Chart Music: the Top Of The Pops Podcast - Chart Music #62: November 3rd 1977 – WHOO! HEY!

Episode Date: November 6, 2021

The latest episode of the podcast which asks; if David picked potatoes on Jack Heap’s playing field for one hour, how many Fumanchews would he able to cram into his gaping maw? Once again, Pop-Crazed Youngsters, Team Chart Music has returned to the safety of the late Seventies, and your panel is a) having their crayons thrown out of the window after an incident that could have been ripped from The Shining, b) being disappointed by Scalextric, and c) getting their arse tanned over an art installation on some concrete staircases. And all the time, the terror of Punk is looming, and no-one – particularly the canine population – is safe.As it turns out, the only Punk-free zone at this time is the episode of The Pops we’re about to get stuck into. Like David’s Scalextric, the show – in Robin Nash’s safer-than-safe pair of hands – is running on rails by now. Unlike David’s Scalextric, everything fits together, and nothing is skidding off the table and smashing against the wall. This is Top Of The Pops in its purest form, Pop-Crazed Youngsters, and we savour every mouthful of it for over six hours.Musicwise, it’s a veritable bestiary of Pop Gargantua, with Xmas on the way, some huge LP drops this week, and the Monsters of the Hit Parade already starting to fight over your forthcoming record token. Paul Weller makes a doomed attempt to get the BBC to post his guitar to his girlfriend. The Carpenters say hello to some aliens. The Barron Knights dare to have a pop at The Old Sailor. Freddie Mercury pitches up dressed like a bottle of Sheridan’s. Legs & Co hit up a sari shop in Shepherds Bush for a game of Sexy Lady Croquet. Status Quo predate Abba with an avatar bassist. Actual David Bowie pitches up to the studio, but can’t be bothered to button up his cuffs. Showaddywaddy have a group huddle. And Abba get down to a proper session of Scandinavian Sorry. All brought to you by Peter Powell in his debut TOTP appearance, and he immediately hits the ground running, even if he has to be nudged by the gallery into putting himself about with the maidens of the studio.David Stubbs and Taylor Parkes join Al Needham for an intense drill into ’77, veering off on such tangents as the Great Dog Collar Crimewave of Coventry, why trying to crush a tennis ball on the school playground in order to impress girls is a wrong ‘un, NASA convincing aliens that British people are big Medieval jessies, the ELO-Faust War, Dave Lee Travis annoying Brian May, a review of Dave Bartram’s 2005 travelogue of caravan parks, Bruce Foxton stroke fiction, and the GOLDEN FLEECE OF CHART MUSIC has been located. Oh, the swearing in this one…   Video Playlist | Subscribe | Facebook | Twitter | The Chart Music Wiki | Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This will certainly have an adult theme and might well contain strong scenes of sex or violence, which could be quite graphic. It may also contain some very explicit language, which will frequently mean sexual swear words. What do you like to listen to? Um... Chart music. Chart music. Chart music. Hey! Up you pop crazy youngsters and welcome to the latest episode of Chart Music,

the podcast that gets its hands right down the back of the settee on a random episode of top of the pops i'm your host al needham and by my side today are taylor parks and rock expert david stubbs howdy doody boys the pop things the interesting things tell me tell me tell me tell me now well um there is one little thing um oh at the shepherd's bush empire scritty polity were playing oh fucking oh yeah and david probably didn't go when in fact he did he did i went to a gig yes yeah it was well it was a gig it was pretty immaculate hung around near the back you know i didn't really want to sort of join the throng at the front uh i thought that might be a bit much it's funny though I mean I was probably about average age at one point uh Green from the stage said something about um

anyone here remember student grants I think everyone would not only remember student grants but have been had one um I mean John Peel talking at one point about um you know he felt self-conscious being a gig being 40 years old at a rock gig. I mean, God, even if it was the 40-year-old there now, he'd say, hey, kid, what are you doing? You weren't even born when Sweetest Girl came out. Yeah. You know, it's too unlimited doing a gig around the corner.

Fuck off there. Shouldn't you be playing with your Nintendo game and what? It must be fucking weird going back to gigs, though, David. I was a little phased, and I'll be honest, I won't be hurry be hurrying back you know but i tended to go to sort of free improv gigs anyway and there was no problem socially distancing at them i can assure you but yeah something where there's a throng a sweaty adoring throng yeah i'm still a little bit wary of that taylor yeah you know i'm all right same as usual the only interesting thing that happened to me was the other day i was out and about and what with one thing and another uh had to have a piss so without wanting to give away too much detail i went into a toilet and as i was there in the process i heard the door behind me

fly open someone pushed past threw themselves onto the floor in front of me just sort of sprawled there with their eyes and mouth open pushing their face into a now unstoppable torrent of piss just getting totally drenched with this sort of blissful look on their face i thought wait a minute, I recognise that white hair and that sort of long, bobbly nose and horsey face, you know, like the crown and the orb and scepter. I thought, fuck, it's the fucking Queen. I thought, fuck, I didn't expect that. Yeah, incredible. I mean, it wasn't even a very nice toilet.

It was only in Stratford, Westfield. But but you know what you say what you like about the queen she looks so regal you can't buy that sort of breeding made me so proud and grateful to be british so afterwards i washed my hands and i went outside and straight away i got my phone out and i rang a couple of my friends and i said you won't believe what's just happened to me. And I was right, they didn't. And it struck me, it's so hard to share anything with your friends. Because this is the thing. This is the experience of everyday life.

separation and that that screaming gulf between your experiences and your private world and those of the only people that you have to turn to and all you can do is try to bridge that gap with words and stories and to a greater or lesser extent you always fail and that's how i feel all the time so this was just another day i forgot all about it I went home I got on with my ship in a bottle but I tell you what she's still the best diplomat we've got she works harder than what you do or I do or the rest of this country and anyone who criticizes her ought to be removed from the discussion I say I say god bless, Mark, and see you again next Thursday. Yeah, oh, indeed. Actually, there was a couple of other things, actually,

rock and roll related, because, you know, there's not a lot of rock in my life, I sometimes think. Which is wrong for a rock expert, isn't it? Oh, yeah, my daughter Alicia went to her first gig. Yeah, she went to Reading. It was very strange, and, of course, there's all that kind of sort of paternal concern, you know, for a teenage daughter, you know,

yomping off to these dubious vortex of sleaze and what have you. But, you know, it's weird. I mean, she showed me some of the videos. And, you know, she's just like shivering in his videos. I'm cold. I haven't slept in 48 hours. I haven't been to the toilet in three days. You know, it's just like, you know, please just pay the ransom.

But she absolutely loved it. You know, I just said, I'd take a jumper next time. But otherwise, yeah, do it again. You know, I just never went through this phase. I think I just went straight from childhood to wherever I am now. I didn't have this kind of intermittent period where something like that would remotely appeal to me. The other thing was that when I looked at the line-up, apart from Stormzy, I didn't recognise any of the names. It was just like Emily Bland,

Rob Reel, Tyler, the XXX, privately educated or whatever. It's very strange listening to that kind of music when Alicia plays and it seems to me there's no euphoria anymore. There's no banging euphoria. It all seems to sort of vacillate between melancholia and fury and they seem to be sort of two dominant motifs but then again he's and I'm talking I feel like you know JB Priestley talking about rock and roll music or something like that you know no Ted

Rogers talking about Mick Jagger you know I'm completely out of touch basically and the only other rock and roll thing that happened to me was I went up north. I sort of see my dad. He's not doing too well at the moment. And just turned 86. Yeah. So there you go. Yeah, I had to go out and do his window cleaner. And, you know, he got chatty.

He was pretty chatty. But, you know, this wasn't George Formby. You know, he wasn't strumming a ukulele. You know, he was quite erudite in his taste. You know, he was talking about Tangerine Dream. Fucking hell. There were pioneers, there were pioneers, Tangerine Dream. Okay, fair enough. And who else? Yeah, Kraftwerk, you know, and he said, yeah, yeah, Kraftwerk, there were pioneers, there were pioneers. And it went on to The Who and yeah, and he says, yeah, yeah, yeah you know what you know what they were i think i can guess pioneers or pioneers you know and it just occurred to me that like yeah we need window cleaners no

doubt about it but we do also need um contrary to a lot of opinion music journalists you know we need just that supply of language you know i think otherwise you know it's either pioneers or of course iconic yes so there you go you know even if you're into the music you might not necessarily have the language yeah yeah i've only got one pop an interesting thing to impart this episode but it's very pop and fuck me it's interesting oh now we all have this conversation over skype don't we uh yeah yeah well okay in that case i'm just gonna put my video camera on say what you see oh hello oh my god oh yeah i'm wearing a judy zook satin tour jacket fucking yes oh that is glorious and it fits did you get it tailored is it it's medium and i'm not so i'm

absolutely terrified of breathing at the moment yeah i'll take it off as soon as i finish this bit but yes all praise is due to pop craze youngster from around the way justin doddsworth his man ran a record shop in the oswestry area yeah apparently a lot of arty fufkins of the salop area used to uh swing by with bounty and uh he got given a load of stuff from it and unbelievably this was one of them the golden fleece of chart music has been unearthed from a back room in oswestry ladies and gentlemen wow that's quite superb yes i'm impressed that you've managed to kind of climb into it with such a plumb of course the downside to all this is the thought of all the sex yeah it's going to be offered to me when i'm going about time and me judy zook sat in tour jacket you know what i mean yeah you know

they'll be coming up to me and said is that judy zook sat in tour jacket and i go yeah yeah yeah oh how did you get that i do a a music podcast. Yeah, that's right. Shall I just lie down here now and let you get on with it? It's going to be like a high karate advert, isn't it? Also, keep away from naked flame. Definitely, yes. He told me that his mum used to get loads of picture discs, which he used to give out to girls he fancied at school.

And more importantly, loads and loads of bottles of whisky it was like when brian clough won bell's manager of the month every fucking month for about two years that was his mom's record shop for the newer pop craze youngsters judy zook satin tour jacket has been for a very long time chart music slang for payola from the world in action documentary uh called the chart busters about chart rigging in the 80s and we started using the term judy zook satin tour jacket and not believing that such a thing existed but here it is on my shoulders it's extraordinary it doesn't fit me at all now but let me tell you there is no Operation 2 life-threatening for me not to take it to fit into this fucker. Yeah, yeah.

It is Sharp Music's own amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, really, isn't it? It is, yeah. Even though it's just one colour. Yes. Blue. Yeah. Royal blue with blue sleeves. Yeah, yeah.

And a nice white love heart with Judy Zook's logo across it. Sadly, no embroidery of an overbite on the back. It must have been kept in a very safe place because I imagine all the others have perished. Oh it's an immaculate condition. It's pristine. I think the V&A could do an exhibition with this as the single

exhibit. Yeah definitely. They'd be queuing around the block like it's Tutankhamun. If we turn up at number one in the iTunes podcast chart anytime soon, that will just have been under our own steam. No need to worry about that. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the only pop and interesting thing I truly care about

is the latest batch of pop-crazy youngsters who have stuffed a handful down our g-string this month and this time in the five dollar section we have mark cowan burt baccarat comes andy heard spencer rogers will gigantic station master sy smith matt d sean moran, Beck Dodd, Matthew Duggan, Paul Mongan, Tim Ward, Matthew Marra, Joe O'Donnell, Lorcan Connolly, Michael Waugh, and Richard Williamson. Thank you, babies. I love each and every one of you. Magnificent people. And in the $3 section, we have April Wust, Steve McKevitt, Peter Adams, Tim Frings, Stephen Dyer, and James Dawes. Oh, you lovely people.

Oh, and Matt Savine, Victoria Clester, Lynn Robb, Dr. Greggles, Toaster in the Bath, and the Blood and Mud podcast. You jacked it right up this month, didn't you? And for that, we thank you so very, very much. We are the mountain. You are the rain. Step back inside me, Pop Craze youngsters. Amen to all of you. There's a lone raven just outside my window staring at me.

Oh, no. That's good to see. And one thing those brand-new pop-crazed youngsters get to do, along with all the other Patreon people, is to rig and a-jig the Chart Music Top Ten. Are you ready, boys? Yes. Yeah.

Hit the fucking music! We've said goodbye to the Cuppatino Kid, Friar David, Fox Biz, and the Pink People of Charlesmoor, which means two up, two down, two non-movers,

three new entries, and one re-entry. Down eight places from number two to number ten. Sharks piss fire. A new entry at number nine. Oven ready

women. Down three from number five to number eight. It's Jeff Sex. Yes! A re-entry straight in at number seven. Taylor Parks has 20 romantic moments. Ooh. And it's up one place from number seven to number six

for rock expert David Stubbs. Rock. Into the top five and back up from number six to number five here comes Jizzum no change at number four Bummer Dog

a new entry at number three The Continuity Westlife this week's highest new entry straight in at number two Romo Cop Which means Britain's number one They're still there at the top

The chart music number one The bent cunts who aren't fucking real Oh what a fucking chart that is Glorious, glorious The bent cunts who aren't fucking real. They're not going anywhere, are they? I bet they played Reading Festival. Nah, I bet they didn't.

I bet they weren't allowed. Yeah, maybe. Actually, I think it's just a really dirty pigeon. So, chaps, oven-ready women, what's their game? Feminist, isn't it? Yeah. Sar sarcastic feminists ooh the worst kind

continuity west life speaks for itself doesn't it yeah yeah yeah and romo cop clearly electro clash yeah so if you want

to end on all the sexy top ten action as well as getting the full episode in one go without adverts ages before anyone else.

See that keyboard. Use those fingers. Mash out patreon.com slash chart music and make our G-strings bulge. Ooh. Ooh. You two finished? I thought, Taylor, you just think you can join in.

Yeah. What, join in with that? Yeah. It's fun. It's fun, honestly. You know, just let your hair down. Ooh join in. Yeah. What, join in with that? Yeah. It's fun. It's fun, honestly. You know, just let your hair down. Ooh. Ooh.

Ooh. That was well funky, Gibbon. That was Taylor. Don't bother. Now, chaps, before we get stuck in, I need to make a couple of clarifications because I made a right balls up last episode and I need to beat myself with the rod of correction.

So you may recall that I said I'd done some work about 20 years ago for Maxim and hadn't been paid for it, and I gave them a nudge, and they said that they thought that I was Alex Needham. Well, the minute I published that episode, remembered it wasn't Maxim at all. It was for a pullout that I did for a magazine that shall remain nameless which I got paid for in the end anyway me and Alex Needham have had a chat about it and it turns out that it was the first he'd ever heard of it he didn't get paid anything

and I'm of the opinion now that um said accounts department of said magazine was stringing me along or something like that i don't know anyway just want to make absolutely clear that no one at the enemy received money on my behalf or took food off my table and i'd like to take the opportunity to apologize to alex needham the accounts department of maxim and to you the pop craze youngsters, because I hate being wrong about this sort of thing, man. It just fucking gnaws away at my soul. Oh, and I also implied that Freddie and the Dreamers came from Liverpool when they obviously came from Manchester. I know.

They obviously came from Manchester. And to be honest with you, I don't know which city I need to apologise to the most. So I'm like Kurt Cobane this episode i'm all apologies so this episode pop craze youngsters takes us away from all the modern rubbish we did last time and plunges us straight back into the comforting breast of november the 3rd, 1977. Oh, nom, nom, nom. I mean, chaps, on the surface, there's nothing particularly special about this episode for the era.

There's a lot of regular acts and chart music favourites that pitch up, and there's a fuckload of cover versions. Clearly, this is an episode where punk needs to happen and happen soon, except for the fact that it already has. Yeah, I think at this time, I didn't have rock-critical consciousness. that was a few months away yet for me um and in fact you know

this episode of top of the pops is pretty close to my kind of pop sensibility at the time much more so than the music press i wasn't really aware of you know i hadn't you know i mean i could pretend later on that i was all about sort of throwing gristle and wire and suicide in 1977 but i think everything had equal merit as far as I was concerned if it was in the charts it always had a bit of velocity and Paul Nicholas and Bob Marley you know it was all much the same sort of thing really

all part of the same sort of you know spectrum of entertainment. It felt very 1977 to me I would say this episode very much so. You know if it was a stick of rock it'd have 1977 running through it. Yeah this is the real 1977 as opposed to oh yeah you know if you want to see the the sort of the enemy world 1977 you have to watch top of the pops from 1978 yeah i watched a random top of the pops from 1978 last week and it had x-ray specs and the lurkers on it. This is the real 1977.

This is full of monster acts and records that people remember and stuff. I've actually got quite into this period of time lately, but mostly the American version, which we don't see all that much of in this episode, but it's useful as a comparison, I think, because this is one of the periods of greatest distance between british and american pop culture right and in the way that we had the avances which isn't quite here yet in this episode no that was when the changes came and that was how

things shifted and and settled in america they had this distinct period between watergate and reagan which i just think of as uh bicentennial you know it's like yeah big cars with brown interiors that look like wood and uh those suits that weren't just wide lapelled they were also about four inches thick the herb tar leg look yeah yeah yeah and and you you couldn't drive your car down the street without seeing a native american chief standing by the side of the road weeping about and it was you know the bionic man acting like he was going to make a fucking difference you know when we had punk they had rumors by fleetwood mac and it and it just looks nicer and smooth. It's just as depressing.

It's like a heat haze of sex-drenched, hairy, qua-lewd, addicted malaise, you know. But I quite like it. Yeah, they had Afternoon Delight. We had Angel Delight. I was just going to mention Afternoon Delight, actually, this dance and vocal band. If you go on YouTube,

there's a sort of video of them performing this and they're performing in the middle of a city and it's a tremendous sort of time capsule really and it exudes a lot of you know that's 1976 minus the um native american chief but um you know if i ever want to sort of get a sort of dose of pure america 1976 that very far off pre freddie laker America. Yeah. I always dip into that. And if you want to do it in a less classy way, also on YouTube, there's all these compilations of trailers and opening titles for the new network shows of each new season from the late 70s. So it's like the 36 new shows

of the hellish mid-season of 1979 and things like that. And they are chokingly evocative of this period. There's all these short-lived sitcoms, and they're all shot in smear-a-vision. They've all got theme songs that explain the premise of the show. So if the show's called Mickey, and it's about a bloke who works in an abattoir

and he's got an extra arm it goes uh do do do do oh mickey you work in an abattoir and you've got an extra arm yes i know why are you telling me this your best friend is an incubus who came out of a cursed bassoon and every show has got a distinct american location like which you see in the titles like snake handlers of pittsburgh pa yeah yeah isn't it yeah yeah or it's shot in in philadelphia or portland oregon or somewhere you get a helicopter shot in the titles which you're just supposed to recognize where it is and there's a really short list of themes and and tropes is put upon every man surrounded by loonies uh neurotic modern woman looking for love and trying to make her way in the 70s um you're a good look with that dog semi-unusual place of work fish out of water battle of the sexes and as you get to the late

70s every show features one black cast member but no more or less than one or else it gets confusing that's the how it is unless it's one of those shows where the gimmick is that they're all black and it's called like good brothers or something and the only point of the show is that they're all black and it's called like good brothers or something and the only point of the show is that they're black they don't do anything except be black what you talking about taylor yeah you know but at the at the beginning of every show will the cast appear in a little circle one by one and then at the end it says and introducing linda puccarelli as sandy i couldn't sit through a whole episode of any of these, but when you watch the titles en masse, they're fascinating as evidence of a culture

that had made a certain amount of progress towards a decent society and then got tired and just fallen into a slump. So it's almost time for everything to get nasty again and wake everybody up but unfortunately when that happens it's always a bit too late but that's what you always get you get a period of modest improvement to standards of living and personal freedom and then everyone gets progress fatigue and it all starts to sag and slide back towards the reactionary, you know. And then you get that period of empty sort of upbeat bollocks,

which usually heralds another clampdown, you know, like it's morning in America. Yeah. I think there's a link between progress fatigue and prog fatigue in a sense, because, you know, that's what made punk happen, you know. Yeah, the response is a lot of these new possibilities are boring. That realisation really hits people. Yeah, people were actually comfortably off

and there was relative social equality, but people got bored. People just got bored. But, I mean, actually, going back to sitcoms, I think that Taxi was the one that perhaps came along to drive out all of the kind of, you know, tropes that Taylor was talking about. I mean, the theme music, again, is pure distillation of that. of that yeah bob james bob james you know but there's a continuum from taxi through to cheers and then phrase it obviously is the era of course when they had

checkered thing on the side of the new york cabs which then then they discontinued i mean what mean spirit in what council decided now we don't need them anymore. Yeah, it's like when they stop British police cars from going, Ni No, Ni No. Yes. Why did you do that? Why? There's something to be said for that period just before things go backwards, right? When people stop being hungry and harassed enough

for just long enough to reflect on, in the end, the emptiness of society and their own existence which is always what it comes around to like in early lockdown i was watching quite a lot of seinfeld but i had to stop because i realized how much i miss living in the affluent west in the untroubled 90s not having to care about anything opened up all these fascinating vistas you know all these these in-depth conversations about being human and attempting to operate as an imperfect being in a twisted society you know and all these deep dives into intriguing trivialities and it's you don't get it now nowadays everyone's so fucking boring and strident

because there's actual immediate things to worry about. You know, everybody's really one-dimensional because they have to concentrate on survival. There's no time for anything interesting or discursive. But what I would say about this episode of Top of the Pops, if nothing else... Oh, we're talking about an episode of Top of the Pops, are we? Yeah.

I didn't know if you'd saw it sorry it does show us albeit british style some of that thumb twiddling malazer delic variation of thought and expression right because whatever else 1977 is it's never entirely predictable there's always a a few things. What the fuck is this? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you could say that this episode represents the absolute crest of the late 70s with record companies getting ready for Christmas

by pushing their biggest acts to the fore and they've all got single releases to promote those albums. And they're all here. And we're about to tuck into them. Let's go this is the first radio ad you can smell the new cinnabon pull apart only at wendy's it's ooey gooey and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long taxes extra at participating wendy's until

may 5ths and conditions apply. In the news, blackouts have been going off all over Britain this week due to unofficial action by power station workers. Meanwhile, BBC staff have joined in the fun, blacking out coverage of today's state opening of Parliament and this evening's episode of Nationwide. But thankfully, they've left Top of the Pops the fuck alone. Michael Barrett is still alive, Nationwide. Is he?

Yeah. It's like Kissinger or something, yeah. He's still with us. Jesus. Yeah. He's still danding or something. Yeah. It's still with us. Jesus. Yeah. Is Dildan in? Yeah, yeah, yeah. 300 tonnes of contaminated tinned corned beef that was imported into the country from Australia

have resurfaced across grocery stores and corner shops across the UK. The Metropolitan Police have recovered £3,000 from the home of Andrew Newton, the hitman who was paid £5,000 by an associate of Jeremy Thorpe to kill Norman Scott in October of 1974. Security forces in Northern Ireland report that the IRA are having a clean-up in their ranks by rounding up all the gangsters, rapists and muggers, and administering punishments such as kneecapping breaking fingers with hammers and shooting folk in the penis hey let's hope they don't get the wrong person but i'm sure they i'm sure they went through a lengthy detection process to make sure that didn't happen meanwhile roddy lledy Llewellyn, Princess Margaret's current shag, has

flown out to Mystique to be with her, unaware that she's been spending her time looking at John Bindon walking around with six pint pot handles around his cock. Hercules, the horse in Steptoe and Son, has been

saved from the knackers' yard thanks to the International League for the Protection of Horses, who stepped into Bayern before he was turned into tins of catamete. He will now be living on a farm in Surrey. Ray Cooney, the producer of the forthcoming West End musical Elvis, has unveiled the man who'll be playing the 30-year-old king, a club singer called Shakin' Stevens. He joins Tim Whitnall and PJ Proby in the star role,

with Tracy Ullman as one of the dancers. FBI agents investigating an illegal gambling ring have released film of Lee Majors gambling on American football while getting friendly with a blonde waitress, leading his wife, Farrah Fawcett, to kick the fuck off on him. He was last seen jumping over a building to get away from her dead slowly. A nightclub owner from Blantyre, Scotland, has announced that he's about to hire a submarine

from an undisclosed European country with the intent of charging 150 Scotland fans £595 each to take him to Argentina for next year's World Cup. Brian Clough has erected a sign on the pitch of the city ground which reads Gentlemen, no swearing please, Brian. And Nottingham Forest go on to batter Middlesbrough 4-0, opening up a four-point lead over Liverpool at the top of Division 1. But the big news this week is that the Sex Pistols have just released Nevermind the Bollocks and Virgin Records' advertising campaign is already causing mither.

Them big posters in the window, chaps. Do you remember them? I certainly do, yeah. Yeah. Ooh, did you have one in your area? Ooh, we had, yeah, two or three, yeah. At the Seen and Heard record shop in Leeds. Ooh.

Various hoardings and what have you. You know, there was Nipply Rectors, Buzzcocks. Good Lord. Filth. The cunt. All along Vicallane. Filth. The cunt. All along the Cologne. Filth. Shall I tell you my Nevermind the Bollocks story?

Yeah, yeah. So a few years ago, I was doing bits and bobs on Inside Out on BBC One, you know, the local magazine show that used to be... Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I fucking loved it. I used to do all types of mad shit. And one time they asked me to do a piece on the Nevermind the Bollocks trial, which happened in Nottingham because the manager of the Virgin Records shop here

had put up all these massive Nevermind the Bollocks posters. And then he got arrested and, you know, they had the obscenity trial there. So, you know, Nottingham once again being the cradle of punk this time. And, yeah, they asked me to do a piece on that. And they got someone lined up for me to interview richard fucking branson oh yes well yeah that was that was my reaction both of them because you know apart from johnny rotten he was going to be the absolute best person to talk to about this so said yeah you come down on a monday morning and uh richard will be there and you can have half an hour with him and all that

kind of stuff so oh brilliant so if it's a monday that means i can go and see my mates uh in london for the weekend so yeah got hammered monday morning i feel like absolute dog shit i've got this fucking evil racking cough that won't go away you know one of them really proper tickly ones yeah a malcolm cough if you will i pitch up at the virgin officers you know meet the camera crew and all that kind of stuff we get there and says oh rich is not around at the minute he's still in cambridge did you want to sit down and you know get comfy in that and fucking hours and hours tick on and it's obvious that he can't even be fucked to get into an helicopter to talk to me so they said right we'll do it. We'll put you in a little office.

We'll set up the screen and all that kind of stuff. So I'm there. I'm waiting. I'm waiting. I'm waiting. They've got connection problems on their internet, haven't they? They call us back. And before he pops up, they say, well, you've only got 10 minutes now.

And it's like, oh, for fuck's sake. So I've got a right cob on. He finally pops up on screen and introduces himself and the first thing that comes out of my mouth was bloody hell richard your internet's not very good who are you with which put a bit of a frosty edge on the interview it had to be said but i by this time i didn't give a fuck also it was uh punk rock, very much so. You know, you should have just given him the V sign and gone... We start the interview and I've got a list of questions. I want to know about the trial.

And he immediately launches into this spiel that he must have given thousands of times about how he was the only person who gave the sex pistols a break and all this kind of stuff. And then he says, oh, I can see you want me to move on. And I look down and I realised my hand's giving the wind it on gesture. But afterwards, I had another interview.

We had to go right across to the countryside to interview Trevor Dan. And he was miles better. You know, Trevor Dan, the sidekick of Matthew Bannister, Radio 1, because he was a Radio Nottingham DJ at the time. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. He was a far superior interview. I could have spent all night listening to him.

Especially as you could tell that he really didn't like Dave Lee Travis. This is just when chart music has started. So I wasn't on my game as much but I'd love to pin him down and hear his tales of Travis. I bet they're brilliant. I mean one thing he said, we got talking about Top of the Pops

and he said there was a plan for BBC television to actually launch a Top of the Pops network where you could get all the episodes available on the iPlayer. Why didn't they do that?

Yeah, yeah. Good grief. It's weird. Something like Branson, it's just awful the fact that he has to be engaged because of his role in the formation of punk.

You know, it's like Tim Martin or whatever, you know, Weatherspoons, you know be engaged with because of his role in the formation of punk. It's like Tim Martin, Weather Spoons, having a founding role in introducing techno in this country or something like that. It's just horrible. On the cover of Melody Maker this week, Dunno, think there was a printer's strike. On the cover of Disco 45, The Carpenters. The number one LP in the UK at the moment

is 40 Golden Greats by Cliff Richard 20 Golden Greats by Diana Ross and the Supremes is at number two and the highest placed non-compilation LP Heroes by David Bowie is at number three over in America the number one single is You Light Up My Life by Debbie Boone and the number one single is you light up my life by debbie boone and the number one lp of course is rumors by fleetwood max so boys what were we doing in november of 1977 right well um i was 15 at the time and i was just getting over at point, one of the bitterest disappointments of my life,

almost a formative one. So what happened is I'd got a holiday job, you know, around in the autumn time, in Barrack-on-Elm, near Leeds, my home village. You could earn a little bit of extra pocket money by doing potato picking in the school holidays. Grim, back-breaking work, working for some of Britain's worst bastards,

northern farmers. We used to have a little field called Jack Heap's Playing Field. It was the one place where kids could go out and play football because they weren't allowed in the main football pitch that was by the village hall. It was just this slope of... That's all we had to kind of... Own your skills.

Own my skills. That was exactly the cliche I was reaching for. Good enough for the Charlton brothers And this bastard right You know It was his name Fred Thorpe And he'd come round

And he'd sort of Shoo us off In the middle of a game So he could ride round In his pony and trap No this farmer No He had acres of his own land

Bastard And this is it And he'd just drive us off And he'd go round in circles You bastard Man that's terrible man Because you've been brought up Thinking that

All these farmers Were like the Wurzels Yeah Oh totally Exactly yeah Absolutely Fun loving Yeah Yokels I was just thinking You bastard. Man, that's terrible, man, because you've been brought up thinking that all these farmers were like the Wurzels. Yeah, oh, totally, exactly, yeah, absolutely. Fun-loving yokels. I was just thinking, is it wise to mention him by name? But he'll be dead now, won't he? Oh, he's long gone. Put a shotgun in his mouth about four years after.

We'd heard about people getting a pound an hour, you know, potato picking. And I just remember writing to him, I'm paying you normal on on 50p hour 50p hour so I only walk and you better work and it was just like a miserable old cunt how many food man chews

are you going to get out of that man I know well this is it fuck all so anyway managed to sort of scrape together

enough wherewithal to buy a scalextric set unfortunately not to sort of turn into a half man half biscuit song but it never fucking worked.

It just didn't work. No. And it wasn't just the dodgy transformer. It was the fact that you had this kind of overexcitable little gun. You know, my fingers were sort of blistered already from playing Crossfire for a solid year, you know. So, I mean, perhaps my grit was a bit kind of, like, chunky. But it would overshoot.

The pieces never fit together. And I'd basically blown my whole watch on this useless box of crap. How many potatoes? Oh, sackfuls. Two, three sackfuls a day, probably. You should have got Jodie Schechter racing. This is why I play Mario Kart every day. I play Mario Kart for about an hour. I'm chasing around those circuits,

racing those monkeys and skeletons and two-year-old girls, like an hour you know i'm chasing around those circuits racing those monkeys and skeletons and two-year-old girls um like an hour a day um and it's to compensate basically for that huge section of my lost childhood who do you go for in mario i'm one of these terrible people somebody said that on twitter they're like one of the characteristics of a centrist dad and i don't think i'm that was that they're always mario when they play mario kart yeah fuck that i am always mario unfortunately why i don't know i tried a few of the others and i tried to be was it donkey kong once and i just couldn't get on with it um i don't know i don't know really i'm a wario kind of guy okay simply because of the n64 version because his laugh is so fucking filthy and gleeful

at other people's misfortunes. Just, that's the kind of person I want to be, I think. Taylor? Yeah, well, as I think I mentioned before, in 1977, I was living in this cheap, falling-down cottage in the middle of nowhere. Yes. Just extending the natural, introspective maladjustment

of the adopted only child into new realms of hallucinatory alienation by living out there for three or four crucial years no one to play with uh just unsupervised in the 1970s style just wandering around forests and streams and farms on my own you know with my head illuminated just thinking and processing everything wrongly like walking through the set of every public information film yeah but having to invent an inner life oh just like now except with forests and streams and farms and a future but it was all right except when my dad chucked all my crayons out of the window in a rage what yeah because i'd written the word warship on the new carpet why right we'd moved into this place and the reason we could afford it was that it had no staircase and no carpets and it needed loads of work which my dad took on as a as a project

and because he worked at a carpet factory kidderminster's one and only uh now long departed industry he got all these wall-to-wall fitted carpets, sort of fawn colour. Dad, why does my new jacket feel like Axminster? Yeah, but he was not best pleased to get back from the pub and find this. I'd been sat there drawing pictures with my crayons while my mum was watching the telly, and at some point they showed a preview of that evening's viewing on BBC One, which included the dreary, ocean-going drama serial, Worship, co-created by Ian McIntosh,

author of incredibly brilliant spy series, The Soundbangers, and Anthony Coburn, talented hack writer of the first ever episode of Doctor Who. And so, for some reason, feeling like it was totally natural, I got a red crayon and wrote the word WARSHIP in block capitals on the carpet in front of me. What colour was the carpet? It was pale.

