Chart Music: the Top Of The Pops Podcast - #64 (Pt 1): 26.4.84 – Metal Mickey Dropping His Guts

Episode Date: March 1, 2022

Simon Price, Neil Kulkarni and Al Needham gird their loins in anticipation for an episode of The Pops located slap bang in the middle of the Aydeez, taking the time to discuss the decline of New Pop, leaf through that week’s NME, and ruminate upon the career of The Mary Brennell Boy’s Murder…Video Playlist | Subscribe | Facebook | Twitter | The Chart Music Wiki | Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Um... Chart music. Chart music. Yay! Up you pop craze youngsters and welcome to the latest episode of Chalk 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 alongside me today are my dear friends Neil Kulkane.

Hello there. And Simon Price. Hello. Jesus and Buzz ride again. Boys, come on, you know what I want. The pop things and the interesting things. Lay them on a brother right now. Well, the last time we spoke, Al I was just before Christmas, I think.

And we all know what January is like. Precious little pop and interesting stuff happening. The fucking interminable wait until payday. Yeah. And I've been a right tightwad. I've been a right Antarctic dad refusing to line the pockets of big heat. You know, I've been having my gym jams and stuff

and clothes layers and gloves and looking at the emergency meters. In the midst of all of this, the only sort of light in it, in a sense, was my youngest's birthday. She wound me up this month. She made me go to Hobbycraft and buy a shit ton of clay because she wanted to make a sculpture. Oh, no. Yeah, it turns out it was of Eddie, the Iron Maiden mascot. She knows I'm still a bit scared of Eddie.

And she made this amazing sculpture, put it on the pillow next to me before I woke up, just so she could laugh at my shit scared reaction when I wake. Which she didn't film, thank fuck. She asked for metal gauntlets and bracelets for her birthday. You know, Man O' War style shit. Oh, Jesus. Oh, yeah.

I did my usual aged pervert shopping in blue banana she's now she's now fully gauntleted up she does look exactly like somebody from manor well inevitably i started trying them on and i'm getting a bit jealous to be honest with you they look amazing it's never too late neil never too late it is never too late did you do a few forearm smashes on a cushion or something? Absolutely. You put them on. You are fucking the road warriors, Legion of Doom, aren't you? It just makes you fucking hench.

And I've got a wedding coming up. My band's got to play a wedding. And we'll be giving a list of cover songs, some fucking awful ones that the bride wants. Oh, go on, such as? Well, she wants us to do a couple of Queen numbersoms which is kind of anathemical to my soul she wants us to do crazy little thing called

she's trolling you so much yeah and she wants us to do Who Wants To Live Forever that fucking song from Highlander but I mean

it'd be good to do them with the gauntlets any Oasis? no no well there you go catch then look at you my bassist has refused to do any Queen songs

But I think he's coming round The thing with gauntlets is right The male arm can be disguised to a point If you wear like Particularly if you wear long sleeves Or kind of long short sleeves If you know what I mean Nobody really knows what you're packing

At the top half of your arm You could be a bit hench You could work out They don't know But the giveaway is always the wrist If you've got weedy wrists right people know so this this is why those kind of cheap heavy metal blue banana wristbands are such a godsend so you know yeah you know you put them on and everyone immediately thinks oh he's hard yeah yeah because i do have like skinny girlish wrists So I'm definitely thinking of getting myself a pair.

The only sort of pop and interesting thing that happened this month, really, was, I think, a somewhat delightful thing happened on Twitter regarding Lieutenant Pigeon. Yes. I can't help feeling that chart music's partly responsible for this. A friend of mine who lives in Coventry, he's kind of like a curator of the Coventry Music Museum, he said, you know,

Lieutenant Pigeon recorded Maldiado at this house in Coventry. And kind of like a curator of the Coventry Music Museum he said you know Lieutenant Prism recorded Moldy Odd at this house in Coventry and I sort of shared it on Twitter and suddenly a load of aforementioned as we mentioned

on the last chart music Oldham Athletic fans sort of noticed this and before you knew it his request for donations so that a blue plaque could be put up on this house

was exceeded you know like in an afternoon amazing it was brilliant absolutely brilliant yeah big shout to the Pop Craze Latics so that a blue plaque could be put up on this house was exceeded, you know, like in an afternoon. Amazing. It was brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Yeah, big shout to the Pop Craze Latte.

It's been, in a sense, although it's usual January doldrums, it's been quite a hopeful January for me because I started up as substat because I was bored. Yes, let's talk about this now. Well, yeah, late December, I thought, look, I've got all this fucking music that I listened to in 2021. Nowhere to stick it.

And you cannot do an end of year list, you know, on the 1st of January. It's got to, you know, come in under the wire. So I rapidly published it, threw it out there, you know, free subscriptions, paid subscriptions for new writing. And I've had enough bites, you know. I've had like about 200, 300 odd quid of bites. So he'll behoves me to plug it. yeah fuck it show neil show neilk.substack.com um please get a paid subscription you can do it right now please you can get a paid subscription for about seven dollar a month um you know let me relive the dreams of freelancing again first week of january i was

happy as a pig in shit i was just in my dressing gown smoking and writing so yeah please subscribe to my subs that i have a strange sense of impetus and hope um which has also actually been helped by having some slow time in the laundrette it's lovely going back to the laundrette because my washing machine's knackered. Oh, mate. But I'm tempted not to get a washing machine because I'm getting back into the laundrette and just parking myself next to the window and watching the pig people of Charlesmoor go by for 45 minutes.

So, yeah, a strangely hopeful start to the year. Are you taking your jeans off and shoving them in and just sitting there in your box of short stil shorts i i honestly do not own a pair of jeans wow but yeah these gauntlets what what you want neil is you want a matching studded dog collar kind of thing yes and when you're singing when you're doing your queen ramble right you want to do like that like the road warriors do the wrestlers when they're being interviewed. Really big hench fuckers. And when they do their interviews, they have their dog collars, they have them just a little bit loose so they can shake their head at the right moment

and the collar falls off. Neil Kulkarni snacks on danger and dines on death. Too right. And in combination with a Freddy-style moustache, I think it'll be... Yeah, definitely got to be done. I'm still processing this image of Neil waking up with the sort of clay head of Eddie the Iron Maiden mascot next to him. And I'm just trying to picture Neil's face.

And in my mind, it's like that bit in The Wicker Man where Edward Woodward wakes up and there's that sort of hand candle lit and he just sort of screams and it cuts. And yeah. It was fucking terrifying. And she'd been doing it in a room, you know, like sculpting this thing in private and hiding it.

So I couldn't, because I am still scared of Eddie. I don't know what it is. There's something residual from way back in the day. He's the least favourite of the metal mascots, I think. I much prefer um i much prefer motorhead snaggletooth simon it's been a while mate what you've been up to come on tell me all well i think one thing that's happened since i last spoke to you is i've started a new teaching job i'm at the lccm which is the london college of creative media near london bridge teaching the

history of pop and as you can imagine i am like a pig in shit teaching that you know it's just it's expert simon price pop expert simon price exactly yeah yeah sorry i apologize pop yeah absolutely that's me what are you doing at the minute so for example it allows me to kind of really indulge my own obsessions while maintaining the illusion that i'm teaching them the kind of official canon so so you know I suddenly stopped and played sort of seven t-rex videos in a row just because I felt like it or I kept sort of crowbarring sparks into every lesson saying well of course sparks are really important to you know it might be reggae or something and I'm saying well no it's great I'm yeah I'm really enjoying

that um the other thing that's changed is I've joined the bourgeoisie. I know. The working class can kiss my arse and all that. Yeah, it's awful. Now, what's happened is I've moved house and we've moved to the suburbs. No. And I've never lived in the suburbs before. This is new to me.

I'm an urban guy. You know, I've always lived in the middle of a city, whether that's London or Brighton or even Paris. of a city whether that's london or brighton um or even paris uh and um the the evil landlady at the last place was going to jack the rent up by 200 quid a month which yeah i know and it was already not cheap let me tell you so you know that together with a few fortuitous things which made this possible means that we are now owners for the first time in my life um like narrowly by the skin of our teeth i'm i'm 54 years old and i've been living like a student for all of that time all my adult life just like

renting and like having to move every couple years uh well you know not wanting to move but just you know something will happen and or whatever and it's horrible that kind of uncertainty i just imagined i'd be like that till i was in my 80s i I just thought that's how life is. But here we are. So, yeah, we've moved to the suburbs. It's a part of Brighton called Bevandean. And it's very much, it looks like the Metroland that John Betjeman wrote about. You know, it's all 1930s semi-detached houses. I can feel myself changing already.

