Chart Music: the Top Of The Pops Podcast - #8 - September 24th 1981: Two Pound Of Tripe In A One Pound Bag

Episode Date: July 31, 2017

The eighth edition of the podcast which asks: a new version of Top Of The Pops with sketches? FUCK OFF! This episode sees the controls of the Time Sofa hijacked by our own Simon Price, who force-lands it smack in the middle of 1981. He's been saying for ages that '81 is the greatest Pop year ever, forcing us to throw down the frilly, fingerless gauntlet. Things start weirdly with Simon Bates looking like a supply teacher and the return of Slade and Alvin, but then it's wave after wave of 'bands' that don't even have proper drums and make records by just pressing a button, don't you know, interspersed with black men slinking about and even getting skinheads to wave their hands in the air. Any Brexiteers who can stomach Leee John being all sexually threatening and David Sylvian looking like Lady Di will be trapping a creased-up England flag in their bedroom windows in unrestrained joy to see a practically all-British line-up, and Madness have dropped another video, but it's not all good news: Barbara Gaskin comes on like a glammed-up Candice-Marie in Nuts In May, and a soon-to-be-on-the-dole Legs & Co look on as Lulu scabs out and dances with someone called Jeremy. Al Needham, Taylor Parkes and Simon Price pick through the dress-up box that is 1981, veering off to discuss dog auto-fellatio, throwing Molotov cocktails into Welsh churches, whether people in Birmingham are proud of Crossroads (or not), cousins who get pissed up at your auntie's do and accuse you of being gay, and why it's a bad idea to do an Ant Stripe with Tipp-Ex. The usual swearing, and edited dead fast in order to get it out before the end of the month, so if it's shonkier than usual, soz. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

What do you like to listen to? Erm... Chart music. Chart music. Hey up, you pop-crazy youngsters, and welcome to the eighth episode of Chart Music, the podcast where it's always half past seven on a Thursday evening. I'm your host, Al Needham, and as always I've got two lovely music writers on the sofa with me.

Taylor Parks. Afternoon. And Simon Price. Hello. Glad to have you back again. But before we get into any of the sexy, sexy chart action of years gone by, we have to make mention of the announcement from the BBC earlier last week that they're going to launch a top-of-the-pop style programme. According to an article in The Guardian,

the new 30-minute show will feature sketches and interviews as well as live performances. What do we think about this? Well, the first fucking flag, the the red flag is sketches and interviews. Can you imagine how fucking awful that's going to be? Songs and sketches and jokes old and new. It sounds horribly like it ain't half art mum for the millennials.

I mean, Top of the Pop's first time around started going wrong, didn't it? When they started fucking with the format. And, you know, okay, you know, we've seen doing this podcast that they've tweaked the format in tiny ways here and there. But, you know, really, it's the most simple idea in the world, isn't it?

You just get the bands who are in the charts, get them to play their songs, and have a little link in between. And that's it. You don't need fucking... I mean, who's it going to be? One of these Russell comedians that they have nowadays, or James Corden or something. Well, apparently James Corden's involved, but it's the first announcement that the BBC made that he will not

present the programme so you know that's a good start nobody needs that but the idea that they're going to do sketches that just brings to mind I don't know some grime lad going this parrot is bare dead fam you get me I actually don't mind James Corden even

you know even though I said that I'm one of these people you know I will stand up for him and I'll stand up for Banksy and all the other people that you're meant to kind of round up on these days. Oh, Simon. I don't care. The only way of being controversial now is to have a front lash against a backlash, you know.

So I'm always thinking of my career. I'm always one step ahead. You know, I'm like a fucking Poundland Katie Hopkins here, right? But, yeah, I don't know. Taylor, what do you reckon about this format that they've announced? I'm the host. I ask Taylor what he thinks about the format, if you don't mind.

We don't need you, need them. Out of the way. Taylor, what do you think about this new format? It's just TV people. They have to fiddle with stuff that doesn't need it to justify their existence and their position and their salary. We can't leave that as it is.

Otherwise, I might as well not be here. To me, it sounds like they're trying to compress one episode of The Tube into half an hour. That wouldn't have been a bad idea. Most episodes of The Tube could have done with some pruning, but... Yeah, of course it's going to be terrible. Everything's terrible that these people come up with. I of The Tube could have done with some pruning. But, yeah, of course it's going to be terrible.

Everything's terrible that these people come up with. I love The Tube. I'm going to put a Come and Get Me plea out to anybody listening to this. If you want to do a Tube podcast, I'm there, man. I fucking love that show. Why is that? Because, you know, if you were of the age to be sort of just starting to dip your toes into alternative music and, you know, you were sort of listening to the to janice long show you weren't staying up late enough to

hear peel then suddenly all these bands were in your face and it was i suppose it was a kind of forerunner of the kind of a much denigrated um zoo tv or magazine format that came in things like like the word but i was i was it just caught me at the right age and i i did i did like the kind of semi-anarchic quality to it and you would see people that you previously only heard big brothers talking about like you know iggy pop suddenly turning up in plastic trousers and you're thinking who the fuck is this terrifying old man old man he's what about 36 you know um And, yeah, just stuff like that. Twisted Sister put in a performance that was more punk rock

than, you know, certainly any footage I've seen of actual punk rock. And it was an incredible show, I thought, the tube. And how else would you have heard of Paul Young and Annie Lennox? You know? Hey, listen, nothing wrong with Paul Young. I'm actually, I'm dying to write a massive, you know, over-long, you know, internet vlog about No Parley, which people are going to read the first three paragraphs and give up. But yeah, I'll step up for Banksy, for James Corden, and for Paul Young in his grey suit with little white and black flecks in it.

But anyway, yeah, we're going way off topic here. I am sorry. black flex in it. But anyway, yeah, we're going way off topic here. I am sorry. But we're not, though, are we? We're not going off topic because this is what the new Top of the Pops is going to be like, except a shit version, you know. Anyway, and they haven't even got the balls

to call it Top of the Pops. They have to call it something else because, well, we know why. Yeah. Yes, we do. Yes. So, this week we are putting our arses back on the time sofa and we're going all the way back to September the 24th, 1981. Simon, you've said on more than one occasion that 1981 is the absolute pinnacle of pop music. So let's start with you laying out your case.

Yeah. Roll over David Hepworth and tell john savage the news never mind 1971 never mind 1964 the greatest year for music ever was 1981 and uh if it wasn't 1981 then maybe it was 1979 which we've dealt with earlier um it was certainly that golden period just after punk where um kind of the door had been pushed ajar by punk for all these absolute kind of weirdos and outsiders and in some case in some cases outright lunatics to um come in and not just have minor hit records but to have number one hit records and to actually seize the spotlight and um it's funny that, you know, punks themselves have kind of run out of steam.

You've got a few of them still knocking around. You've got John Lydon and Susie Sue still making decent records and having hits. But really, it's people who the punks would have literally spat at, like Adam Ant and maybe Kevin Rowland and people like that. Or you've got these people who sat back and watched punk happen uh in provincial towns and

cities and then maybe a year or so later thought right well we're going to do what we think punk is and for them it might have meant um getting hold of a synthesizer getting a reel-to-reel tape machine and a slide projector and making kind of weird stalinist vegan pop in a warehouse in Sheffield, you know, the Human League. And, you know, so... We made our own fun in them days, didn't we? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And this is where pop gets interesting for me, again. You're not saying pop had never been interesting.

But for me, it's one of those... I suppose there was a slight kind of revival of it circa Britpop, but to nowhere near the same extent, where people with interesting ideas could break into the top ten. And I absolutely loved it. And this episode we're going to watch, it's not the best illustration of that. There were better episodes that year,

but it's a pretty decent slice of 1981 life. It does a fairly good job of making the case for me i think taylor how do you feel about 1981 yeah in general culture it's still the event is that period we were talking about the other week the very distinct period with a character of its own between the late 70s and early 80s um if you look at tv shows from that period or footage of London or newsreel, it's indistinguishable from 1978 or 1979, but not if you look at Top of the Pops. Pop has moved on ahead, always a couple of years ahead.

In this whole post-war period, Britain tends to look the same for quite long periods of time and then change quite rapidly. Just the look of the country and the look of people would change quite rapidly in quite look of the country and uh the look of people would change quite rapidly in quite a short space of time um like the 60s still looks like the 50s on the street until you get to about 65 66 and there's a delayed reaction to the beatles and everything's just a little bit sharper and then the next change is uh the very end of the 60s start of the 70s and there's a delayed reaction to hippies and

that's when you start getting floral shirts and big sideburns on people like bob wellings and reg varney and then it sort of stays long-haired and drably flash until about 78 79 and then suddenly there's a delayed reaction to punk and there's a lot less air between hem and ankle and the hair gets chopped away. If you look at the first three series of the Sweeney film between 74 and 76 it might as well be filmed on the same day

and then you look at the episodes filmed in 1978 and suddenly it's a different world. Everyone's got proper suits Yeah and Reagan and Coulter are wearing clash badges and stuff like that aren't they so 1981 in pop and 1981 in life don't look the same and it's not until about 84 85 that things catch up but by that point pop and and the street look the same they're in sync and that's sort of a sign of the beginning of the end really or

at least the beginning of the end of that period where pop music raced out ahead and everyone else had to catch it up yeah and it was also a time where i mean 1981 was a fucking shit year uh i remember my mom and dad got made unemployed within like two weeks of each other and you know i was i was starting my second year of school and I was already thinking, well, what the fuck am I going to do when I leave school? You know, so you've got all this horribleness going on. You've got riots, you've got, you know,

all these factories shutting down. But Top of the Pops, on a couple of occasions would reflect that, but a lot of the times it didn't. couple of occasions, would reflect that, but a lot of the times it didn't. You know, there was all this, you know, it's obviously the new romantic period, although how much of that we're going to see in this episode, we'll, you know, we'll find out.

But, yeah, it was just like horrible life and sparkly television. Sparkly pop TV, if you will. I think the new romantics do reflect what was going on, and here's why. Most of them were people who'd been living in squats in London, or they were people from grim northern towns, or grim midland

cities, whatever. And they were reacting against the drabness of the Aventis, as Taylor calls it, and the first two or three years of Thatcher, reacting in their own way with escapism. And, you know... Sort of like...

Sorry, Simon, it's sort of like sort of glamoury ducks then, is what you're saying. They're all glam kids. All the New Romantics were former, you know, Bowie fans, except for Adamantant who never liked bowie much he was a bowling kid um so yeah there was that lurking in the background certainly but i think you had three reactions to um thatcherism and what was going on at the time you had um escapism which was the neuromantic thing you had social realism, which, you know, two-tone and all of that. Ghost town.

And you also had goth, which is just kind of Cold War dread, really. It was the fear that we're all going to die. Not even the fear, the absolute certainty that we're all going to die. And you had the birdie song. And you had the birdie song, which I think was a reaction to Mitterrand. No, I don't know. I can't make that one work. So, shall we have a look at the news?

Yeah. Radio 1 News In the news, Billy Connolly kicks in a photographer at Heathrow Airport. Belize gains its independence from the UK. The Liberal Party have voted to form an electoral pact with the SDP,

while the Labour Party deputy leadership battle between Tony Benn and Dennis Healey is reaching a climax. The EU is debating the abolition of corporal punishment in schools, but the big news this week is that youths on a scottish housing estate have been warned by the police to desist in playing a game called voodoo which involves wrapping petrol soaked rags around a wooden cross setting it on fire and then chasing each other with it sounds fun amazing i'm gonna do that tonight well it kind of pisses on a Rubik's Cube, doesn't it? I actually did a bit of that myself, because one of my mates, his dad had a speedboat,

which makes him sound way more flashy than he actually was. Or he went on Borg's Eye. Yeah, he probably went on Sail of the Century or something. But there were all these canisters of speedboat fuel lying around his house. And on a Friday night, when his parents had gone out to the pub, we'd nick a bit of it and we'd pour it into glass lemonade bottles and go up to the park and just, you know, make our own petrol bombs and throw them and smash them just for fun. So, you know, it's kind of nice to think that in Scotland

they were doing a more kind of weird religious version of what we were doing anyway. Although we did actually throw one. We threw one of those petrol bombs into a church once, which could have gone horribly wrong. But yeah, because we were pissed off because they wouldn't let us play table tennis. Oh, you nearly invented black metal. I tell you. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, people go on about Varg Vikerns, that Norwegian guy. But it's all going on in South Wales in the early 80s. Yeah, I mean, luckily, it's smashed in this kind of ceramic-tiled lobby and nothing actually, there's a pool of flaming petrol, but nothing actually caught. And, you know, the guy who ran it came and chased us up the road and grabbed us. And it's one of these kind of experiences I look back

and think my life could have forked off in a completely different direction. Because he just, he was this fast little Welsh guy, like a kind of scrum half type, legged it at the road after us, grabbed us and said, right, do you realise if I call the police now, you're going to Borstal and your life is basically over. I'm going to let you go,

but never do anything as stupid as that again. So he let us go, and I still can't believe that my life took a real turn there. So, yeah, petrol-based fun in the early 80s, we're all at it. In Kidder Minster, we couldn't play voodoo because we didn't have the surplus

crucifixes. So we just had to piss on Rubik's Cubes. On the cover of the NME this week is Kim Wilde. On the cover of Smash Hits, Gary Newman. Yes. It's that edition of Smash Hits which features clove seller George helping to destroy a 12-inch of stars on 45

and was one of the first sightings of boy George when he was still working as a clothes seller on a market somewhere. He got everywhere, didn't he? Because he was on top of the pops in the audience, dancing with the Jets, that crap rockabilly band as well. Yes, that's right. And he was also on Something Else. Have you seen that episode of Something Else

where they're having a discussion about fashion? Oh, is he in there as well. And he's basically schooling all... He's managing all these punks, and he's saying, oh, you've got to dress a bit different. And all the punks are going, oh, you know, you're looking a bit... So, yeah, he was all over the place.

I love Boy George. I mean, anyone who's met me or seen me won't be too surprised to know that i'm a boy george fan but also it's great to hear you mentioning smash hits there because what what a fucking brilliant magazine that was you know just earlier i mentioned things like janice long and the tube being this kind of gateway to discover alternative stuff um smash hits was like that for me i didn't read the nme when I was 14. Maybe I did when I was 16, but when I was 14, it was, you know,

Smash Hits with the alternative page, or they'd have a piece about the Human League or the Smiths, or actually the Smiths was a little bit later, but you know what I mean? They'd have the indie chart with all these bands like Swell Maps

and The Only Ones and Magazine. And you could only kind of vaguely imagine what these bands sounded like, but it was just your first glimpse into that world. And it was just a brilliant, clever, witty, subversive magazine from about 79 to 85, 86. It was just, for me, it was the best music magazine. The number one LP in the UK at the minute is Abba Cab by Genesis. The number one single in the US is Endless Love by Diana Ross and Lionel Richer.

