Chart Music: the Top Of The Pops Podcast - #59 (Part 2): 3.7.1986 – It’s ‘Orrible Being A Slave On War Orphan Farm

Episode Date: May 27, 2021

Team ATVLand finally get stuck into the meat of this episode, and shake their heads at the wrongness of cocktail sticks in headstocks, argue over the Housemartins, talk about being recognised in Finland, and conclude that 1986 was the least sexy non-plague year in history.Video Playlist | Subscribe | Facebook | Twitter | The Chart Music Wiki | Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull-apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey, and just five bucks for the small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. Hello, it's Mr. P here. And the other Mr. P! And we are the hosts of two Mr. P's in a podcast. The educational podcast where you don't actually learn a thing no instead we explore the weird wonderful and downright hilarious things

that happen in school from people actually doing the job we reminisce on our own time at school funny things we experience each day and of course we share your hilarious stories from the chalk face so if you work in a school or just want a nostalgic trip down memory lane sit up straight fingers on lips and get ready for the lesson the following podcast is a member of the great big owl family this will certainly have an adult theme and might well contain strong scenes of sex or violence which could be quite graphic it may also contain some very explicit language which will frequently mean sexual swear words what do you like listen to um chart music chart music Chart music.

Hey, up you pop-crazy youngsters, and welcome to part two of episode 59 of Chart Music. I'm Al Needham, they're Taylor Parks and Neil Colcone and the three of us are absolutely champing at the bit to kick off so I'll just say alright then pop craze youngsters it's time to get stuck into this episode of Top of the Pops always remember we may coat down your favourite band or artist but we never forget they've been on Top top of the pops more than we have. It's 7pm on Thursday, July 3rd, 1986, and Top of the Pops is now firmly bedded in at the old Tomorrow's World slot,

where it's been since September of 1985 and would stay until June of 1996. Although last month's World Cup meant that the episode three weeks ago was brought forward to Wednesday so BBC One could screen the second stage game between Northern Ireland and Brazil oh that would have been weird wouldn't it Wednesday Top of the Pops on a Wednesday that just ain't right as we've already pointed out Michael Grade is all to blame for this he forced TV

programs to be constricted to half hour slots because that's how the Americans did it and uh you could say that was the first nail in the coffin of Top of the Pops. We've lost 10 minutes of beautiful pop. Yeah, I mean, those 45-minute episodes are just glorious. I mean, it's scarcely believable that they let Top of the Pops last for that long and let the pop-crazed youngsters have 45 minutes of pop. It's amazing. Not right restricting it to half an hour,

because you can see that it really affects Top of the Pops. I mean, we've only got eight songs to discuss in this episode. Yeah, but I mean, you know, we could talk for five hours about those eight tracks. Your host this evening is Janice All Night Long, who is still holding down the evening slot on Weekday Radio 1, taking over from Bruno Brooks at half at half seven being interrupted by working for yourself the young entrepreneur show at nine and then handing off to andy kershaw at 10 because john peels off cycling about the country or whatever he gets up to on his days off this is her second solo presenting gig on top of the pops She became the first woman to present Top of the

Pops on her own in May of 1985. Because Top of the Pops, you know, they've started to relax the two presenter rule that they put in in the early 80s. But Janice is firmly established in the front rank of regular Top of the Pops presenters in 1986. A pool which includes Mike Smith, John Peel, Steve Wright, Gary Davis, Peter Powell, Simon Mayo, and still Simon Bates. It's not a pool I'd want my children to paddle in. Thanks to a mataterial broadcasting style,

that's the opposite of a vuncular, chaps, don't you know? And Radio 1 wanting to get in on today's issues. Janice is currently being roped in to educate the youth on all manner of causes. up with Eve Ferrett, Andrew Cruickshank, Dr Cameron in Dr Finlay's casebook and Jimmy Young for a series of special announcements about the dangers of alcohol on London weekend television and at the end of the year she'll be teaming up with Brian Redhead, Nick Ross and Jimmy Young again for a week-long campaign on BBC radio about the dangers of the AIDS. I can't imagine Jimmy Young talking about rimming to a load of housewives. Can't you? She's also been in the papers recently having a massive hug with her childhood hero, Mick

Jagger, after interviewing him for her show. But she's just undergone a less friendly interview with another 60s artist. According to the gossip section of this week's NME quote during the recording of a Janice Long show last week on which the artist in question was airing his top seven discs the plump bubbling one their words not mine asked why he'd chosen a particular record why Why did I fucking choose it, came a succinct reply. I didn't fucking choose it. Some two-bit punk from the record company fucking chose it. Asked the same thing of the next record, he reiterated,

I didn't fucking choose it. The fucking record company chose it. Needless to say, these carefully chosen words were edited out of the broadcast, as was the bit where he punched his manager on the nose and promptly sacked him. And that already middle-aged man grew up to be... Oh, man, who is that?

Van Morrison. Of course it was Van Morrison. Fuck's sake. Good to see he's calmed down and become a bit more reasonable these days, eh? Play the game. He's an old pro. He should know better. Anyway, forget about him.

Janice Long. She's essentially taken over from Kid Jensen by 1986. And you could say there are a lot of similarities between the two. They've occupied the same slot on Radio 1. They both love their music. They both get on with John Peel. And they both leave their imprint on top of the Pulse while realising it's not about them.

I think we've already established now that we kind of like Janice, don't we? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I've actually started liking her more through doing chart music and being able, you know, obviously being confronted with so many awful presenters. People like Janice, people like Kid Jensen, people like Peeley. You know, it's like there's two types of TOTP presenters.

