shirley because round about this time they're doing backing vocals for Jerry Shirley. Because round about this time, they're doing backing vocals for Jerry Halliwell round about this time as well. So they're about. You're talking about George Michael.

And when I think about George and I think about Robbie, George just casts such a shadow on Robbie. And George was so giving, generous with his art. Robbie is so, to me, the complete diametric opposite of that. Not just, well, I mean, yeah, just this blaring arrogance that I never responded well to. I respond well to it, that kind of blur. In fact, actually, I've never responded well to the, you know, the thing that was in that list, that 50 list. Fred Durst sneering arrogance. Arrogance is never a good thing.

I would argue that arrogance is an unjustified confidence. A justified confidence is fine, but arrogance is something else entirely. And I've never responded well to that. But Oasis introduced this idea that if you're mouthy enough, that's enough. No, I'm sorry it isn't. I want to be transported by your art before I decide whether I'm in love with your ego. And Robbie and Oasis never gave me that. So the following week, Rock DJ dropped one place to number two,

knocked off its perch by I Turn To You by Melanie C, and dropped down one further place for the next two weeks. But it would reappear on Top of the Pops in mid-December because Top of the Pops had lost its soul. By which time the LP Sing When You're Winning was released, with its label forcing staff at record stores to sign documents promising that they would not let anybody else see the cover until the day of release, and it went double platinum in its

first week. The follow-up, Kids, a duet with Kylie Minogue, went straight in at number two in October of this year, held off the top spot by Beautiful Day by U2, but he'd have four more number ones. Have you ever fancied working in a fairground? Oh, fuck off, Jeremy Spake. What's on telly afterwards? BBC One follows up with Ground Force with Alan Titchmarsh, Charlie Dimmock and Tommy Walsh trying to recreate the Yorkshire Dales in an Oxfordshire back garden,

followed by a repeat of the episode of Only Fools and Horses where Granddad is replaced by uncle albert after the news it's the police drama badger where a girl is discovered lying unconscious at the scene of a cock fight then michael barrymore auditions for the stage show of saturday night fever in barrymore on broadway and rounds off the night with a Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman film Far and Away and the 1993 terrorist film Jericho Fever. BBC2 has just finished David Attenborough's The Private Life of Plants then a load of unexploded bombs are found on the golf course in Woburn Abbey in the documentary series Country House. After Gardner's World, Terry Venables is the guest on Room 101, where he tries

to get uninformed journalists and working class snobs in. Then it's the Irish comedy series The Fitz, then Kate Thornton and Roy Wood are the guests in Nevermind the Buzzcocks, followed by Newsnight, then Jackpot, a documentary about a Glasgow bingo hall. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a repeat of the drama series Tinseltown about the Glasgow club scene. And they finish off with the 1948 Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart film Key Largo. ITV is Carol Vorderman helping people find a bit of money and find a fortune. Then a cheapo collection of air disaster footage is stitched together in flights from hell then it's a repeat of dennis norton's laughter file tarant on tv the news regional news in your area and a repeat of fits where robbie coltrane investigates the death of a stripper channel four

has just started brookside then it's the next eviction in the first series of Big Brother. Friends, South Park, Frasier, You're a Trash, Big Brother Again, the comedy show Edinburgh Robust, Richard Blackwood's Caribbean Breakdown, probably not a documentary series, a double bill of the film series Erotica with a repeat of I Am a Nymphomaniac and the 1972 French film I Am A Nymphomaniac and the 1972

French film I Am Frigid. Why? So me dears, what are we talking about on the IRC channel tonight or tomorrow? How much I hate Robbie. Maybe the fire eater. Or the garage.

Yeah. I don't know. Yeah, the fiery shenanigans, I would think. That was kind of a standout moment. And what were you downloading on Napster tomorrow? Manson, probably. Yeah, Manson. MJ Cole and Wookiee, probably for me.

And what does this episode tell us about August of 2000? That we are already at now. Yes. Really. Yeah, that's it. We're already at now. We're already now. It's 18 years ago, but yeah, we're now.

You can't see Top of the Pops lasting for much longer can you no it kind of doesn't it doesn't really know what it wants it doesn't know it's quite a slick operation but it's just there's a certain energy that's gone out of it at this point there's a certain kind of I mean you know Jane

Jane Middlemas does a good job but there's a certain kind of, I mean, you know, Jane, Jane Middlemas does, does a good job, but there's a certain, she's, she, she is a little bit, she's a bit, there's a bit of a deadness in behind the eyes,

isn't there? But with the, with the whole, with the whole thing. Could have been the closed show for all, all that matters to her. Yeah. There's music everywhere else.

So it's lost its specialness. Pop world on, on E4 is probably, on Channel 4 is probably a bit sharper. And Buzzcocks, a show I actually despise massively, is also getting a lot of pop people on and kind of taking the focus away from Top of the Pop. So not helped by the move to Friday,

but yeah, it's on its way out. And of course, the other thing that was on its way out in 2000 at the end of the year was poor old Melody Maker. Yep. Take her on the back and shot in the head. Yeah. Sarah, were you there on the last day? I was actually there at that moment, yeah.

