Chart Music: the Top Of The Pops Podcast - #69 (Pt 3): 27.12.74 – The Ramadan #1 of 1974

Episode Date: January 26, 2023

Taylor Parkes and David Stubbs go deeper on the last TOTP of 1974 with Al Needham, and recoil at Dave Lee Travis looking none more Gnasher-like as he salivates over Stephanie De Sykes and then we’re hit with Another Chance To See the debut performance of Sparks, the Great Lost Gary Glitter Number One, Another Chance To See Sylvia telling some very young Osmonds fans about how she slagged it about in Spain this summer, and some very unfair jokes at the expense of Brian May…Video Playlist | Subscribe | Facebook | Twitter | The Chart Music Wiki | Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This will certainly have an adult theme and might well contain strong scenes of sex or violence, which could be quite graphic. It may also contain some very explicit language, which will frequently mean sexual swear words. What do you like to listen to? Um... Chart music. Chart music. Hey, you pop craze youngsters. Welcome back to part three of episode 69 of Chart Music. As my dear friends Taylor Parks and David Stubbs join me,

Al Needham, on a plunge into the December 27th 1974 episode of Top of the Pops. Come on now, let's not fanny about. Let us rejoin the episode in progress. From a loadless meanderings one George McRae. Cooey! And Rocky 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? Now, equal terms to introduce... Oh, she was born with a mole on her face. Stephanie D'Saig. Oh!

I was born with a smile on my face. The whole of my life's being a phantomime 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, 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. And he goes, ooh, Stephanie de Sykes. Like, she should be grateful that he's controlling himself.

Stephanie de Sykes, mind you, not featured in the now notorious A Bit of a star no dlt's coffee table book a clef i know because i went and checked and she's not there not in either of my copies despite being exactly two copies of a bit of a star by no idea how i didn't realize 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 lindsey de paul you'd think yeah yeah because round about this time she was a household name yes like we 1974 the in-house singer on that's life yes with exclamation mark like frampton comes alive as the sort of like a millicent mart 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 knockoff 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 wright and 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 three and a week later made it to number

two. 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 oh nice to see the bbc making a bit of a christmasy 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 send. 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 harvest of 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 Britpop 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 jordan heirs And I don't know what they actually are. To me, they look like three butchers disguised as mint viennettes. 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 for their own backs with the premise of the song, really. It means they've got that grin pinned like a kind of synchronised 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 um coming forth yeah 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 well no just managing your own business and a load of kids suddenly start shouting he's behind you yeah and like ian paisley and jerry adams in a horse together yes it's terrible i had to look very closely at at 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 going to 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 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 was resonated with the 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 it's like 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 of 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 programme hung over the 70s like 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. Yeah, I rolled with it, definitely. It wasn't watched in our house. 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 nan's house yeah 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 right 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 right 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 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 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 DeSyke songs. And then Music for Pleasure put out a collection

of standards called Noel Gordon Sings. And then, of course, in 1978 1978 with post-punk redolent throughout the nation paul henry commemorated the death of benny's fiancee 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 axing 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 it's just say bill buckley is no tim buckley and then course, there was I'm Gonna Watch Crossroads,

which was a Breguet-tinged tribute by local comedians Alan and Blewett. That's fucking brilliant. Popular Midlands entertainer. And let's not forget Benny by Kathy Staff, who played Miss Luke before she became Compose Lust Object in Last of the Summer Wine. And, of of course Glenda

and the Test Tube Baby by the Toy Dobbles 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 Descent of the Stiperstones by Half Man Half Biscuit which is

it's an extended recitation uh about him meeting uh the woman who played glenda brownlow uh in a chandler's in montgomery she's worth a listen if just for finally doing the pun that everyone has been waiting years to do where makes reference to uh the tumultuous life of Father Arthur in the programme finishing off by saying the crazy world

of Arthur Brown it's almost 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 thing is i've been thinking about stephanie just psychs it 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. Or 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 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 flavours 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 junk is the home brewed 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 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 1 p.m 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 shite and stinked to meet 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 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. 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 De Sykes' follow-up, getting to number 17 for two weeks in May of 1975. When Diminishing Returns set in, De 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- of bucks fiz'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 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 to the BBC in the mid-80s, he took the Howard's 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 Howard's Way theme and called it Always There, which Marty Webb took to

number 13 in October of 1986, wrote Every Loser Wins for Nick Barry, 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. 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 Aventis 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 Wynwood 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 hitmaker, he said, listen, I'll bet you 100 quid that it makes the top three. And when Wynwood'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 Ron Mayle 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 the 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. 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. Now 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 oddly enough they're you know apart from the kind of the brilliant pile on 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 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 are our favourite things, but it didn't actually make us more enlightened as regards gendered fluidity. It didn't make us more open-minded.

