Chart Music: the Top Of The Pops Podcast - #60 (Part 1): 7.4.1983 – We Need To Talk About Kevin Rowland

Episode Date: July 11, 2021

Jesus and Buzz – Simon Price and Neil Kulkarni, respectively – help Al Needham lay the table for an absolute slap-up feast of Pop as we get ready to watch a glorious episode of The Pops from 1983, stopping along the way to leaf through that week’s NME and talk about wrong haircuts, juvenile delinquency in Barry, and the Action Man Massacre of 1983…Video Playlist | Subscribe | Facebook | Twitter | The Chart Music Wiki | Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 to listen to? Um... Chart music. Chart Um... Chart music. Chart music. Hey up, you pop-craze youngsters,

and welcome to the latest episode of Chart Music, the podcast that gets its hands right down the back of the settee on a random episode of Top of the Pops. I'm your host Al Needham and with me today are Neil Kulkarni and Simon Price. Hello, hello. Fucking hell, Jesus and Buzz are in the house, everyone. You do sound like a very shaking Cheech and Chong. Thanks, mate. Anyway, boys, lay some of that popping interesting stuff on this arse right here now, please.

Well, finally, we can announce to the Pop Craze youngsters,, relax listeners, he's married, because I got married. Sorry boys, he's married. Yeah, you may remember, long-term listeners remember that I got engaged during lockdown one, and at that point, the date that we'd set, which was the 10th of April this year, seemed a long, long way off, and we thought, oh everything will be fine, the world be back to normal by then yeah well was it fuck you know so um the thing is we've been through so many phases of kind of the tier system and sort of gradual unlocking and relocking that it's almost hard to remember what happened when but yeah um april the 10th was in this weird little in-between phase where weddings were allowed

um for six people but you weren't allowed to i mean there weren't even any pubs open um you couldn't have a reception or anything like that the venue had to be outdoors which narrows it down considerably luckily for us uh we had booked the bandstand uh on uh brighton beach nice yeah so that that sort of made it fairly immune to some of the restrictions it was just like every day we were sort of refreshing the bbc website to see what fucking new regulations they brought in and and also the weather because um if it rained the registrar wouldn't do it because their book gets wet you know literally seriously that's it yeah you know because they've

got this this precious book that's got everybody else's wedding signatures in it. And they can't have it getting pissed on. So I downloaded every fucking app. The Met Office and the BBC and Dark Skies and all that kind of stuff. All of which contradicted each other. I became absolutely obsessed with the weather from 14 days out, just counting down to it. But on the day, it was fine. It was actually fucking freezing. But it didn't rain. We were only allowed six um on the day it was it was fine it was actually fucking freezing but um it

didn't rain we were only allowed six people on the bandstand but we kind of got around that with the help of the very kind people at um brighton home council so essentially what happened was separate groups of our friends and family in groups of no no larger than six just happened to be walking along the promenade at the appointed hour nice and they just happened to sort of dally and linger by the railings to watch what was going on and then afterwards um down on the on the sort of beach bit itself they just so happened to share some massive cooler boxes full of champagne that somebody had happily brought yeah yeah yeah so and it was all cool we weren't being assholes about it we weren't breaking the

rules maybe we're bending the rules slightly but there were covid marshals there and um they were all cool with what you know what we were up to the maddest thing was um janie's mum my wife janie's mum um brought a fucking really loud powerful pa speaker on a trolley because she's one of these people who's really extra about everything um which sometimes works out for the best, you know. So she brought it along mainly so that we could have music playing when the bride walks in and walks out and when we're signing the register and all that kind of stuff. And so we could do our speeches.

We actually set it up down on the beach so we could sort of do some speeches. We weren't being noise nuisances, partly because it was too cold for there to be anyone to nuisance. And we had a first dance which really felt like a bit of a moment because yeah it was my girl by the temptations and first of all it's just me and janie a song means quite a lot to us because when we went to studio a in detroit in hitsville usa that's the song that they get you singing in the actual studio on the tour and then on that that holiday, Janie got,

I got sunshine on a cloudy day, tattooed on her arm. So it's got meaning for us. So we danced to it. But then, you know, after verse one or chorus one or whatever, everyone else who'd come down to see us joined in. And it was the first time that anyone had done any kind of dancing to amplified music for months and months. And it just felt like a real...

Oh, the first front yeah yeah it was a bit of a spine tingling moment i know i'm biased it's my wedding i'm obviously going to feel sentimental about that but just to see all my friends everyone's smiling and having to sing and yeah and then then after that um i stuck on a spotify playlist that i made earlier called all night long 80s groove um nice that's all night long the mary jane uh girls by the way not um lionel richie of course uh and yeah just having a little dance on the beach obviously distanced and all that correctly but um to you know loves in control finger on the trigger by donna summers the one i really remember and let the music play by shannon

and single life by Cameo, ironically, and stuff like that. So, yeah, we had to make the decision to sort of separate the wedding ceremony from a reception. We couldn't have a reception. We'll be having a big party later in the year when, if and when, they're calling it Freedom Day, aren't they, in the press? And if that ever actually comes, I'm kind of sceptical about it. Did a seagull nick your cake?

The whole fucking cake in its beak. The maddest thing that happened was there was this guy, he was one of the sort of seafront, I don't know what they call them, just sort of like, not exactly a lifeguard, but these guys would patrol him down the beach in their council uniforms. He had this quad bike and he suddenly comes, it's in the middle of my mother-in-law doing a speech.

This quad bike, this guy in it suddenly comes past with, you know, those inflatable resuscitante doors to teach you how to resuscitate people. One of those just sat on the back, like sort of spread eagles. And it was just, I mean, what a way to have your speech upstage. It's kind of amazing. Oh, well, congratulations, Simon. On behalf of the whole Pulp Craze universe.

Yeah, bless you all. Oh, I saw the photos. They were so magical, man. I mean, it is a difficult thing, this stuff. But not getting married, I mean, in the midst of lockdown. But it looked like a beautiful day. If it had come, like, three days later, we could have all gone at least to an outdoor, you know,

to a beer garden of a pub but there wasn't even that option but obviously we couldn't go on honeymoon so we had what we called a homey moon which was basically just we went on a bit of a week-long rampage around brighton and sitting outside various favorite pubs and restaurants but it was fucking freezing and we just we did that british thing of putting a brave face on it so like everywhere we went we took a bag for life with blankets hot water bottles and these magical stick-on heat pads that you know you put them on your skin and somehow there's some kind of chemical reaction happens and it heats you up so we sat outside having lovely italian meals and stuff like that trying not to shiver yes this is lovely isn't it chatter chatter chatter you know

it does feel like i'm not of course nothing will ever be the same again we're not going to return to normal as such but it has been nice thinking about what simon was just saying getting back to pubs and and actually the thing that i missed the most and that i've really enjoyed in recent weeks was sitting in a pub i'm not an anti-masker but it was nice sitting with friends without a mask on. But more importantly, doing something I've not done, I mean, probably well before COVID, going to the bar, getting a tenner changed into quid coins

and pumping the jukebox and playing it. Oh, it's such a good feeling. And so, you know, that thing that nature is healing, it does feel like it's coming back a little bit. Yeah, yeah. What'd you put on? Oh, man, it's feel like it's coming back a little bit. Yeah, yeah. What'd you put on? Oh, man. It's a really good jukebox.

And I kind of resent modern jukeboxes for the dazzling kind of panoply of choice they offer you. Because I think part of the joy of jukeboxes is finding the good shit in amidst loads of terrible stuff. You know, I remember one of my favourite pubs growing up, you know, it had a load of crap on it but also do the strand by roxy music on it and that was the tune you went for you know um whereas now they just kind of give you everything you want i was in a bit of a glam rock mode that night so it's

all new york dolls and sparks and roxy and bowie a bit of acdc as well but just being able to do that and being able to bother other people with what I wanted to listen to was just a really, really nice feeling. Because my teaching, which was previously bossing my week, has entirely dropped off now, I find myself at the moment kind of remembering I'm a human being and not just a walking schedule, which means kind of boredom, which is great, as well as the kind of anger that's engendered by social media. You know, 10 minutes on Twitter and you're going to be furious aren't you so that kind of dangerous

combination i've inevitably been writing about a few things just off my own bat really not commissions and after an article i posted a few weeks back re overrated albums yeah i encountered a little of what pricey encountered last time we we were all together um when talking about his tweet about oasis i cobbled together a few old facebook posts about overrated albums of a morning posted them as a medium story about the 10 most overrated albums ever posted it fucked off and then i came back to it not a comparable shit storm to the one that's got but it was i was particularly delighted that it was shared among various indie rock um social media groups like radio sex and just how much it pissed people off um does anybody tell you that

you're just an old man trying to make a name for himself yes all of that stay relevant cool carnet nah this is it yeah it was all that it was all um you know oh this is a very angry man desperately wants to be cool he listens to bands you've never heard of um i mean i sort of prefer the people who just come out and just say what a cunt you know just this is an atrocious piece of writing but yeah there was a lot of that i mean it it's weird because you know if somebody calls me a silly man or my writing style is painful or just calls me an absolute cunt i can kind of deal with it what's shocking to me is the shock that people have i know we talked about this last time but this shock that people have and how unprepared for kind of piss

takey writing um you know music fans aren't i, we were all raised on it with the music press. But, you know, I remember Simon Reynolds hiring me, Pricey and Taylor to write for Spin magazine way back when. And American readers just being incapable of coping with it, even the mildest kind of piss-taking about serious bands. I think that habit's kind of, you know, sunk in here too. And it's really dangerous. Yeah, it gets worse, doesn't it?

Yeah. Because it's like, I remember when I used to read the NME and that in the early 80s and people like Bieber Cop used to slag off the jam. And I fucking hated him and I refused to read anything by him because he didn't like the music I liked. And that's fucking thick. I grew out of that pretty quickly. Well, I mean, part of me,

when I start arguing about this stuff with these people, part of me thinks, we're just talking different languages now, you know. It's dangerous for me, this idea that the job of critique is just to cheerlead. Yeah. So when you write anything critical, somebody has to ask you, you know,

why are you so angry? Yeah. You know, really revealing their own kind of infantile, infuriated incapability of reading opinions that they disagree with and you also get dismissed as well as writing for clicks trying to make a name for yourself but if critique is doing little more than conferring approval of choices and helping with filing and confirming the canon or regurgitating or you know sort of pr or lubricating commerce it's a pretty shit lookout. And the idea that anything other than cultural cheerleading...

