Chart Music: the Top Of The Pops Podcast - Chart Music #52 (Part 2): February 14th 1985 – British People React To REO Speedwagon

Episode Date: August 6, 2020

The latest episode of the podcast which asks: if The Smiths were still making singles today, would they have a still from Sex Lives Of The Potato Men on the cover?The latest episode – another five hour-plus plunge into the very depths of your favourite Pop TV show – lands us on the very perineum ‘twixt Band Aid and Live Aid, in a shameful era when even the Weetabix are pretending to be American street youths, and on the very cusp of the achingly slow decline of The Pops. The majority of the Zoo Wankers have been culled, the flags and balloons are being reined in, and even though it’s Valentine’s Day, the roiling sexual chemistry between Simon Bates and Janice Long has been dialled right down. Thank God.Musicwise, oof: Top Of The Pops throw the kitchen sink of Pop at us, with no less than 21 acts getting a shine, resulting in 1985 looking better than it has any right to be. This Year’s Most Lovable Bisexual puts a wrecking ball plastered with mirrors through the wall of the charts while he threatens legal action against his label for being mingebags. The Commodores don a black vinyl poppy for their fallen comrades. Bill Sharpe and Gary Numan look at a fax machine. The entire show is derailed when Jonathan King forces us to look at some chlorinated American stodge, but put firmly back on track when Jaz Coleman stares at us. Morrissey machine-guns the audience. Kool and the Gang channel the spirit of Girlyman. And there’s a load of mid-Eighties rammel.Taylor Parkes and Neil Kulkarni wrap their Dads’ ties around their heads and join fellow Street Punk Al Needham for a rampage through the streets of 1985, veering off on such tangents as rubbish Americans not understanding Ribena, getting started on for laughing at the death of Apollo Creed, why standing on a boardroom table for a publicity shot isn’t a good idea, why sneering at girls singing a love song directly at their music teacher is a worse idea, and a revisit to the Perils of Priapic Price. You know there’s gonna be swearing.Video Playlist | Subscribe | Facebook | Twitter | The Chart Music Wiki Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Green dot laser sight rifle gun scope. I've bought that quite a lot of times, I think. Right, okay. The sex doctor's guide to keeping it hot. Ah, interesting. Did another child come along nine months later? Yeah. Loads of great eps up now, and new ones dropping every Monday.

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Um... Chart music. Chart music. Hey up you pop craze youngsters and welcome to part two of episode 52 of Chart Music. I'm your host Al Needham, those people over there are Neil Kulkarni and Taylor Parks and are our loins sufficiently girded for this episode because it's a big old fucker isn't it this one. Yeah yeah perfectly girded thanks. It really is. Yeah full gird. Before we get stuck into it

I just want to do a bit of notes and corrections it got back to me that the mystery of that metal box in the last episode Taylor. You know the one that I thought might be a camera and you thought was something else entirely you were right and i was wrong but apparently it was a monitor for uh

the live vocals on some of the songs a lot of sense didn't it yeah always pop crazy youngsters if i say anything wrong never be scared of pulling me up on it and saying you don't know what the fuck you're going on about you twat i can accept that i i want to learn we learn together in short music all right then pop crazy young says it's time to go all the way back to valentine's day 1985 always remember we may coat down your favorite band or artist but we never forget they've been on top of the pops more than we have. It's ten minutes to eight on Thursday, February 14th, 1985, and Top of the Pops has been under the reign of Michael Hurl for five years now. You can argue that the show has come out of the yellow hurl period by now,

with many of the original formats he introduced falling by the wayside, but I would argue that the tinkering is at his height round about this time don't you think definitely a lot of things coming to an end and a lot of things just beginning most of which antagonize the viewers your hosts are simon bates and janice long bates is now in his eighth year in the mid-morning slot on radio one but he's also casting his net into other television programs last summer he presented names and games a celebrity it's a knockout he's also about to appear on radio four's magazine show the color supplement where he goes back to his roots and milks a cow on air thankfully he's not wanking any bulls off anything like that

he's also going to be a very special guest on a future episode of the keith harris show with barbara dixon and duncan norvell he's also mixed into the rotation of blankety blank and he's going to end the year as the star prize at the Daily Star and Baby Sham Female DJ of the Year competition, where the winner gets to learn at his feet for 10 days in that there America. Oh, what a tempting prize that is, Simon Bates. Wow. I wonder where did he regularly appear on the Blankety Blank panel? I'm guessing the dull spot, which tended to be top left.

Yeah, or top right. Yeah, not on the bottom where Kenny Everett lived. Yeah, gender segregated, wasn't it? It was always male, top left, top right, and the wacky guy, bottom centre. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, top left or top right really was the dull spot, wasn't it? But he was a bit of a renaissance man, Simon Bates. I think he must have had a good agent

because he turns up on a lot of stuff around this time as if he's the Radio 1 DJ who's a cut above, you know, and he's like he's a wit and an after-dinner speaker or something. Yes. Simon fucking Bates. I don't know what, I mean, jesus christ you look at him here he looks like someone's just come into his cave and poked him awake with a stick and normally he'd eat them but he owes it to the villagers who saved his life to come out once in a while and present top of the

no in his own mind he was like Peter Ustinov or something. He's attained this longevity, which gives him that, I couldn't exactly call it gravitas, but it gives him the right to appear on all of this nonsense. I mean, he's been presenting Top of the Pops now since 1979. And most of the people that he started with have stopped presenting Top of the Pops now. So, you know, there's no Savas.

There's no Travis anymoreies there's no travis anymore uh they stopped in 84 kid jensen's gone andy peoples has gone tony blackburn's gone tommy vance they all stopped in 84 and bates is now with this kind of cast of um you know younger djs peter powell and bruno brooks and gary davis and janice long on this episode yeah and those people they have to inherently sort of slightly have to kowtow to his seniority and he's just about hanging in there he's 39 when this episode airs god that means if i lived on one of the nearby estates i would have been old enough to be his dad i'd have been 13 when he was born are you sure you're not from Coventry? But no, I mean, I sense a slight discomfort from Janice.