And the number one LP is Tattoo You by The Rolling Stones. So what were we doing in September 1981? Taylor? I was in the process of swapping football for music as I thought you had to, for some reason. It's funny that even though I'm a bit older than Taylor, I didn't swap football for music until a few years later. But I did do it. It did seem like, you know, I got to about 16 or 17. And, you know, I couldn't be into the Smiths and Liverpool Football Club. Also football got a bit bit but it's this you

know this is sort of mid-80s i'm talking about um i i did hope i could give you a really really specific answer to this question what was i doing because i have kept all my diaries from when i was a kid and somewhere in this somewhere in this house is that diary and i looked and i looked and i can't find it right now um but you know what if i find it maybe we'll drop it on the facebook page or something i'll just put a jpeg definitely yeah definitely i wasn't i don't think i was pouring out my innermost thoughts it's probably just like little things like played football or went to see my man um but yeah basically um generally speaking um 1981 this particular particular episode was just a couple of days...

Is it 24th of September? Yes. The one we're looking at. That was the day before my... Yes, mate. That was the day before my 14th birthday. Oh! So, yeah.

And on my 14th birthday, because I didn't have many friends, my treat was to go with my mum and my best friend who lived next door just the three of us to a a fancy burger place in cardiff and have a burger meal and uh my big surprise was uh the lights went down and they came out with a knickerbocker glory with all sparklers in my singing birthday to me you were living the life weren't you man yeah i've been away and i've talked about my my um boarding school trauma in a previous episode but i've just come back to wales uh only about a year earlier and i was finding it hard to reintegrate um but yeah i was i was about to start the uh third year of the comp comprehensive school

in barry and i'd very much bought into two-tone by this point so when i look at photos of myself i've got you know sort of half a centimeter long hair like a member of madness um i've got a red fred perry braces stay pressed or skin tight jeans and either dr martinens or kind of tassel loafers, you know, that kind of look. Yeah, I was so into two tone. I bet you had a load of badges down one side of your jacket as well, didn't you? I used to clank when I walked because I couldn't get into the idea that you just wear your favourite, just wear like a sort of tasteful handful of badges. I had to wear all my badges at once.

Like a North Korean general. It was like chain mail it was awful and then i remember and i was still dressing like that a couple years later when we finished our o-levels and uh a bunch of us went to the pub to try and get served for a pint for the first time and um and my mate suzanne um uh said said to me um simon um can, can't you take that jacket off? You look like you're 15. No, you look like you're 16. And I said, I am 16. She goes, yeah, that's the point.

So, yeah, that was me. I was a horrible little rude boy. I was hanging around with my mates, throwing petrol bombs. And I had a marker pen on me at all times, drawing little, like tagging, basically. Terrible. Tagging in alleyways and back doors and stuff like that, yeah. Oh, well, for me, I just started second year of school, and I think this is the pinnacle of my chart interest,

because every Tuesday dinner time, me and my mates, Jovo, Gooch, and Gormy Dornay, on dinner times, we'd go to the chip van in the shopping precinct and then round about 20 to 1, we'd go to Save It, which was the local tat shop, which got that name because the bloke who ran the shop,

when he opened it up in the mid-70s, it got like thousands of bags with the Save It logo on it. You know, the energy saving campaign the government had on at the time. it got like thousands of bags with the Save It logo on it, you know, the energy-saving campaign the government had on at the time. And we'd go in there, we'd buy a can of Saudi Arabian cola, and we'd camp out by the radio, which was in the corner of the shop, to listen to the new Top 40.

And then we'd just go back and tell everybody who was in the charts, and if we saw someone who was wearing a jam badge or something, we'd say, oh, you know, they're straight in at number three or something. And I'd also walk about the estate at night with the first personal stereo I had, which I borrowed off my mate. And it was like a car battery on a strap. I had one of them.

Yeah, it was massive. It was like Meckle Mickey's handbag, wasn't it? And of course course the only time i actually won mine did you i i won mine in a competition at school because we had to do a charity fundraising thing where um the first prize was one of those massive tape recorders you've just described and what we had to do was uh go around barry knocking on doors uh getting sponsorship and so on for some i don't know sponsored run or sponsored walk or whatever and uh i i went and i i rate i was so determined to win this thing i raised about

500 quid and obviously i i won the tape recorder by a mile no one else in the school was even asked i think the second second place raised about a fiver i was a bit embarrassed by the effort i put in to win this thing and i used to cycle round town with this thing strapped round my shoulder listening to like I just can't stop it by the beat or whatever the one tape I had was Dare by the Human League which I think was the

law at the time and it was really weird because I was still a massive jam head and I'm listening to Dare going oh I shouldn't like this I'm not allowed to like this, but it's so fucking good. And, you know, just as well it was a personal stereo because I didn't want people to know I was listening to, you know, the Human League. And also at the time, my mate got started working on a paper round and he'd slip me copies of the NME and Melody Maker

and Sounds every week. So I was, you know, I mixed that into my diet along with Smash Hits and Record Mirror. So yeah, I was properly gend up. It's funny you mention that thing about not being allowed or not thinking you're allowed to like certain bands. Because without wanting to bring too much of a sombre note into this, an old mate of mine from that era died recently. A big shout out to Dave Jennings and his family.

And he was a kid who lived on my street and he just did not give a fuck. He wore a Harrington and wore jam and madness badges like me. In fact, he once got beaten up in front of me at Barry Island for not deciding whether he was a rude boy or a mod. But he also bought records by Gary Newman, Soft Cell, The Human League, Depeche mode duran duran all that stuff which in my town was considered girls music or worse than that gays music yes um because he did it i felt like i had permission to do it so

even though yeah like i say i was a little rude boy um i i also buy Dog Eat Dog by Adam Nance, or I'd buy Sailor Wave Goodbye by Soft Cell, or whatever it may be. But yeah, there was this almost kind of omerta about it. You felt like, right, I'm not going to tell anyone that I bought that. But I think Dare that you just mentioned might have been a bit of a breakthrough

because everyone loved that album and this is one of the planks in my argument for 1981 being so great I did a thing once where I figured out if you had a record token at the end of 1981 for Christmas, what albums could you go out and buy and it was insane

I mean, Dare was one of them Non-Stop Erotic cabaret by soft cell was another tin drum by japan i can't they were just like within a space about six weeks about 20 classic albums just came out and you know it's just phenomenal yeah and the other thing i remember about this month that we're talking about is i've just gone back to school. And when we left, when we finished the first year in, what was it, June or July or whatever, practically everyone was a mod. And then when I came back, it was almost like I was the last one. Everyone else was a greb.

No one was really into futurism or new romantics at the time. But I remember this girl I really fancied and I came back to school and she had like a bag and she had a massive ACDC patch on it and I just went what? You fucking Jezebel. How dare you? But everyone just switched

and you know they didn't become new romantics they became grubs and I just thought I was offended by that. In my school, metalers were the losers. Being into metal was embarrassing. There weren't many metalers, and they were a sorry bunch. They were seen as the real dregs.

Well, a lot of the kids from my school who were into heavy metal were always from the posh estate on the other side of the school, and they had neatly pressed uh neatly pressed denim jackets so yeah my best mate the one who came to me for the knickerbocker glory in cardiff on my birthday was a meddler so when i used to go around his house and play sabutio i would be subjected to saxon and judas priest and moat ahead and you know uh and all this kind of stuff and you know even though i didn't like it much at the time, I kind of, by osmosis, sort of, some of it seeped into my soul, I think.

And I do kind of look back and I do love the N'Wobham, however you pronounce it. Yes. Anything you want to add to this, Taylor? I wish I had more stories of me in September 1981, but I was nine. And it's, you know, you don't really do anything when you're nine. You just, you sort of, you're starting to notice cocks and balls drawn on the wall and everything else is happening inside your own head. And it's like trying to tell other people about your dreams, you know.

You can't do it and no one cares. So what else was on telly this day? Well, BBC One has shown Blue Peter, Willow the Wisp, Nationwide and Tomorrow's World. Four days later after this day, an episode of Blue Peter featured Simon Groom and Peter Duncan doing some heavy-duty legend of Tina Heath and Maggie Philbin in corsets while Goldie

licks her bits. I only saw this the other day. I was shocked and appalled that this was on children's television in 1981. It is, yeah. And it's like Sorry, did you say who's Goldie licking? Goldie was licking her bits. The dog. Yeah.

Simon Group's Retriever. It's not the drummer bass artist from the Metalheads. It is terrible. It's like just the sort of the frozen smile on Sarah Green and Tina Heade's face as Peter Duncan steps forward with his Instamatic.

Yeah, it was Maggie Philbin. Was it Maggie Philbin? No, Tina Heade's there as well, isn't she? Yeah. Yes. And then Isla Sinclair. It's as if they tried to think, who are the... Oh, God, yeah, Isla Sinclair was on there as well.

That's terrible. Who are the least provocative, sort of least sexual people that we could dress in underwear for children? But this look on their faces is Peter Duncan's taking pictures of them. It's like, you're not going to put this on the internet, are you? No.

I was a bit too old for Blue Peter by this point. So I never saw this. But from the description, I need to go and find this. It sounds really grim. You really do. But we were only 19 years away from Maggie Philbin's ex-husband getting his cock out on television.

BBC Two has just screened an episode of Schools Prom featuring the Surrey County Wind Orchestra, the Southampton Flute Quartet and the Doncaster Jazz Orchestra and they're currently showing Crown Green Bowling. ITV has just finished the latest episode of Crossroads, where Arthur Bramlow tells his wife that he's going to the pub for half an hour. Seriously, that's the plot.

Followed by Give Us a Clue. They're now running Earthquake, the 1974 disaster movie with Charlton Heston and Ava Gardner that had a sense around sound system in the cinema that was so powerful it made ceilings crack. So, yeah, not a lot of competition. Taylor, you know you were growing up in the Midlands, right, around this time.

Yeah. So, I mean, Crossroads, did you have some kind of regional pride about it and did it seem like a kind of fly-on-the-wall documentary? Yeah, we couldn't afford bricks. documentary yeah it's we couldn't afford uh bricks but no it was it was the everyone felt the same way about crossroads as the rest of the country did there was no sort of coronation street or brookside civic pride about it it was a bit of an embarrassment really and it's west midland so it's no to do with me oh fair enough. You're all the same to me. Well, the Midlands in those days was like Berlin.

It was like East and West. There was no need to travel from one to the other. It wasn't really the done thing, you know. No reason to go to Nottingham. That was the only reason it was like Berlin, let me tell you. You know, David Bowie didn't think of recording any albums in Derby. In Cannock. Although it

might have improved one or two of them. Well I remember my dad was a removal man and he had to go to Birmingham to some student area which was near the ATV studios and he came back absolutely gobsmacked and told me that every window around the ATV studios and he came back absolutely gobsmacked and told me that every window around the

ATV studios had handmade posters up saying Benny is innocent it was the time when Benny was on a murder charge or something like that probably wasn't murder it was probably just a lawnmower went missing or something and he was

under suspicion of it. But yeah, that's the only crossroads thing I can add to the tale. So was Goldie a bitch? Apparently so. I always remember Goldie as being a man-dog. No. No. That's really, that's horrible.

That's like my whole... No,, think Goldie Horn out of the 60s, not Goldie the drummer bass artist out of the 90s. So now you're picturing a woman from Rowan and Martin's Laughing doing some kind of contortionism and performance. I'm always picturing that. I picture that

more often than I really should. But have I misremembered my entire childhood? it's like the yeah right then sit tight and try not to touch anything as we go all the way back to September the 24th 1981 remember

we may end up coating down some of your favourite bands and artists of the era but we never forget they've been on top of the pops more than we have our host for the evening is Simon Bates, but... Let's just call him Symes. Symes was born in Birmingham just after the war, but his parents craved the simple life and they all moved to Shropshire.

Well, it goes without saying that even idyllic childhoods don't last forever, and before he knew it, Symes found himself a university. But maybe he didn't feel cut out for life on campus or you could say he just didn't fit in so he dropped out and in what you might call a moment of madness took the first job he could find on a farm as an assistant artificial inseminator wanking off balls sucking off turkeys through a straw, ramming his hands up a sheep's fanny. It was all the same to him, but all of a sudden you could say he had a moment of clarity and said to himself, hey, this isn't me. So he sucked off his last

turkey, handed in his notice and went off to New Zealand, playing a cockney cab driver in a radio play and working in Australia on assorted stations. But he soon came home and in 1971 he met the love of his life. Let's just call her the BBC. He started as a newsreader for Radio 4, which was great, but he wanted a deeper commitment. So he found himself spending some late nights with Radio 2 in 1973, and in 1976 he took the plunge and shacked up with Radio 1, taking over the mid-morning programme in 1977, where he still was when this episode of Top of the Pops came out.

But I guess you could say it wasn't all wine and roses for Symes. Maybe it was because he felt that he was something more than a disc jockey and had journalistic pretensions. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that he would blow the Radio 1 budget on broadcasting all round the world. But he was seen as the most unpopular DJ at Radio 1 at the time, to the point where John Peel once said that the first thing people did at the Radio 1 Christmas party was to look at the seating arrangement to find out how close they'd have to sit next to Simon Bates, with General rejoicing if it was suitably far away. One Christmas, it went so far that John Peel, way. One Christmas, it went so far that John Peel, Kit Jensen and Paul Burnett decided to wait in the BBC car park to beat him up, but he never appeared. I guess you could say that Symes

is best known for Our Tune, the segment where he'd read out a letter about someone having a shit life and then play I Will Always Love You by Whitney Houston. The segment was so popular that John Peel said, I was always given to understand that when Bates launched into our tune, it was when the station had his biggest audience of the day. At 11 o'clock in the morning, every lay-by on every major road in Britain was full of weeping truck drivers. of weeping truck drivers. So, Simon Bates.

The first question we have to ask is why the fuck is Simon Bates presenting Top of the Pops in 1981? Because all must have prizes. They used to get John Peel on, for Christ's sake. You know what I mean? At least Bates was popular with the general public. You know what I mean? I mean, it's terrible. It does seem ridiculous.