I mean, another thing I've been called is edgelord. Whoa! You know, because you're an edgelord, you're attention-seeking. It's an incredibly dangerous idea that, you know, if you apply the same logic to non-music journalism, if you like, non-cultural journalism and see how that works. Oh, you're criticising the government. You've got a problem.

What was gratifying about all of this is that whenever I read anyone calling me a cunt or saying, you know, you're an old man or any of that, I would consider it a dereliction of duty, really, if I didn't fucking annoy these people. What annoyed me the most was being compared to that racist transphobic bitch julie birchall yeah um oh really i'm not having that man no she's a fucking a truck i mean as has been revealed our whenever you've read out birchall reviews or parsons reviews um from old enemies they were two of the worst music writers ever yeah and what's been gratifying actually

whenever i've posted about Birchall, actually, is hearing people who were there, like, you know, John Savage, tell me that he hated them from the off. And, you know, Caroline Coon and writers that I do respect from the enemy of that period hated them from the off as well. So, yeah, not exactly pop and interesting, but mainly I've been winding up precisely the people

I've been wanting to wind up. I suspect this will increasingly happen over summer. I have very little else to do. Music journalism nowadays is essentially applauding people for reaching a standard. Yeah, yeah. It's like saying, you know, if, I don't know, if England get absolutely fucking battered in the Euros, we're supposed to applaud them anyway for the proficiency of their getting hammered.

Yeah, for the effort. At least they're trying. Fucking're trying fucking thick i mean yeah these people are just fucking thick they're not used to music writing like that but more importantly i just think that the line between pr and journalism has been blurred for so long now that it's a category error it's the same reason that young prs ask me for copy approval they just don't understand the process and to them these things are equivalent so you know that part of me gets really furious about this stuff part of me just thinks we're talking different languages yeah there's a whole generation of people who just cannot understand critique or or anything being criticized basically because for years and years and years now and this is something i spotted even in the magazines that i write for you know editors don't send you stuff that they think you're going to

slag off they put writers together with albums that they'll like yeah because nobody wants to piss off the pr man nobody wants to piss off the record company or in any way imperil that relationship so consequently you know there's going to be less and less true criticism being printed and every time you do print anything or publish anything self-publish anything you're going to get this oh you know what are you doing this is not the point it blows their minds just doesn't compute does it they don't know what the fuck you're doing it is yeah and and it staggers me because the reaction i mean as pricey was saying about the oasis tweet that he did i mean fucking hell they need to listen to chart music, don't they?

Because, yeah, this stuff is still happening, but these people are massively untutored in it, whereas all of us, of course, are raised on this kind of stuff. I went to the pub for the first time this week, and, yeah, it was fucking mint. I was asked at very short notice to do a pub quiz at one of my regular places. I was more than happy to do that

and even more than happy to um get loads of free drink down my neck it was fucking amazing really enjoyed it pulled out all the stops i did the picture round one of my favorites is uh name name the title of the gay porn dvd yeah yeah where i blank out some words with asterisks and you're invited to fill in the blanks. I fucking love that round. There's a table full of brick shithouses earnestly discussing what the sexual practice is.

Amazing. There was one bloke who just suddenly turned round to his mate and shouted, it smashed my fucking hole, okay? So yeah, I like that. I feel I'm achieving something in life when i've done that these drinks right that you're having in the pub were they bought to you did you just sit there and these drinks i sat at the bar and um they i see yeah it was all table service and that but

yeah because you know table service i i know it's a pain in the ass for bar staff but i quite like it i'm not sure i'm missing much the standing at the bar with loads of people waiting no if that doesn't come back i'm not that fussed yeah but yeah sitting in a pub with a pint in your hand it's just fucking glorious lovely it's frightening is it because i'm i'm very arsey about people banging on about fucking freedom day i mean as far as i can recall special aka didn't sing 21 years in captivity, gagging for a pint in a carvery, but I did get that.

Oh yeah, this is nice. Nature actually is healing a bit and I'm getting absolutely fucking K lied. So yeah, I mean, I feel rough as assholes the day after and still I'm now started smoking again, like a twat. Cause I've been a bit stressed out about a thing or two. So if I'm a bit throaty today, that's why.

So don't worry about me. I ain't got COVID. Touch every single bit of wood in the house. It's kind of sexy, Al. Don't worry about it. Yeah. Got a big Sports Direct mug full of honey and lemon and ginger. There really should have been a lad rock band called Sports Direct mug.

Yes. There's still time. Anyway anyway let us move on and let us do as we always do at this time in the episode bowing the knee and if you fucking boo me for doing this you can fuck off to all the pop craze patreons who've come and joined us this month and this this month, those people are in the $5 section, Jane Webber, Wang Chung-Lung, Alex Batt, Michael Grogan, Tony, Philip, Ming Hawke, Paul Devlin, Connor Brennan, Gavin Hogg, John Rafferty, Emily Grant, Jim Clear and Justin Doddsworth. Thank you, babies. Legends alive. Cheers.

Thank you so much. And in the $3 section, we have Antner, Old Paul, Paul O'Donnell, Michael Avery and Stephen May. Oh, and Darren Lamb you get a special shake of the arse for putting your donation up and beyond and over and away and of course one of the things

that those pop craze patreons got to do this month is tinkering a tanker and fiddling a faddle with the latest chart music top 10 shall we boys yes please hit the fucking music we've said goodbye to barry the sexy lion christopher lilliput and mario cunt which means one up four down two non-movers and three new entries. No move at number 10 for Taylor Parks' 20 romantic moments. Down one place from number 8 to number 9, it's CFAX Data Blast.

Last week's number 2 dropped six places to number eight, Nolan Tentacle Porn. A former number one now down four places to number seven, Jesus Price. And down two places from number four to number six, I'm not even going to try and attempt it, Rock Expert David Stubbs. Places from number four to number six. I'm not even going to try and attempt it. Rock expert David Stubbs.

Into the top five and up from seven to five is Bomber Dog. A new entry at number four. Here comes Jizzum. Whoa. Back. Into the top three And straight in at number three Tandori Elephant Get in

The highest new entry this week Straight in at number two Fucks Biz Which means Britain's number one They're still there Riding high at the top of the chart music top ten. The bent cunts who aren't fucking real.

Oh, what a chart. What a chart. To be honest with you, I was expecting that to stay at number one, but I'm gladdened in the heart to hear that Here Comes Jizzum is back. Yeah. Back where it belongs, to be honest with you. I was shocked by it leaving the top ten. Yeah. I'm fascinated by the kind of ups and downs of these things you know has it somehow gone viral you know was here comes jism used on on a video game is it is it now a meme you know

has it been used in a hollywood blockbuster in the last month or so just to sort of push it back up there tandoori elephant though hell. In with a bullet. Obvious early 70s rock behemoth. Yeah, Australian, I think, with a touch of psychedelia about them, definitely. Yeah. Heavy psych. I think I used to play one of their tunes on Sitar Hero.

And, you know, it's about time that fucksbiz were admitted to the chart music top ten. It's been too long for them. So, if you've been holding back on us so far pop craze youngsters now is the time to support chart music get them fingers throw them at your keyboard mash out patreon.com slash chart music and pad out this here g string just remember you make chart music what it is so it's all your fault anyway this episode pop craze youngsters takes us all the way back to april the 7th 1983 and chaps i don't know about you but after doing that seven hour behemoth on the 1983 christmas

special last december my interest was peaked in 1983 and i was really up for reinvestigating what i'd previously seen as quite a fallow year for pop music yeah it's traditionally i mean including in chart music 83 is seen as a slight falling off from the high points of 81 and 82. Yeah. Although that never quite matched up with my memories of 83 because I remembered 83 always being a great year for singles.

I suspect 83 starts looking like a fall off when you think about albums. But as this episode proves, I think, it's a cracking year for singles. Yeah. 83, it's not a bad year at all. Yeah. I believe that my snuffling

about the crotch of 1983 has unearthed a particularly choice episode i mean spoiler alert pop craze youngsters if you've come here for some coat downs i think you're going to be massively disappointed because there's very little in the way of cat shit in this one is there in fact i would go as far to say that, pound for pound, this might well be one of the best episodes of Top of the Pops we've ever covered. If not the best, fuck it, I'm going to say it. I'm going to put it out there. It's right up there.

It's got a consistently high level, I would say. You know, not much filler. Yeah, it has got a high level. I mean, the question is, are the high points of 83 as good as the high points of 82 and 81 i'm not entirely convinced they are but there's a couple of real fucking corkers in this episode yes and there's no for me there's not a moment in this episode which i associate normally with top of the pops of you know where your soul just sinks because something really awful comes on i haven't quite got one of those moments with this episode right no and i just think in general 83 is a year that feels kind of comfortable in its own skin it feels like the 80s

have kind of found found their groove you know and things haven't started going wrong yet it's definitely not the aventies we're definitely in the 80s now oh we're in the 80s now in fact you probably got the stats at your fingertips out how often have we revisited 1983 so far on chart music uh twice before only twice the christmas episode and the one with long hot weller in it i guess i'm conflating it with 82 a little bit but this kind of era does feel like there's a certain familiarity and comfort in going back there it's a bit like going to visit a favorite cousin or beloved aunt yes um there's there's that thing you know you don't live there but when you're when you get there you think i know my way around yes yeah i'm happy here um yeah i'm very much in sort of my comfort zone in

a comfortable element in 83. There's nothing about it that makes me feel uneasy. I know the year inside out. I know how it works. I mean, when I watched this for the first time after 38 years, I can't deny I was Hadley fisting it all the way through. Almost all the way through, anyway. Because it was just like, number one,

oh, fucking hell, there's lots to talk about in this episode. You know, I have my chart music head on, obviously. But the other part of me was just going, fucking yes! Do you remember watching it at the time? I was like, Beavis and Butthead, yes! Because I actually do recall watching this episode at the time, which isn't always the case with these, but I do remember this one. It really put me in a time and place watching this episode.

