Chart Music: the Top Of The Pops Podcast - #65: July 8th 1982 – Dancey Reagan

Episode Date: April 21, 2022

The latest episode of the podcast which asks; if Steve Miller is in a consensual relationship, and keeps away from certain designated areas, and he’s not just doing it to show off in front of his mates, is it acceptable in today’s society to reach out and grab her?This episode, Pop-Crazed Youngsters, sees your panel – who are currently toting huge consignments of heroin around Leeds, swiftly climbing up the class system of Coventry and still getting over the terror of finding someone’s undergarments in a sex-grafitti’d public toilet in St Pancras station – on the horns of a dilemma; on one hand, a premium-strength episode of Yellow Hurll-era TOTP. On the other, a World Cup semi-final. The latter doesn’t kick off until we’re 30 minutes into this episode, but at what point do our heroes break and succumb to the boot-on-ball surrender? And will Al have to watch all of this on a black-and-white portable with a coat hanger for an ariel, or will his Dad slink off to the pub and let him watch it downstairs?Musicwise, it’s a game of two halves, with two landmark events occurring and a blizzard of Huge Eighties Things being introduced to us for the first time ever. Imagination are at the top of their flouncy, slinky game. Bruno’s Dad lamps someone for ripping a speaker off his cab. Jeffrey Daniel reprises the Starman Moment of the Eighties and makes the Weetabix throw their Doc Martens in a skip. AC/DC get their cannons muffled. But just when you think this could be greatest TOTP episode ever, Jonathan King crashes in like Toni Schumacher on Patrick Battiston in order to curl off another dollop of rubbish American rammel  (although he introduces the UK to Mr T. And Deeleyboppers).But then! Out of nowhere come the Good Germans – Trio – who produce one of the greatest TOTP performances ever, followed by Odyssey slamming home one of the greatest singles ever, and all is well. But oh dear, that ‘3’ button is about to take a hammering as Bananarama pitch up in big nappies, Bucks Fizz take time out from bombing the Ruhr to cheat on each other, Captain Sensible ducks out of the pub to pretend to be the bastard son Worzel Gummidge and Toyah, and some magicians do their underwhelming pieces to the Steve Miller Band. Everything astoundingly life-affirmingly right and groin-punchingly wrong about early-Eighties TOTP is here, and it gets picked over in the usual manner.Rock Expert David Stubbs and Neil Kulkarni join Al Needham for a dance on the car roof of 1982, veering off on such tangents as being nestled against Mr C’s packet, the Line-dancing community of Birmingham, being at a loss about what to say to Jimi Hendrix, wondering what ‘Eagle Farm Today’ actually means, and Top Of The Pops getting Bobby Gee to fight some swans in a cage in a desperate attempt to keep watching BBC1. And all that lovely swearing, too!    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. Hey up you pop craze youngsters and welcome to the latest episode of Child Music. The podcast that gets its hands right down the back of the sofa on a random episode of Top of the Pops. down the back of the sofa on a random episode of Top of the Pops. I'm your host, Al Needham, and rolling deep with me today are my road dogs, Neil Kulkarni and rock expert, David Sturms. How do you do?

Boys, come and sit by the fire and hit a brother off, if you will, with the pop things and the interesting things. on a few things i mean not particularly pop i was in a car crash that was fun no um oh yeah oh got rear shunted no innuendo intended um at speed but it kind of worked in my favor although i should probably have fabricated some whiplash and got some compo but no wrote off my car he split it right down the middle but um it was on its last legs to be fair and the value that the insurance company gave me back has enabled me to buy another car luckily with a cd player in it because without a cd player in it my daughter wouldn't have accepted it i really didn't get on

with the courtesy car and all its ipaddy oaks cable you know uh stuff so yeah i like old-fashioned cars with cd players it. So that happened. Also, I was a TV host for a weekend. What? Well, sort of. A festival happened in Coventry a few weeks ago. Another one? Oh yes, they can't get enough of their festivals. Fucking non-stop festivals are on your way, Neil. It's shitty of culture, isn't it?

So, yeah, we had a Delia Phonic Festival. Three. In the magnificent Coventry Cathedral. A celebration of the life and had a Delia Phonic Festival in the magnificent Coventry Cathedral, a celebration of the life and work of Delia Derbyshire, radio phonic composer. And they, for some reason, wanted me to host the live stream and kind of do interviews and be a bit of a telly person for a bit. Didn't they say, come on, where are you?

Let's have the wrong Delia, isn't it? Wrong Delia. Wrong Delia. But I was bricking it, man. Absolutely bricking it. Oh, yeah. come on where are you let's have the wrong deal here isn't it wrong deal here but i was bricking it man absolutely bricking it oh yeah the first thing they wanted me to do was a q a with caroline katz who's directed a brilliant film that's on bbc iplayer called delia derbyshire myths and legends um which i i kind of got ready for and then uh late breaking kind of you know the q a is about to happen sounds like b like Brian Hodgson from the original radio workshop and the guy who made the sound that the TARDIS makes had been picked up from Cobb Station just to come and watch the film

and in the car he'd been saying, oh, I'm a bit nervous about the Q&A and he's 85 years old. You're not going to tell a guy like that. No, you can't do it. So they let him on and he was fucking fantastic was the memories he had of brian jones being at the radio phonic workshop and his work with dealy and of making the tardis noise he was fucking wonderful um it's hard doing q and a's isn't it it is i did one a while back with some plays a right thick cunt in the end what was he i had to carry the whole thing what was his name again david stubbs oh well that idiot no it's hard though it is you know you're trying to do a

conversation but it's the fakest conversation ever yeah yeah it kind of rolled it kind of worked the inevitable happened when i threw open to the audience uh if they had any questions it was basically a lot of very spoddy blokes who didn't really have questions they just sort of wanted to make statements about what they'd just seen but it was okay and the whole weekend i mean it will behoves me to have any civic pride really but honestly on the saturday night i'm there hosting the telly bits and i noticed somebody walking past me who's unmistakable it's joey Dammers from the specials. He's a bit of a hero of mine and I've never really met him. And he's got a DJ set, an amazing DJ set that he does later.

It was one of those things where my body did something before my brain said no. I saw him and I just stood up and said, hi, Jerry. And I had nothing else to say to him apart from that. But he was beautifully polite. So you didn't say hello jerry dummers no i didn't trick this man but it was a bit it was a bit mad because i think it was a lot of old cov faces after two years of the pandemic it was a slight sense of them sort of reconvening so i'll take a stroll down the cathedral aisle to have a piss um in the cathedral toilets and

there's jerry with linville good lord and horace just having a photo together. It was mental. So I doubt Terry would have got involved with anything like that. But yeah, it was a lovely, lovely weekend of kind of a vague sense of civic pride and I can't have done that badly because they've asked me to do something else. So who knows? I might be a

talking head cunt on a BBC 4 documentary sometime soon. You need to be Neil. Yeah Yeah, but on Melody Maker, they only ask enemy people to do that kind of thing. But, I mean, it's good because I quit my teaching job a little bit.

So doing this media stuff. You're quite right. Flipping school. Too bloody right. So doing a bit of media stuff and reminding myself that I can do this shit. You know, it's been

a nice few weeks, really. Oh, lovely. David, been a while,id been a while mate how you been well you know i've been rocking away and whatnot yeah it's funny you you're talking about um yeah q and a's things i've done quite a few of those in my time and uh yeah and sometimes you feel like a bit of a kind you know you can be a bit invidious especially if the um person you're interviewing sort of tries to take the piss out of you and make out you're being this kind of pretentious music journalist. Oh, no, no. Oh, name, name, name. Oh, dear old Jackie Liebitz,

I was a bit like that when I did him. Was he now? Yeah, so I had to play the full guard to the whole thing, you know, with my highfalutin ideas about Cannes. And he'd go, oh, we just turned up and played. Yeah, of course he did. Who's the biggest cunt you've ever had to do a Q&A with? There's a question.

I haven't really done that many, you know. I mean, the weirdest person I ever interviewed, I guess, was Ginger Baker, the late Ginger Baker out of Cream. That was just dreadful. I thought I'd been like, oh, who's this? I thought I'd been patched through to an old people's home by the state. You know, it's just like, I was doing it for the quietest. They do this thing, Baker's Dozen.

Oh, yes. And, you know, and I was almost, you know, I had to talk to a fashioner, you know, because it's called Baker's Dozen. And I think you took it literally because it's meant to be like the tracks that have inspired you throughout your life. You know, the groups, the artists, et cetera, et cetera. Everything he chose was by himself or involved himself. You know, he thought he was literally Ginger Baker's Dozen. And everybody was crap. Jimmy Hendrix was crap. I was crap thought he was literally ginger baker's dozen and everybody was crap jimmy engen it was crap it was all everyone's crap except there's just like monotones and lengthy silences and tedious and it was oh it was just he's just an absolute the

cunt to end all kinds really he was definitely but um yeah it's funny neil yeah and he was talking about doing things, you know, audiences, et cetera, et cetera. I did a little thing recently just for some students. I was studying some sort of music and media type course. And it was just, I was just there as the great David Stubbs. I'm with the kids. Exactly, yeah.

They'd each prepared a question for me. And it was very nice. And the strangest one was, one of them asked me, they knew that I'd written a book about Jimi Hendrix, and said, you know, if you had a chance to interview Jimi Hendrix now, what would you ask him? And I froze. I don't know.

I've been thinking about it ever since. He's the greatest rock star of all time. He made the greatest album of all time, as far as I'm concerned, Electric Ladyland. And I had nothing. I'd be a bit like Neil in front of Gerry Danvers. I'd be able to say, hi, Jimmy. Obviously, David, you should have said

that Ginger Baker reference you were right for. Why don't you go off and pan in? That is a really difficult question to answer. Because, I mean, especially with an artist that passed, I think the natural habit would be to say, you know, what do you think of Spotify, Jimmy? Or what do you think of something contemporary? You know, that would be the only thing that comes to what do you think of Spotify, Jimmy? Or what do you think of something contemporary?

You know, that would be the only thing that comes to mind. Where do you get your ideas? Yeah. Do you practice to get that good? I mean, it's just, the thing is, what I kind of said rather pompously was, look, Jimi Hendrix just answered all of the questions I had and questions I didn't even dream of in his life and work, you know. And that's a total cop out isn't it david

bullshat my way through that one definitely good lad um the best q a i ever did uh chris needham oh yeah he was on absolute form it was a joy worst q a i did was chris needham again a few months and the reason for that was um someone had given him a crater booze. That was tough going, that was. Interviewing Mark E. Smith when he's absolutely pissed at 1.30 in the afternoon over the phone. Yeah, that was the last time I did Mark E. Smith

and it wasn't great. Yeah, it's always tricky if somebody's getting... I mean, especially if they're getting pissed during the interview. Well, yeah. When I did Sean Ryder, I remember when he was living at the Mar-a-Lago Hotel in London. It was Black Great Yearsder, I remember when he was living at the Mar-a-Lago Hotel in London.

It was Black Great Years, I think. And he ordered a pint, and then he sent someone out to get Xanax for him. Oh, dear. He must have necked about a dozen and then knocked them back with the pint. And, yeah, the interview deteriorated quite rapidly after that. I've got ten minutes of gold and about an hour of doggerel. When I interviewed Sean Ryder, I was pissed. I mean, I'd been waiting for him for six hours in the hotel lobby

and playing it back. Oh, and it's excruciating enough at the best of times listening to yourself in interviews, but listening to yourself when you've got about 10 or 11 pints inside you. Oh, fucking... What do you think of this whole fucking business, Sean? I just... fucking... I just... so good.

Fucking. You know, there's business. Fucking. Oh, it's dreadful. Well, the only bit of pop and interesting business I have to impart to the Pop Craze youngsters is that Al Taylor went out on loan to the Cacophony Sessions podcast for a very intensive blather about Neil Young, which is uh something

he probably won't get to do on chart music so you know that that's good so you know if you're missing him like the desert misses the rain go and fling a tab at that when you're done with us the cacophony sessions podcast everyone i've been on that as well yeah very good very knowledgeable chaps yeah yeah so this is what goes on behind my back. So we've come to the part of the episode where we stop, we drop, and we bow the knee to the pop craze Patreons who've joined us this month. And this month in the $5 section are such names as Alistair Bain, Johnny Cabbage, Mickey Beats, Liam Devereaux, Mickey Beats, Liam Devereaux, Denise King, Ash Preston, Adrian Armstrong, Joe Greaves, Chris Durbin, Ewan Wallace, Tim Ward, Don Whiskerando, Ian Sullivan, Christian Bacayord, Matt Taylor, Ashu Rai and the return of the person who chooses to call himself

Leicester is better than Nottingham it wasn't the other month was there oh yeah David Arsenal lost to Forest in the FA Cup didn't they that was a long time ago I think they kind of threw the game to be honest it's a focus on the Premier League really, young. I think they kind of threw the game to be honest. It's, you know, focus on the Premier League really. Young team.

Do you know what? I think Forrest I've enjoyed watching them this season. They're pretty handy stuff. I hope they get back in the old top flight. Oh, you patronising cunt. Fuck off! And in the three dollar section. Sorry, David. That was harsh.

I'll keep it to him, but that was harsh. And yeah, fuck off, Simon. Yes, yes, of course. Oh, David. That was harsh. I'll keep it to him, but that was harsh. And yeah, fuck off, Simon. Yes, of course. Oh, man. I was just hoping that Forrester beat Liverpool and then the FA would rig the whole FA Cup and get Coventry in for the semi-final. Then I'd have fucking

dominion over all of you. And in the $3 section, we have Stuart King, elaine hutton jimbal 72 and john lekesne oh and gareth price and gareth hawker they whacked it right up this week bless their hearts and their cons we love you superlative and as well as doing their bit from keeping chart music from starving this month, the Pop Craze Patreons have been breaking out the Judy Zook satin tour jackets and rigging the latest chart music top ten list.

Are you ready? Are you ready for this? Do you like it? Do you like it like this? Hit the fucking music! We've said goodbye to Singleton, Notes, Purvis & Judd, the popular orange vegetable, staircase of cock, skin-heady-head air, and rock expert David Stump.

It's bogus. Which means none up, three down, two non-movers, four new entries and one re-entry. This week's number ten is a re-entry for Jeff Sex. First new entry in at number nine, this year's

most lovable bisexual. Last week's number seven, this week's number eight, here comes Chisholm. Last week's number 7 This week's number 8 Here comes Chisholm Yes It's a 5 place drop

From number 2 to number 7 For Crosby, Stills, Nash And Glitter And a former number 1 Drops from number 4 to number 6 The bent cunts who aren't fucking real. Into the top five, and it's no change for Bomber Dog. New entry at number four for That Dog's Dead Now.

Into the top three, and it's another new entry. The Mary Brennell Boys Murder. The highest new entry crashes into the charts at number two this week, Sugar Blokes, which means... Britain's number one. They're still there. The chart music number one, right at the top. Two Ronnies, one cup.

Oh, what a chomp. What a chomp. Some exciting new entries. This year's most lovable bisexual, high energy, I reckon. Yeah. I was thinking something a bit more twee, to be honest, and ultimately rather annoying once you've been amused by the name. We already know that the Mary Brannell Boys murder

are acoustic-filled recordings in a Welsh shopping centre. When are we going to get to hear that? You know he's got a tape. Oh, of course he has. I mean, he threw up on social media the poster for a gig. Yeah, and if you've got that, you've got a tape, man. Fuck exactly. Come on, Price, you know you've got it.'ve got a tape man you've got exactly come on price

you know you've got it you know we want it that dog's dead now what what are they laying down oh i think they'd be italian avant-garde similar to yeah not my cat is an alien yeah they'd be a kind of they tour together and sugar blokes you know know, goes without saying, really, isn't it? It's us. In spangly hot pants. Bra tops. The 21st century baron knights. So, if you want to stick your oar in on the chart music top ten, as well as getting episodes of chart music in full,

without adverts before everyone else, as well as supporting an independent artisan bespoke creative community shake that sexy little arse of your number to the keyboard tap out patreon.com slash chart music press that like button and pledge allegiance to the chart music crusade come on you want it i do like your use of the word artisanal there. You're quite right. It feels handcrafted, doesn't it? Oh, it is. Definitely handcrafted.

It's always weird, though, when people say it's handmade. What else is it going to be? Footmade? Unless you're shredding grapes, pretty much everything's handmade. Especially when they talk about food. Handcrafted burger. That sounds fucking horrible. Sounds like you've got some poor lad

getting his hand in a big fucking frying pan and blistering himself. No one wants to eat that shit. So, this episode, Pop Craze Youngsters, takes us all the way back to July the 8th, 1982. And, oh, can you hear that? That's me rubbing my cakey little hands together with absolute glee

because oh boys we always have a good time on the 1982 episodes don't we? and this episode's no exception 82, it's a lovely grab bag of bollocks isn't it? It is most definitely everything good and bad about the yellow hurl era is in play

in this episode. There's a bit of cat shit, but, you know, you've got to have a bit of cat shit with your good stuff, haven't you? There's always got to be the sublime and the ridiculous. You know, you can't have one without the other. And in certain cases, we get both in one go. Yeah. We'll have this argument as the episode unfolds, but

I'm already somewhat disagreeing with this a little bit of cat shit idea i think there's plenty of yeah okay right a big blotch yeah there is some fucking horrible shit on this but the good outweighs the bad yeah i feel i think so and it's a very strange time 1982 particularly if you're british because you know we're a month removed from the falklands War wrapping up, and it's become very clear that Margaret Thatcher isn't going to be the one-term Prime Minister we were hoping and expecting her to be. The fleet has only just returned last week, waving banners that read,

call off the rail strike or we'll send an airstrike. Lady Di's just discharged phase one of her duties by dropping an heir to the throne. And, you know, essentially the UK is going round thinking it's summit at the moment, aren't they? Yeah. Yes. Yeah, yeah. We can perhaps blame one of the artists that we see later on in this episode for this spirit of national optimism, in a sense. But having said that, this episode that we're going to cover, it reveals quite a lot of things, doesn't it? It's the first tumblings of pebbles and silt of the American cultural landslide that's about to smash into us and define the rest of the 80s. And we're pretty much going to witness the coming out party of a lot of elements of the 80s that's going to dominate the decade. And most of them, if not all of them, are American. Yeah, and enabled by our public broadcaster,

which is the odd thing about it. I wonder what accelerated that. I mean, obviously, American popular culture has always had a significant impact on British culture and Hollywood, et cetera, et cetera. And in the 70s, America felt very, very other. Yeah. And I think by this point, it's feeling rather less so ever since the war

you know we've been fascinated by american culture but you know and we took some of the elements on but even in the 50s you know we're rock and roll and everything there wasn't many people in america who dressed up like ted's you know i mean we could still adopt americanisms and tailor them to our own style. But by the 80s, instead of just absorbing American stuff, we wanted to live like Americans and act like Americans. We became shaking Americans, if you will. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The thing is, it's also coming to us on all fronts. So you've got music doing that.

You've also got film doing that. A fuck of a lot. And that tie up with music and film doing that quite a lot. And also, you've got primetime British television doing that yeah and i don't mean british television i mean what the british networks are putting on television so on sort of these three different fronts which pretty much when you're a kid in particular this is the only access to culture you have yes you know on all those fronts america is absolutely battering down the door yes we supposedly have these british invasion bands in place like duran and things like that yeah and that is sort of happening

that yields dividends later on in the decade but yeah everything so american at the time and it's it's the time of the 80s and the dukes of haslam all that kind of stuff those shows you could say were always with us but never as the prominence that they have in 1982 no i mean you're talking about film and influence et effectively reinvents halloween in this country you know because you've got those halloween scenes yeah yeah really before that it was just sort of mischief night and like you know knocking on doors and running away and all that you know but uh yeah i hate halloween doesn't matter pricey isn't here but uh yeah. Absolute balls. It's like, you know, it's not so much the marmite of like, you know, annual festivities. It's the shit in a jar of annual festivities.

Anyway, fuck that. Let's move on. Forward! 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.

Radio 1 News. Radio 1 News In the news this week, Roy Jenkins has become the new leader of the SDP after beating Dr David Owen by 5,000 votes in a leadership election. Aslev have begun a train strike that lasts for two weeks. Terry Higgins, a Hansard reporter at the House of Commons and part-time nightclub DJ, dies of an AIDS-related illness in London, one of the first in the UK to do so. Michael Fagan is about to break into Buckingham Palace in an attempt to have a chat with the Queen and gets as far as her bedroom before being arrested. Paul Raymond has announced that he's planning to publish

a surreptitious photo of a full-fronted naked celebrity while they were rehearsing for the play they're currently in. It's Billy Connolly. Connolly, who kicked off at Raymond after he published a topless photo of his girlfriend Pamela Stevenson, will be featuring in a forthcoming issue of Club International. Jimmy Connors and Martina Navratilova have just won the singles championship at Wimbledon. 27 Barry Manilow fans have forked out £250 between them for a guided tour of the

room in the Metropole Hotel in Birmingham, where he stayed the night during his tour of Britain earlier this year. I expect they will want to lie on his bed and crawl all over it, said the hotel manager. They must see his room as some sort of a shrine.

But the big news this week is World Cup, World Cup, World Cup, World Cup! We're in the final week of Espana 82. Northern Ireland have had a good sing on the coach after being knocked out by France. We're three days past from England failing to get into the semis and being knocked out without losing a game. And Italy beating Brazil 3-2 in an all-time classic.

And today is semi-final day. Oh, what a time to be alive, Pop Craze youngsters. What a World Cup that was. It was a great World Cup. It was one of the last World Cups to be kind of absolutely soaked in air horns as well, you know, the proper sound of the ball, which have now, you know, the proper sound of the wall, which have now, you know, obviously they've completely disappeared.

It was also the last time that Brazil were actually proper Brazil, weren't they? Oh, God, Zico, Socrates. I mean, oh, man. I was such a fanboy, such a fanboy. That day, the Monday, when Brazil got knocked out, in the evening, England got knocked out,

and I know for a fact that I was more upset about not seeing Brazil anymore than I was about England but what a game they got knocked out in oh god yes yeah

spoilt man what a feast of football no I was devastated by it it just felt like the kind of you know

the death of a certain kind of panache yeah who gives a shit about defending you know yeah just briefly going back to that michael fagan business with the queen it just said so much about this

sycophantic bollocks that you know that the drown the royal family anything to do with them i remember there were reports at the time that you know he got into her room and it was about 20 minutes before anybody had managed to kind of come in and you know apprehend him and arrest him and all that and during that time the queen had been very calm and spoken to him in a way that was not likely to excite him. Or, you know, it was very measured and calm throughout. This is all nonsense. Apparently, she just screamed, get out, get out, get out. But, you know, Lord forbid, you know, which is a perfectly natural response.

But, you know, they had to sort of confet this story about, you know, how sort of queenly and magisterial and calm she was in the situation just complete nonsense the 82 world cup i mean although i was cognizant of the 78 world cup the 82 one was the first one where yeah i fully got i could watch it basically i could watch it all none of it was on too late and and i completely i mean beyond the figuriniurini Panini, I had the, you know, the Falcon 350-piece jigsaw of the England squad in their lovely Admiral kit. Was Ken Bailey in it? Oh, he might have been.

No, the thing I mainly remember about that jigsaw is the unpleasant tightness of Kevin Keegan's shorts on the front row. I think I was so disgusted by it, I threw that piece away. But yeah, no, massively, massively, it was a brilliant world cup that but the first one that i felt like i could fully watch all of it including the amazing semi yes it was just a wonderful so many moments tardelli and the rest the only thing i didn't like about it was the slightly daft format of it you know which did mean that you know like england could go out and i haven't lost a game. And that was good though, man. We left with our heads held high.

Keegan had held his head a bit high when he put that bloody head in. We're having this conversation. On the cover of Melody Maker this week, Captain Sensible and Dolly Mixture. On the cover of Smash Hits, The Associates. The number one LP in the UK at the moment

is The Lexicon of Love by ABC. And over in America, the number one single is Don't You Want Me by The Human League. And the number one LP is Asia by Asia. So, boys, what were we doing in July of 1982? Right, well, I had just completed my first year at university. My mum worked at the job centre in Leeds, and she was always able to blag me some really, really good jobs. So in July of 1982, I would have just started a temporary job

as a pharmacy storekeeper at the Leeds General Infirmary. And the weird thing was, Jimmy Savile was working as a sort of voluntary porter at that time i never came across him but technically i would have outranked him you were still alive david that's why yeah but um but not yet and you know i i didn't actually come across him unfortunately i do remember that what was weird is every week there'd be a consignment of heroin that was brought in from the pharmacy you know for the addicts and stuff like that and you think they'd be like mega security, but no, just somebody just

dumped it at a loading bay. I went across one of those wheelie things and put it behind the counter. That was the end of it. You know, it was extraordinary. I mean, I could have just made off. You could have. There and there, you know, bought my own little island. But, you know, I was too scrupulous and Catholic a boy

and a coward as well to countenance any of that. So I'm really kind of into the whole spirit of 82, you know, the whole sort of popism, you know, Associates, ABC, Scrutipoliti, all that kind of stuff. And it's kind of, it's all sort of marinated in the rhetoric and the prose generated by NME at the time by people like Paul Morley and Ian Pendon. It just feels like we're on the cusp of some sort of breakthrough, some sort of epiphany is about to occur. You know, all of which sounds pretty grand. I think, actually, I would have struck, probably myself,

if I were to look back on Outsiders, as a pretty insufferable little man at that point. A bit of a ponce, to be honest. You know, I was... Going to that Lear University. Well, yeah a ponce, to be honest. You know, I was... Going to that Lear University. Well, yeah, I mean, it was that. I remember actually going to the boat race that year and sort of dressing up a bit.

And I think me and my little gang... Oh, David, no! I know, I know. But we were all a little bit full of, like, sort of bride's head and all that kind of thing and straw coats and the video to, like, The Look of Love and all that kind of stuff. And dressed...

And I remember wearing this pair of bright blue sort of zoot trousers with red braces and a shirt and i remember getting the train back to oxford from london and like we're sitting there and um and then just you know this local wedding woman goes oh really oh dear oh you know in a sort of very sarky snarky oh mr larder bertie woofter here sort of. And I remember just sort of like... Lolladaw, David Stubbs. I mean, my lip curling with contempt at this lump and crawl. I said, you know... You should have horse whipped us.

Don't you read the NME? Don't you realise that these trousers are bursting with semiotic significance? But, yeah. So, yeah, a little bit insufferable, perhaps, at the time. I was nine going on 10 and i was moving house and also in a sense moving social class i think because i was living in erdsford grange is very working class neighborhood of coventry and i moved to where i'm sat right now quite a posh area right um and you just immediately start noticing differences. No kids on the street, no games, no Kirby, no corner shop.

And, you know, I moved to this street, which oddly enough, I'm not... A cultural desert. Well, quite. I'm now looking at the for sale sign, which I have out in front of my house because I'm putting it on the market. Because I've had enough. It's not I've had enough. I've been here 40 years in a way, on and off.

But, yeah yeah i moved to this house then and yeah i just sort of like i went from a life of like a lot of kids in the street to yeah no kids in the street and if there were kids they were sort of rarely glimpsed they were almost like in a victorian sense you know uh barely seen and kind of you know i mean i i we'd had like friends who were middle class before. And the way their parents treated them was really weird. And I think those were the kids that I was surrounded with. Because we had somebody who lived near us before.

And they had the kind of parents who had a lock for the television. What? Yeah. Their TV was in a cabinet and it was locked. And if the kids wanted to watch it. Oh, no, like the ones you used to get on Sailor the Sink. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And if you wanted to watch it, they had to ask their parents. And they weren't allowed to watch Grange Hill and all this sort of stuff.

And even though I couldn't actually see any kids in this new street that I moved to, I suspected they were all like that. And they were just being kept under lock and key to a certain extent by their parents. And it changed my life because I inevitably, you know, stopped living that street life, to paraphrase Roxy, and started living that bedroom life, really. You know, there's no kids to play with out in the street. You sort of retreat inward.

So I think that starts happening from this age onwards. Well, I'm 14, and like you, I'm absolutely frothing at the gash about the World Cup. The other big thing that happened recently was I'd just come back from my first day trip to that there London in order to spunk my birthday money up the wall on trying to look like Paul Weller.

So I am now the proud owner of a white Lonsdale sweatshirt from the official shop in Beak Street. And I've teamed that, of course, with a dennis the menace and nasha badge yeah like uh paul weller had in in smash hits and i got a load of cornaby street ramble including two jam tour jumpers and uh yeah i'm teaming them with some dog tooth check trousers so i'm wearing the shit out of there yeah yeah and i i do believe this is also the time that taken on the uh the Steve Marriott triangle Toblerone hairstyle

that Paul Weller was rocking at the time. So yeah, I am. I am Mini Weller at the moment. You're looking the part. London absolutely did my head in. I got to St Pancras about half past seven in the morning. Yeah, yeah.

I needed a shit, so I went into the toilets and I ended up in a cubicle and was just horrified by the fucking filth on the walls man the entire cubicle was covered in graffiti about you know if you stand on this platform at this time with the evening standard under this arm um i'll let you bum me and all sorts and And I'm just absolutely fucking terrified. Yeah, yeah.

I was in there for about 10 minutes deciding, well, shall I just go back on the train before something happens? And then finally I looked down for some bog roll. And right next to me are a pair of shoes. And on top of that was a pair of trousers. And on top of that was a pair of someone's pants. And on top of that was a pair of trousers. And on top of that was a pair of someone's pants. And on top of that was a rolled up tie. And I just absolutely shat myself thinking,

what the fuck has happened in this cubicle? I nicked the tie, though, and put it in my bag because it was a nice one. Oh, nice. Yeah. Sin City, eh? Yeah. It's a bit weird to think of the future employer of Mr Desmond gathering up his petticoats at the obscene graffiti on the toilet wall.

Oh, man, I was an innocent lad at the time. And then later on, I got the flip side of London. I'm looking for a shop in Chalk Farm, because this was the time when, if you wanted a certain thing, you had to go to a certain shop in a certain town, and they didn't do mail order, or you'd have to wait two months for it to arrive. So I'm looking around for this shop. Can't find it at all.

And the first bloke that walks past me, I just flag him down and say, oh, can you help me out? Give me directions. And he does. And he's like, fucking hell, I recognize that voice. Raymond fucking Baxter of Tomorrow's World. Oh, wow. So I got it into my head that London was full of people who wanted casual gay sex in toilets and celebrities.

And there was nothing in between. So the truth, basically. Hmm. Do you still get excited, Al, when you go to London? Just because it's London? I know you worked there for a long time, so it might have lost this excitement for you, but I still get this sense of immensity to it.

Yeah. And I don't just mean the size of, kind of, the size of London. I mean the size of the structures, the size of the roads, the size of everything. I still get an immense thrill coming off the M25 and seeing the Shard and seeing the city and seeing it lit up in the distance it's still sin city to me yeah um and then you get to ground level you realize of

course it's all changed yeah yeah it's still exciting in an immense way it took me about 20 years to get over not being in london anymore because by the time i'd lived there for about 13 years and by the end of it yeah you was just, you know, as they say, tired of London, tired of being fucking ripped off and shat on and having to sit on a fucking tube for an hour and a half to get anywhere you want to go. The thing about London for me now, that's where most of my favourite people in the world live,

and it's the place I have to go to to see them. So that's what London is to me. But, I mean, at the time, throughout the 80s, I used to go twice a year just down to London to just buy shit. And, you know, I ended up walking around Soho going, one day I'm going to be here. And I was in the end. And it was like, yeah, here it is. Here I am. Big deal.

Yeah. I mean, the early 80s,on and soho would have been such a great place you know yes it doesn't exist anymore no nowadays yeah it's it's nothing there it's a bit like manhattan it's obviously get a feeling that a lot of london is that it's an ex-city in some ways yeah but having said that i mean i've lived in london since 1985 so what's that's nearly 37 years and i do always feel like you know it's not a sort of boasting for that but it has this great claim to be the center of the world just in terms of you know it's pan-continentalism or whatever because i mean america is too solipsistic and

inward looking to be the center of the world it's too disconnected from the world and and there's nowhere else that really quite compares really and i've always felt like that if you move away from london you're moving away from the center of the world you're almost like decreasing in relevance in some ways i've never been able to move away i've never had that option i'd love to say spent a year in berlin or something like that but i've always been committed to living in london i will be for the foreseeable future. Yeah. Music-wise, I'm still absolutely rinsing the gif of the recent Jam LP. And the one and only Jam LP that I actually bought on the day it came out.

But I'm still inhaling everything that the charts and the music press and Top of the Pops has thrown at me. I'm an open-minded child, in a way. We're not yet into the years where you disdain Top of the Pops. No, no, no, no, no, no. If Top of the Pops is on, I'm there. But more importantly

chaps, I've spent the day fretting that I'm going to have to watch this episode of Top of the Pops and the West Germany France game on the black and white portable telly in my bedroom that's got a coat hanger for an aerial, which I'm sure you'll agree is absolutely no way to watch such an event

no no that world cup was full of sun and green and blue skies it was a colorful event yeah and and as i say air horns just you know drenched in air horn you know we've got all these digital options nowadays yeah can't we have an option where the World Cup's on where you can get air horns and distorted commentary and that shine that sounds like it's being kind of over the phone some sort of filter definitely to stress

the otherness of European football absolutely we've already established in the past 64 episodes of Chant Music that my dad was the cruel overlord of the living room telly and would rather watch old man scat pornography than Top of the Pops. But the other thing that he refused point blank to watch was football. So I'm fucked at the moment.

Not interested in sport at all. Right. But the other thing he was interested in was going to the pub. Luckily for me, we're still a pre-video household so you know he can't watch a fucking bronson film or any of that shit so this perfect storm of pop and football hinges upon what's on bbc2 at all past seven yeah you know i'm bearing in mind that my dad would happily sit through emmerdale farm so i couldn't watch top of the Pops downstairs, I know it's going to have to be something pretty majorly unsuitable to the taste of a 39-year-old lorry driver to drive him off to the pub early.

So, you know, I'll leave you on that cliffhanger for now. Yeah, I'm on tenterhooks. My mum goes to the bingo on Thursday night, so she's out of the picture. Yeah, yeah. And my sister can fuck off. She can go out and talk to some lads from the other estate or something you know this is a battle of wills yeah between the master and the pupil so pop craze youngsters we arrive at the part of the episode where we retire

to the chart music crap room rip open a load of boxers and pull out an issue of the music press from this week and this time we present to you the july 10th edition of the accordion times a new musical express shall we leaf through chaps yeah on the cover bananarama again fucking no enemy they're like the bananarama didn didn't they? In the news! The gig news is coming thick and fast this week, and the top story is the return of David Bowie to a British

stage for the first time since a three-night stand at Earl's Court in the summer of 1978. He's been lined up for a 20-minute slot at the Princess Trust Rock Gala at the Dominion Theatre with Madness as the headliners

but don't bother trying to get a £50 ticket if you're not involved with the Prince's Trust as it's invitation only. And in any case, he pulls out a week or so later and is eventually replaced by Gary Brooker. What's Debbie Bowie doing grovelling around Prince Charles?

