Chart Music: the Top Of The Pops Podcast - #41: August 26th 1976 - From Acker Bilk To Chlamydia In Two Minutes

Episode Date: July 9, 2019

The latest episode of the podcast which asks: can you remember a wazz you had 43 years ago? This episode, Pop-Crazed Youngsters, is the beginning of a five-part mini-series where members of Team Chart Music run a finger along our TOTP collection and select one of their favourites - and Our David has kicked it off by pulling out an absolute plum from the very end of the Drought. Your panel were killing time during the summer holidays sitting in hot cars, playing Shove Matchbox, or trying to be the Lord Killinan of the ladybirds, but over in the BBC TV Centre, Noel Edmonds has graciously taken time out from getting ready for Swap Shop (and presumably counting the excrement passing through the piping system) to deluge us all with another massive dollop of brightly-coloured Pop gunge. Musicwise, it's a mainly above-par serving of the usual mid-70s melange: Manfred Mann turn up the knob on their synth. The Bee Gees lob a glitterball through the window of the charts. Robin Sarstedt - the Lothario of the Tea Dance - pitches up one more time. The Stylistics stand in a park on Dress-Down Friday. Gallagher and Lyle do something. The Chi-Lites are accompanied by a non-racist cartoon. OH MY GOD IS THAT CAN. And most importantly, we finally get round to Ruby Flipper, the dance troupe that actually featured men and - gasp! non-white people. David Stubbs and Taylor Parkes join Al Needham for a lick of the Lolly Gobble Choc Bomb of '76, veering off on such tangents as belt shops in East London, mid-70s sexual health clinic procedures, Ian Hitler, the Brum Burger, Godzilla and Social Exclusion, and one of Chart Music being a retired male stripper. NOW WITH ADDED SEXUAL SWEAR WORDS WARNING! Video Playlist |  Subscribe  |  Facebook  |  Twitter Subscribe to us on iTunes here. Support us on Patreon here.   Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull-apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey, and just five bucks for the small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. This will certainly have an adult theme and might well contain strong scenes of sex or violence, which could be quite graphic. It may also contain some very explicit language which will frequently mean sexual swear words sharp music Hey! Up you pop-crazed youngsters and welcome to the latest episode of Chart Music,

the podcast that snuffles around the crotch of a random episode of Top of the Pops. I'm your host, Al Need Needham and with me today are Diddy David Stubbs. I know that. And Tiddly Taylor Parks. Yeah hello all right. Boys make my ears sing with the tales of the pop and interesting things that have occurred of late. Right Taylor go for it. Well you know same ever, wasting my life too late now. David, you're starting on a new book, aren't you? I am, yeah. I might as well sort of, you know, confide with the Pop Crow's youngsters.

Good lad. It's kind of a book about British comedy, a sort of history of British comedy. It's a similar sort of scope and scale to the electronic music book I did, Mars Bar 1980. It's covering a similar sort of time, very late 19th century right through to the present day. The tentative title is Can Men Be Funny? Yeah, I've just been looking at a lot of Steptoe and Hancock recently. Oh, you poor sod.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. What a chore that is. It's absolutely, absolutely. And sort of ruminating on them, you know, the whole Gordon and Simpson trajectory, basically. And then I'll probably sort of followinguminating on them, you know, the whole Gordon and Simpson trajectory, basically. And then I'll probably sort of following on immediately from them with Dick Clement and Ian Lafrenne, you know, Porridge, Lightly Lads, you know, Men in Confinement.

Looking forward to that. Any timescale on that? I'll just kind of track on with it and get it done as soon as I can, basically. You do that, David. Yeah. Yeah, as for can, basically. You do that, David. Yeah. Yeah, as for me, nothing pop or interesting. I was a bit upset that I accidentally caught about 30 seconds of Glastonbury

the other weekend because I thought it was a Chelsea flower show. Then some twat in a beard and a guitar popped up and the remote was fucking grabbed pretty quickly. Yeah, quite right too. See, I'm not saying this out of some sort of pompous sense of pride, but I've not seen a single second of this Glastonbury. Well played. I've been watching the World Cup, the Women's World Cup.

Yes. But Glastonbury though, I mean, you used to put in some proper shifts in there, didn't you? Well, absolutely. I mean, I went three times in total, all yeah all in a work capacity i first went in 1987 when people like new order and elvis costello were were headlining at that point it was still like hell's angels doing the security you know it was kind of i mean in in sort of you know in owl parlance it was like shaking altamont basically um but uh um yeah it was just pretty pretty grim basically um me and this photographer Andy Catlin and and the the so-called stud brothers Ben Marshall and Dominic Wills

were assigned to the um you know reporting and photographing duties and Andrew Catlin decided to hire a huge great range rover which insisted on driving right onto the site. So every evening, you know, it was like trying to get out of Havana on the night of the revolution, you know, because we're trying to edge, inch this bloody range rover. We're all sitting in there feeling thoroughly invidious, past all these kind of sort of, you know, crusties,

you know, this kind of hostile army of crusties who are refusing to, you know, and there's people kind of pushing the car behind us, and then the people in front think that they're being rammed you know and uh it was pretty hairy why why couldn't just sort of park 100 yards away near the gate i don't know but you know people are people are weird about cars don't they insist on finding a way to be as near as possible to yeah were you in a hotel i was that time yeah i booked myself into a sort of single room and i booked booked the Stud Brothers into just a double bed in another room, actually. I didn't think they'd mind.

I thought it would be like Mork & Wise, you know, something like that, or Lauren Hardy. But they kind of bought a little bit of that. I think they sorted something out. Yeah, so yeah, it was a full poster as well. It was very, very pleasant. Fucking hell. Yeah, you know. And then the last time I went to, it was for the NME in 1999.

I made a kind of Dennis Law type transfer from Melody May to NME, you know, when he went from Monday Night to Man City, you know, in my sort of final years. So I was at the NME then. And, yeah, and they were talking about, you know, going down in a tent. And I thought he was just one of those kind of, you know, the new lad, you know, fetch that glass hammer type sort of prank. Yeah. Come on. You know, like the day comes, you know, fetch that glass hammer type sort of prank. Yeah. Come on, you know, like the day comes, you know, come on then,

come on then, where's the hotel vouchers? No, no, seriously. I had to vomit some millets and get a bloody tent. Fuck's sake. I know. And then fortunately it was a sort of junior NME person there and I kind of sort of swayed him to put it up, you know, for me, you know, that's what we'd be doing. Because I was on the staff, you know. Do me a favour.

Go on, lad, you'll go, you know. So it's kind of little things like this that will kind of see you go far. And the name of that writer was... I've forgotten. Poor, godforsaken hack. So, yeah. So, anyway, you know, I put the tent up in...

Or had the tent put up for me in a sort of spot I'd selected, which is near this kind of bucolic, babbling brook um it was and then i hope that's all fine it's all put up you know went off enjoyed the kind of you know the festival and the burgers and what have you and the atmosphere decided to turn in about 10 to 12 because everything pretty much wound up by then i just kind of assumed that you know people would be kind of wending their way back to the tents you know and i turned in with my torch and my p Woodhouse and, you know, at 10 to midnight. And then I kind of realised that, you know, you could still hear the distant raging cannon of techno or whatever, you know, like booming away, like, you know.

And also I realised that there was a kind of vast procession of people going down this babbling book. It turns out it's Piss Alley, you know, basically everyone's just using this kind of giant, you know, sort of collective urinal. So you've got the kind of the steam of fucking crusty urine, you know, kind of wafting its way up the hill. Plus in the tent next to me, there's these two gabbling Australian women, you know, playing some god awful music,

you know, on their rig. And I kind of think, okay, well, you know, I could, it's glassware or whatever, you know. And I thought they'll probably turn glassware or whatever, you know, and I thought they'll probably turn in soon or whatever, you know. But then one o'clock becomes two o'clock, two o'clock becomes three o'clock, then four o'clock, and they're gabbling relentlessly away. And then I think, well, you know, it's about 4.30, 5.

I'm thinking, you know, this merits a formal complaint. But then I think, look, a right tit, aren't I? I put my head out there. You should have done the full Keith in Nottingham, mate. I am in a tent. You are in a tent. The walls of a tent are very thin. Exactly, yes. Be quiet!

I came to Glastonbury to escape the hurly-burly of life. So, yeah, and then, of course, finally, these people, they kind of pass out. They're going up, they're vomiting, piss alley. Come back, pass out. And I're going up they're vomiting piss alley you know um come back pass out and i thought fine they can sleep but then of course an hour later that up comes the sun and then the greenhouse event it's you know it's about 48 degrees and so i can't sleep in there you know and i have to kind of go staggering out on something with one hour sleep under my belt um why do people have tents the glass what's the point who is it what they for just have lockers or something like that just have stacked lockers nobody's going to sleep sounds fun David telly did you ever partake in the the Glastonbury experience

yeah I first went as a punter in 1990 and not yet so cynical I did it properly I hitchhiked down there with a mate whose family had some hippie credentials and knew the ways so got a lift with what were then known as new age travelers in their van very nice people it has to be said although my main memory of that is that we stopped in a forest clearing for a tea and spliff break and while the general standard of hygiene on this van was higher than you'd expect. All the tea mugs were encrusted with like black schmutz on the inside. Obviously hadn't been washed for a long time. So after fitting in quite well thus far with the itinerant lifestyle for four hours, suddenly my germophobia kicked in, as did my upper working class, lower middle class manners.

kicked in as did my upper working class lower middle class manners um i didn't want to be rude um and turn down this cup of tea with its dark crust bobbing on the surface so i tipped a bit into the mud when no one's looking like the old mellow birds yes then put it down and went off for a stroll in the forest just to look at trees. But I've been gone for about... The idea being I could go back and go, oh, I forgot my tea, what a shame. But then after about 30 seconds, my mate appeared with one of the travellers holding my mug, going, oh, you forgot your tea.

Oh, thanks, I appreciate it. But the next morning they said, do you want to buy some drugs before you go? Oh, great, cheers. So we were taken onto this old coach in the Traveller's Field, like a magical mystery tour coach with all the seats taken out, just totally empty, just a metal tube with a double bed nailed into the floor right at the back with an old bloke on it.

It was like being taken on a magical journey to meet their king, you know, through the field field through the crowds into this bus right down the end and there he was this old man like an unprepossessing figure who sold us some bathtub lsd which was on a sheet of lined a4 file paper like not even on blotting paper like what you put in a ring binder um and oh your germophobia was all right with that, though, wasn't it? Well, you know, you've got to pick and choose. But what other people's LSD experiences are about as interesting as other people's dreams,

it's fair to say that this was a little wild. And we took one after about an hour and a half. It's not doing anything. Let's take another. So we took another, and about two seconds later half not doing anything let's take another so we took another and about two seconds later it was like being in Tron then an hour later the first one came on and all I can say

is whichever sector of the psychic multiverse I ended up in not the ideal choice for a feet up away from it all stress busting weekend break for the busy professional best opt for a staycation but yeah being 18 woke up the next morning right as rain sounds like the roadrunner approach to acid isn't it doesn't work hammer a bit harder doesn't work

stamp stamp stamp see i'm a drugs virgin. I really don't, apart from the legal and arguably the most lethal one, alcohol. I've always felt the problem with drugs is that if you get a dodgy batch and it seems to happen quite a lot to some of my ex-Melody Maker colleagues, then your statutory

rights are very much affected. You can't write to the cocaine board. No, or ring a watchdog. That's right, exactly, yeah. This turned out to be 70% Purcell, 30% rat poison. So, yeah, I must admit, I've always genuinely managed to steer clear. Yeah, Esther Anser's not going to do anything for you, is she? She's not, no, exactly, yeah.

So they're not going to kind of, yes, turn to Cyril Fletcher to lighten the mood afterwards or anything. Danny of Camberwell said I'm sorry but this has nothing to do with me exactly I think the only festivals I've ever been to

I used to go to the Essential Festival in London because any festival where you can finish the night having a shit in your own toilet, that's the kind of festival I approve of. Fuck this modern shit. I'm not interested in that. I want to talk about old stuff.

And before we do that, as always, we do nothing on chart music before we give a shout-out to all the lovely people who have realised 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 Peter Longbottom, Paul Fern, Joanna Halpin,

John Skillbeck, David Bartram, Oliver Gibson, Jeff Rideout, Ian, Gareth Hawker, David Watterson, Oh, man. Can you imagine if David Bartram is actually the Dave Bartram, the lead singer of Show Woddy Woddy? Wow. That would be fucking amazing, wouldn't it? I think it could be. Could could be Dave Bartram Jr. Yeah, possibly. Or Dave Bartram III. I did actually see She Waddy Waddy

when they legendarily supported Einstürzner Neubauten. Whoa! Back in 1987. What the fuck was that like? It was obviously meant to be some sort of feeble Steve-O was a promoter and some bizarre and he was managing Neubauten and I think, you know, it's obviously meant to be a bit of a kind of ironic joke

presumably at Shiawade Willis expense but everyone in the crowd was absolutely rooting for the Wads it has to be said yeah they put on a lovely little storming set and it was very nice whereas Neubauten themselves were a little bit off that night I seem to recall a bit over theatrical. They got blown off the stage

didn't they? Well you know it's certainly you know the clapometer would certainly I think have favoured surely what it that night and let us not forget the three dollar patrons who come in this month Matthew Marra Ben Tisdall, Paul Burns Dave Morris, James Rook

Rich Simisker and Chetan Kadodwala. You know what, chaps? Some people, they tease one another, take pride in themselves keeping the other one down. But those people I just mentioned are not like that at all. Not indeed. Excellent people. So, why don't you come and join them at patreon.com slash chart music and ram

that tip down our g-string chart music we're built like a truck and we bump for a book and of course all our patreon subscribers have the honour of picking out the latest chart music top 10

oh are we ready, boys? Hit the fucking music. A new entry at number ten, Serving Suggestion. Oh, yes. It's a drop of two places for this week's number nine, Here Comes Chisholm. Oh.

Up two from number ten to number eight, Taylor Parks' 20 Romantic Moments. A lingerer. It's a two-place jump from number 8 to number 6 for Your Dark Mate. This week's second-highest new entry has crashed in at number 5, The Granny Claps.

Down one place to number 4, Simon Price and the receptionist from Hong Kong for where into the top three and it's a two-place drop for last week's number one chicken Steven up two places to number two it could only be bomber dog which means the highest new entry and this Britain's number one. The highest new entry and this week's number one,

Sarah B and Rakim. Oh, what a chart that is. Nice to see some young blood up the top there. And fucking yes, serving suggestion are finally in the charts.

I've been pulling for them you know when you're a youth at school and you latch on to one band that's not done anything yet in the hope of them getting into the charts and you being able to go around and brag about how you wore their badge first that's me in serving suggestion

I'm telling you I was so fucking upset last month when they didn't get in the charts I was still holding upset last month when they didn't get in the charts. I was still holding out hope for Dilute to Taste. Yeah. Very much the Bilbo Baggins to their Bay City Rollers. Yes, definitely.

So, new entries then, the Granny Claps, what are they all about? It's a bit Stars on 45, isn't it, the Granny Claps? The Granny Claps, yeah. They're like the mothers of servicemen. Now I can see them doing a medley of all the other music that's in the charts. You know, mix up a bit, mash up a bit of Here Comes Jism with Granny Wants Your Spunk. And of course, Sarah B and Rakim just speaks for itself.

What an act they'd be. Sarah B for president. Sarah B is on the cut. Yes. Sarah B never scared. Yes. We could go on all day. So if you want to get involved,

www.patreon.com slash chart music. Go on, chuck some money in. We've just done a bonus podcast the other month. It's dead good. So this episode, Pop Craze Youngsters, well, oh, what a treat we have for you this time. It's the first of a brand new mini series of sorts where I got sick of having to pick out episodes to cover

and I forced team chart music to look within themselves and pick out one episode they wanted to talk about first up to bat is our old friend david stubbs and he's gone for this episode from august the 26th, 1976. So, David, without giving away too much, tell us why this one jumped out at you. Well, yeah, I would certainly have seen it at the time. I was kind of an avid Top of the Pops watcher, but I hadn't yet developed sort of critical consciousness at that point. You know, I mean, I can't pretend that, you know,

I was kind of listening to Bowie or whatever at that time. It was all the same to me. It was pop. It was great. And that could be 10cc. It could be Paul Nicholas. It was pop. It was on after Tomorrow's World.

That was fantastic as far as I was concerned. So, you know, I had a kind of very uncritical. Oddly enough, the most, and given certain sort of books I've written recently, perhaps the most significant thing that appears tonight, think although i remember watching this episode um it passed me by i have to say that the more i look at 1976 pop craze youngsters the more i like it partly because 1976 was one of my favorite years ever but mainly because it's it's a very much an ignored period of pop music history yeah it's a bit of a black hole for me well it's this no man's land between glam and punk and new wave which is always interesting even if it's not an especially glorious period for the british

charts i mean the only reliably good chart music in this time is soul. Yes. But beyond that, there's like this splatter of one-offs and what the fucks, and some of them are excellent and some of them are horrible in a manner that defies description. And some of them are neither. They're just really, really weird um just disconnected cultural artifacts which are probably more rewarding now uh when their weirdness can stand alone context free than they were at the time when they would just look like cultural clutter you know um but 76

especially because there was something hallucinatory about the summer of 1976. And I'm sure I'm not imagining this, right? Other painfully hot summers like last year's didn't really have that. They didn't create a new atmosphere. You know what I mean? They didn't give people the sense they were living on a different planet. Whereas that one did. And it's not just me half remembering a time when I was still practically a toddler. I think it's quite well documented. i've got a great radio documentary somewhere which is just people talking about the

summer of 1976 and they all say the same thing which is as the weeks went on their sense of reality began to melt and strange things would start happening 1976 was uh other people's 1967 you're saying yeah that's exactly what i'm saying yeah but i think the lack of that kind of thing now is probably just a consequence of technology because we don't have the opportunity to drift in the reality of our physical surroundings to we don't feel as prone too connected we don't feel like so much of our experience is controlled and defined by the vagaries of the natural world, although that will probably change in the next few decades as the natural world starts to turn the screw.

But this episode, I think, will have gone out literally a couple of days before the weather finally broke with the most almighty thunderstorms and about two years worth of rain fell in about a week. The day before, actually, Taylor. Was it? Was it really? Yeah.

There you go, you see. It's one of my earliest memories, that summer breaking. Yeah. At the age of four, I knew the word reservoir. Because it was on everyone's lips. Reservoir on everyone's lips and a house brick in everyone's cistern i think there's a sense of this in this episode 76 it was kind of a void but interesting things were kind of filling it you know in this particular kind of juncture and i

mean punk is clearly beginning to happen but there's not really any hint of it you know in the show at all and there wasn't really in it I wasn't really conscious of punk at this point. I wasn't really conscious of it until sort of early 1977. And I think that that's when it really started to kick in and all the various moral panics. At this stage, it's beginning to happen, but nobody's really aware of it. But at the same time, the old order is changing.

There's the year that they did The Last Waltz or whatever, and there's a whole kind of vanguard of musicians there from Dylan to Joni Mitchell and people like that who are about to kind of give way to, like, Patti Smith, the Ramones, television, all the talking heads, all that kind of thing. And they may or may not know it. I mean, obviously, there's a sort of valedictory thing

about that particular thing. Also, it was a big year for the Beatles. Yes. There was a lot of Beatles activity that year. And I think that was kind of significant. I think even in the early 70s people kept hankering for the idea that the Beatles were all going to get back together and I think that perhaps finally by

1976 with this big kind of lot of Beatles retrospection going on and they showed all the films and things like that which was great for me I loved all of that but I think also is like I think this one is probably knocked on the head I don't think we're going to get the Beatles back and then perhaps a sense of moving on from that I i i still say the worst thing about

the 60s and the 70s culturally speaking was this re-enchantment where after almost a century of inquiry and progress this terrible mistake was made and it became almost received wisdom that it was this which had led us to Auschwitz and Hiroshima. And from here, the best plan was to pedal backwards and rediscover the arcane detail of witchcraft and astrology, which would surely save us as a people, you know, even as man was walking on the fucking moon. And although that didn't slow down any positive developments in science or technology itself, it did contribute culturally towards a sort of re-acceptance of wooliness and obscurantism and respect for personal revelation, which had some really damaging knock-on effects and in the short term ruined a lot of young people's conversations.

But it had one positive effect, which was to allow a great deal of weirdness into popular culture, sort of spreading out into every corner like even the real darkest shoddiest corners and giving a lot of otherwise quite dull low art a sort of gleam and a sparkle which makes it reasonably interesting right so like a lot of what's on this top of the pops is not objectively very good or especially vital. I mean, it's a low energy period for the charts, just like 1986 and 1996, I would say. But unlike an equivalent episode from those years, there's all these grotesque frills and decorations and just weird stuff snatched out of the air,

out of the culture and bolted on. And that's what there is to talk about and think about on this episode. And it makes it more interesting and more enjoyable. Let's get stuck in. So, in the news this week, Jim Callaghan announces that he plans to step down as Prime Minister in 1980. Thames Water announces that the Thames is losing 15 million gallons a day due to the drought. Gerald Ford announces Bob Dole as his running mate in the forthcoming u.s presidential

election idi armeen claims on uganda radio that the drought is god's punishment for the united kingdom being a bunch of cunts bbc radio london is criticized by the department of the environment for running a jingle which encourages housewives to save water by having a bath with the milkman. John Thor of the Sweeney and Barry Foster of Van der Volk hand in a petition to 10 Downing Street asking the Prime Minister to mediate in a dispute between the Electricians' Union and Thames Television.

The Rolling Stones have just played the largest gig in the UK so far when 200,000 people pitch up to see them at the Nebwood Festival. The Sunday People has just revealed that Kendo Nagasaki has become a faith healer and conducts surgeries out of his converted garage in Wolverhampton with the help of a spirit of an ancient samurai warrior even sorts out sexual problems as well of course but the big news this week is that the bbc have announced that ruby flipper the in-house dancers at top of the pops who started a mere three months

ago are to be axed no the following news item from the daily Mirror last Thursday reads as follows. Ruby Flopper! Dance troupe told to go. This is the TV dance group that got off on the wrong foot. The group, Ruby Flipper, took over in May from Go Go Dancers, Pans People on BBC One's Top of the Pops, but the flipper turned out to be a flopper, and they're going to be dropped in a few weeks' time. The trouble was that the new group,

four girls and three guys, were out of step with viewers, and the BBC said yesterday, We have had such a tremendous response from viewers who obviously miss Pans People that we think it is now best to bring back an all girl dance group.