She sort of baits this slight grabbiness and tactility. Yeah. But it's nowhere near as uncomfortable or horrific as it would be to, I don't know, see DLT or Noel on the show still in 85. Well, she's been shared out with everyone, hasn't she? Poor old Janice. So she's been with Savile. And I she poor old janice so she's been with savile and i can't even bring myself to look at that episode just yet no no no i mean every time

simon bates presents top of the pops i always ask the same question why and i'm i'm you know i've tried to answer it for myself really i tried to educate myself and I'm just reminded that this is the time when I was 16 so I'm out of school and so I'm listening to more bits of Radio 1 than I did before and you know I've got to say the Simon Bates show was something I would listen to quite often because the golden hour meant there was one spot in the day on Radio 1 where you were guaranteed back-to-back decent music. Yeah. I mean, it's good that you mentioned the rock and roll years earlier

because that strip mining of the past became really precious to a lot of us. You have to go back and realise that, you know, he is the most popular DJ on Radio 1. He's pulling down about 11 million listeners a day. Our tune is the most popular bit of radio in the whole country. Apparently, he's getting something like 8,000 letters for Outune a week or something stupid like that. And Top of the Pops is all about grabbing as many eyeballs as possible.

Simon Bates has got a lot of housewives he can bring to the party annie nightingale did desert island disc just a couple of days before we recorded this and and she said that she was once told by a bbc executive that she was never going to fit in at radio one because the djs were supposed to act as surrogate husbands for the female and housewife-y listenership at the time. So BBC One had gone, oh, Simon Bates, he'll make a good husband for someone. But do you remember when we did the episode with Alan Freeman presenting?

And I think Taylor said that he's a fluff work because he's just a really reliable handover guy, which is essentially all you're doing on Top of the Pops. And it's the same for Bates. He's reliably innocuous. You can't quite, even as us kids, couldn't quite locate our dislike of him. He was just reliably safe and comfortable. And that's why he's there.

That's why he continues to be there. Well, he is at this point, yeah. Because as he gets older, he doesn't become more grotesque. He sort of steps back a bit. And all the personality links in this episode are being done by Janice Long. And Bates is just standing there kind of with a benign half smile. It's like when he puts his arm around Janice,

there's not a hint of sex you know sex pest or like office harassment about it he's genuinely avuncular and grandfatherly i contend that by putting simon bates on top of the pops the bbc is saying look it's all right ma'am you can watch top of the pops you aren't going to see people injecting heroin and bombing each other on on stage no because simon bates wouldn't stand for that nonsense no he got all that out of the way in the dressing room yeah and even if he won't even the thing is with bates even if he won't offer explicit critique of anything that's presented on top of the pops there's something about his facial expressions and the way he delivers links

that that just lets you know what he thinks in a way that happens a couple of times in this episode it's just the way he says certain band names he doesn't wrinkle his nose or anything in disgust but do you know what i mean there's keenness with some artists and they're definite non-keenness with others that i think parents and grandparents would respond to yeah yeah i think he only editorialises at one or two points in this whole episode. It's just a bit of fun. I mean, that's all it is. Janice Long, who is on Radio 1 right now, is in the evening slot that she's held down since September of 1984. Tonight, she's wedged between Bruno Brooks and Into The Music with Tommy Vance.

She made a couple of guest appearances on Top Of The Pops in late 1982 and started co-hosting in January of 1983, originally teamed up with Gary Davis. This is her 17th appearance on Top Of The Pops and her third go on

Simon Bates. Last month, in an interview with smash hits she addressed her current relationship with peter powell and praised radio one and the bbc to the skies when asked if she was the token woman on top of the pub she said i think there'll be a change and more girls will be involved now you can join the b BBC, get married and have a baby and come back to it. You don't have to stay at home. She is two years away from being

demoted from her Radio 1 slot for having a baby and suddenly according to Radio 1 controller Johnny Bearing, becoming two mums there. Fucking hell. Fuck the BBC Simon Bates

Janice Long the sexual chemistry is crackling tonight isn't it I love Janice and I think I still do she was equally important to me as a radio listener as Addy Nightingale and for a while she was way more important to me than

Peely because peel was on too late i was little you know i got sleepy yeah um but janice was crucial in proving to me that that i don't know the things i dug in old music were not things that were entirely entirely abandoned by modern musicians so i remember uh you know very crystalline memories of things that she played that really blew my mind and as a kid at the time who had just been bought a guitar um what was frustrating was that you could learn a stone song or a velvet song or a t-rex song in a few minutes but when you sort of apprehended the music that was getting shoved at you in 84 and 85 by the mainstream it seemed like hyper

musical played through incredibly expensive equipment by expensive session men wearing expensive clothes but janice and peely which they just gave you this suggestion that there might be something else going on um so what i mentioned about like the mary chain being important in that year and of course prince was suggesting a whole load of other things as well 1985 for pop but also for me rather selfishly if i can say it that way it was a pivot year you know i pivoted i changed i decided not to be part of things and to be looking elsewhere and janice was part of that a big part of that unlike say i don't know with andy kershaw for instance and is there a more horrible broadcasting family than the kershaws

but unlike andy kershaw who always gave me the impression he was into music as a way of proving something about himself rather than anything else she seemed to genuinely just be a pop fan and a music lover and and in a sea of kind of gary davis's and bruno brooks's and steve wright's um your janice longs your your Tommy Vances and your Peebles. And also everyone forgets ranking Miss P from this era as well because those shows are really, really important. Those people were godsends.

The fact that the kind of, I wouldn't exactly call it the Janice Long mindset, but the fact that all of that music specialist stuff has now been turned into the kind of entirely objectionable radio six mentality um bugs the fuck out of me but at the time yeah janice was massively important she she lit a lot of you know touch papers for me with the with the stuff that she plays it seems daft now looking back that i could be i don't know listening to the radio and a fucking song by the

blake babies comes on and it blows my mind my mind. But it was thin pickings back then and Janice gave you what little there was to be interested in that was contemporary. So I've always liked Janice. She's not shy in revealing what she likes on this episode. I mean, at some points you're often expected to just

fall over the balcony and just run on stage. But that's what's great. She sounds like a fan. Yeah. She reacts like a fan. It's good to see. Yeah. The problem I always had with Janice Long's show

is that there was always this slight lukewarm water sense about it. There was a lot of groups. Like, she would play a lot of good music, but the groups that were janice long bands right the kind of groups that you would only hear on the janice long show were the problem where they were sort of half arty and half commercial and mostly it used to mean some sort of pouting gel-haired lads in brand new posh leather jackets that they'd bought with a record company advance you know like signed to signed to a pseudo indie subsidiary of crystalis records or wea playing this sort of swirling tuneless pop rock with a gloopy digital chorus effect and reverb on the snare and like sub echo

and the bunny men singing you know it's the sort of thing that was always being tipped for the charts by people who haven't noticed the total absence of bands remotely like this from the charts for all time. And, I mean, you had bands who were born like that and that's just what they were. And then you had bands who started off as fairly interesting or at least like spirited indie bands uh with their own distinct sound who took the shilling and they were rushed into a proper studio with a proper producer

and had all their distinguishing features sanded down this used to happen a lot in the 80s when guitar music couldn't get in the charts um and yeah they were converted into fully generic Janice Long bands and they got on the Janice Long show and that was the end of that yeah never heard from them again would then Jericho be one of those I don't know I think then then Jericho were born that way I'll tell you a good example of a band who were converted into that the Bodines I used to really like the boat they did one great single and b-side and one great radio session and then it was into that smoke glass 80s studio and uh you know with a cost half the advanced producer he was just there to press the make it sound shit but uh and away they went yeah like down the dumper you, and all they got to show for it was a late 80s Gretsch 12-string

and a posh leather jacket. It was all that was left of the advance. It's like, we think our music should be heard by the largest possible audience, you know. So, yeah, 10 seconds on the chart show. Yeah, yeah. And a university tour supporting Cactus World News. Was it worth it?

