Chart Music: the Top Of The Pops Podcast - Chart Music #50 (Part 2): March 21st 1996 - The Movement That Wouldn't Feel The Benefit

Episode Date: May 15, 2020

Chart Music #50: March 21st 1996 - The Movement That Wouldn't Feel The BenefitThe latest episode of the podcast which asks the question: What was David Stubbs doing while the Rainforest was falling?It's our half-century. Pop-Crazed Youngsters, but we're not making a fuss about it, bar the raising of the bat and a nod to the stands before returning to the job of whacking at a random episode of Top Of The Pops. And oh dear: this particular slice of Thursday evenings past comes at us during the even more devastating Second Wave of Britpop, with Steve Lamacq and Jo Whiley playing the roles of Peelie and Janice. Musicwise, we're fully into the Ric Blaxill era, so expect a morbid carousel of Proper Music played on Proper Instruments, with a smattering of past-it Eighties sorts thrown in, and all mixed together with an offensive distain for the charts. Rick Witter may or may not be wearing a Tena underneath his Martin Fry suit. Lionel Richie's head is lowered into a Desperate Dan beard. Prince Naseem Hamed pitches up with Kaliphz to remind us that dance music was somehow still going in the mid-Nineties. Menswear bring along a string section. Oh God, it's Madonna again. Celine Dion wafts about a circus putting in no graft whatsoever. Take That offer up the most half-arsed swan song in musical history, and - finally - Oasis enter the Chart Music arena.Simon Price and Neil Kulkarni join Al Needham for a bit of Gay Exchange-advert-dancing upon the ashes of '96, veering off on such tangents as going into the off-licence in Napoleonic headjoy, stripping in front of someone off Coronation Street, being a Lion Bell-End, bum-rushing the Camden KFC, being made by a Manic Street Preacher to dance to the Ramadan No.1 of 1974, the Horseshoe Of Shame, and a rate and quality of swearing that times like this demand.  Video Playlist | Subscribe |  Facebook  | Twitter Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon Pull-Apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey, and just five bucks for the small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. The following podcast is a member of the Great Big Owl family. This will certainly have an adult theme and might well contain strong scenes of sex or violence, which could be quite graphic. It may also contain some very explicit language,

which will frequently mean sexual swear words. What do you like to listen to? Um... Chart music. Chart music. Chart music Chart music Hey up you pop crazy youngsters And welcome to part 2 of the 50th episode of Chart Music. You'll notice we're not making a big deal about the 50th,

because, you know, most of us have already had a 50th, and we know what a fucking anticlimax that is. So we're moving on. We've only just begun, Pop Craze Youngsters. We've scratched the surface and nothing more on our journey through old episodes of Top of the Pops. All right then, pop-crazed youngsters, it's time to go way back to March of 1996. Always remember, we may coat down your favourite band or artist,

but we never forget, they've been on Top of the Pops more than we have. Live and exclusive, The Prince and The Khal been on top of the pops more than we have. Laban Exclusive, the Prince and the Caliphs on top of the pops tonight. It's 7 o'clock on Thursday, March the 21st, 1996 and we are immediately assailed by the sight of Prince Nazeem Hamid with the WBO World Featherweight Championship belt over his shoulder,

surrounded by six surly youths in baggy urban wear. He tells us that he and they, the Caliphs, will be live and exclusive on Top of the Pops tonight. And we kick right into the strains of red hot pop, which has been in effect now for 13 months, and is already showing its age. We're now two years into the Rick Blacksill era of Top of the Pops, aren't we, chaps? Yeah.

Blacksill, the sixth executive producer of the show, moved into television from Radio 1, where he worked as a senior producer, making him the first non-tv person to assume the role taxed with the job of dragging the show firmly into the 90s he was given pretty much carte blanche when it came to programming bands and artists and in last week's episode he completely broke with tradition as an interview with him in this week's Melody Maker points out. It goes like this. Biss, Glaswegian purveyors of bratty disco punk, have become the first new and unsigned act to appear on Top of the Pops in 32 years. And the show's producer, Rick Blacksill, told the maker this week

that this was just one example of his determination to represent up-and-coming music alongside well-established chart residents. He said, Top of the Pops obviously uses the Top 40 to an extent, and certainly in the past always used to use it, but under the guidelines and the way I produce the show, I can go elsewhere looking for things. It's really important to have your David Bowies and Tina Turner's on as well but if you have those sort of acts on every week what's different about Top of the Pops? They are huge names and they are great for the program but it's got to have a talking point and it's got to show new music coming through and I'm luckily in a position where they let me get on

and do that i just want to break in there isn't that our job to break new music as pop crazed youngsters and record consumers didn't we do that anyway a little bit and we've always on chart music found it a little bit kind of sleazy and gross and wrong and contrary to the spirit of top of the pops when they have something on there that's not even in the top 40 yeah we recognize that it happens from time to time particularly during stagnant sort of january charts where they just have to but yeah in the last episode they did just that and also you know in the in the in the 70s and and 80s to an extent they would have Lulu and Cliff, BBC stalwarts at the time.

They always found a way on, didn't they? But we never liked it. We didn't like it then as Pop Craze Youngsters. We don't like it now as Chart Music Podders. So it's not as if he's doing something completely new here. I think that's a bit false. And also, the band he's talking about, their Biss,

this whole thing about them being unsigned. I mean, they had a record out. It was on Chemical Underground. They were on an indie label. That's not the same. I mean, it's semantic splitting hairs, really. But what's unsigned? All right, there weren't signs of fucking Warner Brothers.

But they had a record out. You could go in a shop and buy it. There were just some peasants that he'd found busking on the streets and said, I will turn you into stars. Yeah, I mean, it's much vaunted how Blacksill got these supposedly renegade acts on Top of the Pops. But it had always happened. But yeah, you

started seeing people like Sterilab and Marky Smith and things like that getting on Top of the Pops. But it was notable for me from the off that those sort of supposedly unsigned, they weren't unsigned acts, were always from a certain they were also in the indie world basically the show got musical and it's not a good thing for top of the pops i don't think um for it to just think of itself as a music show it's just another

adjunct to the rest of bbc's music shows yeah so yes he gets interesting bands on i guess but conversely the way he treats pop music um as opposed to indie guitar music and stuff is it's all kind of boy bands and big stars and american stars always get beamed in um which isn't the same or the video gets shown so i think he although he's he's much praised black seal for what he did to top of the Pop so I think he By who? Or the Tully people? Yeah but the thing is when I think about what's going on in the Midnighters is this

the most exciting kind of non-chart material you could get in there? No but I should be remembering surely Midnighters I should be remembering amazing performances by Snoop Dogg or Missy or some of these people that I was into at the time yeah I don't I remember I remember that the supposed renegade acts where I was meant to

be sat at home thinking oh yes these are our bands not really being that at all no so don't get me wrong there were good things Black Seal did um because he had to because what was going on before he became producer was in danger of killing the show. It was good that he got the DJs back, you know, rather than that rotating kind of cast of kids presenters that seemed to be doing it before. It was good he got rid of the album charts. It was good he got rid of that breakers section.

