Chart Music: the Top Of The Pops Podcast - #39 - May 21st 1981: Grill Equals Fanny

Episode Date: April 23, 2019

The latest episode of the podcast which asks: did Phil Oakey ever have it out with the Undertones for coating him down on My Perfect Cousin? This episode, Pop-Crazed Youngsters, is the longest EVER, but don't blame us - because there is so much going on in this episode of The Pops, and we take a concentrated blast of 1981 full in the face. No lie, it's wave after wave of late-Eighventies pop brilliance, broken up by assorted bits of rubbish, and Dave Lee Travis in an elongated hat. We've coated down the Living Gnasher Badge enough times, but in this episode, we step back and contemplate Dave Lee Travis: motorsport expert. Dave Lee Travis: Lennie Bennett-foil. Dave Lee Travis: Photographer. Dave Lee Travis: Renaissance Man. Musicwise, fucking HELL: The Undertones readjust for the Eighties. Teardrop Explodes - possibly off their tits - show the youth that there's more to life than chicken pancetta. Kim Wilde vandalises a dead nice public toilet. The Beat (again). Chicken Steven (again). Smokey Robinson invents Airbnb. Legs & Co cause DLT to blast a jet of steam from out of his hairy earhole. The Human League steal the entire show, before Adam Ant jumps through a window and nicks it back. It's a glorious romp through quite possibly the greatest year in pop music history. And - finally - TOYAH IS IN RECEPTION. Taylor Parkes and Neil Kulkarni join Al Needham for a hijack of the Alpine van of 1981, loaded with the fizziest and most colourful pop imaginable, and gleefully veer off on such tangents as the many different things you can do with a wall and a dog ball, the Kidderminster UB40 Club, Shaky dropping the strap at a Viz wrestling battle royal, obscene graffiti we have known and loved, the hell of being spotted in a cat cafe on your own, and a flick through Travis' photography book, where he asks attractive female celebrities what they're scared of, and brings their nightmares to life. You KNOW there's gonna be 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? Erm... Chart music. Chart music. Hey! Hey up you pop crazed youngsters and welcome to the latest episode of Chart Music, the podcast that gets its hand right down the back of the sofa on a random episode of Top of the Pops. I'm your host, Al Needham, but arseholes to me, the real street knowledge lies with Neil Kulkarni and Taylor Parks. Morning.

Team ATV Land is back in the house, everyone. Give my regards to Broad Street. Oh, very good. Panel, things that are pop, things that are interesting. Tell me all about them. I went to the circus, which, I mean, it wasn't that pop, but it was fantastic. It was the best thing I'm going to see in a tent all year.

And I think I fell in love actually or with oh there was this performer and she was so multi-talented it was unbelievable she'd come out on a motorbike which already impressed me and then she did some frankly inappropriate gun work um spinning pistols in her hand and then she did some whip work which was thrilling and some lasso work which was equally thrilling which was enough skills but then 20 minutes after that

she appeared in the corner of the tent belting out Proud Mary and she had a fine set of pipes on her and then later on in the finale when they repr the um smile intro that they started with she was playing sax so she just had such a devastating range of talent i was just i fell in love i think good lord what are the the perfect post-brexit girlfriend absolutely but the circus is just it's just fab and and i always want to write a review of a circus and then follow them, you know, follow them on the road,

do a feature. Be a circus grouper. Totally. I think it's down to, I think my sister used to repeat... To get with her, you've got to go with all the clowns first. You do know that, don't you? Well, there was only one clown. That was nice.

And to address any possible coulrophobia, we had no makeup. And he was very funny. But, you you know my sister always used to tell me that i followed the family home from the circus and that's why i was part of the family so i think i've got that residual affection towards the circus but it was fantastic i haven't been to the circus for about what 45 years on the on the field which is like one street behind me now i remember going with my mam all i can remember is really wanting a clown mask and uh my mam going off to get one and then her coming back and saying yeah i was going to get you a clown mask rl but i saw the elephants

pissing into them and then it was another 20 years later it just suddenly dawned on me that maybe my mom was was lying to me and she just looked at the price of the mass and just went fuck that he'll only break it tomorrow i don't know it's quite plausible of course that you don't get any animals in the circus anymore they've just kind of been replaced by motorbikes now which is fine yeah i'm still wondering what where all the other clowns have gone yeah custody oh very good so how you been taylor i'm all right just soaring away at what's left of my life uh what's the most exciting thing that's happened to me i saw a bloke walking down bethnal green road muttering to himself glenn camp assassinated which is I thought that special

knowledge made him very charismatic and so I took to Twitter to call Glen Campbell's surviving family shills and liars but other than that not a lot. Now you know how we go about in chart music Pulp Craze

youngsters we don't do anything before we shake that arse for the lovely Pulp Craze Patreon people who have stuffed their dollar down our G-strings. And the latest batch of people who have dropped $5. A shinty bulger. Christopher Caruso. Richard Copping. Mac McClure. Simon Galloway.

Mike Landers. Benny Poole James Langer Tam Aitken Tim Young Sarah Mark Lassoer Mike Melia and Don Whiskerando

oh aren't they lovely them folk yeah good of Benny Poole to leave his 1940s big band can't give us a bit of cash Yeah, good of Benny Paul to leave his 1940s big band. Can't give us a bit of cash.

And let's not forget the Pop Crazy Youngsters who slipped in $3 into that G-string. They are Sam Turner, James Med, Dan Metcalf, Andrew Fielder and Paul Isherwood. They're lovely as well, aren't they? Lovely $3. I mean, it chafes somewhat, but it feels good. And if you are dobbing your tithe into chart music, you're also bribing your local chart return shop with satin tour jackets and making a contribution to the chart music top 10.

Oh, I love this moment. Hit the fucking music. New entry at number 10 for That Girl Dancing Where You Could See Her Knickers. Straight in at number 9, The Definitive Non-Sandwich Band. Back up two places to number 8, Taylor Parks' 20 Romantic Moments. Last week's number 4, this week's number 7, Fred Westline.

It's been shoved up three places to number 6, here comes Jizzum. Last week's number 2 drops three places to number 5, Bergerac meets Rockers uptown. Bouncing straight back up from number 7 to number 4,

it could only be Bomberdog. Back up three places to number 3 for Your Dog, Mates. New entry at number 2, Tony Blackburn and the Gay Ones, which means... A brand new chart music number one. This week's highest new entry, straight in at number one,

Hot Rex. Inevitable. You knew it. It was just fucking nailed on, wasn't it? It was. It's still so great to see Bummer Dog rising up yet again. And here comes Chisholm? It was. It was. It's still so great to see Bummer Dog rising up yet again. And here comes Jizzm.

I mean, it just won't go. And I don't want it to go. I want it to be in the top ten for a good while. So the new entrance, that girl dancing where you could see her knickers, what kind of music's that? Who cares, eh? The definitive non-sandwich band. Definitely early 70s.

Mm. Mm. You know what I mean? Swirling, organ Definitely early 70s. Mm. Mm. Yes. You know what I mean? Swirling, organ-driven blues rock. Yes. Yeah. Yes.

Greenslade. Like you were saying in the last episode, Taylor, one of those bands where the bass player's got a vest on and you can see his armpit hair. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And, of course, we've established that Tony Blackburn and the Gay Ones, they're rock steady.

Yes, of course. And Hot Rex could only be a glam dog. So there we go. The shocking element of that top ten is the doolies with ghoulies dropped right from number one, right out of the top ten, man. They're in summer season. Yeah, definitely, yeah. They, they're in summer season. Yeah, definitely, yeah.

They must have deleted themselves like Wet, Wet, Wet did with the lovers all around, just adding off. So don't forget, Pop Craze youngsters, not subscribing to patreon.com slash chart music and lobbing over your subs is killing music. So get your arse over to patreon.com slash chartmusic and make our G-strings swing beneath our ankles. Come on, let's get them dragging along the floor behind us. So this episode, Pop Craze Youngsters,

is taking us all the way back to the silver age of Top of the Pops as the time sofa touches down upon May the 21st 1981. Oh! End of the Aventers, I believe, chaps. Yeah. We're doing a 1981 episode without Simon Price, which feels like we're cheating on him.

I'm sorry, Simon. You know, we've all got needs. Yeah, this means nothing. Yeah, I'm fucking them, Simon, but I make love to you. It feels wrong that Simon's not here because he would fight a bear

if that bear could talk and it came up to him and said 1981 isn't the greatest year for pop music ever. So, you know, the first question to the panel is where does 1981 stand in your eyes? For me, it's a cracking year. It's a great year for pop music. And I know the argument has been in the past between 81 and 82 is a kind of zenith.

I would say 81 hit heights that 82 didn't, and it's possibly the best year of the 80s all round in terms of pop music. Yeah, this is interesting because it's the first point in pop cultural history where the Second World War is no longer significant. I was watching this episode and the penny dropped with me. Almost everything that happened from rock and roll right through to the late 70s was either shaped by the war and the experience of war or the social changes that followed it

or it was part of that mass cultural and artistic reaction to the reality of the Holocaust and the atomic bomb or at least coloured in some way by its place in history so soon after the Nazis, right? Like, reached its logical conclusion with punks in swastikas because that was the flattest and dumbest and most obvious form of nihilism. But then after that,

this is the first generation of pop musicians born after the end of rationing. Do you know what I mean? They don't look skinny and malnourished like Dickensian urchins like the Stones or something, or stunted like the Small Faces. They're just healthy, comfortable North Europeans. And the 60s happened when they were kids,

so they took it all for granted and grew up in that world. For these people, the Second World War is just a black and white film and a leather helmet they found in their granddad's shed. This is the first real post-war generation. And this decade won't be overshadowed by recent trauma. It will be overshadowed by potential trauma or the anticipation of trauma. And so, as such, the stage is set for a lapse into narcissism and solipsism.

But the energy of pop music and pop culture is still strong enough that loads of it will be truly fantastic, just in a new and slightly peculiar way. I didn't get any of this because in 1981, I was still drinking school lunchtime water out of those dull metal beakers in like metallic gold and red and blue which tasted of coins you know

and I was still dealing with silence and solitude by thinking about stuff and reading a book and all this which set me up to fail in the 21st century too dumb to wing it and too smart to get involved. So, in the news this week,

Peter Sutcliffe has just been found guilty on 13 counts of murder and is receiving his sentence tomorrow. Francois Mitterrand has been elected as the first socialist president of France. Raymond McCreesh and Patrick O'Hara have become the third and fourth people to die in the IRA hunger strike. The German magazine Die Aktuelle has published a bugged phone conversation between Prince Charles and Lady Di and has sold a million copies of their latest issue. The Pope is back on solid food after being shot earlier in the month but the big news this week

is that Adam Ant has had a phone call off Michael Jackson asking him where he gets his dead fancy jackets from I wonder if this was the year that the sudden Adam Ant's dead rumour went round my school there was just a day where we turned up

and just everyone was talking about Adam Ant being killed in a car crash it's always a car crash isn't it it is always a car crash because a few years later it was Ade Edmondson when the young ones were at the height of its popularity we had that exactly the same rumour because a couple of years previous to this we had Mork

Mork had died in a car crash in an egg or something I don't know in the late 90s I was working at Nickelodeon as a

web designer and the massive rumour was that I think it was Kel out of Kenan and Kel he died presumably in a car accident but in a nicer bigger car

and it got to the point where they had to get in touch with Nickelodeon in America and say look can you just get Kel to film a little something to say look you stupid British cunts I'm still alive shut up it's the wonder of a pre internet age you can't get it confirmed or denied

by anybody oh yeah yeah thank god no one lies anymore and you know mythosol propagated thanks to the internet on the cover of the enemy this week the beat on the cover of smash hits this week department s the number one lp in the uk is stars on 45 by star sound kings of the wild frontiers number two. It was number one previously for 11 weeks on the bounce. Over in America, the number one single is

Betty Davis Eyes by Kim Carnes and the number one LP is High Infidelity by REO Speedwagon. So me boys, what were we doing in May of 1981? I was eight turning nine and people had stopped bullying me about my glasses and it was just kind of straight up racism by this point which was easier to deal with in a way but

it was it was the last time i had a street life in a way um and i don't mean a dodgy street life what i mean is i lived in a normal i lived in a normal street in 81 in 82 i moved to a very middle-class neighborhood where there were no kids on the street so my memories of 81 are quite vivid yeah hours of Kirby and the VG shop down the road and the girls doing cartwheels

do we have to explain Kirby to some of the Pop Crazy Youngsters the foreign Pop Crazy Youngsters maybe the foreign Pop Crazy Youngsters perhaps Kirby was a game in which you and your co-player stood on opposite sides

of the street and threw a football and tried to bounce it off the kerb back to yourself and that was

basically it and you swapped if it fucked up hours and hours of fun only interrupted by the most

exciting moment of the week in 81 which was I don't know if this happened everywhere I'm guessing it did but for us in Coventry anyway it was the arrival of the week in 81, which was, I don't know if this happened everywhere, I'm guessing it did,

but for us in Coventry anyway, it was the arrival of the Alpine Man. Oh, mate. The Alpine Man on a Sunday. You get there. Oh, man, he was a chap who used to drive down the road with a sort of milk float, basically, but it wasn't milk on his float.

Oh, my God, it was pop in all the colours of the rainbows, in all the flavours you could imagine. In those god like the cherryade was yeah like johnny's but the cherryade was a particular favorite and yeah the waiting for the alpine man just playing on the street from dawn till dusk yeah this was the last time i had that i moved in 82 to like i say a middle class neighborhood no kirby no kids on the street just old couples and part of my you know part of my my retreat inwards if you like not only inwards physically into the home but retreating into myself through literature and things like that so 81 a happy last year of normality really you know i was still playing kirby but i was i was also

very much into waller as well which was just bunging a ball at a wall right and there was different variations at our school you had certain rules for certain walls so the b your standard wall with a tennis ball and you know you just lobbed it on the bounce against the wall and you had one bounce to catch it. There was sports hall waller, which involved a rubber dog ball at the sports hall wall. And that was a bit more intense and full on. But then there was also this really intricate version of waller that was in a corner with a load of vents

so you could play these fucking amazing angles. But the best game of all was what we called death waller which was essentially um you used the youth club roof which was on a slant and you threw the ball up and you couldn't see where it was coming down and you had to catch it on the fall uh but because some youths had thrown up bottles and bricks and everything you could be standing there listening for the ball

and then all of a sudden this fucking half brick had just come tumbling down at your face we made our own fun you see if you showed a kid

a tennis ball now and we made our own injuries as well if you showed a kid a dog ball now they'd look for the USB connector or something

yes well I was coming to the end of the second year at Top Valley Comprehensive waiting for the jam to get their arse in gear and release a new album and I also had a really nasty gash under me chin not because of anyone else but because of my own

fucking you know rigid adherence to the modernist ethic I really wanted a shirt with a collar bar, you know, like all the snooker players were wearing at the time. And I got the collar bar, but I didn't have any shirts with a hole in the collar like you're

supposed to have. So I decided to just ram it through a school shirt collar. And while I was doing that, it hit a bit of plastic and went off at an angle. And yeah, it basically just ripped the underside of my chin. Ouch. Yeah, blood all over the place

fucked up shirt, not very happy man. I bet not. You know those stupid things, because people got bored with their school uniforms and you used to fuck around with them. Yes. Those adaptations, you'd be pleased to know actually, they still go on. I wait outside my

daughter's school every day to pick her up and you know see what the see what the kids are doing yeah and yeah you know that thing where you tie your tie so that only the short

bit is kind of showing and the rest of it's kind of hidden that's still going on the rolled up sleeves are still going on so Phil Collins still exerting an influence obviously

so these board adaptations of uniforms still continue it warmed the heart to see it still fucking up at school still hating school but the good news at this time was i got a part in the school production of the tempest and i was yeah i was i was trinculo the jester so i got to wear this fucking bob on jester outfit and i had a little jestery head head on a stick. Oh, nice. Yeah, and, you know, I was really enjoying arsing around and really definitely enjoying knocking about with arty fifth-year girls from the nicer estate.

Yeah, while dressed as Timothy Claypole. Yes. Does that put a bit of a doubt? They thought I was cute, though, you see. Oh, yeah. Because that always works works doesn't it but yeah you know so there'd be lots of arty girls with crimptears who wanted to sit on my knee

and tell me how cute I was and it was like oh yeah this is good I mean as previously discussed you me and Taylor actually this was thick into the country dancing barn dancing era of high school we were heavily into that. Music and movement had been left behind.

So we were firmly into the barn dancing phase. You can't be a tree forever, can you? No, you can't. And also, 81, I recall, I think being the exciting time when we first got our cartridge pens. Oh. A thrilling moment.

I call them fountain pens, but they're not really, are they? You don't need an inkwell for them. But yeah, getting the cartridge pen, loading it with cartridges, breaking the nib within about a day, it was a thrill a minute. At school at the time, for us older boys,

the big technological advance was those paper-made pens that you could rub off the ink. Do you remember them? No, I don't remember them. You could use a rubber to rub them out, you mean? Yeah, rub the ink out, yeah. I do remember those. I haven't thought about those since 1981, but yes.

Well, that's what short music's here for. Yeah. But it was that way you could get your mate who was showing off with his pen and dasting them to write, Sir is a cunt on their book. And then watch them try and rub it out and realise they've left a little indentation and shit themselves.

Glorious times. So, yeah, you know, it was a time where kids were expected to be able to understand Shakespeare and, you know, complicated shit like that. And, you know, I used to be in, I was in like the know complicated shit like that and I you know I used to be in uh I was in like the Nottingham Council Youth Theatre a few years later we were pissing Shakespeare out of our arse and I went to a reunion a few years ago and we ran into a load of kids who were they're doing it now and you know we got chit-chat and everything and he said oh when we were here we were doing A Midsummer Night's Dream

and Romeo and Juliet, and Carol Churchill, Vinegar Tom, and all this kind of stuff. Oh, what are you doing now? High school musical. For fuck's sake. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, without anyone consulting with them.

Is this a bit too much for you? You know what I mean? Yeah. Don't get me started. No. That's the whole of the show. Yeah. It's funny, though, because there is something very damp and depressing

about this period of time. And that's how I remember it. And I know that that's how I perceived it while I was in it. I remember thinking, fucking hell, this is a damp and depressing world. And I sort of knew it had something to do with the time period. But, you know, this may or may not be coincidental, it was also vibrant and speedy and early Thatcherism notwithstanding,

relatively free. And, you know, you can't blame me for looking back with a bit of envy to this time, to be honest. Because, okay, you could barely walk to the shops without getting punched in the face by the Weetabix. Or you couldn't go to a football match without getting cold, especially if you were anything other than a ruddy shade of white. But if you were a smart-ass critic who took pop music far too seriously

and prone to overthinking and bouts of disproportionate fury, you could end up in a three-storey townhouse with a brown-eyed American film studies student and a well-fed Persian cat, you know, rather than approaching your 47th birthday in the certain knowledge that you're doomed to expire in a cardboard box in the doorway of Casino. Better times, I think, overall.

Yeah, it was rough. I mean, I remember Saturdays match days when Coff City had you know were at Highfield Road which was near to town

town was just a no go area on match days especially for the likes of me because you know I think my parents had been hiding me

from this aspect of things for a while but I had started going into town myself and hadn't worked that out in my A to Z of fear, don't fucking go into town on match days. Because when I did, the grief I got was amazing, even though, you know, I was an eight-year-old bloody kid,

but obviously 30-year-old boneheads have got nobody better to shout at. The same arseholes who made your life a misery at school were now making your fucking life a misery on your weekends off. Yeah, but look what happened. Look at this Top of the Pops. Yeah. Look what happened in response and in reaction to that. Spoiler alert, Pop Craze youngsters, this episode is fucking mint.

I mean, I think it may well be the best episode of Top of the Pops, quality-wise, that we've ever come across. Although there is a mathematical reason why that may not be true, which I'll explain in good time. Ooh. No, it's dead strong. It's just pow, pow, pow, amazing song. I feel like a great episode.

Yeah. So what's on telly today? Well, BBC One kick-off at 6.40am with two hours and 20 minutes of the Open University. Then it's nearly three hours of schools programmes before they shut down for exactly 52 minutes. They come back with regional news in your area, the midday news, then Pebble Mill at one, Chock-a-Block, You and Me and then 45 minutes of more schools programmes. After closing down again for 53 minutes it's more

regional news in your area then play school the perils of penelope pit stop hyde air john craven's news round peter duncan climbs down gaping gill in blue peter and the amazing adventures of morph after the evening news we get more regional news in your area, nationwide and what else? Tomorrow's World. BBC Two also starts at 6.40 with an open university splurge followed by Play School. Then they shut down for two hours and 40 minutes

before racing from Goodwood. And then they close down again for 35 minutes before two more hours of the Open University. Then it's Tales from a Long Room, a short documentary about the MCC's cricket tour of the Belgian Congo, told through a magic lantern slide display. Then the mid-evening news, and they've just started Delia Smith's cookery course, which focuses this week on barbecues and picnics. ITV begins with The Good Word, five minutes of religious blather at 9.20, followed by regional news in your area and two

and a half hours of schools programs. Then it's Woof It, Get Up and Go, The Sullivans, The News at One, more regional news in your area, Take the High Road, David Steele is interviewed in Afternoon Plus, but probably not about Cyril Smith. The Comedy Play Tights, about a stolen lorry full of hosiery, and Derek Beatty chats with Pat Coombs in Look Who's Talking. Then it's Albrecht, The Fantastic Four, Tarzan, The News at 5.45, Regional News in Your Area, Crossroads and they're 10 minutes away from

the last in the series of the Kenny Everett video cassette featuring Dire Straits. This series of Kenny Everett was moved from Mondays to Thursdays in direct competition with Top of the Pops which pissed him off so much that he went back to the BBC.

It's a bit naughty of ITV that is isn't it why try and compete I mean TMTP is it's not exactly a gesture of confidence in Kenny Everett either is it well I'd say no I'd say they were out to poach viewers

from Top of the Pops it's not going to happen it's not going to happen it It's not going to happen. It's just, you know, it's a big fuck you to Cuddley Ken. It was, yeah, I just imagined myself hitting a six straight down the middle of the Belgian Congo. Yes. As told through a magic lantern slide. Perils of Penelope Pitstop. When I was about five, I really, really fanils of Penelope Pitstop. When I was about five,

I really, really fancied Penelope Pitstop. And I would get so fucking upset every time she was tied to a trunk or when the hood of Clora looked like he was going to kill her and everything. I would scream and cry so much that my mum had to turn the telly off. Oh, those are my favourite bits.

Do you ever think about going on a double date you and penelope pitstop and simon price and the receptionist from hong kong food we'll find yours one day taylor then it would be merciless no right about that time as well i was reading core comic and there was a strip in there called rat trap about this master criminal called dr rat and the kids would write letters to the police or whatever saying you know if you did this and that usually involving cheese and cages this is how you capture him and he always got away and uh he was so fucking terrifying i used to have screaming nightmares about him to the point that when me and my mum went to the paper shop to get

core, she asked the bloke behind the counter to stick the pages together with sellotape so I didn't accidentally open them up. Oh, bless you. There's nothing more terrifying than the thought of a rat with a PhD. Yeah.

I was so lame in my comic reading at that time I don't think I've moved on from what I had been reading so it's still the Beano and the Bees and all that and money in comics used to excite me Mustapha Million

really excited me the pumpkin billionaires it was a really yearnful age because I remember the Argos catalogue just getting lost in that daydream game of everything you touch you'll end up getting in the Argos catalogue, you know, and just leafing through the pages. And just actually spending a couple of minutes just looking at the fridges page because the fridges were always so full of food. They were stocked in a way that British fridges were not. And, oh, yeah, just yearning,

just touching things in the Argos. Did you ever play Bagsy with someone? No, what's that? You got a catalogue or whatever, and you turned a page, and you just touched the shop Bagsy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, me and my mates were still playing Bagsy at this time

with things like Argos Catalogue. Kind of moved on to Men Only a year or so later. Well, you had the showers in the Argos Catalogue, which did provide, I seem to recall, a glimpse of stuff. But, yeah, no, just massive yearning going on for products that we were never going to get, like a LaserDisc 2000. The best thing about money in comics

is that if you were rich you would push it around in a wheelbarrow. Like just bags of coins, not even notes. With a pound note sign on them. Yeah, like as if you were working in the Weimar Republic, you know what I mean?

But I don't believe that in 1981 this would have been a safe thing to do. No. Pushing bags with the pound sign on it. With coins literally falling out of your pockets of your shorts. You just don't care. Yeah, like I've a lot and Tony broke. Yeah.

He was never happy though in the end, was he, Ivor? No, no. Mustafa Millian seemed pretty happy though with his wealth. Yeah. He was never happy, though, in the end, was he, either? No, no. Mustafa Millian seemed pretty happy, though, with his wealth. Yeah. Then again, did he have real friends? I guess that was the question. Yeah, I mean, he escaped... He could buy some.

He escaped the sort of racial prejudice you'd expect a North African kid in an otherwise entirely white school to experience. But it just never happened because people could go sledging on tin trays down a pile of money in his garden. Too much fun to be had.

