Chart Music: the Top Of The Pops Podcast - #64 (Pt 3): 26.4.84 – Metal Mickey Dropping His Guts

Episode Date: March 3, 2022

Simon Price, Neil Kulkarni and Al Needham continue to gingerly pick through the rubble of April ’84. After gasping at the outright Lijkenpikkerij of Belle and the Devotions, they tackle Lilt Advert Bob Marley, before getting out of the way of Duran Duran’s Come Tsunami…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. I'm your host Al Needham. I'm standing here with my dear friends Neil Kulkarni and Simon Price and fucking about isn't on our to-do list. So let's rejoin the episode in progress. Well the old

Boom Banga Bang Eurovision Song Contest is looming, and representing us this year is a band called Belle and the Devotions. Here they are now with a catchy little ditty called Love Games. CHEERING AND APPLAUSE You were only playing love games. You were only playing love games, baby. Janice, surrounded by the females of City Farm, including one woman in a hoopy vest who appears to be doing some stomach muscle exercises to her right, reminds us that the old boom-banger-bang Eurovision is looming,

so it's time to promote the UK entry. And here it is, Love Games by Belle and the Devotions. Formed in London in 1983, Belle and the Devotions consisted of Kit Rolfe, who was born somewhere in Yorkshire in 1956, and had put out a string of singles in the early 80s which failed to chart, and no one else else as the backing vocals were also done by Rolf. While putting out a couple of singles under the name which failed to chart Rolf was drafted in as an offstage backing singer for Sweet Dreams, 1983's UK entry for Eurovision

and at the beginning of the year Linda Sofieldfield and Laura James, who were born in London in 1963 and 1966 respectively, were bolted on in order to take part in 1984's Song for Europe. They performed this tune, which was written by Graham Satcher, who had knocked out songs for Tony Christian Baccarat, and Paul Curtis, who wrote the kiddie glam anthem We Want a Superstar for Christmas by the Angels of Islington in 1975, but had become absolutely obsessed with Eurovision, having already written 12 songs for the Song for Europe competition by 1983, but only winning once so far, when Let Me Be the One by The Shadows was the UK entry in 1975. This year he had written, or co-written, four of the eight songs for Song For Europe, which took place at the beginning of the month,

including one performed by Sunita and one by a Bucks fizzle-like group called First Division. But it was Love Games that came up on top by miles, thanks to its instantly recognisable harkening back to the 60s girl group scene, which had recently been mimed by Tracy Ullman and Phil Collins. Immediately signed up by CBS, they rushed it out as a single,

which entered the chart of Fortnite to go at number 87, then soared 39 places to number 48. And this week, it's just got under the line at 39, meaning the BBC finally have their chance to shill their coverage of Eurovision 84, which takes place in Luxembourg a week on Saturday. Chaps, another participant in a song for Europe this year, Hazel Dean, having her second go after failing to win in 1976,

probably for the best that she didn't win, because Searching, I Gotta Find A Man, had been re-released after failing to chart last year, and would get to number six next month. So it would have been problematic for her to be plate-spinning, if you will. And it's so incestuous because um not long before this um paul curtis had released a record with hazel dean under the duo named curtis and dean yeah so there is that i'm just surprised that you didn't start this bit by saying

bell and devotions are bell and the fucking devotions yes yeah yeah not not really an act with much chart longevity are they paul curtis that you mentioned there he wrote over i think all in all over 20 songs that became entries to you know the year vision song contest not all of them british ones yeah and uh so yeah he was hedging his bets he wrote for some you know entries for other countries as well i call that being a traitor i agree out well you know but he has form for this, or he had form for this, because later on,

he wrote the winning FA Cup final song two years in a row for different teams. Really? Yeah. Fucking hell. Right, 1989, for Liverpool, he wrote Kenny D, The Pride of Liverpool, which is very similar to Con Can's

I Beg Your Pardon, by the way. Then in 1990, he wrote for Manchester United. Oh, man! Yeah, We Will Stand Together, which has got a lot of the vibe of the Bee Gees' You Win Again in search of a tune, to be honest. That's fucking mercenary, man. It's bad. Anyone knows you just don't do that. No!

You don't play for both Liverpool and Man United. No. There haven't been many. He's the paul ince of songwriting miller chilton chisnell beardsley ince owen and curtis but he obviously was a fairly decent job in songwriter have you heard the northern soul tune that he made oh yes mickey moonshine mickey moonshine yeah yeah it's called name it you got it and i've got to say it's brilliant it's got a sort of a frankie valley begging meets isaac hayes shaft feel to it released on deco in 1974 so it's not one of those really obscure northern soul things it's a white

guy doing northern soul which is known to aficionados as crossover and some people don't like crossover stuff but um it genuinely did get played at the Wigan Casino and you know that's something I like about Northern Soul it was very kind of omnivorous it would just it would just scoop up anything from anywhere that you could dance to yeah the suggestions as to who Mickey Moonshine was was uh Alvin Stardust really and Paul Nicholas the voice of authentic black everything Northern Northern soul like it used to be. Yes. Well, you know, had Alvin Stardust done that,

it wouldn't have been completely, you know, surprising because the DJs at a place like the Wiccan Casino would play anything you could dance to. There was stuff like Afternoon of the Rhino by Mike Post's Coalition, which is just some kind of library music for TV themes, which, you know, was a real kind of dance floor hit there. But yeah, so whatever else we're about to say about Paul Curtis,

and I don't know whether we like the song or don't, I don't know what our consensus is going to be. He did write this absolute Northern Soul banger, so just, you know, give him that up front. So, yeah, Bell and the Devotions, shaking Supremes. Yeah. Really. I mean, they look like they've been loaded into a cannon

and fired through Sue Pollard's wardrobe. Let's get that out of the way from the beginning. That's spot on. Apart from the fact that two of them are wearing yellow coats. Oh, well done. Yeah, they look appalling. I can't tell if I like this song or not. Because, look, we all love Motown.

There's a lot of this stuff about it this time in part. Oh, loads. But I can't tell whether it's good because it's hooky, it's memorable, or it just feels a bit too cynical to the point where every single turn it takes, you know, reminds me of a Supreme song. It's as if the Supreme's 20 Greatest Hits LP has been fed into a bot and kind of regurgitated. So you've got bits of reflections and Stopping the Name of Love

and Keep Me Hanging On and Where Did Our Love Go? To the point where it sort of barely seems like a song. It almost seems like a medley record of hits you didn't know the Supremes had had. I mean, the thing is, if you're doing a song in this style and you have your backing singers going,

baby, baby, your game's up, isn't it? Yeah, but yeah but i mean truth be told doing a totally retro bit of pop like this it's kind of not a bad idea when it comes to eurovision um and you know the eventual place that they get is kind of par for the course for your uk eurovision entries you know box fizz had proved popular i mean even the winner this year diggygy Lou Diggy Lay by Harry's, a.k.a. The Dancing Deodorants, as they were called by a local critic. You know, that's very dated as well. Perhaps I'm over-inflating the excitement of Bucks Fizz. But I remember when Bucks Fizz were doing, you know,

making your mind up on top of the pops, it was like, I don't know, it was like you're waving off an aircraft carrier to the forklans or something there was that feel this is gonna win you know i counted them all out and i counted them all back yes there was that feeling there were four of them yeah and we were waving our contender off with the sounds of triumph almost already in our in our ears but but with this you don't get that feeling really really, from the audience. And as it emerges, of course, in their final performance on Eurovision, it doesn't happen for them.

Although, you know, coming seventh, actually, comparative to now, wouldn't be that bad for a UK. It would be triumph, wouldn't it? It would, for a UK Eurovision entry. But, yeah, there's not that sense of triumph that we felt waving off Bucks Fizz. We're not as confident that these lot are going to go to Luxembourg and do anything. For the benefit of you and the Pulp Craze youngsters, I sat through the song for Europe of 1984. And, you know, the minute this song comes on, you just go,

oh, well, that's going to win. Yeah. Because you've instantly got it. You know, everything else was a bit cat shit. Even Sunita, for God's sake sake wasn't very good would you believe by the by i think it's out of order that he was allowed to have four different entries in song for europe i don't think that's right yeah it shouldn't be allowed the thing with that is everyone's songs entered blind you know you don't know who's written the song so yeah i mean it

wasn't as if people knew who he was he even had a crack at performing one once did you see this um in 1980 in the uk song for europe um paul curtis was in a group called duke and the aces right uh the the lead singer of whom was bruno tonioli of strictly really what good yeah yeah yeah yeah there's footage of it they're wearing those i mean it 1980, so how you got away with wearing these at that time, when punk was four years ago, I don't know. But those kind of flared jumpsuits, where the top half looks like a very tight waistcoat, and the bottom half is just massive Saxons, you know?

