Chart Music: the Top Of The Pops Podcast - #66: March 15th 1990 – De La Stoke

Episode Date: June 24, 2022

The latest episode of the podcast which asks; has anyone ever lost their virginity while listening to a Jive Bunny record?It’s the long-awaited return of Our Sarah and Taylor after their encounter with the Spiteful Armoured Bollock, Pop-Crazed Youngsters – and to welcome them back, Al allowed them to pick out an episode. Consequently, we’re heading deep into the heart of the Neighties. Your panel are a) being Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning without the sex, b) hovering over the pause button during the Top 40, and c) playing Human Frogger on the way to a Blue Boar, while the music scene is awash with flares! Pob faces! That dance where you look like you’re walking on a bouncy castle with a pint in each hand! Ridiculously misplaced optimism! And BLEDDEH DRUGS, of course!Musicwise, crikey: we’re promised a Rock n’ Roll episode by Simon Mayo, who looks absolutely shagged out having been up since 5am, but the overriding theme tonight is British people finally coming to terms with dance music whilst plundering as much of the late Sixties as possible. Wayne Hussey warms up for his date with James Whale with some Pub Goth. New Kids On The Block do something pointless and futile with a basketball. Candy Flip – the Jedward of Madchester – cause the Kids to hysterically scream as if John Lennon had ripped himself from the grave and turned up at the studio to have it out with them. The B-52s have a better night out than you. Big Fun, Fish and Wet Wet Wet get about 20 seconds each. Bobby Omnishake prances like an absolute tit, everyone whoops at an Inspiral Carpets suicide anthem, Jive Bunny throws down some hardcore Dad-Hop, Quentin fancies Lindy I.D.S.T., and we get some actual House music at the end. For about 30 seconds.Sarah Bee and Taylor Parkes join Al Needham for a clinically intensive rummage through the Spring of 1990, veering off on such tangents as a comprehensive drill-down into Mike Read’s Heritage Chart, what not to do when cleaning out a Fleshlight, the Stone Roses/New Kids war in the Smash Hits letters page, Showaddywaddy’s Bloods/Crips dilemma, how the Martians wisely self-isolated and wore masks for a couple of years, and some remarkably graphic sex talk. And swearing!Video Playlist | Subscribe | Facebook | Twitter | The Chart Music Wiki | Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This will certainly have an adult theme and might well contain strong scenes of sex or violence, which could be quite graphic. It may also contain some very explicit language, which will frequently mean sexual swear words. What do you like to listen to? Um... Chart music. Chart music. Chart music. Hey, up you pop-crazy youngsters, and welcome to the latest episode of Chart Music,

the podcast that gets its hands right down the back of the settee on a random episode of Top of the Pops. I'm your host, Al Needham, and standing with me today are Sarah B. Shigal. And Taylor Parks. Afternoon. Oh, they're back, pop-crazy youngsters. And I'm just going to lie back and let them shower me with all the pop and interesting things go well i went to see one of my favorite bands mccluskey um at a private gig um a small venue in hackney with about 100 other people um out of whom approximately 30 contracted the novel coronavirus

and that was seven months ago fucking hell and yeah i've got that long covid that um all the cool kids have these days oh shitting hell yeah so you know fucking mccluskey which i'd get my hands on them they're dear old chums of mine or at least one of them is and uh i forgive them it was really not their fault okay yeah um andrew andrew the singer got it as well for the second time oh his whole family him and his and and his missus who plays bass and uh their little girl all had it and um yeah so bummer yeah i basically shielded for like 18 months until i was fully jabbed yeah or double jabbed at least you know before but this is pre-booster and i was about three and a half months out from my second jab because what i was gonna do was like go out and do a few things and then like just nip back into hibernation before my immunity started to

wane and i just mistimed it i guess you know you went out enjoying yourself sarah that's what you did enjoying myself i mean you know it's really my own fault but that's the thing is that it was at the time you were still supposed to wear masks on public transport at least but obviously a lot of people didn't bother and it was just i i was mad as hell for quite a long time and i'm not necessarily over it yet just thinking about like well the chain of the way that these things work it's all incremental and it sort of works its way between it goes it passes from one person to another person to another person until it hits your face and it's just like oh maybe if one person had worn their mask for 10 minutes instead of leaving it on their chin i might be able to like

go out and do stuff and everything but how are you now dog uh just really tired the thing is that the first i mean you know we bloke and i both had it pretty badly to start with i mean not not hospital badly although his blood oxygen did plummet at one point just because you start to get better and then there's a dodgy bit where you might get loads worse and he just felt really ill and his blood oxygen was like in the toilet so i should probably call you know it's 111 isn't it it's not 101 yeah that's that's when your neighbors are having a covid party you call 101 when you're having a covid party just you on your own then you call 111 so we called them and they were like yeah get an ambulance round and it was fine and they checked them all out and they're like no you're right um but that was slightly hairy so yeah we were like pretty much down for the count

for the first kind of two months um and then he started to get better and i kind of didn't i have got better since then but it's really slow and it's very sort of incremental the fatigue is the thing i have had issues with fatigue before and i have i wish i had more words for it you know like there should be at least 30 different types that you can should have distinction it's a cunt isn't it let's just leave it to that it's such a cunt yeah so yeah it's just that the distinction between these two is that like for the first three months it was basically like a giant industrial fatigue fan kind of on full blast all the time and now it's more like a sort of industrial vacuum just that kind of has a few different settings so what i'm saying is that

first it blew and now it sucks but i'm all right and it's nice to be back i must say oh and it's so nice to have you back ducker taylor well i understand the spiteful armabolic came and knock knock knocking on your door as well yeah it did but i was lucky and uh i think sarah was the last one on the delta train which is a which is a tough train to ride yeah it might have been early omicron but we'll never know yeah i got what was definitely omicron um but although i felt terrible at the time uh i seem to have recovered, perhaps just out of sheer subconscious determination not to be laid low by anything with the initials B.A. to Lord Fortescue in 1859, I am doing little but dimly walking on along the dusty twilight lanes of incomprehensible life.

So, mostly that. That's the spirit. That and the usual hard work, ensuring my place in history as the non-venerable, non-bead riddle that no one had any particular reason to solve but that's long-term work in the meantime i've mostly been glued to the heritage chart we might read oh i've not seen this yet yes we got sarah to thank for that i am afraid so this is a strange discovery so i happened upon this late one night.

The only other pop and interesting thing that I have to report is that we have acquired a small neurotic dog who is currently on my lap. What's his name? His name's Dee Dee. Dee Dee? Dee Dee. Nice. After the Ramones?

Yeah, pretty much. Also, he had two previous names, both of which started with a D. And he is also a Dachshund and a dog. Oh, nice. Yeah, I mean, he was in need of a new home pretty urgently. And so we said, yeah, we'll take him. And to settle him in, as is good to do with any new dog, I was sleeping on the sofa with him.

This is a couple of months ago. Right. Just to have some soothing background noise. And for me to snooze to, I put on the talking pictures channel right which shows kind of archive and vintage films um there's loads of really good stuff on there um and also lots of just dreck and lots of kind of amiable pleasant 1950s flotsam which is quite nice you know the sort of the gentle rhythms of those things are quite nice to fall asleep to when you're settling in your fretted dog so i i tuned my television box

to talking pictures one night and who should i see but our old pal mike reed yes when i was expecting to see you know the mystery at clifton point or something and it's like mike reed what are you doing here are you going to upset my dog did he upset the dog upset me i've heard about this but i've not seen it like two girls one cup yeah it's just it's just there concealed in the schedule between the quota quickies and the episodes of big breadwinner hog um look for anyone who's foolishly never seen this program this is a show where mike reed dressed as a 16 year old from 1979 his hair an oddly even shade of brown but his chin hanging down in the shape of an upside down jelly um just sort of dangling there like a flesh chandelier and his voice the

same as when he was young except if you were listening to it on a tape machine with the batteries running down right um and he sits inside a pulsating neon cube in standard definition and introduces a chart which exists only in his head voted for by people on the talking pictures website i think um and so he's always proudly saying this week's chart voted for by 350 countries and he it's like 16 people in 350 countries you know it only the bands that are on yeah i think perhaps and this chart comprises current singles and online only releases from the heroes of yesteryear and in some cases complete unknowns who just happen to be the same age as the heroes of yesteryear so it's something for the oldens then at last yeah oh that woman would be so proud yeah it's what it is basically

none of these old fools can get proper record deals anymore old-fashioned so it's like the egalitarian leveling down of the internet age means that they can still create product and, you know, get it out there. A bit like 90s music journalists, you know, who would be a painter man. But what's so great is that when you watch this, it's mostly videos shot by somebody's nephew on a Samsung Galaxy. So it's just like the artist hobbling around some street in hastings or wherever they live now but they've put it in black and white or they of course they've put on a load of colored confetti effects or just whatever comes as a preset on windows movie maker or something

but soon you're going to see a video with a watermark on it saying you know free video editor.com trial version they often have as well the um kind of karaoke style the lyrics in really big fonts yes laid over the images as well yeah like you know those modern lyric videos where it's just an animation with the words coming up on screen it's like those but because it's like old people and they don't know what they're doing you'll get like a comic sans lyric video or something like that because it's all so imprecise fucking hell and also there's all these videos made up of stock footage that's just like off the peg just hd junk like drone footage of a lake or something and like a close up of a horse and a dog and a little baby and stuff just edited together with like the new one from tears for fears underneath or something so who

features on this chart then come on tell me well it's quite reassuring um that most of these people are still alive first of all yeah i mean I hate being in this demographic because it's like watching an advert for a funeral plan with Betty Boo in it or something. But it's nice to see them again, even if it is a bit innovating to watch what is technically a pop music program where every male performer is wearing a hat. I mean, I'm not being mean, but once you notice it, you can't unnotice it.

Right. The honorable exception is Peter Cox out of Go West. And I'm not being mean, but once you notice it, you can't unnotice it, right? The honourable exception is Peter Cox out of Go West, who, as my friend pointed out, should really be called Go Bold. But he's all jimmed up and symmetrical, so he gets away with that sort of Ross Kemp on horny divorcees look. His voice is still good. He's got a hand at turns. He still sounds exactly the same.

Oh, who cares about the music, Sarah? Fuck no. He is very, very bold, though, it's true. Fair play to him, because the only other hatless guy I've seen in seven weeks of watching this programme looked like The Scream. From his LP, The Scream Sings. Includes this version of Don't Worry Coco,

Mum is only looking for a hand in the snow. So it's basically the pop equivalent of those Masters five-a-side matches in London Arena. Yeah, yeah, it really, really is, yeah. It's the same people, but they look weird and they move slowly. Who else was on it? Limahl turned up. Oh, really? Yeah, he now looks like a sex doll.

Or like a little Jack Grealish action figure. Got run over. Because like a lot of these people, I think he's been somewhat tweaked physically since appearing on The Roxy, you know. Like Toya came on, like Toya's new video right our favorite is toyah encased in a toyah shaped botulinum shell there's a hunky but somewhat confused looking paul young who now does cowboy music because that's all his ragged voice can stretch to yeah he's got video filmed in his front room and you feel for him because if charity shops were chart return no

parlay would still be at number one yes oh did he have a hat on i think he had a cowboy hat on he's homeless then he's not laying his hat down oh this is terrible news. Ow. Tony Hadley as well. Oh, Tony Hadley. Tony Hadley out of Spandau Valley. He was on there. Perhaps the only one of these people you won't hear on Gary Kemp's Rock on Tours podcast. The Undertones. Oh, yeah.

The Under Undertones. Some Undertones. Yes. Not the Undertones. No, Fergal Sharky. Yeah, Oh, yeah. The Under-Undertones. Some Undertones. Yes. Not the Undertones. No, Fergal Sharky. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, he's off protecting fish now, so that's his deal. Bit of nominative determinism.

Some Buzzcocks. Merillion. Some of Merillion. Yeah. Owen Paul. You know Owen Paul? God, yeah. He did My Favourite Waste of Time.

He's on it. He's got a sock that's like Mumford and Dad's. favourite waste of time he's on he's got a so it's like mumford and dad but he turns out he's got a cap and a beard and shades he looks like he's been smuggled out of occupied belgium he must be super bold oh yeah yeah that's yeah that's he's playing in a band with uh saxon dale's girlfriend on back in. Right. And with a certain deadening inevitability, Chesney Hawks turned up. Yay! Now coming across like Julian Lennon,

if his dad was shit too. And indeed, Julian Lennon himself, who scarcely believably has just released an acoustic cover version of Imagine. Oh, no. No! Possessed him. Oh, Julian.

He's not even getting a cut of the royalties. So, what's the terms and conditions for being in the heritage chart, then? Just be old? Yeah. Who's the youngest person you saw on it? I can't think. I mean, it's Taylor who has seen more of it than I have. Who's on it from the 90s?

The Boo Radleys. What? Oh yeah, the Boo Radleys. Yeah, some Boo Radleys. The Stereophonics. Oh, really? A band from this century. Good Lord. Glad I missed the Stereophonics because I think that really would have upset the dog. So it's voted on

by people from all over the world but yeah, it is basically it's mike reed's choice isn't it they've given him his own show on on this weird little channel it basically it looks like outsider art from 1993 it's it's quite it's quite a sight and it's difficult to i i feel like people are in it for for sort of different reasons it immediately comes across as like the most desperate thing you've ever seen just people trying to cling to their kind of former glory as their face falls off but it's not necessarily that for everyone there are people who just who enjoy doing it it's their their gift they like to share it they enjoy doing it they enjoy

the pleasure it gives to others they like being recognized occasionally in morrison's but not getting harassed that's the dream for some people and it's like they might have they maybe they made bank back in the day they don't really have to worry about money maybe they've got something else going on that that makes them enough to tide them over you know there's people who are perfectly happy to be on the heritage chart with my creed and then there are people who are just clawing desperately and you can kind of pick them out quite easily so like lee john just perfectly perfectly content to be doing what i mean sadly um you know always had a great voice still has it sounds really great um looks great it's true unfortunately inexplicably doing a

cover of betcha by golly wow but when i saw it um i don't know if they fixed this in later episodes but um the caption came up and it had a typo in it it said betha by golly wow which by coincidence is my roller derby name the thing is that like obviously a lot of these people are of of a certain age um mike reed is now 74 and most i know i know what the fuck but uh age comes to us all and the thing is it doesn't fucking mean a shit it really doesn't it's it's like ageism is like it's the forgotten ism it's the last acceptable ism and we do it to ourselves and others and it's a scourge and an irrelevance however if i'm being awful it'd be awful sarah i'm gonna be awful it can be unsettling to see old pop stars still trying to be pop stars like in the way that it would be to

see old gymnasts you know like are you sure that you can and want to be doing this yeah so there's that current of unease. Running underneath the whole production for me. And the ones that don't give you that discomfort. Are the ones that remain free of self-consciousness. And the need for validation. Which is the case with all music made by anyone of any age. But especially older musicians. It's like how much the fuck do you give.

If you're at home in your art. And in yourself as an artist. You know you'll never grow old. The thing is as well. It's like if you weren't good to start with you won't be good now if you were then you might have retained it or you might have lost it so there's just a lot there's a lot going on all the time isn't there with every single it's exhausting i mean i i hardly i could hardly get through a whole episode except for the times when i was just fascinated by it and just glued to it you know i'm not saying that all these people should have been like the character whose name i can't remember in the story whose name i can't remember by guida mopason who finds one day one

single gray hair on his head and exclaims finney it's like i'm watching like the guitarist out of dire straits who isn't mark knopfler his new record like who knew he was still with us and you just look at i'm thinking this bloke used to get his chicks for free i mean fucking doesn't anymore yeah and lee has got a video which is it's like you couldn't take this any further it's lee john performing in front of a still photograph of a beach at sunset that would be considered too generic for a windows lock screen and he's moving but the clouds and the waves are not it's like mike reed has lived his dream and actually frozen time um trapping lee in this eternal moment but the the three e's stand for extra exciting event horizon

so you know wasn't the trocadero open that day? Yeah, it closed, Al, quite some years ago. Oh, right. I don't fucking know. I don't care what happens in London. But this awareness of current affairs is why we end up watching Mike Reid's Heritage Chart Show. But Lee still sounds all right. I've got to be fair.

Hats off to him, so to speak. But I just wouldn't want to watch his video on ketamine, that's all. You wouldn't want to watch any of this on ketamine, to be... Well, I was thinking as well, like, Heritage, it's interesting, like, I think the official title is The Heritage Chart Show with Mike Reed. I wonder if he lobbied for it to be called Mike Reid's Heritage Chart Show Considering every episode starts with the words Mike Reid presents in massive letters I think probably he would have been allowed to call it whatever the fuck he wants

With its theme tune by Mike Reid Oh is it now? Fancy that And his backing band the Immigrants No not really I love your Calypso number I fancy that. And his backing band, The Immigrants. No, not really. That's what he should call himself. A lovely Calypso number. Why hasn't he rigged his own chart yet? Come on, Mike.

You know you want to do it. Well, he's got a few people in there who think, who's this bloke? I've never heard of this bloke. Who's voting for this bloke? This is just an unknown. And then you realise he probably came to fix Mike Reid's bath. A couple of weeks ago.

And he's like, I, did I ever tell you? I was in the music business. Oh, yeah, really? You know, it's a bit of a cheeky monkey thing going on. But he's very hard to love, Mike Reed, even now. You know, even at the point where you might want to sort of, you know, pat him on the head. He's no, no, no, no.

Basically, I was recently watching an old episode of uh pop quest the 70s kids pop quiz program yes um the third series of which was presented by mike reed from the early 18th century right when he's got no glasses and this absurd black add haircut, like a powdered wig. He looks like a disinherited nobleman. Edward Radcliffe, second Earl of Derwentwater's breath, stinks. Mike Reid has got to... He's sat there looking like a bad at maths Isaac Newton and you're just praying for an apple to fall on his head, but an apple with a massive ball bearing inside.

And I was watching, thinking, he's always been the same. He's a groovy fun crusher. That's just what he's all about. He's like, hi, kids, are you chewing in the bin? He's, I mean, out of everyone, if there is desperation in this show, I think the kind of motherlode of it is situated within the shriveled heart of my creed you know because he wants it more than anyone else who is in that chart i think oh yeah oh yeah and if there was ever a former top of the pops presenter concerned about heritage it's mike reed isn't it hey tight fits new one's quite good though

is it fallout decent it's funny the word heritage as well it's kind of like hipster it's not something nobody does anyone self-identify as heritage it's something that other people will use to define you and probably not kindly for the most part but i don't know maybe they're sort of reclaiming it you know like i said i think a lot of people don't give a fuck they're perfectly happy to be here but some of them are desperate to to be there just for some oh there's there's little interviews as well it's like it's not just the chart rundown really there's little interviews where that like i said the resolution just getting further and further just getting the pixels just getting larger and larger until you can't even see who it is you know yeah all done over zoom

yeah yeah well no they have people go in the studio as well and sit with mike yeah the zoom what's about that i saw like interviewing the lead singer out of men without hats yes who perhaps should uh rename themselves men without hits um certainly it's fair to say that men without hats is now a bitterly ironic band name. Yes. No, it's a great show. But I got a bit disillusioned watching one of the most recent ones, actually, because some actually still famous old people had records out,

and he showed all their videos, so it got a bit boring. I don't tune in for that. I tune in to see The Fizz live at Goose Green, you know, and all that sort of stuff. But it's, I watched one, it was Pink Floyd's record for Ukraine. Sting's record for Ukraine. Marillion's record for Ukraine. Lads, it's Ukraine, not me-crane. Fucking hell.

I mean, it is touching, this overflow of compassion from a country that is not let's face it not noted for giving a shit about other countries um i think it's a kinship built up over all those years we've spent next to each other on drop down menus gives a sense of familiarity you know which i think probably explains why we also give a toss about the united states of america yeah and uganda but yeah no it's a great show and you don't need to feel bad about laughing at any of these people because every single one of them owns a six-bedroom house that's worth 900 times what they paid for it in 1988 so what they do now they do purely for love, the love of music, right, which is how it should be, right?

As we all know, you shouldn't be paid for anything you enjoy. Certainly not. That you just don't hate doing because payment is compensation for suffering and or stolen time. Anything else is a hobby and you should fucking do it for love right your passion yeah that's right yeah so what you're saying taylor is we may have just coated them down but we've never forgotten that they've been on the heritage chart so yeah the heritage chart everyone go and check it out how long does it go on for it's an hour long it's an hour that means there's

two repeats of fucking tipping point that's not on the telly at the minute so i'm all for it and remember one day this will be the real chart when nigel is in number 10 anyway you know what we do right about this time pop Pop Craze youngsters. We stop, we drop, we bow the knee, and we give the rightful praise and recognition to the latest batch of people who have lobbed their hard-earned cash down our well-worn G-strings. And this month, those people are in the $5 section. Phil Robinson, Paul Kay, Minneapolis Fuckhat, Stuart Mills, Jeffrey S. Dixon, Kieran, Gaten B, Morgan Marshall, George White, Ken Aiden, Johnny Holloway, Amy Kayser, Hannah Blarwitt, Joanne Longworth, Michelle Lyons,

Tim Ward, Riley Briggs, Mark Atler, Simon Mulvaney, Pete Boardman, Peter Moore, and ill-fitting Casio. Bless you. Bless you and keep you all.

And in the $3 section we have Mark Colclough Matthew Evans Nicholas Leach Paul Braithwaite Saps Jim Tomlinson And Chip Steaks

CHIP STEAKS Oh and Kat and Don Whiskerando You jacked it up a little bit didn't you this month You lovely lovely people. You come with me into the back room and watch me degrade myself just for you. But no touching. No touching. And of course, as well as seeing me defile myself for their entertainment and getting the latest episode of chart music ages before you minge bags who

haven't dobbed in yet the pop craze patreons get to tinker and a tanker and a fiddle and a diddle and a whiddle and even a piddle with the new chart music top 10 i've got it in front of me should we have it ch chaps? Yes. Hit the fucking music! We've said goodbye to the Mary Brennell Boys murder, Sugar Blokes, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Glitter and Jeff Sex, which means two up, two down, one non-mover, one re-entry and four new entries. New entry straight in at number ten, Mini Horse. A former number one down three places to number nine,

the bent cunts who aren't fucking real. A non-mover at number eight, here comes Jizzum. New entry at number seven, the worst dressed homosexual in the Castro. And a re-entry at number six, for rock expert David Statham! Into the top five,

and it's a new entry at number five for Heap Big Cunt. Up one place from number five to number four, Bomber Dog. Into the top three and last week's number one has dropped two places to number three,

Two Ronnies, One Cup. Up two places to number two, That Dog's Dead dead now which means the new chalk music number one and the highest new entry semiotic trousers oh what a chop me did i was expecting a higher placing for Hick and Jism as a sort of tribute, you know what I mean? There were a lot of Pop Craze

patrons who asked if they could change the vote in the wake of Dennis Walkman dying, and I said no, sorry. What a shame. Dave Lee Travis didn't change the top 40 after John Lennon died, but he said it in a sad way. I remember listening to that chart, and he said, down so many places to number 21.

Just like starting over by John Lennon. He was upset. But did he change the chart? No. So what do you like about Travis? He respected a chart. Poor old Dennis Waterman. Yeah.

There goes Chisholm. At least he got a couple of years out of those teeth. So the new entries, mini whores, what are they all about? Sort of like baby metal, but not as good. Anything to chip in there, Taylor? No, because... What's going through your mind when I say the word mini whores? Don't ask him that.

Thinking of Shetland Pony. The worst dressed homosexual in the castle. That's obviously, you know, Fred Wedlock. Oh, yeah. That sort of thing. Yeah, yeah. He big cunt. Yeah, what was that from?

That was Johnny Cougar, wasn't it? The fucking tiger thief. Oh, right, yeah. I just think he'd be a really piss poor adamant shaking ant, if you will. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And semiotic trousers as well as whatever mad shit david likes yeah i think they would be angular so if you want to have your say in the only chart that matters as well as getting every new episode in full with our adverts long before

everyone else you know what to do pop crazy you grab this keyboard right in front of you and you mash mash mash patreon.com slash chart music and you hang on have i got any change on me no i haven't i would have rattled a bit of change there and you pledge all you can well whatever you can i know times are hard but chart music is here to get you through those hard times brothers and sisters that's true so this episode pop craze youngsters takes us all the way back to march the 15th 1990 a year that we've kept away from so far but one that sarah and taylor were very keen to get stuck into and And hey, who am I to break their little hearts? So me days.

I asked you to pick one out from 1990. And you've come back with this. And I've got to say, you've chosen well. But what was it about this one? Yeah, well, because this episode pretty much represents 1990 as I remember it, having been 17, 18 at the time. The peak of the 90s yes a new dawn it was going to be do you remember a new dawn for the human race pure optimism pure beauty time for

the guru I don't think we ever figured out whether it was you know 1990s as in the decade um the as if he was claiming the entire decade was time for the guru or if it was simply if he was being a bit more humble about it and saying 1990 is yeah time for the guru i guess we'll never know now we'll never know no it wasn't anyway so it really wasn't the 80s was a bit short on preening Thatcherites, wasn't it? 90s was going to be his time. Any zero year is going to be interesting, just based on the fact that it's like an infant that doesn't know where its own hands are yet, you know. It doesn't know what it's doing.

It's a lot of jumble, a lot of detritus. You know, like in the way that the theory is that dreams are basically your brain just processing all the stuff that it couldn't process while conscious. Like the first year of a new decade is sort of it's sort of like that isn't it it's all the kind of it's a processing of all the all the junk before of the previous one before you can before anything new can come yeah i don't know if it's down to how old i was at the time but i think the key word of 1990, in everything, not just music, is optimism.

I mean, the South African government have finally listened to Jerry Dammers. Paul Weller's finally brought the Berlin Wall down. Everybody's got the arse about the poll tax. People are finally starting to believe that the foul hag Thatcherax is about to finally fuck off. There's a general sense of relief

that the 80s is dead and a burning desire to kick on and put things right yeah don't you think yeah humanity never learns does it really it's like yeah it's a new it's like i always used to love new year right because it's a secular festival it's the festival of the fresh start and i just thought there's something so pure about that and maybe i will come around to this again but especially having had two absolutely shit identical New Years on the bounce the last two years, I've just been like, fuck this shit.

We really need to get a handle on the fact that, and, you know, it's like, no, nothing's going to be any different. This is just going to be the same, possibly a bit worse. It's a false dawn, isn't it? Although, of course, obviously a lot of stuff, not least Thatcher did get shifted this year yes so fair enough see i remember that in 1980 people were very optimistic about the new decade yeah that worked well and 1990 as well i think that had gone by 2000 i

remember on millennium night i was at my mate's house and I walked back to my house and on the way I passed this very drunk bloke who was staggering down the street coming the other way and as I passed him he looked up at me and went what's the fucking difference and I thought yeah you speak for us all mate

but this episode is not I assume the fact that there's no proper acid house on it, but of course, it's like watching the top of the box from 1969 and complaining that it hasn't got the stooges on it. No, of course it hasn't. But other than that, I think this is a fair representation of 1990, at least as it was in the sixth form common room,

you know, and on the high street. And it is what you would probably have been hearing as your train crashed into another train because they'd recently been privatised and so corners were being cut to increase profits at the expense of human safety. But you probably wouldn't have minded because you were probably on one mating.

Yes. You know. And of course, that's the other thing, Taylor, because there's a feeling that everyone in the music industry is to use the words of my mum bloody drug in it yeah drugs are back hurrah sort of well did they ever go away i mean the immediate moral panic about the drugs is is over i think i i would say that moral panics only last a season, really. That intensity doesn't last very long. It's kind of months, isn't it?

But it has now become encoded in the mainstream. So this week's smash hits, it was interesting to see two two-page adverts that struck me, one of which was the famous drugs, you never know what they'll do to you, the effects can last forever campaign. So yeah, this campaign had like a picture of a sort of picturesquely messed up kid. Um, and a bit of copy talking about, you know,

you're going to lose your job and you're going to have to sell your ass and all of this, which is, you know, the effects of, of serious drug addiction, which is everyone knows is what you get when you take a drug once or occasionally.

The other two page ad being, uh, for, uh, it was anti-smoking, um, and the message being, you really need to give up smoking because it's going to cost you 200 quid a year so that was think of how many drugs

you could buy with that kids that's the most important reason the only reason in fact to give up smoking is to you know cost a living um so yeah also like any right thinking person i'm obsessed with public information films some of which made by the now sadly defunct central office of information which if they'd still been on the case maybe i wouldn't have long covid that's all i'm saying exactly so there were you know there were some public information films about the drugs um there were two entitled chris and friends which were very vague about drugs. There were pills, pills, and more specific, it was pills. And there's one where, you know, a fucked up kid goes to hospital and a doctor tells his mates, you know, yeah, he's very, very ill and he might die.

And they said, we hope he'll be OK. We're his friends. And there's this great moment of acting where the doctor looks at them with naked contempt and if not actual loathing. And, you know, we are to assume that their friend, quote unquote, is going to die of drugs. Yeah. I remember the other one. The other one was like a cheap British version of that scene towards the end of Saturday Night Fever, wasn't it? He was dancing up on the bridge because he was on drugs.

And he's going, oh, yeah, look at me. And one of his friends goes, Chris, come down. And he turns around and goes to them, my baby, like that. And I just stuck in my head ever since. Does he fall off? Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, of course. He was on drugs, though, wasn't he?

He was on pills. They used to call them bridge plunge biscuits. It used to happen a lot. Fall off one, matey. It's interesting that this is the chosen episode in terms of, you know, the influence of drugs on music, which obviously has been a thing since there were drugs and music. But, you know, it's become particularly pointed and acute

in the last two years. And there's a very interesting example of how this influence has made its way into Top of the Pops in possibly the most Top of the Pops way. Just kind of squeezed through in a really strange way, like a sort of, like, kind of icing sugar out of a slightly deformed pipette we'll get to that oh yes we will but this episode me dears is absolutely shot through with newness

and optimism isn't it three bands make the debut on this episode one from the rave scene two of them you could say are our bands and if you disregard the fact that two of those bands have been going for fucking ages, you know, you do get the feeling that the dinosaurs are being chased back into their caves and everything's setting up nicely for the 90s. But looking back now, we can see the real story of 1990, which is the music industry being absolutely up arsehole street. Although the drive to get the CD player out has resulted in a quarter of a million British households

owning one by Christmas of 1989, vinyl sales have absolutely gone through the floor, dropping by 50% since 1988. Really? Yeah. According to an article in Music Week around about this time, there was an estimate that independent record shops were going bankrupt at the rate of one a day. Smash Hits, Circulations, Tankin, and in the eyes of the music industry, the only bankers are compilation LPs by the likes of Madonna and Elton John. on so yeah it's uh hard times for red spectacle ponytail music business wankers good times for

ravey chances and uh indie sorts and uh interesting times for the panel of chart music yeah well and also this was like the last time really that you had a proper split between youth acts and stars from 10 15 20 years ago Do you know what I mean? That always causes a bit of a crisis in the music business. You remember the big concert of 1990 was Nebworth. Yes. It was an all-day gig featuring Phil Collins, Elton John, Pink Floyd, Dire Straits, Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton,

all at their absolute peak of irrelevance. And at the time, if you were a teenager that looked hilarious yes right the state of it right and they were all relevant artists 10 15 years previously unlike the mid 90s by which point you know the who were somehow mods again yeah you know and maca was playing the hoffner bass again and uh everyone was mates and respectful of their elders you know i mean or now when groups from 15 or 20 years ago are still considered current yeah and we are our own might read heritage chart yes we are but what's nice is the definite sense of movement away from the 80s. Yes. At least, you know, because probably the last period where culture and specifically popular culture moved fast and it changed.

And you could look at 15 seconds of footage of a street and you could guess not just the time period, but the actual year. And in some cases, which quarter of of that year just from what people were wearing and what it looked like and it's unthinkable now definitely because it's slowed to a core like around my way the the so-called hipsters look exactly the same as they did 10 years ago yeah which is not very hip if you go around my part of the world there's places like columbia road which is right on the cusp of bethnegreen and shoreditch and it's like a crane has picked up a little bit of hampstead and just dropped it into this sea of concrete and chicken shops as a like a genteel oasis of like posh wine shops and these little twee bagpush shops selling miniature pink teapots and pre-gabalin brioche you know and it's but it's all populated by people

who look exactly the same but they look exactly the same as a decade ago it's yeah still blokes with big wire wall beards that look like a cloud of ginger gas and uh women with asylum haircuts and thick clown eyebrows dressed in romper suits and platform trainers you know because that was the last time that culture moved in their dead brained world you know and so however much crap went down in 1990 there was still a sense that you were on a moving train you know or albeit a moving train heading directly for another moving train. A groovy train, if you will. I mean, I knocked the 90s a lot because that was the time when I was the most active and so I have to blame something, right?

