Chart Music: the Top Of The Pops Podcast - #71 (Pt 3): 19.3.81 – Shaky Of The Dorm

Episode Date: June 23, 2023

Neil Kulkarni, Taylor Parkes and Al Needham plough on through this episode from the tail-end of the Eighventies, stopping for a deep, deep, deep dive on the post-Moon Who. Legs & Co say farewell to Pauline by sitting about under a giant Scotch egg, the Paint Pot comes back for an encore, and Bucks Fizz make their debut and do that thing with the Velcro…Video Playlist | Subscribe | Facebook | Twitter | The Chart Music Wiki | PatreonGet your tickets for Chart Music at the London Podcast Festival HERE 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. The ancient sages said, do not despise the snake for having no horns,

for who is to say it will not become a dragon? So may three just men, Taylor Parks, Neil Kulkarni and me, Al Needham, become an army. A pop-crazed army. An army which is currently laying waste to the episode of Top of the Pops, dated pop craze youngsters, and welcome to part three of episode 71 of Chart Music. No more fannying about. Charge! One of Britain's best singers, Colin Blum, is going to go with Dave Stewart in What Becomes of a Broken Hearted.

Excellent. Well, You Better, You Bet is at number nine. And here on Tour de Pops, The Hoons. How? Surrounded by four ladies with voluminous amounts of hair and one lad with his jumper tucked into his jeans tells us that Colin Blunstone is one of Britain's best singers before fucking up the intro to the next single which is you better you bet by the who i think pal was going for something like you better you bet we got the number nine single next it's yeah but he didn't no he pulled

out of it formed in london in 1964 from the ashes of the detours the who are the fucking who the last time the pop craze youngsters chanced upon the band as part of their thursday evening pop treat was in august of 1978 when the video of who are you was aired and since then much has happened a month after that keith moon was found dead in his flat leading Pete Townshend to almost immediately rush out a statement that the band would continue and they eventually got in Kenny Jones formerly of the Small Faces and the Faces. They spent 1979 continuing to draw a line under their career up till then working on the retrospective film The Kids Are Alright and the corresponding soundtrack slash compilation LP,

working on the film Quadrophenia and returning to the stage at the Rainbow before playing a tour of France, Scotland, a gig at Wembley Stadium and one at the Zeppelin Felt at Nuremberg. After a five-night stint at Madison Square Garden, they returned to the UK for four dates in Brighton and Stafford before embarking on a full-scale tour of America. However, three dates in, 11 people were killed in a pre-gig stampede without the band's knowledge,

but they decided to carry on the tour and finish 1979 with a gig at Hammersmith Odeon. The band went on hiatus for the first half of 1980, with Daltrey working on the film McVicar, and Townsend finishing off his second solo LP, Empty Glass, but reconvened in July to commence work on their ninth studio LP, Face Dancers, which came out last Monday, and this is the lead-off cut from it. It's the follow-up, of sorts, to Long Live Rock, the 1972 track which had been available on Odds and Sods since 1974, but was put out in 1979 to accompany the release of The Kids Are

Alright, and it got to number 48 in May of that year. This single was released three weeks ago, and it immediately entered the charts at number 35, leading to an invite on Top of the Pops, which helped it soar 19 places to number 16. And this week, it's jumped seven places to number nine. So here's a repeat of their appearance from a fortnight ago. Their first in the top of the pop studio since they did 515 in October of 1973.

Chaps, that Wembley gig I mentioned earlier, it sounds extremely heavy manners. 80,000 people jammed into Wembley in the middle of August and someone thought it was a good idea to sell gallon jugs of scrumpy at £4 each, which rendered punters legless and puke in their ring after half a pint and resulted in brawls between old rockers and younger mods who had seen Quadrophenia the night before

and were well dischuffed that the support act was ACDC and not the Lambrettas, followed by the discovery that there were no tubes running afterwards. Great times! The same happened when they played Charlton Football Ground in 1974. It pissed down with rain. And basically, you thought there'd been some fights there when there was a football batch

on you should have seen the who concert by all accounts but yeah being the mod lion that i was at the time you know i always had at least one who badge as part of my clanking in even though i actually didn't own any of their records i mean i bought rough boys by pete townsend the previous year so you can imagine my anticipation of seeing The Who on top of the pops, can't you? Because this was a thing. It was like, right, they're mods. They're a mod band. Why are they acting like grebs?

I remember seeing in Smash Hits the lyrics for Long Live Rock in 1979 and thinking, hang on a minute, what's this bollocks? Yeah. It is weird because there's a nationwide piece about The Who playing the rainbow in 1979 and you can see loads of using parkers queuing up outside the rainbow including one twat who's written tamla mall town with a w on the back of his parker you know not for nothing do they call

detroit the fly mode city you're supposed to be mods and here you are not being mods what's going on here yeah so yeah a very confused young lad i was this period of the who is it's a bit unsettling it has to be said um they've gone all in on uh specifically avanters specifically early middle-aged male aesthetic which burnt out very fast but it's very distinctive when you see it nicholas ball as hazel paul mccartney's rochestra i won't let you down by phd uh the video to street cafe by john lodge right jeans white trainers bomber jackets all scruffy but expensive it's the first attempt by white british rock and rollers to age without complete surrender but there wasn't yet a template of what to do and what not to do they were just winging it so yeah you know you got a little dash of the new fashions here and there like pete townsend's eye makeup

and you know but townsend is in yet another midlife crisis here drinking too much doing coke getting chucked out of nightclubs in between worshipping his eastern guru and lecturing everyone about the healing and unifying powers of rock oh and having an affair with a woman young enough to be his daughter while still trying to hang on to his family and trying not to be in the who while forcing himself to stay in the who and what makes this simultaneously more interesting and more annoying is that all of this went into the music and and that's precisely what this song is about, lyrically and spiritually. It's about that affair he was having

and all that self-doubt and self-loathing, funnelled, as usual, through an uncomprehending Roger Daltrey with tele-evangelist hair, thinking that a brand- new scarf tied around the neck with a big Rupert Bear knot and a 100 degree studio light. He looks like the most violent Rupert the Bear there's ever been. Yeah.

You want to come and join in all of my fucking games, you slag. I'm the fucking hardest man in Nutwood. Yeah, it's a little bit of country squire, a little bit of tennis proire little bit of tennis pro bit of urban professional but hey this rebel ain't wearing no tie yes but this depressing stuff is also what i kind of like about this silly and objectively not good record right i'm quite intrigued by the purity of expression of that very specific mood and style and mental state because it's unusual in rock music this is about people reaching an age where

their rock and roll preoccupations and addictions now seem incongruous and anachronistic but they can't shake them and they haven't yet developed a new vocabulary or style to carry those things with them into middle age so the album that this single is from face dances is the worst who album by some distance because it's all like this yeah late 30 something self-loathing very self-, loads of goofy lyrics about nothing, and all these bitty songs, like this one, where Pete, and this happened all the times he got older, where Pete just doesn't have faith in any of his riffs or melodies

to carry the whole song. So he makes the songs in the sequences of bits, jammed together, like a mini suite. Like Simon Reynolds once said said he's like a weird hybrid of pop rock and prog rock um and they never flow you're trying to follow the song that's pop rock which sounds fascinating you know they spit at the camera and then write the lyrics out but so none of these songs flow. You're trying to follow the song,

but it just keeps changing direction like a runaway pig, you know. And even speaking to someone who can enjoy crap music when it's interesting in other ways, I can't listen to that album and neither should you. But I can take this song because it crushes all that stuff into one stupid pop single which is all you need of it and in its brevity and its weird bubbliciousness it makes that torpor halfway entertaining and it gives full-throated rock voice to that unfortunate age of man the neurotic heading for 40 when 40 was old yes pathetically obsessed with

one's own fading vitality but still young enough that sometimes you can get off the rowing machine and still be able to sing but my body feels so good and mean it. There was a lot of that about Boomer Sunset. The fucking lyrics, man. Well, let's return to the review in this week's NME of Face Dancers because it's been absolutely slagged right across the board. But here Gavin Martin says, in the mental asylum that is rock and roll, the who have a room with no view,

drained by the darkness of experience, bent arthritically by the weight of their own myth. Townsend is a battered elder statesman, offering a set of mouldy memories, vague, pig-headed, unproductive and dogmatic. The Who stand in only one dimension, which is that of their own selfish and worthless world. Townsend's problems and struggles have no real depth because they are cocooned in his own mythology. He's pulling the worst con of the lot, that of a suffering, sensitive artist. Apart from failing to cut it in the immediate areas, social, moral and aesthetic, this album is a hell of a shambles musically. Given the dawdling senility of Townsend's songs

and the predictably cliched couple of contributions from Entwistle, it's very hard to imagine any sort of cognizant tension being mustered by the group and adultery sings with all the conviction of a man who is wondering where his next film contract

is coming from and it is only fitting that he should often sound like a cockney pub artist parodying himself

harsh well no not harsh at all he was good the young Gavin Martin that's good trying to make

a name for himself the thing is though I mean perhaps the best Trying to make a name for himself. The thing is, though, perhaps the best thing to come out of this period of The Who might be this Top of the Pops performance. They are old pros, and they know how to do Top of the Pops. And Townsend's got this weird double-breasted leather jerkin'. Yeah, he's trying to live in the moment, isn't he?

It's a bit kind of like Futurist jumpsuit. He looks like a bellboy to me, but I think Entwistle is perhaps the oddest looking. Yes. You know that episode of Dad's Army where Jones, Godfrey and Fraser

go around Fraser's and get embalmed to look younger? That's kind of like what Entwistle looks like. I was really offended by his flying V base. That was just wrong.

A flying V needs to be brandished and flung about not not just picked up you know i mean but he likes tapping and all of that stuff you know he's a bass soloist it's like having a fucking harley davidson and just walking up the street pushing it along not right mate are you slagging off thunder fingers the thing is like it does seem, by the time we find them here on this episode of Top of the Pops anyway, you know, I mean, Townsend, since about 71,

for me, just seems to be someone enormously unbittered about pretty much everything about rock as well. He's constantly singing and writing about how rock and roll is stopping him becoming a functioning adult. And the lyrics here are just this half-pissed, let-me-in doggerel that's pretty appalling. I mean, why is he listening to old T-Rex? That really struck me as an odd line.

Yeah, him and B.A. Robertson. Indeed. But also, who's next? Name-checking your own fucking album. There's a great, but also who's next. Yeah. Name checking your own fucking album. That is a great way to kick on who? Yeah. Like Pete Townsend in 1981, he's thinking,

I haven't heard Barbara O'Reilly often enough. But there's also, isn't there that line? You welcome me with open arms and open legs. I mean, come on. Yeah. Oh no.