But then, you know, he gets the DJs back, but then he starts the celeb presenter thing, which seems to unmoor it from Radio 1 a bit, which isn't always a bad thing, as we saw in the past with Judy and Co. But, you know, I actually, although Black Seal's seen as the last good era by a lot of people,

I see it's the start of the end to a certain extent. It starts losing its kind of universal reach. And to be honest with you, I think it's the start of the kind of messy chaos that Top of the Pops and and to be honest with you i think it's start of the kind of messy chaos that top of the pops would continue to do um until its end i think it got unsure of itself actually there's a really notable thing throughout this episode i'm sure everyone else noticed it as well that thing of the cheering and whooping that you constantly hear that has nothing to do with the music it's always a dead giveaway that a party is dying

when it has to be artificially boosted like that. It's like the way modern performance cars play fake engine sounds through the car stereo. Yes. Because, you know, even though they've got electric engines. I see the start of the end here rather than some golden era. These weren't what-the-fuck moments. Oh, my God, it's Biss on Top of the Pops.

It was more kind of it just seems smug yeah well he went on to say two years before i joined top of the pops i was watching it and it was full of faceless dance bands and i thought that's the reason the show is going down the pan there's no energy coming off that sort of music. There's no personalities involved, and it's bland. I knew that people hadn't stopped making guitars because I was going out to gigs, but watching Top of the Pops, you'd have thought guitar music was dead.

And I think there's nothing more exciting than seeing someone rip their fucking guts out of a guitar sometimes. Oh, for fuck's sake. Jesus Christ. No energy in dance music at all, is there? Getting no energy off that. KLF. For fuck's sake.

Alternate. Yeah, no personalities in The Prodigy or The Shaman, is there? No. For fuck's sake. This entirely mirrors the kind of worst impulses in the music press at the time. Yeah. Oh, we need these big bands with quote-unquote characters in them who can be gobby. Well, hold on a minute.

Why not give some of those dance people a chance to be gobby i bet they would have been and hip-hop has got an endless diet of gobby bastards um but we never seem to get on the cover you know he might tart it up as oh yeah guitars are still being made guitar music there's i'm not saying he's a racist i'm not saying that but there's an underlying kind of proper music let's get the proper characters back bullshit yeah um you know whereas you know when i think about the midnight that's the thing about this it's it's the thing about when you are when you were breaking down that issue of melody maker five pages of fucking oasis six if you count the gig review you know and the thing is the trouble is for me as a music fan and this was the peak era of getting shit tons of music through the door as well.

This was the slight changeover from getting tapes through the door to getting CDs through the door at this point. But, you know, there was so much good stuff out there. For me, the mid-90s was a golden era for music. And yet the magazine that I worked for was making it look like a wooden age for music. And, you know, and it's a similar thing going on with Top of the Pops. There's all these kind of great dance records in there. Well, let's see these people. And you know that dance acts will put on a freakishly good show

if given the chance, far more than a few stumbly blokes with big sideburns doing the conventional band shape. So that quote's really revealing. It always does my head when people go oh dance bands on top of the pops that were never interesting it's like well you know top of the pops of the late 70s in the early 80s they seem to cope quite well with dance music yeah yeah yeah yeah you know i mean obviously there's no legs and co nowadays yeah i mean there is something

to it we have looked at this before when you you know, it is true that Top of the Pops struggled to convey the excitement of dance music, but the fault of that is on Top of the Pops. It's not on the music. Exactly. And this is something, I mean, and it is also true that sales of smash hits took a tumble in the late 80s.

Well, for two reasons, partly because the pop stars that were coming through were your sort of stock aching waterman puppets but also because in terms of dance music acid house and all that it tended not to be very personality focused so there is something to that and it is true that top of the pop struggled but yeah it's up to people like black seal to make it work not just to say oh well tell you what we'll bring guitars here instead. Yeah. I mean, I think the push behind all of this in that era was an attempt to make the show credible.

And I don't think credible is something that Top of the Pops should be. It should be, you know, it is. Top of the Pops is a show that should be dominated by the previous week's charts and what happened in that. Yes. And you can understand how in the mid-90s, record companies were starting to look at Top of the Pops

as not necessarily something they want to get their bands on that much or get their artists on because, you know, last week's charts are no longer important to record companies to a certain extent. And as the 90s go on, it becomes increased. You know, bands want to get on the national lottery more than they want to get on the charts. But I would say this focus on guitar music it oddly does mirror exactly what's going on

in the press but all it needs is a journalist with fucking two brain cells stuck together to go out interview these bands not these bands rather these dance artists and get their stories they're people they're interesting and they've probably got a damn sight more interesting stuff to say than fucking two twats from Burnage. Do you know, it's interesting, without wanting to spoiler this episode too much, but we do get to the chart countdown. And whether Blacksill likes it or not, there is fuckloads of dance music in the charts. And there's hardly any guitar music. Yeah, absolutely.

You know what, it surprised me that the theme tune at this point even has a name. You said it's called Red Hot Pop? Yes. By Vince Clark. it surprised me that the theme tune at this point even has a name, you said it's called Red Hot Pop? Yes by Vince Clark the use of it is very short isn't it? It's a sting isn't it? It's a sting so you've got lots of blue and orange

things flying at you, you've got like a speaker cone and you've got someone with headphones on and someone holding up a shield but yeah it is like a little five second sting it's almost as if top of the pops is embarrassed to have um a sort of a theme and be you know be a sort of show like we're here it's yeah it's almost apologetic yeah top of the pops almost seems like it's um really there is a kind of like a trailer for Top of the Pops 2, which is far more credible.

Top of the Pops is like the little baby's version. Yes. Yeah. I wanted to talk about the little clip we do get of Prince Nassim at the start there as well. Yes. Which is, for a start, he doesn't say live and exclusive. He says lav and exclusive.

Yes. Because he's talking in MLE Multicultural London English even though he's not from London which I love actually I liked hearing that on Top of the Pops I mean I spout it so he goes it's Prince and the Caloose on Top of the Pops tonight and yeah you know you mentioned

he's got his world featherweight belt over his shoulder I thought it makes him look like he's half way through getting dressed up as Russell Crowe in Gladiator. And he does this amazing thing. He poses side on and he sort of he smoulders at the camera

and he's holding a fucking gold microphone. Now, I thought that was his own touch. And it would be like, if it was his own touch, it would be a very Naz touch to have a gold. Leopard it would be like and that if it was his own touch it would be a very nas touch to have leopard skin be more yeah yeah yeah yeah um but but yeah it turns out that the presenters as we will find out also have gold microphones this is the golden microphone era isn't it when they brought in the celebrities but your host tonight born in l in London in 1964, Steve Lamac studied journalism

at Harlow College and went on to work as a junior sports reporter on the West Essex Gazette whilst editing the fanzine A Pack of Lies. He joined the NME in the 90s and was the first writer to interview Blur, Ride and Teenage Fan Club but was best known for the interview with Manic Street Preachers where Richie Edwards carved 4Real into his arm. By this time he had branched out into radio as a DJ on the pirate station Q102 which later became XFM and he joined Radio 1 at the end of 1993

where he was teamed up with Joe Wiley, who was born in Northampton in 1965 and started her career presenting a local music show on BBC Radio Sussex before moving to Radio 4 to become a researcher on WPFM, their youth programme, with an F. When the co-presenters Gary Crowley and Terry Christian left, Wiley took over. After producing and presenting an indie show on BSB, she moved to Channel 4 to become a researcher for the word before being picked up by Radio 1 and lumped together with Lamac for the evening session in Kid Jensen's old slot. At this point, they're still running the evening session together, although Wiley also has a side job on Saturday afternoons at Radio 1.

