Chart Music: the Top Of The Pops Podcast - #69: December 27th 1974 – The Ramadan #1 Of 1974

Episode Date: January 28, 2023

The latest episode of the podcast which asks; have any of Team Chart Music done a streak?It’s late January, but the inflatable Jimmy Savile-as-Santa is still hanging off the roof of the Chart Music house and the wreath that looks like DLT still hangs on the door as we prepare to tuck into another end-of-year splurge of Pop, as our favourite Thursday evening pop treat gets shunted to a Friday teatime and another Selection Box of the hits of the year gets ripped into. ‘Tis the arse-end of 1974, Pop-Crazed Youngsters, and a definitely end-of-era feel hangs over this episode. Glam is in its last knockings, the teenybop icons are starting to fade, the brickies in Eyeliner are just brickies now, Mock n’ Roll is in the ascendancy, the Pop Famine of 1975/6 is beckoning, and although there’s much to love here, this could well be the very last episode of the Golden Age of Top Of The Pops. Noel Edmonds and Dave Lee Travis are on hand to take us through the smash hits of the year that weren’t introduced by Tony Blackburn and Jinglenonce OBE on Xmas Day, and are fucking unbearable. Musicwise, like all end-of-year shows, it’s your typical running-away-from-a-crocodile episode. The Rubettes pitch up for a victory lap with a flashing bow tie. John Denver goes on about his missus again, before he takes a chainsaw to their bed. Alvin displays the most amazing standwork ever on TOTP if you discount Brian Connolly breaking one over his knee, before George McCrae attempts to introduce the TOTP Orchestra to Disco as he stands over a leftover turkey carcass. Stephanie De Sykes represents the Kings Oak Massive, and then Sparks completely go off. The Glitter Band do a Nazi love gesture at Bad King Gary as he performs his great lost Number One. Sylvia tells a load of underaged Osmonds fans about how she got her end away in Spain this summer. Queen set down a marker for their dominance of the next few years. Ray Stevens fails to get his cock out. After Suzi Quatro says goodbye to the massive bluescreen, the most perfect #1 single EVER is desecrated by the TOTPO. Terry Jacks reminds us that he’s still dying, and we close with the Blokes Of Pop taking over and claiming dominance of the year, while Travis plays a Christmas Tree. So long, Early Seventies, you were MINT and SKILL and we’ll never see your like again.Taylor Parkes and Rock Expert David Stubbs join Al Needham for a celebration of all things ’74, veering off on such tangents as blind West Ham left-backs, Noele Gordon’s musical career, five year-olds demanding to be let into sex shops, the era-defining genius of Yus My Dear, disturbing scenes at Wombles gigs, a re-imagining of Do They Know It’s Christmas written by Chinnichap, and the introduction of the parlour game that’s going to sweep the dinner parties of 2023 – Pantomime Horse. HAPPY NEW SWEARING, POP-CREAZED YOUNGSTERS… Video Playlist | Subscribe | Facebook | Twitter | The Chart Music Wiki | Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Hey up you pop craze youngsters and welcome to the latest episode of Char Music The podcast that gets its hands right down the back of the settee On a random episode of Top of the Pops. I'm your host, Al Needham, and with me today are Taylor Parks and rock expert David Stubbs. Indeed. Boys, before we get stuck into the pop and the interesting things, I have to make an apology to all the pop craze youngsters out there because this was supposed to be the Christmas episode episode of chart music and uh and it's not now it's not even the fucking russian orthodox christmas episode of charmies i miss that cunt as well we recorded a bit late in the day didn't we on this one uh got

it all done just before christmas eve and i thought oh i'll go around my mams for a couple of weeks i'll take my brand new laptop laptop, and I'll do all the editing there and bang it straight out for New Year's Eve, and no, that didn't happen. So on behalf of no other fucker but me, it's all my fault, I'm soz. I'm well soz, Pop Craze youngsters. Can you find it in your heart to forgive me?

We're like those cunts on your street who leave their Christmas decorations up in March, aren't we? Anyway, the pop things, the interesting things, tell me now! Yeah, it's curious really. Normally I see Christmas as this kind of tunnel of barbed wire that you just have to get through and just think about tax returns and all that shit. But there was a bit of a sprinkling of the christmas spirit with me this year oh yeah you know i saw um my little boy dara uh who's seven he did his first ever sort of

nativity i say nativity it was a sort of nativity scene with santa claus heavily involved which i think theologians would probably quibble about a bit but um yeah it was all right they sang loads of songs did some macaton style because it's in a sort of speech and language unit you know so they've all got like these little particular needs he had one line and that was i have brought frankincense and he was doing all right in rehearsals but i know a little giddy is i just had this feeling we all did on on the day when you know it said i have brought gold says the first wise man and the second wise man dara just looks at you and says what do you want but he didn't he belted it out of the park it was

brilliant i brought you frankincense you know it was like brian blessed like he was addressing the rafters beautiful 10 out of 10 so i've never been to a nativity like that before um probably the last time i was when i was in one oh who were you oh i think i was joseph actually of course it was kind of improv really it was like the one in Adrian Mole. Yeah, it's a problem. I got myself suspended. No, I'll tell you who I was. I was the husband.

The chap, you know, went going around with the stable owners or whatever. And there was this other woman there. I was supposed to be married to her. And she'd actually been most of the talking. And I just said, yes, now and again. We do have a stable around the back. It's not very much. And I'd just say, yes.

So, yeah, it wasn't exactly Tony Slatter slattery-esque i suppose you know my skill did you sing rat-a-tat-tat rat-a-tat-tat no no no no i'm afraid not no no that's i mean you know that's the dimmest memories of this and dari you know he really you know it's just like frankincense i mean you know everybody can say mer mer's it's just like frankincense. I mean, you know, everybody can say mer, mer's just a noise. Yeah. Frankincense, I mean, get your laughing ear around that, you know. And I was always like one of the gold Frankenstein and mer kids, you know, when I was at school. It's so easy to fall back on, isn't it, that one?

It is, yeah. Also, a few days before Christmas, there was a train strike and it was his last day of his trampoline class and I had to pick him up from school and it was a three-hour bus journey covering about seven miles. It actually would have been easier to have walked. Just like I was feeling kind of absolutely like shit on a stick. But, you know, finally when he got there into this sports centre where they hold it, they were having their little Christmas party there. I'd sort of snuck in a bottle of Prosecco.

And we did a little toast. I just remember a sort of really kind of like an angel getting his wings or something like that. One of those lovely little Christmas moments. They're only fleeting, but, you know, they do last. Did you get pissed up and have a go on the trampoline? No, I mean, that will happen one of these years. What kind of human being are you? I know, you're quite right, actually.

They chuck us out after an hour, fortunately. If it had gone on all evening, I think, then definitely, yeah. There'd have been a lot of swinging and a jumping and a jumping and a lengthy trip to a and e and yeah definitely taylor what's pop what's interesting baby oh well thomas mann said a writer is someone for whom writing is harder than it is for other people manfred mann said there she was just aer down the street singing do what did he did he dumb did he do cooper man said hey blunder woman get a load of this one it makes you think

doesn't it no you know i've been taking full advantage of london life between the pandemics which is to say uh not having enough money to go out for a drink or to heat my home so uh sitting in a freezing cold flat listening to low-flying police helicopters but i don't really mind them it's company for me and if you had a little box or something like i don't know a tic-tac box or a fag packet you could look out your window and pretend that they're your drones imagine them fun yeah fun in short supply maybe no heating this year so more authentically victorian christmas than usual and a nice lively game of snapdragon you know some especially energetic charades uh nothing in my stocking but an orange and a walnut

and a wind-up toy mouse got myself a christmas present got a rare album of baccarat and david songs very rare it's the songs where but baccarat wrote the lyrics and how david wrote the music it's terrible it's like they definitely got it the right way round, the way they normally did it. That's like that Tommy Cooper joke, isn't it? Now, what you've got there is a Stradivarius and a Rembrandt. Unfortunately, Stradivarius was a terrible painter and Rembrandt made rotten violins.

Oh, yeah, yeah. It has been previously done better, yeah. Thanks, David. Sorry. Other than that, what else we've been doing i watched some more triangle hey good time out of the way fish here it comes uh so yet more steel gray watery horizons and characters called things like arthur parker and barbara carter best thing that's happened lately is the ship stopped to pick up some lost Russian sailors whose enthusiasm for the West and wretched tales of their homeland

taught quite a lesson to the dogmatic young communist engineer who previously appeared to believe that the Eastern Bloc was like Beverly Hills, but for everyone. Because Triangle takes a similar approach to class consciousness as carry on at your convenience but then when i've grown weary of the middle brow and want to really dive like one of those submersibles from the blue planet descending into the mariana trench of western culture in search of the most bizarre and hideous hr giga fish i've also been on youtube watching the australian remake of love thy neighbor oh have you seen this love thy australian

neighbor i've seen bits of it yes this was a traditional move in the old days when your show had worn itself out you could go to australia and star in the australian remake made for people who'd already seen the british version but were still thrilled to have you over there doing it all over again but cheaper and worse john inman did it yes appeared in the australian iub and served obviously the most famous or notorious one is tony hancock who went over there to make Australian Hancock's Half Hour and almost instantly topped himself. Steptoe did it as well. Yeah, but it's a little known fact.

Jack Smethurst also took that long, long flight and appeared in Australian version Love Thy Neighbour. And when you compare it to the British Love Thy Neighbour, well, there's good news and there's bad news. The good news is that they flipped the concept. So now Eddie Booth is the foreigner. He's the immigrant next door. And his macho Aussie neighbour thinks he's a whinging pommy layabout.

So it's slightly easier to watch without the barrage of racist language. But the bad news is this means there are now no black people in the show at all thanks to the white australia policy we have an all-white cast which isn't so progressive and it makes the program kind of pointless and they only got one episode out of the cultural differences between england and australia which is meant to be the point of the thing because the writing is so uninspired they can't even get original ideas out of that or aboriginal ideas either yeah they didn't dare so by halfway through the series they're doing gay panic storylines even before that they were already reduced by episode three to creep up behind burglar and clonk him over the head but it turns out it's not

a burglar there's not a single new joke in sight but it's almost vaguely interesting to watch at least next week on the ugandan buses starring reg varney and joseph adongo and you'll be watching it won't you taylor well i mean what else am i gonna do try actually i was thinking as a money-making scheme you know those dinner nights based on only fools and horses or faulty towers where like non-lookalikes walk around dressed as del boy or yeah that's all fine you eat your dinner in this uk gold tribute band ambience well don't you think a really shrewd operator would start one of those based on love thy neighbor yes i think it would be a big hit with the target demographic despite the inevitable

elitist whining and virtue signaling of the the so-called non-racist errati it's either that or set up a cable channel called great british telly which is just an endless montage of two second clips of every time david jason in early series of only fools and horses used an unpleasant term for an asian grocers just all of those edited together looped and repeated 24 hours a day with the audio playing twice overlapping and going in and out of sync like a steve wright tape composite just that interspersed with videos of the who all day and if the bbc set up bbc nine and just broadcast that forever i'd say all those triple lock cunts would soon stop moaning about the license fee christ i love i had to watch a lot of rub thy neighbor for this

book that i've just about finished and uh oh dear me i mean it's just so awful things the weird thing about it is that smethers will say like knickknock and of course you know rudolph walker comes back with honky and it's as if to imply there's kind of a parody oh yeah that's just as bad isn't it honky yeah because i remember as a white kid you know being called a honky so often and how damaging that was you know to my sense of self esteem and what have you maybe he was just talking about his favorite southampton funk band though it's always disappointing christmas at home when you're not a family man you know makes you long for the days when ordinary humans could go on holiday do you remember that you could spend

your christmas in an alpine fantasia and pull through the streets of grindelwald on a fairy lit reindeer sleigh on christmas eve it'd be nice you've ever been to switzerland yeah i've been yeah quite a few times not at christmas though yeah have you are you fucking david bowie or something yeah yeah i summered rather than wintered in switzerland It's an incredibly great and incredibly terrible place. Every time I've been there, I've felt enormously comfortable. You've been to Switzerland as well? Oh, yeah. Am I the only person who hasn't been to Switzerland?

That's right. It appears so, yeah. For fuck's sake. Well, it's the young gods and yellow and all that, you know. Always sort of trotting over there. I've never been to me either. Fucking hell, what a shit life i've had but listen what it is you go there and you feel comfortable because almost everything about

the the rural or the alpine areas of switzerland is kept exactly as it was in 1926 right it's so laughably beautiful and so exactly what you'd expect from storybooks and sappy films. And personally, that countryside and those old buildings stirs some real emotion in me. I hope it doesn't make me a literal Nazi, but being in a picturesque old-timey European setting does feel very comfortable to me, even being so close to all that gold and all those paintings. And all that aside, the terrible truth is that it's genuinely wonderful to have a place in Europe that is still sealed in the olden days and feels like a century ago.

But the price you pay for that is that it's not a real country. It's like a middle Europa theme park. Because to keep a European country in that state indefinitely first of all you have to forcibly stop it from developing naturally and then you also have to fund this somehow so the payback for the preservation of this beautiful place is that you walk down the high street of any of these picture book alpine towns and in between the fondue restaurants and the chocolate shops it's all jimmy chews and louis vuitton and prada because they've all become play pens for the well for the very rich but not quite super rich and the price you pay is that the cities in switzerland

are the most boring cities on earth because they're just money and business towns. They're only there to keep the billions of Swiss francs churning, to subsidise this vast expanse of beauty. And the major price that you pay is you become a country with absolutely no culture, which is also pretty racist. Apart from the young gods. Apart from the young gods, yeah. Yeah, and a few other things. pretty racist apart from the young gods apart from the young gods yeah yeah because in the 21st century there's no way you can have a place like switzerland without all that also being the case so i think it's probably good to have one place like that in europe or two if you count lichtenstein

which is switzerland taken to its logical conclusion and it would be awful to lose it but the reality is fucking creepy and unnerving as well as being the loveliest place i've ever seen that isn't a tropical or arctic archipelago but i think that you know liking the tinkling of cowbells doesn't make you a national socialist um really but um but having said that yeah it is fucking hell it is never said more cowbell, did he? I used to watch Ski Sunday and I'd just feel the jackboots bursting out. I was stepping across to switch to BBC Two. Yeah, blue eyes lighting up.

It's bloody expensive. The last time I went to Switzerland, I went to Gstaad, to some luxury hotel. You've been to Switzerland more than what for fuck's sake. I know, I know. This was actually with a friend that was on some sort of jolly to this hotel. A glass of wine has set you back 20 quid.

People living in Geneva would cross the border to France to do their shopping. Was this the Gestard Palace Hotel? I think it might have been. Yeah, I was looking at the menu of that online the other day. And quite frankly, 60 quid for the grilled beef olivet with sauteed potatoes and perigordian juice. And I bet you could fit it in the palm of your hand. Pathetic, isn't it? And I say what, I hope you don't like sea bass unless your surname is Monopoly.

Well, goodbye to all our Swiss listeners there. I just think it's a shame that for the Pop Craze Patreons, we didn't have time to do like what Nationwide or Blue Peter or All-Star Record Breakers would do and put on a little pantomime for Christmas. Oh, maybe next year, Taylor. Because at this spooky time of year, thoughts turn inevitably to pantomime

because everyone goes to one every year, don't they? Oh, yeah. Because like what Christmas would be complete turn inevitably to pantomime because everyone goes to one every year don't they no yeah it's like what christmas would be complete without a 32 year old woman in green tight and a three-cornered hat i went to one once in birmingham where there was a flight of stairs leading down from the front of the stage into the orchestra pit right i remember when the pantomime horse came on and stood a bit too close to it, really, really wanting to see the pantomime horse fall down the stairs, not out of any particular ill will, but just because if a pantomime horse fell down a flight of stairs,

I can't imagine the patterns it would make. Have you ever been in a pantomime horse? No. Nope. Oh, fucking hell, I've never been to Switzerland. I've never been in a pantomime horse no no oh fucking hell i've never been to switzerland i've never been in a pantomime fucking hell this entire episode is about belittling me and my my meager achievements in life i mean if it was you and me al i mean you know you haven't been to me but at least you'd have been to me if it would have been in time to have my horse together you know if david and i were in a pantomime horse david who would you put at the front

i'm sorry, Albert. I just have to. I get claustrophobic. But this is it, right? What are you saying about my arse, David? This is precisely what I was thinking about. I'm sort of fascinated. I don't know if there's some rule which determines who goes up front and who brings up the rear.

I don't know whether there are front guys and back guys, and that's their speciality. Yeah. And the back guys are proud of it, like power bottoms. Or whether it just comes down to seniority or who grabs the suit first, you know. And do they get paid the same? I don't think they should.

Right. Because, I mean, mean look what if the pantomime was going on and a loose stallion burst into the theater unexpectedly i see where you're going galloped onto the stage on my horse yes the pantomime the man in the front would be having by far the better time i think but he'd also have the greater responsibility to do something about it so you know i presume that if that happened in that crisis scenario while the bloke at the back was screaming the bloke in the front would shit into his screaming mouth just to establish the hierarchy within the horse. Because without that hierarchy, all you would have is chaos. So you'd be shitting out of malice or fear?

You've just got to lay down some principles. All right, I'm going to chuck out some duos. You tell me which one of the two is at the back of the horse. OK, Wham! Well, you know, come on, we know this one. I mean, he's barely at the back of the horse, this old Andrew. The tail, really. Simon and Garfunkel.

Oh, well, there's a height issue here, isn't there? Despite the fact that Paul Simon wrote all the songs, I think you'd have to put art up the front, really. I mean, there's his head and all that. Yeah, there's a sense in which their recording of Bridge Over Troubled Water is like a pantomime. All right, Liam and Noel Gallagher. I think what you'd have is like a horse-shaped bag with like a lot of sort of bulges coming out at different areas like a be no fight cloud

peters and lee well yeah you see i think that we've established that lenny peters in the past is not the most sort of progressive of thinkers. So I think that despite his blindness, he might nonetheless insist that as the bloke, you know, he gets to go at the front with disastrous consequences. Down the stairs, though, we'd get to see that. Liz Kershaw and Bruno Brooks. Are they both at the back. Surely that must be possible.

How about this one? Mr. Ed and Hercules from Steptoe and Son. Oh, and can I add to that Taylor and modify it a bit? Yeah. Hercules and Mr. Ed trying to get into the pictures with a big long overcoat.

I mean, Mr. Ed's got to talk, isn't he isn't he so he's he's gonna be at the top yeah obviously yeah that's a no-brainer it says one in the stalls and tries to pass over some money whilst forgetting he hasn't got opposable thumbs or anything speaking of chaos by the way since the last time we were here have we all got that excited new monarch feeling oh yes it's lovely isn't it my only concern is how's king charles gonna manage now that he can't ask jimmy saville for advice about everything like he did for 35 years i fear that as a nation we may be lost without that power behind the throne he's gonna have a problem um is old king charles because the thing about the queen is that by virtue of like doing nothing and saying nothing

effectively in terms of public life people could just project whatever they wanted onto her and it could project this kind of rather sort of virtuous saintly otherworldly wise shrewd woman but of course prince charles has spent most of his life saying loads and doing loads so he's a a rather sort of virtuous, saintly, otherworldly, wise, shrewd woman. But, of course, Prince Charles has spent most of his life saying loads and doing loads, so he's a bit sort of demystified, really, and I think that's going to be his major problem. Well, it'll probably be a shortish reign, I would imagine. But, anyway, before we go any further, you know how we go about at this point, because I have come to tell thee of all the newborn patreon subscribers to see in the five dollar section this week we have james shooter emily grant johnny m michael avery Emma Murray, Tim Ward, Joe O'Donnell, Dave Valentine, Jason Branigan, Ian Robertson,

Robert Oliver, Ted H, Paul Braithwaite, Tina Boffin, Michael Cook, Nacho Vidal, Colonel Nutz, Richard, open brackets, Levi Levi everybody wants to be a cat porridge selection box please please me pip it from Jaws 221B Baker Street close brackets

and the return of someone who chooses to call themselves Leicester is better than Nottingham the real Nacho Vidal. I'm surprised he's got time. And in the $3 section, we have Simon Mulvaney,

Kylian Fowler, John Bennett, and Steve Hughes. Oh, babies, we love you so. These guys rock. And Mark Savage, Daniel Sullivan, and Doug Grant jacked their contributions right up, which means they get to go into the private room with me and watch me oil up my breasts

and mash them like they were Play-Doh. And it goes without saying that this episode is dedicated to all the Pop Craze Patreons who have put a jingle in our G-string this year. Fucking hell, you're amazing, your lot. Excellent. We think you're lush. Great people. And as well as getting this episode in full

without any rubbish advert bollocks ages before everyone else, the Pop Craze Patreons get the opportunity to prize open the back door of the record shop, grab that chart return book, and fiddle with it like a bastard in order to rig the chart music Christmas top ten. Oh my God, are you ready, boys? Yes! Hit the fucking music!

We've said goodbye to Jeff Sex, Legs and Cunner, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Glitter and my fucking car. Which means none up, five down, one non-mover, one re-entry and three new entries. A former number one now down seven places to number ten, the Airbnb 52s. It's a new entry at number nine for Dag Vag.

Re-entry at number eight, rock expert David Starr. No change at number seven for for here comes the inches. And it's a one-place drop from number five to number six for the bent cunts who aren't fucking real. Into the top five, and it's a one-place drop for Bumadog. Straight into the chart at number four, the Nagasaki Hell Blaster. Down from number two to number three

for Eric Smulkshaw of Eccles. Last week's number one has dropped one place to number two, the provisional Uaruare, which means... Britain's number one! the provisional which means it could only be the highest new entry and the chart music Christmas number one of 2022 the Birmingham

Piss Troll oh what a chart voice so the new entries chaps Dag Vag well we know Oh, what a chart voice. Represent. So, the new entries, chaps. Dag Vag. Well, we know they're a Swedish band whose name I've completely mispronounced, but it sounds better that way.

Kind of Swedish reggae. Not as good as Finnish reggae. What's his name? Ricky Scorza in the Eurovision Song Contest in 1981, Reggae OK. You know that one, don't you, David? Oh, of course, yeah. Yeah, about time the accordion was introduced to the cultural mix of reggae, don't you think? Definitely, yeah.

I think there's nothing like skanking along to a bit of accordion. The Nagasaki Hell Blaster. Well, you know, there's only three words that sprang to mind when I heard him. That's called thrash. And the Birmingham piss troll. What does that sound like? Yeah. The do they know it's Christmas of this chart.

Probably surprisingly avant-garde, actually. So if you want in on the pulsating thrill ride of being a Pop Craigs Patreon, you know what to do. Keyboard. Patreon.com slash chart music. Pledge. Pledge. and pledge some more if you can it's your money that we want and your money we shall have so this episode pop craze youngsters

takes us all the way back to december the 27th 1974 and I have to say that for reasons both musical televisual and personal there's a definite end of era tinge about this one particularly when you compare it to the 1972 and 1973 episodes we've already covered on chart music. I mean, there's no T-Rex, there's no Sweet, no Wizard, no Cassadare. Slade is still in there, but only for a song they did in 1973. You know, there's a few acts hanging in there, but you can't help but feel that the wind has changed. Yeah, I mean, obviously, I was 12 at the time. I didn't really feel that kind of sense of declinism or whatever.

You know, this is my pop life. It was almost like a kind of a kind of a peak really but yeah i guess you can look at it now and think that a certain 70s is on the point of ending yeah now this is really the the first time in the pop era where the general feeling is hey everything's quite shit now you know like the entire history of pop music up to this point is all about freshness optimism and modernity yeah some definition of progress and now suddenly over the last year or two all of that's dried up and for the first time there's no excitement about living now that's right there's a kind of hiatus and i think that what fills that is the first great pang of nostalgia the early rock and roll and there's so much of hiatus. And I think that what fills that is the first great pang of nostalgia, the early rock and roll.

And there's so much of that from about 73 onwards. Because ultimately you can see the national mood, like the effects of the oil crisis and what it means for the West and all filtering through to this place here, pop music, where consumerism and the imagination meet. And both those things have been affected by the gloom you know and it's partly that and it's partly just well you can see everything has gone a bit shit hasn't it you know it's funny once the technological optimism and the thrill of prosperity drops away

you realize that in 1974 you're still in a philip larkin hancock's half hour world where people sit by a lamp in a cold room in silence writing each other letters to break up the solitude you know and on a sunday or after about 10 o'clock at night, there's literally nothing to do except inhale the damp, you know. So there's all that lost energy and curdled optimism. If you listen to the lovely song 1974 by the very occasionally great Robin Hitchcock, it's in there. And you can see why things felt like that. Unlike a lot of easy assumptions about pop cultural eras i think this is true

there's a bit of a sense of decline because it's verified by pretty much everyone who was there or at least everyone who'd lived through the years immediately before this and could feel the sudden difference maybe if you were 15 at the time it might have seemed exciting although i'm not too sure about that because i was 15 in 1987 which was the 1974 of the 80s and i was acutely aware of how dead things were there was this sort of sense of you know decline is and indicating despair or whatever and just especially going on into the mid 70s the only thing was it's it's more sort of cultural it's more a sort of latitude it's more a sort of latitude, it's more a mood. It's not really, I mean, in lots of ways,

you know, there was a bit more political justice and a bit more equality back in the 70s in the UK. And there was more job security, housing was cheaper. We had sort of public services intact. Nonetheless, people did feel a little bit sort of jaded, certainly, and that things weren't as good as they were and yet you know there was an index at a time when people like i mean going on later into the 70s when you know lindsey depaul or whatever singing about where are we rock bottom and say well fucking

hell you know i'll show you what we start drilling in the 21st century i can fucking tell you you know but um actually there was some there was a survey done in 1976 that suggested that people were actually at their happiest overall in an index States since the end of the Second World War. And actually, although there was a lot of that mood, and I think a lot of it was sort of fed into punk and things like that, it was also coming from the top, though. I mean, a lot of it was like sort of shareholders pissed off that, like, you know, that they weren't getting the kind of returns they are, or people having to pay the kind of tax that they were under wilson and all that kind of stuff you know they were generating a lot of the kind of britain going to the dogs type stuff at the same time as this but yeah i mean what taylor says is it is true certainly having said that yeah if you watch anything that's genuinely representative of the mid-1970s like this top of the pops for instance you do get the feeling that in some ways this was

a more advanced culture than we live in today and yet in others it was a complete shit show well yeah and it's the tug between those two things that makes this period compelling despite everything so if i were to say chaps the music of 1974 what is immediately going to fly out of those musically minded mouths of yours craftwork i suppose but um that's something that's kind of happening beneath the surface really um in terms of what's happening at that you know as it were surface level it's a lot of people still slightly moldering i guess from the early 70s is yeah it was the the energy and pop has dropped off all the interesting music being made is not in the charts it's like we

always say the only reliably good music in mid-70s british charts is black american music yes british pop is kind of in the doldrums a bit and all the interesting music being made is away from the chart i think in this episode we're going to see confirmation that glam is now morphing into mock and roll. I mean, this is the year that show-woddy-woddy won new faces. The big band of the moment is a definite throwback. It's all going that way. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's a strange time.

And, like, look, forgive me if I go on a bit again. No, no, no, go ahead, sir. These podcasts aren't just fabulously long because we're self-indulgent fucks it's because the only way to get any sense out of these relics of a recent semi-recognizable past is to live with them bolt the doors and gradually torture out the true essence of the time. Because if you rush it, you end up falling back on all the myths and all the misleading clichés, you know, about discontinued suites and happy, smiling kids playing out on the main road, you know, with nuclear waste and crocodiles.

And every single one of those kids who's still here to say, well, I survived, really did survive. Every single one of them but looking back this period seems somehow weirder and more foreign than 10 years earlier do you know what i mean even though this is within my lifetime the atmospheres and the vistas that i can personally remember seem stranger and more alien than a lot of stuff that i can't you know because this is like some of my earliest memories are from this time and when i think back it's really hard to relate to now

just everyday stuff that's far stranger when you think about it years later than any crazy fashions or anything like that like people driving around in the mist in cars that were just metal inside you know you know you get in a car now and it's all sculpted plastic and upholstery and little screens which light up and the interiors of these cars look like the inside of an old spitfire it's just metal like you might as well have had a like a oxygen mask hanging under the front seat you know i mean i remember when i was in the car with my dad around about this time to go and see my non-armed grandpa i'd climb up off the back seat um didn't have to take the seat belt off because fucking hell he wears a seat belt yeah and i'd

just climb up on the parcel rack at the back and just lie there yeah yeah yeah yeah and dad didn't say anything yeah i remember being in my uncle's car, driving down the street, and the cold wind would be streaming into the car through a hole in the side where a bit of the bodywork had just rusted away. You'd just sit there in the draft with your coat on, toggled right up to the neck, you know, like sitting at home Christmas 2022. And the suspension was like everything in the car was on its own spring so when you went over a pothole or if you had to drive over a field which in those days people

sometimes did everything was moving in different directions inside the car as the outside rolled around on its axles it was like a carnival sideshow if you're over five foot eight the top of your head would just bang off the roof yes if there hadn't been a roof you'd have been propelled out of the car because as you say seat belts were for homosexuals yes god i remember um eight of us me my two brothers my mum and dad and my uncle and aunt and cousin eight of us all traveling out to scarborough from leeds and a mini fucking hell i mean you wouldn't do you wouldn't do that these days thank christ i tell you what as well speaking of cold the lack of modern style properly warm clothes right because

a lot of which hadn't been invented so they just have to wear layers you see someone in a string vest with a shirt and tie over that with a jumper over that with a suit over that with a leather jacket over that with a big overcoat over that without anything done up so around the arms you'd have about nine layers of clothing but in the front channel like the breastplate area there's almost nothing between frost and flesh so i wonder people always getting a cold on the chest but it's trivial stuff like that seems non-trivial to me because when i think back to my earliest memories that's what they feel like you know it's all about the cold of buildings and the smell of mildew and terrible wartime fibres, you know. At that time, really did feel drab and evil, even though a lot of people were having an awful lot of fun.

It's sad. I was watching an old daytime cookery programme from the mid-70s the other week. And I got a bit upset when they were talking about some recipe or other and the older lady presenting said or you can use black currant leaves they'll be coming along soon and i could only think of this battalion of elderly dying people you know still living by the seasons born in the 19th century their houses all silent and cold at night you know all of them soon gone was it worth it merry christmas yeah i'm not saying at all that this episode is catchy i mean there are a lot of bangers in the trifle of pop that's about to be served up to us but i do feel

this does mark the end of the golden age atop of the pops and it's going to be served up to us. But I do feel this does mark the end of the golden age of Top of the Pops, and it's going to be a long winter until the Aventis come along and perk everything up again. So we'd better enjoy it while it's here, eh, chaps? Indeed. Onward! Radio 1 News In the news this week,

John Stonehouse, the disgraced former Postmaster General and current Labour MP for Walsall North, who was believed to have been eaten by a shark in Miami, has been arrested in Melbourne on Christmas Eve by local police who thought he was Lord Lucan. The IRA round off the year by bombing Oxford Street, Arrods, a pub in Wiltshire, a Dixon's in Bristol, and also find time to lob a bomb through Ted Heath's living room window.

The Australian city of Darwin has practically been flattened by Cyclone Tracy on Christmas Day, destroying 70% of its buildings, 80% of its houses and causing £4.2 billion worth of damage in today's rubbish money. Gerald Ford, the still relatively new president of the USA, reveals in an interview that he believes 1975 will be a year of crisis, with a new war in the Middle East and the complete economic breakdown of a European country allied to America, who he won't name.