And I mean, look, I was five or four or five, so I must have had some sense that this was not completely acceptable but i think i only realized the extent of the problem when my mom turned around and saw it and went ape shit right i mean there's two possible responses when you turn around and see something like that one of them is ah my kid is danny from the shining and the other one is fuck you little shit you fuck the carpet i think my mum went very much for the second option um so i got sent to bed and when my dad got in there wasn't much to suggest that he was creeped out either by the eeriness of the scene uh so much is furious about the price

of a steam clean so the option was number one my dad stormed upstairs and threw him a box of crayons out of the window and two to this very day I start laughing whenever I hear this song Breaking Glass by David Bowie because he says don't look at the carpet I drew something awful

on it my only regret right the only thing that could have made this better is it wasn't the grand national on tv won that year by red rose yes yes yes might have set up the most beautiful perfect which would make a far better story but but things like that just don't happen in real life i'm nine years old and i'm in the third year at junior school and i just about remember this episode because it was the one relief in a very turbulent week all involving like you taylor an art project because on our estate there was a big concrete staircase at the bottom of the street

next to us which was like built into a grass bank and right right about this time, me and Ian Jarvis, my mate, we discovered that if you dug into the grass bank, there was a huge clay deposit underneath. And we couldn't believe it. It was like finding a lake of school glue or something like that. We didn't realise that you could get clay out of the ground. So we spent an afternoon playing with the clay and eventually making nudie women and cocks and balls

out of clay and showcasing them on the staircase and we were about 60 through the whole staircase and fucking bragger jag whose house was next to where we were he came home got out of his car and just saw a staircase of cock and he went fucking mental. Grabbed hold of me, dragged me up the street by the tab, banged on the fucking front door, told me mum I was a dirty bastard and I wanted me arse tanning. He was called Bragger Jag because his only topic of conversation was his car. Oh, I thought he was Hungarian. He had a jag, he liked to brag but more

importantly i'm pretty much convinced that this is the night that my granny was rushed to hospital after having a minor heart attack and we got the call just before this episode started my mom's going hysterical my dad's running around getting ready to take her to the hospital which meant that me and my sister were allowed to watch top of the pops to calm us down because we were both going hysterical as well because you know i'm nine and i've been really lucky so far to my mind the only people that ever died were people who were mentioned on news at 10 and pets yeah she was me granny on my mom's side and she was fucking rock she brought up six girls on her own on the roughest estate in nottingham and very opinionated about pop she loved the rolling

stones she thought mick jagger was really leery she was convinced to her dying day that all the beatles were homosexual yeah well it's not like the beetles ever showed any interest in women no i used to go around us after school every now and then and she'd always let me watch any pop program that was on i remember seeing every episode of mark the mark boland uh hosted kids tv show i remember watching the first episode with her and radio stars came on and did no russians in russia she just sat there with a faggot going what the bloody hell are they going on about there's no russians in russia filling kids heads up with bloody rubbish i would have told her that it was based on a private eye

cover when gerald ford said there were no soviet domination of eastern europe during the presidential debate with jimmy carter the previous year but i was only nine and i didn't know that but she pulled through she she lived another four years and she spent quite a bit of time afterwards stopping around our house while she was getting better which was fucking brilliant because that meant my dad had got to the pub a bit earlier so on thursday nights the living room telly was free for watching top of the pops which she was quite happy to watch as well. She always hated songs about suicide. She'd just tut away when Song for Guy by Elton John came on and the theme from MASH. And I didn't ask why, and I wish I'd have done now.

So music-wise, like many of my age, I'm a grannier. I'm still trying to come to terms with punk. If I'd have been a teenager, I like to think that I'd be full into punk. But, you know, when you're nine, it's teenagers' music. And teenagers are horrible cunts who kick your football into someone's garden or boot you up the arse for no reason.

Yeah, they're always smoking and spitting. So my only source of information about punk was the same source where I got information about sex which was the sunday papers and they made punk sound absolutely fucking terrifying yeah it's not just some kids who are kind of bored and want to dress up a bit the greatest internet forum post in history was in the early noughties when someone on the word magazine forum said that around about this time it went round their school that a Sex Pistols concert

consisted of Johnny Rotten singing We Hate The Queen Cause She's No Use, Look Out Bay Bear, Here Comes The Juice, and then the band would all get their cocks out and piss all over the audience. And if that had gone round my school, we'd have totally believed that. So by this point point if an actual punk

band had pitched up on top of the pops and didn't do something like shit on a picture of the queen or throw a pig into a wood chipper and shower tony blackburn with blood we'd have been massively let down yeah and of course you know as soon as the double whammy of sa plan pour moi and jilted john came on top of the pubs that was it i realized what punk was all about oh yeah and like everyone else at school i was full into it there was a lot of moral panic about sort of you know delinquency and hooliganism at this point wasn't there and i think that punk somehow ended up getting conflated with that do you remember that um public information film in setting a kind of suburb and like hooligans during the night have like absolutely trashed the whole

area and the adults are just, yeah, do you remember that one? Yes. Can't call the police, it's no use. There's just nothing you can do. Half of them are in the police. Yes. First of all, that happened precisely zero times in the area that I lived in, you know, the entire area getting trashed. I mean, if any kids had sort of turned out

and, you know, there are enough sort of like hard nuts in, if any kids had sort of turned out and, you know, there are enough sort of like hard nuts in my road, they'd have absolutely got the shit kicked out of them if they sort of like, you know, they'd be kind of glowering from behind net curtains, look at them, the hooligans smashing up our garage door. But, you know, I think there was a sort of a lot of moral panic and punk somehow kind of got roughly treated, I think, in that regard. By this point, we're 11 months away from the Grundy incident.

There was the initial explosion of outrage over that. And then there was a summer of scare stories over the punks, Ted's fighting on the King's Road. And, you know, by this point, punk has finally filtered out to the provinces. And yes, David, you're right. Vandalism and wrongness hangs thick in the air. For example, here's a dispatch from the Coventry Evening Telegraph a mere fortnight before this episode, which documents that havoc that's been wreaked upon the nation by the punk-crazed youngsters.

The headline? Down with punks. Punks. Rebel the Labrador has had just about enough of the punk rock craze. He didn't mind when the punk rockers stuck safety pins through their noses and ripped their clothes. But he is not happy about the trend of punk fans wearing dog collars around their necks. And Rebel's owner, Mr Harold Smith, is not very pleased either, because the four collars stolen from the pet in the past month have cost him about £20.

I'm quite sure that it's the work of these punk rockers, said Mr Smith, who owns the Beachwood Hotel, St. Pitt's Lane, Kerslay, Coventry. Very reasonable rates. The first three that went were expensive chain-link collars with name tags. Then, rather than buy a new collar, the Smiths decided to use the brass-studded leather collar which was worn by their last dog, Brandy, who died last year. But within a few days that was gone too and they have had to fork out for yet another collar. It was bad enough when the first three went, but that last one was the only memento we had of Brandeis, who was a great old dog, said Mr Smith. The trouble with Rebel is that he is so friendly and will go to anyone,

but I can't understand the mentality of kids who would steal a collar from a dog. Mr Smith now faces a choice of letting 15 month old Rebel go out without a collar and risk it being stolen again. Meanwhile he wants anyone who knows of a punk rocker wearing a dog collar tagged Rebel or Brandair

to contact him or the police. Well if you call your dog Rebel, you're asking for it, aren't you? But, oh, look at poor Rebel in that photo, chaps. Sadness in his eyes. He can't understand.

He's only friend, there. Yeah, they should have called their dog I Love Pink Floyd. Yes. Yeah. Or Genesis. Exactly, yeah. No problem at all, yeah. But have I missed something here here how do you steal a

collar off a dog is the dog out on his own yeah just wandering the street oh but yeah that was the 70s that used to happen all the time like the dog at the road glenn i mean he just they just let out in the morning glenn yeah glenn yeah anyway yeah who calls a dog glenn the clarks did up the road yeah anyway you know he was always having his collar stolen by country music yes he would just roam the streets like a bino character and then come back for his tea yeah so that did happen so it's quite plausible yeah you know it wasn't didn't live in the kind of surveillance society we do now you know didn't the van come around with the dog warden on the side they got a big net like a butterfly to get in with. If you let your dog out on your own,

some of you is going to smear shaving cream around its mouth, aren't there, for larks. Bummer dog never had a collar. I'll bet not, yeah. We would have a collar around our neck when he came around, of his paws. I'd wear a dog collar with bummer dog on it. So, Pop Craze youngsters, you know how we go about. I'd wear a dog collar with bummer dog on it so pop craze youngsters you know how we go about this is the time of the episode

when we delve into the crates and pull out an example of the music press from this week and this week I have gone for the NME November the 5th 1977 fucking hell bonfire nights around the corner what kind of bonfire night would you have round about

this time? God, I can't believe that Jack Eats Playingfield is getting two mentions on Chart Music, but that is precisely where the bonfire took place, yeah. Gingerbread jacket potatoes, which are considered quite exotic, really. One of those kind of once a year things, you know.

Cranberry sauce or whatever. And of course, a guy. Yeah, justyear things, you know, like cranberry sauce or whatever, and of course a guy. Yeah, just usually, you know, like the face scorching hot and your back freezing cold, like some plastic cups trotting into the grass. You'd think the NME would be less enthusiastic as it does celebrate the murder of someone who tried to blow up parliament which

i just thought the enemy at the time would be all for that you know yeah albeit in the name of a sort of catholic taliban which is what the gunpowder plotters actually were but people don't like to talk about that on the cover a mid-60s black and white shot of pete townsend he's facing straight on you could actually cut his face out and put it on your guy. Maybe that's what they were thinking of. You know, like Whoopi used to do. Yeah. They'd have a cut out of Guy Fawkes.

But who's going to want to cut the comic up? Yeah. Ridiculous. Yeah. In the news, the forthcoming Sex Pistols movie, Who Killed Bamber, is off. Shooting was due to commence last week but after the budget escalated to three quarters of a million pounds and one of the backers pulled out the sets and

stages have been struck. Director Russ Meyer has returned to Los Angeles and the scripted drug orgy between Johnny Rotten and Marianne Faithfull never happened. According to a Daily Mirror article this week, technicians walked off set after a deer was shot with a crossbow, and the pistols are claiming that it's all the fault of Princess Grace of Monaco, a director of 20th Century Fox, having a cob on about the film. So one of the great missed opportunities of Punk, that film at one point was going to be directed by Pete Walker, the British genius super hack behind films like Frightmare

and House of Mortal Sin. Like proper 70s British sleaze, but with a really funny, cynical cynical sort of anti-establishment but not pro-anything kind of feel. It would have been perfect for the Sex Pistols. Also directed Schizo, the one true British giallo

bangers and mashed giallo but unfortunately it never happened and Pete Walker was asked about this and he said he met up with him and had some meetings and he liked Johnny Rotten because apparently Johnny Rotten admitted to him that he was only in it for the laugh and the money. But he hated the other Sex Pistols because he said they were idiots who had no idea what was going on. So that's a sort of belief. I love Pete Walker, though.

Just don't bother watching any of his films if you're a big fan of satisfying endings meanwhile shooting has just begun on another film sergeant pepper's lonely hearts club band featuring peter frampton the bgs george burns and the third world superstar himself paul nicholas oh that's to be fucking brilliant, that. Can't wait. There's no possible way that could be a letdown. I know. Having never seen that film, I can state nevertheless with absolute authority that it's shite. I don't think anyone's

ever seen all of it. I have. Have you got through the whole thing? Yes. Because I wanted to see the end bit because there's loads of famous people like curtis mayfield yeah is in the fucking background at the end it's a film i've never been able to get all the way through and i once watched andy warhol's sleep um there's just something sort of queasy and wrong about it on every level but not in a compelling way right it's just like you have a dream,

and the next day you can't quite remember what happened in it. You just have a vivid memory of this indescribable atmosphere which you can't really put into words. Possibly Frankie Howard was in it. Yes. You try and tell anyone else about it, and it's the most boring thing they've ever heard. It's what watching that film's like.

Yeah, Pete Waterman should have done a film about the Bee Gees with Big Fun in it ten years later, see how they liked it. Yeah, put a quote from Big Fun saying, yeah, now the Bee Gees records no longer exist. Wasn't that what Pete said about the original Sgt. Femoral? Now it may as well no longer exist. Peter Gabriel and his band have been arrested on tour in St. Gallen, Switzerland, after Gabriel stopped off on his way to France to make a phone call in the early hours,

and he and the band were mistaken for bank robbers by locals. But the police cleared it all up when they opened the tour manager's suitcase, discovered huge wads of four different currencies, and accused them of being members of the bard and meinhof gang after a four-hour interrogation one phone call to a french promoter cleared it all up and they were released without charge yeah and peter gabriel said to the police uh did this interrogation really have to last four hours? And they said, yes, see, now you know how we feel. Yes. That pebble coming at you direct from a glass house.

Basically, if you're young in Germany, you couldn't go out, unless you had a short back and sides, you couldn't go out without being arrested. A lot of people in the German police at the time with, shall we say, an interesting history. Yes. A bit of a problem there, a bit of a problem getting them out. In other pop stars in the Nick News, Jet Black and Jean-Jacques Bernal of The Stranglers have spent the night in the cells at Brighton after six local policemen, who were tracking two dozen Hells Angels from Holland who were mates of the band, raided their dressing room with a police dog.

When two of the Angels were arrested after the gig, Black and Burnell went to the station to have it out with them and were themselves arrested for disorderly conduct. Imagine sharing a cell with half of the Stranglers. Yeah, it's funny that they were arrested for disorderly conduct because usually the plan,

let's go angrily and drunkenly to the police station and have it out with the police as a much happier conclusion. Yeah. At least that dog kept his collar this time, though. EMI have won the battle to sign the Rich Kids, the new group formed by ex-pistol Glenn Matlock, while CBS have made do with signing the Cortinas. Meanwhile, the punk-crazed youngsters are finally allowed to purchase the new double A-side terminal stupid

I Can't Come by a band who choose to call themselves Snivelling Shit. They're a punk band formed by sounds giorno giovanni dadomo and it's available in all good record shops manufacturing problems forced island records to press it in france and when the first batch was imported into the country it was impounded by customs officers for being dead rude i love how you say say the band called the Snivelling Shit. They're a punk band. Oh, really? It's like I was watching Hammer House of Horror last night

and someone says, you need to meet this bloke, the Swami Gupta Krishna. He's an Indian. Inside the paper, well, Chol Chol Murray gets on the bus for the live stiffs tour and discovers that Nick Lowe is reading Jack the Ripper for the final solution. Dave Edmonds is getting stuck into Elvis What Happened?

And Elvis Costello is leafing through the essential Lenny Bruce. On the way to Manchester, Costello nips into a walrus and comes out with two copies of Anarchy in the UK, a single changing hands for anything up to £15 in London for 32p each. Meanwhile, Dave Edmonds is pissed off that Tony Parcell described him as dumpy and matted in the NME and gets thrown off the tour after an altercation in Leicester. Any injury on the blockhead are absolutely astonishing on stage

and are going to be massive. Because of a dispute with the printers, the pagination has been cut down this week and regular sections are missing, which means that five and a half pages are dedicated to an article written by Peteete townsend who takes the opportunity to talk out how shit being in the who in 1977 is his battle with

alcoholism how denon is the best yogurt in the world but he's only ever seen it in new york he's ongoing rows with roger daltrey and bangs on about Mayor Barber again. Although, in fairness, can you imagine being in The Who in 1977? It's not exactly peachy, I wouldn't have thought. You know what I mean? You've got this constant brandy headache. Your ears are permanently ringing. Your drummer can't play anymore because he's so full of champagne and elephant tranquiliser.

You're playing Charlton Football Ground in the rain while your audience kick the shit out of each other. And they only want to hear Boris the Spider. And then you whack a Les Paul off the stage until the neck separates from the body. And you have to be there on time just to look at the ox's softening booze face and i know you're going to complain to roger daltrey he's just got off a naughtless machine drinking water and eating a carrot he's golden all over and he feels like a shiny new penny you know and he only achieves peace and fulfillment through the mindless repetitive work that is literally driving you insane poor old dodgy pete you know what i mean i wonder he grew a beard and tony parsons introduces

the world to polystyrene of x-ray specs we find out that identity was written on the spot one night in the rocks air when she was disgusted at the sight of a punkette smashing a full-length mirror because that's what she thought punks had to do she stopped selling clothes at the king's road market because ted's kept smashing up her stall brixton is the worst place in the world for a mixed race kid to grow up in and she doesn't like the stranglers single Single reviews. Due to the printer's dispute, there is no singles page in the NME this week

so we whip you over to that week's record mirror. And in the chair this week is Rosalind Russell who once dropped her notebook on the floor during an interview with Grace Slick so she could check if she had a metal scepter. Her single of the week is With You by Demis Roussos.

You have to hand it to old Demis. Who else would have the gall to get on stage dressed in a tent and sing silly love songs? I'm pleased he has women after him all the time. He makes beautifully romantic records and proves to all ladies that they don't have to be skinny to be sexy. A massive hit. Open brackets.

Failed to chart. Close brackets. Railway Hotel by Mike Batt is a sensitive piece of writing that's made me go all weak at the knees. I love it. I hope he manages to lay the ghost of his furry friends once and for all oh yeah right speaking of pete walker there's a really lousy film of his called home before midnight uh from around the period we're discussing here which is a like a pseudo moralistic drama about a pop songwriter who's having an affair with a girl who turns out

to be underage even though she looks 28 um and this character is a successful writer but not the public face of a load of bubblegum hits and his name is mike beresford now if i'd been the similarly named mike bat successful writer but not public face of bubblegum hits most notably for the wumbles much love creation of elizabeth beresford i might have felt a bit uneasy about this film um but it is a terrible film actually it's not don't start with that one the best thing about it is that it co-stars Des Dyer. No! Not Ducky Des.

Yeah, he plays the singer of a pop band called Bad Accident. Which is one of the greatest fictional or non-fictional band names ever. And the other best thing about that film, someone says to Mike Beresford, it wasn't your fault, it was the filth and degradation of our profession i can't really argue and it's got a cameo from diddy david hamill good lord but yeah don't start your pete walker odyssey with that one really i just don't but it's a coat down for orgasmatic by the buzzcocks. Oh, hell, good grief. Sorry, we're completely unshockable by now, and that's the only thing this single has going for it.

As a song, it stinks. It has only one line to hold up the entire effort. The singer sounds less like he's having an orgasm and more like he has a bad attack of asthma. That's a bit weird, isn't it? You know, you big up the bat and you kick the cocks. Yeah. Also, I like the idea that she just assumes

the only reason for this song is to shock you. It doesn't cross her mind that maybe it's supposed to be funny. I mean... Really Free by John Otway and Wild Willie Barrett is described as Mike Sown meets Judge Dredd and the collision is not a pretty sight. That's not on this episode, Pop Crazy Youngsters. Don't get your hopes up. But hang on.

Mike Sawn meets Judge Dredd. That's Judge Dredd's version of Come Outside, isn't it? Equally short shrift is given to rip her to shreds by blonde all sex and sadism sadly little talent says Russell

have you seen the press advert in record mirror for rip her to shreds yeah oh Debbie Harry

in a miniskirt and over her head in massive letters wouldn't you like to rip her to shreds different times I'll tell you what though it's like Rosalind Russell I mean letters, wouldn't you like to rip her to shreds? Different times. I'll tell you what though, it's like

Rosalind Russell, I mean I wonder why she was stuck on record mirror, eh? They say the Championship's a tough league to get out of. Although she's meant to be a very good interviewer actually, I mean, you know, perhaps more where a skill lay than singles assessment.

But Russell really, really hates Short People by Randy Newman. Let me tell you, Mr Newman, I ain't too keen on you either. Keep your insults to yourself or I'll come round here and I'll stand on a box and kick you where it hurts. Alessi have finally followed up their top ten hits with their new single All For A Reason, but Russell doesn't reckon it. A slick production,

but the song doesn't have the charm of Olore, even with the cutesy lisp. Sorry, doesn't cut it this time. Sweet Music Man by Kenny Rogers is sad, but not gas oven sad. Annie by Pete Townsend and Ronnie Lane is almost like a Scottish folk ballad. Little Queen by Heart is a waste of time. Anything for You by Flintlock is one of the best and most commercial singles of this week's bunch. And Guns of Navarone by The Scarterlights is the Grime Thorpe Colliery Band goes raster.

Golden Age. Back to the NME and the LP review section. It's a huge week for LPs, but only one gets a full page. Never mind the bollocks. Here's the Sex Pistols. Unfortunately, they've given the review to julie birchill she claims that she doesn't know where bodies comes from but it scares her and it will be open to much misinterpretation and it was grossly irresponsible to release it open to much misinterpretation by lost punk rockers of course taylor yes immaculate like a

terrine like a terrine i don't really know anything about music but the sex pistols play as well as anyone i've heard and i've heard jimmy hendrix and pete townsend records she says but she claims that spunk the bootleg lp that also came out this week, is better. Leonard Cohen has got together with Phil Spector for his first LP since 1974, Death of a Lady's Man, and Roy Carl reckons it. The teaming of the tycoon of teen and the doyen of doom has proved to be a masterful collaboration. This is an album of great maturity that has succeeded

because a great deal of time and talent have gone into its making. From performance right through to production, there are no weak links. Makes it sound like a bloody Ford Cortina. Yeah, and also the whole charm of that LP is that it is a peculiar weak link in Leonard Cohen's career. It was a bit William Woolard, wasn't it, that review? Yes, very much so.

It's getting close to Christmas, so out come the compilations. And greatest hits by Roxy Music is Bags It by Julie Birchall. After sneering at the cover, a gold disc, and accusing Brian Ferry of lying in his lyrics, she changes tack and declares it the best compilation ever. This music is a precious relic, not relevant anymore, but at their best, Roxy music were better than David Bowie, than the Supremes, than the Doors, than the Sex Pistols, than anyone I imagine I will ever hear. But it's a coat down for Out of the Blue by ELO. Why does the praying mantis eat her male partner after orgasm?

Why do the Italians slaughter so many songbirds during shooting season. Why did Jeff Lynn and Electric Light Orchestra sell so many albums? Asks Angus McKinnon. Out of the Blue celebrates nothing but its own artifice. It will naturally sell the requisite billion and more. It scares me to the bone marrow. I think worse than to be scared of in 1977. But I think the idea of celebrating your own art if this sounds pretty good to me so this is the modern world i'm glad they told me

for an instant i thought i'd been transported to 1965 writes mick farren of this is the modern world the second lp by the jam he then spends the rest of the piece having a gargantuan mod on about paul weller singing that he doesn't give two fucks about his review on the title track and only mentions one other song in the street today which he doesn't like it's fair enough though that he's fucking hilarious in that song paul weller goes i don't give two fucks about your review yeah i can tell volume six of sing along a freddie turns out to be a good deal less limp than the current hit single might suggest says bob edmonds of news of the world by queen but unhappily the first two tracks are the songs on the single, We Are The Champions And We Will Rock You, with May and Mercury evidently vying with each other

to outdo Rod Stewart's sailing and create new anthems for chucking out time. Once they're out of the way, however, Edmonds contends that this is an LP which, quote, rips out of the speakers in a way that makes communication sound broken down. In many ways, this is the most intriguing Queen album since their finest, Sheer Heart Attack. Whether all the obvious tension within the band will spur them onto greater things or simply pull them apart remains to be seen. or simply pull them apart remains to be seen. Inspectors by Blue Oyster Cult is their most cerebral LP yet and absolutely flawless, according to Paul Rambale,

while Monty Smith reckons that Slow Hand by Eric Clapton is dismal stuff. Yeah, fuck off, Eric Clapton. I bet Jimi Hendrix's anti-vaccination single would have been miles better than yours. In the gig guide, wow, David could have seen the Stranglers and the Dictators at the Roundhouse, Elton John at Wembley Empire Pool, Shakin' Stevens and the Sunsets at the Covent Garden Rock Garden, Mungo Jerry at the Music Machine, Dire Straits at the Hope and Anchor,

Wire at the Rochester Castle in Stoke Newington, Slim Whitman at the Palladium, or Show Waddy Waddy at Hammersmith Odeon. But probably didn't. I'd probably have gone to see Mungo Jerry when I was 15 at that point, of that lot, given that choice. Wouldn't have known who Wire were. Just reaching their peak in 1977.

Yeah. Taylor could have seen the Tom robinson band at barbarella's darts at aston university the steve gibbons band at barbarella's kenny rogers and crystal gale at the birmingham hippodrome x-ray specs at barbarella's or barbara dixon at the birmingham town hall oh bir, the centre of the world this week. Boston. Neil could have seen Caravan at Warwick University, the Four Tops at Coventry Theatre, the Clash and Richard Hell and the Voidords at the Locarno

or plunged into Wolverhampton to see Smoker at the Civic Hall. Sarah could have seen Van de Graaff Generator at Hull University, Sham69 at the F Club in Leeds, The Runaways and 999 at Sheffield City Hall, Jasper Carrot at Sheffield University, Generation X at the Doncaster Outlook Club or Gary Glitter at Bradford St George's Hall. Al could have seen Burning Spear at the Doncaster Outlook Club or Gary Glitter at Bradford St. George's Hall. Al could have seen Burning Spear at the Palais

or nipped out to Derby to see the Clash and Richard Hell and the Voidoids at the King's Hall or XTC at Blue Blows in Colville. And Simon could have seen the Drifters at Aberyst with Great Hall, the Adverts at the Cardiff Top Rank or Max Boyce at the Stone League Club in Porthcawl. While you were just reading

those out, I just looked out my window and a dog went past with a collar on without an owner, just wondering. Well, there we go. Were there any punk rockers chasing after him? Yeah, it was like the Benny Hill show. There was a whole queue of them just going round around around in the letters page neil spencer is in the chair for

gas bag this week and the main topic of conversation is the other week's clash gig at the ulster hall in belfast which was cancelled at the last minute due to the promoters being unable to get insurance cover still not having a clue at what was happening, a large crowd of punks gathered outside the venue. They spilled out into the road, and so cars, etc. had difficulty getting through. A few of the more pissed punks started to stop the cars in protest, which is when the real aggro began,

writes A. Greer from local fanzine Private World. Frantic pogoing broke out in the road and when the brits pulled up in their jeep they called for the pigs to get us out of the way when the ruc came they came in force and charged straight into them with batons drawn when we could we got out of the scene and went round to the Europa Hotel and tried to see the band. We saw Joe Strummer, the great prophet of repression and society's failure on the inside. This made a lot of people angry, but what really got my blood up

was when he deliberately turned his back on us, all caps. I mean, I can understand being a little bit pissed off with the very out-of-character behaviour of the RUC there, but I like how they're just outraged that the Clash are staying in a hotel in Belfast, like rather than choosing to bed down in the Comber

Greenway. Just, yeah, just wrapped up in a coat with urban threat stenciled on the front. You caught yourself, punkers and yet you sleep in beds. Yeah, I bet Bad Accident would have slept out on the streets. You humped a minor. That's death to a band like Bad Accident. That's what someone says to Mike Beresford.

I hope the smug little bastard at the insurance company feels at ease with himself knowing exactly what he's done, writes Ian Duncan, communications officer of Northern Ireland Polytechnic, the promoters of the gig. In the meantime, we'll have to pay the clash and sew up all the holes, and that will take £2,000 we can't afford. I feel sorry for the social secretary, sorry for the polly, but most of all sorry for the innocent kids of Belfast who just wanted to have a good time and escape reality for a little while. Bad move, go and see The Clash if you want to escape reality. If escape isn't for you. a load of jolly old cobblers the old gnarled grey whistle test thing he is and that hearing rabbit

teeth chappy harris is quite revolting says rupert ponsonby farquhar smith of olden possibly not real name let's have some jolly old new wave weekly pop program instead of some ponson old hippies with cobwebs strewn around their personas it's been two weeks since Lynyrd Skynyrd's plane crashed and the readership are paying tribute. No smart-arse one-liners, just a big thank you to Ronnie Van Zandt, Steve Gaines, Cassie Gaines and all the rest of Lynyrd Skynyrd who have given me so much pleasure in the last few years, both on stage and on record, writes Ian Wilson.

Dear Ronnie Van Zandt, when you get up there and see Elvis on his guilt throne, munching his way to eternal obesity at his private pizza parlor, give him a good boot from us all. I'll tell you who was fucking king, says Hapadayip Melv of the Cambridge Corn Exchange Appreciation Society. Fucking so much death in late 1977. People forget about Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Julie Birchall and Tony Parsons have announced their engagement, but the two letters printed are too boring to read out. Why would you announce that? Like, if I was working on a music paper and I was getting engaged... To Neil, for example. To Neil, yeah. I wouldn't feel it was worth telling anybody about. You know, why...

Court circular. An angry feminist from Edinburgh has a cob on with the Stranglers for their outdated lyrics about women. A short-haired working-class student living on a minimum grant from Nottingham points out the similarity between something better changed by the Stranglers

and We're Not Gonna Take It by The Who. And Kev Biscoe reckons the new Sex Pistols LP should be called Never Mind The Fans. Here's the singles again. 44 pages, 18 pence. I never knew there was so much in it, even though there wasn't so much in it this week. Didn't cost me fucking 18p off eBay, let me tell you that.

Fucking hell. 1977 NMEs go at a premium. I agree. So you got to hear that Pete Townshend likes Danon. Who? Danon? Yeah. So, dear boys, what else was on telly today? Well, BBC One kicks off at 9.41

with a quick blast of schools and colleges programmes and then has a ten-minute break before displaying a caption for an hour which reads, because of an industrial dispute, we are unable to cover the state opening of Parliament. Fucking hell, thank God you weren't watching that at the time with your crayon in your hand, Taylor. Well, yeah, it could have been worse if it had been on

and looked around and I'd just written Black Rod on the carpet. Yeah. I didn't think they had cameras in Parliament in 1977. No, it would film them going in and out. Right, yeah. Then it's the school's programme, Milestones in Working Class History. Oh, I think that was one of them just then. After a 15-minute close down, it's On The Move, The Midday News,

Pebble Mill at One, Heads and Tails, You and Me, and more schools and colleges programmes. And then it closes down for another 53 minutes after regional news in your area is play school and lippy the lion and hardy ha ha then michael jayston reads the edge of evening by nicholas stewart gray and jack and ore that's followed by charlie brown john craven's news round, then John Noakes and Leslie Judd get to sit in an open carriage being pulled down the mall while wearing the actual

coronation robes and some coronets in blue pizza. Fucking hell. I bet you any money the magpie wouldn't have had permission to do that. No. Or Pauline Quirk and Flintlock. No. Going down the mall. Wrong. So wrong. Afterirk and flintlock no going down the mail wrong so wrong after noah and nele it's the evening news followed by a caption of bob wellings which reads because

of an industrial dispute we are unable to broadcast nationwide and they've just finished the usual gaze into the future in Tomorrow's World. BBC Two commences at 11 with 40 minutes of schools and colleges programmes, then play school and then shuts down for six hours and five minutes. Coming back with Open University, the news on two headlines and they're currently five minutes into Your Move, the Brian Redhead adult reading and writing show with special guests Sheila Hancock and Roy Kinnear. They've got On The Move and then you've got Your Move

on perhaps at the same time. Yeah, getting people ready for CFAX, David. Yeah. ITV starts at 9.30 with two and a half hours of schools programmes. Then here we come to pop land. Here we come to pop land for a heavy session with animal quackers. They didn't go punk at all, did the animal quackers? They were terrifying enough, I think.

Yeah, yeah. Then top off, the emo monkey is the only one in Pipkins who hasn't got a place of his own, bar the top of someone's wardrobe. So Hartley here, Pig and Octavia make him a treehouse in Pipkins. After The Special Child, where Dr Kenneth Day looks at schooling and adult facilities that are available to the mentally handicapped, it's The News at One, by this is your right where lord win stanley answers legal problems sent in by owners then it's crown court then afternoon with mavis nicholson and then aggro breaks out at a wedding between the groom and the bride's ex in the

midlands police drama hunter's walk graham curse shows us how to make Calchas Amsterdam in the Galloping Gourmet, and I have no idea what that is at all. Oh, yeah, you're just the first celebrity chef. Oh, I know who he is. I don't know what Calchas Amsterdam is. Oh, sorry. God, I thought I was going to say. God, I don't know.

It's probably got drugs in it. Yeah. I don't think I'd have to stubsplain the Galloping Gourmet to Alan Eden. No. Apologies. Then it's the cedar tree, little arse on the prairie,

a second chance to see it's your right, and Meg Mortimer is badly in Crossroads. After the news at 5.45, it's regional news in your area, Emmerdale Farm, and they've just started the Bionic Woman, where Jamie Sum summers battles a robot replica of herself by i don't know squeezing a tennis ball until he bursts again i mean i cast

dispersions on that many a time and often char music but you know when you think about it it's actually quite clever because you know whenever the lads on the school playground started jeering the girls about the obvious inferiority of the bionic woman, you know, because after all, she can only just listen and squeeze a tennis ball. One of us would be drawn into proving how easy it was to burst a tennis ball. And, you know, you come off looking like a right twat. So, you know. Was that a special power?

You've got to be Jeff Capes to do that. Yeah, well, it was in the opening credits, wasn't it? She squeezed a tennis ball and it burst. No, no, but the fact that the Bionic Woman was very good at listening. Oh, yeah, she kind of, like, pulled back her flick back here and cock a tab. That's brilliant. And I think some waves came, yeah. Yeah, I remember that, yeah.

You make six cakes at once. Yes. You know what I was going to say? Why isn't there a Bionic Man? All right, then, pop craze youngsters. It is time to go way back to November the 3rd of 1977. Always remember, we may coat Dan your favourite band or artist, but we never forget, they've been on Top of the Pops more than we have.

Hi everyone, and welcome to this week's edition of Top of the Pops more than we have. Hi everyone and welcome to this week's edition of Top of the Pops. And so the sun's out way down low Turn it, turn it It's ten past seven on Thursday, November the 3rd, 1977 And Top of the Pops is into its fifth year Under the reign of Robin Nash Who is still dividing his time between our weekly fizzy pop treat And producing the Generation Game Oh chaps, what a shame he didn't mix the two way

we could have had every band and artist in the top 30 rundown going by on a conveyor belt with you know the stranglers being portrayed as cuddly toys yeah that'd be fucking brilliant wouldn't it yeah this is purest top of the pops to my mind isn't it gone is the album section gone is the tip for the top slot oh yeah the breakers and the interviews and the star bars and jonathan king's entertainment usa all that shit is years away or years behind us yeah there's no ramble there's no fripper this is purest top of the pops isn't it and it's it's not going to change anytime soon is it no no no if it ain't broke don't twat about with it as my mum used to say overall radio one on the other hand changes definitely afoot because the bbc after three years of merging radio one and two together during the

daytime in the spirit of purse string related minginess have finally decided to start separating them out once again, meaning that by this time next year, David Hamilton will have been finally released into his natural habitat of Radio 2, Andy Peebles and Kid Jensen are going to have their own evening slots, and the talent pool of Radio 1 is about to be enlarged. That was really important, wasn't it't it chaps it was kind of important really as a listener at the time there were certain things that were almost given a deliberate legitimacy via kind of being broadcast through the lucidity of you know radio two but i always

liked the fact that radio one that you just had that kind of sort of gauze of static interference i think you know it's an added dimension really to the music. That's how we consume the music, you know. When that goes missing, it's actually a little bit weird. It's not quite the same. You really have to strain to listen to the music, don't you? Back then. Yeah, you know, it was kind of coming over the phone to an extent. Yeah, which is why smart producers would,

before they signed off on the final mix of a single, would put it through a shitty speaker or go out and listen to it in their car. Yeah. Just to make sure that it was going to sound good in the circumstances in which it was mostly going to be heard yeah i mean if you're listening to radio one right now you're being treated to edmundo ross and his latin american orchestra followed by an hour and a half of david allen's country club before you can get to john peel andaps, no one ever talks about this,

but surely one of the factors in the pop explosion of the Aventis has to be the fact that bands of that ilk were finally going to get a fair go on Radio 1 in the early evening, which was their natural habitat. All of a sudden, bands like XTC and X-Ray Specs, there's actually going to be a place on them on Radio 1 that, you know, isn't after the watershed and bedtime. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, it's weird to think that, you know, there was already effective or might as well have been dead air throughout the evening right through until whosoever was listening to John Peel. Almost like the kind of gulf between the idea of pop and counterculture was, you know, that was duly marked out.

