Chart Music: the Top Of The Pops Podcast - #38: April 29th 1971 - Everybody's Got The Clap

Episode Date: March 20, 2019

The latest episode of the podcast which asks: Rod Stewart - a grower or a shower? This episode, Pop-Crazed Youngsters, involves one of the grimmer aspects of Top Of The Pops, as it comes in the wake of one of the regular audience members comitting suicide, the subsequent tabloid coverage when it was revealed that she'd left a diary behind, and the fallout from it - which continued right the way up to this decade. And it's something we can't not talk about. Musicwise, it's a glorious mish-mash of fare from '71, the International Year of the Banjo. The beardiness is ramped up by McGuinness Flint. A man pretending to be R. Dean Taylor runs about in a quarry. Jonathan King lurks about. Pans People get busy to the Jackson 5, before showing up Lulu. The Mixtures give us an opportunity to have a good laugh at automobile fatalities. Ringo requires some Norwegian wood to stop his piano sinking into the snow. The Faces get the chance to plug their LP for eight whole minutes, but Dave and Ansil Collins steam in to drop one of the best Number Ones ever.  Simon Price and Taylor Parkes - the gentle people of Chart Music - get really mellow with Al Needham, breaking off to reason on such subjects as how to make it look as if you've been sweating at junior school end-of-term discos, Leaving Neverland, hot pants, and performative farting. As always, swearing.  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? Um... Chart music. Chart music. Hey up you pop-crazy youngsters and welcome to the latest episode of Chart Music, the podcast that gets its hands right down the bottom of the sofa on an episode of Top of the Pops. I'm your host, Al Needham, and I'm joined this time by Taylor Parks. Hello.

And Simon Price. Hello. Oh, the P squad is all up in that arse pop craze youngsters boys come and sit next to me and simply tell me all the pop and interesting things that have been going on since last we met

I'm going to take this opportunity to plug a couple of things if you don't mind a couple of hosting and chairing gigs I've got coming up one in London one in Brighton on Tuesday 25th March I'm hosting a Q&A with the writer and DJ a couple of hosting and chairing gigs I've got coming up. One in London one in Brighton. On Tuesday 25th of March I'm hosting a Q&A with the writer and DJ Dave Haslam

and the photographer Kevin Cummins and that's at Jackson's Lane Community Centre in Highgate, a place I think Taylor will know pretty well and that's going to be very Manchester centric plenty about Hacienda, Joy Division Smiths etc but also Punk and the Manix and loads more.

And then in Brighton, Wednesday 29th of May, as part of the Auditorium Series at the Brighton Fringe, I'm hosting a panel which is called The Gothic in Music, starring Rose McDowell from Strawberry Switchblade, Johnny Slut from Specimen, John Klein from The Banshees, and the Batcave founder, Hugh Jones. So do come along and shout bummer dog at me at either of those.

Rose at Strawberry Switchblade was my first proper pop crush. Yeah, you and me both, man. Yeah, yeah. Tell her. It'll give her a little thrill, I think, to know. Yeah, I bet she'd love that, Ted. Yeah.

Yeah, I... What have you been up to, Taylor? Come on, tell. Yeah. Yeah, I... What have you been up to, Taylor? Come on, tell us all. You know how we always say, you know, thank God for the NHS and the welfare state. I've been saying that a lot recently because that's been my life the last month or so. Good.

Yeah, not really. Well, no, but good that we managed to round it up in an easily editable way now then pop craze youngsters we can't take another step before the latest episode of the dissection before we drop to our knees and give thanks to the latest batch of

lovely lovely pop craze youngsters who have filled the gussets of our g-strings with the old Teresa Bazaar and David Van Day. So let us give a shout out to the new additions to Simon Bates' High Flying Cats who are listening to this a whole day before everyone else. Those people are Tim Kayser, Effie on Bedford, Mark Savage, Justina Heslop, Alan McGregor, James Wharton, Jack Kavanagh-Homan, OPEC Dreams, A massive contribution from Rupert Gilbert, thank you very much sir, Dr Beat, Paul

Whitelaw, John O'Donnell, John Cooper, Tom Brown, Patrick McNally, Russell Cope and Donnie Morrison. Oh, your names are all down, you're coming in. Thank you so much. Legends, a lot of you.

Yes, yes. And let us not forget the brand new Popcraze $3 patrons. They are Chris O'Clair, Christopher, Paul Sims, Christopher Caruso, Peter White, and Bruce Monroe. Bless you, governor. I wonder if it's the real Tom Brown. You know, he used to do the either him or

the one who did the top 40 rundown who had the really nice smoky posh voice used to do the perfume voiceovers as well in the 70s on the adverts which ones? don't ask me off the top of my head man sorry

now here's something all them pop Don't ask me off the top of my head, man. Oh, sorry. Tweed by Lothar Rick, I'm guessing. Now, here's something all them pop craze youngsters who are hip to the chart music jive already know about that the general population doesn't. We're doing another bonus podcast, a Q&A with Sarah B and Neil Kulkarni, where they end concealing, try revealing, and open their hearts to you the pop

crazed youngsters the pop crazed youngsters have been submitting questions and you know there's still space for one or two more questions so if you fancy listening to that and you know taking part in it www.patreon.com slash chart music. Give us some money, come on. You know you want to. I'm still reeling from that last episode that Neil and Sarah did. It was extraordinary when they just sort of just poured it all out

on what happened to Melody Maker in the dying days. I wasn't there by that point, you know. Taylor was there a bit longer than me, but I think you bailed out as well, hadn't you, by the very end? Well, I was going to say, since this Top of the P pops we're about to talk about went out when I was not even a zygote and

you two were preschoolers and everyone seemed to love the personal touch of the last episode do you want us to talk about how Mark Sutherland was a cunt first because we could I think I've had my say previously when I was on with Neil about a sort of slightly earlier era, but I just thought the way they dealt with it, it was righteous and also slightly heartbreaking. More than slightly heartbreaking really, but I just thought they did it

brilliantly. And of course all those pop-crazy youngsters have been voting on the new Chart Music Top Ten. Hit the fucking music! No movement at number 10 for Taylor Parks' romantic moments. Down four places from number 5 to number 9. Here comes Jizzum.

Up one place to number 8. It's Gamony Sludge. Down three places to number seven, Bummer Dog. Creeping up one place to number six, it's Your Dog Mates. Top five and this week's highest new entry, Mad Phil and the Gummy Woman. Last week's number six, this week's number 4, Fred Westlife. Into the top 3 and no change for Klitz Richard. No change at number 2, it's still Bergerac meets Rockers Uptown which means... It's still there, the chart music number 1, the Doolies with Ghoulies

a very static chart this week it's like the first couple of weeks in January isn't it, that chart but I'm pleased to see some of the classics hanging on in there oh yeah, timeless Bummer Dog is probably always going to be my personal favourite but I feel

a strong connection with Here Comes Jism because I was responsible for spotting that and also of course Gummy Woman so yeah yeah Madfella the Gummy Woman well you know you can imagine the romantic moments they're having

I bet yeah what was it decided that Gamony Sludge sound like well Gamony Sludge basically I think it was originally a description of Kasabian. They sound exactly like Kasabian. Yeah, bummer dog and here comes

Jizma, like the dark side of the moon and brothers in arms of this show. I'm very fond of your dark mates as well. Yeah, because I dredged up the offending letter from Melody Maker

back in the day so this episode Pop Craze Youngsters takes us all the way back to April the 29th 1971 making it the second earliest episode of the topmost of the popmost we've ever done.

So, first question to you, Simon. When we say the music of 1971, what immediately springs to your keen Welsh mind? I suppose T-Rex, because even though I was too young to be listening to music at that time, I went through a massive, massive phase of, you know, being obsessed with Mark Bolan in my teens. And, yeah, T-Rex for me. Good skills. Taylor? Are we talking about the 60s here?

Oh, here we go. Oh, yes. See, I don't know if we are, right? Because it is a definite real thing, the 60s. But unlike the 80s or the 90s or even the 60s, it was over and done with really quickly. I think the 60s began basically on that miserable day at the start of 1969 when the Beatles turned up to start shooting Let It Be.

Yes. And I think it ended when T-Rex were on Top of the Pops with Hot Love. It's a really short amount of time. The changeover was very fast because it was so natural, right? From the 60s to the 70s, it just involved hair getting longer, lapels getting wider, is it just involved hair getting longer lapels getting wider um drug taking going from a you know a lively novelty to a daily grind uh the collapse of hope into nihilism and you know idealism into cynicism but it was a natural progression it just happened it was a continuation so by the time pink floral shirts are on the high street you know and terry scott has got massive sideburns it's all happened it's over right

but it is a thing there's a first series of monty python you know very early color television john pertwee's first series of doctor who yeah and apple records and bob and Bobby Moore getting arrested for nicking a bracelet in Columbia. But it's really just 1969 and 1970 because you've got that 70s looseness and drab flamboyance has already come in but there's

still that residual smartness from the 60s like nice suits and stuff which would soon swell up and collapse in on itself. But I think any time after, what is it, March 1971, when Hot Love had been on Top of the Pops, it's culturally the 70s. So what we've got here is the very beginning of the proper 70s.

The beards are grown and the trousers are frayed around the hem and everyone's ready. Yeah, it's the dawning of the age of whatever came after the age of Aquarius then, isn't it? The age of Brentford Nylons. I mean, me, you and Neil Taylor, we had a proper dig at an episode from 1970 a while back. You know, Has anything changed

between that episode and this one apart from this one being in colour? Yeah, I think it's just that the last specs of the 60s have been blown away. You know. There's acts on this

Top of the Pops that it's inconceivable that they would have been around a year earlier. I'm just looking through the LP releases of this month, and we've got the Donny Hathaway debut OP, given it back by the Isley Brothers, which is fucking brilliant. Where I'm Coming From, Stevie Wonder, L.A. Woman coming from, Stevie Wonder, LA Woman by The Doors, and of course, Sticky Fingers came out about four days ago.

Yeah. If you've got a record token around about this time of year, you'd be well chuffed, wouldn't you? If you get hold of one of the Sticky Fingers with a zip up the front, yeah. Amazing. Yeah, it'd be amazing. So, in the news this week. John Lennon and Yoko Ono have been arrested in Mallorca over the alleged kidnapping of Ono's seven-year-old daughter. The sex education film Growing Up has been banned in the UK

as it features a masturbating teacher from Birmingham who has now been suspended. The Queen's been badly, but managed to get out of the house to look at some horses. The young liberals are about to organise a huge burn-up of census papers in Trafalgar Square at the weekend in a protest over over-personal questions. They were such weirdos, the young liberals.

Yes. There's a whole book to be written about them. Very strange people. Not what you would expect at all. Not these mild-mannered young guys in corduroys. No. They were a bunch of nuts at this point. The US Army admit that over 30,000 soldiers in Vietnam

are smackheads. 15 million people watch an episode of This Week on ITV as it's a documentary about VD, complete with close-ups of willies and fannies, some of whom are quite diseased.

Which is nice. You take what you can get. Yeah, yeah. Just as well most people have got black and white tellies, eh? Liverpool FC have turned down a request from George Harrison and Ringo Starr, who wanted a dozen free FA Cup final tickets. I should think so too.

Yeah. Oh, they decided to come from Liverpool again, did they? Fuck off. A belly dancer from Istanbul has promised three nights of Turkish delight for any home player who scores against West Germany in next week's European Championship qualifier. They lose 3-0. Jeremy Spencer has legged it out of Fleetwood Mac

halfway through their American tour and eventually turns up a few days later in the religious cult The Children of God Princess Anne tells Valerie Singleton on Blue Peter that she doesn't wear hot pants but the big news this week is that David Bowie

a one hit wonder who had a cash in hit about space travel two years ago has popped up in the Daily Mirror wearing a dress. Some people will just do anything for publicity. Yeah, what happened to him? On the cover of The Enemy this week, Ringo Starr. On the cover of TV Times, Wendy Craig

in the first episode of And Mother Makes Three. The number one LP is Machine Head by Deep Purple. Over in America, the number one singlep is machine head by deep purple over in america the number one single is joy to the world by three dog night and the number one lp is pearl by janice joplin so me boys what were we doing in april 1971 what were our parents doing more like um tiny red spiders um the size of a pinhead all moving around on a concrete garden wall um that's the first thing that comes to mind when i try and take myself back there um i've late i've later found out that they're called clover mites and they're arachnids less than a millimeter long um completely harmless yeah but i used to stare at them for ages

and i was three years old so these are kind of this is right on the horizon of what I can and can't remember so these are my first memories of being alive really so they're episodic and impressionistic kind of jumbled snapshots a bit like a flashback sequence in Life on Mars or Ashes to Ashes or something like that. My mum and dad were still together at this point in contrast to all the divorce trauma of some of the episodes we've done living in a very cool little maisonette which would then have been brand new I guess

perfect for a hip young couple they'd previously been living in a flat above a chip shop when I think about it they were still just kids really, my dad had just turned 26, my mum would have been 23 um the place was quite sparse and minimal i remember no carpets no wallpaper um just painted

walls and a couple of rugs on the floor um i remember a big clay amphora that my dad had made and um a child's wicker basket chair that was mine i've still got that chair oh nice and then these odd little things just odd little flashes uh i remember posing with a football for a photo squatted down with one finger on the ball because that's what i'd seen players doing on bubblegum cards right i remember going to the steam locomotive graveyard at barry island and climbing over the rusty engines wearing a very fetching bright yellow suesta and oil skin coat um there are photos of this somewhere um i remember and this is really zooming in i i remember seeing a plug in the wall on which my dad had stuck a strip

of dymo lettering that said amp i asked him what i asked him what amp meant but i didn't understand the answer because I was three. I remember seeing men in sports kits huddled in a circle on the TV and asking my dad, is that the World Cup? And he said, no, it's the rugby. And I remember once refusing to eat my breakfast my mum had made for me and then being scared shitless when a disembodied voice came booming out going um I am the ghost of the empty tummy eat your food and obey your mummy and I wolfed

down the food in record time in silence and it was my dad who had heard what was going on from upstairs and bellowed into the air conditioning vent so that it echoed into the kitchen. I've got to say, that is top class. But do I really remember that? Or do I just remember that story from the retelling so many times? I don't know. I wasn't even old enough for school yet, obviously, but I was an early reader and early writer because my mum was like that.

She taught me. But I do remember I was going to nursery school, right, in a church hall that was later used for the line dancing scene in gavin and stacy um and i've got two main memories of that one of them is a teacher showing us how sellotape worked um by breaking a baguette a french stick in half and then taping it back together which you know in in hindsight was a bit irresponsible and weird and um i also remember one of my mates there having his head flushed down the toilet by bullies. I mean, bullies at nursery school,

but that was life for a three-year-old on the mean streets of Barry. So there you go. Meanwhile, on the West Bromwich-Tipton borders, a young teenage boy is about to make his teenage girlfriend pregnant again. To which her father will say, we kept the first one, but we're not keeping this one.

And what could possibly go wrong in that young lad's life? So, yeah, I'm not here. I'm not even a twinkle. Man. Well, I mean, my first memory was staying up late, eating fish and chips and watching Budger, which had just started this month on ITV. But I'm sure it wasn't that early.

But my mum and dad had just moved to No. 7 Plimsoll Street in Ice and Green, which was at the top of a very steep hill, but still had cobblestones. And it was across the road from a chip shop called Moby Dick and a pub called The Old General, which was named after a Victorian mentalist who'd get kids to lob stones at the local schools and then he'd go round and demand protection money off the headmasters. That's, you know, if you do that kind of thing in Nottingham,

you get lion eyes. And there was an actual statue of him in the top floor window, right in the middle, in Victorian costume. And every Christmas, they'd put a Santa costume on him. Beautiful. I mean, my dad was working for, I think he was working for the co-op as a removal man. And my mum was stuck at home with me and my baby sister, who was, oh, she would have been a year and a bit.

And I immediately took a dislike to her because, you know, that's how it goes. I was two days off my third birthday. And yeah, like you, Simon, I could already read. Whenever we were out my mum would shove a copy of the Daily Mirror in me hands go watch him he can read that and yeah I did. To the amazement of all I should have set myself up as a circus act.

The amazing reading boy. Yes. The amazing reading boy of Nottingham. Oh music wise I think I had a roly-poly that made sort of jingly noises. That was my favourite sound at the time. Oh, I had a seven-inch single of The Jungle Book, which...

Ooh! Yeah, and on one side it had the story, and the sleeve was a book, and there was like a ding-a-ling telling you when to turn the page, but on the B side was The Bare Necessities and I Want To Be Like You which I fucking rinsed I loved that record, still got it in fact The original?

No, I've still got What? No, I'm talking about the Disney version, I've got that from when I was a kid, still got it Authentic right from the off, eh, Simon? Yeah. So what else was on telly today? Well, BBC One has started at 9.38am with schools programmes

and then shut down for an hour and 45 minutes before returning with, help me, Simon, Disgubble Yiddwith? I'm going to have to look up the spelling of that.'m gonna d-i-s-g-y-b-l well for a start the y sound is uh so it's dusker something dusker bull y-d-w-y-f uh edward um it's yeah i don't know i i don't know what it means but um i'm gonna google translate you saying i pupil is it yeah i going to give you... Google Translate is saying iPupil. Is it? Yeah.

I'm going to give you six out of ten for the pronunciation effort. Not bad at all. Good skills. Let me just wipe the spittle off my screen before continuing. Chigley. The News then shuts down again for 12 minutes before more schools programs. Then it's Play School, Jackanore, Blue Peter, possibly with or without Princess Anne talking about hot pants,

the French adventure serial Desert Crusader and Hector's House before the news and nationwide. They've just finished an episode of the drama series The Doctors. BBC 2 begins at 11am with Play School and then shuts down for 7 hours and 15 minutes before coming back at 25 to 7 with Computers in Business. They've had a 5 minute interval, what no Tom and Jerry or anything, and are just getting stuck into a maths programme in Open University. ITV waits until 1.30pm before the start transmission with racing from Newmarket followed by a growing flame origami some housewifey blathering tea break

and a repeat of Peyton Place then it's Gulliver Magpie with Susan Stranks and Tony Bastable the news, regional news in your area Crossroads and they've just started the 1957 Stanley Baker film

Hell Drivers about lorry drivers who move gravel about which also features Sid James, Herbert Lomb David McCallum, Patrick McGowan, William Hartnell Gordon Jackson and Sean Connery, fucking hell it's the wild geese of lorry driving

yeah it's a great film that of lorry driving isn't it that's a great film that's a real man's film alright then pop craze youngsters it's time to go way back to April of 1971 always be aware

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. It's five past seven on Thursday, April 29th, 1971, and we are immediately assailed by stop-motion images of a woman's eye and mouth, punctuated by green sound waves and eventually spilling into a montage of some of tonight's acts while the top of the pop's orchestra

pile into a whole lot of love by Led Zeppelin. Bit of a boring opening montage, isn't it, Taylor, compared to the thrills and spills we've had before. Yeah it's just spoilers. Doesn't that kind of blow the liveness of the show. Isn't it saying right up front. All this has already been recorded. Good point.