You see, that's how you eradicate racism in this country. It's a good way to get free entry into the British establishment generally to break through what used to be the colour bar of the good old British establishment, be an unscrupulous oil shake. Yeah, I mean, this is what needs to happen now.

Just give non-white kids stupid amounts of money. Seems fair. Yeah? Isn't that what they do anyway? All right Alright then, Pop Craze Youngsters, it's time to go all the way back to May of 1981.

Don't forget, we may coat down your favourite band or artist but we never forget they've been on Top of the Pops more than we have. Good evening and welcome to another edition of Top of the Pops. No introductory music, no opening titles bar a multifaceted montage of the classic Top of the Pops logo

in white on black and we're instantly faced with the horror of tonight's host in a tight red jumper with no shirt underneath and a matching benny hat with a rainbow-coloured extension on the top, which makes him look like he's being grabbed by the hair by a gay pride Mr Tickle. OOPS! Dave Lee Travis.

It's a detumescent raster hat, is what it is, really, isn't it? It's like the front bit or the head end of it is like a bobble hat. Yeah, with TOTP DLT on it. Yeah. It sounds like something you'd see in personal columns in gay news or something. Yeah. Straight acting male into DLT T totp no no time wasters it's not me i mean it's not amusing it's a phallic gesture that hat and it's not appropriate he's a fucking heathen

baboon and having that having that sock on his head is a blatant pagan right it extends a good three or four feet doesn't it it does well it looks like he's just on the verge of launching into the full Algernon razzmatazz at any moment, which I'm sure he was itching to do. He was probably waiting to try it out at the police dinner dance. At this moment in time, the living Nashabge is currently pulling a double shift on Radio 1. He's doing a daily hour from half past three to half past four before giving up a besweated leather chair to Steve Wright. And then at 7pm on Thursdays, he presents Wheels, a car and motorbike show,

which makes him the hairy late T. Furthermore, he's also starting to make a move towards mainstream television work. He's been booked in to talk about cars on an episode of Mad About, the ITV kids' hobby show currently hosted by Michael Benteen, and later in the year, he becomes a regular guest on Punchlines, the happy shopper Celebrity Squares, with more perms. He's also about to spend the late summer as part of the Somerset Seaside special in Minehead, along with Joe Loss and his orchestra, Tom O'Connor, Freddie and the Dreamers,

the Wurzels, Kenny Ball his jazz men and Derek beta oh what a fucking lineup man it's like the Woodstock of HTV West isn't it that and he's going to finish the year as part of a

celebrity team on family fortunes alongside Diddy David Hamilton Ed Stewart Pete Murray and Tony Blackburn. Clearly a man looking for life after Top of the Pops, isn't he?

He is. Because, you know, it has to be said, has there ever been a presenter so out of touch with the times as Dave Lee Travis in 1981? He's starting to look, yeah, atrociously dated. It's still an eternal 1976 for the hairy cunt flake here isn't it the thing is you know obviously always trying to remember what i actually felt at the time um dlt the big hairy sandwich i wouldn't say i was exactly fond of him as an extremely small child but i liked him

i think because he was basically he was like someone's funny dad and i didn't have a funny dad which i was perfectly happy about. My dad's rare bits of humour were so rare, they're unforgettable to me and my sister. But DLT, he was like one of those dads in the street who never needed much of an excuse to dress up as a woman for Cov Carnival or dress up as a Santa for the kiddies and the old folks at Christmas. And when you're a little kid, you don't really realise

that such massive quote-marks characters are often just cunts hiding hiding their swaller behind this supposed altruism I think I did start hating him a few years after 81 by the time of the golden oldie picture show definitely hated him um even with my limited exposure to him at that point he had become tiresome and and by then of course I mean at that time you never doubted that he would be on the telly for the rest of your life because by then everyone that you saw on telly had been there all your life and and this notion of any kind of Matthew Bannister overthrow was totally foreign and unheard no no no so so you know i i i don't want dlt in 1981 to try and be fashionable i mean at all no god no but but there comes a point i think where stylistic intransigence like he's displaying looks less like clinging to what used to be marketable and just like the kind

of immovability of a stuck in the mud cunt convinced that they've always looked great and i think that's what's going on here with the hat and with everything else his his look and his entire performance on this show could have been like you say from 76 and probably should have been you know kept there well he's kept on quite a short leash on this program. As if even 1981 was embarrassed. But even in his box he has that timeless capacity

still to make you think fuck off and comb your face with a bullet. And as ever it wouldn't be so bad if he didn't so clearly have this idea of himself. You know what I mean? He's like a fucking,

he's like an arms dealer in a strip club. You know what I mean? Just swaggering about. He doesn't think he's doing anything wrong because he's crazy. He's fucking crazy. You can't predict what this guy is going to do next. He might subvert all

your preconceptions of light entertainment with a single game-changing remark or or he might hack one of his balls off and fling it at the duke of edinburgh you can't he's just crazy you can see that from the 30-year career doing exactly the same thing. Yeah. Reporting from the motor show every May. Yeah. Yeah, I've not heard anything of Wheels, but you can imagine, can't you? Yeah, you can.

He's not suited for Top of the Pops in 1981. He should be dressed up as, I don't know, a Pierrot or a Belgian movie star from the 30s or even a robot. I mean, I've been looking at a lot of German pop television from the 80s because hey, I'm that crazy. And there's one called, I think it's called WWF.

Nothing to do with wrestling, unfortunately. That would make it even better. But they do have a robot co-presenter. And it's like, that's what, I mean, fucking hell, DLT sounds like a fucking robot anyway. Can you imagine if there was a robot in Star Wars called DLT? These are not the droids you're looking for.

You've pilchard. This is definitely not the droid you were looking for. Before we back away from Mr Cornflake, I must read a letter I received last month from a pop-crazy youngster by the name of Jason Hoyle. And it goes like this. Hey gang, just thought I'd share this with you. From 1983 to 1988, I was at secondary school in a town called Chapel-on-the-Thrith, just down the road from Buxton in Derbyshire.

Sometime around 85-86, a new chemistry teacher tipped up to try and learn as horrible little oiks some of that there science. Being that the school had a high percentage of farmers' kids and rural council estate tearaways, she must have soon realised that she wasn't going to be living out any Gene Brody fantasies. She was a pleasant enough lady, but was undoubtedly a little anxious, so during that first lesson, and probably in order to show that she was down with the kids, she announced that she was the sister of local boy done good, Dave Lee Travis. The news was greeted with, apart from a few sniggers and sideways glances, rows of nonplussed, pussspeckled faces staring blankly back at her. Unfortunately for her, it didn't end there. From then on, whenever she entered the classroom, she was serenaded with da-da-da-da Dave Lee

Travis, da-da-da-da Dave Lee Travis, accompanied by appropriate finger clicks, aping his jingle of the time. She managed to last two weeks. I think this sorry episode teaches us that even though it's true that one can bask in the reflected glory of others, one can also be unwittingly infused with the stench of another's twattishness. And kids can be right little cunts. Well, thank you for that, Jason. And, you know, I think it's time that we did open up the podcast to the pop craze youngsters a bit more. So if you're out there listening and you have any anecdotes related to being crazed about pop or making a cunt of yourself over pop or anything like that, something that happened while you were watching Top of the Pop, something your dad said, whatever, fling over an email to chartmusicpodcast at gmail.com.

We might not read it out straight away or at all, but if you say something that's relevant to something that we're talking about down the line, we'd like to use it. Good evening and welcome to another edition of Top of the Pops. On tonight's show we've got some great stuff. We've got Shaky Stevens, we've got Pinwild, we've got Toyah. A whole host of good things. Starting off with the Undertones and it's going to happen! It happens all the time. It's going to happen, happen, till you change your mind.

It's going to happen, happen, happens all the time. So, after spoilering a soupçon of the fear on offer tonight, while the top of his hat extends right off the screen, Travis swings back and introduces It's Going To Happen by The Undertones. Formed in Derry in 1974, The Undertones started as a covers band who played gigs at assorted schools and The Scout up where lead singer Fergal Sharkey was a scout leader. After hearing the first Ramones album, they latched on to the punk boom and started to play outside of Derry. And in 1978, they recorded their first demo tape, which included the song Teenage Kicks.

Although they were rejected by every label they approached, it was seized upon by John Peel, who was obsessed with Teenage Kicks. And not only did he play it to death on his radio show, he also offered to front the cash for a recording session in Belfast. After hearing them on the Peel show, they were approached by Sire Records and were signed to a five-year deal in October of 1978. And a few weeks later, they made their Top of the Pops debut as Teenage Kicks made it to number 31. By the spring of 1981, they had racked up six top 40 hits had toured america with the clash had got out of their deal with sire and signed to emi and this single the follow-up to wednesday week which

got to number 11 in august of 1980 is the lead-off single from the forthcoming lp positive touch on the day that they originally performed this single on Top of the Pops on May the 5th, Bobby Sands died in the maze prison after his hunger strike and guitarist Damien O'Neill appeared on stage wearing a black armband. This is not that performance. They're in London playing the Rainbow the night after this episode was recorded so they're back in the studio and the song's up this week from number 29 to number 21 well what a start to the show this is i i love the undertones and i love this song i loved everything about them and the older i get brilliant the older i get the more i love the undertones um yes you

know in an era when so many punk bands from london were singing about riots and singing about bombs and you know belfast punk bands like stiff little fingers were singing about riots and singing about bombs. And, you know, Belfast punk bands like Stiff Little Fingers were singing directly about the Troubles. I loved the fact that the undertone's response to what was going on in, you know, Londonderry at the time, which was just down the road from them, was to sing songs about chocolate and girls and to sing songs about their cousins and to try and create a normal life in their music. Yes. I thought that was a beautiful kind of gesture. And I just generally loved the way that they couldn't leave Londonderry.

They couldn't leave. Whenever they went on tour, they could only stand it for three weeks at a time, and they had to get home. A very homely band. Out of all of the bands that you'll hear about the undertones that they were fired up by the sex pistols and you'll hear the same kind of thing about the buzzcocks but i think the buzzcocks and the undertones are they're sort of two of my favorite punk influence bands if you

like um yeah because they just wrote beautiful beautiful pop songs and they're in love with pop and rock and roll and and old stuff They were into 60s beat music. And they just had brilliant taste, which they put into their music. I think they were much more fired up by the first Ramones album than anything else. So I love The Undertaker. I mean, my particular favourite actually happens before this. It's the Hypnotized album that came out the year before, has got my perfect cousin on it um but i loved that record like t-rex records that was the record that taught me to play guitar um because it's so simple and you can very very the sound of it is beautiful anyway and the songs like wednesday week are just great but you can very very quickly pick up um the riffs and

the playing of that album and and really impress yourself you know so and i loved that album so much hypnotized it was almost you know how sometimes you love an album so much you don't want to hear anything more by the band because it's so perfect you don't want to fuck with it i kind of didn't move on to um the album that this song is from um but i think i will investigate it because i've been singing this all week um yeah love the song love the sound love the kind of afro step pulse of it and i just think john o'neill uh from the intones just a majorly underrated songwriter just a brilliant songwriter yeah but already in this performance i think you're getting hints as to why the undertones couldn't last in a sense and why they didn't.

Even though they were touring with The Clash and stuff like that, they couldn't make that step up to become a long-lasting band. And the problem is Sharky. Yeah. He's an odd singer, Sharky, because he's definitely a singer, first and foremost, because he was a choir boy and all the rest of it. And he was hired, in a sense, he was recruited by the undertones precisely just because of his voice he never contributed a note musically to the undertones he never wrote a word of the lyrics and i think by this time he

had a van though you are sorry he had a van yeah but but by this it was a t it was a tv repair bloke or something like that wasn't he or or worked at radio ranklers or something so he had access to a van useful to have very useful teenage kicks is actually probably one of my least favorite undertones tunes but but john o'neill he's such a brilliant songwriter but i think by now he wanted fergal sharky to start singing his songs um in a different way here and there. Fergal Sharky's just always got the same attack to songs. He's got a sweet voice, but he's this weirdly old school singer who never wrote a note and refused to change his singing style for the material.

Later on in the decade, Fergal Sharky, in A Good Heart, gave us one of the worst melodic moments in 80s pop, a moment that in a way paved the way for Westlife. That resolving high with this heart of mine near the end of Good Heart is one of the worst moments of 80s pop, but he is, in the Undertones context, quite a compelling frontman, like a kind of cuddly at ian curtis um with a face that kind of looks a bit over ironed but it also looks like even if you don't know what his mum looks like you guess that's what his mum looks like he looks exactly like that but a face once unkindly described by alan jones as looking like a bucket with a dent in it.

It has got this concaveness to it, which is a bit strange. I also like the way at the end of this performance he reacts to the graphics, which is a rare thing that you don't see very often. It's always mind-blowing when that happens. Now, you know, things like Sherlock are fucking ruining that for everybody. But then that would have been pretty mind-blowing.

But I absolutely love The Undertone. What does he do, Neil? Explain. I think The Undertone's name comes out and rises to the top of the screen. And Fergal Sharkey kind of waves his arm about and looks up. He can clearly see a screen where this is happening. And he looks

up at the titles like he can actually see them, which was a fairly mind-blowing moment for 1981 but yeah I mean I love I have just been singing this all week and I need to investigate the album that it's from but I think the Undertones are in danger because

they're so quiet about themselves in a way the Undertones because you know they couldn't do the get in the van and touring they just wanted to be at home, you know, and they wanted to be writing these kind of songs. And they didn't have that massively vaunting ambition that obviously Fergal Sharkey had.

So they've kind of fallen by the wayside in people's memories. But I would encourage anyone listening to that era to listen to Hypnotized by the Undertones. It's one of the greatest guitar albums of all time, I think. It's just a great, great band yeah neil nice as that tribute was i suspect uh the undertones themselves would have stopped listening as soon as you referred to it as london dairy oh shit did i wouldn't have got that well in the undertones camp i suspect but they were confusing about that when you're a kid because midway through Hypnotized somebody plays God Save the

Queen on a bass and I was completely unsure as to which side of the fence they were on when I was listening to them as a kid anyway that only emerged later I saw a documentary I think a few years ago by BBC Northern Ireland called Here Comes the Summer which is a fantastic documentary

about the Undertones which illuminated me about all of that although yeah all apologies all apologies yeah you should have just gone up to him and just said oh what are you then because people from northern ireland love that in my experience but the thing is they never made their politics explicit in their music and this was as close as they got and this was gonna be a song that was explicitly about you know bobby sands and the hunger strikers at the time but but um i think somebody in the band just just depoliticized it a little bit and made it more universal made it more general because it would be weird to hear the undertone sing about something explicitly political they were always that was that was there but it provided

the normality and the kind of family-like conviviality of their music. It gave that an edge because they were clinging on to what they could in basically living in a war zone. Yeah. Was that what it is? Because I've seen this song described as being about the troubles. It's about the Brits in Ireland. The last verse.

You really would have to comb those lyrics to find much of a connection. I suppose you could take the chorus to mean what do you fucking expect, which is a reasonable thing to say. But I mean... Yeah, things are going to stay the same until you fuck off.

Yeah, but I mean, I can't... Stupid revenge is what's making you stay. Yeah, I suppose. But it could be about a relationship you know it could be about some personal it's not it's not spelling it out so explicitly that it has to be about politics yeah i don't think anyone would mistake it for a hymn of praise to and i say this as a strong opponent of what i still unashamedly refer to as british imperialism in ireland what what was by this point an organisation of petty gangsters, weirdo theocratic militarists and sucked-in psychopaths, although I accept that's easier to see from England,

especially 1970s Birmingham, than from West Belfast, or in this case Derry. But there's nothing explicit, so no unsuspecting listeners came into contact with any difficult ideas it's just a really good song it's extremely easy to like uh performed by some nice lads in cotton casuals uh not impressed by the brass as i'm usually not in any record that isn't soul or jazz never seems to do anything that couldn't have been done less tootily you know what I mean

and I'm really not impressed by the audience chattering and running their mouths because there's that bit where the backing track fades down to leave just the brass section playing which means we're left with two unedifying sounds at once, like the tooting and this noise that sounds like a municipal swimming bath.

But although this is early 80s Top of the Pops, isn't it? We know this already. It's a Jabba factory. Yes. It's just what it was like in there. One or two music journalists did have a go at the Undertowners for not singing about their lives and not being political. A couple of music journalists from Tunbridge Wells.

Yes. Why aren't you singing about it? By just being themselves. That said a fucking lot because, you know, apart from stiff little fingers, the Undertowners were the only kids from Northern Ireland or even people from Northern Ireland who you would see on the telly in the Aventures

not lobbing bricks at tanks with flares on or marching about with a drum. They were always subdued over sectarianism. Completely. And when they used to play in Derry, those youth clubs that you mentioned, one of the few places that people from across that religious divide could come

and nobody gave a shit about it. Yeah. You know, if only they could have kept the fun going. Yeah, and they weren't even grim and urban. Because if you ever see, you know that programme Something Else, right? Like made by the kids for the kids. And there's a few of them on YouTube. And there's one from Belfast.

Because each one was from a different city. There's one from Belfast in, I think, 1980. And they're all still into punks, right? Everyone there is going, oh, yeah, punk will never die in Belfast. You know, it feels totally natural to us. Now, I don't know if it was the undertone, slight detachment from that scene, because they weren't a Belfast band, despite releasing records out of Belfast. a Belfast band despite releasing records out of Belfast

I don't know if it was that which enabled them to float past the basic limitations of punk and become such a fluid pop group and so full of light and air you know like making records like Wednesday Week and Julie Ocean you know which

a lot of their contemporaries just got stuck in leather jackets playing Chuck Berry riffs, you know, in venues that got bigger for a bit and then rapidly smaller again. And I think people with actual talent will always find that talent expanding, at least for a couple of years, you know, which is always going to take you somewhere else. But the Undertimes were always able to do what the Buzzcocks did too

and retain that very basic core to their music so it never quite floated away and in fact this is another reason why they split in the end because Fergal Sharkey didn't want to retain that basic core to the music and the others did There's possibly something in the fact that Catholics in Belfast would have felt like a besieged minority, whereas Catholics in Derry were not a minority and had more of a confidence to

perhaps explore just the humdrum and the everyday in their lives, in their music, more than having to address political concerns all the time. But that's, what's so beautiful about the undertones music, but you know, I mean, you don't listen to the undertones necessarily thinking, Oh Undertones music. But, you know, I mean, you don't listen to the Undertones

necessarily thinking, oh, just down the road, you know, there's armed soldiers at all. But what you hear is people clinging to what they love and what makes them feel human, pop music. And their mutual love of T-Rex and their mutual love of 60s pop and just creating these wonderful songs. I love the Undertones. And I really do look forward to listening to this album their mutual love of 60s pop and just just creating these these wonderful songs um i love

the entertainment and i look i really do look forward to listening to this album because i've never properly got into it um and and rediscovering hypnotized as well they need they need uh talking about i think this is their last good album i don't like the last one yeah nor do they nor do they i think but speaking of beautiful one thing that isn't beautiful of course is Fergal's performance here I mean aside from the fact that he does look like a mixture of Mo Howard and Nick Brimble

I don't often watch him perform from this period right so I'd forgotten that his stage act in the undertones was this kind of jerky electrocuted movement. He's got a slightly sort of irritating over-animation to him. It's like he just looks like a bloke who can't dance and doesn't know what to do with his hands,

but doesn't want to just stand there with one hand on the microphone and the other in his pocket, which would actually have been less boring than having to watch this aimless post-punkiness it's like he moves like uh captain pugwash you know what i mean he is the captain pugwash of high-speed vibrato um it's not good to see i think he's got i think what he's got is one of those things that we'll see in another performer later on in this episode, is that I really don't think he cares about music at all, not in the slightest. And when fellow band members suggested to him that he could change his style a little bit for certain songs,

he just threw a sort of blank metal fence in a way. No, I'm the singer. I know how to sing these songs. I'm going to sing them always like this um because he didn't he wasn't really that into music he he was he was already i think by this point probably thinking about his own solo career in his own career more than he was about being you know just just being in a band that's fun to be in yeah did you even know about the black arm ban incident no no i didn't until much later. Yeah, until that documentary came out. I suspect it was just quietly not commented upon by

ABC. I mean, like, people at the top of the pops wouldn't have known. Maybe DLT or whoever did it said oh my god, that was like an advert for the IRA. Afterwards, they did regret it because it was like oh shit, have we pissed off our Protestant fans now I would imagine it might have done yeah

It should have gone on with an orange Sash on this one to make amends Yeah half and half like When I'm calling you The people at Top of the Pops probably just thought They'd made him captain They're not going to know what it was about Yeah

Despite the fact that this record is lovely and clear and bright and fresh as a newly peeled orange the uh orange not being a word of a better word i remember listening to this as a kid and thinking that uh everything goes when you're dead. Oh, yes. Everything empties from what was in your head. Isn't that the bleakest line ever? The bleakest lyric I've ever heard in my life.

It's arguably the second bleakest lyric in existence. The first bleakest lyric, of course, not written by Leonard Cohen or Ian Curtis or Trent Reznor, but by Paul McCartney with the thumbs down turned. Of course, Eleanor Rigby died in the church and was buried along with her name. Nobody came. Father McKenzie wiping the dirt from his hands

as he walks from the grave. No one was saved. Which, I mean, as a kid kid that line used to give me chills it was a terrifying line you can do yourself in right now please so yeah I mean on this showing

it looks like oh fucking hell here's a band that have been around for a bit and it's now the Aventures and they've clearly got a second wind. They're going to be around for quite a while. Yeah, I mean, one would have hoped. The internal frictions we didn't know about. No.

Which I think, yeah, as Taylor's mentioned, I think that came to a breaking point on the next album, which I've never bothered with and I probably won't bother with because even the band kind of disowned that record. Yeah. The other thing I like about them, apart from Fergal Sharky, is that famously when the Undertones come out, they've got the worst dress sense in the world.

Not because they have no dress sense, but because they couldn't get any decent clothes and they didn't have any money. So they look like they know they got a parker and a like a Dave Lee Travis style v-neck jumper with no shirt underneath and all that sort of stuff and then as soon as they were on a major label and got some money

they all went out and bought nice understated clothes like they didn't sort of like buy a gold suit or something they just went out and bought some nice jumpers and nice jeans that look kind of cool. Like the clothes they were wearing before, but nicely tailored and just a little bit better.

It's thrilling guitar music, but they were so un-rock and roll and that's what's cherishable about them. The fact that when they used to leave for tours, they'd be crying, they'd be sobbing because they had to leave their girlfriends and they just wanted to be at at home i just think it's so sweet that they were like that about rock and roll they were not ambitious in that regard they just wanted to make their lovely little songs so the following week it's going to happen jumped three places to number 18

its highest position the follow-up julie ocean, stalled at number 41 in August of this year and they would never trouble the top 40 again, eventually splitting up in 1983. Hoppin', hoppin' Till they change their minds Do you mind? It's now time for the number two sound. A little bit of rock and roll, ladies and gentlemen, we present Chicken Steven! Thank you! Travis is surrounded by four very excitable young women wearing straw hats and elasticated bow ties, one of whom boings his prong. And his reaction, man, to having his little sock head twanged. It's just repulsive.

There's this sort of sloppy grin crosses his face. Yes, yes. And you can imagine that in other settings and all of them. Oh, no, no, Neil. Stop there. He then does a shit Elvis impersonation as he introduces Chicken Stephen. No, seriously, that's what he says. A little bit of rock and roll, ladies and gentlemen. We present Chicken Steven. No, seriously, that's what he says. A little bit of rock and roll, ladies and gentlemen, we present

Chicken Steven! Chicken Steven. He is amazing, isn't he? He is. I think, on balance, I'd rather have Simon Bates doing his village cricket club version of Andy Kaufman. Anti-comedy.

Chicken Steven though man that sounds like a character in Roots doesn't it can you imagine you think Alex Haley should have put in Chicken Steven to just liven it up a bit make it a bit more fun it's actually You Drive Me Crazy

by Shakin' Stevens we've already covered Comrade Shaker in Chart Music 11, and by this time, he is firmly grinding his white-shod foot into the throat of the charts, striking a blow for heterosexual rock and roll. This is a follow-up to This Old House, which got to number one for three weeks in March and April of this year, and it's been written by Ronnie Harwood, a former member of the Savages, Screaming Lord Such's band,

who also co-wrote the last song Bill Haley ever recorded, God Bless Rock and Roll. After entering the charts at number 39 at the beginning of this month, it soared 34 places to number five, and it's now in its second week at number 2 Well, Neil, me and Taylor have already had a bit of a peck at Chicken Steven So you go first Well, I mean, I loved him then And I love him now, kind of, for all kinds of reasons I mean, the same as anyone else

I guess my number 1 reason is his assault on Richard Madeley. Yes. You know, which remains one of the most inexplicable, bizarre, yet compelling TV moments in British TV history, I think. There's also an instance when he first appeared on Top of the Pops doing Hot Dog, where he actually assaults Dave Lee Travis as well. So he's got form. He's standing on top of the hot dog stand that was there as a, you know, part of the set. And Travis comes up to him

and he just kind of like curls his leg around Travis's throat. It's a delicious image. It's up there with the attack on Maidler. Versatile, you know. Whether it's with the hands or with the Carves you know Shakey's got it all Don't even mildly antagonise Shaking Stevens obviously

A more personal reason Which is less universal is that Where my band rehearses Our studio called Moonbase We have a Shaking Stevens scarf Draped over a lamp It's always been there And whenever artistic frustrations

or differences on the rock and roll journey threaten to derail us, his legs akimbo, thumbs up stance on that scarf reminds us of what's important and that we've got to plug on. And beyond that, his life and career are just mind-boggling. His family, the whole time he's shaking in the sunsets

and just so many hits. And the fact, of of course that he teaches CPR to kids now does he? yeah because he had a really bad heart attack at some point in his career he now goes school to school teaching CPR to children

no! yes in Wales so I hear teaching them how to save lives. So God bless him. But I should say, I don't like this performance. And it's not because of him particularly. It's really because of the crowd. Yes.