The other big comeback after 18 months in activity, The Associates, who will be playing three nights at the George Square Assembly in mid-August as part of the Edinburgh Festival, after which they'll be playing Glasgow Ultra Tech, The Hacienda and Two Nights in London. They're also about to release their 12th single and the follow-up to Club Country at the end of the month, 18 Carat Love Affair. But the jams-mooted open-air gig at Loftus

Road, the home of Queen's Park Rangers, is officially off. Plans are afoot to find an alternative venue, but the band's management acknowledge that it's getting very late in the day to sort out a gig while the weather's still not shit, and it sadly never comes off. Killing Joke are officially back from the dead and an active unit again after their drummer Big Paul has scrapped plans to form a new band a week after he announced it and has pegged it over to Iceland to reunite with Jazz Coleman and Geordie Walker. They've also unveiled a new bassist known as Mr Raven, the unfortunately titled Paul Raven, who the NME reports is a capable musician and deranged they've immediately announced a two-month

tour of north america beginning next week and we'll be playing here in the autumn top ahead and the ex-drummer of the clash has been bailed and sent for trial on a charge of nicking a london transport bus stop worth 30 pounds theater of hate is a man down after the departure of their guitarist Billy Duffer in an amicable split. There was a clash of styles, says Theatre of Hate's manager Terry Razor.

I think Billy was more interested in a straighter rock and roll thing. Duffy of course eventually goes on to link up with Wolfchild and form the cult elena lovage announces her return as the co-writer costume designer and star of the musical matahare which will begin a four-week run at the lyric hammersmith studio theater in october some things falling into place there isn't't it? Killing joke,

solidifying. I mean, why would you announce a new band before you've actually got it sorted? But Raven, I mean, he ends up in ministry and revolting cocks and things like this. So he's quite an important figure later. It's weird. I say that I would have bought this issue and I don't recall

anything. Everything that you've mentioned so far would have zoned out completely. I bet you probably remember the reviews and stuff more. Yeah, I think Paul Morley wrote a big thing about Killing Joke at one point

around this period. And he says, oh, and I've been told by the editor that Killing Joke have got a new basis. No one in the world wants to know this, but they are. Yeah, that was my attitude as well. In the interview section, well, Mark Holman gives us a guided tour of the nightclub scene in Leeds,

starting with his old workplace, The Warehouse, where he wrote the first ever soft cell songs in the cloakroom. He tells us that glam rock is making a comeback there and fits in perfectly with the all-encompassing playlist at the warehouse. He also tells us that Le Phonographique has become more adventurous and on good nights feels like a party in a living room, but points out that the bally high across the road is a poor imitation, while noting that Primo's on the top floor of Belinda's club has started one of those video texts that David Van Day and Therese Bazar keep going on about.

Oh, David, you could have written this. Yeah, oh, I used to go to the warehouse on the Ballet High, and it is right to kind of have a low opinion of that particular place. It was a bit Yates's Wine Lodge, really. Yeah, but yeah, the warehouse, yes, all kinds of people there, yeah, Cabri Volvoltaire a certain ratio all that lot yeah did you ever hand in your coat to mark olman i didn't no no um i was probably just a little bit um too young you know for that to have happened oh i mean it's a great place

as long as you don't want to go to the toilet because the toilets are very intimidating really you know especially we don't like being looked at as you urinate. Oh, really? Well, I mean, not a lot of people were sort of like, you know, going out of their way to do that particularly. It's just that there's a lot of people in there. Just like a little bit... Oh, right. A little bit of peace and quiet and solitude.

Perhaps a cubicle to myself, ideally. What, right in where people ought to stand with a Yorkshire Post under their arm if they want a blowjob? Yeah. Lloyd Bradley, fretting that the post-Marley reggae scene is disappearing up its own arse, links up with a duo that he believes has the best chance of

stopping the rot, Sly and Robbie, who were in town last week playing with Black Yuhuru at the Stones' Wembley gigs. They put the blame on artists and producers who only want to sell enough records at home to buy a new car and will only bother to put out new

products when they want a new car. As well as musicians who immediately graduate to studio work without learning their chops on the road, playing all sorts of music. They really like the British variant of reggae that's knocking about at the moment, but it never gets released

in Jamaica for fear it'll put all manner of noses out of joint. And in any case, they're happy being the rhythm section, not the front persons. Bradley ends the piece by gloomily conceding that the work that Marley put into establishing reggae as a

bona fide popular music is steadily being wiped out as reggae music climbs backwards further into the hills of jamaica lost forever lynn hannah travels to hamburg with banana rama who are doing the top and pop and circuit and discharging their final duties with the fun boy three she finds a trio of young young British women who stick out like a sore thumb amongst the other ladies on the programme who are go-go dancing with their tits out. We learn they're grateful to the Fun Boys for giving them a new sense of direction and showing them that it doesn't matter that they don't play instruments.

They find it hilarious that the Daily Mail said they were putting the glamour back into rock and that the vast majority of their fan mail comes from girls who want to look like them. Bow Wow Wow are currently plying their ways on the American market and, according to Adrian Thrills, there's a gaping hole in our charts and hearts about to be filled by the tough and tantalizing new pop

narcotic of hazy fantasia who have just put out john wayne his big legger jeremiah healer who claims that he was expelled from a voodoo cult in south london a few years ago after they accused him of being the antichrist gives us tips on how to get your dreadlocks hanging just so, while we learn that Kate Garner comes from Wigan and is keen to let us know that they're not going to be another Bucks, Fizz or Dollar. Oh, and they'll be going for a skiffle feel in their next single. God. That worked out for him.

And Amrik Rai makes a pilgrimage to the top of the pop studio to interview the man of the moment, Captain Sensible. After noting that the studio looks like Victoria Coke Station in the middle of a train strike, John Peel is referred to by Michael Hurl as John Darling, and Visage have a coughing fit on the dry ice in their dress rehearsal. He finds Sensible in a belligerent mood. He wishes that his current success was as a member of the Damned than a solo affair, and he's insistent that now that Dave Vanian can actually sing, the Damned are more important and

relevant now than they were in 1976. When asked about how he's changed since then, he says, I'm not sure. I tend to despair a lot more for my country. This is probably the worst period in world history, and you can't ignore something like that. Happy talk. Wait another 40 years, mate. Yep, all my beer. Single reviews. At the controls this week is Adrian Thrills, and his single of the week, by a country mile, is Don't Go by Yazoo.

No contest. The Ike and Tina Turner of the new pop return with a slice of soul melodrama that knocks the rest of this week's releases into a cocked hat in terms of impact and intensity. There was a time when we pop snobs used to muse, more in hope than desperation, that singles like this deserve to be big hits. These days, it is a four-con conclusion that the likes of Yuzu will chart, so instead we say that Don't Go deserves to be a number one it might just turn

out to be the first great single of the summer and about time to i bet you agree with that hey david i certainly did yeah i mean i'm just wondering this i can tina turn a comparison yes it's appropriateness i mean the thing is i mean was it known in 82 what a horrible piece of work Ike had been to Tina? Or was that not yet revealed? Yeah, I think probably so. Tina Turner, I think, was just pretty much off the radar. Because when the British Electronic Foundation, BEF or whatever it was, she was just living very modestly. You know, they went round to her little house.

And yeah, she completely dropped off the radar at this point. It all came out in, I want to say, 1986 when her autobiography came out and the subsequent film. Yeah. I think she just started doing more interviews, didn't she, when she went solo, fully solo and started getting hits and then it all came out. So, yeah.

It's an incredibly meaty thumbs up for The Devil Lives In My Husband's Body, the debut single by Pulsar Llama. Incredibly meaty thumbs up for The Devil Lives in My Husband's Body, the debut single by Pulsar Llama. Ten timbala-toting women with names like Gene Caffeine, Wendy Wilde, Bubbles Montana, April Palmieri and Bone Finder Thomas. Pulsar Llama are the most exotic band to burst into bloom south of East 96th Street in the past 12 months. Sure, they're not totally serious, That's a fucking tune, that is. I can't understand how that wasn't a hit over here.

Have you heard it? I've not heard it. No. Imagine if the Slits were a Calypso band. I've got to hear this. Kid Creole and the Coconuts have finally broken through in the UK charts, and Thrills reckons their latest release, Stall Pigeon, is going to decide whether they're here to stay or not.

One of the few truly memorable moments on a disappointing LP and a much better single than the flat, flimsy, wonderful thing, says Thrills. Another hit? Hard to say. There haven't been that many successful singles about super grasses, and for such a leisurely stroll of a song, the arrangement is needlessly fussy and drawn out. The single, like most of Tropical Gangsters, also suffers from the low profile adopted of Coty Munday, the undoubted star of the live show, Over Here. Another banger. Oh, total banger.

Leisurely stroll of a song. I know. Nonsense. I think maybe we're trying to get a little bit spoiled at this time, if you can be that blasé about Kikril and a coconut yeah yeah but it's a coat down for the clapping song by the bell stars although their effort was the more listenable the bell stars were pipped to the purse strings of top of the pops by natasha's update of aiko aiko last month undaunted they now return with yet another cover version,

doing their bit to ensure that a tediously regressive trend continues, the dredging up of old material to appease conservative radio controllers. The Bell Stars have more than enough class and character of their own to be able to do without this sort of desperate dishonesty talk talk have had two flop singles in a row with talk talk only getting to number 52 a couple of months ago and thrills gives them an even chance to break the curse with their new single today a change of heart from heavy-handed tub thumpingumping to a more airy, almost secular feel. As a result, they at least sound a little less like a surrogate Duran Duran and more like themselves.

Wispy synthy pop meets candy floss psychedelia. King Trigger, the first new British group to be signed to Chrysalis Records in Spandau Valley nearly two years ago, have put out their debut single, The River, but Thrills doesn't reckon it. They obviously want to be Bow Wow Wow, although Steve Lillywhite's production has left them stranded closer to the skids, all bristling drum rolls and serrated guitar. What sort of fire will they begin to breathe once they find

themselves a song worth getting really worked up about again that should have been a fucking hit again i've not heard it the sound of the street last summer the bleep of the casio calculator provides the rhythm track to this the most painfully twee excess doshes of the Germanic electro dream since Andreas Daraal's Fred von Jupiter, says thrills of Da Da Da by Trio. You may have caught five seconds of this on one of those excruciating Euro joints on top of the pops a few weeks ago, in which case you, like me, will be trembling at the pretty real prospect that the thing will actually be a hit. Hanging Garden by The Cure is a dismal exercise

in rolling, tumbling textures. The Cure have drifted disappointingly and indulgently from the idyllic pop invention of their younger days girls got to know by aswad gets coated down for having a go at women who are only trying to make themselves look nice i wish i could be me by honey bane is toyah without the histrionics and war child by blonde air is more mild metal than the usual fake funk coy joy. Like all the other singles milked from The Hunter, they're the final poison arrows in the throat of a once great singles band.

But then again, who needs Blondie when you've got ABC, Adam, Altered Images and Yazoo? He has a point. Yeah, that's true, really. Meanwhile, there's so much stuff coming out of New York at the moment that a separate review section has been set up, handled by Richard Grable, and he tells us to get ready for Planet Rock

by Afrika Bambaataa and the Soul Sonic Force. This is becoming the theme song of the summer street. Some records just come along at the right time and embody a moment, and this is one of them. If it hadn't been for the fact that WBLS started opening its playlist to the new electro-pop, allowing Kraftwerk, Soft Cell and the Human League to be heard and accepted in parks and schoolyards from Washington Square to Pelham Bay, this record would never have been made. A breakthrough record.

Too right. It is too right. Fucking hell, what a singles page that is. That Richard Grable page, I remember that section because I used to go out and spend a fiver a go on imports on his recommendation. And that was when I was living on about a fiver a week. Man, how many of them records could you got with just a bit of smack, David?

Idiot. In the LP review section, well, the prime slot this week belongs to Junkyard, the third LP by the Birthday Party. And Richard Cook reckons they're not up to it, lacking the campness of Bauhaus and the sarcasm of the fall, and it's shot through with religious ramble. melodrama pervades the birthday party's tracks dwell in a gallery haunted by the rancid horrors of mish haversham and les miserables venture inside taking the exhibits and leave by the back door i never thought that the birthday party's problem was that they were insufficiently bauhaus like some extraordinary things have been happening in popular African music in recent years

and are only now making their way to Western ears, says Neil Spencer, as he opens his review of Juju music by King Sonny A Day, which he reckons is skill. It's a compelling voyage down dark, sinuous currents of rhythm, a jangle of melodic color clamoring up above with periods of lilting almost placid vocal delicacy and plunging instrumental rapids take a dive into juju music it's magic he writes putting his thumbs up like so in frog it no doubt

richard hell and the voidoids have finally got round to putting out their second LP, Destiny Street, five years after Blank Generation, and Richard Grable chalks it up as an interesting failure. Even before you realise how standard, regular and old the songs are, even before the blazing guitars and lagging, dragging shuffles start to really bore you, the first thing that really scares you is the voice. It's choked up and despairing, infested with self-pity. It sounds like a death rattle. Hell, for all his professions of hope, sounds sad and lost. A wasted talent in both senses of the word.

Nina Hagen has moved to Los Angeles and signed to CBS, and her first English-language LP, Nonsense Monk Rock, has been lobbed over to Mark Cordere, who reports that she's turned into a Teutonic Kate Bush. Perhaps in years to come, this mild blend of mirth-making voodoo iconography will constitute a camp classic. Who knows?

Message from the future, Mark. No, it isn't. In the gig guide, well, David could have seen Samson at the marquee, Sylvain Sylvain at the Hope and Anchor, the Flying Pickets at the venue in Victoria, the Clash at the Brixton Fair Deal, Lords of the New Church

at the Herne Hill Half Moon, the Birthday Party, Sisters of Mercy and Play School at the Zig Zag Club, Howard Jones at the Hammersmith Clarendon Hotel, the Four Skins and Combat 84 at the Blue Coat Boy in Islington, or Talking

Heads and Tom Tom Club at Wembley Arena. Oh, David, spoilt for choice. Yeah. Taylor could have seen Magnum at the Whip Club, Willie and the Poor Boys at the Barrel Organ, Handsome Beasts at the Murcat Cross, or Several Young Men Ignite

and Hardboard Stump at the Star Club. Not very good for Birmingham this week. Neil could have seen Evil Wind at the General Wolf or Marillion at Busters. Ah, you see, I could have invited Taylor over to carve because he loves Marillion, does Taylor, doesn't he? Yeah, he was well into them at the time, wasn't he? He was, he was.

Sarah could have seen Blamonge at the Leeds warehouse, New Model Army at the Keefly Funhouse, or the Really Big Boys at Leeds Royal Park Hotel. Don't know what they're about. Don't want to speculate, to be honest. Al could have seen Incognito at the Palais, Saracen at Zhivago's, Joe Jackson at Rock City, Al could have seen Incognito at the Palais, Saracen at Zhivago's,

Joe Jackson at Rock City, or nipped out to Derbyshire to see Liquid Gold for a week-long residency at Chesterfield Aquarius. Chesterfield Aquarius? When the moon is in the seventh house. And Simon could have seen Samson, Bernie Marsden's SOS, and Angel Witch at Cardiff top rank. And fuck all else, because music agitates the privy pots and encourages the youth of Wales to steal flowers.

In the letters page, well, Paul D'Onoio is entrusted with Gasbag this week and immediately has to start defending his colleagues who have offended the readership this past month i can't imagine that any of the enemy writers would refer to blacks as n words or to jews as y words writes vincent homolka of bristol however referring homosexuals as F-words as Danny Baker did in his singles column is apparently okay. Contemptible. He goes even further, counters Denoyer. He calls pubs boozers, a pound note a quid, and ciggies are F-words as well. Phew, it doesn't do to be sensitive when that Baker boy's around nor pathetically paranoiac different times yeah

the rolling stones have recently swung by the uk as part of their european tour and barney hoskins in a review where he pretended to be an alien observing a weird and confusing rite of worship reckoned that they looked like five mangy and middle-aged characters and their new stuff was ramble. The readership was not impressed. To old man Barney Toskins. Did you write your review of The Stones before actually going? The review was unfunny and at times inaccurate. I expect you were listening to the gift on your walkman says margaret

trudeau of battersea the stones are to rock what coronation street is to ian penman and two million other grannies both have been going for at least 20 years and neither look like stopping in 20 years time strummer weller brandon and others will long be forgotten by your paper yet few weeks have passed this year without a reference to at least one of the stones this is 20 years on blarney you're not blind to reason just pig-headed blarney toskinsins, that's not bad. It's not as good as Neil Cumsarney. No, it's not quite at those heights, but it's good, it's good.

But it's not all bad news, as the midnight rambler of Earl's Court points out. To the guy at Turnstile F at Wembley Stadium who admitted me free one minute into the stone set. I don't know who you are, my friend, and I probably never will, but being unemployed, I was most reluctant to give Michael and co. ten quid. So when, to my absolute delight and disbelief, you told me to run on through, I started to believe in miracles.

May the bird of paradise fly up your nose and here's looking at your kid. Oh, bless. Ten quid to see the stones. He paid for call. This time you have gone too far, gasped Stephen Jones of Colchester. Your live section from the June 26 edition

contained reviews of the following artists. Alan Eger, The Big Combo, Designed for Living, Gawp, Cherry Boys and The Perfect Crime. I am not criticising your coverage of these groups, but if you cover these famous celebrities, you should also cover the real stars. You seem to have forgotten that 72,000 people went and watched Simon and Garfunkel perform brilliantly at Wembley. How you ignorant morons can decide that Simon and Garfunkel are not worth reviewing is beyond me. To be quite honest, you make me sick. Jeez Louise.

Regarding your interview with Iron Maiden, we, as three Lady Rock fans, are appalled by the comments made by Steve Harris and Bruce Dickinson mentioning that they were not aware of females in the audience, right three invisible maidens of Cornwall. It is obvious that they are still in the stone age and have been giving autographs and too much attention to men only, and the reason for this is that females alone at a rock concert are classed as groupies. We would love to meet groups in person, but we don't want to put over the wrong impression. Gurp and B. Lash of Abu Dhabi moans about British artists

knocking about in Germany and Japan just because Bowie has. Bod and X of Fitzroy, Australia, complains that the new Chrome cassette LPs being released by record labels are going to shag up the tape head of his car stereo. ADB Burr is upset that the casing of the new Jethro Tull and Toya cassette LPs don't fit his shelf. And why Yang of Blackheath

is spitting feathers at the enemy's negative review of this year's Glastonbury when it raised £50,000 for CND. The drugs were skill and you could get a vegetable curry for £p oh you see what a time to be alive exactly yeah nonsense about the worst time in human history yeah 48 pages 30p i never knew there was so much in it a good issue and yeah very good you know and those letters

you've just read out i think there's a kind of feedback loop that happens with the music press whereby if the writing in it the features, the interviews, the reviews are literate and well written the letters are as well to a certain extent by the time I was editing the letters page especially towards the tail end

of things, tail end of the 90s the letters were dog shit they were just semi-articulate but you know just look at the language that's used in some of those reviews and and singles reviews that you read out you know you wouldn't find a review i don't know these days that uses words like secular or cannibalistic or aggressive or rancid or any of those things but you know if you're writing into a music paper and it's it's literate like that and it uses words well you're going to up your game in a sense writing that letter yeah and and later on that all falls apart

when you know if the copy shit the letters are going to be shit as well yeah craig david sucks yeah yeah and i mean perhaps a lot of people that you know write in you know write letters into the music press they are perhaps sort of saying can i have a job, please? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they feel like they've got to measure up. Some, not all, but I don't think the Simon and Garfunkel correspondent falls under that category. You know, by the end of Melody Maker, Neil, did you ever have to make up letters?

No, I never did, actually. I made them up all the time. Yeah, it depends how bored you got. Sorry, David, you said you did? Yeah, all the time. Yeah. It depends how bored you got, I think. Sorry, David, you said you did. Yeah, all the time. I did the letters. No! Yeah, you know, eight or nine weeks consecutively,

and I just made the whole thing up. No! Like, David, every single letter, or just like... Every single letter, yeah. I think it kind of began to sort of tell a little bit, you know. But, yeah, you know, because it was just getting, it was just pretty thin, really, you know. Yeah, yeah.

At that point. When I was working on video game magazines, the first three issues or so, I was handling the letters page. Obviously, issue one, we just nicked them off of the magazines on our stable. But by two and three, it was like, oh, these are all dog shit i'm gonna write in myself my favorite letter that i wrote myself was uh i wanted a version of mortal combat with soap opera

characters so you can set fire to ian beale and rip his heart out and show it to him before he died i just do little things like i'd have a letter from somebody sort of saying um you cover a lot of like decent indie and all that kind of stuff, but I notice that you don't really give much coverage to Arbroath. You know, there's a really good, vibrant scene happening in Arbroath. I think we should hear a lot more of it. And then it'd be signed by, I don't know, M. Irvin, Doncaster. And then the next letter would be sort of the same thing.

But, you know, the whole Doncaster music scene, you're just completely overlooking it. So come on, let's hear a bit more about the Doncaster music scene. And that'd be from S. Johnson from Arbroath, you know, the whole Doncaster music scene, you're just completely overlooking it. So, come on, let's hear a bit more about the Doncaster music scene. And that'd be from S. Johnson from Arbroath, you know. You know, stuff like that. So, what's on telly tonight? Well, BBC One kicks off at 6.40am for an hour and a quarter of red-hot Open University action

featuring analysing interaction, bot for manufacture and steel castings. I think you saw them once, didn't you, David? Oh, steel castings. What a bill that was. They then shut down for three hours. Then at five to 11, they whip us over to the Oval for the first day of the third test against India.

After the news and regional news in your area, it's a repeat of the first ever episode of Mr. Ben, where he becomes the Red Knight and helps a dragon who's been laid off by the advent of matches. Then it's Poblacombe, regional news in your area and play school, and then we're dropped into the new camp in Barcelona for live coverage of the first World Cup semi-final between Poland and Italy. After Paolo Rossi has dealt with the plucky poles it's the news nationwide and another chance to see the highlights from the last game and have a bit of a froth over the next semi-final with David Coleman, Laurie McNamara and Bobby Charlton in World Cup Report.

BBC Two also starts at 6.40 with a hardcore Open University bum rush with flavours and fragrances, children's television and semiconductors and the sun and then shuts down for two and a half hours. Springing back to life for play school with chloe ashcroft and then shutting down for another two hours and 40 minutes at 25 to 2 it's the afternoon session of the test match followed by the 1930 short film the laurel and hardy murder case yes then it's the chat show 655 Special

where Sally James and her special guest co-host David Soul invite established stars and newcomers to contribute to a lively half hour of music and conversation it says here in Radio Times followed by a news summary.

They've just started the 1968 musical comedy Funny Girls starring Barbara Streisand. Yes! Yes! Two and a half hours of the bastard. Fucking yes! So you watching

it, Dad? Because you love musical theatre, don't you, Dad? You know who else likes Barbara Streisand, don't you, Dad? You know who else likes Barbra Streisand, don't you, Dad? Bent cunts who aren't fucking real. Are you going to the pub, are you? See ya. Although, having said

that, I would kill to spend an evening watching Barbra Streisand with me dad nowadays. Oh, just a look on his face. ITV gets the party started at half past nine with the cartoon Barney, Google and Snuffy Smith, followed by a chance to see the uninhabited bits of Colorado

in the wildlife series Wilderness Alive. After History of the Grand Prix looks at Jackie Stewart's championship season of 1971, we drop in on some refugee families from vietnam starting a new life in america as farmers in a big country then it's a repeat of paint along with nancy gammon and spinach get up and go and the sullivans after the news and regional news in your area it's a repeat of farm then here today whatever that is then it's an hour and a half of racing from new market that's followed by in loving memory the sitcom that puts the fun in funeral then the 1934 laurel and hardy film march of the wooden soldiers fucking hell so

much laurel and hardy david yeah yeah i think there'd been a disagreement they were taken off for a couple of years there was some um dispute with a german production company or something like that yeah so i think that's been resolved by now or perhaps what was about to happen anyway yeah you're in lauren hardy heaven after the news at 5 45 it's regional news in your area then a repeat of give us a clue where e Eunice Stubbs and Lionel Blair are joined by Melvin Hayes, Windsor Davis, Maureen Lipman, Susan Stranks, Barbara Windsor and Mick McManus. Good lord. Yeah.

McManus. Benny Hawkins continues his quest to buy a house for Miss Luke in Crossroads and they've just started the build up for tonight's World Cup semi-final between West Germany and France what a fucking banquet that semi man that semi gives

me a semi just thinking about it now so what's jumping out of you there on those listings it's Easter holiday time and they're just bunging on any old shit for the youth. Any old shit. Oddly enough, Laurie McMenemy

is leaping out of me as a name from my youth. But obviously, you know, long story football career but all I can remember is fucking Barbican.

Yes, it's great, man. It's great, man. And also, the Open University thing you mentioned, I have to say, later on in the 80s, Open University programmes

became a hotbed for musical experimentalism Oh yeah indeed as a melody maker reader I was obviously avidly hoovering up Everything that David and Simon Reynolds And various other people were telling me about every week And I remember putting on one I think it was about Industrial welding or something

And it being accompanied by The soundtrack of the Young Gods And Spaceman 3 And Loop yeah it was really odd honestly i didn't dream and i wasn't tripping somebody at open university obviously loved all of that shit as well and uh started soundtracking kind of really odd industrial like films with the cutting edge of um yeah melody maker style music god i wish i'd known that at the time yeah you'd be learning about you know arc lights and uh your ass would literally be quaking yes yeah all right then pop craze

youngster this is time to go way back to july of 1982 always remember we may coat down your favorite band or artist but we never forget they've been on top of the pops more than we have. Yeah, sort of. What? There is, well... What are you getting at, David? In a sense, well, I think in a certain sense,

I have been on top of the pops. What? Not in person. But it turns out I was reading really seriously. So when I used to do the Talk, Talk, Talk section in Melody Maker in the early 90s, of course, it was the rise of the shaman and particularly Mr. C. And his god-awful, doggerel raps accompanied by a finger-waggling nonsense that were about as welcome in those songs as a trombone solo, basically. And really, it's just appalling, appalling rubbish. And I just wrote a sketch every week about the shaman featuring that irritating little blonde man in which he keeps bursting into doggerel, and the other day, shut up, you irritating little twat,

you know, and that was the gist of it, really, you know, and it was just an excuse to sort of compose spontaneous doggerel supposedly emanating from the mouth of Mr C. Sportingly, we allowed him to do his own sort of retort, you know, which was bloody awful. It was worse than any of the parodies I wrote to him. Anyway, you know, fair dues. You know, he got his right to reply. But anyway, it turns out that he did take these things rather to heart, and in fact also took them rather closely to another

organ. So what he apparently said is that when he appeared on, I think it was Ebenezer Good, what he did is he cut up the articles, you know, the pieces that I'd written, the piss-takes, and he stuffed them down his codpiece, you know, down the front of his trousers. And so

essentially, my writings, you know, my work was nestled around the penis of mr c good lord while it was on top of the pops and so in a sense i feel that i kind of been on yeah you have well this changes everything it does yeah you're gonna have to change that catchphrase out i know exactly yeah yeah exactly, yeah. Fleddy L. That's mental, because if he'd have gathered together all the fucking articles slagging him off, he'd look like an inverse Rod Stewart

played by Kenny Everett, wouldn't he? Good God. Well, that's ended chart music for me now. What's the thinking about? Is it something like, what doesn't kill me makes me stronger or gives my penis strength or something?

I don't know. It's a very strange thing to do, really. Well, when we actually get round to Eb and he's a good on chart music, I'll just send him the fucking episode

on a memory stick and he can stick it up his arse or something. I don't know. They've been on top of the pops more than we have, apart from David being stuffed into Mr. C's crotch.

There we go. There we go. Clarification. It's 7.30pm on July 8th, 1982, and Top of the Pops, by now firmly into the Yellow Hurl era, is dealing with the challenge of ITV actually putting on something decent for a change, the World Cup, which is currently reaching a crescendo in Spain. Unlike the last World Cup, where the pop-crazed youngsters were actually denied

one whole episode atop of the Pops, so the BBC could screen the opening ceremony and the same nil-nil draw between West Germany and Poland that ITV had put on the third channel of Baxid all the Thursday night games which I believe demonstrates Top of the Pops place in the pantheon of BBC programming don't you chaps yeah yeah yeah you think that was a deliberate maneuver out I think so yeah yeah because Top of the Pops it's currently pulling down just over 10 million viewers every week. And, you know, with the addition of a new program that we'll discuss later on,

they pretty much have a stranglehold on the youth audience on a Thursday evening. And ITV know that. For years they've been putting on any old bought-in American TV movie shit in the knowledge that people like my dad will be forced to watch it. If you're below a certain age you're watching bbc one on thursday nights yeah you have to all of this occasion by the lack of remotes i mean even my mate who had a you know those remotes before remotes that were built into the telly and you could pull them out and they had a cord yeah even that didn't quite solve these

issues no and this was back at a time when you know when you watch you go say if you watched a football game on itv now you know they'd what, six, seven ad breaks within about half an hour in between every single bit of pregame stuff. Then it was a pretty much clear run. I don't remember them going to ad breaks just before kickoff. I remember the run from the players coming on to kickoff uninterrupted by ads. So, yeah, it would have been a thorny issue. You're right, Neil. Remote's my arse i remember when i was about eight or nine i got what my parents claimed to be a remote control car which was on a fucking wire and i'd made the big mistake of

bragging on to my mates about my remote control car and i brought it out man and they just coated me right down because you had to like, three foot away from it. But, yeah, you had to follow it around. That's no good. Car on a lead. But technology remotes from there. Do you remember in The Apartment, that scene where Jack Lemmon sits down to his TV dinner

and he has a little kind of remote control there and he keeps flicking and the adverts keep coming on, you know, friends, do you suffer from loose genches? You know, he gets fed up in the end and he just turns it off. But, yeah, the technology was there in 1960, so... Yeah, but it was just a clicky one thing, wasn't it? You know, either forward or back. Yeah, oh yeah, yeah.

But mind you, that didn't really matter in this country because you're only two clicks away from the programme you wanted. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Jesus. But in terms of, like, lack of choice and in terms of, like, lack of opportunity to see pop music, these were the very, very final years of that, really. You know, I mean, it's not long before the Tube and things like that.

Or videos as well, you know, all those kind of things. Just around the corner. Lack of remotes as well. It was another layer in which, sort of, you could exert hierarchy in a household or a family. So the youngest had to get up and fucking change over. Nobody else. Whoever the youngest was in the up and fucking change over. Nobody else. Whoever the youngest was in the room had to do

that. That was their job. Also, affordability of TVs. I mean, it was considered pretty much upper middle class to have more than one telly. But, you know, and in 1970, a telly cost 100 quid. I mean, today they cost like 150, you know. And it was a 1970 telly.

You know, even the Royal Family rented their telly. Really? Well, yeah, there was an episode of The Crown, I remember, talking about, you know. And it was a 1970 telly. Even the Royal Family rented their telly. Really? Well, yeah, there was an episode of The Crown, I remember, talking about, you know, they were renting their telly, yeah. Fucking hell. My family, my mum and dad, poor mugs, they were the last people in the world still to be renting their telly. I think eventually they came around and took pity.

And they came around and said, like, look, just keep it. You know, you've been given us, like, 20 quid a month now. It's 1987 or whatever. Who were they with, Radio Rentals or DER? Or Reddifusion? I think it was Radio Rentals, actually. Could have been Rumble, I think. Of course, yes.

Saves you money and serves you right. Grumpiness. I mean, it's hard to imagine now, chaps, but BBC and ITV's coverage of the 1982 World Cup patchy as fuck after they agreed not to duplicate matches as they'd done before ITV bags in the opening ceremony

and the first game but as that first game was Argentina vs Belgium they chose not to screen it do you know what they put on instead it was a Sunday evening so we got sing to the Lord, which was shaking songs of praise, heart to heart, and a repeat of Mind Your Language.

Jesus Christ. Yeah, denying the nation the opportunity to have a good gloat at the world champions getting beaten. I mean, presumably a Fortlands-related thing. Oh, yes. Much like the cancelling of Tchaikovsky of late. The war was still going on. Yeah, yeah.

That's remarkable, Alan. I didn't know that at all. I didn't know that that kind of... You wouldn't exactly call it censorship. I suppose it's ITV being careful about the Daily Mail or something. Yeah. But that is truly bizarre, isn't it? And as the first round kicked in, you know,

we quickly discovered that neither the BBC or ITV were particularly arsed about the World Cup, apart from our boys' games. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which meant that we missed out on seeing Algeria

beating West Germany. Oh, yeah. Hungary battering El Salvador 10-1. The Anschluss game, the disgrace of Gijon, if you will, where West Germany

and Austria rigged a 1-0 game to shit on Algeria. And we didn't see any of the games in England's group, which didn't feature England. Sorry, but that's shit. That's unbelievable, isn't it? They would have had highlights packages, presumably, but yeah. Yeah, but you want to see the fucking thing live, man.

It's the World Cup. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So here's what was on in competition to Top of the Pops over the course of the World Cup. You know, just let me know your thoughts and what you would have plumped for that evening so june the 17th northern ireland versus yugoslavia yeah yeah yeah definitely because you know we had a handy team did northern ireland definitely i'll watch that june the 24th yugoslavia versus honduras yeah I think I'd have swerved that and gone for TOTP. And last week, July the 1st, this is when the second group stages kicked in.

USSR versus Belgium. Bear in mind that Top of the Pops is a 40-minute concern now, so you're only going to miss the first 10 minutes of all of those games. But you are going to miss Jimmy Greaves talking about what's gone on before. Last 10 minutes, I would have known what number one was. So if I didn't like number one, it would have been the football. Penultimate to the number one, it would all have hinged on that.

And if, you know, fucking the old sailor came on or something like that, I'd be straight over to the football, I think. Your host for this episode is Kid Jensen. No, sorry,id jensen nowadays who is firmly bedded in at the eight to ten weekday slot on radio one and tonight he's on between walters weaklair and john peel even though he's been there since last autumn when he was tempted back from the turner broadcasting system in atlanta it's still being very much seen as a good thing and a bit of a coup for the nation's favourite.