And I agree with you on the spoilers part. But boring. I disagree. I've got to say. I would say. you know you were talking about the the six fifties being over already at this point i don't agree with that either just purely based on these credits because the thing with these open opening credits is it's a trip because that that psychedelic aesthetic is still in full effect because

yeah you've got the close-up of a lipstick mouth but you've got that kind of garishly colored lens flare going on you've got distorted faces in the sort of pink and green monochrome and and and you've got the letters at the top of the pops logo melting in and out of focus and yeah that's all cut together with those tiny snippets of the performances to come but it's trippy i would say there's no other word yeah it's just the bbc a couple of years out of date as usual i mean because of the 1971 they had you know american bombers and everything didn't they yeah and an egg pinball yeah and an egg and pinball not pinball with an egg though because that wouldn't last very long would it no but i mean these are these are pop art images aren't they so they were slightly out of date then as well.

Now they've just upgraded to sort of an LSD influence title sequence just too late. Yeah, but I take that as just another example of the thing that we've observed so many times of a decade not really happening until slightly into the next decade for most people. You know, the 60s happened in London sure. But for most people watching Top of the Pops around the country. This would have seemed bang up to date to them. And often if you look at the way people dress in the Top of the Pops audience. Around this time.

It just looks very 60s. I think. And we do have the second best Top of the Pops logo as well. The Mexico 70 font. It's cool. I do like it. Yeah, you can't fuck with that font. So, eventually we're greeted by the sight of this week's host

clad in a lemon suit jacket with big pointy lapels and a caramel paisley shirt, surrounded by a cluster of the kids, some of whom are wearing Rag Week t-shirts. It's none other than Tony Blackburn.

Good old Tony, eh? Yeah, good old Tony, but the first, the very first thing we see him do, wearing his lemon yellow suit, is pointing at the crotch of a girl. Already, that's a worrying start, isn't it? It is, yes. It is, and it's not been a

good couple of months for tony has it after an abdominal operation that developed complications in february tony blackburn ignored medical advice and returned to his breakfast slot in early march due to his complications he was told to cancel his forthcoming three-week holiday to Tenerife in March and spend time under medical supervision, with his chair being taken over by Dave Lee Travis and then Dave Eager, a DJ from BBC Radio Manchester, who is now best known as being Jimmy Savile's minion, who appeared at his funeral wearing a sweatshirt

with Jimmy's Eager helper printed on the front. Then, in the first week of this month the News of the World ran a front page article about the suicide of Claire Offland, a 15 year old girl who appeared as a regular dancer on Top of the Pops and the diary

she left, which named two DJs. The inquest, held a week after her death claimed that the diary contained details about her being seduced by blackburn and other celebrities including frank sinatra her adoptive mother claimed that she was quote unpredictable and lived in a world of her own and the coroner recorded a verdict of suicide and And this is the first appearance of Tony Blackburn on Top of the Pops since April the 1st. I mean, as well as Frank Sinatra, apparently Rock Hudson was named.

That's right, yes. Which, for all kinds of reasons, I'm a bit sceptical about. There's an article in Rolling Stone magazine, I think it's the month after Next, by the writer Robert Greenfield. And, you know, if you don't mind, I'd like to read quite a big chunk of it, because this is the best description of Top of the Pops in the early 70s that we're going to get. So, go ahead. One month before her 16th birthday, Claire Uffland is dead.

On the last Monday in March, she went up to her bedroom and swallowed enough of her mother's sleeping pills to kill herself. Six days later, her picture took up the four right-hand columns of the largest circulation newspaper in the Western Hemisphere. In huge white letters against a black background, the News of the World headline trumpeted, BBC pop scandal, this girl was a victim, now she is dead. Two months earlier, the same picture had run in a newspaper. The caption under it then read, Samantha Clare, I was always in

trouble with the nuns, but it was worth it. Samantha Clare was one of the stage names Clare Irene Offland used. Her death has been seized by the British press and made into a scandal of major proportions. The story has all the ingredients that sell newspapers. The possibility of sex and payola at so venerable an institution as the British Broadcasting Corporation, involving well-known TV and radio personalities, the grief of parents bewildered at a daughter's death and a behind-the-scenes look at the heartbreak that every Bond secretly knows is really the essence of show business. Although much of it might seem a throwback to the 50s, where the world was straighter and scandals more appreciated, if much of it seems to verge on the dime novel

sentimentality of a badly made Judy Garland movie, there is one thing about it all that is very real. A young girl is dead. Claire Uflan was adopted when she was six weeks old. She began her show business career modelling children's clothes for TV commercials at the age of three. When she was 11, her mother and father were divorced. She remained with her mother, who remarried two years later. The family moved to Watford, a comfortable London suburb. Claire attended convent school but was not a particularly attentive or dedicated student. Her life was show business. She had a pleasant voice and liked to dance. During the summer months she appeared in holiday reviews at resorts. One July at age 15 she left school to work full-time at her career. In Great Britain dropping out is not the shocking deviation it is in America.

Compulsory schooling ends at 16. The age of consent is 16 and kids tend to grow up faster. Dropout 15-year-olds hold regular jobs, usually gruelling 9-5 menial positions that will keep them trapped for the rest of their lives. Claire began by going to auditions in the West End attending radio shows pushing for a break. It came when she began dancing on Top of the Pops. Top of the Pops is an English television phenomenon. The show is the BBC's concession to the revolution. The revolution that happened seven years ago when swinging london was all topsy-turvy and awash with groovy fab gear rock and roll bands the format is american bandstand type kids who dance interact with live performing acts and tapes and films all in color

much of it very pretty and flashing there is is a group of girls with pipe-stem legs called Pans People in the Bobby Gentry Las Vegas genre who dance. Different disc jockeys alternate as host, Jimmy Savile and Tony Blackburn being the most popular. Along with a programme called Disco 2, Top of the Pops is the only regular weekly place that you can see and hear pop music on television in Britain. As such, it occupies a unique position of power.

An appearance on the show may not be enough to make or break a record by itself but even so auspicious a band as the Rolling Stones felt it wise to make it down to BBC's White City Studios to tape songs from their new album, which happened last week. Samantha, the name most people knew Claire by, was asked back to dance week after week. Her picture appeared over a newspaper article about the Top Pop Dollies. She got to meet disc jockeys. In her diary, on which the News of the World based its story, she wrote that a DJ took her home and gave her a pill which made her feel as if she was floating on a cloud. She also wrote that she had spent the night with him. One of the girls who danced with her on the

show always said that Claire went out with two different disc jockeys and told everyone she was proud of having slept with one of them. Samantha's mother found her diary and unlocked it. She forbade her daughter to appear on top of the pops again. Claire went back to attend in dancing school. Her mother suggested she think about finding a regular job to fall back on. She saw one of the disc jockeys again and wrote in her diary that he had kissed her goodbye. Her mother said she seemed terribly depressed.

On March the 29th, there was a family argument. At about 8 o'clock, Claire went up to her room to play with her tape recorder or watch television, her mother thought. The next morning, she found Claire's body. The last entry in her diary dated March the 29th was read aloud at the inquest. In part it reads, don't laugh at me for being dramatic but I just can't take it anymore. All anyone has ever done is tell me what a problem I am. I am just a dreamer and none of my dreams will ever come true. I just can't face reality. I wish someone would really love me. Well, I have got some of mum's old pills. I'm not sure what they are, so I'm going to eat them all and some bread to keep it down. In brackets, bet it doesn't bloody work. I know it is awful and I

am being very selfish. I am sick of being told how selfish I am. God bless. Three exting kisses followed. The cause of death was established by the coroner to be barbiturate poisoning. A Scotland Yard officer stated it would be ridiculous to connect anyone or anything mentioned in her diary with reality. The verdict of the inquest was suicide while the balance of the mind was disturbed in the opinion of the local pathologist claire ufflin was a virgin when she died i'll come back to that article later because it is a big fucker but it's worth reading out top of the pops has has been under scrutiny in 1970 when man Alive did the documentary about the DJs but it's taken a bit of a dark

turn this year. At the beginning of the year there was a payola scandal at the BBC regarding Disco 2 and one of the producers offering to get bands on for a bit of a backhander but this is a bit more nasty isn't it? Yeah well the thing about

this, in recent years, the two things that have been much discussed is sexual wrongdoing at the BBC, particularly in the pop music and light entertainment field, and how you should always believe accusers. And it's a bit uncomfortable to have this very unhappy corrective there that sometimes people say things that aren't true. And it's not out of spite or meanness.

No. It's because they're not very well. Yeah. Well, it's not even that. It's just adolescent fantasy, isn't it? I mean, you could say this is a bit of a Claire Scott and Mr. Hopwood in Grange Hill. of what it means to respect accusers, right? Which is that what you're supposed to do is listen to them,

take them seriously and not dismiss them. It doesn't necessarily mean that as soon as someone opens their mouth, they're telling the truth. It just sends a bit of a shiver down the spine of anyone who's ever had unpleasant dealings with anyone prone to overstatement, shall we say, which an awful lot of people have. I think Taylor makes some very good points there. I just think it's an incredibly sad story, and it just feels wrong in the mind and in the mouth

to be talking of somebody lying, A, at this distance, in the mind and in the mouth to be talking of somebody lying when, you know, A, at this distance and B, when we don't really know the full facts, but just from the facts as they're presented there, you know, on the face of it,

it does seem that she was a bit of a fantasist and as Taylor says, not very well. And if it had happened to any kid in any part of the country and, you know, living any sort of life, even if they were just a normal school kid not going on top of the pops, it would be a really bleak story. The fact that she was going on top of the pops

obviously lends this other kind of dimension, which in much later years of course would affect tony blackburn also the the fact is that we we do know that stuff not dissimilar to the things she described were going on yeah they were going on with with jimmy savon they're going at the bbc they're going on at top of the pops um so this is the weird thing it's not entirely beyond the realms that something like this could have happened yeah it just would appear that in her particular case it did not i'm going to drag in another article if you don't mind yeah yeah sure yeah yeah there's an article uh in the journal in uh which i believe is a local newspaper, I can't remember which one off the top of my head.

April 6th, 1971. And the inquest on Claire Ruffalo's focused attention on the pop scene. This article tells what has happened to other girls and how DJs have to live with the idolatry they attract. The beautiful dark-haired girl said her name was Lottie. The beautiful dark-haired girl said her name was Lottie. She said she was a reporter from a German pop paper and she was doing a series of at-home features on famous British disc jockeys. The famous British disc jockey invited her in and a tape recorder and showed her his famous British disc jockey's flat and went to make some tea. When he came back she wasn't in the living room where he had left her. she was in his bed her

reporter's outfit and tape recorder stacked neatly on a chair she let a few things slip like her accent her real identity and her age she was 14 needless to say the famous british disc jockey didn't want his name mentioned it all happened a few months ago and he has made sure it never happened again later on in the article a probation officer based in central london put it this way there is a whole generation of young people who have known nothing but pop music and its values since the day they were born it isn't a novelty to them it's a natural way of life and they have embraced it without question i have had to deal with dozens of girls under about 15 who honestly see nothing wrong with sleeping with pop people

they come from all sorts of environments and it's wrong to presume they've all come from broken homes or unsettled backgrounds the vast majority of them are just ordinary young girls who just happen to believe that pop music and the people who produce it are the only things on earth worth worrying about do you know what's interesting about that to me is that when people say oh the 70s were different times they they usually say it in order to um excuse the older male yeah um who's you know sort of taking advantage of the availability of young girls um but what that article also reveals is that it was a different time for girls as well yeah um that uh you know they under under the age of 15 so you know in in the words of the article

saw nothing wrong with it and of course um the the thing to say straight away is just because they see nothing wrong with it doesn't mean that makes it okay yeah for the older male to then just you know take advantage of that yes but um yeah that coupled with the previous article it's it's a really interesting window into things the previous one um part of anything else just the way that americans uh view britain and british pop culture it culture. Yeah, we will come back to that article because it speaks a lot of it. It says a lot of interesting things about top of the pops at the time. I'll definitely put this on the video playlist. The Man Alive documentary from the late 60s called The Ravers,

which I'm sure we've all seen, about the kind of like the fledgling groupie scene in the UK. Because being a groupie, it wasn't a term of abuse, was it, back then? No. This is the one with Simon Dupree and the big sound. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And apart from the existence of the groupies, it makes being in a group look really miserable, like all documentaries from this period do. If you're not in the Beatles, like all documentaries from this period do. If you're not in the Beatles, it looks like a bleak life. And I'll just chuck in one more thing from that article. One of the DJs was asked about it, and he said,

look, my friend, us DJs are all big, handsome fellas, and if the Judys didn't fancy us, we wouldn't be doing our job that's the business we're in the business we're not in is running girls of 13 and we'd be mad to do it i do my work i do a bit for charity and i enjoy myself at the same time there's nothing in the rules to say i shouldn't be a human being. Just count the teeth first, my son. Always count the teeth. Answers on a postcard, everyone. Well, welcome along, everyone, to Top of the Pops. And as you can see, we've got loads and loads of students

from the Slough Technical Training College, that's right isn't it? And lovely, lovely t-shirts. Thank you very much for giving us a lovely time when we came down to judge the beauty queen contest and everything. Right, we've got some lovely records for you. Brand new number one sound starting off with this one from McGuinness Flint and it's called... It is, here it is right now.

APPLAUSE Flint and it's called it is here it is right now Tony Lee leave today get out now while you can Tony reveals that the studio is packed this week by students from Slough Technical Training College it doesn't exist anymore unsurprisingly it's probably a fucking academy or something

Tony thanks them for inviting him down to judge the beauty queen contest because as we've already established what better judge of human beauty than tony blackburn do you think the slough technical college mentioned was shoehorned in to drive home the point that these ladies are over um 16 yeah possibly although i did think there was almost a bit of a smoking gun there where he goes because what he actually said was thanks for giving us a lovely time when we came down to judge the beauty queen competition and immediately i'm thinking yeah i bet they did and you've got

to wonder whether there was any uh quid pro quo in terms of getting them tickets for top of the pops and you can hypothesize the quid or the quo yourself obviously the thing is though tony blackburn always looks terrified when he's surrounded by young women even when he's not he looks kind of nervous yeah but when he's surrounded by young women he's just trembling right he's in fact he's the only DJ well the only DJs from this period who don't look like they're poised to descend on the school girls areony blackburn and the gay ones um but what a great band they are yeah there's a rocksteady but his lack of confidence is almost as disturbing as the overconfidence of other djs but it's really striking and it's like

he said no wonder he couldn't get it up when he went to bed with Babs Windsor. Yes. You know what I mean? Which is like the sexual equivalent of an East End gangland walking tour. A little bit intimidating. Whereas here he's in a crowd of polite young women from Slough who think he's like an untalented Beatle, you know. Yes.

They're instinctively deferential in his presence, you know. Yeah. And, of course, Barbara Windsor was on the panel of the Gong Show when Channel 4 tried to have a go at it, when Tony Blackburn appeared roller skating, dressed as Superman, singing Land of Hope and Glory. For fuck's sake. Have you not seen that, Simon?

No, no, no. When the clock strikes for Brexit, if it ever does, that's the first thing I'm going to watch. All right. That'll calm me down. I skimmed through PopTastic and I touched upon the Barbara Wins a bit

and apparently he was talking to a mutual friend at a party saying that he quite fancied her and everything and she came over to him and said i hear you want to fuck me bless her national treasure the thing is though considering what's been going on in the weeks leading up to this maybe that's why he looks extra nervous around these women yeah um although it's hard to tell. It's like he blows every single line in this introduction. But the thing is, he always does. Yeah.

So it might just be Blackburn, you know, in his prime, undiluted and totally lost. It's the weirdest thing about him is that every morning, like every morning, he talks. Like this is his job. He talks and talks into a microphone live on the radio for hours. And he's pretty good at it as well. You know, durren, durren, notwithstanding. Right. But we see him here.

And every time we see him on Top of the Pops, he can barely get three words out without fucking it up. It's like he's got that wax-lipped smile. It's like it's covering a constant state of mild panic. You know, I would have thought he would have loved to perform. He would love the attention. He would love to have his ego stroked in that way. But he's terribly ill at ease,

especially when there's ladies present. I mean, here it's like, the first thing he says on the whole show is we've got loads and loads of uh students from the uh slough technical training college that's right isn't it he doesn't even know these people are yeah right he's not interested even though he's been there exactly but he's not But he can't even do his job properly. He can't even memorise one small detail, which is the first thing he has to say on the whole programme.

You might be right, Al, about the reason for him bringing it up. Because, yeah, in the light of... I mean, maybe we're projecting. Who knows if we're just projecting. But, yeah, certainly with the scandal in the very recent past, you can see why he might basically want to tell the entire nation they are overage, everybody. It's fine. It's fine. Because the thing with Blackburn is we do know that he had in his prime more sex than anyone else in Britain, at least according to him.

But also, as far as we know, bare minimum, he stuck to the age of consent. So there is that, isn't there? Yeah. You say we're overthinking it, Simon, but I think the audience are going to be doing exactly the same thing, because it's massively inconvenient for everyone

that he's actually genuinely been ill. Because, yeah, it looks like he's been dodging it, doesn't it? And he's been kept off the air because of that, and it's going to look... It'll look like... He's been suspended or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He should have presented this episode in a wheelie cage with a muzzle like Hannibal Lecter.

Yeah. After making clear that we're going to hear some lovely records over the next 35 minutes, he introduces the first tune of the evening, Malt and Barley Blues by McGuinness Flint. Formed in London in 1970, McGuinness Flint were named after Tom McGuinness, formerly of Manfred Mann, and Huey Flint, who was a drummer with John Mayles Blues Breakers. But they also featured Benny Gallagher and Graham Lyle,

a Scottish duo who were signed as in-house songwriters to Apple Records in 1968. This is the follow-up to their debut single, When I'm Dead and Gone, which got to number two for three weeks in December of 1970, held off the top spot by I Hear You Knocking by Dave Edmonds. It's a new entry this week at number 45, and here they are in the studio. And as Neil would say, here we have a definitive non-sandwich band. It's got the musk of the early 70s to it, hasn't it? Yeah, McGuinness Flint, either a conglomerate in the military-industrial complex

or a real ale company. And in context, it has to be the latter, doesn't it? Especially as their number includes Gallagher and Lyle, another name that seems to need a percentage in brackets after it on a chalkboard in a camera pub. They are a jug band, an earthenware jug band. And on the side of the earthenware jug, in oldie worldie lettering, it says McGuinness Flint.