And also I don't like what he's wearing. I don't like him in pink. Well, that jacket looks like it was actually in black and white, but it's been colorized on a zx spectrum like someone pressed three like magenta yeah and it just slowly filled in yeah i think he had another one in cyan which is four it's definitely it's shaking steven's evening wear isn't it magenta sports coat with a black shirt black trousers and of course white

shoes what else what else but i mean the crowd don't help because uh for some reason the producers have decided to get just like literally 300 odd people on stage oh there's fucking loads of them isn't there's too many of them and and they've clearly been given instructions as to how to clap to this song beforehand instructions it is complicated the clapping bit it's a single clap and then a double clap and they can't keep up with it, it rapidly falls apart and

to be honest with you we're pre zoo wankers but there's an awful lot of wankers in there there's a lot of culottes isn't there I mean ordinarily I'd like the fact that you can see so much of the crowd, but not when they're being arseholes like this. And beyond all of that,

I mean, I just really don't like the song. I was more of a green doorman myself. I remember that after watching Cannonball Run, being startled that he could write a song about a porn film. I mean, I didn't realise that it was an old original. I thought he was naming it after a porn film. So I was wondering why he didn't call the song

Deep Throat or Animal Farm or something. But Green Door was more up my street. This song, no. Although written by the guy that you mentioned, I went on that guy's website, by the way, which is a symphony of forlornness. The photo. Really?

I couldn't get on it the photos are just fantastic he runs out of shots of shaky basically and him on the golf course so it rapidly becomes just you know I meet a young fan in Alicante and it's just him sat next to some complete stranger in a bar

and it's just a great great site to check out but I don't like the song don't like like Price's mum and the Native American. Well, there's one where he's with friends. It's always with friends and they're never named. With friends in Tennessee. I think he's just randomly walked up to strangers. Man, when you write songs for Shaking Stevens,

the whole world's your friend all of a sudden. His whole thing is about this song. It's about this song and the one he wrote for Bill Haley. And he's clearly done not much for a long, long while. But I don't like the song. Don't like Shakey's outfit. Don't like the crowd. So probably one of my least favourite Shakey performances.

But at the time, I loved Shakey wherever he appeared and whenever he appeared. And he appeared everywhere. I do quite like this record I think this is one of his better songs I mean the crazy thing being that almost none of them

or Quazy thing yeah he does do that doesn't he yeah he does it's like I remember when this came out and everyone would sing it in the playground and it would you'd lay it on thick with the Quay-ay-zay but then he switches from the both of them it's like what what's going on there but the crazy thing is that none of his hits are really objectionable when you look at it even

though none of them are particularly good with the possible exception of merry christmas everyone they're not that bad you know um but I don't like the crowd it is kind of nauseating it looks like a rally being held by the least frightening fascist organisation on earth or

actually maybe it was Comrade Shakey's totalitarian vision of the Stalinist paradise or the Shakeyist paradise they the shakiest paradise they should all have been carrying big placards with his face on

in quarter profile just gazing off towards electrification works in the distance at the end of the song they should have driven some nuclear missiles past for Shaky to nod at he could have had a purge root out all the should have driven some nuclear missiles past for Shakey to nod at. He could have had a purge,

root out all the Rocky Sharpest traitors and paint over the sunsets on the old LP sleeves. Someone on Twitter going, we painted over people too. Yeah, yeah, all right. Beyond that, I refer the Honourable Gentleman to the answer I gave earlier on the previous 40 shaken Stevens appearances that we've done. I mean, we worry sometimes about whether we're going to end up repeating ourselves,

but I think that only happens when the acts are repeating themselves. Yeah, it's their fault, everyone. I mean, you could do a four-hour podcast on each individual Beatles single and never use the same phrase twice. If Miles Davis had been on Top of the Pops, you'd only have had to repeat the word trumpet. Yeah. You know what I mean?

Or didn't turn round to face the camera. Yeah. But Shaking Stevens is like the perfectly spherical pebble at the centre of the universe, the rotation of which is used to set the intergalactic clocks. You can say what you like about Shaken Stevens, but it would be unfair to accuse him of inconstancy. So, you know, here we are.

And we are forgiven. I think he's also massively ill-served by the production team on this particular performance. They keep cutting away at the important part of his performance which is when he throws that shape and you don't quite know what he's doing and you need to see his face, you need to be close in

at that point but at that point every single time without fail it cuts away to a shot of this panoply of clapping wankers. It's that shape where he's like he's walking up the street and he's just seen a dog turd right in front of him and he's pulled himself up. Or a very large stag beetle.

It's a vital part of his performance and you don't really get to see it. So I think that put me off the song. I think if it would have just been close in, just him and not the crowd yeah i would have perhaps preferred the song more but because of the crowd i didn't like any of it yeah and and the other thing that's uh been done that has has gone again shaky on this one you know they're already playing with the video effects you know with the titling at the end

but for some bizarre reason uh well no for no reason whatsoever, they drew this mental video wipe effect. And it looks like someone's had their rib cage pulled apart. Do you remember? It's like, oh, fucking, it's like Alien. Shaking Stevens got right on my tits because it was my dad's music. And if I was watching Top of the Pops with my dad and Shaky came on, you know, the knee would start going on my dad's music and if i was watching top of the pops my dad and shaky came on you know the knee would start going on my dad and uh well this is fucking proper music this is as opposed to them fucking puffs who are not fucking real etc etc yeah cheers dad shut up no this is heterosexual

rock and roll and he just felt like he was going to be there forever as soon as one single went another one came straight in it's just like oh will be will we ever be rid of the foul curse of of chicken steven see america had more fun really because where we had shaken stevens they had orion have you seen this guy yes orion it's like anybody who doesn't know so he was an elvis impersonator from around the same time who was convinced to wear a mask yes to disguise his identity so people would think perhaps the real elvis wasn't dead the best part of it is that he's just an elvis impersonator in a a bling eye mask.

So, yeah, the idea people will think, okay, the real Elvis isn't dead. In fact, here he is, and he's trying to disguise his identity by wearing a little eye mask with jet black sideburns and quiff, white rhinestone jumpsuit, and he's playing Elvis-type music

and shaking his pelvis, and then saying, thank you very much. Like he's a sly type music and shaking his pelvis yeah and then saying thank you very much like he's a sly old fox hiding in plain sight yeah whatever and he put an album out with a picture of him on the cover rising up out of a coffin as another obscure clue for the initiated yeah and the best thing is that like all these side shows like evil kenevil and people like that he he they all turn into monsters and egomaniacs and philandras you know with a home life that makes jake and vicky lamotta look like paul and lyndon mccartney and it's but it's a brilliant story and people used to

shake and faint in his presence even though he didn't even look like Elvis, he just looked like a fat hack in a Diamante Burt Ward mask. Although his best record actually was before he was around, when he was still called Jimmy Ellis. And he put out an Elvis impersonation record called I'm Not Trying To Be Like Elvis, which is about how Elvis impersonators were all disrespectful cunts, which is a genuinely brilliant move.

You can't, you can't dislike that level of shitheaded. If shaky dies. Well, yeah, I'm saying if shaky dies, because I don't think he will ever. But if that happens, if he decided to leave this planet of his own volition,

then someone's got to do an Orion for Shaking Stevens. I mean, and the other thing about this song is that, you know, the line, heaven must have sent you down, down to earth to give me a thrill. That was dead rude, round our way. Because frill, pronounced and written as frill with an F, Randarway meant orgasm. You would see on the bus shelters and in the subways, you know, the graffiti would say,

Tabby fingered Mandy and gave her a frill. 7-2-81 and stuff like that. And the best bit of graffiti ever on our estate in absolutely massive letters filling the whole height of the subway was the words a finger of fudge

is just enough to give yourself a thrill a finger of fudge is just enough so shove it up your grill and there was an asterisk next to the word grill, and underneath he wrote in brackets, grill equals fanner. So, yeah, this is just, oh, this is very contentious stuff coming from Shaker. Anything else to say about this?

I just need to say out loud what my favourite bit of graffiti near my house please do yes it's not that good but it was just the size of it and the irrefutability of it that I think I like just in massive letters on a railway bridge

Paul Guest fucks his mum I heard that. The best one near me, and I mean recently, where I used to live a couple of years ago, on a bus shelter, it said, so-and-so, I've forgotten his name, is gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, homosexual. Just to clarify so the following

week you drive me crazy stayed at number two and would stay there another week before sliding down the charts however the follow up a cover of the 1956 Jim Lowe song Green Door became his second number one staying there for four weeks in October

and a year later You Drive Me Crazy was translated into Cantonese renamed Goddess of Love and became a massive hit in Hong Kong for Teresa Teng and Alan Tam and the last word on shaky for now has to go to pop craze youngster Lee Kyle, who tweeted the following a few months back, and I've saved it for this moment. He wrote, I used to wrestle and performed at Viz's 25th birthday party. Shakey was supposed to appear in the main event, do a clothesline, and somehow win the belt. He pulled out the day

before as he wanted to be taken seriously as an artist. Nicholas Parsons did it instead. You got me crazy Oh crazy You drive me crazy Oh, crazy and of course, on a wonderful sound like this. I don't care what they think about me I don't care what they say I don't care what they think if you're leaving

I'm gonna beg you to stay Travis, now deploying the tip of his stupid hat to hold his pipe with, skillfully works in a reference to the next act. It's Smokey Robinson with Being With You. Born in Detroit in 1940, William Robinson grew up living down the road from Aretha Franklin and formed a doo-wop group called The Chimes as a teenager, which became The Matadors and finally The Miracles.

In 1957, after failing to land a record deal he hooked up with the songwriter Barry Gorday who helped them get signed with a local label and when he formed Tamla Records the Miracles was one of his first signings. Robinson went on to become a massively prolific writer for Motown throughout the 60s, but his group didn't reach the UK charts until 1968, when I second that emotion got to number 27 in February of that year. Although the tracks of my tears got to number 9 in 1969, and Tears of a Clown got to number 1 for a week in 1970. By that time, Robinson was looking to retire from The Miracles in order to raise his kids, Barry and Tamla, and concentrate on his side job as Motown's vice president. And he finally went solo in 1973.

And his only UK chart appearance of the decade came when Just My Soul Responding got to number 45 in March of 1974. This single, the follow-up to Let Me Be The Clock, which failed to chart in the UK, was originally written for Kim Carnes, who had just had a US hit with a cover of More Love, his 1967 single with The Miracles, but his producer told him to keep it for himself.

It's currently the number three single in the USA, and this week it's gone up 16 places from 39 to 23. We'll address Smokey later on. And, you know, before we do so, thank fuck it's the right Smokey for a change. But Travis, smoking a pipe, not the coolest thing you could have done on a pop show in an era when the only people passing around the ready rope were all the teachers in the pub. It's like your fucking geography teacher presenting top of the pubs, isn't it?

Not my geography teacher. My geography teacher was angry and violent on an almost constant basis. Really? Yeah. Board rubbers, you know. Back when board rubbers could do damage. It's one of the things I'm most upset about

as a current teacher. Sharp corners. Yeah. As a current teacher, I cannot hurt the kids. Not just because of professional duty of care, but if I throw anything at them in a classroom, it wouldn't hurt them. Boardroomers are soft now. We're not allowed those metal rulers that could really inflict damage.

So, yeah, a teacher's arsenal is sadly withered. You could throw a laptop at them or a desk, I suppose, Neil. I guess so. I guess so. I think they'd dodge it but no, the possibilities of just sudden random violence are dwindling in the classroom unfortunately. Oh man, this country.

So Smoker, I mean what did you know about him at the time because to me he was the bloke who wrote Tears of a Clown for the Beat and nothing else just yet. Well this was the first I ever wrote Tears of a Clown for the beat and nothing else just yet. Well, this was the first I ever heard of him, this record. I think, actually, no, apart from the Beatles covers of Miracles tunes.

So I was primed for 60s Smokey and I got this, right? Which to my nine-year-old ears might as well have been Lionel Richie. I mean, I'm not sure this record could mean anything to a kid because it's adult-orientated soul. Yes. Sung by a middle-aged man. And the entire aesthetic of record and video is really alienating to horrible young lads. No edge.

No edges on anything. It's all sophisticated and pastel. I mean, nowadays, you listen to this and you look at the video and listening to airbrushed early 80s soul while wandering around this sun-filled beach house on your own, like occasionally playing a shot of pool on your own table in a game with no opponent. On a fucking pink pool table, man.

That's wrong. Yeah. Well, the whole thing is like a middle-aged cocaine fantasy. Like a sort of Grand Theft Auto... Yes. You know, it's like Thursday 2pm. You know, eternally. This is what he's doing.

Until the masked men with guns kick the door down and spare you from a desperate old age. I'm just surprised he's not wearing a toweling dressing gown yes in this video yeah well i mean it's interesting you say cocaine because i mean he i remember seeing an interview on oprah i think where he blamed this song for starting his cocaine addiction um because you know it suddenly gave him such such success late in his career. But there's a way of listening to this song

whereby the subject isn't his lover but is crack cocaine and it makes it far superior. It makes it far superior to the Lars There She Goes, for instance. It could be seen as that. I've seen this song compared to Sexual Healing. I've seen it compared to i just called to say i love you as a kind of light poppy simple hit for old soulsters but i don't really like either of those songs i find sexual healing far too much like having a dick prodded in your

back and and and i just called to say i love you i mean it's just emetic isn't it it's a terrible song what this reminds me of more I mean like Taylor at the time I would have not responded to this at all and this would probably have been my chance to walk out the room and diddle about somewhere else and then come back for whatever get the crisps in yeah

but right now I kind of quite like it it reminds me actually more of something like Slow Hand by the Pointer Sisters a kind of a light touch song that if you wander around in it with a beautiful enough voice, as Smokey still has, you get quite a nice feel. It's not quite a slow jam because it's quite a retro song in a way.

But yeah, I find it palatable now. I would have hated it at the time though. It is quite retro in that the funny thing about this song is that he hasn't really changed his songwriting style for the 80s right i mean it has changed in that it's not as urgent and not as fresh it's a lot slower isn't it yeah but he hasn't done what a lot of 60s people did and tried to change the songwriting to fit the production right so you get songs'd get like soul songs that were written to have smooth jazz chords

on electric piano or, you know, and laid back sax solos. Or if you're a rocker, like those stupid wide open power chords and massive drums, you know. Whereas Smokey just, he just does the thing he does and the 80s production works around the song, which it manages to do pretty nicely so on the one hand there's something quite quaint about this record

especially that middle 8 that sounds like it's from 1962 in the middle of all this 80s vapour but on the other hand it hasn't actually dated that badly at all in the way that a lot of 80s records by 60s artists have because he hasn't actually dated that badly at all in the way that a lot of 80s records by 60s artists have.

Because he hasn't changed that much. But at the same time, he's not a self-parody. He's not stuck in the past. Yeah. And also, at this point in his career, he doesn't owe anyone another Tracks of My Tears. No. Or I've Got a Dance to Keep from Crying. Or You Really Got a Hold on Me.

Actually, I was going to say his greatest moment was you really got a hold on me but in fact his greatest moment like stevie wonders uh came on sesame street uh whereas stevie's was the ultimate all-time greatest ever live performance of superstition whereas smokey's involved him singing you really got a hold on me with an overly tactile letter U so the only thing which could possibly top the terrifying emotional depth of the original track you know

and it's a brilliant physical comedy performance from Smokey to Boot right like it's like together those two are like it's the full life experience like you play you really got a hold on me. And you understand that being a living, feeling human being is all about pain and frustration and lust and emotional slavery. And then you play, you really got a hold on me and understand that none of that matters. And we shouldn't take ourselves too seriously.

And in a meaningless universe, the closest thing to god consciousness is uncontrollable laughter which is why piss taking isn't just enjoyable it's an existential necessity with regards to sorry to keep harping on about um his drug addiction which he experienced in the 80s but i think he can't blame this record for for that because by the looks of the video i think he's already on crack he looks he looks damaged in a way no makeup um and he he's floating around this uh this beach house set and he he does look yeah like he's totally fucked up am i the only one and he's got the fire turned right up as well in fucking summer by the beach

it's like oh mate what's a weir plays a pool shot throws his hands up it doesn't mean anything on that fucking

pink pool table I like a game of pool but if I'm in a pub and there's a pool table going and it's pink I won't play it

really seriously it puts me it's like a fucking it's like an orange Subutio pitch. Or a fucking, I don't know,

a mauve and white dartboard. It's just not right. It puts you off. I presume you play on... And it's cuntish. You play on a green one. What about a blue one? That would offend me, but it's a dark colour, so I'd try and live with it.

It's not right. It's just showing off. You'd be perfectly happy playing, like, American pool with American balls, not just yellow and red balls. You'd be a white man. Yeah. Yeah, I am, yeah.

I am. But, you know, someone's got a pink pool table. It's been, oh, yeah, you don't really like pool, then. It's a bit of a teenage song, isn't it? Sung by a 41-year-old man. Because he's on about it. Because his mates are having a go at him and even his family's having a go

for fuck's sake. It's like you know you can just hear Smokey's non-or going, hey are you knocking about with that slag down the road? Ah Smokey. I told you to shop around. He is far too old to be taking advice on these matters from friends and relatives.

I don't know. Who am I to judge Smokey Robinson? No one. And, you know, if the worst comes to the worst, you know damn well there's going to be some pretty fine songs coming out of that heartbreak. So, fair enough, Smokey. Knock your son out. And not only is he less unpleasant than Smokey the band,

he's less terrifying than Smokey the bear from the US Forest Service public information films. They say, only you can prevent forest fires. And then suddenly one day they put out that

advert, you know the one I'm talking about, where it's a glamorous sort of 70s woman with Farrah Fawcett hair starts telling you not to start a forest fire. Then suddenly without warning rips off her own face. Yeah, there's file of Bungle. Yeah,

they're sort of moth-eaten Smokey the Bear and he says, if you knew it was me, would you have listened? And it's the most horrifying moment in the history of advertising because her face just crumples yeah into this diabolical mask as she tears it away yeah um yeah i have no idea what they thought they were doing yeah maybe maybe this is the uh this is what smokey's mates and family are warning him about yeah that was his girlfriend so the following week being with you soared 16 places to number 7

and two weeks later it went all the way to number 1 and stayed there for two weeks eventually usurped by One Day In Your Life by Michael Jackson fucking hell two Motown number number ones on the bounce there. Two weeks after this episode, Being With You went as high as number two in America, held off the top spot by Kim Carnes and Betty Davis' eyes. The follow-up, You Are Forever, failed to chart

and he never bothered the top 40 again. However, eight months later, Dave Lee Travis was nominated Pipe Smoker of the Year 1982 by the tobacco industry and was presented with a briar pipe shaped like a microphone and a record. I shall probably smoke it rather than keep it on show, he said, after a charity lunch in London.

I'm the sort of person who likes to use things rather than lock them away. I find pipe smoking genuinely relaxing, and I heard someone once say, it is like going back to your mother's breast. Oh, God. Oh, Jesus Christ, though. I don't care what they do. I don't care about anything else

but being with you, being with you. I want to be free! Woo! Don't wanna go to school, don't wanna be nobody's fool, I wanna be me, I wanna be me. Travis, with the tip of his cuntish hat shoved into his ear, is surrounded by some young adults of mixed gender who mug at the cameras as he shits out an appalling joke about two-year-olds and introduces I Wanna Be Free by Toya. Born in Kingsheath, Birmingham in 1958, Toya Wilcox was a private girls' school pupil who got loads of detaino for letting off some alarm clocks during a speech given in the Assembly Hall by a pre-Tory leader, Margaret Thatcher, dying her hair in the mid-70s and generally not being arsed with school. At the age of 17 she enrolled in the Birmingham Old Rep Drama

School and a year later she started working as an extra at BBC Birmingham's Pebble Mill Studio and landed a central role in the Second City First TV play Glitter about a girl who longs to appear on top of the pops which also featured Phil Daniels and Noel Edmonds. In the play Wilcox got to perform two songs she had written which encouraged her to think about a music career and when she moved down to London to join the National Theatre she started her own band. A year later, the actor Ian Charleston introduced her to the director Derek Jarman, who was so taken by her that he offered her any part she liked in his forthcoming film Jubilee. And when she chose the part of Mad that was going to have to be written out due to a lack of budget, Jarman went without pay to keep her in it.

By 1979, when Wilcox was filming Quadrophenia, a band was signed to Safari Records and immediately started setting about the independent charts, with the single Victims of the Riddle and the EP Sheep Farming in Barnet getting to number one there. By 1980, Wilcox was all over the place, playing Miranda in Jarman's version of the Tempest playing the part of a punk singer in Shoestring and having ATV make a documentary about her that

was watched by 10 million people but her band partly frustrated by their latest single Bird in Flight failing to break out of the indie ghetto and really pissed off that their singer was getting all the attention, flounced off, leaving Wilcox to form a new band. Her first release of 1981, the 4 From Toya EP with It's A Mystery As The Lead Track, got to number 4 in March of this year and this is the follow-up, which entered the charts last week at number 37 and has rocketed up 24 places to number 13 well here we go neil do you want to say anything first while you've got a chance well i'm straight off you can see um but i think you're meant to think with this performance with the hair you're meant to think of bowie maybe you're meant to think of kate maybe, but straight away you can tell this is from a tradition

of musical theatre bad musical theatre, Andrew Lloyd Webber Tim Rice type musical theatre this is if you ask Giles Brandreth to write a punk song, this is what he'd come up with, it's a disgraceful record from a disgraceful pop star

yeah I don't think there's ever been such an outrageous mismatch of talent and achievement as in the case of toyah wilcox right in an art form and an industry which could almost have been designed as an elaborate mockery of the very concept of meritocracy. The Toya Wilcox phenomenon, such as it was, is astonishing. I mean, there is no relevant metric by which Toya is even mediocre. On every single count, she's amongst the worst ever to draw breath. The worst singer, the worst dancer, the worst ever to draw breath right the worst singer the worst dancer the worst actor the worst representative of youth and rebellion um she has no self-awareness no humor uh no guts

no no accidental comic appeal none of which would matter were it not for her complete and overwhelming self-regard. There's this kind of misplaced auto fascination, which is not even cheeky enough to be arrogance. And while you can't really say that her success was immense, it was moderately intense and quite long-lasting. Even today, or certainly a few years ago you might innocently flick on the tv and be confronted by the remains of toya right who for some reason has been asked to give us her opinion on some matter other than how to escape from a

bricked up fireplace in a derelict farmhouse six miles from the nearest town the unimaginable depths of anti-talent required to be a 10th right hazel o'connor right how could this be possible i was gonna say i was gonna say shaking suze but but yeah and so here we are it's a here we are with a single human being who personifies everything that can go wrong in pop music right everything that can go wrong in a discipline where almost everyone is self-taught and not subject to any professional checks, encouraged to behave like the king and queen of the world, and where objective standards of quality do not exist. It's like this is the payback for those freedoms which have given us so much.

The payback is toyah. Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety but still toyah is the price of that freedom toyah is the the high explosive in the toy department that has no metal detector it's this can always happen you know yeah we just have to take it well i think the key word here is it's selfishness this is music that that's selfish in every way and i know we're encouraged to think that a bit of selfishness in pop doesn't go amiss but she her whole thing is about exerting maniacal total control over everything she does.

And pop don't work like that. It's not the way a pop song works. A pop song, you're only slightly in control of a good pop song. A good pop song plays you as well, but there's none of that in Toya's music. There's a deep snottiness about pop music, actually, in her music. And it's the selfishness that always just radiates out of every pore of her being in all of her music and all of her work that I find so difficult

to stomach if I have known people like Toya in my life I've only known them for the half hour that I've been with them and then I've made sure that I've never seen them again because they're vampires of the soul people people like this.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know. You can see it in her performance here, right, with that ridiculous, bouncing, arm-swinging, non-dance, right, like the opposite of dancing. It's just a flat... It's Mad Lizzy, isn't it? All it is is a flat demand to be watched, right? Nobody's being allowed to get on with anything useful.