They were given a trial run in presenting Top of the Pops in September last year, and this is their second go. Well, chaps, they're still chucking celebrities at Top of the Pops. This month they've seen Louise Wenner and Emin8 have had a go, and they've also got Chris Eubank lined up for next month. But they appear to be at least trying to ease in more Radio 1 talent. And here we have, I suppose you could call them the Brit pop, John Peel and Janice Long.

You could do. I mean, look, it's been, what, 30-odd years now. I think the Durriga thing is that I should probably recant previous statements that I've made about everyone in the 90s. No, never. Well, I said at the end of a Cooler Shaker review, I think, that the album made me want to go around Joe Wiley's house with suicide bombs strapped to my body,

which she's got kids. It's not really fair. That fundamentalism has gone for me now i would just crash a muck spreader into her conservatory but for me both of them steve lemac i mean look steve lemac i'm sure he's a nice guy people who've met him more times will tell me that repeatedly um but for me both of them sum up pretty much everything that was that was most appalling about the nights and everything that's most appalling about radio now, in particular Wiley, because I think she's proved horribly influential

on the sort of Edith Bowman's and Fern Cotton's of this world. Oh, yes. Which might sound reductive, but what I'm on about is that kind of mindless positivity. Oddly mirroring of the way that the music press was going at the time was Joe Wiley's stock in trade. Yeah. If a musician started playing something, Joe wiley would sit down next to them and earnestly nod with a parker on

just just lost in this musician's genius and that's always pissed me off yeah and lemac when i used to listen to the evening session with him um he had this habit of saying something was going to completely rock your world and change your life and was going to come roaring out your speakers and it would be like being fist-fucked by the incredible hulk or something and then all that would come out was this weedy kind of pootling indie nonsense so that kind of hyperbole is something that zane lowe kick in the sun exactly the kind of thing that zane lowe has made a career out of. The thing is with these two,

I got no sense that even though they were DJs, there was no discernment, if you like. When I think of Nightingale and Peel and people like that, there was discernment. With Wiley, I never really got that. And by 96, by the time we find him in this episode, we're now into the second wave of shit Britpop. We're into the really unpleasant, shit brit pop we're into the kind of yeah you

know the really unpleasant big sideburn brit pop years and um an era in which we are being told by people like lemac and wiley that um and all kinds of earnest movers and shakers that you know echo belly and republica and cast and the verve were more deserving of our attention than what we were listening to, which for me tended to be Eurobeat and pop music and hip hop. So for me, it's an era in which the foundations and blueprints of that kind of crucial retreat of nerve committed on our behalf by a shit-scared media start happening. And I don't see anything different with Lamac and Wiley.

I blame them for a lot in a great era for pop and Eurobeat they disdained it, in a good era for rap they preferred trip hop in a great era for metal, rock music they preferred the fucking stereophonics and I think a big part of the reason that I felt

frustrated at Melody Maker and just generally frustrated in the Midnighters was yeah that thing, there was so much good music going on. I would very rarely get to hear it through either of these fuckers. Simon! Steve Lamacq, NME. Yeah, well, you know, cards on the table. I like Steve Lamacq. Yeah, yeah.

I also want to say, straight up front, I love the fact that Neil isn't recanting, that he's sticking to his guns. The only thing he sort of dialed back a little bit is his method of retribution um but yeah um as as a melody maker man obviously i resented the phenomenon whereby enemy writers were fast-tracked into jobs at the bbc um the effects of which are with me to this day it's why you know i'm still fucking struggling to make a living and uh talking

to us but i couldn't um begrudge steve personally and we come from incredibly different places musically um he was once called the most indie man in britain along with simon williams also the enemy and um he's waving the flag for indie here. He's wearing a top, I noticed, from Elemental Records, which is the little label that in 1996 was putting out records by Bivouac and Truman's Water, which is really not my world, really not my music. But he's always been good to me personally. I've got to put that sort of disclaimer on anything I say.

He was very helpful when I was writing my Mannix book. He agreed to be interviewed about the Richie Edwards for real incident. He gave me access to the actual interview tapes from that night in Norwich. I've got to ask, Simon, were you jealous when you heard about that? Why didn't Richie do that in front of me? No, because it was clear that Richie did it as a sort of statement of disgust that he was being asked insultingly reductive questions

because that was the whole point Steve was coming from this place of indie cred and the Mannix were very flash and the Mannix assigned to a major label and from his perspective from Steve and Max's perspective

everything the Mannix were about was somehow to be something to be suspicious of, they were somehow fake and he put that to them and fair play, he actually put it to them rather than stitching them up afterwards and it turned out that it was them that needed stitching up ha ha ha

so no he was outside having a fag just white as a sheet, of what he'd seen. Fucking horrible thing to have had to witness. Absolutely, yeah. So, even from that point of view, I don't envy it. Obviously, I wrote plenty of quite significant features about the Mannix myself.

I can't really complain about that. But, yeah, I mean, Steve was fucking brilliant, really helpful when I was sort of doing a chapter on all that in my book. And he's had me on his radio show a couple of times. And even though we rarely overlap musically, I do believe he genuinely loves music. Yeah, yeah, I agree. I don't believe Joe Wiley genuinely loves music. genuinely loves music.

I've always reacted very negatively to her and hearing Neil describe it as mindless positivity hits a nail on the head for me. My reaction to her is almost visceral, I'll say that, because I think it was often that thing of not wearing shoes when she presented Glastonbury or when she presented her Channel 4 show

because I am the opposite of a foot fetishist. I'm the anti-Tarantino in that way. But I just never believed she ever knew much about music and when you gave that Gracie of her broadcasting career there it all fell into place because some of it was music based a lot of it wasn't essentially she's a media person a bit of a hack really she was and she is on this episode she is a presenter just a presenter rather than a DJ and that made her as Neil suggested a very modern

creature because that is now the norm you know obviously there are precedents for this Noel Edmonds didn't love music Dave Lee Travis didn't love music they were just presenters and you know there will be some who will watch Steve Lamac here and they will think he's shaking

John Peel. Fair enough. But I think he's sincere in loving the music he loves, which tended to be scrappy, scratchy indie music by white blokes with guitars. But Joe Wiley is no Janice Long.

No. The music lover DJ is something that i look that can be a great thing but but what it wiley portrayed herself as that but what it really meant was just this suffocating sycophancy to musicians and the total abandonment of any kind of critical faculty i completely agree simon i think um steve lamatt always struck me as definitely somebody who knew what he loved in music and definitely had opinions about it. With Wiley, I blame her perhaps for too much.

But you know the whole sort of live lounge phenomenon of kind of, you know, that has now indirectly led to so many fuckers thinking acoustic covers are suitable showcases for their talent. I blame Wiley for all of that. I blame Wiley for that kind of, that sycophancy to musicians to the point where anyone making music must be applauded. It's a good thing that they're making music.

