Chart Music: the Top Of The Pops Podcast - #72 (Pt 1): 3.10.85 – Rod Vicious

Episode Date: August 21, 2023

Simon Price, Rock Expert David Stubbs and Al Needham prepare for a punishing slog through a post-Live Aid episode of The Pops – but first, a good hard shill of their new books, which are out NOW/SOON. We leaf through that week’s NME, discuss a Norwegian newspaper article from the year 2000, and, y’know, go on a bit about pop music. TUCK IN, POP-CRAZED YOUNGSTERS!  Video Playlist | Subscribe | Facebook | Twitter | The Chart Music Wiki | PatreonGet your tickets for Chart Music at the London Podcast Festival HEREOrder Different Times by David HEREPre-order Curepedia by Simon 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. Chart music. Hey, up, you pop-crazed youngsters, and welcome to the latest episode of Chart Music,

the podcast that gets its hands right down the back of the settee on a random episode of Top of the Pops. I'm your host, Al Needham, and the wind beneath my wings in this episode is being provided by Simon Price. Hello. And rock expert David Stubbs. Bugus. Hello, also. Boys, if you want to see me in me pants and ting,

tell me something popping interesting. Go on, David, you first. Oh, well, I suppose the biggest thing that's happening for me at the moment is that my book has just come out. Different Times, A History of British Comedy, with an emphasis on A. You know, if you use the, then people just think it's a directory and the object when you don't have every single thing in,

comedy-wise, which... It's sad, really. You can't include everything. I've actually dedicated the book to people who go straight to the index, look in it and see that the name's not in it. Sorry, sorry, but there you go. So who's not in it then, David? Well, I mean... OMD.

Well, there's no... Yeah, that's right, yeah. Those unfunny bastards. I mean, I didn't really go a bundle on people like Jim Davison and people like that, obviously, because, you know, it's kind of a category error, really, you know, talking about them in comedy. But oddly enough, I didn't really talk about Peter Sellers that much, really, and people just think he's a great, towering comedy classic.

Actually, I just think he's more of a character actor, really. So, you know, there's little emissions like that, really. I mean, I talk about Boris Johnson and the whole way that he was elected Prime Minister for. So, you know, there's little emissions like that, really. I mean, I talk about Boris Johnson and the whole way that he was elected prime minister for a laugh, you know, because that's what British people are like. And the sense in which we're kind of a bit overdetermined by comedy. You know, other countries use that energy and declare themselves republics and things like that, for example.

But one of the things I touch on later on is in the 21st century, actually, there was a lot of cruelty in the first decade some of it was brilliant I mean there's things like the thick of it and peep show and all that kind of thing but then also you had like Borat and then you had little Britain and some of the horrible stuff you also had a lot of sort of blackface whatever and I just think it was a sort of time of I don't know lassitude basically that it was this like long period of Labour government but nobody really believed in it you know people had sort of lost that sense of sort

of idealism or that things were going to get better. But then from 2010 onwards, you've got a Tory government. And of course, they introduce almost immediately austerity. And I think ever since then, there's been this kind of emphasis on kindness. Now, when I use kindness, you know, I've not gone soft, Al, you know, because it is one of those words that's kind of bandied in a slightly kind of trite sort of way i mean kindness as distinct to civility like fuck civility but you see it in a certain amount of comedy that there is a more sort of spirit of considerateness inclusiveness um decency and and again you know there's been a kind of reaction against that you see even in something like frankie boyle so in the first decade of the 21st century and he's making jokes about

rebecca adlington looking like you know her face face is looking in the back of a spoon or something. And then he's just doing much more kind of inclusive kind of politically, you know, much more sound comedy. You know, it's a political reaction, I think, on the part of especially young people, because they have experienced, you know, actual cruelty, prospective cruelty, perhaps, you know, in what kind of like world they're going to be left, you know, in terms of the environment or whatever. perhaps, you know, in what kind of world they're going to be left, you know, in terms of the environment or whatever. And there's just a sense in which they're being absolutely fucked over in all kinds of ways, in terms of job security, in terms of rent, all kinds of ways. But anyway, this idea about kindness,

I've noticed it a lot quite recently in quite a few manifestations in pop culture, especially in Glastonbury, for example. Rick Astley doing the whole sort of Smiths covers. You know, what was great about that is that like you know you were able to kind of enjoy these songs but not from morrissey because morrissey's become this very toxic figure so in a sense having them delivered by rick astley which is kind of fun in itself also detoxifies these songs you can really enjoy them in a kind of

communal fun way yeah there was another one there was that billy no mates you know when she came on and she did a really good set but you know she did it to a backing trap rather than having a sort of real band there. And, of course, the campaign for real music, people sort of piled on her for that. But, you know, I'm not really upset about this. There's great counter-reaction. It says, no, don't worry. Don't worry, mate.

You know, don't listen to these fuckwits, you know. There was Lewis Capaldi, you know, right at the end of his set where he basically loses it. He just can't really carry on. He's overcome by tics or whatever. And, you know, the crowd there, they're brilliant. They say, don't worry about it, mate. We understand. We've got your back.

And fill in for him. And it was just such a touching moment because you just wonder, 15, 20 years ago, when maybe people didn't have a kind of comprehensive understanding of mental health issues or whatever, they might have got booed for that. You know, they'd say, like, we paid 80 quid for this. Fuck you.

And is it funny, this book? Yeah. Is there a chalkle on every page, David? I like to think so. I mean, I try to be funny about funny, which is where I can. I mean, especially with On The Buses, you can sort of take the mickey there a little bit.

But yeah, I've tried to be funny about funny. Who's doing the audiobook? Joe Pasquale or someone? I don't know. That's not been decided yet. Well, not even remotely discussed yet. What a shame Don Estelle's not still about. Oh, poor old Don.

I also hear that Farmer Price has a big fat book to take to market as well. That's right, yeah. My long-awaited, not least by my publishers, book, Curepedia, Anne A to Z of the Cure. It's interesting hearing David talk about using the indefinite article in his title because I was very insistent on that as well, that it's an A to Z of the cure, because it's my personal take on them. And I noticed that the American version of the book, I've seen the cover,

they've gone with the A to Z of the cure, which I'm not particularly happy about. But it probably means I will get angry emails or messages from American Cure fans saying, how could you have left out the, you know, engineer on their third B side or something like that? But the thing is, the reason the book took so long is because it really is comprehensive. I've just gone over the top. I didn't know where to stop. No, it was just this monster of a research job. And I think I went a little bit nuts doing it, to be honest. I think I just lost sight of a research job and I think I went a little bit nuts doing it to be honest I think I just lost sight of everything I was listening to every kind of you know Australian radio interview from 1981 or something on audio that nobody else was even aware of and you know

like Swiss television appearances and reading interviews that he did in Belgium and just anything to find some little nugget that shed light on a particular aspect of the band. And then trying to sort of shake that down into some kind of sense because I think always when you're writing a biography, you're trying to apply structure to chaos because life is chaos. And in this case, that structure just happens to be alphabetical, which is completely arbitrary, but it's no more or less sensible than any others.

And it's allowed me to sort of write thematically in a way. So I can write about, I don't know, the cure's relation to mental illness or sex or drugs or alcohol or any of that stuff. I can put all that stuff into an essay or into its own section rather than just saying, oh, well, in 1983, they had a bit of a fight when they got drunk or something like that you know and then saying oh and it happened again in 1989 it's enabled me to sort of take this this overview of things this structure it wasn't my idea but once it'd been

given to me to do it in a sort of a to z format i thought well you know i can work with this i can have some fun with this so what's's the first entry? Odd Vox. I cheated slightly because I decided that A, the indefinite article, counts, whereas the definite article does not. So that allowed me to have A Forest as the first entry because it's such an emblematic song. If it wasn't for that, it might have been, I don't know, A is for associates who supported them on tour once or something like that,

you know, which would just wouldn't feel right to start the book that way. So, yeah, yeah, fortunately that happened. I've also sort of done things like there wasn't a lot for the letter Q. So I thought, hang on a minute. Robert Smith supports Queen's Park Rangers. Oh, God, yeah. There we go. There's Q is for Queen's Park Rangers.

And into that section, I threw everything to do with their love of football. So, you know, the team's all the other members support and the fact that Robert did this sort of photo shoot with Stuart Adamson where Adamson's in a Scotland kit and Robert's in an England kit and they're jumping for the ball. Yeah, I remember that. That's the maker, yeah. So, yeah, I played around with the alphabet a little bit.

When it gets translated into Spanish, I wonder, because obviously, you know, different words, different language, I wonder if that might fuck up the alphabet a little bit. What's the last entry? I think it's for zoology. Z is for zoology. Because so many Cure songs are about animals.

You know, you've got light cockatoos, you've got the love cats, you know, you've got all these... Caterpillar. all these caterpillar yeah caterpillar there's yeah so a bird mad girl and yeah there's just so many cure songs that reference animals and i sort of speculated as to why that is and what it all might mean also zoo as in zoo wankers um have an entry oh really they have an entry because yes do you know about that go on, you tell me. They obviously danced to something, did they? Oh, no, no, that's no. It's actually not that.

But one of the Zoo dancers was in a band with Robert Smith. Of course, yes. The Glove. The Glove was his super group with Steve Severin from the Banshees and Robert Smith, McHugh. But Robert contractually wasn't allowed to sing lead vocals on anything other than McHugh. So they had to draft someone in.

And it was Jeanette Landry, who was one of Zoo, which had spiky blonde hair. I don't know if you can picture her. Very sort of 80s looking hair. So Zoo get a mention, as does chart music. Yay! That whole Zoo wankers thing in there. The weird thing about doing a book like this

is that the further you drift into the peripheral stuff and the absolute trivia, the more you think, well, actually, this is the gold. Because the central stuff like, oh, just like heaven was released on the release dates, that's stuff that they can get from Wikipedia. You know, it's when you get to something like, you know, an instrumental track they recorded that came out on cassette only and was named after an obscure Shetland island. Then you go into the history of that island and see if there's any connection with the history of that island to the cure and why they might have named a song after this island, which is so obscure. It's so out there on the edge of the stuff.

But then you think, this is actually what people are going to enjoy the most. That really weird stuff that appears to have fuck all to do with anything. But it's the stuff that took the really hard yards and took the deep research to to to get that stuff and that's why the book is so long it's twice the length it was meant to be it looks massive have you actually got a physical copy no not yet proper chunk of book isn't it i think it's um a third the length of the bible or something like that right maybe about half the length of the bible i'm not sure. They've had to send it to China to get it printed.

They don't normally do this. But because I wrote so much, the only way to make it economically viable was to get it printed in China. And that's why it's taking until November for copies to actually come out. But it's going to look quite deluxe when it does because we've got Andy Vy vella who is um one half of parched art along with pearl thompson x of the cure right the two of them have done most cure record sleeves ever andy's done these plates for the letter the alphabet 26 of them and they look very very cure um and the whole design is yeah i think it's going to look great. I think when I started it, I thought, well, it's a decent job and I'll just do it. And, you know, it's something that I'll hopefully get well remunerated for.

But the more I got into it, the more I started to really love the process. And then, of course, about halfway through, I started really hating the cue. I never want to hear a fucking cue record again in my life. But I sort of came out the other end of that and decided I kind of really liked them, you know. If they asked you to do the same thing now about another band, which band would it be?

That's a really good question. Could you follow up The Mannix? Two Man Sound? Two Man Sound, yeah. The Mannix book is something I do need to follow up that book and I don't quite know how I'm going to do it because more time has elapsed since that book than is covered

in that book but it's also the period of their career where nothing very dramatic happened compared to the first 10 years yeah so that that's a difficult one to know how to approach but in terms of doing an A to Z format I don't know if I'd want to do it again but it would have to be somebody whose work I would not resent diving into so you know somebody like Prince for example but there are enough fucking Prince books out there already. I mean, I mentioned everything because it sounds like there's possibly a degree of that in this book, even despite the format that, you know, the meaning of the cure, as it were, you know, the kind of slightly thematic approach that you're taking, you know.

And actually some of the stuff like you talk about the periphery. But I guess that just shows that kind of cultural reach that they've had, I guess. You know, it sort of marks that as well well that's it yeah I mean it is something I did in my Mannix book where I ended up writing essays about the Rebecca riots and stuff like that um and that you know the chartists and things like that that that you know were tied into this grand tradition of Welsh rebellion and Welsh cross-dressing as well and that's a sort of idea that I stole from Greal Marcus from Lipstick Traces, where he starts off with the sex pistols but expands it into this entire history of European descent.

And it seems that I can't not write like that. I don't know if I'm able to write a straight biography. Maybe it's a failing of me now, but it's the sort of thing that once I start digging into a band and what they mean, I start finding all these threads and all these sort of parallels and cross-referencing everything. And it just seems to be what I do. I need to snap out of it.