In the telly pages of today's Daily Mirror, Stan Sayer writes, I know our David has been back from America for a while, but it's never too late to pay a compliment. I reckon he's one of the best presenters of this programme and the lad was badly missed by us while he was in america making his millions chaps it's very rare for a former radio one disc jockey to get back in after they've left and they certainly don't end up bagging a

regular weekday slot when they do but you know the former kid has booked the trend here hasn't he yeah because we like him the listeners like like him, the viewers like him, and the people that he works with like him as well. And he's dealing with the comeback fine and dandy. He's a great presenter at this, isn't he? Yeah, that's slightly different. I think he fluffs a couple of lines or doesn't... Well, not exactly fluffs lines,

but delivers one or two slightly anticlimactic lines. I don't perhaps quite... I mean, I agree, yeah, he's a nice man. He's a safe pair of hands. He's a sort of a decent sort, etc., etc. And I'm sure that he has a kind word for the tea ladies, etc., etc., in the corridors there and what have you. But really, when we're talking about him being a great presenter

of Top of the Pops, it's more about the least worst, perhaps. And really, if the bar is set so low that he's not actually a paedophile a sex pest or a helicopter wanker it's not that i want to hurdle i would say no also what the hell is going on with his shirt this evening it's got that weird sort of black and white image of the queen on the front i assume it's the queen and then this random collage of sort of glitter and abstract art it looks it just looks like you know something that matisse would have vomited or something it's strange it's just it looks just like one of them shirts robert

mcgarvey wear but instead of having his own face on it he's got the queen yeah i mean i mentioned the semiotics of my trousers earlier on i suppose yeah there's a sort of lost sense of significance about what this shirt might have meant at that point in 1982 i could see but it just looks atrocious now really really, you know. He does look atrocious, but at the same time, I think he's slightly aware that he's getting a bit old for this gig. There's nothing necessarily, oh, have a laugh at me and my cheeky Zayn shirt,

but at least he's sort of self-aware to a degree that, you're right, David, it is a low bar that he's not a totally disgraceful and contemptible human being and therefore we think he's one of the best presenters. But he's no nonsense, strictly biz, very convivial. And where so many other presenters, you know, all the way even to the sort of new breed that have been introduced in this period, who are ostensibly one of us, like Peter Powell or something,

you know, even they would use the intro here to sell their own brand. Jensen never does that. And he does make you comfortable he removes that always discomforting kind of rub between top of the pops being a show for us to enjoy pop music and a show for djs to fucking show off and sell themselves he is just the announcer and i i think at this stage i think he's starting to think maybe i'm getting a bit long in the teeth of this now chaps i've done a bit of digging into his time with Ted Turner, and it doesn't look like he got out of his depth at TBS,

and he certainly wasn't slinking back to the BBC with his tail between his legs. From his autobiography, Kid Jensen for the record, quote, Bob Wussler, president of the mighty CBS TV in the US was in London on business for a few days turning on the TV in his hotel room in 1980 he caught the end of an open university programme on the subject of heroes it was hosted by me

there is a lot of luck in any broadcasting career the opportunity appealed to the little boy in me who had grown up watching the grainy TV pictures as John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth in 1962. The chance to work for the guy who helped to produce that historic footage was unmissable. Having read his latest idea of a 24-hour news channel, I knew his parent company was where I needed to be. Increasingly, as I grew older, Radio 4 and LBC had become part of my listening repertoire, and I wondered about exploring a more challenging opportunity. On my Radio Luxembourg programme, I had been a newsreader

of sorts, but there's a gulf of difference between screaming a few hurried rip-and-read scripts from the Daily Mirror, punctuated by overdramatic Morse code effects, and delivering an envisioned news programme to viewers in Canada and America. I also preferred to forget the story in a luxie bulletin about the Middle East, in which I declared, without realising, that lesbian troops, rather than Lebanese troops, were gathering. I don't know, lesbian troops would scare me more than Lebanese troops, I think. So, he discharged his duties at Radio 1,

retired the Kid Jensen name forever and he relocated to atlanta and started off as the host of a hearts of gold type show called nice people i'd love to see an episode of that well he's a nice person isn't he he is he is who's going to be nicer on that programme than Kid Jensen? I'd like to see them. He then settled in as the host of the 10 o'clock news, and he got all the fucking perks. He got a house with a pool, two cars, even though he couldn't drive. He ended up working with George Bush Sr.'s voice coach because they thought he was sounding a bit too English. Fair.

So, yeah, all seemed well in the Jensen garden. He was just about to be sent to iran to cover the release of the american embassy hostages unfortunately he was starting to be pushed by cnn to become their entertainment producer which really didn't appeal at all to him so back to the book one saturday afternoon when i was shuffling my scripts and preparing to deliver a bulletin between the wrestling and baseball, I heard my name being called. Looking up, I saw the familiar faces of all three members of the police. This was at the height of their world fame, with Don't Stand So Close To Me topping the charts. What are you doing here, I belong in britain the irony of those

words coming from a man living in a new york penthouse was not lost on either of us but his words struck a chord another taste of home was a stock report which crept into my news program about how dallas had emerged as the world centre for the radio jingle industry, which included the familiar Radio 1 melodies, followed by an interview with my old boss, Johnny Bailing. Taken aback after seeing the feature in my own programme, I confessed it seemed a little being in the Twilight Zone. Then the phone rang early one morning at the other end crackled the familiar tones of johnny and paul burnett they had been talking about me and decided to say hello and tell me i was missed i missed them too even hearing jerry rafferty's baker street reminded me of a crowded

london tube after a visit from dorian Davis, the matriarch of Radio 1, he was invited back to the station and slotted into the early evening weekday slot and immediately ushered back into the talent pool atop of the pubs alongside the likes of Peter Powell, John Peel, Dave Lee Travis, Simon Bates and Jingle Nont OBE and this is his eighth appearance since his American hiatus

and it's been an effortless transition back to the routine hasn't it chaps? Yeah, it's as if he's never been away that's kind of heart-rending the fact that he got tempted back by seeing a thing about Jingle the thing is

that whole trajectory from UK Radio 1 to a major news network in America he got tempted back by seeing a thing about jingles. The thing is, that whole trajectory from UK Radio 1 to a major news network in America, just think fuck it was in. Because if it had been Edmonds or something because in a job like that, working for an American news network

you're going to come into contact with people in power ultimately. The thought of Noel Edmonds coming into contact with various conservative forces in America in the the 80s fuck knows where that could have ended up you know he had to go with it though when he hosted his own chat show in america for a while and how did that go down not very well i think he stood in for someone for a couple of weeks and yeah he wasn't invited back he must always be kept away from news and if he was kept near American news. And other people. And other people, yeah. But if he would have

been near the corridors of power as it were that would worry me intensely and we may well be looking at a different future if that had happened. Thank fuck it was. Imagine if fucking Travis had read the news on CNN. Colonel Gaddafi, what a pilchard. Earlier that

lesbian troops thing earlier on, it was Lebanese troops I just wonder if it was some sort of mental fraud or whatever type slip on Jensen's part, because of course Colonel Gaddafi did have his own Amazonian guard made up of this elite cadre of women, and I just wonder if David Jensen thought, well

if they're in the army, they must be lesbians and so lesbian troops, Lebanese, sounds a bit like Libya, you know. Oh, man, I'm not having that. You can't cast such aspersions on Kid Jensen, David. Oh, well, there's a whole big Golden Girls gag that relies on that. We need to find some Lebanese lesbians

and see how they feel about it. Yeah. So if any of the Pop Craze youngsters out there are A, Lebanese, and B, lesbians, get in touch and a warm welcome to another 40 minutes of pitt sounds in vision and we begin this week's music and lights with this from imagination The syndromes pound

The coloured singles cascade The numbers flash That voice goes And pink vinyl explodes all over your mam's carpet As we're hit with a neon Top of the Pops logo With Kid standing next to it, looking suitably early 80s compliant in white trousers and a red, gold and blue shirt, which probably cost your dad's weekly wage packet,

with elephants on the sleeves and a portrait of the Queen beneath his rock and roll heart. He invites us to another 40 minutes of hit sounds and visions before yielding the floor to the first act of the night, Imagination with Music and Lights. We've covered Imagination a couple of times on Chart Music and this, their fifth single, is the follow-up to Just an Illusion, which got to number two in April of this year, shamefully held off number one by Seven Tears by the Gumbe Dance Band.

It's also the second cut from their second LP, In the Heat of the Night, which will be coming out in September, and it's entered the chart at number 31 of Fortnite to go, which led to a performance on Top of the Pops where Lee John decided to wear a massive silky JR hat, a diamond-shaped spangly breastplate, and a pair of Flojo tights a full six years before the Seoul Olympics that left the nation wondering if his bollock would flop out of it, angering dads of Albion in a way they could not articulate.

The following week, the single soared 26 places to number five. And although it's been a non-mover this week, that doesn't matter because it's imagination. And here they are again. And boys, we are off to an absolute flyer would you care to describe to the pop craze youngsters what imagination have come as this week well i i mean i made a few notes um the first two words were absolutely ridiculous but of course that's that's the point but that's the point no no that's the point they should be you know they don't you don't

want you know them to be tabled and restrained. But, yeah, you've got, I think he's wearing, like, you know, the Seinfeld episode about the puffy shirt. I don't want to be the pirate. Yeah, he's got that. The golden pantaloons, the sort of hat that Hyacinth Bucket would wear to a wedding. All of his combos. And the other guy is wearing a life jacket from some sort of 1980s super yacht. And this is what it should be, the stuff of like, you know, Arabic legend or whatever,

you know, like, you know, when I say ridiculous, I use it in a kind of non-pejorative sense, you know, the price it would approve of. I mean, because the weird thing is, this is an era in which certainly I was, again, you know, semiotic trousers and all that, you know, and I was very conscious, especially with suits.

And I would have worn a suit or a shirt and tie every day at this point to university, you know never do since you know and I was very conscious of um tapering down you know in contrast to the sort of flares and the sort of rocket successes of the 1970s but there was a lot of other nonsense you know going on in the 80s I mean imagination have a certain license but if you look across the rest of the crowd there I mean it's a menagerie of mistakes really it's a sea of errors you know and that was all you look across the rest of the crowd there i mean it's a menagerie of mistakes really it's a sea of errors you know and that was all going on at the same time and how we had the gore in the early 80s to sort of like laugh at the 70s as the decade that staff got because there

were some pretty howlingly bad stuff like imagination of course you know they they rise above it yes song wise they can never be accused of um straying from the formula but um but you know it's it's it's great isn't it it's a good formula the formula, but, you know, it's great, isn't it? It's a good formula. That's right. That's the whole point, you know. And we all like to hear the sound of a mystic melody. Hell, yeah.

They're amazing what they're wearing, I think. These aren't just shirts that are flouncy. Oh, no. They've looked at these shirts and seen spaces where they can add extra flounce, and they've packed it in. It's fantastic. They are the best looking people in the entire studio for this performance.

To the point, of course, where I got really fucking angry with the little City Farm cunt looking like... Oh, yes. You know, that guy looks like a Dexys groupie. He's got kind of braces and kind of... Yes, or Bobby Ball. Yeah, Bobby Ball.

He looks like a really flamboyant Bobby Ball, doesn't he? And he's dancing on Imagination Stage. Fuck off. Yes, on their turf. How dare you? That is Imagination Stage, and they completely, completely own it. It's, like you say, Al, totally off to a flyer, this. Let's put it out there right now.

Lee John looks like a sexy meringue, doesn't he? Yeah. The E stands for extra exciting egg whites. Absolutely, yeah. He's basically Nick's Lady Diana's train from the previous summer and just put it on his hat. The thing is, there are other people on the show tonight who think they look good and they look crap.

But I think the difference with imagination is they know the weight of what they're doing. They know exactly and they look crap. But I think the difference with imagination is they know the weight of what they're doing. They know exactly what they're doing in terms of dance and their deportment. They know exactly what they are. And for that reason, they absolutely pull it off. Yeah, yeah. And the thing is, as a kid watching this,

because I'd been like about nine or 10 watching this, of course, now I see the joy-ins. But for me, as a nine-year-old kid who's had his mind blown by just an illusion and the first few imagination tracks yeah and especially their appearances i just assumed imagination walked about like this you know all the time like all day and all night they were dressed like this i mean of course now looking at it i see how this entire routine would have been i don't know pounded out in pineapple dance studios the day before in a way and you know i can also see that that they're sort of pantomime miming of this because the vocal is

actually not a loud one it's like a lot of imagination vocals it's a little sultry one but they've got their big gobs opening and they're completely at variance with the tone of the vocal making the sort of miming a bit blatant but as a kid i'd have just loved this because this is what you want from a top of the pops performance nothing cool and therefore totally cool yes total gusto and really in a way watching it now you know for the first time in a while actually this was one of the imagination songs that i think has probably slipped out of a lot of people's memory yes in contrast to the big hits you know i think the performance it covers up actually a really a great song which is it's it's like a hymn to pop music and i like hymns to pop music i like

things like uh kylie's can't get you out of my head and this is kind of like that it's delivered like a lot of imaginations work at this period like they're a kind of little pervy queer camp cousin group to earth wind and fire yes the thing is they're avoiding cliche but also playing with cliche deliciously and from my current vantage point now you can really appreciate i think what uh what a unique thing imagination were they're not just a response to american funk and soul and pop. They're also a uniquely British black postmodern response to a teenage life spent yearning for both American sort of black pop's ease and style, but also those strange British eruptions of queerness and oddity into everyday life

that watching Top of the Pops would have given you. And this is why imagination, I think, go big. You know, unlike Central Line or Lyn or beggar and co uk pop culture much more than us pop culture is a world in which your life can kind of change overnight and where a decision to wear i don't know revealing togas on tv can make the difference between being a star or not and lee after so many years at the peripheries of fame because he's done so many jobs before imagination you know yeah um singing weights and all the rest i think his past is really important he dates the beginnings of his career in showbiz back to playing a snowflake in a primary

school play um in which his sister was a pixie and he was a shy kid used to sit in the corner and you know act everything out in front of a mirror at home and that shyness kind of gets knocked out of him when he moves to new york with his dad and that leaves him with bits and bobs of kind of new york slang he said himself in an interview that living in new york gave him an awareness of himself as a black person and a sort of big knowledge of songs from broadway musicals and that mix of show business and the street, I think is really, really important. Yes. I read an interview,

Melody Maker, actually, January, 1982. And Paolo, Paolo, you were actually why they dress the way they do. Yes.

And he, you know, he says that visually, this is Lee talking. He says, especially on British television, you have three minutes to yourself. And in that three minutes,

you have to create the biggest, most almighty impact ever. And if it isn't almighty you're gone um and errol actually says as well in that interview you know we believe in being showbiz and glamour and lee actually talks about sweet and gary glitter and things like that you know and i think that's really revealing there's also a fantastic interview in 82 by barney hoskins i think in the nme where lee talks about the videos for poison arrow and bizarre videos as being really inspirational to him so when i saw imagination for the first time on top of the pops there was a similar sense of what the fuckness that i've heard other people talk about when they talk about say when they saw bowie or they saw bolan or they saw adam ant for the first time. In a sense it fucks them

in terms of developing a long career because what they can't do is settle into comfort and familiarity. They have to keep giving us these eye-popping performances. And there's a thing that's going to start happening soon with pop stars in the UK in 82. And it's something Smash Hits I think and the music media encourage.

That desire to take clearly strange otherworldly figures and bring them down to earth a bit boy George is great at that talking about cups of tea yeah and the day to day humdrum things that kind of everyone experienced in amid making these these mad records but but Lee John can't do that he still speaks urgently even in 82 about how imagination music is total multimedia package almost and every line needs to matter and as a multimedia package imagine they're one of the all-time greatest top of the pops performance i think yes although i may have forgotten it because i might be flicking over to the fucking footy this is actually a really really great performance and like you say

it is brilliant start to the show yeah it is. I agree with all of that, actually. I mean, you know, it was a very, very style-conscious era was the early 80s. And I was like 1920 at that time. So I was kind of, you know, very much into all of that. And I would never in a million years have dressed like Imagination. But I loved Imagination. And as I say, they pulled it off because they knew exactly what they were doing.

You could tell they knew exactly what they were doing. You know, they weren't sort of like delusional about looking kind of suave and like a million dollars or whatever or anything like that. They knew what they were doing. And this is, you might say, it's a masterpiece of overstatement in a sense. Let's talk about

the great unsung hero of early 80s pop, Ashley Ingram. Yeah. You know, he starts off the performance holding his base in one hand with no strap not making the slightest effort to play it and then halfway through when the camera's off it he just stashes it by the drum kit because he's he's getting in the way of his slinking about yeah and yeah like you've mentioned he's got those white american football pad things on with them big silver balls that you get on cakes that break your teeth and

he's teamed that up with gold simbad trousers and of course you've got errol kennedy on the drums he doesn't come from behind the drum kit this time which is a bit of a shame imagination were always the black smoke yeah that did you know the drum has got to come up and get get up the front near the end of the song that doesn't happen in this case. But he's quite tastefully got on a white jacket and a matching scarf draped over his shoulders, but just over some tight black pants. Not bothered to put a shirt on or any trousers because, hey, he's in imagination. Yeah, well, this isn't a simulacra of performance.

It's theatre. No, not at all. It's theatre. It's this unity of theater and stage and performance presentation plus the music i mean one of the great quotes merrill actually when he's asked about imagination costumes um he goes we worry about it a lot we really think about it what are we going to wear next and will they let us wear it i love yes yes it's as important as the song definitely yeah oh when imagination come on

you're always going to wonder what they'd get away with this time yeah which is of course an inbuilt dwindling returns thing they can't keep doing this but for the two years where they were there fuck me one of the greatest British pop groups ever

for those couple of years just for those Top of the Pops appearances I mean I'm sure the albums are great but nothing is as mind-melting as top of the pops delivered into your room your little provincial room at 7 30 in the evening with this i mean it's just miraculous isn't it yeah um and of course errol's got some right familial grief going on at the minute because his sister grace who's got her own show on bbc2 has just married a millionaire has been in the papers having a go

at Errol and his band for their provocative image and you know, as far as I'm concerned, if you're embarrassing your little sister on the telly then you've won at life, haven't you? I mean this is the only time in history that black men can caper about like this and have a successful

career, isn't it? Nowadays if you want to be black and camp you've got to be like rue paul and just push the boat right out and just make it glaringly obvious to everyone yeah i've been trying to think what's come close to imagination in this century and the the only thing i can think of is um peer pressure that collective from al who did videos where they took turns to give an Ottoman a C and 2 to some landfill R&B about 15 years ago

you ever seen that? no when I say Ottoman I don't mean some poor bloke in a fez and a big moustache yeah you know the actual item of furniture it's interesting and disturbing

yeah I mean the thing is there's a lot of artists now who I think, I'm not saying they could fill imagination's shoes, who could? But there's a lot of flamboyant gay

black performers right now who would make fucking amazing top-of-the-top performances. Oh, yeah. I mean, I think of Mickey Blanco and other people, gay rappers. I mean, now that the back of that

has been broken, I mean, I remember when, you know, a gay rapper was the subject of rumour in the hip-hop community. Oh, there's a gay rapper out there. It's Pudgy the Fat Bastard or whoever it might have been that week. When I think of The Ones, Flawless, for instance, a video from this century, it's filled with imagination type visuals.

So there's a load of these artists. But, of course, that centrality, that breaking into people's lives who don't want it in their lives which is so important to these mind-melting top the pops moments no these people have a fan base and they can quite happily exist in the margins without gate crashing the mainstream and that's where those people are at the moment but that's the thing about lee john i think lee john and imagination they remember british pop introducing things into your life that, yeah, just changed your life. And they want to do that with Imagination. With every single top of the pop's appearance, they do.

They want to do that. That is never recoverable again. Yeah. But, you know, we talk about queerness. And, you know, as Prince shows, you can have male queerness without necessarily homosexuality. And I think that's actually really, really interesting you know when you have that when i was on the school playground um getting into the the usual hot debating topic of the day which was who on telly's gay yeah imagination never came up yeah because it was like well they're black

black people aren't gay are they yeah there was the blackness there was also the sheer henchness of not lee but you know erin ashley were big yeah and they were they were hench they were muscly they were big he-men of course now even me saying that sounds camp but at the time no that wouldn't have been associated with gayness to me if gayness which you know as a 70s or 80s british kid you learn ostensibly from parody and sitcoms, was a limp-wristed effect thing. It wasn't this. It was Sylvester or that bloke in that ill-advised late series of Alf Garnet.

Do you remember when he has the... Oh, Marigold, yeah. Marigold. Yeah, yeah. He was brilliant. Anything else to say about this? No, it's just fucking ace. And it is so good that it does take your eye off the zoo wankers

who are just all around them doing their usual cuntish yomp. Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. There's two occasions in this episode where zoo wankers are present, but you either forget about them or fuck me, they're made to look old-fashioned and shit. Yes. And this is the first of them. Yes.

That hip-hop and dance review section in this is the first yes that hip-hop and dance review section in this week's enemy that we've talked about earlier the reviewer mentions that just an illusion is the second most played single he hears on the ghetto blasters after planet rock so yeah they're making a bit of a dent in america as well yeah and the thing is with imagination is that sort of deeply political without being in any way political in a way they're kind of you know i remember a lot of interviews with lee john where he's talking people expect them to be more ethnic is the term that he used right at a time when don't forget reggae is being kind of employed as the expressive voice of the black man if you

like and people are expecting imagination to have something to say but of course imagination's point is that the freedom they're exerting in what they look like and what they sound like that's a statement in itself yes um that's really important so the following week music and lights dropped one place to number six although the lp in the heat of the night entered the album chart at number nine at the beginning of september and would eventually get to number seven the title track and next single took six weeks to struggle up to number 22 and they never bothered the top 20 ever again in 1987 after their last four singles flopped ash Ashley Ingram and Errol Kennedy left the band,

leaving Lee John to get ringers in, and they straggled on until 1992, when they split up. Oh, that rubbish decade wasn't meant for one as beautiful as you, imagination. Yeah. Yeah. Music and lights A song that's for you all night Seekers and pearls And monsters in the air Music and lights from Imagination.

Well, the highest new entry in this week's chart, straight in at four, is from the award-winning motion picture Fame, some three years old, which has spawned a successful television series. Here's Irene Cara singing the title. Kid, surrounded by members of City Farm and one youth with a sensible parting and cheap-looking sunglasses, skilfully pivots towards a single that's been knocking around for three years

but has smashed into the charts this week. Fame by Irene Cara. We've already covered the former Irene Escalara in chart music number 53 when Flashdance, What A Feeling, appeared in the Christmas 83 Top Of The Pops and this is her debut single it was co-written by Michael Gore, Leslie Gore's little brother

and the lyricist Dean Pitchford who'd worked with Stephen Schwartz, Alan Menken and Rupert Holmes and it was originally released in America in May of 1980 as part of the soundtrack of the film version of Fame and got all the way to number four on the Billboard chart in the summer of 1980 while

doing absolutely fuck all over here. A year later, while Cara was working on a sitcom which didn't get out of the pilot stage, NBC commissioned a TV version of Fame and Cara was invited to reprise her role of Coco Hernandez, but turned it down in order to focus on a recording career. After becoming a ratings hit in America at the beginning of 1982, the first episode was broadcast three weeks ago today and became an immediate smash amongst the leotard crazed youngsters that encouraged rso to re-release car as single before bbc records the owners of the uk rights to the tunes from the tv show could put out the tv theme which had been recorded by erica gimple

car as replacement it entered the charts last week at number 51 but this week it sold 74 places to number four the highest new entry on the top 40 instead of running the original video or giving zoo the opportunity to jump up and down on a mini metro, the BBC have opted to run an extended clip from the film where Bruno's taxi-driving dad sets up some speakers on his cab and plays the song outside the school. Oh, chaps. There will be a video on Top of the Pops with Irene walking about Times Square,

but we've got this for now, which is giving off some severe screen test vibes to me you know I'm expecting Michael Rod to pop up at any time asking some youths what colour Leroy shorts were and it's got that courtesy of MGM subtext as well hasn't it yeah which is you know pretty nice because this clip is essentially an advert for the film, which is being re-released in UK cinemas tomorrow, and we'll be competing with the likes of History of the World Part 1, The Coal Miner's Daughter, Georgia's Friends, Firefox, Partners, Some Kind of Hero, Countryman, and Honeymoon Swedish Style. A lot of crisp red action in that last one, I'll be bound.

I would have pretty much detested this at the time. Of course you would, David. Not necessarily out of humourlessness, or a bit out of humourlessness. There are various things that still stick in my craw. I mean, that whiny guitar sound... ..is my least favourite sound in all of pop and rock. It's just insipid.

It feels kind of entitled. I don't know. It just sort of signifies all manner of awfulness. I mean, it's strange that the whole vibe about fame, you know, it seems to imply, you know, that, you know, there's a strong kind of multi-ethnic sort of sensibility, a Sesame Street-ish sort of thing, you know, community activity, dance, blacks, white, Puerto Ricans, everyone just a-freaking, you know, halting the traffic,

subverting commerce, you know, in their leg warmers, you know, upsetting the rabbis, all that kind of... You know, there is something that's kind of somehow sort of socialistic and subversive about it. But of course, every single... It's not just this Aaron Cara song, but other songs, it's all about individualist ethos and it just felt a little bit sinister really a sort of transatlantic cultural exchange is you know between thatcherism and reaganism is just

beginning to come into force and it's coming through in the popularity i think of things like this really and it's it's a bit like when somebody wants to describe the difference between european feminists and american feminism that european feminism is about like how women in communities can kind of like you know raise themselves as communities as a part of a wider community and in america it's all about individuality how i can succeed how i can break through it's all very very individualistic you know the dream hold on to your dream you know that kind of thing yeah that's what makes it in in a way, for me, slightly more insidious, that it's wrapped up in this kind of likeability, this amiability,

this sense of young people doing their thing as a collective. And it doesn't really feel like it's actually about that at all. It feels like there's a sort of propaganda is being kind of not too subtly smuggled in at the lyrical level. I mean, Neil, you coined this, didn't you, last episode? The genre of music that I believe is up there with white pajama music and yacht rock. Dancy Reagan. And this might not be the first example of that genre, but it's definitely the one that broke the dam.

Oh, I think in a weird way. I mean, it's a very meta start to Top of the Pops. We've got Imagination singing about pop. We've got Irene Cara singing about fame. But crucially, where Imag imagination seemed to be quite 1982 this in a totally ghastly way it could also tell the story of kind of 83 and 84 and 85 and it because it foregrounds that american notion as david's been saying this lie of meritocratic fame you know in the uk fame is seen as miraculous and random in a lot of ways

in the us powerfully especially in the dance schools um that this would birth you know and you could argue actually that this song is a very stagey dry run for flash dance in which cinema and pop totally cross over this still has a kind of jazz handy staginess that remember remember bits are very very stagy but there is this neatly kind of reaganite idea that combines as david said this dissolution of differences between people towards this capitalist mindset of work bringing reward yeah so so it's all about really the only thing holding you back is your laziness yes and and this deeper suggestion i think that the vast majority of lives are anonymous and mortal and the only way to make your life immortal to have people remember

your name and live forever and see you and die is to gain this celebrity which is utterly detached from the ability to change the audience but entirely sort of down to your own messianic zeal about your own ego the the enemy for a song like this much as it is throughout sort of reaganite conservative culture to this day really is self-doubt an absence of self-doubt is a triumph in itself for a song like this um and we're about to hit it really badly i mean we're two years away from the la um o right? Which I remember being the first time I heard USA being used as a chant. Yeah. You know, we're close to Top Gun.

We're close to the second Rambo film. You know, do we get to win this time? When he dances on a tank. Yeah. But the film, I think we've discussed this last time we talked about fame. You know, it is quite 70s grit. And the film at least contains the suggestion that dreams can get derailed by reality and that you know your race

your gender can have an effect on that the misreading that the tv series does of the film is very akin to the way that u.s culture in general say misread something like born in the usa but like that song this song seems to invite that misreading and the video backs up all of this i'm just kind of disappointed there is a performance of fame by irene carer on top of the pops later on i think um perhaps when it climbs up the charts a bit more i'm sure i didn didn't dream this, where, you know, to Hollywoodify it and make sure that we know this is a big Hollywood thing. She's singing it in front of a backdrop, basically of posters for Star Trek Wrath of Khan.

It's a really, really odd performance, that. But yeah, everything that David said, really. Oddly enough, though, you know, two years after it's been created in 1980, it already seems really dated, doesn't it? It sounds like fucking prog rock roller disco or something. Yes, definitely. You know, the other songs from the album or whatever,

you know, High Fidelity, Star Maker, they just cement that. So a bit of a comedown, to be honest with you, after Imagination. But I'm only saying that now as a kid you know the scheduling was obviously really important for fame the tv series that is why it got so big and its international success became really important to the show itself i think if it just remained an american show it probably would have died to death within

a couple years but it would have gone after one series but it keeps going to 1980 fucking seven yes because of its international popularity well i mean the bbc love having this on because they're screening an advert for a film but they're also screening an advert for a tv show that's going to be on right after this episode atop of the pops yes indeed fang's doing really well at the minute because it's kept the audience atop of the Pops. Yes, indeed. Fane's doing really well at the minute because it's kept the audience at Top of the Pops for another 45, 50 minutes. Yeah. You know, so they're getting, I think they're getting slightly more than Top of the Pops.

So, you know, the Emmerdale crowd have pitched in. And, of course, being on at the same time as the World Cup, there's going to be a lot of people who have gone, OK, I might as well watch this then instead of the dishy soccer men well i mean part of the appeal of this just like the part i mean the massive appeal of all american tv shows in this period especially when you're a kid it's just this is what you think america is like yes you know whether it's this or the fucking dukes of azur or cagney and lacey whatever you're watching this is what you think america is like yes by the way do you know what the most popular show

in the UK was at the time? I don't know. To the Man of Bourne? Was it an American show? Was it an American show? No, it wasn't an American show. No idea, no idea. The biggest non-film TV audience last month was 13.1 million viewers

for Crossroads. Fuck me. There you go. The counter-narrative. Yes. So it's not all about American dreams. So the clip that we see, it's essentially the world's first flash mob, isn't it?

It's the scene where Bruno's over-proud taxi-driving dad decides to rig up a pa on his car and park up outside the school and blast out his son's demo which you know wouldn't be embarrassing to you at all would it i mean imagine if your dad had parked his car up outside your school neil and and read out your um early reviews oh my god father he complains doesn't he says this is just this is just a demo this isn't finished yet and he's like so we're getting a fobbed off with an unfinished version then are we you know and it's all not finished yet exactly david that's right we'll come back when it's

finished then the pop craze youngsters would have been absolutely thrown at the release of this single because this isn't the theme to the TV show, which to my mind is a superior version because Erica Gimple sounds like a woman still learning her craft while Cara sounds like Donna Summer like she always does. And you don't get bangy stick woman telling you you've got

big dreams, you've got fame and fame costs and right as you start paying in sweat. We don't get no sweat. No, you don't get no sweat. You get a tiny hint of the aggravation that actually happens in the film when the scene happens, because it ends badly, doesn't it? It ends extremely badly for

Coco. Yeah, the cops come and break it all up. Yeah, absolutely, it ends badly for Coco. I mean, we get a fight between two taxi drivers. We get a lot of, why I ought to. With a properwood smack in the face as well you know that yeah you know it never sounds like that when you actually punch somebody in the face not that way no because i don't you know it could have been so much worse because

they could have chosen the clip from the actual tv show which on the weekly basis to be honest with you served you up some fucking atrocious bits oh Oh, yes. I fell down a YouTube rabbit hole with this and I found the Shorovsky clip of Bruno. Oh, Jesus Christ. You've got to put that on the CW playlist, I think. What's he going to say?

Have a nice day. It's just fucking awful, man. I can't believe this shit used to entertain me, but it did. Oh, it did. It entertained everyone. I used to stay on BBC One after Top of the Pops to watch Fame.

There's no denying it. Yeah. Another small thing about this is, I mentioned previously in a, you know, chart music episode about, you know, the all sort of checkered black and white thing down inside the New York cabs. And, you know, it's a wonderful signifier of New York

in the early 80s. Definitely. Z-Records or Z-Records, all that kind of stuff. And, yeah, and it turns out, and I read about, read about you know what you know and at the time I thought what mean-spirited cancer revision said no we can't be having that anymore um we've got a surplus of yellow paint and whatever but yeah it's just that's just market forces got rid of it it was some firm in Philadelphia um who were producing you know these these checkered cabs and it was just no longer feasible for them to uh carry on operating you know and it's just ridiculously sad as a result you know because

the free market you know reaganism is all that you know you lose something as kind of small but joyful as that yeah the other main difference between the irene corra version and the erica gimple version is that irene corra sings people will see me Die, whereas Erica Gimple says People Will See Me and Cry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's nothing to brag about. Is it? Really? Cry is at least ambiguous. You can cry in joy, you know.

People See Me and Die. Yeah. That is a weird line, isn't it? Well, it's that See Naples and Die, isn't it? I guess so, yeah. But it basically implies that after you've seen irene carer there's nothing left in life to enjoy i don't know but but even you know the dancing in this as is about to be revealed by something coming up on the episode is in itself

so fucking dated oh it really is i was watching um there's one thing i used to illustrate the way that white culture commercializes and blams out black culture or black innovation and it's two clips from the 50s it's little richard doing tutti frutti on telly and then pat boone doing it two two years later yeah and yeah this is kind of what's going on here um it's street dance that looks a fuck of a lot like ballet basically oh yeah it's just skinny girls doing plies or whatever off a Cadillac or something. It just annoys me seeing people dancing on cars.

What, in all circumstances? I don't know. Now you've put that in my head, I'm trying to think of a good example of a dance on a car. I can't think of a good one. My mind can't get past Nicholas Cage dancing on a car in a fucking annoying way. Yeah. Yeah yeah good car

dancing does it happen Janet Jackson when I think of you isn't there something that oh yeah oh there we go then does Grease Lightning piss you off as well no not at all because they're doing something constructive you know what I mean they've got to be on that car to do what they're supposed to be doing

if they want to have a bit of a dance along the way then who am I to stop them but this is essentially what everyone under 30 thinks the 80s was like all the time and i've got to say if there are any younger listeners to chart music number one why what's up with you go out and have sex or something while you can. At number two, no. It was never like that. We never danced on cars. So the following week, fame would fly high to the very summit of Mount Pop,

staying there for three weeks before giving way to Come On Eileen by Dexys Midnight Runners. Although it would take another five weeks before it was dislodged from the top 10, by which time the BBC Records LP The Kids From Fame had begun its 12-week run as the number one LP in the UK. Although Cara's follow-up, Out Here On My Own Tonight, only got to number 58 in September of this year, Fame would go on to sell 1.1 million copies over here. The second biggest single of 1982.

One behind Come On Eileen, and one ahead of a single that we're going to deal with very soon. And she'd roar back in 1983 when Flashdance What A Feeling got to number two in July of that year taken from a film which was written by Dean Pitchford the lyricist of this single. So incestuous chaps.

Fame and another slice of Americana coming up just a little bit later. A couple of weeks ago, Jeffrey Daniels from Shalimar danced his way onto the program, and we've had hundreds of letters from people asking for him back. Well, he is back, moving to his music,

A Night to Remember. Thank you. music and night to remember kid back amongst more members of city farm warns us that we're going to get more american stuff later on before reminding us that social history was made in this studio a fortnight ago and we're going to get another taste of it with the next single, A Night To Remember by Shalamar. Formed in Los Angeles in 1976, Shalamar was originally a concept created by Dick Griffey and Don Cornelius, the booking agent and producer-presenter of the American music show Soul Train,

which put out a medley of Motown classics over a disco beat called Uptown Festival in early 1977, which got to number 25 on the Billboard chart and number 30 over here in May of that year. Inspired by its chart placing, Griffey formed a vocal trio to perform under the name and picked out two regular dancers from Soul Train, Jodie Watley and Jeffrey Daniel. They joined Gary Mumford, one of the singers on Uptown Festival, but after he bailed out a year later and his replacement left a year after that, Howard Hewitt was folded in, and the first single with the definitive Shalimar line-up, Take That To The Bank, put them back in the charts, getting to number 20 in January of 1979.

