Chart Music: the Top Of The Pops Podcast - Chart Music #61: July 25th 2003 – The Arsethropocene

Episode Date: September 10, 2021

The latest episode of the podcast which asks; has Al ever been tossed off by a robot? Yes, Pop-Crazed Youngsters; after putting it off for ages, it’s finally time for another rare excursion into The Most Rubbish Century We’ve Ever Lived Through. It’s 2003, and your panel is currently 1) Doing a Sex in the Daily Mirror, 2) Baiting David Blaine with a Whopper, and 3) getting their head together in Lancaster by burying their face into a load of dogs. Top Of The Pops, on the other hand, is faring less well; we are in the Poochie Era of TOTP. Pulling down the kind of ratings that would have ill-befitted a repeat of Top Cat on a Tuesday afternoon in 1978, being absolutely kicked to buggery every Friday night by Gail Platt and Vera Duckworth, being stalked by CD:UK and Popworld, and being threatened with permanent exile to BBC3, it’s a grim, grim time for our fave weekly Pop treat.  But in this episode we finally get stuck into the tenure of Chris Cowey as Boss Of The Pops – an era which brought a shiny new studio, a spurning of videos and a modular, bolt-on, Ikea-like approach to scheduling which ensured that anyone who came remotely near the charts at the turn of the century has to pass through the TOTP studio.Musicwise, it turns out that 2003 was possibly the last golden age of Pop, but this episode is a proper Lucky Bag of Randomness. Wayne Wonder is slight, and a bit rammel. Murderdolls have decided to employ a manky potato as their lead singer, who hairballs his way through White Wedding. D-Side get ambushed by the Mrs McClusky of reality shows. Super Furry Animals are dead good. Benny Benassi pitches up with some Oven Ready Women for some Ladisfaction. And Beyoncé crushes everything we’ve seen into dust with one mighty shake of her arse and the best single of this century. And possibly the next one.    Sarah Bee and Simon Price join Al Needham for a through evisceration of 2003, veering off on such tangents as how to create half a johnny, people trying to be erotic with  lathes, the perils of running a club night in a venue owned by Sex Nazis, getting a love bite off The Strokes, James Brown’s opinions on fish supper accoutrements, Rock Star Death Fashion Shoots, and working with the Jimmy Savile Tweenie. Come for the discourse, stay for the swearing…Video Playlist | Subscribe | Facebook | Twitter | The Chart Music Wiki | Patreon 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. Hello all you teddy guys and girls out there. Welcome to the Tweenie Chart Countdown. Today you're going to hear all the Tweenie Chart Countdown. Today you're going to hear all the Tweenie's favourite songs, and first on stage is Young Milo. He's chosen this number as his favourite song because he likes to move and dance.

Teas me, and then just tempt me, so I can get my satisfaction. Tent me, so I can get my, Darned Spatian. Bait me, and agitate me, Until I get my, Darned Spatian. Darned Spatian. Corn. Corn.

I get very excited for corn. Wow. Naughty ladies. Corn. An awful lot I'd like to say about Lex and Co. I'm afraid they'll probably bleep me out if I do. Choke pop and shake your bits off So I can get my Dynastaction

Bed time and chug your drolls off Until I get my Dynastaction Dynastaction Dynastaction Dynastaction Until I get fired. That is my show. That is my show. That is my show. That is my show. That is my show. That is my show. That is my show.

That is my show. That is my show. Here are some young ladies I've admired many times in Little Armchair. young ladies I've admired many times in my little armchair at home. The following podcast is a member of the Great Big Owl family. This will certainly have an adult theme and might well contain strong scenes of sex or violence, which could be quite graphic. It may also contain some very explicit language, which will frequently mean sexual swear words.

What do you write, listen to? Um... Chart music. Chart music. Chart music. Hey up you pop craze youngsters and welcome to the latest episode of Chart Music, the podcast that gets its hands right down the back of the sofa on a random episode of Top of the Pops. I'm your host Alham, and by my side today are Simon Price. Hello. And Sarah B.

Hello. Oh, it's been a while, chaps. So why don't I just lie on the floor and allow you to spill all that poppin' interesting stuff all over me. Well. Well, the rules do allow us to do that now, so the rules allow us to do anything we want.

What I want to do is none of that if it involves being near other people. It's been a while since you've been on, Sarah. About seven months. You must have loads to talk about. Loads and loads. Go on, then. Nothing. Fuck all, mate.

Absolutely bugger all. You're hibernating still. Pretty much, yeah. I mean, I've been out but i haven't like done stuff yeah all restrictions lifted you can do anything you fucking want it's your world baby and um taste that freedom so yeah aka we're on our fucking oh yeah society has at this point been ceded to uh the most robust twats people people who break into football games and, you know, stick flares up their arses in Leicester Square.

And, you know, and also people who don't have any choice but to go out and deal with those people. You have to try and claw back some kind of positivity from somewhere. And, you know, I've just been on a bus this morning and, you know, most people were still wearing masks, even though they don't have to. But, yeah, it doesn't really work like that like oh just be careful use your common sense a lot of people don't have any common sense they just don't they're just missing it and some things have to come from the top and they have to filter down like that and it would have been so easy to just say oh you can do what you want but let's keep the masks on we've all got them now let's

get our money's worth yeah you know um you can get fun ones with leopard print on and you know but there you go that's the government that we have unfortunately the only one positive thing about all of this is that we finally got a generation gap back again aren't we yeah which is nice back in the day when you wanted to alienate and scare the older generation you'd have to you know you'd have to go some lengths you'd have to have a mohican or a swastika T-shirt or something. Nowadays, you just get on a bus without a mask. Last night, I was in central London for reasons I'm going to come on to.

Very pop and very interesting reasons as well. But having done the pop and interesting thing that I'll come on to, my wife and I decided to go for a little late night drink. A quiet late night drink, we thought. A little nightcap in the Soho Arts Club on 5th Street in Soho, which we love. And I suppose I

should have seen the warning signs when the security guy made us wait outside for other people to leave. But I thought, no, they're just being sensible. They've obviously only got about 12 people in there. They're still're still distancing i thought fine fine we'll wait so we walked down the stairs and there's this sort of big soundproof door at the bottom you push your way through and suddenly we're in this fucking sweating seething mayhem of a disco of like loads of very young people going nuts hugging each other leaping around dancing to

earth wind and fire and the rhythmics just old music basically stuff that to them is hilarious because it's so old you know and I got really freaked out partly because I wasn't psyched up I wasn't psyched up for it I mean obviously I'm going to have to psych myself up for being in a disco pretty soon anyway because my here's the plug alternative 80s night spellbound in Brighton is relaunching. Nature is healing. Yeah, exactly. But just to sort of walk down these steps in Soho for what we thought was going to be a nice little rum and coke before bed.

And then boom, suddenly it's fucking Studio 54 in there, you know, and it's fucking, I really freaked out. And also, yeah, I mean, I've never felt quite such an old man among a bunch of young people because it's been a while since I've been in that kind of environment. I couldn't handle it. And I ended up just sort of not drinking our drink and i just had to sort of say look i'm sorry but we've got to go i was surprised at how freaked out i was i thought oh come on i'm gonna be fine with this the thing is we've we've jacked up our brains to into survival mode and it's not easy to step that down again no a lot of anxiety it's like you can drill down

and recognize that it's not based in anything and you can you know let it dissipate but you can't with this because like you can't if you're anything like me like i i can't afford to get long covid i just can't my health is on its ass already i just can't afford to if you are an anxious person to begin with then this just jacks it right right up and like i've tried to you know um i i wanted to go to the seaside for a couple of days and i couldn't do it because i did a little dry run and i went on the overground and i went to barnard castle for half an hour i had a little i tested my brain by going to yeah but i just i i couldn't hack it after i i was okay for a bit my energy bar was

was full when i left the house and then by the time i was three stops from home on the way back i was just like nope nope nope nope nope and you feel a bit foolish about it but it's like no that's kind of normal and it it is weird to me like how many people are fine with like being in crowds and stuff and being out and about and it's like i just i mean good for them and i'm not saying they are all yeah the robust twats that i was talking about but if you're sort of physically mentally or emotionally kind of not that tough, you're going to start falling behind in a certain way. I ended up talking to one of the younger generation the other night about this. And she says, oh, you know, I've been to clubs and all that kind of stuff. And I go, you're fucking mad.

What the fuck is wrong with you? She says, oh, I've had one jab. And I said, oh, well, that's like us having sex and me saying no don't worry i'm gonna put on half a johnny yeah i really need to work on my chat up lines it's been too long how would that work yeah is it half long ways or you know width ways and yeah yeah like it's, which way would a dog wear trousers? Anyway, pop things are interesting things. Yes, yes. Well, now then. Yeah, I spent some of yesterday evening socialising, rubbing shoulders with some pop stars who we've talked about at considerable length on a previous Chart Music.

B.A. Robertson, eh? Sparks. Ooh! Fucking hell. Yeah, Robertson, eh? Sparks. Ooh! Fucking hell. It was very exciting. Basically, I did my first bit of DJing for 18 months last night. It was the West End premiere of the amazing documentary, The Sparks Brothers.

I've done quite a bit of work with Sparks over the years, interviewing them and stuff like that, writing biogs and booklets. The flint to their Sparks, if you will. Yes, exactly. That's how I like to think of myself, very much. And I've done a bit of work with Edgar Wright, the director of the film,

in terms of writing the production notes that get sent to all the people who go to Sundance and that sort of thing. So, you know, I've kind of been on the outskirts of this whole project. But yeah, I was asked to DJ the premiere in the West End last night. Yeah, I was DJing in this sort of pop-up thing

in the cinema bar run by Spiritland, who are this sort of audiophile collective who have a fancy bar in King's Cross and another one in the Royal Festival Hall. And they're good people and, you know, they put on good events and I was honoured to be asked. But the whole experience of getting a vinyl crate because it was a vinyl only set and packing it and you know get my set list ideas together and all that it was quite nerve-tangling after such a

long time not necessarily for sort of covid reasons but just the adrenaline rush of is it gonna go okay am i gonna play the right songs well will i have a technical breakdown and all that kind of shit and also i'm out of practice of playing vinyl anyway, in DJ terms. I've been using laptops for quite a while. But yeah, it wasn't a proper red carpet premiere as such. There was only one paparazzo outside that I saw. But TV's Katie Puckrick and radio's Katie Puckrick, I should say, as well, was there. And she came over to say hi.

And I met the director, Edgar Wright. I hadn't actually met him before, who's um work i'm a big fan of you know spaced and hot furs and shauna the dead baby driver all of that so it's great to meet him but then ron and russell male themselves came along um just as i was playing looks looks looks uh which is if you don't know it's a prohibition jazz number from their album indiscreet it's brilliant and uh and ron just said what's this old crap yeah put some fucking oasis on and russell goes retro rubbish and uh yeah it's great and and we talked about shoes and we talked about the can film festival as you do and they posed for a photo with me and the missus um and i i just love those guys so much i unfortunately uh wasn't

able to get them to say bummer dog no i know i know but i thought about it i i'm pretty sure the words bummer and dog exist in their oeuvre and we can just edit it together somehow um but yeah um some of my dj selections were a little mischievous um i followed this town big enough for both of us with sugar baby love by the rubettes which is the record which prevented sparks from reaching number were a little mischievous. I followed this town at Big Enough for Both of Us with Sugar Baby Love by the Rubettes, which is the record which prevented Sparks from reaching number one.

And they're still a little bitter about it. The shut up of your face to their Vienna. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I played some pet shop boys, right,

who get a bit of needle in the film for never acknowledging their debt to Sparks. It's quite funny. They obviously wouldn't be interviewed for it uh but somebody else talks about a time they did sort of mention sparks to

psbs and neil tennant just said you're very naughty yeah so that's my pop and interesting fun last night in in soho that's pretty good nothing's happened from this end just just use your shit start doing pub quizzes again how's that been going weird weird i've got two on the go at the minute one's in kimberley on the outskirts of town in a local pub and the other one's in a bit near the center of town and people from all over knots usually come to that one the one in kimberley is absolutely fine people are turning up it's all good what in town no fuckers turning up because it's tan people staying away from town because it's really it's full of bellends without masks on and everything central brighton has been pretty fucking wild ever since unlocking and central

london last night you know what before i ventured into london last night which by the way is my first visit to london for you know nearly two, which is kind of weird. Jesus. Yeah. But I have been wondering how this whole thing would have affected the nightclub sector. And I put myself in the place of, I mean, obviously I'm a nightclub promoter, but I'm not a venue owner. And I thought venue owners would be absolutely shitting it that a whole generation would have come through and broken the habit.

They haven't got that sort of rite of passage of, you know, you hit 18 or, let's be honest probably 17 and off you go to a nightclub and that may be that you know just you know nightclubs might might be for the dumper um but you know what last night thursday night it was as we're recording this on a friday central london was absolutely just fucking heaving with young people i guess sort of student age people yeah because midweek nights in london are you know where venues traditionally put on cheapo nights for for students it's fucking you you wouldn't think there'd ever been a pandemic and that you know just from you know nature is healing from the point of view of the nightclub

economy which i suppose is kind of reassuring and good luck to them but yeah people that age always want to get pissed after chucking out time and try and cop off with each other yeah but i thought that they'd found different ways of doing it now whether it's you know having a massive illegal rave in a field or just going to somebody's house but if there is a group of people i'd like to rub up against at the moment it's the brand new batch of pop craze patreons who have shoved some money down our g string this month and that list includes in the five dollar section sarah mcveigh jeffrey s dixon andy hollis justin davis mark symes mark boyle owen marriott jo Joe O'Donnell, Matthew Grenham, William Wright, Jim Prentice, Mark Harrison, Lizzie, David Gilhule, Michelle Stephens, Steve Mishkin, and Louise Duke.

Thank you, babies. Legends. I want to lick and touch you all. Thank you, babies. Legends. I want to lick and touch you all. And in the $3 section, we have Burcles, Aidan Taylor, Peter Hammerson, Nicholas McArdle, an Edinburgh Castle rock expert, Tony C.

And Matt, for real, thank you so much, because you whacked it up just a little bit more, didn't you? Bless you. And of course, as well as getting episodes of chart music in full without adverts ages before the rest of you the pop craze patron people have been a frigging and a rigging this week's chart music top 10 shall we chaps hit the fucking music we've said goodbye to Tandori Elephant, Jesus Price, Nolan Tentacle Porn,

CFAX Data Blast, and Taylor Parks' 20 Romantic Moments, which means one up, four down, four new entries, and one re-entry. A drop of nine places from number two to number ten for Fox Biz. First new entry in at number nine, The Pig People of Charlesmoor. Another new entry this time at number eight, Friar David.

Yes. Down one place from number six to number seven, Friar David. Yes. Down one place from number six to number seven, Rock Expert David Stubbs! And it's a two-place drop from number four to number six, for

here comes Jezebel. Yes, keep on in there. Into the top five and thrusting his way back into the charts, Jeff Sacks. Come on, Jeff. Last week's number five, this week's number four, bummer dog.

Into the top three and last week's number one has finally fallen, the bent cunts who aren't fucking real. Straight in at number two sharks piss fire which means this week's highest new entry and the brand new chart music number one the cuppatino kid. Oh, what a chart. The thing with Jesus Price is he will rise again. It is foretold. It is foretold in the scripture. Yeah, around about March, April time, yeah?

So this week's new entries. Well, the pig people are Charles Moore, but new metal, I think. You reckon? I thought they might be one of those sort of um self-consciously quirky indie bands like bombay bicycle club or mystery jets or something like that could be yeah they sound quite winsome yeah because i got it into my head that they're like slipknot but they've got a mass that look like the corpse faces of people like larry grayson hyacinth bouquet pete waterman another famous people from Coventry and surrounding area.

I do like that, yeah. Oh, that's it then. Friar David, well, goes without saying. Yeah, French monk. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, you know, proving that the Catholic Church can move with the times. I think there's a bit of Judy Zouk satin tour jackets going on with rock expert David Stubbs being in there.

Oh, really? Well, yeah, because I think he's getting unfairly hyped into the charts, given this cross-platform promotion of him having his own YouTube show, which I'm sure all the PCYs are watching avidly. Yes. But, yeah, I think it's like the kids from Fame bumping up Irene Cara's record sales. It's, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's fixed. Choc's Pissed yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's fixed. Choc's Pissed Fire. What are they all about? What's their stitch? Ooh. What do you think, Sarah? Three-piece garage. Yeah?

Yeah. Not bad. Forgettable, but, you know, bit of lead in the pencil. And the Cupertino kid. Well, that's obviously shaking well. Yeah. Like Nicholas Lindhurst when he sang my generation

with michael barrymore in some jam shoes and a parker or or me in 1983 failing week after week to be paul weller one day we'll have to share um the mock-up poster i made of the jam the movie which actually has nicholas lyndhurst in the role as well yes who else was in it uh martin short yeah and dennis waterman of course dennis waterman so if you want to join those lovely people get yourself on that there info net slap them fingers on your keyboard hammer out patreon.com slash char music step up to the pay window and slip some coin next to this here groin. Oh, and if you have subscribed and I've still not read your name out, that's because I'm a disorganised bellend and I need to be told about it.

So don't be shy. Come and shout at me. Call me a knob end or whatever. He loves it, really. I just want to do right by the Pop Craze youngsters. They deserve it. It's all I live for nowadays. right by the Pop Craze Youngsters.

They deserve it. It's all I live for nowadays. So this episode, Pop Craze Youngsters, takes us all the way back to July the 25th, 2003. I nearly said 19 there. I just stopped myself in time because, yes, this is another excursion to this unwiped arse of a century. I can't lie to you, Pop Crazy youngsters.

Looking at episodes from the arse end of Top of the Pops just fills me with dread. Can you hear this? Listen to this. What? That was my arm after it's been twisted by these two here to do an episode from 2003. I didn't want to do it. They forced me to. It was the big boys and girls that egged me on, sir. It's for your own good, Al.

And you know what, pop-crazed youngsters? They were right to twist my arm so hard because if you are setting yourself up as an authority on Top of the Pops, it can't all be billowy Saxons and flags and balloons and all that good stuff. To ignore Top of the Pops' declining years is like an episode of The World at War

where Laurence Olivier says, well, D-Day happened and that was the Nazis pretty much fucked. The end. Exactly, yeah. We've got to cover the grim death march of Top of the Pops in the early part of the noughties. And I think this is a distinct era that we've not looked at, isn't it? Very much so. The particular regime. The nearest we've not looked at, isn't it? Very much so.

The particular regime. The nearest we've come is 2000, me, Sarah and Neil. Yeah. It is a period we have to talk about because this episode we're going to cover comes from a time when it seems like the music business is in decline. Traditional media appears to be in decline. And Top of the Pops is a show in terminal decline. I mean, nobody knows it yet, but after the episode we're going to cover is in the books, there are only exactly 100 episodes left

before Sir Jingle Nonsobe turns out the lights. Fucking hell, yeah. So where to start with this, chaps? If I were to say to you the music of 2003, what's springing to mind well i honestly believe that the noughties were the last great golden age of pop and a lot of it i would say was driven by the creative rivalry between producers at that time on both sides atlantic um so in the us it was timberland versus the neptunes pharrell you know and um in the uk

it was richard x Xenomania. And these producers all had various kind of puppet acts that they were working with. So Britney and Justin, you know, Sugar Babes and Girls Aloud and so on. Often these producers working on the same act at the same time, but just different songs. So, for example, Justin Timberlake's album Justified,

which was huge around this time, had some tracks by Timbaland and some by the Neptunes and Sugar Babes had hits with songs produced by Xenomania and others produced by Richard X notably Freak Like Me which was you know essentially a re-recording of a mash-up he'd made under the alias Girls on Top so he had all these elements of kind of the avant-garde leaning end of R&B and mash-up culture and electro-clash as well, all feeding into mainstream pop and, for my money, making it amazing.

Electro-clash was very much my thing at the time. I was into Peaches and Fisher Spooner and Ladytron and Goldfrapp and all that. And let's not fuck around here. It was basically Romo under a different name. Like, when NME finally deemed it okay to you

know embrace synthesizers and posing about you're saying it's robo romo yeah exactly turbo romo you were just too ahead of your time i mean you knew that yeah you could have reinvented yourself simon at this time as romo cop yeah absolutely you have 20 seconds to like orlando yeah yeah right but also i mean there's so much else around this time i was hugely into the white stripes and um and and the hives and the rapture and harm our superstar and british sea power and the dresden dolls and lcd sound system lcd sound system right were both a product of and a satire of the hipster movement which was emerging it so this was the time of the hoxton fin

you know that hairstyle where you sweep all your hair into a ridge in the middle like you know like new parents do when they're bathing their babies and they think it's hilarious to that's so kind of picked in 2002 didn't it with beckham yeah yeah exactly and you know what i i was in the orbit of that hipster scene i mean i was way too old at 35 to be one, right? But I was going to the club Trash or anywhere else Errol Alcan was DJing and also Nag Nag Nag. But in hindsight, now that hipsters have all grown beards and opened cereal cafes instead,

I do think that loads of amazing music came out of that slightly wanky scene. I even tried launching a noughties nostalgia night a couple of years ago called Destroy Rock and Roll. I don't think people were ready for it yet because it was only the decades after the decades that you're nostalging about. And I think people need sort of two decades gap. But so I might try again soon in that case.

Yeah, I do think that, and other people who know more about these things than me have said that Electro Clash is overdue a revival now by about two years you know like how there are people who like trend forecast and everything and then there are people who predict when you know society is going to collapse and whatnot and it's like before the collapse of society which apparently we are on schedule for according to the um they they've dredged up a report from the 70s about uh like what's you know how how things are going to crumble and it's like we're right we're right

on track for that so if we can have an electroclash revival before that then i'll be quite happy because it was yeah it was great i went to trash a few times i was not i wasn't cool enough basically i went anyway it was slightly snooty and slightly you know know, but I knew that there was something in it. And I, yeah, and I really loved the music. And it's absolutely, it was a great time for pop. Just so much inventiveness coming into like what you would have thought would be quite standard, say fair before, like ex-boy bands

or new girl bands or whatever. And it's like, no, they're coming out justified. What an album. I just rinsed that this entire year and, you know, revisited it since. girl bands or whatever and it's like no the they're coming out justified what an album i just rinsed that this entire year and you know revisited it since and it's still it sounds of its time but it still holds up it's it's incredible absolutely amazing what a joy and you know christina had her fourth album loads of people have their fourth album out this year weirdly so christina was doing stripped at this point so christina had thrown off all her clothes and embraced sex

I love her it's always fun when somebody does that and I love that I know people really laid into her at the time but I thought it's fucking great Kylie had her ninth album out which is this was Kylie's E album Body Language which the main single of which was Slow

which is one of her bestie bests Britney had her fourth album out as well Britney was doing really well Miss Britney had her fourth album out as well. Britney was doing really well. Missy had her fifth album out. I think every member of The Woo put out an album this year. Yeah, probably. Each one, yeah. And a few of their mates. Dizzy Rascal's first album as well. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

So that was, you know, 18-year-old Dizzy Rascal just blasting onto the scene. And Outkast as well, Speakerboxx and The Love Below. Oh, yes. Yes, please. All these good things. And they were starting to be blasting onto the scene and outcast as well speaker box and the love below oh yes yes please all these good things and they were starting to be that sort of healthy cross-pollination and kind of mingling and you know of a lot of different things that was starting to break down genre really which is what you have now where the genre has never been less of a thing um and yeah and then like

the whole bunch of like American garage-y, art-rock-y stuff that you were saying, and the Kills and the Aeas. And yeah, the White Stripes were just great, weren't they? They were such a huge thing. They were quite a music journo thing, but it was also, you know, people loved them and they were amazing.

Yeah, I think they were kind of quite avant-garde in their way, even though they're very retro as well, drawing upon sort of classic blues and stuff. Just the fact they were kind of quite avant-garde in their way, even though they're very retro as well, drawing upon sort of classic blues and stuff. Just the fact they were so minimal. And the fact they had this very clear aesthetic. They had this, you know, that sort of red, white and black design scheme and everything. Everything was three.

The whole kind of Jack White's thing of like threes. Yeah, yeah. I think that people have got them wrong a little bit when they think it's just sort of throwback band. I think there's something weirdly modern about them. they were just really fun as well they were just really fun and they made a big racket and it was incredible how much sound they they produced oh god seeing them at dingwalls when they were just sort of breaking through over here was just phenomenal just you know two people making that kind of physically exciting music oh yeah and

they had this and it was great the sort of energy of the two of them because Jack White was this slightly kind of, there was this slight mania and this kind of wildness about him. And then Meg, who was so serene and just had this little kind of Mona Lisa smile on, was just there crashing away in the background. It was, you know, yeah. And there was that whole conceit of them

pretending to be brother and sister when they were actually ex-husbands and ex-wives. That's so funny how people couldn't figure that out for ages. Like, that's a blues thing. They're doing the blues thing. Going, oh, my brother, oh, my sister. And it's like, that's just kind of, you know. But it was great because it added this kind of subtext to it, to the sort of sexual chemistry on stage. And yeah, it was all part of it, definitely.

You all two have just demonstrated that there's a full tone going on, on the music scene of 2003. But round about this time everyone's talking about pop being in decline when what they actually meant was the music business was in decline i mean as far as the charts went it had got to the point where if you sold 20 000 copies of your new single you could get to number one yeah well i think what happened was that around the turn of the millennium um the music industry tried to squash the internet try to stamp on it things like napster and all of that yes um and by this point sort of three years into the century they start to realize they've got it horribly wrong yes and

really they should have fucking embraced it from the beginning yes and that they're sort of playing catch-up really trying to figure out how they could do that everybody points their finger at the internet for all of this you know by 2003 the internet stopped being cb radio for spods but it's still not that all-conquering yet is it no you know this is pre-social media pre-youtube pre pretty much anything bar file sharing and forums yeah and sharing a file downloading a song might take all night i can remember setting my my old steam powered fucking first-generation iMac, those fruit-coloured ones, to download a Michael Jackson track

at the start of a night out. And when I came home, pretty much the next morning, it had just about finished downloading. Killing music slowly, Simon. I was. It was the first little jab there. Yeah, I just couldn't find that track anywhere else like i could not literally could not pay for yes yeah you'd go nightclubs and people would not have phones they might have their phone in their pocket to fucking call a taxi to get them home but

they weren't staring at the screen all night what would happen was you'd go out to a club you'd live you'd have the night out you'd do stuff then maybe at 3 a.m you'd come home and very drunk sort of fire up msn messenger or MySpace or something and talk to people on there about what had happened. But it wouldn't be the focus of your whole fucking night. You know, you sound like a right old cunt saying that. But I think there was this kind of sweet spot where technology enabled people to sort of reach out and make contact with each other and befriend each other.

But it wasn't everything. Yeah, it wasn't everything. Let's get stuck in 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. instead we explore the weird wonderful and downright hilarious things that happen in school from people actually doing the job we reminisce on our own time at school funny things we experience each day and of course we share your hilarious stories from the chalk face so if you work in a school or just want a nostalgic trip down memory lane sit up straight fingers on lips and get ready for the lesson. In the news, the body of the scientist and biological weapons expert David Kelly has been found at Harrow Downhill in Oxfordshire.

Saddam Hussein's sons have been killed by coalition forces in Mosul. Geoffrey Archer has been released from prison after serving two years of a four-year sentence for being a lying bastard. Idi Amin has fallen into a coma in a Saudi hospital where he's been in exile since 1980 and will die in a fortnight. The British Grand Prix at Silverstone

is interrupted when Neil Horan, a defrocked Catholic priest, runs onto the track in a kilt, brandishing a placard which reads, Read the Bible. The Bible is always right. He would go on to attempt to run onto the track at the 2004 Epsom Derby before being restrained by police, push over the Brazilian marathon runner,

Vandalei de Lima, while he was leading in the marathon at that Summer Olympics. Found not guilty of indecent assault while claiming he only ever wore one pair of green satin pants, which he never washed because he, quote, needed them at all times, and then pulled them out of his pockets and waved them at the jury.

Got arrested in Berlin after planning to do a peace jig outside the stadium before the World Cup final while holding a banner which read Adolf Hitler was a good leader who was following the word of Christ and get through to the first round of Britain's Got Talent in 2009. He was later imprisoned for 12 counts of indecent assault and was last seen dancing outside southwark crown court in support of rolf harris the last british living participant in world war one has died at the age of 108 bob hope has died at the age of 100 in california of pneumonia but the big news this week is that Moe Bear has announced on his website

that he's honoured to learn that his name is being used in salons as a description of a tuppany all off round the fan air. On the cover of Melody Maker this week, nothing, because it shut down three years ago. On the cover of Smash hits decide the number one lp in the uk is dangerously in love by beyonce over in america the number one single is crazy in love by beyonce and the number one lp is chapter two by ashante so me dears what were we doing in July of 2003? Well, I had already burned out and fucked off out of London by this point.

Probably this month, actually. I went to live in Lancaster and tried to live a normal life because I was so fucking tired. I remember this, yeah. Yeah, and just kind of really disillusioned with things. And my uncle was renting out his old house, which I knew from when I was a kid. And he agreed to rent it to me. Not for, like, you know, because people are like, oh, you get a peppercorn rent. No.

So I had to pay proper money. But, you know, it still wasn't very much. It was a little teeny tiny terrace house in Lancaster. And I just tried to have normal jobs with varying degrees of success. And got a dog, because I volunteered at a shelter and then inevitably ended up just falling in love with one of the dogs and bringing him home, even though he was huge and impossible and impractical and hated all other dogs with a searing passion.

But other than that, he was the best. I was just attempting to do something different because i had been in london since uh 99 and i felt like i was done with it and it was done with me and of course i would move back again within a couple of years but um i really really needed the time off but one of the last things i did along with uh bang magazine was i was an extra in shawn of the dead oh my god oh yes i was uh yeah i had filmed um several bits in early summer 2003 right i wasn't like a massive spaced fan but i did actually know edgar a bit he had made a pop video and i had to go and cover it and so we became friendly which video um uh it was a blue tans video oh okay I think it was in like hackney empire yeah so I sort of got to know him through that so he told me that this was happening and I kind of hopped

onto the list of you know because most of the extras were spaced fans and it was uh there was a shout out on a forum and um so I had to you know i went and auditioned and um there was a girl who could put her leg all the way like backwards which was great and i've realized since that because i was so impressed with her doing it i didn't realize that my kind of collagen is so shot that i can do that as well oh my god so i should have you know but i at the time this was a talent that had gone unrealized so yeah um i did like four or five bits i think i was very very sort of deep background so it's hard to spot me in the thing but there's a blob that is me the bit where um they finally realize that the zombie apocalypse is happening and they're in the

car and they're driving through london they look left and right and they see the body bags spilling out of the back of an ambulance with a body writhing around in it and they look to the right and there's a kind of uh there's a park there's a bit of a kind of covered reservoir and i'm one of them in the way way in the distance coming ominously towards the camera is this when um mr mental by 80s matchbox beeline disaster is playing i seem to remember it was when they're in that car drive but anyway anyway, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a bit, oh, yeah, all the 80s Matchbox bits are so brilliant. They were extras in it as well. There's a bit towards the, like, right at the end where there's a little compilation of what happened next.

And it's like, there's like zombie game shows and stuff. I was in the audience for the kind of zombie Opportunity Knocks bit. So I wasn't actually a zombie in that bit. There's a bit, I can't even remember what the context is for this, but there's a bit where there's some zombies chained up in the back of a truck and it's the 80s Matchbox disaster and me and a couple of other people. Fucking hell.

Brilliant fun. I remember seeing a picture of you on the internet all zombied up. Yeah, that's from that day where I had a bit of zombie makeup on because it was so far in the distance that I didn't need a whole lot. But yeah, that was my profile picture on Friendster. Friendster. Yeah. I loved Friendster.

I miss that. That's a very early noughties thing. It really is, yeah. It was great. And the nice thing about that was it was like there was a section for you to say nice things about your friends, wasn't there? Yeah. It was like you could review your mates and go,

they're really great, they're my mates. And you sort of introduce people to other people and it just all seemed like a nice little club rather than what social media became. But yeah. Yeah, there's a whole long read about why Friends to failed, which is out there somewhere and it's quite sad. But yeah, there was, sadly, I don't have a picture of the day

when I did the pub scene. Oh, the Winchester. I was at the Winchester, yeah. So there are some hands, when there's kind of the hands banging on the window, some of those hands are mine. Yes. And then I also got to go in the pub and watch the kind of the pool cue fight. Yeah, oh, my God.

Don't stop me now. I'm a witness to fight. Yeah, oh my God. Don't stop me now. Witness to history. Yeah, really. Because we were in, we were sort of crammed in the little hallway as well. And what's his name? Peter Serafinowicz, who is there just wearing a small pair of pants and body makeup and looking very tall and sinister.

He was lovely. He was really great. And yeah, the zombage, as we were called by the uh by the assistant director um where like you knew when you were being spoken to you would say zombage over here please and so we had to stand in the in the hallway of the pub set and with the pork scratchings and everything there turned out to be loads of people that i know um in that film in the in the zombage so um tim chipping the singer from the band or, is a mate of mine, was one of them, because he was mates with Edgar.

And Lauren Laverne is in there, isn't she? Really? Is she? Yeah, there's a scene in somebody's back garden where I think it's when they realise that the zombie apocalypse isn't just localised, it's really spread. And yeah, just Lauren right there. And she was obviously already quite famous at this point.

Oh, I don't... But yeah, Tim is actually on there. Tim, who's a mate of mine also, and wrote for bang yeah wait until the bitter end he's on the poster as well he's properly immortalized and it was very funny it was quite an insight into because there were a lot of kind of um you know very far background extras who were just there for a laugh and everything and it is it's kind of hard work it's very repetitive and you have to do the same thing over and over and it was you know obviously it's british weather and you're standing outside in the freezing cold even though it's supposed to be summer and your flesh is dropping off your bones as well that's exactly it's like you know

but um yeah and i you know i made new friends and had a lovely time and yeah that was when we were in the pub and they uh they you know they set the bar on fire at one point. So that happened over and over again. And every single time, they had the fire department on hand to put it out. Every single time, we all cheered. It never got old. It was just, hey, firemen.