Choreographer Flick Colbert, who formed both dance groups, has been told to find a new team for Top of the Pops. This is why we picked this one out, eh David? Yeah, that's right. The opportunity to evaluate Ruby Flipper, which is long overdue for a podcast about Top of the Pops.

On the cover of the NME this week, nothing. It's not published due to strike action. Blue Oyster Cult were on last week. On the cover of the TV Times, Patrick Cargill. He's guesting with Barbara Windsor in the Saturday comedy show, Nobody Does It Like Marty. The Marty, of course, being Marty Kane.

I shouldn't have said it was Marty Scorsese. The number one LP in the UK at the moment is 20 Golden Greats by the Beach Boys. Over in America, the number one single is Don't Go Breaking My Heart by Elton John and Kiki D. And the number one LP in America is Frampton Comes Alive by Peter Frampton, obviously.

So, me boys, what were we doing in August of 1976? Probably about this time, I would have been... My dad worked for a firm called Dover Roller Shutters. Now, roller shutters, you know, they might seem a kind of mundane, light industrial thing, but I'm telling you, he knows that they weren't attached to the backs of the lorries, I can assure you.

Anyway, the boss, Fred Dover, he had a house in Greenfield near Stalybridge or whatever. I got the princely sum of £5 for, like, tidying up the yard there, which I've never... I don't think I'd ever... I'd never actually been personally handed a £5 note. Good Lord. He came on, he peeled off a...

Old Fred Dover, he peeled off a fiver and I was just absolutely agog, you know. Oh, man. Fred Dover was no J.J. Barry, was he? That's right. There was none of that no charge nonsense. There was some charge. There was some charge, yeah.

Halcyon days, I suppose, but also because it was the mid-'70s, boring days, you know, as well because it was the mid-'70s, boring days, you know, as well. I mean, you know, prior to that holiday, I remember I just spent two or three weeks in the summer holidays doing nothing, but I had a piece of hardboard set out, and I'd just play sort of a version of Crown Ring Balls with these old kind of like Hot Wheels cars, you know.

I'd just, right, you know, across this sort of six-foot sort of thing of hardboard and try and get them, you know, if they went over the edge, then, you know, I just, right, you know, across this sort of six foot sort of thing of hardboard and try and get them, you know, obviously the top, if they went over the edge, then, you know, all was lost. But, you know, if you get them just as near the edge as possible, you know, ground to a halt. Oh, it's like shove matchbox, isn't it? Absolutely, yeah. I just did that every single day for the week, three weeks.

The trouble was that I went to a different school from everybody else in the village, a little barrack in Elmett, because they all went to the Boston Spa Conference. But being a Catholic, I was lobbed off to St. Michael's in Headingley, the Catholic school there. Box of Spencers! So I didn't really...

St. Michael's, yeah. So I didn't really have mates that I could go out and sort of play with, really, at that point. They were fucking heathen scum. They were going to burn in hell though, David. You're well out of those cunts. It could hardly be associated with the Protestants. It was a burning offence.

But yeah, so another thing that was happening to me at that point was I was a kind of reluctant member of the local youth football team. I lived in Barrack-on-Elmett, as I may have mentioned. The village of Barrack-on-Elmett, as I may have mentioned, the village of Barrack-on-Elmett. We were called Barrack Spartans,

and we were part of the Red Triangle League, which was kind of under 14s. The trouble was, we were all about a year younger. Who the fuck were you playing? I don't know. What is the trouble? Red Triangle League sounds a bit Channel 4 to me, David. I know, yeah, yeah.

Were you all naked and bombing each other up against mountains or something? We weren't particularly Spartan. Were you all naked and bombing each other up against mountains or something? We weren't particularly Spartan. We all loved our hot crumpets and two-bar radiator grills and what have you. But I managed to acquire somewhere our fixture list, and the results were as follows. Barrick Spartans, nil.

Holbeck Wanderers, eight. Oof. Barrick Spartans, nil. Woodlesford, ten. Shit. Barrick Spartans, nil. New Miners Peacocks, don't ask, nine. Fuck.

Barrick Spartans, nil. St. Kevin's, ten. Oh. Barrick Spartans, nil. Scottall Rovers, fourteen. No. Oh, my God. Scott all rovers they were for they were men these were men with hairy legs basically playing against us like we kind of poor little naive not need paul nicholas liking kids it was just no we just got absolutely walloped every week it was

very demoralizing terrible taylor um no i was four yeah i've done it i've done the only thing that i've got fair enough all i remember is it was really hot and then it rained i was an eight-year-old child uh obviously enjoying the summer holiday and you know i was either trapped in the back of a four cortina with my sister outside a pub called the Golden Ball while my dad was in the pub. Because it was that, you know, it was that era when parenting consisted of taking your kids to the pub, locking them in a hot car, bringing out a packet of crisps and a bottle of Coke with a straw in it. Yeah, a glass bottle of unrefrigerated coke with a paper straw yeah not even coca-cola i think it was apollo which was the the local variety begging my dad to put the radio on so i could listen to something other than me fucking sister whining wear the battery down

i found a copy of mayfair in his toolbox, which enlivened things somewhat. So I was either doing that or I was sat in the back garden organising something I called the Lady Bird Olympics. You know, remember that the Montreal Olympics had just gone a couple of weeks previously and there was a fucking shitload of ladybirds about. So I basically drew out an Olympic stadium and got loads of ladybirds. I even made my own Olympic village, which consisted of a tin money box with a slot in the top with a bit of grass in it.

So, you know, they had somewhere to stay. Did some grasshoppers break in and murder a load of ladybirds? It was awful. So basically this was just organised animal abuse. Well, I want animal abuse. I want hurting them. I want giving them steroids or anything, man. I want East Germany.

They're not there for your entertainment, Al. They're living creatures who want to live and breathe. Yeah, but they were all over the fucking shop, so they might as well be doing something worthwhile. Yeah, it was a plague. It was a fucking plague. It was hard man because they could do 100 metres

but that was pretty much it if they did the long jump they weren't coming back there was shit at the javelin it worked a lot better than my previous animal related sporting competition which was me and my mates we got some maggots

out of his fridge where his dad kept them for fishing and got a Cebuto ball and tried to play maggot football. But that was fucking useless, man. It was appalling. Music-wise, I mean, as I said earlier, 1976 really is a black hole for me because we'd moved house a year previously on a new estate

so I didn't have the benefit of Tony Bones' mum taking me in to watch Top of the Pops so consequently it's very rare that I saw episodes

of Top of the Pops in 1976 because ATV always had a fucking film on and my dad always insisted on watching it and it was it was a pre-portable

television age so I missed out on a lot of Top of the Popsers which upsets me even now the only one film that was on at this time

that I really wanted to watch was King Kong versus Godzilla and my dad wasn't having it he deliberately put BBC 2 on

second week of 1975 King Kong versus Godzilla was on ATV and for the whole week, all the kids in West Glade Infant School were banging on about it.

My dad wouldn't let me watch it because it was a load of fucking monsters chucking each other about and it was a load of ramble. And so the next day I got in to school, this kid who hardly knew anyone and was desperate to make friends, and someone came up to me and said,

did you see it? And I said, no, what happened? And he just gave me this look of disgust. And he walked off and behind his shoulder he said, it was a draw. So yeah, thanks, Dad. Spoiler alert, Al, come on. Well, come on, and what else was it going to be?

You've got these two big fucking film studios, one in America, one in Japan. It's like Muhammad Ali versus Inoki isn't it, the same year that was pretty sad that that was another year, it was a huge year Muhammad Ali stuff, I think it was the year

that he was advertising the beef burgers it was the one where he wanted an Elite United tracksuit wasn't it and that girl was bothering him. Yeah, and Ali, the black Superman, I think that was this year as well. In Zaire, in the charts this very week. Oh, there was in Zaire as well.

There were a couple because there was in Zaire, yeah. Number five in the charts, down one, yeah. And then there was also Ali, the black Superman, you know. Catch me if you can. It's not as good as his, who put the crack in the Liberty Bell? And then there was also Ali, the black Superman, you know. Catch me if you can. It's not as good as his Who Put the Crack in the Liberty Bell. Ali, you know that song. Oh, yes, yes, yes.

See, it's weird. It's a sort of zenith. I mean, you know, we'll probably have all kinds of more reflections on 1976. But there was a survey done at the time in terms of, like, levels of happiness. And people essentially, as well as, like, being kind of, you know, the hottest recorded summer, et cetera, people were at their happiest in the uk in the year 1976 relative to sort of previous and subsequent years um it might have seemed a pretty kind of moribund year and it was like punk and thatcherism feeling that they had to kind of revive this desperate moribund time folk were happy people were actually happier than they had been before or since i was a lot happier

in 1976 than i was in 1975 see this is my theory about the late 70s in fact that people think of the late 70s in terms of malaise you know this is the this is the historical received wisdom but in a way i think that malaise was sort of a consequence of satiated boredom and it's like the natural condition of over-evolved primates where survival is no longer a concern right that it's like the social contract still held and inequality was at an all-time record low and at least in the rich and therefore significant parts of the world society had progressed to the point where people were talking about communist or anarchist takeovers not as a liberation from tyranny but because it was seemed like a logical next step it's like you

know we've we've gone as far as we could now. Nobody's starving. You know what I mean? And amidst all that paranoia and the sort of indefinable sense of decline that everyone remembers from the 70s, you get, say, a film as ridiculously pure and absurdly open-hearted as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which I watched again recently. And in between the obligatory scenes of, you know, soulless suburban gloom and all that kind of thing,

there's this expression of that childlike, sort of Carl Sagan-style attitude towards the idea of contact with alien life, which seems completely foreign today now that we're so acutely and constantly aware of what generally happens when a technologically superior civilization meets a technologically inferior one and the fact that it's only an accident of evolution that humans found empathy and solidarity useful to our survival as a species and there's no reason at all why aliens would develop along those lines

far more likely that they would just come to eat but in 1976 we were spending millions sending signals into deep space saying here we are come and we are. Come and get us. Yeah, and the carpenters. Yeah, yeah. There was a lot. I mean, I was, as a kid, I was reading a lot about things like Bermuda Triangle and UFOs. Very, very kind of credulous. But there was a lot of that about in 1976. I remember there was John Lennon put on an album. It might

have been the Brocknell. On the back of one of his albums, he said, you know, he was talking about last October, I went outside and I saw a UFO. He just put that on the other side of his you know people it was all over the shop i read this book by this geezer brindisi per trench or something like that all about ufos and part his theory was that the younger generation were themselves quite possibly aliens and this is accounted for their strangeness they're actually visitors you know extraterrestrial visitors come to kind of reform mankind and um i'll act all that up um you know but, you know, extraterrestrial visitors come to kind of reform mankind.

And I'll act all that up. You know, but, you know, people older and more sensible should be more sensible. Yeah, and it's partly a consequence of that re-enchantment that I mentioned before. But it's also, it's boredom. It's like, well, you know, we're not killing each other for a handful of berries anymore, but we're still not happy. So it's just this desperation,

just looking outside the world and looking outside reality for something, just something to occupy us, you know, because we're not very good when we don't have to fight for things. Actually, it was Francis Fukuyama in his book, The End of History. He said that the only thing that might jeopardise this,

what he saw as this kind of impending sort of millennium of peace and social democracy might just be that people get bored and decide just to sort of kick up for the sake of it basically didn't take long did it no no see we need to bring back it's a knockout don't worry this is the says a lot about the last days of detente you know the the the nations of western europe would dress up as gigantic foam rubber chefs. So what else was on telly this day? Well, BBC One starts the day at five past seven with a double bill of the Open Université

before shutting down for an hour and 25 minutes. Then it's Stop the Pigeon, Jackanora with Judi Dench, Devlin, the kids kids drama series about an American stunt motorcyclist then Rhubarb and then the Girl and the Fox before they go to Scarborough for the England

versus the West Indies in the one day international prudential trophy. After closing down for 20 minutes they start the afternoon with On The Move with Bob Hoskins and Martin Shaw the news news bagpuss then back to the cricket for the afternoon session after regional news in your area it's a repeat of that day's play school then here come the double deckers the canadian goose drama series dan gibson's nature family the magic roundabout the evening news with peter woods

nationwide and they've just finished bellamy's europe where david bellamy dossers around southern italy for a bit and sees how mozzarella is made from actual buffalo milk fucking hell that must have been a revelation in 1976 mozzarella. Oh, never heard of it. Or avocado. BBC Two kicks off at 6.40am with a triple bill of the Open University before closing down for three hours, coming back hard at 11 with Play School. Then it closes down for another five hours before picking up the final session of the cricket.

They're just about to start a 10 minute interval before news on two still doing intervals back then menkle itv begins the day with howell bennett reading toby's flying arc followed by seeing and doing the medical show exploration man then a sea captain talks about his life in Flashback, then it's Stingray, survival, a cartoon, animal quackers,

and then Bungle makes a picture of a squirrel in Rainbow. After the antique show Trash or Treasure, it's Leonard Parkin with First Report, followed by regional news in your area, Crown Court, Mavis Nicholson talks to christmas humphries a former old bailey judge who became a buddhist and is now an evangelist of homeopathic medicine in the best of good afternoon then it's the drama series dorothy and clive the documentary

the shoot and the gamekeeper the lone ranger the, The Time Tunnel, The News, Regional News in Your Area, A Domestic Between Hugh and Meg Mortimer in Crossroads, and then now 20 minutes into the film, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines. Oh, fuck's sake. Dad's definitely got that on. All right, then, pop-craze youngsters. You know how we go about on chart music.

We may coat down your favourite band or artist, but we never forget, they've been on chart music more than we have. Hang on a minute. They've been on chart music more than we have? That's not true. Who? That's what you just said. You mean

they've been on top of the pops more than we have? Oh, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. They've been on top of the pops more than we have. That's not true. Who? That's what you just said. You mean they've been on top of the pops more than we have. Fuck, fuck, fuck. They've been on top of the pops more than we have. Thank you, Taylor. I was going to say, one of the few claims I can make is that I've been on chart music

more than any of these people. If we don't get on with this, you know, I'm not going to be home in time for the top of the Pot. It's 7.20pm on August 26th, 1976, and we are greeted by the sight of tonight's host in a green suit with a jazzy tie fiddling about with a presumably expensive watch noel edmunds at the moment he's still the leonine king of the radio one jungle sat upon the breakfast throne where this morning he handed off to tony blackburn for a couple of hours

before the people of Weymouth undergo an invasion by Dave Lee Travis and the Radio 1 Roadshow. And it goes without saying that Edmunds is already making his move from radio to TV. Not only is he currently presenting the magic and science show Illusionists on BBC2 on Wednesday evenings, he's also spending a lot of time with Keith Chegwin, John Craven and Posh Paws deep in the bowels of Television Centre as he prepares to unleash the multicoloured swap shop upon the youth of Britain. A week after this episode, he was the subject of a three-part feature in the Daily Mirror entitled, Noel Edmonds, the first disc jockey superstar. Which began, he is

young, fit and healthy. As bright as the moon and good looking enough to be a movie star. It is not inconceivable that one day he might be a movie star can you imagine noel edmunds in taxi driver or the empire strikes back no they already had patrick cargill earmarked for that are you talking to me? No, it's...

I see Noel Edmonds in a film about a man who gets stuck halfway through his transformation into a werewolf, but otherwise... As bright as the moon. I quite like that. Yes. Sort of bright-ish, but...

The moon is not bright. The moon just reflects the sun. Yep. As bright as the moon is Yeah, nicely, subtly backhanded there I thought David, we've already discovered that you and your father Actually called Noel Edmonds your god Throughout the mid-70s

So, you know, obvious first question Were you a swap shop person at this time? Oh yeah, I absolutely was Yeah, definitely, I used to sort of bomb around to the news agents and like get an obscene amount you know about two or three pounds of like confectionery and um scarf all of that all the way through um yeah swap shop never actually swapped anything I was a kind of a lurker as it were you know I sort of lived vicariously through all of the other swaps um but um um yeah and Noel Edmonds I no my dad called him God or whatever I had a sort of deep faith

in Noel Edmonds the way that people do with DJs but it's only retrospectively you can think all he was doing was being basically yes he's not generating an awful lot of light in fact this opening routine

it's just like it's not even a joke. It's just a sort of, what is it meant to be? You know, and it's just, it's a bit like, it's just, it's Noel and he's doing stuff. You know, it's a bit like Chris Evans. If you go to 1996 and you see Chris Evans' attempts at quips, it's just like, they're not even half jokes. They're just sort of, you know, they're just these kind of emissions.

Just passes the time, isn't it? It's just emissions light-heartedness that don't actually have any kind of wit or sense about them i learned the other day that there's very few full episodes of swap shop in existence because uh it's all down to the bbc um wiping the tapes in the late 80s so they could flog them on to television stations in australia so they could, I don't know, tape kangaroo races or something. I don't know. Which is a great loss, because imagine, there's a lot of band performances and interviews that are just gone now. Your first instinct is to think, oh, what terrible cultural vandalism.

Well, no, people were thinking, who in their right mind would ever want to watch a full episode of Swap Shop? Ever again. Me? people were thinking who in their right mind would ever want to watch a full episode of swap shop ever again i mean the final episode is is available in its entirety yeah it is i'm literally five minutes walk away from the field that keith chagrin stood in when they did a swapper armor in nottingham and you know you know how they did that competition where they put a multicolored swap shop sticker somewhere and the first kid who found it won a i don't know what a satin bomber jacket with keith chagwin's face on the back um that stood for years at the back of the mushy pea stall in victoria market and then when that was pulled down they just got rid of the sticker and it's like, oh, you stupid cunt.

I would have had that. Nottingham, so fucking shit with its heritage. Every town has its ups and downs. I think you could sort of do some sort of psycho-geographical walking tour, definitely. Yeah. Putting out these kind of various cultural points. I'd go on it. Yeah.

Yeah, that's the hedge where Keith Chegwin hid his bottle of vodka while he was on camera. Well, I mean, before we get stuck into Nolan 1976, we have to discuss the interview that he gave to The Guardian only last month. It was quite interesting, wasn't it, chaps? Yeah. Yeah, although it's par for the course these days.

I mean, he says, right, I for the course these days i mean he says right i think the headline on this interview is he says i confuse people um but he doesn't really because everything is perfectly understandable as soon as you understand the context that this is the straightest squarest man in the world and he's gone mad um this is how itest, squarest man in the world, and he's gone mad. This is how it would happen. It's completely in order that things would unfold like this. He's just another bloke who had a traumatic midlife crisis and lost his mind. But he's shaking Ike.

He's shaking Ike. He's another celebrity casualty who's just gone off the rails but when people get knobbed off by the bbc they don't take it well do they no because it's it's like a job fluff noel edmonds is used to gravy trains right if you remember back in the 70s he would do any advert that he was asked to do but it wasn wasn't all, you know, thrusting private free enterprise, like Pocketeers and stuff. He would also do British Leyland and British Gas and all this. He was always on the public sector gravy.

Rally bikes. Right. He did. He did have it for rally bikes. Well, they stay owned. It'd be him right. Knocking about on his racer and loads of people in uh in choppers

and chippers and grifters would go i've got a rally and right at the end they they just pointed at him and said noel's got a rally oh which is a bit disturbing in uh in a 2019 context isn't it but it's it's strange i mean obviously jim and savile you know this is the age of the train and and that like you know there was such deep faith and trust in these people that they were being trusted with kind of endorsing these great national institutions or whatever. And I'm sure that's what they kind of approached. I'm sure there was deep trust in him, you know, bizarrely enough. I think it's absolutely true what Taylor says.

Yeah, he kind of lost his mind. But I always thought there was a certain kind of bloke with a certain generation that's kind of a bit kind of goodies and with it in the 1970s or whatever and flair trans what have you that there's always this latent sort of potential undercurrent of of the sort of madness the sort of nonsense that eventually he comes ends up coming coming out with you know that i suppose he's not really been surrounded that much in his life and people saying no you're talking shit yeah and also he's in a position where people hang on his every word but there's no core there's nothing you know he doesn't have any

substance um so as soon as his reason for existing is taken away um and people he's he's still expected to keep talking but there's nothing to link there's nothing to link. There's nothing to introduce. So he has to look into himself, and all he sees is this great gaping emptiness. And that's when people go. That's when the cuckoo flies out of their forehead on a spring. And I talk about having that kind of faith that we have. I keep coming back to that.

And then, of course course he himself then places faith in all of this kind of sub-pseudo scientific nonsense and yeah and frankly you know talking about cancer you know my dear mum you know died of cancer and you know for something like noel eddins to suggest that the reason that she succumbed is because she allowed herself to get down in the dumps you know there wasn't enough positive thinking is absolutely obscene you know She died because it's a terminal illness. And the fact that he kind of harbours complete nonsense like that. And when he's questioned on it, he just said, just because, because. It's almost like, I'm Noel Edmonds.