This single, the follow-up to I Can Make You Feel Good, which got to number 7 in May of this year, is the second cut from their six LP Friends, which came out in January. It entered the charts five weeks ago at number 49 and two weeks later it got up to number 25 and top of the pops came a knocking. With Jodie Whatley being stuck at home being pregnant and the group being on hiatus, the logical option was to stick on the video. But when Michael Hurl was made aware that Jeffrey Daniel was in London doing promo work and hoovering up influencers from the club scene and the King's Road,

he invited him on a fortnight ago to dance to the single on Top of the Pops. Daniel responded by turning up in a new haircut and performed a body popping routine he'd knocked up in his hotel room the night before, which feated a move he called the backslide, which involved travelling backwards whilst giving the impression of moving forwards. And the pop crazed youngsters went berserk. While the single jumped eight places to number 17 the following week, the BBC were bombarded with letters from the body pop crazed youngsters panting for them to repeat the performance. But Hurl, God bless him, has tracked down Shalamar's management

who were with Daniel in Amsterdam and begged them to drag him back for an encore. And this week, after the singles jumped another 11 places to number six, here he is again. And before we move into it, Kid's fallen into the unnecessary S-trap there, hasn't he? A rare misstep on his part. Jeffrey Daniels.

Yeah, a little misstep, yeah. I wasn't quite sure his heart was 100% in this one. I think he brightens up considerably for the next one, but yeah, I saw that I absolutely loved it, particularly the first performance. I may have missed this one.

Looking at it now, it's great. It's really, really good, and obviously it's technically wonderful. It's just a little bit. And obviously, it's technically wonderful. It's just a little bit alternative car parking places. Walking down the imaginary staircase, you know, and the limbo manoeuvres. And I don't think he quite pulls off the moonwalk, not to the extent that, like, Michael Jackson, who obviously famously copied it from him, does.

But this was absolutely far and away the coolest thing on the block um in my world it's transatlantic it's robo romo funk it's contemporary it's electronic it's rockless and i think there's a real bonus the sense that like jeffrey daniels and to an extent um jodie whatley actually they connected with the sort of whole new romantic, you know, the fashion thing, the club thing that was happening in London, and it affected their appearance. How I didn't quite get it really sort of affected him. Because I was always disappointed. At this time, I was just listening to so much music coming out of New York

in the early 80s in this particular style, you know. And the appearances of the, you know, which I took deeply to heart, you know, the appearances of the people making it didn't, they felt like they were still in the sort of 1977 vibe, basically, you know, too many sort of flares and big open shirts and all that, and medallions and, you know, wrong hair, you know, for my liking, and moustaches and what have you. But no, I mean, you can see that Geoff Dunton has been really affected by that kind of sensibility of what's happening in London, all the club scene, he's going out, and, you know, you can see that Geoff Dunst has been really affected by that kind of sensibility of what's happening in London

and the club scene, he's going out. And, you know, I love that. And I felt it's, you know, I felt there was a kind of a reaching out there that was going on. Yeah. I mean, it's absolutely true. And I didn't realise until much later on when a lot of the Soul Train footage was released onto YouTube

of just what a great dancer Jodie Watley was as well and just how brilliantly they worked in tandem. You know, they they just do these kind of wonderfully kind of like sprightly routines at one point they pretend to have a fight you know and she sort of pretends to punch him out and then everybody else and and and you just sense that like i mean a lot of the sort of soul train dancers were pretty game but they just weren't at that level and i think that when the two of them sort of bridled a little bit of these two, you know, frankly, brilliant youngsters showing them up on the old Soul Train line or whatever. I mean, the original performance of this is,

it's the definitive Starman moment of the early 80s to my mind. I'm going to go further, chaps. I believe this is even more influential than the Starman moment because, you know, Bowie encouraged the youth of 1972 to experiment with hair dye and eyeshadow but he never got them to perform kabuki theater in a shopping precincts on a saturday afternoon did it this was so fucking influential yeah massively i mean and that's what's remarkable because it's such a happenstance thing to happen it's just out of hell making a phone call yeah

you know but body pop it when we first saw it as kids it was fucking miraculous yeah absolutely miraculous it was like like hip-hop in a sense what was exciting about it was that it looked mental and great and amazing how do i do this but it seems self-sufficient you just needed to crack the trick the magic and you could do it yes and it didn't seem like something i mean obviously it probably was but it didn't seem like something you needed to put years of effort into learning. It wasn't like fucking juggling or something. No. What was exciting about body popping, especially for little kids, I think,

was that it was almost like an attempt to, how can I put it, to sort of cartoonify human flesh. Yes. It was like replicating robot moves. It was a massive nod to pop culture we'd grown up watching cartoons of robots and things like that and that kind of liquid metal kind of thing perhaps i'm going too far but it's only of course later you realize as a kid how it emerges from things like the electric boogaloo and that idea of a human body without bones and of course jeffrey daniel has been popping on soul train if

you like for years he says he's been doing it from 78 but the crucial thing is taking it from soul train to top of the pops that is a massive move not just in uk dance culture in uk playground culture yeah and it proves again the centrality of pop and top of the pops to young people in the uk and what's really telling about even though this is the second iteration of this what we are seeing here isn't just this amazing dance routine we're ultimately seeing the past kind of fading away including the past of dance that's indicated by show like fame yes that's dying yeah and this new age is being born of course there's still a bbc-ness to things that can never be avoided they've you've got that strange random floor manager guy

walking past towards the left at the beginning. You've got that strange shot from between a guy's legs where you half think a knacker sack might start swinging from the top of the screen. Yeah, that bit looks like he's humping towards poor old Geoffrey. But it feels so distinctly new

and my god, how shit does Zoom look during this yeah i remember not to preempt any you know what are we talking about the playground stuff but everyone every time this appeared you you just have your minds blown yeah and you'd have discussion about how we did it yes i remember talking with my friends about this and like some of them were always on wheels or oil or some shit like that. It was a proper, proper mystery. It was so cool. And you wanted to know how we did it.

Like David said, I do think MJ does the backslide slash moonwalk better. I think MJ is just a better, more fluid dancer. And he has the extra aura of fucking being Michael Jackson, for Christ's sake. So that truly blows minds. But I recall this blowing a lot of minds as well now in the original performance of course he accentuates the oddity of the backslide with that final moment where i think he's handcuffed isn't it and he backslides off here the gimmicks are a tad forced the drinking of a cup of tea yeah and the umbrella snowstorm and all that

but it's still pure magic my jaw would have dropped watching this the original performance it really helped that he was introduced by dave lee travis who by this time is looking like an absolute relic of the 70s yes his beard's starting to go a bit gray at the edges and he just looks like ann widdicombe's crotch by this time you know he's got 14 more episodes in him and he's looking more out of place as time goes on. The Golden Oldie picture show is beckoning him. So to set him aside Jeffrey Daniel, fucking hell. But anyway, fuck Travis.

Let's talk about this. I can definitely see how Neil, being at school at the time, how he would have been a real direct playground impact. I'm absolutely sure. I was at Oxford and there wasn't a lot of body part in the Hartford College quad. Didn't you have a varsity breakdance crew?

The blue ribboned massive. But actually there was, this stuff was going on, at least the body part thing, when they started doing a club in Oxford about 82, 83, there was a whole bunch of local geezers came in and did the whole moves to pretty much everything, whether it was in Tumay, Juicy Fruit, you know,

it was all, you know, whatever it was, it didn't have to be electro-frunk. No, God no. You don't have to do it. You've just got to do it all the fucking time, aren't you? Yeah. Or Leet Warehouse when he had things like the electric teas, what was it, E.T. phone home.

Yes. You know, that electro-frunk, you know, the thing like that. You know, it really was happening and I just couldn't do it. I just stood and watched and admired, basically. I think there was also a connection. Maybe I've mentioned this before on chart music, but it's worth reiterating the context of something like this, the attraction of, you know, young African-Americans

to things like craftwork, to things like automation, to these kind of, like, futuristic things, which a lot of people would decry as mechanical and soulless and why aren't you sort of performing soul like you did back in the old days or whatever and i think you know there was a link between you know the attraction of futurism and black people i mean you think about how nostalgic sort of white rock and pop culture is you know and a lot of it's the you know the subtext weren't the 50s good weren't the 60s good weren't the 70s memorable were they you't the 60s good? Weren't the 70s memorable? And Blackwell wanted to say, not for us they fucking well were.

And so there's perhaps some sort of disillusion to dwell on a past that was full of strife and the struggle for civil rights or whatever. Present Ed weren't quite great either, but the future, maybe. Yeah, we're only a couple of years away from Model 500, no UFO. I mean, it all feeds in, definitely.

This is the year that Shalar absolutely blew up in the uk that was down to them and daniel in particular coming over here and just sucking in the new pop aesthetic uh in an interview with smash hits this year he essentially laid it all out and he said when i watched top of the pops for the first time it was pause abc they were something i'd never seen before white guys in gold larmace who's doing all these choreographed steps with a funk backing bow wow wow imagination mark almond they all had their own concepts which is something you don't get in the states everyone just hears a guitar lick on someone else's album and thinks that's great we'll rip it off english acts on the other hand are genuine wow and you can actually see how quickly he's picked it up because on the cover of this single he's still in 1979 he's got an afro and leather trousers on yeah it's fucking amazing let's break down the routine then so it starts off with a load of zoo wankers but they eventually part to reveal daniel

rising from behind a table with a chalamet logo on it essentially reprising his role as a barman in the video then he does the walking downstairs bit and then he comes up via an imaginary spiral staircase he does the backslide because that was expected of him yeah i mean he's doing the backslide behind the table so you can't see what his feet are doing which is what everyone would be watching at this point yeah so he's teasing us and when he comes around from the table he looks like he's come from the future he's got these amazingly complicated red and white trousers tucked into white socks and he's got a roy Lichtenstein-esque image of an anti-aircraft gun going rat-a-tat on a sleeveless T-shirt. A month later, I was watching him on some Channel 4 show, and he had a similar T-shirt on that just said JAM with about five A's in it.

And I just thought, fucking yes, he's a well-alright too. And he's surrounded by the zoo wankers who try to dance along with him, but it just looks like a pub team playing keepy-up next to Maradona, doesn't it? Oh, gotcha. Eventually they give up. He's blown them out of the water. It's one of those great things where the right 80s throws in to relieve the wrong 80s. Absolutely. Oh, god, yes.

The dee-bopper crowd. Yeah, yeah. And also, it's quite interesting. It's quite, to Top of the Pops credit here, it's actually quite an adventurous play around with the format. I mean, you know, on Hurl's part, to sort of do something like this.

Because if I think of all the great previous Top of the Pops moments, like the Starman thing, or Sparks' town at the beginning of both of them, they're just things that occur within the format of the show. Then here, they've actually sort of, you know, been quite imaginative in terms of the format

and said, yeah, why not do this? Yeah. and it's a throwback to ready steady go and that isn't it because it's like saying look here's the new dance that everyone's talking about here's how you do it yeah well here's how you do it but the thing is like you say out we're of course as kids we're like craning our necks close to the television trying to look at his fucking feet yeah how does he do this shit but even beyond the backslide and moonwalk there's actually a more even more mysterious moment in this where he he sort of revolves yes and i i swear down like as a kid i remember looking at his feet of course this is pre-video and everything like that so you couldn't re-watch it i watched it again obviously for the purposes of chart music still can't figure out cannot figure out how he does this stuff no

that's true magic and that stays with you in a big, big, big way. There's this revolving thing he does. He like turns circles and he's moving like a robot whilst he's doing it, seemingly not moving his feet. How the fuck is he doing it? This is before the days of, you know, you can buy trainers with wheels in them. So it's a real mystery, a real mystery.

And we can see Kid in the background watching on at the beginning as he transcends everyone else. But halfway through, we see him talking to someone out of shot and laughing. I don't know what that's about. I wonder what they can see behind that. Well, I know he's just doing the walking down fake stairs stuff. But it's exciting seeing that,

that some people have access to what the fuck he's doing behind that screen. But yeah, like David said, it is weird, isn't it? It's a totally different thing for top of the pops yeah having this like almost a magician's table yes distinctly odd but because of that unforgettable so he does the backslide with an umbrella while someone blows confetti in with a fan and then he goes into the only bit of the routine that i didn't like when he he does the thing with the teacup and saucer. You know, an actual teacup and saucer that's on the table because I felt patronised as a British person. Yeah, that was definitely for the British.

I mean, I remember the other year in the Women's World Cup and I got really into it, you know. And I was really up for appreciating the skill and flair of the American team when they played England. appreciating the skill and flair of the American team when they played England. But then that woman did a goal celebration by mimsily drinking a cup of tea and crooking a little finger. I just thought, ah, fuck off, you bastard. I know. I really wanted one of our players to score

and then pretend to be morbidly obese and shoot loads of school kids. That would have fucking taught them. They're absolutely obsessed Americans. I remember interviewing bands and they keep making jokes about tea and high tea. Everything stops at four o'clock for high tea. I remember there was a trailer for I think when Frank

Bruner fought Mike Tyson in America and it shows like Bruner like really kind of you know wailing away in a sparring session then a little butler rings a bell and everything pauses in mid round so they can have high tea you know because Frank Frank Booth knows English. Then he backslides behind the bar, suckily shoos the zoo wankers out of the way. And then he descends behind it, giving us a wave as he goes.

Like you say, David, a lot of the stuff is just mime, but he's done the amazing thing of doing mime and not being a wanker. That's incredible. Could you do any of these moves, Al? No, and I didn't even bother trying. Me neither. I just thought, well, that's fucking brilliant. I can't do that. No, this is it.

I rapidly realised I couldn't do any of them. Oh, you had a go though, Neil. That's good. Everyone in the playground was having a go, but you could figure out within 10 seconds, oh shit. Did you have a crew? No, I did not have a crew, Al. No, I'm sorry, but I didn't.

Everyone had a go, but no, I realised rapidly I couldn't. I'm still jealous of the fact that Sophia can moonwalk. No! God, yeah, she can moonwalk, without a doubt. In fact, she likes, if I'm telling her off, moonwalking away. Because she knows it staggers me. No, what a fucking insult! Well, it's a good way of evading telling off, you know.

Not just fucking off with two fingers. There's no way of pursuing her, is there? You just have to stand there waving your fist. I'll get you next time. But backsliding away, it leaves me struck dumb with both awe and anger. So she uses that a lot. Brilliant. Someone in Notts made a documentary about breakdancing and body popping in Nottingham called NG83. And I did an article for the newspaper i edited i ended

up meeting a lot of original members of the of the rock city crew the very good but very unimaginably type breakdancing crew who played at rock city and were based there and i always asked them you know obvious first question what what was it what was the first when was the first time you saw this and wanted to do this and i just thought well okay uh buffalo girls uh wild style being uh shown on channel four but no no no they all said the original performance of this wow jeffrey daniel just fucking changed this country yeah he did he made the weetabix breakdance for fuck's sake. Yeah. They stopped being racist biscuits and started spinning on their grains. Yeah. Because of Jeffrey Daniel, we got to see kids robot dancing on That's Life. We got that advert for Right Guard with the bloke in the suit breakdancing.

Yeah. And we got, I know what breakfast is all about it's ready break there ain't no doubt he made ready break cool for fuck's sake and the thing is i mean i know it's a cliche hip-hop has these four pillars and all that but there were sort of four different ways in you know and you could be into graffiti you could be into dancing you could be into the music we're about to hit a period where hip-hop is in danger in a sense of becoming not a fad but a detail of pop rather than a genre to itself of course down the pipe soon we're going to have things like yeah white lines and message blowing our minds and in a couple years we're going to have houdini but you know this period

this was remarkable and it seemed to sort of, yeah, open up possibilities. We obviously were not seeing wild style. We had to wait like fuck to watch that film. But this was a glimpse of something. And I think the promise of that, the excitement of that, stayed with a lot of us. And it takes a focus right off the rest of the band. The one person in the band who doesn't take solos

is the absolute front person of the band now that must have pissed howard off big style well look at what we're talking about we're talking about the dance we're not i mean it's a fantastic record of course and we need to talk about it and we need to talk about shalimar because shalimar a fucking skill yeah it doesn't get said enough to all intents and purposes a disco band who have gone post-disco. Is this single the follow-up to I Can Make You Feel Good? Yes. I mean, fuck me, what a run there are.

Yeah. Is this sounding slightly dated? No, not really. The futuristic dancing helps. It's a brilliant song, and people forget about it because there's so much shit around this song, good and bad. Yeah. At the time, this was held up as a prime example of Gary and Sharon music.

You know the John Godper play, Bouncers? This is the song that the Sharons sing at the disco. Right. The prime example of, oh, disco, eh? Good on the Sharons. Totally. And plus, it's been chopped up a lot, this song, to the point where the chorus becomes the thing that only people remember

and the rest of it is forgotten about because it gets used in adverts so much. But it glides so beautifully. It's such a beautiful song. Absolutely, and it's had such a long, long afterlife. You know, it had been played and heard countless times since 1982, in a way that, like, sort of precludes it from dating. It's up there with Boogie Wonderland as prime disco. Yeah, yeah.

So the following week, A Night To Remember nipped up One place to number 5 It's highest position The follow up there it is Also got to number 5 in October And they'd round off the year With friends getting to number 12 In December In the meantime tapes of both

Daniel's performances were asked for By Michael Jackson which resulted In Daniel linking up with him and teaching him the backslide, which he used in his performance of Billie Jean at the Motown 25th anniversary special in March of 1983 and called the Moonwalk. In 1984, after Shalimar split up,

Daniel relocated to London, presenting 620 Soul train for channel 4 popping up in give my regards to broad street being a train in starlight express and releasing the single acdc which was written by andrew lloyd weber and richard still go and becoming michael jackson's choreographer in the late 80s fucking hell he went from this to richard still go but the choreography in bad and smooth criminal which are the two videos i think it works are fucking amazing so you know yes good collaboration that and in the early 90s a night to remember was saddled with being the music for an advertising campaign for Shaking Bernie Inn, Harvester Restaurants, but survived it.

Because it is that fucking good. Shaking Bernie Inn. Let me just throw out two more things. If you've not seen Shalomar's performance on the Tube at the end of this year, go on YouTube and do so. The version of A Night To Remember is fucking astonishing. And number two, imagine if Zoo had formed a band.

Fucking hell. Oh my God. I just made a little bit of sick come in my mouth. I'm sorry, dude. Not to be practised without supervision, I guess. Jeffrey Daniels from Shalimar and A Night to Remember. And by way of a contrast now, let's join ACDC in concert for those about to rock. Kid, finally surrounded by some real kids, including a youth in an orange Hawaiian shirt who looks like he's in an orange juice tribute band,

a girl in a blue banana-rama vest, and a really chunky black lad in a white dinner jacket that he's actually tucked into his jeans warns us not to either pop or lock without adult supervision and calls him Jeffrey Daniels again. as he introduces for those about to rock by ACDC. Formed in Sydney in 1973, ACDC were a glam band put together by Malcolm and Angus Young, two transplanted Glaswegians, whose older brother George was a member of the Easy Beats and the co-writer of Love Is In The Air for John Paul Young. No relation.

And whose sister gave them the inspiration for the name and the co-writer of Love Is In The Air for John Paul Young. No relation. A new sister gave them the inspiration for the name when they saw it on a sewing machine. After rapidly rising through the ranks of the local scene and bagging a support slot on Lou Reed's tour of Australia in the summer of 74, they changed their management, relocated to Melbourne, ditched the glam for a blues rock sound and knobbed off their lead singer for another Scottish immigrant, Bon Scott, who had recently come out of a three-day coma

after having an argument with his previous band, the Mount Lofty Rangers, getting pissed up and having a bit of a crash on his motorbike. In 1975, they put out their first LP, High Voltage, and a year later, they landed a worldwide deal with Atlantic Records, which led to them playing the Lock Up Your Daughter's Tour, sponsored by Sounds, and being properly introduced to the UK. They made their first dent on the UK singles chart in 1978, when Rock and Roll Damnation got to number 24 in July of that year, and they spent the rest of the 70s making more of an impression

on the LP charts than the singles one. In February of 1980, they were back in the UK to promote their latest single, A Touch Too Much, which they performed on top of the pops, but 12 days after that performance, Scott was found dead in a friend's car in East Dulwich after a night at the Music Machine. Although the remaining members of the band were inclined to finish there and then, they were told by Scott's parents that Bond wouldn't want them to, so the search for a new frontman was on. After being turned down by their first selection, Noddy Holder,

they were advised by their producer, Mutt Lang, to give Brian Johnson, the former lead singer of Jordair, a fair go. Remembering that Scott had bigged him up to the band after seeing a performance in the 70s, which ended with Johnson rolling around and screaming on the floor

and having to be taken off in a wheelchair. And unaware that Johnson didn't normally do this but was suffering a severe attack of appendicitis at the time, they tried him out and gave him the job. They immediately set to work on their next LP, Back in Black in the Bahamas. And when it came out in August of 1980, it smashed into the UK album chart at number one, staying there for two weeks and eventually selling

over 50 million copies worldwide and becoming the second biggest LP of all time after Thriller. This is the second cut from the follow-up LP of the same name which came out in November of 1981. It's the follow-up to Let's Get It Up which got to number 13 in February of this year. It entered the chart at number 25 last week and this week it's up 10 places to number 15. And here is a sliver of the 6 minute 18 seconds video, which was filmed on tour in late 1981 at a gig in Landover, Maryland. And finally, ACDC step in the arena. And this is the reason that we're doing this episode, Pop Craze Youngsters.

Neil threatened to knock me out with those American thighs of his if we didn't do an episode with acdc on it so there we go much to talk about but i think the first thing we need to discuss is fucking hell noddy holder really oh oh you know what though that would have totally worked yes it would he's he's got just the right voice for dc that kind of raucous growl but also an ability to do pop which you need as an ACDC vocalist it boggles the mind confirmed by him in an interview

straight from the lathe's mouth if you will I mean it could have worked it almost feels like too good to be true I just wonder if Noddy Holder would have with all of the baggage and history that he brings he might have overwhelmed it I think that Brian Johnson is just right it would have overwhelmed it in britain and bits of europe but in america they didn't know who he was really no no i mean several people um were up for audition

for acdc they did end up with the right man for the job yeah i've wanted to talk about acdc for ages because for me they're one of the greatest um that i, firstly, I'd like to, if that's okay, to talk about the Bonn era. For me, that period, they are one of the great reductivist rock bands of all time. That run of albums they did from 76's High Voltage through their high point, Power Age, I think, to their perhaps true masterpiece of crossover, Highway to Hell. It's one of the best runs of the 70s. This being on top of the pops, even though it's just a sliver i can just hear the denim creaking in living rooms just enjoy at this the wristbanded fists would be pumping the air right now oh yeah just so big with

the kids and also grown-up metal fans and the thing is though although they're tied in with heavy rock and metal of course they've always stood somewhat apart from that for acdc i think the distance of australia might have helped in a sense yeah they look at heavy music the rest of heavy music that is in the 70s and they they kind of look at it with a kind of contempt beyond that i think they look at the 60s with contempt they see everything going wrong with rock and roll as soon as Elvis joins the army, basically. When you listen to songs like Rocker or a song like Let There Be Rock,

which attempts to biblically tell the story of rock and roll and claim that history, it reveals fundamentally, they're Little Richard obsessives. That's what they are, ultimately. And we should always be looking for the Little Richards obsessives in the 70ss including the new york dolls as well so musically you know acdc stand apart in the 70s from the rest of the kind of metal brigade if you like there's an almost

punk like insistence on simplicity on three or four chords yeah you know which is ironic because they hated punk yeah when they came to the uk people come up to say are you punk then because you're dead loud yeah and yeah they weren't impressed but let there be rock that album is loved by punks precisely because of its raucousness and kind of its simplicity you know everything they do is three or four chords angus is this amazing virtuoso but what he's playing it's not van halen type shit or richie blackmore type shit it's just pure licks and magic there's no attempt to bring anything outside of rock into rock or progress it in any way the attempt always with acdc's music is to just purify and distill the impact of rock

and and i've got to say as a rhythm section there's an almost disco like solidity that sets in by about 78 to what malcolm angus and phil rudd do when you listen to the grooves of something like touch too much which i think is possibly their high point the disco groove of that is really brought out by mutt lang he really pushes them to a new level if you like and in this period before we're seeing them here um atop of all of this is was bomb who called himself a toilet poet yeah i would argue he's one of the greatest rock lyricists ever i mean granted that they're kind of laughable you know the body of venus with arms you know and things like that but there's too many amazing couplets

by bond to pick up but crucially he has this openness and generosity in his lyrics that are unlike anyone else in rock for my daughter who's 16 you know getting to learn 70s rock she loves zepp she loves dc she noticed this when you think about black dog by led zeppelin for instance you know big leg woman's not got no soul it's i mean i'm not saying it's body shaming or anything but contrast that with whole lot of rosie which is just a celebration of this enormous groupie and he's he's always like that he's got a real bonner's just got this genuinely canny ear for a really iconic lyrics and the symbols of the kind of the latter half of the 20th century that were important and that become totemic things for the

band all of the acdc songs from that glorious run i'm talking about they're all about um electricity cars tattoos v8 engines, and very, very elemental rock and roll. It's kind of lyrically, he's actually quite a lot like Mark Bolan, but entirely shorn of that kind of Beltane Way Elfin stuff. It's pure blue collar. And when Bon Scott, I mean, I just think it's one of the greatest runs of albums and one of the greatest bands of the 70s.

So when Bon Scott dies dies it's a big deal it's not kind of something that's going to be easy to replace unlike a lot of metal bands who struggle with new singers um like sabbath and ronnie jones dio for instance it acdc are always going to just sail on because of the innate simplicity of the music but you have to have a front man that you know makes it work there's never going to be any musical differences in acdc because they all just basically have a massive intolerance for fannying about yeah so you know johnson as you've said he's an idol of scott who recalls you know seeing him as a frontman for geordie the good sign actually at the audition is they're waiting for him upstairs and he doesn't turn up they find out that brian johnson's

actually downstairs playing pool with the roadies which is a good sign if you're going to be in acdc you know you get on with roadies you're a drinker etc and he auditions with whole lot of rosie he also does nutbush city limits yes which i wish i could have heard that you know he's still living with his mum brian johnson he is yeah but as a rebrand, what they do with Back in Black is amazing. You know, like you say, it's such a big seller. In the year it comes out, it's only outsold in the States by like five other albums. The only rock album ever to sell more worldwide than this album is Dark Side of the Moon. And it's a massive totemic album for kids who'd miss the 60s and 70s.

And I do think that for a lot of new ACDC fans, it's the start, you know, back in black. And kind of the Bond, I'm not saying the Bond Scott era is forgotten, but they're a new sort of sized band at this point because they're stadium sized now. And Brian Johnson crucially has a stadium sized voice. Yes, he does.

What was warm and lovely about Bon Scott's voice was it's almost kind of sleazy nightclub size and feel, which suited childish songs like Big Balls and stuff like that. Balls was another obsession of theirs. But by sticking to what they did, they carve out this very unique turf. And I have to say, you know,

I have been in the past very much, you know what I'm like with bands when they split up. I'm kind of very doctrinaire. Oh, no Aussie, no Sabbath, you know i have been in the past very much you know you know what i'm like with bands when they split up i'm kind of very doctrinaire oh no ozzy no sabbath you know and i was for a while kind of oh if it's not bon scott i'm not interested that's not dc anymore um i have to say though the first couple of albums with brian back in black's masterpiece and the one that this is from as well is is still a good record but they're unique at this point in metal i know i know they're kind of almost um array of metal cliches in a sense but you've got to realize on the one side of heavy metal you have bands like iron maiden and priest and merciful fate what are they doing

they're more time signatures lots of fiddliness lots of galloping no groove you know and progging it up you can't dance to those bands you can only kind of headbang and on the other side i would argue you've got motorhead you've got saxon and you've got acdc you can dance to these bands they've got groove rather than just gallop in fact you could see this very track for those about to rock as a kind of twin of saxon's hilarious yet brilliant denim and leather a celebration of the audience akin to sort of we are the champions. But for me, it does reveal the shortcomings, if you like, of this new iteration. Brian's voice is kind of unlovable. It's this squawky thing.

I should stress, I've only seen ACDC once at the NEC. It was like about 10, 15 years ago. And they were fucking amazing. It was in a period where I was watching bands playing stadiums, rock bands, like Pearl Jam, for instance. And what a band like that does in a stadium, they play what they'd play in a club, and they just assume a stadium should get with it. ACDC never did that. They're full-on showmen. Massive bell that Brian swings from

and big catwalk that Angus can do his duck walk down and all of that. And at the back of it, there's the rhythm section and the rhythm guitarist just staying virtually still and just keeping this massive mammoth groove going. They were fucking amazing. But as a recorded phenomenon,

from this time on really, ACDC become a singles band more than albums band and they get kind of repetitive in a bad way ripping themselves off over and over again and without bond's humor and his lyrical grace they become a bit cold um it all becomes about power and electricity and there's no i don't know there's no warmth to it there's still as you can see in this video although my god what a grainy fucking video this is you can barely see through the merc but um they're still gloriously cartoonish albeit now with you know seemingly someone from the jocks and the geordies in them but that but that that comically overdrawn thing with the lyrics always means no one can really take offense.

My only kind of problem with this, I guess, is it does signpost the future in which ACDC become increasingly less relevant. Although, when the Beastie Boys bring out Licensed Twill, you know, I mean, that's covered in ACDC samples. ACDC become a real source. This appearance here, this video, it's great that Top of the of the pops are showing it but it's too brief it seems almost tokenistic but for the kids who are into acdc this would have been a mega fucking moment this would have been you know one of our bands appearing so it's glorious to see them i i think yeah for me bon era tops everything and it's one of the greatest discographies in all of rock by now it's becoming a bit samey

and i don't think brian's enough to sell that sameness he's not got enough wit and humor but you know i i'm still hard pushed to resent this they're still good at this point yeah and and it's glorious to see them on top of the pots in a midst this episode in particular they really are completely out of the blue in this episode yeah Yeah, I mean, that's one of the interesting things about metal fans, isn't it? They're extremely forgiving of big line-up changes in their favourite bands. We spoke in the previous episode about Echo and the Bunnymen getting rid of Ian McCulloch and struggling on their own and the undertones and people like that. It's like, no, that's game over.

But with metal fans, they're all right with it. They're all right with it. I mean, beyond're all right with it they're all right with it i mean beyond being all right they're kind of i mean i i remember when ian gillan you know is kind of um becomes black sabbath's vocalist he's got absolutely no problem doing paranoid and all of these things that ozzy did he's also got no sabbath have no problem doing smoke on the water you know um there's this yeah there's this kind of openness to that kind of thing because for metal fans these big totemic bands are massively important they don't want to see them disappear no um and everyone truth be told everyone was really heartbroken about bon scott going it was too soon there was lots more to do so i remember amongst my mates who

were metal fans at this time they were ever so, ever so happy that ACDC were carrying on and not calling it a day. Because even to this day, there's something that happens with Angus Young where he can still knock out at least one killer riff per album. It's normally the single

and it sort of justifies their existence in a way. Is it because in metal bands, the lead guitarist is the real front person because angus was the absolute star of acdc amongst my peers without a doubt i mean if angus my mate had a dog called angus after angus young yeah i mean angus was not only yeah he's almost like the mascot of the band he's like eddie is to alien maiden he has to appear on every sleeve you know there's lots of acdc sleeves where he's the only person on it and you know i mean angus crystallizes everything that's

amazing about the band look at his duck war total homage to chuck berry but also a statement you know that rock and roll got ruined once the 50s were over it's a real kind of purist idea um if angus had been unfortunate to have passed on acdc there's no way they would have continued um another guitarist simply would not have done it um at all sabbath as well if tony iomi went you know i mean it just would not happen but that i think i think to a certain extent that's partly to do with the fact that with a lot of metal bands the guitarists are the prime motivators and instigators of the band because they're the ones into guitar rock. They're the ones who want to be guitar heroes

and they consequently are often the ones who start the bands. And if the band, you know, lose them, they're forced to fall apart. I mean, Richie Blackmore hasn't let a band happen in a sense that he's not part of, you know, even when Rainbow were popping out, he was very, very angry about all of that.

Guitarists dominate heavy metal, you're right, much more than frontmen. I'm not saying frontmen are interchangeable, but, you know, they're a lot more interchangeable than guitarists. Same thing happened with Iron Maiden. Yeah, Paul D'Arno, first album, yeah, and then Bruce Dickinson, Forevermore, unfortunately. D'Arno was great.

I would actually not mind Maiden if he'd have stayed vocalist. I can't stand Bruce Dickinson. There's just something a bit Brexity about that guy. We'll come to that in good time. Let the rock expert have his say. Yeah, I mean, I think it's true about, you know, guitar heroes. No one wants to be a bass hero, for instance. Yeah, I mean, it is

very much a human thing. So anyway, it's 1982. There I am in the junior common room at my Oxford college in my semiotic trousers and red braids. It rocked. But of course, you know, I'm very much anti-rockist at this time in line with NME

orthodoxy and my lip is inevitably curling at the prospect of ACDC. I mean, at this point metal was just despicable. It was like the Tory party or something like that. People like the Tigers of Pantang were like Norman Tebbit or something like that in my aesthetic ideology you know which is funny sexist troglodyte all my kind of cultural values were you know metal wasn't a

deliberate affront to them my aesthetic values or whatever everything i would have sneered a bit at ac dc at the time i think i made a sort of you know a cut a sort of rather cutting quip in the um college magazine about Led Zeppelin meet the crankies which sadly didn't torpedo their careers yeah but I mean it's you know it didn't torpedo their careers and I think that's just as well really really. We Jimmy Page. Now, the thing about ACDC, when you actually sort of listen to them, as I did, I would have confused feelings, you know, basically. It's a bit like finding Hitler a bit erotic or something like that. Well, actually, it's not that. It's beyond that. Genuinely, they're fucking good.

You know, you'd not just have a heart of stone, not to like ACDC, but ears of stone and, frankly, a brain of stone. There is an Australian component in a sense. You know, not to like ACDC, but ears of stone and frankly a brain of stone. There is an Australian component in a sense, you know, it's like Ayers Rock, it is pure rock, there's no twaddling about, it is, as Neil said, it's reductive, it's getting to the absolute essence of rock. You know, I mean, Motorhead kind of got a pass, I think, you know, by the punks and I think ACDC should have a similar sort of thing. Yeah, the fact that he does dress like a schoolboy,

Angus Young, there's that wonderful masculine self-effacement going on just in that, really. There's no sort of self-glorification or whatever. And I think there was always a sense of that. There's just no bullshit about them. If you didn't know ACDC, you wouldn't be able to tell them from their own roadies, would you? Absolutely. No, you didn't know ACDC, you wouldn't be able to tell them from their own roadies, would you? Absolutely, yeah.