So, yeah, I mean, that was a massive difference when there's suddenly this kind of gradual gradient from daytime into the evening and culminating in Jean-Pierre. Yeah, and I think that encourages a kind of feed between the so-called underground and the mainstream. Because to me, as a nine-year-old, the idea of stopping up until 10 o'clock to listen to Jean-P to john peel i might as well have tried to stop up to watch open university programs about physics it just just wasn't going to happen man by 10 o'clock i'm spark out the only time i do it for football was

i'd be sent to bed but then my dad whistled down for me when match of the day came on on saturday so it kind of worked for football but there's no way he was going to whistle me down to listen to john peel you know in the school night. It's like, hey David, he's playing a whole side of Tangerine Dream. Hey David, the snivelling shits are in session. So your host tonight is Peter Powell, who has just joined Radio 1 after three and a half years at Radio Luxembourg, most recently as their breakfast show host. He's been pencilled in to take over Simon Bates' Sunday morning show, giving pig wanker general the opportunity to depose Tony Blackburn

and assume his rightful mantle of King of the Housewives. That's not going to happen for another ten days, but the BBC are clearly so taken by their new sign in that they're giving him his first ever appearance on top of the pops even though he hasn't played one record on radio one yet so chaps peter james bernard powell to give him his full name very much the new kid in town even though he's already put in a brief shift in on radio one in 1972 when he held down the saturday afternoon slot but by immediately sticking him on top of the pops they obviously think he's up to the job it's like it's got this

kind of debut appearance smell about it this whole appearance hasn't it you can practically see him psyching himself up just before the intro energy p know, energy, Peter, energy. And he just kind of overdoes it, you know. You can just imagine him being quite ingratiating around the Radio 1 offices. I can imagine him making Simon Bates his TV and Simon Bates letting him, or even going out on coffee runs for Dave Lee Travis and saying nothing when he doesn't get reimbursed. All that kind of thing. There's a sort of wet niceness about him. Back then, I mean, as a kid, I kid i mean at that age i still ranked everyone all males anyway according to hardness and i reckon he'd been about the 12th hardest in our class theoretically but that's only on imagining how we're doing if i could never actually would right

and i kind of stuck with this idea of his essential niceness but um to be honest after watching this episode i've now busted him down to creep. Oh, yeah. Right. Well, look, Al, you sent a little crib sheet before we recorded this. Yes. Okay, this is what we're going to talk about. And next to Peter Powlett, it said, this is his first Top of the Pops appearance. How does he get on? And I thought, yeah, well, a combination of institutional cowardice

and knowing the right people. I mean, fucking poached from Radio Luxembourg. Yes. He should have been poached like an egg. A dirty egg. I mean, what a wanker. You know what I mean? You look at this non-stunt kite mogul.

I mean, I've met so many young men like this, like privileged, rather corny lads with no particular talents who managed not to be wankers, so he's just got no excuse at all. It's barely credible that someone like this ever really existed when you see him now. There's a lot of modern equivalents, but the modern equivalents aren't quite like this, right? There's a lot of modern equivalents,

but the modern equivalents aren't quite like this, right? With that crushingly affected, like, fake cherubic energy, you know? It's actually more like a biblically accurate cherub. And that obnoxious, upbeat, cheerleading for everything and therefore nothing, you know? Like, he does the intro, you see him, yeah, for a second, completely just still and silent, awaiting his cue nothing you know he's like he does the intro you see him yeah for a second completely just still and silent awaiting his cue you know and then there's a deep breath suddenly a fixed grin and hi everyone he's like the top of the pops yeah that's it it's like a crossroads type moment isn't it or econ antiques that kind ofiques just before the action begins yeah it's a giveaway rearing up he's like a jack

in the box but with a rotting human foot on the end of the spring he's so unreal but at the same time he's so basic and mundane and undistinguished you know and banal evil spreads out from him like a smell yeah christ almighty what must his real personality be like you know if this is what he puts on for the camera he's got his radio one t-shirt on lest we doubt his commitment to being a company man it's like he's been signed by a football club isn't it he's got his radio one shirt on what a shame he's not holding up a radio one scarf as well yeah yeah exactly he's got that sort of like little muscle in his face he's like he's sort of physically fit in the days when when muscle bound meant someone who did 50 sit-ups a day and ate bananas you know he's got that that insincere dimpled youthful youthful pseudo charm, you know.

But his eyes are blazing with this pure, empty ambition, you know. And we're still in a period where the best way to appeal to everyone is to be nauseatingly ingratiating and oily, you know. And it gives me the creeps. Except that he takes it so far that it's entertaining right it's like a trip to the reptile house makes your skin crawl but you can't take your eyes off it in a weird and horrible sort of way he is on a kind of different energy level to everyone else but that's not necessarily a good thing i mean he's kind of a paradox really he's at once vacuous and yet full of piss and shit.

Yeah. And also, I mean, Peter Powell is from Stourbridge, which is proper black country, and there's not the faintest trace of Midlands in those vows. Oh, no, no. I mean, it's like he's from Malvern or something. That's a bit of an in-joke for Midlands people. But, look, I mean, mean like i've lived in london

i've lived in fucking jellied eel country for 30 years and most of the time now i sound like i'm flogging stolen crockery off a market stall but even so i still to this day inadvertently pronounce a rogue w after every letter O, because, you know, I haven't forgotten my roots. There's something wrong here. It's like he's completely untrustworthy on every level. Do you know what I mean? And also, did we leave him out of the Russian doll?

Yes, we did. I think we did, didn't we? I think in between Kevin Keegan and the old sailor is where you'd find Powell. We've seen Andy Peebles and Simon Parkin making their debuts on Top of the Pops during our chart music odyssey, and they both had an absolute mare. But Powell's arrived here fully formed, hasn't he? This is the Peter Powell that you're going to get right through the Aventis and beyond.

It certainly is. He's hit the ground running, hasn't he? Yeah, like a saw. Yeah. I mean, if you had a competition to decide who's the worst pal, you wouldn't actually feel confident about putting a bet on the winner. That's how bad Peter Powell is. He's a fucking grunt, bovie placeholder.

Yeah, I do take your point, Al, that it's almost like, come on guys, it's nearly the 80s, Dealey Bopper time. The 80s is right, David. Definitely. There's notional 80s, which is going to be lots of white trousers.

Radio Luxembourg is definitely the feeder club to Radio 1 right now because would you care to take a guess who Luxy have drafted in as Powell's replacement in the breakfast show uh Mike Reed

oh wow the other thing of note is he automatically becomes the youngest member of the current presenter pool on top of the pubs at the age of well Powell 26 so called kid Jensen, 27. Edmonds, 28.

Really? God, great. Travis, 32. 32. Blackburn, 34. Ed Stewart, 36. Ed Stewart's doing Top of the Pops in 1977. Fucking hell.

And, of course, Savile, 51. They're all such babies. The BBC Globe fades and we are immediately confronted by Powell in a Radio 1 T-shirt who bellows a welcome and throws us straight into the top 30 rundown, accompanied by Turn to Stone by ELO. We've covered the Electric Light Orchestra loads of times on Chart Music, and this, their tenth single, is the follow-up to Telephone Line,

which got to number eight in two non-consecutive weeks in june of 1977 it's also the league cup from their seventh lp out of the blue which came out the other week a double lp which was written in a fortnight by jeff lynn in a rented cottage in the swiss alps and has already notched up four million pre-orders and instantly went platinum. The single entered the charts at number 43 last week, and this week it soared 16 places to number 27. Now, before we let David in to rave on about the ELO, let's get the chart pictures out of the way for a second.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a few in here, aren't there? Say what you see, chaps. Yeah. Mary Mason, I thought I had a few in here, aren't there? Say what you see, chaps. Mary Mason. I thought I had a photographic memory of this era. There wasn't a memory of Mary Mason. This is bullshit. This has been photoshopped in for some obscure reason. There was no Mary Mason.

This is a lie. Angel of the Morning. I mean, Giorgio Moroder. Oh, yeah. That photo of Giorgio. Oh, my God. It's like hideous her-sue-ure creation. You know, beyond the imaginings of the farce show. And, of course, flanked by two of the sultriest stunners 1977 had to offer. Yeah, ending in an A. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, stunners.

Oh, absolutely, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, they've got those huge tinted glasses, that medallion and that kind of right of hair. I mean, it makes Dave Lee Travis look like Howard DeVoto, doesn't it? Yes. I mean, it's ridiculous. It's just like ultra hirsue alpha and yet you say that from this body and this mind sprang the reinvention of pop this very year donna summer that you know it came from this body yeah so he's entitled to all the lovelies he can get his hands on well that's that's true that's true oh ram jam now ram jam to me a pure 1975 and i'm sure that's true. That's true. Oh, Ram Jam. Now, Ram Jam, to me, a pure 1975. I'm sure that Midnight and New

Year's Eve, they literally physically expired. Yes. None more 1977 than Ram Jam, with the possibility of Wild Willie Barrett. Well, there's the wrong line-up of Roxy music. Yeah, exactly. It's nice to see Brian Eno rejoining Roxy music, ditching all that ambient stuff.

Yeah, that's great, yeah. There's those pictures from the first LP where Brian Ferry looks like Doctor and the Medic. Yes, yes. And Phil Manzanera playing his guitar like a World War I fighter ace flying his biplane. Yes. Fucking great.

It's the re-release of Virginia Plains. Ah, OK, well, fair enough then. Yeah, yeah. Oh, that's impressively accurate. Yeah, OK. Oh, well. There's Carlos Santana suddenly remembering his recently deceased dog in the middle of a blowjob.

Oh, man! Oh, God! I put down, he's looking like he's trying to remember where he put his car keys while he's being given a nosh. It's unmistakable. We got to the nosh bit in the end, though, Taylor. Great minds think alike there's the baron knights uh beaming with flinty glee as they hear that the charges have been dropped for lack of evidence yet again uh the the carpenters spectral forms uh wearing those

shirts so white that they don't actually exist in the visible spectrum. It looks like the carpenters live from Three Mile Island. The stranglers pictured in front of precisely the appropriate shade of dirty, rancid green, like a 1970s labour exchange toilet wall smeared with itinerant mucus. toilet wall smeared with itinerant mucus um and uh david soul looking just ever so slightly concerned about the moustache he's grown uh officially recorded as the second ever standalone moustache grown by a blonde man um and he is you know he's right to be concerned, since you asked Brian McLean of love. Oh, and status quo, all leathered and mustachioed and unhealthy, looking like the Albanian secret police in about 1988,

inquiring as to where you got that swing-out sister record. This could well be the debut appearance of that photo of the bgs yeah yeah look how unscratched it is it's pristine i don't think the pistols are doing themselves any favors you know no rather slovenly and yobbish and uncouth yes in a kind of not really quite punk ways if they unless it's some sort of meta sort of yobbishness i suspect john lyden maybe he's being meta meta yobbish i think steve jones is being actual yobbish then you've got sid vicious bent over like an untethered punk monkey it's uh odd image all told really yeah so dear boys it's late 1977 and we are at peak elo don't you think they got off to a good start in the early 70s, but they became more popular in America than they were over here.

There was a bit of a brief lull in the mid-70s, but they roared back in 1976. And here they are following up an LP that sold 5 million copies last year. And this is the opening shot out of that blue if you will yeah yeah i can i can sense pricey already kind of getting sort of angry in advance you know as i sort of muse yeah his pricey prongs i mean i would only say i don't think this particular thing is their finest i remember it vividly from the time and it sort of trundles along in a sort of clapped out boogie wagon type sort of device and you can imagine poor old beethoven liner thinking i rolled over for this but the thing is i mean perhaps i'm a little bit over overall a bit

unfair to elo because of like when this came out i mean i had a sort of peter powell type universal appreciation for absolutely anything if it was pop and I'd consider this first class opal fruits for the ears then of course a few months later when I gained critical consciousness they were one of the they're one of quite a few groups I felt I had to renounce definitely I probably actually read somewhere about how they celebrated their own artifice and nodded along that's probably a bad thing yes yes and then the worst thing was, I've mentioned before, my younger brother getting into something that didn't help at all. Because I always had to be one up.

When he got his chipper, I got my chopper. When he got into ELO, it sort of behooved me to step up a notch. So I think perhaps that has kind of coloured my appreciation of ELO over the years, in fairness. It was your brother's music. Yeah, exactly. So this album would have been ringing through the stubbs household right about this time well yeah it was actually uh or over the next couple years of the slight

delay really because it was more 78 79 you know i was and it was the great elo versus faust wars raged in a certain part of barricade helmet yeah it's a funny one this isn't it this record it's like for me there there's two elOs and I like one and not the other you know two ELOs sometimes in the same song there's the the chunky lumbering beard and pint and mild ELO it's like the ELO that's very specifically a man from the West Midlands in a very expensive recording studio as if it were the shed in his garden in small heath where he tinkers with his 1962 triumph bonniver it's basically it's driving music in it you know you got you got your tinted glasses on and you're driving on an a road so heading for spaghetti

junction or you know full of beef burgers or heading head in for Bolton-on-the-Water to see the model village, perhaps. You know, always worth a visit. It's good because it's got a model village of the town of Bolton-on-the-Water, including the model village in it. Then inside that, you can just about see another model village. If you keep going, you come to the smallest object in the universe and then inside that is the lead singer from air supply um i bet the people who made fantastic voyages must have felt like right cunts when they find out about this so there's that elo there's like you know the

driving gloves elo and then there's the other elo yes who sound celestial and otherworldly, you know, like there's no friction or gravity in this music. That's the best ELO, the ELO that sounds like the music is genuinely being beamed from the ELO spaceship off the record covers, you know. That spaceship which looked like the game Simon. Yes. And this one is a mix of both it's like there's some really lovely textures in it um just sheets of blue perspex you know like which is absolutely my elo and then there's also a lot of smoothly produced clatter which does nothing for me you know it's got that river dance rhythm in it for a start and

that's always a bit suspect in records from the 70s just because of the prog associations the only two 70s records i can think of that have got that rhythm which i like are one of these days by pink floyd and the seven inch of the doctor who theme uh other than that it's right yeah yeah i mean i'm a bad judge because just as uh just as david had his brother i'd elo was the kind of music that my not especially musical dad thought was really impressive you know like it was a a great achievement it's not that i ever resented my dad or his musical taste or anything like that i just felt that those priorities and those concepts of what music should be like or what was good music were not mine and should be

rejected and rebelled against you know i thought that was what people who don't really get music just assumed was obvious right that this great production and this uh achievement was was you know that this was the pinnacle of what music could be and i thought that's not true but i hear it now it's all right i mean it's ripping off the beatles a lot um and queen which for english rock is pretty bass level you know but it's it's okay. It's a bit of a carvery meal, but it's all right. I can hear it and not implode. Yeah. When I watched this episode for the first time in ages

and this came up, it's like, I don't know this song. And then all of a sudden, of course, the chorus tips up and it's like, oh yeah, there we go. I know you now. ELO, very good at choruses. Yeah, well, that's the trouble you see. So in the great ELO versus Faust wars, one of the great maxims of Krauss rock, very good at choruses. Yeah, well, that's the trouble you see. So, in the great ELO versus Faust wars, one of the great maxims of Krauss rock is

that you stew, you know, choruses. You know, there isn't... Yeah, oh, God, yeah. You know, you plough motric on. So, you know, that would have been a pointer against them for a start there. Kind of insidious facility for a chorus. It's interesting, you know, there's this... A compilation has just come out on Cherry Red, and it's called something like

Boston, and it's called something like Boston, and it's a three-disc anthology of Brumrock, you know, from 66 to 74. And, I mean, you know, whilst there's some distinctly variable stuff on it, you do realise just what a kind of civic force, you know, Birmingham stroke Wolverhampton was and how much it actually produced. And yet, at the same time, as implied in the title of that collection, there's possibly always been this very slight cultural cringe around Birmingham. It's almost like there's a sort of built-in kind of modesty, in a sense,

you know, despite, you know, the kind of strength of the achievements, you know. Or perhaps, you know, in terms of it being sort of taken seriously and highly regarded, you know, you think that places like Liverpool and Manchester have been a lot more exalted. But in terms of, you know, quantity, at least, and especially in that era, you know, Birmingham would have produced a great deal of you know quantity at least and especially in that era but you know Birmingham will have produced a great deal you know and they probably did more to fill out the early 70s than your Liverpool's and your Manchester's did yeah but unlike Liverpool and Manchester the area has an inferiority complex like the cultural cringe like I say yeah definitely the UK are finally catching on to Ielo by this point aren't they I mean a couple of years ago they were playing Madison Square Garden and then coming back here and struggling to get 300 people into de montfort

all in leicester but a year from now they're going to be doing eight nights at wembley arena with a big fuck off spaceship which was clearly nicked from funkadelic yeah and uh being introduced by fucking tony curtis of all. I remember that footage, yeah. The greatest rock and roll band in the world. Yeah, Tony Curtis, man. He was well up for the Midlands, wasn't he? ELO, Debbie Ashby, and that's it. But that's enough.

I watched that at the time, and I was really bitter when I saw him saying that, and I lost a lot of respect for Tony Curtis that had built up during the Persuaders, because Faust was obviously the greatest band in the world and like how he didn't see that what did roger moore have to say about elo he kept very quiet about that didn't he yes he kept his own counsel yeah yeah so the following week turned to stone nudged up three places to number 24 stayed there the following week and then took three weeks to crawl its way to number 18 its highest position oh dear bodes ill but the follow-up mr blue sky got to number six in february of 1978 kicking off a run of three singles from the lp getting to number six that

year and out of the blue would go on to sell over 10 million copies worldwide. Mr. Blue Sky, David, where do you stand on that? In a noise. Ooh, lovely. Turn it up when you're coming home This is a modern world This is a modern world This is a modern world What kind of fool do you think I am?

You think I know nothing of a modern world Before turn to stone and the canned applause Even has a chance to fade out, we're hit in the face with a rick and backer being played with fire and skill and the first performance of the evening, The Modern World by The Jam. We've covered The Jam in Chart Music 15 and this, their third single, is the follow-up to all around the world which got to number 13

in august of this year it's also the lead cut from their new lp this is the modern world which comes out a fortnight after tomorrow a mere six months after their first in the city the single which has been re-recorded for radio airplay, came out early last week and it's already crashed into the charts at number 38 and they've been rushed into the top of the pub studio. Well boys, this really is the only thing that's even remotely punk on this episode because, you know, even now, just after 11 months to the day of the Grundy incident, which was Punk's coming out party, it's still not bossing Top of the Pops about, is it? I mean, here's a list of all the punky appearances that have occurred on Top of the Pops so far in 1977.

And by punk, I mean bands who look as if they're personally angry with you for making them do this sort of shit. So, the jam in the them do this sort of shit. So, the jam in the city, 19th of May. The Stranglers, Go Buddy Go, 26th of May, 9th of June and 23rd of June. The Saints, This Perfect Day, 14th of July. The Sex Pistols, Pretty Vacant, also the 14th of july first chant music we ever did david the jam all around the world 21st of july 4th of august 18th of august television prove it 6th of august the rods do anything you want to do 11th of aug August and 25th of August. The Stranglers' Something Better Change, 18th of August.

The Adverts' Gary Gilmore's Eyes, 25th of August. The Boomtown Rats' Looking After Number One, also the 25th of August. Elvis Costello, Red Shoes, 8th of September. Generation X, Your Generation, 15th of September Generation X Your Generation 15th of September The Stranglers No More Heroes 22nd of September Tom Robinson Band

2468 Motorway 27th of October and the Sex Pistols Holidays in the Sun also on the 27th of October so no Clash, Buzzcocks or Damned in 1977, but for Top of the Pops, the Jam were always in reception. Absolutely, yeah, yeah.

I mean, you know, I was just purely a pop craze younger at this time, and so punk to me would have meant the Pistols, obviously, the Stranglers and the Jam, essentially. The Clash didn't really have a look in, because, of course, the Clash didn't do Top of the Pops. It was out of their militancy and what have you. But this cut through, this really spoke to me because I think for kids my age, so I'm what, about 15, just turned 15,

I mean, punk wasn't really about Bond, Injun, Mohicans or any of that King's Road stuff. I mean, it's about the rise of the school kids and it's kind of been in the air for a while. We've been kind of ready for this. This look, you know, this whole attitude's been simmering in us since, well, it's 1973. I mean, my first inkling of punk was in the Beano,

in Dennis the Menace, Dennis and the Dinmakers, if you remember, with Nasher on drums. Oh, yeah, the Pioneers. That's right, Walter of all people on bass, and that was my kind of early... Something was about to change. And I was a little bit off it as well, but there'd always been that kind of surliness and gobbing and repurposing a school

uniform into something that's sartorially rebellious you know big ties top buttons undone oxford bags stack shoes yeah it was weird but also you know these 70s things because we all know i mean nobody was immaculately dressed in punk there were loads of flares and center partings and what have you but for me you know the essence of punk was kevin burke from our class 4s knocking on the staff room door big bill french master answering it and kevin burke and his flares and a safety pin through his nose shouting punk rock at him and running off punk rock what was he into what what bands were he into oh no he didn't he just knew about punk rock he'd heard about it right he understood the essential delinquency of it i bet he'd heard about it in Cheeky Wheatcliffe.

So there's a lot in this. It's about school, you know, and the song and his teachers and stuff like that. And so there is this schoolish attitude. They're like sort of rogue prefects here, hijacking the school disco. It's got that kind of energy about it, really. You know, we don't know what's right and wrong. Yeah, right. I do like also, you know, Rick Buckler on drums. Yes. Have I told you my Rick Buckler-related joke? Go on.

Have I? You want to hear it? Yes. Really? Yeah? The jam one? Yes, please. Oh, right.

Okay, because, you know, it's fantastic, and I don't think it... It just doesn't get the appreciation for some reason. It's never had. I mean, people have been left cold by it, but you wait until you hear it. It sounds like it's going to be brilliant. Well, I think that is the promise, yeah.

Go on, go on, I'm ready to laugh. Let me put my tea down before it goes through my nose. I know. If you've got an aisle nearby, be ready to roll in it. So anyway, the joke is, if I were to open an estate agent... Oh, no, we've heard it! No! Oh, no.

Oh, no, is that what... Well, sorry, I'm sorry. That's the only one I've got. Okay. Every time the jump comes up, you do heard it. No. Oh, no. Well, sorry. I'm sorry. That's the only one I've got. Okay. Every time the jump comes up, you do that joke, David. Oh. And Taylor beat you to it. Well, are you sure?

Come on, let's hear it again. I'm sure I'm going to laugh just as hard this time. Exactly. Even with all of this, I think you're going to laugh. If I were to open an estate agent, I'd call it butlers and only do business with people who got the joke. Ha ha ha ha ha ha! There we go, exactly.

That is exactly. I'm sure that's happening, that's resounding up and down the country among the pot-crazed youngsters. You're raising some very good points here, shit joke notwithstanding, because, you know me, I would become a massive jamhead, but not now not here because you're 15 years old you're um you're fucking leary aren't you oh tell me yeah and

surly yeah yeah yeah but for me the modern world meant forest subutio 2000 ad actually being liked by the teachers and trying to get seven fizz bombs into my mouth in one go on the way to school yeah yeah you know the modern world was fucking mint for me if i'd have written this song the song and trying to get seven fizz bombs into my mouth in one go on the way to school. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, the modern world was fucking mint for me. If I'd have written this song, the song would have been called This is the Modern World, hurrah. I always felt that my younger brothers got life just that bit better. All these kind of things just suddenly opened up a bit

and they had a better quality of life just two or three years down the line than I did, definitely. Because, you know, there was empty desperation empty desperation really as far as I was concerned the only other thing I'd say is um I do well again once again I mean politely received you know by the audience you can actually see them taking a cue from the floor managers who applaud you can actually see them turn heads as the floor managers clearly make oh I'm sorry enthusiasm enthusiasm not too much enthusiasm but that's always a thing. Not too much enthusiasm, no spitting.

Yeah, I mean, I remember seeing them do In the City on Mark, the Mark Boland Granada TV show with me gran there, and just thinking that they looked like the cunts from the secondary school up the road who walked through our playground thinking there was summer. The surliness and the snotiness is he's just coming off paul weller and to a lesser extent bruce foxton but rick buckler really lets the side down when they do a close-up on him and he just gives the camera this gormless smile yeah he just has that kind of

look i don't give a shit i'm the hardest kid in the class you know he's also got a ring of padding around his symbols did you see that yeah so he can give them a proper thrashing without you know pissing off the neighbors poor weller looks angry and larry rick buckler just looks confident in his hardness i never felt scared of bruce though he looks like a man flying through turbulence you know i mean he's always got that slightly look on his face and it has to be said that the jam are not sharp dressed men at the moment are they they've got buttoned down shirts but you know if one of them buttons pop they'd be on the verge of being condor collars the camera stays above the ankle but i'm pretty sure there's going to be a bit of swing in those trousers oh definitely yeah but that was just right that was

just perfect because that's how all those kids looked in their, you know, fourth-form class photos. If they'd looked too smart, too immaculate, we wouldn't have related to them. And also, I love the Grange Hill image of the early generation. Yes, gripper weller. Yeah. Whatever the logic of dressing in off-the-peg suits as a reaction against punk,

or, you know, a reaction against... Like a sort of utilitarian workers' protest against bohemianism, you know a reaction against like a sort of utilitarian workers protest against bohemianism you know the aesthetics of it are great like jet black suits and not in that mohair suit so the light just disappears into them pure black suits gleaming white shirts washed by his mum uh jet black tires gleaming white socks and fire engine red guitars um it's such a strong vivid look you know although it's slightly spoiled here by bruce turning up with the white base because it always looks wrong when their guitars aren't color matched um the rest of the image is so so perfect and symmetrical no you you have to have the same color guitars come on you're supposed to have an eye for detail it's a mod thing it is much better

than the other top of the pops appearance they made for this song where paul weller's wearing a pair of dark glasses that look like he borrowed them off his nan you know like who wore them with a knitted cap and a plum colored leather coat you know i mean the appropriation of shirts suits and ties is just one of the key things from sort of punk through post-punk onwards you know across the board in various ways and very specific ways but overall it is just a rejection of like what seems like a rather trite kind of anti-suit and tie thing that you get from sort of prog and hippie or whatever so it's kind of represents a rejection of that it has to be said that well has got a proper well a dad haircut here oh yeah yeah yeah and it's proper mullity isn't it probably here by robert

at schumer yeah that kind of shit you just remember yeah all those kids rushing into the shop uh holding the record sleeve pointing at that picture of Bruce Foxton makes me look like this but this is the whole thing for all its massive imperfections it's perfect if it had been perfect it would have been imperfect sort of thing you know it's just right they just hit exactly

the right sartorial note for people like me watching so Weller's got a red Rickenbacker and he's one of the first artists of the era to have adorned his guitar with messages on top of the pops, isn't it? He's scratched I am nobody into the top right of the guitar body. Yeah, which you wouldn't do unless you thought you were somebody. Or what you're trying to say is, people keep telling me I'm important.

I know. That's what that means. It kind of contradicts the thrust of the lyric doesn't it yeah uh but more importantly more more intriguing there he slapped a sticker with an address typed on it hasn't he at the bottom right which shall i read it out i don't know if i need well it's jill bromley kent and as we all all know, Jill was Paul Weller's girlfriend at the time and would be so right the way through the jam's career because, you know, she's the one holding the white flag

on the cover of Beat Surrender. But fucking hell. Yeah, it's a bit odd. One of many things about this clip that you probably wouldn't do the same way today. Yeah, look, the full address. Like when they report on court proceedings in the local paper yes or read out viewers letters on the big match it's like and i went on i'm sure you did too

i went on street view of course you looked it up it's a nice maps yeah it's a nice first flat for a young professional lady you know it's a it's a purpose built behind some trees. You know, yeah, nice area. Yeah, they need to fix that gate though. It's just as well there weren't video recorders around so much at that time because, you know, that house would have been laid siege by lads in jam shoes and parkas, you know, hoping to catch a glimpse of their hero having a ride with his girlfriend

and having to be taken to hospital because he smashed a teacup over his head in frustration, as was documented in the Paulo Hewitt book, A Beat Concerto. This isn't a very good song, really. Do you reckon? No, it's all right. I'm arguing with you on that one. Beef, beef, beef, beef.

Well, I mean, it's clearly the best track on the new LP, isn't it? It's up there, yeah. But you don't get much of a sense from it of what the jam would become. I mean, you do in a sense, because the blueprint is very much already there, but you don't get a sense of how strangely subtle and weirdly brutalist beautiful they would become. It is just the skeletal jam. and weirdly sort of brutalist beautiful they would become. It is just the skeletal jam.

It's just an angry bloke barking over this tangled, wiry cacophony with these comical lyrics about how he still hates his teachers, you know, even though he left school years ago. But what it does show you is the base on which the jam's good music would be built. does show you is the base on which the jam's good music would be built in the yeah this is already like it's an explicitly working class expression which was specifically suburban rather than urban because london has always looked down on the jam for their provincial naivety you know which was real but they were really for kids from places like Woking, or Aylesbury, or Bedford, or Stevenage, or Maidstone. It was just council estates on the fringes of medium-sized towns.

They know he comes from Woking and they think he's a fraud, but his heart is in the city where it belongs. but his heart is in the sitter where it belongs yeah and also already at this point the jam are specifically aspirational in a in a sort of quasi-spiritual rather than materialistic sense you know but they're aspirational they're not nihilistic or hedonistic right which is quite an unusual thing at the time. And when you put all that together, it does explain why they meant so much to so many people, for better or for worse,

especially at a time when there wasn't much else to do, you know? And even at this stage, you listen to the album that this is from, This Is The Modern World, with its ultimate new wave cover shot of them underneath the west with some tower blocks in the background uh and it isn't a very good lp but even there it's got stuff on it like life from a window which is a properly beautiful song about a very specific but universal experience of being young and alienated and we you know with no self-consciousness whatsoever they sing i'm staring at a gray sky oh i try to paint it blue teenage blue teenage

which is beautiful and it's out and the fabulous closing line i'm standing on the post office tower so i can see all there is to see it's a pure possibility you know and you can chuckle at it but it's great that that stuff's there and you have to write it down fast because once you're 23 it's not going to come in your head as purely as that so by that point if you're writing about adolescence, suddenly you're writing about a character and it might as well be quadrophenia. It's good to have a bit of the real thing when it's charming. And pop is the one medium that can accommodate that sweet lack of sophistication and make it glorious.

So, I mean, this is one of their weakest and silliest singles, but I like the way that it isn't just a song played by people who look like pupils at Grange Hill. It's a song that could have been written by pupils from Grange Hill. Yeah, this is it. Again, it's the gauche adolescence, I think, that is actually essential. You know, it's not something you have to tolerate. I'm only surprised it doesn't say flipping heck.

Actually, he might as well, because they did censor out the swear word, didn't they? Oh, yeah, it's a bit Scarlett O'Hara, isn't it? I don't give a damn. Yes. Imagine how good Gone With The Wind would have been if Clark Gable had played a character called Rick Buckler. To my mind, the best track on the new LP.

This and Standards are the highlights of that album. But to my mind, this track on the new lp this and standards are the highlights of that album but to my mind this is paul weller saying you know this is the modern world and i'm part of it i'm not a who copyist this is clearly the paul weller who read a review accusing him of being a revivalist and then cut it out stuck it to some card wrote how can i be a revivalist when i'm only 18 over the top of it and then wore it around his neck to the pub that night yeah angry yeah angry young man it also brings to mind chris needham sitting on the bog with his trousers still up after his blazing set in the drama hall of rawlins community college flushing the toilet and saying flipping school and then getting the arse of his jeans all wet yeah but i mean this this is the modern world is the key is the keynote really

this is the modern world and i'm making it yeah convenient that it's got the word mod in it though yes he does want his cake and eat it but i mean yeah they were obviously accused of ripping off uh the who my generation, which they obviously were. But the sound of it is completely inverted, right? Like the black and white look of the early jam is indivisible in my mind from the weird black and white sound of the early jam record. Yeah.

Where the bizarre mix on them all, where it's a guitar record, but the guitar is mixed so low you can barely hear it probably because it's so trebly that if you had it at normal volume it'd rip through your eardrums like a corkscrew and the drums are always absurdly loud like thudding plastic skins walloping

and this is the same on every song they never did anything different for about three years. Paul Weller played guitar solos that may as well not have existed, you know, just in the distance somewhere. Whereas when you listen to My Generation LP, the overdubs that Pete Townshend's doing on the 12th string record back sound like a plane taking off on the other side of the room. And this is considerably less fearsome i

guess you you've got to thank the producer right vick smith um whose real name or full name was victor coppersmith heaven yes but uh it's so that was i mean it's a delightful name but not something that he was prepared to reveal in 1977 probably the worst time in pop history to have that name. So you know there's that goalkeeper Bailey Peacock Farrell he's the Northern Ireland goalkeeper. Like for a time he played for Leeds United

and then I was thinking this isn't right. You can't be Leeds United goalkeeper called Bailey Peacock Farrell. Yeah but that's their nickname isn't it? The Peacocks. Well, that's true, yeah. Leeds Peacocks. It's one of those teams no one ever calls. Yeah, it's like the Throssels. Perfect name.

