Chart Music: the Top Of The Pops Podcast - #58 (Part 1): 23.10.1980 – Top Of The Gear

Episode Date: April 12, 2021

David Stubbs, Taylor Parkes and Al Needham prepare the ground for an intensive dissection of an episode of Top Of The Pops from 1980, a year which has very much established itself as the Ken of the Eighventies.There’s a flick through the NME from that week, fond reminiscences about the Good Old Days of the first lockdown, Robin Askwith’s overuse of sticky tape in the 1970s, and Mr Benn: timewasting get. TUCK IN, POP-CRAZED YOUNGSTERS!Video Playlist | Subscribe | Facebook | Twitter | The Chart Music Wiki | Patreon  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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The following podcast is a member of the Great Big Owl family. This will certainly have an adult theme and might well contain strong scenes of sex or violence, which could be quite graphic. It may also contain some very explicit language, which will frequently mean sexual swear words What do you like listening to? Um...

Chart music Chart music Hey up, you pop-craze youngsters, and welcome to the latest episode of Charm Music, the podcast that gets its hand right down the back of the settee on a random episode at Top of the Pops. I'm your host, Al Needham, and with me today are rock expert David Stubbs. Hi. And Taylor Parks. Hi.

What's up, cocksuckers? What? What the fuck's this all about? I was thinking of doing the whole podcast in that voice. Why? Well, plenty of other people do. I thought if we talk like that all the way through, we might get a mention in The Guardian. Who gives a fuck about getting mentioned in The Guardian? Not me.

I know where I stand in the ways of the media nowadays. I'm provincial. They're only interested in me if I was standing outside a market talking racist shit. Anyway, fuck that. Boys, the pop things and the interesting things tell me your secrets sing me your songs oh well you know i've done a couple of interviews but unfortunately i'm not at liberty to divulge uh what they are but uh oh god not with the police then i hope

you doing all the podcast shit david i did a guest one um a hackney based uh project um and it was um yeah i was just sort of chatting about electronic music blah blah you know again rehashing the old material from our our little our nottingham gig yeah exactly yeah quite a few of the old lines you know well well polished now you know tried them out in nottingham and uh you know oh yeah you know in the provinces and if they can understand what you're saying, it's all right for everyone else. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, as it goes. But, yeah, I've been sort of knocking around, rattling around on social media as ever.

And I suppose the sort of the, whoops, the funkiest thing that happened to me recently. I was out on Twitter and somebody posted up a link to this radio documentary about Foucault, the French philosopher, the avant-garde French philosopher. Oh, yeah. Who wrote a book called The History of Sexuality and all this kind of stuff. So I tweeted thus. Must catch up with this. Remember coming across The History of Sexuality years ago,

looking in the index and finding that the author hadn't even mentioned Robin Asquith. That glaring omission, however, you know, a little smirk, you know, chuckle, right, chuckle, nine likes. Looks at it about half an hour later, and there was a response from Robin Asquith. And he just put, fucking herring,

he agrees. I mean, that's magnificent. I mean, I don't know if he has his Asquith-dar thatwithdar that alert him to any mention anywhere on social media, but it was just absolutely glorious. Worlds collide. What he does is every morning he gets up and does a Twitter search for the word

Foucault. Just to keep tabs on the discourse. Yeah, a few other people joined in and he was speculating on having a shower with Foucault and stuff like that. He kind of mirthsome. You know, this wonderful meld of inverted commas high and inverted commas again, low culture. You know, he seems to have a very good sort of sense of proportion and RNA.

Actually, I warmed to him because he put up a photo of himself with, what's his name, Richard O'Sullivan from Man About the House, who's not been so well you know recently and they're sitting there having a pub sharing a pint you know and they're both they're both looking good and i thought oh good on you and um but yeah so i thought you know somebody mentioned that he's actually a pretty interesting interview and so mindful of that i actually went online and just keyed in rob Asquith interview. And the very first thing that comes up is a piece in Left Lion, 2005, I think, by a certain Al Needham. Yeah, I interviewed him. Yeah, and you describe him as, you know, to anyone who's not heard of him,

imagine a Jim Davidson you don't want to punch in the mouth and you'll get the picture. I was on form that day. Definitely, yeah, yeah. And it seems to be around, it's sort of a Q&A thing, asking what lures, what brings him to Nottingham, as if anybody needs a good reason.

Cradle of Pulp, after all. He's doing a version of Canterbury Tales, but set in 1976, the year of the drought, the year of punk. The same year he was making Confessions of a Driving Instructor in one studio, and George Lucas was next door making star wars and um oh why didn't they mash them together man confessions of a stormtrooper yeah it's a it's a very it's a very sort of jolly interview definitely it's quite erudite he's a bit he's a bit rough on poor old political correctness he

thinks it's poisoned the culture. He never forgave it for Bottle Boys not being a success. Yeah, and apparently he says, comics have to sign pieces of paper to promise they won't make jokes about certain groups. Well, you know. Anyway, I suspect that political correctness generally has had bigger fish to fry than Robin Asquith, in all honesty.

I did ask him the key question, which was, how did you do all those scenes and not get a bonk on? Oh, yes. And he said, lots of sticky tape. Ah, wow. He taped it down. Yeah. Really fascinating thing about that interview was,

it turns out that when he was filming all the Confession series, they had to do three different sex scenes every time for different markets. So there was the British one, the European one, and apparently South Africa was very... Oh, yeah. You had to really tape it down for that. You had to use gaffer tape. Yeah.

A fascinating interview and a very nice bloke. A pleasure talking to him, it was. Yeah, that's probably been the highlight of my year so far, I suppose. Taylor? Well, in between working on my latest movie pitch, Confessions of a Post-Structuralist, I'm planning a new podcast of my own.

It's going to be an affectionate, nostalgic look back at the first lockdown. Oh. God, fantastic, wasn't it? Wasn't it fantastic? Lovely weather, chatting chatting on zoom everyone banging their pots and pans joe wicks tiger king getting a little bit tipsy in the evenings oh great days great days yeah never such innocence again we managed didn't we yeah it's i mean you remember covid nobody called it covid in those days no it was the novel coronavirus yeah

yeah that was before the fucking novelty wore off um but there you go it's weird it's getting weird now it is getting weird this far into lockdown i know for some people it's just been a mild contraction of their social life but as someone who lives alone and has the old underlying conditions it's been pretty much 12 months of total isolation and you really learn a lot about yourself from that but mostly useless and unwelcome information but i take some comfort from the fact that even now every morning when i get up and pick out a couple of socks i still make sure it's a pair oh man applause at the fucking doorway for that taylor you know i mean i'm like an old shipwreck rear admiral in the jungle like still dressing for dinner every night when he sits down

to nibble on a caterpillar uh on the other hand it's been really hard preparing for this because my creativity man has almost totally dried up because i realize i don't have a formula for thinking up ideas in an empty room they just things just occur to me when i'm walking around interacting with other humans and so now nothing ever occurs to me. And I have no thoughts. I get good ideas on the toilet sometimes. Well, you're very lucky, David, because I don't. For about three months, I've been walking around talking like Peter Sellers in Being There. Yes, I will do the next chart music.

So are you going to call this thing Corona-stalgia? Oh, well, let's not get ahead of ourselves. It's funny what you say there, Taylor. I mean, it's alarming. First of all, I applaud you. I mean, actual applause there for wearing properly matched socks. I haven't worn trousers for 12 months. Oh, no.