No, you wouldn't. No, absolutely. I just think that Brian Johnson has got sufficient pedigree, but he doesn't really have that much of a style. He feels kind of replaceable in a sense, really. I think what he provides is a texture. He provides a necessary element. But what's really important is, obviously obviously angus young and the rock and the riffage the thing is with the school uniform with angus what it also neatly does it destabilizes any

sense of egoism yes really and that's absolutely crucial to acdc acdc are not a band of egos what they are is a band of it is five cogs in a machine ultimately and it's the machine-like nature of what they make that makes it so beautiful. It glides. It's got hydraulics to it. It's lubricated. It's a lovely, lovely thing when it's set in motion. Now, I don't think Angus is replaceable

because he's the main songwriter, but I think by doing that, by making himself look a bit daft, basically, he's stopped any sense of ego, in a sense, that I'm at the front and I'm the most important or look at me, I'm amazing. just you know when these guys plug in and play something fucking miraculous happens and and it still happens and you can see it happening here brutally truncated though it is i mean maybe that's just me as a metal fan thinking oh that's not long enough but

it just felt a bit you know yeah um yeah but it was it's lovely that they put it on me well you know back in black was a massive success so it makes sense for top's lovely that they put it on. I mean, you know, Back in Black was a massive success, so it makes sense for Top of the Pops to put it on, but it would also make complete sense for them to not bother. But these are the moments that, you know, kids will remember. If you're sat there with your sister who's in a pop and you're in a metal and this comes on,

that's a fucking moment and a half that you'll probably never forget. So wonderful to see in the midst of an episode that um apart from this is obviously like really i mean apart from some of the dreadful shit that we might run into soon um it's quite free of rock it's nice to have a bit of raunch and heaviness in the middle of it here i mean of course being a jam lad who was still reeling from the events of the autumn of 1981 when I went back to school and discovered that most of my peers had swapped their madness, modness badges for ACDC patches.

I would have been watching this not necessarily with disgust, but with puzzlement. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, when my nephew was five years old, his favourite thing to eat for his tea was half a cucumber rolled in salt. Yeah, lovely. And I would sit there just watching him thinking, really? You actually really like that? Seriously?

And I'd have been doing the same thing with this, just trying to work out why my peers were into something that absolutely reeked of the 70s. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I'd be thinking, did we have the Lambrettas for nothing then? You know what I mean? I get it now, now of course but at the time it was like it felt like a step backwards but i didn't hate it because acdc were absolutely impossible to hate definitely yeah yeah i mean there was a lot of tribalism in the 80s and you know yeah yeah yeah there's much easier metal bands to hate in

this period like fucking maiden for instance maiden uh the zenith of that kind of ridiculous laughable side of metal um i hope we get on to maiden actually because i want to slag them off at some point but um just to an honor daughter but yeah there was that totally laughable side of metal acdc no if you're laughing you're kind of half getting the point, to be honest with you, with ACDC. So you're telling on yourself if you laugh at them. Yeah. I mean, yes, it is good that Top of the Pops have put this on, but, you know, you've got to downgrade them

a little bit for lopping off the intro, which sounds a bit like Barbara O'Reilly era Who. And they've cut it before they get to the cannons going off, which is clearly the best bit. Yeah, it's the 1812 moment, isn't it? Yeah. Maybe they were worried about kids going off

and playing with artillery afterwards. I mean, the reason they put the cannons in, apparently, was when they were recording this album, they were in London, and they were watching the telly when the Royal Wedding was on while they were rehearsing. So all cannons, that would be good. Let's bunk some of those in.

They know their crowd, and they distill things cannons that'd be good let's bunk some of those they know their crowd you know and they distill things down to simplicities so many metal lyrics at this period were full of sort of nonsense acdc really they could have read out i don't know um the manual for some new capacitors or something it's just like it's it's pure it's right down to electricity cars and energy and power almost seen as abstract concepts almost in some in some acdc lyrics it's rock and roll yeah taken to this sort of abstracted um place where it doesn't really make much sense but as a kid it's pure pure adrenaline and that's what you want from rock and roll at the time i like everyone else had a metal mate hey up jake wherever you are he tried to get me into acdc and he played me this song and he said wait till you hear this the cannons bit and it was like and i nearly wavered it was like oh

actually that's really good i really approve but we don't get to see it on top of the pops which is a damn shame it is a damn shame but truth be told acdc at this point they don't need the help of top of the pops um no you know no top of the pops need acdc perhaps a little bit but not the other way around anything else to say about this the only thing i can stress is yeah power rage is the best album highway to hell is a fucking amazing record i consider if you don't have them you're bereft of knowledge about rock and roll music and why it means so much. So the following week for those about to rock stayed at number 15 and would get no further. The follow-up, Guns for Hire, got to number 37 in November of 1983, and they'd have 11 more top 40 hits throughout the 80s and early 90s but their biggest hit on the singles charts came in 2013 when a live version of highway to hell got to number four in december of that year so in closing

i would like to add this quote in my first conscious decision with music was when I heard Back in Black by ACDC and I was sold. ACDC always were, are and will be the greatest rock and roll band in the world. Nobody will beat them. Fuck your Stones, fuck your Beatles, fuck all your White Stripes and all your new fucking bollocks. ACDC are the greatest rock and roll band ever Bon Scott first and then Brian, thus spake the great Chris Needham I knew halfway through that I thought you were going to say Keir Starmer then for some reason

but yeah laughter music music music music music applause Summer ACDC at ten places to number 15. Well, last Sunday, the 4th of July,

there was great celebrations right across the United States. It was Independence Day. Let's see how Jonathan King celebrated as he goes through the billboard chart. Kid! Standing amongst a smattering of zoo wankers and actual real life people has to remind us that we're four days past the 4th of July

because British people still haven't cowered before the might of American cultural power just yet as he informs us that we're about to be treated to another installment of Jonathanathan king's entertainment usa david me and neil have already had to deal with one of these so come on tell us how did you feel about this sort of thing at the time i didn't care for it wasn't the america that i wanted um and um jonathan king i mean he had that whole business, I mean, like Prince Charles meeting Jimmy Savile, looking at Jimmy Savile and thinking, you know,

yeah, he's a perfectly sound, decent bloke. I mean, sometimes you really can judge a book by its cover, can't you? Barbara Cartland or something like that, I think I know what to expect here, you know, like call me prejudiced, but I think I'll give this a swerve. And I mean mean he looks like what he is does jonathan king um and you know that's possibly appearances is but yeah this item again it's that sort of transatlanticism and i don't think that jonathan king was at all a

reaganite in fact i do remember him doing one of these broadcasts in which he was assuring us that um you know you you might be fearing that ronald reagan's going to get elected but um and that would be a dreadful thing because it would be him and George Plastic Man Bush, but I think it's safe to say that Jimmy Carter will win the 1980 presidential election. Thanks, Jonathan. But it just feels like the sort of, yeah, the famism, the transatlanticism about all of this. I mean, I guess there is a sort of a closer relationship, you know, post-Freddie Laker and all of that between the two continents, but I just feel like we're getting the shitty end of the stick of it all, you know post freddie laker and all of that between the two continents but i

just feel like we're getting the shitty end of the stick of it all you know especially through this conjure i mean what joy is this man given anybody ever yeah yeah i mean even doing this for charm is i felt such a familiar feeling whenever this couldn't appears on anything it's just you start feeling these precious seconds of your life just swirling away from you into an unrecoverable void whenever he appears on screen, and so it proves in this. And this is the thing. We always talk about there being half an hour every week.

There's this sliver of entertainment that's relevant to our pop lives. But of course, in the end, it's not even half an hour. Quite often, it's only about 10 minutes or something like that because there's all of this to wade through. And he gives us a bit of a fucking history lesson at the beginning, doesn't he? Oh, yes. Because that's just what you want in Top of the Pops. Definitely, that's why I tuned in.

But come on, chaps, let's not moan. It's America in 1982, isn't it? So, Africa Bambata, Tom Tom Club, Prince, Grandmaster Flash in The Furious Five, Rick James, oh, this will be in the Furious Five, Rick James. Oh, this will be fucking good. Bring it on. 207 years ago, this was British soil. 206 years ago, America declared its independence and they're still celebrating that with various guns going off,

parades and so on. However, the British influence on music is still pretty strong in the American charts. Hiccup 100 and Kim Wilder slowing down... ..lower down the charts. But you'll notice that Fleetwood Mac have jumped from 22 to 12, and Tainted Love by Soft Soul goes from 11 to 9. And at number seven, Deuce Newton with Love's Been A Little Bit Hard On Me,

rather like these guns. We are whipped over to a very boring part of New York as someone dressed up as a revolutionary war type does some bugling. And as the camera pans back, we discover King, dressed and looking like Simon Bates after a night spent sleeping in a skip,

standing in front of some cannons. He reminds us about that war we lost as the cannons roar, sadly pointed away from him. And then he tells us that a load of singles we rinsed late last year are finally showing up on the american charts but never mind that because here comes love's been a little bit hard on me by juice newton born in new jersey in 1952 judy k newton spent her college years in california and had a go at being a folk singer,

eventually forming the country rock band Juice Newton and Silver Spur in the early 70s. After middling success, the band split up in 1977 and Newton began a solo career, and a year later, she had a moderate hit in America with a cover of Bonnie Tyler's It's A Heartache, while a song that she'd co-written, Sweet Sweet Smile, was covered by The Carpenters. In 1981, she put out a cover of the 1968 Mary Lee Rush single Angel of the Morning, which sold over a million copies in the USA, got to number four on the Billboard chart, and got to number 43 over here in May of that year. This is the follow-up to The Sweetest Thing I've Ever Known,

which got to number seven in America late last year and did arse all over here. It's also the lead-off cut from her new LP, Quiet Lies, and it features Andrew Gold himself on guitar and backing vocals. And this episode screeches to a halt, doesn't it? Fucking hell. Let's talk about the 4th of July bollocks for a start,

because that meant nothing then. I mean, this is it. As Neil said, this isn't Michael Portillo's Great Train Journeys or something like that. It's fucking top of the box get on with it yeah we don't need to be told about a war that we fucking lost well yeah i swear that when i first started going on the internet i got involved in this uh internet forum in like the late 90s that was a kind of like american sports themed i was the only only non-American on the thing. And I'd get non-stop shit from fucking morons

saying, oh, you lost that war, dude, and scoreboard on you and all this kind of stuff. And I'd just say, well, number one, I wasn't there, so I don't give a fuck. Number two, a load of people telling the British royal family to fuck off, good on them. What a shame we haven't done that fuck. Number two, a load of people telling the British royal family to fuck off. Good on them. What a shame we haven't done that yet.

Yeah, yeah. And yeah, I mean, crucially, a lot of British people telling the British royal family to fuck off. That's the thing. I mean, Americans winning that war. It's not exactly what happened. But I mean, you know,

Jonathan King is a time sponge, man. And yeah, this opening section, yeah, what you said, Al, about the cannons not being pointed at him, gutted. But anyway, this thing here, I mean, this would be like Solid Gold or American Bandstand devoting five minutes to the latest British videos and we gave them the oldest swinger in town by Fred Wedlock or fucking Fandabi Dozie by The Crankies over an abattoir video.

I mean, no offence to Juice Newton, but what the fuck is she doing here, man? She's about as comfortable on this episode of Top of the Pops as if she'd just walked into the men's toilets at half-time at a third-div division football ground it's like juice sorry duck no this isn't for you no go the thing is this this persists to this day this this thing that you know when i was trying to research juice newton because i've never heard of it before watching this you know and it what you get is a lot of people saying why was she never a big star

in the uk you know how inexplicable is her lack of success in the UK? Look, we don't... Because of this. Well, we don't care about this shit. I mean, it's like, you know, still the desire to get the UK into American mainstream country music persists. You know, whispering Bob Harris, the enemy of pop. He had his own country show on Radio 2 a while back. And, you know, on a weekly basis, he was moaning about why this stuff wasn't big.

You know, bar certain members of the Birmingham line dancing community, nobody gives a fuck about this stuff. And by the way, I'm not just making it up about Birmingham line dancers. I wanted to check out if my idea about Birmingham being the Texas of England is true. So the other day day i was looking for line dancing clubs in birmingham and i found four now come on now oh yeah you've got dancing two night line dancing club you've got bobby suze you've got john's jive and you've got smoky mountain country music club all in the where's the smoky mountain in birmingham man well i looked at the

google map of it outside it just looked like some sort of warehouse, basically. Well, not even a warehouse. It's like Norman Fletcher starting that cowboy club. Yes. There was a bloke next door to my best mate who was into all that kind of stuff. And every Sunday afternoon, while my mate and his

family were settling down to tuck into something traditional and British, all they'd hear is the cunt next door firing his guns in the air and whooping and and yelling and at the same time on central news there was a news story about a bloke who uh dressed up as a native american and spent a lot of time in a teepee in his back garden and the bloke next door had a right moan about it to uh my mate's dad saying look at this cunt here who the fuck could do something as stupid as that well he's dressed up as a fucking cowboy that's the thing that you know we need that imagery in

a sense to get into it this is why stuff like juice newton remains stubbornly kind of unloved over here i think to an extent it's down to our perceptions in this country of country music i mean we take some of the music seriously but for it to become pop music to us it has to contain a bit of gimmickry so it has to contain songs about gambling or poverty or the novelty of kenny rogers beard or dolly parton's tits or whatever ray stevens the. I think it's unique to England, you know. Irish and Scottish friends of mine are far more likely to have grown up listening to country pop regularly

rather than the sort of Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton records that we all have. Whereas to us, you know, in England, listening to country is a bigger crossing of the racial tracks than listening to reggae or soul or bongora music, you know. And this, Juice Newton, she's not even got any of that cowboyish gimmickry. crossing of the racial tracks than listening to reggae or soul or bunga music you know and and this juice newton she's not even got any of that cowboyish gimmickry it's just made mainstream pop really with a country twist and why the fuck would we be interested in that with a twang yeah

i mean i paid close close attention at this point you know to the charts and this if i've even knew this existed um i forgot it did i mean i may have missed this episode or just gone for a slash during this particular segment or something like that. Nah, you were watching Jimmy Greaves, weren't you? Yeah, I was all geared up for that, possibly as well. Willing the Germans on, no doubt, David. No, not at all, no. I was an absolute

Germanophobe, that devious strutting Schumacher. Good grief, no. It took me a long while to recover from that, actually. Yeah, definitely. No, I was very much a Francophile this night. If I saw it, if I was... It just evaporated.

I couldn't even muster the... Much as I can't now, really, to be honest. I can't really muster the words or the energy to say anything about it. It is just nondescript. It's fucking cat shit, isn't it, this? I mean, the only thing that I... I'm trying to make notes from it.

It's pretty much a blank page. And then I just thought there's... Looking at some of the video and whatever, there's nothing worse in this world than a slightly new-waved, influenced American from the early 80s. That's all I get in terms of, like, you know, the sort of attire that people were wearing

in the kind of video and stuff. Also, that weird video, it's a bit like that sort of dangerous brothers type vibe yes it is yeah i mean it mainly consists of juice newton and her band who are the textbook definition of serving suggestion yeah i mean which one did you hate the most out of that band i think it was the one who was properly new waved up i.e non-flared trousers and a skinny tie. Exactly, yeah. That's what I'm talking about.

Yeah, a horrible man, definitely. And it's interspersed with clips of her being severely and repeatedly injured by a thick ponce of a boyfriend. Yeah. I mean, we see him picking her up outside her house and then slamming the car door onto her leg. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He then goes on to accidentally whack her in the face with her own crutch as he gives her some flowers and then he accidentally pushes her wheelchair over a cliff and that was have you seen the whole video yeah yeah oh it's like a fucking public information film that wheelchair going off on a cliff it's really fucking graphic and she ends up with uh her legs wide open in a full body cast in hospital as i say it's not quite done with the dangerous brothers panache though you know there is an art to this kind of morbid slapstick and uh i don't think i mean this is for mums isn't it this is the reason why you say the mums have not done well

out of this episode so far so this is this is for them maybe so yeah but what mums have not done well out of this episode so far, so this is for them. Maybe so. Yeah, but what mums are going to be into this? But it's just a litany of domestic violence, accidentally or otherwise. Really, yeah. Which goes well with country music, I suppose. Well, I suppose, you know, there's always that humorous, you know,

Cletus the Slapjawed Yokel type vibe, I suppose. What's that one on The Simpsons? It's like, Came home one night, Caught my wife in bed with my best friend. You bid her? Uh-huh. Bid him, too.

That's funny. That's a joke. So, yeah, this is what America's got to offer at the moment. Yeah, it's not enticing, is it? Great. I think even the mums would have felt, you know, is this what we get? It's like a shit Mother's Day card or something. So, love's been a little bit hard on me.

Ended up doing fuck all over here and rightly so. And she never bothered our charts again. Good. Quite right. Next. These ridiculous things are dealie bobbers. Everybody's wearing them all over America. But back to the charts.

Going up from 7 to 6 is the Daz band with Let It Whip and jumping from 9 to 5 is a future number one record by Survivor. It's from the movie Rocky III. It's called The Eye of the Tiger. We cut back to King standing outside a cinema who introduces the UK to dealy bobbers and chaps the 80s have truly begun man the age of aquarius sort of the nadir basically him wearing fucking daily yeah the age of nadirius if you will i mean king is a spiritual dealy bopper so i don't know why it's kind of like you know putting this sort of like detached sophistication and superiority. You know, you are a deely bopper.

You know, there was good 80s and bad 80s as far as I was concerned. There was a very sharp divide. And good 80s was ABC, The Associates, Scrutipality, you know, Simple Minds in the early 80s, et cetera, et cetera. And bad 80s, and it was zoo wankers and deely boppers, et cetera, et cetera. And crucially, Jonathan King telling us that all Americans are wearing deely boppers on an almost constant basis. Yeah, wow, there's loads of

people milling about, walking past them, and none of them are wearing them. No, they're all walking their pet rocks, but you know, they don't have Dealey Bobbers. Yes! Invented in Los Angeles in 1981, Dealey Bobbers were a headband with two springy baubles

attached to them, and were the brainchild of Stephen Askin who had already come to prominence in America by marketing Ayatollah Khomeini dartboards during the Iran hostage crisis After making a load of them in his kitchen he took them to the Los Angeles street fair in the summer of 1981 and sold all 800 of them at five dollars each he sold the invention onto the ace novelty company at the end of the year who called them dealie bobbers by the summer of 1982 an estimated two million of the fuckers have been sold by ace novelty

with the market awash with cheap imitations. And this is their first appearance on British television. And somewhere out there, Dave Lee Travis is stroking a thoughtful beard, isn't he? When I see Dealey Boppers, and I do call them Dealey Boppers, because I'm damn convinced that's what they were called over here, I immediately associate them with Dave Lee Travis. With characters.

Yes. Total Colin Hunts. Yeah. And Jonathan King wearing them is a nice start, in a way, to the phenomenon. Yeah, set the tone. Yeah. He then reminds us that Americans get films ages before we do, as he introduces Eye of the Tiger by Survivor.

Formed in Chicago in 1977, Survivor were a rock band formed by Jim Petterick, the former lead singer of the Ides of March, who had a number 31 hit in the UK with Vehicle in June of 1970. He tended to go into radio jingle work, but was talked into giving it another go by his road manager. So he formed Survivor, who were almost immediately picked up by Atlantic Records. Their first LP, Survivor, flopped in 1980, but the follow-up a year later, Premonition, spawned the singles Poor Man's Son, which got to number 33 on the Billboard chart. Later that year, Sylvester Stallone was wrapping up the filming of his next film, Rocky III, and he knew exactly what he wanted for the theme tune, Another One Bites the Dust by Queen, which he had inserted into the preliminary cut of the film. But when John Deacon knocked him back, Stallone left a message on Petrick's answering machine

saying he liked the working-class rock stylings of Paul Manson and wanted something similar for the title theme of Rocky III. And by God, this is it. It's not available in the UK yet, but over in America, it's jumped 10 places from number 19 to number 9 and as the video we've come to associate with the single isn't available

Top of the Pops are giving us another film clip of Stallone over-emoting in a boxing ring, while Lawrence Churroad a former bouncer in a nightclub called Dingbat's Discotheque turned tough man boxing champion turned bodyguard for michael jackson and muhammad ali glares on at ringside displaying

regretful compassion for the imbecilic oh boys we're bound to run across the official version of the video at some point so let's put that aside and focus on this because once again the bbc are practically running an advert for a film aren't they they are and then to be fair the video makes the film look pretty damn good um yes it really does but you know much like with the film uh when i did get to see it let's be honest it's clubber lang you want to see um you know we're a way off at this point, 82. We're a way off, you know, Mr. T's serial and the Mr. T cartoon series,

which I actually feel is his greatest work. Oh, yeah. When he manages a diverse gymnastics team. Well, not only that, he punches a shark, he throws an alligator about, he does loads of stuff. I would recommend the compilation on YouTube by the way

of his moral messages at the end of the cartoon or be somebody or be somebody's fool yes homespun that's genius common sense homilies

on the importance of not bragging and not moaning and basically you know don't be bad be good but he was the most compelling thing about Rocky 3

Mr T yes he was and this is the first time we get to see Mr T isn't it first Dealey Boppers now this fucking hell that america right yeah yeah absolutely rocky 3 is also the first time that we see hulk hogan so a cultural monolith yeah yeah absolutely and and i mean i liked mr t i think from things like top of the pops and look at it because obviously this

way before a team as well but i was finding something with the Rocky movies, because I was taken to see Rocky, probably the first one, really young, and I did watch Rocky 2 as well. So I was looking forward to Rocky 3. I felt old enough to watch this kind of stuff now. But I was detecting something.

I didn't like Mr. T's defeat in this film, you know? And the way the film, I mean, obviously, you know, it's about the great white hope, all of the Rocky films are. But the way that Rocky III in particular, it kind of rewards Carl Weathers for being the right type of black boxer, you know, giving it up for the white saviour.

And Clubber Lang gets demonised for being angry, basically. For being an angry black man. I mean, by the by, if you really want to open up a can of indignant worms and trigger white Americans, just suggest somewhere online that the Rocky films might be racist. They really do not like that at all. Just as somebody

that was kind of conscious of African-American culture and a cute boxing fan. I mean, this is just a ludicrous exercise in wishful thinking. The whole thing. It's Chuck Wetner. I think it was a guy called Chuck Wetner who went a long way with ali yes and he took him all the way and i think that's what inspired him you know like you know perhaps a white man could beat up a black man you know and it's just that's yeah that's all there is to it yeah yeah yeah i mean look

stallone in a weird way he's a good popular artist my favorite of his is by the way the fever dream of action cinema that is cobra but um rocky three i remember that being the first one i think where i started detecting the faint racism of rocky films and having a big problem with it yeah it really does trigger a lot of rocky fans and boxing fans if you dare to suggest that the rocky series is in any way racist i suppose by rocky four it's just entered cartoonism i didn't V, don't bother with. Rocky Balboa, I've not bothered watching, although I was amused that Carl Weathers wanted to be in it.

Sylvester Stallone put it out. Hold on a minute, you were killed in the fourth one. And because Carl Weathers got so pissed off about that, that he wasn't allowed to be in Rocky Balboa. He could have been a ghost. Yeah, as a ghost or something. Who knows? He refused to let Sylvester Stallone

use any of the Apollo footage from any of the films. Yeah, because if you have a ghost box, how are you going to land on it? You know what I mean? Yeah, it's a host of difficulties, isn't it? But yeah, Rocky III is the first one where I sort of start detecting that there's something up with this series.

But that said, I mean, yeah, talking about the video, you do have to sort of talk about Survivor at the same time. Yes, you do. It's a good intro, this tune. It does its job, do Survivor. Lyrically tells the story of the film without really mentioning any specifics,

which frankly would have been ace. I would have loved to have heard the words Rocky and Apollo in these lyrics. You know, when they do the exact same trick in Rocky IV and they do Burning Heart, that film, they do actually mention the sort of, you know, the socio-geopolitical import of Rocky IV. You know, there's that line,

seems our freedoms up against the ropes. But, you know, this song, although it inhabits the same sound world and dynamics of something like Stevie Nicks' Edge of Seventeen, whereas Stevie's a totally compelling lyricist and singer, the chap from Survivor isn't. Isn't, no. It is what you'd expect from a band pretty much made up of jingle writers.

It's rock produced and sheened to the point where nothing really grabs you and everything snags your esophagus a little bit. It's got that weird sense of this is meant to be heavy while sounding really fucking weedy once it gets going. But the intro's good, I can't deny it. It's a good build to the film. It's used cleverly in the film. is meant to be heavy while sounding really fucking weedy yes once it gets going you know but the intro is good i can't deny it's a good build film it's used cleverly in the film but survivor don't really care about rock and roll they're tim pan alley types not really rock and rollers so i kind of applaud the craft but loathe the sentiment but the film itself you know i was having problems

with that as well perhaps you know the first time i had problems at the rocky series is definitely rocky free yeah yeah it's really funny though now because clubber lang obviously heralds the arrival of tyson yeah yeah very much so and also yeah when a white heavyweight boxing champion finally comes around he's a bit nearer to ivan drago than rocky yes indeed yes there was articles in the village voice and places like that when the first rocky came out suggesting you know this is all about white working class people feeling that black people have been given too much progress and this is about claiming something fat.

Not many people picked up on the racism of Rocky III at the time it came out. It was very triumphalist when it came out. But yeah, it's pretty blatant. I haven't watched the film for a while. I must give it another viewing. But as I recall, Mr. T is given this character clubber lang clubber lang is he's like a mandingo type figure of fear and kind of hypersexuality and and all the rest of it it's a real cowalescing of a lot of a lot of stereotypes and he's throughout the film i think contrasted with apollo apollo learns to acquiesce to the

great white hope learns to actually help the great white hope, you know, and is a businessman and all the rest of it. Clubber Lang is this angry, young black man, and consequently he's demonised throughout the movie. And I remember feeling distinctly uncomfortable about that. Yeah, it's a definite vibe of good black man and bad black man, definitely. Yeah, it's interesting that another one bites the dust. I don't think that would have worked particularly well, I think.

No, not at all. I actually think, I mean, I can't stand this song. I think one of my worst nights ever, I think, was in Leeds at some pub. And it was one of those, it was when the London Symphony Orchestra kind of produced hits of the day to a kind of little 4-4 disco beat or whatever. Yeah, yeah. Did some version of Eye of the Tiger. And I just felt so sorry for the players in this.

You know, they come into this world to play Bartok and Stravinsky and Schoenberg, and they're playing fucking Survivor, the poor sods. But I actually think it kind of does its job in terms of, like, capturing the sort of cheapness, the sort of cheap emotion, the sort of contrived adrenaline or whatever of the Rocky film. I actually think it's a kind of a decent match.

My beef with... One of my beefs with Rocky, again, as a boxing fan, is just the awfulness of the ridiculousness of the boxing scenes. I mean, they're risable. Oh, he mystically over-eggs it, doesn't he, Stallone? Absolutely. I mean, it's ridiculously. At a time when boxing was fucking amazing.

Yeah, absolutely, I know. And then you've got this nonsense. You know, it's pretty much like World Wrestling Federation stuff, really. Very much so, yeah. Three or four scenes. You know, it's pretty much like World Wrestling Federation stuff. Very much so, yeah. Three or four scenes in which people, boxers, are knocked clean off their feet. I can recall this happening in the same round. You know, and it's like, you know, with roundhouse punches or whatever. I only saw that once in heavyweight boxing.

It was George Foreman in 1973 against Joe Frazier, where he actually does land an uppercut. And you see Frazier actually just off his feet. And it's happening on a sort of four or five times per round basis in this film. Yeah. I mean, this is a time of Hagler and Hearns and Leonard and Duran. Oh,

no. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I know. And sublime. And these, you know,

these are wonderful things to watch, you know, the idea that this is some idealized version of what boxing ought to be. And then the real thing is a bit boring. It's absolutely ridiculous. This is risible. Also your boxes, put your fucking dukes up you know and it's just like you know people you know the way that like the you know the fights sway back and forth and no one has any idea of like how to sort of conduct a defense it's just just insulting really yeah

and and it's kind of insulting that you know stallone when he's making the rocky films he seeks out people like joe frazier for advice and stuff like that and and it's not of insulting that, you know, Stallone, when he's making the Rocky films, he seeks out people like Joe Frazier for advice and stuff like that. And it's not Joe Frazier who ends up with a statue in Philadelphia. It's fucking Sylvester Stallone. Do you know what I mean? Fucking Philadelphia. What the fuck is wrong with you? But this song, I mean, it does become just the general kind of motivational anthem,

applicable and usable in all kinds of different scenarios. You know, when Mike Walker has his short, unhappy reign at Everton, he gets them to ditch his Edcars in favour of Eye of the Tiger. Fuck. It doesn't work for them. You know, but it's that kind of fucking song, isn't it? I think I've only seen one Rocky film in my life, which was the original one, when the BBC showed it after the England-Germany semi-final in 1996.

And I just remember sitting there, pissed up, absolutely maudlin, just looking at it and going, what the fuck are you going on about miracles come true? Fuck off. So I've never watched another Rocky film, but after seeing this, I don't have to see Rocky film.

I get everything. Yeah, you completely do. It's a really good little capsule of a film. another Rocky film but after seeing this I don't have to see Rocky film I get everything yeah yeah you completely do it's a really good little capsule of a film the thing that jumped out at me

was the images of Stallone all over the magazines and newspapers particularly the London Examiner which reports on another

Rocky victory alongside a news story where the headline is Chelsea's frenzy which probably had more to do with their supporters than anything the team was doing in 1982 world of cricket and the tantalizing headline eagle farm today i'd love to know what that's about well spotted

yeah the films are weird because the films are this weird mix of kind of like almost kitchen sink drama but the boxing scenes they're for children i mean there's more realistic action sequences than fucking scooby-doo or something yeah absolutely but great advert bbc yeah they've done a good job here they've done the film well but immediately the most captivating thing is not sly it's mr t and we want to know more about that guy, and as time will tell, we do get to know more about that guy. I mean, the only good thing I've got to say about Survivor is, and this song, is that Eye of the Tiger was the first song

I ever played on Guitar Hero about 15 years ago. So, you know, I've got a bit of residual fondness for it. I used to love Guitar Hero. Did you partake, chaps? I didn't partake chaps i didn't partake i have heard though that this song is a particular joy to play on guitar hero oh you know what it's that chord just after he sings eye of the tiger you know you know the bit that goes it's the bow oh yeah yeah and the first time i hit that chord it's like oh man the power of rock compels me the best thing you could ever do with guitar hero is have a load of people around

and make sure there's one or two musos that were sitting off to the side refusing to get involved with their arms folded and faces like smacked asses oh it's not real musicianship you know i used to love that i used to just stare at them while i was playing and go look at me i'm a guitarist, everyone. It was like having your mate who's a fucking carjacker coming round, watching you play Grand Theft Auto and going, oh, no, it's not like that. Yeah, yeah.

It's a total misrepresentation of the art of stealing cars and hitting people. And King's going to give himself a pat on the back and claim that he introduced Survivor. Yeah, you get Survivor, Genesis. Chalk another victory up for JK. Two weeks later, Eye of the Tiger would run all the way to the top of the marble steps of the American chart, deposing this week's number one,

and would stay there for six weeks, eventually being battered to the floor by abracadabra by the Steve Miller band. On the last day of this month, it entered the chart at number 54, rocketed 25 places to number 29, then soared 23 places to number six and stalked the number two slot for a fortnight before taking down come on eileen and spending four weeks at number one over here keeping save a prayer by juran juran private investigations by dire straits and the bitterest pill by the jam off number one before yielding the floor to pass the Dutch Air by Musical Youth.

The follow-up, American Heartbeat, got to number 17 in America but didn't get anywhere near our chart and they had to rely on Stallone again for their second and final UK hit when Burning Heart from Rocky IV got to number five in March of 1986. The single was nominated for an Oscar, losing to Up Where We Belong, and was nominated for a Grammy, losing to Always On My Mind by Willie Nelson,

but received the ultimate accolade when it was covered by Cilla Black in Surprise Surprise. Have you seen that, Neil? I have, thanks for sending that through. Fuck me. And like many singles of its ilk, it experienced a strange afterlife last decade when all manner of American Republican cunt politicians

were sued by the band for using their song to whip up banjo twanging inbreds at their rallies. Sticking at number four this week is Asia with Heat of the Moment and jumping over it from number five to number three is John Cougar and Hurt So Good. We cut back to a long shot of the Statue of Liberty while King leans awkwardly on a rail like people do when they're having a photo taken

and think they're going to be out of shot. He tells us some more chart info that we're not that interested in, before introducing Hurt So Good by John Cougar. Born in Seymour, Indiana in 1951, John Mellencamp was a college student and Roxy music fanatic who played in the local glam band Trash and left his wife and child behind to pursue a music career in New York in 1974. A year later, he was discovered by Tony DeFries, the founder of Mainman, who had just finished being David Bowie's manager, signed him up to MCA, and he was immediately rushed into the studio to record his debut LP, Chestnut Street Incident. But it wouldn't come out for another year,

and when it did, Mellencamp discovered that De Vries thought his name was too Germanic and had it changed to Johnny Cougar. After being dropped by MCA, after the LP only sold 12,000 copies, and a follow-up LP that De Vries refused to shop around to a new label, the two parted ways. However, Mellencamp was picked up by Billy Gaff,

Rod Stewart's manager and the owner of Reva Records in 1978, and he spent a year in London under his wing, changing his name to John Cougar in 1979. This is the lead-off cut from his fifth LP American Fool which features Mick Ronson on guitar and backing vocals. It came out last April and it's the single that has finally put him over in America having jumped nine places to number 20 this week. And here's the video, which was shot in Medora, Indiana. A place that's currently undergoing a population boom at the minute, chaps. The last census has the population at a whole 853.

It's now 635. 853 it's now 635 somehow they didn't manage to capitalise on the tourist value of it being the site of a John Cougar video it's a horrible video it's fucking awful

it's vile there's one moment where he cakewalks between these lecherous pensioners on bikes who are pouring his two rock chick dollies it's vile. On chains as well. I mean, just the awful smugness of it, yeah,

just running the gauntlet, you know, these appreciative as you say, sort of ageing Hell's Angels, yeah. The fucking worst looking Hell's Angel gang in the whole of America, man. They're the Hell's Angel version of the orphans, aren't they? Yeah, you go over there and knock over their bikes in a domino effect

thing and yeah what are you gonna do you look shit but i i first became aware of um well he was he was you know johnny cougar i think in an advert in melody maker in the late 1970s well yeah let's let's address this right now david as far as i'm concerned there was only one johnny cougar and he is the kind of the seminal wrestling madman of Tiger and Scorch of fame, you know, a walking compendium of, like, Native American cliches, you know. Here, here, sir. That's Johnny Cougar. You, your heat big cunt is what you are. Yes, exactly,

David. Yeah. I mean, you might as well call yourself Billy Dane or Skid Solo. Yeah, I just thought it was a pretty good name. Yes. You know, Roy Race. It's just not on. And then also... Or Hot Shot Hamish. Absolutely, yeah. With his song, you know, when he. It's just not on. And then also... Or Hot Shot Hamish. Absolutely, yeah. With his song, you know, when he talks about how,

it just came to me, it just seemed like a pretty good title. It's already been done. Millie Jackson, you know, had a hit with this. You know, the idea, just an absolute thief. Yeah, the song's awful. Terrible, sub-stones, bollocks. The first thing, well, the second thing, after what David correctly said after what david correctly said what a knob end he looks he's got this dead tight black leather waistcoat on with a bandana around

his neck and bizarrely he's got cream colored chaps around his jeans which is fucking thick i mean no chap wearer am i but surely the whole point of chaps is to keep the dirt off your trousers. So why would you wear light coloured ones? That's... No, it doesn't work like that. He's not quite worked his look out yet. I still think he's got a bit of glamness to him from his early years. But what he's aiming for here

is really something a bit more blue collar and it ain't working out for him at all. He looks like the worst dressed homosexual in the Castro, doesn't he? Which was Fred Wedlock's ill-advised follow-up to his one and only head. He looks like the worst dressed homosexual in the Castro, doesn't he? Which was Fred Wedlock's ill-advised follow-up to his one and only hit. Yeah, very much so. He looks awful.