You can just see it. The performance, this performance is top of the whistle test, I'm saying. McGuinness Flint are the Mungo Jerry that Bob Harris would find acceptable. And this won't be the last old grey whistle test or the last Mungo Jerry reference in the episode. No, no, no, no. It's all accordions and banjos. This is a very banjo-heavy show, in fact.

It is, isn't it? It's Anglo-Scottish Cajun. It's entirely white-skinned Creole. It's Marshall Plan Zydeco. I had to do a bit of research into who the members were so when uh you know because they all look sort of pretty stereotypically beardy early 70s blokes um so graham lyles the ginger one who's uh exiled at the front uh while all the others stand in a cozy line together which is another act of bullying and discrimination against those who carry the MC1R gene.

The one with the big F-hole guitar and the Joe Jordan face, that's Benny Gallagher. And I don't know about you, I thought his voice is awful. There's that second verse where he sings, someone tries to patronise you when you don't know why. Bloody hell. Yeah, not good. hell yeah not good in there so here he flints the drummer and the really uncool this is really uncool tall one who looks

like you mentioned uh the open university maths program earlier on yes he looks like one of the presenters of that that that's tom mcginnis and um the other one who's neither a gallagher or a lyle or a mcginnis or a flint that's Dennis Coulson with the accordion and the perfectly round face. The song itself, I think I've mentioned before, my love of what I call convivial music. So that is, you're in a pub, you've all worked up a friendly fug of cigarette smoke. Maybe it's December the 23rd and you can almost taste christmas already

uh the beer mats say double diamond and and you've got your arms around your mate's shoulders and the three touchstones of this song wise for me are meet me on the corner by lindisfarne uh see my baby jive by wizard and roll away the stone by mott the hoopoe yes and and i i wanted to say that molten barley blues is a second rate example of that. And the lyrics have got nothing beyond helpfully explaining that if people are a bit aggressive or overbearing, it's because they're pissed. Yeah. But I can't lie, right?

I've had this song going around my head for the last 24, no, 48 hours, actually. So even though I couldn't say I like it, it does have some kind of dastardly power. And it peaked at number five, which isn't bad, so clearly it connected on some level. Taylor, in you come, sir. Well, it's... What I dislike, although they're very much of their time, obviously, what I really dislike about them

is it's like these fucking hacked up fur balls have stepped out of present day east london back in time yeah and set up in 1971 you know they're ugly and they're bearded and they're sort of old young and nothing they have to offer is worth a light and it's entirely for their own benefit right don't let the rusticity fool you. They're in this for themselves. These are city people, right? They're doing this. It's just them doing a thing.

They're playing this stupid barnyard music for themselves, right? They're not giving anybody anything. I mean, the only difference is that in 1971, they smell worse and there's no manscaping. We can be fairly sure of that. And they're much better at playing musical instruments. So, you know, you gain a little and you lose a little. But, no, there's just...

Oh, and this lot weren't all born rich. That's the other thing. Yeah. But they are really unpleasant. I mean, I hate the lead singer as well just because of his pallor do you know what I mean he's like he looks like a veal

he's really dislikable he's like corn fed nothing you know and I mean without wanting to sound too soft

there is much worse music than this in the world yeah much worse music than this on this particular episode of Top of the Pulse. Yes there is. Ultimately I'd rather listen to the muffled

voices of doctors saying no he's gone as I struggle to signal to them with my eyes that I'm in fact still alive. What it is it's the pernicious influence of the band right who were were influencing everybody at this point or influencing all like real musicians right and the band were great but

they were great because they had a certain depth and dread and ghostliness to what they did right which is what's really interesting about old music and old times brought into the present day right so that feeling that you've somehow invoked something old like uh like a curious clergyman in an mr james story picking up a mysterious trinket you know what i mean because this is this is just like if windyy Miller had formed a band. Yes. It's just people taking the band as a cue to start tunnelling backwards and just ending up like a musical version of a sealed knot society. Yes.

You know what I mean? It's like a dress-up. It's like a dress-down dress-up. I never thought of the band thing, but you're absolutely right, because if you think about it, there's a direct connection, isn't there? Because these guys came out of Manfred Man, Manfred Man covered the Mighty Queen

and all that, so, you know, there is that direct... They're obviously Dylan heads to the core. Yeah, yeah. What's going on with the singer's eyebrow? Has he got stitches in it or something? Maybe someone punched him. He's been punched in he got stitches in it or something? Maybe someone punched him. Kicked in the face by a horse or something. A drunken horse, but you can't blame the horse.

That's just the Malt and Barley Blues talking. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the songs essentially don't listen to piss heads. They're just not worth your fucking time. The thing is, though, right, right about hippies i was thinking recently right near where i live there's two cafes and when i'm in the laundrette or something and i don't have time to wander i have to go into one or the other of these two local cafes now they're both real modern east london places in different ways, right? One of them is basically run by hippies and it sells homemade seed cakes

and doubles as a plant shop. So you're surrounded by fronds and stuff when you're in there. And there's a little bloke who works in there with John Lennon glasses and an embroidered pillbox hat. Nice. And they have decorative coffee bean sacks lying around saying like produce of Ethiopia.

Yeah. And then the other one is all ironic, brightly coloured formica and ironic pictures of Boris Johnson on the walls and stuff. And it's called something like, you know, Jonestown or Abu Ghraib or something like that. Ted Bundy's shed. And that's the choicey's Shed. And that's the choice, right? Yeah. And you know what?

You go in the hippie place and the coffee's really nice and they've got good Arabic music playing and the people are nice and friendly. Then you go in this ironic edgelord place and it costs more and it tastes like they've never cleaned out the coffee machine. Right? And everything else is equal because neither of them gets the clientele they want.

It's all just foreign students and mums with buggies and me scribbling down notes for this podcast in a notepad. So what it comes down to is would I rather drink nice coffee and be treated gently or pay more to sit in an ugly environment and drink engine oil with bits in so given the choice between two kinds of beardies i will always choose the 70s variety yes at least with their genuine interest in blues and country styles and their lack of entitlement you know and

this lot are happy to accept the fact that they're ugly and the reason they don't shave is that they can't be bothered because they're too stoned or, you know, whatever it is. Which is the only excuse, right? And when this music isn't playing, I can ignore it. It's not permanently nibbling at the hem of my consciousness and screaming, this is it this is all that's left now so you know

it's alright, it's alright, I mean I say hippies this lot aren't what you'd call peace and love types but I mean it's all the same old grey whistle test so the following week Malt and Barley Blues soared 22 places to number 23,

and three weeks later, it got to number five, its highest position. However, the group were overwhelmed by their instant success and forced by their label to rush out a second LP. The majority of their first nationwide tour dates were cancelled due to various illnesses, and the follow-up single Happy Birthday Ruthie Baby failed to chart. By the end of 1971 Gallagher and Lyle had left the band to form their own duo and shorn of their songwriting heart McGuinness Flint struggled on until 1975 when they split up after never troubling the charts again.

Meanwhile, Gallagher and Lyle scored two top ten hits in 1976 and Graham Lyle started wiping his arse with £50 notes when his song What's Love Got To Do With It was picked up by Tina Turner in 1984 after being turned down by Cliff Richard and Donna Summer and put out just before Bugs Fizz had the chance to release their version. Fucking hell. A direct link between this and Tina Turner slinking about in a leather miniskirt,

with her hair all out. Pop, eh? Bloody hell. Great chop down sound there from the Guinness Flint Here's another great record Gone up 10 places this week So this week's number 20 It's called Indiana Watch Me And here's our Dean Taylor. Without flicking back to Tony, we go straight into the next single,

which he describes as another great record. Indiana Wants Me by R. Dean Taylor. Born in Toronto in 1939, Richard Taylor began his career in the early 60s as a pianist and vocalist in assorted local groups. In 1964, he was hired by Motown as a pianist and vocalist in assorted local groups. In 1964 he was hired by Motown as a songwriter and a year later began a career on the side as a singer with the Motown subsidiary VIP. He first became acquainted with the UK charts in 1968 when Got To See Jane, a tune he wrote with Eddie Holland, got to number 17 in August of that year. After taking a break from singing to co-write Love Child and I'm Living In Shame for Diana Ross and the Supremes,

he resumed his solo career in 1970 when he became one of the first artists to sign to Rare Earth, Motown's white rock label. And this is its first single and it's got up 10 places this week from number 30 to number 20 what's motown playing at round about this time it's relocating to los angeles and it's it's setting up stuff on the side what's going off here they're diversifying yeah i i was in the motown museum last year and there's a whole section on rare earth um which as you say is is the subsidiary that barry gordy set up for white artists although um in the uk i noticed they didn't bother with that uh this singles on tamil and motown in the uk um but yeah they had another um subsidiary i

top my head i can't remember the name but um they used it for putting out kind of political like spoken words of black power speeches and stuff like that. So they were really branching out around this time. And also, you've got to remember, even on sort of Motown proper, this is the era of the auteur. So, you know, as epitomised by Marvin Gaye, What's Going On, and obviously that whole run of Stevie Wonder self-made albums. So accordingly with that, the the album that this

is from the Ardeen Taylor album uh he he wrote most of his own stuff and produced this album it's called I Think Therefore I Am and yeah it's it's it's country pop really isn't it so out of keeping with the normal Motown fare but um it's Berry Gordie reaching out beyond uh their usual market and just at least in this case quite successfully you've got to say well this is an ideal record for a white motown subsidiary because it's commercial white soul in the same way that the best black motown acts were a popped up version of soul and gospel music uh I mean, becoming a bit less popped-up by this point, maybe. But this is like a commercial version

of the kind of white guy equivalent, right? Like stuff like Neil Young and Hank Williams and, like, unfunky white soul music. Do you know what I mean? Like, soulful white music. But zapped with pop and made danceable and radio-friendly, friendly you know without sacrificing all the feeling and it's not easy to do that it's tricky which is why people admire Motown for

doing it um and Ardine Taylor does the same thing uh with the music uh of his own background um and I think this is an amazing record I think it's better than There's a Ghost in My House Wow That's big talk Well because that's essentially an R&B record which you always suspect would have sounded even better if it had been

done by a black singer Yeah you could hear the Isley Brothers doing that or something Yeah Whereas this sounds really natural and fresh and his own, you know. And the extreme dramatics of the lyric and the delivery are set off against this really steady movement in the music where you get a sense of rising tension, but also there's like a weird martyr's rapture

to it when the police catch up with him at the end because you know he's on the run he's killed this bloke to protect his lady's honour now he's looking at it's a bit off isn't it just killing a bloke for presumably slagging off his missus yeah because we get that right

at the start because we're going to talk about the video in a minute I'm sure but I think Kenny Rogers had a stronger case yeah yeah because uh um we'll talk about the video in full i'm sure but uh there's that fbi form that we see at the start which says a man is wanted for assault with the intent to commit murder and in the lyrics we hear rd's explanation if a man ever needed dying he did no one had a right to say what he said about you and i'd love to know what this guy said that was so bad that it justified attempted murder you know rather than just like punching him or something um you know it goes

beyond just spilling a pint or something doesn't it i mean what on earth you don't know what ardeen's like though when he's angry it's just the booze no he goes full you know yeah but this is why i was surprised to hear taylor call it a soul record because to me it is a country record not just in the kind of cadences of the melody but um just that that um the drama that that you mentioned there and the fact that it's a narrative narrative, it's a story about a fugitive on the run for somebody he's killed or nearly killed, and that's classic country stuff. Right, but it's got that finger-snapping beat underneath it, and that sort of emotional delivery,

which is different from a country singer's emotional delivery. It's got this sort of plaintive, soulful way of singing, which is not in a country... It's not a sort of nose-pinching whine, you know. It's obviously been informed by Motown. It's what makes it so good, I think, because the combination works really well. But I just...

I love the way that at the end of this record, as the cops are closing in on him and he's looking at 20 to 10 in the pen there's a kind of twisted elation to it do you know what I mean it's like that sort of like he's fucking Jesus or something it's like

you know I'm gonna get my comeuppance here but he's like he's the strings start to swell up and it's like. But he's like he's, the strings start to swell up and it's like, you know, it's like a religious moment for him. You know, it's great. And the production of this record is amazing as well. It's so upfront and perfectly compressed, right?

The music is dead simple. There's nothing to it. So you have to get the production and the performance just right. And they do. It's like the music. So yeah, it sounds like it's three inches from your face and you can't ignore it. You know what I mean?

It's really bold and moving. And I can't imagine how anyone could ever dislike this record. Let me just step in there, Taylor, because we all used to go to second-hand record shops in the mid-80s to you know to pull out loads of the old shit because we'd had enough of the new shit and you know i fucking love there's a ghost in my house and i'd look at this single and go oh it's him it's that bloke and the the song title indiana wants me it's like oh my god that's a fucking brilliant name

and I could just imagine it in my head and I took it home expecting another stomper and it's like oh what the fuck is this this is fucking dad music this is

hated it hated it hated it and you know it's only now that I can listen to it and go oh yeah

this is alright if it had been done by anyone else I'd have liked it yeah it could been done by anyone else i'd have liked it yeah it could be done by david soul or something like that it makes me think of silver lady this whole thing about being far away from home and far away from the woman you want to be with yeah no star motels yeah yeah yeah yeah when when the names uh holland and dozier drop off the songwriting credits uh ardeen tay Taylor's music does change quite dramatically. I mean, there's a lot of other stuff from around this time

where he sounds like a sort of Motowned-up Gene Pitney, you know what I mean? Which is almost as great as it sounds. But this is the one which really stands alone, I think. Shadow is a good one, isn't it? Yeah. Shadow fucking hell. Yet another creepy underage sex anthem

to put alongside all the others from this period. Gary Puck I love a spoonful Rolling Stones Roy Hart. Shadow's a kind of Humbert style sort of nonce narrative isn't it? It goes body of a woman, mind of a child and it goes

Shadow you sure do drive me wild, you're only 14 years old which you know in the context of what we've just been talking about but it's actually a good record it's got a kind of Neil Diamond girl you'll be a woman soon feel to it I think you know which again

you know this is what most of our Dean Taylor's other stuff sounds like it's got that feel to it you know got to see Jane and all that. So we're going to talk about this film then. We're treated to another homemade Top of the Pops film, which is always interesting. And particularly, well, it's always when it's an American record.

So how do you think they've got on with this one? It looks like they've had a decent budget. Not massive, but a moderate budget. Even if it's mostly just a man running across muddy terrain the thing is it's it's meant yeah it's meant to evoke america but there's just something about the the mud and the grass and the trees and everything that just looks like britain yeah specifically wales don't you think you think maybe I wonder North Wales I thought because of the quarry it was

the same location as your everything and everything is you video oh right could be I've got me nuts in May head on again because you know I speculated that it was filmed near Starehole well I'm thinking it's you know this is set in that quarry where um they were going to make a

little post office candice marie you got a lot of doctor who stuff filmed in quarries as well so you know there's always that yeah um and i yeah i looked into it because uh and in the closing credits we find out that it was directed by Tom Taylor of Caravelle Films so I looked them up and they're a company from Slough funnily enough just down the road from the technical training college they did several of the special films

for Top of the Pops it seems including Joy to the World by Three Dog Night Let's Work Together by Canned Heat, Silver Machine by Hawkwind and Back Off Boogaloo Back Off Boogaloo by Ringo Starr and Tom Taylor himself had worked on some fairly minor

feature films like Michael Caine Vehicle, Deadfall and another one called The Adding Machine but he was mostly just doing title sequences but in the film the fugitive gives himself up um but on the record well it depends which version of the record but on the record he dies in a hail of

bullets and and this got me wondering has any recording artist other than our dean taylor died in two police chases because on Gotta See Jane it's implied because he's driving in the rain there are sirens heard and it ends with crashing sounds but on Indiana Wants Me it's more explicit so he loves a fatal police chase

does R. Dean but by the way according to Wikipedia there was a bit of a war of the worlds situation with this because the police siren sounds were removed from the DJ copies that were sent out because drivers kept hearing it and thinking it was real and they were pulling over their cars. Oh, like Blockbuster?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, because Blockbuster in the States. Yeah, totally. The trouble with this video is that because of the location and because of the guy they've chosen to play the fugitive, it doesn't really have the sort of manly drama of the record. It looks like a provincial polytechnic lecturer fleeing a torch-lit gang of angry parents across the North Wales countryside.

Abuse of trust is a bourgeois concept. Which would have worked as a video for Shadow, funnily enough. Yeah, yeah. The thing is, at the end, when he gets cornered by the forces of law and order, cornered by the forces of law and order um i'm wondering if he might get off on the technicality that the motorcycle cop isn't wearing the right jacket and the detective has got a long raincoat and a trilby hat and dark glasses like a cartoon of a spy um and he's also got a fluffed out hippie beard and long hair that he's trying to hide by putting his chin down yeah also they've got the kind of guns that you shoot clay pigeons with uh which is might not yeah at least it's not

zed cars though and also this this video slightly misunderstands the concept of being on the run right it doesn't literally running literally running across open country right it's more like a prison break you know they put prisons on a moor partly so it's hard to run away from them because you're easy to find the guy in this song is a fugitive which is not the same thing so there's no reason for him to find the most exposed landscape that he can and run across it yeah that's a really stupid thing to do yeah what he wants to be doing is he's being on a bike with uh richard beckinsale and make noises about his upcoming fight that's how you escape from prison i mean he's an amateur fugitive basically. No wonder he gets caught.

He might as well have gone on the track of the Indianapolis 500 and started doing star jumps. He's a bit conspicuous. The one thing that's missing from that film is Malcolm McDonald suddenly turning up at the end with a fishing rod and a Watney's Party 7.

