Chart Music: the Top Of The Pops Podcast - #72 (Pt 3): 3.10.85 – Rod Vicious

Episode Date: August 23, 2023

Simon Price, Rock Expert David Stubbs and Al Needham plunge ever-onwards into a post-Live Aid episode of The Pops, and it turns out that 1985 is SKILL – well, it is when Cameo are slinking about on TOTP stage. Then we’re reminded of the dark times when John Parr pitches up to do a film advert. But then! It’s a double-barrelled blast of Our Bands, as the Smiths are forced to do a video, and Lol Tolhurst stinks out a wardrobe. And them some bloke starts going about thinking he’s Prince. GO FOR IT, 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 is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull-apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey, and just five bucks for the small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. 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 sharp music Hey up, you pop-crazed youngsters, and welcome to part three of episode 72 of Chalk Music.

I'm Al Needham, currently raging hard with Simon Price and David Stubbs, and the three of us are in absolutely no mood to fanny about. So, let us rejoin the episode in progress. That's the way to do it. Straight in at number 20 this week, it's Iron Maiden and Running Free. Now, here come a group that come all the way over from the States to appear with us on Top Of The Pops this evening. It's their first television debut in this country. They are Cameo. They're at number 21 this week, and this is The Single Life. That's the way to do it.

Straight in at number 20, says Jordan, let loose into the studio and surrounded by a smattering of the kids. He then tells us of a group that have come over all the way from America, where they make all them films and that, to make their first ever appearance on British television. It's cameo and single life. Formed by Larry Blackman in New York in 1974, the New York City Players were a 14-piece funk band who were signed to Casablanca Records a year later as The Players,

but were forced to change their name after the Ohio players wagged a finger at them and tuttered. Changing their name to Cameo, after a packet of fags one of the band had bought while they were on tour in Canada, they put out the LP Cardiac Arrest

in early 1977, scoring an R&B hit with a single rigor mortis. After being pulled into the orbit of disco, they ended up on the soundtrack of Thank God It's Friday in 1978. They go on to be a regular presence in the Billboard R&B charts throughout the early 80s, but it wouldn't be until 1984 that their label, Phonogram,

decided to release anything in the UK after they sold out their debut tour over here and She's Strange got to number 37 in April of that year. This single, the follow-up to Attack Me With Your Love, which got to number 65 in July, is the second cut from the LP's single Life, which came out in June but only got to number 66 in our charts. It entered the singles charts at number 47, then soared 12 places to number 35,

which led to about 20 seconds of the video being played in the breaker section of Top of the Pops that week, kicking it up another 10 places to number 25. kicking it up another 10 places to number 25. This week, it's jumped four places to number 21. And here they are for their first chance to have a slink about in the top of the pop studio. Come on in, Cameo. Named after a packet of fags. If they'd have been on tour in Britain at the time,

they could have been called Silk Cut, which is a great name for a band of their ilk. Yeah, it would be, actually. Or Rough Shag. Well, yeah, that would have been alright, yeah. That's more like an album track of theirs. Do you notice that Paul Jordan says it's their first

television debut? Like, yeah, as opposed to their second television debut. This is exactly what I'm talking about, that I get nervous watching him. I know he's a really nice bloke, but anyway. Yeah. Yeah, funk expert David Stubbs, the floor is yours. Yeah, I love this.

And I mean, you know, when I was talking about something happening... It's mint, isn't it? Yeah, in Colonel Abrams. Yeah, I mean, things happen here. Yeah, this is absolute mint. There's no argument about it. You know, they're assuming the stances. They look terrible, dress-wise,

but most people did in 1985. Yes. It's shocking. I didn't. I was fine, but we'll get on to that later on. But it's a bit like that scene in Wings of Desire when Bruno Gantz's angel goes and gets these clothes, he exchanges his suit of armour for some terrible clothes that have just been randomly thrown together.

So many people dressed like that in 1985. I mean, the 80s have got a fucking nerve having a laugh at the 70s, put it that way. They really have. You know, there's so much of that. There's a lot of that about tonight. And the late 80s, early 90s even more so. Fucking hell.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, I mean, this I love. I mean, I get always cameos that are a bit like Prince, but minus the sort of androgyny, the sense of gender fluidity. You know, it's very much an all-male thing. But no, I mean, he loves it. It's a beautiful piece. I mean, that little sort of bass drone that you get that runs through it,

it's kind of subtly quite wistful, really. It's like, yeah, he's living the single life, but could that be the aching, mute voice of his subconscious there? You know, there's that kind of weird, lovely little undercurrent going on there. I mean, the beauty of this sort of record, it's the sort of record that no one makes anymore. if they did they'd make a pharrell size fortune i mean that's what pharrell i think was specialized in you know making the kind of records they don't make anymore you know but um you know i'm sure that like someone could absolutely clean up by

just flat out emulating this i mean i remember being at a barbecue hosted by this british jamaican family and when this struck up know, everyone across the generations put down their paper plates and, you know, they just got right down as one. You know, it was lovely. But I did interview Larry Blackmun about 1988, this would have been. It really wasn't my finest hour, actually. Oh, no. He was late, you know, for the interview, you know, and I was a bit peeved about that, you know, because I'm a stickler for punctuality, you know, being the old wing commander and all that, but it wasn't the most sort of scintillating of interviews. And I think that when I kind of wrote it up, I think I was getting a bit smug. I'd been like a staff writer at Melody Maker for about a year and felt

a bit on top of the world and started, I don't know, there was a sort of slightly kind of unappealing waspishness that was creeping into my copy. And at one point, you know, he was talking about Tommy Jenkins. I think he was talking about how he was going to be helping work on a Tommy Jenkins album. And I wrote something like, oh, well, good luck, whoever the hell he is, something like that. I actually wrote that. Now, what happened is, in those days, they had,

Channel 4, they had, late on Friday nights, they had a sort of what the papers say, and it was like what the music papers say. Oh, no! Yeah, and Charles Shaw Murray was doing it, and he picked up on this little piece, because I watched the bloody thing, and he picked up on this, and he said,

David, Tommy Jenkins is one of Cameo. Yes. It's like, oh, my fucking... And that was a very, very properly humbling experience, you know, and rightly so. God. I mean, this is the pre-Codpiece era of cameos. So, you know, what we're getting here is a more masculine imagination

with more clothes on. They've stripped down from 14 to 10 to 4. And Larry Blackman is obviously the front man, wearing a jacket that appears to have parakeets on it over a light green vest and dark green trousers and you know the only instrument on stage is a bass which stays slung around the shoulder of erin mills he's he's not going to put it down and start capering about like ashley blessing yeah weird choice that yeah you know there's one instrument

but it's the instrument yeah yeah just this track coming on at the time and this time was just like fucking yes. What a joy. Yeah, 1985 is skill. Yeah, I mean, I think this song has kind of been obliterated a bit from people's memory by the megalithic presence of Word Up. Yes. But this is the one, really.

I mean, okay, you know, She's Strange had been a minor hit, but this is the one really i mean yeah okay you know she's strange she'd been a minor hit but this is the one that really kind of broke them through the thing with cameo is they came out of nowhere and they didn't at the same time it's like you used to see their records in the racks i remember my dad dragging me around record shops and i'd be sort of looking through the funk sections and you'd see their albums i mean they didn't even get an album release in the uk until their seventh album which was nights of the sound table great nice um they had played live a bit in the uk they had a bit of a following i mean when they did their first tour the year before i remember seeing an advert in the local paper for the royal concert hall and it said cameo sold out

and it's just like yeah who the fuck a cameo i thought i was on top of everything in the music world i'd never heard of them and i assumed because of the name that there must be some kind of prog band yeah or something yeah i guess they're getting played late at night by robbie vincent or whoever i don't know but they obviously had a following on the kind of soul oh yeah they were like maze weren't they just yeah yeah nobody knew them apart from all the people that sold out their just yeah yeah nobody knew them apart from all the people that sold out their gigs yeah yeah and this is it i mean i used to see their records in in the racks alongside rufus and shaka khan who i also didn't really know who they were and you

know just these sort of like dog-eared records secondhand records and did you think rufus was called rufus khan no no i didn't but the thing with with cameo the name and the logo they had in those days, the logo was a kind of Art Nouveau thing. It looked more like a bar of soap. Yes. You know. Cameo.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Than a funk band. But obviously when they had their big rethink, they changed everything. They slimmed down from 14 members to, you know, four or five. And the logo became more kind of blocky and chunky and modern. The music did too. The music became more blocky and chunky and modern the music did too the music became more blocky and chunky and modern as well i listened to an interview with

larry blackman recently uh by questlove it's on the questlove podcast right and in that he talks about the fact that he really enjoyed being at the end of the old school but at the start of the new technology he really enjoyed being in this position where he was part of that changeover yeah and you can really hear that because this record and this era of cameo is all about minimalism really in the interview with questlove he's talking about some kind of piece of machinery he's got and he says it's a mitsubishi now i looked into this i couldn't find any bit of audio equipment that's made by mitsubishi so maybe he's got that wrong or just my searching skills aren't up to it.

But anyway, whatever this piece of machinery was, he says, it could make silence sound good. And that's clearly what Cameo were about at this time. It's all about the gaps and the spaces between everything. There's some amazing stuff about the sort of backstory of Cameo in that interview, by way there's a thing you know you said they slimmed down from 14 members but when they had 14 members they needed a massive tour bus yeah they bought that tour bus from muhammad ali no yeah fucking hell larry blackman's dad was a boxer so maybe there was some kind of connection there i don't know how it happened but yeah you can imagine that sort of like handing the keys over this kind of yeah that might be about 1981 know how it happened. But yeah, you can imagine that sort of like handing the keys over.

Oh, man. That might have been about 1981, because that's when Ali had his last fight. Right. He lost to Trevor Burbick. And of course, at that point, his entourage would have just disappeared, you know. So he's definitely going to have a bus going begging, definitely.

The thing with his backstory, Larry Blackman, he talks about growing up in New York. And when he was just a child, he was hanging around the Apollo. And he saw live people like Sam cook and james brown and right through to funkadelic and maybe i'm extrapolating too much from this but you know and maybe i'm drawing lines between things but you can see the kind of showmanship that larry blackman must have learned from watching people like james brown and george clinton and sam cook but also the other kind of musical element in his Larry Blackman must have learned from watching people like James Brown and George Clinton and Sam Cooke. But also the other kind of musical element in his life was he was in this thing called the Junior Guard, which is like an even more paramilitary version of the Boy Scouts.

It was basically funded by the FBI. In the interview, Larry compares it to the Hitler Youth. Right. And he joined the Drum and bugle corps of the junior guard and in that he learned drums first and then the bass right from that you know his family moved to atlanta and then he takes those skills to form a school band which becomes cameo and maybe this is a stretch by me but he's in this kind of quasi military organization playing military music and he's playing the drums and the bass.

And he's learnt all this showmanship. And that's cameo. You've got this kind of robotic military beat, backbeat to it. Eyes right! Which is the best bit in the song. Eyes right! Yeah, all of that.