But there was a lot to complain about, although now it's only ever remembered in the twisted terms of the 859th BBC documentary about Britpop in which Steve Lamac tells us it was a radical musical revolution after which British rock was never the same oh no wait after which British rock was always exactly the same and you can trace back a lot of the problems of today to the complacency and the the many missed open goals of the 90s but there's also an argument this is maybe the best time ever to be alive despite everything just because of that odd balance that

yeah achieved like on the one hand technology and public attitudes had advanced to the point where you know boredom and and bigotry were no longer necessarily the default experience of living in Britain. But you still have that great nourishing and motivational force of often having to see and hear things you didn't like or weren't interested in, you know. And more than anything else, this is crucial, the Second World War had not yet worn off. This is our big issue today, the problem for our times. The Second World War is wearing off. And all those things that we thought we'd learnt from it and which our generation took for granted,

all those shared truths about freedom and tyranny and human dignity and what's too dangerous to countenance or coexist with, these were all the things which temporarily saved the world or a lot of the world from moral squalor and servitude and obscurantism and now they were no longer forged within living memory or barely and they're beginning to dissolve and it's fucking terrifying and at this point here 1990 all that was still firmly in place along with a shared understanding of objective truth however shit things got at least that was a solid wooden wedge behind the the back wheel of this suv parked on a slope which is all

modern civilization really is or ever has been i mean you know the general belief at this point was that casual democracy was the only future and there wasn't going to be any global warming because teenagers in baggy white t-shirts with bright african art designs on the front would grow up and take care of it. Oh, God, yeah. This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull-apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey, and just five bucks for the small coffee all day long.

Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. Onward! Radio 1 News In the news Farzad Bazoft, a journalist for The Observer is hanged in Iraq after being accused of spying for the British and British media suddenly gets very interested in Saddam Hussein. Labour have opened up a 21-point lead in the opinion polls,

with 50% of those polled thinking that Margaret Thatcher should resign. An anti-poll tax demonstration in Brixton ends in a riot after 3,000 protesters singing stick your poll tax up your arse a baton charged by riot police resulting in youths lobbing stones and bottles at them in return. Eric and Lyle Menendez two brothers from Beverly Hills have been arrested on suspicion of nipping around the mam and dads with shotguns and reducing them to mints in order to claim $10 million worth of inheritance money. They eventually get sentenced to life imprisonment. Mikhail Gorbachev has become the first president of the Soviet Union

and East Germany is getting ready for its first and last free elections while Lithuania has declared its independence from the USSR. Five Star, who haven't had a top 40 hit in two years, announced that next month's UK tour, which featured dates at Wembley Arena in the NEC, has been scrapped. They give no reason for this. Makes the no money sign.

Similar to the Oxo crumble in happier tour news paul mccartney has finally been allowed back into japan to play the gigs he should have done 10 years earlier were it not for him having a hunk of weed the size of a man's head in his luggage david bowie has revealed that he feels guilty about being such a custard gannet in the 70s and that it nearly killed him. I feel bad that kids took drugs because I did. They looked up to me as a hero and wanted to do what I was doing, he says in an interview with Woman magazine. However, he says that he can't give up the fags.

Woman magazine getting fucking David Bowieie that's insane yeah well wasn't quite as in demand in 1990 s express calls the royal college of art to be evacuated while they're shooting a video for their next single when a technician notices that one of the world war two artifacts they're using as props was an unexploded bomb i was petrified because i've been kicking it around all morning says mark moore madonna and warren beatty have split up and she's gone back to her ex jellybean benitez because she was sick to death of seeing her name linked with his all the time in the papers but the big news this week, courtesy of last week's Sunday Mirror, gay sex

orgy on TV. Four men meet, they kiss and fondle, they undress and swap underwear, and anyone can watch tonight. A shocking gay sex show about mass murderer Dennis Nielsen

is to be shown on ITV tonight, despite furious protests. Presenter Melvin Bragg admitted the gay dance and drama group DV8. A pun on DV8. Think about it, man. The show starts with a group of homosexuals cruising for pickups in a sleazy nightclub. To the strains of the song I Feel Love, two men kiss passionately and fondle each other's private parts. Two other gays simulate sex against a wall. Then a couple undress each other and caress their nipples. One man removes another's trousers and blindfolds him, while a third watches on all fours with his mouth suggestively open wide

finally nelson kills his lovers one by one and sexually abuses their corpses the show is broadcast immediately after an edna everidge special sparking fears that children will see the sordid sex scenes so yeah it's wrong for some kids to see men pretending to have gay sex on the telly because, you know, as we all know, kids went mental for the South Bank show back in the day, didn't they? Yeah. But it's fine for the Sunday Mirror to tell even more kids

who can read what actually happens. That's fine, that is. Yeah. Would you watch that, Taylor, if you were, I don't know, 12? Yeah. Of course you would. Yeah. You want to see what they get up to. It looks like fun. The idea of wearing someone else's

freshly worn pants would, no. Yeah, that was the bit I didn't like about Dennis Nielsen. Sarah, would you have watched that? Would I have watched the pants swap? Yeah, of course I would, yeah. I saw all kinds of so I was 11. I don't know how. It's not that my mum was a bad parent but I saw all kinds of i was so i was 11 i don't know how it's not that my mum was

a bad parent but i saw all kinds of shit that i probably ought not have seen at a tender age and and i i regret nothing i took i turned out fine nothing wrong with me etc stuff you saw after being tipped off by the sunday mirror i should have done that i should have had a column in the sunday papers every week hey kids it's some filth you might want to watch. Set your videos. Sneak downstairs in the dead of night. Yeah. Pop the telly on.

On the cover of Melody Maker this week, Nick Cave and Sinead O'Connor and the Stone Roses. It was just a time when Melody Maker was just slapping as much as it could on the front page. Looks awful. On the cover of smash hits christian james of halo james eating a daffodil the number one lp in the country is but seriously by phil collins over in america the number one single is escapade by janet jackson and the number one LP was Forever Your Girl by Paula Abdul.

So, me dears, what were we doing in March of 1990? I'm going to be really boring and I honestly don't remember. This was like one of those fallow years. At some point, my brain has done like a sweep of memories and just decided to dump that entire year. I think nothing terrible happened, but you know nothing significant i was just making the difficult transition from confusing childhood to horrifying adolescence which is like that's what being 11 is isn't it yeah i was going to school keeping my head down and um probably still making many tapes of the top 40

i was still very much in recording the top 40 mode um so i wasn't i didn't really have a lot of albums at this point who are you into um well there's two of my favorite ever singles in the top 10 this very week um enjoy the silence by the pesh mode one of my favorites of all time just it doesn't even read to my brain as a song made by people anymore. It's more like a little comet that I can just hear whenever I want. And Blue Savannah by Erasure, which is also just a lovely, melancholy pop song of which I will never tire. Both the witch aunts on this episode. No, sadly not.

But, you know, I know they're there. At this point, I would still have been listening to um raw like sushi which came out in 1989 so i had the cassette of that until it was carved into my brain george michael as well this is when listen without prejudice came out which is such a lovely warm album just put as soon as we heard that he died that just went straight on it was like oh god this is so fucking good what a loss this is one of those people there's a few people when they die and you it's like years later, it's like, do you still miss George Michael? Yeah, yeah, I do.

So Heaven or Las Vegas by the Cocteau Twins came out in 1990, but I didn't discover it at the time because, you know, I don't think they were on top of the pops. So, you know, I discovered that later and I was still very much at the kind of mercy of the top 40. Yeah, I got far too much to say about 1990. I began 1990 as a school boy and ended it as an unemployed acid casualty having passed through uh three jobs two pop festivals

and one polite expulsion from school best year of my life i turned 18 later this year, right, which of course means that if I hadn't officially knocked a year off my age in defiance of the pandemic on the logic that if I didn't get to live it, I shouldn't have to cart it around with me like luggage, I would have just turned 50, which would have been scary. But I'm sure that when that finally does roll around in the 12 months time i'll have had such a rich and full 2022 that it won't matter quite ready for it yeah but i remember 1990 is a fabulous year although a personally turbulent one

and even though this top of the pops doesn't contain either of the records which bring that feeling back in a flash for me killer by adamski or the joker by the steve miller band um it does it does suggest it but the thing is look in 1990 i wasn't a city kid and by this point i wasn't even a medium-sized town kid. We'd moved south, and I was living in a small town surrounded by countryside and almost no bus services. And for teenagers who think too much, that kind of semi-rural environment is a funny thing. It's the hand that giveth and taketh away.

Because on the one hand, there's something really good about being 18 in that space with, like, nature encircling you, you know, and having to create your own subculture with your mates as best you can. And on the other hand, it's a frustrating bore and a desperate trial. We were fully aware that things were going on nearby you know the rave scene and all that uh but we had no access because we didn't have transport and we weren't really dancing people anyway we didn't have any access to those drugs because it was a rural area so all the supply routes for drugs were through new age traveler types so it was all hash and mushrooms and that sort of thing.

And for the most part, we had no access to sex without a formal courtship and a phony pledge because that was just the times out in the Tory shires, you know. So that kind of psychedelic isolation, which lasted right up until I moved to London, really defined my experience of world but for 1990 that wasn't a bad thing you know it's like my main memories of 1990 are playing music with various lousy but authentically bizarre groups with absurdly mismatched influences that had nothing to do with anything that was current. And instead of joyous all-night dance parties surrounded by bug-eyed, loved-up strangers, it would be a gang of about eight of us dragging a shit battery-powered tape player into Farmer Barley Moe's field and just sitting out there all night with a bottle of Thunderbird and 50 pro plus neil young and sid barrett and lee scratch perry and our oxfam suede jackets littering the bridal way with ripped up rizzler packets you know and the dawn would be beautiful but it just it never

felt symbolic. I'll tell you what, you know what we had to do? And I've only just remembered this. One of my mates eventually got use of his dad's car. And on Saturday nights, we used to drive out to the Blue Boar services near Northampton. The Bright Lights. Yeah, because they would serve coffee until the early hours and not kick us out because we weren't eight teenagers sat there chain smoking. And to get to the services from the car park, you had to walk across this enclosed footbridge over the motorway, looking down on the lanes of traffic.

So sometimes we'd be in there playing human frogger, like jumping from side to side without knowing if a car or a lorry was going to emerge from under the bridge into your lane, you see. And that was Saturday night because we weren't welcome anywhere else or else we hated the people we were going to find. So hang on, there's supposed to be illegal raves

going on everywhere. What, they're coming round your way? No, we'd drive past them, maybe, without realising it, with talk-talk playing at full volume. Passing round a wet-ended spliff of horrible soap bar hash, and then it was human frogger until the soles of your feet hurt, you know, and then into the calf to be scowled at by truckers, and by the old ladies serving because we

look like a bunch of shiny haired ponce i'll say that again we were a bunch of shiny haired ponces trying to live and failing miserably i mean we had our moments it's just that nobody else was ever around to appreciate them you know luckily turns out, in the fullness of time, there will be no biographer who has to worry about any of that. Effectively, none of it ever happened, which is how it felt at the time. Well, I was 21 and working as a labourer in a furniture factory in Ucknell called Stag,

which made just about affordable stuff, which was stained really, really, really, really, really dark brown. And the place was essentially a massive indoor school playground with power tools. Wow. I'm working from seven to four in a barn with no windows, meaning I'm not seeing any daylight during the winter. I'm humping pallets of headboards around.

I'm fetching boxes of screws for people called jinner chinny and rat boy and i'm only about three or four months into the job but i've already realized that i just can't do this fucking job for the rest of my life not because it was beneath me but because i wasn't physically or mentally prepared for the job quitter it wasn't the most diverse of workplaces. There was one black person in the entire factory. Right. And he came from Texas.

And he wore this constant look on his face that said, how the fuck did I get here? There was one homosexual that had a sign on the front of his bench that read, AIDS alert, don't bend for a friend. Ooh. With somebody bending over, Ghostbusters style yeah there was one person who took drugs and he had an out to lunch sign on his bench with an arrow that read fuck pig or whatever his name was he's off work because of and there'd be drawings of spliffs and

pills and needles and one woman in the entire factory who wasn't working in the kitchen which was my mom who pulled strings to get me the job and you know keep me from burning electricity on tellies and my amiga because you know that's how nepotism works i mean do you remember in a previous episode when i talked about lance the bloke with a viennetta shirt who used to wear shorts with bananas and pineapples on them yeah so fucking tight that his bollocks would flop out. He was my superior. In every way. As you can imagine, there was a lot of what we nowadays call banter flying about.

But, you know, let's call it what it actually was. Bitching. These people were absolute master bitches. Every mistake, every misfortuneortune every excuse to needle someone was logged filed away and deployed at the opposite moment i'll give you two examples right there was this one bloke who got divorced about five years ago and every time he fucked up the entire line would just shout fucking hell no wonder his missus fucked off that's that's a quite clever one the second one i remember there was this lad called warfare whose bench was directly under a

massive blackboard with all the all the part orders on it and he got into a fight in a chip shop and was due in court for sentencing after his morning shift and he turned up at about six o'clock in the morning and he discovered that someone had already been there an hour earlier and filled this enormous board with the odds for his sentence from slap on the wrist to electric chair. And he was actually taking bets on it. And people were laying out money on it. Lovely. The upside of the job was it was still the age where fucking about at work was not only allowed but encouraged. You know, people would spend the morning working the tits off to fill the quota and then get on to the serious business of playing cards, having staple gun fights, having 50-a-side games of football or demonstrating that they were actually fucking brilliant at doing woodwork.

You know, they used to knock out pencil cases boxes sculptures carvings bird tables you know all sorts i remember one morning i came across two blokes in the warehouse who got into an argument over whether you could escape from a crocodile by running at it and jumping over it lengthway and it got more and more animated as the day went on. And sometime in the afternoon, I went back to pick up some more screws, and I noticed that half the cab shop had disappeared, and they were in the fucking storeroom because someone had drawn an anatomically correct full-scale crocodile on this floor in chalk,

and people were either staring at it in awe and pointing bits out, or they were taking turns to try and jump over it. And nobody could. So, you know, the argument was proved. And another day was successfully pissed away in Hocknall. And it seems like only yesterday that Judas Priest were at the miners' welfare. I know.

What happened, Hocknall? The other thing about Stag was the walls were absolutely festooned with fannies. I saw less fannies when I was actually working in Paul than when I did in that factory. And one of the other labourers, he was this lad called Tom, and some of the lads convinced him that Princess Anne was coming later on in the day to be giving a guided tour around the factory, and we had to get rid of all the grot. He said, have I got to rip down all these posters and everything?

He said, no, no, no, you don't have to do that. Here's some paper and I've already cut you out a template for a bra. What you've got to do is you've got to go around and you've got to put bras on all the tits and Princess Anne will be cool with that. And yeah, he started doing it and some of the blokes were he nearly got fucking lambed a couple of times and just had to tell him it was a joke before he he got murdered but princess anne wouldn't mind she opened the original wank factory did she back in the 80s yeah yeah yeah she was going around and they cleared up all the porn and someone

some some wag left out a copy of penthouse and they were taking around and everything and they saw the copy of penthouse and tried to sweep it away and she says oh don't worry about it i know what you do here yeah she was a woman of the world bless her that was the same building where the happy mondays edited uh an issue of once edited my arse oh you surprised me what they didn't actually uh go in the meetings with the publisher and stuff they didn't lay out one flat plan you know when the wank mags are edited by models right no their duties stop and end up um bending over a power mat with a pen suggestively in their gob yeah yeah i don't know if bez did that i hope not i'm gonna say guest editing is basically it's like guest djing

isn't it where like you know a dj well not always sometimes people can actually dj usually they show up with a dj and they just stand in the booth giving it loads it's me occasionally hand them a record you know possibly the day after this episode could be the moment that I was in the co-op with my mum after work and I told her that I'd decided to try and get into university. And she just looked at me as if I'd gone out and said, well, what the fuck do you want to do that for? She couldn't understand it.

And he was like, well, because I can't do this, mum. I'm not strong enough to do this job for the rest of my life. She just folded her arms and went, ooh. Yes, she did. So music-wise, I'm taking what's left of me wage packet after me mum's had a board, and I'm just lobbing it at Selectedist for hip-hop imports, Arcade Records for under-the-counter tapes of Marley Mole and WBLS,

and Rob's Records for second-hand funk funk and soul i'm still banging we're in this together by low profile done by the forces of nature by the jungle bros and i'm absolutely gagging for fear of a black planet by public enemy which comes out in a few weeks i can't fucking wait for that i'm still watching top of the pops before going out with my mates to the rubbish student disco they insist on going to, but like pretty much everyone else of my age, I've stopped expecting to see something that's going to blow my tiny mind. Top of the Pops nowadays, to me, is more of a chance to finally see the bands that the music press have been banging on about that I couldn't be bothered to investigate for myself.

And there's a couple of instances in that in this very episode. So yeah, there we go that's me but anyway pop crazy youngsters you know that whenever we roll on an episode of top of the pops we roll deep and to that end let us retire to the chart music shed and dig out an issue of the music press from this very week. And this time, the spotlight shines on the NME, dated March 17th, 1990. Shall we have a riffle through, me dears? Go on then. Don't see why not. On the cover, the Stone Roses standing outside a court in Wolverhampton,

looking excessively leery and full of themselves. In the news section, well, Manchester continues to dominate, with the main story being reports that the Stone Roses are pencilled in two shows at Brixton Academy in June, as well as confirming ticket details for their gig at Spike Island on Bank Holiday Sunday, May the 27th 27th oh what a shame they didn't announce a reunion gig for snake island the other month eh meanwhile the happy mondays have revealed their forthcoming new single it's a cover version of he's gonna step on you which was originally a number four hit for john congos and t-reex's Fly label all the way back in 1971. It's all down to Elektra Records in the States,

who asked the Mondays to do a cover version for the label's 40th anniversary LP, Rubaiyat. After ditching an idea to cover a Tom Waits number, they opted for He's Gonna Step On You, but eventually decided to keep it as a single and give Elektra another Congo's cover, Tokoloshe Man, instead. Oh, and the Inspiral Carpets have announced a big adopted hometown gig at Manchester's GMEX

on July the 21st. The alternative takeover kicks up a gear as the compilation label Telstar, best known for LPs such as the Joe Longthorne songbook, the Rosemary Party album, and Jive Bunny the album, have announced the release of their first TV advertised indie album, Product 2378,

featuring in Spiral Carpets, New Order, Pixies, The Wonder Stuff and Morrissey. There's a bit of a calm down for them, isn't it? In other label news, the enforced ramage of CDs down our throats continues

as WEA announces that 1,205 vinyl album titles are to be dropped from their catalogue. Approximately 40% of the company's current listings. When did you get a CD player? I got one when I started at Melody Maker because I needed one to review the CDs that everybody kept sending me.

I didn't have one before that. Couldn't afford it. No. I don't remember, but I definitely had. I had one of those all-in-one stereos that looked like a sort of stacker system, but wasn't. It was all integrated. And I did have, it's an interesting, yeah, I have no idea. But I definitely had one of those. And then when I started at Melody Maker, I had this blue CD Walkman for some reason.

And just listening to CD singles on the tube, fannying about, like changing them in my lap. It's all a palaver but i was i was really glad because i was a music journalist and i was in london and i had a cd walkman so you know 1995 for me yeah well i would have got one earlier but i couldn't play any of my albums on it exactly i ended up buying loads of cds that are sitting in big shopper bags in the crap room at the moment. Thanks music business, you cunts. Over in America, hundreds of fans were locked out of a public enemy gig at the Hollywood

Palace after the promoter oversold tickets. Police in squad cars and helicopters were called out to disperse the crowd and the gig was later halted at the request of the LA Fire Department as the crowd had been halted at the request of the LA Fire Department, as the crowd had been counted as double the legal limit of 554.

It didn't help that Public Enemy's performance started with Professor Griff giving a 10-minute speech where the arcaler of the S1Ws had a go at the media and talked about an AIDS conspiracy against minorities. Who the fuck is booking Public Enemy in a venue that only holds 554 people, man? Fuck's sake. Meanwhile, Def Jam supremo Russell Simmons, who recently banned Griff from Def Jam's New York offices, is reported as stating, My disliking Griff has nothing to do with my friendship and aberration for Chuck D,

Flava Flav, and other members of Public Enemy. But Griff's wildest imaginary Jewish conspiracy could not have done more damage to Public Enemy than Griff has himself. Yeah, it's horrible to remember all that stuff, isn't it? All the conspiracies, all the racism, and the science denial, and Farrakhan, and all that i know you look you're looking back there like the black morrissey and sadly the writing is on the wall for bill posters as westminster council confirmed that they are to crack down on fly posting in the city with epic receiving warnings of legal action if they don't remove posters advertising the current single by the godfathers i'm lost and then i'm found the new move is part of a council cleanup campaign but with the new tactic of ignoring the people who slap them up

and going directly for the ones who gain benefit from the advertising. Oh, man. I used to love seeing old gig posters up on walls in London when I was watching Minder and whatnot. Yeah, yeah. You see why they were clamping down on them, though, because they do spoil the beauty of those green corrugated iron fences. Yes. Yeah, I mean, there's like, you know, like when they did out the tube a while ago

and there was suddenly, they peeled back some of the sort of sedimentary layers of posters and you could see all these really old ones. It was brilliant. And it's like, yeah, I kind of wish that, you know, you just keep slapping them on, slapping them on, and then future generations will be able to, like, get some little tools and peel them away and go, wow, holy shit.

The pavements would be about a foot wide, though, wouldn't they? In the interview section, well, Guru Josh is in the chair for the material world section, the former portrait of the artist as a consumer, and has predicted he's got a lot to say for himself. He claims that the rave scene is turning from the love children to the hate children. They're going to go ahead and introduce legislation and the kids are going to say fuck you lot and go ahead with it anyway if the government turn up we'll just petrol bomb them yeah because fucking willie whitelaw's going to turn up at a rave isn't he telling people to be quiet after being asked about being kidnapped

by his parents as a child he says i think a lot of people have been through that haven't they i just had that sort of childhood it was a right pain in the ass right how do you get kidnapped by your parents if your parents take you on holiday and put you in a car and drive you to a caravan park in skagness and you didn't fancy it isn't that kidnapping i would have thought like one parent you know if if they you know people like steal when they don't have custody but they just nick off with their kid anyway so like if his parents didn't have custody of him maybe that's how it worked but yeah i think he may have a slightly uh skewed idea of a normal childhood

i had a paranoia when i was a kid that my parents were going to kill me what yeah i don't like they were just waiting for the right moment just only for about six months but i can remember how old were you i don't know about seven or something i remember walking through a steam fair somewhere in worcestershire and thinking maybe today's gonna be the day sort of half hoping it would be that I wouldn't have to look at any more of those engines. Well, they were just going to throw you into a furnace, like grab you by the scruff of the neck and the waistband

and just hoi you in there. And dust off their hands like, oh, glad we don't have to feed and clothe him anymore. That was worth going through a two-year adoption process we could have just picked one off the street he concludes by stating i'm a modern thatcherite i'd vote for her policies but i prefer someone else to instigate them there's a lot of serious problems in the world and one of the minor ones is acid house parties they haven't got enough manpower to solve murders and meanwhile they're arresting people for dancing it's a very sick world we live

in why does he want somebody else to uh i know that's just because he hates women yeah just because he's got terrible views and is also sexist pa Paolo Hewitt nips over to Carson, California, for a natter with the latest group of fun-loving rappers, the Booyah Tribe. They give him a demonstration of their rigorous martial arts training regime, and then Booyah's leader Ted Davout talks to Hewitt about how rap saved the tribe from almost certain death in the LA gang scene, while his brother George tells us he used to be an accountant, earning 110 grand a year before joining the crew.

There's a bit of chat about how being in prison showed them how to be tough, and that their debut album, New Funky Nation, is, quote, for the kids, so they will never have to say, I couldn't do this before gangs brought me down. Meanwhile, Gavin Martin nips up to the black country to have a word with Robert Plant about his frankly randy new LP, Manic Nirvana. What an amazing title, predating two massive bands of the early 90s there. What a seer Robert Plant is.

Talking about the prolific sexual references in his new material, the yim-yam, thank you, ma'am, rock god insists. I mean, it's been one of those times for me. If you ejaculate and you like it, what are you going to do? Sit on it forever? He reassures Martin that his return to ATV land in recent years has brought him down to earth and back to music at a time when his old band stock has risen.

It's quite mind-boggling to be so out of favour that no one would mention the band for five years and suddenly Ian Asprey wears a Zeppelin t-shirt and it's all okay. What the fuck is all that about he says the people who are my age and have got mortgages and stuff aren't exposed to music other than the mainstream to them Chris Rea is what's happening nobody knows about Big Black or what Faith No More were like with the old singer for, Husker Du's Bed of Nails is an anthem, so I'm impossible to live with. I'm still raving about music.

Most people probably think I'm a wanker. Well, if you will drink with coppers in the Queen's head. But at least you're not sitting in it, Robert. Because it's 1990 and it's the NME, the Stone Roses get a quadruple page spread

entirely focused upon the adjourned hearing of the case of Birch vs Brown, Squire, Minefield and Wren at Wolverhampton's Magistrate Court which involves the band well disjuffed at their old label FM Revolver for re-releasing Sally Cinnamon with an accompanying Mad For It video, liberally dousing the label's officers, boss Paul Birch, his girlfriend and several cars including a Mercedes with paint. With the bulk of the spread made up of a court report from Stuart McConaughey, it's left to James Brown to actually talk to Monkey Twat and his mates, who moan about the video. It's shot

in Manchester, and it's got this bloke sitting in Piccadilly Station reading the face he screeches. It's fucking insulting. But the biggest insult, according to Brown Eye, is when Birch asks the Rosers to make an appointment to see him. That's when it all kicked off. He's earning a lot of money off us, and he tells us to make an appointment. He thinks we're not real people. We're just fucking puppets, performing monkeys that he can make a buck off.

So then we painted him and his office and his motor full tins. I help beyond good and evil. and his motor full tins. They are beyond good and evil. Americana-critical darlings, the Cowboy Junkies, tell Sean O'Hagan that they're really into BDSM and Satanism and expand upon their theories about the alien origins of Sasquatch. They say some other things as well, but it's dead boring. And Stephen Wells gets a whole page to investigate American Rock's backlash against gays

in advance of the Channel 4 show out on Tuesday, devoting an episode to it, which is directed by Viv Albertine. The piece covers Axl Rose's lyrics for One in a Million, Jon Bon Jovi getting booed off stage in Dublin after dropping the other F word after his beloved New York Giants lost a game against the San Francisco 49ers. A member of Skid Row wearing an AIDS kills F words dead t-shirt.

And Chris Doherty from Gangrene saying AIDS is a scary thing, but it's kind of good in a way. It kind of shows people what they're assholes for being a member of gangrene for example john savage frankie knuckles and paul brother forget to represent the right side of history whilst wells conducts a survey with 20 metal fans from quo heads to glamours of the 12 interviewees who claimed to be Guns N' Roses fans, 11 said that they thought Axl was full of shit,

writes Wells. Crusher from Kerrang! weighs in as well. The shit that these bands come out with is totally indefensible, totally pathetic. I mean, this idea of the metal audience as sun readers is way out of date. Yeah, good old

metal fans there. Yeah, well, they're usually nice blokes, aren't good old metal fans there yeah well they're usually nice blokes aren't they metal fans that's always a thing you discover yes you know as a young uh mod most mods are wankers and most metal fans are really nice in the single reviews wow in the chair this week is edwin pancer and his single of the week is I'm Going Straight to Heaven by MC 900 Foot Jesus and DJ Zero which he tells us will shake your spine but also make you look over your shoulder as though some presence older than the earth itself has just entered the room. Also getting the thumbs up is single of the week two popcorn double feature by the fall in which marky smith delivers his vocal like a tired lou reed aghast at the banality of life

in a recording studio while the rest of the fall lumber along as though the song is a rotting albatross around their collective necks take it off and disgust only to find yourself playing it again mere minutes later you're hooked damn the fall for being so sickeningly gifted but it's a coat down for all or nothing by millie vanille slush puppies millie vanille throw a couple of spanners into the album mix and pout out something that sounds a lot lumpier than their usual wet manure production style says pouncey he's similarly unimpressed with real real real by jesus jones what sounds like three dots scoring 180 on your skull kickstarts this latest mini-miracle by Jesus Jones,

with the great man himself weaving through the effects like an ace skateboarder. As clever as it is, it still fails to convert me. The Dinosaurs of Rock return with multiple singles this week, and it's a very mixed bag. Pouncey says J.J.j kale's hold on baby is pretty damn good remarkably asserts that gary moore's cover of old pretty woman is wholesome stuff but is less convinced by cliff richards stronger than that instead of gracefully slipping into old age as indeed he should cliff informs us that he's getting stronger i think he's pretty creepy

dave edmunds king of love is described as in which dave gallantly proves that you can't keep an old rocker down unfortunately and he greets the who's live version of joined together by saying wowie really dig the jews harp openingads, the only plus in this otherwise dreadfully recorded snippet from The Who's recent comeback tour. Who asked them to come back anyway? Not me. And finally, the beloved's Your Love Takes Me Higher really brings out Pounce's curmudgeonly side. This record sounds like you've just walked into a party that's in full swing. The coats are stacked to ceiling height in the bedroom.

There's nothing left to eat except scotch eggs, and someone seems to have taken up permanent residence in the toilet. Still, the atmosphere's great, isn't it? I hate parties. In the LP review section, the lead review this week belongs to violator by depeche mode and although helen mead reckons it's a preposterous title more suited for a heavy metal album or a hardcore porn comic it sees la mode as filling a gap in a current musical climate of electronically produced music.

Comparing the album to its predecessor, 1987's Music for the Masses, Mead observes that Violator seems almost a step back, cleaner, sparser, more clinical. And herein lies the contradiction, as that should mean they also get pervier. But they don't. Either way, Radio 1 won't ban it. Just titter wryly, because Depeche Mode are nice boys and thankfully don't seem to have anything to do with drugs or the acid house scene. Hand to chin.

I forgot they did an album called Music for the Masses. That's obviously some kind of joke, but I can't work out what kind of joke it is. The David Bowie compilation Changes Bowie gets applauded by Andrew Collins as long overdue, as Bowie's finally become an end-of-the-peer-show greatest hits machine. A man touring without a new album is an honourable man indeed. Thus, Changers Bowie is a tour souvenir, a t-shirt you can play at 33 and a third,

and it's brilliant. Its existence is a huge apology for Dave not dying in a drug-related car crash in 1984. There had to be one bad apple to spoil the barrel load, and it's called Fame 90 Remix, an unnecessarily clumsy rape of a perfectly smashing song. Oh, and he notes that the NME's current campaign to stuff the ballot on Bowie's phone in vote to determine his set list in order to get him to do the laughing gnome has been ignored in the track list.

That's an odd phrase, isn't it? This unnecessarily clumsy rape. Yeah, let's not even. Yeah, I've never heard those words put together in that order before. Is this an LP? Is this an EP? Is it a redundant zombie pantomime dame once more dragging his wormy cadaver onto the stage

and squeezing the puss for pennies? As Stephen Wells of Just Say Oz air, the live LP by Mr. Osbourne, capably assisted by Giza Butler. It's a chapter of my musical career I can now close, Ozzy tells me. Leave it out, Oz, I said. That's like John Cleese not doing his silly walk every time he makes a party political broadcast for some nasty little right-wing party.

Can't be done. Beauty by Ryuichi Sakamoto has naive nip and charm, according to Betty Page. Caution horses by the cowboy junkies as terry storton recommending that we light that cigarette fill that glass and get ready to be heartbroken that telstar indie compilation product 2738 has andrew collins frothing that it's about as alternative as ben elton but just as dependable and Urban Classics 3 collection of 70s soul gets sniffily derided by Ian McCann.