It's us poor cunts. There's been a mass arrest of over 150 Santas in Denmark who went on a shoplifting rampage in Copenhagen and gave out their booty to passers-by in the shopping centre as a protest against commercialism. Mick Taylor has left the Rolling Stones after five years

and rumours abound that his replacement will be Ronnie Wood of the Faces. Pope Paul VI is nearly brained by falling rubble on christmas day when the holy door is open for him during some ceremony or other jack benny has died at the age of 80 john purtwee has recorded his final episode of doctor who and will regenerate into tom baker next week outrage has broken out all over the country

over the latest tour by Britain's most controversial group, with angry parents leading walkouts at the general rubbishness of the stage show, The Wombles of Wimbledon Common. According to the complaints, which have been aired right across the media, the kiddies were unable to hear anything through the masks of the actors there weren't enough womble songs in the show and a

lack of padding in the costumes made the southwest london eco warriors look positively anorexic after the liverpool show closed down after one performance the final straw came in belfast when angry dads bum rushed the stage demanding their money back meanwhile the malcolm mclaren of the group great uncle bulgaria has been subjected to a full body search at heathrow airport while dressed as santa on his way to the lord mayor of belfast christ Christmas party brandishing a suspicious looking Christmas cake after they made him do a dance and pick up some straight litter and put it in a bin the customs officers were satisfied as to who he was and he was allowed to board the plane I'm in full sympathy with the angry dads of Belfast because I've been through that

when my nephew was five years old he was well into Noddy and they were doing Noddy the stage show at the Ice Arena in Nottingham so I got tickets for it and I took him out I didn't tell him where we were going I thought you know what

I'll just walk around and he's just going to bump into Noddy and he's going to think I'm the fucking king of the uncles so anyway we're walking around we do a few bits and bobs and we get to the ice arena and i said oh i hear that in that building there's someone you'd probably like to see shall we go in so i sat him down in the fucking ice arena and the lights come up and there's noddy and big ears and everything dancing on the stage and i'm just sat back arms

folded job well done i looked down he looks absolutely disgusted by the whole thing and i say hey look jamie there's there's nod air what do you mean he turned around and looked at me with a look of pure fucking hatred and he just said this makes me mad i couldn't work out why it was i think it was something to do with the fact that he knew that noddy wasn't human sized because he fitted on a small screen television and he realized that he was all a cod and i've got a photo of him at half time and he didn't want to go back in i was just like look i paid fucking stupid amount of money i can't afford on this you little cunt you're gonna go back in there you're gonna enjoy it and he's just leaning against the wall with his head against the brickwork in absolute defeat oh he's never

allowed to forget the little fucker but the big news this week is santa's been what did you get chaps do you know what i was thinking of this because i can remember it pretty clear 1975 was crossfire year no 1972 was monopoly year 1973 was cludo year but i can't for the life of me remember i think i would have got obviously the latest and the sort of top of the pop series of course you know one of my grandmas i said on the back of the sleeve building up a collection that will make you the envy of your neighbourhood. I wasn't the envy of my neighbourhood, I can assure you. How could you be the envy of your neighbourhood? I don't know.

You know, somehow or other, you know, the entire neighbourhood would be kind of, you know, green and wistful. See that David Stubbs there? He's got a full set of the Top of the Pulse collection. Bastard. He's got 20 LPs in total. Fucking hell. That's all I can remember, really. You know, it would have been absolutely mint,

whatever it was. I mean, I'm sure not blanking out or messing some disappointment, you know. I was two, so I suspect my parents were still taking advantage of the fact that you can just lob anything at a kid. It's Christmas. Yeah.

Party seven. At the wrapping paper from my pack of aftershave yeah exactly yeah it's always crunchy crunchy yeah on the cover of melody maker this week freddie mercury raising a glass of champagne on the cover of music star alvin stardust dressed up as s. On the cover of Radio Times, Frank Spencer holding the empty half of a cracker. On the cover of TV Times, Tommy Steel

as Hans Christian Andersen, reading a book to some kiddies. That's a bit fucking cerebral for TV Times, isn't it? The number one single this week is Lonely This Christmas by Mudd. The number one LP is Elton Lonely This Christmas by Mud. The number one LP is Elton John's Greatest Hits.

David Essex by David Essex is at number two. And Rolling by the Bay City Rollers is at number three. Over in America, the number one single is Cats in the Craigle by Harry Shapin. And the number one LP is Elton John's Greatest Hits. It's only rock and roll by the Rolling Stones at number two, Warchild by Jethro Tull at number three. So, me boys, what were we doing in December of 1974? I was 12 years old.

I was in the first year at St. Michaelael's college a very sort of cold it's like institute in um headingley and leeds and you know what i was doing pretty well i was getting pretty much top marks across the board you know across all subjects except chemistry i was a bit rubbish at that and i was in the football team the only thing that really you know to sort of make me the complete chap as it were at that age was a the question, was I cock of 1A? That was my class. Was I best fire? Could I knack anyone that they put up against me?

Trouble was, I was so well-liked and popular that no one ever picked a fight with me, so I never got to test my strength. That's the sadness of it. Walking around the playground with a full set of Top of the Pops LPs under your arm, no doubt. Exactly, yeah. Not just the envy of my neighbourhood, definitely it was pretty grim i mean i had to get two buses from my little village

of barrack and elm into headingley and leeds and you just every morning especially and about in the winter you know you just got you know the full gamut of like the david peace like toxicity of 70s leads you know this and i guess that's generally why you know the colorization of pop had such appeal even though it was only manifested on a black and white TV. We don't have colours up here. Absolutely. But all of that music springs from the kind of the greyest, dourish shitholes of like, you know, Cardiff to Wolverhampton, wherever. It's like that photo of Adrian Street, you know, the wrestler's glam to the absolute nines with his coal miner dad and his mates at the mine shaft. And I mean, the point about that isn't that major street has been on this long long journey far away from this place but he's

born out of this place he actually represents a reaction to this place it's a completely appropriate picture in that respect yeah so yeah i mean that was me really that was that taylor uh lobbing cow and gate at the wall and rocking a bear suit fine time i'm six at this point and i remember exceedingly little about christmas day 1974 the only presents i can remember is getting a cap gun with no caps in it and a big hunk of soap on a rope shaped like a womble which never got used it just sat in my bedroom out of the box until it gathered dust it looked even more like a womble it was it was hairy by that point we would have gone to my non-oran grandpas on christmas day and i do remember that i had a singing contest with my sister on my

grandpa's brand new tape recorder which i lost and had a screaming fit about so that was christmas ruined but the main thing that's hanging over me is the knowledge that in one week's time we were going to be moving out of the house in ice and green that was the only house i ever knew because they were about to pull it down and we're moving into a new building top valley just a few days before this episode uh me and my mom went down to a building site to see the house and we were absolutely convinced that they'd given us the wrong number because you know we were looking at it and we couldn't see an outside toilet and it looked like it had a bathroom and central heating so my mom

went back to the foreman and said you've given me the wrong number dog this can't be where we're moving to and he said no no no this is it is the key just went in it was like fucking hell i was convinced we'd suddenly become posh for some reason and as the council were waiting to pull the entire street down as soon as possible they let us in earlier and we're moving in next week that's great but it's only just beginning to dawn on me this week that everything in the world is going to change so there's going to be no more scott home infant school which i absolutely loved no more rudy guys in the school dinnertime discos and i do believe that this episode marks the last ever time that i'll be going around the house of tony bones as mam who is after all the patron saint of chart music. Yeah. So, yeah, this is landmark times for me.

Still going up in the world. Oh, yeah, upwardly mobile, mate. Sounds like nowadays, but in reverse. Mm, yes. I mean, we'd been on the waiting list for Ice and Green Flats for years, and six months later, after this episode went out, Nationwide broadcast an entire episode live from ice and green flats hosted by frank boff and he called it the most notorious housing scheme in the country with

blues parties going off and prostitutes operating on the balconies so yeah sliding doors and all that we could have lived there i don't know how long frank boff stuck around after the filming but you know so maybe that's why 1974 seems such a kind of year of sort of transition for you oh definitely yeah we've already talked about sitcoms and apart from the cast uprooting and going to australia the other dominant motif of sitcoms and film versions of sitcoms from that era is everything's being pulled down and everyone's living in new flats yeah or the like lads film yeah yeah six yeah there's a lot of that yeah yeah yes my dear yeah and actually the end of till death is due park film as well exactly yeah right at the end there yeah it just seemed like the whole world was tearing itself down and rebuilding itself you know it's like we were living in a very small-scale Dubai. So, Pop Craze youngsters, it's round about this time

that we go into the crap room, have a riffle through a few boxes and pull out an issue of the music press from this week. And this time I've gone for the NME, 28th of December, 1974. Would you like to come with me on this journey, chaps? Indeed. Take our hands. On the cover, a model called the Sensational Lucia, holding a cardboard cutout of Mick Jagger and an armful of t-shirts for a four-page review of the year, which is a bit boring. It's just quotes, and none of the quotes are interesting, so I've not bothered with it.

just quotes and none of the quotes are interesting so i've not bothered with it in the news after last week's announcement that ian hunter has signed a solo deal with cbs it's official mott the hoople have split up mick ronson who joined the band earlier this year has confirmed that he's also leaving for america to work as Hunter's musical director. The three remaining members have announced that they're keeping the name and carrying on, and they do so right up to 1980, with exceedingly diminishing returns. Yeah, I mean, it's a bit weird. It's a bit Wombles-like, really, isn't it?

I'm sure the kind of antipathy they must have got from the Angry Dads and whatever, when they realised that this isn't not the Hoople as they'd anticipated when they bought their tickets. No, this is not the Hoople. Indeed, not the Hoople. Oh, very good. Yeah, yeah.

The next Osmonds World Tour, which would have taken in Southampton, Birmingham, Glasgow and Hammersmith Odeon, as well as 12 other countries, is off a mere two weeks after it was announced. According to a spokesman, it's down to unforeseen logistics problems. All venues in the UK bar Birmingham have been sold out and refunds are currently being processed. But girls throughout the nation are currently being consoled

by the news of new tours by the likes of Lindisfarne, Argent, Bachman Turner Overdrive, the Mahavishnu Orchestra and John Entwistle's Arcs. Great news for the heads in the new year, though. The BBC have announced that the Old Grey Whistle test is being moved to a peak time slot and being extended out to 50 whole minutes.

Look out for Man and Fumble in the studio in the first episode on January the 11th. David Bowie has granted a rare TV interview to Dick Cavett in America. And Lisa Robinson has been given the opportunity to review it in the news pages. From his appearance, Bowie is not a well man. He's thin, almost ravaged beyond belief. There was something depressingly sad about this TV appearance. I'm frankly amazed that Main Man allowed this thing on the air. Oh, we've seen that, haven't we?

Sounds like somebody needs a crash course in myth making and the main points from the teaser's gossip column is that elvis is about to announce a two-year world tour to commemorate his 40th birthday he doesn't the three degrees are posed for penthouse with strategically placed props in front of their bits. Keith Moon is shopping a film about a day in his life around Hollywood. Roger Daltrey is taking fencing lessons for his forthcoming film Lizitomania. Chrysalis Records officers have had all their windows blown out by the IRA bombing of Selfridges and Motown are about to sign up an advertising executive called Chinga Chavin

and put out his LP Country Porn which features tracks such as Tit Stop Rock, Sit Sit Sit Sit On My Face and Cum Stains On The Pillow open brackets where your face used to be

close brackets sadly the deal never comes off and the lp ends up being sold by mail order in the pages of penthouse in 1976 in fine company in the features section well chris salawich nips across the channel to see the most controversial gig in France's Istres. Angry parishioners called for the purification of Reims Cathedral last week, claiming that the 12th century building was desecrated during a pop concert last Friday. They said the concert by Tangerine Dream, supported by Nico, had been attended by 6, ewes who left litter everywhere

smoked hashish and urinated in the cathedral but father bernard guru of the local diocese stuck up for the kids when he said it is true that some ewes smoke pot to communicate more with the sound of tangerine dream it is also true that some others because of the need that prevailed found it necessary to urinate against the pillars it is also true that some because of the cold in the cathedral were seen folded in each other's arms and kissing but it is also true that six youths, staying three hours in the dark, stretched out on the floor, enjoyed the music,

and could have caused more serious damage and behaved in a more disgraceful manner. I mean, just lay on some toilets, bins and heating, you twats. Salowitz reports that it was one of the most profoundly vivid and elevating occasions in his life, and it was dead good when Nico did Janitor of Lunacy. Tony Stewart drops in on the top of the pop studio to talk to the new hot pop sensation, Ralph McTow,

whose Streets of London is currently the Christmas number six, and according to Stewart, sticks out of the glittering array of personalities in the charts like an erection at a eunuch's ball although Ralph has made an effort by changing his denim flares for some quote Carnaby street trousers he gets asked when he's going to change into his costume by a floor manager and is bemused when someone else congratulates him on his comeback when this is his first hit single. After thanking Noel Edmonds for playing Streets of London constantly on his breakfast show,

he tells Stewart that the song is eight years old and was actually written in Paris in order to book up a mate he was busking with there and after it appeared on his debut album in 1969 he got sick to death of people asking for it at gigs although he dislikes being called a folk singer he tells stewart that he's too old at 30 to get into rock i wouldn't want to shake my arse around and wear silly clothes he says yeah that would never do down at the alphabet zoo i wouldn't stand for that sort of thing long tail wagging flippers flapping feathers flying too charles sean murray schleps over to east grinstead to check in on what woody woodman's he's been up to since the dissolutions of the spiders from Mars.

And discovers that he's crashing round Mike Garson's house. He looks a bit like Gilbert O'Sullivan these days. He's been playing in a sort of bands. His latest band is called Flight. And he's brought along a friend to the interview. The public relations officer for Scientology UK. the interview the public relations officer for scientology uk who takes over very early on and renders the rest of the article unreadable him and a mellow candle john ingham finds himself in a hotel in frankfurt having a chat with alvin lee formerly of 10 years After and now touring his new band Alvin Lee & Co across Europe

After playing a gig populated by the residents of the local US Army bases who are all smoking massive spliffs and are being told to fuck off by Lee when they keep asking for I'm Going Home he gets stuck into the brandy Alexanders and tells Ingham about what it was like to work on george harrison's forthcoming lp dark horse you ought to see his place it's a 100 room abbey a real victorian folly the fireplaces have incantations carved into them and the light fittings of friars with

their noses as the switchers and mick farren revisits rodney bingenheimer's english discotheque and laments the end of an era for a couple of years bingenheimer's was the high spot of the international sequence set britain might throw up the bands new york has maxes in 82 where the glam comes with a sinister perversion, but at Rodney's, the children rolled in straight from the suburbs and put on their tinsel before they'd even reached puberty. At 12, they were getting down, and by 15, they were expected to be jaded and world-weary. But it's all begun to fade.

On a recent Saturday night, there were only a handful of suburban 12 year olds in their third stage glit where they had the sad expression of kids who'd looked out and chosen the place when nothing was happening oh dear playground bang around yeah those poor children right They really missed out. Single reviews. In the chair this week is Bob Woffenden, and he's got an absolute dos job, as it appears that only three singles have been released this week.

His single of the week, Boogie on Reggae Woman by Stevie Wonder, deserves the title, but Woffenden claims it works better on the LP Fulfillingness' first finale, an album which has divided opinion in the NME office. He reckons you should take the £55 you were going to spend on the single and lump it in with the £2.50 required to buy the album, which he thinks is skill.

Next up is Crying Over You by Ken Booth, his follow-up to the number one smash Everything I Own. This is what reggae sounds like when they balderise it for the English market. Sort of filleted stuff, which gives the genre a bad name, says Bob. Booth's a good singer, all right. It's just that the only concession he makes to the authentic reggae sound is to have someone half-heartedly

rattling a jar of whole black peppers in the right-hand speaker. And what's the point of reggae in stereo? He also points out that the B-side is an answer song to the Three Degrees called Now You Can See Me Again. Think about it, man. But it's a coat down for

Bowie protégé Dana Gillespie and her single Really Love The Man. Dana, whose image as murky sex kitten has carefully been fostered by main man through stunning symbolist photos with pussies, unfortunately delivers

this in the sort of womanly sincerity adopted by such as wholesome Diane Solomon. It's watery and wimpy and makes the darned Tigress scene seem as thoroughly phony as it no doubt

is. Oh, only three singles, man. That's rubbish. I know. In the LP review section, well, luckily there's plenty of new album releases this week, and the main review is given over to Flashes from the Archives of Oblivion by Roy Harper. It's the strongest bit Harper has made yet to reach a mass audience,

with his intensely accurate insights into love, illusion and conflict, says Angela Arrigo. The album, if you already love Harper, is indispensable. If you've never listened to him, it's the best possible introduction. If you can't make your mind up about him, if that's possible, give it to your mum for Christmas. Skin I'm In, the first new LP from Chairman of the Board in two years, is finally out over here, and managed to come up with a combination of rock and soul that might well influence their influencers. Despite their presence in the UK for the next few weeks, this album may still get lost in the Christmas rush.

Don't be a loser, because this is one hell of an exciting record. Reviewers didn't used to say much, did they? No, but it's a coat down for Desolation Boulevard One hell of an exciting record. Reviews didn't used to say much, did they? No. But it's a coat down for Desolation Boulevard by The Suite, in which they make the effortless transition from technically competent but artistically suspect teeny bopper band to technically competent but artistically suspect

heavy band, says Charles Shaw Murray. At one point, it looked like they were the only British band with the potential to be the UK edition of the MC5, but instead, they've decided to become budget in heavy clothes. There's only one way to save the suite now. Send them all copies of Back in the USA and somehow convince them that this is what is required oh dear perspective lost to time someone sweet as the british mc5

fleetwood mac's major problem since losing peter green has been one of identity reckons steve clark in his review of Heroes Are Hard To Find, where he notes that they've been leaning too hard on their new guitarist Bob Welsh and have put out a tasteful LP which doesn't come anywhere near their Peter Green heyday. While this record isn't by any means a disaster, it doesn't stand even a remote chance of re-establishing Fleetwood Mac's following in Britain. Hijack by Eamon Dull 11 is seized upon by John Ingham as he's always liked them, but he comes away from the experience disappointed and bereft.

Most of the songs would find a more useful occupation as background music in a berlin wimpy bar he says but he likes three of them including traveler which he calls the most unredeemingly repetitious thing since venus infers it's great david your thoughts well i think with amandil kraut rock generally always go for the early stuff i was actually going to call that, generally. Always go for the early stuff. I was actually going to call that book, that, actually. Always go for the early stuff. A history of Kraut Rock. But there you go. Curtis Mayfield has put out his sixth solo LP, Got to Find a Way,

but Neil Spencer doesn't reckon it because he's a fucking knob end. It might be just dandy for cruising down the freeway with the throb of the V8 barely discernible above the patter of funk on the car stereo, but for sheer emotional concentration, you could probably squeeze more from the two and a half minutes of Gypsy Woman. Such judgments may seem severe for a record which is by no means bad,

it's just that one expects more from one of the most hallowed figures of black music. And this LP is just another disappointment. Wrong, wrong, wrong. It's a fucking brilliant album. Ain't no love lost, so you don't love me. Can't find a way. No, fuck off, mate. It's me.

In the gig guide this week. Well, David could have seen Kilburn and the high roads at the hope and anchor brinsley swarch at dingwalls the edgar broughton band at the marquee rupee edwards at the edmonton ballroom or the heavy metal kids at the marquee but probably didn't definitely didn't taylor could have seen ken booth in the cimerons at the bir Birmingham Locarno or the Steve Gibbons band at Incognito. Fucking hell, he's always playing Birmingham. Yeah, yeah. With his disappointingly human band.

Exactly, yeah. Neil could have seen Band Called Charlie at the Coventry Novotel Motel or nipped out to Dudley to catch Ace at JB's. Sarah could have seen Medicine Head at Scunthorpe Bath. Desmond Decker at Dewsbury My Place. Brotherhood of Man's week-long residency at the Sheffield Cavendish. Or Millican and Nesbitt's All Weaker at the Wakefield Theatre.

Oh, Christ. Al could have seen UFO at the Boat Club. Or trekked out to Worksop to see Hello at the carousel club or Sweaty Betty at the Golden Diamond in Sutton in Ashfield. Fucking hell, I think that was the most 70s sentence I've ever read. Simon could have seen Shaking Stevens and the Sunsets at Cardiff Top rank, Sassafras at the HTV Social Club or gone to his future home to see the old sailor and fumble at Brighton top

rank. And there's so few listings this week, the NME have had to fill the space with photos of breasts different times. In the letters page, well, Charles Shaw Murray is in the chair for this week's gas bag, and the lead-off letter is concerned with the BBC's latest round of cuts to its music wing.

So, the rock fan gets it in the codpiece again. So, the BBC intends to scrap sounds of the 70s and also four of its edge-of-the-road DJs. Great stuff, aren't there? says J.A. Vine of Orpington. This and shorter hours will save the BBC £300,000 in the next year to fritter on the overblown salaries of such playlist flunkies as blackburn and diddy david didn't the rock revolution achieve anything in the broadcasting fold look at television god look at it we still have the disposable but not inexpensive prancing of top of the pops peak time. In contrast to mini-budget shove-it-on-anytime old grey-whistle test. As I can't get off on rave teeny-bop singles

or the middle-of-the-road yawn trip, here are a few questions to broadcasters. Am I in a minority of one? Do you ever read music paper polls? Who sells more records and concert tickets the rock giants or the middle of the road artists who hog the media is there a tv chief among you with the guts to put on a zeppelin or purple concert at peak time against a des o'connor show and compare the viewing figures i don't think they compare very well i think either one have been watching des o'connor yeah and and first compare peter grant's proposed contract

having followed roxy music for years we were delighted to hear that Brian Ferry was going to do a concert at the Odeon, writes Lina and Christine of Birmingham. The two of us planned to start queuing 24 hours beforehand to be sure of getting front row seats. We were then shattered to find that tickets would be on sale by postal application only because of the riots in the Faces queue the previous week. We duly sent our money off weeks before anyone else we knew and then weeks later we received our money back. We are outraged that we should have to suffer like this just because a couple of thousand imbecilic Faces fans

got pissed and beat a few coppers up everyone knows that roxy and ferry fans are to quote the man himself le creme de la creme and therefore would have behaved very well while queuing poor lena and christine man yeah and just see lena and christine queuing there for 24 hours in their Nan's fur coat and fascinate her. Kilburn and the High Roads got a feature in The Enemy the other week, but Deadhead Paul, representing both the Kingston Rough Kids and the Battersea Grammar Mob, is not at all happy about the attitude they displayed toward them. First of all, Nick Kent said that they're

becoming last year's thing, which is a typical redundant trendy expression anyhow. Now Pete Erskine joins in with a rather vacuous interview with Ian Drury. Yes, you could at least spell his name right. Erskine replies that it wasn't his fault that pie records unexpectedly demanded that he interviewed the entire band which meant a lot of awe sticking him where everyone talked over each other and nothing of note was said and points out that his name actually is ian jure so just fuck off with yourself mate straight demotion in in the Kingston Rough Kids and the Battersea Grammar Mob there, mate. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Also, one tip, never interview the whole band at once.

Oh, I bet you've had to deal with that loads of times. Oh, it was a shy, it really was. It's like five against one, basically. Yeah, it's either just babble, or it's the opposite, that each of them says less than if they were together, because their mates are looking at them, and they't feel stupid oh that's absolutely that that happened really really badly with the pixies they didn't say anything you could see them just looking at each

other worried that what they might say you know might sort of someone else take issue with yeah so everybody's really constipated and like you know basically banned certainly back in my day they treated interviews like they were under police caution in any case. So it's made it even worse. On a happier note, a staid veteran of the psychedelic generation of Newcastle on Tyne wishes to thank Mick Farron for his piece on Hawkwind in New York. It's nice to read a pleasant Hawkwind review for a change, and it's a refreshing change also to know that at least one band haven't turned into a

bunch of neatly coiffured glitter and makeup poofs are you reading this ian hunter keep it up mick that's nice apart from the poofs yeah when did poofs change to puffs uh yeah i i mean private i always used to use poofs you know know, with a V, in the 60s. Because it went to poofs to poof to poof, didn't it? Poofs, yeah. I mean, it was, you know, Winter Davis, you know, what's up you bunch of poofs? You know, I thought, mum, there was no poofs then. No.

And it was never poofs when I was at school, yes. There was always poofs in Monty Python as well. Yeah. Graham Chapman always referred to himself as a poof. Hmm. Maybe it's a class thing a stones fan from seaford wishes to pass on his regards to mick taylor on his departure from the band wishes him the best of luck in the future and hopes that the stones will be touring in 1975 tina short of stratford coats down bob edmunds review of Elton John's greatest hits for writing that one of the tracks is

Don't Let The Sun Catch You Crying when it's actually Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me. Sammy Saturated of Glasgow asks if we've ever noticed that the end bit of The Gates of Delirium by Yes doesn't off sound like the way we were, and it does. And Dee Davis of Highgate writes, Incidentally, I once gave someone a piece of pomegranate isn't that just far out 32 pages 10p i never knew there was so much in it it's a mingy issue for the christmas one it's usually double sized i know just like file it

and fuck off down on the pub you know for the Christmas piss up I was just thinking Dee Davis of Highgate my old weed dealer years ago used to live in what he swore was the only hippie flat in Highgate in the 70s may have been one of his mates there

boasting about his pomegranate Santa-ism I'll tell you what hoofs, hooves, roof roofs about is pomegranate Santa-ism. I'll tell you what. Hoofs, hooves, roof, roofs. You know, it might be one of those. Like, you know, it's technically correct. You can say fishes.

Obviously, it's a loathsome word, et cetera, et cetera, but phonetically, I'd definitely prefer poofs to poos, you know. Yeah. So, what else is on telly today? Well, BBC One commences at 25 past nine with a repeat of Mary, Mungo and Midge, followed by a repeat of Top Cat. Then David Attenborough talks about how animals sort out somewhere to live and get their ends away

in his Royal Institution lecture. Then, a load of kids from Lincolnshire go to the massive Centrale in France and fall down a lot in the documentary Ski School. That's followed by From China With Love, where Desmond Morris tells us why pandas are so skill. Then a massive hand reaches out from the cosmos and grabs the Starship Enterprise in a repeat of Star Trek. Then it's Bewitched, The News, and then it's a short blast of Grandstand,

featuring racing from Kempton Park and Leopardstown, and a repeat of the fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire. After that, we get the complete set of Planet of the Spiders, the Doctor Who adventure, followed by Brian Kant, John Craven, Bernard Cribbins, Tony Hart, Leslie Judd, Pat Kiesel, Johnny Morris, John Noakes, Peter Purvis, Michael Rodd, Valerie Singleton, Julie McStevens, Ross and Norris McWhirter,

and Roy Castle in the all-star record breakers then it's the news and they've just finished regional news in your area fucking hell what a line that's my childhood all right yeah just to clarify actually an edited feature-length compilation of the last john right dr who story planet of the spiders you know because someone's only going to write in and complain if we don't get that BBC 2 opens up at 11am for play school with Derek Griffiths and Chloe Ashcroft and then shuts down for six and a half hours and are about to come back with highlights from the second day's play of the third test between england and australia in melbourne itv kicks off at half nine with schools programs building the tv times as a chance

for parents and teachers to see a selection of programs which have been shown at schools throughout the year which is actually a chance for itv to pad out the morning schedule, followed by the best of Laurel and Hardy. Mr Trimble shows the youth how to make a crocodile out of some cardboard boxes. Then Leslie Crowther, Willie Rushton and Bill Tidy join Bob Monkhouse for an episode of Quick on the Draw. After the news, it's Cup Glory, the 1972 documentary narrated by Richard Attenborough about the FA Cup in its centenary year.

Then it's the 1967 Tommy Steele musical Half a Sixpence. Tommy Trinder, Margaret Lockwood, Jack Douglas and Douglas Bing join Dennis Norden to bang on about old stuff in Looks Familiar. And they've just started an episode of the proto-Simpsons Hanna-Barbera cartoon Wait Till Your Father Gets Home. Fucking hell, that is a very decent line-up for a Friday, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Football, boxing, Corf. Oh, that Ali to Foreman fight, I mean, that's fight of the century, that.

Yes. Oh my God, he's won the title back at 32. All right, then, pop craze youngsters. It is now time to go way back to December of 1974. Always remember, we may coat down your favourite band or artist, but we never forget they've been on top of the pops more than we have. It's 20 minutes past five on Friday, December the 27th, 1974, and Top of the Pops, now into its second decade, and officially the longest-running pop show in the world, is about to broadcast the final episode of a year fraught with mither.

A BBC technician's strike in the last week of May left the show struggling to cobble together an episode and eventually rammed it with repeat performances and had to cancel its special episode about David Cassidy's farewell to the pop scene and when the strike solidified into a full-on walkout a fortnight later the show was taken off the air for seven weeks, leaving the pop-crazed youngsters turning on their dad's tellies of a Thursday evening and discovering extended highlights and punditry from the World Cup, repeats of Dad's Army,

and Are You Being Served? Could have been worse. Could have been Are You Being Served all the time. That's not too bad. I'd have tolerated that. So, as is the style, chaps, this episode is part two of Top of the Pops' review of the year, where the winners of 1974 get to stand on the top deck of a bus

and be driven around the city of pop, waving at folk and brandishing silverware. We do like these episodes, don't we? Oh, yeah. Obviously, the first part was on Christmas Day, sandwiched between holiday on ice and the queen's speech and it was presented by tony blackburn and jingle nonso be here's what was on it chaps you tell me who the winner is in these two episodes

lonely this christmas by mud love me for a reason by the osmonds. Meow. Sad Sweet Dreamer by Sweet Sensation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Pans People Dressed As Ballet Clowns For You Won't Find Another Fool Like Me by The New Seekers. Ding dong. Gonna Make You A Star, David Essex. Hey.

All right. Billy Don't Be A Hero by Paper Lace. Well, sorry, Al. I'm ignoring you. When Will I See You Again by The Three Degrees. Hmm. Everything I Own by Ken Booth. You gay pop reggae!

Waterloo by ABBA. Hey! She by Charles Aznavour. Give you the beers I can't forget. The beauty of regret. Pants People dressed up all posh for you're the first, the last, my everything by Barry White. Inferno. And of course...

And of course, Merry Christmas, everybody, by Slade. Hoorah. Hoorah. I mean, I think we're getting the better end of the deal with this episode. Yeah. Don't you? Yeah, yeah. But there's been a price to pay there,

because while the Christmas Day episode made some sort of sense with the idea that Tony Blackburn and Jimmy Savile live together and they've invited their pop mates round for a soiree. This episode has pretty much been left to fend for itself, hasn't it? So we get no audience, we get an airless environment and, crucially, no pans people, man. They've spunked their pans people quota in one go on Christmas Day for Dad. Yeah.

Not right. No, no, no. Unfair to Dads. So your hosts this episode are dave lee travis who spent the year filling in for various weekday djs on radio one from time to time while holding down his regular request show spot at 3 p.m on sundays and sort of acting as a hairy tinned salmon sandwich if you will it won't be until 1976 that he holds down a permanent weekday slot, but he's not arsed in the slightest, because he's raking in up to £300 a night,

£2,600 in today's rubbish money, from his personal appearances in provincial discos, a fee which has no doubt been boosted by his elevation to the Top of the Pops talent pool in November of 1973. And this is his 13th appearance on Top of the Pops. Your other host, Noel Edmonds, who has just completed his first full year in the alpha male role on Radio 1 as the host of The Breakfast Show, which was solidified in August of this year, when he was selected to present the week-long BBC One splurge on the Osmonds, which peaked when he joined them to present that week's Top of the Pops. He's been a presenter since July of 1972, and is now part of a talent pool which currently consists of Travis, Jingle Nons OBE,

Tony Blackburn and Paul Burnett. Oh here they are again happy as can be all good pals in jolly good company. There's something about the casual carefree way that DLT is humming along with the top of the pop scene tune when we first see him before he rolls into his usual nightmarish humorless humor babble shtick just seems to radiate pure contempt for the program and for you and me and his mother and indirectly everybody's mother yes but you know at this point unlike 80s dlt he's not jaded and yawning his way through it he's full of enthusiasm which on the one hand is terrible but on the other it's still terrible but the only thing that makes him less than 100 repulsive here is he hadn't yet developed that little spider's web of gray hair at the front of his cunt throat which would you know break through in about 1978 or 79 and complete the skin crawling wrongness because

he's more disturbing when he's visually coded middle-aged rather than this relative youngster who's overbearing creepiness could with excessive charity be written off as youthful high spirits you know you could almost think of him here as just another cunt you know and the one sense in which dave lee travis is exceptional is that he's not just another cunt. No. He is toxic mega cunt. He is the cunt of Monte Cristo. Always on.

Pinching a girl's arse with a sausage sandwich in the other hand. Eternally. He's the top. He's the tip. He's the championship. He's the most tip top. Top cunt. Cunt to end all cunts.

Close friends get to call him DLT, but he hasn't got any actually. Where do we start with these two and what they're wearing? I mean, both of them have come dressed for the occasion. Edmonds is sporting a black dinner jacket with a massive black bow tie, which makes him look like he's being savaged by a bat. And of course, as any pop craze youngster will tell you, he always makes an effort when he's on the programme. Article in the Daily Mirror last week,

it's Natty Noel. Noel Edmonds bought a new suit yesterday because tonight he's comparing Top of the Pops. He has a new suit every time he appears on the programme. The kids who watch the show notice these things, he told me. They complain every time I wear the same shirt and tie more than once. With a regular monthly slot on Top of the Pops, Noel buys at least 12 suits a year.