I need to write a good, short, hundred thousand word biography of somebody who didn't last. You know, their heyday was about five years long and just get it done. Just so I can prove I can do it. Because the queue had been around for 40 odd years and so it's not not only the length of their career but so many literary references in in their works poetry and so obviously i've got to dig into all that and uh yeah it's it's it's going to be the mother of all toilet books put it that way this sort of thing i i don't think people can read it sequentially i think it's you know it's going to be something you dip into yeah back and forth between chapters so for example if if i mention uh dylan thomas in another chapter that that will link you to the poetry section and when

we do the the e-book hopefully that will actually work there'll be sort of hyperlinks that will take you there so it really will be sort of interactive when you're skipping back and forth and it comes out on the 9th of november i would say and back and forth. And it comes out on 9th of November, I ought to say, and around that time I'll be doing a lot of promotional work. I'll be sort of doing book signings and doing events up and down the country. So look in your local listings or look online and see what's going on. Hopefully I'll be coming to a bookshop or a record shop near you.

Well, I've got three things to impart, chaps. Number one, I've not written a book. Number two, tickets still available for our appearance at the London Podcast Festival, but not many. Let me remind you, chaps, Saturday, September the 16th,

4.30pm, King's Place, King's Cross, London, 90 minutes of a concentrated evisceration of a Top of the Pops episode with Team ATV Land. So I suggest that you get your arse over to kingsplace.co.uk now and get them last seats. And don't forget, 20% discount for all Pop Craze Patreons. Sermon over at last.

Thirdly, you may recall that during our discussion about our heart in child music 70 i mentioned that i've been to norway to speak about how the grot industry was making money off the internet while the music business was being rinsed by limewire and the like and i was told that there'd been an article written about me well Well, I have it here. Yeah. All praise is due to Victoria Kleste, a pop-crazed unger from Sweden who translated the following article for me. Now, chaps, before I read it, I want to make absolutely clear

that none of the people who wrote or were quoted in this article spoke to me beforehand. I passed on no information to them, and this has absolutely nothing to do with me, okay? Oh, and in the interests of fairness and balance, let's run it through the lie detector, shall we? So, from Dagsevisen, dated 23rd of November, 2000.

Looking to learn from the porn industry. Al Needham is the name of the man who will share his experiences from internet porn during the Norwegian Music Industry's annual gathering bylaw in February next year. The porn industry, a model for success, is the title of the lecture he will give. For several years, the porn industry has been a teacher and guide for how to best and most conveniently use the internet as a sales device, a marketing tool. Al Needham is considered the

porn industry's absolute most skilled of visionary in the field, according to the press release from Bylarm. The porn industry is different from the music industry. But the porn industry was among the first to use the web commercially. So we have something to learn from them, said Bylom leader Erland Mogdard-Larsen. He heard Al Needham speak to the British record industry during the In The City seminar in Manchester earlier this year and invited him to the Norwegian industry gathering. Bylom's head of seminars, Stein Bjjorger, from the industry company Playground,

says that Needham is a very frequent speaker in the record industry. The big record companies discovered Needham during the Indecity, and he is now a regular speaker and a consultant for, among others, entertainment giant bmg of course it's controversial to gather information from someone who's worked with porn but nobody has used the internet as efficiently as the porn industry bjorge says but unfortunately chaps as you'd imagine the bloody feminists get involved, don't they? And this is something the music industry should learn from.

How difficult is it really to sell sex, says Anita Overolv, leader of AKKS, Active Women's Culture Centre. AKKS works to recruit and make women visible in the music industry and has, amongst other things, been behind the girl band compilation CD, Stiff Nipples. Yes, so there we go.

They must have been so fucking disappointed sitting there expecting the Steve Jobs of film and me turning up in my fucking suit, starting off with an impression of that Norwegian football commentator. Of course. So, chaps, I just want to assure the readers of Dag's Vision that when they were reading that article over their herring on toast, my skilled and visionary abilities were being deployed on

photoshopping zits and bruises off the arses of readers' wives, responding to emails from women who wanted to be porn models by writing them a letter that basically said, well, if you're okay with all your dad's mates seeing you finally get back in touch with them, and getting no replies back, and getting absolutely pissed up with the editor of Mayfair,

and just basically sitting in an office wondering when they were going to call me in and lay me off, because I was absolutely shit at that job. Mainstream media, man, they're all liars. Anyway, less about me and more about the true visionaries of the age, the latest batch of pop craze youngsters who have paid their tithe to chart music. And this month in the $5 section, we have Jonathan Roberts, Killian Foley, Dean Burnett, Murray Munro, P Baker, Matthew James, Grace Harrison, Tim Ward, Tim Healy, Paul Wilson, Andrew Barker, Sean Coward, John Mullen, Gordon Kennedy, Mark Cooper and Lucky Piss. Oh, you fucking beautiful people.

Let me kiss your face right now. We do. We love you like the Rolling Stones. Love. Indeed, yeah. Without that sardonic edge, no. We love you. And in the $onic edge, no. We love you. And in the $3 section, we have Radio Atlantis,

Rob Patterson, Ali B, John Thorpe, Chad Hayden, and Action Edmonds. And Ben Squires, Martin Reilly, Denise King, and Jane Webber. Oh, you nudged it up a bit, and it hurt, but it hurt nice, let me tell you. Oh, and by the way, if you are a Pop Craze patron in the $5 or the $3 tiers and you've not heard your name read out yet, well, that's because I'm a thick twat and you've slipped through the cracks somewhat. So, you know, please send me a message on Patreon saying,

through the cracks somewhat. So, you know, please send me a message on Patreon saying, come on now, you cunt, sort it out, and I shall respond in the adequate fashion. Thank you. And we should especially thank all the Pop Craze youngsters this month because we've all got sexy new microphones, haven't we? Yeah. Yes, we have.

So, you know, it all gets ploughed back in to make this a better podcast. And also, speaking of Pop Craze youngsters, there's a group called Microfilm that made rather an excellent album called Body Arcana. Right. And these are like fans of the show. They're actually based in Portland, Oregon, actually, but big, big fans of the show.

Really? And they've made a cracker of an album. I mean, you know, no disrespect to Albert, it's a jolly slight better than a lot of the rubbish that gets featured on this show. I'll put it that way. But no, no, it's excellent stuff. I mean, I'd compare it faintly to sort of the rubbish that gets featured on this show. I'll put it that way. But no, no, it's excellent stuff. I mean, I'd compare it faintly to sort of the Junior Boys.

It's kind of got that kind of electronic edge, but a bit more sort of slightly out there, like, you know, nicely twisted. But, yeah, very addictive. You know, I've listened to it a fair few times. So good work, chaps. And as we all know, chaps, the pop crazed Patreons get to distract the manager of the record shop

with a full-size cutout of Brit Eklund with a crystal ball over her bits, slip into the back room and fiddle with the chart return book for the brand new chart music top ten. Are we ready, chaps? Yes. Hit the fucking music! We've said goodbye to Noel Edmonds as wank fantasy, Jeff Sex and my fucking car, which means one up, three down,

three non-movers and three new entries. It's a new entry at number 10 for Bjorn Bingabonga. Last week's number three drops nine places to number nine, the Birmingham Piss Troll. Last week's number eight stays at number eight. Here comes Jizzum. It's a two-place drop for this week's number seven, the Ben Cunts Who Aren't Fucking Real.

Yeah. And another two-place drop from number four to number six for Bummer Dog. Oh, yeah. Into the top five and up one place from number six to number five, Eric Smallshore of Eccles. New entry at number 4 Toto Coelho Ultras The highest new entry at number 3

Ian Interesting Another week and still no change at number 2 for the provisional UR URA which means Britain's number one. It's still there at number one in the Chomp Music top ten. Ghostface Scylla.

Fucking hell, what a chop, boys. Yeah, it's good to see some movement in there, but without losing completely some of the all-time greats. Yeah, it's not the 90s here, is it? Yeah. I mean, Bummer Dog's a bit of a dark side of the movie, isn't it, obviously? Yeah, here comes Jism as well. Oh, yeah, indeed, yeah. But yeah,

I've grown very fond of some of the other ones as well that are hanging on in there, but yeah, good to see a bit of churn. We like churn in the church. Yes, we do, yeah. The Provisional who are away are the Vienna of chop music, aren't they? Yeah, yeah. So the new entry is Bjorn Bingebonger.

Well, obviously a Eurovision winner who thinks he's got a career now in the UK. Yeah, velvet suit, dress shirt, definitely. Yeah. And wearing Harmony hairspray. Toto Coelho ultras. No fucking idea, to be honest. A bit electro clash I'd say. And

Ian Interesting, well you know Howard Jones, Nick Kershaw Ian Interesting, the triumvirate Yeah, or Jasper Fascinating, I remember that was a correct what I did. Yeah, I remember in the Romo days you did get people who just tried a bit too hard and got a bit

too on the nose. There was a guy called John Pretty in one of the Romo bands. So if you want in on all the excitement of being officially pop crazed, as well as getting every episode in full without any advert ramble, you need to get that lovely little arse of your own over to patreon.com slash chart music. Chaps, we're coming up to seven whole years of chart music now. Great. Shit, they're bad.

And what's kept it going is the love and the commitment of the pop craze Patreons. Because come on now, we've gone past podcasts. These are fucking audio books that build up month on month-ish into a library of music and pop culture criticism and bummer dog. And it's thanks to them that Pop Craze Patreons praise them, I say. I praise indeed, yes. These are sort of like dark red leather-bound installments

with maybe sort of gold leaf writing on the spine. Yes. It's classy. It's something that you'd see advertised in the writing on the spine. Yes. It's classy. It's something that you'd see advertised in the back of the Sunday Supplements. Yeah. So this episode, Pop Craze Youngsters, takes us all the way back to November the 3rd, 1985.

Oh, dear, Chas, we're just on the wrong half of the 80s, aren't we? Mm-hm. On the other side of Live Aid, which, of course, according to, Chas, we're just on the wrong half of the 80s, aren't we? On the other side of Live Aid, which of course, according to Chart Music Orthodoxy, is a very bad place indeed. Yeah, yeah. It got people all standing together in fields again. You know, we thought we'd done away with that with punk, basically. And now look where we are.

Those are the only gigs that happen. Yes. People standing in fields and paying 250 quid for it. We've done 1985 before, and it's not been the most enjoyable of times, has it? It was a doldrums year in lots of ways. And yet, you look back, and actually there were some fantastic records made that year.

I mean, you know, Kate Butch and Daps Running Up That Hill, there's Steve McQueen, Prefab Sprout, Scritty, Cupid and Psyche 85, Prince, Surrounding the World in a Day, Dexys, if you like that kind of thing. Various other things that were coming through. It actually feels quite halcyon, really. But no, at the time, it felt like things were getting a bit overripe.

I didn't feel that the battle was lost yet, put it that way. Honestly, I had no idea how bad things were going to get in the later 80s. But I think the main difference was that between 79 and 81, the good stuff was just laid in front of you on a plate. Look in the top 10, they're just brilliant record after brilliant record. Now it was more a case of if something good flew into the top 40, it was an event and you'd be cheering it on.

And every half decent record in the chart was a sort of cause to to rally behind and wave a flag for yeah simon you advance the theory that years of pop kind of stand or fall on the number ones of that year yeah so let's have a look at the number ones of the year so far so do they know it's christmas band-aid i want to know what love is, foreigner. I know him so well, Elaine Page and Barbara Dixon. You spin me round, dead or alive. Easy lover, Philip Bailey and Phil Collins. Banger.

That's all right. We are the world, USA for Africa. Fuck off. Move closer, Phyllis Nelson. Trauma. 19, Paul Hardcastle. I never liked that. Oh, yeah, it was true. You, trauma. 19, Paul Hardcastle. Oh, I never liked that.

Oh, yeah, it was true. You'll Never Walk Alone, The Crowd. Fuck, man. Franke, Sister Sledge. No, absolutely no. That is to Sister Sledge what my ding-a-ling is to Chuck Berry. There Must Be An Angel, The Eurythmics. No.

Into The Groove, Madonna. Yeah, good record. I Got You, Babe, UB 40 and Chrissie Hyde. And Dancing in the Street by David Boet and Mick Jagger. South America! Oh, you're rubbing your hands looking forward to the Christmas Day top of the pops of this year

aren't you? Fucking hell. Oh God. It looks bad doesn't it? It looks really bad. You had to look at the charts upside down in those days. It was a question of, right, what's hovering around sort of 35 to 40? That's probably where the good stuff is. Whereas in the early 80s, it was the right way round. But it has to be said, chaps, that this episode that we're going to be looking at, it's a proper lucky bag of randomness, isn't it?

I mean, yeah, there is your dinosaurs and your mid-80s pap for the mug masses, but there's also a hint or two of a more interesting future and a smattering of our bands, if you will. It's funny, revisiting 1985 for this episode, I get a recollection of actually beginning to feel a bit old, actually. Because I think there were just so many... I mean, I don't know, just an example there. You know, UB40 and Chrissie Hynde doing I Got You Babe,

that was just the 80s just gone bad, really. A lot of people just sort of lingering, really, you know, probably sort of, you know, picking up sort of much bigger hits than they'd enjoyed in their early days in some cases. But it just felt like everything, the whole punk-funk thing was petering out and there was a sort of void that was just being filled

by a lot of synthetic balladry and competent songwriting dullards whatever it just felt like you know despite the really good records that were made i mentioned earlier on it just felt like it's this kind of momentum was gone that the old was malingering and the new wasn't quite being born yet yeah everything's getting very americanized we've talked before about the influence of jonathan king's entertainment usa of course you, Live Aid opened the floodgates to a lot of American dinosaurs. There's no need for Jonathan King now in 1985 because all the American shit's here.