It's better than they're not making music. And that's how Wiley always came across. Just one caveat though to my, I wasn't particularly slagging off Lamac, but perhaps there's something personal in this. In as much as a while back, a video appeared on youtube of steve lemac reading an elegy for brit pop and um this was left as a poem i think on the word magazine website and he did somebody had asked him to read it out and he read it out over you know my tune style music and one of the lines was

about and um about singles reviews where neil kulkarni wrote about his girlfriend and i watched that and i was like you fucking bastards that was michael fucking bonner yeah not me as if i'd fucking write that so maybe there's a little bit of grievance there but i'm sure that's not steve's fault um that is bad though yeah wow but wileys you you can see them everywhere now. And throughout BBC's music coverage, they're everywhere. Just this mindless positivity about music with no kind of discernment whatsoever.

So I blame her for a lot. Hi, and welcome to the beast that is Top of the Ports. I'm Joe Wiley. And I'm Steve LeBac. And this is an anthemic start for Shed 7. Lemack in a dark blue top with two gold stripes down the side and Wiley in a see-through dress with blue flowers over a bra top welcome us to the beast that is Top of the Pops

and introduces to some anthemic stuff from the opening act Shed 7 and Going for Gold. We've already covered Shed7 in Chart Music 21, and this, their seventh single, is the follow-up to Getting Better, which got to number 14 in January of this year. It's the third cut from the LP at maximum high, which isn't even out for another fortnight, and it's entered the charts this week at number eight,

their highest chart placing ever, sent to the charts this week at number 8, their highest chart placing ever, and here they are in the studio to rip the fucking guts out of a guitar. Well, yeah, Shed 7, we've already discussed them, I think

we can wring some more juice out of them, but before that, let us nip a mere two years into the future and an interview with the NME conducted by Stephen Wells which goes as follows the sad fact is that the sinister out of touch and utterly evil London rock press think that Rick Whitter is a boring bastard from a rubbish band with a bollocks name they think he is the soul-wutheringly mediocre

spiritual heir of Brian Adams. They think he's got shit hair. And they think he stinks of piss. This bloke was meant to be reviewing our single, and he said that he came up

to York and saw me and was overcome by the smell of piss snarls rick i do not smell of piss even if i did smell of piss which i never do i would immediately cleanse myself rick and shed seven drummer alan leach are sat in a london pub sipping lager and killing time before the 5 30 train takes them back home to York. On your behalf, I sniff them gingerly. Neither of them, it has to be admitted, smells particularly of piss. I mean, it just wasn't needed, Storms Rick. He could have just gone, this is the new Shed 7 single, it's shit. That would have been okay. Ah, but maybe your

alleged pissy smell was a metaphor for the shitness of your record? Yeah, well, but he got it wrong anyway because I didn't stink of piss. Look, let's not get bogged down on this, please, Rick. The point is that if you don't like a record,

you should just say so. You shouldn't just say that the singer stinks of piss because there's a lot of kids out there right now who think that I smell of piss. The reviewer of that single, Neil Kulkarni

of Melody Maker. Neil, the truth. The truth, right. Did Rick Witter stink of piss yes yes he did I'm gonna stick to I'm gonna stick to my guns

did he I'd like to clarify one thing I did not go up to York to see Shed 7 I met Rick Whitter

or I saw Rick Whitter as in his presence because I was studying in York in the early 90s I went to uni there and I live near the Round Trees Chocolate Factory,

which was a nice place to live. And I started going to clubs like Ziggy's and Toph's in York. My favourite North Yorkshire clubbing experience, by the way, was in a club in Scarborough called Bacchus, which had a dance floor the size of a dining table. A fantastic place. But I used to see Shed 7 doing that we're a local band, but we're a bit bigger

than a local band now thing um going around the clubs in york and i used to see him get him a lot of attention that particular singles review mentioned the time when i was in a club i think it was ziggy's and um i went and stood near rick witter because i was wondering what all the fuss was about why these people were thronging around him. Yeah. And yeah, he stank of piss. I'm going to stick to my guns there. Right. I mean, I know that I used the stinks of piss thing quite a lot at that time.

I believe I said it about Joe Wiley as well, but I think I just said that she looks like she stinks of piss. Right. But, you know, the point is about saying that somebody stinks of piss, it's irrefutable legally. And the main thing is Just saying a record shit That's not going to make a record review You have to amplify and elaborate

And use metaphors etc But he didn't metaphorically stink of piss I recall him stinking of piss And it wasn't before any wag chips in It wasn't my top lip It was him So you're saying about Bacchus That you won't dance in a club like this all the

girls are slags and the band smell just like piss too bloody right they did shed seven fucking hour i mean you know it's a frequent motif for me throughout chart music that um you know those pop stars who look like they stink um well he's one of them and he did um because i had prior experience but yeah i didn't go up to york to see shed seven no um he just happened to swim into the uh the nightclub that i was in and i was glad into the club i was glad to verify that and and well i was glad to use that later um in that particular so if he um if if he offered to make you a sandwich no it'd have yellow stains on it man no no but the thing is you know i'd like to say we shed seven i could attack it in that way but in a

way looking back this sort of music you know it won in a way it won whatever battle was going on walk into a pub or a club in uh you know 2021 or whatever and you'll still be able to see bands doing shit like this um yeah and going for gold as a title revealed a lot um this was ultimately music that wanted to lodge itself in student memories, like the final round in fucking Blockbusters. But, I mean, it is a revealing performance. You know, the live singing thing had come in a few years previous in Top of the Pops. A horrible mistake. Oh, dear, it is an unseemly thing to countenance in the shape of Show 7, isn't it?

It's a horrible mistake to make him sing live. It reveals all his limitations. So in that section where it kind of builds there's a bit of a key change and he has to go for it it's so singularly lacking in confidence and an oomph really um but shit like this i mean the thing is about shed seven and bands like that um and there were so bloody many of them that they for me at the time sort of reasserted how valuable the good stuff was because there were dozens dozens of bands like this, but there was only one pulp. Or there was only one Super Fairy Animals.

Whereas, look at Shed 7 in this performance. That slightly piss-takey gold suit he's wearing is a dead giveaway. It looks like they've got a tramp off the street at very short notice to fill in for someone who's going to be Martin Fry on Stars in the Rise. Well, Martin Fry had the height, you see, whereas Rick Whitter doesn't. The legs on this suit are way too long. Rick Whitter's a short arse, so they all look

wrinkled up. He should have checked on these things. And you just think those trousers, are they gold or is it piss? But the thing is... See, this is a wise move. Gold trousers. He's not wearing grey trousers, which is the cardinal error

made by someone prone to pissing themselves. Yeah, no sensible thinking. Oh, that bit of copy you read out there really makes me miss Stephen Wells a lot. But the thing is, all of these looks, all of these sounds that you're hearing from Shed 7, these were getting absorbed by tiny minds and they would wreak damage for years to come.

We're still living with the damage that bands like Shed 7 wrought in a way. Simon, in you come. Well, I've been in the presence of Rick Whitter twice. And on neither of those occasions, as far as I recall, did he stink of piss. But that doesn't mean... See, that doesn't prove that he didn't stink of piss when Neil was near him. The first time I remember being near him, I was walking around Portobello Road Market, Portobello Market in West London.