I pay about £30. And I prefer the off-the-peg three-piece suits because they look very smart, he said. And yeah, that was borne out by his adverts that were running at the time for Hepworth's tailors with Tony Blackburn, you may recall. Edmunds always went for off-the-peg because of his busy lifestyle, while Blackburn opted for made-to-measure because he was particular. But they both paid the same price of £37.50. So there you go. The way Noel's dressed up here, he looks like Young Musician of the Year.

Yes, he does. Or like 9th place. He played W.O.L.D. by Harry Chapin on the core anglais. It's because he always wore those 70s suits with the big shoulders and wide lapels, which are not tailored for the puny likes of Noel Edmonds. He looks like he's disappeared in a black velvet quicksand ear, while his mum looks on proudly. I think he thought the artificial bigness of those clothes would bulk

him up a bit but of course it works the opposite way it's of course he looks like he's standing four feet further back from the camera than dlt when actually they're side by side i mean i'm a bit of a short ass and there are photos of me standing next to gigantic bears of men, where that also seems to be the case. But then, I don't assume the slick, superior, master of ceremonies manner of A. Noel Edmonds. I remember your tag team with giant haystacks. But you just look at that bow tie. I mean, I actually thought it was a comedy, but it looks like the kind of bow tie a clown would wear to another clown's funeral. I mean, it was a comedy, but I mean, it looks like the kind of bow tie clown would wear to another clown's funeral.

I mean, it's just, it's just ridiculous. Yeah. And I actually genuinely thought, oh, this is comedy. No,

no. Remember this isn't comedy. It's the seventies. You know, this, this, this, these aren't intended as comedic parodies of,

uh, no, of the day. No, certainly not. Did you know you went to the same public school as Douglas Adams? Really? Whose middle name was Noel. in yet another eerie coincidence.

Both of them capable of creating an entire universe out of their own imagination, peopled with fabulous otherworldly creations like Zephyr Beeblebrox and Mr. Blobby. I realised the other day I've now lived longer than one of those people did and yet achieved so much less than either. Travis though. Travis has essentially come as a white

gollywog hasn't he? It's like he's in whiteface of some sort. Yes. You feel racially offended. If Spa or Fine Fair made their own brand of marmalade he'd be on the front of it Is it in whiteface of some sort? Yes. Yes. You feel racially offended. Yeah, you're right, yeah. If Spa or Fine Fair made their own brand of marmalade, he'd be on the front of it, wouldn't he?

Yeah, different times, definitely. He's wearing an appalling shiny black suit with massive silver lapels, and he's teamed that with a dark fuchsia shirt and a white bow tie. You know those absolutely shit suits that sports personalities wear nowadays? Yeah. He's sort of like that. that with a dark fuchsia shirt and a white bow tie you know those absolutely shit suits that sports personalities wear nowadays yeah he's sort of like that he looks like he's just been drafted

in the fourth round by the tampa bay buccaneers or he's off to a press conference to pretend to be angry at some other boxer in order to sell some more pay-per-views fucking dreadful tailoring i mean i think of all the toxins running through the bloodstream of 70s star that sort of coalesce into a boil on the end of the nose of the 70s i think this outfit these glasses this beard as well that'd be it so the obvious question chaps we have to return to it noel edmonds dave lee travis pantomime horse yeah i think these two cunts can sort it out between them yeah yeah i think they would end up can sort it out between themselves yeah yeah i think they would end up as a hideous push me pull you straining in different directions until their skin

burst and frayed and the kiddies started screaming and crying and the dads would have to get up on stage and get involved again just as long as somebody walked on stage and blazing saddle style punched that pantomime horse in the face i could just imagine a sort of thing you know a sort of great tussle when noel edmunds his head emerging triumphantly out of the top of the horse's head and then being pulled back down in again by travis and his head popping out and so your long evening wears on i always wanted to go up to bernie clifton when he was on his ostrich just walk up to him punch the ostrich in the face and they both go down that'll be great anyway look allow me to quote from this slim volume here the top of the pops annual 1975

yes i.e the one that would have been in the shops and stockings right now as this episode went out oh oh i've actually got that taylor right in front of me now. Top of the Pops Annual 1975. It's got a big white number one on a red background. And there's three circular image bits off to the sides of Savile, Noel Edmonds, Tony Blackburn, turning around the back. No DLT on it whatsoever. Oh, dear, oh, dear. And in the middle, a big picture of the

Osman family which is nice well this particular copy that I've got here is perfectly preserved but absolutely reeks of somebody's shed which I think tells it's own rather poignant story yes so does mine

anyway among the features on pop groups there are also profiles of the top djs that we at top of the pops viewers have come to think of as our extra special friends now most of these interviews are clustered in one section of the annual imaginatively titled top djs except for the feature on jimmy saville who has this kind of early medieval king figure, has a much bigger section all to himself, written in the first person, almost as though he'd bothered to sit down and write it himself

rather than talk down the phone at some hack reporter who's had to go away and assemble this shit into a coherent piece and credit it to Sir Jim. But that's at the start of the annual. That's the very first thing you see when you open it. The typically soothing picture of Savile with the slightly horrifying headline, Jimmy Savile, the daddy of the DJs.

Yes. What tool? this fucking tool um further in you get interviews with his surfs including one with uh davely travis oh yeah which begins like this davely travis admits it i'm a complete loony, he says. An absolute nutcase. I'd do anything for a laugh. And so the article goes on, running through his career. It says, Dave spent two and a half years in Bremen, Germany, doing his own TV show, which pulled in an audience of over 80 million viewers. of over 80 million viewers which for those of us who've seen beat club um specifically travis's constant comedy sex pesting over ushi nurka the main host to whom he was very much second banana in fact just one of a string of male sidekicks um and which very visibly makes her extremely uncomfortable. Him then going back to England and claiming he had his own show in Germany is even more grotesque. But he goes on to talk about it here and he says, they thought I was a nutter, a maniac.

So I then used to do anything at all just to get a laugh. Well, that's interesting, Taylor, because as I found out to my cost when I went on a German exchange in 1982, the German for nutter is prostitute. I called my mate a nutter, and all the German teachers just glared at me, and I was tucked to one side and informed as to what I'd said. Right, well, it says here that in germany he became known as big dave the english nut that's what he thought they were saying big dave the english nut uh it's actually a german phrase which sounds very like that but actually translates as

i hope his ass falls off so he has to shit through his eyes but wait he's got more to say in this interview he says um i'm not just a dj i'm a really dedicated all-round entertainer oh no it might sound a bit big-headed to say so, but I know I'm going to be a really big-name entertainer a few years from now. Just wait and see. I'll have a really monster TV show of my own. And indeed, the Golden Oldie Picture Show was quite a sensation. Do you think in later years his co-host on this program ever read that quote back and chuckled darkly oh his friend in his toilet mate or one of his many toilets no doubt i love it i got so much

terrible pleasure from reading that quote about how davely travis knows he's going to be a top entertainer with a show of his own that might actually be my second favorite quote of all time after my mate when i was 15 eating some mushroom stroganoff making a face and saying erg this tastes like spunk i imagine hastily appended there yeah uh noel is also featured at punishing length in the 1975 top of the pops annual if you'll allow me to uh quote the words of the great man educators taylor he says already i think i've proven that i'm not just another tonyburn. Ooh! Yeah, that's nice for you. I'm sure some of the kids had no comprehension that Gary Glitter could actually sing a song like Happy Birthday

until I played it from one of his albums on my radio programme. Oh, no! It's really an excellent piece of music. This is the song Happy Birthday. Not that one! Yes, it's about it's about waiting until midnight so that the girl turns 16 and is legal so you can then have sex yes lyrics 11 59 about time one more minute to go i can hardly wait this state, don't my feelings show? All we gotta do, me and you, see it through. When we do, what a big surprise I've got for you.

When you're old enough, ha, I do my stuff till you beg for more. Now the time has come. Have your fun. Bang, you come. Give me some. Look out, birthday baby. Here I come. You're alone're alone almost grown on your own move a little closer fucking hell this is like sean rider writing a song about the day drugs are decriminalized so he can take some anyway noel in this probing piece, he's got plenty more to say.

He says, there's only one fault with Top of the Pops. It doesn't give me enough time in between the numbers to set up a proper comedy situation. You see, I'm really a frustrated TV comedian, and I'd like to do more comedy on television. God. TV comedian and I'd like to do more comedy on television the sadly unnamed writer of this article continues here it's it's not what you call a combative interview one young girl who was in the audience for top of the pops knows just what Noel meansel asked her during the show do you like surprises she innocently replied yes he turned away from her then suddenly turned around and shouted boo everyone in the studio roared with laughter including the girl that's what noel means by being a zany character. These are the closing lines of the article.

That's your takeaway. And there's the man who actually would end up with a monster TV show of his own. Not once, but on numerous occasions. It's funny, isn't it? One disordered psychological state and you end up in a mansion with a helicopter on the roof. Disordered psychological state, and you end up in a mansion with a helicopter on the roof. Another, only very slightly different disordered psychological state, and you end up as an unemployable convicted sex offender.

There's no real logic to it, is there? No. Is that the article that mentions right at the top, his single? Yes, it is. Oh, Kirk Houston. Alcatraz. Have you heard it chaps i have oh if i had played that to you and said this is a top of the pops presenter you would have thought it was travis wouldn't you i think probably so yes it's weird he sounds like a throat cancer victim he's singing about how horrible alcatraz is and at the end he says how do you think i know about all this because i'm

the governor it's like his fantasy isn't it what his wank fantasy i'd like to be in charge of a men's prison they all have to do exactly what i say they all have to bathe in sewage do we know that these two hated each other by the way at the time yeah you just assume it don't you partly because there was so much bad blood and bitching at radio one and partly because uh well why wouldn't they everybody else does yeah well neither is remotely likable if they did hate each other my response is good now you know how we feel. Yes. Now you are both halfway to knowing how we feel. Yeah, at the time I wouldn't know.

I just thought they were brilliant mates. I just thought everyone in pop was best mates with each other. I mean, the thing about these two is at the time, you know, I was a pop kid and I didn't mind them at all, in fairness. And there wasn't actually a general protest against them from us pop kids because i mean first of all this crap was mercifully brief and they sort of functioned you know as signifiers that top of the pops was on we're seconds away from pop i mean raymond baxter was a far more impressive broadcaster yeah but he signified that tomorrow's world was on you know and for fuck's sake can we get a wriggle on with the items about talking robot waste paper

baskets and roll on the closing credits yeah Yeah, fuck tomorrow, we want now! Exactly. It's like the Mr Whippy jingle. It's not like we kids were all hand-jiving in the streets, digging that jingling vibe. We just knew that ice cream was imminent. But they deluded themselves, people like Travis and Edmund, to thinking that somehow they had some sort of autonomous function beyond that and perversely turned out to be right good evening ladies and gentlemen on behalf of your friendly neighborhood hairy monster

and his colleague noel edmunds welcome to the christmas edition of top i'd just like to say that i completely concur with the viewers that have just been expressed we've got to work this together son oh all right now we've got to work this together, son. Oh, all right, then. Now, we've got a host of golden hit records and the artists with them on the show. We do. So shall we start with...

The Rubets! Yes! We're hit with the Pavlovian twang and blare of Whole Lotta Love as the top of the Pox logo flares up in the middle of a Christmas wreath effect which is somewhat ruined by the array of images of this afternoon's bands and artists as they've tried to fit rectangular images into a round space. That's replaced by a shot of Travis, seemingly caught unaware at first, but quickly rallying and starting to mime the horn bits of the theme tune.

He reminds us that he's the hairy monster, and welcomes us to the Christmas top of the pops, before being rudely interrupted by Edmonds in vintage BBC announcer mode. After a bit of 15% passive, 85% aggressive banter, they hold out their hands in an introductory fashion to welcome the first act on stage, the Rubettes with Sugar Baby Love. Born in Rhyl in 1941 and Liverpool in 1943 respectively,

Wayne Bickerson and Tony Waddington were members of the Pete Best Four in the mid-60s, who went on to form a songwriting partnership when the band split up. Although they wrote nothing but a heartache for the flirtations in 1968, the hits eluded them throughout the 60s, and they settled into providing filler for the likes of the Brotherhood of Man, Barry Ryan and In Is Fox, but when Bickerton became the head of A&R for Polydor UK, they began work on a rock and roll musical, and realised that one of the songs they'd knocked out, this one, had definite hit potential. After rounding up a collective of musos to knock

out some demos, the songwriters initially intended to enter this tune in that year's song for Europe, but then offered the song to the hottest new mock and roll band in the country, Show Waddy Waddy, but they turned it down flat. And after their second choice, Carl Wayne knocked it back. They went back to their demo band and offered it to them on the condition that they formed a band. Only two of them took up the offer, but no matter. A few ring rounds to jobbing musos later, the Rubettes were formed. They were immediately signed to Polydor and the single was put out,

and it did absolutely fuck all for six weeks, despite non-stop badgering of Radio 1 and Robin Nash from Polydor promo chief Tony Bramwell, the Beatles' arty fufkin. 24th 1974 robin nash was informed that his booking of sparks to perform this town ain't big enough for the both of us in the studio was off because he'd assumed that they were british only to be told at the last minute that they weren't they hadn't joined the musicians union and they didn't have a promo film or wrote staring aghast at the three minuteminute gap in his episode. He called Bramwell and told them if he could get the Rubets into the studio by 7pm, they'd get their break. After ringing round, sending taxes out across the country and ordering in 12 sets of flared white suits and matching caps from a boutique on the King's Road

because they didn't know the measurements of the band, they made their first ever appearance on the show, and a week later, Sugar Baby Love entered the charts at number 27. The following week, it soared 25 places to number two, and the week after that, it deposed Waterloo by ABBA to assume total dominance of Pop Mountain. Fucking hell. What a story, chaps.

Yeah, yeah. The power of Top of the Pops, eh? Indeed. Question for the panel and the pop craze youngsters listening. What was the first number one single that made you angry about it being there? Because I've got to say it was this one for me, which is absolutely mental because there was far worse songs than this. But even then, as a child,

I could rationalise the likes of Long-Haired Lover from Liverpool or Welcome Home becoming the most successful song in the country. It just felt right. But I remember seeing this on Top of the Pops and absolutely hating it, because it was too slow and too high-pitched, and they all looked like dads. And then I was in the playground one afternoon,

and I got into a huge argument with a lad there who told me that this had just got to number one, and I absolutely refused point-blank to believe him and accused him of being a liar because it just couldn't be number one when there was a suite record knocking about, and they were nowhere near as good as a suite, and getting done and having the teacher have a word with me

to stop accusing lads of lying, and then watching Top of the Pops the next day and finding out that he was actually number one couldn't believe it so fucking angry i'm getting angry now just getting aerated yeah i mean i'm less militant about this song now but god it's still a noise man yeah for me it was probably um i think there's maybe a false memory but i I think it was Dawn, is it Tie Yellow Ribbon? Oh. Simply because Sweet were kind of roaring up the charts with Hellraiser. And it kept it off.

And it was just like, I thought, this is the week. It's got, this is the week, this is the week. And, you know, I was listening to Tom Brown or whatever. And then number two, it's Hellraiser. What? Yeah. I was distraught. I, you know, I was crying like a 12 year old french boy you know

it was you know it really was i was on holiday at the time and i was absolutely you know it it blackened my mood for um you know a good hour or so it really did yeah yeah i felt thwarted i don't think i ever got angry about it as a kid but so the first record i can remember getting angry about getting to number one is also the last one right which was that record by lenny kravitz oh god yeah i wish i could fly into the sky so very high like a dragonfly i heard it on a advert for a car i think and i burst out laughing thinking it was just a song they'd written for the advert and thought, is that really the best they could do? This is absolutely pathetic. People are just going to laugh at this.

And then I heard that it was actually a real record by a real musician and then I heard it had gone into the British charts at number one. Fuck. And that was the day that I spat on this nation. And also then later america because it also won a grammy i think i was in a state of pretty much perpetual rage about what was number one

from 1978 to 1993 but anyway here they are in the studio you know celebrating their breakthrough and and again it's reminding me of another reason why i was so pissed off with the rubets at the time the lead singer's got a necklace with Alan on it in gold. And up to that time, I believed I was the only person in the world with that name. So looking at him made me feel a bit less original and a bit less special. That's nice, I suppose. I mean, the geezers on the like, the sort of bop-shoe-waddy-waddy detail, they're a bit of a chinless bunch.

And there is some kind of mildly annoying wacky humor going on but when you're in the same building as noel edmonds and dave lee travis you know you're going to be like you know far the less of the criminal party i mean they are genuinely having a bit of a laugh i think they know it's going to be back to sort of lunchtime at the batley variety club in about a year's time yeah the first thing that always strikes me about this group is that the singer is like trying to be a pin-up and the others are playing comedy ugly. Yes. And has there ever been an all-male band who've done that and it worked?

Maybe Sparks in a different way. Can't think of any others. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Of course, the Wurzels. Cheap trick. Oh, cheap trick. Okay.

Oh, Shawoddy Woddy, I suppose. Yeah. There's a similar sort of overgrown juvenile look on Bartram. Yes. But I've always been sort of intrigued by Alan Williams, that singer, because he's got those sort of strange Slavic features and permanent Brian Jones, Barry barry norman eye bags there's something a bit unusual about him in the context of the mid 70s i always assumed he must be one of those low-key foreign blokes you

used to get in britain when britain was a lot more culturally homogenous you know like he had yugoslavian parents who moved here in 1962 or something you know i mean he didn't make a big deal out of it but his name's alan williams so the furthest he's going to come from is anglesey you see quite a lot of the other members of the rubets in this clip as though they're like a collective you know it seems a bit. You get very well acquainted with the drummer. Oh, yes. We learned that the Rubets, like too many bands before and after,

have been afflicted by a bad case of performative drummer. Yeah. He's like a sort of sub-Asquith Berg, isn't he? He's like Mr. Lucas or Mr. Spooner, depending on where you stand on that great rivalry. I think fans still duke it out over the definitive grace brothers junior sales assistant oh man the fights in the market square on a saturday over that but yeah he's got a green electric bow tie that he flashes when he does the

spoken word bit and there's a lot of fakery on this because of course williams uh mimes the castrato bit which was done by paul da vinci who refused to join the band and would go solo later on this year you must have seen his top of the pops performance of your baby ain't your baby anymore no no oh wait till we get to that on chart music fuck me thing is this is actually a pretty good record considering what it actually is it is but there's no actual point in listening to it when you could be listening to something that actually came out of the actual new jersey in the actual early 60s it's like buying a seersucker suit that looks okay at a glance but it isn't and will obviously shrink and fade and dissolve as soon as you wash it but it costs the same as the real thing

is that really required you know so the only thing it's got going for it is that it's here now and you can take it or leave it you know and i think there's a at least a discussion to be had about you know when so-called credible bands i.e not really people like the rubets do something that is so closely patterned on something else that it's virtually pastiche right by which i mean a discussion about whether that's fair enough and then whether anyone should care i remember a friend of mine who really loved big star getting into teenage fan club and being a bit apologetic about right saying i know they're rip-off merchants i just want some more music that sounds like that which fair enough when you don't yeah when you don't have the responsibilities of a critic that's understandable you know and it's doubly understandable in that case considering

the early big star were in a lot of ways just the teenage fan club of their day like completely unoriginal just playing their favorite kind of music that already existed but i think if what you're doing is heartfelt pop songs which are at least aimed towards the emotions, you can plausibly argue that there's always room for more of them in any style. You know, you don't necessarily require the shocker than you. But when it's music like this, which might be designed to create feelings, but it's not about personal emotional expression, then a very derivative record feels a little bit more like a forgery you know because you feel like if an idea of their own had occurred to them at any point during recording this uh they would have excluded it because that would have complicated the song to the detriment of what they were trying to achieve clearly they are

part of that general thing that's going on at the time you know the attempt to sort of replicate the spirit and the style or whatever of i don't know pre-beetles music rock and roll etc etc because things have kind of slowed up a bit but culturally it's almost like the first post-modern moment in some ways but at the same time they are quite 70s in their attire i mean you know they've got their shirt collars are peeping right over their shoulders you know so they don't go for the absolute strict sort of teddy boy type period detail. They don't really bother with that. It's a bit conceited of them. They don't take themselves that seriously.

It's a bit conceited of Phil to the beginning of Twist and Shout at the beginning. As if they're going to represent this new pop cultural era. As if Philip Larkin's going to write, sexual intercourse began in 1974 with the Rubets, because nothing important had happened before. They're all in a mixture of the stage togs that they've worn throughout the year. And they appear to be performing in front of the giant Iron Man

in the Channel 4 eye dents that's just collapsed on the floor in despair at what's happened to Glam. The companion piece for this performance, and indeed for the whole of this christmas top of the pops or is that cheap and not so cheerful british film the unfortunately titled never too young to rock the word rock there as so often possibly a euphemism for something, made by the same people who made the naively titled Gary Glitter Vehicle Remember Me This Way.

It's a film that features the Rubettes, the Glitter Band, Mud, Bob Kerr's Whoopie Band. Right. We talk a lot about the grimy, mildewedew damp atmosphere of the mid-70s but watching never too young to rock off a vhs rip or smeary and and muffled is like having your head plunge right into that particular outside toilet all the way up to your knees it's barely watchable but it's in that elite class of mid-70s cultural artifacts which wouldn't be believable if you did them as a parody yeah it would seem a bit too on

the nose um with freddie jones as the appropriately named mr rock bottom driving around in a group detector van which apparently tunes into the modulated frequencies emitted by the pop groups required for the concert this concert they're putting together being very important because it's going to be on tv and if for some unspecified reason if it doesn't get brilliant ratings rock and roll is going to be banned from television that's the plot such as it is and of course this group detector van is basically a converted second world war army ambulance with the doors rusting off you know and a shitty multi-colored paint job and the rubette big moment in this film is miming to this track on the back of a lorry that's going slowly down Golders Green Road

when it's obviously just stopped raining. And it's great, to be honest. It shows off whatever is likeable about them far better than this clip here does. We'll return to that film later in this podcast, I'm sure. But basically, if you think that the natural visual accompaniment to late period glam rock is the look and feel of a public information film with about as many laughs despite the fact that it's meant to be a comedy then you must not sleep on this film no or indeed fall

asleep during it which is a hazard but definitely watch it if you can before the last remaining copy known to man is deleted off a hard drive somewhere to make room for more low budget american pornography because there's nothing like it except feeling sick in the cold this is a film whose closing credits include a thank you to Ready Mix Concrete Limited. A thank you that I doubt was ever reciprocated. But one that says it all. So Sugar Baby Love would spend four weeks at number one, giving way to a tune we're going to be subjected to later on.

The follow-up, Tonight, got to number 12 for two weeks in august and they'd round off 1974 with jukebox jive which is currently the christmas number three and would spend four non-consecutive weeks there that's a miles better tune after three top 40 hits in 1975 they changed tack and became a proto-smoker getting to number 40 in September of 1976 with the anti homophobia song Under One Roof got to number 10 with Baby I Know in March of 1977

but never bothered the charts again however there are three versions of the Rubets still in existence today of course there are three versions of the Rubets still in existence today. Of course there are. Good Lord. They should make a film about trying to book all three of them for a festival.

That was the Rubets for you there, lad. Oh, my arms. All the way through there. It's a long record, isn't it? It certainly is. We've got the sound for you. John Denver and his song. And what song?

No, John Denver and his song. It's and what song? No, it's and. You fill up my senses Like a night in a forest We return to a shot of the outstretched forearms of Travis and Edmunds and realise that we have been subjected to a bit. We also get the chance to contemplate how meaty Dave Lee Travis' wrists and hands are. Fucking hell, they're like rowing oars, aren't they? Wouldn't like to be slapped across the face or grabbed on the arse by that. After some incisive and thoughtful wordplay on the title of the next single,

we're finally introduced to Annie's Song by John Denver. Born in Roswell, mexico in 1943 henry john deuschendorf jr was an army brat who was given an acoustic guitar by his non-art at the age of 11 and ran away from home at the age of 15 to start a musical career in california but his dad went looking for him and dragged him back and presumably tanned his arse and he would have fucking deserved it as well after one year at texas tech college in 1963 he dropped out and moved to los angeles to begin his music career proper playing open mic sessions in folk clubs changing his name to john denver and replacing the leader of the ch Mitchell trio, which changed their name to Denver, Boise and Johnson in 1965. In 1969, he signed to RCA as a solo artist and put out the LP Rhyme and Reasons.

Although it fell to chart, one of the songs on it, Leaving on a Jet Plane, was picked up by Peter, Paul and Mire and took it it to number one in America, and number two over here. When RCA told him they weren't ready to fund a tour of America off the back of his debut LP, he decided to hit up towns and cities in the Midwest on his own, turn up unannounced at venues asking for support slots, and then hit up the local radio station and told them he was the writer of Leaving on a Jet Plane, and asked for the chance to play a few songs live and promote his gig, which garnered him a hardcore following.

And when he put out his second LP, Poems, Prayers and Promises, in 1971, he landed a number two hit on the Billboard chart with Take Me Home, Country Roads. Despite a barrage of hits in Americaica which culminated in sunshine on my shoulders getting to number one the uk wouldn't have recognized him if he'd shagged our mams but in 1973 his manager jerry weintraub decided his artist needed his own tv show and convinced the bbc to do it as he knew that brit British TV didn't cancel series mid through their run like they did in America. So, six episodes of the John Denver show, which also featured Pants People, were put out in the early summer of that year, but still no hits. Then, earlier this year,

Denver had a row with his missus one afternoon and went off for a bit of a ski. And according to legend, he was so pumped with adrenaline after going downhill really fast on some massive sucker sticks that he wrote this song in 10 minutes while he was on the ski lift back and decided to name it after his missus, presumably because you fill up my senses sounded a bit druggy. presumably because you fill up my senses sounded a bit druggy. In mid-August, when it had already been and gone as the Billboard number one, and his song entered the chart at number 37 and started a two-month pull up the charts until it knocked Kung Fu Fighting by Carl Douglas off number one. And here is a clip of him on some American TV show to commemorate that very thing. Boys, we touched upon this song when it was done by James Galway's flute and VD in Chart Music 54,

but here's the original. I think, you know, there's this ongoing raging debate about whether up-and-coming flautists, sorry, copyright, Abigail's Party, James Galway's version is better than Denver's. I'm in Camp galway i think on the grounds of mellifluousness so he's got a sort of slightly sort of disagreeable war will as denver you know you've got the geezers working to work pretty hard on that mandolin to sort of take the edge off but look at this cunt it's you know the milky bars may well be on him but but he's the only one eating them sideways because john denver's wide mouth frog look it really unsettles me right he looks like a rubber ball that someone's drawn a face on

and sliced almost in half and now they're squeezing the sides to make it talk he looks like if his doctor told him to open his mouth and say ah his head would split in half and fold back over on itself and his glasses would slide off at the back and hit the ground which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing if that meant that he then stumbled myopically arms held out in front of him off the edge of the treehouse into a paddling pool full of crabs. I mean, he is pretty much zippy in a wig and glasses, isn't he?

It's actually strangely cybernautic, really. There's a bit of a Commander Data vibe about him. It's as if his lips are made from the same material as his face. And his hair looks weirdly silvery, like it's some sort of fine synthetic fabric that's been generated by a microchip in his skull it's like bleep the space boy yeah very odd very odd

indeed what surprises me i mean is the story of like how it's composed you know i mean it's sort of a breakneck speed because this is one of those breather songs you know one song in we have to have a breather yeah piss break well definitely piss break because it doesn't have any velocity about it at all back then when i was 12 you know my bottom lines were fast is good and slow is bad and the weird thing is retrospectively actually pretty much all of the slow stuff was poor i reckon it's not like guys and gals and what an only nick drake was popping up in 1974 i mean you know you did have exceptions i did like i'm not in love by 10 cc and i admit you know that the carpenters had a fairly mysterious effect on me but generally the slow numbers to

me they weren't just a change of pace they just seemed deliberately consciously designed to dampen down the teenage rampage you know to deny the velocity of youth and exuberance and try and reassert the timid innovation of you know know, the pre-rock and roll years. You know, it's anti-funk, anti-rock, anti-disco, anti-electronic, and it's willfully, maliciously tepid and twee. Yeah, at this point, John Denver is pretty much a one-man Osmonds for the mams and dads, isn't he? Yeah. He's living that American heartland life. He's clearly not going about thinking he's summer,

and he's obviously real and not a bent cunt. Yeah. Ticks all those boxes. Yeah, yeah. And to be honest with you chaps i never minded john denver because as the 70s went on it was obvious that he was best mates with the muppets because you know they'd all go around his house for a bounce around on his grandma's feather bed and as far as i know the muppets don't knock about with balance al the reason he was mates with the muppets is that he shared their physiognomy but they accepted him as one of their own i've got to be honest i i got no time for this colorado beetle it must be a funny place colorado what it does to people right whether

it's hunter s thompson pouring drugs into his bald head and and blowing it to pieces when he got bored or the empty air of aspen colorado the american switzerland yeah except that aspen actually has a long forgotten countercultural history which makes that even worse appropriately enough for a man like this who's essentially a cozy conservative entertainer clinging onto the hippie bandwagon yeah like frank spencer on roller skates they just legalized magic mushrooms in colorado apparently yeah which i suppose is one way to make john denver seem interesting don't like him he's got a capo on his guitar at the first fret right which always just seems like cheating really just shunt the song into some freaky brass band key you know

rather than just singing a semitone lower like a man you know and also let's face it even within the unholy genre of western shirts this is a bad oh yes it looks like he's wearing a denim bib over an old lady's nightie but i mean you know he had d snyder's back at the pmrc earrings he did loads of benefits off his own back did one in chernobyl couple of years after the disaster there it was on the waiting list to get on the space shuttle before the Challenger disaster fucked all that. And he thought Ronald Reagan was a cunt. Which, I mean, it's a pretty low bar. Yeah. But you've got to take your hat off to him.

There's just something really unpleasant about this song. I hate the emotional build as the song goes on. The way it keeps getting bigger and more history on it, swelling up like a boil, you know. It's just a grotesque spectacle of this wide beaked eagle rising higher and higher on the ghastly thermals of his own wind it's horrible to witness but this was always going to happen in the 70s once the mo of the singer songwriter moved on from poetry and social comment to relentless self-examination

the deeper people get into that the drippier and whinier they're going to get because ultimately that's what's inside all of us right so we were drowning in this stuff you know people opening their hearts to the world this is there's something about that that's slightly dangerous like a night out in sheffield because it doesn't work as culture just exposing your soul ultimately it's like blokes exposing their bollocks you know they might appreciate the fresh air but nobody else wants to see them and when one person does it at least's a novelty, but when you live in a world where everyone's running around with their bollocks out, you're not sat there applauding everyone's bravery and vulnerability. You're just sick of seeing ugly bollocks all over the place.

And it's the same with the indistinguishably basic emotions of unexceptional troubadours. You end up thinking, all right, right mate it's your bollocks we've all got them except the ladies please look at my bollocks but most of us don't even find our own particularly interesting oh no get up on a stage every night and just pull out your bollocks yeah and expect applause all i can say is, hey, Denver, zip it up. I only wish we could zip up his mouth, but sadly his physical resemblance to Zippy doesn't extend as far as the useful. I mean, it's true, this whole business about soulfulness,

people think it's an inherent virtue to be soulful, but, you know, most people have got mediocre souls, and Denver's obviously no exception. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, he's the pioneer of ed sheeran you know like stripping down a potentially interesting and lively and affecting musical form to its its barest and least emotionally complex and most dumbly commercial elements and then presenting those in a context of reassuring mediocrity and making millions and not doing that out of cynicism or financial ambition

but as a genuine perfectly natural expression of your personal mediocrity and if you do that slickly you can never go wrong with it from a career point of view because there's always going to be loads of people who relate to that and feel very comfortable. Yeah, absolutely. That's it. And he wrote it in 10 minutes. I mean, it took you that long. But yeah, the wedding song of 1974. If you had older cousins or aunties or whatever who were getting married in 1974, you had to sit there in your horrible tiny three-piece suit

with a bow tie on a bit of elastic and be made to listen to this without even being able to touch the buffet and it just wasn't fair. I bet the Wilkins in the family, when they got married, I bet this got played. Still, I'm glad I saw this clip, by which I mean I'm glad I saw it

as opposed to I'm still seeing it. Yes. So, Annie's song would spend one week at number one, giving way to Sad Sweet Dreamer by Sweet Sensation. The follow-up, Back Home Again, failed to chart, and this remains his only sniff of the British charty arse as a solo artist, although his collaboration with Placido Domingo on Perhaps Love got to number 46 for three weeks in late 1981, early 1982. I can't believe that. Only one hit.