Yeah, yeah. I know what Neil means, right? I know what Neil means about not being able to decide if this is a good song or not, because it's like a simulacrum of a good song. It hits all the points of a good song, all the points that a good song's meant to hit. What it's like, you know those Channel 4 stings

where you've got odd-shaped pieces of masonry hanging from a crane, and just for a second they appear to assemble themselves into a giant four. It's like that. It's like all these elements of a song which just coalesce, and for a second four it's like that it's like all these elements of a song which just coalesce and for a second you think oh it's a good song while you hear it but then you think oh i don't know it's just a little bit like you say cynical is the word

yeah but then i then i think well how is that different from a good song just on a cognitive level if something seems like a good song then isn't it a good song i mean i'm i'm like i'm like matt goss on that point i can't answer that yeah but you've got to compare it to the other songs of that ilk that was floating around at the time i mean the trend for the retooled 60s girl group sound it's been a thing for a couple of years by 1984 and it's you know it's reaped plenty of rewards you know tracy allman singing career marie wilson yeah and i like banana rama lol mason and the masonettes and you know even phil collins's cover if you can't hurry love but this feels like the end of the line here i suppose but i was still so much into motown

yes that i i would have given this a pass in fact more than that i i would have like neil said i would have been cheering them on i would have been cheering them on when it came to eurovision yeah you know as soon as the competition was over with, that would be the last I even thought of them. But just for as long as it took, I would have thought, yeah, you know, it's a bit Motown-y. And also, as well as the Supremes, it does reference other soul things. So, for example, there's that bing, bing, bing, bing guitar bit. That is actually directly lifted from his own Mickey Moonshine record. Right, right.

That's a direct lift so yeah it's a little a little nod for the heads there for the you know for the casino faithful the way they look though really doesn't help that's the thing it's very proto madonna isn't it it's madonna without the millions of accessories i've got to be honest. I've got to kind of, on behalf of my 15-year-old self, politely disagree because as a horny teenager at the time, I would definitely have been triggered by the devotions, if not by Belle, because of the white miniskirts and the big hairdos and all of that.

Yeah, I think at the time I would have possibly been storing something up just like Brian McFadden was in that Mariah video. It's the colors of their their outfits they're so garish it just reminds me of hilda baker on crackerjack or something um some shit pop song dressed modern like you know that there's that aspect that their look doesn't help i suspect and i don't remember hearing it on the radio much if i'd heard it on the radio i probably wouldn't have had a problem with it but this appearance probably makes it me have problems with it are you being racist now because they're white uh no i wouldn't actually say it's explicitly that

although you might be right but no it isn't it isn't just that it isn't just that i think if i did hear this on the radio i might assume it was a it was an all-black girl group by this time though by 1984 if you'd heard this on the radio you would have gone okay they're probably white yeah probably a bit tracy allman-ish this has been co-opted by white is this kind of music by yeah 1984 hasn't it yeah no it has um it's not that they look awful or anything but i come back to that word cynical they're not going for 60s kind of looking in what they're wearing or anything, or the way they're moving. I mean, look, it's Eurovision, for God's sake. Maybe I'm being a bit too up my own arse about this.

But yeah, I think it's a good record, but this appearance would have put me off it, I think. I think the fact that it has this special status has some bearing on the way that it's presented, because every Eurovision entry, every British Eurovision entry, be allowed to go on top of the Pops beforehand. Yes. Whether it was a hit or not, it would just get sort of, you know, parachuted in there.

And it's kind of hermetically sealed off from the rest of pop. And in the way it's presented, they're performing inside this kind of pyramid-like pod, aren't they? Yeah. It looks like they're in a hydroponic chamber. Yeah, yeah. And obviously, yeah, we now know that they didn't exactly set Eurovision alight. And there is this conspiracy theory about that, isn't there?

About why they didn't form as well as they might, which is that England football fans, only a little while before this, had rioted in Luxembourg where the competition was being held after England had beaten Luxembourg 4-0, and that still wasn't enough. And if you see the footage of it, it's so of its time. Apart from anything else, they've all got Union Jacks instead of Cross of St George,

which is what England used to do in those days. But, yeah, supposedly the people of Luxembourg were sufficiently pissed off about this that they poo-pooed Bell and Devotions and even booed them. I don't recall seeing any footage of Wright in Luxembourg and seeing Bell and Devotions chucking a bit of garden furniture through a window. It's not fair. Any more than Gemini didn't bomb Iraq schools or anything like that.

Do you think that was the reason? There's a bit more to it than that. So I'll leave that there for now. Anything else to say about this? Well, as you can tell from the reason? There's a bit more to it than that. So I'll leave that there for now. Anything else to say about this? Well, as you can tell from the crap I've talked already, go down a Bell and Devotion's rabbit hole, which, you know, even if it's the sort of rabbit hole that ends up like the Warren in Watership Down,

like, bloodily churned up by a JCB following the river of death downstream. But a rabbit hole, nevertheless. And, you know, I found out a few other things. Tell us. Well, first of all, Paul Curtis, which, you know, I've spoken about a little bit already. I stalked him on social media, shamelessly.

Oh, good lad. He tells a story about when one of the bands he was in, he doesn't say which, were on a European TV show. It might be Music Laden, one of those. Top and Poppin'. Top and Pop and um on the same yeah on the same show as rainbow and apparently richie blackmore came up to him and well i'll just read it out i read what he says i would like to share a weird but funny story

my band was number one in europe first of all pause there for a second was he number one in europe okay um at that time and we were at the tv studios in hamburg also there were deep purple and many other great artists okay so it's not rainbow i met richie blackmore one of my heroes outside our dressing room and he asked me if he could borrow my plectrum i laughed he smiled so i gave him my plectrum we were on last so we watched deep purple perform in the studio richie turned his guitar backwards and pretended to strum away on the wooden back of his guitar when they finished he came over to me and said thanks and smiling handed me my plectrum apparently the tv director was not amused how could I forget a moment like that? Dot, dot, dot, dot, dot.

Ah, Plectrum's for goalposts. And he comes across okay. He's very sincere and a bit Christian. And he's obsessed with Dua Lipa for some reason. And he keeps posting about her. But he's anti-Trump, so, you know, he's all right. The other thing is about Kit Rolfe herself, who is basically Belle. Well, Kit Rolfe, before being in Belle and Devotions,

was in a sort of Canadian electro-goth band called Vega, who I looked into, in the same vein as Berlin or Gina X Performance, that kind of thing, if that means anything to you. But I also looked into what she's been up to since Bell and Devotions, and sad to say, she is a mad anti-vaxxer. Oh, right. Oh, no! Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you've

got basically Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, Ian Brown, Kit Rolfe, all the bits. Bell and the ends. Lest we forget as well, one other thing about Rolfe, of course, is that single that she did with um eddie the eagle edwards fly eddie fly oh yes don't bother listening no so the following week

love games soared 18 places to number 21 but bell and the devotions would have a torrid time of it in the grand duchy when dutch newspapers accused the group of outright lick and pickerage of Diana Ross and the Supremes, and even worse, accusing the filthy, cheating British of installing extra backing singers behind a curtain during dress rehearsals, and that Sofield and James' microphones hadn't even been switched on. Oh, dear, oh, dear. hadn't even been switched on. Oh, dear, oh, dear. Even worse, on the morning of the competition,

the Daily Mirror reported that neither of the Devotions sang on Love Games and Rolf had dubbed the backing vocals. That evening, as the group finished their song, boos could be heard from the back of the theatre municipal, which startled and upset Terry Wogan. Bastards! It went on to finish 7th well behind Diggy Lou Diggy Lay by the Swedish

Entree, Harry's. Although the instant assumption was that a booing was due to England twats in Union Jack's shorts, who had picked up Luxembourg and threw it through a pub window five months earlier, an article in the Aberdeen Press and Journal reads as follows. British delegates at the Eurovision Song Contest in

Luxembourg were still angry yesterday over Bell and the devotions being booed by the Dutch section of the audience after singing Britain's Hope Love Games. But they will not be making official complaints about the booing, which shocked the audience and was heard by more than 500 million people in 30 countries. The anti-British reaction by the Dutch was understood to have come after newspapers in Holland carried stories claiming Love Games was similar to an old supreme song so there we go the truth at last bringing shame and disgrace on a once great nation yes it's odd to expect i don't know i suppose people want people not to mind but i mean come on it's eurovision yeah i think i think yeah it is important to point out that not the entire crowd were booing, because it's just typical, isn't it?

The majority of Eurovision fans are decent, upstanding citizens, but there's always a tiny minority of Eurovision hooligans who spoil it for all the rest. Yeah, exactly. Also, that thing about the microphones being switched off. Imagine that, a music programme where people's microphones aren't switched on. Who would watch that?

Yeah, yeah. And, of course course it would only be a year later when Ken Bates installed electric fences around the Eurovision Song Contest. The following week, Love Games jumped nine places to number 12 and the week after that it got to number 11, its highest position. The follow-up, All The Way Up up failed to chart when it was released in june of this year and the group were dissolved shortly after kit rolf went on to tour with gary newman as a backing singer sang backing vocals on fly eddie fly the 1988 single recorded by eddie the eagle edwards and would reunite with hazel Dean as the backing vocalist for Samantha Janus

when she represented Britain in the 1991 Eurovision and she now trains horses in Essex oh instant supply to all that Ivermectin eh Simon exactly You can rock your fingers and I know it's a new day You rock your fingers This is the first radio ad you can smell.

The new Cinnabon Pull Apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey, and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. Lots of Eurovision people on tonight. Cassandra Shaw was on earlier on. There's Bell and Devotions and Love Games. They're going to Luxembourg on Sunday.

Wish them lots of luck for the Eurovision Song Contest. Bob Marley's video is a star-studded celebrity package. Bates, once again getting himself involved with the women folk of the studio, reminds us that Sandy Shaw is a former Eurovision participant which she wouldn't be happy about at all and she'd sought to disassociate herself from it and the song she won with, Puppet on a String, the minute it won in 1967. I had a dig into that.

