Chart Music: the Top Of The Pops Podcast - #57: 11.10.73 – A Balloon Full Of Gravy

Episode Date: February 27, 2021

The latest episode of the podcast which asks: would you let your daughter marry this episode of Top Of The Pops?It’s the first episode of the year, Pop-Crazed Youngsters, so the ever-forward-looking Chart Music throws itself all the way back to the glorious year of ’73, where the hair grows wild and free, Bacofoil androgyny is at its peak, Look-In can operate as a dating service and no-one bats an eyelid, and – to quote Karen, aged 12 from Formby, The Colour Brown Is All Around.And yet! All is not well in Top Of The Popsland. They’ve just come off their 500th episode and suffered a double-shoeing from the so-called Mainstream Media for a) encouraging ten year-old girls to get pregnant and b) being full of rubbish songs where you can’t make out what they’re saying performed by men who look like women and God help us if there’s a war. So how do they react? By wringing the last droplets out of Kenny Everett before he defects to Capital Radio and bunging on something for the Old’Uns inbetween the good stuff.Musicwise, it’s a proper bag of Tiger Tots, with a few cubes of Oxo bunged in. David Cassidy gets his straw boater on. Slade finally – and fatally – learn how to spell properly. Elton John arses about with some oranges on Hollywood and Vine. Pans People transmogrify into five sexy Steve Austins. There’s a lad off Opportunity Knocks who isn’t Neil Reid. Jeff Lynne goes all UberTravis. Leicester Man is unveiled to a bemused audience. And the Top Of The Pops Orchestra earn some beer money on the side.Simon Price and Neil Kulkarni – Jesus and Buzz themselves – get down to ’73 with Al Needham, breaking off on such tangents as fending off Brexity Oasis Bots, listening in silent awe to the sound of a soul legend’s toilet activities, Concerned Parent of Exeter, the art of making tapes for girls, and the glorious resurfacing of a 27 year-old demo tape about Eastenders. Swearing a-plenty!       Video Playlist | Subscribe | Facebook | Twitter | The Chart Music Wiki | Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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What do you like to listen to? Um, chart music. Chart music. Hey, up you pop-crazed youngsters, and welcome to the latest episode of Chart Music, the podcast that gets its hands right down the back of the sofa on a random episode of Top of the Pops. I'm your host, Al Needham, and by my side today are Simon Price. Hello. And Sarah B. Hello.

Oh, it's been a while, chaps. So why don't I just lie on the floor and allow you to spill all that pop and interesting stuff all over me? Well. Well, the rules do allow us to do that now so uh yeah the rules allow us to do anything we want what i want to do is is is none of that if it involves being near other people been a while since you've been on sarah about seven months you must have loads to talk about loads and loads go on then nothing fuck all mate absolutely oh bugger all you're hibernating still pretty much yeah yeah i mean i've i've i've been out but i haven't like done stuff yeah all restrictions lifted you can do anything you fucking want it's your world baby and um taste that freedom so yeah aka we're on our fucking own yes society has at this point been ceded to uh the

most robust twats people who break into uh football games and you know stick flares up their asses in leicester square um and you know and also people who don't have any choice but to go out and deal with those people yeah you have to try and claw back some kind of positivity from somewhere and you know i've just been on a bus this morning and um you know most people were still wearing masks even though they don't have to yeah but yeah it doesn't really work like that like oh just be careful use your common sense a lot of people don't have any common sense they just don't they're just missing it and some things have to come from the top and they have to filter down like that and it would have been so easy to just say,

oh, you can do what you want, but let's keep the masks on. We've all got them now. Let's get our money's worth. You can get fun ones with leopard print on. But there you go. That's the government that we have, unfortunately. The only one positive thing about all of this is that we finally got a generation gap back again,

haven't we? Yeah. Which is nice. Back in the day, when you wanted to alienate and scare the older generation, you'd have to go some lengths. You'd have to have a Mohican

or a swastika t-shirt or something. Nowadays, you just get on a bus without a mask. Last night, I was in central London for reasons I'm going to come on to. Very pop and very interesting reasons as well. But having done the pop and interesting thing'm going to come on to very pop and very interesting reasons as well but um having done the pop and interesting thing that i'll come on to my wife and i decided to go for a little late night drink a quiet late night drink we thought a little nightcap in the soho arts club on fifth street in soho which which which we love and i suppose i should have seen

the warning signs when the security guy made us wait outside for other people to leave but I thought no they're just being sensible they've obviously only got about 12 people in there yeah you know they're still distancing I thought fine fine we'll wait so we walk down the stairs and there's this sort of big soundproof door at the bottom you push your way through and suddenly we're in this fucking sweating seething mayhem of a disco, of, like, loads of very young people going nuts, hugging each other, leaping around, dancing to Earth, Wind & Fire and the Eurythmics, just old music, basically stuff that, to them,

is hilarious because it's so old, you know. And I got really freaked out, partly because I wasn't psyched up for it. I mean, obviously, I'm going to have to psych myself up for being in a disco pretty soon anyway, because my, here's the plug, alternative 80s night spellbound in Brighton is relaunching.

Nature is healing. Yeah, exactly. But just to sort of walk down these steps and so for what we thought was going to be a nice little rum and coke before bed, now, boom, suddenly it's fucking Studio 54 in there, you know, and it's fucking, I really freaked out.

And also, yeah, I mean, I've never felt quite such an old man among a bunch of young people because it's been a while since i've been in that kind of environment yeah i couldn't handle it and i ended up just sort of not drinking our drink and i just had to sort of say look i'm sorry but we've got to go i was surprised at how freaked out i was i thought oh come on i'm gonna be fine with this the thing is we've we've jacked up our brains to into survival mode and it's not easy to step that down again no a lot of anxiety it's like you can drill down and recognize that

it's not based in anything and you can you know let it dissipate but you can't with this because like you can't if you're anything like me like i i can't afford to get long covid i just can't my health is on its ass already i just can't afford to if you are an anxious person to begin with then this just jacks it right right up and like I've tried to you know um I I wanted to go to the seaside for a couple of days and I couldn't do it because I did a little dry run and I went on the overground and I went to Barnard Castle for half an hour I tested my brain by going to yeah but I just I I couldn't hack it after I was okay for a bit my energy bar was was full when I left the house and then by the time I was three stops from home

on the way back I was just like nope nope nope nope nope and you feel a bit foolish about it but it's like no that's kind of normal and it it is weird to me like how many people are fine with like being in crowds and stuff and being out and about and it's like i just i mean good for them and i'm not saying they are all yeah the robust twats that i was talking about but if you're sort of physically mentally or emotionally kind of not that tough yeah you're going to start falling behind in a certain way you know yeah i ended up talking to one of the uh the younger generation the other night about this and she says oh you know i've been to clubs and all that kind of stuff and i'm going you're fucking mad what the fuck is wrong with you she says oh i've had i've had one jab and i've said oh well that's like us having sex and me saying no don't worry

i'm gonna put on half a johnny yeah i really need to work on my chat up lines it's been too long how would that work yeah is it half long ways or you know width ways and yeah like it's like which way would a dog wear trousers anyway pop things interesting things yes yes well now then um yeah i spent some of yesterday evening socializing rubbing shoulders with some pop stars uh who we've talked about at considerable length on a previous Chart Music. B.A. Robertson, eh? Sparks.

Ooh! Fucking hell. It was very exciting. Basically, I did my first bit of DJing for 18 months last night. It was the West End premiere of the amazing documentary, The Sparks Brothers. I've done quite a bit of work with Sparks over the years,

interviewing them and stuff like that, writing biogs and booklets. The flint to their Sparks, if you will. Yes, exactly. That's how I like to think of myself, very much. And I've done a bit of work with Edgar Wright, the director of the film, in terms of writing the production notes

that get sent to all the people who go to Sundance and that sort of thing. So, you know, I've kind of been on the outskirts of this whole project. But yeah, I was asked to DJ the premiere in the West End last night. Yeah, I was DJing in this sort of pop-up thing in the cinema bar run by Spiritland,

who are this sort of audiophile collective who have a fancy bar in King's Cross and another one in the royal festival hall and they're good people and you know they put on good events and i was honored to be asked but the whole experience of getting a vinyl crate because it was a vinyl only set and packing it and you know get my set list ideas together and all that it was quite nerve-tangling after such a long time not necessarily for sort of covid reasons but just the adrenaline rush of is it going to go okay am i going to play the right songs well will i have a

technical breakdown and all that kind of shit and also i'm out of practice of playing vinyl anyway in dj terms um i've you know been using laptops for quite a while but yeah it wasn't a proper red carpet premiere as such there was only one paparazzo outside um but um tv's katie puckrick and radio's katie puckrick i should say as well was there and she came over to say hi and i met the director edgar wright hadn't actually met him before who's uh work i'm a big fan of you know spaced and hot furs and shauna the dead baby driver all of that so it's great to meet him but then ron and russell male themselves came along um just as i was playing Looks, Looks, Looks, which is, if you don't know it,

it's a Prohibition jazz number from their album Indiscreet. It's brilliant. And Ron just said, what's this old crap? Yeah, put some fucking Oasis on. And Russell goes, retro rubbish. Yeah, it was great. And we talked about shoes and we talked about the can film festival

as you do and they posed for a photo with me and the missus um and i i just love those guys so much i unfortunately uh wasn't able to get them to say bummer dog no i know i know but i thought about it i i'm pretty sure the words bummer and dog exist in their oeuvre and we can just edit it together somehow um but yeah um some of my dj selections were a little mischievous um i followed this town big enough for both of us with sugar baby love by the rubets which is the record which prevented sparks from reaching number one and they're still a little bitter about it it's the shut up of your face to their vienna exactly yeah yeah yeah and i played some pet shop boys right who get a bit of needle in the film

for never acknowledging their debt to sparks it's quite funny they obviously wouldn't be interviewed for it uh but somebody else talks about a time they did sort of mention sparks to psbs and neil tennant just said you're very naughty yeah so that's my pop and interesting fun last night in Soho. That's pretty good. Nothing's happened from this end, just usual shit. Started doing pub quizzes again. Oh, how's that been going?

Weird, weird. I've got two on the go at the minute. One's in Kimberley on the outskirts of town in a local pub, and the other one's a bit near the centre of town, and people from all over Notts usually come to that one. The one in Kimberley is absolutely fine. are turning up it's all good one in town no fuckers turning up because it's tan people staying away from town because it's really it's full of bellends without masks on and everything central brighton has been pretty fucking wild ever since

unlocking and central london last night you know what before i ventured into london last night which by the way is my first visit to london for you know nearly two years which is kind of weird jesus yeah um but i i have been wondering how this whole thing would have affected the nightclub sector and i put myself in the place of i mean obviously i'm a nightclub promoter but i'm not a venue owner and i thought venue owners would be absolutely shitting it that a whole generation would have come through and broken the habit. They haven't got that sort of rite of passage of,

you know, you hit 18, or let's be honest, probably 17, and off you go to a nightclub. And that may be that, you know, just, you know, nightclubs might be for the dumper. But do you know what? Last night, Thursday night, it was, as we're recording this on a friday central london was absolutely just fucking heaving with young people i guess

sort of student age people yeah because midweek nights in london are you know where venues traditionally put on cheapo nights for for students it's fucking you you wouldn't think there'd ever been a pandemic and that you know just from you know nature is healing from the point of view of the nightclub economy which i suppose is kind of reassuring and good luck to them but yeah people that age always want to get pissed after chucking out time and try and cop off with each other yeah but i thought that they'd found different ways of doing it now whether it's you know having a massive illegal rave in a field or just going to somebody's house but if there is a group of people i'd like to rub up against at the moment, it's the brand new batch of Pop Craigs Patreons

who have shoved some money down our G-string this month. And that list includes, in the $5 section, Sarah McVeigh, Jeffrey S. Dixon, Andy Hollis, Justin Davis, Mark Symes, Mark Boyle, Owen Marriott, Joe O'Donnell, Matthew Grenham, William Wright, Jim Prentice, Mark Harrison, Lizzie, David Gilhoola, Michelle Stevens, Steve Mishkin, and Louise Duke.

