Chart Music: the Top Of The Pops Podcast - #56 (Part 5): 25.12.1983 – Oh Dear!! A Bat Bit You

Episode Date: January 9, 2021

Into the final stretch of a whopping Xmas episode of TOTP, and some absolute beasts of 1983 hove into view. David Bowie plays a pub gig in NSW, Jahwaddywaddy invent Breggae, Billy Joel demonstrates that posh girls all want it off a petite mechanic, really, the Christmas #1 of ’83 pops up to rile Smash Hits readers, and Inky Peebles lies that the ‘party’ is going to continue into Boxing Day…  Video Playlist | Subscribe | Facebook | Twitter | The Chart Music Wiki | Patreon 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. The following podcast is a member of the Great Big Owl family. 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 what do you like listen to chart music

chart music chart music go on David do the windmill now oh you're too smooth, guy. Now on your head. Yes! Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo.

Oh, hey, you pop-crazed youngsters. And welcome to the final part of Chart Music, episode number 56. I'm your host, Al Needham. I'm wearing my chilly duds, my leather belt with all the studs. I called all my friends and had a great dance party. But now, let us roll up the lino,

plonk a set back onto the settee, and get stuck into the final furlong of the 1983 Christmas Top of the Pops. Temptation, Temptation, Temptation, Temptation, Temptation, Temptation, Temptation, Temptation. We're back in 17 there in Temptation. We got back to April of this year, number one in this country, number one in the States, on the title track of a great album, David Bowie, and here is Let's Dance. Let's Dance Put on your red shoes and dance the blues

Let's dance To the songs playing on the radio. Let's swing the keyboards. Standing on his own feet with a Christmas 80s green logo wants to take us all the way back to April for the title track of a great album. It's Let's Dance by David Bowie. We covered David Bowie in the last episode of Chart Music when RCA slipped out his duet of Little Drummer Boy

slash Peace on Earth with Bing Crosby in late 1982 and this is the sort of follow-up. While the pop craze youngsters were watching Bowie and Bing being all awkward over the piano in the last proper Top of the Pops of 1982, he was in Mountain Studios in Montreux knocking out the demo of this single. It's his first release for his new label EMI after he signed with them for $17.5 million, which is nearly 46 million in new money and it's the league cut of the LP of the same name. It was put out in March of this year immediately smashed into the charts at number five and two weeks later it grabbed is there something I should know and threw it off the cliff of pop and here's the video which was directed by david mallet who

had done the videos of hanging on the telephone for blonde air rat trap and i don't like mondays for the boomtown rats emotional rescue and she's so cold for the rolling stones run to the hills by iron maiden and practically all of bowie's videos since Boys Keep Swinging. You could make a strong case that David Bowie was the biggest artist of 1983. Don't you think? Well, it's the high point of his career commercially, I believe, especially in America. It's funny, really, that the era of his career,

which Bowie fans often consider the least Bowie-like, is the one by which most people know him. Yeah. And this, I mean, probably his last great single. I mean, unless you count the Black Star stuff, but by then the whole definition of what a single was had changed completely, you know. And it's simultaneously pure contemporary pop

and sort of weird and uncommercial. And like I say, where Heaven 17 can be seen to labour in pulling that off, Bowie just sort of strolls in at almost 40 and just does it seemingly without effort. Although, you know, there will have been like the swan on the pond a lot of thrashing feet just out of sight when he thought including a lot of other people's feet uh as always but that's the beauty of it you'd never know you know i mean if there's one criticism you can make of this record it's that it's maybe too smooth um and feels effortless to a fault you know compared to previous bowie records but i love it and even though it points the way so clearly to his shittiest period and his shittiest

period was absolutely a continuation of what he's doing on this record um and an attempt to capitalize on its american success but i remember this being a hit and it worked perfectly for me as a kid of what 10 11 in terms of the blend of the weird and the commercial as a kid who was already used to freaky pop stars singing weird lyrics. And I could tell straight away, there was something freaky about this in a slightly more grown-up way, you know, in a good way as well as a bad way. But totally different from what the other older generation rock stars were doing at this point.

You know, this was not Tug of War by Paul McCartney. And you couldn't quite put your finger on what was odd about it, but there was clearly some kind of unearthly sheen on the whole thing, right? In the same way that David Bowie sort of looked like a staid, unhungry rock millionaire by this point, and sort of looked like a monster. You know, you heard that Brian Ferry was meant to be weird. But when you heard Avalon and you saw the video,

it was like a BMW advert, you know. Whereas you could tell that this wasn't. You could tell that this was something different. But you kind of knew maybe you'd have to be 14 or 15 before you could hazard a guess as to what it actually was. But, you know, and yet everyone's mum was whistling it. It was also around the time that everyone's mum seemed to fancy David Bowie. It was an odd development.

I think a lot of that came from Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence. Yeah. I've got to disagree with Taylor about this being his last great single. I mean, for a start, off this same album, you've got Modern Love, which is fantastic. Oh, really? It's alright. And then off, I mean, I guess when you're talking about his shit period, you

mean the album Tonight, and I guess the one after was Never Let It Down. Even off Tonight, you've got Blue Jean, which I think is amazing. Absolute beginners, I'll stand up for that and uh then in the 90s little wonder hello space boys stuff like that you know he did some really good things yeah those are all good singles but i just i don't think they are in the same

category as this or in the same class as this and i think although this isn't as good as the you know the best 70s singles you can put it in a box with them and they won't eat it. I love the story of how Nile Rodgers got together with him to do this. Have we talked about that on Chart Music before? Billy Idol. Yeah, yeah, have we done it? Quick recap, Simon. So, yeah, it's in Nile Rodgers' amazing autobiography, Le Freak,

which everybody ought to read. And it's a story about when Nile was, shall we say, partying very hard, and so was Billy Idol. And they were hanging out in some upscale celebrity bar in New York. Billy Idol had just vomited over his own hands, and then the pair of them noticed David Bowie over in the corner. It's like, oh, my God, oh, my God, it's david bowie and then they go over and he introduced himself and shakes bowie's hand with his vomity palm and then oh but that that's how why do people do that though gonna catch it

not spell a drop and deposit it somewhere no it's it's futile so yeah um i but i guess you know bowies could hardly look at uh a coked up nile rogers and billy idol thing oh that sort of behavior is disgraceful i'll tell you what amazes me though about david bowie one of the most impressive things about the man everyone knows that he had that insane coke habit for a few years and he moved out of la to get away from that environment what a lot of people don't realize is he didn't completely stop he just became a social cocaine user like he'd have a bit if he was out or if it was like a party on tour fucking hell nice work it's like he just wouldn't sit in his house all day doing it on his own you know what i mean it's like that

is impressive yeah it's ridiculous it's like one day you're on your back in beverly hills with a dump truck of cocaine unloading into a kitchen funnel with the thin end going into your schnoz for about two years and then all of a sudden you're like i can take or leave it now you know it's like who does that those and it's those levels of mental discipline and self-control. I mean, it's too easy and glib to say that those levels of mental discipline and self-control are how this ultra-derivative super fan whose early artistic judgment might be described as questionable ended up making all these

incredible records but i mean there's a lot of people with talent who aren't naturals right who can't just walk into a studio and just spew up incredible original music almost by instinct which bowie couldn't and most of them never do anything good because they can't arrange their own brains in the right way to let their talent flow out of them whereas david bowie could do that and he did um and in its way that's as amazing as just being one of those people like captain beefart who just sort of walks into a studio it's like fucking hell what have you just done it was nothing you know but he always worked on everything he did but in a way that's almost harder yeah it's interesting hearing how much

taylor loves this record because obviously it's undeniably good i'm not somebody who really believes that music can ever be um sort of quantified in an objective manner but to the extent that it it maybe can something like Let's Dance is kind of undeniable to me it's it's in that category along with Heart of Glass that I mentioned earlier of a record that I I recognize its quality I find it hard hard to love um and I am somebody who worships at the altar of Nile Rodgers. And also, I'm a fairly regular club and party DJ. And I know that if you put this record on, just the shameless, cynical way it starts with that Beatles.

Yes. Or Rubets, if you prefer. Which, you know, obviously I do. Or Let's Go To The Hop. All right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. At the beginning there. It's just shameless. It's like grabbing you by the balls. Like, boom, obviously I do. Or let's go to the hop. All right, yeah, yeah, yeah, at the beginning there. It's just shameless.

It's like grabbing you by the balls, like, boom, here it is. And you've got that gorgeous Nile Rodgers guitar tone, this sort of jangling motif that goes through it. But it's quite slow. It's quite slow. It's got a slight plodding element to it. The melody can almost hide that. You almost forget how ploddy it is but it's yeah it needs to pick up its heels a little bit i think here's me here's me simon price telling nile

rogers how to write a fucking hit you know yeah but for a self-proclaimed dance record that is a low bpm yeah yeah at the time i knew loads of serious bowie heads of all different ages and this came out i think to myself oh what are they going to make of this and they were just like yes he's back yeah their levels of fandom were like proper football support oh it's like oh yeah we've lost keegan but here's dog leash yeah and of course you know it was helped by the video yeah i place it alongside billy jean for its impact yeah we've spoken earlier about men at work and you know australia sort of uh becoming a thing in pop for a short time here we are again here we are in australia two very different depictions of australian culture aren't they met the men at work and david bowie here um. This one actually pretends to meaning something other

than just being a parade of cultural cliches which men at work are obviously having fun with. The meaning of this, which I maybe didn't even pick up on at the time, but now I look at it and it's not as if it was ever subtle. It's quite sort of on the nose. It's this conflict

between native cultures and western civilisation that's this going on that you've got the aboriginal guy pulling a piece of factory machinery down the middle of the road you know and um the girl putting on the yeah being shouted out by people who are clearly not actors yeah yeah and uh you've you've got you've got the girl putting on the fancy red shoes. And I've got to say that I've got this kind of shudder that still to this day, I hated the way that her toe crinkles up when she puts the shoe on. It used to really freak me out.