It's kind of gross. Yeah. Acted by adultery as well. He goes, you welcome me with open arms and open legs yeah the McVicar himself the song and the lyric just seems to revel

in that kind of arrested development thing that he's been moaning about a while but it's revealing revealing of a kind of squalor obviously in Townsend's life at the time a squalor that extends into the way Daltrey snarls you better with that kind of punky you better yeah it's definitely a kind of not a nod to the pistols or anything but he's

definitely aiming for that but as with everything by the who i you know there are certain things i can't eat right not just because i don't like them but because i've had a slightly traumatic sensory memory of them that just creates this kind of instant gag reflex such as eggs right i can't eat eggs oh and people are appalled at this i'm like you got you're missing out that's also how i am about listening to the who right um the who are eggs to me they're just they're just rank what kind of eggs just any kind of eggs al i mean you know map out the who's career by egg by egg come on well they can't explain well to my generation exciting sizzling fried i get that but no but i wanted to cook yeah okay good good good um sell out by the who seller well you know we're talking scrambled i would say right tommy yeah now here we're getting poached right

okay um who are you yeah this hard-boiled shit from then on isn't it it's it's pretty horrible i mean look look don't get me wrong i think all of us here had that little moment in our listening life when we were sent back you know we had to go back because the present was so horrific and my period of my life when i was doing that was entirely conducted under sort of three different auspices really one was the melody maker the other one was that hundred greatest albums book by paul gambaccini and the other was formula 30 now formula 30 had two who tracks on it and one was substitute right and it amazed me i thought it was astonishing. Not only that here was this really combustible sounding band, but also that the lyrics, they seem to have a really true class

consciousness that no other band of that period, perhaps this side of the Kinks, possessed. And even with the Kinks as a young listener, there was a kind of class slipperiness to them. So that even if the sound was quite an interpunk, the lyrics were a bit more diffuse than that. Davis would sing about dead end streets, but it also sing about mansions and poshery, you know, whereas Substitute seemed to be something authentically angry from an underdog. And Substitute pushed me towards the other Who singles from that time. You know, I can't explain anyway, anyhow, anywhere my generation and I can see for miles. where my generation and i can see for miles and i already started having feelings hearing those songs as a kid that man if they'd have come out with those and then i don't know died in a van crash or something that would have been perfect they were as interesting to me as the creation

or john's children or misunderstood or any of those those sort of bands those singles that run of singles is one of the greatest runs of singles in the 60s. They're properly unique. They seem completely disinterested in making friends or becoming stars, really, or appealing. They still feel like things that had to come out of their system. And crucially, even in those early records, you can detect that this is less a band than four massive egos straining against each other. And there's this faint hint of mutual hatred there which is really exciting especially when combined with the people behind them you know andrew lou goldham is more interesting than brian epstein and peter meeson and kit lambert and people like that are even more interesting than andrew lou goldham you know there seemed to be a genuine commitment then to pop art in what they did that rub between the rhythm section this singer who just seemed to want

to be famous really and this guitarist who seemed to be in constant torment it seems really interesting but then you know you watch monterey pop and you see hendrix kill them yes you know the other song on formula 30 was pinball wizard right and that's clearly a later band yeah unfortunately feeling a bit more like townsend's baby and feeling a little less chaotic more like a band i like a twat you know i got out tommy of the library and you know it was one of those moments about halfway through that album where i thought you know stop you've gone too far roll that back a little ponderous ugly music made by ponderous ugly people can i just stick up for the who at monterey by the way the right okay they're penny pick they're fascinating but penny pinching managers had uh just paid for their tickets so all their guitars and amps they had

to hire in america yeah so they didn't sound like they normally did whereas the more streetwise chas chandler had made sure hendrix took a then brand new marshall stack and his own strat with him uh which is why hendrix sounds twice as good at Monterey. The thing is, by the time I heard Tommy, I'd also seen what I still contend is the most horrific image in pop, and that's Roger Daltrey in those beans. And even knowing that, you know, he nearly copped a dose of pneumonia from that photo shoot

was sort of scant consolation, really. Yeah, Substitute was my in point as well neil because it got re-released and he got in the charts in about 1976 yeah yeah so yeah that was the who to me for a long time and then when it became a mod yeah i heard all the early stuff so oh fucking hell this is amazing and i go all the way up to sell out i can't go any further as soon as the fringes and the perms appear yeah that's me out to me they're a definitive singles band that perhaps should have stayed as a singles band but i mean you know they're one of those bands who i'm pushed towards you know my entry points quite often and i just can never do it the look of adultery is a big part of this i am it just

revolts me you know adultery in those beans Right. It was less grim when I thought that the item in the foreground was a sausage. Like, you know, you get beans and they got a sausage in. I thought that's what it was meant to be. Then when I realised it was his leg, it was worse. You thought it was a savoury 99, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, I ended up watching the tommy film and like all ken russell films that you see in childhood it kind of freaks you out with the intensity of it but it was just

repellent and to be honest i've never really been able to get over that i mean i really wasn't blown away as promised by live at leeds and and who's next was an album where you know reading about town's end's initial concept i mean that concept for life house is it his project that he had you know i found that concept much more exciting if bizarre than its truncated kind of realization this idea he had the grid you know and he didn't he'd sort of like get biometric data about all the audience members and feed into this kind of communal musical moment. I mean, there's moments of excitement, don't get me wrong, even in the later stuff.

So in Won't Get Fooled Again, that big scream is ace, but it's done better by Iron Maiden on Number of the Beast. You know the worst thing about Lifehouse, by the way, when they were first starting like preliminary work on that they did some gigs at the young vic in london right to try and work on this idea that talented out of like creating an amazing transcendent connection between the audience and the band and yeah to the point where you could hit a certain chord and the audience would disappear you know and what actually happened was um it just degenerated into the hoodoo in a version of bony maroney while some skinheads kicked each other's heads

and it didn't go well it was a little bad omen straight away but this performance this isn't the who that anyone wants is it the older elements of uh the top of the pop's audience are going to want to see daltrey just swinging his mic around and people of my age want ready steady go all over again but we get neither yeah well the 60s who would have made much more of the chorus and like taylor says there's these big blustery sort of bollocky bits in between the chorus is the point of this song so the big blustery bits it's a long-winded getting to that core let's put it that way yeah to me the only good thing they do post 1967 is roger daltry's horrific death by botched tracheotomy in shite 78 horror film the legacy that's a marvelous moment but i

perhaps have taken a dislike to the who which is unfair i mean there's loads of 70s rockers who did morally far more appalling things, who did, you know, but their sound is seductive, so I don't care. I find The Who rarely seductive like that. They were very blustery to me. And that's even before we get into

the individual members. I just don't like any of them, you know what I mean? Keith Moon, selfish prick. John Intwistle, nasty prick. Pete Townsend, balls-achingly earnest prick. And Roger daltrey king brexit you know i don't like his liking of enoch i don't like his quote about hitler

which was oh well he said at some point in the mid 70s i think he said you need someone who's going to make people jump you need a hitler figure to just say this is what it is and then he goes on to say and hitler was right for Germany at the time. They were being really being shit on. He turned out mad in the end, but when he started, he was there. He just did marvelous things for the German people.

You just need a Hitler figure internationally for kids. One other thing that one of, it wasn't the thing that bonded me and my missus but we both were repulsed by roger doctrine i will never ever forget one night when i suggested to her a dream that i wanted her to have because i wanted to see how terrifying it could be the dream is this because my my wife like a lot of girls who grew up in the 1970s, was massively fancied Robert Powell as Jesus Christ, you know. So I suggested this dream to her, that she's following Jesus up a biblical hill, you know,

and she's following him up, and she thinks it's Robert Powell, and she gets to the top of the hill following Jesus, and she touches the sort of hem of his garment or his shoulder, and he turns around, and instead of the beautiful blue eyes of of powell jesus it's adultery adultery jesus yeah yeah and just even coming out with that makes me shiver because he's just vile so yeah i she's expecting this hollow-cheeked purity, and she got what looked like a hard Phil Neville. Yeah. But, I mean, I do want to stress,

when the Who are exciting, they're tremendously exciting. But I just think that that didn't last long enough for me. I mean, that performance of them doing Any Way, Any How, Any Where on Ready, Steady, Go is fucking astonishing. Yeah, one of the high points of post-war British culture. And so it always offends me when I see it on YouTube and there's some comment underneath berating the Reddiffusion cameramen

and directors for shaking the camera about during the drum solo. It's fucking offensive, man. That's the best bit. There's some American twat who wants to see how fucking Keith Moon's doing the paradiddles. Fuck off. Have you ever seen that on YouTube, Pop Craze Youngster?

Have a fucking word with him. I mean, it's a really exciting performance, that. And also, you know, I've got to say, just from a music journalist

geek angle, reading Nick Conn on The Who, he's amazing on The Who. He's really thrilling about that band. And that was a big part of my sort of really getting into that early stuff yeah hence the disappointment later you know

one of those bands like the pet shop boys like zapper where i'm more than willing to read about them because an awful lot of people have written good stuff about them and knowledge the importance the legacy the lineage or something but i have next to no interest in listening to them sort of post 67 really yeah yeah the thing about daltry irrespective of his rock horse face his main musical problem is that he's always had a great natural voice in terms of power and attack regardless of what you think of the sound of it but he's very often used it in ways which don't do him any favours. He never really knew what was good for him. So you hear him on this record trying to interpret these smashed-up, garbled lyrics just in any way he can, which for him means bombastic shouting

with occasional real speech inflections, Broadway style. But it all feels daft because he doesn't know what town's ends on about um they didn't communicate well enough for town's end to explain it to him so he's just putting the inflections on random words you know or to give him a bit more credit he's timing those inflections for musical and rhythmic variation rather than any internal narrative logic in the lyrics. But that's how we get to this track's insane peak moment, which is where he sings. I know I've been wearing crazy clothes and I look pretty crappy sometimes. Crappy! Sometimes!

Although, tragically, that gets lost in this performance because this is a re-recording or more likely a remix with live vocals rather than just miming. But it's there on the record and it's the best bit. He always had the same problems. If you listen to the very early Who, Daltrey is trying really hard to resist their transition from a London R&B covers band to a new style pop art group,

even though that's what elevated them out of the pack and made them big. Yeah. And not just the Yardbirds. And also, despite the fact that he sings those new songs beautifully with exactly the right blend of toughness and sincerity and vulnerability. It's a genuine emotional street voice. Whereas on the stuff that he wanted The Who to be doing, like James Brown covers and especially their version of I'm a Man by Bo Diddley, which made it onto the first LP.

His singing is ridiculous. It's so stylized and affected that it's just absurd. He's trying to sound like Howlin' Wolf, and it's more like Howlin' Cockapoo. Like, beyond Blackthroat, to the point where he just sounds like he's doing a funny voice. Have you ever heard this? He goes,

have you ever heard this fucking bizarre but he resisted the move away from that material to the more innovative stuff because accepting that meant ceding control of the band to town's end who was a middle class art student from healing while dalttery was a rock hard sheet metal worker from acton and if you're not from london you might not quite understand the difference between healing and acton there's a difference um the fact that the tension between those two things and those two worldviews turned out to be the who's main feature and selling point and ultimately the point of the band in the end that was a curse because it meant that they then had to preserve the tension between those two men endlessly to keep

it going and doltry rode that out because he was fundamentally unflappable perhaps a little too thick to be flappable whereas townshend was a massive neurotic to the point where it almost killed him which is how he ended up like this pete townshend writing songs like this one about being a self-loathing middle-aged failure of a human being um delivered by a bopping adultery yeah as though with a roar of a lion triumphant in battle. So you get Townsend with his expression of vague contempt and he's got like a trendy haircut that looks shit because he's going thin on top. And he's still chasing fashions because he still believes in youth, even though he's not young anymore

and he doesn't know what else to do. And he's in the same spiral where he spent most of his adult life, smashing his guitar to express the frustration of being caught in a showbiz trap and then realizing that the guitar smashing itself has become showbiz and a trap of its own so he smashes another to let out that frustration and so on it's the exact same psychological loop as alcoholism which he also had and at the same time this is why he became such a key figure especially for critics in the 70s yeah like his life and career working with adultery was the perfect illustration of that tug between art and

showbiz or principles and commerce with which rock music discourse was obsessed for 20 years. And because he was the most articulate and verbal and self-analytical of that generation, he was very aware of this conflict, and it became an obsession, this perpetual self-flagellation, you know. And so everything he said and did after about 1969, he's like an old dissident, endlessly picking over the failed revolution except from a throne rather than from a prison cell um and he knows that he sounds pampered

and out of touch he knows that he is and he looks pretty crappy sometimes and he feels guilty about that as well yeah yeah and we're supposed to care. And it's awful, really. The perfect Pete Townshend story from this period, which I'm sure everyone knows, is the night that inspired the song Who Are You, when he went out in Soho and bumped into Steve Jones and Paul Cook from the Sex Pistols in a club.