That era. I mean, it's kind of, for us fans of guitar music, if I can put it in that stupid way, 87, 88 is when things start getting tremendously exciting. In 85, it was kind of, it's the that petrol emotion years, you know. So it was very much thin pickings. But you grabbed what you could. You grabbed what you could. You grabbed what you could.

The really, truly fascinating music from 85 was probably getting played by Peely much, much later. But yeah, Janice at least offered some hope. But you're right in terms of what a Janice Long band was like. They'd be unfailingly kind of, I mean, they'd be white for a start. They'd be jangly and they'd be kind of quite earnest probably lefties there was a janice long band type definitely tonight you can reign with the killing joke we've got the color field and also the smith

and also we've got to start off with Dead or Alive and you spin me round. Long awkwardly says, hi funsters, and then tells us that we can rave tonight with a list of decent bands skilfully omitting the shit ones. It's a bit like your mam telling you about the lovely trifle that's waiting for you after you've had to eat all the family pets. Bates, clearly in no-nonsense mode, grabs us by the wrist

and Irish whips us straight into the first act dead or alive with you spin me round like a record we've already covered dead or alive in chart music number 22 and this their second single on epic is the follow-up to their cover of casey and the sunshine bands that's the way i like it which got to number 22 in april of last year it's the first track from forthcoming lp youthquake and was written by burns last year as a mash-up of i wanted your love by luther van dross and see you round like a record by little now with a chord structure based on wagner's ride of the valkyries. And when he heard, Whatever I do, wherever I go, by Hazel Dean, and you think you're a man by Divine,

he demanded to be linked up with their producers, which turned out to be Stock, Aitken and Waterman. It was actually released in November of 1984, and took four weeks to get to number 49, then slipped down the lower reaches of the charts for three weeks running before clawing back upward only to slip back after getting to number 41 but it somehow managed to get to number 40 last week and this week it soared 21 places to number 19 which has warranted them a shot on top of the pops simon batesates' professionalism slightly wobbles at the beginning.

He introduces this. He says, we've got, comma, to start off with, comma, dead or alive. But, of course, it comes out the same. We've got to start off with dead or alive. Yes. Someone's twisted his arm behind his back. Yeah. Yeah.

It's the record after which Stock Aitken and Mortman could and arguably should have retired because everything they did subsequently sounds like this Formula One engine being nerfed and depowered and scaled down to fit inside a noddy car. And yes, this was the peak. And everything after this is like a foggy memory of that peak which leaves out half of what made it so glorious it's like uh it's like a tornado this record all this power in a little circular space just feeding on itself and leaving a trail

of devastation and quickly burning out which they did uh but you only need to make this record once you know this is not the first appearance of dead or alive on top of the pops they uh they're pitched up almost a year earlier looking as if they were absolutely lacerated by the early 80s stick and p burns looked like a homoerotic tour de france cyclist of the future with this fucking amazing tsunami of a hairstyle which was swept over one side like like the logical extension of phil oaky's haircut right in this one i mean this is a extraordinarily good introduction to an episode of top of the pops yeah it's like they've they've glued a load of mirrors onto a wrecking ball. Burns is really toned down here, isn't he? Yeah.

I mean, in fairness, no one can look that demonic and spellbinding when they're being filmed upwards from just under the stage, as everyone is in this era. There's endless shots of the underside of people's chins and inside of their nostrils, you know. But, yeah, he's trying. By Pete Burns' standards, this is formal wear, isn't it? Yeah.

I mean, we see him at the beginning from the rear kind of like rocking from side to side and making the flaps of his coat ripple outwards. And we see a bit of white sock peeking out. So the overall impression is Zafal Beeble-Brocks presents a tribute to Michael Jackson. Yeah. It's a fucking good look, though.

The thing is, he looks weird, but not that weird for 1985, when there was a lot of long coats and teased-out hair going around. And there's just a slight sense that he's arrived a year too late, perhaps, which is why it's important that the record sounds so up-to-date. I mean, it's obviously derived from high energy records that have been around for years but in terms of the british charts this is absolutely right now as you can tell from the fact that a diluted version of this will be the predominant sound of the next four years i mean that that's what's weird because of course all of us we think of pete burns as as

kind of fundamentally a freak in a lot of ways but actually these performances I mean he doesn't do anything in this performance that I don't know seems a feat of acrobatics or dancing it's just kind of pure persona even that thing he always did of shoving his hands in his pockets and making his jacket look like bat wings was something that kind of kids could do in a sense but I think it might have been overstated really that he was a kind of last gasp for the freaks he's not a freak really in this performance he's a good looking bloke at this point in fairly good clothes the real freaks of pop when you think about like i don't know somebody like ian jewelry appearing on top of the pops yeah that's a strange thing this isn't as jarringly strange as that, you know.

But I don't think I liked this record at the time. I love it now. I don't think I liked it at the time as a sonic thing because I kind of didn't know where it came from from the start off. And what I didn't appreciate as a snotty little cunt was how lack of restraint can be an art form and how making something almost deliberately trashy can be an achievement in itself.

But now I love it because what it is what it comes across even watching this performance it comes across like a 60s psych single but produced on state-of-the-art shit but it's all that stuff that trevor horn had and all that stuff that martin russian had but it's been given to these blokes on brew 11 and speed and and and it's this it's one of those songs it's kind of like it's you know if you were describing a song to somebody else you might la la it to them this is one of those songs where it can only be described in dun duns it goes dun dun dun the whole song is like that so no doubts static and walkman you know they knew patrick cowley and they knew high energy music. And I like to think that Pete Waterman as a DJ from the 60s knew his 60s R&B as psych as well.