But that said, you know, I complain about it, but at least a couple of the best songs on this episode are American. It tends to be black America, really, rather than white America. Of course. Oh, yeah. And, I mean, you know, this is still the era of, like, Jan and Lewis or whatever and Prince is at the top of his game. Yeah, I mean, you know, this is still the era of, like, Jammin' Lewis or whatever and Prince is at the top of his game. Yeah, I mean, you know, that's not to be sniffed at.

Shall we tuck in, then? Yeah. Onward! In the news this week, rioting has broken out in Brixton over the weekend after Cherry Gross was shot in her bedroom by police looking for her son, leading to the death of a press photographer, further riots in Peckham and Toxton, and in two days' time, after Cynthia Jarrett dies of heart failure during a police search in Tottenham, the Broadwater Farm riot. failure during a police search in Tottenham, the Broadwater Farm Riot. Meanwhile, the Scarman report on the Toxteth and Peckham riots of 1981 puts the blame on economic deprivation

and racial discrimination. Rock Hudson dies from AIDS-related complications at the age of 59 in Beverly Hills, while today's newspapers are plastered with a still-from-dinner stare, where he snogs Linda Evans in a forthcoming episode, his admission and subsequent death leads private donations towards age research in America to double. And by the end of the week, Congress approves a $221 million cash injection towards finding a cure.

Fucking hell, you must remember that, chaps. Yeah, absolutely. Oh, I remember my mum screaming at the telly when he kisses her on dinner stay. Fuck me. The weird thing was, I didn't really know who he was because he seemed such a historic figure. And I know people talk about it as the first major star

who died of AIDS, but he seemed like a figure from the days of Black and White. And when you said he was only 59, that surprised me. That's younger than, I think, Keanu Reeves is now. He's younger than me. Shit. And he's doing John Wick and all that kind of stuff. I guess I suppose it was just the revelation

that there are some gays out there other than Quentin Crisp, and some of them are not the chaps you'd expect. And I guess it was just an eye-opener in that respect to a lot of people. The Labour Party conference in Bournemouth sees Neil Kinnock winning a vote against the militant Tenders' hair and Arthur Scargill over the reimbursement of

fines imposed on the NUM and slapping down Derek Hatton for his council's sending out redundancy notices by tax heir. A diva council! All three of us there have to do it. You can't not do it. The Achille Laro, an Italian cruise ship,

has left Genoa today on its way to Ashdod in Israel via Alexandria and will be hijacked by the Palestine Liberation Front on Monday, resulting in the death of Leon Klinghoffer, the safe passage of the four hijackers in Egypt, the pursuit of the hijackers while they're flying to Tunisia when the US government find out they killed one of their own, and their plane being forced down to a US Air Force base in Sicily. An article published in Vanity Fair this week, which claims that the marriage of Charles and Diana

is up arsehole street, with him described as a wimp, her compared to Alexis Carrington, and both of them completely incompatible for each other, has been savaged by close friends of the couple. These claims are totally ridiculous.

I don't know why people write that kind of stuff. Camilla Parker Bowles. Camilla Parker Bowles. I was going to say that's a joke. Oh, my God. Doris Stokes pitches up on TVAM to tell Henry Kelly that she's had a very interesting chat with Elvis from beyond the grave recently. After telling her that he's made up about being in heaven, although he doesn't like his bathroom, which is black and horrible,

he tells her that he's well dischuffed about the way Priscilla has been coating him down in her biography and that he has a very special message for boy george you may be the queen of rock but i'm still the king there's a new madonna film out but she's not massively keen to promote it it's a certain sacrifice a film she made in 1980 where she has three love slaves, one male, one female and one trans and she ends up performing a satanic ritual in a theatre. It goes straight to video next week after a premiere in New York. A nightclub in Liverpool has caused a row after announcing that women will be given free entree and a complimentary glass of champagne at their disco nights, but only if the hems of their miniskirts are at least eight inches above the knee. Adornment have been issued with tape measures to ensure the rule is adhered to.

No fucking way. Jesus Christ. When asked to address the criticism emanating from Scouse women's livers, club DJ Chris Cross said, I don't know what some women are carping about. Let's face it, their main function in life is to be attractive to us guys. Personally, I would like all the girls to wear stockings and suspenders because that would be nice for our male customers. All we are saying to the girls is,

come along, have a fabulous evening and prove how attractive you are. But Labour councillor Anne Hollins had countered by saying, these male morons should be put in their place. Would they like to turn up in their underpants so we could measure their inside legs? Oh, crisscross. What a downfall from Arthur's song. He should probably fuck off somewhere between the moon and New York City.

Yes. Man United have won their 10th game in a row in Division 1 after beating Southampton 1-0. But the big news this week, according to the Sunday Mirror, Fizz star Mike in pub brawl. Bucks Fizz star Mike Nolan revealed yesterday how a pub landlord rescued him during a barroom brawl. Mike, still recovering from head injuries after a coach crash last year, had been

having a quiet drink with singer Lynn Paul. Suddenly three yobbs burst in. When they were refused a drink they threatened to take the place apart and made a beeline for the hunky Bucks fizz star. But they reckoned

without the pluck of Noel Farrell, landlord of the coachmaker's arms in Slough. He raced around the bar and tore into the trio. Noel floored one thug with a single punch and bundled the other two out into the street. I can't thank the landlord enough, said Mike last night. Although I'm well on the way to a full recovery, I dread to think what might have happened if I'd been badly beaten up or hit over the head with a bottle. Oh, man.

Were there any photos to sort of back this up? You doubt the tale, Simon? Well, I just think the camera never lies. No, that's true. The CTTTV never lies. On the cover of Melody Maker this week, The Waterboys. On the cover of Smash Hits,

Paul Young and Nick Kershaw. On the cover of Record Mirror, Echo and the Bunnymen. The number one LP in the country at the moment is Hounds of Love by Kate Bush. And over in America, the number one single is Money for Nothing by Dire Straits.

And the number one LP, Brothers in Arms by Dire Straits. So, boys, what were we doing in October of 1985? Well, I'd actually just arrived in London.

I've lived here ever since. Like your name was Jimmy Somerville, eh, David? I was, yes. I was a big town boy now, yes. A stick with a knotted hanky. Seat my fortune, yes. Working as a temping in

a place called Freightliners. That was my first job here. Doing what? Oh, just, I don't know, clerical work, you know, nothing. You know, just, yeah, it's just temping rubbish, you know. But I think at that point I was still kidding myself that I wasn't going to be a music journalist. You know, if the call came, I'd refuse it, you know, with their loss. Because, you know, because music was in such a kind of terminal state.

And, in fact, at that, the only music I was listening to was imported R&B and avant-garde classical and jazz. You know, I was a fun guy, a fun guy. I mean, Simon Reynolds has actually started writing for Melody Maker about this time, but we're still putting out Monitor, which is the magazine that we'd sort of, you know, did at Oxford.

And I think one of the dominant themes in that was, you know, the exhaustion. Simon talked about music being over-determined by punk. It was true. That whole punk-to-pop thing hadn't really succeeded in fully radicalising the world as we'd hoped. Everything just felt tired. So I kind of turned away from the music press.

I'd been reading The Enemy or whatever, but I felt like in a way I was growing out of it. And certainly I had that very credulous relationship I'd had with both Melody Maker and NME, you know, when I was, long ago when I was in my teens. But I think I kind of knew that the world of things as it was in

1985 just had to be torn down. It just had to be deconstructed. You know, the mullets, the big head synths, the jackets with the sleeves rolledructed you know the the mullets the big head since the jackets with the sleeves rolled up you know the miami viceification of pop you know poodle hair the highlighted hair the big boxy empty productions the post morley and pen enemy you know this aimless discourse now the white socks worthiness it all had to go so that something new something already born but kind of lacking the i don't know the rhetorical

thrust to make it happen and i was going to have a role in that but anyway the moment i did get the call i practically bit the telephone receiver in half but that was several months away simon i'd uh i'd had a very eventful couple of months leading up to this and um yeah i hope you'll bear with me because i've been piecing together the sequence of events, just figuring it all out. I could just see your bedroom wall now, man, with all the Polaroids and bits of string. Yeah, it's like something from The Wire. So some of it is stuff that we've kind of talked about. I was just starting the upper sixth of Barry Boy's Comprehensive School.

I should say Barry Boy's Comprehensive School. I should say Barry Boy's Comprehensive School for reasons I'll come to. And yeah, I'd started in music journalism in a tiny way by writing for the Baring District News. Of course, Simon Says. Simon Says column was in full swing. I was chafing against the shackles of being a man or at least the pathway of being a man

that was offered to me by the the macho culture of of south wales uh i i honestly might have declared myself non-binary if we'd had the words back then we just didn't have didn't have the words but you know you would be like that rock hudson you do oh god but you know i i was kind of forging my own identity my hair was growing out from i'd had this dave garn slash morrissey flat top but it was growing out into something more approaching a gothic mullet and uh i was dressing more flamboyantly i was wearing frilly shirts with my grandmother's brooch holding the collar in place oh yes um eyeliner inspired by robert smith black lace gloves very much inspired by prince in purple

rain wow my dad had dragged me to Fairport Convention's Cropperty Festival in the summer because he was the compere. I hated the music. I didn't like folk music at all. But I got to play football with Robert Plant. Fuck! Yeah, yeah. Did he pass?

Yeah, he was pretty good. Better than me, although, you know, I was wearing Winkle Pickers, to be fair. Do you remember those games where Damon Albarn used to take part in a Regents' Party? Did you ever play in any of those? Oh, yeah, yeah. I played every Sunday with Damon Albarn. He never passed. But, of course, he was by far the most famous person

who used to turn up, so everyone gave him a pass, as it were. Yeah, so I had a kickabout with Robert Platt. I met Billy Connolly and Michael Elphick, which was a boon. Fucking hell. Just to pause for a moment of respect for that joke. Yes, that's right. Elphick, which was a boon. Fucking hell. Just to pause for a moment of respect for that joke. Yes, that's all right. Elphick.

So I'm just rolling in the aisle here. I should have said to him, what do you want, you old spunker? What do you want? But the best thing about the festival was the market stores where I was able to buy a load of hippie beads and a peacock feather earring, because I was also under the influence of Ian Asprey from the cult. So I was developing this kind of outlandish look.

And on the one hand, I was very pleased myself. I thought I was fucking great. And I thought the world was at my feet and I thought I was going to go to Oxford University. I'd applied to do PPE at Balliol College, but they fucked me over and I failed. Not that I'm bitter but back in Barry

I didn't fit in, almost willfully so, you know, you might say which brought us problems, I mean for one thing I had no luck with girls, okay and this is where the school situation comes in, Barry Boys County Comprehensive School, to give it its full name was the largest single

sex school in europe we were told not sure if that was true but there were about two thousand of us and i genuinely believe that's child cruelty separating everyone off like that because between the age of 11 and 17 i i barely knew any girls at all which meant i couldn't relate to them i didn't know how to act around them i didn't have to talk to them and i entirely blame the school system for that and i think that you know trauma from that kind of lives on a little bit really throughout life but in 1985 something miraculous happened i finally got a proper girlfriend what had happened was a group of my friends and a group of girls from brin haveren

girls school down the road had sort of gravitated towards each other and started hanging out. There were maybe 20 of us in total. And most weekends, there'd be someone whose parents had gone away or gone out for the night. And we'd all descend on their house for a party, you know, tins of woodpecker, bottles of Malibu and all that. But I was always the one left out when it struck snog o'clock. And Move Closer by Phyllis nelson came on which is

why i said when you mentioned that um until suddenly i wasn't left out and i figured out the exact date it was saturday the 3rd of august and it was the birthday party of a girl called claire who was very much the marilyn monroe of our little group everyone fancied claire i was no exception but it was tactfully conveyed to me Claire thinks you're nice but she thinks you're a bit weird and fair enough I was so anyway we all turned up at Claire's house with gifts of seven inch singles that was the currency if it's someone's birthday it's all turned up with with singles together um I remember I gave Claire we don't need another hero by Tina Turner and then I just sort of retreated to do my thing,

which was leaning against the wall, looking tragic and misunderstood, like the pathetic Smiths fan that I was. And of course, being a pathetic Smiths fan, other people's rejection made me feel vindicated. It just proved that they were shallow and superficial and I was superior. But at some point during the night,

I went to the kitchen to get myself a drink and out of the blue a girl I'd never seen before sat on the sofa pinched my arse as I walked past which immediately solved all my problems right because I couldn't talk to girls but it didn't matter if someone pinches your arse yeah there's only one thing you can do and that's burst out laughing which kind of it shattered this tragically cool persona i was trying to create you know and it broke the eyes and bless her for being so forward because it's not like i was going to make the first move you know what i mean yeah so suddenly i had a girlfriend and i i wrestled with whether to give her name but i'm gonna her name was wendy and uh the amusement park rose bold and stark

kids were huddled on the beach in the mist. I wanted to die with Wendy on the street tonight in an everlasting kiss. Yeah, so we had very little in common. She had a horse and I didn't care about horses. She was obsessed with Pieros and I didn't care about Pieros. She liked Limahl and I liked Morrissey. But she was really nice. Loads of fun to be around.