And that kind of minimalist era of cameo, for me, it's their best stuff. I mean, I've tried with the old fun material. I don't know if David has. For me, it's quite sort of second tier, second tier stuff. Yeah, I doubt it. This is their stuff. Yeah, yeah. I think it starts with the album fun material i don't know if david has for me it's quite sort of second tier second tier now this is this is their stuff yeah yeah yeah i think it starts with the album style in 1983 questlove goes further than that he reckons i just want to be single they released

in 1979 is where that kind of thing starts the sort of futurist bit of what they do but the first that we the general public as opposed to kind of specialists and soul boys, I guess, would have heard of it, was She's Strange, which was, you know, top 40 first time round, later reissued, got slightly higher. And again, you know, this is the UK being ahead of the game. Cameo didn't make the Billboard top 40 until Word Up in 86. Ridiculous. And it was number three in the UK, number six in the Billboard charts. But yeah, we were way ahead of the game with Cameo. I remember getting hold of the reissue of She's Strange. And on the B-side of that, there was this Cameo Megamix with various hits all welded together.

And it hit me that their music is modular, like Lego. It all fits to a template and you can mix and match bits together. Which isn't to say that they all sound exactly the same. But if you listen to She's Strange, Single Life, Attack Me With Your Love, Word Up, Candy and Back and Forth, Candy fucking hell. Oh, Candy's fucking amazing. That's their best tune, Candy. Yeah, it probably is, to be fair.

They all sound related, though, those tracks. They're brothers from another mother, all those tracks. And the thing, in pop music, you only need one idea if it's a brilliant idea. Yes, totally, yes. Whether you're the Ramones or Lana Del Rey, just that one idea will sustain you. God, Candy, I mean, Dave, you're talking about witnessing how people reacted to Single Life at a barbecue. If, in the UK, you go to a black wedding and candy comes on have you seen that dance there's the dance that everyone does to it no there's a particular sort of um sort of dance

routine that sort of like a group dance routine that everyone does to it and it's just i try learning it it's kind of a but it's kind of it's just an amazing thing to watch when cyril regis died the footballer that dance broke out at his funeral wake. It's just the most amazing clip, if you find it. Yeah, I've seen that too. But not everybody liked this new thing that Cameo were doing. The critic Geoffrey Himes in the Washington Post

called them Shamio, on account of all the studio trickery that they were doing. Oh, fuck off. You know, yeah. And yeah, obviously there was a lot of studio trick, but that's the fucking point. That's what's so brilliant about it. They're cheating.

They're using synthesizers. Yeah, yeah. And Larry Blackman is a genius. You know, he was the genius behind it. You know, he was the producer and all that, but they were a group. That's the thing.

It wasn't just him. You know, you've got Nathan Lieutenant. He's the guy with the two rows of little baby dreads. He was on vocals and played trumpet on some of their records. You've got Tommy Jenkins, who David mentioned,

and Kevin Kendrick. Those guys co-wrote most of the songs with Larry, so they really were a group. But the thing is, they did have gimmicks. They did have gimmicks. That was the whole... Like, Larry Blackman going, ow, on most cameo hits.

Yeah, later on, we're not quite there yet. He hasn't started singing like he's got a massive hunk of special toffee in his mouth just yet. Yeah, or a, we're not quite there yet. He hasn't started singing like he's got a massive hunk of special toffee in his mouth just yet. Yeah, or a clothes peg on his nose. But I actually tried to trace the history of the funk. It's almost like a lockdown project.

I got so bored, I tried to make this happen. So, It's There on September by Earth, Wind & Fire, and It's Your Thing by the Isley Brothers, 1969. And that was as far back as I could go, 1969 and It's Your Thing by the Isley Brothers, 1969. And that was as far back as I could go, 1969. It's Your Thing. Ow.

So if any pop-crazed youngsters have got a credible earlier instance of the funk, ow. You know, some people say Sly and the Family Stone, but I couldn't find an example from pre-'69. So yeah, I'd love to hear it.

And the other gimmick, of course, is the Ennio Morricone Good, the Bad and the Ugly gimmick. of course, is the Ennio Morricone good, the bad and the ugly gimmick. Of course, yes. That we hear on this record. And that's a bit like, you know, Ann Dudley from Art of Noise. She always had that, hey, hey, sound in the background on everything she produced.

I quite like that, that they had that gimmick, that you instantly recognise the cameo track because of the... Yeah. Even if it's not an ah, which we don't get on this track. The thing is, it's absolutely nothing wrong. We've only got one idea. If it's a brilliant idea, it's great.

All of these things are saying, hey, you know you like cameo and you liked all those cameo records. Well, here, and this is to indicate it, is another cameo record. It's an intro to a Motown song. It's where you, you know Motown, you like Motown, don't you?

Well, here's some more Motown. Well, the individual drummers know Motown you like Motown don't you well here's some more Motown well the individual drummers in um yeah on Motown tracks the funk brothers had each drummer had had their own individual fill that they would start the track with so you could recognize which drummer it was that's how extreme it got there yeah yeah I mean there's very little here in this performance that will anger or unbalance the dads but the BBC could have had a lot of fun with a full play of the video, which, as you'll recall, begins with a very chunky black man

with a high top fade and an uber mercury of a moustache in a wedding dress, which he then rips off and stomps out of a church so he can jump into a Ferrari and bomb around town with a selection of ladies from the 80s

with massive sex frizz hairstyles. Quite the thing to put out in 1985 in the middle of the AIDS scare. Yeah, the thing with cameo is, particularly when you get to the codpiece era, they are incredibly camp. Yes. But they were completely heterosexual.

They're kind of the opposite of Wham in a way. Because Wham appeared, at least to somebody in my generation, to be these young straight lads. But, you know, obviously, we now know the reality of that. But yeah, cameo, candle bar moustache, red codpiece, and yeah, utterly straight, which is kind of amazing.

Like PJ Proby said, I was camp, but I put some beef into it. The dance moves are amazing, I think, the coordinated dance moves on this performance. You know, they're really going for it. And also, they had the guys and girls audience participation down way before timberlake way before outcast that single guys clap your hands and single ladies clap your hands and all that which is just fantastic what a great hook that yeah i don't know if they've been instructed to perform and respond but the kids are well into it, aren't they? They clap their gender-specific hands on cue

absolutely perfectly. Yeah, absolutely. And you know, a good way, if this came on in the club, a good way to signal your availability. Yeah, exactly. Or a really good way for your mates to turn around and just stare at you

when he sings that. Like, aha, you haven't got a girlfriend. And you just go, fuck off. Yeah, you wouldn't know her if she goes to a different school. Like, aha, you haven't got a girlfriend. And you just go, fuck off. Yeah, you wouldn't know her. She goes to a different school. Yeah. Yes, exactly, yes. I mean, Simon, you speak eloquently of the music of the 80s

that emboldened you when you weren't in a relationship. And, you know, you could say here's another example, but, you know, I doubt Larry Blackman and his mates are staring out of their bedroom windows, taking in the landscape of Barré. No, because it's not the single life as in the celibate life. It's not the chaste life. No, certainly not.

It's the promiscuous life, if anything, you know. It's the slacking about life. Yes, exactly. Even though I think that there is an underlying sadness because, you know, life isn't all cock. Yeah. Yes. Fucking hell.

Are they funk, though? These people are in the late 20s early 30s they're veterans but unlike prince or michael jackson a few years later you know they can breathe in hip-hop and breathe it out again in their own style they're not intimidated or encumbered by it exactly that's you've put it perfectly yeah. They took hip hop on board, but they also had an effect on it, you know. Yes. The sound of R&B post cameo does bear their DNA. I mean, Teddy Riley was definitely listening. Larry kind of mentioned him in that Questlove interview I did.

And he mentored Teddy Riley to some extent and almost signed him to his label. And you can hear that similar kind of use of emptiness and space on No Diggity by Blackstreet, for example. And you also, I mean, David correctly mentioned Pharrell Williams. Think of something like Drop It Like It's Hot and the sort of empty spaces on that track. And Outkast, I mean, it turns out

half of Cameo's backing musicians ended up playing on Stanconia and Speakerboxx The Love Below. Notably the bassist, Aaron Mills, ended up playing on Outanconia and Speakerboxx The Love Below. Notably, the bassist Aaron Mills ended up playing on Outkast Records. So this kind of influence of cameo does carry on. Even if their one gimmick kind of runs its course, they did really make a mark on hip-hop and R&B after their time.

Yeah. I mean, that's kind of retro-futurist in a sense, isn't it? Because, you know, things like the dance routines, that harkens right back in as the pips and beyond or whatever, you know. But, you know, like you said, they're a functioning band. But, you know, they've got a handle on new technologies and fresh style and all that, you know. Because there'll be an interview in the NME a few months from now

with Simon Witter. And he talks to Larry Blackman and he says, you know, I heard you don't like being termed as a funk band. Why is that? And he says, oh, we've just never seen ourselves as a funk band. Although I suppose you might say the same thing if I heard Cameo for the first time. When I think of funk, I think of guys who don't take baths,

and I don't like that. I mean, his big influence were Earth, Wind & Fire. They were what he aspired to be. And yeah, I mean, mean cameo mark one you can you can see that so it's kind of weird that he doesn't identify with funk but i suppose that's because he was trying to move things forward you know maybe for him funk meant the 70s and he was trying to move things in a different direction it's interesting the whole the lyrics to this song yeah it's about being a single guy putting about but it's also got that kind of snm

undercurrent to it every little thing you do makes me smile and if i had my way baby i'd tie you up for a while influence of prince yeah yeah the prinfluence if you will as we're gonna see later on eh so the following week single life jumped five places to number 16 and a week later it got to number 15, its highest position. The follow-up, a re-release of She's Strange got to number 22 in December and although the last cut from

the LP, A Goodbye, would only get to number 65 in March of 1986, they roared back at the end of the summer with Word Up, eventually getting to number three in September. Word Up's my karaoke song, by the way. Is it now?

