Chart Music: the Top Of The Pops Podcast - #68 (Pt 3): 1.5.80 – The Ken Of The Eighventies

Episode Date: December 9, 2022

Simon Price, Neil Kulkarni and Al Needham continue their voyage into this episode of TOTP, and the thick musk of denim and leather is beginning to permeate the air. Whitesnake! Saxon! Motörhead! Three youths up the front giving themselves a headache! Rude t-shirts! Jimmy Ruffin in a Hawaiian shirt! Close Encounters of the Errol Brown kind! RRROCKKKK!   Video Playlist | Subscribe | Facebook | Twitter | The Chart Music Wiki | Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This will certainly have an adult theme and might well contain strong scenes of sex or violence, which could be quite graphic. It may also contain some very explicit language, which will frequently mean sexual swear words. What do you like to listen to? Um... Chart music. Chart music. Chart music. Hey up, you pop craze youngsters, and welcome to part three of episode 68 of Chart Music. Here I am, Al Needham, and I don't know about Simon Price and Neil Kulkarni, but I am in no

mood to fanny about. Let's tuck in. That was my living room, that was Robbie Franklin in the groove, at number 13 in the charts, and of course it was Lex and Co. Now here's Whitesnake and a fool for your lovin'. I wish that was my living room, says Vance off camera, as he immediately pitches us into Fall For Your Lovin' by Whitesnake. Born in Saltburn-by-the-Sea in 1951, David Coverdale spent the late 60s

and early 70s fronting local bands such as Vintage 67, The Government and the Fabulosa Brothers. In 1973, while leafing through that week's Melody Maker, he read that Deep Purple were looking for a replacement for Ianan gillan who had fallen out with richie blackmore and wanted to quit music and go into the hotel business fucking hell what is it with pop stars in the hotel business him and bruce foxton should have set up together seeing as he knew deep purple after the government had supported them in 1969 he threw his hat into the ring and was unveiled as the new frontman at the end of the year. In 1974, Coverdell found himself leading a band that had not only put out two LPs that year, but also made his American debut in front of 200,000 people at the California

Jam Festival. But his soul and funk influences were beginning to seep into the band, which pissed off Richie Blackmore no end, leading him to quit in June of 1975 after telling the band, go ahead with your shoeshine music, I'm off. While the remaining members of Purple were inclined to disband, Coverdale encouraged them to stay together, and they put out the LP Come Taste the Band. But the drugs took hold of two of them, diminishing sales were kicking in, and when Coverdale walked off in tears at the last show of their 1976 tour

and put in his resignation, he was told by John Lord and Ian Pace, the last two original members that they had already decided to split the band up. Coverdell immediately launched a solo career teamed up with guitarist Mickey Mude formerly of the funk rock band Snarfoo and put out the debut LP White Snake in February of 1977. A year later by the time his second LP Northwinds was out, he'd already formed a band named after that first LP. By 1980, he'd even recruited Lord and Pace from his old band and put out three LPs under the White Snake name, and this this single the follow-up to Long Way From Home which got to number 55 in November of 1979 is the lead cut from their third LP Ready and Willing which comes out in three

weeks time. Like many Whitesnake songs of the era it's about the breakup of Coverdale's first marriage and was originally written for BB King. It came out a fortnight ago, entered the charts last week at number 51, and this week it soared 21 places to number 30. And here's the first video of the night featuring the band in concert. And oh, cheer up, Tommy. Here comes the rock. Yeah, this is right up Tommymmy street isn't it oh yeah firstly i feel like i should divulge a kind of close encounter that has some relevance to this the year was 1991 i was at university in york and i was having a weekend staying at a mate's house

in scarborough and um i'd sort of done the town i was sort of goggling at the fact that at the stage door rock club i noticed members of the fuck awful little angels swanning around so i and I'd sort of done the town. I was sort of goggling at the fact that at the Stage Door Rock Club, I noticed members of the fuck-awful Little Angels swanning around, so I was already quite starstruck. On the Saturday afternoon, we were tooling around the town centre before the inevitable pilgrimage to Hairy Bob's Cave,

which, of course, it necessitated a trip to our price and I was in our price and I think I found a Public Enemy t-shirt I wanted and I was in the queue and my mate,'s like a serious serious metalhead he suddenly like turned really white even whiter than he was and started practically trembling you know very wide-eyed and I was like you know what the hell's up with you and he started frantically darting his eyes to the guy in front of me in the queue I hadn't really noticed that this chap was wearing a very expensive looking leather coat and he had a fistful of beethoven symphonies on cd in his hand and my mate informed me it was

david coverdale no yes indeed and i'm not a price in our price in scarborough in 1990 now and um i mean i must admit i really couldn't give a shit at the time because by then i mean white snake had had their big monstrous hits yeah and they were firmly in my head at least that I was a sepulture and metallic of head you know they were Whitesnake were everything that was wrong with metal you know for me that encounter was only topped by the way a year later when I stood behind sky blue legend Peter Unlove in the Cure Ball Hillfc in coventry he got himself a three piece chicken meal and a diet coke by the way i'll never forget that um yeah yeah i was close to cover there but i mean at this point in white snakes trajectory they're way more of a blues

rock thing and they're hugely hugely dated even in 1980 right they're sort of feeding off the extra energy that the wobble hum has bought to heavy rock yes um and the wobble hum unlike punk it never sought to kind of slay the old heroes you know it never dissed the old bands but this is this is pretty awful man um this song um basically because of i think because the cover dale unlike those other frontmen that leave big bands, he's not really sufficient enough of a visionary. Not to talk about fire and ice like Derek Smalls or something, but to sustain himself. You know, Gillan goes off and does Gillan. Ronnie James Dio has left Rainbow by now.

He's just about to drop Heaven and Hell with Sabbaths, one of their best albums. Ozzy is about to drop Blizzard of Oz, you know, which has got some of his biggest solo tunes on it. Coverdale here, he's really reconvening Deep Purple without the crazy egotist who made it interesting, i.e. Richie Blackmore,

and doing this rather sort of dull blues rock, much as he did with the cover of Ain't No Love in the Heart of the City. Ian Pace and John Lord have been recruited by Coverdale, and the band aren't

overly happy about that. I think, is it the bass player bernie mars and he starts wearing a subtly adapted t-shirt like john lyden's pink floyd one uh it's a deep purple t-shirt that says no i wasn't in deep fucking purple it must have been good for coverdale though to fucking turn the tables and say oh you're not doing very well at the minute, lads. Tell you what, why don't you join my band, seeing as you kicked me out of yours? It's a very Coverdale move. I think he inherited a lot of egotism from Ritchie Blackmore. But unlike Ritchie, Ritchie Blackmore's kind of hilarious, whereas Coverdale often isn't.

Oh, I don't know about that. His appearance in Rock Family T trees is fucking amazing yeah yeah yeah but but the sheer turnover in whitesnake in the band i mean you know they go through like nine different lineups and in the subsequent decade you know shedding the skin well coverdale has inherited that kind of ego and bossiness i think from blackmore um you know i mean richie blackmore famously forced Dio to sing romantic songs and Coverdale to sing about mystical stuff when he was in purple.

But I think Coverdale's actually perhaps even a bit more arrogant and brutal than Richie Blackmore was. You know, he fires Marsden and Moody because they're not taking it seriously enough in a few years. He starts quite soon after this being heavily influenced by his new manager, John Kolodner who john kolodner is an interesting figure he's kind of ex-music journalist and photographer becomes one of the most brutal a and r people at gethin he signs like asian white zombie and madness and all sorts of bands and peter gabriel and phil collins he claims

that he signs acdc but when he gets involved with Coverdale in a few years, he encourages him to absolutely start dominating Whitesnake. I mean, later on, like the keyboardist Mel Galley, that I think we see in his video, you know, he has a horrible injury, breaks his arm, has this metal thing put in his hand to enable him to play. And it's true that when Coverdale saw this, he said, you can't play a Whitesnake with that on. You'll look like a spastic. This is what Coverdale saw this, he said, you can't play a white snake with that on. You'll look like a spastic.

This is what Coverdale says to him. You know, it's very hard to find anyone with a good word to say about Coverdale. He's kind of pompous about what he does with very little self-deprecation or humor. I was reading a sounds piece, actually, from 78. And he says in this, you know, the quotes are unbelievable. I mean, he says, you know, it seems the media have become alienated from my music, which comes from the heart.

They call it heavy metal, not even human, not even flesh and blood. And he keeps that pomposity up. I mean, even by 2008, he's still up his own arse massively. He says about ex-band members moaning about him, he says, sometimes I just felt it necessary to redecorate the house of Snake. And I read a brilliant interview actually by Gavin Martin, I think it was in the NME, 81-ish, where, you know, he's asked about his R&B influences. He says, I find coloured boys seem to be able to come out of the closet easier and sing exactly what they're thinking about, rather than do a cosmetic job like you spanned out ballet.

Yes. Ever since I was knee-high to a Chinese waiter, I've been listening to R&B. Coverdell rapidly builds up a sort of reputation as being almost a laughable kind of cock rock figure and quite sexist in his lyrics. You know, he says a lot of the songs that have been called blatantly sexist are about my daughter, which is a bit Trump-evancher-ish. Yeah, he said, I did a song called Girl,

which went, you treat me like a dog and I shake my tail for you because she's the only girl who ever had me on all fours doing impressions of horses. He says, it's better than bottling it up.

I never pretended to be a sperm bank um there's a lot of tunes where the male is dominant which the fucking female militant journalists pick up on i'm just writing about it if i was a faggot i'd write about geezers but i'm not um and then his politics come out actually in this interview sorry to keep on coming no no kind of eye popping i mean he says he's asked about you know his distance in a sense from his roots and he says i bust my bollocks what i do i get paid for it incredibly well paid for it but it's 24 hours a day 52 years weeks of the year non-stop a lot of people want something for nothing in this country and he's asked about

thatcher and he says the closest thing we've got to to Churchill in that she can unify the country, but she's got front and leadership and I would probably be in the Young Conservatives. So, yeah, I have problems with Cover Down, which isn't helped by this song because I find this song pretty dull, to be honest with you. And I wish he would have just left it for B.B. King today. We're going to see a lot of denim and leather in the back half of this episode because 1980 is the year of both the new wave of British heavy metal and the return of some rock dinosaurs. Why is that? Ooh, why? Well, I mean, the Wobberham needed the kick up the arse of punk, I would say. It's starting to get discovered.

