Chart Music: the Top Of The Pops Podcast - #67 (Pt 3): 9.6.77 – God Save Chart Music

Episode Date: August 24, 2022

Taylor Parkes and Neil Kulkarni continue their drill into the Silver Jubilee TOTP with Al Needham. Discover how the Wurzels let down Al at a visit to a farm in 1978! Thrill to the sight of Tony Blackburn pulling a bit of string so Neil Innes can look confused as he waves a tiny flag about! Gasp as the Stranglers take the strings off their instruments, swap them with each other, and slip in a drug reference! And stare aghast at the state of Honky!Video Playlist | Subscribe | Facebook | Twitter | The Chart Music Wiki | Patreon*** See us LIVE on Sept 17th *** 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. Hey, up you pop craze youngsters and welcome back to part three of episode 67 of chart music. Here I am, Al Needham, there are my friends Taylor Parks and Neil Colcone

and we are not in the mood to fanny about. So forward and payaka man angle and then go sacca. Stand by the softness now because it's two-hour wire time. They put away their combine harvester and now I want to introduce you to

Farmer Bill's Calabash and Harold Wazzles. It's an hard life when you're working on the farm Down on the farm, I don't need no alarm Fire eyes from me bed at 5.30 After we get to contemplate the overhead lights for a couple of seconds, we return to Tony, who warns us that it's ooh-ah, ooh-ah time. And then, out of nowhere, the two members of the next band who don't look like a kindly Fred West hove into view and whistle in his ear.

It's Farmer Bill's Cowmen by The Wurzels. At last. We chanced upon The Wurzels in chart music number 35, where they trotted out their prized number one single, Combine Harvester, in the 1976 Christmas Day episode. Dead lambs being shoveled into plastic bags, etc, etc. This single, a cover of I Was Kaiser Bill's Batman, the single recorded by Whistling Jack Smith,

which got to number five in April of 1967, is the follow-up to Give Me England, a self-penned single where they go around Europe and aren't impressed because they don't have scrumpy or bingo. Realising their mistake, they reverted to the winning formula of taking a well-known tune and fermenting it in a still and put out this from their latest lp also entitled give me england it's not in the charts yet but the bbc fucking

love the wurzels for reasons we'll go into later so here they who are in the studio that's the only bit of interaction tony's had with anyone so far in this episode why do you think he's being kept away from the kids it is around about this time that the uh top of the props presenters get a bit more isolated yeah they usually start off on their own in their little fortress of solitude and then over the course of the episode they're gradually reintroduced to society yeah like a godzilla film isn't it? It's just the same. Godzilla's always on his own, and then about an hour in,

Godzilla's surrounded by a load of kids and he's introducing the Wurzels. Well, I mean, as we'll see later, there's a bloody good reason Tony's not allowed near the kids at the moment. Yeah, as we'll see later. The Wurzels, chaps, it's easy to forget, but they were fucking massive in 1976, 1977, weren't they?

A cursory skim of the newspapers of the era reveals the following article from the West Britain and Royal Cornwall Gazette. Headline, OOAH! It's strange how folks go for Wurzels. The merits of the pop group the Wurzels and the New Seekers were discussed by members of Carrier Council's amenities committee last week. Mr Ashley Horley, deputy manager of Corn Bree Leisure Centre, said the centre made a loss of just under £900 on the New Seekers concert. Mr Jim Hamm asked how the sale of tickets for the wurzels concerts due to be held on saturday

were going mr hawley said that nearly 1 000 tickets had been sold why can't the new seekers create local interests like the wurzels asked mr ham it was suggested that reports that one of the new seekers girl singers had left might have put people off. Mr. MJ Gale said his daughters were not interested in the new Seekers, but were going to see the Wurzels. It was just the matter of choosing the right people to appear. I think that is the most granular I'll ever get on a bit of research. Fucking council meetings from nearly 50 years ago everyone well they were massive and the thing is you you could not avoid them especially in the year of no

characterful dads you know here that here they are and and and the thing is even if they stopped having chart success as they soon do it doesn't matter they've got the battle brush show to go on they've got chagas plays pop to go on they've got Cheggers Plays Pop to go on they've got all the summertime and seaside specials so there's just so many shows that they can fill in on and that's why they're kind of a big part of 77 they're certainly a big part of my memories of this period because they were just fucking everywhere

you're right Neil, people are turning out for that Somerset sound even when the Wurzels aren't appearing here's another article this time from the Litchfield Mercury a fortnight from this episode entitled A Night for Some Wurzling Pop group the Wurzles

have obviously had a great effect on Litchfield people Out of about 300 people who attended London Cricket Club's Wurzel Night at Seedy Mill Farm at least 60 joined in the spirit and went dressed in smocks and other rustic gear. The grand Wurzel night was inspired by the Wurzels, famous for their country-style

inspired versions of pop songs, and the evening went with a Somerset swing. A challenge to sing a Wurzel song was not taken up, but there was a prize for the worst dressed couple. The event was in aid of club funds. So this is people turning up even though the Wurzels aren't going to be there in any way, shape or form. Exactly. It's mental. It's incredible, isn't it? It's just the concept of the Wurzels has drawn them there.

Yeah. They're like living Wombles at this time, aren't they? And this summer, this puts a tin lid on everything. The Saffron Walden Weekly News reported on a visit at the local Baptist church by two strolling gospel minstrels who performed a Wurzel's hit with rewritten lyrics entitled, I've Got a Brand New Holy Bible. So, yeah, it's Wurzel time, man. It is.

I mean, this song, Farmer Bill's Cowman, this performance, I mean, this is golden era Wurzels, isn't it, really? Before the jokers warm completely thin, which is fair. I mean, I think it probably reached its unfunniest nadir on the I Hate JR and I Shot JR singles. But this is the Wurzels I remember. I don't remember the Aj Cutler years and I don't think I ever caught

an episode of the great western musical Thunderbox because it was only on HTV so this is the Wurzels I do remember this kind of permanent too runny sketch of a band aren't they just it's just a permanent preemption of Spinal Tap

Sex Farm, and I'm astonished to learn that they covered that. Yes, extremely well. It's a fucking great version. But yeah, you're right, Neil. You know, life after Aj Cutler, that makes the Wurzels the new order of the late 70s, doesn't it? So, the single, as we've pointed out,

is a rewrite of a hit that kids didn't give a fuck about, which is good. And as always, they lean heavily on imaginative reinterpretations of the lyrical motif, ooh-ah. In the last single that made the charts, I Am A Cider Drinker, they went for ooh-ah, ooh-ah-ray, which does sound to me like a West Country paramilitary organisation. The provisional ooh-ah OOAR A have played responsibility

for the tractor bomb outside the woodpecker factory last Saturday. The silage bomb. And this time they've opted for OOAR OOAR R, which sounds like something Scooby-Doo would say to Shaggy when a Frankenstein was lumbering up behind him. So, not as good, but, you know know still good enough as a kid neil what did you think of this well you've already laid your cards on the table re brigas and rustrick i'm assuming that you'd like this well i did like this i mean i liked the wurzels anyway because

of their cartoonish kind of aspect i mean their faces are like they're drawn by hannah barbara they do have this horrible habit in a way a lot of comedy records do this um in this period that they've got a in a sense thief from contemporary culture and and blend it in if you like do you remember that kind of comedy music that just uses everything in combine harvester i seem to recall there's an ad lib where he goes who loves your baby yeah and it's kind of this during the performance join the performance. Exactly, yeah. Join the single. Yeah, yeah. But on top of the pubs, yeah, certainly. I remember that Kojak ad-lib.

And here, in this performance, I think they nick John Inman's line from Are You Being Served? Yes. I think there's a moment where they go,

I'm free. I fucking hate moments like this. But they have pushed, at this period, completely beyond local fame. I mean, it's astonishing when you look at those old singles, Drink Up the Cider. Yes. It sold like 100,000 copies in the West Country beyond local fame i mean it's astonishing when you look at those old singles drink up the zyder

yeah it's sold like 100 000 copies in the west country or something insane like that but isn't it at the same time though i enjoyed their appearances on all the different shows that they're on they're pretty much on all the different pop shows you can sense already here that they're running out of songs to parody really aren't they yes so yeah the writing's on the wall but i would have loved this being on i mean the lyrical content as always is an uncompromising examination of rural life so there's scatology violence alcoholism sex and yes bovine homosexuality people get so pissed up on cider that he milks a ball it does a bit of simon bates in on it and that ball gets turned that's what the i'm free thing is about total joke would have gone

over my head i reckon as a kid not me i got it your uh your heritage is hindu isn't my heritage is hindu yeah would fundamentalist hindus be offended by a record where a bull gets wanked on? Yeah, they probably would, you know. I mean, you know, over there, it's nuts. In Mumbai, you know, if a cow is walking down the street, as they do, and just sits on its arse, you can't do anything. The cows have to avoid it, you know. You can't move it on.