The thing is, in some ways, it's a very foolish choice because all of the lyrics are in the first minute and a half and then there's a load of instrumental fanning about. You've got to dance, man. Or you could just go for a piss and come back. Yeah, yeah. That was the song in which i basically defeated a member of the boy band blue at karaoke have i told this story before what yeah um a friend of

mine uh was having her birthday uh a chinese elvis restaurant in hamstead and uh so oh paul chan i think that might have been the south london guy i don't know because but there's one all right and when the chinese elvis had finished doing his thing it would be karaoke time for the punters and uh what's his name simon from blue uh got up and did a blue song he actually did a karaoke version of one of his own hits oh that's like david van day in the falkland island yeah yeah yeah did he do a cartwheel he was a bit subdued and didn't get really a great reception from the crowd I was up next

I did Word Up by Cameo and I really fucking went for it and brought the house down Everyone fucking loved it In a way I should maybe have quit when I was ahead and that should have been my karaoke retirement but to this day if for whatever reason I'm forced to get involved in karaoke I'm looking through the list

for Word Up every time Simon Whiteman my um yeah my karaoke song is um Barry White can't get enough of your love oh

fucking hell I want to hear that we need a child music karaoke night fucking right brilliant my go to karaoke song has always been the Ramadan number one

of 1974 itself Kung Fu Fighting oh yes but I did it in a pub in nottingham once did a really decent roundhouse kick but my loafer flew off went right to the back of the pub caught by some bloke threw it back to me over the heads of all these people caught it again put it on carried on you can't improve on that on that. No, that's very good. It's a little bit frightening. Yes, it was, man. They were expensive loafers. And by the late 90s,

I used to finish it off by going into the rap on the first mission of Parappa the Rapper on the PlayStation. Do you remember? Yeah. Kick, punch, it's all in the mind. If you want to test me, I'm sure you'll find the things I teach you a shot to beat you

nevertheless you get a lesson from teaching i'll kick what percentage of the audience knew what the fuck you were doing there were enough of the heads in the audience to nod and appreciate and my mates fucking loved it and that's the only thing that matters you you don't play to the gallery at karaoke you play to your mates yeah true enough by the way talking to parappa the rapper david i was delighted to learn that it actually samples can did you know oh my god not so much sample but do you know that mission where you get a driving lesson off a moose right okay the openings the uh it's an interpolation of the piano intro from turkish i've short legs yeah go back and listen to it never mind mind that. Go back and rewrite your book.

Absolutely. It's the most important fact. Yes. My biggest fuck-up with karaoke was actually The Darkness. I went to the Caroline Brunswick, which is a kind of goth pub in Brighton, and they had rock karaoke. And I chose Get Your Hands Off My Woman, Motherfucker,

by The Darkness. And I know that Justin Hawkins sings in quite a high voice in quite a lot of his songs. I'd forgotten that that entire song, pretty much, is in a falsetto. So immediately... Oh, mother, the silly games of metal. Yeah, I throw myself into the first verse in a very high voice, thinking it's going to... Oh, mate, where can you go from there? I know, where can you go?

And basically, after about three minutes of screeching, I'd almost lost my voice, and pretty much the pub had lost its audience as well. LAUGHTER This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon Pull Apart, only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey, and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply.

Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. Hey, for that group move, they're up to number 21 this week. Cameo, single life. Hear the charts. And there's a chart entry at number 40 for the alarm and strength. And a chart entry at 39, level 42, something about you. Down 9 at 38, King, Alone Without You Down 7 to 37, I Wonder If I Take You Home, Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam

Chart entry at 36, Aha, Take On Me Down to 35, Go The Damned, Is It A Dream? Down 7 at 34, Dire Straits, Money For Nothing And dropping to 33, Running Up That Hill, It's Kate Bush Princess Samuel, number 1, goes down 6 at 32 money for nothing and dropping to 33 running up that hill it's Kate Bush Princess Samuel number one goes down six or 32 and a new entry at 31 from the cult rain down 11 or 30 the cars and drive and down 9 to 29 into the groove Madonna up 7 or 28 five-star love takes. Up to 27, St Elmo's Fire, John Parr.

New entry at 26, The Boy With A Thorn In His Side, The Smiths. And down to 25 go Ubi Forti and Chrissie Hynde. Up 12 places, 24, The Cure, Close To Me. Up eight to 23, My Heart Goes Bang, Dead Or Alive. Renee and Angela, I'll Be Good, goes up two to 22. Up four to 21, Single Life, Cameo. And the highest new entry at number 20, Iron Maiden, Running Free. Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, up 3 to 19, Brand New Friend.

And up 3 to 18, It's Called a Heart from Depeche Mode. Cliffs up one place to 17, She's So Beautiful. Down 7 at 16, Baltimore, A Tarzan Boy. And down five to 15, My Tie, Body and Soul. Amy Stewart, Knock on Wood, goes down six at 14. Climbing four to 13, The Style Council, The Lodgers. Down one at 12, Maria Vidal, Body Rock. And up one to 11, The Power of Love, Huey Lewis and the News.

And that's the way the chart stands up to number 11. We'll have more charts for you a little later. That's when we take a look at the top 10. Right now, here are some tips for the top. Here are the top 40 breakers. This guy had to make it in America before he could make it over here. Up 11 places this week to number 27, it's John Pass and Elmo's Fire. Hey, can that group move, says Jordan, as Davis grabs us by the wrist and whips us into the charts from 40 to 11, because we're already at the stage where the charts start to matter less and less. That's terrible isn't it chaps? 75%

of the top 40 just done in one go. Oh yeah. So anticlimactic. Yeah it goes on for too long. Yeah. Yeah. It really does. Yeah. It's like the classified scores at the end of Grandstand Yes. You realise they have to do it but yeah it just goes on and on and on Yeah and we're hit with the images of saxophones

guitars and keyboards and I always say this but that awful soft rock version of Yellowpill fuck it I hate it yeah those crappy clip art images of guitars and saxes and piano keys and I don't know if you noticed but the backgrounds of loads of the photos

have been blacked out or whatever background was has been replaced by noticed but the backgrounds of loads of the photos have been blacked out or they've been you know the black or the whatever background was has been replaced by some other solid block of color it's like like a google pixel it's like yeah somewhere between joseph starlin and google pixel top of the pops was kind of intermediary between those two things oh man you jumped out to me princess say i'm your number one um she's trying on a red bowler hat and i kept thinking of you know a bit in the wire where bubbles has identified um some of the gang members um and and you've got keema greg the cop up on the roof watching and bubbles goes over to

the dealers and puts red hats on their heads so you know to try and sell them the hats but also to show keema up on the roof yeah these are the bad guys that you're looking for cars drive still hanging in there it's god it's fucking october and we're still in the live a hangover period i didn't realize it dragged on that long um i know it's cameo themselves only three of them made the photo cut yes why that is and the other weird one was renee and angela um the whites of renee's eyes are too white i don't know what's been done there it's like a horror movie poster or something good see a horror finally got take on me into the chart though fucking hell after three goes

oh that feels like a bit of a moment yeah in at 36 it's like oh here we go you know it's almost a new age of pop coming with that i didn't realize it was so late in the 80s. You forget that they weren't even a thing in the first half of the decade. And while we're still trying to digest all that data, Davis and Jordan immediately throw us into the breaker section, starting with St Elmo's Fire by John Parr. Born in Worksop, Nottinghamshire in 1952,

John Parr formed his first band, The Silence, at school at the age of 12, which he was a part of into his late teens. In 1968, he joined the band Bittersweet, spelt S-U-I-T-E, which were a regular feature on the Yorkshire wheel-tappers and shunters circuit, before he poached musicians from other top-working men's club bands and formed Ponder's End. I wonder if they ever played a few gigs with Punch. After getting his hooks into the music industry through his songwriting, he signed a deal with Carlin America in 1983, which led him to link up with Meatloaf,

who was looking for songs for his next LP, Bad Attitude. He introduced him to John Wolfe who had been The Who's tour manager and was looking for something to do after they'd split up. He offered his management services and Paul was signed up as a solo artist to Atlantic in 1984. His first single, Naughty Naughty was an instant success in America getting to number 23 on the Billboard chart in March of this year while Paul was supporting Toto on their American tour

and it was during that tour that he was approached by the composer David Foster who was doing the soundtrack for the forthcoming Joel Schumacher film St. Elmo's Fire, was impressed by Naughty Naughty and drafted him in to record the theme tune. When Foster played Pa the track he had in mind, Pa told him it was cat shit and sounded well flash dance and suggested that they have a go with a new song, which they wrote together. As neither of them had seen the film and had little idea what it was about, Paul struggled with the lyrics, until Foster showed him a news clip of the Canadian Paralympian Rick Hansen,

who had just started an attempt to go round the world in his wheelchair. Taken by Hansen's name for the event, the Man in Motion Tour, he hammered out the lyrics, chucking in the name for the event, the Man in Motion tour, he hammered out the lyrics, chucking in the name of the film, even though Schumacher told him not to. It immediately scaled the Billboard charts in the summer of 85, and two weeks after the film came out, it reached the summit of Mount Popmore in early July,

spending two weeks there. Naturally, because we're Britain and shit shit the film won't be out here until november but thanks to jonathan king whose new bbc2 show no limits plug the single relentless layer it's entered the charts on the first week of september at 82 then soared 26 places to number 56. After jumping 9 places to number 45, then 7 places to number 38, this week it's gone 11 places

up to number 27, meaning that Top of the Pops is finally screening the video, which is a Melange of Paws standing outside the titular bar in the rain, and a big advert for the film. And alas and alack, chaps, the true face of 1985 reveals itself. God, it's mulletedness.

I mean, Work Stop, that's basically your neck of the woods, isn't it, Al? It is, yes. It's the cradle of pop. I know. Another union of democratic mine workers size stain on your region, though, isn't it? Fucking hell. We got Colonel A. Ramson and sent John Parr the other way. Honestly, I wasn't aware of the existence of this. I did kind of follow the charts reasonably assiduously

or was impacted by them, but I think I managed to zone this one out at the time with dark rum or whatever, so I kind of vaguely hoped you know like is this going to be a cover of the Brani no track from another green world it isn't you know it's just that wretched Bruce Springsteen influence you know that's singing

like you're trying to hurl up a greenie from the base of your throat you know that horrible sustained grunt that you know it's supposed to say passion it's not even like lustful passion urgent sincerity or whatever you know it's not such you know like man you know it's supposed to I say passion it's not even like lustful passion urgent sincerity or whatever you know yeah it's not such you know

like man in motion it's just this walking compendium of every mid-80s transatlantic cliche oh yes chromium played field to that brassy bat beat

you know the eagles are higher you know it's just like are you doing like high school movies coming of age movies killed rock.

You've got this, you've got Don't You Forget About Me, Simple Minds. Such a destructive influence. There's no St Elmo's Fire for us yet at the ABC or Odeon. At the pictures this weekend, we've got a choice of Pale Rider, Fletch, Life Force, The Holcroft Covenant, Cocoon, Rambo First Blood 2, Code of Silence with Chuck Norris, Desperately Seeking Susan, Year of the Dragon, The Return of the Living Dead and The Care Bears movie. But by the look of this video, I would have definitely cocked my nose up.

The film appears to be about a load of American wankers having a better life than me. Has anyone seen St Elmo's Fire? No. No. No. No, me neither. I mean, why would we? Yeah, exactly.