It's starting to get covered in the press more. And, you know, it's definitely the year where it comes across, hits the charts with the bands that we're actually going to see soon um in this episode in terms of the old dinosaurs coming back i just think it's part of the cycle they've kind of they've had their 70s flair at moments that it's all fallen apart thanks to drugs and ego and they now just want back in so you hear gillan making music you hear coverdale making music with white snake ronnie james deo is back with sabbath ozzy's gone solo these big big names just as perhaps the biggest name led zeppelin are falling apart are coming back with new stuff and and that's that's

the sort of reason why simon were the grebs starting to surface at your school round about this time not many before i go any further i've just got to say california jam festival i hate sebastian co just had to get that in if you know you know um yeah there weren't many metallers but my best mate was one i've mentioned this before um my best mate and my next door neighbor andrew rapousis hello andrew the executioner of action men the executioner of action men, yeah and I would hear this crap while playing Sabutio and I grudgingly grew to enjoy a lot of it

by osmosis and the same thing happened for him in reverse with Two-Tone when he came round my house and I actually saw Whitesnake live with Andrew at Cardiff St David's Hall on 7th of March 1984 because I got free tickets off my dad right um and we were right down the front by David Coverdale's thrusting crotch and uh and and to

give you an idea of what a white snake gig was like at that time I actually uh consulted setlist fm to refresh my memory and it tells me that the seventh song was called keyboard solo john lord right the eighth song was called drum solo cozy powell that's the seventh and eighth tracks of the gig for fuck's sake um the album they're promoting at that time was called slide it in of course it was yes yeah yeah um the not even slightly cryptic title track of which goes i'm gonna slide it in right to the top slide it in i ain't never gonna stop slide it in right to the top i'm gonna slide it in slide it in um so yeah i mean he had he had previous for this of course uh you mentioned his um 1977 solo album white snake which as you say eventually gave the band its name

the title track from that goes got a white snake mama you wanna shake it mama got a white snake mama come and let it crawl on you just enough to see you through and there's a load of sniggersome stuff about a backdoor man

like Led Zeppelin's Whole Lotta Love and indeed all the blues songs that Led Zeppelin ripped off Whites Love and indeed all the blues songs that Led Zeppelin ripped off. Yeah, I mean, Whitesnake might as well have been called David Coverdale's Lovely Cock. Well, exactly right. The sleeve of Slide It In had an actual snake writhing down a woman's cleavage,

like a real-life spinal tap sleeve, which makes me convinced that Whitesnake must have been one of the many inspirations, along with another band we're coming to later and he had previous for that as well in terms of artwork the 1979 white snake album love hunter it had uh fantasy art by chris achilleos of a naked woman straddling a massive snake it's like it's like dave we get it you've got a large penis you know i mean the cover of this single is a belt coiling like a snake. Right. With the buckle being all fang-ish.

He calls himself a swordsman, doesn't he? Does he now? He's famously said on stage, times are hard for a swordsman such as I. And the thing is, until literally five minutes ago, I found David Coverdale very likeable. Because I didn't know all that stuff that Neil's just told us. I didn't.

And, you know, for all that kind of unreconstructed chauvinism and cock-swinging that I mentioned, I did find him strangely likeable. He's no Ian Gillan, but he was still somebody I would like to have had a pint with. Yes. I thought he had that kind of agreeable suaveness, like a kind of James Bond with the hair of a King Charles Spaniel.

And a friend of the show, Richard Ogood, once said that all he wanted was for... Hey, Richard. He said that all he wanted was for David Coverdale to call him Ricardo. And I get that. Like he called Richie Blackmore. Is that right? Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. In Rock Family Trees. Right is that right yeah right yeah yeah in that in rock family trees right yeah yeah yeah there we go purple one's fucking brilliant yeah and

david coverdale is so fucking affected there's something about rock stars from the northeast they just put it on big style like brian ferry and sting but i want my heavy metal front men to be ridiculous yeah completely i think that's kind of the deal. My dad actually interviewed David Coverdale for CBC Radio in Cardiff. And that's how I got the gig tickets. And I think my dad was expecting this kind of spaniel-haired

Dumbo. But they actually got on really well. And they just talked about blues all night. Because, as you mentioned, that is where he was coming from, Coverdale. I can only imagine they didn't talk politics, because my dad's a massive lefty you know but full for your loving is one long blues trope about a woman who's done him wrong isn't it you know yes so so it's a different kind of sexism here from the tits and serpents variety you know it's basically the old women you just can't trust them the posh grebs from the nicest day

are not quite surfacing in our school just yet, but they wouldn't be far off. And it was pretty obvious that, along with Rainbow and REO Speedwagon and fucking Styx, Whitesnake was seen as very much a girls' band. Yeah. You know what I mean? You didn't see many Whitesnake patches

on a lad's denim jacket, but on a girl's arse on her jeans, yeah, there'd be that coily snake. Well, what Simon said about his experience of seeing Whitesnake live, that is why, you know, the Wobham was exciting, I think, to young rock fans, because there were no solos. There were no sort of 70-minute drum solos with that kind of nod to the blues rock of the early 70s. In fact, bands deliberately set out not to jam

and not to do solos and were far more influenced by glam and stuff. So yeah, that's why Nawabahum was exciting to a lot of kids, precisely because it wasn't as self-indulgent as Whitesnake. And look, I find David Coverdale hilarious and I want my rock stars to be hilarious. The politics thing, yeah, it did kind of put me off him a little bit

because I wasn't aware of that before but if we're gonna have you know these these leonine rock gods let them be as preposterous as coverdale i mean this single and the video demonstrates what a girls band white snake were you know melodic band not unattractive and yes leonine front man and loads of songs about crying over women who's done David Coverdale wrong. And hard-loving women in particular. Have you ever encountered a hard-loving woman, by the way? I mean, yeah, probably. Yeah, I have.

Because I haven't written songs about it. Odd going, man. She was a nightclub bouncer in London. And she ended up giving me a nerve pinch on the neck and frog marched me into a cab so she could give it to me all night long. And her idea of foreplay was to bite chunks out of me lip and ask me if I've ever had a go at cock and ball torture.

I told her I'd thought about it, but I just couldn't get past the torture bit. You know what I mean? Cock and ball messing about with and having a laugh with. I'm all for that. Torture, not so much. But the video, it's your standard rock trope of, you know, the band miming live in concert, intercut with a crowd head banging away.

Yeah, I mean, you call him Leonine, and hair-wise, I guess he is, but his nose is aquiline. That's a hell of an eagle beak he's got going on there. You notice it when he throws his head back in anguish, you know. And, yeah, it's classic cock rock, isn't it? He stands with his legs apart in that George Osborne, Theresa May, Tory Power stance. And the lighting rig is very of that era.

It's that standard heavy metal rig of two banks of red, yellow and blue spots. And line-up-wise, you've got Ian Pace on drums, wearing a bucket hat, for fuck's sake. Yes! He's like fucking Renny's dad, isn't he? I know! And you've got the aforementioned John Lord on keyboard, so it is basically Deep Purple minus Ritchie Blackmore.

And of course, yeah, he only left Purple because he didn't get along with Ritchie Blackmore. Seems like nobody gets along with Ritchie Blackmore. And of course, yeah, he only left Purple because he didn't get along with Ritchie Blackmore. Seems like nobody gets along with Ritchie Blackmore. No, no, no. No, that's why I left. But the mere mention of this slot and Pete Frame is sharpening his pencil and getting his ruler out, isn't he?

Because the whole Deep Purple diaspora is insanely incestuous. There's that convoluted family tree of Whitesnake, Rainbow, Gillen and Sabah. And each branch of that tree had its moments, I think. I mean, it ought to go without saying that Here I Go Again is an absolute fist-in-the-air monster, specifically the 1986 version

with his future wife, Tawny Kitane, writhing around on a car bonnet in the video. My favourite thing I found though while uh reading up on white snake for this was this sentence on on the wikipedia entry coverdale is known in particular for his powerful blues tinged voice as well as his vibrant caring and loving stage persona vibrant caring and loving i mean i i don't know who wrote that But I'll be a fool for your Vibrant, caring, loving, no more David Coverdale, fucking hell

It's mad actually that John Lord's in this band I mean John Lord's going to turn 40 Next year, you know in 81 John Lord's locking on So seeing him on stage with Ian And what is Ian Pace wearing He never Dressed like that in purple.

And I know purple was a long time before this, but I don't know what look he's aiming for at all there. But I think it's telling. It's not all denim and leather. That's the thing. It's this kind of Allman Brothers band kind of look almost. There's a sort of Southern rock feel to it. And I think that reveals the influences behind the band as well.

Yeah. I mean, the band, apart from Coverdown, they look fucking old and tubby don't they but the one thing that did excite me did you notice the guitarist and his red sweatshirt no he's got a slogan on his t-shirt here comes and the rest is his guitar so you can imagine my feelings on looking at this but sadly i looked at the bits of the video that top of the pops cut away from and by his guitar. So you can imagine my feelings on looking at this. But sadly, I looked at the bits of the video that Top of the Pops cut away from and disappointingly the obscured word is

trouble. And of course, as mentioned in a previous chart music, Slade really nicked off this for Lock Up Your Daughters, didn't they? I don't remember that one. Yeah, I think you're right. Anything else to say? Oh, just one last quote from Dave. He's asked about Prince.

Oh, God, where's this going? Oh, fuck me. No, it's not so bad. He goes, the coloured chappy from Michigan. Oh, no. And then he says, it's all a bit too nice for me. You've got to remember, I was weaned on Sly and the Family Stone, Jimmy Brown and all that.

Nothing stands up to it nowadays. So there you go. So the following week, Fall For Your Loving jumped nine places to number 21. And two weeks later, it got to number 13, its highest position. The follow-up, Ready and Willing, got to number 43 in July of 1980.

But they'd roar back in 1981 when Don't Break My Heart Again got to number 17 in May of 1981 and they'd have 7 more top 40 hits throughout the 80s including top 10 places for Is This Love and Here I Go Again

in 1987 Rock! introduce this man to our country, Mr. Jimmy Ruffin. Vance, nodding sagely, says, ooh, nice to see heavy music back in the charts. Then he tells us what else he thinks is nice, the return of Jimmy Ruffin with Hold On To My Love. Born in Collinsville, Mississippi in 1936, Jimmy Ruffin was the son of a sharecropper who was a member of the gospel group The Singing Nightingales with his little brother David. In 1961, he linked up with Motown as a session singer, only to have his career interrupted by the draft. session singer only to have his career interrupted by the draft. When he got out of the army in 1964 he was offered Elbridge Bryant's spot in the Temptations but recommended his brother to Barry Gordy instead saying that he looked more like a temptation than he did and continued to record as a solo artist for the Motown subsidiary Soul. In 1966 he got wind of a song which had been demoed for the Detroit

Spinners and begged the songwriters to let him bagsy it. When they did the single What Becomes of the Broken Hearted got to number seven in America and number eight over here in the first week of 1967. The success of that single set him up to become one of the most prominent Motown artists of the 60s in the UK, which peaked in 1970 when he scored a pile of top 10 hits with Farewell is a Lonely Sand,

I'll Stay Forever My Love, and It's Wonderful. And he resurfaced in 1974 with a re-release of what becomes of the broken hearted getting to number four in august of that year by then he'd already left motown and put out two lps for polydor which were only released in the uk and failed to chart and he spent the late 70s in the wilderness until he was picked up by RSO Records last year. This is the follow-up to Falling In Love With You,

which fell to chart in 1977, and it's the lead-off cut from his 11th LP, Sunrise, which came out last November and was produced and written by Robin Gibb with songwriting assistance from Blue Weaver, formerly of Amen Corner, and The Straubs. It's entered the chart this week at number 36, and here's the man himself, in the studio for the first time since September of 1971,

having a lend of Tommy Vance's Observation Tower. It's been a good year for Motown acts in the british charts hasn't it i mean that the detroit spin has got to number one last month still at number seven in the charts uh the jacksons are about to roar back with a triumph lp marvin gaye's back on tour stevie wonder's getting hotter than july reddit and here's jimmy ruffin who had far more success over in the uk than he did in America seemingly on the comeback trail. Yeah it's interesting that the cycle of nostalgia was

a lot quicker in those days and it did feel around this time that there was a kind of wave of fondness for 60s Motown and you know it's only 10 years in the past what becomes the broken hearted becoming a hit twice I mean twice isn't enough no because because

i've just got to say that is one of the small handful of songs that when you're hearing it you are thinking okay this is obviously the greatest record ever made you know it's it's one of those it's got that power and um i actually saw jimmy ruffin at hammersmith in 2009 and it was part of some kind of tawdry David Guest package show with millions of singers just coming on and doing a couple of songs. But even in that kind of context, Jimmy Ruffin doing his greatest hit still had that power to send shivers down my spine.