And, you know, it got me thinking, is there such a thing somewhere out there as the perfect Top of the Pops episode? Because, I mean, let me say right now, this one isn't. There's one song in particular that would have enraged the pop-crazed youngsters of the time. But, you know, this one comes very, very close to ringing all the bells for me. It does, time but you know this one comes very very close to ringing all the bells for me it does but you know as ever i mean it's a good episode but of course

the inevitable habit is to look at the chart and what could have been on yeah and it could have even been improved the bully factor if you will is what you could have won but of course the question is is a perfect episode of Top of Pops one where you like everything on it? Or is part of the essential nature of Top of the Pops that there is at least one tune that gives you a chance to flex your hatred? A little bit of hate watch, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I think to me, the perfect Top of the Pops combines the two perhaps, rather than it just being a kind of a load of great records. But as ever, you look at the chart and you look at the episode and there's there's plenty in the chart that you just think oh that would have been fucking amazing and just on the outskirts of the top 40 as well there's a lot of fucking yeah there's the proper waiting to enter yeah yeah i had a little look at that there's some great stuff yeah i mean there's an example on this episode of a single that I fucking hated,

but a performance I loved then, and even more so now. But, you know, let's not get ahead of ourselves. But let's get stuck in! Hello there! Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Quickly, quickly, we haven't got long. Please listen to the all-new Angel of Sandberry podcast. It's a funny one.

Oh, my God, it's hilarious. There's so much muck in it. Radio One News. In the news, depending on who you talk to, the police or the organisers, between 40,000 and 70,000 people attempt to form a human chain around the Greenham Common Air Base. An Irish radio station received an anonymous phone call from someone with a middle-class English accent, claiming that if a 1.5 million ransom wasn't paid by the next morning, the head of Shergar, the 1981 Derby winner who had been kidnapped two months ago, would be left at the Phoenix Park race course in Dublin. The National Union of Teachers conference in Jersey

is dominated by a move by the Gay Teachers Group and the Socialist Alliance of Teachers to stock books on homosexuality in school libraries and put over the message that homosexuality is normal. NUT General Secretary Fred Jarvis says they would support any of their members if they were prejudiced against due to their sexual orientation, while pointing out that the union wouldn't legally support gay members if they were arrested in Jersey, where homosexuality is still illegal and would be until 1990.

What a fucking place to hold the conference. It's mad that. £7 million in banknotes have been stolen from a security company in Shoreditch after a raid involving Ronnie Knight, who is currently Mr Barbara Windsor. He's eventually jailed for seven years for his involvement in 1995.

While the argument over shirt advertising in televised football games drags on, a video company called Telejecta has offered the Football League £8 million for the right to show live games in pubs on Monday nights, leading MPs to demand that the government lean on the BBC and ITV to end their shirt ad ban. TVAM, which is only drawing 400,000 viewers compared to BBC Breakfast Times' 1.8 million, have announced David Frost's replacement as the host of Good Morning Britain. It's their sports correspondent, Nick Owen,

who is relocating permanently to Camden Lock from Central East Midlands and will soon drag his co-host Ann Diamond with him. Elton John, who has recently announced that he hopes to withdraw from his music career and become a film actor, has been photographed stripping down to his pants in a party in Tunisia. One onlooker said, It was very artistic. He had great style. Everyone enjoyed it. But the big news this week is that the Style Council were caught in the act

setting up their gear for an impromptu gig outside the Berlin Wall and told to get back in the van by West German border guards. They went on to be denied entry into East Berlin, where they were due to play for East German punks. The wall, sadly, did not come tumbling down. Oh, Paul. I love them for their kind of engagement with the communist world, the Style Council.

They were really into it weren't they they went over to Poland didn't they later on to record the video Four Walls Come Tumbling Down and you know they really wanted to sort of dialogue with the eastern bloc and I really appreciated that where all the kids are going this isn't Elton John what the fuck's going on

they're going play going underground play eating rifles about that Shergar story right have you seen what's happened this is one of the maddest things I've ever seen going underground, playing rifles. About that Shergar story, right? Have you seen what's happened? This is one of the maddest things I've ever seen.

There's a documentary, a radio documentary on the BBC about the whole Shergar kidnapping disappearance made by, and this sounds

like I'm making it up, made by Vanilla Ice. No! Fuck off! I've heard that as well, but I thought it was a joke. Is that really true? No no it's not a joke

it's real yeah it sounds like one of those Alan Partridge monkey tennis kind of things doesn't it it's like you know

inner city sumo with Chaz and Dave or youth hustling with Chris Eubank but it really is the Shergard story by what's his name Robert Van Winkle

yes but no but he's trading as Vanilla Ice yeah it's just one of the maddest things I've ever heard. But yeah, apparently he's really obsessed with that story and wanted to make a pod about it, and he has. I can't report whether it's any good or not, but it's real.

On the cover of Melody Maker this week, Fish. On the cover of Smash Hits, Claire Grogan. The number one LP in the UK at the moment is The Final Cut by Pink Floyd. And over in America, the number one single is Billie Jean by Michael Jackson. And the number one LP, of course, Thriller by Michael Jackson. So boys, what were we doing in April of 1983?

Well, I was getting sort of, well, I'd have been about two-thirds through my first year at senior school. So, you know, I was just sort of becoming acquainted with the strange rubric of demented rules and sadism and general squalidness that went on at my school. And getting used to the daft rituals that my school had um as a school that was aspiring to look like a public school in a way we had houses we had house assemblies i mean what's the fucking point of those school assemblies for the whole school and also year assemblies for just us as first years and by the way if anyone is confused about the year system of schools at the moment, you know, when a kid says they're in year 10, what does that mean? No fucking idea.

Yeah, yeah. I haven't got a fucking clue either, and I've been teaching it. And I don't know what the new GCSE grades mean either, by the way. But, you know, the thing is, as first years, we were encouraged to put on assemblies right for other first year forms right so i remember in 83 oh such a precocious little cunt i i wrote plays um i was a playwright in 1983 i wrote two plays that got performed uh because i was a wannabe little writer one was a dramatic reenactment of the royal wedding scene from adrian mole oh um yeah and i played burke baxter as i recall don't really remember much else about that the one i really

want to remember um which i wish i could remember more about was that i wrote a contemporary updating of the jesus story replete with an electric chair instead of crucifixion and um we did this in front of the first years and i remember it being a bit demented and being quite rushed in a sense and a lot of people just didn't know what the fuck was going on in it um but christ i wish i remembered more about this um so if anyone went to king emery the eighth in about in coventry in about 1982 uh 83 and remembers that play please get in touch i want to i want to remember more about it i don't know why i wrote it i don't know why i put him in an electric chair um there was an interrogation scene as well as i recall but yeah i was a horribly

precocious fuck but yeah finding ways to basically you wrote the mercy seat by nick cave i was really hoping you're going to say that you've got an old reel-to-reel audio tape. No. No. God, I wish I did. I mean, that was what was so delightful after the last chart music that somebody on Twitter, I think, said to Al. Yes. That horrible gnome story that I remembered reading.

They'd got a tape of it. They'd kind of done a little play of it themselves oh my god but this is this is what happens with time on your hands and boredom and no internet obviously you know you you i mean i was always into writing even as a very little kid um but i had progressed on by this point yeah from just writing disgusting shit to writing meaningful shit like um it's a contemporary retelling of the jesus myth amazing oh man why didn't you get him floating around in a world of piss and shit and spunk i know i should have accepted my hindu disgraceful hellish route yeah you should have told that story neil you could have educated the youth i know i think it was around easter or something

like that um and they just started lumbering me with this shit because i was willing to do it um i wasn't a director or anything oh man if you don't play like that and said yeah you think your religion's mad fucking get a load of this you'd have brought the creeds together i would have just a young man trying to make a name for himself but yeah yeah a horribly precocious little cunt at that age. But finding ways to enjoy myself, you know, rather than things that were handed down to me, as it were, or doing what people wanted me to do.

I was digging into writing a little bit. So I have fond memories of this time. Simon? Yeah, I was 15, jailbait. Still living in Barry, Docktown in South Wales. And at that kind of phase where you're too old for toys but too young for the pub and, like, no interest from girls.

So you just really got, you're just sort of like, you're full of all kinds of energy, whether sexual or aggressive, and you've got no outlet for any of it. You're just sort of bristling with, you're crackling with all kinds of emotions that you don't know what to do with. Talking of being too old for toys, I did still have Sabutio,

but apart from that, there was this really kind of watershed moment where me and my mate, Andrew, who lived next door, who was a metler that I think I've spoken about in previous episodes, he had an air rifle, right? And owning an air... Of course he did. Yeah, because he's into metal.

If you're into metal, I think having an air rifle is a very metal kind of toy to have. Yeah, completely. An air rifle is not a toy, listeners. But yeah, what we did was, there was a basement underneath his house that was just kind of a storage space full of dried up bags of concrete and stuff like that

that his dad had put there. So what we did was, we got all our old toys, like action men and other action figures, like Star Trek and Six Million Dollar Man and all that stuff. And we lined them all up. Which would be worth hundreds of pounds exactly don't don't think i haven't thought of this many many times especially when ebay launched so we we kind of gave them all weapons and posed them behind bricks and stuff in kind of action poses and then from about you know 10 feet away just blew the shit out of them with

the air rifle just like basically executed them it was it was a massacre um it was it was like it was like some kind of american high school massacre i think sadly of course yeah so um the silicon chip inside his head got switched to overload exactly so that that was kind of the symbolic end of childhood um and um yeah i was i was kind of in a gang um not not in the kind of uh modern sense of postcode wars but in that sort of slightly pathetic feckless way of just a bunch of ne'er-do-wells just sitting around on a wooden park bench looking out over the docks which were still the docks in those days and had not yet been gentrified into sort of uh yuppie marina apartments and um doing kind of just just tagging electricity substations with a marker pen and all that kind of business

danger of death yes that's us yeah yeah exactly you know how in every gang there's one who's kind of the whipping boy um it was not not particularly hard but they they let him kind of join in and hang around with him well that was me i was kind of like oh i was kind of whatever the opposite of an alpha male is in that gang um i was the one you know if anyone's gonna have the piss taken out of them or have a prank put you know played on them that was usually me um so these are the same people they're usually the first one in the gang to die as well aren't they yeah yeah so um i mean i've spoken before about um the the time that um we petrol bombed a church well the, the thing is, I was never the instigator. That wasn't me. I was never the instigator. So, the two core members of this gang were these

kids called Screwy and Pete, right? And it was Pete's dad who had the speedboat fuel. You know Pete's the hard one because he hasn't got a nickname. No one dares. When I look back, I've got an enormous amount of respect for this guy.