This is the thing. It was the 80s. I had very limited money. I was on £10 a month from the Bowery District News, so £2.50 a week. That's NME 2023 wages, there exactly yeah plus another £2.50 I could scrape together from my mum and my dad and my granddad so I was on I had a fiver a week to spend I had a look that's the equivalent of £14.72 now right I'm not spending that on seeing

fucking mainstream American films you know I wanted to culturally enrich myself i was really craving culture and if i was going to see a film it would be maybe something worthy and british and kitchen sink like letter to brezhnev so a bit of social realism it might have been something surreal and arty like a razor head or betty blue um you know if i was going the french way with things you know or I'd watch whatever Channel 4 threw at us which might be usually sort of classic things so you know it might be the Defiant Ones

with Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis it might be Night of the Iguana with Robert Mitchum or something like that you know and these sort of black and white classics that felt enriching in some way and that's what I wanted I wanted culture whether it was second hand or brand new. And this stuff,

it's everything I hated and still do. Even from the video, you can tell, even though I've got no clue what the storyline is, you kind of know what the storyline is. It's triumph over adversity. It's people being successful

and going for it, man. Just go for it. Yeah, you know, all this kind of shit. And it's everything I hated. I can't even be ironically nostalgic for it. No know all this kind of shit and it's everything i hated i i can't even be ironically nostalgic for it because people younger than me people may be 10 years 12 years younger than me they love all this shit you know because to them this is the fun 80s and you know if you

go to a club where that generation are in charge of things that's what you're gonna hear what it reminds me of you know um in in the film Boogie Nights, where Dirk Diggler and his mate try and make a record, and it's, you've got the touch, you've got the power. And, you know, it's all that kind of fucking go for it, go getting bollocks. Do you know what it is? It's Tory music.

It's Tory music. That's what it is. And it totally makes sense to me that the backing music is played by members of Toto. His backing band are basically Toto. It's like a youth wing of Reaganism, isn't it? You know, definitely. Yeah, yeah. I mean, essentially, there were two records made in the mid-80s in 24 hours to be the lead single from a film.

Right? One of them is the greatest record ever made. It's When Doves Cry by Prince. Right, yes. The other one is this piece of absolute shit. Yeah. 24 hours to make it. What it makes me think of,

those 24 hours were basically spent in constipation. Like, you know, he just sat there on the bog, just shitting out this massive bowling ball-sized turd of American bollocks. Yeah, yeah. I'm sorry, I'm sure he's a nice bloke. It's the sort of thing that's in the kind of elephant's graveyard of like pre-dawn

minicab rides, isn't it? Oh God, yeah. I suppose in some ways this is the sort of shit that we should play at Late Night Minicab FM. We're going to be totally real about it. Yeah, yeah. I think in some ways music like this and films like Joel Schumacher's films and John Hughes' movies, they kind of Yeah, yeah. there is a safety net if we fuck up and all this kind of stuff. But this kind of individualism, it's the worst kind of individualism has crept in.

And it is a very Reaganite thing. And it's, yeah, it is just young people being, yeah, go for it. While an older man with bouffant hair encourages them. Yes. By the way, he's not even that old. He looks older than he is. He's like 33.

He's younger than Colonel Abrams. Yeah, this fucking Clarkson looking fucker yeah I mean this is your bog standard movie trailer that thinks it's a pop video that was in style at the time with Paul walking about the set of the bar that the film's named after and then

doing the show right there on the stage while some bellends embraces strut about and make the nerds get off their table. But yeah, I know fuck all about the film. All I know about the film is that this is the theme to it and the theme to it is shit

so why would I bother? I always get mixed up with John Farnham who sang You're the Voice. I never know which is which. You're the voice. Yeah, they might as well be the same person. I think he's Australian but I don't think that was from a film. But it's all the same bollocks. He's already

been interviewed on the first episode of the new series of Whistle Test this week at his home, and yet he's come far from his workshop roots. He's been interviewed in his home in Doncaster. Living the dream. His Wikipedia page is one of those ones

that's definitely been written by the person themselves you know right where you get one it says at the top um this biography of a living person needs additional citations or verification there's one of those words right because you mentioned his band ponders end the little bit about them it said uh uh you know he formed a super group with musicians from other working men's clubs and named the band Ponder's End, a band that set a new precedent for the bands in the north. What a weird thing to say. Set a new precedent.

In what way? Precedent of shitness. I don't know. It's like in Cabri Voltaire. Anything else to say about this? No. No, of course there isn't. It's fucking shit.

anything else to say about this no no of course there isn't it's fucking shit exactly so the following week sent elmo's fire soared 17 places to number 10 then spent three weeks in a row at number six its highest position it was tipped as a shoo-in for an oscar nomination for best song but when pa opened up his gob about the song being written about Rick Hansen, it was disqualified because it wasn't about the film, and Lionel Ritchie won instead with Say You, Say Me. The follow-up, the

release of Naughty Naughty in the UK, got to number 58 and after his duet with Meatloaf, Rock and Roll Mercenaries, got to number 31 in September of that year, he never troubled the top 40 again. Fucking hell, Rock and Roll Mercenaries.

I wonder if Putin's rang them up yet. Yeah, well, coming from WorkSop, it should be Rock and Roll Scabs, more like. But Parr went on to do all right for his send, supporting Tina Turner on the Private Dancer Tour, linking up with Pepsi to play a gig which was broadcast live in America, Japan and Australia, and making quite a bit of money co-writing an advertising jingle of the late 80s.

Would you care to guess which one? Oh, go on. Well, it'll be blatantly obvious when I tell you. Yeah. Gillette! The best a man can get! Oh, of course. Yeah, yeah. And zooming in just one place above that one from John Parr

come the Smiths, a new entry at 26, the boy with a thorn in his side. We've done the Smiths loads on chart music and this, their eighth single, is the follow-up to That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore, which only got to number 49 in july of this year although we don't know it yet this is the first cut of sorts from their next album the queen is dead which isn't coming out for another eight months and is a new entry this week at number 26 they've just finished a tour of Scotland earlier this week and are not available, so to celebrate them

courageously breaking the Top of the Pops colour barrier once more, here is their first ever promo video the band have ever made. And let's get that video out of the way first because it's the bog standard, the band having fun in the studio trope or at least as much fun as a band can have when Morris is in it. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, it's kind of an anti-promo thing, really, in lots of respects, you know. You've got the band and then you've got the singer and the twain don't really connect, really. They're doing their own thing. Morris does his thing. There's no harmonies. There's never harmonisation.

There's just a sense of, like, one person delivering a monologue, and then the rest of them having a sort of instrumental conversation. And it's a very unprofessional studio, isn't it? Because it's got massive windows and blinds and candles. Yeah. Soundproofing must be fucking awful. Yeah. Morrissey takes his jacket off at one point

and whirls it around a bit, and yeah, that's your lot. You know, Adam and the Ants, this is not. Exactly. I mean, it feels willfully slapdash, you know, so like, fine if we yeah, that's your lot. You know, Adam and the Ants, this is not. Exactly. I mean, it feels willfully slapdash, you know, so, like, fine if we must, you know. I mean, I've not done, I don't think I've done anything on sharp music before, actually.

I don't think I have. Oh, well, come on, David, take the floor. Yeah, we all know what became of Morrissey, you know, what he descended into and what he sort of bloated and hardened into, you know, to the extent that, like for a lot of people, as we mentioned earlier on,

it's now only tolerable to listen to Smith songs if Rick Astley is delivering them. But at this time, 1985, I mean, I wasn't obsessive about the Smiths, not enough to actually buy and play their records at home, because the thing is, you just saw and heard plenty of them anyway. But actually, I have to say, I thought at this point, Morrissey was a male model of divineness, you know he just did but actually i have to say i thought at this point morrissey was a male model of divineness you know to the extent that even if i didn't quite admit it to myself i was i was actually modeling myself on him you know i wore my hair big on top short the side

absolutely yeah i wore big baggy shirts i had similar eyebrows to him also you know it's not like i was cutting pictures out of smash hits and salatating them to my door. It wasn't a crush. It was just that, to me, he looked like a young man ought to look in 1985. But anyway, if it was unconscious, it was bumped right up to my conscience at a school

reunion I had in Leeds around this time. I made Steve Turner notice. Fucking hell, have you seen Morrissey here? I was like, no, it's a customised look. It's my own creation. Is it, fuck? You're fucking Morrissey.

Hey, lads, come and have a skig at this charming get here. Hey, Morrissey, you're fucking what? Bad skit. Bad skit, exactly, yeah. Actually, what's Stephen Turner, or Stephen Andrew Turner, I suppose I should say, if we're talking about Morrissey, fail to notice, I think, since when we blokes, if we're talking about Morrissey, failed to notice, I think since when we blokes give each other the up and down and tend to stop at the waist, is that below the waist,

I was all soul boy, you know, jeans at half-mast, white socks, plimsolls, anyway, there you go. Anyway, I thought the Smiths were at the height of their powers in the mid-'80s with The Queen Is Dead, especially the title track. I mean, everything from the queer provocation and just the wah-wah velocity of Mars guitars, which is like graffiti spray paint. There was a series of videos that Derek Jarman made of tracks from the album, which I taped and watched a lot. So my take on the Smiths wasn't as yet affected by their non-blackness.

You know, I saw them as twisted, very well-inflected Indian and to the idea of maleness that was still very prevalent, which I you know in the mid-80s i think they're the first group in british or rock history to pine for the monochrome to pine for the black and white to prime for this kind of sort of you know pre-era ian sharples in the snow or kitchen sink drama you know it's i think one of the fascinating things and just ironic really because i do actually like them in their most colorized moments you know like the Queen is Dead track, you know. But this is supposedly Morrissey's favourite Smith song, but it's not mine. It's a bit like Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now. It proceeds at this sort of leafy amble. It's a bit

grey and drizzly and wrapped with swooning self-pity about how misunderstood and hard done by he is by the music industry. And it's all for fuck's sake, man. That terrible music press are just tongues bollocks at every turn. I know, I know. It's like he's addicted to feelings of persecution, you know,

whether they're merited or not, you know. And there's a bit too much of the kind of, whoa, whoa, you know, vocal ketchup on it. Oh, yeah. Even so, you know, you look at this and you listen to this and it still feels well above and beyond the surrounding 1985-ness of which, you know, there's so much in this episode. Yeah, you're right, David.

It is apparently Morrissey's favourite Smith song, which is very easy to believe as it's three and a bit minutes of him whining like a big jessie about how the music biz doesn't understand him and it's all their fault that his singles hardly ever get into the top 10 i mean the smith's chart run up to now 25 12 10 17 24 26 49 that's level 42 numbers isn't it yeah yeah maybe he's going on about mainstream media because you know we like to believe that the smiths dominated the mid-80s but i had a trawl of the newspaper archives of 1985 and the dominant morrisette is the tram mayor rovers winger johnny morrisette there's even more references to a singing group

in ireland called the morris's than there is an actual morrisette the jazz fusion band morrissey mullen get more mentions than him. But I only saw one or two references to Morrissey in the papers. So, yeah, maybe that's what he's concerned about. Yeah, there's a lot of revisionism these days that has it that the Smiths were massive in the 80s. That, you know, sort of U2 or Simple Minds kind of size. They were not. They were not. They were very much two or three rungs below that.

minds kind of size they were not they were not no very much two or three rungs below that yeah obviously their impact uh was huge and it sort of reverberates down the decades far more than than the new two or simple minds yeah but i think they became popular after they split really i think people started to realize what they'd lost and started buying up the old albums but at the time they they very much did feel like this quite fragile cause that was only just making into the charts and needed every little bit of support it could get from right-minded people yeah anyway this song fucking cat shit i fucking hated this song when it came out that this was a song that just put the tin lid on it and my opinions of the smiths particularly where the end where he's just reduced he's just mewling he's just like oh fuck off mate put cameo back on i'd sooner have wow then

well i've got to disagree i mean it's no no no disagree away man we live in democratic england not communist russia i mean okay it's no single life by cameo but then what is i think it's a delightful record i really do right yeah it really speaks to me actually there's a bit in the wire and i i do quote the wire almost as much as i quote the sopranos but in in season four of the wire which all civilized people agree is the best season of the wire that's the one with the school kids the correct order of how good the seasons of the wire is is four three two 5, by the way. Anyway, there's a bit in an episode of season four,

and it is all about school kids, where one of the kids, Dookie, asks Cutty, who's kind of their mentor, the sort of youth group mentor, how do you get from here to the rest of the world? It's such a poignant question. Cutty just says, I wish I knew. And there's a bit in Boy With A Thorn In His Side by the Smiths that goes, and when you want to live, how do you start?