David, stop there now. No. Yeah, no. But I think... What are you wearing now on your on your lower parts well i got to something don't worry yeah you're not sitting there in your pants are you no no not quite but i am i am i am wearing shorts um which are you know a touch on the manky side but uh i don't want to paint a picture really it's it's you know i i'm alarming because i do people always do those things about, oh, when all this lifts and we can all meet up again for a drink

or a pint together. And I'm like, and I kind of sort of like... People are going on as if it's going to be like fucking VE Day with more nurses. I see stuff on Facebook and it's like, oh, yeah, I'm going to get in there and it's going to be, well, first of all, you've got a book, then you've got a queue, then you've got this and then you've got that.

You're going to sit there for fucking 10 minutes and go, you know what, I've got nothing more to say. I'm just going to have a more expensive piss up than the ones I've had every night in my fucking ass. Yeah, it's going to be so disappointing when people remember what normality is actually like. I mean, you know, you don't have to think back that far. Do you remember pounding the same filthy street every day,

going somewhere that you'd rather not go, and then having to walk back again in the rain? Oh, yeah. I mean, this is at the two and a half hour round commute. I mean, you know, having some Zoom drinks, you know, what's great at the end is like, so you're like, bye, back home you know or i could get these shorts off now and to remind people just that 85 of your free time is still going to be

spent completely alone in the same damn room where you've spent the last 18 months, except with no excuse and with the knowledge that, yeah, people really genuinely would rather stay in their own flat watching something on the iPlayer than spend time with you, even after all that's happened in the past year or hasn't happened in the past year. So essentially, I think we're just saying that we should cherish these times while they last. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, because pretty soon, everything will be just as shit as it was before. There'll just be less money around. Half the places that you used to like going won't be there anymore. And no one will have learned a single lesson from any of this. I think that's pretty fair to say. I don't like people trying to look on the bright side of things basically it just it doesn't doesn't do it for me i mean

doesn't help does it ultimately you've got to be realistic what has covid left us canon and little and that says it all you know i mean i had to think about that for a second very lockdown was horrendous but at the end of the day, it was only house arrest. People spend weeks plea bargaining for that. So don't worry, the worst is yet to come. I hope that doesn't make me sound negative. Oh, imagine if the next fucking pandemic means you have to stay out for a year.

You can't even go in your own fucking house, man. But, you know, Taylor talks about, you know, trying the creative juices. I've actually, it's not been the same for me. I've been experimenting with free-form poetry. Do you want me to, I could read you some now. It'd only take about 10 minutes. How'd you go in there, didn't I?

Sorry. But we're all jabbed up, aren't we? Yeah, we're all jabbed up aren't we that's yeah we're all jabbed up yeah yeah yes yeah i'm now today this day i am officially i've got the i've been jabbed for a fortnight so i'm yeah i'm safe well over the other side i got mine ages ago yeah you've had your job as well aren't you taylor yeah i had the first one so uh thanks for that. Rats appreciate your sacrifice, but you guys got us into one plague. Now you've got to get us out of another one. It's fair's fair, isn't it? Although, actually, I read the other day that they weren't actually using rats in these trials.

They used Syrian hamsters. And I thought, these poor sods, they must have thought their luck had changed when they got out of Syria. Suddenly it's like, oh God, what's this? Coming here after our wheels. But anyway, before we get stuck into the rich, creamy goodness of this episode of Top of the Pops, you know what we've got to do first and foremost? We've got to give thanks and praise to the pop craze youngsters who stepped up to the pay window and gave us a little

bit on Patreon and this month in the five dollar section are Philip Desmond, Chris Durbin, Debbie Smith, Tim Ward, Liam Daly, Gerontophile, Paul Milnes, Richard Levesley, Chris Evans, Simon Adebize, Tim Nyland-Jones, and Greg, or is it Greig? I'm not sure. So I'll say both. Greg Stevenson and Greig Stevenson. Thank you so much, babies. Oh, excellent people, one and all. Fucking hell, Simon Adebize. Special message to all the pop-craze youngsters in the Oswald Correctional Facility. babies. Oh, excellent people. One and all fucking else. Simon had a bees there. Special message to all the pop craze youngsters in the Oswald correctional facility. My tits are firm and round.

And in the $3 section this month, we have Brendan McCarthy, Helen Hookin, Dan Island, John Wellington, Lucille Bluff, Lucy healing, Michael cook, Lucille Bluff, Lucy Healing, Michael Cook and Rick Sharp. To all those people, we love you.

You pay our rent. What fucking wonderful people they are. Couldn't agree more. All of them. And a big shout to the $1 Patreon people, who we don't mention enough, but thank you. And apart from giving themselves a well-earned pat on the back for supporting chart music, they get to tinker and a tangle and a fiddle and a faddle

with the chart music top ten. Shall we have it, gentlemen? Yes. Right on. Hit the fucking music! We've said goodbye to James Galway's flute of VD, Rennie out of the Stone Roses and Renato, and the Boogie Woogie Bugle Boys of Quality Street,

which means one up, five down, one non-mover, and three new entries. Down one place from number nine to number ten, Saxon Finder General. It's a three-place drop from number six to number nine for CFAX Data Blast. Last week's number three, this week's number eight,

Jar Waddy Wadder. He's back on the rise. Last week's number three, this week's number eight, Jarwadywada. He's back on the rise from number eight to number seven, Jeff Sex. And firmly stuck at number six for another week, here comes Jizzm. Into the top five and it's a one place drop for Bomberdog. Last week's number one has dropped all the way to number

four. Rock expert David Stubbs! Into the top three and the first new entry, the bent cunts who aren't fucking real. Straight in at number two, Concerned Mother of Exeter, which means...

The highest new entry, straight in at number one, Jesus Price. Oh, what a chart that is fucking hell oh well

obviously Jesus Price that's got to be a Welsh Marilyn Manson isn't it yeah yeah that was if I remember

rightly Price's dad's original suggestion of what to call him what to christen him if you will yeah

oh yes i was quite impressed when i heard that because um i don't think i mentioned this before uh my dad's original idea of what to christen me was merlin no yeah and he told me this years ago yeah i never questioned him on it so i never worked out whether that was as in the arthurian magician or whether it was as in merlin reese yeah yeah soon to be northern ireland secretary and later home secretary i figured it must be uh the magician because who the fuck would name their kid after merlin reese but um yeah i was thinking wouldn't that have been fucking great if when we were working at Maldi Maker, we'd been Jesus and Merlin?

Yeah. People would have taken us even less seriously than they did. Were you always going to be David, David? Yeah, and I would have been Julia if it weren't. Yeah, yeah. So was Price's dad called God? I've got to chuck in my bit of news, which was that finally, after over a year my mom's

moved out of nottingham she was chucking out a load of pictures and it's like man what the fuck are you doing i'll have them and one of them it was this big kind of like black and white portrait thing and it had folded over and i opened it up my mom says oh you know who that is don't you and i said yeah it was uh i call him me uncle alan but he was actually the best mate of me great-grandma's best mate. And my mum says, yeah, yeah, he's the person who you named after. And then she just looked at me and said, yeah, he was a right cunt. I just thought, oh, cheers, man. You decided to name me after somebody you didn't like.

Brilliant. So you need to use fairly fruity language with each other. You're not, you know, this is all... Yes. Yes. Yes. Soul to the earth, working class stocks, warlike bastards. Well, yeah. The family that swears together, cares together. Yeah.