But in a way, it's better that he seems so absurdly out of place hosting a pop programme than all those ones who obviously it was their life's ambition to be a DJ you know or failing that at Butlin's Red Coat I'd rather have Bates just there like this kind of

sort of granite mistake He always comes off to me looking like some kind of I don't know, substitute teacher who's taken a load of kids out to an art gallery for the day. Yeah, but one you wouldn't fuck with. I mean, this idea that as you just referred to there,

this story about who was it, John Peel, Kid Jensen. Paul Burnett. Right, waiting around in the car park to beat him up. Yeah, right. I just got this image of Bates with John Peel in one hand, Paul Burnett in the other, banging them together, and Kid Jensen under one foot, you know,

before he goes off to scale the Empire State Building and pluck biplanes out of the sky. He's a monster but yeah there'll never be another I hate Simon Bates I hate Simon Bates more than I hate Jimmy Savile

I hate Simon Bates more than I hate Jimmy Savile and I'm I'm saying that in a way, you remember Richie from the Manics said that we'll always hate slow dive more than we hate Hitler. I'm saying it in that way. Obviously, I don't think Simon Bates was a worse man than Jimmy Savile. But I hate him more, right?

Because he got in my face. In the school holidays, you'd wake up, you'd switch on, it'd be Mike Reed and The Breakfast Show. I'd just leave Radio 1 on all day and more or less I'd get along with most of it. So, you know, then you'd have Simon Bates and then you'd have Woo Gary Davis, you'd have Steve Wright in the afternoon, you'd have like Janice Long or whoever, maybe John Peel. But out of all of them, Simon Bates was the one that just really dragged and I wondered who it was for.

Who were his constituency? I mean mean you mentioned like wanking lorry drive weeping lorry drivers sorry and then why wasn't he on bbc radio 2 what was he even doing on radio 1 um oh i've got an image now lorry drivers masturbating over our tune oh go away like that's the first time you've thought of that um look right of all of all the top of the props presenters simon bates is the one who looks like he shouldn't be around young people right not in a sexual way not that he's a danger to young people but that he isn't even of the same species he has never been young yes that's that's a very good point um i mean obviously simon is housewife's

choice isn't it? And you're right. What you're saying, you assume that when you leave Radio 1 to go to school, it's going to be like that all through the day. And then, you know, when you get to your summer holidays, it's like, what's this shit? Why are you playing? First of all, you've got an hour of old stuff

and then you've got misery. And it's like, what does that mean to you when you're uh when you were youth i'm slightly intrigued by his weird plywood gravitas it's there's something what he's like he's like what the voice of god would be like if the universe of the tv program doctors was real life i love the phrase plywood gravitas there, but it's plywood with a sort of dark mahogany veneer, isn't it? Yeah, a plastic stick on a brick panel. But the idea that someone like him is presenting Top of the Pops

at one of its peaks is bizarre to me. Every time he comes on a Top of the Pops at one of its peaks is bizarre to me. Every time he comes on a Top of the Pops, I just think, out of anybody else, why are you there? Even Savile. You know,

Jimmy Savile's, you know, when he's on Top of the Pops round about this time, he's seriously knocking on a bit. But you still think, oh, okay,

well, he's Mr. Top of the Pops, so that's fair enough. But Simon Bates, it's just like, no, you've wandered into the wrong studio, mate. Yeah. Or he's arrived late for Nationwide or something. Because, of course, at this time,

he's done his own chat show on Pebble Moor, hasn't he, Taylor? Who else? He did a chat show for BBC Midlands called Saturday Live, I think. What, Simon Bates? Yes, he did, yeah, and it died on its arse. It was pulled very quickly, yeah. There's

very little of it on YouTube. Well, there's none of it on YouTube. He grasped for the Parkinson ring and came up short. Just 35 minutes away from Britain's number one Welcome to Top of the Pops with a good loud start from Slade Right over here Simon Bates in a cream jacket with open necked Czech shirt

Is standing in quarantine at the back of the set With no one around him as he informs us that the number one single is 35 minutes away and then introduces Slade. Formed in Wolverhampton in 1966 as the Inbetweens and then Ambrose Slade, Slade racked up six number ones and 18 top 40 hits in a five-year period, establishing themselves as the dominant British band of the early 70s. In 1975, they decided to permanently decamp to the USA in an attempt to break America, which failed, and by the time they returned in 1977, they were all but forgotten. But in 1980, when they were on the verge of splitting up, Ozzy Osbourne cancelled his

appearance at the Reading Festival and Slade were drafted in at the last minute to play what was going to be their farewell gig. But they became the stars of the festival and went on to adopt a more hard rock stance. They returned to the charts in April of this year with We'll Bring The House Down, which got to number 10. The follow-up, Wheels Aren't Coming Down, only got to number 60,

but Lock Up Your Da daughters Is currently at 45 Good enough to put them back On top of the pops Chaps how do we feel about bands from our childhood Having another go around I'll tell you what right This is a weird thing that in 1981 Slade would have

Sounded and seemed like a nostalgia Act and that is so odd. And that tells us something about the telescoping of time and the effect of the internet. Because the internet means that nothing is really in the past anymore. We live in this kind of perpetual, ongoing, present tense. But in the 70s and 80s, records got deleted. You couldn't buy a Slade record if you wanted to uh uh not one of

their hits unless you found it in a charity shop or maybe you'd you know find their greatest hits somewhere but basically they were done with they were not written out of history but they were written out of the present they weren't part of the present um and yeah them coming back so only seven years really from their heyday it did seem like a real throwback whereas, you know, to give an equivalent from now, it would be like feeling that way about, I don't know, Scouting for Girls or Wombats or something, having a hit

now, you know, you just shrug and think oh, alright, you know, they're still kind of a thing, they're still knocking around yeah yeah, so, but in those days because there was no internet They're still kind of a thing. They're still knocking around. Yeah. Yeah. But in those days, because there was no internet, the past receded from view far more quickly. And so Slade was just a kind of folk memory.

And I think that's kind of an interesting thing about this. And you can see how much Simon Bates is relishing starting the show with something he understands from that earlier era. Yeah, because, I mean, we spoke a couple of episodes ago about the, in 1975, and the Mallory Park Bay City Rollers Radio 1 Fun Day, and there's, John Peel wrote about that, and he said, you know, Noddy Holder was there

giving an interview, and he said that after he'd given his interview, he walked across a bridge and like hundreds and hundreds of Bay City roller fans just ran through him to get to the rollers. And, you know, not one of them noticed him. And, you know, Noddy Holder must have thought, well, we're fucked now. You talk about civic pride. This was Slade.

now you talk about civic pride this was uh slayed yeah oh yes but i don't know this is you know lock up your daughters i mean i know they've been spending all that time on sunset strip with that less than salubrious rodney you know and all those children those children yeah yeah there's There's something a bit I mean this is that agonised moment in early middle age just before bargaining with life begins Slade were a bit

like almost all of the early 70s pop stars, Slade were a bit older than pop stars usually are because they were late developers from the 60s, like almost everyone from that time. So here they'll be, what, 35, 36? Not as old as 35.

That's kind of, yeah. I mean, they look much older, of course, and in one sense it doesn't matter because they never appeared youthful, but you can still smell that kind of edgy giddy hysteria because it's that point in life where you know that your youth um is coming to an end soon they know their career is coming to an end soon but they're not quite thinking about it just yet so there's a sort of a hyperactive um energy and sexuality about them that is a bit a bit tragic um especially when you look at noddy he's got like a sort of uh

almost like a sports jacket faded jeans and cowboy boots it's the timeless uniform of the of the early middle-aged horn dog, you know. Yeah. But, I mean, it's not the worst record in the world, although it is just the riff from Satisfaction, isn't it? You don't notice it because they've buried it. I thought it's the same tune, basically, as Fool For Your Lovin' by Whitesnake. Oh, yes.

That's the tune going on. But Lock Up Your Daughters anticipates the Shannon Matthews story by about three decades, which is kind of interesting. But what Taylor said about that kind of denial of the onset of middle age, do you notice that Super Yob, Dave Hill in this clip, he has given in to the inexorable crawl of male pattern baldness and he's replaced his bizarre comb forward with a cowboy hat here, which I think is a shame

I think he should have kept it going until his fringe was swept forward from the back of his neck. Yeah, well in 1977-78 he actually shaved it bald he was bald for a while and he might well still be under that hat Did you notice also in this clip you get this weird pre-intro bit

before Simon Bates has even introduced them where Norton gets to shout, lock up your daughters that hat did you notice um also in this clip you get this weird pre-intro bit before simon bates has even introduced them where northern gets to shout lock up your daughters in much the same way as he shouted baby baby baby in the previous decade yeah it's kind of interesting little twist on top of the pops there i wonder if they were just allowed to do that because they're kind of top of the pops royalty they're these kind of returning grandees you know no no they've got they've got a fancy boots director in because they do something similar later on with uh heaven 17 by the way do you think that the long dark hair that we see at the side of dave hill's head is attached to the hat or is it like one of those

so captain jack sparrow fancy dress costumes where it's all attached to a sort of bandana. You know, you mentioned that they turned into a hard rock band, a kind of no-nonsense hard rock band. Well, and you mentioned We'll Bring the House Down. I think We'll Bring the House Down was actually a decent effort in that genre. And also partly because it had that other Slade element. It had a football terrace chant going on, We'll bring the house down, you know. That's right, yeah.

But this one just hasn't got that, has it? You know, it's just kind of nothing. Did it... I mean, you'll know. You're the man with the stats. Did it even break the top 40 afterwards, this? We'll find out later on, Simon, shall we? Oh, you tease. You keep the suspense.

But, I mean, Dave Hill's the only one who's making any kind of concession to bothering to make an effort on the close front. He's got this kind of Lemmy-esque leather sort of hat with all the studs. He's got all the studs going on. And also the lyrical content of the song, it does remind me of a kind of like a school reunion drink-up that you know is going to go badly wrong. content of the song it does remind me of a of a kind of like a school reunion drink up uh that

you know it's going to go badly wrong someone's going to burst into tears about a divorce at some point someone's going to hit somebody else over something that happened 25 years ago it you know it's not going to end well um but of course slater a band who are in the mid 30s but they would have seemed impossibly old at the time but your heavy metal fan is going to be a lot more forgiving of an older band, aren't they? Yeah, yeah, good point. I was going to say, isn't he? Because, you know, it was an exclusively male thing at the time.

But the other thing we have to mention is, you know, this could be one of the first sightings on top of the pubs of headbanging, because there's a bit of headbanging down the front, isn't there? Did anybody partake in headbanging at any point? No. No, me neither. Me neither.

It was the dangerous youth trend of the time, wasn't it? It sort of came after clackers and before spinning on your head and on a par with throwing petrol bombs in South Wales and chasing each other with burning crosses. Yeah, there are all these scare stories that it was the equivalent of being a boxer and getting your head punched all the time, or what we now know about central defenders in the 70s

having to head very wet leather footballs and the kind of repetitive damage it does to your brain. Yeah, if you were leaning over the balcony of, I don't know, Bristol Colston Hall, shaking your hair around a white snake, that it might make you into a bit of an idiot in later life, as opposed to make you an idiot right then. The following week, the song only moved up two places, but it eventually got to number 27, its highest position.

The next two releases failed to chart, but My Oh My was the Christmas number two in 1983, and they'd have one more top ten hit with Run, Run Away in March of 1984. Let's lay back on form with Lock Up Your Daughters. Now then, ask your mum, or even your grandparents maybe, about Nat King Cole, and they'll tell you he had a great hit called Pretend. So did Alvin Stardust in 1981. It goes like this.

Bates is surrounded by four young ladies, with his arm round one of of them as he points out that the following song is dead old. Why? It's Alvin Stardust. Like Slade, Alvin Stardust's chart career died in 1975 when sweet cheating Rita got to number 37 and he ended up in the wheel tappers and shunters wilderness. However, in 1981, his manager was approached by Pete Waterman who suggests that Alvin record the 1953 song Pretend, which was initially a hit for Nat King Cole and released as a rockabilly single by Billy Mann in 1959. After the recording was turned down by loads of record labels, his first single release in four years was picked up by Stiff Records, and it's gone up this week from number eight to number five.

Well, first of all, right, in the intro, you've got Simon Bates with these two girls clapping each other's hands across his crotch, which is kind of really weird. It's got that kind of innocence of those kind of hand-clapping games that girls play in the playground, but across this kind of partridge-esque man's groin, it's really kind of quite unsettling.

And then, you know, in a way, it's the perfect intro for somebody like Alvin Stardust. At least it would have been for his 1970s self. And by the way, it is weird that, you know, this is the year of capital F Futurism that we're talking about. And the first two acts are Alvin Stardust and Slade. Yeah, your 1981 hasn't started yet, has it Simon?

No, not on this episode anyway, but do you notice there's a bit midway through this clip where he points his hand down the camera just like my cuckoo chew. So it's kind of like his visual greatest hit is doing that waggling thing with his finger, but no

latex glove this time so no deal really. He appears absolutely naked without his gloves on it just doesn't seem right to see Alvin Stardust bare hands. He's gone from being one of the most sexually menacing pop stars in Britain to a man with all the dark sexuality of

Michael Gove or something and also do you notice when he's playing the guitar or miming the guitar, for a lot of the song, he looks like he doesn't know what he's doing with his fingers. But then suddenly there's a guitar solo and apparently he does and he's properly shredding it. I find that a bit weird.

Anyway, yeah. Well, the last time the three of us were gathered here, we were watching and it's a different picture. What a thought. Thank you for that it's it's only been eight years that's the thing only eight years i've got shoes that are eight i've had for eight years you know and in fairness he's weathered well considering that he was quite old in 1973 um he must be what in his forties here must be 40 or so he looks all right he looks

all right for it and at least he's not trying to be up to date he's gone back to being shane fenton his original um pop incarnation isn't he the 60s pop star but it is still a sort of saga holidays uh sale of the century simulacrum for rock and roll's first generation of old folks this is who this record's for people who were around in 1955

who would then probably have been younger than we are today but in cultural terms they were retired and just sitting around waiting for death. Yeah, he looks a bit like Kevin Keegan's dad, doesn't he? He's got a tiny little bit of a hint towards a perm with his hairstyle. A bit of a lovejoy, a pre-lovejoy.

Yes, definitely a lovejoy, yes. I've got a certain fondness for this song because my dad used to sing it over the sink in the morning while he was fleming up so uh he used to sing this and singing the blues the the tommy steel uh version so yeah you know i've got see the washing up is the perfect scenario for latex glove if your dad had had the latex gloves and he was singing alvin stardust while doing the washing up, that would have been so broken. Oh, he wasn't washing up.

He was deflamming himself after a night of drinking bitter and smoking 20-pult drives. Also, you notice that the audience, like, we had this problem on, I think it was the Vance and Daltrey episode. The audience won't shut up. They're just babbling and jabbering.