I reckon it. That should be enough. But what he does is he acts as though he knows better. He's very superior. It's like he tries to do a sort of mind trick on you and like ah but have you ever thought of like talks down to you right as though and this is this has always been there right he always for reasons of his own because he's a small man in a big world you know he always has to be on top the joke joke is never on him, right? His whole career is about doing funny phone calls and gotchas and dropping gunge on people, you know,

and playfully hitting members of the Top of the Pops audience with his phone-topped microphone. He's always in control, and everyone else is the butt of the joke. It's never him. It's bad for people, that sort of thing. It's bad for people. He of thing it's bad for people he needed at some point in about 1980 to be you know debagged on national television or something

would have would have saved his sanity in the end i think the key part of the interview for me was the interviewer uh pulled him up about his uh comments immigration, where he said that the bus was full. And he says, the interview says, could he clarify his position? And it goes as follows. He asked me how many people I think are living in the UK. I say it's around about 65 million. No, it's not, he chuckles, almost sympathetically. Why would you ever believe a number that has been produced by the people who said we were giving the eu 350 million a week it's a fiction it's actually at least 75 million i ask him where he gets his

information from there is a very simple way of working out for yourself what the real population of the country is he said it's the three f Food, feces and farewells. Food is very tightly regulated because it has to be for obvious reasons. Feces is the same. We know how much shit and piss is going through the system. And as for farewells, we have a pretty good idea how many people are buried or cremated each year. It doesn't quite explain how he has managed to accurately gauge the UK population but this is classic Edmonds

creating a diversion, inventing an acronym and packaging it up in unswerving conviction. Well you know the idea of Noel Edmonds counting people's shit, that's quite alarming. That's my favourite bit in the interview as well. He's the only

man that could make you think Chris Tarrant was a dude. Yes. Feces and farewell. It adds a sort of glib contours of somebody that actually really knows what they're talking about and explaining it cleverly in lay terms. But it's complete bollocks. Exactly. Anyway, a bloke called Sam Delaney who did that interview,

he runs a podcast called Top Flight Time Machine. And in a couple of episodes, he goes into detail about his encounter with Edmund. So, you know, if you want to get it from the horse's mouth, if you will, chuck him a tab. You know, you can listen to all the podcasts. It's allowed. Anyway, Edmund goes straight into the chart rundown

and, oh, as always, there's some very choice images on display, isn't there? What's your favourites? There's a lot of foreign solo artists in this week's chart. There's Jorge Zamfir, the Romanian panpipe stylist. Yeah,

Doina de Jale. Yeah, for a dinner party with a difference, a small difference. Yeah, it's that tune that you don't know the name of but you do know it that kind of like timothee advert music that goes yeah and just like that and demis roussos in a hat made out of the mastermind chair yes yes it's very stylish yeah he looks looks pretty good in that, doesn't he? What else?

Billy Joe Spears, smiling like somebody's mother, standing on top of a building, right on the edge, just before she stamps on her child's clinging fingers and sends them plummeting to their death. Oh, the chai lights. Oh, man, yes.

Gaudy, big lapel suits and oversized bow ties. The colour of an ancient, unwashable egg stain. Yes. They're fucking huge, aren't they? Yeah, it's amazing. They're like being tacked by giant butterflies. Yeah, but what's weirdest about it is that, I don't know if they're like sort of Ronnie Corbett style lemon v-neck jumpers or a sheet of cardboard pushed down the front.

But there's like a weird sort of breastplate under the suit in the same colour. It's a really confusing image. It's like part sort of show busy supper club and part like the Pluto branch of Primark. But then, on the other hand, Tavares looked like authentically bad motherfuckers. There's a really brilliant picture of that. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the ones I picked out were Judge Dredd

with Evie Viva's suspenders in a one- piece bathing suit and a straw boater looking like he's riding a dolphin the white girl in the Starland vocal band with her chin shorn off and the rest of her face obscured by lettering Rod Stewart

under really bad lighting making him look like Frankenstein in Borstal Agnetha's face completely obscured by the number 16. The lead singer of Dr. Hook with a fucking massive trampy beard demonstrating that Dr. Hook actually smartened up their look in the late 70s.

And that picture of status quo, fucking hell. It's awful. Only one of them's face fucking hell. Oh, yeah. It's awful. Only one of them's face you can actually see in full. Oh, and there's also 5,000 volts. Oh, yes. Having divested themselves of Tina Charles and that woman who gets Basil Fawlty's handprints on her tits in Fawlty Towers. And now they've got this lead singer who looks like an art man animations

creation with a blonde norman helmet of hair yes i mean looking at this this chart run down i always don't know the words of the comte de loterie amongst the proto surrealist and he talks at one point in legendarily about the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella and that's one of the great sort of founding thoughts of Surrealism. And I get that kind of feeling about the chance. You just get Judge Dredd, Twiggy, Twiggy's in the charts, Biddy Joe Spears, 5,000 volts. And, you know, that's definitely what immediately occurs to me.

Yeah, there was a lot of, as I've mentioned before, there's a lot of Judge Dredd being played in Next Door. Yeah, and it was so strange because it was just unmentioned. Who's Judge Dredd? Why is he never on? Why is he never mentioned? Yeah. Even at the tender age of nearly 14, as it was at this point, I still haven't solved the mystery of Judge Dredd. Because I've already spoke about John Flynn, my Next Door neighbour,

who's the mobile DJ who played loads of Judge Dredd. And around about this time, I think my dad banged on his front door and said, John, you've got to stop playing your Judge Dredd records. My five-year-old daughter's in the living room singing Up With The Cock. He was amazing. I actually had a conversation with my mum about him a bit more after we mentioned him on short music. And there was one time when certain people on the street actually formed a posse to go and beat him up.

And he heard about it and he just came out into the middle of the street in his vest and pants and stood on his head and said, come on then, and they backed away. Bless him. Blinded by the light Wrapped up like straight into the first song of the night, Blinded by the Light by Manfred Mann's Earth Band. Blinded by the Light by Manfred Mann's Earth Band Born in Johannesburg in 1940, Manfred Lubowicz worked as a jazz pianist in the late 50s and recorded two LPs in a band called The Vikings, the first rock and roll band in South Africa.

After realising that apartheid was a bag of cat's arseholes he emigrated to the uk in 1961 and got a gig writing for the magazine jazz news under the pseudonym manfred man in tribute to the jazz drummer shelly man in 1962 he met the drummer mike hug at clacton bucklands and they formed the man hug blues brothers who signed to hmv in 1963 changing their name to Manfred Mann. The group would go on to score 13 top 10 hits in the UK including three number ones Do Wah Diddy Diddy in 1964, Pretty Flamingo in 1966 and The Mighty Quinn in 1968 but the band split up in 1969 leaving Mann to team up with hog once again to form an experimental jazz rock band called manfred man chapter three after two years and two lps chapter

three split up and man immediately formed manfred man's earth band making their first, and before this year only, chart appearance in October of 1973, when Joybringer got to number nine. This single, a cover of the opening track on Bruce Springsteen's debut LP, Greetings from Asbury Park, New Jersey, is the follow-up to Spirit in the Night, another Springsteen cover, which failed to chart. It's the lead cut from the LP The Roaring Silence which will be released tomorrow and the single has just entered the chart

at number 41. I mean this is mint isn't it? I've got to say this would be the perfect introduction to rock music for a youth my age. Yeah I was very taken with this at the time definitely. Marginally less so now um just small note about wearing a sailor suit you know as he is in that kind of 1976 there's so much that

so 1976 about this episode and that's definitely one of them but i mean because oddly if you know when people talk about the first album that they got they kind of lie a bit you know of course well yeah it was um yeah it was aladdin's scene you know i got it when i was nine you know my first album i ever bought was manfred mann's greatest hits because it was 50p scene, you know, I got it when I was nine. My first album I ever bought was Manfred Mann's Greatest Hits because it was 50p at Tesco in the Arndale Centre in Crossgates. And basically, it was my one album and I extracted every sort of atom of joy that could possibly be extracted from that. You know, I wasn't quite sure I liked it at first,

but by gum I was going to learn to like it. And I think I extracted everything that could possibly be extracted from an anthology of Manfred Mann's 60s hits you know Five Thrill, Three Two One Do What, Diddy Dee Pretty Flamingo etc etc If You Gotta Go, Go Now which is pretty saucy

stuff. Yes. But yeah and then seeing them now I thought wow so it's got all the kind of Manfred and now they've got electric you know so I love that. I love that. So I was, you know, I was bedazzled. I was bewitched by this when I saw it. And, you know, looking at it now, I think you're right.

It's a good sort of like, you know, swizzy sort of intro to rock. It is essentially rock, really. It's just the usual. And a great intro to this episode i feel yeah well it works because for all its sort of prog pop musicianliness it's actually a really gimmicky record and a sort of a nicely tasteless one i mean i mean that as a compliment you know so it works as a hit and it works as fun and it doesn't take up space that anyone else would have been using yes you know um and i mean the nicest thing about this period generally by which i mean i suppose 72 to 77 is that for rock

bands with any hope of making the charts freakiness was the default um if you were young and pretty and pop you could do the boys next door thing you know but otherwise you just go out there looking like space truckers and emit bleeping noises you know and this was commercial uh i mean i i recently i got re-obsessed with that record Standing in the Road by Blackfoot Sue, which is amazing. It's just pure grimy hypnosis. But, I mean, you know, they're a bunch of, like, hairy lags piling out the back of a transit van. But it's that same thing of proper musicians, like grown men, heavy people presenting as a pop group, you know.

It's like sort of presenting as a pop group. You know, it's like sort of presenting as freaks, which was a sort of pop imperative of the time, which forced these people to do something in terms of presentation that was at least halfway interesting, or at worst, quite funny.

Not just visual presentation, but the way the music was presented as well. Put a nice freaky edge on everything. And that's what makes this good. It's interesting that it was a Springsteen cover, because Springsteen himself hadn't managed to glean a hit out of this, as far as I can make out.

He'd done nothing in the UK. I don't think it was quite a household name at that point. And this sounds nothing like his version. It pisses on you from an enormous height from the from the top of the roller coaster in that park he keeps going on about i'd say yeah and it's actually also we had a clarity in the lyric and the lyric just appears to be apparently just a tour around a rhyming dictionary basically it's almost like kind of in joke you know springsteen the lyrics that's going on little early pearly came by in a curly whirly and asked me if i need to ride well you know yeah well it's one of those songs influenced by the bob dylan songs yes bob

dylan dashed off in the studio in five minutes right so a lot of people miss this about dylan right because he was you know one of the greatest lyric writers of all time but those were the days when you had to put out two albums a year, and nobody can write 25 lyrics of that standard every year, however much speed they're taking. There's a bit of a strong element of subterranean homesick blues, definitely, I suppose, about this lyric. Yeah.

But, I mean, there's five or six or seven songs a year from the mid-'60s of Dylan that are at that level, like really good. And the rest of it is just filler like everybody else did. But the difference was when the Beatles dashed off a lyric in five minutes, it went, my love, don't give me presents. I know that she's no peasant. You know, Dylan dashed off a lyric in five minutes

and you got, you know, Ma Rainey and Beethoven once unwrapped a bedroll. Tuba players now rehearse around the flagpole. Yeah, but I'd sooner listen to She's a Woman than any of Dylan's stuff. Yeah, that's a reasonable thing to say, I suppose. But the thing is, because he was writing songs in between that, like Visions of Joanna, Subterranean Homesick Blues, It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding, My Back Pages,

Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window, all of which are genuinely great lyrics. People assume that he was more than human and that all this other stuff, as it emitted from the same orifice, must really mean something too. And even though it just sounded like a witty literate bloke out of his head on drugs writing down the first thing that came into his head, no, it couldn't be that.

It must be more than that. What does it mean, man? What does it mean? You know, worthy of deep examination. Now, I don't think Bruce Springsteen was daft enough to think that. And I think he was just having fun here. But it's a bit unrewarding to hear inferior

versions of somebody else's amphetamine babble, you know, even relatively high-end versions like this. But by 1976 were people analysing lyrics because, you know, I actually did something I really didn't want to do the other week and looked at the lyrics to this song, which I have absolutely no clue about and didn't care.

The only one that jumped out to me was curly whirling because that was you know that was visions of terry scott dressed up as a school boy yeah but you know at that age and probably you know even if i'd have been a teenager the lyrics were just gibberish and it didn't matter because that's what lyrics were i mean for just to prove to you that nobody knew the lyrics of this song the first line of the verse is it says bummers drummers bummers indians in the summer i mean if that had been known about that would have gone right around the playground yeah nobody was going to miss that oh do you if you had that song about bummers yeah it would have been relaxed before its time yeah that that That's the whole thing about Springsteen.

That's part of the problem. I think he's not really, he's not exactly a kind of lucid lyricist. He's a lot of kind of slurring and emoting. And really, it seems like for me, the whole thing about Springsteen is that he's a kind of, he's a signifier of a certain kind of sort of passion and kind of wrestling with his emotions and open heart and open chested and all that kind of stuff. And then you get a problem with that.

So it's just all slurred. And that's the big problem with Born in the USA. She couldn't believe it was misinterpreted. She said, do you want to listen to the verse? But no one's listening to it. I was born in the USA. It's no wonder people just thought it was an anthem. Nobody's listening to that.

Nobody can. Yeah. But it's worth talking about Dylan because, you know, Manfred Mann, one of the many bands who were exponents of Dylan. And now, you know, this is the second Bruce Springsteen single on the bus. They're obviously seeing something in him that they saw in Dylan. Yeah. Should learn to write their own songs.

More profitable. Yes. Actually, the worst thing about the lyrics to this song that always bothers me is the chorus. It says, blinded by the light, revved up like a douche. Douche. Douche. Another runner in the...

I can only hear, blinded by the night, revved up like a douche. Yeah. Another runner in the... I can only hear Blinded by the Night, Revved Up Like a Douche, another runner in the night. It just makes me think of all those brainless, ultra-basic bros on shit cocaine in the town centre on a Saturday night. You know, like massive shirts and tiny haircuts, you know,

giving it a big one. But I mean, the great thing about this song that got me into trouble at the time was the bit where it goes... Because every time that came on, I would grab the nearest knob to me, whether it was the radio or the car radio or the teller or even, you know, the gas hob

and just crank it right up really slowly and methodically. I just feel the power of rock surge through me. None of this bothers the audience. We're all doing the Frankenstein to a man. Yeah. But I think it's too hot to do anything else in the studio. Because if you look, they've got a massive fan going around in the background at the back of the stage

just to stop the musicians from keeling over. Yes. So the following week, Blinded by the Light left 15 places to number 26, and three weeks later it got to number six, its highest position. Over in America, though, it would take six months for it to get all the way to number one for

a week in February 1977. The follow-up questions would fail to chart but they'd have one more top 10 hit when Davey's on the road again got to number six for two weeks in June of 1978 and apart from an extended break in the 90s, Manfred Mann's Earth Band have never split up. She said I'll turn you up Sonny, the sun was strong She got down but she

never got touch, it's gonna make it through tonight What an excessively sensible way to get this edition of Top of the Pops underway. That's Manfred Mann's Earth Band, and they were blinded by the lights.

Now, stop whatever you're doing, particularly if you're doing that, because at this particular juncture, you definitely should be dancing with the Bee Gees. Edmunds, alone in the inky black void at the back of the studio, where he belongs, informs us that you can take heed of the title of the next song, You Should Be Dancing, by the Bee Gees. Spawned on the Isle of Man in the late 40s,

the Gibb brothers, Barre, Morris and Robin, were relocated to Manchester in the early 50s where they eventually formed a skiffle band called the Rattlesnakes. In 1958, the family emigrated to the outskirts of Brisbane, Australia and the brothers made their debut performance as a singing troupe at the Redcliffe Speedway performing on the back of a truck which went round the oval while people lobbed money at them. In 1962, they were introduced to a local DJ who landed them a support gig for Chubby Checker and they sound their first record deal a year later.

After 10 flop singles on the bounce, they finally got to number 5 in Australia and number 1 in New Zealand in 1966 with Spicks and Specks. But they had had enough of the antipodes and moved to London a year later. After a demo sent by their dad to Brian Epstein was passed on to Robert Stigwood, who signed them to a five-year deal with Polydor. Their first UK single, New York Mining Disaster, got to number 12 in May of 1967. The follow-up, Words, only got to number 41, but their third single, Massachusetts, got to number one for four weeks in October of 1967. They'd have four more top ten hits in the late 60s, including another number one with I've Gotta Get A Message To You in September of 1968,

but they'd split up in December of 1969, only to reform in the late summer of 1970. By 1974, however, they were well up Arsenal Street, being reduced to playing the Batley Variety Club, but on the advice of their American label, they were encouraged to settle in the US, work with the producer Arif Mardin, and have a go at the new dance styles that were knocking about, which eventually resulted in the LP Main Course and the single Jive Talkin',

which became their second US number one and got to number five for two weeks in Augustust of 1975 this is the follow-up the first track from the forthcoming lp children of the world and it's up this week from number nine to number six first of all this edmunds introduction it's very strange it's weird when we first started doing this it looked really weird to see these late 70s top of the pops where you start off with the presenter alone in a void delivering pre-recorded links. But in fact, it seems to be how they did it every week for a few years.

And then as it goes on, little organised crowds of girls are slowly added into the picture um it's really it's like it's like he's completely separate from the acts like he's not in the same room as them he's off backstage playing yahtzee with sir walter walker john gourier where they're on you know like yes yes you can make use of my helicopter if it comes to it. Then he has this brief probationary period with the crowd until finally he achieves redemption

and he's allowed out into the studio. It's like when you reintroduce a lion or something back to the wild. Yes, it is. Just, you know, you wander about the cage for a bit. Cage door's open. Now you can have a sniff around and now you can run free amongst amongst the girls but depressingly you've got to say despite the fact

that he says not one word in this 38 minutes which is not banal and hopelessly unfunny shameful even you can see how he got the gig oh yeah because if nothing else he's very slick very and he does this terrible thing uh very efficiently like a calm vivisectionist he's uh i mean like we last time the three of us were here we watched andy peebles yes turn in the least convincing debut since the Shockmaster. Well done, Taylor. This is my entire knowledge of American wrestling right there. I'm not generally

in favour of it because I think it cleared a path for Donald Trump. Do explain the Shockmaster. It was Tugboat off the WWF who went from WWF to WCW. Have you seen this, David? I haven't, no. And he got

introduced by Sting and Rick Flair and the British Bulldog. And he was supposed to burst through a wall. I'm just picturing it. And they made the explosive charge too high and he basically just tripped up and fell through the wall and his helmet it was it was a stormtrooper helmet with kitchen foil over it falls off and he's just rolling about and um the the voice of arn anderson is heard over the tannoy, which is supposed to be his voice.

And you can hear Davey Boy going, fucking hell, he fell on his arse. Well done, Taylor. You're one of us, after all. Well, I love that clip. I recognise the rest of those names, but not the shopmaster, but I'll certainly... Yeah, there's a reason why he's not so well-remembered.

But yeah, the oily smoothness. Yes. A consummate professional, isn't he? Supreme self-confidence, you know, which is allowed him to exude all manner of bollocks throughout his entire career. Yeah. A trace of self-doubt or self-consciousness.

Yeah, it's that self-confidence you can only have when you have a total lack of content yeah yeah because he clearly doesn't give a fuck about pop music no no yeah yeah but he's capable of doing the job without you know plunging the power drill through his own sternum which is you know it's easy to mock but harder than it looks but you're right about the the black i mean i've gone on i've talked before about the kind of the sort of blackness of the rafters in the episode of top of the pops um and you know now it's signifying the sort of the outer darkness of the unlit 70s blah blah but it's really pronounced in this one it's really emphasized

as if to sort of suggest that blackness is yes we are in a temporary void in popular culture at the moment yes and it's if the blackness is really really emphasized if they just want to sort of suggest that blackness is, yes, we are in a temporary void in popular culture at the moment. And it's if the blackness is really, really emphasised, if they just want to sort of inadvertently make that statement. What does he say in the link? Does it stop whatever you're doing, especially if you're doing that? I mean, why would anybody be wanking? He means wanking. I know, exactly.

Why would anybody be wanking to a Noel Edmonds link? Well, why would anybody be wanking to manfred man's earth band exactly you know you want to stop doing that you get blinded by the light yes but yes there is an inky void but oh here comes disco to save the day do we talk about the song or do we talk about the way it is put over to the youth because this is the first appearance of the night for ruby flipper yeah yeah formed in london in march of 1976 ruby flipper were drafted in to replace pan's people when ruth pearson the last original member of the troop turned 30 rather than being spirited away in a logan's run style and fashion pearson was signed up as co-manager of the new troupe

and it was decided that they would move away from an all-women group wearing the same costumes and go a bit unisex. After keeping on Cherry Gillespie and Sue Mahennick from the People of Pan, they put an advert in the stage in February which read, Dancers, ladies and gents,

for long-running TV series, choreographer Flick Colbert. What a mystery. What show could that be? The Money Programme? After three stages of auditions, the final five auditions were picked. Patti Hammond and Lulu Cartwright bolstered the female side, and they were supplemented by Gavin Trace,

Philip Steggles, a former member of Lulu's New Generation, and, most controversially, Floyd Pierce, a member of the Black Race. After two months of intensive training, they were given the name Ruby Flipper, a mash-up of the names flick colby and ruth pearson i'll leave you to work it out for yourself and they made their debut on may the 6th of this year dancing to the stylistics version of can't help falling in love and were immediately bombarded with criticism from all sides it's a big mistake said sue ward a member of the last generation of pan's people men rush home to watch sexy ladies they do not want to see other men even the media had a go at first i thought it was a mistake an omission or even that they were on holiday but never in a month of dancing pumps did i believe that BBC One would replace Pan's people,

the stars of Top of the Pops, thundered the Aberdeen Evening Express. Granted, some of the girls appear in the new Ruby Flipper dance group, but by comparison, they are second rate. A flash in the pan, even. Replacing Pan's people is unforgivable folly. Yeah. That is a table thumper. Yes.

By this point, Trace, the one who looked a bit like Paul Nicholas, had already left, being unable to put up with the gruelling schedule. And as we've already mentioned, we're a week away from them finding out that their days are numbered. But, my God, they're going to dance, dance, dance their way into the tomb. Quite right. Ruby Flipper, this kind of one of the great unrealised futures of popular culture. Yes.

You know, it's kind of sad because they're genuinely trying to do something progressive. But is it really anything new, though, David? Because, you know, the young generation, they were unisex, and, you know, we're a couple of years away from the wonderment of the Brian Rogers connection on 321. Yeah, you would think that. And, you know, fair enough, young boys don't want to see men dancing, but surely young girls don't mind so much.

You would have thought so. But, I mean, I think that in what happened here, clearly the shock, and you almost imagine it when Floyd first first appears although obviously it's not his first appearance but the shock is probably in bad sitcom terms it's like some showing which leslie phillips is um proposed having a menage a trois and he thinks ding dong only to realize that the third party is none other than derrick griffiths and i think that's the kind of um you know this is the sort of shock the apple had on people like Bill Cotton, for instance, who I think was one of the great drivers to make sure that, you know,

this was taken off the air force with. And the whole tenor of the complaint is that they don't really want men involved in this kind of particular... Men with penises, let us not forget. Yeah, it's definitely a troop too far. Yeah. The thing is, it's not completely untrue that men dancing is not something many people want to look at it's like tits right that everyone likes tits the reason

why you see tits everywhere is not just objectification of women blah blah trying to sell to men because they it's perceived that men have got the money. It's also because everybody likes them, right? Straight men like them. Gay men like them. They're hilarious. Lesbians obviously like them. And straight women like them too. They're fascinated by the women's tits.