Drawn from Polydor's Soul Vaults, this is a selection of nearly-hits, later-to-be-collectors' items. Fans of Barry White, and I am sorry to say there are many, will be very happy with the inclusion of Johnny Bristol's You and i and isaac hayes the original crazy bald head offering a bedroom 3b these songs are very much album tracks

aimed at a very small retro market if you're living for today avoid in the gig guide well david could have seen creaming jesus at the leicester square hippodrome gil scott heron at the town and country club lush at subterranea chapter house and slow dive at the camden falcon the jungle brothers and a tribe called quest also at the town and country club or ruptured dog at the king's head full ofham. Jesus Christ, is that the worst band name ever? Taylor could have seen the Steve Gibbons band at the Irish set. They're still going, Taylor, fucking hell. Wow.

Still human beings as well, disappointingly. Yeah, yeah. The Sand Kings and Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine at Birmingham University. Benny King and Eddie Floyd in the This Is Soul show at Birmingham Town Hall. The Georgia Satellites of the Hummingbird. Nigel Kennedy at the Hippodrome. Or Bath Chair Suicide at the Hare and Hounds. Fucking hell.

Neil could have seen Lush at Coventry Polytechnic. The Darkest Wish at Alice's Restaurant. Could at Warwick University, or Gdansk at the TikTok. Sarah could have seen Brother Beyond at Sheffield City Hall, Thunder at Bradford Queen's Hall, The Fall at Hull Uni, or Curiosity Killed the Cat at Leeds Uni.

Al could have also seen Brother Beyond at Nottingham Royal Concert Hall, Saxon at Rock City, the Libido Boys at Oysters, or nipped out to Leicester to see Ned's Atomic Dustbin at the Princess Charlotte, or Curiosity Killed the Cat at Derby Assembly Rooms. No, fuck that, mate. And Simon could have seen Cud and the Chrysalids at Swansea Una, Thunder at Traforest Wells Polytechnic or Nosferatu at Cardiff New Bogies. Thunder and Cud

following each other around the country there. I'm just thinking, like, if you had a Cud covers bandit, it would have to be called Cuddent, wouldn't it? Or Cowshit. In the letters page, well, Andrew Collins is overseeing the Anx page this week, and the readers have rock royalty in their sights. This letter is aimed at the asshole I got talking to me on the tube the other day, writes Tron of Essex.

We only travelled together for one stop, and I had to get off at Woodford, so I didn't get the chance to tell him that all Irish people do not adore you too just because they're Irish I hate Bongo and his I am a new god attitude I hate David Evans and his stupid stage name I hate that Clayton walked from a Dublin court referring to Clayton's 1989 prosecution for possession and supply of marijuana with a paltry fine when my mate got six months for a fraction of the amount because he's not rich and famous and I hate Larry on principle the music is awful I've heard dodgy stories concerning their minders and the way publications like hot press crawly bum lick them every inch of the way pisses me off immensely. If I ever see you again, you know who you are, you red-headed twat.

It's kicking time. Hold me back, everyone. Please look back to Stuart McHoney's Primal Scream interview in your 5th of August issue of 1989, primal scream interview in your 5th of august issue of 1989 when bobby gillespie is asked wasn't there a temptation to introduce a dance element into primal scream to which he replied absolutely not we're not stupid we couldn't do it if we tried writes andy mosley from birmingham well it seems that mr gillespie has obviously become stupid in the six months since the interview and has tried and couldn't make a dance record. Ian McCann coated down the creature's new single Fury Eyes the other week

and Lee Godfrey of Manchester is incandescent with rage. Dear Ian McCann, you are a disgrace. To be given the job of reviewing the singles and then turning it into an egotistical outing of banal nonsense is a waste of everyone's time. How you have the audacity

to say that the creatures quote, have absolutely nothing whatsoever going on in their skulls is beyond me. It's distressing that someone such as yourself has nothing more to say than drivel about your cat. Criticism, yes, welcome any time, but mindless scribbling is the unacceptable face of inadequate music journalism.

You should be shot and the tedious politico sums up the go ahead optimistic spirit of the age when he writes is it my imagination or have i lived the last 10 years of my life under a non-too-wholesome bourgeois leadership intent of stripping me of every right i ever believed fundamental to everyday life the reason i ask is because when i read your apparently well-informed paper i wonder if we live in the same country whereas one might expect growing resistance in pop circles instead it seems as though politics has become a dirty word. As the Tories bang the poll tax, clause 28, water and electricity privatisation, bans on Sinn Féin supporters, etc. through Parliament, what do we get in the NME? Sycophantic articles on wanky overpaid musos

with expensive equipment making dance records boring conservative twats like the stone roses still living in the 60s like the in spiral carpets et al sad proof that indie music has become as conservative and unadventurous as heavy metal punk or any other safe middle-class rock genre acid inspired nonsense verse is not the stuff of revolution when his enemy covered reels off long list of deservedly obscure bands perhaps it's just because those bands are too political and individual for the enemy pop music's own cosmopolitan. Oh! Yeah. Burn! We should go back to the fiery politicised lyrics of the punk bands

who did so much to prevent the rise of Margaret Thatcher. Yes. It's weird, though, isn't it? It's like people who think that impotent rage is more constructive and more subversive than finding an alternative and pursuing it you know it's like this play thinks like a billy brad gig would cause shock waves in conservative central office whereas 400 illegal acid house raves every weekend was just light entertainment just made the government smile contentedly yes placid law-abiding youth of Britain,

wasting their golden years on meaningless enjoyment. Get on one, mate, eh? It's the 90s. He's right about the spiral carpets, mind you. So if the NME is pop music's own cosmopolitan, what does that make Melody Maker? Oh, yeah. New Woman.

Arpors and Queen. Or Four Women. Do you remember that? What was that? It was a wank mag for women. Oh, nice. It had. Arpers and Queen. Or Four Women. Do you remember that? What was that? It was a wank mag for women. Oh, nice. It had knobs in it and everything. It came fresh from Dickie Desmond's wank factory.

Wow. Close down in the, I want to say, late 90s. The running joke in the office was Four Women was the circulation. So, Al, you, I believe, worked at Scarlet Magazine, as did I as did i that's how we met yeah yeah of course yeah um i was a sub editor there for for a time and i remember somebody uh someone else who had worked on similar you know magazines for women one of which was fairly bristling with dick but it was all all nestled behind sort of modesty items for legal reasons you know because you can't actually you can have tits but but no dick items for legal reasons you know because you can't actually

you can have tits but but no dick you see because these are double standards you can have dick but it can't be erect yes i mean you know about the mulligan tire lord um what does it have to do with them the mulligan tire kind of like juts out from scotland yes at a certain angle and if a cock is displayed and it's a bit higher up than the mulligan tire then that's not allowed we're such a weird species aren't we did men have to pose naked next to someone holding up a map of scotland just to check and here's the weather or maybe the mulligan tire rule could also be applied to the the technique of playing the wing single to achieve detumescence that would do it actually i think for yeah yeah anyway so anyway cock cock so there was there was a you know a whole mess of cock in this uh this

magazine and uh it would in in uh the designers a junkyard, was it? It was a fair old junkyard in there. I can't remember what this magazine was, probably just as well. It was, this would have been pre-emoji days, so they wouldn't be hidden behind, like, big aubergines, but maybe bananas or little stars or whatever. That kind of, stars are a bit tacky, aren't they? But whatever it was, the designers would overlay, would lay them gently atop the cock where I went to press.

And one time the whole magazine accidentally went to press with cocks completely out. Oh, no. And someone had to, like, run down there going, stop, stop, there's dick everywhere. We'll all go to jail. Yeah, they had to pulp quite a lot of genitals that day. Sorry, I've got to go in that carry-on style.

I think the most prominent piece I ever did for Scarlet was, I got into a conversation with the editor, who's like one of my best mates in the world. We were talking about sex toys and how they'd managed to sort them out for women but men's sex toys were fucking shit and she said well why don't you do a review of some sex toys and i said fuck it i've got a weekend to myself yeah why not a couple of days later a cardboard coffin arrives at the front door rammed with sex toys and she said yeah look there's 12 of them

here can you do full reviews on all of them and i did and yeah by the end of it my bollocks look like christmas balloons in april the thing is about male sex toys that they've only just started to grope towards is when the rabbit came in it was brilliant because there was no envy if your girlfriend had like a fucking 12 inch dildo, you wouldn't be that happy about it. But with a rabbit, I know my knob hasn't got prongs going off on the side, and it doesn't rotate in the middle, so it's no competition to me. But with male sex toys, it was always,

this has to look like a woman or a part of a woman. And no, no. I mean, there's a wank, there's's a shag surely there's got to be a third way for men don't you think i was one of the first people in the uk to have a bang on a flashlight you know that's something for the cv let me tell you if i was a bloke i would i would definitely want to go on one of those they they seem like they've been very well designed they're all right you can't get over the feeling that you're you're shagging a pringles tube something that should be in a garage somewhere you know what i mean and they're a fucker to wash how do you clean them yeah i mean you unscrew it at the back yeah

and then you pull out the uh the the pink bed and turn it inside out and run it under the tap yeah but you can't be bothered with that so sometimes you just shove the end of the tap into the fanny and turn it on and the thing is if you turn it on full blast you get a big back wash of jizzy water all over your shirt which defeats the object entirely there's also the fear that there's going to be a blackout and whoever you're living with is going to be looking around for a torch and if you haven't washed it out, they unscrew it and go, oh, fucking hell, these batteries have leaked. It's one of those things where you look at it

and you think, that's an ingenious design. And it's only when the cleaning occurs. Like a George Foreman grill. Or a wrap, too. I got loads of bits of porn stars. I got Jenna Jameson's tits. You were supposed to get a soapy tip one coffee which was all well in theory but if you think about it you actually need someone else's

hands around the tits so you can get a purchase on them and i couldn't exactly ask my mate so do you mind laying down here and putting this on your chest so i can get a soapy tip wank you know here's a napkin for your chin that's not going to go down too well but it did end up being used as the letter rack in my old house so you know it didn't go to waste yeah i couldn't believe it what else was there no no i don't forget i even there was one that was just like a tube that jutted up and down so you felt like you were in an industrial milking machine sounds great i was just using it and I just thought to myself, well, fucking hell, I am a man, not a cow.

And there was loads of things you could shove up your arse. The world is full of things you can shove up your arse. A disappointing film, but a great Bonnie Tyler single. As long as it's got a flared base, go for your life. Yeah, somebody I knew who worked on a dirty magazine once gave me a... It was like a midriff of a woman. Like, just that. And it had a supposedly anatomically accurate representation

of the vagina and anus of a well-known porn star. Which, frankly, I don't believe that the woman in question had a vagina and anus that were both so small you couldn't get your little finger in. I don't know what the thinking was when they made this. But it was the most grotesque thing you've ever seen. It looked like something they found under a pile of straw in Ed Gein's barn.

You know what I mean? Really unpleasant. And he brought it round. It was like I was having a housewarming party and he just sort of put it down and went, do you want to serve nibbles out of it? 64 pages. 60p.

I never knew there was so much in it. So what was on telly today? Well, BBC One commences at 6am with a half-hour CFAX data blast. Then it's two hours and 25 minutes of BBC Breakfast News with Nicholas Whitchell and Laurie Mayer. After regional news in your area, it's open air. The points of view with phones programme hosted by eamon holmes there's an argument about the anglo-irish agreement on kilroy followed by the news headlines the new fred and barney show play days henry's cat 5 to 11 the poetry jackanory for grown-ups and more open air after more news

headlines it's daytime live the pebble mill at one in all but name and time followed by regional news in your area the one o'clock news neighbors and then it's over to the Cheltenham festival to see desert orchid let everyone down and give the bookies a new ford granada each then andy peaches wedges himself into the broom cupboard and hits us off with Charlie Chalk, Banana Man, Jackanora, The New Yogi Bear Show, Dizzy Heights, Newsround, Blue Peter, a repeat of Dinner Time's Neighbours, The Six O'Clock News and they've just finished regional news in your area. BBC Two kicks off at 6.45 with an open university programme about shirts and coal, followed by the news, then Westminster, 45 minutes of yesterday's thrilling

highlights from the Houses of Parliament, then a 20-minute CFAX data blast. After the schools and colleges programmes cunningly rebranded as Daytime on 2 in order to suck in any unsuspecting housewives, the oldens and dollies, it's Finger Mouse, then a bit more Daytime on 2, then the news and then even more Daytime on 2. After more news, it's 45 minutes of non-stop red-hot live coverage from the House of Commons. Then they pick up the late afternoon session of the Cheltenham Festival. Des Lynham shows us how nice Tenerife is in holiday outings.

Then Alan Corrin picks out some BBC Archive clips with Emma Freud in Plunder. That's followed by the fitness programme It Doesn't Have To Hurt, presented by June Whitfield, where she shows us how to keep in shape in a workplace where robots and computers are doing everything. Then a mad American bloke in a plane follows Hurricane Gilbert as it cuts a swathe across Jamaica, and they're currently an hour into The Lavender Hill Mob, the 1951 Ealing comedy starring Alec Guinness and Stanley Holloway.

ITV begins at 6 with TVAM, then it's After 9, The Pyramid Game, Regional News in Your Area, an argument in a provincial TV studio in The Time, The Place, This Morning, The Riddlers and Home and Away. After the news and regional news in your area Wish You Were Here takes us to Warwickshire and Maastricht then it's a country practice, win

lose or draw, regional news in your area and sons and daughters. Children's ITV piles in with Hot Dog, The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin, Press Gang, and then it's time to watch the dullest teenagers ever do that cuntish hand jive in Blockbusters. After the news, it's a repeat of This After Those Home and Away,

regional news in your area, and they've just started Emmerdale, where Henry Wilkes is accused of murder. channel 4 opens up at 6 with a channel 4 daily followed by 2 hours and 35 minutes of schools programs after the parliament program business daily and sesame street it's the film life begins at college the 1937 american football comedy film starring the ritz brothers that's followed by the animal movie a cartoon about a lad who dosses about with some lions and that then it's not on sunday the religious magazine show presented by brian redhead countdown and a repeat of treasure hunt where dads get to stare at an Anna Carice's arse as it traverses through

Northumberland. After Neat and Tidy, a comedy short about an Elvis fan on the run for a murder he didn't commit, it's a repeat of Kate and Ale, and they've just started Channel 4 News. Oh, chaps, what's springing out at

you there? What the fuck is Charlie Chalk, for starters? He was a little puppet clown. Oh. I was on the dole in 1990. Yes! Henry's Cat was a good one. Yes.

Finger Mouse was just nightmare fuel, wasn't it? There's just something really wrong about Finger Mouse. Oh, you reckon? Eh. You were an 80s child, Sarah. You wouldn't understand it. I think by 1990, there was a sort sort of layer of cobwebs on that program that might have made it look a bit sinister

yeah fragments of some of these programs do pop up in my video collages that I used to make at the time because I was on the dole I used to sit there like late at night and in the day time basically whenever my mum and dad weren't around

if I had nothing to do I'd make fragmented video collages of all the shit that was on TV. Since digitised, can lend you one for the video playlist if you're covering 1990. Other than that, I've got nothing to say about any of that because I heard nothing after the phrase there's an argument about the Anglo-Irish agreement on Kilroy. Yes.

I wouldn't even have put that on BBC minus one. All right then, pop craze youngsters. It's time to go back to March of 1990. Always remember, we may coat down your favourite band or artist, but we never forget, they've been on top of the Pops more than we have. It's 7pm on Thursday, March 15th, 1990 and Top of the Pops has entered its fourth decade firmly maintaining its position as the most popular music show on British TV.

It's still holding down 9.8 million viewers just a few hundred thousand less than the Yellow Hurl era and seeing off all contenders in the new multi-channel world the tube gone the rock set gone old grey whistle test dead the only other music shows at the moment are niche stuff like big world cafe or cheapo graveyard slot ramble like the hitman and her in America's Top 40. Yes, MTV is fully operational in the UK, but there's only so many times you can sit through loving a fucking elevator by Aerosmith. Chaps, I'd like you to peruse an article that was published in The Guardian three weeks ago.

When Gene Pitney had a hit last year with the revival of Something's Gotten Hold of My Heart, he was nervous about appearing on Top of the Pops again after all those years. Would the technology be too complex? Would he feel out of place amongst the teenage scene shifters and stars? Arriving for rehearsals, he was swiftly reassured by the sight of a cameraman he had worked with 15 years earlier little has changed in the hermetically sealed environment of top of the pops in his 26 years trundling forever on it has neither the compunction nor the momentum to change but the format of hit after hit remains as secure as its advanced position in the ratings. You probably couldn't remove it from the schedule with two tons of TNT.

That article, chaps, goes on to point out that the only other music show to dare encroach upon the patch of Top of the Pops is The Chart Show which is only available on ITV on Saturday morning and late night on Sunday and the BBC's new batch of music TV shows which are Rocksteady and Snub TV are squarely aimed

at cue and melody maker readers respectively. To sum it all up chaps, in 1990 Top of the P pops continues to own the streets of pop television city despite all the new groups and and these exciting new styles it is amazing how little has changed on top of the pops and radio one at this point sarah you're 11 this is pretty much your top of the pops isn't't it? Well, yeah. I mean, I would still definitely watch it every week religiously because that's what you did.

That was how you lived your life. But I was very much into the chart show at this point. I'm sure we've talked about it before, but it had that slightly kind of smash-it sensibility of sort of cheek, but, you know, sort of celebration and a slight piss-take. And the format was so great you know it was a video and then like little captions flying up as a sort of precursor to the experience of trying to use the internet in the later 90s where if you clicked on the wrong

thing there would just be a mass of pop-ups flying at your brain but you know in a good way yes just loved it it was one of those things where there's kind of there's no presenter but there's this kind of benign digital presence behind it you know so it was kind of the anti-top of the pops in some ways yeah and in in in lots of you know very good ways it was essentially mtv in pill form wasn't it for those who didn't have the time or the dish to actually watch mtv yeah we are now two years into the reign of paul chianne the bbc light entertainment lifer who started his bbc career directing the early 70s kids show zocco and ed and zed who joined top of the pops directly from the kenny everett television show and call my bluff in 1988 this is one of the few chances we've taken so far to see what changes is instigated

what did you notice if anything um i mean i've got to say the set is uh this is a great era for the set which is all kind of blue and pink his full bisexual lighting at this point you know everyone's still miming uh well the main change is made is to maximize the 30 minute slot he's been given to bung in as many acts as possible so under his watch all studio performances are no longer than three minutes and there's a two minute limit on videos it's very jive bunny in fact in the way that it's like well if you don't like this something else is coming along in 20 seconds unfortunately he's also tried to create even more of a party atmosphere by getting the kids to granny clap incessantly throughout every fucking performance, as we're going to see as this episode plays out.

Your host this week is Simon Mayo, who has been in the alpha male position on the Radio 1 Breakfast Show since May of 1988, and his 1990 has already seen decidedly mixed fortunes two months ago he was voted third best dj of the year by the readers of the birmingham mail behind steve wright and bruno brooks that same poll voted erasure the band of the year and mikhail gorbachev the most wonderful human being in the world just beating david platt he's been putting himself about on the bbc presenting the game show scruples and the best of magic with anthea turner and the great soprano but at the moment his only bit of telly is being part of the Top of the Pops talent pool,

which currently includes Jackie Brambles, Mark Goodyear, Gary Davis, Nicky Campbell, and Anthea Turner. And he's been doing that job for over three years. And, chaps, to my mind, he pretty much sums up what Radio 1 wants to be in 1990. You know, he's a smartly turned out, reliable, safe pair of hands. Yeah, and here he is hungover looking, sort of all puffy and pale and sallow,

one arm tight across his stomach as though trying desperately to keep something terrible in. Quite literally holding the mayo. That is because he was uh he was doing his uh if i if i could say he was spreading himself somewhat thinly was mayo at this point he was doing the he was doing the breakfast show so he's been up since 4 a.m so he's just really because i was like blimey mayo looks a bit tired and then it's like oh yeah no he's doing breakfast show he's just really really tired yeah although it's hard to tell because the defining characteristic of simon mayo in as much as he had such a thing is that he's too smug and aloof to bring excitement or enthusiasm and he's too straight and polite to bring any disruption

or provoke any thought you know he is just margarine man or perhaps unsalted and unsweetened porridge to which neil once compared his face although al i think you provided the definitive line on a previous episode of this podcast where you said that mike smith handing over the breakfast show to simon mayo was like peter davison regenerating into Peter Davison, which is about right. Virtually no change, my dear. And it seems not a moment too soon. I'm worried the spots will get that. But this is a strange time for Radio 1 and Top of the Pops, as you were saying.

And Simon Mayo is a kind of bridge between the pipe- motorist djs yes and the early 90s pseudo freshness you know we're still a couple of years away from the banister reforms yeah and radio one finally saying see you later pig masturbator in a wild pedophile um and hey come on into the pastel pink cotton sports jackets over paisley shirts and all that lot you know but when you look at it i had a job in a factory in the summer of 1990 making carpet tiles right unfortunately you couldn't sit there in earphones all day listening to an audio book of mr james collected ghost stories which is what i'd done at my last job to escape the sexual harassment from the fag smoking middle aged women uh you couldn't do it because if you missed a bleep off the machine you'd become

underlay so you had to listen to radio one which they had playing in the factory all day from like simon bates golden hour through gary's unpleasant bit in the middle to the the wild anarchy of steve wright's afternoon posse and when you were listening to radio one all day it was still essentially 1974 yes you know everything was still exactly the same every day and you'd hear the same records on a loop all day for a couple of weeks i used to measure out my day in plays of where are you baby by betty boo which was i think the only good record they had playlisted at the time and it would come on three times a day as regular as the conveyor belt in front of me. And the third play was The Charm because that meant I was on the home stroke.

Yeah. And another wished away eight hours of my young life was almost gone forever. Woohoo. So I'd be there laboring through Craig McLachlan and Check One Two. And, you know, Deacon Blue's necessary cover of I'll Never Fall In Love Again. And River City People's necessary cover of California Dream. Sweet memories. And Timmy Mallet's ever so necessary cover of

Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Pocket Up. And every time I heard Betty Boo, it was like getting a mental tea break. Yes. A blown kiss from a better world in the knowledge that a few more hours had been used up. But Simon Mayo was already very present at this point. Yes. He got the breakfast show presumably because of the association between him and porridge.

And looking at him now, he's clearly the advanced guard of the banister years yes you know he's a little bit more intelligent than what went before him but not to the point of being able to transcend the sea of sludge in which he's set um and not really bringing anything with him except uh a non-dlt ishness yes you know which is a relief in the same way as someone ceasing to prod you in the ear with an unwashed hairy wanger but you know he never really seemed like his heart was in it no i mean he just swans about as if all this is slightly beneath him, but only slightly.

And, you know, really you'd rather be watching a middle-brow costume drama or buying a tart au citron from M&S or embarking on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Oh, yes. For that clip on the video playlist. Of course. As the years pass, it only becomes more amazing. Oh, my God.

No, you see, I'm fine with that. I'm fine with, you know, the relief that you feel every time it cuts back to him, where you know that you're not going to be made to feel uncomfortable. Yeah. You know, he's nobody's favourite Top of the Pops presenter. But there aren't the kind of wanky flourishes. There's no making a thing of how he's Simon Mayo and this is his top of the pops. Yes.

He's got a nice, easy, relaxed kind of presenting style, which is fine. He's got that slight dryness. He's got that slight sort of reserve. He's not a sort of capering buffoon, but a guy in a suit standing slightly apart from what's going on, which, like I said, with, you know, considering what the alternatives can and have been, it's fine by me. I think that only one person in the history of Top of the Pops ever succeeded in synthesising the kind of capering buffoon and dry guy personas, and that was Julian Cope.

Oh, Sarah, let it go. He's not coming back. He was so good at it. His contemporaries, you know, Bruno Brooks and Mark Goodier, they had that zany, wizzy, chart-run-down delivery that just made you tired. Gotcha. And, you know, it just tired me from the ears inwards. And so, yeah, I'm quite pro-Mayo, really,

even with his kind of amazing Bart Simpson square hair. Yes. I mean, he is one of the next generation of DJs who scaled the career path that had been laid out by the U-Tree generation. And yeah, the only vaguely wacky thing he ever did on Top of the Pops was when he did an episode a couple of months ago

in sunglasses because he was suffering from conjunctivitis and was therefore hiding his puffy, weeping eyes. Yeah, he followed that career path right to the point of being 65 or doing an interview with the daily mail about how awful the ppc is welcome to the pubs the rock and roll edition for you tonight we have three debut performances before 7 30 and now we start with a band who are appearing in manchester apollo tonight and then they're at wembley next week number 27 doing deliverance

would you welcome please the top of the pops the mission We're treated to the rolling, roiling, synthetic stab of The Wizard by Paul Hardcastle, which is approaching its fifth anniversary and sounds as much of a relic of the wrong-off of the 80s as an SDP rosette. And a bit of graphical trickery which was introduced in early 1989 where the computer generated saxophones cassettes and guitars have been replaced by a neon 3d maze with the only graphical nod to the show being assorted flying death stars with numbers on them underwhelming as always the theme and the graphics both of them could have been tacked on to pretty much any kid show of the time and no one would have noticed would there yeah the logo spins away to be replaced by another spinny effect that gives us the point of view of a fly with a

damaged wing uncontrollably hurling towards mayo who was turned up in a horrible dark suit and blue shirt with paisley bits on it, buttoned right up, holding the mic in his right hand with his left hand clutched to his stomach, as if he's about to suffer a monumental attack of diarrhoea. Simon Mayo looks like he's just put his headless bass down and walked away from the rest of Johnny Hates Jazz, don't you think? put his headless bass down and walked away from the rest of johnny hayes jazz don't you think as a sorted very young looking kids stand around him already clapping and whooping he says welcome to the pops we've got a rock and roll episode for you tonight after pointing out that there are going to be three debut performances in this episode he introduces us to a band who have got to get their arses up to

Manchester the minute they lay their instruments down. It's the mission with deliverance. Formed in Leeds in 1985, the Sisterhood were a splinter group formed by Wayne Hussey and Craig Adams after they left the Sisters of Mercer and took their road crew and equipment with them. They named the band after their previous group's fan community and then recruited Mick Brown from Red Laurie Yellow Laurie and Simon Hinkler from the Sheffield post-punk band Artery. While they prepared to play their first gig in London and do a session on the Janice Long Show at the beginning of 1986,

their former front person, Andrew Eldridge, who was well dischuffed with their band name, registered the name The Sisterhood for himself, recorded a single called Giving Ground under that name, and released it on the day of the new band's gig. Meaning that they had to be known as the Wayne Hussey and Craigams band for a couple of weeks until they settled upon the mission which was either a nod to hussey's upbringing as a mormon

in bristol or the band's favorite brand of speakers depending on who you talk to they were immediately recruited as a support act for the cult's europe tour and put out two LPs on the Chapter 22 label, which got to number 70 and number 49 on the singles chart respectively. But after they signed a seven-album deal with Mercury in the autumn of 1986, their next release, Stay With Me, got to number 30 in October of that year.

This, their ninth single, is the follow-up to Butterfly on a Wheel, which got to number 12 in January of this year. It's the second cut from their new LP, Carved in Sand, which came out last month. It entered the charts at number 30 last week, and this week it's nipped up three places to number 27.

And here they are, fresh from two nights at Bradford St. George's Hall on their latest tour to get the party started. Poor Mission. They've had to be straight into bed after their gig and forgo the pleasures of Bradford at night, then up in the morning, schlep it down to London, sit about in Television Centre all day, and then straight off to the next gig.

It's, you know, didn't get to see the Trocadero or buy any souvenirs of Lady Di or nothing. Poor bastards. Well, they'd have been so drunk, it wouldn't have made any difference to them at all. So, the mission, gotta say, they meant absolutely fuck all to me, then or now.

I mean, at a push, I'd have said they were shaking model army they had too much of the whiff of stale snake bite for for my liking oh just a bit yeah what a fucking mess i mean he looks like he was in bed and amazon banged on the door to get there in the six seconds before they left but at every level here it's the overwhelming sense of people just not trying which can be okay when it's talented people but when it's slovenly piss it's god bless them pumping out this cloud of nothing and of course it's the worst of both worlds as is so often the case with these bands it It's wearyingly grandiose, but that grandiosity is so thin a facade

you can actually smell the piss and vomit coursing behind it. I mean, I appreciate this is very much the low end of goth, but it's like putting gargoyles on an outside toilet. It's like, first of all all are we just supposed to not notice that this is gimme shelter stripped of everything that's stupendously great about it or even stripped of everything that's not complete shit about it because we are gonna notice i'm sorry the spirit of the stones hangs over this episode doesn't it It's more that this episode is splattered with the droppings of the Rolling Stones. Yes.

The guano of the Rolling Stones in a cave. The first Gulf War, children. It's just a belt, children. It doesn't help that Wayne Huss is turned up as if he's going on copycats to take off late period Ozzy Osbourne. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's him. There's loads of, yeah, yeah. There's him. There's loads of pink and blue neon. There's loads of dry ice.

There's loads of leather jackets with fringe in it. This isn't the 1990 I ordered. Send it back. He's barefoot as well. Barefoot on top of the pops. Don't be barefoot. What do you think you're doing? Yeah, even Sandy Shaw wasn't barefoot

the last time she was on top of the pops. Right. And if she can be bothered to put shoes on, so should you, young man. The little sticky prints being left on the shiny shoes. Oh, everyone else going on there has got to wear a Veruca sock now, haven't they? The thing is that this is meant to have, clearly, the chorus is meant to be epic and big and sweeping. But it's not how it works, right? You can't just go gimme three times

and say something biblical twice no and call it a day like you just can't this presumes to stand among the great gimmies of our time yes gimme gimme shock treatment gimme gimme gimme a man after midnight yes gimme gimme gimme the honky tonk blues gimme more gimme all you're loving gimme that thing gimme that thing and it's blues. Gimme more. Gimme all you're loving. Gimme that thing. Gimme that thing. And it's a powerful command. If you're going to invoke the rock and roll gimme, you better have the chops to back it up, which clearly they do not have.

Although, I mean, I'll hand it to him, Wayne Hussey. Great name. It's like Garth's trumpet. Wayne, he's in a bit of a subversive mood this week isn't it as we'll discover and on top of the pops he's being subversive by a flicking the v sign which he cunningly alters to the p sign and b not noticing or pretending not to notice that his mic slipped off the top of the stands and drooping down which to me ruins the effect of a skillful and passionate live performance but but you know the bbc can cover all that up because they've got a new box of tricks they've got a still new quantel paintbox v series which provides a thrilling diorama of

close-up twanging of strings and hitting of drums and also the lads on the floor they've got a new toy haven't they a handheld camera which means they can get right up the front without plowing through the kids as if they were in a panzer but it also means that they can jump up on stage give us a lingering view up the nostrils of wayne hussey and then leg it off when the camera view changes which gets in the way of everything yeah yeah i preferred it when they were just rolling through the audience like Tiananmen Square, you know. Just sending the kids scattering. If you had Top of the Pops now,

you could just fly drones about the place. God, yeah. When there's not much to say about a performance, you end up kind of, you know, thinking around it. And in the course of looking up songs with Gimme in them, obviously there's a lot, I discovered that Gimme Shelter was covered by both Puddle of Mud and Stone Sour, which is an upsetting fact that you now know.

It's like they heard Gimme Shelter and went, this is all right, but I think we can improve it. Fucking hell. It's one of those things where there's no need for this to exist at all. Nobody there looks like they really have a burning desire to be there. But the kids are already granny clapping though aren't they they're all being cattle prodded to do the granny clapping or as one one gentleman kind of had his own take on it which is sort of like tory party conference

applause yes it's kind of appropriate for this record though i don't know the the whole goth thing meant nothing to me no when i was growing up it was pretty much the default for kids who didn't want to dress off the high street you know or didn't want to listen to whatever was in the charts but it just seemed obviously worse than either of those things to me yeah it meant nothing to me because i couldn't see that it meant anything full stop apart from a dress up which is fine but a dress up's meant to be fun and i'm sure a lot of these goths had a whale of a time but to me it just seemed like neither one thing nor the other it was mopey and gloomy but at the same time there was a fundamental lack of seriousness about it you know what i mean and

i never liked the music or the feeling i got off the music i just couldn't see the appeal i've had it on good authority that for a lot of goth girls the appeal was creating a look and for a lot of goth lads the appeal was that look of the girls because in the 80s it wasn't really the done thing for women who consider themselves a bit alternative man to go with the elaborate makeup and corsets and lace and heels and all that stuff and you can't really blame hormonal young men for being drawn towards that and when i was a teenager i copped off with quite a lot of gothy girls despite being resolutely anti-goth because out in the sticks if you weren't 100 mainstream in your, you had to stick together.