And that has that feel. But I think Taylor's spot on in as much as I wouldn't actually say this is a high point for Stuttgart and Waterman. I would say that's probably Mellencamp in 87. But they were always on a trajectory, Stuttgart and trajectory start economic towards basically maximum cheapness and formulaicness that to them is progress so these first few years of productions until 87 and melancholy those are the only times in which they're still finding their method but also they're running up against personas and people who problematize their kind of essentially anodyne plan of what they want to do.

This record would never have worked without Pete Burns. And Pete Burns' shtick, which to his credit, he manages to spin out in a recording and musical sense for a while, would have had no substance without this record. It's one of those accidental flare-ups that happen. And pretty soon, when Scott Aitken and Waterman realized that, I don't know, soap actors are way more pliant than pop stars such a record wouldn't happen again but it is one of their one of their high points and and it it it's one of their first productions but even though it's kind of a first flowering of their ideas you can hear all kinds of start can a waterman motifs that have

come to dominate so you have the co-option of gay music for a straight market you have this kind of anti-minimalism there's no space in this record it's just jam-packed it's full of texture a lot of it horrible but it's like all the settings are at maximum um modernity and there's no space really in it there's no dubbiness there's no silence um so i think the major focus for state can awardman at this point wasn't really making records with feel or ambience in a sense it was just about adhesiveness it was just about getting stuff velcroed to your head and no tactic was beneath them really if they wanted to make something stick in your consciousness so even though i ended up finding a lot of Stott Aitken and Waterman textures

pretty horrible, and especially towards the late 80s, this is, yeah, that brief accidental flare-up where their sound hit a persona that made for a really, really interesting record. Yeah, I think you're right as well about their mentality. It's weird. In the mid-80ss there were a lot of people trying to do that Andy Warhol

thing right like into the velvets or whatever and it's like yeah it's like but they didn't realise that the most Warholian people in pop at the time were probably Stock Aitken and Waterman where it was just about industry and production and just keeping things just work

keeping things going and that was the art in itself and the more the same those records sounded the better they liked it um yeah and just you just keep going and keep going and keep going and i love how they've got no qualms whatsoever about always doing the cheapest and most obvious thing right like if you need a fill before the next verse they just put in an electronic noise that goes like just to charge you up um and it's totally brutal and it works it's like how today the one of the most popular sports in the world is just two really hard people having a fight just cuts out the middleman and all that messing around with a ball and stuff.

And it's like this record. The other thing that this record has in common with UFC is that no fully developed human being could survive on this alone. But for as long as it's happening, everything else just seems like clutter and distraction. It's a really self-consciously inhuman record in a good way. Like if you remove the random aspect of most music, right, like the unpredictable movement of nature

within the sound of a guitar or a violin or acoustic drums, right, which is the element that creates the old-fashioned excitement in rock or funk, but also the feeling of vulnerability and loss of control. And even a lot of electronic music tries to replicate that. Whereas here it's just replaced with this meticulously designed grid of electronic spikes which correspond to predetermined musical pressure points. And it's like you end up with this infallible

record it's indestructible yeah i mean all all of the sounds you could have heard sounds like this coming from your trevor horns and your martin russians but but this this is like all of that stuff has found its way back into the hands of a kind of chin and chapman type setup where it's ultimately cheese mongers um and they're making great great cheese and all the subtle i don't know complexity of the performances of somebody like your martin fries and billy mckenzie's they're suddenly just overwhelmed by the old cliche just having a big flamboyant nutter at the front um now if this record had pointed somewhere it might be considered differently but i don't think it really did point anywhere it might it might have pointed somewhere for starting a walkman's production

but in a sense it's not even a big fuck you to new pop or or a setting up of something new because it doesn't really lead anywhere there weren't really many more records like this in terms of the way it was written um it's a one-off it's a glorious glorious one-off and it doesn't feel like the end of something or the start of something it's just here it is you're gonna buy this and it's gonna stick in your head for the rest of your life um and so it proved yeah just like you Neil at the time I really didn't like this song because I just saw it as tiny music yeah this is a point where high energy becomes music for Gary and Sharon instead of Gary and Barry? Well, the split, I mean,

Star Akin and Warman open up that big cultural division of music fans towards the tail of the 80s that we've already seen in the bits that you've read out from NME and stuff. That split between real and fake townie music, I guess. And although spiritually and politically I'll always err on the side of fake music rather than real music

Star 8 can end up testing that kind of poptimism to its limit because by the end of the 80s nearly everything they're involved with is pretty awful this record still sounds fucking amazing on AM radio so it's different from their other output in that sense

I mean Pete Burns he has calmed down a lot since his last appearance on Top of the Pops. I think that's simply because he knows that the fucking song's going to take them wherever they want to go. He doesn't have to dress it up. Yeah, and it's a good move to tone down the gothiness as well.

Because I think the only weak point, or the weakest point on this record, is that audible hangover from them being a kind of early golf band that do me sort of dark opera acting it works as a counterpoint but i don't know in a way i think this record would be even better without that sort of you know just as a pure white out make-believe future you know just lacking totally in any kind of humanity that is not sexual or violent i don't know i just think it's a little bit just a little bit weighed down by that gothic boom in the that's a dracula i want to bite your finger is i mean yeah i'd have liked it colder and sharper and nastier.

Oh, and without the rest of the band, who are obviously not miming to anything they actually played and look like they should be providing musical backup for an open mic talent contest in Batley. Or coffee and cream, live every night in the Prince's Ballroom. Kids, welcome to Half Past Eight. A selection of sounds to suit every taste. According to Simon Price of the Barry News,

Pete Burns is this year's lovable bisexual. But he was already seen as the Princess Margaret to Boy George's Queen Elizabeth, wasn't he? Right, yeah. Which was a bit unfair on both of them, I reckon. And one thing here that I was quite struck by was he's not looking down the barrel of the camera, is he? No, no, he doesn't break any fourth wall, no.