I always envied that. Because the thing about being lower middle class, you get heirs, right? So it's like you can't swear in a family house, right? Okay. So I remember when I was about 12, I got that book about the jam by Paolo Hewitt. Oh, Beat Concerto.

Yeah. And it's got all Paul Weller and his mum and dad in it, all effing and jeffing. And I remember thinking, well, imagine that freedom. Yeah. That must be amazing. It would be worth having an outside toilet just to be able to say fucking hell in front of your dad the strongest words my mum ever used were rock me old boots that was their equivalent of cunt in hell fire i love that term effing and jeffing if jesus had been called jeff i think he'd have

been a lot more relatable to to the modern world don't you think yeah or did you hear about jeff he healed loads of blind people and made them more yeah yeah fucking top lad yeah anyway concerned mother of exeter that i'm getting getting severe Lena Martell vibes off that one. I don't know, all one of those sort of like modern bands that have names like, you know, Black Country, New Road, and Pigs, Pigs, Pigs, Pigs, Pigs, Pigs, Pigs, Pigs, Pigs, Pigs, and stuff like that, you know. It's like, let's just have a name that people find hard to say. The world's really gone dry hasn't it on band names

nowadays poor sods yeah it's uh getting a bit desperate the bent cunts who aren't fucking real obviously they're gonna play support to seven days jankers at a civic hall in 1973 so if you want to join those beautiful new pop craze youngsters and have your name mangled in my lovely nottingham mouth you know what you gotta do you gotta step up to the keyboard you gotta put your fingers on it you gotta mash mash mash patreon.com slash chart music and you pledge whatever you like thank you oh no hang on i'll do it properly like they're doing them charity ads thank you somewhere a washed-up music journalist

is waiting. This episode, Pop Craze Youngsters, takes us all the way back to October the 23rd, 1980. Yes, it's the 80s, and yes, it's a time when

anything seems to be possible in pop music punk has set off a chain reaction the mod revival is still going two-tone is still dominant there's a wave of cross-pollination in america and we're going to get absolutely none of that in this episode of top of the pops we might as well put it out right now this is not vintage top of the pops at all is it this ain't the kind of episode of top of the pops that. We might as well put it out right now. This is not vintage Top of the Pops at all, is it? This ain't the kind of episode of Top of the Pops that you keep in your cellar for special occasions, is it? Yeah, it's one of those,

almost one of those punk never happened episodes. It's one of those nothing ever happened episodes. Yeah, yeah. But it is an episode you might choose to show someone to illustrate a point. But I think we'll come to that in a bit. Top of the Pops is still a programming transition, making a lot of changes after its hard reset, if you will.

And some of those changes are going to stick. Some of them will be discarded. And some of them are just plain fucking batshit and never used again. And in this episode, we're going to see a prime, if not the prime example, of the latter. Oh, yes. Why does Top of the Pops feel the need to change itself? Is it because it's a new decade? In a sense, it's still the dark ages of Top of the Pops,

the dark rafters to which I'm constantly alluding. It's all very much got that sense that it's just a sort of a rationed portion of light in an essentially kind of dark and actually rather cruel world at this point. But, yeah, yeah. I mean, it can feel like sort of, yeah, just bunging things into the mix, seeing what might work. Yeah, there's a lot of sort of thrashing around for novelty and just, in fact, making things work less well,

which is, you know, what happens a lot when you have any kind of reshuffle or new broom, you know. But no one has any respect for Top of the Pops at this point. Or they do, but it's the wrong kind of respect. You know what I mean? It's an institution. It's good old Top of the Pops. But what actually makes it a great show or, you know,

an intermittently great show that stuff is not respected at all because no it's not understood because 25 years after the emergence of the teenager uh most of the bbc still haven't got a handle on it you know and everything's everything's aimed at the sensibilities of your parents or your little brother and sister as though the teenage or the young adult audience are just viewers with one foot in both camps, and hopefully everything will just meet in the middle. But it doesn't work like that.

Yeah, there's still the sense that it's a family show. Sometimes you think with Top of the Pops, look, it's fucking simple. Just point the camera at the band or the it's fucking simple just point the camera at the band or the singer whatever just point the camera at the axe and never mind all this fanning about but all of the kind of fanning about apart from sort of you know giving us kind of tremendous grist you know in these episodes it's obviously you know it's some sort of attempt at existence justifying on their part be too simple just to kind of you know they're like you know so the

presenters have to sort of you know come up with what they laughingly regard as their dry quips or whatever. You know, they have to have kind of present overall presentational ideas. You know, the producer was to kind of like leave their mark, you know, in some way or other, you know, with certain innovations and changes. None of it is all bollocks. So shall we get stuck in then? Yeah. bollocks. So should we get stuck in then? Yeah. This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey gooey and just five bucks for the small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply.

Hello, I'm Justin. And I'm Lucy. And together we are the hosts of plenty questions it's a very straightforward general knowledge quiz we ask you 20 questions one after the other five second gap in between and you shout the answers out and then you tweet us to let us know how you got on see if you can get 20 out of 20 no one has so far but that's because we haven't started doing it yet but we will and there's also going to be some fiendish brain teasers. So join us for Plenty of Questions. Let's go! Radio 1 News

In the news this week, Iran has abruptly broken off negotiations with the USA over the release of the US embassy hostages, allegedly due to Ronald Reagan secretly having a word with them in order to fuck up Jimmy Carter's chances a week before the presidential

election. The chip panic cunt. Meanwhile, the Iraqi army has captured the Iranian port of Khorramshahr one month into the Iran-Iraq war. Paul McCartney and Wings rescue a baby from a pram crushed under a car as they were coming back from a band rehearsal in Kent. Priscilla Presley has become a Scientologist and launched legal action against Colonel Tom Parker, leading other Presley family members to suspect that Elvis' money is going to be funnelled towards Ron Hubbard and his Menclist family.

Mary Whitehouse has reported the National Theatre's production of the Howard Brenton play The Romans in Britain to the police because it features non-stop cock-out action and a Roman centurion carving up an ancient Britain's arse before bumming him. The Division 1 match between Aston Villa and Brighton and Hove Albion is cancelled when both teams are prevented by their owners from taking the field without their sponsored shirts on as the game was being filmed for Sports Night.

Rod Stewart has been pulled out of his hotel bed and given a severe bollocking by hamburg police after his backing band were thrown out of three different bars in the red light area for quote rowdiness it's a bit unfair on rod do you want doing no yeah exactly yeah it's not their teacher yeah willie whitel the Home Secretary, advises the courts not to jail anyone if they can help it, due to overcrowding in prisons during an industrial dispute with prison officers. One week after the resignation

of Jim Calhoun as leader of the Labour Party, Dennis Healy has been pegged as the 4-5 on favourite by Ladbrokes, with the left of the party battling to convince Michael Foote to throw his hat into the ring. A traffic warden in York gets reprimanded for ticketing a vacuum cleaner that was left in the road.

But the big news this week is that the Daily Mirror is the first newspaper to bandy about the term New Romantics in an article about Chrysalis signing the hottest new band in the country spandau ballet headline coming up poses a new look group hits the big time it can take as long as five hours to get into the right gear for a night at the electro discal for posing often in bizarre and elaborate clothes is just as important as their favorite pop music to fans of spandau ballet the latest young cult group to hit the big time the five handsome guys who are spandau ballet always stay a well-pressed pleat ahead of their admirers. Now, after clinching what may well be a record-breaking deal for a virtually unknown group, they are ahead of their rivals too.