Thank you, babies. Legends. I want to lick and touch you all. And in the $3 section, we have Burcles, Aidan Taylor, Peter Hammerson, Nicholas McArdle, an Edinburgh Castle rock expert, Tony C, and Matt Verrill. thank you so much, because you whacked it up just a little bit more, didn't you? Bless you.

And of course, as well as getting episodes of Chart Music in full, without adverts, ages before the rest of you, the Pop Craze Patron people have been a-frigging and a-rigging this week's Chart Music top 10 shall we chaps we've said goodbye to tandoori elephant jesus price nolan tentacle porn cfax data blast and and Taylor Parks' 20 Romantic Moments, which means one up, four down, four new entries and one re-entry. A drop of nine places from number two to number ten for Fox Biz. First new entry in at number nine, The Pig People of Charlesmoor. Another new entry this time at number eight, Friar David. Number nine, the pig people of Charlesmoor. Another new entry this time at number eight, Friar David.

Yes. Down one place from number six to number seven, rock expert David Stubbs. And it's a two-place drop from number four to number six. For here comes Jezebel. Yes, keep on in there. Into the top five and thrusting his way back into the charts, Jeff Sacks. Come on, Jeff. Last week's number five, this week's number four, Bummer Dog.

Into the top three and last week's number one has finally fallen. The bent cunts who aren't fucking real. Straight in at number two, Shark's Piss Fire, which means... Britain's number one. This week's highest new entry, and the brand new chart music number one, the Cuppatino Kid. Fucking hell. Oh, what a chart.

The thing with Jesus Price is he will rise again. It is foretold. It is foretold in the scripture. Yeah, round about March, April time, yeah? So this week's new entries, well, the pig people of Charlesmoor, but new metal, I think. You reckon? I thought they might be one of those sort of self-consciously quirky indie bands like Bombay Bicycle Club or Mystery Jets or something like that.

Could be. Yeah, they sound quite winsome. Yeah. Because I got it into my head that they're like Slipknot, but they've got on masks that look like the corpse faces of people like Larry Grayson, Hyacinth Bouquet, Pete Waterman, and other famous people from Coventry and surrounding area. I do like that, yeah.

Oh, that's it then. A Friar David, well, goes without saying. Yeah, French monk. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, you know, proving that the Catholic Church can move with the times. I think there's a bit of Judy Zook sat in tour jackets going on with rock expert David Stubbs being in there. Oh, really?

Well, yeah, because I think he's getting unfairly hyped into the charts, given this cross-platform promotion of him having his own YouTube show, which I'm sure all the PCYs are watching avidly. But, yeah, I think it's like, you know, the kids from fame bumping up Irene Cara's record sales. It's, yeah. Yeah, it's fixed. Choc's Pissed Fire. What are they all

about? What's their stitch? What do you reckon, Sarah? Three-piece garage. Yeah? Yeah. Not bad. Forgettable, but, you know, bit of lead in the pencil. And the Cupertino kid, well, that's obviously shaking Weller. Like Nicholas Lindhurst when he sang My Generation with Michael Barrymore in some jam shoes and a parka.

Or me in 1983 failing week after week to be Paul Weller. One day we'll have to share the mock-up poster I made of the jam, the movie, which actually has Nicholas Lindhurst in the role as well. Yes. Who else was in it? Martin Short, yeah, and Dennis Waterman. Of course, Dennis Waterman. So if you want to join those lovely people, get yourself on that there info net.

Slap them fingers on your keyboard. Hammer out patreon.com slash chart music. Step up to the pay window and slip some coin next to this here groin. Oh, and if you have subscribed and I've still not read your name out, that's because I'm a disorganised bellend and I need to be told about it. So don't be shy. Come and shout at me. Call me a knob end or whatever.

He loves it, really. I just want to do right by the pop craze youngsters yeah they deserve it's all i live for nowadays so this episode pop craze youngsters takes us all the way back to july the 25th 2003 i nearly said 19 there just stopped myself in time because yes, this is another excursion to this unwiped arse of a century. I can't lie to you pop crazy youngsters. Looking at episodes from the arse end of Top of the Pops just

fills me with dread. Can you hear this? Listen to this. What? That was my arm after it's been twisted by these two here to do an episode from 2003. I didn't want to do it. They forced me to.

It was the big boys and girls that egged me on, sir. It's for your own good, Al. And you know what, Pop Craze youngsters? They were right to twist my arm so hard because if you are setting yourself up as an authority on top of the Pops, it can't all be billowy saxons and flags and balloons and all that good stuff to ignore top of the pops is declining years he's like an episode of the world at war where lawrence olivier says well d-day

happened and that was the nazis pretty much fucked the end exactly yeah we've got to cover the grim death march of top of the pops in the early part of the noughties and i think this is a distinct era that we've not looked at isn't it the particular regime the nearest we've come is 2000s me sarah and neil yeah it is a period we have to talk about because this episode we're going to cover comes from a time when it seems like the music business is in decline traditional media appears to be in decline and top of the pops is a show in terminal decline i mean nobody knows it yet but after the episode we're gonna cover is in the books there are only exactly 100 episodes left before sir jingle nonso be turns out the lights. Fucking hell, yeah.

So where to start with this, chaps? If I were to say to you the music of 2003, what's springing to mind? Well, I honestly believe that the noughties were the last great golden age of pop. And a lot of it, I would say, was driven by the creative rivalry between producers at that time

on both sides of the Atlantic. So in the US, it was Timberland versus the Neptunes, Pharrell, you know. And in the UK, it was Richard X versus Xenomania. And these producers all had various kind of puppet acts that they were working with. So Britney and Justin, you know, Sugar Babes and Girls Aloud and so on. Often these producers working on the same act at the same time, but just different songs. So, for example, Justin Timberlake's album Justified, which was huge around this time,

had some tracks by Timbaland and some by the Neptunes. And Sugar Babes had hits with songs produced by Xenomania and others produced by Richard X, notably Freak Like Me, which was essentially a re-recording of a mash-up he'd made under the alias Girls on Top. So you had all these elements of kind of the avant-garde leaning end of r&b and mash-up culture and electro clash as well all feeding into mainstream pop and for my money making it amazing electro clash was very much my thing at the time i was into you know peaches and fisher spooner and

lady tron and gold frap and all that um so and let's not fuck around here it was basically romo under a different name like when enemy finally deemed it okay to you know embrace synthesizers and posing about you're saying it's robo romo yeah exactly turbo romo you were just too ahead of your time i mean you knew that yeah you could have reinvented yourself Simon at this time as Romo Cop you have 20 seconds to like Orlando yeah yeah right

but also there's so much else around this time I was hugely into the White Stripes and the Hives and the Rapture and Harm Our Superstar and British Sea Power and the Dresden Dolls and LCD Sound System LCD Sound System were both a product of and a satire of the hipster movement which was emerging. So this was the time of the Hoxton Finn.

You know that hairstyle where you sweep all your hair into a ridge in the middle. You know like new parents do when they're bathing their babies and they think it's hilarious to soak their hair up. That kind of picked in 2002 didn't it with Beckham. Yeah yeah exactly and you know what I was in the orbit of that hipster scene I mean I was way too old at 35 to be one right but I was going to the club Trash or anywhere else Errol Alcan was DJing and also Nag Nag Nag but in hindsight now that hipsters have all grown beards and opened cereal cafes instead I do think that loads of amazing music came out of that slightly wanky scene. I even tried launching a noughties nostalgia night a couple of years ago

called Destroy Rock and Roll. I don't think people were ready for it yet because it was only the decade after the decade that you're nostalging about. And I think people need sort of two decades of gap. But so I might try again soon in that case yeah i i do think that and other people who know more about these things than me have said that electro clash is overdue a revival now by about two years you know like how there are people who like trend forecasts and everything and then there are people who predict when you know society is going to collapse and. And it's like before the collapse of society,

which apparently we are on schedule for, according to the, they've dredged up a report from the seventies about like what's, you know, how things are going to crumble. And it's like, we're right, we're right on track for that. So if we can have an electroclash revival before that, then I'll be quite happy. Cause it was, yeah, it was great.

I went to trash a few times. I was not i wasn't cool enough basically i went anyway it was slightly snooty and slightly you know but i knew that there was there was something in it and i yeah and i really loved the music and it's absolutely it was a great time for for pop just so much inventiveness coming into like what you would have thought would be quite standard say fair before like ex-boy bands or new girl bands or whatever. And it's like, no, they're coming out justified. What an album.

I just rinsed that this entire year and, you know, revisited it since. And it's still, it sounds of its time, but it still holds up. It's incredible. Absolutely amazing. What a joy. And, you know, Christina had her fourth album.

Loads of people have her fourth album out this year weirdly so christina was doing stripped at this point so christina had thrown off all her clothes and embraced sex i love her it's always fun when somebody does that and i love that i know people really laid into it at the time but i thought it's fucking great um kylie had her ninth album out which is is, this was Kylie's E album, Body Language, which the main single of which was Slow, which is one of her bestie bests. Britney had her fourth album out as well. Britney was doing really well. Missy had her fifth album out.

I think every member of The Woo put out an album this year. Yeah, probably. Each one, yeah. And a few of their mates. Dizzy Rascal's first album as well. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So that was, you know, 18-year-old Dizzy Rascal just blasting onto the scene. And Outkast as well, Speakerbox and The Love Below.

Oh, yes. Yes, please. All these good things. And there was starting to be that sort of healthy cross-pollination and kind of mingling and, you know, of a lot of different things that was starting to break down genre, really, which is what you have now, where the genre has never been less of a thing. And then the whole bunch of cool American garage-y, art-rock-y stuff

that you were saying, and the Kills and the Yeas. And yeah, the White Stripes were just great, weren't they? They were such a huge thing. They were quite a music journo thing, but it was also, you know, people loved them and they were amazing. Yeah, I think they were kind of quite journal thing but it was also you know people loved them and they were they were amazing yeah i think they were kind of quite avant-garde in their way even though they're very retro as well drawing upon sort of classic blues and stuff just the fact they were so minimal and the fact they had this very clear aesthetic they had this you know that sort of red

white and black design scheme and everything and everything is three the whole kind of jack white's thing of like threes I think that people have got them wrong a little bit when they think it's just a throwback band there's something weirdly modern about them but they were just really fun as well they were just really fun and they made a big racket it was incredible how much sound they produced

seeing them at Dingwalls when they were just sort of breaking through over here was just phenomenal, just you know, two people making that kind of physically exciting music. Yeah, yeah. And they had this, and it was great, the sort of energy of the two of them

because Jack White was this slightly kind of, there was this slight mania and this kind of wildness about him. And then Meg, who was so serene and just had this little kind of Mona Lisa smile on, was just there crashing away in the background. It was, you know, yeah. And there was that whole conceit of them

pretending to be brother and sister when they were actually ex-husbands and ex-wives. That's so funny how people couldn't figure that out for ages. Like, that's a blues thing. They're doing the blues thing. Go, oh, my brother, oh, my sister. And it's like, that's just kind of, you know. But it was great because it added this kind of subtext to it,

to the sort of sexual chemistry on stage. And yeah, it was all part of it, definitely. You all two have just demonstrated that there's a full ton going on on the music scene of 2003 but around about this time everyone's talking about pop being in decline when what they actually meant was the music business was in decline i mean as far as the charts went it had got to the point where if you sold 20 000 copies of your single, you could get to number one. Yeah, well, I think what happened was that around the turn of the millennium, the music industry tried to squash the internet, tried to stamp on it, things like Napster and all of that. Yes.

