Chart Music: the Top Of The Pops Podcast - #40: 4th April 1991 - You've Got To Earn Your Na Na Na Na

Episode Date: June 6, 2019

The 40th episode of the podcast which asks: so how do you get your pills out of a Kinder Surprise egg while wearing long opera gloves? This episode, Pop-Crazed Youngsters, takes us nearly ten years away from the glory of the last one and plunges us deep into the turquoise shell-suited heart of the Neighnties - and oh dear, our beloved programme is right up Arsehole Street. The ratings are dropping like a Shed Seven release in its second week, newer and savvier shows are undercutting it, and the BBC have pissed about with the scheduling to such an extent that middle-aged spods with a craving for Judith Hann are sitting there shouting; "Oh, what's this bollocks? WHERE'S TOMORROW'S WORLD?"  Musicwise, hmm: Gary Davies, in a boxy denim jacked beloved of the era, just about manages to not look like he's too old for this shit (despite dropping a few clunky Dad-phrases). Inspiral Carpets - the Freddie and the Dreamers of Madchester - pitch up, demonstrating the bad haircuts that were available to youths at the time. Saffron-not-yet-of-Republica dresses up like a magician's assistant. The Mock Turtles do a mobile phone advert. The mid-Eighties refuses to piss off, in the shape of Feargal Sharkey, The Waterboys and Mike and the Mechanics. Still, there's a welcome opportunity for people who haven't got Sky yet to have a proper goz at The Simpsons, Black Box remind us that they did more than one record, and there's some dead good angel wings on your woman in C&C Music Factory. Chesney Hawkes - 'the iconic legend of the 80s and 90s', according to his website, which is roughly 1.96666 decades too many - punches the air.  Sarah Bee and Simon Price link up with Al Needham at the car boot sale of 1991, veering off on such tangents as being refused entry to gay clubs by National Front activists, why you should never install a plastic tank into your wardrobe to piss into, bragging at school that you've seen Sky at Centre Parcs, the phenomenon of Some Rap, and the misery of having to share a crappy Student Union with people who have been on Top Of The Pops more than you have. And there's 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.

This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon Pull-Apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey, and just five bucks for the small coffee all day long. Tax is extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. What do you like listening to? Um... Chart music. Chart music. Chart music Chart music

Hey up you pop crazed youngsters And welcome to the 40th episode of Chart Music. The podcast that gets us out right down the back of the settee on a random episode of Top of the Pops. I'm the person who's talking right now, Al Needham, and the next voices you hear belong to Simon Price. Hello. And Sarah B. Alright. Oh me dear, so good to have you back.

And Sarah B. All right. Oh, me dear. So good to have you back. I'm just going to sit back here in my little chair and be simply regaled by all the pop and interesting things that have been occurring in your life since last we met. Go. You first, Sarah. You've got about a million things going on, as I understand it.

Oh, no, I don't know. It's just it's it's just podcasts as far as the ICC. Podcast. As far as the I can see as far as the ear can hear yeah because we had a jolly time didn't we the other day doing our Q&A the Q&A is forthcoming Pop Crazy Youngsters, me, Neil and Sarah sat down and we talked

a lot of things out mainly crisps a gloriously splenetic rant by Mr Kulkarni about the polar state of affair of the crisp world. And is this only for people who put tips in a G-string? Yes, only for Patreon subscribers. It's coming your way very soon, Pop Craze Patreon people.

You know what to do. Yes. So, Sarah, yeah, podcasting. So you've done that. You're doing chart music. You've got another one on the go, haven't you? Got another one. Well, it is tomorrow, in uh as as we're recording now uh i'll be doing the very last probably uh

night's hate watch which is uh the podcast that i do about game of thrones for my sins with uh mr john tatlock it's been really good fun excellent just just exhausting yeah because you know it's really weird talking about a show that you used to love and now you absolutely hate but we needed to get it out so you know so if any if the Venn diagram is between

chart music listeners and night's hate watch listeners it's probably like two dots very far away from each other but you know

if anybody if anyone's a glutton for that kind of punishment then it's it's in all the places. It's on Spotify and iTunes and all that. It's dead good, Sarah, as well. You know me, I've got no interest in Game of Thrones,

but I've thrown a tab in your direction. And yeah, very good chemistry between you and Mr. Tatlock. Yeah, you know, we've known each other a long time. We just have a right good yak. It's great. It's nice that that isn't it it's nice to do this well I was going to say

I do that for you know for pennies and you know but it's not about that we do it for the love of it or the hate of it and the hate of it

indeed yeah yeah it's all one and the same Simon you're always busy aren't you come on I'm going to be on Netflix what this is really

exciting i'm gonna be on netflix yeah yeah yeah i mean i've done a bit of tv stuff before you know music documentaries and stuff like that but um there's this sort of strand of uh music docs on netflix called it's like the evolution series they had hip-hop evolution i don't know if you watched that uh well they're doing pop Well, they're doing Pop Evolution, and they're doing one on Britpop, etc. Your favourite. And they wanted somebody, well, you know, pros and cons, but they wanted somebody who was involved in the music press at the time,

and someone recommended me. So I'm going to film that in a couple of weeks. And, yeah, I just love the idea that, presumably now, if I sit down with my remote control, and you know when you key in search terms on Netflix, and I'll be typing S-I-M, and maybe my name's going to come up. It's like an actual option.

That's kind of amazing to me. So that's happening. Another little plug I wanted to give. Just something for people in the people in the brighton area um jordan the punk icon has got her um uh her autobiography coming out yes it's called defying gravity and it's written with uh former meldy maker colleague kathy unsworth by the way right um and um there's going to be a little launch due down in brighton on saturday the 8th of June at the Prince Albert. And I and my other half, Janie Blamblam, are DJing it.

We've had a little club night we've been doing down here called Up Yours, which is 70s punk and new wave. And we're playing all that kind of stuff at the Prince Albert. And Jordan's going to do a Q&A there. So that'll be a laugh. Yeah, I ran into Jordan the other day, you know. Serious? Oh, was she up in Nottingham doing that? Yeah did a book signing in Nottingham which I missed because I was working but on my way back it was still well it just finished and I just thought oh fuck it I

went in bought the book and just said oh Jordan I know Simon Price I was basically bragging on to Jordan that I knew Simon Price and yeah she's she's mint she's great yeah yeah and um uh i've not read all of the book yet but i bet she's got some stories oh yes yeah yeah um and the other news in my life is i'm wearing glasses i mean i know this is old to you guys but i'm joining i'm joining the ranks of the great bespectacled and it feels kind of odd i'm still getting used to it i'm right because um i i i got mugged off by basically ended up buying three different pairs of glasses i it turns out i probably only need one i've got varifocals which i held off from till the very end because it sounded like a real kind of granddad thing to wear yeah but um they're

actually just the sort of all-purpose ones to wear all the time but the thing that's freaking me out is i mean this is way way old news to some of you guys, I know. But like when I look down at my feet, I feel like I'm drunk. I feel like the pavement is looming up at me. It's like, you know, if you're walking in a swimming pool or walking through shallow water in the sea and you can see your feet, but it's all a bit distorted. It's like that. It's like, it really is like being high for free.

That's quite enviable, really. Because I mean, I've had glasses since I was like eight or something. So like that's my brainiable really because i mean i've had glasses since i was like eight or something so like that's my brain got used to it long long ago i've known i've i've rarely known anything different you know but what you need to do is next time you i mean yeah you always end up with like several pairs you can't decide but like um you want to get the ones you want to get the transition lenses that go dark and that so you've always got sunglasses on well i thought about that but janie thought i'd look like a nonce and not why is this a thing like i got i was well all right i've got a theory that that all men care about that like the most important

thing for men when choosing glasses is to choose the pair that makes them look least like a nonce right because i've seen friends of mine on facebook friends of mine putting up photos of themselves in spec savers with six or seven different frames on saying right honestly tell me which one makes me look least like a pedophile and basically um because the ones i've got are ray-bans and if i had those ones that you just talked about where it goes dark it would look fucking cool when they are actually dark because they're just like pair ray-ban sunglasses uh but it's that in-between bit where they'd be sort of a weird gray color and i look like you know uh what's his name out of peters and lee either yes or lee um and it's just yeah i don't

know i'm not into it so i've decided i'm you know for for sort of bright sunlight i'm just going to wear my my crappy old wraparounds as usual i had react to like repeats of the late eighties. That's a blast from the past. That brand name. I thought, Oh, I'd had glasses since I was 13 and just always looked a knob end in it. I just assumed contact lenses would be out my price range and there'd be a faff.

Um, so I ended up getting some reactor light repeats when I was about 17. And yeah, for that one moment when it was bright outside, you looked passable but inside you know someone would just spark a lighter up and the fucking things would go dark yeah they're better now though they're better it's like there was so yeah i'm sure they are you don't get the the transition they do go uh that it's quicker there isn't quite the transition

is shorter you know but also yeah i understand it is easier for women, I suppose. But it's just, it's so weird how this has become like a, you know, it's shorthand for nonce, which is just weird. You know, you've got to bust through that. Be honest, Simon, you're only one wear glasses so you look more like Morriser. Fuck off. Absolutely fuck off.

I was just going to say, the ultimate reactor it um Zayfod Beeblebrox yes the hitchhiker's guide the galaxy whenever there's danger his glasses just go black so he can't see it it's like all right well as always pop craze youngsters we do nothing before we give a shout out to all the lovely new people who have realized that not ramming a bit of dollar down the chart music g-string for all the arse-shaking we do is simply not on. So the latest batch of people who have dropped $5 are... Antonio DiPaolo, Rupert Plumridge, Paul Shields, Lorna Easton, Dezo Cochran, John Bruin, Clay Malzun, John McLaughlin, David Sperry, Jason Brannigan, Elizabeth Kerrigan and Peter Johnson. Thank you, those lovely people. Thank you. Some very nice cosmopolitan names scattered amongst that wasn't

it yeah well you know we have global reach yeah we worldwide baby yeah yeah let's not forget the three dollar patrons murray thompson david dane bob caldwell richard arnold mark samson and rich frith oh thank you so much. Yes, yeah. Legends, we love you. Yeah, yeah, coins count as well, you know. And if you're dobbing in your subs, you've been spunking your pocket money on the Chart Music Top Ten, and here it comes. Hit the music.

Down two places from eight to ten, Taylor Parks' romantic moments. Last week's number two, this week's number nine, Tony Blackburn and the Gay Ones. A drop of five places to number eight for your dark mate. Down from number six to number seven, here comes Jizzum. Stay in there. Last week's number one has tumbled all the way down to number six, Hot Wrecks. A new entry at number five, Mark Chapman and the Bullets.

Up one place from number five to number four, it's Bummer Dog. Yes. place from number five to number four it's bummer dog yes into the top three and it's straight in at number three for simon price and the receptionist from hong kong fu-er for fuck's sake what is wrong with you new entry at number two floella benjamin in a dustbin which means Britain's number one This week's highest new entry straight in at the top of the chart Chicken Stephen Oh, a lot of movement in that chart this week Yeah, but good to see some of the old favourites

still hanging in there Here comes Jism and Bummer Dog I think those two are basically like the bat out of hell of this chart Or the love is all around or the everything I do yeah yeah I can't believe

Hot Rex just fell so hard this week yeah well you know it's not right it was burning the candle at both ends there

some of the new entries then Mark Chapman and the Bullets what they sound like I think they're like sort of Blues Brothers or Commitments

type retro troupe in suits and maybe trilbies. Simon Price and the receptionist from Hong Kong Foo. You can just imagine, can't you? For fuck's sake. Probably a cover of Hello, Hello, Is It Me You're Looking For. Oh, God. It's only a matter of time. Yeah.

Chicken Steven, obviously heterosexual Negro spirituals. Floella Benjamin and the dustbin. I can't pin them down. Well, all I can think of there is Ned's atomic dustbin. If you put dustbin at the end of a thing, it's just going to be, after you've listened to it, you're going to need a wash. Wacky indie.

Fucking hell, imagine seeing that lot on a festival this year, though. You'd go, wouldn't you? that. Imagine seeing that lot on a festival this year, though. You'd go, wouldn't you? No. No? It'd be probably called something like, I don't know, the Bin Fire Festival. There aren't. You'd go and see Bummer Dog and Here Comes Jism

on the main stage on a Saturday night, though, wouldn't you? Do they make steel-plated all-body Wellingtons? I don't know know i keep having to explain bummer dog to people like you know i'll be out with friends and uh somebody who's never met me before will say what what's all this bummer dog business then because they sort of vaguely heard about it and i i have to explain to to you know basically a total stranger why I find it hilarious that in the 1970s children were being sexually assaulted

by a stray dog and when you put it in those bloody terms it just makes me seem like an awful human being but I'm sort of there creasing up with laughter and people are just looking at me like stony face like thinking why is that funny

which of course just makes it even funnier yes of course it does so this week's episode pop craze youngsters takes us all the way back to april the 4th 1991 which means for the first time ever on chart music we are smack dab in the middle of the 90s so anyway panel when people do gather together to discuss the 90s the 90s basically happened from 1994 to around about 1997 didn't it in most people's eyes this part of the decade uh is criminally ignored do you not think this is uh yes however this uh without jumping the gun on it this episode is like a really weird little black hole isn't it like it doesn't yeah uh you know it's very odd

i don't think it's kind of well maybe it's representative of of one i mean any episode of top of the box is only representative of like one layer of the times but this is just like it's it it was i had a bit of a weird experience watching this is the first time that i've seen an episode of top of the pops for this podcast and not felt like i've seen an episode of top of the pops do you know what i mean like you know like if you um when you've when you've had a when you've had your tea and you and you feel you know even if you didn't enjoy it you feel like you've eaten you know and you feel, you know, even if you didn't enjoy it, you feel like you've eaten. And I didn't have that feeling.

I was just like, what just happened? It's very weird. It's the television equivalent of a rye vita with cottage cheese on it then. Yeah, pretty much. I'm kind of grimly fascinated by this era. Yeah. Because I do think of it as a real low point in British culture. Everything was very half-arsed and very shabby and also seen from this distance

culture in 91 doesn't feel like it's moved on that much from you know the November 89 episode that Taylor and I did Chart Music 30 that was which was that was the Jackie Brambles and Jenny Powell presented one where it was all it was all boy bands and ballads

and it had the Mondays and the Roses sticking out on that. And I reckon in 91 here, we're still under that clamp down of conformity that kicked in in British culture after Live Aid with a heavy overlay of Americanisation and all that. And the stranglehold of that hasn't,

I don't think, been loosened yet uh so it's a time you know we we got rid of thatcher or the poll tax and all that kind of stuff sort of forced her out of office but we hadn't got rid of the conservatives john major was a year or so into the job and and this kind of beatific beaming banality seemed to descend it upon everything it felt it felt like jill dando and anthea turner were the grinning faces the mainstream and if if you as a british person weren't grinning along with that there was something wrong with you and you weren't a you weren't a team player you know you know um yeah it's like all that silly alternative nonsense

we've put that behind us and and now you you know, this is the mainstream. And grin along, you fuckers. And I remember a few years after this, right, going to Splot Market in Cardiff. It's a massive car boot sale. And people were getting rid of all that stuff, right? It was like the entire city of Cardiff had vomited up the detritus of the 90s onto some tarmac, right? detritus of the 90s onto some tarmac right so stuff like like uh eddie the eagle edwards autobiographies and and uh and loads of money t-shirts i always think of this as the loads of many years you know um pastel colored shell suits like that couple worn on ever decreasing circles um purple and turquoise purple and turquoise were big color especially combo a combo of those two

colors yeah the david ike colors yeah yeah yeah david exactly that is spot on the david ike colors Purple and turquoise were big colours, especially a combo of those two colours. Yeah, the David Icke colours. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, David, exactly. That is spot on, the David Icke colours. And also Simpsons. At the time when David Icke was seen as like a breath of fresh air. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And Simpsons toys.

Just a little bit weird, but, you know, no different to Mr Motivator in his own way. Oh, God, Mr Motivator, yeah. And Simpsons toys, plenty of them, which we're going to come to. But it was a horrible horrible era um the lovejoy years the loads of many years um oh and i think we're loads of many years right and i think his heyday may have been a couple years earlier than this but yeah um it was kind of um is one of these things where people where the person making it had one intention but it was taken in another way you know so for example bruce springsteen's sort of biggest fans will always say

oh well we're born in the usa was actually a kind of savage indictment of patriotism and all this kind of stuff well no it had a massive stomping chorus punching the air born in the usa blah blah and most people took it that way and and when you if you're an artist you've you've got a certain responsibility to sort of think through the way that that these things are going to play in the in the bigger world and I think Harry Enfield you know may have been satirizing a kind of grasping grabbing culture of you know the Thatcher years but really people just celebrated it they were like yeah I am that guy you know loads of money you just pick a big sort of catchphrase so it was that era and and I I wanted nothing to do with it really people just celebrated it they were like yeah i am that guy you know loads of money you

just pick up a big sort of catchphrase so it was that era and and i i wanted nothing to do with it um it felt to me because i was only a very alternative and all that at the time it felt like the alternative scene and the mainstream has sort of made an unspoken pact to kind of go their separate ways it's not like in the early 80s where, you know, the alternative to the mainstream was so crossed over and so intermingled. But by 91, I think the two were as far apart as they've ever been. Britpop was still some way off, obviously. It wouldn't even start stirring till the following year when Suede came along. So it was just a pretty horrible time culturally.

It was just a pretty horrible time, culturally. I think in terms of dance music, there was obviously a couple of years out from Acid House and Second Summer of Love. And at this point, I think people, if you look at what was coming through in the charts, it's all pretty sort of thin sauce. But that's because, you know, stuff was still like the genie was out of the bottle and it hadn't actually gone back in so there was still stuff happening but it wasn't getting through it was all happening in the clubs and it was kind of evolving on its own and it had sort of because the criminal justice act and you know people having to work around that so you weren't

getting like the big raves and stuff um or you were but they were they were paid and it was you know the culture had sort of shifted so that was still going on but you wouldn't it had gone back underground basically so you're not going to see it coming through in Top of the Pops so if you watch Top of the Pops you'd think oh this is the dregs of Acid House and everything

which is not necessarily the truth of it that's just kind of how it these are the kind of little bits of uh feather boa and and you know that were kind of left you know sort of left over um so yeah there was that and it still had so obviously there was still like a huge range in quality most of it was was dreck because you know most of everything is but it was, but it was definitely still going.

So in other words, pop-crazy youngsters, if you're still watching BBC4 waiting for 1987 to fuck off, be careful what you wish for. Radio 1 News So what's in the news this week? Well, Roger Cooper, a British businessman, has been released from an Iranian prison after five years for spying. Labour are just about to retain in the Neath by-election. I believe Captain Beeney came behind Screaming Lord Such by one vote.

So, you know, a seismic poll that was. such by one vote. So, you know, a seismic poll that was. President Bush refuses to do anything for the Kurdish resistance currently battling what's left of the Iraq National Guard, which has left a million refugees trapped on the Iranian and Turkish borders.

The Orkney ritual child abuse case has been thrown out of court. 20 women from a South Korean fishing village protest against a nearby landfill project by standing outside the company's office with their tits out. Status quo have played a gig at Pentonville Prison, but the big news this week is that Dallas is to be axed and the 80s are officially over.