And he went into a half-hour rant about how they had to save rock and roll from from stagnation and wipe away the useless old cunts like him because they were young and valid and he's a rotten old drunken has been who should be burnt up in the fiery cloud of their liftoff and jones and cook just sort of sat there shuffling nervously, no idea what he was talking about. And then when he finished, they asked him when The Who were going to be touring again, because The Who were their favourite group. And Townsend screamed, went off his nut,

tried to hit someone, and shortly afterwards was ejected from the nightclub. He might have made a better critic, perhaps. I mean, he might have made a better critic perhaps i mean he might be a good writer about music but i mean the thing is these neuroses don't get me wrong a lot of neuroses can be part of rock and roll but it's precisely those neuroses that stop rock happening sometimes the excitement of rock and roll happening at least yeah i mean i find townsend a really interesting figure and when i've ever sort of read him talking about music, he's very insightful and he's a smart chap.

But it's precisely that smartness which forestalls the pleasure in their music. And whereas in those 60 singles, you know, those records sound like a fight. I mean, they sound like a fight between four people in a sense there's a togetherness there but there's a tension there yeah whereas of course by the 70s moon was pretty much um not inept what's the word sort of a fucking nightmare nightmare in all kinds of ways but but fundamentally not up for a fight as it were he was too busy cherry

bombing toilet bowls and stuff so apart from with his wife well yeah yeah but but but that that crucial dynamic that makes those singles those yeah you can't be stressed in the fact that i know singles are but that dynamic had gone so it does seem to me when i listen to 70s who the main dynamic is between doltry and townsend doltry is just like taylor says unapologetically and totally. And I think this isn't even a, he's commercially minded and that is it. And I don't even think that's a lacking in him. I just think that's what he sees music as. Yeah.

And that he doesn't want to go back to working in a sheet metal factory. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or a trout farm. The way they're being presented on Top of the Pops, it's like, here are the great survivors of the 60s who have picked their way through the wreckage of the 70s, and here they stand, ready to face a new decade. But out of all four of them,

you'll notice we haven't said one thing about Kenny Jones, because there's absolutely nothing to say about it. He's just a drummer, and that's how he's treated. But out of all four members of that band only one of them looks anywhere near ready to kick on into a new decade yeah yeah yeah and the problem is he's got to funnel everything through doltre who just wants to carry on being the rock horse it's a curse for tanda because neil's absolutely right that he was a good rock critic and he considered himself a good rock critic and said so on several occasions. And the curse, and I don't know if you find this, but I certainly do, the curse of having naturally good critical instincts is that you end up turning them on yourself.

Yeah. And it can paralyse you in some ways yeah it's impossible for me to look back at anything i wrote when i was like you know in my 20s or 30s and not think it's disgusting because i know i could do it better now but that's not healthy right that's not a healthy way of looking at your life that's really only like an inversion of pete townsend who looked back at when he was 20 or 21 and thinks oh i'm shit now and i was great then you know the exact opposite of most people yeah and the terrible thing is that like me he's right and that at 20 or 21 he had the emotion and the vision to write songs like the kids are all right which articulate

adolescent feelings in a in a coherent and insightful way but are still transmissions from the inside and are still about the moment and are still authentically youthful in that they behave as though the future does not and cannot ever exist have you ever seen him on that program a whole scene going from yes yeah yeah yeah he's like 20 years old and he's obviously on speed and he's sat there twitching and he's taking questions from the audience and it's the greatest interview with a rock star i've ever seen because everything he says is brilliant and perfect it's the one where he says the problem with rock music is when you start trying to introduce quality to it he's going to think about our group we haven't got any quality and it's the audience can't understand him

and they're saying things like well why don't you try and put some quality into it yeah and it's like no no you're missing the point it's rock and roll it's not supposed to have quality the quality is somewhere else it's not where you're looking yeah he knew all of this he understood it and he could articulate it so when the future that he was pretending would never exist suddenly did exist he stuck to this grand theme of youthful confusion and he found himself writing about being a confused adolescent which is not the same thing at all and he couldn't hack it because he knew it wasn't as good like i like the much maligned quadrophenia the owl right right for all its proggy filigree and waffle and all the bits where roger daltrey has to deliver gilbert and sullivan like recitations

because townsend can't fit all the words into the tune which doesn't sound lovely i'll grant you but i think it's a genuine achievement in that it does express those deep teenage feelings in the best way that you can hope for from a slightly older man accurately with some distance and wisdom but it's shot through with self-hatred because he knows this is worse than writing the kids are all right so you get all this tortured bluster right so to me that album is the high point of the beard and brandy years of the who but fucking out right one of the key songs on that album is the punk and the godfather which is a song he wrote about the relationship between him and his audience but it's not his actual audience it's his idealized audience it's this

imaginary audience who all hate him for what he's become so in the song you've got this scrappy 60s street kid mod who's voiced by adultery jimmy from quadrophenia right addressing pete townsend himself but it's the pete townsend of 1973 as though he's fallen back through a time warp and it's a really overblown high concept you know pub prog thing and it's a really overblown, high-concept, you know, pub-prog thing. And it's the most thorough and unsparing self-immolation you'll ever hear in song. So he has this kid sing to the rock star, you declared you would be three inches taller. You only became what we made you.

You thought you were chasing a destiny calling. You only earned what we gave you. Now you're watching movies trying to find the feelers you only see what we show you and he's inventing punk three years early but top down and it's not even actual punk it's the music journalist concept of punk do you know what i mean and it did create that discourse because it was like a time paradox because a lot of those original punk writers were old who fans who'd grown up listening to this stuff so in the middle section it drops out and you've just got the synth going me me me me and town's

then comes in with his wobbly high voice like a 12 year old richard man Manuel off school with a cold and in audible anguish he sings back to this kid I have lived your future out by pounding stages like a clown and on the dance floor broken glass and bloodied faces slowly pass the empty seats in numbered rows it all belongs to me you know and it's really uncomfortable to listen to because you're listening to a breakdown formed into a song but you can see why 70s music writers considered that more interesting than wings yeah i mean yeah paul mccartney also wrote a song about how he imagined the experience of going to one of his own 1970 stadium gigs the song rock show from 1975 and the lyrics to that go behind the stacks you glimpse an axe the tension mounts you score an ounce and i wonder town's it was so fucking lonely and depressed

but that's the thing loneliness i mean the thing is if town's end say had split from the who in 1970 and become a singer-songwriter now i don't think he's got the voice for it to be honest with you but what he needs in a band is somebody to enforce a little concision on him and and just to say cheer up mate i know that sounds daft but a balancing ego if you like a balancing ego now what he's doing in the 70s Townsend, he's drowning in his neuroses. And who has he got as bandmates? He's got two total hooligans in the rhythm section.

And he's got somebody who just wants to lamp him as his frontman. So, you know, he's not got that person saying, oh, maybe we could cut that. You know what I mean? Composition of who you seem to be, this thing that are constantly almost sickened by Townsend's indulgence, but without that indulgence, there is no band. I can't help but think, Chavs,

about the terrible bind that The Who and Townsend in particular are in in 1981, because, you know, he's got a solo career on the go, and you get the feeling he'd like to keep it that way for at least a bit, but as we know the who have started spunking their money on films you know that the budget for quadrophenia was two million pound would you believe so the only way to finance that is either to knock out huge selling

albums or relentlessly touring the old tunes out and on this showing they clearly can't do the former anymore so it's hello to non-stop tommy gigs for the rest of the decade and when you compare them to their peers who are still about you know it's obvious that paul mccartney and the rolling stones still have the ability to knock out a decent new tune every now and then and we'll be hanging around through the 80s or you know in the case of led zeppelin accepting that they can't go on without a key component and calling it a day but i'm afraid to say that what we're watching here on top of the pops sounds like a band shoulder in the last straw before resigning themselves to

being a heritage act yeah i mean the stones have got what about two three more years of making good songs before they disappear into nothing. But at least they managed it, you know? Yeah. The Who are not managing that at all. Yeah, but the Stones believed in rock and roll and Paul McCartney believed in pop. Yeah. So they could still churn something out.

At this point, Pete Townshend is only really able to express himself artistically as this kind of mess of neurosis you know i mean it's it's not going to be commercial and it's not going to be much like the who you know when he was just windmilling and having a good time so yeah yeah he can't do it he can only create things that kids aren't interested in now it's a slightly i mean it's maybe not slightly it's a toxic relationship but you know how people can get institutionalized to toxic relationships and yeah adultery can function without the who you know he doesn't particularly want to because it's still a money maker townsend i don't think can function without that dynamic he's so used to it by that's funny i'd

assume it was the other way around because no one's going to want to listen to a Roger Daltrey solo LP in 1981. Daltrey will go where the hits are. Daltrey will go where he thinks is commercially viable. Townsend, I don't think, can let go of The Who. Otherwise, why wouldn't he already? Why does he need The Who? If it's all this aggravation, why doesn't he just do a solo album,

get some session guys in, go around bloody Ronnie Wood's house or something and get something recorded? Well, he did. He'll put out all the best cowboys have chinese eyes a year from now if he's disgusted with what he's become which seems to be disgusted from about 1971 onwards why does he keep coming back why did the who keep coming back it's an addictive toxic relationship for him i think yeah that's precisely what's thrilling about their 60s records but as the 70s go on it really does seem like him town's end that is against the rest of the band which probably isn't the way it was but that's the way these records well that's how these records come across that there is the only creative force in the band

but the rest of the band can't stand him i mean the only half decent who record from this period is sung by town's end eminence front oh yeah well they tried to have an actual contemporary sound on it as well yeah like which doesn't just mean playing a blustery who song and and you know making the drums splash a bit so it sounds like a modern i mean it's constructed like an 80s record. But Daltrey can't do that. No, and wouldn't want to. No, God certainly not. Because he feels like he's put his flag in the ground. Yeah. And this is what we do, isn't it?