And by this point, sort of three years into the century, they start to realise they've got it horribly wrong. Yes. And really, they should have fucking embraced it from the beginning. Yes. And they're sort of playing catch-up, really, figure out how they could do that everybody points the finger at the internet for all of this you know by 2003 the internet stopped being cb radio for spods but it's still not that all-conquering yet is it no you know this is pre-social media pre-youtube pre pretty much anything bar file sharing and forums.

Yeah, and sharing a file, downloading a song might take all night. I can remember setting my old steam-powered fucking first-generation iMac, those fruit-coloured ones, to download a Michael Jackson track at the start of a night out. And when I came home, pretty much the next morning, it had just about finished downloading. Killing music slowly, Simon. I was.

It was the first little jab there. Yeah, I just couldn't find that track anywhere else. I could not, literally could not pay for it. Yes. Yeah, you'd go to nightclubs, and people would not have phones, they might have their phone in their pocket to fucking call a taxi to get them home,

but they weren't staring at the screen all night. What would happen was, you'd go out to a club, you'd live, you'd have the night out, you'd do stuff, then maybe at a.m you'd come home and very drunk sort of fire up msn messenger or myspace or something and talk to people on there about what happened but it wouldn't be the focus of your whole fucking night all right you know you sound like a right old cunt saying that but i think there was this kind of sweet spot where technology um enabled people to sort of

reach out and make contact with each other and and befriend each other but it wasn't everything yeah it wasn't everything let's get stuck in hi I'm Scott Hancock and I host from queer to eternity a new podcast exploring what it means to be queer where we have conversations like this. I look at younger generations and go, you can just Google this stuff. The fact that the only mention of queerness was don't get AIDS.

If I'd been marrying a girl, that would not have happened. Maybe we can find a universality that we weren't aware of before. That's why this podcast is so great because actually, I guess we just don't think to speak of this stuff and yet it's part of our fabric. From Queer to Eternity. Available to listen to now from the Great Big

Owl Company. Radio One News. In the news, the body of the scientist and biological weapons expert David Kelly has been found at Harrow Downhill in Oxfordshire.

Saddam Hussein's sons have been killed by coalition forces in Mosul. Geoffrey Archer has been released from prison after serving two years of a four-year sentence for being a lying bastard. Idi Amin has fallen into a coma in a Saudi hospital where he's been in exile since 1980 and will die in a fortnight. The British Grand Prix at Silverstone

is interrupted when Neil Horan, a defrocked Catholic priest, runs onto the track in a kilt, brandishing a placard which reads, read the Bible, the Bible is always right. He would go on to attempt to run onto the track at the 2004 Epsom Derby before being restrained by police,

push over the Brazilian marathon runner Vandalei de Lima while he was leading in the marathon at that Summer Olympics, found not guilty of indecent assault while claiming he only ever wore one pair of green satin pants, which he never washed because he, quote, needed them at all times, and then pulled them out of his pockets and waved them at the jury. Get arrested in Berlin after planning to do a peace jig

outside the stadium before the World Cup final while holding a banner which read, Adolf Hitler was a good leader who was following the word of Christ, and get through to the first round of Britain's Got Talent in 2009. He was later imprisoned for 12 counts of indecent assault and was last seen dancing outside Southwark Crown Court in support of Rolf Harris. The last British living participant in World War I

has died at the age of 108. Bob Hope has died. 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. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th.

Terms and conditions apply. 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. At the age of 100 in california of pneumonia but the big news this week is that mo bear has announced on his website that he's honored to learn that his name is being used in salons as a description of a tuppany all off ran the fananny On the cover of Melody Maker this week

Nothing because it shut Down three years ago On the cover of Smash Hits Decide The number one LP in the UK is Dangerously in Love by Beyonce Over in America the number one Single is Crazy in Love by Beyonce

And the number one LP Is Chapter Two by Ashante so me dears what were we doing in july of 2003 well uh i had uh already burned out and uh fucked off out of london by this point uh probably this month actually i went to live in lancaster and tried to live a normal life because i was so fucking tired yeah i remember this yeah yeah and just kind of really disillusioned with things and and my uncle was renting out his old house which i knew from when i was a kid and uh he agreed to rent it to me um not for like you know because people like oh you get a peppercorn rent nah so i had to pay proper money but you know it still wasn't very much it was a little teeny tiny terrace house in Lancaster and I just

tried to have normal jobs with varying degrees of success and got a dog because I volunteered at a shelter and then inevitably ended up just falling in love with one of the dogs and bringing him home even though he was huge and impossible and impractical and hated all other dogs with a searing passion but other than that he was the best i was just attempting to do something different because i had been in london since uh 99 and i felt like i was done with it and it was done with me. And of course I would move back again within a couple of years, but I really, really needed the time off. But one of the last things I did along with Bang Magazine was I was an extra in Shaun of the Dead. Oh my God.

Oh yes. I was, yeah. Fucking hell. I had filmed several bits in early summer 2003. Right. I wasn't like a massive spaced fan but i did actually know edgar a bit he had made a pop video and i had to go and cover it and so we became friendly which video um uh it was a blue tones video oh okay i think it was in like hackney empire yeah

so i i sort of got to know him through that so he told me that this was happening and i kind of hopped onto the list of you know because most of the extras were spaced fans and it was uh there was a shout out on a forum and um so I had to you know I went and auditioned and um there was a girl who could put her leg all the way like backwards which was great and I've realized since that because I was so impressed with her doing it I didn't realize that my kind of collagen is so shot that I can do that as well. Oh, my God. So I should have, you know, but at the time, this was a talent that had gone unrealised. So, yeah, I did like four or five bits, I think. Wow.

I was very, very sort of deep background, so it's hard to spot me in the thing, but there's a blob that is me. The bit where they finally realise that the zombie apocalypse is happening and they're in the car and they're driving through London. They look left and right and they see the body bag spilling out of the back of an ambulance with a body writhing around in it. And they look to the right and there's a park,

there's a bit of a covered reservoir. And I'm one of them in the way, way in the distance, coming ominously towards the camera. Is this when Mr Mental by 80s matchbox beeline disaster is playing i seem to remember it was when they're in that car drive but anyway yeah yeah yeah there's a bit oh yeah although all the uh the 80s matchbox bits are so brilliant they were extras in it as well there's a bit towards the like right at the end where there's a little compilation of what happened next and it's like there's like zombie game shows and stuff.

I was in the audience for the kind of zombie Opportunity Knocks bit. So I wasn't actually a zombie in that bit. There's a bit, I can't even remember what the context is for this, but there's a bit where there's some zombies chained up in the back of a truck. And it's the 80s Matchbox disaster and me and a couple of other people. Fucking hell. Brilliant fun. I remember seeing a picture of you on the internet all zombie done so yeah that's from that day where I had a bit of

zombie makeup on because it was it was so far in the distance that you know I didn't need a whole lot but yeah that was my profile picture on Friendster Friendster yeah I loved Friendster I miss that's a very early noughties thing it really is yeah it was great and the nice thing about that was is you you it was like there. It was great. And the nice thing about that was, it was like there was a section for you to say nice things about your friends, wasn't there? Yeah. It was like you could review your mates and go,

they're really great. They're my mates. And you sort of introduce people to other people and it just all seemed like a nice little club rather than what social media became. But yeah. Yeah, there's a whole long read about why Friends to failed, which is out there somewhere. And it's quite sad. But yeah i there was sadly i don't have a picture of the day when i did the pub scene

um well the winchester yeah i was at the winchester yeah so there are some hands when there's kind of the hands banging on the windows some of those hands are mine yes and then i also uh got to go in the pub and and watch the uh the kind of the pool cue fight yeah oh my god don't stop me now witness to history yeah really oh because we were in we were sort of crammed in the uh the little um hallway as well and uh what's his name peter serafinovitz who is who's there just wearing a small pair of pants and body makeup and looking very tall and sinister he was lovely he was really great um and yeah the zombage as we were called by the uh by the assistant director um where like you knew when you were being spoken to you would say zombage

over here please and so we had to stand in the in the hallway of the pub set and with the pork scratchings and everything there turned out to be loads of people that I know in that film, in the zombage. So Tim Chipping, the singer from the band Orlando, is a mate of mine, was one of them, because he was mates with Edgar. And Lauren Laverne is in there, isn't she? Really?

Is she? Yeah, there's a scene in somebody's back garden, where I think it's when they realise that the zombie apocalypse isn't just localised, it's really spread. And yeah, just Lauren right there. And she was obviously already quite famous at this point. Oh, I don't... But, yeah, Tim is actually on there.

Tim, who's a mate of mine also and who wrote for Bang, Wait Until The Bitter End, he's on the poster as well. So he's properly immortalised. And it was very funny. It was quite an insight into... Because there were a lot of kind of um you know very far background extras who were just there for a laugh and everything and it is it's kind of hard work it's very repetitive and you have to do the same thing over and over and it was you

know obviously it's british weather and you're standing outside in the freezing cold even though it's supposed to be summer and your flesh is dropping off your bones as well that's exactly it's like you know anyway but um yeah and i you know i made new friends and had a lovely time and yeah that was when we were in the pub and they uh they you know they set the bar on fire at one point so that happened over and over again and every single time they had the fire department on hand to put it out every single time we all cheered yeah it never got old it was hey firemen. Proud to have been a part of it.

Very, very, very small part. God, it's funny hearing you read through the news stories there and the story about Dr David Kelly just sort of reminds you with a shiver of the kind of dark shadows behind the gleaming, beaming smiles of Tony Blair and New Labour. One thing I do remember is that I was quite blissfully apolitical at this time, by my usual standards, let's say. And I think a lot of people were, you know, because the Tories had gone and didn't look like they'd ever be coming back, ever, you know. And as long as you didn't have the misfortune to live in Afghanistan or Iraq or

anywhere else that George W. Bush was using for bombing practice to help prop up America's erectile dysfunctional sense of imperial dominance, you could afford to drift away from worrying about politics too much. Blair was two years into his second term. Britain had just joined the US-led coalition invading Iraq, using fake dossiers about weapons of mass destruction, of course, as the pretext. I was part of that largest march in history in london that february trying to prevent that happening to no avail yeah yeah everyone we knew yeah absolutely yeah it'd be easier to list people who weren't yeah um

but you know thanks to blair's starry-eyed atlanticism and his eagerness to be george w bush's pet poodle you know yo blair and all that. But, you know, nevertheless, I was still able to call myself a Labour person by default, not least because my local MP was so anti-war, an obscure backbencher called Jeremy Corbyn, who lived a few doors down from me on the same street, it turns out. I was living in the same basement flat off Holloway Road in North London

that I was living in during the Britpop years that we talked about with Neil that time Shed 7 and all that and I was doing three jobs at once this this was insane this year it was just so fucking intense and overloaded and and really vivid as well I think I earned the most money I to date that I've ever earned in one calendar year but also fucked myself up so much that the sensible thing would probably to do what Sarah did and go and live somewhere hundreds of miles away.