Yeah, I know, yeah. Sadly, Denver and Annie got divorced in 1982 when the relationship went from her filling up his sensors to getting on his tits it led to a massive row over alimony which culminated in denver taking a chainsaw into the house and cutting their marital bed in half and he was killed in a plane crash in 1997 and of course the song lives on in britain thanks to the supporters of sheffield united who adopted the lyrics to read you fill up my senses like a gallon of magnet like a packet of wood binds like a good pinch of snuff, like a night out in Sheffield, like a greasy chip butter. Oh, Sheffield United, come thrill me again.

You fill up my senses. Come fill me again. Oh, fantastic. That, of course, is the sound of John Denver. He's out a long time. He finally made it to the top. And the story, all about Annie, who, of course, is his wife. Lovely sounds of Annie's song.

74, a great year for Alvin Stardust. He's here on Top of the Pops with his jealous mind. Edmunds, who has clearly dropped the British accent he had in the 1972 Christmas show, goes into his awful northern accent as he comes out of Annie's song and then introduces a man who's had a great 1974, Alvin Stardust with my jealous mind yeah no earlier the way he says uh alvin stardust with his jealous mind he's always trying to work the title into a sentence very awkwardly and i hate that when anybody does it most of all when it's no just because of the creak of it and he does it all the time he's like this is donna summer and she feels some love this is can and they want some more it's a petty peeve but to me it's excruciating and half the time it doesn't even fit with the actual lyrics

of the song it's like here's chris Christa Berg and he is the lady in red. Edmunds, it's just one of those people that thinks that accents doing voices in itself denotes humour. You don't have to try any harder than that. We last chanced upon the king of the Mansfield Delta in chart music number three when he took my kooka chohoo to number two in December of 1973. This is a follow-up, but it's also the first Alvin Stardust single which the former Bernard Jury has actually sung on, instead of having to mime to the vocals of Pete Shelley,

who has settled for just writing and producing from here on in. It entered the chart at number 22 in the middle of March, then soared 19 places to number three and a fortnight later it knocked devil gate drive off the top spot and here's alvin and his mates returning for an encore performance oh alvin you're always welcome on chart music duck i really had to ask you know's shaking stevens shaking alvin i don't think stevens comes anywhere close to the majesty of alvin stardust i agree it's weird because alvin stardust has basically got to be the alvin stardust in my kooka choo which was actually somebody else in tyler he's trapped in this role but oh what a role and he plays it so

well i mean it's fair to say that he said 99.99% of what he had to say in My Cuckoo Chew, but even so, you know, he's got that kind of Ian McShane vibe about him that's very pleasing. Very much so. And, of course, the glove lives on in The Rock Expert as well, you know. Yes. So, you know, we cannot forget, definitely. And this is one of the great forgotten number ones of the 70s, isn't it? As we pointed out in that episode of Char Music,

everyone assumes that My Cuckoo Chew was his biggest hit, but no, it's not. It's this. Yeah, and this record must have come as a bit of a shock to his fans. Like they'd heard My Cuckoo Chew and they thought they had this guy pinned down. Yeah, well, forget that. But this is how you bring rock and roll into the 70s, isn't it? You know, screaming guitar, meaty drums,

and a front man who's clearly too old for this sort of thing having a moody cavort. Yeah. He's a fucking brilliant man. Yes. As before, he's in his old black leather rig out with matching gloves and a big chunky ring, and his pompadour's been puffed out even more,

and his sideburns are even beefier. The overall look is that he's being school-fuck fucked by a baby chimpanzee, isn't it? Bummer chimp. Imagine coming home from school one day and you open the door and your Ted dad's in the living room cosplaying as Diana Rigg. This is the look, isn't it? Yeah. It is great.

His hair is worth talking about here, though. Oh, talk away. He's got lockdown hair, basically. But it's like a lot of people in the 70s who wanted to recall the styles of the 50s but couldn't quite bear to cut their hair off at the back. Yeah. Which I think is really the origin of the mullet.

Yes. The Fonz in the latest series of happy days or Brian Ferry when he quiffed it up in the end I think it's what Bowie was trying to do with the Ziggy Stardust haircut yeah which is kind of the OG mullet yes which is stand it on end for rock and roll but without being so hopelessly square as to leave your collar visible so you get this terrible halfway house you'd see a lot of 70s guys not fully committing to the quiff because they'd been growing out their hair since 1964 and they just couldn't bear to chop it off yeah and also i think they were possibly worried that someone would see them from the back and think that they had a short back and sides,

like hung-up old Mr Normal. So you end up with this half and half, which really combines the worst of both, you know. Or it's for weekend rockers who want to have the long floppy air in the week for urban camouflage and then just quiff it up on special occasions. No, no, no, no. This lack of commitment has a cost, and the cost is you're going to look shit.

It's kind of, yeah, it is sort of a hybrid. It's like the, you know, the Seth-if-tees. What are you going on about, Dave? The Six-funties. You've got the Eight-funties. The Fifth-funties, surely. Well, you could have that as well. Yeah, yeah.

I love his giallo gloves, though. Like a kinky, sexualised 1970 italian murderer whose identity is concealed for most of the film you just get a pov shot of his strangling hands probably in the last scene he'll turn out to be an old lady or a dwarf or the main young female protagonist who somehow survived the murder spree hey you didn't expect that it doesn't need to make sense no i've actually got a pair of black leather gloves a bit like this and it's funny because if i wear them with a suit or a nice leather jacket i look like an italian murderer right but if i wear them with a zipped up parker and jeans i look like an aging rock star who owns a helicopter i like both of them but the main difference between the

performance of my kooka chew and this one is that his band have changed you know gone are the egg and chippers in the scoop neck pink t-shirts and in their place are younger lads in less durable and luxuriant black rig outs yeah it's good the thing i think there's a sort of a theme actually running throughout this episode of like they this sort of the backing musician stroke session musician, whatever kind of just having a bit of a laugh really just strumming away on these bog basic piss easy chords, you know, they probably could do a note for note of Richie Blackmore on sweet child

of mine if they've been asked to, but you know, this is, this is the gig that they get, you know, and you think that like, in a way, you know,

people talk about post-punk and the intensity of post-punk. And I think that comes from the fact that the get, you know. And you think that, like, in a way, you know, people talk about post-punk and the intensity of post-punk, and I think that comes from the fact that the players are having to concentrate furiously on getting every change right, you know. But, you know, these guys, they can just swish away or grin or even play pat-a-cake mid-song, you know. But there's kind of a vibe running through this. It's a very end-of-term feel, isn't it?

Very end-of-term, and it's almost like a cultural end-of-term. They should have played Crossfire while Alvin was carrying on. Yeah, it's got a cultural end of term feel as well yeah although alvin does come really close to clonking the keyboard player in the teeth with that mic stand oh yeah yes he's a little comedy jab just look how skill alvin is what mic standsmanship you know there's none of this poncy freddie mercury half a stand bollocks he just sees his chunky mic standing he just hoiks it up and then points it at the camera and twirls it and then he holds it in one gloved fist so he can point at his jealous mind then he uses it as a claw to ensnare his pianist like he's trying to win him in a fairground and once again that pianist is hunched

over awkwardly and not deploying the alexander technique and is therefore paying for it right now yeah but fucking hell worth the price i think i think maybe the the keyboard player's being punished for having his white underpants sticking out the top of his black ice skater bell bottoms at the back which lets the side down a bit although actually i looked closely it might not be that might actually just be his skin um he is one of those unhealthy looking 70s blokes even with that helmet of blonde hair that makes him look like he's trying to save his sweetheart from matthew hopkins but no to my mind this is a fucking tune yes and what a welcome relief from

the last two songs we've had. This episode has officially begun here with Alvin. Yes. Christmas has officially begun. This, of course, chaps, is taken from his debut LP, The Untouchable, which came out late last year, and it's inspired me to turn to a book

which is currently residing in bedrooms right across the country the 1975 music star annual as always the cover delivers a snapshot of the stars of the day so we get donny osmond noddy holder elton john suzy quattro david cassaday and gary glitter but inside is a penetrating interview with Alvin which I'd like to share with you right now headline how to touch Mr. Untouchable

I am the untouchable no one is allowed to get close to me not yet Alvin told us putting his feet up on the desk in his manager's office and showing off his leather boots. You see, I even wear gloves. That means that no one can touch me even if they want to. Not my skin or the real me. But why should he be so distant, But why should he be so distant, especially from the people who love him?

I am a star. I love my fans. I love everyone around me. I love making music. I love my family. Just because I don't let anyone come too close doesn't mean I don't love them. But for the moment, it is very important to me that I stay apart. I don't want to reveal anything about myself right away. I want to keep a few secrets for a rainy day. Anybody and everybody who really loves me must understand that. In time, you will be able to touch me, but I never want to be

the same way as some of the stars. I think there are some who are truly distant from their fans. It's all I would show and nothing in the heart. With me, it's the other way round. I have a lot in my heart. For all

my fans out there who are reading this, I want you to know that I love you and I would do anything for you. I'll be faithful to you. Will you be for me? Very naturalistic, that, yeah. Round about this time, he'd do interviews with the music press, particularly the serious music press, flanked by two massive henchmen who would wag fingers and tap on shoulders and look

menacingly if the the journo asked a question that alvin didn't like i don't think that's the true alvin no also we've got to remember that he's responsible for a generation of city kids not being flattened like roadkill you know yes that's how you get to touch alvin absolutely just by legging it across the road yeah yeah i could have done with alvin stardust back in 1969 you know i got run over you know i was out of my tiny mind i've been sent out by my mum to buy echo margarine with a sixpence and cross the busy road didn't look right didn't look left and um you know i got walloped by this green cortina and uh my life saved by a sort of um a grassy verge um yeah so there you go see swings and roundabouts jfk

the thing is more than anything else and this may not be totally obvious to modern day viewers it may require expert vision which is what we're here for and oh yeah we're in the big bucks but this is pure north country steam rising off the tv screen right this is an authentic expression of sex under artex or at least a bit of digital manipulation in a steamed up morris marina with a handbrake on near some chimneys or a colliery wheel it's not romantic but it's sex right and because people in those days had to work for their sex in ways that the youth don't really understand now because nowadays it may be as hard as ever to find anyone prepared to have sex with you certainly for blokes but other than that basic obstacle most of the other barriers have been cleared away metaphorically and physically right like i mean in spiritual

terms most people have now been cleansed of that spurious christian hangover faux morality and that deeply misogynistic talibanesque concept of honour, you know. And to a great extent, they've left behind the terror of pregnancy. And also, physically, people are now less likely to be battling their way through layers of two-inch thick clothing and huge armoured undergarments from sternum to knee, you know, with tights over them. And all the concomitant incubated yeast infections and forests of musty pubic hair, you know.

Unwashed British slime, you know. Just the thug rising off foul-smelling, undeodorised, unmaintained bodies, you know. Merry Christmas, everyone. And people so protected by their society from any kind of useful sex education or visual representation of sexual contact they literally don't know what to do right and all these things still live on here and there but nowadays they're not an electrified ring fence around non-marital sexual relationships or the accumulation of sexual experience for mutual pleasure and personal growth.

So at least that stuff is less fraught these days. But it's starting to make British people almost blasé in the continental fashion. the continental fashion whereas at this point in modern british history if you were an ordinary person in an ordinary town and you wanted sex you had to work for it not just locating and communicating with a prospective sexual partner the actual practical physical act was like an assault course not just for the body but also for the straining libido like tested to its limit and it was only starvation and deranged hunger and the the sexual tunnel vision that resulted from that which allowed anyone to ever get through it i think if you put a modern person in a 1970s sexual situation they'd be so turned off they'd cut their losses and just go home for some

toast i think and it's hard to explain to people especially if they've grown up in a universe of porn hub and doja cat and articles about fetish clubs in the lifestyle section of the sunday telegraph you know but despite how funny and good-natured and showbiz this top-of-the-box performance obviously is, at the time it would have looked almost too hot to touch. Because this was a country where as late as the mid-1950s, lest we forget, the Home Secretary was prosecuting seaside postcards for obscenity. seaside postcards for obscenity like seafront sweet shop proprietors bucket and spade shop proprietors were arrested as pornographers for selling them and the unspeakable postcards themselves would be taken away and literally burnt in government furnaces the ashes would then be shoveled out and dumped in the same pile as the ashes of all those impounded copies of ulysses and the decameron and mole flanders and death war bobby socks by hank

jansen you know all of which were regularly set alight by our spotless moral overlords in order to save our souls from corruption and literally the only thing that stopped those mass book burnings was the clean air act which meant they have to start shredding them instead and in what was basically still that country this was practically hardcore pornography you know in 1974 a lot of men or at least men who were not fortunate enough to be in the Rolling Stones, would have to gulp and run a finger around the inside of their shirt collar at the slightest glimpse of cellulite. Or the gust of wind up a miniskirt provided them with a quick flash of old cotton drawers sagging around the backside. Blokes would just spontaneously ejaculate, you know. And remember, this also was only a couple of decades

after Alvin's fellow Nottinghamshire legend, D.H. Lawrence, having been forced to relocate to Italy, was having all his letters to his British publishers opened by the Home Office in their ongoing attempt to silence and suppress the honesty of his otherwise unremarkable writing to the extent of at one point trying to put pressure on his baffled parisian publishers not to publish his work in french lest it creep back across the channel to deprave and corrupt the bilingual.

This is where we were as a country, right? And this, 1974, this is a time when local councils, which were always cobweb covens of weirdos and crusty old misfits, as they still are, had de facto control over cinema censorship at the local level and would exercise that control so enthusiastically that according to james firman the former head of the british border film classification at this time west yorkshire was the most heavily censored region in the english-speaking world including apartheid south africa and meanwhile mary whitehouse and cohorts were were insisting that despite all this we were all submerged in filth and these laws needed to be further tightened

up very severely at the cost or as i would say the benefit of turning a historically lewd and vicious country into a silent fascist theocracy as if that were britain's natural state and everything else was a perversion and in this very year 1974 the police had seized more about the language of love which was an only mildly exploitative swedish sex education film which had been passed with an x certificate by the glc but which the police independently decided to seize and prosecute as an obscene article after two plainclothes policemen went to see it in a west end cinema despite being told as they went in by the shuddering old woman in the ticket office i don't know why you want to see that film

it's just sex sex sex she even puts it in her mouth but this determination to keep britain in a state of arrested development sexually and psychologically and to close off all those avenues of self-expression and that connection with our own essential humanity and to deny British people by law the opportunity to understand that sex is the only kind of everyday pleasure which doesn't ultimately feel empty and temporary and worthless in the face of crushing capitalist routine and does make almost any life seem worth living and crucially does show up the hypocritical morals of the old British establishment as twisted and dangerous and ultimately evil that determination to deny us all of that was so great and for

various reasons considered so important and such a high priority that cases like that were rushed before the courts while actual sex crimes and large-scale sexual abuse were frequently not prosecuted at all. And in a lot of cases, offenders were protected from prosecution to preserve the spotless image of the British establishment so that it could continue to moralize and forbid and in this context alvin stardust attempts to do authentic raunch english style with only the flimsiest sheath of humor and silly bugger pantomime are really something and obviously no cultural

commentary at the time looked at this and thought fuck you know what we've got here is a poptastic reincarnation of dh lauren and we would laugh if they had because that's stupid but it's not quite the stupidest thing you could say about alvin stardust it really isn't and on these grounds i also have new respect for lisa goddard you know what you could have done with i suppose at this stage is for alvin stardust to have sort of fronted a campaign for the sexual highway code going into bedrooms here and doing it wrong are you out of your tiny mind yeah just walking in yeah you got like you know those 70s bedrooms all done out in brentford nylons yes flock war but none of those 70s bedrooms all done out in Brentford Nylons. Yes.

One of those big coffee and wardrobes. The door just flies open. Hey. You. Yes, point. But yeah, Sixpence's Elvis, he really set the template, didn't he? Oh, yeah. Because isn't this the year, Taylor, that Eli Culberson came over from America

and pretended to be Elvis in Heathrow Airport and went on liftoff with A. Shea and performed the most obscene Elvis impersonation ever with some fucking girl guide sitting at his feet? Yes. Oh, fucking hell. Oh, man, you must see that clip, Pop Craze Youngsters. It's incredible. Oh, yeah, video playlist.

So, Jealous Mind would spend one week at the top, deposed by Billy Don't Be A Hero by Paperless. Fucking hell, Nottinghamshire, the cradle of pop. The follow-up, Red Dress, would get to number seven in May. You, You, You made it to number six in September, and he'd finish off his most prolific year with Tell Me Why, becoming this week's number 16. Sadly, Diminishing Return set in rapidly in 1975, and the wheel tappers and shunters circuit beckoned, but he'd roar back in the early 80s with three top ten hits, and he died in 2014 at the age of 72 i wish i could have interviewed alvin stardust you've seen that massive long interview with um someone from cherry red records on youtube it's fucking brilliant isn't it yeah just captivate oh he's such a nice bloke.

Alex Gardas for you there, and Jealous Mind. Well, at this point in the proceedings... Oh, forgive this, by the way. We decided, as it's sort of Christmas, that we'd have it in stereo. The other speaker's in the kitchen. Where are you? This isorge mccray rock it baby travis on his own holds up two microphones and you already get the feeling that a bit is being deployed which he wastes time on when he should be introducing the next act, which he finally does when he puts on that American disco voice he started to do round

about this time and throws us into Rock Ya Baby by George McRae. Born in West Palm Beach, Florida in 1944, George McRae formed the group The Jiving Jets in his late teens before joining the Navy in 1963 Four years later when he came out he formed a duo with his wife Gwen and when she landed a solo record deal he acted as her manager while keeping his hand in on session singing and club dates Earlier this year McRae was on the verge of chucking in the music business when

he was approached by Harry Casey of Casey and the Sunshine Band, who had written a song that was out of his range and was offering it to Gwen. On the day of the recording, however, Gwen was running late, so Casey asked George to have a go, and by the time Gwen had arrived the single was already in the can and her husband suddenly had a solo career with the single rocketing up the billboard chart it ended our chart in the last week of June then soared 30 places to number 15 then bounded up to number four the week after that then grabbed hold of She by Charles Aznavour and told it to fuck off out of the number one position. And here is the man himself.

And chaps, after crossing the Atlantic and freezing his bollocks off in this frigid husk of an island so close to Christmas, how did the BBC treat him? Like shit. Not only is he having to perform on a set that's been encrusted with big emerald pyramids which makes him look like he's been shrunk down and been imprisoned in a quality

street tin by someone who likes everything bar the green triangles but the opening sequence is george saying sexy mama or some such then a christmas cracker which pans up to a turkey carcass with some holly on the top and a carving knife rammed into it which has been placed off to the side of him and he's expected to sing in front of it why why i asked yeah that turkey with a carving knife in it like it's had a visit from alvin stardust in a pov shop dubbed with heavy breathing and italian prog rock yeah there's a load of people listening to this laughing and all the others going what are the italian prog rock yeah there's a load of people listening to this laughing and all the others going what are the italian prog rock what's he on about i don't know now go and listen to

goblin it's like english prog rock with better food but yeah they haven't really been asked to turn the studio into a winter wonderland i'm assuming this is a callback to the previous episode and this is what's been left over after Mudd and David Essex have had a go at him. Yeah. Or somebody's just not bothered to clear the stage properly, you know. I find it massively disrespectful. Yeah, I do. I mean, George would be looking

at this going, oh, are you calling me a turkey? I feel sorry for George McRae immediately just because the fucking turkey's there. But also I've got a feel for the poor bastard, because he must have been walking on eggshells all year with his missus. And this performance surely puts the tin lid on it. You can imagine him saying,

Oh, by the way, Gwen, I'm not going to be around to help you eat Christmas shopping, because I've got to go to London to do that song that you should have had, but you were late, remember? You know, that song that got to number one in America, Britain, Canada, Austria, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland. See you on Christmas Eve, Doc. It's great. I like it now.

I liked it at the time. It's just the effortless superiority. I mean, it was something like this. It's like Pele coming up against Terry Darricot or something. Although, this particular version of Rock Your Baby... Well, yes, there is that. Yeah, I mean, it's famous for being one of the

first songs to employ a drum machine, but not in this version. But this is the top of the Pops Orchestra in mid-de- evolution. Like, we've seen that they went on what would now be called a journey yes from backing stevie wonder and the jackson five and keeping up with them yeah not disgracing themselves to

just a few years later essentially just randomly honking and squawking while denise williams was trying to sing a song yes and i suppose this is sort of halfway through that transformation you know sort of hovering a little above butlin standard yes i mean it's not as bad as their attempts to play jamaican music no as seen on any top of the pops performance by a solo reggae singer where the backing is not so much sly and robbie as ray and knobby because they don't understand how in reggae music feeling is conveyed through the details of timing and inflection and if you muff that you're really gonna sound like a bbc studio band reading charts under a big clock in a room painted hospital green turning reggae into a variety show umpire like you know that sound right when two ronnie's clash no wait wait wait wait better one better one le scratch perry and although soul music was never exactly their friend either no i think they'd have had

much worse problems if soul music was still Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett and stuff like that. Because, like, the stack sound works the same way as reggae in terms of the playing. They really would have slaughtered those records beyond all recognition. Oh, God.

But at least by this point, American soul music has a sort of slickness and a smooth line to it. So if you play in time and you get the notes right, even if you do sound cabaret sloppy, at worst, you're going to come across as hacks rather than vandals. Although it's a close call on this one because obviously the original backing track is so exquisite. And that's the main point of the record yeah and obviously this sounds horrible compared to that but it's just you know unlike them doing uptown top ranking or or sideshow by barry they don't turn a great record into a terrible record they can only

downgrade it to a much less good record yes you know because even without that magical rolling feel that you get on the real rock your baby just the notes and the arrangement and the singing are enough on their own to still sound good just not in the same way i it doesn't sound sexy which is a bit of a shame considering it's a record about sex this is the same record but as an elderly virgin with those those rim shots going all the way through it going click click click like a cane on the pavement outside mr harper's the fishmonger at 8 30 a.m on a wednesday picking up a bit of salmon for the cat I mean obviously this is embryonic disco I guess 74

and there's beginning and it's perhaps one of the first instances of a clash between like the machinery, disco increasingly involves machinery and in this instance like the drum machine and the tension between that and like the musicians union and you know TV studio orchestras

the culmination for me of that is there's footage somewhere of Donna Summer doing I Feel Love. And, of course, they haven't got the kind of marauder backing. They've just got this kind of TV studio audience sawing furiously away on their high lens to kind of simulate that kind of sequencer effect. And, yeah, it's not great. He wasn't the first one to use a drum machine. Oh, yeah. You know, Sly Stone used a drum machine throughout There's a Riot Going On, and Shuggy Otis used it, and, of course, Timmy Thomas.

But this is the first one that really hit big. What's good about this, though, is that fabulous quick cutting between cameras that they do later on in the song. Like they did with David Ansell Collins. A double barrel. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it sort of lobs back a bit of the thrill that's been siphoned out of this track, you know. And in fairness to George, he does that too

because he really goes for it as wildly as he can, to his credit. He's not discouraged. He's trying to make up for the lost funk, you know. And he's got the standard black male singer suit on, hasn't he? Just one of them zip-up all-in-one jobs with loads of spangles and whatnot on it yeah yeah you can look at this performance one or two ways right either it's the amazing very arguably one of the top 10 singles of the 70s rock your baby by george

mccray being desecrated by hacks with george mccray right there to witness it like a 17th century traitor having his entrails pulled out and held up in front of his face before he dies or it's british light entertainment cracking down the sides as it attempts to accommodate the sumptuous girth of rock your baby by george mccray and what you're watching is the dead past being torn asunder because this and not the record coming up next this is now what ordinary people like yes so really what we're seeing here is just one of the stranger artifacts of change at a point just before these old ways were banished to the echoing concrete corridors of the little and large show for 10 years and then finally into the grave with that audience

you can look at it either way and neither of those two things is lovely listening but it's better to think of it the second way because that's much nicer to witness we've talked often about this song in previous chart musics and you know even in the last episode we talked about how this song influenced dancing queen and by extension don't make waves by the nolans but you know but we can't hate it for that no but we can also kick in another song which was whatever gets you through the night by john lennon which got to number one this year and lennon was quite open about nicking from it yeah yeah so this episode has properly picked right up now hasn't it and nothing can go wrong from here going from strength to strength to

so rock your baby would spend three weeks as the topmost of the poppermost, eventually yielding the floor to When Will I See You Again by The Three Degrees. The follow-up, I Can't Leave You Alone, got to number nine for two weeks in October of this year, and his latest single, You Can Have It All, is currently at number 42 and will get to number 23 in January of 1975. He'd score one more big hit with It's Been So Long which got to

number 4 in August of 1975 then Diminishing Return set in but he's still active today meanwhile Gwen McRae scored moderate hits of her own in the late 70s with Funky Sensation and All This Love That I'm Giving

which in their own way are just as fucking monumental. I love those songs. All this love that I'm giving is a fucking banger. Keep the fire burning. That's great. The melodious meanderings of one George McRae. And rock your baby. I thought as it was crimbo, I'll buy you a present. The melodious meanderings of one George McCrae. Coo-ee! And rock your baby.

Oh, Christmas! I thought as it was crimbo, I'd buy you a present on the air, as it were. Oh, I've always wanted one of these. You don't know what it is. Yes, I do. Oh, no. What are you going to do? Oh, now, equal terms to introduce...

Oh, she was born with a mole on her face. Stephanie D'Saig. Oh! APPLAUSE She was born with a mole on her face. Stephanie decides. Oh! I was born with a smile on my face Though all of my life's been a phantom mine. Edmunds, alone again. Outros rock your baby. And then he's joined by Travis, sporting a very long pink paper hat that makes him look like he's got a high-top fade.

And brandishing a sizably rectangular Christmas present. Edmunds reacts by taking the gift, placing it on the floor, and standing on it. So he's now the same height as Travis. Yeah. A couple of years later, you would never have got Noel to agree

to that hilarious visual gag because it's at his expense. No, no. But right now, he still has to pay his dues before he can start punching down. Yeah. This appalling confection is brought to a close

by Edmonds making a joke out of the title of the next song and Travis visibly salivating at its performer. DLT expresses his lust for Stephanie de Sykes, for it is she, by lapsing into what i think might be some kind of wild black man voice oh and he goes oh stephanie de sykes ah like she should be grateful that he's controlling himself stephanie sykes mind you not featured in the now notorious A Bit of a Star, DLT's coffee table book, Clef. I know because I went and checked and she's not there,

not in either of my copies. You've got two copies of A Bit of a Star by David Trout. I have no idea how. I didn't realise until I went and looked, but yes. But she's exactly the sort of person that that book is full of. Oh, yes. She's not in it. And I don't know if that was a fuck-off-you-hairy-wanker on her part

or just that her star fell so sharpish, even compared to some of the 1970s ladies lucky enough to be chosen to feature in that book. And she'd be right next in Travis's little black book to Lindsay DePaul. You'd think, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because round about this time, she was a household name. Yes.

Like, 1974, the in-house singer on That's Life. Yes. With exclamation mark, like, Frampton Comes Alive, as sort of like a Millicent Martin for people born in the 19th century. And then, by 1984, I don't think anyone had ever heard of her. No. Did she even make blankety blank? No. Bottom left

seat I would imagine. By now Travis is wearing a pink paper hat which just pushes all his hair right down. He's never looked more Nasher like has he? Yeah. Or he looks like one of the ghosts in a knock off Spectrum version of pac-man

terrifying yeah it looks like a cartoon of smoke coming out of an exhaust pipe yes born in harlow in 1948 stephanie wrighton began her career as a session singer in the 60s and put out her first single under the name Verita in 1972. However, it was television where she initially made her name when she became a regular singer on the first series of That's Life in 1973. Earlier this year, she was offered the part of a troubled nightclub singer called Holly Brown in the hard-hitting ITV documentary series about the cutting-edge world of motel management, Crossroads. During her run in the series, she debuted a song which had been written for the show by Roger Holman and Simon May,

which became a certified banger on the King's Oak Club scene and was aired constantly until it penetrated the skulls of the 18 million non-aurs who regularly watched Crossroads. On its release, it smashed into the chart as the highest new entry at number 14 in mid-July, then soared to number 3 and a week later made it to number 2. As she's still a participant in That's Life and therefore a BBC regular, she's been automatically waved onto this top of the pops. And here she is with her all-male backing trio, Rain, which features Simon May.

Nice to see the BBC making a bit of a Christmassy effort here because we get to see a shot of De Sykes ringed by an overlay of tinsel as if she was performing in the glory hole of the mineshafts christmas party beautiful and then we get to see her having a bit of a sing with rain next to some christmas trees and you know rain appeared to have come dressed as humbugs hoopie tank tops over white shirts and black slacks in front of some non-more 70s white Christmas trees. Yeah. Or if you saw a white Christmas tree in someone's house in 1974, you knew they were doing all right for the set. Yeah.

That's like the pacifist version. I suppose they're sort of like the pips to Gladys Knight here, really, aren't they, as it were? Yes. Yeah, sort of harvester restaurants of men, you know. Yeah, I spent a lot of time looking at them. Because what's a little bit uneasier is that i know of stephanie de sykes mainly as the mother of the late toby slater would be post brit pop teen star best known for being halfway through the premiere

of his video on the chart show when itv cut away for the news flash about princess diana's car crash and who i sort of very vaguely knew years ago oh really yeah but that makes it hard to take the piss because i look at her and i just see him because there's a very definite family resemblance yeah i feel a bit wrong so i spent most of the time looking at rain who are not the jordanaires and i don't know what they actually are. To me, they look like three butchers disguised as mint viennetters. The only thing that really stands out about her, which was a common thing at the time, is that flaxen lank hair.

You know, that centre-parted drape like Jane from Rod, Jane and Fred. Yes. You know, or Neil from The Young Ones. Or Dougal. Just sort of scraped in both directions and hanging down like towels on a towel rail because that was normal hair at the time wasn't it that was just the default it was yeah yeah unfortunately they make a rod their own backs with the premise of the song really it means they've got that grin pinned like a kind of

synchronized swimmer throughout the whole thing. And you can sense the strain at certain points. It's a very Eurovision song, isn't it? Oh, very much. You can easily see this coming forth in the Eurovision Song Contest. But the lyrics are really jarring. Putting aside the fact that being ripped out of your mother's womb must be the most fucking terrifying thing of your life thus far. The whole of my life's been a pantomime that doesn't sound fun does it just managing your own business and a load of kids suddenly start shouting he's behind you

and like ian paisley and jerry adams in a horse together yes it's terrible i had to look very closely at the these lyrics because it puzzled me as well it's like forget the politicians nuclear fissions the gloomy headlines official deadlines it's a bit of a puzzling lyric in that it comes on like it's gonna be like a tears of a clown thing you know the whole of her life's been a pantomime you're assuming that the next thought will be that she's hurting inside yes and can't express it that's where smoky robinson would have gone yeah you know like she's somehow limited by this identity as a selfless marionette but as the song goes on there really isn't any of that and she's actually quite jolly about it and the line born with a need to embrace, resonated with Dave Lee Travis, wouldn't it?

But it's the fact that this song is so lacking in reflection and so weirdly open in its robotic good cheer almost makes it feel sadder and more desolate. Do you know what I mean? It's like on that last clip, this is the last knockings of that outmoded mainstream you know 1974 version it's like somebody thought jack in the box by cloda rogers sounded a bit morose yes but in 1960 where this belongs stuff like this was at least a reflection of the the cheery non-contemplative mood of the country.

But this is not 1960. And in cynical, violent times, the best that this could hope to sound is tragic. And it's escapism. But all the contemporary and believable methods of musical escapism in 1974 involved drug-assisted flight from reality or cold humor or the expression of filthy human joy as opposed to this sort of flattened care home sing-along you know which even in 1974 sounds pained and exhausting like born with a rictus grin on its face you know yeah it's liquid crossroads though isn't it in a sense i mean you know there's a certain bomb in that respect and maybe they are

genuinely unconscious you know maybe it's channeling the spirit of noel gordon i mean she had a smile on her face most of the time she was pissed every day yes all the stories i've heard about oh yeah but anyway thank god we can finally have the discussion of crossroads the chart music was initially set up for because the program hung over the 70s like a a wet tea towel over a chip pan fire didn't it but what influence did crossroads have on your life chaps well i watched it was it watched in your house yeah it was watched by me as well i yeah i rolled with it definitely it wasn't watched in our house it was watched in my as well. Yeah, I rolled with it, definitely. It wasn't watched in our house. It was watched in my nan's house. So it was a fixture of being around my nan.