I'm putting some distance between myself and the immature, Jeremy Corbyn's unrealistic brand of student politics. I think we need a more sensible, mature, centrist approach to solving Britain's problems. Yeah, I'm pulling the ladder up. We literally bought a ladder the other day. We bought a ladder to access our loft conversion. Yeah, yeah. And just moving out to the Burbs, it's it's a whole different kind of pace of life it's only a sort of 10 minute bus ride for the middle of brighton but it's deathly quiet here i mean apart from anything else we've we've got a front garden i've never had a front garden before

so there's that kind of buffer between you and human beings walking past which it's just really alien to me i'm used to just hearing that kind of hubbub of life outside the window um and and and also you know you can walk around after dark and there is no one you can hear a pin drop yeah like the other day i i fell over right or maybe at my age i should say i had a fall yeah yeah um i i i say i say it the other day it was just before christmas i i was uh coming back home from central brighton with a heavy bag of shopping of sort of christmas related stuff and um there was there's loads of kind of like plastic bins and recycling bins out on the pavement it's quite a narrow pavement so i kind of like swerved my walk to avoid bumping into these bins and it was dark there's quite a lot of like long gaps between

street lights that's my excuse also um i was wearing these giant stack-heeled dr martin's these big sort of um sort of uh that'll get the neighbors talking oh god yeah i mean right this is it we're trying to do everything we can to to seem as sort of nice and normal as we can because the neighbor's going to be talking anyway or we've seen that pair of goths we've moved in so we're just trying to do everything we can and also just a change in um in the wildlife like in my old place all you saw out the window was pigeons and seagulls and i've seen a seagull ripping the head off a live pigeon out of the back window of my old place and the pigeons themselves look pretty dystopian because

our house backed onto a row of takeaways and um there was kind of um an extractor thing an extractor from the kitchen one of the takeaways where the pigeons had built a nest in in the extractor which was i'm sure it was nice for them really warm but they came out all covered in chip fat and they all look like sid vicious these sort of sid vicious looking pigeons it was amazing so one of these sid vicious pigeon heads being ripped off by a seagull was the kind of wildlife I was used to seeing. If you saw a mammal, it would be a rat. But out here, it's squirrels and foxes.

Like right as I speak, I can see a squirrel kind of monkeying about because they are the kind of British monkey, aren't they? The squirrel, really. And the other day, there were foxes having sex in our garden. Obviously, I drew the curtains to give them some privacy. I'm not a complete pervert, you know. But, yeah, and, you know, bird-wise, you've got rooks and robins and collared doves and most glamorous of all, jays,

which are, you know, beautiful, really colourful and all that. And, yes, suddenly I'm sort of a changed man, living this sort of Terry and June lifestyle. Yeah, I don't know what it's like where you guys live, but this is novelty to me, all this. It really is. It's very similar where I live. Just be wary, Simon, if anyone asks you to join a neighbourhood watch

or something like that. That's where the Pampas grass connection really lies. Neighbourhood crotch, more like. Well, as far as chart music goes, Neil, I've got some very disturbing news to pass on to you. Oh, my word. You know, put the last episode to bed, reclined and luxuriated in the afterglow of it.

And then all of a sudden I got a message from one of my mates, Ayo Bev, which reads as follows. Hey, Al, I just interviewed Jay Osmond on WhatsApp and told him about your discussion of crazy horses on the last podcast. Oh my god. As I was talking his wife was furiously

searching for it online and I now feel completely responsible for all the sexual swear words that go into here. Neil, me and you have effed and jeffed in an Osman's house. Oh, my God. I can just imagine the Mormon shock at that. That don't sit right with me now.

Yes, same here. She also went on to say, P.S. I told them about the denim song and they started searching for that. Oh, fantastic. So there you go, man. We've closed a circle. That is great. That is so great. that. Oh, fantastic. So there you go, man. We've closed a circle. That is great.

That is so great. Yeah. That's mental. That is mental. That our outright blasphemy is in an Osman household like that. That is nuts. I'd just love to know how long they lasted. Because I know within about five seconds I called Harry Nilsson a cunt.

So I can't imagine they even got to you saying anything about how brilliant Crazy Horse is, man. So sorry about that, Neil. In other news, I had a fucking shit Christmas. Started off on Christmas Day. For the first time ever, my mum's moved out of town and living up the road from my sister. So for the first time on Christmas Day, I'm getting to see me nephews and niece,

which is fucking brilliant. The concept was fucking brilliant but i woke up hung over as fuck at about i don't know 12 o'clock stumbled into the living room and there they are the little kids their faces all shining and smiling and i'd forgotten to take out money to give them so that those smiles disappeared so i just said you know try and take the mind off it. I just said, you know, come on, let's do something familial. And I just thought, you know, you know what I reached for? The Christmas top of the pops that was on that day.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I thought I'd sit down with the youth and, you know, educate them as well as getting a little look into a window on their world. And, well, I lasted about 10 minutes. Had to be turned off because I caught myself kicking off at a nine-year-old girl because she said she liked Ed Sheeran. And then fucking Coldplay or some twats like that were playing in a castle. And I just said, right, fuck this.

We're not watching this. And I put on the episode of top of the pops that we covered in the last episode of charles talk them all about gary glitter and you know rolf harris the magic of christmas there but i mean i tried to question them on what kind of music they're into and you know one of them's nine one of them's 13 the other one's 21 absolutely blank stares in return it's like i'd asked them what their favorite shape of drill bit is yeah yeah it means nothing to them oh it means fuck all it's like in previous years right with my kids and grandkids i've bought them presents you know to see their little faces light up all of my grandkids all they wanted this year was robux right which is

is it i know you don't know what it is no you're talking about roblox i'm talking about roblox robux is a fucking american department no no but robux is the voucher for roblox i stand corrected i do apologize and that's all they wanted. And, you know, it's a little card. Fucking cryptocurrency. And their eyes lit up with delight. All the specialness is fucking gone, man. And some of them wanted Minecraft fucking vouchers. I mean, fuck off.

Oh, come on. How much did we love getting a record token, though? No, no, fair enough. Yeah, but as a supplement to your Big Track or your Subutio or something like that. Yeah, I guess. I think I'm just resisting the fact they're getting old at. Because there does come that time, doesn't there, in your life when you're about 10, 11, all you want is money. Really?

Yeah. Oh, and before we move on, I want to give a shout out to the members of Chart Music who are currently under heavy manners with the spiteful Armoured Bollock. One's recovering. One's coming off the arse end of it and I know that the Pop Craze youngsters will be joining us in wishing them a swift and full recovery as they malinger in their sick beds, read comics and get stuck into another episode of Crown Court. Get well soon, duckies.

Oh man, have you had it yet no no i've dodged it maybe this most boring chat going yeah yeah i had it back in august i did yeah yeah i didn't i didn't yeah yeah i'm pretty sure what we had was a delta variant which was like it wasn't the og covid it was like when an album gets reissued on the fame label and it doesn't have the same kind of inner sleeve but yeah um we were fully jabbed up by that point so obviously the effects were kind of uh toned down a little bit because of that but it gave me enough of a window into what it would have been like if we weren't jabbed up and for you know about three days it was pretty fucking scary couldn't breathe my breathing's not great anyway so yeah um get jabbed everybody it's horrible yeah yeah regardless of what um van morrison or ian brown or eric

lapton tells you yeah be more like neil young yes good old neil so we've come to the part of the show where we stop we drop and we bow the knee to the latest batch of pop craze patreons and in the five dollar section this time we have anthony stenson cra Shelton, Andy Crayford, James Fox, Brendan Stone, No Chorus, Sarah LeClaire, Wayne Azarate, Brendan McCarthy, Tony Coles, Eddie Cockring, Stephen Moore, Bruce, Even more, Bruce, Caitlin Francis, Wraith and Dan Gent. Thank you, babies. Can I just stop there to thank Sarah LeClaire specifically? I know we shouldn't pick people out, but she used to write for Melody Maker way back.

Did she? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And kind of lost touch. And yeah, good on you, Sarah. Good to know you're out there. I'm just sort of also wondering which of those was actually Jay Osmond. Yes. And in the $3 section, we have Alan Elliott, Ian Hamilton, David Waring, Simon Mulvaney, Russell Young, Richard Walkington, and Joe Lathorn.

Oh, you complete us, you sexy bastards. We love you like our name was the Rolling Stones. Oh, and Stephen Metcalf, Chris Mitchell, Gavin Montgomery, Richard Williamson and Riley Briggs. You know what they did, chaps? They only went and jacked it up as a Christmas box for us. Isn't that nice of them? Oh, lovely stuff.

And one thing those pop-crazed youngsters get to do every month is fiddle and a diddle and a tinker and a tanker with this week's chart music top ten. Shall we, chaps? Yes, please. Hit the fucking music! We've said goodbye to Tyler the XXX, privately educated Romo Cop and Jeff Sex, which means none up, four down.

Three non-movers and three new entries. It's a new entry at number 10 for Singleton Notes, Purvis and Judd. Holding fast at number 9, Rock Expert, David Starks. No change either at number 8 for Staircase of Cock. And it's another non-mover at number seven. Here comes Chisholm. Yes. Last week's number one falls five places to number six,

the popular orange vegetable into the top five and it's a one place drop for bummer dog down one place from number three to number four the bent cunts who are fucking real last week's number two this week week's number three, skin heady heady. And straight in at number two, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Glitter, which means... Britain's number one. The first number one of the year and the highest new entry straight in at number one. Two Ronnies, One Cup. Oh, what a chart, dear boys.