Very, very, very holy about cows. And when the vegetarianism kicked in with my dad, couldn't have beef burgers for four years man i was gutted yeah no this this might not go down well in india particularly now with the hindu hindu fundamentalist nutters in charge so yeah so yeah people would be floating in a world of shit and piss and spunk and toenails and um and snot and yeah pretty much everything else well there was a diversion yeah certainly didn't expect to be talking about that but the audience reaction is kind of revealing in a sense i think you know it's only little kids who are going to be digging this um there's a handful of kids amused here a hell of a lot more totally unamused just their arms crossed

so yeah the writing's on the wall it's going to be over soon in a chart topping sense or in a chart crushing sense but there's still going to be a going concern for several years hence in kids imaginations and on Crackerjack and everything that they could ever appear on Taylor in you come come on tell me some Worsley stories

well I mean if you got a hundred people at random and you ask them who's your favorite pop group of all time? I think most of them would probably say Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman, Howe. But if you then ask them, who's your second favorite group? would say the Wurzels because even today these icons of Britishness make all of us feel so proud of the landscape and traditions of our country I mean you know that that's a joke right they're about as good an advertisement for the British countryside as straw dog but there's a kernel of truth that you know when you go into the British Museum and you walk through all the

galleries of like ancient art and artifacts from all around the world and there's all these perfectly smooth jade amulets on leather chains and glittering bird statuettes sculpted from solid gold with sapphires embedded all the way around and then you go into the room with british stuff from the same period and it's like some mud with a stick in it you know what i mean like science saying early british figurative art and it's a bit of rock with a parsnip for a nose you know i mean it's not our fault it's because it's so cold and wet here you just have to concentrate on survival and once we invented buildings we managed to catch up but yeah there's

still something in the british psyche that will revert to that when under stress and you know in its way with its mixture of cowpat brain simpleton primitivism and slick showbiz. This is a form of authentic English country music. You know, give me England indeed. Yes. I mean, yeah, it's like if the trogs had been shit. But, yeah, it makes me a bit sad because I used to really feel the countryside. You know, I lived there for a bit as a kid and it was really in me. I used to feel nature deep down with a really intense and yeah almost inexplicable

seriousness nature boy taylor parks and nowadays it's just something i see in the distance from trains passing by you know it's like looking out of a window at youth or social democracy it's like familiar but far away made into flats you know so i sort of thank the for reminding me of what it's really like and why i shouldn't go back you know here we are it's jubilee week uh professional surfs i mean at the time i'd have been well up for this um i didn't know i was kaiser bill's batman but i fucking hate that tune it's just proper carnaby street cat shit yeah my mate hates that more than anything else in the world you're good late night they used to show repeats of beat club and there's that clip of whistling jack ketch on beat club doing this and it's not even him whistling on the record it's just some bloke

dressed up in like a guardsman's outfit uh my mate used his steam used to come out of his ears at how smug this guy looked considering he's miming to i was kaiser bill's batman it's not even him no i can't hear that tune without seeing that fucking mini with Zoom written on the side. You know what I mean? Yeah, well, and those blokes picking out Red Guardsman's jackets off a rail. Yes. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, you're right, Neil. They are practically full-time BBC employees at the moment, aren't they?

They've been on Swap Shop, they're regular guests on the latest series of That's Life, they're on Seaside Special, Ken Dodds' World of Laughter, Ronnie Corbett saturday special cabaret showtime the basil brush show sunny time saturday regular guests on the radio one road show and of course top of the pops and you know while i was watching this i started to think why the wurzels why are they on bbc all the time? Well, let me take you back, chaps, to 1972,

when Johnny Berlin, the controller of Radio 1, was on a camping holiday in France, and he chanced upon a mobile variety show on a stage that was towed from site to site on the back of a lorry. And when he returned back to work, he set about doing a wholesale nick of the idea, but then he discovered that the bbc didn't have anything suitable in their garage to uh put it on with so he cast around looking for advice

and he ran into a producer from bbc radio bristol who put him in touch with a chap called john miles not that music is my first love hit maker but the manager of a local band who bought an old furniture van and amended it so it could open out into a mobile stage, which was then taken to fairs and festivals. And when Beardling got in touch, he was told that the van had already been sent off to the knackers yard because it kept breaking down. But he'd be happy to build another one on the condition that Radio 1 had rented it out for the summer. And after he made them a scale model of what he wanted made out of weterbix boxes beerling gave his approval so miles located a suitably sized chassis did a drawing of what he wanted

and he gave both to a local coach builder and let him get on with it and the result was a portable stage that was able to be towed around the country by a Range Rover, which was driven by his brother, Tone, or Smiler, if you will. And, yeah, that's how the Radio 1 Roadshow came about. And would you happen to know the name of the band that Miles managed? Yeah, the fucking Wurzels, mate. Really? I see. I see. Because the BBC looks after its own, doesn't it?

Indeed. It all makes sense. Anything else to say about this? It's always a bit glum when you look at a band's official website. You start at the news section and the most recent story is from last year and it says one of the bands died of COVID, although he was 80. I'm sure at his funeral they led his empty horse with his wellies backwards in the stirrup but in the lyric section they include the words to this song right

the first verse of which ends out in the pen there's a broody old hen she is as wild as a tiger you try to touch her egg and she'll bite off your leg i feeds her on faggots and cider yeah and depending on your worldview it's either a good bad or hilarious thing that the wurzels have felt the need to put an asterisk next to the word faggots leading to a footnote which clarifies faggots a dish of chopped liver etc made into balls lest any of the woke snowflakes misconstrue these lines to uh mean that pete budd entraps homosexuals and feeds them to his carnivorous hen um It's just helpful. It's like the little pride flag, you know, just to get. But except that the very next verse goes, I felt such a fool, tried milking the bull.

He must have enjoyed it somehow, man. Now every day at three, he comes and says, I'm free. That's why I'm farmer Bill's cowman. It's every red-blooded hayseed's nightmare. Accidentally pulling on a bull's penis, him liking it, and it making him a gay like John Inman.

Yeah. Fucking, I can imagine. Oh, I only got her for a bucket of milk, but it weren't half creamy. Oh, yeah, I love drinking that bull spunk i mean it's an occupational hazard and i suppose it floats on top of your tea man it's not good i think i mean us being the atv land people we've got a natural kind of predilection towards this stuff to a certain extent because you know our accents are a mix of West Country and other stuff. Your accents.

Perhaps so. But, yeah, there's a little bit of Uwanis around here. I'm very close to, like, Worcestershire and places like that, and it's on the downward slope towards that area. And, you know, faggot and pea batches are very, very popular around here in a rich West Country sort. Yeah. So, you know, I've always wondered what a West Country source is. I thinklor's just

described how you do it maybe so but mate i mean maybe that's why i had a sort of slight affection towards this but yeah i must admit i've been moaning about character for dads there is something deeply unpleasant about the way tony introduces this record and the leering looks on the faces of the wurzels as they practically pretty much nibble his ears. Yes. It's pretty gross, isn't it? They're whistling in his ears. I can't remember the names, but the one who looks like a potty thistle defender and the other one who looks like Rennie's dad.

Yeah, Tommy Banner and Tony Bayliss. The two red shirt Wurzels, basically. Yes. Yeah, they converge on Tony Whistling, and he backs away. He looks absolutely riven with pain. Well, he backs away grimacing. He reacts as if they've just started whistling the theme tune to Robin's Nest. Well, what it's meant to be, he backs off grimacing to suggest that they stink, right?

Like they got bad breath. Or they're horrible. I'm just saying, we know that unlike richard o sullivan tony couldn't act and that is a very convincing halitosis recoil it was a really good introduction because they hove into view and tony kind of like withdraws and then all of a sudden pete budd rises up from under the screen pointing into the distance it looked brilliant i do like pete but he does look really friendly he's got a lovely voice as well he is like an older more rural dave bartram isn't it they've got that same kind of bell-shaped hair well the secret of the wurzels i think is their

believability i mean everyone concentrates on pete bud the leader of the Wurzels, because he looks like a Beano drawing come to life. Yes. But the whole band are genuinely unnerving, right? Any one of them away from the stage, you could imagine meeting on a rural walk, and it would be just him standing there smiling vacantly next to another bloke who does all the talking who looks at you suspiciously and he's holding a shotgun and he says occasionally cocks his head towards the and says he don't much care for newcomers sometimes he forgets his manners i'm thinking

here mostly of tony bayliss uh nature's cruelest and most powerful mistake. He crushed a tender young bloom in his fist, but it was his way of loving. It's terrible, though, isn't it? You see the Wurzels here and they're all rosy-cheeked smiles. But, you know, chances are one barren autumn, one moonless night round the back of the grain silo, shoot the dog first, goodbye, my lovely, bang,

and leaving a scene of carnage back at the farmhouse, and then it'll be 12 boar in the mouth, no hesitation, and he'll decorate the galvanised steel behind his head with the valueless jelly that he'd been keeping in it. And somewhere in the distance, there's seven new people born. There is a slight terror of the countryside, which is part of the Wurzels appeal, I think.

I mean, they're here in a big smoke, but you don't know the darkness that they're going back to. I think that is part of it. I spent about a weekend recently um in East Anglia which I've never been to before and it was spooky as fuck the countryside has always terrified me but this you know the East Anglia is particularly terrifying but this is it who knows what the Wurzels are going back to exactly you know the West Country was i'm not saying it's a mysterious zone but it did exert that kind of mystery to it um whenever i got down to devon or cornwall on holiday it was a bit

spooky and um the words was keep that in their faces basically you don't see faces like that in the city they could only be born in somerset or from that area so yeah there is that slight darkness to um what the hell are they going back to once their pop business is done um in the big city appearing on top of the pops you know that long drive back to devon their farmsteads and homesteads all of that still spooks the shit out of me and they are realistic they're not um city boys dropped into farming schmocks you do sense that much as you as most burgers that you have at Glastonbury have animal feces in them,

these guys probably have got a bit of shit on their shoes. There's that realism to them which I think appeals. It was terrible. By the time they found him, his neck stump had been licked down to almost nothing. Yeah, they're spinning

a total myth about the bucolic lifestyle of the farm, because about a year from now, our class in junior school gets took out for a trip to the farm, and of course Wurzel's songs got sung on the coach, and you know, there was kind of like great anticipation amongst the

youth that although we might not see the Wurzels there that day, we were going to see people just like them in smocks and pitchforks but oh dear those illusions were totally shattered when we got there to realise that everything fucking funked animal shit

and it goes without saying that there were no Wurzels or Wurzelikes in attendance just some chunky blokes who looked absolutely fucked off about being stared at by some junior school council cunts and my teacher thought it'd be a great idea to take a tape recorder and hand it around the kids so we could record an oral diary of the day and he played it back to us the day afterwards and what was heard on that tape was me refusing point blank to walk through a barn and then dry heaving and fighting not to cry when Sir dragged me through it.