Yeah, I remember saying at the time, you might get away with that name in Chapel Allerton, but if you're out in town on a Saturday night, you better ask your friends to call you Killer. This really is the sound of a band who have been folded into the punk boom whether they like it or not and they're trying to kick on but they don't really know who they are now they pull the right shapes but they don't want to be trapped in amber yeah well have you heard their demos from 1975 it's like from like when they're like kids they're like 15 16 year old kids and they're doing like yeah beat all type pop songs and the singing and the playing is much better than it is on these records right is they're obviously like really good and just slightly dialed it down a bit for

punk well this is it i think quite a few people had to pretend to be a bit less proficient than they actually were didn't they i mean you, this whole thing about people that can't play, you know, is always... If people physically couldn't play, then it would just disintegrate after 10 or 15 seconds. But, you know, I always thought it was just that people were playing in a very limited way or a deliberately limited way, you know, so to avoid, you know, prog excess, et cetera, et cetera.

A bit like Dave Greenfield in The Stranglers. But, yeah, it's an interesting album because it is the sound of a band just trapped. You know, like Nick Haywood said, you get your whole life to write your first album and then three months to write your second. And, you know, This Is The Modern World is a prime example and that no other singles released off this you'll note.

Yeah, but this little slumpump this early slump in their career wasn't it that he just met uh jill of only kent and uh basically just wanted to spend all his time with her wasn't really into doing the band and so it all got a bit hard for us so you got like bruce foxton right in the a side of the next thing yes Yes. Which is really not a good idea. I mean, by this time, Weller's actually moved to London, to Baker Street, and the other two are still living with their mums and dads in Woking.

Yeah. And Weller's put himself about a little bit in London, and he's already seen the punks on its arse. Yeah. And he's wondering whether the view has been worth the climb of being in the jam. And yeah, he seems to be more interested in his girlfriend than his band

not that you'd know it from the uh fearsome performance here where he's he's doing that usual thing where he he rears back and then plunges forward with his guitar like grimacing yeah baring his teeth like he's hacking the head off a 400 foot serpent yes which in his head he probably was it's a serpent of complacency a pretty good start to this episode of top of the pops i'd say yeah but they were on the verge of becoming the real jam yeah it's just about to click in the next year you know and i think part of it and i mean i've said this before this happens to other groups of people too in the same way. But there's a problem for young working class songwriters and performers because middle class songwriters are allowed to do and be anything that they like. You know, whatever they feel, it's their artistic entitlement to go in any direction they want.

to go in any direction they want. Whereas working class songwriters are always expected to be symbols of and or spokesmen for the working class, right? Or else they're somehow letting everybody down. They're not granted that same freedom. It's like, no, you have to be where you came from. When in fact, of course, the jam are good and interesting to precisely the extent that they're not trying to be symbols of or spokesman for anything they're just being creative and they're dull and prosaic to precisely the

extent that they are symbols of and spokesman for the working class the worst paul weller artistically is the paul weller with a chip on his shoulder trying to express his his commonplace confusion and uns like his relatable confusion and uncertainty in this specifically tough street kind of way you know with a pugilistic huff and puff instead of singing and all this scorching heat and and lack of light you know and's fun, but it's not good. And if that's all the jam had ever been, and if they'd split up after this album, as they almost did, they'd be one of the more interesting of the suburban,

hang around the adventure playground, smoking and spitting type bands. But it's when he worked out that he could express that confusion and vulnerability and defiance in a subtler way and could work it into an aesthetic and a kind of cool sort of that's when they went from black and white into color like figuratively as well as sartorially. Yeah. But they always clunked when they tried to be ideological. That's the thing.

Yeah. Partly because his lyrics are really painful whenever he writes general social comment, rather than doing it through stories about individual people, which is what he does on the best songs, you know. Yeah. And also it never worked when he tried to stitch his sociopolitical concerns into that kind of zap, pow, this is what's happening, sort of 60s pop art vagueness, you know, that kind of vague optimism.

So all these songs about commitment and idealism and passion, but it's almost for its own sake, you know. No definable goal just this hunger for something which wasn't material wasn't religious wasn't politically achievable couldn't really be defined in any way but it's it's what we're yearning for you know it's uh it's beautiful in songs like the place i love where he sort of acknowledges its futility and melancholy, you know. And he just goes, I'm making a stand against the world,

which is like the line you could hear in a million New Wave songs. But then the next line is, there's those who'd hurt us if they heard. He's really paranoid and worried. But, you know, it all goes wrong whenever it becomes pseudo-constructive and that's the bit of the jam i never like when he's trying to link expensive shoes and youth cnd you know and have a cappuccino for international socialism you know yeah yeah and that's sort of pushing on towards style council, I guess. So you've got this cynical, miserable bastard

who also thinks that society is perfectible. And the best way to start is with a 200-quid haircut that looks like a novelty hat. Lyrically, it's odd that a 19-year-old lad is still pissed off with what teachers told him at school. Because when I was 19 19 things that happened at school just didn't give a fuck that was the past yeah i only start getting angry about the way you were treated at school when you're a lot older and it's like oh fucking hell my life could have

been so much better if i'd gone to a better school and all that kind of stuff but you can see this song as the prequel to billy hunt can't you yeah yeah yeah but it's he's still 19 that's the thing that he hasn't really developed an aesthetic yet he's still groping around a bit and sort of like piecing together stuff that he likes trying to just waiting for it to click into a shape that is his you know i think that's true in terms of his concerns as well as his uh you know artistic influences etc a lot of the strangeness of the jam and by extension the most interesting stuff about the jam is down to the fact that paul weller is one of the greatest ever examples of a naturally bright lad with almost no education trying to inform and educate himself on the fly while churning out

songs um and i mean there's countless examples of this in pop music from you know the beatles on down but paul weller is almost the greatest example because he didn't write many love songs he was desperate to communicate every idea that he read about as soon as he'd read about it, right? Like, as soon as he got into a thing or an idea that was maybe slightly beyond his capabilities as a writer at that point. But, no, as soon as he discovered something new, whether it was Shelley or, you know, Geoffrey Ash and his mushroom-headed, pender's fan idea of Camelot and the Vision of Albion. You know, it would all go straight into a lyric or straight onto a record sleeve.

There's a total lack of context. Like, you always get with self-educated people. Like, they read Shelley and it's right, now I know Shelley, but there's no wider understanding of romantic poetry or the context of the early 19th century or, you know, opposing critical views of Shelley or anything like that. Which I certainly don't mean in a sneery way because I went through all that stuff, too. I didn't go to university or live in an environment that was literary. University of life, eh, Taylor?

Yeah, absolutely. Hard knocks and tough surprises. And the stuff that I was writing at 20 is exactly the same, you know. Yeah. But it means that you get all these strange, straining lyrics where he's blazingly passionate, but just slightly out of his depth. And sometimes it's great, and sometimes it's hilariously awkward in a way that you just don't get with most other self-styled new wave poets right who would tended to stick to what they knew and tended to be a bit older than they made out as well yeah yeah yeah this is the the best thing as well as the achilles

heel of paul weller he's always straining at the limits of his brain and the limits of his vocabulary and the limits of his secondary modern education, which is why you get all those malapropisms and all those sort of lines, like down at the tube station at midnight when he says, the glazed dirty steps repeat my own

and reflect my thoughts, which is sort of a horrible line because it's so overwritten and it falls foul of the basic rule of thumb of one image per image, you know. But you can see why he would have thought that was great. You can see why he thought that was real poetry, you know. Musically, you get something similar to that overreach you know there's loads of examples of the jam running before they are walking right which you usually get away with apart from when they do soul and funk you know well there's a few of their attempts at soul and

funk later on in their career which make the top of the pop's orchestra sound pretty fierce you know but it's but they had the same problem that most white guitar bands post-punk had which is that they are not from that generation that grew up playing r&b or pure blues to audiences of people who were dancing you know it's like paul weller was enough of a soul boy that he could grasp how soul music worked, even when he couldn't quite execute it. But Bruce and Rick so obviously grew up listening to Bad Company, you know, and live in this musical world of straight lines

and regular intervals. But here's the thing. This is the thing that, say, like indie bands don't understand. You listen to Satisfaction by the Rolling Stones, rolling stones right we all know how that riff goes it goes and every garage indie band on earth someone has that riff and instinctively when you're trying to work out an arrangement the drummer comes down hard on it and the bass player doubles it and you would get essentially a heavy metal track.

But when you hear the Stones, they don't do that. Bill Wyman doesn't double it. He plays something completely different. It's syncopated against the guitar and drums. He goes like... And you put them together, and that tiny change makes the whole record move. Just the fact that the gaps are in slightly different places

makes you want to move, it makes you want to dance. It turns into a dance record as well as a rock and roll song. And it was second nature to that rhythm section to do that because of their musical background. But this generation of musicians don't have that grounding in r&b so everything they play is straight lines right the best example in the jams case being start which everyone thinks has got the riff from taxman it's not actually the riff from taxman if you listen to taxman paul mccartney plays and there's a gap at the end right and that gap is where the

funk is right because you leave spaces right in in any sort of r&b or funky bass playing where you put the silences is as important as which notes you play but on start bruce foxton plays the riff that most people think they can hear on on taxman he goes and yeah and rick buckler compounds it by coming down really hard on that last note because they don't understand the territory right so you get and it sounds like a fucking goose-stepping umpire band. It's not funky at all. But it's great, though. It's fucking great. It is great in its own way, but it's just sometimes bands wonder why they sound so white and unfunky,

and it's like, oh, is it something genetic? It's like, well, it's not just the looseness or the tightness of how you're playing, it's the actual notes and beats themselves. They don't understand the musical nuts and bolts of what they're trying to play and i strongly suspect that paul weller who had an instinctive grasp of musical forms did understand this stuff and i suspect the fact that the other two didn't may have had quite a lot to do with why the jabs split up when they did i mean obviously let's take the point about the beatles and the stones and I think it was necessary that they be what they were

and they have that proficiency and that background or whatever, and I think that is important. But I think that one of the sort of aspects of post-punk was kids who loved black music, were fascinated by it, sometimes on the sort of extremes, even like Carrie Voltaire's or whatever, hip-hop group or whatever, finding a way, an untutored way, to come to this music, and the fact that it was so sort of off-beam, as it were, made it more interesting, you know, like A Certain Ratio, for instance.

The thing about A Certain Ratio is they spent their careers trying to get slicker and slicker and better and better at playing that kind of dance music. And as they did so, the less and less interesting, arguably, they became, you know, certainly in the first phase of their career. They're now a different kind of band, really. They are more kind of proficient you know but but i think in that early stage it was when they were sort of feeling their way towards it and creating that kind of weird sort of gothic slight perversion of funk that was quite fascinating but i don't know if that necessarily applied to the jam though i mean what you say about paul weller just whacking everything down as soon as he comes into his head you're totally right taylor but you know that's because he's in a band that ferrari knows he's going to be a flash in the pan and could end anytime soon yeah and he's

also got a big record coming on his back saying we want second album now yeah yeah yeah so he's got to think like that hasn't it yeah i guess and also but i mean that immediacy is what he's into you know and i mean look i mean it's anyone including me who wants to snigger at the youthful excesses and over enthusiastic awkwardness of paul weller's lyrics or whatever you know first of all you have to acknowledge the brilliance of his of his best songs but also you've got to see those creaky lines and those weird lines that don't work not as blemishes but as living proof that this is a kid who came from an environment like where you know it came from a school where even the most creative and sensitive kids have to do 15 hours of metal work a week

you know yeah from a an environment where you didn't read books, you didn't watch films, right? Transforming himself through sheer talent and application within about two years into an amazing songwriter, you know, and one who connected with a young audience of, like, you know, football hooligans and juvenile delinquents and bus shelter kicker-inners and fucking made them think, you know? Yeah.

And the fact that 40 years on, half of those people are now carling, drinking Brexiteers, you know, with air cuts that look like they were tipped onto their head out of a bowl. It's not really his fault, is it? There's something genuinely amazing about this that the biggest band in the country for a while certainly the biggest band with these kind of oiks used to put out songs that went i think we've lost our perception i think we've lost sight of the

goals we should be fighting for i think we've lost our reason we stumble blindly and that vision must be destroyed. But he gave them all these songs that are ripping into male violence and unthinking machismo and social deference and the class system and the grinding down of individuality. And once he'd moved on from the clumsy period that we get in this particular Top of the Pops, he usually did it without too much sloganeering or, you know, rabble-rousing. He led all those horses to water and some of them drank, you know,

and some of them didn't. But it's a genuine achievement and he didn't have any help. Certainly not from the teachers who said he'd be nothing. You know, and then you get these amazing songs like Ghosts and Burning Sky and Start, where everything just comes together and it's perfectly balanced and it's proper, fully functioning, purposeful pop that actually got into millions of people's lives and minds. And you look at a lot of those people now

and you wonder what it was all worth or what it really meant. But that's not Paul Weller's fault. I wonder what kind of Friday morning those teachers at Sharewater Comprehensive had the day after this came out. Did you tell Paul Weller he'd be nothing, sir? But yeah, in an alternate universe, there is an episode of chart music that's going on right now

where we talk about the jam and say, oh, what happened to them? Yeah, it would be like the members or something. And it was really close. It was really close, yeah. Well, I mean, by this point, they've started work on their third album and they've already been told that songs like I Want to Paint are cat shit, and they'd better do something about it, or they're going to be out on their arse. And Bruce Foxton's having a chat with somebody from Sounds or something like that,

saying that he's thinking about going into the hotelier business. Oh, yeah. Going to buy a little bed and breakfast and work his way up from there. To a state agency. Yes. a little bed and breakfast and work his way up from there. To a state agency. Yes.

So the following week, the modern world dropped eight places to number 46, but rallied the week after to number 36, its highest position. Meanwhile, the LP entered the album chart at number 54, and the following week got to number 22, its highest position, and the worst performing jam LP during their lifespan. The follow-up, News of the World, got to number 27 in March of 1978, by which time they had scrapped work on their third LP, started again,

and were putting together all mod cons, and the rest is history. Oh, and I promised the Pop Craze youngsters i'd read that bruce fox and storied intro this is a modern world this is a modern world Hey, that's a jam on Modern World. Wild stuff in the jam. And let's just think about those occupants of interplanetary craft, shall we? The Carpenters, Richard and Karen together, and they're at number ten. In your mind you have capacities, you know,

to telepath messages through the vast unknown. Powell, demonstrating how au fait he is with a young idea, reacts to the jam by jumping into the air and shouting, Woo! Hey! Wild stuff from the jam. You fucking idiot. He sounds like Bobby Gillespie. What a cunt. I mean, it's the least ever spontaneous jump in the air, isn't it? And again, you can say, like, hey, three, lots of energy, lots of energy.

You know, it's possibly, vaguely it's meant to be pogoing. The one person in the studio allowed even to do a kind of approximation of pogoing. But actually, it's more like Kevin Keegan leaping up to head the ball into the path of the onrushing Trevor Brooker. Yes. And you can actually imagine Simon Bates, Dave Lee Travis, Noel Edmonds all round at Travis's house

with a pile of auto car magazines where a record collection should be. And they're just saying to each other, who does this little prick think he is? Yeah. And for once, I'd actually fully sympathise with them. Although when he saw that, Paul Weller had a swig from a can of lager

and muttered something underneath his breath. Yeah, see, all that shit you came out with, Taylor, Peter Powell's just summed up the jam like that. But this is Powell, isn't it? This is the absolute essence of Powell. If you ever want to write an essay about Peter Powell, all you need is an animated gif of this looping over and over and over and over. I'm surprised no one on YouTube has put up Peter Powell going woo yeah for 10 hours.

That's on my to-do pile now. It really is. Does anybody remember laughter? He then goes all serious and asks us to think about those occupants of interplanetary craft, as he links to Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft by the Carpenters. Formed in Harold Carpenter's bollocks in 1946 and 1950, the Carpenters, Richard and Karenaren were born in new haven connecticut and relocated to los angeles in 1963 in 1965 they teamed up with the bassist wes jacobs and formed the richard

carpenter trio who won a battle of the bands competition at the hollywood bowl a year later and banked a contract with rca but But after their covers of Every Little Thing and Strangers in the Night were deemed unfit for release, they were dropped by the label. After the trio disbanded and Richard Carpenter was sacked from his job playing covers at Disneyland for being, quote, too radical, Richard and Karen formed the middle-of-the-road band Spectrum, becoming a regular fixture at the Whiskey A Go-Go and supported Steppenwolf before they disbanded in 1968.

After Karen was knocked back as a vocalist for Kenny Rogers and the First Edition, they acquired a new bassist and appeared on the talent show Your All-American College Show, performing Dancing in the Street later that year, which led to a deal with A&M in April of 1969. Their first single, a cover of the Beatles' Ticket to Ride, only got to number 54 in America and did nothing over here,

but the follow-up, a cover of the 1963 Richard Chamberlain single They Long to Be Close To You, got to number one for four weeks over here and made it to number six in the UK in October of 1970. That kicked off a run of 12 top 40 hits in the UK across the 70s, including a pair of number two hits when Yesterday Once More was kept off number one by Leader of the Gang by Gary Glitter and Young Love by Donny Osmond in August of 1973 and Please Mr Postman was held back by January by Pilot in January of 1975. This single, the follow-up to I Need To Be In Love, which got to number 36 in July of 1976, is the lead-off single from their new LP Passage, which came out in September.

It's an LP that they've thrown the kitchen sink at, employing not only the Los Angeles Philharmonic, but all 50 of the Greg Smith singers. It's a cover of the 1976 album track by Klar 2, the Canadian rock band who were rumoured to be the Beatles under an assumed name, and is based on World Contact Day, a yearly event which consists of members of the International Flying Saucer Bureau

attempting to send a telepathic message every March 15th since 1953 it's entered the top 40 at number 26 three weeks ago and then stealthily scaled the charts and this week it's nudged up one place from number 11 to number 10 making it their first top 10 hit since only yesterday over two years ago fucking hell this this song man it's like a lorry of unboxed jigsaw puzzles has just shed its load all over this episode because there is a lot to piece together here to unpack and to piece together yeah yeah i mean it's weird because i mean at the time the carpenters represented almost the absolute MOR norm because they were played on heavy rotation the whole time when one was cooking or whatever on the kitchen transistor.

The ultimate Radio 2 band. Absolutely. And so, you know, they've got this kind of, with their insidious clarity, you know, they'd be sort of playing round and round the clock the whole time. Absolute fixture. Wafting around like the odour of slightly overcooked shepherd's pie. And so, you know, to me, they just represented this absolute insidious norm from which even... Burnt cheese.

Yeah, yeah. E-L-O, or almost like left field by comparison, you know, well left field by comparison. But you can actually see why people like Thurston Moore or whatever rhapsodise about the carpenters, because there is other as kind of Peter Brotsman or something like that, in their own way. There's a genuine alien-ness about them, you know, with Karen's oval face and that weird sort of eerie frictionlessness that they've got. They're only the band the White Stripes could have been. Yeah, exactly.

Unbelievably, this is the first time we've done the Carpenters on Chalk Music, which is fucking mental because they are a 70s straddling band, aren't they? I mean, you could go around someone's house right about the late 70s and you could almost guarantee that the singles 1969, 1973 by the Carpenters would be on their record shelf, on their unit, in between Abba's Greatest Hits and The Sound of Bread. But unbeknownst to us, the Carpenters are in the shit. Richard's become addicted to Quaaludes,

Karen's grappling with anorexia, the hits are drying up, and being known as Richard Nixon's band isn't a good thing by 1977, is it? Absolutely, but this is almost like there's straightness in extremis. Well, this is very of its time in that it's another hopelessly optimistic,

close encounter style, 70s idea of the likely outcome of a vastly technologically superior civilisation meeting a comparatively primitive civilisation. Hey, no, this time it's going to play out differently i promise you um i've touched on this before when we've covered the mid to late 70s this is when the defining figure of scientific inquiry was carl sagan in a polo neck with an anorak over it standing in a field going how lovely is a tree and the dying days of hippie liberal optimism right and even as the

planet first began to groan and sweat under the weight of humanity you know still humanity was so bright and godlike our destiny lay among the stars you know um where we could realize our cosmic potential and terraform pluto or some shit you know this is this is when we started like never mind the the fucking flying saucer bureau uh putting their fingertips to their temples and trying to summon aliens actual fucking telescopes were beaming out signals into the cosmos. Yeah. Saying, here we are, come and find us. We're tasty, tasty, very, very tasty.

Yeah. We're very tasty. So certain that the cosmos is a playroom, not a jungle. I mean, I get emotional at the end of 2001, A Space Odyssey 2, but I know that it's bullshit and the the yawning expanse of the universe isn't really an inspirational thing the the the key to understanding the universe is the knowledge that everything in it is moving further and further away from everything else in it and the speed at which that happens is increasing. And that's the fundamental truth behind all others. But also, just because someone tells you that they're your friends,

it doesn't mean they haven't got ray guns behind their backs. And when your only previous contact with someone is them terrifying a cow by lifting it up off the ground with a tractor beam i'm not sure that unquestioning trust is the wisest first response and also even in the sweet shop world of this record these aliens that we're meant to be so pleased to meet sound like davey jones yes it's that that's the worst bit of this record by Miles is where it sounds like there's suddenly an unexpected cameo from fucking Davy Jones. He goes,

We've been observing your earth. It's like he's just smashed into your window on a wrecking ball, you know, jabbing at you with his space maracas. It's, yeah, yeah. It's the one jarring moment in the carpenter's canon. It's a bit like... There's a version of a crap that's the model,

whereas it's got Emil Schultz comes in, who doesn't normally sort of retort, and he goes, like that. What was that? What was that? This is the carpenter's. It's one weird tear in the fabric is that moment.

But the thing about UFOs and ufology, I mean, I think that I know it was part of it because I was that age. I can be forgiven. But John Lennon was going on about UFOs the whole time at this time. It was very much part of the mainstream. I would say that, like, it's in terms of ufology and that kind of fascination, there was a bit of a crest, really, the like of which hadn't been seen since the sort of mid to late 50s or whatever. seen since the sort of mid-late 50s or whatever. I think we understand these days that aliens, creatures from another planet, would have to traverse billions of light years or whatever to get anywhere near us, and why would they bother just looking at New Mexico?

But back then, there was a tremendous... I mean, for instance, another mainstream author was a fellow called Brinsley de Poer Trench, the 8th Earl of Clancarty. And the book I would have read on my holidays that year was his Secret of the Ages, UFOs from Inside the Earth. It theorised that the centre of the Earth was hollow, with entrances to its interior located at both the North and South Pole areas. This interior, he suggested, consists of large tunnel systems connecting a large cabin world. Trent also believed that the lost continent of Atlantis actually once existed, and these tunnels were probably constructed all over the world by the Atlanteans for various purposes.

And basically, UFOs emanating from the Earth's interior. Various ideas like that. I mean, he had another... Yeah, ideas with the healthy and reassuring pedigree of some of the weirdest Nazis, also believed. Yes. Yes, absolutely, yeah. But this was, I mean, you know, he was considered considered pretty mainstream author and um you know all very credible ideas another idea he advanced i remember because i remember reading at the time was that the younger generation this rock and roll generation were

themselves aliens like yes yes consider it he said you know because you know this is would account for their sort of you know they come here to kind of rebuild the world and it would account for their kind of strangeness of their long hair and their faraway air i remember reading this pop music yeah on the pop music of course and i remember um reading this on holiday in bumaris and saying to my mum hey mum according to this book i might be an alien and she said to me nonsense david you were born in a hospital like everywhere else in edgeware with a difficult birth as befits a difficult child alien she didn't actually say that she's too nice but i'm sure that's what she was thinking and of course things like the pyramids well they weren't built by white people so they had to be made by aliens yes yes of course but yeah you're right you're right this

song is totally of the moment because you know know, 1977, the year of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But also NASA continuing its refusal to do something for the old ones and deciding to have a nose around the outer solar system and beyond. Because, you know, they'd already sent out two Pioneer space probes bearing plaques about information about Earth. But only last month they launched two Voyager space probes bearing plaques about information about earth but only last month they launched two voyager space probes each featuring a gold-plated copper record containing the greatest hits of planet earth with carl sagan as your selector oh yeah it was curated by carl

sagan what a shame this wasn't on it. Unfortunately, the record opens with an introduction by Kurt Waldheim, who was Secretary General of the UN after being a massive Nazi. Yeah, yeah. Then there's a load of people around the world saying hello, and then there's a big wodge of world music,

animal sounds, and classical ramble. But there is Blind Willie Johnson and Chuck Beres, so, you know, there is that. Yeah, dark was the night, cold was the ground. Has now left the solar system. Yeah. Sagan did try to get John Lennon involved in the selection process, chaps,

but he was too busy lying on a bed out of his tits in New York. And Sagan did want Here Comes the Sun by the Beatles on that record, but EMI wanted a cut because they're fucking minge bags so you know if an alien does hear this record the only british contribution is the fairy round conducted by richard holborn which you know essentially makes it sound like a right bunch of foppish medieval cunts to the rest of the universe so cheers sagan yeah i mean another thing around this time i do remember well first of all i was living in constant fear that the sun was going to explode

any second uh because i've read that somewhere it was like fucking hell you know but also yeah there was some footage i remember my brother said oh let's peruse it now aliens ufos or whatever and um and it was this kind of large huge looming lights on a kind of dark um you know on a dark cityscape and um and i was like you know for two weeks of the well that's that settles it doesn't it you know and then turning on the sky at night and patrick moore going yes these images have been doing around i can assure you that it is in fact the planet venus and that kind of like you know i think he was so certain about i just felt a bit deflated really and i never really reacquired my sort of ufological ardour.

The thing about the Voyager record is I can just see some aliens just getting this and just thinking, fucking hell, look at these backward hipster cunts with their vinyls. It's all mini-discs around here, mate. Yeah, mini-discs, yes. Yeah, let's go round there and kill them and eat them. And why did you destroy the greatest medium of all, mini-discs. Yeah, let's go around there and kill them. And eat them. And why did you destroy the greatest medium of all, 8-track cartridge?

Shall we have a go? Trying to call some aliens in, because I've actually found the actual words that they use every March the 15th to call down aliens. Yeah. Would you like to hear them? Yes. Okay. Calling occupants

of... and pop-crazed youngsters at home, you know, join in with us. Oh, yeah okay calling occupants of inter and pop craze youngsters at home you know join in with us oh yeah calling occupants of interplanetary craft that have been observing our planet earth we of ifsb wish to make contact with you we are your friends and would like you to make an appearance here on earth your presence before us will be welcome with the utmost friendship we will do all in our power to promote mutual understanding between your people and the people of earth please come in peace and help us in our earthly problems give us some sign that you've received our message. Be responsible for creating a miracle here on our planet to wake up the ignorant ones to reality.

Let us hear from you. We are your friends. Your friends. Friends. Did it work? Hang on, let me have a look. Now there's a squirrel going down the road. Well, you don't know what form they would take.

It's all quiet in Lower Sydenham, I have to say. Never mind, next time. Didn't do it on March the 15th, you say? Yeah, no, there you are, I say, what do you expect? Anyway, we get the video of this, and oh, what a video it is. It's essentially a recruitment video for heaven's gate isn't it this just makes me want to put on some red nike trainers and get into a bunk bed and die well when do you not feel like doing that let's be honest i mean we're not getting the full

seven minute version but we're getting enough of it aren't we to to understand it's all massively cosmos isn't it yeah yeah yeah we got karen and richard floating about in space asking us to have a bit of a think about aliens and wanting to be their mates uh which is utterly ruined by the illustrations of the aliens that pop up halfway through which are fucking proper hg world shit up material yeah these are not alf or baby yoda are they no it looks like it's from the osborne book of ufos yeah i mean i suppose we have to wonder if all of this was um impelled by a genuine fervor to make kind of you know interplanetary contact or was there perhaps just a speck of bandwagon jumping i don't know i mean the thing about the carpenters that people

seem to forget myself included the vast bulk of their singles output have been cover versions they're they're essentially mor wadi wada top of the world yesterday once more only yesterday goodbye to love they're the only original songs that have charted over here and their new lp is nothing but other people's songs i mean they even do a full version of don't cry for me argentina for fuck's sake yeah other people's songs scrubbed until they're squeaky clean but i mean look david's hit on this already the the what is the most sort of annoying and bland about the carpenters is also what's most interesting about the carpenters because it's so extreme the whiteness of it the the like the full cream mayonnaise lava flow of of it is sort of interesting look and also we had a cassette

when i was a kid right might even have been an 8-track, in fact, of the Carpenters' Greatest Hits. And that was the only music that we had in the family car when I was young. So when we went on holiday and were in the car for extended periods of time, which to a small child felt like periods of time so super extended that scientists should have given each one a name um the carpet

is great hits would go on so it's absolutely a foundational and formative memory for me sitting in the back of a simca rolling around north wales right looking out the window at some wet hills and slate and absorbing the sound of the carpenters before i could really understand or grasp what music was or how songs worked you know at that age it's just like someone's taking control of your brain chemistry and it's flicking levers and you don't quite get it like it's not a picture it's not a story it's not something you take in visually or cerebrally but also it's not like a song song like you sing at school where it's like it's this engulfing wave of texture and feeling and mysterious associations and connections and

you just respond involuntarily to this play of light and shadow in your brain, you know. And this was The Carpenter's greatest hit. This wasn't Bitch's Brew or Take Omega. This was not an annihilating, sort of overwhelming introduction to the power and mystery of music. But it taught me something else as well,

which is that music sometimes could be that powerful and affecting but sometimes it could be like inert and smoothed off and fundamentally banal to the point where it just sounded silly you know and i didn't understand that some of this music was specifically produced to have no effect on you and to just glance off you know and not leave a mark all the records like top of the world and jambalaya and sing you know this sort of creepy ned flanders music that they did which is where the the edges were so soft it was almost sinister yeah i was just going to use that we had the word sinister yeah and there's something kind of absolutely quite appalling just lurking beneath the surface and then in terms of their dysfunctional

lives you know and in a sense anorexia is almost a sad metaphor really for the sort of hyper perfection perfection inverted commas there that they sort of achieve in their music yeah and they left you clues as well because occasionally they'd do something like rainy days and mondays or superstar or um goodbye to love and i could hear those songs i could hear they were sickly smooth like all the others but they also had this weird power to induce feelings which you hadn't asked for you know and you would immediately recognize at some primal level, even though at five or six you hadn't experienced regret or loss or anything bittersweet, you know. But even on these records, I mean, they were still very careful.

They weren't daring records, but the sonic suggestion of them still prods your brain into producing certain chemicals associated with melancholy. It's like whenever they do that Brian Wilson trick of you've got spacious piano chords and a French horn in the distance with loads of reverb on it. It's really an instinctive response. In these songs, you could feel that something wasn't right.

It was this weird airless music coming out of an unfathomable world of pretend smiles you know and like hidden horrors behind doors that are always locked you know it was like it was all tied aesthetically and spiritually to this kind of religious american suburban falseness you know and denial of humanity like it's like they were cracking up but they were just incapable of creating any kind of emotional artifact which didn't have a white picket fence around it yeah you know and there's something genuinely intriguing about that you know like and the creepier it is the moreier it is, the more intriguing it is. And at the time, I was always a bit freaked out

by the creamy, platitudinous warmth of her voice as well. Every track sounds like it's recorded inside an airtight sandwich bag. There was something mysterious about that. It used to remind me of that other thing that used to creep me out, which was the Radio 2 jingle singers, which is close to you know yeah you know what they sound like it'd be like yeah radio 2 and there's like a slow harmonized major seventh or something at the end and they used to creep me out because i'd hear it and think when did this happen like yeah why does this sound so eerie what what sort of music is this?

And I always got something similar from that, you know, the rictus grin of the Carpenters' music. It's the Pam Singers, isn't it? Yeah. From Dallas. Yeah, yeah. Have you heard their version of the emergency broadcast system? No. Fucking hell.

Not the four-minute warning? Not quite. It was a test that the radio stations had to do once a week that just basically said this is a test you know if you if this was an actual emergency you'd have to you know do this and that don't panic and uh yeah they did their own version in their own inimitable style for uh for a certain radio station oh wow and uh only played it a couple of times before the FCC banned it, but quite remarkable.

That's worth a link to. Yeah. Video playlist. But yeah, that eeriness. You know, you'd hear it on Radio 1 and 2 all the time, but you always thought, this doesn't fit because this is American. Even though there was so much American shit being played, it seemed to step too far for me. And we're still in that pre-feddy

laker era where everything american is very other yeah so we've got that weird sort of fuzzy glaze on like the love boat yeah i mean for me there was always a sort of metaphorical sense of the carpenters of things like angel delight and instant whip and smash and these things that you know i'm not one of these people that sort of hankers for like nature and authenticity and soil and all this kind of stuff but there's such an eerie lack of that in the comments they are this kind of scientifically created confection of some sort that bears no relationship you know to nature that is this simulation of it that's unearthly that has no connection to the earth klar 2 a very weird band for someone like the carpenters to cover isn't it yeah well it's a bit of a shame for klar 2 because apart from this to cover isn't it yeah well it's a bit of a shame for clark

too because apart from this the only thing anyone remembers them for is that some journalists thought it was the beatles yes under a false name like despite the fact that it didn't sound anything like the fucking beatles i mean the in the 70s american rock media were obsessed with the beatles and the possibility of a Beatles reunion. Yeah. You know, they're going to come and save us all, you know. Despite there being no evidence at all that the Beatles would have reassembled and made great music in 1975, I mean...

Yeah, they would have got Free As A Bird out of the way 20 years earlier. Yeah, but it became a kind of sport to suggest that certain records were actually by the Beatles recording in secret under a pseudonym. There was a few of these, right? Despite audibly not having the Beatles singing on them, I mean, famously the NME reported on this Klaatu business with the headline, Deaf Idiot Journalist Starts Beatle Rumour.

It says it all. It's like one of the great no bullshit headlines like when you know when um edith sitwell in the 20s did uh facade with uh modernist music by uh william walton and uh one of the critics who was not really used to this sort of uh this avant-garde approach wrote the headline drivel they paid to hear which i was i always wanted like on melody maker when you'd write a review and it was a the headline they put on it was always a weak pun yeah and the band name or something you should have had something a bit more direct i'd like to have you know written about cast at the london astoria and next week's in the headline uh shit some morons queued up for but the thing is that clartu never played up to it themselves but they were fucked by capital

records who did yeah and they lost a lot of credibility as a result because uh you know the record company was running around going oh oh oh ooh, ooh, ooh, wonder who this could be. And it's like, oh, fuck off. But it brings home how vaguely most people listen to music. It's like eating a raspberry until you've eaten a tomato. You know what I mean? Who would hear that? You listen to this quiet record.