What a chart. Give me the bullet. Gives you hope for the new year, doesn't it? I mean, we've already established that Singleton, Noakes, Purvis and Judd are a well Canterbury sound. And Crosby, Stills, Nash and Glitter essentially speaks for itself, doesn't it? Our house, hey, is a's a very very very fine house hey but what's the stitch with two ronnie's one cup

i'm saying no gay electro disco it's gay electro disco kind of like bronski beat meets man to man featuring man parish that kind of vibe yeah yeah i i think it's a little darker than that i think it's kind of uh songs that throbbing gristle would have rejected as too offensive oh a bit white house you mean yeah yeah i'm deeply upset that baxter woolard and rod didn't make the top 10 though but then again as that bloke in the melody makers letters page said last episode you know bands like baxter woolard and rod must always struggle because their music requires some concentration and you can't get off on it straight away. While bands like Skin, Heady Heady and Here Comes Chisholm

who use simple repetitive chords and phrases will always flourish. Yeah, man. Even in the chart music top ten, the big bands squeeze out their pap for the mug masses to lap up. Yeah. This is pop.

So if you want in on the pulsating go-ahead lifestyle of the pop craze Patreons who have already crammed this entire episode without adverts into their gaping maws, you know what to do. Keyboard, patreon.com slash chartmusic, money, G-string. You can do it right now. Please. So this episode, Pop Craze Youngsters, takes us all the way back to April the 26th, 1984. Now, chaps, we've taken a saunter down 1984 Street a couple of times, haven't we? But this one happens to be the first that doesn't have Frankie Goes to Hollywood at number one.

So there is that. But there's a specific reason why we're doing this episode. And we'll come to that later. But, you know, going through this episode, quite an eye-opener, wasn't it? Oh, yeah. It's a right grab bag of bollocks, isn't it? Yeah. Very much so. I mean, one of the basic tenets of 80s pop, according to the chart music odyssey, is that Live Aid was a fault line through the decade, which allowed the dinosaurs of pop to come lumbering back. But this episode clearly demonstrates

that the surface of the plastic cup of water was rippling long before the summer of 85. Yeah, it does. In many ways, superficially, it still feels like the early 80s, but there are things happening in it, which you can sense the ground shifting beneath your feet, and we are moving into the mid-80s. Haven't fully got there yet, but yeah, there are a lot of things,

which, like you say, would probably be associated with band-aid live aid and all of that but they were just sort of biding their time they were sort of affirming their status as the sort of acts who were worthy of being on that kind of global stage yes yeah it was very much you know a shift from brit-centric uh pop and pop charts through to more sort of americanized and globalized feel i think very much so yeah very much so which is odd because i mean in a way we could see that the lines of things getting not as good as the early 80s in 83 but actually at this time in 84 i was really open and quite sluggish about pop music looking at looking at the chart i was i hadn't yet developed all the enmities and

hatreds that would excise people from my listening so you know i was quite open to a lot of this stuff in the charts hip-hop had kind of gone away in 84 a little bit waiting for its renaissance in 85 we were in dmc so in a pop sense i was very open and getting from obviously getting tremendously excited about frankie in particular is probably a terrible time for pot but a time when my engagement with Pop via radio, TV and smash hits was total and absolute. I mean without spoiler in this episode

I'd like you to contemplate the following statistic chaps average age of the presenters on this episode of Top of the Pops 33 average age of the front persons on this episode of Top of the pops in all the bands and the artists and all that kind of stuff 35 wow yeah only three of the 10 acts we're going

to see tonight are in the 20s only one person on stage in the entire episode is a teenager and eight of them are old enough to legally be our parents at the time in a nutshell chaps this episode is night of the living dad it's kind of a re-professionalization of pop the kids are not going to be allowed to take over anymore and these are the kind of re-exerting themselves i don't know i didn't really feel that way when i watched it i mean when you point out the stats it's undeniable but those i mean, the stats of the age of the presenters, on average, and of the artists are pushed up artificially by one presenter and, let's say, two artists in particular. at least sort of three or four things there that are aimed at young people i would say but we'll come to that let's move on no sorry it's 1984 let's go for it this is the first radio ad you can smell the new cinnabon pull apart only at wendy's it's ooey gooey and just five bucks with

a small coffee all day long taxes extra at extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. Radio 1 News In the news this week, American researchers have announced their discovery of human T-cell leukemia virus type 3, otherwise known as the AIDS virus. In the wake of the shooting of WPC Yvonne Fletcher nine days ago, the Foreign Office have ended the siege at the Libyan embassy by deporting all 50 embassy staff with diplomatic immunity whilst closing down their embassy in Tripoli. Seven out of nine pits in Nottinghamshire stay open after the Easter break, defying calls from Arthur Scargill for an all-out strike. Don't start shouting scab at me!

Bobby Kennedy's son has been found dead of a drug overdose in a Palm Beach hotel. Prince Fairclough has been coated down by American media after he sprayed his press pool with a paint gun on his visit to California and said, I enjoyed that. Prince Fairclough. Count Basie has died today in a Florida hospital at the age of 79. Count Basie has died today in a Florida hospital at the age of 79. A male stripping troop have been paid £200 to put on a show at a hemp party at the Greenham Common Peace Camp next week.

A programme broadcast by BBC Radio Merseyside claims that 50% of people aged between 14 and 25 in their catchment area are regular users of heroin. Liz Dawn, who plays Vera Duckworth in Coronation Street, is waiting to see if she's getting sacked after she appeared in Cabaret at a restaurant in Halifax, opened the show by saying she was too pissed to perform, and then punched her agent in the face and had a go at the restaurant owner when she was told she wasn't getting her 325 pound fee look at there bill tarmare her on-screen husband jack was in the audience and studying at short notice what a pro that's amazing liverpool

have knocked dinamo bucarest out of the european cup semi-final and will play roma in the final That's amazing. Thanks to Anderlecht president Constant van den Stock bunging referee Emilio Guricetta-Muro 1.2 million Belgian francs to act the cunt on the pitch. Fuck them both up the arse with a stick with a nail in it. Not that you bear a grudge or anything. Is that the reason we chose this episode, Al? You've been saving that up.

Boy George accuses customs officers at Heathrow for being obnoxious pigs after John Moss was detained for two hours over a pair of trousers he bought back from New York and Mikey Craig was detained for six hours over a guitar. George was still in America as he wanted to stay behind a bit to see Liberace in concert. George was still

in America because he knew what the fuck would happen when he got through there with his luggage. But the big news this week is that the BBC have announced plans to launch a new soap opera, their first since The Newcomers finished in 1969, to replace the ailing news show 60 Minutes and in an attempt to lock viewers into BBC One all night. According to the Sunday Mirror, the soap will be, quote, a cheerful slice of life set in the east end of London. Yeah, what happened there? Filming will commence in August and it will run twice a week from early 1985

with a chat show on the other weeknights with Terry Wogan and Russell Harter as the front runners to present. In terms of like what EastEnders was set up to do to lock you into BBC One for the night, it kind of worked on me completely. I was massive watcher of EastEnders for the first

10-15 years. Yeah I guess I was really yeah. I've come to form the opinion that EastEnders is the prime culprit in the decline and eventual death of Top of the Pops but you know I'll lay out my case when the time is right. No seriously it was death by

a thousand cuts. I'm surprised you didn't mention by the way that on April 26th 1984 Sultan Iskandar of Johor became Yang Depertuan Agong of Malaysia, the supreme ruler of Malaysia. I just assumed everyone knew that. Yeah, I mean, a bit of a colourful character.

He's what's diplomatically known as a strict disciplinarian, which basically means he was a right fucking arsehole, right? He was a motorbike enthusiast who kept peacocks, but he used to walk around with a pistol in his waistband. And he's most known for the Gomez incident of 1992, where he and his goons beat up a hockey

coach that he'd come into a disagreement with. And, yeah, you can say what you like about him now. He's dead. It's fine. I just thought I had to put that out there for all our Malaysian listeners. I know we have many. Think global, Simon. Always. Those mouse strippers are Greenham Common, man.

There's another play for today, isn't there? Well, let me get this right. Were they sent by some kind of mischievous tabloid newspaper? No, no, no, no. It was actually hired by the Greenham women themselves. I mean, Al, if you'd have been part of that troupe, would you have... Oh, yeah. You know, we don't even finish that question.

Of course I would. No, but I'm saying if you'd have been part of that troupe, how would you have adapted your costume and act to reflect it? I'm just thinking of missile shapes, intercontinental bollock stick missiles, et cetera. I mean... Well, we could have kind of, like, got together. If there was four of us, we could have formed the CND symbol.