Everyone loves them. In a way that is not true of bollocks. Nobody wants to look at bollocks. They could have had tits and co, couldn't they? But it's just a general thing and it's partly because men dancing i mean doing anything other than the running man has been coded as gay since about 1970 yeah right which means that really it's only gay men and even then only some gay men yeah can watch tight bund dancing boys in the same way that dads would leer at legs and co right everyone else just finds it funny including straight women yeah so it just sort of doesn't work um on top of which

there seems to be something universal about deriving pleasure from feminine grace and beauty, whereas everybody has a fundamental need to puncture the egos of men who are seen as preening and peacocking. Yeah. So as soon as you put a bunch of men out there, everyone wants them to fall on their ass. Yeah. Right. Everyone wants them to fall on their arse. Yeah. Right?

It's like you see a man dancing, and unless he's camping it up or making a joke of it, you just assume he must be a cock. Yeah. You know, which is why male dancers generally do have to camp it up because otherwise it's not just that nobody wants to look at them. It's people who find it actively objectionable to see. It's interesting about, you you know the whole gay thing codified as gay i think gay consciousness generally was fairly low in in like in in the

mid 70s generally it certainly was as far as i was concerned i mean really had to be pretty unsubtle you had to be kind of coming up in a kind of big pink floppy hat and saying hello tonky tonk how are you or something like that i mean it was really you had to be pretty blatant about it we're only 80 certain about larry grayson and it was really, you had to be pretty blatant about it. We were only 80% certain about Larry Grayson and we were 0% certain about the village people who completely went under the radar, everybody's radar. And yet, in my school playground, just having the wrong kind of shoes

meant that you enjoyed anal sex with other men. Yeah, yeah. Having a haircut that was a week out of date. Yeah. You're a bit younger than us. Definitely, yeah. Oh, no, yeah. Puffs.

There were puffs, obviously. But we didn't necessarily... That was like Walter and Dennis the Menace and things like that. There was a sort of softies and puffs. I mean, you know, but then there was a bit of confusion about actual gayness. Yes, like you say, all the implications of anal sex and what have you.

But also it's interesting about talking about blokes dancing. Ironically, at this time, and to this particular tune, you've got John Travolta wowing it up in Saturday Night Fever. A year later, yeah. Although I remember reading an article at the time, there was some sort of disco crowd that they went and interviewed about, and they said any bloke who went out onto the floor and tried to cut stuff like that, they'd be absolutely barracked.

We've got to point out that this is not the full Ruby Flipper experience. There's only four out of the remaining six. Lulu, Sue and Pate are on podiums at the back in teeny tiny waistcoats and I was

going to say hot pants but by this point in the 70s they're just pants aren't they? It's just knickers with little coloured dots sewn into them. Yeah and they've got Floyd in sort of a silky white waistcoat and matching trousers and

he's in the middle but he's absolutely miles away from them isn't he? You could not have put him any further away in that studio if you'd have tried without being in a different studio, being in the fucking Thames television studio. They might as well have put an electrified fence around him. He's actually segregated, yeah, definitely. Yes. The legend, of course, the great urban legend about this,

is that part of what got Ruby Flipper off the air is that Bill Cotton said nobody wants to look at black men dancing with white women. Now, I don't know if that's true. Right. I have no idea. I don't want to say without evidence that, you know, you went into Bill Cotton's office and it was like watching Michael Richards at the Laugh Factory. Maybe it was. I don't know. Maybe it wasn't.

But if the worry was a sort of KKK style fear of rampaging black sexuality and lock up your daughters, he had perhaps missed something when looking at Floyd out of Ruby Flipper. Yeah. It strikes me would have very little interest in anybody's daughter, you know, Flipper. Yeah. It strikes me would have very little interest in anybody's daughter, you know, carnally speaking. Yeah. But yeah, there is some very extreme segregation going on here. There is. You get the impression they had a handler in green overalls

standing just off set with a tranquiliser gun aimed at Floyd all the way through just to comply with 1970s BBC dance regulation. I mean, the thing that puts me off that train of thought with Bill Cotton is that he commissioned the black and white minstrel show. So it's all right for white women to sit on the knee of white men pretending to be black men. You know, we were all for that, weren't we?

Yeah, we all were. Maybe they should have just got a minstrel in, Ruby Flipper. That would have sorted everything out, wouldn't it? But the thing about Floyd is, he looks such a nice young lad. He does, yeah. He's very in the mould of Brinsley Ford

in Here Come the Double Deckers and Benny Green in Grange Hill. Yeah. It's like, what are you racist to him for he's all right as for the way that the three women in ruby flipper look it's they've already got taylor that um lean and hungry look that legs and co would have don't you think yeah yeah very aerobicized but yeah which increases the sense of them looking a bit naked and stranded out there on their podium. They look like they've forgotten their kit and they just have to do it in their knickers. Yeah, vest and pants.

Yeah. And a sort of a little waist cut. And the choreographer's written a little Marilyn Monroe style cleavage wobble into the dance. Yeah. Which is ridiculous because they're all completely flat chested because they're, you know, live professional dancers. So it's all a bit wrong and they're all completely flat-chested because they're live professional dancers. So it's all a bit wrong and they're all on separate podiums. And the audience aren't allowed to dance at all. No.

The audience are sitting, not even at their feet, at the foot of the podium. Yeah. Like all sitting cross-legged on the floor, swaying from side to side like in a school assembly. You know, rowing the imaginary boat um it's a really strange scene but the song david you know i'm a bit younger than you to me this song is what the bgs were all about you know having no idea that they actually had

a career years before what was it like for you you? Did you know of them in their original incarnation? I really, really liked Jive Talking when it came out. I thought it was fantastic, and I've always thought it was fantastic. I mean, the older stuff. And the older stuff, yes, I was faintly conscious, probably through my grandma, who was a bit of a potpicker, that they had a little bit of a past, and I would probably be dimly aware of that.

I was aware that they were a kind of pre-existing group. I think at the time, the way that I figured was that they were, in a sense, they were sort of fronting for disco, that they weren't particularly responsible for the disco element. They were just sort of, you know, the people up front and somebody else was taking care of the disco. I mean, certainly the fact that they went to RF Mardin is really interesting because he did a similar brilliant job for Scruti Politi, Cuban Psyche, in 85.

So I suppose that was my kind of impression, that somebody else in the background was dealing with the disco and that they were just sort of providing the voice and the kind of the pop present up front. Because to me, this is like, I don't know, status quo suddenly coming back in 1988 in cycling shorts and doing loads of really fucking good acid house records. Definitely, yeah, pretty much, yeah.

I absolutely loved it. I mean, I think I probably went through a slightly austere phase when I started listening to Bob Dylan. I had to sort of try and dismiss this kind of thing as like a kind of mindless dross for the masses or whatever. But I never could, you know, and unfortunately I got over that within about six months no absolutely yeah you can't with this song it's fucking brilliant what a one-two punch this has been so far it's superb and i mean i think you

know obviously people talk about like appropriation or whatever um and there's two things i mean one is you look at this chart overall and there's so much music by people of color i mean you know it it's a really strong representation there, which makes it slightly more ironic, I suppose, the reaction to Floyd, you know, because there's such kind of great sort of acceptance of like great black soul music, blah, blah. This is kicking open the door to disco,

which is going to, you know, absolutely drench the charts over the next couple of years. I mean, how important was it for disco that its two prime exponents at this time are white people? You know, Bee Gees, KC and the Sunshine Band. That's interesting, isn't it? I think that the Bee Gees were genuinely great songwriters

and genuinely produced something that only they could. And I think I felt that at the time and feel that now. And I think, you know, it's always... I think appropriation can sometimes be a really really positive thing um and i think this is an example of that you know you bring your own sensibility to something rather than just being you know of that particular scene you know well it's just what white people have always done with black music it was what talented white people have

always done with black music right untalented white people copy it and make it shit. Talented white people take a rhythmic black style and add white melody to it, right? Like add European style melody to it. And it never fails. If you can do it, you know, then it works brilliantly. Yeah. It's fashionable to like the 60s early BG stuff, which I mostly don't, right right apart from a few of them i

like new york mining disaster 1941 not not many bad songs about mining disasters but most of the rest is a bit smug timothy yeah timothy's is is better yet but no most of the rest of that stuff is a bit smug and a bit deliberate for me i mean it's it's all competent and it's pretty but it's a little bit simpering and toothsome for my tastes but the funny thing about the 70s bgs i think since the self-appointed connoisseurs got over their collective fear of disco um they've been consistently neither fashionable nor unfashionable which is probably right because on the one hand these are great records um both as studio creations and as mood enhancers uh but on the other hand they're sort of sealed into a pocket of time by the bgs themselves everything about them right the visual trappings

and the audible attitude right which is uh it's linked to so many other things which no longer makes sense right it's not possible to fully connect with the bgs in this century right any more than it's possible to fully connect with j Austen. Because the basic premise on which they rest is now incomprehensible. That version of the sensitive macho man just doesn't play anymore. And the grimly sincere heroic edge to the ballads, it doesn't land right now. So today, you can only enjoy these records as sounds, which is a level at which they're fantastic, you know,

or as unserious dance records. Yeah, I think you're right that they are kind of sealed in that era. For another thing, I mean, they are still great records, and they do survive, but they were almost immediately assailed by parody, you know, everything from that airplane film, you know, stuff like that. You know, there's parody all over the shop. And I think that kind of made it difficult for them to sort of kick on from these particular records

and do, you know, and develop in that way. I think they just had to sort of lay off and then reinvent themselves in some other way later on. Yeah, but that thing, just the pure, delightful, sonic and rhythmic texture of it is all that was ever good about these records. So it doesn't matter. They haven't lost anything, you know. Yeah. and the only thing i don't like about this record is that i associate

it with wedding receptions and family 40th birthday get-togethers when you know when it would basically prove the point that most people shouldn't be dancing at least not not publicly also i don't like this air of non-dancer shaming in this song it's a bit repellent isn't it who says I should be dancing what's it to you, why do you care perhaps I have other less overtly embarrassing

ways of showing off and relieving tension I've stripped to it on many occasions I've not mentioned it on many occasions. I've not mentioned this yet, have I? It's been alluded to a bit, but from about 1998 to 2001, I had a part-time job as a male stripper

with a troupe called the Fraud Monte. I'll get into that a little bit more when we do cover a Top of the Pops from that era. Or when Man to Man with Man Parish. Of course, yeah. You know that's imminent. You know that's imminent. Man to Man meets Al Needham.

But for this song, we used to wear different coloured disco jumpsuits, which were held together by two lengths of wire, which ran all the way from our shoulders down to the bottom of the trousers. And near the end of the song, we sort of teasingly pulled the wire out and then the entire costume would fall to the ground, leaving me in nothing but a red sequined G-string.

Let's just pause and think about that for a moment. Or try and expunge it from our minds. I'm so sorry to have missed it. This is what I was saying earlier. The need for humour in this performance, right? Hold on, Taylor. The need for eroticism, Taylor. That's the word you're looking for there.

But didn't you find that there was something of a difference between what I presume would be the hysterical whooping of a female audience and the deep, dark silence at a strip show populated by men watching a young woman? Yeah, but that's the way it was, man. Yeah, it's healthy. Yeah, it was. We'll talk about that another time.

yeah it was we'll talk about that another time so the following week you should be dancing dropped seven places to number 13 but jumped back up the week later to number five its highest position what the fuck happened there wow the flipper factor yes the follow-up love so, would only get to number one for two weeks in November of this year, but they began their period of dominance when How Deep Is Your Love got to number three for five weeks in late 1977, early 78. You should be dancing You definitely should be dancing. And if you weren't dancing, I want a note on my desk in the morning

from your mother explaining exactly why. The Bee Gees, this week's number six, and Ruby Flipper. And we'll be having a little bit of Flip and a little bit of Ruby a little bit later on. But in the meantime, I mean, it's fairly obvious, isn't it? For months and months, he said that his resistance was low. But in the meantime, I mean, it's fairly obvious, isn't it? For months and months, he said that his resistance was low. So, well, after a while, he had to succumb and start doing it.

Robin Sars did. Let's fall in love Why shouldn't we fall in love? Our hearts are made of it Let's take a chance Why be afraid of it? Edmunds, in front of a backdrop of hanging silvery discs, like if your dad had hung a load of CDs up in the back garden to stop the birds getting at his plums, introduces the next act, Robin Sarstedt and Let's Fall in Love.

Born in Rajasthan, India in 1944, Clive Sarstedt was the youngest brother of Richard, who had five top ten hits and a number one with Well I Ask You in the early 60s, and Peter, who went to number one for four weeks in 1969 with Where Do You Go To My Lovely. After playing in bands in Hamburg, he was signed up by Joe Meek in 1963, releasing a handful of singles under the name Wes Sands, and then when nothing came of that, he spent time in various British and Swedish bands before signing a solo deal with CBS in 1968

under the name Clive Sands. In 1970, he signed to RCA under his original name and teamed up with his brothers for the LP Worlds Apart Together in 1972. But it wasn't until he signed to Decca under the name Robin Sarstedt that he finally made the charts when his cover of Hoagy Carmichael's My Resistance Is Low got to number three in june of this year this is a follow-up a cover of the 1933 eddie duchin song and it's not in the charts yet i must admit i have got a bit of a soft spot for my resistance is low yeah oh me too i really

liked it at the time uh i have to say i was was very, you know, as I say, you know, I didn't really have this kind of sort of, in some ways, it was quite an uninhibited sort of appreciation I had of music. I really didn't mind, you know, what it was, what its provenance was and how it sort of fit into the kind of critical scheme of things. And yeah, I really did like it. This, not so much. I mean, what's odd about this, this first off is he was born in india

his real name's clive yeah he never thinks to do the obvious pathetic it's clearly a sort of piece of you know sort of retro whatever and it's like there's not been any obligation to dress in appropriate some sort of appropriate costume or no it's almost like you know it's almost like he did but it got ruined at the dry cleans at the last minute. He turns up in just absolutely Mr. 76, isn't he, with his man necklace and these horrible blue flared strides. I don't think that the machinery is capable of being built. They could excavate and recycle it

even as some sort of kitsch. Well, that Marge Simpson necklace that he's wearing. Yes, that's what I've got in my notes. It must be a stab at androgyny, but it's slightly out of time because by 1976, Macho is back, right? But he can't be expected to know that with his powder blue slacks, you know, made out of some unbreathing test tube fibre, keeping all that Sarstedt sweat on the inside and a thin

white plastic belt he looks like he's just got off a cruise ship where he's been doing fly me to the moon for two years round the Cape of Good Hope one eye open for tipsy widows. He does look like the Lothario of the tea dance doesn't he

yeah he's got this weird make up on as well what he looks like is if ray langton from coronation street decided to try his hand at drag but then sort of lost interest round about the collarbone yeah it's not for me he clearly looks like he's gonna try and sweep away a rich widow and get her into his mg spitfire and get his hands on a premium bond that rusband left behind see i was always fearful that one day i'd end up on chart music having to talk about peter sars there because where do you go to my lovely is in my five most hated records of all time and i just can't bear to hear it but it's quite a surprise to suddenly find

oneself staring down the barrel of robin sarset which i didn't really expect it's like having to talk about ian hitler or chris mcgarvey it's just it's impossible to be fair to him you know um so i don't really want to like this record or dislike it which is how it turned out it's like a cyclone of not giving a shit by the end of it i was poking myself in the palm with a drawing pin just to stay awake you know it it does puzzle me though i mean just again just gonna you know come a bund or maybe a topper or something like that you know to do absolutely nothing and to dress, not even in, you know, so emphatically in

some sort of, like, bad stab at 1976ism. It's very, you know, and I'm sure that's not the way to win over the kind of the wealthy grannies either. No, you should have been in some kind of, like, Aurea Commander's outfit. Because, I mean, this is a song from the 30s as... It's weird, there's also

around this time, it's almost like this first flickering of a sort of post-modernism, something like that. I mean, you've song from the 30s as um it's weird there's also around this time it's almost like this first flickering of a sort of post-modernism something like that I mean you've also got is it Manhattan Transfer around this chanson de l'eau and this kind of a former gracious age of art deco and elegance or whatever um yeah there's one or two other things in the show even it kind of like hinted that as well but um um I mean it's it was a time actually when despite Sarstedt's best efforts trousers were beginning to kind of taper a little bit you know about 1976

and it's almost like people were looking back casting back for sort of stylistic ideas to the sort of the pre-flair sort of generation. I think this is the last period of time when you could wear flares on television and not immediately get laughed at.

So it's the last swish of the trouser leg, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. But it's stuff like this, stuff on this level. It's just casting around for something. It's capitalising on... You know there was that vogue for like 20s and 30s styles like bieber and all that you know yes as if the culture was just a bit stuck and just looking backwards which is what culture always does in a you know in a bit of downtime you know so for a

couple of years this kind of slightly smarmy semi-ironic tea room crooning was not a big deal, but it was an option. You know, you could do it. Peter Skellen was never off BBC Two, you know what I mean? We're one year removed from Whispering Grass by Donna Stel. There you go. Let's not forget. And a bit of it was nostalgia for pensioners.

Although, of course, at the time, this stuff was only about as old as this program is to us you know but it was yeah i mean it's it's just a thing if you've got he's just casting around for a thing to be or a thing to do and he's just landed on this you know i don't think it really means anything to him it's just you look at it it and think, get that man a sassafras. In fact, get him a hundred so he dies slumped over a table at Lion's Corner.

Pennies from Heaven was around, wasn't it? That was another big one as well. Non-Oz would have liked this. He's a nice young man. He's got my necklace. Yes! Now that belt though, the belt is the real crime yes the white plastic belt it's horrendous he needs to go to you know in east london there's loads of leather

goods shops right most of them specialize either in belts or shoes or or bags just that a whole shop full of that thing. Best one I ever saw was about 20 years ago out near the old West Ham football ground. There was a belt shop, and I saw this with my own eyes. A belt shop with a big cheaply painted shop front with the James Bond logo on it. And the name of the shop, 007 Licence to Sell Belts.

and the name of the shop, 007 Licence to Sell Belts. And that's where Clive's so-called Robin's arse texture should have gone, instead of just using the placky one that came with his foster brother's slacks. Yeah. You can't do that, look at me, pearl necklace, and then accessorise with that. You can't do it, people won't take you seriously. It wants to go somewhere like Mr. Bo Jangles in Glasgow. Yeah, you want something that looks like it should go

around a horse's neck. Yeah, belts were big bastard things at this time. I wouldn't want someone to take off their belt at that point. If you were Robin Sarstedt's son, you'd just do what the fuck you liked, wouldn't you? It would be like being hit on the arse with a straw.

I bet Uncle Peter's got a proper one, though. You can bet on it. It has to be said that one positive of this performance is the input of the top of the Pops Orchestra with the Ladybirds because, you know, this is right in their wheelhouse, isn't it? As British people pretending to be Americans would say. Yeah. It really is.

And it has to be said that just like when they did My Resistance Is Low, the top of the pop's version is far superior than the single. Always the mark of a great record. One really strange thing at the end of this song is you can actually hear the audience clapping right at the end for about three or four seconds and then it's completely submerged by the canned applause that Top of the Pops always whack on.

Which is very odd. The one type of cheering and clapping. That is a very very good spot. Only a Top of the Pops-ologist of distinction and refinement would have spotted that. Thank you. So the following week and for every week after that let's fall in love failed to chart although it became a hit in the benelux countries

and he was never heard from again why shouldn't we fall in love now is the time for it while we are young let's fall in love bold, bold, bold let's fall in love that's Robin Sarsted on its way to another top 30 smash I've no doubt at all

now we've got some people who've come a very very long way indeed they've come all the way from Germany, where they're an absolute wow, a sensational, however they say it in that particular language. They are Cannes, and they want some more. I wonder if Cannes will get into the top ten.

Ha, ha, ha, ha. Everybody plays the game But you don't have to say the name Every day comes a new rain Boys and girls just ain't the same After being completely wrong about Robin Sarstedt's chart possibilities, Edmonds, still alone, wants to introduce us to a band who are deemed a wow and sensational in their fatherland. Not bothering to work out the translation and according to Google Translate, their I'm being drunken and racer-ish combo, Can and I Want More. Can and I Want More.

Formed in Cologne in 1968, Can were an experimental rock band who later became known as the pioneers of kraut rock, which is like rock but with more flute solos. By 1974, they had recorded six LPs, but none had made the slightest indentation on the UK charts. However, after signing to Virgin Records in 1975 and making an appearance on the Old Grey Whistle Test in the same year, they started to get known about.

And this, the lead-off single from their eighth LP, Flow Motion, has seen the band having a bit of a go at that disco thing everyone's been going on about. And after creeping into the top 40 and jumping from number 39 to number 30 this week here they are in the top of the pop studio war is a bit of a treat isn't it david it is indeed yes um yeah rock music is set with more flute solos i think that's the tl semicolon dr version of my book i I would have to say, definitely. Excellent. I would say fewer chord changes and more flute solos. Yes, there is the S, I suppose, if we're going to really kind of fill it out.

But yeah, definitely. A bit upset with Edmund's introduction. Very, very upset. For obvious reasons. But, you know, I assume that the German for wow would be wow, but with an umlaut. Yeah, wu, yeah. Wuv. I think he just assumed that they were kind of massive in Germany. But, I mean, they did have, you know,

they did have like one hit with Spoon, which is based on the TV theme that they did. But, you know, this is the whole thing about the whole Krak Rock movement in general. Even Krakwerk is just how little regard there was and remains for them, you know, in West Germany at the time, in Germany today. It's quite, there should be statues of Cannes in Cologne. But, you know, I interviewed Jack Leibniz towards the end of his life, and he was just puttering around the city, completely unrecognised,

even in the kind of studio where he was working, you know, the workplace there. It's, you know, that's the kind of slight irony. Yeah, you know, the top tin joke. I mean, I reckon it's probably his best joke of the evening, although that's, you know, obviously a very extremely low bar. Yeah, that's best ballet company in Mansfield, isn't it? Yeah. Pretty much, yeah.