Fucking hell, it's a very interesting story. In January of 1967, chap, she'd been lined up as a singer of the next Eurovision entry and she was lined up to sing one of five Song for Europe entries

once a week on the Rolf Harris show on a Saturday evening. But then she was named as the other woman in a divorce case and described by the judge as a spoiled child

who felt she was entitled to do anything to gain her own ends okay the publicity and the fact that rolf harris and his manager were actively campaigning behind the scenes to get shaw replaced saying that her presence was ruining his reputation as a family entertainer steps steps back, strokes chin, forced the BBC to have her perform in an empty studio in case the studio audience dragged her off the podium and into a ducking stall. To her disgust, Puppet on a String,

a song she immediately disliked, won, and she found herself in Vienna, still being given the cold shoulder by the BBC and the host of the Eurovision Song Contest for the BBC, Rolf Harris. Although she's since come to terms with the song, which is still the biggest selling Eurovision single of all time, she was still pissed off with it and the BBC's attitude to her and Eurovision by 1984. and the BBC's attitude to her and Eurovision by 1984. And as for Harris, well, in 2015 Shaw said,

knowing what we all know now, but I knew then, I found this hypocrisy as a 19-year-old minor very hard to understand. Yeah, fucking too right. Absolutely right. Yeah, I too right. So from Savile to having to work with Rolf Harris and the way that she was treated by the media and by the judiciary, from what you're saying there, it really gives you a bit of a chilling insight into how young women were treated. Yeah, very much painted as the Scarlet Woman.

Swing in 1967, everyone there. Thank God all that's changed now, eh? I mean, we don't need sort of extra reasons to hate harris but fucking hell i'm adding that one i didn't know that at all yeah so uh hopefully bell and the devotions didn't knock on her dressing room door asking for advice particularly as the lead singer was called kit roll baits then tells us that the next video is a star-studded celebrity package. It's One Love, People Get Ready, by Bob Marley and the Wailers. Born in Nine Mile, Jamaica in 1945,

Bob Marley is Bob fucking Marley. As the lead singer of the Wailers, he had been part of the biggest band on the island since the mid-60s, an instrumental in popularizing reggae across the world in the early 70s but it wasn't until 1975 when the original whalers have split up and he created a new band called bob molly and the whalers that he had his first uk hit when no woman no cry got to number 22 in october of that year By his death in May of 1981, Bob Marley and the

Wailers had notched up eight top 40 hits in the UK, and when Island Records rushed out No Woman, No Cry as a tribute, it got to number eight in July of that year. After emptying the can of unfinished demos for the LP Confrontation in May of 1983, Island began work on their first Marley compilation LP, Legend, which is due out next month. And this, the 1977 remake of the original Wailers 1965 single, which was featured on the LP Exodus, is the lead-off cut from it. It entered the charts last week at number 35, and this week it's jumped 13 places to number 22.

So here's the video, which was shot by Don Letts, who documented the punk scene in 1976 and introduced Marley to it, which inspired him to record Punky Reggae Party. So chaps, the video, let's get into that first half footage from the promo film for is this love uh which was shot at the keskadee art center in islington in 1978 features bob marley at a kids party having a lovely time and apparently has a seven-year-old naomi campbell in it and then half modern day footage from Let's in World's End. Yeah, it's basically like fucking Pigeon Street or something. Late 70s, you couldn't have a kids party without some fucking pop stars turning up, man.

Sex Pistols in Huddersfield, Bob Marley in Islington. Yeah, it's like the Walton Hop for reggae, yeah. It pedals the same sort of revolting message of the song in a way. It's kind of everyone's getting along, isn't it all lovely? There's even that horrible moment where Arasta, it might even be Don Letts himself, you know, shakes hands with a copper. It is Don Letts. Obviously the copper's going to go,

hello, hello, what's going on here then? Was it explained that, oh, we're shooting a video? Yeah. And it's like, oh, okay, well, you know, you've got a camera there so I can't club you around the head it's the copper from not the nine o'clock news going right you gay black bastard i'm going to oppress you but he can't because there are cameras there yeah i think that moment's there to kind of reassure the middle class living rooms of britain that reggae poses no threat in a sense

i mean it just reminds me of when you know when, when fucking William Hague went to the Notting Hill Carnival. Yes. 1984 is the year the Scarman Report comes out. There's racial tensions on the streets and in the terraces. And, you know, this video isn't having any of it. Everyone's getting along. It's all fine. And it does, of course, give us the lovely sight of Paul McCartney limbering up for what we all know is his greatest moment. Yes. But, yeah, it's fucking Pigeon Street, isn't it?

And there's a mini Marley, isn't there? Jesse Lawrence. Yeah, Jesse Lawrence, that young British Jamaican boy, he's the spit of Ethan Ampadu, the defensive central midfielder of Wales and of On Loan, before he got his haircut. He's not just some actor from

a stage school who's been parachuted in. He actually lived up there on the 18th floor of one of those blocks in the World's End Estate in West London where it's filmed. And it's filmed actually in his house. In his flat, yeah. His parents, Bernardine and Paul, they'd been involved in the punk scene,

so Letts would have known them. Bernardine used to cook meals for Johnny Rotten, did you know that? Yeah, he used to get Johnny Rotten's tea on at Gunter Grove, didn't you? Amazing. and she went on to be a cookery writer yeah she wrote how to feed your family for five pounds a day which would be an aspirational book nowadays jesse studied painting and photography in the chelsea school of art design later on himself and became a filmmaker like don let's i think it's umts. I think it's a logical choice

to get Letts in to do this because he was actually a friend of Marley's. He managed to sneak in after a gig in London and got talking to Marley and they sort of became friends. And I think it's a nice choice filming it on the world's end estate. It's West London. A lot of it's on the King's Road which connects with

Don Letts' punk past of course. So we see the kid walking around and yeah it's intercut with that archival footage of marley yeah at a children's party and looking like a family man yeah robert family man mind joke for the heads there there's a scene where a young girl's playing with his hair which of course all black people absolutely love it when white people do that oh have you do that oh can i touch it christ and we also there's loads of punks and goths hanging around on the street they're looking shifty and distrustful of the whole thing but um it's really nice for me to see them because i'm thinking god two years later i was probably stood next to you at the kit kat or sat next to you underneath eros on piccadilly Circus but too shy to speak

and yeah just quite quite a nice little preview of my future life yeah because at the end where they're all sort of marching about and getting the carnival spirit going you actually see and this is this is a demonstration of how diverse uh pop culture was even in 1984, you see a pile of Weetabix, don't you? You see a pulp, a psychobillet and a skinhead all sitting together. Brilliant. Getting on. Not staged in the slightest.

I mean, I quite like all that stuff. I'll tell you what I could live without, though, I'll be honest, is all the celebrities goofing around. We've got sugs and cole smith yeah madness yeah two-thirds of bananarama junior gizcom yeah brinsley ford and drummy zebra vaswad right neville staple and yes of course paul mccartney all giving bob molly the thumbs up literally so in paul mccartney did you notice that Suggs has got a Malcolm X t-shirt on?

Has he? Yes, he has, yeah. Yeah, predating Spike Lee by about five years. Yeah. It's the t-shirt, the promotional t-shirt for Malcolm X No Sellout by Keith LeBlanc. Ah. Of course, yes.

I recognised those names and I spotted them. Yes. But there are others that I didn't recognise. I have no fucking idea about it. He's been doing my head in. Yeah. Particularly that one woman who looks like she's in Cachavaya. She looks very Peruvian.

I originally thought that was Alana Corre. Yeah, I did. But it's not. Even more bemused. There's one bloke who is the spit of Brian Murphy in George and Mildred. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's having a right fucking rank in skanking, isn't he? Who knew George Roper is ITAL?

But there's no way of finding out who the fuck these people are. When I was doing my research, I was convinced that George Roper was someone who worked at Ireland. And I think those people are all Ireland staff members. Oh, I see. I think, I'm not sure, if there's anybody out there who wants to educate me on this video, I've been where all is. Because seriously, that woman you were talking about,

who's got that Alana Curry look, that was killing me watching this. Who the fuck is she? I do know who she is, I'm sure. But I just kept coming back to a Tara Bentovan, and it can't have been her. So, yeah, real confusion there. There's also loads of vintage stock footage, isn't there?

Oh, that thing, yeah. Because the lads watching the telly, and there's clips of VE Day, four West Ham players from the 60s celebrating a goal, Khrushchev kissing his missus, a majorette, Ronald Reagan as a cowboy, of course course a space rocket highly slasher an old car failing to jump over some other yeah yeah and and some 70s dance truth it was the law

that you had to have those clips in pop videos at the time wasn't it yeah i mean it turns out that most of those exact same yes snippets were in return of the Last Palmer 7 by Madness. Yeah, so it's a great chance to have a good look at old London, both from 1978 and 1983 stroke four, where the only difference is the quality of the film stock, really, isn't it? It's actually quite nicely cut together in that if you didn't know Marley was dead, you might think he really was at the same kids' party with all the other ones. I don't know. Yeah, because there's a scene where mini Marley looks through a window yeah yeah exactly like a dickensian urchin yeah

it's just a shame about the soundtrack well this song there's nothing about it that would make it look out of place between the pages of come and praise really you know as long as you're not aware that it's actually about some other gods and you feel it's a very deliberate move by island to repackage bob marley and knock off the rough edges yeah we can't talk about one love without talking about the album it was sent out there to sell which was of course legend the best of bob marley and the whalers and for me it's a very problematic album and i'll explain why um first of all i just want to tell you a story that my wife told me about a place she used to work in south london and there was there was a works party that was organized by a very well

meaning older lady a white lady which is important here and this party was being held in a caribbean restaurant but by the way have you noticed how everyone says caribbean yeah fuck that no it used to be caribbean when i was growing up. That's Lobo's fault. Maybe it is. There's an advert on TV now for Royal Caribbean, but it would have really fucked with Billy Ocean's Caribbean queen.