Leader and Sinatra fan Tony Adler, 19, explained why fashion is as important as music to the leaders of the latest pop cult. We are not like the punks and mods, he said. We don't all believe in wearing the same thing. Our act is a sort of applause to the audience. The band and their fans go to little-known designers, as well as chain stalls and jumble sales for the gear to give them the latest look. At the moment, it is slightly Puerto Rican. Balloon trousers with crossover crotch and string vests and hand-embroidered shirts.

They say romance is back in style. I say it never went out. I always like it when the press get to grips, you know, with things like, well, like the new romantic thing at the time. I think like it when the press get to grips, you know, with things like, well, like the Neoromantic thing. At the time, I think when Depeche Mode was starting out, and I think it was like, I don't know, the Basildon Bugle or whatever, and the headline was,

Posh Clobber Could Clinch It For Mode. And it did. I mean, Posh Clobber did clinch it for mode. That's the weird thing. And Spandau as well. I mean, you know, at the time, people probably imagined he was writing these things, you know they'd be sort of like flunkyish things that'd be kind of away in six months but they both had remarkable durability in their own ways i can't see this catching on at school though david no i mean the local market ain't going to be selling

balloon trousers with crossover crotch anytime soon and you know let's be honest balloon trousers is just a nice way of saying incontinence pants i mean the thing is around about that time whatever you're into the market had always sought you out they give you the sort of the baseline whether it was a leather jacket or a denim jacket or an arrington or a park or something like that and then you add your own modifications like patches and badges and and you could get away with it at school you know you could go into school with a safety pin on your school blazer or you know you could turn your tie around to make it skinnier but you're not going to be allowed into

school wearing a roof no no or painting a snake on your arm that's that's not going to happen that was for the weekend they really haven't thought this through out there there weren't many new romantics at our school because it was just so fucking hard to get into. I mean, you'd see a couple of lads with a Visage badge for a week or two. And eventually them shirts that buttoned down the side, they ended up in the market. But by that time, it was way too late.

Its time had passed. The thing about being a punk back then, it wasn't like the guys you see in the Kings Road, Covent Garden, on the postcards or whatever, or these geezers with enormous great mohicans touting for 50p to have their photo taken with them. You look back at the photos, and whether it's the kids or the bands or whatever, they're just wearing what basically looks like scruffy school uniform most of the time, big knotted ties or whatever. The bassists in the bands are usually wearing flares. So it wasn't really that difficult to get the look. You just needed one or two little modifications, really. The same with being a mod.

I mean, all you really needed was a parka and a few badges, and you were away. Wear it over your school uniform. Yeah, and you were a mod. A bit trickier, really, to sort of, you know, to do all the kind of requirements of dolling up as a new romantic, especially in a school context. On the cover of Melody Maker this week this week fuck knows i couldn't find it on the cover of record mirror

this week phil linert with two kimonoed up japanese ladies on the cover of smash hits the police the number one lp in the uk at the moment is zenyatta mondata by the police and over in america the number one single is another one bites the dust by queen and the number one lp the game by queen so boys what were we doing in october of 1980 i was still at primary school and uh simultaneously so precocious and so innocent that I would look at the individual finger plectrums worn by the finger-picking folk guitar-playing music teacher who was a sort of a sporty, short-haired lady

who also took the girls for PE. And I'd think, why doesn't she just grow out her fingernails? Sweet innocence, but observant and nosy. And I think that's partly why I am a speck of childhood, asking questions you're not meant to think of with answers that I couldn't understand. What kind of music were you into? Just the music that I heard.

That was the music that I liked. Actually, what was it about 1980? Really, I got properly into music just after Christmas 1980 because the death of John Lennon was a way into the Beatles for me because suddenly I started hearing Beatles music. Yeah. David? I had just turned 18 at this point, and I was a very intense young man.

I abstained from alcohol. I mean, I had a few drinks. I went on a Catholic school trip to Lourdes earlier that year and got pissed every night there. But it didn't really take. Deeply spiritual moment. I was religious. I'm a signed-up atheist and all that these days, but not then. I was keenly religious.

I think it conflated with my sense of moral, not exactly superiority, but superiority. Was it not an anti-rockist gesture? Yes, and I suppose in a way it was a kind of anti-rockist thing. There's a lot of heathens in the rock world, as we know, and I kind of pity myself against their ilk. I was very, very pleased when bob dylan earlier that year announced his conversion to christianity and released slow train coming i

thought great you know somebody with great credibility in rock is on the christian track um you know we're on the way the floodgates will open and i bought that album and i put up with all those weedy mark knopfler guitar solos the thing, I belatedly got into post-punk. Suicide, Joy Division, Wire, as well as your Sunrise and Stockhausen's, of course. Your staple fare for an 18-year-old Leeds lad. But the only money I had to spend on records was, humiliatingly, I still had a paper round at 18. There were all these little 12, 13-year-old kids snapping around my knees at the newsagents at 6.30 in the morning to collect the papers. Also, my dinner money.

So I would have bought something like, say, Slugging for Jesus by Cabri Voltaire back then with my Tuesday dinner money from Mr. Meal that day. I had an enormous great fringe, a Phil Oakey-style fringe, and I'm convinced that the follicular strain that caused accounts to my early onset of widow's peak and my present condition. I also had a horrible little tash.

So everyone said, hey, you look like mature, you. I mean, perhaps I was saying, you look mature, you. Mature, mature, anyway. Both good. I was also at the height of listening to John Peel every night, or the Velvet Underpants there, and being made, really, by NME. So I had this monastic intensity about me

I lived in my bedroom I didn't go out anywhere were you watching top of the pops at the time both of you I would probably have gone down most weeks then gone straight back upstairs again gone down watched it in the hope of some sort of personal epiphany or perhaps something that came through that might enlighten the masses that would have been equally as good if not better i couldn't work out why most of the 1980 top of the pops were unfamiliar to me until i remembered that my cubs was on thursday night i missed it for most of that until i thought fuck the fucking cubs at which point i started watching it again round about this time I'm still grieving Forrest getting knocked out of the European Cup to CSKA fucking Sofia three weeks previously

and I was at that game and I remember just gripping hold of the cage at the front of the Trenton with my tears dripping off the bars as that goal went in but I was wearing a CSKA Sofia badge that I got from the programme shop

I was working at at the time, which formed part of the clankening I was sporting at all times, along with me jam badges and stuff. Full-on pop kid round about this time. It was the first time that I properly started to investigate record shops on my own reconnaissance. My Saturday mornings would consist of getting up,

watching Tiz Was and Swap Shop and flicking between the two of them, making sure that one of the two pairs of jeans I had that wasn't flared was dry and ready to go out in. And then I'd go to Fox Records in Vicky Centre, which was part organ shop, part record shop. And then I'd go down to Virgin Records just down the road because they just

installed a tv wall which was just a bank of telly stacked on top of each other with loads of headphones and you could stand there and watch the same pop videos over and over and over again there was i think they had like a 50 minute to one hour run and the only videos i can remember were anywhere you want it by journey missing words by the selector and right at the end breaking the law by judas priest and i remember it was hosted by tommy vance of course i'd spend an hour or two watching that and then i'd go down to broad marsh center and hang around the hmv which was, but it was just absolutely rammed with records. And it was that time when you just stand in a record shop and just think, fucking hell, what would it be like to just go,

you know what, I want to play that. I want to hear this. You know, I want to hear everything. I'd have been going to record shops at this time. I was really intimidated about 1978 by shops like Virgin Records or whatever. You know, I thought it would be like kind of, you know, going into some sort of den of or whatever, you know, I thought it would be like kind of, you know, going into some sort of den of punk. And, you know, that I'd be kind of sneered at by the assistants or whatever.