And you've got to say, you know, on reflection, thank fuck it's Edmonds doing that link and not DLT or Kenny Everett. Yes, yes. Steve Priest's Bismarck helmet would have been brought out again, wouldn't it? Yes, no doubt, no doubt, yes. Yes, it's actually relatively reigned in. There is that small mercy.

The first odd thing about this recording is that they're down to a kind of a four-piece at this point. You know, Diamond Suzuki has left a while back and in fact on this they kind of share vocal duties. But of the four guys on stage, Michal Caroli, the guitarist,

he was actually on safari at the time when they were asked to appear on Top of the Pops. No! So goody! And there was no way of calling him back for the night, just for that night. So what they do instead is they just get these kind of geezers, sort of roadies, somebody in their entourage, and he plays guitar instead and they get away with it because who knows or really cares? You know, you care about what Michael Carolli looks like.

I mean, if it had been Dave Hill, I mean, you know, that would have been a different story. So he's essentially the Ken in Cannes, isn't he? Yeah. Wasn't the story that they deliberately picked someone who looked as little like him as possible, just so that none of their fans would think that, you know, they were trying to pull a fast one? Oh, yeah they weren't trying to get a kind of career lookalike

yeah but you know they probably had fairly limited choice in any case yeah i i would have watched this episode at the time and i don't think this oddly enough would have made that much of an impression on me i mean probably precisely you know some of the reasons that make can very great you know the kind of decenteriveness in, there's no kind of focal point. You know, there's no start there. I mean, that is what makes them, for me, one of the top five most important rock groups ever. But at the time, also, you know,

there was a lot of kind of Euro stuff, one-hit-one-deer sort of, you know, various things, all sorts of things drifting through the charts, you know, things like Focus or whatever. And I would have probably filed it under that. Oh, yeah, a German group attempted to have a go at pop. Yeah, yeah, another one. They're dressed.

I mean, you've seen Wings of Design. You know Bruno Gansi's Angel. And eventually he falls to earth. He trades in his kind of angel suit of armour at a crappy second-hand clothes shop and gets all these really dodgy mismatchings of, you know, duds. They look like that. They're dressed awfully.

I mean, Jackie Lieberzeit in his kind of Hawaiian shirt, Ermin Schmidt in that kind of God knows what top or whatever. And, you know, they just, I think, you know, they look, it was almost like, well, nondescript really. They make no impression whatsoever. But this is just such an immense single. It's almost, I mean I mean yeah you say like they're having a kind of a go at disco but it's got this kind of idiosyncratic sort of robotic

quality a lot of which actually derives from the sheer precision of Jackie Liebzite's drumming which you know is just the thing that kind of underpins them you know throughout their time I mean they're kind of winding down a bit at this point I can I mean they've been around for eight or nine years and Jackie Liebzite had this philosophy he said that a group should only last about the same age as a dog you know and so at this point you know and they've only got two or three more years so this is a sort of you know this is a sort of slight return in a sense their sort of former glories um but um it's um yeah it's it's it's foundational um and sadly as a kid at the time, I would have probably been as underwhelmed by it as Edmonds is.

I suspect a lot of viewers at the time will have taken Can as a kind of Teutonic Manfred Mann's earth band. Do you know what I mean? Because they're clearly older men in non-age appropriate clothes playing a sort of shiny, technically adept variation on groovy rock and roll, but clearly coming from somewhere else, you know. And it might have been a bit much to ask for a 70s primetime TV audience

to consciously spot the difference between the sort of the slightly forced nature of Blinded by the Light, you know, good record though it is, and the way that I Want More seems to just slip and slither directly out of Cannes collection. 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. Active imagination just straight into your ears, you know. Well, I mean, you'd hope that at least some of them were able to feel it when that great gliding keyboard hook starts up and the song picks up that sort of weird unearthly momentum, you know. But I don't know. Yeah, it's weird. I mean, yes, it probably to sort of, you know, Anglo-American ears, it just sounds sort of coming out of the blue. It just sounds slightly off-kilter.

Perhaps it might be mistaken for a kind of slightly cack-handed attempt at disco, you know, but being slightly offbeat or whatever. And I'm sure that I would have found Manfred Mann and the keyboard far more bedazzling than Ermin Schmidt, who just seems to kind of like put in the occasional kind of karate chop. But the fact is, if he'd wanted to,

Ermin Schmidt would have out-progged the fuck, if he'd felt like it, out of Manfred Mann. He would have been a far superior player, but he saw no point in all that kind of ostentatious kind of, you know, flight of the bumblebee excursions up and down the keyboard. I mean, to him, that was just a kind of nonsense. He, you know, he saw things in a kind of conceptual way. He was an absolutely accomplished keyboardist, but saw no reason to kind of flaunt that. and that's one of the reasons when I think that was the sort of underpinning philosophy of a lot of the krautrock groups and I think that is why a lot of post-punk people who'd suffered throughout the sort of early 70s if you're Emerson Lake and Palmer's and what have you and Rick Waitman's they really appreciated the sort of conceptual approach of

krautrock yeah so when did you get into can thenid not until about a couple of years later when i became a kind of student and a sort of you know and i'd started reading the music press and i became a boy of discernment and what have you and i would have raided future days from the um leeds record library and sort of whacked it onto a right c90 cassette you know i used to do that thing i used to borrow like you could borrow three albums at a time so i'll just buy like a pack of um you know c90 cassettes and just um and just kill music yeah that's right yeah i was killing music yeah and it was illegal um but um obviously you know it's obviously very different now with mp3s because the sort of the nature of the quality i mean the quality you know i eventually would have bought all of these albums because the you know sort of dod of dodgy C90 recording is fine to be going on with.

But eventually you do want the kind of smooth stereophonic experience of vinyl. Yeah. I mean, my mate was well into Canon in the early 90s and he tried to introduce me to them. But he made the big mistake of showing me the cover of Egi Bam Yaseasse which has the most early 70s cover ever and i just ran away from it um my loss because then later on i heard hallelujah and it was like oh fuck this is this is good well in the grand scheme of things this is a pretty lightweight can track i mean it's you know it's a bit of a gig but so, there's no other record on this programme with the same mastery of space and balance and movement. Not even the carefully sculpted and super-produced number one

has quite that same delicacy to it. This just breathes and twinkles differently to everything else on this program not and not everything else not just in 1976 anywhere ever you know if you separate the moving parts you would never be able to put them back together again so that they worked right it's almost miraculous um but partly partly why this particular track works is it's one of very few examples of a stereotypically European and highly cerebral white band meeting funk halfway. The great too-seldom-told story in so-called black music

is how often those musicians would take steps towards the kind of electronic experimentalism that's usually associated with a white european aesthetic and they do that to move the music forward without losing any of what it already had you know and this is a rare example of traffic in the opposite direction, which doesn't end up sounding air sats or forced or, or feeble, you know? And you can't ask for anything more on the top of the pops. It's like suddenly a proper,

smart, sane, talented people have walked into this Woolworth's wasteland. And, you know, a little bit of genuine invention and, and wit has sparked and set everything al And, you know, a little bit of genuine invention and wit has sparked and set everything alight, you know. I mean, it's unlikely that this changed too many people's lives

because it's not that kind of can record and it doesn't really communicate anything. And as a 14-year-old, the sight of these people, like, you know, my A-level English teacher looked like Ermin Schmidt, you know what I mean? But it's not like you wouldn't react the same way you might to the Sex Pistols. But still, this is one of the great out-of-place performances on top of the pops. And one of the things that they're doing that's ingenious is that they're not filling space.

They're creating space. They're creating a context in which events can happen, in which flow motion can i mean you know they you know like jackie leapside is about that you know all plays kind of discrete role and they create a space in which you know you know kind of collective energy can happen yeah and also although i mean this isn't quite can's last hurrah because i mean they've still got not quite still got animal waves to come from the saw delight album which for me is the last really great thing they ever did but it's pretty close um but you can almost diminish in your own head how great this really is when you think of it you know in comparison to some of their more large scale stuff and you know you can think of it like a genre exercise like the type

they used to sort of you know meander into once the initial drive was wearing off. But really, it's not like that. It does precisely what it's trying to do, which is to compress all the various aspects of the can sound into a tiny, shiny ball, which can then be rolled down the long hallway into the room where the general public are you know i mean well actually no i say trying to i don't think they're even trying to do it

i think for can the the sort of say the sound of early georgio moroder or you know american funk was just another color to be used and once you've created this sound, it's needlessly self-limiting not to let your record be commercial. Do you know what I'm saying? As soon as you start playing I Want More, it's clear that that's what the music wants. That's where this track wants

to go. The really selfish thing would be to force it somewhere else, lest someone accuse you of being commercial. Yeah. And how do the producers of Top of the Pops try and put all this over to the general public, Satatone? They put a big fucking mencle red wash on it, don't they?

Oh, yes, yes, absolutely, yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's the go-to filter really isn't it um yes the the freaky filter yeah yeah but when you see it on top of the pops it's like a little acknowledgement that the group is something out of the ordinary yeah because i remember they did it on zigzag sputnik yeah yes yes yeah yeah it always looks like the inside of someone's head who's just about to commit a really nasty act of road rage. Germans on teller, singing! Taylor is right, actually, about later can.

I mean, it certainly is diminished by the standards of their early work, but it's definitely worth seeking out, and there are definitely kind of strong moments. They themselves, I think, were becoming disaffected with the project by then. Part of it was multi-track recording, whatever. they in the early days they just jammed together you know in the same room and then sort of sorted all out in the editing suite but then they were kind of like coming in and doing like separate bits or whatever and it was getting a little bit more

conventional the way they're recording and i think they realized you know that that wasn't really the way that they should have gone they should have sort of stuck to their guns really and and just not you know and not necessarily availed of new technology just because it was there. And they're getting on a bit at this point. I mean, it's sad to think that two of the guys there on that stage have died of old age, you know, Jackie Leedsite and Holger Schuichai.

And Ermin Schmidt would have been, you know, he's one of the sort of senior figures really now in rock and pop music. He was born in, I think it was about 1937, I think that sort of time. Jesus. You know. Yeah, yeah, Holger and Ermin were in their 30s

when they formed the group, weren't they? Yeah, yeah. Which I always found quite inspirational when I was about 30. Yeah. It's not too late. Yeah, they're well into their 30s at this point. Yeah.

This is the song that brought us to the dance, isn't it, David? This is why you chose this one, isn't it? Oh, yes, absolutely, yeah. You know, just this kind of freakish sort of interface between, you know, kraut rock, you know, preceded by Stockhouse and whatever, eventually finding its way into the kind of, you know, underneath the strobe lights of 1976 Top of the Pops.

Yeah, go on, plug your book Top of the Pops. Yeah. Go on, plug your book. Well, Future Days. Yeah. Yes. It is considered by some to be a book about krautrock. In fact, everybody, really. And yeah, it's still out there.

It's been reproduced in various different languages. Spanish, Chinese, Japanese. Japanese, but not German. Not German? No, they're not interested. You go to Germany and it's, I'll say this, you go to West Germany, I was out there, I go to Germany, there's no West Germany anymore. I was out in Berlin doing some research around the book and I was looking around at all the kind of, the names are plastered up on

the billboards or whatever you know and it's like bon jovi it's red hot chili peppers the only umlaut i could find anywhere was in motorhead yes you know there's just so there's and you know you just talk to people and they're absolutely no idea about this this heritage they've got um you know and part of the whole idea that was like behind the creation of kraut rock you know part that they all kind of separately came to was to create a music that um that like you know that that wasn't sort of dependent all the old kind of anglo-american blues based uh cliches or whatever and it was west german in origin well you know and if the idea was to kind of galvanize german pop culture in that way then in a sense mission failed because you know it was only really in the rest of the world you know always it was the rest of the

world has always been far more interested in krautrock than germans themselves so the following week i want more nipped up one place to number 29 its highest position the follow-up a cover of silent night failed to chart in november of this year and they never troubled the charts again. We were going to have them actually as the first group on the programme, but we can't have a can opener, not on top of the pubs, and they want a little bit more. Here, tell me something, what noise does a sheet make? Bar, bar.

That's all right, that's all right, because we've got 16 bars coming from Stylus Sticks. I rock on a love song It saves me heart It saves it all It tells the truth Edmund, now allowed to stand over the kids, gets in another shit metallurgical joke before sk skillfully working

in an ovine reference as he introduces the next act who are the Stylistics with 16 bars. Formed in Philadelphia by members of the Percussions and the Monarchs in 1968, the Stylistics signed to Avco Records in 1970 and were teamed up with the producer Tom Bell who at the time was making a name for himself as the producer of the Delphonics and as an arranger for the OJs on Philadelphia International Records they became an immediate fixture on the American charts until their association with Bell ended in 1974

but they became far more popular in the UK, making their first appearance in our charts when Betcha By Golly Wow got to number 13 in July of 1972. That led to them notching up 11 more chart hits on the bounce up to this point, including 7 top 10 hits and 3 weeks at number 1 with I Can't Give You Anything But My Love in August of 1975. This is the follow up to Can't Help Falling In Love, the cover of the 1961 Elvis tune which got to number 4 in May of 1976. places this week from number 19 to number 12 and we are being treated

to a still rare for the time promo video of the lads in their hometown that Edmonds introduction Taylor that was a bit of audience participation which is always nice to see isn't it? The participation being stand there while Noel Edmonds hits

you over the head with a microphone and acts as though you're a foolish ant on his shoe. Yeah, it's very Travis that was, wasn't it? Yeah, just... A rare treat to see America on video, isn't it, at this time? Absolutely. Massive buildings and all sorts.

Yes. I think it's part of the appeal of these slightly mid-range imported TV detective series, you know, Canon, Starsky & Hutch or whatever. It's simply the chance to see America. I mean, this is the pre-Freddie Laker era. And I can absolutely honestly say that I would have felt that in 1976 that my chances of visiting America were about roughly the same as there were my chances of going to the moon.

They really were. It was, you know, there's that real sense of distance, that sense of transatlantic distance. You know, there's that real sense of distance that sense of transatlantic distance there's that slightly different film stock and it's got that kind of sort of wavery kind of grainy feel and it really brings home the kind of the otherness of urban America

it just seems such a far off place they didn't pick the nicest day for it it has to be said no absolutely not no they didn't I mean this is it very little thought seems to have gone into the sort of video concept of it all really let's address the elephant in the room here why aren't they wearing the same clothes as each other that's just fucking wrong to me yeah

it's weird isn't it in the uh in the promotional uh image in the child rundown they've got these powder blue suits on with um lapels so big you could cut a modern day suit out of them with a nice bit of white piping, it's like oh well done lads nicely turned out, it's obviously dressed down Friday for the stylistics isn't it yeah but they don't look happy

they look like they've been forced out of bed and out onto this hill on a fucking miserable day at about 8 o'clock in the morning. It's like, yeah, we're sorry about the weather, lads, but we've booked the cameraman. It's your only free day this week, so get out there and click those fingers.

It'll keep your hands from going numb. Even the little guy who looks like a black chairman Mao, he doesn't seem too chuffed to be there. And he looks like he would normally be a bundle of fun that guy yeah but he's got a sour face you want to chuck him under the chin go uh come on little soldier give us one more take you can have a king cone but although they're not wearing the matching suits what they are wearing is pretty crazy like crazy enough to make up for it like i really i do miss the days when you could wear a mustard colored outfit from head to toe and still walk proudly you know or burnt peach

or whatever it is tangerine i mean it would be nice to at least have the option yeah like when cars were actual colors you know imagine the stylistics just like sitting at home and just going oh fucking hell I'm wearing this really weird fucking outfit. And then ringing up each other and finding out they're wearing exactly the same thing at the same time, even though they're all over America. It's like that

episode of Car 54, where are you, where Toddy and Muldoon are worried that they're copying each other all the time. And so they start eating Chinese food while standing on their head. And then find out that the other one's doing exactly the same thing it's strange though like you say it's such a sort of a functory effort really in terms of like you say the weather's shit no never mind i'll just go ahead and do it anyway and you know is it a budgetary thing i think it's just that people just completely indifferent in lots of ways in 76 you know from

all sides of pop and rock to the kind of visual side yeah there's a bit of effort into the sort of sleeve but but it's something like this there's no sense of you know the language of you know the visual language or anything it's just like you know look it's filmed you've got the city in the background what more do you want because you know by this time the stylistics are on the rails in america but they're doing very well over here so they're probably just oh it's only for england it's raining that's what they're doing very well over here. So they probably just thought, oh, it's only for England. It's raining. That's what they're used to.

Yeah, yeah. Just wave a tall building in front of those limey twats, and they've got their mouths hanging open. But having said they were quite right, if they thought, look, it's America in the background, they'll go, wow, for that. They're absolutely, I would have done that. Definitely, yeah. I mean, by this time, the stylistics have gone from soulful protest of the early 70s

to chitlins in a basket. Yeah, yeah. Definitely. And that's working for them in the UK. When they last turned up, we glossed over them, didn't we? Out of embarrassment. Do you remember that? It was a great act with a lousy

record. Now they're back with a song about one afternoon in the life of Reginald Bozenkett. I'm currently appearing in Run For Your Wife at the Haymarket. But I'm not that bothered about this one either.

I have to admit, I do like this record. But you know, it doesn't feel like this has been a particularly great top of the pop so far when you actually watch it but when we sit there talking about it you realize no there's loads of great stuff and i think there's a bit of a sort of sarsted ruby flipper deflation effect but this doesn't really leap out as immediately better than anything that's been on before the way a philly soul record usually does on 70s top of the pops and i think it's partly that the song is not quite as expressive

and intense as it could be it's very circular and very basic and it's slightly kitsch in comparison to a lot of that genre as a song right i mean if you if you change the words to this song so that they were about not dropping litter or living in racial harmony you could have had primary school kids see you could put it in a pusky do you know what i mean just singing it around the piano in assembly um but i mean a lot of stylistic songs are a little bit like that like right on the borderline of soupy kitsch but redeemed by the sound and the delivery um but it's a thin line to walk and you can be swept over it by the slightest thing and part of the problem here is that the sound is it's optical sound from the 16

millimeter film that's been telecined um of the video so it's really blurry and lo-fi yeah so it comes out sounding really mashed up and all the strings and the harmonies turn into a bit of a mush um and it flattens out all the subtlety and it sort of keeps your arm's length emotionally because you know the point of connection with this this record is that sort of yearning emotional delivery, which is sort of flattened out a bit. So, you know, you just find yourself looking at the togs and the miserable Pennsylvania climate. You know, the fucking Delaware River or whatever that is

lying in the background like a grey corpse. Yeah, I mean, it's distinctly lethargic. It hoves dangerously close to sort of lena martell p's and lee territory at times you know but it's but it's utterly redeemed by the kind of sort of unearthly falsetto grace of the lead vocal you know for me i mean it's you know that that's really that's the sort of it's it's huge redeeming redeeming feature it's interesting you know again you know you talk about like a six little camera and graininess, it's a huge redeeming feature. It's interesting, you know, again, you know, you talk about like a six-inch little camera.

And graininess is, there's a distinct sense of graininess that's to do with like being in the past. There would have been a sort of another layer of graininess, the way that I would have listened to this at the time, would have been on a sort of like dodgy non-FM transistor in the 70s. And I almost like kind of, you know, and, you know, that's the prison, that's the filter which listened to all, most pop, you know, at that time, you know,

except for actually Top of the Pops itself, you know. And so, yeah, so graininess sort of triggers a sort of Proustian rush in me, I guess. Yeah. And the other thing is with black music, you know, finally the tempo's starting to pick up a bit, isn't it? And the stylistics are just carrying on doing what they've done before.

We're going to see an interesting compare and contrast with another band in their genre in a while. And yeah, there's a pronounced difference, isn't there? Yeah. Oh, and we can't leave this without discussing that brief cut- in of the audience which is like it's like the before picture in an advert for methamphetamine it's like you couldn't have picked a more lethargic and dreary looking group of people

the video cuts out we go back to the studio with a load of load of the girls yeah who've obviously been herded into a corner and told to dance. It's hard. It seems complicated. You would have thought in the 70s that if there was any chance of a kind of a ticky, you know, you can be on top of the pops, you think, would I? Yeah.

You know, I was 13, you know, right at the front there. You would have thought that people would have sort of like, you know, crawled over broken glassware, you know, fought with each other like tigers to get on in that little spot you know to be in that little 15 20 minutes like being on the stage but they always look at this in this era and across this show and across the shows around this era they just all look like they've been kind of busting under sufferance or they thought they were there for top of the form or something like that you know they just look they just do not look like pop people. They look bewildered, slightly resentful about being there.

They sway in a sort of like, you know, mandatory sort of manner, you know, like a kind of like school teachers, you know, kind of at the, you know, the kids kind of like, you know, school band or whatever. It's just very strange. And, you know, it's strange to think now,

you know, these will, they already look the age that they are now, in a sense. It's almost like they're mentally voting Brexit already, some of these people. It's strange because you sometimes hear this from that sort of generation. We had our fun, you know. We had to dance. We had to have a good time.

It didn't all start with you. We had a fun as well. And you look at things and, no, you didn't. No. Not in the evidence of this. Yeah, it is full-on song role replacement service once again isn't it oh yeah it looks like the picture has gone into black and white but it's not it's just that's what they look like it's like people talk about you know why punk had to happen and it was nothing to do with prog rock or youth unemployment right it was this it was this

poll of pacified unmotivated nothingness you know dressed in gray and blue gray just shifting from foot to foot and dreaming of ufos because what else is there? My theory is that, in fact, there probably were kind of like sort of, you know, hyperkinetic attention seekers out there, you know, the sort of deely bopper types who then unleashed in the early 80s Top of the Pops, but they were deliberately filtered out of the process. It would have been sort of unseemly to have people

getting too kind of, you know, off their rockers, you know, on top of the pops and they perhaps deliberately selected a kind of a more subdued crowd or dictated you know this kind of subdued level of like response from the audiences. As with all soulful vocal groups of the era

the thing I like about watching any footage of bands like the Stylistics and stuff because there's always one and it's usually the bass singer who looks like an absolute fucking murderer. You can just imagine him in the open air gym

at Attica, just wearing a do-rag and lifting a barbell the size of a pig. There's always one. There's one little cute one and there's one absolutely fucking hard bastard who'd just rip your head off as soon as look at you. So the following week,

16 bars nudged up one place to number 11 and would eventually get to number seven for two weeks in September. It would be their last ever top 10 hit, however. The follow-up, You'll Never Get to Heaven, only got to number 24 in December of this year. The follow-up to that, $7,000 and You, also got to number 24 in April of 1977.