I was doing one newspaper column, one editorial job on a magazine and running a club night. So I wasn't just burning the candle at both ends. I was holding a cigarette lighter under the middle of the candle as well and melting the wax off it leaving it looking like a waxy nunchuck, you which you then threw into a fire yes exactly i know we always

end up talking about clothes and hair so i should mention my look at this time right i wasn't a goth as such by this point i'd had a couple of circuit breakers from that um identity wise um so i you know since being a proper goth i'd had not one but two hip-hop phases and the Romo thing in between and um and by now I created this kind of hybrid non-tribal image for myself which was crowned by a twin set of elaborate plastic antlers uh which you may remember woven into my real hair courtesy of Peppies who were this um really amazing cyberpunk hairdressers at Camden Lock. It was a high maintenance look but I liked it and it used to really piss me off by the way right. I'm going to vent now. When people shouted and to this day do shout twisted fire starter at me in

the street because I wasn't copying Keith. If anything I was copying Sue Catwoman from the 70s. Yes. I met her once and she was really nice. And I apologise to her for nicking her hairstyle. But she said, at least you're doing it well, which was really sweet of her. So yeah, work-wise, after leaving Melody Maker, I'd taken a couple of years off from the front line of music journalism, if you like, to write my Mannix book. And the book was very successful uh i'm gonna blow my own trumpet here was the fastest selling rock biography of all time in the uk um book of the year in nme and rock book of the decade in the guardian so it was a useful calling card career-wise and um

it was off the back of that that i got a job with the independent on sunday um as their chief rock and pop critic um which is a high profile job you. There's only so many of those jobs going around, only so many national newspapers, and it's a bit like the managerial merry-go-round of Premier League managers or something like that, that when you're in situ, when you've got one of these jobs, you sort of cling on to it. So, yeah, I had my own column every Sunday

with a little photo of my face at the top, you know, sort of thing, like a cameo brooch. And one version of that photo cropped my horns out. I was so pissed off. I complained and they reinstated them. But one of the good things about working for The Independent at that time was that they refused to allow record companies or PR companies to pay for anything.

So the paper would cover all my travel costs and hotels and all that. So it was a matter of principle that the paper shouldn't feel indebted to or influenced by anyone, you know, literally independent. And there was also the fact that the paper as a whole didn't stand or fall on music advertising coming into my section, unlike, you know, Q or NME, who completely relied on that. So I had a real kind of carte blanche to say whatever I wanted and um yeah this was at the exact time that music journalism as a whole was becoming very timid and

diplomatic due to a number of factors and and which we talked about in previous episodes and and the role of the critic was turning into that of a cheerleader and you know meanwhile I've got this job where I was able to keep it old school and i was writing pretty vicious takedowns of major stars um yeah including elton john of course which came back to bite me on the ass as i mentioned in a previous episode because he's got some influential friends um so as well as bigging up the things i believed in of course because it wasn't just entirely negative you know i'm not that guy even people think i was yeah and this freedom that i had there it worked out really well for me i ended up winning awards for it um live reviews writer of the year three times in a row and i really must put my trumpet

down now um but you know uh you you often say so what were you doing at this time i can say exactly what i was doing because i've found my independent on sund Sunday column nearest to this date. So I had been to see the world's greatest entertainer, the hardest-working man in show business, Soul Brother number one, the amazing mister, please, please, please, the godfather of soul, James Brown at the Royal Albert Hall. With his magician. It was amazing.

It was a memorable and eventful show in a lot of ways. I remember his band wore these white naval suits with gold brocades, a bit like in the Navy. Right. I compared them to the crew of the Love Boat and also to Glenn Ponder and Lazarus. He did his famous knee-trembling dance, you know, and he did that thing where he pretends to collapse and his minions rush over and bring him his cape and all that.

He randomly brought a Janis Joplin impersonator on stage. I can never figure out what that was for. pretends to collapse and his minions rush over and bring him his cape and all that and he randomly brought a janice joplin impersonator on stage i can never figure out what that was for what he bottled out of you know in i got you i feel good there's the big i feel he bottled out of that which um you know i guess he was getting on a bit but saying that he made the bizarre claim on the mic that he was 59 years old now all biographical material available had him down as at least 10 years older than that at the time yeah and yet he told us y'all need to eat more fish and chips i've had mine yes what the fuck i mean some of it was fucking amazing obviously it's james brown you know and he had a well-drilled band, famously. It's a man's man's man's world, like, utterly slayed the place, right?

Papa's Got a Brand New Bag, fucking amazing. Here's what, right, I've got a bit, here's what I wrote about Papa's Got a Brand New Bag at the time. James Brown has, as he reminds us several times, been coming to the Royal Albert Hall for 30 years since Papa's Bag really was brand new. It's not often in pop history that you can pinpoint exactly one artist and even one song which changed everything. If you're looking for the moment where the various strands of black music, blues, jazz, gospel, soul, suddenly ignited into funk, you can't go far wrong if you pick James Brown,

and specifically Papa's Got a Brand New Bag. Lean, stripped down, brutally propulsive, it was aimed at nothing other than the hips and the feet Truly a revolutionary record And I do believe that And here's how I ended the review For a person so famed for laying down the law James Brown sure spends a lot of time asking for the green light

Permission to take to the bridge is requested And unanimously granted That's it Did he say anything about mushy peas? You need to know, yeah. Like, where does he stand on the sort of north-south divide in ship accompaniments? Yeah.

Yeah, what about the bits? Yeah, we'll never know now. What a shame. Well, I'd also left London this year. I moved back to Nottingham in March and I'm fucking loving it here. I think the last thing I did in london was go on that march yeah and i just had enough of london i honestly believe that everyone should

spend time in their own capital city but as soon as you hit your 30s you just start to think well what what the fuck am i doing i'm spending three hours commuting yeah every day you know my mates had all got to that point where they were all settling down and as soon as they wanted to move on with their life either you know buy a house or get married or have kids the first thing they do is get the fuck out of london because they couldn't afford to do it there yeah and so i was pretty much the last man standing and just not up for for trying to find a new circle of friends there because it was just it was just costing me too much and you know i just came to the realization that i'm not

going to create a new family here so i might as well go back to nottingham and link up with my old one my sister had just had a kid and i really wanted to be part of his life and within months of me moving back and getting to know him my my sister fucks off to Shropshire. So, yeah, thanks, Trey. By this time, I was a freelance magazine writer and was assured by the people I was working for at the time, oh, you're moving out of London, great, we need more provincial writers. So there was a lot of work being dangled in front of me, which mysteriously evaporated as soon as I wasn't in London anymore.

You know, commissioning editors, they want good writers writers but they also want good writers they can go out and have a drink with yes by this time i'm pretty much a sexpert which i've been for quite a few years people always used to ask me what that meant and i just said well i have sex then i spurt but i was writing for cosmo i was writing for But I was writing for Cosmo. I was writing for Scarlet. I was writing for Marie Claire. Yeah. I got a sex column in the Daily Mirror. Fucking hell.

I used to write a lot for M, the women's magazine, which was fucking brilliant. They'd send me out doing all manner of shit. And like you, Simon, I got a photo at the top of my column. It was a sort of a sideways shot with me mouth open and all smiley. And for some reason they'd done it in a demi-silhouette. And it made me look like the fucking Happy Eater Man's perverted uncle who just spotted

some pants in a bush. I looked fucking awful. They should have put fucking horns on me. I would have looked better. I should have asked. So I demanded that they bring me down to London for another photo shoot to get something remotely decent. And, you know, fair play to them, they did. Well, I guess you had to be semi to London for another photo shoot to get something remotely decent and you know fair play to them they did well I guess you had to be semi-anonymous you

don't get recognized among your sex exploits well not only that but you know it would have been nice for him to have had a male sex columnist who actually looked like someone that at least some of the audience would have wanted sex with you know yeah yeah okay anyway as they say when one's tired of london one's tired of being shit on so i fucked off out of it and it's always weird when you decide to leave london into it because you you do feel like you're crossing a line or at least yeah drawing a line in the sand of your life yeah feels like an admission of defeat sometimes don't it yes yeah yeah because most of the time i was there i felt like i was just clinging on to london like my fucking fingernails do you know what i

mean and there was this sort of vacuum sucking me back towards wales and like the undertow in the sea you know and yeah absolutely and just just clinging on to london was the thing i didn't have any life plan i didn't know what i was gonna to be doing when I was 37, 38. It was just like fucking getting through the next few months as far as you ever look, really. Within four years, I was out of there as well. Not back home to Wales, but down to Brighton. But yeah, I just felt a similar thing to you, Al, that the city just felt more and more brutal and hostile and callous

and like it was just fucking rinsing me dry, just sucking every last penny out of me. And I couldn't even enjoy the stuff that you're meant to enjoy about London. Exactly. Because I was paying too much just to fucking exist in London. Yeah. So, yeah, you come to realisation at some point. And, yeah, for me, it was getting down to Brighton.

But, yeah, I completely understand why you went back. Which is really funny, Sam, because right about this time, me and you got to know each other on the When Saturday Comes Forum by having some head goes at each other for me disliking london and you accusing me of being alan partridge we can laugh about it now yes london is you know it's kind of a cliche really but it's tough it's a tough place because you think that your whole identity is is really sort of predicated on it you know and it's like what it is like failure to leave. But then it's like, oh, OK, I won't actually crumble to dust if I cross the North Circular, you know.

And I'm kind of going through that again now because what's been happening over the last 18 months and I have felt like my flat, which I love very much, has just turned into a little sort of space pod. I just want to uproot my flat and take it somewhere else. But also, like, because technology now just about allows you to work from anywhere. And I think people have finally, finally, belatedly got their heads around the idea that that's doable. And I think in a way that people didn't in 2003 because it was like out of sight, out of mind, wasn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I didn't expect at all to get any work in music journalism or whatever if I moved out of London because, you know, I just didn't.

But I went back two and a half years later because I had some work for the satirical newsletter, The Friday Thing, which was a paid-for email newsletter, I've probably mentioned this before, that actually made money and stuff. Yeah, that was a cool thing, which inevitably died on its arse. Yeah. Music-wise, for me, I'm pretty much in the same position i was in the mid 80s where i'm turning my back on the modern stuff and burrowing into the old stuff i'm hoovering up all the tunes i've

been looking for for ages on napster yeah i just stopped being 50 pound man right i just got sick to death of wanting one track and having to spend 17 pound at tower records for a cd compilation from america and uh it being the wrong version of it so i just thought fuck this you're not giving me what i want i'm gonna have to get it for myself yeah i am spree killing music at the moment you're a 50 megabyte man yeah yes and you know as far as top of the pops goes fuck it it's on friday night friday night is either getting ready to go out or being in the pub straight from work top of the pops is dead to me yeah i wasn't watching it either probably four or five nights a week i was out seeing gigs either to review them or just for pleasure and

then there's a good chance that the other two nights i was doing club stuff so you know no no fucking way on a friday evening am i sitting watching that even if my favorite bands are on it no obviously it never recovered from the move to friday nights and it was up against cory and all that but that so there's lots of like logical reasons for why that was a bad idea but less logically i think it's that it belonged on thursday that was just top of the Pops night. Top of the Pops was Christmas. It wasn't Easter. You can't just move it.

The other thing I was doing that was keeping me in London was working full time for a magazine. And both of you were involved in this whole thing to varying degrees. So you know what I'm talking about. But I'd been approached the previous year by these two drongos who call themselves the Gloom Brothers, right? Right. They're these two posh blokes, one big, one small, like Batman and Robin. They previously held some sort of non-specified role in the music business, but they had a sideline in very high-concept, graphics-led DIY zines,

very big on poster art and stuff like that. And these two, Absolute Chances and Charlatans, they'd somehow managed to persuade a major publisher, Future Publishing, which was the home of Metal Hammer, among other things, to just give them a magazine, a new magazine called Bang! It was Bang! All Caps. Yeah, all of it was caps. Yeah, yeah.

Got into trouble if you didn't cap it all. It was meant to cash in on the noughties wave, and we've talked about this a little bit already, of guitar guitar music which came along in the way of the strokes and and and the idea was i guess from a market strategy point of view to attack the existing glossy monthlies like q and mojo from a more left field kind of young invert commas edgy position if you know what i mean i you talk about bands that are actually still going. Yeah, yeah, right, exactly. And they brought me in as features editor.

Now, obviously, Brandy Mag, we needed writers. And my most recent experience of working among other really good writers was at Melody Maker. So I decided to get the old gang back together for one last heist. So I decided to get the old gang back together for one last heist. So the idea being that we'd have that kind of freedom of writing, actually say what you want and express yourself in the pages that we used to have at Melody Maker in my time at Melody Maker, let's say at least.