He sounds terrible. And as is the case with much of this bit, this whole Jonathan King bit, you just sat there, a British kid at home, just thinking, when are the charts coming back on? Yeah. Our charts. And why haven't, you know... The proper charts. There's so many records they could have played, man.

That they could have played. The video consists of him doing a turn with a band of absolute fucking American egg and chippers before he leads the crappiest motorcycle gang in history and then he walks down Main Street with two women who are clearly not gossip and they pretend to enjoy it while they avoid being

groped by the rubbish bikers this whole segment really feels like there's some sort of cultural necessity for like american white rock and pop that we may not have considered before to be promoted in the uk like it's almost like some sort of charitable work that's required yes because we're not exactly interested it's shit absolutely but it sounds like won't you give johnny cougar a hearing you know no somewhere johnny cougar is waiting for your house thank you do you consider yourself a rock and roll singer more than an opera singer i guess yeah but but you think rock and roll may be coming to the end of its life well i think rock and roll is a dinosaur you know it's been around 20-some years,

and I don't know what else they can do new, you know? I mean, you know, synthesizers aren't new, guitars aren't new. I mean, you only play DG&A so many ways, and that's it, right? If it ain't DG&A, it ain't rock and roll. Well, then what's the next phase? Next phase, I don't know. You know, if I knew, I'd tell you, and we'd go out and do it and be rich, right? John Cougar, thank you very much.

We're treated to an interview with Cougar where he pretty much says that rockism is dead, which a young David Stubbs would have been nodding furiously at, no doubt. Hey, David. Well, yeah, absolutely. I mean, he kind of, he warms me a little bit in this interview. First off, because when Jonathan King says to him, would you consider yourself a rock singer? And there are so many people in various sort of,

across the musical spectrum who would have said, that's just a category, I just defy all categories. No, you're obviously a rock singer. And he says as much, you're more than an opera singer. You know, so I don't, you know, I got that kind of slightly warm-driven that. And yes, of course, for his prediction that rock was dead. I mean, obviously his own rock is stillborn and sterile.

That's certainly true. But it's reasonably kind of honest stuff. I did slightly warm to him as a result of that interview. But the interview does make the entire record that we've just seen just seem entirely cynical, doesn't it? Exactly, yeah. He doesn't believe in any of it. It's a load of shit, and I'm just trying to turn a pound off it.

Do you want to buy some Dealey Boppers off me? Totally. I mean, it's just like when Frank Zaffer said, jazz is not dead, it just smells funny. And I mean, this has been a similar sort of thing, really. It smells funny. But, you know, it's a video from the heartland, which is going to be shoved up our arse over the next few years.

It's just basically American Long american long eaten isn't it this place so hurt so good would eventually spend five weeks at number two in america unable to dislodge eye of the tiger but did fuck all over here however the follow-up, Jack and Diane, would get to number 25 in the UK in November of this year. His one and only top 40 hit as a solo artist. And not even changing his name to John Cougar Mellencamp in 1983 and reverting to John Mellencamp in 1991 could help him much over here. Okay, back to the American charts. At number two is Rosanna

by that fantastic band Toto. And at number one, well, a few months ago, Phil Oakey complained in the press about Top of the Pop's wasting time always looking at the American charts and why did we do it? Well, I'll tell you why we do it. This week's number one in America is a record called

Don't You Want Me by the Human League. You were working as a wait America in a record called Don't You Want Me by the Human League. King tells us how fantastic Toto are before taking massive offence at Phil Oakey when he spoke for the nation and said that this section of Top of the Pops is absolute cat shit and what's the fucking point of it

anyway? Why do we do it, says King? Well, I'll tell you why we do it. This week's number one in America is a record called Don't You Want Me by the Human League. What the fuck is he going on about? What does that even mean? If that proves the value of this segment, you know. And his reported complaints from Phil, they would have had a nation nodding vociferously.

Oh, yeah, totally. Especially us pop kids. Yeah, Phil, 100% correct, yeah. And if the chance was just a wash, you know, with the British invasion stuff, then the whole section would be superfluous anyway. Yeah, no, the type of section is to showcase people like Juice Newton and Johnny Cougver that no one is interested in.

Phil is absolutely right. When Phil's talking, he usually gets some sense. We've already covered this single, the Christmas number one of 1981, the biggest selling single that year in the UK, and the fifth best selling single of the 80s in chart music number 49. Since then, it's been handed down to less modern and cutting-edge countries such as America, and my God, it's driven them synth-pop crazy. And this week, Don't You Want Me has shoved the piano

that Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder were sitting on right off the top of Mount Popmore and taken its rightful place as America's number one. Yes, fuck ebony and ivory. It's all black plastic and white plastic now, isn't it? Me and Neil have already covered this. So, David, your thoughts? I mean, this song, it's more than a hit.

It's like a sort of fact of life these days. It is just absolutely preserved. But obviously at the time I think that the words synth-pop were inevitably followed or preceded by the word disposable. And I think the idea that they were the sort of deedy-boppers of their

charts or whatever and the things that would truly last the ages would be the great sort of stone and metal edifices of like Prague or the kind of current relevant works like the Tigers of Pantang, all of which are just fallen to dust, really, in public memory. And what has actually endured is the same one,

which is Depeche Mode or Human League. And here's an absolutely prime example of it, that this is, disposability is absolutely not. I think just what I love about this point of Human League, though, is the takeover of when, you know, Joan Catherine and Susan Sully, when they come in, and I think that they almost force the issue, maybe sort of, I think it's something that they're very kind of conscious of wanting to do,. It's them. They are the pop essence, the sort of, you know, the sort of slightly kind of uncoordinated dancing, a certain spirit of smash hits-ness of popular music in the 1980s.

And that has endured right through. And they're still touring now. They're still on the road. Yeah, just the absolute durability of it, I think, is just a great thing. So once again, the whole artifice of this section has been completely exposed because, hey, look, here's that thing that you all bought seven, eight months ago. Yeah, yeah. This is basically a section that reduces a 40-minute show

to a half-hour show of relevance, really. And look at what they could have won. Look at what they could have been playing in the 10 minutes that we get here. When I look at the chart... In five minutes. Well, five minutes, okay. But it feels like 10 it feels like 10 when i look at the charts and when i look at the records in there japan

hot chocolate even dollar fuck it adamant soft sell bow wow wow abc visage roxy just i mean fuck it in fact never mind other good records in the charts they would have been better off just giving imagination five minutes just giving imagination five minutes. Just give them five minutes. Do what the fuck you like. Do whatever you like. Free swim. That would have been better.

Or get Jeffrey Daniel out and say, right, show us in real slow motion how you do that backside. That would have been more value to the nation than this shit. So Don't You Want Me would spend three weeks at number one in America, giving way to Eye of the Tiger, and, as in the UK, would be their only number one in the USA. Well, we may have lost the colonies, but at least we've still got the number one record in the American charts. From Jonathan King at Independence Day Parade in New York,

back to the studio. A fantastic achievement, that, for the human league. Well, a couple of weeks ago, Jonathan King was going to the European number one, and at that time, Trio were number one in Austria and Switzerland. And now they have a hit in the UK, and here they are with Da Da Da. You don't love me, I don't love you. Uh-huh, uh- love you uh-huh uh-huh uh-huh kid next to a zoo wanker with all glitter in her hair that makes it look like she's been involved in some Cyberman Bacar care.

Gives the human league a pat on the back. I think that woman is definitely using glitter spray. Which was one of the adverts that would be seen on Channel 4 in its first year. And was absolutely fucking hammered to death, man. You know the one that goes, you got a glitter? Just keep this spray. 18 beautiful inches away, you glitter girl. That was on all the time.

It was that and them adverts for Freddie Barrett's off licences, which was fucking mad, which no one outside of London had the slightest clue what was being advertised. It was just this middle-aged bloke gnawing on a massive bone or doing something mad good old channel four he then goes on to virtually claim full responsibility on behalf of top of the pops for the success of the next single da da da by trio formed in brevenhaven, West Germany in 1966, McBeats were a band put together by vocalist Stefan Remier

and guitarist Gert Krawinkel who were heavily influenced by Das Roland Stonen. After changing their name to Just Us, they became a regular feature on the North German beat combo circuit, but split up in 1969.

Undeterred, Remier and Krawinkel formed a folky prog band called Krawinkel which signed to Phillips and put out two LPs before splitting up in 1972 which led to the two of them spending the rest of the 70s as teachers. In 1979, however, they decided to have another go and recruited Peter Behrens, a veteran of the Hamburg scene who was in the krautrock band Silberbart before attending the Milan Circus School and was currently working as a clown and pantomime artist. After renting a house in a hamlet in Lower Saxony and moving in together, they pieced together their debut LP, recording it in the cellar. After shopping it around 23 different labels and being rejected by 23 different labels, they found a champion in Klaus Vormann.

Yes, that Klaus Vormann, mate of the Beatles and bassist of Manfred Mann, who had seen them in concert and recommended them to his mate, who was the German A&R manager for Phonogram. After signing to Phonogram and being given Vorman as their producer, they commenced work on an LP called Trio, which came out in West Germany in October of 1981. While touring the LP around at assorted record shops across the country, they wrote and played out this song, which leaned heavily on the teenage-spod lust object of the age,

the Casio VL-1, which was retailing in WH Smith at the time for £39.95, which is about £163 in today's rubbish money. They were so knocked bandy by the response, they immediately pegged it over to Zurich to borrow Yellow Studio and knock it out as a single. It was put out in West Germany in the spring of 1982 and immediately shot up the charts,

getting to number two, but being unable to dislodge their commissar by Falco and ambition freedom by Nicole. But it spread like wildfire through Europe, getting to number one in Switzerland and Austria and lodging itself in the top ten from Norway all the way down to that there Spain. Three weeks ago, on Top of the Pops Jonathan King presented his segment from Madrid so he could show off that he was at the World Cup and you weren't but also to break down the Euro charts and they played 30 seconds of da da da to the UK after which Simon Bates went so far as to say,

well, we reckon at Top of the Pops that Trio, if that record was released in this country, could be a British number one. As we all know, Simon Bates' word is Bond. And when it was released over here at the beginning of the month, it entered the chart at number 54, and this week it soared 24 places to number 30. And here they are in the studio with Top of the Pops pushing Das Boot out to put them over.

And, oh, chaps, all is well with the world again because this performance is skill on so many levels and I don't even know where to start it's magnificent isn't it just it's one of the most memorable top of the pops appearances of the entire first half of the decade i would say yes on an episode where jeffrey daniel's done his pieces fucking hell we're spoiled tonight obviously we have to give the floor over to uh to the rock expert the author of future days a definitive book on krautrock, and Mars By 1980, which does likewise for electronic music.

Come on, David. Thank you. All right, here we go. Well, perhaps I'm going to sort of drop a bit of lukewarm water here, just based on how I felt about this at the time, because I was pretty fierce about my music. And I was actually hoping to like this more than I actually did, because it was European and it was kind of mentioning Dada. And we already touched on my passion for Dada.

You know, this is terrible. Al, I realise I perhaps don't have any kind of sense of humour. No. I was one of the chaps, you know, game for a laugh and all that, you know, chuckle. But what happened, it was like this. I've long been an admirer of the great Dadaist sculptor, poet, Jean Arp, also known as Hans. Also his wife, Sophie Toiber Arp, who exhibited at the Tate, modern recently. Since about 1981, I've been aware of like the Dada movement. I was listening to this Danny Baker modern recently. Right. Since about 1981, I've been aware of the Dada movement.

I was listening to this Danny Baker podcast recently, and for some reason he was discussing this great artist. And the first thing he said, he says, like, his name's Hands Up. I mean, what's funny about that? And I think, shit, that's funny, isn't it? Hands Up, of course. You know, Otterwan.

Hands Up. Oh my god. And in 40-odd years, I didn't get this. It never occurred to me that this is funny. So I just feel terrible. I feel like possibly, you know, as I say, I've always thought of myself as having a lighter side and all that. But I have no sense of humour at all. Terrible, terrible business.

But this song. Right. What's up with it, David? Why don't you like it? What the fuck's wrong with you? I don't know. Because so obviously with my... Why't you like it? What the fuck's wrong with you? I don't know. Because so, obviously, with my... Why do you hate Germans?

Absolutely. I love Germans. But I think, I don't know, as it kind of progresses in this kind of willfully innovated way, you know, with this kind of ticking deadpan Casio, I just think, what would Hans Arp, baby Hans Arp, have made of this? I don't think that he would have felt that this is the true dada spirit there's something else that perhaps they're just sort of exploiting the reductiveness of the dada moniker or whatever so i felt a bit stern about that also i i just felt at this point

a lot of groups that were kind of operating in in a post-punk era in germany and having this kind of sort of brutalist sort of neo-kraututrock type thing going on in a sense. And all of a sudden it was getting codified as the Neue Deutsche Welle. And I always think that like this, with its kind of quirkiness, was a sign that things were just about to go wrong and we were all going to get a bit 99 red balloons any second. Oh, he's having a go at fucking Naina now. I know, exactly. I know, it's terrible.

I just felt a bit like when people like Nick Kershaw and you know and howard jones rocked up in 1983 and i thought this is the end of something here um so i kind of felt a little bit embittered about it on that basis i guess i didn't i thought it should have never mind trio i thought it should have been da da da da daf is who i thought should have been enjoying this kind of pop and daf at this time um so you mentioned nicole um a little a little bit of peace or whatever it's called a little piece a little piece a little piece yeah which won the eurovision song contest that year yes df immediately came out with their own riposte i'm busy and krieg a little war you know and i just thought that's what oh that's the stuff to give the troops and um yeah and so i suppose i just found all the kind of the quirky

roboticisms and all that and i thought no craftwork, do that properly and more thoroughly and better. Also, you're not DAF. And so I think I kind of resented it on that basis. But obviously now you can perhaps appreciate from afar the strangeness of it, the audacity of it. Nevertheless, you know, perhaps I'm sort of setting, you know, like setting up high hurdles and strict standards or what have you. I just suppose I can never quite get over that initial disappointment you know no i can completely understand that um you know um at the age you were david you know yeah elitism is a big part of total listening absolutely i mean for me as a kid obviously nine ten years old if we can

just talk about the record before we even get on to the performance yes the record on the radio had already you know entranced me really mainly because that that casio beat that was you know it's both melody and rhythm but more importantly it's accessible to me i can go into dixon's and i can press buttons and make that sound happen you know and also it might not be the sound of the street in 1982 but it's definitely the sound of the high street and yes nil like me utterly infectious to people of our age massively reachable you know we had some of these keyboards in our school in the music room so there was that as well oh you jammy bastard i know jammy bastards but that a massive pop hit could be hinged around something so simple was it was a real revelation to me because sims you know in the hands of people like human league etc they were everywhere i looked but they always seemed kind of impossibly expensive you know used by technicians and here they're being

used by people who definitely aren't slick in a way and they're being used in an almost childish and infantile way in terms of the expertise needed um it's a really mind-blowingly kind of minimal thing but it's immediately arresting because of that sound when you're a kid it's real earworm and so that every element that then gets blended in on that basis um you know the basic rock and roll guitar that we hear and of course the motif melodically that ends up getting played on the casio they become big pop moments and that's the thing it's a big pop smash made out of very small moments the only record it reminds me of in that regard is something like the flying lizards it's one of those records that's right on a tightrope it's totally catchy

pop magic but it's also showing you the nuts and bolts in a way it's like this kind of wizard of oz revealing um method of production you know and of course inviting the question even as a kid are we getting played by this record do you know i mean are we getting caught so it's amazing record for for a little child um but the great thing about i think this performance is that everything good about it including its its odd stance somewhere between sort of despair and a smile it's accentuated by top of the box hurl completely goes along with the weirdness which is really lovely to see the vl1 sound it's one of those sounds that kids fucking go mental for we're four years away from that beat that happens in the first round of three two one which kids always used to get up and dance to,

we're about four months away from hearing the countdown bit for the first time. So yeah, this is a golden age for bleepy bloopiness. Bleepy bloopiness, yeah, exactly. Michael Holmes played an absolute blinder here, so let's break it all down. So first of all, for the first time in the whole episode, they've actually let us see the kids they're all sitting around the band in a horseshoe holding up pieces of card with faces drawn on them and that's giving off some severe vibes at the opening credits of rolf on saturday okay

yeah which was produced by michael hull of course oh but we can still see them peeking out from behind the cards yeah and they look a million times better than the zoo wankers oh too bloody right yeah i mean there's one lad who you think's part of the band at the beginning because of the camera angle and he's got a theater of hate logo stunted on the arm of his leather jacket he's sitting behind a girl who is the absolute dead spit of a teenage rose west there's loads of miniskirts on the girls which are coming back into vogue and there's one white girl with dreads you know this is months before do you really want to hurt me becomes a hit yeah and there's one bloke who's a bit older and he looks the dead spit of

mick mills who's just come back from spain so yeah there's a lot going on just with the audience yeah and i wonder about those pictures that they're holding up. I sort of started assuming, and I think I did at the time, that the audience had been asked to draw pictures of themselves. That's what I thought. Yeah, and I'm not sure what point that makes, but I loved its oddity and its boldness. Well, according to someone on YouTube who was there,

the kids were given the portraits which had already been done and were conjoled into getting involved basically saying if you want to see yourself on telly you hold this card up it's pretty clear that about two or three different people have done the artwork yeah i think that goes with the image on the t-shirt that stephen remy is wearing which is the cover of uh the single right yeah which is you, childish drawings of the band. Yeah, yeah. Feeding into that Dada thing a little bit.

But I mean... And making it appear that the kids are part of the band. Yeah, definitely. And I remember the response to this, especially in the Smash It Sliders page and stuff, being about how ugly Trio are, right? And, you know, because they're not tarted up, they're not made up like everyone else is in this episode.

No. They are... I wouldn't say they're not tarted up, they're not made up like everyone else is in this episode. No. They are, I wouldn't say they're ugly, but if they are ugly, they're ugly in a way that we've not seen on Top of the Pops since really punk, since the kind of punk era. Yes. You know? Yes. And that in itself, they're kind of unmade up, unoutfitted, sort of what the fuckness. It is kind of

revelatory in itself. You know, and you've also got, you've got so much else going on in this performance, you know? Yeah. The top of the pop's video screen's been brought out of storage in order to show us the lyrics. And there's a robot dancer in a boiler suit who is neither tick or tock. He's a black dancer. So, yeah, black robots, good lord. Is that not Daniel?

Do you reckon that might have been Daniel? Oh, no. No, no. You sure? Yeah. Well, look, when I watched it, I chose to think it was him. Well, that's what we're saying now, then. I think what you're saying

really makes sense, and it's another reminder as well of our age gap, as like fathers of the chart music house who realise what an old git I am, and I was like probably a bit ten years too old even at this point in a sense you know I think what you say does make sense I mean obviously what they

are doing is it is an act of deconstruction it's sort of and also it's a kind of anti-pop thing going on so meta-pop is almost like Brechtian thing going on I don't love you you don't love me it's sort of shades of you know, is it Peter?

Yeah, yeah. Dremble wedge in the vegetation, I think. Yeah, yeah. I mean, 1982 is the most German year in British culture, isn't it? You know, Kraftwerk, number one with a model. Heimat, Das Boot. Oh, it's all going on. We're finally opening up To our German cousins

But every time Every time I watch this clip Something inexplicable Catches me I mean this time It was the parasol Behind the drummer Yes

Why the fuck is that there And one other thing I noticed Which might seem like A tiny detail But let's face it Chart music's all about Tiny details It's the fact that

The singer chews gum Was a big deal for me I thought that was so cool. The only other person I remember chewing gum a lot was obviously Paul Weller, who always seemed to chew gum. He might have nicked that habit from Nick Lowe. And it's also that great bit, of course, when something you just wouldn't see pre-Watershed at all.

Oh, God, yeah. When the guitarist sparks up a fag on stage and purchased it on his guitar string and then that don't work so he lights up another one. These are odd things for a Top of the Pops performance and you know, I'm sure Trio perhaps just did what came naturally but by doing that

they've made something really memorable. Really memorable. I don't know about that Neil because being Germans they would have seen a lot of Top of the Pops throughout the 70s. That is true. Because Music Laden and all the Top and Poppin' shows were always showing Top of the Pops clips. So they would have come to this knowing what was expected of them

and what they could do to put themselves over. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, the band looks sinister as fuck. And you're right, I was getting a lot of punk vibes off it. Yeah. As we mentioned when we do punk era episodes of Top of the Pops, there was always that element of the singer just staring at the camera and shitting up children.

And we get that here. Stefan Remier, he looks like Glassage, who's the scabby outsider outsider in high mat he's in a shapeless black suit with a brooch on his lapel shaped like a woman's ass over a trio band t-shirt which he kind of like flashes at one point and a big inside pocket so he can whip out the casio vl1 but halfway through singing one of the lines, he just snarls at the camera. He does, he does, but it never feels... And it's fucking brilliant!

The thing is, crucial thing is, it never feels mean-spirited. No. I mean, I read an interview with Trio by Gary Bushel, I think, and, you know, their English isn't great. None of this Gary Bushel's, though, is it? But at one point, the lead singer does say, you know, the word we use for our music is frolic which is near to your cheerfulness right that's what he says and he says you know we're the first

of german new wave orientated bands who put entertainment into the act and little gags he says before everything was only frustration and anger we make rock and roll with entertainment but it's more like a cynical cheerfulness where you don't know whether to laugh or cry there's a black humor to it yeah and he also says by the way um we don't want to be lumped in the same bag as grupo sportive or haircut 100 who are only entertainment with nothing to refer to so they're not pure pop but they're also not scowley punk that there's a kind of in-betweenness to the to the record and this performance that as a kid certainly you don't know where to put this in your mind or file it yeah and that's always a

memorable moment you know i mean also it's one of those things you know you got like john cleese and the germans you germans have no bloody sense of humor and yet again yet again especially through the music you know german there was there was a profound and sly sense of humour. Not only a sense of humour, but a sense of humour of which British acts actually wouldn't be capable. And humour has a way of enhancing a lot of great German music, like Kraftwerk, like DAF. Objectively now, I can see that it was a very, very special thing, and it was you know it is an occasion i still feel that if somehow or other daf or dear plan or even baby and token hosen if they'd have gone on top of the pops it might have been even more blind oh god i'm blowing that's that's the thing didn't write hit record though did the david yeah well this is true unless you got dear mussolini you know but uh

yeah yeah meanwhile gert kravincourt he looks like an absolute kraut rock refugee, doesn't he? Wearing faded double denim and a Where's Wally hat. And yes, his bit is lighting up the fag in the studio and screwing it into a springy cigarette holder on his headstock. Yeah. Which again would get him flung straight out of Sparks. Yeah. Peter Behrens, the drummer,

he's come as a skinhead tintin essentially hasn't he in a white t-shirt and incredibly thick red braces and he kicks his bass drum at the beginning it looks like he's wearing a pair of kickers and then in a heartless plunge of the dagger into the hearts of the english pop craze youngsters and mick mills who's in the fucking studio he brandishes a tell star football with thank you written on it and then just smiles really fucking evilly a clear dig over west germany top in their second round group absolutely three days previously i mean it's interesting when you mentioned right at the start about was it mcbeat and the fact that 1966 the kind of group they would have been in I mean trio in a sense precede and succeed krautrock um because krautrock was actually part of it was a response

to the fact that like so many German groups are simply aping the Beatles the rattles people like that it was almost like a sort of cultural martial plan that was going on they felt look you know we're Germans we're creative we need to, we need to find something original of our own that isn't just following Anglo-American orthodoxies. It's actually vital as part of our post-war regeneration. They're kind of thinking in those musical terms. So it's hard that they should be part of all of that and, of course, have the Klaus Wollman connection to exacerbate that.

But then come out and be part of almost... I suppose I do think of it as the point where sort of post-punk west german moment was perhaps just beginning as much as it was in the uk was just beginning to sort of fade um but um so yeah so perhaps i bring you know sort of a certain amount of begrudging baggage to trio that they don't merit so i'm glad that you chaps uh you know and get the joy of it well i mean part of what gets this across to me as a kid is actually Hurl

actually I have to say this that you know that we've often talked about Hurl being sort of overlooking a slight golden age but also we've picked out the things that he did wrong but what he did right I don't think what he did right was tell bands what to do he

just did that perfect thing of putting things in place yeah and letting accidents happen a little bit yeah i mean they would have pitched up and he would have said look we've got this for you we do we want to do this we want to do that want to do that you call with it good let's do it yeah exactly yeah and this is where magic happens yes in living rooms you know yeah that's the very dada, you know, the element of chance. I was on a German exchange in the spring of this year. You know, and I've been back about six or so weeks ago. Hand on heart, I can't remember hearing it once when I was in Germany,

which is fucking mental. Maybe it was played out by then, Al. Maybe it was like a done deal. Maybe it was. But when it was on top of the pot three weeks ago, just 30 seconds of it, it fucking rocks the fucking playground to his foundations i remember one of my mates daryl just saying have

you heard that song that just goes da da da da yeah it's fucking mad isn't it and we got it instantly of course but you know as as we've already pointed out, it created an absolute generation gap. Even with someone who's only a bit older, like David. Yeah, yeah. You know, our parents fucking hated it and started wondering who won the war anyway. Yeah, absolutely. This is a record that would be held up as kind of,

is this even music? You know, it's that kind of record. I do have to be distinguished from members of that generation because, of course, as we know, I am a very rarefied soul in terms of my refined aesthetics. So no one else is going to point that out. You know, I just thought I would. Well, a letter in the Daily Mirror soon afterwards,

which I dug up, entitled, What a load of da-da-da. I couldn't believe it when i saw the german group trio on top of the pops pointing to the words of their hit song da da da on a board all for the songs of my childhood why can't today's composers write such happy numbers as keep your sunny side up happy days are here again all the sunny side of the street you're sincerely rm lord rochford essex ah fuck off granddad yeah kids live in it anything else to say about this it will always be returned to da da da i think when something needs to be summoned, i.e. this kind of futurism that failed, if you like. And, you know, like Slang Tang,

it's a rhythm that's a melody that's a whole record in a way. Yes. God, yeah, same year, isn't it? Yeah, same year. I'm shocked that we didn't hear more of that sound on records. All I can think of at the same time is The Bubble Bunch by Jimmy Slicer. And that was sampled by Delight for Who Was That? And of course, Poor Georgie by MC Lyte, which is fucking devastated.

When that kicks in, man. Yeah, but most musicians, you see, they'd be getting better kit than a Casio, one of those little Casios. Whereas Trio, they're deliberate. I don't want to call them fucking pranksters because that'd make them sound awful, but they're deliberately going for the cheapest thing you can get.

Yes. And it's great when he just pulls that out and holds it close to his face, going, look at me, look what I'm using. Yeah, yeah. Two absolute landmark performances on the same episode of Top of the Pops, and an example of Michael Hull getting it absolutely absolutely right hats off sir definitely so the following week da da da soared another 23 places to number seven and the week after that it jumped to number two hold off the top spot by fame it would go on to be number one in new ze and South Africa and sell 13 million copies worldwide.

And a week after this episode, in the wake of Italy beating West Germany in the World Cup final, Italio Chanza's masters put out Mundial da da da. Not very good. The follow-up, Anna let me in, let let me out only got to number 113 over here and they returned to being a german only concern splitting up in 1984 but the song lived on ended up on an ariston advert in 1987 then a volkswagen advert in america 1997, and an un-par-par version was deployed by Pepsi for an ad campaign during the 2006 World Cup. Sadly, Stefan Remia is the only surviving member of the band.

What a shame. I just imagine just living on a sort of island. It was 13 million sales. I just imagine just, you a sort of island. It was 13 million sales. I just imagine just, you know, at the end of Trading Places, that island they all retire to. Or a massive luxury apartment block shaped like a Casio. Now, why wasn't that the German entry to the Eurovision Song Contest we won? That's Trio, this week at number 30 in our Top 30.

Right, Odyssey, stay at one I hate the most. Some twat with a tash and a boo font, with what looks like Hulk Hogan's thong around his head. Regrets the fact that da-da-da wasn't the West German entry for Eurovision while Hulk Hogan thong twat blows a kiss at us. I hate him. I've seen him on previous episodes of Chart Music and I've always wanted to mention him, but he's not done anything yet and now he has.

I love the fact you have a most hated Zoom. You've got two, haven't't you have you got one nil i think it might be him i think it might be the same guy yeah yeah i mean you had a particular dislike for that horrible smug twat dressed up as dracula in that halloween episode i haven't seen him since up next inside out by odyssey formed in in Stanford, Connecticut in 1975 from the ashes of the Lopez sisters, Odyssey consisted of Luis and Lillian Lopez and a rotating cast of male singers before settling on Bill McEachin, who immediately jumped on that disco train and rode it all the way to Chartland.

In 1977, they lifted a track from Frankie Valli's latest LP, Native New Yorker, and had a whopping hit with it, getting to number five for two weeks in January of 1978. But management problems and an attempt to move away from disco resulted in two years in the wilderness, until they roared back in 1980 with Use It Up and Wear It Out, which got to number one over here for two weeks in July of that year. This is the follow-up to It Will Be Alright,

which got to number 43 in September of 1981. It's the lead-off cut from their new LP, Happy Together, and was written by Jesse Ray, the Scottish braveheart of funk, who was working with Bernie Worrell in the P-funk band Space Cadets. They're apparently backed up by Slave, the Dayton funk band best known for having Steve Arrington as their lead singer, and it's entered the top 40 at number 18 a fortnight ago, and this week it's jumped four places

from number 7 to number 3 this fucking group and this fucking song chaps, Al Simons made mention of certain songs that while you're hearing them is the best single of all time and I've got to say this is one of mine

and I was shocked to hear it on an episode of Top of the Pops as late as 1982 because I always peg it two years earlier at least and the way Odyssey look is kind of update as well especially the chap he looks like he could be from 78, 77 sort of era

yeah totally I was just going to say that it's party for rocks they haven't sort of drunk the old Shalimar Kool-Aid yet definitely yeah this is their last ever appearance on top of the pops this yes but what a way to go out yeah their last top 40 here but you think of the run from native new yorker to this it's amazing but i mean for me it's not actually this record that is my favorite odyssey i think it's um i cannot get over looking

for a way out i fucking love that record yeah i can't forget that but yeah they're so great odyssey lillian lopez what a fucking voice and she's also in this performance she does this thing she repeatedly does actually um remember what i was telling you way back when i think probably the first chart music ever did how scared i was of kate bush and her wide eyes lillian lopez does that all the time as well it can be quite creepy but yeah this is a wonderful record wonderful record like you say Odyssey are clearly not 1982 people the Lopez sisters are

47 and 49 respectively and they're there wearing very ornate dresses in the Lopez sisters almost looks like a sari yes I was going to say that so they're wearing that And Bill McEachin's come as Big Bill Wurbinook

Hasn't he? In his snooker outfit And they're doing not much of anything There's no real There's a kind of a cursory wave at a routine But who gives a toss The single is doing all the work It's a glorious single

I really wouldn't want it any other way than it is. The only slightly disappointing thing was actually old David Jensen's intro, old kid's intro. He just says, Odyssey, you've built up a large fan base in the UK because they're constantly touring. Is that it?

I thought you were going to get a quip or something like that, a really half-arsed Noel Edmonds-type quip or something like that. Yeah. Of the sort he's been attempting throughout the show. I just thought it was a strangely flat, it's a very, very boring fact indeed, really.

It's only barely a fact, really. That's the only note of disappointment. This is a beautiful, magnificent single. And the fact that, I mean, Slave were fantastic. You know, they're really sort of undersung as Slave. Yes. Their involvement is great. Just a touch of love is a fucking tune, mate.

It's a fucking tune, man. Did that ever get in charts here? We're never going to see that on Top of the Pops, are we? No, we're not. Absolutely brilliant. Yeah, watching you, all that kind of stuff. Brilliant. Absolutely excellent.

I mean, I just love the way that the slap bass keeps sort of picking really sort of high and keeps sort of popping up through the mix, you know. There's actually something strangely understated, in a sense, about the whole vocal performance it's yeah it's enigmatic in a sense but all praise to jesse ray oh god yes what a character i mean like he lived in america for a while he was he became a runner in the new york stock exchange yeah to sort of make his money with that and that's how he met roger trant and

bernie warrell and obviously made such a strong impression on them you know when he did his own solo stuff in the late 80s they all sort of dutifully came out to the highlands whatever and and performed on these videos that he did and and over the sea mentioned before fucking amazing that's right yeah that should have been a hit yeah i mean jonathan king should have been sent up to scotland to fucking yeah totally yeah do his bit and i just love the fact that you know he just didn't hold back there was so much kind of sort of scottish you know wet wet wet type sort of white soul at the moment i thought now this is what you want you want yeah you know absolutely mega funky but unapologetically scottish as jesse was scottish people are fucking mad into funk though aren't they when i was in london if i ever met a scottish person

it would be about a 75 chance that we'd end up talking about Sly and the Family Stone. I went to that Sly and the Family Stone gig in Bournemouth, fucking hell, about 12 years ago. And I just ran into a gang of proper meaty Scottish lads from Glasgow. And they were fucking mint. We were gabbling on for ages about funk and what we were into and what we grew up on all that kind of stuff they'd had a hotel room I was planning

on sleeping out on the beach and getting the first train and he says nah come back come back to the hotel we'll get pissed up it's like

yeah fucking brilliant and I lost their phone number and I've always wanted to thank them so if they are listening respect to you

my dears yeah yeah and of course this song is rightly revered and beloved and very, very well known, but I would definitely encourage anybody to seek out anything by Jesse Ray on YouTube or whatever, and just, you know, in his full kilt and regalia and

armour and whatnot, and you know, as you say, it's an absolutely logical link, and I just thought it was an absolutely brilliant riposte to all that kind of Marti Pello-ism, and you know, that was emanating from Scotland at the time, you know, that was emanating from Scotland at the time, you know. He's such, also politically, he's so strange because, basically, obviously, as you can imagine,

he's a Scottish nationalist, he's Jesse Ray. But he wants to take it further. Firstly, he wants Scotland to get its independence and then for the Scottish border regions, you know, Berkshire, to declare their independence from the rest of Scotland. Blimey. He's on a mission.