So the following week, Indiana Wants Me jumped another eight places to number 12, and a month later, it went all the way to number two, held off the top spot by knock three times by Dawn. The follow-up, Taos, New Mexico, failed to chart in 1972 1972 but he'd land one more UK hit in 1974 when a tuning recorded in 1967 There's a Ghost in My House was re-released and got to number 3 in June of that year. That's the title with his model A. Once again, Tony Blackburn is deliberately being kept off our screens as we crash straight into a very abrupt introduction to Henry Ford by The Mixtures. Formed in Melbourne in 1965, The Mixtures were signed to EMI Australia a year later and released three singles, all of which failed to chart in their motherland. They then signed

to CBS Australia in 1969, which resulted in two more flopped singles and appeared to be destined to be another Aussie also-ran band who couldn't score a hit in their own country, whose chart was dominated by British and American acts. However, after signing to Fable Records in 1970, the Australasian Performing Rights Association, which represented the major labels of that country, started demanding payment from Australia's main commercial radio stations, claiming that they were providing free content. This resulted in the record label slapping a six-month embargo on the supply of

records to commercial stations and the commercial stations refusing to play all British and American singles and removing them from their charts. This led to a boom in homegrown bands and artists, with Australian acts vomiting out cover versions of the latest hits from abroad. And one of those bands were The Mixtures, who jumped on a cover of Mungo Jerry's In The Summertime, which got to number one in August of that year and stayed there for nine weeks. In late 1970, they followed up with a song of their own, the Pushbike song, which not only got to number two in Australia after the band on Foreign Airplay was lifted but also got to number 2 over here for 4 weeks in February of this year held off number 1 by George Harrison's My Sweet Lord and is still in the charts this week at number 35.

charts this week at number 35 this encouraged the band to get on a plane and decamp to the uk for the spring where they gave a sorted interview slagging off the australian music scene and here they are to promote their latest single which has just been rushed down now before we go any further chaps let's discuss the push bike song well the thing with the push bike song is that it sounds exactly like in the summertime by Mungo Jerry, right? And I didn't know that whole backstory that you just told us. So there's a reason why it sounds exactly like In the Summertime, because they had a huge hit with it. They're shaking Mungo. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And they're basically thinking, oh, shit, we've had a massive hit with actual In the Summertime. We better give the world another thing that's a bit like that. And it paid off first time at least but not second time the push bite song was an absolute banger at the west glade junior school end of term discos of the late 70s oh yes fucking hell man it was that not three times return to sender chirpy chirpy cheap cheap you should do a night sometime you should do a night in a pub in nottingham playing songs that were big yeah yeah yeah, because what me and my

mates would do, well first of all we'd go to the toilets and put paper towels down the plug holes of the sinks and fill up the sinks and then just throw water over our faces and under our armpits to make it look as if we'd been sweating out of all the dance floor action and then you know

push bike song had come on and you know it just went off we invented a dance you know the bit where it goes tsss ooh ooh tsss ah we kind of like did a dance to that which involved pretend shitting and pissing

it actually got the record banned by the end of my time at Westlake Junior School. That's amazing. But this, however, is no Pushbike song, is it? No. I mean, you know, like I said earlier, this is a very banjo-heavy Top of the Pops. It's as if 1971 was International Year of the Banjo.

But the Mixtures couldn't hit a cow's arse with theirs in terms of scoring a second British hit because this didn't chart, despite the extreme efforts that the BBC have gone to here to help them. Oh, what, with this video clip? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think they spent all of the money on the Indiana Wants Me video clip shot on film.

I mean, this is... I've bought products with the brand name best in that cost more than this video clip i mean they're in there they're in a yellow vintage car they're crammed in they've got the drum kit at the back and uh you know they've got the guitars and basses poking out and everything. And has it been chroma keyed onto a background of traffic scene? Because at some point, because it's got a black border around it, it looks like they've just put a projector behind it. But it is chroma keyed because you can see their hair being all unnecessarily frizzy,

even for the early 1970s. Yeah, sometimes their limbs disappear. I mean, so we're all thinking the same thing right when they're in the yellow vintage car because you've got first of all you assume it's bessie the car from doctor who right because bessie was a siever edwardian which is um a faux vintage car which is built on the chassis of a 1950s Ford Popular. So it's the car equivalent of a mock Tudor house if you get my meaning. Bessie first appeared in

the Doctor Who and the Salurians episode in 1970, driven by John Pertwee. That's when the Doctor stranded on Earth because he's been exiled by the Time Lords without the use of his TARDIS. And I thought, great, this is amazing. We're seeing the Doctor Who car on top of the pops.

But here's the problem. It's really sad to report this, but I freeze-framed the mixtures, and then I did a Google image search and carefully compared the two. Sadly, it's not Bessie. It's a slightly different model, which is, in its way, even more bizarre,

because this means the BBCbc owned two bright yellow siever edwardian faux vintage cars and we wonder why britain suffers an economic collapse in the 70s and oh the thing with the green screen footage is that the possibilities surely are kind of endless and instead they start off they start off it looks it looks like they're driving across black fire's bridge in the rain um yeah it looks horrible and then it uh there's the verse that mentions flying and we get i wonder right is this the first sighting of that montage of flying machines and other sort of steampunky contractions it ended up on steve silk hurley's Jack Your Body and countless other things. Between 1970

and 1990, the BBC must have showed these clips more often than the Globe. They're so delighted. Those shit flying machines not taking off and the wings are collapsing and all of that.

They do change it up eventually to be fair there's some crashing waves in the background which is a kind of surreal and then you've got crashing mob you know cars and mob movies or something uh which fair enough it's sort of a californian road in the evening yeah yeah yeah oh which is a lot nicer and then and then they go into the sea where this song firmly belongs. But surely some of those clips must be actual deaths caught on film. Yes, exactly what I was thinking when I was watching it, man. Right at the end where there's them three car crashes, no one skipped out of that and brushed down their bowler hat and toddled off.

Yeah, especially not in those 1920s cars that were not known for their safety records. No! There's no airbags in that. And so you see that, have a good old chuckle, and then cut back to these grinning Antipodean oafs in their stupid jalopy. Yeah, faces of death. Deaths from the past are funny, aren't they?

What is it? These guys are too old to matter now. They don't exist. Yeah, but the song's fucking funny, aren't they? What is it? These guys are too old to matter now. They don't exist. Yeah, but the song's fucking awful, isn't it? Well, yeah, I was just distracted the whole time by how much the singer Terry Dean reminds me of Noel Fielding. Yeah.

But it is an awful song. It's got nothing. The thing about Australia, it's like, it's a weird country where someone took like a freeze-dried version of early 50s English suburbia and plonked it down in the middle of a blasted sun-scorched alien landscape full of freaky plants and nightmarish psychotic wildlife um with a sort of weird inbuilt pre-assigned settler versus transportee

conflict between like a egalitarian mates culture and on the other hand the very worst kind of lily white entitled racist christian snobbery and when you take that strange society and environment and you put it on a drip feed of modern western culture including rock and roll you do get some extraordinary popular art not very much because there's not very many people there but enough to put australia probably about fourth or fifth on the list of countries which have produced the most great pop culture specifically music i mean behind britain and usa but probably battling it out with germany and jamaica for the bronze perhaps uh but all the great work from australia reflects where it came from to some degree right like the weird

nature of the culture and the landscape and the specific tensions arising from that it's there in the birthday party and nick cave and the baddies it's there in the go-between certainly the early stuff um and it's it's at the very heart of the finest piece of modern australian art which is the original film of picnic at hanging rock which is a masterpiece for all time and could only be australian and i'm not really feeling this with the mixtures right so they might have impressed molly or whatever that bloke's name is molly moldrum yeah but this is not buttering many parsnips back in the home country, back in the mother country, is it?

No. It's like this is coming straight from the other Australia, like the white bread Australian dream, you know, the neighbour's aesthetic, which is the least interesting thing about that weirdo place. Yeah, mighty white. Yeah, I mean, they saw a gap in the market which was mungo jerry for the under 10s and congratulations coppers you did it you know great now you've got to spend the rest of your life feeling proud of yourself yeah but it's weird because they do a

song about henry ford good old Henry Ford. Yeah. Like all the mixtures were long-time subscribers to the Dearborn Independent and first editions of his essay collection, The International Jew, The World's Foremost Problem, as it was syndicated to the German market in the 1930s. An ideal figure for an uncomplicated celebration in song. Yes.

I mean, yeah. The only interesting thing about them is that they only wrote songs about modes of transport as well, which is really peculiar. So the following week, and for every week after that, Henry Foyle failed to chart and only got to number 43 in Australia, where their UK interviews had eventually arrived in the music press and were not appreciated.

After one more hit in their home country and myriad line-up changes, the band finally split up and were on their bike in 1979. 1779. That's the sound of Henry Ford from The Mixers. Right now it's time for a touch of glamour, and here comes fans, people, to dance to the number 28 sound, Mama's Pearl from the fabulous Jackson 5. Again, no on-screen Tony action. What the fuck's going on there? They're going straight from one act to the other without giving us the benefit of seeing Tony grinning in Ainley.

Yeah, I noticed this. It's not right, is it? For most of the show, really, Blackburn is an unseen continuity announcer. Yeah. Which is an odd editorial decision. And again, I wonder if this was something to do with playing things very, very safe

in the light of the scandal that broke. I think we saw something quite similar in the 1970 episode, didn't we, Taylor? They just go straight to. Yeah, there was a bit of that. But I mean, they took more chances. I mean, Top of the Pops became conveyor belt TV a bit later in the 70s.

And, you know, there was a format and they did it the same every week, you know, for years at a time. They took a lot more chances in these days like in terms of direction and editing and all sorts the other thing about blackburn here and this is you know you could have said this about pretty much any top of the pops that he presented he talks uh in famously transatlantic sort of semi-american yes accent and i just wondered if maybe uh the game was up for him

when Kid Jensen turns up. Because, you know, all right, Kid Jensen's Canadian, but, you know, basically North American. And in a way that it wasn't necessarily with Emperor Roscoe, because Emperor... British. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, all of that. Sensational, that kind of stuff.

And, yeah, I think, I wonder if Jensen kind of... In Jensen's very gentle and gentlemanly-like way, just blew Blackburn out of the water. The other thing I was going to say, in the next link, he puts on a comedy Northern accent. Yes, he does. What's up with that? And this is such a 70s thing, such a top-of-the-pops thing.

DLT does it more than most admittedly but why does breaking into a northern accent for a few words instantly equal funny I don't get it yeah but it seems to be a trope of British sort of light entertainment forever yes yeah I just don't get it

it's like in the absence of a punchline or any kind of humour or any kind of humor or any kind of gag whatsoever go northern and people will will chuckle yeah fuck off so he introduces mama's pearl by the jackson five we've already discussed the jackson five in chart music number 10 and this single their fifth was the first jackson five record not to get to number one in America having to make do with number two behind a song that they originally turned down One Bad Apple by the Osmonds.

It's the follow-up to I'll Be There which spent five weeks at number five and eventually got to number four in January of this year and was originally called Guess Who's Making Whoopie With Your Girlfriend before it was completely rewritten by the corporation, the songwriting team led by Berry Gordy. After entering the top 30 last week, it's actually dropped three places from number 25 to number 28 this week,

but here come an excessively hot, pantered-up-to-f fuck-pants people to save the day. Before we go into the song chats, we need to have a discussion about hot pants. Yeah, they're in a right quality street assortment of them here, aren't they? Yes, they are. Shiny hot pants and plunging crop tops to go with them. And matching knee-high boots, I noticed. They haven't gone for some chaotic colour scheme with those. But this is the age of the hot pants.

Yeah, I guess it is. Hot pants first came to the attention of the general public in October of 1970 when an article in the fashion pages of the Daily Mirror said, short skirts may be having a rough ride at the hands of the midi merchants, but leg fanciers around the world will take on a new lease of life when they hear about mini shorts tommy roberts the owner of the mr freedom boutique said shorts will take over where the mini skirt left off after all girls still want to show off their legs don't they i don't know if he spoke

like that i bet he did by the spring of 1971 rolled down the legs of the shorts moved higher and higher, and the papers went absolutely fucking mental over the rebranded hot pants. And so did the people of Pan. See, anyone who doubts that the 70s were in full flow this early in the decade, you just need to look at this clip, right? Because not only is this version of female glamour quite obviously different from uh the sort of skinny blank-faced mannequin dancers of the 60s you know with their stripy jackets and little caps and stuff and downturned mouths it's also not the stern, aerobicised, Aventis hardness of Legs & Co. This is a very particular kind of earthy, flashy, unsophisticated joy

which characterises a lot of low culture of the early 70s. And I think it's unmistakably from that time period there's nothing remote or unhealthy about these people and they don't look like they've been trained to within an inch of their lives in a in a dance dungeon and and they're not stopping to admire themselves in a mirror or analyse anything they're doing. You know, they've worked hard, but it hasn't squashed the basic joy of youthful movement, you know, and music going through you. And they know that they're the most lusted after women in Britain. But at this stage, that's still seen as a cause for celebration as opposed to

an invasion of psychological space although this is one of the least expressive routines we've seen from Pans people probably the closest to simply lining them up to be leered at there's you know what I mean they're not really there's not a lot to this routine other than the hot pants i disagree i agree with everything you're saying up to that point when you were talking about them not looking like they've been schooled within an inch of their lives uh and although they have clearly put hard work in but i actually thought the routine was quite was first of all thought was quite good all, I thought it was quite good, but I thought it was quite complex.

There are a lot of different moves in there. There's no audience, so they've taken as long as they like to film it, I guess. There are quite a few cut points, I noticed. So they fairly clearly filmed it in chunks to get it all perfect. I wondered if maybe they had a bit more time than usual to do that. But the sense in which I agree with Taylor is that they don't feel robotic when they're doing all these moves.

You know, it's all stitched together in the edit. But, you know, I think it's – they look free in their movements, but there's a lot going on. Yeah, I mean, it does look Route 1 at first. Well, when you just see all their arses lined up. I'm guessing that pants people welcomed the introduction of hot pants because they could wear something short, but they didn't have to worry about flashing the drawers.

Yep. There's a song in there somewhere as well. Should we talk about that? The song is shaking I Want You Back, isn't it? Yeah. You know, right down to that bit at the end. Got what you need, that bit, you know. But the Jackson 5's writers were knocking them out

like nobody's business at this point. Five straight number ones in America. The corporation you mentioned, so there's Barry Gordy, Alfonso Mizell, Freddie Perreddie uh perrin and deke richards great names um but my my favorite of that run of theirs is the love you save i got so obsessed with the love you save um a while ago i just sort of kept playing it six times in a row uh this one um mammoth's pearl not so i'm nothing wrong with it it's got it's brilliant it's still brilliant it's still great i mean but you know huge in america number two in Pearl, not so good I mean, nothing wrong with it, it's got that It's still brilliant It's still great, I mean, but, you know, huge in America

number 2 in America, not so huge here I think it was number 25 but you can see, I would say you can see why it didn't catch on quite so much over here, because like I say, I do think it is shaking I want you back It's definitely the point where the law of diminishing returns

begins to set in for the Jackson 5 I mean mean it's recognizable as a brilliant record as long as you don't play it within an hour or two of i want you back or abc you know because then you realize it's just the same brilliant record again but just a little bit less brilliant i mean not that that was uncommon with motown you know and very forgivable but there was just something of the lightning strike about those jackson five records and rehashing them just isn't quite as easy as doing the same thing to where did our love go or i can't help myself you know um and in fact it took the jacksons about another six years to even get close to that original greatness again, didn't it? Once that initial flame blew out,

it all went a bit quiet for a while with them. Yes. But it still sounds like it's being beamed in from a better planet when you put it next to most of the music on this programme, you know? Yeah, definitely. It's often the case with these early 70s records, planet yes you put it next to most of the music on this program you know yeah i mean it's like it's often the case for these early 70s records there's a lot of uh holiday camp shit going on you know from the british side and then suddenly a black american act turns up and everybody else looks irredeemably square you know although the jacksons were as square as they come in many ways but they don't sound it especially as

this is one of those songs pleading for a girl to give up her virginity which considering Michael is about 13 at this point is a bit eyebrow raising but you know maybe we've seen nothing yet if that younger I think I don't know

yeah you might be right so the following week Mama's Pearl nudged up one place to number 27 but then slid down the charts. The follow up the original version of Never Can Say Goodbye only got to number 33 for three weeks in August

of this year but made it to number 2 again in America. But the follow up to that looking through the windows made it to number two again in america but the follow-up to that looking through the windows made it all the way to number nine in december of 1972 oh and uh uh have we seen leaving neverland yes no i haven't well um obviously it's extremely plausible uh that all this stuff is true because we know for sure that michael jackson's a terrible fuck up in a grotesque and potentially dangerous way and it's not as if he's only been accused of this once uh but at the same time i still think it's vaguely distasteful to speculate uh in public on the truth or otherwise of accusations that haven't and can't be proven i mean you could do it in the pub i mean if you

gave me six gin and tonics i would tell you whether i think michael jackson was a child blaster right very freely but i don't even feel good about doing it on here you know i don't like the or what it is it's more that i don't like the idea that people think it's fine to do that right to come down on one side of the either because they love michael jackson's music and they don't want to believe it or because they watched the documentary and said oh that must be the truth listen to the sad piano music. Yeah. You know what I mean?

I've seen one or two clips and it is festooned with home and away incidental music. Yeah. I mean, on the one hand, something ungodly was clearly taking place. And let's face it, when choosing his innocent pre- prepubescent playmates, Michael wasn't picking out no ugly kids, right?

On the other hand, you know, I don't know. The fact that he was repeatedly acquitted of something while alive does not count for nothing, even if it doesn't count for much. So, I don't know. I just don't like to talk about this stuff as though i was there or as though i was an authority you know which i think this people feel very free about doing that these days it makes me really uncomfortable i mean to the point where radio two have stopped playing his music right that's what they said uh which i mean look if tomorrow adele walked into a

chip shop with a submachine gun and took out 30 people you wouldn't want or expect radio one to be playing hello at five past eight the following morning you know, if it came out tomorrow that Mozart was a serial killer, would that matter? I don't know. I don't understand the way people think of time or the weird mental relationship they believe they have with artists. I don't know.

It's a mystery to me. At the end of the day, it's just you, an individual, inside your headphones, listening to sound. So, it's a mystery to me yeah well um i've i've discussed uh jacko on a previous chart music with with sarah yes um and you know we went into quite a lot of depth at that time um the thing that gets me about of um leaving neverland

not having watched it but just the kind of reaction to it and i've been paying fairly scant attention to it i've got to be honest but it's just um i found it really odd seeing all these people suddenly acting completely shocked like oh my god what michael jackson's a massive nonce who knew you know as if this is somehow brand new information yeah that happened with saville as well though didn't it you remember i'd say i'd say it's different bit of a difference there i think i'd say it's different because you know for the last 20 years or whatever there have been these these stories about jacko they're the well-publicized court cases surely um everybody has already got there's enough stuff already in the uh rumors and fact in the public domain that if people were

gonna sort of say oh my god he's cancelled he's done they would have done so by now where these people have been living you know hiding under a rock or are they sort of like you know children barely born themselves when all this was going on it's quite possible that this documentary and these um allegations within it um aren't anything particularly new um i i don't know but that that's kind of impression i get that it's kind of more of the same but it's it's the uh the the accusers actually speaking out um but yeah i just find it odd that that that it's taken this to tip a load of people over the edge like oh what no no one told me come on you know so if everybody seems to have either made their peace with Jack Owen and his music

over the last couple of decades, or they haven't. And I'm just a bit kind of, I mean, maybe I need to watch it to see what all the fuss is about, but the idea that, you know, people are only now deciding, oh, you know what,

maybe we shouldn't play his music on radio too. Are you still playing his music? What, in my dj set yeah absolutely yeah yeah yeah totally um i mean and i'll continue to do so um you had any comeback of that well i mean i haven't dj'd out since uh this documentary uh it'll be interesting to see if things have changed but um you know i i did a club just a couple of months ago playing big sort of mainstream 80s music and I played, you know, two or three Jacko songs and no one had any problem with that.