And then us looking at some cows in a field and one of them rearing up and landing on the back of the other and Michael Hall shouting, Ah, Sir, look at them cows bumming. Bummer cow. Yeah, bummer cow. bumming bummer cow yeah bummer cow and the tape concludes with us standing next to the pigsty which was properly rank oh god by this time you can hear on the tape that i'd absolutely fucking lost it now this is the era of prince the dog on that's life and you can actually hear me manhandling the tape recorder off some youth going up to the pigs and shouting sausages sausages sausages and by this time i'm lying completely face down on the desk with my arms over my head

totally shamed up and i've never been to a farm since so yeah thanks wurzels no i mean the realities of the farm are something that the wurzels no i mean the realities of the farm is something that the wurzels don't really talk about their idea of farming it's not the brutal inhumane angry business that is actually going on you know which would probably lead to entirely different type of music yeah it's just getting pissed moving some shit from one end of the barn to the other and then uh getting kalied on scrumpy and trying to get your end away that sounds appealing whereas i don't know having a job where you get a box of freshly hatched chicks and throw them into some machine that destroys them um would lead to i don't know

some proto-industrial merc in the mid 70s i guess but yeah the world wasn't ready for it ah you're a bunch of soft city boys. So two weeks later, farmer Bill's cowmen enter the charts at number 45, then enter the top 40 at number 39, and a week later got to number 32, its highest position. The follow-up,

a tune for their favourite football team called One for the Bristol City, failed to chart, but they went back to the formula and put out a cover of the push bike song called the tractor song which also failed to chart and this remains their final appearance on top of the pops probably for the best just just a warning by the way to the pot crazy youngsters do not seek out the b-side to the tractor song funky farmyard oh it's so disappointing isn't it it is it's just

not funky in any way whatsoever disappointing yeah i was expecting a bit of bill oddie style yeah a little bit so what's that meters track seahorns farm or whatever it's called um yeah something like that but no it's it's resolutely unfunny after trying once again to do a bit of euro bashing with i'll never get a scrumpy ear in 1979 and then jumping on the Dallas bandwagon with the double A side I hate JR, I love JR in 1980, they got all urban in 1983 with Wurzel rap, but all failed to chart.

Have you heard that? No, I actually avoided it. I did see it, but I just thought... Video playlist, everyone. Yeah, I'll check it out. However, they resurfaced as a student union act in the early 90s, and a re-release of Combine Harvester got to number 39

in November of 2001, and their cover of Don't Look Back in Anger got to number 59 in December of 2002. Neil, have you? No, of course I've bloody... I bet it's better than the fucking 08s.

I mean, presumably they've adapted the lyrics in a Wurzel style-y. No, no. It's just a straight cover. Why the fuck would I want to do that to myself? After putting out Make Hay Not War for the Stop the War movement in 2003, they went back to basics with a re-recording of I Am a Cider Drinker with guest vocalist

Tony Blackburn, which got to number 57 in May of 2007. They're still active today and share the same manager with which other band? Ooh.

White House? The Stranglers. Blimey! Neil? Yeah? You know what I'm going to ask? I think I do. Something about the catering.

The Wurzels or the Stranglers? Who would you have a sandwich of? Oh, man. I mean, they're both gross. Oh, man. I mean, they're both gross. But, yeah, with the fear of genuine fecal contamination from the Wurzels. Bread all soggy with cow placenta.

I think I've got to go Stranglers. Wow. Fucking hell. You've got to consider, though, from the Wurzels is going to be Farm Fresh. Yeah, but Farm Fresh is often gross, to be honest with you. With that West Country sauce. Yeah, I'd have brains faggots in a West Country sauce off the Wurzels, so long as they assure me that they're just putting it in a microwave. Anything that they've touched.

No, they're farm folk. They don't know cleanliness. Neil! No, you know, it's the country way. I feel so apologetic to our rural no no no no your stomach hardens to that stuff this is it years this is it bacteria just die like dogs in there yeah my air con in my car right is fucked so um when i was driving through the countryside on my way to norfolk of course i was hit by those gusts of chicken shit and pig shit you know they're really

bad stuff. And, you know, because my aircon's full, there's no point closing the window. So I just had to, you know, brave it. But these countryside folk, you know, you just get used to it, don't you? They are completely inured to that stuff. So, you know, during sandwich preparation, who knows what the fuck will be going in there? Who knows whether they've cleaned it? Oh, look, I'm not saying everyone in the countryside is a dirty disgraceful bastard but the words also committed rural folk

and yeah i'd be dubious about proper contamination from animals uh animal shit basically so yeah although the stranglers are grubby bastards as well um i don't think they've got um you know pigs in their back garden or anything so yeah i've got to go got to go stranglers i'm afraid so pop craze youngsters if you read in the news about a cow being thrown off a bridge onto someone's car on the outskirts of coventry soon that'll be O-R-O-R-R They call me Farmer Bill's Cowman La-la-la-la O-R-O-R-R-R

I'll be watching what he does with that pitchfork, I tell you. Just have a look at this. Guess who it is. You're absolutely right. Glad it's not in the bits. And this one, called again, naturally, decides to turn the show into an episode of Who's Baby? As we see a photo of a toddler who's so obviously the front woman of the next group, followed by a photo of her and her mates

with ed sullivan as he finally introduces baby don't change your mind by gladys knight and the pips we covered gladys a brother bubba william guest and edward pattern in chart music number 18 when they took midnight train to georgia to number 10 in June of 1976. Since then, there's been a steady presence in the lower reaches of the top 40 over here, but this single, the follow-up to Nobody But You, which got to number 34 in January of this year, written by Van McCoy and the lead cut from the LP Still Together, sees the group sniffing the wind, recogn recognizing the gamey tang of disco and scampering after it it's entered the charts of fortnite to go at number 33 then soared 11 places to number 22

this week it's only nudged up one place to number 21 but no matter because here is the video. I really like Tony's link here where he says, I'll be watching what he does with that pitchfork, I'll tell you. Because although it's not a very clever or funny remark, it does make you think how incredibly exciting and memorable it would have been if Tommy Banner had actually leapt off the stage, it would have been if tommy banner had actually leapt off the stage pushed through the audience and rammed his pitchfork up tony blackburn's arse causing tony to throw back his head and scream with pain so both prongs of the pitchfork emerged tearing through his exposed throat and showering the cheering audience with blood and tissue.

And Tommy Banner whispers, you was right to worry, young'un, as he performs an unspeakable pagan rite on the body. And up in the gallery, they're getting calls telling them to cut the feed, and Robin Nash is screaming, don't cut, don't cut, we're staying live. This is sensational stuff. No, at home Tessa Wyatt is watching it with Richard O'Sullivan and they're both laughing.

Anyway, that's what Tony was worried about. I think he needn't worry quite so much. Have you been watching a lot of Italian folk horror movies of late, Taylor? No more than usual. So anyway, this video, it's 70s video cliche number two isn't it the band having fun in the studio even though the entire film is just set in a massive couple of boxers you still get that american vibe off it and you know by this time 1977 any bit of film about america even if it's just a studio is thrilling oh without a doubt

to the youth isn't it I mean by American standards this is actually kind of a budget video you know yes but after the Wurzels yes my god

what a magical other world America looks like yes I mean I love this song the Van McCoy production tilts them towards disco like you said it's not wholeheartedly disco yet I don't think

no but it's getting there isn't it it's getting there and it keeps the Motown-ness and the soul and it's just a great track and and fundamentally i mean as ever with with black american pop from the 70s i'm not saying cmp contributors have to stand down in a sense but it's tricky because the sense of relaxation that happens with american artists when a camera is pointed at them it's just totally different british bands in a video like this would feel the need to prove their relaxation by by sort of gamely sort of grinning along but gladys night in the pips they just have it they're gladys night in the pips for fuck's sake and good on them really in a way for sending a video because i think by now the pips and gladys

had twigged sort of just how odd the british are. And I think it would have been that they kind of always dress down a little bit for their TOTP appearances. And I think, you know, it would have been frankly undignified for them to follow the Wurzels. No. So this video is a delight. But it's accompanied for me watching it with a sense of Christ what to say about this because it's just wonderful. It's just a wonderfully produced record with a great little budget video with it as well yeah yeah luckily this was before anyone had heard of homosexuality except the wurzels um and it was unexceptional and it's only mildly fabulous to see grown men with mustaches wearing tennis shorts and dancing in

formation and doing exercises together yeah with the t-shirts all rolled up and everything exposing their midriff yeah yeah yeah socking each other on the arm no doubt talking about the ladies when gladys is out of the room i love those shorts i love those shorts jimmy connor shorts are really strong yet as taylor said highly camp look at the beginning we see them kind of like doing a bit of a dance routine, being taught by someone standing behind them in a vest. And, yeah, they do look like they're about to go roller skating afterwards, aren't they? Yeah.

But they look like they're having so much fun. Yes. Like nobody that age or nobody who looks that age ever has that much fun. No. Without a bit of an edge on it. Do you know what I mean? But the pips look like they don't have a care in the world only blue skies for the pips yeah and gladys looks

really cool in her sportswear as well and it's a shame because then she gets sort of frumped up a bit for the main bit you know where they're in civvies in in the studio and all that whereas the pips you're kind of grateful when they're back in the slacks yes yeah i mean to a nine-year-old like me it was obvious that being gladys knight and the pips was the fucking best dos in the world they have a bit of a sing then they have a bit of a dance and then you know there's a couple of blokes lingering in the doorway watching on and then we cut to the uh other side of the glass and there's two blokes behind a mixing desk, one of whom is the absolute dead spit

of Ron O'Neill in Superfly. And they're watching Gladys Knight and the Pips perform and they have a bit of a chat to each other. I mean, I don't know what they're saying, but it's bound to be words to the effect of, fucking hell, this song is mint and on our life skill. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they've got the best headphones in the world.