But anyway, yeah. So this party going on, organised by this well-meaning older white lady where my wife used to work, and it was in a Caribbean restaurant. And because all the staff in the restaurant were of west indian

heritage this woman put on bob marley and the whalers legend on repeat in order to make them feel at home which made my wife cringe herself inside out but that tells you a lot because that is what legend exists for right if you go into someone's house and they've only got one reggae album or perhaps even only one album by a black artist it's going to be legend by bud marley and the whalers they're not going to have handsworth revolution or forces of victory or heart of the congos or king tubbies meets rockers uptown and you know god knows those aren't particularly deep cuts i mean i'm barely more than a dilettante myself. But you know what I mean? I mean, Legend has become the token reggae album

to show that you're down with reggae, that you're cool with it. And that album probably comes out in July when the weather's warm and you're having a barbecue, right? And it was quite deliberately calibrated that way. Dave Robinson, the founder of Stiff Records, earlier, of course, had been brought in to Ireland by Chris Blackwell

to be the president of Ireland Records UK. And the first task that Blackwell gave him was to sell Marley to a mainstream audience, particularly an American mainstream audience. And Blackwell wanted to show Marley's militant side, but Robinson disagrees. He wanted to aim Marley at not just the college kids who might get turned on by radicalism,

but also at the parents of the college kids. So we're basically talking about white people. And Dave Robinson later said in an interview, a quote I got here, my vision of Bob from a marketing point of view was to sell him to the white world. So Robinson commissioned focus groups to survey white suburban listeners in the UK and what he found out was that most of them didn't own a Bob Marley album but they didn't know why they didn't own them because they they were kind of theoretically on board with it but so what Robinson did first of all was choose a track listing that isn't going to spook the white horses you know so you're not hearing songs like small axe on there you know with vengeful lyrics like and whosoever diggeth a pit lord shall fall in it and if you are the big tree we are the small axe sharpened to cut you down

and you're not hearing things like down press a a man, when you run to the rocks, the rocks will be melting. And when you run to the sea, the sea will be boiling. You know, legend pivots away from that fire and brimstone stuff. It's New Testament. Yeah, yeah. It pivots towards sappy sentiments like, don't worry about a thing because every little thing's going to be all right. Have I already told the story of one of the lowest points of my life involving Ian Brown?

When I was... This is... Oh, God. It's got to be getting on for 20 years ago now, I suppose. It's sitting in the noughties. When I was working for The Independent on Sunday, I used to get invited to all kinds of stuff. And I got invited to the NME Awards. Oh, yes.

At Hammersmith Palais. And basically, the rule was, while the live act was on, you weren't allowed to buy drinks. And whoever had won... I don't know who even voted on who the um legend was was going to be you know this sort of lifetime achievement award essentially but it was ian brown ian brown gets to perform three songs and we weren't allowed to buy any drinks while he's on stage oh man i don't know if that's his rule or the venue's rule or what but i didn't know this i i just i thought fuck it ian brown's coming on. I go, I'm going to get a drink. Yeah, the natural thing to do. Yeah, of course.

Did they shut the toilets as well? Ha, fucking hell, yeah, probably. But I get to the bar and the steel shutters are done. I think they were, in my mind, the shutters were sort of being pulled down as I arrived, you know, in this cinematic way. Indiana Jones, did you roll under them? Yeah, right, yeah, exactly.

But I'm just stood there forlornly looking at them like gasping for a pint and it's bad enough that ian brown's on stage and then brown starts honking three little birds by bob marley oh can you imagine and i really really started to question my life choices in that moment um so yeah not not only did did Dave Robinson tilt the track listing towards stuff like Three Little Birds, and also Redemption Song, of course, the bad busker's favourite. Oh, God, yeah. Have no fear for atomic energy. Yeah, tell that to the people of Pripyat and Fukushima Prefecture, Three Mile Island, you know.

But, yeah, he also, what he did was soften Marley's image, posthumously, of course. But they chose a cover photo where Marley's looking reflective, not rebellious. Yeah. Reasoning. Yeah, yeah. And apparently, and this is really interesting, when they tried to market the album in America, they never used the word reggae once in the marketing. They just didn't use the word.

And the songs, of course, they even sequenced. Well, I don't know. They just said he's some kind of legendary Jamaican performer. They didn't use the word reg and the songs of course they were even sequenced well they i don't know they just said he's some kind of legendary jamaican performer they didn't use the word reggae yeah because americans wouldn't have really understood they or they might have been turned off or freaked out by it uh they they wanted permission to listen to it without thinking oh we're listening to reggae so there's that and even the way the songs are sequenced right it eases people in gently side one starts with is this love yeah side two starts with one love people get ready which which again that you know

one love mostly devoid of fire and brimstone apart from that briefly let's get together to fight this holy armageddon but apart from that it's very much oh can't we all be nice by the way it's robinson who tapped up paul mccartney right be in the video for one of them i think the presence of mccartney in the video is very important because it is oh yeah it's to say to white people you know come on in white people the water's warm the water's warm it's safe and the video also deliberately emphasizes marley as as a family man as i said you know smiling and surrounded by kids and it you know it worked all this legend sold 44 million and amazingly for reggae album about quarter of those in the u.s yes right and the success of

that album i think has become a real problem right there's a problem generally with how white people enjoy bob marley now i'm not gonna presume or explain or describe how black people feel about bob marley in the whalers that's really not for me to say but i know how black people feel about Bob Marley and the Whalers that's really not for me to say but I know how white people feel about Bob Marley and the Whalers because by and large they cherry pick they just want to hear the stuff that basically gives off the vibe of can't we all just be nice to each other you know as if a bit of stoned skanking to jamming is going to erase 500 years of slavery and colonisation. And sadly, it's easy for them to do that because Marley did write plenty of

can't we all just be nice bollocks, right? The sort of material that's basically John Lennon's Imagine with a reggae beat. And One Love is perhaps the most emblematic of that Bob Marley. But there's another Bob Marley who was a radical and a revolutionary and a black nationalist who wanted all the peoples of the African diaspora to return to Africa and so on. White audiences, by and large, don't want to hear that. They don't want anything to make them feel uncomfortable

or to remind them that the luxury they enjoy, the splendour of the grand civic buildings in their city centres, is directly due to the theft and rape and murder and enslavement that brought Bob Marley's ancestors to Jamaica in the first place. They just want to hear one love. It was named Song of the Millennium by the BBC. Yes.

For fuck's sake. And because of this airbrushing and simplifying of Marley's complex persona, he's become an icon in the worst sense. He's a high contrast blackrast black-and-white image on a cheap nylon flag, like Che Guevara, superimposed onto a red, golden, green master flag, with a marijuana leaf,

to be blue-tacked to the living room walls of students and stoners. And I know what I'm talking about. I live in Brighton. I'm surrounded by these cunts, right? Now, obviously, I don't want anyone to misunderstand what I'm saying. Obviously, Bob Marley is fucking brilliant yes but the best favor that white people can do to bob marley is to stop

listening to him and let black people have him back well yeah the thing is in a weird way i think legend almost put me off reggae nearly and songs like this you know are also what almost put me off legend as simon said it's a very telling very cynical and selective collection that that definitely tries to marginalize and edge out bob's most sort of interesting work and propound this view of him as just this positive-minded liberal sort of come one come all reggae ambassador and and when you look at the track this thing yeah what we got we've got one track off catch a fire because any other track might reveal you know that peter tosh and bunny waler were better singers for a start off we've got nothing off natty dread we've got the likes of like simon said three little birds and redemption song and satisfy my soul and one

love you we don't get 400 years or stop that train or slave driver or anything that might suggest actually that marley was at his best in collaboration with other equally determined people rather than being this figurehead this international face of reggae that you know chris blackwell and himself turn himself into and i've been writing a piece this week actually about a lee scratch perry album from the mid 80s and i was digging deep into some interviews from the late 70s and early 80s and um i was reading a brilliant quote max romeo talked about how so many reggae artists in the late 70s they found their work just sacrificed on the altar of bob you know i mean so people like the congos and people like max romeo they had sort of a hit album which maybe you know you could say that bob marley uh raising reggae's profile might have had a part of that but when it

came to the second album now i didn't really want it and didn't really put him out properly because it was all about bob and all you get on legend is that smooth side of bob the side that basically says to white audiences and american audiences you know hey you don't have to decode this music or interpret it just sink a have a joint, feel the spiritual communion with these. Red stripe. Yeah, yeah, and then feel the spiritual communion. Some jerk chicken. Some jerk chicken, yes, of course, from Turtle Bay. And, you know, feel that spiritual connection with these essentially kind of totally tropical ideas,

if you like. And crucially, legend's all you need. Don't worry about anything else. Certainly don't worry, you know, about what's actually happening in Jamaican music right now. In the early 80s, don't worry about Barrington Levy or Yellowman or Ecom House. This'll do you. Yeah. The general perception was, because Ireland had lumped so heavily on Bob Marley and the Wailers,