And so the people I tried to bring in to create this team included Neil Kukani and Taylor Parks, of course. And also Sarah, even though our times at Melody Maker did not overlap, we knew each other. And I knew you were a good writer. And when I finish my rant now, I'd love to hear Sarah's memories of all this. But also Maria Jeffries, who I knew from Melody Maker Maker was already on board as the picture editor so you know I even got you to do something didn't I Al

I remember there's a thing about suicide girls the thing about suicide girls the alternative porn website because as you say you were Mr Sex you were porn expert I'll need hum I was starting to call myself Nottingham's Mr. Sex.

Yeah, exactly. And people used to ask me why, and I'd say, well, because I come from Nottingham. If I called myself Derby's Mr. Sex, I'd be lying to folk. I like it, yeah. I'm all about the honesty. So, you know, I was trying to build a strong team there, but from the very start, there was a friction

between the people I wanted to bring in and the Gloom Brothers. So, for example, I tried to get Stephen Wells, RIP, involved. But when he came to the pub, and Sarah knew Swells really well, and she'll know what I'm talking about, Swells was so abrasive in his usual kind of take-no-prisoners, motor-mouth style, that the Gloom Brothers just didn't want to work with him. And it didn't help when Taylor Parks came to the pub and said that the trouble with music magazines these days is that they're always run by someone called Crispin.

And one of the Gloom Brothers was literally called Crispin. For fuck's sake. and one of the Gloom Brothers was literally called Crispin. It was an actual Crispin. For fuck's sake. Anyway, we got the first issue out with the Flamin' Lips on the cover, and the piece was written by me. I was interviewing Wayne Coyne in Vienna, and we held a swanky launch party with The Darkness playing live. I'm going to talk about The Darkness in a bit.

Issue two was a misfire. We put a band called Hot Hot Heat on the front in the belief they were going to be the next Strokes and clue they weren't. Issue three was a complete self-indulgence from the Gloom Brothers. We had the Polyphonic Spree on the front, right? That utopian cult-like choir

in a special elongated cover that folded out because the band had so many members including including the gloom brothers themselves as temporary honorary members in red cassocks which right was never going to shift copies right they had terrible instincts um that the cover i wanted to do was vetoed and this was um peaches and iggy pop together they made a single together i thought peaches and iggy pop would they made a single together i thought peaches and iggy pop would have been an amazing front cover and would totally have embodied the ethos that the magazine purported to hold and it's something that um q would never have done mojo

would never done it's like you know it would be really sort of staking our claim for our territory and they you know nah they weren't having it and they literally laughed at franz ferdinand when the first record came in right this is a band who we should have been all over. And the rest of us were like, what are you fucking talking about? This is brilliant. By issue four, any pretense of being edgy had gone out the window.

They stuck Radiohead on the front in desperation and it wasn't long before Coldplay and Blur were on the front. So it might as well, at that point, it might as well have been Q Magazine Melody Maker In fact, the Gloom Brothers they used to troll us in the office by playing Coldplay really loud

while we had to sit there silently resenting them it was a total power play because they were in charge we had to sit there while they were playing The Fucking Scientist by Coldplay, full volume on CD player some of the things I was obliged to do were fucking humiliating We had to sit there while they're playing The Fucking Scientist by Coldplay, full volume on CD player. Some of the things I was obliged to do were fucking humiliating.

They'd come up with this really gross, insensitive item called dead fashion, right? Right. Where famous rock star deaths such as Jeff Buckley and Mark Bolan were restaged as fashion shoots. Oh, no! Yes. Fucking hell! With a bit of pretentious prose to go along with it. And I, as features editor, this was imposed on me to sort of make this happen,

I had to make the phone call to clear it with Roland Boland. Oh, no! And I felt such a cunt telling him... Fucking hell! ...telling him it would be tasteful, right? I fucking... I hated myself in that moment because I knew it was going to be horrible

and it was fucking horrible. Also, the glooms kept over-commissioning and spiking articles, which, you know, as journalists, we know how fucking annoying that is. It's hugely unprofessional. There was this series of city guides they were doing and I went to Liverpool to do one with Lady Tron, which was fucking great.

They really showed me amazing stuff around liverpool and you know bang just never ran it which is such a waste of everyone's time and very embarrassing for me you know but i would say you know despite all of that despite the editor's constant interference and dicking around right we we did manage to sneak out a few great things in the mag there's there's some work mine and by other people that i'm proud of um i say probably the best thing that came of it for me though was that i was sat next to this lugubrious northern guy called john doran um who was the editor and we became really close mates and he's now for those who don't know one of the editors of the quietest and a brilliant author and i probably never met him if it wasn't for bang but um anyway after i'd

been there for six months um the gloom brothers called me in for this sort of appraisal meeting you know you get sort of hr kind of thing and um they totally gaslit me it was an obvious case of workplace bullying what they did was they marked me out of five on various aspects of my work you know quality communication time keeping now creativity whatever and they gave me naught out of five for the first one then naught out of five on the second one and then naught out of five on all of them one by one and at first i was stunned i was stunned but i quickly realized exactly what they were doing they sat and looked me in the face and did that even though we all knew it was bullshit and what it was really about was that i was a challenge to their authority because i knew

about magazines and they knew nothing right yeah so it amounted to constructive dismissal really and i remember going down to wales one weekend and getting a call from john doran bless him um telling me that the gloom brothers were going to get rid of me so i had to jump before i was pushed and i i handed in my resignation on on the monday and and and here's the thing i mean i'm so fucking glad i didn't quit my column with the independent i i nearly did because i had this seemingly cushy new editorial job at Bang but I kept both the jobs going just in case even if it meant working a full day at the office and then dashing up to Nottingham or Birmingham to review a gig for the

indie and by the end of the year Bang had gone out with a whimper anyway. He was down the fucking toilets. I'd have been fucked if I'd quit my job so yeah that that was my uh view of it um so yeah Sarah what do you remember about all this we were so hyped about it like wasn't it like a just kind of yes we're gonna get to do what we fucking want because I was frustrated I got there at five minutes to midnight for the maker obviously as as uh you know podcast pass him um and I really thought that I'd missed my chance to kind of become a good writer and and be among the people who were my mates who had been the maker kind of front line before and this was like oh i've just got this one last kind of chance to do a thing so i was really

flattered and pleased to be asked obviously and it's like yeah this is you know you can you can write in the first person everything i was like don't let me do that i'm mad with power but um i thought oh you know this is this is great but i wasn't completely naive you know the maker had fallen down around my ears and i i had taken all of that in and i knew what was what and i knew that the the landscape was very treacherous you know but it was like yeah no this is going to be good and swells was on board and obviously i adored swells and we were really good friends the first editorial meeting which was like standing room only everyone crammed into this little and i swaggered down there i felt so confident but this was a great thing and i was in on the ground and it was and i did say to myself at the start like this is my last shot and if this

doesn't work then i'm done and you know and so it came to pass really i could have eked it out more but i really lost heart i mean i did speaking of like spiking features i did a feature with the canadian content crew or was it collective one of the other which was basically peaches gonzalez feist moki and a few other kind of assorted eccentrics and it was great and they played at the la2 and i interviewed all of them so this was like 20 minutes or half an hour or something with like eight different artists and i had to crunch all of that down including like writing about the gig as well and then it got spiked just because they the gloom brothers changed their mind just didn't want it anymore it's like that's not a good reason to do this but um fortunately tom yudo um also may he rest he was on he was on board. He was news editor, wasn't he?

This is a man who once apparently held a server hostage to get them to pay it. Yeah, he walked in with his mate and walked out with the server and they had to go round with ransom. They had to go round and pay cash to get it back. It was that and realising that they were completely out of tune with all of us and just seeing how they treated people and seeing how it was going. And I just kind of went, nah, I just lost wood completely for it. You could see from those early issues like how it could have been maybe. I mean, it's all quite scrappy and, you know, because it hadn't quite got its identity in order and maybe it could have done.

But what would have had to be different everything really it became as well like a kind of expensive failure that nervous industry people could point to and go you can't put money into magazines because look at that it became like a cautionary tale i think yeah and so and we'd had thought it would be daring and brilliant and freeing and oh well what a new music magazine in 2003 ever worked out? Because it's getting to the point now where traditional media just doesn't know what the fuck to do with itself.

Well, you know what? Words magazine came along at pretty much exactly the same time. In fact, we were worried it was going to blow us out of the water, but it ended up being aimed at a different demographic, really. But, yeah yeah I mean they managed to keep going for a good few years obviously in in the end that you know the realities the magazine market saw that one off as well but yeah I think it was an opportunity and something could have been done I'm not saying it would have lasted forever but you know um it had the potential

and one of the things that frustrates me about it so much is it was such a missed opportunity but the other thing hearing Sarah say what she said there just brings it home to me that apart from being disappointed for myself and disappointed for the you know the missed opportunity of a potentially great music mag is that I felt really guilty because I had talked it up because I'd had these preliminary meetings with the Gloom Brothers and we we sat down and sort of thrashed it all out and we and we seemed to be on the same page about what kind of mag this was going to be so as far as I knew I had the

green light to go ahead and tell people like Sarah and Taylor and Neil and various other writers this is what it's going to be like it's going to be amazing guys come over here it'll be like Melody Maker at it's best but a glossy monthly so trust in me and then when it came to it I couldn't fulfill that promise

because it was taken out of my hands and I just felt fucking awful for leading people on like that you know what I mean and it was embarrassing for me it really was you should put your mind at rest we knew it wasn't it wasn't your fault and you suffered more you know as much as anyone and probably more so so you know just put that to rest um yeah it was such a fucking shame but i was kind of primed for it you've got to be happy and engaged and enthused on a certain level to be able to do it and i was just like i can't do it but one of the last things that i did for it was um i love doing the city guides because i was never very confident as an interviewer and i did a decent feature with the cardigans but um the the city guides when it's like a tight format where the questions,

I could always relax with those where you know what the questions are going to be and you don't have to get in a knot about it. And we went to Mull. Oh, yeah. Mull Historical Society, which is one guy. And so he did the guide to Mull, which is tiny, tiny. It was Tobermory, which is the pretty street overlooking the harbour with all the different coloured houses.

It was so beautiful. It was so absolutely flat, calm sea and just so peaceful. And we did all talk about what if we just fucked it all off and left it all behind and just came here. It's the place that does that to you. And that was kind of instrumental, I suppose,

in my leaving London because it does nudge your head and go, you don't have to be there anymore. There's a whole world out there. And I wasn't surprised at all when it died on its arse after a year, because that's what a lot of things did. So, chaps, as is the style with child music, this is the time that we leaf through the crates

and we pull out an example of the music press on this week. And this time I've gone for the NME, July the 26th, 2003. Shall we nose through? Yes, please. On the cover, James Skelly of The Coral in a pair of sunglasses with the words, you must create in the top corner of one of the lenses, shouting into a light bulb. of the lenses shouting into a light bulb in the news julian casablancas has announced that the strokes have one week left to finish recording their next lp room on fire they intend to immediately start on the mix down before nipping over to japan for two shows at the summer sonic

festival and then get it ready for an autumn release. It eventually comes out at the end of October and spends a week at number two in the LP chart, held off number one by Life for Rent by Dido. The big news event of the month, Jack White's car crash, which left the index finger of his left hand all mangled up and that, is updated with a photo of his last appearance on stage when he made a guest appearance at the science farms gig in detroit five days before he's posted a statement on the band's

website which concludes apologies to those wishing to see my hand live soon enough i'm sure now me and meg can share war stories i love when we share like once there was a monkey and we shared the experience as children do. For readers asking if the White Stripes will be able to play Reading and Leeds this year, the answer is yes, according to the

organisers. They pull out a week later and are replaced by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. Oh, for fuck's sake, man. They were so embarrassing. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. Oh, for fuck's sake, man. They were so embarrassing. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, right? I always used to call them the Mean Cool Leather Gang, because the fucking name,

you know, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, trying so hard. I remember, it might have been when this, you know, thing broke that they were stepping in for the White Stripes. I remember an interview with them when they said our ambition has always been to headline the second stage at the reading festival and like if if right if that was a wry self-deprecating joke fair play but i don't think it was you know that was the kind of height of their ambition oh god they were so nav

no i i loved them they were my bottom they were i fucking loved them they're such a pure rock and roll band and also they were they were instrumental in me upping and fucking off because i realized that i didn't care to try to convince people about this like i couldn't do it even now it's just like no look they were some of the best gigs i've ever seen it was it was great i loved them so much so people like me making fun of them bullied you out of music journalism, basically. Going back to Strokes, I mean, there's so much I could say about them, about how they were hugely important, bringing this kind of rebirth of cool and sharpening everything up after everybody was really slouching about.