And I think a lot of these girls just looked at me because I got like a leather jacket on and Chelsea boots. And they said, oh, that's close enough. You know what I mean? And I always had some respect for the full-on goths who got into the black magic and the weird lifestyles and actually made their own lives much more difficult because at least that's a direction

of travel and if you get to go to an orgy in a broken into church or something like that who's complaining you know i mean yeah more constructive than getting into level 42 in it or you know it's less evil than joining the young farmers but for the most part i couldn't understand it and if they were also obsessed with death how come they all smoked silk cut I couldn't understand it. And if they were all so obsessed with death, how come they all smoked silk cut? I couldn't see it. Have some courage of your convictions, I thought. You know, smoke filthless camels and end up wheezing through your ears

when you're 35, like I do. I mean, the mission to these eyes then and now, they look massively out of date by the spring of 1990. But no, they're quite go-ahead. They cultivated a rabidly dedicated audience who would go out and buy anything they put out on week one which got them into the charts and for the past year or so they've been dropping a phone number in their fan club newsletter and a date and every other month the band meets up in someone's house for the day and set a load of

phones up and whoever rings them up they'll answer and they'll talk to them so you know people will ring them up asking them questions about the songs when they're touring next they'll be asking wayne hussey for relationship advice and you know find out what cars are driving at the moment and in some cases asking wayne hussey if he'd write a song for someone's wedding it was no 0898 two pound a minute bollocks you just ring up and talk to a member of the mission for a bit some of the other members used to get really fucked off because they could hear the the disappointment in people's voices when they realized they weren't talking to wayne yeah people ring up what's james whale really like so this is there was high goth and there was low goth and the mission are the

classic example of the latter you know at least with the high end like maybe what the sisters of mercy there's like some attempt to sculpt an aesthetic structure which could realistically be described as gothic you know like elaborate and intense rather than graceful but this is the low end it's just people trying to look solemn and mysterious while pissing cheap lager into a bus shelter you know i mean who needs it it's what got my goat in the old days like the low end of goth just imbeciles stumbling around in army boots and faded black jeans and a band t-shirt with their hair dyed black and hair sprayed up you know i mean i'd always give props to a goth who's made an effort right regardless of whether they look magnificently vampiric or you know like somebody works at b&q

who's tripped over a tin of paint and rolled through the net curtain because at least it's something you know what I mean but this stuff it's just about not trying at all and expecting people to think you're something you know with your spooky finger waggling on stage you know give me a break and it's the most insultingly easy music as well it's a very pernicious influence on bands or it was you know this sort of stuff you don't have to work out an arrangement you don't have to really write a song you certainly don't have to generate any heat or funk when you play there's no musical ideas necessary you just switch on the flanger pedal just hit a big minor chord and let it ring and hope you carried along on the dry ice you know it's shameful really i'm i'm all for music that doesn't require skill when it's a

way to enable people with great ideas and limited musicianship to create something beautiful or funny or exciting or thought-provoking but this shit at best enables people with fuck all to say and fuck all to offer to get up on stage and pose and to pollute the culture with even more windy narcissism while pulling a face like they're dispensing the secrets of the great beyond you know there's a reason why nobody listens to this music these days it is just sludge it's the lowest level of rock and roll it's lower than the holiday camp circuit because at least there you need something to make you stand out even if it's just a dog that barks every time you do a magic trick yes you know it's like the mission should have had a roomy eyed old whip it on stage that shats itself after every song although i guess if you were a mission gig it probably felt like they did it is definitely

pub goth as opposed to like dungeon goth like it's the drip tray rather than the goblet and if you're doing a single called deliverance and there's no banjo on it what the fuck are you playing at or wayne huss is not squealing like a pig bad start to the show this is so the following week deliverance stayed at number 27 before dropping to number 55 and they're right out of the charts the follow-up into the blue got to number 30 in june and they'd rammed off 1990 with hands across the ocean getting to number 28 in november but one night after this episode was aired a massively k-like wayne hussey was driven from a mission gig in sheffield to the radio air studios in Leeds

to appear live on the James Whale radio show on late night ITV, where he swigged from a bottle of Black Tower, took offence at having his horoscope done on a computer, and dropped three fucks, three fuckings, two fuck-offs, two shits, and two pillocks in four minutes and twenty seconds

before being escorted off the premises by Whale after he lobbed both of his shoes at a camera or brazen hussy if you will. We've seen this, haven't we? Is that why he was barefoot on top of the pops? He'd just come from throwing his shoes

at someone who was trying to interview him? Yeah, he went and asked for them back. James Whale went, no. The two famous ones was this, and the other was Rob Newman of Newman and Baddiel getting escorted from the studio for mocking James Whale's mother's terminal illness or something. It was a...

Class act. Yeah, well, people. It was a... Class act. Yeah, I know. Well, people thought it was a great idea to sort of load the green room with cans of lager, I suppose. Yeah. Or maybe it's just putting a live show on that late at night. People turn up, you know, having pre-loaded. But great fun for the viewers.

Somebody said, fuck off. Yeah, if you were 12 years old and you saw this, fuck, you know, you'd have been the king of the playground on Monday morning. The funniest bit was when the astrologer turned up to do his reading on the computer and Hussey took his hat off and put it on top of James Whale. James Whale just looks like the fucking shopkeeper in Mr. Ben.

In an interview on the Channel 4 Robo Chat Show Star Test a year later, Hussey said that he was convinced he was going to be stitched up by whale, so he went in hard with the swears as soon as the interview started, because I don't fucking know. Hey, look. Forever and ever Mayo, standing amongst the kids tells us that every band eventually goes through a big ballad phase, punctuating the words with splayed fingers in the air, like he was explaining fireworks to a toddler.

He then tells us that the next group have entered that phase surprisingly early. It's New Kids on the Block and I'll Be Loving You, open brackets, forever, close brackets. We chanced upon Nakotba in chart music number 30 when they scored their first number one with You Got It, The Right Stuff in November of 1989. And this is the follow-up to their re-release of Hanging Tough, which also got to number one for two weeks in January of this year. It's the third cut to be released in the UK

from their second LP, Hanging Tough, and was their first number one in America last June. And it sees the rapping Osmonds taking a break from throwing down hardcore lyrics and electing instead to lay down some smooth R&B for the tenderonis it's the new entry this week at number 11 and as i've got a gig on at the nassau coliseum in new york tonight here's the video which was shot in and around the xavier high school in nyc and chaps in the last

episodes we had a good laugh at the colonials didn't we for being half a year behind us when it came to the new style even on their own records but oh dear the tables have considerably turned and we're still coming to grips with the kids aren't we yeah but they're still living in the 80s that's the thing it's like so couple more years, it's still the 80s in America. Yes. In the same way that it was the 70s in America until about 1983, because they didn't have punk. Not as a national novelty. Yeah. With an even more immediate and obvious effect on clothes than pop music.

Right? It's the same. It took until a few years into the 90s for america to cut off its mullet you know because fashions don't move that fast america because it's too big yeah if you look at american mass culture in the early 90s it was still stuff like america's top 10 with tommy pewitt do you remember him do you ever see that guy he was like this american heartland caricature you still dressed like the breakfast club right he might as well have been sucking on chili You ever see that guy? He was like this American heartland caricature. He was still dressed like the Breakfast Club.

Right. He might as well have been sucking on Chili Dog outside the Tasty Freeze. He had snow-washed jeans, high-top trainers, spiky mullet, cap-sleeve T-shirt, rigid adherence to corporate agenda to the max, dude. And he was like, you know, he was giving it all the sort of old school smarm, but with attitude.

So he'd say like, that was Roxette taking a joy ride. It just, that really hung on in the States for a few more years. And it just slowly evolved from, I love my corporate agenda to my corporate agenda makes me very sad. I think I'll have some tasty heroin.

But it was a slow process. Yeah, Jordan is sporting a Batman sweatshirt under his leather jacket. Yes. A really up-to-the-minute film ref. Yeah. Although, however out of time they feel here, they're actually more of a clue to the future than the heralds of the daisy age who turn up later if

you want to know where pop music and pop culture are going in the medium term this tells you a lot more you know this is like hunks you like like providing that strange kind of comfort and just non-threatening boys yeah their career just happening like a rock thrown into a pond that disappears under the water without leaving a ripple you know they're following a plan and the arrow points straight at the wall but they have to keep following it just bumping off again and again until they finally knock themselves out and are heard no more this is where all that begins you know that that kind of boy band so over here they've had two number ones on the bounce with their hardcore stylings but like their equal

ll cool j the kids are not afraid to display their soft ass side and you know when this came out i thought they'd made a right mistake going all slushy. But in actual fact, this, what we're listening to here, was the single that put them over in America. So what the fuck did I know? Well, it's a slow jam. You know, this is a, it's a school disco shuffle. Yes. Yeah, it's quite a sort of gloopy American Sunday.

Somehow they've managed to cram more sugar into one dessert than you could ever imagine was possible some sort of ultra synthesized corn syrup yes in musical form yeah i mean by this time they are the ultimate boys in a bag aren't they sarah are you concerned with them at the time i had hopefully i still have like a Japanese bootleg set of their first album. Right. Which is just an excellent object, you know. Don't know how I ended up with that. But yeah, that was a thing that is cooler than I was at the time in a weird way.

But Boys in a Bag I always think of as distinctly British. Yes. Americans, it's different. Even if they're shit, there's always a certain sharpness and ease and assurance about Americans doing show business. It's like it's their thing. You know, this kind of looks really sloppy now to our eyes because we know what came after just became more and more and more super sharp and super tight, you know. And, you know, the choreography and the songwriting, everything just entered like a new era. Choreography and the songwriting and everything just entered like a new era.

So, yeah, they do look very 1988 in American terms, you know. It's like acid house never happened. But, you know, fine. Were they a big deal at your school? I don't think they were. Really? No, I mean, they were American. I don't remember them being a big deal at all. Oh, yanks coming over here.

Oh, no, we don't take kindly don't take kindly to them them americans chewing gum or did they appeal to like even younger kids i know what you mean though like at this point british boy bands even the pretty ones still had that slightly dickensian undernourished look that you got from kids that have been raised in the austerity years. You know what I mean? Whereas these look healthy. I mean, this might be the introduction of developed musculature into teen pop.

You know what I mean? Like, we've already seen Bobby Brown go in shirtless to show off the fact that his stomach looks like a Klingon scalp. But these have got to be the first white bread pop stars who look a bit gymmed up, you know, in this genre. I mean, I'm not counting Man O' War. But I mean, like, Bross were just sort of skinny rather than beef. Yeah. You know, and A-Ha certainly looked like they couldn't tell one end of a barbell

from another not that actually it really matters because both ends of a barbell are identical that's kind of the point but you know what i'm saying i mean prior to this the only way you'd have found yourself using the word abs in connection with any of these teenybop stars was if it was short for abnormalities. Abnormalities of a sexual nature. I mean, it's Donny, really, who is bringing that energy and the sort of the rippedness. There is the sort of emergent, you know,

each one of them is a different kind of character. Really? Yeah, I think so. I mean, Donny is kind of the bad boy. Right. Obviously, Donny Wahlberg. To me, they all look like a load of potsies waiting for the Fonz to come along and tell them what to do. Well, it's funny because they are, the other ones are kind of all the sensitive guy.

There's kind of the one who looks like Ross from Friends. And Jordan, who is your main guy out front, who is quite, you know, kind of not a hard lad, you know. But also Joey, who was 17 here, I think. He was only 13 when he was signed to new kids on the block right it's all he's ever known oh pop fact born in needham massachusetts was he now oh yeah there you go but yeah he really looks in this video um he's he's very baby-faced anyway and he he looks like he's just wandered in from the set of bugsy malone like you know they're in the pool hall and it's like you're even old enough to be in here you expect him to start

going we could have been anything that we wanted to be shooting up the pool hall with like gobs of whipped cream from a massive tommy gun so you wanna be in a boy band there can you help me out here because like i've had a good old look at new kids on the block here in an attempt to tell them apart. I didn't want to Google them because I felt that would demean me and by extension the listeners. So if I just give you the evidence of my eyes, maybe you could tell me which one's which, right?

Because I don't know. There's the one who looks like if you fed all the levi's genes models of the late 80s into a neural network along with a handful of human feces and asked it to work out an average there's the one i remember most from the time with the big shield shaped face who looks like r Ross from Friends if he'd just woken up from 34 hours sleep. And he's got a big block head and a rat's tail hanging out the back of it. So it looks like the rat is wedged into his skull, gnawing at the part of the brain that controls not being a cheesy douchebag.

I think that's danny okay there's the one he looks like a photograph of ollie gunner solshar taken on the day his parents bought him his first pair of proper boots i think that's donnie right there's the big one with a side parted mullet um which is an often forgotten variation on the theme. That one's Donny. That's Donny. Donny looks like Mark Wahlberg, the actor, who was in New Kids on the Block for about five minutes

and then was booted out unceremoniously. Went to the gym. Yeah, yeah. And then there's the fair-haired one with the sort of blow-waved Roberto Baggio haircut, like a non-divine ponytail and nutty hamster cheek one that's got curly hair people some people have curly hair taylor and that's like weird and wacky and stuff but you know that's just what some people have to work with they haven't done it on purpose to

annoy you 30 years later so basically they're all donny no no it's it's funny because i was never you know i did have i had i had their first album i wasn't like a squealing fan but i i somehow because that's kind of how it works with boy bands i do remember i i had to look up some a couple of the names but i remember jordan joey and donnie so i was, who are the others? Roley and Craig, except it's American, so you pronounce it Craig. But no, I believe it's Jordan, Joey, Donnie, Danny and John, confusingly. Have you ever screamed at anyone at a gig? I have, you know, I have bellowed my appreciation in the time-honoured fashion. Oh, you're a woman, you're allowed to.

Oh, yeah, of course. I've always wanted to scream at a gig and i can't bring myself to do it actually no i tell a lie i tell an absolute lie 1992 earls court prince oh yeah of course and uh he did his usual pieces obviously didn't want to go back to the 80s but he thought oh you know what i'll do a bit of a sex you know i'm here now might as well get on with it and he uh he went down on his mic stand and he laid the mic stand down and started crawling on all fours you know with his tongue wiggling and this scream just went up amongst a load of people who were too old and too cool for that shit and one of them was me i just went ah it's fucking brilliant

i've never wet myself at a gig but you know there's still time it'll probably happen if i start going to gigs in a few years time eventually those two axes are going to meet in the middle and no i've never thrown a knicker oh that. It's just not my, it's not ideal. No. I crowd surfed once. Really? One time I did a, yeah, I fucking crowd surfed. Yeah, yeah, because I wanted to do it one time.

Who to? It was to my fave's Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. And you'd think, you can't crowd surf to them, but whatever. It was at Glastonbury. Fortunately, I didn't get groped or dropped on my head or any of the things that could happen so and that was the one time and i will i will never do that again at least i've done it the ones but anyway new kids on the block according to this week's nme the deluge of nakotba is only just beginning in the uk because they've announced a new line of action

figures that are fully poseable so you could break into your little sister's bedroom and create a gay orgy tableau or make a human centipede out of them. According to the NME, the dolls come fully equipped for the good life. They sport earrings, ponytails, rings, hats and bracelets, while also on display is a toy instrument playset, along with girls' fashion accessories, a new kid's telephone, a play microphone and a cassette player. But not everyone in the UK is succumbing to the new kid's invasion. In the singles review section of Smash Hits in January of this year,

Matt Goss was given hanging tough and said I think this is one of those records where unfortunately white boys are trying to sound black and not succeeding I know them and I like the guys but I just feel that their managers make them work so hard and at the end of the day they don't write they don't produce they were auditioned for the band and i think it's unfair sometimes on them as people but they're nice chaps sorry and as you can imagine there's been a absolutely massive backlash on the smash hits letters page i'm writing to tell you that matt goss is a total prat how dare he slag off new kids on the block writes a nakotba fan fighting against racism apart from being rude he was also racist

what happened to this all colors are equal stuff he sang, screeched in black and white on their new LP. What a hypocrite. All I can say is I hope none of your fans, very few, considering you couldn't fill Wembley Stadium, ever scream for you again. I hope you lose all

your fans for being a racist hypocrite. Ross's latest single, Madly in Love, entered the charts at number 15 last week. This week, number 14. The accountant's about to find out that they've overspent by three

quarters of a million pounds. They owe American Express 58,000 quid. Their former management are about to put in a damages claim for 1.2 million, and Matt's attempt to sell off his flat in Maida Vale has been commented on by the Daily Mirror thusly. Matt has spent £240,000 on the flat

and unrealistically expects to sell it for more. But the truth is, no grown-up would want it. He painted the entire flat in his favourite sky-blue colour, a shade so lurid that no-one can stomach looking at it for more than a few minutes. Oh, dear. Poor bros, forgotten about. Anyway, the video. So, they're all malingering around a school loping about in front of some

traditional graffiti which is you know just scrawling and then they have a bit of a sing while some teenage models look on and then they remind you how urban they are by flinging a basketball each other or against a really high wall which is fucking stupid man that really upset me that they're not even playing wall-e or kirby or anything there's no basket either so they can neither win nor lose stupid someone's cheaping out on the video here because they're in that same studio that they always use like there's another whatever video they had out last time this is exactly the same setup and the same cameras and stuff yeah yeah and they only have three microphones to go around i

mean maybe they're doing that kind of classic thing where you know there's guys kind of do what yeah yeah there's only three microphones and there's no basketball basket and you know i bet they couldn't they probably weren't old enough to drink in america because america is insane god no so you know they go to the pool hall and just drink mineral water yeah showing the ladies how to play pool yeah they sort of mooch about a bit and then they all share a pizza at the end to prove that, despite their success, they've not forgotten how to put food into their own mouths and chew.

And you remember the last Nacotiba video we saw on here, one of them was wearing a Bauhaus T-shirt. Yes. In this video, one of them's wearing a T-shirt which looks as if it says south today the name of the bbc regional news program for the south of england which is an even hip regional news in your area fucking hell even hipper and more niche anglophile reference god yeah i think that's what it says it's got those words and there's a picture of someone underneath

which i assume is sally taylor yes that's kind of like um japanese t-shirts that have sort of random english words on them isn't it just completely out of context yeah if they were being hipster and ironic it would be a picture of tom coin or bob warman the thing is you can tell what they're supposed to look like and what their image is meant to be. But in terms of how it actually connects when you watch it, it feels more like a compare has come on and said, ladies and gentlemen, please give him a warm hand. Here to tap dance for you, little bastard.

And on comes a kid with a bowl cut in a bow tie and a velvet jacket with a fixed grin and fear in his heart the problem is not that they're a manufactured group man or any of that stuff it's just a matter of what's here and what comes across when you're pure showbiz there's stuff you can do there's a lot of stuff you can do and get away with and then there's stuff that you just can't get away with and new kids on the block always very very keen on the stuff that you just can't get away with if you're this sort of group and it's a bit depressing you know it's stuff like this that gives exploitation a bad name it's like what neil said before when you love pop you want the top band of the era

To be fucking astonishing And I'm not feeling that here with this lot No Although, speaking of the smash hits letters page I was looking at the smash hits for this very week That this Top of the Pops went up And there's a bit of a mini war Between swallow anything pop fans

And sort of snobby little indie kids who haven't yet made the jump to the inkies quite um yes so there's a letter from an un-stereotyped stone roses and house of love fan west germany who uh doesn't reckon new kids on the block and lives up to their pen name by busting those stereotypes and writing what really flipped me was that letter from the west coast posse that reckon the stone roses are unoriginal i can only say one thing to them crap crawl back into your sheds, look stupid, rip out your voice boxes, form a group and become famous. After all, that's what New Kids on the Block did. Oh, yes. That's what sort of idiot you'd have to be

to think the Stone Roses were unoriginal. But directly underneath, there's an instant fight back from Jordan's Lucky Charms charms in gwent who writes may we just say to the stone roses fan from the real world that it is not hanging tough which is crap but fool's gold at least gorgeous john knight hasn't got hair like hippies as the stone Stone Roses do. Good point, well made. At least new kids don't jump around wearing flares, which were only popular in caveman days. The Stone Roses song portrays them perfectly.

Fools! So to the first letter I would hold up two cards saying six and eight, and to the second letter I would hold up two cards saying six and eight. And to the second letter, I would hold up two cards saying seven and nine. Oh, if only Barry Tuck had read out the fucking music press letters pages, man. Yeah, all those voices they used to use on... Yes! Who all sounded posh because nobody else wrote a letter to Points of View. I always wanted to write a letter and say, Dear BBC, I live on a letter to Points of View. I always wanted to write a letter and say, dear BBC,

I live on a council estate in East London and just see what kind of voice they'd read it out in. Yeah, at least what the papers say had a bit of range to them. Oh yeah, for the tabs. Well, the only way to do it really is the Eurotrash way, which is just to do the broadest possible regional access. Yes.

Dear BBC, Points of view, fuck off. So the following week, I'll Be Loving You Forever jumped six places to number five, but no further, oh dear. The follow-up and the final single release

from the Hanging Tough LP, Cover Girl, got to number four for two weeks in May, and then there was an absolute deluge of Nakoba. They started their magic summer tour in the UK in May, selling tour programmes at £10 each, released their third LP, Step By Step, in June, and banged out four UK top ten hits during the rest of the year.

After dropping off the radar in the uk at the end of 1991 they split up in 1995 reunited in 2008 are still going today and have just announced a summer tour with salt and pepper on vogue and rick astley that in fact, the new super group. Yes. New Kids on the Block, Salt-N-Pepa, On Vogue and Rick Astley together at last with a new single. Very familiar to viewers of Mike Reid's Heritage Chart Show. Yes. Yes, indeed.

This was one of the actual highlights of the Heritage Chart Shows that I've seen. This new single called Bring Back the Time, which is a comment on nostalgia that is also nostalgic in itself. They haven't new single called Bring Back the Time, which is a comment on nostalgia that is also nostalgic in itself. They haven't spent an awful lot on the video, but they have spent, you know, certainly nothing on it.

So it looks like it belongs on the Heritage Chart Show because it just looks like it's been lit by supermarket overhead lights. They've got Rick Astley as David Byrne and Jordan as Billy Idol and Joey as Robert Palmer on Vogue as his lady backing band. The kind of sultry ladies at the back.

And it is both ironic and sincere, which is a hell of a thing to pull off, especially given most of the people involved are American. They're very niftily doing a postmodern song about nostalgia and desperation and they've actually sent themselves up quite nicely.

And it's a good song. I am actually full of admiration for them at this point i think they've played an absolute blinder and you know if i was going to stuff then i would definitely consider going to see this tour because you know holy shit what a line although it is a bit like a pop version of the wild geese back together for one last job but i mean it's less humiliating than talking to mike reed over zoom yes in a hat with a straight face and pretending your new record is going to have some kind of impact beyond your wife giving you a kiss on the cheek and telling you she's very proud of you. It's one for me and a million for you.

It's just so much that I'm worth it. And they're very nice to their grandparents as well, apparently. That's new kids on the block. OK, our first look at the charts now, 40 to 31. new kids on the block. Okay, our first look at the charts now, 40 to 31. And our first new entry there at number 40, Read My Lips from Jimmy Somerville.

White Snake and the Deep of the Love, this week's number 39. Kate Bush and Love and Anger goes up to this week's 38. At 37, Advice for the Young at Heart from Tears for Fears. You at 36, Everything Starts with an E from the Easy Posse. Lonnie Gordon happening all over again.

This week's number 35. And you at 34, Birdhouse in Your Soul from They Might Be Giants. Electrive 101, Talking With Myself at 33 this week. 32, Dude Looks Like a Lady from Aerosmith. And up to 31, Hold Back the River from Wet, Wet, Wet. Okay, now pay attention, please. Here comes the band who have never, ever been on television before. Not just not top of the pops, never been on television.

It's their first hit single, Candy Flip, and Strawberry Fields Forever. Thank you. Let me take you down So warm and sweet So warm and sweet Mayo on the balcony flanked by two females, one of which is sporting one of them techly T-folk hats that are the style in the spring of 1990, studded with what looks like the bathroom tiles in the Banana Splits house, remarks that Nakopa are very nice to their grandparents as well,

before whipping us into the first quarter of the brand new Top 40. Yeah, that girl's hat looks like she smashed a Rubik's Cube in frustration, and all the pieces flew up in the air and embedded themselves in a cow's bladder that she had on her head. Is this the sort of Mondrian shower cap? That's what I've got on my nose. Yes. And by the way, females.

Yes. Put in deliberately to rile you, Sarah. Thanks. It's all right. Look, the only people who are allowed to call women females are cops and the narrators of nature documentaries. Right. I'll bear that in mind.

So think on. Okay. The band picks, alas, are tediously adequate. Jimmy Sutherville, White Snake, Tears for Fears, Aerosmith, Kate Bush. Welcome to the new decade, everyone. Back on the balcony, Mayo tells us that the next band have never been on any sort of television before not police five not the bandung file not even supermarket cctv but by god they're here now it's candy flip with strawberry fields forever with Strawberry Fields Forever. Formed in Stoke-on-Trent in 1988,

Yin Yang were a Pet Shop Boys-influenced duo who originally met at a music production course in Manchester called Danny Spencer, a house DJ and former Midlands breakdancing champion otherwise known as Dizzy D, and Rick Peat, whose man was in the Vernon's Girls, the 60s group that mutated into the Ladybirds, the in-house backing singers for Top of the Pops in the 70s.

As Spencer was already part of a house collective called This Ain't Chicago, who were signed to a phonogram offshoot label, they were picked up by them. But after they discovered that the head of A&R thought they were cat shit and had lobbed their latest demo tape out of a window they signed to Debut Records the home of Toto Coelho and MC Micah G and DJ Sven and changed their name to Candy Flip because drugs their first single Love Is Life came out late last year but failed to get any airplay possibly due to the lad shouting it's mental it's mental in a cockney accent so they went back to the drawing board put out their next single and started to cast around for a b-side one fateful

night they were driving back to stoke after a night at the Hacienda, found a French radio station, heard it play the 1967 Beatles single that was held off number one by Release Me by Engelbert Humperdinck, looked at each other with their mouths presumably hanging open, and knew exactly what they had to do. Get their arse back to Dizzy D's dad's garage in Stoke, and spend eight hours doing a soft lad cover of it, with a funky drummer sample whacked over the top. After being rinsed in clubs, but not the hacienda to the chagrin of the lads,

it was released last week, and it's immediately shot into the charts at number 18 and they've immediately been hustled into the top of the pop studio to caper about like emissaries from a future eden holy shit here we are this could be the definitive holy shit this is yes the tsar bomber of horrified disbelief it's like the beatles on acid yes 23 years of progress has led us to this moment i mean bearing in mind that whether intentionally or not this is less a pop record than a piece of trolling yes i can remember at the time being pointlessly and predictably vocal about this record not surprised walking straight into it as it were and i remember someone saying

to me and not for the last time yeah but kids have never heard the original this is all new to them like as if the beatles back catalogue was some hidden jewel and as if i wasn't 17 myself you know what i mean yeah but more than that i thought yeah but this is like giving someone an asbestos sandwich because they've never tasted cheese. Yes. On top of which, I couldn't quite get with the idea that the appropriate attitude to musical history and heritage was not to learn from it and move on or to ignore it or to try and tear it down. to try and tear it down but to keep on repackaging it a little bit weaker and a little bit worse every time to meet the cultural and commercial demands of a deteriorating society now call me old-fashioned but you know and all these decades later it doesn't matter and i'd like to look at Candy Flip and just chuckle and applaud demonically, you know.

But you remember that conceit of the Durruti column? They put their first album. It's an idea they borrowed from the Futurists, right? They released their first LP in a sandpaper sleeve. So that when you filed it away, it scratched and it ruined all the sleeves of the albums around it as a as an artistic statement and a gesture of contempt towards uh you know the historians or the librarians concept of pop music it was like they were getting ready to fuck over jiran jiran isn't it but the thing is this is like that except the sandpaper is also on the inside.

Against the soul. I mean, yeah, you're right, Taylor. It's put an absolute cat amongst the pigeons, hasn't it? According to the news section of this week's NME, the chairman of the Beakles Appreciation Society has given a wacky Mac a thumbs up, but Matt Goss has said, this record should never have been made

a cat amongst the pigeons indeed this is basically the reason ultimately that uh that taylor voted for this yes of course it is he wanted to talk shit about candy flip more than he wanted to rhapsodize about killer or grooves in the heart yes so here we are but he was drawn to it like you know like a moth to a really bad pop record to a bin fire the thing is that that this is named after um obviously i didn't realize at the time but i now know that it was named after the popular ritual of taking MDMA and LSD. Why have three letters when you can have seven? Exactly. That's a candy flip, is it?

That's what a candy flip is. It's a very weirdly named thing because you'd think, I don't know, candy flip sounds more like, you know, MDMA and... Chew it. Yeah, it doesn't. But that's partly the reason. That's partly the thing, isn't it? It just sounds like a lovely, fluffy, innocent thing. I assume they were called candy flip because that's a baudelarised version of the words

that come out of your mouth the first time you hear them. Actually, a surprisingly sensible combination of substances. You know, it sounds like, if you're like, bloody hell, I would never do that. Holy shit, what the fuck are you doing? It's like, no, they go really nicely together substances you know it sounds like if you're like bloody hell i'd never do that holy shit what what the fuck are you doing it's like no they go really nicely together you know because like the lsd kind of fills out what can be quite a small bubble of mdma and the mdma takes the existential edge of the lsd so it works really well but um these people are i fail to see any evidence of them ever having had transformative psychoactive

substances in their lives this is one of the least drugs records i've ever heard i mean at the time you know before i commenced um ruining my life with with these things i didn't know what to make of it it probably was the first time that i heard strawberry feels forever was in this format there you go within the kind of weird milkshake version it's very odd apparently according to your wikipedia it is now considered a rave classic how by whom citation needed like i don't know this is not rave by any definition that that i have heard you can't dance to it because it kind of it stops and starts but without there being a build-up or a drop no it's too fidgety for chill out and it's too boring for like the main room you know i mean obviously the funky drummer is yeah we all love

there's a comfort inherent in hearing that break you know it's so familiar to you that it's just like a lovely soft even at the time that's the thing i think that break was more familiar to me at the time than strawberry fields forever by the beatles but i did not enjoy it even as an 11 year old because it's got that sort of slightly magic roundabouty feel to it but not in a pleasant way there's just something sort of off about it it starts with like 10 to 15 seconds of like weird dead air and you can kind of feel that in the studio when when they perform it like there's four of them like there's no reason for there to be four of them yeah they're being billed as a two-piece but on that stage there are four people one on a keyboard one singing one with some maracas obviously because it's 1990 and someone with a tambourine what's going on also it isn't psychedelic

either no like it's not dancy right it is neither of the drugs that they are claiming to invoke with their name. It's not dancy. It's not ecstatic. And it's not psychedelic. I mean, the thing about the psychedelic experience, and especially British psychedelia, is there's lots of humour and absurdism in it. Yeah. And kind of cartoonery. It's very daft because, in fact, acid is very silly.

It's not just very silly. It also forces you to confront all kinds of large things and this doesn't have any of those things it doesn't have any of those elements it's just this sort of very strange vacuum yeah and it doesn't invite the listener to be sort of transported or transformed just sort of a bit weirded out by what it isn't. Yes. It's sort of like if you pulverised the shaman in a Nutribullet with some celery and some antihistamine that they told you was an absolutely top-draw pinger. This is what you get.