And they've left the audience mics up high for a bit of atmosphere. And all it does, it's like a big fuck off to the performer, you know. Yeah, it's not fair, is it? No, they're just... And it's like, I just... You just want Alvin to just sort of lose it

and just take that lovely... Yeah, just grab one of them and say, you must be out of your time. Get that lovely Gibson ES 175 or whatever it is he's strumming away at, just smash it over somebody's head. Judge, jury and execution.

Yes, very good. But no, it's the worst thing about this period of Top of the Pops. The single worst thing. Worse than the professional dancers. Worse than the... Just that jabber.

Just shut up. Yeah. Which weirdly is what gigs are like nowadays. Yeah. So Pretend would nudge up one place to number four, its highest position. The follow-up, a cover of Pat Boone's A Wonderful Time Up There, only made it to number 56.

B signed for Chrysalis in 1984, and would have two more top ten hits. I've been scarred us with number five to be a full chart run down a little later on. Now then, it seems like only yesterday, since True Life came out, here's the new single from Depeche Mode. Just can't get enough over here.

Simon Bates makes his first mistake of the night when he announces that this band's previous song was True Life. It's Depeche Mode. Formed in Basildon in 1980 from the ashes of No Romance in China and Norman and the Worms. Depeche Mode, named after a French fashion magazine, appeared in the Some Bizarre compilation album with The The and Soft Cell before signing with Mute Records before the year was out. Their first release, Dreaming of Me, got to number 57 in April of 1980, but the follow-up

New Life got to number 11 in August. I Just Can't Get Enough was rushed release the next month, and it's crashed into the top 40 at number 24 from number 44. Three synths, a reel-to-reel tape, a gong, and four plastic trumpets. Here we are, Simon. Here's the glittery edifice of 1981 for you. Yeah, first of all, I'm sorry to be anal about this, but let's look in some detail of what Simon Bates said there. Yes,

because there are actually three things wrong with what he said. He said, right. And I quote, he says, it seems like only yesterday since true life came out. Depeche mode. Right.

Yes. So first of all, it makes no grammatical sense. It seems like only yesterday since. Right. That's that makes sense. True life. You It seems like only yesterday since. That makes sense. True Life, you put it out, is not the name of the song. And Depeche Mode.

This was rife in the early 80s. Everyone getting it wrong. Shades of Blackburn with his Duran Duran thing on the top 40 countdown. So there's that. Simon, is Depeche Mode, is that the B-bomb of the early 80s mode is that the b-bomb of the early 80s it is the b-bomb of the early 80s yeah um although i think there's some kind of dispute over this apparently they muddied the waters themselves by um doing certain interviews where they said it was depeche mode so maybe i should go a bit easy on you know these Radio 1 guys. Yeah, I was going to say also, shouldn't it... You see, I only got A-level French,

but shouldn't it actually be Depeche mode? Well, it should be mode Depeche, because in French, generally speaking, you put the adjective after the noun. So in all kinds of ways, it's... If they got it from a fashion mag, presumably they saw it written in that order for some reason. See, if they'd called themselves Woman's Own or The People's Friend,

they wouldn't have had this problem, would they? Woman's Own is a great name for a band. It actually is, yeah. Exchange and Mart, there's a great name for a band. Yeah, for a synth duo. Yeah, and we've basically gone from Simon Bates' Comfort Zone, which is Slade and alvin stardust to the future you know this is proper futurism yeah and uh you mentioned the reel-to-reel tape

that was quite a kind of totemic thing of synth bands of that period so that you had the human league omd into pet depeche depeche mode using them um And they were just there as kind of set decoration, but they were there to make a point, weren't they, that it was almost a snub to the musicians' union who tried to ban these kind of artists because it wasn't real music. So it's basically sort of shoving that in the face of the MU, saying, yeah, this is pre-recorded.

And there was this kind of subversion to that which goes through the whole performance. You've got them playing toy trumpets as well. That's right, yes. Where clearly there are no trumpets on the record. And that kind of subversion runs through quite a few. The Human League, and I mentioned OMD as well. Do you remember there's a performance by the Associates

where Alan Rankin is playing a chocolate guitar and then in the second verse he breaks it into pieces and starts feeding it to the audience. So quite a few of these synth bands like to do that just to kind of take the piss out of the whole thing. I really like Depeche Mode but I don't love them and I find it weird when people do love them. I've got friends who are Depeche Mode mental.

I also find it weird that anyone could hate Depeche Mode. I just think they're a band that you've got to respect. They've just made so many really good records while stopping short of quite loving them. But this is a brilliant song. This is just a classic pop song. So, you know, I don't think anyone can really argue this is just a perfect pop pop song if you put this on

in a club when you're DJing it just cheers everyone up there was something because they eventually became this kind of sleazy dark electro band and I know that I've interviewed Mark Almond a few times and he reckons that soft cell imploding kind of paved the way for Depeche Moe to take on that mantle and then become this kind of stadium electro goth monster that they became. But at this point, they're very clean cut, aren't they? Like Dave Garn, he's got this

little bow tie. He looks about 12. He's a sort of like synth pop singer you could take home to your mum. He looks a bit like Ducky in Pretty in Pink, which hadn't been made yet. But then you've got um uh martin gore who's who's uh uh he's topless in braces and a trilby like a gay dancer from a from a new york club like a kind of stonewall play have it with your nipples that would yeah oh too right yeah and as i as i knew only too well from my sort of madness

fred perry kind of look um but he's he he's singing at Vince Clark, kind of dancing at him, and Vince Clark's not quite having it. And I wonder if that might have precipitated his departure from the band, but Martin Gore was gaying him up just a little bit too much for his comfort. Vince Clark looks proper Hitler youth in this, doesn't he? Yeah, he does. But I love Vince Clark. I think he's a pop genius, And his fingerprints are all over this song.

And, you know, basically when he left the band, that's another reason why they took that more sombre turn. Yes. And also, just going back to that musicians' union point, it's kind of hard to remember this distance. In 1981, still, how controversial it was not to have a drummer or a guitarist visible on stage i know you mentioned this kind of thing when you're talking about ultravox the other week uh but ultravox kind of they they had a foot in both camps because they did have you know um uh was it a real drummer they had in the band um there was you know at least there was something kind of to root it down and make it seem kind of whereas the mode they're just totally in your

face with how synthetic in both meanings of the word they were and and i absolutely love it yeah this is almost like the archetypal new pop single isn't it it's like it's brisk and artificial and bright and droll and slightly faster than it needs to be but still rooted in classic pop rules. There's nothing wrong with this at all. I mean, it's funny to look at, you know, this is a group that haven't taken heroin. You just take one look at them and you can see, you know,

even like Martin Gore, it looks like he's failed the audition for the Hot Shoe Show. But it's not really sleazy, is it? He's just having a little dress-up. But no, this is good. My problem

with Depeche Mode came in the later years. I remember yes, reacting. I still react with incredulity when people talk about Tresh Mode as though they were a you know a classic band or one of the greats I remember the lyric sheet to their album Black Celebration being passed around at my school as comedy right look at this look at those lyrics because they were so bad because Martin Gore is one of the

worst, well not one of the worst lyricists but one of the most classically bad lyricists of the 80s if you think bad lyrics this is what you think very quotable doggrel but

I'm not sure that they made a bad single until about 1988. So I just can't get enough would soar to number 12 and go as far as number 8. The debut LP Speak and Spell was released the following month, and the follow-up See You would get to number 6 in March of 1982. Depeche Mode would have 42 top 40 hits between 1981 and 2009, but would never make the top three. That's it, Depeche Mode. And here's a gentleman called Dave Stewart who specialises

in making oldies sound like something out of 1981. The lady with him is Barbara. And listen to what they do with It's My Party. If I want it, right, if I want it Nobody knows where my Johnny has gone Bates, on his own again, introduces us to Dave Stewart, who specialises in taking oldies and making them sound out of 1981, but feels that Barbara Gaskin isn't worthy of a surname. Barbara Gaskin was involved in the late 60s Canterbury scene

and became the lead singer of Spyro Gyra, a folk prog band of the early 70s, not the jazz funk group of the late 70s, and guested with bands such as Egg, National Health and Hatfield in the North and travelled around Japan and India when the band split up. When she returned to the UK,

she hooked up with the keyboardist of Hatfield in the North Northern National Health, Dave Stewart, who had scored a number 13 hit earlier in the year with a synth cover of Jimmy Ruffin's What Becomes of the Broken Hearted. This song, a synthy cover of the 1963 Leslie Gore hit, has jumped up from number 17 to number 8. Dave Stewart is not Dave Stewart of the T tourists, later the Eurythmics. I only knew that last week. That shocked me. Well, you thought he was two-timing Annie Lennox with Barbara.

Yeah. I mean, Barbara Gaskin, the thing that struck me, first of all, was that she looks like Candice Marie in Nuts in May, glammed up for a work stew at a vegan cooperative canteen. One of the recurring themes of these podcasts is the whole thing about people ageing much more quickly in the past. And, I mean, how old was she? You know, 30 or something?

I mean, God knows. Something like that, yeah. Yeah, but she's such a mum. She looks like she's run through the wardrobe department from Play Away and nicked Chloe Ashcroft or Carol Chell's costume. And, you know, there's this subtle generation gap between

this and Depeche Mode. They're probably only about, you know, seven years apart in age. And again, this is a synth performance, but Dave Stewart comes from an entirely different generation. He clearly came to synths through prog rather than through craft work. So, you know, he's all about Rick Wakeman rather than Ralph Hutter.

Taking three hours to set your moog up. Yeah, there's four musicians on stage. And at first I couldn't figure out which one of them is Stewart, but I think he's the one with the vest because he gets to have two keyboards on some sort of Black & Decker A-frame thing. And he waves his arms around like a maestro and does a stage bow when it ends. And he's got this shiny red bum bag, it looks like, on his hip

like Larry Blackman from Cameo's codpiece has slipped round to the side. He's got one on either side, I think. That was bothering me what they were. Well, I wasn't sure. The picture quality is not great. But I couldn't tell, is it a hairdryer or boxing gloves? Is it boxing gloves? I thought it was boxing gloves,

but I also think it could be some kind of percussion instrument. Ah, right, okay. Yeah, with Depeche Mode, you know, totally artificial. But it's a bit more natural with them. With this performance's like oh look at all my sims everything's synthy oh you know i'd never heard the original when when this came out um so i i did i didn't know the original um and uh in in retrospect i um some some of the lines uh allowed a sort of Finn Bar Saunders-esque smirking. Nobody knows where my Johnny has gone. Let's get to the heart of the matter here.

I was nine years old and this record came out. The first line of which is, nobody knows where my Johnny has gone. It was like, you know, with the Bell Stars, the clapping song was you had to you know it was like an innuendo it was like they didn't actually say rubber john it just you you had to fill it in yourself was here they actually said it it reminds me of that scene in uh in bed with chris needham where uh greg gets questioned about uh who's got in chris's top drawer and got the Johnnies out,

and they've decided that it's actually his little brother who's used them as balloons. I did ask Chris about that, and I did say, look, Chris, did you put that in to kind of like put about the fact that you were sexually active? And he refused to be drawn on the subject, so I'm taking that as a yes. Yeah.

The other thing I was going to say about this is it's very kind of uh amdram very theatrical and performative you know the way that barbara gaskins gives it the big shock eyes the big kind of silent movie shock eyes and that kind of hand and the hand the hand to forehead swooning that she does um i i don't think i liked it very much at the time and i thought it was... Oh, couldn't stand it. It's an odd record to be number one, really, because it's got these weird noises in it. It's very discordant at times.

It's got a tempo shift, a massive tempo shift near the end. So it's quite a peculiar thing to be number one. And I, even though I was 14 and, you know, listened to Radio 1 all day, I couldn't figure out why this one shot up the charts, what's going on there and by the way a lot of this now you know the era we're dealing with gives me such a Proustian

rush. I used to cycle home from school every Tuesday lunchtime with a little chart diary that I got from my granddad's stationery shop and I used to fill in what was in what the new entries were, cycle back to school and read it out to my classmates who were kind of humouring me. You probably didn't give a shit. But I was bringing them breaking news, like the guy who ran the original marathon in Greece or like Paul Revere or something. I was giving it that. What news from Gallup? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or BRMB as it might still have been

at that time um but uh hearing this song i can actually taste um cheap ketchup on a particular chip shop's chips in my mouth when i hear it it's really powerful when when you hear this stuff and and yeah it brings it does bring back tastes and smells and all kinds of stuff this is grown up synth pop isn't it? Yeah, but in all the wrong ways. Because what this is, it's a bunch of old hippies trying to be as modern as they possibly can. And that's never good news.

For a start, it's completely unsympathetic to the actual song. I mean, it's a mess. This record is a mess they've just uh troweled on all these modern textures and studio techniques with no thought to how that might affect the you know emotional push of the record because they've got no respect for the song because the song's kitsch no it's inescapably kitsch, like all this sort of immediately pre-Beatles or pre-Beatlemania pop songs tended to be. Yeah.

But they don't even respect what the song's trying to do. After it says she's wearing his ring, there's like a sample of church bells that goes ding-dong-dong-dum. Yes. It makes Shadow Morton look like a lateral thinker you know and then it straight from that into a sort of chirpy coda of pigeon street reggae with a jolly little primary school teacher dance and it's like this is not this doesn't follow from the emotions laid down in the song. It's just wrong.

And the kitschness of the original is in the composition. It's in the song. It's not in the arrangement of the song. So when you put on all these Yamaha synths, it's just you're recladding a load of schlock. It's like doing a Belgian house version of Tell laura i love her it's just it's just a waste of resources there's no point first thing that first song that quincy jones produced by the way is it yes i didn't i should know that i didn't know that to me it sounds like the midpoint between the albums of the late 60s and early 70s of oh oh, here's Beethoven on Moog. And the more recent thing of taking an old song

and playing it dead slow to try and wring out as much emotion out of it as possible. But all that does is make a really shit version of a song last two minutes longer than it should. Yeah, but it is, I don't know what you mean, it's like that classic rock by the London Philharmonic. It's like, you liked it like that? Well, you'll love it like this.

Also, it's got all the signifiers of modernity, like one of those drum kits that looks like the Gold Run from Blockbusters. Yes, yeah. EastEnders drums, as I call them. Yeah, there's something really really miserable and point missing about this. The following week it would jump up to number one and stay there

for four weeks. Fucking hell. All the synth pop tunes of that era that should have been number one, and this one was. The follow-up, Busy Doing Nothing, a cover of the Bing Crosby song, stalled at number 49,

but they would continue to work together to this day. The only other bit of chart action they got was a cover of Little Eva's Locomotion, which only got to number 17 in the summer of 1986. A couple of years too early. Yeah. And not fronted by an extremely popular soap star. Yes, that's where they went wrong. That's probably more to do with why it was unsuccessful.