It doesn't sound like the fucking Beatles. As far as a lot of people consider, as I said before, the entire 70s were a void where the Beatles should be. Yeah, it really was. And of course, chaps, we're only a few weeks away from Vrillion pitching up on Southern TV, aren't we?

Why didn't he just cut into that Looney Tunes cartoon by saying, I've been observing your earth. Anything else to say? Yeah, it just struck me. I should probably say that I really like this record. I don't think I've mentioned it.

Despite its babyish insistence that First Contact would resemble the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1977, rather than the film Prey, 1977, except not as sexy. I've just got to have one little shout-out to a friend of mine. Apology, really. We just tormented each other with, like, physical insults at this time. And this fellow, Patrick, his ears were just a little bit pointy,

so we just sort of jeer at him every day. We've been observing your ears and we think they look like Mr Spock's. Drove the poor sod mad. You were his friend. I know. Well, yeah, he was banter. So the following week, calling occupants of interplanetary craft

nipped up one more place to number nine, its highest position. The follow-up sweet sweet smile would only get to number 40 in february of 1978 and they'd have to wait over 13 years to return to the top 40 when a re-release of merry christmas darling got to number 25 in december of 1990, by which time Karen Carpenter had succumbed to heart failure in February of 1983. And 44 years after the release of Calling Occupants, there has been no official record

of extraterrestrial life hollering back at the Carpenters because aliens are ignorant cunts. Yeah, I said it. Come and do something about it if you don't like it, aliens. Come and have a zap if you think you're hard enough. Oh, but of course there was that Carpenters TV special a year later, wasn't there, Taylor?

Oh, yeah, you can't talk about this record and not mention Space Encounters. A lot of thought went into that title. Yes. There was so much of this space shit around in the aftermath of star wars right everything had to be space for about three years like to the point where you'd see a tv advert for dfs and it would be like a three-piece suite floating in space and the voiceover guy come to dfs earthling and encounter the lowest prices in the galaxy and for about five years it was just relentless yeah just as the actual space program had ground

down to the point where the only off-earth possibilities that anyone was exploring was like fucking tv satellites and the space shuttle going round and round, like one inch outside Earth's atmosphere. We've been living in a post-space age since 1972. Yeah. Yeah, it was shit. I mean, of course, this is the era of KP outer spacers. Yeah, pickled onion flavour, lovely.

You've sat through that Carpenters thing though, haven't you, Taylor? Because that's the commitment you give to chart music time after time. Yes, yes. Well, this was it. The Carpenters, they weighed in to the space craze

with Space Encounters, which is an hour-long space-themed TV special brought to you by Clairol herbal essences shampoo you'll swear that you've got more hair um which you know inevitably it makes the star wars holiday special look like tarkovsky's solaris i mean aside from the fact that the carpenters circa 1978 are about as well suited to a wacky knockabout pantomime as pink floyd circa the final cut right it's just not right no and it's like all these things they've built all the sets and the costumes and they've hired a studio and gone to all this trouble to do

that but then they thought it was okay if the actual script was written by a chaffinch and a dead guy. Nobody ever cares about writers, ever. So what happens is this sub-Butt Rogers alien, like Nickel Rogers, comes to Earth and he beams down into the carpenter's recording studio because his race want to learn how to make music with warmth and feeling. Which, when you've travelled millions of light years to get here,

seems an avoidably catastrophic miscalculation. Probably by his co-pilot, who's a mini-skirty bimbo. Suzanne Somers. Despite being second in command of an intergalactic spaceship. She's thick as shit. So the Carpenters teach him how to make music that sounds how air freshener tastes. And then he beams them up to his ship,

where, first of all, Karen and the bimbo co-pilot on harry belafonte's man smart woman smart yes it's a good old battle of the sexes moment like just just slightly undercut by the fact that they spent the previous half hour showing us that one of these women is so calamitously unintelligent that you wouldn't leave her alone in a room with a potato. And then there's an inevitable romantic duet between Nicol Rogers and the grotesque straining mask of Karen Carpenter's happy entertainer face. Before the aliens fuck off home in time for the adverts

and we end with a version of calling occupants that really makes you think specifically uh about what you're going to be doing when it's finished that's about it but if nothing else the audience seemed to be enjoying whatever it was they were watching when their laughter was recorded in 1965. It's the most choking late 70s white American entertainment. You know, it's like a plastic cup with an inch of cold coffee and 12 cigarette ends in it. You know, it's like, just don't pick it up and try and drink from it by mistake.

You can't get more of that late 70s malaise. It's like being asphyxiated in norgahyde and gabardine if you think that late 70s native american chief was upset about pollution right show him this he tried to eat his own legs just what has happened what have they done to our country past the fucking fire water i have mixed feelings about this in a sense, because these days there's a kind of protective tier of creative consultants, et cetera, et cetera, whose job is to ensure that things like this never, ever happen.

But as well as this ridiculous, they also repress the sublime as well. So I'm not quite sure we were perhaps better off back then. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I'd rather have this than, you know, the carpenters sponsored by a hair gel company. What if the aliens sent us a record though? Maybe they already have. Yeah.

Mouldy old dough. No. We send the message. We declare world contact day. The Carpenters and Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft. We liked that one, didn't we? Yes.

You bet we did. Hey, a bigger bunch of loonies you're never likely to meet. The Baron Ice, the new entry at 23. And live it up! Everybody has their little troubles, yeah. As all of you will know by now. We cut back to Powell suddenly flanked by two women with the camera pulled back to reveal he's tucked his T-shirt into his jeans because it's the 70s and everybody is still thin.

I think Stan Bowles was the only person in Britain in the 70s who went about with his shirt unturned. Can't think of anyone else. With his free hand, delicately holding the mic lead, but unfortunately over his crotch, as he asks a girl in a flat cap if she liked that. She did. He then says,

Hey, a bigger bunch of loonies you're never likely to meet. What a cunt. Well, having been a warden at Broadmoor Secure Unit for 11 years, I can confirm this. Those loonies, the baron knights. He throws us into the direction of live in trouble by the baron knights. Or live it up, as he thinks it's called oh no yeah oh fuck me yeah yeah and then he picks it up at the end and goes oh that was live in trouble because someone's obviously

told him he got the title wrong yeah he's thinking of the other comedy genius of the era russ abba isn't it we're actually dealing with live in trouble by the baron knights we dealt with the baron knights in chart music number 34 and this single the follow-up to the frank spencer song which failed to chart in 1974 marked their return to the charts for the first time since an olympic record got to number 35 in november of 1968 after nine years of non-chart action while they tried to be a proper band with their own songs, they went back to taking a sideways look

at the hits of the day and debuted this medley at a club in Ten Bear on the night that Elvis died, which led to a deal with Epic. It entered the charts last week at number 42 and this week it soared 19 places to number 23.

And here they are in the studio for their first Top of the Pops performance since they played Here Come the Bees in October of 1967, 10 years and one month ago. Fucking hell, and 10 years and one month was a fucking eon in pop terms of the 70s don't you think oh yeah yeah absolutely yeah but that it's just that horrible it doesn't even say you know peter powell it doesn't it doesn't even say you get a bigger bunch of loonies you're never likely to need you actually yearn for the sort of wild and elevated dryness and aphoristic wit of noel edms at this point

you know you genuinely do you actually i found myself hankering for noel good lord i know i mean it's that that bad so where do we start with this let's get the look out of the way because as always the baron knights have come dressed as a supporting cast of oh no it's selwynggatt as a dinner dance, haven't they? Red velvet hunting jackets over white walls, Viennetta shirts with massive condor collars. Fuck me. They are huge. If there was such a thing as air conditioning in the 1970s, if someone had turned that on in the studio,

they're going to be smashed against the back wall, aren't they? Absolutely, yeah. Yeah, no, it's, I mean, I just can't yeah no it's it's um i mean i'm just can't really believe it's a bit like watching seinfeld recently and it's just like because i lived through all of this at the time i didn't think anything that was untoward about the way they dress and then it's like 20 30 years only thing fucking hell i mean how did we kind of how do we manage to keep our focus on anything at all other than these appalling mullets and trainers and stuff like that? Or, in this case, yeah, these ghastly colours and what have you.

Yeah, they look like John Pertwee just regenerated, but something went horribly wrong. Yes, yes. So the song, or songs, if you will, they're putting down a marker for future years. This is the Baron Knights we're going to see on top of the pops every year round about this time for the next three years or so. Doing funny versions of the pop favourites.

They start off with a pop at the Old Sailor with an interpretation of You Make Me Feel Like Dancing, which got to number two in November of 1976. And then they move on to Float On by The Floaters, which of course got to number one in August of this year. First things first, there's a missing tune in there, isn't there? Yeah. Do you know what it is, David?

No. I do. Long ago. Outside a chip shop in Walthamstow stood a young rocker named Greasy Joe. Oh. Put on his helmet and said, let's go. Oh. He was keen. He drove down the high street like Barry Sheen,

doing his best to look very mean. Oh, my goodness. Until he saw Anne on a new machine. Angelo by the Brotherhood of Man, which also got to number one in August, before Elvis died while he was having a shit and ruined everything. And that's the fucking best tune on the whole thing.

There is a version on YouTube where they do Angelo and it's like it's sort of edited into this clip, but it fades in and out and they're wearing different coloured smoking jackets in it. Oh, really? So I think it's an edit of two performances. I'm assuming they did this on Top of the Pops twice because why wouldn't you ask these heroes back again?

That's weird because I do remember taping this at the time, you know, with my little kind of mono cassette recorder and, you know, somewhat uncritically, you know, I included this in selection, but I don't remember that Ang angelo bit i must admit so he passed the bloody tower at a hundred miles an hour yeah i used to love it that went down a treat on the playground that song did probably well the least appalling of the bunch you know it's about as good as it gets according to their own lights my tailor took my pants in but he left in all the pins yes yeah the general conceit is that the old sailor is such a

high-pitched voice because he's got tailors pins jabbing into his testicles yeah then there's float on oh fucking hell i mean i was just sitting there and praying that they just didn't do it in black face because it was central wasn't it they didn't just sort of come on but then i suppose that's the thing with the medley i think if it hadn't been a medley then i think that cork would have been kind of smeared right across you know but never mind you know there's a little bit of mycophobic comedy instead my name's michael yes of course we're at the homophobia cancer and i can't stand girls if anyone touches that drummer i'll scratch their eyes out yeah standard 70s fair isn't it irish people are stupid and homosexuals are amusing it's it's it's sad you know like people

you can't say anything these days yeah well when you could this is the shit that people said yes exactly yeah when you stop being able to say that stuff people had to kind of think a bit like come up with something different that was maybe a bit funny david your alicia would she be okay with the idea of the irish joke no no and this is the thing completely gone hasn't it yeah yeah yeah i mean it's a whole thing with a lot of you know contemporary comment and that is that you know it's not the young people that would like to laugh but they know they shouldn't you know it's like that at all. They're just absolutely left blank by it. It's like, what is this? This is appalling.

And there is a generational gap. I think there are people that, with something obvious like the whole Fawlty Towers thing, with Manuela, whatever. I mean, I'm a generation that actually does still think it's funny, but you wouldn't do that nowadays. Whereas nowadays, I think, what are you doing? This is horrible.

This bears no relation to reality. Yeah. Yeah, nowadays, that section of this record would go, hello, hello, hello, I'm Michael. I'm passionate, romantic, and oppressed by you. That'd work. One thing you can say for the Baron Knights is that they can at least come up with parody songs

where the supposedly humorous words do fit the meter of the original and actually scan which is apparently harder than you'd think considering that most song parodies you hear have the flow of an early manic street preacher's record you know what i mean so you've got to give them credit for that and the other thing you can say for them is they do make the grumbleweeds look like a bunch of awful cunts but yes then so do the grumbleweeds the the main problem is that all the time they've spent on that stuff is not matched by the time they spent on the actual jokes. Because it's like, Float On is probably the most easily parodiable song in history. And that's the best they can come up with, right? There's a gag that isn't a gag, an anti-Irish gag that also isn't really a gag,

and then a homophobic gag at a playground level with, again, no actual gag in it. But it's this idea that people with no real sense of humour have, from spitting image to whimsical indie comedians, that something which would not raise a titter if you said it or wrote it down suddenly becomes hilarious if you put it in a song. Whereas, in fact, the truth is pretty much the opposite of that. You know like there's half decent jokes that just die of embarrassment when you set them to music you know you can only

make a funny song work if the humor is very very dry and you know the baron knight's humor whatever else you want to say about it it's at least damp and it's such a grim face audience as grim face i've ever seen on top of the pot you know barely raise a titter they all look like they're waiting for a coach to take them to doncaster or something yeah yeah there's a brilliant bit in the during their amusing reworking if you make me feel like dancing just as pete langford who is the the small curly one he's one who looks like the drunken baker yeah or the runt of the litter that also produced keith harris and bend over just as he sings he took my pants in pants in just the other day there's a spectacular display of silent disapproval from this rather sour-faced girl in the crowd who

rolls her eyes like a cartoon dog and looks around her mate with a stinking expression of bored contempt although she's still shifting from foot to foot to the throbbing beat of the barren knights while she does it i think they used to turn the hoses on the audience if they stopped i mean that's yes yes yes that's bizarre i think they're having to sway along to it but it's a shame because how many songs or song fragments which begin my trousers get people talking aren't great this is the only one it's like you were saying earlier on you know you know the jokes shit they're just sort of like placeholder jokes isn't it okay just have that then so we think of something good and they never do yeah it's it's um i mean you can't blame the audience and be like but just

generally with with the audience i suppose it's not just this program but the entire era that i suppose they can't have them guffawing away i mean there are probably people that could find the country that would actually laugh to this stuff and give out full proper cannibal benny laughs but um they can't be done everything has to be kind of lukewarm the response it's almost like some sort of bbc protocol that doesn't allow for people to get really really excited i mean you know it's the mid 70s people get enormously excited but everyone it's almost like perhaps the audience is specifically selected a bit like a jury just have you ever heard of david bowie no okay good you're in you know they're actually selected on the basis of not having much interest in pop music just so they don't get too excited and you know bubble over the top in terms of what's

considered acceptable on top of the pops and that's what peter powell is it's one man enthusiasm machine and he's having to sort of generate it all alone which makes him look even more of a kind of sort of pitiable specimen yeah it's a shame with the baronites they were quite well regarded as a pop comedy group in the 60s when they first came roaring out of late and buzzered doing parodies of the hits of the day and those records aren't funny either but no i think in those days people would just respond to the competence of the parody more than anything else right and their laughter was just a show of appreciation for that like it's like delighted chuckles at the novelty of it rather than actual belly laughs at the idea of what would happen if mick jagger had to work in an office or the dave

clark five join the army which is what those songs are about and that's the other thing those records weren't really piss takes because they were obviously fans of all these groups but they were the only cabaret act at the time who were young enough to be into the beatles and the stones and bother the only band to ever support the beatles and the stones the baron is that true i could believe believe it. But people would hear that and appreciate it and just laugh like a reflex. It's weird how... Can you imagine if the barren knights did Altamont?

Fucking hell! All those old angels would go, oh, let's put our knives away and have a good chuckle. So that they'd be too busy rolling in the aisles to administer any kind of impromptu execution. Yeahu execution yeah wow god there's a whole parallel turn of history there yeah yeah yeah that'd cheer the whole day up a lot you know we'd still be in the 60s now if that had happened yeah yes we're just yeah the dark heart of the 60s would have been kept at bay yes yeah good old-fashioned cabaret chuckles yeah and plays on words but by the time

you get to their late 70s chart renaissance the that novel is gone you know and they are just a bunch of competent old hacks and this is the first run out for their new formula but they used the same formula on all these singles they have like a triptych of hit song parodies linked by a bit of uh self-penned boogie which sets up each section in the in the style of a cabaret comic saying wouldn't it be funny yes tommy cooper met larry grayson um and then they just repeated it. Which probably happened loads of times. Yeah. In the BBC bar. Yeah, yeah.

So they did a taste of aggro, never mind the presents, the not un-racist food for thought, if you know that one. She's only really worth hearing it or worth still watching the video just to imagine what kind of reception that would get on twitter these days now we've asked the question before about the baron knights if if they're doing three cover

versions on a single how are they getting paid the usual answer is obviously they slip out one of their own songs on the B-side. But in this case, they've given us more of the same on the other side. So there's a cover of D-I-V-O-R-C-E, which is about a dog shitting up a tree instead of pissing against it. Oh, the bluer stuff, yeah. Yeah. A pretty straight cover of Loving You, where the drunken baker goes on a killing spree amongst the wildlife and a cover of lucille involving what can only be described as bummer ball yeah his girlfriend

they go to a fancy dress party and she's come dressed up as a cow and then she drops something and oh hilarity ensues you see you say that and you think there's no way that cannot be hilarious. So it's only Pete Langford, the drunken baker, who's getting any money out of this single because he's the one who writes the linking devices. But the Baronites don't give a fuck because their bread and butter is the cabaret circuit. And by this point, they could well be the busiest cabaret act in the UK. I read an interview round about this time in the stage where it had got to the point where they're begging their management to give them a few days off before Christmas so they can play golf. They've just completed a triumphant three-night stand at the Talk of the West in St Agnes.

They've got a full week at the night out in Birmingham coming up. And this performance, and the one of Fortnite from now, is essentially going to ensure that they'll be booked up right into 1979 and beyond, leaving the rocking berries, the black abbots, and the grumbleweeds choking on their dust. Oh, good creation.

Yeah. The main problem with the Baronites is they're easier to take the piss out of than the things they're taking the piss out of. Yeah. It's not that you have to be super cool to be a piss taker, but it has to come from some sort of anger or irreverence or contempt or joy or something vital, you know.

Not just the automatic chuckle response of a bunch of rancid professionals, you know. Not just the automatic chuckle response of a bunch of rancid professionals, you know, who don't feel anything ever, you know. We certainly don't get that kind of dead reaction on the single. There's lots of laughter and someone goes, ah, when they do float on. And they sound suspiciously like the members of the barren knights reacting to their own song creating that chicken in a basket atmosphere yeah well all of those that they

it sounds like the seeds roar and alive you know all of these records they're not yeah yeah yeah they that effect is quite familiar and of course the other thing about the barren knights you just couldn't have a barren knights today because back then everybody knew these songs yes absolutely you know so when the baron knights pitched up and said oh you know let's have a bit of a laugh with this song everyone in that audience which would be dad's age would immediately know i mean it's it's a bit like you don't have impressionists anymore because nobody knows who the fuck anybody is anymore it's just like you know you can't say no do you gareth williamson you know it's like it's not gonna work is it you know who's that standing over there by the nibbles table oh it's pewdiepie but i mean it would get worse

for the baron knight after the hits dried they did two christmas tv specials but here's the thing they were on channel four i know oh my god like in 1982 and 1983 lenin bombing a rastafarian era channel four yeah there they were like sandwich in between brent community action theaters salute to enva hodger and uh advice on how to be a lesbian after the nuclear war. Suddenly you've got these glistening hams with their shortling mock rock doing songs about how factory workers are lazy and overpaid and a version of Bohemian Rhapsody about how his mum's really fat, you know. It wasn't the usual Channel 4 fare. Oh, and they threw in their version of Lucky Number by Lena Lovitch, which is about being chased by a sheep.

Oh, fucking hell. And, yeah, one of these specials did even include that hilarious video for Food for Thought, which nowadays some uptight stick-in-the-mud lefties would try to say was racist, no doubt. The sheer British shitness of these programmes is really something to behold. You wouldn't have that little shit triangle in the corner

during the performances. A brown triangle. It's like shot-on-video TV cabaret shows. They've got little sketches filmed in a fucking field, presumably just outside blast-off buzzards, so they could sleep in their own piss-stained beds that night. And there's a bit, they're on stage, and lovable anvil-faced Duke de Monde does a big MOR ballad.

And he gives it the big intro, right? Like, hey, well, we've had a bit of fun tonight but this is where we take things a little more seriously so obviously being a veteran viewer a fine british club comedy of the golden age i was expecting something wacky to happen to undercut it right but no it really is just and this is me but in this case it's and this is me. But in this case, it's, and this is me, a cunt. And that's your Christmas. You know, have a nice 1983. You know, fucking hell, I'd say unplug the telly,

put on the ZX Spectrum and have a game of Emlyn Hughes' Cunt Soccer. No, that'd be 1982. 1983 would be Emlyn Hughes' Cunt Socunt soccer 2 that was the sequel it got his just he had new graphics or the shaky game of course yeah just because the 70s ended in the five-year diary doesn't have to mean they have to end for real no a perma 70s so the following week live in trouble jumped nine places to number, and a week later it got to number seven, its highest position. The follow-up, Back in Trouble Again, which covered Bohemian Rhapsody, Telephone Man and Space Auditor, failed to chart in January of 1978, but they repeated the trick

to greater success with A Taste of Agro which got to number three in december of 1978 and never mind the presence which got to number 17 in december of 1979 saddest of all if you type their name into google or youtube these days you get as far as baron and they're only the second suggestion that pops up. Yeah, after Baron Trump, who I believe was named after them. Yeah. If you ask me, they've only got themselves to blame. Live in trouble. Terrific.

What a nice bunch of lads, the Baronites. Can you spin like that? Oh, not bad, not bad. Hey, we are the champions, Queen. I've paid my dues Time after time I've done my sentence But committed no crime We cut back to Powell with two more women,

both with proto-Tricia Yates hairdos. He then asks the girl on his left, in a baggy pink roll neck that looks a bit foreskinular, if she could spin like one of the baron knights did. And they both do so. He then says, hey, because he's Peter Powell, and introduces We Are The Champions by Queen. We've covered Queen many a time and oft on Chart Music, and this, their ninth single, is the follow-up to Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy, which got to number 17 in July of this year.

It's also the lead-off single from their new LP, News of the World, which came out last week. It entered the charts at number 30 a fortnight ago, then soared 17 places to number 13, and this week it's up seven places to number six. As the band are getting ready to kick off their 1977 world tour in America, here's the video, which was shot at the New London Theatre in front of specially invited Queen fan club members who were also treated to a dress rehearsal of the tour. So, chaps, here we are, Top of the P so chaps here we are top of the pops another queen video because it would be

another five years before they deign to appear on the top of the pop stage and the excuse has always been that since bohemian rhapsody they've refused to mime on the show as it would compromise their integrity but i believe there's another reason i direct you and the pop craze youngsters to the book entitled top of the pops mishaps miming and music by ian gittins and the following quote from well i'll leave you to decide who it is i introduced queen doing seven seas of rye and they were a very important band, but I was in one of my moods. As soon as they started miming, I put on a janitor's coat, got a brush, jumped on stage and started sweeping up behind them. Brian May was doing a big guitar solo,

so I picked up the brush like a guitar and walked towards him and we soloed together. That had never been done before with a group like queen would you care to guess who that was i don't know he got a beard you're getting warmer somebody who needless to say always had the last laugh definitely it's travis yeah yeah it's a bit ungrateful of Queen not to appreciate his comic contribution. I mean, putting aside the reason that that had never been done to Queen, because it was their first fucking single, and in the two separate performances that are available on YouTube,

I can't see the cunt anywhere. So I don't know if he was lying or not, but you can imagine that it happened. Or maybe it was a dress rehearsal or something like that, and he leaves out that key detail. But is it any wonder they don't want to get involved with top of the pops if that pull-off is going on i can understand i mean people aren't really talking about video at this stage but i think there is a desire that artists perhaps just protect their own concept and not have it kind of compromised by the kind of naffness of appearing on stage on top of the pops where there's all kinds of factors out of your control. I mean, Kate Bush, I mean, she did appear on top of the pops,

I think, in her sort of latter stage of her career, you know, where with just a couple of dancers and it looked hideously kind of budgetary compared with set pieces that she'd put together before, right from the beginning, really. Yeah, I understand that. I understand that on their part. I mean, Queen, genuinely, always had kind of mixed feelings about them, in a sense.

I mean, on the one hand, you know, my friend Andrew Muller once described them as gale force rubbish. And I get an element of that, really. And I think, I mean, for one thing, the thing I hate to the point it physically hurts is Brian May's guitar. That horrible tuning sounds like he's torturing badgers' genitals. Plucking pubes. Horrible stuff. plucking pews oh horrible stuff mercury i find you know absolutely preposterous but then that's the sort of sentiment in speechable unabashed star i mean that's kind of key to the whole thing really that wonderful rampant shamelessness i mean i do love that story um in danny baker's going to see on a sieve i think it is you know just when he worked in a record shop

and this was very early on just before queen broke and fred think it is, you know, when he worked in a record shop. And this was very early on, just before Queen broke. And Freddie Mercury comes in, you know, with a couple of the other geese from Tween in tow. And he gives them, you know, their debut album to put on. And, you know, the wasn't old geezer who owns the shop, he just plays a couple of minutes of it, it's rubbish, gives it back to them. And Freddie Mercury is obviously absolutely indignant

at this kind of snap judgment. He goes out in front of the shop and he just shouts at people in the precincts, on the street, whatever. Attention all shoppers, do not shop in this retail outlet. The owner knows not at all what he's talking about. Not one whit. You know, something along those lines.

Attention all shoppers. I mean, I absolutely love that. And this is that early era, Mark I era of Queen. I mean, look at this absolutely preposterous outfit he's wearing, this kind of black and white, right to the navel thing and those but you put me famous fortune if it goes with it you know that kind of rick is a young one like a two-toned my mark yeah yeah definitely it just imagine him doing a mime routine to ghost town that'd be brilliant absolutely but it's it's that 70s era queen Queen, pre-Freddie Mercury, presumably getting exposed to the sort of late 70s New York gay scene or whatever, because, you know, this is kind of, you know, preposterously effete, you know, anti-man Freddie Mercury.

And then in the 80s, he comes back as this macho moustache. You know, it's fistfucker Freddie back in the early 80s. It's an absolute transformation. There are two Freddie Mercuries out there fisty mercury and the only other thing i think is is i just wonder how cynical artists are or premeditative when they call the song something like we are the champions knowing the kind of future royalties or whatever they'll engender through being used in sports shows or whatever and triumphalist events of that kind of nature i mean you know can you imagine that we are the runners-up it's like we spanned mean, you know, can you imagine that? We are the runners-up.

It was like we spanned our ballet, you know. I'm sure that the first draft, it was just like, bronze, ooh, always. You know what can go better than this? Okay, yeah, silver. No, no, even better. Ooh, yeah. Daley Thompson's not going to pole vault in slow motion to that tone there.

Think again. Have you gone, bronze, not bad in the grand scheme of things. I mean, my first reaction to this song, which still lingers today, is a sense of outrage that when I heard it for the first time and it wasn't a cover of the theme tune to the TV show of the same name,

and, you know, the video didn't consist of the band investing shorts doing a Fonz double thumbs up, and then running about on an obstacle course before Ron Pickering turns up and shouts, away you go, and the band all jump into a swimming pool. Really upsetting. Yeah, yeah.

Taylor? Well, Queen, my question to you is, but what if you weren't the champions? Think on. Good point. Well made. So I sit here and this song plays, but I can't hear it. It's like the judder of the fridge or the, you know,

or the constant pings on my phone from The Athletic. It's there, but it's only a rustle in the corner of the consciousness, you know. Not because it's understated you understand or insufficiently demonstrative but because it's been repeated to the point where it can be ignored well perhaps where it can only be ignored right a lot of the time the key to fully appreciating older music is to hear it as though for the first time but obviously in this case that that's impossible. It's like thinking, is the funeral march a good song?

I don't know. I mean, you hear it so often and usually not on a happy day. It's impossible to tell your critical response from your instinctive flinch, you know. But let's have a go. So this record uses some quite appealing musical tricks but in the service of a song with a fairly nauseating tone and although you're clearly not meant to take it 100 seriously you are expected to respond with genuine awe which is

an expectation i never appreciate that much you know and i mean if you set yourself up the way queen do in this period with this much flash and pomp i want to see you howling into the face of god you know not this shit because in a way it's remarkable how unexpectedly relatively boring queen really are once you've heard a couple of tunes it's just the vocal histrionics and that very small room guitar sound thousands spent on increasingly sophisticated studios to make it sound like he's played in a wardrobe um and that's it and beyond that they're they're just about the scale and spectacle and a version of camp that isn't too unmanageable to sell. And you get a little bit of what Led Zeppelin give you and a little bit of what Sparks give you, but all in the form of astronaut food.

You know, you don't have to chew it or heat it up with your brain. It's easy to get get down but it's not necessarily satisfying and it really pains me to sound so much like a kind of script following music critic there but that's the worst thing about queen they only deal in the obvious and they bring out the obvious in you you know and it's never a good time when a group are this hard to think about. And then thinking about them produces so little. You can really spend a long time pondering on Queen and still not really have that much to say. And it's not because they confound critical thought or, you know, they change the rules as they go along, man, or anything that, you know, any good reason why a group can be hard to think or write about. that you know any good reason why a group can be hard to think or write about it's because they take up so much space and then when you pierce the outer shell it's just the same all the way through there's nothing happening in queen music after a certain point there's musical movement

and action but it doesn't really do anything except parade up and down. It's not that it's terrible. I mean, I like a few Queen tracks. I like the B side of this record, in fact, We Will Rock You. Yeah, that's probably my favourite. Yeah, it's also been heard in too many other contexts. But when you actually listen to it, it's very compact and direct and intense and weird. And it's sort of a bit close up and uncomfortable,

like Freddie's right up in your face you know and it just sounds like pure undiluted wrongness you know whereas this is like one part wrongness to 700 million billion parts the atlantic ocean the irony is that for a band that were all about scale they're actually better the smaller and nastier and weirder and more stripped down and and and spiteful and perverted they sound you know and the further the music shifts and bloats to this non-human scale you know like giant doric columnated pomp for the sake of it the easier it is to ignore even when the lead singer's dressed as a bottle of sheridan it's just so easy to just just let it wash over you you know yeah and we will rock you

put another minute on that you've got a fucking massive hit single that but big fuck up by queen there yeah but i like that's the late 70s version of rock on yeah but i like that i like the fact that it's so short and it just finishes and you're like what what was that it and so you have to play it again true it's strange with queen yet somehow and i can't really quite put my finger on it i mean it's it's really all about freddie mercury you know whatever essence or quality there is in queen it's about him this unabashedness he was the only person that grasped live aid and he just had you know there's a certain kind of quality that i don't it might be illusory it might not actually be anything admirable it's not even something i necessarily particularly appreciate but i i'm just

swayed by the idea that there is really really something about freddie mercury one question that hardly gets asked about queen because probably because it's such a fucking stupid question but i was watching this and i thought how much of the mercury tongue is in the mercury cheek here queen's lyrics are never seen as the important thing about them but here he's laying it on with a fucking trowel isn't he oh you know you've given me fame and fortune and everything that goes with it i thank you all but i did it i've suffered for my art yeah well i would say it's 50 50 i would say having this play can eat in it yeah yeah well it's but it's but it's that's the camp aesthetic isn't it that you find something utterly

ridiculous and you undermine it but at the same time it is actually great you do also think it's great yeah i think it's the same area serious and he's also taking the piss. He didn't really do interviews as such, did he? I mean, he kept it like Prince. He kept his, you know, cards close to his chest. So I think perhaps in order to sort of maintain, you know, that kind of having your cake and eating it, because if he spoke too much, if he became too discursive,

then he might give the game away. People kept asking him when he was going to get married. The problem with Queen is that the other glamorous person is stuck behind some drums. Yeah, I mean, the thing about Queen, from about 1975 onwards, they were always there. I can't remember anyone in my school at the time being massively into Queen.

And for that reason, I've always had it in my head that they were a bit of a middle-class band. Queen of the band that the posh grubs on the nice estate found an entry point with and I've always wondered why I thought that and it hit me while I was watching this it's Freddie Mercury's half a mic stand isn't it which he used right from the beginning of Queen's career and I realized that at the time while i was using the warming pan that was on the wall as a base there'd be other lads of a higher class using their dad's golf clubs as a freddie mercury mike substitute probably the driver i haven't played golf for fucking decades but you know if i picked a driver out of my golf bag there's one fist going up in the air you know what i See, what interests me here

is that decades ago, you played golf. I know, yes. I was just thinking that, yeah. You don't mean crazy golf. I'm just thinking you're plus fours there all of a sudden

and you're a little kind of... No, no, no, no, no. Back in the 90s, me and my mates were well into PGA Tour golf on the Mega Drive and it inspired us to have a go. And it was fucking mint.

Have a bit of a walk, have loads of spliffs, crack someone to fucker with a stick, pretend to be Freddie Mercury. Fucking mint way to spend an afternoon. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's not quite the Arnold Palmer spirit there, but yeah, there you go. No, no, not really, no. Yeah. So where were we? Queen. The old course, yeah, yeah, yeah.

News of the world was framed then and now as Queen going back to basics, even though you wouldn't fucking know it from this single. And as everyone knows, they recorded it at Wessex Studios directly next door to the Sex Pistols who were putting together Never Mind the Bollocks. And as you can imagine, chaps, much larks ensued.