This is what people pay to come and see The Who. And he's absolutely right, it is. What we're talking about did at least give us the extraordinary album The Who by Numbers. Have you ever heard that? From the bleak season of 1975 and it's like the high point of that tortured self-loathing inverted narcissist version of the who or version of pete townsend you know and it's real grot it's all these solipsistic songs about

obsessive self-destructive anxiety it's around the time pete town's in turn 30 so it's full of songs called things like however much i booze and you know how many friends have i really got and stuff he opened songs with lines like i see myself on tv i'm a faker a paper clown as if anyone's meant to care you know people listen that going wow you saw yourself on tv fucking brilliant what were you being pulled up by the ears by chris tarrant on tiswell this is what anybody else thinking and he's ending songs with lines like goodbye all you punks you see what i mean goodbye all you punks stay young and stay high hand me my checkbook while i crawl off to die like a woman in childbirth grown ugly in a flash that's nice i've seen magic and pain now i'm recycling trash so which the only

answer is well don't do it yeah yeah yeah yeah and also this is not something that ever seemed to hold back david bowie or can or leonard cohen or anyone else who was interesting and interested in their 30s it just wasn't an issue because they hadn't nailed everything to their own youthful energy and frustration yeah dooming themselves to pantomime in in in later life and of course that means pete townsend trying to stay youthful ends up sounding like the least youthful person on the planet. There's a line on The Who by Numbers which goes, I lose so many nights of sleep worrying about my responsibilities. Has there ever been a less rock and roll line than I lose so many nights of sleep worrying about my responsibility this is what paul weller was trying to dodge when he split up the jam at the age of 23 he started wearing cycling gear and singing about milton

keynes he didn't want to be doing you better you bet in 1994 god no it might have been an improvement on her oh yeah to be honest yeah that was the thing that's the thing i mean you know as soon as you hit 30 to be honest with you you start dwelling on the good times you start dwelling on those bits of your past you know and a large part of the rest of your life is spent doing that don't get me wrong it doesn't make for music it doesn't make for rock and roll i'm not saying you have to plaster on a smile and face a face of future but you know perhaps get out of yourself a little bit um would have been good for townsend i think yeah have a drink no but from 71 onwards i mean look i understand why you know he's he's he's lived through one of

the most thrilling periods of pop music history and he's been a part of it yeah but you cannot just spend the rest of your career endlessly bitterly dwelling on that fact and what has been lost since and i think if the who were more of a not democratic proposition but i'm looking i mean townshend had been challenged more rather than by a pig shit thick cunt like doltry but somebody with you know ideas beyond pure commercial success he he would have developed better but by the time we find him here it's just endless this end and i'm not going to say self-pity because he you know tanzan would reject that himself i think um it is slightly drunken slightly red-eyed um self-piteous but yeah he's just endlessly from about 70 onwards i think just

dwelling on the past he can't get over it that once he felt excited and now he feels dead i mean that's great turn that into one song i'm not so yeah it's been the rest of your career out of it and he couldn't shake himself loose from adultery because adultery was his connection to who he thought he was writing for which was like rough lads who you know can't express themselves so they need somebody else to do it for him and as you know like a lot of lower middle class people he felt like a link between the working class and the artistic middle class um and that's what he was explicitly trying to do and it must have been soul destroying to him that the personification

of the people he thought he was writing for was like yeah i don't want this i don't like this yeah can't we just do i can't explain again yeah maybe the this song's not about a nagging girlfriend who keeps saying you better it's about fucking doltry yeah but the thought of doltry opening his legs and mind to pete townshend isn't a pleasant one but you only you only have to watch Compost Corner to understand that. As far as Top of the Pops is concerned, and this performance, Daltrey is the absolute front person of The Who, because he's bagging the lion's share of the camera here

with some very awkward cutaways from Townsend. But this week's Enemy News section explains all. Quote from that news piece at the Who press launch. Pete also explained the reason that he wasn't anywhere to be seen on the recent Who appearance at Top of the Pops, their first in eight years, was because the director, unused to Townsend's windmill actions on the guitars,

mistook his flailing arms for a fascist salute and therefore concentrated on doltry. Do you believe that? Fucking mencle. Because the thing is, Townsend's holding up a raised fist. Yeah. But mind you, Donald Trump does that nowadays, because that's the right wing, isn't it? They always nick all the good left-wing stuff.

Cunts. That might not be true, but I really hope it is. Also means you get a lot of John Entwistle, which at least evens it up after years and years and years of TV appearances where you never saw John Entwistle. I was going to say anything else to say. I interviewed him once, Pete Townshend. Yeah, in the 90s.

Really? Obviously. Not a proper in-depth interview, because people like me would never be allowed to do that. It was a thing for rebellious jukebox in Melody Maker. Right. People would list their favourite records and talk about them. Was it face-to-face or a phone-up?

Face-to-face. I did it at his house up by Heel Pie Island. Wow. list their favourite records and talk about them. Was it face-to-face or a phoner? Face-to-face. I did it at his house up by Heel Pie Island. Wow. So we were sat in the little recording studio built onto the side of his house. And I found out years later from reading his terrible autobiography and working out the chronology,

this was about a fortnight after he'd finally given up drinking, which explains why his hands were shaking so badly every time he lit a marlboro light which was very very often either that or he was nervous being in the presence of the great taylor polk's a melody maker come on yeah it's probably probably a bit of both wouldn't it really if you're being honest but he was exactly as i expected and in a way exactly as i'd hoped he was still completely obsessed with what was young and new right more so now that he was effectively excluded from it so he was asking me about i don't fucking know you know but it was the

mid 90s so he was full of the possibilities of the internet for music and music writing, as though that effect was going to be something more than simply to fragment and impoverish. Bless him. Poor bastard. It's all his own fault, but, you know. We all felt like that at the time, though, Taylor. Which of us honestly can't say that everything is our own fault?

You know, still doesn't mean it's fair. And if you want to know what it was like working for Melody Maker at that time, when it finally went into the paper, someone changed the spelling of his name so it was wrong. Oh! It took the H out. It took the H out, yeah, sorry. Yeah.

So the following week, you bet stayed at number nine before dropping down the chart. But Face Dancers entered the LP chart at number 3 a week later, and then spent two weeks at number 2, held off number 1 by Kings of the Wild Frontier. The follow-up, Don't Let Go the Coat, only got to number 47 in May, and they finished the year with Athena getting to number 40 in October. Although they put out the LP It's Hard in 1982, garnering an American single hit with Eminence Front,

a fault line developed between Townsend, who wanted the band to stop touring and become a studio-only concern, and Doldtry and Entwistle, who respectively wanted to whirl a microphone about and then throw it dead eye and catch it or just stand there in an enormous dome for the rest of their lives which resulted in their farewell tour in late 1982 and after townsend attempted to write their final contractually obligated lp for polydor he gave gave up, bought himself and Kenny Jones out of their contracts and announced he was leaving in December of 1983. However, they reunited for their final gig at

Live Aid in 1985, their final tour in 1989, their final gig in 1996, their final tour, in 1999, their final tour, in 2000, their final tour, in 2002, even though, John N. Twissell, died in a Las Vegas hotel, the night before,

the first date, their final LP, Endless Wire, in 2006, their final tour, in 2012, 2015, and 2016,

their final LP, Who, in 2019 2019 and their final tour which finished last year and they'll be beginning their final tour in Hull this July there's still time to die before I get old tour You better make a choice Oh, look at you

Just like a lady 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. From the open, Faith Garces, that's The Who, and You Better, You bet at number nine.

Something really delicate from Stevie Wonder is released. It's in the chart at 18. And Lex and Kurt are going to dance to it. It's called Legally. Pow! With his hand in his pocket and adopting a pose which my non-art would have described as slorming about

introduces something really delicate that's going to be emoted to by Legs & Co. It's Lately by Stevie Wonder. We've covered Steve and Morris a time or two, and this, the follow-up to I Ain't Gonna Stand For It, which got to number 10 in January of this year, is the third cut from his 19th LP, Hotter Than July, which came out last September.

It entered the charts for Fortnite to go at number 57, then soared 30 places to number 27. And this week, it's up nine places to number 18, causing Legs & Co to embark upon a second wave of daddisfaction. And yeah, Neil, I didn't know that this was Pauline's last ever performance on Top of the Pops, and it's a shame they didn't let her pog it. Indeed. Truth be told, I wasn't really looking at Legs & Co doing this. performance on top of the pubs and it's a shame they didn't let her pod get indeed the truth be

told i wasn't really looking at legs and kojo in this i was staring at the strange granulated ball hanging down to the right yeah which looks like a big scotch egg well it just made me repeatedly yearn for the long-wanted bliss of ear syringing oh what a dream but no it's barely dance isn't it what they're asked to i mean which you can't really dance to this record anyway it's more of a selection of sort of one and two point balances with them dressed in some sort of strange blend of native american tribal dress they've been given an absolute dog to dance to it in terms of dancing but it's not a bad song starts with rosie jill and sue depicted in close-up forming a pyramid shape, possibly in tribute to the cover of Zenyatta Mondatta,

while Lulu lies on the floor of a very sparse set which features a long blue bit of fabric that's just been draped at an angle and a brown crusty globe hanging down like a big scotch egg. And that's your lot, Legs and Co. Here you go. They're supposed to look like you know full of eastern promise aren't they like the turkish delight advert the overall effect is

a turkish delight advert shot during a technician strike isn't it yeah but you're right it's got to be the least mobile dance routine i've ever seen now their fit bits barely registered it they don't do any of the horsey horsey or the the knee pointing most of it is just hot girl on girl staring yeah yes yeah it's got quite an erotic charge you know if it if you didn't know they were trying not to giggle and i discovered this is rose's favorite legs and coat before really yeah and you can sort of see why because it's classy in it yeah in the same way as the record which is to say 1981 classy and they look very nice and they're not made to look silly like normal but also like the record it's immobile and a bit unengaging i think i don't know if that's a controversial view no it's not exactly controversial i mean for me when i heard this track because it's

been a while since i've heard this track well they're being familiar with it as we all were i think you know it's fairly big here for me it sounded like it wouldn't be out of place on the oft-forgot Stevie album that I think everyone should listen to the most, in a way, fulfilling this first finale. It sounds like something off that. It reminds me of something like They Won't Go When I Go. Yeah. Or kind of a ballad of songs in the key of life,

something like Ask. So it's a good song. It's a good song, but yeah, its immobility is part of its point. It's kind of a static song, and consequently the dancing reflects that. I can't believe it's a favourite, but perhaps it's precisely, yeah, song and consequently the dancing reflects that i can't believe it's a favorite but perhaps it's precisely yeah it's that classiness that staticness that

puts it in our affections yeah but yeah i wasn't looking at legs and care i was strange i was looking at that weird what is it what is that thing meant to represent i can't quite get it did they nick it off a set of blake seven or something it does look like something like that it's probably got eyes on the other side or something, I don't know. But the song, is this Stevie Wonder's last great ballad? I fucking love it. Well, what ballad has he done after this that we should be aware of? Well, forget it.

I just called to say I love you. Well, this is it. This is it. And that's the cut-off point, isn't it? Yeah. We're not messing with Stevie after that or even with that. Yeah. So, yeah.

I mean, it's the black american talking in your sleep by crystal gale isn't it there's something going on behind his back yeah i i always say it's about stevie wonder but with a lot of artists you love the stuff that they did in one period and then you hate the stuff they did in some other period but with stevie wonder i find this split happening on the same albums right like there's always something that is the greatest thing i've ever heard and then there's something that sounds like an ass and it's unsettling to me because obviously in terms of talent stevie wonder is in the top circle you know he's one of the relatively small group of people who

were genuinely musically and creatively gifted and didn't need the egalitarianism of popular music to express themselves except in terms of escaping his background obviously in purely musical terms he's one of those who could well have been composing concertos for the court in 1835 you know if he wasn't a blind black man you know there's a good chance that on talent he could have been there sat next to you know paul mccartney and brian wilson but baccarat to the point where some of it is actually frightening to any mortal musician who can see what he's doing but has no idea how he came up with yeah but his middle of the road streak is a big problem for me even on his best records right although i've never quite understood the phrase middle of the road

because first of all okay if you're in the middle of the road you've got edgy and challenging music on one side of you and on the other what yeah and also since when was the safe choice to be in the middle of the road yeah that sounds riskier than almost anything exactly yeah when stevie's soft he's very soft indeed and and you know when i first came to songs in the key of life which is one of my favorite albums now i was initially daunted by some of those balladic kind of songs. They are. They're soppy. They're not soppy. They're sweet. Yeah, I used to go straight for, you know, live it in the city and the funk stuff much more than the ballads. I think as I've got older, I see how he's weaving something that you've got to kind of put yourself in for the duration of.

something that you've got to kind of put yourself in for the duration of and eventually you stomach it um and i don't mean it's difficult to stomach but eventually you take that even as a young listener it's like when as a young listener when everyone's telling me to listen to forever changes right yeah i've got to say the first time say i listened to forever changes i was like this is dead soft you know what's going on here um i'm not really into this but then of course it grows on you and that's what happened with me with stevie sly stone presented no such problems but stevie did songs in the key of life is a long record and there's some very very soft sappy stuff on there but as you get older i think yeah it becomes it becomes more amenable to you and lately is from that side of him i haven't i've got to admit checked out the album that this is from because i do kind of part

company with stevie after songs in the key of life, really. I have the occasional moment when I go for the Private Life of Plants, but, yeah, I mean, I sort of avoid 80s Stevie because of that horrible record that's coming down the pipe in a few years. The Secret Life of Plants. The Secret Life of Plants, I should have said. The Private Life of Plants kind of, like, suggests, you know, stamen action. I think what it is, I can take some people's middle of the road leanings

because what happens is it gets mixed in with what they usually do. And the amalgam that comes out is unusual and interesting. Like Forever Changes, it's like there's that little bit of middle of the road strings mixed in with this like psychotic, sort of unpleasant man music. But Stevie's command of music is so effortless that when he decides to do middle-of-the-road, he just snaps his fingers and it's just instant, super slick middle-of-the-road. There's no errors or mutations. He just does it. And there it is.