Yeah, you can't kill the spirit, girls. I am like the mountain. On the cover of Melody Maker this week, Ian McCulloch of Echo and the Bunnymen. On the cover of Smash It, Frankie goes to Hollywood. The number one LP in the country is now That's What I Call Music 2. Can't Slow Down by Lionel Richie is at number two. And over in Americaica the number one

single is against all odds by phil collins and the number one lp is a soundtrack to footloose with 1984 by van halen at number two so boys what were we doing in april 1984? I was 16 going on 17, like my name was Liesel von Trapp. My life was an empty page that men would want to write on. Eager young lads and roues and cads would offer me food and wine. I was innocent as a rose, bachelor dandies, drinkers of brandies. What did I know of those? I was in transition, really. I mean, the Pop Crazy Youngsters already heard what I was like at the age of 15, I guess. drinkers of brandies what did i know of those i was in transition really i mean the pop craze

has already heard what i was like at the age of 15 i guess you know wearing a burgundy cardigan with a big y on it dabbing detol on my acne damaged skin which only made it worse staring out the window listening to dexys all of that you know stuff but i was kind of shifting i wasn't yet writing for the local paper simon says. I was really open. No, not quite. That was coming in the summer. But I was kind of just my whole interests and my aesthetics were moving along a bit. My best friend at the time was a kid called Andrew Hammond.

And he was into Bob Dylan and I was into the Smiths, of whom possibly more later. We were both into vintage stuff, which I think it's a real shift when you're a teenager when you move from everything having to be brand new all your clothing everything to actually sort of think no i like old stuff and sort of understanding that it's not embarrassing to wear secondhand clothes and it can actually be cool and you can actually break away slightly from wearing what every other fucker is wearing to just sort of adapting things and just coming up with your own style not that my style was particularly original but um we'd go into jacob's market in cardiff which was still is in fact um an indoor market over several floors in what what was then the red light district it's uh it's right by where the manics later

recorded the holy bible right and we go in there and we buy old cinema posters and beads and old clothes and stuff we'd be wearing brothel creepers and granddad shirts and secondhand dinner jackets and brooches um i actually borrowed a brooch off my mum which was a family heirloom and i got into loads of trouble because um it fell off my jacket on the way home from a disco at barry island and got run over in a back alley behind a chip shop. Yeah, and I later found it. I went back the next day thinking, oh, maybe it's there. And I found it, but it was all crushed by car wheels and all in pieces.

Yeah, yeah. But we were just bored shitless, so we used to just run into church halls and working men's clubs into the doorway and shout, communists with a bomb! and run away just for something to do. This was around the same time as my famous crisp-sacrificing exploits

on the Druid Circle. But we actually formed a band as well, like a duo. What were they called? They were called The Mary Brennell Boys Murder. And it came to me in a dream and it was a weird dream. It wasn't just,

it wasn't a dream where visual things happen. It was just a voice in this kind of slightly sort of spooky low tone, just repeating over and over the Mary Brennell Boys Murder. And I woke up with a real kind of shudder. And I decided it had to be the name of our duo. So yeah, there's just two of us with acoustic guitars. And we used to go into cardiff and sit on the floor in the pedestrian shopping street queen street with with our with our ray bands on because not not to be cool but because we were shy and scared of catching anyone's eye and people would come up to us and throw money and we would get really angry because we're like no no that's not what we're doing it for and we we we pick up the money and throw it back at them, you know.

We had this idea of, because the Jesus and Mary chain was starting to become known. We thought, well, the way they're fucking around with the electric guitar and getting feedback from it, maybe we can do that with acoustic guitars by going into like an indoor shopping kind of arcade and playing a really loud chord and sort of swinging around with it and getting loads of echo and stuff like that. And our best song was 12 seconds long.

It was called Pain Angel. That's fantastic. I can still hear it in my head. This is a song about a girl and a boy. I wrote one called James Dean and Natalie Wood, which was absolute shit.

Andrew wrote one called Sylvia's Paris Adventure, which was about this elderly lady he fancied who worked in the chip shop where he had a part-time job. Wow. Which is, you know, a bit weird, but, you know, that's fair enough. But, yeah, we played one gig in Barry, which is down at the Boating Lake, and this was a bit later on when I did have my newspaper column.

And I kind of announced it the previous week. I said, everybody turn up at this Boating Lake. It's kind of like a concrete shelter with pillars next to the lake. And we thought, this would be good for our crazy acoustic experiment. So we said, everyone's got to come here come here in the end like about four people turned up and even even with four people in front of us we were so shy and embarrassed that we ended up not playing any of our own songs and just played jesus and mary chain covers um but there was a woman there who was from the rival local paper, the Barry Gem. Oh, no.

Yeah, yeah. And she actually wrote a review of it. But she obviously didn't get that it was cover versions. She thought that we'd written, like, Taste of Cindy by the Mary Chain or whatever. And she actually did a write-up saying, they could be quite big in a bedroom sort of way. So, yeah, that was the Mary Brennell Boys murder and that's where I was at in

1984. Wow. Tape? There is no tape of it. Says you. Andrew, the other half of the Mary Brennell Boys murder, Andrew, happens to live in Brighton now. Oh, come on! Reunion? Yeah, I'm thinking reunion, right? Listen, just watch this space,

that's all I'm saying. Oh, man. And I'll announce it for some kind of boating lake in Brighton and see who comes along. Well, in comparison, my 84, my God, this is very mediocre. Second year of senior school, between about 11 and 12. And just really starting to realise just what a strange institution my school was. Having done a fair few chart musics around about this 80s

period i do worry that my memories kind of blur and overlap but luckily because i'm a hoarding old cunt i found in the mess that is my front room a little aperture into my 12 year old consciousness via a plethora of old exercise books from school which which to be honest with you don't really tell me much about myself other than that i was fucking lazy but i could do a really great color-coded picture of plate tectonics and i was also i also did an excellent diagram of a locust oh man well what more do you need quite but they did remind me that i did fucking greek at school i did fucking latin at school because my school had pretensions of being a public school you know

presumably prepping us all for life's future captains of industry but i've got i found this this book called greek vocabulary i've written on the front of it i've spelt vocabulary wrong it's got all this fucking greek writing in it i'm i never even learned the alphabet which is the basics of learning Greek, I guess. And we were taught this by an old teacher called Ted Norris, who's a fucking lunatic ex-military. But I always liked him in a weird way. He's very intimidating.

But I remember I had a mate who was just a real tearaway and was really bad at pretty much everything. And he illustrated an essay about the fall of Troy. Yeah, this is the kind of shit we were taught but at the top of it he drew a massive apple going one way and a nuclear missile going the other way and yeah the teacher gave him top marks he said that that's a real insight that is um it was the eyes but yeah it's demented school you know and and these exercise books really reveal that greek and latin mean, what was the fucking point? Well, you could be a doctor in Athens, I suppose.

Well, I guess so. But beyond that, yeah, yeah, I was just apprehending what a strange school I was at. And unlike Simon, I hadn't developed these lines of call about what I was into quite yet. So I was really, yeah, I was into pretty much anything that floated my boat particularly frankie at this time well i'm five days away from a 16th birthday and five days away from my first exam math cse and i've already decided that there's absolutely fuck all points in revising because you know there's no jobs to go to because hey it's 1984 thatcher's britain etc etc and you know we're all going to die in a nuclear holocaust anyway so fuck it i'm ramming on ours ramming handfuls of fun-sized milky way into me gob and watching top of the pops on the portable telly upstairs i'm essentially living

the first scene of the first episode of going out and four idle hands and prospects and all those drama series about youths turning into adults i'm desperate to get the fuck out of school but i'm also aware that my entire support systems about to be kicked away we went on about alice cooper in the last episode and you know it might go on about no more teachers and no more pencils but he's never stopped to think that it also means no more football on the tennis court three times a day no more seeing the girls you fancy every day no more easy access to your mates and no more somewhere to actually fucking be in the week no more structure no more order terrifying because there were people there who i'd knock about with on a daily basis and then don't hear

a word from them until about 30 years later when they're tapping me up on Facebook. That's mad. Oh, it's a tremendously anxious time. My daughter's going through that at the moment because she's going to be doing the GCSEs. You know, but I've reassured her we're just going to get a big van and a big dog

and go solve mysteries, so we'll be all right. Well, I suppose nowadays for most kids they get funneled into further education straight away, don't they? Yeah, and I'm starting to feel that the whole system of education is bullshit. So, yeah, I might even be going the homeschooling route. Fuck it.

She wants to be a music journalist, which strangely she does. Maybe I can give her some help. Take her to go and see Simon's reunion with you. Give her honest appraisal. Like school, I'm watching Top of the Pops, not because I want to, but because I have to. You know, to keep an eye on things whilst not expecting anything to blow my tiny mind.

Yeah. And I'm also noticing that, like you, Simon, whatever money I have nowadays is starting to go towards the second-hand record shops and second-hand clothes shops of Nottingham. Yeah, yeah. That chasing after the 60s has begun in earnest yeah and we're going to see elements of that in this episode aren't we oh definitely

yeah it's a common thread throughout the grim mid-80s isn't it well boys i do believe it's about time that we have a bit of a leaf through an edition of the music press from this week and this time i've gone for the nme would you care to join me in this leaf through yeah let's all right then on the cover an extremely blue tinted bananarama looking up at the clouds in the news well there isn't any really because bar a few tour announcements nme hasn't bothered with its new section this week and have given over that space to let Bieber Koff tell the world

about the new pop sensation that all the kids are getting down to lie back seeing that the only news item of note in Melody Maker this week is that Epic are denying that Michael Jackson is working on a new single called Tingle.