Our attention is stolen and wasted just by this idiot showing off, making herself unignorable. This performance is unspeakable. And you can it's so appropriate the way it reaches that wretched triumphant conclusion right with her arms aloft and her head thrown back like she was perched on the top of the tinfoil castle you know the the empress of utter shit. There's a way in which it's compelling, right? There is a sense in which it's compelling, but it's not even funny.

It's almost impossible to believe this song was not written as a deliberate exercise in stupidity or as a sort of not-the-nine-o'clock-news pastiche of what it actually is. I can't believe they didn't have a go at her on the night of news. Pamela Stevenson would have had a fucking field week, never mind day.

I mean, and the thing is with Toya, I remember viscerally disliking her at the time. You know, and the more I found out about her, the more I've seen of her, the more I've read interviews with her, the more there's never the word for it vile she becomes because it look i don't mind a bit of ego in pop don't get me wrong i don't mind a bit of careerism in pop perhaps there's nothing wrong with wanting

the career but her careerism is just unending and and seemingly for no reason that there's no sort of point to it and she's just massively all you get is this colossal outpouring of this spoiled indulgence with no sort of real there's not a note of generosity in her music or compassion or empathy it's just a spoiled little cow

you know what I mean just pouring out her own self-adoration that is all that there is in this music and why someone would respond to it other than loathing it I mean, I remember one of the first conversations I ever had with my missus was about

how much we hated Toya and I don't know why I think she was on the telly or something but I don't know who Toya's fans were but I can kind of imagine that they were probably just like her. Spoilt little rich girls. Yeah, I mean, by 1981

this is what punk is to the general public, isn't it? Yeah. And it's also, to a lot of people, this is what feminism must be. Yeah, we could be just as annoying as blokes perhaps even more so on occasion I have to say

my deep and abiding hatred of Toyah doesn't just come from these horrible but nowadays quite easily ignorable records and performances it's really rooted in that documentary, that incredible documentary,

which is one of the most darkly fascinating arts documentaries ever made because it's like the anti-In Bed With Chris Needham, right? It's just as compelling and jaw-dropping and endlessly quotable, but instead of showing you the adorable humanity at the heart of bad but honest rock and roll, it exposes every miserable inch of the empty self-regard

of bad, dishonest rock and roll. And it reveals her to be one of the worst human beings never to have had a secret police at their disposal and utterly consumed by this delusion not just that she's talented or in some way useful to humanity but that she's an artist and a leader and a creature of fascination because it's the kind of pop music documentary

that's made by people, I would imagine, who don't really get pop music. So they take this at face value, right? They can't tell what's good or bad because it's all junk to them. So, hey, here's someone who speaks for themselves as an artist, therefore they must be an artist. Here's someone who doesn't just do pop music,

they do other stuff like theater right which is always seen as the mark of someone whose talent and general artistic nature is too great to be contained within silly old pop music in fact it's usually the mark of someone who can't create anything worthwhile out of pop music and is therefore not fully committed to it um i don't think the people who made this documentary would have listened to toyah for pleasure i think they're just they have this idea that the people who look the most awkward and ill at ease within pop music must be the people who are just too good for it right so it opens with toyah stomping down the street

that's the word stomping down the street. That's the word, stomping down the street, trying to look above it all. And in voiceover, in this kind of put-on, stroppy voice, which is meant to suggest attitude, but it just makes it sound like a horrible child, she says, hang on, I've got this written down. She says, of course you've got it written down it's in your little black book she says my art is based on life around me and if you call london

a work of art a piece of dog shit a work of art then fine which means nothing at all because she's a complete bullshitter but she's never called on it at any point she but in being indulged like this over the course of the hour she's given an enormous length of rope and gets busy with it immediately right so you get that and then after it's a cat's cradle with it and after like take seven of her trying to look alienated on a tube train she starts telling us about her life and she says after a year at drama school i did some extra work at pebble mill and you think right okay i get it now because this is what's going on here it's a lousy actress playing the role of a pop singer with a script dashed off by an imbecile and she's massively overacting. So it's like breaking glass,

but for real. You know, this is the real thing. And of course, chaps, being residents of ATV land, we got Toy rammed up her arse in the Aventus, didn't we? Oh, yeah. On the BBC Midlands show, Look Here, when Pebble Mill turned itself into a youth club for an evening or so.

I've actually looked at some old episodes of that. There's one floating about on YouTube. It's quite remarkable, isn't it, Taylor? Yeah, the best thing is that bloke doing the gig listings. Yes. He's going, and serving suggestion of playing at Kidderminster Town Hall tonight, if you want to go along to that.

It's remarkable they had an assortment of Radio Wolverhampton DJs didn't they it was all made for a penny looks like it I think my favourite bit is when the youth gets involved for

unemployment clubs and stuff like that and you're seeing the real youth of the Aventus there aren't you yeah there's that girl representing my own fair town in a pullover going there are hundreds of people like me in Kidderminster and thousands in the Midlands as a whole it's like yeah you're not fucking kidding there's that clip on youtube that's been floating about of of toya watching derrick jarman and christopher biggins and steve strange and vivian stanzel playing space invaders where you can't fucking see anything you just see some backs and it's like oh for fuck's sake man get out the way i want to see how you do that spaceship at the top that's real kids issues but yeah anyone who ever has thrown around the word pretentious

as soon as anyone just stops reshuffling the same old cliches and tries to do something different needs to watch this documentary to understand what the word pretentious actually means, right? And the actual difference between confidence and arrogance and to learn the telltale signs of the genuine phony and how poisonous those people almost always are because their life is about keeping up that front so they don't get found out the documentary is dominated by like you say her front but there are there are a few really key uh really revealing moments genuinely revealing moments um the way she glosses over

things like um you know the story according to her is she is she arrives in London with a plastic bag and nothing else. And she just gets this warehouse and turns it into an art place. Called Mayhem. Yeah, and the colossal wealth that clearly supported all of this is not mentioned. She does get called out in a lovely part towards the end of the show when she's on a TV show and she's asked questions by various people. One's a headmaster, the other one's, I think, just a librarian or something like that. Just normal people who object to her strong and strident message.

And they absolutely nail her, all of them, as ultimately, yeah, a little show-off who probably has had too much blue pop and needs to go and sit down. And she's got no real response when the headmaster says, you're extremely wealthy and you come from an extremely wealthy background. How are you recommending that kids drop out,

you know, kids drop out of school when they're not in that position? She hasn't really got a response. She immediately, very tellingly, starts talking about herself, not other people people because she can't really comprehend other people in that way and there's a very very revealing moment where she's talking about what her songs are about and she's saying i'm not part of punk i'm part of the future um there's millions of unemployed people blah blah who fucking cares yeah and she says people getting murdered who

cares yeah yeah that told me that told me everything i i kind of suspected about toya and her fakeness but also the kind of cruelty in her heart in a sense yeah but the only thing she talks about is herself relentlessly and pompously throughout i mean in the voiceover that runs all the way through it, she addresses the audience as though we were a blob of shit that she's just discovered on lifting a newspaper. She's got this lofty disdain for everyone else. And then that's intercut with these passages

of the most worthless and objectively dreadful music you've ever heard, and scenes of her acting so badly that Andy Warhol would have shouted, cut. Like you see rehearsing a play with Cassandra from Only Fools and Horses, who's another terrible actor. It's like a alternative comedy parody

of an early 80s theatre play and then you see that long section with a band to show that they're real working musicians and they're artists too and every song they're working on sounds like Alien Invasion from the Kit Kat ad

it's like the talentless they're working on sounds like alien invasion from the Kit Kat ad. It's like the talentless idiot's idea of what experimental music is, where they've just taken the same basic building blocks and lumps out of which straight rock music is constructed and just put them in the wrong order. Do you know what I mean? So it doesn't sound like normal music. But's also it's not catchy or pleasing to the ear you know it's just wrong and sounds ugly and shit and then you congratulate yourself on having moved beyond the conventions of rock you know um yeah and her her response to this is like later on they ask her about the band and whether she overshadows the

band um and she says called toy yeah she says i say this with all due respect to the band i work harder than any of them and it's up to them to keep up with me if they want as much publicity as i get now i would pay to learn the various nicknames by which she must have been known behind her back imagine if you could speak to one of her road crew of the time can you imagine how she must have treated the road crew fucking hell

yeah she's an apazite pop star for the age she clearly treats everyone like shit in a thatcherite, dawning Thatcherite age, I guess that's perfect. But, yeah, you know, even the worst pop stars, I tend to find one redeeming feature.

In Toya, it's not possible. She's an out and loud, proud celebration of everything that is worse about the human spirit and and she needs rejecting entirely i found it really difficult watching that documentary fast forwarding through the music clips though i was because because just her presence is so so horrible and and it's just it's spending an hour in the company of a genuine total narcissist yeah with with that who really properly doesn't deserve to be a narcissist because there's nothing beautiful about yeah so nothing beautiful inside or out so yeah um and and this song um is i think you know it's it's everything that's awful

about Toya summed up in one horrible horrible record this isn't a song written by anyone who likes pop or even I suspect even grew up listening to pop or anything you get that sense when you read Toya interviews about why she started a band

she's at acting school and she just suddenly she suddenly casts around for a band. Do you know what I mean? Are there any bands going? That's not why or how you make music. She does it purely out of total craven, naked ambition and careerism. That is all there is.

That is all she consists of. And as a pop fan i find that impossibly difficult to respond to i i feel a similar feeling um about madonna i think that that that kind of that kind of feeling that this person doesn't really like music but is using it purely to push push their own brand and as an actor who should perhaps have stuck to acting mediocre though they were and who made almost totally bad music she's up there with Tupac oh yes

harsh words perhaps but I think Tupac actually made more good songs than Toya did i.e. he made one good song you hear her say when she's on that programme and she's sort of introduced as though she's like a radical. People are asking her questions about her radicalism

as if it was like Rosa Luxemburg sat there, you know. And when she gets down to detail, she compares herself to Cilla Black and Lulu and just is quite honest about the fact that she's only really interested in stardom, like pushing her brand, as you would now call it, in whatever direction is the path of least resistance. And at the moment it happens to be pop music.

But it just goes to show that even years after the event, the media are still trying to get a handle on punk. And they think that's what toy is yeah but that's all of a sudden someone's come along and it's like oh you know yeah as we'll see she's been interviewed on parkinson she's been interviewed on everything and it's like oh this is the person who could explain to us what punk is even though she's saying she's not one but and it's like oh she's all right really really. She's just like everyone else, really. She's just got funny hair. That's what's so massively aggravating.

It's similar to the way that Madonna used to shock people. Well, if you're shocked by that, you know, I mean, what kind of withered soul would be shocked by Madonna? In a similar way, you know, Toya is going, you know, Toya's portraying herself as some sort of transgressive artist. And here's all these idiots asking her, why are you so transgressive? Why are you so rebellious?

And she's fucking not. And kids knew it. Grown-ups knew it. A few arseholes didn't know it and bought her records, which was a terrible, terrible shame. But I know girls, boys, grown men, grown women, we all hated her. Yeah.

There weren't many Toya fans at my school at the time But the ones who were were always horrible There were just horrible girls Who just wanted to scream in your face Basically Because this is what punk's been reduced to You know there's that bit in that documentary

Where she does an in-store at Woolworths And it's shot In a very very tight angle so you can't really see how many people have turned up um a lot of people who do see her grannies who are just like looking at her crazy hair um but then there's a some of her fans that are one and there's a bloke in a in a sort of leather jacket looking like a, you know, leftover punk. And he's obviously some sort of semi-stalker because she sees him and says, oh, hello, back as usual.

And then there's a pause and then she's going to sign the album and she goes, oh, sorry, I've forgotten your name. And he looks completely crestfallen and goes, Sid. And she goes, oh, of course, course Sid how could I forget yeah well you did because these people mean nothing to you um I mean a horrible arrogant chippy personality is so extreme that a few years ago I researched her background because I wanted to know what's the the root of this right was she deprived did she have a difficult childhood uh was she mistreated and no of course she's a very very very rich kid um and as a child uh her rebellion took the form of her violently

assaulting her own mother um who would spend hours performing physiotherapy on her to sort out a spinal problem that she had as a kid and was rewarded with unprovoked physical violence from her own daughter. Now, our heroine doesn't appear to have done this because she was mentally ill or in retaliation for anything. This was just a repulsive, spo spoiled brat with an unearned superiority complex just lashing out because why not nobody else really matters you know um and what we see here is a grown-up version of that little shit being treated like fucking royalty uh yeah and it's yeah and it wouldn't matter it wouldn't matter that she's one of the most dislikable characters in

pop history if she had ever once used up a second of anybody's time without wasting it you know what i mean it's like pop music is amoral you know for as long as it's good and i mean i'd listen to anything you know i, I'd listen to Louise Woodward doing a cover of You Shook Me All Night Long. But if it was worth listening to. But as soon as you start wasting people's time, you become doubly disgusting. And you deserve far worse than you get. I mean, the thing is, and also, the thing is to bear in mind it would it would be one thing right if if this top of the performance by toyah there was loads of toyah alikes at the front or something or you saw loads

of female fans you know absolutely hanging on wherever you would you don't get that at all what you get is one bloke stood really quite close to her in awe you know her said yeah and you know what that reminded me of this is quite a digression but what it reminded me of this last no not last year it's a few years ago uh two three years ago my band supported a transvision vamp right wendy james and it was just wendy james actually solo show and i thought well i wonder who's going to turn up to that because it's a bit of an odd gig show and I thought I wonder who's going to turn up to that because it's a bit of an odd gig um and all it was was blokes like that um there was like about 40 of them and when we came on stage they were clearly disappointed with me you know that I was even there and they had to look at me um and I left I didn't stick around for for Wendy, but what I was told afterwards was that, yeah, the whole audience was just these blokes staring at Wendy James,

staring at her in that way that this guy's staring at Toya, which, you know, that was, I'm not saying that was her entire fan base, but I would recall, I don't know, my sister and her mates dressing up like Toya or something like that, you know what I mean? But I don't remember any of that at all. I don't think she had these acolytes or fans that a figure like Bowie would create um because she was so un just unremittingly selfish nobody really got anything out of her um apart from the easily shocked and and and yeah the

feckless yeah except of course there's that thing with bowie where he's not like the stooges or something where if you just copy him but you haven't got any talent you might maybe pull it off you might accidentally make a good record or you know the worst you'll look is unoriginal there's something so kind of with bowie it's a miracle that he pulled it off so you look at his imitators it's's like if David Bowie is driving the bullet train and then Toyah and Steve Strange are following behind on one of those wooden platforms with a handle going... Going down the track. But the song, fucking awful, isn't it?

It's fucking awful and it's got... And the lyrics are fucking awful. The lyrics, man. Toyah's idea of Teenage Rebellion is to just throw a toddler fit, isn't it? Yes. Scream and shout. Yeah, but she's going to turn suburbia upside down. Yeah.

Oh, man. I can just imagine seeing Terry Scott accidentally cutting a topiary of a peacock as he gazes upon Toya. cutting a topiary of a peacock as he gazes upon Sawyer. She has this ongoing ability through all the songs on that documentary that you see to squeeze in these words that have no business in a pop song. Yeah. And they're massively annoying. The line, I don't want to be sweet and neat, that's a horrible line. Yeah.

Knock that out. That's a fucking awful line from this song it's very Violet Elizabeth Bott isn't it it's just awful the song is terrible lyrically musically I just kept thinking of Lloyd Webber and that's probably a disservice

because there's bits of Jesus Christ Superstar I quite dig it's probably a terrible disservice but there's those horrible terrible disservice but there's that there's those horrible florid sort of piano bits that that you know firmly put her in that kind of prog pop thing but it is very proggy isn't it very proggy well this if this is a new band and the one thing you can say for them is that they've tried to write a hit record unlike the last one who just sort of made awful noise um but it is it's horrible it's like all the sort of spark and and melody and joy has just been flattened out of it uh except the keyboard

player who thinks he's in a symphonic prog band and it's yeah it's an unholy blend it really is and sorry that also the light the way she delivers I mean, she's still banging on about her fucking hair. So what if I dye my hair? I've still got to braid up there. Fuck me, man. That makes my whole body shudder with revulsion. And the worst thing, worse than her phony Cockney accent,

which took me about 10 years of living in the south to sound more cockney than brummie right she's been there about six months and there she's yeah i'm a i don't think i am a punk you know yeah okay um worse than this worse than any of the dog shit music is just the total emptiness of the whole thing it's the way that the way that she's co-opted that sort of radical the last dregs of that radical energy you know yeah and transformed that into an advertising campaign for a shit product which is just her the idea of her being rich and famous you know and yeah and while doing it has the goal to pose as an artist and as the audience's intellectual superior and yeah or just superior full stop and you can forgive a successful chancer quite a lot but you can never forgive them that but this is what punk has been reduced to isn't

it i mean as simon's pointed out you know by 1978 sham 69 all that lot punk's already becoming about oikishness and and now here we have toya wanting to be free and her idea of freedom is screaming and shouting and crawling through the alleyway singing very loud. Yeah, just annoying people who haven't done anything wrong. I mean, the song should have been called I Want To Get On Everyone's Tits. Yeah. She rapidly started revealing sort of a true nature, not only in that documentary, but I mean, over the years,

I'm sure we've all seen one of the Loose Women and all of this malarkey. Yes. Spouting a crappy... over the years I'm sure we've all seen one of the loose women and all of this malarkey yes spouting a crappy I remember 2002 her leading a campaign um against uh um an asylum center in Worcestershire near our home right and that sort of told me a lot as well yeah I mean it's kind of couldn't have been more perfect yeah or they can't scream and shout near you, Toya. I remember her saying, I'm not some terrible racist nimby. I just don't like them. Yeah. But the sad fact is we now live in an age

where most of the straightest, most boring people in the world have dyed hair. There's a specific reason why there's a character in Coronation Street that's not called Susie Battersby or Palmolive Battersby. You know what I mean? Yeah.

She won in the end. I don't like that thought, Al. I wish you hadn't introduced it to me. I'm sorry. And I just want to point out that Toy is wearing a white Doric chiton. I need to shoehorn that in. I've had that phrase rattling around my head for about 32 years. When there were two girls in my stage decor class

who gave a demonstration of Greek theatre dress. And yeah, Doric kaiten was the only thing that stuck in my head and i've been looking for a fucking way out for that but for three fucking decades so you know there we go there's the positive thing about toyah yeah i'm glad you found a little spark of joy um it's the horror of this performance so the following week i want to be free jumped three places to number nine, going as high as number eight. The follow-up, Thunder In The Mountains,

got to number four in October of this year, and she'd round out 1981 with another EP, Four More From Toya, getting to number 14 in two weeks in December when she won Best Female Singer and Most Fancyable Female in the Smash Hits Reader's Poll. Jeez, the wine. I'm gonna be free I'm gonna be free I'm gonna be free I'm gonna be free

I'm gonna be free I'm gonna be free I'm gonna be free I'm gonna be free I'm gonna be free I'm gonna be free I'm gonna be free I'm gonna be free

I'm gonna be free I want to be free. Now, very serious now, look. The hat is at half mast because of City, who went down to Tottenham Hotspurs. Ha ha! Here's Spurs now! Ozzie's back to Wembley, he's a Donald Wembley, come on you Spurs, come on you Spurs. Ozzie's back to Wembley, he's a Donald Wembley. Come on, you Spurs, come on, you Spurs. Come on, you Spurs. Travis's stupid, cuntish hat is now sticking out at a right angle in solemn commemoration of his beloved Manchester City's capitulation to the next act, Tottenham Hotspur with Ozzy's Dream.

We've already discussed Tottenham Hotspur in chart music number 27 and this is the original collaboration with Chas, Dave and M. It came together when the band's manager Bob England asked Hodges and Peacock to knock up a song for their favourite team who had just won their sixth round FA Cup game against Exeter City and were due to face Wolverhampton Wanderers in the semi-final and bunged it over to the club. When Spurs beat Wolves in a replay, both band and club went full steam ahead,

going from recording to mixing to distribution to the record shops of North London in 48 hours. Not only did it catch on with the non-Arsenal half of North London, but it also became popular nationwide, entering the charts at number 45 the week before the FA Cup final, which saw Spurs and Man City draw 1-1, meaning that a replay was required the following Thursday, resulting in a truncated episode of Top of the Pops. By that time, Aussie's Dream soared 37 fucking places to number 8. And after Spurs won the replay 3-2, resulting in the band

playing the song live on the open top bus as it went through North London last Sunday fuck knows how they got the piano up there, it jumped up 3 places this week to number 5. And here's a repeat of their original performance shot through with clips from both cup

final games. Now first question of many I believe should this even be on? It's old news isn't it? It probably shouldn't be on but that final was tremendously exciting just having football on a Thursday night was bizarre I remember

ridiculous wasn't it? and Ricky Villa's goal I suppose it deserves it deserves one last play and that's your lot all of this watching this invariably just makes me think

six years from now boys Dave Bennett, Keith Outchin Gary Mavisney will wipe those cockney grins off those faces yes indeed I mean to my mind it was bad enough that Spurs had robbed

us of 15 minutes of last week's top of the pops but here they are again taking up even more time talking about they're going to do something that's already happened. It makes no fucking sense to me. What they should have done, some of the team,

I know there's holidays and all that kind of stuff. Some of the team should have come back with Chaz Day, even if it was just Ozair, so we could see the FA Cup on the piano of Chaz Hodges. That would have been something. The FA Cup and Top of the Pops togetherges that would have been something the FA Cup and Top of the Pops together that would have been fucking amazing

I do feel sorry for Ozzy as well in this performance and in this song because I mean he by then of course could say Tottenham properly but was forced he got man-weld didn't he yeah he got man-weld a bit I was on here a while ago and we watched Tottenham's 1982 Cup final.

Tottenham, Tottenham. Yeah, and this clip is almost... No one can stop them. ...indistinguishable from that clip. Like, right down to the mysterious women in Spurs shirts amid the throng, just there to make it seem a bit less homoerotic, which is, you know, a doom.

And some of them are legs and co as well. Yeah, but with all this prime meat on display, you know. Yeah, more Pringles than a 24-hour garage. But, I mean, we talk about shaking Stevens repeating himself, but this record and Tottenham Tottenham are like two verses of the same, like two verses of the same status quo song. You know, there's not a lot of difference between them. So I kind of used up everything I had to say.

I mean, this song does suggest that Ozzy's dream was to play at Wembley, like before that was devalued by playing every tuppany-apeny kick about there and Spurs being on their way to Wembley every fortnight for a stroll against Cardiff City or some twats. It is a bit odd that someone who's won a World Cup final is, oh yeah, that was

nice, but you know the dream is. But he was wearing number two in midfield which must have just taken a little bit of gloss off it, you know. But he wore number one in the next year's World Cup. Argentina did all the numbers in alphabetical order. Yeah, but where can you go after wearing number two, you know? No, it's just I'm very snotty about football records.

I know the official version is that things get better with Anfield, Rap and World in Motion and stuff like that. But it's not that I prefer football records like this, but I want football records to be like this. Reaching a Zenith with Go For It City, Cough City's 87. Classic. I prefer football records like this

that don't in any way actually count as good partners. It's incredibly militaristic, isn't it? Ironically enough, considering what would happen soon to rather spoil their relationship with their star player. Ricky V is not on stage, is he? No.

I can't see him. He's pissed off, isn't he? No one's asked him about what his dream was. Being chased by a giant potato or something. With a knife. What's weird about Spurs and what makes them so kind of odd is that they're the only one of the current big six English teams not to have had a period of dominance, right?

Like a run of a few years where they're the the boss of football you know but even when they've won things uh they've never really stayed on top of the heap for a few years so they can look down on everyone else and boil in their own superiority um i mean when teams have a period like that it pumps up the fans in various horrible ways, but deep down it calms them, right? So however entitled they get and however angry they are in later years when they have another team of different blokes who happen to be wearing the same shirts who aren't as good,

there's a sort of inner glow that lasts for a while and keeps them going, you know? Whereas Spurs' successes have been so bitty and really the experience of their fans going you know whereas Spurs successes have been so bitty and really the experience of their fans is watching nice attractive and

expensively assembled sides win the odd cup and then fall apart as soon as the pressure's on so the fans are

sort of perpetually blue-balled you know and I think that's why they're they often so often seem grumpy and

ill at ease. But they've been on top of the Pops more than other clubs. They have. And you know who looks really happy about being on top of the Pops? Glenn Oddle at the back, I think. He's got a look of sheer delight. He's clearly thinking about his future pop career right now. Yes.

He's just enjoying this experience so much. They should have a special amendment to the badge. You know how clubs have stars on the badges for fucking any reason

nowadays. Spurs should have one on theirs, man. To commemorate the fact that they've been on top of the Pops more than any other club. They should have

a gold silhouette of Dave Lee Travis's wreathy head to commemorate make it happen now I mean the

shocking thing about this is how fast it rockets it up the charts like you know after the FA Cup final and you think fucking hell

Tottenham have not got that many fans well yeah which suggests there must have been people all over the country who didn't even care about football

never mind supporting other teams who thought oh yeah this is alright it's the Chas and Dave factor in it everyone loved them it's a good old Chas and Dave tune with football nonsense on it so the following week Aussie's Dream stayed

at number 5 it's highest position the follow up Tottenham Tottenham, Tottenham, would only get to number 19, and they never troubled the charts again. Also, by this time, Ozzy's dream had turned into a nightmare due to the Falklands War,

and he had left the country to train with Argentina's World Cup squad and was eventually loaned to Paris Saint-Germain before returning in 1984. And there would be three FA Cup final replays on the bounce from 1981 to 1983, resulting in at least 40 minutes of Top of the Pops that never happened because of stupid football.