On the cover of the NME this week, James. On the cover of Smash Hits, Vanilla Ice. The number one LP in the UK is Greatest Hits by the Eurythmics, Vagabond Heart by Rod Stewart is at number two. Over in the US, the number one single is Coming Out of the Dark by Gloria

Estefan, and the number one LP is Mariah Carey by Mariah Kira so me dears what were we doing in April of 1991 I just wanted to say you mentioned Status Quo doing a gig in

Pentaville Prison I've been to one well I've been to a club night thing in Pentaville Prison really yeah yeah it was kind of around the early millennium, 2001, something like that. Jarvis Cocker put on some kind of club night in the

prison warder's bar, and it felt really wrong. It felt really, because it felt kind of creepy and wrong, and like a very kind of snarky, hipster thing to do. There was a bunch of us, sort of connoisseurs from the Londonondon media all having drinks and a little dance and stuff while jarvis and his mates did some dj and the

music was probably audible to the prisoners in their cells yeah i just i remember leaving thinking oh we're a bunch of cunts we really are you know anyway sorry uh to answer the question, 1990, the year before, I'd finished my degree at UCL. And I stood for election as the social and services officer, which was at the Students' Union, which is basically the ENTS officer, but also with responsibility for the shops and the cafes and all that.

And I won, which meant that after... I'd already done a four-year course, French and philosophy, but I was staying on for a fifth year. So I was like one of these eternal student types who's always hanging around and never seems to leave. So I was 22 when I got elected, 23 by the time of this episode, coming to the end of my stint doing the Ents.

I basically lived in my office. Some nights I'd stay at my girlfriend's, but I was technically homeless. I mean, I could have afforded a bed, sit somewhere if I bothered, but I was practically living for the job round the clock, round the clock sort of job.

So it felt like there was no point. So I slept on a sofa in my office underneath a yucca plant, which really dates it, doesn't it? I think I bought the yucca plant. There'll be a plant sale. You know, in the student union at the start of the academic year they have a poster sale and they have a plant sale and I bought it the plant sale and um and I I used the disabled toilets across the corridor as my bathroom when no one else was around so a bit of a grim life

I I wasn't looking very goth at the time I was having a bit of a break from that because um I was just so busy occasionally I goth up but most days i was dressing like one of emf basically right i had a baseball hat um it's i think it's a meldy maker baseball hat actually tilted to one tilted to one side and a long sleeve t-shirt with um one with black and white stripes on and there's another one sort of suns and moons and stars on it which again really dates it because goth was too high maintenance to look um yeah and it's funny just i got thinking about this tiny little details come back to you suns and moons and stars on it, which again really dates it. Because goth was too high maintenance a look. And it's funny, I got thinking about this, tiny little details come back to you in a Proustian way.

I smelt of body shop perfume, those tiny little plastic bottles I remember. I was living off hummus and sweet corn baps from the student cafe. And I would start most of my working days with an hour or two on the pinball machines in the student bar. There was a Monday night football one and RoboCop. And I can still, in my mind, I can still hear the little voice things when you score a few points. It goes, I'll buy that for a dollar. Yes. Yeah, yeah.

Pinball, man. Why did it go away? I know. I fucking loved it. So that... Pinball, man. Why did it go away? I know. I fucking loved it.

So my department, putting on the ends, was a leaky boat, shall we say, financially. But we had a great time. We put on loads of cool gigs. Pretty much by anyone Melody Maker was writing about at the time. Mostly kind of shoegazy stuff, like the Boo Radleys and Cranes and Chapter House, who were actually from UCL.

And we did comedy. We had Jack D and Rob Newman, who were on the way up at the time, and also Big Balls with people like Imagination, The Beat, Bad Manners, anyone who I loved 10 years earlier and can now get on the cheap. Before you go any further, Samuel,

I think it's worth pointing out that the Monday night football pinball game would have been ABC American Monday night football pinball game would have been ABC American Monday night football wasn't it you didn't have a massive head of

Richard Keyes spinning around in the middle or anything no no no but it had a ramp that would pop up in the middle and you could shoot the

ball so it would go up over the ramp and through the goalposts which was awesome yeah yeah yeah which is amazing but one thing I'm quite proud

of is is um i brought in our first ever recycling policy which um the bar the bar managers absolutely fucking hated me for at the time they wanted to kill me um but quite recently actually um i i went to london on holiday which sounds ridiculous because i only live in brighton but um but janie and i thought fuck it you know we never get to have nights out in l London. We never get to do all the sort of touristy things. Let's just spend a few days up there. And we were staying in a hotel really near to the Student Union, which is in Bloomsbury. And I walked past it.

And now there's a massive kind of display in the window boasting how much recycling they do. And I thought, I started that. So, you know, but I was theoretically working for Melody Maker um I was writing the odd thing just to keep my sort of name in there but um I hadn't broken into the features yet I was just doing the odd kind of little album review or little live review yeah um and when I wasn't doing all that stuff and one song in the countdown has reminded me that most weeks I was going out to a club called Syndrome it was a midweek club uh on Oxford Street in a venue called Plastic People and uh it was very much the center of um what was

then called the scene that celebrates itself but um the name that actually stuck was Shoegaze and um uh so basically uh you'd you pick up Melody Maker and we're going to come to that in a little bit uh and whoever was on the front of Melody Maker, you probably run into them down this club. So that, so I was kind of, I was keeping my, I was, I was merging in that,

moving in that world of, of, you know, the, the indie rock and roll thing while also holding down a day job, which itself was quite, you know, indie rock and roll,

shall we say. What's your relationship with Melody Maker? Well, you know, I, I'd we say what's your relationship with melody maker well you know i i started writing for them uh late 88 um and throughout my time at uni i was doing the odd thing but i was still very much a foot soldier i was a pawn you know um and uh i i was still sort of waiting i i knew i wanted to do it full time and you know within within a couple of months when the job at the student union finished, that's pretty much what I did.

Excellent. Yeah. I absolutely loved the paper, and I was very proud to have a tiny, tiny connection to it. I was doing the odd down-page review. But my big breakthrough wouldn't happen until the following year when I had a whole issue, which is basically me. I had a front-cover story on Daisy Chainsaw,

and I had interviews with the manic street preachers and public enemy all in the same issue and then boom like boom i arrived you know but that that was some way off at this point good skill sarah uh 91 well at this time i was 12 i was just about to turn 13 um i don't know i was uh yeah i had a um i had a pet snake yes this time yeah eric yeah we've had this eric the snake oh you remember yeah may he rest um yeah so i was just kind of you know uh mostly kind of in my bedroom listening to listening to my tips i suppose and you know taping stuff off the radio it's like yeah sorry sorry about that no sorry everyone from whom i stole money but uh yeah we all did we were all doing it in my defense well what text did you have what you into at the time stuff stuff that was in the charts and i think i had an idea of

what was terrible but also i wouldn't want to i've still probably got a bunch of these things that i taped off uh you know maybe not this old but you know around this time or just a couple years after um but yeah loads of stuff was um time or just a couple of years after. But yeah, loads of stuff was... This was such a kind of weird fallow period, wasn't it? Because I was never that into Take That, but my best mate Laura was into Take That, but not for another year or so. I mean, Michael Jackson's Dangerous came out in November. Apparently, yeah, a week after...

No, a couple of days after Freddie Mercury died, Dangerous came out. So that was all. And I did listen to Queen still and I enjoyed that. And I don't really have any guilt about that. They did loads of really fun stuff. And yeah, that really hit me hard, actually, Freddie Mercury dying. Partly because just all the kids at school were such cunts about it.

Right. And it really disturbed me that they could be that way. And I didn't understand it at all. I just felt, you know, awful in all kinds of ways. Yeah, I was listening to, I don't know, Listen Without Prejudice was out this year, so I was like rinsing that. Yeah.

In excess as well. I loved them. The funny thing about this episode is, as we'll get to, looking at the charts for this week, there's loads of fun, kind of rollicking stuff in order, well, just outside the charts, but none of it has made it through into this episode. It's like, I want to give you devotion,

which is such a hilariously brilliant tune. Backed by Dope Demand by King B, no relation. That's in there or out there, you know. I've always meant to ask, Sarah, you and Derek B. Yeah, he is my bad young brother. Oh, right. Sarah B and Rakim. I don't see that.

There's next episode's chart sorted out. Yes. But yeah, I mean, it's weird to... Oh yeah, also, Unfinished Sympathy, which is just a mind-blowingly sublime record. And I went back and watched it. Sliding down this week in the charts, alas. I think it was Melty Maker's single of the year

at the end of 91. Yeah, rightly so. It was, yeah. Didn't review it at the time but gave it single of the year along with you know a lot of other people and and you just yeah it's one of those there's so few tracks that really kind of stand above and kind of really you know so that is it's a very 1991 thing but it also it doesn't age at all and you know just the video is incredible and and it's yeah i so I was very I I was quite

fond of Massive Attack sort of later so Blue Lines came out this year but um you know loads of stuff I'm always like late to the party it's always stuff that um kind of you know stuff that came out this year that I would be into later like Orbital their first album came out this year and you know it was all stuff so like you know dance music was something that i it was like uh kind of it was quite mysterious and alluring and there was it was like a sort of message from a distant satellite you know and it was communicating something that i wouldn't fully understand until quite a lot later in my life but there was just like an inkling of that it's like hearing adult conversations yeah uh that you don't uh you... Well, a lot of music does this.

It's like music about, you know, grown-up big stuff and you get a sense of what that's going to mean to you but you don't really have the ability to process it yet and it's just like a message from the future, you know. Well, I was in the first year of a drama and english course at a polyversity in isleworth which funnily enough had been started up in the late 80s by stewart cosgrove he's right for the enemy yeah he was long gone at the time and uh the the course was crap but uh i didn't care because it just meant i was in london. You know, when I say London, sort of London.

London was near enough, put it that way. Shaking London. Shaking smoke, if you will. And I was in halls of residence. Luckily, I was in the mixed one because there was an all-male one and an all-female one and a mixed one. And the all-male one just stank non-stop of feet, hash, fish fingers, bacon, just basically anything that would go under a grill.

And there was one time when it turned out that my mate's next-door neighbour could never be arsed to walk like 20 feet to the toilets. Oh, no. So he installed this massive plastic tank thing with a screw at the top and uh he just unscrewed that and i put it in his wardrobe and he'd unscrew that at night and piss into it and then when winter came along and the the radiators came on uh the pipes kind of like ate through the plastic and uh yeah the the whole that whole floor basically had to sleep in the gym for a couple of nights while it got fumigated oh my god yeah chatty as fuck

that's horrible I need to go and recover myself now I'm so foul thanks Al that's alright cheers I mean music wise I mean music was massively important to me at that time to the point where it would choose my mates for me.

I basically had a strict policy that if I saw anybody in a James T-shirt, I wouldn't talk to them. You wouldn't have talked to me then, because I owned one. I've got it right. Well, there we go then. Yeah, I did. Well, fuck you too then. I'll carry this podcast on on my own show.

But no, I mean, I had a group of mates they were all into the the cure and uh the pokes and stuff like that it's like oh no no no i'm not having that i was essentially their dark mate no fuck that get that shit off we're listening to ice cube yeah but i mean as far as top of the pulse went no no not watching there was there was a tv room in halls but no telling it because by this time everyone had their own portables and anything. So I would go down with my mates, probably on a Thursday night, and set the telly up on my Amiga, and we'd play entire leagues of sensible soccer.

Top of the pops? No, mate. If it was on, I'd watch it, but there was other things to do. And music-wise, fucking 1991, a glorious year for hip-hop you know dayla soul is dead mr hood the low-end theory yeah death certificate apocalypse 91 breaking atoms the first cyprus lp fucking beautiful and you know so i've been listening to tim westwood i mean there's only two people from that university I still have any regular contact with and one of them was a bloke who didn't even go to the university he lived next door to one of my mates at the time he introduced me to jungle which was just bubbling up if I was listening to the radio it would be the pirate stations uh particularly Don FM which was uh which was a

kind of like a ravey early proto-techno station. I wasn't really into the music, but I just loved the shit people were coming out with. And we'd just ring them up and get them to diss my mate Fat Dave. It's a time in my life I'd love to have back, simply because I'd make better choices. I'd get the fuck out of it and try and get in on

a journalism course or something you don't want to do that mate well for the contacts I suppose I can't picture you being a thesp you know I'm imagining you now in sort of in some sort of I don't know leotard and I don't know sort of I don't know

I don't know yeah I can't picture you being a sort of I don't know John Malkovich type I don't know. It was a theatre. I don't know. Yeah, I can't picture you being a sort of, I don't know, John Malkovich type. I don't know. No. No. I don't know, man. I can see it.

I can imagine you being... Were you any good? I was all right. But I mean, the thing was, I'd already been to a college where they were absolutely full on about, you are doing this course because you want to go to drama school.

The whole point of us being here is we're going to spend two years showing you how to hone yourself to get into drama school and a lot of people did um and when i started that course i you immediately worked out that there were people that were far better than you at it so it was like oh well you know i've got no chance getting into drama school don't think i want to anyway I just started script writing and stuff like that all right so you know that's that's what turned me towards writing and you know you're talking about music of early 1991 I just remember what I was into in certainly in the spring of that year um one thing I should have mentioned Manic Street Preachers I totally associate them with that that exact moment because uh

earlier that spring um I'd heard Motown Junk for the first time. Their PR person, Cathy St. Luce, absolute legend, sent it to me. And I was already obsessing over them. I was just devouring their interviews because they were so funny and they just didn't give a shit who they offended. And I loved all that stuff.

And I'd even, I'd bought a leopard print coat and I bought tight white jeans and all of that. And, but because I was still a low ranking writer at Melody Maker, I wasn't, you know, one of the people who was going to be interviewing them for quite a bit. So I had to sort of bide my time. But only three weeks after this episode aired,

I would be traveling up to Manchester to see them for the first time, which, you know, life-changing consequences for me, it turned out. It turned out to be a massive thing in my life. So, yeah, I always think of discovering the Mannix when I think of Spring 91. So, I mean, as I said, there's absolutely no way I'm watching this episode of Top of the Pop. Yeah, I didn't have a telly, same as you said. I didn't, well, I just lived in my office, but if I did have a telly, I'd still be out. I'd be out running events or

attending gigs. There's no way. It was that whole thing of the alternative of the mainstream being so far apart that it just wouldn't have crossed my mind to think, oh, Top of the Pops, better watch it at this point. So anyway, Simon, you happen to have the latest issue of Melody Maker in front of you, don't you? I have have uh april 6th 1991 which is the one that would have been in

the shops at the time um it feels like a very flimsy issue actually it's only only got 56 pages the last 10 of which are just adverts for musical instruments which uh of course in those days is how melody maker made a lot of its revenue but there's actually quite a lot crammed into those, I guess, 46 pages of actual content. Front cover, blur. Damon with his top off, with his wispy chest hair around his nipples. And the little subheading is, get ready for the broadcast nudes. You see what they did there. There's also a trailer on the cover for a chance to win the shirt off Robert Smith's back

Maybe Damon needs it Although I imagine it might be a bit big for him I don't know Just as while you weren't in the office at the time, eh Simon? Oh yeah, yeah You'd be able to sniffer that I could have probably held that to ransom For quite a lot of money for certain people I knew at the time

So in the news section It's mostly just bands working on their new albums, Pixies, Mission, Elvis Costello, people like that. Ian Brown was back in court this week, evading photographers and giving evidence as the Stone Roses versus Silvertone case ended its third week. And the story says, court watchers are now confident that the case will run until april the 9th um it actually dragged on for over a year after that uh yeah silver tone appealed against the ruling which had sided with the band and all went on and on and on um michael jackson has signed a billion dollar deal with sony and is expecting to be making short films for his songs with david and Richard Attenborough, among others. I'm not sure if that happened or not.

The excellently named Robert Go To Bed has left wire, who will now continue as WIR, spelt W-I-R. Rough Trade is making people redundant and may be bought out by Geffen. And this little weird one, the Camden Underworld have been threatened with legal action by British Sugar for using their Silver Spoon logo on flyers for a club night called Silver. In the sidelines section, which is the new band section, we are introduced to 1,000 homo DJs, which is one of Al Jorgensen's alices, and also Miranda Sexgarden and Earwig.

It's one of Al Jorgensen's alias. And also Miranda Sexgarden and Earwig. The Stone Free section about Clubland is very excited about the World DJ Convention in London, which is hosted by Tim Westwood and Pete Tong. Probably your kind of thing, Al, I imagine, at the time. Live acts such as 808 State, Technotronic, Snap and LL Cool J, and including the DMC Music Awards and the World DJ Championships and the writer of that column, Push, somehow managed to get about

a thousand words out of that so hats off to him for that. In the features there's a big interview with Vic Reeves who's releasing a cover of Matt Munro's Born Free in which the writer, John Wilde describes Annika Rice as the sunny British telly dolly bird

with the gappy teeth and the figure like an ironing board. Different times, eh? Jesus. Here come the 90s. Yeah, well, yeah, exactly. Loaded and Lad Culture just around the corner. In fact, John Wilde was a big writer for Loaded, so there we go. Steve Sutherland

has interviewed Blur, all of whom have their tops off in the photos inside. Oh dear. Some look better on it than others, it's got to be said. Damon's about to do his first Top of the Pops, and he's very cocky about that. And he reveals he wasn't really into music and bands and stuff like that when he was at school, but he just knew that something was going to happen to him, like becoming a pop star. Whereas Graham Coxon was a real music nerd which is interesting because damon's such a

massive kind of music head now um anyway there's a feature on stereo mcs which hails hails them as britain's most accomplished rap act by far not sure about that but there we go um in which um dj nick hallam aka the head says um says if you take a group like in spiral carp, I can't see why anyone would want to buy their records. They're just so regressive. Most of these groups have so obviously been listening to The Doors, Velvets, Rolling Stones, all the old cliches. There are also interviews with Ice Cube,

which discusses the Rodney King trial, which is going on, and with Banderas, Megadeth, the Boo Radleys and the Mothers. There's a techie piece about Curtis Mantronic and there's a round up of the Camden Lurch scene which I think we talked about before actually Yes. In the

immediate section which is like the arts and film and stuff there's a full page review of Oliver Stone's The Doors. I remember that being massive and a retrospective on the football zine, When Saturday Comes, which is how a slot got to know you, Al, isn't it? Exactly.

On Backlash, the letters page, there are angry letters about Steve Sutherland's negative review of REM's secret gig under the name Bingo Handjob at the borderline, RIP the borderline this week, actually. And there's an apology for printing a hoax letter

purporting to come from crew alexandra manager dario gradi seriously uh um in the live section simon reynolds raving about world of twist and their reviews of s express the lemon heads maria mckee new fast automatic daffodils front 242 daisy chainsaw chapter house and moose and there's a small down page review of the then obscure pulp um and in the gig guide this is the bit i always do um about where we were living at the time in aylesbury taylor might have gone to see chapter house and moose i wonder if he did um up in yorkshire had she been old enough sarah could have gone to see something called rubber leather plastic in bradford also the alarmarm in Bradford, someone called Elegy in Huddersfield,

but she'd have been spoiled for choice in Leeds with The Jesus Lizard, The Boo Radleys, or Four Heads in a Fish Tank. And in the amusingly named Penis Stone, I just wanted to say Penis Stone, she could have seen Steve Gibbons. Jesus, still going! In Coventry, Neil might have gone to see

the Wild Hearts, Milk, the Groundhogs or the Bootleg Beatles but I'm guessing he didn't in London David Stubbs and I let's face it just me could have gone to see Jefferson Airplane, Levitation Radical Dance Faction, The Three Johns Screaming Lord Such, Ned's Atomic Dustbin

The Paul Weller Movement Rod Stewart, Kingmaker, Back to the Planet, Frontline Assembly, Gallandrunk, Desmond Decker, Doctor and the Medics, or Thousand Yards Stare. And there are loads of comedy poets knocking around for some reason. Attila the Stockbroker, John Cooper Clarke, John Hegley all gigging. At West

Hampstead Moonlight, it just says MSP, which I strongly suspect was Manic Street Preachers, though I couldn't find it in their gigography. And lastly, Al, in Nottingham, you might have got your groove on to Cooling the Gang or Incognito. Not sure if you did. Well, I was in London one time.