And I was looking through a clothes store and I realised there was a guy stood near me trying on a pair of trousers so he'd actually taken his own trousers off yeah he'd taken his own trousers off so he's down to his kegs and he's trying on is he wearing a tenner? well he was, yeah yeah exactly he was wearing a kind

of see through adult magazine that was like swimming in piss no no he was him and Roachford they could make a fucking killing doing adverts for that shit now couldn't they? And Fergie, Fergie man and Fergie yeah

so yeah he was trying on this pair of multi-coloured stripy trousers that looked like a jester and I really judged him on that. I thought if he didn't literally stink of piss, then his taste in clothing did. And then decades later,

about four or five years ago, I actually interviewed him. It was backstage at a festival in Yorkshire where Shed 7 were the headline act. And I was doing a bit of work there was a festival tv station and whoever uh lumbered interview backstage I just had to grab him for an interview and there he was perfectly nice bloke you know as they always are they always are nice blokes or nearly always you know um Neil's completely right about the uh the effect

they had musically and we're still living with to this day I don't know which writer it was, it might have been Andrew Harrison who coined the phrase Landfill Indie but I think Shed 7 are very likely the year zero of Landfill Indie they are the patient zero the first tin thrown onto the ground

the first tin, yeah yeah is Shed 7 Steve Lemack says an anthemic start from Shed 7. And he does a little smile, does Lamac, because this is his music. And it's actually his doing. But how shit would you contribute if that's your fucking anthem? Well, now here's the thing. Right, you correctly point out the suit.

A gold suit used to mean ABC. It used to mean absolute dazz that elvis yeah and they've got a horn section a horn section on top of the pops used to mean dexys yes right and this shows how far we have fallen that it now means this and i kept listening to this song and i don't really remember it from the time um and i started thinking when does the anthemic bit happen yeah when like i thought okay you know some songs can have an anthemic chorus but the verse that gets you there is a bit nothingy but it just never happened yeah and um the weird thing about first of all it's two weird things first of all this was a top 10 hit which yes i don't know if

that's just a quirk of the fact that Britpop was so huge that a moderately well-liked indie band could get in the top 10 just like that. But the lyrics, for fuck's sake, it goes, you took the words right out of my mouth, which is taken straight out of Meatloaf's mouth. They play their guitars in that really shitty indie way where their hands hardly even touch the strings yeah they're just sort of drifting their hands up and down the blokes because the rest of the band are standard indie blokes in black yeah yeah they look like they're just kind of vaguely thrilled to be there they've got no charisma to them at all no and and even rick witter or as the press cruelly called

him at the time and i may have been part of that cruelty, Rick Fuck Whitter. You can dress him up in a gold suit. You can hand him a pair of maracas to shake, which he does here. It's a polished turd, isn't it? He's got no dynamism. The song has no dynamism.

It's the most half-arsed maraca shaking I've ever seen, man. And I've seen Ian Brown. And Lamac makes a little joke about that as he outros it. half-arsed maracas shaking I've ever seen, man. And I've seen Ian Brown. And Lamac makes a little joke about that as he outros it. He says, shaking the Earth's core tonight on top of the pops. Fuck me. If the Earth's core was shaken like that, we wouldn't be here now because

there was just acres and gallons of that shit knocking around at the time. It's really, really very poor. The weird thing about Shed 7 is they are bigger now than they ever were at the time. They were moderately big at the time. They've become this thing, because they keep plugging away,

and they play all those kind of... those festivals called things like... Oh, God, what are they called? Like... Probably Live Forever or... Yeah, yeah, they play all these kind of Cool Britannia festivals or whatever they are,

including the one that I interviewed in there. They're the Tremolos of their age. Yeah, yeah, exactly. They just kept on going. Yeah. And so they can now fill Brixton Academy at the drop of a hat, probably three nights run in. They can headline festivals.

And it's a weird sort of anomaly in the industry. It's a weird little tale in itself as long as you don't have to listen to their music. And like I say, seems like a perfectly nice bloke, but fucking hell, you know, what he did and what his band did led on to things like Scouting for Girls and all of that shit that clogged up the noughties and clogged up the 2010s

and is still with us to this day. So it can do one as far as i'm concerned the reason bands like that still going like they do keep plugging away i mean what's being sold essentially is nostalgia i doubt anyone's sitting around listening to shed sevens albums and recovering what musical geniuses they were but people want to feel feel if they're in their mid 40s they want to feel like they did when they were young um so so they'll buy tickets for shit like that um but that that's the mac phrase at the end really got to me that and then shaking the earth's

core that kind of jokey enemy type hyperbole really used to piss me off and um and still does and the odd thing is with this record going for gold it is their best that's This is as good as Shed 7 get. So the following week Going For Gold dropped 12 places to number 20. The follow-up Bully Boy would only get to number 22, but they'd have two more top 20 hits

this year, making them the most prolific chart band of 1996. What? What? Yes. Fucking hell. They had more hits this year than any other band.

Jesus. Fucking hell. Hello, I'm Jack Beaumont. I do Crime Club. In Series 1, I spoke to people like this. Did you not kick a policeman in the head? Yeah, that was... When was that? I was 17.

Wait, was I 17 or 19? I think I might have been 19, actually. In Series 2, I talked to people like this. There was a paedophile with one leg. I kicked him clean out his wheelchair. About four of us... I mean, we battered him. And this.

Cheating on your boyfriend to give him gonorrhoea? Do you want to go there, or should I have a knock? Yeah, no, no, no. I can talk about it. I have jingles like this. That's Crime Club, where strange people tell stories involving bad behaviour. New episodes out every Monday. Shaking the earth's core tonight on Top of the Pops,

we have two exclusives from Lionel Richie and world featherweight boxing champion Prince Laseem. Plus we have garbage and menswear. But first, Cracky America, yes really, mingling with the rich and famous and how our friends in the North Oasis. Don't you know you might find A better place to play The Mac continues to shill the bill of fear for tonight

while Wiley tells us that the next actor playing in America are mixing with the rich and famous, which is something bands have never done before, and then gets in a plug for a recent BBC drama as she introduces Don't Look Back in Anger by Oasis. Formed in Manchester in 1991, Oasis are fucking Oasis. This is their ninth single, the fourth cut off the LP What's The Story Morning Glory and the follow-up to Wonderwall which got to number two for one week in November of 1995,

held off the top spot by, I believe, by Robson and Jerome. It made its first appearance on Top of the Pops on February 22nd, three days after it was released, where they followed it up with a performance of Come On, Feel the Noise, making them the first band to play two songs on an episode of Top Of The Pops since the jam in 1982. A week later, it entered the chart at number one, Usurping Spaceman by Babylon Zoo, but was immediately knocked off the top by this week's number one. This week, it's spending its second week at number three.

And because the band are in dublin where the news of the world are currently stalking their hotel with nolan liam gallagher's father in the hopes of a reunion after they set up a phone line where you could listen to a phone conversation between liam and his dad with the former threatening to break the latter's legs we're getting a repeat of a month old performance why why is this even happening this is last month's number one because that because the oasis man i mean neil you know we've come across this phenomenon before when uh when they had craig david back on again in 2000 but this is this is a song that's been at number three for its second week. What the fuck is going on here?

It's a music lover show now. Didn't you hear the memo? Oh, sorry, yeah. It's like BBC News now going, oh, you know what? Fucking coronavirus again. Sick of that. Let's talk about that royal wedding that everyone liked.