For fuck's sake. Oh, what we could have had. I don't know how people get excited about netball like that. There you go. Never mind. Better luck next time, Sydney. Take that camera five. I didn't know we could afford five cameras.

Number 18 in the charts. It's a teardrop fix. Oh! This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon Pull Apart, only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey, and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. I can see the veins in my hands are showing through Travis, the tip of his hat standing erect, bows his head to hit camera 5 with it

as he introduces treason by the Teardrop Explodes. Formed in Liverpool in 1978, the Teardrop Explodes were immediately signed to the local label Zoo Records and put out their first single, Sleeping Gas, in February of 1979. This is the third and final single the band recorded for Zoo and it was first put out in February of 1980, originally failing to chart. But their follow-up and first single for new label mercury records when i dream got to number 47 for two weeks in october of that year in the wake of their next single reward which got all the way to number six in march of this year this was put out again and it's up this

week from number 25 to number 18 yeah this is a sublime record. Although that might be slightly exaggerated by coming straight after Toya and Chas and Dave with the 1981 Tottenham Hotspur FA Cup squad. I mean, but in that context especially, you'd need a lot of dead bits in your brain not to hear this as a torrent of pleasure and imagination and not to spot the sudden return to this programme of that indefinable but instantly recognisable spark

that makes great pop music different from rubbish, right, above and beyond any direct analysis. Like something magical and energetic is happening in this music, even though it doesn't do anything all that remarkable, and suddenly the whole world lights up. And it's a song about nothing, sung by some chatty-looking blokes in jodhpurs and fisherman sweaters,

the most fascinating art form. Why can you just feel the presence of beauty in this song? I don't even think it's anything they did deliberately but it's clearly there yeah i mean i'm gonna have to sort of change my opinion of the teardrops because i must admit i haven't heard this before watching this episode because to me teardrops it's but a teardrop explodes sorry uh they're like one hit wonders to me you know how some people you only need one record off it's like charles and eddie that's obviously such a different place and you know a reward hit all kinds of pleasure buttons and that'll do me do you know i mean so i never bothered exploring anymore there's a few

things that kind of there's three big gaps in my musical education that always sort of make me feel slightly heretical being a music journalist one of them them is that I don't like the Pet Shop Boys that much. I like West End Girls and I don't like much else. That immediately is not appreciated in music journalist circles. And I don't get the two sort of twin scenes of early 80s British pop music in as much as I'm really not that fussed about New Order. And I'm really not that fussed about Echo and the Bunnymen

and Teardrop Explosion, that whole Liverpool scene either. However, watching this song, I immediately got totally suckered into it because it is a beautiful song. It reminded me, there's a thing of attempting to sound like, say, Forever Changes or something. But this song is genuinely,'s just look really interesting it's it's got got a really nice flow to it and it's it is like taylor says a beautiful song something like a band i obviously need to investigate

further or maybe i should just leave it at this a two-hit wonder reward and treason and that will do me i don't know whether to investigate kilimanjaro um i'd say give passionate friend a go yeah that's how you get on with that well you see the thing with teardrop explodes particularly kilimanjaro which is like the first album they much as i love them i'm also conscious that most of their songs are just the same song yeah um which it could be some sort of gimmick or like a perverse aesthetic thing but i think it's not practically everything they did for the first couple of years just barrels along on one chord for most of the verse and the tune is based around two notes with the same wide interval that goes like or every one and you listen to killer manjaro it starts to get a bit disturbing

and i sort of almost half suspect that's deliberate because that's kind of like what seeds lps sound like you know what i mean yeah two notes have a narrower interval but it's the same sort of rest uh relentless uh repetition but i wouldn't put it past julian coke but i don't know i think he at this point he might just have been too out of it to write more tunes yeah but this is the big exception from this album because this one shows what he could really do yeah um it's got this immense sort of sweeping melody uh and the chorus that sounds sort of authentically uh expansive it's not like mock heroic you know which is why I dislike Echo and the Bunnymen, all that sort of mock heroic stuff.

Right. Because this just sounds full of air, you know. I think if all their stuff had been on this level, or the level of Tiny Children, which is their best song, and an authentically emotional record, despite Julian Cope's almost

psychotically emotionless vocal, then they would have been the second best band out of Liverpool rather than the third or possibly the fourth, depending on how you rate the searches. I mean, with this performance here, it's clear that Julian Cope is the only person

that anyone's interested in. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you can't take your eyes off him. I really liked him. I really liked Julian Cope when I was, like, 13. It was a bit like your best mate's really decent older brother, who was a bit of a boffin and could also play the guitar, and you were really envious that he wasn't your big brother.

Yeah. Or, to put it another way he's like kevin ayers because when you get into or discover kevin ayers you can't look at julian cope the same way again because not only does he look exactly like him he sounds exactly like him too he's like the orion of kevin ayers now the what julianope does, or did really well, is that he would take that sort of 70s head music and Kevin Ayres and all that stuff and then drag it backwards through garage rock and round again through punk,

like bashing a sheet against a rock to get off all that hippie mould. Yes. And it works really well you know well yeah what i like about what coke does he when he does go back to the 60s it's not the fucking doors basically and it's it's more like it's more likely to be the electric prunes which who are always a more interesting band anyway so his his kind of obscurantism was was always yielded good dividends i thought yeah i know there's a lot about this band his kind of obscurantism always yielded good dividends, I thought. Yeah.

I know there's a lot about this band being kind of monged out on LSD a lot. As to whether they're monged out on LSD on this performance, I'm not sure. I mean, whenever I was on LSD, the urge to sing and dance never really came to the fore. It was more the urge to kind of, I don't know,

watch a pendulum swinging in a hallway grandfather clock for an hour, firing at it with a spud gun and hitting it every time with a lovely sort of solaris chime that radiated away in chromatic orange waves. Things like that. It wasn't really about jumping around and singing. If they were, if they were tripping, I mean, hats off to them. They're putting a lot of effort in. I've never done LSD, but I'm guessing that if i had done it i wouldn't want to do it in the presence of dave lee travis oh that would be terrifying man well what it is with teardrop

explodes is there's something really abstract about their stuff um it's not really pointed in any particular direction um but it's not so much like tripping it's more like that sort of flat blasted mental state you get into when you've just been taking too much acid but you haven't gone insane yet just like this sort of sprawling mental wilderness you know like very brightly and confusingly lit but almost featureless it's just like this heavy uh throbbing mess you know and then after he left um his first two solo albums is the best stuff julian cope ever did i think uh world shut your mouth which has got nothing to do with the song world shut your mouth which is from a few years later uh and fried which are to me like all-time class he's trying really hard to make them like sid

barrett's solo albums like you know he's really damaged and stuff but i think he was a bit uh and they don't have quite that same uh feel because he's present again you know he feels like it feels like he's emotionally present and human on those albums in a way that he's not on the Teardrop stuff. But, I mean, it is all very drug-oriented, and there's a sense in which it's very unconstructive and solipsistic and useless, you know, like a lot of LSD-related stuff. But on the other hand, I'd rather have that

than kids now just talking about food and stuff i was in the cafe right the other day i was trying to read a book this sort of fit and healthy young couple came in and sat down at the table next to me and for 45 minutes they just talked about food and it wasn't like conceptually like they had something to say about food it was they were going to make a chicken pancetta and they were talking about where to get the ingredients and you know how to make it shop obviously yeah they're just talking about cooking it they weren't even excited about it they just they didn't have anything better to talk about do you know what i mean yeah and i say give me the the neon lit shambles of the acid head brain over that any day

because it's less frightening. And then another load of people came in and there was this girl blathering on and she says, what's your favourite non-dairy milk? And then she answered herself. She said, Oatly is killing it. Why are people so boring why are people so fucking boring now and then later on she said

and by this point yeah I was earwigging right she said my 2019 goals is to be close to nature surrounded by nature and shit that I care about. She wants to turn suburbia upside down.

She said, next week I'm going to the Azores. Started talking about all these places, like she was going to all this jet fuel she was going to burn up in order to be closer to nature. Well, I mean, when you talk, I mean, because every year I have to talk to kind of a generation of kids if you like to interview them to get on courses and stuff and what when you ask them about themselves and what they're into what you actually get back is a list of their anxieties it's like

lords so i've got a very very low tolerance for all this shit now so what was i'm yeah i'm kind of allergic to allergies if you like um when i hear about somebody being allergic to something they can't eat this they can't eat that i am very much of the you know gluten intolerant bone idol more like which is terrible and unsympathetic but i've just heard too much of it you know so the following week treason dropped three places to number 21. The follow-up, Passionate Friend, got to number 25 in October of this year, their last appearance in the top 40.

Sadly, diminishing returns set in and the band split up in 1982. Until you realize, it's just a story Until you realize, it's just a story Until you realize Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and now this is where I get hot on the collar I get very excited because my favourite ladies. Let's go! Travis, with steam literally coming out of his ear, pulls at the collar of his jumper in a carry-on, four-slap-the-back-of-the-neck style as he introduces Legs & Co. without even bothering to mention the band or the song.

It's Stray Cat Strut by the Stray Cats. Formed by three schoolmates in Long Island as the Tomcats in 1979, the Stray Cats were teenage rockabilly revivalists who garnered a following in CBGB's and Max's Kansas City before hearing all about that Ted revival thing in the UK, which caused them to flog their instruments and buy plane tickets to London in 1980. Once here, they set about the Ted strongholds with Gleeful Abandon,

causing Mick Jagger, Pete Townsend and Jimmy Page to check them out. And after one such gig in London, they were introduced to Dave Edmonds, who offered to produce their first LP. After signing to Arista, their debut single Runaway Boys went all the way to number nine in December of 1980 and this is the follow-up to Rock This Town which also got to number nine in February of this year and it's up this week from number 14 to number 11 and they've been rewarded by having Legs and Co doing their catty thing all over it we need to go back to that Travis introduction, chaps. It was quite remarkable, wasn't it? Yeah, magic of the movies.

I mean, that jet of steam I would previously have associated only with Sid James growling and charging like a bull at Jen Sims. Yes. It's remarkably precise jet of steam as well. It's not just dry ice around his head or anything. It's precisely coming out of there. They've got a pipe up in his pubic tangle which makes you think that some

poor runner on that show had to touch that beard, had to dodge the bits of dried egg that were probably encrusted into it and the little tufts of tobacco as well, how grotesque that poor person. So what do we talk about first me dear boys, the song or the

performance well the performance has a real yeah yeah it has a real um hot gossipness to it um yes it really does what i immediately recalled was just colossal embarrassment this was the kind of thing if rude stuff came on the telly because i'd be watching this with my parents if rude stuff came on the telly whatever however sexualized it was whether it was this or whether it was I don't know particularly fruity scene from Dallas or Dynasty or something I would just um hide behind cushions or leave the room I couldn't watch I couldn't watch that stuff with my parents in the room um because uh you know I mean I was I was eight turning nine and any burgeoning sexuality I had. I mean, basically, if I even mentioned a girl's name in my parents' presence, my mum would, you know, nurture me by going,

Woo, woo, do you fancy that? Oh, no. Which just made me avoid, you know, that entire subject. So anything sexual, anything rude like that i i would have kind of bolted and gone out yeah watching i was like that yeah i was just like that neil my i remember one time there was a an episode of disney time on when i was five and i was at my grandpa's and there was this young kind of early 70s britney spears type uh singing a bit of a song and i'm just sitting there,

just minding my own business. And my dad and my grandpa come back from the pub. And they're like, oh, she's a bit of all right, isn't she, Aral? Oh. And I remember marching off,

stomping off, to sit at the bottom of the stairs and just feel really angry. And I carried that through my life. It was like, oh, what that taught me was is that if you show any affection or you make out that you fancy anyone it's something that you've got to hide or you'll have the piss taken out of you yeah but so yeah but even to this day i don't ask i

don't ask uh ladies out well oh no, to this day, right, you know, the most uncomfortable moments for me are when you're with other men and they start talking about women in that way. I feel so uncomfortable in those scenarios. Like, I've been in staff rooms and stuff where, I don't know, it's just been blokes and they start talking about, I have to get out of that scenario.

It's too close to a fucking biscuit game, basically. So I just went out. And similarly, yeah, at that age, I would have just bolted. I would have just ran out the room. I was pretty similar to you at the time as well, Neil, because whenever something a bit fruity came on the telly and I was watching it with my family,

it would be, and I actually did a diagram of this and I drew it out, the eyelines of everyone in the living room. And it would start with me mum, right? Me mum would look at me dad and me dad would look at me and I'd be looking at the dog on the floor and the dog would be looking at the telly.

So there's this shagging scene going on and the only person watching it is Rex the fucking dog yes Neil there is the element of the hot gossip about it and you know this is in competition with Kenny Everett I don't think hot gossip were going at the time though

by this stage I'm not sure I know that Foxy Feeling was on the Little and Large show and apparently they were dead raunchy i remember reading the daily mirror about how terrible uh it was that video recorders had come in and young lads were recording little and large and freeze framing uh foxy feeling to look at a bit of gusset and stuff it's not natural no but it'd be even worse if they're freeze framing it to have a good leer at Eddie Lodge though dressed up as

Olivia Newton-John you know we're a bit lucky getting this one for legs and coat because a couple of weeks previously they did Kimae by Ennio Morricone and they were just in dead long dresses and just walking about in formation

ankles and coat yes and just walking about in formation. Ankles and cobalt. Yes. This is more like it. The thing is, having seen the beaming, healthy Pans people in the last episode we did, in living colour, at the apex of patched together glam you know looking really glossy but really relatable yes it's quite strange to then turn straight to this and to remember how hard and frowning and unyielding legs and co really seem by comparison

it's like entirely appropriate for the times, but the times are chilly. Yes. And I know that they're aiming for a sort of crimp haired, you know, feline thing. And they're trying to look, uh, scraggy.

Foxy feline, if you will. Indeed. Yeah. They're trying to look, you know, imperious and, uh,

and street. But even in the course of looking so silly they don't give an inch they always look well set up for tutting and rolling their eyes and holding on to their tia maria and coke as a parade of hapless jack the lads in foster brothers suits sidle up to them in Alberto's nightclub with like half a lager in one hand and lean and shout into their ears, your father must have been a thief

because he stole an angel out of heaven and put it in your body. You can't blame them. You can't blame them, but it's really noticeable that times have changed and become just that little bit less innocent. But the thing is, what I didn't like about this dance is that they're doing that thing a lot of people do when they try to impersonate cats,

which is to put their hands together in front of their chest, flopped over to look like paws. Well, this is wrong because no cat has ever done that. No, that's rabbits, isn that's rabbit and i don't think they would be capable of it is it yeah when mice would mice do that when they stand up on their back legs twitch nose the only time a cat has its paws in front of its chest curled over is when it's lying down lollies yes you know rolling about it's a sign of contentment you don't stray cats don't don't do that on dustbin yeah and i'm sure i've seen that um half-eaten fish fake fish on something else and i can't remember it was it's possibly rent-a-ghost or something yeah but there's an argument really it was a standard trope of cattiness wasn't it

it it was but i mean there's an argument really that legs and co are no longer needed um because by this time 81 just play the video we're surely at a time when most songs you know have videos and and yeah taylor's right they're cat impersonations um i mean it's what they leave out that annoys me as a cat owner um you know pretend to be sick yes pretend to have that far away look in your eyes when you're doing a particularly satisfying bit of frottage. Yes. There's none of that. There is one bit where a woman nearly,

she nearly falls over, doesn't she? She's coming back up the stairs and she nearly takes a tumble. But like Taylor says, whereas I think Pan's people would have had a giggle at that, and maybe you might have seen her having a giggle at that, you don't get that with Legs & Co. It's just murderously following through. Well, maybe she would have landed on her paws.

I mean, they're wearing cat ears, not real ones, because that would be disgusting. And combinations of denim and leopard print, which in 1981 still denotes slinky rock chick, but nowadays means female Jeremy Kyle guest. And they're doing sort of cat things in front of metal bins. So, you know, they're slinking about and pulling cartoon fish bones out of the bin.

They didn't spray their musk, and they didn't claw each other in the face, and they didn't shit in my back garden. There is some sort of suggested power hierarchy happening amongst these uh stray cats as well which could have been quite sexy but the the file is so blurry and old that i couldn't really see what was going on because it's dimly lit as well they've got a sort of a like a low red light on it to kind of give it that extra model upstairs oomph

to it. I think the hierarchy works whereby the woman at the end who is chewing gum, buffing her nails and winks at the camera. She's TC. She's Top Cat. Close friends get to call her DD. Oh, that's

Dan. Yeah, the original idea for the costumes was they wanted Jill to wear like a massive tie and nothing else. Yes. And another one, a white roll neck and nothing else. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, yeah, I mean, you know me, Taylor. I'm always... My heart lies with Pans people over legs and coat. But at least they didn't do a jungle rock thing with the cattiness.

And thank fuck they didn't try to emulate Get Down by Gilbert O'Sullivan. Can you imagine how well that would have gone? Oh, yeah. It would have been almost like herding cats. Yes. Wouldn't it? Yes. No, but at least in these days,

people still gave cats a bit of respect, right? And acknowledged their tough, independent nature, you know. And it's the contrast. Yeah, they didn't bung them in a fucking cafe. It's the contrast of that and the fact that they look cute is really what's great about cats it's uh um you know whereas nowadays they're they'd have had them you know sat on a on a countertop pushing things off with their paws you know what i mean everyone going this cat's an

asshole you know what i mean i sort of on behalf of you know my cat and cats everywhere i sort of, on behalf of my cat and cats everywhere, I sort of object to that a bit. When you get adverts on that and they put the cat's voice on and the cat's going, oh, he wants some yummy food in my tummy. That's not a cat's internal monologue. No, it's intransigent murderousness. That's what's on a cat's mind. That's why I never feel...

My cat is a fucking pain in the arse but I never feel bad about telling her this I never feel bad about frankly calling her a twat and calling her a cunt and things like that a cat doesn't care about what you say to it

I would never do that to a dog because it's eyes would break my heart but a cat you know you can call it what you like and it just stares at you with this blank well because you know the cat's calling you that. Yeah, permanently. And worse.

Yeah, if cats could talk, they would be considerably less well-loved. But I think possibly even more fascinating and wonderful. Should we talk about the song? If only there was a cat cafe where Legs & Co were there. You ever been in a cat cafe? There's one just down the road from me. But you have to book six weeks in advance because it's always full of cupcake people, you know what I mean?

Oh, man. My niece, yeah, she's seven now. And every time she comes down to Nottingham, where do you want to go for the day? Oh, the cat cafe. It's like, oh, for fuck's sake. I'd go in there with her. He says, right, we've got an hour.

Now, what you want to do is you just want to sit with me, dead quiet there, and the cats might come up to you. No, no, no. She just charges off, running after these cats who clearly do not give a fuck. They've all gone into the cat green room. There's this room next door that's got and there's a little kind of like massive mouse hole in it and and that's where

the cats rest uh to get away from the fucking mentalists to go into cat cafes so she's she's off yeah and and so there i am sitting she always wants to sit in the same fucking place as well which is right in front of the full-length windows. And so I'm sitting there reading a book. I'm just thinking, please, no one who knows me walk past this window and just see me looking like I'm on my own, surrounded by menclist cat women. It looks like I'm making the last throw of the dice.

And, of course, all the cats come up to me because they realise they've got a kindred spirit that hates everyone else in the room as well. We sit there and say, how many cats did you stroke? Oh, none.

They all ran away from me. It's like, honestly, we could have gone round the fucking back of the kebab shop up the road, sat round the bins and would have had more cats

coming up to his head fucking ridiculous but anyway the stray cats, the band rock and roll is absolutely refusing to fuck off, even in 1981 we've got Chicken Steven at number 2 This Old House is still at number 41

The Polecats are at number 38 with Rockabilly Guy and Hidey High Holiday Rock by Paul Shane in the yellow coats has soared 33 places up the charts this week. Why isn't that off? But this is the difference with this. This is an unforgivable but great record, I think. Yes.

I think it's much more great than it is unforgivable. So you end up forgiving it anyway. Well, why is it unforgivable? Well, because it is, in a sense, pattern work. It is just an attempt to recreate elements of the 1950s. But, you know, as they say, throwback's all right if you're doing something decent. You put this record on and it's not fucking shaking

stevens they know exactly what they're doing and they know yes enough about this music to know what they should be playing up and what they should be playing down um yeah and you know and also it resists the negative advances of the 1980s in a good and a bad way right it refuses to acknowledge that it is in the 1980s but also it hangs on to that toughness and sharpness of rockabilly even though it's recorded in a clean and modern way um and it's also it's not just a a dead straight lift of all the bits that everyone remembers from the old days you know i mean this really this is almost more like a night club jazz song you know which a lot of those records were when you listen to them the thing

is the stray cats they know where to leave gaps in the singing dave edmonds knows where to leave gaps in the production and um it's just a great sounding record i seem to recall having a real fondness for the stray cats and even at a young age absolutely understanding that what they were doing was was retrograde in a sense but you didn't at that age interpret that like Taylor says as a kind of almost a philosophical move or a bad move it was just a textural move of putting this stuff into pop and it was a deeply pleasurable one I remember really liking this record they've also given the ted revival a huge shot in the arm by number one actually being american and number two not looking like a load of fat dads you know i mean it must have if you were a ted in the like in the aventures the stray cats must have been your gino washington yeah yeah because many ted revivalists look like the football coach in Jossie's Giants, really. Yes, yes.

But, I mean, they did get lucky in that there was this weird slow-motion rock and roll revival happening all through the 70s and into the early 80s. And they only just caught it. But, you know, there's something truer and more authentic in the worthwhile sense about their approach. I mean, of all those bands, this is the one that is like

a proper rock and roll band. These are the ones who don't act like they're entertaining the troops or playing in the dinner hour at Pontings. You can sort of believe them. They understand and pay attention to and reproduce all their little details in these 50s records, which can be mistaken for magic by non-musicians because you can't write them down

and they don't show up in songbooks. You feel them more than hear them, all the sort of little edges and inflections in the playing. This is what's at the heart of all those records because if you look at most uh 50s rock and roll and rockabilly songs it's the same song they're all it's all the same song over and over again uh it's that it's those little inflections and personal touches and little uh sonic moments that make those records. And all that stuff is ironed out of shawody-wody and ironed out of darts, you know. Whereas they understand it and they do it, you know.

And it gets more right than it gets wrong. But the main thing is it has something of the smell and taste of old rock and roll as well as just the sight and sound. So, the following week, Stray Cat Strut dropped three places, back to number 11. After backing Dave Edmonds on The Race Is On, which got to number 34 in June of this year,

their follow-up single, You Don't Believe Me, only got to number 57 in November of this year. And they'd only have one more hit in the UK when She's Sexier and 17 got to number 29 for two weeks in September of 1983 and they were pretty much done here however tracks from their first two UK LPs were cut and shut by EMI America into one LP built for speed and it went platinum in the USA and stayed at number two there for 26 weeks unfortunately for them released at the same time as Thriller

and Stray Cat Struck went to number three there in March of 1983 Number 15 is The Human League in Chart Music 11, and this single, their fourth on Virgin Records, is the follow-up to Boys and Girls, which got a number 48 in March of this year. It's also their first single with their new line-up after Boys and Girls which got to number 48 in March of this year. It's also their first single with their new lineup after Martin Ware and Ian Craig Marsh defected and Phil O'Kee and his girlfriend went to Sheffield nightclub The Crazy Daisy to find a last-minute female backing singer for his rump band's forthcoming tour and discovered Suzanne Sully and Joanne Catherall. Two 17 year olds who first met at a show waddy waddy gig in 1976. You see show waddy waddy man.

Catalysts. Three weeks prior to this episode the sound of the crowd entered the charts at number 53. And the band were invited on Top of the Pops. Which led to Sully and Catherall nicking off Six form to go on top of the Pops and win at life. This is not that performance. But after it went up 12 places from number 27 to number 15 this week, they've been brought back on. And here's your fucking highlight, I believe.

Yeah, and it's really illustrative to me as well of how a few years' age difference can make such a difference in your perception of Pop. For my missus, was the cutoff point with human league she loved the early stuff but as soon as the girls joined she she really lost interest in a sense for me it's when the girls joined of course it's when i got interested and not just because i really fancied joanne cathwell oh yeah um you know i love the human league i think from this song onwards my sister had there, and I was so into it because of the sound, the drums, the bass.