It's incredible. This song, though, I mean, it's slight but pleasant. I haven't heard it, honestly, in 40 years. But I could sing it in my head as soon as i saw the title written down yeah what i didn't realize at the time is what you said is that it's basically a bg's record yes the album it came from sunrise had the bg's hands all over it robin gibb co-produced it and co-wrote this song barry and morris turn up as songwriters and backing vocals elsewhere they're members of the bges live backing band on several of the tracks. And as you say, it's on RSO, which of course was the Bee Gees label

at that time. But that itself was kind of a contentious issue, right? Because this very year, 1980, the Bee Gees filed $200 million lawsuit against RSO and the owner and manager Robert Stigwood claiming mismanagement. Now, a bit of context for that, this was the aftermath of that disastrous Sergeant Pepper movement that they made in 1979. And Stigwood basically issued a $310 million countersuit alleging libel and defamation of character and extortion. So they settled out of court for an undisclosed sum

and patched up their differences which is bizarre so there's that connection the whole Bee Gees thing there is as you say um a Cardiff connection because Blue Weaver the co-writer on this song plays keyboards as well is from Cardiff and also um Dennis Bryan on drums he was another former member of Amen Corner so it's it's a half Welsh record basically Basically, if there was a sole World Cup, this song would qualify for the Wales squad. But the thing with it is, despite the pedigree of the musicians involved,

the Bee Gees and the Welsh lot, and of course the Motown backgrounds of Jimmy himself, the production on this single sounds really cheap and toy-like to me. And it's a real contrast with jimmy ruffin's musical past i i went on a bit of a voyage of uh soul vinyl rediscovery during lockdown yeah i was just digging dusty old lps out of my collection stuff that i'd acquired but never played and one of them was i am my brother's keeper by the ruffin brothers so david and jimmy together and that's from 1970 and the the standout track from that

being the bridge suicide heartbreaker got to see if i can't get mommy to come back home oh that title fucking hell but the the production on that um 1970 as you'd expect peak motown the funk brothers on fire yeah and then 10 years later jimmy sounds like this and i i did wonder if it's one of those things that we've seen before on Top of the Pops where a soul singer gets screwed over by the Top of the Pops orchestra. No, I'm about 80% sure that this is the Top of the Pops orchestra because on the original, there's some bells and you can't really hear them on this performance. And the backing singers are definitely different.

And I believe they are the Maggie Streder singers who took over from the Ladybirds in 1977. And Jimmy's singing live, I believe, because he does a few bits at the beginning, you know, like singers do on Top of the Pops to prove that they're singing live. You might be right. I played them on A and B back to back.

And the only difference I could make out was just the speed of it. So in that case, if it was the orchestra, then they didn't do him a disservice. It really does sound that cheap. I don't know. It sounds dated, perhaps deliberately so. You know, that they're aiming for something like that, for that kind of sound.

And he's definitely singing live here, because he sounds rough at times. He sounds slightly hanging, whilst dressed in this kind of Giacomo shirt that's far too big for him. Oh, yes. Would you call that a Hawaiian shirt? It's a little bit too tasteful for an Hawaiian shirt in 1980s. Yeah, not quite Hawaiian.

No. No. More of a Hawaiian tabard, perhaps. Yeah. And I sort of don't like the fact that Jimmy's stranded up on that platform away from the kids. Yeah, he looks lowly, doesn't he? Well isn't it yeah he's far too high up i don't know why they did that what's that song called simon someone try and bring jimmy back from the observation tower his feet are obscured by dry ice as well so you can't even see it's like he's just sort of floating

there yeah he's doing his best and he's giving it the air grabs and he's trying to deliver it. But I don't know. I just think it's nice to see a genuine Motown star on British TV. That in itself would have, I imagine at the time, had a bit of a novelty factor to it. He was a bit like Edwin Starr in that respect and a bit like Gino Washington, although, of course, Gino wasn't on Motown,

in the sense that he came over here for quite a while and made his living in the UK Jimmy Ruffin so I think because of that he he looms disproportionately large in the imagination of British soul fans but he hadn't had a hit for a while when this came out but around this time as you say at the turn of the 80s there seemed to be this wave of nostalgia and affection and fondness for these old Motown acts so you had the Detroit Spinners reaching number one with Working My Way Back To You this year and then the following year 81 you've got the Four Tops having a big hit with When She Was My Girl yes and in the middle you've got this and it's interesting that in all cases they're not trying to reinvent themselves they're not you know it's not like somebody like Jermaine Jackson going for

quite a sort of modern funk sound with his material around this time and michael as well but with these acts they're very much harking back to the golden age yes it's not a classic this but you sort of don't begrudge the three minutes of your time that it takes up i think no it's proper chicken in a basket disco soul but it's it's grade a poultry meat and it's a well-crafted basket but you know it doesn't taste like soul food but it'll do for us british cunts indeed in the heart of the midlands yeah and his voice is always just wonderful to listen to especially yes which is why i don't know why he's up on that platform like he's got a restriction order on him or something

very odd so the following week hold on to my love soared 22 places to number 14 and a week later it got to number seven its highest position the follow-up night of love failed to chart and he never did again although in 1984 he was recruited by pa Weller for the Council Collective to chip in with the single Soul Deep Part One, the benefit single for the minors, which got to number 24 in December of that year. And he died in 2014 at the age of 78. I'm nothing And I can't get on without you You're the light, you're the light of my life There's no giving you up

Now we played you some David Coverdale. Let's play you some heavy music by a newish band. This is Saxon. They're well in the charts with Wheels of Steel. As the camera dollies back from Jimmy Ruffin, grinding out the last of Hold On To My Love. We see Vance overseeing a gaggle of the kids and mumbling about the last song that I couldn't quite catch, Soz. He then tells us that we've had some David Coverdale and now it's time for some metal from a newish band

who are well in the charts as some girl off-camera giggles. He introduces Wheels of Steel by Saxon. Formed in Barnsley in 1975, son of a bitch played the Yorkshire rock circuit in the mid-70s with a drummer called Frank Gill, a former member of the Glitter Band. Changing their name to Saxon in the summer of 1978 when they signed a deal with Career Records in France, they supported Motorhead and Gillen and put out

their eponymous debut LP in 1979. This single, the follow-up to Backs to the Wall, which failed to chart, is the lead-off cut from their new album of the same name which got to number five in the lp charts last month and is currently at number 13 it came out in mid-march enter the chart at number 66 soared 25 places to number 41 and just when it looked like it would go over the top, it dropped four places to number 45. But the week after that, it rallied and entered the chart at number 37, and they were rewarded with a slot on top of the pops. After climbing 12 places to number 25, it dropped to number 28,

but this week it's jumped eight places to number 20. They're midway through their first headlining tour of the UK at the moment and are about to knock the crowd out at Chequers in Barnstable this evening. So here's another chance to see that performance from three weeks ago. Chaps, I've got a feeling that a lot is going to be said about Saxon and this performance, but before we do that, just to set things in context, here's an article in Music Week from a fortnight ago which tells a tale or two. It reads, heavy metal hitting back with a bang. Heavy metal music is enjoying its biggest boom for years, with albums selling apace and concerts selling out all across the country.

Often written off as a minority music of interest, only two mindless headbangers, heavy metal is now providing a lifeline for the industry. for the industry. Along the established names such as Status Quo, Ted Nugent, Rainbow, ACDC and Rush, a new generation of bands are making their impact on the UK market. Saxon, Iron Maiden, Girl, Sammy Hagar, April Wine, Riot, Crocus, Death Leopard and a host of aspiring HM bands are shifting vinyl and selling out hauls.

Last week, Saxon's album Wheels of Steel went straight into the Music Week album chart at number 10 with no big promotion or TV advertising. Careers A&R manager Peter Hinton comments, We signed Saxon two years ago when the UK company was first formed. They were our first UK signing and it came as quite a culture shock when I first saw them performing in Sheffield as it was in the middle of the punk boom. Phonogram product manager Alan Phillips is not surprised by the current interest in heavy metal music I think the real reason for the popularity of heavy metal music is that if you get into the music as a kid then you stay with it as you get older unlike more fashionable styles of music

think a bit of a nail on head situation there isn't there there's going to be a lot of old fuckers listening to this sort of stuff and a lot of kids as well yeah it's hard because career the record label they originally wanted saxon to be called anglo-saxon right which the band didn't go along with like the uk saxons saxon gb it's a great name, though, isn't it? Because like all the best heavy metal names, you can't just call them Saxon. It's got to be Saxon. Well, Tommy really gives it some, doesn't he? It's like scorpions. I mean, bless him.

It's nice for Tommy. I feel happy for Tommy by this point in the show. We've had Whitesnake. Now we've got Saxon, and he's going on about how it's good to see some heavy music back in the charts. And then he gives it the full tommy doesn't he on on wheels he goes wheels of steel i mean you sort of imagine he's got if not a boner then at least the stirrings of a semi going on by this point they are the one band on the show so far who definitely aren't wearing saxons saxon yeah no their legs shocking isn't

their legs are as straight as their sexuality, no question about it. But yeah, he describes them as a newish band, and they were, but I think they were not quite the first Newobham band I was aware of, because Running Free by Iron Maiden came out in February 1980.

That was a hit, and I remember that. But in terms of Saxon being new-ish, here's how quickly music moved in the olden days. Saxon released four albums in their first two years, and there were just four months between the second and third album, both released in 1980. And the title track of the fourth album, which was Denim and Leather from 1981,

is nostalgic for 1979. It goes, where were you in 79 when the dam began to burst? Did you check us out down at the local show? And their fans are probably thinking, of course I remember. It's only two years ago. I haven't even changed my underpants since then. Cheap digger metal is there. I'm just going to say that it feels like a very South Yorkshire thing, the Newabham, the new wave of British being metal. Cheap digger metal is there. I'm just going to say that it feels like a very

South Yorkshire thing, the New Wave of British heavy metal. What with Saxon and Def Leppard. You've got that whole connection with heavy industry and metal anyway. Obviously Black Sabbath being from the West Midlands and that's where it all begins. And also

places like the North East and the Welsh Vsh valleys being real heartlands of metal fandom yeah um saxon as you say from barnsley in terms of barnsley icons that there's uh basically michael parkinson uh you've got uh brian glover arthur scargill and biff byford so that you know he's right up there Have you looked into his life before Saxon? It's unbelievably grim. Go on. His mother died when he was 11. His violent alcoholic father, first of all,

lost an arm in an industrial accident and then died when Biff was 13. And then Biff got his girlfriend pregnant when he was 15. I mean, fucking hell. Then he works in the coal industry, but he was told he was too tall to go down the mines, so they kind of put him in the pump house or something. Could have got a job as a prop.

Yeah, yeah, right, exactly. So when you know that stuff, you sort of wish him well. You sort of think, it may not be my kind of music, but fair fucks to you, you know. He seems like a likeable doofus, which you often get with heavy metal bands. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, that's absolutely part of the appeal of saxon yeah the northernness is a big part of it yeah i mean the slight humor and there's a mustache on stage here that's very

it's very seth armstrong isn't it yes yeah we'll come to that later but oh yeah before we go any further neil can you provide a casting vote because um simon just called the lead singer biff byford and i always assumed it was biff bifford what is it i think it's bifford you know although it is spelled byford um but yeah i think it's biff bifford that would i mean because you know that that trend of 80s metal singers having names yeah that were just daft and sounded like wrestlers' names, ultimately. Bifford sounds like the mortal enemy of Roger the Dodger and he's going to give them an absolute bashing after school for conning a bag of sweets out of him.