Yeah, if they'd have got Eddie Yates or somebody, it would have had a hit. Sad songs from Dave Stewart and Barbara Gaskin, It's My Party. And talking of sad songs, try the lyrics on this one. If you haven't listened, try Lynx for the real, real sad story of romance. I got a note from my cousin the other day Bates, with three more young women, one of which actually looks a bit new romantic, insists that we listen to the lyrics of the next song because they mean something. It's So This Is Romance by Lynx.

Yeah, you've got a woman there with simon bates who's got proper princess di hair and this was only a few months after the royal wedding and it's bringing back the horror to me of this period of about god it could be anything up to two years where all women or all girls and young women wanted to look like princess diana and it just and even men some men did and it and it just wasn't a good look. No, well, it was terrible, wasn't it? I don't know how I managed to have a wank in the early 80s. I really don't.

Formed in London in 1980, Lynx were initially a multiracial band which were presented as a duo of David Grant on vocals and Sketch on bass, although their backing singer was Junior Giscom, yet to have a hit with Mama Used To Say. Their debut single, You're Lying, got to number 15, and the follow-up, Intuition, got to number 7,

thanks in part to their video being played on Top of the Pops due to a BBC technician strike, which banned in-studio performances. This is the follow-up to Throw Away the Key, which got to number 21, and it's up this week from number 19 to number 18. The song is about David Grant's cousin writing him a letter about some misfortune in the relationship front, and I can't really sort of empathise with this

because the last time I saw my cousin, he got pissed up at our auntie's 80th birthday do and he spent all night asking me if I was gay because I hadn't got anyone up the stick yet so if I got a letter so if I got a letter from him saying his missus had fucked off with someone else I'd just laugh my tits off. It would be, the song would be like a version of the laughing policeman

Well that's the thing isn't it right? This is the thing right? You've got Simon Bates, he's like a schoolteacher, isn't he? Sitting us down. And he's saying, we've got this real sad, sad story about romance. And he's seen one or two in his time, bear in mind. Yeah, I mean, he's in our tune mode here, isn't he?

He's saying, right, let's get the quote. He says, talking of sad songs, try the lyrics on this one. If you haven't listened, try Lyn links for the real sad story of romance and to be honest he's bigged it up a bit too much hasn't he because you're expecting something incredible you're expecting something from the pen of you know a latter day leonard cohen or smoky robinson or something like that but it's just crap i mean uh right here's a quote from the from the lyrics that simon bates thought we had to sit down and listen to um in her last letter she was water skiing and she has learned to drive a car a gigolo bearing a gigolo bearing the name romero takes her for evenings in

a cocktail bar i mean what you know this, this is what Simon Bates thinks. Pay attention, children. This is proper songwriting. And you've got David Grant, meanwhile, waving his arms in the air and getting the audience to do the same while someone plays a jaunty tune on a clarinet. The drummer looks like a bouncer at Talk of the Town.

Yes. There's a whole kind of sleeveless um t-shirt the sort of cap sleeve t-shirt thing going on so it's just kind of a fashion disaster it's aesthetically appalling and i quite like a bit of um some of those other link singles you mentioned were pretty decent but yeah this is very um slender and slim and crap and just baits talking about it as if it's like, you know, the Book of Revelations or something. It's extraordinary to me.

But David Grant's brought the letter with him to prove that he's not bullshitting, so, you know, you've got to give him that. Yeah, they use a few props in this. There's also, in the last line, it says, can I pour you a drink before you go? And he's got a cocktail shaker and some cocktail glasses set up on the piano,

just next to the cork, so you can imagine the keyboard player, don't spill it, just do not spill that, all right? Oh, fucking hell. And he's only got two glasses as well, and there's four people in the band, so that's not good. Yeah, but he's acting out the story.

I'll tell you what, though, you're right to highlight the fact that this letter is supposedly from his cousin. And it sounds so weird that he, rather than saying it happened to him or his friend or even his brother. Why his cousin? Because it's not true. I mean, this isn't a true story. You know this isn't a true story because it's not plausible. I'm sorry.

This story is not plausible. Let's look at what happens here. His girlfriend says she's going on holiday, like without him, and he's like, oh, okay. And he says he expects her to be gone for a... Not in 1981, she's not. Yeah, well, he expects her to be gone for a week or two. And he says, well, that was more than two months ago.

And it's like he's only just starting to you know and then he says oh yeah no she said they're always she's been sending always the last to know taylor you know that she's been sending him letters saying well i'm going to a cocktail bar with a gigolo um and i've learned i've water skiing and i've learned to drive a car who learns to drive a car on holiday well she's done a fucking intensive driving course like, you know, Martinique or wherever. It's like, it's not believable. To be fair, I do know women like that.

I do know women, ex-girlfriends of friends of mine who would absolutely, maybe using modern technology, rub your face in it in that way. They would absolutely disappear for an unexpected holiday and let you know what they've been doing while they're away. She'd be posting photos on Facebook, wouldn't she now? But this guy thinks that it's still his girlfriend. That's the thing, because at the end of the song...

Well, it's a twat, isn't it? But at the end of the song, he goes out there to isn't it but at the end of the song he goes out there to bring her home and then he's surprised when she tells him that she's just got married it's like i've seen porn films with more realistic plots than this it doesn't make sense but he gets a can of summer out of it though doesn't it i mean she's not that much of a cow i don't know i i broke your heart, have a can of, I don't know, Quattro or something. A can of Kestrel. But the thing is, yeah, I took Bates' advice

and I'm not grateful. And it's not even a good record because I don't like that obnoxious singing style, that sort of bleating singing style that you get on a few of these sort of synth-bassy soul records from the time. And I don't like David Grant's look either. It was a sort of a... He's an early adopter of the wet look, isn't he?

Yeah, but that whole thing, it was a short-lived look for black guys. There was him and Junior, a couple of musical youth with the cap-sleep t-shirt and the sensible glasses. Yeah, and it's very business-first and it's not flattering.

There's nothing good about the struggle, except the drummer, who looks like he's at the PFA Awards dinner. He's somehow, in 1979, and he's somehow been lured on stage to sit in with the band. But the audience are enjoying it, aren't they? I mean, I noticed there was a skinhead

in the crowd in a black Fred Perry and white braces, and he's waving his hands in the air like a good'un. I think he was expecting, I don't know, the Cockney Rejects or Combat 84, but you know, he's happy enough. He's close enough. But I have to say, this is the biggest audience

we've ever seen at a Top of the Pops, isn't it? There's fucking millions on them. Yeah, they won't shut up. That's the problem. They're chattering all through this one as well. It's really noticeable on this. Oh, and not listening to the real story of romance. Yeah, that's why Bates gets so pissed off.

They must have been doing it in the run through as well. That letter that he got off his cousin at the end, it said, P.S. Please don't make a song out of this or anything. So the following week So This Is Romance jumped three places to number 15, its highest position. This will be their

last top 40 hit and the band split up in 1983. But David Grant got involved with and then married one of the professional dancers on Top of the Pops, Carrie Gray, had a brief solo career and the pair of them will pop up on Fame Academy. There's Vince, and here are the voices of Diana Ross and Lionel Richie,

and Lulu and Jeremy. My love There's only you in my life The only thing that's right The BBC have managed to find the only person in the audience who looks like a new romantic and have stuck her next to Simon Bates as he introduces Endless Love by Diana Ross and Lionel Richie. The song that was written by Lionel Richie for the Franco Zeffirelli film Endless Love starring Brooke Shields. By this time in the reign of Michael Hurl as producer of Top of the Pops, Legs & Co are

starting to realise that they're on their last legs. Not only is the rising popularity of promo videos cutting into their performance time, but they're finding themselves reduced to backing bands and artists. In this instance, only Lulu is required dancing a duet with someone called Jeremy. The song is up this week from number 13 to number 17. But let's put the song to one side for a bit, as we always do in dance routines. Legs & Co, it's like they're facing the threat of redundancy like everyone else. It's terrible.

This is like the point where they get a letter from Lulu and Jeremy telling them that they've just learnt to drive a car. I was really disappointed because they didn't tell you it was Lulu from Legs & Co, they just said learnt to drive a car. I was really disappointed, because they didn't tell you it was Lulu from Legs. They just said it's Lulu and Jeremy. I was expecting the Lulu and the Jeremy Corbin. Jeremy Thorpe.

Yeah, well, Jeremy Thorpe. It's Jeremy Thorpe and Norman Scott with Diana Ross and Lionel Richie's endless love. Now, you can imagine poor old Jill and Patty sat at home thinking, what the fuck is this? Pauline. Yeah, as indeed am I, because what the fuck is this? Do you think Lulu's scabbed or something?

It's not very sisterly, is it? No. Maybe they told her that the others would get a turn to dance with Jeremy as well, but it never happened. She's shaping up to be the big star in it. She thinks she's Diana Ross, like, you know, walking away from the Supremes, or, you know, became the special man

and now they were Lulu's band, to quote Ziggy. Yeah, they're hoping that the future Legs & Co appearances they'll be billed as Lulu and Legs & Co. Or Lulu and Co. This dance routine is of no value. I feel... No, it's not.

I don't like to say that about many things on All Top of the Pops because, you know, as we know, you can always find value if you dig for it. But this is of no value. And I have nothing to say about this at all i think the routine is and i'm sorry to diss your local heroes or or you know implicitly do so al but it's basically torval and dean before torval and dean happened you know um it's very it's very kind of in inverted commas beautiful in that way that uh the parent generation would perceive beauty to be yeah this is more for the

mums than the dads, isn't it? Once again, the dads have been robbed. You know, they've had to sit through all these puffy-looking lads. And when their moment comes, they've been denied. They've got to look at Jeremy's PVC trousered arse. Can I just ask, have either of the other two of you seen the Brooke Shields film, Endless Love? Did you see it?

No. Well, I have. I saw it. I can't say I've got it. I actually, yeah, I went to the Theatre Royal Cinema in Bury to see Endless Love, which I believe was a AA rated film, which was kind of just like slightly less than an X, and I was

13 or 14 at the time, so it was the closest you could get. I think I went because there might be some tits in it or something. I went to see the film and it's pretty trashy but I looked into this when I knew we were going to be talking about it. I looked on Wikipedia and I found

a poster for the film and the tagline on the poster goes, it goes, She is 15, he is 17, the love every parent fears. Now, those parents have got a bit of a failure of the imagination, it strikes me.

Yeah. Things could be a fucking sight worse than that, let's face it. She's 15, he is Prince Charles. Are we going to talk about the song? Oh, why not?

Why not? I'll tell you what, right? I i love motown i absolutely love motown and this would be around the time actually that i was getting obsessed with motown and i found it hard to square what motown was in 1981 which was this with the the stuff that i was delving back into which, you know, 60s records by the Four Tops and the Isley Brothers and the Supremes and Marvin Gaye and all of that. And it's a bit of a kind of blunt instrument way of looking at it. But I think when Motown left Detroit in, what was it, 1970 and moved to Los Angeles, it pretty much lost its soul and became this kind of corporate machine. And not in a good way because you know obviously it was a sort of hit factory before that but um there's something

especially insincere i think about this type of duet it's a bit like when uh in in uh medieval times um that you know a prince of england would be forced to marry a princess from Spain to bring two great houses together. It's like you've got Lionel Richie, who he happened to write this song, fair enough, but it might just as well have been written by Norman Whitfield or whoever. And there's no rapport between him and Diana Ross, as far as I know, they never had a relationship. Now, I know, you know, that's a dumb way of looking at it

because you know pop is fiction but there's just something about these duets where you get one megastar and another megastar ships the past in the night going to a vocal booth singing this thing together I guess the most famous example was

On My Own by Patti LaBelle and Michael MacDonald where they apparently never even met. Right. But this one, there's just something about it that maybe I was too much of a Puritan about soul and what soul had to mean at the time. But the idea that Motown had come to this, I found kind of upsetting. And also, I don't think my musical palette was sufficiently developed at this point to even understand the chord changes in it,

these kind of pseudo-classical movements within the song. I just didn't get it. A bit like things like, I don't know, Woman in Love by Barbra Streisand. Yeah. You know, that's Barry Gibb. But there are certain ways that those songs move which I didn't quite get

because I still had a kind of you know, three or four chord understanding of... Because you were chucking petrol bombs in a field Simon I was too busy chucking petrol bombs This music isn't calling to your soul It wasn't, yeah These are sighing chord changes

and at that age you don't do a lot of sighing no really do you it's not a part of your emotional vocabulary you do a lot of huffing but not sighing yeah huffing yeah and to think we're just one year removed from upside down on my old piano it's like oh diana what are you doing knocking about with this yeah weird bloke and lion Lionel Richie's alright, you know, it's not long ago he'd been writing Brick House and Machine Gun and stuff like that. But no, this is awful really.

So the following week, Endless Love dropped down to number nine. Oh Lulu and Jeremy. It went on though to become the second biggest selling single in America in 1981 after Betty Davis Eyes by King Karnes. Meanwhile, Legs & Co were less than a month away from performing

their final song on Top of the Pops, The Birdie Song by The Tweets. It could have been worse. It could have been The Birdie Song by The Electronicas. Yeah, yeah. Tragically, in this chart, as we'll see later, The Tweets are at, what is it, number eight with The Birdie Song?

Because the original version by The the electronicas is languishing down at about number 29 or something well the the pioneers always suffered yeah i know just too early yeah they were the beat-a-max birdie song really weren't they and they were overtaken by the vhs of the tweets here's a single that isn't new and the band has been around for a while but with a single hit, it's Japan and Quiet Life over here Formed in Catford in 1974 Japan were signed to Hansa Records in 1977 and recorded three unsuccessful albums for the German label. At the end of their deal, they signed to Virgin Records,

recorded two singles, Gentlemen Take Polaroids and The Art of Parties, and both of them hung about the lower reaches of the charts. Then, in August of 1981, their old label re-released Quiet Life, which had been the B-side of their last Hansa release, and it's just scraped into the top 40 at number 39. Now, if we're talking about Lady Di here...

Yeah, there's a lot of work gone into that hairstyle. But it's, yeah, it's a bit Lady Di, a bit Dallas. It's a bit proto-George Michael. I don't think he... I think from now, it's, I don't think he, I think from now looking back, I don't think he looks like he would have wanted to have looked this far into the future. Do you know what I mean?