And I never like it, know and i mean i like all the different kinds of music disco classical military band yeah i think that's all of them but i struggle with this kind of thing you know you are the sunshine of my life and all that like stuff from his good period and i don't like it. And this is a superior slick ballad. Because it's by Stevie Wonder. Before he completely lost it. And I like some things about it. I can appreciate the way that.

The hook line rises up quickly. And then slowly flutters back down again. Like an autumn leaf. It's very smartly done. And it worked. Because I remember this being on the radio at the time very clearly and at this age i was aware of the charts but i only registered the stuff that was actually memorable yeah so it's clearly not terrible or forgettable it just doesn't do

anything much for me it's like it's too nicely done you know so it just has to join a bunch of other stevie wonder records with a bunch of kate bush records um weather report you know paul simon stuff that i can see is good i just don't respond to it i heard this on the radio once and i just burst into tears man i envy you just just going through all manner of shit with my girlfriend at the time and I was in the paper shop getting some Bacchae and Rizzlers before going to work and it came on and it just stopped me in my tracks and just

fucking lost it man which is something I wouldn't have done in 1981, he would have been like can we have something else please yeah you do need to fall in love and get your heart broken to understand a lot of Stevie stuff. I haven't really investigated Hotter in July as much as I should,

but I do note in the track list, he does his own version of a song he wrote in the 60s for Tammy Terrell, which is called All I Do Is Think About You, which never got released. It's one of the greatest Motown songs ever. Definitely one of the greatest slow Mot songs ever definitely one of the greatest slow motown songs ever you need to investigate it only came out on cd a few years ago it's fucking incredible video playlist but i mean he's not in the studio but no in contrast to an awful

lot of the 60s figures we're seeing this year stevie is coming out of this with dignity yeah you know yeah for now for now i mean his last great single to my mind was do i do a year later but yeah after that gets hard it does get very difficult but fucking hell what a run oh yeah what if you for the only thing you'd ever done was superstition on sesame street it could have made 25 albums that sounded like fucking Mumford & Sons. It wouldn't matter. He did it. He did the greatest thing anyone has ever done in music. So the following week, Lately soared 12 places to number 6

and a fortnight later began a two-week run at number 3. The follow-up, Happy happy birthday did even better getting to number two in august behind green door by chicken steven hey excellent slates and co dancing the sticky wonders lately and this is two out of two Hey, excellent. Legs & Co. Dancing to Sticky Wonders lately. And this is two out of two for Phil Collins. Of his LP, Face Value, I missed again.

Hey, excellent. Pursed pile at Legs & Co. As he stands there with his free hand suggestively on his belt buckle in front of a few rows of kids who all look as if they've been made to sit in the corner and think about what they've done to Sharon Redd. He then tells us that it's two out of two for the next act, Phil Collins with I Missed Again. We've chanced upon Phil Collins a couple of times in chart music and this, his second solo single, is the follow-up to In The

Air Tonight, which got to number two only a month ago, held off number one by Woman by John Lennon. It's the second cut from the LP Face Value, which came out last month, and immediately spent three weeks at number one in the album chart, and is still hanging in there in the face of the ant invasion at number two, and it was recorded with the assistance of the Earth, Wind & Fire horn section. It entered the chart of Fortnite to go at number 45, section. It's entered the chart of Fortnite to go at number

45 and the BBC immediately invited him into the stew stew studio if you will, which helped it soar 25 places to number 20. This week it's leapt 6 places to number 14, so here

is a repeat of that performance. Fucking hell, lots of repeats this week. Yeah yeah there's a few in there but anyway that powell introduction where he displays interest at phil collins for having two hits in a row it's a timely reminder isn't it chaps that being the drummer out of genesis wasn't a guarantee of an endless run of hits in early 1981 no no but face value is massive and it's like a showreel of what he can do outside of genesis yes and in a weird way that album not that i sit around listening to it much it does

when you think about all the tracks that became singles and stuff it prefigures the 80s a lot more than perhaps more revered less commercially successful albums do you know what we ultimately have here is an adolescent or young man of the 60s and 70s coming out the other side of the divorce and making music definitely pitched an adult audience i mean it's not that i think phil considers the kiddie stuff beneath him but he's going to dominate the 80s both in bands and out of bands and scoring massive solo hits they're not in any other way analogous but he's like the rod stewart of the 80s in that in that regard it's like what rod stewart does in the 70s and

what he's ultimately saying is comforting it's hey look i know you like these new sounds but you might not like the weirdos using those new sounds i'm going to use those new sounds but i'm going to make music for grown-ups hence its success i think yeah and he could have been on this episode five minutes earlier you know he approached pete townsend a few weeks after the death of keith moon offered up his services but townsend had already asked kenny jones but pete townsend was clearly up for it though and it would have been interesting having phil collins to bounce off yeah how long it will have lasted, I don't know. Thing is, as divorce albums go, I mean, look, obviously, every middle-aged man who's just gone through a separation

can identify with a lyric like, I can feel it coming in the air tonight. But when you listen to a great divorce album like Blood on the Tracks by Bob Dylan, that's an unfair comparison, right? But all right. Or a great divorce pop single like The Winner Takes It All by ABBA. They're full of all these tiny insights and little chilling details with tragic residents and all that stuff.

And face value just seems like some old cunt moaning by comparison it's a difficult balance to get right between magic and some old cunt moaning so they tell me um yeah the original title for chart music that was wasn't it but look we we should probably start with the paint pot on the piano. Round one of Phil Collins versus dignity. And boy, does he come out swinging. Yeah, let's talk about the paint pot, because it's making a return after its debut when he did In The Air Tonight. We all know that his missus ran off with a painter and decorator the year before, and some people assume it's a wry comment on that,

but allow me to direct you to chapter 10 of Not Dead Yet, his 2016 memoir, quote, about that tin of paint. In the Air Tonight comes out as a single in the UK on January the 5th, 1981. Within a week, it's at number 36, and I'm at the BBC, appearing on their Nation Uniting Weekly Chart Show. How am I going to perform the song? I'm still not comfortable standing there

with a microphone, especially on TV, so I'll play keyboards. And my engineer, Rhodian Factorium's Steve Pud Jones says, I'll get a keyboard stand keyboard stand nah looks a bit duran duran to me get a black and decker work mate that'll do okay what we put the drum machine on um a tea chest the tin of paint that's because we're going for rehearsal after rehearsal and the top of the pops producers are desperately trying to make this tea chest look interesting so pud just adds little bits a paint pot so there it is indeed a diy theme to that infamous top of the pops performance but it has nothing to do with my wife going off with a decorator that performance and that paint pot have come back to haunt me time and time

again i mean it needs stressing here that he actually did work as a painter and decorator in the 60s when genesis had just started up and apparently this other bloke was actually a public school type who just lost his job and was acting as the real decorators mate so there we go you think after hanging out with genesis for 10 years uh phil collins would be a little bit sick of being aced out by public school boys wouldn't you i never understood it because it like i always thought it was a bit weird because you can't tell whether it's meant to be ah you're sleeping in my bed with my wife but in the daytime painting walls i'm on top of the pops or you know where horrible paint cunt took my wife but in the daytime we're painting walls and i'm on top of the pops or you know where

horrible paint cunt took my wife away here is his emblem it's a shame that cookholder pop stars didn't use props like phil collins has done you know tony blackburn could have pitched up on top of the pops wearing the nudie woman apron like the one out of robin's nest yeah it's just that nowadays his wife would respond by putting a picture on Instagram of her sitting at a piano with a button mushroom on top of it. I'll tell you what's really funny when you look at him here, by the way. He's not even that bald.

No. It's strange, isn't it? It's like how when you see on the buses now an olive isn't actually particularly fat or ugly. You know, it's like, how did this happen? But anyway, the song, I've got to say, I think it's far superior to In The Air Tonight. Do you?

Yeah, I do, yeah. And I'm saying it right now. Doing chart music has left me with a shocking revelation that I kind of get on with a lot of Aventis, Genesis and Phil Collins. And that's because Collins has pretty much taken over the band by now and he's leaning on his love of 60s black music. He's featured in the top ten in Smash It's His Bits section the other month and he drops Earth, Wind and Fire,

who he says has been his biggest influence over the past few years, The Jacksons the miracles and his all-time favorite group the action who i get into in a very big way in a year or two's time yeah so yeah when it came on the radio back in the day it's like oh this is all right and now appearing on top of the pops after the who more of this please he seems really at ease doesn't he uncomfortable he sort of knows his own limitations and so consequently he's not going to try and look 80s um or dress up well i mean yeah i know he's not that bald but in contrast to the amount of hair going on elsewhere in this episode he's comparatively bald um but he's this kind of dressed down very approachable

avuncular figure he's not going to put makeup on in any way, dress differently in this new decade. And he actually tells us in this decade, you know, that he can't dance. This song, it has a touch of ELO's Evil Woman about it as well, melodically. Oh, yes. Crossed with, as you mentioned, a kind of EWF vibe. The thing is, he's had the hit now, you know,

and he's consequently looking very relaxed. He looks like he literally just got the cab from his gilford home aforementioned to do this and who joins him on stage is a bit odd because they look like cameramen in disguise to be honest with you yes they do i'm not entirely sure if they had any part to play in face value at all it's certainly not the original sax player on this record because because that's Scott in it and it's not him. Is Ronnie Scott the one playing the trumpet? I don't think so. That would be odd. But yeah,

Ronnie Scott. The Ronnie Scott. This new love for late 70s Phil and Genesis. Have you actually dived into Face Value? Are you loving it now? No, I haven't yet. No, because In The Air Tonight puts me off. But I need to listen to Hotter In July and Face Value now. Because you haven't yet. No, because In The Air Tonight puts me off. But I need to listen to Horror In July and Face Value now. Because you haven't finished listening to Duke.

No. And Abba Cab. By this time, Genesis and Phil Collins are on a roll, man. They're shitting out the hits. And, you know, as a curator of pub quizzes, I know that people have difficulty in remembering who did what song you know people think abacab is a phil collins song so i've devised a rhyme that i teach people to help them out and i'd like to share it with the pop craze youngsters if you don't mind so let's hear it if the lyrics

are gibberish the song must be by genesis but if they whine about a cheating wife, that's Phil Collins. You can bet your life. So there you go. That's locked in there now, Al. I will never forget that. Much like my sister's mnemonic for diarrhea, I will never forget that.