Janice I would put with Peeley and Kid Jensen. They are, to all intents and purposes, not slick. They're naturally good presenters. You never get the feel with her that she's putting anything on or that she has that oleaginous thing that's so unsettling in the likes of you know Steve Wright and Bruno Brooks and people like that the thing about the supposed slickness of that whole well I mean going way back that whole Travis Blackburn Bates generation is that it's a really thickly painted on veneer and a really blatant one

that's clearly masking so much internal arrogance and bitterness and fundamental inability to genuinely connect with other human beings um that generation of DJs and their kind of their ancestors if you like which I'd say Bruno Brooks and Gary Davis and Steve Wright are definitely inheritors of that kind of thing they all have that faint solipsism whereby it seems the interaction with others is kind of, you know, waiting for others to shut up so you could speak. Their conversations with people are just interrupted monologues in a sense. They can't cope with other humans or other human beings that aren't serviceable to their ambitions. And, you know, this extends all the way through to today with that disgraceful bag of shit liz kershaw whereas with with janice

she always seemed honored to do top of the pops and kind of as surprised by her success as she was delighted by it you get you don't get this sense of horrible wheels turning inside her thinking of ambition she's not doing this so she can open some supermarkets i mean that ambition is all you get from her contemporaries that the slickness wasn't just what the 70s top of the pops presenters had perfected to mask their horror but but something that also the relatively anodyne innocent likes of goodyear and brooks and davis had as well that aspect of kind of self-deprecation that never really successfully masked their own ambitions i really like janice and to be honest doing chart music has made me like her even more for a show like top of the pop

she manages to communicate excitement and discernment and humor all the good things that a good totp host should be able to conjure crucially she's a relaxing presence she seems comfortable in her own skin she seems like a music fan she seems like a music fan as well who like us in this period was kind of staying loyal to top of the pops um through an era of music shows which is not what top of the pops is it's not a music show it's a pop show um through an era of music shows which are threatening top of the pops janice stays loyal and this is the thing with her i think she likes music i'm not saying it's easy to be a top of the pops presenter but when you think about savile dlt baits etc you know you imagine having the arrogance and the gall to feel you can present a tv pop show let alone substantial chunks of

the airways on the uk's only pop station when you actually don't like pop and you consider it beneath you then of course presentation just becomes part of a kind of portfolio career but janice is born in 1955 and by the time top of the pots has started she's a little kid by the time bowie's singing starman you know she's 17 i think she remembers how important the show is and you always got from janice not a sense of confrontation or sliminess but a sense of comradeship and to me she's equal to kid yensen in in that that ease of style, really. So, yeah, I'd put her up among the very last TOTP presenters, certainly of this era.

Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say that I particularly liked her broadcasting style, but it doesn't really matter because she doesn't come over as a psychopath. And, you know, the enthusiasm is genuine. And really, that's all you need to do this fucking job. You know what I mean? It's amazing how difficult that seems. She's just like someone that you could imagine if you were stuck on a cable car for six hours with Janice.

You'd just chat about what she did at college and, you know, which was the best Julian Cope solo album. Yeah, what's ted rogers really like the men would arrive to get you down and you'd say well anyway nice to meet you yeah what 7 30 to 10 you say all right i'll i'll be sure to give it a listen and that would be that right as opposed to almost any other top of the pops presenter where the men would arrive to get you down and they'd say, oh, they told us there were two people stuck up. You go, no. But I mean, that's not to damn with faint praise because she has spent her life genuinely enjoying and actively promoting music without becoming a monster or a smug prick,

which is a rare achievement, so fair play. Yeah. Hello and welcome to Top of the Box. And here in the studio at number three with Happy Hour, it is the House Martins. The show begins with The Wizard and the usual kind of like 1986 graphic mess. It's horrible. I hate these titles.

I always hate those sort of 80s vector graphics or whatever they are, where it's like, you know, Cerise lines. Bank advert graphics. Yeah, on a black background. It's all blocks zooming around in formation meaninglessly. And you've got a cassette spinning in the void, killing music. And it's illegal.

Which is an interesting choice for a programme based on record sales. Yes. Unless they now imagine that most of the audience were buying cast singles, which they most assuredly were not. But for once, a Top of the Pops title sequence isn't five years behind the times. Unfortunately, the time that it's not behind is 1986. unfortunately the time that it's not behind is 1986 but the point is this is the first sign that we see tonight that the late 80s is a coming in um which there's a lot of it in this program i mean this is a ghastly mess in precisely the style that we would come to associate with the next few years i think we've retched over this top of the pops logo before but

it's horrific design it's like they laid out all of the typefaces and asked a six-year-old child to choose one and they just kept saying all of them all of them yeah exactly and some wiggly lines and in the end the designer just went, well, okay, but as long as it's not symmetrical. And you can see it in the studio as well. It's full of clutter. Yeah. And everything's on different levels. And there's neon squiggles in clashing colours flashing everywhere.

It's like the objective was to stuff all the available space with crap which was a popular late 80s uh delusion that a good idea is worth 10 points and a bad idea is worth one point so 10 bad ideas equals one good idea you know i mean what sums it up is in the studio they've got these uh spinning christmas tree lamp towers yeah they don't do anything they're just like twirling cylinders studded with different colored lights which don't illuminate anything or create any sort of lighting effect and anyway if you stick that many different colors that close to each other and then spin them around they just cancel each other out anyway um so it's just like this pointless clown color distraction just doing nothing but taking up visual space and making

it hard to establish any actual mood which is really what 80s design was all about yeah yeah fucking horrendous the simple failure to to settle on a unified typeface for the logo is you know in in terms of brand and marketing strategies it's disastrous you can't picture this logo i mean you can picture the faint nausea you feel from the colors because it feels like your telly's on the blink but you know whereas if i asked you to picture the 70s TOTP logo it'd be instantaneously in your head this one is just a bit all over the place you just remember it looking kind of nauseating and revolting so yeah yeah yeah not a good look if you watch Top of the Pops every week at this point and someone just gave you a biro and a bit of paper and said, draw the Top of the Pops logo. You wouldn't even know where to start.

No, no, no, no. We crash straight into the opening act with the disembodied voice of Janice introducing Happy Hour by the House Martins. Formed in Hull in 1983 by P.D. Heaton and Stan Cullimore, the House Martins originally began as a busking duo whose demo tape was picked up by Go Discs, the independent label formed by the former press officer at Stiff Records

that was beginning to have success with Billy Bragg. Once signed, they expanded into a four-piece line-up which also included Hugh Whittaker, the former drummer of local band The Gargoyles, and a former bandmate of Heaton's when he lived in Surrey, Norman Cook, on bass. Their debut single, Flag Day, failed to chart when it came out in November of 1985, but their second, Sheep, scrabbled up to number 56 in March of this year. This is the follow-up, which was originally called French England

and had been sitting in Heaton's notebook for years when he was an office worker in Surrey and was exhumed when the band were invited to do a peel session. It's the third cut from their debut LP London Nil Hall 4, which came out the other week. It entered the top 40 at number 30 three weeks ago, then soared 18 places to number 12. After a screening of the video on Top of the Pops, which juxtaposed live footage of the band in a pub in St. John's Wood with a dollop of Claymation tomfoolery, which was put

together by a team of student animators, it soared another nine places to number three this week it stayed at number three but no matter here's the fourth best band in hall but this time in the studio and it might be a mistake for them not to run the video again but who can blame them for wanting to have their moment on top of the pops yeah i think i think by the time of this appearance, most of us had seen the video. So it was actually kind of refreshing actually seeing them in the flesh, as I recall. Yeah, here they are actually playing instruments. Yeah, absolutely.