Where do you go? Who do you need to know? And that really spoke to me as a teenager trapped in South Wales and not really knowing many people who were like-minded and just reading about exciting life going on in other places through the Face magazine or whatever. It's a lightweight song, but I think that's one of the delights of it,

that it's quite flyaway. It doesn't have the attack of Big Mouth Strikes Again on the same album. But I think when you take it together with the B-sides of this record, Asleep and Rubber Rings, it really proves the depth and breadth of their songwriting at this time. I don't know if you know those songs, but Asleep is this incredibly haunting suicide

ballad, essentially. And Rubber Rings is this incredibly perceptive lyric about what it is to be a pop star who knows that they will one day soon be discarded by the people who love them. The Rubber Rings, of course, being records, the circular seven-inch single, they're both fantastic songs. Rubber Rings particularly, great bass line by the late, great Andy Rourke. Yeah. First of the gang to die.

Yeah, yeah, indeed. Who we see on this clip, it's lovely to see him on there. This song, yeah, I don't suppose it would be Exhibit A if I was trying to convince somebody of the genius of the Smiths. But it's part of the picture, definitely. Yeah, he is second

guessing the way in which he's perceived by the media and the public in the lyric here. And that's always where things start to curdle with any band when they are too obsessed with their own perception. is it because i mean look a public enemy you know don't believe the hype and stuff like that or the first public image single yeah but maybe with morrissey it was always there you know david mentioned heaven knows i'm miserable now and that's almost self-parodic and that's what their third single i think well it's his own fault that

he's not getting more media attention. Go on Live Aid. Go out with Linda Lassade. Come on, sort yourself out. Oh, but that's exactly it, though. As you well know, that's exactly the point, that he wasn't that guy. And, you know, David said that Morrissey was almost this kind of platonic ideal of mid-'80s manhood, that, you know, it was worth aspiring to be.

And I completely felt that too. He wasn't the healthy, tanned, mainstream ideal of 80s youth. He wasn't a typical kind of boy band pretty boy or rock god. You know, he's prognathic of chin and heavy of brow. But it doesn't matter because he's filled with self-love. I found something quite subversive about the self-regarding vanity of, you know, the way he touches himself so much in this video clip. You know, he's running his hand in his shirt, which is open to the navel almost.

Men who look like him are not meant to fetishise their own bodies, not meant to love their own bodies in that way. And I found that absolutely fantastic. More memorable to me than this video is the performance they did of this song on top of the pops where he's got marry me written on his neck in eyeliner it's this guy who's not classically handsome or some people would say he was but he wasn't the 80s ideal of handsomeness you know he wasn't George Michael or Morton Harkett or something like that I think Morrissey would have married himself if it was legal, definitely.

Yeah, yeah, fair point. Oh, yeah. But he's wearing a very nice blue sort of paisley patterned shirt in this. I was quite envious of that. And he does have a hairless chest, which I don't know if he shaved it. I think it's quite hairy now. It comes with age. But I just think as a sort of an exhibit of non-masculine manhood,

but not being ashamed of that. And actually, in a weird way, sort of fetishising yourself. I thought it was a wonderful thing. I do look back and wonder why I loathe the Smiths so much. And I think it might be something to do with the fact that people expected me to be a Smiths fan, because by this time, I'd become this really quiet, introspective youth who kept to himself.

People probably just thought you must like the smiths and i just go no what the fuck are you going on about yeah i can see that because not only did i not like the smiths i didn't want to hang around with people who like the smiths either yeah i guess i caught smiths off them you know what i mean like i've said before by the time i was at college a few years later you know know, there'd be Prince people and Morrissey people. And I always wanted to be around the Prince people. This is the cruel irony of it. I thought, you know, how do you get from here to the rest of the world?

When you want to live, how do you start? Where do you go? Who do you need to know? And all of my hopes in that line were directed towards getting out of Barry and going to university. And I thought once I got to university in London, I'd be surrounded by all these amazingly erudite people who were probably Smiths fans.

Well, guess what? I did get to university. I was surrounded by Smiths fans. And they're a bunch of cunts. Like, just terrible people. And just all my hopes came crashing down, really. And nowadays, of course, they're even worse. The people who will still defend to the death

anything Morrissey says, you know, that rump of his fan base who's still there are almost by definition the worst people on earth and they'll probably come for me now when they hear this but i don't give a yeah they are terrible the thing now is though of course the only way in which it's possible to like the smiths or to enjoy the smiths for a lot of people is to say, oh, well, I always preferred Johnny Marr. Yeah. And of course, yeah, sure, Johnny Marr, boy genius, an absolute musical genius. And he is a boy.

He looks so, so young in this clip. I guess he was still only about, I don't know, 20 or something. He's about my age, yeah. Yeah, so there's that kind of tendency of people now to say, oh, no, I never liked Morrissey. I never liked him anyway. It was always about Marr for me. But I remember the time I was always deeply suspicious of people now to say, oh, no, I never liked Morrissey. I never liked him anyway. It was always about Marv for me. But I remember the time,

I was always deeply suspicious of people who said that. People who said, oh, yeah, that band, the Smiths, they're not bad. I like the guitarist, you know, because it's basically a way of saying, yeah, don't worry. I don't like that weird poof they've got to be a singer. There was that idea among lads.

And I was very, I'm not going to rewrite history. I was very, very pro-Morrison. I hung on his every word. I thought only he understood me, and perhaps only I understood him. And earlier this year, 1995, I went to see my second Smiths concert at Chippenham Gold Diggers.

I think I've spoken about my first Smiths gig in Cardiff. Peckles in Bear. Yeah, yeah, in a previous Chart Music. But this one, I just remember being transfixed by Morrissey. I remember standing in the middle of this whirling, seething mass of humanity in the mosh pit, and I was just standing still. And Morrissey actually noticed me, and he thought there was something up. And he sort of looked at me and sort of did a thing with his eyebrows,

like tilted his head, like, you all right right kind of thing right everyone else is moving i'm just stood staring and it must have looked really quite odd but yeah it it was almost uh religious for me to to be that close to him and obviously my view of him as a human being has changed dramatically now but i i'm not gonna lie and say it wasn't how it was no I think that's something yeah absolutely yeah it was a tremendous validity about Morrissey it's interesting that lyric that you picked out which I think you know it's a very fair point but I think for me it shows that part of Morrissey's appeal was to kind of preserve that period prior to him being remotely famous at all you know like adolescence or whatever yeah yeah it's almost in a sense becoming as famous as he did it's a slight inconvenience you know in the kind of narrative that he's often presenting because you know i

think he wants to preserve perpetually that sense of adolescent exile from things i think simon reynolds when he interviewed morrissey for melody maker it would have been around the first solo albums i guess 88 he asked morrissey what are you going to do when you've exhausted the diaries yeah and yeah i think i think you know morrissey kind of accepted that's a pretty good point it's essentially what you're saying now yeah and of course the answer is that he'll start writing twee whimsical songs about carry-on actors or whatever it is you know i mean this ineffectual songwriting of the 90s and i think a little smith's affection from the 80s carried him a long long way with very little justification in the 90s I

probably clung on longer than I should have done but just stuff like Dagenham Dave or whatever the one for me Fatty fuck off and that's even before he really outs himself as a you know we all know what he is we don't want Chalmers to get sued but one of

the things that I really valued about the Smiths, and this is also tangentially related to this record, is that they were a group that came with a cultural hinterland. Previous bands had done that for me. You had Dexys, you know, singing about Oscar Wilde and Brendan Behan and all of that, yeah? And you had the Style Council doing a similar thing. There was so much to unpack with their records, you know, the record sleeves with all these kind of quotes from French philosophers and stuff like that. And the Smiths come along and there was so much to unpack with with their records you know the record sleeves with how all these kind of quotes from french philosophers and stuff like that yeah and the smiths come along and and there was so much of that with them obviously the the two biggins being james dean and oscar wilde but this record sleeve has truman capote on it and uh right i didn't know

he was and stuff like that fires your curiosity it's like okay well it's it's a nod to you as a fan of the smiths all right well if you want to know where we're coming from investigate this stuff and dig into it and it only took me 40 years and i did i during lockdown i read music for chameleons the short story um collection by trim capote which which i i did enjoy although i admit i only bought it because it shares a title with a gary song. But the value of that stuff can't be underestimated, particularly to a sort of voracious teenage mind. Yeah, absolutely. I think that all of that is true.

And I think there is, as I say, the tremendous validity, you know, to the Smiths. But retrospectively, I think kind of what probably galls me the most is seeing how they broke the relationship between, I don't know, white post-punk, whatever, and black music, which had been something that had been right there at the beginning, you know, punk, you know, like punky reggae park, etc., etc., you know, the whole reggae, the funk thing, the pop group, certain racial, you know, there's always this strong relationship.

Well, I know what you're saying, but it is, isn't it? I mean, you know, this charming man has got a Motown bass line, and, you know, there are bits of shit like guitar on Big Mouth Strikes Again. In fact, Johnny Marr named his son Niall after Niall Rogers, you know, and there is all that in there. But it's not as kind of overt as it had been before. I mean, you know, there are all these kind of slightly Motander shows, and of course it's always like, if it is black music,

it has to be like very, very historical black music. You know, there's no relationship at all with contemporary black music. No, they weren't doing what, you know, the Jesus and Mary chain or Susan and the Banshees were doing, which is sort of incorporating hip-hop beats into their music. There was never going to be a black music. No, no, no. And it's just the statements that he made about black music,

as we know, about Diana Ross and reggae and vile and the conspiracy to get... So it was all of that as well. What's it going to be like when Morrissey dies? Is he going to go back to being the Morrissey of the mid-'80s, like Elvis became the Elvis of the late 50s? I think the word but will happen a lot. There'll be 280-character tweets

or however many characters you can put on Mastodon or what's the new one called? Threads, where people say, blah, blah, blah, racism, blah, blah, blah, but, and then they say how much she meant to them i think it'll be light and shade it'll be it'll be both sides of it anything else to say i've remembered exactly where i was when i watched the uh marry me performance of the boy with the right side um at our school we had french assistants assistant um who would come over

on i guess their sort of gap year from uni in France and help to teach us French. There were two of them, one that taught me in the lower sixth, one that taught me in the upper sixth, that ended up being a couple, Corinne and Didier. And because I was, you know, in the upper sixth, you get to that sort of stage where you kind of become mates with your teachers. And because they were so close to me in age, I guess they were only in their early 20s themselves they kind of took me under their wing and one time they invited me around for dinner at their flat which was uh above a shop in high street in barry and it was the first time I tasted exotic foods like couscous and polenta yeah yeah imagine that in barry but Didier was a massive Billy Idol fan. Right.