Unlike nearly all other synth-based pop music at the time that I had access to anyway, the stuff in the charts, Human League stuff was bassy, and it had, like, these big, wumphing moments of squelchy pleasure in it. And it was ultimately, like, taking what sort of cabaret Voltaire were doing and making it pop this, Sound of the Crowd was one of the, you know they used to call their songs

blue or red didn't they according to whether they were pop or dance numbers, this was one of the red songs by them which I always preferred to be honest with you, I had my love for Human League validated not by the music press because I wasn't reading the music press at the time but actually two years later when Fascination

came out which it's probably not their best single but for some reason remains my favourite human league single Keep Your Feeling Fascination but when that was introduced on Top of the Pops it was introduced by Bruno from the Kids From Fame because the Kids From Fame were doing that episode and I remember so

distinctly that when the opening synth rift Fascination started Bruno was nodding his head on really getting into his music and that really validated it for me because I quite liked Bruno from the Kids of Fate He liked the high fidelity didn't he No this is it but I mean Fascination was the

first single that I went and bought by the Human League but I was well aware of Sound of the Crowd always loved it Fascination by the way the B-side Total Panic I think and bought by the Human League, but I was well aware of Sound of the Crowd, always loved it. Fascination, by the way, the B-side, Total Panic, I think is one of the greatest synth instrumentals ever. But Sound of the Crowd's another record like the Undertones one

that I've come to love more and more the older I get. It's true nature being revealed to me, really, when I started DJing with it. I mean, if you're doing a party, you're going to put Don't You Want Me On at some point towards the end of the night. It's a guaranteed floor filler. But sound of the crowd is the perfect one to build

up that last hour with yeah um you know a song about clubbing about getting over yourself to a certain extent and surrendering to the kind of the nightclub step and it's not snotty about it it's not denigrative of of kind of of that club clubbing culture I just love this record I mean who couldn't I remember once hearing it like decades after this but hearing it in the correct context in a sense I was in Meadowhall Shopping Centre and it came on

near Sheffield and I don't know why but just being in Sheffield and hearing it it was like I don't know hearing Nightclub by the Specials in Cov or something and this performance on Top of the Pops is just great Phil always

it's just wonderful Phil always simultaneously managed to look kind of androgynous from the neck up but like a proper rock singer from the neck down and I love the way

the musicians they're barely touching stuff you you know what I mean? Yes. And the tape reels are still going. It's really like that bit in Close Encounters when, you know, manual control turns off and the machines start speaking to each other. There's no sweat involved in this performance in a sense. No. It's just this impossible to imagine kind of futuristic circuitry making this sound.

So I remember watching this precise performance and just being blown away. Just a brilliant, brilliant song by a brilliant band. Yeah, what they understand and always did is the force of synthesizers, right? And the fact that the lack of subtlety at this point in the development of electronic keyboards um has simplified everything right so it makes it ideal uh for pop music so like you know how famously gary newman first pushed down a synthesizer key or probably pushed the pad because it was a probably an oldp synthesizer, and thought, that sounds bigger than a hundred Les Pauls all playing at once. And so he built all those Tubeway Army songs around that rock idea

of brutal riffs and power and distance. Whereas the Human League heard that huge flat noise and linked it with the simplicity and directness of pop so even on those early albums there's still that sort of bubble gum undertow you know and it's not a piss take you you sense you can just feel that these are the kind of people who would instantly know that uh it's a rainy day sunshine girl by faust and Yummy, Yummy, Yummy by Ohio Express are non-identical twins. And it's astonishing to me that Human League were criticised

in some quarters at the time for being cynical, you know, when they weren't popular. They're the least cynical group alive, you know. They're smart and calculating, which is not the same thing as being cynical. And like Neil says, Phil's performance here is amazing. calculating which is not the same thing as as as being cynical and like neil says the phil's performance here is amazing i mean we've got to give credit to joanne and susan because in a in a top of the pops where a lot of an awful lot of acts seem to think that dancing just means swinging

your arms around like an ape at least at least they do it with some rhythm and discipline um but phil is magnificent because he's he's doing that thing which is really hard to pull off which is more than being androgynous he's being simultaneously macho and a feminine which is slightly different i mean it it's like he's chiseled and heroic and girly at the same time. He looks like you might walk past his house one day and look in through the window and see him there with his girl's world head giving it a disco makeover. But then the next night you might walk past and he might be out in the garden swinging a horse around until it shits itself and then dies.

It's like duality, you know, Yorkshire style, reflected in his haircut, which is literally half a man's haircut and half a lady's haircut. That's what I liked about his style. And it fits with the music, because this new human league music doesn't chuck away the boldness and the sort of austere thrill of their earlier weirder stuff. It keeps it

there. It just turns up the pop side to match it and you get this sort of hubba-bubba avant-garde. And in a way of course it seems laughable that they should have come from Yorkshire but in another way they couldn't have come from anywhere else. Especially at this

point in time, London cool was too restrictive to let this much proletarian joy through you know and the northwest is always too hung up on itself and the obsession of not being a knobhead you know you can't be a knobhead right if you're from manchester or liverpool so which is usually the the fast route to being a knobhead doesn't allow this much straight-faced silliness. But this specific mix of a bold and slightly gauche electronic futurism with the authentic texture of the youth club and the bedroom mirror, at this point could only have come from this part of the country at this moment in history. But, of course, you know. At this point, it could only have come from this part of the country at this moment in history, you know.

But, of course, you listen to it now, and for all the huge early 80s trappings, it's immediately understandable, and it stands outside time because that combination of distance and directness doesn't really date. Like, this record is painted with such broad strokes, and you're not really being asked to buy into anyone's narcissistic fantasy life right or take them seriously as emotional beings you know it's like this is a blend of the personal and the universal um and it's a blend of the human

and the mechanical and it just seems right and permanently good, and it makes perfect sense that the human league should be really big around this time, despite how odd they are. And it also makes sense that almost everyone who liked them then still likes them now, right? Nobody's embarrassed that they used to be into the human league, you know? No.

Despite all the attempts to kind of snigger at them because they look so early 80s it's like there's something really lasting about this music because it's it's physically addictive that's the thing it's got this push to it you want to i mean you know there's plenty of early 80s bands that probably meant a lot to me at the time i have no desire to hear any of them again. Whereas the physical hit, the physical bass hit of this music, I'm addicted. We all get addicted to it all our life.

And, you know, the thought of never hearing this again, it's massively upsetting. Whereas when I think about other bands from that era, I might never hear again. Fine, absolutely fine. But never in the Human League again, I'll be missing something major.

Yeah. I mean, the Human League fucked me about Big Style in 1981. It was the first dismantling of the brick wall I built around myself with the jam era sold on it. Because it's like, oh, synth bands,

not real music and it's rubbish and girls like it and blah, blah, blah. And you watch this performance and it's up there with all the classic top of the pops

introductory performances for a band because your eyes are all over the fucking place i mean the tune's fucking immediately immense and you're looking around going oh my god look at that lead singer yeah look at that look at the fucking engine room look at all the shit that's going on and i think it was joanne and suzanne tipped me over the edge because it's like oh my god they're like them girls in the fifth year i really fancy yeah i don't know what to think about this i fought against buying it and uh i remember coming out of school one maybe the day afterwards and uh all the teachers were going past in the car and all of a sudden i heard the sound of the crowd and um i just thought

oh my god which one of my teachers is playing that because because if they like it that's that's my that's my excuse yeah it was this fifth year lad with the first ghetto blaster i ever saw and it was like oh no oh god this is so fucking amazing because the song basically makes Sheffield sound like the absolute centre of the world. It makes Sheffield sound glittering and kind of neon and gliding but also gritty and tough and heavy you know it's got that

beautiful balance to it. Yeah it's like the 1981 version of Dancing in the Street isn't it? Yes. As opposed to the 1985 version of Dancing in the Street. Yes it really is. Right down to the 1985 version of dancing in the street yes it really is um right down to the fact that it comes out of a an industrial city and it's got that industrial pulse behind it which is yeah uh now being used for dancing if i have any criticism of sound of the crowd is very mild is linked to something that phil oaky said to me when

i interviewed him years and years ago which is that he was disappointed as a fan of craftwork when they did the man machine because what he loved about them was that they used electronics to talk about non-electronic things like european identity right or you know the open road and all this sort of stuff. Then suddenly they were doing science fiction, which struck him as a little bit predictable and a bit of a letdown, you know. Aside from the fact that it's a great album. Yeah.

Well, here the league are using these robo beats and these big slabs of synthesized sound to do a song about crowds and marching with you know with the obvious sort of vague kinky hints of totalitarianism you know which is it's the obvious thing it's like that it's either that or future dystopia is what you do you know with this sound so in a way i prefer them when they're doing more obscure subjects or when they're doing photo love stories you know or songs like louise about time and regret you know with the same kind of backing but that is a very mild criticism indeed yeah in fact the only really uh bad thing that i associate with human league i once got blanked by

joanne catharine right no yeah because this was another peril of working for Melody Maker in the 90s. I wrote a rapturous, and I seem to remember slightly crazed, review of the Human League's greatest hits, which they brought out to coincide with some gigs they were doing. And the person editing the LP section at that time was a lady of rockist persuasion who wrote the little intro bit, because it was a leadasion who wrote the little intro bit, because it was a lead review,

wrote the little intro bit, like the start of a feature, where it says, you know, blah, blah, blah, Taylor Parks assesses Sheffield's greatest hit makers or something. And put in some snide remarks about the Human League, despite it being a rave review. Yeah, yeah.

And said something about, you know, oh, despite the fact they had two Linda McCartneys in the band. Oh, for fuck's sake. And so I was backstage at the Human League gig and she'd go and say hello to Pricey, who'd just interviewed them. And he said, oh, this is Taylor. He wrote the review in Maddie Maker.

She just looked at me, just turned around and walked off. Oh, man. And it's like, I wasn't going to go running after her. I didn't write that bit. Do you not understand this? It's got my name in it. I don't speak about myself in the third person. But, you know, that was like,

it seems like a typical and representative experience for 90s music writers in so many ways. I didn't actually buy the record not because i didn't want to but because you know as i've said before i couldn't go to select a disc or something with me jam badges on and buy the human league because i thought i'd automatically be questioned and you know people say oh well how can you like this when you're wearing that and everything so i didn't but i did tape it with my dad's music centre. I taped it and played it endlessly.

But when Love Action came out, it's like, oh no, fuck this. This is getting bought. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, the Human Liga opened my mind as well as their heart. Beautiful. Yeah, bless them. What's curious about this song still is how undated it is. I know it's from the early 80s,

and I suppose we should associate it with a lot of things, but driving into town on a Friday night or going into town on a Saturday night still feels and sounds like this. The mayhem of it, the lunatic drive to get out of your face and go crazy and dance still sounds as propulsive as this record does so it just it hasn't dated at all just a stone cold classic do you think

this would have been the first time that for loki had run into the undertones since my perfect cousin yeah it must be his mum bought him a synthesizer got the human league into advisor oh yeah now he's making lots of noise. Blah blah blah with the art school boys. That was what you were afraid of Alan, your jam badge wasn't it? Yes. I don't know who would win that fight because

Phil Oakey is a physically much bigger man. The undertones are all like scrawny little gits but also they are from Derry. They're like street urchins from Derry whereas he's Filokey so the following week the sound of the crowd nipped up three places to number 12 its highest position the follow-up Love Action got to number three for two weeks in August of this year they'd have another top 10 hit in october when open your heart got to number six for two weeks and they'd rammed off 1981 with don't you want me getting to number one for five weeks in

december Good brother music is loud Get around town No need to stand proud Add your voice to the sound of the crowd. Wonderful. Hey, hang on. I'll save you. It's all right. It's all right. Don't panic.

It's all right. We have got Kim Wilde for you now at number four, see? Travis, surrounded by a huge gaggle of the kids, pretends to protect them from the rampaging cameraman and introduces a video of Checkered Love by Kim Wilde. Born Kim Smith in Chiswick in 1960, Kim Wilde was the oldest daughter of Marty Wilde, a first-generation British rock and roll singer who scored six top ten hits in the 60s and made her first public appearance as an early teenager in a publicity shot with her brother Ricky, who was being groomed as Britain's answer to Donny Osmond, and her dad, who was making a comeback as a glam singer in a Superman costume and glittery bicycle helmet called Zappo. costume, and glittery bicycle helmet called Zappo. In 1980, when she'd left the St Albans College of Art and Design, she was immediately signed to Rack Records and teamed up with Ricky, who was now a

writer and producer. Her first single, Kids in America, got to number two for two weeks in March of this year, held off the top spot by this old house by Chicken Steven and this is the follow-up which was also written by her dad and brother and it's up this week from number nine to number four well there's a lot to discuss here chaps but before we do that let us comment once more upon Dave Lee Travis Renaissance Man Because I have in my possession right here a book that he put together in 1985. I'm going to send you the cover right now and I want you to open it

and I want you to say what you see. A bit of a star. Media women, their fine points and phobias as photographed by Dave Lee Travis. Dave Lee Travis's photography book, everyone. A bit of a star put out in 1985. Describe the cover to me. Well, Dave is there looking at the camera with an undone bow tie.

Why? Oh, yes. Like he's at the end of a particularly long night Brian roll on roll off ferry if you will looking insufferably smug as usual

under the legend a bit of a star in pink kind of neon-y writing yeah and this is Dave in Golden Oldie

Picture Show era Travis isn't it with that sort of like sort of almost like mini afro hair with the massive white patch at the front it's essentially a compilation of his photography uh involving

famous women and the things that they like about themselves and the things that they're scared of i'm gonna pass on a selection now so um here's the first one right that appears to be is that who is that lindsey de paul who is that lindsey de paul what being tortured by neil young yes on some kind of medieval rat and stretching yes um with hay on the floor and immediately the concept of this book which is already worrying, Dave Lee Travis photographs basically women that he likes and talks to

them about what they're scared of becomes Dave Lee Travis usually I didn't realise it was actually going to be this horrifying inside that looks like a wax work from the Jorvik Viking Centre in York. That's horrible.

Yeah. Yes. That is Lindsay DePaul being, like, dressed in a sort of sexy medieval way. Serving way. Yeah, being torched on the rack with a massive grin by this bloke who, yeah,

looks like sort of Neil Young circa 1973. This is what David Travis got his rocks off to, you know. And it's not even styled like a fetish shoot or something. No. It really does just look like a fractured dream that he had. Yeah. Including what appears to be a bucket full of human feces in the corner. What the fuck is going on here?

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Next picture. Right. What we have here is a Floella Benjamin in a blue dress and a blue headband and her blue high heels

on the floor next to a bin that she's in, a dustbin. She's in a dustbin. Yeah, a really chatty dustbin as well, isn't it? Very chatty dustbin

with what appears to be mould and mildew all over the lid. Yeah, a lot of the time you see dustbins in shots like this and they've clearly just been bought.

They're like what you would win if you chose Dusty Bin, like a brand new dustbin. Now, this has been used for Dave Lee Travis's garden waste. Yeah. So essentially what's happened is, is that all these celebrities have told Dave Lee Travis what they like most about themselves, what they dislike most about themselves,

and what their phobias are. And then he goes off and works out a shoot. Lindsay DePaul says she doesn't like her height. So Travis has decided to torture her. And in this case, Florio Benjamin told him that she doesn't like her legs.

So Travis has put her in a dustbin. This is ostensibly right for a public audience and he's seen this concept through but it's clearly just for his own masturbatory purposes it's a oh dear oh dear I want to see more but I don't want to see more

we'll take to my grave the image of Dave Lee Travis masturbating over a picture of Floella Benjamin in a dustbin let's look at another one. Say what you see. I believe this is Lisa Goddard. Yes, it is.

This is Stardust. All wrapped up in sort of grey wrapping paper tied with string. Oh, dear, oh, dear. This is a few of Dave Lee Travis's favourite things. Like a giant smiley lady parcel. I'm not sure it's paper. I think it might be some sort of tarpaulin,

in which case, like, her fear is what? Being a victim to a particularly fastidious murderer. What's her fear? I've got to know. Well, this is another of the ideas which came to me the moment I spoke to her. The first thing Lisa said to me was that the only thing she liked were her face and her feet. Right. Jesus.

Jesus this is too close a little walk around what's actually inside behind that beard behind that grin oh god this is fucking grisly yeah you can imagine the steam coming out of his ears on this one

here's another one dear lord Christ almighty who is that I don't know who that is it's Georgina Hale Dear Lord. Christ almighty. Right, who is that? I don't know who that is. It's Georgina Hale, who was Budgie's missus and was in The Boyfriend as well. Who appears to be, yeah, I mean, I can't describe that image, I'm sorry. Well, she's resting her head.

She's wearing a sort of negligee, like a night-time negligee. Very sun-naught naughty knickers week. Resting a very scrubbed-looking head on a pillow being held by a giant man in a gorilla suit who's also copping a feel of her arse. Yes, yes. She likes the comfort of being protected, which is why I opted for a King Kong, Fay Wray type of shot.

Yeah, because King Kong really protected Fay Wray didn't he really well and one more we've gone and saved the best to last oh god Jesus right so what we've got here is as far as I can tell

is that Kim Wilde yes that's Kim Wilde with a kind of face mask on a chain coming from it she appears to be chained to a policeman

of who's who's got a far too big a beard and we act like a very American policeman that's not him is it no it's not well we don't know who's got a far too big a beard and we act like a show. He's a very American policeman. That's not him, is it?

No. It's not Travis. Well, we don't know. It's clearly an avatar of Dave Lee Travis. You know, this is clearly DLT placing himself in the fantasy. Yes. With a firm hand on his baton, you'll notice. Yeah, gripping his baton in a slightly suggestive way,

with his other hand made into a fist holding the chain, which goes to Kim Wilde's fetish eye mask. So he's also dressed from head to toe in black PVC. Nothing wrong with that. Deeply disturbing. I was reading recently about the Mineshaft Club that gave the village people its look. They're incredibly strict dress codes about uniforms, etc. This photograph looks like...

The fascinating thing about the Mineshaft Club is that they had a scat room that only lasted six months before it proved, quote- proved quote unquote unmanageable these people are possibly on their way jesus can i stop looking at this now it's in his notes uh travis says kim wilde likes her eyes hence the over the top protection oh how how did he get this shit off the ground and did these people get paid for this Did they get a fee they better have done It was done in association with Kodak

And it was £8.95 That's a lot of money back then And what would you do With this book once you'd looked at all the photos Oh I want to look at that photo again A Floella Benjamin in a bin Yes So yeah That potted history man we have to

talk about a brother and a dad because uh we're not going to get a chance to talk about them again i feel um marty wilde obviously knew nothing about him apart from that scene in candid camera where he got the cleaning lady to sing why must i be a teenager in love but zappo taylor you a fan um i wouldn't say a fan um but there is clearly something interesting about what looks like brian cant do the stripper gram yes but it's i mean the record it's junk I mean, the record, it's Junk Shop Glam, isn't it? Yes. It's like, it's a failed glam record. I mean, it's all right, but it sounds like an album track. And if you're doing a glam A-side, I mean, it has to have an impact, like the moon crashing through the roof of your house, you know,

to really make it. It's a little bit fiddly by comparison. And it's very mannered. And usually the best thing about cheapo failure rip-off pop is that in the search for originality and or gimmicks, it can do weird and inexplicable things. But this doesn't. No, he's no Panther Man, is there?

Oh, no. No, no, no. But then who is her brother ricky who uh who wrote this song along with kids in america and everything fucking hell i i am an astronaut what a fucking tune that is i haven't heard that it's neanderthal man by hot legs on tiger tops it's fucking brilliant but this song and this video I mean this is the follow up to Kids in America and I think she's done it

I mean this is obviously inferior to Kids in America but so are a lot of things but they do make a good fist of following it despite this being a much thinner song you can tell she's got wily veterans behind the scenes because as follow ups go it's smartly done because it's not just the exact same song rearranged which is

always the mark of the hit and run chancer you know and always sends the message okay well i'll be off soon uh but no they want kim to have a. So it's a slightly different type of song. But all the things which made Kids in America a smash hit are reproduced almost exactly. So it's got that production, the mood of glamorous anxiety and the sort of staccato backing in the verse. And that same delivery that's sort of glum and agitated. In the verse. And that same delivery that's sort of glum and agitated.

And like Kids in America had that football terrace chorus, which was the hook. Yeah. Because this has got a hook that sounds different, but it's even simpler because it's just three bangs on the same note. It just goes, check out love. And it's done quite cleverly. Like you open up the song with the first lines of the chorus, which goes into a minor chord for the first time in the whole song,

really unexpectedly, which lifts you out of the verse, pumps some air in it, and then locks it back down again with a hook that's just da-da-da. This is professional work. Yeah, yeah. I like this song a lot. It's kind of like a Chinny Chat cast-off in a way. Like, Racy could have done this about five years previous.

And of course, you're invited in a way by the video to make blondie comparisons because it has that pristine look to it. But, I mean, I love Kim. I always have.

I can almost, I can't believe I'm loving so much in this episode. I can almost hear my mum go, ooh, you fancy her, do you? And I did fancy her. Like,

mad at the time, of course. I mean, a more accessible version of the kind of Ice Queen that Debbie Harry was. But the more I read about Kim, and the more I heard her, the more I liked her. And we've got a perfect illustration, really, with Kim Wilde. I mean, everything that was bad about Toyah, in a sense. You could say that Kim Wilde had not a privileged background as such.

But, you know, her family was obviously a benefit if you're going to build a pop career. But you never resented that. No. Because she was humble but serious. And she clearly loved music and pop. And she understood the fundamental fact about pop, that it is about collaboration with others. And a kind of mutual conciseness, not the flabby indulgence of a toy. So even though she's the figurehead and the front woman, there's no arrogance.

There's just confidence here. What I love about the video as well um because i was trying to remember you know of course you know showers um did everyone have a shower because i seem to recall having baths for ages and then yeah showers getting really exciting with the dawn of zest soap which which made showers, I think, become something that everyone had to have because lemony zest just made a shower really appealing in those adverts. Well, you want to lick it, don't you? Yeah.

I bet you did as well, didn't you? Yeah, probably once. The disappointment and horror of licking or even biting into lemony zest and realising it was just soap I love this, obviously Kids in America is her greatest record and I love what Taylor said about it

having that football chant in it because one thing I recall about that song is being in America once in the 90s and I was with a group of other music journalists and photographers and we were all English obviously and we were in some club in Chinatown and um the dj put on kids in america now kids in america if we heard it back in england we'd probably just have you know tapped a toe but it almost became this lunatic hooligan

anthem kind of us you know clubbing together and waving our fists at the American people in this nightclub. Yeah, it's a badge of pride. We are the kids in America. Great record. But this is, it's not as good, obviously, but it's nearly as good. It's a great record with a great video. The video, it looks like it's been shot in NSTC or NCST. What is it?

NTSC or NCST. What is it? NTSC. Thank you. Never the same colour twice as television engineers would joke. Because the colour looks shit on it. That's the problem. Smeary and crap. Yeah, but it gives it that kind of American sheen. Yeah, absolutely.

Looks like she's being groomed for bigger things than us scab bags. Yeah. Watching Top of the Pops. Yeah. But, I mean, all Kim Wilde videos are cool. They've got a little bit of that sort of not-the-9-o'-clock-news thing going on, but no more than is appropriate because, ultimately, this video understands how a daft early 80s video should work.

It's all about communicating an image in a quick and silly way and finding a visual hook like a musical hook that's simple you know and we talk about pretentious 80s music videos but you know leaving aside the hilarious moody stares and poses uh really this is an unpretentious video because it just sells you an image and leaves it at that you know as opposed to someone like toyah you know so i was going to say even hazel o'connor was only a fifth rate hazel o'connor um the toyah did all these videos that seemed to think they had some actual merit or importance or that they were about anything you know and just revealed that inner emptiness and the credulity of people whenever a new medium arrives right like if you've

got a filter on it that makes the sky look pink and people say oh well she must be a video artist you know the only video toy reality business making was a remaker that one with our bud dwyer but this is fine because because this is. You know, this is just fun. Nobody smiles in it, but it doesn't matter. It's just fun and it's just meant to be. But it's got to be said, it's in a fucking public toilet, isn't it? It is. I mean, a really nice one.

And also one where there isn't any doors, but there's just like opaque plastic sheeting. Yeah. But she smashes the glass and everything, and that was pretty decent, actually. It was. That was a very good thing. But imagine the poor sod who's in there trying to have a shit,

and Kim Wilde and her band have come in, and it's like, oh, I can't go until Kim Wilde's gone. I can't have Kim Wilde stopping halfway through a video to go, oh, fucking hell, that stinks. That fucking funks. What dirty bastard's done that?

It's very ahead of its time, gender-neutral bathroom. Yes. But you're right, Al. The video grain, that's all you needed back then, a change of video grain to let you know that an artist was leaving you. Do you know what I mean? And they were now American-bound.

Yes. And the grain of this video does precisely that even though it wasn't you know quite to happen yeah i'll tell you something else though a little confession about kim wilde she's another pin up that i never pinned up right and i reckon she's great kim wilde i think she'd be a really she seems like a really good laugh and a really nice person you know she's very beautiful and everything but i just never fancied her, and I'm not sure why. I think it's that faint, wobbly confusion in her eyes. Never quite did it for me. But it's her and Debbie Harry, isn't it, Taylor?