Johnny Rotten was dearest to crawl on all fours into Queen's studio right up to Freddie Mercury who was playing piano and say hello Freddie and quite possibly thank him for pulling out of that interview on the Today Show with Bill Brunt in the previous November. Yeah apparently Johnny Rotten

and Brian May got on really well and of course we all know about Mercury calling Sid Vicious Simon ferocious but very little has been said about sid's side of the story so allow me to quote an interview with john tobin on radio one's rock on show which came out round about this time when he noticed the interview was drinking out of a queen mug is that a queen mug oh i saw freddie mercury in the flesh pictures just can't convey how revolting that bloke is he's absolutely hideous he's like an old turk he's got a great blue shadow that

comes up to under his eyes and this disgusting voice he warbles away like oh the ballet is rather good this season he's absolutely awful i've never met anyone like him so there we go he's like an old turk yes yes i think that some of sydney's attitudes were a touch on reconstructed uh definitely um very much so yes very much so pakistani brethren i think came in for the rough side of his tongue ah fuck sid vicious the cunt anything else to say yeah i hate the way that people talk about queen especially americans like they've somehow ghosted into this canon of unimpeachably brilliant classic rock that everybody loves right like there's the Beatles Jimi Hendrix the Stones and fucking Queen you know it's been forgotten it's not even forgotten it's been overwritten that while they existed Queen were a horrible joke yeah you know anyone

who was alive just in the 80s just remembers them hanging around Montreux with their vests and and mustaches you know eating and drinking the the money they'd made in South Africa I mean certainly that was all they were associated with by that point they were people who like dire straits and go west you know they were like yeah pure stadium stodge and I'm all for re-evaluation but there's nothing much to re-evaluate really they were a competent rock band who put on a show but i'm not going to be gaslit into thinking they were genius when it's obviously like 10 or 15 good tracks and the rest is wallpaper paste you know yeah i've never listened

to a queen album and never will no yeah the only one you can get through is sheer heart attack which is not right that bad but generally i think a lot of people just can't separate scale from skill. And it's, you know, I mean, it's no offence to Queen even, because 10 or 15 tracks is more than most people manage, right? Definitely, yeah. There's a lot of other groups who managed it, and people don't talk about them as though they invented oral sex, you know. But I guess the terrible truth for people

like us is that rock history is now in the hands of american kids on youtube who react to it uh with no grasp of context you know it's like phil collins yeah wow who is annie lennox what a voice and and queen are sufficiently obvious to pass that test you know and worse I don't think the thing that endures in that context is you know the humor and the spectacular absurdity of Freddie's performance or any of the good stuff it's just the crushing weight of everything you know which which modern people respond to, because at least it's something that their deadened hearts can feel, you know. Not just the weight, but the windiness of it all as well.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's what makes sense to 21st century people. No time for losers. Like, share, subscribe. 21st century people no time for losers like share subscribe so the following week we are the champions stayed at number six but the week after that it began the first of three weeks at number two held off the summit of mount pop by this week's number one a mull of kentire by wings Mull of Kintyre by Wings. The follow-up, Spread Your Wings, would only get to number 34 in March of 1978. But in 2011, a team of researchers at Goldsmiths University, who were studying the sound waves of hit records, deemed We Are The Champions the catchiest song ever, putting it

above the likes of YMCA by the Village People and the final countdown by Europe, even though Goldsmiths doesn't actually have a science department. So I wipe an Alsatian's arsehole with what they have to say. Champions At number six, Queen and We Are The Champions, best thing since Bohemian Rhapsody. And now, a little bit of beauty on top of the pops. Dorothy Moore and I Believe You.

This is Megs and Kerr dancing to that song. I believe you When you say that you will reach into the sky song. We go straight into a hoopy wipe effect while Powell off camera essentially tells us that everything Queen have done since Bohemian Rhapsody into We Are The Champions has been cat shit before telling us that it's time for a little bit of beauty, as Legs & Co prepare to emote to I Believe You by Dorothy Moore. Born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1946, Dorothy Moore was the lead singer of The Poppies, a girl group who were the original backing singers for Irma, Thomas and Freddie Fender,

before branching out on their own and having minor hits in the mid-60s with Lullaby of Love and He's Ready. After going solo in the late 60s, working with assorted labels, she finally hit the jackpot when her cover of Misty Blue, a country song originally recorded by Wilma Burgess in 1966, languished in the vaults of Malarco Records for three years before shooting up to number three in the Billboard charts and getting to number five over here in August of 1976. This is the follow-up to a cover of the 1961 Billy Walker song Funny How Time Slips Away and was written by Don and Dick Adrissi, a duo in the Alessi mould

who were having minor success at the time in America. It's also the lead-off cut from her new LP, Dorothy Moore. It nipped into the top 40 of Fortnite ago at number 38 and this week it's risen five places from number 26 to number 21. And as she's in America and there isn't a video here come legs and co for a flounce about well chaps last episode we discussed big tank chess and here's flick colbert playing sexy lady croquet i love at this point legs and co are being kept well away from the audience, right? They're often pre-recorded in an empty studio earlier in the day.

It's like otherwise they think it would be like that scene in Apocalypse Now where they fly in the playmates of the year. It doesn't bear thinking about. Despite the fact that for this one, they've been dressed in ankle- length green leggings underneath a loose dress but the dress is off the shoulder and they've all got silver chokers and valkyrie style silver bicep bracelets it's uh yeah a runner's been sent down to a sorry shop in shepherd's bush haven't they for material well it looks like their top half is attending a banquet in a castle where bearded men stare meaningfully at them across the table with one eyebrow raised.

And their bottom half is pushing a pushchair around Wandsworth Park holding a caramel latte. I mean, impressive multitasking, but it's not the most coherent image, you know. No. But there's not that much to love or hate about this particular routine apart from jill's painfully sincere expression at the start as she interprets the line you will reach into the sky by pretending to reach into the sky i mean i suspect that this is one of the less considered and less well rehearsed legs and co routines yeah maybe put together in a bit of a hurry yeah yeah it's one of them standard ones where they just walk about yeah yeah there's a

lot of aimless swan in about and also quite a few of those moments where one of them realizes they're slightly off their mark and does a little hurried high-heeled trot to speed up a bit and get back in line once seen never unseen yeah well you know that fixed radiant smile just gets a little bit grittier just for that one second uh yeah but i like that i like when there's a tear in the fabric like that you know and you can peer through this semi-erotic reverie and uh get a glimpse of them you know two days earlier in a long room in a concrete building in acton you know nine o'clock in the morning in november yeah one of them's drinking a box of just juice through a straw you

know just in 1977 oh no no no kellogg's rise and shine taylor yeah yeah with still little bits of grit at the bottom yeah i think just juice was of the future you can imagine the scene can't you come on jill really reach up into the sky love come on rosie rosie stop moving your head like a goose all the time they're running through the familiar tropes aren't they in this particular routine i i agree i suspect this one was a bit of a rush job um but then again i mean you've got to think my granddad again you know he's he's this this is basically there to kind of to lower his heart rate after freddie mercury because it's not like in seven days jankers he's thinking you know he wants his ass dipped in aniseed and pursued across rough terrain by famished bulldogs you know he's he's got his bloody great girl of a man dressed like

that giving me feelings whoa no no i mean you know he didn't say that, you know what I mean? That's, you know, he was very exercised. He was always very exercised by these glam boys, these glam men. And I think that, unfortunately, I think that, you know, the idea that, like, pants, people, legs and co. would kind of up the kind of heart rate, I think it would have lowered his, you know, really. And I think that was the idea, this kind of balm, really.

Because, you know, it's... A soothing balm. Yeah, I mean, it's the usual unerotic gyrations really i mean taylor said semi-erotic i'd go all the way to unerotic i mean and i think that's you know again it's deliberate it's setting a cap on anything too intense you know that's kind of mandatory really at bbc yeah because the record's about making love well yes absolutely yes, absolutely. And I can't account for all tastes, but to me, they're very anti-masturbatory, Legs & Co. and Pans people.

I mean, unless you get off on a woman wagging a finger at a dog or something like that. No, round about this time, Legs & Co. are doing a sex. This time, they're not. I mean, with the sorry material thing, the overall impression is if Nia Zendagi, Nia Jeevan did a fashion show and then realised that there aren't enough Asian models in the UK, so they've had to make do with legs and coat.

It's a nice enough song. You know, it's the sort of thing that Patti Boulay had knocked out on the two Ronnies. But it's not what I want at the age of nine, and it's certainly not what the dads want. No. Well, I mean, it's not what I want at the age of nine, and it's certainly not what the dads want. No. Well, I mean, it's okay. We always complain that there's a particular kind of smooth pop soul record, especially from the 70s, that sounds absolutely fine

and is clearly more enjoyable than Live in Trouble by the Barren Nights. But it doesn't really touch the sides and it's almost undiscussable because there's no particular significance to it and there's nothing hanging off it or sticking out the sides of it to grab hold of you know what i mean it's just a reasonably nice record and uh an acceptable soundtrack to tony blackburn's cum face and mighty chest beating roar as he issues forth into Tessa Wyatt's eye um a little sooner than expected but he had no choice because he suddenly remembered the next song on the tape was the Wombling song and took the least worst option but the thing that struck me I'm unimpressed by the lyric i believe you when you say you'll fill

my body with your soul and love will grow into a brown-eyed little girl who looks like we do even now even in the 70s they're having to take that route the brown-eyed handsome man route but of all the things that one might have been asked to believe in the 1970s, surely this is the one that requires the least credulity, right? It's not exactly the Enfield poltergeist, is it? Like, he's saying, oh, what, if we have sex and I get pregnant, we might have a kid that looks like we do. Yeah, well, you know, it's like saying I believe you

when you say if you lob a bottle of milk off the multi-storey car park, it will not survive the fall and milk will go everywhere. It's like, oh, well, I'm glad. It's good to have your trust, you know. So I much prefer the line, I'd live in a cave if you wanted to, because it makes me think of Dorothy dorothy moore and her boyfriend living like the hair bear bunch yes you know or or smiling lovingly at each other while absolutely plastered in bat guano stay at home every night never quarrel or fight oh we don't even buy

but i'm sure that records like this aren't even made as additions to the great soul canon or anything like that. They are purely about the programming. They exist because there's a need, you know, doing a programme up top of the pops for the... Let's just calm down a little bit, you know. And we can't have, like, the Nipply Rectors, Buzzcocks and the Snivelling Shits all in sequence, you know. We've got to have a little bit of respite. And I think it really just functions as respite and no more. think that's why there was a commercial demand for records like this really what should have happened is a nice little film clip of dorothy more sort of flouncing around a

garden you know holding roses to her face and all this kind of stuff leaving legs and co to do orgasm addict dressed up as tissue boxers or something yeah anything else to say about this I noticed there was an interview with her in this week's

Record Mirror oh yes also featuring an on the road piece with the jam in Dachau oh god we didn't even

mention that yeah their tour manager is very fond of leaning out the window at passers by shouting we won the war. Oh, great.

Yeah. Witty stuff. But yeah, there was an article on Dorothy Moore, which was headlined, Dorothy's more than just a thick hick. That's all I know about Dorothy Moore. You'd like to hope so, yeah. Apart from Misty Blue. That's all I know.

She's more than just a thick hick, and she believes her boyfriend when he tells her where babies come from. Low bars to get over, but still both definite positives. And I suppose this record is too on balance. It's all right. Yeah, it'll do. So the following week, I believe you dropped two places to number 23, but rallied the week after to number 20 its highest position but it would be the last dent that dorothy moore put into the uk charts a year

later i believe you was covered as a single by carpenters the carpenters but it only got to number 68 On the Billboard chart And wasn't even released over here I've made up my mind For a lifetime I believe you I believe you And I saw you Tori P. Moore And I believe you That's beautiful And. I'm gonna show you. Dorothy Moore.

I believe you. That's beautiful. And Lexi Coe. They dance so beautifully. And now, well, where have we gone? So it's status quo and rocking all over the world. This is at number five. Hello, blue eyes.

Hi. Hi, hi. Let's get down to this one. Yeah. We cut back to Powell with two more women. They're obviously being let in two by two, just like at Santa's Grotto. These two look almost new wave compliant with shorter hair and blank expressions. After telling us that Legs & Co dance so so beautifully he introduces the next single but when it starts it sounds like he's been instructed by the gallery to chat up the women so he says

hello blue eyes hi hi let's get down to this one yeah yeah yeah see by this point there's this middle section of the episode peter powell's links get really creepy it's like suddenly this tender softness creeps in right it's like he's going they dance so beautifully it's like he's doing one of those afternoon tv ads you know for a donkey sanctuary up to 15 of your donation will will reach Miguel or someone like him. Won't you please give? And you think, thank God for a change of pace, but then no, because just the way he says the title of this record

makes me want to crawl back into the womb. Anyone's womb, I don't care. But it's that little squeak at the end when he goes, yeah, fucking piglet. Oh, with his violet Elizabeth curls. It's like, oh, you need to pick up the seat of the pants, that little stinker. I strongly believed he's being egged on by the gallery

to be a bit more alpha. Yeah, yeah. He's standing with women, but his free hand is still clinging on to that mic. He's not being snaked around anyone's waist or shoulders or anything like that. And it's like, oh, this isn't right. You've got to dip your bread in mate it's top of the pops this is what you do yeah but he's the only person in the studio operating at that energy level you know that's the weird thing about it yes it's actually the thing you know when you're edmunds isn't

trousers or whatever you know they are and baits you know they are actually in keeping with that slightly kind of lukewarm level of enthusiasm. He's truly trying to gee things up, even in his appallingly white-trousered way. This one happens to be Rockin' All Over The World by Status Quo. We've covered the overlords of heads-down, no-nonsense group masturbation a few times on Chart Music. And this single, a cover of the 1975 John Fogarty single which failed to chart in the UK, is their first new release of 1977

and the follow-up to Wild Side of Life, which got to number nine for two weeks in January of this year. It's also the lead-off cut from their ninth LP of the same name, which comes out next week. But all is not well in the Quo camp. After hiring Pip Williams, the former guitarist of Jimmy James and the Vagabonds, who arranged a fluty bit in Kung Fu Fighting,

the Ramadan number one of 1974, as their new producer. And while Rick Parfitt really likes a touch of class he's added to the production, Francis Rossi and Alan Lancaster think their new album is, quote, poxy. The single entered the chart a month ago at number 32, then soared 15 places to number 17. And since then, it's Stolfele and Nimble picked its way up the side of Mount Pop, and this week it's nipped up one place to number five. As the band are currently making their way to Cork

to begin their 99-date Rockin' All Over The World tour, which shamefully fails to take in Africa, North America, South America, Central America, Asia, and both poles, we've been treated to a clip from the video. So, boys, here we are again, again, again, again. Why don't we do it again? Yeah, I mean, a song like this, to me, it's hard. In terms of, like, discourse, it kind of, you just sort of slide off it

like a kind of grease plank of wood or something like that i mean it's not something that can it's just a it's just a fact of life as a song like this it's not so much a kind of artifact really yeah and it's it's tricky to find things you know to say about it in a sense because it's it's it's well let's find oh yeah don't worry yes yes don't worry I was absolutely shocked when I found out this was a cover because it is the most Quo song ever. If you fed a strip of denim into a computer and waited for the spools at the top to spin about,

this is a song that would be spat out the other end. Yes, it is. It is essence of Quo. Yes, eau de Quo. Eau de Quo. Fucking hell. That's what denim should have been. Yeah, definitely. The advert for eau de Quo would be a denim hell that's what denim should have been yeah definitely the advert for eau de quo would be a denim shirt opened up and a woman's hand sneaking up and then being slapped away so uh so the bloke could have a polish at the end for men who don't have to try

and so they don't yes this record although as far as i know it was not where quotidians or whatever their fans call themselves lost the faith is certainly the point where an objective listener can tell that status quo are no longer accelerating remorselessly towards some kind of greasy high speed motorway wipeout and entry in a rocker valhalla yeah they're going through the quotients very much yeah well worse than that they're losing speed they're losing momentum and they're drifting into this motoric music you know dressed up in unlaundered denim but with freshly washed hair this sort of sounds like paper plane or down down or on eyes records in the same way that a man in a gorilla suit sort of looks like a gorilla but if you watch them fight over a banana you'll soon see the difference and it's the same here and but the fault is not with the song if you listen to john fogart is original the logic is is different he made sense of this song right okay if you go and listen to the other single from that john fogart lp uh which is called almost saturday night which is one of edwin collins's favorite singles and i love it too um and then after that you listen to his version of this it all falls into place

right if you can stomach the sort of shit kicking down home plaid shirt feel of it which not everyone can you understand that this song is just a sort of less musical version of almost saturday night it's like a straight shot of moonshine right it's really it's pure pop in a way john fogart is kind of hairy and he's like woody from cheers you know and he's got bits in but he's good stuff as a basic roughness and attack and simplicity which is totally joyous and wide open you know but then you listen to this after listening to that and the first thing you notice is the vacuum-packed laboratory conditions sterility of this record you know so obviously quo are equally gritty and astute in their presentation but yeah there's the

the sound of their records from now on is is edgeless and yeah automated it's that repetition which is never hypnotic they sound like a huge expanse of formica stretching off into infinity you know i guess that's what what francis and alan found poxy and i i have to agree with them i mean it's not really so much rocking it's trucking really and it's not so much that they're going all over the world or even around the world they're just going around in these circles these kind of decaying loops really and it's interesting that you know because obviously you know people like norway have been doing the whole motoric thing but there are edges there like, peripheral details or whatever.

There's a sense of, like, impetus. There's a sense of, like, the paradox of being stasis and momentum and all that kind of stuff going on there. And this is just... Yeah, I mean, there's repetition and there's repetition, put it that way. This is B-road motoric, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Far and far and far after B-46.

Yes. They've left just enough bits of straw in it to trick you into thinking that it's organic and soily, you know, and it's got an odour of piss, you know. But really, you can see where all this is heading and the flatness and the weariness and the sort of sodden thump of this record are status quo's new direction.

Yes. I mean, you compare it to the jam, right, like the spindly early jam that we saw here, and, you know, in the broadest possible sense, they're playing the same kind of music. It's rock and roll. It's simple guitar. But what I want to say about about the jam they are free of

stodge and they're full of fresh air and ideas and movement and we can sit here in the justifiably cynical 21st century and giggle about the the hyperactive incoherent optimism and idealistic energy of the young jam you know but then or now who would choose this who would choose the zonked out silent toe tapping of this record over the the speedy three-hour conversation over one cup of coffee in the local caf that is the modern world you know even if most of what's being said in that conversation is a little bit silly you know that's not the point one of them is at least obnoxiously alive you know and the other one moves like a zombie i mean there's only an 11 year age gap between francis rossi and paul weller but it might as well be fourter yeah yeah in in lots of ways

like i say it's tricky i mean it's almost aspiring to this kind of down the line this does exactly what it says on the tin you know it's just the straight stuff no rules straight down the line you know there's that sort of pretentiousness in a sense about it you know but it's not really those things i mean there are other people i mean like motorhead make them sound well freely you you can be much, much straighter than status quo. Suicide the same year, Ghost Rider, that is getting right down to the absolute electric wire of things, you know. But that's, you know, there are certain kind of straightnesses that are a bit too much. Yeah, I think the really upsetting song is they go on about rocking all over the world, but they don't even talk about the world.

No, no. It's just that they like it. They're rocking all over their world. Yeah, I mean, for fuck's sake, why don't even talk about the world. No, no. It's just that they like it. They're rocking all over their world. Yeah, I mean, for fuck's sake, why don't you add a few world music sound effects in? Why don't you have a bit where there's some Chinese-y music and then some nose flute from the Andes? Yeah, yeah.

A picaresque tour of the Americas and the Orient, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, add in the ambient sound of a Persian market. Yes. I always think we should do that on this podcast. Yes. I mean, like, you know, rather than like the sound of low-flying police helicopters

and kids screaming at each other out on the estate, you know. Yeah, and the cunt across the road doing his fucking soaring again. Honestly, man, he's there all the time. He's soaring up planks of wood and he never uses them for anything he hasn't built one shack yet across the road what's he using them for he's just being a fucking annoyance well i said that's a metaphor for status quo isn't it you know just produce yes sort of series of planks of wood to no particular yes well played a little too neat so anyway the video that we get you know it's your bog standard band pretending to play live promo that we were kind of getting

used to by 1977 but with one major difference because you know you're looking at it and there appears to be very little sight of the recently deceased alan lancaster because you know he's relocated to australia at this time and clearly he couldn't be asked to drag himself around the world for this so uh what have they done chaps did you not notice this not on the first viewing no no it is a dummy isn't it yes they've replaced him with a dummy in alan partridge's wife style and fashion it moves as well man it's proper animatronic the bbc clearly didn't approve of that did that because the only time we see him on this episode of top of the pops is when they do a sweep around the back of the stage and we we just see his electronic arse going left and right,

like he's had a hip replacement and he's jogging on the spot. And the first time I saw it, it's like, something fishy about this. And then I checked it up, and yes, they have a proper proto-animatronic horror. And you see him in the full video. Looks like they've gone round the back of fucking Madame Tussauds and they've lobbed out a Jason King king dummy and yeah they're using it and he's there with a bass and his fret

hand is forming a v sign which could well be construed as a message from status quo to their missing bassist well you described him as the recently deceased alan lancaster you mean recently deceased as of the time of this recording yeah of course yes he'd been the recently deceased Alan Lancaster. You mean recently deceased as of the time of this recording, of course. Yes, yes. If he'd been the recently deceased Alan Lancaster at the time, that at least would have been a good excuse. Yeah. It would have been a little grotesque.

It would be like, just is. But the great quo conspiracy theory is that Alan is dead. Yes. But if they'd had any sort of modicum of wit or conceptual sense, they'd have had animatronic models for all of them and bunged that out and it would have been in keeping yeah well maybe rossi ought to think about that now just as a footnote i saw a thing the other day it was a an article from an old music paper from uh 1968 about the supposed rock and roll revival of 1968,

which seemed to be mostly just Lady Madonna, as far as I could make out. Apparently there's all these bands playing 50s type rock and roll. And so in this article, you've got all these musicians, like The Move and stuff, hailing the revival of a 50s influence sound, you know. And then the last paragraph in it says but one popster who's hoping it won't return is status quo's rick parfit quote i hope rock doesn't come back

since the days of rock pop has progressed so much as a musical art form and it would be very retrogressive to return to such an old sound. We should be looking for new sounds instead, unquote. But he's a voice in the wilderness, concludes the cheerfully unnamed writer. How delightful. A man of his word. Yes, a matchstick man talking there. So the following week, rocking all over the world hauled itself up to number four.

And a week later, it would commence a three-week stint in the number three slot. Rossi and Lancaster's disillusion with the LP ensured that no further cuts would be taken from the album, meaning there was a nigh year-long wait for the follow-up again and again, which got to number 13 in september of 1978 in the summer of 1985 of course quo were invited by bob geldof to be the opening act at live aid specifically because he wanted rocking all over the world to be the first song played that day and three years after that they put out a version called running all over the World as a tie-in with Sport Aid 88, which got to number 17 for two weeks in August of that year. God, status quo inspiring the youth to run.

Away from that. In circles. Here we go. Running all over the world. How? With two more 70s lovelies, one with the most flicked back hair ever, reminds us that we're rocking on the very best show on television. This is the biggest party of the whole lot. Before introducing us to Heroes by David Bowie,

we've done David Bowie loads on chart music, and this single, the follow-up to Sound and Vision, which got to number three in March of this year, is the lead-off cut from his 12th LP of the same name, which came out a fortnight ago. Co-written with Brian Eno during his Berlin period, the lyrics, according to Bowie at the time, are about an anonymous couple he saw snogging by the Berlin Wall

while he was in the studio. Before it was released at the end of September, Bowie was already out and about plugging the shit out of it. Even though a promo video had been shot in Paris, he performed it on the last episode of the Granada TV kids show Mark nine days before Mark Bolan was killed. Then he performed it on Bing Crosby's Merry Old Christmas a month before Crosby died. It entered the chart at number 27 and a week later he went for the hat trick when Dave Lee Travis introduced him singing live

over a specially recorded backing track. But sadly, Travis lived. so here's a repeat of his performance a fortnight ago his first appearance in the top of the pop studio since gene gina in january of 1973 and only his third overall appearance on our favorite thursday night pop treat first things first ch chaps, Peter Powell is the absolute enola gay of the B-bomb isn't it? Fuck's sake. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

But again, I mean, the girl on the left of him has a real sort of, can I go now, vibe about him and I don't think that's entirely down to the creepiness of Powell. I just think it's that, just people, even people that were on a show like that in those days, there was almost like a collective shyness.

It was just a general attitude. You know, the stars are the stars and we are but the humble audience and all that kind of stuff. There wasn't... Yeah, don't look at me. I'm no one special. Absolutely.

And it's almost like paralleling football, the way that fans in this era, they would just wear scarves and maybe sort of rosettes or something like that. They wouldn't actually wear replica shirts with that tender implication that they clearly had dreams and aspirations of being players themselves and would do something as daftly precarious

as wear the actual shirt or, in some cases, full kit. You know, you'd see Liverpool fans in the absolute full kit. Right about that time, the only person who was doing that was Brian Glover in Cairns. Absolutely. I think that reticence is partly, you know, a humility that we have lost as a people. But it's also, because this was a more violent time

where it was a really good idea not to put your head above the parapet. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. If you didn't have a bodyguard and a limousine, just keep your head down, eh? Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah. You were on telly the night. You must think you saw that.

Extroversion would get your fucking head kicked in. That's right and i even went on into the 80s because you know i mentioned in a previous episode of chart music that i auditioned for the central television workshop didn't get in and failed to be on your mother wouldn't like it and since then i've known loads of people who were in that and were on telly and all that kind of stuff they told me that their lives were just made fucking hell by it and they just said yeah you just wouldn't go into town on a saturday because there'd be a load of youths coming up to you going oh you're on fucking telly you must think you're somewhere yeah yeah i believe this phenomenon continues to some extent in that i'm told male porn stars avoid the local pub really yeah so yeah this song i mean

fucking hell what a mountain to scale yeah people go on about it as if it's one of his biggest hits and he's currently promoting the arse off it but you know let's look at the chart position so far number 27 number 26 number 25 and now number 24 what what's going on is this something to do with rca pressing plants around the world still hammering out elvis vinyl because you know he's just died and there was a massive surge in demand for elvis lps in the wake of his death and that's been compounded by a trade union dispute at rca's plant in county durham only last month yeah i guess it's one of these songs and there's two or three of them tonight actually that um really you know transcended their times and it's like you know the performance in the charts at the time is just incidental because um they really kind of in their own way even up

and include rocking all over the world and that they kind of belong to the ages really and bowie has that wonderful sense of self-possession he's bowie david yeah fuck say oh oh yes bow wow wow wow wowie yes yowie bowie um you know he has this wonderful sort of self self-possession you know he's in the moment but he's kind of belongs to the ages i mean you know he has a sort of timeless appearance about him you know there's not apart from possibly is the sleeves on his shirt or whatever it's a kind of pretty timeless look he's got there he's just wearing a standard shirt but he's um he's unbuttoned his sleeve yeah they're hanging down i just i just admire his whole demeanor in this song i mean if you contrast it with the ludicrous histrionics of freddie mercury early on that kind of willful preposterousness you just get the feeling here that bowie bowie wow wow wow he's pretty conscious of the massive and exact precise weight of his importance but

just carries it really modestly very lightly indeed he's sort of radiating this quiet supremely confident benevolence really is absolutely at ease with the idea of sharing himself with the world yeah and i mean this is 1977 and he's such an important, you know, we've talked about this before really in terms of kraut rock and everything like that and the fact that he kind of gives it his blessing and that sort of changes so many things. So he's in the process of redirecting rock culture or subculture from west to east. You know, he's meeting Kraftwerk and contemplating working with Michael Rotter out of Neue. But I always think that with Bowie, there's always an essential Bowie-ness about him.

You know, he's meeting, and he's always in between. Well observed. Yeah, he's meeting Ralph Rutter, but he's also meeting Bing Crosby. You know, he's signposting Kraftwerk, but he never imitated Kraftwerk as such. I mean, he's generally classic. I always think of him as a classic artist. This is classic in the sense of being immaculately sculpted and balanced and built for durability and no built-in obsolescence or faddishness or

anything like that um yeah and i think the only i would just say if i could go back in time and tell him anything i'd just say look just leave it here mate don't bother keeping pace with the times or signposting the times as we go into the 80s catching the tail of the zeitgeist fuck the zeitgeist just do what you do you know a bit of sax tony visconti at the controls you know aloof from the fray don't be worrying about the bloody pixies or drum and bass because i think belatedly he did come to that sort of sense and i think that was why he was kind of more universally exalted whereas during the 80s he was to be honest he was a bit of a laughingstock you know after this moment you look at a wonderful moment like this

and perhaps he should have just sort of stepped back at that particular point ever since the early 70s and right up to 1982 he's an rca man and apparently colonel parker would threaten to end elvis's deal with rca at a stroke if they ever signed anyone that he saw as competition. That was a shake he was on Epic. I mean, so at the moment, their roster is Boe, Iggy Pop, Hall & Oates, Harry Nilsson, Baccarat, and fuck all else. But, you know, Elvis did save RCA.

There's a story that they were having a board meeting on August the 16th of this year, and they're absolutely in the shit and someone runs in and says oh i've got even more bad news elvis has just died and someone just jumped up you know threw his papers in there and went fucking yes we've made the month full steam ahead to the printing press as okay said i've heard elvis is dead and the guys like his eyes shiftily go from side to side. Oh, really? Oh, what terrible.

Talking of Elvis, this song has become Bowie's American trilogy, hasn't it? It's that one song that from here on in has to be on every set he plays. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, like David was saying, I really like this neither young nor old seedy Robert Redford version of Bowie.

It's like before he climbed back into the clown suit for Ashes to Ashes. You know, it's like he's dignified, but he's the opposite of boring. You know, it's like he's just 30-ish, you know, in front of a decolorized mutation of the lwt logo uh in his chunky dad jeans you know and it's funny because in 1973 david bowie comes on top of the pops and it's like this freak has materialized from another planet yeah the everyday world of of y fronts and power cuts you know and he's he's tank. And he's going to electrify and pervert everything. And in 1977, David Bowie appears, and it's like a real normal person has just walked into this creepy pantomime of Peter Powellism

and, you know, souped-up variety show nonsense. And he's surveyed the scene and lifted one eyebrow and he's visibly above the fray here in that he's thinking adult thoughts but not the boring ones and he's slightly bemused by all the trashiness and he's not concealing a quiet smirk but it's not in a snooty way he's just an intelligent mature man enjoying an amusing evening out before he gets back to the serious work and it's fair enough he doesn't need to be here like you wouldn't have got paul mccartney or the stones or even queen into the studio to do their latest song in front of 50 lank-haired adolescents, you know, shifting from foot to foot like they need a piss.

But while Bowie clearly considers himself to be above the reality of Top of the Pops in 1977, he doesn't consider himself to be above the concept of it. So here he is, you know. He's a mature artistic rock musician who still understands the thrill of the game, which is as rare as a newspaper article about The Who, which spells all their names correctly. The only regret is it means we don't get to see Legs & Co dancing. Yes.

Like, dressed as Odysseus, Spider-Man, Kevin Keegan, Bob Fish out of darts, you know, Merlin Reese, all the heroes of the time, you know, Lord Boothby, David Berkowitz, Uther Joyce. recorded track that was knocked up that very week fully complying with musician union regulations which is a bit of a shame because just imagine what the top of the pops orchestra could have done with this one but by appearing on top of the pops you know as we've seen he's done a kids tv show he's done a show for the oldens and here he is on top of he's very keen to sell this record isn't it is that because he's finally enjoying being a pop star again or is he being pushed by rca to remind people that there's more to them than elvis or is he worried that the spotlight's moved away from him i think that yeah there's

definitely an element of the latter i think there i mean i don't think that bowie really had anything to worry about in terms of punk no nonetheless i Nonetheless, I think that he was, you know, he was a little bit sort of nervous, I suspect, by nature. I do remember a tale of him when John Wilde at Melody Maker reviewed one of the Tim Machine albums, and the last line was something like, sit down, man, you're a fucking disgrace. And he was absolutely devastated by this review.

I mean, to me, David Bowie, who gives a shit? But he was, and his press officer had to kind of read it out to him line by line and sort of hold his hand, as it were, you know, to kind of, I don't know, it's not so bad. Well, it was bad. But, you know, it's kind of sad to think of an artist being that kind of thin-skinned, I guess. And, you know, he probably was. And so I imagine that maybe punk did unnerve him,

despite the fact that he was absolutely adored. So, yeah, this single is seen as one of his best, isn't it? Well, when we started doing this podcast, 16 years ago, come Michaelmas, I remember everyone thinking, how is this going to pan out? If we keep on going and the big hitters start turning up over and over, will it become tedious and repetitive? And I remember thinking, only if will it become tedious and repetitive and i remember thinking

only if the records are tedious and repetitive yeah if they're not then no and there's no better illustration of this than in the sequence in here right we go from trying to talk about status quo for the third or fourth time trying not to say the same things about Endless Formica and Hamster Wheels, to getting to talk about David Bowie for the third or fourth time and immediately filling up with too much to say. All of it different from the last time we did him because it's a different David Bowie record. Exactly.

And while this record, like the Quo record, is based on repetition and momentum and locomotion, that one, by the time it finally collapses feels like it's used up half your life this one this is cut to three minutes precisely i guess because it's a repeat clip and just that fact it leaves you feeling half full because the song is not a grind it works by building momentum and then setting up contrasts and emotional switches within that momentum. So when it's cut short like this, it actually feels unfinished because it's going somewhere,

as opposed to the way you can cut the quo boogie off by the yard, you know, like lead piping. It's like, you know, what do you want, 15 foot? There you go, same as the other 15 foot right was here it's like you've dived into this this rushing lurid blue river of this record and then someone's hauled you out with a boat hook after 300 yards you know it's like yeah i was on my way to the sea it's just you You just want to hear the whole thing. It gathers moss as well.

There's a sense of that, I always feel about it. I mean, yeah, you could go for an aquatic analogy, but there is a sense of, you know, a rolling stone gathering moss. It's a real sort of physical, sort of tangible, furry feel to it almost, you know. It's almost like the classic Bowie record in as much as when you break it all down joylessly, there's not much here that hadn't already been done by hands. That's rhyming slang for German bands. But nothing that Bowie ever did was original in that sense, right?

It was always all collage and cut-ups and rearranged stuff that was already there but that's okay if you do it well because imagination is much more important than originality it's something people don't always get about music you don't have to be original if you've got imagination and i've always smilingly admired the way he cleverly presented that. Like, hey, this is me. This is actually a true reflection of me, the restless, questing artist in a postmodern world of echoes and shadows and reflections. This eclecticism is actually the natural state of the true artist in the 1970s that was a neat trick for a man who had every ability in spades except the ability to sit down in an empty room and create something completely new out of nothing right

but it's okay if you're this good a singer and this good a songwriter and this good a performer and this good a catalyst for bringing the best out of other people and you've got this many ideas it's fine you can take everything from other people and make it into something of your own you know in a way you could say that bowie was an interpreter of other people's ideas in the same way that frank snartra or ella fitzgerald or elvis presley were interpreters of other people's songs, you know, which is a very long way from shameful. It's not like he was some hollow jackdaw, you know what I mean? Yeah.