Oh, yes. Massive red headphones. Yes. And I don't know whether they've been've got the best headphones in the world. Oh, yes. Massive red headphones. Yes. And I don't know whether they've been told to hold the headphones in a certain way, because they all kind of hold, not over their heads, but kind of under their chins. Yes, like a giant telephone. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The kind of phone that Busby had on top of that telegraph pole.

Indeed, but they're instantly, deeply covetable, these objects, these red headphones. They really catch the eye. But the whole look of it, it's just instant. You're propelled to this magical land called America. And after the Wurzels, fuck me, you need that. Yes. I mean, they're on the way out here, really. They've got one foot in a chicken basket.

Yes. They've got a couple of sunset hits ahead. Yeah. But that's about it. I mean, this is sort of their last hurrah. But this is so great yeah it's just one of those records that sounds like it came off a production line in the best possible ways you know like everyone involved knew exactly what they were doing and just did it without any

fuss you know and it's another one of the few 1977 records that I think I remember from the time as well. It stuck in my head because of that moment where half the instruments drop out on the chorus and the vocal melody is doubled by the string section, which is a trick they used to use on a lot of American records at the time, just underlining the hook. We talked about the same thing on Silver lady by uh david soup i seem to remember it really does weld a chorus onto your brain yeah and the chorus sort of needs it because it's not an especially strong tune but it sounds heavenly because it's done with that

effortless american sophistication and gloss which 70s british records could never replicate you know british records could do cold dry strings in a way that you would never ever hear on an american single which is brilliant but they also could never get that brimming over pearly gate sound that you get from yeah philly soul and late 60s early 70s motown and stuff like this yeah and these moments are important in any episode of top of the pops because they're just transportation away at midway through this song you know you've forgotten about the fucking jubilee you've forgotten about top of the pops and tony blackburn to be honest with you and you know you're completely immersed in it so it's magical and it's the first bit of proof in this episode that there is life after motown for a lot of acts yeah as we're going

to see again later yeah so the following week baby don't change your mind jumped seven places to number 14 and three weeks later got to number four its highest position the follow-up home is where the heart is got to number 35 in october and they'd make their last appearance in the top 20 when come back and finish what you started got to number 15 in august of 1978 that's a fucking tune very much though yeah by which time the group have fallen out with their new label buddha records and were forced to record as two separate entities until their deal ran out. They eventually signed a new deal with CBS in 1980, but their hits dried up over here and they parted ways in 1989. You know, by the best in your word, baby

Don't change your mind, don't change it Well, there you go. You're probably wondering what this little bit of string is here. Well, I'll tell you what will happen. If I pull this bit of string, two things will happen. First of all, some balloons will fall down on Neil Innes, who will then sing a number, Silver Julieilee. Let's see if it works. You ready?

Queen Elizabeth Queen Elizabeth Silver Jubilee Queen Elizabeth Queen Elizabeth God save you and me

Tony, standing next to a tatty bit of string tells us that when he pulls it some balloons will fall down from the ceiling and the next act will do their bit he does, and by God we're thrown into Silver Jubilee by Neil Innes born in Danbury, Essex in 1944, Neil Innes was a fine

art student at Goldsmiths in the early 60s when he joined the Bonzo Dog Dada Band, a rotating collective of art school sorts who took the piss out of trad jazz cover versions in local pubs and college balls. As the only trained musician in the group, he whipped them into some semblance of a band and they made their TV debut playing Won't You Come Home Bill Bailey on Blue Peter. They signed a deal with Parlophone, but after the success of the new Vaudeville band, a group of session musos put together to record Winchester Cathedral, the Bonzos were invited to inherit the name for a tour, which they all turned down by their trumpet player, Bob Kerr, which gave Innes the opportunity to convince the band to drop the old stuff

and steer them towards the new sounds of the mid to late 60s. On December 23rd 1967, they became the resident band on the new Thames television kids show, Do Not Adjust Your Set which introduced them to Eric Heigl, Terry Jones and Michael Palin and three days after that they appeared in the Beatles film Magical Mystery Tour on BBC2. After myriad TV appearances and a string of sessions for John Peel's Radio 1 show Top Gear and a punishing gig schedule, they finally made it big in late 1968 when Urban Spaceman, written by Inez and co-produced by Paul McCartney,

got to number five for three weeks in November. After touring America in 1969, they decided it wasn't any fun anymore and they split up in January of 1970. And Inez and Viv Stanshaw spent the early 70s in bands such as Freaks, with Keith Moon on drums, and Grimms, a collaboration with members of the Scaffold. And he also put out his debut LP, How Sweet to Be an Idiot, in 1974. How Sweet to Be an Idiot in 1974. Later that year, he reunited with Idol, Jones and Palin as a filling of sorts for John Cleese in the final series of Monty Python

and wrote songs for the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. In 1975, he and Idol starred in the BBC Two sketch show Rutland Weekend Television which featured a song called I Must Be In Love, which was performed by a band called The Ruckles. By 1977, he's working up a film script and a soundtrack for the forthcoming Ruckles film All You Need Is Cash, and has just put out his second LP, Taking Off, this April. But while being interviewed by the BBC World Service,

he was challenged to make up a song on the spot about the Silver Jubilee, and this is it. It's been rushed out by his label, Arista Records, and it's not in the chart yet, but Robin Nash is clearly looking for a hook to hang his oversized Jubilee hat on, and this will do very nicely, leading to Inez's first appearance on Top of the Pops

since he wore a ball gown to perform Urban Spaceman nearly nine years ago. And, oh, chaps, we're instantly thrown into the Top of the Pops of 1982, aren't we, without the zoo wankers. I mean, if Michael Hurl had been asked to organise a National Front front demo it would probably look like this wouldn't it yeah this almost cancels out the ruttles i mean obviously the key

factor the main characteristic of this record and also the main problem with it is that you watch it and even if you're very familiar with neil innis and his work yeah it's impossible to work out how it's meant or how you're supposed to take yeah yeah because clearly he's not hailing the queen with an expression of murderous intensity but it doesn't sound like he's having a go either um and as usual he's just standing there looking underwhelmed uh a little sheepish and uh incorrigibly morose so you won't find any clues in his facial expression and generally i'm broadly in favor of not being able to tell how sincere somebody is on a record because it allows discussion and it encourages you to think a bit

but here it's it's a bit annoying yeah and i mean a big part of neil innes's aesthetic and the bonzos and to a certain extent monty python is this sort of baffled ironic mildly alienated distance from the world which creates this kind of perpetual satire but at the level of a lack of seriousness and an inability to be po-faced about anything which people never tire of pointing out is a very comfortable middle class old world way of seeing things because you don't have the complication of any of those things being a direct threat to you even though that wasn't the background of everyone involved in those groups but it was the reality of their lives and in the context of comedy that can work very well you know like the best satire of the ruling classes tends to come from the children of the ruling classes uh or used to but i'm not sure it works so well in the song because this isn't

comedy it's just whimsy and so all the protections and defenses that comedy has just fall away and and you're just left thinking yeah but what are you doing it's like your your half-raised eyebrow as you sing a deliberately trite song about the queen's silver jubilee suggests that you don't really care either way perhaps you don't dislike royalty but you're aware of the the silliness of the whole palaver but it doesn't work even as a sort of dryly equivocal take, because you're doing it right here and now in this context, which tips you over into unironic celebration, because that's the way the current is moving, and you've decided to step into the current and not swim.

Or his record labels decided he's going to do that. Oh, yeah. But the end result is, there you are on TV, waving a very small union jack and it's kind of upsetting you know i mean it's fucking shit this record i don't like the equivocation of it but i mean you know i do think i mean in his it's a great hookmeister he can knock out a pop song i mean i know he said he did this as a bet but fuck me we just did not need this yeah it's a bet that we lost well yeah, yeah, and he does great cod reggae.

You know, if you listen to the section about medieval open field farming systems in Monty Python's The Background to History, he does great cod reggae. And I guess some of the rhymes here are kind of pleasing. You know, saluting with highfalutin and that. But I love Neil Innes. But this, you know, he was part was part actually neil innis sidetrack of one of the best gigs i've ever seen i went to see yola tengo at warwick art center once and they had a couple of guests on stage with them one of them was sonic boom from spaceman 3 and the other

one was neil innis and he was wonderful he was playing their songs he was also playing spaceman 3 songs he even did urban spaceman but this is surely an idea. I mean, thinking of ex-bonzos, if you want a picture of class at this time in British society and culture, probably dig into Viv Stanchel's Sir Henry at Rawlinson's end LP that comes out from the year after this, and maybe the film from 1980. But Taylor's exactly right. There's this equivocation in this song.