I'm sticking with Bifford only because that's how it's pronounced in a little bit of documentary footage, which I'm going to allude to later on. Oh, OK. OK. But, yeah, you're right're right saxon like all heavy metal bands of this era well most of them anyway they all look like grafters they look like they've just come off the lathe and put a guitar on yeah you've seen the um judas priest documentary

haven't you um dream deceivers about their trial in america yeah yeah and there's a scene where they're all standing there waiting for the verdict and they all look like a a load of miners that got involved in a fishing weekend that's gone horribly wrong you know what i mean and and to bands like this you know top of the pops is hugely important yes um and and it's not just usually important in a promotional sense they've had their minds blown by Sweet and Bowie and all of that in the early 70s so they make a show of being on top of the pops

and fuck what a sight we get here also thanks to the stage again I think the production values on this show like Simon mentioned are occasionally spot on those big spiral circles within circles that are above the

band yes um even if they look a state and it's a great state a massive stack of amps even though there's no need for them oh yeah like the stone roses doing falls gold but yeah i mean it it's a perfect stage set for them yes and a signifier of that massive crossover really between glam i mean you mentioned the Glitter Band connection. That kind of connection between glam and gayness and campness and the Wobboham at this point. Yeah, the way they're set out on stage is odd. Yeah.

Because you've got Pete Gill, the drummer, up front. And this is a recurring theme, isn't it? It's the drummers to the front episode of Top of the Pops. I was complaining before or mocking Ian Pace for wearing a fucking bucket hat. Your man from Saxon here, he's wearing a Saxon T-shirt, which is so uncool, you're not meant to do that. Having said that, I am wearing a Pop Crazed Youngster T-shirt

as I speak, so I shouldn't cast the first stone, possibly. A few other visual observations before we get to the main one, which I know you're dying to talk about. The guitarist, I'm not sure if it's Paul Quinn or Graham Oliver, because they're two guitarists, but one of them's playing a Gibson Flying V. Of course he is, because that was the fucking metal guitar at that time. And he's wearing Tiger Print leggings.

And again, I can't laugh because I've got those exact leggings. So basically, I am a member of Saxon. And then you've got Biff at the back. And it's like a school photo where the tall kids get sent to the back of the row. You know what I mean? But this song, chaps, I was absolutely shocked to discover that they're singing about a car instead of a motorbike. Yeah. It's Grease Lightning for Grebos, isn't it?

Yeah. And it's forced me into comparing and contrasting with the other big car song of the Aventis, You Need Wheels by the Merton Parkers. So what we know about Saxon's car is it's a 68 Chevy with pipes on the side. Yeah, right. In Barnsley. It runs on aviation fuel. It goes up to 140 miles an hour and more.

It's capable of blowing away a Trans Am from a standing start. It helps Biff Bifford slash Byford take no jive from the motorway pigs and has wheels of steel, which is a bit fucking thick, really, because you can just imagine all the sparks flying up and people going, oh, fucking hell, here's Saxon again. He's talking about his rims man this is proto hip-hop yeah because me to me wheels of steel is always grandmaster flash and the wheels of steel but don't you know what i mean don't forget that on the album wheels of steel there is a song called motorcycle man so they do have the biker angle oh yes oh yes we'll get to that in a minute, Neil. But the Merton Parkers car, it's a low slung sports car finished in red. It's guaranteed 100 miles from nothing dead. It's got heated windscreens front and rear. All the latest things. It even pours you a beer.

seven band radio stereogram there's only one previous owner but he was a stuntman value 500 pound now and the rest next week what which one of those two is appealing to you chaps well to be honest with you both those descriptions um as a dad and a buyer of cars in my past well you know where's the talk about reliability affordability of parts what's the mileage here what both of those songs are lacking is you know it ain't no shit you'll be getting lots of tit you know that I ain't bragging it's a real pussy wagon it's funny you mentioned

that you assumed Wheels of Steel was about a motorbike because I assumed You Need Wheels by Merton Parkers was about a Lambretta a 68 Chevy with pipes on the side what on the a628 yes i don't believe you biff i don't believe you but yeah they were obsessed with the biker thing because as well as that track you mentioned from the same album on the first saxon album there's a track called stallions of the highway which is about being a biker. So, yeah, he's kind of upgraded, I suppose, from two wheels to four.

I mean, Saxon at the moment, they do have an American car that they go about on tour with. Oh, like the KLS? Yes, yeah. But it's an automobile 99. Yeah, what a shame it wasn't a 98 automobile. They could have been lined with Public Enemy.

Bring the noise with Public Enemy and Saxon. Oh, yeah. Would have been miles better public enemy bring the noise of public enemy and saxon yeah oh yeah would have been miles better than fucking anthrax i hate that song i love it but i mean the thing is with this song you can tell immediately this isn't the wobber hum you can immediately tell the difference between this and those dinosaurs that we've already seen like like coverdale and white yes saxon had a few rules when they were starting or that the bifford used to talk about no covers that was an important one for that and no jamming right um you know he said in an interview that we want everything to build to a crescendo all the time by the way in the same interview from sounds in 79 the bassist steve says at the end of most gigs i want to throw my arms

wide and say to the audience i love you thanks for letting me play i'd open my bowels for them um and the wobble on them yeah yeah i mean partly here you could say that that kind of no covers no jamming policy that's kind of slightly the influence of punk, but I actually think the influence here massively, as we see a lot in the Wobbam, is ACDC. There's a lot of ACDC-alikes around in this period, from Saxon themselves to, as you mentioned,

the Swiss band Crocus. Yes. Crocus, fucking hell. Long Stick Go Boom by Crocus is one of the best ACDC sort of rip-offs ever. Right. But Crocus, fuck it, because they did a song called Smelly Nelly,

which is literally, honestly, I'm not, you know, just Google the lyrics. Don't listen to it. Video playlist, everyone. It's one of the most unpleasant songs ever. It's a horrible, hateful song. But anyway, you get that mix of ACDC,

also a bit of glam rock rock the northernness that we've mentioned that they're not po-faced no or pretty to be honest with you no you know and and they're like a lot of these bands they're having a laugh yeah at the moment paul quinn the guitarist is uh just late 79 he's got his cock and balls out on stage at the Sunderland Locarno and the bouncer puts an axe through their back line. You know, the guitarist Paul Quinn at this point has one of those rotating things to spin his guitar. Yes. Oh, yeah.

And he often smacks himself in the mouth. And like Simon said, yeah, Paul Quinn, I think it is Paul Quinn who's got the leopard print spandex on. In this performance, I particularly like the fact that most people's legs are wide apart. Yes. But Quinn doesn't. He kind of steps. It reminds me massively.

Once I was told, I was watching Metallica live, and I was told by their press officer, you've got to go behind the stage to watch him. Because when you watch what Lars Ulrich's doing, it's amazing, right? So I was standing backstage watching him doing his double kick drum stuff and immediately the only thing i could think of was you know you know whenever sooty ran you know what i mean whenever sooty or sweet ran and you saw that sort of little pause it was exactly like that and that's what paul quinn's doing on this appearance but there there's a lot of alikeness, if you like, in some metal bands. I mean, the drummer you mentioned with the Saxon T-shirt on

looks uncannily like Phil Taylor out of Motorhead, I think. And he's chewing gum, clearly, because he's nervous. But, yeah, there's a lot of ACDC-ness here. But this is an amazing year for Saxon. Yes. I mean, the first band, really the first Wobbleham band, I think, that got signed. And it is odd that they get signed to that particular label, who were really... A disco label.

Yeah, exactly. More of a sort of Italo disco label. Famously, you know, when Saxon go over to sign for Carrera, it's that classic thing. They get on a train at Doncaster. They go down to london they give an 80 quid each to buy clothes they they you know they hair around uh carnaby street tighten themselves up then they go to paris get some jam shoes no no no i mean wherever wherever metal wear was available at that time and and then they go up to paris they sign the deal

they're leaning on a big glass table in the penthouse office of this very, very, you know, moneyed-up record company, and one of them leans on it too far and it smashes into pieces, into a thousand pieces, they're mortified and they head back home. But it's an amazing year for them. Well, put it this way, Neil,

Saxon's first gig of 1980, the Assembly Hall of Oakham High School in Mansfield, one pound to get in. Their last gig of 1980, headlining at Hammersmith Odeon, £3.25 a ticket. A meteoric rise.

Indeed. Yeah, absolutely. And this is the year where, of course, they're on the bill at the inaugural Monsters of Rock Festival, hosted at Castle Donington august the 16th with alongside judas priest and scorpions and headliners rainbow you know so so this is a huge year for them a big year for them and and it's mental because wheels of steel with as we've mentioned not that much radio support or anything else it does sell 250 000 copies yeah it's all happening

for them this year yes it's It's all right, this song, but it's no 747 Strangers in the Night, is it? Because that, right, so that's a true story about a potential plane crash and you can't get any more metal than that. No.

And that's got an amazing riff and it's got real excitement and drama to it, you know. This is Scandinavia 101, for God's sake, get the ground lights on and all that. I fucking love it.

But Wheels of Steel, it's a bit sort of one note and plodding, but it's all right. But the most alarming thing about Wheels of Steel is the artwork. Have you seen it? No. It's a massive Nazi eagle clutching a wheel instead of a swastika. It's like, it's complete, like, it's not just by chance. It's not any old eagle.

It's definitely that Nazi eagle. Any, any, any old eagle. Yeah. It's not any old eagle. It's definitely that Nazi eagle. Any old eagle. It's a fucking iron eagle, yeah. It's a clutching or steel, yeah, instead of a swastika. Yeah, but that was their motif all the way through, wasn't it? Because Strong Arm of the Law had that eagle holding a police badge. Right. Well, yeah.

Fucking hell. There is that dangerous congruity between these kind of bands and Nazi imagery, to be honest with you. Yeah, yeah. Which will come to place, eh? As we see with... Yeah. Exactly, indeed. I would have completely ignored this or sulked at it or tuttered.

You know, I was a mod man. I'm not giving metal any fucking house room. It wasn't until 1986 that I allowed metal in my life through the medium of hip-hop when I listened to Raising Hell and Licence to Will. I mean, I remember one time at college right about 1988 or something like that i got into a huge argument with chart music luminary mad phil uh the rush obsessive that i mentioned earlier and you know he was going on hip-hop shit what you fucking what you're listening to that for and i said what you listen to fucking metal for and rush and all this shit and he demanded to listen to what i had on

at me walkman and i played it and it was by all means necessary by boogie down productions second track you're slipping and it comes on and he just looks at me and he's just said that's fucking smoke on the water you thick cunt and I had no idea and in order to make this musical exchange your bedrooms were next to each other and you smashed through the wall with a microphone stand do we address the elephant in the room now

yeah come on alright I mean it's the bassist isn't it we've got to talk about the bassist Steve Dawson the Trevor Boulder of New Albom. You can't take your eyes off him. No, you can't. But you want to.

You can't. You want to take your eyes off him, but you can't. He looks like Paul Rutherford's dad, doesn't he? Yes, it's incredible. His look is quite something. Or Freddie Mercury, sapped of all self-belief. I mean, look, me and Simon, we've got no reason. But he's got a right slap head on him, hasn't he?

He's balding, yeah. In a genre which prizes hair above most other things. Yeah, so he's balding, but he's compensating with the massive moustache. Yes. And he's got the spandex leggings. He's got white daps on. And he's got a black leather jacket over a bare chest. He looks like a politician visiting a farm or something, doesn't he?

With white fucking booty things on. And of course he's got his legs very wide apart. But the thing that I found unsettling, what I found unsettling is his hips rocking metronomically from side to side. It makes me feel a bit wrong. It's too sexual. Fair play to him. While the less liney members of Whitesnake were covering their hairless shame

with bucket hats and cowboy accoutrements. Steve Dawson doesn't give a fuck, does he? And I don't know what either of you are on about. I think he looks fucking great. But I think that is partly down to the short hair thing. I think that's partly down to Rob Halford from Judas Priest. Yes. When Rob Halford did that, that was quite a big move.