Yeah, my nan all watched it. But it was on our house as well, because round about this time, it was always the second to last thing I ever saw on telly before I was forced into bed. Because ATV would run a cartoon afterwards at about five to seven or something like that. And then Peter Tomlinson or Mike Prince would roll up and tell me personally that I had to go to bed.

So round about this time, it didn't matter how shit Crossroads was. And it was. I just wanted it to go on for fucking hours so I could stay up. Yeah. It's like a lot of stuff in the 70s. He didn't watch it because it was good. He watched it because it was on. And of course, when people talk about soap operas and pop,

they invariably bang on about Neighbours and EastEnders. But I'm sorry, you can't fuck with the power of Crossroads and its myriad attempts to crack the charts. And it all started in the late 60s when Sue Nichols, who was playing the part of a waitress who got up on stage at a Birmingham night spot, spelt N-I-T-E, of course, recorded the song she sang for pie and it got to number 17 in july of 1968 but then carl wayne formerly of the move and turner downer of

sugar baby love joined the cast as colin the milkman and recorded a version of the theme tune with lyrics called standing at the crossroads i never knew that yeah even as a move fan i never knew that yeah wow and and he ended up marrying miss diane in real life after she got divorced from tommy vans and this year um jonathan king's uk records released to my daughter by noel gordon and in 1975 with the impetus firmly behind it because of this song they put out the crossroads wedding party lp to commemorate the nuptials of meg mortimer and her dear hugh which features two stephanie de sykes songs and then music for pleasure put out a collection of standards called noel gordon sings and then of course in, with post-punk redolence throughout the nation,

Paul Henry commemorated the death of Benny's fiancée on the morning of their wedding with Benny's song and followed it up with Waiting at the Crossroads a few years later. And we haven't even touched upon the cashing records from Noel Gordon's accent from crossroads in 1981 including the first and last noel by the gay gordons and meg is magic by bill buckler who went on to become one of esther's bitches in that's life yeah i've heard that one let's just

say bill buckley is no tim buckley and then of course there was i'm gonna watch crossroads which was a bregay tinge tribute by local comedians alan and blue that's fucking brilliant popular midlands entertainers and let's not forget benny by kathy staff who played miss lute before she became compost lust object in last of the summer of wine and of course glender and the test tube baby by the tour doubles in 1983 about glenda brownlow's attempts to sport what a fucking rich legacy crossroads has bestowed upon our nation you're also leaving out uh descent of the stiper stones by half man half biscuit which is uh right yeah it's an it's an extended recitation about him meeting the woman who played Glenda Brownlow in a Chandler's in Montgomeryshire. She's worth a listen, if just for finally doing the pun that everyone has been waiting years to do, where it makes reference to the tumultuous life of Father Arthur in the programme,

finishing off by saying, the crazy world of Arthur Brown. Yes. It's almost wise, you just have to say it almost apologetically. It needs to be said. Different soap, and I can't remember the band, but there was somebody who did Ernie Bishop's Dead Body. Lastly, you're looking a bit pale, Ernie.

I think they were a kind of proto-half-man-half-biscuit. Right. The thing is, I've been thinking about Stephanie de Sykes here, right? Do you remember when you used to get British cheeses other than cheddar or Red Leicester? They're like sports other than football they still exist but you just you never see them around no they used to be common speedway yeah i mean when was the last time you had a nibble of creamy lancashire no derby cheese you know one mouthful of that

you'd have instant proustian recall of the days when the average passerby could name at least five members of the england cricket team yeah or six famous snooker players right not that i'm getting nostalgic don't get me wrong do you remember real bin men yeah exactly yeah but no but it's it's not nostalgic because it's horrible next to that now exotic cheese on the table would have been some homemade jam presented as though it met the basic acceptable standards of spreadable confectionery even though it wasn't strawberry jam or raspberry jam or any of the flavors jam is meant to be and from which jam gained its reputation as a treat it would have been like loganbury jam or crab apple or green gauge or rose hip or some kind of wicker man nightmare indigenous hedgerow

substance you know with a rubber band around the paper lid in the cupboard for four years with a sticker on it with a date in borough. And you would be expected to act as if it was nice. Do you know what I mean? As though the dissolution and resetting of these plants was an achievement for which your host should be congratulated. But the 70s was full of this weird penny-pinching in areas where it wasn't needed right like a jar of

robertson's jam would have cost you about 2p in 1974 inadvertently racist label and all which was less than the cost of buying some jars and a set of paper lids and a lot quicker you know and it wouldn't have been buttercup flavor or adder's tongue or root of hemlock you know it might have been nice instead it was exactly the same with home brewing because everyone including my dad was neck deep in this false economy right of home oh god yeah my granddad seven days jank is the home breod yeah yeah so did my dad bubbling flasks and jars everywhere like breaking bad you know what i mean yes it's like trying to make beer with all these plastic tubes and bags it looked like a colostomy and yes by all accounts it tasted about

as good you'd end up with his brown woody liquid with some sediment in the bottom and people be standing there lying to themselves like it's not bad you know and people come around to try it i remember people people coming around to have a taste of my dad's bed and then they'd lie to him and say oh it's not bad you know like it was a mortal insult to acknowledge the reality of how dreadful this barley-infused shit water really was, compared to a six-pack of cans, which at the time would have set you back about 40 pence. So cheap, even the unemployed could afford them. I used to drink them in the street at 1pm. It was quite a double diamond, though.

It didn't work any wonders on me, I tell you. I had that when I was 12 and I didn't drink again for six years. I was shy and stinking to eat lemonade. I wonder if the Germans have a word for nostalgia for the horrible actually. Brexit, I think it is, David. Yeah, well, yeah. But anyway, the point is

that's kind of what Stephanie de Sykes is like, or at least this record. You could have gone out and got a blandly semi-acceptable version of this for pennies from some american musical conglomerate you know pre-packed and ready to go but instead it sounds like it's been cooked up under the sink in a semi-detached house in enfield and when you try it it makes you want to puke to the point of not even caring that nowadays that modest family home in Enfield has been replaced by a block of much smaller flats which cost 700 times as much one of them now occupied by a yuppie with a hippie

beard who's just brought up the building down the street, which used to be a food bank until the donations dried up and turned it into an 85 quid a meal street food restaurant called The Food Bank. So, born with a smile on my face, spent one week at number two, kept at bay by Rock Your Baby. But the Sykes Reign ATV Triforce continued to flourish, resulting in Golden Day,

the theme tune to the new series of The Golden Shot, when Bob Monkhouse returned after the Liz Truss-like stewardship of Charlie Williams. And Odyssey, the theme for ATV's start-up sequence, which was practically the national anthem of the Midlands at that time. And when Holly Brown returned to Crossroads to sing at the wedding of Meg Mortimer, the song she sang, We'll Find Our Day, became DeSykes' follow-up,

getting to number 17 for two weeks in May of 1975. When Diminishing Return set in, Dis Sykes appeared in the 1975 pop comedy Side by Side, then joined Madeleine Bell and Katie Kassoon, amongst others, in a collective of backing singers called the Birds of Paris, who backed assorted French disco sorts, including Sarone, and then teamed up with her baby father, Stuart Slater, to write two Eurovision entries,

The Bad Old Days for Coco in 1978 and Love Enough for Two for Prima Donna in 1980. Before teaming up with her new partner, Angus Deaton, for a piss-take of Buxfiz's winning entrant called It's Only a Wind-Up, under the name Brown Ale. Meanwhile, Simon May continued his relationship with Crossroads two years later, when he wrote and sang Summer of My Life to soundtrack Bob Powell's Marriage Falling Apart As He Goes Blind, which was released and got to number seven for three weeks in october

of 1976 and when crossroads recycled the storyline for a third time in 1981 when the singer kate loring played by kate robbins whose cousin paul mccartney tacked a guitar solo of the crossroads theme at the end of the wings album venus and Mars in 1975 recorded a song also written by May called More Than In Love in a recording studio in the basement of the motel which appeared out of nowhere it got to number two in June of 1981 held off the penthouse suite of the charts by Being With You by Smokey Robinson and after switching bbc in the mid-80s he took the howards way theme to number 21 in november of 1985 wrote anyone can fall in love the eastenders theme with words which anita dobson took to number four for two weeks in august of

1986 repeated the trick with the howards way theme and and called it Always There which Marty Webb took to number 13 in October of 1986 wrote Every Loser Wins for Nick Berry which got to number one for three weeks in the same month and something out of nothing for Letitia Dean and Paul Medford which got to number 12 in November of the same year. What a fucking rabbit hole. Yeah. That is Stephanie Desai, of course,

and born with a smile on her face. We take you back now to the top of the pops from June of this year, when Sparks made it straight into number two with This Town Ain't Big Enough for the Both of Us. APPLAUSE Edmunds, alone again, tells us we're going back to June of this year, for this town ain't big enough for both of us, by Sparks. We covered Sparks in chart music number 45 during their Aventus renaissance,

when they took Beat the Clock to number 10 in August of 1979. But this is the single that brought them to the dance. It was the first release on their new label, Island Records, who relocated the duo to the UK, put an advert in Melody Maker which read, wanted, new bass player for Sparks, must be beard free and exciting, picked up Martin Gordon and added Norman Dinky diamond on drums and adrian fisher on guitar after riffling through the bbc sound effects library for the right gunshot sound effect the band pushed for it to be the lead-off single from their lp kimono my house but their producer muff windwood was reluctant to put it out as it was a bit mad even by early 70s standards but when he

played it to his mate Elton John the I'm Dill Danding hit maker he said listen I'll bet you 100 quid that it makes the top three and when Winwood's wife agreed with John he relented. Despite missing out on that Top of the Pops performance on its release in April of this year, it eventually entered the chart at number 49 in the first week of May. The following week, it soared 21 places to number 27, and with all the MU paperwork signed, they made their Top of the Pops debut that week, and a nation's youth got stared at by Ronon mail for the first time the week after that it soared another 18 places to number nine and a fortnight later it got to number two and here

is a repeat of their debut performance and as soon as i decided that we were going to do the 1974 post christmas episode i knew this was going to be on it because no fucking way are the BBC letting sparks on the telly on Christmas afternoon while the extended family are letting their dinners go down and end up agitating elderly relatives who are suddenly being confronted with the sight of Hitler playing the keyboards. Can you imagine such a thing?

I mean, obviously, I saw this at the time. It made an incredibly vivid impression on me and I think I'd have to say, thinking about it, this is probably my favourite ever Top of the Pops appearance. And I might even argue it's the best ever, perhaps. But that's perhaps a little subjective, really. And I'd say it, David. It's interesting that they were relocated to the UK.

It's a bit like Jimi Hendrix was relocated to the UK. And you think, this couldn't have happened in America. This couldn't have been launched in america it had to be launched in the context of well in this particular instance you know top of the pops absolutely perfect for it no i could say actually sort of stands out from what else has been going on tonight but the strange thing is that actually apart from the male brothers the other geezers could have been playing earlier on with the rubetz or alvin stardust actually obviously you know apart from the kind of the brilliant pylon of the guitars that you get in the middle i mean you know they're slightly superfluous really it's really about them they were sort of

a duo within a five piece but um clearly the hitler thing was just the most astonishing thing that i'd ever seen in the context of pop you know because it is so on pop what was he doing there is he playing under sufferance you know what's what's the score the queerness aspect is interesting i was thinking about this because me and all my schoolmates we love the queerness of glam and stuff like that we love you know like steve priest in sweet or whatever you know these these are our favorite things but it didn't actually make us more enlightened as regards gender fluidity it didn't make us more open-minded you know we love these people yeah but at the same time we thought there were a bunch of puffs who wore frilly knickers and bras and lipstick.

And, of course, they got the back of old seven-days jankers, my grandad. But it didn't decrease our homophobia seeing these kind of people. It was celebrated. It was a weirdly ambivalent relationship. Yeah, it was puffs in their proper place. Yeah. Up on stage for the entertainment of the rest of us. Yeah.

I mean, Russell here, he looks like a Jim Morrison you'd be happy to go out for a drink with and know that nothing fucking major is going to happen. You wouldn't have to listen to his poetry. Yes. And Ron, of course. This is the debut performance of Sparks on Top of the Pops, as far as I know.

And right away, he's looking at us, watching him on the telly, and his expression is, oh, so you're here again are you you know as we said last time we did sparks he always looked at the camera as if he was offended that we were watching and he was waiting for us to go because we clearly didn't belong here we weren't grown up enough to appreciate this yeah i mean everyone goes on about the scariest of ron mail but you know i have to say he came pretty low on my list of the things that terrified me on 1974.

Oh, yeah, it wasn't terror, yeah. In the top ten, it went Dying, Spiders, the News at Ten theme tune, Dr. Rat out of Rat Trap in Core, Big Writing, The Humphreys, that shot of the burglar running away on the watch out there's a fifa bar advert which absolutely terrified me even though the fucker's running away from me not at me chinese restaurants the dream i kept having where i was at school or home and i just floated upwards and upwards and no one even noticed even though was screaming. I think that came off a public information film. Of course.

Ron Mayle. Yeah, yeah. So pretty low. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was wary of him. I wasn't outright terrified. I think what's so clever about it is that he doesn't over-hammer it. He doesn't sort of mouth, you know, bloody rubbish

or what's all this nonsense, you know. It's more kind of enigmatic, really, you know. It's like, you know, there's sort of absurdism about it, you know, like what precisely he's doing there, kind of sort of clanking mechanically away. And, of course, you know, that whole yin-yang thing between him and his brother is what actually ultimately makes him such a great electronic music duo. You've always got to have that yin-yang element, you know, like in Suicide or whatever or Soft Cell.

You say that, David, but the way they come off on stage, it's like, do these two even know each other? How could they even know each other? I mean, you had that with Mark Holman and Dave Ball, but you could accept that they were mates, and they were both there and they'd arrive together and they'd leave together. With the male brothers, who are fucking brothers,

it's like, do you two even get on? How can you? Yeah, yeah. And short hair was such a radical thing, you know, back then. It was, you know, absolutely, no one had had short hair unless they were Prince Charles or whatever. Any kid whose parents insisted on giving them a short back and sides would get absolutely tortured in the playground. Obviously when you watch this, the first thing that strikes you

is the visual appeal of Sparks. But as well as that, there's something else which makes them stand out one thing this program highlights about the hits of 1974 is that although there's a lot to say about them there's not usually lots and lots to say about the actual music itself which tends to be either crunchy and basic or soupy or childlike and you can't really discuss or describe the architecture of the sound or the shape or the sonic picture or the construction of the song the way you absolutely can with big hits of other periods whether it's the bgs or frankie goes to hollywood or beyonce you know but this is very much an exception to that this is one of very very few tracks on this episode which sounds like it's in

3d rather than music being made by cardboard cutouts yeah it's an edifice yeah yeah yeah it's this record does things and goes places it does impossible things and goes to imaginary places for real no idea how but if you've never heard this record before there's no possible way you could predict what was going to happen next and even if you've heard it a thousand times you still sometimes forget what's going to happen next because there's so much going on and so much of it is completely unpredictable without any of it feeling forced and even in the sparks catalog which is obviously a treasure box this is the one yeah right they're a band with lots of semi-hidden gems to their name and all that but this is the one this really is the greatest thing

they ever did because everything that was great about them is right here at its best and it's most immediate and exciting and appealing and 99 times out of 100 when there's one hit in a band's back catalogue that is the perfection of that band in that way it's all you need and the rest of their stuff is an afterthought yeah it's just a restating of a theme but the amazing thing about sparks is that they had this one big strike right you know pretty close to the beginning where they excelled themselves in being themselves and they made hours and hours of other music which is almost as good and that's not almost as in close but no cigar that's almost in the sense of being independently startling and energizing despite not being this town ain't big enough for the both of us which very few things are

their whole career it's like the same thing seen from a multitude of different angles each of them interesting and unique it's just that this one is face on right there in front of you and it's everything you want from sparks at maximum volume and intensity yeah i mean that's right the intensity is the guitars they really kind of whip up storm there and i think also it's one of these things where it has to take place in 1974 and it has to be on top of the pops that is its element it's not something that you know a rock festival whatever or something would sound better if you go and see them live it's got to be in this situation you know right here right then yeah the whole thing the whole creation can only exist for me in in that particular moment yeah and it's really important

because occasionally you get moments like this where you're watching sort of the pops like you're watching 1974 and you're thinking well this all that is quite tidy and professional and i can see the charm of this and there's a certain value to that but it all seems a little bit distant and out of focus and at worst it's like a trick that's being played on you you know and then suddenly something like this comes on and you think oh right yeah in fact whatever the mainstream looked like creativity and the generation of bright ideas where it happened was actually more intense back then than it is now and all this other stuff is absolute junk by comparison and presumably that's why people

back then were so evangelical and stony faced about the separation of art and pap which they decreed could not coexist but the problem was they often misjudged which was which because there's a whole lot of nonsense from 1974 that proves often at very great length that pap would turn up disguised as art and now here are sparks to prove that the opposite was also true and while in some ways they seem absolutely 100 1974 in others there may be a little bit out of time because they hark back to the period before that separation when there was no concept of cult and so in pop music and television and a few other areas the most imaginative and the most forward thinking popular art would have to aim for actual popularity and would often achieve it you you know, Beatles, etc.

And there are some periods in pop history where that's been true of pop music generally, where the most exciting and imaginative music was in the charts, but 1974 is not among them. Like we were saying before, there's good stuff in the charts, but you could only rely on soul and reggae because most white acts with bright ideas are album orientated. Whereas Sparks are still doing that 60s thing of folding artistic ideas and crazy concepts into just about radio friendly music.

The unusual thing about this is that they're not an art band who make the occasional commercial pop record like Roxy Music or even David Bowie to an extent. They're an out-and-out pop band. But they're an out-and-out pop band whose artistry is baked into what they do and how they do it. So if you have a collection of Roxy Music singles, that's not the best Roxy Music album, or at least it's certainly not the best imaginable Roxy Music album whereas if you were to compile a compilation of the very

best of Sparks from their whole career the vast majority of the tracks you put on it would be singles and there aren't that many artistic groups where that's the case. You know, Madness or whatever, Blondie, but almost none from this period. I mean, the thing about it, it's self-evident. It's writ large. I mean, of course, you know, music critics or whatever, I mean, people can have differences of taste. You know, one of us might love something, one of us might despise another, et cetera, et cetera.

But anybody who is anything less than absolutely laudatory of this, I mean, I think it's just fundamentally untrustworthy. I'm sure at the time there were a lot of eminent, sensible critics who thought this was, you know, a kind of a nonsense. There might even be some now. I doubt there's very many. Or they've probably got the sense to keep their mouths shut because anybody who's absolutely less than full of praise for this,

their judgment is that it's untrustworthy. I'll tell you something else that people don't talk about people forget what an incredible lyricist ron mayle was as well because he could do this what he's doing here just putting together phrases and images in a kind of pop art collage that is droll but not whimsical and then literally the next track on the album is amateur hour which is actual proper writing about a real subject which is humorous and sympathetic and mocking and even manages to drop in one outrageously tricksy metrically perfect, endlessly quotable line. He was amazing. He was amazing. And I think there's a case to be made

that the album covers of Propaganda and Indiscreet are the best album covers in history, or in rock and pop history at least, because neither of them quite top the cover of Underground by Thelonious Monk, which is surely number one. Have a look if you've not seen it. But the thing about those Sparks covers is they don't mean anything.

They're not significant or artistically grand or anything like that. They're exactly like Sparks' best music. They're just examples of what you can do with imagery and the imagination if you don't think in a cliched way and you don't impose false restrictions on yourself you can just fill people's heads with all the potential color and humor and intrigue and novelty of life and make them feel like they're alive and not dead or at least remind them that such things are still possible it's the value of play you know you look at those covers and they're silly meaningless 70s album covers but they're not like abstract prog covers or that hypnosis style of

design that's like lsd meets ad agency where you're looking at stylized fashionable airbrushed weirdness you know like magazine advertising to sell a product these are bright living things that that tease the imagination they're lively and unexpected and good for you because they encourage thought and daydreams and great things like everything else about Sparks. One tiny criticism really of Sparks is perhaps they're over fondness for a pun. You know, they say no place in pop music, you know, it's the downfall of the Beatles as we know. But yeah, but other than that, yeah.

Oh, man, you can't say that about sax and violins. Yeah, I know, yeah. But you have to feel for paul russell in this song and this performance because ron's forced him to sing in a key out of his range um ron said this town ain't big enough for both of us as written in a and by god it'll be sung in a i just feel that if you're coming up with most of the music you have an idea where it's going to go and no singer is gonna get in my way oh he's like hitler russell said in an interview that ron couldn't and wouldn't play the song in any other key so he was fucked so yeah get on with it and also the other thing is bbc shoddiness

well to the forehead there's a bit midway through where the top of Russell's microphone flies off and he stares into the camera and waves it at us disapprovingly. So amateurish. Amateur hour, yeah, yeah. I went to see him a few times in the 90s. Oh, really? Yeah, when they were playing in London. And the day of one of those gigs, I sustained a scratched retina and I came out of the doctors with an eye patch and i remember

thinking there's some gigs you really wouldn't want to go to wearing an eye patch but if you had to list the gigs that you would want to go to in an eye patch sparks would have to be number one ahead of dr hook or gabrielle or momus or johnny kid of the pirates because that would just be copying a look whereas this looks yeah looking like you would take yeah this is more like you've adopted an original look which fits and complements the spirit of the artist but what you wouldn't want to do is turn up with an eye patch and a pirate hat and a cutlass and a bag of gold doubloons. Because the point here is not fancy dress, it's playfulness and idiosyncrasy. And in this case, serendipity.

And that's what Sparks was really about. Yeah, there's a lot of songs in this episode which point the way towards the future, mainly in a bad way. This is one that doesn't. This is one that makes 1975 sound like the most exciting year there's ever going to be. Yeah, I can't wait. So this town ain't big enough for both of us.

We spend two weeks at number two, held off its rightful place at the top by Sugar Baby Love by the Rubets. Oh,in nash the follow-up amateur hour got to number seven in august and they finished their biggest year with never turn you back on mother earth getting to number 13 in november they'd notch up three more top 40 hits in 1975 before falling off the radar for four years, roaring back in 1979 with the number one song in heaven and beat the clock in

1979. Spark foil and a studio in, big enough for both of us referring of course to Noel. Now what would Christmas be without a bit of tinsel and glitter? You guessed, the man who's had so many hit sounds, Gary Glitter, the Glitter Band, and always yours! CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Travis, now with three mics in his paw, I know, you know, I'll never, never let you go. I do know, I'll never, never let you go. Travis, now with three mics in his paw, drops the same tinsel-slash-glitter joke that's been done three years in a row on Top of the Pops now as he introduces Always Yours by Gary Glitter. We've covered GAD, as we're legally obliged to call sex offenders in this country by their surname these days many a time and often chart music and this his eighth single was the follow-up

to remember me this way which got to number three in april of this year after i love you love me love and remember me this way it was a return to the up-tempo glitter beloved by the pop craze youngsters and it smashed into the charts as the highest new entry at number five in June and a week later barged aside the street by Ray Stevens to reach the very summit of Popo Montagna. And here he is in the studio reunited with the glitter, who have scored three top ten hits of their own this year with Angel Face, Just For You, and Let's Get Together Again. And once again, Pop Craze Youngsters, we return to the Music Star Annual of 1975 and pull out another blisteringly critical piece written by either Woodward or Bernstein, I'm not sure, entitled Glittering Gary. All the glitters is not gold,

but all the glitters on this page is Gary. Golden Gary. Gorgeous Gary. Gary the Groover. Gary of the Gilded Grin, our own Gary. Who's the most glittery guy in pop? You're right, it's Gary. So here's some beautiful sparkling pickies for you.

We chatted to Gary as he posed for us. How does it feel, we asked, to be a super superstar? Great, was his reply, as he turned to the right and changed expression. It's an incredible feeling. I feel as if I have so many friends. The fans make me really happy. Enjoy that while it lasts. I know that sounds corny, but it's true. It's as if I suddenly have a huge family and everyone loves me. That makes me feel really secure. Gary, you're

right. We are your friends. All of us. You can strip off all the glitter, all the sparkle, and underneath there's you, a really nice guy, our friend. Don't lie to me, chaps. Would you have rather worked a melody maker in the 90s or music star in the 70s? Going to fucking Switzerland to talk to the young gods or making up shit in an office about Gary Glitter and knocking off early to go to the pub. Well, knocked off early to go to the pub anyway, so, yeah. The annual is absolutely

encrusted with Glitter. There's a piece called My Most Wonderful Moment by Gary Glitter where he tells music star about the time a few months ago he's in a dressing room in a post-gig depression when he sees a note from a fan in a wheelchair saying that she was in a car crash and the only thing that gives her pleasure nowadays is gary glitter so he gets a roadie to bring her and her mom in and tells her she shouldn't feel so useless and

that she could learn to be a typist whereuponon her mum tells Gary that he's the only person she's spoken to in ages, leaving Gary to vow to count his blessings, snap out of his malaise and vow to never do an inferior concert again. But anyway, this song, I mean, I must have heard it as a kid and I would have fucking loved it, but I've got absolutely no recollection of it, and it is the lost Gary Glitter number one, isn't it? Yeah, it's a bit like Squeeze Me by Slade or something like that, really, yeah.

And it's almost like, you almost feel like you've had a lot of Gary Glitter by this point. You know, it's a bit like Nick Hayward was still going on Top of the Pops in about 1986. Whilst getting ready for this, I heard it, and it's like, fucking hell, as far as mock and roll goes, this is fucking all right, this is. And I think it's the glitter band that make the performance and the single work. They're fucking brilliant in this.

Yeah, they are really good, yeah. It's nice, though, isn't it, to see the savage young Gary Glitter all piss and vinegar, 10% vinegar. But like a lot of 70s teen pop this is artistically speaking really all about slightly older men whose ideal of the pop star is still elvis and obviously to some extent every solo male performer virtually used elvis as a template because he invented it but these blokes still thought it was necessary to have black hair that went upwards and a curled lip and shaking legs and all of that wear something that shines and so they all did it these old

fuckers even though none of them could do it you know yeah and it's's like when it's Gary Glitter, like, who cares? But it might at least have been a bit more interesting to see what we'd have got from a Gary Glitter whose primary role model was Ewan McCall or Paul Robeson. I'm sure it would have been something startling at least, because even though he's trying to be an asylum Elvis here, he ends up looking more like if kramer from seinfeld was an unrepentant lifelong sex offender and that might be eye

catching but it doesn't doesn't feel like nourishment but yeah the glitter bat were actually quite good and did some good stuff and so they own glitter band records some of those are all right of course they're now fixed in the popular mind they are the court of bad king gary which they really don't deserve if just because they play with such a fascinating lack of fluency you know and i mean that as a compliment it's quite interesting and good how plastic and 2D they sound. And there's a sort of rigidity about it as well. I mean, if you think in a sense,

one of the things that the Beatles took away from rock was that certain rigidity. But it's like the Beatles never happened, it sometimes feels, especially watching an episode like this, that people want to kind of go back to prior to that. Well, I think they should have played that rigidity up even more and stripped it down even further because like for a start the sax on this record is just needless honk you know it'd be much better if it was just the crunch of the drums and guitars but they can't

escape the 50s so they put a sax on it like it was hoots mon or something you know because their brains are still locked into this infantile happy days world you know like the whole point of gary glitter's good records was the minimalism and the direct attack but it's yeah it's like a lot of people who aren't particularly driven by unstoppable creative fire as soon as the focus slackens they go straight back to their roots and just revert to their default you know because they've got nothing else and the default for this whole generation of uh hard-working hacks was jack good's traveling rock and roll stage show or you know six five special all the shit that these 30 something chumps remembered from their

youth and i mean to put it delicately it's fair to say that this record brings you several things that the 1970s pop scene was full of but one of those things is definitely 50s pastiche from aging men you know it's like what david was saying it was like i think the beatles are important here because a lot of these are musicians who began their careers in the 60s so they've got a sense that they can't ever top the beatles so there's no point trying so the only way forwards was backwards i think that's what happened with yeah jeff lynn's endless tributes the golden age of rock and roll you know but at least jeff lynn's endless tributes the golden age of rock and roll you know but at least jeff lynn was talented and he also got it from just blokes who didn't have a

lot of talent or ideas and knew that making 50s music was relatively easy but of course it's only the basic construction of that music that's easy and actually making it good is a lot harder than it looks i reckon something else that's a lot harder than it looks i reckon something else that's a lot harder than it looks by the way is this band who costumes are embarrassed of them but almost certainly thugs underneath gary glitter and the glitter band are all wearing those liz trust jackets aren't they you know those ones with the with the pointy bits on the shoulders that liz trust wore which people pointed out that were very similar to a fascist dictator in some television show or film i'd know fuck all about they were in them but obviously more spangler yeah it's i mean some

people now think oh it was the 70s you know you'd go out to buy sprouts and you'd see 10 blokes dressed like that you know but, it was just pop music. We talked about this before. Oh, my dad never wore anything like this. No, no, this was like a kind of uniform for anyone who was trying to be a smash hit in this period. It was like putting on a pair of overalls to paint a ceiling, you know. It's just that some of these blokes managed to make these clothes look like overalls and some didn't you know and when you look at this although the glitter band are definitely the more likable

people on the stage the only one with little enough self-consciousness to pull off these garms is gary who does seem natural in them even though he looks like a haunch of venison yeah he's got a right gut on him by now, hasn't he? Yeah, he looks like he's got a girdle on or something like that, yeah. Well, obviously it's not nice to look at him here, or, you know, cock of the walk when I think we'd all

rather be looking at him gripping the edge of the dock, like white knuckles like ping pong balls, but, you know, that's the way it goes. I love Gary Glitter, and it was actually my dream to meet Gary Gl balls but you know that's the way it goes i love gary glitter and it was actually my it was my dream to meet gary glitter you know one-to-one and i did even think of asking jim to fix it for me at one point oh god of course little was i to know that you had the same dream about me or you know the likes of me i did meet him when i was 13 did you as mentioned before in

chart music and revolver records Just standing there at the counter, I don't know what he was doing there. He wasn't making a personal appearance. He was just there and just hanging around. Why would Gary Glitter be hanging around a place that young kids would go into? It doesn't make any sense at all. No. But the Glitter

band just basically are there to just whip him on. And at the end, they do this punch in the air and pull the fist back down and point directly at us or at Glitter. It's fucking brilliant. I mean, a record like this could only be made in the mid-'70s. I mean, nothing like it was made in the 50s or whenever. I mean, really, he is this kind of meta-star.

You know, he's sort of somewhere between Elvis and Liberace, perhaps. And I think you sort of understand that this whole deeply unnatural repertoire of frantic, hyperkinetic moves that he goes through is completely unorganic. And it can only really exist in this sort of glitter space that he kind of creates and occupies. Again, on a top of the pop stage. It's like a Beano cartoon writer's idea of a pop star. But then the Beano cartoon writer's probably got their idea of a pop star from Gary Glitter. You know, he's kind of, that's large.

But it does feel like it's something that's perhaps coming to the end of its natural life, whereas Sparks are just beginning. You know, they're easily going to outlive this, well, not just this phase of pop, you know, but many more to come. And again, microphone issues. Oh.

Did you notice that? What? Near the end of the song where Gary's doing his pieces, he jerks the microphone up and the top flies off. The same top as the one that Russell Mail. I didn't notice. Can't have been the same microphone because that Sparks performance was a repeat from, you know, months ago.

That doesn't mean it couldn't be the same microphone. This is the BBC you're talking about. Couldn't be. It wasn't Bl't bluetack invented 1974 but gary just carries on manfully of course he does i would have been delighted with this song being on top of the pops when i was six years old and and looking back at it now it's like fucking i'll have discovered a gary glitter deep cut and it's been played often in this household i have to say yeah it's the best single that Shaking Stevens never did.

That's a reasonable comment, I think. By the way, if we're going to hymn the Glitter Band as the forgotten heroes that they really were... And we should. I was talking about the Sparks album covers, right? In a completely different way, the Glitter Band also gave us one of the greatest album covers of the 70s. Yes.