I never got to know him that well. We sort of lost touch. I wonder if he's still out there and what he's up to. But he was a very early kind of animal rights type. He once put a brick through a butcher's window, all this kind of stuff. And, you know, yeah, I was quite in awe of him in a way. He was quite quiet. But, yeah, it was his dad who had the petrol for the Molotov cocktails and all of that.

So, there was this one night that with Screwy and Pete and a couple of others, we snuck out of our houses at midnight without telling our parents and tried to not make the door make any

noise and just very quietly went to preordained meeting place and we went this kind of rampage around the town and uh it's really bad i was always the voice of caution saying uh are you sure we should do this but you know i was still there and um so basically it was nothing when you look back it was it was pretty harmless the first thing i remember was going hedge hoppinghopping, like doing a sort of, there was this one street, I think it was Windsor Road in Barry,

where the terraced houses were set up in such a way that they all had quite high hedges between each garden, and they all went down a sort of fairly gentle slope. So if you started at the top and just ran at it, you could sort of do a steeplechase. It was like the Grand National. You'd could sort of do a steeplechase you sort of it's like it's like the grand national you just sort of jump over these hedges and the danger was of course you didn't know what was waiting for you on the other side it could be you know could be a nettle patch it

could be the sort of comedy thing of standing on a on a rake and it twats you in the face you know anything like that um so that that was the first bit where the only thing we were really harming was ourselves then i remember this bit where somebody had brought along a very fine pointed marker pen and started going up to people's living room windows and drawing thin lines or cracks on the window to make it look like oh that's evil yeah Yeah, it's quite inventive. That is evil. That's worse than a spunking cock. Yeah. What you winder that is. Yeah, yeah. And then I remember we went down to the nap in Barry.

I hope there's a statute of limitations on this, and I can't be put in prison for it now. Basically, there were lovely ornamental flower beds there, and like complete arseholes, we ran around kicking all the flowers over. Oh, Simon, I can't approve even even so you know i i i probably was stood on the edge of it going i don't want to do that yeah pete what about fucking flowers right and i i remember standing around wondering what we could do next and we were on this corner um of the causeway over to barry island and it was Butlins at Barry Island at that point,

and somebody from our gang thought, let's go over and meet some girls. There'll be girls staying in there. I don't know how the hell we thought there were going to be girls knocking around on what was probably like a Tuesday night, you know, well past midnight. But, yeah, that was the plan. But at that moment, a police car came screeching around the corner

and picked us up and took us in, right? Didn't take us to the police station, but gave us all a severe talking to. And what has happened was they couldn't prove that we'd done any of this vandalism around the town. They couldn't tie us to any of it. I'm not sure they could if they fucking searched us for marker pens and all that. Instead... Pre-DNA, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah. The reason that they came looking for us and I never lived this down is that my mum heard the click of the door when I left the house she knew where her lad was tonight

she figured out that I wasn't in my room and she must have actually had to walk all the way down the hill to a phone box because we did have a phone to phone the police. And, yeah, the police came, got us, found us, picked us up and took us to our respective homes. And after that, whenever I met up with that little gang, they would taunt me by singing No More Heroes by The Stranglers,

but with the words changed to no more heroes anymore, Pricey's mum phoned up the law. So, yeah, that's one of my memories of being 15 and sort of being on the edge of getting into trouble, really, and always being the kind of wuss who was like, no, no, can't we just play football? Did you get a massive bollocking when you got home? Yeah, of course.

You're like Adrian Mole. Again, another Adrian Mole reference when he starts hanging around with Barry Kent and his gang and they spend their time throwing chips at each other in the shopping precinct and he writes, I used to write about life, now I'm living it. Well, round about this time, I have a sore heart and a sore forehead.

I mean, I was full into the fucking Style Council. So right about this time, I am absolutely incandescently enraged that Speak Like a Child has been stuck at number four for the third week running this week. Did my fucking head in. It's like, why didn't everyone buy it on the first week like I did? On the first fucking day like I did. Like they did with Jam Records.

Yes. And this might have been the week that I decided to get Paul Weller's latest haircut. I'd had massive success with the Steve Marriott Toblerone cut the year before. So when I saw he'd changed his look again, look again it's like yeah i'm rolling with it now i don't know where paul weller got his hair done but i'm pretty sure it wasn't haircut sir in bull wall uh where i got mine i blame myself for not doing the obvious thing and taking in a photo and pointing at it to the to the bloke in the white coat yeah and i just said no just just off here a bit off here at the sides and a bit just doing it off memory basically and um when he'd finished i looked at

the fringe and i thought uh that fringe isn't right he needs to be a bit more sort of rounded and up a little bit more so i just drew a fucking arc across my forehead oh my god yeah big mistake because if you remember this was the time that the t-file adverts were out by the scientists with the massive foreheads and uh yeah that that was me for for a while one of the most traumatic moments in my time at secondary school i think it's one stage below being debagged on the school field and being called maggot man was walking in that monday morning about five minutes late to registration just opening the door and walking in and just being hit by a wall of screaming and laughter and just abuse and uh yeah for the next month or so until it grew out, it was open season on my forehead. I'd just be sitting there and some fucking fifth year youth

would just walk past and just slap me on the forehead. Talking about kind of fashion choices at that time, this episode of Top of the Pops, I really believe, changed my dress sense specifically. There are a couple of things that happened in this episode that did change how I dress. Because at this point, I was still, it very much the the burgundy and gray era you know it was burgundy cardigans with a big y on it it was it was tight jeans it was um canvas baseball

boots they weren't converse chuck taylors they were knockoff ones but those ones that had like a rubber disc on the ankle bone you know the ones yes and yeah i had i had the the bad skin that i've talked about before because i thought the way to remedy it was with neat dettol not diluted and it was that it was that well you know i've talked about that before but yeah this episode of top the pops did sort of make me um sort of change things up a little bit and i'm looking forward to telling you all about that the good news and there's quite a lot of good news round about this time is i finally crossed the line and felt brave enough to start shopping at the record shop in town and in nottingham that record shop was selected disc great great shot which seemed fucking massive and intimidating at the time it was just the place you walk past and you just think

i'm not old enough to go in there yet i might get cussed down or they might chuck me out but no me and my mate steeled ourselves and we went in and i can still remember my first purchase from it would have been about the month before it was a monsters t-shirt the one where they're the beat combo you know that one and my mate daz clark he bought a set of badgers with all five doctor who's yeah selected it's a big part of my life for many years afterwards i mean when i worked in soho at the turn of the century there was still that selected disc on um barrack street yeah yes yeah and when i felt homesick for nottingham which I did quite a lot round about that time

I'd spend my dinner hour in Selected Esk and pretend I was in Nottingham because they had the same t-shirts hung up on the walls they had the same labelling on the

the record racks and it was just like oh I'm in Nottingham everything's alright yeah they were great for t-shirts that London branch I remember

stuff you wouldn't see anywhere else you do have to hit a certain age i think um before not that you necessarily feel comfortable in record shops but record shops actually become these things where you realize oh actually i can just stay in here yes you know for like 40 minutes or an hour you know when i don't have to buy anything i can just browse and fantasize it's part of your education isn't it yes like reading the small print on the back of sleeves and wondering who the hell these engineers or keyboardists or whatever yeah might be they're like anyone into selected is for years selected had its own tramp oh nice there was this one bloke who was known as mr pope and he was this huge

bloke with a massive white Santa beard. And he'd just come in when it was raining and just sit up against one of the record racks and fall asleep for about three hours. Yeah, he fucking stank as well, man. There was like entire chunks of the alphabet that you just couldn't go and delve into. But he became part of the third year.

Selected, he was brilliant. When it shut down, that was the beginning of the end year selected it was brilliant when it shut down that was the beginning of the end for nottingham city centre i say it's a sad thing i mean all the ones i remember from cove they're all gone now of course all of them we used to have a virgin shop spinner disc where i saw the fantastic sight of a pigeon flying in shitting behind the counter and flying straight out again in one fluid movement. Way ahead record. No manners, but what a critic. No manners, but what a critic. Must have been the same pigeon that shat in that Kings of Leon guy's mouth. But yeah, there were three or four.

And Cobb's not a big town, 300,000 people. But three or four really ace record shops all gone there. I should give a shout out for this website that I discovered. I say discovered because it seems to be semi-dormant. But I think it's called BritishRecordShopArchive.org Somebody obviously had more time on their hands than

would be desirable a couple of years ago obviously built this and it's kind of an open thing where you can just join in and add a record shop from your local town and do a little kind of you know reminiscence thing about it and if you've got photos of it put photos in and add a record shop from your local town and do a little kind of, you know,

reminiscence thing about it. And if you've got photos of it, put photos in and just potentially it's such a great website. It's still a bit half formed. There are huge gaps in it. Annoyingly, some of the towns are placed in the wrong County and all of that, but it's just something that,

you know, anybody who's got fond memories of record shops, go on there and like make it happen because it's, it's potentially a really beautiful thing. I put Christopher's records from Barry on there. Didn't have a photo of it, but just wrote down everything I could remember about that shot. Nice.