Proud to have been a part of it. Very, very, very small part. God, it's funny hearing you read through the news stories there and uh yeah the story about dr david kelly just sort of reminds you with a shiver of the kind of dark shadows behind the gleaming beaming smiles of tony blair and new labour one thing i do remember is that i was quite blissfully apolitical at this time by by my usual standards let's say and i think a lot of people were you know because the toories had gone and didn't look like they'd ever be coming back, ever, you know. And as long as you didn't have the misfortune

to live in Afghanistan or Iraq or anywhere else that George W. Bush was using for bombing practice to help prop up America's erectile dysfunctional sense of imperial dominance, you could afford to drift away from worrying about politics too much um blair was two years into his second term britain had just joined the u.s-led coalition invading iraq using fake dossiers about weapons of mass destruction of course as the pretext

um i was part of that largest march in history in london that february trying to prevent that happening to no avail yeah yeah, yeah. Everyone we knew. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. It'd be easier to list people who weren't. But, you know, thanks to Blair's starry-eyed Atlanticism and his eagerness to be George W. Bush's pet poodle, you know, yo Blair and all that. But, you know, nevertheless, I was still able to call myself a Labour person by default, not least because my local MP was so anti-war,

an obscure backbencher called Jeremy Corbyn, who lived a few doors down from me on the same street, it turns out. I was living in the same basement flat off Holloway Road in North London that I was living in during the Britpop years that we talked about with Neil that time, Shed 7 and all that. And I was doing three jobs at once. This was insane this year. It was just so fucking intense and all that and i was doing three jobs at once this this was insane this year it was just so fucking intense and overloaded and and really vivid as well i think um i earned the

most money i to date that i've ever earned in one calendar year but also fucked myself up so much that the sensible thing would probably to do what sarah did and go and live somewhere hundreds of miles away i was doing one newspaper column one editorial job on a magazine, and running a club night. So I wasn't just burning the candle at both ends. I was holding a cigarette lighter under the middle of the candle as well, melting the wax off it, leaving it looking like a waxy nunchuck, you know. Which you then threw into a fire. Yes, exactly.

I know we always end up talking about clothes and hair, so I should mention my look at this time, right? I wasn't a goth as such by this point. I'd had a couple of circuit breakers from that, identity-wise. So, you know, since being a proper goth, I'd had not one but two hip-hop phases and the Romo thing in between. And by now, I'd created this kind of hybrid, non-tribal image for myself, which was crowned by a twin set of elaborate plastic antlers,

which you may remember, woven into my real hair, courtesy of Peppies, who were these really amazing cyberpunk hairdressers at Camden Lock. It was a high-maintenance look, but I liked it. And it used to really piss me off, by the way, right? I'm going gonna vent now when people shouted and to this day do shout twisted fire starter at me in the street right because i wasn't copying keith um if anything i was copying sue cat woman from the 70s yes i met her once and she was really nice and i i apologized to her for nicking her hairstyle but she said at least you're doing it well which was

really sweet of her so yeah work-wise after leaving melody maker i'd taken a couple of years off from the front line of music journalism if you like to write my manics book and the book was very successful uh i'm gonna blow my own trumpet here was the fastest selling rock biography of all time in the uk um book of the year in nme and rock book of the decade in the UK, Book of the Year in NME and Rock Book of the Decade in the Guardian. So it was a useful calling card career-wise. And it was off the back of that, that I got a job with The Independent on Sunday as their chief rock and pop critic, which is a high profile job. There's only so many of those jobs going around, only so many national newspapers. And it's a bit like sort of the managerial merry-go-round of Premier League

managers or something like that, that when you're're in situ when you've got one of these jobs you sort of cling on to it so yeah i had my own column every sunday with a little photo of my face at the top you know sort of thing a little like like a cameo brooch um and uh one version of that photo cropped my horns out i was so pissed off i i complained i i complained and they reinstated them um but one of the good things about working for The Independent at that time was that they refused to allow record companies or PR companies to pay for anything. So the paper would cover all my travel costs and hotels and all that. So it was a matter of principle that the paper shouldn't feel indebted to

or influenced by anyone, you know, literally independent. And there was also the fact that the paper as a whole didn't stand or fall on music advertising coming into my section, unlike, you know, Q or NME, who completely relied on that. So I had a real kind of carte blanche to say whatever I wanted. And this was at the exact time that music journalism as a whole was becoming very timid and diplomatic due to a number of factors which we talked about in previous episodes

and the role of the critic was turning into that of a cheerleader and you know meanwhile I've got this job where I was able to keep it old school and I was writing pretty vicious takedowns of major stars including Elton John of course which came back to bite me on the arse as I mentioned in a previous episode

because he's got some influential friends so as well as bigging up the things I believed in of course because it wasn't just entirely negative you know I'm not that guy even people think I was and this freedom that I had there it worked out really well for me I ended up winning awards for it live reviews writer of the year

three times in a row and I really must put my trumpet down now um but you know uh you you often say so what were you doing at this time i can say exactly what i was doing because i've found my independent on sunday column nearest to this date um so i had been to see the world's greatest entertainer the hardest working man in show business Soul brother number one The amazing mister Please, please, please The godfather of soul James Brown At the Royal Albert Hall

Yes With his magician It was amazing It was a memorable and eventful show in a lot of ways I remember his band wore these white naval suits With gold brocades A bit like in the Navy Right

I compared them to the crew of the Love Boat And also to Glenn Ponder and Lazarus. He did his famous knee-trembling dance, you know, and he did that thing where he pretends to collapse and his minions rush over and bring him his cape and all that. And he randomly brought a Janis Joplin impersonator on stage. I can never figure out what that was for. What?

He bottled out of, you know, in I Got You, I Feel Good, there's the big, I for what he bottled out of you know in i got you i feel good there's the big i feel he bottled out of that which um you know i guess he's getting on a bit but saying that he made the bizarre claim on the mic that he was 59 years old now all biographical material available had him down as at least 10 years older than that at the time yeah and yet he told us you all need to eat more fish and chips i've had mine yes what the fuck i mean some of it was fucking amazing obviously it's james brown you know and he had a well-drilled band famously it's a man's man's man's world like utterly slayed the place right papa's got a brand new bag fucking amazing here's what right i've got

a bit here's what i wrote about perhaps got a brand new bag fucking amazing here's what right i've got a bit here's what i wrote about perhaps got a brand new bag at the time james brown has as he reminds us several times been coming to the royal albert hall for 30 years since papa's bag really was brand new it's not often in pop history that you can pinpoint exactly one artist and even one song which changed everything if you're looking for the moment where the various strands of black music, blues, jazz, gospel, soul, suddenly ignited into funk, you can't go far wrong if you pick James Brown, and specifically, Papa's Got a Brand New Bag.

Lean, stripped down, brutally propulsive, it was aimed at nothing other than the hips and the feet, truly a revolutionary record. And I do believe that. And here's how I ended the review. For a person so famed for laying down the law, James Brown sure spends a lot of time asking for the green light. Permission to take to the bridge is requested and unanimously granted.

That's it. Did he say anything about mushy peas? You need to know, yeah. Like, where does he stand on the sort of north-south divide in ship accompaniments? Yeah. Yeah, what about the bits? Yeah, we'll never know now.

What a shame. Well, I'd also left London this year. I moved back to Nottingham in March and I'm fucking loving it here. I think the last thing I did in London was go on that march. Yeah. And I'd just had enough of London.

I honestly believe that everyone should spend time in their own capital city but as soon as you hit your 30s you just start to think well what what the fuck am i doing i'm spending three hours commuting yeah every day you know my mates had all got to that point where they were all settling down and as soon as they wanted to move on with their life either you know buy a house or get married or have kids, the first thing they'd do is get the fuck out of London because they couldn't afford to do it there. And so I was pretty much the last man standing and just not up for trying to find a new circle of friends there because it was just costing me too much.

And, you know, I just came to the realisation that i'm not going to create a new family here so i might as well go back to nottingham and link up with my old one my sister had just had a kid and i really wanted to be part of his life and within months of me moving back and getting to know him my sister fucks off to shropshire so yeah thanks by this time i was a freelance magazine writer and was assured by the people i was working for at the time, oh, you're moving out of London, great, we need more provincial writers. So there was a lot of work being dangled in front of me, which mysteriously evaporated as soon as I wasn't in London anymore.

You know, commissioning editors, they want good writers, but they also want good writers they can go out and have a drink with. By this time, I'm pretty much a sexpert, which I had been for quite a few years. People always used to ask me what that meant, and I just said, well, I have sex, then I spurt. For fuck's sake. But I was writing for Cosmo, I was writing for Scholar,

I was writing for Marie Claire. I got a sex column in the Daily Mirror. Fucking hell. I used to write a lot for M, the women's magazine, which was fucking brilliant. They'd send me out doing all manner of shit. And like you, Simon, I got a photo at the top of my column. It was a sort of a sideways shot with me mouth open and all smiley.

And for some reason, they'd done it in a demi silhouette. And it made me look like the fucking Happy Eater Man's perverted uncle who just spotted some pants in a bush i look fucking awful they should have put fucking horns on me i would have looked better i should have asked so i demanded that they bring me down to london for another photo shoot to get something remotely decent and you know fair play to them they did well i guess you had to be semi-anonymous you don't get recognized among your sex exploits well not only that but you know it would have been nice for him to have had a male sex columnist who actually looked like someone that at least some of the audience would have wanted sex with you know yeah yeah okay anyway as they say when one's tired of london one's tired

of being shit on so i fucked off out of it and it's always weird when you decide to leave london once tired of being shit on so i fucked off out of it and it's always weird when you decide to leave london into it because you do feel like you're crossing a line or at least drawing a line in the sand of your life feels like an admission of defeat sometimes don't it yes yeah yeah because most of the time i was there i felt like i was just clinging on to london like my fucking fingernails do you know what i mean And there was this sort of vacuum sucking me back towards Wales and like the undertow in the sea, you know? And yeah, absolutely. And just clinging on to London was the thing.

I didn't have any life plan. I didn't know what I was going to be doing when I was 37, 38. It was just like fucking getting through the next few months as far as you ever look, really. Within four years, I was out of there as well. Not back home to wales but down to brighton but yeah i just felt a similar thing to you al that the city just felt more and more brutal and hostile and callous and like it was just fucking rinsing me dry just

sucking every last penny out of me and i couldn't even enjoy the stuff that you're meant to enjoy about london exactly because i was paying too much just to fucking exist in London so yeah you come to realisation at some point and yeah for me it was getting down to Brighton but yeah I completely understand why you went back

which is really funny Sam because right about this time me and you got to know each other on the Wednesday Saturday comes forum by having some head goes at

each other for me disliking London and you accusing me of being Alan Partridge we can laugh about it now yes disliking London and you accusing me of being Alan Partridge. We can laugh about it now. Yes. London is, you know, it's kind of a cliche really, but it's tough.

It's a tough place. Because you think that your whole identity is really sort of predicated on it. You know, and it's like, it is like failure to leave. But then it's like, oh, okay, I won't actually crumble to dust if I cross the north circular you know and i'm kind of going through that again now because what's been happening over the the last 18 months and i have felt like my flat which i love very much has just turned into a little sort of space pod i just want to uproot my flat and take it somewhere else but also like because technology now just about allows you to work from anywhere and i think people have finally finally belatedly got their heads around the idea that's doable and i think

in a way that people didn't in 2003 because it was like out of sight out of mind yeah yeah yeah and so i didn't expect at all to get any work in music journalism or whatever if i moved out of london because you know i just didn't but i i went back two and a half years later because i had some work for the satirical newsletter the friday thing which was a paid for email newsletter i've probably mentioned this before that actually like made money and stuff yeah that was a cool thing which inevitably died on its house yeah music wise for me i'm pretty much in the same position i was in the mid 80s where I'm turning my back on the modern stuff and burrowing into the old stuff I'm hoovering up all the tunes I've been looking for for ages

on Napster yeah I just stopped being 50 pound man right I just got sick to death of wanting one track and having to spend 17 pound at Tower Records for a CD compilation from America and it being the wrong version of it. So I just thought, fuck this. You're not giving me what I want. I'm going to have to get it for myself. I am spree-killing music at the moment. You're a 50-megabyte man, yeah.

Yes, and, you know, as far as Top of the Pops goes, fuck it, it's on Friday night. Friday night is either getting ready to go out or being in the pub straight from work. Top of the Pops is dead to me. Yeah, I wasn't watching it either. Probably four or five nights a week I was out seeing gigs, either to review them or just for pleasure,

and then there's a good chance that the other two nights I was doing club stuff. So, you know, no fucking way on a Friday evening am I sitting watching that, even if my favourite bands are on it. Obviously it never recovered from the move to Friday nights, and it was up against Corrie and all that. So there's lots of logical reasons why that was a bad idea. But less logically, I think it's that it belonged on Thursday.

That was just Top of the Pops night. Top of the Pops was Christmas, it wasn't Easter. You can't just move it. The other thing I was doing that was keeping me in London was working full-time for a magazine. And both of you were involved in this whole thing to varying degrees, so you know what I'm talking about. But I'd been approached the previous year by these two drongos

who called themselves the Gloom Brothers, right? Right. They were these two posh blokes, one big, one small, like Batman and Robin. They previously held some sort of non-specified role in the music business but they had a sideline in very high concept graphics led diy zines very big on poster art and stuff like that and then these two absolute chances and charlatans they'd somehow managed to persuade a major publisher future publishing which was the home of metal hammer among other things yeah to give just give them a magazine a new magazine called bang exclamation mark was bang

all caps yeah well all of it was caps yeah yeah got into trouble if you uh yeah didn't cap it all um it was meant to cash in on on the noughties wave and we talked about this a little bit already of guitar music which came along in the way of the strokes and and and the idea was i guess from a market strategy point of view to attack the existing glossy monthlies like q and mojo from a more left field kind of young invert commas edgy position if you know what i mean i you talk about bands that are actually still going yeah yeah right exactly and they brought me in um as features editor now obviously brandy, we needed writers. And my most recent experience of working among other really good writers was at Melody Maker.

So I decided to get the old gang back together for one last heist. So the idea being that we'd have that kind of freedom of writing. Actually say what you want and express yourself in the pages that we used to have at Melody Maker in my time at Melody Maker, let's say at least. And so the people I tried to bring in to create this team included Neil Kukani and Taylor Parks, of course, and also Sarah, even though our times at Melody Maker did not overlap,

we knew each other and I knew you were a good writer. And when I finish my rant now, I'd love to hear Sarah's memories of all this. But also Maria Jeffries, who I knew from Melody Maker, was already on board as the picture editor. So, you know, and I even got you to do something, didn't I, Al? I remember there's a thing about suicide girls. The thing about suicide girls. Yeah, I did the thing about suicide girls. The alternative porn website. Because, as you say, you were Mr. Sex.

You were porn expert, I'll need hum. Yes, I was starting to call myself Nottingham's Mr. Sex. Yeah, exactly. People used to ask me why, and I'd say, well, because I come from Nottingham. If I called myself Darby's Mr. Sex, I'd be lying to them. I like it, yeah. I'm all about the honesty. used to ask me why and i'd say oh well because i come from nottingham you know if i call myself darby's mr sex i've been lying to phone i like it yeah i'm all about the honest day so um you know uh i i was i was trying to build a strong team there and um but from the very

start there was a friction between the people i wanted to bring in and the gloom brothers so for example i tried to get stephen R.I.P. involved but when he came to the pub and Sarah knew Swells really well and she'll know what I'm talking about Swells was so abrasive in his usual kind of take no prisoners motor mouth style that the Gloom Brothers just didn't want to work with him and and uh and it didn't help when taylor parks came to the pub and said that the trouble with music magazines these days is that they're always run by someone called crispin and one of one of the gloom brothers was literally called crispin for fuck's sake uh anyway anyway we we got the first issue out with the Flamin' Lips on the cover and the piece was

written by me. I was interviewing Wayne Coyne in Vienna and we held a swanky launch party with The Darkness playing live. I'm going to talk about The Darkness in a bit. Issue 2 was a misfire. We put a band called Hot Hot Heat on the front in the belief they were going to be the next

Strokes and clue they weren't. Issue 3 was a complete self-indulgence from the Gloom Brothers. We had the polyphonic spree on the front, right? That utopian cult-like choir in a special elongated cover that folded out because the band had so many members, including the Gloom Brothers themselves as temporary honorary members in red Cassocks which was never going to shift copies right they had terrible instincts that the cover I wanted

to do was vetoed and this was Peaches and Iggy Pop together they made a single together I thought Peaches and Iggy Pop would have been an amazing front cover and would totally have embodied the ethos that the magazine purported to hold and it's something that Q would would never have done mojo would never done it's like you know it would be really sort of staking our claim for our territory and they you know nah they weren't having it and

they literally laughed at franz ferdinand when the first record came in right this is a band who we should have been all over and the rest of us were like what are you fucking talking about this is brilliant um by issue four any pretense of being edgy had gone out the window they stuck radio heads on the front in desperation and it wasn't long before coldplay and blur were on the front so it might as well at that point it might as well have been q magazine in fact um melody maker oh fuck me yeah um in fact the the gloom brothers right they used to troll us in the office by playing coldplay really loud well we had to sit there silently resenting them it's a total

power play because you know they were in charge we had to sit there while they're playing the fucking scientist by coldplay full volume on cd player um some of the things i was obliged to do were fucking humiliating they'd come up with this really gross insensitive item called dead fashion right right where famous rock star deaths such as jeff buckley and mark bolan were restaged as fashion shoots oh no yes with a bit of pretentious prose to go along with it and i had as features editor this was imposed on me to sort of make this happen I had to make the phone call to clear it with Roland Boland and I felt I felt such a cunt telling him telling him it would be tasteful right I I fucking I hated myself in that moment because I knew it was going

to be horrible and it was fucking horrible also the glooms kept over commissioning and spiking articles which you know you as journalists we know how fucking annoying that is um it's hugely unprofessional there was this this series of city guides they were doing and i went to liverpool to do one with lady tron which was fucking great they you know you know really showed me amazing stuff around liverpool and you know bang just never ran it which is such a waste of everyone's time and very embarrassing for me you know but i would say you know bang just never ran it which is such a waste of everyone's time and very embarrassing for me you know but I would say you know despite all of that despite the editor's constant interference and dicking around right we we did manage to sneak out a few great things in the mag there's there's some work mine and by other people that I'm proud of um I say probably

the best thing that came of it for me though was that I was sat next to this lugubrious northern guy called John Doran um who was the reviews editor and we became really close mates and he's now for those who don't know one of the editors of The Quietest and a brilliant author and I probably never met him if it wasn't for Bang but um anyway after I'd been there for six months um the gloom brothers called me in for this sort of appraisal meeting you know you get sort of hr kind of thing and um they totally gaslit me it was an obvious case of workplace bullying what they did was they marked me out of five on various aspects of my work you know quality communication time keeping now creativity whatever and they gave me

nought out of five for the first one then nought out of five on the second one and then nought out of five on all of them one by one and at first i was stunned i was stunned but i quickly realized exactly what they were doing they sat and looked me in the face and did that even though we all knew it was bullshit. And what it was really about was that I was a challenge to their authority because I knew about magazines and they knew nothing, right? Yeah. So it amounted to constructive dismissal, really. And I remember going down to Wales one weekend

and getting a call from John Doran, bless him, telling me that the Gloom Brothers were going to get rid of me. So I had to jump before I was pushed. And I handed in my resignation on the Monday. And here's the thing. I mean, I'm so fucking glad I didn't quit my column with The Independent. I nearly did because I had this seemingly cushy new editorial job at Bang. But I kept both the jobs going just in case,

even if it meant working a full day at the office and then dashing up to Nottingham or Birmingham to review a gig for the Indy. And by the end of the year, Bang had gone out with a whimper anyway. He was down the fucking toilets. I'd have been fucked if I'd quit my job. So yeah, that was my view of it.

So yeah, Sarah, what do you remember about all this? We were so hyped about it, wasn't it? Like a just kind of, yes, we're going to get to do what we fucking want. Because I was frustrated. I got there at five minutes to midnight for The Maker, obviously, as podcasts pass him. And I really thought that I'd missed my chance to kind of become a good writer

and be among the people who were my mates who had been The Maker kind of front line before and this was like oh i've just got this one last kind of chance to do a thing so i was really flattered and pleased to be asked obviously and it's like yeah this is you know you can you can write in the first person everything i was like don't let me do that i'm mad with power but um i thought oh you know this is this is great but I wasn't completely naive you know the maker had fallen down around my ears and I I had taken all of that in and I knew what was what and I knew that the the landscape was very treacherous you know but it was like yeah no this is going to be good

and swells was on board and obviously I adored swells and we were really good friends the first editorial meeting which was like standing room only everyone crammed into this little and I swaggered down there I felt so confident but this was a great thing and i was in on the ground and it was and i did say to myself at the start like this is my last shot and if this doesn't work then i'm done and you know and so it came to pass really i could have eked it out more but i really lost heart i mean i did speaking of like spiking features i did a feature with the canadian content crew or was it collective, one or the other, which was basically Peaches, Gonzales, Feist, Mocky, and a few other kind of assorted eccentrics. And it was great.

And they played at the LA2, and I interviewed all of them. So this was like 20 minutes or half an hour or something with like eight different artists. And I had to crunch all of that down, including writing about the gig as well. And then it got spiked just because they the gloom brothers changed their mind just didn't want it anymore it's like that's not a good reason to do this but um fortunately tommy udo um also may he rest he was on he was on yeah it was news editor wasn't he yeah this is a man who once apparently held a

server hostage to get them to to pay him yeah he like walked in with his mate and walked out with the server and like and they had to go around with ransom they had to go and pay cash to get it back it was that and realizing that they were completely out of tune with all of us and just seeing how they treated people and seeing how it was going and i just kind of went nah i just lost wood completely for it you could see from those early issues seeing how it was going and i just kind of went nah i just lost wood completely for it you could see from those early issues like how it could have been maybe i mean it's all quite scrappy and you know because it hadn't quite got its identity in order and maybe it could have done but what would have had to be different everything really it became as well like

a kind of expensive failure that nervous industry people could point to and go you can't put money into magazines because look at that it became like a cautionary tale i think yeah and so and we had thought it would be daring and brilliant and freeing and oh well what a new music magazine in 2003 ever worked out because it's it's getting to the point now where traditional media is just doesn't know what the fuck to do with itself well you know what um words magazine came along at pretty much exactly the same time in fact we were worried it was going to blow us out of the water but it ended up being aimed at a different demographic really but yeah i mean they managed to keep going

for a good few years obviously in in the end know, the realities in the magazine market saw that one off as well. But yeah, I think it was an opportunity and something could have been done. I'm not saying it would have lasted forever. But you know, it had the potential. And one of the things that frustrates me about it so much is it was such a missed opportunity. But the other thing hearing Sarah say what she said there just brings it home to me that apart from being disappointed for myself and disappointed for the you know the missed opportunity of a potentially great music mag is that I felt really guilty because I had talked it up because I'd had these preliminary meetings with the Gloom Brothers and we we sat

down and sort of thrashed it all out and we and we seemed to be on the same page about you know what kind of mag this was going to be so as far as I knew I had the green light to go ahead and tell people like Sarah and Taylor and Neil and various other writers this is of madness was going to be. So as far as I knew, I had the green light to go ahead and tell people like Sarah and Taylor and Neil and various other writers, this is what it's going to be like. It's going to be amazing, guys. Come over here. It'll be like Melody Maker at its best,

but a glossy monthly. So trust in me. And then when it came to it, I couldn't fulfil that promise because it was taken out of my hands and I just felt fucking awful for leading people on like that. You know what I mean? And it was embarrassing for me, it really was.

You should put your mind at rest, we knew it wasn't your fault, and you suffered more, you know, as much as anyone, and probably more so, so, you know, just put that to rest. Yeah, it was such a fucking shame, but I was kind of primed for it. You've got to be happy and engaged and enthused on a certain level to be able to do it, and I was just like, I can't do it. But one of the last things that I did for it you've got to be happy and engaged and enthused on a certain level to be able to do it

and i was just like i can't do it but one of the last things that i did for it was um i love doing the city guides because i was never very confident as an interviewer and i did a decent feature with the cardigans but um the the city guides when it's like a tight format where the questions i could always relax with those where you know what the questions are going to be and you don't have to you know get in a knot about it. And we went to Mull. Oh, yeah. Mull Historical Society, which is one guy.

And so he did the guide to Mull, which is tiny, tiny. It was Tobermory, which is the pretty street overlooking the harbour with all the different coloured houses. It was so beautiful. It was absolutely flat, calm sea and just so peaceful peaceful and we did all talk about what if we just fucked it all off and left it all behind and just came here and like you know it was it's the place that does that to you and you that was kind of instrumental i suppose in my leaving london because it does nudge your head and go you don't have to be there anymore yeah there's a whole world out there so and i wasn't surprised at all

when it died on its ass after a year because that's what a lot of things did so chaps as is the star with chart music this is the time that we leave through the crates and we pull out an example of the music press on this week and this time i've gone for the nme july the 26th 2003 shall we nose through yes please on the cover, James Skelly of The Coral in a pair of sunglasses with the words you must create in the top corner of one of the lenses shouting into a light bulb. In the news, Julian Casablancas has announced

that The Strokes have one week left to finish recording their next LP, Room on Fire. They intend to immediately start on the mixdown before nipping over to Japan for two shows at the Summer Sonic Festival and then get it ready for an autumn release. It eventually comes out at the end of October and spends a week at number two in the LP chart, held off number one by Life for Rent by Dido. The big news event of the month, Jack White's car crash,

which left the index finger of his left hand all mangled up and that, is updated with a photo of his last appearance on stage when he made a guest appearance at the Science Farms gig in Detroit five days before. He's posted a statement on the band's website, which concludes, Apologies to those wishing to see my hand live soon enough, I'm sure.

Now me and Meg can share war stories. I love when we share, like once there was a monkey, and we shared the experience as children do. For readers asking if the White Stripes will be able to play Reading and Leeds this year, the answer is yes, according to the organisers. They pull out a week later and are replaced by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club.

Oh, for fuck's sake, man. They were so embarrassing. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, right? I always used to call them the mean cool leather gang because the fucking name you know black rebel motorcycle club trying so hard um i remember it might have been um when this uh you know the thing broke that they were stepping in for the white stripes i remember an interview with them when they said our ambition has always been to headline the second stage at the reading festival and like if if, if that was a wry, self-deprecating joke, fair play.

But I don't think it was. You know, that was the kind of height of their ambition. Oh, God, they were so nav. No, I loved them. They were my bottom. They were, I fucking loved them. They're such a pure rock and roll band. And also, they were instrumental in me upping and fucking off because i realized that

i didn't care to try to convince people about this like i couldn't do it even now it's just like no look they were some of the best gigs i've ever seen it was it was great i loved them so much so people like me making fun of them bullied you out of music journalism basically going back to strokes um i mean there's so much i could say about them about how they kind of they were hugely important bringing this kind of rebirth of cool and sharpening everything up after everybody was really slouching about i think the post brit pop come down lasted about four years yeah 1997 to 2001 well this is a year that the brit pop documentary live forever comes out so we people are being nostalgic about Britpop already in 2003.

But I think what had happened was that, you know, everybody's listening to Moby and Travis and Coldplay and it's all very benign and slouchy music and baggy clothes and there's no edge to it, no sharpness. And the Strokes sort of carefully curated everything about them. The first thing anyone saw of them was a grainy black and white photo, big photo of them sitting in a cafe in New York in the NME. And it's like, oh, right, we're going back to that.

And, you know, these sort of good-looking young guys in leather jackets and that kind of thing. And, you know, musically they were zoning in on things like Cheat Trick and the Ramones and Blondie and stuff and television and just that particular kind of American aesthetic of sharp uptight new way so that they're really important in that way and they kind of changed everything but the reason I wanted to go back to them was just because I have to say this one sentence Julian Casablancas gave me a love bite in Nottingham

no yeah not in a fucking hell yeah I went up to review them in what was that venue was it just called the Heavenly Social the Social the Social

yeah yeah which was the fucking best pub in Nottingham Friday night that's where I'd be I'd come straight out of work

straight over to the Social not moving until three o'clock in the morning my mate actually went to that gig and after Julian Casablancas had his in the morning my mate actually went to that gig and after um julian casablancas has had his way with you uh my mate crashed with them all right i don't know if he got a love bite it might have more yeah no yeah what it was that you know i got chatting with him

afterwards and uh somebody came and said let me take a picture of you two so uh we stood there posing and while um whoever it was was taking the picture he leans in and gives me a hickey on my neck. It's like, oh, all right, fucking hell, mate. But there we go, yeah, rock and roll. Takes a while to really engender a proper one, doesn't it? Yeah, I mean, maybe I'm exaggerating. Put it this way, I didn't exactly fight him off, do you know what I mean? Because I thought in 18 years' time, I've got a really good story for a podcast.

I don't even know what a podcast is yet, but it'll be worth it. Did you have to wear a polo neck the next day son yeah yeah absolutely i wear i look like harry hill massive collar for you know yeah for a year yeah fran healy of travis has been spotted at craven cottage recording crowd chants at half time of a friendly between fulham and saltic for the track peace the fuck out on their forthcoming LP 12 Memories. Despite getting rained on again when the sprinkler system got turned on while he was conducting the away support, he gets the track in the can and gets to meet Celtic manager Martin O'Neill, who's a big fan.

That's a very big deal. Martin O'Neill is a very private man. When I used to hang around Forrest in the early 80s, I'd get everyone's autograph every day apart from Martin O'Neill. He wouldn't sign anything. I hope Fran Ely realised what a big deal it is to be recognised and liked by Martin O'Neill. Yeah, maybe he's a not an M3. Because he didn't like Robbie Williams, remember?

Mega Man of So Solid Crew has spoken about being interviewed by Cypriot police in the wake of the stabbing of Dizzy Rascal in Ayia Napa at the beginning of the month and how well dis-chuffed he is that his collective get blamed for everything. The authorities wanted to get all the black DJs off the island because of the trouble, but I told them no one would come back, he says. Mews are celebrating the relative success of their latest single release, Stockholm Syndrome, one of the first in the world to be available as a download-only release. If all the downloads had translated into single sales, it would have easily gone top 15, says a band spokesperson. We estimate that in one week,

5,000 people have downloaded it. Oh, as many as that. But over in America, plans are foot to introduce legislation that will make it easier to bring criminal charges against people who are sharing music online, with prison sentences of up to five years being threatened lock them up courtney love has signed a publishing deal with

tokyo pop incorporated to produce a manga series based on whole songs called princess i it's about a smart and talented yet controversial princess who is exiled to Tokyo with nothing but a heart-shaped box. Oh, for fuck's sake. Yeah, think about it, man. Where she makes a living as a rock star and falls in love with a sensitive muso called Kent who looks suspiciously like Kurt Cobain. The first of three novels eventually come out in the summer of 2004.

Happier news for the polyphonic spree. One of their robes that was stolen in a gig in Northampton has been returned freshly laundered and ironed. We want to thank the good people of Northampton, says a band spokesperson. It's stolen by the Gloom Brothers, yeah. Dancing around doing weird polyphonic cosplay that story about the polyphonic spree and um moby's fanny related uh story that got twice as

many column inches about the one about dizzy rascal getting stabbed so for sake there we go rascal was amazing around this time by the the way. Obviously, you know, the album and all that, blah, blah, blah. But I caught him live at Fabric in London, and he was doing just like a sort of freestyle rap battle with, you know, a few other people and just improvising. And just absolutely force of nature. I've never seen anything like it. I mean, I like his records, but just how he was on the microphone. No fucking backing, no beats, nothing.

Just going for it. It was phenomenal, it really was. In the interview section, well, Damon Dash, the co-founder of the Rockefeller Empire, is quizzed about his latest project, the relaunching of Victoria Beckham's career. He said he didn't know her from an hole in his arse when he was introduced to her by Naomi Campbell,

but he likes her attitude and sense of humour. He doesn't give a toss at a career as Nosedive in the UK because he knows how strong his music is. And he also thinks that David Beckham has got a definite hip-hop plan and he's got his hip-hop dress game down. The Enemy has decided that Glasgow is the new centre of music this week, but they can only find two bands to lump into a feature. The newly signed Franz Ferdinand get a quarter of a page, where we find out that the band was formed as a party when Alex Kapranos got into a fight with Nick McCarfer

when the latter nicked the former's bottle of vodka. They get round the licensing laws at their warehouse gigs by charging a quid for a raffle ticket, which automatically wins a bottle of beer, and their ambition is to make the world forget about that Archduke that got shot in 1914.

Meanwhile, dogs die in hot cars get asked about their name, how they feel about getting called the new Proclaimers and very little else. Alex Needham nips down to Raymond's review bar in Soho and waits for Alison Goldfrapp to finish having her photo taken before she gives him a guided tour of Soho. She says the review bar was the site of one of Golf Rap's first gigs. She used to work at Agent Provocateur and had to deal with men in raincoats having a wank. And she only does drugs at home these days. Sensible.

Can we just clear something up in case anyone's still wondering? I am not Alex Needham. Do you know Alex Needham? I do, yeah, yeah. What's he like? He's a lovely guy. I think he lives in Australia now. Because he was the fucking bane of my life in the late 90s. Really?

I did a massive load of articles for Maxim and put my invoice in and waited and waited and waited. And eventually I just said, look, can I get paid now, please? Was told that I'd already been paid. And I said I hadn't. And they checked into it. They paid Alex Needham. Oh, Jesus.