Most of all, we fancied each other. And at that age, I think that's kind of all that matters. So, you know, we spent the second half of 1985 just sitting on park benches, snogging each other's faces off. So basically, in terms of girls, I'd gone from zero to 100. I mean, not wishing to be overly crude, but I'd never seen an actual real life pair of tits in the flesh before, you know, and suddenly here they were all for me. It was a lot to process. It was almost psychedelic, you know. Like Adrian Mould. Yeah. I mean, seriously,

I could relate to that. And Wendy had a poster of Pete Burns on her bedroom wall. So my first sexual experiences took place under the watchful eye patch of Britain's most lovable bisexual. the watchful eye patch of Britain's most lovable bisexual. Of course, to whose cousin I am now married, weirdly enough. So it's funny how that's the circle of life right there. Those experiences took place to the sounds of Now That's What I Call Music 6. So to this day, I only need to hear that opening run of One Vision by Queen, When a Heart Beats by Nick Kershaw

and A Good Heart by Fergal Sharkey. And I'm triggered, you know, by the time it gets to Lavender by Marillion, it was game over. I mean, lucky if I got as far as Empty Rooms by Gary Moore, if I'm honest. So we'd been going out for a few weeks when I had my 18th birthday party, which was just a week before this episode of Top of the Pops, in fact. And I got together with this other kid called Soggy, who shared my birthday, and we held it at feathers nightclub over barry island's classic 80s disco name uh which was taking the piss because i'd already been going there for years telling the bouncers i was already 18 and suddenly i'm

having my 18th birthday there but anyway and uh i remember wendy walking in and some other girl was already sitting on my lap so it wasn't even someone i particularly liked as i remember but there was a bit of a scene and i think we broke up for a few days and then we got back together again we were always doing that uh we were together about 16 months on and off which is an eternity when you're that age um when i went away to london for university we did that whole cliche thing it's such a fucking cliche of me solemnly promising uh we'd stay together but by christmas i'd already dumped her and started going out with someone i met at uni you know because men are trash especially young men uh yeah but women are like that too yeah as soon as they're off to university that's it new world yeah

i guess so so i don't feel so bad if you put it like that but this very week when the top of the pops happens i had been to a festival and and it was a bit closer to home than the Fairport Convention one. It was the Butlins Barry Island Festival of the 60s. And this is where, as long-term listeners will know, this is where I met the treacherous Steph the previous year.

But this time around her treachery was a distant memory because, as I mentioned, I had a proper girlfriend. So I don't care treacherous was a distant memory because, as I mentioned, I had a proper girlfriend. So I don't care, treacherous Steph, you can't hurt me anymore, you know. Treacherous Steph's turn to cry. Yeah, right. So anyway, I was working there at Butlins. I was carrying a wicker basket of cockles and mussels, a dead, a deado, you know, wearing a white coat and a little trilby. And my dad was working there as well that weekend. He was carrying a microphone and a massive tape recorder on a shoulder strap, interviewing the stars

for Red Dragon Radio. And he also carried my autograph book everywhere. So I've got loads of signatures of those washed up 60s stars. And I just wondered, guys, if I could get you involved in a little guessing game here. Please do. If I tell you, and maybe the listeners can play along, but if I tell you that it was very much the second tier of 60s acts as it would be

being a butlin's festival so obviously no beatles or stones no who or kinks no monkeys or beach boys so we're talking the next level down right so if i give you three guesses each maybe we'll sort of do one at a time one at a time and see how well you do. There were 44 acts in total, so you've got quite a good chance that next level down of 60s acts. Who wants to go first? Go on, David. Freddy and the Dreamers.

1-0 to David. Obvious, obvious. The Tremolos. 1-0. The Searchers. 2-1 to David. The Swinging Blue Jeans. 2-1 to David. The Swinging Blue Jeans. 2-1. Oh my god. That was going to be mine.

Hang on. What did I say? Take your penalty, man. Jerry and the Pacemakers. 3-2 to David Sturbs. Kyle, have you got what it takes? Okay, well, I'm going to come out of left field here and I'm going to say Leapy Lee. And it ends 3-2 to David Stubbs.

There was no Leapy Lee. Leapy Lee. What a shit festival. Yeah. That was a Chris Waddleman. That was right over the bar. Yes. So, yeah, that was quite tense.

I enjoyed that. It was, yeah, that was quite tense. I enjoyed that. It was, yeah, it was people like Swinging Blue Jeans, Jerry and the Pacemakers, Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, The Searchers, Marty Wilde, Freddie and the Dreamers, and Herman's Hermits. Oh, and Screaming Lord Such. I'll tell you who else was there.

Peter Sarstedt was there. Aye. No. Yes. So I squandered the chance to accidentally on purpose trip him up into the Olympic sized swimming pool and performatively do a laugh. Ha ha ha ha.

You had some acts who no longer had the full complement of members. So there was Dozie, Beaky, Mick and Titch. Dave D had gone off to be an A&R man who was involved in signing ACDC, Boney M, Gary Newman. He appeared in the great rock and roll swindle as an A&R man. Yes, he was.

Alongside another real A&R man played by Chris Parry, manager of The Cure. A bit of a Chekhov's gun moment there, foreshadowing. This is my favourite one. There was The Tremolos and there was also Brian Poole, but separately. Yeah, Brian Poole with a different backing band called Black Cat. And you can imagine them glaring at each other from across the pig and whistle. Or, you know, the real Tremolos throwing chips at Black Cat from the cable car ride.

Shouting, who are you? Who are you? Was David Van Daze the Tremolos? Yeah, basically. There were acts I would have loved to see, but I was probably shifting prawns and whelks to the boomers. I wish I'd seen Love Affair just to hear Everlasting Love. I wish I'd seen The Trogs just to hear them put a little bit of fucking fairy dust over the bastard.

I wish I'd seen The Fortunes just to hear Storm in a little bit of fairy dust over the bastard yes i i wish i'd seen the fortunes just to hear storm in a teacup and i wish i'd seen edison lighthouse just to hear love grows when my rosemary goes and you'll be way ahead of me here edison lighthouse were a 70s band of course um and the festival of the 60s played fast and loose with the concept of 60s because there was also mungo jerry oh nottingham's own paper lace oh yes and les gray's mud good lord and uh and i i did see mud but and this just freaks me out when i think about it i wasn't bothered at the time um it blows my mind nowadays to think i was just stood there reeking of seafood hearing them play tiger feet Feet and not particularly arsed, you know, because now it's one of my favourite records of all time.

Just as well that the cat didn't creep in, eh, Simon? Oh, man, yeah. And the very least I could have done was go up to him afterwards and say, fuck Pertwee, fuck Stardust, fuck Keegan, fuck Bugner, fuck Prowse, fuck Tufty. You were the one who saved my life

because I wanted to live to be 10. I got the picture. I took it from you. Be smart. Be safe. Imagine that, though, seeing loads of old bands from three decades previous. Thank fuck we don't do that now, eh? I know, right?

Yeah. Well, I'm still in sixth form at High Pavement College, but this week I'm feeling absolutely jealous as fuck of my little sister because it's all kicking off at my old school. Article in today's Nottingham Evening Post. The scenes at a comprehensive school in Top Valley where 300 pupils staged their own demo over teachers' union strikes and eventually acted like irresponsible juveniles by stoning the police,

made it a sad day for our education system. Fucking went on strike, the kids at my old school. Amazing. The main point. 20 were arrested during the day and they could count themselves lucky to get off with a warning pupils organizing a bush telegraph between schools to make their demos bigger and more effective pupils arguing with teachers in public as if they were on the same level and a teacher's union

official alleging that somebody is behind this agitation in trying to organise the children. I mean, come on. Can you imagine how fucked off I was to miss out on all this? Were there any flying pickets from other schools coming along to show solidarity? Well, on this very day, Simon, about half the school with other kids from other schools, from the Rodney Bennets of the area,

had all marched to County Hall on the other end of town and there's an article in tomorrow's Evening Post that reads thusly Children at Nottingham's Top Valley estate were back in their classrooms after a day of protest against the teachers' strike yesterday. About 400 children, mostly from the Top Valley area marched to County Hall to present a petition complaining about the effects the prolonged dispute is having on their education. Well, that was bollocks.

I spoke to my sister about this and she just said, oh, no, we just wanted to bunk off school. Better than that than being anti-strike, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, from the Welsh perspective, it's just nice to hear that some people from Nottinghamshire actually went on strike in 1985. There was chaos yesterday when several hundred children arrived at County Hall. As County Council Leader Dennis Pettit tried to maintain order in the council chamber, dozens of youngsters scrambled over the furniture while others shouted, catcalled and threw paper darts.

The floor was left littered with plastic orange juice cups and broken biscuits. As the children dispersed, a team of four cleaners moved in to clear the debris. One of the pupils who helped set up the march said she was disappointed it went badly many of the youngsters were just not under control she said i don't think coming here today has achieved anything they just let me down they were just a mob yeah i bet she came from rice park the fucking posh estate on the other end of our school but oh man i was so upset that i missed out on all this there was a similar kid strike a couple of years before i went to that secondary school and i remember seeing out the window my mom coming back from

work and disarming a youth in flares and a star jumper who was running about wielding a big stick with a nail through it yeah serious times man music wise still listening to our favorite shop uh still listening to the redskins yes buying loads of james brown and all that kind of stuff from record fairs and secondhand shops you know just not getting involved in this 1985 shit really because why would i yeah so chaps i do believe that it's time to go into the chart music crap room, rummage through some boxers and pull out an issue of the music press from this very week.

And this time I've gone for the NME, 5th of October, 1985. Would you care to join me on this journey? Yes, certainly would. On the cover, a nice painting of a bare bare chested black man with an afro raising his taped up fist in the air for a stewart cosgrove article about boxing and soul it's a weird front cover that um it is nice it's a lovely fucking painting yeah but it looks like prince didn't you think that this box yeah it looks like prince um and? And it's got a purple cover as well. So I did wonder how many Prince fans just bought the NME that week without looking too closely.

I reckon it'd be quite handy. I mean, you know, he was little, but he was ripped, I reckon. In the news, it's been a bad week for the men they couldn't hang a week before their UK tour, with all plans thrown into disarray by the hospitalisation of singer-guitarist Swill Odgers. According to the NME, the band were having a drink in Dingwalls in Camden to celebrate the final mixes of their third single, Greenback Dollars,

when Swill was attacked whilst nipping out of the club to make a phone call, leaving him with his jaw broken in three places and extensive bruising around the throat and chest. No-one connected with the band has any idea what might have prompted the attack, but fears have been expressed that whoever did it was probably a martial arts expert

who aimed to damage the singer's vocal cords permanently. Him and Mike Nolan from Bugs Fizz. It was a dangerous time to be a pop star, wasn't it? Yeah. The NME visited the unfortunate Swilling Hospital after an operation to reset his jaw, but obviously couldn't get much out of him, what with his jaw being wired up.

Although he demonstrated that he's been making the best of it by practising ventriloquism with a Dennis the Menace glove puppet. Possibly a plastic cover mount in the latest issue. Mick Jones, formerly of The Clash, has announced his new band, Big Audio Dynamite, and their debut release, the 12-inch single The Bottom Line. An LP called This Is Big Audio Dynamite is due out next month and gigs are in the pipeline. In other Clash XL news, Topper Heaton is finalising his own solo album Waking Up

after coming out of hiding early in 85 with a cover of Gene Krupa's Drumming Man. According to the NME, thep contains a selection of classic dance numbers and autobiographical songs about his addiction to heroin and his successful bid to kick the habit i remember a single off that called i'll give you everything been played a lot on radio one it's really fucking good seriously because when i heard that description selection of classic dance numbers and autobiographical songs about his addiction to heroin and successful bid to kick the habit i just thought fuck me imagine what that's going to sound like the drummer out of the clash but

you're saying it's actually pretty good well the single's pretty good fair play to top it he's in hayden head and yeah good for him okay yes across the atlantic in the city that no one who lives there calls the Big Apple, Richard Grable files a dispatch from the 6th Annual American New Music Seminar. It's the largest music industry convention in the world, says Grable, offering the biz a chance to catch mid-afternoon sets by the Beastie Boys and John Sex or a rap battle between Roxanne Shante and LL Cool J. Oh, Shante would have battered him. Oh, yeah.

But I want to know more about John Sex. Tell us about John Sex. Any relation to John Pretty? Or Jeff Sex. Yeah. Yes. But his report paints a gloomy picture of the state of play. Independent labels have been entirely absorbed

into the corporate structure of the music industry and can be marketed as an image and packaged as neatly as Madonna's navel, while the real indies are on the defensive, he writes. Seminar highlights included Dick Griffey of Solar Records announcing that both his label and its distributor Elektra will now donate all profits from record sales in South Africa to organisations fighting apartheid. Jerry Damas flagging up the inherent racism built into the industry's chart-keeping practices and declaring that the music industry needs to put its own house in order. declaring that the music industry needs to put its own house in order.

Frank Zappa and Dave March having another go at the PMRC, describing the Record Industry Association of America's plans for voluntary compliance with the wishes of the Washington wives as a toady in cave-in. Meanwhile, Claire O'Connor of Limelight and Chris Sullivan of the Wag Club had to stand up to repeated bullying from Hippodrome owner Peter Stringfellow on the nightclub's panel, with O'Connor revealing that Limelight is trying to open a London branch and Stringfellow has opposed all of their permit applications.