Her toe goes all wrinkly and crinkles up when she put it on. I just remember looking at it. I don't know. That's just me. But it's just one of these things that you cannot shake. Whenever I hear that record, that's what I think of. But yeah, and there's the bit where the couple are in the Modern Art Museum and there's a couple of Picassos on the wall.

And they are there crouching on the floor, painting a more kind of traditional Aboriginal thing of a snake, aren't they? And it's all these kind of conflicts between you know aboriginal culture and and the sort of white settler culture plus the plus the obligatory but slightly meaningless to the plot nuclear explosion in the distance because it's the 80s you've got to have a mushroom cloud but it's a happy nuclear explosion isn't it because they're in australia so they're going oh the rest of the world's fuck we're all right yeah the thing with this it's not just this video but this episode in general we all know what muscle memory means you know the psychological theory if you do the same action enough times it becomes second nature do you remember there was

the idea was popularized a lot of people by this advert for bbc sport featuring andy cole andy cole repeating this particular move, which you then see him using the same move to score for Man United. And it's also something that dancers have, muscle memory. And watching this episode, Top of the Pops, has made me realise that there's such a thing as muscle memory by proxy because 1983 was a very dancey year. I don't just mean in the sense that dance music was breaking through.

Although it was. We already had I.O.U. by Freeze. This was also the year of Rocket by Herbie Hancock and various other things. We discussed Rocket in another episode, of course. Both hugely important records. But I mean it was a dancey year in the Terpsichorean sense. Dance, if you will.

Dance, yes. That's where the muscle memory by proxy idea comes in for me because it's not just this video. There were so many exact body movements in this episode which are imprinted on my memory. And as I said earlier, I didn't have a VHS recorder, so they had to really make their imprint when they could. There's the bit in Billie Jean

where Michael Jackson's on this dystopian litter swept kind of yellow brick road with his legs apart and he just pulses his legs a couple of times and just that movement it's almost like a gif or jif as you're supposedly meant to say it in my brain that just loops over and over there's the guys from Men At Work

stamping up and down in the sand really quickly like they're seagulls tapping for worms really huge worms that be in australia probably like ken russell layer of the worm sized you know yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah there's there's there's the bare-chested guys prancing around outside bonnie tyler's haunted mansion there's jennifer beals doing those very mechanical iron pumping moves in front of a really bright spotlight, flash dance there's this particular way Simon Le Bon throws his right fist

outwards in Duran Duran is there something I should know? There's Lionel Ritchie looking a bit uneasy as he's stepping from the floor to the wall in this rotating living room, so there are all these things, just dance moves, just moves that are just so ingrained in my

mind but in in this video after the girl has put on uh put the red shoes onto her wrinkly toe she does this particular little bit of boogieing as they're walking away and that little dance there it's like that's it for me this song and yeah i almost you know that's the way in which this song has to be danced to almost you know you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's a funny thing, though, this video. It's, on the one hand, it's really good in that it's very professional. By the standards of 1983, this is a really well-directed video. And it at least sort of tries to say something about the tangled relationship between, you know,

the first world and the rest. But no normal person can resist a bit of a laugh after the noble peasants find the shoes and immediately there's a nuclear explosion. A mushroom. Oh, what a blow for them. But it's true, like you say, mushroom clouds in 80s pop videos

were basically what locked the earth to the sky and stopped it floating away. But it's a funny thing because, like, you compare this to the Duran Duran video. Lovable doofuses like Duran Duran always seemed very aware of how funny their shit was, you know, like how kind of silly it is. and they'd play up to it for a laugh um whereas bowie who's a you know a vastly better artist and more talented and all that sort of stuff and the originator of all this bilge in a way you know

always seemed oblivious when he was in close proximity to silly kitch yeah um which is strange and i don't know why that was but there's this sort of dotted through his career there's just moments where david bowie appears to have no artistic judgment at all this man who kind of could if you sat down privately with him you could have a two-hour conversation about, like, any era of painting or, you know, early experimental films of the 1920s. You know, he knew about all this stuff, and yet he still would dress as a Pierrot clown. He would still have a fucking mushroom cloud in his video.

Funny you should say that, Taylor, because I got into a conversation once with a mate of a mate who was a designer on a really high-end art magazine. You know, one of them magazines that cost like 30 quid and the cover's so glossy you could fucking ice skate on it. And he'd be working there. You know, him and the rest of the staff would be working on the magazine and they would get about seven or eight phone calls a day from david boa who was just

bored and wanted to talk to him about art oh my god it got to the point where it's like oh fucking bowie's on the phone again because someone just talked to him because i'm on a fucking deadline here jesus best we got was an angry phil collins wanting to threaten legal action okay now yeah yeah so the video was shot at the corinda hotel in corinda and the warren bungle national park right uh both of which are in new south wales and the opening scene where they're playing at the bar apparently they just announced while they were setting up the cameras and everything oh well does anyone want to come into the bar? Because David Bowie's going to be miming to his latest record. And apparently, there's only one or two people who actually knew who David Bowie was.

We see their uncomprehending stares, but that's probably because there's two non-white people in the bar for the first time ever. The only time you ever saw an Ab originally on the telly was, you know, as an extra in Skippy or something like that a walkabout yeah yeah or his backup to rolf harris yes yeah true going back to what taylor was saying about um bowie um being quite happy to place himself next to you know or or oblivious to his proximity to kitch the other thing that he doesn't seem to mind doing is looking really fucked. Because I think in this video, I think he doesn't look well. He may have been well.

He may have been completely clean that time. Maybe just like a very sweaty, hot, humid day in New South Wales. But he looks like a man in the grip of a fever leaning against the wall there. And he's not... I suppose historically he hadn't been afraid. For a very beautiful, he hadn't been afraid.

For a very beautiful man, he hadn't been afraid of looking ugly when the work called for it. Like, obviously, he appeared in The Elephant Man and Barl. Buried up to his neck. Yeah, yeah, of course, yeah. And even his own video for Be My Wife is probably when he looked the most fucked. But that was probably real. That was probably genuine I look at this and just think

mate are you okay but yes Simon as you've said about Live Aid you know the day that dinosaurs came roaring back here's the first thud isn't it of the enormous claw I suppose it is but does Bowie get a special pass for never really having been away

notwithstanding what Taylor said about him not really being a sort of chart figure for the first couple of years. Yeah, it was a cause for celebration that David Bowie was back, wasn't it? Certainly coming back in that sort of chart-conquering number one way. I suppose as long as you weren't the sort of Bowie fan who thought, oh, fuck this commercial pap, then you would have been... Yeah, be more gay, David. Come commercial pap then then you would have been be more gay David come on

you would have been cheering him on it may not be our Bowie but it's Bowie at number one and there's something to celebrate about that I dug up a clip from the BBC from about 7 years ago where the owners of that bar that's in the video they were going to try and get more

people in because they've only got about 120 population in that place they going to um try and get more people in because they've only got about 120 population in that place they're going to try and get more people in by turning it into a david bowie theme bar right that is a long way to go for a drink surrounded by pictures of david bowie yes yeah they're gonna have waxworks of all those people. Well, just stuff them. Yeah. They should have all the people in the video. When they die, they stuff them and put them in the bar and animatronicise them, if you will.

And every day at 3pm exactly, they arrange for a nuclear bomb to go off on the other side of the hill. Australia's a big enough place. They can manage it. I was thinking about this the other day, actually, because I've been watching the gloriously trashy tv series married at first sight australia um and uh in the episode i just watched they go to the gold coast which um isn't a region apparently but an

actual city i had no idea um and uh in the background you can see that there is a hard rock cafe gold coast now right as i understand it hard rock cafe obviously it's a global chain but And in the background, you can see that there is a Hard Rock Cafe Gold Coast. Now, as I understand it, Hard Rock Cafe, obviously, it's a global chain, but they try and have at least a few bits of genuine rock and roll memorabilia in there so that people go in there and go, oh, it's a bit special. Look, there's, I don't know, there's the guitar that Chris Rea played Driving Home for Christmas on or something, right? There's men without hats hats. Yeah, yeah.

So, you know, I guess every continent needs its, you know, little sort of meccas of rock and roll realness and that bar in a place I'm not even going to attempt to pronounce, maybe that could be one. Have they actually done it or they were thinking of doing it? don't know that's the pretty low levels of research there al i thought

you'd got a quick flight sorry yeah quick flight and a cab ride and yeah journey on a kangaroo so let's dan spent three weeks at number one knocked off its perch by True by Spandau Ballet. It would go on to sell just over 900,000 copies in the UK, making it his biggest selling single here. The follow-up, a cover of China Girl, the song he wrote with Iggy Pop in 1977, got to number two, held off number one by Every Breath You Take. And he closed

out 1983 when Modern Love also made it to number two in October denied its place at number one by Karma Chameleon. Let's go! Wonderful! We've got the best music in the world here today on Top of the Pops. Merry Christmas to you. Now, our next guest this afternoon, they've got a record of the charts at the moment in the top 20, but their biggest hit single this year was the number one cover version of an old Neil Diamond song.