Yeah. But even more importantly, this is the week that I purchased my very first gig ticket. Trent Polley, Friday, April the 29th, which would have been two days before my 15th birthday, to see people who are actually in this episode of Top of the Pops. There's a teaser. Oh, my word. So, dear boys, I do believe it's time that we rip open a cardboard box or two

and have a bit of a ruffle through our back catalogue of magazines and pull out an issue of the music press from this very week. And this time, I've gone for the NME, April the 9th, 1983. Shall we? Yes, please. On the cover, Tracy Young. shall we? Yes, please.

On the cover, Tracy Young. In the news, the main news this week is David Bowie's summer tour and the location of his projected open-air gig, which has recently announced to mop up the overspill of ticket applications for his gigs at Wembley Arena

and the Birmingham NEC. Harvey Goldsmith has been dispatched to source a location and has so far narrowed it down to Nebworth, Blackbush and the Milton Keynes Bowl. The latter venue would win out with not one but three gigs held over the first weekend in July. A spokesperson for Goldsmith claims that

practically every band in the country has been asking to get on the bill with Ice House and The Beat getting picked out. That was The Beat's final gig. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I think we've spoken before, that famous story about how their elderly saxophonist, well, I say elderly, he's probably about the age I am now.

He was in his early 50s. Yeah, yeah. Saxer met David Bowie uh when Bowie I think wearing a white shirt and a black waistcoat came into the beats trailer and just said you know you're okay guys anything I can do for you and Saxa sent him off to get some red stripes because he just thought he was just some kind of waiter you know but um the thing with that gig is I I interviewed Dave Wakelingling from The Beat a little while ago for Record Collector. And one story he told me that did make it into the finished piece.

Bowie had offered them the American tour because he really liked The Beat. A lot of the band were into it, but Wakeling was not feeling it, just didn't want to go. And he thought, right, I've got to do it. I've got to split the band. So what he did was um because the gigs as you say were over a weekend um in between wakeling went back drafted his letter of resignation and posted it through the door of their record company office go feet there's a management record company thing and then the final final gig went so well that he really regretted it and he thought oh no i've got to unresign so he went back and i think it was like a sunday night or something and he thought shit if when when you know the the pa

opens the door on monday morning they're going to find this letter and that's it the game's up so he went back there at the dead of night you know one in the morning on sunday night and was sort of going through the letterbox with a stick trying to sort of grab trying to sort of shoo the letter back under the door so he could just tear it up and resign but he couldn't do it so eventually just thought oh that's just fate that's fate telling me i've just got to accept it and quit the band you know oh just a longer stick and the beat would have been with us yeah simon i'm guessing you were still massively into the beat at the time yeah oh yeah they were fantastic if you'd have known this was the last time you get the chance to see them you'd have been up for going wouldn't you i mean i couldn't

afford a trip to you know milton keynes from wales but yeah it certainly would be tugging at my heart strings would have been kicking down the doors of my heart yeah I absolutely love them with a stick this would have been the time that they were basically touring their final album Special Beat Service which is, you know if people ask

what do you think of the kind of underrated or forgotten masterpieces of the 80s, to me that's one of them because it did fuck all in the charts they were pretty much forgotten about it did quite well in america actually special beats service it was the one that relatedly sort of saw them take off a little bit um over there but yeah i i completely love love that album it's one of those things that because you're aware that nobody else is into it and even your mates who were previously rude boys or ever were

not into this it just makes it even more special to you think this is my album so i would have dearly loved to see them play that set and then funnily enough i think the beat dave wakeley's version of course because rankin rogers sadly no longer with us um are playing bright and soon and it may be my first gig back in the world when gigs start happening. Meanwhile, with a week to go before the release of the Let's Dance LP, EMI have launched a massive promotional campaign. As well as their usual shop window and music press ads, they're running adverts on Channel 4 and local radio,

and even backlit adverts on the Tube. You didn't see that at all did you back then the only albums that got advertised on the telly were compilations as i recall yeah big on you know k-tel compilations and stuff yeah that's that's a crazy promotional push yeah i don't think bus shelters even where i came from had adverts on just yet at this point yeah in other gig news the jacksons who have already cancelled plans to play in the UK earlier this year, look set to play a string of gigs in London in September, probably Wembley Arena.

The reason for the delay is that they're currently in the studio working on the LP Victory, which in itself is being delayed due to Michael working with Paul McCartney in the ET soundtrack. And they're currently working on the single State of Shock with Freddie Mercury, which falls through and results in Mick Jagger stepping into the breach. The dates don't come off due to infighting. State of Shock is a fucking tune.

Yeah, and now I'm sort of imagining this counterfactual universe where it's Freddie Mercurydie mercury on vocals that could have been amazing i don't think it'd be as good as the jagger version yeah great single i don't know because i mean at the end it does sound like mick jagger and michael jackson are having bum sex the last five seconds which is let's face it what the world wanted to see yeah yeah and crosby still Stills and Nash have announced plans to play their first dates in the UK since they played Wembley Stadium in 1974. Although they intend to headline a major open-air gig, they eventually settle for two shows at Wembley Arena and one at the NEC. And Channel 4 have announced a new chat show for young adults, Loose Talk, which begins

transmission from next Monday at half past five. Naturally, it'll have guest performances from the likes of Sade, Grace Jones, Squeeze and Robert Wyatt. It is best known today as the programme that gave a break to Ian Hislop and Jonathan Ross, who worked on the show as a co-presenter and researcher, respectively. Christ, Ian Hislop appealing to young people. What the hell do they think? In the interview section, David Durrell skulks about on the set of the Channel 4 show Switch

to find out more about Respond, Paul Weller's recently new label. He begins with a sit-down with Weller in a nearby hotel, who tells him that he likes the idea of someone going into a record shop and automatically buying the latest Respond release, like people used to do with Motown and Stax. Still obsessed with the young idea he says that he wants some music biz to get back to bands and audience being the same age again

and points out that he's younger than most of kajagoogoo i love that fact that's a great fact he's 24 at this time isn't he was so fucking young when he was having all his number ones with a jam it's just mind boggling really He also finds out that Tracy Young likes John McEnroe, Gary Kemp and squirrels she isn't very political, she's already argued with Weller about what she should look like, she worries about

using him as a walking stick and she's only had three fan letters so far she is not the girl next door contends Durrell, although she's maybe had three fan letters so far. She is not the girl next door, contends Durrell, although she's maybe the girl in the window opposite, or maybe the girl about town that you've heard of. And he spends five minutes with the questions, who talk about being called puffs at school for buying sheet records

and are enjoying having Uncle Paul for a boss. Response seemed pretty important at the time, didn't it, Simon? Yeah, I really bought into it. You know, I suppose I was looking around for a label to believe in after the kind of demise of Two Tone. And it seemed like a similar idea, really, that you've got this one band, the Style Council, who were in the kind of specials role

of being at the centre of it, even though they weren't themselves on Respond, but, you know. And Weller being the kind of Jerry Damers figure, the kind of Svengali behind it all. Yeah. I was really into the idea of socialism, of, you know, 60s soul-influenced modern pop being used as a Trojan horse for left-wing political ideas

and there's obviously loads of that about in the 80s not just the style council but people like the cane gang and fine young cannibals and all that kind of stuff and respond um just had so much promise at first i really thought it was going to be a huge thing but for some reason it just and possibly it's just purely down to the quality of the bands it never really took off i really liked the questions thought they were a great band and i i got the um i got the respond compilation album love the reason yes you know how on style council records they always had these kind of slightly embarrassing now passages of kind of beat prose on the back written by the cappuccino kid who was, of course, Paolo Hewitt.

Well, On Love the Reason, it's actually written by Weller himself. Yes. And I've got the LP here. Can I read it? Please. All right. This is Weller's little explanation for the label under the headline, Ours is to reason why.

Big 16 and straight out of school to clock in at the DHSS and live the Teenerama myth on a street corner Chewing nails, gum and getting bored or hostile If only those in command could see People need PRIDE capital letters not party politics But alas their vision is warped

their minds hopelessly out of touch and their lust is for power not body heat i'm glad i ain't 16 to be so young so beautiful and so strong and not to be heard is criminal give up bow down surrender never should you say people get uncomfortable and start wriggling apostrophe in their seats when you talk about pop music having a consciousness or ideals i can understand it really when i have to deal with the big boys in various big boys record companies i'm subjected to words like markets product units their own curious vernacular for records yes and people they may have a point you do have to sell records to carry on making them sick isn't it but there you go business is a polite word for dipping your hands

in shit or so i believe anyway it's all coming back to me now if you believe in goodness art culture and life and are strong enough to have a smile and not a sneer. You must have old what's-his-name on your side right on. Apart from the people's faces on this respond long play, there are three new faces who have something to say and want to make music. That's the reason why these cats make music. The justification is purely subjective. We personally love the reason keep the faith hope and charity paul weller p.s don't get my haircut from haircut sir in bulwark

but i think that would have fired me up at the time any kind of you know missive from the mod father which i never called. I hate myself for even bringing that up. But yeah, I was just, I was a Wellerist, totally a Wellerist. Wonderfully idealistic sort of document that. And, you know, obviously all these, a lot of artists who start labels, they want them to be like Motown. And what none of them have is the ruthlessness. That's the trouble, that they are a bit idealistic.

You know, they need that Barry Gordy ruthlessness of telling artists what to do and artists obeying them this kind of idyllic idea of a kind of shared experience of eventually you know labels to work and to last because stacks didn't last as long as it possibly could have because it was slightly more ill disciplined than motown for these things to last, you've just got to be a ruthless bastard, haven't you? Which I don't think Weller had in him. Yeah, the quality control on this album is not the greatest, to be honest.

No. There's three tracks by The Questions, two by Tracy, one by Tracy and The Questions, two by A. Craze, who were a kind of very bright, soul-pop, female-fronted group. They wrote Give It Some Emotion, didn't they?

They did write Give It Some Emotion, which I thought was a cracking single by Tracy. And Big Sound Authority, who ended up not being on Respond. But I really liked them. I thought Julie Hadwin was just a great vocalist. And I was just surprised she didn't go on to have a proper kind of career. And then there's these things, there's this guy called N.D. Moffat who's sort of acoustic reggae in the vein of Bob Marley singing Peace, Love and Harmony, and that's pretty awful.