So, yeah, it'll be interesting to see if suddenly everyone's given it some kind of, I was going to say Edvard Munch shock face, but maybe Macaulay Culkin would be the opposite comparison when I do it well you know what we need to remember though is that there may well have been a perfectly innocent

reason why he set up a system of bells as an advance warning alarm so that when someone was approaching the room in which he liked to sleep in a bed with angelic prepubescent boys, he knew they were coming several minutes in advance. It was a big room, though.

Also, there's this whole thing, if we're particularly talking about Jackson 5 records, he was a child when he made these records. Yes. All of this stuff was far, far in the future. These records, they are cultural artefacts of a place and a time. They exist. They're out there.

Logically, it's almost impossible for them to be changed. They are a thing. They exist in the world. Nothing that's happened since can alter them. It's not even like Morrissey where you can think where you can say oh it's it spoils the smiths for me because uh you know I can look back at his fondness

for old England and think that there was something a bit more sinister underlying it than I really realized at the time um you you can't now sure no one's listening to I want you back by the Jackson five and think that that 11 yearyear-old boy's thinking, I'm going to grow up to be a paedophile. Do you know what I mean? This exposes the philosophical conundrum and just how weird all of this is. Say if somebody is a child abuser,

to what extent would that retrospectively taint creative work they did when they were a child. It sort of exposes the futility of the whole concept of writing people's work out of history because of their personal crimes. There's a disconnect between the the and the human and that's that's never never clearer than uh than in that case yeah and you know we we all know people who are kind of separate the art from the artist fundamentalists and and i i always say that really everybody's mileage might vary with that and

nobody's entirely consistent there there are people who go at one extreme, say that even allegations are enough, you're cancelled, that's it. And then there are people who really like to show off about how... They despise those people. People who really like to show off about how able they are to separate from the artist at the other end. And they make a big point of saying, I will unrepentantly listen to absolutely anything by anyone.

But in between that, I don't think anybody even has a line it's it's a wobbly line it's a mess um but yeah given that that's the case i i think the um records that were made way before the thing even happened are a special case compared to you know you, you could say that somebody will still listen to a Morrissey record now and say, well, I don't really care what his politics are, it's just a good record. You know, that's a bit more kind of a sort of upfront, in-your-face art-artist separation

because it's going on right now in exactly the same moment. But when there's decades of disconnect then surely those records get a pass well you would think so i mean as a human being you will listen to a record differently if it turns out that it was made by someone who in whatever way was a wrong and uh differently yeah i don understand. I genuinely don't understand the idea of, I am never going to listen to this music ever again. You know. Hot pants though, eh?

For God's sake. As for hot pants, they fell out of favour amongst the high fashion brigade at the end of the summer of 1971 in favour of the maxi dress and peasant couture, but they still hung in there around the ulcers of the youth right through the early 70s including all three installments of the on the buses movie trilogy or that that sacred boxing day ritual uh and the final word on the matter i found an advert

in the daily mirror uh this month uh from honey styles of king's cross which reads as follows hot pants £1.25 girls we have the latest hot pants in bonded orion crimpoline velvet corduroy wet look and other materials from only £1.25. We also have a special range of hot pants to fit young ladies from the age of three. Open brackets. They look delicious.

Close brackets. Oh my god. Different times. different times I didn't tell past people they could borrow my pairs of hot pants still never mind. Right now, here's Ringo Starr, filmed in Norway, and let's listen to his brand-new hit record, number seven this week, and it's called It Don't Come Easy,

up from 12 of last week. Going to be a big, big number one hit, this one. It don't come easy You know it don't come easy It don't come easy You know it don't come easy Still no on-screen Tony action and we're whipped over to Scandinavia

for what Tony predicts is a future number one. It Don't Come Easy by Ringo Starr. He does a classic Blackburn thing because he goes, I didn't tell them they could borrow my pairs of hot pants. And then he laughs at his own joke. That is such a classic Blackburn thing. Born in Liverpool in 1940, Richard Starkey was a former railway worker and waiter on a boat which made trips to North Wales before becoming the drummer with Rory Storm and the Hurricanes and changing his name to make it sound a bit more country and western. After a successful stint at the Fwelly Bucklins holiday camp, the band were invited to play residency at the Kaiserkeller, where they enjoyed top billing over another Liverpool band, the Beatles.

After joining Tony Sheridan's band for a brief period, he rejoined the Hurricanes for another buckling season, and it was at Skegness where he was asked by John Lennon and Paul McCartney to join their band, which he did. Eight years later, and two months before the release of Let It Be, Ringo released his debut LP Sentimental Journey, a covers LP, in March of 1970. And it was during those sessions that he recorded this song, which was mainly written by George Harrison. It's been held back for a year as Ringo's debut single. It entered the charts at number 29 two weeks ago, and it's up this week from number 12 to number 7. All four Beatles are in the charts at the moment, aren't they?

There's Another Day at 19, Power to the People, number 21, and My Sweet Lord is still hanging in there at number 36. I mean, at the moment, George Harrison appears to be winning the battle of the Beatles, but Ringo's more than holding his own on this showing. Yeah, well, this is the best of all those Beatles records that are in the charts at the time and Ringo was by far the

coolest Beatle in 1971 because he was the only one who wasn't trying too hard right like all the others were sort of making fools of themselves in one way or another to a greater or lesser degree because they don't know what to do outside the Beatles so Lennon's gone you know student political to try and justify his own existence and McCartney's going a bit mad because he can't believe it's over and he's making these

empty but obsessively overworked records in a kind of grinning panic and George Harrison's just done all things must pass but he's put all his eggs in one basket and doesn't know from now on it's like a sort of ever dwindling stream of religious rock songs you know uh whereas ringo doesn't give a fuck he's the one least equipped to deal with the breakup but he's cool he's just digging it he's making records with the same air of carefree gormlessness with which he seemed to play the drums right when you see him he just he's just delighted to be drumming he's just grinning and swinging his head around and and it really works you know for as long as he's got a few good songs you look at him here he he looks great he's pulling off that shoulder-length hair and beard combo,

you know, in a way that not that many people can do. He comes across as an adult. He's got nothing to prove. He's just a likeable 31-year-old dude, you know, before the drink kicks in. Offering up this culturally meaningless but very enjoyable record. Simon, as we all know, you're a bit Beatles sceptic. I am a bit Beatles sceptic.

But, you know, I wouldn't let that blind me to whether this is any good or not. So Blackburn incorrectly predicts Ringo will be number one at the start and the end, although he hedges his bets a bit, doesn't he, at the end, by giving the Rolling Stones a chance too. I'm just amazed it was a hit at all because it's dog shit um right it's a bog standard bluesy chord structure no particular hook i'd say it's not even a song really and you can whack as much echo on his voice as you like he's no singer um so it actually got to number four, which astounds me. I mean, it was, I think, his first solo single, so I guess we can attribute it to post-Beatles goodwill.

That doesn't explain why he's doing so well in the charts compared to the other Beatles. It's not as if he couldn't make decent records either, because back off Boogaloo was Belter. Photograph, even better. Photograph is amazing. But for me, this is rancid reindeer bollocks yeah i don't know i think i think people liked it at the time because it's one of the few early solo beatles records which sounds as it would have sounded as a Beatles record, right? Because it's got that George Harrison arpeggio guitar riff on it and Klaus Vorman playing bass not entirely unlike Paul McCartney.

And it's got the backing vocals by Badfinger, which is about as close as you get to the sound of the Beatles, you know, backing vocals. And it's got those slightly outmoded lyrics about peace is how we make it and all that sort of stuff, which is what we'd have got from the Beatles if they'd carried on. But also it's the same understanding of how a structure and layer and arrangement, so that even a nothing song like this

sounds kind of rich and nourishing, like those late period Beatles records you know so I think you're right in that there's not much of a song here but I don't know that anyone was really listening to the song anyway

yeah I mean the media are still refusing to believe that the Beatles are gone for good there's a front page headline in the mirror the previous month claiming that Klaus Vorman's been drafted in to replace Paul. It seems that a lot of people are going, oh, this is nice, they're having a bit of a... They're on a break, as Jeremy Carr would say.

Yeah, it's like the penny hadn't quite dropped yet, that the Beatles were associated with the 60s. And that was all they were going to be. I mean, if they had got back together, it would just have been, you know, double albums with overdone gatefold sleeves produced by Richard Perry, and, you know, it would have been all right,

but it's, no, no, no, leave it, leave it. This song was actually on Top of the Pops a couple of weeks previously with a different film. It's essentially a colder version of Ringo's scene in A Hard Day's Night, isn't it? He's just basically arsing around on his own. Yeah, well, he was in Norway already because he was filming a Cilla Black special.

Right. So while they were there with the BBC crew, Michael Hurl went out and shot this clip, which is completely needless because there was already a video for It Don't Come Easy He just wanted to ask around with Ringo for the day didn't he? No oil crisis yet so hang the expense

get a helicopter, whatever fuck it, get a helicopter shot of Ringo just playing the piano in the snow who cares? There's a lot of him, I was going to say skiing but it's more of him falling on his arse and getting his black flares all sodden and arsing about on a yellow snowmobile and, yeah, playing the piano in the snow. Yeah, he's got a primitive snowcat.

It looks like a bumper car. And he's driving it around as if he's really hungover. You know what I mean? No, hang on. A snowcat is one of those ones with tracks. Oh, is it? Hang on, what's this? I can't remember.

What's he got? It's a snowmobile, which is also known as a skidoo, but that's like a trade. That's like Hoover. It's like a trade name has become generic. Okay. It's no banana splits, though, is it? Oh, what is?

No, it's partly because he doesn't convey the sense of madcap uh funsterism you know what i mean he he's like it was bloody cold you know what i mean he's uh but also he's in a period where every moment is wasted when he's not behind a drum kit or a bottle yeah you know yeah so he does look like he wants to go back and sit by the fireplace with a nice Brandy Alexander I like how Michael Hurl who of course was later king of Top of the Pops brought a

scouser with him to help him because David Spence who edited this also worked on the Liverbirds so there's a scouse connection but videos like this piss me off I'll be honest I think they're made in the assumption that we'll find

their antics or their holiday footage delightful somehow I don't I just, you know and you know, I suppose even as I'm saying this I realise how ludicrous it is that I'm bringing up the

plausibility or otherwise of what goes on in a music video but why is the piano in a field in a snowy field that's never

explained really the best in some shots it's on wooden boards yes some it isn't so obviously

they didn't put it on wooden boards and then it started sinking started sinking see that footage I would watch that's what I want to see yeah So obviously they didn't put it on wooden boards and then it started sinking. It started sinking. See, that footage I would watch. That's what I want to see.

Oh, and I like the opening shot as well because it's from above and you see him leaving this trail and it looks like he's drawn a massive knob in the snow. It's like, go on, Ringo, my son. What a shame he didn't make a Snow McCartney and then whack it with a cricket bat I was reading an old interview with Ringo the other day

from the old Beatles magazine from the 60s and they went to his house to do this interview and it said hang on it said after wandering around the grounds we walked back up to the house and ringo showed us his wood i thought wow man the 60s is a free and easy and then it said

that's enough questions said ringo let's have a cup of tea and he disappeared out of the room to return a couple of minutes later with a tray two cups teapot a bowl of sugar and a plate of munch mallows oh he wasn't even the biggest consumer of munch mallows in the beatles john lennon said that i always feel a bit bad because when when we're about 16 me and my mate uh were in london and we were really pissed and we thought we'd go and see Abbey Road Studios. So we went there, just the outside. And everyone scrawls

all these messages of love to the Beatles all over the wall. And because we were drunk, we wrote Ringo Smells, which I'm sure he didn't. I bet he was aftershave from Monte Carlo, you know. And his breath's not a polo mince to cover the scotch.

So the following week in Don't Come Easy jumped three places to number four where it stayed for three weeks. The follow-up, Back Off Boogaloo, spent two weeks at number two in April of 1972, only denied its rightful place at number one by Amazing Grace by the pipes and drums of the military bands of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guard.

And he'd have his fourth and final top ten hit on the bounce when You're Sixteen got to number four in March of 1974. You're Sixteen, you're legal and you're mine. Oh my god. I've just realised why that video pisses me off right. It's because it reminds me of another video that pisses me off which you know people mucking around in the snow. It's the police

to do do do da da da. But maybe that's unfair because I could have thought of Wham last Christmas and they're quite likeable. Or Mariah Carey for that matter. It's an early entry in the very rich pop stars

larking around in the snow and showing us how rich they are kind of genre. Well it's either Ringo Starr or the Stones that's gonna get you the number one slot, I'd say. Here's a fabulous new record from Lulu, Chartbound, and it's called Everybody Clap. Hey! The distinct lack of an on-screen Tony continues as he backs away from his prediction of Ringo getting to number one and saying the Stones might instead,

with Brown Sugar currently at number four. Neither of them did. He then introduces a tune he guarantees is chartbound. Nope. Everybody Clap by Lulu. Born in Lennox Town, Stirlingshire in 1948, Marie Laurie grew up in Glasgow and at the age of 13 she responded to an advert put out by a local pub band called the Bell Rocks who were looking for a new singer and she appeared with them on Saturday night gigs. Rocks who were looking for a new singer and she appeared with them on Saturday Night Gigs. At the age of 15 she was picked up by her manager Marion Massey and signed to Decca and her debut single a cover of the Isley Brothers Shout got to number seven in June of 1964.

She racked up six more top 20 hits during the rest of the 60s but by this point had gone two years since her last hit boom banga bang in 1969 although she scored a us number one that year with to sir with love nonetheless she was a regular fixture on bbc one hosting her own light entertainment show which began in 1965 this song the follow-up to Got To Believe In Love, which failed to chart despite getting plugged on top of the pubs, was co-written with her husband Morris Gibb, and it features Leslie Harvey of Stone The Crows and

Gibb on guitar, Jack Bruce, formerly of Cream on bass, and John Bonham on drums. And here she is in the studio with Pans People, pulling a double shift. Fucking hell. Quite the line-up.

First of all, we've got to get this out of the way, right? Despite the fact that this was written by Maurice Gibb and Lulu with their weird, distanced, unworldliness, right? Surely they can't have failed to notice that the chorus sounds like everybody's got the clap. It says everybody's got to clap. It sounds like everybody's got the clap. I don't believe for a minute that this was an oversight, surely. And then when someone pointed it out to Maurice Gibb.

Well, that This Week documentary a couple of days earlier. Yeah, cashing in. It has to be deliberate. I mean, in 1971, everybody did have the clap, but you don't have to shout about it. I'm not sure that Lulu, of all people, would find this a cause for celebration, you know. No.

Incompetent dancer. Huge studio space for Lulu and her chums to cavort upon. And pants people are off to the side doing a sexy goose step, aren't they, pretty much? Yeah, and in the same hot pants outfit as Lulu, which is really cruel. It's really unfortunate. I mean, to wheel pants people back on in the same fucking outfit.

I mean, supposedly, to add to this spurious sense of community, there's like a sort of make-believe secular gospel feel to this because it's that kind of song, right? It's like a sub-gospel record. So they've got all the band in the background and everyone's, you know, boogieing to this sort of anthemic. So both people are there, there yeah throw everyone in but really they're doing nothing but

make Lulu look by comparison like a bag of washing with Iron Bruce built on it it's really seems really spiteful she's dressed like a toddler isn't she Lulu is she's got like a navy blue top and shorts and

there's a purple flower in the middle of the top. But she's wearing almost the same things as Pans people. It's just that they don't look like toddlers. Yeah, a bit more flesh on display with Pans people, obviously. Well, yeah, we often talk about daddy's faction, don't we, on this show. And with Pans people in this particular clip, I mean, I don't want to sound like Toby Young or something,

but we get a very startling cleavage shot straight away as soon as it cuts to them and then there's some random audience members shuffling about the whole thing's a very odd directorial decision and in terms

of the band members given the sort of personnel on this record we don't see that much of them. I was trying to figure out who out of the band members given who you know the sort of personnel on this record we don't see that much of them I was trying to figure out who out of the personnel you know that remarkable line up

of people involved in making the record who's actually here obviously Morris Gibbs is John Bonham isn't no well this is it

and I was very careful to find out because I found a photo of John Bonham from the previous month in which he's got a massive bushy handlebar moustache. So I was able to ascertain that, yeah.

Unless he shaved it off and then re-grew it very fast, then Led Zeppelin's proud pop-hating record of shunning top of the pops remains intact. Morris Gibbs there, very obviously, very recognisable. We're told Zoot Money is there. Is Jack Bruce? That's inconclusive. But

Leslie Harvey is there. Leslie Harvey you mentioned from Stone the Crows. The brother of Alex Harvey. And the thing everyone knows about Leslie Harvey at least if you come from Wales he died on stage. About a year later in fact, with Stone the Crows.

Stone the Crows were a blues rock band, Maggie Bell on vocals. He touched a microphone that wasn't earthed at a gig in Swansea and died. And if you're from Wales, it's one of the few things you know about rock events that happened in Wales. And the thing with

Stone the Crows is that they were co-managed by mark london who co-wrote um to to serve with love um for lulu so there's the lulu connection with that's what brought him in but as well as being co-managed by him they're also co-managed by peter grant who of course and then being able to tap up john bonham to come in and at least play on the session, but presumably he had better things to do than be on top of the Pops that night. I mean, we've spoken before about the problems that the likes of Sandy Shaw and Dusty Springfield

and Cilla Black have transitioning into the 70s, but you'd assume that Lulu, for want of a better word, had a bit more of a shout. It's weird because on the one hand, she's hugely visible at all times she's a she's a bbc stalwart by now she had her own bbc one series presumably that's why she's on that's why she's on given that she's she's box office poison in the charts right now yeah because in in musical terms certainly in chart terms she is in wilderness years you

mentioned how long it'd be since um she she had a hit uh so you know so we're talking post shout and boom banga bang pre man who sold the world it's this kind of lull in between where she can't get a hit to save her life and and indeed for for the bgs uh you know we're sort of post words and massachusetts and pre saturday night fever so they're kind of in the dole judge as well but you know imagine being a viewer at this time you know you're thinking we didn't buy this

why is it on? This is her fifth single in a row that hasn't charted never mind just the UK, hasn't charted anywhere it's a failure of democracy and you know that's not to say she hasn't made any good records Melody Fair, the previous year, there's a decent album

she made with Tom Dowd and Jerry Wexler, Arif Mardin released on Atco. Well, it was very much her answer to Dusty and Memphis. So exactly the same production team as Dusty and Memphis. Trouble is, the singer's Lulu, not Dusty Springfield.