So a couple of years later, when I was really into my avant-garde stuff, it was almost like I took a revenge by going into all these places like Jumbo Records in Leeds and ordering like mega avant-garde stuff, you know, which is not even heard of. You know, even the store clerks haven't heard of it yet. Like the Art Bears and things like that, and James Bloodholmer and stuff. The Art Bears? Who are them? The Art Bears? Are you sure?

Oh, yes, yes, yes. It was small. One time, one of my friends coming on one of these kind of trips, and he just sort of said to the assistant, my friend here would like the most obscure record in the shop, please. I was 12 at the time, and that's a dangerous time when it comes to pop music, because you could go either way. I was proper modded up, religiously buying every single two-tone release

and everything that Jam put out. But I'd also bought Zenyatta Mondatta by the police, and for the third time I realised that the police were a singles band. And that was the last police album I ever bought. But, you know, it's that time when you're just open to anything. You know, if someone at one of these record shops says, oh, look, here's a copy of Axe Attack that's just lying about Tech It, I would have took it home and played it.

And because it was one of the few bits of vinyl I had, I'd play it often. Even worse, that Journey album that had just come out, if someone had given that to me for my birthday or whatever, I'd have listened to it. And God knows what state I'd be in nowadays. God, yeah, yeah. It's frightening.

Yeah, you'd honestly believe that Journey were a good group. Oh, no, I would still stick up for Journey, just purely based on that chance encounter. You would. It's what people would do. Yeah. I'm not misremembering this, am I? You gentlemen are both

slightly older than me it was a bleak year 1980 it was a a chilly bleak year i'm not sure there was a single day in 1980 that wasn't damp and overcast uh or a a single square yard of concrete anywhere in britain that wasn't stained by something like piss or blood or just 10 years of english weather and the might of excitement was finding out they'd put a the invaders machine in your local chippy so people generally look back at years and they get a hugely oversimplified idea of what was going on in any given year. But I think 1980 is an exception. It really was bleak and great.

I mean, not that in some ways it wasn't a better time than now, blah, blah, blah. There was still plenty of freedoms flapping open, and there was some kind of culture, and there was that unpolluted simplicity of consciousness where a fella might just decide he's going to have a break. Just have a break and just go and check into a 17th century hotel pub in Berkshire somewhere and spend three days in there with a thick novel and no telly, just living on roast pork

and neat brandy and a wine glass down in the dining room you know and staring out the window at victoria wine and the car park that used to be the market square and after three days of that you'd feel like you'd recharged your batteries and could drive back to london you know three days of silence but for ambient sound and nowadays a weekend like that would induce panic were it even possible do you know what I mean but I think there's something to be said for that kind of empty space and and borderline boredom you know where at least you're not so perpetually distracted that you can't feel reality moving through you and reminding you of who you really are and and how quickly time is passing you know which i think was probably useful

it's funny talking about yeah pubs there i mean one of the things that probably did put me off pubs at that particular time is that the ones around leeds certainly it was just all leads the outlying villages whatever it was just all sort of horse brasses low and brow and all there's always a soundtrack of like classics on 45 do you remember that thing where they like diddly diddly diddly diddly diddly with a little four four beat running underneath that was everywhere it was just piped in perpetually is this the future i thought Just bringing a bit of quality to pop music. Yes. But it was a strangely anxious and uncertain time, wasn't it? Oh, very much.

Very much. And it still looks it. I mean, I was just about a week ago, I was watching the kids' BBC serial Break in the Sun, which was made in 1980 it's about a a little girl from deptford who runs away on a boat with a middle-class theater group because her dad right her dad is terry the chef from faulty towers and i'll say no more then and as kids tv drama goes it's really good uh but it's not you watch it and you notice it's not like emotionally deep like that sort of program would be if they made

it now and it's not sort of super brutal like it would have been if they'd made it in the 70s there's just a sort of melancholy and chronic emptiness to it, which feels really specific to the time. It captures that sort of quiet, brooding anxiety of being a child in 1980, in a society that wasn't completely terrible, but was just sort of chilly. There's a lot of shots of this girl just staring blankly into the middle distance

with a downturned mouth and i was thinking yeah that's how i remember i mean as an 18 year old i spent most of 1980 pretty much shitting myself about the prospects of nuclear war oh yeah i remember like that lordship i remember thinking like well if the world's yeah i'll get to go on this trip if the world's still around in three or four weeks' time. It was really hard to think of anything more than a few months. And that was a widespread feeling. Talking about Reagan

and Carter and all that kind of stuff. You've got this kind of nutter in the White House wherever. And you'd think that it was going to be like Dr. Strangelove. What's his name? Slim Pickens. Astride the bomb. Reagan's his name? Slim Pickens. Yeah. You know, astride the bomb, you know. Reagan's on the verge of being elected. That's right, yes, he's Reagan's president-elect, yeah. But this is, we kind of know it's on the way at this point, I suppose, October, yeah.

It's all impending. Yeah, and the Iran-Iraq wars just kicked off. Yeah, I mean, that was absolutely terrifying. That's the kind of thing that's a plot device in threads, isn't it? Yeah, I didn't give a shit about that at the time. I just remember seeing that sort of tan-coloured map they used to use on the 9 o'clock news and thinking, well, they fight, look, Iran, Iraq, it's almost the same.

Can they really be that different? They're only one letter apart. Oh, I remember actually not being able to hand in a school essay and my excuse and it was a genuine one is that i was scared about nuclear war and the teacher you know i'm great i'm interested says like nothing you can do about it it's the human condition so that made me feel even worse well chaps it's around about this time that we dip into a section of the music press from this week. So shall we do that now with the NME? Because obviously I couldn't get the Melody Maker.

Yeah, 1980, it'll be better anyway. Yeah. So this time I've gone for the NME from October the 25th, 1980. On the cover, Toya Wilcox sitting on a chair backstage with her feet pushed against a door. Shame there was a door in the room at all. In the news, Talking Heads have announced their first gigs in the UK in early December,

a mere two shows. The first one is at Hammersmith Palais, and the second venue, obviously selected for the benefit of provincial fans who don't want to travel so far, is at Hammersmith Odeon. You too are expected to be the support band the british phonographic industry's six-week inquest into the allegations made by world in action about

chart fixing concluded them deciding that there should be no expulsions no fines no reprimands and no legal charges and a round of jud Judy Zook satin tour jackets for everyone. I hope World in Action were forced to make a public apology as well. The specials will not be playing at a CND demo in Trafalgar Square this Saturday as originally planned due to the Department of Environment not allowing them to use a loud enough PA. However, they will be joining in jury and the blockheads the skids and madness in a two-week series of charity gigs at the hope in anchor to raise money for bedding and cover heating costs for the oldens the only ones john cooper clark paulie murray and the invisible girls the damned tom robinson's new

band sector 27 bad manners the rumor the selector and the revelos are also pitching in fucking hell that's pretty decent you're betting as previously reported chrysalis records have won the battle for the hottest unsigned band in the country spandandau Ballet, and have tied them to a long-term worldwide deal. Their debut single, to cut a long story short, comes out the week after next. Outbreak of Robert Elm's disease. The dance of perfection. But the Body Snatchers are no more

having split up into two separate entities, one of which would become the Bell Stars. Oh, yeah, I'm not going to believe that from the MSM. I'll wait until Q confirms it, thanks. Oh, fucking hell, yeah, Jenny Bell Star. There are all these minor 80s pop stars who went mental, just like previous pop stars. No one would have noticed it if it hadn't been for social media.