He's not quite taking the piss. At any any other time i guess i tolerate it but in the thick of the jubilee it's a time to call sides in a sense and he hasn't done so no and i don't like seeing neil innes do this because i like neil innes a lot yeah i mean you'd see how this would work on the end credits of rutland weekend television or the innes Booker Records, where you can actually control the visuals. But here on top of the Pops, he can't. Yeah, and the crowd's frenzy and the flags and the balloons and stuff do not help it. They make it look like he is, yeah, in celebration,

whereas the lyrics are a little, you know, more nuanced than that. And he's not dressed up either. I mean, if he'd have turned up dressed as a queen that might help but he looks very poor simon doesn't it in his dress he's got this baggy suit jacket on and a white flat cap and of course we've got the heavy duty discipline of the top of the pops orchestra yeah yeah yeah well the cap is to uh hide evidence of a hair transplant oh right fortunately he was the donor right the thing is it's not surprising that this is where neil innis has ended up sort of kind of almost sort of celebrating the queen because spiritually a big part of his work was a kind of melancholic distrust

of progress and you know he was like terry jones at monty python he liked natural things and old stuff and like you know real ale and things he was distrustful of anything too organized or too cerebral or too manufactured and in his book of records is full of that all this sort of little man in the modern world yeah you know retreating into magic and imagination which can be lovely but in the wrong context it can easily seem reactionary or at least in sympathy with a reactionary position this is the first time he's been on top of the pops in seven years it's like oh fuck where's the dolly birds on the gantre who are these kids it is weird isn't it and and there's not many other performances on Top of the Pops in this period

that I can think that are, not the performances, but the crowd dynamic that are quite like this. You're very right to point out that it's prophetic of kind of an 80s Top of the Pops in a way. And it's unbelievable

that none of them Ruckles songs charted because they were fucking brilliant. Yeah, he never made a penny out of any of them, of course. Yeah, but he did make a ton of oasis yeah i'm ripping off how sweet to be an idiot along with gary glitter yeah good old no giving a peter bone a million pounds well played yeah i tend to prefer neil innes's uh collaborative work right to his solo stuff partly because that sort of vague whimsy

and distracted sweetness doesn't really do that much for me. Like, he was brilliant in the bonzos because he provided the platform and the guardrails for Vivian Stancher, you know. And he was great working with Monty Python because of his grasp of the detail of music and what sounds like what and what should go where to create this or that effect right which which went brilliantly with monty python's least discussed superpower which was the incredible eye for the detail of for instance english archetypes or

styles of television presentation like people forget this now because tv doesn't look like this anymore. But in 1969, 1970, Monty Python's parodies of TV looked as uncannily, almost unbelievably precise and accurate as the day-to-day did in 1994. So when they added music to that, they needed someone with the same observational skills. And it's like, yeah, it's like Neil just mentioned, the best bit of Monty Python's

matching tie and handkerchief LP is that sketch, which if you haven't heard it of the university of manchester puts it like this and each one sings their bit to a different kind of pop tune and there's a reggae track a glam rock track sort of framework and it's just an obviously contrived palin and jones sketch where you put two incompatible things together so they spark and undermine each other's seriousness and then the sketch writes itself but it's not even a funny idea it's only funny because of how convincing and well judged and well observed neil innes's music is and it sets up michael palin as the professor of medieval studies at Cambridge doing an uncannily accurate impression of a stoned rock star being interviewed on all of that precisely right, which you need to or the whole thing dies. And it's just not funny.

You know, which is obviously also why he ended up doing the ruttles. But his own material, I mean, the only song of his that I like, you know, or that I love, let's say, in that sort of slightly sad whimsical style is how sweet to be an idiot all the other songs of his are like a dead straight you know the ruttled songs and uh you know i watched in his book of records a few years ago and god bless him it dragged a little i didn't like it as much as i really wanted to because again a lot of it is stuff where you can't quite work out the point or what he's trying to do which should be interesting but too often you just end up with the impression that actually there is no point yeah and he's not really trying to do anything at all he's just

singing a song which you know it's fine it's fine but this this is not a pretty sign no sailing on the yacht britannia no one in the world would ban you. Well, I can think of a few pubs on the Falls Road that might have issues with that. And nowadays, a few schools might turn a son away. Yeah, it's a line that's been left behind by time a bit, hasn't it, that line? So, the following week, Silver Jubilee failed to chart and never would. The follow-up, the Bob Dylan pastiche protest song, also failed to chart and he never troubled said chart ever again.

Two years after this performance, he returned to BBC Two with three series of the Innis Book of Records, a collection of music videos of his own songs, and then spent the 80s as the host of the ITV kids' show The Book Tower, played the magician in Puddle Lane, and wrote and narrated the cartoon series Raggy Dolls. And he died in 2019 at the age of 75. Dolls like you and me, don't you know?

Made in perfect length. 75. Dolls like you and me, don't you know? Made imperfectly. Well, I hope you're all having a really lovely Jubilee week. We're having a fabulous time here at Top of the Pops. Hope you're enjoying all the music. We've got to change tempo a little bit right now. We're going to have a bit of that sort of... a bit of rock for you now, in the shape of the Stranglers. This one.

Working! Working! The boys and the girls are dancing around... Tony, still in his realm of solitude, suddenly notices that the camera's on him again and he expresses his hope that our Jubilee week hasn't been a crashing disappointment ruined by your dad constantly going on about how Elvis is the fucking king. He then warns us that a change of pace is imminent and tells us we're going to have a bit of that sort of,

er, bit of rock for you because he can't even bring himself to say punk. Yeah, that's exactly what's going through his head. Yes. To Tony Blackburn, saying punk is as good as saying fuck. Yeah, it's sedition. You can't say punk. No.

That's exactly his thought process. I mean, and as ever with Tony, not hiding his disgust. He introduces Go Buddy Go by The Stranglers. We've dealt with the happy-go-lucky, squeaky-clean former Guildford Stranglers on numerous occasions, and this, their second single, is the follow-up to Get A Grip On Yourself, which got to number 44 in March of this year and should have done better were it not for the British Market Research Bureau,

the compilers of the official chart somehow mistakenly taking a chunk of the strangler sales and lumping them onto everyone's talking about love by silver convention, he said, placing his hand on his chin. It's actually a

double A side with peaches which features on their debut lp ratus norvegicus which came out in april and is currently at number seven in the album charts but seeing as the subject matter is about hugh cornwall dosing on the beach looking at women's arses and the cover of the single depicts a hand pulling at the back of a pair of pink knickers that have been put on a peach, Radio 1 forced them to put out a radio edit and don't want it on Top of the Pops. It entered the chart three weeks ago at number 37 and only nudged up one place to number 36 a week later, but that didn't stop Top of the Pops from issuing an invite as long as they played the song on the other side,

which involves John Jack Burnell encouraging his mate to stop being a wallflower at a club and get stuck into all the punky crumpets and being delighted to see him with a chicky on his knee at the end of the song, which helped it jump nine places to number 27. This week, it's moved up four places to number 23, and here's a repeat of that performance a fortnight ago.

Chaps, let's deal with Peaches first, because to my mind, that's the far superior song. The only thing about it, it reminds me of that HP sauce advert that Frankie Howard did with the couple in the seaside postcard with the fat bloke with a tash perving on women while his wife doesn't know him. Oh, HP,

you've got to admire their sauce. I mean, it would have made for a better Top of the Pops appearance. Yes. Whether it was the band... Oh, imagine Legs and Co. doing that.

That's exactly what I was about to say. Probably dressed up as giant peaches. One of them dressed as a massive banana running round after them, no doubt. Played by Dave Lee Travis. This song is less good.

It's interesting, though, this. I mean, listening to the demo of this song from 76, because before, you know, the Stranglers even got signed, they demoed this song, and it's totally different. It's like a slower pace, a sluggier sound because it's a demo, but you can at least hear an attempt with the hand claps and the harmonies on it to sound, I don't know, professional. This has been, it's kind of been professionally scuffed up. Yeah, it's been punked up a bit, hasn't it?

Yeah, because of punk completely, much like the whole band has. There is a deliberate, fuck you, amateurism to their performance here. Yes. Because they swap instruments and they take all the strings off their guitar. Ah, yes, yes. I was wondering about that.

I think it's JJB, isn't it? He's playing guitar and other fellas playing bass and he's playing quarter U. Yeah, that's right. He's playing chords on the bass

like he would on guitar. No one's playing the guitar solo at all. There's a couple of good moments of kind of spikiness if you like towards the end when his guitar lead starts tangling him up um jjb has a nice pull up there's a lovely

moment as well did you see the bit when um i think somebody's got their hands on the stage yeah and he stamps on it yes he goes to the front and stamps on him it's kind of nice but as ever with stranglers um although yeah they're punked up dave greenfield's keyboards yeah are the kind of thrillingly problematic spanner yes in the works so he's not changing instruments with jet black is a fuck no no i mean and he's always you know far too good a player in a sense to be a punk and he always confers this instant 60sness to what he plays not just in the sound of his keyboard, but in the lines and the melodies. But that said, you know, even though it's not as good as Peaches,

in the context of this episode of Top of the Pops, this is weird and thrilling, and I think it would have been to any punks or kids tuning in. This is the moment when that wedges in and when mums and dads are probably talking about sticking them in the army or something. Yes. Seven days, Jankers.

Which makes, I mean, it makes the crowd's reaction kind of inexplicable. I don't think Top of the Pops audiences at this point have figured out how to move to music like this. No. Because the inevitable consequence of moving to a record like this is probably something like a mosh pit. Yeah. And the Stranglers,

unlike the bands that are coming in a few years, they haven't bought their little coterie of fans with them to Top of the Pops. In an ice cream van. Yeah. There's not a couple of hardcore devotees down at the front to show the way. So the crowd's reaction is a little bit odd.

But in the context of a pretty, I'm not going to say awful episode of Top of the Pots, but there's been precious little excitement, this is one of the most exciting moments of the show. Yeah, I don't dislike this record. I mean, it's just a garage punk tune, isn't it, with just enough of an edge left on it. Yeah, it's more pub rock than Frankie fucking Miller.

Yeah. But I mean, you know, I'm no fan of the Stranglers really, but when you look at the pantheon of 77 punk tracks, like the non-heroic ones, that's some pretty floppy competition really. And the Stranglers are actually up there, although like you I'd rather have Peaches, which is musical trolling, you know.

Peaches is just a musical shit posting um but i sort of like it because it's like if the doors were as stupid as they actually were but knew it do you know what i mean and also the problem with it being this song is that is it just me who doesn't like to see groups on top of the pops and it's not the usual lead singer singing like i know you know it just me who doesn't like to see groups on top of the pubs and it's not the usual lead singer singing? Like, I know, you know, it just sets bad bells ringing because of all the A-sides where someone other than the usual lead singer is singing, has there ever been a good one?