This record, you kind of don't want it to end. You do need it to end in the context of Top of the Pops, but whenever I listen to it, it's like, I don't know, I know it's not looped in on itself, but it almost is. You don't want it to end because the lyrics, they've got no narrative to them. It's about those first few weeks of love when you're so bound up with someone it's amazing this record well it's a bit more than that neil it's about um being in love with someone who's with someone else well yeah

but it's it's it yeah it's just this beautiful gaseous glowing kind of beautiful thing it's just full of desire this record and it's just unrequited desire but a lovely place to be you just don't want it to end yes yeah the bit where it goes in yeah side out and the bass goes fucking mental it's just like no can we have this for like half an hour and again it's another example of britain adopting and cherishing american songs that can't get played in their own country because disco sucks fuck off absolutely and it's as funky as it is soulful yeah and yes soulful as it is funky and that sounds almost right but there's not an awful lot you can say that about and that perhaps might be something that is extinct these days that you may it may not be actually possible for everyone in time to make a record like this. It belongs, you know,

obviously it's eternal, but it belongs to all of its era. It could only really be made at a certain time. I'm coming after Jonathan King telling us that the Americans should be listening to a juice of fucking Newton and John Cougar. Yes, absolutely, yeah.

The standout song of this episode for me. One of them, yeah. Thank fuck it's still early enough in the episodes that I wouldn't have missed it. Yeah, of course, of course. So, Inside Out would spend one more week at number three, its highest position. The follow-up, Magic Touch, stalled at number 41 in September,

and they never troubled the top 40 again. Although the band are still going to this day, it's a complete triggers-broom situation, as both Lopez sisters died last decade, and McEachin retired a while back. Oh. We'll see you soon, though, Odyssey. You're featuring a lot of early 80s episodes of Top of the Pops.

Yeah. Yes, their performance is somewhat dated, their clothes are somewhat dated, but it could have been so much worse. A couple of weeks before this, Zoo danced to this. Yes, they did. The record.

And oh my fucking God. Yeah. Scrape my eyes out. I think that was the last performance of Zoo as a dance troupe. Yeah, yeah. They wouldn't let him do it. I don't know, because it was so fucking rubbish, what they do to this record.

They almost take the piss out of it, you know? And that's what really aggravates me about Zoo's performance of this. Yeah, it's saddening being dead. I just remember there was a certain time when I realised that astronauts and disco stars were dying of old age, and that's sort of somewhat depressing. Thanks, David. Odyssey who built up a large band following in the UK because they're constantly touring

and that's number three, Inside Out Right, it's time to go to the electric scoreboard now and check out the charts You at number 30, it's Trio and Da Da Da At number 29, up one for dollar and video tech at 28 goody two-shoes from adamant heart stop eating in time from leo sayer is at 27 at 26 do i do stevie wonder at 25 soft sell with torch at 24 i want candy bow wow wow Soft Cell with Torch. At 24, I Want Candy, Bow Wow Wow. With ABC at 23, The Look of Love.

At number 22, up from 28, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Freebird. At 21, it's Night Train from Visage. And at number 20, Bananarama. And here they are with Shy Boy. Thank you. Kid, next to some of the kids and a zoo wanker on another zoo wanker's shoulders just in case we don't see them

tells us that Odyssey are big in the UK because they're always touring then he whips us into the first third of the charts, settling upon Shy Boy by Bananarama. We've already discussed Bananarama on Chart Music No. 27, when they and the Fun Boy 3 struggled to be picked out amongst a blizzard of zoo wankers and balloons while recording Really Saying Something, which got to No. 5 for two weeks in May of this year.

This is the follow-up of sorts to that, and not only is it their first single since the Fun Boy 3 gave them a leg up into the charts, it's their first non-cover version, written by their new producers Steve Johnley and Tony Swain, the knob twiddlers behind Imagination. Originally called Big Red Motorbike, which the group didn't like at all and demanded a lyric change, it was released just over a fortnight ago.

Enter the charts at number 61 last week, and this week it soared 21 places to number 20. And although there's a video, by mid-year and chris cross of ultravox where the romans give a spot played by terry sharp the boyfriend of sarah darlene and future lead singer of the adventures a makeover here they are in the studio let's get into them chart pictures first chaps because as always at this time of top of the pops gestation period they're pretty and sadly professional in the main aren't they they are there's no no no i didn't spot a single oddity amongst the chat i've got one or two i

love you i mean trio are wearing the same clothes as they did in the top of the pops performance leading me to believe that the bbc didn't have an actual image of them and hustled them outside for a last-minute photo shoot. Yeah, very probably. There's that great photo of Soft Cell poncing about with oversized musical notes, which pops up quite regularly on Top of the Pops. It does, and I think

it's on the front cover of The Art of Dancing. Ah, there we go then. There's a really 70s-looking washed-out photo a dollar, when they should have used the picture of them in this week's record mirror when they're all Japanese-ed up. Have you seen that one? Oh my gosh, no. I can only imagine.

Therese is all geisha'd up and David Van Day's gone full samurai. David Van Day's the water margin, if you will. All the cultural sensitivity of a of Japanese boy, basically. Yes, exactly, yeah. There's a satisfyingly crappy shot of Ronnie Van Zandt bellowing into a microphone with a big hat on for Freebird, because that's been re-released. There's a bit of a Greb revival going on.

Yeah, yeah. And a pic of Bananarama looking extremely pissed off at the fact that they've got to hold up some inflatable bananas. Yes. Kind of like predating football terrace culture by a good 10 years or so but they're still not happy about it yeah they do now it's under protest um you know but perhaps that's the whole idea you know perhaps it's perhaps they concede you know the idea and let's let's hold up some bananas and make out we're pissed off about it that'd be very very meta very post so this performance then um i mean the good thing about it is that it looks like three of the better dressed women in the audience

have come on stage to do a turn and in this case that's the bad thing too because let's get this out from the off to me this is no really saying something well you say it's their first non-cover and it is a cover of come see about me basically it's very much a cover the thing is you know as a poptimist i should be into this i should really support bananarama as a kind of counterpoint to to lad rock and lad pop but it's tremendously difficult holding something like shy boy up as anything other than a record really in which everyone us and bananarama themselves really are being entirely cynically manipulated um you said there that they didn't look like they were happy in the shot of the

molding but bananas i mean the key thing for me with bananarama really throughout their career is that never post their work with fun boy free they never look like they're enjoying being pop stars to be honest with you there's always this kind of sense of manipulation sense of stuff that they're uncomfortable with i mean i realize that this this record is never going to be a powerhouse motown type song i realize that the point of bananarama is their weakness in a sense vocally this isn't music for girls to sing along to in their bedroom mirror this isn't sort of betty everett doing the shoop-shoops it's the sound of girls singing along in their bedroom mirror in a sense you know there's there's no harmonies in bananarama's music they all sing the same note and that kind of amateurism can be really endearing but the trouble is what i find here what's sad about this it's obviously a

tremendously exciting period for the girls but i think here be the seeds of problems that they face later on you do have to wonder how much autonomy they're exerting over their appearance and you know this single the b-side don't call us is better because it's theirs it's them their own song um there's an interview with oddly enough another sort of all-female band but obviously completely different the raincoats in 1982 that i've read where vicky from the raincoat she talks about girls being bought into ornament groups and she's talking about the human league now by then i think the girls in the league have totally proved themselves but bananarama certainly become in this period a target for that kind of idea of manipulation really thanks to records like this

because it's a weak sounding record they sound kind of bored which can sometimes be a good thing but they feel and they look on this appearance they feel a bit pushed around a bit pushing it into this and i know that's the bargain that they're accepting do this yeah get hits don't feel particularly happy about it but it always made Bananarama, for me, a little bit uncomfortable in a sense to really get into. Yeah, Neil, because when we cover Bananarama, when they did Really Saying Something in a previous Top of the Pops, we were all for them.

They came off as the three older girls sitting on a wall that if they nodded at you and acknowledged your existence, that was a really big deal. And there was a dubbiness to really saying something that lifted their take on a Motown song. But that's gone now, and it leaves their singing abilities exposed. So while you could appreciate their take on a Velvete single, with this original song, you're left wondering

what the Velvete's and the Motown house band could have done with it. And a bit more than this i'm afraid to say the thing is bananarama they're punks and they're post-punk girls you know and and that's why they work with fun boy three suited it now they are being pushed into this new kind of type of pop for the 80s and and it ill befits them i think a little bit i mean don't of course it doesn't because they end up having a fair few hits. But at no point, I don't think they're enjoying it. I think already, we're obviously years before the pizza incident that blows the band apart. But, you know, I sense already they're not enjoying this. No, it's interesting, Neil, that you say that because I think, in a sense,

that suspicion is kind of vindicated by when they hooked up with Stockake and Waterman. However, I'm a lot more positive about this single than you two chaps. And I was at the time. I really liked it. It's interesting. I think before, why did they seem to get so much press? I mean, obviously, you know, there's the fancy ability factor. I think they used to work as sort of press officers, used to come up to music press officers before my time

and sort of hand out vinyl to journos and editors and probably built a rapport that way. So there was probably a sense among journalists that there were some of us, as it were. Similar thing with Emma out of Lush. I remember that when she did that. But I do like this. I think there is a sort of kinship with human league,

what I was talking about earlier on, in a sense. There's a certain effortlessness, not in the Usain Bolt sense of qualifying for the 100m final, you know, in the semis, looking like he's strolling through. Not that, but a sort of lack of, I don't know, lycra-busting strenuousness that you get from the 1990s onwards. It's that era in pop when women in pop become re-objectified, frankly. There's a certain withering disdain about them.

There's this little half-smile that Keren gives to the camera on the line every minute we're together, and it reminds me of a similar smile that Joanne out of Human League does in the video to keep feeling fascination. It's a half-smile. It's very sarcastic. They're out of sync when they're dancing, and that's great's great i mean whack a hand bag down there on the stage and that'd be about the size of it and if those geezers are only fools and horses like mickey pierce his mate comes sidling up to them they'll just mouth piss off without missing a beat you know there's that you know i like all of that i like them i mean i like

i always like sarah or Sarah, her iciness. She never cracked a smile, as far as I'm aware, throughout the 80s. So, yeah, I do like them. I found the song a little bit weak. But perhaps I'm reading in later Bananarama problems into what they're going through at this point. Maybe they're completely happy doing this. And they've got a big hit all by themselves without having to, know um have some male band introduce them so it is a successful moment for them yes but i just never got the feeling with banana rama they enjoyed success much no well

they're shooting each other looks as they're performing and cocking a leg and lifting a knee and all that kind of stuff as if to say what the fuck are we doing here you know we've been through this week's nme where they were interviewed on music larden and i've seen that performance and it's fucking brilliant simply because the fun boy three are on there as well the audience are a typical european pop audience like bored shitless not reacting to anything and terry hall was exactly the same performing on the stage. So you get this feedback of boredom between him and the audience. It's fucking great. And I think that is okay.

It's kind of mandatory. When I was a kid at school, one of the worst things you could do was have a cheapie, i.e. be overenthusiastic about something. Yes. He's having a cheapie there, isn't he? You really have to curb your enthusiasm. And I think that was kind of mandatory at this era of punk.

I mean, if one thing slightly lets them down, it's what they're wearing. Oh, God, yes. It is distinctly zoo-wankerish. But in every other respect, they are the antithesis of zoo-wankerdom. I mean, they're all mainly in white with sort of colourful bits and bobs here and there. You know, they're wearing banana, well, one or two of them are wearing banana-rama vests, obviously. Unfortunately, in Karen and Siobhan's case, their outfit involves baggy shorts that just look like massive nappies.

Yeah, yeah. So they end up looking like Pamela Stevenson pretending to be Claire Grogan on Not the Nine O'Clock News. Yes, yes, there is a bit of that. And yeah, by this point, I'm starting to wonder what Jimmy Greaves is saying about Germans on the other side. I mean, Bananarama's one of those

bands where you do have to take their singles on a case-by-case basis. And this one, no, it's not doing anything for me. Do it for me. I mean, what normally happens with bands is that they start exerting more control as time goes on. I think it's the opposite with Bananarama. And by the time they're working with Stuyke and W exerting more control as time goes on. I think it's the opposite with Banana Armour. And by the time they're working with Stike and a Walkman, they really feel pushed around.

Yes. And they're not enjoying it at all. No. At least here, we're getting a sense of joy. There is a really powerful sense amongst them and in between each other. The looks that they're shooting at each other are exactly what you said, Al. They can't believe they're on top of the pops doing this. And that is always wonderful to see. i celebrate the slight amateurism i celebrate the fact that

musically they're not harmonizing they're just all singing it like girls would yes who were teenage girls who were singing along to this in the mirror much like their fans would end up being but at the same time do i want to hear it again not sure no not sure if i want to hear it again um but a good presence in pop and certainly useful for the music press in as much as putting bananarama on the cover in 1982 makes a statement of a sort definitely about what kind of music you you think the future should look like so the following week shy boy soared 11 places to number 9, and a week later it got to number 4, its highest position. But already the group were dissatisfied with Swain and Jolle, claiming that they wouldn't let them record their own songs

and wanted them to be an 80s update of the 60s girl group, and the partnership was immediately dissolved. Linking up with Barry Blue, they put out the self-penned cheers then, which only got to number 45 in December, and were slacked off in smash hits for sounding a bit like the coffee tastes nicer with coffee mate advert jingle. So they reunited with Swain and Jolly

and roared back to number five in march of 1983 with a cover of na na hey hey kiss him goodbye with a video featuring them roaring off into the night on three big red motorbikes and shy boy had an infamous afterlife in february of 1983 when channel 4 broadcast the first episode of Mini Pops, a show produced by Mike Mansfield, featuring extremely young kids dressing up and karaoke-ing the hits of the day, featuring three frizzy-haired tots singing

He gives me loving like nobody else I like the way he turns me on. Which led to an outraged letter to Channel 4's right to reply, which read, Minipops should be called Miniwhores. Are you people out of your mind? Fucking hell, Minipops. Is it the children's fault?

Yes, it's the children's fault. Did you ever see that, though? I did, and even as a kid. Even as a kid You felt like a paedophile It's vile I mean Yeah

It really is Immediately spot It was totally dodgy And just should not have happened Let alone on Channel 4 You know I know I know

Very shocking That that even ever existed And those three girls Doing that song It's deeply unpleasant Not only because of what they're wearing But they're made up as well Heavily made up total man yeah the homosemce makeup gun fully deployed well exactly a couple with those lyrics god it's horrific i don't think mike mansfield realized

how um sexual uh lyrics were getting by 1983 i'd love to do a bonus episode of chant music where we do that but it's just... You could not sit through a whole fucking episode like that. It is on YouTube, everyone. Bits of it. At your own risk. Mini Pops is just immensely bizarre because it's when one

tries to identify who would watch that. You cannot answer that question without a host of nerdy worlds and characters. It's just appalling. Who the fuck would watch that and you cannot answer that question without yeah a host of nerdy worlds and characters yeah it's just appalling who the fuck would watch that i think it was supposed to be something for the oldens and something for the kids but the kids would fucking hate it oh god yeah simply because oh that kid they they're famous and i'm not fuck them i mean kids singing pop songs is one of the greatest things in life ever i've got a video of my niece when she was six singing I Love Rock and Roll while I'm playing it on Guitar Hero.

And it's the most brilliant thing ever. But that's because she's so fucking amateurish and thinks it's called Put Another Dime in the Dew Drop, baby. Yeah, it's all the kids on mini-pops. All that stage school. Yeah, it's all about, isn't it? Yeah. You'd have Jimmy Savile wanking in his car around, you know. Oh, please, David.

Neil, before we go, explain the pizza incident. Oh, the pizza incident was one of the major things that broke up Bananarama, or at least that led to Siobhan leaving. Right. It was down to, they all shared a flat, obviously. A lot of, I mean, if you're going to share a flat with people,

that is, especially people that you're in a band with, that you then have to sort of tour with and do everything with. It's a recipe for disaster. I think the pizza incident was the one that shoved them over the edge. In as much as there was a slice of pizza

on the floor that had attracted cockroaches. Right. And, yeah, it caused a massive argument because I think it was Siobhan that left this slice of pizza on the i think it was siobhan that left this slice of pizza on the floor boom siobhan leads the band oh yeah over that pizza slice and that coverage which to be honest with you is better than most of the reasons that bands split up it's a more legitimate reason i would argue the musical differences And don't make me feel good Don't make me feel good

Kieran, Sarah and Siobhan collectively banana-rata. Now that's Shy Boy. Right, that's number 20. Let's go zooming back up the charts. At 19, Roxy Music with Avalon. Up 3 to 18, it's Murphy's Law from Cherie. Las Palabras de Amor from Queen is at 17. At 16, Hungry Like the Wolf, Duran Duran.

ACDC's For Those About to Rock is at 15. At 14, Wonderful Thing from Kid Creole and the Coconuts. At 13, up from 20, Bucks Fizz and Now Those Days Are Gone. At 12, it's Ico Ico from Natasha. At number 11, the Beatles' movie Medley. Now we're going to put our engines into reverse thrust, go back to number 13, and catch up with Bucks Fizz with Now Those Days Are Gone.

Thank you. When we were young and free Love happened easily And dreams never die In the midst of another failed attempt to integrate the zoo wankers and the normal people, Kid handles a second part of the top 30 before rewinding and coming forward with Now Those Days Are Gone by Bucks Fizz. We seem to have accidentally become

the world's leading podcast authority on Bucks Fizz and this, their sixth single, is the follow-up to My Camera Never Lies, which became their third number one single in April, ending the foul reign of Seven Tears by the Gumbe Dance Band and giving way after a week to Ebony and Ivory by Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder. It's the third cut from their second LP, Are You Ready?,

which came out at the end of April, was given a 10 out of 10 review in smash hits and got to number 10 in the album charts. And it entered the top 40 three weeks ago at number 37, then soared 17 places to number 20. And this week, it's jumped seven places to number 13. So here's the video, which was partly shot in Hyde Park and features Mike Nolan as lead singer for the first time on a Bucks Fizz single. Well, chaps, this video starts at the exact same moment that the World Cup semi-final does.

And I'm afraid to say you can practically hear the ricochet of the ITV1 buttons clicking right across the country. I was never dud out. Like a shot. Shameful. I mean, was this deliberate scheduling by Hull? I mean, we've said he's front-loaded all the good stuff, and this is definitely the arse-end of the episode, as we're going to find out.

Yeah, without a doubt. I mean, most of us will have seen this video well before this appearance of it on Top of the Pops, so we definitely don't need to see it again. Nothing miraculous is going to happen in this video that hasn't happened in this video well before this appearance of it on Top of the Pops, so we definitely don't need to see it again. Nothing miraculous is going to happen in this video that hasn't happened in this video before. And of course the video misses the key moment of the filming of the video.

Yeah, you know, the swan attack. Yes. Is it Bobby or Mike who gets attacked by swans? It's Bobby. It's Bobby, and I believe he was mildly injured in this. Yeah, he had to be dragged away by the camera crew. Oh, man. Because we all know what swans can break.

They can. The Frank Baird of the animal world, that is. Size of a dinner plate. Well, quiet. Never trust mute creatures, swans, rabbits. Just don't trust them. If Top of the Pops has said, stay to the end, because we're going to see that swan attack for the first time,

we're going to recreate it in the studio. Bobby G is going to be in a cage fighting with loads of swans. Don't turn over to the World Cup. You don't want to miss it. Well, I mean, we would have stayed without a doubt, of course. Yeah. Before we get into all this Bucks Fizz goodness, let's rewind a bit and go through them chart picks

because, you know, there's one or two interesting ones. Roxy Music. Yeah. Oh, Brian Ferry looks like the manager of a nightclub who's come out to have a diplomatic word with a difficult punter. Exactly, yeah. By a couple of his bouncers, doesn't he? No trainers, tracksuits or baseball caps in Brian Ferry's club, I'm afraid.

Brian Johnson looks like an angry dad trying to tell Angus Young that he's a big lad now and shouldn't be on his shoulders anymore. Buxfizz themselves are basically a four-torsoed Blake Seven villain, aren't they? Natasha, with Ico Ico, I believe, standing in front of some space invaders, which is incredibly passe by the summer of 1982, don't you think? It's all Donkey Kong around here now, isn't it? It's all Donkey Kong and Defender. Yes. You know, definitely.

And they've just slapped up the cover of Let It Be for the Beatles movie medley, because, you know, who gives a fuck? It's only the Beatles after all. So, yes, chaps, chart music, you know, it's been a voyage of discovery for all of us. And two things I've learned is that Bucks Fizz seem to be on top of the pops

all the fucking time in the first half of the 80s. And more importantly, and more frighteningly, I've come to realise that, you know what, Bucks Fizz are actually alright, you know. I mean, we've not done My Camera Never Lies yet, but that is one of the maddest number one singles of the decade. It just goes all over the shop and it's like, oh, fucking hell, this is alright, actually. Well, it's, you know, it is telling. Like you said, the album that this is from, it gets 10 out of 10 in Smack Hits. Yes. And the review, I've read it,

is extremely positive about the songwriting and everything else. In 81, I needed Book's Fizz for a bit of national pride. But by 82, I still needed them, even though I was seeing them as shit already or starting to see them as a little shit. You kind of needed Book's Fizz to be the centre of pop. Yes. To make your own ordinance kind of away from that centre, more plain.

You do need a figurehead of the mainstream to make your musical choices a little bit more interesting. And Book's Fizz are definitely sort of stepping into that come 82 with videos like this. And they're total real. real i mean let's be honest their inheritance of the abba mantle if you like yes i mean i think they've gone beyond brotherhood of mania oh god yes and they are so not as big as abba in terms of how many years of success they've had but they're doing they're doing very abba like songs as this one is as well yes i mean 1982 is books fizz's imperial phase, isn't it? They've already got two number ones under their belt,

and it's still only July. And it's only them and The Jam who managed two number one singles in 1982, let's not forget. But the thing about them was they just couldn't or didn't want to break out of their family-friendly end-of-the-peer, crackerjack ghetto? Well, perhaps at some certain level, certainly. I mean, it feels like they are definitely trying to shake off

the Shakin' Abba thing, obviously, by this stage. Shabba. It's Shabba. Shabba. Yeah, you know, and this is very ambitious, and it was actually nominated for an Ivor Novello Award. I mean, you know, and those dresses are definitely staying on. There's no doubt about it.

Yes, yes. They're serious now. Perhaps they feel that this is the moment at which they kind of ascend way, way, like in a balloon beyond the brotherhood of man,

certainly, indeed. And, you know, they join a pantheon, I don't know, of Jacques Brel, Tim Rice, the Bacharachs, you know,

the sort of realm of like mature songwriting and craftsmanship. Little do they know that right down at number 29 of the charts there's an interloper-in-waiting like Corporal Hitler in 1918 who's going to cut them right up a few years down the line. The great Bob Stanley described this as Home County's potting-shed balladry of the highest order.

Yes. They were ruthless at this time, that's fair. I mean, this is an obvious play for the Radio 2 audience, isn't it? And that's Radio 2 in the old money. I can imagine Cliff Richard absolutely fucking fuming that he wasn't offered this, while he's pouring another bucket of child blood

on his vineyard. Well, quite. I mean, look, Bucks Fez, they could easily have taken sort of wall space in the old people's home that I was living in you know um next to next to tour valentine and that i mean they're ruthless at this time three number one singles and they're each selling half a million only the human league beat that in this period oddly enough by the way yeah it is and oddly enough bucks fizz are offered this year in fact

a 50 minute tv special on easter monday which ends up falling through it never happens but um bobby has said that um their guests were going to be the human league and i mean who knows where that might have ended up oh man especially seeing as the you know the books of his life show at the time included a medley of of my kind of life hot stuff do you think i'm sexy and rocking all over the world so where are you who the fuck knows talking about their tour it's another example of them kind of like downplaying themselves a little bit you know surely band with three number ones you can command some pretty big venues yeah their tour which starts next month takes him seaside resorts

and mansfield leisure center is down there yeah on one of their dates and their support act is bob carol g's and spit the dog but that is them isn't it they were comfortably in between the two but i mean you know these are venues that dollar wouldn't play books for should probably be playing the sort of venues that dollar are playing if not bigger i mean they're enormous at this point. Why isn't Paul Morley banging on about Bucks Fizz? That's a really good question. I think he might have done, you know, actually.

I think he might have done. Not to the same extent as Bananarama, who he did bang on a great deal about, and Dollar, certainly, of course. I think Eurovision is always a big thing to have to live down, really. And you don't necessarily see it. But they've done it. They're a standalone group now, aren't they? Very much so. Making songs that I think the two words that most apply to them are

expertly crafted. And that's what this is, you know? I mean, even though, for me, it's gagging for a kind of ABBA-like pulse behind it, it works. It works as a piece of nostalgia for the people that, you know, might take it that way. But it also works as just a nice bit of harmonised pop. The only trouble is, it's acapella for a long

bit, and that always has that little bit of acapella smuggery. It kind of reminds me quite a lot, this, of the New Seekers anthem from 1976. It's kind of similar, but, I mean, the video in itself, much like all Buxford's videos, they'd

started becoming events of a sort they're doing something for the old ones in this video which takes us all the way back to the 40s don't you know bobby g in his raf togs is essentially taking time out from giving the luffwaff a biff in by slapping it about with both rita crudgington who looks so fucking 40s looks like she's just walked off the set of Shine on Harvey Moon, man. She was born too late, that woman. And Jay Aston, who's essentially playing Jane in the old Daily Mirror cartoon. And in the meantime, Mike Nolan's in an old school radio studio

with one of them proper microphones and a dinner jacket, ruining the 40s effect by keeping his Lady Di hairstyle on. The only thing that's missing from this is David Van Day in a dinner jacket ruining the 40s effect by keeping his lady die hairstyle yes the only thing that's missing from this is david van day in a stuka with an iron cross to be fair both the boys in buxford are letting the side down a bit i think the two girls they look convincingly wartime yes but if you had hair like bobby or Mike in the 1940s... Seven days jankers. You'd have been shot as a fifth columnist or something. You know, and also, how have they got bread to feed all these geese in the park? You know, don't they know there's a fucking war on?

Do you know it's bread, though? It might be powdered egg or something. It might be, but, you know, they're using up one of their ration coupons. Yeah, traitors. You're right, they only semi-commit to it, really, don't they? It's funny you talk about, like, taking us back to the 40s. That, of course, today wouldn't have taken us back to the 80s.

Yeah. Which I think just goes to show that certainly in pop time, you know, there are decades and there are decades, you know, because the 1980s are much closer to the 2020s than the 1940s were to the 1980s. Well, exactly, David, because at the very end of the video we see gian baker sat on a bench and then they transform into what i assume is an elderly version of them 40 years later yeah which is pretty much what they would be now but the 68 year old cheryl baker and bobby gubby certainly don't look like that today fucking hell oddly enough i i mean i i remember lying to my mate and saying that the old couple

at the end were books fears made up right that they were cheryl and bobby made up he believed it i know it might seem that i was a lying little cunt back then i just spent my whole time conning the credulous but um i'm sure i wasn't the only person to you know have a second look at that video sometimes i think oh that could be them you know, have a second look at that video sometimes. I think, oh, that could be them, you know? We need to go back to that old people looking like actual old people. Yeah, you're right. This is a really, really competent song that is going to mop up a big part of the pop market.

But its appearance at this point, yeah, I would absolutely be fucking killing myself to turn over to the footy by now. Yes. Oh, yeah. I mean, you mentioned a pulse, you know, anything that didn't have a pulse to me, it was just dead to me basically at this point i mean we're two months away from the first

anniversary of books fizz winning eurovision which was made quite a big deal off by the band and the media which is mental because it's only a year but the fact that everyone seems to be commemorating it sort of signifies that they have moved on yeah absolutely and it's like oh yeah do you remember we did this every single after making your mind up was almost like a gradual step away from that oh yeah look the fact that we are even remembering books for a year after their eurovision appearance is a miraculous achievement in itself yes so yeah the fact that they're having huge hit albums, huge hit tours and all the rest of it. And I do recommend people seek out the 10 out of 10 Smash Hits review.

This was not a band that could easily be castigated as Eurovision cheese. They were taken seriously as a pop band. So the following week, Now Those Days Are Gone nipped up five places to number eight, its highest position. The follow-up saw them take another swerve and transform into fucks biz

when they took If You Can't Stand the Heat to number 10 in January of 1983. And 24 years later, Now Those Days Are Gone became the only official books for his release to contain obscene language when the demo, recorded by co-songwriter Andy Hill, was put out on their Lost Masters 2, the

final cut anthology of unreleased songs and off-cuts. Yeah, he Fs and Jfs a bit at the end. It's disgusting. Disgraceful. Cut. were going wrong now those days are gone

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applause Applause Applause Applause Applause Applause Applause Applause Applause Applause Applause Applause this short, it's just that they're standing on a ledge above me. Let's go back on the chart. At number 10, Work That Body, Diana Ross.

Mitch Ewers at number 9, Last Week 11, No Regrets. At number 8, up 5 for the jam, Just Who Is the 5 O'Clock Hero. At 7, I've Never Been to Me from Charlene. Shalamar with A Night to Remember is at number 6. Still at 5, Imagination with Music and Light.

Irene Cara's Fame, the highest new entry at number four. And three, Inside Out from Odyssey. This week's number two from the Steve Miller Band is Abracadabra. And incredibly at number one once again, it's the wonderful Captain Sensible. And here he is with Dolly Mixture performing Happy Talk. Yeah! Kid, back amongst the zoo wankers, breaks down the top ten before alighting on this week's number one,

Happy Talk by Captain Sensible. Born in Ballam in 1954, Raymond Burns began his career as a member of the proto-punk band Johnny Moped in the mid-70s, before being invited by Malcolm McLaren to join a new group called Masters of the Backside, which featured Dave Vanian, Rat Scabies and Chrissie Hind in 1976. The band fell apart after one gig, but the non-female members decided to stick together and form a new group, The Damned, who immediately signed to Stiff Records. In August of 1976, while a coach party of bands, including Eddie and the Hot Rods and the Pink Fairies, were waiting to depart for the first European punk festival at Mount de Marseille in France,

Burns got his name when he turned up pissed out of his skull in a shirt festooned with epaulettes and lurched up and down the aisles, pretending to be an airline pilot leading someone to exclaim oh it's fucking captain sensible and the name stuck although the dams accredited with releasing the first ever punk single new rose in october of 1976 and the first punk lp damned damned damnedned, in February of 1977, they split up in early 1978, and Sensible was invited by the band's former road manager to front a Dutch band called The Softies

to record a cover of Jet Boy, Jet Girl, an Elton Mattelo single which utilised a backing track put together by the godlike ludopric of two-man sound which he later put out himself under the name plastic bertrand called sa plan pour moi due to the lyrical content about a 15 year old boy in a gay relationship with an older man who he wants to kill because he's now got a girlfriend it was strangely never released in the UK. In the spring of 1979 the dam reformed and finally broke into the charts when Love Song got to number 20 in May and Smash It Up got to number 35 in October but diminishing returns started to set in. By 1981 when Sensible

noted that loads of people at damned gigs had Crass logos stenciled on their leather jackets, he linked up with Penny Rambo and spent a week with him at Dial House, Crass's anarcho-pacifist open house, and together they worked on his first solo release, the This Is Your Captain Speaking EP, which was released on Crass Records with a cover of Sensible's face on the body of his pet rabbit in November of 1981. It got to number three in the independent chart. Earlier this year, while The Damned was still active, he landed a solo deal with A&M and was linked up with the producer-musician Tony Mansfield, a former member of the Nick Straker band who had just split up New Music, the band he had fronted since 1977.

They immediately commenced work on an LP mainly consisting of sensible songs that Adam had rejected for being too melodic, but discovered they were one song short for the album. When Mansfield told him to pick out a cover version to make up the shortfall, Sensible considered Waterloo Sunset or See Emily Play, but knocked them back when he realised that he couldn't improve on them. So, on the encouragement of Mansfield, he rummaged through the record collection of his parents,

who he was still living with at the time, and pulled out their copy of the soundtrack to South Pacific the 1949 musical written by Rodgers and Hammerstein and zeroed in on the song where Juanita Hall gives her daughter and an American Marine that she's knocking off some relationship counseling when A&M discovered that another artist was ready in a cover of Happy Talk for release, they took a chance and rushed it out as a single three weeks ago. And after extensive play on Radio 1, it entered the chart at number 33, which led to a performance on Top of the Pops with Mansfield, Rod Bowkett, a keyboard player and arranger who'd worked with Cliff Richards,

Rod Bowkett, a keyboard player and arranger who worked with Cliff Richards, Stackridge, Fern Kinnear, Marty Kane and Bernard Cribbins on the single Make Someone Happy Every Day, which was recorded by Buzz Bear, you know, the massive yellow-orange bird who used to knack at you for not ringing up your mam. And Dolly Mixture, an all-woman post-punk trio who were signed to Paul Weller's Respond Records, were once supported by U2, and had just come off the Bad Manners' Gosh It's Tour. To the amazement of everyone involved, the following week,

Happy Talk sold 32 places to number one, becoming the first single ever to jump to number one from a position outside the top 30 and breaking a record which was set by the Beatles in 1968 when Hey Jude jumped from number 27 to number one. I think that's going to be the biggest soaring I'll ever do on Chart Music. Well, I mean, it's the biggest soaring. That record, that lasts for many the biggest soaring that record that

lasts for many many years that record this is its second week at number one and he and dolly mixture are back in the studio for the third time wow where to begin with this i'll start with you david you obviously knew all about captainensible being at that age in those trousers. And I was just about aware that he was in the Damned and a punk. But what did the young Neil Kulkarni know of him? Me? I wasn't aware of the Damned. Even though I think they might have been on Top of the Pops,

I wasn't aware that he was a member of the Damned at all. So what I knew about him was, was yeah this record and these appearances yeah and did i emerge from that with much sense about who the fuck he was no because this performance and this record to a certain extent they're kind of a joke i wasn't getting to be honest with you at that age um although you know eventually i would come to love certain solo Captain Sensible things like what what worked because it's pretty much a pop version of Oggy Oggy Oggy yes you know this this just seemed odd this long-awaited return to number one for Rodgers and Hammerstein it was just strange and the performances didn't help much to be honest with you um i wasn't that familiar with what drunk

people look like now of course i can look at this and think he's pissed out of his face and he was probably well in fact as later reading of uh of features and interviews with captain sensible reveal he was pretty much drunk for the entire period of the early 80s and was drunk when he made the record but yeah what i had in my head was, who is this eccentric chap? But he wasn't captivating, particularly. I was much more captivated by the Dolly mixtures, I think, than Captain Senses. Yes.

Yeah, well, I would have watched this and my semiotic trousers would have rolled up and down with contempt. Primarily because, obviously, I knew, I would have seen everything in the context of punk and pop entries and whatever, and that was a project that appeared to be reaching a zenith in 1982. And the Human League had already cracked number one.

But, you know, there were sort of would-be pop like Scrupulity. There was The Associates, ABC, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now, that was the trajectory that was set, how you were supposed to go from punk to entryism to pop. Not this. You know, they just cracked it. This is something else there was the sort of the wing of punk that was in it for the kind of getting the pit getting pissed

and having silly names like captain sensible because he's not sensible at all he's a bit nutty um nor is he a captain no no he's not no that's right yeah yeah i'm gonna say this is the wing commander it's a bit sorry isn't it but there you there you go. So, yeah, I would have disliked this intensely, and I would have despaired at the country that was buying this in droves or whatever. Musical eras like this were precisely equivalent to Thatcher even getting re-elected or whatever. It really was.