What do they want me to do, Stringfellow asked? Throw them apart, eh? Meanwhile, in the British indie label Seminar, Tony Wilson of Factory offered his explanation of the slumping indie record sales in Britain in the early 80s, blaming it all on music writers and an article by film critic Pauline Kael on Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Paul Morley and Ian Penman had become bored with good music, Wilson claimed, and they picked up her theory of crafted schlock as art. According to Grable, the producers' panel, featuring Jellybean Benitez, Mike Thorne and Arif Mardin, was boring as fuck, and the artists' panel, featuring Yoko Ono, Herbie Hancock, Jimmy Cliff, Deborah Harre, Adam Clayton and Martin Frye were equally so, bar the continuous interruptions from a tired and emotional Marianne Faithfull.

Faithfull kept screaming about the Washington Wives censorship campaign, asking, Yoko, what are we going to do? I'm sure it's bordering on boredom to hear Yoko talk about peace and love again, said Yoko. That's a bit much from Tony Wilson. I know.

Nonsense. The idea that even when the enemy was selling what it was selling then, the idea that it could have that kind of tangible impact on sales, anything, is complete rubbish. I just love this idea of Marianne Faithfull drunkenly yelling, Yoko, what are we going to do? You know, which I can feel myself wanting to incorporate

into my daily speech patterns. Yoko, Yoko, what are we going to do? The thing is about the Washington Wives, though, again, versus Frank Zappa, frankly, I have a bit of sympathy for the Washington Wives, you know, because the records that Zappa was putting out was just this crappy, smutty shit, you know, and it's just like, you know,

in terms of the whole censorship thing, it's just like, well, it's hard to defend. On the ground, it's bollocks, Frank. Yeah, sadly, I don't think they were opposing Zappa for his misogyny. No. You know, it's just the same rude stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Still in America, the NME reports that Vince Neil of Motley Crue is on his way to the big house as a result of the car crash that killed Hanoi Rocks drummer Razzle Dingle late last year. After pleading guilty of drunken driving

and vehicular manslaughter, Neil has been ordered to pay $200,000 to the estate of Dingley, $571,000 to Daniel Smithers, who was driving the other car, plus another $1.8 million to Lisa Hogan, the other crash victim who spent several weeks in a coma as a result of the accident. Additionally, there's been a jail sentence of 30 days after which Neil's on probation for five years and has been ordered to perform 200 hours of community service, hopefully in a decent band for a change. Neil would be released after 14 days on good behaviour and would take up motorsport in the early 90s.

It's funny, Razzle, Raz from Hanno Rocks, I was reminded of him on a daily basis because a portrait of him hung above the rock and roll table at the Apporto where all the Melody Maker crew used to gather. Oh, was he mates with Clerky? Yeah, exactly. He was like the rock and roll table martyr. Who else was on the wall of the rock and roll table? It was him, really. It wasn't like a whole kind of gallery.

It was just him, you know, staring down from heaven. Rock and Roll Table sounds like a DIY show presented by Meatloaf, doesn't it? Or Roscoe's Round Table, yeah. So you weren't well established there enough to start lobbying to have Stockhausen put on the wall? No, no, no. Oh, no, no.

I didn't want to sort of tamper with the culture there. Wham! who are currently working on their next single, which is due out next month and is provisionally titled The Edge of Heaven, have quashed the rumours that they're planning a string of Earl's Court Christmas shows and emphasising that there are no immediate plans for a tour. Furthermore, it's been confirmed that Andrew Ridgely will not feature in a Hollywood film

being shot next spring. The film is set in Edwardian times and would have seen Andrew playing the son of a wealthy aristocratic family, said a WAM spokesman. Andrew was offered a part, but it was never finalised and the film company

seemed to be having financial difficulties. Fucking hell, Andrew Ridgely finally vindicated. Well, yeah, there was actually an interview with him in the last big issue, and he was talking about his stalled acting career, and he just said, you know, the director just kept saying to me, why don't you just think about your mum dying? And he said, what's a terrible thing to think of? I wasn't going to think of that. That was it really.

I've just got to second what David said about the documentary, the Wham! documentary on Netflix. I mean, I'm sure everybody's seen it already, but if they haven't, it is just a joy, it really is. The takeaway from it really is find yourself a friend who's got your back, like Andrew had George's back,

you know? But, you know, mostly I just kept finding myself laughing all the way through, not in a sort of mocking, sneering way, but just with pure joy because, you know, just the dance routines and the utter camp of their act, which I think sort of flew under the radar at the time, you know? Yeah. So, you know, sitting on a floating lilo, pouring cocktails into the swimming pool or

putting shuttlecocks down their shorts and whacking into the crowd it all just seemed like good sort of heterosexual fun at the time yeah yeah yeah but also it really stresses i mean you tend to think of like andrew ridgely and wham as being like art garfunkel only mine is the voice sort of thing in terms of his contribution but you sent him out he was a really strong character he was a really sharp wit and it was was really important that he be in the band. Yeah, I think he had a really strong idea of what Wham should be. And also, yeah, it turns out that he sort of wrote some of the melody or chords of Careless Whisper.

So everybody thinks that George just put his name on the credits as a favour. But, you know, it seems like he earned his keep, to put it that way. Because it was obviously a very, very early thing they did. And I think at the time, it's like, it's like he was a bit older, was Andrew Ridge at the time, when that really, really counts. And I think that he almost mentored George Michael to a degree. It's fabulous. It's beautifully put together.

It's beautifully edited. All of the old footage. There's stuff in China as well. Do you know about this other film that was made by Lindsay Anderson when they were in China as well. Yeah. Do you know about this other film that was made by Lindsay Anderson when they were in China? Ah, yes, yeah.

It's called If You Were There, and it never got released because apparently there was hardly any Wham in it. Yeah, it was just a documentary about the Chinese people. There's only like four songs by Wham. They've flown this director to China, and then he doesn't really bother putting them in the final cut. Instead, he was sort of going around just filming people's ordinary lives in in China and I think in order to see it you've got to go to the University of Stirling and that's the only

place you can see it and yeah I just really hope somehow whoever owns the sort of copyright to that can can get it together and actually get it released because I bet that would be interesting in its own right even if there's precious little wham in it. In other Enormo gig news Brent Council are taking Wembley Stadium to court over the sound levels of Bruce Springsteen's July concerts. At a meeting of the housing committee Brent councillors were told that the sound levels at Springsteen's gigs often reached twice the permitted volume and that the words and music were distinguishable half a mile away from the stadium.

Well, that's a first, people being able to distinguish these lyrics. Well, that's fucking hell, not to born in the USA. Yeah. I was born in the USA. Why don't you listen to the verses, man? When Brent Council takes over licensing arrangements after the abolition of the GLC next year, they will take enforcement action

against both the stadium and the promoter of noisy pop concerts and install electrical equipment that will give immediate warning when maximum noise levels are being reached. Wembley Stadium would not comment, reports the NME. And finally, in fuck all to do with music news, the Brewer Society have sent out a booklet informing publicans and their staff how to avoid falling foul of the 1971 misuse of drugs act and losing their licence due to in-venue custard ganitre. Resident bent lynchers are now asked to watch out for pseudo-boozers

who sit in the same dark corner table and frequently receive visitors. For where such activities were once a fairly innocuous province of Honest Burt, the friendly neighbourhood book air, today's denizens of the dark are apparently more likely to be the sort of business folk who are into skag rather than skull. Landlords are advised to inspect toilets frequently, especially late evening and after closing an increased frequency of glass clearance and ashtray emptying from tables in order that the gloom cloak pushes and their clients shouldn't feel too secure the buckler also points out that bits of beer mats and foam upholstery

can also be used to make filters for joints oh Oh man, imagine using a bit of fucking foam from a bar stall, man. Do you know what? I have seen pub chairs where the foam has been kind of ripped away and I never understood why, but maybe that's it. Also, can I just say that Gloom Cloaked Pushers is a band name

waiting to happen. I mean, if they're not in next week's Chart Music Top Ten, then I don't know what, really. In the interview section, well, Bruce Dessau has a chat with Annabella Lewin, two years removed from her firing from Bow Wow Wow, and is back on the comeback trail as a solo artist called Annabella,

and is disconcerted to discover that the interview has to be conducted with press officers in earshot. Apparently a regular practice these days. Yeah. When asked about her old band and her ex-manager, she says I was just a child then.

I didn't know what I was doing. I can't believe that it was me that posed nude. RCA kept me and sacked the band because they obviously thought I was the one who could be the most successful and I am very grateful that they have had that faith in me. Maybe their decision was helped by the fact that you're a woman and an undeniably pretty one to boot, asked Esau.

Well, no, she answers. But the use of only your first name suggests to me that you were unimportant. You were simply a female body with a negligible identity, says Dessau, while the press officers start giving each other side eye and the interview winds up. Press officers at interviews. Yeah. That's fucking not right. Yeah.

Have you had that? Yeah, yeah, I have. The first time it happened to me was TLC in the 90s I remember them telling me beforehand things I wasn't allowed to talk about so the press officer before the TLC interview was telling me

all these things I could and couldn't talk about and what had happened was Lisa Left Eye Lopez was dating this American sportsman I think he was a football player. Andre Rison. Rison, I think they pronounced it. Andre Rison of the Chiefs. They lived in a big house together and

for some reason when he was away, she was obviously pissed off with him and she got all his sports memorabilia and trophies, put it in the jacuzzi and set fire to it and basically burnt the whole house down. And, you know, there were,

I think it was a front cover of Vibe magazine where they took the piss out of themselves appearing in, you know, firefighter costumes. But yeah, I was told, do not talk about the fire. Do not talk about the fire. Oh, my first question he asked is, how do you set fire to a trophy? I know.

So I thought, well, how am I going to get around this? Because I thought Jonesy, the editor at Melody Maker, is not going to stand for it if I come back without questions about the fire. And, of course, my first question to TLC was, right, I understand there are certain things you don't want me to talk about. And meanwhile, the press officer is sat in the corner going puce, you know. And TLC just said to me, no, fuck it, we'll talk about anything, whatever you want.

And I said, all right, then, well, tell me about the fire. And they did. They just told me all about it. You know, usually these edicts don't come from the band themselves. It's usually just overprotective PR people. You had that, David. The nearest I've got, it wasn't really a pop interview. It was a feature I did for GQ with Ian Wright.

And it was at some... God, no, it was supposed to be some sort of country club it was billed at. And it was basically a sort of sports centre in Stanmore with a sofa that looked like it had been left out in the rain for several weeks. But anyway, it was supposed to be a feature about Ian Wright and some clothes that he was modelling. I think it was Yves Saint Laurent or something like that. And I wanted the questions faxed over

in advance. And I said to the guy, you know, the editor at GQ, it's not rubbish, isn't it? He says, oh, just send some questions and then on the day, you know, we'll talk about whatever. So I just made a list of utterly inane questions, you know. Does your wife have any input into your clothing, you know,

choices and all this rubbish, you know. So I get there on the day and Ian Wright turns up and sitting in on the interview, not just a press office, but four other people, you know, representatives from the design company, and they're all sitting there clutching copies of these inane questions I sent over that I bashed out in two minutes.

And actually, Ian Wright looked at me and he kind of said, we can talk around these, you know. And so that's why I started talking, it was something named Question, and then started digressing onto other topics, including racism, you know, and stuff like that. And Ian Wright would start talking, and then I'd get an intervention,

and I said, from one of the people at the six-week, I've noticed that you've deviated from the questions, as we agreed. Fucking hell. I know. And Ian Wright, it was like, it wasn't the boss in the situation, apparently, you know. So I was like, fine, I've got a reasonable amount anyway, actually, at that point.

So then after that, I just very mechanically said, you know, does your wife have any input into your clothing choices? And the whole thing wound up. But it was just a shockingly ridiculous experience. I mean, just ask the questions yourself. Why waste my time? I've come to fucking Stanmore, you know. And that's about 25 years ago. Anecdototally one hears that the situation's even worse now if you do manage to get an interview with a top level footballer you know yeah it's even more locked down isn't it yeah but

ian wright was was he i i want to believe he was brilliant was he great yeah he's cool it was a nice play he was cool when we're just talking about other stuff than his wife's input into his clothing choices it was yeah it was it was interesting yeah And when we're just talking about other stuff than his wife's input into his clothing choices, it was interesting. I think it might even have been his manager that made the intervention. His manager was sitting in there, you know. And it may just have been that when we started to talk about racism and stuff,

that that perhaps was the, you know... That's not going to shift no clothes, is it, though, racism? Yeah, yeah. Unless you're selling white hoods. Simon Witter links up with the dancey man of the hour, Colonel Abrams, who's in town to promote his new single Trapped And watches him bat away the accusation That he's modelled himself on Luther Vandross

No way! I admire him very much But I grew up with Marvin Gaye Otis Redding Teddy Pendergrass I love Smokey Robinson's writing And the whole Motown era. I think Trapped could have been a Motown song.