I think the post-Britpop come down lasted about four years yeah 1997 to 2001 well this is a year that the brit pop documentary live forever comes out so we people have been nostalgic about brit pop already in 2003 but i think what had happened was that you know everybody's listening to moby and travis and coldplay and it's all very benign and slouchy music and baggy clothes and there's no edge toign and slouchy music and baggy clothes, and there's no edge to it, no sharpness. And the Strokes sort of carefully curated everything about them. The first thing anyone saw of them was a grainy black and white photo,

a big photo of them sitting in a cafe in New York in the NME. And it's like, oh, right, we're going back to that. And, you know, these sort of good-looking young guys in leather jackets and that kind of thing. And, you know, musically, they were zoning in on things like Cheap Trick and The Ramones and Blondie and television. And just that particular kind of American aesthetic of sharp, uptight, new way. So they were really important in that way. And they kind of changed everything. But the reason I wanted to go back to them was just because I have to say this one sentence. Julian Casablancas gave me a love bite in Nottingham.

No! Yeah, Nottingham. Fucking hell. Yeah, I went up to review them in, what was that venue? Was it just called the Heavenly Social? The Social? The Social, yeah, yeah. Which was the fucking best pub in Nottingham.

Friday night, that's where I'd be. I'd come straight out of work, straight over to the the social not moving until three o'clock in the morning my mate actually went to that gig and after um julian casablancas has had his way with you uh my mate crashed with them all right i don't know if he got a love bite it might have got more yeah no yeah what it was that you know i got chatting with them afterwards and uh somebody came and said let me take a picture of you two so uh we stood there posing and while um whoever it was was taking the picture he leans in and gives me a hickey on my neck it's like all right fucking hell mate but there we go yeah rock and roll takes a while to really like engender a proper one

yeah i mean maybe i'm exaggerating yeah put it this way i didn't exactly fight him off do you know what i mean because i thought i Because I thought in 18 years' time, I've got a really good story for a podcast. I don't even know what a podcast is yet, but it'll be worth it. Did you have to wear a polo neck the next day, Simon? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I went around looking like Harry Hill,

massive collar for, you know, a year. Fran Healy of Travis has been spotted at Craven Cottage recording crowd chants at half-time of a friendly between Fulham and Celtic for the track Peace the Fuck Out on their forthcoming LP 12 Memories. Despite getting rained on again when the sprinkler system got turned on while he was conducting the away support, he gets the track in the can and gets to meet Celtic manager Martin O'Neill, who's a big fan.

That's a very big deal. Martin O'Neill is a very private man. When I used to hang around Forest in the early 80s, I'd get everyone's autograph every day apart from Martin O'Neill. He wouldn't sign anything. I hope Fran Ely realised what a big deal it is to be recognised and liked by Martin O'Neill. Yeah, maybe it's a not an in thing. Because he didn't like Robbie Williams, remember? Mega Man of So Solid Crew has spoken about being interviewed by Cypriot police

in the wake of the stabbing of Dizzy Rascal in Ayia Napa at the beginning of the month and how well dis-chuffed he is that his collective get blamed for everything. The authorities wanted to get all the black DJs off the island because of the trouble, but I told them no one would come back, he says. Muse are celebrating the relative success of their latest

single release, Stockholm Syndrome, one of the first in the world to be available as a download only release. If all the downloads are translated into single sales, it would have easily gone top 15, says a band spokesperson. We estimate that in one week, 5,000 people have downloaded it. As many as that.

But over in America, plans are af fought to introduce legislation that will make it easier to bring criminal charges against people who are sharing music online with prison sentences of up to five years being threatened lock them up courtney love has signed a publishing deal with tokyo pop incorporated to produce a manga series based on whole songs called Princess Ai. It's about a smart and talented yet controversial princess who is exiled to Tokyo with nothing but a heart-shaped box. Oh, for fuck's sake. Yeah, think about it, man.

Where she makes a living as a rock star and falls in love with a sensitive muso called Kent who looks suspiciously like Kurt Cobain. The first of three novels eventually come out in the summer of 2004. Happier news for the polyphonic spree. One of their robes that was stolen in a gig in Northampton has been returned freshly laundered and ironed. We want to thank the good people of Northampton,

says a band spokesperson. It's stolen by the Gloom Brothers, yeah. Dancing around doing weird polyphonic cosplay. That story about the polyphonic spree and Moby's fanny-related story, that got twice as many column inches about the one about D rascal getting stabbed so for sake there we go dizzy rascal was amazing around this time by the way obviously you know the album

and all that blah blah blah but i caught him live at fabric in london and he was doing just like a sort of freestyle rap battle with you know a few other people and just improvising and just absolutely force of nature i've never seen anything like it. I mean, I like his records, but just how he was on the microphone. No fucking backing, no beats, nothing. Just going for it. It was phenomenal. It really was. In the interview section, well, Damon Dash, the co-founder of the Rockefeller Empire, is quizzed about his latest project,

the relaunching of Victoria Beckham's career. He said he didn't know her from an hole in his arse when he was introduced to her by Naomi Campbell, but he likes her attitude and sense of humour. He doesn't give a toss at a career as Nosedive in the UK because he knows how strong his music is. And he also thinks that David Beckham has got a definite hip-hop plan and he's got his hip-hop dress game down.

The enemy has decided that Glasgow is the new centre of music this week, but they can only find two bands to lump into a feature. The newly signed Franz Ferdinand get a quarter of a page where we find out that the band was formed as a party

when Alex Capranos got into a fight with Nick McCarthy when the latter nicked the former's bottle of vodka. They get round the licensing laws at their warehouse gigs by charging a quid for a raffle ticket which automatically wins a bottle of beer and their ambition is to make

the world forget about that archduke that got shot in 1914. Meanwhile, dogs die in hot cars get asked about their name, how they feel about getting called the New Proclaimers and very little else. Alex Needham nips down to Raymond's review bar in Soho and waits for Alison Goldfrapp to finish having her photo taken before she gives him a guided tour of Soho. She says that the review bar was the site of one of Goldfrapp's first gigs.

She used to work at Agent Provocateur and had to deal with men in raincoats having a wank and she only does drugs at home these days. Sensible. Can we just clear something up in case anyone's still wondering? I am not Alex Needham. we just clear something up in case anyone's still wondering i am not alex needham rich pelly links up with the next euro dance sensation junior senior they tell him that they can't understand why danish bacon is so popular over here as it's no different from anyone else's slices of pig

they're not impressed with the danish pastries they've tried in London. They hate being compared to Aqua, Wigfield and DJ Otze and they're glad that Denmark voted to reject the Euro. Imran Ahmed drops in on the Morrison Hotel in Dublin for three whole pages interviewing the coral, which gets mashed into an A to Z. We learn that James Skelly has been helping his grandad put some paving stones in his back garden. He doesn't have a mobile phone because

they get on his tits and he thinks Chris Tarrant is a fucking cunt for grabbing him by the scruff of the neck when he puts his foot on a chair that had Mr Tiswaz's jacket on while they were waiting to be interviewed by Jonathan Ross. If I see Chris

Tarrant again, I'd have a shit on his foot, he says. This week's singles page is handled by a pool of Mark Beaumont, Chrissie Morrison and Rob Fixpatrick, and the single of the week is No Not Now by Hot Hot Heat. This is proof that they were not just a flash in the post rapture punk funk pan and allows them to brush off those unwelcome cure comparisons

says Morrison. It'll have you buying late new wave power pop in bulk and claiming that XTC have always been your favourite band. Why don't you just buy an XTC single then? If this single was by a trio of hydraulic Mediterranean bimbos

called the Ibiza Bandidos, you'd pay to have them throttled in their beds, says Beaumont of Rhythm Bandits by Junior Senior. Instead, it's by two chancing-it dockers dressed like a blind-run DMC, and is therefore brilliant. Since 1982, over 20 million people have died of AIDS, reads the cover of Starter Fire by Radio 4. In case you get so caught up in the baggy beats and angling guitars that you miss the lyrical message that could save your life, says Morrison.

If all government health warnings sounded like this, there'd be no disease. But it's a coat down for In Love by Lisa Mafia. While her career so far has been spent attempting to convince us what a tough old bird she is, the rose among so solid thorns has given up her guns for chocolates and a table for two. But unfortunately, along with her heart, she's also lost her cool, states Morrison.

Lisa, if you came round to our door singing this, we'd set Dizzy Rascal on you. Hideout by fuck? Sounds like the strokes chasing the wedding present on a knackered jogging machine you were the last high by the dandy warholses like

the mid 80s electro melodics of new order at their tranquil loveliest and if no Gallagher had stretched himself a little further than simply hammering the arse out of the uninteresting end of the Beatles catalogue he might have come up with morning Wonder by The Hiss,

according to Rob Fitzpatrick. Ooh, fucking hell. It's safe to slag off Oasis now. We're in a new era. They changed their mind on that, though, didn't they? Yeah. They came crawling back up the Gallagher arsehole pretty soon. In the LP Review section,

the main review is given over to Take Them On, On Your Own by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. And James Oldham reckons it's a sensational album for many reasons. A fearsome confirmation that music can still act as a radicalised form of protest. The sonics are so full and heavy they make the yeah, yeah, yeah sound like leaves being blown down a street. Take Them On, On Your Own is a masterpiece. You should get hold of it as soon as possible. Nine out of ten.

Right on. Mondo Generator, another Queens of the Stone Age spin-off project, have put out their second LP, A Drug Problem That Never Existed, and Barry Nicholson is impressed. This record may not be as wild-eyed and rabid as 2000's Cocaine Rodeo, but it's loaded with more illicit sex, insanity, and glam punk brilliance than you can shake Satan's pitchfork at. Seven out of ten. But it's a mild coat down for Truly she is none other by holly go lightly

if it came bursting out of some crackly 10 inch piece of vinyl you bought for too much money on ebay you'd think it was incredible but it was made in 2003 and as such can only ever be really quite good says rob fit Fitzpatrick. Six out of ten. The Forever Changes concert by Love could well be the perfect record, according to James Jam. Longview are dismissed as sad Chester middleweights by Tim Wilde, and their debut LP Mercury is the sound of a great band

who have had all their interesting edges knocked off. And Rob Fitz patrick announces that killing joke by killing joke with dave grohl on drums is after the latest jane's addiction release another comeback record that isn't embarrassing rubbish in the gig guide david could have seen junior senior at the mean fiddler Sex Maniacs at Highbury Corner Garage Roachford at Old Gate Each Spits or Cunts at the Brixton Wimbledon but definitely didn't

I mean fucking hell we've already discussed whether David would have seen Panties in 1978 that's hell of a double bill isn't it yes yes Cunts and Panties together at last 1978. That's hell of a double bill, isn't it? Yes! Yes! Cunts and panties together at last. Mr. Sex in between them. Taylor could have seen Funeral for a Friend

at the Birmingham Academy 2 and fuck all else. Neil could have seen The Bobs at the Coventry Coliseum or gone to Wolverhampton to see Marina Topley Bird at the Little Civic. Sarah could have see Marina Topley Bird at the Little Civic. Sarah could have seen Harmar Superstore at the Leeds Cockpit, Shed 7 at the Hull Wellington, the Motherfuckers at Sheffield Grapes or Dogs Die in Hot Cars at the Sheffield Boardwalk.