I mean, when I first heard it and when I heard about it, I was convinced at some point it was going to pull on my way with Sid Vicious and, you know, start in a sort of serious way, but then just go off on the song. And as I listened to it the first time and as it went on, the realisation sunk in that he wasn't going to do that at all. And it was just like, god is that it yeah yeah and of course now it comes off as a big in joke played on the oldens who bought it in drugs but

immediately took against it sid definitely didn't die for this i felt no certainly not but no i think that's true i think it is just that basically it is a parody of the kind of the shit one-off st winifred's type single, basically, delivered with a vast, vast dose of sarcasm. But what is happening is, nonetheless, people are unironically going to record shops and paying unironic cash for it. We're talking about the old ones. We're talking about there would have been people

sitting in living rooms having this beamed at them who would have grown up in the Edwardian age. And I think that this is genuine nostalgic feel-good balm you know for a certain existing demographic as it was and i mean because you can't clearly it was an enormous success and something has to account for that it will meet again for the falklands war isn't it yeah yeah yeah i mean friends i'd make later older friends they'd say that when this came out, you know, they'd be dealing, if they were working in record shops, with, you know, little old ladies coming in,

asking for records by Captain Sensible, and having to resist, you know, selling them Tam Tam Dan, for instance. It's odd, thinking of the fates of that class of 77, if you like, the jammer in the top 10, the clasher break in America, stranglers kind of in their way, also have an oddity kind of record with Golden Brown.

They're all finding ways to do stuff away from the centre of pop, perhaps, while still having hits. But this, I mean, this is just, yeah, like David said, this is definitive novelty fare. It's weird because obviously it's number one, but it's not a big seller. Do you know what I mean? It's one of those for a few weeks smash midsummer novelty hit that attracts enough attention during a kind of week sales period to slip up to the top position.

You know, it only noticeably spends eight weeks in the top 75 in total. So the joke obviously wears thin quite quickly for a lot of people. Happy Talk, I looked at the charts for the top 50 best-selling singles of the year, and Happy Talk's not even in that top 50. Yeah. Which, oddly enough, is a distinction it shares with Beat Surrender. Right. You know, similarly, Big Smash,

but they don't stick around long, and they don't sell that big. Just need to note something. Dolly Mixture, their album that they sort of put together themselves and self-release called demonstration tapes which bob stanley i think reissued bob stanley's coming up a lot today isn't he um yeah he he reached it on i think his mint royale label it's actually well worth seeking out that you know they had that they were great um but captain here is clearly as pissed as he was when he was recording it.

There's a fantastic interview by the wonderful Carol Clark in Melody Maker with Captain Sensible round about the time this was coming out. This very week. This very week, indeed. Where he says, you know, he backs up everything you said, obviously, about the recording of it. I mean, he says, what can I do with this song? I couldn't play it because it had a key change and i can't play the black notes on the piano so he says all i did was go down a pub get extremely drunk and wait for them to make the

music yeah and he seems to have continued that drinking all the way through to this appearance because this isn't just wacky zaniness this is he looks trolled to be honest with you it's not unpleasant to watch no but it's not dangerous or anything like that um yeah it's a big fat fucking laugh so that's how he's being portrayed in the music press uh let's have a look at how he's being framed in the tabloids because there's an article in last week's sunday mirror called this star is so daft he's sensible call him a disgusting slob and he'll love you for it but clear away the smelly socks and general disorder from his pad and he'll probably spit in your eye this is britain's number one hit loony captain sensible a name specifically chosen because that's what he's not throughout my interview with

him he was hell-bent on maintaining the image of the nauseating layabout i have been known to be sick all over myself he said and generally behave in a revolting manner so would money and newfound stardom change his bawdy habits nah governor said the former toilet cleaner from croydon south london who now does gigs in the nude i won't change i love living in squalor and there's a photo of him naked playing the bass i bet he did not use the word governor thankfully not holding the bass to one side like ashley out of imagination we don't we don't see any uh any of that nonsense i mean although it predates the tv show by nearly six months to these jaded eyes of mine captain sensible's coming off in the media as a one-man mashup of the young ones oh yeah yeah you know what i mean he's got that tinge of violence like Vivian. He's got a beret like Rick.

He's a bit of a hippie like Neil. And I couldn't think of anything to do with Mike. So let's ignore that. You know, he's a lovable layabout. Yeah. He's a bit wacky. I think there is definitely an understanding, you know, that he has some sort of punk origin. You know, there's a strong inkling.

I think even the old girls watching this would have a sense of that. Oh, he was one of them punks. Exactly, yeah, yeah. And I think he kind of plays on that. There's that little bit at the beginning of this where he seems to kind of be like, yeah, to the rabbit girls,

before sort of backing off as if to say, nah, it's all right. We're all right, really. We're just, you know, we're punks and all that, but we're cuddly, really. You know, have a cup of tea. Yeah. Like the sex pistols in that

Danny Boyle atrocity that's about to happen and I can see again you know this is betrayal you know you've deliberately de-radicalised yourself for the kind of Top of the Pops shilling you bastard. This is his third appearance on Top of the Pops

what has he come as this week chaps? It's sort of Wurzelgummidge Pirate, isn't he? Yeah. Yes, Wurzel Gummidge Pirate. Has he got the bird on his shoulders like in the previous one? Yeah. And Dolly Mixtra are rabbits singing into giant carrots. There's daisies painted on the studio floor.

There's tinsel and balloons everywhere. And as in the previous performances, there's a model seagull that's flapping its wings overhead looks really realistic it looks like it's been stuffed which is a bit grotesque there's a deliberate shitness to it isn't it yeah there's a kind of deliberate mathness to it and i think he is kind of cocking a snook uh the sort of po-faced pomposity of certain aspects of new pop here yeah there's a very telling quote in the interview with carol clark the the aforementioned interview, where he says, we all liked Happy Talk after we'd done it.

I thought it was definitely better than the Human League. I don't like them. They stink of dog shit. Yeah, very nice. You know, I think he is surprised that this becomes a hit. Oh, yes. And he's sort of surprised and delighted as well, a dolly mixture. It shouldn't have been that surprising

though. I think if you're going to take this particular song which i've got to say as ever with chart music i've been fucking humming this all bloody way it's an incredibly well crafted song yes it is and it was a song that was known about it was you know it was it was on the national playlist for quite a while yeah rod you know roger tamstein, first return to the charts since you will never walk alone, actually. Really? Yeah. I mean,

it's their first number one since then. A lot of people seem to think you never walk alone as Joey in the Pacemaker song, but it ain't. No. It's from Carousel,

isn't it? Yes. I think he's massively surprised. Consequently, he's kind of taken the piss with all of his appearances, but there is a little bit of, look, we're going to use sense. We're going to do this old cover um we're not as po-faced as what

else is going on in british pop music at the moment and yeah return for tony mansfield new music we've raved about them not even covered them once on chart music yet but we're dead keen on them so good to see him back but what a shame it's on this yeah i think that's the trouble though not wanting to be po-faced is part of the british disease yes yes i mean he sings the song straight which is a bit bad but then on the other hand you know imagine this in the hands of someone else he doesn't lean into the pigeon englishness of the original which was a song written by two jewish americans sung by a black woman and mimed to by a mixed race woman pretending to be polynesian imagine if he'd have punked up the vocals that would have been truly awful oh fucking hell yeah i mean i'm

not to pick on the guy but you know i imagine jimmy percy doing this and something like that you know i mean whereas at least he just keeps it flat. And consequently, you know, for the old folk, and let's face it, it is going to be old folk buying this. Yes. His punk roots are completely eliminated. He's more of just the kind of wacky, zany Ken Dodd type figure. Definitely. You know, more than anything else.

I tried to find out who the other major artist was who was thinking of covering this song. Oh, right. Couldn't find it anywhere, but I'd take a guess of Anika. Yeah, yeah, yeah. She's got form for this sort of thing. It'll be part two of a racist trilogy

no doubt. It's calibrated to appeal to everybody apart from the people who usually watch Top of the Pops, i.e. people like me fucking hated it at the time doesn't get played enough for me to hate it now so you know there is that but the only fond memory i have of this song is that i've got a tape somewhere of my mom singing it to my sister at the time and when it gets to the golly baby i'm a lucky cusp it my sister just says did you say cunt and my mom corrects her

without batting an eyelid and and they carry on i mean that was the thing you just thought well there's got to be one time where he just sings i'm a lucky cunt even if it's unintentional maybe this would be it this uh this performance but no he does draw it out a little bit inviting of course he does yeah yeah yeah that story you told earlier on about the recording it just reminded me of that apropos of nothing really i when i was like 15 and um that was my catholic school and um i had a school essay and it was just meant to be sort of in the kind of vernacular of a northern man you know sort of hovis type thing and you know and it was he kept saying couldn't a lot. And quite innocently, you know, I kind of, you know, he says, you couldn't make it up.

You couldn't credit it. And I was writing C-U-N-T every time in this thing. And it came back with these red rings. You know, my teacher handed back the exercise book, absolutely glowed at me. And it was honestly, I was not being subversive. You couldn't make it up. You couldn't.

I was like, you wouldn't come't appear 12 times in this short essay and obviously i really really wasn't i was an innocent boy but i also think i mean look this is not a record about nuclear war it's not a record about falkland's war or anything sort of socio-political but in a sense the enforced geology of it is in a way making us not a political point as such but i think that's potentially why it sold so much. There's no subtext here. Well, it's not Ghost Town, is it? No, no, it's not.

So the following week, Happy Talk dropped to number three, being usurped by Irene Cara. The follow-up, the adamant diss track What, got to number 26 in September, and his LP, Women and Captain First, only made it to number 64 in the same month, while The Damned's new LP, Strawberries, got to number 15. After putting his solo career on hold for two years, he left The Damned in 1984, and his next solo release, Glad It's All Over, got all the way to number six in April of that year.

That's a fucking tune that is. That's the great lost new music single. Don't remember that one at all. Oh, it's brilliant. But Diminishing Returns set him when his double A side Christmas catalogue and Relax. Yes, that Relax only got to number 79 in December of 1984 and he was dropped from A&M. Sensible rejoined the Damned in 1996 and still tours with them today while his record was eventually broken by Pixie Lott in 2009 when boys and girls jumped from number 73 to number 1 in September of that year

because it's the 21st century and the charts don't mean shit. Well, absolutely. That record just goes. And before you know it, you're in a world where, yeah, Lily Allen entered the charts last week at 168, now soars to number 3 without a bat of an eye in it. You know, this kind of stuff happens. No, fuck that

it's not the same is it fuck that but it's interesting to learn that your mate's working at the record shop and fighting not to sell damned records to non-Oz because I always thought

that was a bit of an urban legend it would have happened and the weird thing is I mean with what coming down the pipe a few months later what was traditionally held up by all the old people

that I knew as you know this is terrible. Not offensive, but kind of ridiculous that this can be a pop song. This kind of back and forth chant. So he's kind of, you know, Captain Sensible is kind of held up in about a few months time as evidence of just how empty and shit pop is. But these were all the fuckers that were buying Happy Talk. Oh, man, the old ones turned their back on Captain Sensible.

They did. They went off and bought Spread a Little Happiness. Yeah. And went to see the film that it was in. Fickle old bitches. Yes. Then you'll never have a dream come true. Captain Sensible, then, still at number one. Next week's Top of the Pops will be introduced by Peter Powell.

And this week, we're going to leave you with the music of the Steve Miller Band. And moving to it are some magicians from the Human Circus. I think you're going to like them. Kid, back amongst the throng of zoo wankers, warns us that Peter Powell's coming on next week and signs off with Abracadabra by the Steve Miller Band. Born in Milwaukee in 1943, Steve Miller was the son of a jazz-crazed mam and dad and the godson of Les Paul. When he was seven years old, the family relocated to Dallas

and offered up their back room as a demo studio to the likes of T-Bone Walker, Charles Mingus, and Tal Farlow. And the young Steve was encouraged to have a bang on the guitar by godfather Les. In the mid-50s, he started his first band, The Marksmen, which consisted of him, his brother and his best mate at school, Boz Skaggs. And when he started attending the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1961, he started up Steve Miller and the Ardells with Skaggs in tow. They were put on hiatus when Miller

went to the University of Copenhagen for his final semester, but he packed it in with only six hours of study left to be completed and decided to take his band to Chicago and get immersed in the blues scene of the time. After running into and jamming with Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and Buddy Guy, he linked up with Barry Goldberg, a keyboard player who was in the Paul Butterfield blues band and was a part of Bob Dylan's backing band during his electric performance at the Newport Folk Festival and they formed the Goldberg Miller blues band and moved to New York but didn't get on with

it and he ended up in San Francisco where he formed the Steve Miller Blues Band in 1966. After they backed Chuck Berry on the 1967 LP Live at Fillmore Auditorium they were signed to Capitol, knocked the blues off their name on the recommendation of George Martin and ended up on the bill of the Monterey Festival in June of that year. It would take five years and eight albums for the Steve Miller band to get properly sorted out in America when The Joker got to number one on the Billboard chart in January of 1974. And it would take another two years after that

for their first dent on the UK chart when Rockin' Me, his second US number one, got to number 11 in November of 1976, their only British hit thus far. Earlier this year, when their 12th LP, also called Abracadabra, was being prepared for release, Miller pushed for this to be released as the lead-off single in America, but Capitol Records didn't reckon it at all. However, Phonogram, their European label, were all for it and it got to number one in Austria, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.

And even the Brits went for it when it came out last month when it entered the chart at number 38 then soared 26 places to number 2. After an airing of a very expensive-looking video on Top of the Pops, it jumped 8 places to number 4, and this week it's up 2 places to number 2. Now, normally, chaps, that would warrant a pan of the kids and the zoo wankers in the studio or a fisheye view of the studio lights, but hey, it's 1982. So Michael Hurl has riff or a fish eye view of the studio lights but hey it's 1982 so michael hurl has riffled through the classified section of the stage and booked in some magicians to do

their pieces in between clips of the video i mean he rolled the dice with trio and came up with whatever's good in craps which i've never understood but in this case he's tried to repeat that trick, and this time the dice have gone right off the table and under the settee. Been hoovered up by his mum and lost forever. I contend. Indeed. I

concur. You contend and I concur, definitely. The magician's not really that magic, is he? Well, there's three of them. Well, the one who looks like a kind of mustachioed Frasier crane. Yes. He's bloody awful. Definite animal cruelty issues going on with what he's doing.

He starts pulling a variety of species out of the box. And I'm fairly sure a couple of those creatures are dead. They don't seem to be moving much. And then he closes his stuff by pulling a deeply unimpressive amount of handkerchiefs out of a cocktail shaker a cocktail shaker that looks perfectly adequately sized to contain that many handkerchiefs it would be it would be more magical for me to pull tissues out of a man-sized kleenex box it's not really magic well no that's more difficult you know the first the first few you usually get a right fucking watch don't you that's true that's true i mean the stream that there's one in a dinner

jacket who looks just like a zoo wanker who was actually standing right next to kid jensen and kind of like walks off when the song begins and starts dancing yeah before he starts doing his pieces there's that bloke the animal cruelty bloke with a receding hairline, but there's someone else with an absolute fucking uber Keegan of a perm who does ball tricks. Amazing hair.

He looked like, he reminded me of Jim McLaren from Porridge, actually, a little bit, that guy. But what's he doing? Kazooing his mouth, bouncing a football on it? This is not magic.

No. Also with magic magic magic requires undivided attention well exactly good didn't it you know bloody steve miller's all right you know harpy on in the background it's yeah it's not an ambient thing well magicians kind of do suit top of the pops in this era because magicians are all about look at me look at me look at me but they're also about distraction so you've got loads of zoo wankers doing the look at me bit and then you've got them and you've got the video and you've got the music and you've got the neon and you've got the balloons and you've got the flags and you just can't focus on anything it's a bit of a headache isn't it

and you do need distraction from what zoo are doing most definitely of course there's an appalling bit where city farm they join hands and they start jumping up and down steps it's horrible yes it's horrific i think near the end you know there's a really horrible bit it's like really blokey and space entitled you know all those sort of chaps get together the sort of people who barge their way onto the center of the dance floor the ballyhy nightclub or something you know there's there's no grace about it i mean pans people there was always grace wasn't there there was a certain you know not necessarily gracefulness but there was grace

in terms of their presence they didn't feel invasive there was dignity these feel yeah exactly these people just feel invasive and horrible but truth be told

couldn't they have shown the video couldn't they have just shown the video yeah well they've already shown the video they don't like

showing the same video twice yeah but it's a well expensive even though it's 1982 how many times have you seen it? Well, this is it. You know, there's no MTV. You might not have. You probably haven't got a video recorder.

You know, you're not going to see it on Breakfast Time or TV AM because they don't exist yet. There's no Channel 4. Just show the video. The song for me, because I'm a kid, I'm an idiot at this time. I mean, look, I love this song. It's well catchy. And it was intimately associated

with the video for me i was annoyed in a sense that it kept cutting to the video and then just depriving us of it and showing us yes city farm wankers again yeah because which we've seen well we've seen them we've seen them plenty of times we don't need to see them anymore it is i mean i cannot believe that capital didn't think this was a single. It's mental, isn't it? It's mental. It's blatantly the single off any album that it would appear on. It's catchy as fuck. Very, very simple song. But it's simple, catchy. And it has, I'm not saying it's avant-garde or anything,

but the guitar solo is kind of mad and kind of wacky and full of sound effects. It's got a similar sort of appeal to the reflex later on by Duran. It's kind of gimmicky, but absolutely. It's like a similar sort of appeal to the reflex later on by Duran. It's kind of gimmicky, but absolutely... It's like being trapped in Defender, isn't it? It is, but immensely ear-catching for a kid. So let's talk about the single. I mean, I've got a very sweet tooth

for Steve Miliband. Fly Like an Eagle and Rocky Mayhem. I've been playing them recently. It's like, fucking hell, these are good. I'm not supposed to like these, but fuck it, I do. Yeah, I would have just hated it. I had like, fucking hell, these are good. I'm not supposed to like these, but fuck it, I do. Yeah, I would have just hated it. I'd have a very salty tooth for them, really.

It's just slick, white, orthodox. But I will grant you that it is absolutely very, very memorable indeed. I mean, so from that point of view, I mean, it certainly does a job. Horrible lyrics. Very sort of Donald Trump, isn't it? Grab, you know, grab them by the pussy. Yeah. Well, let me stop you there, David,

because it's actually the woman in the song that sings that. Because the lyric goes, just when I think I'm going to get away, I hear the words that you always say. So she's the grabber. And of course, you know, that's all right, because feminism, et cetera. Well, I don't know.

I think it's still very risky, really, because, you know, he's saying it, if he'd sort of said, I want a great gentleman, you know, and conveyed a distinctly feminine voice, then it would have been in the clear, absolutely. I want a great gentleman, grab you. You see, that's obviously a woman.

Yeah. Obviously. Yeah. Such a fine line between sexy and sexist, isn't it? It is. And the thing is, you know, it's like, who's listening to the lyrics? All you're listening, it's a bit like the Bruce Springsteen thing. Born in the USA, didn't you listen to the lyrics?

No, of course not. You know, you listen to the key line. So all I ever heard for years and years was a bloke singing, I want to reach out and grab you. I mean, maybe Donald Trump could have used that defence. In any case, you know, Steve Miller's clearly in a consensual relationship involving magic. So, you know, if he's clearly in a consensual relationship involving magic. So if he wants to reach out and grab his partner, as long as it's not too grotesque and she doesn't mind that he's not just doing it to show off to his mates.

I think that's fair dues. Okay, fair enough. You're a bit more liberal in Nottingham. Al, why did you have to say consensual relationship involving magic? And I've now got you, obviously, McGee and Daniels in my mind. And Scat Dungeon. No, sorry. I think it was a bit doubtful.

For years, I think it was a stigma. I think, you know, it affected me. It probably affected my attitudes to women for many years. You know, who's to say? I mean, you know, in your formative years, when you hear these things, you know, the sort of things that are sexable. My case comes up on Thursday. In any case, what else rhymes with abracadabra I mean come on well I know I mean it's it's tough isn't it I mean obviously he's done it because he was thinking of something that

rhymes with abracadabra I suppose it would be like hey there hey there hey presto I really want to molest you. Just as bad, I suppose, isn't it? Yeah, pretty much. Or he could have sang, I want to take you to Tesco. Maybe, maybe, I suppose. I can scoff at you, David, for being lyrically wrong about Abracadabra, but my head is bowed at the moment because talking of lyrics that you didn't get, I've come up with an absolute oh, what, wow moment.

Oh, really? I've had it in my head until today that the lyric in this song goes, silk and satin, leather and lace, black Betty with an angel's face. Right? Which is a callback to the Ram Jam classic of 1977. Of course. But I've only just realised what it actually is. Do you know what it is? Go on then. Right, which is a callback to the Ram Jam classic of 1977. Of course. But I've only just realised what it actually is.

Do you know what it is? Go on then. Black panties with an angel's face. And that changes everything for me. Because not only a pair of drawers with an angel's face on it would be all kinds of fucking wrong, particularly if it was a biblically accurate angel as taylor's pointing out but now i mean all i've thought about all day is frank spencer going

ooh panties so yeah i never heard the black betty thing but now of course i'm thinking about betty dry yes not in a pair of knickers with a biblically accurate angel on it, though, eh? No. I'm going to stop now, actually. But yeah, Neil, leather and lace. Leather ampersand lace. He's brought that into the dictionary of rock. How astoundingly prophetic of him. And I'm sure he didn't know the legion of shit rock compilations that would ensue. legion of shit rock compilations it would um it would ensue david's thoughts are actually very much reminding me of uh miles davis's quote about steve miller which i love um in his autobiography miles davis says i remember one time it might have been a couple of times at the fillmore east in

1970 i was opening for this sorry ass cat named steve miller ste. Steve Miller didn't have his shit going for him, so I'm pissed because I got away from him for this non-playing motherfucker, just because he had one or two sorry-ass records. I mean, you've got to imagine that in Miles Davis's voice. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I just hate the fact that he's called the Steve Miller Band or whatever, you know, it's like, you know, Frills,

does what he says on the tin. Give yourself a name, ACDC, whatever, you know. But, yeah, it's a slick white orthodox, as I say. And I think what really would have bothered me, you made a list earlier on of all the things that are imminent, Al, you know, like video and Channel 4. This is the very, very last, the last knockings of the era in which pop time is really

really precious and this yes this would have pissed me off because it was really eating into my very precious pop time what you're moaning about david you're watching fucking your heroes west germany oh i mean by this on itv now well yeah it's a show to be honest about we all would have been by now i would have thought yeah i have flicked back about three or four minutes in and gone, oh, it's that, it's abracadabra, okay, flick back. Because I'd be hoping it was just who was the five o'clock hero by the jam, who suddenly just made an appearance on top of the pops out of nowhere. I was terrified I was going to miss something like that.

So I'd have flicked back and then gone, oh, and flicked back over again. But I suppose with things like this precisely because they're actually well crafted in a way they don't just occupy precious minutes of top of the pops they sit in your brain you know they're earworms or whatever so they have that kind of add-on insidious effect and this was one of the big anthems of the summer of 1982 yeah yeah but i mean i didn't know life was just very very different these days i mean by and i carried this through right into being a music journalist and for me it justified you know the Summer of 1982. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, I mean, I don't know. Life is just very, very different these days. I mean, and I carried this through right into being a music journalist. And for me, it justified, you know, the kind of absolute roastings I would give out to music that I disliked.

Because, you know, a song like Baby Jane by Rod Stewart, which I think is the worst song, worst pop song I've ever made, whatever. I just deeply resent the fact that I heard that 80, 90 times. And I can play it now in my head. I deeply resent that. 80, 90 times, and I can play it now in my head. I deeply resent that, the way that people resented U2 putting their album out on everybody's mobile phones

and all that shit. But now, I don't get bothered in the same way with this anymore. I think most people can just live in a bubble, really. There's rubbish music out there, but it doesn't detain me for one single second. I don't have an opinion on Adele, because I had never knowingly listened to an Adele record. It's not eating up space in my head or sort of taking up you know my precious the only thing Adele takes

up is that um rack in Tesco's where the toughies used to be I mean yeah yeah video's expensive though isn't it I like that spinning ball I still can't work out how they do that yeah and they've got animals in it but it's a white rat being treated nice by a slinky woman who uh who is joan severance who was a model at the time yes she later became hulk hogan's love interest in the film no holds barred so there you go that's my second hulkster reference anything else to say about this no i'm saving my abracadabra story which you could say it will be appetite here i'm saving it for halloween um there was what oh no there was a moment in my life where i heard the word abracadabra in a truly terrifying scenario oh no come on you can't leave oh i was

just lying on my bed in my flat in York, right, where I studied. And this flat had a bit of a history to it. We were students and we wanted to move in in June, as I recall, for our final year at uni. And we were told by our landlord, no, sorry, you can't. They found a body under the floorboards. And then they found a skeleton. Now, York's obviously an ancient city. It could have been ancient.

But we didn't tell one of our roommates and luckily he got that room but that room was full that whole house was full of spooky shit the one thing i really distinctly recall and i honestly i wasn't doing drugs or anything i was lying on my bed listening to something and i don't know the record had finished had lifted, and deep in my ear, well, right in my ear, this demonic voice, genuinely demonic, said abracadabra in my ear, and it scared the living fucking shit out of me.

Now, you could say... Did it reach out and grab you? No, it didn't, and fuck, but my God, that was scary. Granted, I was a suggestible child, and teenager, and young adult but I'll never forget that that was terrifying I mean I can listen to

Abracadabra by Steve Miller no problem it doesn't raise traumatic memories but yeah what about if he crept up behind you and whispered it in your ear don't Al that's shitting me up don't even fucking say it sorry man so the following week Abracadabra I don't even want to say it. Sorry, man. So, the following week, abracadabra...

I don't even want to say it now, Neil. Oh, it's creepy. The following week, that song stayed at number two for one more week before entering a large box, having swords thrust into it and disappearing out of the charts.

However, its success over here and throughout Europe forced the hand of Capital Records, who put it out in that there Yankee land where they make all the films. And it got to number one for two non-consecutive weeks in September. Fucking hell, man. We're even ahead of the game on America's own fucking singles, man. Useless bastards. Backwater. The follow-up keeps me wondering why

only got to number 58 in September and that was their lot over here for the rest of the decade. But in 1990, Levi's ran an advert where someone who looked like Madonna's latest boyfriend rode a motorbike into a stock exchange office and lobbed his girlfriend some jeans to put on to the sound

of the joker their 1973 single and it spent two weeks at number one in september of that year it is unfathomable to me why this record company thought this wouldn't go down well in america i know is it do you reckon it's because steve mill Steve Miller in America has got a bit more of a catch-it and kind of people like know who he was and therefore the contrast with him doing this quite new wavy kind of record. Oh yeah. Might have unsettled them a bit. I don't know.

But it's mad because it's an insanely catchy song. It's a big dumb catchy song for a big dumb catchy country. You know, I don't see what the problem is. I think they're worried that the likes of Johnny Fever wouldn't play it because it's too disco uh of course maybe yeah maybe maybe yeah but you see i would have refused to have danced to this on principle um you know i was very very discrimined there were certain things you didn't matter what you know there was something kind of romantic brewing on the dance floor if this came on i would absolutely as a matter of principle whatever the situation storm off in high dudgeon.

You know, you only dance to funk. It could be white funk, but you do not dance to... I was very strict. I wonder if I wouldn't even dance to Motown. I just thought, or if I did, I'd do it in a pointedly sarcastic way. You want to sort of bust some contemporary moves, you know, with some nuanced

rhythms and what have you. That's how I felt about it. I was very, very strict about this sort of thing. Dancing like fucking Andy McCluskey, eh, David? And that, dear boys and girls, is the end of this episode of Top of the Pops. What's on telly afterwards?

Well, BBC One whippers straight into the fourth episode of Fame, where Coco's band do a benefit show, but Bruno develops stage fright, but everything turns all right in the end because it's fucking Fame. After the news, it's episode six of the drama series Oppenheimer,

where the inventor of the atomic bomb starts getting mithered by Joe McCarthy. After that, it's the concert series Night Music, and this week, it's a chance to see Sky in concert. Great. Then we go back to David Coleman for highlights of the World Cup semi-finals in World Cup Report, then the weather, then close down at a quarter past midnight.

BBC Two eventually ensures that my dad doesn't stop me from watching the end of the football by putting on summer festivals where Paul Gambaccini and Fran Morrison take us to the chittest of festivities to see someone play the piano in a cathedral. Then it's news night, highlights from today's cricket and they shut down at five past midnight. ITV are ten minutes into the West Germany-France game with no goals as yet, and unaware that they're about to screen the first ever penalty shootout in a World Cup, which fucks the rest of the schedule right up. So they presumably follow up with news at fucking ages after ten,

followed by regional news in your area. Then TVI nipsed over to toxteth to find out if any lessons have been learned after last year's riots then it's hill street blues what the papers say and they close down at god knows when so boys what are we talking about in the playground tomorrow morning imagination um of course shalimar for sure uh although probably you know with equal avidity to haven't seen it the first time oddly enough you know i genuinely did go out and buy um shy boy by maranarama right like i'm a very soft spot for that didn't like much maranarama before then or subsequently but that that one kind of you know it got me

is that because you were a shy boy, David? Underneath those trousers? Could be. Oh, yes, yes, could well be. Yeah, that's probably it, yeah. I think we'd have been talking about, yeah, Geoffrey Daniel, I think would be top of the discussion, probably about how sick we were getting

of that Captain Sensible tune. My mates would definitely have been talking about ACDC. And I think imagination were always talked about whenever they appeared um so yeah that's what we'd be chatting about what are we buying on saturday so as a kid i'd have been getting imagination trio and possibly that's about it as an adult odyssey yeah shalimar yeah um dc um in fact quite a lot of them yeah what a strike rail in this episode there is definitely and sorry another thing i would have been talking about probably in fact inevitably would have been which member of bananarama i found said um the most which was probably Karen. I would have bought, I actually did buy Odyssey, of course,

and I did buy, as I said, the Bananarama. It was the only Bananarama record I ever bought. And I think that's about it. I would have probably not bothered this time with Imagination. Already got it, really. And, of course, I would have already got Don't You Want Me. And I should, sort of not been quite so much up my own arse and actually invented it in ACDC

it might have made a man of me but I didn't and I was just disappointed I had high hopes for Trio and Da Da Da and I felt they were dashed really so yeah But hey, we got a decent chocolate bar out of them didn't we? Trio doing the advert music for Trio would have been fucking amazing.

With that girl. And Derek Griffiths, fucking hell. They could have done a whole album of that, man. They could have done the United one as well. You know, my name is Sam, I am a fan, all of that. I am the boss. And sometimes I get cross. And what does this episode tell us about July of 1982?

Well, you know what? It was a lot more interesting than I might have thought, I think. Yes. You know, I think pop's getting more colourful in a way than the kind of glowering early 80s years. Things at the moment, when this episode comes out, they could have gone kind of one or two ways. We could have ended up with more perversity and oddness,

if you like, a la Trio, or we could have gone more competence and slick professionalism, as in all the shit that Jonathan King throws at us. Unfortunately, Jonathan King's world wins, as I think 83 and 84 prove. But things are still sort of nicely up for grabs in this period in a way that I wasn't expecting.

I think this tells us that 1982's got to be taken really seriously as one of the great years of music. Oh, totally. Yeah, definitely. I think we have to extend that golden age out from 1979 right past 1981 and into at least the middle of 1982. I think the problem with 1982 is, is like 1980 it's a year stuffed with brilliant music but the number ones are shit yeah yeah because the oldens and the nor'ears and the kids are still having their say the toddlers what a high water mark of humanity july of 1982 is this

kind of quality on top of the pops and and a decent World Cup. Fuck hell. Take me back there, please. Yeah, great times. And I would agree, I think I'd ultimately probably plump for 82 as the greatest pop year. Simon makes a strong case for 81, and I think it is a strong case.

I thought it was a great year too. And then 83, the descent begins. I mean, it's Howard Jones, Nick Kershaw, who are just kind of peroxided chancers, basically, who don't have this kind of punk trajectory. And actually, the Smiths, although I loved them at the time, they're the kind of, you know, the first white group in ages, you know, coming from that sort of Mancunian background,

who are clearly, who, without funk, who have no relationship, indeed have a disdain for black music, or Morrissey, certainly. And I think that in itself you know although you know the smith's early smith's records are very great they represent a kind of re-caucasian firing as it were of rock and pop music and you know they're the first group to break off that relationship with great black music that you had since punk yeah and in 82 kids are still into music if you like that is and when i say kids i mean not little kids yeah like you said out a few minutes ago you know little kids and oldens um i mean teenagers they're into music that their parents can't fathom out

and that their parents think this isn't proper music whereas in 83 both kids are into things like like david said howard jones you know howard jones is never gonna rub an older person up the Whereas in 83, both kids are into things like David said, Howard Jones. Howard Jones is never going to rub an older person up the wrong way with his feather cut and his basically sort of synthy prog type music. Whereas in 82, there is still that thing of, I mean, I remember my parents saying to me, this is barely music. That's what you want to hear as a kid. You really want to hear that. That is what you want to hear. Whereas in 83, I don't think that's what you want to hear as a kid you really want to hear that you know that is what you want to hear it's in 83 i don't think that's happening as much so yeah an underrated year 82

as this as this episode proves really was i was always saying to my daughter alicia you know this isn't noise it's just music and so we come to the end of another episode of chart music Episode of Chart Music. All that remains for me to do is the usual promotional flange. So www.chart-music.co.uk, facebook.com slash chartmusicpodcast. Reach out to us on Twitter at chartmusic, T-O-T-P, money down the G-string, patreon.com slash chartmusic. Thank you, Neil Kulkarni. It's ever a pleasure. God bless you, David Stubbs. A pleasure indeed.

My name's Al Needham, and golly, baby, I'm a lucky cunt. Chart music. Thank you. easily dreams never died life sung a pretty song now those days are gone styling hey everybody gotta wear clothes

and if you don't you'll get arrested but that don't mean you gotta let some fashion designer in New York or Paris tell you what to wear clothes express your personality so express yourself and not someone else do Calvin Klein, Bill Blass or Gloria Vanderbilt

wear clothes with your name on it no of course not so you table the label and wear your own name. All dressed up with no place to go. No sweat, says Kelly. I'll just run around the block a few times. And she probably won't be running alone in this versatile outfit.

Perfect for stopping traffic and starting who knows what. Manny. All the brakes been going well for Manny. He's wearing the B-Boy look. B for breaking, and boy, do that look tough. David. Who's the hippest cat in town Ain't no doubt when David Around with semiotic trousers

And hair and fitness He's the 80's nod to 50's splendor Stay cool David Thank you. And now I'm not gonna stop Just a bet And I'm going to survive It's me I am trying to fix the thrill of the fight Rising up to the challenge of a rival And the last don't have a soul to praise And keep watching us all with the eyes of a tiger. A los brazos. ¡Dance, dance!

¡Dance, dance, dance! ¡Soy! ¡Aleja el baño! ¡Aleja el baño! Oh, yeah, baby. Oh, yeah, baby. Oh, yeah, baby. Big screen. I'm thinking, long ago, when we were young and free, love happened suddenly, and we could not see Where we were going wrong Now

Those old days They're Fucking gone I fucked up