And in a way, he was such a nice guy, Didier. And I don't want to mock him. I don't really want to mock Billy Idol. But Billy Idol is very much a French person's idea of what is cool again. Do you know what I mean? It's that pop in your collar thing. Yes. Whereas the Smiths, for me, were in a way more rock and roll and more

subversive. But as a Frenchman, I don't think Didier could completely understand that. I think that, you know, the Smiths and Morrissey do have their constituency in America among Anglophiles. But I wonder if it's a very, very British thing to see what Morrissey did as being subversive and indeed rock and roll. You know, that idea subversive and indeed rock and roll you know that that idea that the way to be rock and roll is to abscond and renege and drop out of the aesthetic of the dominant society whereas I think yeah my friend Didier was like why isn't he wearing a leather wristband and going we had Ashley Stance also in our school to help us with our French and the upper six. But we also had Ashie Stentz, who helped us with our German.

Same sort of thing. So I remember going to a party of various Ashie Stentz in Leeds. You know, it's like Simon Says He. You can be kind of mates with us. And I got talking to one of them. I think his name was, I don't know, Rolf. And he said, I'm von Hamburg. I said, Hamburg? Wow.

You must know all about Faust then. And he says, Faust? I do't know, Rolf, and he said, I'm von Hamburg, and said, Hamburg, wow, you must know all about Faust then, and he says, Faust, I do not know of this, I'm only interested in the important groups, like Rainbow. Fair enough, lock it out. So, the following week, the boy with the thorn in his side trudged up five places to number 23, which got them a studio performance on Top of the Pops next week, but then dropped five places and was out of the top 40 in a fortnight. They dropped out of sight for the rest of the year, resurfacing in the summer of 1986 with the follow-up single

Big Mouth Strikes Again, which got to number 26 in June of that year. Mid-20s again, come on. Here's a follow-up to In Between Days, up 12 places to number 24 this week. The Cure and Close To Me. Formed in Notre Dame Middle School, Crawley, in 1973, Obelisk were a five-piece rock band which featured Mick Dempsey on guitar,

Lowell Tolhurst on drums and Robert Smith on piano, who played a one-off gig at the end of Term Review, like manslaughter. Three years later, Smith and Dempsey joined a local band called Malice, who were led by Martin Creaser and did assorted sets that covered Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie and the Alex Harvey band. But when punk came a knocking, they changed their style and their name to Easy Cure after a song written by Tolhurst. After winning a battle of the bands in spring of 1977, they signed a deal with the German company Hansa, like Japan did in the same year,

but the label wanted them to do covers, hated their demo of their proposed debut single Killing an Arab, and the partnership dissolved in March of 1978. After myriad line-up changes, we saw Smith taking over on vocals, the group, now called The Cure, recorded a new demo, which found itself in the hands of Chris Parry of Polydor,

who signed them to the Polydor Offshoot Fiction Records and became their manager, finally releasing Killing an Arab in the last week of 1978, where it failed to chart. After putting out their first LP, Three Imaginary Boys, in mid-1979, and supporting Suzy and the Banshees on their UK tour, with Smith eventually doubling up on guitar for the Banshees when their guitarist walked out, they made their first dent on the UK charts, and their first ever Top of the Pops performance in May of 1980

when A Forest got to number 31. By this point, they'd become a regular fixture on the charts and this single, the follow-up to In Between Days, which got to number 25 in August, is the second cut from their six LP, The Head on the Door, which came out last month, and entered the album chart at number seven. It entered the chart of Fortnite ago at number 44,

moved up eight places to number 36, and this week it soared 12 places to number 24. And here's an all too brief-brief clip of the video, which was directed by Tim Pope, who has been the band's go-to video bloke since 1982, filmed at Beachy Head. And fucking hell, I felt like I was given an oral exam to master Price there.

Did I get anything wrong, Simon? I think he did a really good job of summarising the line-up changes in their early days, which is actually way more complex than that. And I ended up writing, you know, probably about six pages just on that in the book, because it's ridiculous. There are all these people coming and going as lead singers. Somebody called Gary X, who's right, is whereabouts nobody knows anything of. Peter O'Toole, no, not that one, and so on.

Fucking hell. Yeah, and Mark Ciacciano, who, again, is sort of lost to history and all these kind of members of this crawly, haughty mafia. It's ridiculously complex. But I suppose it is in small towns, you know, where there's only a handful of people who are into music and people who own a drum kit are even more kind of prized. So everybody ends up playing in each other's bands, you know.

Yeah. I think there are anything up to 15 people involved. Fucking hell. So well done on making it sort of tolerable in your preamble there. I mean, I think this is really, really good, actually. I mean, you know, you've got that kind of soft, muted feel in a production. You've got that lovely little glowing keyboard line. And, of course, you know, the way it anticipates George Michael's faith

in ripping off the old Bo Diddley riff and in singing about faith as well. And it's a really good video. And I guess that was a time where there's enough money sloshing around in the industry that the top tier could make videos like this, which, of course, therefore tended to exclude these little two Bob Indy outfits in the charts who simply couldn't budget for what was becoming a prerequisite

for any sort of chart impact. I mean, that made a huge difference. Back in the late 70s, spend 100 quid on just recording singles, it would have a chance of charting. But we're very much post all of that, of course, you know, post MTV and all that. But this video, I mean, an absolute claustrophobes nightmare. I bet Robert Smith wished he'd called the song

Ample Breathing Space or something like that, definitely. Well away from me. Yes, exactly. Yeah, yeah. I mean, as for The Cure generally, I was just thinking about why they never absolutely riveted. In the early days, I didn't like them as much as Susie and the band She's, but I liked them a lot more than Bauhaus. That's kind of where I sort of placed them in that scheme of things. Right.

I mean, I suppose maybe I just find Robert Smith a little bit kind of floppy and swoony. Wonderfully, wonderfully, wonderfully, wonderfully. Well, you know, but really, I don't think the reason is any failing on their part. I think it's the same reason why I was never absolutely riveted by the Smiths as a rule, much as I appreciated them. It's just that I think the cure, the sort of group that invited you, regardless of, you know, gender orientation, to sort of become besotted with them at some level, infatuated,

you know, that sort of, and I suppose I was never really up for that sort of relationship, you know, which can tend towards the monomaniacal. And I just never had space for it because I was just listening to such a huge range of music in the mid 80s. But, you know, listening to this again and seeing this again, you know, I just wonder if I didn't miss out on something. I mean, obviously, Simon, to celebrate you finishing Curepedium, because we've never done them before, I asked you to pick out a Cure single for this episode. So why this one? Well, this is the song that sealed the deal for me as a Cure fan. I mean, I'd previously enjoyed and admired them.

You know, I suppose I was mostly familiar with their occasional forays into the charts. So, you know, stuff like the Love Cats that David alluded to there, the Caterpillar, the Walk, stuff like that. But, yeah, this song, and I guess the album itself, The Head on the Door, is kind of where I really fell for them. And I mentioned before that I was sartorially under the influence of various people, whether it's Morrissey or Prince or Ian Asprey around this time.

Well, Robert Smith's definitely part of the picture by now because I'd started... I remember turning up to one of the aforementioned house parties wearing eyeliner for the first time. I thought, oh, I'll try this out. Dare I do it? You know, and yeah, it seemed to work and I carried on with it. And I nagged my mum to knit me a massive, baggy mohair jumper, like what Robert Smith would have worn.

I still got it, actually. Not so baggy anymore. But yeah, this is what sealed the deal for me. But it was only after this, and I suppose shortly after this, you get the greatest hits album, Standing on a Beach, that everybody had. Because if you're a fan of alternative music in the 80s, there weren't many greatest hits albums.

You had Once Upon a Time by Susan and the Banshees. You had things like Singles Going Steady by the Buzzcocks and maybe a few others. I think later on, Echo and the Bunnymen, Songs to Learn and Sing. But really, if you want to sort of bang for your buck, value for money in terms of greatest hits, there weren't many. And Standing on a Beach by The C cure was a real kind of primer and it was this single and stuff like this single that made me buy it in the first place but then it had

things on it like the hanging garden which then piques your interest you think well where did that come from and you end up listening to the album pornography yeah which for me is the greatest album and um yeah i was kind of interested of interested that David wasn't sort of really grabbed by that I would have thought pornography and faith would have been the two for a fan of let's say Joy Division like yourself that might have spoken to you a little bit

I probably just didn't get around to buying them to be honest the thing with me is I've mentioned my love of Motown before and also my love of Motown derived pop of the 80s. And The Cure, at this point, are sort of dabbling with that, really, aren't they? I mean, this is the second single from The Head on the Door. It's the second Cure single in a row to have a detectable Motown influence.

You mentioned In Between Days, the single before it, which has more of a kind of crashing, exuberant Detroit clatter. That's Boris Williams, the drummer. He was incredible. He was, you know, widely considered their best drummer. There have been many. But this single, it's got that kind of wonky Tamla Motown beat. Robert Smith told Record Mirror that it reminds

him of Jimmy Mack. In Between Days was sort of everything in the kitchen sink thrown in. It was a big sort of Motown production. But on this one, you've only got the very barest rhythmic skeleton of Motown. And it's got this minimalism. It's got this minimalist sort of punch and snap between Boris Williams and Simon Gallop on bass. It's back and forth. It's got this exquisite discipline to it, I think. Andid mentioned the video and how it takes the lyrics very literally the song is musical on a matter pier as well because from

the instrumentation and the really excellent production from david allen that's not the guy sitting on a stool with a glass of whiskey and um you know one finger missing by the way um and robert's very up close and personal vocal the way it's recorded's very up-close-and-personal vocal, the way it's recorded. So it sounds like what it is. It's a song about claustrophobia, and it sounds airless and desiccated and sort of freeze-dried

and oppressively intimate, I would say. But the thing that opens it up and just gives you that little bit of breathing space is the brass section. The brass section absolutely makes it for me, right? That was provided by a South End Jump jive revival band called rent party right yeah they play these sort of muffled trombones and trumpets and it makes it sound sort of rag time doesn't it and a little bit in the same way that the love cats had that kind of aristocats

feel to it the brass comes in after every musical phrase almost like an answer to a question and it's just wonderful. And that's only on the single version, by the way. If you hear close to me in the context of The Head on the Door, you don't get the brass. You don't even get... You know there's that creaking hinge at the start of the single? That was actually a sound effect from the video, which they then tacked onto the single.

So it's missing that, it's missing the brass. And you feel a bit short-changed when you hear it on the album. And the reason that the brass is there, it's because there was internal disagreement about whether it should even be a single. Right. Which seems mad now. God, yeah.