It's proto-trip-hop, isn't it? Is it? If you take my definition of trip-hop, which is really fucking boring hip-hop. But it's supposed to be dark though i mean there isn't any darkness in it it's not really sunny there's something beatific about it but not blissy yes do you know what i mean there's like a pose and i can't figure out for the life of me and nor did i want to spend any time trying to figure this out how cynical an operation this is

like whether it's purely naive and awkward or the opposite or maybe both somehow they're essentially madchester jedward aren't they if you will it's like east 17 babies or if you want to be geographically correct they're de la stoke oh if this evokes an altered state at all it's the feeling of half waking from a wrong nap you know the kind of liminal state where you've napped for too long at the wrong time and you regret having it and you can't move and you've got like sleep paralysis and you've just dipped into unconsciousness at the wrong time and like your arms numb and you've drooled onto your cuff and it's like oh no what

have i done it's that so who are these boys well in an interview with the enemy next week we learned that they fully bought into this gimmick in 1990 people have needed to develop a hippie attitude says dizzy d things had to move away from that whole 80s thing of me me me now it's us us us not just people but the whole planet people are striving for harmony meanwhile rick feels that the 60s have been neglected by modern music as a source of inspiration fucking hell didn't he live through the 80s at all and both of them feel that rave is the only new scene that has happened since punk when it gets pointed out to them that rave is doing nothing but desensitizing people to reality they counter that rave has done what punk tried to and failed which was create a scene without heroes according to them in this interview where punk

was all right until the sex pistols came along that's what they actually fucking said well they're certainly doing their best to turn it into a scene without heroes and even in this era it's quite strange to see a band with two bezes yes that's what i've got here a brace of bezes yeah well i mean really it's a whole band of bezes of course but yes what if you just you know copied and pasted bez for time if catch a fire was entirely populated by bezzers this is what we get because they've got those kind of like ethnic hooded tops yeah those double bezzers i can name the guilty boys because thanks to the sounds check column in the stafford sentinel which was the bible of the pottery's rave scene, in an article dated November the 10th, 1989,

we can name those bezzers. Budding stars signed big deal. Four budding young Potteries pop stars have been snapped up by one of the world's biggest music publishers. The friends, all from Bradley, Staffordshire, have signed a contract with London-based Polygram Music to make one album and two singles. Calling themselves Candyflip, the band are Kelvin Andrews, Richard Scott, Carl Johns and Dizzy D, alias Danny Spencer. Richard Scott is Rick Pete. So yeah, that's Kelvin and Carl up there

shaking a maraca and a tambourine. It's a shame that the baggy era was so limited in their choices of percussion instrument, don't you think? You know, they could have mixed in a baudrin or a massive gong or a scrapey fish. Yeah. No, damn shame.

Yeah, or a twisty cheese grater thing. Yes. And some spoons. Yeah. But a twisty cheese grater thing. Yes. And some spoons. Yeah. But anyway, back to the article. Dizzy's father, Tony Mould, is acting as manager for the boys and is planning to have recording equipment so his son can work from home. Yes.

Keep an eye on him so he doesn't take any of them bloody drugs. The four boys have called themselves Candy Flip and the album they're doing will be called Ice Pops and Global Grooves. Oh my God. It was not, in fact. It was called... Yeah, we'll come to that later.

An even worse title for an album. Imagine the brainstorming sessions that went into that. We can sit here and sneer as we did back in the day, but no no to the mainstream media these boys are the representatives of rave in 1990 they're about to be invited on to wogan and blue peter until someone had a word about what candy flipping is and those invitations were withdrawn pretty sharpish but they get two smash hits covers in 1992. And the one on the 4th of April with your man making the classic

pub cat's arsehole face. Yes. The cover line being peace and love and rave on, man. And because it's smash hits in 1990, you can hear the tone in which that has been put on the cover. Yes.

That edition also featured Adamski, Sydney Youngblood, D-Mob, Happy Mondays, Easy Posse, Andrew Ridgely and Snap. Every man jack of whom is more rave than they are. Yes. At least they're keeping up one Top of the Pops tradition, which is to piss off dads all over the country. Yeah. By this point, Beatles fans would have kids of a Top of the Pops watching age and they would have been so fucked up.

would have kids of a top of the pops watching age and they would have been so fucked up yeah i mean it's a very boringly traditional view that strawberry fields forever with penny lane on the double a side is the greatest single of all time you know like there could be such a thing but the thing is that's a traditional view according to the tradition that pop isn't just a practical joke and should be imaginative and stimulating and courageous you know but there are also aspects of pop music like essential elements that that view doesn't allow for like cheapness stupidity trashiness pointless mischief and an opposition to the very idea of objective artistic worth so in a way this record is like a giant horrendous corrective that strips away all the worthy qualities of the original yeah and replaces them with all the shitty and shoddy things that it's missing but however amusing that looks and whatever else you can say about candy flip never let it be said that

they don't look amusing no god it's not in the end a very rewarding thing to do and ultimately the struggle is to not let him take you down you know people do these compilations of terrible beatles covers right it's always the obvious kitsch ones it's like the barking dogs doing hard days night sort of thing but what would really hurt would be a compilation of Beatles covers which are supposed to be good but which actually

systematically drain away everything magical from the original as though that were the point you know if you had a CD and it was the Thompson Twins version of Revolution U2 from the original as though that were the point you know if you had a cd and it was the thompson twins version of revolution uh you too doing helter skelter uh dollars version of i want to hold your hand oasis doing i am the walrus and this i mean that would take a heart of steel you know i can't imagine how you'd feel about the world by the end of it and what thoughts it might inspire.

There is basically no humour in this at all and no mischief, but he does have that slightly cheeky look, almost as if he's stepped off the set of Bugsy Malone. We're the very best at being bad. He's more like Brilliant Lad in the Fast Show. Fantastic. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's he got around his neck he's got a little it's a pouch there's a little pouch it looks like a 19th century condom i'm assuming it's got his

change in it for the vending machine or you know unless it's his lsd and his and his ecstasy or some unidentifiable ashes i don't like this bloke he gives me the creeps to look at him i mean the whole group it's like regardless of the musical vivisection that they're performing it's that blend of all blonde nordic purity and sort of arm-swinging, soft lad mopiness. It's like if the Hitler Youth had been indoctrinated to believe that they were the inferior race. They're just stood around sort of with slumped shoulders, you know, simpering, like too scared to take up any space,

but also chillingly psychopathic. It's like no wonder Simon Mayo seems so keen on him. That lead singer, what's his name? Rick Peat? Yes. He's got that very innocent, milky look to him. He's like a small boy in a historical drama whose one line is, soldiers came,

they took my father. And frankly, I'm surprised he's quite so cavalier about boasting publicly of his drug use because he doesn't look to me like a lad who would save a prison life. It's like after the show he flew away on the back of a giant pelican to lollipop land and ruined that and all. No, that's what they want you to think, though.

I just didn't get anything like that off it at all. I don't see any imagination really that off it at all. No. I don't see any imagination really going into it or coming out of it, you know. It's like the end of music. It's like, turn back now. It's like, we've done, you know, that's it. You can't do anything else.

Yeah. Also, a resident synth nerd here pointed out that that is a Juno 60 on the stage, and it is not plugged in and also there isn't a juno 60 on that record good lord that's not the sound it makes the way they lie to the kids they lie it's lying liars the giveaway is that bears number one is wearing mum jeans i mean i'm guessing they've all gotten from you know affleck's palace or somewhere you know like you're supposed to but fucking hell there's flares and then there's

flares he's got these jeans with like they're all gathered up just below the beltline yes it's not it doesn't look very good the bbc have enhanced this somewhat by bonging loads of dry ice on which means you don't see the width of those saxons but you know the proper swing-a-lingers because they've appeared in the media as advocates of flares. Back to sounds check, everyone. Headline, Rick's flare for fashion. Stoke-on-Trent's latest pop celebrity has given a top fashion tip to all those trendies. Rick Peet, one half of Chart Sensation's Candy Flip, reckons that flared trousers are where it's at and he added when you're buying your flares make sure they're really tight at the top and around

the back side so the overall shape looks better make sure that they're tight at the top and around the back side and then continue that way all the way to the ankles where you stop. Yes. And be thankful that we don't give you a slap for your terrible fashion ideas. Because, you know, I'm 22 now. There's no way I'm ever going to wear flares, man. I did that when I was eight in 1976.

Fuck that shit. Yeah, yeah. But the thing is, is that Rick P is fucking same age as me, I believe. Yeah. What's his excuse? Drugs. Drugs, yes. The kids are going fucking hysterical, though.

Or at least Paul Ciani and his henchmen have goaded them into being hysterical. Yeah, what do the kids know? It sounds like Jimmy Osmond being lowered into a tank full of piranhas in 1974. I'm sure this is just the beginning of a long and rewarding pop career for Candy Flip. They're already landing some huge bookings, Taylor. Don't look down your nose. Advert in the Burton Daily Mail. Attention, Burton and surrounding area.

Dance Arena Part 1 featuring live on stage candy flip currently in the national charts with their massive hit single strawberry fields forever support by mr freestyle guest rapper cliffy white boy also appearing burton's first and exciting dance crew, Lafitte. Supplying beats and bass lines, spelt B-A-S-E. DJ Magic Touch, Party Man, a newcomer, Chuck E. Bad Boy. Drill Hall, Burton. Tickets £2 from Oasis, £3 on the door. Live video shooting, whistles and horns essential

five pound each for the wackiest male female dressers so be there or be rectangular don't miss it mickey muck and dj mr bronson ladies free after a first time i I miss those nights. Al, you've somehow inadvertently become the keeper of the Candy Flip archive. I know, I know. Can you handle that responsibility? Yeah, wait till all them Candy Flip documentaries turn up on BBC 4, man. Get out of my fucking way, Stuart McConaughey.

This is my patch. They've struck the first chord in something that's hanging over this episode and this year, which is a fucking hankering for it to be the late 60s. That's the great thing about 60s. When you get bored with one bit of it, you can start craving for another bit of it. I mean, because this generation,

and I'm speaking as one who was part of it, had a real proper sweet tooth for the late 60s. All those episodes of the banana splits and Scooby-Doo. Yeah, I have perhaps more to say in connection with that in relation to something that's coming up a little later. But, yeah, no, it's true. It is true. So where are the Beatles at the moment? Well, Paul's halfway through a 103-date world tour

and finally bulking out his sets with Beatles songs. George is about to reconvene with the traveling wilburys and ringo is busy at home presumably ringoing john's still dead but yoko and sean are flying into london tomorrow and stopping here for two weeks for her first exhibition in the uk since 1967 and presumably they'll have a bit to say about strawberry fields forever by candy flip a magical mystery tour and uh help are being released for the first time on vhs next week so yeah beacles still churning along when you say ringo's ringoing i guess by ringoing you mean filling up a tumbler with brandy pouring it into his mouth and then refilling the tumbler go to 10.

it's hard to feel sorry for the 80s beatles because you know they weren't that likable at that point but you listen to this and you just want to pat them on their head you know what i mean it's like there's actually a long history of of jaw-dropping question mark over the head cover versions of classic records like the 70s was full of them when you look closely all these monstrous manglings of great old rock and roll songs manglings or straightenings out of great old rock and roll songs made dull and flavorless you know but there were always limits there was always crown jewels that you just didn't touch right you didn't mess with strawberry fields some yeah angel or demon would be after you you know and yeah it's sort of nice that these clueless cunts just don't give a toss

they don't have any sense of what's a good idea and what's an unthinkably terrible idea and they just stomp wherever they please you know and it is nice to imagine all those mojo subscribers in waiting going around the corkscrew over this shit but the fun only lasts for as long as you don't have to hear it yourself it's like if somebody lobbed a stink bomb into the tape right you can appreciate the symbolism but also you can't pretend that it's anything more than dumb kids being dickheads and you just hope the smell is cleared by the time of your next visit yeah i'll tell you what the the legacy of this is, this might just be the algorithm going from my dubious taste, but when I looked up Strawberry Fields Forever on Spotify, this was the top result. Fuck no.

Is the original on Spotify? Yeah. Oh, for fuck's sake. Jesus. So I looked up Candy Flip on Spotify and it's like, they've got 20,000 monthly listeners. And I thought they had a new single i was like oh what the fuck is this but it's somebody else called candy flip with someone called claude steeze cat and spotify has just done the thing that it does by and lump them in together into the one page even though they're two different artists which is what happens when

you know so someone else thought it was a good idea to call themselves candy flip and that track is also very bad but in the modern way right you know the way that things are bad now when they're bad um yeah it's one of those um by the way steeze cat is a i should say claude steeze cat but the s in steeze cat is a dollar sign right of course it is so there you go i hope candy flip got really outraged at somebody just fucking with musical heritage like this. You can't do that. They are basically the poor man's jaw valley. And you have to stick another of his tone deaf and disturbed reimagining of Beatles classics

on the video playlist and demonstrate that it is actually possible to desecrate the canon while adding to the number of interesting things on Earth. So the following week, Strawberry Fields Forever soared 12 places to number 6 and a week later it spent two weeks at number 3. A fortnight after this performance they put out their lp madstock the continuing adventures of bubble car fish which failed to chart i know i know you just wouldn't ask for that at the record shop would you i knew what that was and also

crucially there's an ellipsis in there that's dot dot dot and I knew that was coming anyway but just somehow hearing you say it has just delighted me although they announced to the music press that their next single would either be a cover of

brace yourself the land of make believe or calling occupants of interplanetary craft. They decided not to become showbaggy baguette and put out their own composition, This Can Be Real in July. But it only got to number 60. Have you heard that?

No. Oh, it's fucking cat shit. It's the sort of thing that Thames Television would have chucked back in the faces of Rod, Jane and Freddie for being too childish. It's awful. And after two more singles which lingered around the murky depths of the top

100, the octopus's garden of the top 100, if you will, they split up in 1992. Pete went on to engineer and produce for the likes of the top 100 if you will they split up in 1992 pete went on to engineer and produce for the likes of the charlatans and six by seven while dizzy d teamed up with his brother kelvin andrews one of the maracas shakers to form the production duo soul mechanic which knocked out four tracks for robbie williams on the 2006 LP Rudebox. Do you know something? That's going to be a top five hit.

What a great performance. I think they enjoyed it as much as everybody else. That's Candy Flips, Strawberry Fields Forever. Here's another record of the week. The B-52s have a charted at last. Love Shack. Mayo, back on the balcony behind a massive Radio 1 logo and in the middle of a line of much older members of the audience, appears so enraptured by the flared four that he predicts a top five placing for them before pivoting to one of his former records of the week,

Love Shack by the B-52s. Formed in Athens, Georgia in 1976, the B-52s were signed to the local label DB Records in 1978, and when their debut single, Rock Lobster, sold 20,000 copies in the Georgia area, and they were invited to play at CBGB's and Max's Kansas City in New York, they were picked up by Warner Brothers in the US and Island in the UK and whisked over to Island Studios in the Bahamas to record their first self-titled LP. They made the first dent on the UK charts in 1979 when a re-recorded version of Rock Lobster spent two weeks at number 37 in August of that year, while the LP got to number 22 in the same month. Although they weren't as successful in the American charts, their

influence was such that when John Lennon was interviewed by Andy Peebles the day before he died, he said that hearing Rock Lobster was the spark for getting him back into the studio and recording Double Fantasy. Although they were an intermittent fixture on the UK LP chart throughout the early 80s, diminishing returns set in singles-wise. And when guitarist Ricky Wilson died in October of 1985 after the band had recorded their fourth LP, the band shut up shop and refused to tour. However, when Island re-released Rock Lobster and their second single Planet Clear as a double A-side in May of 1986, it rocketed up to number 12, which, combined with a guest appearance as hosts

of a PETA fundraiser in Washington where they were cheered to the rafters convinced them to get their thumbs out their arses and start again this single the follow-up to channel z which failed to chart in America and hasn't been released here yet is the second cut from their comeback LP cosmic thing which was released last June and was co-produced by Don Woz on the advice of the record label and Nile Rodgers on the advice of Kate Pearson's mam Psychic. It's based on the cabin where the band recorded Rock Lobster and it's already been and gone in America, getting to number three last November. It entered the charts at number 33 at the beginning of the month

then soared 19 places to number 14. And this week it's jumped eight places to number six. And here is the officially allotted two minutes of video. Mmm. Amazingly, chaps, this is the third cut release from the LP in America, which is fucking mental because if there was ever a nailed on hit in the spring of 1990 it's this bastard right here yeah don't you think i i always felt a bit weird that i don't really like this much i fall in and out

with it myself because like love shack by the b-52s we all have to get right with the fact that we're going to be hearing this off and on for the rest of our lives oh god yeah hopefully it won't be the last thing you hear before you depart this mortal coil i'm not sure that would be you know sort of drifting through the hospice so yeah i fall in that with it sometimes i want to slap it in the face because it's so fucking cheery and you know and other times i think no no come on this is a great record and i just want to smack it on its ass in a friendly hijinks sort of way it's very zesty isn't it it's not it's not quite zany but it's very zesty yes and it's it's filled with

color and texture and made to delight and amuse that's the point of this i mean let's not fanny about it this is by a country mile the best tune on this episode so far yeah yeah by by a georgia mile and to hear it in this context will be like opening a window in a festival toilet and letting the sun in but yeah you're right age and repetition has worn it somewhat i mean they are a good fun band they've been going for a long time they do have other songs they're unacceptable doolies aren't they the people um yeah i guess so i mean the thing is i kind of have to like them because i live with a man who will break into rock lobster at the drop of a hat or indeed the drop of a matching towel you can't say narwhal

in this house without all hell breaking loose but But you have to be in the right mood. I don't think there are some tunes where it's like you can't be sad while this is on. I wouldn't file this among them. I think if you're sad, this is going to just piss you off more. Oh, God, yeah. But it really creates a world in the kind of three minutes. Like we've spoken before, haven't we, on this podcast about what parties we'd go to and which nights out in pop yes i would go i would go to the love shack i don't know oh god yeah you would it's like a sort of day glow speakeasy just secreted in the middle of the lush forests of

georgia yeah it's one of the great mythic party places of pop and they've set it out right yeah guaranteed no fools that's good semi-naked people yeah the jukebox isn't free but i maintain that's good because people will care about what they're putting on if they have to pay for it yeah hugging kissing check dancing and loving double check all of these things the music and the vibes are great the drinks are terrifying it's a lawless health and safety nightmare it's it's great i love that there's such a great mental image that they've conjured up, that the whole shack shimmies

when everybody's grooving around and around and around and around. Yeah. Like the glittery dust falling from the ceiling into your beehive. I mean, the instant reaction I always have to this, it's always, oh, it's this again. So they'll be playing Groovies in the Heart next

and that'll be the early 90s taken care of, and possibly Step On. Yeah, whenever you hear this record, you know you will find ordinary people dancing, which is, you know, on the whole a good thing. I just don't appreciate how, if you say that you don't really care for this record or group, people respond as though you've said you don't like happiness

i can see that you would probably have to be weirdly over sour or have a very specific be in a very specific bonnet to actively hate them or this and you know people have got great memories of dancing to this at donna's hen night or whatever you know which is all great and totally valid it's just that for me the b52 i don't know they sort of exist in the in the mysterious unlit gap between me and happiness you know and they don't run a ferry service it's a representation of a certain kind of happiness or at least camp amusement which just isn't necessarily contagious and it probably should be because it's you know sort of smart but undemanding and there's a reasonable arrangement of simple ideas all of

which are potentially appealing. But it just doesn't connect with me. And I think because I'm never in quite the right state of relaxation and acceptance. But I mean, I know there's a queue of reasonable people who love this record stretching from Barbary to here. And I don't say that I know any better than any of them. You can sort of grudgingly appreciate the craft, can't you? Even if you can't get with the mood that's been very forcefully created in this very, very American way.

Yeah. I mean, I do get it. This could not have been made by British people, I would posit. Oh, God, can you imagine? I mean, when British people try to do this, you get bomb ballerina, don't you? Yeah. That's what you get. It just doesn't work.

And there is often as i have remarked upon before this sort of uncomfortable contrast on top of the pops between the super snappy sexy whizzy cool kid americans and the kind of slumpy slouchy sloppy blundery brits you know that doesn't mean this is the only way to do this. It is quite an obnoxious record, but you know that there are Americans in control. It's very Roy Walker, isn't it, the video? Instead of say what you see, it's film what you hear. There's a shack and it's film with people getting together

and people are getting to it via a highway and a car as big as a whale, but there's no need to bring your jukebox money because there's a band on tonight. And it's the B-52s, fancy the video is very very literal but it goes with it very well they painted a picture with words they didn't necessarily need to do it in the video but but they did and it works really well um the one thing that i noticed is that stood out in this little clip is um the bartender is shaking a cocktail shaker so laconically. Yeah. Like, that's not how you do it.

Put your pack into it. I can only assume that the contents are so volatile that he has to baby it. Yeah. You've got to be careful. You go to the love shack. You drink things that no man of woman born should drink. And you wake up three days later half out of a creek wearing only another man's pants. It's dicey.

It's probably one of those 1950s cocktails that are now illegal they've got lead in it it's fine that it's literal but there are some preposterous theories kicking about about how it's not it's not literal it's actually about getting knocked up in a brothel and uh the chrysler is a somebody's dick no obviously there are loads of vehicles in pop that are actually penises, but in this case, I don't buy it. Sometimes a car is just a car. Yeah.

Even if it is as big as a whale. And I didn't see any stars or bananas over that car in the video, so... Hell no. I think the really disturbing lyric in Love Shack is glitter on the highway, because it sounds like a fucking breakout at HM Prison The Verne. in love shack is glitter on the highway because it sounds like a fucking breakout at hm prison

the verne well there's nothing good that ends with glitter on the highway oh yeah or glitter on the mattress i mean yeah okay if you stretch you can see that as you know something other than actual glitter but oh my not spunk what are you going on no oh imagine ejaculating glitter oh well you'd never get you never get rid of it that's the thing no and again it's another example of the uk falling behind america because you know this has been our fucking ages in america we're even behind australia on this one it was their christmas number one last year don't you know uh well it might just be that it's taken a bit of time for this aesthetic to make any sense in britain right because i think a couple of years ago i'm not sure anybody would really have got it you know

because it's very american it's like a sort of cutesy cramps in it it's like a sort of neo-americana the twingers but this is it like all reluctant critics the problem i have is when i don't really like something i usually know exactly why and then i can't stop thinking about that which makes it even harder to relax in its presence and just go along with it which might sometimes be a better course of action but this is it the b52s just hit me in the same way as those things to which they are aesthetically similar right like john waters films or fridge magnets with a picture of a 1950s american housewife you know and a caption about drinking gin and all that they just pass through without pinging any symbols you know i think because they feel like the work of people who have some brains and talent in a shape that

doesn't necessarily fit into the culture of their time but for whatever reason they don't have the gumption or the genius to create their own culture or their own space within a hostile culture so it's just this kind of atomic age kitsch you know which wants to make peace with its own irrelevance and almost revel in it i might be overthinking this but you know what else can i do taylor i i feel like there's a struggle going on here that you don't need to have like there's no shame in being a person who doesn't like love shack by the b-52s even if you know the only person or one of a very few it's fine it's all right you don't have to it doesn't cause me any mental strife in my in my personal life you know it's just a just a professional consideration i don't know i think

it's just a character thing like i don't really want to dance to this record same as i don't know i think it's just a character thing like i don't really want to dance to this record same as i don't really want to apply to be on a game show actually i did apply to be on a game show i applied to be on uh sas who dares wind but they they turned me down they said i was too hard it wouldn't be fair i'm the same as you taylor if it comes on it's like oh this yeah and that's the wrong reaction to have to any single yeah yeah you know i mean i think that annoyed me about it at the time is it it's one of the most prominent singles about being in a club that's a million times better than the sticky flawed stale beer reeking provincial shithole that I was currently in. Right.

You know, I'd just be there lumbering about to it and thinking, oh, God, I wish I was there instead of here. It's like the polar opposite to nightclub or Friday night and Saturday morning, isn't it? Yeah, but if somebody said to me, hey, come with me, we're going deep into the forest in Georgia to a shack, it's going to be great. I'd be thinking, gimme gimme deliverance yes so the following week love shack moved up four places to number two and camped out there

for three weeks held off the summit of mount pot by this week's number one and the power by snap the follow-up rome got to number 17 in june and then their chart appeal became more selective but they'd have one last hurrah in 1994 when they temporarily renamed themselves the bc 52s and took their cover of the flintstones theme tune to number 43 for three weeks in July of that year yeah oh man why do they bother remaking the Flintstones stupid Americans still going just about last month they announced their farewell tour supported by knobhead cunt and whatever remains of the sunshine band so good on him yeah that's great isn't it yeah well Kate Pearson who I mean I still don't believe she's real I'm sure she's a Tim Burton character you know yeah she was about my age in in the love

shack video and she looks about you know she looks about 20 so she looks amazing in this video yeah yeah yeah i mean she is truly ageless i think but i mean she for years has also had um i don't think you can call it a side hustle it's probably her main hustle which is to have rented cabins. She had a whole compound in the Catskills just outside Woodstock, which she's now sold. But she still has several of those, like cabins and Airstream trailers and stuff for holiday rent. The Airbnb 52s. Indeed.

If you will. The website for them is so beautiful. It's all so kind of like i said about you know you when when you throw a party and when you have a compound of of kitschy cabins you just the the intent filters through right to the last detail you know and they look exactly like you expect in the best way um my my pal and uh fellow ex-maker guy um stevie chick said that he stayed in one and said it was brilliant there's a beat-em-ax machine and like a library of 80s comedies and slasher movies it's just that's lovely nice yeah oh did you notice the black woman in the white outfit yes do you know who that is no it's the

first appearance on british tv of a 28 year old pole dancer from a club in Atlanta called RuPaul Charles. Yeah. Dang. If your dad fancied her, go and see him now and tell him. It's a great song. Okay, here come the breakers this week. We have the Wets at number 31. We have Fish at number 30. And Kiki Doolough for 29. This is big fun., here come the breakers this week. We have the Wets at number 31. We have Fish at number 30.

And kicking it all off at 29. This is big fun to start the breakers this week. Mayo, still on the balcony. Spoilers this week's breaker section before pitching us into Handful of Promises by Big Fun. We last covered Human Sop in chart music number 30 when they danced like they were trying to get dog shit off their trainers in an attempt to promote Can't Shake the Feeling,

which got to number 8 in December of 1989. This is the follow-up and will be the third cut from their debut LP, A Pocket Full of Dreams, which is due out at the end of next month. It came out last week, and it's a new entry this week at number 29, and here's a chance to see the video. And all dear chaps. It appears that by March of 1990. The Hit Factory is in recession. Kyla doing films and trying to move away from her Charlene image.

Jason diminishing returns are setting in. No more Mel and Kim. Rick Astley's moved to RCA. And even Sunita's fucked off. All that's left at the moment for Stock Aitken and Waterman is Sonya and these twats. Some boys in a baggy, shapeless, faded bag, isn't it? Very much so. They are quite hearty lads.

Yes. They're quite ruddy-cheeked. They look like volunteer firemen. But it is like a strange parody of a boy band video it's it's like a sketch isn't it a little bit and it's like what anyone is doing behind or in front of the camera is beyond me yeah well they are the pioneers of what we see as boy bands nowadays aren't they group of lads who don't play instruments and do a bit of a dance and look at us girls you fancy us yeah it's such

there's such alchemy behind boy bands and when it it it works or it doesn't you know and obviously a lot of like craft and hard work goes into as well this is hard thankless work it's a bit like i don't know it's a bit like being a server in an american restaurant or something yes where you have to bid everyone have a nice day and smile whether you feel like it or not you have to feel sorry for the poor sauce not just because of who they are and what they're not capable of and not just because they're the vanguard of arsene stockakin and waterman and they've just landed a disappointing chart position but you know you have to remember this is an all gay boy band who are still being forced to keep it on the down low by pete waterman and

they're on the cusp of an era where every single boy band that's going to come down the pike is going to be encouraged to do a gay and they can't they're not allowed they've just got to stand there togged out in their young person's rail card advert outfits yeah they've been dressed by some straights haven't they it ain't right what makes it even worse is the location they've put them in which is an empty warehouse with a sprinkler system and a steam machine which is you know if you were going to build a trap to attract and snare homoerotic acting males that's what you'd make if take that were in this video a year later you know their shirts are coming right off and there's going to be some

horse play oh yeah possibly with some jelly but because big fun aren't allowed to express were in this video a year later. You know, their shirts are coming right off and there's going to be some horseplay. Oh, yeah. Possibly with some jelly. But because Big Fun aren't allowed to express themselves, all they can do is throw some unconvincing shapes and interact with some models who are pretending to be their girlfriends. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, you're not going to see members of Big Fun taking their pants off and swapping them and putting them on again in a video, are you? To us, it is a warehouse, but to them, it's just a huge closet as people of the future we know what big fun wants a handful of and it's not promising but back in the day when big fun were a concern on the playground there would have been no inkling that you know about what they like to get up to oh no absolutely not i mean obviously everybody

knows that no 11 year old boy has ever known he was gay that only happens when you turn 16 like literally on your birthday you wake up that's the first thing that occurs to you maybe i like guys yeah because it is a decision isn't it also depends how much homosexual propaganda you've come into contact with in your teenage years yeah oh yeah yeah mean, despite the fact that they must have been feeling pretty bad at this point. They must have watched this episode of Top of the Pops and by the time it rolled round to their little clip, it'd be like, Jesus, you know what we are? Old cunts on the block.

It'd be like when you do some talking head shit for some documentary and you just peel off perler after perler you just think well there's no way they can't use that and then it comes on and you've got 10 seconds talking about something that you you did as a fucking aside that was shit you just think oh that's who i am i'm just the big fun of this documentary i'm uh yeah well i don't know. I mean, what is left to say about Big Fun? Oh, plenty, Taylor. Because Big Fun are the whipping boys of pop at the moment.

They encapsulate everything that needs to be gotten rid of from the 80s. And, you know, they're the yardstick that all these new bands that are coming along are railing against. To that end, I direct the Pop Craze Youngsters to an interview conducted by stephen wells in the enemy a month ago with birdland whose latest single sleep with me has just entered the charts at number 32 which has encouraged them to go about thinking the summit when asked if being in magazines like the face and on top of the Pops, compromises selling out. Lee Vincent says,

no, no, no, we're going to be there rather than Big Fun with their conditioned hair. And when Swells asks them if they really hate Big Fun, Lee replies, yeah, it makes you want to puke. The whole thing about these

bands is that they're in it for money money and girlfriends and wearing designer things and being in the face right number one girlfriends don't think so number two this interview was conducted well birdland were actually in a studio doing a fucking photo shoot for the face and then swells asked robert vincent if he would chin big fun if you met them i wouldn't go anywhere they go but then swells asked what about if you met them in the top of the pop studio and they came up to you and said hi i think you guys are really great and we really like the single robert comes back with i just say yeah it is isn't it i think your record's crap why don't you make a record like that actually play something can you do that you wankers oh yeah real tough guys there wow what an

extremely hard target that's so edgy oh you hate the boy bands, do you? Gosh, you must be amazing. You're such a free thinker. Your music must be the most brilliant music if you hate the boy bands. Please tell me more. At some point, we'll get to Birdland's whole 30 seconds on top of the pops. Can't wait. Yeah, a mate of mine had a bootleg video of something once. Can't remember what it was.

And at the end it finished, and then, you know, it went vvvvvv, and then you saw what had been on the tape beforehand underneath, and it was a Birdland gig. Oh, no! And it was the climax of this Birdland gig, which was just a load of feedback and noise, and the bloke out of Birdland was on his knees on the stage

shouting into the microphone, and he was going, baby, you can drive my car, baby, you can drive my car, baby, you can drive my car, and he said it about ten times, and there was a pause, and then he went, my fucking car! And so for about the next three years, on the rare occasions that you saw a mention of Birdland in the press or on tv everyone would just start shouting my fucking car you wouldn't get away with that now either would you because like that's hate speech

well it kind of it yeah but wells was clearly goading them into you know making threats and whatnot but more importantly big fun versus birdland i know with my money you'd be on yeah there was a a new metal band whose name i now forget who actually did they call their album kill all boy bands and the tour was like the kill all boy bands tour i had to go and do a little backstage interview with them after a gig and the guy was so fucking pleased with himself about his entire concept and she's like you know that it's the chart right and if you deign to be in it you you can share it with some people sometimes they'll sell more than you but that's okay yeah you know it's all right mate it's okay it's like when peter

and the test tube babies did a song called beat up the mods and this chorus was beat up the mods beat up the mods beat up the mods beat up the mods beat up the mods beat up the mods beat up the mods and this chorus was beat up the mods beat up the mods beat up the mods beat up the mods beat up the mods beat up the mods beat up the mods beat the mods up my fucking mods so the following week handful of promises jumped eight places to number 21 but would get no further in panic mode stock aiken and waterman teamed them up with Sonya in the summer with a view to recording a cover of You've Got A Friend for Childline. But for reasons unknown, they ended up recording a single with the same name written by Saw and it got to number 14.