I can't think of one, ever. I mean, Guns of Brixton wasn't a single, was it? No. There's nothing. And I don't count XTC, where the one who wasn't the main singer was better than the one who was the main singer and wrote all the best hits. There must be one.

Doesn't really leap out at you, though. That wasn't a single, was it? Que Sera Sera by Sly and the Family Stone. Right, right, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it makes sense having JJB as the front person, because before Generation X pitch up, he's the only one who's going to be on the centrefold of Jackie, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, with his Trotsky t-shirt, which he's had to half cover up like the Flying Pickets tea towel. Trotsky's still stuck in the number two slot on the commodified communist top ten, behind Che Guevara, the everything I do, I do it for you,

of oblivious consumerist irony. JJB's wearing a T-shirt with the pastiche of the Ford logo, but it says Trotsky. Yeah. Yeah, this all started in January of this year when Hugh Corman was spotted at a gig by the member of the GLC's public committee wearing a Ford logo on his T-shirt that read,

Fuck. GLC went on to force the rainbow to put a clause in their contract with the stranglers when they were about to open as support to the climax blues band which forbade them to either say or wear obscene language on stage and wow on the night of the gig cornwall had the same t-shirt on which he either chose to wear or he was just living in at the time and a glc inspector spotted it from the back of the hall with some binoculars and they just cut the power on them blimey so yeah if you'd have been in the know you'd been looking at that t-shirt and going no they haven't oh i see what they've done there yeah but they're

doing a nice bit of subversion on this episode as you pointed out with the swapping of the instruments and the removal of the strings but also it appears that the bbc is so preoccupied with t-shirt slogans that they've failed to notice that burnell's kept in the line i'm with my friend with bob having a good time i got me some speed and i'm doing fine yeah yeah they probably thought he got a motorbike or something. Yeah, no, exactly. 10 or 15 years earlier, you could definitely imagine them getting away with singing about speed because the straight and narrow people might think,

oh, he must have been prescribed it by his doctor for weight loss or listlessness or a general sense of malaise, you know, trying to mill spanchulesels but probably not by now but then again probably nobody who listened to this with a censor's hat on could understand any of the words you know i mean but the thing is historically references to speed do tend to slip past the censor in a way that references to other drugs don't. There's a lot of records that were never banned that are obviously about speed. The Small Faces got away with singing about their dealer. Yes.

He's always there when I need some speed. At a time when you could get banned from the radio if your song had the word smoke in it, even if you were actually referring to a senior service untipped. Dexes were named after Dexys and had a number one hit whose lyrics helpfully explained what that meant. I don't know if you can't understand what the Stranglers are singing here. Good luck deciphering Gino.

I mean, the thing is, is this punk rock? Probably not. The Stranglers never really were. JJB, he's punking it up in his delivery of this song. He's jumping about almost like Jimmy Percy or something. And there's a slight discomfort there. It don't feel right, is it? Because it's almost like a cartoon approximation of what punk rock is, I guess.

Because they're not quite, and they never do, quite fit in with punk rock. So it's a little forced. But anything, I mean, we've just had fucking Neil Innes singing that song. You know, I mean, anything will do at this point. So it's pretty thrilling to just have, yeah, just have a rock and roll band doing what they do. But I would encourage, by the way, people to seek out that demo from 76, because it's totally different. A lot of people, a lot of Str stranglers fans prefer it i don't but it indicates the kind of process that's going on with the stranglers in a sense that before 77 they had a lot of material now they're figuring out ways of punking it up

and making it sort of current and making it feel contemporary rather than just being another rock and roll band well this is the thing about punk i mean bands like the stranglers they're years behind the curve and a lot of the punk elite just look down on them because look you're too old and you're too proficient but punk's giving them the keys to the charty kingdom hasn't it it's like okay we'll do these songs but we'll be yeah yeah the arrogant aggressive bastards that we are anyway and here we go into the charts yeah but i think what i don't like most about the stranglers apart from the the beer breath ambience in general is that feeling that they're putting it on or taking

it off you know like you know they're all about 56 and they could play better than they let on you know and i completely understand why older proper musicians would enjoy power and simplicity over anything else and would find it genuinely refreshing and exciting that suddenly everyone was playing fast and quick and i just would like it more if they'd use their experience to create a different way of doing the same thing rather than doing exactly what a group of untutored 18 year olds would have done except they're playing all the right notes i mean at this point they were probably the only punk or punkish band in britain who could write a song with a hook line based around a circle of fifths which is this um and they're almost certainly the only one where

you can imagine at least one of the members might know what a circle of fifths is, even though they probably refer to them as the Hey Joe Chords, just like everybody else does. And they're also the only punk-adjacent band who are having no problems getting gigs. They're about to announce their tour, and there's a bit of furore in the local papers, but it never comes to anything.

They never get banned. So, yeah yeah everything's coming up stranglers but the thing is with the stranglers i mean as letters to the music press kind of reveal um although aligning themselves with punk they are liked by proper music fans you know and and that's the thing with the stranglers look i like the stranglers but i know that they are satisfying whereas the damned and the pistols are thrilling and and those are things that the stranglers never really are you know they're satisfying they're filled out but then they'll never be as thrilling as the great punk records that are coming out this year and just before we close can we just have a little word as usual for dave greenfield they're always the hero of the stranglers never has he looked

more inappropriately named than in this clip you would believe it if somebody told you that he was something they dug up the night before for a laugh and got him moving with puppet strings and electrical charges and the reason this song is so short is that his jaw keeps dropping off so they can't take any chances no he looks just delightfully half rotten he's in a green boiler suit he looks great yeah makes him look like someone's just snipped the top of a body bag just sat him down in front of the keyboard exactly and also a quick word for jet black who i do like because he looks like what he is a coach driver that you definitely wouldn't want to speak to while the vehicle was in motion or afterwards one word out of place and what like to ask him where the bucket of sand was

your classmates threw up in the aisle no one word out of place and he'd fell you with richard burton drunk karate. Have you ever seen that? It's one of my favourite clips on YouTube. When Richard Burton was really drunk, like literally almost dead in the mid-70s. He did this film called The Klansman where he was in America battling the Ku Klux Klan. There's a clip on YouTube of this where he has to have a fight where this good old boy starts on him and his and his missus and he has to kung fu him but because he's so drunk he can hardly move he just has to walk up to him with his fixed grimace with a bright

purple face and then he just kind of raises one flat hand up and the bloke goes and flies through a window you know it's like you've got it yeah yeah put it on the playlist of course it will worth a watch so the following week peaches slash go buddy go jumped four places to number 19 and continued its slow pull up the charts eventually getting to number eight three weeks later the follow-up something better change got to number nine in august and they'd close out 1977 with no more heroes getting to number eight in october and the lp of the same name getting to number two in the same month held off number one by 20 golden greats by diana ross and the supremes imagine the party that the manager of the Stranglers and the Wurzels has every Christmas. Can you imagine what the buffet's like?

Lots of finger food. Well, I guess it's holiday time at the moment, so if you go to Greece and you look for an island called Carilla, you won't find it, actually, because it's in the imagination of Demis Roussos. But the wonders of Top of the Pulse will conjure up a lovely island and Demis for you right now. Tony, still alone, reminds us that it's holiday time but takes the opportunity to warn us about unscrupulous Greeks trying to tempt us towards islands

that don't actually exist, as he introduces Kyryla by Demis Roussos. We first encountered Artemis Venturis Roussos in chart music number 35, when he reprised Forever and Ever, which got to number one for a week in July of 1976. And this tune, the follow-up to Because which got to number 39 in april of this year is the lead track from the ep of the same name it's been taken off his recent lp kirilla in cell de trauma a german only album and it along with a few other tracks have been englished up and shoved out for the bevs and angers of Albion to slink about to.

It's not in the charts just yet, but the BBC are fully expecting it to be so. So while Demis is in the country, they've winched him into the studio. And what a spectacle. Oh, it is. I mean, no expense spared on the holiday voyage from the BBC props department.

No. What, a couple of palm trees, I think? Yes. But it would have impressed me. You know, I mean, the blue caftan would certainly have impressed me, but it looks great. I mean, I just think for the longest time as a kid, I was just impressed by Roussos, simply because of his size.

I mean, much as, you know, in the Middle Ages, like fatness was seen as a signifier of wealth and status and all that, I did look on him not as rotund, but a winner, you know, somebody who could presumably have as many Goblin Burgers and Scampi and Chips and Crisps and Pop as he wanted. And, of course, that contrast between his physicality and his high-fluted sort of john anderson style voice provided a bit of novelty value by this point 77 he's already well into the kind of being parodied years you

know the sure sign of making it benny irwin and you know always did an anonymous score i remember freddie star routine as well where um star was uh you know doing the demis rousseau song in in the high voice and then he walks across the stage and some of these voice drops and you notice that behind him there's a bloke with a pair of pliers so he's getting parodied a lot i think he is the first solo artist who was born in africa to get in the war in the uk. I know about Manfred Mann and Freddie Mercury and stuff. It's odd how he's covering this Cameroonian song. The original by It Can Be Brilliant called Ilongi

is a lot more interesting in its arrangement. Oh really? Yeah, and if you stumble across, by the way, any mid-70s It Can Be Brilliant records, hoover them up, they're great Afro-funk records. But this song, Kirilla, both in its recorded version and in this slightly sloppier iteration by the BBC Orchestra.

Oh, yes. It's aiming for this kind of, yeah, Fernando-style world music feel. Because he's got a great voice, it kind of works. There is that

bring your package holiday home feel to this. You know, to my mind, it's massively unfair that the Germans heard about this mystical island

before us because, you know, that means they've already got their towels on the best sun line. But seeing as Tony has told us that the island doesn't actually exist, well, that's the Germans' fault, isn't it? That meant a lot in 1977. I mean, 1977 was the year of the fake island, wasn't it? Because, you know, two months earlier, The Guardian devoted eight pages of its April 1st edition to a supplement on the island of Sansarif. All right.