It's now the only way to keep tabs on the icicle works previous pop stars no one would have noticed it if it hadn't been for social media it's like it's now the only way to keep tabs on the icicle works and who the secret jewish world government have bumped off now for getting too close to the truth inside the paper well nick kent drops in on a&m records big hope for the 80s chas janklele, formerly of the Blockheads, who's just signed a seven-album deal with them. Kent notes that the Blockheads are already going off the boil with their latest single, I Wanna Be Straight, but Jankle claims that Jury wrote more of their collaborations than he did, talks about the time he kicked Jury out of a recording session

because he was fucking about, mentions that he left the Blockheads because he didn't have any time to do his own thing and they're all still good mates seven album deal jazz jankle god i remember much more than that jazz jankle was fantastic i mean you know that's that funk element that he brought but yeah yeah meanwhile adrian thrill spends an afternoon in a grotty pub in Leeds to talk to James Allen, the guitarist of what he calls one of the most promising groups of 1980, Girls At Our Best. Nothing much of interest is said. Yeah, but they were great girls at our best.

The only thing that let them down a bit was their roots in that earnest Le lead scene of the late seventies, which may be why nothing of interest was said very well intentioned, but sometimes a drag on pizzazz, but they made some really good records goes our best. Like what'd you recommend fast boyfriends or warm girls getting nowhere fast. Yeah.

They're all in that sort of sardonic and slightly shoddy style that was big at the time. But they're really good. I think some of them genuinely did end up working on some kind of play bus for disadvantaged children, which is funny because if you say, what do you reckon this group did after this group? That would probably be quite high on your list of suggestions and good for them vivian goldman nips

over to new york with a chat with james blood olmer he says he's surprised to be regarded as the leader of the so-called jazz punk movement but he properly rates public image limited james blood older there david well there are. The man who brought you to the dance at Melody Maker. Yes, that's right. Oh, absolutely. The wider the flares, the badder the funk. Charles Shaw Murray goes round Polly Styrene's house in Fulham to see what she's up to.

She says that she got x-ray specs out of her system by reading loads of books about psychology and listening to Aretha Franklin. She's completely out of touch with the bands of today. She's recording under the name Polystyrene because it was part of the deal with United Artists, and her LP Translucence will be out soon.

Just to say, if anybody's not seen the documentary that just came out, I'm a cliche. Is it good? It's excellent, yeah. Oh, good. And Paul Morley goes backstage at the royal court theater for a four-page interview with toya who's currently starring in the play sugar and spice where she gets to twist a broken bottle into some lad's groin and rip his genitals out at the end

you think that's a like a subtle comment on something she wants your genitals to be free you're gonna turn your genitals upside down she says that she can't understand why her name is appearing on leather jackets between crass and adam and the ants because her music is jazz based yeah oscar peterson there definitely yeah if the media tried to paint her as the new Debbie Harry, she'd shave her head and start gobbing on the elderly. She might be going to Hollywood soon. She likes punching groupies in the face. And her idea of a good time is, quote,

seeing a world revolution and nobody knowing what to do when everyone dumps the cars and starts looting. Someone like you, Morley, will be the first to go when that happens. It'll threaten me, but I'll enjoy it very much. Don't worry, I've got my fair share of Tommy guns stashed away. I'm waiting. Yeah, it's funny. You know, I really kind of thought Toya was an idiot,

but that's completely turned me around. What an inspiring figure. It's just like someone like you, Morley, will be the first to go when that happens, a revolution. I mean, it's an actual revolution. You think probably the emphasis will be on perhaps the royals, the bankers, the politicians. No, no, the first people near the top of the list are going to be slightly impenetrable music journalists.

I love that. I would just say anything. It doesn't matter. It's just the business of pop music. It's all just top-layer nonsense. Nobody's going to ask you to explain in what way your music is jazz-based. You can just say it. Yeah, a posh Tory am-drum actress who'd really quite enjoy a violent world revolution.

Just say anything. It doesn't matter. It's just a scam. It sounds like a kind of like gobby punk auto-generator, actually. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you don't need to think or make an effort. We're just trying to make some money here. And according to teasers, the gossip section at the back of the paper,

half the audience for Sugar and spice a militant feminist who cheer toy when her character coats down men and the other half consists of blokes who want to see cassandra out of only fools and horses in the nip i remember going to a lot of plays of that ilk when i was a teenager with my drama class and everything i remember coming out of one and my mate turning around to me and saying, fucking hell, feminist theatre's great. You always get to see some tits. The singles reviews. Well, this week's singles are reviewed

by Julie Burchill, who spends the first 200 words by stating she only likes the Sex Pistols when Johnny Rotten was in them and Tamla Motown up to 1976, and how she despises the term rocks-rich tapestry. Consequently, because it's 1980, there is no single of the week. Oh, it feels weird to agree wholeheartedly with the whole of a sentence written by Julie Birch.

Having said that, I mean, it's, you know, I only like the sex versus when Johnny Rotten was in them, you know, unpopular opinion. The biggest single this week, just like Starting Over by John Lennon, draws comparisons with Jerry Monroe, who won Opportunity Knocks ten years ago with his maudlin pub sing-alongs.

So much for McCartney writing the slop and Lennon writing the shocking rock as she says john lennon either needs to be put away if this record is meant to be good or wants to be written off if the direness of this dirge is meant to be intentional my guess is that he's happy in his house husband niche and did this merely to dissuade people who ask him when he's coming back to the studio to lay down some new tracks. Meanwhile, Elkie Brooks, with all her looks, gets a coat down for her new single, Dance Away. Just the other night, I saw the younger Elkie Brooks on TV, lurching about like Joplin's most promising pupil.

Now she seems to go about licking Petula Clark's old ashtrays. She's not keen on Give Me An Inch by Hazel O'Connor. Ever since punk, the media has longed to fawn over a token wild youth, only it could never be a real punk. Too fine, too sharp, too much edge. It had to be a young person who would talk bullshit but would put career before anything else. The media picked up on Jimmy Purce, Toyah Wilcox, Ian Page, Phil Daniels. It dropped them all for Hazel. Her looks, a sheer Wurzel Gummidge meets the Michelin Man, and her singing style is one which Lena Lovage made into an attractive novelty about 18 months ago. When it comes to obedience, doing and saying everything that's expected of her,