Here are UB40 and... Smith, surrounded by assorted office girls, many in big nasty nasal cavity caving in 80s glasses, wishes us a Merry Christmas and tells us that the next band are currently in the charts with a good single. But we're getting this one instead. It's Red Red Wine by UB40. Formed in Birmingham in 1978, UB40 were a multiracial reggae band who were named, as we all know, after unemployment benefit form 40. A year later, they were discovered at a pub gig by Chrissie Hynde,

who booked them as a support act for the Pretenders UK tour of early 1980, at the same time as they signed to the local independent label Graduate Records. The debut single, the double A-side King slash Food for Thought, immediately scampered up the charts, getting to number four for two weeks in April of 1980, becoming the first indie single to breach the top 10, which encouraged them to set up their own label, DEP International. By the end of 1981, they had racked up three more top 10 hits with My Way of Thinking, Slash I Think It's Going to Rain, The Earth Dies Screaming, Slash Dream a Lie, and One in Ten. Diminishing returns set in in 1982, however, and by February of this year,

their ninth single, I've Got Mine, only got to number 45, their first single not to make the proper charts. Under pressure by their label's parent company Virgin to deliver a fourth studio LP in three years, they elected to do a covers album called Labour of Love. This is the lead cut from that LP, a cover of the 1967 Neil Diamond single which Jimmy James and the Vagabonds took to number 36 in October of 1968 but the version the band were using was the 1969 cover by Tony Tribe which got to number 46 in August of 1969. It entered the chart at number 36 in late August Then soared 25 places to number 9 And a week later it jumped all the way to number 1 Displacing Give It Up by KC and the Sunshine Band

And here they are in the studio One word Jawadiwadi I fucking hate this song It's terrible, it's really sad One word, jaw-waddy-waddy. I fucking hate this song. It's terrible. It's really sad. I mean, I was a huge, huge fan, and I was about 17, 18, of UB40.

Yes. When they were coming through at that time. And I saw them as coming from the sort of same deep, spacey sort of place as a lot of the kind of post-punk things, you know, that you order, even Bauhaus and stuff like that in a way, you know. And, you know, obviously they were kind of suing very explicitly and very, you know, very melancholy in their sort of politics and their kind of rage about the earth dying, screaming and Martin Luther King and stuff like that.

And so this comes along. And to me, it would have felt like a kick in the teeth, like Joy Division, Ian Curtis living on and eventually going on and doing a cover of sweet caroline yes something like that it was um exactly i mean and i felt personally betrayed at the time i just you know i mean you know i'm prepared at this point i'm running a nightclub with regular attendances of zero you know i've got my principles um and they've gone over to the other side i remember like watching this on top of the pops my mum's tapping along to this with a slippered foot and I just thought, this is betrayal.

You people have self-lobotomised. It's Brexit reggae, isn't it? It's fucking bregay. This is the first time that UB40 have popped up on Chopped Music and I was really hoping it would be one of their early singles because I totally agree with you, David. I really wanted to point out how fucking brilliant this band were. And yes, when this came out, it felt like an absolute betrayal.

And also, it kind of wipes out the memory of the early group that they were. Yes. You know, it's funny, because I interviewed them, actually, later on in Jamaica. I went out to Jamaica and interviewed them. About 1998, it would have been. And I was talking about the early stuff and Ali Campbell was just sitting there laughing

under every man is king, and passifard, oh my god horrible jurassic it was like no that was really good stuff he just thought of it as adolescent misery in terms of his scheme of things maybe he was being self-deprecated

their cover of I Got You, Babe is the real deal. Oh, yes. Sure. One thing it did remind me of, actually, is like a lot of people of that generation, you know, your Jar Wobbles, your Margie Smiths and whatever, Annie Camden, they were kind of like, you know, working class kids who had a really good sort of turn of phrase

and a lot of energy in interviews and a lot of attitude and great in terms of copy in that respect. You know, even by 1998, they still had that. They were kind of trying to recover some of their sort of reggae integrity at that point. Yeah, good luck. In terms of the activities and stuff that they were doing, you know, the people that were working with them, whatever, etc., etc. But, yeah, they still had that kind of natural sort of abrasion about them.

So it was very entertaining because, you know, I was used to, you know, I've been used to, you know, when I came in, I was interviewing kind of My Bloody Valentines and Dinosaur Juniors and they just didn't have a kind of two words to sort of rub together between them. You know, it was terrible. So it was great. You know, it was always great, you know, to come back and interview people from that immediate sort of post-punk era, you know, just had so much more about them interview-wise. The only grim thing that happened on that trip was, you know, they do like to sort of, I mean, you know,

he's smoking about a pound of dope a day or something like that, Ali Campbell or whatever, and they were all utterly stoned. And I remember, like, one morning I was supposed to go out and join them at their place. Me and the other journalist and kind of like that, we were staying at, I think it was one of Noel Coward's properties out there that they converted into a hotel. So went down to breakfast and got there late and they'd finished serving breakfast so on an empty stomach you have to go out to like

the ub40s compound about 10 15 miles away and i'm starving you know like three or four hours and like and i said to them at one point it says do you have any food and alice says now we have a woman that comes in about one o'clock with some ackee and rice, please. But no. And everybody else is stoned. Like, look, I didn't do any of that stuff. I didn't do anyone. Everybody else is just crawling around like fucking idiots, you know. I thought this stuff was supposed to make you hungry.

Yeah. And they were completely oblivious to appetite. And I've been five, six hours without food, no breakfast, now no lunch. And eventually I had to steal into their house into their big kitchen look for food you know i opened the kind of fridge door and there's just a did you find a rat i would have eaten that fucking rat i would have tell you there's a rat in my kitchen i'll tell you what i'm gonna fucking do with it yeah absolutely wrap a cob around it was nothing i went to the fridge opened the fridge door and it was just like a jar of mustard you know your

classic sort of bachelor thing eventually i went into another fridge door and there was just like a jar of mustard, you know, your classic sort of bachelor thing. Eventually I went into another room and there was a display of like three or four day old bananas. And I just had to look around and I just had to cram one of these overripe bananas, you know, unwrap it and just cram it into my gob, just to keep going for the next 30 minutes until the woman came

with the ackee and rice, please. And, you know, eventually she turned up, you know, I practically dived headfirst into the bloody pot and just about survived. But, yeah, it was a nice experience, you know, good people. And I was going to say, as Phil Oakey once pointed out, because I was talking to him, he says, well, you know, they're a big man, you know, they've got mouths to feed.

I don't know why the fucking hell they could do a better job of feeding fucking mouths than they did with me, you know. Yeah. Did they think you were a square because you don't ride the green horse? I think possibly so, yeah. I don't think there was a calculated punishment, though, the whole thing. I think my only problem with UB40 is that I'm a reggae fan. And when you think of all the British bands of the 70s and 80s,

including UB40, as you say, for a while, who found reggae useful as a way to express certain feelings musically. And when you think about how intelligently and sensitively a lot of those groups took that music out of Jamaica, like out of the high-pressure sunshine, and reset it in the slate-grey bleakness of Britain in the 80s. Either playing reggae or just using bits of it, like ideas and elements of it, to break the straight lines of rock.

It's a depressing thing to watch UB40 here, you know. Not really that long after making decent records. Yeah. Turning it into the sort of thing you'd expect to hear at Montego Bay Butlins. Yes. You know what I mean? Like doing four hours a night.

And the other thing that bothers me about UB40, it's like vocal blackface, isn't it? It's black throat is what you do. And I mean, pretty much all pop music goes to that well, you know, and white singers have always tried to sound black to an extent and almost all rock singing is at least derived from something that a black vocalist did at some point. And it's daft to worry about that, really.

And when black artists use string sections, you know, or jangling guitars, nobody goes, oh, he's trying to rip off white music. None of that is the issue. It's just the fact that he's doing a fucking impression of a Jamaican accent as if he wasn't literally standing next to a couple of black guys. Yeah.

Does he not feel a bit self-conscious? Because I would. I mean, obviously, they're not bothered because they're in a band with him. But to anyone watching, it's like Jim Davidson doing chalky white material on deaf comedy jam. You know what I mean?

I don't know. I think, in a way, it would be worse if he was a really good singer and a charismatic front man you know it's like he's helped by the fact that he's a little nasal brummie urchin yeah he looks like he should be in a sausage because it makes him seem curious and sort of rather than infuriating but how much better all their records would have been if he just sang them in a in a white brummie accent yes and just steered clear of this fucking oh or even a dave waitlin type yeah yeah yeah i mean you can use the phrasing of reg if you're going to play pure reggae music you can use the phrasing of reggae music without actually having to do the

voice i mean the other strike against ub40 post you and me theme tune ub40 here that's where the blame can be put everyone at school who was a cunt to you was into ub40 not all ub40 fans at school were cunts but everyone who was a cunt was also a ub40 fan that's a universal thing because in the book the van by roddy doyle set in 1990 which i was reading only recently there's a group of cuntish lads called the living dead who spend all the time lobbing boulders at the chip van that belongs to the central characters and roddy doll wrote sometimes it wasn't rock say through it was used up batteries from their ghetto blaster all they ever played was ub410 yeah nothing else no ever nail on head sir yeah i mean i talk about just my mum tapping her foot

yeah you're right i mean now that you say it it got worse than that there was a similar sort of lesser thing with simple mindss for me, actually, who had kind of sort of a 1982 New Gold Dream. And they came crashing right back down to sort of Stadium Rock Earth. And then all of a sudden, yeah, the twats were all into Simple Minds. Yeah. Speaking as one of the whitest men in the country, this is more offensive to me than reggae like it used to be.