Which didn't exist either. Yeah, they really went for it. But this song. There's a question we can ask about a lot of the songs on this episode. What's it doing on this show? It's a non-chart record. Yes. Why is that happening?

What is it about the Jubilee that has made this happen? Yeah. And this ain't very Jubileesh. Oh, very much. No, no. Unless it's for the Queen's husband, of course. And of course, you know, another question. What the fuck has he got on his feet?

Oh, lovely. Yeah. Shiny red knee boots with a cheeky heel. Basically, it looks like if Superman one day said, oh, to hell with a lot of you mcconnell's aggro boys kick to kill yeah it's this weird combination of platforms and kind of ronald mcdonald shoes yeah they're very pigeon street yeah he cuts quite an impressive figure, doesn't he? All round. Yeah, not so much a dash, more of a gouge.

I'm sort of half certain that this is the clip I saw as a kid, actually. Because that stuck in my head. It's exactly how I remember first seeing Demis Roussos. And, you know, yeah, I appreciate that in terms of his presentation, he was very much the non-chameleon of pop. But there's something familiar in a very deep way about this particular combination of sound and picture and the fronds because he made a mark on a very young me you know i was half disturbed and half intrigued by the sound and the look and the

movement the way he always had a fan on him, you know, the foreign sound. And I remember asking my mum, why does he wear those clothes? And she said, because he's so fat. And I got it into my head somehow, linking it in my brain with another clip that had fired my imagination and worried me a little bit that perhaps demis russos had jumped up and down on the tacoma narrows bridge um and that was what sent it wobbly and so maybe these two unnerving things were connected i mean i didn't actually think that had happened but in head, those two things got mixed up to the point where it was all I could think about.

And yet here he is, still smiling beatifically, despite having wreaked so much terrible destruction. Do you know how old he is at the time? Ooh. I'm guessing 36, I'm going to say. 31. 31. Ooh. That changes things.

He's not looking great then, is he? No. But you know, it's 31 in 1977, Monet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, to me, Demis Roussos, you just saw him and just went, oh, yeah, that's Demis Roussos. You didn't think, oh, my God, look at that enormous fat man. No, no, no.

You know, there's plenty of people knocking about who look like demis russos yeah mainly men but yeah yeah no yeah the blokey soldier a brown paper bag full of plums probably look like demis russos my only problem is that whenever i hear a song by demis russos that isn't one of the famous or good ones, and isn't by Aphrodite's child. All I can think of is the film L'Ultimo Treno della Notte, also known as Night Train Murders, and also known as Don't Ride on Late Night Trains. It's a classier offering than most of the don't movies, right? These are instructionally titled horror films, right, which urgently advised us

against going into the basement looking out of the window going into the house and so on yeah but what if you live in the stockbroker belt and this film's only on at the west end and you didn't want to bring the car out yeah yeah you're fucked aren't you good point but yeah look this film is a bit grubby it's a blatant remake of Wes Craven's Last House on the Left, as acknowledged in the original title, L'ultimo treno della notte, the last train of the night. But the English translators just worked too fast to spot that. Even though Last House on the Left itself was a blatant remake

of Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring, that on the left itself was a blatant remake of Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring, which itself is a implausible story that's centuries old. And it doesn't get much more believable when, as in L'ultimo treno della notte, you put it on a train in Europe in the 70s. But incredibly enough, the first thing that you experience when you watch this very unpleasant film, the key events of which are too gruesome to detail, even on a broad minded podcast like this, which was actually banned in the UK until relatively recently under the absurd video nasty moral panic laws, which made it a crime to sell or purchase it and any copy of your possession could be confiscated by the vice squad it's just a low budget horror film but the first thing that you hear is the theme song a flower's all you need by demis russos no co-written by oscar-winning composer enyo morricone which gives you some insight into relative british and european attitudes to low budget exploitation films at the time even those that are so transparently

desperate to shock that the opening scenes show the baddies attacking a department store father christmas which happens more often than you might expect including in l'ultimo treno della notte but there he is singing the theme to this this this vomit splurge of sexualized violence and elementary emotional switch flicking the russos phenomenon himself singing this song that goes tell the world i saw a man fall in the street and die and just where he fell for love grows a flower a big red flower like the blood he shed for love and peace wow find a way to live your dreams you'll make it if you try for love, can't be wrong. Your dreams will come true. If you don't want to die before you get a bed of love, you never had with your love.

Beautiful words, man, right? Which might seem oddly inappropriate lyrics to any viewer of this film. Although the main refrain goes, sing a song, sing an everlasting song, which does feel quite appropriate when you're listening to it but the thing is i may just be showing my ignorance here of middle of the road greek pop but that song

is almost indistinguishable from this song at least in my memory so when i hear this i subconsciously brace myself in preparation for traumatic sites which in the context of this episode is actually quite fortunate as we'll see yeah i mean they've obviously got him in early because he's in the country but oh they've served him poorly here haven't they you've just got a few trees from fucking habitat and bunged them in the studio and they've've got some kind of yellow moon in a blue sky in the background, and yeah, that's pretty much it. One of the motifs of this episode of Top of the Pops, there's a lot of sweeps of the camera behind things,

whether it's trees or bits of the set, so there's times when we don't see anything for about two or three seconds. It's like someone's stalking Top of the Pops. And also, I mean, this whole episode feels not like a bodge job but it's a bit cheapskate to be honest with you it's like they've shat all their money bbc entertainment budget has just shat it all on that nationwide on the nationwide jubilee special obviously but of course yes yeah well money well spent but yeah i mean at the time and even now gree Greece might as well be Mars to me and my family because our holidays were Chapel St. Leonard's

and I think this year we went to Mabelthorpe, Golden Sands. Oh, get you. My nonna got an earwig in her ear and turned her half deaf. Really? And, yeah, we got charged 50p for a broken cup which we hadn't broke. And my mum tried to buy it off them so she could smash it in front of them so they couldn't rip off anyone ever again. I got one of them big cat's head things

made of toffee apple, whatever, to lick on the way back and I ended up throwing up all over the back of my dad's neck. So yeah, not the best holiday that year. Golden memories. But I wanted to go to Kiriola anyway because, you know,

he's singing about the sky and the sea and all that boring shit. Where's the amusement arcades? Where's the chip shops? Where's the clubs that kids were allowed into where they had blue comedians on? No, mate, not having it. So the following week, Kiriola entered the charts at number 50,

that soared 17 places to number 33, but no further the follow-up life in the city was given a run out on top of the pops in april of 1978 but did fuck all and he never troubled the charts again but he remained an endless subject of fascination in the tabloids here chaps is a tasteful article in the daily mirror that doesn't allude to sizeism in the tabloids. Here, chaps, is a tasteful article in the Daily Mirror that doesn't allude to sizism in the slightest from this November. £30,000 winks in the mink. For Demis Roussos, the glamorous Greek, money is just a big, big yawn.

To prove it, the 17-stone singing colossus trundled into a london store yesterday and bought a giant mink lined bed for 30 000 pounds gross does it actually say gross yes that's 35 000 pounds in today's money perhaps even more the falsetto voiced pop star plans to take the super ball fuck knows what they mean there on a world warbling tour and since it measures a jumbo size eight foot six inches by eight foot there should just be about enough room for his pretty eight stone wife dominique to climb aboard too clearly they're sure to enjoy setting off on a luxury snooze that's actually about 142 338 pounds today wow on a bed that's impressive i like how the subtext of that article basically is but how do they actually do it yes

and also making it seem as if you know when demis roussos goes on tour he has to be like winched into a cargo plane or something to get anyone yeah 17 stoner that's not that much nowadays is it no i know but i mean these were the days before high fructose corn syrup yeah yeah yeah only pop stars could afford that. Well, we have two ladies here who, well, you come from Blackburn, don't you? What a very sensible place to come from. And I'm sure you've had a street party, so why don't we join the party now with Honky. You know your body is grooving But you might want to give it a chance

Don't worry about a thing Just feel the music and dance Toner is finally allowed to mix with the maidens of the studio audience. All flicked back hair and paper baseball caps that have been pushed back so far, they look like cast members of the Young Doctors. He tells us that he has two ladies here, but he only bothers to talk to one of them as she comes from blackburn presumably the other one lives in berry st edmunds i don't know

he's convinced that they had a street party without even asking if they actually had and then awkwardly winces at his tenuous link and waits for the video machine to kick in and play Join the Party by Honka. Formed in Southampton in 1975, Honka are fucking Honka. This appears to be their debut single on Creole Records and came out in March of this year, catalogue number CR137. The label is orangey- at the top with a 50 graduated fade into a goldy color seriously chaps that's pretty much the total result of my research on these bastards i couldn't find anything else well first off i just want to say something extra about what

tony does oh please don't i mean am i wrong did mishear this? He says Blackburn's a very sexual place. Does he say that? I think he says a very sensible place. Does he say sexual? It's right on the edge. And he gives this little sort of grimace before it cuts to video, where he realises he might have put his foot in it there. He's thinking about them 4,000 holes, isn't he?

There's a little deflated sort of, and his posture sags it does it's a real sort of that didn't go well yeah but that does set us up nicely for honky after a couple of months in general circulation they were drafted in to perform it on top of the pops almost a month ago and two weeks later it's entered the chart at number 43, then jumped 12 places to number 31. And this week, it's only moved up one place to number 30. But what does that matter to Robin Nash, who's clearly putting any old shit on this week?

So here is a repeat of their previous performance, and fucking hell, the state of it. Yeah, this is a band that seems to have slipped through a hole in everybody's memory and yeah as your intro suggests are now essentially google proof but if nothing else they do make you sit up oh yes like ect i mean basically this is two man unsound yes we have to start off by talking about what they look like, i.e. breathtaking and horrifying. It's a stage full of misshapen uncles in full flight going for the check of flight.