And it's odd because I'm very ambiguous about the House of Martins. At the time, I think I really loved them and I flipping loved this song and I love the funny video. I'm a sucker for anything claymation. And you know, there were leftists that worked for London, very catchy songs, et cetera. As time's gone on and i've sort of seen their influence um and i think about scouting for fucking girls and the like i've

grown less fond of them but you know probably in this episode they would have been one of the things that i would have most enjoyed yeah they're kind of like what they remind me they're kind of like those that whole socialists brigade if you, but without any soul music in the sound. Or any kind of sloganeering or any of the kind of rabble routing. This is definitely post-Red Wedge kind of pop in response to Thatcherism. But consequently, it's got quite a defeated perspective in a way. There are still bands trying to keep a bit of leftism alive in pop at this period you know you and crying people like that still trying to keep that kind of great resistance to thatcherism

alive in pop so this song it finds the singer out in the town feeling alienated on this works night out from the kind of aspirant macho yuppies he has to work with to survive and although i love the video in a strange way on top of the pops where the house martins can't control the messaging so much they're actually thrown into an even more kind of stark and vivid reflection of the line that they're treading because the song seems to express this faint contempt for a lot of people in the audience to be fair it's this it's this kind of gust of humberside drizzle in the middle of people dancing around their filofaxes including i'm sure i see a couple of zoo guys i don't know whether we're still going in 86 but there's a couple right in the middle dancing in a very very zoo way and exactly the kind of people in a sense that the song is

is taking the piss out of yes what i don't like now although i loved it then is that jokiness that kind of love of pop that comes off as kind of parody you know that we're ugly gormless blokes so let's accentuate that in a period coming after really the demise of Wham and Duran and that that's a less bold move than it might have been a few years previously but like everyone else you know I loved the video and I really yucked at the kind of small scaleness of it the familiarity and the lack of things like big air and makeup it was like the video was like it was like a play for today or victoria wood documentary or something you know it's like this real shot of that or a comic strip in this yeah which i just

got into that yeah and fucking loved and i think the first time i saw the house martins would have been in this is top 10 bribery page yeah and it and it'll go discs. They sponsored Fulchester Rovers, didn't they, briefly? Yeah, exactly. I mean, I should have felt a lot of kinship with this kind of music as a despairing young lefty. I was, you know, drawing CCCP on my pencil cases at this point. But I found far more excitement in the games with identity politics that someone like,

I don't know, Prince was making, or the far more explicitly agit-pot manoeuvres that the likes of Public Enemy would soon be making. I think as a team, what you're really after in terms of politics in pot is not necessarily what's right, but what is righteous. And, you know, when you're a teenager, you're not really into mournfulness in this regard anyway. And I think what they were providing the House Martins was kind of sad

and a little bit sardonic and essentially a plea in really tough times but of course I was you know 13 I didn't want equality or an evening up of the scores I wanted a kind of revolution and although in 86 this almost sounds like an alternative by 87 what the house martins are doing here really it sounds dated I mean i love the undertones who i think are a big influence here and although i'm not sure i noticed at the time actually the precise feel this this happy hour reintroduces to the charts is actually that of karma chameleon in a weird way but but like the smiths the house martins suggested really that the only way forward for white pop that wasn't directly trying to wake black pop anyway was backwards.

So we get here not so much a new Beatles, but a new Tremolos, I guess, or a new swinging blue jeans. As time's gone on, I've liked it less and less in a way. I'm sure Paul Heaton is a hoot on Twitter and a massively lovely guy. Oh, you'd get on with him, Neil. He's got a massive collection of crisp papers. I probably would, yeah. But I'm also kind of sick and nice guys on twitter it counts my unfathomably deep loathing of um everything but the girl i'm

innately distrustful of that whole radio six set of people are all mates on twitter fuck those people um but um i mean one thing that has cemented my dislike is that my biggest tv crush dr alice roberts tweeted something funny about dumping a guy just because she was a goth at the time and found that he owned a house martins record so that cemented my ongoing aversion to a certain extent because i'm still holding a torch for her but in 86 i really flipping love this song and and and i'm glad to see him on top of the pops having fun playing it as well in the latest melody maker in the interview they did in it they were talking about whether they were going to get involved in red wedge but they said oh i don't know it depends what they have to say about things so that's still

going right and from that interview and this performance they can't believe that they are where they are today i mean paul heaton was convinced that there were only going to be one hit wonders and his main memory of this performance is getting bill oddie's autograph in the bbc bar afterwards so yeah their sights are set really low and they're not sure what they're doing here as soon as i saw this was a 1986 episode i thought to myself fucking house martin's are going to be on this the under undertones and here we are there's not even time for your soup to cool down and there they are it's a bit weird that they were the indie breakthrough act of 1986 but they were our band weren't they yeah but i think it's because they could be sold as a novelty and their their quirks and their passion was ignorable and compared to most indie bands they were fairly pleasingly musical in as much as they could play

and he could sing and there was no particular element of like artiness or or rawness which meant that they just came over as these little dancing men singing jolly songs about nothing, which of course were actually all fire-breathing left-wing agitprop, but no one noticed or cared, apart from the people who had nothing to learn from that anyway and were just chuffed to have their own views sung back at them, you know, while fondly imagining that the masses might be converted in a flash of enlightenment by inaudible lyrics that they weren't listening to. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And that was a lot of people's idea of subversive at the time, and it sort of still is. And I've never really believed in it. It's like that tedious thing of hey this song was really about drugs but nobody knew and nobody knew or cared and it's the same this song sounds like a field full of bouncing bunnies yeah but it's actually an anti-yuppie and anti-boss class diatribe and you know fine that's a perfectly reasonable thing to write a song about but let's

not forget that the only reason these lads are in the chart is that they found a way to mix unthreatening northern self-deprecation with pure student appeal with like the shaved necks and the shapeless Billy

Bragg t-shirts and you know comical specs and an exaggerated sexlessness and pretending that your name's stan when it's really ian or pretending that your name's norman when it's really quentin uh and you know with this cheerful and deliberately thin sounding record as though taking up any more sonic space would be obnoxious and macho. You know, it's like that would be like oral manspreading. And that was it.