It's not right, man. Top of the Pops is dead to me now. This fucking song is probably one of my, I mean, it probably is my least favourite song ever. And talking about things to recant from the past, as I have about Joe Wiley slightly. I know with most bands, even the ones that you hate, there's this rule whereby you will love one of their songs.

With Oasis, that is not the case for me as soon as I hear even a second of their music I want to vomit and I wish these enemies of beauty nothing but misery for the rest of their days and and that extends to all their fans hate this band I mean I don't know where the pricey needs to come in before I just go off on one no please take the floor Neil go for it um well I mean for me you know it's odd in recent years we've seen an awful lot of bullshit written about how um you know the night is all about oasis and nirvana and it was about attitude coming back for me my memories of this era and thinking about this era now is that you know definitely maybe and things like that and oasis

it meant the cunts taking over it meant it meant the proper homophobic mildly racist lads taking over it meant the rejection of puffiness stylistically and the reassertion of the kind of english rock defense league's tiny minded ideas their tiny minded ideas about real proper music so it just sees rock regressing into this pure soulless pastiche. It also means in this period, a cowardly craven press surrendering any critical standpoint in fear of this supposed consensus. National broadcasters and publishers boosting the lads, the coked up and the leery. And deeper than that, it meant a reassertion of quite racist and sexist music stereotypes and snobbery. Beyond that, sorry, it enabled also a middle class media to a certain extent to homogenise its ideas about what counted as working class art.

Yes, Neil. Ever since then, ever since the 90s, when I've slagged off Oasis or The Roses or any of those bands, I've had it back. Oh, you must hate the working classes as if this is all the working classes can do exactly this kind of thing um i mean i would use oasis if i was teaching a lesson about the 90s i would use them but not in a kind of this is how good things got kind of way but but this is definitively 90s in it celebrates the mediocre so long as it's um arrogant and and it's this cultural environment and as long as it's um arrogant and and it's this cultural environment and as long as it's successful yeah and as long oh it has to be successful of course it has to have hundreds of thousands of zeros attached to all the figures attached to it it's

it you know it creates this cultural environment in which anyone can be i think this is the start of the word start of the overuse of the word iconic and legendary right about this period because anyone can be iconic and legendary seemingly in the 90s so long as you just tediously and endlessly assert the fact so long as you just keep saying that you're you know rock and roll band so yeah i'm not going to celebrate this fucking hoax this con job this cowardice and and this essentially a triumph for reactionary conservatism and beyond anything else the shitty music the fucking utterly shit music i'm not gonna i'm not gonna celebrate this in any way i've always fucking hated liam gallagher

perhaps more than any other british pop figure in the past two decades there was something i read i mean beyond all the homophobic shit that he's come out with over the years which is unforgivable and disgraceful i remember reading him um about adam ants and it was a comment that really summated a lot of things he said um adam and the ants no i'm not into a geezer who wears makeup especially fucking nutty ones yep yep that's absolutely you know doubtless he thinks british pop history would have been better entirely populated by these sort of gurning faux simpleton fake lads wearing um smart casual dad's clothes um but he's just a fucking charmless thicker shit cunt and i wish he'd fuck off and die i've never seen either of those brothers as kind of you know the witty characters that they are

frequently seen as but but yeah they are definitive of the night is, the witty characters that they're frequently seen as. But yeah, they are definitive of the 90s because if you just say that you rock and roll often and drearily enough, it makes you iconic. And if you're half-wit, it's this kind of, you know, there's frequently moments where I listen to Oasis records and I just think, honestly, that larceny, that theft, that laziness, you really think that'll do?

And they do think that'll do. And clearly an awful lot... And it did. Yeah, and it did. An awful lot of music fans thought it'd do as well. And if that's admitted, then any kind of pastiche is okay. And, you know, it's this admission

of a kind of general a bit shitness that you can't be as good as the past, but you can sort of innocently thieve it a little bit. This kind of attitude that's scruffed up like factory damaged jeans. So for me, Oasis, they're the Chris Evans of music. And if you like them, you must despise pop music. They're the single artist, the single band rather, that most sums up all I most detest in rock and pop music over its entire history i know it's

common to say now oh yeah but those early singles come on they were undeniable nope sorry they have always for me made the most revoltingly lumpen conservative sounding music um yes they absolutely are iconic and legendary and if you like them you and their fucking rubbish music and those kinds of adjectives deserve each other, you cunt. They're an appalling band. And, you know, especially in recent years, one thing I've noticed creeping into Noel Gallagher's quotes now that he's moneyed up and he's sending his kids to posh schools. schools um there's a definite tinge of kind of racism and brexitiness in in what he's been saying about his schooling about the schools that he's sending his kids to how he does he'd rather his kids hung around with russian oligarchs all day than came home sounding like ali g and how he doesn't want to send them to school where there's metal detectors on the doors and how he fucking

loads hip-hop and he doesn't think Jay-Z should headline Glastonbury. All of these things. And he doesn't like reading and he doesn't like jazz. Oasis, for me, have always just been a celebration of stupidity and conservatism. The sound of a door slamming shut. Well, for me, they're kind of weird because they're one of the biggest bands of the 90s.

For me, they're the biggest bands of the 90s for me they're the nadir of the 90s so watching various videos of England fans over the years adding to their repertoire of fuck the IRA and 10 German bombers

with Oasis songs is very revealing to me much as it was the other day when I saw some cunt in a fucking multicoloured Harlequin style suit leading a a street long sing-along

at the 8 o'clock clap for the NHS of Don't Look Back In Anger revealed a lot to me as well. It is that kind of national anthem and I fucking hated it then and I hate it now. I mean Simon, how much to the fault can be

lumped on the music press for Oasis? A fair amount can be lumped they were hyped up to fuck at the beginning i remember when their first album came out they got a cover on cue and the tagline was was to the effect of here they are the band you've all been waiting for and it's like really them i think neil made a really important point about the homogenization of um the way the working class were seen and depicted um in the media around this time and it was entirely down to oasis i in fact i remember thing neil wrote because uh noel had said something like i'm writing songs for the guy who's going to the local news agents to buy his 10 bents and hedges and neil wrote

fuck off i'm that guy you're not writing songs for me and you know this is the awkward truth about Oasis and about their media cheerleaders is that it suited the predominantly white male very middle class very southern music press

to imagine that Oasis represent the true proletariat or the lumpenproletariat if you like of the UK and that anyone who diverges from that stereotype just isn't proper properly working class and that that even goes back to that Melody Maker front cover that you mentioned earlier on where what's what's the headline what's the thing on the front again, it's like, are you looking at me pal, is that it it's this imagined idea, that's not a quote

you know, it's just because you've got a picture of Noel looking a bit sort of chippy and we're meant to think oh yeah, he's this tough street fighting northerner, fuck off apart from anything else, Oasis are really soft I will defend that to the death,

that they are fucking soft. They're just pretending to be hard. Like, the one time that Liam started acting hard in Germany in front of a bunch of fucking management consultants out on a jolly or something, he got the shit kicked out of him, didn't he? Do you remember that? But yeah.