Yeah. It's like last year year i moved house into a house where the previous occupant was called simon price oh no yeah yeah and um he had set up his mail to be re-delivered to his new place i'd set up my mail to be re-delivered from my old place to this place so my mail ended up in some kind of never-ending vortex and it was really fucking hard to get it to sort it all out it really was it's a real head fuck yeah so i mean i don't know if um they got that money back from alex needham now you've told me he's all right i hope you kept it alex wherever you are as long as they paid you no but you're alberto needham aren't you yes yes that's right

yes maybe he got enough cash from this to pay for his passage to the other side of the world. Yeah. Good for him. Rich Pelly links up with the next Eurodance sensation, Junior Senior. They tell him that they can't understand why Danish bacon is so popular over here, as it's no different from anyone else's slices of pig. They're not impressed with the Danish pastries they've tried in london they hate being compared to aqua wickfield and dj otser and they're glad that denmark voted to

reject the euro imran ahmed drops in on the morrison hotel in dublin for three whole pages interviewing the coral which gets mashed into an a to z. We learn that James Skelly has been helping his grandad put some paving stones in his back garden. He doesn't have a mobile phone because they get on his tits and he thinks Chris Tarrant is a fucking cunt for grabbing him by the scruff of the neck when he puts his foot on a chair that had Mr Tiswas' jacket on while they were waiting to be interviewed by Jonathan Ross.

If I see Chris Tarrant again, I'd have a shit on his foot, he says. This week's singles page is handled by a pool of Mark Beaumont, Chrissy Morrison and Rob Fix Patrick. And the single of the week is No Not Now by Hot Hot Heat. and the single of the week is No Not Now by Hot Hot Heat. This is proof that they were not just a flash in the post-rapture punk funk pan and allows them to brush off those unwelcome cure comparisons, says Morrison. It'll have you buying late new wave power pop in bulk and claiming that XTC have always been your favourite band. Why didn't you just buy an XTC single then?

If this single was by a trio of hydraulic Mediterranean bimbos called the Ibiza Bandidos, you'd pay to have them throttled in their beds, says Beaumont of Rhythm Bandits by Junior Senior. Instead, it's by two chancing-it dockers dressed like a blind run DMC and is therefore brilliant. Since 1982, over 20 million people have died of AIDS, reads the cover of Starter Fire by Radio 4. In case you get so caught up in the baggy beats and

angling guitars that you miss the lyrical message that could save your life says morrison if all government health warnings sounded like this there'd be no disease but it's a coat down for in love by lisa mafia while her career so far has been spent attempting to convince us what a tough old bird she is the rose amongst so solid thorns has given up her guns for chocolates and a table for two but unfortunately along with her heart she's also lost her cool states morrison lisa if you came round to our door singing this we'd set dizzy rascal on you hideout by fuck sounds like the strokes chasing the wedding present on a knackered jogging machine you were the last high by the dandy warholses like the

mid-80s electro melodics of new order at their tranquil loveliest and if no gallagher had stretched himself a little further than simply hammering the arse out of the uninteresting end of the Beatles catalogue, he might have come up with Morning Wonder by The Hiss, according to Rob Fitzpatrick. Ooh, fucking hell, it's safe to slag off Oasis now, we're in a new era. They changed their mind on that though, didn't they? Yeah. They'll be crawling back up the Gallagher arsehole pretty soon. up the Gallagher arsehole pretty soon.

In the LP review section, the main review is given over to Take Them On, On Your Own by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, and James Oldham reckons it's a sensational album for many reasons. A fearsome confirmation that music can still act as a radicalised

form of protest. The sonics are so full and heavy they make the yeah, yeah yeah yeahs sound like leaves being blown down a street take them on on your own is a masterpiece you should get hold of it as soon as possible nine out of ten right on mondo generator another queens of the stone age spin-off project have put out their second lp A Drug Problem That Never Existed, and Barry Nicholson is impressed. This record may not be as wild-eyed and rabid

as 2000's Cocaine Rodeo, but it's loaded with more illicit sex, insanity, and glam punk brilliance than you can shake Satan's pitchfork at. Seven out of ten. But it's a mild coat down for Truly She Is None Other by Holly Golightly. If it came bursting out of some crackly 10-inch piece of vinyl you bought for too much money on eBay,

you'd think it was incredible. But it was made in 2003 and, as such, can only ever be really quite good, rob fitzpatrick six out of ten the forever changes concert by love could well be the perfect record according to james jam longview are dismissed as sad chester middleweights by tim wilde and their debut lp mercury is the sound of a great band who have had all their interesting edges knocked off. And Rob Fitzpatrick announces that Killing Joke by Killing Joke with Dave Grohl on drums is, after the latest Jane's Addiction release, another comeback record that isn't embarrassing rubbish.

In the gig guide, David could have seen Junior Senior at the Mean Fiddler Sex Maniacs at Highbury Corner Garage Roachford at Oldgate Each Spits or Cunts at the Brixton Wimbledon but definitely didn't I mean fucking hell

we've already discussed whether David would have seen Panties in 1978 that's hell of a double bill, isn't it? Yes, yes. Cunts and panties together at last. Yes. Mr. Sex in between them. Taylor could have seen Funeral

for a Friend at the Birmingham Academy 2 and fuck all else. Neil could have seen The Bobs at the Coventry Coliseum or gone to Wolverhampton to see Marina Topley Bird at the Little Civic. Sarah could have seen the Bobs at the Coventry Coliseum or gone to Wolverhampton to see Marina Topley Bird at the Little Civic. Sarah could have seen Harmar Superstore at the Leeds Cockpit, Shed 7 at the Hull Wellington, the Motherfuckers at Sheffield Grapes

or Dogs Die in Hot Cars at the Sheffield Boardwalk. Why didn't they put the Motherfuckers and the Cunts together? Just let them fight it out. This would have been carnage. And fuck, yeah. Yeah, a golden age for band names that aren't particularly arsed about going on top of the pubs. Yeah, I think fuck buttons were around that time as well, weren't they?

Yeah. Al could have seen Jesse Sykes and the Sweet Hereafter at the Maze or gone to Derby to see Ron Sexsmith at the Nerve Centre and Simon could have seen Rocket Science at the Cardiff Barfly, Funky Monkey at the Barfly and Miss Black America at Club EvoBach. In the letters page, my nemesis, who turned out to be a nice bloke really,

Alex Needham, is in the chair this week. I wonder if he ever got approached and said, you're that bloke who writes all that shit about sex. Beyond sex and shopping, talking bollocks and how do you wear half a condom yes have you sort of sitting there confused like that guy gomar bloke on you know yes and the main topic of conversation is the darkness and their appearance at tea in the park. After their tequila slammer of a set, I was amazed to hear some moaning minis complaining that they obviously weren't real, didn't mean it and had donned the leotards as a marketing gimmick. Get the fuck, writes James McTavish of Edinburgh.

Who gives a galloping shit? People get so hung up on the authenticity, but sorry, when the sun's shining and the log is flowing, I want to be entertained. The darkness rock, and that's what matters. Yes, I get the joke, but it's just not funny, counters Daniel Whelan via email. Never before has one band managed to steal all the manic's crap points

without any of the good ones. If we all ignore them, they'll go away, and we'll never have to look at their bad teeth again. If I wanted to watch some rubbish novelty tribute band, I'd get a fucking season ticket for stars in their eyes says steve-o via email i have written to michael evas demanding one two hundredth of my glastonbury ticket price back for waking me up on friday morning with their squealing comedy shit simon i remember when we were arguing the toss on internet forums back in 2003 the darkness was a hill you were prepared to die on 2,000 times.

Listen, man, that band were the band who were giving me life more than anyone in that era. And I kind of discovered them. I'm going to give myself credit for that. What happened was, back in spring 2001, a woman I knew called Valerie Gerrimond, who was the promoter of a night called The Fan Club that happened at The Verge in Kentish Town,

urged me to check out this new band she was putting on with what I thought was a shit, gothic-sounding name. So I went along a bit reluctantly, but I was absolutely blown away. And I wrote their first ever live review in The Independent on Sunday. In this review, I've got a little quote. I described them as being

a histrionic, high-camp, heavy metal band, best described as a gay ACDC. Gay CDC, if you will. I mean, ACDC is already a sort of gay name. Yes. Fronted by a young Freddie Mercury. Hugely entertaining, regardless of their exact location on

the irony-to-seriousness scale. So that's what I wrote. And I remember them treating this small pub gig like it was Wembley. And I love that about them. I mean, Justin Hawkins was getting a roadie to give him a piggyback around the room and moving through the fairly sparse crowd,

high-fiving everyone as he played guitar. And I loved that. I mean, their music was just shameless. Obviously, we've all heard it, but fucking joyful, fist-in-the-air fun. I mean, the songs are brilliant, and they fucking genuinely rocked. And also, right, they put a trestle table with loads of pizza slices at the back of the room for everyone to help themselves.

So that's a tip for up-and-coming bands. If you want to get audiences and critics on site, give them pizza. Yeah, or a buffet at least. Yeah, something like a buffet. It was a really nice touch. And send Neil along to review the buffet. Yeah, and you've got to put crisps out if Neil's there. Yeah, fucking hell.

And, well, whether he'll touch your sandwiches is really the mark of it. Definitely. But the darkness, they were just so unlike anything else that was around. And I emailed absolutely everyone in the music industry who I had in my email contacts list and just said you have to see this band and I'm generally not taking credit for getting them signed but I did everything I could to help with

the kind of buzz that was naturally growing around them and we we became good mates we worked together a lot I even DJ'd several of their gigs and after shows and birthdays and it was just such a pleasure and a joy to watch this band who i'd championed when they were at pub level making it all the way to brit awards and headlining festivals and playing wembley and all that and the fact that some boring bastard indie kids who wrote for the enemy or read the enemy didn't like them only made me love them more you know yeah and when the darkness became too big to ignore and you've mentioned the Glastonbury thing there they were just this reality that the NME couldn't sort of like laugh

off anymore Connor McNicholas who was the editor of NME at the time approached Justin Hawkins at Glastonbury to beg him for forgiveness, to beg him to forgive NME and to give them an interview. And Justin made him literally get on his knees backstage at Glastonbury and grovel, and he did it. Yeah, yeah. I fucking love that. The thing with Connor is, right, and he was a weird one. He wasn't from NME world.

He wasn't immersed in indie rock. And he was a dance music journalist. He'd been at Ministry and Mixmag and Music and things like that. And, you know, his job after the NME was he went to be a motoring journalist. Right. He actually looked like one of the Strokes. And I liked him despite myself because I was the last Japanese soldier in the jungle. You know, I was still fighting the war, even though Melody Maker was long gone.

So I hated NME on principle. And I was also at odds with what it was doing and i i was always taking pot shots at enemy from my sunday newspaper bunker and then because enemy at that time and i don't know maybe it's partly come across in this issue and maybe it's not a good example of it but it was fixated on the idea of cool specifically this kind of hipster understanding of cool that was being formed in hoxton and also williamsburg and the enemy was also enthralled to this really reductive like jack daniels swilling keith richards idolizing idea of rock and roll you know which i found kind of embarrassing and they were glorifying that whole smack head culture that surrounded the libertines as well you know yeah and then and throughout that decade they they were

just too keen to provide a platform for all those tedious posh boys and girls like Razorlight and Florence the Machine and Jamie T and Jack Pignate and Kate Nash and all that lot basically pulling up the castle drawbridge and making pop into an upper-class playground. I hated that. And the other thing that was going on in The Enemy at that time, it was the age of advertorial. I don't know if you saw any examples of this. Did you? Well, basically, right, they saw no contradiction

between naming a tour the Rock and Roll Riot Tour, right, an Enemy-sponsored tour, and having it sponsored by O2 and Samsung. Yes. For fuck's sake. And it was during Conor's six-year reign enemy that nme became this brand it was like a logo the enemy it wasn't so much a magazine anymore and they were always fortunate i think david stubbs has mentioned this before that you know enemy had this nice blocky logo that looks good on a t-shirt or a badge whatever

so it became this brand so there was a website there was the enemy awards came back there were these package tours there were sponsorship tie-ins with shockwaves hairspray and all these other lifestyle and they were yeah and they were selling t-shirts under the enemy banner you know the band t-shirts not enemy t-shirts they were selling tickets for gigs it was just this ugly corporate kind of lifestyle monstrosity. But they must have been doing something right, because the weird thing was, despite the fact that the music press was having its arse kicked

by new forces at this time, sales of the enemy actually went up slightly under Conor's reign. Whenever I ran into him in person, he was nice to me, despite all my sniping and slagging. And I've got to say, I've actually got a sneaking amount of respect for him that Justin Hawkins says, get down on your knees, and he fucking did it, so fair play to him. When I read that Nathan from the Kings of Leon said,

I'd rather have a son in a band than a daughter that's at the club trying to get with the guy in the band in NME, I couldn't gosh darn believe it, writes Condoleezza Rice's fallopian tube via email. Here I was all this hair time thinking that girls could actually be in bands ourselves instead of just being mere groupies. It's so refreshing in 2003

to see such a forward-thinking band who sound and look like a parody of good old rehashed 70s rock cliches hayden wants to know who cosmic rough riders think they are james de mello points out that the corals latest single is a direct nick of you like me too much by the beagles and princess fairy thanks the enemy for the cover mounted condoms in an issue last month as her boyfriend gave her her first double orgasm with them. 52 pages, £1 forte. I never knew there was so little in it.

It's a very patchy thing, the NME, by this time. Gone down in size, gone down in pagination. The articles are bitty as fuck, and you go through it and you think well this is nicely laid out and everything but you feel so sorry for the people writing in it and so sorry for the bands and artists who are being covered in it because it's proper nm heat by this time heat did so much damage to the music press yeah there are a lot of listicles in the enemy around this time and one of their most sort of totemic ones was the cool list that they publish every now and then was like the 50 coolest people in the world you know it always seemed to be like karen over the years at number one and

yeah it was all those people that were eventually sort of collated in the book meet me in the bathroom about that whole cocainey new york scene of of the noughties. And yeah, it just seemed like they were all kissing America's arse. In a way that 10 years earlier, I guess Melody Maker was kissing sort of America's grungy arse, you know. But yeah, it was all sort of fixated on these indie celeb personalities and what they were up to. Pop stars at this time are celebrities who happen to make music and the way they keep themselves famous

is by making music and putting it out every now and then. But that's not their real job anymore. Their real job is to be somebody famous. I don't know. I mean, obviously, Smash Hits was great in its pomp, but I suppose it has a lot to answer for in terms of the influence of format in that way. But a lot of the joy had gone out of it, I guess.

It's like, you know, a list. I love, you know, list i i love you know i love a good list i love like the daftness that you can put into these things but you've got to get it right it's such a such a dicey thing and when it's like transparently chasing after audiences i mean we all know how that goes you know it's it's where you're chasing after people who aren't there or you're pandering to people who realize that you're pandering to them it's yeah i mean obviously the maker did this as well it's like putting like non-music people on the cover or whatever it's like hang on so we call it's like yeah it's like a weird category error that's going on it's like but that's not a what you know

like the sex issue and stuff with like kelly but i interviewed kelly brooke actually she was a sweetheart she didn't know what she was doing there either she was really sweet because she was quite dim but she was really a she was really self-aware about it which was so endearing she was kind of like well I don't know what I don't know why you want to interview me for this but okay yeah because it was all the same to her but yeah culturally it was all starting to get a little bit of a mishmash that that was a bit queasy I mean the last magaziney job i had was a few years ago i was working for a celebrity magazine and my job was to sit on the associated press wires as soon as a news item came up jump on it cut and paste it amend it just a little bit give it a title that was seo friendly and try and get it out before everybody else did yeah and we're seeing the

beginning of this here everything's celebrity related you're not really learning much about the bands or the artists and the people writing it aren't learning how to be proper journalists because they're not being given the space to do that I mean I did I did a couple of days at heat online and that was just weird it was just because i did all kinds of bits and bobs of work around this time i i did do some some odd bits of music stuff subsequently i did some stuff like the bbc music website and then i lost any inclination to do that as well but um yeah i i was never going to like pivot to do celebrity stuff because it was just too odd yeah but it was starting to the walls were kind of closing in a bit and it was starting to become this kind of homogenous thing.

It's all meant to be zingy and fun and exciting and you don't feel that. It's quite hard to fake it, you know. Yeah. So what else was on telly this day? Well, BBC One starts the day at 6am with breakfast. Then it's Kilroy, house call in the country where assorted TV presenters tell the unemployed,

pensioners, kids on their six-week holiday, and anybody else stuck at home watching BBC One on a weekday morning about what houses they should be buying. Then it's garden invaders, house invaders, trading treasures, the proto-flog it, passport to the sun, the docu-soap about British people in Majorca. to the Sun, the docu-soap about British people in Majorca. Then it's BBC News, regional news in your area, Neighbours, cash in the attic, diagnosis murder, more news, more regional news in your area. Then it's the Tweenies, Arthur, Rugrats, the Basil Brush Show, the film show Call the Shots, a repeat of Neighbours, then the 6 o'clock news, regional news in your area again, and they've just finished a repeat of the episode of Open All Hours, where Granville

mines the shop while Arkwright goes to a funeral. BBC Two starts at 6.30am with Fimbles, The Adventures of Marco and Gina, Sheep, the Ovine-centric cartoon series, Then You Get Me, the interactive drama series about yous running an internet radio station, followed by Round the Twist, Newsround, Tom and Jerry Kids, and the role-reversal reality show Rule the School, where a group of kids educate a pool of young teachers. After a dragon interrupts an important baseball game in the scooby and scrappy show it's smart the shaking take heart which teaches the youth how to make a personalized mobile phone holder then it's mona the vampire tween is possibly the episode where they do their own episode of Top of the Pops and one of them imitates Jimmy Savile,

which received 213 complaints when it was accidentally repeated in 2013. Oh my God. And Clifford the Big Red Dog. After Miss Hooley does something for the old uns by organising a fish supper in Balamore, it's Rubber Dubbers, CBeebies birthdays and a Laurel and Hardy double bill. After the business show working lunch,

we get to look at the Orkneys and Pembrokeshire in this land before being whipped over to Ascot for the racing, hosted by Willie Carson and fucking Bunty. That's followed by Escape to the Country, Ready Steady Cook, The Weakest Link, the episode of The Simpsons with Elton John in it, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Robot

Wars Extreme, and they've just started the Royal Horticultural Society Flower Show at Tatton Park with Monty Don and Charlie Dimmock. ITV kicks off at 6am with GMTV, followed by Trish R, This Morning and Loose Women. After the lunchtime news and regional news in your area, it's Under One Roof, a repeat of Quincy, Yes Chef, more news, more regional news in your area, then the kids show Squeak, followed by Hey Arnold, Rescue Robots,

My Parents Are Aliens, Boot Sale Challenge, and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire Classic, i.e. a repeat. Then it's regional news in your area, the ITV Evening News, Emmerdale, and they've just started Coronation Street. Channel 4 commences with a double bill of the Jim Henson Alien on Earth kids programme The Hoops, followed by Rise, Pop World, a repeat of last night's Big Brother's Little Brother, then a repeat of last night's Big Brother. Then it's over to Edge Bastard for the second day of the first test between

england and south africa which runs all the way to 6 15 then it's holly oaks channel 4 news and they just started highlights for the first day of the rally deutschland in the world rally championship channel 5 yeah who gives a toss hell, that is a packed television schedule and a very familiar television schedule. There's not much difference between now and then, is there? A lot of familiar names there, like Loose Women and so on. I don't think I was watching any of that. I just wasn't watching TV around this time.

Maybe Pop World. I don't know if that was Simon Amstel's era, but I thought he was really good. And Makeda Oliver as well. I thought they were great and it was one of those shows that was aimed at kids but when it was shown on a Sunday morning it was just great

hungover viewing for people being out at a nightclub and yeah I thought it was a good show. I used to work with the guy who was the Jimmy Savile tweenie. No! So he's just a very tall man so he did uh he did some writing but he also did some acting and uh yeah so he was on the front cover of the sun when that whole

scandal broke in his you know he's very sort of tall and lanky with the big head on he just thought it the whole thing was quite hilarious because nobody knew it was him you know he didn't actually get tracked down he didn't have people so he didn't get cancelled through no fault of his own so he didn't get tracked down like the sex teletubber fortunately i mean we might have you know because i was like in an office with him they could have had the paps at the door and everything but fortunately we didn't so mention of um rescue robot and um robot wars extreme reminded me i haven't told you about the third job i was doing in 2003 which was uh running my club night oh yeah i was running um a night called stay beautiful it'd be going a couple of years um

it ended up lasting for 10 years in london and another five in brighton and what it was it was basically a place a home for a subculture that didn't really have a name but was out there and existed and obviously stay beautiful it's named after Manic Street Preacher's songs. It's partly coming from that kind of subculture of, you know, Richie Edwards fans, but also people who are into Hole and Placebo and maybe Manson with a S-U-N and maybe bands like Kinnicky and kind of new glam bands like Rachel Stamp and King Adora and all of this. So basically there was this tribe of people who didn't have a name,

but you'd see them, they'd wear a lot of eyeliner and glitter and leopard and feather boas and all that, and they would coalesce around certain bands and certain gigs, but there were no club nights for them. And I decided just to sort of do a night that brought all this together, and it ended up becoming this kind of self-perpetuating little tribe to itself. It really was its own scene. And the thing is, I was running with my then-girlfriend

and one of my best mates, and we kept having to move from one venue to another. We could never get a weekend night to start off with. We were fucking running on a Monday, you know, in London, which wasn't ideal. Then Wednesday. Eventually we got Friday in Islington, but we got booted out of

that um we ended up going to this place in london bridge it was called club wicked um it was previously known as cynthia's robotic bar oh yes yes i bet you have because i'm coming on to the i'm coming on to exactly why i think you might have been there so uh it was in tooley street in the underpass beneath london bridge and it had an actual robot yes that would serve you cocktails this metal mickey type thing called cynthia and another one called rastus cynthia and rastus the robots they were a bit shit i never actually got them successfully to pour me a drink but they were there anyway but it was run by this guy he was a former police officer called brian sheridan and. And he was a sort of fetish lord.

And we didn't know what we were letting ourselves in for when we got involved in this venue. I found a newspaper story about what went on there. Basically, around the time that we moved in there and started doing Stay Beautiful once a month, this is Brian Sheridan and his wife, Lady Caroline, a writer of erotic fiction. I'm going to come on to that. They were trying to get a license for Cynthia's or Club Wicked, as they renamed it, to become a live sex club where people could just go and have sex in public in front of other people. You know, that was kind of unprecedented in London.

And there were all kinds of legal obstacles to it. And they were trying to find a workaround where you could pay 25 quid to be a member and it becomes a private club and stuff like that. But I found a newspaper story about all of this, about what they were trying to do. I'm going to read it out now. It goes, Former police officer Brian Sheridan, known as the General, due to his penchant for military uniforms,

and his wife Lady Caroline, a writer of erotic fiction, say that their arrival in SC1 was quite deliberate and well-researched. We wanted a fast and up-and-coming area with easy access to the city with no or minimal competition. The Sheridans are well-known figures on the fetish scene where opinions are divided about their business style and personal tastes.

Brian, a self-styled World War II historian, says that World War II uniforms are his fetish. In my opinion, the World War II German uniforms are highly glamorous and erotic, he wrote in response to criticisms on a London fetish message board. Flyers for previous promotions have featured the couple in full SS uniform. Fancy that, yeah.

Yeah, a quote from him now. We are not Nazis or fascists, says Brian Sheridan, who goes on to add that the British have committed more terrible atrocities than anyone over the last 1,000 years. We make the Nazis look like they're in kindergarten. Right, so that gives you an idea of, you know, that these people... They're never interested in dressing up like the Home Guard, are they? No, they're not. Exactly, exactly.

So I went there for a business meeting just to try and sort of, you know, pin down what our deal was going to be. And I went in the middle of the afternoon, probably on a weekday, and I saw someone strapped to an apparatus getting their bare arse spanked with a paddle by a man in a latex Nazi stormtrooper outfit. And that was Brian Sheridan, the general. What, on his dinner hour? Well, they just had stuff going on in the daytime.

And I think it's because they were so close to the city. And quite a lot of the people who went there were quite well-to-do professionals. And the thing is, right, most places where Stay Beautiful had happened, we were the freaky wild ones. The crowd was quite... Our crowd was very LGBTQ friendly and, you know, very dressed up, very glam, very punk. At Club Wicked, we were the squares, we were the prudes, you know.

And what ended up happening, because we had a really good run there. It wasn't a long run, but we had a load of really good nights so um we had things like like peaches uh the aforementioned peaches came to dj for us one time and that was a real coup we had sylvain sylvain for the new york dolls bless him r.i.p it was oh that was a fucking weird one because uh he knew he was meant to be doing an hour and he only brought 30 minutes worth of songs and i didn't know that and i'm stood next to him just making sure nothing's going wrong with about 30 seconds left on his last song he says right well that's it I've got no more I'm like what and I had to suddenly leap into my record box and just grab something New York-y like a blondie record stick it on and from then on it was amazing because what

he did was he would take the microphone and I would sort of like put on sort of New York punk type records and and he would just sort of narrate them say oh yeah well I remember walking down to 53rd and 3rd where I first met Johnny Ramone and this kind of stuff and it ended up being this amazing DJ set and we had Mira from Lady Tron and I think what it was it was we were quite close to South Bank Centre and our run there coincided with the Meltdown Festival and they had a really forward-looking booker Glenn Wax and a lot of these bands like the New York Dollars were playing there and then they would come over and DJ for us and it was a lovely venue it was this kind of chrome and mirror plated well dungeon really cavern and under London Bridge I loved it but the reason it came to an end was because of Brian Sheridan trying to get this license for it to be a live sex club

and there was pushback not just from the local police but from Southwark Cathedral which is if you know where it is it's right at one end of London Bridge it's just right there. The Dean of Southwark Cathedral the very Reverend Colin Slee started getting involved in the campaign to have Wicked shut down. And it was very difficult for the police or anyone to shut it down under existing laws because it was all a bit vague. The only law that they could really use, there was something from 250 years earlier called the Disorderly Houses Act.

Right. I mean, it was a pretty fucking disorderly house. There's a lot of disorder going on in that house. But there was another, when lot of disorder going on in that house but um uh there was another um uh when the scandal was going on there was a there was a story in the uh evening standard from a woman called alexa balakaya who did that thing she wrote that kind of i made my excuses and that kind of article do you know what i mean uh so here's a bit she goes um as my taxi drew up in tooley street I thank goodness that my outfit,

skin-tight black PVC catsuit, killer heels and a buckled leather neck strap was not too outré. And then she meets Caroline Sheridan, the wife of the General. Tonight she was Lady Caroline and wearing an outrageous blonde wig and studded leather straps that displayed her ample naked breasts

and so on and basically just sort of titillating the the readership of the standard in a way that possibly contributed to the eventual decision of a hearing at Southwark Town Hall to shut Wicked down and then make Stay Beautiful homeless sadly but it was it was a ride it was a fucking wild ride while we were there anyway it was so did you ever go there then i did a few interviews there it was always a good venue to interview and do photo shoots yeah i didn't partake all right they all say that i didn't have sex with anybody while loads of people watched you weren't wanked off by a robot not that time anyway no no no yeah fucking hell the other thing i've just remembered about this and I was so proud of our crowd for this is that we happened to be

doing our night while that fucking bellend David Blaine was hanging in a Perspex cube from a crane do you remember this he was like living in a Perspex cube with no food or anything for however long it was near London Bridge and it was like 3am and our crowd were

kicked out they all just went along there with fucking Big Macs and Burger Kings like waving them out and going ah wanker and stuff like that

and I just thought I love you guys alright then Pop Craze Young says it is now time to go way back to July of 2003

always remember we may coat down your favourite band or artist, but we never forget, they've been on top of the pops more than we have. We've got intruders in the building and they're eyeing up our talent. Oi, teacher, leave those kids alone. It's still number one. It's top of the pops. is Top of the Pops.

It's half past seven on Friday, July the 25th, 2003, and Top of the Pops, as is its want in its waning years, is on its arse. The falling ratings of the show and calls for its demise has been an oft-used stick, which the tabloids have beaten the BBC with ever since the early 90s and the show has been locked into a pattern of low ratings leading to a new producer leading to a makeover leading to rising ratings leading to falling ratings leading to another producer and so on and so on. Panel, it seems like Top of the Pops has been on death row

for 10 years by this point. What's the reason for that? I mean, there's kind of lots of reasons and no reason, I guess. Primarily, anything that's been going for this long, it's kind of not a natural lifespan for a show, is it? You know, it's like animals, kind of. When natural lifespan for a show is it you know it's like animals kind of when you see like really old animals they always look really weird because nature kind of does them in when they're still young the show's been going for 40 years and it

sort of lost its way in that profound and irreparable way that long-running things generally do it's like the center cannot hold whatever you're doing if you've been doing it for so long that like nobody who was involved in it at the start is still involved, that culture has changed, every element has changed and there are such forces being brought to bear on it that nothing can survive that pressure. It's like The Simpsons has now been bad for longer than it was great and its legacy is completely secure and it will always have been a great show.

But, you know, it is not what it was. And the same thing has happened to Top of the Pops really is that everything about it has changed. And there's a kind of self consciousness when you start to focus intently on every aspect of a thing and try to analyse and micromanage what exactly is going wrong and what's right and what do we like and what do we not like? Who the audience what side of the bed do they get out of in the morning how many eyelashes do they have you can end up sort of destroying things by just over analyzing them when you start a thing there's an innocence about it and everyone is let's put on a music show we'll have some bands that'll be lovely and then after a few decades you're like but do people still like this and why and why not and that process i think is just like it's just death by a thousand cuts isn't it i like this idea of tv shows having a natural longevity like animals it's like the hayflick limit do you know about that no yeah it's this theory i i learned it from uh going to one of those gunter von hagen's uh exhibitions you know where he he plastinates human bodies. It's this theory that

biological cells in an animal's body or human body can only replicate themselves a finite number of times and then you just conk out. This is why immortality is not a thing. Although there are things that do challenge that. For example, lobsters. Lobsters. Which some types of lobster can live to be at least 700 until some arsehole catches them and boils them in a pan. But yeah, the hayflick limit for television programmes possibly is a thing. I was wondering about Top of the Pops in 2003, and it had a few predators out there, as do lobsters,

but the internet was not yet really one of them. The internet was still in its infancy, and YouTube hadn't even been launched yet, I think I'm right in saying. No. So in terms of getting your visual fixer pop, the internet really wasn't killing it. But what the internet was doing was changing the way people kind of got together as music fans

and how you construct your identity as a music fan, which in the past, it would always be a consensual group effort that you would be a rude boy or a meddler or a hip-hop kid but you would be doing it kind of in definition against everything else that was going on and it was in the context of everything else that was going on it would still have a nod to the rest of the world and be part of that world and it was much easier by the early years of the millennium to consume your music and to construct your tribal identity it's not just the center cannot hold the the center wasn't even there and being looked at you know top of the pops was originally central to culture but it sort

of didn't play that role anymore so once upon a time you know it would gather everything in all these genres every genre every little scene it would gather in the sort of most popular versions of that and then amplify them and make them more popular again whether you're you know a jangly indie band like orange juice or a horrible heavy metal band like motorhead it would still have the function of taking to that next level and then bringing you into the homes of people in shitty little towns who don't get to see gigs and i i think that that had kind of gone by the millennium. I really do. Top of the Pops was one of the BBC's flagship shows

alongside things like Match of the Day and Panorama. But none of those other shows got fucked about with as badly as Top of the Pops did. By the time Top of the Pops had moved out to Fridays, the charts had moved from Tuesdays to Sundays, which meant the charts were even more out of date by the time it got on top of the pops yeah because I suppose CD UK on ITV would be less than 24 hours after top of the pops but dealing with a brand new chart because essentially CD UK

was using the midweek chart wasn't it you know yeah sort of a spoiler for the you know the Sunday chart so yeah absolutely um in the fast-moving world of pop um I suppose top of the pops was sort of a spoiler for the Sunday evening chart. So yeah, absolutely. In the fast-moving world of pop, I suppose Top of the Pops was looking pretty stale by the time Friday came around. Yeah, and of course with Countdown UK, when that became a thing, it turned out the bands were more interested in being on that

than they were on Top of the Pops because if you can get your shit out in front of the kids on a Saturday morning just before they're're going into town with a pocket money it's a better situation for them that's a very clever bit of programming it's weird how it becomes you know it's just it's not cool anymore i mean the kind of the great thing about it is that it was never cool in some way but it kind of was by default i think and yeah i mean it's very snazzy at this point but the trouble is as we know as we have experienced in our careers, once you start trying to chase an audience and pander to them, like people know when they're being pandered to. Even dickheads know when, you know, they go, wait a minute, you're pandering to me.

I don't like it. So it's kind of it's just turning that way. And that's, you know, it's kind of it's just turning that way and that's you know it's kind of in the the death spiral it's it's the poochy stage of top of the pops isn't it this it really is they've rasterized this episode of top of the pops by 10 however there has been a steady hand on this tiller for the past six years and his name is Chris Cowie. Born in Sunderland in 1961, Chris Cowie went to Rye Hope Comprehensive School where his English and drama teacher was Malcolm Gerre who came to national attention in the mid-70s when his school production of the David

Essex film Stardust made the cover of the NME and was filmed for an episode of the London weekend art show Aquarius. After the broadcast of that program Gary was approached out of the blue by a viewer called David Putnam who persuaded him to pack up teaching and get involved in TV. After Gary landed a job as a researcher at Tyne Tees he would regularly get former pupils including Cowher involved and in 1979 Cowher was filmed and interviewed at his night job DJing at the local Mecca ballroom for Tyne Tees' new pop program All Right Now. After the interview he was approached by Angela Wanfor the head of Ty Time Teaser's kids' programming, and invited to audition for a presenting gig.

He was immediately picked up by the station and given the job of co-presenting Check It Out, a local bi-weekly youth show, which is best known nowadays for the interview with Public Image Ltd, which they commence by showing the band a film of local band the Angelic Up starts being interviewed by Coway as they took a stroll along the Tyne where they accused John Lydon of selling out and being an old man called Public Image the worst band ever and stated that the Sex Pistols would have been a hundred times better with Jimmy Percy as their lead singer which led to Lydon tossing his mic at Cowie and walking off set and also effing as well as jeffing after all right now and check it out

wound down in 1982 Gary was given the job of producing a new tiny pop show for the brand new channel for the tube and while Cowie was still working as a presenter, he also became a trainee researcher on the show, and by the mid-80s had worked his way up the ranks to become involved with Tube specials and outside broadcasts. In 1987, just before The Tube was phased out, Cowie went freelance as an assistant producer and linked up with Gary and and one four's new production

companies leading him to get involved with wired big world cafe the white room jonathan ross presents channel four's mid-90s coverage of glastonbury and linking up with gary again to co-produce the first televised brit awards since the Fleetwood Fox debacle. In the spring of 1997, while he and Gary were working on creating a TV version of the Pepsi chart show for Channel 5, he was approached by the BBC to take over from Rick Blacksall as the producer of Top of the Pops and rescue a programme that was on the verge of being axed. Once installed as the new boss of the Pops, he reinforced changes that had already been set in motion by the interim producer Mark Wells,

such as phasing out the practice of celebrity guest presenters and replacing them with a pool of Radio 1 DJs and CBBC presenters and getting acts to record performances in the studio in advance before their new singles have been released in order to use them when they actually made the charts he also scrapped red hot pop by vince clog as the theme tune in preference of crashing straight into the first single of the night more importantly he clamped right down on videos unless absolutely necessary, telling record companies that if they wanted their acts on the show, they would have to appear on set or not at all.

This culminated in the most complaints ever made for an episode of Top of the Pops in December of 1997, when he was told that the Teletubbies, who had got to number one that week, would be unable to appear in the studio because they never left Teletubbies, who had got to number one that week, would be unable to appear in the studio because they never left Teletubby land. Leading Cowey to play the video for only 40 seconds at the end. Yeah, fuck you, Tipsy Whipsy, or whatever the fuck you're called. In May of 1998, he commissioned a new-ish theme tune, a drum and bass version of Whole Lotta Love,

a new, cleaner, 60s-inspired branding, which he plastered all over the set. Then, in 2001, the BBC decided to push he sends us out to four episodes a week, which would require more space at Elstree, meaning that Top of the Pops had to squat at the Riverside Studios for a bit, and was eventually brought back to its spiritual home in Television Centre

in a studio built to Cowey's exact specifications and relaunched once again. While Cowey was being credited for writing the ship, adding on an extra three million viewers by the end of his first year, his paymaster sorts out new revenue streams for the Pops, franchising the show out to Germany, France, Italy, Netherlands and Turkey, with the BBC version being exported to 87 countries, sometimes intact, other times with a local presenter doing the links. This, alongside the top of the Pops magazine, which was first published in 1995 as a rival to Smash's, and was selling half a million copies a month at its peak,

video and DVD sales of Top of the Pops performances, and a compilation CD series, meant that Top of the Pops was bringing in an estimated £20 million a year to the BBC coffers. In 2001, the first edition of the Top of the Pops Awards, an attempt to give the BBC its own Brits, was broadcast, and a year later, Top of the Pops Saturday, a spin-off show bolted on to BBC One's Saturday morning programming, was introduced.

However, by the summer of 2003, the viewing figures are dropping again, and Cowie has been making noises about more wholesale changes. He's already said that the top 40 is full of crap because they're dictated by record companies and no longer fulfills its role of providing a list of the most popular singles in the country, possibly due to the deployment of Judy Zouk's satin tour jackets. In an era where 20,000 single sales can bag you a number one single, he's pushing for the charts to be determined by the value of sales as opposed to volume, and for radio plays to have more of an influence as they do in America.

So, yes, Chris Cowey, a man with a rock-solid pedigree and also someone who clearly got what Top of the Pops was supposed to be all about. In the interview for The Guardian to commemorate his first year in the job, he said, The most important thing about Top of the Pops is that it's BBC One at 7.30pm. I remember watching it as a kid and your dad would like something, your mum would like something else, my brother and sister would like other things.

It's real family viewing. Well, is it? Is it now? First of all, there's so much to unpack with that whole backstory of Gary and Cowie. Yeah, I know. Sorry I waffled on Pulp Craze youngsters, but I much to unpack with that whole backstory of Gary and Cowie. Yeah, I know. Sorry I waffled on Pulp Craigs Junkers, but I had to get all that shit out. Because the footage of the Rye Hope Comprehensive, which is just outside Sunderland, their production of Stardust, directed by Mr. Gary.

It's there. I'm sure you'll put it on the playlist. Oh, most definitely. But yeah, if you watch it, I mean, first of all, you've got Russell Harty introducing it. And I don't get it. I don't get why NME and ITV are so interested in this. It's what schools do or did.

I suppose you can compare it to all the fuss over the Langley Schools Music Project, if you remember that. So for those who don't know what, that was in 1976 and 77, there was a school teacher in rural Canada called Hans Fenger, who got the children to record these enthusiastic but very lo-fi versions of songs like

Calling Occupants and Help Me Rhonda and Space Oddity, complete with all the sort of guileless bangs and crashes of a typical junior school orchestra, but perform with this real joy and charm and the tapes were rediscovered and released as an album in 2001 and it kind of went viral and it's now considered a masterpiece of outsider music and it was actually performed live at the royal festival hall in 2002 as part of david bowie's meltdown festival with london school kids instead of what they should have done was get the middle-aged survivors of the 70s recordings.

That would have been amazing. But the point with Langley Schools is, it was discovered decades later, and therefore it served as an evocative time capsule, which might have been the case with the Rye Hope comprehensive Stardust, if the tapes had been discovered years later. But what I don't get, I'm really amazed that NME and ITV gave a shit at the time what's what's that well before that they'd done a production of tommy

right and i think on both occasions they they did the stage show before the actual films came out all right okay i think gary was seen as stereotypical 70s trendy teacher oh god isn't he just yes fucking hell yes by the way there's loads of wrongness in that right hope thing i mean they they stage a new faces panel show and there's a girl group who are billed as the ronettes but they sing to do ron ron which is a crystal song and that really annoys me for a start but the panel has this limp-wristed gay stereotype on it which everyone in the audience finds hilarious and there's loads of sexist objectification of the six-form girls, right? And the ITV crew isn't exactly innocent of that.

There's lots of lingering on the girl group from the neck down. Yes! And then they interview them about their outfits and one of the girls explains, Mr. Gary got a special person in to decide what we should wear. White jumper and a black bra so it shows through.

Black hot pants, black boots and black fishnets fucking a special person eh mr gary a special person wasn't jules holland was it christ i guess it's interesting in hindsight in terms of television history because of that kind of mac and mafia that emerged from all this and first of all gary getting a job in tv and then him handing out jobs to some of his former pupils. Yeah, why don't we have fucking teachers like that? Oh, fuck, yeah, exactly. Including Cowie, of course. Cowie's in the cast of The Rye Hope Stardust.

Yes. And he's, don't you think, to look at even, he's very much Gary's mini-me. All right, so he ends up as executive producer of Top of the Pops. I've got to say, I can't hear the name Cowie without thinking of Collatterley Sisters on the day-to-day, where she goes, and it was a rather Cowie night for the pound.

It stood at 3.9 against the German Bordello. That's up 0.5 against the Portuguese Starling and down 100 against the bitch. Chris. Yes, exactly. And also on YouTube, and I'm sure you'll give this to the PC-wise on the as well is the um that version of was it called check it out the show it's basically nosing around at this point um Cowie looks like Bobby Borden very much so and obviously I don't know about the rest of you but obviously I'm on rotten side here oh total stitcher wasn't it he's been fucking ambushed by Cowie and Menci from the

Angelic Upstars who by the way doesn't look very punk with his nice center part no but but they they think rotten sold out because his new band isn't punk and because they've moved on and make their music more complex which is bollocks i mean i'm i'm on team rotten all the way yes oh incidentally cowey's co-presenter if you close your eyes sounds exactly like lauren laverne which is disconcerting i suppose she would obviously obviously, coming from that town. He's not averse to nobbling a famous act, as we're going to see on this episode, actually. Something very similar happens later on. I think the thing with Cowie is

he's that sort of very confident chancer and hustler of the sort I'm sure we've all met a hundred of in the industry. They're not all called Crispin. Some of them are just called Chris. It's like, these are the guys who are always going to be our bosses and they'll be dead friendly to us and then as soon as they turn their backs, we don't exist to them. That's who Cowie is.

He's an operator, isn't he? You know, people like that get shit done, but, you know, they are remarkably ruthless, I think. He also said, it's really important that there are things in top of the pops that one group of people should like and another is alienated by then it swaps around the reason the program is doing well is because we embrace that idea that pop music is diverse top of the pops to some extent is a program for people who don't necessarily like music don't necessarily buy cds and who aren't necessarily

still part of youth culture but if they only dip their toe in the water of that culture once a week they watch top of the pops now these are very fine words but they're buttering no parsnips with me and it's all down to the bbc's decision to move Top of the Pops to Fridays. We can't move away from it because when that happened, the concept of family viewing is just gone because your mum's always going to want Coro on. In 2003, the highest rating programme in the country was the episode of Coronation Street

where Richard Hillman, the Weatherfield mass murderer, drowned. That got 19.4 million viewers and that is a colossal amount for this century you know England's got to lose in a final for those kind of numbers nowadays yeah I guess they weren't even trying to compete on a level footing with Coronation Street they weren't even thinking well some people will just almost on a coin toss decide which to go for it's very much all right then, Combination Street has millions and millions of viewers and we'll just skim off another three million off the top

who are pop kids. Yeah. You know. As his comments for people who still want to dip a toe into music, well, he's talking to someone like me in 2003 and people like me in 2003 are either already in the pub on a Friday evening or getting ready to go to the pub

Friday night is not a night for watching teller no you've got to have a major life-changing event to keep me in the house on a Friday night were you watching it Sarah because we're slightly different ages and yeah you know I don't think I was um I don't know what else I was watching I mean I wasn't watching Corrie at that point but um i used to you know that was a thing that i i saw when i was a kid because everybody watched it but um yeah no i i wasn't i just i don't know it said nothing to me about my life at that point i guess i mean he's a solid choice to oversee a music program but the problem is it's top of the pops which is more than a music program judging by the interviews he's given since he took over he's clearly a paid up member of the campaign for real music although the insistence on live performances has been

relaxed he's he's clearly not keen on miming is there there's a video on youtube of him uh giving viewers a guided tour of the top of the pop studio which is quite revealing isn't it yeah for a start i quite like i mean he's obviously been given a big budget because everything behind the scenes looks the same as front of scenes, as it were. Yeah, it's a bit weird. Everything's white plastic. No more darkness.

Yeah. Unless the darkness is on. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, David Stokes wouldn't be able to give his usual spiel about the darkness in the corners of the screen here because there isn't any, yeah. It's a bit sort of Carova Milk Bar

from Clockwork Orange meets the Mondrian. It's a bit mondrian as well yeah and yeah he's been given a big budget by the look of things um and the whole thing is this sort of um labyrinthine complex there's an actual bar called the star bar which we're gonna come to later oh god and there's the top that pops magazine off is right there in the middle of it it's not farmed out somewhere else and as he's walking about he he has got that trendy teacher energy hasn't he he's got a phil redmond energy of middle-aged men with in a suit but with long hair which is always a bit of a red flag yeah yeah um there's a bit there's a bit where he goes into the control room and he fades up a bit of pududdle of Mud, who are that dreadful third-wave grunge band. Puddle of Mud with two Ds. Yeah, yeah.

And he goes, pretty good, huh? Which it plainly is not. Oh, and he makes a point of telling us that one of the Top of the Pop stages that night will later be hosting one of my favourite bands. I saw them the other night, Foo Fighters. Yes, yes, Dad, you're very trendy. We get it.

It's a little bit weird, this, isn't it? It's like, hey, gang, welcome to my gaff. People are very at ease now with the whole branding thing, which I first started to become cognizant of when the maker went under. And it's like, well, they kept the brand alive artificially for like a month. Yeah, thanks.

By keeping the adverts bit, wasn't it? It was the back pages. Muso bit, yeah. Yeah, the muso bit. And't it? It was the back pages. Muso bit, yeah. Yeah, the muso bit. And kind of grafted it into the NME with the logo on it, which is like, do you remember that time when they managed to grow a human ear on a guy's arm? They could like transplant it onto him.

So it kind of gives me the heebie-jeebies a bit. I just sort of have brand PTSD from that. It's like, ah, it's the top of the pops brand. Oh no, it's basically, it's the top of the pops brand oh no it's it's basically it's all over at this point yeah i don't know i suppose what he was doing was was kind of in that respect was similar to what conor mcnicholas was doing with nme in you know turning it into this monolithic brand that went across several platforms and i think it's quite clever you know he's made it into this syndicated international franchise. Yeah, he's IKEA-ified, I guess.

Yes, exactly. It's flat pack, it's kit form, it's modular. So they had exactly the same stage, exactly the same backdrop, whether it's in Germany or Italy. So if a band couldn't make it to the London studios, they could perform in one of the continental studios and the footage would be patched into the main show, which I strongly suspect happened in one of these cases we're going to see, by the way. So yeah, it is this sort of modular, flat-packed IKEA version of Top of the Continental studios, and the footage would be patched into the main show, which I strongly suspect happened in one of these cases

we're going to see, by the way. So, yeah, it is this sort of modular, flat-packed IKEA version of Top of the Pops. I think it is quite clever as a business model. Yeah, yeah. You've got to handle that. That's the problem, though, isn't it? Because people don't want to watch a business model.

No, I know. When we were young, we didn't go away and go, fucking hell, what an amazing business model that was last night. No, true. But I think he's made a good decision by focusing on live, or at least, you know, mimed performance rather than videos, because you could see videos

pretty much fucking everywhere at this point. Yeah. Whereas this footage, which has got what he hoped would become iconic, Top of the Pops backdrop, that Mondrian white plastic stuff everywhere, so that when that gets resold around the world or, you know,

for all time, really right until the present day, people will look at it as, Oh, there's, there's so-and-so I'm not going to sort of spoiler a very famous star who appears in this episode, but there they are on top of the pops rather than just there's the fucking

video that we could see anywhere. So I think that, that was kind of smart. I guess it was, but I, I kind of missed the videos. There's just a, um,

because you know, as, as we know, you can get some spectacular feats of artistry in, that was kind of smart i guess it was but i i kind of missed the videos there's just a um because you know as as we know you can get some spectacular feats of artistry in in pop videos that you know and things that we we still talk about now and we still remember and you know that and when you hear the music that's the image that comes to mind i mean there's you know there aren't really any apart from maybe frankie like what music is there now where the first mental image that comes to mind is a top of the pops performance as opposed to a video? Maybe now that I've said that, that's very controversial, isn't it? But do you know what I mean?

There are lots from the past, but I do see what you mean. And I suppose he's made a rod for his own back there because essentially by shunning the artistry and the excitement and the spectacle of videos, you then have to make sure that pretty much every episode of your show has got something equally fucking memorable. Yeah, which you're not going to get. You're just not. And so it's like there's a variety to it, which is now lacking, which makes it more monotonous when everything is a performance, I think. And also there's the idea,

now there's the whole thing of everything being curated. You know, it's like if you literally everything, it's like i've curated this fucking sandwich that i'm having for lunch but it's like it's curated videos it's like somebody has chosen that like i would always trust that someone had had a choice in like well it's five videos i'm going to pick this one to show to the people you know so you you would get a sense that somebody wanted you to see it you know but i mean i'll tell you what the just as a side note, having the magazine office like right in the studio, I guess it's convenient in some ways,

but it just reminded me of I had a brief writing gig in an office in the middle of Soho and it was above a strip club. And so at like five o'clock in the afternoon, you could just hear this weird rattling noise, which I realised was like the pole. It was a pole as the weight of a woman kind of hung off it amazing it's quite distracting when i worked at paul raymond we were right next to the windmill and the only thing we could hear in the afternoon was the theme tune to take the high

road because that's what all the strippers used to watch no way on the tea break yeah i'm gonna say they were stripping to that music that's a challenge, you know, that's a warm-up. Yeah. Yeah, we'd just be there tapping away, and all of a sudden you're just there. There we go, strippers are having a break, God bless them. Your hosts tonight. Born in Paris in 1976,

Liz Bonin relocated to Dublin at the age of nine with her parents and ended up studying biochemistry at Trinity College. After graduating, she joined the Irish girl band Chill, but apparently the world didn't need a Celtic spy skills at the time, and after they were dissolved, she went into into television presenting the rte kids program the den telly bingo and the irish fashion show off the rails in 2002 she relocated to london and became an entertainment correspondent for rise channel 4 short-lived digital clock nomenclatured breakfast show which once registered a rating of zero viewers one morning luckily one of the few people who were watching rides was chris cowher who offered her

presenting gig in may of 2002 and she's now part of a rotating talent pool which currently includes edith bowman colin murray reggie Yates, Sarah Kaywood and Richard Bacon. Her partner this week, born in Northwood, West London in 1981, Fern Cotton was the daughter of a sign writer and an alternative therapist who was also a distant relative to Bill Cotton, the former controller of the BBC who destroyed Ruby Flipper in 1976 because a black man lifted a white woman up once. At the age of 15, she began her presenting career when she won a competition to become a TV presenter and was given a spot on the GMTV kids show The Disney Club,

moving to CITV in 2000 to present Draw Your Own Tunes and the kids computer show Mass. A year later, she was approached by CBBC to present the kids science show Eureka, while also doing the CITV kids art and craft show Fingertips, eventually replacing Danny Bear in The Saturday Show, the replacement for Live and Kick In on BBC One. It was only a matter of time before she was funnelled

into the Top of the Pops presenting team and she made her debut in February of this year. This is her sixth appearance on Top of the Pops. Wow, chaps. By this time, as Morrissey might have said, in order to present Top of the Pops. Wow, chaps. By this time, as Morrissey might have said, in order to present Top of the Pops, one must, by law, possess a fanny. As we've discussed before, from the mid-90s,

the gender balance of Top of the Pops presenters has completely swung the other way. Why is that? I do like this quote that I dug out of an interview with Chris Cowie, where apparently he had a look at every male DJ on Radio 1 and decided they were all too ugly to become a presenter. So that's possibly one reason. Well, that really is turning things on its head.

That used to be a positive plus. If you look terrifying and creepy, then, you know, hey, welcome aboard. Here are some naive young girls you can slip your arm around on screen. They're all right, aren't they? They look good together. But, I mean, it's a very, it's, they're very professional and they're very kind of, they're slightly too professional in a way that makes me wince a little bit.

I'm kind of pulled in two directions with Top of the Pops, where I get frustrated with it for being so shonky. And then when they make it less shonky, it's like, but that's not Top of the Pops at all. It's supposed to be slightly crap. I mean, Liz Bonin's certainly no thicko. And Fern Cotton has been doing this sort of thing for eight years by now. So they are professional.

But you wouldn't necessarily call them pop people, would you? They've definitely gone for, you know, it's presenters above all else rather than, you know, nerds of any sort or, you know. But Liz Bonin is really great. She has gone on to do a lot of nature stuff, doing a BBC programme called Animals in Love where she hung out with some bonobos and tickled them. Oh, my God.

I think this should go in a complete... You're saying, oh, my God, like this is going to be... them it's like which i think this should this should go in the um in a complete what you're saying oh my god like this is gonna be because we all know i i don't know if people do know about bonobos they're the they're the apes that just have sex all the time but on this occasion they're not they're just they're young ones they're being tickled by a delighted liz bonin and it's very wholesome content indeed and yeah she's really great and she's very telegenic and um also um apparently she turned down fhm when they were like hey liz yeah hey liz come and do you want to come and do as a spread do you want to do that thing where you pull one side of your pants way

down over your hip and that's the thing isn't it and she said nah you're all right no you're right so fair dues yeah i like them i have to admit um i'd never heard of liz bonin until watching this episode of top of the pops the other day yeah she completely passed me by somehow um i know she mainly makes nature programs now she's sort of basically being groomed as the new attenborough but i don't really watch those those shows so she's brand new you hate nature don't i hate nature um you hate nature you hate nature you hate nature don't you god once see once we popped we can't stop with the dex's references yeah so she's brand new to me but i've got to say i could not be more impressed by her um i mean for a start there's a backstory yeah she's mixed race of

west indian heritage um trinidad on her mum's side martinique on her dad's side and growing up mixed race in a country as white as ireland i can't even imagine i mean people shouted the n word at her on the streets in dublin when she was a kid and to to have the strength not only to come through that but to actively put yourself in the public eye takes a sort of streak of steel i would say and we've seen what happens to high profile women of color in the media repeatedly of late i mean with the way alex scott and naga manchetti have been treated so there's there's that for starters and you know liz bonin is just she's obviously really smart and obviously just really sound i mean she, as well as the Bonobo thing you mentioned,

she made the BBC documentary Meat, A Threat to Our Planet, and she does an email. She does loads of environmental campaigning and she publicly had a pop at Boris Johnson over single-use plastics. So, you know, she put her head above the parapet there. She publicly supports Black Lives Matter and all of that. So, you know, she's obviously really sound. And on this Top of the Pops, she's a warm, likeable presence.

It doesn't hurt that she has that Irish accent, in which she could basically read out a statement telling me that I've been sentenced to death and it would still sound lovely. And because she's brand new to me, and maybe this is unfair, Fern Cotton, not brand new to me, she has the disadvantage of having made a very bad first impression on me back in the day, whereas Liz Bonin's brand new. I strongly took against Fern Cotton when she first emerged.

And I can't rewrite history. I can't pretend I didn't. For me, she, around that time, was the walking embodiment of a certain cultural shift that I hated. Around the turn of the millennium, there was a watershed moment where this kind of abyss opened up. It wasn't just a generation gap, but I would say a gap in values and attitudes. And it was marked out in geographical terms

by the shift between people who socialised in Camden and Soho and people who socialised in Hoxton and Shoreditch. And in verbal terms, between people who had never, ever, or would always always use the word sick right um so there was this there was this new as far as I this is how I saw the time I'm just sort of you know channeling my my then self but there was this proudly vacuous post-modern post-everything mentality among the hipsters of East London where everything was held at arm's length in implied quotation marks as tongs, you know.

And everything was just a bit of a laugh. And they were taking over radio, they were taking over TV in the noughties. You had your George Lamb and your Nick Grimshaw, and you had what Stuart Lee called those Russell comedians they have now. And yeah, right at the front of all that, you have Fern Cotton with her mean little downturned mouth

and her dead shark-like eyes. And I really thought she was the embodiment of everything that was wrong with the noughties. I thought she was vacuous and thick and just one of those renter presenters who were colonising the telly. And in many ways, looking back, my dislike is irrational because that's how TV works, right?

It's not as if I was ever likely to end up on TV myself, partly because I didn't come up via the NME to BBC fast track, but rather the Melody Maker road to nowhere. But I was never someone who was dying to get on TV because I thought about it, right? And I used to talk about this with friends. And I thought, I hate nearly everyone on TV. I scream at it.

I throw things at it. I think everyone on TV is a cunt. So why am I going to be any different if I'm on there? There's a moment in an episode of Friends I recently re-watched, right, when they're all sat around watching the Gellers high school prom video, and they're

all laughing because Monica used to be fat. And she goes, shut up, the camera adds £10. And Chandler says says so how many cameras were actually on you right and then what what i reckon is what i reckon is not only does the camera add weight but it adds loathsomeness unfairly sometimes i really think the very act of pointing a camera at someone and thereby you're giving them access to invade your living room and get all up in your face right immediately makes them 10 times more hateable than

if you just met them in the pub because you're like who the fuck are you know fuck off who are you what are you doing up in my face in my living room and yeah when when you look into it fern cotton has done a lot of admirable things so her um her happy place podcast and the related books speak up about mental health and and and she's written a vegan cookbook which obviously i approve of being a tree hugging meat dodger um yeah she's done loads for good causes she's not vegan though no i know she's pescatarian but it doesn't matter she's like me yeah but i put the book out there she's making it easier for people to be vegan but we agree on that me and fern fisher cunts aren't they fuck when's a fish ever rescued a child from a well? Never.

Oh, man. I remember the first time I went to Glastonbury, I bought a badge that said, Fish have feelings too. Just because I thought it was hilarious. But yeah, and the other thing, and I know I drone on about this sort of stuff, but at least she wasn't privately educated, you know,

which makes her a bit of a rarity in the broadcast media, it really does. And plus, on a humanitarian level, we have to feel pity for her regarding this sentence on a Wikipedia page. Yes. Oh, no. Cotton dated Ian Watkins, frontman of the band Lost Prophets, in 2005. I mean, just when you thought Billy Pper had some horrors lurking in that catalogue of exes yeah i really um i i really i did want to say like it doesn't matter it's not

like she's ever going to hear this but i hope she's okay yeah i really do and the thing is this right even if i did find her dead-eyed and vacuous as a tv host so what it's not as if she's any worse than the dlts or the anthea turners of previous generations on that score, right? So I'm not going to say that I've made my peace with her to the extent that I'll ever willingly watch or listen to any of her shows for enjoyment. But, you know, I can just make the decision to quietly avoid her work without getting so enraged by it as I was at the time. And so I do regret going so overboard and letting it get me so annoyed at the time and so I I do regret going so overboard and and letting it get me so annoyed at the time not that she'll ever have been aware of my ire or even my existence you know but I want to apologize sorry once you start apologizing I know she's caught me on a good day you know what I mean

because I another day I might double down but you know there we go no it's true though you can just and it sounds really wet isn't it it's like well like, well, if you don't like it, you can just not look. You can just turn away. But it is true. You can just go, it's all right. Go live your life, and I'll live mine, and we good. Well, now more than ever, if it's 1977, it's a different matter. But now you can just not watch stuff.

Satisfying your musical needs tonight, Benny Benassi, The Coral, D-Side, Beyonce, and the official Top of the Pops Top 20. But first, one of the songs of the summer. It's Wayne Wonder.

Come on, time of the props. We are greeted by our hosts, Bonin in a black top with red flowers, Cotton in a green top with shiny bits and a brown scarf, who tell us that there are intruders in the building, in the shape of Fame Academy judges, leading Cotton to drop a Pink Floyd reference and Bonin to utter the show's well worn by now catchphrase it's still number one it's top of the pops we're then thrown into the

10th and penultimate top of the pops theme the drum and bass remix of whole lot of love by ben chapman which has been going for five years now i mean they really should have done a dubstep remix of yellow pearl after this but you know yeah nice bit uk garage i mean already we're you know only sort of 15 seconds into the episode and there's quite a lot that's annoying isn't there yes i mean for a start cotton can't even get the pink floyd lyric right which no wow me up and yeah these kind of sinister figures that man and woman they cut to as if we're meant to know who they are it's just assumed but we'll come to that but um the thing with the the credits the um whole lot of love is that halfway through it they spoiler the whole show yes by telling you

what's coming up now al i know uh you know the kind of twists and turns of top the pop history inside out and there were certain phases in the sort of classic era when they did this. I don't like it when they do. I don't think any of us do really, do we? No, no, no, no, no. I like the surprise of somebody I don't fucking like and it's going to piss me off when they come on. Yeah.

You know? Yeah, because, you know, after that, there's going to be something that you do like. Yes. If your tagline is, it's still number one, it's Top of the Pop, stand behind that and go right what we have chosen for you tonight you're going to like enough of it that it's worth your while and you know the point is that you know we know what we're doing yeah it's just such a

disappointment where it's like no don't touch that dial well i literally just put the show on it's you know 7 31 and two seconds like no no wait wait wait don't go away i'm not going anywhere what during my top of the pops watching phase i used to be absolutely militant about not looking at the telly pages in the in the newspapers because they'd spoiler it and say oh here's who's presenting it and here's two or three people that could be going on it's like no i don't want to know you did the likely lads thing but with top of the pops exactly, I mean, it's like everybody, you know, we've all squeezed a Christmas present occasionally,

but you don't open them all on Christmas Eve unless it's, you know, unless you're in some Scandinavian countries where that's what they do. Yeah. Yeah, and also these two, that also is a mark of kind of weird desperation. Like, here we've got something completely different for you that isn't anything to do with Top of the Pops. thought i was gonna watch top of the pops what yeah it's almost like saying um this is top of the pops and it's number one but if if you don't like it um there's other stuff here it's really so needy it's so needy yeah and and do you think they're just

shitting it because you know it's uh combination street starting on the other side yes and that's purely you know uh the fact that bonin and cotton are stood there announcing the start of top of the pops means that there'll be some people on the sofa saying oh oh yeah that's uh combination street time time to switch over yeah so they're sort of leaping in there no no no don't go anywhere please yeah you know is it is it that you know i guess it is. I feel bad for them too, obviously, being in that position, having to toe that line, you know, and say that and mangle that line. Yeah. Because they're good, aren't they?

Ronin and Cotton. They're all right. No Simon Bates, though. See, I miss the authority and gravitar of Bates. He'd certainly tell you not to watch Coronation Street because it may contain northern swear words. To be fair, he is prettier. Eventually they introduce us to one of the songs of the summer No Letting Go by Wayne Wonder. Born in

Buff Bay Jamaica in 1972 Von Wayne Charles began his dancehall career at the age of 15 as a member of the Metro Media Sound System. After coming to the attention of S as a member of the metro media sound system after coming to the attention of sly dunbar he eventually linked up with king tubber and recorded a slew of records including a cover version of rick astley's never gonna give you up but when tubby was shot dead in 1988 he eventually linked up with the producer lloyd Dennis and recorded his debut LP No More Chance. A year later he moved to Penthouse Records and did cover versions of Fast Car by Tracy Chapman, Hold On by En Vogue and Forever Young by Alphaville

eventually linking up with label mate Booju Banton and co-writing Murderer and Boom Bye Bye with him for which he can eternally fuck off. Fuck off. By the end of the century, he made a dedicated turn towards R&B, setting up his own label Sing So and working with Foxy Brown and Lisa Left Eye Lopez, eventually picking up a worldwide deal with Atlantic Records.

This is the lead-off single from his new LP No Holding Back, which came out in March. It crashed into the charts at number 5 a month ago, spent three weeks there on the bounce, then dropped to number 7, but this week it's nipped back up again to number three. And here he is on stage. One of the five stages in the Top of the Pop studio, actually. All named after crew members. And Wayne and his chums are on the biggest stage of all, called Chris. After Chris Cowan. For God's sake.

Chris. It's a bad choice because that stage is looking very sparse isn't it well yeah just one man and a dj and a couple of dancers it's dog yeah and he's not really kind of prowling and owning the stage in a very charismatic way not to me anyway he's having to go at a little prowl and trying to like work the crowd and stuff you say he's prowling about but only in the style of a kitten that's just getting used to a new home and sees its reflection for the first time you can see like how kind of low down the stage is as well i quite like the look of it i mean it's a massive kind of lighty upy i mean it's a little bit local

nightclub isn't it it's a bit sort of yes you can see the headlines in the sort of local free sheet local nightclub installs new floor and it lights up. I love that. But overall, the whole production is not, it doesn't set anything on fire, does it? No. I love a lit up dance floor, you know. I mean, obviously, it makes us think, if we're of a certain vintage or even not, of the Billie Jean video. And, of course, Saturday Night Fever, particularly the front cover of the album. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it's got a long, there's a storied history. I'm sure there's a, you know, there's a long read in the history of the light-up dance floor. And what was the club as well? It's in the Common People video. Oh, yeah, Eve's, where smashing happened. Eve's, yeah. Smashing.

Yes. And I dare say that we've all been to clubs where smashing happened. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that is where the Common People video was filmed. And. And I dare say that we've all been to clubs where smashing happened. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that is where the Common People video was filmed. And yeah, I loved it. That was the main selling point. Apparently, it was where Christine Keeler used to go with Profumo

on their sort of secret dates in the 60s, or at least that was part of the selling point. And she'd, like, put a chair in the middle of the dance floor and sit on it funny. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, it's storied history. It's great. But yeah, and Wayne Wander is kind of a very small footnote in this now. It's funny watching this, seeing this guy who clearly by his sort of chart position and his status at the top of the show was at least fleetingly a big deal. Because, you know, as I said, it was my job in 2003 to have a handle on what was going on pop wise but i've honestly never heard of him until we looked at this episode no i saw the name and my first thought was you know stevie's son like like damien junior gong marley or enrique iglesias yeah no he was called wayne wonder because he spent lots of time at school sitting there and pondering things. Right. And reasoning. Wayne Ponder would have been. Yes, yes.

And Lazarus. That's what it should have been called. Yeah, sadly, he's got nothing to do with what we must call the ebony and ivory hitmaker. But, yeah, the name, it does sound like a piss take, doesn't it? Like some really on-the-nose comedy character from a second-rate sketch series. You know, like somebody who's watched the day-to-day

and thought, oh, we can do that. And they, I know, we'll call a pop star Wayne Wonder. That would be hilarious. Oh, it's like somebody, or maybe, you know, a friend of Philomena Kunk, who's like, no, I've been, no, I had a wonder about that. And I thought it was shit. Yeah.

The other thing about this set is that he's got on a sort of blue and white track suit which kind of really coordinates but also with the kind of general blandness of the track and the performance serves as quite effective camouflage yes yes you can hardly tell there's even anyone there visually as well as orally he's in a blue puma track suit and a white t-shirt looking very sports casual yeah gone and got himself an urban starter kit hasn't it which consists of some decks uh a dj with dreadlocks and movable arms to do all the gestures they do when when they put on a record and got fuck all else to do for the next few minutes yeah and uh two honeys with a z on the end in batty riders. Yeah. Very tight cycling shorts.

I mean, if he'd had a bit more pocket money, he could have got himself a bouncy car and some youths doing some graffiti on a wall and then spinning on their backs. Or indeed a bouncy castle. Yeah. Yes, that'd be even better. It's funny you mention it being a starter kit

and being budgetary issues, because Puma, right it's all about perception and maybe I'm not a sportswear aficionado anyway so I'm the wrong person to ask but I always thought Puma was a bit kind of third division do you know what I mean? talking about this ever since KRS-One had a go at MC Shining for wearing whack Puma sneakers I've always been an adios boy so yeah I understand what you're saying at least it's not fucking umbro no but the thing

that's it to me and Puma is only just a step above what your mum gets you for Christmas when she's got it wrong and she's just yeah or she's gone to

like Woolworths and got their own brand thing that's got two stripes instead of three or whatever. There's a really good article about this in the Beastie Boys magazine, Grand Royal, which is really hard to get hold of now, but somebody's archived most of it online, about the birth of Adidas, or I'm going to say Adidas, right?

Because that's what was said in the 70s, and that's what Run DMC say themselves. And Puma, because it was two brothers, a bit like Lidl and Aldi now, isn't it? It's these sort of feuding German families. Why aren't you fighting each other over the difference between Lidl and Aldi? That's coming. That'll happen. Trust me. You boys and your sports wares. Just as long as it's Velcro, I'm good. I don't understand why Velcro has not...

It's one of those things, it's like, you know, finally we've got the electric car now, but it took a really long time because it was being suppressed and everything. Who was suppressing Velcro? Velcro is the best... It's the best fastening. Big shoelace. That's who's suppressing it. Big shoelace. Big shoelace. That's who. Fat lace.

Anywho, Wayne Wonder. That guy. You remember that guy? So, shall we get on to the song okay it's um so based around um the very solidly head-bopping diwali rhythm yes um by um i love it when white people say rhythm that's i'm not yeah but it would be whiter still for me to say rhythm yeah wouldn't it i think we should lean into it based on the diwali rhythm i believe i think we should say in the whitest way possible we should really lean into the whiteness here do you just say rhythm or do you really commit to go redeem um i i don't know i would refer to

corrupt fm on on on this however they would do it you know based on duality which is a loop a loop created by a jamaican producer steven lenke mazda yes well done it's something that you kind of can't it's really hard to fuck it up because it's just solid thing um this actually would appear in two weeks time as the foundation of uh-oh brackets never leave you close brackets by lumidy which is the famous one where it's sort of slightly out of key but in a really compelling way and that was massive and you know

if you don't twitch one muscle or another to it something has gone wrong and you should probably see a doctor and also this it would form the backbone of Rihanna's debut single in 2005 in a couple of years time which is a fucking banger

Get Busy by Sean Paul Get Busy by Sean Paul, yes Feet, sorry, Feet Sean Paul to give him his full name basically the noughties are the noughties Feet Sean Paul and they were better for it

the thing with that rhythm I'm um if i'm going to say rhythm that rhythm um is that yeah it was inspired by the indian feast of lights diwali so i don't know how exactly maybe sort of bollywood kind of are we saying diwali right oh i don't know but yeah the thing is there was there was a whole compilation in 2002 on Greensleeves called Diwali, all using the same beat, which, I mean, I'm trying to imagine, I've not listened to it, but imagine listening to that all the way through. And the thing is, No Letting Go is on there.

So it's already a year old by the time it's a UK hit. So if this is the waters you're swimming in musically, if this was your thing, you must be thinking, oh, fucking hell, not this Rhythm again. I don't know. But most notoriously used a year later in Dirty Kaffir by Sheikh Tara and the Soul Salah crew, which was a jihadi rap video,

which basically stated that Tony Blair, George Bush, the BNP and Ariel Chiron should be chucked on a massive bonfire and 9-11 was dead good and there should be more of it. But the problem is, it's a fucking tune. I mean, bad people, good music. Yeah. Hey, man, you've got to separate the art from the artist, man.

Yeah, I mean, this is very soft and weedy and nothingy. Oh, yes is very soft and weedy and nothingy. Oh, yes. Very slight. Very slight. It's meant to be a sort of lovely kind of sit on the beach, think about your woman kind of thing. But, yeah. Also, it's a bit, the point isn't the lyrics, obviously, but, like.

Yeah, there's nothing to the lyrics. Oh, lovely lady, I like you. It's fucking colon, isn't it? Kicking the sun. Yeah, girl, I like you. It's fucking colon, isn't it? Kicking the sun. Yeah, girl, I'm so glad we've dated. Oh, wow, you old charmer, Wayne. Mr. Ponder. Why haven't we mated?

This sounds a little bit, it's a bit of a confusing thing as well, because it's like, oh, we're in love, we're sitting on the beach, we're drinking daiquiris, it's all good. But there's trouble in paradise. They say good things must come to an end. But I'm optimistic about being your friend, though I made you cry by my doings with keisha and anisha but that was back then doings fucking hell that's such a non-hour word that my non-hour used to use that word all the fucking time whenever she ran me a bath when i was a kid she she'd always used to say or make sure you go all around your doings sorry carry on so is he is he

just sneaking in he's just slipping in a little confession of infidelity well no he's bragging on um inter the song just goes to show that reggae and its offshoots have absolutely withered on the vine by the turn of the century you know if you discount sean paul i mean he was expected to be a breakout reggae dancehall star in the 90s but he's gone and taken the r&b shilling here hasn't he and from now on reggae is just going to be something that you can bolt onto your record or your mobile phone advert for a bit of urban credibility which is fucking weird because in the 90s reggae or at least pop reggae, was huge.

Yes. You know, you had everything from, you know, Shaggy and Red Dragon and Chacodemus and it was enormous. Like,

every summer, there'd be four or five just inescapable pop reggae songs. But yeah, by the time we get to 2003, it's, yeah,

it's very much sort of Lego or Meccano bolt-on, isn't it? Yeah. It's your standard male R&B thing here, isn isn't it there's a bit of gangster milkman whistling at the beginning and he's he's dedicating it to the ladies uh there's a bit of shouting from the dj who who goes you know oh come on london or whatever top of the pops very offensive to people from

macclesfield who are tuning in what about their issues what about their needs level up the north dj fuck's sake we've we've spoken before about how certain pop and dance records have some rap bolted onto them yes but you could basically shrink down everything that wayne wonder does on this track just call it some reggae yeah and just stick it in the middle of a nelly furtado single or shakira single or just whatever you know i don't know if they'd want it but you know yeah r&b is a strange genre anyway because you know the men always have to sound like soft lads who go on about the ladies or almost always cat shit there's obviously some brilliant exceptions to that rule but the truly great r&b is almost always made by women yeah even if all what they usually have to

say is your skin so what you're looking at me for you fucking trump piss off you know there's huge gobs of female r&b which is essentially no money no fanny i suppose the comparison that's staring us in the face here if we're looking at a guy who started out as a producer before having hits in his own right and he's wearing dark glasses and all of that is R. Kelly he's kind of like trying to be a sort of reggae R. Kelly by doing this yeah it's not very good is it he's flat as a fucking pancake isn't he yeah he's singing over a backing track obviously so either he's got no in-ear monitor so fair enough can't blame the guy or he's just a legit terrible singer i don't know well the thing is that i always i always noticed this just because i had like because i had a few singing lessons one time and so i sort of know how to do it so you can just hear that

everything is coming out on like the last 10 of each breath yeah which is like just don't do it to yourself it's actually really easy to like not do that and he can't not sing but there's this unpleasant thing of like it doesn't sound relaxed it makes you feel tense because you're just kind of like breathe breathe breathe you know and it's just it is unpleasantly sort of just a tiny bit discordant if you're going to be discordant like really go for it like the lumity track is so much better than this even though she's way way off which apparently wasn't her fault she she maintains that it was recorded to a completely different backing track and then the producer just slapped something else on yeah but whatever it is it's one of those weird things that just sort of works right and this doesn't really yeah and if he hasn't got any

in the air monitor can't they spring for that have they spunked all the money on the fucking lighty up dance floor we've already talked about the branding even the record labels on the on the records that are spinning around on the decks top of the pops logo oh yeah slap right on them yeah like it's the wig and casino we're trying to hide the fact that it's that it's way wonder no letting go that pot of history though jesus christ king fucking tubbe reduced to producing stock aiken and waterman songs at the end of his life fucking breaks your heart man Like the whitest thing. King Tubby meets Sonia Uptown. But, you know, Jamaica did have this kind of long tradition of doing that,

going right back to people covering the Beatles, you know, like Marcy Griffiths in that brilliant version of Don't Let Me Down. But, yeah, I mean, it's just something that was just a standard thing. They would churn them out. They would hear what's coming on the airwaves over from the mainland US. And quite often, they'd be easy listening or country tracks. And then somebody like, I don't know, Johnny Nash or whoever

would just churn out a cover of it. So I can see why they did it. I'm sure King Tubby's heart wasn't in it necessarily. Yeah, but the difference is, Simon, back then when they did cover songs like that, more often than not, they made them better or at least equally brilliant in a different way. As pedestrian and generic as the lyrics to this song are,

at least they're a cut above something else in his back catalogue, which you have touched upon. Boom bye bye in a batty boy head, rude boy no promote no batty man, dem halfy dead, this not a deal, guy come near we, then his skin we must peel, burn him up bad like an old tyre wheel.

So that's not from No Letting Go, that's from the, as you mentioned, the notoriously homophobic single Boom Bye Bye by Boodie Banton which Wayne Winter apparently wrote, so if that's true, Wayne Winter can once again absolutely go fuck himself and yeah, I think maybe we've wasted plenty of our breath on the arsehole already. wrote so if that's true wayne wonder can once again absolutely go fuck himself and uh yeah i think maybe we've uh wasted plenty of our breath on the arsehole already well i mean he did say in

an interview budger banton said the standard get out clause number one the bible reckons it right and number two oh it's about a pedophile actually that was in living in the area oh no no yeah so there you go so he's conflating gays and paedophiles. Oh, that's okay then, as long as he's only conflating somebody's sexuality with crime. Great, yeah. Fine, that's fine. Anything else to say about this?

The DJ... Yeah, God bless him. Bless him. He's giving it the old college try. But he kind of goes, take it to the bridge, which is not all that at all. No. I mean, I guess, you know,

this is not a moment to do your James Brown thing, really. It's like, just leave it. Mate, you've done your job. You've pretended to lift an arm and put it on the fucking record. That's it. That's your job. Just stand there now. Yeah, you've earned your 50 quid.

Yes. But personally, and this may be a personal thing, but when I hear somebody say, take it to the bridge, the next thing that my brain wants to hear is, dirty babe! That's what I want. I don't want to hear more of this. Why would I want that? Also, there's a slightly embarrassing fade-out. The DJ's like, yeah, Top of the Pops, London, we love you.

Top of the Pops. London again! Fucking hell! I know. It's where they were, though, to be fair. Yeah, but they all do that, though, don't they? I know, it's terrible. We all feel terrible about it. Oh, yeah, people have gone out on stage at glastonbury and said london oh well that is

embarrassing which is quite funny actually but yeah there's that sort of slightly uncomfortable moment of like demi silence while wayne brings the vocals to a close and the dj goes tab of the pups london we love you and then everyone just like oh is it over now okay yay and yeah it's just a little bit it's it's a sad end to a sad start yeah and the reason for that is it's because the song is so fucking slight but it's got that rhythm and you just think oh well this is going to kick off any minute now he's doing his soft ass bit but it's really going to kick in and it's going to get proper and some answers are going to be shook and it never happens it doesn't really have a dynamic or structure as such so when he says take you to the bridge that

you think you're looking around for a bridge you're looking around it's more like a step a style a ledge to the ledge so the following week no letting go dropped three places to number six the follow-up bounce along there that's when you have your bouncy castle got to number 19 in november of this year and he was done as a chart act by the middle of the decade he'd gone back to covering rubbish 80s songs in a ub40 styler including a cover of hold me now by the thompson twins oh my god which was on some adam sandler film i haven't bothered to watch and when he appeared in the identity parade of never mind the buzzcocks he revealed that he had gone into business at home selling yams he was still gigging and everything

but he was selling yams on the side makes a change from t-shirts and knocked off cds isn't it well the trick is to give them away for free like you know the darkness with their pizza just uh yes a bit of free food yeah maybe if you had the puma logo burned into them or something yeah i think like a sort of halloween lantern just carved in there yes i think he was just in the pocket of big yam at that point Moving on up into the top three It's Tropical Tati Wayne Wonder Next up a band who must be huge fans Of the old sunblock

Featuring a member of Metal Maniacs These guys decided up, a band who must be huge fans of the old sunblock. Featuring a member of Metal Maniacs, Zipknot, these guys decided to form a band just to show that they have a fun side. Now, I don't know about taking them home to meet the parents, but with their own take on the Billy Idol classic white wedding, it's the Murder Dolls. After Wonder gets described as Tropical Totter by Bonin, she describes her next act as a band who must be huge fans of the old sunblock and that she didn't know if she'd want to take them home to her parents. It's Murder Dolls with White Wedding. Formed in Des Moines, Iowa in 1994,

the Rejects were a metal band put together by the guitarist Nathan Jordison, better known as Joe Air, who had also played in local bands The Have Nots and Anal Blast. In 1995, Jordison was invited to play drums with a new local group, the Pale Ones, who eventually renamed themselves after one of their early tracks, Slipknot. And by the time they finally signed a record deal in 1998 the rejects were shelved by 1999 with slipknot's debut lp becoming the fastest selling metal lp in american chart history and well on its way to going double platinum jordison developed a hankering for side projects again and was up for resurrecting the rejects to this end he linked up with wednesday 13 the lead singer of Frankenstein Drag Queens from Planet 13, and Trip Eisen of the New York metal bands Dope and Static X, eventually changing the name to Murder Dolls.

right to remain violent in early 2002 and the video from its main track dead in hollywood featured a guest appearance by marilyn manson repaying jordison for his appearance in the video for tainted love and it got to number 54 over here in november of 2002 this is the follow-up a cover of the billy idol single which got to number six over here in August of 1985, and it's crashed into the chart this week at number 24. And as they've been in the country last month, touring with Stone Sour, another Slipknot offshoot, they popped in to get Summit in the can for this episode of Top of the Pops.

So yes, here we go, a prime example of a pre-record job the way wonder one was uh was pre-recorded as well you can kind of tell by the way they cut back and forth from the acts to the presenters so yes sarah in a previous chart music you you mentioned that you like slipknot you saw them did i'm evil panto i think was the uh the phrase yeah they were never going to be my faves you know know, I was not their audience, but I did get it after a bit. I mean, I realised that, you know, forgive me if I've told this before,

but seeing them at Reading, I realised what they were about and who they were for and what they're doing is actually brilliant and very clever. Not clever in a cynical way, clever in a very sort of emotionally intelligent way because they realised what their audience was,

which is kids. And they were like a kids' party band. It's like these are grubby teenage boys on their first do at Reading without their parents. Reading is like legendarily a kind of really gruesome kind of rite of passage, as it was at the time. A metal crash. Exactly, it was a metal crash. What they did at one point was get the whole crowd,

this was on the main stage, so, you know, however many thousands of people, everyone to to crouch down they're like oh crouch right down to the ground um and eventually so everybody did this and it was hilarious to see everyone just sort of hunkering down like like rabbits and then jump the fuck up and so everyone just sprang into the air and it was like this is so perfect they understood that these are still kids they're still children they're just sweary grotty children lurching upwards into adulthood against their will it's play the fuck away it is play the fuck away and that's there is a great sort of truth in that because it's like yeah adulthood is terrifying and being a teenager is extremely intense and very

frightening in and of itself and you can't do anything about it and like you know there are a lot of young people who feel that they cannot handle it they're going to look for ways out which can be very dangerous and slipknot was saying to them hey it's okay listen to this shit do some screaming connect with other people who feel the same as you and know that we see you and we love you in all your grubby adolescent grottiness and just try to rupture your throat in some way with the ah of everything and you'll feel better, you know, and tomorrow will be another day. And I think that's really beautiful.

That's like life-saving shit. And that has value beyond whatever musical value. I don't actually know how well thought of slipknot are apparently in the last they're still going and there's a kind of resurgent actually turns out slipknot were really good thing but it's so far outside of what i know i just don't know enough about metal but you know this is this is life enhancing life-saving shit which is the best you can hope for for music so i knew who that was for the murder dolls i don't know who it's for maybe there's an audience for it in the same way that

there's a type of horror film fan who will watch any old shit with fake blood in it doesn't have to be good on any level just give me a hundred weight of horror just stick the horror channel on oh what you know that's not me by the way sorry oh christ no it's a cartoon schlock nonsense yeah they did actually appear in an episode of Dawson's Creek as like the Halloween party band yes it would make sitcom parents of the time furrow their brows that is what it's for it's a sort of a trash nonsense isn't it really yeah I agree with Sarah about horror films um i'm you know i imagine we may have similar tastes in that you know you get people like rob zombie uh who's obviously from a similar world um making films called house of a thousand corpses and for me house of one

corpse is always going to be a better film yeah you know what i mean maybe house of no corpses but an implied one you know that you know, that's my kind of horror, rather than, you know, gallons and gallons of blood. It's interesting listening to Sarah's thoughts about who Slipknot are for and what they mean to those people. Because I was on the bus the other day and there was a young couple sat in front of me.

They're about 14 years old and the girl had like half green half black hair and the boy had a studded dog collar on and they were kissing while keeping their covid masks on which was both sweet and weird um but they were basically the same sort of emo kids you might have seen on any bus and in any shopping center any year in the last 20 right and and it occurred to me that they weren't even alive when this murder dolls appearance happened fucking hell isn't it but also that their 2003 equivalents would have been watching this shouting fucking yes in the same way that we uh you, Al, me and Neil, shouted fucking yes in 1983 when Twisted Sister came on, right?

Because there will always be an appetite for this kind of band among a certain kind of teenager. Yeah. If they catch them at just the right age. And in other years, it might have been Aiden or Motionless in White or Black Veil Brides or whoever's on the front of Kerrang right now. I don't know. I haven't looked in a while. The Murder Dolls in a while. The Murder Dolls served a role.

And here's where I have to state an interest. I know one of the Murder Dolls. One of them's a mate, AC Slade, who's on guitar. One of the guitarists. He's the one on the far left of the screen. And he's been in loads of bands, including Joan Jett's Black Hearts and his own band, Trashlight Vision. And I got him to DJ for me at Stay Beautiful once, actually. But I can't remember how we got to know each other.

I mean, through a mutual friend, maybe. But we bonded over a shared love of the Manic Street Preachers, which seemed really unusual for an American meddler, you know. In fact, I once took him to see the Manics in Cambridge, and I got him backstage, and I introduced him to Nicky Wire, who seems quite excited himself. And of course he was, because Nicky Wire's from the valleys and he's got that inner Metaller, you know, that inner Kerrang kid. And Nicky Wire's always going to be more impressed by AC Slade from the Murder Dolls than if I'd introduced him to the bassist from The Young Knives or The Good Books or whoever.

Do you know what I mean? So I got in touch with AC about this episode of Top of the Pops to see what he remembered about it. And his answer might seem a little bit confusing and misremembered, but I'll come back to that. But here's what he said. Oh, yeah, I was part of that. One memory was that we performed it entirely live, which is very rare on TOTPs. remembered but i'll come back to that but here's what he said oh yeah i was part of that one memory

was that we performed it entirely live which is very rare on totps this really pissed off the other bands that performed that day one of those bands was marilyn manson he was supportive of the band until we started to do well so there was some awkwardness between our two bands but no drama or anything yeah but the energy of a live band is always more impactful than a band who plays to backing tracks. That's not a diss or put down to the other bands. It's just an observation and makes me glad we fought to play it live. Right, so back to me now.

Now, as we know, Marilyn Manson is not on this episode. However, there's no evidence that Murder Dolls are in the same studio as Liz Bonin and Fern Cotton. They just cut to and from screens. And because of that kind of, we talked about the syndicated, flat-packed, IKEA nature of Chris Cowie's Top of the Pops, it's entirely possible that the murder dolls

did record on the same day as Marilyn Manson. Whether, I mean, it turns out it was in London, but it might as well have been Italy or France or Germany, you know, one of these top-of-the-pops outposts. And Manson's clip just got used on a different show. So if AC says he recorded on the same day as Marilyn Manson, he probably did, do you know what I mean? You've kind of got to remember if Marilyn Manson's about.

Yeah, yeah. So that's a little insight into how the show was put together. And also just the slight beef between these kind of icons of that era so the line-up that we're looking at, it's AC Slade on guitar Eric Griffon on bass Ben Graves, possibly not his real name on drums

Wednesday 13 on vocals and Joey Jordison on the other guitar and I guess it was perceived as being Joey Jordison's band and can I just make the obvious joke I'll never forgive him for that handball in 1977 Sarah's now completely

baffled by this I mean Slipknot were very much not for me and I did I really appreciated what Sarah said about them and I get it but at the same time I wasn't the target audience I saw them at the Reading Festival in God knows well probably the same year and I just found it so kind of basic and reductive and stupid but you know yeah that I know that's what it's meant to be but anyway I I had a lot

more time for murder dolls myself and you know murder dolls in some ways are part of this lineage that runs from Alice Cooper through things like The Misfits and The Cramps, you know, just mucking around with horror for fun. And for me, all right, I admit, the Billy Idol cover they're doing here, it's a bit redundant because it's a song that has a brooding menace to it anyway. And you don't make it more menacing by doing a heavy metal death scream in it. You just screw your face up and raise a fist at appropriate moments yeah yeah um usually when he says shotgun exactly because the thing about mechel is

if you're going to be a lead singer you've got to have proper fucking pipes and he's just got a wet straw of a voice he does a bit the thing with the original is that um there's some modulation to it because he's sort of doing the murmuring kind of, hey, little sister, what, you know, and then kind of, you know, revving it at a certain point. But this is just like proper hairball singing from the... Hey, little sister! It's proper Eric Cartman.

Hey, little sister, what have you done? Just full gravelly, screamy bit the whole way through. And everything is whacked up to that setting, which I understand. Like I laughed. I did enjoy this in spite of myself. There's also the what I always bang on about the kind of American stagecraft, which is full in evidence here. Yes. You know, which is just I love to see a guy, you know, spin round and point his guitar.

And it's like good old Wednesday, just properly going for it at the top screamy register of his voice the whole way through. It's what you call a death growl, I guess, the whole way through. And it doesn't help that with his dreads, he just looks like a fucking potato that's been left in the cupboard for two years. Now that's a horror film I would like to see. What happens to a demon potato that's been left in the cellar?

Oh my God, it's alive! The singing is not the point of this, is it? I mean, his breath control on this is so bad, he actually takes a breath in the middle of the word sister, which is not the place to do it, mate. I took right against this record. I was no fan of Billy Idol, but by about this time,

I was accepting him as part of the canon. Because in the 80s, a lot of people thought Billy Idol was Rod Vicious. He'd gone to America and sold out. He's called Billy Idol. He literally called himself Billy Idol. What do you people expect of him? It's kind of a thing.

I fucking love Billy Idol. He was love Billy Idol He was so cute and ridiculous I mean fucking hell by 2003 is there anything that makes you feel more old than hearing a song that was part of your life when you were a teenager but being used as a cover version for kids who probably never heard it before? Fucking hell

But there's another interesting compare and contrast here between this and the performance of twisted sister in the last episode twisted sister had far less tools in their presentation armory like just a couple of flash pots and this lot have got you know they've got the fucking works haven't they have they they've got their logos massively by the side which is it's like a toilet sign for women in a coffee with horns and in a coffee yeah better lighting better costumes but not feeling it debatable whether they got better costumes really i mean d schneider i don't know if you can beat that but that's for another episode we've already done now i think they look

fucking awesome here i'll be honest with you yeah i'm enjoying the look i mean first of all as as for the song you know yeah i you know the cover version doesn't do much for me i i had more time for their own material that single you mentioned dead in hollywood in particular but yeah i i think they i think they look amazing i mean for one thing right black white and red is a color scheme you can't go wrong with which is a fact that is known by Manchester United, the Third Reich, and the designers of pretty much every vampire movie poster ever. It's black, white and red. It works.

And shiny black as well. You've been waiting years to compare Man United to the Nazis, haven't you, Simon? No comment. And, you know, they are wearing some fucking killer clobber here, I would say. Several of them have got the same sort of stack-heeled goth boots I was wearing myself at the time.

And Wednesday 13 is in this fucking awesome black PVC jacket thing with white piping on it. I would wear the shit out of that. He's got a tie on, hasn't he? He's got a PVC tie. Yeah, I know exactly where you could buy them from. Corporate goth there. And there's a medical red cross on the arm, which is a big plus.

Nice. Thank you. Yeah, if someone gets a nosebleed or does their ankle in in the front row, we can go out and sort them, can't we? Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, I'm not the target audience for this because I'm too old, even in 2003. Yeah.

But if I was those kids on the bus that I saw the other day, or the 2003 equivalent, I would have been bouncing off the fucking walls with excitement at this. I'm absolutely sure of that. Yeah, fair enough. I probably, when I say I didn't know who this was for, then yeah, of course that would be who it was for. In a similar way to Slipknot,

because Joey Jordison, who actually passed away last month, so I was looking up a lot of tributes to him, a lot of people who were very, very sad. And something that he said was, this was when he was in Slipknot. But he said, our music is so personal. Each person that's bought one of our records, I have something in common with each one of them, which is just beautiful. I mean, that's like I think they were very all of them were very sincere in that and very earnest and really wanted to, you know, reach the kids. So, you know, this even though I didn't quite get that from this, it took me a long time to get it from slipknot because you know there was a lot of

stuff gnarly uh schlocky stuff in the way of it and i was what the fuck is this but i can appreciate this on that level too i can see that there is that thing it's a gang you can join you know which one of slipknot was he because they were like the fucking metal village people weren't they all had like one in the mask. He was number one, which is they all had a number. He was number one. His mask was like the pretty one. I'm not sure what it was.

And they had various they had different versions of the masks kind of throughout. But he always had a variation on. It's like the comedy tragedy mask, but just the sort of like the emoji, no expression one. Did he have like his dreadlocks coming out through little holes like it was a colander? One of them had that. No, no. He had like very lank sort of just very straight hair over the top. He had to stop drumming because he had transverse myelitis, which is where your spinal cord swells up.

It's really, really nasty. Oh, shit. But he did before that, he did all sorts of, he had like an amazing drum rig where they'd strap him to it and it was in the shape of a pentagram. He would do a drum solo and it would tip up and rotate and everything. Apparently he's technically a really good drummer, but to me it does just sound like...

It's like Angry Wasp dancing on a tin of 7-Up type drumming. He's a typical metal muso. A band the size of Slipknot by 2003, they can afford to take their time between albums but he just wants to play man yeah so you know why not start another band no resurrect your old band this is that you know they yeah and also for the pop craze youngsters it's it's a great way to see people in massive bands in a more intimate venue even though they're going to ignore your request for people equal shit. Yeah, everybody seems pretty happy.

I did just want to add to this. This track is from the special edition of the album Beyond the Valley of the Murdered Dolls. And I just wanted to read in full the track listing of this album. Please do. I can't do the voice. Well, I could do the voice, but then I wouldn't be able to do the rest of the podcast.

So, you know, Slip my wrist, twist my sister, dead in Hollywood, love at first fright. People hate me. She was a teenage zombie. Die my bride. Grave robbing USA. 1976, six, six, six. Dawn of the dead.

Let's go to war. Dressed to depress. Kill Miss America. Be movie scream queen. Motherfucker. I don't care. Crash, crash. Let's fuck.

I take drugs white wedding welcome to the strange i love to say fuck oh my god let's go to war because the manic street preachers had a song called let's go to war just a few years after this i'm claiming it's because i introduced those two you know the cross-pollination of murder but yeah it's a fun trash thing and i did chortle all the way through it and i loved all the the pvc strides yeah it always comes back to the trousers doesn't it sarah trousers are important the leggy mount baton of chart music hey and at least they actually played it live they're not like those bent cunts who aren't fucking real yes So the following week, White Wedding dropped 18 places to number 42.

A few weeks later, Murder Dolls were put on hold while Slipknot recorded their next LP, Volume 3, The Subliminal Versus. They reunited at the end of the year for a tour of Europe, but were then put on hiatus due to other band commitments, reunited in 2010 for the LP Women and Children Last. But by which time, Jordison had developed acute transverse myelitis, a spinal inflammation which temporarily caused him to lose the use of his legs, which led to him leaving or being fired from Slipknot in 2013,

depending on who you talk to. Although plans were drawn for a re-reunion of murder dolls at the end of last decade, it never came off, and as we've already mentioned, Joey Jordison died in his sleep at the age of 46. Oh, running DJs everywhere. Beware. That was the mighty murder girls. Now, there must be something in the stout as the Emerald Isle produces yet another successful boy band. Flying in the dark steps of Boyzone and Westlife,

dig the new breed. Enjoy D-Side. rate in trading sides. We fade into cotton, looking at a tiny video screen of the last performance as she warns us to beware of murder dolls. She then pivots into some nonsense off the autocue about Stout as she prepares us for another Irish boy band and invites us to dig the new breed as she introduces Invisible by D-Side. Introduces Invisible by D-Side. Cobbled together in Dublin in 2001 by the Sweeney twins,

a pair of doctors who were dabbling in band management, D-Side were a boy band who were quickly signed up to the Hamburg media company, Adele. They were immediately linked up to the managerial capabilities of Kim Glover, the former head of radio and TV at Arista Records, who was part of the management team of New Kids on the Block, the manager for a short time of Princess Stephanie of Monaco in her doomed attempt to become a pop star in the early 80s, and a guided PJ and Duncan let loose and bewitched towards the top end of the charts. Their debut single, Stronger Together, was only released in Ireland, getting to number five there in August of 2002,

but they landed support slots on tours by Westlife and Blue, and a slot on the Smash Hits tour, leading to their next single, Speechless, being put out across Europe. It slammed into the UK charts at number nine in April of this year, but immediately slithered down. This is the follow-up, and it's a brand new entry this week at number seven. So yeah, first things first, dig the new breed. Do you think the Fern Cotton of 2003 would have been into early James Brown

or jam live albums. I think not. Yeah, I mean, it really becomes more obvious as the show goes on just how auto-cued it is, doesn't it? I mean, again, you know, Sarah said we're never happy when it's sort of shambolic or when it's not shambolic. There's got to be a happy medium. There does, yeah. I mean, Derek Okora, for one.

But just in the early 80s, we've done episodes where we've moaned about people like Mike Reid or whoever ad-libbing and just talking absolute bollocks. And then when they don't, it's like, oh, it's so scripted. But yeah, it does jar a little bit, where it's clearly somebody else's words, possibly Chris Cowie's words, who knows. There's a production assistant that handles all this now.

But I think Cowie's put that in right and all that business about the emerald isle and all these cliches yeah it's like god please weak sauce so anyway d side wouldn't have known them if they shagged me mom no same same like like wayne wonder i mean it was it was my job to know this stuff and they totally passed me but three top top ten hits, apparently. Yes. Nope, not a fucking clue. I mean, being called D-Side, I would have assumed they were from Shotton or Connor's Key. Yes.

But no, yeah, Irish boy band. And I guess if Westlife are shaking boy zone, then D-Side are shaking Westlife, or shaking, shaking boy zone, to put it another way. I prefer the continuity Westlife or Shakin' Shakin' Boyzone, to put it another way. I prefer the continuity Westlife. They do have a bit more energy than Westlife. I mean, Westlife were quite wet, weren't they? They're standing up, and that's a start, yeah.

Standing up and moving around and, in some cases, sort of jumping and pogoing in a rock style. I had no memory of them at all either, but it's hard to lay into a boy band or a girl band Because there's so many of them And they had such a short shelf life I mean, they did okay They sort of lasted for a bit, didn't they?

These guys And they did okay in Japan At this time They appear to be the coming boys of pop After Five and Blue Or at least Smash Hits seem to think so Did they really think that? Well, they're on the cover of the latest Smash Hits

And when they approached them for that cover, the band had to tell them that they couldn't make a photo shoot because they were touring Germany at the time. And Smash Hits got back to them and said, oh, okay, well, we're going to fly out and take you to Malaga. And they finished the gig in Berlin. They got whipped straight onto a plane, put on a yacht, given a wardrobe of clothes to put on.

They did the photo shoot, did the interview, flown back to Germany in the morning. So, you know, Smash Hits clearly thought that this was the next thing. Fucking hell. The money that was still sloshing around in journalism and in the industry at that time. Successful journalism in any case. Yeah.

Yeah, well, Smash Hits needed bands like this to sort of keep coming along at regular intervals. So they had a hugely vested interest in this sort of stuff. I mean, three Top Ten hits, none of them got any higher than number seven, I think. So it didn't quite work out. No. But they've got to number seven more than we have.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the song, it's bog-standard boy band balladry, isn't it? I mean, if they were on st stools they'd stand for the key change it's that kind of song written by andreas carlson who wrote for n sync and backstreet boys and westlife yeah and chris braid who's written for everyone so it's inevitably it's generic although there's this creepy voyeur twist the lyrics isn't it if i was invisible then i could just watch you in your room yeah that's quite me. That's quite Twilight, isn't it?

Yeah, it's up there with Knock Three Times by Tony Orlando and Dawn for wrongness. The thing about that is, as a sort of, I don't know if you can call it a trope, but I guess it's something that does occur. Like a lot of things that are presented to you as romantic, they're actually very fucking creepy. There's a whole bag of that shit.

You can't give consent to be watched as you sleep by you know they haven't really thought this through as a sort of romantic concept partly because the creepy element partly because like you know if it's like i'll watch you in your room and it's like when women are alone in their room they're not going to waft around in a in a satin slip like all seductive like a fucking flake advert they're going to be in their old fucking baggy boy cotton pants and they're going to sit weird and they're going to belch freely and they're going to mutter to themselves and pick their feet and sing out of tune and just be relaxed and you wouldn't like it you wouldn't like it women women are gross you wouldn't like it yeah i mean if you You wouldn't like it. Yeah, I mean, if you're invisible... Sorry, a lad of that age,

if he got the opportunity to be invisible, he'd go, I'm going into town and nicking all the Xbox games. Yeah, you'd do other stuff, wouldn't you? Yeah. You'd go and stick your wet finger in people's ears and watch them go, Exactly.

The main singer, lad, looks like Owen Jones, which is a bit unsettling. the main singer lad looks like owen jones which is a bit unsettling but um one of them looks like david moyes which is even more unsettling so they're not they're not the sort of i mean given that they are created to be objectified they're not very objectifiable no i i would say no um i mean you know easy for me to say looking how i look but anyway there's what makes me laugh is there's a bad boy one, isn't there? It's the law. It's the law with a boy band. He's got spiky

hair and frosted tips and a thumb ring and he pogo's about and he does some sort of Fred Durst type rap metal dancing. But it's all a bit try-hard, isn't it? That might be Dane Geeden, who is thoroughly enjoying the fruits of pop fame at the moment because he was in the papers round about this time

squiring Jodie Marsh about. There was an article in Ireland's Sunday World which reads, they may have been snatched leaving a club together for a torrid night of wild sex. But this is the first picture of Irish boy band star Dane Geeden and glamour girl Jodie Marsh posing for the cameras. Page three girl Jodie, infamous rival of Jordan,

claims she spent five hours making love to Dubliner Dane. She added, he was like an athlete. He went on for hours, five to be exact. He may look like a teenager, but he's all man. Thanks, Daddy. Five to be exact. I'm sorry, that's not exact enough. I want like five hours and 11 minutes or something.

Yeah, yeah. Handsome Dane laughed. I just wanted to give her plenty. I just want to say that I love that kind of journalism because it's something no one's going to deny. You know, it's obviously, it's entirely made up. The quotes are obviously completely made up, but nobody from either star's PR company

is going to get in touch and threaten legal action and say, no, actually, I'm shit at sex. I lasted three minutes, you know. So you've got free reign to just say any of that shit. But anyway, the performance is absolute fucking cat shit. I mean, yeah, you're right. As we mentioned, boy bands have clearly progressed from all sitting down and then all standing up together

at the emotional bits. But they've not been choreographed at all. They look like five lads in a club who've been dragged up on stage to pretend to mime to a D-side record in order to win a wicked key ring. You know, they're all doing their own performance. It's crap.

I think that's probably deliberate though, isn't it? It's like they're all meant to be, you know... Individuals. That's that one and that's that one, you know, in a very rudimentary way. Yeah, but they don't do anything that's interesting. I mean, the only synchronicity you see in the performance is you notice that they do a bit of group walking

to the back of the stage so they can all rush up to the front again. And they all hold their radio mics right at the top, which is what I tend to do during a pub quiz or when i'm doing karaoke to boost the volume a little bit and of course one of them near the end the bad boy does the tipping the mic to the audience bit to sing along to a song that's only just come out that nobody seems to be that into so they don't know the fucking words yeah that's brilliant there's a set of moves that you go

through and that's one of them yeah a bit preemptive there's a bit previous you know one of the reasons to keep going through through the hellscape of of the music industry is the thought that one day you might be on a stage and people will sing your song back to you that's the kind of shit that'll make it all worthwhile but you can't just do that no it's a bit of a leap of faith isn't You know, you've got to earn it. It's one step down from just turning around and then just falling into the audience, hoping you're going to be caught.

I think if Deeside had tried to get the entire audience to sit down, they might have sat down, but they wouldn't jump up again. Yeah, it's a bit of a jumble. It's very forgettable. They have the same problem that Wayne Wonder had as well, I think, where they're just... It's like they can't hear themselves. But hey, they're the first band to actually be there

for this episode. Oh, yeah. So we get a sweep from Fern Cotton to the stage and back again. So, you know, well done to them for being there when they needed to. De-Cider in reception. Yes, they're punctual, if nothing else.

I was going to... You mentioned Let Loose, and they were the great lost boy band. They had a couple of absolutely cracking singles. Right. I don't know if they were, yeah. Yeah, they were really good. Yeah, we should put them in the playlist.

Yeah. So the following week, Invisible dropped 10 places to number 17 because even the young girls aren't buying singles these days. The follow-up, Real World, entered the chart at number 9 in December, but no higher, and after Pushing Me Out only got to number 21 in June of 2004, they never bothered the chart again. And after a spell of being moderately sizable in Japan in the mid-naughties, like Spinal Tap,

in Japan in the mid-naughties, like Spinal Tap, they split up in 2006 with Derek Moran going on to present the Channel 5 kids' show Milkshake. That's mentally... We were used to indie bands in the 90s entering the chart high and then dropping straight down, but bands like this, going on top of the pops, surely it's supposed to push them up a bit higher, isn't it? Yeah, that's got to dent the ego a little bit hasn't it fucking hell appearing on top of the

pops used to be you know you've got to a certain position and here's your reward and it's you're going to sell more singles by this time it's just a reward for getting that high in the first place yeah strange times and sad times in a backhanded, it's a sign of the success of record labels in that they've really got their shit together marketing-wise and they can have a sort of impact date, as they call it, rather than a release date for a single and make sure that everybody buys it in the first week. But then it fucks it up.

It doesn't have that long tail and you don't get the lovely long climb of a proper hit record. So, you know, in a way, yeah, the major labels being a victim of their own success. Oh, well. Fuck them. Wait, I already am. There's another new boy band on the block, that's D-side.

Still to come, we've got Beyonce, Benny Bernassi, Bo Carle and the official Top of the Pops Top 20. But for now, Fern is in the Star Bar, reliving her fondest memories of those days back at the Academy. Yet another boy band on the block, sniffs Bonin, who then goes on to spoiler the rest of the show in case you were starting to wonder what was going off in Weatherfield. She then whips us over to Cotton in the Star Bar. Knocked up by BBC carpenters in 2001,

the Star Bar was part of Top of the Pops' brand new set when it returned to Television Centre in October of that year. In an interview with the BBC News website that month, Chris Cowie said, Much more important than the move is the fact that we've got a new set, meaning the programme will be much more the way me and the team want it to be. Now we've also got the star bar the star ball will be a glorified green room and it'll be a great place to be a place where artists can relax

hang out bring their entourage girlfriends boyfriends lawyers and rub shoulders with other stars as we've come to learn on chart music me dears top of the pops has always been happy to pad out episodes with interviews with people like the old sailor motor show models american acts who are passing through little and large in their panto gear even peter marinello for fuck's sake but this is this is next level fucking with the formula, isn't it? Yeah, you know what? It's funny because on a recent episode, in fact, the most recent episode,

we complained about the kids from Fame being there in person on top of the pops but hardly getting to say any words. Well, watch out what you wish for, isn't it, really? Yes. Because we do get this really overly long section which completely kills any momentum the show had isn't it, really? Because we do get this really overly long section, which completely kills any momentum the show had with Fern in the star bar,

while, you know, you've got all these smartly dressed young media professionals from London having a cocktail in the background, like, you know, we're meant to somehow care who they are. They don't look like lawyers to me. No. No, and it's all to cross-promote the BBC's new Season of Fame Academy.

I mean, right at the very beginning, when we see them in the intro, these two cuts, who are they? Why are we meant to care? I mean, the general assumption about the Star Bowl was that it was inspired by the interview sections in TFI Friday, but, you know, come on now. This is a direct nick from the tube, isn't it? Where they had a pub across the road from the studio called the Egypt Cottage. And that was used as the green room and used on occasions for interviews and the like.

Good spot, Al. I hadn't clocked that, but yeah. And so, you know, Cowey's had this in his back pocket for a while. Yeah, yeah. The problem is, is the fucking decor in the Star Bar is so sterile. It looks like you're watching a canteen in a trade show where you know people in ties and lanyards burn their mouths on a panini while they try and sell software and photocopiers to each other it's not pop and it's certainly not interesting yeah you can see what the idea is it's like they're trying to establish it it's like oh come with us and in

and peep into the the inner backstage sanctum yeah the breakout room of pop yeah but it looks exactly like the set outside which bends your brain a little bit i mean at least there's enough people in it it's not like there's a couple of people standing around awkwardly it does seem like it's a bar and there's that kind of authentic ambient noise so it isn't like too it could have been cringier, but it's still not, it's just a bit odd, isn't it? It's just, yeah, it's very sterile. It's very, not very top of the pops. And I think we've all experienced the sort of dubious frisson of being in that place, you know, being back in the bit where other people are not allowed. And it's not always, sometimes it's exciting and cool,

but it can also be really boring and sort of weirdly bleak and empty and kind of make you question your life choices. It doesn't matter how much free booze there is. It's like, yeah, free booze. And then it's like, oh, is this my life? Is that all there is? Is that all there is? And you don't really want that in the middle of your Top of the Pops, do you?

Yeah, what it's like, it's like uh you know in in zoolander there's this bit where there's some party and there's like a velvet rope and behind that there's the vip area and then um then they they make it through there and then there's another velvet rope and another and eventually they get to the vv vip area and when they get there they're just winona rider sat on her own looking really depressed that's that's what these places are often like and i think cabaret's got something to say about this it would have been good if they had it as like um star bar sponsored by star bar but they weren't quite that cross-pollinated at this point this section is not shot through with peanuts is it it is sort of place that shot through with ar, is it? It is the sort of place that... Shot through with arseholes.

If your mate arranged to meet you there for a drink, you'd turn up and you'd have one drink and then you'd say, do you mind if we go somewhere else? You just worked, you know. Yeah, it's just too weird. I'll tell you what it reminds me of, actually, with all the white everywhere. It reminds me of that, you know, the W Hotel that popped up in Soho. Yes. It's just around the corner from Leicester Square and it's just white the W Hotel that popped up in Soho. Yes!

It's just around the corner from Leicester Square and it's just white and it looks like it's just landed from Tokyo, but not in a good way. As if Godzilla's just lobbed it. Yeah, yeah. You may have noticed, Pop Crazy youngsters, that we haven't said anything so far about the kids and that's because so far there's been nothing more than a row of silhouetted

heads and arms.'s right yeah even the spectators in roy the rovers get a speech bubble every now and then but finally we get to see two young women who've been told to stand in the background holding a drink while two lads on the other side look at them a great place to be indeed i've been wondering about this because um obviously we already learned that they film various bits of footage in France or Italy or whatever and patch it in. And I wondered if it's because the audiences in those places would look too different from British audiences. You'd just be able to tell. Or those sombreros.

No, but you know what I mean. They look very Euro. But that's the thing, Simon, because now they've committed to pre-recording stuff, there'd be no sense of continuity in the audience. Yeah, but it would give you more of a sense, like if you don't see the same people all the time, it gives you more of a sense of there being more people there. Yeah.

It's quite sort of audience porridge, isn't it? It's quite a sort of mush. You get the general sense that people are quite happy to be there. It's not too flat. But I do get the sense, and people are quite happy to be there it's not it's not too flat but i do get the sense and i wonder if you know in their little kind of instruction well not an email but in their little instruction leaflet that they would get like don't dress up like dress down just dress relaxed and stuff because you used to anyone that you would see on top of the pops any of the kids would be dressed to the nines mostly um and you know obviously the blokes would generally

lag behind but you don't really see there's not like standout outfits or anything dress like you're from somewhere between britain and france dress like you're from guernsey yeah welcome carrie grant and richard parts the star bar hello yeah the star bar immediately became a weekly fixture on the show containing three minutes or so of interviews with bands and artists, but it wasn't shy in breaking up the flow with a blatant dollop of cross-platform brand synergisation, and this week is no exception, as we're treated to an advert for the new series of Fame Academia.

series of Fame Academy. Squeezed out of the arsehole of Endemol in 2002, Fame Academy was the British franchise of the Spanish TV programme Operacion Trifuno and was a mash-up of Fame, Pop Idol and Big Brother, where contestants were boarded in a mansion in Highgate and given an intensive musical and performance art education over ten weeks with live online streaming and highlights shown on CBBC and BBC3 and they compete for a £1 million record contract and the use of a luxury apartment in London and a sports car for one year.

Sports car. The first series, which concluded in October of 2002, gave the world the gift of David Sneddon, who got to number one in January of this year with his debut single Stop Living the Lie, and the second series begins tomorrow night. So here's two of the teaching staff. Born in Cookholddy in 1948, Richard Park is a former DJ on the pirate station Radio Scotland,

who was part of the original pool of Radio 1 presenters, working primarily on the Radio 1 Club and Round Table. After moving back to Scotland to concentrate on football on Radio Clyde, working his way up to head of entertainment. He came back to London in the late 80s to assume the role of programme controller of Capital Radio. In 1997, he formed Wildstar Records and was responsible for the signing of Craig David. By 2003, he's the head of his own consultancy company, the radio consultant for EMAP, and the headmaster of Fame Academy in the Shaking Cow role. So Richard Park is actually a big shot in the music industry and the radio industry. Yes, he is.

And he's only the age I am now in this footage. He looks well leathery, like an old wallet, doesn't he? Yes. And he's the headmaster on Fame Academy. And yeah, it quickly becomes obvious the the way they feed him lines to kind of you know be snippy about other people that he is the shaking simon cowell you know because pop idol was going already by this point we go in a couple of seasons and richard park he's doing that cowell thing of being the the hard to please judge and fern helpfully points out that he's Mr Meany. Like, yeah, we get it, you know.

Born in Enfield in 1965, Cary Grant made her Top of the Pops debut in 1983 as a member of Sweet Dreams, the UK entrant in that year's Eurovision Song Contest with I'm Never Giving Up, which finished sixth and got to number 21 in May of that year. After the follow-up single, Seventeen Electric flopped, the group split up at the end of 83 and Grant fell into vocal coaching with her husband David Grant, formerly of Lynx.

Since then they've worked with Take That and the Spice Girls, and in 2001, she was recruited by Pop Idol as an on-screen vocal coach and was poached, along with her husband, to do likewise for Fame Academy. And they're already matey with Fern, it turns out, because she's been on the celebrity version of Fame Academy, we learn, and there's lots of hilarious bants about how she can't sing and all that.

So, obviously, I looked them up. Carrie Grant's a vocal coach. We find out she was once a Eurovision entrant in a group called Sweet Dreams. I was going to say nobody remembers. I don't know if you do, but I don't. And they were like a shaking Bucks fizz. And it turns out one member of them, Bobby McVeigh, actually later joined the fizz. Yes.

Which shows how incestuous this world of kind of eurovision slash talent show groups is i mean fame academy was something that definitely contributed to the shitting of saturday evening tv where it seemed that terrestrial television schedules had been put together by joe maplin so you got a fucking singing competition then you got a dancing competition you got a dancing competition you got a personality competition you know i can't believe that nowadays they haven't done a glamorous grandmother show or celebrity knobbly knees what the fuck happened to those good old days when we were entertained by jeremy beadle dressed up as an oil shake yeah it's i i mean i never watched

any of these things really i watched bits and bobs, but I can't. My secondhand embarrassment is too acute. It's not entertainment for me. It's not fun at all. It's just like, ah, no, stop it. Stop it. They're already dead. Even when you get past, yeah, I just can't. The pressure of it is too stressful for me.

It's really odd there's such a dissonance about having that plopped in the middle here in so many ways. I mean, same as Sarah, I never watched Fame Academy academy and you know you've you've mentioned sneddon um and he did okay out of it he had a number one and apparently then became a successful songwriter for other people and that first season um they all did all right shanae quinn came second had a number two here the big winner was actually lamar who came third, had a number two hit. The big winner was actually Lamar, who came third, but had a run of seven top ten hits. But by the time of this season coming around, they're desperately trying to plug here.

The public were obviously already bored of it because the season they're trying to sell us here was won by Alex Parks, who had a number three hit and then a number 13 and then got dropped by a label. And that was the end of Fame Academy in Britain. No one gave a fuck. Now, Fame Academy starts tomorrow. So what can we expect from the new series?

Well, I think there's going to be sweat and there'll be tears again. As you know, when you came into the celebrity show, you shed a few. I think that we're raising the standard that we're looking for. We're hoping to produce a real star. But in doing so, we want to make sure that we work everybody to the very extremes. This Academy, though, is the best place to learn, Fern. Now, Richard, obviously we have met before, Celebrity Fame Academy. I don't know if you saw, but Richard was quite horrible to me.

Will you be as mean and tough this year? I think I'll be exactly what I was with you, which is honest. I told you you couldn't sing and Fern, you can't sing. What? I'm moving on, Carrie. Defend me. I wasn't that bad, was I? I think you were just very nervous.

I think you can sing, but you got hit with nerves. So what are the contenders like this year? Oh, my gosh. Well, there are 25 of them, and I would say I'm personally excited about maybe 10 or 11 of them. The British music business could actually use something special for it, and I know that Carrie, David, myself, and Robin Gibb will be looking for the very best, and we'll be starting tomorrow night, 6.30, BBC One, and the first seven will be giving it all they've got.

Now, what do you think of tonight's talent, we've seen beyonce you fans of beyonce that beyonce is the dawn she's so fantastic her voice is great she looks great her performance is great and she's got nice big girly hips which i like she can shake that booty yeah cotton perched uncomfortably on a bar stool leaning against a tv screen asks park and grant what the second series of fame academy is going to be like park says there's going to be a lot of sweat blood and tears and reminds cotton how ramble she was when she did the obligatory comic relief does fame academy in march of this year being the second one to be eliminated one after paul ross one before joe brunt he could at least have banged a big stick on the floor when he's saying sweat you know come on get it right mate i've seen clips of her doing she's not a bad singer she's she's better than me put it that way yeah but the whole thing of this

is to go oh you were shit and you have to go oh yeah i was shit and there's something really unpleasant about that it's like oh it's all in good fun it's all in good fun there's so much of everything that's saturated with that thing now where it's like oh it's just a joke it's just a joke funny it's a just suspense and you have to if you're in the you know if the camera is on your face or you know you're you're in the public eye whatsoever you have to take it in good humor that's quite a lot to ask of somebody but it just becomes it's it's just becoming normalized at this point and it's assumed that we're all in on the joke and we're all enjoying it along with them you know it's a bit like on fucking more common

wise when they used to get des o'connor on and make a joke about how shit he was and everything which well actually no it's not is it because that was that was all right that was actually quite funny cotton asks park if he's going to be as much of a horrible bastard this time as he was last year and he says he was just being honest she turns to grant and asks her what she thinks of beyonce grant reckons she's dead good and it's nice that she's got a bit of meat on her then the tv screen switches to d side still standing on the now darkened stage and this happens and how about d side i thought that as a coming boy band, they're not quite together yet. I don't think they've probably worked hard enough for a long enough period of time.

I like the song because it was slightly obvious, but a decent pop number. Again, Mr. Meany. Park says the song is alright, but D-side aren't together yet. And he doesn't think they've worked hard enough for a long enough period of time. They stare on with nowhere near the reaction Cowie obviously wanted, so they cut back to a replay of the performance we've just seen. This entire thing is not in the spirit of Top of the Pops at all.

It's a jolly, upbeat show that celebrates all things that are pop and interesting yeah you know and even things that are pop and a bit shit yes like that's fine you don't it doesn't really ultimately it's not like it's too saccharine obviously people would take the edge off it but it's like those people have all earned their place there unless you're i don't know who was the worst for being just a big bitch maybe baits i don't know but like you don't really seriously cock a snooker anyone and then there's these two cunts who've come from wherever the fuck from somewhere else who have just sitting here and they're like yeah well no i'm not sure about this no i don't think you're very good having having a go at the

presenters even and just like yeah well you were shit at that when you tried it and you know it's kind of like somebody turns up to your house party and and goes hmm yeah sofa's a bit saggy i don't think that wallpaper really works it's like get out of my house what are you doing i mean they are desperately trying to play up the shake in simon cowell thing you know fern has to sort of telegraph it by telling us that he's Mr. Meany, you know. And yeah, to prove it, we hear his opinions on D's side. Here's the thing, right, Chris Cowie loves an ambush. Obviously, he loves a fucking ambush because of what he did to Johnny Rotten. So, you know, we hear Richard Park's opinions on D's side

that they're apparently not quite there yet. They haven't worked hard enough. And then we see them in this sort of dark, blue-lit bit of the studio reacting to it. And yeah, they've been ambushed in the manner of Johnny Ron. That one lad should have said, well, fucking ask Jodie Marsh who works hard enough for a long period of time then.

What it reminded me of, I don't know if either of you remember this, when the BBC rebooted Jukebox Jury for a little bit, I guess it was the late 80s, early 90s. Glenn Medeiros famously was on there and the panel didn't know that he was out there in in in probably not even a green room but probably a broom cupboard and um just completely slated it and destroyed it and then they brought glenn out and he was in tears and he's got to go up and front it up to the panel and

it was that kind of really awkward telly i guess you have to kind of agree to that you have to sort of uh you have to kind of consent to doing that and that's why this this um d-side bit is so like unpleasant it's like however good or not they were they earned they earned their spot there it's really pulling the rug in a really unfair way to uh say yeah actually you shouldn't be here it's like you've just you know you have crashed this place and you should know it it's like what yeah i mean i suppose we've got to assume that unlike tearful glenn medeiros they were maybe primed for this they were told what was going to happen yeah i don't know i don't know i don't think so i mean

they should have but yeah they should have been i think a floor manager just grabbed all the d side at the end of their performance and said, could you just stay here for a bit? Stand here a minute, yeah. Stay here for a bit. We've got a surprise for you. But it is just kind of like, they're a professional band just because they are a boy band, you know,

and they may have been put together in whatever way. That's kind of not the point. Like, they're not auditioning. It just really weirds me out how they've kind of how they've done this it's like no they've passed that point so yeah Sarah's so right about saying that this is contrary to the spirit of Top of the Pops in that sense of somebody coming on and crashing the party and being a cunt but there's also another aspect in which it's contrary to the spirit of it because what they're assuming by having these guys on there is that if we're top of the pops viewers we are by default we're bbc one viewers and that

we're just generally yes interested in the channel's light entertainment output i don't think we are because something like fame academy isn't a music show as such it's a reality show you know fans of the murder dolls or wayne wonder or the band we're about to see next aren't going to be tuning in for that. You know, it makes as much sense as Top of the Pops having an elongated plug for National Lottery Live or Strictly Come Dancing or The Vicar of Dimley, you know. Any of those would have been better. Any one of those.

And those shows aren't going to return the favour, are they? For fuck's sake, you know. And this whole... This is the trouble. This is what Cowell and Cowell's imitators had done to pop. They effectively had turned pop, or a large chunk of it, into light entertainment.

Yeah. So, in a way, it's just a sign of the way things were. The cross-platform brand synergisation wasn't all one way, though. An episode of Tomorrow's World, in April of of 2002 featured kate humble in the star bar demonstrating a metal detecting glove for nightclub bouncers who were looking for knives and guns in the wake of 9-11 it sounds like some kind of anxiety dream

yes yeah can i just give a shout out to another podcast the tomorrow's world audit time podcast they dredge that up they basically do for tomorrow's world what we do for top of the pub so all we need now is um podcasts on fame and question time and the independent podcast community would have thursday nights on bbc one absolutely locked down that podcast again tomorrow's world audit time hi but the whole section lasts two and a half minutes that's basically 10 of the show yes and that's a that's a single we could have uh listened to it is i i looked at yeah right because people yeah you're right people will be switching over to weatherfield in their droves the next song is only two minutes 12 seconds long so they literally

could have fit another song in there and you know um uh you got neil and i to have a look last time and see what we could have had and do a sort of counterfactual top of the pops well going by the rules that it has to be going up and it can't have been on the previous week unless it's a number one i had a look um and in this stupid fucking star bar section here's what they could have they could have had jane's addiction or killing joke or the polyphonic spree right i mean jane's addiction on top of the pops would have been a real moment yeah you know but no we get fucking eurovision failure woman and leathery neck man it's shade all the way down and side to side is this because they're having a go at

d side who and i know i said my own things but those are good boys you leave those boys alone when they're standing there it's like fucking hell it's not fair but also it's shade on the producers of the fucking show to say that that band that have just been on were not really ready that's saying that the producers of the show and everyone who

chose to put that band there instead of any other that they could have had that's saying that they got it wrong they made an error there. And then it's also shade on the viewers. It's like, well, you know what? You just watched her. You thought that was a professional job,

but you were wrong because here I am, the arbiter of these things who you've never clapped eyes on before probably. And yeah, that's what I think. And it's like, what? Like, if you just enjoyed that, which you might've done if you were a young'un, and then you have this guy just going, yeah, no, no, they're not ready.

It's just an insult to everyone. Telly really started sticking its oar in by this point. It's like, oh, well, we can create stars out of bloody women who can't drive and blokes who work in airports. Oh, let's have a go at making some pop stars. And, you know, they were very successful at it but not very good pop stars in the main no i mean the whole thing was predicated on the idea that the chief requirement for being a pop star was being technically good at singing yes reaching a

standard and we all know that it fucking isn't and having a tragic backstory oh yeah and it also pulled back a curtain on the music industry you know know, it was saying, oh, this is how it's done. None of this bollocks about, you know, actually forming a band or working your arse off and gaining a following. You do this, you get on this and we'll sort it out for you. And it absolutely ruined the battle for the Christmas number one. Oh, for years, years and years. Oh, God, yeah, yeah.

It was great when, let's get a thing to number one stunt is a little bit tired now but it was great when they got rage get to the machine to number one just to just to cunt them all off it was brilliant cotton brings up the fact that this isn't grant's first appearance on top of the pops when the monitor brings up her performance on the april 14th 1983 episode the one after the episode we did last month performing i'm never giving up by sweet dreams everyone here has to submit to the stocks apart from your man parks who i'm assuming has never done anything remotely embarrassing ever like that might have taken the edge of it a bit if it had been like haha here's a here's a picture of you in your tin bath when you were two yeah i know this is kind of a cliche to say but

it's like this seems to be a man with without charisma or talent or anything much to offer the world you know i wonder about the kind of dynamic between young singers and somebody like um carrie grant because i wonder if it's similar to footballers where you get managers who were no great shakes in their professional careers you know or, or didn't even have one. Like, some of the most successful managers, like Arsene Wenger or Jose Mourinho, didn't really make it as players. And I always wonder, like, you know, some of the players, I'm sort of like, oh, show us your medals then, you know. And what's, Carrie has just been in a, you know, a group who kind of flopped at Eurovision or certainly didn't win it. Well, they did all right. I mean, fucking mean fucking hell i think the uk be totally happy with that with a six or seven place finish

in eurovision well they've been on eurovision more than we have yeah yeah they didn't get booed and blamed for football violence that year put it that way no but you know if you're being coached by i don't know elkie brooks and all her looks or something at least you can point at some hit records it only matters when it's on the wall, eh, Simon? Yeah. I mean, the most famous vocal coach back in the day was Tona DeBrett, and she wasn't a professional singer, and everyone used to go to her,

but then she wasn't on TV all the fucking time, you know, strutting about, telling everybody their shit. So, yeah, I don't know. Well, I suppose it's different. I know exactly what you mean, but also it is kind of different skill sets, I guess. Like David Sneddon, who was not Great Shakes as a pop star, just wasn't quite ready yet, but went on to be a decent songwriter.

He co-wrote National Anthem by Lana Del Rey, which is an absolute banger. But I know what you mean. But yeah, I mean, the thing that got on my tits about Fame Academy was the BBC dipping its hands into the shit bucket of populist tv but still managing to be really snooty about it oh we're a we're a fame academy yeah even the fact that it's in highgate you know yeah yeah used to be known as fame secondary school before the tories got in when the first episode of the second series of fame academy was broadcast the tabloids had already pointed out that most of the contestants were already on songwriters contracts and it quickly became

apparent that the format had changed to Big Pop Idol Brother with clips of contestants falling out with each other being broadcast in highlight shows and accusations that the feud that was building up between Park and presenter Patrick Kilty was completely fabricated. Even worse, it ended up being directly scheduled against the new series of Pop Idol and coming off worse in the ratings. The eventual winner, Alex Parks, got to number three in November with Maybe That's What It Takes, with Maybe That's What It Takes, but diminishing returns set in very quickly, and a third series, Slater for 2004,

was quietly scrapped. Park went on to work for Global Radio, who now own all those shitty radio stations, and Grant went on to work with a singer who had won a national talent competition held in a chain of wine bars, but couldn't get a record deal because labels were only interested in people who had already been popular on TV talent shows, forcing her to enter X Factor, Leona Lewis.

And the star bar was knobbed off a few months later and became the costume storage room for Strictly Come Dancing. Now, there's also a new band on the block. the costume storage room for Strictly Come Dancing. Fucking hell. Now, there's also a new band on the block. They're called Sweet Dreams. Do you remember Sweet Dreams? Oh, Spurn, you would now

scrape the barrel with that, would you? Here's Carrie on top of the pops a very long time ago, shall we say. It was a very, very long time ago. And that just goes to show you that with coaching,

you can get better that is a lovely hairdo there carrie loving that thank you so much what are you going on about really i think i'll be keeping mine to this style thank you cheers guys now a group who are far too surreal to take part in a reality tv show is the super furry animals animals. After Cotton tries to take the piss out of Cary Grant and we get an achingly fleeting glance at the yellow hurl era this nearly three minute dead spot comes to an end

when Cotton introduces to a band who are far too surreal to be bothered with all this reality TV bollocks, Super Furry Animals and Golden Retriever. Formed in Cardiff in 1993 from assorted Welsh language bands, Super Furry Animals signed to the Welsh indie label Angst in 1995 and put out the Clanfire PG in space EP yes I did completely dodge that name after gigging around London in 1996 they were spotted by Alan McGee of Creation Records at the Camden Monarch who approached them afterwards and said he was willing to sign them

on the condition that they started singing their songs in English. They told him that they actually were singing in English, but the PA was shit, and they signed to the label. Their first release on Creation, Hometown Unicorn, got to number 47 in March of 1996, but the follow-up, God Show Me Magic, put them into the top 40, getting to number 33 in May of that year,

sparking off a run of 11 top 40 singles throughout the rest of the 90s. After creation wound down in 2001, the band put out Ming. Did I say that right, Simon? Mung. Mung, I thought it was, yeah. I thought it was, but I didn't say it.

It means Maine, like a lion's mane. The band put out Mung, an all-Welsh language LP on their own label, Placid Casual, which got to number 11 in the LP charts in May, was commended in the House of Commons for bigging up their native tongue, and remains the biggest selling Welsh language LP of all time. A year later, they were picked up by Epic and resumed their run of chart hits, and this, the follow-up to It's Not The End Of The World, which got to number 30 in January of

2002, is the lead cut from their sixth album phantom power which came out last monday and it's a new entry this week at number 13 well simon as a fierce champion of the welsh music scene a man who famously quit melody maker when they wouldn't put max boyce on the cover let's not forget a man who accused me on an internet forum of being a massive racist when i said that i thought murrenbich stansiger was welsh fucking hell simon i i was only saying that i thought he had a welsh name i wasn't implying that the welsh lived under other people's sinks for fuck's sake you need to have first go at this fair Fair enough. By the way, I don't remember that, but I'm sorry. I do.

Where to start? Where to start? I mean, yeah, there have been times, many times, when I think that the Super Furry Animals are my favourite band in the entire universe. And for me, they're the greatest of all the Welsh bands, certainly, and I'm including Manic Street Preachers in that. I don't think the Manics would disagree.

I know Nicky Wire bows down before the genius of the Super Furries. He knows they can do things the Manics can't do. So I'm going to have to ramble on for a little while about why I love them so much before I shut the fuck up and let Sarah in and before we get down to the specifics of this song. But the thing is, because I love them so much and because I'm often the go-to guy for Welsh stuff, I've written about them so many times.

And I gathered a lot of my thoughts together on the sleeve notes for Zoom, their greatest hits album, five years ago. So I'm going to have to paraphrase what I wrote there a little bit, if you don't mind. But to begin with, way back when I tried to figure out how, just how, how the superfairy animals sort of emerged the way they did, how a band as brilliantly strange as that could emerge from Wales.

I used to see it in evolutionary terms, because there's this thing in Darwinian evolution called island gigantism, right? Where isolated populations of animals can mutate into outsized and freakish versions of themselves. So you get things like the dodo or the Komodo dragon or the giant tortoise due to the lack of predation and the lack of outside influences and forces. And in musical terms, Wales,

particularly the Welsh language music scene, really was a world to itself. Certainly the pre-internet age where, you know, you could be 20 miles from the English border, but a whole different universe because there was no connection. So, you know, the Welsh language scene was separated linguistically and geographically from the swing of things, you know. And even though Superthrow animals were formed in Cardiff, they're a North Wales band in a lot of ways. They're actually from all points of the pig's head. Dav is from Bangor.

Cian is from Bangor, they're brothers. Gito is from Cardiff. Bunf is from Cardiff. Griff was born in Pembrokeshire, Haverford West, I think, but grew up in Snowdonia. So there's a North Wales majority just about. And the thing with North Wales, or just rural Wales in general,

is you get these weird little pockets of stoner culture up there in the mountains, you know, where people just sit around getting wasted and listen to these mad psychedelic records that nobody in England has heard of. And without giving a fuck what's cool in London. Certainly, you know, in the 90s, it was this real isolated little thing. You just get this kind of weirdness that evolves naturally

from sort of like-minded people in these isolated places getting together and forming their own path. This sort of counterfactual reality that's got nothing to do with what's going on in the music press and what's going on in sort of centres of things. And that isolation used to allow bands a rare freedom to develop i think and i i think it helps super fairy animals grow into this truly unique and fully formed musical force not in an ostentatious or or

performative or affected way like look how weird we are although there were you know elements of that i suppose but just naturally so and and without any ironic intent and without kind of second guessing the whims of tastemakers in the london scene and i think that's what cripples london sometimes is the second guessing of oh how are people going to react to this you know yeah this thing that we're doing is a comment on the thing before and will people understand that comment and it's so refreshing for a band who would just fuck all to do with that yeah and i i do still think there's something in that theory the island gigantism comparison but what's wrong with that theory is that it implies an insularity that was never really there in the super theories because if

you listen to their work there's such an evident love of german cosmish and um brazilian psych and jamaican reggae and Philly soul, Nashville country. You know, they're an internationalist band that just happened to come from Wales. And that was so important at a time when the press was obsessed with Little Englanders. I didn't necessarily get it at first. I was put off by the press around them. They were missold as a lads band, like a druggie lads band you know signed to creation wearing cagoules like a welsh oasis and then obviously that put me off and you know you used

to get those adverts have you been missold ppi well i i was missold sfa but i it's funny how you can remember exact moments i remember the exact moment it clicked for me, and it was the afternoon of the Redden Festival, Saturday 23rd August 1997. I stood in the middle of the field. Super furry animals were halfway up the main stage bill, and I'm sort of standing there with moderate to low expectations. And Griff restart singing. Clarity just confuses me.

The line's drawn on the map a strange assembly that bit from demons except that when he sang it was the most beautiful thing in the world and it just transfixed me just fucking grabbed my heart you know his voice his voice man it's so rich with warmth and humanity and vulnerability and empathy and he became my I'd say my equal favourite male singer alongside Smokey Robinson and I think I developed a bit of a man crush on Griff he's so handsome and and he's got this sort of slow calming zen wizard-like presence about him and and he takes quite a long time to get the words out to answer a question and and and when I've interviewed him I've never been quite sure whether he's translating his thoughts in his head or just contemplating it really carefully

but then again one time when i was interviewing the super theories someone turned up possibly one of howard marx's minions and slapped a bag of weed the size of a pillow down on the table so you know that that has to come into the equation um but he just gives you this sense that everything's going to be okay in the world i'll never forget walking through bordeaux after wales had beaten slovakia 2-1 in our first game in euro 2016 um because welsh people never go on about that tournament do they no never and and a tram went past and griff reese was on it and he waved and smiled at me through the glass. And I just thought, we're going to be all right here.

I said that they're not performatively weird. All the peripheral stuff is fun, of course. That Pete Fowler monsterism artwork that they have, the alien helmets they wear sometimes. And famously the time they spunked all their record company advance on an army tank yes painted it blue fitted it up with a pa system and they used to roll into the backstage areas of various rock festivals blasting out techno and then they got bored with that and they sold it to don henley out of the eagles who collects tanks do you know about do

you guys know about big tank chess yes and it's about time it was mentioned on Chart Music. I don't know about this. Sarah doesn't know about it. All right, okay, right. So I should explain. Yeah, so really, the Super Furries selling their tank to Don Henley was the origin of this fictional pastime of Big Tank Chess, which I invented with John Doran and John Tatlock,

who we all know and Sarah did her Game of Thrones podcast with. And there's another rock star who collects tanks. I can't remember who it was, but we started speculating that in fact loads of them do it, right? And that the rock aristocracy all get together in the Mojave Desert and sit in these big wooden control towers and move their tanks around in a game of big tank chess laid out in the desert

and the fun was deciding who would definitely be a big tank chess player so don henley obviously and we came up with people like jeff lynn lindsey buckingham um ringo star they were all definitely in yeah definitely big tank chess men and we can now, by the way, factually almost, add Stephen Morris of New Order, who genuinely collects tanks. Right. So that was big tank chess. So feel free to play at home. Who would be a big tank chess player? They usually sort of wear aviator shades

and sort of cheesecloth open-neck shirts. I feel that's the kind of vibe of it. But all that kind of daft stuff around Super Furries isn't just bolted on. It's not like they were a conventional brit rock band with a few eccentric hobbies you know they weren't basically cast with a tank you know they've got a genuinely left field lateral thinking approach to pop and that that's probably helped by griff's unusual method of playing guitar because he plays left-handed on a right-handed guitar strung upside down which i think I think I'm right in saying Paul McCartney did that, Jimi Hendrix.

But it's quite rare, and it forces you to look at music in a different way. But it's very rarely experimentalism for its own sake, I would say. They never abandon pop melody for too long. I remember I got drunk and I tried to explain what Super Furry Animals meant to me. And I blurted out, they understand me with their melodies. And I got laughed at for that.

But I meant it because their melodies do seem to understand you. The chord changes intuitively anticipate your own emotions. And this song is not an example of that, but it's a lot of fun, but I am going to shut the fuck up for a bit. So Sarah can come in before you come in, Sarah, well, show aces don't look back in Bangor. Yeah,

there it is. Yeah. Yeah. I have a great love for this band. Also. I was at university in Aberystwyth and there was, you know, while there was a thriving local scene and bigger bands

did sometimes schlep all the way down through the mountains to get to us we did have to do our own excursions and I remember the local record shop organised a bus trip to Tenby to see Super Furries that was a couple of hours away and it was great it was like a school trip but good

and you know yeah it's interesting what you were saying about, like, how they sort of evolved out of the landscape in that way. I mean, obviously, there's a thing about the coast as well, coastal towns, which are weird. There was a, obviously, I hate to use these words, but there was the whole cool Cymru thing that journalists of the time tried to make happen. I think the opposite is also true. I think it is a sort of, there is a sort of cultural Madagascar thing that journalists of the time tried to make happen. I think the opposite is also true. I think it is a sort of, there is a sort of cultural Madagascar thing that happens there. And yeah, a lot of it has to do with weed. Like there were a lot of people that I knew who were in bands who had gone to Aberystwyth to study stuff like countryside management or physics,

and then dropped out and just you know smoked weed dealt weed whatever and were in bands and you know they weren't all good but there were people like the crockets who were really good and um murray the hump who begat keys sorry the crockets who begat the crimea who just a really wonderful band so you would get stuff like that the people who were just doing their own thing in the most natural way um but of course this also roped in the stereophonics who are incredibly pedestrian and kind of conservative kind of gives that you know it's it's almost the exception that proves the rule i suppose but yeah super fairies they're such a fun band it's just so fun and clever and so kind of sweet and warm and so inventive and not like

anybody else a lot of sort of psychedelic pop can be quite ponderous and kind of quite inward looking and quite full of itself and very superficial and super fairies were kind of very light-hearted but with real depth as well and like you said there was a weirdness about them but it's not contrived it's it's a very natural thing unlike your two i wouldn't know the super furry animals if they shagged me non-o. But I was quite impressed by this. I mean, the one thing that did hit me in the face was this absolutely reeks of the album of the week slot in early 70s Top of the Popsers. Do you think that was what Cowie was aiming for here?

What, because it's a proper band playing live kind of thing? Maybe, but it was high in the charts. It was just a commercial fact that couldn't be ignored i mean the studio set has been massively bright and sterile so far but this performance gives us a chance to see where the money's been spent where the band do know what to do with themselves i mean the blocks at the back have suddenly gone all satiny and shimmery and there are people standing at the back in like archways in in kind of orangey orangutan-y Chewbacca-y costumes yeah Wookiee or Yeti or whatever yeah they're like Sasquatches aren't they they're like big blonde Sasquatch yeah which is from the video by the way that costumes yeah yeah some of them are playing well almost all of them are playing kettle drums apart

from one who's just standing there like a bouncer aren't they timpani rather than and floor toms in one case yeah oh yeah you're probably right but yeah there's that one guy there's that one guy who's like standing guard looking impassive probably one of their mates probably the guy who whacked the pillow of weeds down on the interview table that time is he like the the um the bez of this yeah maybe yes fucking hell super furry animals are one or two actual bands on top of the pops tonight and and in this era of top of the pops you can pick and choose whether you want to play live or mime or sing live over backing tapes but if you're in a band like this you can't get out of playing live can you yeah i mean it definitely is live there's all that chaotic

guitar overload near the end which is not on the record uh yeah i mean it's audibly definitely live isn't it i heard a podcast called off the beat and track uh the other week with dougie pain out of travis turns out he's a pop crazed youngster so a up dougie stay pop crazed oh hello yeah and he said that when travis first went on top of the pops him and the rest of the band were they were a bit knocked that they had to play live because it felt more to them like a gig that they had to nail than a chance to perform and put themselves over. You know he said

that they couldn't enjoy themselves like Slade and T-Rex obviously did when they went on top of the pods. I suppose you can't ease your way into it the way you could with a gig you've got an hour and a half and you can kind of warm up a little bit. Yeah. But like yeah you've just got to go and nail it in three minutes. Yeah.

You can't have a guitar made out of chocolate. Yeah, there is that. It does seem like it's kind of... It's neither fish nor fowl, isn't it, performing live on Top of the Pops? It's not quite a telly performance. It's not quite a gig. And I'm sure there were people who regretted it afterwards,

like, ah, you know, it's just a bit weird. And Super Furry Animals have got round that with the Sasquatches but the problem with that is Chris Calvers decided that they're the focal point and not the band they cut back to them all the time and it's like those alcoves yeah we've seen them mate let's look at the band

super furries themselves used to wear those costumes during gigs but only at the very end because they used to get really fucking sweaty. Oh imagine that, oh god, the whiff especially if you had weed into it, Christ. Yeah, that meant that around this time you always knew that Golden Retriever would be the encore

because they're only going to come on for the encore in that outfit. Also I've got to shout out to Griff Rees' hair here, what a gorgeous 70s mop. A mane. Yeah, it is a mane. A mung. A mung.

It kind of looks like both the Alessi brothers at once, or like a brunette version of Tommy, you know, in Carrie. You know, in the film Carrie. Tommy Ross, he takes Carrie to the prom. He's sort of like a negative version of Tommy Ross. Bless him. Yeah. I mean, this is a throwaway song,

but the thing with Super furries is that even their throwaway songs take a kind of off-kilter boomerang throwing path you know um so it's it's a 70s glam pastiche similar feel to i reckon um back off boogaloo by ringo star or he's gonna step on you again by john congos that kind of feel. And I just remember the first time I heard it, it just made me laugh out loud because what they've done is they've taken a hard rock trope about women, you know, she's a witch or she's a snake or she's a

vixen or she's a tiger or whatever and they've satirised it by making it about a really basic British yellow dog, you know, the default dog, you know, she's a golden retriever, but making it sound all sexy and badass you know supposedly it was written about two actual golden retrievers and the dynamic between griff's girlfriend's two dogs one male and one female and also it's taking the piss out

of that old blues trope about robert johnson meeting the devil at the crossroads except it's a roundabout and then it's a puppy at a zebra crossing my favourite bit is stop said the puppy that's just the best bit in the song yeah and it's done completely deadpan as well that's the thing is they were never self consciously they weren't they might have been

weird but they weren't fucking wacky yes this is from the album Phantom Power as you said which is one of the good ones it's not my favourite SFA album, probably not even the top three, but it does have glorious stuff on it. Maybe the best one on it is Hello Sunshine, which was also a single, and it's the opening track.

Yeah, that's lovely. It has the legendary verse, I'm a minger, you're a minger too, so come on, minger, I want to ming with you. Which was always a massive, joyous sing-along moment at the gigs, that was. This performance, yeah, it's great, I think, because they are playing live,

but there's gold tinsel all over the floor, but just the way they are seems to be almost in defiance or against all that crap, you know. I noticed that Griff never smiles. He looks a bit pissed off in fact i wonder if there was a backstory to that i don't know but yeah liz bonnie now introduces them as the sublime super furry animals and i thought she's bang on go on liz she gets it so the following week golden retriever dropped 23 places to number 36 while the lp entered the chart at number four the follow-up hello sunshine

got to number 31 in november of this year and they go on to have two more top 40 hits before winding down for the first time in 2010 There's sublime, super furry animals there. Do you reckon they could start a trend? Nah, maybe not. Okay, next up, a club anthem that's been filling up the dance floors all over the place. Created by an Italian record producer, this tune has

made the hard hat the essential fashion accessory of the summer. Don't know about the rest of the outfit, but maybe I could try one on for size in next week's show. With vocals from The Biz, this is Benny Benassi. Push me and then just touch me till I can get my satisfaction. Push

me and then just touch me till I can get my satisfaction. Satisfaction. Bonin, holding aloft one of the orangutan's wigs, walks in front of the kids who we actually see for the first time.

They look pretty rubbish, all combat trousers and band t-shirts. She says something I couldn't quite catch, then picks up a Bob the Builder helmet as she introduces a club anthem from Hitler that's been filling up the dance floors across the country. Satisfaction by Benny Benassi featuring The Biz. Born in Reggio Emilia, Italy in 1967, Marco Benassi started DJing with his cousin in the late 80s before moving into production in the 90s, working with post-Saturday Night Wigfield and Assorted Italio Dansax. In 2001, he started putting out singles under the name of KMC,

gaining moderate club success, and when he put this out under his own name in the summer of 2002, it got to number 80 in May of this year. But when it was put out again by the Ministry of Sand, with a new video featuring Assorted Lad Mag models being all erotic with power tools, which got extensive play on music video stations, it soared

into the chart this week, straight in at number two. And here, on the top of the pop stage, is an attempt to recreate the video in a health and safety pre-watershed style and fashion. This is well fucking men and motors isn't it or or tits and tires as we used to call it back in the day fucking hell i i mean

what to say about this i mean as as this podcast token woman i i feel i should go first on this and and you know yes to be to be serious and you know to this this is fucking hilarious i mean it's it's not actually it's not funny it's it's not really sexy it's not anything the track itself let us let's get that out of the way yeah the track itself is not a very good dance track basically what it's for we're now in the era this is peak super club that we're at now yes um and this record has been produced for super clubs it's everything has been cranked up and you know there's kind of nothing wrong with the sound palette itself it's just that it's been given the the aural equivalent of a very big boob job yes to make it sound big rather. It doesn't matter how good it is.

It just sounds big. Yes. And it's kind of borrowing from a sort of a lineage of dirtiness and the sort of throbbing gristle kind of style. And I think it's meant to evoke a sort of Pavlovian dribble response. Yes. But it's just got the production values of like flabby stadium rock you know it's essentially two speak and spell machines having phone sex isn't it basically or the robot bar stuff that cynthia's having a workplace liaison

yes why didn't they work that into the video oh my god yeah would have brought a few partners into my club as well yeah the, the general would have approved. Yeah, he'd be slapping his arse or somebody else's with glee. I mean, that's actually, this was Apple's voice synthesis program, Macintalk. Right. Benny Benassi was very fond of it. He used it all the time. It also appears on Fitter Happier by Radiohead.

Flaming Lips used it on Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robot. So, you know, lots of people. Apex Twin used it on uh yoshimi battles the pink robot so you know afex twin used it a lot outcast marilyn manson it's also the voice of the autopilot in wally which is and i don't know if anyone's seen uh the mitchells versus the machines which is extremely funny that's uh that's the robot vacuum cleaners in that so it's it's you know it's standard it's it's very sort of shorthand for robot voice and the weird thing about this is that it's robotic without being futurist at all it's sort of deliberately dead-eyed and flat but not in that sexy way not in that kind of shiny way yeah it's music non-stop by craftwork but shit but bad yeah it's yeah it's not a good. The thing is that if you want this sort of sound, but good, then you want... Kerncraft 400 Zombie Nation did this much better in 1999.

Right. Just had a lot more going on with it, just interesting little details and much more sort of punch and more ideas. Yeah. And I don't know if you could really dance to that either, but this is for, like, girls to pose to and, you know, recreate the fucking video. And men to punish the air and look at the girls yeah and also um uh silver screen shower scene by felix de house cat that was 2001 right that's how you do this right anyway so the tits um yes to the tits some of the models in the video were doing an encore as there obviously wasn't a sunday sport road show event

on that night and ben Benny hides behind a newspaper as he tries to whip up some mystique about himself. But when he puts the paper down to reveal himself, the camera's too busy zooming in on the arses and we never really see him again. So that's him out of the way. Is that actually him? Or is that the biz?

Yes. Who is the biz? Is the biz a sort of gestalt entity of the bloke and the woman who basically have the same voice but different? Yeah, the biz are the man and woman, the latter of which looks well fucking Sarah Palin, which was very disconcerting. They're the singers he calls in every now and again.

And they really fuck me off because, you know, if you're talking about the biz, there's only one the biz, the late and the great biz market. Oh, yeah. So they can fuck off. So that's them dealt with. So, yeah arses everyone fucking i mean it is insane seeing that like doesn't this give you whiplash seeing this on top of the pops i mean is this the the the kind of latter day top of the pops equivalent of daddisfaction daddisfaction daddisfaction it's laddisfaction, isn't it?

It is laddisfaction. I mean, as we all know, whenever there's a discussion about pants, people and legs and co, people, including ourselves from time to time, always say that, oh, dance troops on top of the pops. They just wouldn't fly at any time since the mid-80s. But, you know, as soon as the dance acts came in, in the late 80s, you know as soon as the dance acts came in in the late 80s and especially

during this time you know who do they almost always get in a dance troupe yeah i mean we're going to see three of them on this episode so you just wonder why didn't they bring back a dance troupe for top of the pops does this count as dance this is dance in the broadest oiliest sense of the term isn't it yes these are models who have been doused in oil and put in some pants and given a tool belt apiece. Basted is the word, isn't it? They have been thoroughly basted. They are oven-ready women.

And there's a bit, you can't really count it as dancing. They do the, in the one sort of bit that counts as, it's very monotonous track this. And the one bit of sort of, that's meant to be like a drop is like, it sort of double, it goes double time. And so it's like, and then they do a little, they sort of pretend to be drilling and everyone goes, all right.

I mean, they're at fucking hell. You don't really see the crowd again, but it's like there are young men in that crowd baying like hounds. It's a bit queasy, isn't it? It's not the yellow hurl, but they're all balloons in that audience, just in their trousers. Balloons on the stage as well, mate. Oh, God. I'm sorry, but it reduces you in very, you can just feel your brain kind of reducing

down in some ways. Yeah. You kind of can't blame them. If there's men hooting at this, that's the reaction that was meant to be elicited. But it is, you can see that the camera is a little bit, there's a bit of hesitation there. It's sort of a horny Catholic in a strip club camera,

sort of looking and looking away and looking and looking away. Oh no, no oh please forgive me please forgive me yeah the camera made its excuses and left yeah this shit's still going on isn't it i mean as a former smut peddler i could see this coming a mile off all this bollocks after i finished my shift at the wank factory and i was waiting for me train to get back home i'd always nip into wh smith and have a look at the uh top shelf yeah i just wanted to know who was buying the fucking shit i was helping to pump out and you'd see mr suit come in and his eyes would go right across the top shelf at razzle

and escort and mayfair and penthouse but then he'd see a couple of shelves down, Maxim's got a 16-page laundry special. And he'd always buy that. That was the beginning of the end for wank mags in this country. Because nobody ever went broke underestimating the sexual cowardice of British men. That's the sort of alka-pops of... Coward porn. You know what you want and you've settled for that. And by this point it was it was

embedded in the in the british male psyche yeah i mean it's a weird sort of thing isn't it when you see this which is european you know this is italian so you have to take off a few points of of you know of of outrage for like european sex standards you know he'd have done this on the italian version of crackerjack and no one would have been yeah exactly cracker jackal it doesn't have enough it thinks it's got a sort of tongue-in-cheek sort of humor about it you know but i don't think it like it wouldn't get on eurotrash it's almost too slick and again too too oily to get on eurotrash but you can just imagine antoine decaux and just kind of going they're thrilling, they're willing and they've come here to do some drilling but

not quite I think they probably would have turned it down for not quite being silly enough. See when I saw this on the list I wondered how the hell they were going to make it work on Cowie's Top of the Pops because he's anti-video and let's face it if ever a song was all about the video

it's Satisfaction by Benny Benassi but they basically get ever a song was all about the video it's you know it's satisfaction by benny benassi but they basically get around it by completely recreating the video like it's a school play in sunderland basically so i'm sure he approved he probably loved it on that on that basis yeah they they kind of like rub the fannies against some brooms and they they've got chainsaws and stuff there but they just hold them up near the end don't turn them on of course it's all a bit hills angels that's what i thought yes massively so it's not it's not so much pans people are legs and co it is hills angels it's that kind of comedy aspect to it benny hill benassi yes because you've got the vocalist ones are dressed

as the building site foreman and forewoman. So they get to wear clothes. But the rest of them are the basted sexy ladies from the videos in their hot pants and bikinis and high viz and their hard hats and boots and they're wielding the power tools. And yes, the broomsticks, for fuck's sake. There's a moment where some extreme ass shaking happens as if they're as if they're pre-empting the number one record a bit of a um which is which

is cheeky literally um so it's it's ah but not though but there is a crucial difference which i will which i will get to it is you're right it's quite a throwback to see a dance-based performance like this on a more modern totp it. It is like Flip Colby never retired. But yeah, you're right that when dance records happen, what else are you going to do? And this does tend to be the way. Maybe not as extremely sexualised as this one, but still, I've got a lot more time for the record than you two.

And when it comes down to it, I think the thing that Sarah said that chimed most with me was comparing it to Felix the house cat because this song is arguably Electro Clash's biggest hit because it has a lot of Electro Clash tropes, that pounding beat. It doesn't have any funk to it. It's just doof, doof, doof. And that cold, dispassionate vocal put through that robotic voice synthesiser, you know, the Macintalk,

that you compare to two speaking spell machines having phone sex. Yeah, the female vocal is very Flying Lizards or Miss Kitten. Yes. And the two vocalists even have a robotic way of moving. So for me, as, you know, I was very much an electroclash aficionado at the time, this isn't a million miles from fisher spooner or adult to one of those groups but it is all about the visuals this the song that you can't separate the song from the visuals in this case the whole package is shameless sexploitation but for me it's a

fucking solid platinum banger and i'm surprised that that you guys don't like it you say it's dead-eyed and flat yeah it is and that's kind of what I like about it because I was into that kind of thing. It just doesn't do it. Yeah, I love this sort of thing. I just don't love this, I guess. Maybe it's because I'm a humorless bin. I don't know.

But it is like so inextricable from the video. You know, I went and watched the video and it is fucking outrageous. And like I said, it's funny without being humorous, you know. But it's like, you know, because all the names of the equipment, like, flash up on the screen. And it's like, orbital sander, minimal dust opera. And then it's like, there's a bit about it. Minimal dust operation with disposable bag.

And part of my brain just goes, is that what we are to you? Is it disposable bags? Is it? Exposable bags, is it? But there's a whole kind of sub-genre of this type of electro house dance around this time, which kind of lasted for a good couple of years, where the videos were made so that when you heard the music, it would evoke the video. Yes.

So it's almost like the music was almost secondary to its video, and that's what it's supposed to do to your brain. And it usually meant sexy women in their smalls doing sex things in absurd circumstances. Like, often it would be really sort of pedestrian summer nightclub chum music, but with, you know, a video that had women in their pants, like in an office or a laboratory or a gym, or notably in a white void pretending to be a marching band.

What was that? That was, do you remember this? It was Alex Gordino's Destination Calabria which had the Crystal Waters sample which is actually quite a banger. This is like 2005, this is way in the future. And it's hysterical. The absolute topmost of this was

Perfect Exceeder by Mason featuring Princess Superstar. Oh, banger. It's absolutely amazing. um video has three women but it really sends up that whole thing and just puts a lid on it puts an end to it right and the video has three women like made up to such a grotesque degree with like three sets of eyelashes each and they're like bouncing on gym balls and spanking each other and and it's great but i think credit is due to benny benaski for like bringing electro house kind of into the mainstream and paving the way for stuff like justice and digitalism who i love very much so you know fair enough it's just that it doesn't hit the spot for me yeah i

mean the video just reminds me of when i used to work in a factory in oakland in 1990 and one bloke on the bench next to me he had a calendar that had been handed out by a local engineering firm and it featured models trying to be erotic with lathes and i remember him pointing at that month's picture which was some woman squatting by a lathe with her undercarriage out and licking the starting knob and just saying oh all local lasses there mint it great. That's what I got from that video. And this performance. I can confirm by the way

that you can dance to Cuncraft 400 by Zombie Nation because it's a Wales thing. Do you know about this? No. Basically what happened was in one of Wales' qualifying games for Euro 2016 which Welsh people never go on about the away fans were kind of

kettled in the stadium in Belgium they were doing that thing of sending the home supporters out of the stadium first so that they don't end up mixing on the streets and kicking off or anything like that so the Welsh fans were just locked there in the stadium nothing to do and over the Tannoy

the DJ in the stadium played Kerncraft 400 and everyone just started singing along and there's like a massive disco in the stands and that just became a wales thing then that all wales games particularly away games um that just happens like just like one of those kind of let's all have a disco moments and that's one of my main memories of following wales away in particularly in France in 2016. The other thing I was going to say about this song is it's well man-to-man featuring man parish.

Yes. And that got me wondering, Al, have you ever stripped to this song or was it the wrong era? It was the wrong era and I wouldn't anyway on principle. I did wonder if, because they've got one of those little, I don't know what they're called, the little polyester stripy road hut thing on the stage. They've done the set out as if it's, you know, roadworks.

Spared no expense. No. Just nipped out and kind of plundered a roadworks, you know. If they'd had any balls, they would have had somebody hidden in there. Yeah. Like Benny Benassi himself, who burst out at the end, wearing nothing but some strategically smeared road grease. Yes. And maybe nothing but a hard hat between himself and an urgent parliamentary session on the future of the BBC.

I did appreciate the triangular road sign behind them. Did you notice that? No. Yeah, it's a bridge with two humps. I see what they did there. Oh, of course it is. Fucking hell. It's like yeah it's it's a bridge with two humps i see what they did there of course it is fucking hell it's like tits and arses and arses as well oh god it's a feast of but i it did occur to me as well that it does indicate how far we've come in terms of you know beauty standards because while there are still enclaves of this, like this, the look of these Lad Mag models

is not too far removed from what you now get, which is women who kind of take an Instagram filtered shot and take it into a plastic surgeon and go, that made me look like that. It's not that it's kind of the classic thing with big lips and cat eyes and tiny noses and big tits. But, you know, there's also like every other type of body and figure and everything now.

So, you know, there's been some progress. This is not like the only thing that you're allowed to dribble over. Yeah. And what a shame that Benny Benassi didn't put up a follow-up single, which was a cover version of the Bird's Eye Steakhouse advert. Hope it's chips, it's chips. That would have been something um i have one more thing to say about this which is say it apart from on the youtube comments one of the somebody said watching this video as a kid felt like a crime which seems but no the one the last thing is, do you know of the satisfaction challenge of 2018?

Well, 2017, so this was kind of pre-TikTok, some Russian cadets at the Ulyanov Institute of Civil Aviation filmed a parody video of themselves in their pants doing maintenance tasks. I say their pants are stuffed pants, army hats, leather belts and big boots and they are ironing, twerking, mopping and eating bananas. It's the gayest, most subversive thing ever. It's amazing. It's amazing and obviously the Institute was quite upset about this and read them

for filth and threatened to expel the men of Russian military must not twerk. And it caused a massive upset and there were headlines like row over cavorting Russian air cadets twerk. Yes. And it caused a massive upset. And there were headlines like, row over cavorting Russian air cadets. All those Russians. And then loads of other people, all those Russians,

loads of other people made their own videos in solidarity. Yes. As like some pensioners in Petersburg and Ukrainian swimmers, welders and stuff. It was awesome. So if nothing else, that's Benny Banassi's contribution to our times is that.

There was a piece in the New Yorker arguing that the parody video was a show of solidarity with oppressed LGBTQ people in Russia. And certainly, you know, the Russian establishment were, as you say, furious about it. So I guess they read the signs. And, you know, what a brilliant thing to do. I think we've got to put that on the video playlist. Yes. I did wonder if this, not this performance, the video, the iconic video, I did wonder if there was any sort of a nod in there

to Quentin Tarantino's Chicks Who Love Guns bit. Do you remember that? Yeah. From Jackie Brown. It's quite early on in Jackie Brown where Samuel L. Jackson is showing off to Robert De Niro about his gun knowledge through the medium of a video that he's got of some girls in bikinis firing guns. And you only see a tiny bit of it in the film. But they spent a day making a short that is in there.

And it's really funny. It goes on for so long. And it's really uncomfortable because it's like, oh, Christ. there and it's really funny it like it goes on for so for so long and it's really uncomfortable because it's like oh christ and then it's funny and then it isn't funny anymore and then it's funny again and i don't think that maybe if benny benassi had just maybe if they just fixed on the one woman with the one implement and just gone all the way through that would have been brilliant actually wonder what david thinks about this video because you know it is einstein norbotton isn't it with more attractive people doing it einstein norx barton oh very good it's tna at b and q hey so the following week

satisfaction dropped two places to number four but would spend five weeks in the top 20 a massive accomplishment by 2003 the follow-up no matter what you do only got to number 40 in february of 2004 but he would have a chart renaissance in 2011 when he collaborated with chris brown on beautiful people which got to number four for two weeks in May of that year, and Cinema with Gary Go, which got to number 20 in August of that year. Meanwhile, the video developed a life of its own when it was parodied by some middle-aged blokes in Denmark, some grannies in Belgium to demonstrate against gender pay equality,

some squaddies in Britain, and yes, most famously in Russia in a few years after that, with the Russian Air Cadet Dormitory, which was, yeah. It's so good. Mmm, glad to see they're wearing their protective clothing there. A big thanks to Benny Benassi and The Biz. Now a young group who are taking on the mantle of Liverpool's best band.

Now we've seen many Merseyside legends come and go, but these guys are carrying on their city's musical tradition. The new heroes of the wild North West. This is The Curran. Cotton, turning away from a strip of monitors on the back of the main stage while the piano player for the next act stares on blankly while chewing gum, tells us that loads of bands from Merseyside have come and gone, and here's one more, The Coral with Pass It On.

Formed in Hoylake in 1996, Hive started out as a school band who changed their name to The Coral when they started playing local gigs. A few years later they ran into Alan Wills who was intrigued by a gig poster which featured Ian Skelly's grandfather's head exploding and offered to start up a label which became Deltasonic and make them his first signing. They put out their debut single Shadows Fall in July of 2001 followed by two eps none of which made the charts but then they teamed up with ian brody for their fourth release goodbye which put them over the top and got them to number 21 in july and their debut self-titled lp was nominated for the mercury prize one day after its release and entered the charts at number five in August.

This is the follow-up to Don't Think You're the First, which got to number 10 in March of this year. It's the second track from their next LP, Magic and Medicine, which comes out next Monday, and it's slammed into the charts this week at number five. So, chaps, by 2003're you know supposedly in post brit pop times but it's a good time to be a band like the choral isn't it still because if a band like this came out in the mid 80s they'd be happy with a page and melody maker and about 20 seconds in the

indie section of the chart show but you know a band like this can sell a few records and get straight into the top ten. Yeah, I mean, obviously, we've had Oasis and their whole kind of Beatles comparisons, and there's also been things like Cars, who are literally from Liverpool. Finn Cotton is plugging them into that heritage. She's introducing them as being part of that Scouse tradition.

Yeah, Freddie and the Dreamers, Liverpool Express. Yeah, I mean, implicitly back to the Beatles. Our kid. They're actually what's disparagingly known as woollybacks, aren't they, from the Wirral. Woollybacks meaning people who aren't quite from Liverpool. Plastic Scousers is another term. So, yeah, as you say, the Coler from Hoy Lake on the Wirral.

And they're on the corner, because the Wirral's like a rectangle that sticks out, and they're from the corner that because the Wirral's like a rectangle that sticks out they're from the corner that's closer to Deeside Deeside there is again as the crow flies, Hoy Lake is as close to Wales as it is to Liverpool and it's a moderately posh seaside town

it's got the Royal Liverpool Golf Course there where the Open has been held and Mike Rutherford out of Genesis went to boarding school there, that's not where the coral went they went to hilbra high school where james bond daniel craig and the cyclist chris boardman also went fact fans so what i'm saying is it's not it's not the mean streets of toxteth you know what i mean no so they're definitely woolly backs not scousers as such and it's good to clarify that because you know if people say um somebody from sunderland is a geordie, they get very heads up about it.

Half Man, Half Biscuit, who are from Baird and Ed, because it's impossible to say that word in any other accent, wrote a song called Rock and Roll is Full of Bad Wolves. And it's about bands who turn up on Soccer AM professing to be into footy, but they don't know anything about it. And it did cross my mind that it might be about the Coral because they have been on Soccer AM a lot but it turns out Nigel Blackwell actually wrote it about a band from Southend who've never heard of Roots Hall

so that's more likely to be the horrors or something like that by the way when you google bad wool you just find loads of stuff slagging off UKIP's Paul Nuttall. Paul Nuttall is a bad wool, which really made me laugh. Anyway, it got me thinking, who are the good wools? So Halfman Offbiscuit themselves, obviously.

Boo Radleys are from Wallasey. Pete Burns from Someport Sunlight. Paul Heaton's from Bromborough. OMD are from the outskirts of Hoy Lake, because we're getting closer. Cliff Williams from ACDC grew up in Hoy Lake. On the downside, you've got that tedious, sexist twat, Miles Kane. I would say the choral are good wolves. On the whole, they were a best-case scenario version of capital T S O T this sort

of thing northern guitar based indie rock of the noughties at their best they almost had an SFA thing going on actually Dreaming of You was brilliant I thought In The Morning has got that twinkly daytime radio feel like

Dancing In The Moonlight but top loaded which I like despite myself i know i know i'm sorry i'm gonna yeah it's your favorite track on cooking isn't it yeah i'm cooking the jamie oliver compilation oh my god yeah and and the choral's first album that sal title and really good it's got elements of sea shanties and hispan Hispanic folk mixed in there with all the more predictable 60s psychedelia. Oh, by the way, I sat with the Coral at an awards ceremony once, the Enemy Awards. For some reason, I was stuck on the same table as them.

But, you know, they were nice guys. They kept leaving a table in ones and twos and coming back with a certain chaotic energy about them. There were fucking loads of them. At one point, i think there were seven members of the choral um but i've i've been skating around talking about this actual song because it's very slight i think i was stunned to learn that this is their biggest hit i mean why i i can only put it down to this certain kind of mathematical momentum of their rise. Because their first five singles went 180, 21, 13, 10 and 5. And the album, as you say, got to number one that this is from. And it's as if the whole thing had just been decided by forces bigger than us.

It was just sort of all heading that way. Because this song, yeah, I couldn't have sung it if you put a gun in my head there is a certain scousy thing to them in the james skelly is exactly the same haircut as lee mavers from the lars and i even did a compare contrast i found the lars on top of the pops and um uh you know lee from the lars is wearing a round neck jumper and baggy jeans exactly the same as James Skelly. The only difference is one of them's got a tambourine, one of them's got a guitar. By this time, if you're the lead singer of a Lancashire band, you've got to have a tambourine with you. That's the law.

Have a tambourine, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I thought, well, OK, maybe I'm missing something here. So I looked in the lyrics and it goes every day I recognize what's deceased and what's alive but don't repeat what I just said until gold has turned to lead then all the tales will be told whilst you and I are in the cold but don't think this is the end because it's just begun my friend and when it's done and all this is gone just find the feeling pass it on so I don't know I mean it's just a vague i mean there's that reverse

alchemy thing of gold turning to lead but it's just a sort of vague very vague feeling of everything going wrong um somebody i don't know if you ever go on the website song meanings but somebody on there reckoned it's about stds which made me laugh pass it on but um i prefer i prefer to interpret it you know there's that child childish way of whispering a rumor in school as they pass it on you know like darren grimes had a crafty wanking class pass it on that kind of thing oh man the thing about that is that um obviously there were enemy cover stars this week and i think this was a thing that the enemy did they were always always trying to nail down the next big songwriting guitar genius and slap them on the cover as quick

as they could and go this is your next big song until people kind of caught into it i think and went really um but that was definitely a thing and i think it may not have done them any favors no it's nice this it's inoff, it's pleasant enough, isn't it? It's a bit of a nothing tune. Weirdly, I think the chorus is pleasant and the verse really grated on me for some reason. And the fact that there's no bridge as well. It's like, just put a bridge in there.

It's missing your bridge, mate. But, you know, they don't have to put a bridge in, but it just seemed a bit sudden. Or a tunnel, at least. It's just something. It kind of goes back to that whole sound arising from place. Yeah. And they have definitely turned towards Liverpool

and kind of lent into that. But it's not completely lazy. Obviously, there's a million bands that have come from there that have completely coasted on that. If you come from somewhere that has such a heritage, you kind of don't have to be good you just have to be confident you just have to go yeah and and for wait for somebody you know to go yeah that sound is is what we want on our label right now um and they are shooting for for

timelessness as well yeah that's the thing is that it does sound kind of slightly out of time it doesn't sound distinctively 2003 but it isn't like a really wincy throwback either no um a dreaming of you which is better than this definitely um pete doherty claims to have written that and sold it to them for i don't know a bag of something a massive breakfast i've been to that cafe it's really good he wasn't there at the time unfortunately yes it is a nice it is a nice gaffe and they have proper sauce you didn't do the challenge, though. I did not undertake the Pete Doherty challenges, I guess it is now called. Listen to a baby's shambles single without throwing up your breakfast. Oh, I'll tell you what, though.

I bet that was a fucking cheat, though. Because, you know, Pete Doherty, he's got like an Alaskan Malamute or a Husky, a large dog. Right. And I'm sure you could just pass half the bacon under the table to the dog. The thing that this reminded me most of, actually, is Dodgy. Right. Who were, you know, the kind of Britpop-adjacent dorks who were extremely uncool but actually pretty good at songwriting. They're more like that than Cast, which is better.

The presentation of it is a step down from Super Furry Animals, isn't it? They've got the video screens up again, but it's like really thin transmissions of their video for this song you know when someone films summer for the news and they've got the phone cameras upward yeah the orientation's wrong yeah yeah and you're just there saturday going oh you stupid cunt turn your phone round yeah yeah what the fuck is wrong with you i do give them credit because they are um as i'm sure you're going to mention they're still going and um yeah I was slightly surprised, but quite pleased to find. And they were quite freaked out by how big they got, how quickly. Which I'm sure is the, which obviously is the experience of a lot of artists.

And it's got to be a huge head fuck. It's going to be really difficult. And James Skelly said that what they couldn't deal with was the, how other people project their idea of you onto you. And then that's, that's who you are. And so then you have to sort of go back and reclaim who you think you are. And so they sort of did that. And their most recent album is a double,

they just put a fair dose to them. They just put out a double album about an imaginary decaying seaside resort. And it's very, it's very soft and very gentle psychedelia it sounds like people who used to smoke a lot of weed but then knocked it on the head because it was making them go a bit wrong yeah and i respect the fact that they are still they are still at it and they're doing it on their own terms well i mean a band like this in 2003 if they can get about i don't know 10 000 people to go out and buy their new single at the same time

they're in the top 10 yeah and you know if you've just been on the cover of the enemy that's going to be easy to to get isn't it and then within that world you're suddenly a big deal and you're potentially a festival headliner yes and then it just it can spiral yeah absolutely yeah yeah but the problem is you've got to keep it up i think they they kind of just went no we're not going to do that we're going to do the other thing yeah i'm sure a lot of people would be better off for doing that. Because you have to resist a lot of pressure. Because then once other people are counting on you to make them money,

then it's very difficult. But luckily for them, they're an indie band on an actual indie label. So they've got the best of both worlds, haven't they? They're calling the shots, in a way. Good on them. They are playing the Shine On Weekender in November, by the way. Along with the likes of, just check this out, see if this makes your brain twang at all, They are playing the Shine on Weekender in November, by the way, along with the likes of, just check this out,

see if this makes your brain twang at all, Glass Vegas, Pigeon Detectives. Oh, fucking hell. Cast, Republica, Dub Pistols, Ned's Atomic Dustbin, Goldie Lookin' Chain, Bentley Rhythm Ace, Peter Hook and his amazing Peter Hook band, Sunscream. What was their thing? I don't know

Black Grape Alison Limerick Oh look a woman Oh no Republica Two women 808 State and The Farm I would go and watch Las Vegas and Goldie Looking Chain

Out of those But very little else I would go and see 808 State And maybe The Coral I'd go and see The Coral Yeah So the following week Pass It On dropped 11 places

to number 16 the follow-up secret kiss only got to number 25 in october of this year and they'd have to wait until 2005 for their next and last top 10 hits when in the morning got to number six in may of that year but they only had one more top 40 hit in them, even though they're still going, and their most recent LP, Coral Island, got to number two in May of this year. Hi, I'm Wiersyes and here is this week's official Top of the Pops Top 20. 20's Escalade, Full No More.

19, Delta Goodrum, Lost Without You. Pump It Up's at 18, Joe Budden. 17's Can't Get It Back from Mystique. 21 questions at 16 from 50 Cent. 15's Madonna, Hollywood. New at 14, James Addiction, Just Because. New again at 13, Golden Retriever from the Super Furry Animals. Ignition Remix at 12 from R. Kelly.

M&M's at 11, Business. At 10, Fly on the Wings of Love from XTM and DJ Shucky. 9's The Fast Food Song from the Fast Food Rockers. Javine's at 8, Real Things. New at 7, Invisible from D-Side. 6 is Feel Good Time from Pink featuring William Orbit. 5's The New Ent on from the coral fours bring it to life from the nations wayne wins at three no letting go and the highest new entry at number two goes to benny badassi presents the biz and satisfaction and don't forget to check out the new chart this sunday with me on radio one

that was the chart that was top of the pops i'm liz bonin i'm fern coul Do you know, I don't think I can remember a time when this lady wasn't at number one I know, a big well done to the booty shaking Beyonce Knowles See ya Yes So crazy right now Most incredibly It's your girl B

It's your boy Young You ready? It's your girl, B. It's your boy, Young. You ready? Sing it, y'all. After a ridiculously fast top 20 rundown from Wes Butters ended in a plug for his chart rundown on Sunday, Carton and Bonny muse upon the longevity of this week's number one and they do some appallingly workmanlike arse-shaking

as the camera zooms in on a repeat of the top-of-the-pops performance of this week's number one, Crazy in Love, by Beyonce. Born in Houston in 1981, Beyonce Knowles began her music career at the age of seven when she won a school talent contest singing Imagine by John Lennon and beating out contestants twice her age. A year later, she auditioned with her schoolmate Kelly Rowland for a spot on a local group called Girls' Time, and they both landed the gig,

playing around the Houston talent show area and eventually being entered in Star Search, the American talent show area and eventually being entered in Star Search, the American talent show which also broadcasts the first nationwide appearances of Britney Spears, Backstreet Boys, Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera, Tiffany and Usher. Although they didn't win they kept going and in 1995 Beyonce's dad packed in his job to manage the group trimming it down to four and getting them support slots for assorted female R&B groups and a year later they landed a record deal with Columbia and changed their name to Destiny's Child.

They made the first dent on the UK charts in 1998 when No No No entered the chart at number five sparking a run of eight top 10 hits over here including number ones with Independent Woman in December of 2000 and Survivor in April of 2001. Round about the same time it was announced that Destiny's Child would have a break so the three remaining members could embark on solo careers and dabble in films and whatnot, with Knowles becoming the most successful of the trio. This is the follow-up to Work It Out,

which got to number seven in July of 2002. It's the lead-off single from her debut LP Dangerously In Love, which came out last month, and leans hard on a sample of the 1970 Chi-Lite single Are You My Woman and includes some rap from her knock-off Jay-Z, repaying the favour she did on his last single, 03 Bonnie and Clyde. It entered the chart at number one two weeks ago.

This is its third week upon the summit of Mount Pop and here's the repeat of her performance on the main stage earlier this month that um chart countdown from wes butters um when he goes at the start higher i'm wes i mean i'm just thinking who the fuck because i'm yeah i didn't know he was um turns out yeah wes butters um who was presenting the chart on radio one at that point and uh obviously he's missing a trick by not having a jingle that goes everyone knows it's butters that's me apparently um where the wife comes from and when the wife comes from which is Croydon and the 90s um butters means ugly or disgusting so he must have had a tough time in the public eye

I can only imagine um but the thing that struck me about the countdown because you see tiny little video clips almost sort of gif length clips of each song um only three of them are not top of the pops footage yeah which was jane's addiction um something called xtm which is a dance thing i've never heard of as like a cartoony video and r kelly which you know all things considered it's for the best that he wasn't in the studio. Otherwise, we probably wouldn't be talking about this episode. But, yeah, I just thought that, the fact that 17 out of 20 are from this sort of IKEA Top of the Pops footage, just goes to show how well Cowie's system is working at this point.

It's just, it's on a roll, isn't it? They've just got this constant production line of content. So, yeah. And they're massive stars as well you know you've got madonna in there and eminem and you know all right um s club eight but um and no no proper big stars like 50 cent and so on and um and and pink and uh yeah yeah clearly um cowrie's whole thing is it's it's a machine that's well oiled by this point i would say but it does make it like i said before it doesn't make it all quite samey and it's quite self-congratulatory as well isn't

it it's like look at all the people we've had it's like yeah yeah we know yeah they're sort of trying to co-opt pop it's like this is the one your one-stop pop shop and you know just it's it's a bit samey but this fucking song jesus i mean it's, it's a toss-up between this and Hey Y'all for the best single of the century so far, I contend. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's this. And I mean, this is, it's an important moment as well, really, just in all kinds of ways.

Which, you know, for one of those, you know, you look up the story of it and it's one of those things that almost didn't happen. Hungover producer was instructed to just knock it out in a couple of hours and uh yeah yeah um and you know she wasn't keen on the horns in the first instance because it didn't no one else was doing it you know it seemed a little bit too retro it's like no that was absolutely the right call but obviously we have to mention the choreography because the thing is that since the dawn of pop culture in i don't know let's say 1957 um arses had been shaken left to right to and fro and as of 2003 when beyonce dropped

the video of crazy in love and and performed it about the place the world understood that it was possible for arses to go up and down. It was the birth of arse longitude. She single-handedly ushered in the arthropocene. This is an announcement of a lot of things. This is a real watershed. And it's incredible, really, that it is pre the watershed on top of the pops this is it's so far beyond any sort of stab at sexiness that has happened in this episode thus far and it's it's an important it's a real declaration that this is gonna be the most important pop star of her generation and you

can see that now this is the track that we'll remember when we're old and we think about these things. This is it. You brought us round to the subject of arses, Sarah. Oh, you've got to get it out of the way. Yeah, let's get it out of the way. There was a lot more gratuitous arse shots in the Benny Benassi thing. And Beyonce's got jeans on, but it doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter. She could have sackcloth on and it'd still be... My God, look at that woman. Yeah, fucking hell. You're also getting arse shots in the Star Bar, let's still big. My God, look at that woman. You're also getting our shots in the star bar, let's not forget. Cotton and Bonin doing a bit of comedy booty shaking there with a camera zooming in on them

while they're letting us know it's been number one forever. Very poor. It's a bit of a pro-am tournament this, isn't it? Oh, bless them though. It's nice to see them getting into the spirit of the thing. But also going left to right still, because, you know, it takes a while.

It takes a while for the world to catch up when something like this happens. Even if it's happening right and right. It's like they hadn't got the memo. It's so magnificent. It's like a whale breaching on, you know. Oh, my God. Just the awe.

You know, you don't get over it. I mean, there are four other women on the stage, Leggin' and Coe in it, but it might as well be me, Simon, Taylor and Neil up there doing the mud rocker, because it doesn't make a blind bit of difference. You're not looking at them, you're looking at her. They're the backing arses.

Yeah. But it's important, like it would look, it would be too much if it was just her. So, you know, it's good that they are there as a team doing it together. And she's sort of carried that idea through. They've been sort of tinkering with this over the years. I don't know if you've seen the Coachella performance from 2018. She's got like 50 or 100 dancers and horn players.

Wow. And just really messing with the format. They slow it down, they speed it up, throwing in samples and stuff. It's absolutely staggering and it really shows her inventiveness and her desire to keep pushing it. But also then you can go right back to this

and it's perfect. It's just such a perfect thing. And what I was saying before about music being made to kind of evoke the video, so the video becomes more important. And this isn't like that, but there's a perfect dovetail of the imagery from the video and the choreography and the song. The song would still be great without the video but it's

just one of the big moments in in mainstream pop culture the whole thing i saw destiny's child play a skate park in labrador grove once this was um the notting hill carnival of whatever year it was that i guess no no no by destiny's child was in the charts, which I thought was amazing, by the way. It had this real kind of almost Paisley Park-ish psychedelic feel to it. No, no, no. And yeah, I thought a lot of Destiny's Child stuff was just lovely. And they were there in this fucking skate park as part of the Notting Hill Carnival. And they were all wearing just sort of double denim outfits and doing a sort of pa on on top of one of the kind of

moundy bits of a skate park and um at that point there was no real indication that this one beyonce was going to go on to be this you know obvious massive star um except i guess if you knew what was going on behind the scenes and you knew that her dad was basically determining their career, then you could have predicted it. But just to look at, they were very much a group. But by this point, we're seeing on top of the pops, she is totally dominant. She is, you know, a world star on top of the fucking world.

She's radiantly beautiful. Yeah, she's got those silvery jeans on and the crop top. And we are getting a bit of Builder's Arse crack there at times, which would have been more appropriate for Benny Benassi. It's like she's hitting back at them for stealing her arse-shaking thunder. One thing that really impressed me, she's in these massive stilettos, right? Yeah, fucking hell. She's in these massive stilettos dancing about,

and she drops to her knees for a bit of wailing, and then she gets up again without using hands singing at the same time and it is live i'm pretty sure it's live because her vocal her vocals a bit off at times but not too bad you know she does a lot of ad-libbing towards the end which is really thrilling yeah she's singing over backing tapes there's a bit during jay-z's bit where she just does this little grin at the camera and pokes her tongue out slightly. Like, yeah, I know I'm amazing and I'm smashing this, you know? Yes. Some rap in this case was provided by Jay-Z,

and apparently it was written and recorded in 10 minutes. And to my mind, it sounds like he was out having a shit for at least eight of them because it's his usual tedious gibberish. You know, he's got loads of money. He's dead good. He's a star like ringo he's mad he's cut from a different cloth his texture is the best fur like chinchilla etc etc oh i don't know i quite like the line stick bony but the pocket is fat like tony soprano

and i've been iller than chain smokers i I quite like that. He was the first big rapper that I didn't reckon. When he came out, it was around the time when hip hop had started devouring itself. And he was just basically sampling old hip hop tunes. Well, he was sampling fucking Annie, wasn't he? Yeah. Which I quite liked. I like Hard Knock Life. But by this time, he's one of the few rappers who can actually afford to clear samples.

So it's like, yeah, he's one of the few rappers who can actually afford to clear samples. So it's like, yeah, he's no good. There was a lot of kerfuffle around this time when it was announced that he'd name-checked David Beckham in a forthcoming tune. And, you know, cue lots of discussion in the papers about how football was really seeping into the American consciousness. But then it turned out he only mentioned it because of the rockefeller connection with victoria beckham and he was looking for something to rhyme with every suit covers my rectum so there we go i mean usually you get some rapping to pep up a single and make it funky but this to my mind this just gets in the way of everything it's the wet tea towel of landfill rap thrown over the glorious chip pan fire of r&b i don't know it's like you're having a conversation with this brilliant woman and you you're really interested

in her and then all of a sudden her fucking boyfriend doesn't like it and he has to stick his oar in and it's like no mate i'm not trying to cop off with your girlfriend i just find her more interesting than you at the very least you could have said oh yeah you see her there this brilliant woman i'm going out with her yeah you know it doesn't take that long to rhyme beyonce with soon she's gonna be my fiancee fucking your rappers that i shit them like i it's supposed to be like i know it was a last minute addition and everything but that's not it's it's fucking rap you know isn't this the soul of spontaneity and you know it's like she's right there

she's right there and he's not he's not bothered to turn up has he to be fair I mean he does do an excellent hype job at the start

most incredibly to girl B which is obviously what I want to hear when I come into a room in massive heels yes hey

next time we go out for a drink Sarah I'll make sure I get in the pub early and i'll shout that as soon as i see you in the windows excellent and just make sure everyone is quiet as well by the time well i won't have heels on there will be by the time i'm finished don't worry about that but yeah so so that's good you know strong start there but then he just kind of in the middle it's like he just lapses into navel-gazing, you know, about his own skills,

which I am now calling into question, you know. I'm surprised they didn't slag off D-side as well. Yeah. Get another lick in on those poor lads. I don't know. I think it provides a little bit of a bridge and a little bit of kind of, it builds up the anticipation for when she's going to come back in, because you know she's coming back here. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I think it has a function in the record, that bit of some rap in terms of what it's for in terms of him being able to clear samples because he can afford it sure um but he didn't produce this let's not forget it's rich harrison who i mean i've mentioned um pharrell and timberland earlier on in this episode as being the the two guys who are really running American pop, particularly black American pop at this time. But Rich Harrison isn't one of those top guys. He did go on to produce One Thing by Amory, which is amazing. Oh, that's the other great tune of this time. But this record, if he'd only done this in his career, who cares?

Because it's just phenomenal. It's one of those ones I would also put Can't Get You Out of My Head by Kylie and Bad Romance by Lady Gaga in this category that I can just remember exactly where I was when I first heard it. And I'm like, fucking hell. You know, what is this? And it's not just a matter of lazily whacking a well-known sample over the top

because the little bit of brass from that Chai Lights record, it doesn't even dominate the Chai Lights record. If you play that Chai Lights record, you're kind of disappointed that that bit of brass isn't happening all the way through it's just one little bit of it so that's a good find from the producer yeah i remember being slightly confused by the lyrics at the time because being a big liverpool fan i was convinced she was singing sammy whoopie is crazy right now but she's actually going got me hoping you'll page me right now she's obsessed with pages because um bugaboo right bugaboo by destiny's child that's 1999 uh you make me want

to throw my pager out the window right in 1999 you can imagine yeah pages were still a thing 2003 yeah she's going on about pages i it's weird yeah surely pages are gone by now but yeah well this is the 3g era, isn't it? Yeah. I think paramedics and stuff still, doctors still had them, but, you know. She's a doctor of pop and of arse shaking. It's great, though, because the horns actually sound like Beyoncé coming towards you. Yes.

That's what that means now. Like, here I fucking come in my heels if she was a wrestler that'd be her entrance music yeah yeah yeah it really like the smashing a glass for steve austin i think it is like it is one of those kind of happy accents where everything just kind of came together in the most brilliant way if they'd intended that it wouldn't have worked but because they didn't it's, it's just naturally, you know. But speaking of Jay-Z, I mean, I don't think much of it as itself, but I can't imagine the track without it at this point.

But I wrote the guidebook for, you know, those kind of big orchestra plays, pop hits, events that you have a lot of these days. There was one of those at the Royal Albert Hall and I wrote the guidebook for it. Oh, yeah. So just like a little bit on each. And one of the tracks was crazy enough.

I didn't go to the event actually, but kind of wish I had. I didn't put this, but it really amused me to think of putting, you know, featuring her partner Jay-Z, a star in his own right. Wow. That would have been, yeah,

I just thought, no, I'll just leave that out. I'll let him off this time. And the thing is, I heard Alicia Keys' version of Empire State of Mind that hasn't got him on it, and it's just not as good. So I don't know what to do with that. You might think he's just splurging his sort of lumpen, fairly useless rap all over things. But, yeah, maybe it's just what you're used to.

But when I heard the Alicia Keys track without him on it, I thought it i thought yeah i'm not saying there shouldn't be some rap on it but just get a better rapper in imagine q-tip on this what would q-tip oh well there you go fucking hell but crazy loves just a fucking monster it's a juggernaut isn't it it's just it's one of those things it cannot be resisted if you're in its path you're fucked you know it bends you to its will i mean i can understand especially after all these years i can understand someone feeling they've heard it too many times right no no but if anyone said they didn't like this record i just wouldn't trust them it doesn't compute yeah me you could not like yeah yeah there's something a bit off if if you don't feel any feelings for it at all not all of this stuff know, can stand up next to this by any means.

I mean, the sexual politics of single ladies, I mean, don't even fucking start me on that, you know. I know people think very highly of her Lemonade album and stuff. You know, she's done some interesting stuff since, but this just towers, doesn't it? It really does. Yeah. I mean, to my mind, she's a one-hit wonder.

My God. No, she she is to me come on because I've never heard anything else by her I couldn't sing you one note of any other song that she's done

High Court Needham I could have another you in a minute was that her yes yeah there you go then that's the other thing I know her about

but that's it that's all I know about so just crazy in love and I could have another you in a minute yes doesn't matter what else she's done

because she did this. I mean, yeah, she's gone on to do some very sort of, some very, talking about sexual politics, she's gone on to really delve into that, you know, where it's, and it's really interesting in the kind of course of her career where it's like marriage is lovely

and men are great. And then to go, oh shit, they fuck you over and this is what I've got to say about it. She's very righteous. She's got to the position of power where she could have 50 Black Panthers with her at the fucking Super Bowl and pull that off. Yeah, yeah.

And she's very pro Black Lives Matter. You don't have to be. When you're that big, you can sort of go, it's not for me to say, or you can actually go, fuck this, and you can stake your claim in that way. Yeah, totally. She's important in so many ways, and she's a good philanthropist, and, you know, she's done a lot of extremely interesting stuff,

not all of which is, yeah, you're not going to throw on lemonade to, you know, before you go out on a Friday night, but, you know, it just shows that she's got a kind of breadth and depth of, you interesting stuff going on but yeah it always comes back to this this is just the greatest yeah she's also responsible um inadvertently for one of my favorite bits of music writing ever when she um headlined Glastonbury in 2011 and Clive James of all people wrote a review of it I mean I guess he was writing a review of the TV coverage rather than the gig, but you know. And if I can just read out what he wrote. The whole deal is organised like D-Day,

but without the mistakes. It's got everything, except the kind of emotion we would get from Amy Winehouse if she were organised to cross the road successfully. Beyoncé and Pathos are strangers. Winehouse and Pathos are flatmates

and you should see the kitchen. I just enjoyed this so much. Like, I teared up a bit watching this because she's so, she's so blazingly brilliant and nothing, and so beautiful and so sexy and nothing else in this episode even seems to belong to the same planet, does it? Yeah.

I think Beyce may actually be where human evolution has peaked i think it's all all downhill from her so the following week crazy in love dropped to number two usurped by never gonna leave your side by daniel beddingfield the follow-up baby boy with sean Paul, got to number two in October. A year later, Destiny's Child reunited for the LP Destiny Fulfilled and then split up, leading Knowles to have 31 top 40 hits, four of which would get to number one. Look at all pretty and loud I'm looking Look at all pretty and loud Hey

Will Beyonce make it four in a row? Or will Daniel Bedingfield Triple eight Or will the stereophonics be top of the pops? To find out and for the best of the rest of the charts Don't miss Top of the Pops Friday, 7.30, BBC One. We do our very best to give accurate critiques of what we've just seen

and that's what we're going to continue to do. We're just having a bit of slack by the fellow who did Fame Academy. We came off stage and he said that we weren't quite there. But we are on Top of the Pops, so what's the news? We go straight to a voiceover of Bonin and Cotton spoilering next week's episode and begging us to tune in next week.

And then we go to a graphic of the word inquest and footage of Park and Grant walking out of the building, shilling Fame Academy again, and then cutting to D-side flouncing down a corridor, telling us that they've just been slagged off by Pogs, but they've just been on top of the Pops. So what does he know? Yeah.

They've been on top of the Pops more than he has. So fuck off. Yeah, properly fuck off. This does remind me a little bit of the one time that I did a comment is free for The Guardian, and the editor made me go into the comments and respond to the comments. And it was so difficult because, you know,

the ones that were mean and I responded to them as, you know, and so I told them off. And then the editor told me off for telling them off. But I have to, I was really put in this impossible position and I didn't want to. I wanted to just say what i wanted to say and then fuck off and i was not allowed to just like comment is free but you can only be free once and then after that you've got to be super diplomatic comment ain't free there's a hefty

fucking fee um and you know poor d side having to come on again it's like oh no we'll give them a right to reply and it's like oh poor lads you know because they're sort of going down the step there's one of them is sort of um doing this sort of like fake boxy boxy to the camera. Yeah. And it's like they've been told to like laugh it off in a particular way and just like, oh, but it will be people will think you're great. And it's like, but they just, it's like, this is not what they signed up for at all.

No. But I do love them for the fact that, you know, one of Chart Music's catchphrases has actually been made real for once. They've been on top of the Pops more than he has. They've manifested it. What's the tune on? If you're looking for anyone else, it's us. The tide is high but I'm holding on

What's up, Paulie? Get on up when we're down, baby I've got you to kiss goodnight. I've got you to understand. Horrific. Sorry, man. Sorry, man, that messes with the D-side. Find out where they live.

We cut back to Park and Grant sitting on a sofa watching pre-recorded footage of randoms outside Television Centre singing very badly and making absolute arses of themselves, which has obviously been collated by the camera crew so Park and Grant can have something to sneer at. A regular feature of shows like this, isn't it?

Look at these twats who think they're summer. Is Top of the Pop's self-esteem this low at this point? Yeah. This is so weak, isn't it? Yeah. The show ends with Ken from D-Side throwing punches at the camera and saying it's a sorry man that messes with the D-Side, while his bandmate, Ken from D-Side,

says we'll find out where he lives as the camera fades down and that pop craze youngsters closes the book on this episode atop of the pops and also closes the book on the reign of chris cowher because four days later the bbc recruited andy peters over the head of cowher in a last ditch attempt to shore up the ratings, which caused Cowair to walk out and Peters to mind the shop in preparation for a massive relaunch in November. Article in The Guardian the following week, the BBC One controller Lorraine Hegeser even suggested yesterday that Top of the Pops' long-term future on the channel was not secure. It's on BBC One now, but BBC One has to appeal to all of the people some of the time. She conceded that a move to

BBC Three was possible, but added, for the moment, it will stay on BBC One. The thing is, are the charts as valid as they once were? Last Friday's edition attracted, get ready for this, 2.8 million viewers. Far fewer than the 4.5 million who watched the programme when it was relaunched in October 2001. The show has suffered from drastic changes in record buying habits in the first quarter of this year the sales of singles by number and value fell by 42 percent prompting crisis meetings in the bpi fucking hell that november relaunch will be covered at some point but not for a while because let's go back to the distant past yeah there's gonna have to be some severe loin girding before we tackle that one 18 years ago is way too recent this let's be honest I'm sorry Al that Sarah and I dragged you

so close to the present but you know so what's on television afterwards? Well, BBC One kicks on with EastEnders. Then it's the final episode of the second series of My Family. The Robert Lindsay-Zoe-Wannamaker sitcom. Then it's a repeat of the final episode of the third series of Alveda's Aimed Pet, the one where they reunited after 16 years to relocate a transporter bridge to Arizona. After the news, it's the chat show patrick kilty almost live followed by close to the edge the first of three comedy specials featuring jim davidson 2003 everyone fucking hell then it's boxing from the sports village in Norwich. The 2000 murder film Exposure.

And they hand over to BBC News 24 at 5 to 3. BBC 2 hits us with The Flying Gardener. Where Chris Beardshaw gets in a helicopter to look at someone's garden in Herefordshire. Because the BBC has that much money to piss up the wall. Then they follow that up with gardener's world the documentary series stalin inside the terror news night news night review then the 2000 australian comedy film the wog boy about a greek australian who suddenly becomes famous and then they hand over to bbc learning zone at 3 a.m itv continues withV continues with Tonight with Trevor McDonald, a repeat of

A Touch of Frost, where David Jason finds out if someone with Down Syndrome has done a murder, then a repeat of The Undertaker docusope Don't Drop the Coffin, ITV weekend news, the 1996 comedy film Joe's Apartment, highlights from today's action in the tour de france and all the usual nighttime ramble channel four has just started grand slam the show hosted by james richardson and carol vorderman where two champions in other tv quizzes face off against each other then it's the first part of the grand final of the fourth Big Brother. Then it's Scrubs. Then the final part of Big Brother.

After V. Graham Norton, it's the last in the present series of Bo Selector, featuring Craig David turning up to have the piss taken out of him and David Sneddon. Then it's Today at the Test, Big Brother's Little Brother, and a repeat of tonight's Big Brother, then some Brazilian football. So, me dears, what are we talking about in an empty playground tomorrow? Because it's Saturday. If I was literally still at school, you know, if I was literally 13 or 14, I'd be talking murder dolls because exciting, and Benny Benassi because tits and arse.

I went to a boys school. As a grown up just wanging on about the genius of Super Theory Animals probably and Beyonce. Depending on what age I was I suppose I might be pondering the great artistry of Beyonce Knowles and the fact that there's nothing else that that

woman was put here on this earth to do What are we buying on Saturday? Crazy enough. Super Theory Animals and Beyonce and maybe woman was put here on this earth to do what we're buying on saturday crazy enough super fairy animals and beyonce and maybe benny benassi and what does this episode tell us about july of 2003 it's a load of ass now um what what it tells us is that some things never change um from 1973 to 2003 if you want to stand out, either have tits and arse if you're women or wear a mad costume if you're a bunch of guys.

I don't make the rules, Chris Cowie does. And what would you have done to rescue Top of the Pops or is it too late? It would have been good to just go kind of back to basics in terms of get the best people who are going to do the most interesting stuff live and then just the best videos you know the whole the whole uh let's not have any videos anymore thing is death i think just like one or maybe two you know you don't even have to show the whole

thing but just yeah that's been part of it for so long and i think it was a mistake to get rid of it so but yeah just get the best people in who not necessarily the you know the best singers or the best dancers or the people who can make their arse go a different way to how arses have always gone. But obviously, ideally, that's what you want. Just the greatest range that you can display, which there is some of that in evidence here. But just really double down on that.

I would scrap the star bar. Yes, I would allow more videos and just have much more of the studio audience and much more of the presenters being in amongst it so that it feels like a party you've been invited to not one that you haven't yeah i mean yeah i came to this episode pretty much stone cold but it wasn't as bad as i thought it was going to be if this was a new bbc one music show you'd look at it and go well this is all right actually there's some there's been some interesting bands and singers on and everything i'm coming away from it feeling i've got a handle on what's happening

music wise at the moment but here's the problem it's not a music show it's top of the fucking pops yeah yeah the other thing of course is to uh keep a bit of suspense in it yes yeah i love the whizzy suspenseful countdown at the end you know there was a period kind of you know in the 80s where they absolutely nailed that and it's like i don't know what you know stay tuned for some good stuff that you can trust us will be good yeah you know run with that like you're supposed to be able to trust there's a certain degree of like when you turn on top of the pops it's like you're going to have there'll be some stuff you like some stuff you don't like but it's all going to be worth watching so like why spaff it all in the first you know they did it a couple multiple

times as well is that weird it's like you know when um people started to do documentaries in that american style where after every advert which is like every 20 minutes or something there's a recap of everything you've just seen. And, you know, as if you're just coming into it for the first... It's like, don't fall for that. You know, it's all right to trust people to have an attention span. There was a series on Bravo about the band Towers of London, which I'm in briefly.

And, yeah, every episode of that, I think an episode was like maybe 20 minutes long. I swear, like like 12 minutes of it was recap or throwing forward and only about 8 if that that's being generous

was actual programme it took them fucking ages to get the whole series out because it was just inching along you know what I mean and yeah it drives me mad

it's a bit like that and that Pop Craze Youngsters is the end of this episode of Chart Music time for me to do my usual promotional flange And that, pop craze youngsters, is the end of this episode of Chart Music. Time for me to do my usual promotional flange. www.chart-music.co.uk facebook.com slash chart music

Reach us on Twitter at chartmusic, T-O-T-P money down the G-string patreon.com slash chart music Ta very much, Simon Price. You're very welcome. God bless you, Sarah B. Oh, God bless me. My name's Al Needham,

and I implore you to make sure you get all ranger doings. Chart music. GreatBigHour.com I'm Mark Haynes, and for the last 32 years, I've been a fan of professional wrestling. My friend Pete Donaldson from the Football Ramble, he hasn't. But in our podcast, Wrestle Me, the two of us subject the greatest spectacle in sports entertainment,

Wrestlemania, to the kind of rigorous scrutiny that ruins it entirely. GQ called WrestleMe enrapturing. Shortlist said it's beautiful, and it's a hit with common people too, with well over 400 five-star reviews on iTunes. WrestleMe, available from all good podcast providers. Hello all you teddy guys and girls out there. Oh, welcome to the Tweenie chart countdown.

Today you're going to hear all the Tweenie's favourite songs. And first on stage is Young Milo. He's chosen this number as his favourite song because he likes to move and dance. Teasman, I beg just tempt man, so I can get my, Dynastaction. Bait me, and agitate me, until I get my, Dynastaction. Dynastaction. Corn. I get very excited for.

Wow, naughty lady. Corn. A lot I'd like to say about Lex for her. Wow. Naughty lady. There's an awful lot I'd like to say about Lex and Cole. I'm afraid they'll probably bleep me out if I do. down and shut your drawers off until I get back. That is facture. That is facture. That is facture. That is facture. That is facture.

That is facture. That is facture. That is facture. That is facture. Here are some young ladies I've admired many times in Little Armchair.