It kicked open the door didn't it yeah and what you see in subsequent years is yeah um saxon guy you also see i don't know i'm thinking of a band like except one of the worst of all german metal bands uh balls to the wall oh you got to get that video on the playlist as well i mean they have a really sort of you know a singer who you expect to come out with a massive peroxide perm. Yeah, closely cropped. I think it was a thing that certainly front men started doing. Here we've got the bassist doing it. There was the bald guy in Gillen as well.

What did he play? Was he a guitarist? But he was amazing as well. Bald guy with mirrored sunglasses. Oh, who played with John Deccan on Don't Be a Dumber. Oh, did he? Yes. Apparently Harry

Shearer acknowledged Steve Dawson from Saxon as the inspiration for Derek Smalls in Spinal Tap. Yes. Projecting strength.

Yeah. Pointing at the audience and all that malarkey, as Dawson put it. There's this quote from Dawson where he's actually quite

magnanimous about the whole thing. He goes, Harry's lovely. I'm proud to be an influence on Spinal Tap. They're taking the piss, but that's part of the game isn't it so fair play to him um i also think frankie poulain of the darkness owes a little bit to steve dawson's whole vibe by the way oh definitely yeah yeah i can definitely see that i mean it's interesting that harry shearer kind of

connection because it captures this time where these bands like saxon maiden etc they are having such a big impact on the other side of the pond um perhaps more so than here i mean it captures a time i think just before american bands took on the wobbleham and repackaged it and basically did it bigger i'm thinking of bands like motley crew and metallica that they all say that they're massively influenced by saxon. Whereas these bands kind of, they just happen in the UK, and they don't really lead anywhere, because what's going to happen next in UK metal is a more deathly kind of darker, thrashy kind of thing. Yeah, yeah.

But in America, these bands are hugely important to people like Lars Ulrich and people like Tommy Lee and people like that, in showing them that these things can get in the charts. You know, this is the thing. They're signed, Saxon, not because I think Korea want to, you know, get on top of some new wave of British heavy metal. It's because they've got chart potential. If you listen to a track like, I don't know, Big Teaser, it's like Power Pop.

It's, you know, so... In that article from Music Week the blood from career record said they were signed simply to um be a german chart act they didn't expect any chart success in the uk so it's a bonus for us interesting because career is the label of dollar and sheila and be devotion that's right saxon sit very strangely on that don don't they? And crucially, they're not pompous or po-faced about this. And Byford slash Bifford is asked, you know, about their look. He says, yeah, we wear tight pants. Why not?

The tighter, the better, I say. That appeals to the female part of the audience anyway. You can't ignore them, can you? He then says, blokes in the audience couldn't give two fucks whether you wear any fucking pants and your bollocks are just swinging i mean i beg to differ to be honest yeah well quite but there's a very telling quote in that interview which is also from sounds actually later on this year where he says i think heavy metal and heavy rock in general this is biff still he says it's the new

circus you don't put sea lions on stage but you are an entertainer like a vaudeville entertainer and that's kind of where they see themselves and they're certainly perhaps in this episode the most interesting thing to look at so far before we turn away from saxon chaps let's not assume that they're turning their backs on the standard Mecklenmoder transport in 1980. Article from the Pop Talk column in the Aberdeen Evening Express a few months from now. Join the Saxon search for the best biker. Nearly everyone has something to say about motorcyclists, and it's invariably uncomplimentary. Although bikers would be the first to admit there

are some in their midst who are black sheep, in general they would say that as people go, they're not that bad and it's something that the heavy metal band Saxon would like to prove is true. They want to clear the bikers' names. They are concerned about the poor image of bikers and are offering a special saxon crash helmet for the person who can best show the better side of bikers with the help of radio aberdeen dj jeff jones we are running a contest to put a stop to the slagger biker syndrome jeff has already announced the contest on his show and asked listeners to put their heads together. The special prize of that Saxon helmet

goes to the biker who can fit that bill, and the winner will be presented with his or her helmet at a special heavy metal disco. Whoa. Amazing. You know, I've already got a Judy Zook satin tour jacket. I now want a Saxon motorbike helmet. Oh, can you imagine that combination?

Imagine the sex that would fall upon me. The following week, Wheels of Steel stayed at number 20 and would remain its highest position. The follow-up, 747, Strangers in the Night, did even better, getting to number 13 in July, and they finished the year with their next LP, Strong Arm of the Law, getting to number 11. Diminishing Return set in in 1981, however, as Nwobham's star fell, but while they were on tour in america they were joined for three days by someone they thought was a journalist who actually turned out to be harry

shearer who was doing some research for the forthcoming film spinal tap despite the band splintering in the late 90s an illegal battle between biff bifford and two former members trying to register the band name as a trademark david van day saxon if you will they're still going today and are beginning a tour of the uk as we speak fucking out you can't kill saxon yeah either of them you do still see their name that are on them on festival bills. And because of that, you assume that they've kind of been able to make a living throughout, but that's actually not the case. In the late 90s,

Biff actually had a job as a furniture salesman in West Yorkshire. Fucking hell. Obviously, there have been ups and downs. They've had various attempts of making a big comeback. And do you all know about the thing that happened at a football match? No. All right, all right. Sit thing that happened at a football match? No. Alright, alright. Sit down, make yourselves comfortable. This is amazing. This was

in January 2007. Saxon were brought on as the halftime entertainment at Sheffield Wednesday vs. Sunderland. With Barney Owl the mascot. And what it was, it wasn't just to play a song. They were trying to, and this was Harvey Goldsmith's idea,

who was, I guess, their promoter at the time. What they're trying to do was to break the world record for air guitar, for the most people playing air guitar at one moment. The record at that point was 4,000 people. There was a crowd in the ground of 30,000, so they did the math and they thought, well, this should be fairly easy, right? But Harvey Goldsmith clearly didn't understand football fans.

Because what happens is, because the footage is out there on YouTube, stick it on a playlist. Of course it will. What actually happens is one small child joins in with the air guitaring. Everyone else is booing them going, who are you? Who are you? Oh, no. You're absolutely rubbish. you're absolutely rubbish you're absolutely rubbish while biff and a couple of other members are out there on the pitch with

their guitars not plugged in but with their real guitars sort of like whittling away trying to get the crowd air guitar in with them and it's not even one of their big songs it's playing over the tannoy i don't know what it is. And the clip finishes with Harvey Goldsmith leading the band back down the tunnel and Biff saying, that was the worst three minutes I've ever fucking spent in my life. That's heart-rending.

And in the tunnel, Norris McWhirter shakes his head and puts away his stopwatch. He was undeterred, though. You can't keep a good man down. Do you know this thing about in 2010? He tried to get heavy metal recognised as a religion on the census forms. It was some kind of collaboration with him and Metal Hammer magazine.

Bless him. I don't think he succeeded. Thank you. After some balls up Where the camera fades on Saxon And is replaced by a still of Saxon At an extreme Dutch angle We cut to Vance Surrounded by every black kid in the audience All five of them.

It is literally all the black kids, isn't it? In the crowd. Do you think that's deliberate? Oh, God, yeah. Do you think that's deliberate? No doubt about it, Neil. Yeah, I did wonder that. I don't get why they've done that at all.

It's odd and it's noticeable. He tells us that Saxon's new LP is doing well in the charts. Then he introduces us to a band who always do it well. Hot Chocolate and No Doubt About It. We last covered Hot Chocolate in chart music number 47, The Last Supper of Show Waddy Waddy, when they trotted out So You Win Again in the 1977 Christmas Day episode of Top of the Pops. Since then, they scored a number 10

with Put Your Love In There on Christmas week of 1977, number 12 with Everyone's A Winner in April of 1978, and number 13 with I'll Put You Together Again in January 1979. But diminishing returns rapidly started to set in, with their next two singles, the appropriately titled Mindless Booger, and Going Through The Motions, failing to break the top 40. Glenn and Mike Burns, two songwriters affiliated with Rack, Hot Chocolate's label, were on their way to a meeting at the Rack studio when they saw what they believed to be a flying saucer malingering over the Finchley Road in North London, which they followed for 90 minutes. When they finally got to the studio, they told a third songwriter dave most about what they'd seen and he believed them as he claimed to have seen one too they immediately set to work to report this phenomenon through the medium of pop which was snapped up by errol brown and the chaps and was put out a fortnight ago as

the follow-up to going through the motions was got to number 53 in august of 1979 this week it's smashed into the chart at number 31 and here they are in the studio and all chaps we get some proper spacey effects for this one don't we yeah some kind of whiteout thing at the beginning that that makes the kids look like a frothing ectomorphic mass yeah the weirdness of the song is accentuated by the production here indeed people they kind of start off in negative in a way don't they yes they do yeah a bluey negative it's very otherworldly very otherworldly and it's a it's a kind of mental decision letting the whole weird alien intro of this song play before the groove comes

in i mean it might have been more sensible to start the performance where the beats start but we've got this weird floaty minute of just synth texture really and the kids just thinking what the fuck is going on here because it's an amazing song this i mean it's possibly the weirdest most futuristic thing we'll hear in this episode. Yes. Yeah. The verses sound like, I don't know,

mid period can or something. The lyrics are like this Sun Ra Afro futurist stuff. And then the chorus lifts off into this almost Northern soul place. But the love and the testifying is about an alien visitation. It's mental, this song. And it's perhaps the last of Hot Chocolate's weird hits, if you like.

You know, it recovers the oddity of something like Emma. And yeah, the weirdness is completely accentuated by the type of the pop's production here. I mean, here's an example of a band who could not be any more 70s, looking around for a future in the harsh landscape of the 80s. And on this showing,

it looks like they're going to do quite nicely, thank you. Yeah, you're right. They've got those silky flared trousers and the sequined tops. And they could be forgiven for that. The 80s have only just barely started and they maybe didn't get the memo. But yeah, they do look a little bit out of place. They do. But it doesn't matter.

Errol's in this fucking amazing shirt that looks like there's a laser show going off on his chest and yeah some incredibly shiny silver trousers yeah this kind of black it's almost like a blues on that he's tucked in it's got it's got like this peacock sequin rhinestone pattern on the front and those trousers man those are trousers of the future they're amazing i'm also quite enamored with the bassist powder blue velour trousers they look like they're crafted out of the interior of a particularly jazzy austin maxi but you have to feel sorry for errol here because you know here he is telling these youths about his close encounter and and instead of giving him the rapt attention he deserves that they're either gassing away to each other about lads and shoes or trying to chat each other up or turning away to see themselves on the monitor so they never get to find out if he took a probe up his arse or something fucking kids man what's wrong

with them this audience is very sullen isn't it very sullen very naughty they need sending into the corridor with their fingers on their lips yes i think at the time i didn't realize that hot chocolate didn't write all their own songs so i i thought this was literally errol brown out of hot chocolate telling us the kids that he'd had an alien visitation it's like when david thought that um terry jacks had a terminal illness in 1974 and the minute that seasons in the sun stopped being number one he would die exactly i took it very literally and i wanted to believe because i'd had a ufo experience myself as a child only a couple years before this right it would have been about 1978 i was playing football in the street with the aforementioned andrew in those days of course this is real sort of

jumpers for goalposts stuff, almost literally. It was lampposts for goalposts. You know, you would play until it got dark. In fact, beyond it getting dark, because there weren't many cars around. So one of us booted the ball off down the road, and I remember running after it, and just getting the ball, looking up over the Bristol

Channel, and we both saw this red and white sphere revolving and moving erratically in a way that just didn't seem normal for a plane or a helicopter or anything like that and uh it was really odd and we we both saw it and the next day we went into school and we made the mistake uh in uh romley juniors of telling a teacher about it and the teacher teacher said, oh, tell me more. And we told them everything. And this was sort of, you know, registration or whatever. And then when it came to assembly,

we're all sat there cross-legged on the floor. And the headmaster said, I hear that Simon Price and Andrew Rapousis have got something they want to tell you. Oh, fucking hell. They may just get up and tell a story, but they completely cunted us off and mugged us off and made fun of us for it.