Go on. You know, diarrhea is a difficult word to spell. Very difficult word to spell. So just let me lodge this in people's heads. Did it at Robert Redford's house one early afternoon there you go yeah he's a he's a strange man against whom to have a vendetta but i sort of did like like a lot of people after this a few years after this he was just below dire straits and weirdly a five star in my personal rogues gallery at the time when i was a teenager and it's partly just the fact that he was so brazen in his blandness like it was his selling point you know it was like it was his personal brand like sheer and now and that enraged me at a time when i still thought there might be hope

so to stay pure i had to wipe my brain of the feeling that maybe in the air tonight was an imaginative and unusual record and instead just get exercised about stuff like the way he spent most of the 80s copying styles of black american music past and present which maybe he couldn't really pull off in return for which he was worshipped by two generations of black american musicians who clearly knew far less about the subject than i but i'd hear 1999 by prince and then I'd hear Susudio by Phil Collins, and I just couldn't process how the latter was a fractionally bigger worldwide hit.

In the same way that at that age, you can't process how the world won't simply bend to your will, and reality won't bend to your own intuition of what does and doesn't make sense. I mean, this was put out as the lead cut from Face value in America above In The Air Tonight. Yeah, it's more radio friendly.

Taylor, you weren't even persuaded by the proto-industrial grooves of Mama. I know. What it is with Phil Collins is that he wasn't just a good musician. He had actual imagination and feeling in his playing, even though I don't like Genesis, right?

He was a really good drummer. And if you listen to some of the drumming he did on Good Records by other people in the 70s, it's great, you know. And he also had pretty good taste in music. And yet what comes out of him is this terrible gauzy whine, you know. And it annoyed me because it came across the same way he did as pinched and unremarkable and hyper conventional and simultaneously humble and apologetic and sour and grudgeful it's like this kind of rich little man music. Yeah. And it's bloody-mindedly stubborn

in its refusal to venture beyond the crushingly ordinary, you know. And when it does, like on In The Air Tonight, suddenly he sounds talented and the music at least sounds interesting. I mean, is that a better or worse record than Harold the Barrel? But it was his choice to do a kind of pastiche act.

And I think that's partly why he rubs people the wrong way. He made that choice and he didn't have to. Now, probably he just heard a lot of this kind of breezy radio friendly sort of quasi jazz funk pop on the radio and wanted to make one you know which is fair enough and of course he was deliberately going commercial after 10 years in a prog band like the london pro reasserting himself as one of the common men after having to sit behind those public school fops for 10 years with their songs about sentient aubergines and fantastical croquet matches like the streets weren't burning man um it might just have been liberating for him to turn on the radio and think you know what i like this stuff i know how to do it yeah even before you got to the millions of pounds it could potentially make him but the trouble is although he could do it he didn't

really have any flair for it because his problem was he was talented but it wasn't really a creative talent he was a drummer and that's not being schneid it's just a different kind of musicality the fact that he could also sing and play piano and knock a tune together and make it sound technically good i think fooled him into thinking that he was a creative talent but no there's something else you need for that you can be a really good musician you can be multi-talented to a very high professional standard with a a real feel for music and great imagination and all that and still be a horribly pedestrian writer and performer in fact in in this case your horribly pedestrian work will sound so assured and superficially pleasing to the ear

it means it might sell which just makes it worse he does that thing in performance as well repeatedly of sort of chuckling to himself like with the daftness of it all. Yeah, so he doesn't take himself too seriously. Yeah. Al, do you follow him all the way? I mean, is Easy Lover on your radar, Al? Oh, yeah, that's a tune, man. I think that's a fucking great tune. But that's a Philip Bailey song, not a Colin song.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Even I like that one. But it's Phil's drums, and they're great drums. Yeah. Anything else to say about this? It's just, the best of what he did sounds better now, right? It sounds sort of competent and okay. If you can switch off and dream yourself

into the aesthetic universe of Grand Theft Auto. I was just about to say Grand Theft Auto. Yeah, so you're essentially eating the carton empty. But it's easy to forget at the time this was the sound of evil. Yeah. This is the sound of upwardly mobile slime. Yeah. You know, and front lawns being concreted over and filled with pebbles

and turned into driveways for new BMWs with disastrous effects on the local water table. And it was also the sound of adult music like popular big selling music which wasn't specifically aimed at young teenagers you know it's like every phil collins album should have come with a little sign saying done roaming you know hang it on your brain and it sounds silly to say this now because who cares cares about Phil Collins? And if you do, you know, who's got time to hate him? But that's because time has drained the poison. So people can listen to this and think, oh, yeah, it's all right.

But we should probably remember what it was and what it was used for. Yeah. Yeah. And it's probably good to remember as well that his Motown covers that became big hits are some of the most horrible records of the ages. Fucking hell, yeah. They're such defeated and defeating things. That shouldn't be forgotten either.

Yeah. Face Value isn't an album I sit around listening to. I suspect it will be soon. I am going to get to it. By the way... You're not getting divorced, are you, Neil? No, no, no. It's just the time I caught up with all those 80s things

that I hated out of principle and actually hear what they sound like but um do not bother by the way with the police and i don't mean ever because some of their songs pretty good man but their albums do not hold up no um you know i have memories of because my sister was really into the police um and i had memories of the album being good, but she's given me all her albums now, and I listened to a police album the other day, and it was shite. Which one? So just don't bother.

Oh, it's the first one, I think. Is it Outlander's Demour? I can't remember which one it, what it's called. I think it's just called The Police, isn't it? No, Outlander's Demour. Outlander's Demour, yeah, dreadful. Best thing they ever did was Landlord,

the B-side of Roxanne. But yeah, do not bother with the police. Too much jokes. Yeah. Not enough Copeland. that's like jefferson airplane just don't listen to those albums say what the the thing about phil collins i wish that his pent-up rage and resentment could have been given more voice you know and i don't just mean about his wife i mean it's almost fascinating that it's not just that he was crabby and undignified about his own love life. When you look at the rest of his emotional range, you know. You know that thing a few years ago, it came out about how he hates Paul McCartney.

Because he met him and felt really patronised. Yeah, yeah. And it's understandable because that is what Paul McCartney can be like. But what a strange thing to even think about if you're phil collins right you know it's interesting because he spotted that about mccartney which most musicians don't they're just in awe and they let it go i've seen film of paul mccartney outrageously patronizing ozzy osbourne right but ozzy osbourne is just love struck he doesn't care yeah you know whereas bill noticed it and he really cared and got pissed off about it and got a grudge about it

and i don't know what that says about him i just wish there was more of that madness expressed directly in his music you know i would listen to a mystifyingly bitter little twerp like frothing and raging against these smooth expensive backdrops and probably like that more you know rather than just him melting into the metallic finish you know because i've got to be honest this song was a hit and i've heard it a number of times in the past week, and I can't even remember how it goes. Like, frankly, this whole record, to me, is about as memorable as those parts of the song

Living in a Box by Living in a Box that don't go, Am I living in a box? Am I living in a cardboard box? And if you asked me to hum both those songs to you now, my God, what a mess that would be. Luckily, it got better things to do. So the following week, I missed again, dropped three places to number 17. The follow-up, If Leaving Me Is Easy,

got to number 17 in June, and he finished the year with the first cut from his next LP, Hello I Must Be Going, Through These Walls, only getting to number 56 in October. But he'd start 1982 with his cover of You Can't Hurry Love, spending two weeks at number one in January, and he'd coast through the 80s and beyond. Oh, I'm Mr. Gay,

I, I, I, I've been a Mr. Gay. I've been a Mr. Gay. I've been a Mr. Gay. I've been a Mr. Gay. I've been a Mr. Gay. I've been a Mr. Gay. Thor Collins and I'm Mr. Gay.

Excellent single, that. Well, the band who are going to represent us at Eurovision on April the 4th in Dublin have a name which is made up of a simple thing like orange juice and a bit of champagne. Don't let the cord go. It's got to be, and good luck to them. Bucks fit! We return to POW, standing twixt two young ladies

wearing matching horrible blouses with squiggles on them and see-through visors, holding up bottles and clearly preparing to do a bit. Powell tells us that it's Eurovision time once more and explains the name of the group that are going to ride out to Dublin to defend our musical honour by getting one girl to hold up a bottle of orange juice and the other a bottle of champagne. Shame he didn't do the same thing for Candy Flip nine years later, but never mind.

Here's Bucks Fizz and making your mind up. We've become the definitive podcast authorities on Bugs Fizz since we started our odyssey on chart music and this is the single that brought them to the dance. They were formed in late 1980 by the composing management in a relationship team of Nicola Martin and Andy Hill specifically to make a run at the Eurovision Song Contest and their first pick was Mike Nolan a singer from the proto boy band Brooks who was managed by Freya Miller before she guided Comrade Shakey's March to Glory

and originally featured Chris Hamill who went on to be Lamar he went off and recorded the demo of the song that they'd already written with Eurovision 81 in mind, this one. With that demo tape nestling snugly in their pocket, they then offered a spot to Cheryl Baker, who had already represented the UK with Coco in 1978, and while she was making her mind up whether to join the band or not, they held an audition for the missing piece of the

puzzle, opening it up to men and women with the intention of forming a three-piece with two males and one female, but keeping their options if Baker decided against it. But they found it impossible to turn away the Italia Conti graduate and former Miss Pearlie 1978, Jay Aston. The male choice was easy, the theatrical singer Stephen Fisher. But when he landed a part in Godspell at the Young Vic, he had to turn them down, so the spot was offered to a former builder and plumber who had packed it all in to become a pub singer and an understudy for Pontius Pilate in the West End run of Jesus Christ superstar Robert Gubbe, who changed his name to Bobby G.

The brand new four piece immediately signed to RCA and was shoved into Pineapple Studios and put through a two day dance routine boot camp organised by Chrissy Wickham. routine boot camp organised by Chrissy Wickham, the dark-haired one out of Hot Gossip, and eight days ago they took part in a song for Europe, not only crushing the favourites Liquid Gold and Unite, a six-girl band which featured Kathy Hargreaves out of Grange Hill under their heels, but also battering Andy Hill's own band, Gem. RCA rushed out the single by the end of the week and they were instantly adopted by the BBC and flung into a whirlwind of promotional appearances. And although the single hasn't charted yet, the BBC looks after its own.

So, a full 16 days before they sally forth to Dublin to take on Bjorn Bingebonga and his European ilk. Here they are for their first ever Top of the Pops performance. Yes, Jay Aston, Miss Pearlie 1978, chaps. Wow. Yeah, yeah. I watched Miss England 1978 just the other day, in fact. Of course you did, Taylor.