And there's one, the main TKO, Fickle Public Speaking, which is this kind of guy with an echo box. You know who that is, don't you? Yeah, I do. It's vaughn to lose it is department s yeah sort of um declaiming over this um fairly shit electro backbeat and i don't think the label was ready to go and i think well i love the idea of it and there's some good stuff on there but it sadly didn't live up to all that exciting prose on the record sleeve andrew tyler is summoned to County Hall

for an interview with the runner-up in last year's Most Wonderful Person in the NME Reader's Poll, Ken Livingstone. Oh, different times. He says that he agreed to the interview because he used to be a reader, gets into an argument over whether schools

should be allowed to keep animals, claiming that when he was in a school group that kept amphibians, they would occasionally breed, which is a sign that they were happy in captivity. They bred in Auschwitz as well, counters Tyler. So basically someone makes a

Holocaust comparison at Ken Livingstone. Yes. Tables turned a few years later, of course, more than once. Afterwards, he discovers that Livingstone worked for seven years as a vivisectionist at the Chester Beatty Cancer Research Labs. Wow. Fucking hell.

That's a bit mental. Yes. Richard Cook drops in on Joan Armatrading, who enjoyed being back on top of the pops with her recent hit Drop the Pilot, although she wouldn't like to do it for every single. And she wouldn't ever again. Lloyd Bradley nips over to Wembley to meet East West, a multiracial group who won a contest on the Channel 4 show East and I

to find the country's best indie pop group. That's indie without an E and will be performing on the show tomorrow they tell him that they formed a local youth club, got their start by funking up the theme tunes of assorted Indian films and are currently

talking to CBS and Arista oh man, Eastern Eye it does seem a bit mad now, thinking back to the 80 years how um asian people were given a program every week you know like yeah in more than one yeah it's so yeah but kind of in the same slot as the program for i don't know deaf people and things like that it's weird i mean i remember with eastern eye and also with network east later on in the eighties um my mum and dad sort of tuning in not with excitement exactly but just to see what what

it was like you know only to realize that 10 minutes in it was the usual diet of what they thought asian people wanted to hear about bollywood cooking marriage was all we were gonna get this group east west do you remember this group neil i don't i don't remember them at all. I shouldn't moan, you know, that East and I existed and BBC had Asian shows as well. It's better than, you know, the sole Asian representation on telly being, I don't know, the Chinese detective and dueling the crown or whatever. I mean, it's weird, that history, though, because, I mean, the BBC put on programmes for Asian immigrants in, like, the mid-60s.

Naya Zindagi, Naya Jeevan. Yeah, yeah. on programs for asian immigrants in like the mid-60s um uh yeah yeah when i was about five i used to sing that all the time i thought it was the best theme tune on the teller i mean because i think my dad i remember my dad telling me that there was a show in the 60s which the translation of its title was was kind of make yourself at home and it was it was genuinely a mix of kind of language lessons um in everyday english and popular music from kind of bollywood films and stuff sort of aiming to help asians cope with everyday life over here yeah which you know there was a lot of immigration at that point you know and such a show should have been watched by my mom and she maybe wouldn't have gone to boots looking for a pair of shoes you know but you know network east i remember as well late 80s and all only all of the people who were on those shows

they're still with us some of them krishnan gurumurthy and sanjeev kohli and people like that i just wish i'd harvested a bit of the the new asian cool in the 90s but never mind it's like i never got to be a professional welshman yeah i see other people doing it and good luck to them you know some some very good friends of mine but i just think if only my accent was a little bit stronger and gavin martin swings by the rock garden to watch and then talk to the next big thing roman holiday he finds a group who pack all the spontaneity and exuberance that a lot of us have been missing and draws comparisons to eddie and the hot rods when they first started while lead singer steve lambert goes to great pains that he can't stand glenn miller and he's more into the

black dixie side of swing their hit they hit, their one hit, Don't Try To Stop It, it seemed like one of those songs that the record company released about three or four times. I might be misremembering, but they were just desperate for it to be a hit, and finally it crept in. And then that was the end of them, wasn't it?

I remember... One more hit, I think. Did they, right, yeah. Stand by. Right, of course, yeah. The singer guy, he's a good-looking fella, I remember, with more hit, I think. Did they, right, yeah. Stand by. Right, of course, yeah. Yeah, the singer guy, he's a good-looking fella, I remember, with very big 80s hair. Nice quiff. Yeah, but they were going for that sort of big band jive sound that seemed very London, very wag club,

and just a bit wank, to be honest. Single reviews. Well, in the chair this week is Charles Shaw Moran, And his single of the week, by default, according to the layout Is Cash Money by Prince Charles and the City Beat Band This record does not lead off this column because it is incredible But simply because it is the best of the few That isn't mediocre, says Murray This record certainly doesn't mess about Do you know that track, Al?

Yes. Really good. I really like Prince Charles and the City Beat Band. Partly because of the name. When people say, what's your favourite band name of all time? I often say Prince Charles and the City Beat Band. I think it's just a great combination of words. I quite like long names for a band anyway,

as long as they're not too comedic. So I remember another name I used to like was The Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus. But that was a really good name. But yeah, just Prince Charles and the City Beat Band. It's sort of so evocative. But yeah, they're from Boston, weren't they? And it's in a kind of, I guess it's a combination

of Grandmaster Melly Mel and the Furious Five kind of early gritty rap, but also a bit of electro-funk a la Zap and a bit of kind of African Bambato and a bit of Funkadelic and that kind of stuff going on in there. It was his actual real name, Prince Charles, or Charles Alexander. And then he went on to fucking this mega producer

for Notorious B.I.G. and Usher and Mary J. Blige, all kinds of people. But their gimmick, they had this instrument called a Lyricon, which was an electric wind instrument. And that's all over a lot of their records. I've got the album, it's called Stone Killers that this track Cash Money comes from and again

it's one of these things that, they never had a hit in the UK, they were just one of these names you would see around occasionally You'd see them on the tube quite a bit wouldn't you, stuff like that and it would just make it all that more special to you that if you somehow managed to grab older on their records you'd think, none of my mates listen to this but I'm going to fucking learn to love it I don't want to you that if you somehow manage to grab older on their records you'd think none of my mates listen to this but i'm gonna fucking learn to love it i don't want

to stick my neck out too far but i think this might just be a hit says murray of beat it by michael jackson this is a touchingly anti-macho song designed to set off the new slightly more macho jackson stance as revealed in recent videos and sleeves further compounded by big buffalo eating power chords and a friske squibbling solo contributed by eddie van halen the chords are revolting but the solo's quite nice. People with extreme guitar aversion can pretend it's a synth. Talking of things Jacksonian, Murray gives grudging respect to Candy Girl by New Edition. In a bold move designed to give America

its own musical youth capability strike force, New Edition have bubbled to the surface. A quintet of youth who evidently eat, sleep, drink and breathe old Jackson 5 records. They make a debut with a sound not a million miles away from ABC and should, if nothing else, give the repulsive mini-pops someone closer to their own age to imitate. to their own age to imitate. But it's a coat down for temptation by Heaven 17. The inability of the British Electric Foundation

to do anything right apart from the first and third Heaven 17 singles is one of the most bewildering mysteries that a music-obsessed person with a ridiculous amount of time could get involved in studying. Those confident boardroom smiles must be congealing round the edges by now as yet another indifferent single plops into the arena. Since one presumes that fascist Gruthang and Penthouse and Pavement

were not flukes, the only answer can be that where and marsh are keeping the perfect single up their sleeves and waiting for the ideal time to release it that time is now gentlemen delay no further fucking out mate oh my god i mean all the things that we said earlier on about journalistic subjectivity notwithstanding you know because i am a radical fundamentalist believer in critical subjectivity and that there is no objective truth you've still got to look at that and think what the fuck how can anyone not like temptation by heaven 17 that just like baffles my brain and it is the perfect heaven 17 single it's exactly what he said i mean mean, it's interesting with Charles Sean Murray, because I remember him on that Bowie doc

when his review of Low was read back to him. Yes. Where he completely slagged that album off. And to be fair, he wasn't contrite as such, but he just kind of admitted, I don't know, yeah, I was being a bit of a twat that week, but he's definitely got this badly wrong, hasn't he? The thing with CSM is that his whole raison d'etre within the NME

was, in his words, to barbecue some dinosaurs. And once you've painted yourself into that corner, you've just got to keep doing it, I suppose. Yeah. There's not one but two singles by a flock of seagulls on the block this week. Their new release, Nightmares, and a re-release of their debut single, It's Not Me Talking Talking from their old label. Fans can be reassured that both singles sound very much alike

and also very much like the stuff that crept out in between. This pompous drone rock always induces in me a desire for a walk or else a deep, refreshing slumber. Something alarming is happening to Cliff Richard's face, says Murray in his review of True Love Ways. It remains undeniable that those neat little features are beginning to look a trifle sunken. Neither his voice or his taste appear to have changed though,

which is why we find him strolling through a venerable buddy holly tune with the london philharmonic orchestra to accompany him the result is a glutinous stodge murray proclaims the mental disorder ep by disorder the worst punk record ever states that mark king sounds less like a pinball machine on overload than usual on the new Level 42 release Out of Sight Out of Mind and claims that sexual rapping a hip-hop take on the Marvin Gaye song by T-Ski Valet a former member of the Erotic Disco Brothers

is risible in the extreme and about as erotic as a bowl of six week old rice pudding with four fag ends and a bit of old chewing gum on the top the erotic Disco Brothers come on in the LP

review section Pride of Place goes to Attitude the third LP by Rip Rig and Panic and Neil Spencer still isn't sure where they're going, but is still enjoying the journey. It's a more complete, more defined, more thoughtful and more satisfying affair than either of its predecessors. Naina Cherry sings with a deftness and commitment

that shows up the effort of most of the would-be chanteuses for the clumsy travesties they are gabby delgado is evidently the half of deutsch-americanisch freundschaft that fancied himself as a sex pot says gavin martin in his review of de gardo's solo lp mistress which solo LP, Mistress, which leaves him distinctly unmoist. Like DAF, Mistress is sex between the lines, the sweat and the stains, not the good bits, not the parts worth celebrating. Barney Hoskins rounds up five import LPs by Johnny Taylor, ZZ Hill, Tyrone Davis, Sonny Charles and Tony Troutman and claims that, for male singers

at least, Soul is finally stepping away from the wreckage of disco and has a future in the 80s. Here are five great black male voices who have broken free of corporate shackles and are pointing us away from the disco aftermath of Quincy Jones and Lionel Richie. And Cynthia Rose reckons that the kitchen tapes by the Raincoats is dead good. Tony D lavishes praise on Let The Tribe Increase by Yeovil-based anarcho-punks The Mob. And Halfway Across The Rainbow by Liverpool duo Shiny 2 Shiny is a promising debut, according to Kev Mac. All of us were ordinary compared to Cynthia Rose. She always stood at the back of the line, a smile beneath her nose. In the gig guy, well, David could have seen Joan Arbitradian at Wembley Arena,