And I just felt so humiliated, right? And I only felt slightly vindicated that evening when I got home and put on the local news show which was called Points West, because our TV aerial pointed west rather than to Wales. And there was

actually a policeman from Somerset, which is pretty much the direction we were looking at who said he'd seen the same thing it was a news story in in the west country that there had been this red and white thing hovering over there and I thought fucking hell you know I'm not saying you can always trust a policeman ACAB and all that or SCAB as I prefer to say some cops are bastards bastards. But yeah, if only our head teacher had seen this fucking policeman, he might have believed us. It really pissed me off.

And then your headmaster went back to his study and took his mask off and revealed he's a lizard himself. Had a good laugh to himself. Yeah, he sort of wiggled his 30-foot tongue about. I've got to ask something. Were you frightened? Were you scared? Were you thrown into confusion?

No doubt about it. It was from other skies that's for sure. English skies. That's amazing Simon. I believe and I want to believe in UFOs I really want to see one so I'm always delighted to hear testimony from somebody who really has. I think

as soon as you start talking about this people immediately start curling their lip because they think that you're stupid and they think that what you're saying is i believe that aliens have visited the earth because it's not that i think you've got to separate the two things you've really got to separate the two things first of all ufo literally means unidentified flying object. Although these days they've rebranded it as UAP, haven't they? It's an unidentified aerial phenomena. That's what NASA call it now or the Pentagon. All right. So there's that.

UFOs, literally unidentified flying objects. Obviously, that happens all the time. If you see something in the sky and you can't identify it, it's, to you at least, a UFO. And then there's the separate issue of alien life. it's to you at least a ufo yeah and then there's a separate issue of alien life now mathematically it is as near to a certainty as you can get that there is life on other planets but it's also almost as certain that those planets are so fucking far away that it's literally impossible for those uh beings to make it here so i don't the two. I don't think that if you see a UFO, it means close encounters of the third kind,

which of course was very recent when this record came out. So that would have been in everybody's mind. And I think even if it is experimental aircraft or unusual meteorological phenomena, that to me is interesting. I want to know. That's fascinating. Oh, it's worth writing a song about, isn't it?

Definitely. And actually Wales, in particular South Wales, is a bit of a UFO hotspot. Is that right? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I only seek the most unimpeachable sources, as you're well aware. Craig Charles' recent UFO conspiracy series on Sky History talks about an event in the village of Pentwick, South Wales. Interestingly enough,

listening to your description, Simon, it did talk this episode about what people see is this vast triangular UFO appearing in the night sky, but it ejects smaller red and green craft from its thing. So, yeah, it's a bit of a hotspot around there. Yeah, I love the film

close encounters by the way i was almost quite partisan about that i thought you were either a close encounters kid or a star wars kid and i yeah i i thought star wars was for cretins i really did i'm sorry and and i thought close encounters was for the for the cleverer kids i love that film there's so much going on in there i mean it's it gives plenty to an adult view as well it's not just a kid's film just the guy having a mental breakdown about it and and the whole conspiracy theory business and the domestic situation where he's creating that that mountain first of all out of mashed potato on his plate and then later on out of just mud and junk and crap in his in his garage i think my favorite bit was um there's some guy who's um

he's driving at night and he's stuck at a level crossing and there's somebody tailgating him there's these bright lights behind him his rearview mirror and he's like okay pal you know and then suddenly these lights just lift up and go over here i love that bit richard draper yeah yeah yeah i mean the thing is though obsessed with with UFOs as I probably was in 1980, I'm not sure I'd have noticed that this song was about UFOs because I had this bad habit of not listening to verses or at least not noticing the lyrics. And by the time it gets to the chorus, this hot chocolate song,

it could be a love song. Yeah, yeah. That's because he puts it over so well, doesn't he? Yeah, yeah, completely. The verses are quite low-key. He sings them quite sotto voce, so that if you're not listening carefully, by the time he gets to the chorus,

it could absolutely be a love song. And it's credit to Errol that he's able to put it over with so much emotion. I suppose it's like a sort of visitation of the Virgin Mary that a Catholic believer might have, you know. He just puts that kind of passion into it. No, no, this really happened. Yeah.

Even though it didn't happen to him, it happened to someone else. Anything else to say about this? I think that they did do some great stuff in what is seen as maybe not their golden period. You mentioned I'll Put You Together Again, which I thought was a beautiful song, a kind of gospel-tinged ballad. And even some of their other 80s stuff,

like Girl Crazy and Are You Getting Enough? And of course it started with a kiss. You don't remember me, do you? And all of that. Just really great singles. And didn't they hold some kind of record, some chart record at the time? The band who'd been in the top 40

for the most consecutive years, or something like that. Yes. Which I loved and really deserved, I thought. Yeah. So the following week no doubt about it soared 22 places to number nine and a fortnight later it began a three-week stand at number two held off the summit of pop mountain which had been sculpted out of mashed

potato by roy neary no doubt by a tune we're going to hear later on and theme from MASH, Suicide is Painless. The follow-up, Are You Getting Enough of What Makes You Appair, got to number 17 in August of this year and they'd have three more top ten hits throughout the early 80s before splitting up in 1986. No doubt about it.

Hot chocolate and no doubt about it. Now here's Motherhead from their chart EP, Leaving Here. Before Errol and his mates get to finish their tale of extraterrestrial mither, the whiteout effects kick in again, the camera dollies back, then pans right to the stage at the other end of the studio, and the effects fade away to reveal the dingy reality of 1980, and Motorhead with Leaving Here. Born in Stoke-on-Trent in 1945, Ian Kilmister was relocated to Newcastle-under-Lyme

and then the Isle of Anglesey after his parents' divorce and picked up the nickname of Lemmy, allegedly due to him going up to people and saying Lemmy a quid until Friday at school. After knocking about in a sort of band in Wales, he moved to Manchester in the early 60s, put himself about on the Northwest beat combo scene and regularly saw the Beatles at the Cavern,

including one gig where John Lennon went out into the audience and head-butted someone for calling him a queer. After playing guitar for the Motown sect in 1962, he joined the Rocking Vickers in 1965 and stayed there for three years before moving to London, flat-sharing with Noel Redding of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, becoming their roadie while he looked for another band but stints with Sam Gapol's Dream and Opal Butterfly didn't last long. However in 1971 he was recruited by Michael Dick McDavies in his band Hawkwind as a bass player even though he'd never played the instrument before. Davies just wanted another band member who was into their amphetamine. A year later, Kilminster found

himself singing on an overdub of a live recording of their single Silver Machine, which got to number three for two weeks in August of 1972. In May of 1975, during a tour of North America, the band was stopped at the Canadian border where Kilminster's stash of amphetamine was found. The police assumed it was cocaine and arrested him, although he was released without charge the next day. This was the impetus the rest of the band needed to knob him off, and he was fired when they got back to the UK. Killmister immediately set to work, putting together a band in his own image, and he recruited Larry Wallace, formerly of the Pink Theories, and his mate Lucas Fox, forming the band Bastard, which was quickly changed to Motorhead when their new manager told them

that a band called Bastard would never get a book in on top of the Pops. After Wallace and Fox were replaced by Fast Eddie Clark and Phil Filthy Animal Taylor, they signed to bronze records and put out their debut single, A Cover of Leaving Here. The 1963 Holland Dozier Holland song that Eddie Holland took to number 76 on the Billboard charts and London R&B band The Birds took to number 45 over here in June of 1965.

Motorhead's version failed to chart, but their third single, Motorhead, got to number 68 in September of 1978, and thanks to some string-pulling by label boss Jerry Braun, they found themselves on top of the pops, but the single dropped straight out of the chart the week after. They're currently spending 1980 finding themselves as the elder statesmen of Nowabham, have just finished a UK tour supported by Saxon, and put out the Golden Years EP, a collection of early period tunes recorded live, as the follow-up to Bomber, which got to number 34 in December of 1979.

It came out last week, and instantly dive-bombed into the charts at number 23, and here they are in the studio, to play the first cut on that EP, their first ever single, Leaving Here. And chaps, it's very telling that Motorhead got their name, because they wanted to be on Top of the Pops. And it's very telling that motorhead got their name because they wanted to

be on top of the pops and it's also pretty obvious that top of the pops are very happy to have a band like motorhead on because this is their fourth appearance now and it's only mid 1980 wow i've got no memory of this you know whatsoever um i guess obviously i wasn't watching a lot of top of the pops at the time but even though though, yeah, this EP, the Golden Years EP, apparently reached number eight. I think the first I really knew of Motorhead was Ace of Spades, of course. Yes. And this is a really surprising record in a lot of ways.

I mean, as you say, 1963 single by Eddie Holland, written by Holland, Dozie Holland, not a hit in the UK in its original form. So in Motown terms, this is a deep cut you know yes i mean i'm not saying i can imagine lemmy doing spins and drops at the wig and casino you know and let's face it if he's shaking out the white powder it's not going to be talcum right but you need to know your soul music to even have heard of this the original anyway well it was one of those standards that british R&B bands played.

Yeah. Also, I mean, Lemmy's trying to align himself a little bit here, I think, with kind of the Ramones and things like that, that touching back into 60s. But I think he's majorly heavily influenced in this choice of song by the Byrds version. Yeah. You know, pre-Ronnie Wood.

They did get Ronnie Wood in their ranks eventually. But when you listen to the Byrds version, it's actually quite similar to the Motörhead version in a way that the Motown version isn't. And isn't it funny how the metal bands of 1980 appear to be more influenced by 60s R&B than the mod bands of the time? Yeah. I mean, David Coverdale, he was an old soul lad, wasn't he?

Well, I mean, don't forget the crazy thing. I mean, Phil Filthy Taylor was a skinhead way back in the day. He actually became a skinhead way back in the day. He actually became a skinhead late 60s, early 70s due to a haircutting accident from his girlfriend. But he stuck with it and he used to go to Blue Beat clubs and he used to go to ska clubs. So there is that connection there. Wow. I mean, nobody's born a metal and nuwabum.

In fact, metal itself was still a sort of fairly new genre. So obviously everybody involved in it is going to have a backstory. They're going to have things they were into when they were young. And the Birds, as in Birds Spelled With An I, version, is the thing that leads to Lemmy covering this. He was a fan of theirs and supported them once. But I think the telltale thing is something you said in the intro, Al, that he was in a band called the Motown Set, you know, doing Motown covers.