It's safe to assume that pop is on its half term. Did you look into this? Because I did. The Tingle thing. Go on, please. Well, it turns out it was an April Fool hoax that sort of got out of hand. Really? Yeah, I looked at this website. Well out of hand, because this is April the 28th.

Yeah, well the thing is, people didn't realise it was a hoax, and they took it and run with it. So I found this. This is from hoaxes.org, which is a pretty good website for this kind of shit. Right. And what they say is, On Cable magazine reported that a huge publicity blitz was being planned around an upcoming Michael Jackson song, Tingle.

The song was said to be three minutes and 12 seconds long, and a video of it would feature Jackson walking out of a boutique Jackson song Tingle. The song was said to be three minutes and 12 seconds long, and a video of it would feature Jackson walking out of a boutique and catching fire. Jackson's record company had reportedly also developed a 37-minute promo clip to hype the video, and this promo was in turn being developed into a three-hour film by Paramount. So, I mean mean already you're

thinking how did anyone not know this was a hoax but it carries on three video versions of the song would be sold michael jackson's tingle for 39.95 making the tingle video for 79.95 and the i know where this is going the making of the making of the Tingle video. Yes. For $99.95. Right. MTV was supposedly going to show the 37-minute promo clip hourly. So basically leaving 23 minutes for anything else. Yeah.

Parker Brothers would release a board game designed around it. Pepsi would be the official soft drink of the video and all states would sell exclusive fire insurance along with the video and yet despite all of that you know pretty much signpost telegraphed flagpole fucking obvious jokes in that um yeah um somebody in well several people in american media picked that up took took it seriously, ran with it, to the extent that it then ends up in the NME with spokespersons for Melody Maker. Sorry. Don't blame the NME for

this, Simon. It's your lot. And it then ends up in Melody Maker with spokespersons for the record label having to deny it. I mean, for fuck's sake. If you're going to hoax, go big, I guess. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Bieber-Cott, prophetic there. I mean, if any band defied the 80s, it was Lieback. Oddly enough, Al, I know you had problems with Bieber, didn't you?

Because he slagged off, was it The Jam or was it? Paul Weller, yeah, slagged off The Jam, yeah. He's my current editor at The Wire, by the way. Not Paul Weller, but Bieber Cop. No way. Is he? He is. Chris Bone?

Chris Bone, yeah. It's a strange thing, these names that we're conjuring with. You know, last month I had to bother him for an advance on some mag pay because I was so skimmed. It's just weird getting in touch with these people with these day-to-day conjuring concerns. But yeah, he's my current editor. He's a good one, actually. He doesn't like the jam though, so fuck him.

In the interview section, well, Susan Williams, the current pen name of Stephen Wells, nips over to the offices of London Records to goad and poke Bananarama, who are still basking in the afterglow of Robert De Niro's weight in getting to number three, and their new LP Bananarama coming out next week. are coming out next week. Wells opens the article by pointing out that the LP is dedicated to Thomas Riley, a longtime friend of the group who was shot by British soldiers in Belfast. Siobhan tells him how they were mithered at the funeral by the News of the World and News at Ten, who wanted shots of the three of them together, and says she regrets not telling him that the reason Riley, her ex-boyfriend's brother brother is dead is because the British government has got 18 year old boys running about

with loaded guns they go on to tell Wells that they were wearing headstaffs to still sign on while they were having top five hits with a fun boy three they're sick of being called cute when they only wear sunglasses to disguise how hideous they all look without makeup and they don't get on with the current crop of radio one djs who didn't play robert de niro's waiting until it got into the charts quote from siobhan one of the d, Bananarama are harder to fuck than fives. Ha ha, very witty. They're all nicey nicey on the air, but after

that it's all lads together. We don't prop up the bar with them leering at secretaries. We don't fit in with that crap. Paul Morley has been tasked to interview Fish out of Meridian, but he completely forgot about it, so he's surprised

when he gets screamed at by Fish over the phone from an officer at EMI, who tells him that he's been waiting two years to have a go at the NME. Morley then tells us that all he knows about Fish is, quote, silly eye makeup,

a pansy pageboy haircut, and songs that make the Bible look abbreviated. An interview is scheduled for the next day, meaning that Fish has to cut short his attendance of the Razzmatazz end of series party. And the interview commences with Mr. Dick apologising for being pissed up yesterday, telling Morley that he was the only NME hack he wanted to talk to after his recent confrontation with Phil Collins. Then he asks him what his star sign is. Morley asks Fish, are you a prat?

And the tone for the interview is set. Fish claims that the NME doesn't like Marillion because they might be scared that a band influenced by the 70s could actually be the one true band of the 80s. He's aghast that some people laugh more at his band than they do at Duran Duran, and he doesn't care if people bitch about him as long as they listen, man.

Morley concludes the interview by saying that Fish is a bit mad but a bit clever as well these confrontation interviews i'm i was all for them at the time and still are now have you ever had interviews like that where you've clashed heads properly with people yeah yeah i've had a few what's your favorites i.e the ones where you won to To be honest with you, with me, it was never the context of the interview as such. It was my behaviour. So with the band Puddle of Mud, for instance, terrible, terrible band,

I stubbed my fag out in their stash. That pissed them off. I got Jerry the Damager didn't get along with me. Marilyn Manson didn't particularly get along with me. Just as well, eh? Well, quite, quite. I mean, but yeah, it was never sort of... I am too shy to ask questions.

You're like, you know, why are you such a wanker? Or anything like that. I have spoken with bands whereby they're strung out. They're on their last legs. They're all on heroin and stuff. And you do end up having to just take the piss out of them just to get anything out of them at all. That that certainly happened with smashing pumpkins in my experience um they were all strung out to fuck and i just had to start taking the piss the confrontational interview

used to happen i suppose because of the power of the weekly music press in those days yeah because there was you know there were few other places for artists to go and for record labels to go so you know somebody like fish would be sent along to be richly slaughtered by the nme because like where else they're going to get any publicity and that was still kind of lingering on in our day a little bit but it tended to be more with indie bands so for me there was this band from hulk or kingmaker who hardly anybody remembers now but but they were briefly popular, sort of... Cover of the NME one week, wasn't it? Yeah, they were very NME, you see. They were very kind of just sort of bog-standard landfill indie,

as far as I was concerned. And I interviewed the chap, Loz, and, you know, he was perfectly nice, but he knew and I knew when we went in that I wasn't a fan, and that was the whole basis of the interview. And I thought, because he knows that and I know that, I'm not going to stitch him up. It'd be so easy to go in there and just sort of pretend that I love his band and I'm going to give him a fair hearing.

You know, I laid my cards on the table and made it clear I didn't like him and sort of, you know, gave him a few reasons why. And I think I wrote up a fair piece where we both sort of reasoned our point of view. And I remember the last line being, we leave by separate doors. You know, it was a pub in Soho and we literally did leave by separate doors. So yeah, it was a thing back in the day,

but totally would not happen now. Oh, good God, no. I can't even conceive of any situation where that would happen. Maybe only if it was somebody like really fucking powerful, like, I don't know, Joe Rogan or somebody on his podcast would get to do that but um it's a dying art or dead yeah now the pr would simply not allow that to happen um you won't get the access yeah and the editor wouldn't even commission it um not a chance you've got a cheerlead sean o'hagan drops in on the latest contender to bob molly's throne winston foster

better known as yellow man while he's on tour in europe he tells o'hagan that he wants to make reggae popular again throughout the world with his cheeky tales of knobbing loads of women which is a big joke that the ladies in the audience are in on he also believes that reggae is in the doldrums because too many of its practitioners are banging on about politics all the time and ignoring the real issues, like telling people how many kids they've bothered and how great they are. Edward drops a double-page spread about his sojourn through Louisiana and Texas

in an attempt to dig into Cajun music, Zydeco in particular. He advises the readership that if they want in, they need to get their arses over to New Orleans, scowl the posters on the walls for upcoming gigs, and then work out their chances of getting shot there or not, and not to kick off if you get barred out on the door for not coming from round here.

And this week's subject of Portrait of the Artist as a Consumer is Alan Freeman, who tells us that his favourite TV shows are Channel 4 News, That's Life and The Money Programme. He likes Making Love and Truth. And his favourite records include One Day I'll Fly Away by Randy Crawford Rock and Roll Part 2 by Gary Glitter

and I Like Big Tits by Joe Walsh Single reviews Well, Gavin Martin is in the chair this week and his singles of the week are a one-two punch of southern soul from 70s veterans. First up is Leave the Bridges Standing by Shirley Brown. The lady famous for the stack standard woman-to-woman

cuts herself a niche away from the empty gestures and trifling diversions of so many young bods. Let's hope the British distributors don't waste too much time getting their mitts on this, hence not losing any sales to the import markets, hence putting some real music in the charts. The second, Gotta Give a Little Love by Timmy Thomas, is a jab of solar plexus bending, New Orleans flavoured funk, a few lightning shards of scratch, and a spruce and prickly invocation to a fave soul-meeting place, the utopian dance floor.