Its structure and lyrics are similar to what The Temptations would do with Dennis Edwards. Womack and Womack chat to Stuart Cosgrove about their recent split with Elektra Records and how they're tentatively engaging with hip-hop. Elektra were treating us like meat, two steaks that they wanted served their way, says Linda. They wanted to remix our material. They wanted to tell us which vocals weren't right. They wanted to dictate our direction right down to the clothes we wore. I won't be too sad to leave Los Angeles. When asked about their new stuff, Cecil says,

our new stuff is aimed at those too old to breakdance, but too young to retire. If you're 60, it's a bit of a lie to say you dig hip hop, but it doesn't mean you have to give up either. It's so easy to stay stuck in the past, like signing Sam and Dave and re-recording hold on i'm coming we're not interested in being an old gold act we want new gold i actually think that that quote from i think you pronounce it cecil womack um cecil yeah do apologize cecil

yeah yeah i think that's actually an amazing quote. Too old to break dance, too young to retire. I feel like getting that made into a T-shirt, that's really got potential. Yes. I'm 60 and I dig hip-hop. Yes. But then again, a 60-year-old in 1985, you know, who would now be, oh God, who would now be 98,

that's frightening. Probably wouldn't, I guess. Sean O'Hagan pays a visit upon the newest pop sensation from Scotland, Hip Sway, who are very keen to let us know about their yearning to create classic pop. What we want is if you were to ask someone to think of their all-time favourite pop records, then say, now think of an 80s equivalent,

we'd want them to say Hipsway without hesitation. We want our records to be that good, says Johnny McElhone. We want everything we do to be right, including the sleeves and stuff, because that's important in the 80s, as you have to compete with the Frankies and all, says Harry Travers. With time running short and the photo shoot not yet done,

frontman Graham Skinner says, I hope we don't get laughed at. One time we were making this video up in Glasgow and I had to stroll down this deserted street about ten times till they got it right. I was just getting into it when this voice shouts out, What are you up to, Skin, you big fucking poser? I'll never forget it.

Felt like a right prick. These boys will go far, predicts O'Hagan. Reader, they didn't. You know what? I actually thought they were pretty good, Hipsway. Just the three singles that I had. The Honey Thief was the only one

that was an actual hit, but there was Ask the Lord, but the one that I thought was brilliant was The Broken Years, which is a really amazing bit of kind of Scottish white funk. And, yeah, I think they were an underrated band. They're often sort of the name that sort of casually dropped to sort of mock the hubris of mid-'80s bands who thought they were going to be big but weren't.

But, yeah, I thought they were decent. This week's Melody Maker cover star, Mike Scott of the Waterboys, finds time to sit down with David Quantick to chat about his new album, This Is The Sea, and is rewarded by a critical ambush. The sound you make is a crashing thing, an overstuffed mattress. Have you ever felt the desire to write something sparse?

asks Quantick. I disagree with that, says Scott. You talk about the records being rough and spiky and the voice being shouty and all that. Well, if that's the way I am, that's cool. Undeterred, Quantic starts having a go at the lyrics. Three LPs of almost unrelenting seas and mountains and churches and spirits and pagan places and big musics. Almost every Waterboy song seems to deal with an aspect of the big plan. The listener longs for the potterings of a madness or a Ray Davis among the small loves and everyday concerns of folks. Is nothing small in this big music, Mike? I just write songs about what I'm thinking about

and must think about them in that way, counter Scott. People have written in that kind of language for centuries and will continue to, so it must be a valid language to express things that people feel. Can't really help you. Mike Scott,

constantly trying to evoke some sense of the meaning of life and just ended up making a racket. I like these three LPs but they just aim and aim again and keep missing. Mike Scott will keep making a noise and not quite getting it right and he'll keep banging the drum until no one wants to listen anymore says quantic as he walks away shaking his head and probably lights up a strand and walks off alone while a harmonica plays i just wonder if it was quite as confrontational in in real life as it's made out on the page you know that's I mean, I wasn't a massive water sports fan, but I'm kind of sympathising with Mike Scott there a little bit because I'm not sure I did want to hear about the potterings

of ordinary folk, you know. Yeah. You know, I think it is valid to write in a kind of widescreen way. And, OK, that wasn't to Quantic's taste, but, you know, I'd rather hear something that's approaching the majesty of early simple minds or something like that than something that's approaching the majesty of early simple minds or something like that than something that's really kind of quotidian if you know what i mean yeah i was never particularly a water wars fan but there's something slightly pointless i suppose

about this kind of exercise it's like me going along an interview and saying why aren't you the young gods and well i'm just not you know this is what i am you know maybe they should have said somebody that's you know remotely interested in me you know so it is what I am, you know, maybe they should have said somebody that's, you know, remotely interested in me, you know. So it's a bit strange really. At the same time, you just get the sense with these interviews that a lot of the writers at NME were just feeling that kind of dullness of 1985, that lack of momentum. And it's getting filled in by people like Mike Scott. And so you can sense a sort of frustration from that point of view. Meanwhile Matt Snow heads to a diner in Greenwich Village to meet none other than Suzanne Vega and presumably have a coffee. Naturally the first thing he does is to quote Robert Criscow's review of Joni Mitchell from

The Village Voice in 1973. Then he starts having a go at her. Your songs embody a passivity which I find irksome because they're clothed in a language of fae self-absorption, long familiar from Joni Mitchell's Blue and onwards through the Me decade. Vega, politely, tells him to fuck off. That's really interesting. I don't consider myself to be an aggressive person. I hold my ground. Yeah. Very isolated, but in the back of my mind, I had the myth of a solitary person jumping a freight train and exploring the country and just having an acoustic guitar. And that did not include fancy costumes and making yourself a cartoon character. How are Dylan and Leonard Cohen allowed to be symbolic and I'm not?

When Dylan sings I in a song, he's talking for every man. When Dylan sings I in a song, he's talking for every man. When I say I in a song, people say, oh, she's talking about herself again, being precious again. I want to get beyond that. It's a bit rude, isn't it? It's weird that all those interviews are all quite confrontational. They're like Andrew Neil interviewing politicians.

Yeah, you're shit. Why are you so shit? I could never do those kind of interviews. Not because, you know, I was a cow behind a tightrope who was going to do a coat down, but it's just the pointlessness, the extreme social awkwardness of it as well. You're David Stubbs, the world's friend. Yeah, well, you know, there's that as well. But, you know, I could never be able to see the point.

I think it's okay to take people to task for certain things, but I don't understand what Suzanne Vega's done wrong here. Well, not being Joni Mitchell, I think. Yeah, I mean, man, if you listen to something like Marlena on the Wall, I don't think she's being passive in that song. I think it's a brilliant bit of songwriting. I just think she accounts for herself very well, actually, as it turns out. But, yeah, I mean, it would be one thing to say to go in and view PJ Harvey,

and say, look, I love the records, I found something to talk about them, but we have to talk about this fox hunting business, you know, something like that. But when you're just going along and eating something and saying, look, I find you fundamentally useless, you know, it's just, you know. Danny Kelly makes his way to a pub in Kensington

to chat with Depeche Mode and first sits down for a one-on-one with a very K-lied Martin Gore. His tiny girlish frame is armoured from head to foot in creaking black leather. His platinum quiff has been squeezed like toothpaste through a hole in his otherwise shaven head. His makeup is ghostly white and thick. His nail varnish iron cross black and chipped. He's taken up with a fraulein called Christine and deserted Basildon for the last stop on rock and roll's main line, Berlin. I'm quite a pessimistic person and I see life as quite boring.

Our stuff is love and sex and drink against the boredom of life. I see love as a consolation for the boredom of life, and drink and sex when we're on the road is consolation. Drinking is enjoyable, and collapsing is enjoyable. Don't you ever feel like casting off the careful consideration of Depeche Mode's rise and do something extreme, disturbing or dirty, asks Keller. If I make boring records and people identify with them, I've achieved my aim, replies a clearly shit-faced Gore. I wonder if Martin's dabblings in Berlin meant that he'd outgrown his fellow moders. At the moment, they're most worried about the way I dress,

about my dresses, in fact. Maybe I'll get them all wearing them. When the rest of the band join in, Dave Gayen says, We're very dependent on Martin's ideas, his writing, whatever his whim at the moment. That's what the songs are about. We have to accept that. He has totally changed. Mark missed out on his teens, going out,

seeing different girls every night and getting drunk all the time. He's living all that now. It's not a bad thing. Everyone should go through that phase, wearing tons of makeup and dresses. Now, if I want to go to a club, I just want to have a good time, not to shock. But Martin says that he hates going into the street and feeling normal. He does enjoy it when we go through customs. And they asked him if he wants to go into the men's or women's cubicle to be searched. It's really interesting hearing from Martin Gore at that moment where he's just entering into that kind of goth phase, if you like, or at that moment where he's just entering into that kind of goth phase if you like where he's experimenting with cross-dressing and he's writing about these kind of perverse sadomasochistic sexual dynamics and so on and hearing um dave garn's perspective on it you know which is that

martin had missed out on that in his teenage years i found that really interesting and also just this this suggestion that dave garn wasn't really on board with that, you know, he seemed a bit like, oh, alright mate, you do you you know, but, and he sort of got dragged along with it. Yeah, because he apparently has no creative input, yeah, that's the interesting thing, so he's not really got any choice you know, it's just, it's like when Roger

Daughtry, having to sort of be the mouthpiece for Pete Townsend all that time, you know And the other thing is, just from the NME's point of view, they've got an interview with Depeche fucking Mo, and it's not the front cover story. Instead, they've got a painting of a fictional boxer. What the fuck?

Single reviews. In the chair this week is Gavin Martin, who tells us before the reviews start, according to Music Week, 3,000-odd singles have been released so far this year, which averages out at about 75 per week. This week the Christmas rush starts and there are 118 pieces of plastic vying for your attention. To cover them all would be a waste of my time and your money,

so here's a selection from an industry in overload. Single of the week one, Rightful Air, is Slave to the Rhythm by Grace Jones. An undeniable jewel in Little Miss Maneater's crown. A definite monster. Trevor Horn's execution matches the record's dizzying conceits. He's brought all the threads together into a real rich tapestry. Breathtaking.

Single of the week two, Just Like Honey by the Jesus and Mary chain. A sulfurous French kiss. Spectre's symphonic dreams dragged screaming into a miasma of feedback and searing cackles from the best pop-titions of the day. Good pop music has always captured the zeitgeist as a matter of course, so it's no accident that along with the compulsive melody and sweetness, the J.A.M.C. plunder shocking a trophy, fear, waste and impotence no one else would dare.

But it's a coat down, for this is England by the clash. Their first record in 700 years, and they manage to miss the real riots once again. Still determined to slay the totems, bear the social ills, attend the wake of our crumbling banana republic. Strummer's rant bears all the signs of agic rocker well into a vancinility. Busking would appear a more fitting vocation. I mean, he's not wrong.

No, he's not been wrong so far at all. Jimmy Somerville has wriggled out a Bronski beat, teamed up with Richard Cole and returned with the Communards, but Gab doesn't reckon their debut single You Are My World. It continues where the Bronskis left off with a few musical adjustments. Viennese tea party string section, the piano line from Queen's Seven Seas of Rye and an operatic vocal cadence, says Martin. All these elements are overloaded, overwrought and embarrassing in their attempt to attain qualities of reach and emotional pungency. It's hard not to cringe at the mega melodrama of I Will Follow You To The End Of Time, I Will Be The Blood Throwing Through Your Veins, when sang with the usual of I will follow you to the end of time. I will be the blood throwing through your veins

when sang with the usual hysteria and stride and say, I'll pass. Also on the comeback trail, Fergal Sharkey with a good heart, open brackets, is hard to find, close brackets, which Martin reacts to in the same way as if he'd been shown the contents of a chimpanzee's nap air. The first fruits of his partnership with David A. Stewart

see Sharky casting his vocal pearls to swine, blundering MTV rock out bombast. Remember the wit, the maelstrom, the magic of positive touch? Sharky sure helped me forget that in a hurry. Future number one single. Preposterous over-inflated pomposity from a group that seems to have lost all sense of their roots, their aims and their proportion,

says Martin of Alive and Kicking by Simple Minds. Fair enough. There's little semblance of a song here, just an exercise in U3 gushing. Fair enough. of I'm Production Follet. The closing howls could be a chorus of stadium yuppies, and with a record this bad, this brainless, the cries may turn out to be for their own funeral. Gambler by Madonna is an up-tempo FM butch broad pose unredeemed by the superior dance track of Into the Groove or the flighty cheek of Material Girl.

Sweetest Taboo by Sade is a serious case of too much blamonge pulled down the listener's luggol from a one-dimensional singer with a lifeless sheen unable to zap or sting. As the column continues, Martin reviews get shorter and shorter. Closer to the Heart by Clannad, a hopelessly preppy piece of Barbara Dixon-style whinging. Just Another Night by the OJs, a drippy candlelit ballad for two in a velveteen wall restaurant of your choice. Don't Look Back by Michael McDonald,

an FM Freeway Ron Pordeneer and One of the Living by Tina Turner. Grace Jones for Head Bangers. I'd love to listen to Grace Jones for Head Bangers, man. That'd be fucking mint. But he gets in a two-line shooing for

Sweatbox by Wolfgang Press from the 4AD stable. An interchangeable bunch of ex-Maldeutschlanders and Cocteau-type people get together to produce the wearisome dirge that is customary from this label. Dance music if you're into leg irons. And he winds up with a review of the intriguing Only a Conservative Dream from Bernard Haywood on the red flag label. 40-year-old Vernon's contribution to scoundrel Kinnock's campaign trail, a piece of Lowry land mork released and financed by the Labour Party. It's aimed more at working men's than youth clubs, though I wonder if Orr Lads will readily accept such blatant politic profiteering from the unemployment industry.