And Motorhead had previous, I suppose, for this kind of thing. Obviously, leaving here in its studio form was their debut single. But the first Motorhead record I actually own was a blue FlexiDisc from Flexipop magazine following year, 1981 the train kept rolling right which was the final track on their debut album back in 77 and the train kept rolling was

um originally a jump blues track from 1951 by tiny bradshaw but in that case there is at least a fairly easy pathway to it becoming a motorhead song because that had previously been covered by by the yardbirds led zeppelin and aerosmith so basically it was a bit of a rock chestnut by that point yeah but leaving here even though yeah you know 60s beat groups like the birds might have had it in the repertoire it feels like it's coming way out of left field to find itself in motorheads set and um it's there's something really pleasing about it i think that you know this this this band seemed like the least likely motown cover band in the world but i mean i think it is that it's crucial that looking back with those sort of elderly statesmen of irvin the wobberham as i refer to what motorhead are engaged in always i

think i mean like acdc it's an attempt to take rock away from its pompous ambitions and return it to this thing of, a 50s thing, really, of simplicity and noise and adrenaline. And I think with Motorhead, that even extends to how many members they have. Having just three members is a statement. Power trio. Yes. I mean, Lemmy said the reason it was three, because there was no room for anyone else. And what he means by that isn't, you know, room on stage. He he means sonically there's no room he's got his bass so overdriven constantly that it's this perfectly locked in wall of noise and as such i mean much like acdc motorhead of

this band that are going to be loved by punks and metal kids alike but like acdc they kind of don't fit into either i mean later on in the 80s lemmy becomes very very good at slagging off metal bands you know every time he's interviewed i mean i i read an interview where he said i'd rather be sealed in a pit of my own excrement than listen to metal and he watched no palm death on a documentary and he says it was like talking to two skirting boards people think we listen to anthrax when I'm at home, I listen to The Carpenters. So he's very much kind of, although in the Wobberham figurehead,

he disowns it almost completely. Yeah, I agree with Neil that Motorhead are one of the base elements of rock and roll. They are like ACDC, they are like the Ramones, they are irreducible. You can't break Motorhead down into its component parts. They are the component part. And the thing with bands like that is there's usually no point in buying anything past the first four or five albums because once they've perfected their thing, there's nowhere to go.

So basically when Motorhead released Ace of Spades, that's it. They were done, really. Oh, by the way, there's been a lot of talk about the young ones recently. Yes. The 40th anniversary. Fuck me, 40 years. I know.

Jesus. And the greatest musical moment of the show. Obviously, I'm sure we all agree. All civilised people agree. It is Motorhead doing Ace of Spades. For those who haven't seen it,

it's in the episode called Bambi. It's where the four students are rushing off to get the train to represent Scumbag College in University Challenge and it is amazing but yeah, Motorhead stood implacably opposed to the idea of progression, which is

funny because you could say that Hawkwind were kind of a progressive rock band but Motorhead weren't going to change and mutate no one's going to call Motorhead the chameleons of rock, you know what I mean? They were going to go soft and release a ballad, you know, unless...

I mean, Neil, you may know better than me, I don't think they ever released a ballad. No, no, they never did a ballad, no. Does his duet with Wendy O'Williams stand by your man? Does that count? Not quite. Well, no, I mean, even the Motorhead and Girl School duets don't. No, absolutely not.

They were going to bring hip-hop into their sound although they they did do a single with ice tea at one point but motorhead were motorhead that was it you cannot break them down and no matter how many records they released they existed mainly as a live band if if you went to see them live which you know i did a number of times i don't know about you guys but you you knew exactly what you're going to get there's no fucking around yeah and that's where they were in their element and maybe that's why records like this keep coming out they kept releasing live records this ep it's all live tracks recorded on i believe the same european tour as some of the no sleep till hammersmith album that album by the way went to number one which i i still think is a really startling feat for an uncompromising fast thrashy metal band yeah yeah i mean do you know how many live albums

motorhead released by the way no i don't actually 16 fucking out motorhead released 16 live albums they only released 22 studio albums they loved a fucking live album yeah they were never about studio craft they saw the studio in a weird way like 40s and 50s people it's the snapshot of what we do live and obviously his voice it's like filth it actually sounds like engine oil that's been there for months and it's full of grit and dirt and his bass tone that overdriven tone that you mentioned is fucking thrilling isn't it yeah so i know we've had some hard rock and some metal already but this is a real blast of adrenaline isn't it oh yeah it's funny that you mentioned the young ones actually because alexi sale used to have a

motorhead joke that he used to do live i went to a motorhead concert once someone shouted out sexist crap and they thought it was a request but in actual actual fact, I mean, oddly enough, like ACDC, there is strangely female positive band motorhead. When Lemmy lends support to the wonderful Girl's School, I have to say, I love hit and run and singles like that. You know, it's genuine, even though it becomes to be an albatross for Girl's School. And when you listen to, I mean, their finest album, I think,

aside from the live ones, is probably Overkill. It's just such a fucking amazing record that and when you listen to a track like i'll be your sister they're genuinely odd lyrically and sexually let me never does that i'm gonna put it inside your thing no he's not cover dale yeah no he's not cover dale leaving here this this track it's not one of the greatest i don't think it's it isn't off one of their greatest records it's's no Ace of Spades or Iron Fist. But we do massively get a sense of how thrilling Motorhead must be live here. And for me, you know, as a very young kid at this time, no chance of actually seeing Motorhead. This appearance is amazing.

Everything's in place. Phil Taylor, like this kind of naughty schoolboy, always a frenzy, always lunatic fast. But he's always got that kind of Tiz Was Friendly grin on his face. I'm amazed he got that T-shirt past the censors. Yes. Well, he's got a T-shirt that says, Whale Oil Beef Hooked. Yes, he has.

Yeah. I can't believe that went unnoticed. I know. It's the sort of thing you can imagine Tommy Saxondale's girlfriend selling in her shop. Along with, you know, I like the Pope, the Pope smokes dope and all that kind of stuff. It's one of those, isn't it? But did you notice the actual swear word on that set? No.

What? On the speaker behind Lemmy, there's a Nevermind the Bollocks sticker. Yeah, Motorhead said bollocks on top of the pops. I mean, it's a rock and roll. I mean, Fast Eddie's exactly what you want from a guitar. God. Lemmy, mic angled down. He always said that he did that so he could hit the high notes.

I'm unconvinced, but it's a good look. It's a good look. I think I'd have been scared by Lemmy as a kid if it wasn't. Oh, totally. If it wasn't for Tiz Was. But Tiz Was had kind of made them not cuddly as such. Were they on there a lot then? I didn't really watch Tiz Was.

I seem to recall them being in that cage, getting buckets of snow thrown at them quite often. But I mean, crucially, any metalhead appearance on top of the pops, it really does feel here as if the metalheads have taken over the audience as well. Yeah. There's some scary looking people.

Those three guys down the front. Actual headbangers. Yeah. Yeah. Three of them. They probably all got early onset dementia now, sadly. Yes. The problem with them lads is

they're having a good go and they're introducing the new dance craze to the nation. But their hair's not long enough. It's not thrashing about enough. It's probably like collar length for school, isn't it? It's like being a wrestler. If you're a wrestler, you're always told back in the day have your hair as long as possible because when someone pretends to hit you in the face and you jerk your head back your hair's going to go right up and people at the back are going to see the impact yeah yeah yeah but like

um you're asking if there are any metalers at my school and now i'm thinking about it yeah there were but they all had that kind of hairdo where it grew sideways and upwards but not down because the teachers would tell them it had to be like above the collar so they'd end up just looking like mushrooms you know yeah but there are some scary looking i mean there's a guy just seemingly swigging from a can of lager you've got this kind of mix of it what looks like bikers and acid heads and headbangers there's a little bit of hawkwinds audience here i think as well who look as if they've been there since the last episode of disco 2 but it gives this performance you know that thrill you occasionally get from top of the pops performance of our bands whether that's indie or

rock yeah just weird yeah that yes the top of the pops production people are in control but they're in control only in terms of allocating a space where this band can perform in that space the band are in control yeah and you know we actually get that from a couple of the subsequent performances in this fantastic episode too yes that thrilling kind of rub between bands that are too exciting to be contained and the usual kind of dick tacks of the Top of the Pots space. Yeah. They're here to promote a live EP, chaps, but is this a live performance? Who knows, because the record's a bit of a mess.

This is a bit of a mess. I was pretty convinced at the time that it was, and I was up until, like, the other day when I looked at it again, and I noticed that Filthy Animals got some pads on his drum head. So that leads me to believe that it's mimed. So they're miming. I mean, are they miming to a live performance? And is that a first on Top of the Pops?

It's a weird head fuck that, isn't it? I know. Miming to a live record. Which raises the question, well, if they are miming, what are they miming to? Because it's not the track on the ep for obvious reasons and it's not the original either so yeah a mystery i mean like saxon they've got a wall of speakers set up which must have uh must have cheered up the fucking floor manager and the crew no end um to

hump these fuckers about yeah and also there's this kind of scaffolding around them which separates them from the crowd but also makes makes them into this crazy spectacle. Yeah. Because it's got a noise to it. It's got a noise to it that doesn't seem, you know, it's certainly not the top of the box orchestra. About those speaker cabinets, it's entirely possible that they were empty.

Because ACDC were famous for that. They'd have these enormous kind of great wall of china sized you know banks of of martial amps behind them but apparently they were all just uh empty quite lightweight wooden cabs i don't know yeah yeah um yeah i i do think that filthy animal taylor is the most watchable member of the band i always like how he looked like a Mexican baddie from a western. I like how he had a drum kit with shark's teeth in the front of it. Quite fun, I thought. Lemmy, though, right? He does this

thing. There's obviously a woman in the front row who's caught his eye because he crouches down and flickers his tongue lasciviously at her. It's a bit unsettling. For all we know, she loved yeah. It's a bit unsettling, that. I mean, for all we know, she loved it.

I don't know, but... Wow. I need a slight take. Did you ever get a chance to speak to Lemmy, Simon? Oh, I met him at the Mojo Awards once, but what do you say to Lemmy? He's just fucking Lemmy.

I just thought... Hey, Lemmy. Yeah, yeah. You're right. If I'd known I was going to meet him, I might have thought of something, but no, I had nothing. How about you? I chatted with him on the phone once um it was for a melody maker special feature about

halloween and i had to interview him about um his haunted house experiences um not much of which i can remember but yeah i mean basically he told he spun a good yarn and it was just mental you know just hearing that voice um yeah down the phone there's nothing like a halloween stew i never met him but he used to go drinking in uh the garage the the club i prefer going to in nottingham in the late 80s it's not like he lived in nottingham but he'd just pitch up every now and then and my mates would go fucking hell lemme'smy's at the bar. And I'd be like, oh, yeah, great. That's it. Because you're right.

What can you say to him? At this time, I would have been watching this with a curled lip and a sneer of disgust because I never got on with Motorhead at the time. Possibly because of a resemblance between Lemmy and someone I used to see every Saturday. I mean, we've already talked about local characters. Allow me to bring another one into play. He was known around Nottingham as Axeman. But that wasn't his real name. I knew his real name and I always used to pull people up about it.

Basically, he was this massive sweaty greb who used to wear a headband and a cut-off denim jacket. He looked like a morbidly obese lemme, and he'd hang around the badge stall of Pendulum Records and read out the slogans on the badges and scoff at the modern two-toned ones and just basically terrify us young, sharp mods and rude boys with his tales about how he was welling with the local Wales Angels

and how he knocked over a line of scooters outside a pub the other night and, you know, him and his gang set fire to some parkers before he got a blowjob on his motorbike while he was riding through town. And then he'd say, yeah, you've heard of me. My name's Machete Max.

Machete Max. And every week, without fail, I'd run into this cunt and he'd be there standing at the store going oh look at this one mod is news punk is history fuck off and we'd just be standing there waiting for the event that happened every week which was always a gang of older mods or skinheads who would just turn up and hover around him and stare him out and he'd make his excuses and leave he was still knocking about nottingham until about 10 years ago with a walking stick looking absolutely fucking rattled as fuck

with the same headband on which had probably knitted into his flesh on his forehead fucking hell it's funny isn't it because like metal is a lot of it is about expressing male rage and male aggression and all that stuff and it's about expressing male rage and male aggression and all that stuff. And it's about power fantasies and all that kind of business. But you often find that the people who are into it, first of all, they're quite soft. They might have leather jackets and loads of studs and spikes, but they're actually not very tough.