Of course you were by then. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But my heart was still in Nottingham. Yeah. In the live ads, it's ads for Julian Cope's Peggy Suicide Tour, Ice Cube on his America Cuckers Most Wanted Tour, Wilco Johnson seems to be gigging everywhere at all times there's a half page ad for James

who have made the big time with Sit Down of course and The Shaman doing an event called Synergy featuring various DJs and MCs there's an ad for the inaugural Fla Festival headlined by Christy Moore, Van Morrison, The Pogues and Nancy Griffith in Finsbury Park, and also in the same venue for an open-air gig

by The Mission, New Model Army, Killing Joke and Henry Rollins. I did go to that one. Not surprisingly. Singles of the Week, the Boo Radley's Every Heaven EP, reviewed by Paul Lester, Madonna's Rescue and the Wonderstuff Size of a Cow Get a Kicking.

There's a full-page review of Bob Dylan's bootleg series, volumes one to three, by the editor Alan Jones. That was kind of the editor's prerogative. He was such a big Dylan fan. He'd just say, right, I'm having a full page just for Bob Dylan. And the releases are to coincide with Dylan's 50th birthday, and the review ends, birthday man, ah Jonesy there's

a glowing review for the album by Rain Tree Crow who are Japan under another name from Chris Roberts, David Stubbs has a sneaking admiration for MC Hammer's shameless opportunism and hails him as a breathtaking dancer and choreographer even though he describes

the album Let's Get It Started as truly pitiful. Speaking of David, David's Talk Talk Talk comedy section that he wrote anonymously, but the cat's out of the bag now, of course, has stories including Rick Wakeman has been dead for five years. Shock.

Talking Sport with David Silvo Silvian. And it also takes the piss out of Ice Cube, Ocean Colour Scene and Snub TV The Page's columnist Mr Abusing as he's still called at this stage this is before he became Mr Agreeable later lays into Rod Stewart, Holly Johnson

Banderas and Roxette and in the cunt of the week section the cretinous useless negligible tossunt of the week section, the cretinous, useless, negligible tosser of the week, he compares a hapless reader's passport photo to the fucking elephant man's irritating kid brother. Now, this sort of thing is exactly why Mr. Abusing had to become Mr. Agreeable, because there were complaints when it emerged that people were sending in passport photos unawares of other people. And it basically was sort of like an early version of online bullying. And they had to kind of shut that bit down.

And Mr. Abusing had to sort of be Mr. Agreeable for a while before he got really horrible again. And from the other chart music contributors, I have nothing in this issue. No, sorry. Neil, Taylor and Sarah don't either because they are years away from arriving at the maker. And that's the end of that. Oh, Simon. I never knew there was so much in it. So what else was on telly this day?

Well, BBC One starts the day at 6.30 with breakfast news. Then it's Brave Star, Why Don't You, Play Days, The Family Ness and The Jetsons. After the news, Peter Purvis presents Kickstart, the arsing about on trials motorbikes competition. Then Jay Nasher makes some muffins and cookies for an American diner in Eats for Treats. Then it's more news, Rosemary Connolly's Diet and Fitness Club,

Seen Today, which was shaking Pebble Mill at one, and the One O'Clock News. The afternoon begins with a repeat of Yesterday's Neighbours, the quiz show Turnabout, then the Australian film Warming Up, where an Aussie rules team are given lessons by a ballet teacher. Children's BBC kicks in with Pingu, Mick and Mac, starring Michael Barrymore, The Further Adventures of Super Ted, Simon and the Witch, Tricky Business with Bernie Clifton, Newsround and Blue Peter. After the latest episode of Neighbours, it's the six o'clock news and we've just sat through regional news in your area. BBC Two begins with the 1942 film The Falcon Takes Over, followed by the 1945 film Albert and Costello in Hollywood,

then Laurel and Hardy in Toad in the Hole. After a repeat of The Honeymooners, it's the American chat show After Hours, followed by a tribute to the archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler in the documentary Digging Up People. The afternoon is given over to the first day of the Grand National Meeting in Aintree. Leslie Phillips picks out his favourite BBC archive clips in Plunder. Then there's a disability magazine show One in Four, the Highland docu-soap The Vet,

and they're two-thirds of the way through the 1961 film Atlantis, The Lost Continent. ITV is started at 6 with TV AM, then it's Lucky Ladders with Lenny Bennett, followed by the American sitcom Out of This World, This Morning with Richard and Judea, The Riddlers, A Repeat of Yesterday's Home and Away, A Country Practice and Diamonds TV Weekly, Kid Jensen takes on Alison Holloway

in the quiz show Jumble, then it's The Young Doctors, Art Attack, DuckTales, Spats, Blockbusters, The News at 5.40, Today's Home and Away, Regional News in Your Area, and they're just about to start,

Emmerdale. Channel 4 starts at 6 with the Channel 4 Daily, then it's 5 minutes of poetry. The documentary. California offbeat. The documentary series. The horse in sport. The Scottish eco-doc.

Fragile earth. Storm on the mountain. The wildlife of the Amazon. In Noah's Ark. Then business daily. Sesame Street. The docu-series. On the march.

About the march of time. Newsreels. Then the 1933 film. The Bowery. After Belgica Magica, an examination of some caves in Belgium, it's 15 to 1, The Adventures of Tintin, Oprah Winfrey, the short football documentary series The People's Game, Gaza's Soccer School, Kate and Ale, and they've just started Channel 4 News.

A lot of telly by now. It's like a foreign land to me. Like I said, I didn't have a telly. Look at all you missed out on. All that Australian soap opera action. I'd be quite interested in the Belgian caves, to be honest. That sounds amazing. I used to enjoy Kickstart, actually.

Really? Which is surprising, considering I had quite a bad accident on that sounds amazing I used to enjoy Kickstart actually I wasn't into it really yeah I mean which is surprising considering I had quite a bad accident on a push bike when I was 11

or something but no I used to I really enjoyed watching other people do it there was something about like you know when you just see other people doing

like feats feats of things that you could never do yourself and it's like but that's too steep you can't go on that wow oh he's jumped over a thing so yeah i found that like really relaxing yeah it was just

show jumping for kids whose parents could afford trials bikes for for their children it was great and the noise the noise with the most inappropriate theme music ever yeah you know with something like that you expect something a bit like you you know, a bit motorbiking by Chris Spedding. But then you get kind of like Blackpool organ music. I think that was part of the charm, I think. Alright then, pop-crazed youngsters,

it's time to go way back to April of 1991. Always remember, we may coat down your favourite band or artist, but we never forget. What don't we ever forget, Sarah? They've been on top of the pops more than we have. Hello, very good evening to you.

We are all live tonight from Television Centre. We're in stereo on Radio 1 FM. In the studio, we've got the Mock Turtles and Virgil Sharkey and N.Joy. But first, we start off with a song at number 30 in the charts. It's called Caravan in Spiral Carpets! CHEERING AND APPLAUSE It's season 28, episode 14 of Top of the Pops, and it's becoming painfully clear that our favourite TV show is right up arsehole street. Ratings-wise, the show is in a decline that will bottom out in this summer when it pulls in audiences as low as 4 million. The BBC are

currently churning out a slew of reasons for this. A drop in the teenage population, the decline in single sales, an over-reliance on videos that you can now watch elsewhere and the fact that dance music is all over the place and alienating folk. Which means that a severe tinkering is due in the autumn where the long-standing rules of the program set in 1965 are about to be fucked about with you know we'll come to that when we cover um a later episode of this show but um there was a piece i managed to dig out that was in queue uh in late 1991 about the current woes atop of the Pops. And they quoted Malcolm Jerry, who was the producer of the Tube and the current producer of the Channel 4 show Wired. He'd been approached by the BBC and offered to be a consultant,

but he told them to fuck off when they weren't about to offer him any money. But this is what he had to say. The Pops is glitzy, professional, professional lamely directed and it has the worst presenters on television it survived basically as a news program which was how it was conceived originally it used to be essential viewing though but now the polemic of pop has changed kids want to go out and dance apart from that they're interested in icons, events, Madonna live on Sky, Sinead saying rude words at the MTV Awards,

even the three tenors at the World Cup. They don't talk about the top 20 because the chart isn't news anymore. What Top of the Pops is really up against is the who gives a fuck factor. Panel, your thoughts? He's got a point. I mean, I take issue with a bit about Madonna on Sky

because how many people even fucking had Sky? Half a million people or something. But there was a crisis with pop in general at this time. And it's not only top the pops it's um because you know i i teach music journalism at bim in bright and and one of the things i i do a lesson about is smash hits and um this crisis that was going on in in the 90s uh is reflected in the sales figures of of smash hits because uh it was it was the best-selling music magazine of all time. And it peaked in 88 with 800,000 readers.

But by the time of this episode, in the space of just a couple of years, it had fallen to half that number. Jesus. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, something you touched upon in the explanation given for Top of the Pops, there is a similar received

wisdom that puts it down to the rise of, you know, anonymous dance music or faceless techno bollocks, as it was disparagingly called. And then that became reclaimed as a sort of t-shirt slogan, you know what I mean? But yeah, the dance music factor, how dance music could be presented in magazines, it was a similar problem to how you're going to present it on top of the pops so that's part of it and also just that the actual pop stars were very it's very kind of clean cut stock aching waterman starlets which who were pretty boring and they they did make a very readable copy so there was that that decline of the kind of outrageous gobby pop stars of the 80s, they were all kind of gone. So

I think Top of the Pops suffered from the same, you know, a lot of the same problems as pop magazines at the same time. Yeah, you say all that, Simon, but the fact that Smash Hits' peak year was 1988, that's shocking to me, because that's

Bross, isn't it? Yeah, you've got Bross, Rick Astley kyle minogue and all that so i i think in the short term yeah not not exactly the the wacky pop stars we know and know but i i i think you know in in the in the short term that there was that kind of mania for those stars that maybe drove figures up but after a while people realize that they're just boring to read about and it's all very well buying a magazine to stick posters on your wall but it's just not very readable and

you know okay maybe the dance music thing is more on point as far as this discussion goes but you know it's not even as I think most of those SAW stars had peaked by 91 anyway I think that whole culture was kind of on the way

so it was it was a kind of a weird interim time as we're going to see in the episode it was kind of the tail end of a few things but nothing had really got going in terms of something new very arse end kind of time yeah sarah i mean you're you're 12 going on 13 at the time Yeah. Sarah, I mean, you're 12 going on 13 at the time. How big was your Who Gives a Fog factor? Yeah, I think it was quite a dull, drummy time. Like Simon says, I think it was almost like a perfect, boring storm where loads of stuff was coming to an end, but nothing had replaced it yet and like i said dance music was kind of it was off doing its own thing it really wasn't um and it was something that people were very involved in that was happening kind of elsewhere you know um and it kind of wasn't wasn't really uh punching through into you know kind of this area and into the magazines and stuff because you know it had no it didn't need

to it was it was kind of a separate entity i think at this point not not appointment television just yet then no i mean it was on you know i would always watch it but i mean i think um it was probably this time uh was uh the chart show on a saturday yes that was definitely competitive wasn't it yeah brilliant i loved that show I mean I kind of got more and there was that slightly

I really want to go back and revisit some of those because when it was I mean it it got shit in the end as you know it went the way

of all things but there was a period where it was very all the little captiony bits were very kind of smash hits very sort of

spiky and irreverent. And that was great because it was always like... A data blast, if you will. Yeah, but it was like, can they say that? But it wasn't dismissive or sort of sneery. So that was probably an influence on what I wanted to do in writing is sort of be... Of course, I ended up just gushing about the wrong stuff like a twat but um yeah that was um the fact that it was so wordy as

well i think i loved that there was loads of text up on the screen um so that was cool but yeah top of the pops i'd top of the pops was something i've grown up with so yeah of course i still i would watch it but probably around this time it's that you know the anticipation wasn't really paying off so you'd go oh top of the pops it's like and like i said i probably saw this episode at the time but i don't really remember and i felt like i'd you know eaten a rice cake and that was about it so your host for this evening is gary. At the moment, he's tucked in between Simon Bates and Steve Wright in the weekday early afternoon slot.

Unfortunately for us, we can track down Davis' activities for the week down to the minute, thanks to his weekly column Off the Record, which, yeah, very good, which was syndicated amongst various local newspapers. This Tuesday, he got to chat to Jim Kerr of Simple very good, which was syndicated amongst various local newspapers.

This Tuesday, he got to chat to Jim Kerr of Simple Minds, who was plugging the new LP, Real Life. He saw Gloria Estefan knocking about with Simon Bates, probably on his broomstick. He spent Easter Monday in the company of Kim Wilde, and he's had a lovely doss at Paul Heaton's house in Hull, where the beautiful South Frontman Let him look at his

Extensive collection of crisp Packets Oh man he needs to be Friends with Neil Kekani they would get on so well Yes We've got to make that happen Later this year he would be The last Radio 1 DJ to host

An episode of Top of the Pops before the Year Zero revamp. And he'll be playing real life Monopoly with Gary Glitter for Children in Need in November. So yeah, a busy man. It would seem so. Last episode of Chart Music, me, Taylor and Neil saw Dave Lee Travis flopping about like a bearded fish out of water. is flopping about like a bearded fish out of water. And you have to say that on first impressions, Gary Davidson, 1991,

looks horrifically out of place presenting Top of the Pops. But I amended that opinion as the episode went on. Well, I mean, fashion-wise, he's on point in that he's wearing the same kind of bad boxy denim jacket that appears on at least two of the performers. Yeah. So, you know, he's got the uniform of this time. It's the kind of thing that you can have a stab vest on underneath. Yeah, yeah.

It's funny, just from the very beginning of this episode, it was starting to aggravate me because of the theme music being Paul Hardcastle's The Wizard still. And those credits, credits are like a sort of cheap computer simulation of being trapped in an air conditioning duct trying to escape from prison with the numbers flying towards you.

And it's just already like just all in my grill. I'm like, I don't like this. But as, as a presenter, he, he doesn't bother me too much. I don't dislike him.

It's that classic thing that he's a twat but not a cunt. You know what I mean? He's a safe pair of hands. He's not the gold-chained playboy he was six or seven years earlier. No. His hair is now kind of almost apologetically trimmed back from its mid-'80s bouffant. And, yeah, he is in that

sort of nondescript jacket that Sarah mentioned and I sort of feel like he's there as an announcer to move things along. He's not there to project his personality. He wasn't plugged into the zeitgeist in 1991, but that's fine, right? He's a little bit

of an awkward presence here, but not too much. And by the way, it's nice that he's sort of bit of an awkward presence here but not too much and and by the way it's nice that he sort of found his home again now on radio 2 nowadays where where he can just play wham records to his heart's heart's content and basically be that guy from he could be that guy from 1985 again and i i but you know i i don't begrudge him anything and watching this i just think well fair enough mate you know you're not the coolest DJ they could have hired to present it but you're doing a job and

you're not Norm Skagg though no but exactly he's kind of yeah he's unobtrusive and he's not dislikable I'll say that he's not here to get the party started in other words is it and the thing is it's as an episode it's not very audience heavy either so it's not you know that the the audience during performances are in shadow most of the time

when when you do see them in in the links with gary davis they are very nainties people aren't they they all look like some of them look like a young claire balding um a lot of a lot of them look like michaela strachan because it was peak Strachan time. She was a kind of fashion icon of the time. But it's very much, you know, it's not like him larking about with them or anything like that. He's not sort of groping them or making crap jokes. It's just very much he's flanked

by a bunch of audience members, but he's just there to say, that was that and here's the next song. And, you know, fair enough. Yeah, he's all right. And he's not a creep I know the bar is extremely low

but you don't get the bad vibes off him so that already puts him head and shoulders above many of his peers I think you're both right he's moving the show along he does drop a couple of clangers

as the show goes on that kind of dates him a bit. Well, we'll touch upon those when they arrive. But yeah, I mean, we're treated to the intro sequence that, to my mind, looks like you're being dragged out of a nightclub on a space station by invisible bouncers. As the wizard by Paul Hardcastle plays, which has now been used on Top of the Pops for precisely five years and one day. It would be replaced in October when they did the relaunch, but by now they might as well be playing the sound of the swinging cymbal. You know what I mean?

Or Sailor the Century theme tune or something like that because it is so out of date. It is, isn't it? Yeah. Davis reminds us that Top of the pops is all live with an additional stereo simulcast on radio one because our tellies don't have stereo yet because we're not american did anyone actually do that i wonder because um you know when you if if you watch football on tv but you listen to the commentary on the radio it's slightly out of sync i used to do that i used to i was that

annoying cunt who'd be in the pub watching the football and can't stand the commentary so i'd have the uh my radio walkman i'd have an earpiece in so you'd know if apparently went in when everyone else is waiting to see yeah yeah yeah and i would know when a build-up turned into a goal so i could just go oh there's something on here look yeah and look like an absolute tactical genius yeah yeah that all happened when satellite came in yeah but it was the kind of thing you do when you're a kid when your mum and dad have gone out and on new year's eve or something and to be I don't know Ian Jury live or or Toya live on whistle test on on BBC two it's top of the pops trying to trying to keep up with the times isn't it really? Yeah. He introduces

the first act up tonight in Spiral Carpets and Caravan. And he goes, Davis, he goes good Manchester band to start the show off with, right? Yes. He's from Manchester and Gary Davis and he's only two years older than

Clint Boone from the Inspiral Carpets. Yeah, he's 33 isn't he at this time? But even though, you know, he's only two years older than Clint Boone from the Inspiral Carpets. Yeah, he's 33, isn't he, at this time? But even though he's only a couple of years older, you just know he doesn't understand this culture at all. But then you know why should he? It's fair enough. Formed in Oldham in 1983 and named after a song that had been written by the dad of guitarist Graham Lambert, Inspiral Carpets spent the mid-80s going through assorted line-up changes

and first came to the attention of the Northwest music scene in 1987 when they appeared on a flexi-disc given away with Manchester's Debris magazine. After putting out their own collection of songs under the name of the Cow Cassette a year later, they signed to the independent label Playtime and their debut release, the Plane Crash EP, was picked up on by John Peel which led to a Radio 1 session. In March of 1989, Playtime Records went under and the band set up their own label, Cow Records. And after their next single, Find Out Why, was re-recorded as the theme tune to the summer Saturday BBC kids show, The 815 from Manchester, they were lumped into the burgeoning Madchester movement.

Chart-wise, Find Out Why only got to number 90 in September of 1989, and the follow-up move got to number 49 in November. But their first release of 1990, This Is How It Feels, got to number 14 in March of that year. This Is How It Feels got to number 14 in March of that year. This is the follow-up to the Island Head EP, which got to number 21 in November of 1990, and it's the first cut from their second LP, The Beast Inside, which is due to be released in three weeks' time.