You know what I'm talking about. Yes, they did. They put out an album that was just called hey exclamation mark just the best title for an album absolutely the cover of which is just them standing in a line all with their fists raised with a giant cartoon speech bubble over their heads with multiple little tails coming off it leading to each of their mouths so they're all saying the same thing and in the speech bubble it just says hey exclamation mark fucking amazing oh and they're also in never too young to rock yes they're big scene in never too young to rock

is them pumping out the huge flat sound to a small audience, including Sally James dressed as an alien, for no reason, on a boat cruising slowly down what looks like the Norfolk Broads in late November, with the light outside the windows so dim and damp and cold, I'm honestly surprised they were able to go on without just putting down their instruments and saying, no, I'm sorry, I just can't do it. By which I mean anything ever again. Which might not have been that much of a problem

considering they weren't really asked to. But before we go, chaps, we must go back to the Music Star Annual and a chillingly scientific piece entitled, What Will Your Star Be Like in 5, 10, 25 Years From Now? Where the future of the teeny-bop icons are revealed. We learn that Donny Osmond will cause a family rift in 1980 for marrying a non-Mormon. David Cassidy will spend the mid-80s trekking through South America. Jimmy Osmond will rise to become the most popular and successful Osmond ever by the year 2000

and Noddy Holder will grow a beard in the 80s and in 25 years, quote, this part of Noddy's life is very unclear it is shrouded in mystery there are indications to suggest an interest in the supernatural, and these influences obscure everything else. He actually ends up in the Gremlins. But finally, we come to Gary Glitter in 25 years' time. A happy old man. The stars predict Gary will live a very long time. In fact, the older he gets,

it seems the better things get for the big G. Always yours would spend a mere one week at number one, deposed by the appalling she by Charles Aznavour. The follow-up would be a return to ham-handed balladry with Oh Yes You're Beautiful, which got to number two three weeks ago,

held off the top by You're the First, The Last, My Everything by Barry White, and is currently the Christmas number nine. He'd score two more top tenors with Love Like You and Me and Doing Alright With The Boys in the first half of 1975 but a break with producer Mike Leander and a move to the USA to record the LP GG Reaped A Poor Harvest and he was cast out into the charty wilderness and would have to wait another ten years before another rock and roll Christmas got to number 7 in December of 1984. And as we're recording this,

it's being speculated in the press that he could be released from Dorset Prison as early as February of 2023. Oh, boys. Do you think he'll have a go at making a comeback? I could see him on I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of It. Yeah, they'll let any cunt go on that nowadays. Isn't that drama about him, that Channel 4 drama about

some fiction scene where he hanged? Yes, Gary Bushall's wank fantasy. I think it was called. Let you go, let you go, let you go, let you go, let you go, let you go, let you go, let you go. Gary Glitter and Always Yours. And now we have a fantastic lady,

and to make it more difficult, we'll announce this whilst drinking a glass of water. Ladies and gentlemen, a giga España. APPLAUSE Ladies and gentlemen, a giga España. Edmonds and Travis embark on another bit, this time pretending to be a ventriloquist, Travis, and his dumb air, Edmonds, while they introduce the next act.

When Travis declares that they're going to do it while drinking a glass of water, the dummy produces it and drinks as Travis introduces A Viva España by Sylvia. Born in the village of Hepen in Belgium in 1931, Leo Kertz was a musically-minded bricklayer who played accordion and piano and taught the trombone in his spare time. In the mid-60s, he teamed up with Will Chura, the Flemish Cliff Richard, and led his orchestra throughout the rest of the decade, developing a talent as a songwriter. In the early 70s, he teamed up with the actor Leo Rosenstraten, who had caused a ripple or two on the Flemish pop scene under the name Robbie Roos, and in 1971, they wrote the song Eviva Espana, spelled E-V-I-V-A, in Dutch, for the Belgian singer Christine Beervoet,

better known as Samantha. After the single cut a swathe through the Benelux, it was picked up on by myriad artists and re-translated in 1972, scoring hits in Holland for Imke Marina, France for Georgina Plana, German for Hannah Aroni, German again for Heino, Johannes Neuzig himself, and Norwegian for Groen Need to Shun.

In 1973, the variant mutated and spread even further, with versions in Danish by Elisabeth Edberg, Finnish by Marion Rung, Arabic by Melon Barakat, and finally reaching Spain itself when it was recorded by Manolo Escobar, by which time the title was changed to Why Space Viva España, because a viva means fuck all in Spanish. From there it spread right throughout the Spanglosphere, becoming a hit for Los Zafiros in Cuba and Billo's Caracas Boys Orchestra in

Venezuela. By this point the song was snapped up by Sonnet Records, the Swedish label who had offices in London and usually put out American jazz artists in Europe, and they offered it to Sylvia Vrethammer, who was born in Uddevalla in 1945 and was singing part-time while she was studying to be a child psychologist and was going to pursue a career in telling kids like me that they weren't going to die and they should stop playing with their nipples in the playground until she got her degree on the same day

as her Swedish language cover of Son of a Preacher Man entered the national charts in 1969. However, as she was forging her career in jazz and cabaret songs at the time she turned the offer down and turned it down a second time but when her label came back a third time her husband the jazz pianist Rune Offwoman suggested she should do it for a laugh and it immediately made it to number one in the Svens Toppen. When it dawned upon her label that no one had done an English version yet, she was rushed back into the studio and it was released over here in the summer of 1974. It entered the chart at number 48 in August and then soared 20 places to number 28.

She was immediately flown into London to appear on the episode of top of the pops co- presented by edmunds and the osmonds which helped it soar another 13 places to number 15 and three weeks later it got to number four and here is another chance to see that performance oh come on al if you don't know anything about this one just say so i'm sorry man i fell down the fucking rabbit hole of all rabbit holes for this song i mean chaps there's been 21 number one singles in the uk this year and this this one only got to number four but it simply had to be here because it's a landmark single of the era isn't it yeah definitely i mean spain was pretty much third place in the most aspirational locations of the mid 70s after california and new

york it's weird that like france which is nearer in a place like germany we're still not going to go bloody france you know full of yeah frogs with the you know hoop jerseys and all that kind of stuff maintain our stereotypes you know you have to eat snails david and who the hell is going to go to germany you know we're practically still at war with them yeah where are the beaches yeah that's right yeah well there's that as well beaches don't there but we don't want to go to no no no and if we did we would be fighting them yes yes indeed yeah but you know i mean once again films um you know drive from sitcoms are leading the way because you had in the first Steptoe and Son, they go off to Spain, don't they, for the honeymoon?

And then, of course, there's Carry On Abroad, you know, a year later. And, you know, there's definitely in Carry On Abroad, you know, when they all go off to Ells Bells. Yes. You know, this strong idea that, like, you know, that the Mediterranean heat will bring about a kind of a sexual awaking or melt away all this British frigidity. And, you know, you'll have a bloke that's got endangered turning gay

with his gay mate, but fortunately, Carol Hawkins or whoever it was from Police Sir is on hand with a mate to disabuse any of that. And, of course, it was the destination of the pace setters of 1974. Yes, it was. Such as Blaker in Don't Drink the Water. Yes, of course, yeah. Stephen Lewis, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you know, and I suppose it's people in the UK, lewis yeah yeah yeah you know and it's it's i suppose

it's it's people in the uk their international horizons expanding you know it's like yeah if you went around someone's house and they'd been to spain you'd know about it straight away because there would be a wicker sangria bottle on top of the telly totally yeah it was the equivalent of the harrods tea towel but our next door neighbors were quite go ahead and they went to london and went to harrods i don't know what else they bought if anything but they bought a harrods tea towel and that was immediately pinned on the washing line and he stayed there for years and they had lots of spanish stuff in their house as well but definitely it's not you know it's like i've been to spain it's almost like i've been to sex. Yes. Oh, yeah, even at this basement level,

you could always lure in British punters with the mysteries of Europe. The combined British fear of and trembling fascination with these weird countries where sex was apparently legal and you were trusted to drink alcohol after 9.30pm. And the classics of European literature were not routinely confiscated and burned to custer. They depraved and corrupt the angelic natives. Like places that were sunny and modern. Although not a lot of this actually applied to Spain in 1974.

No. It was in that stretch of the reign between full-on Francoism and the post-Franco reforms. But, I mean, this was still a place where any amount of dancing in the street would have had the cardia civil clear in the area with nightsticks. Unless it was a street of English pubs in Malaga where they'd just let the gutters overflow with vomit and sunburnt ham and send some grannies in black headscarves to sweep it up in the morning because these tourists are money.

But it was hot, which is all that mattered. As long as you were able to stomach food that tasted of something. You know, it was like a bullfight poster with your name here yes lizard in the b-day sand coming out of the tap yeah and you could have it off with some crumpet well funny you should say that david because this song just fascinated the fuck out of me while i was researching because i learned that as it moved through europe the lyrics were changed until they were absolutely unrecognizable from the original so allow me they were absolutely unrecognisable from the original. So allow me to give you the first verse and chorus from the original Belgian version.

Right. After that beautiful, warm journey through sunny Spain, I forget everything. I only think Spanish. My whole room glows with red and orange. The bright colours of the Spanish sun and moon, the Spanish fury has confused me so much, that temperament has conquered my heart, I like dancing and music, eviva España, of old pride and romance, eviva España, a serenade on the balcony aviva espana give me sun every day espana por favor i mean the google translation goes on to say i only wear andalusian toilets so you know let's not take this

as a textbook reading but it gives us a fair indication of the original lyrics doesn't it you know essentially northern europeans craving a bit of sun on their bones but anyway when it gets to spain and old manolo gets his hands on it it practically becomes a national anthem between flowers fandanguilos and joy my spain was born the land of love only god could make so much beauty. And it is impossible that there could be two. And everyone knows that it is true. And they cry when they have to leave. That's why you hear this saying. Eviva España.

And they will always remember it. Eviva España. The people sing with ardour. Eviva España. Life has another flavour. And Spain is the best. When Sweden get hold of it for Sylvia, it's very similar to the original with a few amendments to the chorus. But when it comes to Britain, it's completely rewritten.

And the basic implication is that the good people of Spain are all massive slags who do it with Arthur Mullard and Rita Webb. And you should get over there this instant and dip your bread in. Sample lyric. Quite by chance to hot romance I found the answer. Flamenco dancers are by far the finest bet. There was one who whispered Oh, hasta la vista.

Each time I kissed him behind the castanet. He rattled his maracas close to me. In no time i was trembling at the knee no non-british person could have written that and even though sylvia speaks fluent english do you think she realizes that she's singing about being given a scene to in an alleyway there yeah it's weird though because because these lyrics sound like they were written for a man even though i'm i don't think they actually were.

It was just, in no time I was trembling at the knee. I mean, yeah, the same thing happens to the knees of women standing upright in alleyways at the moment of ecstasy. So I've been told. But it's not the usual gendering of that particular naughty euphemism. Up against the doorway of teff cough and all the all the stuff about the girls being so tasty as soon as they go brown like yorkshire puddings it's like the song is almost written from a male perspective but you can't really imagine

a man singing a song like this yes i think it only makes sense to the extent that it does make sense as a song sung by a woman because you need that gloss of glamour to make the stuff in the song seem exciting do you know what i mean like as a man if you were going to get away with a simple celebratory knees up thing in 1974 like this you'd have to be about 40 and look about 60 with a knotted hanky on your head wearing bad shorts like charles hortry and carry on abroad swigging from a hip flap oh jack out of on the buses he'd do a good rendition of this i mean the actual male equivalent to this is that song i'm going to spain yeah steve bent yeah another brilliant record from kenny everett's so-called world's worst record yeah but in that the bloke sounds completely pathetic and helpless and tragic you know yeah which is why it's great he's the bloke in it is a sad sack so it doesn't sound

like a horrible laddish chant along which this song probably would but he sounds hopeful as well he thinks by going to spain it's going to change his life and change him yeah well he's got nothing to lose and he's saying that i hope i can quickly learn the language yeah yeah which your average punter to benidorm isn't going to think twice about learning any phrases like that oi pedro marga i always wished i could speak spanish but i've never done anything about it, apart from just the bits you pick up like dust as you go along. The first Spanish word I ever learned was entrada, which means entrance, from Sesame Street when I was seven.

Yeah, agua. Yeah, weirdly, I didn't learn the word salida, which means exit, until I was about 25, which was a narrower state, because I could have been stuck inside a building for 18 years yes yeah and whoever wrote this didn't realize that rudolf valentino was actually italian but hey you know it's all the same isn't it i'm slightly surprised at that from a record with swedish dutch belgian lineage because it's like a british thing isn't it you know where if you're aware of any significant difference

between Italy and Spain, people will tell you, you need to get out more. Yeah. Because the only people who actually know anything about the world are people who never leave their home, apparently. Like, you know, on quiz shows, you know, that's a bit before my time. Yeah, what?

You mean the concept of having any curiosity about anything to do with the planet that we live on? It's nature or culture or history, you know. Then it's like, okay, first question. For 10 points, from where did Phileas Fogg begin his journey around the world in 80 days? Well, I want to say, Medamsley Road concept. You know, I hate that kind of proud ignorance, right? Yeah.

It bothers me more than billionaire corruption in a way, because you assume that stuff like that is going to be a part of the world, whereas it makes no sense that the fact there are actually rewards in life for ignorance and incuriosity, you know, in every area of life except afternoon game shows. Speaking of half-and-half biscuit,

I still maintain the best half-and-half biscuit line is not one of the ones with a joke in. It's from their song about being on the dole, which goes, there's people who can't spell weird right driving around with thousands in the bank that stuff gets to me like when you switch the telly on in the afternoon and it's some program where someone's buying a million pound converted farm house in dorset and doing it up and they're saying oh i love this place it's very unique and i'm screaming at the tv there's no such thing as

very unique uniqueness is a singular quality something is either unique or it is not and then i realized that my cesspool of poverty and failure and social exclusion is so deep that they can't even hear me no anyway we're all off to sunday just going back to the the silver you know and whether it should be sung by a bloke or a woman i tend to think of this as almost like she's an employee of the spanish tourist agency or something like she's trying to sort of drum up interest you know in spain you know along these kind of slightly salacious lines you know and passing out leaflets wherever and bloating, will you be there? I tend to think of it that way. But I mean, it's been rewritten by a British bloke.

But looking back on it now, it's quite a go-ahead, almost women's lib song. Here's a woman who's leaving the country to go off and have some casual sex. Good for her. Personally, I'd rather she'd done it in this country, but you know. And Sylvia, I mean, she's got the Spanish hat on and all that kind of stuff.

She looks a bit Margot Leadbetter, but she comes off as an attractive teacher type, doesn't she? Well, she looks like Billy Whitelaw's pointless sister. It's a bit disconcerting. I'll tell you what, though. You talk about her hat, that fucking tattered old hat that she's got that hat has seen many a matinee that hat has been on and off a few 737s i think mashed into the hold on a lot of two-hour flights with the smuggled washes and dolls in national

dress because that will have been her life for a season right sylvia and her goons dashing off to do a pre-record for top pop in amsterdam on the wednesday and then home for one day and then down to studio hamburg for a mimed performance on disco and then you know a week at cabaret in nor chopping and that hat clearly did not have its own suitcase no it's a fucking disgrace she's not bono is she no not to put too fine a point on it it's falling to bits could somebody not have got her a new hat i mean also sweden in the 70s well i'm surprised the government didn't give her a new hat on the taxpayer's krona. She's stuck up there representing the Swedish nation with a hat that looks like it's been in a war.

It's no good. And of course, the other thing is, this is part of the Top of the Pops Osmond special, so we get the awkward juxtaposition of a woman in her late 20s giving advice about guiltless casual sex to a theatre filled with pre-teenage girls who were there to see Donny Osmond. It's a bit odd, isn't it?

But the good thing is, is that episode wasn't recorded in the top of the pop studio. It was recorded in a theatre somewhere in London. And it really suits the song because this song's pure musical, isn't it? I mean, you can imagine Barbara Winstead in a trash defleenca on the stage of the lead city varieties belting this out and that bloke banging his gavel and saying big words yes

yes the most yes inscrutable way imperious ways don't make sense and of course this came out in august and in early september we'd go to chapel st leonard's on holiday and spend all night in the maid marrying club which i fucking loved and this was the absolute anthem yeah i remember the lady singer who was in residence i was she was called kim because i got her autograph on a card and everything with her photo and this was sung every night at least once more often than not twice quite poignant when you think about it because there's all those people there who couldn't And this was sung every night at least once, more often than not twice. Quite poignant when you think about it because there's all those people there who couldn't afford to go to Spain and ended up there singing about how they're going to Spain.

During my deep research on Sylvia, I eventually discovered her Wikipedia page, of at her wikipedia page which says and i quote she is perhaps best known for the 1974 release viva espana yeah perhaps i could certainly imagine that this song made it onto sylvia's greatest hits i own a copy myself but i would bet my 150 pound cost of living payment that it's on there somewhere maybe third track on side two or a bonus on the cd yeah or just straight after a swedish language version of the windmills of your mind ditch sinners vada kavana a mate of mine said that scott walker should have done a cover of this song really yeah but then again he needn't have bothered because we can all hear it in our heads now anyway that's probably enough so eviva espana would end up spending 28 weeks on the uk chart and sylvia even managed to bag

another chart with her follow-up hasta la vista which got to number 38 in may of 1975 and after conquering the uk the song spread to turkey as the football song yassa fenabachi by nesrin sipahi america as a cover by pat boone and czechoslovakia by ladislava kozdakova where the lyrics were amended to, I'm already married. And parody versions include Viva El Fulham by Tony Reese and the Cottagers to commemorate Fulham getting to the FA Cup final in 1975. And even Judge Dredd got to number 27 in September of 1976 with a Viva Suspenders, where he lamented the fact that girls were wearing jeans

and not showing off their legs and all that kind of stuff. España, I'll read the new reason for the score. España, por favor. España, por favor. That, of course, is Sylvia with a mechanic song, Viva España. In 1974, the Heaver of Spanner. In 1974, our next guest did remarkably well. A whole series of top-selling albums, some great singles,

and this one came into the chart at 23 in October. Killer Queen. KICKING She keeps Moet's chandelier In her pretty cabinet Let them eat cake, she says Just like Marie Antoinette After another tiresome pun about spanners, Edmonds tells us about all the great music that happened in 1974, including the next single, Killer Queen, by Queen.

Yeah, Noel always does this, where he does a shit gag and then immediately lapses into that i mean this most sincerely yeah the voice it's fucking hateful it's huey green level sociopathy that kind of control over your tone of voice not for entertainment purposes but to ensure that you're setting the tone of a room to just the right level of obedience and with this veneer of sincerity and natural leadership just assumed by a tiny bearded prick with cocktail sausage fingers and hair shaped like a wigwam you know just the horror of his narcissistic manipulation which he deployed with increasing success over several decades

despite a complete lack of charisma or you know anything to offer i think we're lucky that noel edmunds never attained real power when you come to think it could so easily have happened because this is the recipe for success in this country just that pure shit energy you know no qualities except an instinctive personality disordered facility for treating other human beings as part of your personal enrichment kit and it's always the same old story that british blindness to the painfully obvious methods of self-serving mediocrities with nothing to offer the world but their own mystifying self-assurance is what makes British people easy marks for con men and psychopaths and conniving creeps, you know. humiliating thing right for all the shame of the german nation for falling for hitler at least he was a genuine one-off whereas britain will surrender its better judgment for any fucking office boring slacks you know the most unimpressive ditchwater intellects and non-personalities just so long as they act like they think they're in charge

especially if there's some token pretense of being wacky or zany or inverted commas funny and nobody ever learns their fucking lessons right in the 1970s and 1980s this whole country was taken for a ride by an ugly sinister looking man with unkempt white hair doing a double thumbs up and then almost as soon as they'd worked out that he was a wrong and the exact same thing happened again with another ugly sinister looking man with unkempt white hair doing a double thumbs up they even looked almost identical facially and no one twigged and the second time around it was almost worse because this cunt didn't even bother to keep himself in shape and in between causing harm did no good work for charity in fact quite the contrary.

I think it's time to learn some lessons. Mr Blobby. We've covered Queen many a time and oft on Chart Music, and this is the follow-up to Seven Seas of Rye, which got to number 10 in April of this year. Released in October as the lead-off single from their third LP, Share Heart Attack, it was given the rub by Top of the Pops the week it was released, which helped it enter the chart at number 23.

The following week, it soared 18 places to number 5, and a fortnight later, it camped out at number 2. And despite still having a cob on at Travis for popping up on stage in a janitor's coat, brandishing a broom like a guitar, and miming to Brian May's solo on a performance of Seven Seas of Rye earlier this year, here they are for an encore performance. And yes, chaps, that actually happened.

A pop-craze youngster passed on the video of it to me with his broom, the cunt. Oh my God. Yeah? Yeah. passed on the video of it to me with his broom the cunt oh my god yeah yeah anyway my dears we've mentioned before the widespread theory that queen of sparks for cunts on chart music and here's the ideal opportunity for a good old compare and contrast don't you think what this shows though not as sweetly as sparks but sweetly enough for now is that so-called proper bands could still ride the singles charts in 1974 so long as they were prepared to do something which very few of them were i.e meet the pop demands of 1974 halfway and look hey yeah it turns out that when they did do just that it augmented them rather than diminished them because i think this is one of

queen's best records right yeah maybe it's significant that queen's best records are their gayest by which i don't mean their campus necessarily i mean their gayest in terms of the sexuality of the record right the most authentically sexual and open and you know with something of the atmosphere of a lively male homosexual social life in the pre-aids era you know which is what comes across here more than any of their other records and maybe that's why it works so well and unlike a lot of their records it doesn't just feel like a zero inflated in size until it circles the planet like saturn's rings you know i'm quite fond of killer queen because it's got a sort of genuine slinkiness to it and a sort of silly panther walk you know and i like the very 70s attack all the hot sounds

compressed and made to sound very dry like there's an awful lot of sonic content packed into a very small heavy space you know which is the opposite of those queen records of the 80s which demanded aircraft hangar space and then the actual content was the size of a bag of wheat crunches you know like a bag of wheat crunches that's just been dumped and left in the middle of this aircraft hangar, you know. Corner of the bag, gnawed through by vermin. As far as Queen and Sparks go, I think the tricky thing is that you've got, you know, you've got Ron and Russell in Sparks.

And I was talking about, you know, Ying and Yang and everything like that. Whereas with Queen, it's Freddie Mercury and Brian May. So it's more like kind of ying and twat really this would still be one of the earliest top of the pops appearances but the persona of pre-moustache freddie's already in place isn't it and it's already clear to everyone at top of the pops that he's the only person worth looking at yeah he's right front and center and the band are scrunched into the corner and we get lots of lingering close-ups of freddy with his black fingernails with a saucy finger running up and down the mic stand yeah this is the clip they always show isn't it and after all these years it's quite strange to see this clip without snide little captions popping up making

fun of the fact that they dress differently to people from the time that the captions were written yeah what a way to make a living this is pretty much the campus we're ever going to see freddie mccregg if you discount his go at bet lynch in the i want to break free video but chaps would the pop craze youngsters have been aware that they're inviting one of those into their parlours in late 1974. No, because they weren't gays yet. They didn't come until 1975. That's right, yes.

Quentin Crisp. The assumption would be that everyone's gay on top of the pubs round about this time. I mean, I know that most punters seem to have no or not much idea about Freddie for a while, but I find it impossible to imagine that sophisticated culturally curious man of the world music biz professionals such as we would not have taken one look at him and thought i won't have to worry if my girlfriend gets on unusually well with him uh because i mean the public gaydar was still under construction but it's like... It was just made out of tin cans and bits of string, wasn't it? It was just a hole in the ground with a sign up.

But there wasn't some huge opaque divide between gay culture of the 70s and the slightly less hairy end of rock culture. Not to the point where a band called Queen, with a singer who camped it up this outrageously, would pass without recognition. I think people, certainly the public, were slower to catch on with Elton John. Yes.

Because although he was flamboyant, it wasn't very sexual. So they didn't make that connection. He just looked like he was in a costume. Whereas Freddie's outfits certainly are costumes, but he never looks like he's in costume costume whereas freddy's outfits certainly are costumes but he never looks like he's in costume he's just being freddy yeah he'd only be in costume in a jumper and jeans we just assumed it was all part of the performativeness of pop at this time you know we just assumed that their domestic lives were entirely orthodox to be honest as a six-year-old

this completely passed me by but david being a bit older you'd have known all about queen oh yeah i was well into queen at the time you know and i was still right through to like bohemian rhapsody or whatever you know even even that spoke to my kind of early teen self and i mean i think seven seas of rye it was kind of a love me do really you know it didn't really quite but i think with this you know like they definitely established themselves in the old pot firmament really i mean retrospectively i still do like this but i tend to think what part with a handful of songs i'm still in the kind of queen suck school really but certainly at the time no i mean again the sort of gender transgressiveness that you get with freddie mercury that even though

they're not quite sure of his states or whatever and i think the um that the physicality of it the force the attack you know the layering of it and to the general audience it would be about this woman who's obviously done freddie wrong yeah but let's spare a moment to think about brian may because his family shivered all winter without a fireplace so he could and worse still he made the strap out of cavity wall insulation and the strings were 13 amp fuse wires so they were fucking freezing i'd say they had to set fire to his 1957 stratocaster for warmth all right let me just do some brian may jokes he wrote the solo in a fit of inspiration after an apple fell on his head just after he'd had it chopped off by all of a cromwell and so on and so on but brian may's solo it sounds properly new

and original in tone if you could wheel back to 1974 this would sound really new oh yeah it's like he was still feeling the novelty of that guitar sound himself you know years before we all got sick of it but he couldn't think of anything else to do because he was too busy with his telescope and his wife with the same haircut as him just being happy yeah into physics yeah like this town ain't big enough for both of us to a lesser extent it's it's impossible to remember how mencle this record must have sounded at the time on the radio yeah and how equally mencle that it nearly became number one it is prog for looking readers isn't it yeah it's it's shrewd you know that's a good thing to do and a shrewd thing to do anything else to say about this we don't need to know let's move on to

something a bit more significant well we might not have anything to say about Queen, but I know someone who does. Rock expert David Stubbs. That's right! Hi, I'm David Stubbs. Rock expert David Stubbs. Here to bring you a hard-driving mix of hard rock and hard facts. Today, I'm going to talk about Queen. Sure, you had Princess. Say I'm your number one. You had Prince. Kiss. The Queen outranked them all. They were Queen and they were outranked by King. Love and pride, which is bogus. Formed in London, England, Queen were famous for such iconic, hard-driving albums as

A Night at the Opera, A Day at the Races, Horse Feathers, and Duck Soup. But this, Killer Queen, was their most iconic single to date. Catalogue number E-3-5-8-2-6-8-9-3-5-9-7-G. That's E-3-5-8, two, six, nine, eight, three, five, nine, seven, G. With his microphone stand action and puckering lips, Mr. Freddie Mercury is a veritable swordsman of the stage, London's gayest blade. It's all about the timing,

the action of lips and stand. Thrust, pout, pout, twirl. Thrust, thrust, thrust, twirl, pout, thrust, pout, twirl, pout, thrust, twirl, and pout, and twirl, and thrust. I thank you. I mentioned the word gay there, but not in the sense that some of you people are thinking. I mentioned the word gay there, but not in the sense that some of you people are thinking. Freddy was flamboyant, but he was one of the boys. He'd have given John Inman short shrift, that's for sure.

And yet, vicious, unfounded rumors about his sexuality dogged him to the end of his life. In the end, he came out. Hey, I'm gay, he said. But we who were true to Freddy, true to Rock, knew what he was doing. He was like, get off my back. All right, if I say I'm gay, maybe that'll stop you asking the damn question. He wasn't gay. It was just his clever way of putting an end to the speculation. But we knew Freddy was a man's man, loved by men, many men, and I was one of them. I'd have done for him whatever he wanted me to do, which is why I go down on my knees right now before the one and only Freddie Mercury.

So Killer Queen would spend two weeks at number two, held off the throne by Gonna Make You a Star by David Essex. The follow-up, Now I'm Here, got to number 11 in February of 1975, then all went quiet for most of that year. But they roared back with Bohemian Rhapsody getting to number one for nine weeks and being the Christmas number one of 1975. What an amazing piece of music. Queen for you there, and Killer Queen.

Well, as my part for road safety in 75, I've invented this Traficator hat, you see, left and right. And I think it's only fair to go from a flasher to a streaker. Here he comes, boogie-dee, boogie-dee. Here he comes, boogie-dee, boogie-dee. And he ain't wearing no clothes. Oh, yes, they call him the streak. Travis,

now brandishing four microphones and a remote control button and a microphone cover on the index finger of the other hand, as well as wearing a bowler hat with indicators on each corner tells her that i can't even be bothered to fucking describe this man tells us that he's doing his bit for road safety in 1975 by inventing a trafficator hat which is a piss poor way of introducing the streak by ray stevens oh fucking oh man the bits are just piling atop each other what's the point man oh yeah absolutely i mean you just wonder you know

did they have to have a team of like people come in you know sort of cambridge footlights graduates and people like that to help cobble together all these bits or did they honestly think the two atoms of wit that they had between them you know edmunds and travis was enough to rustle up something usable it's just awful i mean who was between them, you know, Edmonds and Travis, was enough to rustle up something usable. It's just awful. I mean, who was their target? Or, you know, did they sort of run it by, you know, nervous secretaries or, you know,

people in a typing pool or whatever? I mean, you know, who kind of gave them the idea that anything of this was remotely funny? I know. Or even zany? We've not really brought this up or hammered away at it, but, you know, this is on at Friday tea time. This is in the crackerjack slot isn't it yeah yeah and even i as a six-year-old would have thought this was massively childish and pointless yeah yeah born in clarksdale georgia

in 1939 harold ragsdale formed a band at high school called the barons and signed to capital records after graduating from college. He spent the 60s writing and recording minor novelty hits such as Jeremiah Peabody's polyunsaturated, quick-dissolving, fast-acting, pleasant-tasting green and purple pills, Ahab the A-Rab,

which was later covered by Jingle Nones, Harry the Hairy Ape, and Guitarzan. By the end of the decade, he was a regular guest on the Andy Williams show in America, which led him to be signed to Williams' label Barnaby in 1970. And his next single, Everything is Beautiful, got to number one on the Billboard charts and made it to number six over here in June of that year. A year later, he did even better when Bridget the

Midget, the Queen of the Blues, got to number two in the UK for three weeks in April of 1971, held off number one by Hot Rex. After the hits dried up over here and diminishing return setting over there, he found himself on a plane in december of 1973 flicking through an issue of time magazine and his eyes alighted on a letter from a student at colton college in minnesota about the newly created winter tradition of running about like a bastard through the snow in the nip which was spreading across campuses all around the states. He immediately started to hammer out a song on the plane, which was left unfinished. But a few months later, when the newspapers suddenly became full of it, and over a dozen singles about the phenomena had already been released, he dug out his notes,

finished it off, and it was released in February of 1974. A few days after it came out, of 1974. A few days after it came out, Streaking reached its peak in America when Robert Opal, a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan who was working as an English language teacher in Los Angeles, managed to get backstage at that year's Oscars by pretending to be a journalist, cut through the backstage curtain and ran bollock naked past that year's presenter david niven and the publicity ramped up the airplay of the single and got it to number one on the billboard chart for three weeks in may it was then put out over here as the follow-up to love me longer which did note enter the chart at number 40 during the british variant of the streaking outbreak, mainly at football matches, and soared 27 places to number 13. He was immediately catapulted over the Atlantic

to make an appearance on Top of the Pops, which helped it soar to number four. And a week later, it waved its musical cock at the Rubets and scared them off the summit of Mount Pop, denying Hey Rock and roll by show waddy waddy it's moments at the top and here is a repeat of his studio performance and chaps here's the novelty song of 1974 isn't it yeah yeah i think this is my favorite ray stevens song i think this will almost certainly have made it onto the best of ray

stevens possibly later reissued as the best of ray stevens featuring the streak not available in any shops except walworth yes you see i i know an element of the sardonic in what taylor said there but um i genuinely did like look at the time I genuinely did like, look, at the time, I genuinely did like this. Now, the thing is, I mean, I was acquainted with Ray Stephens also. You mentioned Everything Is Beautiful, which was played every bloody 30 minutes on Radio 2, which unfortunately was the family default station on the old radio.

And, you know, and it was just, everything is beautiful. And it's just like, look, mate, I live in Leeds. Everything is not fucking well beautiful, I can tell you. So, you know, I was a bit sceptical about that. But I love this. And I think I love it in every respect. I mean, I think part of it, for various reasons. One is it brightened up.

I was having a miserable summer holiday in Triada Bay in Anglesey, in this kind of Transylvanian type hotel on the sea front you know horrible place you know and it helped brighten up that there are various things i think it was hearing boogity boogity i'd never heard anybody say boogity boogity and it was like having chewing gum for the first time bubble gum for the first time you know proper chewing gum as well hubba yeah exactly big thick explosions of flavour for three seconds. Exactly, yeah. So there was that element of, like, Americana about it.