They, they didn't turn out to be some kind of entryist Trojan horse. They turned out to be the house Martins. So what? What I, I did quite like them at the time but what i didn't like at the time and what i really don't like now was their gimmick if you remember of saying that they were christians and i don't take jesus take marks take hope which is what they had on the inner sleeve of their album. Yeah.

Oh, right. Now, I don't know if they really were Christians or if it was just the last pose left after Morrissey had pretended to be celibate. I don't know. Maybe it was just the desperation of worn out rock and roll, you know, but maybe they were. you know but maybe they were but it seems a bit unpleasant to me not just because they set themselves up as christian pop musicians which you know nobody likes let's face it but because they set themselves up as christian political pop musicians and for me personally that always sets sets off the alarm that mixture of uh politics and religion even when it seems quite benign right because i hate it when that stuff comes around like the christian lefty thing always gives me

the creeps like you know in this country when people do like oh jesus was the original communist and all that stuff you know i don't think he was an astronaut yeah yeah yeah i must insist he was a socialist you know talk about liberation theology and uh you know the role of methodism in the early labour party and all that it just it makes me uncomfortable because what you find in real life is that that credulity and woolly thinking which brought these people to their church makes them prone to blind faith and or messianic delusions and you end up with like a weird ideologue i've never trusted politicians of any stripe who come across like vicars do you know what i mean didn't like it in tony blair didn't like it in tony. Because there's always some level at which they're living in a fantasy world

and distanced from other human beings. And they trust themselves too much. Like they're blinded by a light in the heavens. It never ends well. And also I hate the way that the House Martins aesthetically mix Christianity and socialism to accentuate the worst aspects of of both you know it's not like it doesn't really seem joyful it seems like they're almost fetishizing the sort of the small rainy black and white television versions of those

things it's like a like a freezing cold church with uh two grannies in it you know and a chipped font and uh or like a clp meeting in a hut there's some old cunt pulling everyone up or points of order it's all it feels more like that stuff it's like this proud attachment to every form of austerity except one you know what i mean and if the battle is raging then okay yeah better this lot than mumford and that you know sure but when you're not thinking in strict binary terms or when you're thinking in artistic terms these people are the enemy really like all sort of pinched and frigid and disapproving do you know i mean Like they're doing their tiny dance in their tiny space, you know, talking about how there's a world to win

and never going further than Bridlington. I mean, we can say this from a distance and, you know, from this distance, they do look like another lab band, and they have been forgotten about as well in the uh annals of the late 80s but at the time they seemed massively important they were one of our bands showing that a band like that could still get into the top 10 you know what i mean yeah and you know to me seeing people like hugh whittaker and stan cullum or on top of the pops in 1986 almost as much of a shock as seeing boy george on top of the pops in 1981 you know yeah

i mean i remember watching this and thinking fucking hell that could be me and my mates doing that and that hadn't happened in ages yeah they're massively out of place aren't they in that studio with all the aforementioned color lights and stuff this is a club that they wouldn't ordinarily go to you know i can't deny i loved them at the time i mean i bought this single and i got the album and they are one of the last british bands that i was properly invested in yeah i mean the thing is i'd really like to pick up on something taylor said as well about this this sort of stealing a socialist message through in what appears to be a pop song i must admit that you know as a what i was 13 14 the lyrics to this what sang out was that phrase happy hour over and over again you know i mean that that it was the

hook that mattered and kind of the subtleties of the lyrics did pass me by i think i got conditioned by hip-hop potentially to kind of expect my political music to not only lyrically be political but to sound political in some ways you know i mean and this this doesn't really it is that thing of stealing that message through somehow which implies that really that message yeah it's amenable to the to the cognoscente or at least people who can be who are still buying smash hits i guess to read the lyrics but i'm unconvinced by it you know if if i much preferred the house martins when i didn't know that they were lefties in a way when they were just yeah this kind of they were an odd proposition in 86 and seeing them on top of the pops it wasn't even a blast in the past or anything it was like you

know there was nobody else quite like that on top of the pops um and they didn't play the same games of kind of performance you know on top of the pops either that i mean look at the way paul heaton's dancing on this this is like you know these are people who aren't commonly seen on top of the pops in the late 80s era at all so i appreciate their difference but yeah i think you're right out retrospect does them no favors i mean at the time i was 18 but i wasn't going into pubs because pubs to me meant sitting with my dad and his mates moaning on about shit I wasn't interested in or danger and violence

and the song's about going out to the pub and having to sit there with your cunt of a boss wanging on about how easy it is to pick up women when you know all the tricks and that song always reminds me of sitting in the pub when my cunty boss has invited everyone out for a sitting in the pub when my cunty boss has

invited everyone out for a drink in the pub for a bonding session and everyone's just sitting there going look can't you just go so we can start enjoy ourselves bitching about you that is it that is what works drinks are like but i mean the thing the thing is the odd thing about team building the odd thing about this song is, though, you know, it's self-consciously small in a sense. And the video, you know, like you say, is made by sort of student animators and stuff like that. But in a weird way, as much as, I don't know,

Dead Ringer for Love, this is a song that is so intimately associated with that video that when I was enjoying it on the radio, it was reminding me of the video. You know, the song came across not as a unique statement in itself, but as the soundtrack to that video that we had all enjoyed so yes and it did for them didn't it because people thought oh look it's a northern madness yeah and that's not what they wanted to be and that's not what they turned out to be the christian thing i'd completely forgotten about

until taylor mentioned it i remember a lot of talk about that around about the time of Caravan of Love. Yeah. When they had crucifixes shaved into their heads. But in this performance, they've pushed the boat out. They've got in a load of House Martin scarves and lobbed them out to the audience who were waving them about Bay City Roller style. Yeah, yeah. And I always wonder what happens with that, because that's a very 70s conceit, isn't it?