No. He's kind of performing to the crowd, to be fair. Yes, he is, yeah. You know, without the need for a mic. I don't think he actually has a mic, does he? You'd expect him to look down the camera, especially when he does the finger-waggy bit, when when he says you look like a lot of fun yeah or he could have turned around and looked at simon bates yes but hey the kids seem to like it don't they the flags

and the party hats are still in full effect on top of the pops they are they're wearing those plastic boaters with the red and white stripes that make it look like a dartboard and uh yeah kids are getting down well are they getting down now i mean what they're doing what they do throughout the episode which is clap and blow whistles and stuff um they're still in the hurl era they're still yeah there's not enough audience and what what we do see so far anyway we do get to see more of them later, but what we see so far is just to add to a general sense of boisterousness. So the following week, You Spin Me Round leapt 14 places to number five,

and two weeks after that, after being out for 17 weeks, it ripped this week's number one off the summit of mount pop and stood there proudly for two weeks before giving way to easy lover by philip bailey the follow-up lover come back to me got to number 11 in april of this year and they'd have two more chart hits in 1985 but by this time it transpired that an estimated 72% of its sales was off the 12-inch version at a time when record labels considered 12-inches as promotional material and bands and artists were not paid royalties on them.

Oh. You know what I mean? I didn't know that. That's fucking outrageous, isn't it? When I bought Paul Harcastle's 19 on 12-inch, he got no money from that. Well, I'm guessing it depended on what label he was on, but apparently it was standard practice in the early 80s

that you were on either a reduced rate for your 12-inch singles or, in the case of Epic, Dead or Alive's label, you got no royalties at all on it. So when I bought Take It Away by Paul McCartney on 12-inch that money wasn't even going to Paul. He could have bought a donkey for his farm or something like that with it, Taylor, but no. That animal idiot.

But after threatening to take the label to court they relented and the band and everyone else on epic were paid off good old pete burns but that's amazing isn't it i suppose that we've seen his promotional items in as much as they'd be circulated to djs and stuff and be played out because they're extended mixes and stuff so but i don't know that's mad because i mean you know by this time if the style council got a single out like a good lad i'd go out and I'd buy the 7-inch and the 12-inch. Yeah. That's what you did.

I wanted to hear extended mixes anyway. And bonus tracks. I bought, Ray, I think it was, yeah, Talking Edge Road to Nowhere. I think I bought that in 85. It was definitely a year where I started buying 12s because of the extended mix. I'm appalled that all of that money I spent, all of those pennies, never found its way to the artist. This can't be true. Are you sure this is true?

All right, here's a quote from Pete Burns himself from the book Europe Stars of 80s Dance Pop, compiled by James Arena. One thing that came out of that period was that we changed something huge in the music industry. Back then, artists didn't receive any royalties whatsoever on 12-inch record sales. These records were seen as promotional tools. The people who did the chart thing kept holding it back because they couldn't believe how many 12-inch singles it was selling. It depends what you think a lot of money is, but I think we lost a lot as a result of our arrangement with the label.

In my estimation, we lost maybe three quarters of result of our arrangement with the label. In my estimation we lost maybe three quarters of a million pounds in royalties. We told the record company we were taking them to court for non-payment of royalties and that we were going to leave the label. The record company didn't want to lose us, agreed to pay the settlement and royalties on our 12-inch record sales because there was no way any judge was going to look at 72% of our sales and agree with the label that it was acceptable. After we received the sacrament, I just basically let it out whenever I could because I thought the label's protocol in regard to 12-inch singles was wrong. Gradually, other people on the label like Paul Young, Alison Moyet, Sade and others started getting royalties on 12-inch records.

They don't know that I made it happen, but I did. So there you go. Paul Young got a whole new wardrobe of leather box jackets and flecky grey suits, all down to Pete Burns. Well, kudos to Pete Burns. I'm Tilly Steele and I'm Helen Monk and this is Bitchin' I'm dyslexic

yeah why do you read the Wikipedia page? It's good to practice. A podcast where every week we talk about a different person. So how old was he when he first popped on the scene? That's a great question. If you say he was my age, I'm gonna fucking die. And we veer wildly off track. Pop that Prosec.

Available on all your podcast apps. That's not right. Can you not say er in the advert? Available on all your podcast platforms. Just search Bitchin' or Great Big Owl. We'll see you there. That was all right. This is the first radio ad you can smell.

The new Cinnabon Pull Apart, only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey, and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. That's Pete Burns and Dead or Alive. I'm delighted about that actually getting into the chance after three months on release it should spin me around here's a song dedicated to Marvin Gaye and Jackie Wilson it's the Commodores Night Shift

he was a friend of mine and he could sing my song His heart in every line Bait on his own tells how he's been waiting three months for Dead or Alive to ravish the charts before pivoting towards the video of the next single Night Shift by the Commodores. Formed in Tuskegee University Alabama in 1968 from the ashes of two student groups the Mystics and the Jays the Commodores were immediately signed to Atlantic

Records for one LP. After signing to Motown in 1972 and being installed as a support act for Jackson 5 tours their first single on the new label Machine Gun got to number 20 in the UK chart for three weeks in October of 1974. But thanks to the influence of lead singer Lionel Richie they moved away from funk towards a more easy listening style, which paid off in 1978 when Easy got to number nine in August of 1977 and three times a lady got to number one for five weeks in the late summer of 1978. After racking up nine more top 40 hits in the UK, Lionel Richie left the band to embark on a solo career in 1982, leaving the band to fend for themselves. This single, a tribute to Marvin Gaye and Jackie

Wilson who both died last year, is the follow-up to Only You, which got to number 93 in October of 1983. It's currently at number 49 over in America but over here it's nipped up two places from number 19 to number 17 and here's the video. One word gentlemen Lick and Pickeridge. Lick and Pickery

I believe. Is it? Well the IJ in Dutch is a Y sound. Yeah but Lick and and pickery sounds better. I don't know, lick and pickery rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? God, I'm torn now. Bates, he points out what the song's all about. It's a tribute to Marvin Gaye and Jackie Wilson.

No love for Eric Morecambe, Diana Dawes, Leonard Rossiter or Tommy Cooper, who also died in 1984 I note. They're just trying to censor history. Terrible. I mean this is the first of a torrent of videos we're going to see tonight and a great many of them are going to feature the finest

exponents of the visual arts deploying high concept iconography but probably wisely in the case of the Commodoresores they've gone here for expensively shot but bog standard on stage performance with lots of dry ice yeah yeah it's just a simple performance video but it's i mean it's still fitted out with all the accoutrements that a modern band had in 1985 so it's mainly keyboards those lovely headless basses that always look so good and uh keytars as well yes um so i mean look the commodores in this video maintain their dignity um which is crucial because the song

isn't really very dignified there's something there's something about night shift in it that's undignified and i recognize this even as a 12-year-old, they had clearly noticed that Lionel Richie had had massive hits with this kind of, what could we call it, sort of world soul music, I guess you could call it. So it's got these kind of afro elements in it. The beat doesn't quite roll. It's not funky. It has this kind of afro pop step.