Happened in Milan as well, didn't it? I despise this idea that uh the working classes of britain are not allowed to a have consume and b create things of beauty and um yeah we're not allowed to be poncy or arty or well read yeah and i'm saying that i grew up in a terraced house in south wales with fuck all money, single parent. We didn't have a car. We didn't have a telephone. A lot of the time we didn't have a TV because it kept having to be sent back because we couldn't afford it.

And all this kind of shit. You guys, you're from the Midlands. You're not from the North, but you're not part of that London or that Southern bubble. So you know, you know as well as I know how fucking mendacious that is, that idea that everyone in the north or everyone from sort of a working class area is like those

cunts, right? And it's really important in order to disprove that, to be able to point to counterpoints, to examples who do diverge from that and conveniently enough um and we've already mentioned them in this episode manic street preachers right the manic street preachers are as if not more working class than oasis but they educate themselves they were proud of their

learning they put quotes from literature and philosophy all over their record sleeves they started their biggest hit at the point that it came out with the line libraries gave us power and you get these dicks the gallaghers boasting about not reading books and could i just chip in there sorry pricey yeah the direct quote from noel booksellers book readers book writers book owners fuck all of them. Exactly. And, you know, the media lapped that up. Because there's nothing the southern middle class media love more than a bit of rough. The illicit thrill they get from a bit of rough. And that's what Oasis represented.

By the way, you can go on Google Earth and look at the fucking suburb that they came from. Yeah, I'm sure it had its social problems. I'm sure they didn't have much money. They've got a lovely big leafy street with big front gardens big back gardens do me a fucking favor you know just because they talk it's like it's like jess phillips everyone thinks that just because she talks in a regional accent she's got to be properly salt of the earth working class her fucking mother ran the nhs in the midlands you know that's that's that's an 80 grand a year job i mean the music

press they lumped on the stone roses and happy mondays a few years previous so that was the beginning of this yeah both of those bands fucked up uh here's a band who are not going to fuck up and you know you just had oasis rammed up your ass right from the off yeah and there was a trade-off right a lot of people who should have known better who did know better people of my age and slightly older um decided you know what we may have grown up listening to i don't know um the fall or echo and the bunny men or you know any of these kind of vaguely cerebral indie bands but we're going to sort of brush all that away and uh and pretend that we're never into that stuff and what we really want is something that sounds like the most reductive idea of what the beatles were because it seems

to be popular it seems to be what the kids like so i saw people of my age suddenly sort of wearing um you know best minds of my generation the best minds of my the best the best torsos of my generation uh wearing wearing vintage Adidas and all that kind of stuff. And just pretending to be something they weren't because it was like, if you can't beat them, join them. And it seemed to be popular. And the amount of times in my work I had to go and review Oasis gigs,

and they quite often happen at Wembley. And you get out of Wembley Park Station and you'd walk up Bobby Moore Way and there'd be all these fucking dicks doing this sort of crap themselves, bandy-legged walk towards the stadium or the arena, and they'd be wearing those fucking wicket-keeper hats or fisherman's hats,

whatever you want to call it, and they too are pretending to be this idea, you know, because they've all come from fucking, I don't know, Roehampton or something. But they are pretending to be lads, lads, lads. And because of that, because that is now, A, all the working class are allowed to be. And B, what we're supposed to aspire to. It's the very limit of what we can aspire to.

That is why, for me, Oasis are the, and I'm not exaggerating, the most malignant and damaging force in British popular culture of the last 30 years. I agree completely. As I said at the time, I think Oasis give you rickets. But it's interesting that you mention Happy Mondays. I mean, Happy Mondays, yes, genuinely properly working class band. But look how weird their fucking music was. How liquid and funky and strange and complex it was and also think about sean ryder's lyrics i mean these were amazing amazing lyrics um the lyrics to oasis records i mean this is a perfect example this one

for starters you can get no meaning from them so don't bother looking for any meaning but they're just pitched at that that kind of mix of phrases that clearly noel gallagher has overheard that he thinks are clever like don't look back in anger from the play from the john osborne play um mixed in with just a load of shit about sliding away it always seemed to be about sliding away from him and staying in bed and they're just remorselessly unpoetic, unimaginative shit lyrics coupled with this lumpen awful music. It's Oreo Speedwagon without a decent guitar solo, isn't it? I don't want to say roadie rock. I like some roadies.

But, I mean, it's lumpy, joyless, just totally sexless music. It's just revolting. Oh, God, yeah. You know? No, you're absolutely right to talk about the lyrics. totally sexless music it's just revolting oh god yeah you know no you're absolutely right to talk about the lyrics slip inside the eye of your mind

it's got to be one of those embarrassing opening lines it's embarrassing and yeah just this sort of lazy jamming together so don't look back

in anger you've got don't look back the Bob Dylan documentary and look back in anger the play of course then you've got like they're quoting

you know you start a revolution in your head so that's like a Beatles book isn't it so they're fucking laying it on so thick start a revolution from my bed he says doesn't he that's right oh right sorry right yeah but it is clearly cause revolution in the head

had just come out hadn't it yeah yeah so there's all of that going on and a lot of people say oh who cares it's just pop music who cares about the lyrics well alright fine and to your point i can go along with that and i suppose in some ways demonstrably what they do works because they write these melodies that have those kind of descending triplets like which is the thing that

you know everyone's fucking bowie did it but we did loads circa uh ziggy stardust george harrison was a big one for that and it's just a fairly easy way of giving a phrase in music a little bit of an emotional tug at the end so they had that going on I remember Taylor writing a review of them live where he talked about this hurricane force that you feel at their gigs whether you like them or not you just got swept away, steamrolled by this kind of

back and forth between the band and the audience. And I can kind of see that. But what does it give us? Where does it get you? There's fucking nothing to it at all. And the first thing you see in this clip, by the way, is the drummer's arse. And I think that is so telling because it is just loads of arse. Oh, even visually, this signifies.

You've got Noel with his little Lennon shades on. You've got Liam sitting at the piano, prodding at a fucking piano with single fingers like he's doing chopsticks, but at a grand piano. He's also wearing the little Lennon glasses. It's so fucking desperate. You've got Bonehead there, by the way, which is the second sighting tonight

of someone wearing an outdoor coat indoors. Britpop was the movement that wouldn't feel the benefit when it stepped outside. And then you've got Noel with his big fucking Brexit guitar. Yes, Brexit guitar. And you look at it and you see it's a really bad paint job. I mean, the St Patrick's Cross has been put slap bang in the middle of the St. Andrew's Cross, probably because whoever did it wasn't sure what the right way up the Union Jack was

and just isn't taking any chances. But you look at it and you go, oh, actually, that's really shit. It was really shit anyway. It was just like, oh, look, let's pretend to be the who. Well, that's it. The symbolism of the Union Jack in popular culture is the who well that's it the the symbolism of the union jack in popular culture is an interesting thing that's kind of shifted over time and uh you know in the 60s with the kinks and the who it seemed to have this kind of slightly almost

subversive optimism to it it wasn't at that point poisoned by uh uh feelings of kind of racial white supremacy or any of that that kind of that feeling crept in more in the 70s but then you had the jam trying to reclaim that whole 60s thing again but then when Morrissey waves around at Finsbury Park and of course what we know now about Morrissey we were you know people were quite right to be very very dubious about what his motivations were nevertheless on the face of it the only evidence that NME were really willing to present was that he was waving around the Union Jack. And, what, two, three years later,

you've got these cunts with a massive fucking Union Jack on their guitar, and no one bats an eyelid. You've got Jerry Halliwell in a Union Jack dress for the Brits. And suddenly it's all, yay, cool Britannia! And nothing seems to bear at all. And it turns out that Gallagher's pretty Brexity, Jerry Halliwell's pretty Brexity. Neil is absolutely right to call out their racism.