Paul Nicholas was just having a go at summer, right? These people actually understood and liked and loved reggae. And then they come out with this shit. Synthesised steel drum sounds. Fucking hell. But this is stuff like this that really, really embittered me at the time and just made me feel that pop and rock and everything had absolutely gone to seed and gone to the dogs.

You know, it was going to have to be Stockhausen and George Clinton from now on. Yeah. But the strange thing about this one, being a Neil Diamond song, right, this is obviously only a reggae classic because it was covered by a load of Jamaican acts. Yeah. Who, as we've said before, would do reggae versions of absolutely anything. Oh, yeah.

Come on, Feel the Noise by Slade or whatever. Yeah, absolutely. Really? There's a reggae version out there of that, yeah. No. Yeah. I vote a reggae version of Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep by a Jamaican pinky and perker.

Yeah. But in this case, I would imagine they latched on to red red wine because someone heard the guitar part on the neil diamond version which is sort of choppy and on the offbeat you know in what is otherwise a country ballad and so suddenly there are various reggae versions which filter down to this which is the worst version yeah it's a nice enough song but by this point it's it's not so good that it can survive being sat on by this musical diana doors in the sweeney falling ass first onto a wedding cake you know i mean if you listen to tony tribes version incidentally we've always been told that the Tony Tribe version is what UB40 grew up with.

It's actually the version that sounds the least like their version. Yes, yes. Which is much closer to the Tinga Stewart version. If you listen to Tinga Stewart's version of this, that's where UB40 seemed to have got their arrangement from. Not Tony Tribe at all. But Tony Tribe's version sounds really alive it was obviously recorded in a pretty basic studio but the sound of it is almost uncanny it's a human beings playing with that much discipline and precision yeah while still

sounding so loose and human and they sound as if they're just over there by the standard lamp playing straight at you you know what i mean whereas this ub40 record sounds like it's happening in another building you know like a much worse building than the one that you're in yeah even if the one that you're in is on fire um so if you've never heard a reggae record, which I think may well have been true for quite a lot of the people who bought this, it would sound fine because it's a catchy song. And if you like glassy early to mid-80s pop, there's nothing wrong with the record.

But I'm a reggae fan. And all the things that I love about reggae are the complete opposite of what i'm hearing here yes in terms of the playing the sound the feel reggae is supposed to sound heavy for fuck's sake it's supposed to sound heavy yeah it's not supposed to sound like this even when it's light it's supposed to sound heavy now I was going to digress, really. I mean, in terms of like, if you want to do something populist, popular, do something like Dennis Bavell doing Silly Games or whatever,

which he did it just for money. He just turned it out. He knew it was a catchy tune or whatever, but it's an absolute classic. There's a glorious remix of that going around, which is like the Dennis Bavell dub version. It's on SoundCloud. I think it's Optima. It's spliced with the big

sing-along you had in Small Axe or whatever and it's just one of the most beautiful things I've heard all year I understand you before it being a bunch of working class lads who probably found we've got to do something we're in the shit here we've got to just do something and hold our noses

that's a bit kind of commercial or whatever and well you know but they could have done better, I'm sure. So Red Red Wine would spend three weeks at number one, giving way to Karma Chameleon. Yes. The follow-up, a cover of Winston Groovy's 1970 single Please Don't Make Me Cry, got to number 10 in November and they finished up their comeback year with a cover

of Jimmy Cliff's 1969 single Many Rivers To Cross which is currently at number 16 it's highest position I like that one, that's alright that's what they should have done ah fuck em This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon Pull-Apart, only at Wendy's.

It's ooey, gooey, and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. I'm Mark Haynes, and for the last 32 years, I've been a fan of professional wrestling. My friend Pete Donaldson

from the Football Ramble, he hasn't. But in our podcast, Wrestle Me, the two of us subject the greatest spectacle in sports entertainment, WrestleMania, to the kind of rigorous scrutiny that ruins it entirely. GQ called Wrestle Me enrapturing. Shortlist said it's beautiful. And it's a hit with common people, too,

with well over 400 five-star reviews on iTunes. Wrestle Me, available from all good podcast providers. He's in the charts at the moment, but he was at number one for five weeks. Who am I talking about? Billy Joel at Tango. Janice, next to a Duncan Norvell lookalike with an appalling yellow and blue dazzle jumper, who she doesn't attempt to cop off with, tells us that UB40 was one of the best gigs she's seen this year, and then Pivots to Uptown Girl by Billy Joel.

We've covered Billy Joel a few times on Chart Music, including the time when Legs & Co slinked it about to It's Still Rock & Roll To Me, which got to number 14 in September of 1980. Since then, he's been in the UK chart as many times as I've been in Beyonce's knickers, with his next six singles all flopping over here, and his stock in this country declining to the point that his label didn't even bother to release Tell Her About It, the lead cut from his new LP An Innocent Man, over here in the summer of 1983. In the wake of Teller about it getting to number one in America, however, the UK wing of CBS decided to take a punt on the follow-up, a shameless tribute to Frankie Vallee.

And what do you know, it entered the top 40 at number 25 in late October, then soared 18 places to number seven, and a week after that became the single that was big enough to dislodge karma chameleon after its six-week reign here's the video where christy brinkley drives into joel's garage so she could be sung at by him and some other blokes who just so happen to be as short as he is i mean i looked I looked at Dazzle Jumper, man, for fucking ages to ascertain whether it was Duncan Norvell or not.

Because, you know, after the debacle of last episode, where we missed Peter Duncan and Simon Grimmer, Blue Peter, awaiting the balcony speech by Conrad Schick. That was outrageous, man. I apologise, Pulp Crazy youngsters. I have failed you. Oh, oh what's the other thing i cocked up as well yeah i said et liked m&ms and it was reese's pieces so yeah there we go the notes and corrections segment of chart music is over we can attend to this song it's weird that cbs didn't

put out tell her about it over here because as we stated in the last episode, 60s revivalism. We were fucking all over that round about this time. And it's at its apex here, isn't it? This is the 60s slapping you across the face. It's a perfect Frankie Valli pastiche. Yes. It's uncanny.

Uncannily like Frankie Valli in the Four Seasons record with a great video. And it's a brilliantly catchy song. And yet and yet, I still don't like Billy Joel. And I know this has brought me into conflict with other chart music contributors in the past. I had exactly the same thing where I think you and Pricey loved... I can't remember which track it was. Tell her about it.

That's right. And I was kind of floundering. I don't know. Shaking S. Tell her about it. That's right. And I was kind of floundering him. I don't know, Shaking Siddhartha. I've never, it's just, I've never also seen in the same room as Michael Keaton. I want to just register that. But I was, I think the problem with this record for me anyway, is that I've never been into the scenario of feeling that I'm in the company of a group of men yakking

about women and I will actually avoid such scenarios because they just fill me with dread I remember like a couple of years ago I was in a staff room at work and men in that room started talking about who they fancied celebrity wise and stuff and I'm sorry guys I can't cope with that I have to leave I don't like that blokey kind of talking about women in a sense it just makes me massively uncomfortable it's just a bit too close to the biscuit game um and this whole song is that scenario it's billy joel showing off to his mates and you know worse than that basically billy joel is as ugly as i am and he's bragging about shagging a supermodel so i mean i remember thinking at the time you know thinking you

smug cunt but i've since read interviews you know billy joel i mean i'll quote him directly here he says um i read an interview where he said so here i was a rock star who was suddenly single i took a vacation down in the caribbean i met l mcpherson christy brinkley and whitney houston all at the same moment in some little hotel bar they were all down on the model shoot and i was just in the piano bar playing as time goes by i looked up and there were these three gorgeous women looking at me from the other side of the piano i looked back down at the piano and said, thank you. Being a singer is so great. What an incredible thing this is.

I was squiring these models around. I dated Elle Macpherson. Oh, I hate that. Squiring around. I know. Fuck off. Just to complete the quote, I dated Elle Macpherson half a year before Christy.

Then I was dating Christy Brinkley. And so the original song was Uptown Girls. I was just a pig in shit. I mean, I suppose I should applaud the honesty, but fuck off, Joel. You know, I mean, I just, you know, I don't like men talking about women in a group like that anyway. So I couldn't deny the fucking total and utter adherent catchiness of this song. It's a brilliantly crafted thing.

But I resent it because I just don't get on with Billy Joel. Convince me, Simon. Yeah, the sentiments, essentially, all posh birds. They all want it off of them on a garage floor, don't they? Pretty much. It's just, it's... Yeah, look what I got, despite just being an ordinary Joe.

You know, nothing except my love and my amazing songwriting talent and my six grandies and the proceeds from a multi-platinum album. You know, it's, I don't know. Oh, Neil, go ahead with your own life. Leave him alone. I'll tell you what I don't like about this whole thing is him trying to do the whole blue collar bit, you know, or 14-inch blue collar in his case.

It's like posing in a context that's so totally bourgeois, right, in the sense that this record is pure indulgence and is created only to be bought and sold, you know. It is a fundamentally meaningless commodity. It's bourgeois art in the truest sense. That's all okay, but I don't like it when people do that while playing the regular Joe, you know. It's like, I just got to work,

take my hard hat and my box of sandwiches. It's like, no, fuck off, you know. Yes. And this video is like an attempt to do a heterosexual Grease. Yeah. And that's like trying to make German spaghetti. It's pointless and impossible. But I think it was what a lot of Americans were waiting for.