In a last throw of the dice, they released their karaoke version of Eddie Holman's Hey There Lonely Girl in August of this year. And when that only got to number 62, they were dropped by Jive and Saw, reforming as Big Fun 2 in 1993 to put out a cover of the Johnson Brothers' Stomp. But when that did nothing, they split up in 1994. And I couldn't think of anything It's a handful of promises To give me a pocketful of drink That's just what I'll do It's a gentleman's excuse me So I'll take one step to the side

Can you get it inside your head? I'm tired of dancing. Fornindale Keith Midlovian in 1958, Derek Dick was a former petrol pump attendant and gardener who picked up the nickname Fish from a landlord who complained about the amount of time he spent in the bath. He relocated to Aylesbury in 1980, becoming the lead singer of Marillion a year later. And after a session on Tommy Vance's Friday Rock Show, they were picked up by EMI in 1982.

Their debut single, Market Square Heroes, came out in October of that year, getting to number six there. But the follow-up, he knows you know, got to number 35, sparking a run of 12 top 40 singles on the bounce, peaking in the mid-80s with Kaylee getting to number 2 in June of 1985, and Misplaced Childhood entering the LP charts at number 1 in the same month. By late 1987, however, Merillion's ridiculously excessive

touring schedules caused a row between Fish and the band's manager, who told the rest of the band to choose between the two. When they opted for the manager, he quit the band in July of 1988, took the songs he'd already written for their fifth LP and embarked upon a solo career. This single, the follow-up to Big Wedge, which got to number 35 in January, is the third cut from his debut LP, Vigil in a Wilderness of Mirrors, which came out at the end of that month

and featured a pickup band which featured a 23-piece orchestra, Hal Lindes of Dire Straitsits mark brzezinski of big country and carol kenyon yes the temptation woman with heaven 17 it's entered the charts this week at number 30 and here's a snippet of the video which is dead marillionaire and the backroom boys are having a right good fuck about with their new graphics package, aren't they? They've mashed the title of the song together to form a fish, would you believe, which swims across the screen

before breaking up and falling into place. Really nice touch, but it makes you wonder what they'd have done for snivelling shits or anal cunts. I didn't notice that. I think probably because I had my fingers over my eyes when this now as all true pop craze youngsters know it is the law on chart music that we always have to point out that taylor fucking loved marillion back in the day yeah so yeah in 1990 telly you

must have been as excited about fisher's solo career as I was in 1983 about the Style Council, yeah? It's hard to believe, but by 1990, I'd kind of lost interest. By 1987, I'd kind of lost interest in it, really. It's hard to believe, though, listening to music of the calibre of Gentlemen's Excuse Me. I mean, you look at him in this video. You could get drunk just inhaling his BO. The clip we see consists of Fish sat in a ballroom with loads of people behind him having a bit of a slow dance, emoting to the camera about a failed relationship.

We don't see him from the waist up in this clip, thankfully, but I'm suspecting he's wearing a kilt don't you what because it's a formal occasion yes well i mean it is a kind of ballroom themed video so it might be a full ball gown yes for all we know and he's essentially telling us that he don't want to dance dance with you baby no more so yeah they're kind of they're in so there's a ballroom inside and then there's another bit of video where they they are outside for some reason on like a cleared site. And they're all kind of clustered up dancing in a corner of it. And there's like a grand piano.

But they're not even like in the rubble because the rubble has been cleared. Maybe they meant to film it in some rubble, but then it's like, oh no, the builders have cleared it. Oh, well, let's do it anyway. Yeah, you know that's going to be a summer field or a gateway in six months time. Yeah, or a crossrail station. He does have that kind of lower league football manager look with his sort of wispy mullet and his

scraggy chin hair and his kind of kinder egg yolk head. But he does have beautiful eyes, like a Weimaraner. I know there's a filter on everything but those are lovely kind eyes so that's fine, nothing else about your face matters if you've got lovely eyes well this is it i've been looking at loads of interviews for research for this it seems a really nice bloke you know you can imagine sitting down and having a pint with him and having a good chit chat and

getting on you know as long as you didn't tell him that you knew Taylor, of course. And the other thing is, us lot, you know, the so-called experts, we've always seen Fish as shaking Gabriel ten years out of time and a bit ludicrous. But to the general public, he's that bloke who pops up every now and again with the really nice, sad little love songs. And here's another example. Well, I mean, that was my experience of marillion you know when i

was a kid i always had a soft spot for kaylee which i was as a kid i found it really devastating there was just something about the whole tone of it that was just like oh it's really heart-rending it's a sort of mythic lament it's almost like it's almost like jim steinman experimenting with a more straightforward low-key kind of narrative song structure i have to say as well in the context of 1990 especially can you get it inside your head i'm tired of dancing is quite a beguiling little line yes and it's delivered with some real feeling in this slightly wobbly voice yeah and it did make the hairs on my arms go up i mean the follicles don't lie you know yeah particularly during an episode of top of the pulseulse where they're practically going, dance, dance, dance, now!

Yeah, especially after Big Fun doing a kind of sad forced frug in the disused industrial prison of suppressed sexuality for their sore overlords. Yeah, Fish was never going to be the fourth member of Big Fun, was there? Big Fish. I think Fish probably thought dancing was a bit shallow. Yeah. The song's based mainly on his marriage, which had been falling to bits almost immediately after it occurred three years ago.

And then he discovered that she was having an affair during the recording of this LP. And he had to record this in Abbey Road with an orchestra in the same room as him in an extremely tight recording window, having all that on his mind so you got a feel for the poor sod but you know you can also draw comparisons with his marriage and subsequent divorce with marillion because he was marillion wasn't it to

us sorts who weren't that interested in marillion yeah if you've got a band of like four or five i don't even know how many it was four or five blokes who look like they work in a guitar shop. Yeah. And there's like a six-foot, six-inch lunatic with his face painted in the front going, rah, rah, rah. Yeah, he tends to be the one who draws your attention. I mean, doing songs about other people,

it's a tricky thing, isn't it? Because, you know, they can't answer back in song unless they're Britney Spears or Justin Timberlake. I mean, the only recourse Mrs Fish would have in this case would be to appear in an advert dressed as a mermaid and say, Fish thinks he's hung like a whale, but his performance in bed gave me much to carp about. And I'll tell you all about it only in the sun.

But it turned out reasonably all right in the end because she actually appears in this video as herself and they had a kid a year later and they stayed married for another 13 years so you know doing this song and video was a lot more helpful to them going to relate so you know if anyone out there is in a bad marriage at the moment go make a pop video with your partner no anything else to say about this? No. No. So the following week, a gentleman's excuse me dropped one place to number 31 and slid out of the charts.

The follow-up, Internal Exile, made it to number 37 in September of 1991 and a slow and prolonged series of diminishing returns set in across the rest of the 90s. I'm taking two steps back Can you get it inside your head? I'm tired of dancing Somebody gotta hold back the river.

Somebody's gotta kill the... We've covered Marty and the McKens a couple of times on Chart Music, and this, their eighth single, is the follow-up to Broke Away, which got to number 19 in the last week of 1989. It's the third cut from their third LP. Holding Back The River. Which got to number two in the LP chart. Of November of 1989. It entered the chart at number 34. Last week.

And this week it's moved up three places. To number 31. Hardly a breaker. But top of the pops. In a move to keep Mam Happe. Has lumped it in with the others. So here's a flash of the Pops, in a move to keep Mam happy, has lumped it in with the others. So here's a flash of Marty Pello doing that smile he does at an Enormo gig. Marty Pello, he's essentially Les McEwan recalled by the manufacturers

and repaired and modified and sent back out again, isn't it? You know, the cockiness has become cheekiness, the level of professionalism has been radically upgraded. And it's fair to say that he's not going to run grannies over in a big car or shoot his fans in the face with an air rifle. They've got it right, haven't they, with Marte? Yeah, and it just feels like it would be genuinely impossible to stop him smiling. But I think most people would take that as a challenge it is a shit-eating grin

isn't it so yeah by this time wait wait wait they've made a conscious decision to step away from their teenage fan base you know the minute the bros encroached upon their patch they took a move away probably with relief and concentrated on being musos. And in recent interviews, they're revelling in the fact that people, well, all right, women of all ages are turning up to their gigs. But, you know, there's going to be a short-term price to pay for that, which is a period of rubbish chart placings and only getting 28 seconds on Top of the Pops. By this point, if you sat down and looked at this episode of Top of the Pops,

you'd see that band and go, God, they're on their arse then. Yeah, well, it's hardly surprising when you hear the the deep soulful sound of hold back the river it fucking out it's like it's got that 80s drum clatter on it and that's like the only audible thing on the record it might as well have just been that because when you hear it that's the only thing that you notice just this it's a horrible horrible sound the least rich and soulful sound you could ever imagine does sound like they've taken a sort of big classic big band sound and put it in a breville yes a sort of easy popping into the chart i'm assuming that you've both seen some of the sopranos at some point tony soprano gets gifted a big mouth billy bass this sort of weird fishy gift and it sings take me to the river in this horrible tinny voice and when it gets to the chorus it sort of turns

and looks at him and it violently triggers the memory of how he killed his best friend and dumped him in the sea spoilers and i was thinking like what water related tune could a big mouth billy bass sing to a new jersey mob boss that would be more disturbing than that and i think this could work yes is that kind of slow creeping dread masquerading as swing isn't it marty pello seems like an all right sort of bloke yeah i'm happy to see him doing okay in his life and still getting work. Why are you glad to see that? Because, you know, it's nice sometimes. I mean, I throw my casual hate around the place a lot.

And sometimes I go, no, it's all right. It's nice when people aren't suicidally miserable sometimes. You know, go in peace, Marti Pello. He's overcome lots of adversity in his life. You know, the addiction and the death of his brother and stuff. But I cannot. Delighted as I am to see that he's overcome lots of adversity in his life you know the addiction and the death of his brother and stuff but i cannot delighted as i am to see that he's he's all right i i can't in all honesty say i was happy to see him in the 40th anniversary of the musical version of jeff wayne's war of the world no god when did that worst thing well on the 40th anniversary of you

know but he's been he's been doing it for the last 10 years actually it's been you know it's the musical version has been doing you know obviously they had a pandemic break and then they came back like last year or whatever good to see that the martians survived the pandemic though when they usually keel over at the first sniffle so there must have been wearing masks and self-isolating and uh you know complying obviously the martians didn't go to any bloody McCluskey gigs. It's the worst thing ever made by humans. I mean, I'm not a musical person anyway, but, you know, with some notable exceptions,

but fucking hell, he's doing the sung thoughts of the journalist. So, basically, what's going on in the head of the hologram of Liam Neeson as humanity faces extinction and actually not smiling during during that's not right and look quite weird yeah yeah he still looks like marty pello but like he doesn't smile so no so it is possible sometimes he doesn't but he's in a cream suit and like everything about it is worse than every other thing about it like i happened upon it like one morning when i was feeling really crappy and i just kind of hate watched it like i just decided to punish myself

with a horrible work of bad popular art but yeah they're very keen to put over how big and popular they are you know these kind of videos is uh look at us aren't we brilliant loads of people like us maybe you should too come to one of our gigs buy a t-shirt and a tour programme. I don't think there's necessarily anything dirty about making a video like that. I think it's legit. It's a cheap way to do it I suppose. Save a few quid. So the following week, Hold Back

the River dropped six places to number 37 and fell out of the chart. The follow-up a double A-side consisting of Stay With Me Heartache and a cover of the beacles i feel fine not with the funky drummer beat on it thank fuck did slightly better getting to number 30 in august yeah it's their fault for fucking candy flip isn't it wet wet wet they had an absolutely cat shit 1991 with a live lp failed to chart, and two singles from their next LP,

which got to number 37 and 56 respectively. But the third cut, Goodnight Girl, spent four weeks at number one in January of 1992, and the LP, High on the Happy Side, entered the album chart at number one the following month. And that was the breakers, fucking hell. Yeah. When Tim Buckley sang,

Well, should I stand amidst the breakers? Or should I lie with death, my bride? Now I understand this dilemma. Somebody like you stand his time. I love you. Okay, well, they're the breakers, but this is already broken. It's our second debut performance at number 24 this week. Performing Loaded,

would you welcome to Top of the Pops Primal Scream. Mayo on the balcony next to a girl in an insane black bra top that's been wrapped round her forearms, which makes her look as if her breasts are wearing sunglasses. Tells us that those were the breakers, but this single has already broken. It's Loaded by Primal Scream. Formed in Glasgow in 1982 by Bobby Gillespie and Jim Beie, two youths from the Kings Park Secondary School. Primal Scream began their career Mary Brennell Boys Murder Style with bedroom tapes where Beattie played guitar

and Gillespie banged on two dustbin lids. After trying out a few Birds and Velvet Underground covers, they moved on to writing their own Birds and Velvet Underground inspired songs, started gigging and were picked up in 1984 by another classmate, Alan McGee, who signed them to his London-based label, Essential Records. Although sessions for a single were aborted and the deal fell through, Gillespie was immediately recruited as the drummer of the jesus and mary chain keeping primal scream as a side project and turning it into a proper band who were signed to mcgee's new label creation in 1985 just before the release of their debut single all fall down gillespie was given an ultimatum by the Reid brothers to either join the Miri chain

full-time or resign, and he chose the latter. After myriad line-up changes, they finally made a dent on the UK chart in 1987, when Jenkel Tuesday got to number 86 in July of that year, but was stuck in a retro rock rut for the rest of the decade destined to give good interview in the ink is but ultimately being slagged off in the reviews pages and by the time their second lp primal scream came out in september of 1989 and failed to get anywhere near the lp chart they were teetering upon the rim of the dustbin of history. However, after being taken out to raves by McGee throughout 1989, the band were introduced to the fanzine writer and DJ Andrew Weatherall,

who had just finished working with Paul Oakenfold on the club remix of Hallelujah by the Happy Mondays. In a last row of the dice, they gave him a copy of the LP track I'm Losing More Than I'll Ever Have with instructions to completely gut it. Keeping nothing but the horn section at the end of the track, he larded it with a sample of Peter Fonda having a go at a preacher at a Nazi biker funeral in the 1966 film Wild Angels,

the drum loop from an Italian bootleg mix of What I Am by Edie Brickell and New Bohemians, the horn blast from Freestyle, the 1975 library track by John Hawkins, and vocals from the 1976 Emotions track I Don't Wanna Lose Your Love. And after Gillespie added a couple of lines nicked from Robertson's terraplane blues

the single and the band instantly became non-more 1990 after being rinsed in the clubs it entered the charts of fortnight to go at number 47 that soared 15 places to number 32 and this week it's up another eight places to number 24 and here they are finally at the promised land at the top of the pop studio oh well well well where to start with this me dears well i'd like to just read out a quote if you don't mind go ahead from seeing bands such as suicide the pop group and the fall i had developed a love for confrontational performance Go ahead. waiting to be herded to another field, shepherded all their lives, unthinking, unknowing. Artists have to be brave, as the old saying goes, pioneers take the arrows.

It's lonely out there on the perimeter, on the edge of consciousness, the dark, unknown regions of soul dread and psychic derangement where the straights are too scared to go. The great herd gather around each other, take safety in numbers, and all move together in the same direction, safe in the knowledge that the farmer will feed them regularly. They know their place in the great or not-so-great scheme of things, while the lone wolves go hungry, always searching for the meagre, unwanted scraps

that society has forgotten and seen no use in. But the lone wolves use this cultural garbage as soul food and through a kind of feral alchemy create powerful arms to use Kipling's well-worn but true maxim, he who travels fastest travels alone. Thus spake Bobby Gillespie in his recent autobiography, Tenement Kid. I imagine having that much talent, it must be a bit terrifying. Let's start off with you, Taylor, because in that Q&A that we did fucking ages ago,

one of the Pop Craze Youngsters asked you, who were the shakiest band of all time? And you immediately came back with, you can't get past the omni shake of primal scream yeah well the poor man's candy flip uh i mean at least candy flip have that ingenue quality which you might at least mistake for freshness or charm no i mean this is clearly a better record than candy yes record but it's even more contrived more desperate less free and ultimately less like what it thinks it is yes because what kind of person could look at poor old bobby gillespie flailing and flouncing and you know, knock-kneed in his meaty finery and not laugh. It's just self-evidently hilarious.

That determined frown of his, just utterly without humour or self-awareness and furious with everyone who isn't. I think probably the other Bobby Gillespie, star of ITV's Keep It In The Family, would have been a sexier dancer yeah i mean the dads who were outraged by the desecration of strawberry fields are now just pissing themselves laughing and throwing the remains of their tea up in the air with glee because as my mum would say bobby gillespie he looks a bastard, doesn't he? I've related before my very brief encounters with Bobby Gillespie, the briefest of which was when we both happened to be

at the Barbican seeing Spiritualised. I was coming back from the loo and he almost laid me out by crashing through some double doors and almost into me. Yeah, he's a man with what I might describe as a threatening aura. He's like a recently redundant witch's familiar can I share my brief encounter with Bobby Gillespie before you go

I once see Prong screaming about 1987 and after the gig he came out to mingle with the audience and commune with the sheep precisely to offer us a little bit of guidance and he went round lifting up girls' skirts and peering underneath. Oh, did he know?

Yeah, knowing that nobody was going to say anything to him. Oh, man. Okay, fuck that guy. I was feeling a little bit bad about, you know, just the terrible things I was thinking or going to say. Now I don't, so that's very freeing. He's free what he wants to do, Sarah. Come on.

Look up girls' skirts. And that's what what he wants to do sarah come on look up girl skirts and that's what we're gonna do um he's deeply deeply awkward for a rock star and not in the david burn neurodivergent kind of way absolutely unselfconscious in some ways or possibly the most self-conscious man who's ever lived i can't quite figure it out the thing about this kind of brilliantly is that it's not actually a primal scream record it's an andrew weatherall record because obviously as you said they gave it to him and just said just fuck it up completely make it good which is great which you have to say that's a that's a hell of a thing for i'm sure a lot of people are very precious about their remixes and it's it's credit to them for just going just make it sound not like us at

all make it sound like it could be a hit but it's being presented on top of the pops as a song by a rock band with their rock instrument yes but they're just like the front it's like it's a rock band made up of samples of individual members of primal scream playing the instruments they play and some other stuff and loads and loads of space around all of that it's like it's rock band as sound palette which is much more drugs than candy flip to my mind it's about as authentic as when one of the reynolds girls mimed playing a guitar to uh heavy metal rock and roll music of the past and i'd rather jack it does make bobby gillespie kind of the

equivalent here of the bird from black box yes in in his little in his little leathers doing his little knees together shimmy but it i kind of I have to hand it to them in the sense that, like, even more, obviously, going on top of the pops and miming and then going away again must be a curiously unsatisfying experience for anyone. Gotcha. But, like, this is kind of turning that on its head. He doesn't take the mic for a good two minutes. No. You know, like, in my second gangster reference of this episode in goodfellas where they let um is it goodfellas or casino anyway it's the thing where like they have to let their wives

talk shit about nothing for two minutes and then the fbi have to who are listening in aren't allowed to listen for any longer than two minutes on any given calls they have to hang up but as soon as they do the guys take over it's like so we're gonna go kill that guy yeah we are so he doesn't take the mic for two minutes and just kind of shimmies about and then says about 11 words two of which are either woo or hey and then call it a night yeah al you you should have said on the at the start he drops in a few lines uh lifted from robert johnson'splane Blues, and a few lines lifted from Peter Powell. Yes! So, yeah, so the music's going on, and then occasionally he just shouts,

Woo! Hey! Come on! I think you should have ad-libbed a few more of those, like, comb your hair! Yes! Now, ski! Spray! Macho man! I think it could have improved his performance immeasurably.

There really should be a loaded Superman mashup. Yes. They've got this loping beat going on, as was the style in 1989 slash 1990, but it's fair to say that the performance is less soul-to-soul and more arse-to-mouth. They've got Tiny Tim on slide guitar someone in the manchester uniform of a white long-sleeved t-shirt with something hippie-ish on it and

billy smart jeans on the keyboard uh there's someone who's turned up looking like an extra in the video for calling the kaftan on guitar and a couple of members of serving suggestion i mean for all i know those chaps could be you know some of the back end of the mission and I wouldn't have fucking noticed any difference but how is Bobby Omnishake

deploying his feral alchemy to create powerful art chaps I contend it's by looking like Justin Bennett out of Grange Island

a heroin screws you up advert I mean you do have to feel sorry for him and them waiting all their lives to go on top of the pops and when they do is to pretend to play a song that he contributed about five percent to but yeah you know it allows top of the pops to put a dance record on where people are standing there

with actual instruments like they were real musicians when you know what they should have been doing was sitting around andy weatherall who's in a big gold throne in a nice white robe, and cutting his toenails and feeding him grapes and just bowing to him for saving their career. He should be on this. He should be on there just sitting there just waving to go, I made this song, isn't it mint? That would actually have been brilliant, wouldn't it?

Yes. As a kind of situationist, top of the pops moment, just have Andy Weatherall with his lovely flowing beard and just sit there and drink from a goblet but you see this is why you've got what you described as the chap in the manchester uniform it's the bloke out of ride is it yes it's the lead singer out of ride um i think this was a last hurrah for mu rules right because the band we see here are quite clearly not the musicians that we hear of the record so somebody decided that well what is it it's synthesizers or something yeah so you have to see somebody playing a synthesizer so I think they were forced to draft in somebody to

mime a synthesizer part and it turned out the only person they could get on the phone at short notice was their label mate this bloke out of ride really and it's kind of funny because it really spoils their big moment it's like because he's just wearing a t-shirt right and they're all dressed up like you know extras from black adder and he's there in his baggy top from the 1990 Top Man raver collection. You know, and it's like the theatrical costumier ran out of Elizabethan leatherware. And he's like, no, you're just going to have to do it in your pants and vest, mate. It's like if one of the black and white minstrels had forgot to put his makeup on. It'd just ruin it, wouldn't it?

Yeah. I mean, I think it's kind of cool in a way that they're barely on this record and in fact the pattern of their music generally tends to be that the more primal scream there is on the record the worse it is and the less primal scream the better now that's potentially a great thing yeah right as is the fact that the most contrived band in musical history chose to call themselves primal scream i mean these could all be positives right because the key to primal scream is that they're fetishists to an almost creepy extent and not in the good way you know it's like they're cut off from their own individuality and they're incapable of really connecting with imperfect

reality so they end up like this just sort of locked away grasping at precious objects and discarded clothes and memories and accessories in lieu of actually fucking anything themselves musically speaking you know it's like the everyday folk leave behind well it's like a religious and sexual act of worship and displacement you know they really mean it yeah but they don't mean anything and this is why this is possibly their best record because it sounds like what it is it sounds like them twirling and posing in this huge empty echoing space where their music should be yes i kind of like that yeah yeah it's such a peculiar thing isn't it even now you just kind of go what the fuck you know like i know at

the time like it makes sense on its own terms but i couldn't really put it together in my head i was like what am i supposed to make of this which has to be a good thing and it's just so funny that it's come from this imperfect vessel but also I mean Denise Johnson who did a lot of incredible vocal work on Primal Scream records and just didn't, that's the kind of uncomfortable

side of this is that she really didn't get enough credit for her work on making Primal Scream sound good. We've been swerved somewhat in this episode of top of the pops aren't we chaps by strawberry fields forever because the real dominant influence over this era wasn't the beakers at all it was the rolling stones because you know this single is feelings of pity and sorrow for the horned one oh yeah people picked up on that there was a club where andy weatherall first laid it and um said that everybody you know was doing the woo-woo bit over the top of it so they obviously maybe ironically or maybe just in in great

enthusiasm but you know yeah apparently sympathy for the devil was played out quite a lot in acid house clubs in the early days simply because they didn't have enough records to pad a night out with also round about this time i bought let it bleed from rob's records and the first time i heard monkey man i thought fucking hell this is so madchester yeah why don't you do a remix of that mick come on anyway fuck primal scream let's talk about the real artist in this, Andrew Weatherall. Yeah, so there's this excellent book, Acid House, The True Story by Luke Bainbridge, which is like a sort of very entertaining oral history of Acid House.

Yeah, so Andrew Weatherall had plenty to say about a lot of things, including this. Yeah, it was Innes who said, I've got this great sample you can use, which was the Peter Fonda sample from Wild Angels. I'd love to claim that was my idea, but it wasn't. It was Innes. I played at a Primal Scream gig at Subterranea

under the Westway, and the whole place went mental, all singing the woo-woos, that sympathy for the devil thing over the top. I think Bobby was double pleased because all the Schumann Spectrum kids there loved it, and all the Fae Indie kids were trying to get into the dressing room to ask, Bob, what's the fucking disco shit? So Bob was doubly

pleased because in one sweep it had managed to please the cool kids and ditch all these fey indie kids what did surprise me was it was quite a slow record it's about 95 bpm i'm surprised it's that much so to get a reaction like that at peak time really surprised me the tempo in london was maybe slower than elsewhere but it wasn't that slow i remember a review that one certain northern dj gave it when it came out i can't remember who it was but it was someone who worked at the Thunderdome or one of those proper full-on clubs. He sent back his reaction sheet and it just said,

soft, southern, shandy-drinking shite. So, you know, there was a mixed response to it at the time. I've got to say this right now. I actually like this single. At least I don't hate it. Because at the time, it gave students something to lumber about to without getting on my tits, which was really important at the time. You know, when a DJ chose to put this on at a fucking student disco,

he was also choosing not to play the Wonder Stuff or Birdland or any of that shit. So while it was on, I had a comfort zone. I mean, i grew up listening to primal scream when they were a birds revivalist band you know in 85 86 doing these endless sped up rewrites of she don't care about time the record which should have ended that kind of jangly pop because you're not going to improve on that ever um no but in fact they were quite good at it and if you listen to their old peel sessions and stuff like that they still sound all right i mean

they sound better and more charming than the stone roses who massively ripped them off um well documented if you do a side-by-side comparison of made of stone and velocity girl by primal scream yeah you know yeah uh but that version of primal scream were kind of likable they had a tambourine player in the band just a bloke who stood on stage with a tambourine that was all he did he played the tambourine while wearing black leather gloves you can't complain about that sort of thing you know what i mean unless you were a cow but what happened to them they ended up on alan mcgee's uh new label that he did uh elevation which was a subsidiary of a major trying to make it by putting out an album of these lovely songs with a big 1980s major label indie production oh dear and like all those bands it killed them the make it sound shit but yeah so the 12 string guitarist left um the one who was mostly responsible for

creating the sound so yeah let's carry on for a bit as a sort of crappy bar room rock band until they tripped over weatherall and tumbled into a gold mine but the thing is this in a way this is the most interesting thing about them they're a band with a a hole in the center they've got no identifiable talented one to hold it all together do you know what i mean yeah they just find ways to get along like a three-legged cat and of course andrew weatherall and kevin shields and all the different people they've worked with down the years are talented and as a result they've made music or they've made at least bits of music that's not that bad it just never quite feels right because what pours out a primal scream is not a sense of gleeful mischief and delight at getting away with it

or a sort of graceful passivity as they are used as a vessel. But this kind of arrogance and entitlement, which is perfectly appropriate for the band that they're pretending to be, but in this reality can't help but feel a bit charmless and a little bit embarrassing. And I really get it because it's part of the holy aesthetic. You know, you have to commit, right? There are no half measures.

You mustn't ever smile. You mustn't act like anyone can reach you. You know, you have to believe that you are the Rolling Stones and all this is really happening. Yeah. But the thing that they've missed, the one thing that they've missed in their extensive study of rock and roll mythology is that even in rock and roll, that sort of arrogant shithead attitude only passes as cool when there's a spark of genuine credibility. You know, something to mark you out from all the other kids with tennis rackets in front of their mirrors yeah you know and without that you just are gonna look ridiculous and i don't make the rules i'm sorry i think the most

prominent thing about primal scream at the time was they were putting themselves over as the biggest custard gannets in pop there's an interview in Q a year later, which reads as follows. Upstairs, Andrew Innes is strutting his dance floor stuff with his own mother. Gillespie is up there too, signing autographs for his skinny disciples and looking up girl skirts. Nearly all of the Scream Creation tribe end up punching the air beneath the mirror globes at some point during the next two hours of Andy Weatherall's DJing. But for the moment, all attention is keenly focused on what's happening downstairs.

The entourage, Milbizle, rub their hands and grin gleefully. The reason? The drugs. Et irive. The drugs. Et. Erive. Tonight's menu includes glug, methadone, extracent, magic mushrooms, amphetamine sulfate, cocaine, and the backstage staple of hash. The varied and various mood alterants are liberally distributed amongst the tour regulars. You know, muses bobber, it was a love of music that brought us all together and that's what we really get excited about but we also get excited when the drugs turn up really excited

yeah there's always a bit like uh what's that you smoking a joint there oh yeah i see you smoke hash guess what i do i take crack they are the real old twats of drugs, aren't they? Primal Scream. Like, glug. A fucking glug. I've never heard that before. It's like, yeah, a wee bit of Night Nurse, just to tick it. Hey.

I did experience an oh-what-wow moment during this song, after hearing it for the first time in ages. I always thought the women singing I'm Gonna Lose love was them singing i'm gonna loosen up which was aided by seeing bobby omni shake clearly loosening up in those uh leather trousers it's a weird one look my response to primal scream is always going to be weird and conflicted in some ways because i'm a music critic with a speciality in late 60s early 70s psychedelia and underground rock and a sub speciality in 80s indie music so on the one hand that means i can see through these people like air this song is your mastermind subject isn't it taylor but yeah but at the same time there's a kind of deep, unshakable empathy.

Unshakable, perhaps not the choicest word. So it feels like I get this group at the deepest level. It's possible to get something this shallow. But I can't admire them. So, you know, the old cliches about music writers, like the first one being writing about music is like dancing about architecture, which sounds clever for about 10 seconds until you think, actually, no, hang on. What it's a lot more like is writing about architecture. And if you've got anything to say about Ian Nairn, my friend, you should step outside and say it to me there.

Yeah, fuck off zapper yeah but the other one is that music journalists are failed musicians right which i wish was more true because then music journalism might be a little bit better informed and a bit more clued into musicians tricks and what is and isn't cheap and hackney you know uh but it's also meaningless partly because a lot of the best musicians were also failed musicians, and because success and failure as a musician isn't linked to insight or, you know, understanding or writing ability

or anything else you need as a critic or used to. But the point is, you'd rather have a music critic who's a failed musician than a musician who's a failed music critic. Either literally like Morrissey or spiritually like Primal Scream. Because they know everything. They get everything. They feel everything right down to their tingling little souls.

But ultimately, they don't really have anything to add. And I mean, look, I've always hated being a critic. And in a lot of ways, I wish I'd never fallen into this particular pothole. I mean, despite the perk of entry into the latter-day Algonquin roundtable that is the Chart Music Collective. Partly because it's intrinsically frustrating and demeaning, but also because you need too many ideas. It's like being a comedian where you go on TV or radio

and everything you say has to be a new idea. And once you've said it, bang, it's gone. You can't just say it again over and over for the rest of your life. Whereas if you're a musician or a painter or a film director it bang it's gone you can't just say it again over and over for the rest of your life whereas if you're a musician or a painter or a film director or even a novelist you can get by for 20 or 30 years on one idea just retouching it and refining it and exploring it from different angles you know and at the lowest level you don't even need that you can get relatively rich and relatively famous and have a relatively large amount of fun without ever

having to think of anything and it's fine if you do that with charm and grace and a certain style even a sort of snotty kind of style but if you do it snootily with a deluded sense of your own seriousness and this much ironic self-regard that's just hard to love right so as a responsible critic i can't abide primal scream because every disparaging thing that can be fairly said about my old profession is far truer when applied to them. Right. When applied to this group who live in a world of refractions and reminders and whose relationship to the thing they love most is largely parasitical. to the thing they love most, is largely parasitical. Because all rock bands are derivative and in hock to some extent, but the best of them inhabit their favourite music and they use it as a language with which to communicate something.