You didn't fancy Debbie Harry either. Yeah, it's weird, isn't it? But also, when I was living in the Sticks, there was a story in the local paper about some overprivileged local shitheel right who was going out with kim wilde this was this was the news story in about 1991 like local man going out with kim wilde um and they told the story of how they met right on a dance floor of a hotel disco at some posh resort in the swiss alps um to which she had gained access by singing

hit songs and making people happy and making money from that and to which he had gained access by being a repulsive spoiled toad um so he waited until the dj played kids in america which of course he fucking did then went over and according to the news report started doing a crazy dance in front of kim wilde while singing we're the kids in switzerland whoa and of course she was impressed enough to start going out with him now no i can't talk i can't talk i've copped off with enough complete idiots in my time. But I trust I'd have a bit more self-respect than to respond to such an abject display of crass cockishness.

And I tell you what, I doubt Kim will have been as desperate as I've been at times, you know. But then again, we... Yeah, that's not good, Kim. You should have smashed your fist into his face like you did with that mirror. That is a shocking moment because you expect to see blood on her hand.

Yeah. Yeah, it's quite alarming, that moment. No, no, she's hard. But that guy, that's fucking confidence, isn't it? The thing you can't blooming create, but confidence gets you places. Yeah, but... Just doing a crazy dance, that's awful, man.

She's kind of gone down in my estimation of hearing that. we we do forget as well that a few years after that uh kim wilde also went out with chris evans so when you put it all together it does suggest that she has a type yeah so the following week checkered love stayed at number four its its highest position. The follow-up, Water on Glass, got to number 11 in August of this year and Diminishing Returns set in, which were promptly reversed in 1986 when a cover of You Keep Me Hanging On got to number two for two weeks in November of 1986 and she reeled off a string of top 10 hits in the late 80s. Well, as usual on Top of the Box, we have a look at the top 30, and right now we go from number 30 up to number 21.

Number 30, Bermuda Triangle from Barry Manilow, and Sugar Minot with Good Thing Going drops to 29. Up to 28, How About Us from Champagne. The Jacksons with Can You Feel It drop down to 27. Down 4 to 26 is Vic there from Department S, and The Beach with Drowning Up 1 to 25. Down to 24, Can't Get Enough of You from Eddie Grant. Smokey Roberts' great new record, Being With You, is at 23.

A 22, Musclebound from Spandau Ballet, and the undertones, When It's Gonna Happen, move up eight places to 21. Here's the other A-side from the beat now called All Out To Get You. Time to explain this incredible strain Now confusions become partisan Follow up, or it is what you make That's a usual mistake If you're happy with pain, you can take it from me. Travis, now with the rainbow-coloured attachment of head joy encircling his face,

making him look like a bearded snake about to strike, runs down the charts from number 30 to number 21, finally introducing All Out To Get You by The Beat. Chaps, any takeaways from that rundown? Well, it's a link that Travis can't and doesn't fuck up, unlike his other links, because he's been obviously given the insistence here. Band, song, song, band.

Do it in that order. And it enables him to not fuck it up, surprisingly. Yes. There's a couple of records I don't remember in there as well. Go on. Keith Marshall, which for two seconds I mistook for the Captain Beaky hitmaker. But no, that was Keith Michelle. Yes.

I've never heard Department S either. Am I missing out? Haven't you? No, genuinely, never heard them. Is Vic there? Honestly, if you played it to me, I probably would know it, but I don't associate a song with that band name at all. Right.

Fucking hell, Neil. Am I missing out? It's all right. A bit. It's all right. A little. And there's also Champagne, but spelt... Oh, you must know that one.

Yeah, I think I do. But it just took me by surprise because they spell their name C-H-A-M-P-A-I-G-N, which at first I took to be one of those pointless alternative spellings that just makes you think maybe they couldn't spell it and nobody corrected it. But no, then I realised it's actually a boring college town in Illinois where they come from, isn't it? Yes, yeah. Which seems to be a bit of a common theme of American bands

at the time, like Chicago and Boston and America. Just name yourself after where you come from. New York City. It would have been great if more British groups had done it. Like if the Rolling Stones had been called Dartford. Yes. The history would have been great if more british groups like the rolling stones had been called dartford yes that history would have been so different or if spaceman three had called themselves rugby yes it would be much better name so the beats we've well fucking hell we've we've covered them practically every time we've done an early uh 80s top of the pops and this single their sixth

is the follow-up to too Nice to Talk To which got to number seven for two weeks in January of this year. It's part of a double A side with Drowning which featured on Top of the Pops last month and it's the first cuts from their second LP Wapen which is out next month. The single had actually peaked at number 22 before dropping to number 31 three weeks ago but somehow it's hauled itself back up the charts and it's up this week from number 26 to number 25 well I mean in the chart rundown Travis announces drowning as the main song this is the cut I remember being played most on the radio definitely definitely I remember this being way more on the radio and I don't really remember drowning that that much it's another beat record it's another great record a

little little kind of pop feel a cootie type song it's got that afro step to it and that's what you know as we previously discussed with the beat the most the least scar of the kind of those kind of bands you know much more of a post-punk thing a pop poppy kind of pop group, in a sense. I love this record. I like the mordancy of the lyrics as well. The bleakness as ever from the beat. Something which typically DLT responds incredibly badly to. He's singing.

If you're happy with pain, you can take it from me that they're all out to get you. They're painting your life in a permanent grey. It takes more than tears to get rid of the stains and then it's straight to dlt going whoop whoop whoop whoop and it's yes yeah you're scared you might slip when you're holding a knife lose your fingers or more in a lathe on the night shift you're scared that your babies get born with no legs you're're so scared of death, you don't know what life is. Whoop, whoop, whoop. Get down, kids. DLT, just so fucking out of step. DLT's 1981 was CB Radio and Dealey Boppers.

He's in transition, isn't he? He's still a bit 70s DLT, but he hasn't quite got to the smoke glass shades and sports coat DLT of the later 80s. I'll tell you what's weird, the beat sort of passed me by a bit at the time. Really? Which is weird, because they were like local heroes and all that. I mean, I knew of them,

but they barely impinged on my consciousness. I don't remember any of their songs being hits at the time, I don't think, and i'm not sure why i guess it this was big brother music you know and i didn't have yeah i didn't have a big brother it wasn't quite like madness you know which was totally accessible to nine-year-olds musically and in every other respect and it wasn't even like the specials who had a sort of naughty older kid thing about them because they use swear words and, you know, words like contraception and it sort of sounded tough and street smart, you know.

The beat sort of fell down the cracks a little bit for me, really. And although I've heard all that stuff since and it's really great, I don't know, it's always slightly paler compared to their peers just because it doesn't have the unfair advantage of childhood familiarity. That's the only way in which the beat are inferior to those other groups for me. Because it is great. Although, despite being sort of catchy and upbeat, this doesn't sound much like a single to me.

You can see why I didn't have the confidence to put it out on its own, just as an A-side. Because the song doesn't do that much, and it really takes off. What this is really about is the contrast between the verse and the instrumental breaks, where it's like the dance floor's dropped out from under your feet, and it does that shifting multi-level thing. And there isn't much of that in the charts of 1981.

It wasn't a thing at the time and for some reason people don't like singles or don't buy singles which meander off like that you know even when they meander into beautiful places like this one does but yeah that's the thing just there's a subtlety to their stuff which doesn't quite take in the mind of a of a restless child do you know what I mean so I think yeah for

the fact that it's so brooding all their stuff is so brooding and rhythm based it sounds great to a more musically sophisticated adult but if you're like an English, sort of English kid who can maybe get the jam head on, you know, you feel a bit like a non-swimmer in the middle of a beat record.

It's like, what is it? They're like the dark chocolate of the two-tone area, or like the neat scotch of British scar, you know. It's an adult taste, I think. And of course, watching this, doubly upsetting at the moment with Roger, you know, ranking Roger as a passing.

And there he is in his pomp, just looking fantastic. Yes, a bit zoot-sooty, isn't it? Yeah, he's got that kind of kid Creole thing going on and he just looks great. Yeah, and Dave Wakeling in his grey suit with blonde hair looking like kim novak in vertigo yeah it's amazing didn't it yeah with that vox teardrop guitar which they look so lovely but

they're horrible guitars don't stay in tune it's like playing a cow uh yeah the only the only thing i don't like about the beat is I don't get how they thought it would be good to call themselves The Beat. Because it's probably the most boring band name I've ever heard. Worse than The Band, because at least that's definitive.

The Beat, it's like... They should have called themselves The Landlubbers. Or just Landlubbers. You know, it's artier. Or Birmingham. Yes. At least they wouldn't have had to call themselves the English Birmingham in America.

Yes. Or the English Landlubbers. What a great name that would be. Does it sound like a band in decline? No, not really. No? And do they feel out of time? Like their moment had passed? No, not really. No. And do they feel out of time? Like their moment had passed.

No, not really. Not in 81. If they were coming out with this, yeah, no, no, not in 81. It's still Santa Curran. No. You've got madness in the charts still. Yeah.

So. But it is, there's something slightly looser about this stuff than some of their earlier stuff. And a band trying new things and getting just a little bit looser is either a sign that they're going to move

into their next phase of artistic achievement or a sign that, yeah, they're on their way out and this could well be their last record. So the following week, All Out To Get You Slash Drowning dropped six places to number 31 again. The follow-up, Doors Of Your Heart, got to number 33 for three weeks in June of this year, and they wouldn't be let into the top 40 again until their cover of Can't Get Used To Losing You

got to number three in May of 1983. Woo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo! That's it. All out to get you. Well, if you're all seated comfortably at home, and indeed, why shouldn't you be? Because we've had some tremendous music on the programme and we've got some more to come yet. Let's take a look at the middle section, top 30, 20 to 11. At 20, attention to me from the Nolans. Then Lizzie with Bad Reputation and Are You Ready?

At 19, at 18, Treason is Just a Story. Teardrop explodes. Keith Marshall only crying still at 17. Down 10 to 16, make your Mind Up from Buck's Fizz. And Human League with the sound of the crowd up to 15. Up two places to 14, I Know Corito from Quincy Jones. Toyah's I Want To Be Free is up to 13. At 12, Up Goes Wendy Shines from Sheena Easton.

And Stray Cats with the Stow Cats Drug are at number 11. Right, right now the program, oops, we're moving for some unknown reason there's some great music around as i've told you this is careless memories from duran duran so soon just after you're gone My sense will sharpen But it always takes so damn long Before I feel how much my eyes have darkened Travis fucks about with his hat some more And then breaks down the charts from number 20 to number 11

Finally introducing Careless Memories by Duran Duran. Formed in Birmingham by John Taylor and Nick Rhodes in 1978 when they were working part-time at a club called The Rum Runner, Duran Duran became the house band at that venue, going through myriad line-up changes before their original singer, Stephen Tintin Dufferer was replaced by Simon Le Bon. In 1980 after recording a demo tape and playing regular dates in London as well as Birmingham they were offered the support slot for Hazel O'Connor's UK tour which led to a bidding war amongst major labels which was won by EMI. Their debut single Planet Earth made an immediate impact when it got to number 13 in March of this year, and this is

the follow-up. Put out on the insistence of EMI and against the wishes of the band. And after entering the charts a fortnight ago at number 38, it's only nipped up one place this week, and they're obviously hoping that a Top of the Pops appearance will give the single the

push it needs. Well, fucking up so much Birmingham in this episode, man. Yeah, but what I will say, it shows you something really interesting about music out of Birmingham, which is that there's not really a common thread. No. You mentioned Birmingham and people think of metal and they think of reggae because there's loads of metal and loads of reggae but

when you look at the actual hit acts that come out of birmingham uh or you know bands that people know there's juran juran uh dex's midnight runners black sabbath elo musical youth uh ocean color Colour Scene, Broadcast. The Moody Blues. Moody Blues, Fuzzbox. Jasper Carrot. Oh, and Toya, of course, lest we forget. Yes, of course. How could we forget? Not really a common thread, do you know what I mean? It's like most other cities, there's something.

Like groups from Manchester, there's always a sort of a rhythmic base to the music. Even something like The Smiths, there's always a repeating rhythmic pattern underneath everything. And that's true of The Fall and Joy Division and all of that stuff. Liverpool is all big chord changes and melody. Bands from Glasgow always sound American or American-influenced for some reason. Newcastle, there's a sort of a weird perversity.

Newcastle bands always sound soft, almost like they're rebelling against the grittiness of the city, you know what I mean? But Birmingham, there's nothing, no common identity. That's reflected in the geography, because in Birmingham, all the suburbs are quite distinct. They don't blur into each other the way they do in london like you quite often you have to get on a main road to go from one bit of birmingham to another um which is partly why a lot of the gang violence there is location based because people are cut off from each other

like los angeles uh yeah i think the same is true in music as well there's a it's like a a bunch of walled gardens you know not really overlapping we see travis uh introducing here's another great record blah blah blah blah um we do get the unedifying sight of him dancing for a while and then the camera swings away and he thinks that he's he's off camera and he's his shoulders just slumped down. I think we can kind of guess what Mr Travis thinks of Duran Duran.

But what the likes of Travis think about Duran Duran and what the likes of the Inky Music Press think about Duran Duran are kind of irrelevant really because I mean what I vividly remember about them that the emergence of was they were one of those bands where people would discuss which band member they fancied the

most and if you get a band where people are discussing which one they fancy the most yeah i remember my sister and her mates talking about this all the time and it kind of whether it's one direction or or gerand or toc later you know if you've got a band where people are discussing which band member they fancy the most, that is a band that's going to make it. My sister had that freedom to be able to... I knew back then that my sister fancied the drummer out of Duran Duran the most, just like I knew that my mum fancied Romeo Challenger out of Shawty Potty.

They were able to talk about these things, I wasn't. But I think that's partly the partly the you know duran duran they're a british success story aren't they and i guess we should feel proud but i find it difficult to have affection for them because their rise was just so in a sense unproblematic and they they were just immediately hugely successful. They got massive and with minimum derailments, they just stayed massive forever. And whenever you watch or read anything about Duran, there's no drama as such.

There's just this implacable rise to success with the best of everything, which is probably mirroring what Duran themselves were trying to achieve. Obviously not anything to do with punk. The new romantic thing, because of Spandau and the rivalry between the two, I think really what Duran were harking back to was a pre-punk age. And not in a glam sense.

A pre-punk age in terms of big studios, expensive equipment, massive tours, big promotional budgets. They yearn for this and as such they pose no threat to anybody. And consequently I just find it a little difficult to love them. Do you know what I mean? There are songs that I dig. There is an album by Duran that I love, which is Rio, which is sort of an undeniably good album. But in terms of having affection for them,

they just seem to have unproblematically got massively famous and stayed famous and stayed big. And it's a difficult thing to fall in love with. The only drama was when his boat turned over. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because it was blatantly obvious to me pretty quickly after this period and all to Rio that they started then making increasingly dodgy records uh genuinely gimmicky records like Reflex you know with the with the YII bit and you can hear Metal Nicky

dropping his guts and all that all those silly things all those silly things you can laugh at um so it's tricky um you know but by now it's irrelevant what D at. So it's tricky. But by now, it's irrelevant what DLT thinks. It's irrelevant what the NME thinks about Duran Duran. They have fans. They have young fans who are reading the pop press, not the music press. They're reading Smash Hits.

So they were never going to be liked by the Inkies because they did several things that the Inkies never liked. For starters, they had teenage fans almost exclusively and they had those teenage fans without the antagonisation of those teenage fans parents. Parents liked them as well and there was no wit or oddity really to their music

it was just honest music. The songs came from the Bond's poetry book you know he didn't really see his platform for anything else i remember reading an interview paul morley did when riots were going on in birmingham at the time down the road from where they were going to play a show and they didn't care you know they were just annoyed that their entertainment was kind of being interrupted with so they crafted well-played songs that they could play with a session man's competence

and they had that emphasis on just entertainment and escape so so the inkies were never going to like them but that's why ultimately they were probably far more influential than anyone else in terms of what would go on to happen in the 80s because duran were a kind of reassertion of a tradition they had nothing to do with a with punk they really had a lot to do with that reassertion of the kind of early 70s days of the record industry so it's a new sound I guess but it's absolutely

sucked dry of any threat to the industry so the Yankees are going to hate them and finally sorry, one thing music journalists hate always is when a band gets popular by diluting better sources so when you hear early geran if you're a music journalist in the early 80s you are hearing magazine and roxy and japan and simple minds and

all these bands that you've been trying to boost who aren't getting anywhere and then suddenly this band comes in prettifies things simplifies things a little bit and immediately has monster hits so they were never gonna appeal to kind of proper music fans if you like i guess that should make me like them more but it doesn't i find it very difficult to feel affection towards Duran yeah i mean i would agree that it's easier to enjoy and maybe admire their records than to love them um but my first thought when i see djandran is it's incredible that they pulled this off right and i sort of i kind of love them for that because we should sit and watch this now almost 40 years on and feel embarrassed for them you know that they went out there with this amount of talent and these clothes and this hair

and and that singer and did it you know this should have been a disaster and it has been a disaster whenever anybody else has tried it like you know won the juggler or blue zoo drum theater and even now i'm not really sure if it was just sheer chutzpah or something to do with the times or you know a particularly fortunate blend of modest talents or it's probably a bit of all of that stuff but not only did they pull off pop stardom and indeed super stardom they nearly pulled off what they were really trying to do which was to be that famous while making arty interesting music and they fell short of that partly because they weren't that talented and partly because they set the bar really high they wanted to be like roxy music and chic

and mark boland you know which is a hopeless dream for these dorks you know and by those standards um they fail they make arses of themselves but still in itself a lot of their best music really is quite peculiar and it's pretentious but it's gleefully pretentious and it's obnoxious but it's intriguingly obnoxious and yet it was more popular in its day than almost anything else. And it's appealing to people who hear it now, right? Young people who don't remember it like Duran Duran records. Partly because they don't have the snobbery and snootiness, but also because it's gross and tasteless music,

but at the same time it's cute and poppy. So it really succeeds and also because they've got that classic show-off pop appeal that they come on like complete burks but they get away with it because you can tell that behind the moody glares they're so obviously laughing on the inside you know and it doesn't surprise me obviously that serious pop critics at the time thought they were vapid and hollow and all that because they are you know it does surprise me a bit they couldn't see the charm behind that but then again we no longer live in that world where everything seems to matter intensely you know and everything seems up for

grabs i mean we're too broken for that so maybe if we were rushed back in time to the eve of the make-believe revolution you know or just a period when ghost town was a plausible number one record you know that this would seem like pap and nothing more and there would be something offensive in that you But for better or for worse, we don't hear that now. I mean, I was never, ever going to like Duran Duran. But I must say, when Planet Earth came out, and it was on the radio all the time, it didn't bother me. It's like, oh, yeah, okay, fair enough, fair enough.

Yeah, it's a tune, it's a tune. But this sounds to me like the mandatory, allowable second hit a band gets before completely sinking into oblivion. You just look at this and listen to it now and you just think, oh, well, they're done. They're not coming back from this. But isn't it right that this was, like you say, this was a decision by the record company to put this out?

And then straight up because of the failure of this single, they gave all of that decision making back to the band um so the next single is girls on film isn't it which is obviously just a yeah a storm isn't that remarkable because normally what a record company does is make a decision over your heads and then when it fails they go okay you failed bye yeah yeah yeah yeah because this does sound like does sound like a shitter follow-up to Planet Earth, you know? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think we should maybe save our thoughts on Golden Era Duran until one of those records

comes up. Yeah. I still say Rio's a classic. It's a great record. It's undeniably a great record. Good songwriting, brilliantly played. I'm saying boring things about it, but that's why it worked. And that's why they were so successful.

Because they knew how to write, you know, diamond-tight hits and play them brilliantly. But they worked up to that as well, because that's the thing. This Duran Duran, this sort of clearly new wave-influenced, sort of churning, live band Duran Duran, it's like a different group. This doesn't really sound like Duran Duran as we think of them. It sounds like if The Cure had been forcibly cheered up

by the massive application of cocaine. It's a different sound. But it's because, despite appearances, they were a new organically formed rock-type group. Do you know what I mean? They weren't a band that had been around for a while and had just popped themselves up like a lot of the early 80s groups were.

They hadn't been around for years and years and years. And it's like, okay, we know what we're doing. Now let's go for the charts. And they didn't have these great creative musical talents behind the scenes it was just this and they had to stumble through this phase before they really worked out how to write and perform yeah you know or indeed worked out what did and didn't suit them visually which again they did apart from andy taylor who doesn't suit anything. But, I mean, it's funny to see how anonymous Nick Rhodes is here, right? He's got these sort of understated clothes and dark hair disappearing

into the shadows, you know, behind the stage. I mean, if at any point in this clip Nick Rhodes had started talking, his accent wouldn't have sounded as weird and incongruous as it would later. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can tell they're not quite ready. When they start, there's like an awkward bit where the neck of John Taylor's bass is in Simon Le Bon's way. And there's always that terrible fear that they're going to actually bump into each other like a lot of idiots from birmingham and pinner you know they don't and there's quite there's similarly no there's similarly no space in the music that's the thing they're all playing everything they can

all the time yeah um but yeah but the thing is with geran from the off you don't get the feeling that anything happened to them by luck in a sense it's kind of that there was this master plan already in place you know from years back they wanted to be the biggest band in the world and they went ahead and did it i would ordinarily applaud such achievement of that ambition but it's perhaps that that stops me loving them i was sitting here watching this as i would have done as a 13 year old ladold lad going, oh, fucking hell, this is cat shit. The lead singer looks like a fucking Greek waiter. Just get this shit over with and play me the number one because that's what I want. But they are unquestionably the best-looking band

that's on this show tonight. If you're a teenage girl watching this, you're going to fancy all of that band. They were all incredibly good-looking. And you can see okay with the benefit of hindsight you can see even if you can't hear that they're potentially bound for stardom because even though they're not very good yet they have that winning combination of of silliness and genuine self-assurance even though that self-assurance is not yet entirely appropriate.

But it works because they're not serious and they don't really pretend to be serious. Or at least there's always that invisible wink, you know, that's there for those who can see it. Which certainly wasn't me in 1981. I mean, the other thing is, I think up until watching this episode, I thought this song was called We're the Girls from Reveille

You know the magazine That was the rival of Titbits in the 70s That's what I thought The song was called We're the Girls from Reveille So the following week Careless memories stayed at number 37

Before dropping to number 38 the week after and then sliding right out of the charts. See the foot. However, the follow up Girls on Film went all the way to number five in August of this year. And although they closed out 1981 with My Own Way only getting to number 14, Hungry Like the Wolf kicked off a run of 10 top 10 singles and two number ones over the next five years. There you go, Duran Duran and careless memories. Well, very soon, the big one. First of all, the top ten. Up ten places to number ten this week, it's Kim Karnes with a beautiful record called Betty Davis Eyes.

Give it some straps, somebody. I hate voices like that. Usual editorialising over records kids don't like. Down four places to number nine this week, Ennio Morricone and Key Mai. Oh. What a crap video, though. Hills, mist, trees.

It's also a drop of four places to number eight for Madness with Grey Day. Probably their best tune, I reckon. Kids across Britain, just, yeah. Still at number seven, REO Speedwagon. No kids across Britain, so yeah. Up four to number six, Swords of a Thousand Men from Tempo, Chile. Sort of lost something post-Brexit this record.

Tottenham Hotspur, the FA Cup final squad, Chas and Dave at number five with this one. lost something post Brexit this week look at that flag that looks like a confederate flag for Tottenham supporters it's a bit wrong

you've got to put down some paper so she doesn't hear you plopping A few memories for you at number three It's still the same place as last week It's Star Sound No, fuck off

Number two It's still the same position as last week From Jacob Stevens Proper billiard table there And I immediately like this song better now it's Dumbass Hair Positioners last week from J.K. Stevens. Proper billiard table there. And I immediately like this song better now it's just him and no tossers around him. Dragon Deliver! Adam and the Ants are still there at the top of the file. Number one, stand.

So yeah, top ten all videos and some proper tunes in there and some dreck as is the want. Anything standing out for you in that top ten? The N.A.O. Morricone tune had me welling up. Not because it's got any particular emotional attachment for me, but I remember being fearful of that record as a child because I knew it was emotional and I knew it was sad. And when you're a kid, sometimes you prepare yourself, you know that that's going to upset you, so you fear it.

And I couldn't go near that tune. Every time I even heard a little bit of it, I felt myself welling up a little bit. And you couldn't avoid it because not only that about the decline of the liberal party well who knows just thinking of sadness just preparing myself for the sadness that that melody and that arrangement brings and and you couldn't avoid it because people used to buy us like you know best of mantovani records and things like that. And Mantovani did covers of that tune as well. It was kind of omnipresent to a certain extent. And I felt a little frizz on a fear just hearing it again.

Yeah. It was Life and Times of David Lloyd George, wasn't it? Yes. The theme to that, yeah. You see, like, so there is an attachment there for Neil. Some people say, my father knew Lloyd George. Neil would say, my mother knew Boy George was gay. Yeah, no, true enough.