It's like, he's very much rooted in a time and place, that hairstyle, in a way that I don't think he'd have been too pleased with. Japan, of course, went to great pains to point out that they weren't a new romantic band Simon what do you think about that? About them not being a new romantic band? Well yeah

I mean I guess they've been knocking around since the 70s so you can understand them wanting to distance themselves a bit but they were clearly precursors of the new romantic movement and this is an almost stereotypical new romantic sound. this record is actually one of several attempts by arty white guys to channel i feel love um by donna summer yes another example

would be i i travel by simple minds um and i i i absolutely love this record um i think i think it's amazing it's transcendent and transgressive um the way that david sylvan just sings the word boys throughout in this really offhand way um which you know it seemed kind of daringly gay at the time um and and they japan felt like they came pre-packed with this kind of backstory and secret knowledge that um there was something more than meets the eye to them and when you're 14 that kind of stuff's really exciting musically i do love those kind of helicopter synths they got going on and it's got that fretless bass yes could could that be the first

fretless because this is before pino paladino with paul young uh and uh and and before um uh gary newman uh roped in uh it was mick khan wasn't it yeah from from japan that uh um newman uh would uh kind of steal um but yeah and mick khan himself uh having no eyebrows i had not seen what david bowie looked like in 1973 at this point so the idea of a man going on top of the pops and no eyebrows was completely freaky. As for Sylvian, I've got to disagree with Taylor. I think David Sylvian looks absolutely amazing here.

He was described, was he in Smash Hits as the most beautiful man in the world? I believe it was their press office put out to the news of the world that a newspaper in Japan had called David Silvian the most beautiful man in the world and they printed

it and then the next thing the press office did was go to a newspaper in Japan and say hey look the news of the world printed that David Silvian's the most beautiful man in the world. That is pretty smart press manipulation I've got to hand that to them and I do like his suit that he's wearing here.

Is it a Prince of Wales check? That check that he's wearing there? I believe it is. This song actually made me then investigate Japan. Do you guys remember the reissue label, Fame? There's this label called Fame

that used to put out albums that had been out a little while. It would basically be the original album album but in the corner of the sleeve it would have this Fame logo that was like a kind of electrocardiogram thing a sort of zigzag thing and I got quite a lot of records in in Boots for about £2.99 on that and you know one of in fact I got Searching for the Young Soul Rebels by Dexys on a fame reissue. But this one, it was assemblage or assemblage. I don't know which way you'd say it, but it's basically a greatest hit so far of Japan. And it had this on it. And I absolutely loved it.

And yeah, I just feel like Japan in this era are another strong argument why 1981 was a brilliant year to be a pop kid. But this is not a 1981 song, is it? It's one of their old ones. No, it's not. Are there any other examples of a band who end up competing with their own product on a different label? Yeah, loads. I mean, Adam and the Ants.

Adam and the Ants around this time were competing with reissues of deutsche girls of course yeah and then later on in the 80s madonna um had uh was it gambler got reissued by an old label or something like that so yeah it's a sort of thing that goes on particularly in the 80s seems to happen quite often i mean do you think it'll fuck you off if you're in abandon or your old shit's being dragged up and you i mean japan obviously quite happy to promote it i mean this is the first big hit i wonder what the record i wonder what virgin was thinking at the time yeah because this was on hansa wasn't it that's right yeah they and it happened again i think with i second

that emotion yeah which uh was was another oldie of theirs that um got reissued became a hit and quiet life was the b side of i second that emotion when it first came out. I've never been 100% convinced by Japan, except for Ghosts, which is one of the best records of the first half of the 80s. And to me, when I listen to their albums, that seems to have come almost out of nowhere. I like this one as well, even though it is like a more tasteful Duran Duran

and therefore slightly less interesting Duran Duran. But it's a very good record. It's just, yeah, when I investigated Japan, I was a bit let down at the fact that most of their stuff is basically like interior decor, you know. But, you know, better that they exist than they don't exist. And at this point in this Top of the Pops, it's crying out for a bit of self-conscious art,

or at least artiness. And they fill that gap very well. I think it's Taylor mentions Duran Duran there, and Japan were kind of the highbrow Duran Duran. And hearing this song on Top of the Pops would have been a way for you know Duranis or proto Duranis to find their way in but once you actually go and buy what would have been the contemporary Japan album Tin Drum it's really pretty challenging listening it's almost bracingly unlistenable but but in a brilliant way, if you know what I mean. The best thing about this clip is the drummer in eye makeup that really doesn't suit him. But he has to have it because it's important. But he does do a pretty good glassy stare. And of course, David Silvan's got his Brian Ferry voice on, hasn't he? Yeah, totally. I mean, let's see him deny that and stay fashionable.

hasn't he? Yeah totally I mean let's see him deny that and stay fashionable Yes I think there was a rumour going round our school that David Silvian did the vocals on the Allied for Carpets for You advert that was around at the time because nobody would think Brian Ferriold's stoops

are low as to do that So the following week Quiet Life jumped up to number 26 and would get as high as number 19 The follow up Visions of China on 26 and would get as high as number 19. The follow-up, Visions of China on Virgin would only go as high as number 32 and the band's new output

would compete with Hansa re-releases right up until they split up at the end of 1982. It's Heaven 17 on top of the pops Play to win by Heaven 17 Formed in Sheffield in 1980 After Ian Marsh and Martin Ware, left the original incarnation of the Human League,

and recruited Glenn Gregory, who was the original choice for lead singer of the Human League. Heaven 17's first single, We Don't Need This Fascist Groove Thang, stalled at number 45 in March of this year, when it was banned by the BBC, for mentioning Ronald Reagan. Even though it said Regan,

for some bizarre reason, I don't know. Did they apply that same standard to Brown Sauce? Yeah. Who also mentioned Ronald Reagan and also pronounced it Regan. Yeah. To rhyme with... A bit different when it's Keegan. That's right.

Yeah. A bit different when it's on fucking BBC records. Yeah. That's how the Yeah. It's a bit different when it's on fucking BBC records. Yeah. That's how the BBC is, mate. In any case, this is the follow-up single, and it's static at number 52. Hasn't jumped up the previous week, but it's still on top of the pops.

I want to like this more than I actually do. It's high concept, but at this point, the concept is better than the tune um it's interesting that there's a bit in the lyrics that goes suit the action to the word and at this point heaven 17 are not quite doing that um for me um i do like fascist groove thing that you mentioned but um for me that when they really when it really came together for them was the single let me go thought let me go was an incredible record yeah but um getting to the top 40 though unfortunately no at this point they're not quite there um it's busy bustling but um it's all above the waist it's got no hips and no arse, this, right?

And the crowd seemed to love it in much the same way that they loved Lynx. They're going as crazy for this as they went for Lynx. Is that victory or failure? I don't know. Or is that some BBC bloke with a stick? Yeah, maybe. As Taylor pointed out earlier, Glenn Gregory does indeed do that play-to-win thing at the start, same as Noddy did.

So that was obviously a little trick that the BBC decided to play around with. I noticed Martin Ware playing a guitar rather than the synth on this one, kind of peculiar. But the thing that really stood out more than anything else was their hair. Their hair in this performance is really bad um ian craig marsh and glenn gregory have both got these little rat tails they've got their hair tied back these little rat tails which is a really distressing hairdo which i've got to hold my hands up and confess i was guilty of um i was not copying really i was copying second wave Dexys. Dexys of the era of Plan B and Show Me

when they were in their kind of jogging bottoms and had their little rat tails. And I actually got sent home from school for having this hairdo. So, you know. Oh, man. Yeah, I got bad associations with that hairstyle. But yeah, just Heaven 17, great band,

a lot of respect for them. I like the ideas of it, but this song's just not happening i think they've got that hair um just in case anyone doesn't understand that they're wearing those suits ironically i mean it's uh yeah you keep waiting for something to happen in this record and it never does it just jogs on the spot and then eventually you're rewarded with that comedy parping keyboard brass solo that is so so clearly the best bit of the record um no it's yeah it's and the bad vocal terrible vocal um he's an awful singer he thinks because it's like a sort of a white funk track you can just do anything over the top but it's not that simple he does a little shouted bit where

he goes and it's uh it he just sounds foolish it's horrible horrible this is a really really unimpressive record anything else to say about it yeah i was i was going to say that um we mentioned earlier that uh a lot of these neuromantics were bowie kids right yeah and um most of them would have drawn on two things either the berlin stuff or the ziggy stuff but i think heaven 17 are actually almost unique at this point in drawing upon young Americans. Right. Particularly the song Win, of course. The song Win by David Bowie is what they're basically channeling here. So I can see what they're trying to do,

but that's it. They're trying. So Play to Win edged up to number 49 the next week and got no higher than number 46. They played and lost. The follow-up Penthouse and Pavement would only make it to number 57 in November of this year, and it wouldn't be until 1983 that they scored top five hits

with Temptation and Come Live With Me. And now let's take a look at what's happening in the top 30. And into the 30 goes Adrian Baker, Gideon Park with Seasons of Gold. The Electronicers version of the original Bird Dance is at 29. And down goes Genesis to 28 with Abacad. Teardrop Explodes is up to 27. And down to 26 goes UB40.

Down as well, Ultravox, The Thin Wall to 25. A Climber, though, for Depeche Mode, just can't get enough, is at 24. Everybody Salsa and Modern Romance is down to 23. A climber though for Depeche Mode just can't get enough is at 24. Everybody's Salsa and Modern Romance is down to 23. And Madness, a new entry at 22 with Shut Up. And here at 21 on Top Of The Pops, Imagination and In And Out Of Love. I keep falling in love I keep falling in love I keep falling in love In love

Formed in London earlier this year by Lee John, a former backing singer for touring American soul bands, and bassist Ashley Ingram, Imagination were created from the ashes of Fizz with three Zs with a desire to form a quote slinker, sexer and erotic soul funk band. Calling themselves Imagination in tribute to the recently shot John Lennon, their first single Body Talk made it all the way up to number four in July of this year thanks to a top of the pubops performance where they wore skimpy gold lamé shorts.

This is a follow-up, and it's gone up from number 22 to number 21 this week. Never a chore, their appearances on Top of the Pops. This is probably the least extraordinary of all of them, in that Lee John has turned up in a sort of gold llama tic-tac man outfit it's not impressive and the oh and also he's got yellow shoes because it's the closest colour he

could find to gold so he's got gold trousers gold and white shirt, gold and white hat and yellow shoes and it really clashes you know you'd think you'd have no yeah uh bass player gets to do his unique emoting style on a couple of lines and uh

he's only about halfway through that i realized he's got no strap on his bass um which means it's impossible to play you you can't play a heavy Fender bass without a strap on it while standing up. So it's just a prop. And he uses it as a prop throughout. There's a bit where it looks... You say that they're miming. They're doing more than miming. It's like...

There's a bit where it's like he's petting a large collie. Or he sort of puts it down and crouches down and strokes it yeah I mean he could have taken it further but it's you don't get bored watching them the worst thing about this is that the drummer didn't come out from

behind the drums at the end and start dancing with them which he does in all the others, which is always worth waiting for. I mean, the one thing that struck me about Imagination was they were like hot gossip, but without the silly white girls getting in the way with their skimpy-ish...

Yeah, it is... 1981, yeah, probably the only time that a black British band could get away with looking like this. Yeah, definitely, yeah. Partly for sort of complex sociological reasons, but also because it doesn't fit with a white stereotype of black culture, or at least the approved and appreciated images of black men.

There's this weird situation where you get the sort of sexually insecure white cultural guardians who are quite happy to appreciate and hail black men who present themselves as more virile and heterosexual than they are. But they suddenly get all weird when it's black men presenting themselves as even gayer than white men. Suddenly, people don't like to see it for some reason. But I've got to say, I look at Lee John and I just think, he's more virile than me. Yeah. I'm willing to conceive that to him.

This is fantastic. The only disappointment with this is, first of all, the record is, this is their worst hit right this is the the others are better um and they just it's like they camp it up but it's like they don't want to go too far and it's a shame because there's something almost intrusive about the sheer level of campness of their earlier top of the pops appearances they're sort of the the records kind of insinuate themselves into your consciousness while they're literally thrusting their crotches into your face and it's uh it's really entertaining

but um it's like you get a sense they're holding back yeah i can imagine my dad being really quiet while this was on lost in thought you know what I've only really kind of come to appreciate in later life how great imagination were at that time. I don't think I really got it at the time, but the sound is fantastic. That slow and low groove they got going on, but with those kind of opulent textures on top as well. Do you know, I didn't realize you mentioned

they were previously physis which um is presumably why he was lee john and not as he let people believe at the time that the three e stood for extra exciting energy do you know that that's that's what he claimed in smash hits and stuff. Right. Ashley Ingram, the bassist. I, I love Ashley Ingram. I think he ought to be a cult hero in the way that, you know,

Steve Priest from the suite is because everyone forgets about him, but he's in a way even more outrageous because he looks more of a sort of muscular black guy, but he's being really, gay at you um and and yeah i love that um there's a drummer and there's a bassist but there's no hint of where the music comes from in this performance there's even you can hear a harp going on uh no no you can't no you can see a harp you can see a harp but you can't hear a harp. That's what I meant to say. Which I think is amazing.

And as subversive in its way as Depeche Mode with their little reel-to-reel tape machine. And this was only their second single, just trying to get the timeliners. So they'd only had Body Talk before this. So they would go on. I mean, some of the latest stuff like Music and Lights and Just an Illusion, absolutely brilliant records. You stick them on now,

turn the volume up, they totally stand up, those records. And I just think Lee John's look was quite something. Maybe not in this clip, as you say. He doesn't look great in this one, but his general kind of thing, I think it inspired... Looks better than me, though.

I don't know if any of you watched the pretty awful HBO supernatural series True Blood but there was a um a gay character in that called Lafayette played by Nelson Ellis who died quite recently and his look is totally Lee John from imagination just trust me on that anyway right the great thing as well about Lee is that he's actually not a particularly good-looking man. But the way he preens and acts as though he's the most beautiful creature on God's earth, it really takes something to pull that off. It would be very easy to do that and be instantly loathsome.

But who could hate Lee hate lee john not me so in and out of love jumped up to number 16 the following week its highest position the follow-up flashback would also reach number 16 in november of this year uh they'd have two top five hits in 1982 but they fell off the charts and split up in 1992. They hung it out for a long time, didn't they? I actually booked them to play live at my uni. Right. Which was really exciting for me.