Mudder the Golden Lion in Fulham, Screwdriver at the 100 Club, The Old Sailor at the Dominion Theatre, The Kids from Fame at Wembley Arena, Dr John at the Half Moon in Putney, or nipped out to Hayes for the Billy Fury Memorial concert

featuring Joe Bran, Lynn Paul, Alvin Stardust, Helen Shapiro, Dave Berre, and Mike Reid. But probably didn't. Taylor could have seen Spandau Ballet

at Birmingham Odeon, Tears for Fears at the Odeon, or the Kids from Fame at the NEC. Oh dear. He well would have gone to Kids from Fame,

I reckon. And out of those David ones, sorry, although Screwdriver would have, of course, enraged him, I would have gone to Kids for Fame, I reckon. And out of those David ones, sorry, although Screwdriver would have, of course, enraged him, I would have... What a shame David didn't go and see that Billy Fury Memorial concert. Yeah. Neil could have seen Spandau Ballet at the Coventry Apollo or Dean Friedman at Busters.

Busters. Choices, choices. Mind-blowing decisions. Sarah could have seen The Exploited at the Palm Cove Club in Bradford A flock of seagulls at Sheffield City Hall The Undertones at Hull Dingwalls Sisters of Mercy at Leeds Warehouse Or the James Last Orchestra at Sheffield City Hall Al could have seen Twisted Sister at Rock City

Cilla Black at the Royal Concert Hall Sheffield City Hall. Al could have seen Twisted Sister at Rock City, Cilla Black at the Royal Concert Hall, or Forest at the Sutton in Ashfield Leisure Centre. And Simon could have seen Clan Ad at St David's Hall in Cardiff, Bucks Fizz at St David's Hall, or Spandau Ballet at St David's Hall. Oh, it's all going on, isn't it, Simon? In St David's Hall.

You were camped outside all week, you was. Yeah, I think that venue had only opened in 82, actually. We weren't spoilt for choice for gig venues down there. But it's still open now. It's a really nice theatre. Really good acoustics and everything. Yeah, I was the age to be going to gigs

there. I had seen Dexys there the previous October. And the following March, I would go and to be going to gigs there. I had seen Dexys there the previous October. Good Lord. And the following March, I would go and see Whitesnake there. Whoa. And then at some unspecified time, not long after, Spear of Destiny and Shalamar. Oh, you saw Shalamar? Yeah, well, I sort of did.

It was the arse end of the first Shalamar. So it was Howard Hewitt plus two ringers. I've actually seen Howard Hewitt with Jeffrey Daniel and a fake Jodie Whatley more recently, and that was much better back in the 80s, to be fair. So I couldn't really afford gig tickets very often, but my dad had just got a job with CBC, the local radio station. So there were free tickets flying around occasionally. So, yeah, Whitesnake on their slider indoor.

By the way, we were thinking of metal things because I went to that gig with my mate Andrew, he of the Air Rifle. While we've been recording this, I've just had a message from him. This is the that the universe uh working he he just messaged me to say uh he's ordered a flexi disc of motorhead train kept a roll in which came free with smash hits because he remembers me having that flexi and i've i've reminded him about about the uh the assassination of our toys and yeah he's he is confirming it and uh he's saying yeah i was still finding their

bodies in the basement a few years later amazing in the letters page well there's been some right bollocks in the letters page this week i can't be bothered to read out but the general theme is your writer doesn't like the music i like an old theme i see it's gotten to be that time again slag off a steve hillage album time writes roger of argyle if he had listened to you lot he would never have made an album after fish rising and then where would we be, eh? Thank God Richard Cook, and no doubt all at NME, slammed Roger Waters' The Final Cut. I would have been so upset if any of you have actually liked it, says Miss Aussie Trier of Surrey. If I thought I had anything in common with any of you ageing posers pampering to the young, trendy readership, I'd commit suicide. Isn't that Pink Floyd's The Final Cut?

What the fuck's she going on about there? It's a Floyd album, The Final Cut. It's the one with Not Now John on it, and it's why my friend James Ward always refers to Pink Floyd as the Not Now John hitmakers. How come the jam managed to monopolise the hearts and ears of your readers for four years

when they are clearly an artless bunch of talentless sods who never smile? Asks S Hampshire of Plymouth. Because the readership openly encouraged by your contributors identify so easily with their heroes. Yeah, think about it, man for thought eh and john connolly of new barn it says in jesus's day people were crucified for preaching to the ignorant these days they seem to work for music papers oh you should have put that into your play neil definitely definitely all of these contributors revealing something that is still with us isn't it that um you know i disagree with your music opinion but i'm absolutely not angry about it yeah yeah who opened the letters that

were sent to the music press it would be whoever was editing the letters page that week right i used to just get when i did backlash for maker yeah you just get given a big black bin liner full of these things and that'd be your job unopened unopened yeah yeah so they could have had razor blades in them and all sorts oh potentially yeah sometimes like somebody else would have opened one maybe from a previous week and they wanted it to be included in the following week's pile in which case you'd be handed an open one already but yeah mainly yeah it could have had anything in them what's the worst thing you ever got inside a letter sent to melody maker i got a death threat from c18

from combat 18 but what that was i mean that wasn't to the letters page that was to me fuck um and it was just you know we've seen you come and go, blah, blah, usual stuff. So that was probably the worst, which I probably should have worried about more or told somebody about. Yeah. But I didn't.

I didn't want to cause a fuss. So I didn't. Just chucked it. Fucking hell. But, you know, it's to be expected, to be honest with you. If you weren't white

and you sat above the parapet a little bit in a white space, if you like, which is basically what the music press was you're probably going to get that deli for deli i remember telling me he used to get similar letters um whenever his name appeared in print i'm not saying the nf or anybody was being vigilant you know and checking and then therefore firing off these missives but it was to be expected to be honest with you especially especially in that period oh i was expecting someone's knickers or something sorry that's not a very amusing response to your question but yeah i did get i did get that kind of thing cunts 48 pages 35p

i never knew there was so much in it yeah enemies floundering around isn't it there's not a lot in this issue that's going to show up on top of the pops now or in the weeks to come don't you think well see enemies role at this time was i mean enemy itself was floundering around in some ways it was the golden age of enemy because um as a sort of political voice it was really important but in terms of what music they were covering it's interesting there was a review of rip voice, it was really important. But in terms of what music they were covering, it's interesting that there was a review of Rit, Rig and Panic in that because they are seen as being kind of totemic of this phase of NME being really distant from what was going on pop-wise

and going into quite esoteric territory. Willfully. Essentially what happened was when smash hits came on the scene, NME had a choice to make um what you know would it try and fight smash hits on its own on sort of you know pop turf or or would it just all right say smash hits can have that you can have pop and we'll go off into the kind of uh indie fringes and that's what they did and um it completely kind of backfired and smash hits this is i i love this smash hits office was on carnaby street directly opposite nme but like half a floor above so that

from the smash hits office they were literally looking down on enemy looking looking straight into their office almost sort of taunting them and i was very very much a smash hits kid at this point my dad my dad got enemy and i'd sort of pick it up and look was very very much a smash hits kid at this point my dad my dad got enemy and i'd sort of pick it up and look at it at his house but it was all a bit still a bit sort of daunting and off-putting for me god the idea of thinking of the enemy is your dad's baby yeah it's just interesting the news section stories you read out new pop really hasn't won has it i mean you the stories about the dinosaurs. Bowie, Jacksons, Crosby stills a gnash in the news section.

You know, not too much has actually been swept away by what's happened in 81 and 82. These people are still there. But they'll meet the New Pop halfway with Weller, with the Style Council, and respond and all that because at least that's got some kind of political heft to it as far as they're concerned. So what else was on telly this week?

Well, BBC One starts the day at 6.30am with the still new Breakfast Time followed by The Wombles, Jackanora, Champion the Wonder Horse, Why Don't You, Highland Pony Trail and the 1977 Australian film Blue Fire Lady about a girl who forms a bond with a mardy horse and becomes a show jumping champion

Afternoons Afternoon, regional news in your area and Pebble Mill at one, it's gran and then stop go and then everybody's doing it a collection of home movies from the 20s and 30s, presumably of stockbrokers doing the Charleston on a window ledge before throwing themselves off.