It was a bit of a thing. Well, basically, weeks before this happened, so this basically was December 2000 and we had worked all of us very hard on the double Christmas edition with Fred fucking Durst on the cover in a Santa hat

oh great, was it a really tight Santa hat he'd actually wore it over, it had to be an extra large one to fit over his backwards snapback and his massive fucking meat head anyway

in the weeks before that we'd have PRs and various people going is it true is it true Melody Maker's shutting down is it true and Mark Sutherland about a week before had said now funny bodies I know people i know there are rumors uh obviously they're all full of shit it's not true uh don't believe it and so we went okay and kind of looked at each other and so you know i was uh i was naive enough to to believe this and then of course i was uh i was at home and i got a call from uh

one of the freelance photographers who just said like you know it's it's gone it's over i was like what um and he said yeah they've they've they've uh they've closed it i was like what what the fuck so i just immediately got on the tube and went down there and um and you know um i remember distinctly the first the first uh the first thing i saw when i got in was ian watson who was a feature editor at the time um who was who was um i have to admit he was a he was difficult man to work with he always seemed very very stressed and would sort of take it out on other people but was basically a sweet guy who really loved his job and loved music and um loved loved the maker and he was there on his phone and uh turned around and saw me and just and smiled and just looked really heartbroken went

hello sarah and it was like oh my god it was um and you know people were just sort of wandering around in sort of state of shock really and quite shortly after that uh you know there's a very brutal thing that happens i know other people have experienced this when a magazine folds often there's or sometimes just when people are let go as well um they they come in it's very brutal it's very quick and very kind of brisk and this is you know after 70 76 years and it's the same thing there's no ceremony about it's just like guys we're shutting you down um i wasn't there for that bit but apparently you know, after 70, 76 years and it's the same thing. There's no ceremony about it. It's just like, guys, we're shutting you down. I wasn't there for that bit. But apparently, you know, the suits came in like the, you know, like the kind of horsemen of the apocalypse and went, yeah, that's your lot. And then fucked off again.

And then very quickly after that, they shut down the email and then they shut down the phone. So you can't phone out. And then it's like, what is there there to do you go to the fucking pub so a bunch of us the people who were there just sort of traipsed next door to the stanford arms and proceeded to see what you can get pissed well no that's precisely what i did i went back after having had a couple of beers went um you know stumbling back in and uh to see what i could what i could fit under my coat and one of the first thing I got was a was a plant it was there was a peace lily which is a big old peace lily I just had this I had this moment of like oh god I just had this vision of it just dying on the on the windows or unloved

and so I picked up this plant and also I went how much you're gonna get for that at the record and tape experience come on I got other things as well but it was just like who gives a fuck and I was fucking heartbroken and I just went around picking things up and by the way I hope I didn't actually steal anything that belonged specifically to anyone else and wasn't just office detritus and if I did sorry it's probably gone now but

if I've got it you can I've got an Everlast mug I've got an eat it whiteys mug which you can have if you want it and yeah and and then mark sutherland hove interview as i was uh trying i was eyeing up the office stereo like can i get and i was like you know can i have this then he's like what the stereo and you know and he wasn't gonna let me take it and i sort of you know and then he was like yeah all right go on no so he let me have so i went back like the next day but then we went i went back into the pub with the

plant and uh and he was like oh look it's sarah and the plant so that was about that was about my level of function was just like what do you do you steal you steal a plant which i then i looked after uh diligently for a couple years and then killed it by cutting too much of it, by pruning it too hard. So there you go. That's really the kind of symbol of the entire fucking sorry business for me. That's really upsetting to her, Sarah. And, you know, I wasn't there on that last day. Like I said, I came back to an empty office with all the chairs up on the tables and all the computers gone. Yeah. And Zane, who was the listings editor, gave me a final issue. You know, the thing is, Sarah, Mark Sutherland will not have shed a fucking tear

at any point during that process. Ian Watson, who you've mentioned, Ian was a melody maker person and he'd been there a while. I liked Ian, I got you've mentioned. Ian was a melody maker person. He'd been there a while. I liked Ian. I got on with him. But as Sutherland's reign continued, Ian got steadily more stressed.