I have a record collection and a political conscience, both of which will survive very nicely without this. Oh, dear. The thing with that singles page, first of all, I think it's pretty well written and there's not a lot to disagree with in what you said there.

But the presence of Grace Jones and the Jesus and Mary chain as his two singles of the week, both very different acts, but both reasons why I would have been thinking at the time

that all is not lost. There were these sort of disparate strands that were still offering hope. In the LP review section, the lead review this week is given over to Mad Not Mad by Madness. A Bieber cop breaks the news to a nation of youths, wondering if the Nutty Boys can still cut it in this, the wrong half of the 80s. wrong half of the 80s. Entropy is, colloquially speaking, all energy being absorbed in a losing battle against irreversible decay. The surface flakes and crumbles despite all the frantic efforts to shore it up. Entropy really belongs to physics, but it aptly describes the physiognomy of

Britain. Putting a brave smile on things when your insides are being eaten away by doubt, tears of frustration never far away. For a proper sense of the nation's increasing entropic state, you'd do no better than listen to a madness song, as no one else in popular music is presently reading Britain's physiognomy so accurately. If their turns have become more serious, their tunes imbued with a weightier sadness, it is because things have taken a turn

for the worse. When madness recalled the toll of the big issues on the spirit, the time has finally come to worry, for they are a valuable litmus test to the national sentiment. Mad Not Mad manages the impressive shuffle of being revealing and therefore bleak and light-footed both at once.

I think he likes it. It's funny, knowing Beavercott, he's perhaps about the last person in the world you can imagine sort of bouncing around in tight trousers and white socks to House of Fun. Doing the bummer's conga. That's right, yeah. But I think he kind of makes a point there in a way about, you know,

a group like Madness are actually reflecting that sort of sense of just things sort of slowing down and kind of bleakening, you know, and I guess they probably do mirror that at that point. Some good tunes on that album, Yesterday's Men. Oh, yeah. They are, yeah. ABC have returned with their third LP, How To Be A Zillionaire,

but Adrian Thrill skips the hearts and flowers, skips the ivory towers. It has one or two moments, but that's it. The orchestras of Lexicon and Flaming Axes of Beauty Stab have given way to a billion pounding beatboxers, brash staccato slabs of rhythm and spongy, grungy dollops of Fearlight and Emulator. The new ABC are gaudily excessive

and Zillionaire is a simply not very good record. I think that's the sort of misunderstood and underrated phase of ABC. It's one in which they kind of presented themselves as human cartoon characters in a way that gorillas would do later on. They were adopting kind of retro kitsch in a way that I think D. Light picked up on later on. Oh, God, yeah. And stuff like that. And I think D. Light picked up on later on. Oh, God, yeah. And stuff like that.

And, you know, I think the title track, How To Be A Millionaire, is a pretty great single. You know, I've seen the future, I can't afford it. It's a great opening line for a song. I think it's just in 1985, the looming, sort of towering achievement of Lexicon Of Love is still, you know, it's very much in the shadow. I mean, it still is. They're touring Lexicon Of Love on its 40th anniversary now,

playing Brighton next year. And who can blame them, really? If you've got an album that good, rinse it. Einsturzende Neubauten. David, help me. Einsturzende Neubauten. Have put out their third LP, Half Mensch, which makes Sean O'Hagan go off on one.

The collapse continues. The noise of a nervous system under attack, the sounds and struggles of a body disintegrating. Almost the entire landscape of Half Mench maps out a world where death is enticingly close, is another flirtation, is waiting for an unlucky throw of the dice or a final turn of the screw. Nor about an event at a place few others choose to explore. Not so much because of the subject matter, but more through an instinct that is pursuing such bleak paths. Leads to an emotional, spiritual and artistic impasse.

Where do you go when you plumb the depths? The virus continues to spread and the collapse continues. Yes, sure, but can you tap a toe to it? Is that any good, David, by the way? Because you'd know. Yeah, particularly the title track, yeah, which is just a sort of like a purely choral vocal piece. It's superb.

Electro 9, the latest Street Sounds compilation, is out now, featuring Doug E. Fresh, the Fat Boys and Mantronics, and Simon Witter spins on his head with glee. You might not like what the entrepreneurial capitalists at Street Sounds are selling,

but you can't deny that they're the most on-the-ball compilers ever. They're also, by necessity, very streetwise, championing the critically unfavoured Electro phenomenon, which, despite bad press, is decidedly happening. The LP is stronger than their previous Electro LPs. The cuts are also hotter, having been picked up with a speed that will madden the nation's import dealers.

Electro 9 confirms and pins down exactly where Electro is right now. If it's your bag, this is the real beef. Yeah, Morgan Kahn was really onto something, you know. Those Street Sound compilations were very exciting every time a new one came out. And in a very quiet week for LP releases, Leave the Best to Last by James Last

finds itself being reviewed by Stuart Crosgrove. James Last would be perfectly at home at an SDP conference. Ooh, sick burn. He's bland, short on ideas, and sits comfortably on the fence somewhere between music, an orchestral pop. Jimmy has a massive David Owen factor, a high rating in the middle-aged opinion polls,

and the kind of sweat back here which simultaneously tries to be young and old. Polydor liked to boast of last ubiquity. Apparently, he is known to 93% of the German population Less people know Hitler But what's his line on cruise missiles? A bit like Owen Soft options and silent night

Since when has a cover version of Hooray hooray it's a holly holiday Been the best unless you're lying pissed on a beach near Parma. Culture Club's Karma Chameleon and the Bushy Boys' Wake Me Up Before You Go Go come ready primed for the James Last treatment. Easy listening. Just swap the Catherine Hamnet strides

for a pair of golfer's leisure pants. And lovers of black lace will have to stomach Agadou rubbing shoulders with John Lennon's tiresome Imagine. And another predictable romp through his self-celebratory signature tune Do The Conga. The song that guarantees reptilian

dancing at his live concerts. Oh, man, I would love to hear a fucking mashup of Agadou and Imagine. Yeah, of course, ten years later, hipsters couldn't get enough of easy-listening cover versions of pop hits. In the gig guide section, well,

David could have seen Ornette Coleman at the Forum, but might have preferred to spend the same evening in the company of Fred Rickshaw's hot ghoulies at the Knightsbridge Grove or dump his rusty nuts at the Marquee. Later that week, he could have checked out Gary Glitter at Mile End Queen Mary College, Joe Boxers at King's College

and perhaps actually did see Jurati Column at Greenwich Theatre, but probably didn't. David? Unfortunately, I didn't get along to that. And, you know, it was nearby as well. I saw Sun Ra that year. Oh. That autumn.

Yeah. Taylor could have seen Gary Neumann at Birmingham Odeon. Joe Boxers at Birmingham Powerhouse. Got his corpse paint on for Venom at the Birmingham Odeon. Or his tam on for Tipper Eyrie and Pato Banton at the Birmingham Triangle Arts Centre. Rounding off the week to have a good scream at David Cassadare, also at the Birmingham Odeon. Sarah could have seen the Membranes at Sheffield's George IV Hotel,

a certain ratio at Sheffield Polair, seen the Fall support the Long Riders at Sheffield Unair, the Waterboys at Leeds Polair, or gone none more goth with Balam and the Angel at Leeds Warehouse. Al could have seen The Waterboys at Rock City. Van Morrison at the Royal Concert Hall. Or The Spinners at the Royal Concert Hall. Neil could have seen Joe Boxer's skint video.

Or The Flaming Mussolini's at Tory Shit or Warwick University, Streetlight at Brighton Bridge, Dave Berry at the Jaguar Sports Club and pretty much fuck all else. And Simon could have seen John Hegley at Cardiff University Union, Billy Connolly at St David's Hall and wound the week up with everything but the girl at Cardiff Uni. Can I just say, Balam and the Angel, the only goth band named after two tube stations. Of course.

I actually, I didn't go and see John Hegley in Cardiff, but I met him once and it didn't go well. Oh no. Yeah, what happened was my girlfriend in the late 80s, early 90s was a fan of his so i was familiar with his work you know the album was played around the house and he had this song called eddie don't like furniture yeah which is very memorable very catchy what happened was like

years later in the noughties i went to see the actor turned country singer billy bob thornton do a gig at the union chapel in l. And I was invited downstairs into the basement, which was a green room slash dressing room beforehand to meet Billy Bob. And there was no furniture in the dressing room. Tables and chairs all being completely room. It's a really big room, but there were no chairs. And somebody sort of signed up to me and explained he's got this phobia of furniture. And I thought, oh, my God, it's like the John Hegley song

so I stored that information away and then I happened to see John Hegley play a show at the Red Lion Theatre pub in Islington and I went up to him and said John this really weird thing happened once you know your song Eddie Don't Like Furniture well I met Billy Bob Thornton and I told him this whole story about how Billy Bob Thornton don't like furniture well i met billy bob thornton and i told him this whole story about how billy bob thornton didn't like furniture and he looked at me john hegley like i was completely insane he started sort of shrinking away from me like i'd said something completely mad and i i was i was really really disappointed in the letters page well gas bag has been handed over to neil taylor who discovers that the main topic of conversation this week

is how much the readership hates Neil Taylor. Yeah, you know, I think Neil Taylor's much maligned, you know. I mean, it's not cool that he broke Seamus Coleman's leg back in 2017. I was there. And what he did led to quite a tense and terrifying atmosphere that night in Dublin. But what you have to balance against that is the fact that he also gave me one of the best nights of my life the previous year in Toulouse, when, much to his own amazement, as well as everyone else's, he scored against the Russians. And, oh, wait, not that Neil Taylor. Sorry.

One for the Welsh football heads out there. It is comforting to know that once in a while you serious rock critic type persons relax from discussing the merits of post-modernist, neo-structuralist, post-stoicism in modern day society or some such. Step down from your ivory tower and visit an actual rock and roll gig to get on down with us morgles,

writes Ricky Hill from Deptford. At a recent That Petrol Emotion spotted cowboys hoedown at the old tiger's head, Lee Green, luscious, pouting wild man of rock Neil Taylor, was seen to really let his hair down. Yes, he strode seductively past the rows of bopping funsters at the front of the audience, stopped right in front of the stage, took off his shoulder bag and removed his shirt and pogoed madly like a man possessed. No, of course he didn't. Our extremely hip and cool man of the people proceeded to take out his wind-filled cup reporter set and from there on in spent the whole of the set taking notes.

What a rocker, what a fan, what a prat. Yeah, taking notes. Imagine that journalist being diligent enough. Because if you don't take notes, they'll just write to you and say, oh, were you even at the same gig? You've, you know, said nothing about what happened. Also laying into Mr Taylor is Paul Haywood from Bristol, who writes that he is mostly thankful, but sometimes sad.

That's the way enemy makes me feel. Revulsion takes over when your cynicism gives way to savagery and hysterical viciousness. Richard Cook is right. To Neil Taylor, 100% of everything is shit. Presumably, the man has self-respect, yet he can write of Ian Curtis. Thankfully, the dead pop star can't make records anymore. Very selective selective Neil.

However, it's simply not true that Neil Taylor hates everything as Stig from Dundee attests. This has gone far enough. Week by week I have watched as each new creation act has been paraded through the pages of your rag. Each

more brattish, arrogant and untalented as the one preceding it, and each granting Mr Neil Taylor an exclusive interview. It is time Mr Taylor showed himself to be the thing I suspect, i.e. either on the payroll of creation, a close friend of McGee, and or the Mary Chain or simply misguided. Granted, there is little or no new music to get excited about at the moment, but that is no excuse for giving space to dross. Mr Taylor continues to come up with any dross that pervades from East Kilbride in its environs and the NME prints it. As Creation and Taylor are no doubt aware, this is a whole lot cheaper than advertising. Who is this new recruit, Neil Taylor, whose outpourings have started to decorate the NME?

Asks Brian Savage from Battersea. In the last couple of weeks, this writer has informed us that the Bunnymen are dreadfully run-of-the-mill, the Cocteau twins appalling, everything but the girl atrocious, and Elvis Costello an ageing bore. All in the middle of articles or reviews of other groups. Of course, there is nothing wrong with holding these opinions on such NME readers' favourites,

but merely slagging off name groups for the sake of it seems silly, pointless and not at all original. Would it not be better when hiring young graduates to write for the NME to find those who can mix genuine enthusiasm for popular music with constructive criticism? Please thank Neil Ta- Fucking hell, what with constructive criticism. Mmm. Please thank Neil... Fucking hell, what a pylon. Yeah. Please thank Neil Taylor-Profusler for his witty article

on how much he hates all musicians, writers and record companies. Well done, Neil, writes Quentin Bissell from London. Perhaps in future he can voice his opinions in the local pub so folks can hear them for free instead of wasting 45 pence. And finally, we have Neil Taylor makes me puke.

Love, Marco Croydon. Fucking hell. Oh, man. Did you ever get such a slagging in the letters page? Yeah. Oh, it was great i mean a coat down was like it's like the bebop jazz generation you know every time they got sort of slated by these kind of you know trad jazz music there were little badges of honor like being on the daily mail's woke watch list exactly no it was great it just felt like a vindication

because it was usually dellards and they're usually writing in a very you know there's usually usually the thing was like i believe you might have been to a different gig altogether. You know, there's a lot of that. Yeah, I mean, I've already said that when I wrote for the Barrington District News, Simon Says, I loved it if people wrote in angrily, so how dare you say, you know, the Smiths are better than the Beatles.