And it's up this week from number 36 to number 30. Now then, as Simon's already mentioned, this is the week that the Stone Roses are still stuck in the courts. And it's also the week that Loose Fit by the Happy Mondays was sliding down the charts after only getting to number 17. And it's fair to say that by this time, Manchester is looking a bit dead in the water. I mean, this band here have always been keen to stress that they shouldn't have been lumped into the Manchester movement,

but they were, weren't they? Everyone says that, though, don't they? Yes, they do. Bands always hate being sort of tagged as being involved in a scene, but, you know, we don't imagine these things. They do exist. Yeah. I mean, do you think they'd have been as successful

if they hadn't been lumped into that scene? No. No, I don't. No. Because basically, right, in terms of their of their success it's an interesting thing right with any given movement if you're not one of the big two because there's usually a big two in these movements yeah who you know usually divide people into camps right um you can do quite well for yourself by being everyone's third or fourth

favorite band and and that that's where the inspirals were. So you had the Stone Roses and then the Happy Mondays and then the Charlatans and then probably just sneaking into the Champions League places you had the inspirals. I guess you've got to throw James in there as well. But yeah, you know,

so you can do quite well for yourself by not being the big shot in the scene but by being there or thereabouts. And so they can say they weren't part of it. I mean, you mentioned that the fanzine and debris that they they released a record with that that that was uh dave haslam's fanzine right of course was the uh dj at the hacienda so they they were they were connected to all that stuff whether they like it or not you know um i'll admit they were the most kind of indie pop of the manchester bands if you know know what I mean from that sort of wacky name

to those cool as fuck t-shirts with a cartoon cow on it which they probably made more money from that than from record sales but mostly because they had that 60s thing going on that all the trappings of I mean the haircuts for a start right so Tom Hingley had a haircut

like a medieval village idiot wrongly accused of buggering a goat. And Clint Boone also looked like the man who was going to manacle him to the stocks in the market square for doing that. But above all, there's that keyboard sound. I mean, Clint Boone's gimmick was that Farfisa compact duo, which was literally from 1966. And because of that kind of retro aesthetic

for which the stereo mc slagged them off in in that we smell d maker um i think they might be the least likely signing to mute records ever because they you know which they were i i could never figure out how that happened um and and and this this song in particular i i don't remember it at all i mean i won't remember it i didn't i don't remember it from then I won't remember it when we finish talking about it now. The lyrics are just nothing, back of an envelope bollocks. There's no chorus. It's just the words caravan at the top of the octave.

And that's it. I mean, I don't mind some of their stuff, the Marky Smith collaboration, I Want You. And there's another single called Joe by them that I quite like. But mostly they weren't my thing at all. And this caravan, ropey as fuck, I Want You. And there's another single called Joe by them that I quite like. But mostly they weren't my thing at all. And this, you know, caravan, ropey as fuck, I'm saying. Yeah, I couldn't remember it while I was listening to it. I mean, it's like I've got, like, it's hard for me to tell now

what's catchy and what isn't because my brain will play back. If there's a thing, if there's a song or a jingle or whatever, I've probably said this before, my brain will immediately play it back as soon as it's finished. Didn't happen with this. So it was kind of almost a relief, actually, because that's a very annoying thing that happened in my brain. But yeah, it's pretty nothing, isn't it?

And I mean, Tom Hingley, bless him, not a very charismatic performer. No, he's got a pair of sunglasses on a chain around his neck that makes him look like a base and cutted Larry Grayson. I'm off expecting Arliss Sinclair to come on with some maracas in a minute. He's also wearing the bad boxy denim jacket, which is very much like Gary's and there's the bowl cut. I mean

all I could think of was you've seen No Country for Old Men right? Yes. It's like a very mild mannered Anton Chigger you know you just expect him to go like call it you know get out a dime and flip it in the air but although he's so

he's kind of so nice, you know, he wouldn't have a bolt gun. He'd have like a pogo stick or a bottle of Lamborghini, you know. I mean, the crowd seemed to like it, but, you know, it's... Well, the crowd seemed to like fucking everything. I mean, we've mentioned already that we don't see much of the crowd, but, oh, fucking hell, we hear them. The fucking granny clapping begins right from the off.

And the whooping it's just non-stop clapping and whooping the woo girls are out in force just because you know sometimes you've just got to go woo you can tell that sometimes people just go woo to try to jump start their enthusiasm about a thing

you know there's a lot of that. Yeah, there's so little to say about it. Yeah, I didn't mind some of their stuff, but now it's like, I'm not going to, like, dig out this album. So, oh, yeah, so after this, Gary says, oh, there's an album coming out soon, The Beast Inside. And it's like, it's so inappropriately named. There's such an inoffensive band.

It's like, how far inside is that beast? As an opener as well for Top of the Pops, it's just, it's... The party's not started, has it? Not really, no. Everyone's kind of hanging up their coats and, you know. Yes. Yeah, everyone's hanging up their bad boxy denim jacket

and, you know, trying to get in the mood. But the kind of uh the comic comic tragedy of of uh of in spiral carpets now is that um yes clint boone yes clint boone uh kept the name basically and so he he's still kind of in spirals guy tom hingley is now fronting an Inspirals tribute band called The Carpets. Oh, dear. Every time they do a Manchester tribute band festival thing with the Clone Roses and all that shit, Clint Boone's always on it doing a DJ set.

He's the actual only person from that era who's still doing it. But, you know, he's making a living out of it's a good show to him yeah yeah i'm i'm i um i met him once at a um and in the city thing at manchester lovely guy really sweet really um really enthusiastic i mean you know quite quite potty i think and quite uh you know yeah and and you can see but the thing is that he's he's kind of the one who's got any sort of presence in the band. And so you occasionally get him kind of... I'm not saying it's not necessarily a good presence, but it is some presence, you know.

So you get him kind of eyeing the camera. And he's got on also a bad boxy denim jacket, but it's like neon yellow or green. Which I thought was a Sal Wester, because they were going on about the rain and caravans and all that kind of stuff. They got galoshes on. I don't even know what even are galoshes.

Are they things you put over your shoes, like plastic covers you put over your shoes? I know this from Beatrix Potter, where there was a frog wearing them, which you'd think was, you know, frogs don't need them, what the fuck? What was she on? A built-in waterproofing, yeah.

Tim Boone, right? I bet he's got an amazing record collection. I bet he's one of these people that, you know, the Nuggets compilations, I bet he's got all the original records from that, you know, they're on there. But none of that really sort of filters through into Spiral's

music, does it? I'm sure he's got brilliant taste, but it's just... Some people can channel that and other people can't. But, I mean, yeah, as you said, Gary Davis gets over the fact that they're a Manchester band and that, at the time, was supposed to be your gold seal of quality, man. Yeah, and I think that by having them

at the start of the episode, Top of the Pops think they're doing something really kind of trendy. You know, it's like, you know, here we go. This is where young people's thinking is at right now let's have a bit yes even though it's already feels a bit past it you know yeah because i may have mentioned this before but i remember the one of the first few weeks i was at university i went to one of the many shitty gigs uh at rsu i wish you were running it Simon and this band came out

and go oh hey we're from Manchester and all this kind of stuff and I'd seen them in clubs in Nottingham that come from Derby yeah there's a lot of that and it's like oh I'm not having this, this is a cod and I just turned on my heel and walked away yeah a lot of people putting off fake bank access yeah that's not really how it works is it

you know you can't just invoke that and go yeah this is us, I mean you know you're probably in trouble immediately if that's what you're if that's not really how it works, is it? You know, you can't just, you can't just invoke that and go, yeah, this is us. I mean, you know, you're probably in trouble immediately if that's what you're, that's your, you know, it's almost like sort of, it's like patriotism, isn't it?

It's like, yeah, no, I'm English. It's like, well, so what? You know,

what else you got? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like Ian Brown said, it's not where you're from, it's where you're at. Yeah,

man. Yeah. I mean, you know, this is, this is in no way cutting edge at all, but there is one cutting edge element of this performance because I do believe it's one of the earliest examples

of an overhead crowd sweep, beloved of youth TV shows of the 90s and a Nolse House party. You've got that weird sort of moving graphics thing for the band names and stuff like that. Yeah, and I noticed that they do something weird gary davis every time he announces something they kind of swirl him with the computer graphics you know so for example example in the next link they swirl him into the shape of a donut or or um maybe maybe one of one of those inflatable cushion

toilet seats for people with hemorrhoids so following week, Caravan dropped one place to number 31 and slid right out of the charts. The follow-up, Please Be Cruel, only got to number 50 in June of this year, but they'd go on to notch up seven more top 40 hits before splitting up for the first time in 1995. Can anybody hum any of them? A month after this performance they went on

a US tour and when they came back to the UK they lost their guitar technician who had unsuccessfully auditioned for the role of their lead singer in 1989, Noel Gallagher, who went on to join his little brother's group. Oh, imagine if Noel Gallagher had become

lead singer of Inspiral Carpets. It would have been a very different world we'd be living in now, I feel. Sliding doors. Yeah. Sliding doors. Good match is about to start the show off tonight in spiral carpets, and they've got an album called The Beast Inside coming up later this month.

All right, they've done the Bartman, and now they're in deep, deep trouble. Here come The Simpsons. The Bartman. Davis, flanked by an assortment of whooping and clapping young women, shills the next in Spiral Carpets LP before introducing Deep, Deep Trouble by The Simpsons. before introducing Deep, Deep Trouble by The Simpsons. Formed in Springfield, somewhere in America, no one's exactly sure, might be Oregon, in 1987, The Simpsons were a family band who got their break on the Tracy Ullman Show in America, which led to their own TV series two years later.

By mid-1990, they'd become so popular that they were deluged with merchandising offers including an approach by david geffen to get an lp out for christmas entitled the simpsons sing the blues the first single from that lp do the bartman was co-written by michael jackson although we didn't know that until 1998 when simpsons creator Matt Groening revealed that his name was kept off the credits to avoid creating mire with the label he was signed to although it was never released as a single in the US it got to number one right throughout the English speaking world

including three weeks in February of this year in the UK and it's still in the chart at number 25 this is the follow-up a new entry at number 22 and we're obviously being treated to the video now first question me dares do we know who wrote the rap no if you think about it if you think about rappers of the year right it'll it'll become apparent the fresh prince uh right oh well that makes sense because jazzy jeff did the music and it because it is there we go it is a retread of parents just don't understand yeah yeah yeah of course it really is we're simpsons a thing in your world at the time um well um because i think the bbc are going to be absolutely delighted to get

another opportunity to put the simpsons on i can't i honestly can't remember a time before the simpsons you know it's like they've always been there i can't really remember you know so they yeah they must have been yeah yeah well they're all over the place it was you know the christmas present of of 1990 was some simpsons ramble i remember getting a bart simpson t-shirt off my man for christmas yeah i never had any simpsons stuff at all but i was you know it was just kind of the the background noise of of uh of pop culture wasn't it really it was just it was everywhere yeah yeah no and obviously it was you know the the show itself was properly great for at least 10 years so i think it was it was just getting into its kind of purple period at this point.

Because I was into The Simpsons from day one, because in 1989, I treated myself to a satellite dish. We were the first on the street to have a satellite dish, and we're the last on the street to still have that satellite dish. My mum's never bothered to have it taken down. And when The Simpsons came out, I watched the first episode and stuck with it i was that cool i wasn't um i wasn't watching it yet because you know obviously i didn't have a telly but definitely didn't have sky so i mean uh but i knew it was a thing in culture um but i i only had these records

to go on to judge it by and also you know, the merchandise that you'd see everywhere. So you'd see people wearing T-shirts saying, don't have a cow, man, and stuff. And so I just assumed it was ghastly. I just assumed it was some horrible, brash, sort of numbskulled American thing. You know, it would be several years, probably not until it

turned up on BBC that I would actually see an episode of Simpsons so I didn't realize the kind of brilliant writing and the humanity of it and all that kind of stuff at all I just thought it was some terrible terrible piece of sort of cultural imperialism just getting in our faces and all that um but but you know knowing what i know now um it it feels as if a different almost like a different department at fox was in charge of the records than was in charge of the tv show because that with with these songs um it's as if they were going for them i know it sounds stupid it's a cartoon anyway but they were going for the most cartoonish version of the simpsons do you know what i mean um but you know it turns out that Matt Groening was involved in the record,

same as him and Jazzy Jeff made the record. But it's almost as if he's traducing and misrepresenting his own creation by bringing out these records. Because, yeah, basically from these records and the T-shirts, I just thought, oh thought oh fucking hell this is just gross the thing is is that by this time i mean the simpsons hadn't peaked yet as you know the quality of the shows but it was massively popular obviously i mean as well as the as well as all the official simpsons merchandise you would see a lot of black bart simpson t-shirts

knocking about that that were sold on the market in both London and Nottingham but at the time this is a time of the Simpsons when Bart's being thrown at you as the central character yeah yeah when the Simpsons first came out in the UK there'd be these massive sky posters everywhere and it would just be Bart Simpson it's like oh yeah this is the show and this is a central character and you know I was I was bereft of a satellite dish at the time um being at university I'm really missing it because you know I really missed the Simpsons WWF and NWA wrestling any American sport that I was into and all the mental Dutch and German stuff that you could get. So yeah, I was missing out at the time,

but I was massively aware of The Simpsons. And you'd start talking to people at work or at university and everything. You'd talk about The Simpsons. And without fail, they'd go, yeah, you know who the king of that show is, don't you? Fucking Homer. Homer's the king.

And then it would eventually slip to homer being the central character because to me bart was just an annoying cunt yeah yeah as soon as homer started taking command that's when the simpsons really took off it's interesting you mentioned uh parents just don't understand as being sort of something that might have been the precursor of this my first thought was the beastie boys my first thought was fight for your right to party right yes because uh you know if you look at the lyrics uh right so this is i'll do a whole bunch of hit goes now i've never ever claimed that i was a smarty but inspiration hits me let's have a party called it my posse they were here in a flash they brought all their pals we started to thrash there was

romping and stomping an occasional crash a fist fight or two and nintendo for cash we raided the fridge dogs raided the trash i got a little worried when the windows got smashed which is very kind of like a sort of pg version uh or you know a children-friendly version of the beasties and uh i don't think it's too much of a stretch to see this kind of chain of influence here right which led from the beasties to this and it then leads to um dray and snoop's gin and juice right because compare that bit to that that bit i just read to this two in the morning the party's still jumping because my mama ain't home i got bitches in the living room getting it on and they ain't leaving till six in the morning see what you want to do shit i've got a pocket full of rubbers and my homeboys do too

so you know so all that all that that Dre and Snoop had done there, sort of taking the Simpson, you know, the Bart kind of template and just sort of cranked it up a bit. And again, the twist with the Simpsons record, right? It turns out that it was all a dream, right? And what does that remind you of in hip-hop terms? Ice Cube, It Was A Good Day. Yes.

Which came out in 1992. in hip hop terms Ice Cube it was a good day which came out in 1992 so I'm saying Bart Simpson influenced Dre Snoop and Ice Cube basically Bart Simpson is the hidden force behind G-Funk is what I've established

and it's a much better single than Do The Bartman which got on my tits do you think yeah see I was thinking yeah much better you see yeah but that's I don't know I'm not gonna this is not a hill I'm gonna die on or even sit on to be honest I'm not even gonna walk up this hill

you're not pausing with some candle mint cake on a ledge on that hill I understand that there's a hill I'm having nothing to do with it I'll tell you what though the this video is it is pretty strong stuff. It is.

Because it's like they electrocute him in an electric chair, and then he's nude, which is what would... I don't know if that happened again until the kind of ill-advised movie that is now kind of... It's like 10 years old now or something that didn't... You know, the good bit is like the opening kind of seven or 10 minutes is really good. And there's that sequence where he's like skateboarding nude. But yeah, so he's naked at one point.

He's like, what the fuck? He's got a Walkman over his bit. Yeah, you know, there's some modesty involved. But yeah, and then he goes to hell. So it's cut off quite early on. But yeah, this is pretty, this is quite strong stuff. So, but yeah, we didn't have any context for it. I am trying to remember if I'd seen it at this point,

because I didn't have Sky. I did go, I was like the first person at my school to see any satellite stuff, because I went to Centre Parcs. I went to like the half-finished Centre Parcs when that opened, and every apartment had satellite so you know

that was cool I could go back and like preen about that and everyone was like wow what's it like it's like well it's telly but more of it you know it kind of goes against the ethos that Centre Pogs was trying to get over though wasn't it I think they were realists about this there's only so much

you know there's only so much archery and swimming and uh fucking about in the woods that you can do well one person who definitely knew about sky was gary davis who was part of the presenting team from day one in the early 80s taking the murdoch shilling and hosting something called sky tracks and something else called the great video race and there's some there's some fucking mental clips on the video playlist of him getting set upon by Slade and Venom. Yeah, Venom. While he tries to introduce videos of Marillion and Nick Kershaw.

And he's also on this fucking insane shaking band-aid advert for Sky called Join the Family of Sky, singing along with Pat sharp tony blackburn anthea turner and some puppets it's fucking mental go and watch it pop craze youngsters but anyway this song it's sort of charming this i mean it's all right and also nancy cartwright to her credit does not try too hard to rap no she does a good job she's got flow oh you know yeah she doesn't but she yeah she just does it as bart would do it and it's kind of slightly world weary sounding i can't i can't do it very good but my uh no i mean my my abilities are more in the kind of uh patty

and selma kind of arena yes and yet you couldn't listen to a whole record of that could you And yet you couldn't listen to a whole record of that, could you? And you'd just have to turn it off. I don't know. Double your pleasure, Springfield. But no, it serves as a good introduction to The Simpsons. And for those in the know, you can pick out various reference points and go, ah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But this was, yeah, it was still getting, it wasn't quite into its stride yet so you know there was no um and like you said this was kind of a different angle on it this was uh that the sort of t-shirt facing version i guess yeah yeah you know who absolutely loved these simpsons records was the irish right do the bart manman was number one in Ireland for nine weeks. I know. What the fuck? Insane. Yeah, yeah. You mentioned that Do The Bartman was co-written by Jacko,

had him on backing vocals. I looked into the credits on this one. The backing vocalists, you know, deep, deep trouble. It's Rosemary Butler, who's a sort of session singer with people like Warren Zevon, Linda Ronstadt, Bonnie Raitt, James Taylor. So, you know, quite experienced. The other backing vocalist, Marcy Levy.

Do you know who that is? No. Marcella Detroit from Shakespeare's Sister. Good Lord. Yeah. Really? Yeah. And they were a big deal at this time.