Why didn't they put the motherfuckers and the cunts together? Just let them fight it out. This would have been fuck yeah yeah a golden age for band names that aren't particularly asked about going on top of the pubs yeah i think fuck buttons were around that time as well weren't they yeah al could have seen jesse sykes and the sweet hereafter at the maze or gone to derby to see ron sexsmith at the nerve center, and Simon could have seen Rocket Science at the Cardiff Barfly, Funky Monkey at the Barfly, and Miss Black America at Club EvoBach. In the letters page, Alex Needham is in the chair this week.

I wonder if he ever got approached and said, you, that bloke who writes all that shit about sex, and be on Sex and Shopping talking bollocks. Yeah, and how do you wear half a condom? Yeah. They'll be sort of sitting there confused like that Guy Gommar bloke on, you know, the BBC News channel. And the main topic of conversation is the darkness and their appearance at Tea in the Park. After their tequila slammer of a set,

I was amazed to hear some moaning minis complaining that they obviously weren't real, didn't mean it shining and the lager's flowing, I want to be entertained. The darkness rock, and that's what matters. Yes, I get the joke, but it's just not funny, counters Daniel Whelan via email. Never before has one band managed to steal all the manicix crap points without any of the good ones. If we all ignore them, they'll go away, and we'll never have to look at their bad teeth again. If I wanted to watch some rubbish novelty tribute band, I'd get a fucking season ticket for Stars in Their Eyes, says Steve-O via email.

I have written to Michael Eavis demanding two hundredth of my glastonbury ticket price back for waking me up on friday morning with their squealing comedy shit simon i remember when we were arguing the toss on internet forums back in 2003 the darkness was a hill you were prepared to die on two thousand times listen man that band were the band who were giving me life more than anyone in that era and i i kind of discovered them i'm going to give myself credit for that what happened was um back in spring 2001 um a woman i knew called valerie gerrimond who was the promoter of a night called the fan club that happened at the virgin kentish town urged me to check out this new band she was putting on with what i thought was a shit gothic sounding name um so i i went along a bit reluctantly

but i was absolutely blown away and i i wrote their first ever live review in the independent on sunday in this review i've got a little quote i described them as being a histrionic high camp heavy metal band best described as a gay acdc gay cdc if you will i mean acdc is already a sort of gay name yes fronted by a young freddie mercury hugely entertaining regardless of their exact location on the irony to seriousness scale so that's what i wrote and i remember them treating this small pub gig like it was wembley and i And I love that about them. I mean, Justin Hawkins was getting a roadie to give him a piggyback around the room and moving through the fairly sparse crowd,

high-fiving everyone as he played guitar. And I love that. I mean, their music was just shameless. Obviously, we've all heard it, but fucking joyful, fist-in-the-air fun. I mean, the songs are brilliant and they fucking genuinely rocked. And also, right,

they put a trestle table with loads of pizza slices at the back of the room for everyone to help themselves. So that's a tip for up-and-coming bands. If you want to get audiences and critics on site, give them pizza.

Or a buffet, at least. Yeah, sing them a buffet. It was a really nice touch. And send Neil along to review the buffet. Yeah, and you've got to put crisps out if neil's there yeah fucking hell um and yeah and and uh well whether he'll touch your sandwiches is really the marker definitely but the darkness they were just so unlike anything else that was around and and i emailed absolutely everyone in the music industry who i had in my email contacts list and just said you have to see

this band and I'm genuinely not taking credit for getting them signed but I did everything I could to help with the kind of buzz that was naturally growing around them and we we became good mates we worked together a lot I even DJ'd several of their gigs and after shows and birthdays and it was just such a pleasure a joy to watch this band who i'd championed when they were at pub level making it all the way to brit awards and headlining festivals and playing wembley and all that and the fact that some boring bastard indie kids who wrote for the enemy or read the enemy didn't like them only made me love them more you know yeah and when the darkness became too big to ignore and you've mentioned the

glastonbury thing there they were just this reality that the enemy couldn't sort of like laugh off anymore conor mcnicholas who was the editor of enemy at the time approached justin hawkins at glastonbury to beg him for forgiveness um to beg him to forgive nme and to give them an interview and justin made him literally get on his knees backstage at Glastonbury and grovel, and he did it. Yeah, yeah. I fucking love that. The thing with Connor is, right, and he was a weird one.

He wasn't from NME world. He wasn't immersed in indie rock. And he was a dance music journalist. He'd been at Ministry and Mixmag and Music and things like that. And, you know, his job after the NME was he went to be a motoring journalist. Right. He actually looked like one of the Strokes. And I liked him despite myself because I was the last Japanese soldier in the jungle.

You know, I was still fighting the war, even though Melody Maker was long gone. So I hated NME on principle. And I was also at odds with what it was doing. And I was always taking pot shots at enemy from my sunday newspaper bunker and then because enemy at that time and i don't know maybe it's partly come across in this issue and maybe it's not a good example of it but it was fixated on the idea of cool specifically this kind of hipster understanding of cool that was being formed in hoxton and also Williamsburg.

And the NME was also enthralled to this really reductive, like Jack Daniels swilling, Keith Richards idolising idea of rock and roll, you know, which I found kind of embarrassing. And they were glorifying that whole smack head culture that surrounded the Libertines as well, you know. And throughout that decade, they were just too keen to provide a

platform for all those tedious posh boys and girls like raise a lie and florence the machine and jamie t and jack pinate and kate nash and all that lot basically pulling up the castle drawbridge and making pop into an upper class playground i i hated that and the other thing that was going on in the enemy at that time it was the age of advertorial i don't know if you saw any examples of this did you well basically right they saw no contradiction between naming a tour the rock and roll riot tour right and an enemy sponsor tour and having it sponsored by o2 and samsung yes for fuck's sake and it was during connor's six-year reign enemy that nme became this brand. It was like a logo. The NME, it wasn't so much a magazine anymore.

And they were always fortunate. I think David Stubbs has mentioned this before, that, you know, NME had this nice blocky logo that looks good on a T-shirt or a badge or whatever. So it became this brand. So there was a website. The NME Awards came back. There were these package tours. There were sponsorship tie-ins with Shockwaves Hairspray

and all these other lifestyle brands. Rock and roll. Yeah, and they were selling T-shirts under the NME banner. You know, band T-shirts, not NME T-shirts. They were selling tickets for gigs. It was just this ugly corporate kind of lifestyle monstrosity. But they must have been doing something right because the weird thing was,

despite the fact that the music press was having its arse kicked by new forces at this time, sales of the enemy actually went up slightly under Connor's reign. Whenever I ran into him in person, he was nice to me, despite all my sniping and slagging. And I've got to say, I've actually got a sneaking amount of respect for him that Justin Hawkins says,

get down on your knees. And he fucking did it. So fair play to him. When I read that Nathan from the Kings of Leon said, I'd rather have a son in a band than a daughter that's at the club trying to get with the guy in the band in NME, I couldn't gosh darn believe it, writes Condoleezza Rice's fallopian tube via email.

Here I was all this hair time thinking that girls could actually be in bands ourselves instead of just being mere groupies. It's so refreshing in 2003 to see such a forward-thinking band who sound and look like a parody of good old rehashed 70s rock cliches. Hayden wants to know who Cosmic Rough Riders think they are. rock cliches. Hayden wants to know who Cosmic Rough Riders think they are. James DeMello points out that the Coral's latest

single is a direct nick of You Like Me Too Much by the Beatles. And Princess Fairy thanks the NME for the cover-mounted condoms in an issue last month as her boyfriend gave her her first double orgasm with them. 52

pages, £1 forte. I never knew there was so little in it it's a very patchy thing the enemy by this time gone down in size gone down in pagination the articles are bitty as fuck and you go through it and you think well this is nicely laid out and everything but you feel so sorry for the people writing in it and so sorry for the bands and artists who are being covered in it because it's proper nm heat by this time heat did so much damage to the music press yeah there are a lot of listicles in the enemy around this time and one of their most sort of totemic ones was the cool list that they publish every now and then was like the 50 coolest people in the world. It always seemed to be like Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs at number one.

It was all those people that were eventually sort of collated in the book Meet Me in the Bathroom about that whole cocaine-y New York scene of the noughties. And yeah, it just seemed like they were all kissing America's arse. In a way that 10 years earlier, I guess Melody Maker was kissing sort of America's grungy arse, you know. But yeah, it was all sort of fixated on these indie celeb personalities and what they were up to.

Pop stars at this time are celebrities who happen to make music and the way they keep themselves famous is by making music and putting it out every now and then. But that's not their real job anymore. Their real job is to be somebody famous i don't know i mean obviously smash hits was was great in its in its pomp but um i suppose it has a lot to answer for in terms of the influence of format in that

way but a lot of the joy had gone out of it i guess it's like you know a list i'd i love you know i love a good list i love like the daftness that you can put into these things but you've got to get it right it's such a such a dicey thing and when it's like transparently chasing after audiences yeah i mean we all know how that goes you know it's it's where you're chasing after people who aren't there or you're pandering to people who realize that you're pandering to them it's yeah i mean obviously the maker did this as well it's like putting like non-music people on the cover or whatever it's like hang on so we ball or whatever it's like yeah It's like putting like non-music people on the cover or whatever. It's like, hang on. Zoe Ball or whatever.

Yeah, it's like a weird category error that's going on. It's like, but that's not a, you know, like the sex issue and stuff with like Kelly Brook. I interviewed Kelly Brook actually. She was a sweetheart. She didn't know what she was doing there either. She was really sweet because she was quite dim, but she was really self-aware about it,

which was so endearing. She was kind of like, well, I don't know what, I don't know why you want to interview me for this, but okay, because it was all the same to her. But yeah, culturally, it was all starting to get a little bit of a mishmash that was a bit queasy. I mean, the last magazine-y job I had was a few years ago. I was working for a celebrity magazine, and my job was to sit on the associated press wires as soon as a news item

came up jump on it cut and paste it amend it just a little bit give it a title that was seo friendly and try and get it out before everybody else did yeah and we're seeing the beginning of this here everything's celebrity related you're not really learning much about the bands or the artists and the people writing it aren't learning how to be proper journalists because they're not being given the space to do that i mean i did i did a couple of days at heat online and that was just weird it was just because i did all kinds of bits and bobs of work around this time i did do some some odd bits of music stuff subsequently i did some stuff like the bbc music website and then i lost any inclination to do that as well but um yeah i i was never going

to like pivot to do celebrity stuff because it was just too odd yeah but it was starting to the walls were kind of closing in a bit and it was starting to become this kind of homogenous thing it's all meant to be zingy and fun and exciting and you don't feel that it's quite hard to fake it you know yeah so what else was on telly this day well bbc one starts the day at 6 a.m with breakfast then it's kilroy house call in the country where assorted tv presenters tell the unemployed pensioners kids on their six-week holiday and anybody else stuck at home watching bbc one on a weekday morning about what houses they should be buying. Then it's garden invaders, house invaders, trading treasures, the proto-flog it, passport to the sun, the docu-soap about British people in Majorca. Then it's BBC News, regional news in your area, neighbours, cash in the attic, diagnosis murder, more news,

more regional news in your area, then it's the tweenies, Arthur, Rugrats, the Basil Brush show, the film show Call the Shots, a repeat of neighbours, then the six o'clock news, regional news in your area again, and they've just finished a repeat of the episode of open all hours where granville mines the shop while arkwright goes to a funeral bbc2 starts at 6 30 a.m with fimbles the adventures of marco and gina sheep the ovine centric cartoon series then you get me the interactive drama series about yous running an internet radio station followed by round the twist news round tom and jerry kids and the role reversal reality show rule the school where a group of kids educate a pool of young teachers after a dragon interrupts

an important baseball game in the scooby and scrappy show it's smart the shaking take heart which teaches the youth how to make a personalized mobile phone holder then it's mona the vampire tween is possibly the episode where they do their own episode of top of the pops and one of them imitates jimmy saville which received 213 complaints when it was accidentally repeated in 2013. Oh my God. And Clifford the Big Red Dog. After Miss Hooley does something for the old uns by organising a fish supper in Balamore, it's Rubber Dubbers, CBeebies birthdays and a Laurel and Hardy double bill.