Bob Marley in particular, reggae was seen as a spent force the minute Marley died. Yeah, absolutely. And that's what happens when you create a messianic star like that and and that star goes what's not being pushed on legend is the marley of you know catch a fire and arms like that political and also you know he wasn't just pretty he was the pretty boy front man of one of the tightest greatest bands ever you know the whalers by now by this time the whalers are clearly you know just background bob's the messianic star i think to be honest with you he's a participant in this he started believing his own hype at the one love concert getting manly and sega to shake hands and

it's no accident that you know that kind of messianic mantle passes on to the likes of bono and galba yes throughout the 80s you know And that sentiment of one love, you know, this kind of why can't we all get along thing, I can only imagine what Peter Tosh thought of that. And this video, yeah. I bet he felt like bombing a church. Probably. But like I say, you know, this video in 1984,

which not only is the year the Skyman Report comes out, it's also the year when I think about what's going on in British reggae, for instance. You've got sax and sound happening and smiley culture starting to make stuff you know entirely different rules for reggae in the uk and in jamaica one love just just isn't you know really it's not what's going on to be honest with you but as simon has so so brilliantly pointed out yeah it's a tokenistic kind of by this that's reggae sorted you don't need to bother with anything else or what's happening contemporaneously you know this is it and the basic underlying

messages yeah um it's the totally tropical taste yes what we're seeing with legend is is pop marley isn't it what island are doing here it's no repackaging job of people like nick drake an artist who's been forgotten about for two decades you know Bob Marley was a living breathing entity in the British charts in the late 70s he's even appeared in the top of the pop studio a time or two you know people know about him oh yeah look the hits have to be on there don't get me wrong I didn't know any of that stuff that Simon was saying about you know the decisions being made about this and the way to portray him and the way he's portrayed on the sleeve but you know there could have been a great posthumous collection of Marley which would have actually reflected not just kind of white

experience of Marley and what white people wanted to hear about Marley but black experience of Marley for an awful lot of West Indian Jamaican people in Britain yeah Marley was something they grew up on yeah you know and those early albums so utterly neglected by legend that they're formative biblical documents I mean to completely cast the black experience of Marley aside and just go for this kind of that these are the hits and also these songs you'll get along with there's nothing that will make you stop and think for a moment here that's a very deliberate strategy i don't actually hold any enmity towards bob marley you know he had some messianic delusions towards the end i would say but i think he made some some great great music you know and looking back into his history i mean even beyond the 70s when he's you know in the 60s some of the singles

he's making and being part of are fucking astonishing. Yes, they are. He's ill-served hugely by this reductive viewpoint that legend casts upon him. That unfortunately still adheres to this day, I think. You know, he's still a signifier of this kind of ease, this lilt feel. But, you know, his music is intensely more problematic than that. Yeah, and i do think that they could give him a double vinyl yeah you know like brian ferry and roxy music around the same time i think it was yeah and t-rex yeah yeah yeah why not um it's a really interesting point neil made there actually about uh the way that sort of contemporary british reggae was being

treated and uh there were hit singles but it was just usually hit singles so you know somebody like smiley culture um comes through and you know he'll be allowed to have one hit but there's no investment in him yeah as an artist isn't it yeah yeah yeah on the lighter side lovers rock stuff like you know sophie george or uh boris gardner and stuff like that you do get these one-off records in the UK charts, but there is no kind of investment, and I mean that in the financial sense, but also kind of intellectually or emotionally,

in the idea of reggae and reggae artists being artists. They aren't just people who turn up with a hit every now and then. And what's mad is it's not so bizarre that it wouldn't be marketable to a white audience when i think about the people involved in sax and sounds you know ash banton and and smiley these people are stars man and the way that they talk they look amazing their music's amazing and the lyrics are amazing it really wouldn't have taken that much stretch to try and market this stuff but no get a single then leave it alone leave it alone we don't really understand it don't know what to do with it and of course all of this i guess essentially stems from the institutional racism of the music

business at the time the fact that these people in our positions the people who decide this shit are almost uniformly white blokes who don't really understand what they're you know getting into in a sense i mean we've had this before with elvis and particularly with John Lennon. I mean, when Elvis died, he was immediately repackaged as a bit younger and less fat. Lennon just basically had his rough edges and awkward politics knocked off. And Ireland are doing very similar here. They're Lennonising Bob Marley. Or, to put it in a more Simpsons way, they've de-rasticised him by 10%. Yeah.

And it's lucrative, don't get me wrong. it's probably a wise business decision oh definitely because the thing is these are all fucking amazing pop songs they are but you know what i can't listen to legend can't look at it i own it that signifier that tokenistic tick off that's what it sums up to me i can't put it on because i feel like i'm committing a hate crime i've got it in my record collection, but only because I nicked it off my sister. As mentioned before, for some bizarre reason, she wrote Trey Lobb's blood clots on Bob Marley's forehead. Amazing. By spring of 1984, we're at the absolute midpoint between UB40 turning into Jawaddy Waddy and Purcell running Three Little Birds

in an advert. Yeah. See this is it. The after effect. I mean I don't know if Blackwell and Robinson thought beyond the bottom line when it came to the after effects of Legend. Maybe they just wanted to make as much money as they possibly could but I would like to think that there was

at least some kind of vague good intention, particularly given that all that Blackwell had done historically for reggae and for Jamaican artists. Even though he's a controversial figure, I know that. Chris Whitewurst, according to Peter Tosh. Yeah, yeah. And Lee Scratch Perry's had some things to say about him. Oh, I can imagine.

Yeah, yeah. But considering that I do at least believe that Blackwell was sincerely, that he sincerely cared about reggae, maybe on some level he hoped that legend would kind of have a Trojan horse effect or a battering ram effect, just kick the door down. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And pave the way for other reggae artists. But it just, for one reason or another, it didn't seem to happen, even with Other Island. You know, it's not as if Gregory Isaac suddenly became a massive breakthrough star on the back of this or something. Do you know what I mean? They let the brand leader win, and that's always dangerous. And he was conveniently dead, yeah.

But Bob Marley had a fucking huge back catalogue of stuff that people like me wouldn't have heard of. I get that, Al, but you were the sort of listener who would listen to Say Legend. Say if Legend was the first thing, the first first that bob marley album you had you would have dug back you would have gone backwards for i think for the vast majority of the people who bought legend that was that with reggae um and if they wanted to conjure that vibe they put that album on and they wouldn't investigate the degrees in the shade as i'm sure you did you know and and

this is the problem with the document like that the thing is with Legend did it have to all be like that could they not have squeezed in something you know just some sort of taint of his past which was actually fascinating you know those first few Wayless albums they're fucking amazing and you know Chris Blackwell's got a lot to answer for don't get me wrong but actually the way he makes rock and reggae meet in some of those early records is thrillingly exciting and it's not reflected on legend which is a real shame i think after legend comes out i i encounter people in my life just so i don't like reggae and i think what they mean is they don't like this kind of reggae and if they if they knew just exactly what an amazing because you know Jamaica is for its size I think it's probably the most astonishing

place in pop history in terms of what it's created Punches well above it Absolutely yeah, perhaps more than anywhere else and it's ill served by Legend being the main reggae album that people own, I mean as Simon mentioned

a lot of people it'll be the only reggae album there people own i mean as simon mentioned that you know a lot of people it'll be the only reggae album they're in the only black album they own actually i mean i say again as i said in a piece for the quietest about reggae in 1976 you know the rolling stone top 500 list contains one reggae album and it's legend by bob marley so you know that's supposedly a survey of the 500 greatest albums ever made you Do you know what I mean? It's not Bob's fault, perhaps. It's maybe not even Legend itself's fault. But the way it has been used is ruinous. In an interview last year, Don Letts himself said,

in the 21st century, Bob Marley has been somewhat castrated. What did he do in this video? Do you think he's got some... He's got his hands on the shears i like don let's and obviously he's a very important figure as well very influential yeah he's done so many amazing things so i am reluctant to blame him for the wider phenomenon of what happened with marley but yeah this this doesn't help another celebrity appearance in the video is of course musical youth who are right at the front of the throng.

I wonder what they'd be thinking, because they're kind of like fading from the scene at the moment, aren't they? Yeah. Maybe they were hoping that the release of this might give them a shot in the arm and maybe get them back. Or maybe they were in the crowd hiding from that truant officer in the video for Pastor Dutchie, which, of course, was directed by Don Letts. Don Letts, yeah. Obvious question, chaps. If Bob Marley had lived, what would his 80s have been like?

It's interesting. Would he have embraced things like dancehall, you know, and more electronic stuff? I suspect not. I mean, I think he'd end up collaborating with British reggae artists, but, you know, McCartney and all that lot

would be lining up to work with him, so he might have just entered kind of rock aristocracy or reggae aristocracy, as it were. Would Marley have done Live Aid? Oh, yeah. Abso-fucking-lutely he would have done Live Aid. Do you reckon? Why would he not have done Live Aid? Maybe he would have seen through it and said

you can't just chuck money at Ethiopia, you've got to do more than that. A handshake between Michael Manley and Edward Seeger isn't going to solve Jamaica's civil war problems in 78 but he still creates that gesture and it's a meaningless gesture. It's good though. It's a really good picture. It's a great

picture but. I recreated that when I did a documentary for BBC East Midlands about the rivalry between Derby County and Nottingham Forest. Oh my God. Yeah, I got Rame, who's the Derby County mascot, who's a big Ram,

and Forest's mascot at the time, who was Robin Hood. And I linked their hands together and put my own hand out in front, just like Bob Marley in that picture. Amazing. Look, it's a lovely image of the unifying power of music

and all that. But I taught a module last year called Events in Context where I looked at important gigs. And I was teaching this module and one of my students was a very, very mature student. He was in his late 50s, early 60s. He was from Jamaica. And I did a lesson about that precise concert, the One Love concert.