They hadn't yet released Stay with me, the single. Stay, wasn't it? It was called. But they were already a chart act. And she's moonlighting here as Marcy Levy, her real name, on this record. And the credits on the album, it's extraordinary. They've got David Johansson from the New York Dolls, B.B. King, Joe Walsh, John Sebastian and Dr John on the album

Fuck it, hell I do like the title of the next album The Yellow Album which made me chuckle when I saw that I've got to admit What would the equivalent be now do you think? Because this isn't really something that you see now is it? I don't know

Rick and Morty going to have a single out? Yeah I know because I mean things like Family Guy and South Park no South Park did have hit singles but Family Guy came and went without me being aware of a record spin off so I don't know yeah maybe it's probably a blessing to be honest I'm not saying

this is the thing I want to see in the world but you know yeah so the following week Deep Deep Trouble jumped 11 places to number 9 and would eventually get to number 7 for two weeks. Alas, the follow-up, a cover of God Bless the Child performed by Lisa Simpson, failed to chart and they never troubled the charts again, leaving The Simpsons utterly forgotten by everyone

who has never looked at a telly for the past 30 years. Barn, Homer Simpson and Deep, Deep Trouble. Okay, here's a song that was originally released in October of last year. Since that time, it's become huge in the clubs. the second highest new entry in the charts this week this is enjoy an anthem Want you to love me too Davis, with more of the kids, including a tiny blonde woman by his side who will not stop fucking clapping, introduces the next act completely unaware that a youth with shit-izzy shoulder length hair and horrific multicoloured shirt

is looming over his right shoulder and pulling a full on Ian Brown face. He's fucking gurning his nuts off. I want to know what he's up to. It's amazing isn't it? This is the highlight of the show for me. It really is. There'll be kids, kids of 18

19 watching this episode that would not know what the fuck he's getting at, that lad. Yeah, he's come straight from the Hacienda. The Hacienda in his mind anyway. Yeah, yeah. Because they'd think, oh, is he pretending to be sucking someone off? The Ian Brown face did become

the Belm of the 90s, didn't it? Right the way through to the poster of human traffic. There's a bloke at the front who's doing the same thing. John Simm, isn't it? Yeah. So bad.

Yeah. Yeah, that night Ian Brown got to learn a lesson about the fickleness of pop, didn't he? One minute you're the golden child of alternative music and the next you're a belm. So eventually Davis introduces the next act,'re a belm. So eventually, Davis introduces the next act, Enjoy, an anthem. Formed in Southend in 1989,

Enjoy were a rave duo who were supplemented by the vocalist Samantha Sprackling, who had changed her name to Saffron. This single, their debut, was originally released in October of 1990, spending two weeks at number 45. The follow-up, the Adrenaline EP, got to number 23 a month ago, which led to Anthem getting a re-release, and it's a new entry this week at number 19. well as you can imagine for 1991 this is a very dance heavy episode of Top of the Pops and we're going to get a very interesting compare and contrast between different nations views of that music as the show

goes on. Simon did you have any involvement in dancing us at this time? Either writing about it or putting it on or anything? Not really I did go to a rave once for melody maker and it was pretty much as sarah described earlier where uh it was you know it got to the stage where you were now paying 25 quid to get in and it was all fairly well regulated and all that kind of

stuff um but i think i mentioned in a previous episode that i liked a lot of the music but i hated the communal experience of it. So I was sort of locked in my bedroom. I was dancing around my room to a guy called Gerald and 808 State and stuff like that, you know, a few years earlier. So it was musically interesting to me, but not, you know, culturally, it was just my worst nightmare. So, yeah, obviously I was running a sort of broad church at the

student union so i i just allowed other people to have a budget and go and you know put on dance events but it wasn't really my my thing we mentioned earlier you know the top of the pops is really feeling that the that the burgeoning dance culture is is kind of fucking their scene up a bit but you know if top of the Top of the Pops is a news programme, and it pretty much was, you know, the teenage news, if you will, this is a huge part of it. This is what people are buying. What's the problem here?

Well, the problem is how to present it visually, isn't it? And I guess the way they've got around it. 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. Joy's case is just find the best looking woman you know and get her to dance about. I mean, full disclosure disclosure saffron's

a mate of mine um she lived in brighton for a while so you know but um i i do think she she's she's great here um she you know visually very striking and then yeah i don't know what you call that thing she's wearing whether it's a bodice or a corset or but it's some kind of sci-fi futuristic version of that and um she looks like a magician's assistant. But a really glamorous one. But how can you present something like this otherwise? Because it is just two blokes with keyboards. Yeah.

There are some professional dancers, obviously, but there's really not a lot to look at if it wasn't for Saffron. But she is, you know, very stunning and striking. And, you know, she does draw the eye. Whatever camera angle is going on, you know, she's the one you're looking at. So it was a smart move, I guess, on their part. How's Melody Maker covering dance music at this time, Simon?

In its own little ghetto, we had sections in the paper that were devoted to it. And we had two or three experts who would cover that stuff. I think we embraced it a little bit more fully as time went on. And we had people like Shaman and Underworld. All the indie-friendly dance acts, if you like, on the front cover. Prodigy a few times acts that kind of look like a band yeah yeah i suppose so the thing and things where the people

involved had something to say which in a way it's expecting too much of musicians to always have something to say but we were used to it sort of indie rock bands tended to be gobby dance acts not so much but when you have people like Mr C from the Shaman or Keith Flint bless him RIP from the Prodigy um then you know there was something to latch on to there which you weren't going to get with somebody like Enjoy who for all I know might be the most brilliant kind of uh dinner guests you could you could hope to have but um there was not really any evidence for that um I'm interested in that you in the fact that they are known as being from Southend, from Essex, so you automatically assume that they're like proper rave hooligans,

you know, the sort of thing Simon Reynolds would drool over. They're actually posh boys. Nigel Champion went to Framlingham, which was the alma mater of no end of conservative politicians and high court judges, and also Charlie out of Busted. And Mark Franklin went to Felstead which was the same school as General Sir Richard Dannett, Bamber Gascoigne and countless lords and bishops and half the England cricket team so they you know they weren't necessarily what they appeared to be shall we say no but I wouldn't

have known I wouldn't have known this at the time I mean enjoy and entrance submerged in my mind I couldn't have with a gun to my head I couldn't have told you at the time. I mean, NJoy and NTrans have merged in my mind. I couldn't have, with a gun to my head, I couldn't have told you which was which until, you know, half an hour ago. There's a guy who now is a massive Tory blogger who was actually like one of the first rave promoters. Right. It was Tony Colston-Hater and it was like his right-hand man.

Right. They kind of did the massive first paid parties. It's not one of those Guido Fawkes people, is it? Oh, it's Guido Fawkes, isn't it? Yeah. I think it is Guido Fawkes. is it? Oh it's Guido Fawkes isn't it? Yeah. I think it is Guido Fawkes. It's that guy. He was actually a massive raver back in the day so there is like a bit of a slight crossover Well it was kind of gangster capitalism

It's ironic isn't it that the Conservative government was so opposed to rave culture when really it was very entrepreneurial. It was everything they wanted people to be doing Massively yeah. Yeah yeah yeah Well it just pulls in everything. I mean, it was such a, you know, it was a huge thing that had all kinds of consequences and all kinds of implications.

And, you know, but yeah, I mean, this is quite, you know, I enjoy this. This is kind of the high point of the episode for me. It's kind of, it's a bit tame. It's a bit flat, you know, as a, you know, if you're going to call your track Anthem, you need to really, really bring it. It needs to be one, doesn't it? It needs to fucking be an anthem. Yeah, but it hits that. Should have been called Filler.

But I mean, it hits, it is kind of, it's quite pedestrian in and of itself. But for me, it still hits that neural circuit of like, oh, dance music. And it goes for a little scale-extric whiz around that. Do you know what I mean? It's something that works. It's part of... It's got its place on a 90s rave compilation. And I think in this episode,

it's an oasis of fun and colour and excitement, you know, comparatively. I mean, yeah, Saffron does great. It's got sort comparatively um i mean yeah saffron does great yeah it's got sort of mustard a kind of saffron colored actually sort of satin satin corset thing and with sort of big uh big kind of like futurama wings coming off the the hips and long satin gloves this is you see the thing about this is this is not an outfit in which you could actually rave no the point you could not you could not give it your all for 10 hours in that get up you just couldn't yeah how'd you get your pills out of your kinder surprise egg with them gloves on well exactly you know um she looks a bit like a young cheryedy a little bit. She's super pretty.

She's got really glossy hair. Yeah, shiny, shiny hair. Yeah, very nice. And yeah, she's got as a... Like a conker. So there's another dancer who nobody's looking at, despite the fact they're in a pink bodysuit, a sort of bright pink bodysuit.

Not half as good. I mean, she's throwing in like ballet moves and stuff you know she's obviously like you know a proper dancer and uh you know mark and nigel the two blokes just sort of beavering n n and joy tinkering away on the sins of the lecterns oh if it was only n the actual n in enjoy that would be great yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Playing the spoons. But she's got also, Saffron has a very difficult job here. She's got that impossible job of miming to two different vocal lines where they merge. Oh, she goes, ah, ah, ah, like that, yeah.

Yes, yes. But yeah, this would just wash over me, this sort of thing. But looking back on it now, yeah, it's all right. I sort of find myself kindly disposed to it at the start because i i prefer dance music that's dance music and that doesn't come with a prefix like indie uh you know with with no side or slant or twist or sort of disclaimer you know like this apologetic disclaimer it's dance music but don't worry kids it's indie dance music, but don't worry, kids, it's indie dance music. You know, I prefer it without a rider. That's not with a capital R, Y, but I suppose.

But this track, yeah, I mean, as Sarah says, it needs to step up its game if it's going to be called Anthem. I've got to say, though, I mean, I don't remember at the time. I've played this episode through a couple of times. It's sort of grown on me already. A few more plays and I might really like it. I would imagine, because it was a pretty big hit, that for people who were into this, this is one of the kind of iconic records of its genre.

But I'm sort of blissfully unaware of that. But yeah, it doesn't grab me immediately, but I think it's all right. Yeah, it has its place. This is like the pop end of this culture, you know? So it's like, that's what it is. It's quite sugary and insubstantial, but, you know, it still does the business.

Yeah, and presentation-wise, you know, Top of the Pops have done the best they can, but any kind of sort of rave element and imagery they're looking for is totally ruined by the audience who were just doing granny claps again. There's no training the granny claps out of that audience. I don't just mean this episode. I mean all the episodes.

Yeah. But this one's particularly full on. I mean, the granny clapping during fucking Gary Davis just blathering. Terrible. They're just so excited to be there in his presence. They turn into like sea lions at the aquarium. Yeah, yeah.

So the following week, Anthem jumped 11 places to number eight, its highest position. They then spent the rest of the year concentrating on cracking the US and made a return to the UK charts in February of 1992 with Live in Manchester parts one and 2, which got to number 12, by which time Saffron had left the group to go solo, eventually pitching up in the mid-90s as the lead singer of Republica.

And she's nearly on this episode twice, don't you know? We'll come to that later. That's Mark and Nigel making the music and Saffron who is singing the song and that's Enjoy and Anthem. OK, here comes some happening tunes. There's a new entry at 39, where Love Lives, Alison Limerick. A new entry at 38, Hyper Real from The Shaman. New at 36, Ring My Bell, Moni Love and a Diva. And up 4 to 35, Word

of Mouth, Mike and the Mechanics. Up two places at 33, Can You Dig It from the Mock Turtles. And up 6 at 30, Caravan, The Inspiral Carpets. The Rolling Stones, Don't Move at 29 with High Wire. Up 4 to 28, over to you, John, Jive Bunny and the Master Mixers. A new entry at 26, Strike It Up from Black Box. There's a new entry at 22, Deep Deep Trouble, The Simpsons. Up 12 to 21, here we go, CNC Music Factory and Freedom Williams. And up 4 to 20, She's a Woman, Scree, Pallidi and Shabba Ranks. A new entry at 19, Anthem from Enjoy.

Up 5 places to 17, Where You Love Like Heaven, Definition of Sound. No change at 16, This Is Your Life from The Banderas. The highest climber up 16 to 15, Love and Kisses, Danny Minogue. Up 11 to 14, Human Nature, Gary Clale on You Sound System. And up 2 at 12, I've got news for you, Fergal Sharkey And here is the highest new entry at number 11, The Waterboys and the whole of the moon Time styles, with the wind at your heels You're struck by the stars and you know how it feels

To get too high, Too far, too soon You saw the whole of the moon Davis, on a platform alongside some more pop-craze youngsters, introduces the first chart rundown by announcing, here come some more happening tunes. Oh, Gary, what a faux pas that is. Do you know what? When he says that it's unclear whether it's said with kind of

knowing irony. If it was Steve Wright we'd know because of his persona. Here comes some happening tunes we'd know he was joking. Yeah or John Peel. But with Gary Davis you sort of think is he actually trying a little bit hard to be cool

does he mean it do you know what I mean yeah and it just doesn't quite come off yeah so the chart rundown they miss out

number 40 what's that about well they're doing a weird thing here aren't they they're just doing new entries upward movers

and non movers they're cutting out anything that's gone down the chart so presumably what was at number 40 must have been a faller it was Who, Where, Why by Jesus Jones it got disappeared

I know it's just like a time saving thing that's a bit you know editing history there it's a bit Martin Lewis isn't it oh we should only broadcast the good news the charts look horrible but at least they are telling us how many places these things have gone up

which is something I think it's a weird thing they're doing with the photos around this time as well yes the photos are superimposed between blurred out versions of the same photo so it's like yeah so it's like on the news these days, right,

when a chemical plant has caught fire and the only person to film it on their phone filmed it in portrait, so they have to fill the rest of the screen with the same image in a sort of blurry reverse thing. It's a bit like that. And he eventually settles upon the whole of the moon by the Waterboys. Formed in Edinburgh in 1983, the Waterboys were essentially a collective of musicians

who swirled around the orbit of frontman Mike Scott. Their debut single, A Girl Called Johnny, marked their first entry in the UK charts when it got to number 80 in April of 1983. But it would take three LPs and their sixth single, this one, before they entered the top 40 in November of 1985. It originally climbed all the way up to number 26 back then, but no further, mainly due to Scott's point-blank refusal to mime the single on top of the pubs to the despair of his label, Enzyme Records. records however in 1991 and at the end of their deal they're about to put out a compilation lp the best of the water boys and this has been

re-released again and bugger me gently if it isn't this week's highest new entry at number 11 unfortunately for everyone there's a video that can be bunged on it's not me bandy when i uh when i saw it i totally forgotten that they'd re-release this yeah me too yeah are people really hankering for the mid 80s in the early 90s it's weird but i'll tell you what maybe they're a little bit ahead of their time because um i mean right there's a lot of this sort of stuff around i know um the water boys were you know, he's from Edinburgh, but I think they spent some time in Ireland, and it's definitely Celtic soul.

Yeah. And there was, God, when did the Hothouse Flowers happen? They were maybe a little bit before this. Oh, yeah, 1880s. Yeah, so there's a lot of this sort of fiddle-de-dee nonsense around from the Levellers to the Wonderstuff started using violins. Yes.

And there was all this kind of sentimentality that was maybe vaguely connected to Jack Charlton's Republic of Ireland. And then you had things like Beamish adverts and the commitments. And there was a lot of this sort of stuff around. So maybe it was just all in the air that people wanted a bit of this.

I mean, it's a huge, huge song. Yes. You can't argue with it. They fucked with it a bit here though, haven't they's a huge huge song yes you can't argue with it they fucked with it a bit here though i don't know if you notice but yeah certainly the version in the video it's got extra it's got extra fiddle and extra horn bits yes added on it which i don't think it needs i don't think it's helped by those extra accessories but i i i have fond memories of this song first time around um it was it's weird really with bands like the water boys, because round about the sort of mid to late eighties,

you know, me particularly personally, I was getting into this whole idea that melody maker, right. It was like David Stubbs were trying to put across that we must do away with all this kind of soft option business, you know, because the average person who was into alternative stuff in the late 80s you'd

have been into kind of the arse end of echo and the bunny men you'd have been into sort of the cures biggest albums you'd have been into like morrissey's first solo record and uh um you know all this maybe a bit of psychedelic furs and blah blah blah and it's you know kind of janice long music annie nightingale music rather than rather Peel music and the Waterboys to me is almost the epitome of that but it's just in terms of the kind of bigness and the emotion of the song, the way it sweeps you

it's comparable to something like Story of the Blues by Wah I think that kind of bigness and the fact that it's got firework noises going off when it came like a comet blazing your trail I think. Yes. That kind of bigness. And the fact that it's got sort of firework noises going off on it, that kind of stuff, you know, came like a comet,

blazing your trail. I think more records should have firework noises on it. There was a great one that wasn't a hit called You're the Generation That Bought More Shoes and You Get What You Deserve by Johnny Boy that's got fireworks all over it, which is brilliant. The thing everyone thinks about this song,

that it's about prince uh it turns out it wasn't uh so uh it uh mike scott has gone on the record that that people are way off the mark with that so in that in that sense it's the indie you're so vain uh you know people trying to guess guess who it's about uh and the the only other thing i've got to say about this is pub graffiti right my local pub back in wales at the first pub i ever drank in uh um to celebrate finishing my o-levels uh it's called the park uh on park crescent and uh um every time i go back there uh there's there's two bits of enduring uh graffiti on the inside of the toilet doors um one of them says dom is english and gay right which as as if those two things are equivalent

sort of crimes roughly and the other one says mike scott is a cock right and obviously it's not the same mike scott but i just love to think every time i'm there that it's somebody who really really fucking hates the water boys yeah it's a very it's it's one of those almost too clever lyrics isn't it really and and you know ripe for for parody i suppose you know i spoke about wings you just flew i thought about having a beer you just brewed you know it's like it's it's you could you could just you could do an entire we didn't start the fire type type thing can you it's it's all right. I mean, I wasn't massively thrilled to hear it again.

It's an interesting clip, this, because it's not actually the video, is it? It's a video of a live bit. So the dude can obviously sing. And he has great hair. I've got to give him that. It's a lovely, lovely mop of curls. I think this song, now hearing it's kind of it's sort of out of time in some ways like the production dates it and uh yeah you know but also i can kind of imagine

it coming out now like i don't know bastille or one of those like inexplicably massive kind of posh indie bands you know i kind of imagine them you know doing this i don't know if it's a i don't know if anyone would dare cover it but you know i was quite shocked to to find out that it only got to number 25 in the charts but also shocked that it did get in the charts because i do not remember it making the charts the first time around but i'd heard this song fucking endlessly at shitty student discos at rock City throughout the whole late 80s. So the fact that it's come back again when I'm trying to move on and progress,

it was a definite thing in the early 90s because we're not too far away from Young at Heart by the Bluebells being number one for fucking weeks on end. Oh, yeah. We're not letting go of the mid-80s. It's not right. So the following week, the whole of the moon leapt eight places to

number three its highest position the follow-up a re-release of fisherman's blues which originally got to number 32 in february of 1989 would only make it to number 75 in june of this year but after his current band drifted away scott moved to new york signed to geffen recorded his next lp with session musicians under the water boys name and notched up two more top 40 hits in 1993 The hole of the moon Davis, surrounded by more granny-clapping youths, introduces, in his word, another fine Manchester band. It's the Mock Turtles with Can You Dig It? Formed in Middleton, Greater Manchester in 1985,

the Mock Turtles spent the late 80s on a local independent label, releasing a smattering of singles, an LP, and appearances on tribute LPs to the likes of Sid Barrett, Captain Beefheart, The Kinks and The Birds. Earlier this year they signed to Siren Records, an offshoot of Virgin and were set to release Lay Me Down as their first single for the label. But after they realised they were in need of a B-side, lead singer Martin Coogan dashed this tune off in an evening and named it after the rallying cry of Cyrus in the Warriors. It was immediately promoted to the A-side,

entered the charts at number 46 a month ago and tentatively crept upwards. And it's nudged up two places from number 35 to number 33 this week, warranting their first top of the pops performance. Now, before we move on, if you'd have told me that this had been named after something in the film, I would have sworn down it had to be named after the monkey's song in head ah you know what i mean yeah i didn't get the worries thing at all no because in a pig's arse would cyrus be playing this fucking song well while the grammacy riffs did their militant kung fu workouts to to soft lad music no no no this is more of an orphan song, isn't it? You remember that gang of Jesses

who weren't even invited to the meeting in the park? This is their music. I think I would have been thinking Shaft, actually. Isaac Hayes going, can you dig it? In that. Yeah. For me, it's more of a questions to which the answer is, eh, no.