Two worlds collide. Yeah. Yeah. Of course she did, Taylor. Two worlds collide. Yeah. Yeah. Cheryl appears as part of Coco,

who were there as the failed British entry in the 1978 Eurovision Song Contest, dressed as a pride float from the planet Mongo. And Jay is there as a failed contestant. Yes, Miss Pearlie. She didn't get past the first bit, so we don't see her in a bikini no what we do get um no it's basically this is one of the great horrible beauty contests it's hosted by terry you're a connoisseur of them aren't you taylor so you know what you're talking

about i really do it's terrible um hosted by terry wogan in a frilled green shirt that looks like a mint Viennetta, with his Radio 2 piss mop Ray Moore as the voiceover man, which allows Terry to skip those awkward scenes where usually the presenter has to interview the girls with a hand mic, you know, and it's like, well, I have to ask, please, can I just touch you um so instead what happens is they walk down the catwalk while ray off screen makes remarks about them into a microphone it's fucking awful he says things like susan cockett 20 years old and has in fact been involved in the national child

development survey since birth developed rather well i'd have thought oh yeah fixed smile from susan cockett um or things like beverly isherwood miss blackburn her great passion in life is watching golf and a pretty attractive birdie she is herself no he says it he really does say that this was actually fit for broadcast oh yeah janet morris miss scunthorpe a great musician very fond of playing the piano terry was telling me she's got a lovely touch it's a bit disturbing how many of his jokes are about the contestants supposedly having sex with terry wogan but his comments on jay aston are oh yeah probably the worst of all of them um she comes out in a frock uh and he says a rather interesting girl very keen on weight training and she picked up a train to get here tonight now i don't know if he meant to say she caught a train yeah which would make

more sense as a joke right she's into weight training she's very strong she caught a train right i don't know but unfortunately what he actually said he might as well have said she pulled a train to get on this program tonight she's a really unkind suggestion poor jay i mean we see her at the beginning because all the the girls get to introduce themselves i was appalled to see miss nottingham fucking it up oh really i i didn't i didn't look i i don't want to fall into the trap of big and air sats ray moore miss nottingham couldn't even say miss nottingham no but she was the only busty lady in the whole competition right and i can't say i noticed taylor i know well you wouldn't you see you're not a connoisseur of these things but you don't get a lot of busty

women in beauty contests of the old school right so i was just sort of thinking well good for her she didn't let that hold her back and in case you're interested um it's finally won by miss blackburn beverly issherwood largely i think for a storming go in the round where the finalists get interviewed by esther ranson oh god yeah to see what their personalities are like esther comes on and grills them and to be fair beverly issue would miss blackburn does actually have a personality so she wins god beverly issue would best unknown as the original projected letters girl on countdown um really yes until the producers decided that having a dolly dealer for the numbers and a different one for the letters was just

overkill so they axed her not literally as far as i know much to ray more chagrin but uh unceremoniously but anyway this song i mean there's absolutely no point in talking about the song or the routine because if you're listening to child music you know every fucking millisecond of it but i've got to say that when i approached this song with fresh eyes it just immediately hit me it's a it's another fucking rock and roll song isn't it oh yeah yeah i mean you can easily imagine racy doing this with a bit more piano and a bit more drum. Yeah. And they could even bring a girl on so Mr. Racy could rip her skirt off. This could perfectly accompany, to be honest with you, Danny and Sandy on the Shaken Shack. I mean, it's got that Grease soundtrack feel to it.

Yeah, and there's even more hand-jiving going on. Fucking hell. But this record's very important to me. I mean, this was my Falklands, this record. It really was. I absolutely loved this when it Falklands, this record. It really was. I absolutely loved this when it came out. Extremely catchy, great gimmicks, gorgeous people, perfect facial expressions, great production.

It felt like an inevitable winner. We were in that period. I mean, England goes through that period of caring about the Eurovision and then, you know, not caring because actually we're good at music and we don't need to win it. But I think by 81, we were a bit pissed off we hadn't won it for a while so five whole years nil that's a drought isn't it

indeed so we all thought come on it's a great song it's got to win and you know books visit make better records i think london maple even though those days are gone and they'd find themselves like dollar really curiously adjacent to new park but i think this is yeah it's got it's that most irresistible moment it's sort of clever enough not to just be totally dismissible as cheese but it is dumb enough to get in your head on first exposure yeah and i did like and i do think um i'm not totally barking up the wrong tree as a kid i thought the lyrics were kind of half a love song and half like at the judges right you know because there's all this

stuff about making your mind up and going for the right choice and it does feel it's got that that metanus so yeah this was the best moment to be english since the 66 final really yeah the lyrics always confuse me a bit because what do you really have to speed up and then really have to slow down i've lost valuable time pondering this like in fear of having something important in my life running at the wrong speed which is something i've long suspected to be the case possibly oral sex yeah i don't know i mean i'll trust bobby g on that but i've also lost even more valuable time pondering on the exact meaning of the line don't let your indecision take you from behind because if we really have to anthropomorphize individual character traits in this way i'm not sure that's the kind of behavior you'd associate

with indecision no taking you from behind like especially against your will seems a bit assertive to me yeah it's quite decisive isn't it really yeah i mean the only scenario i can imagine is that indecision had already come around the front of you and then decided to go around the back and then it came back around the front again and you were like come on this is ridiculous yeah i can't have this that's all pincer movement yeah to the point where eventually you got so pissed off with it indecision went storming out of the bedroom in tears just screaming look i'm sorry but if i wasn't like this i wouldn't be indecision and if you don't like it why did you fucking marry me and out the door it's the kind of terrible emotional scene that people like

bucks viz just don't think about no and they come swanning in telling everyone what they can and can't do it's terrible they ought to stick to what they're good at which is cybernetics uh blow football and necromancy um it's do you know what i mean it's like a supposed to be a really simple song like they're all they're dressed like two-year-olds you know what i mean it's like a supposed to be a really simple song like they're all there dressed like two-year-olds you know and like washing powder advert colors but the lyrics to this song would bamboozle ted rogers master of the opaque verse you can imagine it like so you've chosen the ripped off knee-length skirt that was brought in by cheryl from bucks fizz you stand there reading off the card you put your rubbish in this cylindrical tub you drive this

down the road it's two weeks holiday in marbella and an 18 piece set of stainless steel steak knives worth nearly 200 pounds now what do you think that might be remember you've already rejected dusty bin you don't have to worry about that you've rejected the car you've rejected a holiday in marbella and you've rejected an 18-piece set of stainless steel steak knives worth nearly 200 pounds now i think in general lyrically uh it's an answer song to shop around by smoky robinson don't you think if the the answer song if the question posed by Shop Around had been, can you write a song that's nowhere near as good as this, and then sing it with about as much guts and aggression

as if you were trying to stop a child crying, the answer to Smokey's question is a resounding yes. See, what we didn't realise at the time was how much it'd fuck up Eurovision chances for a good decade afterwards, you know? But I hugely remember the tension of the night itself. Oh, we'll come to that later, Neil. But yeah, you're right, man.

I mean, this is an updated Brotherhood of Man who actually look like they might be in their 20s. One perky blonde, one saucy blonde, two men with lady dye hair. Come on, Europe, refuse that, you bastards. But it's got to be said that not everyone is raving about

the hot new sound of Bucks Fizz, because in a review of the Song for Europe contest in the Daily Mirror, Hilary Kingsley dared to write the following. We didn't need the viewing panels to tell us that the number nearest to the winning Eurovision thump-a-thump formula was making your mind up, performed by a set of ABBA lookalikes called Bucks Fizz.

The song involved much bottom wiggling and grinning, with the two girls losing their swirling skirts to reveal swirling minis underneath there was also a bit of jiving which must have gone down well in old folks homes everywhere i hate to sound unpatriotic but i hope the continental singers provide something better otherwise the eurovision song contest won't be worth the trouble typical ramona yeah traitor traitor so the eurovision song contest i mean there are very real fears at the moment as this episode's going out chaps that it's going to be disrupted by the national h block committee who will be forming a picket line which is going to be very uncomfortable for one of the

members of sheba island's entry this year, whose brother is actually in the maze prison at the moment. But it raises the very real possibility of a dirty protest while books fizzle on. Is that necessary? Thankfully, though, they kept the protest outside the hall and we were treated to what i thought was a very disco-centric eurovision don't you think you know a good three years after

the event yeah that's the way it goes isn't it i mean because the eurovision song cast i mean i'm 12 years old and i should have no time by now but i remember it very clearly i remember being absolutely fucking cock a hoop when we won because you know I'm English I'd seen England fail so many times since 1976 that I'd given up on the football side of things Eurovision was my

one chance to see Britain winning somewhere yeah it was an amazing night yeah well if you want your memory refreshed in the interests of interest I watched the 1981 Eurovision Song Contest when I could have been wanking. Come on, Taylor, give it, man. Hosted by Ireland this year, as Terry Wogan says,

because of Johnny Logan's victory at The Hague. I knew those charges would never stick. So here we are, back in the good old days of ireland when priests were just allowed to randomly kick you in the bollocks there wasn't enough electricity to go around red lemonade and chocolate with bits of crisps in it this is my understanding and the entries in capsule form read verbatim from my scribbled notes um as quickly as possible austria venduda by marty brem generic euro ballad sung by white suited tucker carlson bloke with backing vocals by a beautiful young woman in leotard pop socks and an american football helmet they must have

their reasons turkey don me dollop by the modern folk trio since there are four of them their name is inaccurate on three separate counts lead singer described by terry as a very pretty girl oh germany johnny blue by lena volaitis olivia newtoff john described by terry as a very attractive performer she's lithuanian she weren't german sorry i just thought i'd insert that is that the fact yeah it is a fact she was lithuanian she wasn't german yeah there's a couple who invented a ringer as we shall see luxembourg by jean-claude pascal who apparently lacks the certainty of david bowie uh this song sung by a teak-faced bucket voice 60 year old crooner has everything you associate with luxembourg

israel halila by habibi spelt with a l-a-y-l-a so this halfway possible showbiz disco number becomes the best song ever written with a title spelt like that lead singer introduced by terry as schlommet who's an attractive girl denmark crawler la by tommy seeback and debbie cameron tonight's only multi-racial act inevitably singing about the fact that they are a multi-racial act lady done up as a 1920s flapper and bloke done up as a prick yugoslavia leila by saeed memich vaita again the long suspected transitional form between demis roussos and dr hook spelt l-e-i-l-a but pronounced layla so this undistinguished nug of nothing becomes the best song ever written with a title pronounced like that finland reggae okay oh yeah resourcer the

iroy to paul nicholas's uroy dressed in a rhubarb and custard-coloured harlequin outfit with a footballer's haircut. Author of the book Sipple Out Dare, an illustrated history of South Ostrobothnia. Music for this one written by Jim Pembroke, British leader of Finnish prog rock band Wigwam. And the song that brought the accordion into the reggae sphere. Indeed. About time. France, Humana Hum by Jean Gabelou.

From the people Orson Welles would call the French. As though in a deliberate attempt to bust stereotypes and defy preconceptions, France's entry this year is an arrogant-looking man in an open-neck suit growling a histrionic ballad into a ham mic. Spain. Y Solo Tu by B by baccheli another ringer this man is italian even though he looks like he should be a bloke called mike from swansea should be disqualified for fielding an ineligible player and also for wearing a white double-breasted jacket with gray slacks sp Spain's selection of this song proves

that they were still only just getting to grips with democracy. Netherlands, Het is in Wunder by Linda Williams. This is what a really big fan of the nitty-gritty dirt band thinks ABBA sound like. And considering they've stolen the synth sound and some of the notes, in one sense, they'd be right. Linda Williams, introduced by Terry as a charming lady married with two children. Ireland, horoscopes by Sheba,

as seen on the BBC Summertime special, as mentioned by me, what feels like a week ago. A spirited condemnation of astrology, which goes, it's crazy, crazy. Don't let the planets take control of our lives. Believe in the truth and not celestial lies. Wow. I would applaud, were it not for the suspicion that this is not actually a skeptic's anthem.

And by the truth, they mean Christianity and specifically Roman Catholicism. Right. truth they mean christianity and specifically roman catholicism throw away almanacs signs of the zodiac when there is sense to be found they are celestial we are terrestrial let's keep our feet on the ground described by terry as three attractive irish, very charming, very pretty. Norway. Audrey Illevite by Finn Kalvik. Oh, yes. An incomprehensible attempt to be charming by a clean-shaven Kenny Burns. In the voting, becomes the definitive nul point, the OG, if you will.

No, mate, there were loads of nil pointers in the 50s and 60s in Europe. Oh, really? But in 1970, they changed the way they voted, and there was a drought of nil puanters until 1978. Jan Tegen, Milete Mil. You know that one, surely. Which one was that? It looks a bit like Iggy Pop nowadays,

and he's dressed like XTC's dad, and he's doing his bit and everything, and then all of a sudden he just goes, Ah! Me let him me! But no, carry on. Sorry to interrupt. United Kingdom, making your mind up by fuck's sake.