And the guitar is this kind of pointillist, bundoo boy style thing. I should have done that in my Andy Kershaw accent. But, you know, it creates that same kind of lambent pleasantness of something off Graceland

from the following year. So, I mean, really, this is a Lionel Richie record without him on it. Yes. But what this has, though, that I would argue actually makes it better

than Lionel's solo hits. I mean, I just really like this song. I really like the melody i love that big fretless bass sound that cuts through everything yeah that pino palandino thing that's that's the thing i i just think um i really like this song and i mean of course in 85 it's got this weird kind of resonance because the whole pushing of old soul you know this is peak let's buy some kent stop dancing comps uh time and and you know the song is in a sense a response not just to the passing of marvin gaye and jackie wilson but also to the supposed kind of soullessness of modern pop we are in the cronenberg different kind of strength era here yes um and lyrically

you know this song gives listeners that kind of smug pleasure of knowing who they're on about you know when they're mentioning marvin and jackie um yeah which i mean at the time i you know jackie wilson wasn't that high in our cognizance because higher and higher no it only became a hit again i think in 87 so um yeah i mean i remember at the time not really knowing who that was about but but you know at this point it it's it it's not exactly a contradictory thing to do hip-hop is is giving the world a means of black expression that actually prides itself on its coldness and its lack of warmth and r&b by then was kind of trapped between um being just pop music and being quite

retrograde it'd take probably jam and lewis and control by janet jackson to move things on so in 1985 this record does look retrograde a little bit um and by 1986 with jam and lewis and everything else it would have looked as dated and pointless as things like the christians or danny wilson um it's this weird thing it's kind of it's this it's this modern sounding song i guess about an old soul figure it's kind of like gino but it's telling actually that dexy's covered this late on um in the noughties but um i've always loved this i've always loved this um this song there's there's just something about it it's it it lifts you and and it the melody melody's beautiful and I felt that as a kid

I did feel at the time, is Lionel Richie on this or not because it sounded so much like one of his records but I would argue it's probably better than All Night Long and Dancing on the Ceiling and all that I think it's a better record. I mean there's always been a tradition in black music to recognise the fallen so

this is no Danny Mirror shit is it? No but at the same time you can't escape that licking pickery as i believe it's known in the netherlands um you do you know what i mean it does get in the way a little bit i like this record i don't think this record is possible to actively dislike um because there's nothing to dislike about it but at the same time there's a part of me that thinks they're deserving of the gravest insult which is that this cringing deification of dead soul singers is almost like it could have been written by a not very soulful white British band with a saxophone player in 501s.

You know what I mean? It's just right on the edge. And the only reason they rise above that is the actual quality of the singing and the quality of the song. But it's, I don't know, that strange quasi-religious sort of Lion King element to the remembrance of dead soul singers. You know what I mean? Very much so, yeah. As you say, there was really a lot of that around in the mid-80s.

It's like 80s acts paying tribute to their influences always seems a bit weird anyway for some reason. always seems a bit weird anyway for some reason although this doesn't have that element of self mortification which you'd get of uh bad records which which deified dead soul singers right where there was always that you know these guys were more natural and pure and dignified than we could ever be you know i mean that creepy stuff yeah doesn't you don't get that here and they're obviously sincere but it's just that because it was the period where like cringing nostalgia became endemic um it sort of almost infects this record because it was always reductive and it always seemed to end up with complex or subtle things being blanded out and simplified to the point where they could fit into advertising or at least to the point where they themselves could be more easily sold sold it was

like um it was like what happened to john lennon in the 80s you know where all the complexities were ironed out like good stuff and bad and bob marley yeah yeah but with soul singers and jazz musicians or more precisely with jazz it wasn't even jazz musicians it was just the generic figure of the jazz musician the man with a horn you know it just got more egregious when you perceived it as being part of or adjacent to yuppie culture, you know, and this isn't that, but because it's from 1985, it felt like it was in uncomfortably close proximity.

I think the two clunkiest moments of the song are when they actually refer to lyrics in a sense that the line, you know, talk to me so you can see what's going on. That's really clunky and awful. And later on when it, when they talk about, um,

Jackie lifting us higher and higher, those are the two kind of worst moments of the record. Yeah. Well, there's one even worse than that. It goes on about when we were working out. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which was, you know, it's a reference to baby workout, but it, you know,

it sounds like they used to go to the gym, which would have been odd because he'd been in a coma for about 10 years yeah yeah but as a love letter i mean i know it's about um marvin and jackie but really what this song summons to me is radio it's about the magic of radio it's about it's about that feel that nighttime feel of radio keeping you company um and and that's what's moving about this record, rather than the more sort of obvious clunky references to lyrics and stuff. Yeah, you know, Calling Heaven, which I suppose they're doing, the night shift, that's a bit disturbing.

Because I was working a bit of a night shift at the time at the co-op in Bulwul, you know, stacking shelves and lobbing out-of-date blocks of lard into a skip. It's like, oh, is that what I've got waiting for me if I live a good life? Well, fuck that. I mean, this is quite an achievement for the Commodores, isn't it? Because they are essentially a band of Kens

who've lost the one person that everyone knows. And having a big hit after all that's happened, that's a fucking amazing achievement yeah i mean other bands have done that but you could sort of even previous to that happening you could detect the other musical talents in the band or they push themselves to the front a little bit so when fleet would matt carry on having hits or the supremes carry on having hits etc you kind of expect that but um with the commodores definitely was all about lionel our consciousness of the commodores was definitely all about Lionel.

So after he went, that is a real achievement. Although, did they have many hits after this? Not really, no. Maybe they were just waiting for other people to die. Add an extra verse on. Would have been amazing if Lionel Richard died. What would they sing about him? Lionel, you left us in the shit.

I'd have bought that. Yeah. They were getting outsold by the ZX Spectrum. No, I'm not going to. No, no, no, no. Just cut that out. I can't believe I said that. So the following week, Night Shift jumped eight places to number nine.

And two weeks later, it got all the way to number three, its highest position. A month later, it also got to number three in America because their charts are dead slow, as we'll discover later. The follow-up, Animal Instinct, only got to number 74 in May of this year, and they were soon dropped by Motown, but Night Shift won a Grammy for best R&B performance by a duo

or group with vocals. And although they never troubled the UK chart again, they are going to this very day. And in 2010, they put out a new version of Night Shift in tribute to Michael Jackson. I bet that has an age, well... Yeah. I bet you don't mind

It's gonna be a long night It's gonna be alright Night shift It was a night shift. Watch out for a really good album. It's due out in April. It's called Virgins and Philistines. It's got this on it.