True enough, although that tune as well, I mean, it's confused in my memory, I think, with the theme from The Deer Hunter, which I also have similar emotional fear of. So hence it's tied together, yeah. See, what made me sad about that top ten was when it got to Stars on 45, so hence it's tied together see what made me sad about that top ten was when it got to stars on 45

and Dave Lee Travis says a few memories for you for who? for who you cunt not the audience of this programme not the audience who live for this programme and don't have a clue what he's talking about

this is who he thinks he's broadcasting to already. I mean, what he means really is, here's a few of my memories for you. When I was trying to grope Usher in a studio in Bremen. I've installed your memories in my brain, and I have to say the music sounds much worse than it should. And yeah, I suddenly have this memory of relentlessly mauling

a clearly uncomfortable German woman on national television oh and what's this apparently I was the real A6 murderer I never knew that that's very interesting a horrible time for medley records all round

because I'm pretty sure this was the year of Hooked on Classics as well It was just a grim time Non-stop fucking stars on 45 shit We'll get to it at some point But anyway The number one single this week Stand and Deliver

By Adam and the Ants We've already covered Adam and the Ants In chart music number 8 And this is the official follow-up to Ant Music which got to number 2 for two weeks in January of this year held off the top spot by Mark Chapman and the Bullets. However, between then and now his old labels Decca and Do It Records

have been shitting out old Ant product resulting in Young Parisians getting to number nine for two weeks in February, Call of Trouble getting to number 33 in February, and Xerox getting to number 45 in the same month. This single, from their third LP, Prince Charming, which isn't out for another six months, crashed into the charts at number one two weeks ago, knocking Making Your Mind Up by Bugs Fizz off the top.

It's now in the third week of its reign, so here's another chance to see the video. And oh, what a treat it was at the time to see this video. Fucking too right. I mean, all hail. You know, I don't want to demystify the chart music process, but ordinarily when I watch uh these old episodes i watch them and then i do a bit of research and a bit of you know that for this i did no research for this because what i wanted to do was recover that moment

that i first saw this um which was you know not about knowing where it came from or what was being blended here it was just this instant thrill. Taylor earlier said like the moon crushing for your, for your roof. This, this was that it was beamed in from Venus. Um, and, and,

and although at repeated viewings, cause inevitably you did get repeated viewings. You kind of vaguely, even as an eight year old or nine year old kid, you registered the world that he was combining and, and the kind of dandies and the highwaymen and all of that the music remained totally immune to analysis because you hadn't really heard the maybe the burundi music that formed its rhythms and for those of us born too

late um i mean born too late it goes for a lot of us but for those of us born too late for those nation-changing kind of epochal performances from t-rex and bowie this kind of thing was our mind bomb moment um you know way more than anything more musically sophisticated from that era it had this rawness it was marching music and it was stomping music just got inside you and and then singing on top of this insane music that's resembled no other music that you knew about anyway you've just got inside you. And then singing on top of this insane music that's resembled no other music that you knew about anyway. You've just got this beautiful man with incredibly expressive eyes when he's singing. And crucially, really performing only to you in the videos.

You don't really get, in Adam Ant videos of that period, and of course everything was just captivating by him in this period, you don't really get moody side shots of him. Do you know what I mean? Singing to some audience that he's doing it for. You get him singing at you, directly in the face, in a way. And full face with his eyes looking at you.

So you notice everything. You notice that lovely little camp pout he gives you in between conscience will be mine and all mine and I think the slow motion bit near the end of this video, when he escapes the gibbet and he stomps off it is one of the finest and dandiest

moments in all British pop when I watch this now I still have to put my hand over my mouth to stop myself squealing he's he's too much still um I remember my my daughter watching this my youngest daughter and her first response was just laughter and it was the joyous laughter it wasn't laughing at him it's just she couldn't believe that such a pop star existed um he's probably my favorite pop star from my youth because of these

videos um and you have to remember you know when you're eight or nine you might not be actually buying records that much you have the radio where his records always sounded amazing um and you have these appearances on telly these occasional views of his video which were just like pipe bombs in your day they just blew your mind so um i i can't bring out i've not researched this record because it just hits me like it just hits me like an like an earthquake and and he is our bowling he's our bowie moment for for us kids who were born too late for those moments adamant provided them yeah yeah it's genuinely hilarious to watch this now right like partly because it's funny but also because this bloke is doing everything a modern pop idol would be discouraged from doing you know and he's doing it in ways which suggest to the audience that he's authentically off his head

you know and this would have been sneered at at the time and was for being overly commercial but you look at it now it doesn't look commercial at all it looks completely insane i mean just the fact that the biggest teeny bop star of 1981 could make a video which climaxes with him on a gallows with a noose around his neck, as opposed to the previous decade, where practically everyone in the music industry should have been on a gallows with a noose around their neck, but would never have served up such troubling or interesting imagery to a teen audience, right,

which they would rather disturb privately. It's so amazing. And there's something i've never even noticed in this video until i watched it for this uh all the times i've seen it is the row of black guys dressed as american gis standing on the scaffold behind adam right who are only there to look askance as he leaps to freedom and to fill the frame with even more visual lunacy. You know, it's this overload of imagination, all of it trashy and preposterous, but defiantly so.

And it's a wonderful thing that could only have been the biggest thing in the country at this one moment you know where somehow it seemed to make a funny kind of sense and from now on pop fans it's almost as if pop fans lost that in that sort of instinctive understanding of absurdity and suddenly started asking boring questions right like what's what's all this supposed to mean, you know? Why is he dressed as a highwayman? You know, this is stupid.

You know, like, within a few decades, they'd be reduced to hour-long conversations about chicken pancetta. Yes. I mean, I don't want to sound like, you know, these bloody kids, you know, eating their newfangled hamburgers. But it's not me.

It's those little bastards. They're like geriatrics, you know. Yeah. Yeah, but I mean, the video's essentially Adam poncing about in a really good way, slagging off everybody else who were being tramps, who were trying to look like him and a shit-a-tip. And it seemed a very expensive video. Yeah, this video cost more

than a feature film. That's what people used to say in the 80s, isn't it? So what would be a price to us if we said every band did a video that wasn't just a filmed performance? People would have this terrible indignant thing about this western decadence you know this

video costs more than a feature film and i knew it was expensive because of the way that adam disdainfully rips the headphones of the sony walkman off that knob who he's coating down for looking like a truck he just throws it on the floor and he's like fucking hell man that's yeah does he not know how much they cost i mean i tried to do a bit of research for now i'm trying to find out what how much the sony walkman cost in 1981 the nearest i could get is the argos catalog for a binatone uh version and uh 50 pound 50 pounds in 1981 wasn't the doll about 20 quid a week in 1981 yes

blimey there you go yeah the devil take your stereo also that bloke whose stage coach he holds up he looks like an off duty policeman he's got like a cop tash but also the best thing about this video

and something else which makes me sad about the modern world it draws on all this corny stuff which was part of the weird musty richness of a kid's cultural understanding back then right there was nothing to do so you watch tv or you listen to the radio or you leaf through old books or whatever was lying around. And in that boredom, a hundred doors flew open, you know. Like you choose not to walk through most of them, but you saw inside. So you grow up with an awareness of things of which you had no real knowledge or interest in, as well as the things that you liked. That's really spot on, Taylor.

And the Highwaymen, you know, they were the interesting bits of history lessons, do you know what I mean? And you got excited by those moments. So to see that, you didn't make that direct connection necessarily because watching the video, it's such an enclosed world in a sense.

I didn't as a kid watching this then oh yeah they're a band that play gigs and they get in the van and they play this venue and they think this they existed in that video you know in that world and that world was a magic mirror world that wasn't reality it had roots somewhere in in our historical past I guess in it in it it was obviously human beings walking about, but that wasn't the world. They must have stepped through some magic aperture into this place. And that was my understanding of Adam-Man.

It wasn't as a kind of, yeah, as a working band remotely. He was a total, yeah, the pop star beamed in from Venus, from God knows where. Yeah, but you could understand the absurdity because you could understand all the elements of it you know and all the imagery i mean i'm not i'm not suggesting that kids now should be forced to sit through episodes of bonanza or whatever you know just so that they know about cultural crap i just think the world's getting narrower and i find it a bit scary personally because that great wild galaxy of crap like that sort of horrible panoply of curious reference

points right for me that's all there is in a way like it's the world that i was raised in and it was cluttered and it was constantly expanding and you could always find something to laugh at or to play with in your imagination right and a man could dress up as a dandy highwayman and it sort of meant something like it triggered something somewhere in your brain a different angle or a colour. It was just part of living in a busy world where the human imagination was valued, even at its silliest, you know, as opposed to being marginalised and largely distrusted.

And I just think you take that away and, yeah, OK, all you lose is you know a load of a load of boring crap and you know sort of films about Charlie Chan and things you know which nobody really ever needs to see again but you just feel like all that's left then are brands

and a fight for resources yeah and the pervasive damaging idea that music has to be from the heart you know which is dangerous this this music is hearts are involved don't get me wrong but this is from somewhere else this is from like you say the imagination and that's what makes it so thrilling yeah and the sheer power of hysteria and hilarity like to affect you and to move you you know

yeah you couldn't sit still listening to this no you just had to oh your hands would be going like a bastard on your legs wouldn't they doing the drumming

yeah absolutely yeah my mum used to take the piss out of me when she caught me doing that when I heard it on the radio for the first time and you know even my mum caught off with it

because she would sing she'd sing this song all the time, but she'd change the lyrics to stand and deliver your money or your wife, take me wife. We used to sing stand in your dinner. Nice. And then I think it rhymed about something about a knife, you know, like a knife you eat with. But I mean, as a 13 year old this was

dead excited but but as an eight year old it must have been even more so particularly when he came in through the uh through the window fuck me what a moment and he's so high up i mean you know that was that's that's a fantastic moment yeah also the moment when the dogs open their mouth to correspond with one of the moans in the record that's a spot on it's that it's that type of it's that thing of having the generosity to have the humour in your music but this is nothing a kid would laugh at

this but with a glee and not with scorn at all it's just this fantastic rollicking party that you are part of and everyone in it this is the crucial thing, he's not singing this song at anyone normal. Nobody in this video

is normal. Everybody in it is a strange confection of things. So your eyes, you'll drink it in the first time you see it, but you'll only get about 10% of what is there. So you want to see it again.

So hearing those records on the radio, particularly with Adam and the Ant's drum sound on AM radio, it was just so fucking thrilling, those records on radio. And, yeah, an Adam and the Ant video showing is an event in a kid's life when you're eight or nine. It jacks you up, you know, with adrenaline. Yeah. But there's also a sort of a

weird depth underneath it um like i never knew what to make of his restless eyes and mouth in all these videos yeah and i'm still not sure how much of that is performance like exaggerated smoldering and how much of it is you know in a disquiet itching to get out. Like the final shot in several of his videos is him staring into a mirror or out of a mirror with a kind of depersonalized blankness, you know, which always sits a little bit strangely with all the pantomime stuff and the high jinx and the saucy cosplay,

um, that's come immediately before when we did prince charming i remember commenting on the climax of that video where an image obsessed man with mental health issues attacks a mirror with an enormous hammer um and there's something a little bit disturbing like the last scene here too there's this sudden uh solemnity you know and i'm probably reading far too much into this but for a number one pop pin-up uh you know if if you can read anything into their work at all that's a pretty heavy achievement in itself yes yeah no that end moment is solemn and and previous to that moment there's a moment where he's singing the final lines of the song song right down the lens at you and the way his eyes

are so important in all these videos because his eyes, it's like he's looking at you and he's looking at you up and down almost, not in a sexual way but in a way that is almost like you are excited by this as I am excited about this and I'm excited by you I think you're great

I'm not saying I went away from these videos punching the air with self-belief or anything but you were you felt part of it and you felt that he was in a weird way of course he wasn't but in a weird way he was as interested in you as you were in him that is a really delightful moment towards the end of the video that seems to imply that so stand and deliver would stay at number one for two more weeks until it was usurped by being with you by smoky robinson the follow-up prince charming entered the charts at number two and then got to number one for four weeks and they'd finish the year with ant rap spending three weeks at number three by then adamantum burned himself so deeply into the national consciousness that he received the ultimate accolade being parodied by ronnie corbett

in the 1982 to ronnie's christmas special when adam and the gnats performed spider woman yeah i ain't got six legs i've only two but I'd like to get one over on you but you know I still contend that Bad Habits by Busta Gut was the better song there so long for the night You're all I ever wanted Papa Papa Papa Papa Papa Papa Papa Papa

Papa Papa Papa Papa Papa Papa Papa Papa

Papa Papa Papa Papa Papa Papa Papa Papa

Papa Papa Papa Papa Papa Papa Papa Papa

Papa Papa Papa Papa Papa Papa Papa Papa

Papa Papa Papa Papa Papa Papa Papa Papa

Papa Papa Papa Papa Papa Papa Papa Papa

Papa Papa Papa Papa Papa Papa Papa Papa

Papa Papa Papa Papa Papa Papa Papa Papa

Papa Papa Papa Papa Papa Born in Chicago in 1933, Quincy Jones didn't make a living as a trumpet player in assorted jazz bands in the 50s, as well as playing in the house band on the CBS stage show, including the first six television appearances by Elvis Presley. After being offered a job as music director of Mercury Records' New York studio, he was promoted to vice president of the label. Working on the side as an arranger for Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, Frank Sinatra and Nana Muscora scoring myriad film soundtracks and producing singles for Leslie Gore he logged his first entry in the UK charts in 1978 when Stuff Like That got to number 34 in August of that year

and around the same time when he was producing the soundtrack for The Wiz he hooked up for the same time when he was producing the soundtrack for The Wiz he hooked up for the first time with Michael Jackson who asked him to recommend a producer for the debut solo LP he was about to start on after he offered himself Jackson accepted. Meanwhile Chaz Jankle who had just left Ian Durie and the Blockheads put out his self-titled debut solo LP in 1980 which featured this song which was put out as a single but only got to number 18 in Belgium. However Jones liked the cut of his jib and got in the singers Charles May otherwise known as June and Patty Austin to record it for his 1981 LP The Dude and it was released as the first single from that LP

it's done much better than the original getting to number 28 in the USA and this week it's up here from number 16 to number 14 and yeah we can talk about the song but let's talk about Travis at the end oh dear

oh dear oh dear oh dear once again he's been forced to get involved with the music about Travis at the end. Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Once again, he's been forced to get involved with the music. How does he respond to this? Yeah, he's got his hat pulled firmly over his eyes. His hat is now a flaccid mess, really, that keeps banging

in his face in an unpleasant way. Yes. And he's frugging mildly whilst pretending to play Blind Man's Buff as this record unpleasant way. Yes. And he's frugging mildly whilst pretending to play Blind Man's Buff as this record's player. Yes. Yeah. Oh, Blind Man's Buff with David E. Travis. What an appalling thought.

So he can just accidentally blunder into some young woman with his arms outstretched. And curiously, it seems that everyone's gone home. I mean, where are the hundreds who were there earlier? As the camera pans out... Yeah, well, as soon as Shakey's gone home. I mean, where are the hundreds who were there earlier? As the camera pans out. Yeah. Well, as soon as Shakey's gone.

Yeah. When Shakey goes to sleep, all his friends go to sleep too. And the camera pans out for ages until the remaining stragglers in the audience, they kind of recede into the distance. It's a very bizarre ending that accentuates your feeling as a kid. I think that, you know, it's kind of, you've had your half hour of pop, you know, bye-bye pop.

You'll have to wait another week for any more pop. Yeah. The party's going away. Yeah, and of course you only get 50 seconds of this record. Yeah. Which is what they were doing around this point, just jamming a bit of something here and there. You know, it's as if pop songs are like sellotape and you can just tear off whatever length you required. And it would be just the same.

Like two minutes of a song is just one minute but double. But I was like, yeah, it's all right, this record. It just doesn't really belong here, does it? No. Do you know what I mean? No. It's like at the end of this particular show, it's as if you've been gorging yourself

on saturated fats and tartrazine you know and then someone gives you a like a phyllo pastry and some broccoli well i mean it does yeah it's it's like in a sense the whole episode is it's a glut of kind of british oddity in a lot of ways and the smoky record and this record really stand out uh and not in a positive way either um not in a not in a good way um i mean i was intrigued to find out that herbie hancock plays on this record he contributes roads to it and i love herbie right but beyond that yeah i mean you'd expect that from quincy to put an amazing group of players together but in the context of this show, it's a bit dull.

And actually, it feels rather retrograde and dated compared to... You know, you've just had Adam Ant, for Christ's sake. Yeah. You know, you cannot follow that, really. No. Yeah. The most amazing thing is that you could write a record this relatively dull about being suffocated

and having your cock chopped off. Yeah. Which is what it is about. Because it's based on, I know, Carida, in the realm of the senses, right? About whatever her name was, Sada Abe, the Japanese courtesan who famously killed the bloke she was with in auto-erotic asphyxiation

and then cut his dick off and carried it around with her for a bit. Which is, you know, it's the sort of thing that kids and people with the minds of kids find endlessly fascinating, you know, and useful to lend sort of spurious depth to their daft art, you know, without really trying. It's like the word Jesus.

You just drop the word Jesus in and it sounds like you're heavy, you know. Really, I mean, it's an interesting story. But, you know, she was just a crazy person in an incompatibly crazy society. That was what was interesting about her. Which is less dangerous than being a crazy person in a compatibly crazy society the one thing i like about her whole story is the photo of after she's been arrested um it's a fantastic photo because it's her and about three japanese um military officers and it's just you know big smiles all around you know all of them just big grins on their faces.

It's a strange end to such a disturbing tale. So I guess Chas Jankel must have liked the idea of writing a song about, you know, him wanting to be suffocated and have his knob chopped off, which is entirely a matter for him. Yeah, fair enough. But it's hard to identify with. It would be easier to identify with it if it had been about uh wanting to drive a dustbin lorry over davely travis's conservatory or if you if you really wanted to explore the sensual world in a dark

and transgressive way he could have written a song about the horrible negative exhilaration of that moment when something unexpectedly rips your earbuds out of your ears yeah the whole universe goes this is something that happens to me more often than it really should logically happen to anyone but i think I notice it less than most people because I'm experiencing a low-level version of that feeling all the time. It must have been weird being Quincy Jones at this point in history. Like, just as an artist yourself, you know, it was strange to be behind this little curtain all the time, you know,

like an earthquake operator pushing the little lever with a red ball on the end and mountains cracking off you know and it's like music fans knew who he was yeah but most people didn't know and he was responsible for so much of it but then some people like it better that way i mean the only quincy i was uh knew about at the time was the one who made all them young coppers vomit when he pulled back a sheet and then

the swing music kicked in. He also liked his ladies to sort of look a little bit like a corpse for about three seconds. Yes. It's like, oh blimey. So the following week I know Corrida nudged up

two places to number 14 it's highest position and the follow up Razamataz got to number 11 in July which was his

highest chart position in the UK until we all start slapping Quincy Jones's name over the Michael Jackson LPs that we still want to play but why would you want to listen to music that makes you hate when you can listen to

music that makes you laugh so what's on telly afterwards well BBC One plunges into the erotic dreams of Mrs Slocum the final episode of the series of Are You Being Served, where the mad-haired protagonist is beset with fantasies about being taken hard by Mr Humphreys and tries to do something about it in real life. Followed by Butterflies, where Ria gets two birthdays from her husband and a bit on the side. Then it's the nine o'clock news, the Chinese detective, question time, the news headlines and they round off the night with a repeat of Kojak. BBC Two is ten minutes into The Pursuit of Power, where Robert McKenzie talks to Enoch Powell about his philosophy and beliefs. Followed by People from the Forest, the Stephen Davis play about Andrei Sakharov, then Man Alive examines the link between business and politics in Switzerland and finishes off with Newsnight.

ITV goes into Young at Heart, the John Mills sitcom about a retired pottery worker in Stoke, then TVI, and then Peter Marshall and Judith Chalmers host the 1981 British Beauty Championships, where Miss England, Miss Scotland and Miss Wales get picked out in one go. After the news at ten, it's soap and then check it out. Time Tease's answer to something else, featuring Stiff Little Fingers and the band Youth TV. Youth TV, fucking hell.

Stiff Little Fingers and the band Youth TV and signs off with a new series of Double Top the Pub Darts Tournament. So dear boys, what are we talking about in the playground tomorrow? Adam Ant all the way

I mean I could say now that I'd be talking about Human League, Undertones Duran etc. I think I'd be talking almost exclusively about Adam Ant in an incredibly positive way and probably talking about Toy league undertones Duran etc I think I'd be talking almost exclusively about Adamant in an incredibly positive way and probably talking about

Toya in an incredibly negative way as well so not much has changed really no yeah although

we'd all have seen Stand and Deliver before so possibly something unthinkingly homophobic about Duran Duran

or Phil Oakey's hairstyle I mean 1981 was 1981. And what were we buying on Saturday? Didn't get that much pocket money. Yeah, well, what would you buy if you had the pocket money, Taylor? Yeah, I can't narrow it down. The only bad records on here are Toyah and Tottenham.

And, you know, most of the others are brilliant in some way and to some degree. I mean, under normal circumstances, this might well be a contender for the best episode of Top of the Pops that we've ever covered. Oh, yeah. Except that, sadly, the presence of I Want to Be Free drags the overall average down so badly

that purely on points this may in fact now be the worst episode of Top of Pops that we've ever covered she's poisoned the well a little bit then I would have bought Adam now pretty much everything Barb, perhaps Toya

Quincy, Spurs and maybe Smokey Robinson, I definitely would not have got that record at that time. And what does this episode tell us about May of 1981? Well, yeah, it's fucking thrilling. There's so much going on, but crucially there's no sense of dominance from anyone. And it also reveals just in watching it and remembering what this felt like

just how important top of the pops was at that time for pop listeners way more than any other way of accessing music even more important perhaps than the radio the press you know i i really hope that's why i was so gratified um to read the other day of all those uncovered Top of the Pops episodes that have been discovered. Yes. I mean, you know, depending on who the hosts are, obviously how many we'll get to see is a matter of conjecture. Bet you any money all of them have got Saval on them. Possibly so.

Possibly, which would be a real shame. But, I mean, look, if I was sending somebody to look at something to teach themselves about what pop was like in a particular area, I don't think I would send them to the music press. The music press will kind of give you editorially a picture of pop, but the type of the pop's metrics are just so random. It's like a mix of what the industry wants

on, what the producers can get on. It's an absolutely kind of egalitarian yet chaotic way of putting a pop show together. And that's why finding new episodes is so important, not just for those of us who enjoy watching them, but these are vital artefacts of UK pop history

and this episode which is among the best that I think I've looked at doing a chart music podcast, is emblematic of that, if I wanted to conjure the excitement of 1981 musically in this country yes i could be sending you to all kinds of obscure records but no put this on it's a it's a fucking

it's fucking thrilling i'll tell you what though imagine going up to someone in 1981 and saying look here's the charts of 1986 yeah five years five years happened? I know. Or informing them that in 1991, everything on this programme will be, albeit temporarily, will be mocked and cast out of the serious pop, or almost everything, just for coming from 1981. Yeah.

Which might, in a way, please some of the young rocking intellectuals of 1981 as a demonstration of the transience of pop until you play them selections from the charts of 1991. But, I mean, that just shows that nobody can steer this ship, right? Yeah. That pop music is sailing on a stormy sea and conditions can change alarmingly quickly

without anyone really being able to predict it or do anything to make it happen or to counteract it. You know, nobody can really control it. Yeah. I mean, yeah,

Taylor, let's put in toy to one side. This is definitely the best episode of top of the pops we've ever covered on chart music. And it is so close to being the perfect episode of Top of the Pops we've ever covered on Chart Music. And it's so close to being the perfect episode of Top of the Pops. If you took out You Drive Me Crazy and replaced that with Don't Let It Pass You By

by UB40, which had just entered the charts. And if you took out The Stray Cats and had Legs & Co dancing with Paul Shane to Holiday Rock. Dressed as erotic Sue Pollard. This would have been the absolute pinnacle of Top of the Pops. Gotta say, the price is right on 1981. Yeah.

Great year and a great episode. And that, Pop Craze Youngsters, is the end of this episode of Chart Music. All that remains is for me to say, www.chart-music.co.uk Get us on facebook.com slash chartmusicpodcast Find us on Twitter, chartmusic,

T-O-T-P Money down the G-string, patreon.com slash chartmusic Thank you ever so much, Taylor Parks. Bye. Love you, inside and out, Neil Kulkarni. Aw, thanks, Al.

My name's Al Needham, and so what if I die in my ear? I've still got a brain up there. Yeah. Chart music. Chạm music我对你的爱有信心信你对我永远无变更 是我的爱人 见爱的女神 我唱夜有你无变音 我的世界永远你最亲音我的世界永遠你最親

是我的愛人 敬愛的女神 望見你就最猛獎 你的說話太天真 有次過大細蚊 假裝我是最真你真的馬上死心优优独播剧场——YoYo Television Series Exclusive