You've got this thing under Sutherland that freelancers would become staffers and overnight they'd become dicks because they were then operating to Sutherland's guidance and they were just stressed and run ragged by his idiocy he would not have shed a tear the various other enemy bods who came up to save us quote unquote would not have shed a single tear but I don't think there was anyone who worked for Melody Maker who didn't genuinely cry that night and and and the reason is is because

yeah the obvious reason you lost something that was the journalistically the love of your life and and even in the worst moments i remember ben myers telling me something ben myers that sarah you mentioned yeah that you got in touch with ben earlier he's a goodie ben ben myers never forgets for some reason something i said to him um towards the tail end and we were we were just having a general normal fag room whinge about everything and um I said to him but but Ben it's the best job in the world and you know we still believe that we still believe that something was salvageable here and that it wasn't all disastrous and and that Melody Maker still meant something

it was still something we all deeply deeply cared for because this was a magazine that changed our lives and i don't mean just changed our lives because we got jobs there it changed our lives as readers and as writers in all kinds of ways even before we started working there so yeah it was a it was a heartbreaking heartbreaking time for everyone involved who cared those in in charge, unfortunately, didn't. Yeah, I still, I lament actually that we were, you know, because Mark came into the pub as well. And I shook his hand because it seemed like the thing to do. And I kind of, and so, I don't know, I kind of,

and then I even at the time, I sort of thought, why did I do that? But I guess it is the noble thing, I guess. But it was just like, what the fuck do you do in this situation? And, you know, he also had lost his job. I didn't really give a fuck about that. But, you know, we had all, there was, it was a great loss in so many ways. And we couldn't get our heads around it, really. And immediately kind of after that, Ben Knowles, who was the youngest ever editor of NME, I believe,

possibly there's been somebody younger since, but he was a good pal of mine at the Maker and I had kind of a homeless, I had some stuff that I'd written for January and he sort of immediately said, we'll run it, come down to the enemy, which I did. And that was not, I felt like that was good. There was some kind of continuation, but it was just really, it was very, it was very weird.

I didn't feel quite, you don't want to be too tribal about it, but it wasn't, there was a tribal thing. And it was a different way of working, different way of being, different way of writing, different way of editing. And in a lot of ways, probably better better it wasn't as dysfunctional as the maker at in its in its last days but i couldn't quite get on with it and then i got asked to sign some um there was one of those kind of contracts that went around that everyone just went what you know and we that where you signed away all of your things like every note you'd written on every scrap of paper kind of deal and i sort of drifted away from it because I went, Oh God, I don't want to sign that. And I just don't feel right about any of this at all. So, and then I ended up doing some internet stuff,

you know, and, but that was really, it was kind of such a false start. And it was, like I said, it was, it's the feeling of turning up. You're finally at the show, you finally made it to the party and it's, and it's already over. And what do you do? I'd kind of thought that I, I had some notion that maybe I had seen other people. There was this career trajectory where you would sort of, you'd cut your teeth in the music press and then you kind of move on and maybe, you know, you'd, you'd maybe get into the broadsheets or whatever, which obviously the only ever going to be a few people who manage that. And I didn't for various reasons. But one of the losses that I experienced was this loss of momentum,

of just like, what now? What now? Where do I go? Well, I mean, the thing is, it was traumatising like any bereavement, really. And the odd thing is, a lot of us were knocked back by it to the point where we didn't immediately pick ourselves up and and get going i was certainly freelancing don't get me wrong but i'll never forget sort of four or five years later after the melody maker had shut um karang wanted me to come over for metal hammer and stop writing for metal hammer so i went to meet the editor of karang and he came down the stairs at EMAP, where they were based,

and strolls up to me in the foyer. And I'm looking at him, I'm thinking, I've seen you somewhere before. My memory's always shot to buggery, so I couldn't remember who he was. We do the interview. He says,

we'd love to offer you some work, Neil. And then he goes, do you remember me? And I was like, I think I've seen you before, but I can't quite recall. And he was like, I was the intern I think I've seen you before but I can't quite recall and he was like I was the um the intern at Melody Maker I used to bring you tea and I used to bring you your faxes when you're in the office and he was you know he in that five years since Melody Maker had gone

had become editor of Kerrang and I was still floundering around writing for specialist magazines. So it knocked a lot of us back. But I'm never going to get a tattoo. But if I did, it would be a Melody Maker tattoo. I fucking love that magazine. Yeah, we all did. All things must come to an end right i don't feel cleansed

sarah i still feel upset oh no you know what you know what i mean you know what i mean i know i know i know i know oh i know well yeah it's it's hard you know this is always going to be it's it's something that only if only like a there's kind of a privilege in it in a way it's only a few few of us who understand what this feels like because it is it's bigger than you and it's this kind of shared specific uh kind of kind of trauma really it's just yeah oh it's a bummer but it's really nice to it's good to talk about i mean i hopefully this will you know hopefully other people will kind of enjoy it if that's the word i don't know i still got the stereo i've still got the stereo, by the way. Like I said, the plant died a long time ago.

Still got the fucking stereo, so fuck off. And on that note, we say goodbye to this episode of Chart Music. All that remains is the usual promotional flange. Our website is www.chart-music.co.uk. You can reach us on facebook.com Slash chart music Or you can get with us on twitter Chart music TOTP

And of course Money down the g-string Patreon.com Slash chart music Thank you very much Neil Kulkarni Cheers Al God bless you Sarah B Thanks love

My name is Al Needham And I am all over your... Chart music. The American Pronunciation Guide Presents ''How to Pronounce Thursdays'' Something's happened to Thursdays. Thursdays will never be the same. Thursdays will never be the same. Thursdays have changed. The melody maker's changed. There is life on Thursday.