We can all point at the famous remarks Noel made about having Jay-Z or Stormzy headlining Glastonbury. They are massive, massive homophobes. I'm not going to let them off the hook about that I was present at the Q Awards When Liam Started shouting queer, queer To Robbie Williams when he went on stage And lesbian, lesbian

To Kylie Minogue And by the way, the fact that Neither of those are queer or lesbian Is really not the point That was his go-to insult For people that he didn't like are queer or lesbian is really not the point it was that was that was his go-to insult for people that he didn't like was queer and lesbian there's plenty more examples plenty more proof of their homophobia matter of fact I was commissioned by a major major national newspaper about a year ago to write an article about this stuff about Oasis and their homophobia

um strangely they got cold feet and bottled out and spiked that article. Now, I'm not ruling out that piece appearing online at some point soon, so that's something to look forward to. But yeah, they just didn't like anything remotely puffy. They were very dodgy when it came to black music and black people, as we've now found out. And he,el in particular is a pull the ladder up cunt he's one of those ones uh because you know for all their much vaunted

working class backgrounds he thinks that uh and never mind jeremy corbyn he who he called a communist he thought ed milliband was in his words a fucking communist ed milliband was, in his words, a fucking communist. Ed Miliband! Because, yeah, heaven forbid, anybody should want to redistribute any wealth. He's the Jimmy Tarbuck of Manchester, isn't he? Totally. In summary, fuck them. They're the worst thing to happen in 30 years.

And anyone who likes... No, I'm not going to say anyone who likes him is a cunt because I know some lovely, lovely people who are Oasis fans, but they are misguided i've had my my feelings about blur many a time and often on chart music but i remember when i moved back to nottingham about 15 years ago i'd go out or have to go out to to see local bands and 80 of them were oasis clones yeah they'd have the kind of publicity shot where it looked like they were standing outside of weatherspoons on a tuesday morning and i just thought fucking hell if only there were a few more bands wanted to be blur instead of oasis perhaps we'd have you know perhaps things would have been better back then i mean we just said that shed seven um

unbelievably exerted an influence just think about the damage that this fucking band did oasis well the thing is i must admit at the time i was casting around trying you know in 1996 i was basically trying to call everyone a racist but um you know the the union jack guitar didn't help but you can't really go from that to racism but i've i've been proved right over the years about this stuff i mean a lot of us have been proved right not only quote some noel but yeah um it's odd when you look back because now when i look back it's like pricey mentioned morrissey now when i listen back to say panic i hear a race hate anthem in a way you know and in this music um fatally oasis one englishness back for the for the non-fay and the non-puffy and the charmless fundamentally and we've been seeing it on stages nationwide ever since and it's not like

there weren't any other options all right the manics went hiatus at this point uh but jarvis cocker was around yeah he's a fucking working class northerner and he's fucking clever and you know funny and a bit puffy and you know it's you know sorry journalists is is that is he not proly enough for you is he not enough of a fucking stereotype because he's not swaggering towards you like doing that kind of come on things with his hands yeah but offering you out for a fight is that not real enough for you and when he swears you can't you can't write it as F-double-O-K Yeah all of that Talking about their influence

there was a thing just the other week on the Bank Holiday Monday where Radio X did their annual Best of British where they asked their readers readers, well they asked their listeners to vote for this kind of countdown of the 100 best British songs ever and 4 countdown of the 100 best British songs ever

and 4 out of the top 10 were by Oasis, 17 out of the top 100 were by Oasis and a massive chunk of the rest of it was, it might as well have been Oasis and I do wonder though actually looking at the rest of that list if Shed 7 haven't also exerted

a massive influence on that bands like the fucking Cortinas and all that stuff and I know in some ways it's not exactly news, it's dog bites man that people who listen to a lads guitar radio station like lads guitar

music but nevertheless it was the most depressing thing I've ever read, it was like basically if you wanted to find out what the worst British music ever is, look at what Radio find out what the worst British music ever is, look at what Radio X listeners think the best British music ever is. And talking about Oasis being in lots of lists, I mean, this week

in the charts, all nine Oasis singles were in the top 100 this week. They've re-released them all, like when the jam split up and when Michael Jackson died. But it needs noting, right? The trouble is with looking back, especially from this vantage point, is the 90s have been rewritten. In anger.

Fucking in a lot of fucking anger, to be honest with you. But, I mean, you know, the 90s have now been rewritten as Oasis' decade. It just needs lodging somewhere that there are an awful lot of us who fucking hated them from the off. Yes. You know, and we were there. We might not have ended up dominating the cultural landscape

for the past 20-odd fucking years, but there were dissidents to this. The 90s were not just this. There was so much great shit going on. Oasis, one of the worst bands of this period. Yeah, I mean, essentially, people did want it to be the 60s again. So therefore they had to be a Beatles.

And the general consensus in the media was, oh, they'll do. Let's lump on them. Well, I do think Britpop was the first musical movement in this country that was entirely looking backwards. And yeah, you're absolutely right that that it needed a b clause and people were just gagging for that to happen yeah and it became self-fulfilling i was instantaneously suspicious of brit pop for precisely that reason because when

something looks back like that and it only looks back like that you have to wonder what dreams are being reanimated here what are they what are they clicking their heels together and wanting to vanish back to? And fundamentally, what they're wanting to vanish back to is time in an odd way where white British music was made by bands completely influenced by black American music. And yet, you know, and yet the music that they vanished themselves back to

absolutely wasn't that. So, you know, the 60s can mean a lot of things for a lot of people. But yeah, I think they got that era completely wrong in a sense. Yeah. Of course, we've got to mention the obvious Nick of Imagine at the beginning,

which was, you know, clearly, oh, you think we're ripping off the Beatles? Well, fuck you. Yeah. But it also serves to mask the even more blatant Nick, which is, so Sally can wait, pretty flamingo.

Yeah, yeah. But the thing is, that kind of brazenness became part of their shtick. It's the same thing Robbie Williams would exploit later on in the 90s, and hence them becoming friends, I'm guessing. That just, yeah, we're getting away with it.

Yeah, we're getting away with it. That kind of brazenness, that cheek, that arrogance. You know, arrogance is unjustified confidence. They had no, Noel Gallagher's musical abilities gave him no right to call himself a rock star. But by that time, it was enough for the idiots, they're boosters in the press anyway, that if somebody was just cocky enough, that was enough.

I'm not sure. Anything else to say? No, fuck them. Fuck them forever. Fuck them to hell. So the following week, Don't Look Back in Anger dropped five places to number eight. The follow-up, Do You Know What I Mean,

went straight to number one in July of 1997, knocking I'll Be Missing You by Puff Daddy off the top and staying there for one week before giving way to I'll Be Missing You again. It would go on to sell over 970,000 copies in the UK and was the 11th best-selling single of 1996, one place above How Deep Is Your Love by Take That and one behind To Become One by The Spice Girls. I thought we were quite concise there.

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