He said, look, how this was portrayed is complete bullshit. For starters, a lot of the of people in not only the musicians i mean we know about peter tosh not exactly behaving himself that day and various people having problems with what was going on but he said out in kingston after this concert it wasn't oh everything's all together it was a brief little holiday if you like but of course straight away the violence between streets just continues marley is able to then and perhaps ireland and chris blackwell are you able to use that incident as you know some sort of proof of his messianic status and i really do think it has a dangerous effect in the 80s when it comes to people like bono and geldof thinking that they can they can change the world mean, I'd argue there's a direct line

from that concert to Live Aid. Maybe he would have done the same thing with Reagan and Shenenko. Or Margaret Thatcher and Arthur Scargill. Yeah, or Margaret Thatcher and Colonel Mengistu or something. I don't know. I don't know, but I think he wouldn't have been able to resist that playing Live Aid. Oh, he would have fucking killed it, though't know, but I think he wouldn't have been able to resist

that playing Live Aid. Oh, he would have fucking killed it, though, wouldn't he? Yeah, he would have been great. Maybe, yeah, he'd have been the Freddie Mercury.

I don't know. Speaking of Live Aid, one fact I found out recently, and this is from listening to the Rock On Tours podcast, which is Gary Kemp and Guy Pratt. Yeah.

It's about Bob Geldof because Geldof was on there. Well, actually, it's about Bob Geldof because Geldof was on there. Well, actually, it's from Bob Geldof. He was on there and he's a man not devoid of ego, shall we say. He certainly has a not exactly underplayed view of his own role in rock history. But one story he told is that when the whole live aid thing was going on is i guess it was in the period between band-aids and live aid is that he was in conversation with david bowie and mick jagger about you know doing a a charity raising duet and bowie originally wanted to do

one love with mick jagger fucking hell yeah Mick Jagger, One Love, people get ready. South America! It was Geldof who persuaded them to do Dancing in the Street instead. But if Bowie and Jagger had done One Love, my God knows what accent they'd have done. And, you know, maybe it would have changed history and the people wouldn't now think so harshly of Spies Like Us, Paul McCartney's Meat Free Mondays rap, you can do it right now, please.

I mean, Bowie hasn't got form, but Jagger has, because Cherry-O-Baby off Black and Blue, he's got some dreadful cod reggae accent going on there, so yeah. Fuck. So the following week, One Love so sought 13 places to number nine and two weeks later made it up to number five its highest position by that time legend had entered the lp chart at number one and stayed there for 12 weeks the lp would sell well over 25 million copies worldwide, over 3.4 million copies in the UK, and has been in the British Top 100 LP chart for a combined total of 19 and a half years.

The follow-up, Waiting in Vain, got to number 31 in July this year, and Ireland rounded off 1984 with Could You Be Loved getting to number 71 in December. When Three Little Birds only got to number 76 in July of 1985 despite or because of it being known as the personal music Island gave up on releasing Marley singles, but in 1992, while preparing the box set Songs of Freedom, they dug out an unreleased track from the early 70s called Iron Lion Zion, remastered it,

and put it out as a single, which got to number five in October of that year. I don't care what you say about Legend, anything that gets waiting in vain back in the charts is alright with me. That's a fucking tune.

And I will feel alright Let's get together and feel alright Bob Marley and One Love. Okay, it's time for Janice Long's solo. Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you. To Roger Taylor, live on a Thursday.

Top of the pops, Duran Duran and Reef Lakes. Bates and Janice, now reunited, are hanging over some surprisingly tatty railings for stupid streamers. Janice attempts to sing happy birthday to one of the members of the next band, but Bates gets in the way with a time check. She slaps his arm jovially, but I reckon she meant it. Yes. And combined with the long black gloves, it made me think of Russell Harty being slapped by Grace Jones. Later, of course, to Be The Baddie in a Duran Duran video and the guest Scary Lady on an Arcadia single, of course.

That band, Duran Duran. That single, The Reflex. We last chanced upon Duran Duran in Chant Music No. 56 when they were trotting around the winner's circle in the 1983 Christmas special with their first No. 1, Is There Something I Should Know? Since then, they've been playing the second leg of the Sing Blue Silver Tour, playing seven dates in Japan, six in Canada, and 45 in America. That tour finished last week, and they've just put out this,

their 11th single. It's the follow-up to New Moon on Monday, which only got to number nine for two weeks in February and it's the third single from the LP, Seven and the Ragged Tiger. It was supposed to be the lead-off single back in October of 1983, but EMI put their foot down

and Union of the Snake went out first. It's been extensively remixed by Nile Rodgers and was put out a fortnight ago, and this week it smashed into the chart at number five, this week's highest new entry. And although there's a video with the band playing in Toronto before they drown the audience with a computerized waterfall, here they are standing among the top of the Pops audience like actual human beings for their first studio appearance on the Pops in 13 months. And you've got to say it's a very inauspicious start to their return, isn't it? You know, the return of the biggest band in the country right now, mark you. Because we see Simon Le Bon handing a cup of something to a runner and fucking up the miming right at the beginning. And also, did you notice that the graphics department have got this single down as this week's number two?

Oh. Tut, tut, tut. It is a big moment, them coming back. Yeah. It seems really odd. I mean, you know, the juxtapositions at top of the pops throws up. It seems really odd now from our vantage point to recall that this

existed in the same pop time as the Smiths. Because one seems so redolent of something perhaps already passing and the other so redolent of what's ahead. But I remember there being massive anticipation for this, as there was for every Duran single. Because the singles were were an event it was actually becoming easier to get excited about the singles with their attendant videos yes than the albums anymore seven and the ragged

tiger was a bit of a disappointment around our way uh we were a rio house i guess you know uh we we absolutely came that out maybe it was just because my big sister was moving on for the pop stuff a bit but seven and the ragged tiger was a bit of disappointment and not just because of its sleeves strange visual proximity to culture clubs color by numbers it's like same sleeve designer isn't it and and right yeah assorted images i think there's a vague prognosis to geran as brummies was always bubbling under the surface and that's what seven and the ragged tiger scene seemed to be for me. I hadn't been grabbed by Union of the Snake

and New Moon and Monday. Because you want the Duran single really to hit you with a kind of biff bang power. The reflex got me more than those. But pretty soon I started wondering, even as a 12 year old, sort of, do I like this? What am I listening to?

Is this a song or just the procession of kind of gimmicks and weird sounds? It was like this thing you am i listening to is this a song or just the procession of kind of gimmicks and weird sounds it was like this thing you entered with a big grin on your face and initially you were mad excited about it but once you're in there it started to seem ever so fragile and and the grin you had on your face started feeling a bit a bit forced and by the time i'd seen the aforementioned video about you know replete with that relax style cum tsunami i mean that was another thing because relax is in the charts and this is called reflex i know it's a daft little thing but you notice these things when you're kids two records starting with our

ending in x from big bands the video seemed to cement this idea that joram were now an international concern and i was I was I was becoming increasingly disbelieving because the thing is with the reflex its gimmicks wore off pretty quickly and dated pretty quickly to the point yeah where the best bit of the record you know what I'm going to say it's when those uh why I I I I's that Jordan chorus yeah and that was why it wasn't the lead off single because the label didn't like that I think that's crazy why it wasn't the lead-off single because the label didn't like that i think that's crazy yeah it's clearly the lead-off single or should have been the lead-off single the hookiest thing in the whole single isn't it well no the hookiest thing is that sound

of metal mickey dropping his guts after yes which apparently is andy taylor saying yeah you've had a bad atomic goggle burst to their main yeah but for me Duran as a kid they'd gone for making this kind of classic Japan influenced new romantic dance pop to kind of mullet headed

going for the rock market within about 12 months yeah so the first two albums Dead Solid Seven and the

Ragged Tiger for me anyway was weak I must reinvestigate that album there maybe I've grown into it by now but they had

become already by now I think not really an albums band in a sense the singles were always an event. You know, Wild Boys becomes an event. View to a Kill becomes an event. But, you know, the live album arena

just continued this kind of downward trend. The first half of their career, album band, second half singles band, their second number one is The Reflex. It's their biggest British hit. But you can't help feeling their careers are on a bit of a downturn. Yeah, I mean time i didn't around about this point duran duran with that bandwidth or fucking out they're going to be around forever yeah they're not going to go away and i'm going to

be fifth day and they're going to be celebrating their 120th number one but to be fair right this performance is actually pretty good i know le Le Bon lost up at the beginning. I think one thing I can't believe I didn't notice at the time was just fucking hell, how much was David Bowie continuing to exert an effect on people? It's pretty blatant how the Berlin period affected early 80s UK pop, but I really do think Let's Dance is having an effect here. There's this kind of international territory marking going on. And that focus on kind of danceability and rhythm means that the most memorable touches of the song are the percussive

touches the steel drums and the wood blocks and and the vocals stuff uh the flex flex flex flex but that's the trouble for me the the the trouble with the reflex is it's a continuous stream of kind of three second hooks that doesn't quite coalesce into a song it's like non-sequitur pop yeah time doesn't really matter when you're in this it's like non-sequitur pop yeah time doesn't really matter when you're in this song you can kind of turn it on at any point there are big Duran moments in this era is there something I should know I think it is one of those wild boys is another one and this is one of them but you know crucially we're watching the young ones we're seeing Rick Mayall sitting on a turntable singing this pretending to be a Duran Duran record and

people are starting to take the piss a lot allow me to return to this week's Melody Maker chaps and and the singles page in particular which was handled by Colin Irwin and this very single came up right he writes at a time of day when most righteous souls are tucked up in bed with Agatha Christie certain public houses around these parts have shuddered to the sound of melody maker personnel debating the rather dubious merits of this band. And blatant attempts at assassination have been attempted on this writer, following his loudly voiced theory that by the end of this year, Duran Duran won't mean a light in Britain. Perhaps already alarmed by the relative failure of their last single, New Moon on Monday,

these Duran persons have turned to Nile Rodgers to remix this track, presumably to give them the character they so patently failed to engender themselves. Rodgers does fine. There's a new zest in the music and lots of those damn snazzy technical ploys producers are famous for. But this ain't David Bowie and Duran Duran need more than studio trickery to restore their flagging impotence to a decent song. No matter how much mass hysteria and tribal devotion they may inspire. There comes a time in every band's life when they've got to put up with the goods on record. Duran Duran badly need it now, but this isn't it.