Yeah. The rest of the band were convinced it would be a hit. Robert wasn't so sure. And he agreed to put out a single only with the addition of a brass section. And that turned out to be a masterstroke, I think. So, yeah, let's talk about the video, because we all know it so well. You know, the band trapped in a wardrobe on a cliff edge

at the third most notorious suicide spot in the world after the Golden Gate Bridge and some wood in Japan. But, you know, loads of other things have happened there. It's where Jimmy crashed his scooter at the end of Quadrophenia, where it could have landed on David Bowie's JCB in the Ashes to Ashes video. And for all we know, it could also

be on the same spot where Throbbing Gristle did the cover shoot for 20 Jazz Funk Grace. Sadly, the wardrobe doesn't go off the cliff and then fly off like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang did in the same location. But, you know, we can't have everything. It's not even the only Cure video to feature Beachy Head. Oh really? First of all because there's the part two of this because they put out the remix version that came

from their Mixed Up remix album and there was a video for that which sort of starts at the bottom of the ocean but you know you see the cliff falling off the But also, Just Like Heaven by The Cure has a video, which is also, it's supposed to be set on Beachy Head, but it was actually recreated in a studio. But, yeah, it was about a real-life sort of camping trip that Robert and Mary and some friends had at Beachy Head. So, yeah, it recurs in sort of Cure mythology quite a lot. For me, though, they were the greatest video band of their generation.

I think the only rivals would be Madness for that. The Cure and Madness in the 80s were just always brilliant for videos, I think. And yeah, that is mainly down to Tim Pope, who I think, if we're looking at the Cure's body of work, he's the other genius in this story, I think. We've spoken about him before, haven't we, when we did Long Hot Summer by the Style Council? Yes. And I think this is the Cure him before, haven't we, when we did Long Hot Summer by the Style Council?

Yes. And I think this is The Cure's best video, despite all that strong competition. It starts beachy head in that wardrobe, filled with clothes and filled with The Cure. And there is that creak that we then hear on the single. The first face you see is Simon Gallop, and he's all trussed up. And his mouth is lit from inside by a light bulb.

The camera then moves to boris williams and he's clapping out the rhythm and this is the thing they're all using objects instead of instruments so oh a lot always to be fair does have this tiny little casio keyboard but then on the top shelf you've got paul thompson nowadays pearl thompson um picking out the notes on an orange plastic comb yeah like that and then finally he sort of rises up through all the jackets and the shirts and the hangers. You've got Robert Smith. And as he starts singing, you've got these finger puppets which represent each member of the band. Yeah.

And they're made by Tim Potts' company. He was called Glow. And he sort of manhandles them quite roughly, Robert, you know. And then every now and then we see these external views of the wardrobe teetering on the edge. And in this episode of Top of the Pops, that is all we see is just the teetering, of course. In the full video, two minutes in during the trumpet solo, it does topple and, you know, down past the chalky cliff

and we see the red and white striped lighthouse and, you know, onto the rocks below. But instead of shattering on impact, which you'd expect and killing everyone inside it miraculously hits the sea and begins filling up with water and soaking and implicitly drowning everyone within drowning is a sort of recurring trope in cure songs there's loads of cure lyrics about drowning and yeah i just think it's a masterclass from tim pope and i think robert's acting performance performance is superb in this because the other members of the band, they stay quite neutral and quite understated.

Instead of sort of mugging or portraying panic, they just look quite calm. But he does look kind of traumatised. Apparently Robert Smith has quite the affinity for water, doesn't he? According to a Daily Mirror guide published round about this time about where the pop stars go on their holidays, we learn that fish goes to amsterdam whenever he can uh roger daltrey loves west island for the trout fishing

holly johnson spends loads of time in hawaii with his boyfriend wolfgang and the lake district is robert smith's favorite place where he indulges in a go on water skiing yeah yeah yeah he used to go to lake District or Wales. According to the article, the Lake District is also popular with fellow spiky-haired person Howard Jones. I can just see Howard Jones and Robert Smith water skiing there.

Yeah. Probably on each other's shoulders. Yeah, it's funny. There are so many Cure songs about drowning that I've actually got a section in the book just drowning. It is for drowning. But he had plenty of time to think about that in the video shoot for this,

because as David alluded to, it was kind of horrific by all accounts. It was Robert's least favourite Cure video to make, and partly that was just the sheer discomfort of being in water for such a long time. They filmed it in this huge tank filled with a thousand gallons of water and the state of the water didn't help i mean first of all he's thinking about dying a slow painful death the whole time just being in the water but then the tank was filled from a fire engine and the water in the fire engine had been sitting there for two and a half weeks and everyone was ill after that apparently um to make matters

worse lol tolhurst had been for a curry the night before oh no yeah with toxic results as you can imagine um this is i've got a quote from tim pope this is what tim pope said later lol's bowels were a problem in a very confined space suddenly i saw the crew retract and the band all shot over the other side of the studio. But Laurel was just standing there with this bestial look on his face, grinning, and I had to go outside and throw up. Fucking hell. But yeah, the video was rarely shown on TV,

certainly in full. There's a myth that the BBC banned it. But everyone knew it. This is it. How do we all know it? I mean, I don't know about you, but I sort of spent my 20s in the company of people who had the VHS of The Best of the Cure,

so you've just seen it on there. But yeah, it was on MTV on heavy rotation, but we didn't have MTV in Britain. Yeah, so... But it does seem so familiar, maybe just from tiny little clips like this one. But yeah, Robert reckoned presumably the BBC was scared it would incite kids to climb into wardrobes and then fling themselves off cliffs.

Little finger puppets of themselves. Talking of illness, I mean, this is only in the breakers. They never get to perform it in the top of the pop studio. But that's a place that Robert Smith probably wants to stay away from for a bit, judging on their last appearance. Article in the Daily Mirror last August. The Cure spiky-haired singer Robert Smith was recovering last night from a stomach complaint which has laid him up for nearly a week. Robert was struck down after celebrating the band's top 20 single In Between Days last week.

After performing the song on Top of the Pops, he had a few pints in the BBC bar before really letting rip in a Chinese restaurant, says an aide for the group. He was violently ill the next day, but we ruled out alcoholic poisoning. Anyone who can drink 10 Pernod and Blacks can drink anything. Right. It's not been well in 1985.

It's been quite a stressful year because according to another Daily Mirror article I dug up, entitled Love Cures a Nightmare, it reads, a vivid recurring nightmare turned Cure lead singer Robert Smith into a nervous wreck. Now,

as the group rocket through their charts with their brilliant single Close To Me, he has found the perfect remedy by falling in love with a nurse called Mary. It sounds silly, but I dreamed again and again that a plate glass window would drop down on me on Valentine's Day, injuring me horribly. window would drop down on me on Valentine's Day, injuring me horribly. Then I dreamed that the accident would end my life on April the 21st, my birthday. The dream terrified me and resulted in me lying awake at night, sweating. Robert was so distressed that he said he would drink himself senseless every night to forget about them. I don't think it mattered what I did, because I wouldn't be alive much longer.

When February the 14th came around, I went through the whole day feeling very anxious, but obviously nothing happened. Again, just like Chris Needham seeing his own gravestone in a dream. A fairly big gravestone, let us remember. Yes. It's sloppy journalism there, saying that he's found the remedy

by falling in love with a nurse called Mary. They were together since they were 14. It's not just... No! Actually, just going back to what you were saying, Simon, about the whole Motown thing, that's really, really interesting that you sort of think about Jimmy Mack

because it's such a kind of an oblique relationship with Motown, because I kind of felt that at times in the 80s, pop was a bit overdetermined by Motown, you know, and you had the whole Phil Collins can't hurry love thing and it almost seemed to be a sort of reproach on contemporary black music and I kind of really resented that. I mean, you've got that, but also in terms of the production as well,

it's really, really good and you really sort of notice the stark contrast in this between that kind of sort of big, slightly clichéd boxy sort of trevor hornish type production that's kind of very very prevalent elsewhere in 1985 you know so i think again i think that's really really appealing yeah and it's a cure's second most sampled song right it's quite interesting yeah i mean lady sovereign afro man young blood there's 21 different artists have used close to me so there's obviously something about that sort the rhythm section of it that appeals to people. It's interesting you saying that that year might have been a particularly traumatic and terrible year for Robert. It wasn't his worst. His worst was, or maybe his best in some ways as well, was 83.

I've got a whole section called 1983, Robert's maddest year, Robert's craziest year in the book. And it starts in late 82 and carries on through to May of 84 because it's all the same narrative. But what happened was he got himself into three bands at the same time. Right, yes. So he's formed this sort of spin-off supergroup with Steve Severin called The Glove.

He's a member of the Banshees again, you know, for the second time. And this time he wants to make an actual album with them. So he's recording their album Hyena, as well as making the live album Nocturne. He's still in The Cure and they're making their album The Top. And he's doing various side projects like,

you know, making a song with Mark and the Mambas. He's touring with all these different bands. When he was making The Top and Hyena, The Top by The Cure and Hyena by The Banshees, he was travelling back and forth between Eel Pie Studios in London and Genetic Studios in Reading, sort of doing back-to-back sessions, like not sleeping, basically. He got on his bike and he looked for work.

Yeah, exactly. He ended up having to quit The Banshees, really pissing them exactly he ended up having to quit the banshees really pissing them off but he had to quit the banshees in uh early 84 because his doctor basically just took one look at him and said look if you carry on doing this you're gonna die you know but on the other hand he made loads of amazing records in that in that year so yeah i had a weird relationship with the cure i mean as soon as they came on the radio somewhere, I'd just go, ugh. And then I'd stop and think, why have I done that? This is a fucking tune.

It's odd. I probably pinned them down as a goth band and I didn't like goth bands. I like goths, but I didn't like the music they listened to. Well, the thing is, they got it from both sides because they made these pop singles. A lot of goths thought, oh, they're not a real goth band. They're the soft option because they make these pop records.

But it's just because they'd gone so far with the album Pornography, which they described as the ultimate fuck-off record. It's most famous song, probably 100 years, starts with the line, it doesn't matter if we all die, you know. And it's just this sort of nihilistic record. They couldn't take that any further. So they sort of, you know, go and make Let's Go to Bed, The Walk and The Love Cats, these sort of quite frivolous pop singles.

And they've always flitted back and forth between those two extremes. And probably their best albums, you know, for me, things like Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, are the albums where there's a bit of both on there. But yeah, if you were a very serious goth into the Sisters and Bauhaus and The Nephilim and whatever else, those sort of people would

sneer at the Q and say, oh, they're soft. Of course, at this time, and I remember because I hung around a load of goths, I mean, the goths... Goth expert David Stubbs! Bogus! I don't know what was bogus or not. No, but in America, if you were goth, you'd say, yeah, I'm a goth, I'm a goth, I'm a goth, I'm proud of it, goth to the max,

goth all the way. But in the UK, it was all, oh, we're not goths, we're not goths, you know? So it would have been a bit weird, like British goths condemning the cure for betraying the spirit of goth, because of course, well, we're not goth either. You know, so you've got a fucking spider tattoo on your neck.