And after that, they were done in the UK charts. This is the love song In 60 bars This is my love song in sixty bars. To tell the world that I'm really going on you. That's what happens when you get fluff on the needle with stylus sticks. What a beautiful song, what lovely words. And if you really like lyrics, if you like a really good love song and you like to see somebody singing words and really making them meaningful, just listen to this next song. Edmund acts the right cunt once again,

commenting this time on the lyrical content of the next single, an instrumental. Ho, ho, ho! It's Aria by Acker Bilk. Born Bernard Bilk in Pensford Somerset in 1929, Acker Bilk was a former worker at the Will's Cigarette Factory in Bristol, who learned to play the clarinet while undertaking national service. After working as a blacksmith by day and jazz musician by night, he moved to London in 1951 to play in Ken Collier's Jazzmen, but hated it there and went back home to form the Chew Valley Jazzmen. And then he returned with them to the capital later that year under the name Mr Acker Bilk and the Paramount Jazz Band.

jazz band. By the late 50s, Bilk found himself as a key component of the trad jazz boom and he made his chart debut in 1960 when Somerset got to number five in March of that year. This kicked off a run of eight top 30 hits throughout the early 60s which peaked in 1961 when Stranger on the Shore got to number two for three weeks in January of that year, held off the top spot by The Young Ones by Cliff Richard. It did much better in America though, when it became the second UK single to get to number one there after Vera Lynn's Auf Wiedersehen Sweetheart in 1952. A year later, he appeared in not one, but two films.

A guest appearance in It's Trad Dad And then him and his band playing prisoners in the film Band of Thieves But when the beat boom kicked in he was done as a chart act Until now Because this single, an instrumental cover of the 1975 French hit single That was performed by Sheila B Devotion when she was just known as Sheila, has become his first hit in 13 years when his cover of A Taste of Honey got to number 16 in February of 1963.

It's up this week from number 44 to number 34, and here he is on his own in the studio, accompanied by the Terpsichorean wonderment of Pate at a ruby flipper. And the disorientating thing about this, when it starts off, this has got practically the same tune and chords as 16 bars. Yes. Did you notice this? Yes.

So it's like, it really catches you off guard. It's like he's done an instant cover. Yes. But to be honest, I preferred his version of the Mr. Men theme. Yes. I know he's sort of a quietly, mildly respected old gentleman of British jazz. Old Cathy, as he was known in the dressing room. But, you know, in his day, back before rebellious musicians were really rebellious

bunking off a straight career to play clarinet like a black american or you know a little tiny bit like a black american was actually a pretty remarkable thing to do so this is a genuine music lover you know right here not somebody picking up a career off the peg uh you know or taking a lifestyle off the peg like a lot of younger musicians but in the end british jazzers are like french rockers do you know what i mean it never really works because the instinctive fire just isn't there oh hang on whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa roy castle he's saying he didn't have dedication it rather than taking the the building blocks of the form and starting again in your own original style a la can it's usually a case of just perfected your swing an object

that's always just slightly out of reach do you know what i mean and what's interesting is a few years after this the british blues scene which was very similar and could have gone the same way would find a way to bust out of this dead end right with a combination of uh youth and new technology but it never really happened with british jazz and by this point british jazz is forked in two directions there's the older fellas still chuntering away with a pint of heavy ale and a fisherman's sweater which is very much where uh mr ackerbilt belongs and then young jazz heads uh abandoning pure jazz for like prog and and art rock which i guess is one way to live with the awkward desexualized reserve of british jazz which is to play a consciously awkward and desexualized style of music and although you know i like a lot of soft machine stuff and that. It ain't on the corner.

And neither, it's fair to say, is this, right? It's just him stood there like a statue or a monument with pigeons shitting on his head, you know. Which is maybe why he wears the Bobbler hat. I mean, it's a bit like being in port sunlight or bourneville or whatever it's like it's nice but it's creepy and you're sort of aware that you're inside a quaint facsimile but yeah another one another one for the nuns nuns are being served this was always the trade-off yeah between the kind of the grand and the kids. And yeah, and this would have really depressed me at the time.

It's sort of, you know, the slowing of the pace. You know, it's all sort of, you know, living in houses. We did it at that time of like pre-war furniture. You know, most of the furniture in my house was from the 1920s and 30s. And I think that was the case for a lot of people. And, you know, and it was like having to sit through Charlie Chester's radio soapbox, you know,

before the sort of top 20 rundown on Sundays. All those kind of redolences of like, you know, pre-pop time or whatever. And like you say, yeah, they're for the sort of grandparents and what have you. What's interesting for me, actually, about, I mean, now, I mean, I do actually like Strangers on the Shore a lot, actually. And it's interesting, you mentioned, like, it's trad dad. And there was that moment just before the Beatles emerged and when no one really knew what the 60s was going to be about, you know, It's Trad Dad. And there was that moment just before the Beatles emerged.

And when no one really knew what the 60s was going to be about, you know, in the UK, pop-wise. I mean, you know, people weren't anticipating this beat revolution. I mean, no one was taking it for granted at all that rock and roll was just going to kind of carry on in some sort of, you know, in various kind of mutations. You know, that could have been a passing thing. And Trad Jazz was seriously mooted as the way ahead for the 1960s and something like akabil could have been seen as something as a kind of cornerstone now it's interesting that obviously that's not what happened um you know it's strange to think of like trajads gaining that kind of sort of currency but he found a way of converting it into some sort of pop form or whatever

and yeah people thought that that might happen a bit odd like you're kind of like ornate coleman and people like that albert eiler doing their thing out in america and then trad jazz over the uk um but then of course the beatles happened and and that's squelched everything basically it squelched all these kind of alternative 60s you know some of which could have been quite radical some of which could have been pretty pretty stayed so it's ironic there's now this delay of about 14 years and then it's like the Beatles are definitely not coming back now I think 76 and then you realize that the game's up there and in a similar situation where at this point nobody really quite knows again what is going to happen next you know and it's like this show offers a kind of range of like potential some pretty kind of dismal options really so

maybe Acker thinks okay you know maybe my sort of you know maybe the kind of dismal options really. So maybe Acker thinks okay, maybe my sort of maybe the kind of wheels turn and my numbers up again. And then Johnny Rotten came along and fucked it up for him. The only two other surviving Acker-Bilk things in the culture I can think of, do you remember when you were doing the Stackers

advert? Do you remember when Pringles were Stackers? Yes. And they did a big sort of like jingle around Stackers and of course Stackers rhymes with acker and so they have a kind of brief snatch of acker bilk in there playing a bit of strangers on the shore whatever so he makes a brief appearance there nice yeah they went to paul mccartney but he said i won't do that right now please but the other one is he's on the klf chill out album you know there's a kind of um strangers on the shore is a kind of recurring motif in that kind of great ambient flow. I didn't know until I was doing the research for this

that this was a Sheila B. Devotion song. No. What a shame Acker didn't have a go at Spacer a couple of years later. Yes. An interesting way of putting this song over, I believe, because Acker's standing there in a green waistcoat and a bowler hat and with his beard and that and that outfit he looks the dead spit of the logo of the notre dame fighting irish american football team um but yeah they've drafted in uh patty out of ruby flipper and you know as

the show goes on we're going to find out that they're they're going to run ruby flipper into the ground until they get rid of them aren aren't they? Yeah, definitely, yeah. They're working him hard. They're on quite a lot. And they use video effects to have Patty dancing in the background, an overlay, if you will. The thing is, that's obviously supposed to be a bit of visual sweetening because I think nobody wants to look at this motionless old man for three minutes.

But in a way, it spoils it because that's sort of what's cool about him like he's not like a human do you know what i mean he's just this unchanging emotionless silhouette and whenever you see him from like you know at any point in his career he's just standing there he's got his tit for and his clarinet and it's completely unmoving like he'd be there as like as hurricanes swept entire streets away behind him you know yeah looking exactly the same as he would have done 16 years previously but in color this time yeah he doesn't raise an eyebrow or an elbow no surely akabalki in color would have been enough of a thrill for the viewers i think just generally you just need to whack him on a shore, basically,

for your visual backdrop. That's what you need to do. Yeah, on his own. Well, there's something genuinely sinister about that look as well in 1976. Like the bowler hat and the shiny green waistcoat. It's like a geriatric clockwork orange. It's like he's going to very slowly break into your house and shove his clarinet down the end of your cock you know going up to his grandson going oh that

giggly goo golly's good isn't it his proper horror film he is although in 1976 having a clarinet shoved down the end of your cock would not be a totally unfamiliar sensation to anyone who'd been to a sexual health clinic because i tell you i had a checkup recently myself and things have come on leaps and bounds in terms of patient comfort because i remember as late as the 90s uh the terror of a simple chlamydia swab you know nowadays it's it's two seconds of mild discomfort but back then that's what she said yeah well but back then they had to go right inside so to speak um which they don't now and back then it's funny sexual health clinics in london then were almost exclusively staffed by gay and lesbian Australians. This being a time when Australia was still one of the most homophobic places in the free world and London one of the least.

So gay Australians would seek refuge here in huge numbers and a lot of them would naturally end up working in gay charities or sexual health clinics because AIDS was a major concern. So you'd go in there and you'd find yourself standing with your trousers down with a very camp Queenslander crouching in front of you, holding what looked like a plastic coffee stirrer and trying to distract you

because it's worse if you tense up in anticipation. So it'd try and catch you out. you you get you to look in another direction and then he'd say like oh you're going on holiday you just see him fiddling with a bit of kit and he'd say you're going on holiday anywhere nice this year and you go no mate i haven't got the money and you did like in your head you didn't like a swanee whistle um yeah and experience a terrible feeling of violation i mean i remember leaving there and having to get a cab home because walking just felt unnatural and i was just sitting in the back with a thousand yards i came out of there feeling like John McCain in 1973. You know what I mean? Although not an exact parallel,

as he could no longer raise his arms past the 90-degree angle. The wormholes of Taylor's mind. I was just thinking... Yeah. What a great party game. Yes, the wormholes of Taylor's mind. I could build to chlamydia in two minutes. Absolutely. I mean, it's not so long ago

a discussion about the Wurzels became a discussion about shoveling dead lambs into plastic bags at four o'clock in the morning. And now we leap from Ackerbilt to full anal penetration. I mean, it's... there you go. I would suggest that Ackerbilt to chlamydia in two minutes. Not the first time

that's happened. This song's one of, yeah, going back to the song very quickly. It's one of these songs that you don't know the title of until all of a sudden it just whacks you in the face because this tune,

obviously I knew it was Ackerbilg. Who else could it be? But this song used to get played every night in the late 80s at the Bulwell Apollo Bingo Hall where I worked as a change giver in the late 80s at the Bulwell Apollo Bingo Hall, where I worked as a change giver in the evening. And so immediately when I heard this song, you know, Patti's doing her best to be all ethereal and everything,

but I'm just thinking of just sitting there with me bow tie off at the end of a shift after I've had my arse mauled by elderly women. There's just a pool of fag smoke hanging in the air because everyone was chuffing the fags. It was like a scene out of Apocalypse Now at the end of that bingo haul. Fucking hell. So yeah, thanks, Hacker.

The following week, Aria leapt 12 places to number 22 and would get as high as number 5. Alas, it would be his last hit, but he kept on touring, ended up playing on three Van Morrison LPs, and died at the age of 85 in 2012. Acker is local slang for mate, apparently. Which means that if he was going today,

he'd be known as Mandem Bilk. That's sad. That's Ackerbilk. The one with the bowler hat was Ackerbilk. The one with the white dress was Sydney from Ruby Flipper. And that was an aria. This is The Chai Lights. And you don't have to go You just wanna see me go through changes

Oh, don't you, baby Oh, don't you, baby You bring out what's deep in me Till my body flows with energy Well, well, well Edmunds finally bothers to pay Ackerbilt the compliment of saying his fucking name and what the tune is before pointing out that it was being danced to by Sydney.

Sydney? Yeah. What the fuck's that all about? I had to go and research that. No, apparently there's no one called Sydney in Ruby Flipper. Do you think that's Edmonds being absolutely blatantly disrespectful to Ruby Flipper there? The thing with Edmunds, there's no way to tell. He could have been trying

to be funny in some way and failing dismally. It could have been a short-lived stage name or he could just have got it wrong. Like, desperately wrong. He finally gets round to introducing You Don't Have To Go

by the Chai Lights we've already covered the Chai Lights in Chart Music number 9 when Pans People did a turn to Homely Girl and since then they've had 4 more UK chart hits including Too Good To Be Forgotten and Have You Seen Her this is a follow up

to It's Time For Love which got to number five earlier this year. And it's up this week from number 17 to number nine. Sadly, they're not in the country, and they haven't done a video, so the BBC have resorted to their old trick of slapping an old cartoon over it. And in this case, it's the 1936 Warner Brothers cartoon

Page Miss Glory. And I'm just going to stop there And in this case, it's the 1936 Warner Brothers cartoon, Page Miss Glory. And I'm just going to stop there and just pat myself on the back for finding that out. Outstanding bit of research by me there. It was a complete stroke of luck. I found possibly the only comment on YouTube that was informative and not racist. So whoever said that, thank you.

It's an old grey whistle test thing, really, isn't it? They used to do this all the time. It's an old grey whistle test thing really isn't it they used to do this all the time it is exactly old grey whistle test I always felt when they did this sort of thing on the old grey whistle test there was a sort of element of white frog condescension or whatever you know the music that they were kind of performing

was a kind of stratospheres above and beyond this kind of banal cartoonery and what-have-you and frippery of the 20th century. Using ink and paper instead of two-fret guitars. Yeah, yeah. And four synths. We've seen this before, haven't we?

Like when we, what was it, we saw Silver Convention doing Get Up and Boogie, yeah. Yeah, and well done to the BBC for finding a cartoon that wasn't racist. Yeah, and well done to the BBC for finding a cartoon that wasn't racist. Yeah, it makes a change. But it still creeps the hell out of me. As I said before, like any animation from before about 1940,

I find horrifying. And it's, I mean, objectively, this is a lovely animation with the Art Deco feel and and the really basic but really fluid uh animation uh but it stinks of death to me and it's the same with all these however pleasantly dotty they look it just yeah reeks of the tomb and what's more it fatally distracts you from the music because it doesn't complement the song in the slightest. So the first time around, I was just staring horrified at the pictures.

And, you know, I could have been hearing the chai lights or I could have been hearing a waste disposal unit crunching up a handful of walnuts. You know, it wouldn't have made any difference. You might as well have put this music to a still picture of tub girl uh it would have been just as pleasing to the soul a lot of the imagery in the cartoon is is sophistication and you know champagne and all that kind of stuff which kind of like goes with sort of later period disco you know the kind of like chic kind of stuff but there's that one scene where

you see a glass of champagne being tipped into someone's mouth from the point of view of the tonsils, which is really disturbing. But I do like the fact that they don't give a toss about the massive amount of print damage.

They just shove it out anyway, it doesn't matter. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I suppose there's that kind of weird sort of Art Deco feel to it. I mean, you know, I think that and that sort of Art Deco sort of thing, you know, with Manhattan Transfer and then, you know,

Sars did earlier on. It seems to be a sort of, you know, a kind of motif at this point in pop music for whatever reason um it's weird with these old warner's cartoons very early warner but you know consider that they made genuinely funny cartoons later on i think you would laugh at today if you saw them any no bugs but in depth but very early cartoons they do it's like the sensibility is a bit weird it's like betty booper anything kind of things there's somewhere it's just like they're

obviously supposed to be funny in some way, but they've got this weird sort of Busby Bartley thing going on and the sheer excitement of, like, you know, animation or whatever. You know, they're very strange to watch, really. You know, they really make you feel like, you know, people before the war were just totally different creatures in terms of their sort of comedy sensibilities or whatever.

It's hard to really know what they're trying to do, you know, when you watch cartoons like that. And then post-war, then suddenly it's like really early Daffy Duck where he's not this kind of sort of misanthropic creature or whatever. He's just sort of manic. You know, and it's just like that's meant to be funny somehow, you know. And then they kind of sort of get a sensibility that's just right and it still works today.

It's really odd. Yeah, with this stuff, at least 60% of it is banking on the audience thinking, the pictures, they're coming alive. Yes, yes. Absolutely, yeah. I mean, the way Top of the Pops do this, the equivalent would be some grime tune on the

telly but set to bod you know what i mean or gideon crystal tips and allister yeah maybe yeah yeah the song isn't it fucking mint absolutely because i thought i knew the charlights back to front i love that banter bits this song came out of nowhere to me. It's like, I'm fucking out. It is properly decent. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, the compare and contrast to the stylistics, you know. Stylistics are quite happy to plough their groove or their rut, if you will. Childlights are picking up the pace a bit

and having a go, trying out the new style. And it's paid off for a big style. Definitely. Yeah, this is the one other record on it which has the same fluidity and movement as the can record and it but it takes off from there in a completely different direction you know but the the rhythm section on this are miraculous in a purely 1970s way but as far as i'm concerned that's the best way. Yes. I mean, it's got that kind of feel of like Rolls-Royce car or whatever, you know,

that driving electric keyboard thing, which I think Stevie Wonder might have gone, it was going that direction even early before he discovered like Arpenberg synths or whatever. It's, yeah, it absolutely bristles. It's sheer electric. It's funny though, generally, I mean, there's so many, you look at the chart rundown

and how much kind of, it's so strange it's funny though generally i mean there's so many you look at the chart rundown and how much kind of it's so strange that there is that you know that that people are accustomed to sort of you know black faces or whatever on top of the pops or whatever in the charts or whatever there's clearly this great acceptance when it comes to poor old floyd it's like what a black man you know it's really he's not singing you say i think partly why this is so good is that it's not just a good record it's a good song which isn't always completely necessary with this kind of track you can get by on a rhythm uh and a hook but shy lights always had good songs you see like stylistics records aren't always based on such interesting songs they're about the whole sound experience you know um whereas this is

co-written by barbara acklin in it who also co-wrote like have you seen her and stoned out of my mind and all those things um and they're always it's like proper songwriting if you know what i mean where there always has to be some kind of imaginative hook to the song, like to create some sort of world or environment in the lyrics that you can latch on to. And it really makes a big difference when you listen to it. Almost on a subconscious level, it hooks into your brain. It's not just love clichés or sex clichés. There's a sort of slightly intriguing situation here

where this guy is excited, but he's also losing control of his emotions, and he's conscious of that too. And you just get a feeling. I mean, there's hardly any words in this song, but it's enough to make you think that he's setting off down a wrong road, and this relationship is going to

go badly wrong um i mean all all the best soul records have a psychological or psychosexual element to them and with heavy soul it's usually really obvious and up front right like when otis reading sings you know i've been loving you too long to stop now you're tired and you want to be free my love grows stronger as you become a habit to me it's not just riveting because of the delivery it's because this emotional car crash that's obviously happening is spelt out to you in the words and everything's right up front but with pop soul as in every kind of pop the great thing is that it's all done with suggestion and in a sort of a vague understated way so it doesn't get in the way of it being a pop tune but it also

means it doesn't sound like a clear emotional statement and in some ways it makes it more interesting do you know what i mean so it's like yeah there's just that hint there's just that hint of darkness and chaos and a lot of the time in top 40 soul that's just done with the vocal but it's best when it's done in the actual song which is why the best ever commercial soul record is bernadette by the four tops yeah because it's a horrifying horrifying psychological portrait of this bloke that bernadette should clearly emigrate to avoid you know like and he's pledging his obviously genuine love and affection and it's just a huge red flag fluttering in a strong breeze it's

like run run bernadette run and levi stubb sings it like he's on the verge of a breakdown and music is full of all this desperation and emotional turbulence but you know that at least one clothier sap was going out with someone called Bernadette and bought it for him. Yeah, this is our tune. This expresses how I feel about you. Well, this song isn't in the same class as that song because not many are. But this song hints at feelings and situations which aren't made explicit

and there's just enough drama and unease in the music to flag that up without it being a recital. You know, it's not just an intense one-dimensional statement, which is why it's still pop. I mean, it's not, you know, I agree with that. I mean, you know, there's this sort of palpable sense of nervousness in this song. And it's physically conveyed in the sort of texture of the song as well. I mean, it isn't just a sort of lyrical theme you feel it you know i mean i suppose i mean bernadette is another great example um and i don't know um i don't know why i love you that's stevie wonder wasn't it and i mean the way you know that he builds now he's almost like

sort of suffocating in that song or whatever you know it's it's yeah that's it's i'm just going to say that i think it's a lot of people were very depressed, I'm sure, at this time when older soul groups or singers went disco. And I think there's just nothing better than when that happened. Diana Ross' love hangover is just absolutely magnificent.

And the fact of having a regular beat or whatever, in no way compromises the quality of the songwriting or the quality of the vocal performance or any of those elements whatever when you get to get right into the early 80s you've had people like dramatics who made this great single i can't stand it you know and that's you know that that's superb whatever and i'm sure a lot of their diehard fans thought they're just utterly sold out but no it's it's it's it's evolution whatever you know even the aretha franklin stuff yeah early 80s you know similar thing yeah because you know. Even the Aretha Franklin stuff in the early 80s, you know, similar thing. Yeah.

Because, you know, the received knowledge is that, you know, just like the prog bands were washed away by punk, all the old soul and early 70s singers and bands were done in by disco. But this is a prime example why that train of thought is completely bollocks, isn't it? Yeah, in a lot of cases, it actually saved them artistically. Like, what was Diana Ross doing before Love Hangover?

Just a load of shitty Broadway stuff. Do you know where you're going to? And she didn't. This song could be filed away with the likes of Come Back and Finish What You Started by Gladys Knight and the Pips and Rubber Band Man by the Detroit Spinners. Got to Give It Up by Marvin Gaye.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Well done, Chi Lights. So the following week, You Don't Have To Go stayed at number nine, but a week later it jumped up all the way to number three, its highest position. However, it was their last appearance in the UK charts until they had a couple of minor hits in 1984. That's a delightful creatures on that film.