You know, it's like them big Kenny stickers we mentioned mentioned before do you need to get permission off michael hurl or do you just lob them out and hope people pick up on what they're supposed to do with them oh i think her would have been involved absolutely i think this would have been a consultative process hours before the show taped because otherwise how are you going to get them out to the audience you can't just sling them out so you know yeah it would have it would have been yeah a consultative thing but the audience i find an awful lot of the audience really don't know how to dance to this no it's one of those weird songs you either find the pulse which is actually slower than you think or you try and dance to it too fast and look like a fucking idiot and most of them seem to be doing

the latter or you dance to it like they do on their own video yeah yeah yeah yeah which is essentially a chicken dance yeah the video's funny as fuck it probably still is funny as fuck yeah it is but i didn't buy this on single i didn't sit around at home listening to it without the video i just waited for the next showing a video because it always used to make me chuckle and because of the video and because of the title of the song it's essentially um born slippy by underworld uh almost a decade before the event and it's another born in the usa isn't it because in an interview with a guardian in 2018 paul heaton said that he got loads of letters from landlords who were complaining that people would jump up and dance on the tables when happy hour came on the jukebox and causal manner of damage i mean it wouldn't surprise me if it became the anthem of the end of lockdown and when the pubs were properly open again yeah yeah because because

it's happy hour again it's the one bit of lyric you can make out all of the rest of them are too fast for you to discern every single word and that's where all the critique is but yeah happy hour yeah that that's going to be a pub anthem it's going to be a chumba wumba style fucking pub anthem yes and so it remains probably i'll tell you the other thing that's weird about them they do this like down to earth unpretentious bit right which can be great but you have to do it a certain way. Like if you set that sort of bluff grounded, like anti-pretentiousness off against some twinkle of madness or darkness or humor or fury or something that it can work. But otherwise it doesn't,

it doesn't come over like you're undermining idiots and posers you know it's just you undermining yourself because what you're actually giving you know but it's sort of quite often you find the people who are most keen to present themselves as normal and ordinary are weirdos right like i was completely unsurprised for instance when uh the house martin's drummer was sent to jail for an axe attack on a former business associate i saw that coming a mile off right him and bungle from rainbow um if you if you forget this the stan Bates, the bloke who played Bungle in Rainbow, bound over to keep the peace after a road rage assault on a 40-year-old mother of five in Bury, Southend. Oh, my God.

But that seemed inevitable too, you know. I've read a local paper article about, because I had to check that I hadn't misremembered that, right? So I looked it up on the internet. No, you dreamt it. Yeah. local paper article about because i had to check that i hadn't misremembered that right so i looked it up on the internet and there's a local paper article from the time and it describes the the case and it says baits who wore a gray suit rather than his usual fluffy outfit like he's gonna be standing in the dark, dressed as... And, like, on the jury was George and Zippy.

It's like Ronnie and the Drew crouched down, like, underneath the jury benches. It's like, oh, Bongo Bunch, you're going down now. Yeah, I can imagine there was much wiggling of George's fingers over his mouth. Yeah. I mean, look, it's... So, like, the House Martins are supposed to be these regular guys.

They're fucking, I mean, what a weird rhythm section this band's got for a start. Like Quentin and the Axeman. It's just like, I hope things picked up later for him and the man he hit with an axe. But sadly, history records no more. I tell you, you can tell that quentin already in this you can tell quentin is from a slightly different bracket right because the band dress code is down and the others follow that with you know shitty t-shirts and like old billy bragg t-shirt yeah yeah that's what I mean. And old jeans. The drummer's got Frankie Say on the unemployed T-shirt,

which would have been enormously retro in 1986. Yeah. But Quentin's managed to sneak in these kind of understated Northern Soul togs, you know what I mean? And instead of getting a two-pound haircut like the rest of them, he's got this sort of semi-suede head do that was obviously what he actually asked for rather than just whatever was left when the barber got tired you know you can tell he's already

itching to get down to brighton you know thinking i wonder if johnny ball's got a daughter he's calling himself dj ox at the minute isn't it is he all right yeah there's a clip of them on one of the bbc2 music shows and he's already demonstrated that he knows his way around some decks i remember that was that when he had the clash and run dmc yes which now seems just like the most dully obvious mix you could ever do but yeah, yeah, at the time it was pretty go-ahead. It was, and they seemed pretty go-ahead at the time. I mean, there's an age difference between me and you. So, you know, to my mind, this was a relief.

It did seem like a can of Top Deck had been fizzed up and let off in the cocktail bar. I'll always be fond of the House Martins. Well, to be honest, that's sort of what I thought at the time. I just can't recapture that feeling when I see and hear yeah yeah yeah i'll tell you what though i'll tell you a story about why i quite like paul heaton right i like the fact that he does seem to be this slightly distant and sort of doer bloke you know and you're never quite 100 sure what his game is right um but that's all right i met him once and he was he was okay he said about six words in six hours but

he was all right this was in turku which is in finland right uh it's like a really ugly soviet looking town in really really beautiful surroundings of lakes and greenery and i was there to write about a pop festival that they were having there by the side of the lake um but of course there aren't many hotels in turku no so all the megastar acts like headliners bon jovi were sort of i guess flown in and out um and all the local acts would have made their own way but all the sort of middle groups like the british sort of mid-range acts and me, were all staying in the same hotel in the middle of Turkey. So I found myself in the bar drinking with the Boo Radleys and Paul Heaton

and someone else whose name and entire existence now escapes me. And he didn't say a lot he just basically only seemed interested in his pint and and the next one and the one after that um happy hour again well no such thing as happy hour in scandinavia though that means the pints are only 30 pounds yeah exactly but i understood the sort of militant anti-star thing a bit better after this night. Because what happened was we sat around drinking. And, of course, it's Finland in August. So it gets dark about 1 a.m.

And then it gets light again at 2 a.m. So we're still sat there like English idiots, you know, when the sun's back up. And we noticed there's still people milling around outside in the street because it's still night time. Yeah. And the night is still underway. So we decided to go out and go down to a drinking club down in the main street in Turku.

So we go outside and we go past this young bloke of about 21, sat in the curb with his feet in the road, eating chips out of a styrofoam tray and we go past and he stands up and he starts walking with us and it's like okay

where are you going? just down to a drinking club oh yeah can I come? so this lad's got like a red neckerchief with white polka dots and ankle length corduroys. And he comes over to me and he wipes the chip grease off his mouth. And he says, hey, are you Taylor Parks? No.