At 20 past two, we're whipped over to Aintree for the first day of the Grand National Killer Horse Festival. Then it's regional news in your area, Play School, The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse. A repeat of the first episode of Hyde Air again. John Craven's News Round. And then Simon Groom spends a day with the Household Cavalry and gives Sefton, the horse that survived the Hyde Park bomb,

a sugar lump or something. Then it's the news. Regional news in your area. Nationwide. And they've just finished you know what bbc2 gets the party started at five past six with a two hour five minute blast of red hot open university action and then closes down for nearly three hours, coming back hard with Play School, and then closes down for over four and a half hours until it picks up the racing from Aintree. Then it shuts down for another 45 minutes, eventually returning with a documentary

about the North Westminster Community School and the Brothers Lionheart. Tucker tries to sort Alan out with a bird in episode five of the first series of tucker's luck then the documentary series just another day hangs about waterloo station and they're currently 30 minutes into a dream of alice a celebration of the 150th anniversary of the birth of lewis carroll itv begins with daybreak the tv am news update with robert key then it's good morning britain then a close down from 9 15 to 9 30 probably a bit of

jingly music and a picture of a transmitter on a hill somewhere then it's sesame street science international the computer show database then a chance to meet great chief anga gaga Then it's Sesame Street, Science International, The Computer Show Database, then a chance to meet great chief Angagaga Tongalo II of Zaire in Lost Kingdoms. After film fun, it's gammon and spinach, get up and go, The Sullivans, News at One, Regional News in Your Area, Crown Court, Afternoon Plus, Plays for Pleasure and a repeat of Survival. After another repeat of Gammon and Spinach,

it's a foghorn leghorn cartoon and then First Post, points of view for kids, followed by Rowan's Report, a new series about children who are already far more successful than you. This week it's a 13-year-old model. Then Mac finds a new goalie in Murphy's Mob and Arnold gets stage fright in different strokes. After the news at 5.45, it's regional news in your area, crossroads and they're halfway through Michael Knight and his talking car,

who are hunting a chauffeur who is trying to sabotage a political summit in Knight Rider. Channel 4, on the other hand, can't be asked to do anything until 5 to 3, when it runs the 1946 film Two Sisters from Boston, followed by Tennis That Count that counts where a coach takes some of his students to spain to prepare them for a career of losing to foreigners after countdown it's get smart and then a master class from dancer hanny coles in masters of tap and they're currently halfway through channel 4 news oh chaps precious memories seeping through the ages just like wine what's jumping out at you there that um that show rowan's report i'd never heard of it maybe it wasn't shown in our itv area where i'm from um so i looked into it and and um it's

just something where they interview um assorted young people teenagers who are doing well at something and later on they did annabella luin from bow wow wow but um i had a look at the list of other people who are on there and uh there was there was a kid who uh was one of the youngest stock market investors and this is the the cold um hand of history here can you can you guess who maybe that was a teenager at the time jacob reese mogg oh imagine being introduced to that cunt that early i know and i imagine at the time it was probably done in a spirit of novelty of you know whenever they used to have the child who is now known as uh lauren harry's yeah talking about um antiques and it was this novelty oh look this this child who knows about grown-up stuff.

And probably at the time, it all seemed very... Oh, look at this slightly nerdy 13-year-old who's buying and selling stocks and shares. But, yeah, little do we know that they're going to be very much part of the project to rip up Britain as we know it and turn us into a casino capitalist hellhole. But come on, man. He was investing all his money off his paper round and that.

Yeah, right. And pulled himself up by his bootstraps. Nothing to do with his fucking dad. The other thing that jumped out at me, I don't know if you guys were as much into it as I was, but Tucker's luck, man. Tucker's luck. Oh, gorgeous.

Fucking hell. I love that. I remember the anticipation for it. Just hearing that this series was going to happen. And also, I mean, crucially, hearing that characters from Grange Hill were going to be in it beyond Tucker. Yeah, so for people who don't know,

it's Tucker Jenkins played by Todd Carty, later Robbie Stenders, of course. Tucker Jenkins was kind of roguish, good lad from Grange Hill. And it's just him and his mate, Alan, and their adventures having left school and to me it sort of hit me in in two ways first of all at the time it just seemed so true to the kind of life I imagined I was living which was you know a life of broken glass everywhere people

pissing on the stairs you know they just don't care you know just that kind of gritty urban thing. Everywhere you go, everything you see. Yeah, right. So, you know, basically running scared of skinheads. Yeah, the antagonists in Griggs. It's Passmore and his mate Brains. Passmore in a trilby and Brains in his bad manners vest who are the antagonists in Tucker's luck. And there's a famous confrontation in a skate park

in which a ghetto blaster gets smashed and Tucker's lip gets cut and it's all very dramatic. It just seemed like a sort of heightened version of the world in which I thought I was living, when really as bad as it got was drawing my own little tag on a park bench. But I did have to run away from skinheads, mind. When I used to sort of go off to barry island the way to get there quickly was to cut through the cinder track through the steam locomotive graveyard and that's where the skinheads a la tucker's luck would be their

sniffing glue and they didn't like me because i used to be a rude boy but i'd kind of turn my back on it a bit and they they said, so yeah, yeah. And I just learned to run very fast in my Paul Weller-esque slip-on shoes. But yeah, this episode of Tucker's Luck, I looked it up, this series one of episode five called Bo Derek. The episode description is that Tommy believes Tucker should have a party to help Alan get his friend off of Susie. And then the following week, it's the morning after the party,

the house is a disaster, and there's an unknown guest. Can the boys clean the place up before Mrs Jenkins gets home? Hello, French polishers. Yeah, exactly. It's like that, isn't it? It's like that advert that Yellow Pages had. But I vividly remember this episode, and I did go through a deep dive rewatch phase

of looking at Tucker's luck on YouTube. It's all on YouTube. vividly remember this episode and i i did go through a a deep dive re-watch phase uh looking at tucker's luck on on youtube it's all it's all on youtube yeah um a few years ago i was going to pitch an article to the quietus of some massive deep dive into tucker's luck but never got around to it but this episode of tucker's luck one thing i remember about it the house party the record they put on um when people arrive and it's a brilliant choice of record it's Love and Dancing by the League Unlimited Orchestra oh yeah which is it's the remix album of

Dare by the Human League and it's just a brilliant record to put on at a party and I just remember thinking you know however grim and shit everything's meant to be at least they had that but yeah watching it again this is how it hit me the second time around, watching Tucker's Luck now.

It's such an amazing document of old Britain, of 1983 Britain, because even though Grange Hill was meant to be in the fictitious North London borough of Northam, most of Tucker's Luck is filmed kind of around Westbourne Park, Labrador Grove, kind of West London. And it's an area of London that hadn't really been gentrified um a lot of it still hasn't really and it's just this world of kind of backlit plastic shop signs and everything's covered in a bit of kind of carbon monoxide grit and it's a world of cafes with watered-down ketchup and just, you know, steamed-up windows.

And it's just... Even the way that the British Telecom phone booths look, it's just an incredible document to have of that world, I think. The anticipation for it was enormous, because, of course, you know, Alan and Benny and Tucker and all, they'd left Grange Hill. Grange Hill used to do that thing where the kids left. You know, it stopped doing that after a while. It wasn't like, please, sir where the kids left. You know, it stopped doing that after a while.

It wasn't like, please, sir. Yeah, yeah. No, but it stopped doing that. It kept people on for too long after a while. But, you know, and for any kid watching it, it was simultaneously like a good sort of extension of Grange Hill, but also slightly, not scary as such, but it told you you're going to have to do this one day.

You're going to be out of school. You know, you're going to have to not be a grown-up necessarily but find your way as it were but yeah it's a massive thing took his look it was the era of mass unemployment particularly among the youth and it the program was grappling with that this this idea of just these these kids being basically thrown on the scrap heap and wondering what the fuck they're going to do and ending up just doing little kind of little jobs in some mate's auto repair shop and then getting sacked and yeah all of that it just seems all very real and like quite chilling in a way that this was a you know being 15 years old myself this was only just around the corner for me as well yeah i mean you've seen going out haven't you i remember that that was like that was shown really late at night yeah yeah talking of the weetabix i can't believe i actually haven't dropped this yet i went for a drink on my

own one night in a pub in nottingham ended up at the bar chit-chatting to this bloke who claimed to be the illustrator for the weetabix adverts wow and i was just pushing him for information and trying to catch him out on the colour of Brains as Hawaiian shirt in that advert where they went all American and he said oh no I wasn't involved in it by then but at the end the one thing that convinced me

that he could have been the illustrator for the Weetabix is that just before he left he picked up a full bottle of Bex and smashed it into the face of the barman fucking hell who'd be getting on his tits all night there you go He picked up a full bottle of Bex and smashed it into the face of the barman. Fucking hell. Who'd be getting on his tits all night. There you go. Yeah.

Fucking hell. No, he legged it out because he knew what was good for him. Okay. And on that note, pop craze youngsters, I do believe that the table's been laid for this episode of Top of the Pops. Oh, I'm rubbing my thighs in anticipation of this one. It's going to be a fucking corking episode, this. So we'll leave it till tomorrow,

and I'll say thank you very much, Neil Kulkarni. No worries, Al. God bless you, Simon Price. God bless you, too. My name's Al Needham. Stay pop crazed Chart music Hello, I'm Alex Lynch And this is Out of Character

A podcast about sketch and character comedy You're not a wizard I've got a beard Oh yeah, he's Oh, you're not a wizard. I am. I've got a beard. Oh, yeah, he's right. He does have a beard, actually. In this show, I chat to writers and performers from the world of sketch and character comedy. And I sort of couldn't believe what I was seeing. Like, I couldn't believe anything could be that good.

That moment of self-hatred is your rehearsal. That's what... You've been doing it your whole life. Find out what made them venture into it. good. That moment of self-hatred is your rehearsal. You've been doing it your whole life. Find out what made them venture into it. I mean, just getting that DVD in and binging through those was just some of the most profound comedy joy of my life. I'd spent my whole childhood being,

I'll be honest, a dick. Talk about their characters. And it just made me really want to make her move with her pelvis, basically. dick. Talk about their characters. And it just made me really want to, like, make her move with her pelvis, basically. Maybe meet some of their characters. Because she's actually only got one leg. That's why she's been hot pink. I don't know what to say. She's quite terrifying.

That is correct. And generally just shoot the breeze and, more importantly, have a laugh. It's all an act, Alex. I'm horrible. I'm an horrible person. That's so good. Recorded entirely in the first lockdown. The most joyous bit of idiocy. And Twitter was full of just people going, that's awful or that's brilliant.

That's Out of Character with me, Alex Lynch. Hello, I'm a spider. Sounds nuts, which it was. Coming soon, wherever you get your podcasts.