After the business show working lunch, we get to look at the Orkneys and Pembrokeshire in this land before being whipped over to Ascot for the racing, hosted by Willie Carson and fucking Bunty. That's followed by Escape to the Country, Ready Steady Cook, The Weakest Link, the episode of The Simpsons with Elton John in it, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Robot Wars Extreme,

and they've just started the Royal Horticultural Society Flower Show at Tatton Park with Monty Don and Charlie Dimmock. ITV kicks off at 6am with GMTV, followed by Trisha this morning and Loose Women. After the lunchtime news and regional news in your area, it's under one roof, a repeat of Quincy, yes chef, more news, more regional news in your area, then the kids show Squeak, followed by Hey Arnold, Rescue Robots, My Parents Are Aliens, Boot Sale Challenge and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire Classic, i.e. A Repeat.

Then it's regional news in your area, the ITV Evening News, Emmerdale and they've just started Coronation Street. Channel 4 commences with a double bill of the jim henson alien on earth kids program the hoops followed by rise pop world a repeat of last night's big brother's little brother then a repeat of last night's big brother then it's over to edge baston for the second day of the first test between england and south africa which runs all the way to 6.15. Then it's Hollyoaks, Channel 4 News, and they've just started highlights for the first day of the Rally Deutschland in the World Rally Championship.

Channel 5? Nah, who gives a toss? Fucking hell, that is a packed television schedule and a very familiar television schedule. There's not much difference between now and then, is there? A lot of familiar names there, like Loose Women and so on. I don't think I was watching any of that. I just wasn't watching TV around this time. Maybe Pop World. I don't know

if that was Simon Amstel's era, but I thought he was really good. And Makeda Oliver as well. I thought they were great. And it was one of those shows that was aimed at kids, but when it was shown on a Sunday morning, it was just great hungover viewing for people being out at a nightclub and yeah i i thought it was a good show i used to work with the guy who was the jimmy saville tweeny no yeah so he's very just a very tall man so he did uh he did some writing but he also did some acting and

uh yeah so he was on the front cover of The Sun when that whole scandal broke in his, you know, he's very sort of tall and lanky with the big head on. He just thought the whole thing was quite hilarious because nobody knew it was him. You know, he didn't actually get tracked down. He didn't have people. So he didn't get cancelled through no fault of his own.

So he didn't get tracked down like the sex Teletubber. No, fortunately. I mean, we might have, you know, because I was like in an office with him. They could have had the paps at the door and everything, but fortunately we didn't get tracked down like the sex teletubber fortunately i mean we might have you know because i was like in an office with him they could have had the paps at the door and everything but fortunately we didn't so mention of um rescue robot and um robot wars extreme reminded me i haven't told you about the third job i was doing in 2003 which was uh running my club night oh yeah i was running um a night called stay beautiful It'd be going a couple of years. It ended up lasting for 10 years in London and another five in Brighton.

And what it was, it was basically a place, a home for a subculture that didn't really have a name but was out there and existed. And obviously Stay Beautiful, it's named after a Manic Street Preacher song. So it's partly coming from that kind of subculture of, you know, Richie Edwards fans but also people who are into

Hole and Placebo and maybe Manson with a S-U-N and maybe bands like Knicky and kind of new glam bands like Rachel Stamp and King Adora and all of this. So basically there was this tribe of people who didn't have a name but you'd see them, they'd wear a lot of eyeliner and glitter and leopard

and feather boas and all that and they would coalesce around certain bands and certain gigs but there were no club nights for them and I decided just to sort of do a night that brought this together and it ended up becoming this kind of self-perpetuating little tribe to itself it really was its own its own scene and the thing is and I was running with with my then girlfriend and one of my best mates, and we kept having to move from one venue to another. We could never get a weekend night to start off with. We were fucking running on a Monday, you know, in London, which wasn't ideal. Then Wednesday.

Eventually, we got Friday in Islington, but we got booted out of that. We ended up going to this place in London Bridge. It was called Club Wicked. It was previously known as Cynthia's Robotic Bar. Oh, yes. I've been there. I bet you have because I'm coming on to exactly why I think you might have been there. So it was in Tooley Street in the underpass beneath London Bridge.

And it had an actual robot that would serve you cocktails. This metal Mickey type thing called Cynthia. And another one called Rastus. Cynthia and Rastus the robots they were a bit shit i never actually got them successfully to pour me a drink but they were there anyway but it was run by this guy he was a former police officer called brian sheridan and uh he was um a sort of fetish lord and um we didn't know what we were letting ourselves in for when we got involved in this in this venue i found a newspaper story about what went on there basically around the time that we moved in there and started doing stay beautiful once a month they um that this is brian sheridan

and his wife lady caroline a writer of erotic fiction i'm going to come on to that um they were trying to get a license for cynthia's or Club Wicked as they'd renamed it, to become a live sex club where people could just go and have sex in public in front of other people. That was kind of unprecedented in London, and there were all kinds of legal obstacles to it. And they were trying to find a workaround where you could pay 25 quid to be a member,

and it becomes a private club and stuff like that. But I found a newspaper story about all of this about what they were trying to do and i'll read it out now it goes former police officer brian sheridan known as the general due to his penchant for military uniforms and his wife lady caroline a writer of erotic fiction say that their arrival in se1 was quite deliberate and well researched we wanted a fast and up-and-coming area with easy access to the city with no or minimal competition. The Sheridans are well-known figures on the fetish scene

where opinions are divided about their business style and personal tastes. Brian, a self-styled World War II historian, says that World War II uniforms are his fetish. In my opinion, the World War II German uniforms are highly glamorous and erotic, he wrote in response to criticisms on a London fetish message board. Flyers for previous promotions

have featured the couple in full SS uniform. Fancy that, yeah. Yeah, a quote from him now. We are not Nazis or fascists, says Brian Sheridan, who goes on to add that the british have committed more terrible atrocities than anyone over the last 1000 years we make the nazis look like they're in kindergarten right so that that gives you an idea of you know that these people they're never interested in dressing up like the home guard are they no they're not exactly exactly so i went there for a business meeting just to try and

try and sort of um you know and pin down what our deal was going to be and i went in the middle of the afternoon um probably on a weekday and i saw someone strapped to an apparatus getting their bare ass spanked with a paddle by a man in a latex nazi stormtrooper outfit and that was brian sheridan the general what on his dinner hour well they just helped they just had stuff going on in yeah in the daytime and i think it's because they were so close to the city and uh you know quite quite a lot of the people who went there were sort of quite well-to-do professionals and the thing is right most places where stay beautiful had happened we were the freaky wild ones yeah the club the crowd was quite our crowd was very. Our crowd was very LGBTQ friendly and, you know, very dressed up, very glam, very punk. At Club Wicked, we were the squares.

We were the prudes, you know. And what ended up happening, because we had a really good run there. It wasn't a long run, but we had a load of really good nights. So we had things like Peaches, the aforementioned Peaches, came to DJ for us one time. And that was a real coup we had sylvain sylvain for the new york dolls bless him rip it was oh that was a fucking weird one because uh he knew he was meant to be doing an hour and he only brought 30 minutes worth of songs and i didn't know that and i'm stood next to him just making sure nothing's going wrong with like 30 seconds left on his last song he says right well that's it i've got no more i'm like what? And I had to suddenly leap into my record box

and just grab something New York-y, like a Blondie record, stick it on. And from then on, it was amazing because what he did was he would take the microphone and I would sort of like put on sort of New York punk type records and he would just sort of narrate them and say, oh yeah, well, I remember walking down to 53rd and 3rd

where I first met Johnnyny ramone and this kind of stuff and it ended up being this amazing dj set and we had mira from lady tron and i think what it was was we were quite close to south bank center and our run there coincided with the meltdown festival and they had a really forward-looking booker called glenn max and a lot of these bands like like the new york dollars were playing there and then they would come over and dj for us um and it was a lovely venue it's kind of chrome and mirror plated well dungeon really cavern and under london bridge i loved it but the reason it came to an end was because of brian sheridan trying to get this license for it to be a live sex club and there was pushback not just from the local police but from Southwark Cathedral

which is if you know where it is it's right at one end of London Bridge it's just right there the Dean of Southwark Cathedral the very Reverend Colin Slee started getting involved in the campaign to have Wicked shut down and it was very difficult for the police or anyone to shut it down under existing laws because it was all a bit vague the or anyone to shut it down under existing laws because it was all a bit vague. The only law that they could really use, there was something from 250 years earlier called the Disorderly Houses Act. Right.

I mean, it was a pretty fucking disorderly house. There's a lot of disorder going on in that house. But there was another, when the scandal was going on, there was a story in the uh evening standard from a woman called alexa balakaya who did that thing she wrote that kind of i made my excuses and that kind of article do you know what i mean uh so here's a bit she goes um as my taxi drew up in tooley street i thank goodness that my outfit skin-tight black pvc catsuit killer heels and a buckled leather neck strap was not too outré.

And then she meets Caroline Sheridan, the wife of the General. Tonight she was Lady Caroline and wearing an outrageous blonde wig and studded leather straps that displayed her ample naked breasts. And so on, and basically just sort of titillating the readership of the standard in a way that possibly contributed to the eventual decision of a hearing at Southwark Town Hall to shut Wicked down and then make Stay Beautiful homeless, sadly. But it was a ride. It was a fucking wild ride while we were there anyway. So did you ever go there then?

I did a few interviews there. It was always a good venue to interview and do photo shoots. I didn't partake all right they all say that i didn't have sex with anybody while loads of people watched you weren't wanked off by a robot not that time anyway no no yeah right the other thing i've just remembered about this and i was so proud of our crowd for this is that um we happened to be doing our night while that fucking bellend david blaine was hanging in a perspex cube from a crane do you remember this he was like living in a perspective with no food or anything for however long it was um near london bridge and um when it was like 3am and our crowd were kicked out they all just went along there with fucking big max and burger kings

like waving them out anchor and stuff like that. And I just thought, I love you guys. So, me dears, I do believe the table has been laid for this episode of Top of the Pops. Let's reconvene tomorrow for part two of this episode of Charm Music. So, until then, thank you very much, Simon Price. You're welcome. God bless you, Sarah B. God bless me.

My name's Al Needham. Stay pop crazed. Chart music. GreatBigOwl.com Hello, my name is Pete Ellison. This is Dave Cribb. Hello, and we do a podcast called Friends with Friends, as you might have guessed from the music that's playing underneath,

which is a sort of lo-fi rendition of the Friends theme tune for rights reasons. We get a different guest on every week on our podcast to talk about their favourite episode of Friends. And we look through it in excruciating detail. We pick through levels of plots like no one has ever done before. So if you like Friends or just listening to people talking, which are both valid activities, do look us up on the old podcast apps and that. Friends with Friends, and we're on Twitter, at Friends WF.