I'm like, yeah, I couldn't believe it. What? I'm in fucking Finland. I've just been recognized in the street at 2.30am. Fucking hell. In this blazing post-apocalyptic sunshine by a bloke in the gutter. I mean, I used to walk around London every day and every night and no fucking knew or cared who I was, you know. Nobody ever said he was that cool cat dressed like a 70s photographer.

Is that Taylor Parks? So I said to him yeah yeah you didn't have a leather jacket with your face on it and taylor park's written on the back did you no no no i didn't didn't dare take that one out of my wardrobe in case it got creased but no but i said to him uh yeah yeah yeah yeah well that bloke over there is single from the beautiful south and this is the singer from the Beautiful South. And this is the Boo Radley's, you know, thinking that might be a bit of a bigger deal if he was a sort of starstruck type.

And he sort of vaguely looks over and then he looks back and then he sort of shrugs. He goes, yes, I know. Now tell me about your Supergrass article. Whoa. It really wasn't comfortable. And literally like 30 seconds in in this guy says to me so look tell me i need to know this is paul lester a twat i said to him uh why uh why why do you think paul lester would be a twat. And he looked at me like I was an idiot, and he goes, his articles.

Now, look, it turned out that he was an okay bloke, although a boozy one. And I think he ended up crashing on the floor of my hotel room and, like, dropping the contents of the minibar into a towel and taking them away because tomorrow is a new day. What, this Finnish bloke or Paul Heaton oh the Finnish bloke all right but I mean yeah it's I think Paul Eaton may have done the same thing with his own minibar but the point is it demonstrated to me that being a star would be

really shit in lots of ways unless you're genuinely a preening narcissist. Because if this was happening every time I left the house or every time I changed trains at Camden Town, you know, this would have been a fucking nightmare. Especially when one finds that one's moods are not always entirely predictable. Can you imagine? You know, isn't it? Like, you're on your way somewhere. It's like, you know, tell me about this thing you said three years

ago yeah sorry you get me confused with alexa i don't i mean and the thing is if you say fuck off you're a baddie which yeah you know is you know you sort of would be because there's no need for that but it would happen oh yeah so every every other day you'd have been like bjork at the airport yeah yeah yeah so i don't question paul heaton for wearing an anorak and a face like the emoji someone might send you if they were telling you they had to drive to middlesbrough tomorrow um you know and having no visible personality because he got through that night in Turku saying 15 words and drinking 16 pints and then going back to beddy-byes, cosy and alone. I get it.

I get why he does that. It's not entertaining and it's not a great contribution to culture but I do get it. And is Paul Lester a twat? What makes you think he'd be a twat, Al? Because this Finnish bloke just said it. Well, I'm sure he's listening,

so maybe he wants to reach out on Twitter and he can tell you what I said. The House Martins. Are they the godfathers of Britpop? Because there is a definite lineage between this and the soft lad end of Britpop? Because there is a definite line nature between this and the soft lad end of Britpop, don't you think? Sort of, but I would say that the soft lad end of Britpop is too in love with glam, in a way,

or too in love with Bowie and that kind of side of things to truly just see this as an antecedent. I would say the godfathers of landfill because that i hear that same bounciness in bollocks like you know whatever they were called all those groups now i can remember what they were called you know what i mean and the libertines like let's not fucking forget what how much the libertines took from the house mines that dreadful fucking you know it's like the chord sequence from heat wave but played bouncing over and over again oh fuck it so the following week

happy hour dropped one place to number four and then spent another two weeks in the top 10 before sliding down in the meantime london nil hall 4 crashed into the LP chart at number 3, staying there for one week. The follow-up, Think for a Minute, get to number one for one week in December, being pipped for the Christmas number one by another Claymation video song, Reap Petite by Jackie Wilson. After an amicable split in 1988, Paul Heaton went on to form the Beautiful South, Norman Cook formed Beats International before mutating into Fatboy Slim. Stan Collymore opened a Whole Foods shopping hall

before becoming a children's book writer and journalist. And Hugh Whittaker went on to be the drummer in extremely late period, Freddie and the Dreamers. By the way, did I ever mention the long-running argument I had with my mum about um rainbow no oh yeah always used to argue with my mum about rainbow um we were discussing what the creatures were yeah yeah obviously george is a hippo even though he's not a pig bungles obviously a bear

she was convinced zippy um was a turtle we used you have this endless argument i just just adamant zippy is a zippy yeah yeah it's just a creature called zippy he's not he doesn't have any real natural analog but yeah no she always used to argue with me about that yeah he doesn't seem to fit any sort of real life branch of fauna but i i remember having the same conversation with someone at school and they got really weirdly furious about it like they seemed really he's a fucking worm

I don't think he's a worm he's a fucking worm no he's just epic. 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. Richard and Pearl Gonna make your lives better today

If you'll subscribe to our podcast. You know, it's all about how to get the most out of your partner. And we're partners. So we know all about it. It's good. Get it wherever you want to get it. When you go and get it from your podcast place. Richard and Greta.

You know. You know. please Richard and Greta you know you know House Martins 4 at top of the pops nil they are house heroes check out the album it's also at number 3

here's Gary Newman and I can't stop Janice finally in shot I'll be fighting for some time now Janice, finally in shot, wearing a barely-hanging-on-the-shoulder brown dress and festooned with bangles and earrings, capping off a look that can only be described as Romany Harvester's serving wench, is dead excited that the House Martins are in the studio and tells us that their lp is also at

number three before grabbing us by the wrist and irish whipping us into the next act i can't stop by gary newman we've covered the new many a time and off most recently in chart music number 52 where he teamed up with bill Sharp and took Change Your Mind to number 17 in March of 1985. Since then he's put out the LP The Fiore on his own label Numa Records along with four singles and a live EP which landed in the 30s and 40s. This is the second single from his eighth LP, Strange Charm, which is due out in November. It's the follow-up to This Is Love, which got to number 28 in April of this year.

It entered the chart last week at number 32, and this week it's jumped five places to number 27. And here's the video, which divides its time between a nightclub set in Shepperton Studios and above the Duxford Aerodrome in Cambridgeshire, where Gary zooms about in his T6 Harvard single, Seater Plane, like a replicant Mr. Sheen.