And I suppose a lot of British people too. But the thing is, when you take that kind of high camp dance routine and you disconnect it from the winking, transgressive thrill of 1970s camp, it just deflates and just sinks to the level of the conga line. You know what I mean? It's just a bunch of blokes arsing about for no good reason yeah it's a bit depressing and also like by 1983 that that dragged out slow motion rock and roll revival was more or less over you know like the tyranny of the

old teds and that generation like either working for a like an 18th rockabilly revival or doing that 70s thing of playing a heavily produced pastiche of 50s rock and roll that was sort of over but almost immediately we moved on to the next and even more insulting step towards the the the burial of the spark of the rock and roll age which was this mid to late 80s obsession with that sort of airbrushed, expensive, yuppie approximation of the aesthetics of the 1950s and early 60s, which was everywhere for years. And I think this was one of the first examples.

It's like an Athena print of a record. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's perfectly well put together catchy song but it it turns my stomach a bit it's like all that stuff does like i used to live in the sticks right and we wanted to like when i was on the dole and i had a couple of mates we were just hanging around and we wanted to live a sort of cafe society when it's going to a cafe and be in tents and all that which is just as much of a pose but it's what we wanted to do

in Woolworths yeah right well exactly but a bit later on they opened a cafe near where we lived which did free refills of coffee so we went there but that was a policy which we single out or we mob- handedly ended by sitting

in there for five hours while smoking 300 filterless camel uh for about five days in a row but it was horrible because it was a it was a real late 80s early 90s type coffee shop with fucking james dean boulevard and broken dreams poster and like marilyn monroe you know and we're sitting there like the genuine scuzzballs and depressed fucked up chain smokers like james dean right and these fucking yuppies are trying to get us out of their glorified calf because we're putting off the other yuppies you know on account of being like that but still alive yeah and i'll admit it slightly less good looking yeah alison moyer wants to do a video in there for folks sake yeah exactly sounds like a good place it sounds like uncle mo's family feedback but But no, I mean, the thing is, it's odd with,

I mean, I've spoken to Americans about Billy Joel for some reason. Don't ask why, it was a long night. But he's got a very skewed regional fan base when Billy Joel starts off in the 70s. Yeah. Kind of, which does have that ordinary Joe aspect to it. You know, the working to middle-class suburbs

of the whole kind of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington Northeast corridor is his kind of place. But by this era, he's bigger than that. And consequently, you know what I say? When I watched this video, I was reminded of another horrible thing from the 80s. And that's the dance scene featuring tom cruise in risky business it's got that similar oh just just repulsion for me um yeah yeah so i just wanted to lodge that

thank you get out of my system and why has he got body poppers in it what the fuck is that about? Because he likes them black people. Oh, Rob, I don't know why. Apparently. You know Nicky Wire out of Manic Street Preachers? Well, a secret that me and Pricey were once allowed in on, which I'm now going to share with the entire world. Yes. Apparently when he was at school,

he worked out his own full dance routine to this song. No! And would perform it at school discos. Oh, my God! And I bet you any money that that performance was both less embarrassing than this one and aesthetically better. I mean, the whole key to this record is the bellow

isn't it, it's one of those bellowing songs, you can be in the pub or whatever and it comes on, you don't have to know any of the lyrics because you're just going to wait there before you can go it is all about the O word it is Tarzan boy before Tarzan boy isn't it, we can sit here

and pick this song to fucking bits and we have, but when it starts going oh that's it you surrender pretty much yeah put your fucking hands up you've lost well yeah you can't resist no you can't over you it trundles over you you might

remember I don't know the only lyrics I could ever remember were um what is it you know I can't afford to buy her pearls but maybe someday when my ship comes in I think is one of the lines but beyond that it is all about the oh woes

yeah she's looking for a downtown man and hey that's what I am yes also maybe we're not really well positioned

to appreciate this song I think maybe we'd understand why this song is apparently so good if we had the sort of voice where we say it's a big grappling and the big stop him he's getting away um then you could truly understand billy joe yeah so uptown girls spent five weeks at number one, eventually conceding the throne to the next single on tonight.

It would sell 975,000 copies in the UK by the end of 1983, ending up as the second biggest single of the year, one place below Karma Chameleon, one above Red Red Wine. CBS made amends for their earlier fuck up by putting out tell her about it as a follow-up and it's currently residing at number seven in the charts eventually getting to number four in july I don't care Don't you know I love this Supergirl Wow, who ever would have predicted a number one single for Billy Joel this year?

Hey, it must be Christmas. I've been kissed by Annie Lennox under the mistletoe. Look, great stuff. Now, the number one this year, could you have predicted it two months ago? Because I sure as heck couldn't have done. They are a great group. They apparently have come from nowhere at all. They're going to great success. The Christmas number one for 1983, The Flying

Bigots. Smith, next to a girl who looks the dead spit of Jill, the woman that Alan Partridge took to the owl sanctuary still can't believe that billy joel added in him before lying that he's been kissed by annie lennox pointing to his cheek at some lipstick that isn't there that's disgraceful i'm a bit sued for that sort of thing there yeah he then expressed equal astonishment that the next actor this year's Christmas number one,

The Flying Pickets, with Only You. We've already covered The Flying Pickets, the erstwhile members of a left-wing theatre group who performed songs a cappella in a play about a brass band and took it up as a part-time job in pubs, who covered Yazoo's debut single for their own debut in Chart Music 16. And after it crashed into the top 40 at number nine and saw Uptown Girl off, has been number one for three weeks. And here it sits as the Christmas number one of 1983.

But oh dear, some of the Pulcres youngsters are not best pleased. Letter in the latest issue of smash hits just who are the flying pickets they take brilliant songs like space oddity and only you and practically ruin them one of these people the bold one looks like a member of the adams family why don't these abnormal people leave the hits to the young shocking behavior how old are they now but yeah how did you feel about this being the christmas number one interesting point to raise i think that is it's christmassy what the fuck like what do you expect from a christmas number one really christmas i i I like my Christmas number ones to sound fucking chimey or jingly or snowy or any combination of these.

And this fulfils the brief. It's not my favourite Christmas number one ever, but it works for this time of year. I don't remember this as a Christmas number one. I just remember it as a surprise big hit. When we were doing Chant Music's number 16, it was like, oh like oh yeah this oh shit this is christmas number one fucking hell all right yeah fair enough because you know it's 1983

this time last year it was fucking renee and renato so you know i'm i'm sitting there fully prepared for the christmas number one to be shit and we get this and it's like oh fair dues why not fuck it yeah how did you feel taylor was the christmas number one a really important thing to you or not um not really my main memory of this record is my dad loved it so he played it all the time which didn't go down particularly well with me um i don't hate it there's look there's a Huckleberry Hound cartoon where Huck is selling door to door and no one wants to buy anything off him. And he creeps up to a window

where a bloke's sitting in an armchair and he tries to do his sales pitch through the window. And without looking round, the bloke slams the window closed and goes, who needs it? That's how I feel about the fly and pickets version of only you i'm surprised you didn't remember this as a christmas number one because i've never heard a record trying harder to sound christmassy that hasn't actually got sleigh bells on it it's the

way the echo is set up yeah um the sort of sparkle effect on the voices, right? And that sort of icy sheen that they've put on the sound. Later, done again by E17 on Stay Another Day. Yeah. But to me, it sounds melancholic in a less appealing way because I sort of associate it with the last couple of real Christmases because of my age, right? Yeah.

83 and 84 were like the last real Christmases for me before I got old and before I lost that childish susceptibility, you know, to pretend magic and unpolluted excitement and the ability to imagine that Christmas was a special time. Yeah. There's some useful message of peace or greater wisdom to be found so to me it sounds like a sleek and quite ugly early 80s digital rendering of sparkle and wonder you know and it just makes me think of the end of that you

know like the sounds have curdled along with the world. It's just that when you see that well-rehearsed, imploring old Ted face looking directly into the camera, you know, with these puppy eyes, it's all a bit professional, isn't it? Do you know what I mean? It's a bit club circuit, you know it's like you can you can almost see the the cigarette machine and the the lit up row of optics and the fitted carpet full of static all solid with trodden in dirt you know and the ice bucket with a horse's head for a hand yeah and i know they were trying to be all man of the people and unglamorous and unambitious in their shot at the fucking christmas number one it just it rankles a bit with me like i can take that sort of donkey jacket thing in pop music like

you know like yeah we would be standing around a brazier outside a car factory at five in the morning, you know, arguing with HGV drivers. But we're appearing live tonight at the Bloxham Lyceum, you know. I can take that when it comes from people whose music has some kind of rawness to it. You know, okay, you know it's a bit of an act and it's slightly played up, but not when it's these slick sort of sub vegas dudes you know what i mean yeah that's what i don't like about it they were on saturday superstore earlier this month and were banned

from giving away a tea towel with carl marx's face on it as a competition prize so you know there we go which tells you everything you need to know about the flying pickets in their brief moment of glory right there's something slightly sad and embarrassing about them and their sudden appearance in the mainstream which i think they would have liked to have seen as their rough hewn chartist human voice music you know breaching the walls of radio one but really it was a message of how how little they actually communicated and what an old school variety act they really were you know like a sort of new faces runners up you know yeah and the idea that they would then be startled that they were we want to give away a karl marx tea towel, no, what? You can't do that. Why did they not realise that they're not being seen

as a sort of revolutionary a cappella band, you know, bringing Marx to the masses? It's a bunch of old blokes who couldn't be bothered to learn how to play an instrument. It really is the most Corbynite Christmas number one ever, I think. Yes. In all the ways. It is at once too professional and not professional enough, I think,

because it's quite studied the way that they all... It's like, we're just a ragtag bunch of troubadours who've... But I can't find any hate in my soul for them, really. No. I mean, the thing is about them is if you were under 40 now and i showed you the video of this and i said look this this was the christmas number one in 1983 your first question would be so what sitcom were they in then it looks like a middle-aged young ones that i've been repeated on dave yet because there's

a quiffy one there's a bold one there's one who thinks he's doctor who and then there's three mics yeah yeah i thought that guy uh i thought he looked more like one of the minor hobbits the peter jackson hobbit this guy looks a bit like barry manilow in blue and then there's a guy who looks a bit like Barry Manilow in blue. And then there's a guy, there's your main dude who has amazing mutton chops, which, you know, quite startling. And the biggest bolo tie I've ever seen with like a tiger's head on it. Nice. Which is not a good use of tiger. And yeah, the sort of slightly sepulchral looking bald guy. He does look a bit like Ingmar Bergman's death.