Yeah, like what they say about headlines don't they yeah they say that any any newspaper story that has a question mark at the end the answer is always no no so yeah similar thing with this see yeah i mean you really do get a feeling with this that like yeah everyone's still out raving one way or another and this kind of this is like the sort of indie tilth that kind of settled in the charts because that's what they were it's like um you know the fact that like beer sales took a massive hit because everyone was on e and drinking water so that's why they had to invent alka pops so it's like nobody's buying the beer and and like the beer is just kind of sitting in the pipes and going stale and it's it's that feeling of you know it's like the chart equivalent of that just kind of the lager that's just kind of just you know lonely unloved lager kind of just

just occupying space you know it's really it's really tame it's really sort of you know in in so it's very weak sauce it's like greasy spoon brown sauce or like you know it's it's kind of mellow birds coffee in a greasy spoon and you know and there's they've got bowl cuts or other kind of you know bowl adjacent bad cuts bad boxy denim jackets um yeah a nice lady in a catsuit on the keys who seems to have come in from you know seems to have wandered in from another performance altogether. A more interesting one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But they don't focus that much on her.

Because usually if you've got one woman in your band, it's usually, they usually make a bit of a fuss about it, don't they? There's kind of a wah solo and I don't know. I mean, I remember this, you know, from the time. And I think at the time I found it quite agreeable and now just kind of you know but no more than that you know I had no strong feelings

about it and just having it seeing it come up in this is just like David's described him as a fine Manchester band can you translate that for the for the Pop Craze youngsters what does he mean by that I just think he wants a fine Manchester band. Can you translate that for the, for the Pop Craze youngsters? What does he mean by that?

I just think he wants everyone to think that he's down with Baggy, doesn't he? Old GD there. Yeah. I don't know about you, but I was watching this, just given what we know now and who we know his more famous sibling is, I was just staring at Martin Coogan's face, trying to see how much he looks like and trying to imagine him going,

ah-ha! And in his autobiography, Steve Coogan talks about how he looked up to his brother and thought he was impossibly cool and didn't think he could ever be that cool himself. And of course, just reading that, that makes me think of Steve Coogan in the day-to-day when he's doing that bit about road safety. And he's like, so what about me?

Do I look cool? Do I really look cool? Do I look cool now? Yeah. Do I? Do I? Yeah, yeah. So basically, he just desperately wanted to be as cool as his big brother.

And I think probably most people would think that he's kind of won that battle. Although I noticed that Martin Coogan did do the music for the latest Alan Partridge series. So a bit of payback there. I actually, can I surprise you to quote Partridge? I actually think it's not a bad song. I think it's one of those melodies that moves itself along with a kind of easy logic and inevitability. A bit like Good Enough by Dodgy a few years later,

which is another, I didn't like Good Enough by Dodgy particularly, but there's something that kind of gets around my defenses about a song that has that kind of nice logic to it it's a bit you know neil kakani's a big fan of bach i think and um there's something almost mathematical about the way the bach wrote wrote melody melodies and i think that um things like you know that dodgy song and this one have a bit of that to them yeah um they were so obviously only going to have one here you can just even in you know as you're listening to this song thinking oh this is quite nice you're thinking this is all they got in the locker that's that's kind of it basically yeah um but i i don't i don't dislike it at all but i mean when gary davis is saying

a manchester band manchester band by this time is short and for homeopathically psychedelic and you can lumber about to it a bit. Well yeah, they're a little bit runty aren't they, the Mock Turtles in the Manchester litter I suppose. So yeah, it is sort of homeopathic doses. It just sounds

like the lower league highlights bit in Football Focus. Every time I hear it I can just hear the words, Hereford United's relegation woes continued when they visited Field Mill last week. Yeah, yeah. Anything else to say about this? No.

Again, a lot of wearing of white, I notice. It's terribly high maintenance. It's the kind of clothes you want to wear on stage, but you don't want to wear in the pub. It's a weirdly luxe-y thing, isn't it? If you wear white, you're kind of clothes you you want to wear on stage but you don't want to wear in the pub well it's a weirdly luxy thing isn't it if you wear white you're kind of advertising that you can afford to buy something that you wear once and then you get curry sauce on it and then that's it you know there's no you know so so it's a weird weird expression of privilege you know i actually think that the symbolism of white trousers was very important in the late 80s when the Stone Roses brought it back.

Because it really was visually doing away with all that kind of sort of skinny, black-legged indie band thing, you know. And I guess it was harking back to people like John's Children in the 60s and The Who and The Creation and those kind of bands who all wore white jeans. And that's why the Manic Street Preachers, the year that we're talking about, adopted white jeans to kind of distance themselves from Ride and Chapter House and Slow Dive and all those sort of downbeat indie bands. And lock themselves in with the Mock Turtles.

Yeah, well, this is where it all falls down a foot. So the following week, Can You Dig It? bounded up 11 places to number 22 and would eventually get to number 18 for two weeks. The follow-up, And Then She Smiles, would only get to number 44 in July and they were completely shut out of the charts for the rest of their career however 12 years later vodafone used the song for that advert where david beckham holds up

the queue at tesco because he's a thick ignorant bastard who stares gormlessly his new picture phone it was remixed by fat boy slim and shoved out again And this time it got to number 19. The Mug Turtles and Can You Dig It, they're going to be sporting the spiral carpets that you saw earlier in June. That'll be a good gig. Alright, CNC Music Factory and here we go.

Davis, up on the balcony in front of a huge I'm gonna rock this song. I'm gonna make it through. I'm gonna rock the floor. Davis, up on the balcony in front of a huge Radio 1 logo, shills the tour of Inspiral Carpets and the Mock Turtles before introducing Here We Go by C&C Music Factory. Formed in New York in 1989 by David Cole and Robert Saville from the ashes of Two Puerto Ricans, A Blackman and A Dominican, C&C Music Factory first set about the charts where they teamed up with the rapper Freedom Williams and released Gonna Make You Sweat, Everybody Dance Now,

which got to number one in America and number three over here in January of this year. However, they immediately ran into Mither when it turned out that the former Weather Girl, Martha Wash, had unknowingly recorded the vocals for that song only for the model-turned-singer Zelma Davis to take the credit on the video. While Wash is still trying to get paid for a contribution, this follow-up single, which actually features Davis on the vocal this time

along with a reappearance by williams has been put out and it's up 12 places this week from number 33 to number 21 and again it's it's another video and they're really cutting late into these videos aren't they yeah yeah it's the uh they get in at the last possible minute get out at the first possible minute as well yeah so we've had a song called anthem that isn't we've had can you dig it when you can't and now we've got here we go a song that never does go um i keep waiting for the chorus but it never really comes and i thought i knew it from the title but it turned out i got it mixed up with here we go by stacker bow right which uh which which though very annoying is at least memorable uh yeah, you mentioned all the kind of legal shenanigans

about Martha Wash, who we're going to talk about again shortly, aren't we? Yes. This one does appear to be legit, you know, Zalma Davis. She grew up in what we must call war-torn Liberia before she moved to America, and she also sang on Coca-Cola adverts and her voice is on the Sister Act soundtrack. So she's, you know, she's a proper singer.

She's legit, yeah. Yeah, she's legit. The other thing I know about Zelma Davis is that I would wear the shit out of her angel wings in this video in a nightclub. Or I would have done about 10 to 15 years ago, let's say. They're like eight foot angel wings. They're massive. They are extraordinary. Yeah, yeah. i want them or you

know my my younger self certainly does uh i i've got i've got you want to get a tennis strap around your arse though simon no way you go to the toilet with them wings on well you know this is what this is what um you know adult nappies were made for yes um i i've got a real fascination with with that era in the early 90s where every pop single had to have some rap on it yes um usually uncredited and usually you're sort of three quarters of the way through before like before the final chorus and the outro you get 20 seconds of some rap capital s capital r yeah and it was usually not by a named rapper or i think it's just just someone from the uk scene who'd be bunged a few quid for an afternoon's work and and it was normally never billed as main artist featuring rapper you'd have to scour the small print uh of the credits on the lp sleeve to find out

yeah who they were like shocked by kylie minogue was was an example that always comes to mind so um uh and and it i did a bit of research on that when The rapper on that one turned out to be a guy called Wolverhampton, called Jazzy P, who later appeared on Non-Celebrity Big Brother. And I always wonder where they are, these guys. You know these guys who are hired to add some rap to a pop record. And I always wonder if any of them went on to make a

career for themselves. And I wonder how they feel about it now, kind of mercenary work and where it sits in their kind of personal narrative of how they got where they are. And I wonder how they feel about it now kind of mercenary work where it sits in their personal narrative of how they got where they are I wonder if they feel exploited in retrospect or just struggling it was a bit of easy cash

so what's not to like and there is some rap on this record although to be fair of course he is credited it's Freedom Williams and there is some rap on the next one too and I thought Freedom Williams was the singer until last week yes this whole business about

Zelma it's all new to me I just thought Freedom Williams sounds like a woman's name and being an American release I tell you what's interesting you sang it got number one in America there's a kind of narrative now that says that EDM

is the belated breakthrough of dance music in America they had a number one with this in the States in 1991 so that sort of caused bullshit on that story so there's always a market for

dance music there it would seem the production values of the video being an American video are pretty high aren't they yes they are there's lots of smoke, there's dancers in these industrial goth boots but no shirts there's like a random angel

on a bicycle, there's a random creepy doll baby near the end I seem to remember it's unlike any factory I've ever worked in. Usually just really scrawny old blokes with fags clamped to their lips, reading the sporting life. This would be the CNC music factory, though, that's why. They're literally, it's like, they get oiled up,

you know, whip up, shirts off, shirts off, helmets on, get to work. I do wonder if the later, the the top of the pops intro that came a few years later was based on this video it's very similar you know lots of uh lots of steel balconies and uh blokes with the shirts off jigging about a bit yeah i mean i've always you know I love the idea of like you know like dancing as work you know and you go to it like it's your like it's your job and you're going to get fired you know I love that and there's there's some there's some great there's some really nice choreography in this and uh there is the bit yeah it's quite it's it is not it's the other other cnc music factory track that I hadn't I'd forgotten all about and have forgotten all about again.

Yeah, it's everybody dance now a bit more, isn't it? Yeah, everybody continue dancing now. Doing an overtime shift. Yeah, but there is a bit of, they've dropped the kind of go, go, go bit in, which, you know, always makes your, you know, you realise you're being instructed to do something. And it's like, oh, right. Yeah, I'm not going to do it.

But I appreciate the, I appreciate you telling me this. You know, I understand what's going on. Yeah. Also, so Friedan Williams has got a very, he's got a very sort of deep voice. Like he's talking to the, it's slightly, you know, talking to the party people. It goes out to the young and to the old. Which I appreciate. He's speaking to all the generations. Inclusive, yeah. He's talking to the granny people. It goes out to the young and to the old. Which I appreciate. He's speaking to all the generations.

Inclusive, yeah. He's talking to the granny clappers. It's like, this one's for you. Yeah. All the grannies in the house. The thing is that C&C Music Factory just reminded me of this documentary about dance that I used to have on VHS

called Everybody Dance Now. I loved this thing so much and I was so excited. this documentary about dance uh that i used to have on on vhs called everybody dance now and i loved this thing so much and i was so excited i couldn't dance for shit myself but i just loved to watch other people doing it and it was rosie perez talking about choreography on it and there were just loads of really good montages of people fucking ripping it up and you know mostly and the kind of it was you know mostly american stuff and kind of breakdancing and street stuff. And yeah, and I've looked for it on, occasionally I'll look for it and it's not there on YouTube. But yeah, it definitely existed.

But that's very this. It's the kind of, it's quite high, you know, it is quite a sort of high end, high production thing. But as for the kind of breakthrough thing with edm i i guess that stands up in terms of like how unbelievably massive edm is and what you know just the insane amounts of money and how it has kind of uh like what a massive business it is and how it's now in the culture in that way i suppose that it's like comparatively this this was pretty small beans you know but i mean like you say yeah the video that it's like comparatively this, this was pretty small beans,

you know? But I mean, like you say, yeah, the video is, it's an extended Christmas perfume advert, isn't it? Well,

you know, with the, with the biggest angel wings you've ever seen and, you know, and your girl in kind of more of the long black gloves. Yeah. See, I've never got the long black gloves thing.

It's just, it's really, you know, it's, it's, they're an incredibly impractical garment, but looks, looks amazing in this

unless you're Christopher Timothy in All Creatures Great and Small and you have to stick your hands up a cow's fanny and pull out a calf you wouldn't want velvet gloves for that would you or the mess that you'd leave and it has to be said compared to other dance music of the time, the stuff that was coming

out of America was a bit gay, wasn't it? There's a lot of focus on the lads with the shirts off more than the nice lady with the big angel wings. Yeah, actually. Yeah, I mean, and maybe that's where it was coming from culturally. Yeah, yeah. In America at that time. Yeah, but it's New York.

Yeah, well, I mean, even though it was number one in the mainstream charts, I mean, that would be a classic thing that happened with disco as well. Disco was coming out of, you know, the gay scene and sort of black and Latino clubs, but, you know, it became a huge mainstream crossover thing. And I guess this was a 90s version of that. Yeah. Being gay was finally being seen in the media and elsewhere

as something a little bit better than a crippling affliction that you had to hide. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Being gay was finally being seen in the media and elsewhere as something a little bit better than a crippling affliction that you had to hide. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But it was around about this time where this girl I really fancied on my course invited me to a gay bar to see somebody else doing a drag act or something, someone else on our course. I remember pitching up, two skinheads at the bar with old tattoos around the neck just said no mate uh you're not coming in you're not gay enough and i i remember walking home from that just feeling really confused because a couple of years ago he would have been oh yeah thank fuck for that hey yeah i'm old man but like oh hang on i'm missing out on something here yeah yeah and then it turned out

later on because i clocked with tattoos there was a big chelsea tattoo on the neck and i'm pretty convinced that one of those blokes was nicky crane you know the national front activist who's on the cover of strength through oi right yeah yeah who later came out i'm just thinking oh shit that was that him so yeah very confusing but yeah i mean this song's all right but it is everybody Dance Now a bit more I mean the fact that we're talking about getting turned away from gay clubs by National Front skinheads probably tells us something

about the record doesn't it it doesn't really live in the memory beyond the three minutes you're listening to it so the following week here we go only nudged up one place to number 20, its highest position.

The follow-up, Things That Make You Go Hmm, got to number four in July of this year, and they'd have four more top 40 hits through to the mid-90s, would finally settle up with Martha Wash and actually get her to join them, but C&C Music Factory came to an end in 1990 when Cole died of an AIDS-related illness. C&C Music Factory featuring Freedom Williams and Here We Go. Some more music now for you to boogie to.

Another track from the album Dreamland. This is is black box strike it up a new entry at number 26 Strike it off, nobody's gonna stop my sound Strike it off, you know how long that one can last More enforced excitement from the kids as Davis introduces, quote, some more music now for you to boogie to. Oh dear, Gary. Yeah, again, he's not being ironic, is he? Yeah. That's such a dad thing, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah. He might as well said always some more lovely disco oh dear the group he introduces are black box with strike it up formed in reggio emiliano italy in 1989 by the three members of an italo house production team known as groove groove melody black box started their career with Ride On Time, which got to number one in the UK for six weeks in the autumn of that year, selling nearly 1.1 million copies and becoming the biggest selling single of that year. However, midway through its run at number one, it turned out that they'd nicked the vocals from a 1980 single recorded by Lolita Holloway, which kicked off an

enormous fuss, resulting in the group quietly discontinuing the original version and putting out a uk remix with vocals by heather small after notching up four more top 20 singles on the bounce throughout 1990 here they are again with their fifth cut fifth cut from the 1990 lp dreamland and if you think that alone from their experience with right on time you'd be wrong sir or madam because this single features the uncredited vocals of our old friend martha wash and it's a new entry this week at number 26 now before we go into a mental scheduling by top of the pops here isn't it yeah putting two very similar records back to back yeah and both videos yeah terrible and it's a

and it's a much cheaper video isn't it yeah much simpler certainly i mean it's quite well lit and all of that but no big angel wings though no because they've got i mean the the front person of black box as far as anyone could see, was Catherine Quinault. It was a model, of course. Falsely, I don't know if you remember, falsely rumoured to be trans. Which, you know, I mean, who cares? But it added a little intrigue to it, particularly because, you know, a lot of kind of lads who are into house music

were like, oh, fancy that bird from Black Box. And, you know, the idea that that maybe just maybe they were barking up the wrong tree was quite exciting but it turned out to be false anyway um this whole thing about martha wash okay now never mind it's raining men it's raining lawsuits isn't it um so um but but yeah um on on on this record this there's so there's so many bits of misdirection and kind of deceit going on. So the thing with the rap, apparently, right, so Strike It Up, first of all, the original illegally sampled a track by Nels House featuring FFWD called Acid House which on the album version of Strike It Up it included sampling

illegally the original rap on that record by Oscar Pabon and on the single version what we're hearing here this is some rap 100% it's a guy called Steps with a Z aka Stepsky real name Lee Bennett Thompson,

who's also rapped for Quartz and Phase One, among others. And what he's done here, Steps has just re-recorded the illegally borrowed Oscar Pabon rap, word for word. So basically, nobody in this video is who they appear to be.

It's really, it's quite an interesting thing conceptually this because they present as a group in this video not just capturing but there's a keyboardist, a guitarist and all that kind of stuff which we're not hearing any of that. So they're kind of a virtual pop group.

And that everyone thinks is really clever when Damon Albarn does it. But they think it's yes and and that and everyone thinks is really clever when damon albarn does it but yeah but they think it's really sort of terrible and immoral when millie vanillie say do it yes right so i don't know just from a sort of pop fans point of view just quite interesting thing to to get your head around this thing of of a group presenting themselves as one thing where every single element of that record is not what it appears to be well it's the sneakiness i guess isn't it is that it's like it's you're presenting it as you know uh you are kind of there's something queasy about you know taking credit for somebody else's shit and you

know but but what an odd experience to to be to be heard to be capturing and it's like that's what i mean obviously she had a career as a model, but how odd to be doing that. I mean, obviously lip syncing now is like, you know, there's a massive thing. There's a lip sync battle on, you know, which is a huge show. And like pop stars go and like lip sync to other and do a whole production. And all they do is mine, which is fascinating to me that this has become, you know know become a thing yeah i think musically this almost again this is like the other other other black box track that you know i i didn't remember yeah and and kind of still don't but um i think it's probably a better track than the the preceding one i think it's probably better than the cnt music factory in that you know it's all i i think it almost kind

of prefigures edm in that everything is kind of cranked up everything's at the same level there's not a lot of light and shade it's all very very bright and brash and kind of crashy and like sort of like a big loud print of a thing um and there's the kind of like really really super flattened horns it's like steamrollered horns are in there. Like at one point they sounded like, you know, a French horn and now it's just a weird noise in your ear. But yeah, I probably would have cut, you know, a modest rug to this. If I'd had a couple of Bacardi breezes.

The idea that Black Box had more singles than Ride On Time does my head in. I didn't even know. I just thought it came and went and it was just a producer-y thing. Yeah, I did too. I remember, I don't, was it, I Don't Know Anybody Else.