You know, we love these people. But at the same time, we love these people. Yeah. But at the same time, we thought they 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 granddad. 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, but 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, Doctor 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 i was screaming i think that came off a public information film and ron mayle yeah yeah so pretty low yeah yeah i was wary of him i wasn't outright terrified but i think what's so clever about it is that he doesn't overhammer he doesn't sort of mouth you know bloody rubbish or what's all this nonsense you know it's a much it's more kind of enigmatic really you know it 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 short hair unless they were prince charles or whatever you know it's any kid whose parents insisted on you know giving them short back and sides or whatever would get absolutely tortured you know in the playground yeah and 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 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 Bee Gees 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, 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 catalogue,

which is obviously a treasure box, this is the one, 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 have 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 a storm there. And I think also it's one of those 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 top 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 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. and 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 like 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 yeah i'm going to think about it this it's it's self-evident

it's writ large i mean of course you know but on music critics or whatever i mean people you know have differences of taste you know one person might love something one might despise another etc etc but anybody who was 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 um 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 you know less than full of praise for this their judgment that it's untrustworthy yeah i'll tell you something else that people don't talk about people forget what an incredible

lyricist ron mayer 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 met 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 spark then one tiny criticism really of sparks is there perhaps they're over fondness for a pun that you know they say no place in pop music you know it's the downfall of the beatles as we know but uh but yeah but other 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. 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 going to get in my way. Oh, he's like Hitler. And 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 fore here.

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 were taking a piss. 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 eyepatch 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 are 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, Robin Nash. The follow-up, Amateur Hour, got to number seven in August, and they finished their biggest year with Never Turn Your 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 Oil and the studio ain't 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 I know you know I'll never, never let you go I do know you 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 on 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 Band, 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. But all that 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 and tells her she shouldn't feel so useless and that she could learn to be a typist

whereupon 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 read for this, I heard it, and it's like, fucking hell, as far as mock and roll goes, this is fucking alright, 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. Yes. yes 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 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 roberson 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 you know and there's a sort of rigidity about it as well and i mean if you think in a sense one of the things that the beatles took away you know from rock was that certain rigidity you know but it's like the beatles never happened it sometimes feels you know especially watching an episode like this that you, people want to kind of go back to, you know, 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 would 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 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 roll stage show or you know yeah 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 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 by the way is this band who costumes are embarrassed of them you know but almost certainly thugs underneath gary glitter and the glitter band are all wearing those liz truss jackets aren't there you know those ones with the with the pointy bits on the shoulders that liz truss wore which and the glitter band are all wearing those Liz Truss jackets, aren't they? You know those ones with the pointy bits on the shoulders that Liz Truss 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're wearing them, but obviously more Spangler. Yeah, I mean, some people now think, oh, it was the 70s. You'd go out to buy sprouts and you'd see 10 blokes dressed like that. But no, it was just pop music. We talked about this before. Yeah. 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. Yes. this period it was like putting on a pair of overalls to paint a ceiling you know yes 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? I was going to say, 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 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 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. Yeah, 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. Yeah, 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 a glitter he'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 or whenever i mean really he is this kind of meta star you know you know, he's sort of somewhere

between Elvis and Liberace, perhaps, you know, but, and I think you sort of understand that this whole deeply unnatural repertoire of frantic, hyperkinetic moves that he goes through, that's completely unorganic, and it can only really exist in this sort of glitter space that he kind of creates and occupies, you know, again, on a top of the pop stage. He's like a Beano cartoon writer's idea of a pop star yes but then the bino cartoon writer's probably got their idea of a pop star from gary glitter you know he's kind of that's large it's it's um but he 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

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 male i didn't know it can't have been the same microphone but because that sparks performance was a repeat from you know months ago it doesn't mean it couldn't be the same microphone. This is the BBC you're talking about. Couldn't be. It wasn't Blu-Tack invented in 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 looking back at it now, it's like, fucking hell, I've discovered a Gary Glitter deep cut. And it's been played often in this household, I have to say. 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 seven yes you know what i'm talking 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 are 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 teenybop icons are revealed we learned 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 Grimleys. 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 10 years before another rock and roll christmas got to number seven 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 fe 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 Bushel's wank fantasy set. I think it was cool. 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. Edmonds and Travis embark on another bit, this time pretending to be a ventriloquist, Travis, and his dummy, Edmunds, 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's 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 Neuensig himself, genaplana german for hannah aroni german again for heino johannes neunzig himself and norwegian for grow and need to shun in 1973 the variant mutated and spread even further with versions in danish by elizabeth edberg finished by marion rung arabic byon 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 a 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 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 to bloody France,

you know, full of frogs with, 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. Well, they do have beaches, don't they? But we don't want to go to them. No, no, no. And if we did, we would be fighting them. Yes, yes, indeed. Yeah. But, you know, I mean, 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 a board you know when they all go off to l's bells yeah you know this 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 or whoever it was from from police service on hand with a mate to uh disabuse any of that and of course it was the destination of the pace setters of yes it was such as blakey in uh don't drink the water yes of course yeah