You know, they could have had him. That would have been so good. They could have done so much with this format because it's just like six guys all going bah, bah, bah, bah. They could have just had him sitting at the back with a chess set. And I do. He really does. I'm so sorry, mate, but you do.

It would have been good actually just to have him not singing and just standing there and giving it like the Wilco Johnson stare. Oh, yes. How great would that be with this exact record, with this exact like nan-pleasing sound? And just get the cameraman to just, you know, sort of, he's cruising past them all, give them all equal time and then just like, zhoom. Oh, that would change everything for me. Death is coming for everything. So who bought this?

Apart from my dad. Yeah. Mums and your dad. I think this is what was pissing off the Smash Hits reader. The impression that's being given off, if not by the band, but by the type of people who are buying it, is, oh, yeah, this bloody synth rubbish. It's not proper music.

All we've got to do is press a button. Here, we've took one of your songs and we've made it proper. I think they did it with a certain amount of humility. You know, you're even talking about it. They just sort of were doing a, you know, it's always a little bit like you have to justify it. If you're going to do a cover, you've got to have a good reason. But it's interesting.

Most covers are very straight and don't really have any imagination and often it adds nothing to the universe at all. And at least this has a thought in it, like what if this but that? And it works. The original is one of the sparsest pop hits of the decade. Yeah, yeah. What they should be doing is adding more instruments to it, not less. But it's basically coffee table frog chorus, isn't it?

That's what this is. And I'm okay that that happened. You know, that's not any great tragedy, I don't think. Stop making me like this more. Sorry. I don't think they did cynically kind of go, yeah, we're going to have a Christmas number one. Although I wouldn don't think they did cynically kind of go yeah we're gonna we're we're gonna have a christmas number one although i wouldn't mind if they did because who wouldn't

want a christmas number one you're set for life yeah well vince clark's set for life well in this case oh well i did well maybe not there's too many of them don't have a band with with like this many people in it it's not a good idea but um they did uh they were on top of the pops um like quite a few times with this because they didn't really expect you know and they were like do you want to be on this again okay um but they did they were like do you want to dress up as snowmen so they got they had that they were all standing there in i mean it is a little bit twee and it's a bit winsome it's a bit cloying but they did this really great thing where they they were in their sort of big bulgy snowman costumes and then they were like that they had one of them had the idea to to melt so at the end of the song they all just like crumple down in their costumes and it

it looks really great so i kind of wish they they'd just done that again but But we do have that. It is in the archives. Yeah. I don't know why, but going on Coronation Street seems like an undignified thing to me for an ex-one-hit wonder. You know? I mean, as opposed to opening a jacket spud emporium called Tater Station or something like that. Player Tater. Yeah. Or being fired from your job as a school caretaker spud emporium called tater station or something like that you know play a tater yeah or being

fired from your job as a school caretaker for being caught pissing in the corridor which i could also imagine him doing i don't know imagine how shit it would have been as well to be in the if you weren't him it would be one of the other flying pickets because your whole life you spent just standing in a crowd going ba ba ba ba and no one gives a shit no one knows which one is you until one of your bars is flat which instantly makes the whole thing sound horrible or even more horrible and all the others turn around and glare at you fucking misery i'd rather be around the brazier. So, only you would spend two more weeks at number one, eventually yielding to Pipes of Peace by Paul McCartney.

The follow-up, a cover of the 1964 Ruby and the Romantic single When You're Young and in Love, got to number seven for two weeks in May of 1984, but diminishing returns set in. And although the Flying Pickets still exists today there hasn't been an original member in it since 1994 oh and of course margaret thatcher said it was her favorite single once deviating from her original choice of tolstar by the tornadoes all right i take it all back you remember when thatcher went on saturday superstore i was

on the pop panel and what made me laugh was she said she hated the style council record because obviously someone was there with her and whispered in her ear don't say you like this one she chose as her favorite record just some major label nonsense by some group I can't remember what they were called thrashing doves it might have right um that was never heard of before or since except that they went in smash hits uh purely to say uh that they were utterly appalled that Margaret Thatcher liked them and they just wanted to totally disown Margaret Thatcher on every level. They were terrified it was going to destroy their career and they were somehow going to be thought of as Margaret Thatcher's pet pop group.

Wow. That's like when that was in recent... That happened again, didn't it? Well, it happens all the time. There's a whole catalogue of artists who have had to come out and say, no, I do not support Trump, despite the fact he's just blasted my biggest hit to a load of a load of his death cult in the middle of nevada and johnny ma having to tell david cameron that he's not allowed to like the smiths i forbid him to like it you like the smiths no you don't i forbid you to like it which is great i love that that's like what musicians get you might not get

your royalties you might not get the life that you really hoped for but that's what you get if somebody terrible likes your music you get to go no no you do not get to fuck Ba-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da- for the yearly review on BBC One. Stunning hat. Hope you've got some brilliant presents. Merry Christmas. The part of Dan Deeny was played by Janice Long and the part of Andy Peebles by Andy Peebles. Thank you. KCM, the Sunshine Band from August of this year to take us out with Give It Up.

We won't. We'll carry on having a good time and a big party. Bye-bye for now. Bates, now wearing a cardboard pirate hat, Janice, Smith and Peebles realign at last. Bates wishes us a lovely rest of Christmas Day and shills part two of the end of year review on Thursday.

Janice tells her mam she'll see her soon. Smith is distinctly unamusing and Peebles signs off with the final track of the night, Give It Up by KC and the Sunshine Band. We cover this single in chart music number 31

when it got to number one in August of this year, Displacing Wherever I Lay My Hat, That's My Home by Paul Young. In that episode, we got a very tired and nervous-looking Harry Kay say, looking lost next to some backing singers, but this time it's used as a sign-off music while it goes all party, party, party

in the studio. Taylor, you covered this before. Is this any better in its natural setting of a nightclub scenario than when we witnessed it being emoted by a tired and nervous Harry Kayser? Yeah, I think it is. It's the kind of record where having to look at a bloke who doesn't want to be there sort of detracts from it a bit. You know what I mean?

There's some records where that would be a positive boon. This is not one of them. It's just the only way that this record makes any sense is if you just see a load of people who aren't very good at dancing dancing to it. Yeah. I mean, this would be like the era club, my evil nemesis up the road in Oxford.

I mean, this is an idea of like 1983. Trousers were never whiter. Tank tops were never redder. People were really rolling up their jacket sleeves and getting on with the 80s. Sickening. This sea of sort of athletic, air-headed extroversion. And that's the kind of thing Top of the Pops at this time, you know,

from the early 80s onwards, it's getting slightly milder maybe, but you know, it really makes me miss those sort of 70s episodes where everyone's just got that kind of morose hang-on expression, like they're kind of, you know, shuffling towards the escalator at Leicester Square during rush hour, you know, that kind of thing. You know, so this, you know, I do find this

kind of, you know, this extroversion did rankle really I mean it's a fairly it's a chipper track it's a bit bread sauce for me and when I was at this point I was almost Stalinist in my kind of funk and contemporary sort of dance appreciation or whatever and it wouldn't have probably passed muster in my personal star chamber but it's interesting that like you know there was a bit of nervousness about releasing this track at the time the fact that they sort of don't call it casey in the sunshine round they call it kc as if to sort of take the disco edge off it because it's you know the impact of like disco sucks and the movement and how unnerving it was to people these fucking

sort of like you know trump voters 30 or 30 40 years you know, were kind of staking their cultural claim. That was in America, though. Over here, we were still up for a bit of disco. Oh, over here, yeah, it was fine. But I suppose that the decisions about releasing it, and I think they were against releasing it at one point, were made by American executives just thinking of the American market. Yeah, I mean, how it goes in England or New Zealand or wherever is a bit of a shit, I suppose. But, I mean, it's always sad.

I only really realise it's retrospectively that Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards out of Chic were really unnerved, deeply unnerved about the whole disco sucks thing. And it makes the whole Bowie thing, you know, let's dance, really a quite important thing. In a way, you know, he's actually, I didn't really appreciate it at the time because I just took disco and funk for granted. But he probably, you know,

it probably was a real kind of fillip, the fact that he was sort of validating Nile Rodgers, the way that Bowie had validated Krautrock and, like, you know, and made an immense difference there. And, you know, there's real sort of added value there. So, although I don't, you know, I suppose in that context, I can kind of appreciate this track a little bit more. But I'm not a huge fan.

I mean, it's funny that he was sung in appreciation of, like, Nicky Butt or whatever, you know. Nicky Butt, Nicky, Nicky Butt. And, you know, perhaps it's kind of its level there, I suppose. But, yeah, the whole partying thing, I mean, the whole thing, yeah, it's Andy Peebles at the end, it's just like, yeah, we're signing off now, but we're going to be partying long into the night.