Fucking hell, chaps. It's Gary Newman again, and again, and again. It's Gary Newman again and again and again. It's Gary Newman again. We have seen him at every stage, haven't we, really? Yes. Newman.

Here in the time of his career, I'm guessing. He knows he's only peddling to his fans now. I don't think there's any ambition to reach any further beyond the pneumonoids at this point. Well, Neil, he's been in the news this month for pulling a status quo before status quo ever thought of it. From John Blake's white hot club in the Daily Mirror is this article. Beeb snub is putting me in the red,

says angry Gary Newman. Gary Newman, the singer who became a millionaire from all those smash hits like Cars and Our Friends Electric, tells me he is facing hard times. The reason, he says, is the lack of playing time given to his records by Radio 1 bosses. I am a very disappointed, bitter and worried man, Gary said,

at the offices of his companies Rock City and Numa Records. Gary has mortgaged his quarter of a million home to keep his companies afloat and put off his wedding plans because his future is so uncertain. Gone too is his gleaming Ferrari. Gary has released five records in the last year. The last two reached number 28 released five records in the last year. The last two reached number 28 and number 27 in the charts and then suddenly dropped out. This was because Radio 1 gave them practically no airtime, he says.

The last two got a total of three plays, despite being in the top 30. I think the problem is that I don't wine and dine people for favors like heads of bigger record companies i thought he was going to say i think the problem is i don't whine i was going to say no you really really do gary both on and off record by the a bbc spokesman denied a ban on Gary's records. We have pointed out to Mr Newman's company that our playlist is not just a mindless rotation

of what is in the charts. It is more to encourage good music. Oh, me. Oh, BBC. But the BBC have given him a big plug here on this video Well too right and he's only in at 27 for fuck's sake I don't know what he's moaning about

I mean yeah What does he want? Like you say the reason his singles of 85 and 86 haven't been played much is because they're fucking rubbish like this one But the video's a bit odd I mean there's a lot of the Newman is playing and you wonder what he's up to

and what he's looking out for He's either looking for traitorous scum who should be shot for not being excited about the forthcoming royal wedding as we learn from that smash hits piece in chart music number 24 or maybe he's looking for where he fits in the landscape of 1986 well in 1986 i was still so tuned in to 1986 that I actually remember this. But I also remember it being almost the peak of his irrelevance. You know what I mean?

Like, just dressed as a waiter and looking uncertain. It's like he's going to a dinner dance in Mad Max. Yeah, part-time waiter, full-time conspiracy theorist. Yeah, and he's still got that old-fashioned hair transplant problem where you got coverage but no body so it's thin and scraped sideways really flat on the top and really thick at the sides and he can't fix it because in 1986 no one had their hair shaved up the sides except gay men and the house martins. So he's stuck with his oblong hair like Wogan.

Yes. And that parting is such sweet sorrow. And it's not very good, this record or this video, but if you can't be good, be entertaining. And it at least comes close to being entertaining, this video but no if you can't be good be entertaining and yeah it at least comes close to being entertaining this video yes i've said this before whenever we do one of these i always watch the episode once when i'm completely out of my head because you get a different perspective right and on that viewing i was almost up on my feet applauding this video. Because it's so weird and uncomfortable, especially for what is meant to be a fairly simple performance video,

you know, spiced up with a bit of aviation footage and a glamorous lady. But the actual sort of lurid, abnormal reality of it is fucking horrible. And great. For a start is group like have you has there ever been a more ragged band these fucking jokers it doesn't look like it's real what it looks like you know when you used to have a like a shit comedy show and they were doing a spoof of some singer and they'd dress someone up quite carefully as the singer but for the band they just have a few blokes standing around in the background you know yeah they're not spent any time or effort they just chuck them some sort of wrong

vaguely rock starish clothes and guitar they never look like a real band um and that's what this is like it's like his real band didn't turn up so he's got he's got serving suggestion yeah yeah or just like you know the lighting crew or something but but instead of skulking around in the background being ignored he's got them right up front with him like brightly lit and sharing the spotlight and for those of us with a certain sense of humour, this is fantastic news because you've got that fucking Mr Spooner on lead guitar in a PVC trench coat that looks like a tarp flapping off the back of an 18-wheeler

halfway up the M6. It doesn't fit him at all. And he's got it over what looks like his office clothes. And just in case any trace of rock and roll glamour might have stuck to him by accident like from a previous job or something he's got a cocktail umbrella stuck in the headstock of his guitar the way rock and rollers have a fag thrown straight out of the fucking audition for Sparks for that. Yeah, it's like, which just further undermines his owner's attempt to snarl convincingly, you know.

Why did Gary Luman allow that? It's hard to tell. If you were a lead singer in a band and your guitarist did that, you'd be fucking well disheveled. What are you doing? Yeah, and of course, the love interest is a is a bit of an eye opener as well it's this woman of the 80s with a sort of shapeless teased out brian may hair you know which is like the mid-80s signifier of raunch and wild spirit which actually is bizarrely desexualizing and unflattering and it was

endemic at the time that sort of bird's nest haircut you know for all yeah supposedly sexy ladies if you were supposed to be a sexy lady you had that it was like there was some variation of that on every glamour model and and like porn performer and like rock and roll vixen and all that sort of stuff yeah and it pissed all over my teenage hormones. This is partly why I was getting such little action, because the girls I fancied all had normal hair. And those were like the good girls who were not prepared to ruin themselves for my enjoyment. And all the girls who were more broad-minded and accommodating all had that haircut so i didn't

fancy them any more than they fancied me um but it's it's a very effective cut for neutralizing human attractiveness you know like stevie nicks went from the personification of the californian ideal to debbie from accounts in the space of an hour just from getting that haircut in 1980 you know it's so what we got here is this mysterious naughty lady um who's like you know sort of gary's uh sexy uh painting on the side of his van or you know oh i'd like to kiss her yeah yeah or like the like the the what's what they call it on the front of his ship you know yes and she's like obviously like good looking woman raven haired you know dressed in a low-cut skin-tight pvc outfit and she's advancing on the camera with heavily made-up eyes, you know, a slinking and a winking.