Hazel O'Connor makes Marie Osmond look like Valerie Solanas. Properly lumping on Toya Wilcox is the real deal, the enemy, aren't they? I Know Corrida by Chas Jankel and and Flight 19 by B.A. Conterson get lumped together because while the former had a hand in the blockhead's finest moments, the latter, according to Birchall, is shaking Dioré. I Know Corrida, harmless. Flight 19, it's sad when a shallow person is set on being serious. Pete Shelley discovers that the only thing worse than losing love is losing the ability to write

insistent stainless steel songs about it, says Birchall about Strange Thing by the Buzzcocks. The band do a passable impression of a leaden sloth hurrying to keep an appointment at the taxidermist's. Buggles seem to like writing songs about popular commodities suddenly and brutally dropped by a bored public, she says about their new single Elstree. Their next song should be called Buggles. Think about it, man. While Birchall likes Dave Edmonds for Queen of Hearts

and Nick Lowe for having a dad who killed loads of people in World War II, that's being anti-Nazi, you liberal creeps. Some things never change. She's not keen on Teach a Teacher by Rock Pile. Good old boys make bad old bands. The old sailor does his usual impersonation of a fog horn with its jaws wired together slopping up his putrid pathetic pap for the mug masses comments birchall on where did we go wrong he was doing so well it's i mean as soon as you see the word pap and the word masses yeah exactly in the same

sentence in a music review you know that the person writing it either is a buffoon or is carrying the launch code of buffoonery that is just waiting yeah and the alliteration is also a kind of uh yeah putrid pathetic pap for the mother. And out of a ton of re-released singles on EP, she says that she likes Dave D, Dozy Beaky, Mick and Titch, hates Backman, Turner, Overdrive, Esther and Abby, Afarim and Craftwork,

Sarah Vaughan and Billy Eckstein could teach Ian Curtis' Corpser thing all 30 about music and, quote, anyone who was the proud possessor of a brain in the early 70s already has a copy of you can do magic by lima and family cooking proud possessor of a break you see how easy it was to get rich in the 80s it's not a lie that what they say it wasn't just city boys and tycoons it was these people complaining about

everything while while 50 pound notes spill out of their pockets you know i mean and the the publishing and broadcast industries kneel before them crying name your prize let's at least do lunch i mean it's uh i'm not saying my singles pages, well, I was, what, 22, I guess, something like that should have been. I'm not saying mine were any better, but at least that fact is fairly reflected in my subsequent fortunes. And at least I improved rather than degenerated.

In the LP review section, the lead review is given over to remain in light by talking heads and after max bell has banged on for ages about white western artists pillaging african music he decides it's dead good an album of brave intentions and haunting textures safari so good danny baker kicks off his review of faces by earth wind and fire by pointing out how mint and skilled they've been but this should be the last earth wind and fire lp before they quote explode into a super vacuum as he believes that the funk baton is about to be snatched up by british bands links incognito and light of the world

but the tip of the london soul iceberg backed by a crazed and extremely sizable army of people desperate to do for funk what the sex pistols did for rock oh get ready for shack attack danny boy the debut lp by islands new signings you too is drooled over by paul morley i find boy touching precocious full of archaic flourishes a modernist conviction and genuinely strange i love you too you may worry about me loving you too. Don't. It's not us who should be worried. I think Morley had a bit of a thing for sting around the same time. Really? It is weird. Sometimes, as a critic, you're meant to do this,

but sometimes you just can't quite tell the real shape of something when it's right in front of you. Do you know what I mean? Sometimes it doesn't happen. You need in front of you do you know what i mean sometimes it doesn't happen you just you need a bit of distance before you can recognize that it's the shape of a penis it's funny you should say that um taylor alan jones i remember him telling a story about going out on a trip um paul morley was one of the other journos on it and i think paul morley had been a little bit disparaging about sting you know the know, the uncertain, et cetera, et cetera.

But, like, Sting had, like, kind of sought him out and just, like, you know, really disarmed him, you know, been utterly kind of charming. And you could see Paul Morley being kind of visibly disarmed, you know, on the whole thing, and then kind of walking off on a kind of sort of flattered daze. And then Sting turned into Alan Jones and just saying, Got him.

Ah, yeah, yeah. No, I remember even when I was a kid, days and then sting turn into alan jones and just saying got in ah yeah yeah no it's that i i remember even when i was a kid i remember being at melody maker and being able to see through that i always thought that that there should be a sign above the door that says they're always quote really nice yeah yeah yeah yeah it's that's you've just got to see past that Bob Edmonds listens to Making Movies, the new LP by Dire Straits and thinks it's dead good even though he knows the readership won't agree none of it will appeal to rock

revolutionaries whose heroes failed to scale the barricades in the late 70s it's essentially dinosaur music but extinction seems a remote possibility. Meanwhile, it's an uncredited coat down for Organization, the second LP by Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark, nine months after their debut. Whereas their debut was aimed magnificently and unashamedly at the bullseye of the new bubbleg they now seem to be torn between the pop market that is so

obviously their best bet and the dreary terrain of flat electronic doodling julie birchill listens to trance and dance by martha and the muffins and deems it's a prime example of what's ramble about pop these days it's small with no big singers no big tunes no big looks no big emotions no big charm or sex appeal coming after punk which had all those assets in abundance it looks especially petty and paul morley lumps killing joke by killing joke and greatest hits volume two by the cockney rejects together and fucking hates them both the former are parasites sucking all the goodness out of important musics while the latter are sprightly loony teen pop prats who should be appearing on the current daily star adverts alongside Arthur Mullard.

What a lot for Tim P! A timeless observation. In the gig guide, well, David could have seen the Stray Cats at the Woolwich Tram Shed, Atomic Rooster at the Marquee, Ozzy Osbourne's Blizzard of Oz and Budgie at Hammersmith Odeon, the Four Tops at the London Palladium, Scorpions at Hammersmith Odeon, or chubby checker at the venue in victoria but probably didn't i certainly didn't taylor could

have seen ac dc at birmingham odian uk subs at the cedar rooms simple minds at the cedar ballroom the cockney rejects at digbuff civic hall bow house at dudley jb's or captain beefart and his magic band supported by comsat angels at the odeon well the dock at the radar station tour plays the birmingham odeon still a few tickets available quite a few in fact neil could have seen the pretenders at coventry theatre or the crusaders and randy crawford at coventry theatre or nipped out to walsall to see johnny ray at the memorial hall sarah could have seen ub40 at leeds polytechnic linton quasi johnson at huddersfield poly motorhead at bradford st george's hall The Jam, supported by The Piranhas at Sheffield Top Rank.

Al could have seen darts at Nottingham University, The Associates at the Boat Club, Gerard Kennair, Sheena Easton and Dennis Waterman at the Theatre Royal, fucking yes, or gone to Crispin Jumperland to see the chords at Leicester University, or Hawkwind and Vardis at the De Montfort Hall. Vardis.

One of my memories of knocking round record shops around, I was at Fox Records in Vicki Centre and I'm standing next to these two tubby blokes with their studded wristbands on. One of them, who was obviously the apprentice, pulled out a Vardis LP and he turned round to the other bloke

and said, Vardis, what are they like then? Are they heavy? And the other bloke who was obviously a big wheel at the local rock sock, just looked at him and just went, very heavy. So every time I see the word Vardis, in my mind I just go, very heavy.

Yeah, well they're the one of the stars of Calendar Goes Pop the Richard Maidley helmed short lived the one where Shaken Stevens attacks Richard Maidley they had an up and coming group

on every episode and Vardis was one of them to be honest they didn't sound very heavy set up in Kirkirkstall road studios and uh and it the sound men there were not not really used to metal you know but no it doesn't sound very good and i just i looked at i thought okay two things first of all lead singer that hair is not long for this world um and secondly, they are surely called Vardis because

they couldn't spell the Vardis out of Quo Vardis. Looked it up, both things true. And Simon could have seen After the Fire at Port Talbot Troubadour, Andy Pandemonium at Swansea University and fuck all else.