The colour field, thinking of you. I guess I kind of sort of know I ought to be thinking of you But a friendship's built on trust And that's something you never do. Long, on her own with the Top of the Pops logo on a video screen and some pink and green neon circles in the background, tells us to watch out for a really great album that's coming out next month.

I Love a Party by Russ Abbott, available on KTL Records, with an advert voiced over by Simon Bates no it's actually Virgins and Philistines who sound like the sort of people who would buy a Russ Abbott LP in 1985 and here's the first single

from it, it's the Colourfield and Thinking of You formed in Coventry in 1983 the color field originally consisted of terry hall who had just split up fun boy 3 and toby lions formerly of two-tone band the swinging cats who played keyboards on the fun boy 3's one and only american tour after recruiting carl shell also of the Cats, they relocated to Stockport, mainly so Hall could go and see Man United home games, and named their new group after a 1960s art movement where the protagonists would paint a canvas one colour only. After signing to Chrysalis

Records their debut single, The Colour Field, just missed out on the top 40 getting to number 43 in January of 1984. And their next single Take only got to number 70 in April of that year. This is the follow up assisted by the singer Katrina Phillips which entered the top 42 weeks ago and this week it's nudged up four places from number 17 to number 13 the colour field chaps or terry hall at least uh was interviewed in the latest issue of smash it's and uh he spent his time coating down his previous bands the specials were quote supposed to be at the head of a new scar movement but it was only jerry dammers who was into scar i thought it was crap it's incredible that the specials reputation has lasted so long i still get checks for the first album and you can still buy special ties in

carnaby street as for the fun boy three he said I felt I had to look like a complete idiot in order to sell records we were basically such a crap group just because we were in a band together people thought we were long standing friends or something I didn't really know them very well then and I don't know

them now I felt I was in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people and I think the main problem was that we were into different music. They liked Billy Ocean and I didn't. I think by this point, I mean, record companies don't really know what to do with Terry for quite a bit of his career. So the colour field is this kind of, I don't know, it's his last mooring post before he just starts being seen as a problem, really. In a few years from now, his record company are going to, sorry, from 85, his record company are going to try getting him to work with Beverly Craven and stuff.

And even the Colorfield themselves are strangely unmarketable in a way. Although this song is very marketable because it's fucking fantastic i love this song and i've been singing it all week um it's a song guaranteed to appeal in the general shit fest of 85 because it instantly sounded old-fashioned in a good way yes you know you know there's like old-fashioned in a bad way like um tears for fear sowing the seeds of love for instance this is old-fashioned in a good way and i think it's old-fashioned in a good way because where i say that tears of fears record you could say oh yeah spirit of 67 or whatever this is a kind of non-specific nostalgia yeah definitely a bit of a 60s thing but also a bit of a 70s singer songwriter type thing as well yeah and they're looking back not really to reintroduce

a feel or or raunchiness or a look or anything but it's more to introduce a kind of freedom in the songwriting i think so they're not attitudinally dark songs they're just shifty and the album that you mentioned by the way is fucking fantastic the album that this is from um and and that that the thing is the sound is shorn of that kind of big 80sness that we're hearing everywhere else in the in the episode yeah um Virgins and Philistines, it was a real revelation when I heard it in 85 because, you know, there's a Roaches cover on that. There's a cover of the Hammond song by Roaches and things like that on it. It's a strangely unmarketable band.

But the first band, really, in which Terry, I would argue, is Terry sings in a way. Yes. He actually flexes his voice beyond his face. You know what I mean? It's not just an expression of his moroseness. He's cursed, or blessed rather, with this face that's just instant deadpan.

And it curls into a smile a little bit for Funboy 3. But here, with Colourfield, you just feel it's more natural. And he can sing in a grown-up way that he hasn't before. This is pretty much his style council period, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. Oh, I do what I want now. Yeah, definitely.

I mean, I really dislike the Fun Boy 3. And I didn't like this at the time, simply because it wasn't the specials. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, I was surprised by that Smash Hits interview. Yeah. About how disparaging he was. I'm not surprised about what he said about the specials

because him and Jerry were always banging heads. But I was really startled by him just basically saying the Fun Boy 3 were a crap group. Yeah. You know.

Well, it's in his nature though, isn't it? It is in his nature. And his nature comes across, I think, in his performance quite a lot. He doesn't bring anything or any attitude to this he's been kind

of prized out of his stockport home where he readily admits he just spends his life watching telly and going to see manu yeah and he he's been taken to top of the pops he's an old hand hence he smirks a little bit but i don't need any of that kind of blank faced hostility here no it's more this kind of just this happy introversion and i i really like this song, always liked this song from the first moment I heard it. And I know it was a big Janice Long fave. I seem to recall her playing it quite a lot. So I would encourage people, if the fans of the specials,

fans of Terry Hall in general, and they've not properly investigated the colour field, they should seek out that album, Virgins and Philistines. I think it's really good. You get the feeling he's found his comfort zone here, because the first single, the first single, The Colour Field, it's very Terry and the Bunnymen, isn't it?

Or the Bun Boy 3, if you will. But you know what? What was influencing them, I think? It wasn't even the more outre kind of bits of 60s and 70s stuff. It was more like Andy Williams,iams you know an easy listening so this is this is very radio 2 pebbermill at one wouldn't be out of place there would it yeah very much so and i think you can i'm not saying you can draw a line from more specials to this because more specials is kind of a quite a fractured take on that easy listening thing but it's the same

kind of focus that that desire not to do anything cool in a sense yeah but just to do something yeah different and and and that that has that kind of that 60s hopefulness but also that 70s kind of forlornness to it as well so it's that non-specific nostalgia about it that i really like yeah it's got the same mentality as the style council in that it's sort of perverse but not for the sake of it. And, I mean, you know, let's not get carried away and call this a brave move because brave is getting an erection,

balancing a sugar lump on it and sliding it through the fence into a field with a horse in it. This is just a song. But it is escapology. I've not seen the video. But it's, yeah, it's escapology. And it's very sort of au courant in its embrace of the cardi-wearing anti-macho thing, right,

which was just picking up speed at the time. And it's more honest in that than something like The Smiths where the self-deprecation is fooling nobody. The shyness is always tugging at your sleeve to make sure that you notice it. I'd love to know what Terry Hall thought of Morrissey at this time. I'm sure he said somewhere, if you hunt it down. I mean, he was not shy of sharing his thoughts on such things but it's this really and truly is genuinely a nice cup of tea of a record you know what i mean which felt

constructive and appropriate in 1985 um although musically it's actually a bit behind the times because that thing of post-punk people playing jazz chords or, you know, sixths and major sevenths on a huge hollow body guitar and allowing in the influence of like supper club music or, you know, middle of the road or whatever. That was kind of done by 1985. Like Aztec Camera and Weekend and everything but the girl and all these people have been doing it for a few years like since 82 or 83 which in 80s pop terms is a really long time ago but

it doesn't really matter and it especially doesn't matter now because you know years after the fact like if you especially if you don't have that critic's responsibility to discourage cultural stagnation. It doesn't matter where a record fits in. You play it and it either sounds good or it doesn't, and I think this one does. But, yeah, the main feeling you get, obviously, is that this record has to be like this because it's so far from the specials and Fun Boy 3.