You've got your hair in a... The one weird thing about goths that they wouldn't denial about being goths, I mean, mods weren't like that. It's all, I'm not a mod. A mod? But you don't want a fucking scooter. You know, it's just very weird.

Very weird. Yeah, it's pretty much how you spot a goth, is they will say, I'm not a goth. scooter. You know, it's just very weird, very weird. Yeah, it's pretty much how you spot a goth, is they will say, I'm not a goth. Yeah. You know, I know that's the logic of the witch's ducking stool, that if they say they're a witch, they're a witch. If they deny it, well, just duck them anyway, and if they drown, well, they're dead, you know.

Yeah, yeah. So that's kind of how it is with goths. In snakebikes. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, I think the Cure can't really deny being a gothic band, even though he has denied it, and other times he's admitted being this kind of figurehead. They went to the Batcave Club, for fuck's sake.

They were hanging around there. They were part of the whole thing. They're definitely the gateway drug for goths, aren't they? Yes, yeah, that's a good way of putting it. For a lot of the youth. Definitely, yeah, yeah. I was never a goth, by the way. Which means he was.

Yes, exactly. Maybe the reason they weren't seen as a golf band was because they could knock out tunes yeah that's a crime after banger after banger they're too pop wasn't just stentorian drones yeah yeah i mean really looking back on it now i equate the cure with being in student discos years after the event and the love cats coming on and all these people just getting up and dancing and me going oh yeah should i i shouldn't be here i don't belong here by the way in the early 80s whatever all the goths i knew did the chicken dance yes did you do to chicken dance you know it wasn't just you know maybe it's a northern stroke nottingham thing i don't know but i've heard other people said what the fuck's the chicken dance come on

demonstrate you know of course i think I was taking the piss, but no. Demonstrate now, David, in words to the pub craze youngsters. Well, it's just a sort of, you know, you sort of flap your arms in a kind of,

well, I suppose a chicken-like way as if attempting to take flight. You know, elbows out, you know. There we go. Simple as that, kids. By the time I arrived in the goth scene, it was more about

this kind of gothic two-step where you'd, you know, do two steps forward and two steps back while flinging your arms in the air in sort of at special moments in the song you'd sort of throw these mystical shapes with your hands in the air that was the sort of thing yeah yeah yeah like people did at new model army gigs yeah yeah exactly and if there was a smoke machine all the better picked up by the ravers a few years later yeah right exactly fucking hell the rave goth link needs to be examined a bit more.

Oh, listen, that actually happened. You might be joking, but, you know, glowstick goth became a thing. Of course it did, yeah. That's kind of when I lost interest, to be honest. I wasn't having that. That video of the goth youths dancing and someone slapped Thomas the Tank Engine over the top. Yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anything else to say? No, amazingly. No. Buy the book. Read more? No, amazingly. Buy the book, read more about it. So the following week, Close To Me stayed at number 24 and would get no higher, ending a run of four singles on the bounce, getting into the top 20.

I think if we had asked the Pop Craze youngsters to guess which chart position Close To Me by The Cure got to, they'd have gone way higher than number 24. God, yeah. Because this is such, you know, it's like immortal, iconic, universally loved Cure song. Yes. If you ask people to name a Cure song,

this is probably in the top three. And it only got to number 24. It's extraordinary, isn't it? Yeah. I suppose it just had a long afterlife. Yeah, yeah. However, a remix of Close To Me was put out in 1990 and entered the charts at number 15 in November of that year,

eventually getting to number 13. The follow-up, a remix and re-recording of their second single, Boys Don't Cry, got to number 22 in May of 1986, and they'd have five more top 40 hits before the 80s ran out. So those were the top 40 breakers. Talking of breakers, this next song was a breaker a couple of weeks ago. This week is at number 22 in the charts, and they're here in the top of the pop studio.

It's Renee and Angela and I'll Be Good. CHEERING AND APPLAUSE I'll be good We cut back to Davis, the Bisto kid, standing in front of the wrought iron and tube lighting. There's some sort of staining on his lapel, presumably caused by one of the maidens of the studio floor laying her head on his chest, as he tells us how prescient the breakers section is

because here comes one of its alumni, I'll Be Good by Renee and Angela. Born in St. Louis in 1955, Angela Winbush was a part-time gospel singer who recorded a demo in 1977, which was heard by the New York DJ Garyj gary bird who passed it on to his mate stevie wonder who invited her to move to los angeles and join his backing singers wonder love while she was in la that year she linked up with a local singer called renee moore

and they began a career as a duo with a songwriting side gig for the likes of Janet Jackson, Rufus and Chaka Khan and Odyssey. After signing a deal with Capitol Records and notching up a string of hits on the Billboard R&B chart throughout the first half of the 80s, they moved to Mercury earlier this year and their first single on the new label, Save Your Love for Number 1, was their first strike on the charts, getting to number 66 in June of this year. This is the follow-up, which entered the charts at number 54 in the first week of September,

and took two weeks to get to number 31, which led to an appearance in the top of the pop studio a fortnight ago and a seven- place jump to number 24 this week it's jumped another two places to number 22 and here they are again well chaps i have to admit that this totally passed me by back in 1985 and it kind of did again when i watched this episode again 38 years later mainly because of what we're seeing on stage. Rene's costume, fucking hell. Yeah.

His purple rain costume, isn't it? Yeah. He's taking off Prince. It's blue instead of purple, but there's that. Yeah, blue rain. He's got the rough sleeves and he's got the frothy cravat thing. You're trying to be Prince, mate. What's going on?

Yeah. Unnecessary, really, you know, because they've kind of got their own identity, yeah. If Lenny Henret was going to tech off Prince with Big Ron out of EastEnders in the chink Huntsbury role, this is the outfit he's going to wear, isn't it? Yeah. Talking of Lenny Henret, it appears that Rene's massively influenced by him

because in the video, he wears this shiny tiger print jacket, which was beloved of the Zimbabwean comedian Joshua Yarlong. You know, Katanga, my friend. Oh, yes. Yeah, I'm surprised he didn't dress up as David Bellamy for one of her videos. But anyway, once you've seen it, you cannot take your eyes off it. You know, Angela might as well be bollock naked

as opposed to the baker foil over shirt with the sleeves hoiked up, which she's chosen to wear. With this amazing bouffant. It's like a quiffy girly mullet plastered with glitter on the side. This is the trouble. I was listening to this kind of stuff all the time, as I've mentioned before. But the outfits were always, always awful. I just had to avert my eyes, basically.

Yeah, René's attention to detail of trying to mimic prince in purple rain extends to violence against women unfortunately yes there is a story that he hit angela on stage uh which was kind of the beginning of the end for them as a joke yeah yeah so he's dressed like a minor member of the revolution um yes but um you would have thought because i was so obsessed with prince i'd have thought oh brilliant this is for me and you know i i might have made it sound earlier as if me and my mates were just lapping up black american pop willy nilly but if cameo and colonel abrams were willy then this is nilly i'm afraid it does nothing for me i mean for what is nominally a modern soul record it's cold and soulless to me it's got a similar kind of register to do you remember

loose ends that brit funk they had this kind of noise that was their recurring motif yeah hanging on a string oh see i didn't like that stuff it just froze me out it just sounded cold yeah but i feel weird saying that because sometimes i like chill in in a record but i suppose it all feels very professional i mean you've you've spoken about their backstory. They were jobbing songwriters. They're basically a shit Ashford and Simpson in that respect, aren't they? But, yeah, it didn't really work for me. How about you, David?

I mean, I definitely think that this is the best ever duo whose name begins with Rene and... ever to appear on Top of the Pops and to record a song with the word save your love in the title you know i think you at least say that that would have confused a lot of people so my my ex dara's mum roshi she's doing this show up in edinburgh at the festival called um ramalam ding dong just to plug it a bit and uh at one point she makes a reference to black lace except when she does the read-through she keeps calling him black great by mistake i mean you know i mean

that's kind of understandable be more more so, Black Grape... Imagine Black Grape doing Do The Conga. Well, exactly. It's like, you know, more so, Black Grape had recorded a song called Agadoo, very unlike the original Agadoo, but purely coincidental use of the same verbal motif, you know. Imagine Black Lace doing England's Irene.

Oh, doesn't bear thinking about. Well, no, I mean, I think we've got the whole Colonel Abrams situation in reverse here, because I did like this. I think she's really, really good. I mean, you know, you mentioned that she started off with Wanderlove, you know, Stevie Wonder's backing singers, and that's a great foundation course in, like, electric funk composition.

Oh, yeah, you can't be shit if you're in Wanderlove. I mean, you know, she's connecting from right back in the day, the kind of inauguration of electricity in funk, right through to the present day, where she's getting sampled or whatever. I think she does probably a great deal more props than she ever got, actually. And as Simon alluded to, yeah,

the reason they didn't continue as a duo is probably because of old Prince Boy's twatty violence. I mean, I think one of the particular aspects I like about this is this sort of viciously viscous synth bass thing chomping all the way through it. I mean, you know, for me, this is serious stuff, you know, with a decent pedigree. And I think it's the sort of thing that gets, you know, definitely gets harked back to. Like the SOS band. This is something that I like now.

Yeah. But back in the day, I would have just conked my nose a bit because, you know, synths, oh, that's not proper music. Yeah, but SOS band, I mean, you know, Just Be good to me is this all-conquering steamroller of a record you know yeah you know absolutely just drives this into the ground to be honest i don't think you can even compare the two yeah i mean both renee and angela have synths on stage but there might as well be an iron in because they remain pretty much unused for about 90% of the performance. But you know what synths are like, chaps. You just push a button and I'll Be Good comes out. Anything else to say?

I don't think so. No. So the following week, I'll Be Good stayed at number 22 and got no further. The follow-up, Secret Rendezvous, was immediately rushed out, but it only got to number 54 in November, and they never troubled the chart again. In 1986, the partnership began to crumble when Angela Wimbush linked up with Ronald Eisler

and was drafted in as a songwriter and co-producer for the Isley Brothers LP Smooth Sailing, which led to violent disagreements between the two backstage and on stage, particularly during a gig in Cleveland, and they split up, refusing to communicate with each other without attorneys being involved. Moore embarked upon a solo career and would co-write Jam for Michael Jackson, while Wimbush started her own solo career, continued to work with the Isley Brothers and married Ron Isley

and wrote something in the way you make me feel for Stephanie Mills which is a fucking tune especially the hip hop remix oh that's astonishing and on that note, I do believe that that is enough fizzy pop excitement for one episode, Pop Grace Junction. So join us, why don't you,

for the thrilling denouement of this episode tomorrow. Oh, and don't forget, there's a thick and meaty video playlist waiting for you at youtube.com slash chartmusic TOTP. Everything we talk about, everything we listen to, it's all right there just waiting for you in an audiovisual format. So, on behalf of David Stubbs and Simon Price, this is Al Needham telling 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 Tom 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 cmlive23, all lowercase. 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?