Because he was never totally original, always, or almost always, incredibly imaginative. Yeah. I mean, I'd stick my neck out and say that in terms of, like, your relationship with your source material, which isn't necessarily your own, he is something of a world apart from the Baron Knights. Controversial. Well, I know. You know, that's what it's all about. The hot takes. So the following week, Heroes dropped one place to number 25, stayed there the week after, and then tumbled down the chart.

The follow-up, Beauty and the Beast, would only get to number 39 in February of 1978 and he'd have to wait until June of 1979 for his next major hit, Boys Keep Swinging, which got to number 7. Despite its piss-poor chart position, heroes would go on to have a prolific afterlife featuring in bowie's set at live aid his performance at the freddie mercury tribute concert the concert for new york city in the wake of september the 11th and as the intro music for the british team at the london olympics it became the most streamed song on spotify in the week after bowie's death in january 2016 and the highest placed of the 13 bowie singles which entered the charts at number 12 fucking

hell so there's this rocking all over the world and we are the champions the three most key songs of live aid are all on this episode of top of the Pops. That's fucking insane, isn't it? Absolutely, yeah. And in 1999, Tony Visconti admitted that the anonymous snoggers by the wall were actually him and a backing singer while he was still married to

Mary Hopkins. Oh, man. That's taken a lot from the song for me. Yeah. With Bowie covering up for them Exactly Bowie enabler We could be sneaky bastards just for one night I don't know about you

But I don't see anything particularly heroic About shitting on Mary Hobkin Not at all, no No now the music and the charisma of david barry at 24 with heroes nine hits in all so far this could be the next one for them it's shawty wad They've got a brand new hit out to be. It's called Dancing Party, and it goes like this. It's fantasy, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Are you ready? Yeah. Are you ready? Powell, finally on his own, drops a second B-bomb before informing us that the next group are on the cusp of their tenth hit single. It's Dancing Party by Show Waddy Waddy.

The Wads are always welcome on Chart Music, and the last time we chanced upon them in chart music number 47, they were having a big tensely slap up meal in the 1977 Christmas Day episode to commemorate you got what it takes getting to number two in August of that year. Held off number one by that classic Hispanic suicide anthem, Angelo by the Brotherhood of Man. This is the follow upup and in a surprise move they've elected to do a cover version in this case the 1962 chubby checker single which got to number 19 in september of 1962 it's just missed out on the top 40 this week entering the charts at number 41 but top of the pops clearly doesn't give a fuck about that, waving them straight into the studio

for a bit of Leicester sexual rock and roll. Oh, Shawoddy Woddy, welcome back. We've missed you. Yeah, how many episodes is it now? One. I like the fact that at the beginning they've got that group huddle game, which is decades in advance of every sports team in the world. Yes. Yeah, that group huddle going which is decades in advance

of like every sports team in the world yes yeah the group huddle that's excellent i was initially i was gonna i was gonna come in with like you know all guns blazing about how come you know the black guy the drummer isn't allowed in on the bonding session at the beginning you know but um of course somebody has to hold down the beat and yes i think we can let them off you know not not a racialist bone in their bodies i think no no no safely say of the wads yeah i mean you know it's a dancing party you'd want to be at isn't it you know yes the village hall the orange squash flowing home by quarter to eight in the evening i mean it's got that vibe about it yeah like i've said before if you did put a gun to my head

in 1977 number one i'd shit myself and run off. Because that's what my dad's mate used to do. Every time I used to go round his house, he had this big gun on top of his telly that acted as a lighter. And he'd point it at my head, and I would absolutely quiver while my dad laughed. Teary-eyed.

You know what I mean? That's just grim, yeah. But no, show what he wanted my favorite band at the time so i would have been absolutely fucking delighted to see this on top of the pops yeah yeah and it's a tune as well you know i was very au fait with chubby checker at the time because i think 1977 was the year that i had a rummage through my dad's record collection and pulled out less twist again by Chubby Checker, took it to the Westlake Junior School end-of-term summer disco

and demanded it get played. And oh, what a fucking reaction from the youth. It was just like Kool Herc putting on Chum for the first time ever. You know what I mean? Absolutely. Another cut version, but unlike the Baron Knights and the Carpenters, the Wads have wisely put out one of their own compositions written by all eight members of the band on the b-side that they're a true

workers collective a leicester commune because you know they did start their career off with original songs like hey rock and roll but they're very quickly floundered about in the 30s but in may of 1975 they did a cover of eddie cochran's three steps to heaven which got to number two and after going back to original stuff and re-floundering in the 30s again they of course got to number one in december of last year with under the moon of love and they've now gone full covers for the rest of their career yeah when you're completely fucking talentless it's a wise move one of the things I like about his performance is the radicalism. I was talking earlier on about how the audience

feel like there is such an incredible divide, that punk has supposedly come to kind of narrow the great divide between the humble audience and the superstars. And here they are mingling with the audience. Yes. Get that off. The only other person I remember seeing do it,

well, the Rolling Stones kind of in the late 60s when I was a kid, it really terrified terrified me they sort of like the audience so there was a real kind of you know breakdown of the division between you know the crowd and the band and which i thought was all a bit terribly delinquent when i was five and gilbert o'sullivan did it he once sort of like got up from the old piano and started dancing around in the crowd you know and it feels like really breaking down a wall when they do it on top top of the pops. Yeah, it's like Hey Jude in reverse, isn't it? Yes, yeah, definitely, definitely. And when you think about it, chaps, it's weird seeing a load of men in Teddy Boy outfits capering about and having fun with the audience

when, you know, you consider that Teddy Boys were the Weetabix of their day. Yeah. And the current version in 1977 are still fucking nasty bastards. Oh, yeah. That's really strange, isn't it? and the current version in 1977 are still fucking nasty bastards. That's really strange, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. It's a very kind of laundered version of Teddy Boyism in 1977. They're making the shit out of punks.

Yeah, there have been a few young punks watching this who would not have seen this as a group of lovable party people living it up. No, no. It's like a band in the early noughties calling themselves skin heady heady and doing cover versions of screwdriver and four skins records in

in different colored doc martins yeah skin heady heady i sense a future top 10 entry there yeah i mean this looks like a pre-record from the previous week because it looks like a different audience and because it's 1977, of course, two of the kids are wearing massive Jubilee tinfoil top hats with writing on the side that Dave Bartram puts on when he's getting involved with the audience. Did you notice what they said on them? Was it, hello, mum?

Hello, mum, on one side, and on the other side, vote Fonze. Yeah. And the other hat that her mate was wearing just said, call it. Happy days at its absolute apex by 1977. I mean, I never got to see Shawada Wada. Well, I did. I saw them in 1987. Yes, you did.

I saw them before when they supported Einsturz and Neubau. Yes. And absolutely won our hearts. But I do remember around this time, the only other cultural impact of shawada wada was a friend of mine, Carl Pease. He sagged off football in order to go and see shawada wada play. Good lord. And there's a lead.

And the teacher, who was also the juggler teacher the next day, just spent the entire lesson talking about dark sarcasm in the classroom. He was just like, so, you'd rather see shawada wada play? You'd rather see shaw-addy Paddy play than play football, eh? Shoo-addy Paddy, eh? Not football, eh? Shoo-addy Paddy.

And he was just going on this the whole time. He thought it was pretty witty stuff. You know, the idea of there could be an Irish tribute band, no doubt. But, yeah, Shoo-addy Paddy, eh?

Eh, eh, no matter what your football, eh? Shoo-addy Paddy. That's cool. And it was just relentless, you know, and about that level of wit and searing. He was excruciating stuff. And it was just relentless, you know, and about that level of wit and searing. It was excruciating stuff.

Poor old Carl Pease, you know, burrowing his head in his desk, you know, trying to keep his head down. It's not off. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, they had an impact. We're used to seeing shoo-addy-waddy bouncing about on the top of the pop stage in different coloured drapes.

We certainly are. Like a bag of rock and roll skittles, but not this time. They're all in red. Yeah. Even the Sikh lad is in red this time. Why? I'll take your word for it. Maybe someone left a red sock in the communal show

Waddy Waddy washing machine or if we're deploying the show Waddy Waddy gay drape code, they're all into fisting at the moment and have spent the afternoon jamming their arms up each other's arseholes in the top of the pop's dressing room but i actually contend it's to commemorate their third lp red star which comes out a week tomorrow red star yeah the cover looks like a parcel it's not it's not a communist thing or a tribute to Belgrade. No, no, no. No. It's a parcel.

I mean... But what a parcel it is. I mean, look, we were talking about repetition. I don't understand why you would buy this record if you'd already bought a Shoddy Woddy record, especially if you'd bought Under the Moon of Love the previous year. Just play that again. Let's have a ball at the hall tonight

under the moon of love absolutely and i mean in terms of this podcast it's like you know there's that famous story about how when alex ferguson was managing manchester united uh that he'd kind of give him these team talks before every match except when they were playing Tottenham Hotspur where he'd just walk into the dressing room, shrug and say, lads, it's Spurs, and walk out again.

And they'd always win. Always win. Getting a bit like that, we might as well just come in and go, lads, it's Shawoddy Woddy. And just, you know, everyone knows exactly what we're talking about. But Taylor, I mean, fucking hell, you could say the same thing about Shaking Stevens.

Look at the fucking tangents we've gone off with him. It's true. It's true. But luckily, on this occasion, I don't have to say that much about the record. Because instead, I can give you a book report. Instead, I can give you a book report. About 10 years ago, Shawodewoddy lead singer,

or lead singer, Dave Bartram, the one who looks like Joey Sarney with slightly shorter hair, he wrote this book called The Boys of Summer, which is a memoir of Shawodewoddy's disastrous 2005 tour of British holiday camps. Described to him on the phone by the agent who set up the tour as not quite as upmarket as the rival Butlins camps. He doesn't specify the company, but he does tell you where these places are.

So with five minutes on Google, you can work out they were Haven holiday parks. So in fact, not quite as upmarket as the rival pontins camps no e.g pontins breen sands subject of a memorable itv news expose which i watched on youtube the other day it's very funny but it's one down from that it's the kind of places that would hire shawadi wadi in 2005 basically now first of all i don't care who you are you're gonna be impressed when you open any book and see that it has a forward by amanda holden oh definitely unless you're les dennis i guess so that's good but the problem is that a book like this is all about the author's voice right

these stories are only as funny as the way they're told and it has to be said dave bartram's dad joking exclamation mark heavy pro style is not really a beautiful thing i don't think he's used a ghostwriter because he makes quite a big deal about writing it himself but he really should have. I mean, fucking I'd have done it for 50 quid and a night out with Amanda Holden. I mean, you know, I reckon I'd have had a chance, you know. I told her that I know Dave Bartram out of Shawoddy Woddy. She'd have been eating out of my hand. But yeah, it's one of these situations

where someone writes a book about themselves and they're the worst thing about their own book yeah the writing style is very stout yeoman of the bar isn't it? It is yeah which gets very wearing and it's also a little bit needless to say I had the last

laugh. I had the last laugh that's what I found and it's that kind of Alan Partridge thing of like and then his job's work behind the bar know yeah and i don't recall a single story in this catalog of calamity where dave bartram comes out looking silly or in the wrong or makes any kind of mistake even a bit where he tells us all about his terrible hemorrhoids it's not really self-deprecating he's just passing on information which we will presumably find interesting because it's about him uh let me give you a little illustration of what i mean please do

he spends quite a lot of time describing a kid's magician who's also on at one of these camps, who's got a dog which barks after every trick, right? Which he thinks is one of the funniest things he's ever seen. and frequently rears its head to silently amuse my warped sense of humour and cause me to snigger much to the puzzlement of those in my company at the time. Now, if you can imagine 336 pages all written in that style, it's like an extensive course in how to write badly. You know, some people who are articulate and can spell and punctuate and aren't completely thick always think that means that they can write yeah it's why it's the most undervalued specialist skill if you start singing and it's terrible

people will tell you to stop and no one will employ you but if you start writing and it's terrible a lot of people can't tell and if you start writing and it's terrible a lot of people can't tell and if you start writing and it's good a lot of people also can't tell so yeah i mean i'm not in a position to lecture anyone i've written plenty of rubbish in my life but i've done it for long enough that i know the things you shouldn't do yeah right there's an awful lot of pov in this book which does not stand for point of view. It stands for popular orange vegetable. It's a famous story sort of shared among journalists. Some hack had to write an article about carrots,

and they used the word carrots, and they used the word carrots again. It gets to the point you have to start reaching for synonyms or finding roundabout ways to say these things. By the end of the article, they were reduced to writing the phrase, the popular orange vegetable. And Dave gives us one of the greatest POVs I've ever read in a scene where he's walking through a caravan park and he mentions the caravans

and then he says something else about the caravans and then he doesn't want to say the word caravans again. So he refers to them as wheeled homes. An exquisitely awkward phrase, which hasn't left my head since I read it. Wheeled homes. I mean, I heard the audio version of this, and I do must confess, I lost a little bit of the kind of the goodwill and respect that had accrued after the um blue noi batman off the

stage oh well there's potentially a very funny book in it obviously because spending weeks on ending some of britain's shittiest holiday camps is an intrinsically funny situation yes and also operating at this depressing basement level of rock and roll is clearly funny in itself but what's funny about it is the atmosphere and detail which is all the stuff that dave can't do no but unless lots of really really funny things happen to you it's not automatically going to be funny as a collection of anecdotes which is what dave does so uh not wanting to take up too much of your sweet time here's a very brief selection of highlights from the book so uh please come on this journey with me the first place they play is uh inevitably has recently hosted a shawadi wadi tribute band um most writers would

see that as a an open goal but rather than explore that personal humiliation for laughs dave just mentions it in passy and instead goes on his first flight of fancy here we are i wandered back to the reception area as prior to the gig i'd received a phone call from the duty manager who'd said he was looking forward to meeting me and asked if I'd pop in to say hello upon arrival. Behind the front desk was an anorexic looking girl who informed me that he was on a call but wouldn't be long if I'd be so good as to take a seat. My eyes were immediately drawn to the pallid woman who clearly had an aversion to the fare they served up at the camp, if not to anything nutritious in general.

There's something eerie about very skinny people that gives me the creeps. Perhaps it's the angular bones that jut out beneath a thin sack of skin that renders their appearance as almost deathly but whatever it may have been rather than engage in a conversation about her daily dietary requirements i took the option of perusing the notice board which listed some quite fascinating forthcoming attractions well this is page 14. I think, you know, punching down on women with potential eating disorders isn't the most engaging of attacks. Well, you may say that, David, but, you know,

don't let it be said that he concentrates on his ghoulish preoccupations. Look, because Dave can do comedy. Listen to this, right? This is when they play that place with the magician and his dog right and during the set wait till you hear this right it's quite the yarn uh the the the dog wandered onto the stage while no just like altamont again yeah yeah yeah dave takes up the action in the midst of the hilar, I quickly improvised and ranted into the mic, who let the dogs out?

To which the crowd instantly responded with barking noises, something akin to the answer backs on the original Baha Men recording. It was a while before anyone was able to regain their composure and complete the show without further incident but the receptive punters had lapped it up and we had rounded off a good day in fine style and then just when you think no more laughs can possibly be squeezed out of the dog story. On the next page, he gives us a top ten, an indented top ten, mark you, of all the songs they should have played that night, as suggested by members of Shawody Woddy after the show.

And it's like Hound Dog, Elvis Presley, Black Dog, Led Zeppelin, I Love My Dog. It's just a load of songs with dog in the title. There's not puns or anything. He put this in a book. I think after this, people are going to be racing back gratefully for my Rick Buckler joke. He has a running joke through the whole book where he wants some fresh fruit. But the camp shop never sells it because he strongly implies all the punters are fucking

subhuman peasants who only eat chips and like super kings fried in lard um so at one point he gets very excited because he thinks he sees some oranges through the window so he goes in the popular orange fruit that's right yes yes yes so take it away dave i went inside eager to see if i was right and picked up a plastic netted bag containing two solid wooden rackets and a bright orange ball the pallid assistant looked across and said, They're £8.99. I explained to her I'd mistaken the ball for an orange, to which she sharply retorted,

I think you need an optician's, not a supermarket. Nothing super about this store, I snapped back and strode out with my doer demeanour intact. Well, that definitely happened, didn't it? I was going to say, Danny Baker's got a series on his podcast called Now That Never Happened. Everything that you've said so far will be absolutely prime. Yes, no doubting the veracity of this particular rock and roll legend. What else happens? Dave goes to the gym and gets a personal trainer yes his

personal trainer's gay oh and uh obviously propositions dave um that's another story watch your backs well i think he does a bit more than that does he i can't remember why he gets his cock out and dangles it in front of his face while he's lying on the floor yes i didn't even remember that bit sorry that there's just so much gold in this book it just it just washed right over me my personal favorite passage from the book he's still on that fresh fruit search motif yes so here's another deathless vignette irritatingly the shop was closed but reopened at 7 p.m with an appalling schwarzenegger impersonation i posed hands on hips and said i'll be back yeah that's the closest dave gets to being self-deprecating, by the way. Dissing his own short-term. Shawody Waddy's reputation is just in ruins for me after this.

Oh, you wait. Dave's haemorrhoid hell. He goes to the doctors, only to find that the wonderful NHS could do nothing for me, with no doctors sitting until the following Monday morning. So, after muttering some curmudgeonly un-PC comment, I hobbled off in search of a chemist. David later transpires, reads the Daily Telegraph.

Right. Surely what is intro tape is the Dambusters theme. In Perranporth, they're put up in a caravan next to some Eastern Europeans. Right. Dave picks up the story. There had been much media speculation in recent weeks about the growing number of asylum seekers being allowed entry into the country. And perhaps the government had enforced some new legislation

that temporarily placed those seeking UK residency into empty caravans in the country's seaside resorts. But whether or not that was the case here, we figured it may not actually be a bad idea. The din became almost unbearable as glasses and bottles clinked together and then a cd of wailing gypsy type music began blaring out through the open door to cut a long story short in the end shawody waddy have a ringside seat for a bare knuckle boxing match between two of these Eastern Europeans, one of whom is called Ivan, brackets, pronounced even. You're right. It's so sad. There's some fucking great stories clearly here and there,

and he's just not telling them. Well, you say that, but here's something which may be of interest to the Pop Craze youngsters. For varying reasons, I've long had an intrinsic dislike for that vast majority of djs the band have so often had the dubious pleasure of working alongside don't get me wrong in my humble opinion there have been many talented protagonists of the decks over the years such as emperor roscoe tommy vance kid jensen and more latterly steve lemac who all share brackets a genuine appreciation for good music and consider their playlists

to be infinitely more important than filling the airwaves with inane verbal diarrhea. But those apart, in our eons of experience, we've shared stages with a whole multitude of egotistical dummies, most of whom bear no responsibility whatsoever for the tunes blasting out from their mixing consoles and turntables. One episode of my career, of which I'm not particularly proud, was back in 1978 when the band was invited to record a song with the high-profile Radio 1 DJs of the day. The studio was littered with such names as

Tony Blackburn, Dave Lee Travis, Noel Edmonds, Diddy David Hamilton, Simon Bates. There was a face for radio if ever I saw one. Oh, he's what God made him, sir. And many more. But the session itself was, to put it mildly, an eye-opener, with the celeb DJs resembling a clan of hyenas released into the wild for the day as they bitched and henpecked from the word go.

Such was the unremitting nature of their joring that at one point I was forced to rudely request that they pipe down and concentrate on the task in hand, which was to deliver in unison a football-style chorus that provided the song's monotonous hook and which would be dubbed over the backing track that five of our members had prepared a couple of days earlier the record new wave band by jock swan and the meters was made to mark the frequency change of Radio 1 from 247 metres to 275 and 285 metres.

And despite receiving a fair amount of airplay, it was a mercy that the band's name remained anonymous as the awful release justifiably sank without trace. Anyway, I won't spoil the ending of this book. They get sacked from the tour because Dave goes on stage with the novelty elephant head, which belongs to the camp, which is against regulations. But needless to say, he has the last laugh.

That is the ending, but trust me, nothing has been spoiled here. You missed out the bit where one of Show Waddy Woddy shits himself in the van. Oh, God, yeah. When they're just outside a service station, but there's a traffic jam, and yet he fills his drain pipes. He needed his gutterings cleared after that. But, yeah, the book concludes on a happy note with Shawoddy Woddy's retirement and the warm glow of Dave being able to report

that one of his many named antagonists from earlier in the book was later arrested by Northamptonshire Police for indecent exposure, which probably served him right. It's terrible. After all of this, I've kind of radically revised my opinion

and now think that Shawadiwadi are a load of awful shit which will never be seen or heard again. That's terrible. What are we going to do in future chart musics in the light of all of this? The Boys of Summer by Dave Bartram, published by Phantom Books. F-A-N-T-O-M. Available in all good, well... No, available on the internet. With a forward by Amanda Holden. So, the following week, Dancing Party soared 24 places to number 17, that week's highest new entry. And two weeks later, it would begin the first of two non-consecutive weeks at number four.

The follow-up, a cover of the 1958 Dion and the Belmont single I Wonder Why, did even better getting to number two in April of 1978. Held off the top spot by Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs by Brian and Michael, and the rest of their 1978 output, A Little Bit of Soap and Angel Eyes, both got to number five, marking seven top five singles on the bounce. The scales have fallen from my eyes, they really have, with the wads. I begin to think that perhaps Neubauten were the better band on the night now, now that I kind of think about it. Well, maybe not. All right. Yeah, well, just waiting till you read Neubauten were the better band on the night now, now that I kind of think about it. Well, maybe not. All right.

Yeah, well, just wait until you read Neubauten's book about their disastrous tour of the whole season circuit, David. Blicks above held here. He doesn't say I had the last laugh. Shoddy Woddy, and that's their brand new single give me three other hits of that when? on the road with love

Saturday night very good and now it's number one time because it's brand new it's ABBA and the name of the game Powell

surrounded by five girls keeps doing that thing he's been doing all episode. Suddenly crouching down as if the camera's got a ray gun mounted on the top and jumping back just a little bit. He's a bit nervous. Would you say that's nerves or is it just him being an unstoppable force of energy? Yeah, he doth leap too much really, doesn't he? Definitely. I think he's definitely masking a kind of craven fear.

Yeah, and of course he's not concentrating because he's actually got a low-grade anieta look-alike standing right next to him completely ignores her call yourself a professional fuck off back to hospital radio where you belong you gotta get stuck in p. Yeah. It's just the inanity, though. It's just virulent. It's like a plague, a one-man plague of inanity. You know, you can imagine that, you know, if this had been untreated, unvaccinated, you know, centuries ago, there'd be a pal in every village of St Giza going around with a wagon, ringing a bell, shouting, bring out your inane.

It's just dreadful. How did they ever tolerate it? He then drills the kids on their knowledge of show-waddy-waddy hits, and they all pass with distinction. He then pivots to this week's number one, The Name of the Game by ABBA. It's the late 70s, so of course we're going to talk about ABBA again. This is the follow-up to Knowing Me, Knowing You,

which got to number one for five weeks in april of this year and like practically everything else in this episode is the lead-off cut from their forthcoming lp abba the album which is due out in five weeks time it also features in their forthcoming drama doc abba the, which will also come out in December. It entered the charts at number 20 a fortnight ago, then soared 15 places to number 5. And this week, it's effortlessly knocked, yes sir, I can boogie, by Baccarat off the summit of Mount Pop. And here is the video. Oh, chaps, where do we start with this i mean hands up cards on table all the danny

dyer cliches i think this is their best single i agree it's a definite toss-up between this and knowing me knowing you david usually an unfairly builders and abba skeptic you get in first okay yeah i mean i do have this sort of reputation for regarding Avra as kind of, I don't know, Formica Nazis or whatever. But it's, you know, it's a bit more complicated than that. I was forced on occasion to play Devil's Advocate and it's kind of stuck with me, which, you know, perhaps serves me right, really. Serves you right for being a whore for television, David. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, he has a whore of contrarianism, definitely.

Yes. vision david yeah exactly yeah he has a whore of contrarianism definitely yes so when that appearance on that documentary which i showed every six months i think a million people watched it how many pence did i get my appearance zero no i sold myself and even sell myself i gave it away for nothing yeah you got your name out though david i did i've got some exposure yeah yeah yeah very useful yeah and the name was the Man Who Is Wrong About ABBA. Yep. Yeah, just what a kind of up-and-coming 50-year-old journalist needs. Absolutely. But, no, I think this is really, really good, particularly the intro, which is just absolutely exquisite, crystalline.

It's among, possibly it's my favorite passage of abba music apparently it's inspired by um i wish but with the kind of funk surgently removed which is which is absolutely fine i mean you know that's yeah abba's gonna ab and that's no problem with that also i think this is the only i read something i remember it was sampled by the fugees and for that song they in that the muhammad ali documentary when we were kings it's used at the end there yes rumble in the jungle that's right the moment jungle that's right and apparently that's the only time abba have been sampled i know that's extraordinary yeah i've been absolutely extraordinary i don't know whether it's like you know the rates they charge

or whatever i mean in a sense people like simple minds i'd say on new gold dream in a sense well they i don't know they don't sample ABBA, but they kind of echo ABBA in all kinds of ways. Tell you what, any old-school hip-hoppers could do worse than listening to Hey Hey Helen. It's a very nice run-DMC-type beat in that, just going spare. OK, yeah. As for the video and everything, I suppose it's become almost like a French and Saunders-type cliché, the way that they kind of all interact. It's the usual ABBA video, isn't it's become a sort of almost like a French and Saunders type cliche, you know, the way that they kind of all kind of interact.

It's the usual ABBA video, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. You know, they're all sitting around, they're all flirting with each other and then feeling a bit sad. Yeah. That's fine, it's ABBA. Yeah, it looks like they're contemplating a possible bit of a swing, you know, you know, sort of Frieda and Bjorn, Benny and Bjorn and Frieda and Agnetha or whatever, you know, whatever combination. But, you know, there's an air of that. I think the one thing that perhaps was educative about this track for me

was that I learnt finally the meaning of the word bashful because I'd always understood the word bashful to mean like, you know, like the Bash Street Kids, you know, somebody was like, you know, bash them up, you know. And I think I'm really into it. I'm a bashful child. Oh, okay, fair enough. You know, because I used to, you know, you hear my mum or whoever saying, you know, bash him up, you know. And I think I'm really into him. I'm a bashful child. Oh, okay. Fair enough.

You know, because I used to, you know, you hear my mum or whoever saying, you know, he's a bit bashful. That Isaac, he's very bashful. No, he isn't. I'd bash him. You know, he's not bashful. I'm not any little get. He's not bashful.

I'm bashful. I'm more bashful than he is. You know, so I mean, you know, so it was helpful to me in that respect, definitely. Yeah, so you thought, you initially thought Frida was saying, you know, she puts herself about. Well, I mean, I think I realised then.

She's game. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think I kind of realised that I've got it wrong. It's not the first time I've got it wrong about Abba. In this case, they're having a nice game of Flarschbell, which is the Swedish version of the German Mensch, Ager, Dich nicht, which is roughly translated to Don't Get Angry, Man. It's nice that we do actually learn the name of the game.

Yes. It's a Swedish board game where everybody wins and then you all have sex and then kill yourself. Yeah. Fun for all the family. I mean, out of all the 70s games that they could have played man it's a bit disappointing yeah i mean mousetrap was going on yeah yeah but it's they don't they don't need it they've reached the state of nordic calm they don't need all this stuff flashing in

front of their eyes it's but it's fascinating how many ABBA videos are just film of some adults sitting around, hanging out, looking relaxed or tense. There's a bowl of fruit on the table. It's a little bit chilly, but you're all in knitwear. Some conversation and a quick round of fjord spell you know checker curtains pale light no telly nordic blanc really isn't it it's uh you know it's reminiscent of a caravan holiday in the rain isn't it where everyone's stuck inside playing pontoon with matchsticks yes it is except with a standard of living high enough that you're not too worried about it, you know.

Well, that might well be a caravan that they're in, but a really massive one. Because they've got a better standard of living than us. And they don't go to Chapel St. Leonard's or Mablethorpe. Well, I mean, this video, it's sort of in the vein of the Knowing Me, Knowing You video, except if that one really is Ingmar Bergman, this one is like an episode of Doctors. It's a bit less intense

and a bit less carefully put together. But, you know, I'm surprised to hear that you think this is their best single. I mean, I really love it, but I'd put a few ahead of this. I'd say Dancing Queen, Knowing Me, Knowing You, SOS, Winner Takes It All, possibly Mamma Mia.

There's no consensus opinion on the greatest ABBA single. It's personal, isn't it? And for me, this is it. If you were an ABBA single in that company, you'd be pleased to finish sixth. Like Arsenal. Yes.

Hurtful. Just outside the Champions League of ABBA singles. But it is amazing whenever you see footage of abba in an house as we did then you're just looking around going oh what have they got that we haven't and i'm always reminded of the publicity shot that i saw that was taken around this time where they're kind of like sat at a breakfast bar and on the table they've got a holder for crisp breads which did my fucking head in when i first saw it it was like a kitchen roll holder but stubbier and with a wider base

and i asked around and someone said yeah it's a crisp bread holder you know for for certain massive crisp breads with big holes in the middle yeah for the brat yes yeah yeah because even then at the age of nine i was quite a continental lad and every time i went out to the co-op in bulwark with my mam i used to mire the roof of things like crisp bread you know not not because i like them but they seem massively exotic and the and the sort of thing that a go-ahead household should have in their cupboard yeah even when she caved in and uh we got some you know I'd only have a couple of them with an entire triangle of Darily on them

before they got long. But that wasn't the point. The point wasn't to eat them. The point was to have them in your house. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sort of like a bottle of Perrier in your fridge a few years later. Yeah, in your completely spotless kitchen

with hardly anything in it. I just remember my poor old mum in the 70s. She used to go on these occasional diets, and it consists of a bit of crisp bread and a huge lump of cheese. Cottage? No, no, just regular cheese. Oh, that's where she went wrong then. Exactly, yeah.

Never worked, but yeah. I mean, in these videos, they always seem to be very much downplaying, you know, it's not like kind of lifestyles to envy or anything like that. They always look like, you know, there's a national pub strike and they're just trying to find something to do with themselves, you know. No, but beer's so expensive in Scandinavia, isn't it? Yeah, that's true, yeah. Apart from Denmark. Yeah.

So it's like they can't go to the pub. Yeah, because it's too expensive even for ABBA, yeah. Yeah. And it's always like Benny never gets his round in. No. Yeah. No. yeah yeah and it's always like benny never gets his round in no yeah no i mean the other great thing about this video and the single to my mind is that it gives frida a fair go because she was always pushed to the back in this country you know i never forgave not the nine o'clock news for

having her portrayed as griff reese jones in that video for super duper yeah and the lyric one of us is ugly one of us is cute, one of us you'd like to see in her birthday suit. And fuck that, Frida's mint. I know, God. I mean, in this video,

Agnetha looks a bit like Bette Lynch about to go out on a picnic with Mike Baldwin by a canal lock. But Frida, she gets the best line, tell me please, because I have to know

I'm a bashful child beginning to grow. And it's obvious in the footage that Frida's got an absolutely filthy laugh, man. I love to see that in a woman. Yeah, well, the dynamic of it was always that Benny and Frida were like the rockers, you know. They were the ones that you'd go out

and you'd go out to some bar and you'd crawl back at two in the morning, whereas Bjorn and Anya are a little bit more weird and neurotic and more like raising the family. If you're into that sort of thing. But people couldn't get past the fact that one of these women looked like the ideal of Swedish beauty. Yeah. And the other one didn't because she's not Swedish.

She's half Norwegian. I think the politest way to put it is half Norwegian, all things considered. Yes. But, yeah, I know she does get a rough deal. There's some clips where Frida looks amazing and there's other clips where she kind of doesn't because she would chop and change her look a lot i sort of know someone this is how bad it's got right i

sort of know someone who's in another tribute band right and i've seen pictures of them of both the women are done out like adieta and that ain't fucking right. I'd say some of it, but I don't feel I know the person in question well enough to just put them right on it. I mean, it's a bit rich, people having a go at freedom of looks when you look at fucking Bjorn and Benny. I mean, you know, even as a kid, I had a Joe Jackson-style grudge against this pair of little kind of shaved gorillas

punching well above their weight. But this song's fucking amazing, isn't it? Yeah, it's like all their songs from this period like the more you sort of dig into it the more interesting it is as well like the link between the music and the lyrics is really odd here like the lyric is really uh hesitant and helpless and the music matches that it's very sort of anxious until she starts singing about this bloke lifting her out of her rut and it rises up hopefully you know reaching out but then the chorus spills over into this creepy strident victory march uh with that triumphant trumpet which i suppose allowed

people who didn't really listen to assume that this was more bright pink candy floss you know from cheery old abba uh bopping around in their comedy platform boots to no great effect rather than what it is which is an uneasy song about someone with no confidence surrendering to a love affair and it's accompanying terrifying loss of self-determination and putting themselves in a position of complete vulnerability to their more confident and experienced lover about whom we learn nothing so it's neither a happy song nor a sad song nor a cheerful or a bleak scenario it's all of those because the song takes place at a moment when literally anything could happen next but that ambiguity and that sort of

that focus on specifically adult anxieties and neuroses is what defines this whole period of this mid period between the pure pop years and that final sort of live-almond period where, you know, when they tried to sound like ABBA, they'd end up sounding like ghosts. Yeah, I agree with that. And I think that's particularly, you know, that opening, that very hesitant, very brittle opening, and I think it kind of wonderfully, yeah, captures the character

and the sentiment of the song and the kind of that song and that delicate mood, and it's excellent. I went overboard on this when we covered Knowing Me, Knowing You in the Christmas episode a couple of years ago. Obviously, we didn't cover it. That might not have sounded quite as glorious. But this middle period is when they were their most remarkable because they could still combine that relentless angst and uncertainty with worldwide number one singles you know yeah i mean there's a clip of them playing this song name of the game on some tv show somewhere and

they're still in the white judo suits and the white micro kimonos and there's all these colorful balloons being blown around in the background and everything's virgin or white like a sixth birthday party you know and it's all massively over lit and it's because that's how you present the bubbly wholesome family family act ABBA, you know. As opposed to how they were presenting themselves around this time, most of the time, on record sleeves and in videos, which was all uncertain glances and cold skies, but nobody noticed. So, yeah, once again, a completely worthy number one. And what a fucking one-two punch, eh? This and knowing me, knowing you.