And frankly, they seem incapable of achieving it. Hush. This idea that Duran Duran were going off the boil. Yeah, well, the chart stats don't lie. This was their equal biggest hit. I think it was their biggest selling single, wasn't it? Yeah. Yeah, I think Newman and Monday was a disappointment

in that it only got to number nine and all of that. But you've got that with a lot of bands, I think, that they were still allowed to be perceived as huge bands and not every single had to be top three. Yeah. Because singles came thick and fast and albums were just rinsed to death and just milked for loads of singles and stuff like that.

So yeah, I didn't really perceive it as much of a kind of wobble in their career. The thing with Duran is, right, I love Duran Duran more than I can really justify. I love the existence of them more than I love sitting down and listening to their music. If I'm sitting down and listening to music kind of broadly of that type and from that time, it's more likely to be the Human League or Soft Cell or even Visage.

But I just love them for being Duran Duran. And I know all the arguments against them. And I know people think they're Japan for dummies. But in a way, that's exactly the point and i really value that i value the fact that they were pretty boy pinups and they wrote strange cryptic lyrics and made weird arty videos they were wham and japan at the same time yeah because jiran occupied the space in british pop culture that would later be occupied by Take That or Boyzone or Westlife or One Direction,

who are all boring as fuck, right? You didn't get The Wanted or JLS doing songs called Union of the Snake or albums called Seven and the Ragged Tiger or making videos with weird lizard-headed people in pools of fire, or putting out books of their own polaroids yeah you know i've interviewed duran a few times and they're really great and they're really self-aware about their own ridiculousness but also i think they're very aware of what's good about them they're aware of why they're great because duran for me they are

the fizz in the champagne of 80s pop that That's what they are. If you listen to Hungry Like the Wolf, those kind of super fast arpeggios of Nick Rhodes' synthesizer literally sound like champagne bubbles to me. And I guess I feel about them the same way that a lot of people feel about Andrew Ridgely, you know, that he's living the good life out there for the rest of us. I once put it to Duran Duran that being in Duran Duran looked like the most fun it's possible to have in a band.

But they reckon that being in the Rolling Stones looked like even better fun. So I suppose the grass is always greener. The thing with this performance on Top of the Pops, it's a rare case where I felt shortchanged by seeing the band in the studio. You know, normally if a video's on, you think, oh, God, well, they couldn't be bothered to turn up. I don't want to see Duran in the studio. Yeah. You know, normally if a video's on, you think, oh, God, well, they couldn't be bothered to turn up. I don't want to see Duran in the studio. They're a band who exist in the imagination on video. And yeah, Neil's talked about it. And I know the reflex video is mostly a performance one,

but there is that huge pixel waterfall, that cum shot that Neil talks about, that explodes in the screens over the heads of the audience. And I want to see that. Instead, we get one cheap domestic television behind the drum kit like a fucking sony trinitron or something right yeah and uh i guess it might be a a smartass sort of reference by the production crew to the lyrics sometimes i think the reflex is just absolute bollocks lyrical but then but then they say it's absolute bollocks lyrically yeah but you see a bit like this and you think it's actually a really acutely perceptive description of showbiz cocaine addiction definitely where

it goes i'm on a ride and i want to get off but they won't slow down the roundabout i sold the renoir and the tv set don't want to be around when this gets out i think there's something to that, you know. That's a great couplet, that last line. And like you said, Simon, imagine Tate that writing a line like that, not in a million years. No, no, no.

And I think, given that I've grudgingly accepted we're not seeing the video, I think they look pretty fucking great in their individual ways. Oh, yes. So, Le Bon, he's got that kind of alpha male lead singer swagger all the time.

That's pretty much why they hired him. When they first met him, he was so cocky. Just the way he walked up to them in a pair of, I think, bright red trousers and they were like, what the fuck's this guy doing? They just thought, you know, he's got it. He's confidence incarnate, totally. He's got that alpha male lead singer swagger.

But his shirt, right? His shirt, I think it's sort of red white black and grey or something yeah it's got so many competing diagonals um it looks like dazzle ships it looks like right he could have sailed his yacht drum through the battle of jutland and he'd have been fine right and then you've got john john is the most rock star in capital letters, obviously, you know. And I love how he reinvented himself. Do you know the whole thing about Nigel with him? Go on.

Well, Nigel's his real name, right, for a start. And he sees Nigel as being an entirely different person to John Taylor. Because when he was Nigel, he was bullied at school. He was spotty and he wore glasses and he's a bit geeky and he just wasn't a sexy guy he was an ugly duckling um and then he thought no you know what fuck that and he basically completely gave himself a makeover restyled himself and became John Taylor you know maybe the most fancied man on earth at various points in the 80s and yeah he's there with his fucking shoulder pads.

If he's not wearing shoulder pads, he wears his shoulders as if they're padded, just the way he moves. It's a great bit where, because it's balloon time at Top of the Pops, a balloon sails towards him. And he just sort of looks at it with this kind of amused curiosity, like he's never seen one before. He's just fucking great, exuding charisma and sex on stage.

Roger, the drummer, who, by the way, when i interviewed them was was kind of the nicest just surprisingly down to earth as limmy would say he was the one my sister fancied the most by the way was he he said well he said he's a sort of classically good looking hunky male and he's not kind of puffy in the way that would put some people off because that's the word that would be used in the playground oh you you like those puffs do you and you're out yeah and this performance he has got a hell of a lot of blusher on his cheekbones and i don't know if you notice roger is never not pouting even during the really tricky drum fills and there's there's some you know pretty fancy percussion going on in this track but he knows what exact angle to sort of tilt his head he knows where the camera is he's not going to look at the camera,

but he knows where the camera is. He does know how to mime playing the drums, though, in this bit, man. I'm calling mime drumming. Or at least a very uncharitable camera angle, which would not have gone unnoticed by the playground detractors. But that happens a few times with the whole band.

I find the guitarists don't quite know what to do sometimes because the track is so synthetic and full of peace together isn't it yeah it's pieced together so possibly until they toured it they probably hadn't played it as a whole thing yeah yeah very often i even think andy looks all right because andy was always the last one to get picked at games if you like of duran in terms of fancy ability do you know what i mean um but even he looks okay he's got this big japanese jacket with japanese symbols all over it he's got a full mullet hasn't he's got the full nino ferretto slash gas oh yes mullet going on but obviously my favorite one my man

crush is nick rhodes right nick rhodes in this he looks beautiful yeah beautiful beautiful nick rhodes got beautiful bro what he looks like he looks like simon rhodes yes nick rhodes in this performance looks like life on mars bowie in his away kit right because life on mars bowie is pale blue and yeah nick rhodes has sort of flipped the colors around uh in that beautiful red sort of military looking suit jacket he's got on. And a nice, neat tie underneath it. Just the slightest hint of a mullet in the hair. Not like a proper Andy Taylor mullet. Just a sort of tasteful little Bowie mullet.

He just got married in a pink Bolero jacket and matching top hat, hasn't he? What a fucking legend. Yeah, I love him, man. Yeah, of all the members of Duran, he is the most Duran of all of them. Yes. I think, and he is aware of his own absurdity in many, many ways, and he plays up to it.

And when I interviewed him, I asked him about the fact that, you know, you must be aware there's a little bit of a cult of Nick Rhodes around you, and a little kind of smirk played around his lips he's aware of that he you know he's a little bit of a sort of self-created caricature and i i absolutely adore that about him but the first time i met him uh it wasn't for an interview and i kind of embarrassed myself because i got overexcited yeah it was um it was it was at a Duran Duran gig at Birmingham City Stadium, St Andrews.

It was in the noughties when they were making one of their big comebacks. I think it was the time that all five of them had got back together. So it felt like a proper comeback, right? And, you know, big enough for them to be playing stadiums. So there was a party afterwards and it was in the clubhouse of birmingham city fc there were members of duran duran walking about and i was sort of playing it cool because i didn't want to sort of be the first person to go over and bother them but i thought maybe i'll maybe i'll talk to them at some point so i just sort of uh kept my distance for a bit and had a few drinks

but then because i'd had so many drinks i needed to go to the toilet and it was down oh no it's not going where you think it's going. Don't worry about that. It's not a Bruce Foxton letter, is it? It's not a Bruce Foxton letter. Oh, dear God. But, yeah, I had some liquids to offload. No, not in that way. You know, having drunk so much.

And then when I came back, and it was down the stairs to these toilets. When I came back out of the stairs, I'm sort of stumbling back up the stairs. And Nick Rhodes is coming the other way. And I sort of glance up and he's pretty much right in front of me before I know it. And I didn't have time to compose myself. And I just said, without almost any gaps between the words, Hello, Nick Rhodes. Hello, Nick Rhodes.