But because of this fucking ridiculous Charles I hair, like, cervit and topiary, the only thing that this suggestive performance actually suggests is 1986 could be the least sexy non-plagiar in British history. Yes. You know, it's like you're meant to see it and go, whoa, you know, but in fact, you're just thinking, you know, you go back to the Queen Vic.

Yeah. Yeah, no one lied to Fag. Yes, yeah. And it's set in a cocktail bar kind of thing. Yeah, yeah. You just think, what cocktail bar would have Gary Newman and his band playing? And there's no one there. That's the thing.

The worst thing. Because I've seen it. It's like, oh, fucking Gary Newman's playing. Fuck that. Let's go to the new fun pub down the road. They've got a bucking bronco machine. There's a couple of people around the corner who aren't watching the group.

But the only one who's standing there watching the group is sexy Isaac Newton, which becomes even more embarrassing when she gets up and starts dancing because if there's one thing worse than playing a gig to one person who's sat down listening, it's playing a gig to one person who's up and dancing because it looks like they're trying to give you moral support rather than enjoying the music it's like a pity frog you know yeah or the the drummer's the boyfriend yeah yeah yeah what cocktail is she drinking i bet it's taboo that's classier than malibu isn't it well it mess, isn't it, this video? Because I don't think Gary knows what he wants to sound like, in a way.

His voice is still the same as on those early 80s records. But, I mean, the fact that he's got a guitar on him suggests to me that he's trying to take it back to Tubeway Army. Perhaps. There's a lot of that. But it's 1986. But there's a lot of this stuff in 1986. This band of elderly rockers that Taylor's talked about, what they play is this kind of horrific melange

of leather and lace-style pointy headstocked jippage and this kind of nondescript US version of dance music. And, you know, it doesn't help that the aerial cutaways, to him presumably crop spraying or something, I don't know what he's doing. He's like Tali Savalas in Capricorn One. And I couldn't help thinking, is that the same field that, you know,

Rene heartbreakingly waves goodbye to her night? In his slashingy shorts. They look very, very similar. But that leather and lace thing, I mean... And she's out there, she's followed him and she's sitting on a car and the plane goes overhead fucks her hairstyle

she looks much better afterwards as well perhaps what the crop spray is is fucking harmony it's the only way to administer sufficient quantities there's so much of this skin tight PVC type stuff of this time. And if as a pubescent child, you know,

you watched Top of the Pots through the 80s and didn't come out with a faint interest in BDSM behaviours, you probably weren't watching hard enough. There was a hell of a lot of this leather and lace stuff at this period. But I don't know what he's made about it. Number 27. Clearly, he's only on here. It's a record.

I mean, it's his own record company, but I think he's put a word into one of his fellow aeronauts, Mike Smith, maybe, to get this on top of the box. Yes. Or Edmonds. Yeah, maybe. Well, this song is obviously meant to sound like something off lodger or scary monsters you know what i mean it's that in that but except that it misses the point because

it's all straight lines and everyone playing exactly what you'd expect them to play which is kind of the opposite of what happens on those albums which is why those albums are really good and this is shit um but i sort of almost like it just because it's so awkward and peculiar and the whole thing is so exquisitely uncool you know and unselfaware again it's another single that's completely out of place on top of the pops in 1986. Yeah, yeah. What it is, is that at this point, he's like one of those loonies who used to put out their own records. You know what I mean? I mean, literally, that's what he is.

Like one of those lone nuts who puts all his records out himself because no record company would touch them, you know. But a lot of those records are obviously terrible, but when you hear them, they're sometimes intriguingly weird, you know? And you're not 100% sure what you've walked into. Like Joah Valley, if you've ever heard that.

It's this bloke from I don't know when who did this amazing album of Beatles covers with him singing in this nasty operatic warble over the top. Oh, yes. It has to be heard to be believed everyone should hear it once but that's what newman reminds me of at this stage he's just doing his thing from just out in the country somewhere you know and he's like this weird outsider cast out from our world and lost in his own you know and he's but the trouble is he's too boringly competent to stumble on greatness by mistake but he's much too shit to be conventionally good so it's all lost in no

man's land you know i mean but at least this song and video combination are amusing and uncomfortable, which is two things which in pop music can be adequate substitutes for the genuinely lively or provocative. So, you know, I'll take it for now. It does touch back on what we were talking about earlier, about 1986, and that, you know, pop is going to move on, but it can't lose its past yet.

It seems to keep looking back just to the recent past of the early 80s and it can't move on to these new figureheads that were coming yet. So we do get this, and as we'll see later on in the episode, this 1986 episode finds it very difficult to sort of shed the ghosts of the early 80s.

Because, I mean, by the end of 1986, Human League, Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, they're all going to come roaring back, or at least trying to roar back.

Yeah. But it does feel like they can't stop. I mean, I'm not saying the Pet Shop Boys and Eurasia were massively new, but they at least felt like

sort of the next generation, if you like. You know, back then, most of us sort of assumed our pop stars would come and go within five years and fuck off and disappear because that's what we were used to,

that quick turnover. But these people were still hanging on, still hanging on. So the following week, I Can't Stop dropped one place to number 28 and then nosedived out of the charts. His next single, New in london town another collaboration with the keyboard player artist shack attack with a shiny red arse only got to

number 52 in october and bar a couple of re-releases of cars he'd have to wait 16 years before his next top 40 place in when rip got to number 29 in July of 2002. I can't stop you. I can't stop you. And as Gary Newman soars off into the distance, we're going to close the book on this part of chart music number 59. Don't forget, pop-crazed youngsters, if you want the whole episode in one go with no adverts,

with no fannying about or waiting for the next part to drop, you know what you've got to do. You've got to take them fingers, you've got to put them on the keyboard, you've got to tap out patreon.com slash chart music, and you pledge whatever you like. Sermon over at last. My name's Al Needham. On behalf

of Neil Kulcani and Taylor Parks, I implore you to stay pop-crazed. Shark music. GreatBigOwl.com Hello, I'm Chris England, and I'm here to tell you about the Fun Factory podcast, available now on Great Big Owl.

Each time, I will be reading a couple of chapters of my novel, The Fun Factory, a historical comedy about the history of comedy. So it will kind of be like a free audiobook, which you can listen to at the gym, or jogging, or at your desk while pretending to do your job, or on the train, without the embarrassment of people seeing you actually reading a book like some kind of SWAT.