It's a volley of blows around this point. It's like a Street Fighter II combination, Abba, in 1977. It certainly is. So the name of the game would spend four weeks at number one, eventually usurped by the long winter of Mulliken Tire by Wings. Amazingly, the UK was the only country in the world that rightfully sent it to number one. Even in Sweden, it only got to number two. Held off Music Fjall, that's Pop Mountain, by Yes Sir, I Can Boogie,

which was number one in Sweden for 22 weeks. Eventually knocked off number one in January of 1978 by... Naughty, naughty, naughty by Joyce Arney. I Remember Elvis Presley by Danny Mirror. Oh, my God. Fuck it up. News travelled slow in Sweden in 1977. Bloody hell.

ABBA only had three number one singles in their own country, don't you know? Ring Ring, Dancing Queen, Summer Night City. But two of their early LPs were number one in their charts before they split the singles in the LP charts in 1975. As the bloke from Alon Dool said to me a profit is not without honour saving his own country. The following month there were so many advance orders for ABBA the album in the UK that our printing presses couldn't cope and we had to wait a month after everyone else by which time it had sold so many copies in Poland

that it exhausted their entire allocation of foreign currency. Fucking hell. The follow-up, Take a Chance on Me, got to number one for three weeks in February of 1978. And as we've already mentioned, in 1997, the name of the game was sampled by the Fugees for Rumble in the Jungle which got to number 3 in

March of that month but anyway fuck the Fugees ABBA they're back sort of what do we think chaps what are we saying I mean I'm really not keen and that's not out of any sort of anti ABBA thing one of the great things about ABBA is that they kind of let it lie and that they'd left

it pristine. No. I don't really like any revival. When My Bloody Valentine came back, I didn't really care for it. Well, the Pixies, you know, it's not even determined by people who I like or not. But I just think in their case, it's a wonderful thing. They've just absolutely let it lie. But they would not let it lie.

Yeah. Well, at least they're not doing caravan poles. Yeah. Yeah. I think the support act is going to be the Smiths. Hmm. They would not let it lie. Yeah, well, at least they're not doing caravan poles. Yeah, yeah. I think the support act is going to be the Smiths. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Taylor? Well, I mean, it sounds exactly like you would imagine the next ABBA album would have sounded

if they'd made one in 1983 instead of splitting up. Except if they had made one, it probably wouldn't have sounded quite so retro or quite so 1983 but i think it's quite pleasing just because like most people i was worried about what was going to come out you know i was sort of vaguely expecting something like chess but worse you know boggle maybe yes but it's not that so good but what creeps me out is those computerized artificially de-aged avatars that they're using for the live show avatars well they're so yeah they're sort of great and sort of horrifying on so many levels because i mean they're unnerving in themselves but also the combination of of

abba being presented in this kind of holographic uh necromantic kind of way coupled with the the inescapable existential darkness in so much of their music not not king kong song obviously but a lot of it and then the nostalgia element for people who are now at the end of their lives or at least approaching that stage which is the case for pretty much everyone who remembers abba um you put it all together and it's it's quite a death-packed experience you know like i mean more than watching the stones shuffling around, you know, like old pit ponies having a laugh, looking like crows. I mean, that's one thing. But watching the videos of these old crocs from ABBA having their stage movements mapped and motion captured onto these virtual PS5 versions of their younger and more beautiful selves.

ps5 versions of their younger and more beautiful selves i don't think you're supposed to find it depressing or unsettling but i think almost anyone with a realistic view of life probably would and it sort of works because their best work is about this jumble of emotions and and moods but it's just that idea of of robot communion you know i find it a bit so i imagine this is a real gig and we're all young together again you know i don't look at that and and only see blue skies but obviously when like i went on youtube and i looked at all the stuff they'd put up for the reunion all all the sort of one-show-like celebratory interviews with them and members of the pub. In fact, it's far bleaker than that

because obviously it's all framed 100% as a lark for the oldens and it's camp and office party and hen night and all this stuff. And that's all it is, right? And of course you listen to I Still Have Faith In You, their new song. It's not like any of that at all, right? There's absolutely none of that in it. All of that bubblicious sort of ultra-commercial,

you know, hey, it's really cheesy stuff contrasts incredibly sharply with that song and this song you know and and yet there's face and manner you know too good for this world but also too weak um yeah it's very weird i'd still like a beer with benny though even now yeah i told you about that waiter at his hotel he was impressing upon me what a great bloke he was i can really believe it laid back but impatient with bullshit you know he's still the same and he hasn't gone any bolder despite apparently having a comb over since 1975 you know yeah but you know these are the thoughts you think when you become the kind of person who sees old clips of John Noakes on Blue Peter

and thinks, blimey, doesn't he look young? That's me now, you know. That's us, ABBA's audience. Fucking hell. May God have mercy on us all. It's funny, actually. Listen to Taylor talk about these gigs. It's actually filled me now with a sort of eerie, grim fascination.

I think I perhaps would like to see it for about 10 minutes. That 10 minutes is all I could bear, really. Because you do wonder if it is some sort of harbinger for the future. There's one thing, you know, I was talking about people coming back, I make an exception for Kraftwerk or whatever, because I think that if you look at their 70s heyday, I think they were always keen to create this total work of art, this Gesamtkunstwerk.

And there just wasn't the way at all to do it. You know, you see you've got these kind of crappy brown sort of stage curtains behind them as they're playing and things like that. And I think the justification for Kraftwerk doing what they're doing is they can present this kind of fully fledged digital Gesamtkunstwerk with all the kind of graphics, etc., etc., which is what they would have loved to have done if they'd have been able to back then you know if the technology had been up to speed with the with the music but yeah i can just imagine though that like once the ralph footer goes that you know i can imagine crappett carrying on as a touring proposition uh we're just sort of like you know four four chaps you know um you know and you know perhaps if there is a future or if anybody cares you know that somebody will perhaps sort of do a replication of The Beatles

or something like that, using holographic skew-together things. So, yeah, this could be the harbinger of what's to come. That's how we always were. Well, that's right. I hope this episode hasn't been too much like last of the summer wine. Oh, yes. Strong resemblance, I'm sure. I'm kind of in the middle between you two because as soon as lockdown kicked in i completely bunkered myself in and you know me i'm not exactly a a boy about town but you know i used to run into the same people

over and over again and i started mithering about the people who i used to see who didn't particularly know and i'm just fretting about them hoping that they were doing all right i mean in particular there's one old woman who used to just absolutely hammer it up and down the hills of nottingham with a shopping trolley in a floppy hat with all flowers on it her not the trolley i think we'd exchanged about two words to each other all the time i've been here but we were on nodding terms and you know i hadn't seen her for ages and about six months ago i was in tesco in town and i just turned the corner and there she was and i just couldn't stop myself from punching the air and going fucking yes yeah i was so delighted it's like yes you're still here well done and

that's exactly how i felt when i watched this abba reunion shit after i'd sat through all the zoe ball bollocks but when they actually got to the music and i heard frida and yetta's voices melding together again it was like yes yeah they're still here fucking brilliant good on them I've got no interest in going to see Robo Abba but you know I've had a bit of a thought Abba all this is going on near you isn't it oh you mean London generally yeah

I suppose so yeah East London well you know why don't you get your heads together and put together a Brotherhood of Man puppet show as a fringe event for people queuing up? You two can do that, and I'm only going to take 20% of all your audience. How's about that? Just sort of like tug a little bit of string for the kind of kick on kisses for me.

Yes, the performative form. Yeah, yeah, yeah. See, what I'm going to do now, I'm going to be very clever and turn up there with a Guys and Dolls puppet theatre and I owe you nothing. David Van Day's Abba. Yes! I'm a rational child Beginning to grow

And you make me do And you make me blue, blue, blue And you make me feel blue, blue, blue And make me feel blue, blue, blue Well, they've done it again. The name of the game from ABBA. And that's it from all of us here to all of you back home. Good night, God bless, and join us next week for another edition of Top of the Bops. I saw her today I saw her face It was a face I love

Pow! Alone once more informs us that ABBA have done it again before telling us that everyone in the studio tonight wants us, the pop-crazed youngsters at home to be blessed by God Almighty before saying goodnight and leaving us with needles and pins by Smoker. We covered Smoker and this fucking single in chart music number 23.

As before, it's the follow-up to It's Your Life, which got to number five in August of this year and is a cover of the Searchers song that got to number one in February of 1964. After making an appearance on Top of the Pops before it was even in the charts, it made a modest debut at number 48, then soared 26 places to number 22. And this week, it's up four places from number 17 to number 13 now then chaps me and taylor we've already done this and david this band are practically your lot so you say something about them and we'll sit here and learn something oh smoky i mean yeah i was brought up in west

yorkshire and so i ought to have some sense of affinity and kinship and loyalty to Smokey. But I didn't. I hated Smokey because I hated West Yorkshire. I hate the fact that I lived there. You hated yourself, didn't you, David? Oh, no, I liked myself. I was all right. It was all these other northern bastards I hated,

you know, with their coarse accents and what have you. And there was just something about West Yorkshire at this time. I mean, I'm not necessarily very proud of feeling this way, but I just thought it was willfully ugly. It wasn't like there was just the grim lot of these working folk. It was that they actually liked this kind of mediocrity, this ugliness, this cheerlessness. And I just thought the whole place was toxic.

It was like a David Peace novel. It was like drinking out of a coal scuttle. And, you know, a used one, you know. And this place, Yorkshire, was not where I belonged. And Smokey, for me, they were just essence of West Yorkshire. And if they'd been called Heckman Dwight, there couldn't be more West Yorkshire. You know, just red and, like, grim, freezing days

in what was laughingly called playtime at our school. You know, the school looked like cold hits. You know, standing around in a freezing circle, everyone's hawking up and spitting into a collective puddle and swapping stories about all the sex they'd supposedly had, even though they were only about 13. I was stupid enough to believe them, you know. My virginity was a secret shame, you know.

But just smoky. It was like, who would want this? Whose pop dreams were made of this? The Germans, apparently. And also, Smokey had been the name of my cat. So the reminder that my cat was dead. Thanks for that as well. And then one of the, like, respites I had, you know, so at the weekend.

So there's my granddad's seven days jankers. But grandma, his wife, she was hip. She'd been a flapper. She was the hippest member of my family. She'd been a flapper in the 20s. She had a radiogram. I've probably mentioned this before. And it was a whole stack of records.

But one of them was Needles and Pins by The Searchers. And it gave me a kind of sort of silvery, slightly kind of nostalgic spike for kind of other places, other modes of being or whatever. Manchester. And then these fucking cunts, Smokey, get their fucking grubby northern West Yorkshire paws on it and desecrate that as well.

You know, it's the absolute final straw. Yeah, they are the bird's eye beef burger of pop, Smokey. So, David, what you're saying is if someone had said to you, do you like Smokey? You'd have said, no. Just about, just about, yeah, yeah. And, you know, really, to be honest,

I don't want to waste further breath on them. Terrible, despicable, awful. But, you know, perhaps that was me as well, you know, in some respects. But I found it hard to divine the beauty in them that others did did they we don't get to see them here in their steve murrier on stars in their eyes demeanor we get some kind of weird rainbow edged pool of oil effect yeah rather than the usual uh credit sequence with a sort of drunken fly point of view it's yeah it's these wobbly pulsating colored lines just to you know express the the psychedelic intensity of of smokey yeah

it's like the kind of thing that mario would fall into on rainbow road yeah on the last bit of mario car but i mean we we talked for like 20 minutes about needles and pins by smoky last time i mean i could say it all again 19 minutes too much for them yeah let's not do that yeah i came across a video on youtube uh the other week punch on the road yeah have you On the Road. Yeah. Have you seen it, chavs? Oh, yeah. Oh, yes. An amazing BBC documentary from 1976 about a band doing the grim slog of wheel tappers and shunters land. And it's very clear that being smoky is the absolute pinnacle of this band's ambitions, isn't it? Definitely, yeah.

Well, it's the only conceivable ambition for a band like this who want to be pop stars because nobody else has ever followed that path no it's not just oh yeah playing the clubs man it's like well look first of all this is a documentary of impeccable bleakness in every respect because it's shot on that murky public information film 16 millimeter film with speckles on it you know on days with no sunlight do you know where your lad is tonight yeah he's playing the red rose club in wakefield it's these absolute chances i mean they're a show band they're like this basically they're like the sort of group that i used to see at my dad's works sports and social club on a Saturday night.

That's what lower middle class people used to call a working men's club. It's basically a working men's club with a bowling green out the front. Like when you used to buy a Rolls Royce, and in the manual that came with the car, the cigarette lighter was referred to as a cigar lighter. Yes. Absolutely true. that came with the car the cigarette lighter was referred to as a cigar lighter yes absolutely true uh yeah it changes your perception a lot what we call things which is in what it was called in the manual to the vw camper van but um what that's what they are they're like the first group I ever saw live who were called Distinction. And they had matching, clad, powder blue suits and Fender guitars.

These groups always played Fender guitars for some reason. And they had, you know, covers of the Eye of the Tiger when you get caught between the moon and New York City, you know. And at some point they'd say… Arthur's theme the best that you can do by crisscross before he sold

out and did jump he used to wear his suit backwards he also had his beard backwards as well on the back of his head so Distinction would do all those songs and then at some point they'd say anyway if you don't mind we'd like to do one now that we wrote

ourselves yeah and they'd put more passion into that of course all of their others despite the fact that it was the worst song in this yeah um and punch are exactly like that they're all about 32 uh but they look older than i do now yes they're all married uh and yet seized by this bizarre conviction that they might actually make it big you know in 1976 i ask you the worst possible moment yeah this is it you know like this one that's 30 you're married with four children and this is like you can't be doing this man this is it you know like there's one that's 30 married with four children and this is like you can't be doing this man this is ridiculous you know did you have a family meeting about this you know we don't know what the kind of you know the poor wives think of this you know are they don't have a say mate no it's absolutely shocking as long as he puts money on that table

at end of week the whole vibe was like that paul sykes documentary you know the boxer it is the whole thing yes that's grim you know he's working and it's this terrible sad thing end at week. The whole vibe was like that Paul Sykes documentary. You know, the boxer. Yes. And it's this terrible, sad thing. You know, these poor sods, these drinkers sitting there watching this stuff. It's almost like a kind of... Oh, with arms folded. It's the opening shot, isn't it? You see the lead singer's massive, meaty head. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

In some flared, white, sub-Elvis costume. Really trying to please an audience that are unpleasable. And you get a shot from the back of the hall, well, from the back of the club. There's the band all togged out, looking extremely 1972. And they're just seeing a row of folded arms. Absolutely, yeah. You know, they get blokes coming up to them and saying,

oh, you don't applaud me when I come out of the pit, so I'm not applauding you. And they say right at the beginning you know uh hello to everyone over there yeah and everyone over there yeah and you sit back and watch us work for you yeah it's like yeah this the idea of musicianship is graft yeah and that's what you get off Smoker, don't you? Yeah. And obviously people talk about these audiences kind of being implacable or whatever, but I also read it as a sense of just collective class,

low self-esteem, and this kind of entertainment is all we deserve. Yes. It's really, really sad. I mean, when Michael Roetzer and Klaus Dinger were in Dusseldorf in 1971 or ever 72 and you know they were thinking about forming noi i mean their primary concern is what can we do distinction what can we do that is actually distinctive from you know the conventional anglo-american tropes and format etc etc what what sound can we devise that is generally original and

therefore gives us you us a particular edge? And with this light, it's just a sort of, we play our cards right, our names could be up in lights. And it's just that, and it's just horrible. Yeah, they spend their whole life inside a brown transit van full of heavy denim and wire-framed spectacles and sort of flossy, over-the-ear, not-quite-graying-yet hair. Just for the privilege of playing a working men's club in Sunderland.

Yeah, and there's like 20 people there. Yeah, yeah, sat behind the four-micro tables and tin ashtrays. Yeah, with their massive arms folded. Yeah, while Punch do morning of my life by the bg and then have a possibly staged argument in the dressing room yes before the uh chairman of the committee gives them their pay which is 43 quid in one pound notes. Yes. And, you know, even back then it didn't stretch very far, didn't it? Well, they earned about five pound more than they did in the factory.

So they were up. Yeah. But not that long ago was a time when you could actually make a living as a musician without being famous. Yeah, yeah. And if you wanted to, you could live that life and cover your arse. Pay for your kids' Leeds United tracksuit. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, not that it seems to have made them particularly cheerful. I mean, there's all those interview clips of them and they just moan about how miserable their lives are. Yeah. I mean, the first thing they do when they drive up is look where the loading is. Yeah. I mean, the first thing they do when they drive up is look where the loading is. Yeah. And there's this massive,

oh, that goes up inside the van when they realise they've got to go up some fucking steps with their amps. Yeah, yeah. Some bands nowadays have to fucking pay to play venues like that. Well, those venues don't exist anymore. They're not getting 40 quid now.

I was going to say, 43 quid. That's, yeah, 43, 20, 21 quid now i was gonna say 43 quid that's that's yeah 43 2021 quid um yeah it's hard to come by definitely yeah another thing is that it's from an era though if and when all of this goes tits up they can go back very confidently into the jobs market you know there isn't that kind you know into probably very secure and decent jobs you know and they can probably you know they probably felt secure enough, in a sense, to be able to abandon all of the jobs that they were doing. Yes.

There doesn't have to be any kind of terror that once they embark on this, then there's going to be no way back for them into the workforce. A bit of disparaging banter over the lathe when they came back. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, here they come, Jimi fucking Hendrix. Yeah, and that's about it really but it's all in the same way that the punch go on about how miserable their life is the only other thing they talk about is how hard they work for such little money which does appear to be true but yeah it makes sense because that's what their music's like it's very professional and hardworking and and horrible and wearing it's like listening to them he's like a seven hour drive on the m1 sat

on the speaker cabinet you know but it's what makes you feel so bad all the way through is that it's not enough for them they do want to be pop stars yeah and but they are this very weird and nowadays unthinkable cross between rock and roll and cheap cabaret um and that never made it that never ever made it these groups in their beer soaked bar towel world you know like playing gigs to adults, to married adults, you know. Reading up bits of paper passed up to the stage, you know. Will the driver of an Austin Maxi register for them? Please move your car. Can you do rolling round the river? Yeah, last order's half past ten, you know, except wearing jeans.

That's all it is. And talking about being pop stars. Constantly, as if they're treading this this familiar path to rock and roll glory you know they do an audition for opportunity knocks at one point which was the route for bands like that well to release one single yeah and get on teller and get more bookings yeah yeah i suppose and chaps wouldn't you know what song they do did you notice no so you think you know how to love me by smokey i watched it the other night for about the third time and it just it's just like hang on i know that song what do you know smokey of course of course that's their presentation to the world they're just trying to drop you a hint of, like, no, no,

we're not just a bunch of old men in a band like you've never seen before. There is a precedent. Don't worry. Yeah, there's a heritage. Got a world with two Smokies in it. Like a world with six DLTs in it. But this is it. Their only possible inspiration is Smokey.

Yeah. You have to blame Smokey for this. You do. I was just going to say, it's just a massive indictment of Smokey and their rubbishness that encourages poor, sorry saps like this that they could make it. It doesn't seem such an unreasonable proposition

if arseholes like Smokey can. Yeah, giving them false hope with their wasted work ethic you know really you can't even watch it and take the piss out of them you just think yeah you poor sods i don't even think these will have been the best days of their lives you know or or if they were god help them you know. And I would imagine that at least one or two of Punch are very dead now because that's how it goes. But if any of them aren't, I hope they can laugh about it rather than telling themselves those stupid stories

that people invent for themselves after defeat, you know. No, shake it off. Embrace the cosmic joke. You'll feel much worse and much better the footage of the opportunity knox audition though fucking hell it's worth watching just to see what randy, bibulous old lady. It's exactly what you'd expect. Yes. I mean, look, what really sums up Punch

is that one of them is called Malcolm Jagger. Yes. He couldn't be any more perfect than that. His real name was Ziggy Jagger. Yes. Anything else to say about Smokey? Obviously not, because we've talked about another band entirely for the past quarter of an hour.

So I'll just say that the following week, Needles and Pins moved up three places to number 10, its highest position. The follow-up, for a few dollars more, would get to number 17 in February of 1978, its highest position. The follow-up, for a few dollars more, would get to number 17 in February of 1978 and they'd have one more top 10 hit that year before diminishing returns set in and they split up in 1982.

And although Punch did appear on Opportunity Knocks in November of 1976, there is no further record of them and we have to conclude that they failed in their attempt to be smoky. We should get them to do a comeback gig supported by Renier. Yes, yes, on the scene All That Glitters programme.

Yeah, animatronic holograms of punch. The Renier documentary is fascinating because it was basically telling kids, you know, all being a band, but it's not going to be all glamour and getting noshed off by Brit Eklund. Have you seen the follow-up to that? Yeah. Yeah, and they split up. Yes.

They interview them and they go, shit. The thing was, even at their lowest point, Renier seemed to be having a better life than somebody who was working in a bike factory or something. For prog bands, there was the university and polytechnic circuit. Yeah, yeah. For egg and chippers like Punch, you know, there were the working men's club, but you could play music and be paid for it.

Yeah. As long as you were happy to sit in a van for hours on end. Well, you know, and of course music was more of a scarce resource back then. Yes. One of the things I loved the most about that documentary was the knowledge that just about 18 months later, the Fall were playing those places. Like, just perversely choosing to play those places instead of rock clubs.

You know, going out there doing Roush Rumble, No Christmas for John Keyes. places instead of rock clubs you know kind of they're doing roush rumble no christmas for john keys as heard on the lp totals turns where in fact markie smith does actually have to read out a bit of paper that says last orders are past 10. one of the great live albums yeah and that's pop craze youngsters closes the book on this episode of Top of the Pops. What's on the telly afterwards? Well, BBC One kicks on with the first ever episode of a brand new sitcom, or should that be sitcom-unism, Citizen Smith. Then James Bolum gets involved in 1920s wheeling and dealing in Gallowsfield

in When the Boat Comes In. After the nine o'clock news, Frank Cannon discovers a Chinese hatchet embedded into a snowman in the middle of the desert in Cannon. Then Omnibus covers the history of the BBC radio features department, followed by an examination of child pornography in Tonight. Then it's the weather, then regional news in your area, and they close down at midnight. BBC Two is midway through the current affairs show Newsday, following it up with Chronicle, the long-running archaeology series,

which pisses off to the Andes this week to take a good look at the Nazca Lines. That's followed by the 1955 version of Guys and Dolls, where David Van Day, played by Marlon Brando, bets Dominic Grant, portrayed by Frank Sinatra, that he'll be playing gigs in care homes in 40 years' time. They round off the night with the late news on 2, and they close down at 25 to midnight oh 1977 you just could not get away from the nasca lines no itv eventually gets round to k is for kill the latest episode of the new avengers where John Steed, Shaking Emma Peel and Coffee Wanker

have been transported to war-torn France in World War II. Then it's Odd Man Out, the sitcom where John Inman inherits a stick of rock factory that isn't as bad

as Take a Letter, Mr Jones. Then this week, News at Ten, a regional politics in your area show, What the Papers Say, and then we go over to the cauliflower in Ilford

for the northern heat of pub entertainer of the year, which is hosted by Frank Carson, with a special appearance by Clive Dunn, and they close down at midnight. So, boys, what are we talking about in the playground tomorrow? Well, I'm standing in a freezing circle with a bunch of 15-year-olds now spitting into a collective puddle. But probably we're talking about the jam primarily, I think.

The fact is, I would have actually taped everything. I do remember, in fact, having a cassette. I've got my kind of cassette recorder like previous Christmas. I would have taped everything on this show, the Baron Knights included, and listened to that cassette over and over. So you'd be watching this in your living room? set mono recorded like previous christmas i would have taped everything on this show the baron knights included and listened to that cassette over and over so you'd be watching this in your living room i'd have watched it living room but i would have taped it off the tom todd the tom now i'd taped it off the tom brown show you see you know when tom brown did the it was on radio

yeah it's a countdown yeah countdown on the sunday evening i'd have taped it all off that and i would actually listen to pretty much everything off of this, but the jam in particular. Punk rock! Yeah, we'd have been talking about the jam. Someone would be going, my big brother's got the LP, and he swears on this song. No, no, he does. Honestly, I've heard it.

Yeah, you want to bet? What are we buying on Saturday? This is the modern world, and actually heroes, I think. I think I'd consider everything except Queen, Quo, Waddy and Smokey, I suppose. I would certainly have bought the BKs at the time. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Big fan.

The ideal for, if you were like an awkward kid, you could buy a piss-take record and feel fine about it. It was a joke. It wasn't about love or anything. It didn't suggest any kind of vulnerability, or it didn't suggest that you either fancied women or were gay, which were both really embarrassing things. No, absolutely, yeah.

Just some old cunts have a laugh about float on. Yeah, excellent. Yeah. I think, I i mean the thing about abba is that i i i like the other thing about i think i might have considered it too effeminate to buy it myself i'd have probably had to bribe a girl you know to go in and store and buy it for me you know the way that you'd you know get adults to go in and get you some candelabra or whatever yeah it's terribly i remember when it when i was 11 or, whenever it was, and since yesterday, my Strawberry Switchblade came out.

And I thought it was one of the best records I'd ever heard in my life, but I couldn't go and buy it because they were girls. I was worried someone would think I fancied them, even though I did. Yeah, yeah. And what does this episode tell us about November of 1977? I think it is very much essence of 1977, as far as I'm concerned, you know, across the full gamut, really. In a funny kind of way, I think there's a sort of delayed impact with punk.

I think it's really kind of beginning to rumble around this kind of time. And I think the jammer will kind of of but punk's kind of weird like that punk sort of coming some people think it's already over at this particular stage yeah punk had seemed to apparently come along to drive out because it wasn't necessarily um emerson lake and palmer and pink floydness no it was the kind of slightly overblown polished likes of of Queen, ELO, ABBA, all of whom were on this episode, you know, and they're still very much intact. Yeah, and all of them disappeared, didn't they, by 1978?

Never heard from them again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just don't get that way of thinking. I saw an interview with Genesis recently, and it was like, oh, how Genesis coped with punk. They were going on about, oh, yeah, we were really worried about punk. And I was like, fuck you were. Social workers and common room boars who dominated the record player

aren't suddenly going to go, oh, look, there's this new thing. I'm not going to listen to Genesis anymore. No, no. Ridiculous. Yeah. Doesn't work like that. No, no. It's not like Jethro Tull were put on the breadline by the Nipply Rectors

or anything like that. But what did happen is that a lot of these bands lost their sense of importance and relevancy in terms of the way that they were perceived. And I think they did smart a bit at that. But yeah, also, it's like, I mean, you can see from this, 1977 is never the 1977 that people who were around in 1977 tell you it was.

No. It's like, yeah no elvis beatles or the rolling stones but plenty of shawadi wadi left to go around it was it was you it was just a decent year for music which happened while some other people who had nothing to do with this program were leaping around in small clubs doing something else, you know. There was never any problem with coexistence between the different forms of music. Apologies for the grown-up long perspective there, you know. Yeah.

Sorry for telling the truth, Pop Crate youngsters. Stop before I reach the point where we're just a pale blue dot and molt of dust in a sunbeam. So why does any of this matter? But, yeah, you know. It is odd to me to think that just a few months later, I was kind of very conscious of the fact that 1977 had been the year of, like, you know, John Ma in One World, Suicide's first album.

People like Periwu were kind of knocking around, even Throbbing Gristle, you know, and I just became aware of that kind of whole undertow of activity, which was completely oblivious when this episode actually went out. Sweep it all away for Sid Vicious's version of come on, everybody. Yes. But I just saw punk at this point as like, you know, just some other sort of, just something that was joining the general party, you know.

There's a party going on. The Baron Knights are there. She-Waddy-Waddy are there. Abba are there. The Jan are there, you know. It's just all part of the same pop party. Yeah, a punky reggae party, if you will. Without the reggae, because there isn't any in this episode.

And that, me dears, is the end of this episode of Chart Music. Use your promotional flange. Website, www.chart-music.co.uk. Facebook.com slash Chart Music Podcast. Reach out to us on Twitter at Chart Music T-O-T-P. Money down the G-string. Patreon.com slash Chart Music. you david stubbs and thank you

god bless you taylor parks everyone i hope you've enjoyed this half as much as i have my name's al needham and i don't give two fucks about your review unless it's five stars on itunes please thank you five stars on iTunes, please. Thank you. Chart music. This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon Pull Apart, only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey, and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th.

Terms and conditions apply. This is a test For the next 60 seconds The station will conduct the test Of the emergency broadcast system This is only a test This is a test of the emergency broadcast system. The broadcasters of your area are in voluntary cooperation with the FCC. My authorities have developed a system to keep you informed.

In the event of an emergency. If this had been an actual emergency, you would have been instructed where to tune in your area for news and official information. This concludes the test of the emergency broadcast system. On WHEN Syracuse Rock expert David Stubbs

Rock expert David Stubbs Hi, my name's David Stubbs. Rock expert David Stubbs. Hi, my name's David Stubbs, rock expert David Stubbs. Rock expert David Stubbs. Rock expert David Stubbs. Bringing you a hard-driving mix of hard rock and hard facts. Today, I want to talk to you about the daddies of them all. That's right, Jeff Wayne and his merry men, the Electric Light Orchestra. With me as my guest is a young lady who blotted a copybook last time out. Her name's Alicia.

Got a little sassy. Got a little wise. But she begged me, begged me to give her a second chance. And so I thought to myself, what would Yellow's Jeff Wayne do? I think he'd be magnanimous. So I'm giving her that chance. What do you have to say to that, Alicia? Thank you from the bottom of my heart, rock expert. This is the happiest day of my life. Damn right it is. Well, Alicia, I'm going to fill you in on the Electric Light Orchestra.

It is. Well, Alicia, I'm going to fill you in on the Electric Light Orchestra. Lay some hard facts on you. If you were Yorkshire-born, you'd say, Hey, yellow, I never knew that. Oh. You come in there. Laughter. Brackets. No, no, you're supposed to... Now, am I...

Ruin the joke! He's a rolling and rocking and rocking and rolling' Rock expert David Stubbs Why were Yellow important? Because Jeff Wayne saw rock and roll music and he saw classical music and he thought, I am going to mix the two. No one in rock had ever thought to do. Jeff Wayne was the first.

Len? No, Jeff. Yellow were iconic pioneers doing something that had never been... What about the Beatles? Huh? Huh? All you need is love. That doesn't count. That was after 1966. They didn't know what they were doing then.

No, ELO were the first, the very first, to mix rock and classical music. It was unheard of. Perhaps the finest example is their iconic hit single, Roll Over Beethoven, catalogue number CH56. What about Deep Purple? Huh? Deep Purple, a concerto for a group and orchestra. Me and my friends listen to it all the time.

All right, this is bogus. You've ruined the catalogue number readout. It's the most important part of the show. Little lady, you are out of here. Join me next time when I won't be hassled by some error-prone know-nothing chick who thinks the lead singer of the Electric Light Orchestra

was called Lin Wayne. Huh. Women's lib. I'm embarrassed. Embarrassed. Catch you later, folks. Meanwhile, take it away, Al! Rockin' and rollin', rollin' and rockin', rockin' and rollin' and rockin'!

If you want to hear more from me, rock expert David Stubbs, subscribe to me on YouTube. Address HTTPS full colon slash slash www.youtube.com slash watch question mark V equals QK It is.

I heard that. All right, chaps. I promised, and now I'm about to deliver. Hey. From the book Starloss by Fred Vamoral. It reads as follows, and yeah, if you're having your tea or you're a bit squeamish, turn off now. My name is Stephen. I am 16 years old, and I am a homosexual.

I'm 16 years old and I am a homosexual. After reading your advertisement, I decided to write and tell you about my secret sexual fantasy. It is with Bruce Foxton of The Jam and it is as follows. I attend a modern comprehensive school and I always imagine going to the toilets during the lessons and finding Bruce there facing the wall apparently having a piss dressed in black trousers, grey jumper, shirt and tie. Anyway as I have always liked Bruce Foxton that sexy looking fifth former I decided to stand next to him. To get a good look at his prick. As I do. I realise that he is wanking himself. And what an ace dick he has.

It is seven inches long. With a big red knob. And I can see his brown hairs. Peeping through. Having good fun. I say to him. Yeah, there's nothing like a fucking good wank, is

there? At this, he walks over to the door and said that we'd better lock it in case anyone came in. Wouldn't want our wanking session disturbed, would we? He said as he walked across the floor, dick in hand,

until he rested against the wall and continued wanking. By now, my Nortinge prick is rock hard, and I was enjoying a great wank. Facing Bruce, I watched him slowly pull his foreskin back and forth, revealing his lovely moist red knob. Bruce started moving his blazer pocket and brought out a pack of cigs. He handed me one, and we both had a smoke and a chat whilst wanking off. After a while, he says, Oh balls, I'm gonna have to take these bloody things off they're

aggravating me to death and so he quickly pulls his trousers off revealing his long masculine legs then he takes the undies off and everything he had showed his long-inch cock stood upright, just waiting to be sucked. In between his legs were a massive pair of really fleshy balls, the largest balls I'd ever seen. And then his dark

bushy brown prick hair. He was fantastic! It wasn't long before we were both completely naked. He turned round for a minute, revealing his bum. It was ace. It was smooth as silk and just the right size. I felt him slip down my body and take hold of my cock. He moaned softly as he gave my dick an expert sucking. After a few minutes, he withdrew and licked his lips.

He sat on the floor, legs open, and said, It's your turn now. I opened my mouth and put his balls inside. His balls were so big, really a mouthful. Then I pulled away and started to kiss his knob and suck at the beautiful thing. Well, yeah, it was veggie sausages and dumplings for tea for me tonight, but I think that's enough. Well. He was now so excited I could

feel his spunk ready to shoot out, so I decided to let him bomb me, as there is nothing better than someone shooting their load into your bum. So I told him, and I kneeled down while he got behind me and

slowly guided his weapon in. When after some lovely forcing he was finally up me, he started to let my bum wank him off, until finally I felt the spunk shoot up, and I heard him moan in sheer ecstasy. You see, when Bruce came, he leapt in the air and went, Yes! That was my secret sex fantasy with Bruce Foxton.

I hope you enjoyed reading it. And then Peter Powell came out of the toilet and said, Woo! Hey!