That was the follow-up, wasn't it? It's Ride On Time. But Ride On Time is, you almost can't overstate how huge a deal that song was. It was just a real kind of turning point in music. Obviously, there had been house hit records before, like Steve Silk Hurley, Farley Jackmaster Funk,

and that kind of thing. Yeah, big hits as well. Yeah, yeah, big hits. Absolutely, yeah, huge hits. But there was just something about Ride On Time, which seemed to sort of crash through and break the walls down for a whole culture and just sort of bring Italo House particularly overground.

I mean even these guys had had hits before so you know it's uh Daniele Davoli um Valerio Semplici and Mirko Limoni um they they were starlight weren't they uh numero uno I love that track that was them that was a great track but it uh it didn't have the impact that Ride on Time did and um you know I've been banging on about the Student Union, but I just remember that song was just on fucking rotation all the time in the disco there. This one...

It was like the first house hit that didn't feel like a novelty. Yeah. You know what I mean? And it's like, oh shit, this stuff's here to stay now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, this track, Strike It Up, I don't remember it. It's not bad. But the fact that it's their fifth single,

the fifth off the album, and that's not including fucking remixes and mega mixes and what have you. Yeah, who do they think they are? Michael Jackson or something? I mean, it says it all. It's very much got a fifth single off the album feel to it.

But the fact it's still being bought into the charts, that says something. Number 16, yeah, it's not bad. It's the same formula, isn't it? There's a bit of plinky-plonk, there's a belting singer, and then there's some rap about how this music is dead good and you should be dancing to it.

That's pretty much the formula now, isn't it? And it's all by other people who you can't see. And in the meantime, Martha Walsh is just sitting there going, what the fuck's going on? Yeah. People want her sound, but they don't want her can't have felt nice that's a bit shit isn't it it's like yeah you're kind of you know you you're a bit ruben-esque for for the for the for the times you know we need we need it's it's skinny girls it's just what people want

sorry nothing personal in a genre where you're not supposed to be gawping at people on stage you're supposed to be dancing like a bastard to them. What's the point? So the following week, Strike It Up leapt up eight places to number 18 and would get as high as number 16. The follow-up, Open Your Eyes, was an LP cut too far, only getting to number 48 in December of this year. But they'd have two more minor top 40 hits in the mid-90s.

It's Fergal Sharkey. I can see clearly That he loves you dearly Just by the way he looks at you But I've got news for you girl I love you too Born in Derry in 1958, Sean Fergal Sharkey was the lead singer of the Undertones from 1975 to 1983, who we covered in the last episode of Chart Music.

After the band split up, mainly due to Sharky wanting out, he linked up with Vince Clark, who had just split up Yazoo and put out the one-shot single Never Never under the name The Assembly, which got a number four in November of 1983. He started his solo career proper the following year when he collaborated with Cole Smith of Madness for Listen to Your Father, which was also the debut release for Zajaz, Madness' own record label which was part of Virgin, which got to number 23 in November of 1984.

After getting to number 6 in August of 1985 with Loving You, he got to number 1 for two weeks in November of 1985 with A Good Heart and followed it up with You Little Thief which got to number five in January of 1986. In 1988 his second LP and the single from it failed to chart and he dropped off the radar until now with his third LP Songs From The Mardi Gras and this single which was co-written by Sharky and Dennis Morgan, who wrote I Knew You Were Waiting For Me with Simon Climey for Aretha Franklin and George Michael, and it's nipped up two places this week,

from number 14 to number 12. Now then, me dears, we did cover the undertones in the last episode, and here's Fergal 10 years down the line in the guise of a mid-80s crooner on the comeback trail. So let's start with a brief appraisal of his solo career from your point of view. My favourite thing about his solo career is that A Good Heart and You Little Thief were written by warring ex-lovers. Yes. It was Maria McKee, and it's going gonna do my head in who the guy was but

they are basically fighting it out via Fergal Sharkey's rather nice voice by the way which I think is a really weird weird things have happened in part yeah Paul Fergal man it was a bit harsh in the last episode where he was described I think secondhand yes by Alan Jones as looking like a bucket with a dent in it

yes I think by this point I hope I'm not wrong in this but he's had a bit of work done, he's had a bit of cosmetic surgery by the time we're seeing him here so he no longer looks like a bucket with a dent in it and he's got a bit like Saffron actually, nice glossy hair, lovely glossy hair like he's just

stepped out of a salon you mentioned the assembly track there. I absolutely adore that. I totally forgot about that until I was doing the research for this. It's a magnificent record. And his voice is just perfect for synth pop. It's heartbreaking.

And you can also, because I hope I'm not getting the timeline wrong, but I think the assembly comes between Depeche Mode and Yazoo either way it totally fits into um Vince Clark's thing of using synth pop with a really sort of tremulous uh emotional human voice and sort of contrast contrasting the two um and and I I wish he'd done more I would love it's shocking that they only did one single. Yeah, or just in general, I would have loved to hear Fergal singing more kind of synthy stuff. But never mind. He's gone very old school on this one, hasn't he?

Yeah. Obviously, you mentioned Dennis Morgan, who, as you say, wrote for Aretha Franklin. And he was also a session muso in Nashville. So he's got that kind of old school. He's got those chops, you know what I mean and it's a torch song isn't it, it's something that you can imagine

Otis Redding singing it, it's not amazing but it's kind of agreeably old school and I guess it's alright, I quite like it. Yeah because this episode now is taking a more adulterated tone isn't it, sort of a more traditional tone shall we say

yeah i'll tell you what though right there is something a bit creepy about this song in the lyrics in the um it goes now every night when i go to sleep can't tell you the hell i'm going through because i know he's making love to you girl and i love you too something a bit creepy about that it's not quite in the every breath you take lead but you do imagine him kind of across the road in a car noting down her comings and goings

in a book and occasionally phoning but not saying anything like stupid marriage yeah yeah yes yeah yeah like stupid marriage by the specials but he doesn't lob a brick through the window. No, he doesn't lob it. Well, we don't know that.

But he's acting a bit entitled, if you know what I mean here. It's basically like, you know, I'm a nice guy, I'm Focal Sharky, what are you going out with him for? Yes. Booking the room next door and kind of pressing a glass up against it. Pressing a glass up against the wall. What's she doing? I don't want vocal shockies singing about adult themes

and stuff like that. I would have wanted an update on his cunty cousin. I want to know what he's getting up to now. Well, he's... He's probably got his own software house or something. Yeah, yeah. He's had his teenage kicks and now he's moaning about other people

having their grown-up kicks. So, yeah. Yeah, it's all right, this. I don't mind it. I prefer it to A Good Heart, which I've never liked. It is very basic. It's quite sort of meat and potatoes, croonery. And also, it's like the opposite of the undertones, isn't it?

I always find it remarkable when people kind of springboard off something into something completely different, and obviously there's many examples of this um you know this is what he really wanted to do isn't it it's it's like is is do this serious stuff which is um yeah no i mean his yeah really unusual voice doesn't really it's never kind of landed for me it doesn't really resonate for me do you know what i mean it's like sometimes there's like your your skull is the wrong shape or something for so like it's never going to hit your ears right you know um i feel like he's kind of trying a bit too hard and you know it there's something a bit there's something a bit strained about it but you know

it's you know I feel bad for him that he didn't kind of get to the place that he wanted to get to with this. I was talking to my mate this weekend and we were watching this episode and he just went oh fucking hell that's the bloke who went to my

assembly funnily enough. When he was at school in the mid-80s, they had an assembler. Then all of a sudden, the headmaster turned around and went, oh, here's Fogel Sharker, who was doing a gig in Nottingham that day. And, yeah, for

some reason, and he doesn't know why, Fogel Sharker just turned up at their assembly and the gale of screaming from the kids. He said that a couple of girls next to him fainted at the sight of Fogel Sharky standing on their assembly hall. He's not that ugly. But yeah, and he just stood there

and just looked like he wanted to be anywhere else in the world. It's because his agent said to him, we got you a gig with the assembly. And he thought, he's in the park again. Yeah. It's like, yeah, yeah. I know what Sarah means about it sounding strained, actually. There is one particular note he hits in the very last verse where he's trying to put all the emotion into it. And it's like, ah, you know, whatever.

And he's just trying too hard i think what he's trying to do um with with this song in general actually he wants a bit of that kind of um adult oriented curtis stigers uh michael bolton dollar he's going for that kind of thing here isn't he could this be one of the very last examples of the saxophone oh yeah we need to do this don't we need we need to kind of track the uh the sax solo uh you know, the rise and fall of the sax solo. So the following week, I've Got News For You dropped one place to number 13, and he decided to call time on his music career to become an A&R for Polydor. When the Undertones reformed in 1999, he knocked back the offer to rejoin them, 1999 he knocked back the offer to rejoin them and the only performance he has ever made since retiring was to sing never never at an erasure gig in 2011 later saying that clock was the only

person he would have done that for and after his last lp he quote just felt he could not go on making that intellectual and emotional investment anymore and And now him and Ken from Bross basically run the music industry. Yes. Which is kind of something nobody ever saw coming, but there we go. Well, I've got news for you, girl. I love you too. I love you too. Isn't that beautiful?

And singing live, Fergal Sharkey, Out.news. He's got a new album called Songs From Mardi Gras out on Monday. Top ten now. Up three places to number ten, it's the Snap Megamix. This week's number nine, The Stonk from Halen Pace and the Stonkers.

No change at eight, It's Too Late, Quartz featuring Dinah Carroll. And at seven, Let There Be Love from Simple Minds. At number six, Where the Streets Have No Name, the Pet Shop Boys. Up five places to five, Secret Love from the Bee Gees. Up one at four, it's Rock Set with Joyride. And no change at number three, Rhythm of My Heart,

Rod Stewart. Climbing five places to number two, it's James with Sit Down. And here's Britain's number one for the second week running, Chesney Hawks, the one and only. I am the one and only.

Davis waxes straight into the top ten, coming out the other end with this week's number one, The One and Only by Chesney Hawks. Born in Windsor in 1971, Chesney Hawks was the son of Chip Hawks, who replaced Brian Paul as the lead singer of the Tremolos in the mid-60s. He started songwriting at the age of 12, and when he left school, he formed his own band called Adrenaline. When that was going nowhere, he ended up as a pianist in assorted wine bars in an attempt to justify to his dad that he could make a living as a muso by the age of 18,

lest he be forced to do his A-levels. Then, in 1990, he was in a hospital bed after a wisdom tooth removal when he saw Roger Daltrey being interviewed on TVAM, who announced that he was looking for a youth who could sing and play guitar to play his son in the forthcoming film Buddy's Song, so he attended the audition and was given the part. This song, which was written by Nick Kershaw, was the lead-off single from the soundtrack LP, which doubled as Hawks' debut single, and while the film was being panned by the critics,

the single was languishing round the arse end of the chart. But it was helped massively by an appearance on the Little and Large show, it took massive bounds upwards, and it's now at its second week at number one. After it shoved the stonk by Halen Pace and the Stonkers off the top of the mountain. And here he is in the studio. Well, Roger Daltrey and Little and Large. Thanks.

Thanks a lot. Before we get stuck into Chesnay. I knew only four of that week's top ten. Pet Shop Boys, Roxette, James and this, which is a shocking reflection upon my relationship with the charts at the time. Yeah, I was thinking the same thing when I was listening to that countdown from Gary Davis there. It just sort of rammed home to me how far out of touch I was

with the mainstream at that time. Because, I mean, for a start, Hail and Pace. The stonk by Hail and Pace and the stonkers. It was a whole national in-joke that I wasn't privy to. Was it Red Nose Day? That was a comic relief thing. Yeah, comic relief, yeah. Comic relief, yeah.

I mean, the word stonk being enough somehow to carry the joke because it means having a boner or whatever. Yeah. Fuck's sake. And, yeah, there are quite a lot of examples in this chart of big acts having a hit i've never heard of so earlier on in the countdown there was the rolling stones with something called high wire which i can't remember at all here in the top 10 we've got simple minds let there be love nope no idea uh the bes at number five, Secret Love.

Nope, never heard that. You know, and it's, you know, the fucking Bee Gees, number five. Why don't I know that song? Yeah. So, yeah, it is weird that that kind of separation. The other thing that stood out to me was James at number two. Yes. Sit Down.

So even though in some ways we're talking about the arse end of Manchester, you could also make a case it's at its fucking peak with, you know, James. Or is that a case of a band who've sort of used Manchester as a ladder, as a step up, and now they've ascended to their own thing? I don't know. They were always kind of their own thing, weren't they,'t they James I mean obviously at this time that's kind of where they sprouted from

but then you know I think they're still going now and they've just always been slightly they've always been like an oddity you know

in that way so yeah but obviously that single just you know unbelievably massive yeah no but I'm the same

I didn't know the Rod Stewart track I didn't know the Bee Gees one or the Simple Minds one I remember the Dina Carol one the Snap Mega Mix though

I'd forgotten this was such a the kind of brand tub dance thing where it's just like we'll just stick a few things together and bung it out, that was such an odd thing. Jive Bunny's still in the charts of Fox 8. Yeah, yeah, yeah what a strange business all that was

Yeah, weird times. But this song. Sarah. I was the target audience for Chesney Hawks is what you're about to say. You were. Well, I... Yes.

It left me... I was not asked, though. Did you not fancy him? No, I didn't really fancy... It took me ages to realise that fancying people was a thing, even.

You know, I was quite oblivious for quite a long time. You know, yeah was quite oblivious for quite a long time. You know, good for you. No, also, he does look incredibly young. I mean, how old was he at this point? He's 18, 19.

It's crazy, isn't it? When you're younger than the people on Top of the Pops and then they stay that age and you overtake them and then you look back and you go fucking hell they were so young like you know when craig we saw craig david who was like 18 at the time it's like what yeah he's a he's a fucking school boy you know um so yeah it's i had that slightly disturbing um sensation of just going wow he's a he's a kid and there was always that that sense of like oh my god this person is

so young are they really ready for being number one in in the pop charts um yeah so at the time i i did not i wasn't into this i found this quite quite annoying my first thought on on seeing and hearing this again was um i bet chesney hawks is pissed that it was rick astley who was turned into an internet prank and not him yeah do you know what i mean i just thought i bet he just has occasionally thinks about that and just has a little spit to himself you know well maybe not maybe he thinks he got off lightly but you know you can just imagine there is a timeline whether i'm not sure if it's the better universe than this one or not but in another universe it was i am the one and only that was the rickroll i don't know it's quite naff isn't it it's it's a naff record um there isn't even it's very like it's kind of too much conditioner pop

rock chuggity chug with a bad kind of bendy solo in the middle. And there isn't even a key change. No. This needs a key change. If ever, you know, and I kind of have, I love a key change apart from anything else just because of how much it upsets people. They're like, oh no! And they kind of cringe and rend their garments.

It's like, yeah! Key change! So, you know, they didn't go for it and I was most disappointed to remember this. Kind of looks like Keanu Reeves' little brother. Keanu Reeves' blonde little brother. And I must say, looking at what he looks like now as well, he has...

Hats off to him. He is aged in the Keanu Reeves fashion and looks great. He's really grown into his face. He's a handsome dude simon your thoughts uh this fucking ninny i i i really hated this one thing i hated for a start was just that he and it haven't got the memo that it's the 90s yes it's such a fucking um 1986 song for fuck's sake yeah yeah yeah nick kershaw exactly um it's such a fucking 1986 sounding record it's a fucking Nick Kershaw song for fuck's sake

yeah Nick Kershaw exactly it's quite harsh on Nick Kershaw I think actually but I know what you mean I don't think anything there's not a lot that would be too harsh for Nick Kershaw to be honest you know how loads of the things that you kind of scorned

when you were younger for being cheesy or whatever they kind of grow lovable with age this has not for me, you know, plenty of stuff from this era that I thought commercial bollocks, I fucking love now, but not this

this is just totally dreadful I mean even the fucking lyrics right, we're talking about an era when the Berlin Wall has come down and Nelson Mandela has walked to freedom. And we're entering the era that, you know, Francis Fukuyama was talking about with the end of history and all that. All the great struggles are supposed to be fought and won.

And to soundtrack that, right, here we go. We've got, My soul embraces one more in a million faces high hopes and aspirations and years above my station maybe but all this time i've tried to walk with dignity and pride and then it's like i can't wear this uniform without some compromises because you'll find out that we come in different shapes and sizes and it's all this kind of self-determination bollocks that, you know,

it's, it's as if he thinks he's fucking Labby Siffray singing something inside so strong. Do you know what I mean? But he's just some fucking white kid with like too much shampoo. And yeah. Yeah. I'm almost becoming inarticulate with rage at how much I fucking hate this

record. What it is, right, just the fact that it's called The One and Only. Yeah. Because he's trying to express individualism while making the most generic music possible and looking like someone who's... And basically, he's totally the product of the man.

Capital T, capital M, isn't he? Yes. He is. He is what parents want teenagers to be like yeah it's it's funny sarah mentioning the kind of um potential rehabilitation that he missed out on by not becoming an internet meme i i remember the closest he got was uh a few years ago i was watching celebrity big brother yeah and there there was some weird thing where they built a kind of craven shrine to Chesney Hawks

in the back garden of the Big Brother house and Mutia Buena who I absolutely adore and some other fucking nobody had to go out in the garden and pray and do this ritual where they had to do this movement that was

chest, knees, hawks or something I can't remember how it was and he would appear or something like that but it never really caught on it never gave him the career boost that Rick Rowling did so in summary it's a no from

the price jury. It is proper bollocks isn't it really. It gave me a slight whiff of um of the of i'll be there for you the the friends theme only a little bit though it's not it's actually not even as good as that um but also the first line gave me a kind of friend's thought as well which is always welcome which is call me by my name call me by my number and it reminded me of the great uh the phoebe at point, a bloke says to her, um,

Oh Phoebe, that's a pretty name. She says, Oh yeah, you like that? You should hear my phone number, which is such a good, no one's ever going to say that to me.

I'm never going to Sarah is such a generic name. That's never, I'm never going to be able to, to like throw that one in. But, uh, yeah. Um,

but yeah, he's, he's a, it's, it's a very sort of deodorised nothing of a number one, really. Alas. I mean, this song is the only song on the whole episode that puts me back in the time and the place.

Yeah. Yes, because his brother and the other members of his band were at my university at the time. No way. Yes, because his brother and the other members of his band were at my university at the time. No way. Yes, they were. They were on the music course. Unlike my shitty drama course, the music course was quite prestigious. And so at this time when the song came out, they were far and away the big men on campus.

And so lots of sucky girls in my year would kind of like moon about them while me and my mates used to just sit in the corner, blithely ignoring them and saying how sad, to use the parlance of the day, it all was. So I know for a fact, while I'm not watching Top of the Pops, my shitty fucking SU, which was the size of a shoebox, would have been rammed out with people watching the telly tonight. But they weren't even... It's not like they got to call themselves a band.

It wasn't like Chesney and the Hawks or something. No, no. It's a bit of a shame for them, really. Yeah, yeah, definitely. But, you know, all the time while this is going on, I'm there going, oh, fucking hell, you're on top of the pubs. So even though we may coat them down, et cetera, yeah. Yeah, and it got to the point where they actually left their prestigious courses

to go out on the road with Chesney and be in his band and, you know... How did that work out for them? Yeah, and have success after success right through the 90s. So, yeah, don't know what happened to them, but, you know... So why didn't it work out for Chesney Hawks in the end?

He had nothing else in the locker. The follow-up was I'm a Man, not a boy, wasn't it? Which is basically the same song again. No, he had nothing. And sooner or later, even if he didn't know it was the 90s, everyone else did. So it was like, sorry, mate. We're not doing this shit anymore.