stephen 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 and it's like yeah if you went around someone's house and they've been to spain you'd know about it straight away because there would be a wicker sangria bottle on totally 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 like, 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 30 p.m yeah and the classics of european literature were not routinely confiscated and burned at customs they deprave and corrupt the angelic natives yeah 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 way. Fashion strategy. Between, yeah, 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. Yes. Where they'd just let the gutters overflow with vomit. Sunburnt ham. And send some grannies in blackhead scarves 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's 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 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. Aviva España. Of old pride and romance eviva espana a serenade on the balcony eviva 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 lyric, 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 espana 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 rackled 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 realises that she's singing about being given a scene to in an alleyway there? Yeah, it's weird, though, because these lyrics sound like they were written for a man even though i'm i don't think they actually were no like in 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 yes 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 Tefkoff.

And 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

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, 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. 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 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 like 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 the you know that's a bit before my time oh 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 fog 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 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. Anyway, we're all off to Sunday school.

Just going back to the woman, the silver, you know, 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 that. She's trying to drum up interest, you know, in Spain, you know, along these kind of slightly salacious lines, you know, and passing out leaflets wherever and bloke thinking, will you be there? You know, this is like, you know in spain you know along these kind of slightly salacious lines you know and passing out leaflets wherever and bloke doing it will you be there you know this is like you know i i tend to think of it that way but i mean it's it's been rewritten by a british bloke but

looking back on it now it's 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 yeah 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 ledbetter but she she comes off as a an attractive teacher type doesn't she looks like billy white law's pointless. 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 washers 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 of cabaret and nor chopping

and that hat clearly did not have its own suitcase 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 i mean also sweden in the 70s well i'm surprised the government didn't give her a new hat on the taxpayers 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 osman special so we get the awkward juxtaposition of a woman in her late 20s giving advice about guiltless casual sex to a theater 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 theater somewhere in london and it really suits the song because this song's pure music musical isn't it i mean you can imagine barbara winster in a trash deflamenca 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 imperious it doesn'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 Marian Club which I fucking loved and this was the absolute anthem yeah

I remember the lady singer who was in residence that week 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 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 which says and i quote she is perhaps best known for the 1974 release viva españa yeah perhaps i could certainly imagine that this song made it onto sylvia's greatest hits i own a copy myself 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 k. 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 España would end up spending 28 weeks on the UK charts,

and Sylvia even managed to bag another chart hit 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 yasa fenabachi by nesrin sipahi america as a cover by pat boone and 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. I'll read the new reason for the score España, por favor España, por favor That, of course, is Sylvia with a mechanic song,

Y Viva España. 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. Killer Queen. She keeps Moët Lachande in her pretty cabinet. Let them eat cakes, 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 tone of 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 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 and the really 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 ditch water 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 yeah we've covered queen many a time and often 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 number two 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 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. Anyway, me dears, we've mentioned before the widespread theory

that Queen has 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. for 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 they're 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

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've got Ron and Russell in Sparks. I was talking about 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 their 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 centre and the band are scrunched into the corner. We get lots of lingering close-ups of Freddie with his black fingernails with a saucy finger running up and down the mic stand. Yeah. Yeah, this is the clip they always show, isn't it? 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. What a way to make a living. This is pretty much the campus we're ever going to see Freddie Mercury

if he discount his go at Bette Lynch in the I Want to Break Free video. But chaps, would the pop craze youngsters have been aware that they were 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 pops

round about this time. 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. Because, I mean, the public gaydar was still under construction but it's not like it was just made out of tin cans and bits of string it's just all in the ground with a sign up but the there wasn't some huge opaque divide between gay culture of the 70s and the slightly less hairy end of rock culture you know not to the point where a band called queen with a singer who camped it up this outrageously would pass without recognition you know i think

people certainly the public was slower to catch on with elton john yes because although he was flamboyant it wasn't very sexual so yeah he didn't make that connection and they just he just looked like he was in a 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 didn't know 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 pop 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 stakes or whatever. And I think the physicality of it, the force, the attack, 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 have a guitar. 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 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

no 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. See, 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 E35826893597G. to date catalog number e-3-5-8-2-6-8-9-3-5-9-7-g that's e-3-5-8-2-6-9-8-3-5-9-7-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 of 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. Freddie 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. All right, and pot-crazed youngsters, we're going to leave it there and gird our loins for the final furlong tomorrow. But before we go, let me remind you, the biggest ever video playlist for an episode of Chart Music is waiting for you on YouTube right now.

Everything we've heard, everything we've talked about, it's all there. Seriously, if you want to listen to 16 different versions of Aviva España, fucking hell, it's your lucky day. So, take yourself over to youtube.com slash chartmusic

T-O-T-P. Navigate your way to the playlists and tuck in, you lovely people. So, until tomorrow, this is Al Needham, advising you to keep warm and stay pop- crazed. Chart music.

This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon Pull Apart, only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey, and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply.