Chart Music: the Top Of The Pops Podcast - Chart Music #52 (Part 4): February 14th 1985 – British People React To REO Speedwagon

Episode Date: August 8, 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.

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. My mate bought a toaster. We go through celebrities' Amazon purchase histories, so you don't have to keep calm and love love Dom Jolly novelty key ring and fridge magnets. Yeah, I love that. The G-spot. The good vibrations, guys.

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.

That's My Mate Bought a Toaster from Great Big Owl. 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. do you know what this is um music sharp music Hey up you pop-crazy youngsters

and welcome to the final part of Chop Music episode 52. I'm your host Al Needham alongside my dear dear friends Neil Kulkarni and Taylor Poggs. Before we plunge in to the final bit, just want to remind you, if you want the full episode in one go with no adverts, just by lobbing a few Minji dollars every month to patreon.com slash chartmusic

will guarantee you the full episode fresh out the box. Anyway, sermon over at last. Let's rejoin the episode in progress. Let's do this. Till the day the night's done That's a lot of blood and killing jokes. Right, what we'll do now is look at those singles that can be called Top 40 Breakers because they're the ones to watch for next week on Top of the Pops.

Here, for example, Bill Sharp of Shack Attack and Gary Newman. They've got together out of the discos and into the charts with Change Your Mind. Change your mind. No, I'm never playing again. Change your mind. We're immediately whipped into a feature on Top of the Pops which was introduced only last month, the Breakers section. And first up is Change Your Mind by Sharp and Newman.

Hello, Newman. Formed in London in 1984, Sharp and Newman came into being when Bill Sharp, last seen on Sharp Music sticking his red shiny arse out at us while in his regular job as a keyboard player in Shack Attack, was fooling around with this very song in the studio and feeling it needed a steely detached vocal, his words. At that very moment, according to the bits section of smash hits in walk the person who would book the studio next door that very day the noom he was more than happy to throw his voice

down a mic and they decided to team up this is their first single together it entered the charts last week at number 43 and this week it soared 15 places to number 28 making it this week's highest new entry in the top 40 we haven't got depeche mode we haven't got madonna but here's the new again what's interesting here is the supposed contrast between these two right it's supposed to be like wow why is this you know the faceless bloke from Smoothie Shack Attack teamed up with whiny emo robot Gary Newman? Yeah. When in fact, they're two sides of the same shiny 80s coin. Yes.

I mean, in that they're two faces of the early to mid 80s home counties who wouldn't have done what they did the way they did it if they'd been from anywhere else in the country you know if these if either of these acts are from leeds or plymouth or newcastle or cardiff they they're significantly different even if they're playing essentially the same kind of music so it's sort of meant to be a startling contrast uh and you know the record is sort of audibly formed from two separate streams uh but they make sense in the same geographical historical context it's not like you know suicide featuring dana although how awesome would that be um it is nice and nice of Newman to let Sharp take top billing but I think I think Gary knows it's his name that draws the eye with this and that the minimal chart

success it gets is obviously going to be purely down to numenoids I don't think loads of Shaq attack fans I mean I don't think there were loads of Shaq attack fans but I don't think they were being you know bought over for this one um The video is almost, it's like an algorithmically created simulation of 80s pop videos. There's, you know, face appears on screen, check. You know, robotics to indicate modernity, check. Statue to indicate a person's confinement, check. Fax machine and IBM computer to indicate modernity, check. And faint look of bemusement on musician at technology.

Check. It's all there. Why has he got a fax machine, though? I've no idea. I've no idea. Waiting for the new menu from the sandwich shop or something. It is strange. It is strange.

I mean, maybe it's not a fax machine. Perhaps it's a vidi printer or something like that. It could be. But, you know, I mean... Borrowed from Grandstand for the day. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Spam Ra 3, Queen of the South. But Sharp, I mean, he's kind of vaguely normal in this video.

Newman, you see, previously his whited-out look kind of fitted, I guess. But in this video, in combination with the bow tie, the white face, he just ends up looking like a sort of mime artist cum waiter a la Billy Crystal and Spinal Tap. Yes. You know. So I do remember this record, though. It's probably the last Newman record I remember.

And I recall even in 85, it seemed weird that he was still around doing his newman thing while sharp concocts a very sort of um electro ish groove way more modern than presumably he was allowed to do in shack um but once you scratch the surface it's actually a pretty horrible record because it's all made on the as i think sharp admitted later it's all made on the yamaha dx7 well i've actually had to sack people from bantam in because they play that instrument it can only pretty much make horrible sounds and that's kind of what's going on here yeah i was in a band with someone who had one of those ones but luckily he only ever left it on the setting uh elect organ one right it seemed a bit of a waste of 350 quid,

but there you go. See, the problem with this video, for me, apart from that Newman head sculpture, which appears, which is like Lionel Richie's, but made more quickly. You've got Bill Sharp in a plain suit, sort of doing nothing much.

And then, yeah, Newman's throwing shapes all in white with his pale face makeup. And it just looks like if there was a Zanussi advert with Rundle and Hopkirk deceased. Yes. I met Kenneth Cope's son once. Have I ever told this story on air? I met Kenneth Cope's son once. Have I ever told this story on air? Kenneth Cope at Ruddland-Upcock deceased.

His son was in a band or something, and he was hanging around the pub by Melody Maker. Somebody introduced me to him. He said, oh, it's Kenneth Cope's son. I was like, oh, hello. And someone said to him, sorry, is your dad still alive? I can't remember. He said, oh, yeah, yeah, no, he's still alive. He says, it's the other bloke, Mike Pratt.

He died a few years ago. I said, oh, yeah, yeah, no, he's still alive. He says, it's the other bloke, Mike Pratt. He died a few years ago. And I said, oh, yeah. And there's a pause. And he says, so really, it should be Randall deceased and hot. Anything else to say about this? Yeah, I have to say this, even if it's been said before. Gary Newman is 12 days older than Gary Oldman. Very good. I'll tell you what. I think this record is all right, which it Oldman. Very good.

I'll tell you what, I think this record is all right, which it has no right to be whatsoever. If you listen to the whole thing, there's a really silly-sounding instrumental break where he's obviously just looked for the... or created a custom setting of the DX setting to just sound as weird as possible. And he plays a little keyboard solo that sounds totally grotesque.

And it's all right. It's one of those things. I mean, I've got no particular interest in ever having anything to do with it. But if someone said, do you want this flushed from the face of the earth? I'd say no. You know, like badminton. from the face of the earth, I'd say no. You know, like badminton.

Sharp and Newman, though, just sounds like a computer shop on the high street, doesn't it? That only sells business computers and they get absolutely no trade at all apart from kids coming in asking if they've got Manic Miner yet or Gobbler Ghost. No, we provide IT business solutions. Can you repair my tape recorder so the following week change your mind jumped eight places to number 20 and a week later it reached its highest position

number 17 in the wake of the success of the single newman and shop will continue their collaboration throughout the rest of the 80s and although although the follow-up, New Thing from London Town, only got to number 52 in October of 1986, the follow-up to that, No More Lies, got to number 34 in February of 1988. And they signed off on their collaboration in the summer of 1989 when the LP Automatic got to number 59 in the album charts in July of that year.

Sharp and Newman are a new combination. Here's an old one. Kool and the Gang have been around for years. They've got a new single called Miss Lit. Always searching for adventure Like Pandora's box I'm missing me We've already covered Kool and the Gang

in Chart Music's 11, 22 and 48 and this single, the second cut in the UK from their latest LP, Emergency, is the follow-up to Fresh, which got to number 11 in December of 1984. Also that month, three members of the band, Robert Cool Bell, JT Taylor and Dennis Thomas, were, along with Jodie Watley and Shalimar, the only Americans and black people to appear on Band-Aids Do They Know It's Christmas. It entered the chart last week at number 50,

and this week it's just rolled under the sliding door of the top 40, jumping 14 places to number 36. Oh, God. I mean, look, what we have to do is quickly deal with the song. Because there's always been a rock element to calling the game's music, hasn't there? Oh, yeah. I mean, the crossover success of michael jackson and prince has has forced practically every black pop act of the era to have a go but this is this isn't so much beat it as tap it tap it unwrap it i wouldn't say it's

exactly prince's fault as such but by then he had proved that a kind of black band could write a rock song and make it a hit so so that definitely would have had an impact um I mean this isn't such a departure for Kool and the Gang it's their early funk stuff I had plenty of fuzz on it and stuff but it's that bizarre mix of kind of Jacko Prince style funk and that overdriven guitar sound that sounds like it's played on an old Casio tone. It's not a real guitar, perhaps. But yeah, but this entire thing for me is all about the video and what the frigatey fuck is going on. Oh, yeah.

I know. Because, I mean, I can't guide you through every single labyrinthine bit of this video, but it's truly demented. It's a really unsettling few minutes. Say what you see Neil what do we see we see JT

waking up in his house what happens first does he see the strange white lady who's perhaps meant to represent cocaine am I over interpreting this I don't know could be anything she's all dressed in white she's got

a big frizz of white hair she's an american zoo wanker isn't she yeah basically but there is also in his house these strangely black clad um kind of cloaked horror movie type figures in weird masks um sort of following them around and then they then they end up in a very massive garden. JT and this strange lady having a dance. The hooded figure's also doing it. But which would all be normal? It's the 80s. But then what happens is, well, I can't explain what happens because it's still confusing me even now.

Obviously, look, Indiana Jones, right, 1984ones right 1984 1985 massively massively popular for some reason this video cuts from this fairly ordinary or bizarre rather um garden scene to just strange chunks of film that seem like they've been filmed out in the desert like quite expensive you know um but it's like a film that they abandoned and then recut and there's strange characters in it who aren't in any way developed just suddenly arrive from somewhere there's an old fella, there's a young black girl as well and what's strange

I mean it's an octogenarian Indiana Jones isn't it? yeah basically which would be fine, what you'd be thinking in 85 watching this is oh this must be from the film and this is a clip from the film. Fair enough. But then, jarringly, massively jarringly, the white lady turns up in the desert. And she's only been in the video before.

So even though halfway through the video, most viewers would be in the impression that there are two things going on, a pop video, but also a film that the song is from, suddenly she up and your mind splits open basically in a really shit way um and you're just thoroughly confused from then on in yeah it's like part thriller and part king solomon's minds it really reminds me of you know all those yeah very much so 80s canon films faux blockbusters like life force and the invasion usa it's like but this is like the one they rejected for looking too cheap like no no no this will tarnish the canon brand i'll just add romancing the stone in there as well it's got yes i swear to god it looks like it was filmed in a dogging spot in swindon and actually lit by the headlamps of two parked ford fiestas that bit

where he's dancing around with that fairy woman it's like you've stumbled on a dogging scene except uh with one of the cottingly fairies come to life as opposed to janet from greg's and it it cuts back and forth yeah with this with that. And that, yeah, that weird, unengaging, incomprehensible desert drama. Yeah. It's like Raiders of the Shit arc, you know what I mean? Yeah. And then, yeah, when finally the streams cross, it's that fairy lady in a terrible 1930s composite shot

walking down an invisible staircase, like from a load of rocks in front of the aged indiana jones it's like yeah i've no idea what any of this is meant to be or what it's meant to relate to but it is a hideous joy it really is definitely definitely because i mean one of the first shots of the video is jt looking at the mirror in his bathroom and he sees this young black girl with a kind of veil on looking back at him with tears in her eyes she reappears in the desert and then you think well what's going to happen here what actually happens is the Indiana Jones type guy he basically gets beaten to death doesn't he kind of gets yes he gets kind of torn apart um the kid that JT's seen

in the mirror escapes in a car with tears in her eyes it's all quite dramatic the same car then pulls up outside jt's house and calling the gang get out just dressed normally he's calling the gang and they go up and he's like waking up it's all a dream and they're like come on jt it's rehearsal time you know pull your socks up and all that yeah we've got to make cherry and then they walk out um well jt walks out you know let's your socks up and all that. Yeah, we've got to make cherry. And then they walk out. Well, JT walks out, you know, let's go to the studio then, guys. We have that classic kind of Korn and the gang look back, don't they, at the camera.

I mean, God, the massive thriller influence on this, of that last look that MJ gives to the camera. And then, yeah, the rest of the band, are they evil? Are they the – I mean, what the fuck is going on if anyone could disentangle this you get an english degree for that man oh easily and a masters if there's one ending that's always more satisfying than it was all a dream it's it was all a dream or was it yes yeah if they'd have had that old indiana jones's head under the pillar that would have finished it off perfectly but no they chose not to yeah this video is going for thriller but it ends up yeah visually and spiritually much closer to condoviti donga aka girly man uh aka indian thriller it's got that same sheer ludicrous

energy of that low budget indian cinema that just redeems everything it has the vibe of also of an italian horror film from the time called demons it has that grain yeah that kind of nasty graininess i mean the first first thing that sprung to mind when I watched this video was he's got Bill Sharp out of Shack Attack's trousers on. Well spotted, Al. Circle of pop.

That's where they pay you the big bucks. I mean, but, I mean, the weird thing about this video is you think that the making of it would have become part of 80s legendary law

or something yeah yeah it's completely vanished in us i mean obviously you can watch the video but when you i don't know you googled the song misled there's no mention of what the fuck is going on here it's just one of those strange strange things that are now left to us to decipher i hope it stays that way to be honest with you yeah there's some things that are now left to us to decipher. I hope it stays that way, to be honest with you. Yeah, there's some things that are best left. I think Kool and the Gang thought they just had a bit of a line in Crazy 80s videos at the time, because they did one for Fresh as well.

It's not as weird as this, but it is not what you would think a Kool and the Gang video was going to look like. They're all dressed up as cheeses in a fridge yeah the cheeses of england and wales those yes i hated them is it just me who at the time uh thought this record was called mysald when they hadn't heard it only it's one of those words where like when somebody says it oh right yeah but you see it written down oh my sword right yeah they should have called the follow-up epitome epitome yeah yeah that last bit wasn't worth saying so the following week, Miss Lead jumped eight places to number 28, its highest position.

However, the follow-up, Cherish, spent three weeks at number four in July of this year, which would be their last of their 12 top 20 hits in the UK. But Miss Lead was used in the soundtrack of the 1986 Whoopi Goldberg film Jumping Jack Flash, which, to my knowledge didn't feature any Indiana Jones types. Ex-Eagle Don Henley had an American hit with the boys of summer and much against the better advice of a lot of the british pop publications but certainly no surprise the top of the pops the boys of summer is a hit here

born in gilmer texas in 1947 don Henley was a drummer in his high school band who formed a group in the early 60s called the Four Speeds, who then changed their name to Felicity. In 1969, they were introduced to Kenny Rogers, who encouraged them to change their name to Shalowa, got them a deal with Amos Records, and helped relocate them to Los their name to Shaloha, got them a deal with Amos Records and helped relocate them to Los Angeles a year later. But after one LP which did fuck all, the group split

up. In 1971 Henley was recruited into Linda Ronstadt's backing band where he met the guitarist Glenn Frey and while they were on her tour decided to form a band which they called The Eagles who went on to spend the next nine years as the biggest selling American rock band up to that point. However, they were a relatively minor concern in our charts notching up seven top 40 hits which peaked in May of 1977 when Hotel California got to number eight. In the wake of the Eagles' breakup in 1980, Henley dipped a toe into a solo career,

teaming up with his then-girlfriend Stevie Nicks on the single Leather and Lace in 1981 and getting to number 3 in America with Dirty Laundry in 1982, which, until now, has been his only appearance in the UK charts, getting to number 59 in February of 1983. This single, with music written by Mike Campbell of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, was originally offered to and turned down by Petty, and immediately gobbled up by Henley, who wrote a lyric about getting owed and selling out,

and lifted the title from Roger Kahnhan's book about the 1955 brooklyn dodgers baseball team it's the league cut from his latest lp building the perfect beast it's the follow-up to i can't stand still which did nothing in the uk it peaked last week at number five in the usa and over here it soared 24 places from number 63 to number 39. And here's the video, which has been directed by the French cinematographer Jean-Baptiste Mondino, who has been flown in from Paris to make his first non-French video. Fucking hell, I heard this a lot on Laser 558, as you can imagine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I remember it getting, in my head, crushed together with a lot of other records

and me getting confused. That was a bit of a problem as a kid. I had a mental shortcoming. It's a real problem, perhaps, for a burgeoning pop critic, that certain records become fused in my mind. So much the same way that, at the time, I couldn't disentangle what, I don't know,

Francis Drake did and what Walter Raleigh did. They were just one person. In a similar way, like, Nights in White Satin and whiter shade of pale fuse together in my mind so does the boys of summer and brian adams summer of 69 but in all yes but in all these cases there are winners because boys of summer as of sort of grown older it's become a great record to me that kind of pisses on brian adams sort of almost spiritually identical slab of nostalgia i'd like someone to explain why Boys of Summer is great and Summer of 69 isn't.

Taylor? Yeah, well, first of all, though, Simon Bates is a real snidey cunt at the start of this. He says, I'm much against the better advice of a lot of the British pop publications, but certainly no surprise to Top of the Pops. The Boys of the British pop publications. But certainly no surprise to Top of the Pops. The Boys of Summer is a hit here. And I'm not really sure who he's talking about because for a start, I

first, in 1993, sort of bonded with Alan Jones, Melody Maker Editor, who was also Melody Maker Editor in 1985, by mentioning to him in the pub how much I love this single. And he tried to convince me that the whole album, Building the Perfect Beast, is in fact a modern classic,

which I soon found out was not an opinion I shared. I think it might even have placed quite high in that year's end-of-year Melody Maker critics poll, where albums that only the editor liked often did somehow. Yeah for me this is this is by far the best thing Don Henley ever did and in 1985 it's one of the best things anybody did. Obviously it's vastly more trad in every respect and completely explicable in a way that they're not and not even remotely comparable in terms of musical invention but for me i class this track emotionally with uh running up that hill and life's what you make it

as mid-80s hits which have a very particular kind of space and power to them and whose emotional edge seems very strange because it is in the best possible sense mature um i mean this is adult orientated rock not just because it's aimed at old boomers but because the song will only really reveal itself 100 to to an adult. Yeah. Even though it's written in the lyrical and musical jargon and language of a dumb young man. Because as a kid, you hear this and you're like, oh, yeah, yeah, I get it. Yeah, irretrievable loss, I understand. But you don't.

And there's a really genuine feeling in this song, which only lights up when you're ready. There's a sort of a, like a mortal pain to it. And with an instinctive recognition of its own meaninglessness, which is how it can be expressed in such trashy terms and still mean something. And I don't think that's down to any genius on the part of Don Henley or

indeed the, you know, the, the heartbreaker who wrote it I I think he just you know struck oil while he was digging for a bone but I think this justifies the existence of everyone involved with it eternally as far as I'm concerned there's just something about this record over and above what it really is. You know what I mean? There's something about it that is, that just, there's a sort of just emotional quality to this just that has nothing to do with what's in the grooves.

You can just feel it coming off, coming off the recording somehow. I think this is one of the 10 best singles of at least the mid-80s, if not of the whole 80s. Good Lord. I mean, as Simon said in a previous Chalk Music, 1985 is the year when the dinosaurs came roaring back. And he was referring to Live Aid, of course.

But this is a time when all those 70s bands and artists finally seemed to get a grip on the technology of the mid-80s, using music videos and just know just harnessing the the recording technology and and and having big hits with it big hits that are not shit yeah and they're not making an issue of it or making it apparent that they're struggling with it or sulking about it really which tends to be what you hear late 70s early 80s um with their uses of technology there's a kind of sulkiness or a kind of show-offiness whereas this is natural and fluid it doesn't feel like anything's being done to make don henley

suddenly current again it's just a really beautiful song um where normally you get beautiful songs in the mid 80s and they come through despite their production this comes across i think partly because of the production, which is an odd thing to say for a 1985 record, but I couldn't imagine it any better. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's a nice enough video. It's a nice enough video, black and white,

for that retro vibe. Don't exactly know what's going on, but vague hints of a kind of, yeah, of the same kind of imagery in a way that Bryan Adams used in Summer of Six. I'm sorry to keep reminding you of his shit record in the midst of imagery in a way that brian adams used um in summer of six i'm sorry to keep reminding you a shit record in the midst of talking about a great record um but this this goes to show the difference retrograde imagery attached with shit song appalling retrograde imagery attached with great song really really moving it's a really good video yeah but it's a

it's a french person's idea of california yeah which is i think why it works because it's a French person's idea of California, isn't it? Which is, I think, why it works, because it's the same sort of weird, sort of part idealised and part sort of dystopian vision of the emptiness of California, which you get a bit of in the record as well. Are we even going to talk about the deadhead sticker on the Cadillac, which is supposed to be one of the most profound lines in in all of pop music yeah it's not is it but well not to us it's not well that's because it's not i mean if i'd seen a deadhead sticker on a cadillac it would

be oh fucking hell look at that american car it's fucking brilliant oh Oh, who's driving it? Boss Hogg. I want to get the connotation that it was about yuppie-ism and selling out your principles and stuff. Yeah, well, you know, he better get used to it. I mean, you know, one day soon Boris Johnson's going to turn up in an Iron Maiden t-shirt.

You know what I mean? There's no end to this now. Yeah. So the following week the boys of summer soared another 17 places to number 22 and two weeks later it got to number 12 its highest position in september the video won four mtv awards including video of the year and john baptiste mondino went on to direct the videos for Open Your Heart by Madonna, Would Bees by Scritti Polite, I Wish You Heaven by Prince and Man Child by Nena Cheri.

The follow-up, All She Wants To Do Is Dance, failed to chart in the UK and the only other salty bit of Top 40 action he got was in July of 1998 when the Boys Of Summer got to number 12 again. And Josh Paul, who played the young lad in the video, would become the bassist of Suicidal Tendencies in 1996. Next week, for some reason, the section was renamed Top of the Pops Chartbusters, but that only lasted for a week. The Breakers section lived on right

the way through to march of 1994 even in 1985 you couldn't get away with using the term chart buster yeah they introduced it with a little animation of a guy in stack heels and glitter flares. Yes! The break is okay. If you have taste, you will appreciate that Meaty's Murder is the best album around. It'll be number one next week. From it, the Smiths, How Soon Is Now? How Soon Is Now? I am the sun and the air Long, continuing her trial separation from Bates,

stands at the back of the studio as she tells us that if we have taste, we're aware that the next act has put out, quote, the best album around, and says that the next act has put out, quote, the best album around, and says that the next track is a cut from it. The camera swings round to reveal how soon is now by the Smiths. We've chanced across the Smiths a time or two on Chop Music, and this, officially their fifth single, started live as a 15-minute track, which was chopped down to just under seven minutes

and slated as a future single. But when Jeff Travis of their label Rough Trade heard it, he believed it didn't sound Smithy enough and relegated it to the B-side of the 12-inch version of William It Was Really Nothing, which came out in August of 1984 and got to number 17 in September. However, How Soon Is Now was rescued from its flipside obscurity and rinsed to death throughout the tail end of 1984 by the Radio 1 night shift, including Janice Long, and it was put on Hatful of Hollow,

the Smiths compilation which came out in November of that year. In the same month, it was put out as a single in America on Sire Records which featured archive film of an old factory and the sort of girl no Smith's fan would ever get off with dancing about but it failed to catch on over there even though the band have put out their second LP meet his three days ago, which doesn't feature this song, Janice. How Soon Is Now has been edited down to single length and released last month, and this week it's up nine places

from number 35 to number 24. Oh, Janice, she fucking loves this shit, doesn't she? Oh, yeah. Yeah, she's beside herself. She punches the air with both hands, and it looks like she's about to go, fucking yes, have it! And then just barge away through the kids and get up the front.

Yeah, she's beside herself, perhaps to a point beyond charming. But that's the Smiths for you. Yeah, no, that's exactly it. And it kind of slightly put me off, actually, Janice, seeing that. You know, this is is what this is the original spore the the primary ancestral gene pool of the english rock defense league right here um there's been i mean there's been a lot of debate recently for a lot of us really about how all of us deal with music or great art that's made by horrible people and i've seen a lot of my

friends go through sort of twists and torsions and traumas having to strike morrissey and the smiths out of their listening a bit because of recent supposed revelations about his politics but to me he was always hiding in plain sight he was always sort of part frontman part farage and but perhaps because i don't know you know a frontman's important they negotiate your relationship with the band the front man's ultimately what changes cognizance of a band to love but can also just as easily turn admiration into loathing and I've always had sort of big massive problems with Morrissey that have stopped me loving really anything he's been involved with

especially the Smiths which was odd in a sense in 85 because in 84 i quite like the smiths i quite like the early singles i i think i actually bought um what difference does it make um you know but i think what happens is in 85 i start getting this sense of double kind of rejection from his music it's like being invited to a party and where you realize that once you've been invited you've only been invited to be humiliated in a sense anyone young teenage and alienated uh from notions of modernity as well as masculinity is going to find some resonance in the smith's music but it became pretty clear soon that that alienation that he felt was partly down to the likes of me being in the country as well and that alienation

and longing you felt couldn't really be be solved or saved by um by the smiths of course this is all after the event it's only later that i find out you know that aged 18 morris is writing letters to friends saying that he dislikes pakistan is immensely because they smell and all of that um and at the time you know what he offers is pro-animal rights and it's anti-royal and it's anti-tory this kind of outward leftism but with a truly truly conservative heart fearful of the future and fearful of change and that really is that's the dna of indie rock um so you know i mean i can't i i cannot deny that the prophetic nature of this record and just how much it influenced and i mean how much smith's influenced rather but i kind of

wish in a sense uh white people would fix themselves up a bit i mean all my life i've been making allowances for the shit music my white friends are into um and no artist is my pale mates yeah sorry but no artist has presented this dichotomy to me more than morrissey virtually all my white friends like him or liked him um i've had major problems with him from the off my sister's mates were big fans so early singles did make it into my house um and so i came to this performance to watching this performance thinking oh maybe it'll be reminded what appealed but actually it was a kind of instant reminder of what i immediately started hating about morrissey and the smiths you know it when i finally got to write about the smiths which wasn't until about 1999 i said there's something about the smiths that still

has an unhealthy hold over people you'd love to love, but get the facts straight. The Smiths were about nostalgia. They were about destroying any black trace in pop. And when they emerged, they were pretty much a rights for whites insistence that nothing since punk had mattered. I was writing about the song Panic, and I said it was a letter to Melody Maker spun into a song, and that Morrissey is a TED-fixated, pre-immigration

fantasizing granny of a man um the band laying the groundwork of morose retrospect that lad rock would later find its spiritual motivation i encourage people to blame and shame them every chance you get now i realize now that that might be unfair to johnny marr um you know but not much i suspect i remember him in 84 slagging off things like Earth Wind and Fire and Chic and Prince because for bands like the Smiths the DJs that play black music and the press that support them and consequently the music culture that grows up around them black music is something they wish had stopped back in the 60s um you know and then I heard and sort of read deeper and i realized that this band

the smiths simply weren't on earth for me in fact they were sort of eyeing the likes of me with suspicion and fake repellents every time i even approached so by the time i knew that morrissey hated rap and hated black pop and you know by the time of asian rut and bengalian platforms and all that i knew that his his dreams didn't include include me and that me and my kind were a problem and kind of an obstacle in his vision of English pop progress or regress. And all he loved was these sanctified suede heads and all this poor doomed trash that kind of populated his perspective and marked the limits of his compassion.

And it's all summed up in this performance with a single element that perhaps I'm overextending when I'm thinking about it but i absolutely interpret as being central you know the moment when he sings i am human and i need to be loved just like everyone everybody else does and he machine guns the crowd yes i'm sure fans saw that as great because they'd like to machine gun their schoolmates as well and it's no surprise to me later on in my career when whenever i interviewed an american metal band they fucking loved morrissey and the smiths um he appealed to that oh they love him they absolutely all of them absolutely loved him because they appeal to that kind of wounded uh uh you know macho thing and self-pity but that

bit to me reveals everything that machine gun gesture he holds modern multicultural britain in contempt and he wants everything to return to a time when the white working class were only compromised by the black working class the afro-caribbean working class because he sees a worth in their old pop culture he can't see any worth in the likes of me and he doesn't like it when he feels that black culture is getting too dominant and so that mindset for me that ukip edl almost mindset um i think it you know it dominated the music press and the media for far too long this notion that there was a superficial black pop influenced uh music that underneath which all this white kind of regression should be focused on instead it It's really, really damaging.

And actually, I remember this song. Of course, we all remember this song because we've heard it too many fucking times. But I don't like it. I think it's rubbish. I think it's got no joy or animation. It's just smuggery. And the more I hear Morrissey, the more he just sounds like Cilla Black yawning. So I hate him so much.

I can't even tell if I like his performance because I just see a big racist cunt on the stage, this Peter Pan of Welchmertz. And, you know, I mourn the victory of classic guitar rock in Manchester to a certain extent because there were much more interesting things going on in Manchester in the decade of the 80s. And Morrissey kind of trailblazed that campaign I'll concede that the Smiths aren't entirely kindling I mean for the first few

singles when the mystery was still intact and he hadn't ruined it with his bullshit I was kind of in love but now I would I mean I would argue if you like Stephen the Chinese or a subspecies Morrissey you're a racist cunt simple as the only thing i applaud is the kind of honesty of it that injured regret that post-colonial revulsion of his music is really close to white england's heartbeat in a lot of ways um but not for me and and they're a band who actually get the worst the further away i get from them i mean that machine gunning thing he's trying to be all heroic and make a gesture but he just reminds me of

Private Pike whenever he gets to borrow the Tommy gun yeah and when he draws white lines on his suit to be a fifth columnist he's out of Billy Lyre he's trying to do out of Billy Lyre is what he's doing

but yeah in defence of Johnny Marr I would be astonished Billy Lyre. He thinks it's like he's trying to do out of Billy Lyre is what he's doing. But yeah, well, in defense of Johnny Marr, I would be astonished if you'd ever heard him slag off chic. Johnny Marr's guitar playing on the early good Smith records is 50% Byrds and 50% Nile Rodgers. But in terms of Morrissey, yeah, it it's really strange how do you remember how loads of people refused to believe that he could possibly be a racist yeah yeah yeah because he was a vegetarian yeah or because he didn't like the royal family it's like people have this weird idea that if someone is like righteously left wing on you

know five topics they can't be foul on another you know if you're looking for reasons why people still give morris your chance you won't find them in this performance because this performance is totally unremarkable and it's weird because you'd think that a band that did have a strong image and were performing, I still think, one of their most powerful and unusual records would dominate this episode and it would be the thing you came away remembering. But it's almost an afterthought, right? There's no sense of occasion.

With previous Miss Appearances, of course, they were smashing through the glass ceiling placed over white rock bands yes confounding that conspiracy to only allow black artists on top of the pop but now that shock has has gone and morrissey no longer feels the need to communicate anything directly to the camera right it's like his basic presence is supposed to be startling in itself, and it's not. You just say, oh, stop licking your lips, man. Yeah, here he is again.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's no sense of this being an event or disruptive. People at home will have been watching this, like people who didn't follow the charts or whatever, didn't know who these people were. They just think, oh, look, it's a watered-down, killing joke, because there's no difference to most of the audience. You know, it's a watered down killing joke because there's no difference to most of the audience you know it's a doomy record got big guitars and walloping drums and a weirdo

singer wailing it's all the same you know but that one had a bit of guts to it and it it shouldn't have been that way i think it's a a bit of a betrayal of one of their best tracks but yeah it it struck me a few years back you can draw a line in morris's career on one side of which he's objectively a really good lyricist and on the other his lyrics are facile and and frivolous and not half as funny as they're meant to be uh but the thing is that line isn't drawn in 2002 or 1996 it's in 1984 like months after the smiths got started and the deterioration seemed to have happened almost immediately at the precise moment he became successful because we know that those first batch of sm Smith songs come out of his old notebooks and they were mostly written when he was a nobody and I still think those lyrics are startlingly sharp and evocative

and skillful this charming man is possibly one of the most underrated lyrics I can think of it's elegantly concise and there's a whole screenplay in there with defined characters and an intriguing scenario and a dramatic dilemma and it's like 90 minutes of queer cinema compressed into i think 14 lines with a chorus that's just got a catchy lyrical hook that doesn't advance the plot at all and that's phenomenal songwriting and a lot of the stuff from the smith's first year is not as good as that but it shares a lot of the same qualities and it's authentically daring and and and unique and and then something happens and afterwards almost everything is just this dashed off silly ass froth you know well, he's too busy thinking about things to say for his interviews.

Yeah, yeah. And it happened at the precise moment he used up his pre-fame lyrics and began writing as a successful pop musician and a minor star. Instantly, he went to shit. It was this bloke who'd spent his whole adolescence believing that fame was his only salvation and it turned out to be the worst thing that could possibly have happened to him like in terms of his own creativity maybe in terms of his own happiness it helped i don't know but his happiness didn't

seem to do very much for him in terms of not being a cunt you know um i think that's one of the most intriguing and under-discussed aspects of of the smiths the the way that almost immediately he went off a cliff in terms of the quality of what he came up with and nobody noticed this in the 80s because this spell had been cast and he'd go like oh i know how joan of arc felt and I was like, isn't that brilliant? Isn't that amazing? He said he knew how Joan of Arc felt when she had a Walkman on. What? That's shit. That's fucking terrible.

It's like, if you want to listen to humorous, very English, slightly whimsical, listen to Half Man, Half Biscuit. They're fucking brilliant. And then go and listen to Morrie. Oh, I know how Joan of Arc felt. devock is fuck off it's wasting my time which side of that divide does this one come under then taylor is this when he's fallen off i don't know there's hardly any lyrics in it is it it's just just a verse repeated right yeah i i think this is probably uh this is probably post

drop off because yeah it's there's there's almost nothing on it, is there? It's just a bit of wailing. What you're really listening to is Johnny Marr just having a ball. Yeah, yeah. It's the sound of this record. There's no denying that when you first heard this on the radio, the initial sound of it is amazing. But it kind of then doesn't do enough for me.

I like that sound, don't get me wrong, but it just kind of hangs there and doesn't do enough for me i like that sound don't get me wrong but it just kind of hangs there and doesn't move anywhere so that's kind of why i started having problems with this record it took me ages to realize this was a smith song oh yeah for me it doesn't sound like one you know i was used to a certain sound from them and this was just a bit of a step up and a bit of a step beyond um so i was captivated by the sound but yeah not him or his lyrics and it took me even longer to realize that morrissey wasn't singing i am the sun in the air s-u-n-a-i-r all right yeah it sounds a bit hippie a lot of that flatness is just the 80s though right if you listen to a lot of the guitar effects and it's like the meowing noise and all of that

it's really it's the stuff that j Page was doing on Led Zeppelin II. It's the same things that he's doing on the guitar. But on that supposed hoary dinosaur album, those noises sound live and clear and exciting and hard to ignore. Whereas on this zippy post-punk classic, it's a little bit of a sludge but it's got those 80s drums on it as well like the door of a meat freezer slamming shut it's the same because it is i think this is a great track morrissey notwithstanding but it really could have been a lot better if it had been made at almost any other point in the history of

recording technology it would sound just an awful lot better than this the smiths with someone else's lead singer yeah how would they have got on because to me morrissey was always the sticking point a lot of the smith songs are kind of like them but it's just like oh the lead singer's a twat yeah i'll tell you what though if you want to if you want to laugh um and a little bit of schadenfreude watch that biopic of morrissey that came out a few years ago right have you ever seen it no i haven't no it's called england is mine and i'm a big fan of mortifying rock star biopics uh so i watched it for kicks and it is a scream it's all about his pre-smith's life not that action-packed thrill ride

and there's no smith's music allowed in it and nobody looks like anybody they're supposed to look like and like all modern stuff set in the 70s the people in it don't look like they're from the 70s they look like they're in pulp um except that half of them are obviously uh muscly because they go to the gym because they're from the 21st century. Just unlike anyone in the 70s except professional sportsmen and gangsters in forces and some gay men.

So it's just all these blokes in retro purple wing collar shirts trying to conceal these grapefruit biceps. But it's a wonderful film. i like a wonderful piece of shit it's almost on a par with summer dreams the story of the beach boys and daydream believers the monkeys story which are my two favorite biopic catastrophes right the first five minutes of this film he's in his room with his mate in specs and she picks up a book about the Moors murderers, which happens to be lying around, and holds it up and says,

do you ever think it might have been us? Buried in the dirt. He's sat there reading his 70s music paper from that week, and it's all yellow, because he got it out of someone's collection. Then you've got people in what's meant to be a 70s rock club in manchester and they go up the bar and ask for a beer and they give them a green bottle of becks it's like you know he's mate um linda sterling who in real life was a militantly unglamorous feminist punk.

In this film, she becomes a sexy goth chick. It's so fucked up. If you imagine what this film would be like, right, it's like that, basically. Oh, and he's straight in it. That's the other thing. This is the film that finally quashes those ugly rumors um all the sexy ladies are after him because he's a shy individual which you know as we all know is what happens in real life and yeah oh god yeah knocking them off for your steak his boss comes up to him at one point and says

why can't you be more like everyone else and mor Morrissey just does a meaningful pause and stares at him. Oh, and he's got a big Oscar Wilde poster on his wall. I do not believe they sold those in 1978. I think all you could get was Farrah Fawcett in a leotard and that tennis girl scratching her arm. Yes. And the whole thing is narrated by him,

or it's supposed to be him, right, in his voice. Like it's his writings or his personal diaries, you know, which it isn't. I mean, there's nothing about Pakistanis in there for a start. But it's like offcuts from Adrian Mole. He's going, I am so persecuted. When will the world recognize my genius and it's obviously someone writing what they think morris would have said and i loved it partly because he

was horrified by it it's obvious when you watch you think morrissey would hate this yeah he he thought it was appalling and tried to block it and failed. And, yeah, it's wonderful. Because, really, it's just a film about a ten-a-penny teenage dickhead. And I hope somebody somewhere saw that and the penny finally dropped. So, the following week, Howl soon is now nipped up two places to number 24, its highest position. Meanwhile, Meet His Murder entered up two places to number 24, its highest position. Meanwhile, Meet His Murder entered the LP chart at number one,

staying there for a week and acting as the bridge between Born in the USA and No Jacket Required. And a week later, they swept the board in the 1985 NME Reader's Poll, because of course they would. The follow-up,peare's sister got to number 26 in april and although the next single that joke isn't funny anymore only got to number 49 in july

they closed out the year with the boy with the thorn in his side getting to number 23 in october fucking hell 1985 the biggest year of their career, and those shit chart returns. But the thing is, they thought of themselves as a singles band, and they never were. They never were. I mean,

you can see by the way they mishandled this track, right? Putting it out on a 12 inch extra track, and then on the compilation album, and then putting it out as the lead off single for the next album, which it wasn't on. It's, it's farcical. It's farc farcical would blondie have done something like that no with the rolling stones no it's just they they weren't a singles band and they could never accept that they had singles like that joke isn't funny anymore and and shakespeare's sister it's like but what do

you think you're doing do you think this is going to be number one? No. They couldn't even pick their own songs that should have been singles. It's really weird. You know, if the Smiths were still going now, you know that thing where they have old films, stills from old films on the covers of the singles,

who would they be doing by now? Chuck Norris. Yeah. Steven Seagal or something. Yeah. Yeah. Who would they be doing by now? Chuck Norris. Yeah. Steven Seagal or something. Yes, yeah. Rita Sue and Bob too. That's probably really accurate actually, Al, yeah.

Tim Roth in Made in Britain. Yeah. Yes. Or someone sexy out of Romper Stomper, you know. Because the whole issue of racial violence, it just pales next to Morris's own wank fantasies. Putting the oi in poignancy. You go home and you cry and you want to die. I'm Tilly Steele.

And I'm Helen Monk. And this is Bitchin'. I'm Dethneck Thick. 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 per sec available on all your podcast apps that's not right uh just can you not say uh in the advert available on all your podcast platforms just search bitchin or greatl. 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. You can tell she's a Smiths fan. It's Valentine's Day and she's gone. How's the Smiths and how soon is now? Wonderful. Let's have a look at the charts. 40. This week at 40, The Limits, Say Yeah.

It's a chart entry for Don Henley, The Boys of Summer at 39. Band-Aid, Do They Know It's Christmas at 38. Grandmaster and Millie Mel at 37 with Step Off. A chart entry at 36, Cool and the Gang, Misled. Chaka Khan's at 35 with This Is My Night. Up to 34, Eugene Wild and Personality. Wham! Last Christmas, Everything She Wants is at 33. And at 32, Ghostbusters, Ray Parker Jr.

George Benson's Climbing with 20, 20 to 31. Can I from Kashmir at 30. Imagination, Fast at 29 with Thank You My Love And the highest chart entry this week at 28, Change Your Mind, Sharpen Human Amy Stewart's Friends is at 27 Up to 26, it's The Smiths and How Soon Is Now 25, Yamo Be There, James Ingram And great news, Killing Joke, up to 24, Love Like Blood.

Madonna's hanging on in there at 23 with Like A Virgin. We Belong From Pat Benatar at 22. 21, This House by Big Sound Authority. And Chicago with You're The Inspiration, up to 20. Highest Climber of the Week, It's Dead or Alive, You Spin Me Round at number 19. Since yesterday, Strawberry Switch played 18. At 17, Night Shift, The Commodores. Tears for Fears with Shout down to 16.

Up to 15, Billy Ocean and Loverboy. And at 14, it's Mr Bowie, This Is Not America. Colourfield, Thinking of you at number 13 this week. Phil Collins, the studio, stays at 12. Same as last week for Bryan Adams, run to you at number 11. So the ups, downs and the non-movers in the chart this week. The camera cuts back to a reunited Long and Bates and it looks as if Long has forced Bates to dance with her to the Smiths

before we cut to the chart rundown from 40 to 11, which by this point has been lumped into one. Bad idea. Yeah, it goes on for far too long. This is the beginning of the charts don't mean shit anymore attitude of Top of the Pops, isn't it? Yeah, because once the charts start dragging, once you fuck up that rundown,

it's going to get ditched, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, of course, by this point, everything's professional, start dragging once you fuck up that rundown yeah it's going to get ditched isn't it yeah yeah i mean of course by this point everything's professional but the only things that jumped out at me were baits calling it grandmaster and melly mel yeah dickhead and uh a still of imagination just looking straight and boring they're not wearing golden nappies anymore and that's wrong man they look pissed off they look bored with their new direction. Yeah, the 80s have turned to shit in front of us. Yeah, but you've got a picture of The Limit,

who look like a boys' school master and pupil who've eloped, disguised as the Foster Brothers' summer sale. James Ingram looking like he's just sat down on a syringe full of fentanyl. And that picture of Phil Collins, the album cover picture, he's gazing at you imploringly through the oven door. Yes. Please turn it down.

No, no. Oh, and Tears for Fears, like say for Beeblebrox appearing on the front of a knitting pattern. Yes. But the one that I liked the most was the picture of killing joke because if you look closely jazz coleman is at the back of that picture looking for all the world like simon bates yes things had panned out slightly differently you can't have a close look that is bizarre but also bizarre i mean you think for such a high-end multi-million blockbuster product as ghostbusters they'd find a better shot of ray parker jr with the ghost you know i mean than

the slightly it looks like some sort of damaged lectrist document from the 1950s or something the shot of the shot of ray parker with with with the ghostbusters very strange yeah yeah it looks like a really crap um st do photo, doesn't it? Yeah. It's what would now be called a screen grab, but from the day... Yeah, yeah. You literally have to put a camera in front of a TV.

And of course, by this point, we're also treated to that fucking awful soft rock version of Yellow Pearl. Yeah. With a fucking electric guitar, man. It's horrible. I bet Midge was upset by that. All right, we've reached the top of Yellow Pearl. Yeah. With a fucking electric guitar, man. It's horrible. I bet Midge was upset by that. All right, we've reached the top of the pile.

This is Top of the Pops video top ten. And after ten, it's a great video from Kirstie McCall and New England. If there's one voice I can't stand, it's Billy Bragg's. It's not Kirstie McCall's, it's Billy Bragg's. Sexuality remains for me the most embarrassing song ever made. A jump head, really, for Art of Noise. They got one place to number nine with close to the edit. A what?

A job head. Don't you know what that is, Art? Oh, right. Sorry. Ah, I bought this on 7-inch. Loved it. The future. I always thought that was Pauli Yates.

Oh, really? And I was wrong. It's actually Ann Dudley of Art of Noise. One of the Pop Craze youngsters, Daniel Griffiths, pointed that out to me just now. I wish this was the other video where the creepy little girl makes the middle-aged bloke smash up the musical instruments with chainsaws and power tools.

Oh, yeah. That was much better. It's so fucking dated now, but at the time it really did sound like the future. Oh God, yeah. Because you could see the collage of it. Yes, we're all waiting for the album and a major tour. It's Russ Abbott

at Eton Atmosphere. I feel sorry for Russ here. He's the butt of their jokes and it feels mean. Walk away in silence. From Russ Abbid to the sublime howard jones up 11 places where things can only get better to number seven that hair looks wrong on howard jones man his forehead's too high this is not sublime as simon bates called it! Yeah, de-ream the usurpers. There's winners and losers in this game. But yeah, for further discussion,

Simon Bates' concept of the sublime. It's one of those gig vids where the main artist legs it around the stage, not like some circus master of rock and roll chaos, but like a line manager performing a performance evaluation. Well, it's amazing that this week's Wally Prince can make such good records.

He's down to six with 1999 Bodyguard. Fuck off! Yeah, Morrissey is a studying call, but Prince is a Wally. That's indie psychosis. One thing's for sure, foreigners don't need blankets over their heads. They're at number five,

having had a really good run so far with I Want To Know What Love Is. They do need blankets over their heads. Or pillows. And the best bottom in the charts, Bruce Springsteen of 4, Dancing In The Dark. He's up. Oh, God, we get loads of this.

It's my fave Springsteen, actually. I think it's an amazing song. Is it? Typically awful dancing and typically triumphalist video belaying the darkness of the song, but I quite like this one. Yeah.

By dancing, he means shagging. And by gun, he means his dick. Barry White, explain that to me. Ashford and Simpson, they're singing about their own relationship And they're up one place to number three Their song's called Solid Street punks This is a tune

It is a tune They're singing about their own relationship Yeah, God preserve us from two people Singing about their own relationship It's one of the greats, this. My best friend Juliet listened to this song so much morning and night that one day she woke up convinced she'd wrote it. He does look like Barry White after gastric band surgery, doesn't he?

Hailed as the faces of 85, King is still at two With love And pride A couple of King Were from my school And I No I imagined That they played my school But they didn't

It was It was like A couple of their relatives Or something We had an assembly Where they It was told Yeah

These know The people in King And now they're gonna play You a gig They were fucking awesome I'll tell you what my heart yearns for now. Them to be arrested for defacing those rocks. Let's wheel back and come forward

on a couple of things here. I mean, the references to Prince, man. Fucking disgusting. But the previous Monday, BBC One had broadcast the British Record Industry Awards featuring Prince and his bodyguard, Chick Huntsbury. So that's what that's all about.

Oh, I see. But yeah, thank fuck Simon's not on this episode. He'd have gone fucking berserk at that. Well, also, why give us 30 seconds of Howard Jones and about three seconds of Prince? I know, that's wrong. Bang out of order. Howard Jones, by the way, prefiguring the entire career of Coldplay there. jones at about three seconds of prince i know that's wrong bang out of order howard jones by

the way prefiguring the entire career of coldplay there what we're seeing here is that it kind of started happening every year this post christmas bounce for records from the previous year yes i mean these records from 84 you know and i'd like solid dancing in the dark and the king one are all 84 records but they've got this kind of there's fuck all to buy basically because there's no other records to buy these things are still alive and kind of there

That's King and Love and Pride at number 2 and this week at number 1 in fact still at number 1 it's Elaine Page, Barbara Dixon and Tim Rice's lovely song from Chess. APPLAUSE Nothing is so good, it lasts eternally Perfect situations must go wrong We cut back to Long and Bates

dancing to Love and Pride in an office party style before lovingly nuzzling together as they introduce this week's number one I Know Him So Well by Elaine Page and Barbara Dixon. Formed in the pulsating brain of Tim Rice in 1979, Chess was a musical based on a tournament between two grandmasters at the height of the Cold War. As with Jesus Christ Superstar, Joseph and the Amazing Technical and Dreamcoat and Evita, Rice intended to work on the musical with his oppo Andrew Lloyd Webber, but he was too busy working on Cats.

But when his producer pointed out that Benny and Bjorn of ABBA were dossing about looking for something to do after they'd finished The Visitors, ABBA's final LP, he met up with them in Stockholm in November of 1981 and they agreed to collaborate. The three of them spent 1982 exchanging ideas and demos via mail and when ABBA finally wound down in 1983 they went full steam ahead. As with Evita and Jesus Christ Superstar it was decided to release a soundtrack LP well in advance of the actual stage show

in order to test the material and raise money for the production. And Rice cast Barbara Dixon, the January-February hitmaker who appeared in Chart Music's 29 and 48, in the role of Florence, the Russian bloke's missus, and Elaine Page, best known at the time for getting Memre to number six in July of 1981 as Svetlana, his mistress. This is the follow-up, of sorts, to One Night in Bangkok by Murray Head, which got to number 12 last December

and is a direct nick by Bjorn and Bennett of the chorus of I Am An A, the comedy number that ABBA used in the set of their 1977 world tour in order to introduce themselves. It crept in at number 79 in the last chart of 1984, then jumped 16 places to number 63, then 29 places to number 34,

and after her appearance on Top of the Pop, soared another 28 places to number 6. And last week, it rid the number one spot of the musk of I Want To Know What Love Is by Foreigner and is at its second week at the vanguard of the hit parade. Yeah, introduced by Simon Bates as Tim Rice's lovely song. Fucking hell. I mean, Tim Rice's contribution to this song is probably Tim Rice's most worthwhile contribution to anything ever.

Certainly, I'm not aware of him ever writing another line as quietly profound as no one in your life is with you constantly. No one is completely on your side. But everyone knows the two men who are mostly responsible for this song and everyone knows the two women who should be singing it. Exactly. Yeah, no, that's it of course this is the lost abba number one and the consolation is that most probably even if abba

had still existed it would still have had the same perspex piano sounds and thudding 80s drums on it because they would have moved with the times for better or or for worse. But this is still a fantastically well-written song, let down only by the stains from its position in history and British culture, its historical position and its cultural position. So you can wince at the staginess of the delivery, and you can cringe at the soft-focus production, and you can understand this purely as west end kitsch if you want because it sort of is but as a song it's got a quality

and a worth and it it could have sounded very different had it been given the treatment it deserved there's obviously there's a very direct line from certain late period abba songs to this and it's tempting to look back at that. Songs like Slippin' Through My Fingers and I Let The Music Speak and think, OK, well, that's them embarking on the dogshit, studded road to chess. Which, I mean, chess, after all, what is chess if not a more sedate Rocky IV?

And you can allow that to weaken that album music in retrospect but i think in fact it makes more sense to see it the other way that that stage musical atmosphere got a little bit out of control and just made bjorn and benny's mid-80s music weaker than it could and should have been but they were 40 bjorn and benny and in 1985 there was no clear space in pop for blokes of 40 who were instinctively commercial in their artistic vision all you could do was become professional songwriters writing for teenage singers as though you were thinking teenage thoughts and there's nothing wrong with that but that's really not what they did so they had to peel off into musicals. You know, they weren't self-serious artists who were going to start making serious music.

And they weren't heritage rockers. So, you know, in a way it makes perfect sense for them to go in this direction. It's the 10th ABBA number one in disguise, isn't it? But I mean, but crucially, I mean, beyond the craft of it, which is a really well-written song you realize just how important agnetha and frida's accents were in those old records in in exoticizing the relationships they portrayed and there's just something about the swedish accent

adds extra poignancy with certain words but now these words are in british mouths and you're right they're not bad words from tim rice but now that those words are in british mouths we just get a really quite a good show tune really um but when i think about you know pages he needs a little bit more than me more security and and dixon's he needs his fantasy and freedom that could be so moving if it was agnetha and then then frida this is really just two troopers knocking it out and it's given a really really dull arrangement that i suspect i mean even if if abba had stayed together and were doing this song i don't know there was something about abba productions that was always interesting and i suspect might have even sustained through the grim sonic recesses of 1985 and made this more

interesting than it ends up sounding um but i mean at the time i hated it because i was young and i didn't know anyone who liked it you know and i and i remember kind of like i remember listening i think i was listening to i wasn't deliberately listening to but you know i actually just had radio one on constantly um i was listening to paul gambaccini show i think uh that you co-hosted with tim rice uh when this hit number one and paul gabaccini cut into a record saying this is the first time we've ever had a number one artist presenting a show as well um but really you know in this arrangement it's as i would have put it at that age mentally in exactly the same place as don't cry for me argentina it's one of those radio two

records that makes it into the pop charts and and i mean in retrospect i look but tim rice's involvement is always going to make me a bit sus um because of his tory cunt mate lloyd weber um and that kind of just just that national success story entrepreneurial creativity thing that they had that always made this seem like i don't know the kind of music Michael Fabricant would like, you know. And his shirt with a collar underneath a sweatshirt, look, which is, I never

felt comfortable. Yeah, it's a great song that I wish almost could have been sent back in time so that we could hear what ABBA would have done with it. It's as if ABBA have started franchising themselves out and this is the British wing. We've got a tiny Agneta and a more Celtic Frida. You know, if that had happened, who would Benny and Bjorn be?

I think Richard Stilgoe. Yeah, yeah. But Bjorn, I'm not sure. Isn't it funny, though, how everyone hears this and instinctively knows that Elaine Page is singing Agnetha's part and Barbara Dixon is singing Frida's part. Yes. Might have been the other way around.

No, no, it wouldn't. It would have been this way around. Yeah. So we got two British women who were obviously supposed to be Swedish pretending to be Russians. It's just fucking with my head. As for the video,

it's a lot of standing about in front of windows. But we also get a bit of them walking past security cameras and fences. Almost as if they're going to walk in by accident on the Nikita video without the job. Yeah. And 80s video alert in a strange kind of cafe, sparse, like a stage set, and lit in unnatural shades where the singer sits lost in thought as some schmuck wipes the tables

or sweeps the floor because it's almost closing time. That intolerable melancholy and introspection. Except performed, so it's extroverted introspection. And he's thinking, fucking hell, Alison Moyet one night, Elaine Page this. For fuck's sake.

She wants to get home for a sports night. Yes. And the other weird thing about the video is that the heights of Page and Dixon, they kind of change. Because when you see them standing up throughout the video, Barbara Dixon is just towering over Elaine Page. One of them must be really massively tall or one of them must be really short. Or maybe both. But by the end of it, they were almost the same height.

Did you notice that? Elaine Page is obviously standing on a box. Yeah, must be. They should have accentuated that a bit more, actually, for some little and large type shenanigans. Or dressed up as chess pieces. One of them could be the queen, the wife, and the other one could be the

treacherous knight or something they're aggravatingly static though i mean the thing is with that set with all the sets with the chessboard pieces and the cafe it's just crying out for a legs and co routine not a zoo routine but it is crying out for legs and co routine but hang on yeah i am not convinced of dixon as the tolerant wife, to be honest with you. Dixon sings, he needs his fantasy and freedom. And I don't think Dixon would sing that.

She's unconvincing in that role, I would argue. She looks like she cut somebody up for doing such a thing. So, yeah. Well, she's Scottish. But look,

this song has got a big place in my adolescence um where it doesn't really belong but there it is all the same at my school the music department was in a separate building like this collapsing many-roomed building which i think had been bought up by the school many years previously when it was a boarding school but now it was just full of xylophones and cheap spanish guitars and slightly out of tune upright pianos and the music teachers being music teachers allowed you to hang around in there in lunch breaks and so on and you'd either sit and talk to them and they'd treat you like an adult or and your presence would make them feel young and cool. Were you all sitting the wrong way round on the chairs? Well, yeah, but I mean, you know, we had big dreams.

Fame costs, and right there is where we started paying. Or you'd just loaf around in groups on the stairs, you know, or you'd go and sit in one of the rooms, you know, with halting piano recitals of the theme from EastEnders and Axel f but it was a great thing to have this place especially in the late 80s when it fucking rained all the time all year round if you remember and sitting in there in a damp blazer eating a chip cob from the chippy on the high street, trying and failing to chat up the flautists and cellists

with their sexy, posh voices. That was my late 80s, right? That's how I remember it. Blazing youth. Oh, isn't it madness they can't be yours? Yeah, but check this out. There were two main music teachers. There was an old John Lennon nut with a beard

and a younger bloke who was very much in the peter davison mike smith mild fair-haired middle-class englishman mold right very non-fiery and sensibly shod with these gray thick cord trousers and a v-neck right not what you would ever think of as a heartthrob teacher by any means and yet it became apparent that a lot of these musical girls these quite well-bred musical girls towards whom i'd been driven because everyone else thought i was a weirdo also thought i was a weirdo and had crushes on mr wilson because this was the late 80s and I can't overstress the extent to which social and sexual conservatism

had infected British youth, at least where I was living at the time. And it was completely natural for intelligent teenage girls, not eight-year-olds, not nine-year-olds, intelligent teenage girls to sneer at the misunderstood young rebel and cultivate their unrequited love for a 35-year-old teacher with no personality and a face like a thin mist and a legal obligation to not kiss them. And, you know, it's possible,

it's possible that it's just that I was a teenage dickhead and a half-formed blob of precocity and excruciating pretension, but I doubt that very much. Anyway, here's the story. A few years after this Top of the Pops, we were doing our GCSEs, and the music GCSE involved a performance exam. So we all had to go into the main room in this building, one by one or two by two,

and perform for a panel of teachers, singing and playing, with one of them accompanying on the piano if necessary. So on the day this was happening, we were all lounging around the music department, waiting our turn. And I had two girls rehearsing this song, I Know Him So Well.

And of course, being a teenage know-nothing, I scoffed at them. And I said, how are you doing that song? It's for old folks and it's like being a Tory or something. And they looked at each other meaningfully. And the one who was always prone to giving things away said, actually, it's a lovely song. The lyrics are very interesting and they both sort of blushed and you know it's slowly it started to dawn on me oh no when they went in to perform

i went around the side and peered in through the window and watched them deliver a school choir-tastic rendition of this song with and to Mr Wilson at the piano. Oh, my God. And I realised I was watching a genuine emotional outpouring. Right, this was their hour tune. These lyrics, these Sir Tim Rice lyrics, expressed their feelings towards the unreachable, impossible, idealised figure of their fucking boring dickhead music teacher.

And there they were, experiencing this moment of unparalleled romantic intensity as the rain poured down and a bitter young Sid Barrett fan spied on them through the window, laughing uncontrollably, but knowing deep down that the joke was on me. And they were visibly shaken afterwards. One of them perhaps had to console the other on the stairs. And while I was not outspokenly mean, I must admit I wasn't feeling the poignancy at the time.

And neither were any of my friends who I all told about it who all responded the same way as me basically by saying but inevitably the joke was on me forever because about a year later I'd had this very long-lasting crush on a different girl who inevitably I'd idealised as cool and smart and intriguing. And one night at a party, she drank enough to end up outside with me where we shared an intimate moment, but not in the way I'd hoped. She couldn't kiss me, she explained, because she was so mixed up about her feelings for Mr Wilson. And if she'd had a magic wand, she'd wave it all and everything would be fine.

She'd be settled down with her bloke in Clark shoes on a layered centre parting. And so instead of getting my first kiss, I was expected to feel sympathy for this predicament. At 16 years old, maybe even 17 actually just standing there nodding gravely like that must be very hard raging anarchistic teenage fuck hormones coursing through me oh yeah it must be it must be uh must be very difficult poor you and already i understood the world was going to refuse to do what i wanted and needed it to for the rest of my life seemingly out of pure spite almost like eternal karma for watching two honest romantic girls trying to follow their hearts and going Ah!

It's been coming back to bite me on the arse ever since. And what did you do, Taylor? What did I do? For your examination. I believe I played a song in my own composition. Oh my God. Oh yes. I was hoping you'd say, oh yeah, I did

Careless Whisper. I did One Night in Bangkok. Yes. This is the scene where the Russian Grandmaster kills Apollo Creed. It was only mentioned to winkle Neil's Rocky IV anecdote out of him. Go on. Well, yeah, when I went to see Rocky IV, which is one of my favourite films, I was with a mate.

You know the scene where Apollo Creed gets killed by Ivan Drago? Me and my mate were giggling. You will lose. Me and my mate were laughing our ass off at that bit. And this bloke in front of me, really hench bloke, big, you know, teardrop tattoo and all of that,

turns around, jabs a finger at me and my mate. You fucking giggle again, I'll fucking make you Apollo Creed. Yeah, we buttoned it after that. It was, I mean, we were scared shitless, but we were too scared to even move seats. But, yeah. But people had no problem with that stuff in terms of shouting stuff out in cinemas back then as i recall anyway i remember racist stuff when i went to see indiana jones and the

temple of doom you know the bit at the beginning with the indian village it's been i remember suddenly quite a poignant moment that all the kids have been kidnapped and all of that and just this loud voice in the back of the Odeon screen one in Jordan Welling commentary. I came here to watch Indiana Jones, not fucking Gandhi. Oh, Jesus. So I know him so well would spend two more weeks at number one finally yielding to You Spin Me Round by Dead or Alive.

It would go on to sell over 823,000 copies in the UK, became the second biggest single of 1985 after The Power of Love by Jennifer Rush and remains the biggest selling single by a female duo in the UK. However, neither singer scored another top 40 hit in the UK again, although the song was taken to number 5

by Steps in December of 2001 when it was cut and shut with Words Are Not Enough and taken to number 11 in April of 2001 by Susan Boyle and Peter Kay in a dress not heard that I bet it's

hilarious hey come on I'll be a sport it's for. Hey, come on, Al. Be a sport. It's for charity. Yeah. I'm guessing it was for charity anyway. It fucking better have been. I know him so well. I'm going to skedaddle back to Radio 1 now, so see you soon. Mike Green and Bruno Brooks are on top of the pubs next week. Little and larger Radio 1.

They're going to love her for that. We'll see you next week. Bye-bye. This is Eugene Wilde and personality. It's like the fancy clothes you wear Or the way you comb your hair The diamonds that are there There's just something about you, baby That knocks your heart free

We cut back to Bates caressing Long from behind, while a couple of youths behind them pull faces and lark about. Long makes her excuses and attempts to leave, reminding us she's on Radio 1 right now. Bates informs us that Mike Reed and Bruno Brooks are in the chair next week, and Long calls them the little and large of Radio 1. Then they sign off with Personality by Eugene Wilde. We've already covered Eugene Wilde in chart music number 44 when he took Gotta Get You Home Tonight to number 18 in November of 1984 and this is the follow-up.

This time he's teamed up with his old band Simplicious for a double A-side featuring Let Her Feel It, and this track, which is the one that's been picked up by Radio 1. It entered the charts last week at number 43, and this week it's slithered up five places to number 38. And, as is the style

in mid-80s top of the popters, it's the accompaniment for some enforced jollity and capering amongst the studio floor. Now, Neil, Zoo, essentially no more, aren't they? They did the last proper routine on September 29th of 1983 when they did the bits to Superman by Black Lace and What You Got, What I Need by Unique. And Flick Colby parted from the show,

but members were kept on right known to the production crew by now as cheerleaders but known to chart music as city farm and here they are looking like plain close police officers at a disco in an episode of juliet bravo no official routine but yeah we stab them with our steely knives but you just can't kill the beast they're still here they're still here i mean it's not been pushed right to the back that's the giveaway yeah yeah they've been pushed right to the back to a certain extent and we get a lovely sort of i would say about 15 seconds where you can finally see a bit of the audience um tantalizing glimpses of the kind of mixed bag that is pop fans in 1985 um but then the show ends

on a kind of looping 360 degree shot of just two really dull never mind their name they're zoo cunts um just doing their usual step um very disappointing end to the show really um i would like to as ever just see more of the crowd yeah it's those two like she a one woman 15th birthday party circa February 1985 and he also looking rather like Jazz Coleman if he had just

lightened up a bit let his body move to the music felt all that tension draining out of his shoulders maybe put on a brightly patterned shirt open to the navel

and some white slacks explore his feminine side but no no too many matte black stages to stalk too many front rows to sweat on too many boardroom tables to destroy well quiet i mean we do get a good look at the kids finally and you have to say in comparison to the last episode of chart music taylor these kids the youth of today have got much to say oh yeah and they're having a lot more fun than their counterparts from 75 certainly more diversely dressed yeah but i can't help noticing that uh ties and shirts are starting to creep in yes already i said the sexist look from the late 80s like out of the hitman and her yeah i hated

that yeah yeah but there's also a lot of people with big red hearts sewn onto their outfits as though there had been some plan to make this a valentine's day special because it's valentine's day yeah until someone looked at the lineup of the smith Smiths, killing joke, Terry Hall, Gary Newman, and allowed that idea to expire on the vine. By the end, we see Bates and Long kind of like coupling a bit, but it just doesn't work, does it? No. I mean, you know she belongs to Peter Powell

for a kick-off. But number two, it's Simon Bates she's with. And he's a bit WC Handy with her, isn't he? Yes. He's a bit overly familiar. I mean, Bates never normally does that, I find. So that surprised me a little bit. No, you're safe in Simon Bates' giant paw.

Yes. Janice feels like Fay Wray. So this song, I mean, I don't remember it at all, but it's about as good as this sort of music can get in 1985 isn't it yeah old eugene he's um he's he's not trying to get anyone home tonight no well he's not he's not into bullshit superficiality and he's into personality he's into what you know the content of your soul rather than you know how much revlon you've got on so um that seems to be the underlying message

of the song yeah but i mean this is among the first of the cringing 80s anti-sex songs yeah but this one's worse than usual because he's not even saying that he doesn't want sex he's trying to wangle his way towards it dishonestly yeah yeah oh yeah i'm different because i like your personality oh fuck off you chance baron fuck but as soon as he shuts up this does become a half decent record because the instrumental track is is actually a bit peculiar there's quite a lot going on um whereas it's his generic nasal 80s uh singing That's the drag. You know what I mean? Cause it's got that, that snappy early eighties,

Lindrum sound still hanging onto it, which is good as far as I'm concerned. And, and an absolute torrent of DX seven bell toned keyboard. Like so many of these records from this era, it just sounds like someone with a spoon hitting glasses with different amounts of water in them you know but it sounds all right i think i mean now that the the troweled on mid-80sness of this record has become charming in a way which it wasn't at the time or for years afterwards you know and so slightly ironically for a record about a man pretending to ignore the

surface and only caring about the human being uh it's got a lovely surface but the human being is a bit of a pain in the ass yeah it's a great record to end the show on i think yes because reason being it gets everyone dancing and what was always the pleasure of seeing the audience dances particularly when you see those odd little figures in the audience you can tell they're there for just one band but but you know a really part of one subculture perhaps forced not forced to but dancing and responding to like basically disco music um it's always really nice but you know that in the distance because there is distance in the studio it's fucking enormous it's like a super club with a super club attached to the power super club and

yet the camera has been put in the hands of some monomaniacal dickhead who's just focused in on the two most objectionable looking people in the entire setup you know have a wonder let's have a look at the kids of 85 because the like you say, Al, you're dead right. It's quite a diverse bunch, and it's quite an interesting bunch as well. It's another missed opportunity with the crowd, I think. So the following week, personality jumped four places to number 34,

where it stayed for two weeks before slithering away. After that, Eugene Wilde went back to being a solo artist, having two more minor hits in 1985 with che che cool and the zamo defying don't say no and then never troubled the charts again and that closes the book on this episode atop of the pops and it closes the book on an entire era of the show because four days later, Michael Grade, who had been controller of BBC One for five months, put the new BBC weekday schedule into operation.

The chat show Wogan was moved from every Saturday to Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and on the 19th of February, the first episode of EastEnders was broadcast, originally running on Tuesdays and Thursdays. That combined with Grey's edict that as many homegrown TV shows as possible be broadcast in half hour blocks because that's what they did in America meant that this would be the last regular 40 minute episode of Top of the Pops and seven months later it would be brought forward to

seven o'clock where it would stay for the next 11 years end of an era chaps yeah and it i should have felt the repercussions and remembered the repercussions but i don't i'm not sure i noticed to be honest with you um yeah that's odd isn't it it is a bit odd but but truth be told that that the great thing about this particular episode in a way is that it's 40 minutes there's too much in it and and it leaves you a bit groggy but too much in a good way in a good kind of oh fucking hell where am i kind of way um that you know there is an argument for saying the half hour format is actually better and tighter and they start eliminating things that shouldn't have been in it. But unfortunately, the music policy, I would say, goes downhill from then on.

So the weird thing about this episode is that musically it doesn't really point anywhere in terms of what would happen later on in the decade. But I'm astonished that I didn't really notice that it had dropped. I noticed the change in schedules, and I was an EastEnders watcher from the off. But I didn't mourn it. I wasn't saddened by it. And I don't really recall a load of letters into the music press moaning about it.

Yeah, it's odd, isn't it? Because as they've just demonstrated, you can get a lot of different things in a 10-minute slot. Yeah. That means that chances aren't going to be taken anymore. Yeah. Yeah. But as we've seen, they weren't taking much chances anyway.

They just used that 10 minutes to wedge in loads of American stuff. Yeah, I mean, if that's what the extra 10 minutes is for, Jonathan King's fucking shit. Good riddance. Yeah. I'll tell you the worst part of all of this. You know who composed the Wogan theme? Go on.

B.A. Robertson. Oh. Must have been down in his dowry. So what's on telly afterwards? Well, BBC kicks on with a question of sport, followed by the nine o'clock news, the last episode of the murder series, Charters and Caldicott, question time from Manchester,

and they close out the night with Rock School, with comments from John Taylor, Gary Moore, Ian Pace and Karl Palmer. Rock School must have had a place in your life back then. Oh yeah, definitely. Deirdre Cartwright. Such a weird concept, Rock School. It's like if there was a programme called Sex Chore. In music education at the moment,

Rock School is cited not as an influence but what we are trying to avoid really yeah very much so especially when it comes to teaching music production music performance and things like that whereas i remember watching those shows because i didn't watch them late i think they were often repeated at the weekend early yeah and i remember watching those they were instructive i didn't play in that you know even before i played an instrument they were okay they weren't so bad but yeah that's everything we want to avoid in music pedagogy these days apparently why is that no idea i think it came across as a little bit smug and it came across as a little bit foreboding for i don't know i don't know i'll have to ask a music production teacher i'll'll get back to you on that, Al. Please do. But it was good having a woman presenting a music show as an authority figure.

Well, we had Muriel Gray, sort of. Oh, yeah, of course, yeah. Sorry. BBC Two have just started Out of Court, the law and justice programme hosted by Sue Cook, which throws light on the dark alleyways of crime, according to Radio Times. Then it's the Carla Lane sitcom of crime, according to Radio Times.

Then it's the Carla Lane sitcom The Mistress, starring Felicity Kendall. Then 40 Minutes documents two stories of love from the West Midlands, and they finish off with The Rockford Files, Newsnight, and more red-hot Open University action. ITV has just finished a repeat of Duty Free, followed by another chance to see a five-year-old episode of Minder, where Terry's day out in Brighton is marred when he has to guard a racehorse and tries to cop off with

Lisa Goddard. After TVI and News at Ten, it's a repeat of Kojak, followed by Looks Familiar, and they close down with Night Thought by paul botang channel four has just finished discovery where david bellamy looks at the social life of hairs and then annika rice's arse takes a jaunt through shropshire in treasure hunt after the final episode of the kidnap thriller the price eddie charlton takes on rex williams in the blue arrow

masters billiards tournament then it's assaulted nuts the sketch show starring cleo rocos and tim brooke taylor and they finish off with an examination of islam in today's world in hall of mirrors so me boys what are we talking about in the playground tomorrow i mean oddly enough i remember being in the playground tomorrow after this episode. It was just Killing Joke. Oh my God, did you see Killing Joke? If you heard Killing Joke, do you know Killing Joke? It really blew my head open that one.

So I would have been talking about Killing Joke a lot and also Terry. Yeah, I mean, Morrissey would love to think we'd all be talking about him pretending to machine gun the audience. But by now he's old hat and it's gone a bit flat. I remember being more intrigued by Andy Rourke's salmon-coloured Fender bass because I'd never seen one. But yeah, Dead or Alive, possibly colour-filled, and Jazz Coleman's Pompeii mosaic face would edge them out, I think. What are we buying on Saturday?

Dead or Alive Colourfield killing joke probably I wasn't buying How Soon Is Now despite being a Smiths fan because I'd already got it twice

and the B side was a track from Meet His Murder which I'd already just bought and I wasn't going to splash out more money and get the

12 inch for that previously unreleased third track because that turned out to be an instrumental. Thanks, love. Yeah, also, what, Dead or Alive, Colourfield, Don Henley, all of which I liked at the time. It's a good strike rate for a mid-'80s top of the pops, isn't it?

Definitely. What does this episode tell us about February of 1985? This does make the first half of 1985 look much better than it really was. In all sorts of ways, and not just the 40 minutes thing, it's a big episode. There's lots in it, and the small isn't kind of really allowed anymore. But what it tells me now is that it's not the Nadia it's often characterized as, 1985. I mean, what it is revealing of in a sense is the different tangents and urges and trajectories that had led up to this point

what it gives me nothing of really is what the fuck is about to happen or what's going to happen in 86 87 i don't really get that but as a kind of index of of what's happened to all the different things that have been going on in the 80s. It's a 40-minute slab of honesty, the shit and the gold. It's all kind of in there. Yeah, I would say don't let those good records fool you. Don't let the five fool you. This is now the second half of the 80s,

as will very soon become apparent. And Live Aid, here we come. Welcome to the haties i mean i counted 21 different singles that got airplay on this episode and it does make you wonder that why didn't they persist with this you know as a snapshot of the charts in 1985 it's pretty comprehensive it is it is even though the tracks on that have already been and gone and tracks that

wouldn't do anything in the top 40 it's still pretty comprehensive and you just wonder if they'd have brought EastEnders a week earlier and this was a half an hour episode what what would they cut out

hmm I think Killing Joke might have not got in well you can't help thinking they cut out all the good shit, you know what I mean? Yeah. If you take 10 minutes out of a 40-minute show,

the 10 minutes in this show that that could be, that could be the colour field in Killing Joke gone. Yeah. In which case, you've suddenly got a shit episode

atop of the pops. And that, pop craze youngsters, is the end of this episode of Chart Music. All I need to do now is use your promotional flange, www.chart-music.co.uk

facebook.com slash chart music. Reach us on twitter at chart music t-o-t-p money down the g-string patreon.com slash chart music. Ta very much, Neil Kulkarni. Good luck with your posture corrector out.

God bless you Taylor Parks. Cheers. My name, Al. God bless you, Taylor Parks. Cheers. My name's Al Needham and I... Hang on. My name's Al Needham and I am now standing on my computer table like a god. My natural situation. Ah!

Arseholes. Shark music. GreatBigOwl.com Hi, and thanks for listening to the online hour tune. So, let's begin. I was working at Barry Island Butlins selling seafood when I had my first kiss. It was over the seafood trolley with a girl called Steph from Basingstoke and it was probably

to the sound of Jerry and the Pacemakers performing live in the background because it was a festival of the 60s weekender. So only this year, 85, Steph from Basingstoke

turned up again. And one night after I'd finished my shift, I met up with her in the Butleys Disco. My main memory is that we had a slow dance to Careless Whisper by George Michael, right? Simon feels unsure As he takes Steph's hand and leads her to the dance floor. As the music dies in between his thighs. Something's getting tumour sent. Simon's pitching a tent. And the problem was that I was wearing a pair of fashionable pleated trousers.

And when our bodies parted, I was visibly showing my enjoyment. In what fans of Curb Your Enthusiasm will know as a pants tent. Time could never mend The awkward throbbing of a bell end There's a sinking heart as the swelling starts And they look down to contemplate A full-on Billy Smarts He's never gonna dance again Guilty pleaded trials has got no rhythm

As they watch his crotch distend He knows it isn't cool He should've known better than to wear them slacks he wants to hide his side his pants tense so he's never gonna dance again the way he danced with Steph

visibly showing my enjoyment Tonight he's feeling so forlorn He wishes he could lose this horn Maybe it's better this way She doesn't copse off with someone else anyway He stands there looking so defeated He wishes his trousers weren't so pleated He turns and walks away

Back to his cockle tray Visibly showing my enjoyment Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Neil Kulkarni's stomach. I turned up the next night hoping to run into her again, but, you know, what did I see? The treacherous Steph from Basingstoke snogging someone else. But to be fair to her, I did stink of cockles, probably. Guilty pleated trousers, I got no rhythm. Visibly showing my enjoyment.

Welcome to All Rather Mysterious, the podcast that aims to unlock the mysteries of the past with the key of fact. My name is John Rain. My name is Eleanor Morton. My name is David Reed. Rather Mysterious, the podcast that aims to unlock the mysteries of the past with the key of fact. My name is John Rain. My name is Eleanor Morton. My name is David Reed. Please join us as we present to you mysteries that have baffled the world. You heard any noises? What about a door creaking?

No, you don't have to do that. That weird ka-dunk that lights going off makes for some reason in films. All Rather Mysterious. that lights going off makes for some reason in films. All rather mysterious. 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.