But also, you find that they're often really gentle souls not this guy obviously but you know yeah i'm sure i'm sure neil can you know back that up yeah oh yeah got my daughter my daughter for instance and she's immensely gentle and yeah yeah covered in man o' war style spikes yeah on an almost constant basis and just to pick up on something you said earlier neil about moat head being strangely kind of female positive. Just choosing this song itself, the lyrics to Leaving Here, right? First verse goes, Hey fellas, have you heard the news?

Yeah, the women in this town have been misused. Yeah, I've seen it all in my dreams last night. Girls leaving this town because you don't treat them right. Right? So basically, Eddie Holland saying Detroit is becoming the anti nottingham so like you know if we buy into the myth of course that nottingham has this kind of massive excess of women to men which is bullshit nowadays yeah i know i know but basically yeah detroit is becoming

doha where apparently um the population is 81 percent male because of all the transient workers. Of course, that figure itself fluctuates according to how many of them are dying in the construction of sports washing arenas. Bit of politics there. Fuck the World Cup. I'm about to ask this question. Did Lemmy get away with murder? Isn't he just Jeremy Clarkson with warts?

I mean, as we all know, he's very keen on collecting Nazi memorabilia. And just like Father Seamus Fitzpatrick in Father Ted, he's not interested in the Allied things at all. Yeah, funny that, innit? In 2008, he was investigated by the German authorities after a photo of him wearing a cap with the SS Death Head logo appeared in a local newspaper. And when the subject cropped up in an interview, he said,

I'll tell you something about Istra. From the beginning of time, the bad guys always had the best uniforms. Napoleon, the Confederates, the Nazis, they all had killer uniforms. I mean, the SS uniform is fucking brilliant. They were the rock stars of their time. Don't tell me I'm a Nazi because I have uniforms. I had my first black girlfriend in 1967 and a lot

more since then. I don't understand racism. I never thought it was an option. Well, you know, just as well he wasn't editing Loaded in the late 90s, eh? Well, yeah, James Brown, the godfather of Loaded, got sacked from GQ for publishing an article to that effect, didn't he?

And Brian Ferry basically got cancelled for expressing that kind of view. Yeah, it's funny with these guys, isn't it? These people who say, well, I'm just interested in history. Well, yeah, they never collect stuff from the Peace Corps or the International Red Cross, do they? It's just, yeah. Also, the Confederates uniforms were shit, man. So that's where his argument falls down.

Well, he used to wear a Confederate cap, didn't he? But then again, so did New Edition. So, you know, where does that leave us? I mean, by the by, not to say that Lenny's woke or anything, but there is that famous clip of him responding to a letter from a black fan, which you've probably seen, I don't know um he gets a letter from a black metal fan who's

just asking him you know loads of people take the piss out of me because i'm black and i'm into metal blah blah and his response is beautifully done um because he talks about not only his experiences with jimmy but also that rock and roll is black music yeah ultimately um and you know you know good on lemmy for that even the lighting rig for last year's bomber tour was a reconstruction of a heinickel mark iii which absolutely ruins the legend that he once pointed to it at the beginning of a gig in germany and said good evening dresden i bet you haven't seen one of these in a while and seen as dresden was still part of East Germany and off-limits makes the story double bollocks, alas.

He is war-obsessed, he is war-obsessed, but I mean, it's a perennial thing. He's a typical 70s bloke, isn't he? As we've mentioned before, the 70s were absolutely sodden with swastikas in the UK. Oh, God, yeah, usually in 24 parts with a free binder and the the thing is that it's a frequent thing with rock and rollers from bowie all the way through to marilyn manson that they are fascinated with the with the prettiness if you like of fascist imagery yeah is that an excuse i'm not entirely sure yeah i mean it's about the power dynamic as well because it does mirror and mimic the dynamic of being a rock star so much.

And I think that's what Marlon Manson was picking up on and satirising so much. I know Marlon Manson is now persona non grata, but I just think the way he just sort of exaggerated that kind of fascist element to rock and roll was magnificent. Well, that goes all the way back to 1969, when Albert Goldman did a gig review of the Rolling Stones and compared it to the Nuremberg Rally. rock and roll was was magnificent well that goes all the way back to 1969 when albert goldman did a gig review of the rolling stones and compared it to the nuremberg rallies yeah yeah you know there's a lot of stuff in um the dick hebdige book subcultures about the use of the swastika

in punk and basically he exonerates them um as if it's his place to do the exonerating i i admit of anti-semitic intent because he says it's completely place to do the exonerating, I admit, of anti-Semitic intent. Because he says it's completely to do with shocking the parents. Because if you think about it, punks were mostly born in the, I guess, late 1950s, or in the 1950s, that was the era that people of the punk generation were being born. So basically, they're the arse end of boomers.

So their parents were people who probably fought in the war. And if you want to piss your parents off, you dress as the baddies. You dress as the baddies. I mean, there's that Man Alive documentary about Hells Angels and skinheads from about 1970, I think. And it begins with a Hells Angel wedding in a pub in Birmingham. This girl gets married to her boyfriend, who's known as Hitler. And he's got a swastika flag wrapped around his shoulders so in the 70s if you wore a swastika you're basically saying i'm fucking hard and evil i am but yeah yeah you know what i mean but the downside of that is when punk came along uh i got a mate who's a bit older than me and he said yeah any lad who drew a swastika

on his hold all or his satchel or anything, just all the black kids used to beat the shit out of them until they stopped doing it. So the black kids knew what it was all about. Yeah, I guess it's analogous to that situation with Matchbox using the, you know, the Southern Rebel flag, as they would call it. The only thing with that is,

it's a bit harder to draw on your rucksack. But yeah. Yes. Yeah, I went for the much more safe and politically actually no it's not less dodgy hammer and sickle every time and the cnd logo as well yeah of course yeah and let me just add an interview in 2017 with uh mickey d one of his former drummers uh who was asked about what lemmy would have thought about the riot in Charlottesville, which ended in a right-wing cunt ploughing his car into some people protesting against a statue of Robert E. Lee. And he said, oh, he would have hated it.

I can totally speak for him there. He hated that shit. A lot of people judged him on collecting war stuff, but he hated fucking Nazis. He hated stupidity, and he was fascinated by the stupidity of the human race. He would probably write some incredible lyrics

about it. He thought it was so ridiculous. Well, yeah. I think I'm willing to give him benefit of the doubt on that. I buy that. I will. Also, look lyrically into the lyrics for one of their best later LPs, 1916. He's talking about the stupidity of war and conflict throughout that

and the stupidity of the rise of kind of um didactic leaders so yeah he gets a pass from me anything else to say my favorite fact about this single is that there was a lapse of quality control at the pressing plant which meant that a number of the seven inch singles slipped through the net that had kate on the A-side. Right. So I love imagining all these fucking greasy rockers getting home from the record shop, dropping the needle on the record,

expecting Lemmy, and getting Kate Bush screeching away, like, what the hell is this? Amazing. Neil, right, I've got a question for you. Now that we've seen the three heavy bands on this show, Whitesnake, Saxon, Motorhead, right? Where would you place them on the sandwich scale?

Right, so basically... Okay, good question. Just to do a reset for brand new listeners, Neil has previously judged bands according to whether he'd let them make a sandwich for him. The Strang stranglers for example being a hard no so yeah basically white snake saxon motorhead what's the order okay the order is as follows i think the last person that i'd have a sandwich of is david coverdale's white

snake um they look awful i don't know where his hands have been, you know, Coverdale. No, no, I wouldn't have one of them. Saxon would make a delicious sandwich, I think, full of stout Yorkshire ingredients, I'm sure. But, you know, the one I'd want the most is Motorhead. Reason being, I remember going to festivals in the 90s, not knowing anybody, and going backstage, and going to the bogs, and there'd be just a layer of speed and cocaine over everything

that you could just harvest for yourself. And I reckon a Motorhead sandwich would have that much loose amphetamine in it. I'd be buzzing for fucking days. So, yeah, I'd go for the Motorhead sandwich, please. Hardcore horseradish going on there. Fucking hell, yeah. When he was interviewed in the decline of Western Civilisation Part 2, that was in his kitchen, wasn't it? Looked quite clean. Oh, no, hang on, that hell, yeah. When he was interviewed in the decline of Western Civilisation Part 2, that was in his kitchen, wasn't it?

Looked quite clean. Oh, no, hang on, that was Ozzy. Forget I spoke, everyone, I'm a thick cunt. Carry on. I know there's shots of him in denim, sort of tiny pants. Yes! Most unsavoury. That's it.

But I think his hygiene would be impeccable in the kitchen, albeit with a bit of amphetamine added in, which is fine. The fucking short shorts man this is something that comes over in uh have you seen lemmy the movie no oh it's yeah it's a documentary like uh it's really good actually yeah dave grohl is in it quite a lot and um he talks about the fact that lemmy would walk around la wearing these tiny little denim hot pants you know not you know you know like uh metalers normally wear those kind of big knee-length shorts. No, no.

Lemmy was going the kind of... Aussie rules footballer. Yeah, or the Leopoldo Luque Mario Kempez Argentina 1978 length of short. You know, fucking hell. That's just an unsightly image for the mind. My favourite bit in that, though, is when, I think I've got this right, but Grohl tells his story of being at LAX airport and Lemmy's there and this car pulls over and it's a fucking stretch limo

and the tinted windows wind down and it's Little Richard. And they're all really excited to see Little Richard, but Little Richard's kids are there and they made him pull over because they're really excited to see Lemmy. Wow. Yeah, I love that. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

What a time for a metal fan to be alive, 1980. I mean, if you're like, I don't know, 13, 14, 15, you've got all this exciting new music, but you've also got a huge back catalogue going back 10 years of similar shit. Yeah, yeah. I mean, Parano paranoid gets into the chart soon doesn't it true yeah reissued yeah and it's at that crucial point before ntv gets hold of it and before the americans get hold of it and blow it all stadium sized yes it's still in that sort of excitingly thrillingly close place there's probably not another nawabaham friendly episode like this episode the combination of both these bands but also also, of course, Tommy Vance presenting,

it's an absolute fucking bomb for Metalheads this episode. So the following week, the Golden Years EP soared 15 places to number eight, its highest position. The follow-up, Ace of Spades, got to number 15 for two weeks in November of this year. They had an even better 1981 when two more EPs, St Valentine's Day Massacre with Girl School and Motorhead Live, got to number 5 for two weeks in February and number 6 for two weeks in July respectively. two weeks in July, respectively. The band continued with an ever-changing lineup, with Lemmy as the one constant member,

all the way until December of 2015, when he died in Los Angeles at the age of 70. But this very month, an avatar of him was one of the headliners of a virtual OzFest on their Tintinette. Did you see that? No. I caught a glimpse. What the fuck?

It's all you need. Yeah, that is definitely all you need. Yeah, it was very PlayStation 2, wasn't it? Very much so. Very much so. But, I mean, Lemmy is kind of cartoonish anyway. Yes. So, yeah, kind of suitable.

All right. I don't know about you Pop Craig Junctions but we've got chronic headaches now so we're going to stop for a bit and come back tomorrow for the final part of this episode of Chart Music don't forget there is a video playlist for every episode we do, and this one's no exception. Everything we talk about,

everything we listen to, just everything about May of 1980. So if you're tired of using your ears, why don't you use your ears and your eyes and tuck into that playlist. All right, me dears, see you tomorrow. My name's Al Needham. There's Simon Price and Neil Kulcone.

Rock!