She's not a bad singer. She's a bit of a one-trick pony. She's sort of like British Brenda Lee or whatever. But this song, you hear the title, Everybody Clap, and you just think loser immediately. There's just something about it. The heart sinks. Everybody clap. You think, oh, God, that sounds a bit desperate, you know?

It's this kind of sentiment of trying to get everyone together and you know sort of bring people from the the sort of post-60s come down to sort of get together and just vaguely feel positive about something or other and we're talking about uh you know the early part of 1971 where 68 people had died in the ibrox disaster in Lulu's hometown of Glasgow. Idi Amin became president of Uganda in a coup. The Vietnam War spilled over into Laos. The Weather Underground have bombed the capital in Washington. Charles Manson and the family have been sentenced

to death by gassing and there's bloodshed and strife going on in Jordan, Uruguay, Turkey, Poland, Guinea and Bangladesh. In response to all that, Lulu can't have, she can Guinea and Bangladesh in response to all that Lulu can't have I'd like to teach the world to sing because Coca-Cola and the New Seekers

have already got that so her idea is to solve the world's problems by clapping and when she claps she makes this kind of noise and does this fist pump this fist pump with a knee in the air and what it reminds me of right when when you're at school there's always a kid in your class who like to do performative farting right you know they say

right right you know there'll be someone in your class they go listen everyone i've got one i've got one wait wait every show every shut up and then they stick their knee in the air go like that and like really pump it out and that's just what it reminds me of when she does that yeah it is revolting isn't it those guttural grunts i don't know if it's supposed to be like a soul music affectation a tina turner kind of thing it sounds like there's a ladies tennis match it's really repulsive if you heard that noise on a betty davis record or something you'd think of sex but it's lulu um so you just it sounds like she's been impaled on an obelisk oh it's got a heavy bag of shopping yeah really

unpleasant isn't it the main problem with this record is that it's secular religious music which i fucking hate like like religious pop music without the excuse of uh of actually being religious you know it's like the greatest pop music of all time is often quasi-religious in that it locates the numinous in a godless universe and it gives you the same lift of the spirit that god people get from whatever they get you know but this is the opposite this is all the horror all the trappings of like a vw camper van full of jesus freaks you know but under an empty sky it's like the really pointless in the truest sense and it's horrible to listen to like great great record as it is hey jude has got a lot to answer for because there's a lot of these records

where they try and copy the end of hey jude that sense of you know yeah it's very simple and everyone's kind of singing along but hey jude earns that hey jude earns Hey Jude earns its plodding, overlong, major chord fade-out because it's an emotionally involving song that rises to that point. Whereas this just sort of walks straight in and yanks its trousers down, so to speak. It makes no effort to earn the participation of the congregation, which is us um it just it just says this is clapping music you will clap now yes and no fuck off it treats you like a like a four-year-old in a crowd of other four-year-olds it's really unpleasant really

nasty and like that mcginnis Flint record, it is really catchy. It's called Everybody's Got the Clap, appropriately enough. It's very catchy despite being quite unpleasant. But it's records like this that make me think of there was somebody who wrote a letter to Melody Maker once about how somebody had said that such and such a song was catchy and they were saying, look, I work in Camden and there's a bloke who stands underneath the window of my office Somebody had said that such and such a song was catchy. And they were saying, look, I work in Camden.

And there's a bloke who stands underneath the window of my office going, lighters, three for a pound, all day. Lighters, three for a pound. And he says every day this bloke would go home with, lighters, three for a pound, going round and round his head. It's like, yeah, I don't want this in my head. I don't want it. Three lighters for a pound going round and round his head it's like yeah I don't want this in my head I don't want this three lighters for a pound when fucking 15 lighters

for a pound man was knocking about I know disgusting man reassuringly expensive isn't it oh yeah of course longer than one pack of fags anything else to say about this when this came on i remembered my

one favorite thing about lulu which is her greatest ever moment where she was asked in 1967 for her response to the the then current controversy over drugs and pop music um and she said where is this uh people talk about this love love love thing as if you have to be on drugs before you can be a part of it in fact love is far older than pot and goes right back to jesus i'm a believer which is so exquisitely square and with just the right amount of crass ignorance in this assumption that Jesus is older than marijuana and that there was no such thing as love until 2,000 years ago. But it's like the perfect Lulu quote

in that it's very smiley, very positive, sort of on the periphery of rock and roll, feeding off that energy, but 100% reactionary. positive sort of on the periphery of rock and roll feeding off that energy but a hundred percent reactionary but at the same time too daft to be actively annoying because that's the thing about lulu have you ever lost any sleep from hating lulu no neither have i right nobody likes lulu she gets on everybody's tits but as soon as she's gone she's gone you know you forget about her she's like a a shooting pain like it's intense but it doesn't linger so you know, you forget about her. She's like a shooting pain. Like, it's intense, but it doesn't linger.

So, you know, can't even say that I hate Lulu. She's just an annoyance. So, despite this performance, and the one on the Valduna can show the previous Saturday, everybody, clap, couldn't find its charty arse with both hands. And it wouldn't be until January of 1974 that she made the charts again when her cover of david bowie's the man who sold the world got to number three thank you very much that's uh that's a new one there from Lulu.

And a very, very nice number it did. You probably saw on the backing tracks as well, there was Bill Laurie, who's Lulu's brother, and called Suit Money, and there's also Maurice Gibb, who's a hobby. And I think that's going to be a very big hit record. Right now, we're going to have a look at the charts. Three new entries this week. We've got the Delphonics in at 27, East of Eden, very unusual record, in at 22, and this one we're going to have a look at the charts. Three new entries this week. We've got the Delphonics in at 27, East of Eden, very unusual record, in at 22, and this one we're going to dance to right now.

Straight in at number 26 by Sakharin. It's called Sugar Sugar by Sakharin. Born Kenneth King in London in 1944, Jonathan King was a former boarder of Charterhouse who began his music career as the lead singer of a pub band called The Bumblies before getting into Cambridge. While there, he managed to get a record deal for his old band, and although their single flopped, he used the experience and contacts to shop around for a solo deal. And after linking up with Decker Records and the producers of the zombies his debut solo single everyone's gone to the moon appeared on top of the pops sold 35,000 copies the next day and eventually got to number four in September of 1965.

Although the follow-up single green is the grassped, King hit upon an idea that would flourish throughout the early 70s, releasing singles under a pseudonym. He put out his Good News Week with the help of an RAF band called Hedgehoppers Anonymous, which got to number five in November of 1965. By the late 60s, he'd discovered and produced a band from his old private school, Genesis, written a column for Disco Music Echo, presented a music show for ATV, worked a stint at Radio 1 and was the assistant to Sir Edward Luce, the founder of Decca. He also scored his second solo hit, a cover of The Ombres Let It All Hang Out, which got to number 26 in January of 1970. It was in late 1970 when he cranked up the band projects. After two flop singles as Nemo,

he tried again with a cover of It's The Same Old Song under the guise of The Weathermen, which got to number 19 in February of this year. And this is a cover of The Archies single that got to number one for eight weeks from late November to mid-December of 1969, under the name Sakharin, and it's up this week from number 37 to number 26. And finally, we get to see the kids getting on down.

Yeah, we see a lot of them, don't we? It's kind of an important historical document. It really is. There's a lot of attention upon the flowers of the Slough Technical Training College in their ragweed t-shirts, but I'm not sure it was wise to come on top of the pubs with the words SCRAG 71 across their chests. But yeah, they are being

employed as a sort of intern Pans people, sort of junior Pans people, aren't they? Up on that sort of mezzanine stage, like the under 21s for football let's go back to the um to the article uh the rolling stone article by robert greenfield uh because this this describes uh what we're seeing here so dolly is a particularly english word for a girl a secretary or model or go-go girl whose main function is to be decorative.

One of Top of the Pops' hidden attractions for viewers are the dollies who are on display. The young girls who come to shake and pwnay in the time-honoured Hollywood and go-go traditions first pioneered by the Gaziri dancers on American TV. first pioneered by the Gaziri dancers on American TV. A 15-year-old girl who appeared on the programme regularly told a reporter, Mum and I have spent more than £100 on clothes for the last five appearances. If you don't look spectacular, the cameramen won't notice you. Everyone I know watches, another regular gushed, so you don't mind spending all your money to look good. Instant stardom, that's what this is. Joan is 13. She met Samantha twice

on Top of the Pops and once on a radio show. She used to tell everyone she was 23 years old, she said. She loved Top of the Pops so much. No one ever gave my daughter any trouble Jones mother says. No one ever approached her. She was just an acquaintance of this girl. It was the girl herself I think. That's all there is to say about it. She would have done the same thing if there had been no Top of the Pops mum and I reckon Jones says says timidly, but she did love it so much she got it in her head and couldn't get it out. It is a month since Claire Ruffland died and the stories about her in the British press have stopped. Her parents have moved to a new address and don't want to give any more interviews. For one reason or another all journalists are banned from the Top of the Pops studio. Black uniformed security guards enforce the ruling,

questioning strange faces and checking at the exits and along the studio floor. In the studio, the clarinet player concentrates on the chessboard balanced on his lap. The flute player waits for his move as they both wait for a break in the run-through to end. Top of the Pops is being taped on Wednesday night, one night before it's shown over the air in BBC's special colour studios. A huge hangar of a place with a ceiling hung with lights and steel framework girders, as if some giant had been at play with an erector set. Jimmy Savile is this week's host.

His hair sprayed very white, a big cigar in his mouth and out again, and in his hand. He's found a paper party favour that he whizzes into the camera. The run-through ends and the outside set of doors is open to let the audience in. Two painted girls, faces chalk white over acne skin are stopped how old are you a suit and tie executive asks 17 one says 16 says the other do you have proof i have the 17 year old says i haven't uh well you see i work in marks and spencers you can call them up and check. I am 16. Go in then. Remember, the warm-up man tells us once they're inside. This is a dance program. So let's dance, shall we? All the dancing is very genteel, slightly lame, white, middle class and polite, like at a Saturday night wedding in

the suburbs, except for one girl in the corner. She has the face of a woman, the body of a girl. No breasts, good legs in aquamarine satin, hot pants, boots up to the knees laced tightly over bare skin, a see-through white blouse. Her face is painted. All throughout the show, as floor managers herd the girls from one place to another, turning them so they don't block the stars, she is painted. All throughout the show, as floor managers herd the girls from one place to another,

turning them so they don't block the stars, she is pushing, waterfalling her red hair so that it tumbles over her head when she bends to shake, banging away at the music until the assistant producers and the floor men start to notice and line her up in camera range. The warm-up man goes over to her and asks her a question. He writes her answer down. Finally, it pays off. She's pulled out of the crowd and set up to dance on a platform at the far end of the studio to Britain's number one sound for the sixth week in a row,

Hot Love by T-Rex. The closing credits roll. Every man in the room who's not working is on tiptoe, craning for a better look. It's not often you get to see a girl ball a camera. How'd you like that for a night? The suit and tie executive asks a guard, who's too old to remember. Wouldn't sleep at all, would you? The guard grins back crookedly, slamming one hand across the other and drawing it back and forth in a piston-like motion. Diabolical, he says slowly. And such hot love does this little girl have to offer as she goes one-on-one with the BBC colour lens, rolling her shoulders and opening her mouth slightly in adolescent promise of the best sex

ride around after the taping ends the girl said her name was linda salmon she was 18 years old and out of work she was a dancer she said and she wanted to work in television the weird thing is um i noticed that in the uh tony blackburn link preceding this, that the women stood around him looked very prim and proper Tony flanked by women, but only in the manner of... His women. Yeah, and only in the manner of some kind of Victorian portrait. But then we cut to this dance sequence and all bets are off again. It's a tricky one, though, isn't it?

Because young people like to dance and wear crazy clothes. Yes. It's like it's not there it's whose fault is it that all the people who know how to operate camera equipment were 40 you know and were inevitably uh at that time gonna leer and you know it's uh it's i mean what do you do just not put anyone on TV unless they're old and wearing something that comes down to the floor The 1970 episode

me and you and Neil looked at the dancers, there were plenty of dancers in the studio but we kind of clocked that a lot of them looked for what of a better word professional they were seen they were they were seeing you know they were they were like kind of like professional models mixed in with the kids

yeah or at least hand-picked uh yes their dancing skills yeah yeah um that seemed to have gone now hasn't it yeah luckily what's also gone was the thing of uh putting the girls in tiny mini skirts up on a platform and filming them from underneath. There is that, yes. Certainly overstepping the mark, I think. Yeah, but as we'll find out in certain cases, there's no need for that. Yes. They are up on a platform, but yeah, they're filmed from a certain distance.

The thing that really shows that people are not chosen anymore for their dancing ability necessarily is the guy who's right alongside the Slough Girls in very high-waisted grey trousers and a coral shirt who looks like Gareth from The Office. Gareth from The Office meets a young Marky Smith, I was going to say, as well. I mean, the blokes look fucking uniformly awful, don't they? No, they don't. No, they don't.

There's that one black guy in a... Oh, yeah, that's him, yeah. He's got a lime green shirt and a bright orange tie. Having the time of his life, he looks amazing. Yes. Also, I quite like the style of that guy. We see quite a lot of this one guy. He's got a purple jumper and a red

neckerchief, and he looks a bit like D'Artagnan. I thought... I was going to say Geoffrey Fourmile, the early years. I don't know what that is. Georgian Muldren's next-door neighbour. You know me, BBC House. Is this the bloke who keeps doing the whirly, wind-it-up hand movement in front of his chest?

No. Like he's signalling to the bench that he wants to come off. Yeah, this is one lad, and he looks exactly like the kind of lad you go to the other side of the refectory to avoid when you're at college. You know when you're 12 and you start going to the youth club disco and you're having a bit of a dance and you're trying things out and you just catch yourself in the mirror doing this one thing

and not only does it feel good but you think it looks good as well. So you do that thing over and over and over. That's what he's like he's got it into his head that doing that rotating thing is is he's going to make him look a bit of a head and it makes him look a an enormous dickhead i'll tell you what else is weird though when you look at the audience from this period there's a real gulf between the beautiful people and everyone else. Yeah. Right? And like nowadays, there's so many beauty products and makeup techniques and male grooming products that the playing field has become a lot more level.

And almost anyone can look glamorous at least or, you know, well-groomed, whatever they look like naturally. Whereas here, you get the genetically blessed on the one hand they were all full of self-confidence and you know looking wonderful and then normal people who all look really uncomfortable and like they've been sleeping in a chip shop you know um and they're mostly thin unlike now, despite the fact that nobody in the 70s did any exercise and lived on a diet of white bread, sausages, lard, custard, brown ale and HP sauce

and bowls of cornflakes with full fat milk and seven spoons of sugar on them. Yeah, Kellogg's Rise and Shine, if you were looking. Powdered orange juice. But, yeah, very distant from beauty. But in a way, I think this is how the classic early 70s look was created, wasn't it? It was normal people reaching towards glamour. But they live in early 70s Britain so they can't make themselves

look like actually glamorous people they can only make themselves look weird and sort of kind of wear weird colours and put shiny things on their face and stuff you know yeah um but it's okay because we're all at this this point, still living in the same reality. And human beings can still relate and respond to each other rather than to images and phantoms. So you get a human response and positive things can flow from it. You know, proper memories and satisfying feelings. But yeah, there's definitely a bit of a missing middle

when you look at the state of these people. There's a good opportunity to see the myriad lengths of the hot pants of the day. It wasn't one length. I mean, there's one girl with a bit of an Amy Winehouse hairdo and she's got extremely tiny hot pants on. But her mate next to her, she appears to be wearing

Freddy Starr's Hitler shorts. Yeah, I really like Taylor's point there about glam being a kind of make-do-and-mend response of Britain to the wish to be glamorous, but not having the kind of wherewithal to carry it off. Because in a way, that's what glam was.

If you look at even you know t-rex who were bumped down to uh number one uh this this week um mark bolin um sort of put glitter on by accident almost it was a makeup artist backstage who just before he's going to go on i think he's going to go and do telegram sam who said just try a bit of this and just stuck some green glitter under his eyes and suddenly that just became a whole thing and the whole movement took off and it's just something that anybody could get from a craft shop yeah it's not um haute couture and um yeah i i really like that and i i think taylor's onto something there that um it was all within reach at that

time let's talk about the charts because uh yeah as with the top of the popses of this era it's in the middle of the show and we see them dancing in front of an enormous screen yeah 1971 uh with with the chart rundown uh interesting way of laying it out i think yeah massive photos massive faces looming up white yeah some of them are terrifying uh yes the most terrifying one to me was this guy who i hadn't heard of before called jerry monroe yes he looks he looks like a cross between eric morcombe and a fascist dictator um apparently he was off opportunity knocks and he's this yodeling falsetto guy from the northeast and i i listened to his hit that is called it's a sin to tell a lie that was in his chart And it actually is quite unsettling

and quite frightening. There's that one. And then you've got Waldo de los Rios. Yes. He looks like Carlos the Jackal on the run. Yes. Hiding in the pop charts. He looks like he was picked up by Interpol

at Caracas Airport in 1974. Oh, and Fame and Price together. Georgie Fame and Alan Price choosing not to call themselves the Price of Fame. The biggest cop-out until Hoddle and Waddle went out as Glenn and Chris. Yeah. But the thing is that the massive black and white publicity photos on this giant screen um what's really disturbing about it is what they do quite often when it's a group someone's cut around the heads of the members and arrange these

like four or five disembodied heads around the screen, like on a pantomime post. Yeah, or outside Traitor's Gate. Yeah, but this is it. But by 1971, Group's hair was getting so long that they couldn't just cut round the head like a circle. They had to include two drooping lengths of lank hair on each side. So it looks like all these bands were made up of like red setters or something really peculiar and they arrange these heads at jaunty angle around the screen like it's like if if isis had a sense of humor you know what i mean the the most disturbing one is the Fantastics who is a group of four black guys with

moustaches and slightly startled expressions and it's their heads arranged in a row, they look like the contents of Jeffrey Dahmer's fridge that's what I thought, I thought exactly the same thing, the singer from the Fantastics, I assume he's a singer because he's sort of front and side, he looks dead

he looks like a corpse, yeah really weird, but the song, I mean it's a bit of he's sort of front and center. He looks dead. He looks like a corpse. Yeah, yeah. It's really weird. But the song. I mean, it's a bit of a shit semi-instrumental cover, isn't it, of Sugar Sugar. Big on the drums a la Glitter Band and John Congos, I guess, that kind of thing. Very bad guitar soloing, I thought. The guitar soloing is out of sync, but not in a cool kind of freestyle jamming way that you might go out of sync,

but bring it all back round again. It's just kind of badly haywire. That's what I thought. Yeah, it reminds me once again of the hippies in Carry On Camping. Yeah. Although this is one of the better records he was ever involved with.