Yeah, so that was about 1989 or something. What was their rider? Well... A harp. Yeah, a harp. And yeah, lots of gold things. No, I wish I had a story to tell about that, but I've got a feeling it might

it might not have been imagination it might have been Lee E.E.E. John's imagination one of those kind of deals you know what I mean where it's him and a bunch of ringers at that point I don't know Imagination. Right, we've got two more new entries for you on this week's Top Of The Pumps. But now let's take a look at the charts. We've looked at 30 to 21, so it's logical. Carry on in the order we meant to carry on in. Number 20. And it's no change at number 20 for Bucks Fizz with One Of Those Nights. Handheld in black and white, Dollar are up to 19.

Lynch, you've seen them and they're up to 18, so this is romance. Stars On 45, part three for Star Sound is up at 17. But down go the Rolling Stones to 16 for Start Me Up. The Human League are down as well with Love Action at 15. And down to 14 go ELO with Hold On Tight. Japanese Boy and Anika are down to number 13. And up to position number 12, My Glass and You'll Never Know. Godly and Cream are up to number 11 with Under Your Thumb.

And here's one of those new entries at 22, it's madness. And shut up. Simon Bates gives us the first 10 tunes in the top 40, or should it be the last 10 tunes in the top 30? The one thing that sprung out to me is that he mentioned High Gloss. It sounded like pint glass. Seriously, I've listened to it over and over and over again. He says pint glass.

And up to position number 12, High Gloss and You'll Never Know. It sounds like a skinhead band. Yeah, it would have been a better band name for uh or a more imaginative band name for what they actually were which was a high it was a high gloss soul record but this is this week's record that i don't remember oh right every time we do one of these there's always one just one record in the chart that yeah high gloss is that one for me as well it's not just that I don't remember how it goes it's I don't remember its existence High Gloss, you'll never know I know that one, you had it all and threw it all away

well I've since heard it and it's alright did you notice also by the way that Bucks Fizz Bucks Fizz and Dollar are next to each other in the top four and those bands would later fuse much acrimony. Yeah, like the fly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, man. You know, when we get a Dollar song, man, I know we're going to spend a whole hour talking about that documentary. But Handheld in Black and White is a brilliant record. And that was basically Trevor Horn's calling card, which got him the gig of then producing The Lexicon of Love for ABC.

So even though we're just kind of glossing over it in this rundown, it's a really important record. So anyway, Simon Bates introduces Shut Up by Madness, the ninth single in two years and the follow-up to Grey Day, which got to number four in May of this year.

This is the second single off their forthcoming and third LP, Seven. It's the second highest new entry this week at number 22, and because it's madness, they're showing the video. Now, by this time, of course, everybody's kind of like waiting for the new madness video every time a song comes out. How does this compare? It's fantastic.

This is, I mean mean not only has this video got 1981 burnt into the grain of the film um it's it's got if it's got the the lack of self-consciousness of young british men at this time um like also like all madness videos there's no sunshine in this right it's filmed on a really sort of British murk, like nine months of the year, you know, pure overcast, only falls at all his misery. And just as the monkeys only make sense visually in blinding sunshine, Madness only makes sense visually under that, you know, a grey ceiling of gray day fallen rain yeah on a

filthy london street like never more than six feet from a rat yes it's uh but it's i mean even if someone did this video now you'd think it's fucking amazing partly just because it includes neither serious singer songwriter emoting nor like of half naked models twerking you know but it's so idea rich um and it does the important thing is it doesn't detract from the record because if you make one of these early 80s videos where there's a lot going on and a lot of ideas in it and it it they're designed to grab the attention the danger is always that you obscure whatever's good about the record and this doesn't because um i mean it's already quite a creatively busy pop record with a lot of ideas in it so you have to be very careful but i think

this works because it does exactly the same thing that their songs do which is to take the ugly and the mundane and the quotidian and charge it with uh with a dry imagination you know i mean like a a dry droll imagination and so it works alongside the song without without muffling it and also you get to see london yeah which is always good back in back in the days when you were allowed to make your own fun simon i once considered forming a seven-piece ska band influenced by music hall and the kinks but then i thought now that'd be madness i'm so glad you did that joke that's your that's your best joke no my best joke is the arthur brown joke but we'll talk about

that another time um i was actually really glad to hear taylor say all the stuff that he did there um i i was um a huge madness fan yeah at the time um even though probably the specials felt like a more important band with more of a kind of um urgent message if i'm going to be honest madness were the one that i loved more and uh when i was going around with that marker pen tagging alleyways that madness m symbol with a hat on top was one of the things i would have been drawing and it was all over my pencil case in my school books a key thing for any band i was in the fan club i used to get the nutty Boys comics sent to me every few months and all of that. And they're one of the bands, actually, that for a long time,

in fact, they were the only band from my childhood who, as an adult, I couldn't see what I had seen in them. It was like, why did I ever like them? And for, God, 10, maybe 15, 20 15 20 years I just thought what was I thinking why was I into madness but I've come full circle you know I went through a phase of kind of you know you go through a phase of putting away childish things and madness were the childish thing that I put away but I've totally come full circle on it and I can totally see this is just a brilliant song and the weird thing about Shut Up is that,

and this sort of gives you an idea of how much depth Madness' catalogue has got, that if you mentioned Shut Up by Madness to the average person in the street, they wouldn't even know what you're on about because, you know, the title's not in the lyrics. But if you said Pass the Blame. Pass the Blame and Don't Blame, yeah, they might get it. But do you know what I mean, though?

It's not kind of one of their sort of iconic, I hate that word, songs. It's just not. The video, I mean, they were kings of the comedy video, obviously, and this is a cops and robbers caper. You've got Lee Kix Thompson doing his trademark flying saxophonist thing. With him, it was always either that or dressing up as a woman.

Lee Thompson loved dressing up as an unconvincing, bristly woman. Yes. I don't know. You can probably deconstruct that all day long. Yeah, I'm actually really glad that I've lived long enough to come full circle and appreciate Madness for how brilliant they were. Another interesting thing about this, it was a new entry at number 22, enough to come full circle and appreciate madness for how brilliant they were um another interesting thing about this it was a new entry at number 22 which is quite quite low for such a massive band

and a band who had previously had huge hits but that tells you something about the charts at the time that songs often did take a while to catch on they were slow burners and it was wasn't it but also also in those days people hadn't quite got into the idea that you have to release your record on a particular day of the week to get maximum first week sales they might have released that two days before the charts were compiled yeah um i think the weirdly enough of all the of all the bands that you wouldn't expect to go in for this sort of marketing i think the jam were one of the first to get hit they were and they put out going underground on a day of the week where singles aren't normally released so that it would get a four-week sales um and it

worked you know fair play to them but i mean of course uh madness's sort of career trajectory it was a pretty weird one at the time because specials have just split up so they're um they're they're the standard bearers of that kind of like you know that two-tone thing even though they're trying to move away yeah um as a sort of rude boy myself uh i was clinging on to whichever bands were still knocking around you know um i i took a long time to let it go i was probably still dressing like that in 1983 when all all you had left to cling on to really was you know the fun boy three um records by the beat that didn't even chart and the odd bad manners thing you know so yeah mad madness completely uh outlived the scar thing

and you know quite a lot of this stuff has no element of jamaican music in it whatsoever and this is an example of that i think yeah and the. And the other thing is, we've spoken before, the mid-80s one we've done is that, you know, videos are already starting to kill top of the pobs. But at this stage, videos are a huge bonus because this would have been possibly the first or second time you'd have the opportunity to see the

Madness video. I mean, you'd probably see it on Tizwas or maybe Swap Shop. But then, you know, you'd have to wait until Thursday. And, you know, I mean, Simon Bates has been shilling the video for the number one single, you know, right through the show. So, you know, videos are becoming very important here. Yeah.

The weird thing is we've, this is what, the eighth one of these, and there haven't really come across that many uh big videos in any of the top of the pops we've done so far and here on this one at the end we got two of the original kings of the video right next to each other with two uh superb examples of genuinely fantastic early 80s videos and of course we course, we can't leave this without mentioning the Super Yob guitar. Ah. Dave Hill's Super Yob guitar is brought out.

I can't believe. I wonder who owned that at the time. Do you think Dave Hill lent it to him or he'd sold it in the late 70s or something? I just wonder how Dave Hill would have felt watching this episode of Top of the Pops, you know, with their single Slade that stalled outside the 40

and then Madness these comparative kids who've borrowed his guitar or whatever and they're on their way up to the top 10 he's like you fucking bastards It would have been really nice if Madness had lent Slade something for their performance like I don't know, Chaz Smash

doing a bit of nutty dancing. Shut Up would jump up to number 10 the following week, and the week after that, it would peak at number 7. The follow-up, It Must Be Love, would get to number 4 in January of 1982, and the follow-up to that, House of Fun, would be their sole number 1. Madness is still going today. They're probably playing in a field to thousands of middle-aged skinheads and their wives and kids as you hear this.

That's madness. I love that suit. And I'd like to see David Ferris touch and sign it. Now then, 30 minutes or 35 minutes ago, I promised you the number one. It's coming up right after we've looked at the top ten today in the UK. Give me a slow hand for the Pointer Sisters. They're at number ten this week. And a new entry for the police at number nine, it's Invisible Son. After last week's Top Of The Pops, the Tweets have made it to number eight with The Birdie Song.

And Diana Ross and Lionel Richie have climbed to 7 with Endless Love. But down goes Cliff Richard and Wired for Sound to number 6. Alvin Stardust is up to 5 with Pretend. But down goes Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark with Souvenir to 4. Otterman's Hands Up, Give Me Your Heart is up to number 3. And same as last week, Soft Sells at number 2 with Tainted Love. Which means with a bang and a yell, it's Adam and the Ants.

Number one again with Prince Charming. Simon Bates takes us out of madness, brings us into the top ten. And says, of Suggs' loud checked suit, I love that suit, and I'd like to see Dave Lee Travis tucked inside it. Alas, that never happened, but if seeing Dave Lee Travis acting out part of the shut-up video was his wish, it did come true years later,

when he could have switched on the Six Scott News and seen him surrounded by policemen. I'd rather see Dave Lee Travis play Macbeth. I mean, yeah, what kind of... Little Paul Carff reference there. What kind of weird in-joke or office banter was that anyway between

Bates and Travis? God knows. But I mean, we knew who they were. They were part of our family weren't they? Radio 1 DJs. Yeah, the ones you definitely wanted to go round to see. We're going round to see your uncle Dave Lee Travis. Do we have to?

Simon Bates next week. Big matches on. In the top ten countdown before Adam Leance, Simon Bates says, give me a slow hand for the Pointer Sisters. No thanks. No thank you, Simon. Oh, like he me a slow hand for the Pointer Sisters no thanks no thank you Simon like he gave a slow hand to a pig exactly

sorry do carry on just to make it last we went to the job interview and they said Simon we need an artificial inseminator with an easy touch not come and go in a heated rush so Simon Bates introduces the number one hit single of the week, Prince Charming by Adam and the Ants.

Formed in London in 1977 by Stuart Goddard, a former bassist of Bazooka Joe, Adam and the Ants went through several line-up changes, not least when Malcolm McLaren was drafted in as an advisor in late 1979 and convinced the rest of the band to piss off with him and form Bow Wow Wow. I think he said to him, it's all right, Adam, you can stay and be our hairdresser,

which was nice of him. After creating a new set of amps with Marco Pironi, they crashed into the charts in October of 1980 with Dog Eat Dog, which got to number four, and a re-release of amp music got to number two in January of 1981 this is the first single from the new lp which will be released in november and the follow-up to stand and deliver which entered the charts at number one in may of this year and stayed there

for five weeks and it went straight in at number one the week before as simon bakes has been inferring all through the show it's the video of of the song, a reworking of the Cinderella story. Simon, before I take you off the leash, I must say that I actually watched the video for Standard Deliver with a mutual friend of ours. When it came on, the first thing he said was, this is what it must be like in Simon Price's head all the time. You know what I've got written in my notes here uh ballroom scene inside of simon

price's head uh yeah i've got to hold my hands up that is absolutely fair enough i've got written down and i'm not kidding i've got written down i want to live inside this video i mean you've got that kind of regency masquerade ball going on and the chandelier swinging and the panther and all of that stuff. It's just amazing. But I think straight away I've got to talk about Diana Dawes, right? Yes. I remember being really freaked out by how Diana Dawes' arm, when she waves the magic wand, bends beyond 180 degrees

when she brandishes it. And it's why I can't watch women playing tennis right because um women women's arms bend further than 180 degrees uh you know just genetically that's how it is uh because of having hips and stuff um and and i i think their arms are going to snap when they serve the ball really hard and when diana doors puts her arm up like that and it bends beyond the straight line i i i't know, I can't watch. It really freaks me out. The other thing I was going to say about Diana Dawes, this is doing the kind of mortality maths thing that increasingly you have to do at our age.

I remember at the time she seemed like the oldest granny that could possibly be in a pop video. I thought, why is this old woman? What's this old woman be in a pop video i thought why is this old woman what's this old woman doing in a pop video right um because the last time i'd seen diana doors i mean i knew she was but the last time i'd seen her was in steptoe and sun ride again aril goes round and she's as as all women of whatever age of the time in the early 70s was wearing a milli skirt and some really severe red drawers and she's bending over the drinks cabinet asking him if he fancies anything.

So yeah, I mean, I thought she was the oldest granny imaginable. Why is she in a pop video? And then when I looked into it, she was 49 years old and that's the age exactly that I am now. Oh God. So yeah, that is a bit of a cold dagger of ice down the spine.

It is, isn't it? Same as me. A year earlier though, she had been in The Worm That Turned, that amazing... Yes, of course she was, yes. That Tironi's thing. And as a kind of feminazi commandant. That's right, yeah. I thought she was kind of sexy in that. I've got to admit, I do think she's kind of hot in that. That

incredibly insightful look at the future, which has come true, hasn't it? Absolutely. But, yeah. Female Doctor Who indeed. Yeah. I mean, the one thing I've got to get in with,

I mean, as soon as we've got on to Diana Dawes' immediate layer, the one thing I've got to add to this is that my ex-girlfriend's dad every time this song came on Top of the Pops and the video came on and Diana Dawes came on he would say £2 a tripe in a £1 bag and then he would start singing

£2 of tripe in a £1 bag, £2 a tripe in a £1 bag and piss off the kids in the family by singing that all the way through this song they've been waiting all week to see. The other thing I want to say about this is that this is another example

of why 1981 was such a great year because it's a deeply odd record musically performed by this total weirdo pop star and it was number one It wasn't just a minor hit

Bought by you know Kind of John Peel listeners or something like that But you listen to it It's got these weird atonal shrieks going on And it's based on An obscure Rolf Harris record Walkanoo Yes

And it's just, and it's got dance moves, which not, actually not, not the only song in the top 10 with dance moves. You've got the tweets, Birdie song, but.