Enemy's really into its old soul stuff at the minute, aren't they? Oh, very much so. And all of this singles stuff from Gavin Martin, it's a reminder of kind of... One of the delightful things about doing a singles page was it it was your chance really to push your vision of what you thought important part was because you weren't limited to one band or anything so you could accentuate some slag off others and it really was a page long chance for you to kind of say this is what

I think is important in pop music and this this is me. Yeah, yeah, completely. While Martin wouldn't give Electro house room as he thinks it's the worst thing to happen to music since Elvis enlisted in 1958 because it's boring, repetitive, soulless and brainless. But he is keen on Jam On It by Nucleus except he or the sub thinks it's by New Clues. A record that has dazzle, colour and imagination in its grooves that doesn't require you to spin on your head for three hours

before you can appreciate it. That was a big tune on our estate, jam on it. Otherwise known as the wiki-wiki-wiki song. our state jam on it otherwise known as the wiki wiki wiki song but it's a coat down for the lebanon by the human league more pop people with their serious hats on writes martin like their fellow sheffield socialists abc the league figure that musically the best way of showing maturity is to move away from their jewel enccrusted pop to the murk of rock density but there's no real thinking or provocation in this slf clash style banner waving sensationalism this is a propulsive streamlined slab of modern rock that bears its teeth and stamps his feet

hopelessly immobile and incapable of agitation. Oh, dear. I do remember feeling a little bit betrayed when the Human League had guitars on one of their records, to be honest. But then somebody like Gavin Martin would probably have thought that's a slight improvement because he hates all that electro crap.

And that thing he said there about Nucleus and just his point that he made in that earlier Shirley Brown review, it's very symptomatic of a way of thinking that was at large at the time, which was that black American music is fine as long as it's old. It's got to be 20 years old. And God forbid it involves people spinning on their heads, is to be, you know, you've got to be sort of wary of that. And yeah, so he's very much one of these kind of keep it real black music's fine as long as it's from the

past kind of guys well that's what i was like at the time i guess i was to an extent but then i also love things like let the music play by shannon or you know word up by cameo or ain't nothing going on but the rent by gwen guthrie and all this kind of stuff so yeah you know i i was i was open to both it's a way for martin to to sort of reject new pop and simultaneously yeah just kind of sort of hypostatized black pop back to 77 much as people were doing reggae you know it all went down in what dancehall started and soul all went down and once synthesizer started getting involved king have put out their debut single, Love and Pride, and Martin immediately puts the spray-painted boot in. It's gormless, aesthetic, obovise, upturned,

extraneously performed London clubgoers' dance music. I suppose a few years ago we'd have had them as the inevitable next big thing and put them on the cover nice to think how we've all matured can I ask Neil on this point we all know what cov people think about two-tone because there's a fucking museum we know what they think of lieutenant pigeon

because there's going to be a blue plaque what do cov people think about king there's no pride let me put it that way you know any love a bit of love for maybe the single i think it's a class-based thing simon i think like specials orchids and and all the others that kind and lieutenant pigeon they come from a sort of general cough background with king for me they occupy they're not as bad as the enemy you don't get me wrong but they're one of those don't start that again no i'm not gonna open up that can of worms but um they're a kov band but are they a kov band because they

were kind of like you couldn't tell whether they were from kov and you didn't really see them out and about in kov much and they were kind of like you don't see bobbies on the beat anymore wow this is the thing because it used to be a copper didn't it no but you could never tell were they from leamington were they from cannaworth you know they were kind of a bit more middle class and and consequently there's no there's no love and pride in in king uh in cov um there's no sort of fond reminiscences or anything like that and it's not like you've got to play Love and Pride at a Cov party, whereas you do have to play Moldy Old Doe and you do have to play special stuff.

Helen Terry is striking out on her own with her debut solo single Love Lies Lost, but Martin doesn't reckon it in the slightest. She should get her own group together and call it Helen and the Foghorns. It's a sad reflection on the inherent racism in the industry that,

were the likes of Carmel and Miss Terry struggling lovers rock chanteuses in Stoke Newington or Halston, they'd never see the inside of a recording booth, let alone a place in the charts. Oh, for fuck's sake. Right, for a start, I mean, Love Lies Lost is a banger, but that's neither here nor there. What does he want Carmel and Helen Terry to do? I mean, black up? I don't know, it's just a weird thing to do,

to sort of use them in order to sort of virtue signal about how black female singers don't get the breaks, which I'm sure is true, but just whatever. But if he's talking about inherent racism, and it's odd, it's kind of revealing in the previous reviews that, you know, a black kid from Stoke Newton or Halston spinning on their head isn't going to see the inside of the NME, are they? Exactly.

Somebody Else's Guy by Jocelyn Brown would be dead good if it stayed like the intro all the way through. Peace in Our Time by The Imposter, Elvis Costello whenever he fancies doing something political, is a woefully mournful dirge. Do the Square Thing by the Three Johns is flat and bland. And Country Girl became drugs and sex punk by Serious Drinking. Country Girl became drugs and sex punk by Serious Drinking. Is punk by numbers of the sort that the members and ruts excelled at? And Serious Drinking can only pay lip service to.

Hang on a minute, right. But he likes the band name. Jocelyn Brown, somebody else's guy, right? Yeah, the intro is great, obviously. Especially on the full-length version, right? But come on, the entire song, start to fucking finish of the full length version is an absolute fucking battleship of a record it's a fucking juggernaut, how can anyone not

love that, oh is it because it's got synths on it by any chance, do you know what I mean for fuck's sake, that is just one of the greatest records of the 80s of all time I think we can all agree on that right Jocelyn Brown is actually playing a festival near me this summer, and I've thought about going along just to hear that one song.

You know what I mean? Fucking hell. It sounds like you want to write a letter to the NME, man. I want to write a letter to the NME, yes. In the LP review section, well, the main review this week is given over to Der Ostern ist Rott by Holger Zucke, and Richard Cook deems it one of his most sombre releases to date and a departure from his last LP, 1981's On The Way To The Peak Of Normal.

One wonders if this is a descent into the maelstrom, he writes. Stuart Cosgrove has been given three new Motown LPs, Don't Look Any Further by Dennis Edwards, In A Special Way by DeBarge, and Joystick by The Daz Band. And not surprisingly, he makes the X Temptations LP the pick of the bunch, even though he's sporting a wet look. Thanks God and his hairdresser in the credits, and he's using Sims.

Meanwhile, DeBarge are Pleasant Pop Soul, a band who thank Jesus and wear purple leather trousers, and the Daz band are a massive disappointment. So much promise, but so pedestrian, the funk band that falls asleep on you. But it's a big fat coat down for Grace Under Pressure, the 10th LP by Rush. I don't suppose it's exactly news of any kind that the latest album by Rush stinks like a lorryload of whelks in August. But what perhaps is news is that the following penny has dropped. The Police are a very successful trio. Rush are a far less successful trio. Therefore, to be more successful

rush must imitate the police they screw it up writes matt snow quite honestly if you can derive any pleasure or meaning from grace under pressure then you must be some kind of dickhead. And that's not snobber air. That's the truth. Demonstration Tapes, an anthology of UK subs offcuts, is given about this much shrift by Bruce DeSoto. Like the national football team, the subs have undergone numerous personnel changes without tangible alteration in performance or fortune. In fact, why should they record a new album

when it would not sound a million miles away from this one? During the recording of All The Young Dudes, David Bowie mic'd up a toilet cubicle and crammed Mott into it. This LP sounds like the toilet has been mic'd up, but the band are playing in the corner of the pub. Punk is dead. In the gig guide, David

could have seen Dennis Brown at the Brixton Academy, Jeffrey Osborne at Hammersmith Odeon, R.E.M. at the Marquis, or Billy Bragg and the Redskins at the Electric Ballroom. Yeah, Redskins, Simon. Nice piece you wrote in the Quietest.

Thank you very much for doing the plug for me. Yeah, I mean, what a gig that would have been. Billy Bragg and the Redskins. I would so love to have been there. I'm very jealous of the fact that you saw them, what, three times or something? Oh, more than that, about five or six times. Really? Fucking hell.

Yeah, I wrote a big piece about the fact that their, I was going to say debut album, their only album, neither Washington nor Moscow has just been reissued in all those kind of deluxe formats. So I wrote about that for Quietus, and it sort of like allowed me to expound my thoughts on just kind of left-wing 80s pop in general, but particularly the Redskins and the fact that I was,

you know, at the age of 16, this era that we're talking about, very exercised by the possibility of a genuine working-class revolution because, the age of 16, this era that we're talking about, very exercised by the possibility of a genuine working class revolution because of the miners' strike and the Redskins are completely tied in with the miners' strike. And when the strike ended, they kind of fizzled out as well.