You don't have to go, so you can take your cycle clips off, settle down. The chai lights, of course, followed by highlights, fashion highlights from the autumn collection of Hardy Amies. And just look what the well-dressed exhibitionist is going to be wearing in the coming months. Note the silver wellies and the see-through jodhpurs. MUSIC PLAYS Morning glory

This is a true life story Someone came along Stole away the night That's alright Edmund, absolutely delighted by that cartoon, warns of the garb sported by Ruby Flipper as he introduces Morning Glory by James and Bobby Purify. Born in Florida in 1944 and 1939 respectively, James Purify and his cousin Robert Dicker teamed up as a duo in 1965 and they were signed to Bell Records in 1966. They scored a top five hit in the US right off the bat when I'm Your

Puppet got to number four there in 1966 but by the time the original duo split up in 1971 they had not made any kind of a dent in the UK charts. After a three-year solo career James Purify linked up with Ben Moore a singer who had worked with James Brown and Otis Redding and he adopted the stage name Bobby Purify. Their re-recording of I'm Your Puppet finally put them over in the UK getting to number 12 in May of this year. This is the follow-up written by Uwe Busch-Kotter who did the music for the opening ceremony

for the 1972 Munich Olympics and assorted jingles for German adverts and it's risen this week from number 28 to number 27 and here, finally a ruby flipper in their entirety Edmunds really liked that cartoon do you think he was kind of like getting himself

into a swap shop frame of mind for all them Hong Kong fooies I think it's just his aesthetic sense is so degraded that he just thought it was brilliant it's just the sort of level of stimulus he requires but I hate Edmundmund more than ever

for his introduction to this right chuckling at their stupid outfits um partly just because it's very rude and i i believe if you've got nothing nice to say you should say nothing at all quite right but also because 40 years on it takes you out of the moment, right? It does no one any good to be reminded that even in the 70s, a lot of people thought extreme 70s clothing looked a bit silly. Do you know what I mean? So people have this vague idea now that back then it was just how it was, and you might go to the fishmongers and be standing next to a bloke who looked like Roy Wood.

No, no. The place was full of fellas in non-platform shoes and manageable flares dressed in earth tones. The Rigsby's and Blakeys of the world. Right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I remember as an adolescent in the 80s, I'd look at high street fashions then

and think, no, that looks objectively terrible and in the future people will laugh at you. And nothing's changed. The second time around seeing these fucking idiots dressed like china crisis walking around acne you know as if they were wearing a 1920s gangster suit uh but you don't need it years later you don't want some prick like edmunds in his hepworth's get up pop in that balloon because it's nicer to wallow you know and if someone's wearing a lilac blouse

with collars like a wingspan of a golden eagle that's interesting and sometimes it's the only interesting thing on the screen um so it's a marker of difference in time and it's nice to remember that or it's important to remember that this fashion psychosis was not universal. But you don't need like a prick with an estate agent beard getting in the way of the visual feast. Oh, look at these pop people wearing pop clothes on a pop show. Isn't that odd? I mean, it's just a reminder that you had this whole generation

of like male DJs who palpably knew nothing and cared less for the sort of subject matter that they were hosting. It's just absolutely extraordinary. I mean, that would just not be tolerated only a few years later. But where do we start on this? The dance in all the song? Ruby Flipper. Yeah, OK.

Which sounds like a slang term for a kind of weird sexual practice. You know what I mean? Or something that Chris Morris would say to that paedophile, along with Bunty Man. I think of it more as like a dirty Sanchez or something. It's like some revolting thing. It's something, it's a ruby flipper, you know. You and your good lady wife can only only

do it five days out of every month well here they are ruby flipper i mean flick colby was looking to do something new after pan's people were in the same things and doing the same things and you know after what three months or so looks like she's given up on that yeah well let's straight away the main problem here is philip steggles let's be honest he's the guy out of ruby flipper who's got like a gormless gurning face and thinning hair and quite clumsy movements and it's fair to say that had he been female auditioning for any top of the pops dance troupe he wouldn't have made the cut so you have to wonder how he made it in well surely they could have found a better dancer who looked better just by dangling a hook into a gay disco and just

pulling out whatever yes you know just get benny from the steam room. It doesn't matter. But you've got Philip, and he's got these silver wellies, and it's like he's wearing diving boots. Just a waste of everyone's time. And he looks so pleased with himself. I think those facial expressions might be ironic, but come on, man, have the courage of your convictions. He doesn't look right in that outfit. He doesn't seem to suit. He doesn't look right in that outfit he doesn't seem to suit he

doesn't look right dancing he's got the kind of face that doesn't look right above a dancing body which is a bit unfortunate in his profession it's like no he looks like a second string of playaways yeah yeah yeah you know brian brian kant's got the flu and the scottish bloke out of it ain't our fault mum's not available. So, yeah, give Philip a call. It's like watching Jeremy Hunt do kung fu. It's very distracting. He is the worst. He's very much the olive on the trifle.

Yeah, he's got that Jeremy Hunt streak of piss thing about him, hasn't he? Yes. Yeah, it's horrible. It's horrible. But I suppose at this point, aren't they all kind of working out their notice, basically? Pretty much so, yeah.

They know they're leaving. They're waiting for the axe to fall. Yeah, which is ironic that they're kind of being used so often, really. We're getting a lot of Flick Colby signature moves, aren't we? A lot of finger work, a lot of finger wagging. And well, it has to be kind of energy and gyration or whatever, but it can't be too full on. It all has to kind of chord with BBC restrictions and protocols. So you get this strange sort of there's a lot of marching up and down.

Yes. Oh, yeah. It's always a fallback for flick. Yes, definitely. There is an element of comedy about this performance isn't it yeah it's like look at us in our silly clothes yeah yeah and it detracts from the uh sultry eroticism well this is nobody wants sultry eroticism from men on tv no because it's like no it's basically it's like if you get a male dancer dancing in a genuinely erotic way, it's like having a cock thrust at you like the Grange Hill sausage. Yes. And I think most people would recoil.

If you're having a late tea, because it's August, that's not what you want, is it? Well, it's very strange, isn't it, that the objection to it should be an all-female duo, that the whole thing is predicated on the idea that Top of the pops is entirely for male consumption which is very strange exactly yeah very odd and there's not really much interaction between the males and the females is there apart from all heroes doing our little winsome fingery bits and here's us marching around in our spangly wellies that whole sentence sounded like my

adolescence but i mean is it their fault or is it the song's fault yeah i mean the song is it's passable but it sounds very dated when you after we've just had the chai lights it's got that bit of a northern solely feel to it yeah sort of pass its sell by date beaten feel to it all told really definitely yeah it's funny because before we recorded we all individually said we didn't have a lot to say about this record um and it's interesting i don't know if anyone else gets this the same way but for me this is one of those records that i know um and i've known all my life but if you played it to me without an introduction i couldn't have named it uh and i couldn't have

named the act which is a shame because they've got one of the best names i've ever heard james of bobby purify there's no denying is a great name but even even though it's a lie it's a different bobby purify and it's another one of those david ansel collins isn't it yeah but like every other set of supposed brothers in pop history they never are when you look into it yeah because and also you think that the blokes bobby purify as well and it's not it's james purify yeah and bobby purify is not bobby purify at all it's just lie upon lie isn't it well it's like mr and mrs frank mckenzie yeah i imagine if bobby purify who doesn't even exist teamed up with the band james can you imagine how awful that would be

see this is this is the kind of speculation we're reduced to here listening to this yeah the only thing that occurred you know it occurred to me when I was listening to this, I got a kind of flashback to my own 1976. And not to give Dover Roller shutters another plug. You know, my dad, the firm my dad used to work for. Go ahead. Although they're now all wound up, sadly. But, yeah, it used to take me out. It rolled up.

His job used to involve going to various cities, Sheffield, Nottingham, Manchester, and, like, going on to these kind of light industrial estates and sort of dealing with sales inquiries or whatever about roller shutters. And quite often, as a treat, I'd accompany him on these long journeys. And I'd be sitting in the front seat there. And he'd have to go in, and I'd be sat in the kind of car in some utterly bleak, jejjune, like, industrial estate in, you know, in the East Midlands or whatever.

And I'd have a, like, giant pile of Beano's, I'd have a bottle of pop and a couple of bags of crisps and, you know, at times it could be pretty heavy. And Radio 1 on, you know, Diddy David Hamilton or whatever in the afternoon. Your dad let you have the radio on in the car when it was parked up? Oh, God, yeah. Oh, man! Oh, there'd be protests, there'd be ructions otherwise.

Oh, some people fucking spoilt rotten, aren't they? Yeah, I know. Yeah, we had it. Yeah, I had it good. I had it good. What's weird, I don't really recall going to the toilet in those days. I mean, you know, you think now, you need a little personal break every sort of hour, an hour, an hour.

I used to be able to go all day without going to the toilet, despite, you know, sort of, you know, drinking whatever, you know, it's Coke and... It's not usually something that sticks in your mind. Yeah. I remember this great piss I had in 1988. Because it would have been pretty tricky to negotiate, actually. It's like, you know... Really, I mean, what would you do? I mean, it's like, Dad, can I come in with you?

And have they got a toilet there? Because I'm, you know, full of, what would you do? I mean, it's like, Dad, can I come in with you? And have they got a toilet there? Because I'm full of, like, Pepsi. It's like the Sweeney where they're staked out in the back of a camouflage van and they have to pass a milk bottle around. Many, many, many, many, many times I would have made these kind of jaunts. And not once. Did I ever actually do that? Do you need to go to the toilet, son?

You've been sitting in there since 9.15, drinking Coca-Cola. You must have a pretty full balance. No, it's fine. Didn't even ask, actually. But I think 95% of the inside of little kids is made up of their bladder. Because that's just what they're like.

It's weird. Yeah. Yeah. Which gradually reduces to, in the present day, 5%. Yeah, because of the size of a shrunken pea. I'm still here, by the way. I'm just trying to think of a piss I had in 1976

to add something to the conversation. No, I can't. I'm sorry. Sorry, Pop Crazy Youngsters, I've failed you. So you can blame James and Bobby Purify for this conversation. I was just thinking, this being instantly recognisable I've failed you. So you can blame James and Bobby Purify for this conversation. Yeah. I was just thinking, this being instantly recognisable but nobody knows what the fuck it is

until you tell them. It's like all those actors who used to turn up all the time in TV drama who everyone recognised but no one could name, right? You just think, oh, it's him. Or who?

I don't know, I don't know his name. It's like people who... Him on the telly all the time. Yeah, if you look at IMDB, they may or may not have a picture next to their name. You know, people who would have made a pretty good living out of acting, rarely out of work, but who had slightly less face name recognition

than Colin Jeevans. You know what I mean? And respect to Colin Jeevans, my homie, for clawing his way out of that particular brand tub. But there were loads of these people. I'm just trying to think. There was David Lodge, Nick Stringer, Clive Merrison, Ron Pember, Mike Grady. I mean, if I showed you or anyone else aged above 35 photographs of these people, you'd recognise them instantly.

But almost nobody ever knew their names. Imagine if they'd done a TV show with all of those actors in, man. People's heads would have exploded, wouldn't they? I don't know. I mean, I only know their names because I became so fascinated by this phenomenon that I looked it all up. But yeah, you'd see these people in a... they might have a bit part in a BBC costume drama or an advert for super noodles do you know what I mean it just they it's weird but they were all famous in a way yeah you know like some of them

would carve out a niche like uh Talfrin Thomas you know you say oh it's the Welsh bloke with the fucked up teeth yeah he's called Talfrin Thomas nobody knew it or um what's his name paul brooke exactly paul brooke you say oh it's the fat bloke with the wonky eye yeah he's paul brooke right it's why i have a lot of respect for clive swift because at one point clive swift it was oh it's the little balding bloke with the posh voice no no but he he was so good that by the time he died it made it up to oh it's the little balding bloke with the posh voice no no no but he was so good that by the time he died it made it up to oh it's Clive Swift very impressive

very impressive that is I guess Milton Johns was on the borderline of this right 50% of British people would say oh it's Milton Johns

and the other 50% would say oh it's the thin bald slimy bloke is his name Clive Merrison? No no but Milton John's cheated because he was in so many Doctor Who's that all the Doctor

Who fans know him which bumps up his name recognition because those lunatics remember everything but no I'm fascinated by these people and no no no in fact the whole point is I'm not actually fascinated by these people I'm fascinated by the fact that they're just there and when you're feeling especially alienated it's quite a good thing

to examine things with which you're very familiar but which you've never really thought about just to make the world seem a little bit more real although i'm not sure that really applies to morning glory by james and bobby purify which is it's the most all right of all right records do you know what i mean yeah and the only yeah what to sum it all up it's neither the best nor the worst record i can think of with the phrase morning glory in the title well exactly yeah this and this is something that needs to be addressed because, I mean, for fuck's sake, it's a damning critique upon the year of 1976 that nobody, not the dancers, certainly not Edmunds, alludes to the fact that the song's named after a bonk on. done was like you know when the beastie boys did that tour in 1987 with run dmc and they'd finish by doing fight for your right to party and then all of a sudden these massive inflatable cocks would just burst out of these boxes yeah and just completely fill the stage flick colby why why

didn't you do that that would have been amazing you're getting sacked anyway. That would make Philip Steggall's Roger Moore eyebrow raise even higher. So, the following week, Morning Glory went all detumescent, dropping six places to number 33, their final entry in the UK charts. And I am, and I am Oh, oh, yeah It's better than a medicine for you Ruby Flipper getting well and truly mixed up in James and Bobby Purify's hit Morning Glory. You know, old Cliff Richard is absolutely amazing. I just never know how he manages to keep those creases in his jeans. Incredible. How do you do it, Cliff? Oh, baby Absolutely amazing. I just never know how he manages to keep those creases in his jeans.

Incredible. How do you do it, Cliff? Oh, babe. You could have been a bad girl. Wasted all my time. You could have got me mad, girl. Made me lose my mind Edmunds, sat on the floor, drops yet another shit joke as he introduces I Can't Ask For Anything More Than You, Babe by Cliff Richard.

We've discussed Harry Webb many a time and oft, most recently in chart music number 35 when he did some danger dancing to Devil Woman and this is the follow up to that single which got a number 9 in June of this year. It's the third track off the comeback LP I'm Nearly Famous which recast him as a contemporary artist

and was written by Ken Gold and Michael Denny who wrote You To Me at everything and can't get by without you for the real thing it soared 20 places from number 46 to number 26 this week and here he is in the studio this is pretty much silver age cliff isn't it yeah well cliff had four british hits in 1976 two of which were devil woman and miss you nights but unfortunately we get this which is sort of part of that micro renaissance in as much as it's better than most of the other music he ever made but it's still fairly poor you know and it's hard to look at this and understand who or

what it's actually for you know he's got his unnervingly natural falsetto and his empty life you know and it I don't know I was listening to this I was thinking he's a bigger influence on today's pop balladeers than you'd ever have expected

in this there's a lot of records now which remind me of Cliff, except with worse singing, because one thing you can say about Cliff is pitching was always perfect. And his singing is never more than 15% mannerism, which puts him above a lot of present-day singers. But there's that same thing of just overpowering wetness and pointlessness and sort of tepid emotional.

Yeah, I mean, you know, with Cliff Richard, I suppose, you know, quite often you come in with very low expectations. And yeah, I mean, yes, this is no devil woman. But, you know, I didn't think it was so bad just because you can feel the kind of little elements that are in there, that kind of slightly boogish, funkish kind of element that's in there, that probably, like, you know, the composer has kind of brought in, but also the musicians. You know, there's tiny sort of inklings of, like, even things like Little Feet and Dr John, you know,

faint elements of honky-tonk. But, yeah, I mean, you know, he's pushing those vocals right up into the upper register, there's no doubt about it but always always with cliff richard i remember i think it was charles sean murray reviewing um because cliff you know the bit revival we don't talk anymore then he put out an album in which he really tried to recast himself in a kind of rock and roll vein and charles sean murray made the point at the time of the review and says that rock and roll has always got to have that whiff of the carnal about it. And of course there's never any whiff of the carnal about Cliff Richard because of his

beliefs. And it's also strange, what struck me about this is and it seems to me a lot, there's obviously a band playing on this record but he performs conspicuously alone. He's not performing with a band as if that would

some, I mean in the lyrics to power to all our friends we read power to the boys who play rock and roll but it's like the boys playing the rock and roll have got to be kind of like you know they've got to be sort of shoved somewhere back in the background or whatever as if cliff kind of having some sort of interaction with the boys playing the rock and roll might it's you know he might i don't know catch something or whatever or he might sort of get with the boys playing the rock and roll, he might, I don't know, catch something or whatever, or he might sort of get something effective with a hint of the sexual. So therefore he has to kind of be isolated from that. And it's just Cliff solo here,

and the music kind of coming from the sky somewhere. If it's not Hank Marvin, then no one's interested. Yeah, but also you don't want to step on the toes of the Shads. No. Yeah. A lot of men did and a lot of men died. The key to understanding Cliff in the 70s is looking at his strange relationship with the contemporary, right?

I mean, this is a bloke who was out of date within a few years of his first success. And as time went forward, he turned around and started sprinting backwards. So by this point, he's like a relic from another century. But he's a pop artist, right? He might be something else on a spiritual level, like no pun intended, you know, easy listening or stars on Sunday. But he's categorised as pop, so to some extent he had to live up to that. And every move he ever made, which was even slightly interesting,

was the result of this awkward blind date between this pink-eyed lamb of God and some aspect of late 20th century pop culture. Now, this obviously reached its eye-popping peak in the Wired for Sound video. Oh, yes. With Cliff gliding through Milton Keynes' shopping center on roller boots. Oh, yes.

But that's only an extension of previous presentation attempts, which cast Cliff as a stranger in a strange land. I mean, this clip here, we're only a couple of years down the line from Take Me High, which Neil mentioned in the Patreon thing recently. Yeah, which is an almost unwatchable and yet amazing film. Cliff, for anyone who doesn't know, he plays a merchant banker moved against his will to 1970s Birmingham where he bangs Victoria out of Doctor Who

and opens a fast food restaurant and creates the Brumburger, which is like a hamburger uh except it's in Birmingham and it's essentially the reason why it's interesting apart from the fact that it's like a visual tour of 1970s brutalist Birmingham architecture um is that it's basically a film from 1962 that's been just shunted 10 years forward or 11 years forward into the confusing and colourful early 70s. So Cliff is a man from 1962, and he's all damp brickwork and church hall sandwich beanos, like teleported

into this weird futuristic world of 1970s Berger. And although this is an attempt to make him seem current and modern, in fact, it highlights his deep, unworldly weirdness underneath that sort of thin tissue of American showbiz. You know, that affected sort of... He's got that affected nonchalance. He goes, uh-huh, uh-huh. Underneath that, we all know what's there.

So now he's in this carefully chosen cheesecloth shirt and dad denim. And it's the same conflict. With a matching indigo waistcoat. Waistcoats were big in 1976, weren't they? I blame Quo. Right. But it's the same decisions being made, right?

Yeah. It's which of the tokens of post-Beatles culture can be taken up and used in service of his medieval crusade, and which should be suppressed. Yeah. And the result is the same. You get a sort of hollowed out modernity.

Yeah. With like this sort of, it's this weird, you get like, it's like the air of a deserted amusement park. Yeah. You know, like evacuated because of a sudden outbreak of Legionnaire's disease. Yeah, or your dad getting new rig out once every couple of years that's vaguely modern that goes out of date very quickly.

It's obviously the primary driving force in his life is his religion, you know, once he converted to his religion. And yet, I mean, at the same time he's, you know, that you see him, you know, it's a recurring thing that you know, trying in his own way to kind of keep pace with what's happening, what's going on, to kind of cast himself as relevant, and not just a

pop star, but I think with an element of rock as well, you know, going back to that rock and roll thing he did in 1980. It seems to be his crusade and his mission. It's almost that you can have a form of pop and rock music that is nonetheless consistent with religiousness and celibacy. It's almost

like somebody that's kind of trying to convince you of the merits of an alcohol-free beer or something like that. And he tried and he tried and he tried well into the 80s. convince you of the merits of an alcohol-free beer or something like that it's it's um and um yeah and he tried and he tried and tried you know well into the 80s yeah yeah well i watched the whole of another of his films recently uh to a penny it's called it's from psychedelic summer of 1967 but it was funded by billy graham um and it has cliff who incredibly is still in

his 20s at this point because it's easy to forget he was the same age as john lennon in fact he was um i think he was a week younger than john lennon but you know well while john lennon was was floating in the subversive confusion of I Am the Walrus, Cliff was playing a stroppy youth who turns to God, much to his own surprise after witnessing a lecture by that poisonous old fraud, Billy Graham. And this film is almost unwatchable too, especially because Cliff does like a mockney accent

all the way through. And he's in a corduroy suit skipping around central London like absolute beginners. You know what I mean? But again, it's this weird attempt to take someone so fundamentally reactionary and anti-natural

and make him seem violent of the moment, even as he's quite explicitly attempting to undermine this new society and any progress that might have been made since Move It the best thing you can say about this record is that there's a

nice inspiring lyrical moment where he says I feel like a slave that has been freed. He's slipping a wink to his black fan base there. Very Widdicombe that is isn't it? Much appreciated I think.

It's like probably how he felt when he played Sun City in the early 80s. Liberated from caring. It's like you know how the Taliban don't allow music, right? Like it's banned. It's haram.

Now, I think this might be why, like the best music by religious people, and there's been a fair bit of it, is devotional and sort of dreamy. It's about transcending worldly concerns. transcending worldly concerns whereas in the in the hands and in the mouths of people like cliff or mullah omar for whom religion is about enforcing and reinforcing an earthly lack of freedom music turns to damp dust do you know what i mean it's so perhaps cliff made a mistake if cliff had taken the same approach to music as the taliban yeah he might have succeeded but his music acts like a kind of advance warning it's like the bell around a cat's neck right and maybe this was such a giveaway this was the reason that he was never able to enslave us as he would have wished.

So the following week, I Can't Ask For Any More Than You jumped three places to number 23. And three weeks later, it reached its highest position of number 17. The follow-up, Hey Mr. Dream Maker, only got to number 31 in December of this year.

And he'd only go on to have 55 more top 40 hits i'm sitting this one out, my Radio 1 dancing shoes are hurting. That's the incredible Cliff Richard. You know, when you meet some people in this business, they quite often don't turn out to be quite so pleasant as you imagine. However, our next two guests on Top of the Pops are even more unpleasant than you can ever imagine human beings being. In fact, they must be two of the most awful guys that you could...