Poor lad. In the letters page, well, the burning issue this week is Julie Birchall's review of The River by Bruce Springsteen the other week, which she described as drudgery chic and great music for people who've wasted their youth to sit around drinking beer

and wasting the rest of their lives too. Oh. You limey creeps at nme used to slag off americans because our rock heroes sung about fast cars and swimming pools and didn't relate to the working classes writes joseph heller yet when bircher reviews the river she tells us that the american working classes don't want to hear a rock star relating to their life. Looks like I've spotted a Catch-22 situation. But yes, of course, the music paper is a monolith. Contrasting opinions expressed in that same paper years apart

constitutes rank hypocrisy. Having read Melody Maker's unbelievably ecstatic review of The River, Julie Burchill's review was what I needed to bring me down from Cloud Nine, says Ziggy of Clyde Bank. But to term the musical theme as drudgery was wrong. The working class have two choices. Listen to music which is pure fantasy, such as heavy metal and pop, or listen to music which reflects reality, for example, the jam and joy division.

So do you want us, Julie, to bury our heads in the sand of metal and be lost? Sand of metal. Yeah, unlike all those jam and joy division fans who changed the world. Cheers again for Brexit. Brian Mills of Edinburgh has a monk on about Andy Gill slagging off the new Joe Jackson LP. Whale Oil Beef Hawks of Gosport ask for an article about the Green Party of West Germany. DSC LSE of London comments on the recent specials riot in Cambridge by quoting John Bradbury of the band

claiming that coventry skins were some of the hardest there were and saying dear specials you deserve everything you got and irreverent tatty vagabonds of london say if any skins cause trouble when the specials play for cnd nukem 68 pages 25p i never knew there was so much in it so much fucking toyah yeah well yeah but i i mean at this time i was absolute peak enemy reader i was being kind of made by enemy at this point and i actually remember um certain little things that have been quoted here actually still remember them now you know like 40 years on i mean that paul morley thing about like you too anybody give a shit and i probably did at the time you know i mean it was but you know it wasn't just morley at this point um it was ian penman there was danny baker um andy gill and each in a different ways i mean they were just um

really really sort of opening my eyes and my imagination to the prospect of being a music journalist that you could write in this way. It gave us U2 and Dive Straights all through the decade. Cheers, anyway. I mean, yes, there was all of that. And, of course, looking back at some of this now and some of the bits that are quoted, I mean, it's pretty poor writing, a lot of it, really. It's just poor imagery. It doesn't seem to be thought through. It's not as witty as it thinks it is.

But it made a great – it was almost the fact that it was being done at all, I think, at the time. And even someone like Judy Birchall or whatever, now you can just see it as just sort of trolling and clickbaiting and scattergun iconoclasm. But at the time, it all just seemed to be kind of very exhilaratingly contrarian

or whatever. And in fact, there hadn't really been anything previous to that kind of thing, you know, well done or badly done prior to her. And to be fair to the writers of The Enemy at the time, and music journos in general, you know, there's not a lot of time to turn this shit around, is there? No, no. I mean, Julie Birchill, the poor cow,

she's sat there in an office with about 30 records, and she's got to say something about all of them and she's got x amount of time which isn't that much so she would also have had a pretty big bag of speed i would have thought which probably helped but yeah it's one of those things that you don't really understand this until you're about 35 but people in their 20s can't write. I mean, you know, apart from like Rambo, who'd done it all already. But generally speaking, nobody, yeah,

but nobody really nowadays is good. It's one of those things. Writing is not like pop music or being a sportsman or being a model or being a, you know, where you finish by 30 or 40. Writing is more like directing films or painting where you really are shit in your 20s. You get good in your 30s. You peak in your 40s and 50s.

And that's a bit of a problem for music journalism and always has been. So what else was on telly this day well bbc one commences at 9 00 a.m with a three hour and 20 minute orgy of schools and colleges programs and then closes down for 25 minutes but then it comes back hard with the midday news pebble mill at one and the episode of mr ben where he gets to be a caveman. After You and Me, it's more schools and colleges for a bit until they close down again for another 25 minutes. Then it's Them en Lundath, Unnoid Neuwy,

a Welsh-language programme which for some reason is only available in English region areas, followed by Regional News in Your Area, Play School, Touche Turtle, Kenneth Williams reading Count Backwards on the carpet in Jackanore, Part 4 of Hyde, entitled The Blind Grandmother, John Craven's news round, Blue Peter, and then Morph takes his pet nail brush to a dog show.

After the news, it's Nationwide nationwide and they've just finished you know what before i forget i just want to point out what a time waster mr ben is i mean you thought the owner of that place after about two or three episodes you'd just be saying like behind the glass of a very hard shut door fuck off i'm trying to run a business here he never buys anything does no he doesn't no it just turns in yeah disappears for about 20 25 minutes in the changing rooms then comes out and says no i, I don't fancy it. I mean, he used to really vex me, even as a child. He's got to sponge the crotch of that caveman outfit now,

that poor bloke. No, exactly, yeah. Also, I suspect that time is fairly short before someone twigs that there's something funny going on in that changing room. And, you know, black helicopters arrive. BBC Two kicks off at 11 for Play School with Fred Harris and Floella Benjamin and then closes down for nearly three hours, coming back with two hours of racing from Newbury

and then whipping us over to the New London Theatre for the final match in Group 3 of the State Express World Challenge Cup of Snooker as Ireland take on Australia. After an open university module about preschool childcare, they close down again for 25 minutes, returning to the snooker for an hour and a bit. They're currently halfway through school's prom featuring long riding junior school the leeds youth orchestra and the stone lee youth orchestra itv starts at 9 30 with schools and colleges programs then it's little blue the music and story show stepping stones looks at hairy things then it's the suivans, regional news in your area, the Nairie Dawn

Porter and Ian Hendry terminal brain tumour love series for Maddie with Love, Afternoon Plus and then a repeat of Sending the Girls, the Elizabeth Sladen drama series about a sales team. After the practice, it's Windows, The Fantastic Four, Le Class on the Prairie, the news at 5.45, regional news in your area. Then Iris Scott starts to stir the shit between Kevin and Glenda in Crossroads. Something rural and boring happens in Emmerdale Farm. And they've just started the first episode of the Bridget Forsyth and Dougie Brown sitcom, The Glamour Girls, about the exotic world of sales promotions.

I'm glad you pronounced that as the little arse on the prairie, because that gave me a little Proustian, yes, off back to my school days, because, you know, that would have spoke depths to our, you know, to our sense of humour. Snooker's starting to kick in. Yeah, international snooker's starting to kick in yeah international snooker at that the best kind it became a big thing the year after this was steve davis in 1981 when he first arrived on the scene i think that had a sort of galvanizing effect of course we

all had color tellies i am actually old enough to remember um watching snooker on black and white telly pop black fuck and um yeah that's uh yeah but yeah're right. It was never the same until the electrifying presence of Steve Davis. Well, it genuinely is interesting. That's the damn thing. Everyone talks about how interesting Hurricane Higgins was. He was just a pisshead. You know, Steve Davis is into magma. Yeah.

Well, that is, in fairness, the only thing anybody knows about. Yeah. Like magma. Yeah, I think someone that's into magma and is a snooker player is more interesting than somebody who's just a piss head But it's Steve Davis and Doyle out of the Professionals who in one episode you see his record collection

and at the front is a magma album. That's who listens to magma. Steve Davis Doyle out of the Professionals and people like that Well chaps I do believe that the table has been firmly laid for this episode of top of the pop so we're going to stop there and we're going to come back tomorrow so thank you very much david stubbs there you go god bless you taylor parks

so my name's al needham see you tomorrow for part two until then 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 favorite episode of

friends and we look through 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. 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.