The whole purpose for being just sort of went away. But what an exciting album that was. Yes. But what were they like live? Come on, I want to hear about it. Oh, they were fucking mint. Yeah. Like a lot of people who missed punk,

this was the nearest we were going to get to seeing The Clash. And there was always that threat of a bit of aggro outside afterwards. Possibly whipped up by the Redskins. I think it was Martin, the bassist, would always say, oh, you look out tonight. You know, when you go out, we've heard there's some dodgy right wingers outside well it did happen once that you know one of their gigs was stormed by you know national front skinheads and you know there's a massive pitched battle going on so uh yeah martin hughes the guy you're talking about ended up having to sort of hide a

baseball bat behind his amp yes this happened again taylor could have seen swan's way at birmingham powerhouse king kurt at the tinhouse, King Kurt at the Tin Can Club, Talk Talk at the Birmingham Odeon, Naina at the Odeon, or Camped Out at the Night Out for a whole week to see the Nolans. Neil would have gone

through a gig famine, alas, as nothing is happening in Coventry this week, but he could have seen Dion Warwick at Wolverhampton Grand Theatre. Sorry, Neil. No worries. Sarah could have seen Slim Whitman at Hull New Theatre, Swan's Way at the Sheffield Lead Mill,

Prefab Sprout at the Sheffield Lyceum, or REM at the Leeds Warehouse. Al could have seen Camel at the Royal Concert Hall, Alexi Sale at the Theatre Royal, The Cure at the Royal Concert Hall, Alexei Sale at the Theatre Royal, The Cure at the Royal Concert Hall, Sisters of Mercy at Rock City, or Crass and Fluck of Pink Indians at the Marcus Garvey Centre. And Simon could have seen Alien Sex Fiend at Bogies in Cardiff.

And fuck all else. I have in my hand a typed letter from the dad of one of Alien Sex Fiend. No, why? Well, here's the thing. In the 80s, my dad had a radio show on CBC, the local radio station

in Cardiff, whose studios funnily enough were also in the Red Light District, along with Jacob's Market and the studio where the Mannix recorded the Holy Bible. you've got to keep all that kind of stuff together yeah um so my dad had this sort of graveyard shift um show i guess it was sort of i don't know it might have been sort of midnight till 3 a.m or something like that which was really handy if i was going to a gig or a club in cardiff yeah because i could just yeah and i could go in there and he could drive me home but But because it was late at night,

he could probably just play whatever he wanted to play. You know, he wasn't sort of bound by the playlist. So he actually played Alien Sex Fiends on his show. And the thing is, they were a Cardiff band, so he could justify it on the basis of them being local. And since my dad passed away i've inherited um well as many of his records as i wanted um including all his alien sex fiend singles and lo and behold when i went to take them out of the sleeves there were letters tucked inside um some of them from and

here's the first one it's tucked inside their single dead and buried it's not directly to my dad it's to the station it says dear sirs because you know they couldn't imagine there being any mad ones at the considered you may be interested in the disc dead and buried by the alien sex fiend band write ups in sounds on pages 3 and 54 and back cover

on keyboards with the group is Chris Fiend formerly Christine Alexander of the above address ex-pupil of howells school cardiff and latterly a microbiologist bsc surrey university if you require any further info please contact me as above sincerely yours ted alexander wow bless so yeah that's the that's the dad of the very proud dad of chrisiend. Yeah, that is such a dad letter. Yeah, talking about her academic achievements as well as, you know, the fact that she's from Cardiff.

A later single called Smells Like, there's actually a little, this is a bit more terse. It's a post-it note. It's like a little memo tucked inside, which I imagine is also for Mr. Alexander. It says, Chris Fiend, Cardiff girl on keyboards, support group for Alice Cooper. And then it's got a list of the Alice Cooper tour dates written underneath so in response to this my dad who was always looking for a local angle on any music he could play

he's really into that he's big into sort of helping local bands did start playing Alien Sex Fiends and then in one of their later still singles I found a letter from the mum of Nick Fiend the lead singer thanking my dad thanking my dad for playing her son's records on the air and it's so sweet it's just really sweet just you know because you don't think of these sort of scary you know war painted goth electro

bands as having proud mums and dads but yeah they do yeah it's just a really nice unexpected thing to find tucked inside a really nice unexpected thing to find tucked inside a record yeah i went to my mum and dad and said oh i'm in a band at the minute called alien sex fiend i don't know if they'd be as encouraging as that fucking anyone in a band you know whenever they go back to the parents house their parents are saying how's the music going you know and they are encouraging. That's so sweet. Yeah. The alien sex fiend band. I love it.

Talking of which, in the letters page this week, Paulo Hewitt is in charge of Gasbag, but the vast majority of the letters are people licking the enemy's arse about their recent issue dedicated to soul and are a bit boring. So let's go over to this week's Melody Maker instead, which has a 20-page mini pull-out exclusively dedicated to Big Country where Backlash is being manned by Adam Sweet. 20 pages, good lord. Yeah, a mini pull-out, but, you know, 20 pages on Big Country, Simon.

I mean, I was a fan, but even I'd struggle to read that much on them, I'll be honest. Yeah. Pete Burns was interviewed in Melody Maker a fortnight ago, where he told Sweetin how Dead or Alive got revenge on Nick Haywood for slagging them off in a singles review by chancing across him at the Epic Studios, waiting until he'd nipped off for a quiet shit, and then appearing over the top of his cubicle with a fire extinguisher

each, and literally coating him down in return. Anyway, despite the fact that Burns said nothing disparaging about Boy George in that interview, Isabelle of Swansea kicks off, telling Melody Maker that she has had her fill

of this year's most lovable bisexual okay pete burns enough is enough stop slagging george and remember your mediocre success is down to him george broke the media and had them eating out of his hand because he worked to become a showbiz personality, which you seem to hate. Because he made people accept him, you can now appear on top of the pops looking androgynous and wearing outrageous clothes. You won't become a millionaire like George because you're too sexual. But all the money you do make will be because of George's

hard work appearing on Russell Harter and Wogan. It's a strange defence that, isn't it? Yes. You're only making it because George sold out, I guess. Yes. It's odd that. As we've already established, I have married into the

family of this year's most lovable bisexual. So, you know, I'm saying back off Isabella Swansea, alright? You're definitely Team Burns now, aren't you? Part of the family and had fun with boy George. Yeah, well, you know, we've had our ups and downs, me and George.

Mind you, when I met Pete the one time, he wasn't exactly the friendliest but, you know, I'd have been disappointed if he was any other way, but you know but i mean i'd have been disappointed if he was any other way do you know what i mean it's like you meet people you want to you want the real thing don't you so yeah no i'm i'm totally on his side even if he is too sexual unsigned of raven road walsall has decided to rip all their duran duran posters off the wall after reading steve sutherland's piece about the band

swanking about in New York the other week and generally going about thinking the summit. Thanks for a really interesting article, Steve. I am sorry to note that you have become just as disillusioned in Duran as I have. I have been a fan for three years and now I think it's time to move on. Please send my condolences to the New York fan who they casually dropped off the

back of their limo. I hope her broken leg gets better soon. It's nice to know they care about their fans so much. What did Duran Duran do there? Was it some kind of wrestling move did do a

fucking suplex off the back of a limo there is this perception isn't there definitely at this time that Duran Duran have gone too far or are getting too big getting too moneyed up

they've gone too far this time and they're dancing on the valentine but they're brummies you know oh here we go they're not going to be tasteful about their newly

acquired wealth they're brummies they're vulgar we go they're not going to be tasteful about their newly acquired wealth they're brummies they're vulgarians you know in regard to a recent article published in your magazine on queen preparing a video for i want to break free i feel i must comment on the matter the subject was approached writes mc smith oh that brings up some fucking appalling visuals of a rap in Morrissey, doesn't it? Fucking hell. There are some members of the public like myself who would gladly welcome a praising and couth report on Queen's activities.

However, you chose to print articles which contain material, making them out to be lower than a snake's belly. Unfortunately, this does not ensure my purchase in another magazine, except the one in which you print this letter. Yours disgustingly, etc. A Lionel Richie fan aged 28 and proud of it, is deeply offended at Dessa Fox's review of Hello.

It happens to be an extremely good record just because it's not punk junk or disco does not give that idiot the right to write such dribble it's people like dessa fox that are the zits on the face of the human race if she wants to pick on someone, then what about that grade A prize Wally slash turkey slash head case Alexi Sale? Why does the Melody Maker allow idiots like Killing Joke to review the latest singles as Sandy Arnold of Ashford? Tamara Loftin of London thinks that Steve Sutherland looks like Kelly Monteith, and Linda Perkitt of Mordham is massively offended at Torval and Dean being made Wallys of the Week and points out that they have brought beauty and happiness to so many people, unlike Melody Maker,

which is a cheap and nasty rag, which dwells on all that is rotten and is, quite frankly speaking speaking an insult to decent people yes quite proud of that actually yeah proud melody maker writers right here 52 pages 40p i never knew there was so much in it oh the main two ink is appealing off now aren't there enemies just backing away from the charts. Melody Maker trying to be the inky smash hits. Yeah, it's all changed, isn't it?