And it's not that it's insincere, it's just that there were probably several roads that Terry could have taken at this point, and it's at least possible that he chose this one with a certain perverse glee. And frankly, I approve, because I'm always sympathetic to that impulse, at the very least.

And I completely understand why going with it is sometimes uh necessary and medicinal you know what i mean i mean he's invented the beautiful south here hasn't he oh that's that's a harsh charge i hear that a lot and and it's aggravating in a sense that he ends up working with people like ian broody and and lightning seeds and all those people i kind of i resent terry's co-option by the brit pop brigade a little bit um because his voice isn't quite like any of those people there's that there's something about terry's voice that it i'm gonna stop before i i just start chanting play up sky blues or something this is getting dangerously close to this getting dangerously close to civic pride but um there's a resignation to terry's voice i don't i don't know how else to

put it here has by this point there taylor's right there are all kinds of different things he could have done it's miraculous that he chose perhaps the only one that had any dignity um and and and that's you know just retreating he's not fussed about going to parties being a pop star anymore i don't know what he's fussed about i guess he's fussed about man you yeah and perverse as he is he's moved to the one part of the greater manchester region where everyone supports man city yeah yeah but i mean you know i i really don't think he's fussed about going to parties or being part of pop i think he still likes music enjoys music and wants to make music but he's bereft of ambition at this point in terms of bit pushing himself as a pop star and that's why his record

company has successively just can't figure out what the fuck to do with him and i still don't really until the specials reconvened i don't think they ever really figured out what to do with terry no i mean i think the best thing he did after this album was that tricky record that he was on yeah where it just fits into it perfectly this really spooky depressed scary sounding record with this sort of tiny voice on it yeah i was really into this record at the time. I remember liking it a lot. And I appreciated the mild, gentle feel to it because I was 12 and I had no interest in the kind of manliness that makes you seem manly in a class of 12-year-olds. And for a couple of years in my early teens, I got quite into that whole sort of Cardi lad,

you know, Penguin classics, don't drink or smoke, swooning weakling thing hence the girl trouble i partly i think because i've moved down south to a place where that was tolerated um you know like in kiddo ministry if you don't fit in you just wear black and get a piercing and you hang around in the town center drinking cider but you know in the town centre drinking cider. But, you know, in the south, as a teen, you could at least get away with pretending that you weren't a ragged mess of surging hormones that suppressed rage. And, in fact, you wanted nothing more than to sit down quietly

and read your book like a 60-year-old northern bachelor maybe brought up to be a florist. And it wasn't really me, but it was useful in the 80s just like it's useful for these people you know but yeah it's still at the sounds associated with it up until about this time up until about this point i'd have recoiled from the radio two-ness of this right those that those because those sort of chords and this sort of arrangement it wasn't about what they actually sounded like it was about the associations which was sunday afternoon you know it was that that that sort of dead space in your week you know that was what it so and you know elderly relatives and all of that sort of stuff and the only thing

worse than the sound of sunday afternoons was the sound of Sunday evenings, which was the dolorous brass at the end of open all hours. Yeah. Like the last post for your weekend. You remember how depressing it was on a Sunday evening, like when the closing theme of That's Life would kick in. Yes. And it was like, you know, one last amusing local paper misprint. Yeah, the weekend ends here.

Yeah. It's like, oh, yeah, okay, right. we've all had a good chuckle at this sign that says the pubic swimming pool yes and uh yeah and now it's this is yeah it's the last knockings it's a sheer misery you just have to sit there you've got your pajamas on like so separated from the freedom of adulthood by your dress with a glass of milk. You sat there with that awful brass band jazz theme and you sat there watching a shit, jerkily scrolling cartoon with Letraset on it. You know what I mean? That's death. But by 1985, those associations were easing right and those audio visual symbols

of the british sunday lost their power to instantly make everything seem dismal and it became possible to sift through that and pick out stuff you could actually use and maybe discover some you really liked because all of a sudden as the 80s as britain started changing in the 80s that old stuff was no longer the establishment it didn't it wasn't the sound of the establishment it was an antidote to the new establishment this new thought world of money and yeah chrome and glass and aerobics you know it, we were short of options. Yeah, I mean, uniquely in this episode, this song, it sounds intimate. It's the size of your living room, this record.

You know, it's the size of your lounge. Everything else in this episode wants to sound like it can fill a stadium or at least fill up a super club or whatever. This is living room sized. It's intimate. And that makes it completely unique. I mean, not to jump the gun, but for me, this is by far the highlight of intimate and and that makes it completely unique i mean not to jump

the gun but for me this is by far the highlight of the episode really love this song don't know what the kids make of it because by this point they're just a murky shape aren't they kind of like rocking from side to side then you know there might as well be rows of cutouts being moved left and right by the floor crew like like the waves in captain pug wash they are into it because it's catchy as fuck i mean it is you you have probably been singing this all week al i should imagine i have yes i'm the kind of person that hasn't anything to lose now there is an audience member on a gantry uh clapping gently along in a plastic hat shaped like a world war one helmet but with this vacant look you know like they've like they've got shell shock or as i call

it unpatriotic cowardice but i think yeah i think a lot of them don't quite know what to make of it no so the following week thinking of You stayed at number 13, but the week after that it nipped up one place to number 12, its highest position. However, the follow-up castles in the air would only get to number 51 and they never troubled the top 40 again. And after Shale left in 1986 and Lions walked out midway through the recording of their third LP in 1987,

forcing Hall to recruit Raquel Welsh's backing band to finish it off, the colour field were wound down. I'm thinking of you Thinking of you Thinking of you Thinking of you Well, colour me peach and black, colour me taken aback. This episode's got off to an absolute flyer, so we're going to leave it there, and we're going to come back to the next part tomorrow.

So, on behalf of Neil Kulkarni and taylor parks this is how needham stay pop crazed