Yes, come on! Introduced by Terry, an Irishman, sat in Ireland, observing a contest in which Ireland are taking part against the United Kingdom as the song we've been waiting for. But here they are, flying the flag. Truly a band to put the great back into Great Britain is a bit tatty. Jay's high harmony shredded by the demands of the dance routine

and manic grin. They fucked up, didn't they? That sounds fucking horrible. Oh, yeah, it's breathless, isn't it? Wasn't Cheryl singing in a key too high and the lead mics were given to the wrong people? Oh. Yeah, it was a bit of a balls-up. A bit of a Gemini.

Well, no harm done. Best bit is when the men rip the ladies' clothes off. Almost done, not long to go now portugal playback by carlos piao oh yes it looks like if bruno fernandez had a little brother who resented bruno getting all the attention so he's got a blue plastic anorak stick on dickie bow back in band dressed as ludo counters they're well chock-a-block aren't they yeah but this is probably my favorite of all these songs just because practically the whole thing is on one note which in the context of eurovision sounds stylistically outrageous but if you put it in the open air it'd die like a fish belgium samson by Emily Starr, song described by Terry as one of their strongest, I think, for some time.

And I think it can fairly be described as one of the strongest Belgian entries to the Eurovision Song Contest in one particular time period, according to one man's subjective opinion. Leet Singer described by Terry as best legs in the contest. Home straight. Grease. Figari Calacarino by Yanis Dimitris. Bearded youngish man singing all around a female pianist described by Terry as 18 years of age. Like a music teacher a little bit too fond of his star pupil,

who may or may not be blind like Lionel Richie's was because she doesn't seem to notice him or look at him at any point, despite the fact that he's inhaling her. Cyprus. Monica by Island. Six people dressed in outfits based around the colours grey, indigo, lilac, pink and aubergine. Sort of a song.

Switzerland. Io Sensate by Peter, Sue and Mark. Mustachioed sing-along with a guitarist who looks like he's on trial for his life and a balding man playing panpipes in white shoes with a bit of a heel. And finally, Sweden. Fangad, E and Drom by bjorn skiffs lads face it the glory days aren't coming back but the swedes staying true to their reputation as one of the more tuned in musical nations in europe because unlike most of the entries this does at least

sound like some utter shit from 1981 and then planks do come on and play an irish reel reels being something i find about as welcoming music as on facebook so i fast forwarded to the voting which as ever is some of the most austere ritualistic television ever brought yes we can probably love it. as usual after a dog fight with the Swiss. And slick old broadcasting dog Terry talks right over the moment when Bucks Fizz reach the number of points they need and actually win it, completely spoiling the drama.

And at this point he still sounds sober so he's got no excuse. I seem to recall the last vote's quite shocking, isn't it? Because it hinges on it. It's like Switzerland give Germany zero and they give us eight in the penultimate vote. And that's what swings it in. Yeah, a bit ungrateful that last one.

Those Swiss bear a grudge, man. Or something. Where's that famous new travel team? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, it was a very tense night. Yeah, they should have given 12 points to everyone. Switzerland should have done it. So yes, the golden year of Bucks Fizz.

But let's not forget, chaps, that with success comes problems, as they're going to soon discover. Article in the stage from a few weeks from now. Bucks Fizz, this year's Eurovision winners, can look forward to a date list, which includes engagements at the London Palladium, Bayliss Club Watford and the night out Birmingham. But the group's formation means that there are now two Bucks Fizz acts working the circuit.

The other Bucks Fizz comprises three Cambridge graduates who perform a Camp Noel Coward-style show and are managed by Stephen Hayterater owner of london's embassy club they were formed 18 months ago but the eurovision lineup founded earlier this year has already registered the name so fuck off david van day hater claimed he was not worried our group cannot say hello in three languages and we have no intention of teaching them he commented well they must be right thick bunch of cunts i can fucking do that yeah it's more than three languages where it's just hello yeah but sadly for taylor and his ilk the gig at the night out didn't happen

because they had to pull out to make a top of the pops appearance so they were repaced by the brotherhood of man oh fuck me that's so yeah to be fair the pioneers the first of the shabbers they must be right because people think of bucks fizz as being a a shabber but there was a lot of it about at this time, wasn't there? The Dooley's had gone shabber. Tight Fit were about to come roaring in with Fantasy Island. Guys and Dolls. Guys and Dolls.

After Barry and Yvonne left. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But more disturbingly, chaps, is this other article in the stage from September. Headline, Bucks Fizz Con Man Escapes With Cash. Police are looking for a blonde con man who escaped with cash from two... I know who you're thinking of immediately.

Who escaped with cash from two theatre box offices by passing himself off as a well-known pop singer. The cheeky imposter claimed that he was Mike Nolan of Bucks Fizz and even came equipped with a stack of records by the group. Small sums of money, £50 in one case, £18 in another, went missing from two Blackpool theatres shortly after his visit. In both cases, he gained admittance to the box office By saying that he wanted to telephone the theatre manager. And discuss the possibility of Bucks Fizz. Staging a charity concert.

And police a warning. That he could strike again. So. Touch one eye. Touch other eye. Keep them peeled. Last scene speeding away in a burger van so books

Fizz well on their way to success and glory and you know already if you want a measure of how well this song's going to do I remember it already being parodied in the playground as you gotta shove it up and then you gotta twist

it round. It's a nailed on certainty, man. Straight to the bookmakers, everyone. Oh, yeah. Sailor quality, that, innit? I mean, I seem to recall similar things. Yeah, I mean, there was not an inevitability about their success.

They could have just disappeared, didn't they? Oh, yeah, definitely, yeah. Given the songs that they were given, they were all right. I mean, what's Love Got To Do With it was initially offered to books for us wouldn't um god yeah recorded a demo i don't think it actually appeared on an album did it but um no yeah you really gotta twist it around yeah i know it's like it's quite sort of forward thinking because it's really it centers uh sex toy use. Yes, predates the rabbit.

Yeah, rather than PIV there. So I've got to ask, how do you think Making Your Mind Up would have got on in this year's Eurovision, chaps? Ooh. Yeah. It's a very catchy number. It is. I think it's ageless and it would have done pretty damn good. They are for white heterosexual women and men,

so that might have counted against them, but, you know. Because it's not really the Eurovision Song Contest anymore, is it? It's the Eurovision Emotional Gut Punch Contest. And I fear that the song and the routine wouldn't have cut it. You know what I mean? I think if Bucks fans were doing it in the last Eurovision Song Contest, it would have to involve Cheryl and Jay

ripping off Mike and Bobby's trousers and they waving their penises about because that would pass muster with the woke snowflakes of today. What, with the Ukrainian flag painted on their balls or something? Yes, definitely, yeah. Or they could have had leotards made up for the girls with

pictures of viscera on it and worn that under their clothes so they could do that line and if you want to see even more and rip the front off them so it'll look like organs and a rib cage and stuff it would have worked quite well or they could have hired smaller versions of Cheryl Baker and Jay Aston. And then when it got to that bit, rip their whole bodies away to reveal the miniature versions inside. So if you want to see some less. Did you watch it this year? No.

No, I don't bother anymore. Because it's all too knowing. It's all too winky nudgy. I mean, the fact that it's become gay Christmas is fucking brilliant, but I miss the seriousness of it. You know what I mean? Yeah. It's not for us anymore, basically.

Which is fine. Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, I'm guessing that previous on-chart music we've acknowledged Cheryl Baker's huge part in kick-starting Britpop. What? Well, you know Blur's first TV appearance? Go on. It was doing There's No Other Way on Sunday

morning cooking show, Eggs and Baker. Really? Right! Yeah. A key moment in the Britpop history, which is unacknowledged, so thank you, Cheryl. It would have been funny if Jay had had a programme where she'd been the first people to put Oasis on TV. Yeah! It could have been set in Spain

called Aston's Villa. Yeah, let's not go there. Shit on the villa, man. So the following week, making your mind up, smashed into the charts at 24, then soared 19 places to number five. On the verge of the contest, it tucked in at number two. And after edging out West Germany by four points

to win Eurovision for the UK for the first time since 1976 it deposed Comrade Shaker and stayed at number one for three weeks giving way to Stand and Deliver by Adam and the Ants. It's also got to number one in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, Israel and the Netherlands, selling over 4 million copies worldwide and finishing the year as the seventh biggest selling single of 1981. It's also spawned not one but three immediate cover versions, Mi Ma Aval Ver Loco by Paraches, the mini-pops of Barcelona, My Rock and Roll Cowboy by Maggieaches, the mini-pops of Barcelona, my rock and roll cowboy by Maggie

May, the Deirdre Barlow of German Schlager who was known as the Mad Hen, and it's only a wind-up by Brown Ale, a collective led by Stephanie De Sykes. Oh, Stephanie De Sykes! Who refused permission to release

it by the co-owner of the publishing rights, Billy Lorre. Lulu, us, brother. The follow-up piece of the action got to number 12 in June, and one of those nights only got to number 20 for two weeks in September, but in November they closed out the year by releasing Land of Make-Believe, which took eight weeks to nimbly scale the charts and got to number one for two weeks in January of 1982, while the group was still on £30 a week,

their weekly stipend from the record company until the royalties started to kick in. But they did receive an estimated 1,000 bottles of champagne during their many personal appearances, and a car dealer gave them a mini Metro each. Stephen Fisher, the Pete Best of Bucks Fizz, finally got his place in the sun when he teamed up with his girlfriend Sally Ann Triplett as Bardo, who represented the UK in the 1982 Eurovision Song Contest and took their song one step further to number two.

And 17 years later, when the eggs laid by the parasitic wasp of Buxfizz began to hatch, Buxfizz, not yet David Van Day's Buxfizz, released Making Your Mind Up 98, featuring Van Day, nolan and some birds but despite the europop update paul laver's appearing in the video and a bit where the girls ripped open their tops to reveal their wonder brought up jubilage it only got to number 84 in may of that year according to van Van Day in that incredible Trouble at the Top episode, quote, Although we didn't do the skirt ripping routine,

we did this 90s thing. I felt we were in the boob age. We came up with this idea where the girls would rip their tops off and they would have skimpy bras on underneath and I thought it was a nice thing to move it on. I mean, at least the girls did the velcro ripping bit themselves which is extremely feminist of david van day it's such a fantastic thing that isn't it that that trouble at the top thing we've got to cover it one day in full obviously it's very difficult to like David Vanday, but how dull would pop be without him?

Yes. Without moments like that and without the coach trip bit, you know. Oh, that was glorious. That was amazing. People were moaning on in the last Eurovision that Sonia pitched up to make a special appearance. And it's like, no, no, no, no.

Hang on a minute. Say what you like for Sonia. You go and look at her battling with Davidid van day in that reborn in the usa and then come back to me and then go and apologize to sonia yeah yeah she's fucking brilliant yeah really up to her in my estimation that yeah definitely and before we go chaps i do need to ask how did you feel when you found out the other week about the announcement of Teresa Bazar's dollar? Did you punch the air like I did? Yes.

Yes, I did. Especially when you found out that she'd actually got an ex-member of the Fizzing to replace David Van Damme. Oh, my God. Oh, man. If she'd have got Bobby G and I think the universe would have collapsed in on itself. It would have been a perfect end to human existence.

Ooh, I think that's enough fizzy pop excitement for one day pop craze youngsters. So before we go, let me remind you that if you want this and all other episodes in full without adverts and whatnot, get your arse over to patreon.com slash chart music now and put a jingle in our G string. Also, like every other episode,

there's a huge video playlist featuring everything we've seen and everything we've talked about at youtube.com slash chart music t-o-t-p oh and one last call for our live show on september the 16th at king's cross kingsplace.co.uk anyway pop crazed youngsters final part tomorrow so until then stay pop crazed youngsters final part tomorrow so until then stay pop crazed sharp music