I think at that point, Melody Maker still didn't know what it was or what it was for, to be honest. It didn't really find its direction until Reynolds and Stubbs joined in 86. And Chris Roberts as well. Chris Roberts came over from Sounds. And then it became the kind of thinking person's music paper prior to that NME had been the thinking person's music paper

with people like Paul Morley and so on which means it's kind of weird to see Bananarama on the front cover because Bananarama, on the face of it you'd think having Bananarama on the front of the NME in 84 would be equivalent to now having something like Little Mix or something like that on the front of the NME in 84 would be equivalent to you know now having something like you know Little Mix or something like that on the front if it was now um just doesn't seem

seem to add up but I guess Bananarama of all the kind of pop groups had this kind of slightly alternative pop edge to them you know they they I mean their first single I.E.M. One was very credible and then the next couple of records were with the Fun Boy 3. So they had that kind of cred as well. And by the time of this, Enemy, they're with Swain and Jolly, the production team. But even so, the stuff they made with Swain and Jolly, Bananarama didn't come across as much as kind of, you know, production line factory pop puppets as they would later under Stock Aitken and Waterman,

when they hooked up with Stock Aitken and Waterman. At this point point they still seem to be kind of in charge of their own destiny and the fact that they weren't very styled and coiffured they were very much sort of DIY the way they danced, the way they dressed. Skimping as they used to call it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly

so they did seem just about within NME's remit Yeah. Well they're the last of the post-punk bands really really, aren't they? They are, and they even had, every now and then, a tiny little political message in their songs. Like, there's a B-side called Give Us Back Our Cheap Fares about London transport pricing

policy and stuff like that. And, yeah, there's a whole business with the Troubles in Ireland that came out in that article. So, yeah, they were kind of a more credible pop act. You know, the best articles in this issue of NME are the pop people. Fish and Bananarama, because they've still got something to say and someone's poking them with a very critical stick.

Well, this is why one of the best music books you could possibly read is Ask the Chatter of Pop by Paul Morley, which is out of print now, but, you know, I'm sure you can find it on eBay or whatever. And it's just all his interviews, and a lot of them are with people who are very much on his home turf, like ABC or whatever. But then there'll be interviews with Meatloaf

or indeed with Fish from Meridian and stuff like that. And it just gives you a brilliant kind of rounded picture of what pop was like at the time and a brilliant kind of rounded picture of what pop was like at the time and of the kind of questions you were allowed to ask major stars yeah yeah yeah i mean this is the time when pop groups were still supposed to have a manifesto and that's been painted in a really poor light nowadays it's like what you're talking to them for what do they know about anything but it just gave the bands and artists a chance to prove that they were in the same world as us i was always pissed off the band didn't have a manifesto

it's like i want to know what you stand for on the major issues of the day it was a huge deal to me it was a deal breaker really and people are shit scared of saying that kind of stuff now because they'll lose half the fan base whatever they decide upon oh i, I don't know. This fucking shit old century. Anyway, what else was on telly today? Well, BBC One commences at 6am with a half-hour CFAX data blast and then Frank Boff puts on his jumper, wipes his nose on the back of his hand

and joins Shaking Diana on the sofa for another edition of Breakfast Time. As it's Easter holiday, the morning is a non-stop barrage of Battle of the Planets, Look Back With Noakes, a mash-up of old episodes of Go With Noakes,

Mighty Mass, and then the youth of Bristol employ you to fuck off out and pull some statues down or something. Why don't you? After I've all the engine and play school, there's a 35 minute CFAX data blast before the news. Then Paul Coyer goes sand yachting on Blackpool beach and Jean Pitney does a bit of singing in the foyer on pebble mill at one.

That's followed by a repeat of finger bobs. Then Johnny Morris and Terry Nook can get shrunk down to two inches so they can find out what it's like to be a mouse in Animal Magic. Then it's the 1965 kids' film Zebra in the Kitchen about a lad who frees loads of animals

from the local zoo and lets them doss about at his place. Can we just at that point pause to say RIP to the great Yoffie from Finger Bobs, Rick Jones. Oh, hell yes. Rick Jones, who was a lovely man and I became internet friends with for several years. And yeah, just a great bloke.

Anyway, carry on. After regional news in your area, it's Play School with Chloe Ashcroft. Then The Hunter, Jigsaw, part four of Huckleberry Finn and His Friends, John Craven's Newsround, and Blue Peter. Then it's 60 Minutes,

the hideous mutation of the BBC News and Nationwide without the beer-drinking snails, followed by the brass division of Young Musician of the Year 1984. Fucking hell. Come back tomorrow's world all is forgiven imagine if you turn that on earlier and you saw young musician of the year 1984 and just fucking know what is going on with pop in 1984 bbc2 starts at five past six with open university programmes about feminism, the evolution of fish and the designing of lorries,

before embarking on a five and a half hour CFAX mega blast. Then it's over to the Crucible in Sheffield for the sixth day of the World Professional Snooker Championship, presented by David Icke. After a repeat of Risk risk the peak experience about the first two people to climb mount everest without oxygen it's a new summary followed by the 1957 comedy film the naked truth starring terry thomas peter sellers and jones sims and they're currently five minutes into the evening session of the snooker itv commences at 6 25 with good morning britain where the world is introduced to the latest robin hood michael praed who's there

to shill the first episode of robin of sherwood which starts on itv in two days time then it's roland goes east where the john Eared Rodent Superstar knocks about Hong Kong for a week with Kevin the Jerbil. After regional news in your area, it's Sesame Street. Then Laurel and Hardy pretend to be Native Americans in Flying Elephants.

Then it's a look at the Northern Tribes in Fascinating Thailand. Followed by Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Bene, Get Up and Go with Beryl Reid and the Sullivans. After the news at one and regional news in your area, Lord and Lady Banger talk about their war correspondence careers in A+. Then it's Take the High Road,

followed by a repeat of a celebration of British fashion from the Harrogate Centre, where Diane Keane shows us some pastel culottes or some such. After Sons and Daughters, Children's ITV is presented by Christopher Biggins and features Benny again, Aubrey, Mad About and the news quiz What's Happening, presented by Tommy Boyd and Leonard Parkin. After The Young Doctors, News at 5.45 and regional news in your area, they're currently five minutes into Carry On Laughing. Channel 4 has a big lay-in, as is its want in its early days,

and opens up at five past three with the 1943 Frank Randall film Somewhere on Leave. Then it's Countdown, the kids show everybody here, a repeat of the ITV drama series Barriers, where a teenager loses his parents in a sailing accident and then discovers that he was adopted, which makes everything alright really, I suppose, and travels through Europe to find his real ones. Then the Good food show looks

at the best supermarket wine salt-free cooking and what we can learn from medieval banquets then janet street porter introduces the women in advertising show hey good looking and they're now 10 minutes into channel 4 news, golden age of television there. What's jumping out at you, chaps? Probably all the kind of educational stuff, to be honest, like feminism, the evolution of fish and lorries or whatever it was, you know, seriously. I'd rather watch that than any of the kind of stuff that's actually aimed at your sort of casual viewer.

What a degree, though, all those three things lumped into one. I've got to say, I mean, for the past minute, to be honest with you, I've just had the Sons and Daughters theme in me, Ed. Love and laughter. Yes. Tears of sadness and happiness. We'll find out our sons and daughters are what we too were once about. Yeah, what the fuck does that mean?

I've never understood that line. I've been absolutely struggling to try and remember what Benny was. Yeah. Because, you know me, there's only one Benny when it comes to television. I don't think there's a children's TV show about him. It's not a spin-off like Joey from Friends. No, if only. No, Neil?

No idea, no. No. Benny Bullshit, I remember a variant of Itchy Chin was Benny Bullshit and Cop. No, I don't remember this. And the whole thing about the islanders of the Falklands being called Bennys by the soldiers. And then when they weren't allowed to call them

Bennys, they called them Stills. And when asked why, it was like, still Bennys. Although, you know what? I have just found out what Benny is. Go on. Benny was a show about a dog. And it featured an animated intro and um yeah in tv times in March 1984 and there's an article called uh with the headline Benny the hairy hero the latest

star of children's itv is a lovable mongrel dog he He's the hero of a new 13-part series, Benny, starting Thursday, aimed at younger children. So the story is told as illustrated adventures, comic strip style, complete with dialogue and thoughts in balloons. Oh, that's ringing a bell. Yeah, that's ringing a slight bell for me as well. The series begins with Benny

being rescued by two children, Bella and Jack, from a cruel barge owner. And from then on, it's adventure all the way, we are promised by TV Times. Is he called Pippin? He looks like Pippin. Yeah. Pippin was all over the shop in the 80s, man.

No, there's no name of the dog. Olivia Ward as Bella, Kirk Wilde as Jack. He's a specky little sod, actually. He looks a bit like me. That's disgusting, man. That's so animalist, isn sod actually he looks a bit like me that's disgusting man that's so animalist doesn't it don't even tell you

who's playing the title role that's disgusting they probably went through about six or seven of them I should imagine yeah hey Neil that dog's dead now

yeah yeah yeah yeah and on that cheery note we're going to step away and come back tomorrow for part two of Chart Music 64. So thank you very much, Neil Kulkarni.

No worries. God bless you, Simon Price. You're welcome. My name's Al Needham, and I implore you to stay pop crazed. Chart Music. This is the first radio ad you can smell. Chart music.