So the one and only would spend three more weeks at number one, being usurped by the Shop shoop song by Cher it would have not one but two promotional videos one of which involved a girl watching Buddy's song when Chesney Hawks jumps out of the screen and beckons her into the store cupboard only for him to be chased by his tethered up dad until he drags her into the screen for a snog. And that girl grew up to be Saffron of Enjoy and Republica. Ah. The follow-up, I'm a man, not a boy, only got to number 27 in June of this year,

and he was doomed to wander the non-charity wasteland until this very day. You know who the other woman, the other girl in that video is? Yeah, it's Lucy Alexander, isn't it? Who's now a presenter of Homes Under the Hammer. Yes, she is. Yeah, seriously, right? I say this with all disclaimers about objectifying women,

but she's ridiculously attractive. She's like this ultimate MILF who basically turns up at people's houses and tells them how they can jazz up their house with a view to selling it on the market. Nobody's listening to her. No one is. All these blokes there in their fucking overalls and stuff waiting for some advice. They're just looking at her thinking, God, you're so attractive. But anyway, yeah, that's her.

She's the girl in the video. The other girl, the one that's not Saffron. The Chesnok's not interested in? I can't remember the plot now, I'll be honest with. She's the girl in the video. The other girl, the one that's not Saffron. The Chesney Hawks not interested in? I can't remember the plot now, I'll be honest with you, but she's in it. He's still putting himself about today, isn't he, Sarah? He is. It appears there is a thing called the Ches event.

Yes, a weekend with Chesney Hawks, the one and only. Holy shit. Join us for an exclusive weekend with the one and only Chesney Hawks, hosted in a farm in Leicestershire. Spend a wonderful weekend of luxury in our beautiful Glamping village with one of the most iconic legends of the 80s and 90s. That's one decade too far, for starters.

That is a stretcheroo, isn't it? Also, yeah, in the small print, it says that it's a beautiful glamping village. They don't provide bedding. So it's not that glamp. No. So you've looked into it then. You've gone that far of checking out facilities.

Maybe. But the weekend will include Chesney hawks meet and greet chesney hawks acoustic set chesney hawks full band performance chesney hawks dj set coyote featuring chesney Hawks. Chesney Hawks, This Is Your Life, hosted by Pat Sharp. Oh, can you imagine? Can we scrape up some money to send Taylor to this? He would be literally

the only bloke as well, wouldn't he? Porter, I mean, you know. The one and only. I don't know, did Chesney have any gay fans, do you think? Nah.

I don't know. Got too much taste. Yeah, that's a good point. Like I said, though, you know, looking at the picture of him that goes with this, he looks good. He looks good. You know, I would consider it. I would consider meeting, if not fully greeting him. So, you know.

Meet and all greet. But it is going to be a bunch of horny scrubbers, isn't it, really? I hope he's got good security. You can say that, Sarah. We can't say that. I can. And with all due disclaimers, you know, I'm sorry. Sorry, the sisterhood.

But, you know. You know what I mean. Look, Bryce, you and I went to to You had me along to the O2 For Robbie a few years ago And it's that crowd isn't it It's terrifying A much smaller version Terrifying Prosecco ladies

Out on the prowl Probably holding up bed sheets With can I be your fuck buddy On them Oh I see what you did there yeah Chesney Hawks apparently

at the age of nine he cried when John Lennon died don't you know imagine that yeah maybe it was in Simon maybe it was him

that your mates were talking about at school fuck I knew there was a reason I hated him yeah yeah we need to go

to his weekend do and just go John Lennon! Fuck it. Fuck it. And the one and only Come take that Chesney Hawks, number one for the second week running. Will it be number one next week? Well, tune in to The Chart Show on Radio 1 FM at 4.30.

Mark Billybags will tell you all. And next week on Top of the Pops, it's Anthea Turner. It's so noisy in here. Hope you've enjoyed our live show. We'll leave you a mic in the mechanics and word of mouth. Good night. Davis complains about the fucking incessant rackle of the fucking audience, warns us that Anthea Turner is on next week

and winds up the show with word of mouth by Mike and the Mechanics. Formed in Dover in 1985, Mike and the Mechanics were the side project of Mike Rutherford, the bassist of Genesis, which also featured vocalist Paul Carrick of Ace, who had a number 20 hit with How Long in 1975, and Paul Young, not the flex suit singer, but the frontman of Sad Café who looked like Chris Morris. After their debut single Silent Running got to number 21 in March of 1986,

they and the Charts existed without each other for the next two years, until they hit pay dirt with The Living Years which got to number two for three weeks in January of 1989 held off number one by Something's Got On Hold Of My Heart by Mark Holman and Gene Pitner. This is the first cut from their new LP also entitled Word Of Mouth which has come out this week and it's the follow up to Nobody Knows

which only got to number 81 in May of 1989 and it's up this week from number 39 to number 35 oh we've taken a dark turn here haven't we, the last three songs all the dancing and all the Manchester rubbish

it's been swept away and we're back in the mid 80s again these dreadful men making their dreadful noise. And it's so, you know, I mean, at least it's not, the best you can say for this is that it's not the living years, which is a horrible thing. But yeah, it's like, they're just kind of shouting horribly and then there's a bad bendy solo.

What is it with like bendy guitar solo? horribly and then there's a bad bendy solo what is it with like bendy guitar solo just this is a an episode replete with uh with with that kind of that kind of guitar bother um and they do a kind of um they do a an attempted kind of crowd sing-alongy bit it's built into the middle of this song it's a come on nah nah nah nah it's like no no not come on yeah you must earn a nah nah nah nah you can't just put it in there earn the nah nah nah that's yeah that's good advice for any songwriter yeah i did not nah nor did i nah the best thing also the good thing is that at least you know this is the end it's not going to there have been top of the pops where they've played the video and it's the whole thing and the credits run out the video is still going it's like yes yes brilliant and mercifully uh you

don't even see the entire thing because they do this weird effect where there's like a they squeeze the screen into a kind of hourglass shape yes don't they so you can't even kind of see it which is a you know small small mercy and then it cuts off in the middle so it's like oh thank god yeah top of the pots and really don't like doing videos round about this time I mean really really really don't but it's like that's you know if you're going to show the thing show it

yeah it's a bit perfunctory isn't it yeah they're kind of assuming that everyone's seen it 50,000 times on MTV and it's like no there would be some dad sitting there going oh yeah this is MTV and it's like, no. There would be some dads sitting there going, oh, yeah, this is all right. Oh, it's gone.

It's not right. Not fair on the dads. The entire episode has not been fair to dads. Well, I don't know. You know, the dads have got other stuff going on. Why don't you go and do some dad stuff then? Do some actual fathering instead of, you know, sitting there complaining,

instead of writing in. Actually, you didn't show the entirety of the Mike and the Mechanics video. I feel quite short-changed. I pay my tax. No, go and pay attention to your kids. Yeah. Dad's got a satellite anyway. Yeah.

They could be trying to tilt the satellite to get Verotic or something. Simon, you've been quiet on the subject of Mike and the Mechanics. The outro slash intro there from uh uh gary davis i i wondered if he was getting a little bit delirious towards the end of the show because um he he calls mark goodyear mark goody bags which was that kind of awful nickname he has and then and then when when he's telling us anthea turner's presenting the following weeks he's he's laughing and i'm thinking, is he laughing at the idea of Anthea Turner presenting Top of the Pops? Or is he laughing in a sort of delayed reaction to his own Mark Goodybags joke?

Or is it just some kind of nervous chuckle that comes in, you know, as a sort of almost reflexive radio DJ tick? It's a bit odd. Maybe he's being thrown off by, because he's like, oh, it's so loud in here, because he has got people screaming in his ears at this point. And so, you know, he's a pro, but maybe that is it. He's trying to make a joke of it. And, you know, he does seem like he's having this slight wobble

at the end of it. Maybe, yeah. Maybe. I don't know, to be kind to him. Who knows? This song, I mean, for a start, Mike and the Mechanics, I agree with you. Why are they still around? it because maybe yeah maybe i don't know to be kind to him who knows this song i mean for start mike and the mechanics i agree with you al why are they still around um it's at this point yeah it's definitely music for partridge it's like you know at the start of um alpha papa there's a bit

where um alan's driving uh and he's he's got cuddly toy by roachford playing and he's like really getting into it um you could imagine if it wasn't Cuddle Your Toy it could be this it's that kind of song um as he raises a string-backed gloved fist in the air through his sunroof um one thing I noted down watching this episode uh was that I thought it's a very German idea of a rock anthem right uh Perhaps because I felt like I wanted someone to blame. I wanted someone other than the British to blame. But I did my sort of due diligence and I checked to see if it was a hit there. I was kind of hoping that my

theory would be borne out by being a massive hit in Germany. No! It was only number 27 in Germany and number 13 here. So no, we've got to own this. It's our fault. Germany's like everyone else they are rocking until they are hot so um uh the the um i mean just just the kind of visual thing that there are there are calf length leather success coats on yes there are headless guitars

headless maybe fretless as well i couldn't quite quite pick out. So it's, yeah, it's just really awful. The lyrics are actually a kind of dire premonition of the era of fake news. Yes. Right, I'm going to read this verse here. It goes, you don't believe the information. You don't believe it when it's denied. So when you're reading explanations, you have to read between the lines

and all this kind of stuff, which, you know, seems a little bit kind of ahead of its time from Mike Rutherford there with the conspiracy theory stuff. Yes. He might be talking about the Weekly World News or Sunday Sport or something. Well, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, that bus didn't end up on the moon. So the singer Paul Young here, I was actually into both Paul Youngs at different times. But this book, because I went through a very brief Sad Cafe phase when I was about 12. And I got this really, I got this terrible, embarrassing memory that makes me cringe to this day of something that happened involving Sad Cafe. which is that my dad and stepmum took me out for a burger in Cardiff to this fancy American diner called Lexington's. And maybe it's my birthday because I was talking about records that I might like to have.

And one of them was the new Sad Cafe album. Now, I was quite good at French at school. Right. And, you know, I could pronounce most things properly. But I hadn't learnt about the cedilla yet, the little squiggle underneath the letter C that you get on some words. So

Sad Cafe had an album out called Facades but I didn't understand I thought it was called Fuckards I said, yeah, Sad Cafe I really want their album, Fuckards and my dad and stepmom were just looking at with their jaws open like, what's it called? Fuckards. Can you spell that? And I spelt it and they just breathed a sigh of relief.

Oh, right, Facades. Yeah, yeah, fine. Yeah, yeah. I never did get the album, but I've got an enamel Sad Cafe badge, which I wear with pride to this day, almost to try and get over my still raw, still hot-eared memory of that embarrassing moment. It could have been worse. It could have been Fakadies, you know. You got any Fakadies? Oh, another thing I noticed with this video,

the closing credits tell us that there's a job on the show called a resource coordinator. Now, if ever there was a euphemism for a drugs gopher, right? This is a 1991 Top of the Pops, the era of dance music and baggy, and there's a resource coordinator on the credits.

I'm just saying. They get the flowers. They get the flowers in, right? Yeah, flowers and fruit. The flowers, yeah. Those flowers that everyone likes. Was there also a video titles artist

or something which seemed a bit extra for the time and for the quite indifferent fonts used? Yeah, but the video titles are a bit jaz the time and for the quite indifferent fonts used. Yeah, but the video titles are a bit jazzy, aren't they? I suppose, yeah. On Deep, Deep Trouble, all the words change into this stick figure

with high heels on walking for a bit. Yeah, that is a good point. For some bizarre reason. Yeah, okay, I guess it's artistry of a type, but yeah. So the following week word of mouth jumped 12 places to number 23 and would eventually get to number 13 I'm shocked reading that out the follow-up a time and a place would only get to number 58 and they'd have to wait four years before ever bothering the top 40 again and that me de, is the end of this episode of Top of the Pops.

What's on the telly afterwards? Well, I'll tell you, shall I? BBC One follows up with EastEnders, where Sharon has a face like a smacked arse, as per usual. Then a designer pig pen is showcased on Tomorrow's World, followed by the sitcom Doctor at the top then the nine o'clock news a repeat of open all hours the documentary series rough justice about people who were gone banged up when they didn't do nothing the amateur modern section of the uk dance championships

presented by angela rippon then heartbeat American drama series, not Nick Berry's rubbish one, then the documentary series Ramadan, A Month to Remember, then All About Ambridge, a documentary about the archers, and they stay up dead late for the results of the Neath by-election. BBC2 is now showing the magazine show First Sight about the poll tax, then the Scottish sitcom City Lights. Top Gear from the Daytona 500 race in Florida. A repeat of Up Pompeii. Then Video Vultures, the 40-minute documentary about people who go round the scabbier bits of New York with a camcorder that can be sold to the news networks. Then the comedy series The Staggering Stories of Ferdinand de Bargos, followed by Newsnight and The Late Show.

ITV is running the medical docusoap Jimmies, followed by The Bill, This Week, LA Law, The News at Ten, a regional magazine show, a repeat of the daytime soap Families, the documentary Reawakenings,

about people who snap out of long-term comas, a repeat of The equalizer the 1975 peter fonda and telly savalas film the diamond mercenaries and they finish off at 3 20 a.m with cinema attractions the dirt cheap movie preview clip show channel 4 is still running channel 4 news then it's spaceship earth another eco dog this time about the great river basins of the world then the crystal maze followed by the nick broomfield documentary about beardy mentalist eugene terra blanche the leader his driver and the driver's wife the 1984 and bancroft film garbo talks and they round off the night with the medical documentary East NGPs. Fucking hell, so many documentaries.

I'm just thinking of the Twitter outrage there would be from some murky quarters now if there was a documentary series called Ramadan. Yeah. Fucking hell. Yeah. So, what are we talking about in the playground tomorrow, me dears? As Sarah was literally in a playground, I think she needs to answer this one. Yeah.

What's to talk about, really? I suppose Chesney Hawks. Yeah. Because if I was trying to get in with the popular kids, maybe. Yeah. But I didn't, so I don't know. I would just... I think I'd just stay and try to get my homework done early, you know.

If these were the options. Simon? A big fat nothing, really. I mean, fucking hell. Zelma Davis' Angel Wings at a stretch, maybe? Nah, nothing. And what are we buying on Saturday? Again, nothing.

Maybe the Mock Turtles, just for the DJ booth at UCL Union because we used to do that send somebody out to buy the latest chart entries probably for the same reason we'd have gone out and bought the Black Box, Enjoy and CNC Music Factory records just for the disco

but not for personal use I'd probably get Enjoy it's a tune I enjoy and i'm i did at the time so yeah that was definitely it was the high point of the episode for me so yeah that one and what does this episode tell us about april of 1991 everyone was tired or out i think that's about yeah that's about right isn't it um i had this feeling of like Tired or out? I think that's about right, isn't it?

I had this feeling of like, is that it? At the end of this episode. Because it felt quite short as well as being shit. It's like that old Jewish joke, isn't it? About some women complaining about the food at a restaurant. And they go, and such small portions yeah uh and um so that um just the fact that top of the pops is as far from the center of the zeitgeist as it had ever been it's really not appointment viewing or essential viewing at all and and that we've got a lot of the kind of runts of the litter of, not just in terms of the acts, but even within those acts,

the runts of the litter of their own discographies, you know? We've got lots of follow-ups to the follow-ups to the follow-up. We've got lots of famous acts with the song Nobody Remembers by them. And we've got a sense that Manchester and House have kind of had their day, and we're waiting around for something new. Before I watched this episode, I just thought, oh, fucking hell, 1991.

Blinding year for music. There's going to be some decent shit on this. And it was like, yeah, I'm still waiting. Come on. You know, the idea that Top of the Pops is about to dive down to 4 million viewers, well, no fucking wonder. Particularly when you compare it with the chart show

because by this time, the chart show has become much more important. It's more convivial to my viewing patterns because you would be lobbed out on a Saturday morning just glaring at the telly. Also, the chart show served a better purpose because you would get a snatch of something that was never going to feature on Top of the Pops for about 20 seconds and you go, fucking hell, that's alright.

I might go out and buy that today. He's doing Top of the Pops' old job, the chart show. We need to cover one of them one time, I think. And that, Pop Craze Youngsters, brings this episode of Chart Music to an end. Promotional flange,

website, www.chart-music.co.uk Facebook.com Slash Chart Music Podcast Twitter At Chart Music TOTP Money down the G-string Patreon.com Slash Chart Music

Don't forget, bonus episode with Neil and Sarah Coming very soon. Thank you, Sarah B. Cheers. God't forget, bonus episode with Neil and Sarah coming very soon. Thank you, Sarah B. Cheers. God bless you, Simon Price. You're welcome. My name's Martha Wash, and I'm going to sue the arse off Al Needham

for using my voice without permission. Ha, ha, ha. Chart music. April the 26th, 1982. to Europe, entertaining every day. April the 26th, 1982. An era began with the birth of the family of Ska. Good evening and welcome to the London office of Satellite Television. As you can see, we're having a party here tonight because tonight is a very special occasion for us all.

We're celebrating the launch of S television's Sky Channel. From now on we'll be transmitting five hours of family entertainment into cable homes in Norway, Finland, Switzerland, Germany and from this evening into the United Kingdom. We'd like to say a very warm welcome to those of you who are watching on ThornyMI's cable network in Swindon. We hope that you're going to enjoy the Sky Channel. Hello, Saturday Night Television and all our new viewers in Swindon. It's my great pleasure to be here today to open the new Sky Channel, and let's hope we have lots of good music. Thank you very much, Kate, and will you now pull the ribbon?

My pleasure. Thank you, Kate, and welcome everybody to the Sky Channel. Now pull the ribbon. My pleasure. Thank you, Kate. And welcome everybody to the Sky Channel. Well, hey, how you doing? Welcome to the Young, Free and Single Show. Here's a good video from Nick Kershaw. When a heart beats, phone calls after this. Who's that? Oh, no.

You know the heavy metal group Venom? The heavy metal group Venom are standing in the entrance to the library there. I don't know what Venom are doing here at Skytrax. Sandra, I will send your uncles a Young Free and Single T-shirt each, and let's hope that works, and you have loads and loads of cousins. A great song, that Nick Kershaw, When a Heart Beats. Of course, you probably have noticed our wonderful Christmas decorations.

Are these... Do you like them? Rubbish! Rubbish! Rubbish! Jimmy and Noddy from Slade. Leave our Christmas decorations! Boys, hold it. What are you doing coming in here

wrecking the studio? They're awful. Listen, I know you're guests on the program, don't you like our decorations? No. Rubbish! Hang on a minute, what's wrong? Ronnie the Runner has got hold of a Tony Blackburn LP. He's showing Venom a Tony Blackburn LP and they don't like it at all.

I'm gone, Ronnie. I'm gone, Ronnie. He showed them a Tony Blackburn LP and they didn't like it and he gave them a chance to get into the video library and hopefully he's got Nick Kirscher when a heart beats. This is Marillion in Communicator. Terrible. Oh no, Venom! More Venom!

Here's Huey Lewis and the news. A dream that's coming true Five years on and going strong Still reaching out to you A special feeling everywhere Come on, let's show them how There's 18 nations all together now Join the family of sky It's all one world we're living in Don't let it pass you by

Join the family of sky Reach out for one another Helping each other, you and I We are the first in Europe We're now and the future too Five great years for a family And the family is you We've got a lot to say about a dream that's

coming true five years I'm still reaching out to you join the family of sky