And it was the same at Melody Maker. I'm sure Neil Taylor would have been sort of digging through that mailbag, looking for anything with his name on it. It's only human to do so, I think. Oh, of course, yeah. I've just got one here, actually, because it was somebody sort of trying to do a kind of comedic conceit,

which is fair enough. I think I'd given... I was never much of a fan of Theatre of Hate stroke Spirit of Destiny, Kirk Brandon. Oh, in the spirit of new kindness. Apparently he's not been well lately, but he's on the mend. So, you know, big shout-out to him. All is forgiven.

Yeah. But anyway, I'll try and do it in the owl voice if I can. So anyway, you know, it's a riposte. So basically the review, I was effectively making out that Kirk Brandon was a dead horse and I think I extended the metaphor to kind of tins of meat in Brussels supermarkets

or something. But anyway, so I think this is what inspired this. So anyway, sorry. Picture the scene. Ten minutes before the Grand National is due to begin and Willie Carson's horse drops down dead, Willie sprints instantly to the stables to find a replacement. Only two horses remain, the mighty Brandon and Stubbs the Sap.

Willie has to choose between the two. I need a horse that can bounce back whenever down. The mighty Brandon neighs. I need a horse which won't give up, no matter what the odds are. The mighty Brandon neighs again. But what about you, Stubbsy? Willie asks.

I'm afraid I won't be much good, he says. People laugh at me all the time. All I do is make myself look silly, but I don't mind really. Once a failure, always a failure. And with that, Willie rides off into the distance on the mighty Brandon to storm home first in the race, while Stubbs the sap is left to contemplate

what might have been. There you go. That's how to extend a metaphor. Oh yeah, Stubbs the sap. Very chastening. But that was in 1987. He's yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, Stubbs the sap. Yeah, very chastening. Yes. But that was in 1987, so there you go. He's not the only enemy, Jono, that gets coated down this week, however,

in the wake of Stephen Wells' interview with Steve Wright the other week. Did Wells get paid for rewriting the 1984 slag-off of Steve Wright, asks John Carr from nowhere? I hope not, because he's offered me no new insights into the DJ. What it boils down to is that Wells can't stand Wright's

show. Big deal. Whatever anyone thinks of Wright's show, it does bring pleasure to millions. In fact, most of my mates love it, and they do not read the NME. Obviously, Wells feels himself above Steve Wright. But what is the man of the left's contribution to society? A. He goes on tour with Billy Bragg. B. He writes for the NME. C. He used to attempt humour on

Whistle Test. I remember Steve Wright saying how disgusting it was that unemployed people were forced to live on £20 a week. That will have more impact than any number of smart slaggings from someone like Steve, man of the people, Wells. Perhaps he'll provide some

witty response to this letter being the man that he is. Reader, he doesn't. Just a note to tell you that at least one long-term reader of your paper does not appreciate the amount of space you're currently allowing Stephen Wells. It is becoming increasingly obvious that he cannot wait for blood to be spilt. The most trivial and yet illuminating example of this macho attitude occurred when Mr Wells poked fun at a correspondent who used the word crap in his letter. Mr Wells's reply, you tinker, obviously meant to put this wimp, read, non-macho reader in his place for not swearing vigorously enough.

Yours violently, Paul Kennedy, Liverpool. Matt Snow also comes under the microscope in a letter from a dickhead of Manchester who writes, there are dickheads and dickheads and Matt Snow is a dickhead. And finally, someone remembers that the NME is a dickhead. And finally, someone remembers that the NME is a music paper and writes about the new direction of Dex's Midnight Runners. Kevin Rowland, you have the mind of a retarded

skate, the dress sense of the jerks I used to work for in the stock exchange, and your music has fallen to bits. The Emperor's new clothes indeed for four years i was dex's number one fan but i'm into cnd my parents used to live in notting hill and if you call me scum i'll kick your fucking head in turban brain seems like quite a few music journalists have been fooled, though. Ha! Reminisce part two. Awful, writes Attila the Stockbroker of Essex.

64 pages, 45p. I never knew there was so much hatred of Neil Taylor in it. Attila the Stockbroker used to write quite a lot of angry letters like that. You know, the punk poet. I don't think he was really quite with the programme of the 80s NME. I remember there was one time where he just got so enraged that at the end of the letter he said, what are you even talking about? He said, you've said it now.

You've done it now, Morley. You've done it now. You've pissed on whatever reputation you have. You piece of scabby rat. And that was the end of the letter. At the end of the stockbroker. What's he done? What are you referring to exactly?

I think I actually know what he was referring to as well because the previous week, Paul Morley had interviewed... He talked about simple minds and he referred to them as being post-ABBA rather than post-punk. And I think that's what really kind of got him going. But he was so seething with that rage that he couldn't even bring himself to specify the complaint. Yeah, it's interesting hearing that that is the actual

Attila the stockbroker because I've run into him down here he lives he lives uh he's you know from Sussex he's uh I think it's Southwick right next to Brighton and I've I've I met him once a a Labour Party event um and the letter signed from Essex that's the only thing that threw me um but anyway yeah this letter what it's specifically referring to is this is what she's like which is the 12 minute epic from um the don't stand me down album and it's a song on which kevin roland tries to describe the woman he loves by listing what she's not like and a lot of it is about class antipathy. He says the English upper classes are thick and ignorant. But he also hates the nouveau riche.

He calls them newly wealthy peasants with their home bars and their hi-fis. And he has a go at people who put creases in their Levi's. And people who use expressions like tongue-in-cheek. People who use words like fabulous. Who describe nice things as wonderful and the line that's pissed off Attila here is the line you know those scum from Notting Hill and Moseley they call the CND the thing with that is it upset me at the time as well I remember I was a very pro CND teenager and I felt seen I felt criticized I attacked. And it's not as if Kevin Rowland himself

is some sort of hawkish pro-nuclear warmonger, you know? No. I mean, he's a Jeremy Corbyn supporter, for fuck's sake. He's very much of the left and all that. But what he's doing there, it's not about the belief so much as what that belief is a badge of and the sort of people who wear that badge, if you know what I mean. Because sometimes, I don't know if you feel this as well about anything but sometimes the most aggravating people are the ones

you basically agree with yeah so for example i'm massively pro europe and i was massively pro remain but if i see fbpe on someone's twitter bio my hackles go up. I can't help it. I don't know why. It just, my guard is up at least, let's say that. FBPE? Oh, is it fuck Brexit pro-Europe? Right. Yeah, yeah. And it's become a thing that people put in their Twitter bios, you know. And the same with Ukrainian flags. Now, obviously, I'm a supporter of the Ukrainian cause. Obviously, I'm a supporter of the Ukrainian cause. But there are certain things which are signifiers of nicey-nicey liberal centrism, you know.

And I don't get along with those people, as Kevin didn't, even if I'm 100% in agreement with them on certain causes. You know, fuck Brexit, fuck Putin, you know. fuck brexit fuck putin you know and i guess to kevin um cnd supporters from mosley and notting hill were the 80s equivalent of that and this idea of alienating the very people you agree with is is something that totally fits with dexys and their mentality at the time i mean for a start even in a world you know the mid-80s a world of left-leaning, soul-based pop, Kevin didn't want anything to do with the rest of the left-leaning, soul-based pop groups. He always wanted to stand alone. And he didn't even want people to agree with him, this sort of perversity of it,

that if you go back to the 2RIAY album and the track Liars A2E, that's all about he doesn't want his fans to follow him and to copy him to be like him so it's almost like i'm not saying his mind worked this way but it's like you know dex's fans are probably sort of like you know cnd supporters or whatever i'm gonna really fuck them off and if if dex's lost the support of attila then you know fuck it it was worth it but but but you know what i mean though that that thing about just feeling this antipathy towards your nominal allies. Yeah, 1985 there. Yeah.

So what else was on telly today? Well, BBC One kicks off at 6am with a 50-minute CFAX data blast. Then it's breakfast time with Frank Boff and Debbie Greenwood. Then it's the morning session of the final day of the Labour Party conference from Bournemouth. Then it's play school. Then it's back to Bournemouth. Afternoon's

afternoon. It's Pebble Mill at one. Okie-kokie with Don Spencer and Chloe Ashcroft. And back to Bournemouth for another two hours. At five to four, it's up our street, Super Ted and Beat the Teacher. Then it's Cheggers Plays Pop

with Bernadette Nolan and Depeche Mode. Fucking hell, Depeche Mode on Cheggers Plays Pop. Working it. Oh, Martin Gorby aged himself. After John Craven's news round, Janet Ellis nips over to Darwin to talk to the survivors of cyclone tracer who flattened the place on christmas eve 1974 then it's the six o'clock news followed by regional news in your

area you know what al i think you know even if my home had been destroyed 10 years earlier by a cyclone i think meeting janet ellis would have cheered me up definitely and seeing it on TV as a teenager would also have cheered me up. But one thing you skipped over in the listings there, it was straight after Blue Peter, Rolf Harris cartoon time. Oh, did I miss that? Yeah, yeah. And that would not, see, that would not cheer me up.

No. So you've got light and shade there from the BBC Kids programme. All human life is here. BBC Two commences at 6.30am with geometry, axioms and energy closing the gap in Open University then closes down for an hour

and 40 minutes, springing back at 9 for a 36 minute CFAX data blast. Then it scores programmes all the way to 3 o'clock, followed by a 50 minute CFAX data blast before they pick up the last knockings of the Labour Party conference. After another 25-minute CD,

it's the new summer air, followed by Jeremy James and William Hartson who take us to Moscow for an update on the World Chess Championship. Then Captain Kirk and Spock get trapped in a dungeon by a woman who can turn into a giant cat or summit in star trek and we're now 10 minutes into a repeat of the adventure game our tv starts at a quarter past six with good morning britain followed by a concentrated dollop of schools and colleges programs until noon. Then it's the giddy game show, Puddle Lane, the Sullivans, the News at One and regional news in your area.

After a repeat of Falcon Crest and the Home Cookery Club, we're treated to the first semi-final of the Goya Snooker Matchroom Trophy and horse racing from Newmarket. Then it's regional news in your area. A repeat of this morning's giddy game show. Doris, Scooby-Doo, them and us, blockbusters, crossroads, and they've just started Emmerdale Farm, where Amos Brearley starts troubleshooting at the wool pack

and makes a dog's arse of everything as usual. Amos Brearley was the funniest ever soap opera character for me, bar none. The greatest ever soap opera creation. Channel 4 actually gets out of bed at a decent hour for a change, all the better to provide their coverage of the Labour Party conference at half nine before closing down at noon for an hour and a half and then going back to Bournemouth for the rest of the afternoon. At five o'clock they run The Lion of Judah, the 1983 two-hour long documentary about the fascist invasion of Ethiopia and they've just

started Channel 4 News. Not much there that's leapt out at me and brought back sweet memories. Apart from the Gidi Gang show, I used to like that. Bernard Breslow being a gorilla. I never heard of that. Probably one of the last things he ever did, really. Game over. I'm impressed that you found anything out about the Lion of Judah.

I looked it up on IMDB and there's nothing. Not from 1983 anyway, which is the owner listings i just presumed it's rastafarian propaganda from the loony left channel four you know channel four is still channel four then wasn't it you know yeah lennon bombing a rastafarian yeah um al you mentioned super ted super ted's from barry you know really yeah yeah well mike young who invented super ted is from barry he was at yeah yeah well mike young who invented super ted is from barry he was at school with my mum actually um which meant that super ted was the most famous

person from barry when i was growing up i mean nowadays there's derrick brockway the weatherman who i was at school with um there's mike bubbins the comedian there's that woman who was prime minister of australia julia gillard and right in fifth place is probably me yeah um barry's not Mike Bubbins, the comedian. There's that woman who was Prime Minister of Australia, Julia Gillard. And in fifth place is probably me. Barry's not overly blessed. None of you are as good as Super Ted, though. No, absolutely. Can any of your lot fly?

I don't think so. Well, I used to tell people I could when I was about 10 years old, but that's a whole other story. Yeah. Well, chaps, I do believe that the table Has been well and truly laid So I think we ought to step back now And gird our loins for a proper Evisceration of this episode of Top of the Pops tomorrow

So we'll call it a day there And we'll see you tomorrow So thank you very much Simon Price God bless you David Stubbs My name's Al Needham Imploring you to stay Pop Crazed. Chart Music.

Hey Pop Crazed Youngster. Do you love chart music but hate London? Do you want to see our new live show but would sooner stop at home and doss about in your pants on a Saturday? Are you going to our live show but want to see it again and again and again and again for a week or so?

Well, it seems to me like you need to get booked into our live stream at this year's London Podcast Festival. See that keyboard. Use those fingers. Mash out tinyearl.com slash cm live 23, all lower case. Step up to the pay

window, lay your money down and get ready to see Team ATV Land throw down live and direct on Saturday, September the 16th. That link again, tinyearl.com slash cmlive23, all lower case. Come on, Pop Craze youngsters, stick that money down this G-string and watch Team ATV Land grind and thrust just for you. No wanking, though, OK?