Not even, Hello, Nick. Oh, hello. Hello, Nick Rhodes. Like that. Like Nick Rhodes is this kind of singular entity. Hello,hodes and i i just immediately i've done it i just oh fuck fuck fuck but he just kind of laughed and walked past me and i i think i think he laughed in a kind of forgiving charitable way of like yeah it's like it's like yeah i get it i'm nick rhodes yeah yeah yeah i get that all the time people just blurting out hello Nick Rhodes at me.

Yeah, I fucking love Nick Rhodes. He's the best one. The song, yeah. I mean, the Nile Rodgers remix. Imagine the cocaine going around when that was going on, by the way. What's the difference between the remix and the original? Because I've never heard the original. When you hear the album one, you do feel it's a bit flat and it needs a bit of jazzing up.

What I think he brought to it, I interviewed Trevor Horn once and I asked him about Owner of a Lonely Heart by Yes that he was involved in, obviously. And he said that that was the best whiz-bang record he ever made. And I understood exactly what he meant. It's all his production tricks thrown in at once and it's brilliant on that basis. And I think that's pretty much what Nile Rodgers did. And yeah, Neil's right. It's a load of trickery in search of a song, but I don't mind that.

It's a great record rather than a great song. It's all about the record. And I really think it works on that basis. It is exciting. You don't want to analyse it too much. You don't want to think too much about what the lyrics are, but that's always the case with Duran. Nearly always the case with Duran.

I even really liked the B-side. I don't know to think too much about what the lyrics are, but that's always the case with Duran, nearly always the case with Duran. I even really like the B-side. I don't know if you heard it. It was a live recording of Steve Harley and Cockney Rebels' Make Me Smile. And that, they brought the same feel to it, that kind of brio, that kind of exuberance to Make Me Smile that they bring to their own material. It's got these kind of triumphant flourishes between every line this these kind of synth swooshes and uh andy taylor at the end of every line and it kind of almost changes the meaning of the song and yeah despite what they say i i do think being a member of joanne in their pomp at this exact moment must have been pretty fucking amazing oh yeah it is

very cocaine you're right simon and much like another record that we're going to come to later yeah am i going to seek this out and listen to it no but i am very glad it exists i i'm glad it's there and i know it's out there because it does offer amusement and delight in equal measure yeah i mean they're back in the country after months on tour and they're're putting themselves about on various TV appearances and whatnot. But in this very day's issue of the Daily Mirror, there's a two-page spread on Duran as part of their week-long series called Britain Rocks America,

with a graphic of a very 70s-looking guitarist thrashing away while the Stars and Stripes backdrop shatters under the onslaught of the Thompson Twins and the Eurythmics. It reads, 20 years after the Beatles, Britain's rock stars have conquered America all over again. Duran Duran are one of the top bands taking the American road to riches.

Their popularity here might be waning, but across the Atlantic, their future looks brighter than ever. You know, it's an interesting enough piece. They've done two nights at Madison Square Garden, but they still have to go to a school in Coney Island as the prize in an inter-school competition. But they get to doss around with Andy War warhol and jeremy irons and they do an advert for suntory whisky for japanese tv so classic 80s classic 80s doing that wasn't it

yeah you can't get no more 80s than that do an advert in japan that no one would see over here it's basically you know um the foundation of the plot line of uh lost in translation even though he's bill murray's an actor in that. Madness did it, didn't they? Yes. Oh, God, what was it called? Honda City. Yeah, in the city, the song. Yeah, yeah. But hanging around with Andy Warhol,

obviously you know which member of Duran Duran loved that more than any of them. It became his mate. It was Nick Rhodes, obviously. Of course. Their own little Warhol, their mini Warhol in the band. You know, we're bragging on that British bands are bringing in export money and all this kind of stuff the trade-off is the band isn't as good as it used to be because it has to be that way so thick americans could get it a bit unfair to the americans there i feel and also they were just spending a lot of time over there because

what happens in 1983 of course is mtv is. And that meant fuck all over here, because nobody even had cable in this country. But in the States, it meant that bands who were the stars of the new pop in this country in 82, 83, were able to break America almost overnight just by having a great video in a way that previously they'd have had to tour for five years. Like, you know, we've talked about how Slade tried and failed to do that. Culture Club would have had to do that in the older days, just like 10 years or even less than 10 years earlier. But suddenly you've got these bands who are very visual,

very glamorous looking, the English haircut bands, as grumpy American rockers would call them. But Duran Duran's videos are fucking made for this because their videos have got the same production values as Dune, or Dune as they say in America, or Blade Runner or something like that. So, yeah, the trade-off was that a lot of these bands were kind of, because they'd already had their big moment

in the UK in 82, 83, they were naturally kind of running out of steam a little bit. And at that exact moment, they're running out of steam and then maybe they need to take a bit of time off. They are being forced to go over and pedal themselves in America. Yeah, obviously, a lot of that can be done by video. But even so, it's going to be knackering them out. Yeah, yeah.

Even ABC, you know, ABC, kind of a one or two year wonder in this country. And one album wonder, really, in terms of how we perceive them. But they were doing really well in the States while we weren't looking. Culture Club went over. You know, Culture Club with the album waking up with the house on fire which uh i think was 84 i haven't got my facts in front of me but certainly uh it felt that that was they were kind of running on empty a little bit even though there's some stuff on the album that i love they were just fucking burning the candle at both ends and going over the states and and flogging themselves over there and I guess that's what was going on with Duran. And I think when you sort of compare all the bands who did try and do it,

Duran made a better fist of it than most. And you could say that having the biggest selling UK single of their career is papering over the cracks a little bit. And I guess we do know in hindsight that it was only a year later that they basically break up. Well, they certainly dissolve into two factions arcadia and the power station and they're never quite the same again after that but still at this point it looks like they're getting away with it yeah and they could i think they could perhaps have continued to go away from it if they hadn't detached into those

two factions because you know wild boys when that comes out that's still a major event i remember the excitement about that video coming out and even of you to a kill as well um they are right pairing number twos aren't they but um yeah i i think i think that yeah it's the detachment into arcadia and power station ultimately does for him but i guess trying to break america even if you're doing it with videos it's going to do that you know that plus cocaine it's a recipe for a breakup isn't it yeah the involvement of Niall Rogers I think on this record is a really sweet bit of wish fulfillment for Duran because famously their kind of template when they began was to combine Sex Pistols and Chic I would say that

they're a lot closer to Chic than they ever were to Sex Pistols but apparently John Taylor was sat in a pub somewhere in Brum and a track by the Pistols and a track by Sheik came on on the jukebox one after the other. And you thought, well, you know, what if you jam those two together? And finally, you know, quite a long way into their career, they're getting to work with Nile Rodgers, who would also go on to produce Wild Boys.

And of course, after the whole Arcadia power station business, which let's not forget involved Tony Thompson from Sheik, as well as uh bernard edwards essentially they make some of their best material with nile rogers even though the world's not listening so much anymore stuff like notorious and skin trade one final question that needs to be addressed what the fuck is this to reflex bollocks that simon lebon's coming out yeah you're right never thought of that like his fucking fucking Bill Oddie in Eckie Thump. Oh, like Toreflex, right.

Outrageous. Toreflex. Like when Limmy does Blamange living on the ceiling, it's like, I'm upped, bloody tree. Yeah. Fucking hell. Ridiculous. I would have thought Le Bon was taking the piss out of me.

If I'd heard that when I was 10 or 11 or 12, because I had such a bad stutter, right? And I was in a school play once. I had to play Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest. And I got that lead role because I was the best at English. But I had a real problem saying lines, particularly any lines that began with the word the. It was ths in

particular yeah i couldn't i couldn't manage so i had to almost rewrite shakespeare i remixed shakespeare in my own head in my own mouth to to sort of start the sentence with a word that wasn't the uh which is quite tricky um so yeah if i'd heard uh Le Bon going to reflex or do reflex and then go flex, flex, flex, flex, I'd have thought, fuck you. So the following week, the reflex swept aside the current number one from the summit of Mount Pop and stayed there for four weeks before it gave way to Wake Me Up Before You Go Go by Wham. it gave way to Wake Me Up Before You Go Go by Wham. The band pretty much then went on hiatus, dabbling in the side projects Power Station and Arcadia, getting married to various models, arsing around on yachts and putting out the live LP Arena in November. The only studio track on that album, The Wild Boys, was put out as the follow-up single to this, and it got to number two in November of this year,

Unable to Dislodge I Feel For You by Shaka Khan from the top. Two days after this broadcast, according to a Duran fan site, the band were temporarily barred from Saturday's Superstore when Andy Taylor bumped into the actor Erkan Mustafa, Roland Browning in Grange Hill, off set and said, fuck off, fatso, which was picked up by his mic and broadcast live.

Fucking hell, gripper Taylor. I've gone off Duran now. Yeah, that's like... I can't believe that, because that would have electrified the playground, man. Yeah, never mind Gordon Brown and that bigoted woman. I mean, fucking hell. No. Maybe Duran Duran got him to roll about on

the floor and then made him eat a sandwich with a grasshopper in it or something. Bastard. ......... Isn't that big talk? Every little thing we've learned Leaves me answered through the questions And on that jarring note, Pop Craze youngsters, we're going to step away from this episode and come back tomorrow for one last dig at this episode of Top of the Pops.

Don't forget we do a video playlist for every episode we do you can get to that at bit.ly.com slash chart music vids that's bit.ly.com slash chart music vids all one word all lowercase and if you

want the whole episode in one go without any adverts you know what to do get that money stick it down this g string at patreon.com slash chart music see you tomorrow me dears my name's i'll need them their names are neil kulkarni and simon price and you are staying pop crazed chart music Chart music.