No, you're not. Within 15 minutes on that floor, there'll be a floor manager ushering everybody to the exit and someone in one of those street-sweeping vehicles with the big brushes going around the floor picking up bits of Burr's balloon, within 10, 15 minutes, the idea that four or five hours later,

the party's still going to be on, you know. Yeah, the idea anyone would want to spend that long in the company of Simon Brace. Yes, absolutely, yeah, and no bar. This basically puts the tin lid on what Top of the Pops is in late 1983s. It's gone from fake gig to fake nightclub. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I used to think give it up meant pack it in and now i've been fully americanized it's very obvious what he's asking the lady in question to give up and it's not smoking yeah yeah i only ever heard it that way as well yeah me too yeah or just like she was nagging him all the time, you know. And he's going, oh, give it up. Yes, turn it in. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, it's great warm-up music for the Queen. I can imagine her doing her stretches to this before she goes on and does her bit. So Give It Up would spend three weeks at number one

before it was usurped by Red Red Wine by UB40. The follow-up, You Said You'd Give Me me some more only got to number 41 in october of this year and harry casey really did give it up in 1985 and that my dears closes the book on this christmas episode of top of the pops what's on telly afterwards well Well, BBC One kicks off with the Queen's Christmas message, and this year she's banging on about how skilled technology is. Then it's Blankety Blank with Sabrina Franklin, Roy Kinnear, Ruth Maddock, Patrick Moore, Beryl Reid and Freddie Star,

followed by the 1950 Robert Newton film Treasure Island. After the news with Jan Leeman it's a christmas gym will fix it where the top of the pops host who mysteriously hasn't appeared on chart music yet gets his backroom staff to help some youth to become a yellow coat get two kids from a school for the blind to appear at the horse of the year show and as an eight-year-old pitching up dressed as santa and he shows us his method of how to crack a walnut which presumably involves tying them up in a boiler room of a nightclub in leeds for a few hours just to soften them up after a songs of praise special from

peterborough cathedral it's the two ronnie's with special guest elton John and a one-off movie-length episode of All Creatures Great and Small. At half-past nine, it's the episode of Only Fools and Horses where Del and Rodney's waist man of a dad turns up and pounces off the family. Yeah, the only reason they weren't shown in the episode of Only Fools and Horses where they dress up

as Batman and Robin again is that it hasn't been made yet. Yes. Another reason why 1983 is better than 2020. After the news, it's better late than never, David Niven's last film. And after the spinners at York, they turn it in at 20 past 12. BBC Two has just started the book game,

where Anthony Burgess and Jermaine Greer have to guess the book that's had an extract taken from it. Then it's a repeat of the documentary series The Great Palace, The Story of Parliament. After Henry's Cat, it's the 1944 Judy Garland film Meet Me in St. Louis. Then Robert Powell talks over some footage of animals dealing with winter in the natural world. of animals dealing with winter in the natural world after the news it's two and a half hours of the opera version of cinderella from glimeborn then it's the queen wanging on about space shuckles or summits and they finish off with norman wisdom and yakov shmurnoff on the bob munkhouse show and the 1933 marx brothers film but duck soup ITV have had the queen on, saying,

have you seen what they can do with satellites today? It's fucking mental. What will they think of next? Jesus. Then it's the UK TV premiere of Superman. Yeah, punching a perfectly circular hole in blankety blanks ratings. Yes.

Followed by Nottingham's gift to baby Jesus this year, the Bullseye Christmas special featuring Eric Bristow, Keith Deller and Maureen Flowers with Kenneth Kendall, Anne Diamond and Judith Hann as the non-dark players and Anne Aston helping Tony Green out. After the news, it's a royal concert of carols where a hospital choir singer prince charles and lady die then it's play your cards right and then jimmy tarbuck's christmas all-stars where gappy two tory cunts interacts with bruce forsyth

mike yarwood max bygraves cannon and ball comrade shaker bonnie tyler michael barrymore the game for a laugh team and links up via satellite with andy williams the four tops the temptations david hasselhoff and robert wagner and stephanie powers no freeway. No Kenny Lynch. No, no Kenny Lynch. Tonight's film is Revenge of the Pink Panther, and after the news, it's the King's Christmas with the King Singers. That's followed by Benson, and they close out the day with a different Christmas, where the radio critic of the Daily Telegraph

listens to Jimmy Savile banging on about how he's been spending the day with the foul hag Thatcher Axe as patients of Stoke Mandeville look on. Channel 4 has the animation short Sky Whales about hunting on a distant planet, followed by animals fucking and eating each other in Alaska in Fragile Earth. Then it's the 1953 film Monsieur Hulot's Holiday.

Hey, yeah, listen, there was a whole season of uh or a short season of jacques taty films on channel four this christmas and i know this because i saw a load of them because a weird teacher at our school taped them all on the school vcr and showed them to us like as if we'd be interested, you know, except I wasn't. Do you know, I got the same thing a few years earlier. Yeah, and I really feel so bad. We were in the sixth form, and he took us to a screening of Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, and we just didn't get it. Idiots that we were.

And he was so crestfallen. He thought we were kind of a particularly bright, you know, he thought it was a dead poet society. He thought we had a particularly bright crop here. And we weren't. We just didn't think, well, this isn't the goodies, is it? You know, we it was a dead poet society, you'd think they had a particularly bright crop here. And we weren't. We just didn't think, well, this isn't the goodies, is it? We were such idiots.

And I really kicked myself. I never got to apologise to Paul Brooks, my old French teacher, because he was so sad. I'd been building it up for weeks. I mean, it was probably a mistake as well, but we just didn't get this kind of alternative vocabulary of comedy and slapstick

or whatever we just you deserve that stockhouse and prime i did oh totally yeah yeah yeah now you know exactly yeah oh yeah this teacher at my school was a was a bit of a weirdo to be honest he was really jovial and friendly with the kids and then he once threw a table at some jabbering at the back of the class and almost got fired that was the beauty of the 80s and the 70s and back all the way because people have the same issues and personality disorders uh and problems that they got today but mostly undiagnosed so you just had to get on with it and that was just part of life and in responsible professional positions as well yeah but i mean to be fair to the bloke his his name was actually mike hunt oh no left some sort of mark on the man oh you know i mean imagine if he was having a drink in a bar and you

had some urgent message you had to get to him so you rang the bar like How many times would the barman just put the phone down? Especially if your name was Al-ca-holic. Yes. Or Duncan McCockinna. It's like, who do you think I am? Infuriating. After another chance to see the Queen's Christmas message, where she shows us how to make her telly say fuck off over and over again on her new Sinclair Spectrum,

it's twice nightly a one hour special featuring the baron knights taylor i believe you've seen this yeah i i own that i tell you it's edge pushing comedy uh the edge of what can realistically be called a joke. It's very good. You do want to assassinate them all. They do a song, like the theme song, that goes all the way through it and keeps coming back, that goes, Hickam the knights, hickam the knights, on their trusty steeds.

What was it? Saving damsels in distress and always doing good deeds, which is just plainly a lie uh yeah fucking book what's he called butch and duke de mong yeah got to feel like you know him all as close personal friends after that it's horrendous after the news it's father's day christmas special the sitcom starring coffee masturbator John Alderton, but not Diane Keane. Then it's the latest episode of the drama series

Struggle, about a London borough who renounces capitalism starring Tim Piggott Smith. Oh, Merry Christmas, everyone! At half eight, it's the British TV premiere of The King of Comedy with Robert De Niro

fucking hell I would have seen that that's one of my favourite films except that my first ever proper adolescent post puberty crush was on a girl who I now realise looked exactly

and I mean uncannily like Sandra Bernhardt in king of comedy i swear if i showed you a picture of her you'd be like fucking hell is that not a publicity picture of sandra bernhardt from the early 80s i didn't know this at the time because i hadn't seen the film but it means that now i can never fully enjoy this truly great motion picture because i feel a bit freaked out and a bit uncomfortable like more than that film is meant to make you feel a bit freaked out and uncomfortable not least by the fact that i don't even fancy sandra bernhardt in it which makes no logical sense at all i would have watched that broadcast i vividly remember actually what

the first time i can possibly say this but i remember watching that me too oh and another positive thing about it the the feuding members of the clash that you mentioned yes it will be reunited briefly at least oh yeah yeah we'll be watching because there are extras in it for about six seconds yes yeah and it finishes in time for you to get to the fridge and back before duck soup on BBC Two. I mean, this is not a bad Christmas day, is it? It's not at all. No, no. Then, ta-da-da, Peter Brook's Paris Cabaret,

a review with some opera singers. And they finish off with Peace on Earth, where Flora Robson and Laurence Olivier bang on about Jesus for an hour. Fucking hell. This flies in the face of everything my dad used to say on christmas day my dad had gone to the pub and get pissed up i think i mentioned this before but i'll say it again because hate is christmas gotta get the old traditions out yep my dad sat at the christmas dinner table and all of a sudden he go what about fucking Jesus then? Why don't people go on about Jesus anymore?

Everyone's forgot about the cunt. And my mum would say, oh, for fuck's sake, shut up, Colin. You're ruining my fucking Christmas. And as soon as that happened, I knew it was Christmas. Oh, marvelous. So, yeah, my dad should have been made to watch Laurence Olivier and Floor Robson talking about Jesus. That would have sated him, no doubt.