And the music's all right, but they, as individuals, are just... I watch the distant lights go down the runway Disappearing through the evening sky Oh, you know I'm with you on your journey Edmund, still on the floor cross-legged, goes into one about the horribleness of the next group, Gallagher and Lyle and break away. Filmed in London in 1972 from the ashes of McGuinness Flint, who were covered in Chart Music No. 38,

Benny Gallagher and Graham Lyle had actually known each other since 1959 when they were in a rock and roll band in Larg, Scotland, called the Blue Threats. They spent the 60s writing songs for Marmalade and the northern soul singer James Galt and moved to London in the late 60s to work as in-house songwriters at Apple Records. After McGuinness Flint split up, they signed a one-album deal with Capitol and then they signed to A&M and put out four more LPs. but it wasn't until earlier this year that they finally entered the charts when I Want To Stay With You got to number six in April, and this is the follow-up to Heart On My Sleeve, which also got to number six in June. It's already been recorded by Art Gorf on Colour's, the title cut of his 1975 LP,

and it's also the title cut and third single released from their own LP, and it's not in the charts yet yeah and you have to say that intro that private joke intro it's like Mike Smitty Smith their names shall go on the list Edmunds enablers yes yeah I mean what I really detest about that is that like after that you know Graham like had anything about him Graham lyle instead of giving that kind of sort of rise of appreciative glance across to edmunds he should have just grimaced and mouth what the fuck are you dribbling on about man this comes a distant second to uh don't take away my breakaway by dennis waterman a few years later but it's a nice little pot of history of the 70s so far, isn't it? You know, we had Gallagher and Lyle.

Yeah, yeah. Beardy, trumpy, jug-bunned nonsense. And now they've graduated and progressed to this sort of thing. Heart on my sleeve. I remember liking a lot of the time, actually. I think it's fairly pleasing. This isn't actually so bad, but it's kind of... No.

It's got this feeling of like Popper's MFI furniture. It's just got this kind of, you know, this is what we're going to have to sort of settle for now because there's not going to be any kind of more, any sort of major revolts or sort of re-infusions of electricity or excitement or whatever. It's all going to settle into this

sort of thing, into a sort of MOR torpor right through to the sort of, you know, late 70s, 80s, 90s. I mean, that blackness I'm constantly referring to, you know, that you get into. Oh, your blackness, David. None blacker. It never seemed blacker. It just seemed like a kind of a jet black uncertainty

of like, this is what we're kind of, like in a kind of, you know, spaceship towards space, 1999 or whatever. This is the blackness into which we'll proceed at this kind of steady humdrum pace. I mean, Taylor, do you think the weather had an effect on the charts of the summer of 1976? Because we've had a lot of laid-back stuff

mixed in with the dance music, haven't we? Yeah, although I'd guess the recording and release schedule would be long enough that you wouldn't be able to predict this in advance. I think it might have done, actually. It's kind of sweetly torpid, this track. And I think that's kind of... Yeah, and it would have been a sort of

inertia, I guess. And something like this, this might have suited the sort of drowsy, fetid sort of mood of the times. Yeah, I mean, this is the worst thing about this record. They don't even have the pride to be offensive, you know, or to make something really terrible.

Yeah. I mean, they came up in conversation a couple of chart musics ago when it was McGuinness Flint. And I think Pricey said it's a band name that really belongs on a real ale chalkboard or a bottle of whiskey or some quality knitwear. It's not on top

of the fucking pops. Gallagher and Lyles sounds like haulage contractors doesn't it? Now what can you say about this group really? I mean the best thing you can say about this group is that they're not the same group but all murderers and I mean, the best thing you can say about this group is that they're not the same group, but all murderers. And I mean, beyond that, you're struggling because this is boring, but it's borderline pleasant, which displeases me more than some monstrous bowel blowout by, you know, Jimmy Osmond or ELP.

Because what can you do with it, right? At least a really terrible record is stimulating, and this is just too close to being all right. It sounds like a High Llamas album track. But you instantly resent them, because in the context of Top of the Pops, they appear as the forces of Sunday afternoon. Do you know what I mean?

It's like the voice of non-chocolate digestives and the steady clunking of the clock on the mantelpiece in the awkward silence. And it's a terrible thing. Considering the reality of these people's lives as a fairly successful rock group would have been travel performance creation freedom um and yet this is what they bring in you know the 1970s is wasted on them in the as much as

it was wasted on cliff and they don't even have the same excuse so what's the the most interesting thing you can say about them visually is that the bass player looks like the Shroud of Turin as a younger man. So did everyone's uncle in 1976. This is a pitiful return. There are things like this and Brian Prothero and things like that. None more 1976. I mean, this has got notes in it, which is almost the same thing as having a tune.

And the chorus is what they used to call radio friendly, you know. But it's like the ghost of a Bee Gees record haunting Nashville. And it's not good. What pisses me off the most, I think, is that so much work has gone into this. So much work in the musicianship and the production. This will be the product of hours and hours in a studio and yeah it's like a team of scientists has been working night and day for 15 years and then they call a press conference this is the great unveiling what have you done we've managed to synthesize a test tube full of uh well it's a mixture of oxygen nitrogen argon and traces of carbon

dioxide and it's perfectly breathable and absolutely harmless all right so it's air yes that's right thin air there you go you're welcome use it wisely that's what this record's like yeah if they'd done something insane and ridiculous, which had objectively spoiled this record, it would have made it better. And the only interesting thing about this record for me was that it was clear that Kiki D absolutely nicked the fuck out of this song for Star five years later. And I found myself singing along to it.

So it goes, I'll watch the distant lights go down the road. Da-na-na! Dis road disappearing to the evening sky whoa whoa don't you tell me it's rough temporarily social suicide yeah and that's the only interesting thing about this song yeah they, they're caught in this horrible misconception of what the word quality means in the context of pop music. That's all I can say. Yeah. Upholstery.

Good word. There will not be time in anybody's life to listen to Gallagher and Lyle, however painless it might be. One good thing about their music when it hits you, you feel no pain as Bob Marley said about Gallagher and Lyle, however painless it might be. One good thing about their music when it hits you, you feel no pain as Bob Marley said about Gallagher and Lyle

Three weeks later, Breakaway entered the chart at number 43 would drop to number 47 and then rise up to number 35 its highest position The follow up, every little teardrop, got to number 32 in January of 1977,

would be their last chart hit, and they split up for the first time in 1980. Oh, lovely, lovely, lovely. They're breaking away. That was Gallagher and Lyle. Oh, great. That's from them, is it? Oh, excellent. Oh, they're not so bad after all. Quite nice fellas. Now, of course, Kiki D and Elton John

have been at the top now for some five weeks and, well, we can't show the same film. Yay! No, we can't, we can't. Yay! I was supposed to say that. We wanted to dance, didn't we? We wanted to dance.

We're going to dance. At least I'm We wanted to dance. We're going to dance. At least I'm not going to dance. They're going to dance. I'm breaking my heart. I couldn't if I tried. Oh, honey, if I get restless. Baby, you're not that kind. Edmund, finally surrounded by the kids,

goes through the pantomime of being slipped a massive pound note from Gallagher and Lyle before announcing that we can't see the video for the number one because it's been shown for the past month or so to the very overexcited reaction of one woman who looks a bit not right. As he introduces Don't Go Breaking My Heart by Elton John and Kiki D. We've already covered this song, the Rocket Man's first sniff of the number one arse, in chart music number 35,

and it's now in its sixth week at number one, not fifth, Edmunds. Even though it's 1976, Top of the Pops is clearly sick to death of the promo video which features Elton as Reg Holdsworth doing a bit of karaoke with a better-byes tool girl in Gladys Pugh's broadcast station at Maplins

and have let Ruby Flipper out of their cage for another cavort as the kids look on yeah and that woman I say woman she's probably about 15 but you have to say woman she looks like a young liz smith if that's not another actress yes yes um and yeah yeah she really does seem tremendously keen to see the video rather than what we actually get and who can blame her do you really think that they decided not to show the video rather than what we actually get and who can blame her do you really think that

they decided not to show the video still 1976 videos are still rare and precious things and it's it's not like it's been on telly all the time yeah the dance routine which i'm doing saying with air quotes is extremely perfunctory uh i get the impression from it that it was like oh shit the tape snapped uh get rubylipper on to do something. It could be that. Or maybe, you know, Flipkart was making some sarcastic point about, you know, because it was Bill Cotton or whatever, didn't it, who basically sort of put the kibosh on Ruby Flipper.

And just maybe it's just like working them and just like rubbing Ruby Flipper in your face this one last time at every opportunity. It's about the fifth or sixth appearance of something isn't it it's uh but but ruby flipper and rubbing in your face that they don't go together really it's more of a spit into the hanker and a dab on the face it's not really a dance routine is it it's basically the audience standing there with their arms folded watching ruby flipper wearing the same shit that they wore in the previous dance, just freestyle.

Watching that, it reminded me of when I was working on the Wank Mags, and every now and then I'd have to go to places like Torture Garden and all these kinds of places, and there would be just a load of people just standing there watching the sex people. You know, people who've spent 300 quid on a fucking dog collar and who all know each other just doing their pieces. And everyone else is just standing there going, oh, yeah.

Meanteller have already discussed this song. The thumb was kind of wavering. It was about 15 degrees in an upward direction you know we conceded that it was a good song so yeah David all yours I liked it at the time and it is a kind of reminder when a song being number one for a long time it was like a heat wave I mean you know pop music was like the weather everyone knew when wet wet wet was number one for like weeks and weeks and weeks everyone knew that like this has been number one for weeks and weeks and weeks now i mean like you know you have to kind of go and look on the internet if you want to find out what's number one i mean you know it's just a sort of lovely

sort of you know after that entire unifying summer when we all celebrated the heterosexuality of elton john yes you know it's got that kind of sort of white philly thing that he's doing i wouldn't say shaking philly but it's because it's more sort of a depth at that, I think, you know, in terms of, like, you know, sort of taking that particular sound. It's more Pittsburgh soul than Philadelphia soul, is what you're saying there. Yeah, I think probably so, yeah. Yeah, it's the kind of soul

that would... Sort of near to Philadelphia, but not quite. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like Shelbyville to, yeah, Springfield sort of thing. Yes. Yeah. Something like that. But no, it was joyful enough, I suppose. Like Shelbyville to Springfield. Something like that. But no, it was joyful enough, I suppose. The dance routine as such.

Floyd's got two girls on the go, which must have upset some dads. It's like a load of mates at the school disco, isn't it? Turning the back on the flea bags of the school, which are the audience and us, actually. Yeah, and it's got a kind of, like, you know, last afternoon at school before the holidays feel, so it's pretty shambolic. For some reason, I started thinking of the dwarves that dance around the, you know,

the 18-inch stone-hanged triptych in Spiral Chapel. It just shambles or whatever, you know. I don't know if you spot it, but during its performance or whatever, just near the end, it looks like Edmonds is about to touch the breast of one of the women next to him. And then just the last second thinks better of it.

Oop, cameras. The Floyd dilemma could have been solved massively easily by just having a black female dancer for him to dance with at all times. Like when in Sergeant Bilko, when, you know, their best girls come to the dance and everything. All the black soldiers have got a black girlfriend.

It should have got Barbie out of Love Thy Neighbor. Yeah, the only visible black woman in 1970s Britain. Yes, exactly. Apart from Florella Benjamin. Yeah, that was a bit later on, though. Yeah, I suppose. No, I know what you mean. They did it in Grey Jill as well.

It was like there was one in the sort of mid-'80s Grey and Jill. There was one black lad and one black girl in the class. And at the school disco, they... What do you know? Hey, guess what? We've got so much in common. Same as when you would have black characters in 70s TV. And they were trying to show them sympathetically.

Even so, the only topic of conversation, even in private, was about how they were black. That's all they wanted to talk about. Yes. Very odd. I mean, if there's one good thing to be said about this decade, is that now you can turn on the telly and watch an advert and there'll be mixed race couples in it.

And, you know, they'll be carrying on as if that was a completely normal thing, which it fucking has been for decades. Yeah. But occasionally a white man would be allowed to show the anti-racist credentials of his character by having a black girlfriend. Yes.

Like the all-time great professionals episode clansmen which yes i knew this was going to come up far too much to get into now oh no come on taylor out with it which takes the daring standpoint that racism is bad and uh shows you this through having one of the main heroes of the show call people dirty spades and things and be a complete racist all the way through it until he gets stabbed by some black blokes and then has his life saved by a black doctor and nurse and at the end waltzes off arm in arm with a black nurse,

a reformed character. Despite the fact that this woman's only experience of this bloke is him waking up calling her a dirty spade while she's trying to save his life but it doesn't matter doesn't matter that wasn't the episode of the professionals where they had to uh they had to sort out the keep africa white movement no that was a different one this is the one we featured the guy from porridge good luck with that that featured the guy from porridge didn't it and it was that it involved a nuclear didn't involve a nuclear bomb or something yeah in a bowling alley in hem or hemp that's right

yeah no this is the one with edward judd of think once think twice think bike fame as the leader of a british kkk yeah anyway the terrible thing about this spectacle right of the audience dancing here it struck me we as a nation historically have tended to snigger at germans in terms of pop and fashion right as though there's just some some innate superiority but on this program not only have a german band turned up and stolen the show um speaking of blackfoot sue as i was earlier the clip of them playing standard in the road on 1970s german tv that also has a dancing audience and they look 1000 times as interesting and lively and exotically dressed as this collection of fucking high street zombies that you see here. It's not a myth that the fizz had gone out of the 70s to a great extent by this point.

I mean, there's like a fashion parade of it's like the full gamut of mid-70s streetwear from yes from badly cut pale blue flannel leisure tops to poorly fitting white crimpling trouser suits for the ladies and it all looks like the rags that are left once retro fashion has dined and departed it's like if you've got an early 90s oxfam shop just after jarvis cocker has left this is what this is what's left and you want to be understanding because it's the general public and you know but ultimately no it's a bunch of suburban nobodies who look like they comb their hair with bacon just shifting from foot to foot as though they're trying to evenly distribute the weight of their cultural desolation uh and you can't and i thought i'll sit down and try and

pick out members of the audience to say something funny about. And you can't. You can't. There's one lad who looks like Eric Bristow. Oh, yes. In the condorest collars ever. And he's next to a girl who looks like Dennis Waterman in the sweet. There's a lot of sleeves rolled up, obviously, because of the weather. It's a bit warm, yeah. I don't recall seeing many people in vests or shorts with vents or anything like that.

No. It's like, oh, so it's summer, so what? I'll just roll my sleeves up and get on with it. Oh, and there's the bloke who looks like he lost the part of Carlin in Scum to Ray Winston. Yes. Maybe kept on as an understudy. But yeah, apart from that, it's just scores of sullen-faced typists and skull drinkers in sweatpants

just waiting for something to happen. But the worst thing of all is that they don't look miserable. No. They look sullen, but they don't look miserable. No. Because if they were unhappy with their lot, it might have inspired them to some kind of action. At the end of the day, they are looking at some girls in their pants.

And in Lulu's case, the one with the day they are looking at some girls in their pants and in Lulu's case the one with her interesting curly hair thing going on, she's 16 at the time. Yes and looks younger. Because this is a song that has imposed a cruel reign over the summer of 1976 there's no other song

this is it and Edmunds signs off the show like this. I don't know it's like the retreat from Moscow set to music. I hope you've enjoyed this programme. We're going to continue. And with a bit of luck, I'll get out of here alive. See you on The Breakfast Show tomorrow. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

The retreat from Moscow of 1812 resulted in the deaths of at least 380,000 French soldiers due to disease, exhaustion and attacks by Russian peasants seeking revenge. According to historical records, it did not involve at all a load of youths in flares and waistcoats looking at some girls dancing in their pants. What a fucking ridiculous thing for Edmonds to say there. You almost feel like, you know, one becomes, eventually through experience, you become a sort of Edmonds

whisperer, you know, like, what the fuck are you on about man? And you think, why is he... Oh, it's because they're high kicking and that's a bit like, you know, kind of Cossack dance. He's awful at punchlines, Edmonds is. I mean, the great gas disco advert. He finishes off with,

I've never eaten so well in my life. It's like, fucking hell no. No, you're on your way to becoming a fucking millionaire. Surely you've eaten something better than a sausage from a fucking oven in a disco. Surely. He is the cunt to end all cunts, isn't he, basically. So the following week, the rain fell down and the spell was broken.

And Don't Go Breaking My Heart dropped two places to number three. Finally relieved of its duties at the top of the summit by last week's number 16, Dancing Queen by ABBA. the summit by last week's number 16 dancing queen by abba the follow-up true love spent two weeks at number two in november of 1993 held off the top spot by the anti-cock and ball torture diatribe i'd do anything for love but i won't do that by meatloaf and the single would go on to become the second biggest selling 45 of 1976 between Save All Your Kisses For Me by the Brotherhood of Milan. Anyone want to take a guess what the third best selling single of 1976 was? No charge.

Mississippi by Pussycat. Of course. Missing from our thoughts the same way as it's missing from everyone's memory of 1976. from our thoughts the same way as it's missing from everyone's memory of 1976. Meanwhile, Ruby Flipper continued dancing and a prancing all the way to death row

and they were not happy about it. According to an interview with Philip Steggles in 2014, Flick said to me that there hadn't been one letter to indicate that anyone was missing P's people. One of the reasons given to Flick was that the ratings had gone down slightly.

Now, this was when the bionic woman had just started on the other channel, so it seems ridiculous that we could be blamed for the ratings going down. Especially as it was 85 degrees outside and still daylight. It does tend to have a bit of an impact on the ratings of a long-running programme. Exactly. He went on to say, the other reason given in the letter, though, was that, quote, young teenage boys watching their favourite music programme would not want to see white girls dancing with black boys and then lifting them. dancing with black boys and then lifting them.

A month after this episode, Cherry Gillespie left the group to pursue a theatre career and made appearances in Minder, The Bitch, Mekel Mikke, Octopussy and Crown Court before becoming a key component of the Hot Shoe Show. What a fucking great CV that is. Ruby Flipper's final appearance came on the 14th of October when they bowed out to the sound of Play That Funky Music by Wild Cherry.

However, they continued to exist as a troupe, performing in the German TV show Schlager Festival 1927 a year later. And in adverts for Legs & Co in the stage for the rest of the 70s, people looking to make a booking were advised to contact their management, Ruby Flipper. Philip Steggles went on to form his own troupe,

Philip Hay and Wild Cover, and they worked with Ken Dodd, Windsor Davis, and performed for the troupes in Belfast. Lulu Coltrane, Patty Hammond and Sue Mahennick were kept on in the new troupe who made their debut the week after, who were unnamed for three weeks until a competition on Blue Peter came up with Legs & Co. As for Floyd Pierce, he was drafted in for nine appearances with Legs & Co.

from December 1976 to December 1978, by which time he had joined Arlene Phillips' troupe Hot Gossip, where he got to throw about and grind against white girls in their pants to supernature on the Kenny Everett video show. And when Hot Gossip recorded the LP Geisha Boys and Temple Girls in 1981, produced by Martin Ware of Heaven 17, Pierce was the lead singer. And he also was a member of Who Cares?, the ensemble who recorded the charity single Doctor in Distress in 1985.

Yeah, sweet revenge for Floyd there, I think. Well done, that lad. So what was on telly afterwards well BBC One piles into Happy Ever After the prequel to Terry and June where their son returns from Hong Kong with his fiancee and we learn that Terry and June have had sexual intercourse at least once and then Raymond Baxter and William Woolard present The Risk Business the series about industrial democracy and worker participation after that it's the 9 o'clock news, the fourth

part of Sailor, the documentary series about the Ark Royal and then a repeat of Play for Today's Just Another Saturday about a Belfast flute band during marching season and they finish off the night with Alan Sings Price, a collection of the pianist's

greatest hits recorded in Manchester. BBC 2 is halfway through Word of Mouth a documentary series presented by Melvin Bragg which this week looks at the Scouse dialect, followed by repeats of documentaries on L.S. Lowry and Edward Elgar as part

of BBC 2's Festival Forte. The year-long series which marks the 40th anniversary of the BBC. Then it's the guitarist Joe Pass in concert. The documentary series Inside Story about an early 70s miscarriage of justice. Newsnight and the highlights of the cricket. ITV still has another hour and a half of those magnificent men in their flying machines. Then it's this week, news at 10,

gardening today, a repeat of the prisoner, and they finish off with five minutes of religious blather because it's still the 70s. So, me boys, what are we talking about in the playground tomorrow? Well, sadly, I should have been talking about Cannes, but I probably would have been talking about Man for Man's Earth Band. Yeah, or

Ruby Flipper's ungainliness and horrible knickers. And what are we buying on Saturday? Cannes, Bee Gees, Chai Lights, those are the three great records on this programme. There's a few other good ones, but those are the three great records on this programme. There's a few other good ones,

but those are the only ones worth spending money on, I would say. I would have liked to have said I would have bought the Cannes and Chai Lights and all that, but I probably would have bought the BGs. Maybe the Manfred Mann is a sort of, you know, top-up to my existing Manfred Mann collection. And what does this episode tell us about August of 1976? Yeah, like I say, it's just that

no one, a bit like 1962 and it's tragic, you know, just before the Beatles and I don't think anybody had a clue where things were going next. But we know, don't we kids? Yes, yes. Sex Pistols play in the 100 Club next Tuesday, don't you know? Yeah, but for now

drifting, drifting. This is not a boom time but from this remove malaise at least looks more appealing than crisis right you get the impression that this is a world where what little fun there is can at least be savored and fully experienced without that modern edge of panic and desperation. These people are a long way from shore, but not drowning, waving to their mums. And always remember, much as

they've all been on top of the pops and we haven't, these people were happier than anyone in Britain had ever been before, and we've never been that happy since, so this show actually represents peak happiness. Doesn't show show does it no and that me dears

is the end of this episode of Chart Music all that remains is the usual promotional flange www.chart-music.co.uk facebook.com slash chart music podcast get us on twitter at chart music t-o-t-p money down the g-string patreon.com slash chart music podcast. Get us on Twitter at chart music, T O T P money down the G string,

patrion.com slash chart music. Thank you ever so much. Taylor parks. All right. God bless you, David Stubbs. And God bless you, Mr.

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