That's not a bar you need to shield your eyes and look upwards to see but it is i mean it's really tasteless and horrible and quite weird and totally brutal you know i mean and the one interesting thing about the record is that it like all his stuff it comes out of a contempt for pop music. But in another way, it shows a deep understanding of pop music that it can just be complete trash, and that's OK. The usual rules don't apply. It's fine. It only has to brighten a moment.

And in that respect, this doesn't mess around, even though it is just literally messing around. I quite like to record by him which objectively is even worse Johnny Reggae by Piglets which came out later in the same year which is both worse and better I reckon

for pretty much the same reasons I tell you what bothers me about this and this is like a real pedant thing is that in the Guinness Book of British hit singles, saccharine are not listed it's listed under Jonathan King and then it turns out

that all of his various guises are just listed under Jonathan King so saccharine don't get and he must have had a hand in that because he was one of the people behind the Guinness Book so it's as if he pulled his prank on the music industry

in the early 70s by managing to get more air time than you were technically meant to have by having all these A-lises and now the game's up and he's had the hits he wants everyone to know, yes look it was me, look what I did and that kind of bugs me a bit

you know, when you by the way when you type um saccharine spelt that way with a double k uh into wikipedia what you get instead uh is the former king of luang prabang in southeast asia uh who had seven wives that this is around the turn of the 20th century. He had seven wives, one of whom was called Queen Thongsy. Which I think is an amazing name. It really needs to be like a trap artist, I reckon. Anything else to say about this? Well, that it's continuing a bit of a theme on this show. Yeah.

Yes. The disturbing thing about this is the fact that jonathan king was sort of first call for the pedo dragnet on account of being gay which is not to minimize the wrongness of jonathan king as if your name was jonathan king but there there was still this idea that a man having sex with a 14 year old boy even if that 14 year old boy was gay isn't just the same as a man having sex with a 14 year old girl it's inherently far far worse right um of course as opposed to a woman having sex with a 14 year old boy which is seen as the answer to every lad's prayers you know yes um but this it's. And I mean, it's not that there's any doubt

that people like Jonathan King and Tam Payton and Chris Denning were, you know, terrible abusers, I mean, to varying degrees, but appalling people doing appalling things to young vulnerable people. It's just this idea that somehow the finger has to point in their direction first before Britain can then go on to accept it's just this idea that somehow the finger has to point in their direction first before britain

can then go on to accept that maybe straight men failing to restrain themselves around jailbait crumpet might also be a little bit of a problem too you know it's like it's almost like the issue here is if you'd left him alone that lad might have turned out to be straight yeah yeah you've robbed the world of another straight person it's a really strange perspective that people in this country have you know i mean you don't want to say it because you sound like you're sticking up for the legends of the walton hop you know which i'm very certainly not i thought i've already told the story about how i said basically that to one of Jonathan King's employees in a pub and was invited to become one of his prison pen pals.

And it only dawned on me later that this will be because when this was relayed to Jonathan King, he heard the word journalist and his narcissistic zero-empathy brain went click. You know, maybe I can get some get something out of this you know i was reading up on um you know the the the legal case uh because i i yeah i i had this vague idea in the back of my mind that maybe jonathan king was unfairly targeted for being gay and i i was i wasn't sure of the facts and I needed to know

and basically when you look at what he did yeah it's wrong, everything he did is completely wrong but one thing that really struck me was how methodical he was about it, there's this thing that he did, apparently he approached thousands of people with questionnaires

claiming it was market research asking what they thought was most important to them. So it was like music, sport, friends and family, and so on. And boys who listed sex high in their list of priorities, they were then immediately targeted by Jonathan King. It's quite remarkable. Yeah, and I've asked if they fancy sleeping with Colombian Estudess or Samantha Fox.

Right. You know, when somebody gets their comeuppance, you know, you think, well, I never liked them anyway, good. Well, obviously, in a case like this, you think, well, if people have been hurt in this, then you feel a bit of a piece of shit yourself for saying good but I always despised Jonathan King even before all this stuff came out

he was just so loathsome to me just as a figure in pop culture you know just his fucking smug lopsided grin and his way of fucking inflicting terrible terrible mainstream American music on a reluctant Britain, which eventually caved in in the late 80s.

I've never forgiven him for that. Yeah, I'm shocked that we haven't covered one of those episodes of Top of the Pops yet. I'm sure we will at some point. Can't wait. So the following week, Sugar Sugar jumped seven places to number 19 and would get as high as number 12 he never recorded under the saccharine name again but followed it up with lazy bones a cover of the 1933 hoagie carmichael tune which got to number 23 for two weeks in june then he produced leap up and down wavy and knickers in the air for sense of celia which

got to number 12 in july followed that up with john the Air for Saint Cecilia, which got to number 12 in July, followed that up with Johnny Reggae by The Piglets, which got to number 3 in November, and closed out 1971 under his own name again with Hooked on a Feeling, which got to number 23 in December. He also produced four songs for the Bay City Rollers and sang the backing vocals on their first hit, Keep On Dancing, and then set up his own label, UK Records, a year later.

And all the other stuff. There you go, that's our brand new look at the charts. It's very nice to have a brand new number one, isn't it? Do you like the new number one? Yes. You do? Lovely. Okay, what we're going to do now next is have the LP spot from an album called Long Player. Here are Faces, and they're going to do two numbers.

First of all, Ronnie Lane's going to take the lead vocal on a number called Richmond, and then Rod Stewart and a number called Bad and Ruined. So here they are are Faces and they're going to do two numbers. First of all, Ronnie Lane's going to take the lead vocal on a number called Richmond and then Rod Stewart and a number called Bad and Ruined. So here they are, Faces. It's pretty good. It's pretty good. Okay. Tony, amongst the kids again, says it's very nice to have a new number one and asks a hot, pantered madam if she likes it.

She thinks about it and says yes. Finally, he introduces this week's album section, which features Richmond and Bad and Ruin by The Faces. Formed in London in 1969, The Faces were the small faces, minus Steve Marriott, who had pissed off to form Humble Pie, but plus Ronnie Wood and Rod Stewart, who had just left the Jeff Beck group. They released their debut single, Flying, in late 1969, but it failed to chart. And the following LP, First Step, came out in March of 1970,

only getting to number 45 in the album charts. This appearance, as part of Top of the Pops' LP section, is a showcase of their latest long player, Long Player, which has just come out and hasn't charted yet. Now this is a regular thing on top of the Pops of the era because this year we've already had the Rolling Stones doing tracks from Sticky Fingers, we've had the Groundhogs, Neil Diamond, McGuinness Flint, Badfinger, Cleo Lane, Tom Paxton, The Hollies, The Four Seasons, The Kinks, Elton John, Stevie Wonder and the cast of Jesus Christ Superstar. And do they generally get to do two songs? Is that the deal?

Yes. Okay now. Seems like a very anti-pop thing to do. Massively anti-pop. The old Grey Whistle Test doesn't exist yet, but it nearly does. And there's this thing called Disco 2, which is a sort of precursor. Which is on tonight. Was it Richard Williams presenting that? I can't remember.

I believe so, yeah. So basically, in all but name, the Whistle Test is there. And it's there, I think, for this kind of stuff, surely. I mean, if you look at the charts, we could have had Remember Me by Diana Ross, Didn't I Blow Your Mind This Time by the Delphonics, or Heaven Must Have Sent You by the Elgins. I mean, you chucked two out of those three in, you've got a fucking

blinding episode of Top of the Pops. I feel really sorry for the kids in the audience as well, because they're gamely trying to boogie to a song, certainly the first bit, that has no... Richmond. Yeah, Richmond, which has no beat. And, you know, this may be the only time

they get to be on top of the pops in their lives, you know, the audience. You know, this is their sort of respite from their grey 1971 lives. And you get the fucking, well, the two Ronnies starting off with a bit of bottleneck guitar. And the camera's zoomed in on their hands and fingers. And we can hear one of them says,

it's very good. It's like, oh, fuck off. And then the camera pulls back and I'm thinking, which one of these two fuckers is Smugly saying to the other one, oh, it's very good. And we later find out that it's Ronnie Lane saying it.

This is bad because I know about his illness and I know it's really sad what happened to him. I can't look at him. His face just makes me feel unwell. He's like a jug-eared wasp chewing. He's like a melted John Alderton.

He is. Someone throws some bog roll at him. Sadly, not pre-used, which is fair comment. We later find out what the bog roll thing's about. But yeah, then it goes, it's pretty good again. And they're smuggling. It's like when Bloody Ronan said,

oh, it's Boys Over Live on Top of the Pops. And they're going, oh, look, we're playing live, everyone. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because we're a proper band. The way they smile at each other it just makes it so clear that it's for their own benefit this is literally wank yeah right and just in the background you've got you've got rod pulling inexpertly at an upright base but you know so that the fucking lyrics of richmond by the way i mean richmond before we go into rich into Richmond's essentially shaking you got the silver by the Rolling Stones, isn't it? It goes, the women, because it's all about being in New York.

It's basically super trooper, but not as good. Right. So he's going, he's going, the women, they may look very pretty and some they know it, but some look good. They show a leg and smile but they all look like the flowers in someone else's garden that's actually the best bit but it's basically about being in new york and missing missing your woman back home but it's insipid it's pitiful it's just rubbish yeah i mean i originally i thought oh they mean richmond virginia but no obviously not no ronnie wood and all that lot they're all, they're all from Surrey, aren't they? So it's

that Richmond. Yeah, they mean Zach Goldsmith's stomping ground. I used to work in Richmond and I don't miss the fucking place at all. It's fucking boring and expensive. Fucking Richmond or New York in 1971. See ya. Yeah, exactly.

I really like the faces, but after that super charged top 20 rundown, I'm not really yearning for a slow, playful Cockney blues. So why they chose to do Richmond... It's like getting Dusty Ben, isn't it? Yeah, but as we've seen before and we'll see again, any kind of tampering with the basic Top of the Pops format is a mistake and it only leads to dilution and loss of focus.

You know, it's what happens here. Like someone's reached out and grabbed the giant brake lever and yanked it. You know what I mean? Yeah. Underneath that slide guitar, you can hear this almighty mechanical groan as the programme slows down to a crawl to let some goats across the tracks.

And this week, it's not really the kind of show where this sort of boozy, you know, bonhomie really makes any sense. It's like they've walked in off a different show or out of a different pub. If it had been on Disco 2 or, you know, Old Grey Whistle Test a few years later, it'd be like, oh, yeah, fair enough. Yeah, OK, I'll listen to this. But because it's on top of the pubs, it's like...

Yeah. It's like, fuck off, this isn't for you. Yeah. It's actually like playing football with your mates having a really good game and then some fucking dads come spilling out of the pub pissed out of their brains and thinking the fucking Socrates

at least when it kicks into bad and ruined at least that's got a bit of life to it well yes yes and this is where we see the problems for the faces because it's clearly obvious that Rod's not going to be tied down to this band for much longer

No, because he is he's ugly sexy you've got to say that for him, he's got a massive fucking nose and a warty face but he's got this kind of sex appeal to use a very 1970s term that can't be denied really even if he's worryingly Bobby Gillespie

like at times in this game Although I would say Rod's tight, revealing trousers, possibly ill-advised in light of his rather unimpressive bulge. Now, I mean, maybe he's a grower, not a shower. Right, fine. But in that case, get a different tailor, because those strides were made for Jimi Hendrix. It's not flattering at all.

And then we then uh yeah we we find out the source of the toilet roll gag it's ronnie wood has got a guitar in the shape of a toilet seat so it's some kind of bad in joke going on um and then you got um so the keyboardist that's mclagan isn't joins in um and then we get a shot of the drummer, Kenny Jones, who looks like a cross between Derek Smalls and a young Desmond Lynham. Yes. Yeah, he's had a go at a tush, hasn't he? Yeah, he looks like a Dutchman.

But yeah, it is weird watching the audience try to dance because it is an uneasy shifting around because you need to be a bit drunk to move to this music because it's booze music as surely as roots reggae is weed music you know this is sweating brandy and it's all wet lipped and open mouthed you know um but it's young people's boozing right it's the it's the world opening up in front of you you know and all of it is funny it's not that sort of middle-aged boozing where you're simultaneously pacified and demoralized you know these lads have a drink and their bodies loosen up you know as opposed to shutting down

but yeah it's it just doesn't fit here you know and i And I think these songs were re-recorded. They're not actually playing live live. I think the vocals might be live, but the music certainly isn't plugged in. But it's not the record. So I think they've gone in and re-recorded it in the way that all groups were supposed to not mime to the record, but of course they never did.

You know, the famous dodge was you were supposed to give the master tape to the Top of the Pops people that you were going to mime to the record, but of course they never did. You know, the famous dodge was you were supposed to give the master tape to the Top of the Pops people that you were going to mime to, and it was supposed to not be the record. It was supposed to be a re-recording of the record. And at first, what people would do was go into the studio, just slightly mix something up and something else down, and say, there you go, it's different.

And then they stopped even doing that. They just gave them the record. Well, if that's true, then the two Ronnies here with their fucking circle jerk at the start, they're not even fucking playing that bottleneck guitar. They're just sort of miming it and looking at it and going, oh yeah, this is pretty good. Fuck off.

And speaking of not live, the applause at the end is hilarious. It's like it's been flown in from a 3,000-seater venue. You know, there's a little sweetening going on there, I think. I thought it was quite funny that when you get the transition from the slow song to the fast song, the producers get a bit creative with the colour washes and the special effects on the camera. You know, it's like, yeah, let's freak out.

It's rock and roll now. Jesus Christ. There's one bit in the Rod Stewart one that I did like. It goes, and I'll be down on Cannon Street, passport in my hand, should you not recognise me in my heavily made up eyes. This is addressing his mother who might not recognise him because he's been living this debauched rock and roll lifestyle. And then the song slows down a bit towards the end

and Rod starts barking like a dog for some reason but there we go Blue Tulip Rod Stewart Yes! So over a week later the long player entered the UK album charts at number 33 eventually getting as high

as number 31 in late May and their only single from it their cover of maybe i'm amazed failed to chart however rod stewart's third solo lp every picture tells a story was released a few months later and got to number one for six weeks and the lead-off single from it maggie may ruled over the charts for five whole weeks and when the band reconvened at the end of the year for the next LP and nods as good as a wink to a blind horse they ended up with the number one LP and the single Stay With Me in February of 1972 but it was getting near the time when they were known as Rod Stewart and The Faces. After The Faces, Ronnie Lane formed a band called Slim Chance

with Gallagher and Lyle, who we've already seen in McGuinness Flint. This episode is like one of Pete Frame's rock family trees. It's so tangled. That's right There you go, that's our LP spot, sir, and a very good one as well. Thank you very much, though, to the faces. Right now, Hot Rex has been at number one for six weeks running, and it really is quite nice to have a brand new number one record, particularly when it's as good as this.

So here is Dave and Ansel Collins with their number one song, which is called Double Barrel, isn't it? You forgot, didn't you? Here it is right now. which is called Double Barrel, isn't it? You forgot, didn't you? Here it is right now. I'm the Magnificent. I'm back with a shake of a bowl of salt.

More socking, mocking, music on the mocking. Sounds of salt. I am Double O. And I'm still here again Tony, with the kids clustered round him once more Tells us that Hot Rex has been number one for six weeks But no longer. Hot fucking Rex, for God's sake. What a great name that is. If you were like a male

stripper and you come on like dressed as Rex Harrison. Yes. It'd be brilliant. It does sound like a sort of alias of bummer dog. Yes, I was just about to say that. Yeah, Hot Rex. Sorry. Sung by Rod Stewart. That'd be great, wouldn't yeah, Hot Rex. Sorry. Sung by Rod Stewart. That'd be great, wouldn't it? Hot Rex.

Yes. He gets a girl in Dungarees to say the name of the new number one, but she forgets. It's Double Barrel by Dave and Ansel Collins. Born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1947, David Crooks began his career in the mid-60s as a vocalist in the Two Tones, who was then poached by Winston Riley and drafted in as a replacement to lead singer Pat Kelly in his band, The Techniques. together by Ansel Collins, who was also born in Kingston in 1949 and was the keyboard player in The Invincibles, who played on Pressure Drop and Sweet and Dandy for Toots and the Maytals, and was asked to imagine that he was James Bond on top of a mountain. Two years later,

and three weeks before this episode, Collins was in the studio with The Techniques and Riley received a phone call from Trojan Records in London telling him that Double Barrel was at number 17 in the UK charts and selling like an absolute bastard and they were required for Top of the Pops right there and then so they cleared out for London and were whisked straight to the studio for their debut performance the record soared 13 places to number four,

got to number two last week, and has knocked Hot Rex himself off the perch that he'd been sitting on for the past six weeks to attain its rightful slot at number one. And here they are again in the studio. Who's going to start by saying how fucking monumentally skilled this song is? You won't get any argument out of me. It is fucking mint.

Yeah. One of the best records we've dealt with on this. Yes. I would say alongside Kung Fu Fighting as the definitive number one of the 70s. Really? Yeah. Yeah. From my point of view.

But this is fucking skilled. It is. It's one of those ones, we often get this, when a record is so good, you almost can't talk about it. Yes. It's almost impossible to say anything. Except all you can do is talk around it or talk about the performance. Yeah, or talk about the first time you heard it.

The first time I heard this song was in the late 70s. McDevill was working at the co-op again. And we used to go to the co-op social club in Nottingham on a Saturday night and the DJ without fail would play this and Monkey Spanner back to back every week and everyone of all ages would be up on the dance floor fucking having it to it. Yeah I suppose I would

have first heard it by going backwards from being into two tone you know 79, 80 I was getting into two tone ska and for a start you had the specials covering a lot of this kind of stuff on their b-sides um and then once my dad twigged that i was getting into this he had all these sort of compilation albums like club scar 67 all these lps and stuff like that so that that would have been how I would have heard this for the first time. But I love the fact that in Britain of 1971,

I think this is a really working class number one. Yes. I think it's not just being bought by skinheads in Brutus short-sleeved shirts and oxblood Dr Martens, but it's being bought just by masses of you know british working class people who you know it's probably not coming off being played on the radio that much i don't know it's probably very club based i think it only had about 33 plays on national radio before it got into the charts so it's a very real very true number one it's sort of grown organically from

just people fucking loving it. Yeah. Because it was really hard for reggae singles to get a foothold on the Radio 1 playlist. So this is the second reggae song to be number one after The Israelites two years earlier. So there is this whole thing going on, this sort of skinhead movement around this time. Yeah. I love the fact, all right, there was a bit of a lull in the mid to late 70s, but that there was this thing that was then echoed a decade later by Two-Tone. And it's just, it's a sort of underwritten about time, I think.