Of course. Yeah. Yeah. We'd like to be told what to do, didn't we? Back in 1981. And I just think, you know,

a lot of punks or punky kind of people at the time thought that adamant had betrayed punk by becoming this kind of um dashing um action hero pinup that he became in his videos but you know what i i genuinely think that um even if his audience had become nine-year-old girls or whatever it's absolutely brilliant that this guy is number one. You know, the message of this song is ridicule is nothing to be scared of. Genuinely brilliant message for a record for little kids to be singing. So, yeah, I mean, I don't love Prince Charming, but I think it's pleasingly weird, especially for number one record. I want to live inside the video.

And I think in terms of the message of it you can't fault it so there you go do you think that him actually doing a video based on a pantomime was a fuck you to uh all those old punks who was accusing him of being mr entertainment i i think he'd already kind of crossed that line with stand and deliver uh but you know but by the time this comes this is him at his peak this is his imperial phase in in every sense you know he is basically playing as kind of emperor in you know in a castle and everything um i i interviewed adam a few years ago and i asked him about uh one of the other singles off this album ant rap which is, I think they must have filmed it the same day to save money because it's also in a castle. And that's this even weirder kind of Baroque hip hop record,

if you remember Ant Rap. And that was a top five hit as well. And I just thought that getting to number five is almost as mental as Prince Charming gets to number one. And he said that he almost put it out as a kind of a dare challenge to his fans and he realized that if if they were buying that they wouldn't even listen anymore they were just buying any shit with his name on it and that's when he became disillusioned with the whole process right that madness video didn't drown out the the actual

music's effect on the imagination because it knew what to play up and what to play down in order to complement the song and this is exactly the same in its own preposterous way it's people when people laugh at this video it's because it sort of looks cheap although it obviously wasn't cheap they hired a fucking black panther no for one shot yes an enormous american car for one shot but it's got that sort of shiny cheap look to it but it has to look like that and that that was an actual animal not uh huey newton yeah yeah yeah although huey newton would have looked very good in this his fee would probably have been more than the the actual black panther but the point is it has to look like this because it has to look cheap as well as sparkly

because otherwise the lushness of the images would cushion the rough edge on the music. There's that savage sort of carnal edge on the music, which is what makes it probably the best record on this top of the pops and one of the very best singles of the music, which is what makes it probably the best record on this top of the pops and one of the very best singles of the year, despite the fact that there's nothing to it as a song. I mean, in terms of how this works as a piece of music, it's closer to Bo Diddley than anything since the days of Black & White.

This is a really primitive primitive rawly exciting record um so there has to be a basic vulgarity to how the video looks in order to emphasize that rather than obscure it and what makes the record and the video work so well together is the mixture of that uh rough sexiness with this sort of fairy world of the imagination. And it comes out sort of part fetishy and part farcical. And also, not only does the last scene of this video remind me of the insider Simon Price's head, it also seems to say something about the insider Stuart Goddard's head

because is it just me that gets a little bit chilled by that last scene where knowing what we know about sort of problems that Adamant has had since, when he slowly ascends this staircase watched by this frozen crowd to look into a shattered mirror featuring himself in various incarnations to the sound of an ominous drum beat. As a kid, I found that a little bit creepy. And knowing what I know now about the exciting world of mental health,

there's something, it's like a sinister harping, you know, of what was to come. If you made the Prince Charming video, which four people would you be at the end? Growl Tiger, Mr Badger, Eeyore and Bodhi. Nice. Very good. Very good.

Simon? I'd like to say Jonathan Rhys-Myers in Velvet Goldmine, but more realistically, Divine in Pink Flamingos I think. I was going to say about that little kind of dress up parade that Adam does at the end. Yeah you mentioned he does those four characters but do you notice the last thing he is is his own self. He's his stand and deliver, his highway self. And I find it's kind of implicitly

meaning that Adam is a bigger star than them all yes that's the message I got from that which he was at the time I mean that look

I mean you know there were kids at my school who were insane over Adam in the answer there was one lad who decided to go to the school youth club in the dandy highwayman style

but he made two mistakes number one for the white stripe he used Tippex and number two instead of doing it across his nose he did it across his eyelid and his eye stuck together and he had to go to hospital so yeah not very

dandy of him but I mean my four people would be Brian Clough Sly Stone, B. Smith out of Prisoner Soul Block H, and Otto Sump out of Judge Dredd. The one who had the ugly parlours. Nice. So there you go.

All I need to do is write a hit record now and I can live out my dreams. Fuck it, make the video anyway. Yeah. Is this the most important pop video ever? I don't know. Go on make make a case for that i mean it's important i think even above madness it was the the first one when you heard the song and you know you just went fucking hell this is this is insane i've got to see the video for it

i mean he'd set down a marker with a stand and deliver video but you know on top of the box you knew you were going to see that video at that time and so i just think it is probably the most important pop video ever but that's just my opinion it's a strong argument anybody want to say anything else about this song only that i love the roller skating messenger girl who turns up with a ticket to the ball who's the most british looking person i've ever seen prince charming stayed at number one for two more weeks and was knocked off the top by it's my party by dave stewart and barbara gaskin the follow-up ant rap will be the last new adam and the ant single and we'll make it to number three and it was revealed in 2010 that rolf harris had won a substantial settlement from adamant after a musicologist found Prince Charming

to be musically identical to a 1965 song called War Canoe. Oh, Adam. Oh, Marco, didn't he write the music? Oh, did he? Oh, there you go. It's Marco's fault. Oh, yeah. The big time is number one again.

I would reckon it's number one next week, unless it's this thing that we're going out with on top of the box, the police. Good night. See you next week with Invisible Zone. The first cut from forthcoming LP Ghosts in the Machine, which will be released the following week, this is the seventh top 40 hit by the police and the follow-up to Do Do Do Do Da Da Da Da, which got to number five in December of 1980. It was written by Sting while he was living in Ireland

during the IRA hunger strikes, and the song's perceived to be about life in Northern Ireland. It's this week's highest new entry at number eight, but because the video features clips of bombed-out bits of Belfast, it's been banned by the BBC, so they've bunged it on at the end and have played it over clips of the band posing on a tropical beach. Looking like three Pavel Nedveds.

Yes! Has there ever been a decent song about Northern Ireland from anyone who isn't Irish? And did I even have to mention that last bit? No, that is a low bar. There are actually quite a lot of songs about Northern Ireland knocking around at this time. You had The More I See, The Less I Believe by Funboy 3.

It would have been a year later, I think. And Dexys did more than one you know about this subject matter I actually I like this song and I feel that instantly I have to justify why I like it lyrically it's really

quite tame I had to look up the lyrics to see what is it about it that's to do with Northern Ireland and he mentions the barrel of an armour light and soldiers have been in a prison cell and all that but it's not really very strong politically but David Stubbs

I guess I should say of this parish at this point David Stubbs has in the past compared Nirvana to the police while he was at Meldymaker and he did so I believe disparagingly you know meaning sort of belittle nirvana by saying oh you know nirvana you know they bet you know that that's yeah you know nirvana they're basically just the police and you know we're all meant to

chuckle and think yeah how crap nirvana i i actually agree actually but um i i think quite highly of nirvana particularly around the time of their final album and I think you can hear that kind of, that comparison in this song particularly and I just think it's really good musically, the lyrics

are just nothing really, they're pretty tame but I could definitely hear a common thread between The Police and Nirvana in a positive way even though stubsy meant it as a negative one yeah yeah i i would say it's only sting that ruins this record um i mean it's not a great track but it's inoffensive it's got a nice sort of 1981 sound to it but it's his repulsive voice his his loathsome presence, and his appalling and unignorable lyrics, right? Because, you know, I said earlier,

I began to say that Martin Gore was possibly the worst lyricist of the 80s. And then I stopped myself. He's the most classically bad lyricist of the 80s. You quote Martin Gore's lyrics and it's like, ha, ha, ha. Whereas Sting is an awful lot more literate but he's a worse lyricist a much worse lyricist he's got no idea of where to put which word which means that uh his lyrics always strike the wrong tone um they always sound really forced and you can't ignore them you can't just just go, oh, yeah, whatever. Because they leap out and grab you too much

in all the worst ways. It's not... Ties you down and rapes you. Yeah, well... Quite. But I'll tell you my dirty secret. I'll say that again. Ties you up and rapes you.

Let's get it right. Is it? Yeah. Tell us your dirty secret, Taylor. The first contemporary LP I ever bought was Regatta de Blanc. Right. When I would have been

what, about eight or nine. Right. Because I like walking on the moon and messaging a bottle, you know, which are probably the best songs they ever did. When you talk about your first album, I always say one step beyond by madness but really it was outlander more and regatta de blanc on on cassette so i always say oh it's not my real yeah yeah yeah and um you know i had the first three police albums i love that band see my my experience with this though was that prior to this i'd only heard greatest

hits albums yeah and beatles albums so i was genuinely surprised when i got this record home and played it and all the other songs were much worse than walking on the moon and yes messaging a bottle i didn't realize that that's how albums work stewart copeland said that the rest of this album's complete bullshit and he wasn't lying. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We see the only one that I liked, apart from those, was that one about how his wife's burnt the scrambled eggs

and his son's gay. Which, you know, that is very funny at that age. Any other day. Yeah, that's right. thing is i mean sting and everything taylor says about sting is correct as a lyricist um and sting is absolutely to to coin a word uh a very 80s word that i think you taylor used in an earlier podcast he's a wally he's absolutely

wally but um some of the songs i'd go a bit further. Well, some of the songs that you've mentioned just now are genuinely great pieces of music. I think Walking on the Moon, when you're 12 years old or something at the time, that was quite a kind of spaced out record, you know, not unintended. And also Can't Stand Losing You. Basically, you know,

a suicide note in sort of new wave form. And I think that's a really brilliant song. And the sleeve of that has got a guy standing on a block of ice

with a noose around his neck and a three bar electric heater melting the ice, which is quite extraordinary. That's not the way to do it. Very dangerous. That ice melts, he gets

water on that electric heater, he can electrocute himself. Terrible. So, you know, what I'm saying is, the police, for all their kind of naffness, and they were a very naff band, they definitely had their moments. But you see, the worst thing for me about this album was that it didn't

seem like the sort of thing that kids were supposed to enjoy right because it was very kind of gray and it had songs about sleeping in beds with people and stuff it was nothing i could relate to but at the same time it wasn't alluring an adult it wasn't like a glimpse into the adult world it just seemed like all the fun and irreverence and the genuine fear and misery had been drained out of it. It was just sort of boring and sensible, and it made me not want to get old.

Of course, the BBC choose to complement this dark song with, you know, oh, here's the band on holiday wearing, I think Stuart Copeland's wearing an XTC T-shirt, isn't he? They like to do that, didn't they? To sort of align themselves with a new wave. Because in the video for Don't Stand So Close To Me, Sting is wearing the Beat t-shirt.

As a kid at the time, I'm just thinking fuck off, mate. You are nowhere near as cool as them. You are not fit to wear that t-shirt. So Invisible Sun shot up to number two the following week but dropped to number three the week after that and slid out of the charts. The follow

up, every little thing she does is magic would get to number one in November of 1981. Yeah, that's where I part company with the police. And they'd have five more hits before they split up in 1986. Synchronicity 2 is alright. Yeah, that's a 2. But wrapped around your finger with those

candles, it's like, oh, fuck off. Knowledge College rhyme. So what's on TV afterwards? Well, BBC One has Sandra Dickinson, the author English, Beryl Reid and Spike Milligan in Blankety Blank. There's part 3 of Day of the Triffids with John Dutty

and a documentary about how much money America is pissing up the wall on dead expensive tanks and planes. BBC Two has an episode of Fame with Steve Davis. Sadly, not the drama series about a performing arts school, but a documentary about famous people. A documentary about child labour in Thailand and the British Professional Darts Championship from Fiestas in Stockton.

ITV has TVI, News at Ten, Soap and Danger UXB. And that closes the book on that episode of Top of the Pop. So what are we talking about in the playground tomorrow, dear boys? Definitely the madness video. Yeah, you'd have no choice but to talk about madness because it's what the nine-year-old alpha males would have been talking about and they were going to set the topic. This is assuming that everyone had already got used

to the sight of imagination. Yeah, and of course, you know, we've got to say that madness are moving away from the bummer conga, as Mr Stubbs has it, to the falling over pyramid. I'm guessing there'll be a lot of reenactments of that in playgrounds around the country the next day. Oh, that

was a clever little thing in that video, forgot to mention. When they're standing in that pyramid, that was the pose they then adopted on their next album, Seven. So it's almost sort of subliminally planting that image in your head, so that when the album comes out you've already seen it, clever

Simon, anything we're talking about in the playground tomorrow? Yeah definitely the Madness video, I went to an old boys school so you know no way would we be talking about Adam and the Ants or anything like that we probably would have been just sort of re-enacting various skits from the Madness video

and so on. And possibly somebody would have said something vaguely off colour about Lee E.E. John. Yeah, I would imagine that would be it. And what are we buying on Saturday? I actually bought Shut Up by Madness. And I also bought Depeche Mode, Just Can't Get Enough. Yeah, Madness. May have bought Adam and the Ants already and what does this episode tell us about 1981?

rhythm was king again for the first time in a while and it was the last point in history where Slade could get laid I don't know I just think it proves my point it vindicates me so up yours

anyone who thinks there was a better year for pop music that was it that's as good as it's ever going to get just ideas there are ideas in pop again this is the important thing there's just so much going on so much life of the mind so much kind of

cultural kind of fizz and crackle about it that would send your mind off in other directions to discover other things even if those other things are just slightly more obscure records but it would probably take you far beyond that I just think it was a remarkable year

and as I said at the start, not even the greatest Top of the Pops from that year, just a fairly typical one I mean 1981, this is going to be a year we're going to return to many a time and after, I can imagine. But the one thing that struck me about this episode is virtually all British, isn't it?

Yeah, apart from the Motown thing, yeah. Yeah. So, this is the part where I have to give you all the promotional shit, so let's get it over with. www.chart-music.co.uk facebook.com slash chart music podcast

and on twitter we are chart music T O T P and that is us for this episode thank you very much Taylor Parks lovely to hear from you sir pleasure as always Simon Price thank you very much for your vindication of this episode.

You were right. You're welcome. I enjoyed it. Thank you very much, chaps. I'm Al Needham and I specialise in taking oldies and making them sound like they're out of 1981. I'm Al Needham. Chart music. Lean on the paddles, lean on and lift out silently. All together, all together, lean on the paddles, lean on and lift out silently. War canoe can creep along, can glide along when, when there may be Enemy near All together

All together Lean on the paddles Lean on and lift out Silently