So, me dears, what are we talking about on the street? Who the fuck's this? Hello? Yes, it's Taya here. Right, end team chart music. Let's all gather round the microphone and finish this episode off. So, what are we talking about on the street, on our BMXers this afternoon? Oh, man. We're talking about a lot.

I'll be talking about MJ, I think. I'll be talking about men at work. Yeah. My unfeasible love of them. I'll be talking about the strange glaring presence of andy peebles oh yes um and you know what 83 i think by then i'm not saying i was hip but i think i'd probably actually be talking about how much i don't like um duran anymore oh um yeah oh yeah i think i'm not saying i've got in there early because the whole world was in love with them

but i think that yeah it was starting to fray by that point so a lot of a lot of positive things to talk about but hints of darker days to come where i fall out of love with that center of pop if you like especially with geran this is the this is the time yeah that i start turning on those guys which would be massively cemented later of course when my wife revealed to me that she went out with nick rhodes oh yes um and snogged him in a birmingham coffee bar which i was bitterly resented but you know she always went for pretty boys i reckon the break dancers in the freeze iou performance yeah i'm not gonna say took off in my school um i think everybody sort of stood around and tried to do a bit of body popping. Everybody attempted the moonwalk and failed. There were a couple of kids

who actually got into the full-on sort of spinning around on your back business. And seeing those guys with freeze would probably have been the catalyst for a lot of them. I would say total eclipse of the heart. Yeah. Trying to decode the symbolism that goes nowhere and just

doing our best Bonnie Tyler by gargling with gravel off the street which is the kind of thing that you could get away with doing in 1983 I would at the time have decried Bonnie Tyler but I was accused

of being narrow-minded. Oh, you? Yeah, you know, it's just like, you know, you don't listen to, you know, this is Oxford, you don't listen to Meatloaf, you don't listen to Bonital, you're so narrow-minded. I listen to everything from the SOS band to Stockhausen. What's up with you?

No, but I probably was a bit narrow-minded. I don't remember the Christmas Day episodes really getting talked about. No. Just consumed. But they were more sort of short-term nostalgia than something you'd go and discuss. But if I was going to discuss something, I guess it would either be Mike Smith's pathetic,

half-assed, abandoned drag act, or who kept giving Janice doubles when she asked for singles? And what are we getting with our record tokens on Boxing Day? Oh, 1983. I'd just tape them off the radio. Oh, come on, Taylor.

Do it properly. Yeah, probably all of them except Flying Pickets and Eurythmics and UB40 and Billy Joel and KC and Sunshine Band and Shakey and Bucks Fizz. All the rest. Oh, mate. Man, if I've got a big enough record token, I am buying. I'm buying MJ.

I'm buying Eurythmics, Adamant, Heaven 17. Probably buying Bowie as well men at work um and i've got to admit i'll probably buy billy joel as well and and despite what other people i know have said in chart music's pass in about casey and the sunshine band i freaking love that tune so be casey as well so yeah i'd have a right caboodle and bundle at nice price prices, hopefully. It's Christmas, so I would hazard we'd get more record tokens and maybe we could even blag a copy of Totally Clips of the Heart, a copy of Down Under, and maybe even a copy of All Night Long,

which is festive in its own way. It's much more of a New Year track, actually, isn't it? It's going to take you into the New Year. But you would want to get, if you had to choose, it would have to be Total Eclipse of the Heart for sheer pound-for-pound value. I can be quite real about this because I can remember, out of all those records, I only bought one,

and it was Heaven 17, Temptation. Yeah, Let's Dance, because I haven't got it yet. Billie Jean, because it's Billie Jean. And although, you know, it's strange, I'd already got the Concert Angels album with a track called Baby, which has got that exact bass line a couple of years earlier. So I'd have like smugly pointed that out.

And All Night Long, which is wonderful. And why didn't Lionel Richie go more up-tempo more of the time? Because it's a beautiful piece of work. And what does this episode tell us about 1983? First of all, that 1983 is a lot better than we give it credit for. And secondly, I think that dance music is coming. There are a few hints of it through this episode and I think you can kind of see it's the coming thing.

Yeah. It's really tricky. I don't know what it does tell us, but because it's like it's not a normal episode, it's a review of the thing. I mean, you really get a sense of how scattered and erratic any year is from an episode like this um but i think it says good things about what people were trying to

do and what people were going to be prioritizing in 1984 which is hedonism and bohemian nonsense, terrible synth experiments, all things of which I approve. For me, culture, the world, all of my hopes and dreams were going to the dogs. Oh! But I look at things in a slightly modified way these days. I think anybody that's trying to do anything in the 80s gets a sort of thumbs up from me, including Bonnie Tyler, bonnie tyler even to a degree duran duran you know yeah when you brush the the caked mud off 1983 it's still quite shiny underneath isn't it um even though the i mean the general health of

pop is visibly beginning to fail but there's not that much evidence of it here unless you look too closely like we do. It suggests a slight lie in a sense. What it suggests is pop's fucking fantastic. There's loads of great records, you know what I mean? But that's the condensing power and fallacy in a way of a Christmas episode. It can go one of two ways a Christmas episode. It can compile all the shite and, you know, reveal that sort of side of things.

But I think this episode actually, to an extent, the best of 83 is all here. It is all here. Just hinted at, even suggested that. It is all here. So it's actually a very poptimistic episode, if you like. So it tells us great things are ahead. So it's actually a very poptimistic episode, if you like. So it tells us great things are ahead.

And it's a lie, because they're not. It's all going to get terrible. But yeah, that's what it tells us. And that, my dears, is the end of this very special episode of Chart Music. All that remains for me to do now is bung out the usual promotional flange. www.chart-music.co.uk facebook.com slash chart music podcast reach out to us on twitter at chart music t-o-t-p money down the g-string patreon.com slash chart music

thank you very much taylor parks yeah bye al sorry about the carpet don't worry it'll come out thank you and thank you for the eggnog. Thank you very much, David Stubbs. God bless you, Neil Kulkarni. No worries, Al. Thank you, Sarah B. You're welcome, and a happy new year to you, Al. Well played, Simon Price.

You're welcome, and a happy new year to all the pop-crazed youngsters. My name's Al Needham. Fuck off, 2020. You were fucking shit! Chart music. GreatBigOwl.com Hi, Roger. It's Brian.. Look mate, an unbelievable opportunity has presented itself for us. We've been asked to speak to a lot of people at the Podcast Stop Festival at the Kentish Town Forum on February the 13th 2021 at 2pm. I'll be there, I think you should too. Okay, cheers, Rog. Bye.

Hello, Brian. It's Roger here. So that's the Podcast Stop Festival at Kentish Town Forum at 2pm on Saturday, February the 13th, 2021, to speak to a lot of people. Okay, mate, well, that sounds like it'll be loads of fun. And I really can't see anything going wrong at all. Okay, mate, see you there. Bye bye. Brian and Roger live at the O2 Forum Kentish Town for the podcast Stop Festival on Saturday, the 13th of February. Tickets are available at livenation.co.uk and ticketmaster.co.uk. livenation.co.uk and ticketmaster.co.uk In association with the British Market Research Bureau and the Pop Craze Patreon people,

the Chart Music Top 40 for 2020. At number 40 in this year's Chart Music Top 40, ATV Eyes. At number 39, it's Quo Wadi Wadi. A star who had his moment in 2020, at number 38, Fine Time Fontaine. In at number 37, working class youth of Newcastle. This year's number 36 is Billy Preston and Ry Vita. At number 35, the horseshoe of shame. In at number 34, it's the ragamuffin sound of Lion Bellend.

ragamuffin sound of Lion Bellend. The number 33 sound of the year belongs to Chirpy Human Cerberus. At number 32, the Old Sailor. Number 31, Pig Wanker General. Into the top 30 and at number 30 is Priapic Price. At number 29, 15 Hitlers. In at number 28,

Mr. Neil Kulkarni's stomach. Number 27, the posh grebs from the nice estate. At number 26, flaky pastry. Hanging in at the number 25 spot is B.A. Cunterson. Oh, yes. In at number 24, the bummer's conga.A. Cunterson. Oh, yes. In at number 24, the Bombers Conga. In at number 23,

the English Rock Defence League. At number 22, it's rock expert David Stubbs! Yay! And at number 21 resides Frumpy Pumper. Into the top 20, and at number 20, it's the sound of panties.

At number 19, it's this year's chart music Christmas number one, James Galway's flute of VD. In at number 18, the treacherous step. Burning hell. At number 17, it's Simon Price's Arsehole Material. Number 16, Dusty Shelbyville. A new talent at number 15,

Dean Spunk presents a tribute to Olly Murs. At number 14, Danger Freaks! Cool. In at number 13, Suicide featuring

Donna. At number 12, CFAX Data Blast. And the number 11 position belongs this year to Romo Ralph Wiggum. Into the top 10 and at number 10 is Lesbian Dwarf Actra. Number 9 in Selvis Costello.

Number eight, Taylor Parks' 20 Romantic Moments. Still going strong. It's been a huge year for the number seven act, Spiteful Armoured Bollock. At number six,

Noel Edmonds Gas Disco. Time for the top five, and at number five is Chip Pans People. At number four, Dave D. Creeper Twat and Cunt. Thrusting all the way to number three, it's Jeff Sex. Yeah. And ramming its fist into the number two slot, here comes Jizzle.

Which means... Britain's number one. For the second year running at the top of the chart music end of year chart, it could only be this year's number one Bumadon yes we are chart music and we believe in

sex and looking good with our own brand of podcasting happy new year see you in 2021 and if you do nothing else next year stay pop crazed. 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.