And of course you had all kinds of weird shit like fucking Judge Dredd and then, you know, like Prince Buster and his Ten Commandments and some sort of ropey old dodgy records like that. But, you know, it's a really interesting phenomenon, I think. Bass Culture by Lloyd Bradley. That is a fucking amazing book about the history of reggae. Right. I think there's a two-and-a-half-page section

describing reggae record shops in the 70s, and I think it's my favourite bit of music writing ever. It's fucking amazing. That's an interesting point in itself, because how many copies of this record were shifted out of reggae shops that weren't even chart return shops? Exactly, yeah. Exactly.

I mean, it goes on in it, how difficult it was for Trojan to get a foothold on the Radio 1 playlist. They'd turn up a broadcasting house and just basically have the door slammed in their face and they wouldn't take a blind bit of notice to a reggae song unless it got into the charts on its own and they couldn't not play it

and this is quite an unusual one to take off as well because it's not something like The Israelites which is basically a pop song you know, which has got a sort of verse chorus structure and anybody can sort of latch onto it, this is basically you know know a sort of sound system record in a way it's it's a it's it's a rhythm track with a guy occasionally shouting over the top about how fucking awesome yes you know which is it's really unusual this is why you talk about um this record being

in a way hard to talk about well part of the reason for that is that it's pure music. Do you know what I mean? Like the concept of pure film, this is like the equivalent. It's just pure music. It's like it doesn't get much purer or more essential than this, you know, which is like the opposite of a lot of people's view at the time and ever since, not just of this record, but of anything that breaks the rules of cole porter

or rogers and hammerstein you know it like it's not music you know this isn't real music because there isn't a song getting in the way you know uh you don't have to go through that quite as much now but every new generation has its share of hippies and snobs you know but back then that went really deep you know really really deep like not just uh among people programming radio one but amongst heads as well you know so it's not real music and it wasn't just a a racial thing um is it was as you say it was a class thing it's the fact that records like this were big on football terraces and youth club discos and people who wouldn't go to university. And the records themselves were not cerebral in any way. So they fell foul of that sort of weird misplaced middle brow approach

to pop music that hung around for years. When in fact that's the strength of this record, that it's simultaneously totally natural and instinctive and physical but also it's tantalizing in its inarticulacy right in that it throws out so many abstract and disjointed ideas and little suggestions it's more stimulating to the mind than most of those records that you can read like a book um and also you know it jacks up your nervous system and it gets things moving that way it's like a piece of magic you know which only makes sense to people who understand the form uh

consciously or unconsciously you know and in that respect it's almost 100 i am the magnificent double yeah yeah you can't argue with it and it helps that Dave Barker is one of the voices of God him and Chuck D I would say Chuck D Old Testament Dave Barker New Testament it's a bit harsh on Dave Barker isn't it

he doesn't even get a surname on the credit Ansel Collins gets his surname on it because for how long did I think they were brothers yeah yeah precisely and also Ansel Collins gets his surname on it. Because for how long did I think they were brothers? Yeah, yeah. Precisely, yeah. And also Ansel Collins gets screwed over by his first name getting spelt differently pretty much everywhere you see it. Yes.

Two L's, I-L. Yeah, E-L, I-L, yeah, yeah. At least Tony Blackburn didn't call him Dave and Ansel's bitter. The other thing with Dave Barker, he doesn't do that much on this record, but if you listen to the original instrumental version of this that Ansel Collins did with, what's his name, the producer, Winston Riley, Nuclear Weapon.

Yes. It's got a better title. But it's just his, it's like a lot of those records they did together. It's just his, Ansel Collins' weird ice rink organ over like this massive gut bucket bass you know and rhythm track and it's not a quarter as good as this because it needs that sort of broken up vocal to give it that strange sort of abstraction you know that kind of weird feel. And of course, this is a version, isn't it? Yeah.

Completely different. Obviously pre-recorded, especially for Top of the Pops. And, you know, if someone had told me before I watched this that, oh, it's not the same, I'd have been really fucked off. But it's just as brilliant as the single. And to emphasise how startling the whole thing is at the very start we get that strobing effect on oh yes face which you know ought to come with some kind of warning for people suffering epilepsy yes it was i mean which i'm not but it started to freak me out he's like

shot from two angles yeah yeah clicked back and forth yeah that because it would have been it would have been shocking to see this yeah a shock of mighty if you weren't seeing it on top of the pops everything about the presentation is great though they've got like they've got those the dim studio lights they got that strobing quick cutting there's that deep blue set

it's all really different to the sort of cheap bright look of top of the pops later on you know it's like the record's being taken seriously and it's being treated with a bit of thought and care, which sort of faded out of Top of the Pops, you know. It's a lovely self-contained clip and it's a really good example of how music can work on TV

with just the bare minimum of care and thought and respect. And of course their presentation is great because Dave and Ansel are wearing rather nice plum coloured suits and in Dave's case he's got a neckerchief that looks like a twister

mat. Yes. And the rhythm section are dressed as, what they african tribesmen yeah yeah it's fantastic because it's like a an embrace of roots but also almost like a piss take you know yes because it's like i mean these guys are standing there playing fender bass and stuff you know it's a very 1970s but it's like there's gonna be people at home thinking that oh well they're from jamaica or something go home and eat fried sheep's face or something you know pray to some unholy god you know but and it looks fucking brilliant you know yes because those lads

have got the figure for it as well it's not like mungo jerry covered in woad. That wouldn't have been as good. On the record, of course, Sly Dunbar, 18 years old, I think, the first record he played on. Sadly, that's not him on top of the pops. I was going to say, it's not them, is it? No, he wasn't able to make it over. We spoke earlier about the people who hated reggae,

and one of the most outspoken of them was none other than Tony Blackburn. He constantly claimed that reggae wasn't proper music in interviews. If he had to play a reggae record, he'd sometimes pull it off halfway through, and if he had to play a reggae cover version, he'd immediately follow it up with the superior original. I'm very disappointed to hear that. I didn't know that. And surprised as well.

He apologised for it later, but at the time, yeah yeah he was not feeling the rhythm if you will yeah but you have to say you look back at certain charts and you know when you see certain things at number one you just go yeah that country had its head screwed on at the time yeah things just feel better when there's a really fucking amazing number one yeah and of course if you're're a 14-year-old black kid, this must feel like victory in the early 70s, seeing this on top of the pops at number one. I guess so, but I see its presence as being the result of a love affair between the white British working class and black Jamaica.

Because I don't know the stats, but I wouldn't have thought there were enough black people in Britain at that time alone to get that so high in the charts it's definitely a white working class thing just buying this amazing record

and not just this amazing record but dozens of them you know I mean the one black lad in the audience he's well chuffed oh he's having time of his life absolutely yeah and by top of the pops 70s standards it's a shockingly cosmopolitan audience isn't it yeah because you've got really you've got him yeah you've got one asian lad in this kind of like late 60s suit and a pink tie and you've got two oriental girls yeah and you've got black people and basically it's a diversity that I think Top of the Pops

would lose for a while before regaining it later on. But yeah, I found that really striking. It was really quite cheering to see that. Yeah, but four people out of a studio of 200. True. So Double Barrel will spend one more week at number one before it was usurped by Knock Three Times by Toli Orlando and Dawn. The follow up and the other track he recorded that day, Monkey Spanner, got to number seven for three weeks in July of this year.

And they would sadly never trouble the charts again although collins would go on to record stalag 13 the rhythm track best known for ring the alarm by tenor saw and bam bam by sister nancy and what's it called by general echo oh what's that record called oh shit i've forgotten what it's called great record by general echo anyway same because some of their i mean i've got the album Double Barrel and there's some fucking tunes on it, man. The follow-up to Monkey Spanner is the most early 70s record ever. Tun Up Kids. Have you ever heard it?

Yeah. It's fucking amazing. From Trafalgar Square to the Isle of Man, we're riding high. It's just the most 70s thing ever. Black Jamaicans singing a song to British skinheads about Hell's Angels Thank you very much indeed for watching. Hope you've enjoyed the show.

Be back with us at the same time next week for another edition of Top of the Pops. See you then. Bye-bye. Tony has the cheek to come back at that girl who forgot to say double barrel. Fucking hell, Tony. At least you didn't call Mark Bolan hot Rex or anything. And this is the thing, right? This is your flagship pop programme, yeah?

BBC One, the fucking state broadcaster. And the fucking host fucks up badly on something. Surely you can spend one minute to go back and say, all right, say that again properly, Tony. It's so ridiculous that I half wondered if he was doing a thing. But he's not. It's not a joke. No.

And he signs off with Jigga Jig by East of Eden. Formed in Bristol as Pictures of Dorian Gray in 1967, East of Eden were an early progressive rock band who signed to Durham Records a year later and released their debut LP, Makata Projected, in 1969. Their second LP, Snarfoo, was put out in early 1970 and got to number 29 in the album charts, but they didn't get a sniff of the singles chart until now. This single, the follow-up to Northern Hemisphere, which didn't sell dick, is a less heavy departure for the band and is a mash-up of three traditional reels.

The Ash Plant Reel, Drowsy Magge and Jenny's Chicken. It was released in May of 1970 and for some reason has only now been picked up by the pop-crazy youngsters and it's up this week from number 34 to number 22. 34 to number 22. Well, the first thing we need to say about this is that we finally get to see the Slough Technical Training College Ragweek Princess of 1971. And chaps, explain her attire

in a manner more couth than I ever could, please. Well, she's basically wearing a long T-shirt and very visible knickers, and that's it. Yes. Yeah, it's like she's had to get out of bed to answer the door. Yeah. Unbelievable flashing of knickerage. and that's it. Yeah, it's like she's had to get out of bed to answer the door. Yeah.

Unbelievable flashing of knickerage. But she's actually doing some amazing dancing there. Oh, yes, she is. She's totally having it. Yeah, frugging. Properly going for it. But who can blame her with the sounds of East of Eden resounding around the studio? It's a hippie bewitch.

Yes. It's just what everyone wants. I've got to say that first bit. Al, what was the name of the first of the three jigs? The Ash Plant Reel. Ash Plant Reel. Right, because that first bit of the song, that sort of wig out psych instrumental bit that they do I really felt that it

must have influenced one to another by the charlatans. Very similar riff going on. But then, yeah, it suddenly turns into this kind of well a jig or a cayley or whatever and it gets to jenny's chicken doesn't it it's it's very weird it's a sudden lurch isn't it it really is it is and david our good friend once made mention during a performance of remember you or a womble that british people cannot get enough of irish fiddle and his opinion is proven absolutely right here isn't it? People just burst

into smiles like three year olds seeing a balloon. I ate a reel. I mean prog bands scoring novelty hits is usually bad enough at the best of times right but when they get jiggy with it it's nightmarish. I can't

stand this. I can't say I can sort of take it as part of traditional music right like traditional irish or scottish music it doesn't trouble i don't like it but it doesn't trouble me because it's sort of aesthetically coherent um but when you take that jaunty shit and you put it in other kinds of music as a cheap way to grab the ear, you know, or to signify, you know, Celticness or something. It makes my heart weep. It's like, let's all have a hippie knees up. You know what I mean?

It's like the point where Fairport Convention... Knees up, mothers of invention. Yes, yeah. Sandy Denny leaves Fairport Convention, and almost instantly they go from making this authentically creepy affecting music to playing like the 17th century equivalent of agadu you know well full of what in his red barrel um the whole thing reeks of that gloom that that that very early 70s british hippie prog rock gloom,

which is what I always associate with this stuff, where you've got like hairy blokes in mouldy greatcoats lugging their gear into a comma van, you know, because they've got to drive to Staffordshire Polytechnic for a gig in their refectory, and they haven't built most of the motorways yet, so they've got to go via Northampton, and it takes five hours you know uh it's a sort of newsreel ira bleakness when you see melody maker front covers from 1971 and it's like a picture of someone playing a les paul in a

vest with their armpit hair sticking out you know what i mean like kipper yeah it's just like oh you know bummer man my old lady's hamster pissed on my stash it's like you know it's a yeah it's like not never mind punk react explain kipper uh you are taylor to the uninitiated kipper oh from uh confessions of a pop singer is that what it's called yes of a Pop Singer. Is that what it's called? Yes. Confessions of a Pop Star? I haven't seen it for years. Yes. Yeah, they were the group that Robin Asquith joined on drums in that and basically sounded like a proto-Oasis. Yes.

My favourite fact to come out of reading up on this lot is that the violinist for Mies de Wieten, Dave Arbus, not only played on Baba O'Reilly by The Who, but was also in Fiddler's Dram. Yes. But sadly, he'd left them before Day Trip to Bangor. So otherwise, that would have been quite an amazing connection. And I love this bit.

This is, I'm just going to quote directly from Wikipedia here because it's so beautifully understated. The three core members, Arbus, Keynes and Nicholson, reunited in 1996 and their album, Calypse, was released the next year. Like most of their earlier work, it was a cult hit. That's total spinal tap. Their appeal became selective.

And the other thing I hate about East of Eden eden don't name yourself after a piece of art which already exists which is better than what you're going to do oh i always hate that with band names yeah yeah a book or a film or a painting or worst of all somebody else's song you know how clearly do you want to signal that you're fundamentally second rate and this isn't even an imaginative one or an appropriate one because most people when you hear east of eden first thing you think of is maybe james dean and you can't really imagine him doing the river dance the brooding sexual charisma of jigger jig you know fucking jig off jigsaw had the brooding sexual charisma of Jigga Jig. Fucking Jig of Jigsaw had more brooding sexual charisma.

He was in Rebel Without a Cause, not Rebel Without the Cause. Oh, yes. Come on. Fuck's sake. That was off the cuff. Very good. The band you were talking about earlier, Taylor, on the way to the Polytechnic. Renia of course.

We've spoken about the All That Glitters Schools Program documentary about the suite. At the same time they did one about an upcoming band called Renia who were basically all those things that Taylor talked about earlier. Check it out on the video playlist

Pop Craze Youngsters. So yeah I mean this is essentially one last chance to have a good old lair at the flower of the Slough Technical Training College. And it is weird you know it's like have we learnt nothing? I mean seeing this now you just think how the fuck did that get on the telly? And yeah it's just you know

all through this we've been talking about were they making certain editorial decisions because of caution and having their wrists slapped? And suddenly, at the very end, no! So the following week, Jigga Jig leapt seven places to number 15 and would eventually spend two weeks at number seven in late May. The follow-up, Ramadan, failed to chart, although it got to number two in France,

and they never troubled the charts again. After myriad line-up changes East of Eden finally packed it in in 1978. And that, dear boys, is the end of this episode of Top of the Pops. But 45 years later in the wake of the BBC's investigation into Jimmy Savile the Claire Offlan story was brought up again when Tony

Blackburn was sacked after 49 years at the corporation after he was summoned to the inquiry to discuss the two interviews he was alleged to have had with his bosses in the wake of the inquest two meetings he claimed not to have had BBC Director General Tony Hall said that Blackburn quote had fell short of the standards of evidence that such an inquiry demanded and asked him to retire from the BBC, though he was reinstated at BBC Radio London eight months later. Bit of a cunt's trick, I think, on Tony, that. Yeah, they were just looking for an excuse.

Yeah. One thing I quite enjoyed was there was an interview that Tony Blackburn gave in response to all this stuff only a couple of years ago. And he clarifies this whole idea about him being suspended. And he says, the one time I was taken off air was when I said the

miners should go back to work. Yes. So what's on telly afterwards? Well, BBC One goes straight into an episode of Comedy Playhouse written by John Lloyd and Graham Garden. Then it's Zed Cars, The Nine O'Clock News, Donald Pleasance and Thora Heard starring The Foxtrot, which is this week's play for today.

Then the current affairs programme, 24 Hours, and finishes off with a documentary about the Royal Institution of Great Britain. BBC Two is midway through Newsroom with Peter Woods, then Lady Astor's Buckler is interviewed in the short documentary series Times Remembered, followed by The Money Programme, Gardner's World, Nana Muscori presents Show of the Week, then the news, Disco 2 featuring Cochise and Loudon Wenwright III and finishes off with the 1945 French film Né. ITV is about to screen On The House, the Kenneth Connor and John Junkin sitcom

which also features Robin Asquith and Derek Griffiths. This week, News at Ten, the movie review series Cinema and rounds off with Pete Murray murray presenting the sun tv awards so what are we talking about in the playground tomorrow dear boys what i would have been talking about at the nursery school on trinity street in barry at the age of three would have been the big yellow car in the mixtures video that girl dancing where you could see her knickers let's face facts yes i mean especially in 1971 because that was the nearest thing to hardcore pornography that british people had you know because you know it was either that or off to the abc to watch a sex comedy called stick it up

downstairs you know with arthur lowe as the lord of the manor. Gabrielle Drake as his faithless wife. Linda Hayden as a nymphomaniac serving wench with an IQ of 40. And a taste for gone-to-seed middle-aged men with teeth like a blown-over fence. And what are we buying on Saturday? Double barrel, all day long. Oh, yeah. Dave and Ansel, Ardeen, Ringo. I've been tempted to buy the Jacksons record

if I hadn't already bought it twice before under different titles. And what does this episode tell us about 1971? The 60s is done, but the 70s are still gurgling and screaming and anything could yet happen. Who knows it might be brilliant. Rockism

is trying to kill us but reggae and soul will save the day. And that me dears brings us to the end of this episode of Chart Music. All that remains is a usual promotional flange. www.chart-music.co.uk facebook.com

slash chartmusicpodcast Join us on what the fuck you call it, the thing where people are racist to each other. Oh yeah, Twitter. Chart Music T-O-T-P money down the g-string. patreon.com slash chartmusic Thank you very much, Simon Price.

You're welcome. Ta ever so, Taylor Parks. Cheers. My name's Al Needham. Ugh! Chart music. Yeah! I'm a mother for a new home Where there's will be more than one More than one

I'm a mother for a new home I have a word with all minds. You dropped one I tell you something he said he bring the house down he certainly did even the dog didn't know where it was we all did what do you think to be British made me ashamed to be British. Oh, I feel all like that. Do you uptight? Oh, I'm tired, yeah. What about you?

It made me ashamed to be here. I think Tony did his best, and that was the saddest thing about it, really. I see. That's not nice. It's not nice.