The singer has got a face that makes you think you might need glasses or if you wear glasses, a face that makes you think you might need glasses or if you wear glasses a face that makes you want to take them off his black throat singing is so absurdly exaggerated that oh it would have made sandy shore a bit uncomfortable yeah it is proper 90s pot noodle advert black voice isn't it yeah hey i'll have a baby sham and he dances like he's wearing stilts um which is very suspicious as he also dresses like he's wearing he's got some massive billowy white saxons on hasn't he fucking hell yeah and his constant violent and rhythmic crotch thrusting makes you feel like you're being threatened with a licorice comfit.

It's not comfortable. Then there's the horn section of Watson, Keegan and Hoddle. In the kind of socks people wear in lieu of having a personality. Yeah, they're mad catwoman socks, aren't they? Oh, God, yeah. There's a drummer who looks like the secret brother that John Travolta keeps in the loft. A bass player who actually appears to be Pete Townsend,

brandy edition, in a joke shop wig, a genuinely uncanny and unsettling likeness, but not half as uncanny or unsettling, I think you know what i'm about to say as the fact that on lead guitar is the yorkshire ripper yeah yes hiding in plain sight i guess nobody recognized him without the tuxedo and dickie bug or the blanket over his head if he'd been driving in la laura waving a crisp five pound note yeah i mean i know it's not nice but this can't be ignored this man beat dave lee travis in the second place in a peter suckcliffe

look-alike content lends a certain visual menace to honky which quite frankly they were not in need of yeah the brass line they just look like a packet of fruit pastels, don't they? They actually look like Hector or any other third division glam band. And it's like, oh, come on, daddy, get with the programme, it's 1977. Yeah, yeah. I couldn't actually notice much of the rest of the band, because the lead singer, his face... Ray Oven.

I mean, he looks like Brian Tillsley's Klingon brother. And it's, I mean, it's no accident actually, whilst we're on a sci-fi thing. He also looks like Charles Napier, AKA Adam, the singing leader of the hippie group in the way to weed an episode of

Star Trek. But the problem is, I mean, beyond the slight vocal blackface of, you know, black throat of his vocal, as Taylor's identified with his crotch movements, he's trying to be sexy and in fact when he twirls his totally inconsiderable packet in a sort of bawdy simulation of stand-up sex inevitably i mean perhaps it's just me but it makes you visualize

just horrible stuff you know three things for me one him looking down at you grinning maniacally as he plows into the vinegar strokes two oh with his lad in his hand wanting you to degrade yourself yeah or number two him looking up at you mental image pop crazy youngsters or him looking up at you is his nasty afro chafes your thighs or in in a scenario that i must admit i perversely and masochistically spun myself into um him andy mccluskey and roger daltrey all staring at me in a club a lascivious leer creeping over their face as they plan to pull the ultimate intercity repellents train on me um he's just vile he's just vile watch your backs now, Neil. Yeah, bummer Cerberus. I mean, the problems start really with the name.

I mean, you know, the average shite band. There's this sense in the name. Yeah, they are Panda Pops Wild Cherry, aren't they? They are. But there's a lot of that about at the time. I mean, just like AWB, they're heading off accusations of cultural appropriation from the off, I guess. But, you know, what next? White motherfuckers here with their song.

Honky, Taylor, has anyone called you Honky? No, I've been called a white cunt, which was preferable, really. I mean, Honky, to me, means Fingers Girlfriend in Nuts in May. She should have been on the side dancing to this. Hey, Honk, look at them bleeding bluebells. Blading millions on them. There's a fair few artists who call themselves honky over this i remember a midnight is hip-hop troupe called honky right um who did an album called culture i think which is actually fucking ace no but it's it's a repeated trick got thrown about at the playground but it just bounces off doesn't it that was a really frustrating thing, though, Al. You know, as somebody who needed, obviously, words to combat with

for stuff that I was called, there weren't many. Honky was one. Bird shit was another. Oh, that's a good one. You know, but they weren't satisfying in the way that the racial epithets throw my way, presumably, were to the people who said them. I mean, out of the honky songs, you know, actually, you know inevitably like taylor says they're very google proof and you can find scant sort of uh tracks by them anywhere can't sit down was their other single i think

and that's a better call in the gang rip off right slightly i would also if you get a chance and you're on youtube and you're intrigued by the honky phenomenon there's a video called join the party tv television special 76 which is basically it's it's like it's join the party this track with accompanying visuals um it seems like a home video in a way which is odd for 76 obviously it's weird because obviously you know they're a funk unit but they've filmed a video like an indie band from the mid 80s it's all done down the park and they're on swings and there's sort of comedy bits reverse bits totally sexist bits as well they've managed to persuade a couple of dolly birds to dance with them and they occasionally carry them off to the woods in a caveman way it's actually a really poignant snapshot of something um it's a it's a snapshot of a band who are about to in a sense make it you know they

sell 40 000 copies of this record and they're all necking champagne and stuff it's just a nice little snapshot of those times yeah it's just some super eight film edited together to this song but yeah for a start it makes it clear to the point of utter desolation that in mid-1970s britain even being a successful pop group could look about as cheerful and glamorous as having your sub-post office robbed by Donald Nielsen at Black Panther. It's all unwashed wranglers and creosoted garden fences and a plain grey judgmental sky, you know.

And this is the six-week period when honky were all the rage you know yeah remembered by them like it lasted a decade i'm sure mostly spent i would imagine drinking warm beer out of small cans in a artex ceiling room at the back of southampton polytech dressed in singlets and dried sweat. Those cans were the really fucking hard ring pulls to get off. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Two lads with a spiral-bound notebook hanging around saying, how do you get the name Honky?

You know, glory days. I was just thinking, they should actually have called themselves Hanky. Yes. Plain, square, tucked out out of sight and then when you retrieve and unfold it you're staring at the gross waste product of humanity ready to be swept away in the wash and the terrible thing is they're really good musicians and they're all they've obviously rehearsed loads and loads and loads and should they ever have passed through alberta canada they might reasonably have been able to

call themselves the funkiest band in medicine hat tonight but in the grand scheme of things it's a bit lacking in it there's a bit in this song where he starts to lecture us on what soul is about because when a band can all play this way and are clearly marinated in funk and soul music and yet sound as stiff and and as pale as honky there's some explaining to do you know this is one of those records that would sound a lot better if it was worse. Do you know what I mean? If it had been this peppy and had this much front, but it was as malformed and broken and semi-functional as their big English faces, you could get with that. That would be interesting.

get with that that would be interesting but it's that cellophane layer of slick competence that just seals this up and renders it literally useless in five years time they could have been level 42 and just dressed up as themselves and got on with it and people would have accepted it but because it's 1977 if you're playing this kind of music you've got to try to look the part at the very least and have a jokey name that alludes to your whiteness. Unlike, say, Level 42, who are using funk, I don't know, I'm not saying Mark King was talking about his situation, but there was no attempt to sound American in his vocal, necessarily. Whereas this is, yeah, this is pure black throat. Yeah, as Taylor says, it's fairly worthless.

I think it's been undiscovered, though course by hip-hop producers because it's got a groove yes they they can summon up a groove the bass and the drums and everything else it works but yeah um as a performance it's it's actually grotesque i mean if you're looking for positives, the backing vocals are great. Good work there by the two Peets. And I like the synth squiggles that they've plastered all over it in a semi-successful attempt to liven the thing up a bit. And good for them that they just did this and then melted away. You know, they weren't like, right, said Fred. You imagine when I'm Too Sexy came out,

if someone said to you, in 30 years' time, they'll still be controversial. Why? Oh, because of their dangerously arrogant stupidity. Oh, right. So why are they still getting attention? Because of their dangerously arrogant stupidity. Oh, right, I don't understand this new century.

No, neither do we. Right, said Fred, I have got a new record out, getting play on Mike Reed's Heritage Chart Show. Of course. With a cartoon video about how we're all being spoon-fed disinformation by the MSM, like robot sheep. There's a bit where a TV appears and it says on it, Tell-I-Vision. Oh.

Think about it. google operation northwoods look this time traveler has a mobile phone in a picture from 1906 you're all so blind so blind i bet you don't get any of that from the surviving members of honky no if any no they just want to throw up videos of their old photos on YouTube when they're stripped at the waist and a bit too close to each other, put the caption, we weren't gay. Yes. Yeah, important.

In case they're in Superdrug today, picking up their prescriptions. Some homosexuals might rush in and attempt to fuck them up the arse. Yeah. Yeah, it's a bit protest too much in it yeah but you know at the end of the day they may look like the contents of a crate marked for euthanasia in a section of the wonderland zoo that's closed to the public but at least their only message to humanity was come on get up and join the party them Them and the late Dr. Goebbels. It's pretty obvious at this point that Robin Nash is just bonging anything.

This is a repeat of a performance from a month ago. A month? What's going on, Robin? It's a rush job, it feels, this episode at times. It's a rush job. It's like, oh, jubilee, jubilee, jubilee. Oh, there's nothing we can do. We can't use that.

We can't use that. Oh, party. Yes, chuck it in. Yeah, anyone would think there's a currently popular record in the charts that for some reason they can't use so the following week join the party moved up

two places to number 28 but would get no further the follow up give all you got failed to chart and they were never seen or heard of ever again. Come on, get up and join the party. Get up and do your thing.

Do it, do it. Come on, get up and join the party. Get up and do your thing. Oh, I'm sorry to say this, Pop Craze youngsters, but we're going to have to leave you for a bit. But trust me, our hearts are staying right here with you, the Pop Craze Youngsters. So come and join us tomorrow for the thrilling denouement of this episode of Top of the Pops.

I'm Al Needham, they're Taylor Parks and Neil Kulkarni, and you are staying pop crazed music music music music