But the problem with Primal Scream is that we're kind of given nothing. It's almost like just an instruction to worship you know it's like these lads are so touched and moved by music that maybe they can't accept that perhaps their place might be just to consume that music on their headphones while delivering uber eats and and i admire the determination and the lengths they're prepared to go to in order to deny that destiny but alas it's not quite that simple they're not very important in my musical life but i'm kind of fond of them in the way that you would be of of you know the sort of the the guy that sleeps in the doorway of your apartment building and kind of swears at you every day as you go as you go to get your post but the problem is i can't

hate them because we come from the same place in terms of musical revelation and what hooked us and in fact so i sympathize with this this sort of deep love that sets in and how it can affect you. I remember in about 1986 or something, Bobby Gillespie wrote an article in the NME about late 60s psychedelic music, which today would probably make you wince or yawn because it's the same old psych manifesto, you know. But at the time, it was kind of beautiful to read someone rhapsodizing about all this music that I love, time it was kind of beautiful to read someone rhapsodizing about all this music that i love like the birds you know 13th floor elevators sid barrett chocolate watch band uh love all this stuff that still lives in the deepest and most sensitive tunnels of my heart to the point where i'm still toying with the idea of forming a love tribute band called like the single cleverest

thought i've ever had in my entire miserable life but all the other response mechanisms in facebook oh yeah angry yes by the way you should know that there has been a band called the like so there is a danger you'll have to share a spotify page with them yeah happy to piggyback but it's just that this particular kind of music and i say this particular kind of music not meaning the actual sounds that we're hearing here but the sounds that are in primal screams head as this music is played behind them it means something special to those of us who were young in the 80s that's the thing and who took the 60s as an escape from the 80s musically and culturally right an inversion of the 80s, musically and culturally, right?

An inversion of the 80s. But the danger is always that you're going to disappear into that past because that love and that sensibility is not transferable into the 80s. There's no way to make a blend of now and then. So the glories of the past become an alternative reality which you disappear into, you know. And every time you're forced to snap out of that

and face a repulsive Tuesday morning, you cling on to that alternative reality a little bit tighter. And before you know it, you're cut off from everything other than your own internal dream reality. Right. And it's fucking terrible. It's a terrible mistake trying to inhabit the invisible structure of this dead world you just become ghostly and even as primal scream are

miraculously rescued from their self-imposed predicament right when andrew weatherall like a a giant charitable bird flies overhead and takes the collar of their leather jackets in his beak and lifts them out of the rotting corpse pit of revivalism into the blue sky they're still twisting and writhing in their old time clothes you know in the empty air still in front of their bedroom mirror still trying to match each new experience to somebody else's old experience. But the trouble is, because of that shared formative experience, I'm looking at this absurd scene of failed necromancy. And despite myself, and despite my laughter,

I am feeling the intensity and the seriousness of that love and devotion to a particular tradition and aesthetic, even though I kind of don't want to. It's a bit like a religion. It's like being a lapsed Catholic. You know what I mean? I'm out here living my life, but it's never completely let me go. completely let me go and i still get a feeling when i see the stations of the cross you know or rather a bunch of fellow victims dressed up and reenacting the stations of the cross andrew other all he did give them the keys of the kingdom and they used it to make get your rocks off yeah yeah they did yeah look can i tell you one more story quickly right years ago an old melody Maker colleague got a job as a commissioning editor for a book company and started getting loads of us in for boozy expense account lunches and trying to think up projects and stuff and try and match writers to projects that were already in the works.

things that was coming up was the book that eventually became my magpie eyes are hungry for the prize right history of creation records by the late david kavanagh um but at this point it was still at the stage of meetings with alan mcgee and all that stuff and this bloke mentioned to me that he'd given mcgee a list of all the writers that were on the books and he'd gone down it crossing people off and so on and apparently when he got to my name mcgee said he's an okay writer but i don't think he really understands the label and i still laugh every time i think of that because of course the real problem the real reason i ended up not liking half the stuff that came out on creation and was absolutely not the right person to write that book is that i understand the label far too well i mean i'd

only written nine chapters on ghost of a young man by the jasmine minks and half a paragraph on teenage fan club precisely as it should be so i think they chose well in the end so after this performance in spiral carpets were carrying their organ and whatnot out of television centre and saw Bobby Gillespie storm out of the dressing room, run smack into a full-length window thinking it was the exit, and then getting on the tube and going back to his girlfriend, presumably thinking to himself, fucking hell, I've waited all my life for this, and all I did was play the bastard maracas.

Even so, the following week loaded jumped another eight places to number 16 and stayed there for two weeks i mean this is the thing about the mythology of this era you know all these massive hits by stone roses and happy mondays and primal screen 16 for two weeks that's fucking shit Yeah, entered the charts lower than Candy Flip. Yes. That doesn't necessarily mean anything ultimately, though, does it? Oh, it does to chart music and the charts. Oh, what, you big nerds?

It's like there's loads of classic records that didn't make it to number one and stuff. Who gives a shit? Yeah, there's loads of classic records that still made it in the top ten. Yeah. Yeah, if they were so good, why aren't they in the charts? Yes. So we should just pay played devil's advocate the follow-up come together completed their transformation into the shaking stones and they'd shake around for the rest of the 90s and beyond scoring 10 more top 40 hits three of

which made the top 10 can we do one more quote from his book? Yes, please. I've been going through it, like, gripped by the horrific realisation that in lots of ways this is the book I'd have written when I was 15. There but for the grace of God. I'm turning the pages thinking, fucking hell, if I hadn't got myself together, I could have ended up as a wealthy and widely loved rock star. Shudder.

But look, of all the memorable moments in this book, so far this is the one that's really stayed with me. It's an early Jesus and Mary Chain gig. Right. And if you remember, they used to have sort of so-called riots at early Jesus and Mary Chain gigs where people would start smashing everything up and fighting and all that. And people are throwing bottles at the band.

And one of them hits Bobby Gillespie's girlfriend on the head, to which he responds with appropriate outrage. And his response is, I quote, I proceeded to pick up any bottle that had landed on the stage and started throwing them back at the audience. Fucking sheep. So afterwards they go to A&E to get his girlfriend seen to and Bobby remembers the scene.

There were people who had attended the concert in the waiting room who started screaming abuse at us because they'd been bottled too. Joe Foster and I went over to them and told them all to fuck off, that they deserved it for being part of that audience of fools now if you pick apart that sequence of events and bobby's reactions to his own actions and to the actions of others and their relative consequences not just on one furious night when he's pissed off that his girlfriend got bottled, but almost 40 years later in a book. All I'm saying is psychologists have a word for that. It's loaded from behind the screen. Not a one-act on the show tonight from South of Manchester, just in case you're interested. OK, here comes the charts now from 30 to 11.

And a new entry at number 30 from Fish. And a gentleman's excuse me. New at 29, a handful of promises from Big Fun. New entry at 28, Don't You Love Me from the 49ers. Up at 27, Deliverance from The Mission. 26, Room at the Top from Adam Ant. The Stone Roses, Elephant Stone at 25. Up 8 to 24, Loaded, Primal Scream, you've just seen them.

Glory Estefan, here we are. Up to this week's number 23. A new entry at 22, This Is How It Feels, the Inspiral Carpets, coming next. Shakin' Stevens, I'm Mike at 21 this week. Second single from the Stone Roses, Made of Stone, new entry at 20. Number 19, Downtown Train from Rod Stewart.

New entry at 18, Strawberry Fields Forever from Candy Flip. At 17, Black Betty, the Bentley brand remix from Ram Jam. Up four at 16, Natural Thing from The Innocents. 15, Get Up Before the Night Is Over from Technotronic. Up at 14, Madly In Love from Bross. Black Bolts, I Don't Know Anybody Else, this week's number 13. Depeche Mode, Enjoy the Silence at 12. Black Box, I Don't Know Anybody Else. This week's number 13. It's the best mode. Enjoy the silence at 12.

And you're at number 11. I'll Be Loving You Forever. New Kids on the Block. Okay, Success City 1990 is Oldham. There's Oldham Celtic in the basketball. There's Oldham Rugby Club. And there's Oldham Athletic in the football. Oh, yes.

And at number 22, Spiral Carpets. Yes. Husband don't know what he's done. Mayo, standing with three girls and look absolutely bored and disgusted with what they've just seen on the stage, rather like Tony Blackburn after watching a porn film, says that there is not one act on tonight that's from south of manchester which

is absolute fucking bollocks i mean manchester's north of all of america bar alaska and big fun were from surrey so what the fuck is he going on about there he then whips us into the charts from number 30 to number 11 again another boring rundown picture wise but the only interesting picture in that rundown is the cover of i might by shaking stevens which has been done by viz did you notice chaps yeah yeah he was a good sport features biffa bacon barry asquith roger mele san out of the fat slags postman plod spoiled bastard johnny fart pants and finbar saunders with comrade shaky sat on a postbox with letters addressed to shaker memphis marie marie and oh oh julia strewn about and of course there's a green door an old house and a hot dog stand no No Billy the Fish, that's wrong. Finally, as he stands next to a youth with an Adidas baseball cap on,

which he turns backward and then makes some gestures at the camera like it's still 1986, Mayo tells us that it's a golden age for Oldham, what with the football and that, as he introduces This Is How It Feels by Inspiral Carpets. We dealt with Inspiral Car carpets in chart music number 40 when they took caravan to number 30 in march of 1991 but this is their sixth single release it's the second cut from their debut lp life which comes out next month and the follow-up to move which got to number 49 in November of 1989. A chart placing so

disappointing in the same month that Fool's Gold and Hallelujah were kicking the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays into the top 20 that the band decided to sign with a proper label settling upon Mute Records. This is the first release on their new label and it's sent to the charts at number 22 and here they are in the studio for the first time ever the northern monkeys with two e's if you will and that nearly happened chaps they were approached by bbc manchester last year who wanted to make a cartoon series with them but they wisely knocked it back can't imagine it being an exciting thrill ride there must be the raw charisma that just pours out like musically this is a very prosaic plodding record without any real resonance but lyrically

it's it's heart-rending and it's fucking grim range and grim it's like an nspcc advert like you expect a free phone number to come up at the end yes that's mayo's linker if you've been affected by any of the issues raised in this song husband don't know what he's done kids don't know what's wrong with mum what what the fuck is going on here this is yeah i don't you know i don't like it it's very very oldham as well it's very distinctly northern in that way it's like away from the exciting burgeoning club scene and vibrant youth of manchester and the big city it's like there's still little brick terraces with outside toilets and nothing good is happening there the kind of places where play for today is a documentary. I mean, from this distance, Inspiral Carpets have been treated like the Brian Paul and the Tremolos of Manchester,

but they certainly weren't seen like that back in the day. Allow me to direct you to an article in last week's Record Mirror. Go on then. Inspiral Carpets, the sought-after young band among the world's compilation LP compilers are about to score a massive hit with their debut mute single, This Is How It Feels. The band, who pointed the stranglers in the direction of chart possibility with a cover of 96 Tears, have been thrilling people up and down the country with their superb live shows. people up and down the country with their superb live shows such as the band's ascendancy at present that when they played at london recently they had to fit in no less than 30 interviews that day and such is their self-confidence that they must surely be the only band to feature pictures of themselves in their spectacular live stage show singer Tom looks set to be the first real pop sex symbol of the 90s.

With that flashing smile. So be prepared for the screams on top of the pop soon. Yeah. I don't know if that was a piss take. Didn't read like that to me. Maybe they mixed him up with Clint Boone. I don't know. Clint Boone with his perfect medieval peasant haircut.

That sort of serial killer grin. Bless him. I mean, we laugh at Primal Scream, but at least they had the basic good sense to get someone talented in to make the record for them. So the finished product was halfway presentable, as opposed to this diy disaster this record is the musical equivalent of a set of shelves collapsing off the kitchen wall

onto the draining board they're going to need some new bowls yeah next time they have a haircut but it's so poor this is such a poor. It's like a school band having a go. Do you know what I mean? It sounds like my first song by Ian, 13. And the lyrics make that worse because, you know, when kids write a song, they're too embarrassed to sing about girls. So they do a social comment. I mean, you can imagine writing this song and thinking that it was good enough to release really you know even even if you do have a sex symbol on lead vocals he looks

like the tunics tea cake boy if if tunics tea cakes were filled with giraffe shit and lead paint and he'd been eating them all his life but it's the way he hits every note right on the beat right like kids don't know what's wrong with mum so he sounds like he's on the last mile of an over ambitious sponsored walk like just plodding as if this song wasn't already flat enough this is a terrible record and this is more of a desecration of the beatles than candy flip could ever hope to be because there's no twist it's not funny it's not novel or outrageous or it's not an inversion of anything it's just that thing but done so badly that it's an insult to the people who invented it it's grim to you know use the oft usedused term about the north but it's you know

in a way that would definitely be offensive if anyone outside of the north yeah said it you know it's but it's there's something fascinating about it for me because it is wrong it's very unpop it's like the most unpop thing and it is just like the smashing of a mallet into a tent peg for three minutes until the thing just bends and then just goes further and further into the soft earth yeah it is a terrible record but there's some idea in it they had some sort of an idea that they wanted to yeah and the idea was nick off the police black car drives through the town some guy from the top estate they would kill me for a cigarette but i don't even want to die just yet it's a subtle lift of invisible sun by the police i content oh yeah i'm not as familiar with that song i'm not as much of

a police head as you, Al. Yeah. But yeah, there's kind of an attempt has been made at kitchen sink. Yes. It's kind of kitchen sink, but it's not. It's like it's the space where a kitchen sink was in a sort of derelict house. Yeah. But I feel like by accident it achieved something, because the way that I'm talking about it, the things that it evokes through not being quite right,

gives me that not unpleasant tingle that i also get from watching public information films from the from the central office of information the only public information film these people should be on is uh is don't run if you've got hair in front of your eyes well um oldham is in fact there's a sign, whether or not it's still there, but there was, that said, welcome to Oldham, home of the tubular bandage. So if you happen to, you know, wreck yourself in an electricity substation or in a disused quarry, then you'd be home free here in Oldham. That sign could have said home of the Inspiral Carpets, but they were very disparaging about their hometown in interviews round about the time. I mean, fair enough, because I understand that there are people who are proud of where they're from. And that's, you know, that is not something to fuck with.

But a lot of people will affect that when actually they hated everything about it. And, you know, everyone who was there. Did they say Old Ham is about right? Yeah. That's what I'd have said. I'm not having no set against Oldham, remember? They clubbed together for that plaque at their Lieutenant Pigeon House. Oh, yeah.

So, yeah, fucking good on Oldham. Yeah, in their time of need. We can coat this down all we want, but we're listening to the future here, because this strikes the keynote for much of the decade, Triumphant Downness. It's a song to front up to with your arms in the air. And I don't know if he's about backstage, but their drum technician, a certain N. Gallagher,

is surely taking notes and making plans. Yeah. But that doesn't mean a toss because the kids are just granny clapping away and whooping like gibbons. The zoo influence continues to linger in that studio alas yeah i mostly remember hearing this song as a football chant because something else it sounded more mellifluous that way um man united fans used to sing it at man city fans while doling out their biannual thrashing with the lyrics this is how it feels to be city this is how it feels to be small

this is how it feels when your team wins nothing at all this goes to show doesn't it we are all but straw in the wind tossed by the hands of billionaire floridian vulture capitalists and billionaire rulers of gay murdering slave driving oil states so we should all be as smug as we possibly can while it lasts for some reason that i can't work out this song has actually crashed into the cool cuts dance chart in record mirror at number two would you believe wow one below tripping on your love by Way of Life. One above Ghetto Heaven by Family Stand. Underneath it says, Solid beats for the latest indie band to hit the dance floor.

Awesome! Did Mark Sutherland write that? How are people dancing to these things that are being presented to us as dance records? I mean, I'm not the greatest dancer, but like, how are all these people moving them? No, I wonder why. Sorry, Sarah. A what? Wow. Yes. not the greatest dancer but like how are all these people moving why sorry sarah oh what wow yes how are all these people dancing and moving their bodies around to records that are not dance records no no no it's weirding me out drugs sarah drugs no not drugs what are they well a ketamine

that nobody was doing at this time or glug maybe, maybe. Glug some Glug, and then just loll about the dance floor with your tongue out. Well, it's the association with the Mad Chester scene, isn't it? Yes. Isn't the only reason this is classed as a dance record? And you've got the same problem with every supposed scene, whether it's a real one or a semi-invented one, which is that there are never enough bands or there are never enough good bands right because human talent and ingenuity is depressingly thinly spread so whenever something like madchester bubbles up like people get into the two or three decent groups

and then you get this kind of dragnet which picks up all the singing milkman and the youth club audition failures you know adding sort of credibility to this idea of a scene but also subtracting from it or you know diluting it and there's nothing worse than ending up as one of the bands that are pulled along in the in the glittering slipstream because deep down everybody knows what you are and it means that you never get a second chance. But, you know, luckily in most cases that doesn't matter. They were like the real run to the litter, weren't they? The Inspirals, which is, you know, unfortunate but kind of undeniable.

Part of the problem is that they're like a Manchester band and, yeah, I know they're from Oldham but Stone Roses were from Altrincham and Happy Mondays were from Salford. Part of the problem is that they're like a Manchester band. And, yeah, I know they're from Oldham, but Stone Roses were from Altrincham and Happy Mondays were from Salford. They're still Manchester bands, right? But they're a Manchester band who sound like a Liverpool band. Ooh, yes. And with the exception of the Hollies, that never works.

I mean, look, first of all, this is easy for me to say as an outsider, albeit one who's spent a lot of time in the northwest over the years but the whole manchester versus liverpool thing is fundamentally hilarious and everybody in manchester and liverpool needs to understand this because when you look at it no two other english cities have as much in common as those two culturally not even bradford and leeds the minneapolis and st paul of england it's the only real difference people from liverpool pride themselves on wearing their hearts on their sleeves and being emotionally open while people from manchester pride themselves on being a little bit more emotionally aloof and controlled and, you know, cooler.

And apart from that, lads, you're the fucking same. The music, the politics, the humour, the cockiness, the sort of insularity, it's all the fucking same. And in music, there's always been a bit of an understanding of that. There's a lot of cooperation and crossover between manchester and liverpool groups and the only time the rivalry boils over is when they start talking about football yeah the interesting thing is that the cultural differences such as they are between the two cities are reflected clearly in the music that comes out of them traditionally right in that manchester bands are a little bit artier a little bit more cerebral um often based on rhythm and repetition which is true of people

like joy division and even the smiths in a way because liverpool bands are all about melody and that kind of surging emotional sound now to some extent that's down to in the 80s manchester was full of people taking speed and listening to funk and liverpool was full of people smoking weed and listening to pink floyd although you know maybe that's an expression of that contrast rather than the other way around but the point is liverpool bands who tried to sound like Manchester bands and vice versa, it never worked. Manchester Mersey beat was horrible, unless you got a song off Graham Gordman. Canal beat. Yeah, and Liverpool bands trying to do baggy stuff were always horrendous as well.

And in a way, it makes perfect sense that the young Noel Gallagher was roadieing or whatever he was doing for this lot, because Oasis are the ones who finally fucked this balance, because they caricature Manc in attitude and caricature Liverpool in sound. But here's the earlier example of that, and it's fucking awful. I mean, we can scoff, but there is a genuine hero for the 90s in this band, Martin Walsh on bass, who is sporting a full-on

gordon honeycomb of a hairdo and quite clearly doesn't give a fuck i mean we've spoken many a time and oft about bold pop stars in hats on this episode and if there was ever a time when hats were acceptable it was this era you know he could have slapped on a bucket hat with a cow on it and the pop craze youngsters would have been none the wiser but no he was bold he was proud hero sir because you know when i see a grown man in a hat and i'm speaking as someone who's been a total slaphead for half his life now i instantly think a you're bold and b you're a fucking coward. So I respect him. Yeah, and also, he's in a band where everyone else is like a sort of awkward man at C&A

with a haircut like a canteen lampshade, dressed like a three-year-old. Do you think the band all got together and said, look, Martin's having difficulties with his hair. Let's all have mad hairstyles to um detract attention from him but i'm clint boone so i'm bagsy in the best hairstyle is it like the opening sequence of full metal jacket except instead of everyone getting their heads shaved they're all getting a bowl cut preparation for you know going to war in pop yeah and they're lumbering about in their new togs which have been provided to them by joe, who they've just cut a deal with for a few thousand pounds.

Meaning they can go on top of the pops and look like cast members of Pigeon Street for nothing. Yeah, Joe Bloggs, the mother care that thinks it's summer. Yes, cool as fuck. Yes, indeed. That's what everyone's going to think when they see this line. Hey, they're cool as fuck. Everything about this is kind of boxy isn't it from the clothes yes through to the bass line all of it is just yeah it's such a peculiar record and it seems so odd to see it even on top of the pops and but like i said i would never listen to

this for pleasure because you can't because it's not pleasurable to listen to but i appreciate that they've tried to do something different here you know you don't get many husbands in pop music do you nor mums no like these are just words that you don't hear and you know it's because they're very lumpen words and you know but it's yeah there's something about this that really fascinates me in the same way that it's fascinating to look at um you know walkthroughs of abandoned houses and you say they've been dragged into the the manchester scene taylor but they're clearly fighting against it you know they've not called in andrew weatherall oh my god this is how it feels to be loaded yes fuck that was a missed opportunity core and you can't imagine them being massive custard gun it's either you know except with actual custard yes birds yeah when they got backstage they'd be less inclined to

get the drugs in and more inclined to count up how many t-shirts they've sold that night yeah yeah this has got a sort of can of kestrel and an embassy number one feel to it hasn't it yeah unfortunately the only thing i find fascinating about this group is why they all chose to go to the same barber. Yeah. Alas, not Sweeney Todd. Oh! I got a drunken text from a friend of mine the other night.

Right. Claiming, I think fraudulently, that he once, and I quote, broke into television centre did a shit in Basil Brush Oh, I say Mr Roy That text has more artistic merit than the entire existence

of the Inspiral Car Has he been able to buy a small terraced house in Oldham off the back of it? No, I don't think he has But, you know, at least they tried. So the following week, this is how it feels, jumped seven places to number 15,

and a week later got to number 14, its highest position. And the LP Life would sell 200,000 copies in the first fortnight of its release, and crash into the album chart at number two, kept off the top by the compilation Only Yesterday by The Carpenters. Oh, you see, Candy Flip, you should have done Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft.

The follow-up, She Comes in the Fall, got to number 27 in July. They finished off the year with the Island Head EP getting to number 21 in November and spent the rest of the first half of the 90s as a regular but not massive presence in the charts until they were dropped by Mute in 1995 and splitting up soon after. Telling you that's an inspirational song that's inspired Carpenter 22. And now, with a gear change that Nigel Mansell would be happy with,

at number four, the highest new entry, this is Jive Bunny. Everybody needs somebody Everybody needs somebody Love What we're going to do right here is go back, way back Mayo, on a mission to stand next to every single member of the audience, drops a Nigel Mansell reference in order to introduce That Sounds Good To Me by Jive Bunny and the Master Mixers.

Bred in an electrical shop in Rotherham in 1988, Jive Bunny was the creation of John Pickles, who ran the shop but wrote songs on the side and recorded them in a studio in a terraced house on the outskirts of town and when he heard the owners were going bust he bought it up in the mid 80s after employing his son and a local dj called ian morgan to mine the studio he successfully applied for a license to start a DJ record service called Master Mix in 1986, a subscription service for club DJs which provided remixes of the hits of the day on a monthly basis, which put him in touch with a load of remixes

right across Europe. In the summer of 1988, he was contacted by Les Hemstock, a DJ from Yorkshire who was based in Norway, and given a copy of a megamix he'd just done, which consisted of rock and roll classics mashed together with Glenn Miller. It was released by Master Mix that very month to a rapturous reception from the subscription base, which encouraged Pickles to fly Hamstock over to Rotherham

and do a version suitable for release to the general public, which got round to any publishing mither by re-recording the Glenn Miller bits and using an Elvis impersonator. The single, released under the name given to the bloke who repaired irons and keckles in the electrical shop who called everybody bonair came out in july of 1989 it entered the chart at number 54 then soared to number 31 and after the video was played on top of the pops it soared 28 places to number three

and a week later it camped out on the very summit of mount pop for five weeks eventually selling over a quarter of a million copies the follow-up that's what i like smashed into the chart at number four in october of 1989 and spent three weeks at number one and they finished the year of the rabbit with let's party entering the charts at number one in December for one week, becoming only the third act in history to go to number one with their first three singles after Jerry and the Pacemakers and Frankie Goes to Hollywood. And this, their attempt at a record-breaking fourth number one on the bounce has entered the chart at number four, this week's highest new entry. And even though they've recruited a builder

who knocks about their local pub to play Jive Bunny at PAs, here's the video. Yeah, I'd never seen the video to this before. No. Or I don't remember seeing it. And it's amazing. Like the record, it's about modern technology descending onto the 80s holiday camp aesthetic yes and recharging it which i think is why it was so successful because there's

something genuinely joyous and celebratory about the shitness of it it's basically it's a bunch of higher littlewoods models yes whoever they could scoop out a spotlight and probably some friends of the crew you know dancing around with giant unnatural grins bolted onto their faces right shot on glaring cheap video but lit with this unearthly acid lighting and intercut with a that marker pen flip book animation of jive bunny himself yes and everything's either slowed down or sped up and it's not really cut to the record there's all these arbitrary garden shears edits yeah it's just this frantic whirl of low aesthetics and like short attention span high speed hucksterism yeah you know and what it looks and sounds like when you put it with this track is one of those

early 90s late night tv adverts for mail order only cd compilations of classic hits yes remember that sounds good to me is not available in any shops i was in a minicab once about 25 years ago and the cabbie was playing this cd with uh black betty by ram jam on it and we're in the back we're like so oh cool and he kept turning around and going do you like this and putting it on again do you like this do you like it and when we went yeah he started boasting he said yeah this cd it's not available in any shops nice but the the shamelessness of those adverts is captured really well here yes and it's quite a nostalgia trip on that level i think the b side of this record was if you're sat around at home make new friends on the telephone eight nine eight double five double oh double five chat back i think a lot of people thought that should be the

a side as well but yeah they held out extra track on the 12 inch was uh oh eight nine one do you remember old things they were funny right me and my mate used to ring those numbers up when we were on LSD. I only just remembered this. I've got a tape of it somewhere. His mum was live-in staff at a sheltered housing, and the phone was all paid for. So when she went away, I'd go round there, and we'd take acid and call these premium rate proto-internet chat rooms.

Somewhere I got a tape of him trying to suppress hysterical acid giggles while talking to some flat-voiced disaster in Essex about what he does for a living. Going, my name's Gus. I put a hose to the cars. that was our psychedelic odyssey it was all right then and it's all right now so the tune we get a cover of the intro to everybody needs somebody to love by solomon burke long tall sally by little richard ooh my soul by little richard keep a knocking by little richard roll over beethoven by chuck beret tequila by the champs shout shout knock yourself out by ernie maresca and a few stabs of chubby checker because why not i would like to know the process by of elimination by which you know they've got

in a hundred way of boogie woogie and then it's like how do you choose you know especially by by now this is their fourth go at this you know what are they what are they doing what are they doing why is this happening no making hit records the thing is my dad fucking hated hip-hop and he bang on the ceiling when i was playing ultra magneticetic MCs or Boogie Down Productions, and he'd moan on about it, talking about how it's not fucking real music, and we'd end up going to someone's wedding do or leaving do or whatever,

fucking Jive Bunny would come on, and he'd be immediately up and off on one, probably because Jive Bunny would rinse the back catalogue of Little Richard, who he fucking loved, and, you know, so did I. And on this episode of Top of the Pops, after sitting through Bobby Omni Shake and Inspiral Basin Heads,

hearing Little Richard cut through all the shit is just a glorious thing to hear. Yeah, but it's like they've taken the steak of Little Richard and just pounded it flat with a mallet. And then it has been cooked well done and it has been served to you with watered down ketchup. Why isn't this offensive to people who love Little Richard? You know, I don't really understand. This is essentially dad hop, isn't it?

Yeah. Hip hop for dads. Yeah. It's like if hip hop had been informed primarily by Shawoddy Woddy. Yes. I mean, if there of a black planet had been made by the cast of Ross Abbott's Madhouse, this is what it would sound like. Yeah, that's the funny thing.

This record didn't offend the people who like and grew up with the music that it destroys, but it offended younger people. Yeah, it did. To continue the Stones theme of this episode, I once went to interview andrew lou oldham and tony colder in their offices in belgravia or somewhere early nights they'd written a biography of abba with colin irwin so it was about that right i went to interview him and as you go up the steps to their office they had all the gold discs that they'd ever been involved with framed so it was

like stones records then a lot of immediate records stuff like small faces pp arnold and then lastly a massive row of jive bunny gold discs because really tony colder co-owned the company who owned jive bunny in some sense or other. And I just had this lovely vision of Paul Weller or some heavenly records guy walking up the stairs and watching the expression on his face slowly change, like one of those time-lapse films of an orange that's been left on a plate for 100 days

and just collapses in a foul black liquid but that's the best thing about the best thing about this is that it's a proper historical record of the nasty cheap corners of 1990 it gets it all down in sound and vision right the true look and feel of the stuff that nobody wants to preserve and so will not be remembered you know and in no in any era 80 of people's reality is low rushed zero effort worth i mean the stuff that you see in here most of the time the world that you actually have to live in right in future days most of that is chucked away and forgotten yeah in favor of the stuff that seems like it's worth remembering. But the stuff that's unmemorable or beneath consideration,

10 or 20 or 30 years later, that's what made up the majority of that era's reality. And so it's good to have it and it's good to preserve it. Is it though? I mean, isn't this just kind of like there are plastic toys that were made in the 80s and, you know, next time you go to the beach, you're going to find one of them. Yeah, and then put them on eBay and sell them for fucking 60 quid.

Yeah. I've just got this real, like, searing mental image now of, like, I don't think they've made any, like, Jive Bunny toys, but I'm just imagining, like, a really crappy-looking Jive Bunny toy with his eyes just rubbed off by decades in the sea. And it's killed various fish on its way, you know, and has survived in some form. It's just washed up in the surf at Margate. It's such a weird void of a thing.

It's like it's a non-funny novelty record made by a celebrity who doesn't exist you know it's like we were saying like is is this like the first avatar pop star in a kind of precursor to gorillas you know but it's not an avatar for the creators it's an avatar for the audience i'd sooner listen to jive bonnie than fucking no you fucking wouldn't i mean you are fucking words well be my guest al where does little richard feature on a gorilla's record show me yeah huff all you want madam is the truth the worst thing about this for me is the biggest um not that i had high expectations but the the kind of reflexive disappointment induced by uh a sample at the start that goes what we're going to do right

here is go back way back back into time which um is also how um kisses on the wind by nana cherry starts off one of my favorite records ever and days of way back by nwa yeah yeah i can't believe they both sampled jive bunny i know i mean it's just trailblazer you know what an influence you know what a legacy my brain just went oh it's kissing the way oh no it isn't like i couldn't help itself it just went yay i'm gonna have three minutes of fun now and then that was not what i had by the way that sample is from troglodyte brackets caveman close brackets by jimmy castor bunch i need to investigate this man's work further. Oh, you must.

Yeah, yeah. Go to It's Just Begun. I'm going to check out the Bertha Butt boogie. Apparently Bertha Butt was introduced in Troglodyte. It wasn't actually historically accurate. It's saying, the only people that existed were Troglodytes, cavemen, cavewomen. And here was the original Troglodyte listening to his stereo and this is what he heard it's amazing so yeah i'd rather much rather listen to that the list of things i'd rather

listen to fucking this is how it feels by spiral carpets than jive bunny and that's very literally the truth i mean i do wonder whether jive bunny was knowingly named because i think if you purchased a time scoop and gathered up all the black american musicians honored on these records and permitted them to hear this they might find the name quite apt because it's just called themselves shaking star sound but you know but look my only defense of this record is that i think this is the point where you just have to tip your hat. Because on this podcast, over the years, we've seen attempts by Candy Flip and Dollar, you know, trying to turn the Beatles into tatty shit. We've just seen Primal Scream trying to do the same to the Rolling Stones.