And, of course, in 1974, America might as well have been on the moon, basically. Might as well be Spain. Yeah. You had all of that going on, you know, plus, obviously, the self-evident hilarity of the spoken word bits, you know. Horon et al, you know.

I was absolutely taken. I was absolutely smitten. You were 12. I was 6. I mean, absolutely smitten. You were 12. I was six. I mean, as a six year old, there's nothing funnier than nakedness. Oh,

totally. Tackle out. Yeah. I've already mentioned that documentary that the BBC ran about a nudist camp. Tears falling on my Subutio pitch while I was watching it. But yeah, even at 12, it's still funny,

isn't it? Oh, totally. Yeah. Other people's cocks are just hilarious. That's right. it. But yeah, even at 12, it's still funny, isn't it? Oh, totally, yeah. Other people's cocks are just hilarious. That's right, yeah. I mean, one's own is no laughing matter, but other people's, hilarious, definitely, yeah.

I just imagine you just sat there pointing at the screen going, he ain't wearing no clothes. Yes. Sadly, he is, though, isn't he? He's just got this suit on And you're sitting there watching it Well he's got to take that suit off At some point And run about bollock naked

After Dave Lee Travis Yeah Give him a taste of what he's been dishing out Oh god you just put me in mind of One of the ways in which DLT could have Contributed to this performance Oh god yes Oh for fuck's sake, yes.

Although the really terrible thing here, of course, is that if an actual streaker had burst into the studio and onto the stage and knocked Ray Stevens' hat off, you could guarantee he would have been forced to the ground by BBC security, knee in the back, you know, frog-marched into the car park yeah with a hat over his groin like that copper yeah commissionaire's peak cap yeah held over ray stevens applauding as he's led away yeah sell out i bet if travis actually did decide to get all his kits

off and run bollock naked around the stage do you think edmunds would take it upon himself to bring him down or would he just run off like a bitch what rugby sack a little yeah i think he might produce i mean they've always got a sort of plastic policeman's helmet at hand didn't they you know well i suppose i was later on they needed one whenever the police came on didn't they you know yes hello hello hello it's sting you know so they might yeah i think that's probably what they've done he'd have like you know call for a might, yeah, I think that's probably what they would have done. He'd have, like, you know, called for a minion to sort of grab a helmet from the props cupboard and chased after him with that, yeah. It'd be like Steve Austin against Andre the Giant

as Bigfoot in the $6 million one. Thrilling television. Just perhaps with a view to kind of, you know, covering his knackers, basically. I don't know, knowing Edmonds, I think he's more likely to reach into the inside pocket of his suit, pull out a little walkie-talkie and just mutter darkly

into it. And the next thing you know, eight goons appear. But here's a rare chance to see some actual kids in the studio in this episode. And, oh dear.

Yeah. They look well fucking Brentford Nylons, don't they? It's fair to say the audience respond in muted fashion. It's very much like a

belgian pop tv audience isn't it yeah like when two man sounder on and uh poor old lou de pricks in his sailor suit jaggering it up and giving his all and fucking people's just fire on the bongos and they're just looking as if a frog's been dissected yeah it's like a who can look the most appalled competition you know their cool rests on this yeah again it always amazes me how they managed to find the kids that are the least excited about pop in the 70s and you managed to get them like front and center you know as if they're disappointed that it's not top of the form or something yeah even ray stevens isn't enough to get him going there's a there's one young lady who looks pretty unimpressed

but continues to jig up and down a bit. Yeah, there's a lot of bobbing up and down. Yeah, there's some mild smirks in there. There's a couple of stone-faced non-movers. There's a few who look like they haven't really noticed anything different. It's just there's some music playing somewhere, so they're sort of bopping about to it. know whatever it is isn't really their concern let's just get through this and back home to a new english library paperback you know skinhead goes skiing

it doesn't help that the song is being performed without its usual gales of canned laughter that ray thoughtfully provided on the single. And the problem is as well, he's talking gibberish half the time. I mean, fucking snow cone, basketball playoff. What's he going on about? Is that drugs? Yeah.

Well, it's one of those records made by and for Americans. Yeah. And if any other suckers are dumb enough to bite, he'll go there and he'll do it for them if they pay but he's not going to worry too much about he's not going to give a ted talk is there no he's him doing this in britain is like british groups going and playing in japan you know they're pleased to be there but it doesn't worry them much whether anyone can understand what they're singing about certainly not to the point of trying to do anything about it. But Americans are like this.

You remember when that film Hancock came out with Will Smith in it, right? Now, I know that most Tony Hancock fans are now dead, and I know there basically have never been any in America, but fuck you, he's still one of the all-time greats, and that's his name. And nobody would go to America and try and sell them a film about some character

called jerry lewis just because nobody in britain gives a toss about jerry lewis the comedian and expect them not to care or not to be confused just the arrogance to do that would be appalling yeah as well as commercially stupid you know but it doesn't work both ways you know a lot of a lot of americans are anglophiles and love specific british stuff you know the less american the better even though one american who listens to sleaford mods and can sort of follow it with the help of google but that's not the same as the big country bearing down on you is it expecting you to just understand its stupid words because you know i mean i didn't mind at all far from it that i couldn't understand all the american bits that actually made it all the better as indeed you know

for the pop kids you know as evidenced by its its number one status etc how wonderful must a snow cone a snow great you don't know what it is. It sounds American and therefore it's great. Yeah. Yeah, this would last all the way through to the mid-90s when 7-Eleven started popping up everywhere and you could go in and buy a bar of Hershey and find out it tasted of desiccated cat shit. But yeah, this song, it doesn't help that Ray takes far too long

to put his hat on to do his redneck voice, which holds the song up so long. Yeah, the fumbling is terrible. Awful. This would have been, you know, a laugh riot back in the summer. But it's December now, mate. It's a six-month-old joke that's just worn off. If you're not going to get your cock out, just go.

Oh, yeah. I suppose the one thing you can say is that this is an ideal track for cutting a montage of Erica Rowe. And, yeah, that bearded bloke with a police helmet over his bollocks. And perfect to listen to on your orange foam Walkman headphones while hurdling the stumps. Other than that, there's not a lot of use for it isn't it really no what is the defining characteristic of streakers by the way do you think because i've never quite understood it the obvious psychological explanations for it don't really hold up when you look closely you know i mean obviously these people are exhibitionists of a sort but presumably not in an erotic way

because there are far sexier and less illegal ways to satisfy that craving if you have it even in 1974 and although the the footage and the photos of male streakers tend to be censored it's pretty obvious from the location of the black bars that these men are not aroused by their exposure, at least not at the time. And they don't necessarily have anything astonishing to show off. And you think there'd be some kind of psychosexual component in a woman stripping nude and running around in front of a, say, you know, like a testosterone frothing crowd at Twickenham or something, you know. But when you see them, it's just carefree smiling and waving. You know what I mean? Like they think of themselves as cheerleaders

taking to a logical conclusion. You know what I mean? Yeah. Just part of the show. So I don't get it. It must be an act of regressive desperation like a child getting his bum out you know and cackling at the adults looking shocked yeah you lose your sense of humanity in modern society so they tell me so what better way to refresh that what indeed breaking the lines you

know of a controlled and ritualized gathering yeah i suppose i've never done it or even thought about doing it and you know me i used to get my cock out for money on a very regular basis yeah for money yeah not for free in a controlled environment i've never streaked myself i don't understand the psychology of it the newest who got to it in my family is my younger brother tony who was that he'd got like he'd had a few lotions and this was at the um a test match it was at Headingley because up in Leeds and uh it was England Australia whatever and he was kind of being kind of half dead you know he wanted to sort of do a little pitch invasion and he did he sort of pitched he's right at the front and he kind of I don't know he was just

impelled and he pitched over and thought oh well fucking hell I might as well do it now you know races across the pitch past the wicket you know they're all standing there looking at him and he feels he's sprinting along trying to get to the other end you know he thinks he better say something so he just shouts me house is on fire and eventually gets to the other end and uh you know but she's scooped up you know once he's reached you know the uh the other boundary and he says actually the police were pretty complimentary about it so you know the security you know obviously they had to sort of wash him out of the place. He says, you know what, lad? You're the first person that's ever made it across all the way.

Nice one, lad. Well played, Tony. Yeah, definitely. So the streak would last only one week at number one when Gary Glitter chased it off. The follow-up, the Moonlight Special, failed to chart, but he roared back a year later with a country-tinged cover of the Errol Gardner standard,

Mr., which got to number two in July of 1975, kept off the top by Tears on My Pillar by Johnny Nash. I don't mind that at all, man. That gives off very fond memories of hearing that on Radio 2. Meanwhile, Robert Opal cashed in on his Oscars fame by launching a presidential bid in 1976 And then opening a homoerotic art gallery in San Francisco in 1978 Becoming one of the first in America

To exhibit the work of Tom of Finland Alas he was murdered in a botched robbery attempt in 1979 Is that you, Ethel? Where do you think you're going? You get your clothes on! Ethel, you shameless hussy! Say it isn't so, Ethel. Ethel!

The million voices and characters of Ray Stevens in the number one sound of the street. Why don't we pull a cracker there? Oh, go have a look inside and see if you can get the motto out there. I got the motto. What is small and noisy? What is small and noisy? It's gotta be Suzie Quatro, hasn't it? Of course! Let's go! Let's go! Let's go! Let's get out!

Edmund starts to out-reduce the streak when he's interrupted again by Travis running around him in a circle. After pulling a cracker, they read out the joke, which... I can't be fucking bothered to explain. It's Devilgate Drive by Suzy Quatro, everyone. We've dealt with Suzy Quatro a couple of times now, and this single, the follow-up to Daytona Demon, which got to number 14 in November of 1973, was a stopgap release between her debut LP Suzy Cuatro and her next one Cuatro

it was featured on top of the pops before it was even released and when it did it became the highest new entry at number 14 in the first week of February then it soared to number 2 and a week later it dislodged Tiger Feet by Mud another

chinny chap single to become her second number 1 after Can The Can. And here's a repeat of an earlier Top Of The Pops performance. And also, it's the last chance, I believe, to see that huge green screen background that Top Of The Pops were so keen on in the early 70s, which flares and pulses as Suzy's band worship her bass as she holds it aloft oh it's lovely and

fucking hell from the back suzy quattro's band look just like supergrass don't they i like the bloke um on piano who looks like a mad roger waters or rather an even more obviously mad roger who comes out from behind the piano and starts dancing around crazily in the foreground. Oh, yeah, the little dancing scene. It really looks like a cartoon of the young Roger Waters drawn by the bloke who did Felix the Cat. It's the best thing about this clip. And it's prefiguring imagination, really.

Yes. It's like the keyboard player and the drummer come out front and do a dance, even as their instruments continue to play. It's good. Well, I think there was a sort of, and you can see this quite a few times in this episode, that no one's allowed to kind of go all virtuoso and go off on twaddly to guitar sellers,

because it's not the old grey whistle test, it's top of the pops. No. So you've got this alternative form of virtuosity, which is being able to high kick as you're playing, or needle down as you're playing, or swivel around Hank Marvin way, you know, and that's a sort of top of the pops form of guitar virtuosity. Would have appealed to me massively at the time.

That piano's playing itself. Oh. I thought this was the best song, actually. I mean, you know, the thing is about Suzy Quatro is, much I was saying earlier on, you know, about sort of queerness and the glam types or whatever, similar suzy quattro you know yeah it was great it didn't make me a feminist in any way you know this was great yeah this you know got people's backs or whatever but girls were still crap you know girls were just as bad as george best still you know they were frilly knickers and a bra well not bras not the one i knew but certainly you know probably frilly

knickers you know so it didn't make me any less of a sort of young misogynist. I do believe you'll find, David, it was a Playtex bra. Well, yeah. Of course, cross your heart, yes. But the bra was too big and he also wore a wig. And that was why he was known as a sexy pig. Oh, he had a busy life, didn't he? Do you remember that time that he skidded off his yamaha

and banged his bollocks on a dustbin no wonder he had to retire at 27 i mean obviously you know it was just one of these passing novelties a woman fronting a pop group you know it's just like sparks wherever you know just a passing fad and heteronormative service would be resumed as soon as possible yeah hitler woman but anyway chris france says that um because tina weymouth was very reluctant to join talking heads i should think it was a bit unseemly but one of the things one of the ways he got to play the bass was actually to get to listen to suzy quattro so suzy quattro begets talking heads is this the last ever glam number one single, chaps?

Because always yours came after this, but that's a bit more mock and roll, isn't it? Yeah, it could be. I mean, there is an element here of last tucky in the shop. I was going to say I really like the early Susie Quattro records, or the only Susie Quattro records, but really it's only Can The Can that is so good that it makes len tooky seem like a dude you know yeah because the other decent ones are basically can the can but less exciting

and dramatic you know and she is not the only early 70s pop act whose records sounded broadly similar but one was clearly better than all the others at doing the same thing. I mean, there's at least two or three others on this programme. But I don't know, I think the Suzy Quattro formula was a little bit more limited because there's no weirdness or depth. It's just Hanna-Barbera boogie with a good production, you know. So it seems like there's more of a drop-off, even though this is still a good record in

itself but it's no high high high by wings hard as it's trying there's more kids in this clip but this time they're fucking well into it aren't they yeah yeah you see them off to the side just frugging away like bastards they love it yeah well she was very popular suzy crock trial which i don't know despite everything i find it sort of hard to warm to her really right she's the barbara windsor of america you know like small cheeky right wing taste for brutes uh scrappy do energy energy fancied by maladjusted reactionaries and overgrown conkers champions i just can't really get with it somehow but that's retrospective i guess you know i mean at the time you know i didn't really wasn't aware of her politics or a personal unpleasantness which one or two people are reported on and all that kind of stuff oh no you'd be a fire-breathing

mini minx at the time yeah definitely yeah yeah yeah i mean the only memory that this triggers for me once i was doing the melody maker letters page right and somebody had written us a letter about something or other and for some reason it mentioned halfway through that the letter writer used to live next door to suzy quattro so i published the letter and then at the end I tampered with the address so that instead of saying Steve Jackson Chelmsford it said Steve Jackson Devil Great Drive which I found really funny for no good reason and they say I got a raw deal I deserve penniless obscurity with a fucking track record like that. Anything else to say about this?

Yeah, isn't it sad? By the 80s, she was reduced to selling her piss as a soft drink. That's what I always assumed that stuff was anyway. And if you think it wasn't, prove it. So, Devilgate Drive would spend two weeks at number one before giving way to Jealous Mind by Alvin Stardust. And the follow-up, Too Big, got to number 14 in July. She'd rallied somewhat in November when The Wild One got to number seven.

But her next single, Your Mother Wouldn't Like Me, would only get to number 31 in February of 1975. february of 1975 and sadly diminishing return setting with her third lp the non-more 70s titled aggro dash phobia failing to chart what a fucking title that is yeah she returned to america in 1978 to play leather tuscadero in happy Days for a couple of series, and musically changed Tack in 1978 with a softer rock approach, and got to number four for three weeks with If You Can't Give Me Love in April of that year. I don't wanna let her come and go

She can drive Down a terrible drive Mmm, very interesting Devil Gate Drive. Mmm. Very interesting. And extremely noisy. That's Suzy Cuatro and Devil Gate Drive. Down in the Silver Jungle, something stirred,

which is not bad considering the sugar shortage. It was Carl Douglas and with his Kung Flu. And a nasty cock. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, Edmund suddenly pops his head out of the forest of silvery Christmas trees and does a shit impression of Wolfgang, the German played by Artie Johnson in Rowan and Martin's Laughing, and then pulls down his suit trousers, squats on the floor, and shits out an appalling introduction for Kung Fu Fighting by Carl Douglas. Born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1942, Carlton Douglas was relocated to California

to live with extended relatives in his teens before joining his family in East Dulwich. While he was serving an engineering apprenticeship and was still nursing the ambition to be the first ever black player for Tottenham Hotspur, he attended a dance at the local amateur football club that he played for and ran into a band who were playing that night, Sounds Five. After being egged on by his mates to join the band on stage and singing Tutti Frutti and Long Tall Sally, he was invited to join them full time. Changing their name to Carl Douglas

and the Charmers, they spent the next six months tearing up the South London beat combo circuit. After getting interest from assorted small local labels, they recorded a demo and changed their name to the Carl Douglas set, but the only offer they got was from Strike Records, who just wanted Carl and put out the single Crazy Feeling, featuring Big Jim Sullivan on guitar and John Paul Jones on bass, but it only got to number 56, even though it was voted a hit on Jukebox Jury. Returning back to the Carl Douglas set, who had now changed their name to Carl Douglas and the Big Stampede,

he spent the late 60s supporting Cream, Ike and Tina Turner, The Move, Curtis Mayfield, the Bonzo Dog Doodah Band and Jimi Hendrix, who joined them on stage for a few songs. In 1968, the band gave up and Douglas signed a solo deal with United Artists, putting out the single Serving a Sentence of Life, which failed to chart, as did all the other singles over the next six years when he bounced to Polydor, to Buddha, to CBS, to Blue Mountain, to Youngblood International. Earlier this year, though, Bidu Apaya, who was born in Bangalore in 1944 and relocated to London in 1967 with the intention of becoming a singer, but ended up working for Pi Records as a producer, was lined up to produce a song written by Larry Weiss, who had already written Rhinestone Cowboy, Bend Me, Shape Me and Hi Ho Silver Lining, and was looking for a singer.

Remembering the man he had worked with on a Blaxploitation soundtrack a few years earlier, he summoned Douglas to the studio. When Douglas arrived, he was told by a pire that he hadn't even thought of a B-side yet, needed something that very day, and asked him if he had any lyrics and air. When Douglas produced his notebook Bidu was struck by something Douglas had written about Chinese lads kicking each other in the face and worked

something up on the spot after taking two and a half hours of a three hour session to nail the A side with a tea break thrown in Douglas was given ten minutes and two takes to get the B side done which was then massively over eggedged in post-production by Bidu with lashings of

and the oriental riff, because it was only a B-side and who the fuck was going to listen to it anyway? When Pi took delivery of the single, to the astonishment of everyone involved, they insisted that kung fu fighting had to be the A-side in order to capitalise on the tsunami of interest in martial arts that had swept the playgrounds of Britain. And they released it in the summer of 1974,

where it did precisely fuck all and got zero radio airplay. But the Phoenix can fly only when its feathers are grown, and it's spread through the clubs and discos like a bastard, and finally enter the chart at number 42 in mid-August. The following week, as nimble as the tiger, it soared 13 places to number 29, but top of the pops were far too busy concentrating on the finger of mud in the Osmonds to contemplate the heavenly glory of kung fu fighting.

But when it soared another 20 places to number 9, the nature of Carl Douglas was irrepressible! He was finally allowed on for an astonishing display of Chinese-lettered pyjama-suited funk. And three weeks later, it scaled the summit of Pop Mountain, confronted Love Me For A Reason by the Osmonds, and shouted, Stupid fool, you're forcing me to kill you! And here he is, back in the studio,

readying himself to face off in a monumental battle against the 36th chamber of the top of the pops orchestra fucking hell where do we start with this chaps oh yeah i know that people are going on about the specials and ghost town at the moment and let me say on behalf of all of char music thank you terry hall and And Pop Craze Youngsters, you really need to read Neil's piece on him and the quietest. But I'm sorry, because for me,

this is the ultimate right place, right time, perfect number one of all time. I fucking love it, man. It's interesting that I think that, once again, sitcom and pop were in this kind of cultural alignment because around this time, we would have had the Steptoe and Son episode. was the seven steptoe right yes the old man and

all his geezer mates yeah they they see off frankie barrow with a few kind of kung fu moves in um perhaps not one of the kind of more naturalistic uh episodes of steptoe um no but uh yeah and of course eggy thumb yes yes was this around about the time that fu manchus came out as well? There was some Fu Manchu. There were sort of repeats. Yeah, there were a lot of repeats of Fu Manchu at the time. But of course, there was Kung Fu.

No, I'm talking about the Treebor Fu Manchus. Oh, sorry. I'll make you up. It was about C-H-E-W at the end. Oh, ah. Mmm. And of course, there was Kung Fu by David Carradine. David, I was going to say, David, Kwai Kang Che.

That was a fucking cowboy thing. That was so disappointing. Yeah, snatch the pebble from my hand. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And this was the time when every comedian on the telly was cutting ping pong balls in half and shoving them into their eye sockets. That's right. Snatch the pebble.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, Kung Fu was the absolute rage of the playground at the time. And like everybody else, I was just fascinated by it, even though I was too young to actually see any of it. But the thing is, I lived in a violent... I was 12, and it was a violent playground I was in. And, yeah, it was kind of all the rage, but no-one was actually performing kung fu as such. It was all, like, headlocks and kicks in the bollocks, basically.

That was still the tried-and-trusted methods of fisticuffs or whatever. Kept on our playground would just throw themselves at each other doing flying kicks and stuff. Oh, yeah. I mean, missing each other. I mean, not deliberately, but yeah. No, it was just the old method. I mean, but you couldn't really have a song

called Everyone Was Kicking Each Other in the bollocks, you know. It wouldn't have had the same cachet, but that's what was actually happening, I tell you, you know. Yeah, a song by John Thor. Yes. I mean, I remember every weekend

I'd crash-rhyme in on our grandpas in the meadows. And every Sunday morning, me and my grandpa would walk up Arkwright Street, which is a big, long street that connected the train station to Trent Bridge, for the sole purpose of me getting me comics for the week from this massive newspaper stall in the train station. And every time we went past one particular shop, I'd beg my grandpa to take me in there, and he'd look at me as if I'd gone out, and get really confused, and say, oh no, no, no, you can't go in there, you're not old enough, and I'd get really upset,

and one time, after months of this, he just stopped, and he asked me why I wanted to go into that shop, and I pointed up at the sign and said, look, grandpa, martial arts. And he just pissed himself laughing. And he wouldn't tell me why. And a few years later, I went past that shop again. And I realized it actually said Maracle Aids. It was a fucking sex shop. And my grandpa was just so confused why I wanted to go into a sex shop i mean thank fuck he didn't

take me in because he'd be like oh god look at these crap nunchucks grandpa where's the chain holding them together i mean there was a chinese restaurant next to it and i'd always duck behind me grandpa because i was scared of it as mentioned before uh just want to point out i wasn't scared of chinese people i was just scared of big writing and more importantly big chinese writing that i didn't understand yeah i was terrified that i'd be dragged in there and they'd hold up big fucking placards with chinese writing on it which would have absolutely terrified me yeah well and also come to think of it next door to that on the other side there was a barber shop and it had a massive

anti-abortion poster in the window with a photo of what i thought at the time was a bin filled with dead babies and all blood must have been a load of dolls in a bin with loads of fake blood i think i hope great ochre street was terrifying man does sound it yeah yeah but anyway i remember being in the playground and a mate telling me that someone had made a song called kung fu fighting and i immediately realized that this had to be the greatest record ever and when i heard it fucking hell it was because this song is fucking brilliant my first introduction to funk and you know teaming funk and kung fu was a stroke of absolute genius 17 years before the wu-ang Clang, let's remember. Yeah, from the motion picture, Bollocks of the Dragon.

Now, obviously, look, I love this record like everybody else does. How can you not? Or at least everybody below the rank of Blue Belt. This isn't the best performance of it. Oh, no. As I'm the fact that he's got the top of the pops orchestra backing him up and a distinct lack of you know i mean he completely muffs the opening line that's the weird thing i don't know if he can't properly hear the top of the pops orchestra lucky man

or if he's just not concentrating but he comes in a beat and a half late yeah expert timing indeed and you just think how do you not remember how to sing the song kung fu fighting how many times in the last year have you had to sing this song it's like if you were locked in a room for nine months with the same song playing over and over again through a speaker in the ceiling and then when you got out you're telling someone about it and they said oh my god what was the song and you said i can't remember it that's the equivalent of carl douglas in december 1974 forgetting how to sing kung fu fighting we can talk about carl douglas fucking up the timing of his own song but come on now the top of the pops orchestra are to blame because they have desecrated this song

in a manner very similar to the opening of a Kung Fu film where the baddies go to a rival school, give everyone a panning and then rip the school sign off the wall, break it over their knee and throw it down in contempt. They should have made a film where Carl Douglas swears revenge on the top of the Pops Orchestra, culminating with Johnny Pearson at home in his cardigan and slippers. And Cole Douglas just bursts through the wall and says, you have offended my family and you have offended Pi Records and just kicks the fucking shit out of him. I'd pay to see that. I would pay to watch him chopping them up and chopping them down. And aside from anything else,

there shouldn't be a top of the Pops Orchestra. He shouldn't have a microphone. He obviously should be miming it to somebody else's voice out of sync. Yes, some jobbing actor. Yeah, exactly. Oh, that's what I used to love about the Wu-Tang Clan. All those samples of fucking middle-aged jobbing actors

in the 70s. Yeah. Hey, Daddy-O, you want to fight? The thing about Cole Douglas, you're not going to want to select him in Street Fighter 2, are you? No. He's a big, chunky, lumbering hunk of a lad who only appears to have two moves,

one of which is flailing about with his arms as if his picnic's just been ruined by a swarm of wasps. Yeah. And his other move is the kick up from the hip which makes him look like he's trying to fend off bummer dog you know chun li and dal sim are gonna have no problems sorting him out and flared kung fu trousers won't work man you're gonna put some proper drag on your kicks it's like when you see footage of fighting on the terraces from the mid 70s and

people are kicking the shit out of each other but they've got flares on and really heavy clumpy boots and it's like well that can't have hurt that much because of the drag yeah and they're trying to kick each other in the stomach and but you could just grab the flares yes and then you got that unseemly thing where after you've grabbed the leg of someone who's trying to kick you in the nuts you just start walking backwards and they hop along for a bit and then fall over yes that was always my best art of self-defense i shouldn't have said that now because if some some like an angry ba robertson confronts me you'll know my trick it is a recreation of the original top of the pops performance but there's no bidu this time which is a bit of a original Top of the Pops performance. But there's no bidu this time, which is a bit of a shame.

I think he realised. I think he's well out of it, to be honest. But even a crap version of Kung Fu Fighting is still a fucking towering landmark over this episode. It is, it is, yeah. It also reminds me a little bit of, was it, Willie Hutch Brothers' Gonna Work It Out? It's got a very similar feel to this.

And that's a stone's old classic yeah and of course cole douglas was on the christmas day top of the post wasn't he taylor yes he was i was gonna say first of all another nice thing about this is it provides a little reminder to us white people that everybody else does things that are maybe a little bit racially insensitive as well yes you, both on the grand scale and on this sort of blundering, well-meaning, silly bugger scale. You know, usually doesn't come with the same baggage, often doesn't have the same consequences,

but it happens everywhere all the time because that initial impulsive response to difference is a human flaw. It's not genetically specific so i mean this record is not kanye west no um instead he was driving me mad trying to think of what kanye west's permanent fixed facial expression reminded me of and i realized it's homer simpson when he's got a thought bubble rolling tumbleweed. But yeah, Carl is no yay oriental riff notwithstanding. It's not even Hey Pedro by Chuck Berry, if you know that, which is a great record musically, but it's all done in like Speedy Gonzales type Mexican accents.

You know, my buggy has a hole and all that stuff, which he obviously thinks is fucking hilarious um at least carl is trying to be nice and trying to show his appreciation for another culture that he obviously thinks is fucking wicked so it's an ancient chinese art he's trying to do a nice thing here by making out that he lives in a pagoda with a massive gong inside it with a pet panda called Confucius. But yes, on the Christmas Day episode hosted by Savile in a toga and Santa suit

Christmas Day episode. Yeah, the one of these two we chose not to do. Carl makes a guest appearance in between songs just chilling out. He doesn't sing, he's just hanging with Sir Jim OBE, KCSG. He's just there to say hi, except it's more like hi-ya, because he does the ah-so, me-so, veli-solli voice. Egged on by Savile, it has to be said.

Yeah, very much to Savile's delight. And then he wiggles his tongue when Jimmy introduces the three degrees. And the last lady, Lin Paul's turned up. Listen, Lin, there's a question I've got to ask you. Now, I've got to hear you, my dear. Yeah, so. Ah, Merry Christmas to you. Oh, goodness gracious.

I have experienced more edifying 15 second periods but at least he hasn't taped back the corners of his eyes yes we can at least be thankful for that i mean this was the time in any film or program you know no chinese person could come on screen without an enormous gong bashing yeah yes did you ever do kung fu or any ancient chinese art when you were younger once i think the community center was having kung fu classes and i went once and then my parents realized how much they'd have to lay out for kids and belts and everything and yeah it kind of ended there for me yeah i i was a little bit too young but i know that as a kid yeah i did go to judo lessons for a couple of weeks and

wow civic center and we didn't have the kit or the the white suit we were just doing it in like track suits and stuff the gi is that what it's called the gi yeah it shows what i fucking know it was just flopping around on crash mats in a big echoing brick room you know and i decided i had better things to do with my days off the main thing i remember about it this must have been the very early 80s because i remember a kid there telling me about his uncle who apparently looked so much like john lennon that on the morning after john lennon was killed he went into a shop and a lady saw him and screamed as if not only had she been visited by the ghost of john lennon but that ghost had chosen to haunt not liverpool not london

not weybridge not even new york city but kidderminster a town that the local boomers always insisted to me as a kid that the Beatles had once played. And of course they were there watching. And yet no record of such a gig appears on any Beatles concert calendar. So if they're ghostly apparitions that already graced the town once, it's not so unbelievable that one of them might do it again. Yeah. unbelievable that one of them might do it again yeah yeah the only um connection i've got really is just um a friend of a friend who actually reached adulthood by this point but he kind of he went through he did the whole thing he completed the whole kung fu thing he got his kind of black

belt and he went and he was from scotland he went back up to his family place in glasgow and told his dad you know very proudly he says yeah i'm black belt now and kung fu yeah what do you think of that he said i said is that right and he took him out the backyard and beat the crap out of him but no this song one of the two songs that instantly makes me happy whenever it comes on along with my guy by mary wells yeah oh fucking love it it was my karaoke standby song for a very long time and it's on the short list for my funeral songs as well kung fu fighting yes cool why not it's also responsible for one of the best dreams i ever had when i dreamt that do they know it's christmas was made in 1974 instead of 1984 and i was at home watching the video and just thinking, oh my God, this is the greatest thing ever.

And sadly, the only thing I can remember of the whole video is a shot of Carl Douglas in his Kung Fu rig out, waving his hands around and then smashing a plank of wood with the word hunger on it, which was being held by two of the Wombles. So come on, chaps.

Do they know it's Christmas? Written by Chinnychap instead of Euron Goldoff. Who's singing what? Come on, I'm throwing that in there. I've had a bit of a think about it. I think it's Christmas time and there's no need to be afraid. I think it should be the person who should have sung it in 1984 but couldn't. Bowie.

Yeah. He was lined up to sing it but he couldn't get away from New York. Christmas time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, okay, that's out the way. 84 but couldn't Boer yeah he was lined up to sing it but he couldn't get away from New York yeah yeah yeah so okay that's out the way in this world of plenty that bit

the boy George bit who's doing that Brian Ferry oh Brian Ferry could work or Johnny Nash yeah maybe

yeah he's got Johnny Nash in I'd throw Mark Bowler in a bone get him back in yeah I'd have him for that I suppose so yeah

yeah but say a prayer pray for the other ones, the George Michael bit. Someone soulful. Yeah, this is where the energy goes up. So, Les Gray. Oh, or Dave Bartram. Yeah.

There's a world outside your window and it's a world of dread and fear. Obviously, Elton John, but then Judge Dredd comes in to do the dread and fear bit with a massive wink to the camera. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. The Christmas bells that ring there are the clanging chimes of doom.

Surely Ozzy Osbourne. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And obviously the key line, well, tonight, thank God it's them instead of you, the dad line. I can't think of anyone but Noddy Holder. Noddy Holder, absolutely. Oh, no, Steve Priest. Oh, fucking hell, yeah. Well, no. Steve Priest. Oh!

Oh, fucking hell, yeah. That's a night, thank God it's there. Instead of you. With a little point into the camera. Ooh! Yeah. And then you bung in Roy Wood, sweet sensation. Cole Douglas, show what he wanted.

Glitter Band on drums. And Gary Glitter all the way through going, hey, at the end of every line. Ensuring it can never be played again. How much better would that be, though? Oh, miles better. And it'd have had a bit of a sort of glam stomp to it as well. Yes. You can imagine, can't you?

Alvin pointing at us. Yes, right. Yeah, shaming us into donating money. Are we out of our tiny minds? Yeah. So Kung Fu Fighting would stay at number one for three weeks in the UK before giving way to Anis. So fuck off.

And then got to number one for two weeks in America and, as we all know, became the Ramadan number one of 1974, eventually selling an estimated 11 million copies worldwide wow that's not a bad day's work is it oh have you got your notebook on you oh here's a shitload of money for the rest of your life mate the follow-up dance the kung fu got to number 35 a couple of weeks ago and he had one more hit in 1978 when run back got to number 25 in january of that month dancer kung fu is a fucking tune i don't care man we often bring it up yeah you can learn a lesson from it though can't you which is if you have a novelty hit

and you're lucky enough that people want another thing from you they may want you to repeat the form but not necessarily the content what it makes you think of you know when you see twins and one of them is always distinctly better looking than the other even though they're supposed to be identical that's sort of the thing with carl douglas records isn't it dance the kung fu is almost indistinguishable from this but it's just nowhere near as good maybe you should have gone for savate or whatever it's called the french one yeah because it's got exactly the same comedy sketch set in chinese restaurant vibe to this one and the same mock eastern sound on the record because he turned up to sing it in the same kung fu outfit with kung fu fighting

written on his headband right the one of the least necessary headbands in world history it doesn't feel like just artistic continuity it feels like you're just thinking what is it with this bloke western pop cultural cliches about china it's like he was trapped in this world, unable to get out. It's like if the crazy world of Arthur Brown had wanted to do a follow-up record about feeding their rabbit, but they just weren't able to do it. You are compelled to continue on your path. Maybe he could have done a song about origami or bonsai.

And in 1998, Daz Samson and his dance band, Bus Stop, teamed up with Douglas for a cover of Kung Fu Fighting, a single I chose not to listen to then and still refuse to now, which got to number eight in June of that year.

And of course, one of Simon's favourite questions is, which football manager is mentioned in a number one single of the 70s? And of course, it's little Sammy Chung. Yeah, yeah. Oh, so... All right.

Come for Friday Hands and feet Fast as lightning Come for Friday Kung fu fighting Ladies and gentlemen, that was Carl Douglas and Kung Fu Fighting. And now we have a somber song. This is Seasons in the Sun and Terry Jackson. Get off my place. Terry Jacks, get off me, please.

Goodbye to you, my trusted friend. Travis, now bristling with microphones, with Edmunds behind him blowing a curly paper whistle thing, tells the kids it's time for a piss break as he introduces Seasons the sun by terry jacks we've already covered terry jacks who was born in winnipeg in 1944 and this single because hey what other terry jacks singles are we going to come across in chart music number nine last year he was doing a production job for the beach boys who are pissing about with an english language version of the 1962 jacques brau song le moribond before presumably having an argument started by my club and giving up on it terror

spotting an opportunity decided to fiddle about with the lyrics even more and change the sentiment from go on you cunts have a good piss up at my funeral it's not like i give a shit anyway to oh no i'm dying goodbye everyone and it spent three weeks at number one in america in march on the back of its american success it smashed into the chart at number 20 in late march as the highest new entry and then soared 17 places to number three. And a week later, it had Billy Don't Be A Hero on the run. But the fun didn't last, because the bastards ran too fast. So here's a rerun of his performance, recorded for the BBC on the West German Toppenpoppen,

Musikladen, who have thoughtfully changed their name to Music Shop, so as not to enrage any seven days Jankers type grandparents with German words yeah

David we've already done it as we've established you thought Terry Jacks was actually genuinely dying and the moment

the song stopped being number one he'd cock it and here he is here he is still alive what a cod I mean

the person that told that oddly enough he mentioned John Lennon earlier on i had a mate called john lennon coincidentally um i knew about this my mate john lennon before the actual beatles john lennon but anyway he's kind of a bit of a spoofer i mean you know he was the one that put me on the list that he was actually dying and i believed it he was also somebody that told me remember frank lampard the west ham player frank lamp Lampard Sr., that Frank Lampard Sr. was blind. Blind!

He showed me this, like, you know, these bubblegum card things, and there was this kind of weird mauve thing, and his eyes were shut, you know. And this was, like, evidence that he was blind. How did he play football? And he just had a sense for the ball, you know, a bit like the old snatch the pebbles from my hand geezer, you know. That's how I was able to beat the shit out of Kwai Kang Cheyne, You know, that he had a kind of sort of bat-like sense, you know, for the ball and for, like, such a strong positional sense. He didn't need his side, you know. And a right fool I made of myself when I actually was asked to write an essay

about which person do you find the most inspirational. And I said Frank Lampard. Oh, no. You know, I put this whole essay. My inspirational person is Frank Lampard, who, despite his blindness, played 200 games for west ham you know and uh yeah i got roundly mocked for that yeah oh there you go we'll explain a few of his tackles i mean this is supposed to be heart-wrenching and all that

yes but really this song it's like hello mother hello father here i am in camp granada you know and of course the original jack brell song is not like this at all it's another viva hispania job in it yeah you have this problem wherever you find translated jack brell songs because so many of them were translated to death for example numa keep pat is one of the most uncomfortably intense and emotionally desperate songs of all time right it's about helplessness and terror and impotence in every sense right but it's most widely known in its english version as if you go away so that the lines don't leave me, we must forget, all that is gone can be forgotten, are translated as, if you go away on this summer's day, you might as well take the sun away. Just completely bland and opposed to everything

Jacques Brel ever tried to achieve. And the lyrics to this song, Le Moribond, in the original are very different because, yeah, it's about a bitter unfilled man trying to come to terms with his imminent death with a chorus that goes i want them to sing and dance as they dump me down the hole you know and and a verse addressing the man back home who's been fucking his wife he says goodbye antoine i never liked you and it it kills me to die today while you are still so alive as robust as boredom but because you were her lover i know you will take care of my wife um now i'm not sure that version could ever have been covered by Westlife. No. Because it's too fucking good and complex.

So instead here, that verse becomes, Goodbye, Michelle, my little one. You gave me love and helped me find the sun. Basically, almost all of these old pseudo-translations of Jacques Brel are an abomination. And it's worse than not translating them at all because the lyrics would actually be more stimulating in a language that you didn't understand the big exception being

the standard translation of of jackie the mort schumann translation which everybody knows which is brilliant and completely in the spirit of the original although oddly, the person who did the best Braille translations was Momus, whose own songs impressed me less as an adult than they did as an overall teenager, but whose Braille EP has what are probably simultaneously the most imaginative and the most tonally accurate translations of those songs. It's really, really very good indeed. It's one of the first things he ever did and which I don't think he ever topped.

But this, of course, is a song which underwent further rewrites in its turn in Playgrounds and Football Terraces, which may have even further disconnected it from reality because looking at Terry Jacks, I think it's a fair bet that while this bloke may well have had joy and fun uh he never had millwall on the run no no i although i can't comment on his level of experience re flicking bogeys at the sun but um i'm sure it's

all in his autobiography jacking off it's the's the inverse of what Eric Thompson did with The Magic Roundabout, where he just took these Serge Dano originals and actually sort of converted them into something that was probably actually quite decent and watchable, turning Dougal into Tony Hancock, basically. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's the inverse of that, I guess. It would have been better if they'd left Dougal's name as Bollocks,

which it was in the original. Oh, I've just remembered. i think this is the only song that i've ever requested to be played on the radio really i asked my mom what what her favorite song was she said this and i said well i'm gonna write on a postcard and get it played for you on radio nottingham dear bbc radio nottingham can you please play seasons in the sun by terry jacks for my mom and i gave it to my mam and she looked at it and she just said oh alan your handwriting's fucking awful she just lobbed it in the bin you got a feel for him though haven't you in his terrible war that he's had

that he's seen the awful flying you know what theson confetti, the men at the front call that. And now he's caught a whoopsie that's made his hair curl. And worst of all, he has to spend his dying moments immersed in his own treacly cornball thoughts. You wouldn't wish that on Kaiser Bill. No. But the thing that I really don't like is the upward key change at the end oh god yeah yeah this is presumably somehow meant to represent the final collapse and surrender to death and the rising of

the soul to heaven yes this is this is the thing they should have done a downward key check yes and a gradual slowing down and bring in some phasing and echo. Yes. In the last few seconds before it's played. And some crackling flames and cackling demons. Yes, because as it is, this sudden fucking breezy uplift sounds horribly like we're meant to think he's passed through the clouds. Yeah, like the opening credits of Highway to Heaven. Yeah, outside the pearly gates. Never quite understood why the entrance to heaven

would be in the borough of croydon yes god moves in mysterious i do agree but i think if you put this to terry jacks he would have kind of said suggestion noted and uh stuck with the uh you know upward rising cause yeah that's why he's a cunt i mean this salvation is not an outcome that brells moribund has been been anticipating, I tell you that. And it just makes me think, hang on, if you're going to end this song in eternal paradise, soon to be joined by all the people to whom you've just bid goodbye, what the fuck are you complaining about? Yeah.

And why have you then made me listen to your belly aching? Which is, in fact, the question i'd ask all religious true believers to be honest like if you're so convinced of your eternal salvation what's the fucking problem why the long face yeah this of course being the reason why suicide was made a mortal sin in christianity because there's no mention of suicide in the bible but a few years later when people noticed that life was a rack of shit and uh you know you're probably going to die of scrofula or syphilis at the age of 26 anyway in those days or some cunt in a hood with a big crucifix around his neck was going to torture you three quarters

of the way to death and then throw you in a cesspit to drown because you had a mole on your left shoulder you know which marked you out as spiritually unclean once that penny dropped in the middle ages people started killing themselves in huge numbers like leaping into rivers holding bibles and stuff just to cut out this miserable slog and get straight to the good bit yeah which meant no more tithes and a loss of social control and so the church quickly invented this entirely man-made doctrine that anyone who killed themselves was going to go to hell which was probably lucky or else the eventual success of seasons in the sun by terry jackal

would have sent off a quarter of the earth's population in the year of our Lord, 1974. Didn't bear thinking about it. And yet I envy them, sat now at God's right hand instead of at Noel Edmonds' feet like the rest of us, waiting for his sweet mercy. So Seasons in the Sun would spend four weeks at number one before the life support was switched off by Waterloo, by ABBA. At the time, it was the biggest selling single ever by a Canadian and it's currently the third biggest behind My Heart Will Go On by Celine Dion

and Everything I Do, I Do It For You by Bryan Adams. You know, kayak! The follow-up was another dig at a Jacques Brel song, If You Go Away, which got to number eight in July. But that was his lot in the UK, and he eased out of the music scene in the late 70s and became an environmentalist and documentary maker. Still alive, don't you know?

Oh, absolutely. All our lives we have fun, we had seasons in the sun, but the hills have been... Oh, the sound of Cherry Jackson, Seasons in... Oh, you know. And over to you for the final number, Dave. Yeah, actually, I'm a bit sad that it hasn't really been, in all parts of the country, a white Christmas this year, but... I'm dreaming of...

Well, it is time, unfortunately, to come to the last part of the show. You see, I've got a fetish about microphones. I've also got a fetish about mud and tiger feet! Travis and Edmunds, now obscured, but not obscured enough, by a cluster of mic stands, share their commiserations to the parts of the country that haven't had snow this week because snow was a thing we used to have in midwinter quite a bit. While Edmunds dumps fake snow on his partner,

Travis tells us he has a fetish about microphones and a fetish about the final act of the episode, Mud and Tiger Feet. We've already covered the former Carl Schultz and hippies who were dropped by CBS in 1970, went three years without a deal and were picked up by Rack last year, who then straddled the glam and rock and roll revival trains and immediately scored three top 20 hits. This single, the follow-up to dynamite

which got to number four on two non-consecutive weeks in november of 1973 was selected as their next single on the basis that producer mickey most liked the title they were ushered into the top of the pop studio before it was even released and the world was introduced to the mud rocker the thumbs in belt loops and syncopated elbow swinging dance craze performed by their mates and it thudded into the charts at number 10 on its first week the following week it soared to number one not only dispatching you won't find another fool like me by the new Seekers. But keeping their chinny chapula stable makes the suite from the top with Teenage Rampage. And here they are back in the studio to claim sole ownership of the pop scene of 1974. Because chaps, let's not forget they were the first band on on Christmas Day with their number one Lonely This Christmas.

Yeah. And here they are again in the number one position in this episode. Yeah. Well, everything ends with mud sooner or later. Yes. Everything and everyone. So I don't know if this is hats off or hats on, right? But fucking hell, pure English beef.

Yes. Look at this. Any one of these blokes could have been a copper you know not just the band but also their henchmen who they've got on stage here in that specifically 70s basic young bloke uniform of dirty white plimsolls, tight faded flared jeans over completely flat arse, and tight white T-shirts with words on the front. Yes. They look just like those geezers who forced John Noakes up Nelson's column. And then later, Peter Duncan up Big Ben,

from which he so tragically didn't plumb it. And I bet that these fellas here, I don't know if they're Mudd's roadies or just some faithful fans they're s1w's exactly but if they don't work for the band i bet you they did some nine to five job like that which was fantastically dangerous but it never occurred to because it was the 70s and and nothing was safe you know there'd have been steeplejacks or waltzers operators or you know semtex manufacturers you know smoking and drinking cans a long life on the job this was peak 1974 for me i must say at the time it absolutely was and it's great i mean you know and i was out there on the old parquet dance floor you know with thumbs and you know the old loops and

clashing invisible antlers you know and obviously it's boy to boy action because you know of course as we know only gays talk to girls but of course we've got the gamut here you know so yeah you've got the kind of full-on machismo end of what's happening on stage right through to um it is rob isn't it you know with enormous great earrings you know representing the performative effeminacy or whatever yeah this is this is it this was peak 1974 oh yeah and of course the best thing about this song really is how odd it is because i'm with mickey most on this what a title yes tiger feet it's one of those things that's so familiar that you don't think about but might as well go I really love your panda knees.

Like, which of us has never told our beloved, oh, I really love your bison ankles. But, you know, I'm not putting them down. It's like my mate says, mud are basically Dr. Feelgood before they discovered amphetamine. Just on brown ale and neat bells drunk out of a tea mug with a plate of triangular ham sandwiches in fact you wouldn't even have had to ask them about their rider would you just have been that and some angel delight yeah all lines of it racked out yeah and a coxies orange pippin for the fitness fanatic in the back i was all right with tiger

feet i mean you did the sort of the tiger it was the prowl wasn't i used to do the prowl across the barrack and helmet village hall dance floor you know impressing one and all i think that's that was my interpretation anyway yeah you can't not love them because they are so beautifully gross and they are indisputably the real thing it's like watching a knees up at the bus depot i mean all the drivers putting on a show for the clippies help yourself to a rock hard sausage roll you know it's like oh you oh shut up you silly cow it's only a bit of fun you know it's that world right yes and this is a great record it's just that it's their only great record yeah and when you listen to it and watch them perform it's really obvious why it's their only genuinely great record because

people who are like this by which i mean not instinctively or naturally creative or musical but also not hung up on their own stupid half-baked concepts of artistry or soulfulness. They can make great records when they've got people like Chinnichup behind them. Yeah. But they usually don't make more than one great one because too many ducks have to be in a row. You know what I mean? It's not quite like me standing there taking 6,000 free kicks

until eventually one of them goes in the top corner because mud themselves have got that basic level of competence and showmanship so something was going to go right sooner rather than later but it's interesting all these 70 showbiz groups have got their own thing going on their own look and feel and atmosphere so the song and the production has to work according to those rules the rules of their tiny universe and when the songs weren't coming from the band sometimes it took a while for everything to match up so that it all felt right do you know what i mean yeah um but in retrospect

it's better to do it this way than spreading the magic moment over a string of nearly good records do you know what i mean also if you drag out your success too long you can convince an artiste that they are an artist which is always a fucking disaster yeah well i mean i was disappointed in it with lonely this christmas because for me i think the main appeal of mud is that they were wholly angst free you know there wasn't that even when slade he had all that kind of look at last night everybody wants to know you all that kind of stuff you know there was no hint of like moroseness it was absolutely full-on 100 bully beef great time uh don't worry though david here comes show what he wanted to pick up the slide well yeah yeah but they weren't

quite 100 bully beef enough for me i think they were very bentos Well, yeah, yeah. But they weren't quite 100% bully beef enough for me, I think. They were very bentos pie filling. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, the only thing I don't like about them, well, actually there's a few things I don't like about them, but the worst is that these are the kind of old world blokes where it's impossible to look at them without thinking about their underwear,

which I think would be tomato red Y-fronts with white trim right yeah matching vest you know he's got his y-fronts with a yellow patch front left you know what i mean he's got an egg stain on his vest on the back for some reason and vertically striped multi-colored swimming trunks at the beach worn with nothing but a chain necklace and tinted specs or saint christopher yeah that strange male physique where the legs are skinny but the top half's like a barrel you know fried food and an elvis cassette on the dashboard and where do you go from there yeah yeah my imagination never really penetrated as far as their underpants, I must say. I think I feel blessed by that, actually.

Well, it's not a choice. No, no, exactly. I know, this is it. You're compelled, you know. But what an introduction to a song this has, man. It's one of the greats, isn't it? Do you think they nicked it off the metres for Sissy Strut? You know, oh, yeah! Probably. They would have been aware of that,issy strut you know oh yeah probably they would have

been aware of that wouldn't they yeah of course they would yeah i reckon you're right because i remember a few years ago right in nottingham we have goose fair absolutely loved it as a kid even as a teenager and a young adult right up until i was about 30 wherever i was i had to be back in nottingham for goose fair it was just that thing you had to go to yeah you like romario having it in his contract that he had to go back for the rio carnival every year even if there was a game on yeah exactly like that but when i moved back to nottingham and i started going to goose it got really shit all the good stuff that i loved was going in and And nowadays it's just shaking Alton Towers.

And I remember going a few years ago and thinking, well, I've had enough of this now, man. This is going to be my last year of going to Goose Fair. And I'm just standing there looking around. And all I can hear is this fucking landfill rap that everything's blaring out. But then I found myself by the waltzers. And all of a sudden it just went. But then I found myself by the waltzers and all of a sudden it just went. I immediately changed back into a six year old to the point where I was looking around really frantically for my mom and dad because I felt that I'd lost them. And it was like, oh, this is just perfect.

Let this be my last experience at Goose Fair. Thank you, Maud. You made it special for a few seconds one last time. And I'll always be grateful to you for that. I think this is one of the things that you get throughout the show, actually. You think of all of these kind of particular, whether it's sparks or whatever, and the stomp you've got there, or the thing here, that all of these kind of rhythmical patterns were swept away by, like, 4-4 and that. And it kind of feels a shame, really. But then at the same time, that sort of these kind of rhythmical patterns were swept away by, like, 4-4 and that, and it kind of feels a shame, really, you know,

but then at the same time, that sort of helps preserve them. I mean, we've already done 1972 and 1973 Christmas specials, and in the 1972 one, the winning single of that episode, the one either last or second to last, was Mecca Guru by T-Rex. 1973, Merry Christmas, Everybody by Slade. 1974, Tiger Feet by Mud. That tells a tale, doesn't it?

A tale that, in its way, is also told in Never Too Young to Rock, which Mud are really the big stars, right? Where they stomp through the cat crept in at a lorry driver's transport cab with Les using a mustard dispenser as a microphone. All of them dressed in Ted Pink, while a lot of extras playing rival football hooligans, half of whom are supporting the red team

and half of whom are supporting the blue team. Swigig nasty metal army surplus mugs of tea the color of monkey fur and they're all wearing their coats indoors because it's an incalculably miserable day just like every day on which they filmed never too young to rock so their mud stopped playing and without their pacifying influence a mass brawl breaks out between the football fans and all the heated cabinets that say hot snacks are flying around no sheila stiefel tragically cast as the owner of the cafe is improvving half-heartedly in the chaos uh so mud move over to the stairs out of the fray

and they run through tiger feet while dodging the flying punters you know but it's the 1970s where men punching each other really hard in the face is only ever portrayed as funny yeah or exciting and that's the first scene of the film um And later in the picture, they seem to become guerrilla fighters of some sort in a sodden freezing wood in Hertfordshire. I'm not really sure what's going on there because I was watching it in below freezing conditions in my flat with no heating on. So I could barely stand to look

because Never Too Young to Rock is the chilliest looking film I've ever seen. And the second chilliest is Touching the Void. It's just a lot of people, you know, falling fully clothed in the dirty water in wintertime on location in places where there would not have been a trailer to dry off in. Just the backseat of a Mark II Cortina and a couple of beach towels. Brrrr! I was watching it in sub-zero conditions

and it was almost comforting. HE LAUGHS We hope you've had a great Christmas week and you've thoroughly enjoyed Top of the Pops, right? Really, we do. We wish you a very happy New Year and if it's anything like this in 75, I shouldn't bother tuning in. Ladies and gentlemen, till the Top of the Pops 75. See you in the New Year. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

Top of the Bob 75. See you in the new year. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Edmunds and Travis, now entangled in a mass of mic cables while the floor managers wobble the mic stands off camera, express the hope that we've had a great Christmas, we have a happy new year,

and if 1975 is going to be anything like this, we shouldn't bother tuning in before thrown is into a reprise of tiger feet with a sort of cast members joining the band in a sunday night at the palladium style farewell which includes carl douglas and his dancers the characterful dad drummer of the rubets holding a large cone of rolled up brown paper to his mouth and walking about like Groucho Marx. Members of the Glitter Band who give Les Grey a custard pie in the face.

Edmonds clapping along gamely at the side. And finally, Travis, who takes centre stage with one of the Christmas trees, which he plays like a guitar fucking hell fire i mean it's i mean at least noel edmonds has the sort of native sense to stay on the periphery you know he knows which lane he belongs in yeah you just said you know that travis you know he's just this leering ignoramus who thinks he's entitled to be front and center and yet as soon as he gets front and center there he senses immediately he's out of his element you know he can't dance you can't stay in step he can't play a christmas tree either that's right

i can't play christmas tree guitar and you just sense looking at everybody else on that stage like les gray whether that travis is someone who's pathologically incapable of actually having a genuinely good time you know and like i say you can see this moment of panics it's like well all right yes if we could just cut out the jostling, please. You know, just know your place, Travis. You are literally a waste of space. I mean, as pop craze youngsters of then and now, we knew that there was a line drawn between the presenters and the true stars. And once again, Travis has crossed it and pissed on it

and then rolled about in his pissy line. Yeah, you've got this star-studded scream full of 1974 i mean it's all the other groups who were actually there yes in the wintry studio rather than flown in from previous episodes but obviously travis has to see center stage because he's the one everyone really wants to look at he's the one with charisma. He's the one why everyone really tuned in to watch an ugly, stupid man with no qualities showing off like a small boy at his own fourth birthday party. Yeah.

Barging professional entertainers out of the way to pick up a fake silver Christmas tree and play it like a guitar while gurning. A visual joke so self-evidently hilarious, it demands that whoever thought of it shoves all the pop stars to the side of the stage to give his physical comedy stylings the prominence that they deserve. I mean, a lot of the truly great people are people who, by rights, on paper should be total wankers, but miraculously pull it off somehow. And it's useful to have Dave Lee Travis around as an illustration of what that doesn't look like.

And exactly as David says, whatever you may or may not say about Noel Edmonds, he's so obviously smarter than travis if nothing else like as we see here he knows he has to keep out of this yeah and keep a low profile and retain some dignity at least he's very much the midge ewer to travis's bob geldolf here like the the invisible man behind the desperate attention--seeking, immature clown with the faintly nasty edge of everybody shut up and listen to me. Yeah. I mean, do they know it's Christmas time at all? It's as if Brian Moore and John Motsen had run onto the pitch amongst the Liverpool players

after the FA Cup final and were taking turns to put the lid on their head before just diving into the plunge pool afterwards. It's more like if they'd run on in stoppage time and kicked the ball in the net, taking their shirt off and started whirling it around their heads. It's interesting to see who's not on that stage at the end. There's no glitter.

Alvin's there, but he kind of like lingers at the back, obviously making sure that nobody touches him. Yeah, his albino keyboard player is at the front. Just exhilarated that he's still got all his teeth. Yes. And then Les Gray suddenly brandishes a cutout number one as he wipes the custard pie from his face, which is a tradition that began the year earlier, remember,

with Noddy Older and Wizard. Travis, with his bow tie now fully askew drops a meaty arm around les gray as he attempts to do the shadows walk making it look like he's being drunkenly ushered from a pub before it all kicks off it's the end of the glam era and the blokes of pop have taken over again yeah yeah they're gonna be there for quite a while aren't they yeah and they're not actually gonna thump you unless you say anything out of line but there's always just that suggestion yeah yeah oh les gray's got a very nice tiger head belt buckle did you notice yeah it's lovely isn't it i would it. You wouldn't want to be his misbehaving lad, would you? So, Tiger Feet would spend four weeks at number one before yielding the floor to Devil Great Drive

and would become the biggest-selling single of 1974. The follow-up, The Cat Crept In, would get to number two for two non-consecutive weeks in April, unable to usurp Seasons in the sun and Waterloo. They took Rocket to number six in August, and they'd close out the year with Lonely This Christmas as the current number one. They won 1974.

When we look back on 1974, West Germany, Harold Wilson twice, and mud. Yeah, and I would say that you have to admit this is arguably one of the four or five finest bands ever to come out of Karsholm Beaches. But it will never happen again. This blend of old Ted, dodgy uncle, bacon sandwich eater and teeny bop sensation. There is simply no route to victory. Old Ted, Dodgy Uncle, Bacon Sandwich Eater and Teeny Bop Sensation. There is simply no route to victory for this combination anymore.

And that's probably a good thing, but in some ways it doesn't feel like it. And that, Pop Craze Youngsters, closes the book on this episode of Top of the Pops. What's on telly afterwards? Who's the book on this episode of Top of the Pops? What's on telly afterwards? Well, BBC One kicks on with nearly three hours of El Cid, the 1961 film starring Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren. Then it's the Nine O'Clock News.

Then the play Dr Watson and the Darkwater Hall Mystery, starring Edward Fox as the snarf to Sherlock Holmes' Lion-O. Then it's a gala performance from Sadler's World Theatre featuring Stephen Grappelli and Nigel Kennedy and they sign off with an episode of Harry-O, closing down at half past midnight. BBC Two finally gets

its arse in gear with News on 2, then Tony Bennett at the Royal Festival Hall, then The Breaking, a five minute film about an Arab stallion getting trained up. After that, it's a dramatisation of Alice Through the Looking Glass, starring Brenda Bruce, Freddie Jones and Geoffrey Baildon, followed by In The Spirit, a gospel-y songs of praise from a black church in Birmingham,

then MASH, and they rhymed off the night with a gene kelly double bell of on the town and singing in the rain closing down at half 12. itv has put out the news and regional news in your area and then dot smith cops off with a new bloke who turns out to be mr lucas from are you being served in crossroads after some cartoons to see the kids off to bed see told you it's the brand new american tv film skyway to death where stephanie powers and ross martin and a load of other actors get trapped on a massive ski lift 9 000 feet above the ground after an explosion the only remaining disaster movie plot that hadn't been done yet yes these waltzes have gone out of control then it's the final episode of the

first series of itv's comedy hit of the year rising damp that's followed by charlie drake and colin crompton on des O'Connor Entertains. Hmm, I'll be the judge of that. The news at 10, and they finish up with the horror series Appointment with Fear, featuring the 1957 film The Black Scorpion, where Mexico gets mithered by giant stop-motion arachnids with stingy bits hanging out of their arses, closing down at a quarter past midnight so boys what are we talking about over the handlebars of our new rally choppers tomorrow

well for me it would have been sparks most definitely mud absolutely ought to have been george mccray but to be honest i was too much of a racist when i was 12. Ought to have been George McRae, but to be honest, I was too much of a racist when I was 12. It's always Sparks. It can only be Sparks. And Alvin Stardust almost knocking his keyboard player's teeth out. What are we getting with our record tokens tomorrow?

Tiger Feet. Obviously, this town ain't big enough for both of us. Beyond that, I'm not 100% sure. The trouble is, Gary Glitters New Alvin Stardust, I felt, were kind of slightly played at this point. So I don't think I might have ventured beyond that, to be honest. No. You know, they were precious things, them vouchers.

Yeah. Sparks, yeah. Carl Douglas, yeah. Maybe, yes, George McRae, providing this particular performance had not been my only exposure to Rock Your Baby. And possibly Tiger Feet, although I bet it was one of those records you couldn't avoid hearing every ten minutes when it was current, so I might have been able to save my pennies for the even grimmer year of 1975 that lay ahead.

And what does this episode tell us about 1974? I just think there are the first inklings of the long, slow march of decay that's ultimately going to culminate in punk. Yeah, by this point, the kids have grown tired of Mark Bolan and David Bowie and decided to only like ugly, talentless men who are almost 40 and are either paedophiles or aren't, but could pass as paedophiles, or at least criminals of some stamp, you know.

I bet you every time there was an identity parade down the local nick with all the suspects lined up in a row, they might as well have played Tiger Feet over the speakers because that's what it would have looked like. And that, Pop Craze Youngsters brings us to the end of this episode of Chart Music. Use your promotional flange.

www.chart-music.co.uk facebook.com slash chart music podcast. Reach out to us on Twitter at chart music T-O-T-P. Money down the G-string. Patreon.com slash Chart Music. Thank you

Taylor Potts. That's alright. God bless you David Stubbs. Rock! My name's Al Needham. Special thanks to Ready Mix Concrete. Chart Music. chart music brother and sister open your eyes muster your mind try to visualize a hell on earth where men are sent in effort to make the wicked repent? These poor men have left our world,

went onto this isle of their bodies, a world escaped from this prison nobody has. Everyone dies on Alcatraz. Once in a cell, a man can't stand an identity. Numbers burned on his hand. The food will be a crumb but don't ask for more. The bones of the brave are beneath your floor. Defy the god and receive the lash.

Strike from the whip leaves and ugly gash. Never breathe loud, never keep mass. The lord is forbidden on Alcatraz. Should you attempt a suicide fail, you've been to the door with a giant nail. Water from a sewer drips on your head until the floor starts turning red. Next you're thrown in the big salt bath, You might as well write your epitaph. You'll never get free of that foaming briar. O.B.D. is the very next line.

You're probably wondering after all I said. How it is that I'm not dead And how I'm living to tell this tale Well I'm the governor of Alcatraz jail In association with the British Market Research Bureau And compiled by the Pop Craze Patreons, we present the Chart Music Top 40 of 2022. Number 40, RomoCop. Number 39, TylerTheXXXPrivatelyEducated.

In a 38, CFAFax Data Blast. Number 37, Thatcherite Stride. Number 36, Donio Smond. Number 35, Andy Peebles Space Kush. Number 34, Flesh Chandelier. In at number 33, Dag Vag.

Number 32, Legs and Cunny. Number 31, Singleton Noakes Purvis and Judd. Hmm. Into the top 30 and at number 30, Taylor Parks' 20 Romantic Moments. Yes. Number 29, Unkempt youths in spangles. In at number 28.

Mini whores. This year's number 27. This year's most lovable bisexual. And at number 26. The Nagasaki Hell Blaster.

Number 25, Arse to Mouth. Number 24, Baxter, Woolard and Rod. Number 23, the worst dressed homosexual in the Castro. At number 22, it's Cliffy Whiteboy and DJ Mr Bronson. And at number 21, the popular orange vegetable. Mm-hmm. Into the top 20 and at 20, Eamon Doll 11.

Yep. Number 19, the Mary Brennell Boys murder. Number 18, staircase of cock. Number 17, skin heady heady. And at number 16, Heap Big Cunts. In at number 15 this year, Sugar Blokes. Number 14, Semiotic Trousers. Yes. The number 13 of 2022, My Fucking Car.

At number 12, it's Jeff Sex. And at number 11, the Birmingham Piss Troll. Oh. Into the top ten And at number ten Eric Smallshore of Eccles

Oh yes At number nine Rock expert David Stubbs Bogus Number eight The Airbnb 52s Number seven

The provisional OOR ORA And at number six Number 7, the provisional OOR ORA. And at number 6, that dog's dead now. This year's number 5, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Glitter. Number 4, here comes Jizzum. Number 3, the bent cunts who aren't fucking real number two two ronnie's one cup which means

britain's number one the number one act of 2022 by one vote bomberdog yes of course had to be my name's al needham and on behalf of everyone at Chalk Music, I'd just like to say, fuck off

2022! You were shit and we are skilled! Yes! We'll be right back.