Rolling Stones and just all manner of English seaside wet weekend deck chair attendance turned loose on cool and sexy styles of the past right but usually there's an element of misplaced pride or would-be artistry there you know like they really think they're doing something with it whereas here it's hard not to feel a kind of weird grudging admiration because nobody's putting themselves on or trying to put you on there's a kind of wonderful purity to this this revels in its cheapo shitness and it's not trying to fool you it's just a simple offer they're saying we've taken this reinforced submersible craft down lower than any man has ever been before to the inky depths of pop music. And we've discovered fish so ugly they could have been torn from your most brutal nightmares. Now, would you be interested?

interested it's like we've taken the spirit of rock and roll killed it chucked it dead in a bowl pissed on it and then sliced it up and made it into a sandwich would you pay us for a bite no pressure and lest you make any mistake we've presented this in such a way that you could no more mistake this record for art than you could accidentally let yourself into an electricity substation thinking it was an adventure playground there's lurid warning signs everywhere around this record if you buy this record you're not going to be embarrassed about that in 10 years time because if you buy this record embarrassment is clearly beyond you you know yeah but i just think it's good that that's been preserved you know the library of alexandria burnt to the ground destroying thousands of the most precious documents of the pre-christian era the river arno burst its

banks in 1966 flooding the city of florence and destroying millions of priceless art treasures and and irreplaceable ancient literature but we still have this so we should hold it close and and keep it so so in centuries to come when people say how did they really live we've heard all about primal scream and the stone roses and all those raves how did they really live then those people can thrill to it once more while yes while trying to chew off their own ears what percentage of the people who originally bought jive bunny's records do you reckon are dead now when you started that sentence i somehow knew that was how it was going to end oh is that because i'm predictable no but just because it's such a good right it's such a good point to make i'm not sure anybody under 40 bought this record or under 35

oh come on kids fucking love jive bonair what are you going on about it was for kids yeah but kids who were too young to buy records yeah kids under 10 this is their introduction to hip-hop sarah sampling yeah this kind of perfectly evokes the experience of going to a holiday camp in the 80s for me despite the fact that i never did that yeah get us a crock man and the new jive bunny single yeah i did go to a holiday camp in the 80s and you're absolutely right yeah yeah i guess it was a record for kids and old people it was just those awkward people in the middle like teenagers i suppose yeah i mean do you think anyone in the world lost their virginity to this record i mean there might have been one or two can you imagine you don't always have a choice in what's on when you lose your virginity to be

true to be grim it's always risky did you have anything playing when either of you lost your virginity side two of moon dance by van morrison wow how how very american werewolf i am not saying that on this podcast just it's not even that it's embarrassing it's just fucking private also there was one well there were two different things um because there was the the failed attempt and then there was one well there were two different things um because there was the the failed attempt and then there was the successful attempt and they're both like burned into my brain but um they i will take that to my grave this is how it feels to be isn't it sarah isn't it hang on what i was fucking no uh also not later even. Scrub that out. Jesus. No.

Sorry, doc. Also, no. No, they were good records. I just don't want to fucking tell you. Jesus Christ, I have said enough on this podcast over the last six years. I have blurted my innermost in ways that I now regret bitterly. So, fuck off. Right, when we do late 90s episodes, every shit song that comes up,

I'm just going to sit back and stroke a thoughtful chin no way no way by vanilla i'm gonna start the bidding at that jesus h so the following week that sounds good to me stayed at number four and went no further breaking the streak the follow-up can Can You Party got to number 8 in September and they closed out the year with the crazy party mix getting to number 13 in the last chart of 1990. The next two singles, Hot Summer Salsa and Rock and Roll Dance Party

both failed to make the top 40 in 1991 and the costume was presumably shoved under a bed in Rotherham, where it remains to this day. I'm just looking at the side two of Moondance. It's crap. All the good shit's loaded on the first side. Isn't the first track on side two of Moondance called Come Running? Yes.

Yeah. I think most people's experience of losing their virginity oh we're two minutes in oh i remember it well i'd fancied her for ages i wanted to shag her so badly and i shagged her so badly taylor what you know what did i have anything playing when i lost my virginity yeah i think i was listening to chart music number 17 Taylor. What? You know what. Did I have anything playing when I lost my virginity? Mm. Yeah, I think I was listening to chart music number 17. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Yeah, this is a jumping little record.

I want my jockey to play. Oh, the Beethoven. I got it. Oh, boy. That's giant bunny number four. Could be next week's number one. It's not this week, here comes as they say The final countdown

And up to number ten Lily was here, David A. Stewart featuring Candy Dolpha Number nine, Nothing Compares To You from Sinead O'Connor Up to number eight, Blue Savannah from Eurasia And up to seven, Moments In Soul, JT and the Big Family. Up eight to six, Love Shack from the B-52s. No move at five, Infinity, Guru Josh.

The heist went to number four, That Sounds Good to Me, you've just seen Jive Bunny. No move at three, How Am I Supposed to Live Without You, Michael Bolton. And no move at number two, The Brits, 1990. And that means week number three for Beats International, featuring Lindy Layton and Dub, Be Good To Me. This is Jam High. This is Jam High.

Mayo, next to a lad in a leather jacket with the sleeves rolled up, who clearly thinks his summit breaks down the top ten. Oh, chaps, we know what the jarring note is on this selection of pictures, don't we? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Number two, fucking Jonathan King popping up out of nowhere. Jesus. That was disturbing. He's the front person of various artists with the mash-up single The Brits 1990 Dance Mix,

which features Street Tough by Double Trouble and Rebel MC, Voodoo Ray by a guy called Gerald, Freak Tough by Double Trouble and Rebel MC, Voodoo Ray by a guy called Gerald, Theme from S-Express by S-Express, Hey DJ, I Can't Dance to That Music You're Playing by Beatmasters, Eve of the War, Ben Libron's remix by Jeff Wayne, Pacific State by 808 State, we call it Acid by DMOB and Got To Keep On by Cookie Crew. That's Brits 1988-89 to me.

Yeah, but almost all good records. And all of them having absolutely fuck all to do with Jonathan King. So why is he on the front with a line over his head that's clearly stuffed and therefore not going to bite his head off? That's fucking wrong. People like him. A humble man. Finally, Mayo gets around to introducing this week's number

one don't be good to me by beats international featuring lindy layton formed in brighton in 1989 beats international were a loose collective which orbited around norman cook the former bassist of the house martins who had split up in late 1988, and who had put out the hip house single Blame It on the bass line and the dance single for Spacious Lies under his own name. Later that year, after Cook appeared on Jukebox Jury talking about his new plans, he was approached by Lindy Layton, an 18-year-old actor-singer who had appeared in Press Gang and Casualty, who was currently best known for a Heinz Spaghetti advert.

She suggested a cover of the 1984 SOS band single Just Be Good To Me, which got to number 13 in April of that year, and Cook stitched together the bass line from Guns of Brixton, the 1979 Clash track from London Calling, the harmonica from Ennio Morricone's Lumo della Monica from the soundtrack of the 1968 Spaghetti Western Once Upon a Time in the West, the drums from the 1975 Headhunters tune God Made Me Funker and got bandmate David John baptiste to redo a snippet of the rap from jam hot the 1983 johnny dinell single for the intro it's the second cut from the lp let them eat bingo which is due out in a week or so it was released at the end of january and smashed into the charts at number 15 then soared 12 places to number 3.

And two weeks later, it scaled to the very top of Pop Mountain, picking up Nothing Compares To You by Sinead O'Connor, holding it over its head, lobbing it over the side, and bellowing triumphantly. This is its third week at number 1, and here's a repeat of their performance from two weeks ago. And chaps, before we get into this, allow me to shave a frank beard, if you will,

because we all know the legend that's been bandied about for over 30 years about this single, don't we? Do we? Well, Lindy Leighton was supposed to be in Grange Hill. Oh. And she was not not sir or madam the so-called mainstream media got her confused with lindy brill who played kathy hargreaves and it never got corrected and that fact has been circulating for over 30 years now and i've just killed it well done anyway this single to my mind it's the first proper

number one of the 90s isn't it so far we've had hanging tough by new kids on the block tears on my pillow by kylie minogue nothing compares to you by shanae o'connor but finally we get a single that sounds absolutely of its time in other words a song from six years ago sung over another song from 11 years yeah it does sound very of its time. And I think it has aged pretty well for something that does sound so 1990. And it's technically clever, isn't it? I mean, is it the opposite of Jive Bunny, do you think, in most meaningful ways? It's another slow dance record, but, you know, with very few breaks in it, but it works.

And another one with loads of space in it but it works and another one with loads of space in it like all of the low end is taken up with the bass so the bass has like loads of room to stretch out and be a big fat bass and it's a really interesting and carefully arranged assemblage of elements that all work really well together in a pleasing way that like well who would think to put these things together it's like well apparently these people and this teenage girl brilliant it's one of those songs that's like a matchbox cascade it just goes round and round and round but you're quite happy to sit there and watch the balls bounce off the little bongos and go round again yeah yeah the rhythmic part is so crisp it is like people sort of marching through a field of iceberg lettuce

and there's no kick drum. They're clearly people who understand music who have gone right back to the basics and chosen things very, very carefully. Yeah, it's a funny one, this, isn't it? Because it is a good record, largely because it's based on a better record. Two better records. Two better records.

And I'm not sort of griping and being grumpy about it, because I do like this, but it's quite hard to do a track like this with a dub bass line and a sort of, you know, haunted, distant melody and make it shit. Because this kind of music is the easiest music in the world to play to a reasonable standard without having to try too hard. Because as soon as you've got the rhythm going and you've put down a heavy bass it already sounds quite good so all you have to do then is

not spoil it yeah which they don't yeah but that's that in itself is quite a skill isn't it it's like with with editing of of writing it's like sometimes the best thing to do is nothing oh yeah i mean i'm not sniping so much as saying that it's done cleverly that's why this is the style of black music that's most commonly approximated by white bedroom boys because the entry level is so easy to get to and once you're there you can draft in anything else you want any other kind of sound or melody to layer over the top because there's no issues of authenticity to worry about there's no concerns about funk and the possession of this doesn't exist in a hard dance floor space where you have to meet certain demands and it doesn't exist in a specific urban hard knock

space where you need certain kinds of experience and knowledge to make it convincing it's basically reggae music that's expanded out into a space that lads like Quentin understand like a stoned mind space where you don't need any tight connection to your own body and your own physicality you can be horizontal and not miss anything you know so growing these little window box flowers is within the reach of people like him you know and they're really nice it's only when you listen to like actual dub music like if you listen to the long version of no love by the twin roots you know or something, or something by Keith Hudson or Termination Dub by Glenn Brown. You're stepping into a hundred mile square forest

of unearthly phantasmagoric blooms against which this seems a little bit underwhelming. But it's because, appropriately enough, playing reggae, especially slow, moody, dubby type of reggae, is like playing the bass in that the bass is the easiest instrument to play to a just about acceptable standard which is why the crappiest musician in the band always gets put on bass but it's extraordinarily hard to play at that supersonic john entwistle level where you're basically playing fast guitar solos but on an instrument with a much bigger neck and much bigger strings and you know that's a good thing don't get

me wrong expanding access to music and to making good music is a good thing and the more good records in the world uh the better you know it's you know I just saying, you're also obligated to point out that what they've really done here is take an SOS band record, which they wouldn't have been able to reproduce, never mind originate, and space it out to the point where they can cope with it. Yeah. You know, that's all right.

It's more constructive than, you know, tipping slush puppies into pillar boxes. Or whacking the funky drummer beat over strawberry fields forever yeah right this will be another song at the student disco that you'd be glad to hear and easy to dance to as well yeah you only have to look at lindy layton to see that she's 17 or 18 here and you know she's tiny tiny and she has really great presence and she doesn't have any makeup on because they um they they said to her like don't get dressed up don't put makeup on so she's got the kind of proto billy eilish giant clothes on i think it's cool when there's a woman on top of the

pops and you can't see what her body's like and she it's kind of a it's quite a radical thing and it is something that somebody that we have not yet collectively got over as evinced by billy eilish oh look what she's wearing oh look she's got a big tracksuit on oh yeah and then as soon as she's like okay i'm gonna pose in a corset oh blimey oh yeah people just get extremely exercised about this one way or another so it's great it's always interesting and and cool to see somebody just like opt out of that altogether. She's got this nice shiny oversized hooded top on. Yeah, yeah. And she's wearing a baseball cap with British Knights on it, which obviously means that she's a crip.

Because at the time in certain parts of America, if you wore anything with BK on it, it meant blood killer. So there you go. Oh, God, could you accidentally like declare your affiliation to either the bloods or the crips oh god yeah what a fucking minefield there was a period where visitors to los angeles were advised what colors they should and shouldn't wear in certain areas because some of those guys shoot on site yeah that's why show waddy waddy had to cancel their tour of south central la you've had about this time yeah i'll be sitting around going well we're playing concert tonight so at

least two of us are going to get shot fuck that how is there not a documentary about this how has there not been a limited series on hbo i know go on but it really helps that quentin looks really shit in a Brazil sweatshirt and some troop tracksuit bottoms that he probably got from Four Star General. And he's matched that with a white hat and some absolute fucking jumbo trainers. The kind of trainers that Chris Needham wears. Yeah. Well, I mean, he manages not to wreck it.

I mean, I like Lindy Leighton's presence. I like the fact that she's not i mean she can sing but she's not a singer do you know what i mean she didn't really project there's no superfluous melismas or whatever you know we're not meant to care about her tragic backstory and we're not supposed to marvel at her lung capacity like scouts for the swimming team you know yeah she can sing in tune um she's got the bottle to get up there or more precisely the stage school training to get up there and front the record you know and dance around like a cartoon gorilla because it is her dancing is like donkey kong taunting mario from the top of his girded citadel so all the dance songs we've heard so far they're perfect

for doing that dance where it looks like you're walking across a bouncy castle with a pint in you don't want to spill anything yeah yeah i mean i still i'm forgiving her for getting in the way of silly games the way she did well yes but you know Yeah, that was less good. But, you know, in this moment here, it's all very natural and not annoying. You know, maybe given time, annoyance may have come to pass, but time was not forthcoming for Beats International. But what does bother me a little bit, it's not specifically Quentin.

It's just the general Brightoniness or West Londoniness of it. I just get that feeling that these are the people you might a few years later see in bafflingly nice flats which you couldn't quite work out how they afforded you know with frame posters for the godfather and goodfellas on the walls calling each other man you know what i mean i don't know it's just maybe it's just the way that the record doesn't really go anywhere and or these people are never in a rush they don't need a

direction you know I don't know that's the only thing I don't like about it the association with that like it's made by people who have no drive and no serious problems because you know what's coming down the tracks after this is the kind of

oil spill ubiquity of fat boy slim yeah that just choked everything that is so of its time and has aged so badly to my ears that i'm always astonished when there's a car advert with the fat boy slim track on it it's like really because it just sounds like it's from another time altogether you know yeah i guess he sort of has the good grace to look surprised about that himself but i think it was just that he had a certain thing and a certain ability and his way was probably smoothed quite nicely by other people and he had enough of an idea and enough of a work ethic and was lucky enough and all these little things that need to come together to make you preposterously successful you know yeah and he was prepared to you know do the kind of punishing touring and ridiculous hours that you

had to do in order to be that successful and seemed to come out of it you know relatively unscathed which i think is becoming harder to do actually i think um for you know i've seen enough kind of edm horror stories about people just completely losing it one way or another no but you're right though the fat boy slim stuff just reeks of that sort of cokie 90s shitheadedness you know what i mean i'm not suggesting he was on coke or anything like that of course whereas this is pure 1990 and that it's got that air of faint melancholy but it's like uh it's a happy melancholy it's like a nice sort of lsd come down melancholy, but it's like a, it's a happy melancholy. It's like a nice sort of LSD come down melancholy, you know,

it works better. I think now because we meet enough horrible coked up obnoxious lads today that when you hear old music that sounds like it is for them, it sounds horrible. Whereas this is a bit more distant. for them it sounds horrible whereas this is a bit more distant it's like we can't imagine living in a climate of cautious optimism yeah any more than we can imagine living in a tent on pluto yeah you know what i mean and i think records like this chimed very sweetly back then and i think that's why they've aged better i think that's also reflective of uh judging by the uh the the story of 1990 top of the pops documentary right where kind of slightly unkind editing i think there's norman cook and lindy layton talking about this record and you know their collaboration and he's kind of

quite embarrassingly going on about how struck he was by her and how he fell a little bit in love with her and then cuts to her and she's like yeah it was great meeting you and it was like meeting my brother oh mate i think he was either mid-divorce or he was definitely heading that way and it's like oh no no i'm gonna work with this beautiful teenager oh so i think sort of happy melancholy seems about right it's one of those number ones that when it goes to number one you just go yeah that makes sense that's brilliant yeah i'm not gonna buy it but i won't need to because i'm gonna hear it all the time now for a bit yeah so dub be good to me would spend one more week at number one before being usurped by the power by snap and would finish the year as the seventh best-selling single of 1990, one ahead of Vogue by Madonna,

one behind Show Me Heaven by Maria McKee. The follow-up, Won't Talk About It, got to number nine in May, but their last single of 1990, Burundi Blues with Janet Kaye, only made it to number 51, and they never bothered the top 40 again, dissolving in late 1991.

Meanwhile, Lindy Leighton's solo career began with a cover of Silly Games, also assisted by Janet Kaye, which got to number 22 in September. But her only other encroachment on the top 40 was We Got The Love, which got to number 38 in two weeks in April of 1993. She's now a songwriter. And after the disbandment of Beats International, Cook went on to form the band Freak Power, whose debut single Turn On, Tune In, Cop Out

got to number 29 in October of 1993. But when it was used in a Levi's advert in 1995, it was re-released and entered the chart at number three in March of that year. And he'd go on to be Fatboy Slim. Just be good to me. In the morning. Just be good to me. In the afternoon. calls me a nerd Well, we promised you a pretty good show and I think we delivered our side of the bargain. That's Beats International. Stop tickling me. Don't be good to me. Week 3 at number 1.

Well, it's Phil Scofield coming up next on Radio 1 and it's EastEnders on BBC 1. I'll see you for breakfast tomorrow at 6.30. Gary Davis next week. See you soon, bye bye Mayo, firmly ensconced in the middle of a throng and complaining that he's being tickled warns us that Philip Schofield is on radio one right now you're about to be subjected to eastenders and gary davis is on next week before not even bothering to tell us who they're signing off with i'll tell you it's don't you love me by 49ers formed in brescia by

the producer jean franco Bortolotti in 1988, 49ers were a four-handed collective of DJs and producers who named themselves after the San Francisco 49ers, but also because their original singer, Dawn Mitchell, was the 49th person to audition for them. After two singles that did next to nothing in Europe, they hit the jackpot with their third, Touch Me, which went down a treat in the UK, getting to number three in January of this year. This is the follow-up, which leans heavily on Jodie Watley's 1987 single, Don't You Want Me, and it's a new entry this week at number 28. me and it's a new entry this week at number 28 before we go any further chaps philip scofield in the kid jensen janice long slot that ain't right a bit odd isn't it top of the pops is still

being broadcast live on radio one so i think they want all the kids to keep it locked to radio one for a bit longer but no fuck off yeah yeah so finally we get some actual house music it's not a prime example of the genre i must admit it is slightly mean to say it's landfill house music but it's quite forgettable it's kind of like the mild covid of dance music yes um i mean it has all the elements it kind of is omnicronic yeah i mean there was loads of this at the time like this is kind of you know throwaway soulful dance stuff it kind of sounds like 10 other more familiar slightly better things

yeah it's a nice sound it's kind of slightly tinny but it's pleasing um a little bit of house piano black lady singer some bloke interjecting you know it's a very nice familiar sound palette and a respectable bpm yeah it's your bog standard house video isn't it lots of party people who are more attracted than you getting busy and working that body and even i content striking a pose yeah it's essentially an extended christ perfume advert, isn't it? Before perfume adverts went mad. Yeah, what I'm really hearing here, I think, is the Roland 909. Oh, right. Yeah, I might be wrong because it's not quite my manner,

but I think it's that, the box that was a big part of the sound of the early 90s. There's a lot of hits from this period that are elevated by the sweet tambourine sound on that machine like do you remember that awful record insanity by oceanic and it's uh there's like a double time tambourine sound that comes in on the chorus and it's so good that it almost convinces you that what you're listening to is decent when in fact it's not. It's terrible. It's like if Lazy Town made a record. Yeah. But this is okay.

I mean, this is one of the most okay records you could ever hear. It's nothing special, but, you know, at least it smells of exuberance and poppers. Yeah. Do you remember when poppers were bisexual? It's weird, isn't it?

Gay blokes have always had poppers, but I remember when kids used to do them. Really young, straight kids, like oiks,iks you know they were like the gateway drug they're like the top deck shandy of drugs it's like doing balloons now they used to do poppers i remember going to the heavenly sunday social years ago when it was in a pub basement someone would always smash a vial of amyl nitrate on the dance floor to create a a miasma you know nowadays amyl nitrate seems to be exclusively gay and who can blame it i suppose you know is it still legal or did it get swept away along with everything else that makes you feel any

feelings with the psychoactive substances act of 2015 or whatever it was i'm not sure there's little golden barrels of something for sale in my local pound shop but i haven't investigated that close you sure that's not like vape juice could be could be i mean i'm not personally much of an expert on either dancing or homosexuality i only dance when yosemite Sam points his six-gun at my feet. I only do the other when he points it at my head. Or offers what is, at least to me, a substantial sum of money. But this record appears to me to be an example of Acid House gay crossover. And I'm not sure how much of a crossover there really was,

because I'm just shooting in the dark here. Because although gay people will take drugs and dance to electronic music if pushed it's usually not while dressed in a fucking moo moo and a helmet haircut in a field on the outskirts of braintree there's very few styles of modern popular music that didn't originate with gay people or black people or both and acid house obviously came down those same roads but it's my perception is that there was a branch of house that went directly from chicago to the gay clubs without passing through that field in braintree another branch that snagged all the straight suburban kids and soundtracked all those summer nights of boggle-eyed idiot dancing, right? But that's the one that's seen as significant because of who it appealed to, right?

And the fact that it later extended into stuff like the charmingly named Intelligent Dance Music. What a joy that was, right? Was the other branch... Intelligent Drum and Bass, fucking hell. dance music what joy that was right was the other branch intelligent drum and bass fucking right was was the other branch led directly to euro dance and stuff that was actually fun and that lots of people really liked and you know i mean i'm out of my element here but it just seems to me like familiar patterns of snobbery and self-appointed objective judgment in pop music you know well maybe anything else to

say about this yeah it's like if somebody made a film about named his dance music but they couldn't afford to license any of the hits to get all the music off a library album called something like kpm 1396874 house it's like the album of library music i've got uh in the brit pop style kpm brit pop with a union jack on the front it's fucking hilarious i see that it's really good it's a lot of generic brit pop style tracks like brit pop flavored tracks with the title was like look so pretty smashing time all right with you believe shake me let it roll it's a hilarious fucking proof of how easy that shit was to spoof and bluff right it's the sort of non-real records that you hear in jd sports right or right or in shaking supermarkets right it's basically musical clip art yeah i think some of

them were written by jake shillingford the bloke from my life story yeah no doubt while cackling through grimly gritted teeth um i mean, having met the fellow a few times, I would imagine he'd be able to play it both ways in his mind, right, as simultaneously a sort of inverted glamorous down-on-your-luck scene and an intriguing interlude for the imaginary biography of the future, you know, like Lou Reed churning out cashing songs for Pickwick Records, you know, except that that was before the Velvet Underground. You know, I mean, it's not quite the Brill building,

but I mean, there were actual Britpop records in the charts that were worse than some of the tracks on there, you know. And say what you like about the 49ers, which in our case is clearly not very much, but they were better than any of that. So the following week week don't you love me soared 14 places to number 14 and a week later managed to get to number 12 its highest position the follow-up girl to girl got to number 31 in june of this year which would be their last pinch of the charty arse until 1995,

when Rockin' My Body also got to number 31 in March of that year. And that, me dears, closes the book on this episode of Top of the Pops. What's on telly afterwards? Well, BBC One kicks on with Doc Cotton being deluged with begging letters after a big bingo win in EastEnders. And then Tomorrow's World looks at a dam in Leningrad that Soviet environmentalists want to blow up. Then it's half an hour of painter and decorator-related slagging about in brushstrokes,

followed by the 9 o'clock news, Ben Elton, the man from Ante, Crimewatch UK, Question Time, a Crimewatch UK update, highlights from the racing and highlights from the cricket. BBC Two has just started 925, the work-based magazine show, and are looking at how and why Britain has the shittiest workforce training record in, and what the fuck we intend to do about it. After a repeat of Yes Minister, Michael Burke nips over to Niagara Falls and has a good look at it, and then investigates why salmon has become cheaper than cod in the eco-show Nature.

Then it's the first episode in the new series of French and Saunders, who have a go at the sound of music and ABBA. This week's 40 Minutes documentary is the Bernie Mob Go Wild, where nine lads from the rough bit of Dundee go on a survival course on an uninhabited island and swear a lot. Then Small Objects of Desire looks at the history of the aspirin, then it's Newsnight, The Late Show, half an hour of Open University and art.

ITV is put on science fiction, shaking tomorrow's world. Then it's The Bill. Then this week looks at new legislation designed to meet the green policies that the public are demanding at the moment. After the last in the series of Taggart, it's News at Ten,

regional news in your area, a regional politics show in your area, Prisoner Cell Block H, Contacts, a load of personal video ads for people who want sex and all sorts. Then it's the WWF show, Superstars of Wrestling,

some celebrity ramble from America, Three's Company,ica's top 40 and news until 6 a.m channel 4 finally get round to a repeat of the final episode of brass the timothy west comedy series set in a mining town in the 30s followed by the crystal maze the 1989 film wildflowers about a lesbian affair on the west coast of Scotland, a documentary on the Holocaust poet Karen Gershon called Stranger in a Strange Land, and they finished the night with the 1985 French film Vertige about the rehearsal stage of a production

of The Marriage of Figaro. Oh, Channel 4's still Channel 4. So, me dears, what are we talking about in the playground tomorrow? I really don't... I think I might have been lost for words. Even at this tender age. At the time, I think I was suckered into getting cross about Candy Flip, but I think nowadays it'd be, my God, did you see Bobby Gillespie dancing like he'd been hung from a lamppost?

Prancing like a tit. What are we buying on Saturday? Probably Beats International. Yeah, I'm not sure I'd actually buy any of these records, all of which are more interesting to talk about than listen to. But I think Beats International is the one that sounds sweetest to me now. And what does this episode tell us about March of 1990? The 90s haven't really started yet,

but you can kind of see a little bit of which way the wind is blowing. And it's amazing how positively you can respond to almost anything when you're 17 and on drugs. There's that sense of, since this is my time, it follows that all this music belongs to me and is therefore a part of me, like a skin tag. And then, stretching out ahead, the endless plane of fortune. But, you know, you make the best of it.

And on that note, we come to the end of this episode of Chart Music. Use your promotional flange. www.chart-music.co.uk facebook.com slash chartmusicpodcast Reach out to us on Twitter at Chart Music T-O-T-P money down the G-string patreon.com slash chartmusic Thank you sarah b toodaloo god bless you taylor parks mind how you go my name's al needham and when i buy my flares i make sure they're

really tight at the top and around the back side so the overall shape looks better chart music shape looks better. Chart music. Are they good? Do you like the railway children? Or no? Nice name. Ladies and gentlemen, now, where are we? Over here, this is... Who gives a fuck?

This is another, you know, very popular series, Interviews with Drunken Rockstars. But here, Wayne Hussey from The Mission, and he's celebrating, because, listen, you're doing well aren't you number what it wouldn't the charts I know okay no you don't know number number 27 number two oh thanks James number 20 James the number 27 you for you and in there it's very it's a privilege to be here yeah this is a very nice occasion for me and everything and you've got lovely glasses in there.

Do you like them? They also look quite nice. They're sort of a little Lennon-esque, aren't they, really? Let's swap. A little Lennon-esque. Let's swap. Let's have a go. All right, thank you very much indeed.

Let's have a go. Oh, bloody hell. Wayne, either you've been taking something that sort of traps me through the glasses... I've got perfect vision, you know. Yeah, yeah. Let's swap back, then. You won't love me.

No, no, no. Mike, where are they? Well, they're... Sorry, can you... Don't, don't, don't do that to me. There. There you go, right. Wayne, listen, I mean, this all came as a bit of a shock to you,

all this stardom over the last year or so, hasn't it? Don't you think? I said, fuck. I expected a bit of a shock to you, with this stardom over the last year or so, hasn't it? Don't you think? I said, fuck. I expected it, really. You did. Why is the camera on me? Well, it's on here. Number one on you.

Number one on you. There you go. No, you see the little... No, the interesting thing... I'll show you. This is a beautiful thing. You see the red lights over there? Red lights.

Go to number one there. Red lights. Red lights. Number one there. Yeah, that's right. Okay, let's go round. Number two in the middle, over here. Number lights over there? Red lights. Go to number one there. Red lights, red lights. Number one there. Yeah, that's right. Okay, let's go round. Number two in the middle, over here. Number two over there.

Beautiful. And then over there, number three. Fantastic. You can count. Yeah, you know, not bad. That's more than I thought you were capable of. No, no, no, no, please. Please, what do you think about predicting?

I love your earrings, actually. Do you like mine? Yours is nice, yeah. Wayne, what about the future? Do you like predicting the future or not? I could give a shit, actually. You couldn't? No.

No? The future is here. Yeah. Fuck the rest of the world. Yeah, yeah. Give us that bottle of wine back. Yeah, you want another sweet? Yeah, OK.

No, I want the fucking lot, man. Jonathan, shall we bring Jonathan? I think you'd better come in here for a few moments, Jonathan, and sit down. This will probably ruin your entire... Hi, Wayne. All right, man. I wish I was wearing my caftan now. Yeah, have a happy birthday. Can I wear that? You don't mind?

It'll make him happy. It's not an earring, after all. How about that? That's OK. It's not bad, is it? What do you think? You're a pillock. Well, thank you, Wayne. I liked you until now. The Mission were one of my favourite bands. We still are.

Let's have a little look through here. Wayne, watch my finger. Now, what's your date of birth? No. Let's put you on the computer. Have you got him on the computer? I can put him into the computer quite easily. Let's put him into the computer.

What's your date of birth, Wayne? I've forgotten. I was going to say this could be tricky. Anybody know Wayne's date of birth? 26th of May. 26th of May. 26th of May. 26 of May. And I would say...

1928. 19... No, 19... Go on. 67. Seven? No. This makes all the difference.

Now, come along, Wayne. Well, I need to know. 1959, I would say. 58, 59. What do you think? I think that... Oh, you're a bunch of... Now think? I think that we're doing our best, Wayne. We can't all be pop stars, you see. We can't all be rock and roll stars.

You're going to read me a fucking astrological chart by computer. Well, come on, give us a date. That's right on. Give us a date. Hey, all that shit. What I could do is show you the difference that a year would make in a person's life. We could work it out by private error. Could you do that?

Yeah, well, if I set it down for 67, as Wayne says, and press calculate here, what we get... You've got it wrong, haven't you, Chul? Oh, sure, but let's see what kind of a different chart we get. And you can see that... Oh, that's nice. Wayne, broken in the middle. Look at that. Not broken completely in the middle.

Which camera's on? Can you carry on with that? Yeah. Just a moment. Wayne, look, I've got... Hang on, just a minute. Just a minute Can you carry on with that? Yeah. Just a moment. Wayne, look, I've got... Hang on, just a minute. Just a minute, Wayne. Just a minute, Wayne.

Just a minute. I've got something to show you. I want to show you something. Come here, Wayne. You are going to... No another year to wait here. Now, wait, wait, just stay over here. Roll VT and... Wait, right, OK.

46-10-00. He's waiting for your call now. I'm sorry about that. Now, don't for one minute think that we're going to have throw out a rock star every week on the show, because that would get monotonous and boring. But if you do have somebody you'd like to see thrown out of the show live on a Friday night,

then please write to me, James Whale, at Yorkshire Television, all right? I'm sorry about that, Jonathan. It's embarrassing for a guest. I didn't think that he was... You know, Wayne has had a really good gig tonight. He's been playing locally, and he's on a real high. I'm sorry.

It's nice, isn't it, though? Because if you're a rock star, you can get away with that. And it only makes your image look even better. Do you think so? I don't know. I don't know about that.